47. Inception and Truth | 45
Truth is not an addition to being, as if it were something that comes into human representing and is adjudged to be above being.
Far rather, the essence of being is truth. But truth, here, means unconcealment— as the original opening of coming-to-presence {als Eröffnung des Anwesens}, the bringing-forth of the open that presences in advance.
But unconcealment is sheltering, and sheltering is the concealing safeguarding of the possibility of unconcealing.
Being is truth—in the sense clarified. But this says: being is inception. The inceptuality of inception is the emergent returning-into-itself, the originative grounding of the abyss. Inceptuality is ever more inceptive.
Being unfolding as truth, truth unfolding as the essence of being: this comprises inception. What is said in this manner can never be grasped conceptually with the aid of the familiar and therefore ambiguous metaphysical concepts of “being” and “truth.”
Truth is not, here, something that supervenes onto being as a result of a discernment. Truth is the inceptive essence of being. Truth is unconcealment and concealment, and is thus the original unfolding of coming-to-presence {die Erwesung der Anwesung}, that is, being in the sense of the first inception. Again, “being” is only the first name of “truth.” And of course “truth” has been long misunderstood, estranged thus from what is to be said here and always, even now, in danger of being seized hold of metaphysically.
“Being” and “truth” are both inceptive names and name, here, inception itself.
Only now can it be seen what transformation of the essence of ἀλήθεια means:
1. That it comes into the service of being as ἰδέα, determining all that follows after it in metaphysics. Plato already accomplishes {GA 70: 60} the first step in the overturning of what is still, to be sure, inceptively ungrounded. Truth is not the essential unfolding of being, nor is being inceptive; rather, beings are able to come into a relation of (representational) conforming to it.
But this, and all that ensues in metaphysics right up until Nietzsche’s equating of being (secured existence) and truth (making secure, stabilizing) is itself only possible because, inceptively, truth is the essential unfolding of
9. Zum Ereignis-Denken (GA 73), edited by Peter Trawny (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2013).
10. Ibid.