truth becomes the question of the secure, assured, and self-assuring use of ratio. Descartes, the first thinker of modern metaphysics, inquires into the usus rectus rationis, i.e., facultatis iudicandi, the correct use of reason, i.e., of the faculty of judgment. The essence of saying and asserting had already for a long time not been the Greek λόγος, i.e., ἀποφαίνεσθαι, the letting appear of the unconcealed. The essence of saying is now the Roman iudicium—correct saying, i.e., attaining, with certainty, what is right. Therefore the fundamental book of modern metaphysics, Descartes's Meditationes de prima philosophia, includes within its reflections on metaphysics the meditatio quarta, which treats de vera et falso. Now, where all that matters is the usus rectus rationis humanae, falsity is conceived as usus non rectus facultatis iudicandi. The usus non rectus is error, fault; or better: erring and error are conceived on the basis of the usus non rectus facultatis iudicandi. The untrue is the false in the sense of the erroneous, i.e., in the sense of the wrong use of reason.
In the second principal book of modern metaphysics, Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, the usus, the use of reason, is in question everywhere. "Critique of pure reason" means essential delimitation of the correct and incorrect use of the human faculty of reason. The question of the "correct use" treats of the will to secure the certainty which man, on his own, standing amidst beings, must attain and wishes to attain. Veritas in the Christian understanding, i.e., rectitudo animae, iustitia, provides to the modern essence of truth its character as the certainty and assurance of the content of human comportment. The true, verum, is what is right, what vouches for certainty, and in that sense it is the righteous, the just.
If we experience and come to know these nexuses historically, as our history, i.e., as modern European "world"-history, will it then surprise us that in Nietzsche's thought, where the metaphysics of the Occident reaches its peak, the essence of truth is founded on certitude and "justice"? Even for Nietzsche the true is the right, that which is directed by what is real in order to adjust itself to it and make itself secure in it. The basic feature of reality is will to power. What is right must conform itself to the real, hence must express what the real says, namely the "will to power." All correctness must be adjusted in terms of the will to power. Correspondence to what the will to power utters is the just, i.e., justice. It receives its essence, at the end of Western metaphysics, from the decree of the will to power. Nietzsche very often uses the word "life" as a title for the "will to power," and he uses it in accord with the usual "biological" way of thinking of the second half of the nineteenth century. Nietzsche can therefore say: "Justice is the highest representative of life itself." This is a Christian thought, though in the mode of the antichrist. Everything "anti" thinks in the spirit