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The Question of the Essence of Untruth [225–227]

that slogan, but bringing forth a total transformation, a projection of a world, on the ground of which he educates the entire people. National Socialism is not some doctrine, but the transformation from the bottom up of the German world—and, as we believe, of the European world too.

This beginning of a great history of a people, such as we see among the Greeks, extends to all the dimensions of human creativity. With this beginning, things come into openness and truth. But in the same moment, man also comes into untruth. Untruth begins only then.

Openness is always limited, definite. The limit of an openness is always what is not revealed, what is concealed. This is the genuine sense of untruth. The concept, taken in this sense, has nothing inferior or derogatory about it, but signifies untruth only as what is not revealed.

The expression “untruth” is ambiguous; it can mean: (a) non-openness = concealment, and (b) concealed and yet at the same time revealed in some way. This is the essence of seeming—something that looks like something else; insofar as it looks like something else, it conceals something. This last characteristic is what we designate as untruth in our sense. From the essence of the Greeks we see that their concept of truth belongs immediately and intimately together with the essence of untruth. Truth, for the Greeks, is nothing but the assault on untruth. This is already expressed with the construction of the word ἀ-λήθεια: a negative, privative expression, which brings to light the fact that truth is something that must be wrested away from untruth. With us, the word “truth” is a positive expression.

Now, along what lines can the essence of truth be exhibited more primordially as unconcealment, as the assault on untruth? The issue is the inner essential connection between truth and untruth.


b) Preliminary clarification of the fundamental concepts: ψεῦδος, λήθη, and ἀ-λήθεια


Here, to begin with, we again want to stick with the concept in the word. How do the Greeks designate what we call untruth? The Greek word for untruth in the narrower sense of falsehood is ψεῦδος. The Greeks do not express the concept contrary to truth with a contrary word formed from the same stem. We also see that with the Greeks, untruth is expressed positively, and truth negatively (ἀ-λήθεια).

If the word for untruth is taken positively by the Greeks and if it has a different stem, what experience lies at the basis of this word? If we want to get clear about this primordial word, we are not just doing linguistic history, but we are convinced that language is always the interpretation of a people’s Dasein, that word coinages give expression to completely essential fundamental experiences.

What does ψεῦδος mean for the Greeks? We want to clarify this with our loan word “pseudonym.” It is put together from ψεῦδος (false) and


Being and Truth (GA 36/37) by Martin Heidegger