of an assimilation of assertions and thinking to the state of affairs present at hand and firmly established. Assimilation is called adaequatio. In the early Middle Ages, following the path set by the Romans, ἀλήθεια, presented as ὁμοίωσις, became adaequatio. Veritas est adaequatio intellectus ad rem. The entire thinking of the Occident from Plato to Nietzsche thinks in terms of this delimitation of the essence of truth as correctness. This delimitation of the essence of truth is the metaphysical concept of truth; more precisely, metaphysics receives its essence from the essence of truth thus determined. But because the Greek ὁμοίωσις turned into rectitudo, the realm of ἀλήθεια, disclosure, still present for Plato and Aristotle in ὁμοίωσις, disappeared. In rectitudo, in the "self-adjustment to ...," there also resides what the Greeks call οἴεσθαι, to take something as something and to accept it thus. But whereas for the Greeks to "take something as something" was still experienced within the essential realm of disclosedness and unconcealedness, thought in the Roman way it lies outside this essential domain. To "take something as something" is in Latin reor—the corresponding noun is ratio. In a variation of the Roman saying: res ad triarios venit,1 we can say: res ἀληθείας ad rationem venit.2 The essence of truth as veritas and rectitudo passes over into the ratio of man. The Greek ἀληθεύειν, to disclose the unconcealed, which in Aristotle still permeates the essence of τέχνη, is transformed into the calculating self-adjustment of ratio. This determines for the future, as a consequence of a new transformation of the essence of truth, the technological character of modern, i.e., machine, technology. And that has its origin in the originating realm out of which the imperial emerges. The imperial springs forth from the essence of truth as correctness in the sense of the directive self-adjusting guarantee of the security of domination. The "taking as true" of ratio, of reor, becomes a far-reaching and anticipatory security. Ratio becomes counting, calculating, calculus. Ratio is a self-adjustment to what is correct.
Ratio is a facultas animi, a power of the human mind, the actus of which inhabits the inner man. The res, the thing, lies apart from ratio. In rectitudo as adaequatio, ratio is supposed to assimilate the thing. Now what is completely lacking here is the essential space of ἀλήθεια, the unconcealedness of things and the disclosing comportment of man, a space completely covered over by debris and forgotten. The essence of truth as veritas and rectitudo is without space and without ground. Veritas as rectitudo is a quality of the mind or soul in the inner man. A question was thus bound to arise as regards truth, how is it at all
1 The matter has come to the final stage —Tr
2 Ἀλήθεια has come to reason —Tr