contrivance of reason, of a reason which in principle nothing may resist, and if thereby this reason, as a being, appeals to lived experience, and if furthermore it should happen that the contrivance fails and “cites” destiny, then this reference to the contrivance and to the lived experience is naming only the two poles between which the ordinary conception of truth—correctness—oscillates.
The determination of truth as correctness is not the indifferent and innocuous theory of a scholastic “logic” which has been obsolete for ages. Correctness is the calculable adjustment and adaptation of all human behavior to the end of contrivances. Whatever resists these contrivances will be crushed. Yet correctness, in its effect and its success, is appropriated, preserved as a possession, and carried over into use and profit through lived experience. At the beginning of modern thought, Descartes for the first time posited the certainty of the ego, a certainty in which man is made secure of beings as the object of his representations. Now this certainty is the germ of what today, as “lived experience,” constitutes the basic form of being human. It is one of the ironies of history that our age has discovered—admittedly, very late—the need to refute Descartes, and takes issue with him and ‘his intellectualism by appealing to “lived experience,” whereas lived experience is only a base descendent of the Cartesian cogito ergo sum.
We conclude from this allusion that the conception of man is tied to his position within truth and toward truth and that conversely the status of the question of truth, i.e., above all, the forgetting and disregarding of this question, always corresponds to a determined self-comprehension of man and of his relation to beings as such. Admittedly, this does not yet decide anything about the genuine character of the essential relation between truth and man. Above all, we may not understand the transformation of the self-understanding of man psychologically or in terms of the history of culture. These psychological, moral, and cultural transformations all move within one single constant comprehension of man—a constancy that has now been shaken and requires a first great transformation. This can only be appreciated on the basis of the relation of man to beings as such and to their truth. It follows that this transformation is rarer