§5. Discussion of truth by asking the basic question of philosophy, including a historical confrontation with Western philosophy. The need and the necessity of an original questioning.
If, in what follows, we are not to discuss truth as a “problem of logic” but instead are to question it while asking the basic question of philosophy, then at the very outset we will need to take into account these difficulties of understanding, i.e., we will have to recognize that today the question of truth involves a confrontation with the whole of Western philosophy and can never be broached without this historical confrontation. A historical [geschichtlich] confrontation, however, is essentially different from a historiographical [historisch] reckoning of and acquaintance with the past. What a historical confrontation means should become clear in actually thinking through the question of truth.
The question of truth—even if the answer is not yet forthcoming—already sounds, merely as a question, very presumptuous. For if behind such questioning there did not lie the claim to indeed know the truth itself in some sort of way, then all this to-do would be a mere game. And yet greater than this claim is the holding back to which the question of truth must be attuned. For it is not a matter of taking up again a well-established “problem;” on the contrary, the question of truth is to be raised as a basic question. That means truth must first be esteemed as basically worthy of questioning, that is, worthy of questioning in its ground. Whoever holds himself in this attitude, as esteeming something higher, will be free of all presumption. Nevertheless, seen from the outside, the question of truth always retains the appearance of arrogance: to want to decide what is primary and what is ultimate. Here only the correct questioning itself and the experience of its necessity can forge the appropriate attitude.
But in view of the tradition preserved throughout two millennia, how are we supposed to experience the necessity of an original questioning, and of a stepping out of the circuit of the traditional problem of truth, and consequently the need of an other sort of questioning? Why can we not and should we not adhere to “the old”; why does the determination of truth hitherto not