be necessary in order to answer that question? This preliminary foundation does not hold as a foundation; rather, it is a starting point for an inquiry that undermines this foundation.
And now, with regard to the way of determining truth, as we have shown it to be rooted in the tradition, we inquire into the “why.” Why is truth intuition-truth? Why is intuition the basic kind of knowing, and why must truth, understood in this way, be understood as sameness (identity)? Why is this truth the truth of propositions, and why does the actuality of propositional truth have the kind of being that Plato attributed to the ideas?
Briefly: Why is truth identity? How is it that the being of the true is timeless validity? We are not posing these questions casually, over against the treatment of the problem of truth in philosophy heretofore. Rather, we are asking about the concrete roots of this interpretation of truth, and about its impact, by going back to its historical origins. That is, we are going to concern ourselves with history, not out of some interest in antiquity—say, to know what Aristotle thought, to know what his view of truth was. No, the historical questions that we ask should confront us with ourselves and force us to enter our own history. [125]
In order to put ourselves into question, we are critically questioning back [into history], and in that regard we can clarify the project as follows. In a radical critique that starts with the whole and goes back to the whole, we actually have to make the adversary put forth his most crucial points. But the remarkable thing is always this: In philosophizing, you first have to “acquire” great and creative adversaries by waking them up. Then you can grow and mature by arguing with them and establishing the simple outlines of elemental issues, where “elemental” means both “simple” and “explosive” at the same time.
These questions are elemental in their historical origin. They are “simple” not just because they are still clumsy questions and haven’t quite been understood, but “simple” because you don’t need elaborate contraptions to investigate them.
So once again, the two questions:
1. Why is truth interpreted as identity?
2. Why does the true have its being as validity?
We must ask these questions in an elementary way. Therefore, let us seek help from a place where these questions necessarily became elementary. And so we come to the first part of our treatment.106
106. [Here (Moser, p. 262) Heidegger ends his lecture of 1 December 1925, to be followed by that of Thursday, 3 December, which opened with an 870-word summary that is omitted in GA 21.]