its truth, i.e., when the openness of beings themselves comes to pass, when history is. Philosophy, if it is, does not exist because there are philosophers, nor are there philosophers because philosophy is taken up. On the contrary, philosophy and philosophers exist only when and how the truth of Being {Seyns} itself comes to pass, a history which is withdrawn from every human institution and plan, since it itself is the very ground for the possibility of human historical Being {Seyns}. This may serve to indicate the direction out of which we must experience the necessity of the question of the essence of truth, assuming we are able to and want to experience it.
2) Ἀλήθεια as primordial for the Greeks yet unquestioned by them.
The preceding path of our reflections gave rise to the insight that that toward which our critical deliberation had to question back, namely the openness of beings as the ground of the possibility of the correctness of an assertion, was already known in Greek thinking as ἀλήθεια, the unconcealedness of beings. Consequently, our critical reflections, and thereby the question of truth itself, have no original necessity. They are superfluous, because they only bring back something already accomplished. Our critical reflection may indeed signify a turning in the direction of the thinking of Greek philosophy, but thereby it shows itself—in addition to being superfluous—as a flight into the past, no matter how highly prized.
But as certain as it is that what we are calling the openness of beings is connected to what the Greeks called ἀλήθεια, that is how undecided it is whether our question, its what and its how, was also a question raised by the Greeks. That alone matters here. Now it has been shown that the Greeks did indeed primordially take up ἀλήθεια in the sense of the unconcealedness of beings as the essence of truth and founded upon it the determination of ἀλήθεια as ὁμοίωσις but that they precisely did not ask about ἀλήθεια itself and its essence. Furthermore, because they did not raise this question of the essence of ἀλήθεια, of unconcealedness as such, because for the Greeks ἀλήθεια remained primordial and unquestioned, therefore the determination