This truth of beyng is indeed nothing distinct from beyng but rather is the most proper essence of beyng. Therefore it depends on the history of beyng as to whether beyng bestows or refuses this truth and itself and thus genuinely brings into its history for the first time the abyssal. The reference to the fact that the usual concepts of "truth" and the usual non-differentiation of "being" from "beings" lead to a misinterpretation of the truth of beyng and, above all, already always presuppose this truth-that reference itself could deteriorate into something misleading if it permitted this conclusion: what matters here is only to express the tacit "presuppositions." As if pre-suppositions were graspable without a previous grasp of the suppositions as such. The recourse to "presuppositions" and "conditions" is meaningful and justified within beings and within the interpretation of beings in terms of beingness in the sense of representedness (and already in the sense of ἰδέα). That is why this recourse, in many variations, has become the basic form of "metaphysical" thinking, so much so that even the overcoming of "metaphysics" for the sake of a first understanding cannot dispense with this mode of thought (cf. Being and Time and "On the Essence of Ground" ["Vom Wesen des Grundes"]; here the leap into beyng is attempted).
As long as "beyng" is grasped as beingness, as in some way the "general," and thereby as a condition of beings which is in play behind them, i.e., as a condition of their representedness, or of their objectivity, or finally of their being "in-themselves," for so long is beyng itself degraded to the level of the truth of beings, the correctness of representation.
Because all this is carried out in the purest way in Kant, one can therefore attempt to make visible in his work something still more original and thus something not derived from his work, quite different from it. Yet such an attempt would face the danger of being read in a Kantian manner once again and misinterpreted as an arbitrary "Kantianism" and thereby rendered innocuous.
The Western history of Western metaphysics "proves" that the truth of beyng could not become a question and indicates the grounds of this impossibility. The crudest misunderstanding of the truth of beyng, however, would lie in a "logic" of philosophy. For that is the conscious or unconscious application of the "theory of knowledge" back onto itself. But the "theory of knowledge" is merely the form taken by the perplexity of modern metaphysics regarding itself. The confusion culminates in this "theory of knowledge" pretending to be even a "metaphysics of knowledge"; calculating on the slide-rule of "aporetics" and of "aporetic" discussions of "directions" and of "problem-fields" which are objectively present "in themselves" becomes, indeed with full justification, the method of the most modern philosophical erudition. These are