The questions we have asked here are not just some formal critical questions that we have pulled out of the blue and put to the logic of validity, to modern logic, and maybe to an entire tradition. No, they are concrete questions that we ourselves will have to ask in the course of these lectures in hopes of getting a preliminary answer.57
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Precisely because of this link-up with the grand tradition of ancient philosophy, validity has almost become the magic word for contemporary logic—and not only for logic. People speak as well of ethical and aesthetic validity (non-logical validity) and claim to show, by analogy with the claims of psychology, the lawfulness, normativeness, and determinateness of all kinds of behavior: theoretical, practical, artistic, objective. But at bottom, this magic word “validity” is a tangle of confusion, perplexity, and dogmatism.
Why does “validity” cast such a spell? Answer: because the term is even more ambiguous than we have shown up to now, and this ambiguity allows the term to be very broadly applied according to the context. The reason is not that its referent has been unambiguously fixed as a universal phenomenon and that its universal relations have not been discovered. No, it’s because the vagueness of the word and its referent allows such an unquestioned, broad application. Its broad employment is not because the function of its referent is clear and based on principles, but because of the concealed ambiguity of the term itself. [80]
We must again return to Lotze if we hope to show the essentially different meanings that “validity” has, along with those we’ve already mentioned. In sketching out Lotze’s treatment of the doctrine of ideas, we showed how he rejects the traditional concept of truth and sets out from the flux of ideas as a whole and from the consciousness of ideas, i.e., from what is accessible to (in his words) “inner intuition.” The result is that the true is what is permanent and stable, and can be apprehended by this intuition. What remains permanent and stable is the valid—invariable, ever recurring, without contingency, in a word, the necessary. At first, this permanent something is only in consciousness; but its material content consists of the determinations and lawgoverned togetherness of what we naïvely call external things. In the true and the stable, we find something given in our consciousness that asserts something about the outer world without needing or being able to be measured against it. The valid, taken as what is stable and necessary, now has the meaning of something that qua valid holds
57. [Here Heidegger closed his lecture of Friday, 20 November 1925, to be followed by his lecture of Monday, 23 November (Moser, pp. 164–181), which began with a 500-word summary (Moser, pp. 164–66) that is omitted in GA 21.]