ON THE ESSENCE OF TRUTH
the idea. If all beings are "created," the possibility of the truth of human knowledge is grounded {GA 9: 181} in the fact that matter and proposition measure up to the idea in the same way and therefore are fitted to each other on the basis of the unity of the divine plan of creation. Veritas as adaequatio rei (creandae) ad intellectum (divinum) guarantees veritas as adaequatio intellectus (humani) ad rem (creatam). Throughout, veritas essentially implies convenientia, the coming of beings themselves, as created, [77] into agreement with the Creator, an "accord" with regard to the way they are determined in the order of creation.a
But this order, detached from the notion of creation, can also be represented in a general and indefinite way as a world-order. The theologically conceived order of creation is replaced by the capacity of all objects to be planned by means of a worldly reason [Weltvernunft] that supplies the law for itself and thus also claims that its procedure is immediately intelligible (what is considered "logical"). That the essence of propositional truth consists in the correctness of statements is thought to need no further special proof.4 Even where an effort is made - with a conspicuous lack of success to explain how correctness is to occur, it is already presupposed as being the essence of truth. Likewise, material truth always signifies the consonance of something at hand with the "rational" concept of its essence. The impression arises that this definition of the essence of truth is independent of the interpretation of the essence of the Being of all beings, which always includes a corresponding interpretation of the essence of the human being as the bearer and executor of intellectus. Thus the formula for the essence of truth (veritas est adaequatio intellectus et rei) comes to have its general validity as something immediately evident to everyone. Under the domination of the obviousness that this concept of truth seems to have, {GA 9: 182} but that is hardly attended to as regards its essential grounds, it is considered equally obvious that truths has an opposite, and that there is untruth. The untruth of the proposition (incorrectness) is the nonaccordance of the statement with the matter. The untruth of the matter (nongenuineness) signifies nonagreement of a being with its essence. In each case untruth is conceived as a nonaccord. The latter falls outside the essence of truth. Therefore when it is a question of comprehending the pure essence of truth, untruth, as such an opposite of truth, can be put aside.
a First edition, 1943: Nor a double coming into agreement, but one, yet multiply articulated: Because of agreement with the Creator, there is also agreement [of beings] among one another (since what is created is in a certain way divine); "correspondence" in a more essential sense than that intended by the crude, unthought analogia entis adopted from Aristotle by the Scholastics.
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