Chapter Two
§4. Truth as a “problem” of “logic” (correctness of an assertion) distorts every view of the essence of truth.
The two titles announce the task of our lectures in a double way, though without making it clear what the content of the discussions is to be. To learn that, let us take the subtitle as our point of departure. Accordingly, the course will be about logic. Traditionally, this is a “discipline,” a branch of philosophy, supposing that philosophy itself is taken as a discipline, which scholasticism divides into individual branches: logic, ethics, aesthetics, etc., each of which then encompasses a series of concomitant “problems.” “Problems” —the word in quotation marks serves to name questions that are no longer truly asked. They have been frozen as questions, and it is only a matter of finding the answer or, rather, modifying answers already found, collating previous opinions and reconciling them. Such “problems” are therefore particularly prone to conceal genuine questions and to dismiss out of hand, as too strange, certain questions that have never yet been raised, indeed to misinterpret completely the essence of questioning. The so-called “problems” can thus readily usurp the place of the basic questions of philosophy. Such “problems” of
1. The question of the essence of truth is the casting of the one and only goal which by itself reaches out beyond itself, truth understood here as the truth of Being {Seyns}, seen in terms of the essence of the appropriating event [vom Wesen des Ereignisses]. What is at stake is not only the removal of goal-lessness but, above all, the overcoming of the resistance against any search for a goal.