the self-concealing. And what, in an exceptional and unique sense, conceals itself in the domain of open beings is Being. We experience this in the most prosaic and yet most enigmatic event, namely that beings most immediately press upon us and impose themselves and that only beings seem to be. But perhaps our seeming to manage, in the domain of beings, with beings alone is the most uncanny semblance that plays with us, a semblance that certainly prevails constantly and erupts, but which can nevertheless be overcome. When we set forth on the path of the question of truth, we take pains to overcome this semblance to the effect that if beings are, then only beings are open. For openness is on behalf of self-concealment. And what conceals itself is Being. Insofar as selfconcealment requires openness, this latter belongs as well to the essentialization of Being. The question of truth is the question of the essentialization of Being. Being, however, is that which needs man as the founder and preserver of its truth: man as this or that one, but not simply any man but only the one who bestows to truth its ground and home, and who bears the openness for the self-concealing, who is the “there” [Da]. That is how truth as the essentialization of Being comes to pass, founded in the Da-sein of man, between Being [Sein] and being-the-there [Da-sein].
Truth belongs to the essentialization of Being without exhausting its essence. Truth belongs to the appropriating event, and truth belongs to Being. That is why the Greeks experienced for the first time, in the thinking of beings as such, unconcealedness as the beingness of beings. But because they did not ask about Being itself, truth degenerated into correctness, became something for itself, and lost the essential relation to Being.
If we now recollect the traditional and ordinary conception of truth as correctness and consider that it was finally determined as a relation between subject and object, then we can recognize in the subject-object relation a very remote layer of that relation between Being and being-the-there, a layer entirely ignorant of its origin. The question about truth begins with this view in order to unfold for the first time its full bearing and to lose completely the character of an isolated question. Indeed still more: not only is it inserted into this most extreme and broadest realm of thoughtful knowledge in general, but the question of truth becomes at the same time, in terms of the approach we characterized, the first leap into the heart of the basic question of philosophy.
Therefore it should not be surprising that everything we say beyond the ordinary concept of truth will at first, and for a long time, seem very strange. Therefore we must all the more assure for ourselves what is already accessible in the tradition as an echo of the original essence of truth and which is expressed in the word ad7Deve (unconcealedness). In this way our question of truth will become historical in a double respect: on the one hand, insofar as there is prepared in it a transformation of humanity hitherto and its relation to beings (and consequently the “hitherto” necessarily enters into the discussion) and on the other hand, insofar as even the more original determination of the essence of