The Essence of Truth

The proper and original meaning of ἀγαθóν refers to what is good (suitable) for something, what can be put to use. ‘Good!’ means: it is done! it is decided! It does not have any kind of moral meaning: ethics has corrupted the fundamental meaning of this word.

Only in the rigour of questioning do we come into the vicinity of the unsayable.

Even so, what is viewed remains, as Plato says (341 c 5): ῥητὸν λὰρ οὐδαμῶϛ ἐστιν ὡϛ ἄλλα μαθήματα, ‘it is not sayable like other things we can learn’.

Untruth belongs to the essence of truth.

The philosopher must remain solitary, because this is what he is according to his nature. His solitude is not to be admired. Isolation is nothing to be wished for as such.

Truth is something greater than man. The latter is in the truth only if, and only in so far as, he masters his nature, holds himself within the unhiddenness of beings, and comports himself to this unhiddenness.

A man of the stature of Jacob Burckhardt was not a great and genuine historian, instead of merely a scholar, on account of his conscientious mastery of sources, nor because he found a manuscript somewhere, but because of his projective essential view of the fate, greatness, and misery of man, of the conditions and limits of human action, in short, because of his anticipatory understanding of the occurrence we call history, of the being of these particular beings. This essential view illuminated research of so-called facts which others had described long before him.

The dark fails to make visible because it can also secure sight: in the dark we see the stars.

In all genuine philosophy there is something in the face of which all description and proof, however brilliantly scientific, fails and sinks down into empty business.

In everything inessential and without purpose the beginning is what can be and is overcome; therefore in the inessential there is progress. In the essential, however, where philosophy belongs, the beginning can never be overcome.