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the very same thing. Confirmation means the being's showing itself in its self-sameness.34 Confirmation is accomplished on the basis of the being's showing itself. That is possible only in that the knowing that asserts and is confirmed is itself a discovering being toward real beings in its ontological meaning.

To say that a statement is true means that it discovers the being in itself. It asserts, it shows, it lets beings "be seen" (ἀπόφανσις) in their discoveredness. The being-true [Wahrsein] (truth) of the statement must be understood as discovering [entdeckend-sein]. Thus, truth by no means has [219] the structure of an agreement between knowing and the object in the sense of a correspondence of one being (subject) to another (object).

Being-true as discovering is, in turn, ontologically possible only on the basis of being-in-the-world. This phenomenon, in which we recognized a basic constitution of Dasein, is the foundation [Fundament] of the primordial phenomenon of truth. This is now to be followed up in a more penetrating manner.



(b) The Primordial Phenomenon of Truth and the Derivative Character of the Traditional Concept of Truth


Being-true (truth) means to-be-discovering [entdeckend-sein]. But is this not a highly arbitrary definition of truth? With such violent definitions of the concept we might succeed in eliminating the idea of agreement from the concept of truth. Must we not pay for this dubious gain by letting the "good" old tradition fall into nothingness? However, this seemingly arbitrary definition contains only the necessary interpretation of what the oldest tradition of ancient philosophy primordially anticipated [ahnte] and even understood in a pre-phenomenological way. The being-true of the λόγος as ἀπόφανσις is the ἀληθεύειν in the manner of ἀποφαίνεσθαι: to let beings be seen in their unconcealment (discoveredness), taking them out of their concealment. The ἀλήθεια which is equated by Aristotle with πρᾶγμα and φαινόμενα in the passages cited above refers to the "things themselves," that which shows itself, beings in the how of their discoveredness. And is it a coincidence


34. For the idea of demonstration as "identification," cf. Husserl's Logische Untersuchungen, vol. 2, part 2, Investigation 6. On "Evidence and Truth," see ibid., § 36-39, p. 115ff. The usual treatments of the phenomenological theory of truth are limited to what is said in the critical prolegomena (vol. 1) and they note the connection with Bolzano's theory of the proposition. In contrast, the positive phenomenological interpretations, which are quite different from Bolzano's theory, are left alone. The only person who took up these investigations in a positive sense was E. Lask whose Logik der Philosophie (1911) is influenced just as strongly by the Sixth Investigation ''Uber sinnliche und kategoriale Anschauungen," p. 128ff.) as his Lehre vom Urteil (1912) was by the sections cited on evidence and truth.


Martin Heidegger (GA 2) Being & Time (S&S)