here a standard or measure is presupposed, to which the representing conforms. Even here truth is conceived as correctness.
The doctrine that our representations relate only to the represented, the perceptum, the idea, is called idealism. The counterclaim, according to which our representations reach the things themselves (res) and what belongs to them (realia), has been called, ever since the advance of idealism, realism. Thus these hostile brothers, each of whom likes to think himself superior to the other, are unwittingly in complete accord with regard to the essence, i.e., with regard to what provides the presupposition and the very possibility of their controversy: that the relation to beings is a representing of them and that the truth of the representation consists in its correctness. A thinker such as Kant, who founded idealism and strictly adhered to it, and who has most profoundly thought it through, concedes in advance that the conception of truth as correctness of a representatio–ans correspondence with the object–is inviolable. Realism, for its part, is captive to a great error when it claims that even Kant, the most profound “idealist,” is a witness for the defense of realism. On the contrary, the consequence of Kant’s adherence to the traditional determination of truth as correctness is simply the opposite, namely that realism, in its determination of truth as correctness of a representation, stands on the same ground as idealism, and is even itself idealism, according to a more rigorous and more original concept of “idealism.” For even according to the doctrine of realism–the critical and the naive–the res, beings, are attained by means of the representation, the idea. Idealism and realism therefore comprise the two most extreme basic positions as regards the relation of man to beings. All past theories concerning this relation and its character–truth as correctness–are either one-sided caricatures of the extreme positions or diverse variations on the numerous mixtures and distortions of the two doctrines. The controversy among all these opinions can still go on endlessly, without ever leading to genuine reflection or to an insight, because it is characteristic of this sterile wrangling to renounce in advance the question of the soil upon which the combatants stand. In other words, the conception of truth as correctness of representation is taken for granted everywhere, in philosophy just as in extra-philosophical opinion.