rendered "War is the father of all things ...," has in common with Greek thinking only the empty verbal sound.
But how are we to know anything definite of the essence of πόλεμος (which, according to the dictionary, does indeed literally mean "war"), and how are we even to surmise the essence of the "polemical" named here, as long as we know nothing of a conflict indigenous to the very essence of truth? And how could we know the primordial conflictual character of the conflict in the essence of truth as long as we did not experience its essence as unconcealedness and knew ἀλήθεια at most as a word-sound buzzing in the air? The conflictual essence of truth has already been alien to us and to Western thought for a long time. For us, "truth" means the opposite: that which is beyond all conflict and therefore must be nonconflictual.
Accordingly, we do not understand to what extent the essence of truth itself is, in itself, a conflict. If, however, in the primordial thinking of the Greeks the conflictual essence of truth was experienced, then it cannot astonish us to hear, in the dicta of this primordial thinking, precisely the word "conflict." The interpretation of the Greek world by Jacob Burckhardt and Nietzsche has taught us to recognize the "agonal principle" and to see in the "competitive match" an essential "impulse" in the "life" of this people. But we must then go on to ask where the principle of the "agon" is grounded and whence the essence of "life" and of man receives its determination so that it is "agonal." "Competitiveness" can only arise where the conflictual is experienced before all else as what is essential. But to maintain that the agonal essence of Greek humanity rests on a corresponding predisposition of the people would be an "explanation" no less thoughtless than saying the essence of thinking is grounded on the capacity to think.
We have noted so far that, on the one hand, unconcealedness belongs to the realm where concealment and concealing occur. On the other hand, un-concealedness makes manifest a conflictual essence; i.e., it is unconcealing when in it something comes to pass that is in conflict with concealment.
"Unconcealedness" provides a third directive, according to which truth, on the basis of its conflictual essence, stands within "oppositional" relations1. For the usual theory of truth, the opposite to truth is merely "untruth" in the sense of falsity Something is either true or false. To be sure, in the age of the first completion of Western metaphysics, in the philosophy of Schelling and Hegel, thinking reaches the insight that something can at the same time, though in different respects, be true as well as false. Also, in the form of "negativity," something discordant appears here within the essence of truth. But to infer
1 See below. pp 117-119