Since Plato there has been a fatal relocation of truth away from concrete things themselves as they naturally show and reveal themselves in the richness of our vernaculars toward the idea of the exchange of equivalents. To be established, however, equivalence, as the word implies, requires a general notion of value, a common denominator by which the equality of the exchange is to be measured. In exchange, formal identity is preserved over material change. Something remains the same and self-identical, while in all other respects it is replaced by something entirely different from itself. Now, this commensuration can only take place by means of abstraction, generalization, and reduction to what is held in common. To advert to Aristotle again, exchange, whether in commerce or in theoretical representation, implies the notion of a general equivalent, a standard measure "which by making things commensurable, renders it possible to make them equal" [The Nichomachean Ethics]. The truth of theory, being truth as adequation, is thus the abstract, one-sided, and fragmented truth of general equivalence. The genesis of the general equivalent is no more than the invention by the Greeks of conceptual thinking, in which thought sloughs off what is fortuitous, separating essential from inessential in the phenomenon, thereby creating an abstract representation of it. Whereas in intuition we stand in immediate relation to the whole, rich but undifferentiated, thought sunders, allowing us to mediate between many different things, thus bringing them into relation with one another by means of universal representations. The development of the concept is a rising movement from the singular to the particular and, thence, from the particular to the universal as general equivalent.

-- from "Heidegger on the Art of Teaching", excerpt from transcript of the Deposition of Professor Dr. Martin Heidegger, submitted before the Committee on De-Nazification, 1945.

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