(necessary), (3) being-how or howness [Wie-sein], and (4) being-true, trueness [Wahr-sein]. The being of beings means whatness, howness, truth. Because every being is determined by the what and the how and is unveiled as a being in its whatness and howness, its being-what and being-how, the copula is necessarily ambiguous. However, this ambiguity is not a "defect" but only the expression of the intrinsically manifold structure of the being of a being—and consequently of the overall understanding of being.
The question of being as copula, pursuant to the expositions we have given, is oriented to assertion and truth of assertion, more precisely to the phenomenon of the combination of words. The characterization of the "is" as copula is not an accidental imposition of a name but the expression of the fact that the interpretation of this "is" which is designated as the copula is oriented to assertion as spoken, as an uttered sequence of words.
We have to ask whether this delineation of the "is" as copula really hits the mark with regard to the ontological sense of being expressed by "is." Can the approach made by the traditional type of inquiry relating to the "is" be maintained, or does not the confusion of the problem of the copula reside precisely in the fact that this "is" is characterized beforehand as copula and then all further research into the problem is channeled in that direction?
§ 17. Being as copula and the phenomenological problem of assertion
a) Inadequate assurance and definition of the phenomenon of assertion
The problem of the copula is difficult and intricate not because inquiry into it takes its start in general from the logos but because this phenomenon of the logos as a whole has been inadequately assured and circumscribed. The logos is simply snatched up as it first forces itself upon the common experience of things. Regarded naively, an assertion offers itself as an extant complex of spoken words that are themselves extant. Just as there are trees, houses, and people, so also there are words, arranged in sequences, in which some words come before other words, as we can see clearly in Hobbes. If such a complex of extant words is given, the question arises, What is the bond that establishes the unity of this interconnection? The question of a combination, a copula, arises. We have already pointed out that a limitation of the problem to assertion as pure verbal sequence cannot in fact be maintained. At bottom. something that the nominalistic theory would not wish to grant as valid is already implied in every assertion, even when it is taken as a pure sequence of words.
In the propositions with which Aristotle prefaced his treatise on the logos