His position is clear: it is Descartes’s. What is given first and what alone is given with certitude is the manifold of ideas in us, in consciousness. I can never get outside them, but there is supposed to be knowledge of them, that is, an apprehension of their truth. But within this position (which is the only one possible), what is the one thing truth can mean? Not an agreement of ideas with things because (as says the argument so often repeated today), how am I supposed to measure the ideas within myself against things outside myself? How am I supposed to bring these into agreement? For things are always given to me only as ideas; so then I am measuring ideas against ideas. (Rickert also argues this way in his Gegenstand der Erkenntnis, and he attempts to show that ideas as such are not knowledge.)48
But from this it is already clear that truth is something that presents no exceptions, has no lacunae, and is never otherwise. It is the connection of ideas and the lawfulness of this connection. Truth is what keeps itself permanent, the firm point of certitude amid the changing world of presentations. The formal pre-conception of truth is: the true, the abiding, the stable. Truth = permanence = what always is.
Here emerges what we previously understood by “truth.” The true is what remains permanent throughout the change of [66] presentations. In the flowing multitude of mental appearances and impressions, we effect a first formation of impressions by naming something. An example: When I have the sensation of red, I always sense a specific red (thing), here and now in the mental flow of experiences, a unique “this red,” in this light, with this strength of color, etc. Now Lotze says that as soon as I recognize the sensed red as red, or think it as red, I have already transcended the sensation of this red and now apprehend it and in some way understand it from the universal content “red”: this individual red as a particularizing of red-in-general.49 “Red” is now raised up and thrown into relief, it is something objective which is no longer a condition we passively receive (in affection), but rather, is the content that we name “redness,”
which in itself is what it is, and which means what it means, and which continues to be and mean this whether or not our consciousness is di-rected to it. (p. 15)
The affection is objectified into an autonomous content, which as an
48. [Cf. Heinrich Rickert (1863–1936), Der Gegenstand der Erkenntnis. Einführung in die Transzendentalphilosophie (Freiburg: Mohr, 1892; 6th, rev. edition, Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1928). Heidegger read this sentence out in class (Moser, pp. 137–138), but GA 21 confines it to a footnote.]
49. [The two preceding sentences are aided by Moser, pp. 138–139.]