knowledge of the truth, could perhaps still bear a significance and even one that reaches beyond everything useful. But how is the essence, as a universal concept, supposed to acquire a sovereign rank? What is more shadowy, and therefore more impotent, than a mere concept?
In this regard a question still remains, one that is perhaps most intimately connected to the question of truth as the question of the essence of the true. Have we determined the essence sufficiently in identifying it with the concept? Perhaps the essence of the true, hence truth itself, is not grasped at all if we merely represent in general that which applies universally to everything true as such. Perhaps the essence of the true, hence truth itself, is not what applies indifferently with regard to the true but is the most essential truth. In that case, the genuine and decisive truth, upon which everything must be posited, would be precisely this essence of the true, the truth itself. In that case, the standpoint which pretends to care so much about reality–“We desire the true, why should we be concerned with truth itself?”–would be a great error, the error of errors, and up to now the most enduring of all errors. Supposing truth is this truth, then our inquiry into truth as the question of the essence of all truths, provided we carry it out correctly, will not be mere play with empty concepts.
§12. The question of the legitimacy of the ordinary determination of truth, as point of departure for a return to the ground of the possibility of correctness.
The fact that we are immediately leaving behind the customary conception of truth and are trying to attain the ground upon which the determination of truth as correctness is founded shows that we are not entangled in an empty squabble about the mere definition of the concept of truth but that we want to touch something essential. Through such a return to the ground–to what is worthy of questioning–we put into question the determination of truth hitherto and in so doing make ourselves free of it.
But do we really make ourselves free? Are we not binding ourselves all the more to this essential definition, to such an extent that it becomes the obligatory one? Let us not deceive ourselves.