customarily formulated as the problem of truth or objectivity. But this fundamentally wrongheaded approach to the question is motivated by the fact that assertion is taken first as verbal sequence. The Greeks, too, conceived the logos in this way, even though not exclusively so. This manner of starting passed into the traditional approach of logic and has to this day not been overcome in it.
It becomes clear from what has been said that we not only require a general delineation of what pertains to the complete concept of the logos—that it is not enough to say, in going beyond nominalism, that signification, what is thought, and what is belong to the logos—but that the essential thing is the portrayal of the specific contextural interconnection of these phenomena which belong essentially to the whole of the logos. This contexture must not merely come about after the fact by a process of composition under the constraint of things. Instead, this relational whole of word, signification, thinking, what is thought, what is must be determined in a primary way beforehand. We must ask: In what way can the ground-plan of this whole be sketched so that the specific structure of the logos can then be drawn in? When we raise this question, we free ourselves from the start from the isolated and isolating orientation toward the complex of spoken words of the problem of assertion. Spoken articulation can belong to the logos, but it does not have to. If a proposition is spoken, this is possible only because it is primarily something other than a verbal sequence somehow coupled together.
b) Phenomenological display of several essential structures of assertion. The intentional comportment of assertion and its foundation in being-in-the-world
What is the logos when taken as assertion? We cannot expect to condense the whole of this structure into a few propositions. We can only try to bring to view the essential structures. Have the considerations thus far undertaken prepared us in any way for this? In what direction must we look in making the logos as a whole our problem? Assertion has the characteristic double signification that it means both asserting and asserted. Asserting is one of the Dasein's intentional comportments. In essence it is an asserting about something and thus is intrinsically referred to some being or beings. Even if that about which an assertion is made should turn out not to be, an empty illusion, this in no way gainsays the intentionality of the structure of assertion but only demonstrates it. For when I judge about an appearance I am still related to beings. Today this sounds almost self-evident to us. But it required centuries of development of ancient philosophy before Plato discovered this self-evident fact and saw that the false and the apparent is also