Existence Is Truth, Reflections on Truth

Since Parmenides proposed that "what exists exists, what does not exist does not exist", philosophy has established "existence" as the core object and delineated a deterministic path for truth characterized by constancy and identity. This has opened up the continuous questioning of "existence-truth" in Western metaphysics, and at the same time laid the theoretical foundation for the formation of the correspondence theory of truth. Plato inherited this awareness of the problem and placed real existence and truth in the realm of transcendent ideas to combat the changes and contingency of the real world; Aristotle returned to the being itself and established the basic framework of the first philosophy through the analysis of entities. Since then, although Western philosophy has continued to deepen its understanding of existence, it has been mostly limited to the level of "beings", solidifying truth as the conformity of subject's cognition to objects, and ignoring the manifestation and unmasking of existence itself. Heidegger broke through this tradition by proposing "ontological difference" and understood truth as the process of manifestation and unconcealment of existence, thereby revealing the inner connection between existence and truth. However, Heidegger still regarded the meaning of existence as the ultimate inquiry and did not directly anchor the essence of existence as truth at the ontological level. On this basis, this book proposes that existence is truth, and its nature of truth is no longer the correctness of a single judgment, but the way existence appears in reality. In other words, truth is not a static correspondence between a single proposition and a fact, but is experienced and understood through the way existence itself presents itself in the real world. This re-anchoring not only aims to theoretically return to the origins of philosophy, but also confronts contemporary technocracy and nihilism.