Martin Heidegger: Parmenides, P 43-102

Heidegger begins pages 43-102 of Parmenides by continuing with his lecture on the essence of pseudos. He claims that there is much more to the oppositional nature of alathea than a mere positive and negative relationship. Rather, both truth and falsity must be thought in terms of a reciprocity with one another. He reiterates that pseudos is a dissembling that lets show something other than what is being concealed, and as such exists as a concealment that also unconceals. 

Following this review of pseudos, Heidegger points out that the Latin falsum has since taken the place of pseudos. Behind falsum lies the notion of imperium, a domination. Alathea has become the Latin verum, and thus evolved into veritas, or "correctness." Specifically, because verum is oppositional in nature to falsum, which resides in the domain of imperium, "correctness" has replaced unconcealedness. Verum is further convoluted into rectitudo and certum. Because of this conversion, "the false" becomes, simply, the wrong use of reason, or ratio, a "self-adjustment to what is correct." (50) Such Roman thinking is behind Nietzsche's "will to power," which has the certainty of reason as its essence. Heidegger asserts that, even though veritas has skewed the essence of alathea in modern thought, the Latinization of the concept cannot fully envelope the full essence of unconcealedness; the concepts of veritas, rectitude, and certum "are what they are only in the wake of Alathea." (54) After discussing this transformation, Heidegger points out the difference between history and historiography. History is the history of thought, or the happening of assignment. Historiography is the mere cataloguing of events. The history of the transformation of truth points to the fact that Being is misgrounded by such a transformation. After all, beings receive Being by the essence of truth.