the presence at hand, the reality, of the individual being. We are in a way then asking about the ἰδέα, though in the sense of the κοινόν, the universal. Yet even in this conception of the essence there is implied an abstraction from the individual being as here and now, such and such.
We are now better prepared for the question that occasioned these deliberations about the essence as such. The questions is: how does Aristotle found the essential determination of truth in the sense of the correctness of an assertion? Why does the whatness of truth reside in the correctness of an assertion? To what extent is the correctness of an assertion the “idea” of truth and consequently the universal that pertains to everything true as such?
The first step will be to look about in Aristotle himself and see how he founds this essence of truth and its positing. And here a remarkable thing appears: no foundation is given. The essential determination of truth is simply proclaimed. What is true is that representing and meaning and saying which is ὄμοιον, similar, corresponding, to the πράγματα; and the false is what is ἐναντίως ἢ τὰ πράγματα.1 What can be true or false, what proves to be the seat of this possibility and consequently the locus of truth as conformity and correctness, is the λόγος, the assertion, the asserting thought: οὐ γάρ ἐστι τὸ ψεῦδος καὶ τὸ ἀληθὲς ἐν τοῖς πράγμασιν,... ἀλλ᾽ ἐν διανοίᾳ.2 That here it is said explicitly of the truth: οὐκ ἐν τοῖς πράγμασιν [“It is not in the things” —'Tr.] may be a hint that it does precisely belong there in a certain, and perhaps more original, way.
One might try to vindicate this fact, that the essential determination of truth as the correctness of an assertion is not founded but only proclaimed, by having recourse to the pretense that the treatises
1. Cf. Aristotle, Metaphysica, Θ 10. [“At odds with the things” —Tr.]
2. Aristotle, Metaphysica, Ε 4, 1027b 25ff. [“For falsity and truth do not lie in the things . . . but in the mind”—Tr.]