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since his time. According to it the being-true of assertion is οὐκ ἐν πράγμασιν, not in things, but ἐν διανοίᾳ, in the understanding, in intellectu, as Scholasticism puts it. We shall be able to decide whether this thesis of Aristotle's is correct and in what sense it is tenable only if we first attain a satisfactory concept of truth. It could then be shown how truth is not itself a being that appears among other extant things. But if truth does not appear among the extant as something itself extant, that does not yet decide whether it may not nevertheless constitute a determination of the being of the extant, of extantness. As long as this question is not cleared up, Aristotle's proposition "truth is not 'in' things" will remain ambiguous. But the positive part of his thesis, according to which truth is supposed to be in the intellect, will remain equally ambiguous. Here, too, we have to ask, What does "truth is in the understanding" mean? Is it supposed to be saying that truth is something which occurs like a psychical process? In what sense is truth supposed to be in the understanding? In what way is the understanding itself? We see that here we come back again to the question about the mode of being of the understanding, of the act of understanding as a comportment of the Dasein's, the question about the existential determination of the Dasein itself. Without this we shall not be able to answer the question in what sense truth is if it is in the understanding, which [understanding] belongs to the Dasein's being.

Both components of the Aristotelian thesis are ambiguous, so that the question arises in what sense the thesis is tenable. We shall see that neither its negative part nor its positive part can be maintained in the form it assumes in the naive and customary interpretation. But this means that, while truth belongs in a certain way to things, it is not present among things themselves as another extant entity like them. And on the opposite side, truth is not in the understanding if understanding is thought of as a process within an extant psychical subject. It thus will emerge that truth neither is present among things nor does it occur in a subject but lies—taken almost literally—in the middle "between" things and the Dasein.

If Aristotle's thesis is taken in a purely external manner, as it is usually taken, it leads to impossible problems. For it is said: truth is not in things; it therefore is not in the objects but in the subject. This then leads to the statement that truth is in some sense a determination of the mind, something inside it, immanent in consciousness. The problem then arises, How can something immanent in consciousness refer to something transcendent out there in the objects? Inquiry here gets irretrievably pushed into a hopeless situation; since the question is itself put the wrong way, an answer can never be attained. The consequences of this impossible predicament of inquiry appear in the theory's being driven to every possible device—for instance, it sees that truth is not in objects, but also not in subjects, and so it