220. The question of truth
Just as the conjunction of the question of truth is joined, this joining remains a way in which we are at the disposal of the history of being, provided we still have the power to maintain ourselves in the stream of that history.
The question of truth in the delineated sense, and only in that sense, is for us the precursory question we must traverse first of all.
Only in this way is grounded a domain of decision for the essential meditations. (Cf. the separate elaboration, in an orientation toward time-space, of the question of truth as the precursory question.)
The question of truth is the question of the essential occurrence of truth. Truth itself is that wherein what is true has its ground.
Ground here: 1. that in which sheltered and retained;
2. that by which compelled;
3. that by which pervaded.
What is true: what stands in the truth and so becomes a being or a nonbeing.
Truth: the clearing for concealment (truth as un-truth), in itself conflictual, and permeated with negativity, and the original intimacy (cf. The grounding and the Frankfurt Lectures19). All this because
Truth: truth of beyng as event.
What is true and to be what is true: with it at the same time what is untrue, the distorted and its variations.
The essential occurrence of truth.
221. Truth as the essential occurrence of beyng20
Truth: the clearing for self-concealing (i.e., the event; hesitant self-withholding as ripeness, fruit, bestowal). Truth, however, not simply clearing but precisely clearing for self-concealing.
Beyng: the event, permeated with negativity in the oscillation and so in strife. The origin of the strife: beyng or not-being.
Truth: ground as abyss. Ground not the whence, but the "in which" as what belongs. Abyss: as time-space of the strife; the strife as the one between earth and world, because the relation of truth to beings!
19. "Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes." In Holzwege (GA 5).
20. Cf. Prospect, 9. Conspectus.