Logic: The Question of Truth

Part II

PA RT II The radicalized question: What is truth? (A retrieval of the analysis of falsehood in terms of its ur-temporality)§15. The idea of a phenomenological chronology The conclusion that we have drawn is also an enigma.1 In other words, the conclusion of the preceding analyses has brought us, intentionally and radically, to the central problematic of philosophy. The conclusion of the investigation up to this point is not an end but a beginning. So what does it mean that we now take the preceding investigation and the phenomena we have articulated—statement, truth, falsehood, synthesis—and relate them all as a unity back to this phenomenal context of time? If this kind of interpreting and philosophically understanding such a trivial phenomenon as the statement really is philosophical , and if we assert it to be such, then can we appeal (if it makes any sense at all) to Kant? In his Reflexionen, Kant says: “The business of the philosopher is not to give out rules but to dismember the secret judgments of common sense.” “The secret judgments of common sense”—that means those unspoken, unknown, and un-understood comportments that underlie all the daily comportments of existence. It is the business of the philosopher to bring these secret (hidden) judgments of common sense to light, and to do so in a way that dismembers them. For Kant, dismembering, ana-lysing, means two things. In the first place he understands analysis in a very broad, formal sense where it simply means: to separate an already given thing into its [198] elements , to divide a particular concrete concept into the component parts that go to make it up. But “analysis” and “analytic” also have a 1. [Heidegger opened his lecture of Monday, 11 January 1926, with a 1,450word summary (Moser, pp. 411–417) which is omitted in GA 21.] 167 broader, fundamental philosophical meaning for Kant: to lead something back to its “birthplace.” In that case “analytic” means the same as bringing to light the genesis of the proper sense of a phenomenon, pressing forward to the final conditions of the possibility of something already given. But such an analytic presupposes some directives about the horizon within which the analysis is to move, so to speak, in order to find the genetic conditions of a phenomenon and of its possibility. Our thesis is that truth, being, and consequently falsehood, synthesis, and statement are, in some kind of (for the time being) obscure sense, connected with the phenomenon of time; and this already delineates the horizon for our philosophical analytic of propositions. Only an investigation that is adequate to such a philosophical analytic can be considered to be authentically philosophical. Traditionally we put our minds at ease regarding logic by saying that a proposition is something simple and ultimate; it is synthesis and division . Finally everyone understands that thesis. But on the other hand no one understands how there could be any further questions at all regarding a determination like this and a phenomenon like the statement. The point is not just to give you closer contact with a concrete understanding of statement and truth, the phenomena that are our topic. It is much more essential for your philosophical studies and reflection for you to see that the real problem of philosophy is the “obvious”—“the secret judgments of common sense.” And perhaps you notice how little of philosophy, as it has been practiced up to now, is a matter of philosophical reasoning—only in a few circles and to a limited extent—and how it is dominated much more by common sense. Philosophy can make good its claim to being a science (in fact the basic science) only if we drive common sense out of philosophical reasoning. [199] Let us now take the dogmatic conclusion that we first arrived at and pose it once again in three theses: 1. Being means presence. 2. Truth means the now-present. 3. Presence and presence-now, as characteristics of presenting [Präsenz] are modes of time.2 The analysis of the proposition is now oriented toward time. In other words, our project will be to clarify the characteristics of time with reference to the phenomena we have been discussing—truth, falsehood, synthesis, and statement in its three different meanings. The characteristics whereby these phenomena are temporal, we call their ur-temporal 2. [Compare with the four theses at GA...