ABSTRACT
Inanestranged world information is available but no truth. “Truth about the world”—this mode of speech implies a meaningful or understandable whole, a cosmos. But the world is no longer recognized as cosmos, and by the same token truth as the revelation of meaning to man seems unattainable. Truth as the disclosure of meaning is not to be wrested from the objects of the Existentialist’s estranged world. However, the subjective truth is not entirely severed from reference to things subsisting outside man. As truth is made subjective and thereby temporal, philosophy becomes historiography of the human mind. Vital truth is grasped with the passionate anxiety of a drowning man grabbing the life belt. Speculative truth is eternal truth, out of touch with time, and reaching it means to get away from one’s self. If everything depends on how a truth is held, with what passionate zeal, while the reference to an object is of little or no account, strange consequences result.
