Lotze’s inquiry discussed in some detail, because his inquiry now becomes relevant to that issue. The primary instance of validity is the actuality of contents and propositions “in consciousness.” That primary validity is the foundation on which objectivity is based; and bindingness is based on both of those two. A proposition is not valid because it holds true of objects—i.e., validity in the primary sense is not founded on validity as objectivity. Lotze obviates such a demand for measurement in the sense of a correspondence with something. We cannot say “truth is correspondence.” It’s the other way around. Because the proposition is valid, it holds true of something; and because there is something in consciousness that is stable, it agrees with something! But even this formulation is inadequate. Why is the proposition valid? Because it is something stable and permanent that must be affirmed in itself; because it is something we have to affirm in itself, something that we must acknowledge.
It is important to note that, as the earlier “derivation” indicated, validity remains primarily related to affirmation.60 [82] The other two meanings of the word “validity” only corroborate the fundamental point we have already made: that Lotze does not investigate the phenomenon of truth at all. It is not the case that Lotze now broaches the question of truth for the first time. Rather, he presumes that the question is already answered in principle by the equation: to be valid = to be true. He builds validity as objectivity and validity as universal bindingness on the first concept of validity, and to that extent these concepts lead us even further away from the central question about the essence of truth.
The predominance of the concept of validity pushes the question of truth more and more into the background arena of secondary problems and ends up reducing it to the intrinsically unimportant question about the kind of relation [viz., “bindingness”] that truth has to the possible comportment of the “subjects” who acknowledge it. Sometimes this process of devaluation goes so far that the first meaning of validity is forgotten, and truth is even identified with universal bindingness. The true is what is valid for all, what everyone is bound to acknowledge.
The much-extolled “discovery” of validity is only the semblance of a genuine question about the essence of truth. But let me say one final thing: we have yet to reach the lowest point in the downfall of the question of truth.
Philosophers felt they had to get beyond Lotze. They wanted to radicalize him and for the first time get the final meaning of his doctrine of validity (and therefore true philosophy) by means of the following considerations.
60. Affirmation, assensus, agreement; iudicium [judgment] in the specific sense of recognition.