as such, as it does communicating a state of affairs as one that has been indicated. The expression of the statement or indication (i.e., what is stated) is now not only “the chalkboard in its blackness” (i.e., what was indicated and brought into view), nor is it merely “black-ness” (i.e., the predicate qua predicated). Rather, it is the blackness of the chalkboard as expressed, the spoken-forth-ness of what has been indicated, and indicated in the matter of predication. In living speech, an ἀπόφανσις is a statement in all three senses of the word at one and the same time. These three meanings are not just empty or invented distinctions within the meaning of “statement.” No, each of them refers to a specific structural moment of λόγoς. The various determinations of “statement”—1. showing, 2. determining, and 3. communicating—are issue-oriented directives for studying the phenomenon itself.
In laying out the three meanings we have also indicated (although only roughly) their interrelation. The first one makes the other two possible. The basic movement is not from language to speaking but from speaking to language.9 In fact, language and speaking are not distinguished at the start; and the first explorative questioning of that started from both sides at once, that of language and that of speaking, and oscillated between the two with no fixed point of reference.
That point of reference is “truth” understood as uncovering, as indicative showing-as. In order to be understood as ἀπόφανσις, speech needs to be brought back to the act of uncovering. [135] The proposition is not the place where truth first becomes possible, but the reverse. The proposition is possible only within truth. However, that requires that we understand the phenomenon which the Greeks meant by “truth” and which Aristotle was the first one to capture in a clear concept. “The proposition is not the place of truth; truth is the place of the proposition.” At first glance this formulation may seem forced and dogmatic. But later we will show its complete legitimacy.
In this regard, we must keep in mind that the proposition has a peculiar relation to truth since, as propositional truth, it is necessarily caught in an either/or. It is the kind of speech that is neither true as such nor false as such, but can be either true or false.
Our question now is: What makes this either/or accrue of necessity to the proposition as a statement? What exactly is the structure of a statement, and why is that structure necessarily qualified by this either/or?
9. This is important because all of Greek logic, and consequently our own logic right up to today, takes its orientation from this, the spoken sentence.