identification, the act of knowing knows how things stand with regard to its own legitimacy. But the legitimacy of knowing is its ability to be proven, or its proven-ness in and with the thing. Identification or proof is an intentional matter. It is carried out; and thereby, without any reflection on its part, it attains to a clarification of itself. If this moment of unreflected self-understanding, which lies in the intentional performance of identification, [108] is specially apprehended of and by itself, then it is to be taken as what we call evidence.

Evidence is the self-understanding act of identification. This selfunderstanding is given with the act itself, since the intentional sense of the act intends something identical qua identical; and thereby, in and with its intending, it eo ipso clarifies itself.

The essential thing about this apparently primitive (but from a phenomenological viewpoint extraordinarily important) analysis is this: Evidence is not an act that accompanies proof and attaches itself to it. Evidence is the very enactment of, or a special mode of, proof.

But insofar as legitimacy makes its appearance in such proof, what we have said about evidence also means the following. The legitimacy of knowing is not established after the fact, as it were, in a new act of knowledge whose content would be that the first act of knowledge (the one proven in the first place) is legitimate. Rather, the legitimacy of knowledge becomes visible in, through, and for the intentional enactment of identification. If we do not grasp the phenomenological situation in this way, that is, if we do not see the phenomenological structure, we will be inevitably thrown into an absurd conclusion, namely, that the legitimacy of an act of knowledge is established only when it is known in a second act of knowledge, which in turn would need another demonstration of its legitimacy, and so on in infinitum. The first act of knowledge, the true and proper knowledge of the thing, would never gain legitimacy because a priori and unto infinity it would always be necessary to know the legitimacy of the knowledge of the legitimacy of knowledge, and this knowing, in turn . . . , and so on and on.

The legitimacy of an act of knowledge or of speech is its ability to be proven or its actually having been proven. (The state of having-beenproven is the identity of the intended and the intuited, an identity that is seen in the proof.) As an act of knowledge whose legitimacy can be provided at any time by an intuition of the thing it intends, it is [109] true. Truth is the identity of the meant and the intuited.

Truth is identity or sameness, although obviously not in a universal sense, for not every form of identity is truth. But in this case, truth is interpreted in terms of identity, and specifically as the identity of the intended and the intuited.

With this we have now determined truth itself. To put it formally: Identity is a relation. And truth as an identity is a relation between the