Therefore the question of truth, in the sense of the question of its essence, immediately encounters the deepest suspicion; for we desire what is true, why should we be concerned with truth itself? To be sure, it is presupposed here without further reflection that the essence is a universal which applies to every particular instance in the same way–indifferently. But this might be to misunderstand the essence. Therefore our reflection must reach the point, indeed as soon as possible, where the question of what the essence itself is becomes unavoidable. It might turn out that the essence of something is not the indifferent but what is most essential. In that case we would have to reverse the apparently obvious demand–“We desire what is true, why should we be concerned with truth itself?”–and say instead: “We desire truth, why should we be concerned with the true?” For then precisely truth, the essence of the true, would be what is genuinely true, that which is desired in the just-mentioned demand, though sought on a by-way.
2) The problematic character of the obviousness of the traditional conception of truth, and the question of its legitimacy.
The first steps of our deliberations have already shown that we are not striving for an indifferent definition of the essence of the true, in order to be appeased by it. We freed ourselves from the customary determination of truth as the correctness of an assertion by showing how this determination is based on a more original one that constitutes the ground of the possibility of correctness.
But as unavoidably as we were led to acknowledge an openness—as we called it—that is precisely how dubious it has become whether we have indeed liberated ourselves from the customary conception of truth through this return to openness as the ground of correctness. In fact we are relying precisely on the customary conception, so much so that we are seeking a foundation for this reliance and consequently want to confirm it all the more.
We rely on the customary conception of truth as correctness, without having founded this conception sufficiently. We come by