subjected to a goal which is all the more insidious the higher it is—e.g., Plato's παιδεία, a word we badly translate as "education." Even the fact that in the Republic philosophers are destined to be βασιλεῖς, the highest rulers, is already an essential demotion of philosophy. While the grasping of beings, the acknowledgment of them in their unconcealedness, unfolds into τέχνη, inevitably and increasingly the aspects of beings, the "ideas," which are brought into view in such grasping, become the only standard. The grasping becomes a sort of know-how with regard to the ideas, and that requires a constant assimilation to them. At bottom, however, it is a more profound and more hidden process. It is the loss of the basic disposition, the absence of the original need and necessity, a process linked to the loss of the original essence of ἀλήθεια.
In this way, the beginning contains in itself the unavoidable necessity that, in unfolding, it must surrender its originality. This does not speak against the greatness of the beginning but in favor of it. For, would what is great ever be great if it did not have to face up to the danger of collapse and did not have to succumb in its historical consequences to this danger, only to remain all the more illuminating in its initial singularity? In the beginning, the question of beings stays within the clarity of ἀλήθεια as the basic character of beings. Ἀλήθεια itself, however, remains by necessity unquestioned. But the sustaining of the beginning position in the sense of τέχνη leads to a falling away from the beginning. Beings become, to exaggerate somewhat, objects of representations conforming to them. Now ἀλήθεια itself is also interrogated, but henceforth from the point of view of τέχνη, and ἀλήθεια becomes the correctness of representations and procedures.
§39. The need arising from the lack of need. Truth as correctness and philosophy (the question of truth) as without need and necessity
Ever since truth became correctness and this essential determination of truth, in all its manifold variations, became known as the only standard one, philosophy has lacked the most original