PATHMARKS
itself accordingly is correct (true). What is thus said is the correct (the true).
A statement is invested with its correctness by the openness3 of comportment; for only through the latter can what is opened up really become the standard for the presentative correspondence. Open comportment must let itself be assigned this standard. This means that it must take over a pregiven standard for all presenting. This belongs to the openness of comportment. But if the correctness (truth) of statements becomes possible only through this openness of comportment, then what first makes correctness possible must with more original legitimacy be taken as the essence of truth.
Thus the traditional assignment of truth exclusively to statements as the sole essential locus of truth falls away. [81 {GA 9 185] Truth does not originally reside in the proposition. But at the same time the question arises as to the ground of the inner possibility of the open comportment that pregives a standard, which possibility alone lends to propositional correctness the appearance of fulfilling the essence of truth at all.
3· THE GROUND OF THE POSSIBILITY OF CORRECTNESS
Whence does the presentative statement receive the directive to conform to the object and to accord by way of correctness? Why is this accord involved in determining the essence of truth? How can something like the accomplishment of a pregiven directedness occur? And how can the initiation into an accord occur? Only if this pregiving has already entered freely into an open region for something opened up that prevails there and that binds every presenting. To free oneself for a binding directedness is possible only by being free for what is opened up in an open region. Such being free points to the heretofore uncomprehended essence of freedom. The openness of comportment as the inner condition of the possibility of correctness is grounded in freedom. The essence of truth, as the correctness of a statement,8 is freedom.
But does not this proposition regarding the essence of correctness substitute one obvious item for another? In order to be able to carry out any act and therefore one of presentative stating and even of according or not according with a "truth," the actor must of course be free, i.e., unimpeded.9 However, the proposition in question does not really mean that an unconstrained act belongs to the execution of the statement, to its
a Third edition, 1954: And this within the clearing.
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