Being which itself uncovers—has become truth as agreement between things which are present-at-hand within-the-world. And thus we have pointed out the ontologically derivative character of the traditional conception of truth.
Yet that which is last in the order of the way things are connected in their foundations existentially and ontologically, is regarded ontically and factically as that which is first and closest to us. The necessity of this Fact, however, is based in turn upon the kind of Being which Dasein itself possesses. Dasein, in its concernful absorption, understands itself in terms of what it encounters within-the-world. The uncoveredness which belongs to uncovering, is something that we come across proximally within-the-world in that which has been expressed [im Ausgesprochenen] . Not only truth, however, is encountered as present-at-hand: in general our understanding of Being is such that every entity is understood in the first instance as present-at-hand. If the 'truth' which we encounter proximally in an ontical manner is considered ontologically in the way that is closest to us, then the .\6yos (the assertion) gets understood as λόγος τινός—as an assertion about something, an uncoveredness of something; but the phenomenon gets Interpreted as something present-at-hand with regard to its possible presence-at-hand.1 Yet because presence-at-hand has been equated with the meaning of Being in general, the question of whether this kind of Being of truth is a primordial one, and whether there is anything primordial in that structure of it which we encounter as closest to us, can not come alive at all. The primordial phenomenon of truth has been covered up by Dasein' s very understanding of Being—that understanding which is proximally the one that prevails, and which even today has not been surmounted explicitly and in principle.
At the same time, however, we must not overlook the fact that while this way of understanding Being (the way which is closest to us) is one which the Greeks were the first to develop as a branch of knowledge and to master, the primordial understanding of truth was simultaneously alive among them, even if pre-ontologically, and it even held its own against the concealment implicit in their ontology—at least in Aristotle.xiii
[226] Aristotle never defends the thesis that the primordial 'locus' of truth is in the judgment. He says rather that the λόγος is that way of Being in which Dasein can either uncover or cover up. This double possibility is what is distinctive in the Being-true of the λόγος: the λόγος is that way of comporting oneself which can also cover things up. And because Aristotle never upheld the thesis we have mentioned, he was also never in a
1 '... interpretiert aber das Phänomen als Vorhandenes auf seine mögliche Vorhandenheit.'