been believed in the refutations of scepticism, in spite of what these undertake to do) than it has been demonstrated that there are any 'eternal truths'. But perhaps such sceptics have been more frequent than one would innocently like to have true when one tries to bowl over 'scepticism' by formal dialectics.
Thus with the question of the Being of truth and the necessity of presupposing it, just as with the question of the essence of knowledge, an 'ideal subject' has generally been posited. The motive for this, whether explicit or tacit, lies in the requirement that philosophy should have the 'a priori' as its theme, rather than 'empirical facts' as such. There is some justification for this requirement, though it still needs to be grounded ontologically. Yet is this requirement satisfied by positing an 'ideal subject'? Is not such a subject a fanciful idealization? With such a conception have we not missed precisely the a priori character of that merely 'factual' subject, Dasein? Is it not an attribute of the a priori character of the factical subject (that is, an attribute of Dasein's facticity) that it is in the truth and in untruth equiprimordially?
The ideas of a 'pure "I"' and of a 'consciousness in general' are so far from including the a priori character of 'actual' subjectivity that the ontological characters of Dasein's facticity and its state of Being are either passed over or not seen at all. Rejection of a 'consciousness in general' does not signify that the a priori is negated, any more than the positing of an idealized subject guarantees that Dasein has an a priori character grounded upon fact.
Both the contention that there are 'eternal truths' and the jumbling together of Dasein's phenomenally grounded 'ideality' with an idealized absolute subject, belong to those residues of Christian theology within philosophical problematics which have not as yet been radically extruded.
[230] The Being of truth is connected primordially with Dasein. And only because Dasein i s as constituted by disclosedness (that is, by understanding), can anything like Being be understood; only so is it possible to understand Being.
Being (not entities) is something which 'there is' only in so far as truth is. And truth is only in so far as and as long as Dasein is. Being and truth 'are' equiprimordially. What does it signify that Being 'is', where Being is to be distinguished from every entity? One can ask this concretely only if the meaning of Being and the full scope of the understanding of Being have in general been clarified. Only then can one also analyse primordially what belongs to the concept of a science of Being as such, and to its possibilities and its variations. And in demarcating this research and its