the “therefore”! And where does the necessity of unprovability find its basis?
3. The principle of contradiction and the principle of identity are presupposed to be self-evident, with no questions asked about whether they are actually ultimate. I don’t mean to say these principles should be reducible to simpler ones. However, we should at least entertain the question of whether or not the “proposition” of contradiction is simply a specific and determinate “expression” for an original basic relation that does not primarily lie in the dimension of statements and propositions. Hence, appealing to this proposition—even apart from the fact that the appeal leads us into the dimension of the theoretical statement—does not as such touch on the real presuppositions of truth in general.16
4. In both the argumentation for and the refutation of skepticism, the issue is whether or not there is truth, whether or not it exists. But what goes unasked in all this is what the being of truth means, what the “there is . . .” refers to. There are automobiles, Negroes, Abelian functions, Bach’s fugues. “Are there” truths, too? Or if not, what then?
5. This delineation of skepticism and of the refutation of skepticism claims to deal with the ultimate presuppositions of all philosophy—but without asking about the meaning and necessity and possibility of presupposing as such. After all, where is there such a thing as presupposing? And why must there be? What is the basis for the necessity of making pre-suppositions? The more noise one makes about “the selfevident,” the more puzzles there are to solve. But to philosophize means to be entirely and constantly [24] troubled by and immediately sensitive to the complete enigma of things that common sense considers self-evident and unquestionable. Of course such philosophizing requires that we hunt down and look into these “immediately selfevident” things, and for that we need the right direction and the crucial light for finding our way.
This list of questions should make it clear that the supposedly basic reflection [on skepticism] is only a semblance of that. Later on, when we again take up and investigate these questions in their proper place, we will have to show how they are intimately connected with the question, “What is truth?” This will show us that the question about the essence of truth leads to a dimension that will remain completely closed to those who orient the basic concept of truth to truth as the validity of propositions.
Far from being a foundation-laying prolegomenon to philosophizing logic, the above discussion of skepticism and relativism is only an
16.Aristotle’s principle of contradiction is also a relation of being and a law of being, something that has not been understood up to today.