In later works, especially in On the essence of truth, Heidegger underlines a ‘hierarchy’ of three levels of truth. We can roughly summarize this hierarchy, which Heidegger appropriates from the Nicomachean Ethics, as follows.
1. The lowest level of truth is propositional truth. Here truth is taken to be the correspondence (adequatio) or agreement between a proposition, and thus the intellect, and a thing. Truth is logos apophantikos: The predicative assertion in its two forms of kataphasis and apophasis (affirmation and denial).
2. The next highest level of truth is the ontic. Propositional truth itself presupposes that beings show themselves to us. ‘How something shows itself’ is a more primordial characteristic of truth than the simple criterion of correspondence. In other words, the being-true of the assertion is a derivative mode of the primordial happening of truth on which it is grounded. This is also the first level of unconcealedness. Dasein first finds beings as unconcealed before the question of correspondence can emerge. Heidegger appropriates from Book 6 of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics the different ways beings can be uncovered by Dasein. The human psuche (Dasein) can be uncovering in the five ways being-in-truth: techne, episteme, phronesis, sophia, and nous.
3. The last level of truth is the ontological. This refers not to the unconcealedness of particular beings, but rather the Being of these beings. It refers to the event of openness itself which makes possible Da-sein’s own openness to beings and the openness of beings themselves. Here Heidegger re-appropriates Aristotle’s notion of to on hos alethes (Being as truth).
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