217 I.VI
Being and Time

The thesis that the genuine "locus" of truth is judgment not only invokes Aristotle unjustly, it also fails with regard to its content to recognize the structure of truth. The statement is not the primary "locus" of truth, but the other way around; the statement as a mode of appropriation of discoveredness and as a way of being-in-the-world is based ·on discovering, or rather the disclosedness of Dasein. The most primordial "truth" is the "locus" of the statement, and this primordial truth is the ontological condition of the possibility that statements can be true or false (discovering or covering over).

Understood in its most primordial sense, truth belongs to the fundamental constitution of Dasein. The term signifies an existential. But thus we have already sketched out our answer to the question of the kind of being of truth and the meaning of the necessity of the presupposition that "there is truth."



(c) The Kind of Being of Truth and the Presupposition of Truth


Constituted by disclosedness, Dasein is essentially in the truth. Disclosedness is an essential kind of being of Dasein. "There is" ["gibt es"] truth only insofar as Dasein is and as long as it is. Beings are discovered only when Dasein is, and only as long as Dasein is are they disclosed. Newton's laws, the law of contradiction, and any truth whatsoever, are true only as long as Dasein is. Before there. was any Dasein, there was no truth; nor will there be any after Dasein is no more. For in such a case truth as disclosedness, discovering, and discoveredness cannot be. Before Newton's laws were discovered, they were not "true." From this it does not follow that they were false or even that they would become false if ontically no discoveredness were possible any longer. [227] Just as little does this "restriction" imply a diminution of the being true of "truths."

The fact that before Newton his laws were neither true nor false cannot mean that the beings which they point out in a discovering way did not previously exist. The laws became true through Newton, through them beings in themselves became accessible for Dasein. With the discoveredness of beings, they show themselves precisely as the beings that previously already were. To discover in this way is the kind of being of "truth."

That there are "eternal truths" will not be adequately proven until it is successfully demonstrated that Dasein has been and will be for all eternity. As long as this proof is lacking, the statement remains a fanciful assertion which does not gain in legitimacy by being generally "believed" by philosophers.

In accordance with the essential kind of being appropriate to Dasein, all truth is relative to the being of Dasein. Is this relativity tantamount to


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