ON THE ESSENCE OF TRUTH

Coming from this origin we not only understand this principle in its intrinsic possibility, but we also gain an eye for something noteworthy and hitherto unelucidated concerning the way it has been conceived, something that is, however, suppressed in the way the principle is ordinarily formulated. In Leibniz we indeed find the principle coined in ways that lend expression to an apparently insignificant moment of its content. These may be schematically brought together as follows: ratio est cur hoc potius existit quam aliud; ratio est cur sic potius existit quam aliter; ratio est cur aliquid potius existit quam nihil. [A reason is why this exists rather than something else; a reason is why something exists in this way rather than in another way; a reason is why anything exists rather than nothing.] The "cur" ["why"] is expressed as "cur potius quam" ["why rather than"]. Here again the first problem is not that of the ways and means by which these questions, in each case posed factically in ontic ways of comportment, are to be decided. Rather, [173] what needs to be clarified is why it is that the "cur" ["why"] could associate itself with the "potius quam" ("rather than"] at all.

Every accounting for things must move within a sphere of what is possible, because as-a manner of intentional comportment toward beings with respect to their possibility it is already compliant with the explicit or implicit (ontological) grounding of something. In accordance with its essence, such grounding always necessarily provides a given range of what is possible - here the character of possibility changes according to how the being of those beings to be unveiled is constituted - and it does so because being (the constitution of being), in grounding something, is, as transcendentally binding for Dasein, rooted in Dasein's freedom. The reflection of this origin of the essence of ground in the grounding that pertains to finite freedom shows itself in the [69] "potitus quam" found in these formulations of the principle of reason. But once again, shedding light upon the concrete, transcendental connections between "ground" and the "rather than" presses us to clarify the idea of being in general (what-being and how-being, something, nothing and nothingness).

In its traditional form and role, the principle of reason has remained stuck in a trivialized form that necessarily entails that we first of all illuminate everything that has the character of a "grounding principle." For even declaring this principle to be a "grounding principle" and, for instance, placing it together with the principle of identity and principle of noncontradiction, or even deriving it from these, does not lead us into the origin, but is equivalent to cutting off all further questioning. Here we should observe, moreover, that even the principles of identity and noncontradiction are not only also transcendental, but point back to something more originary

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