Heidegger Reexamined, 4 Vols.

This is probably one of the most important posts on Heidegger I have given to date. Hubert Dreyfus and Mark Wrathall got together and created an anthology of, in their mind, some of the best and most important works on Heidegger's thought. Normally you would have to pay a small fortune (at least on a student's income) to get your hands on this set. I've been searching for online copies for some time and, with one failure, I've finally located them! They are in RAR format, so you need to download WinRAR or another program that unpacks it, but you can get a trial version. So enjoy!!!!

Read more!

Concise Statement of Dasein's Essence

In his first day in Burghölzli Auditorium of the University of Zurich Psychiatric Clinic, Heidegger provided the most concise definition of Dasein than I have yet to find in any of his other works. Dated September 8, 1959, this definition also includes many developments in Heidegger's later work, which makes it all the more fascinating and, I think, useful.

[T]o exist as Da-sein means to hold open a domain through its capacity to receive-perceive the significance of things that are given to it and that address it by virtue of its own "clearing".
Zollikon Seminars, 4/H4.

I will address each part of the quote in turn.

"To hold open a domain": Dasein, as being-in-the-world, is always already holding open a world. The active nature of 'world-opening' was recently accentuated to me by a statement by Merleau-Ponty in The Primacy of Perception: "We must say that at each moment our ideas express not only the truth but also our capacity to attain it [i.e. the idea] at that given moment" (21). To be able to think implies the opening up of a particular world wherein that thought is meaningful and, hence, possible; to be able to speak meaningfully, then, is to remain in (or sustain) an opened domain at the time one is thus thinking. We see the tight relation between ideas and the opened world in various phenomena: when someone says something in one domain that we are not presently open to, what they say is alien, enigmatic, or perhaps humorous when situated within our current domain. So it is a matter of remaining within an open domain and, indeed, having a grasp of when particular domains are relevant and/or appropriate for our context. Either way, to be Da-sein is to actively "hold open a domain."

"Through its capacity to receive-perceive": as the being that is in-the-world and that dwells in its openness (Offenheit), Da-sein has a capacity to "receive-perceive" (Vernehmen-können) things. Heidegger uses this term to differentiate it from the psychological approach of "seeing [things] in a sensory fashion with the eyes" (ZS, 35/H44). In relation to perception, Heidegger has been quite clear: first and foremost we see beings, things, not bare sensations. The dominant psychological theory of perception requires a distinction between sensation, understood as bare sensory stimulation, and perception, understood as the cognitive ordering of sensations into meaningful objects. Whatever may be said of the physics and physiology behind this understanding of perception, it is not primarily where human beings dwell and insofar as psychology is the study of human beings it must be grounded in an understanding of the human mode of being if it is to be relevant.

The capacity to "receive" speaks of the relation between Da-sein as the opening and beings as that which comes into the open. The metaphor of the open can be easily misunderstood: Da-sein's openness is not merely present-at-hand such that it passively sits and waits for things to be deposited in it, like an empty box that we use to store things. Rather, Da-sein's openness, as constituted by practices, attunements, and a totality of inter-involved beings, is more like a filter that polarizes the world such that beings that are relevant to my current projects may appear if present.

While the opening is not a present-at-hand thing, similarly it is not a subjectivistic attribution of value and meaning onto a meaningless objective thing. As Heidegger states in the "Letter on Humanism," man does not unilaterally decide how beings appear, but it is always a question of man creating and sustaining an opening appropriate to the kind of beings that man is concerned with (paraphrase; Basic Writings, 234). This "receiving" is particularly important in relation to the "given to it" in the original quote, to be addressed below.

"To receive-perceive the significance of things": as early as Being and Time, Heidegger claims that we first see the significance of things for our projects, according to our world, not the thing itself with its present-at-hand properties. We are ecstatically open to beings because we care about things, thus they can appear in a significant and meaningful way (in the least as either relevant or irrelevant for our concerns). For a being who literally "does not care," things would not appear as things. This would be the highest expression of the so-called "objective" viewpoint where, at best, one would see bare sense data if one would not simply be catatonic and thus not 'see' anything at all. But Da-sein does not exist in such a state; even in the case of depression, where all beings and events get reduced to the same meaningless level, our mode of being-in-the-world is a deficient mode of concern, not the absence of concern. That we first and foremost see significances, rather than bare sense data that must be constructed into meaningful things, is one of Heidegger's great insights.

"Things that are given to it": things are "given" to Da-sein. As in "Letter on Humanism," man does not force beings to appear, does not bring them to presence by mere force of will; they are gifts. Being is that which gives, es gibt (it gives). Man creates and sustains the opening by way of his cares and concerns, thus giving a space for being to enter in; being gives that which man can bring to presence given his concerns, yet essentially exceeds that presence. This is the clearing where the event of appropriation (Ereignis) occurs: man's opening and being's giving, both of which are co-necessary. Technology is a danger because it forgets this receiving/giving, uncovering/covering, but sees things as merely present resources that are only available as resources. The same may be said for every appropriation: when our concern is appropriately interacting with beings, the way in which beings come to presence (as the dynamic relation between presence/absence) will be covered over and necessarily so. When our concern is getting about in the world, the mode of presencing cannot be of concern; the latter is necessarily reflective in nature and must be its own matter of concern. Philosophy, as fundamental ontology, brings Ereignis to remembrance.

"And that address it": in the realm of technology "man [is] the master of being" ("The Turning," in Question Concerning Technology, 39). Being is the mere presence of endlessly interchangeable materials that are understood through man's calculating concerns, that exist solely for those concerns. In this view, beings cannot "address" Da-sein since beings are merely present as materials. When Da-sein properly dwells, however, beings address man as this particular being in this particular context with this particular use. Mark Wrathall put it well:

Rather than increasing the universal and uniform availability of everything, we need instead to learn how to let things be things rather than resources, and develop practices attuned to the things that are peculiar to our local world with their own particular earth, sky, mortal practices and divinities.
How to Read Heidegger, 111.

Beings must condition us in their particularity rather than us merely conditioning them as resources for our own concerns. We should let them address us as much as we address them.

"By virtue of its own 'clearing'": I have yet to discover if Heidegger is using "opening" and "clearing" as synonyms, but this part of the quote re-emphasizes the human aspect of being-in-the-world. Heidegger often uses the word Geschick in reference to man's clearing. The common translation is "fate" or "destiny" (see above reference to "Letter on Humanism"), but it can also mean "skill," "aptitude," or "aptness." Man's clearing sets the stage wherein beings can appear as meaningful; it, in a sense, sets up in advance (makes fateful) the possibility of beings appearing within a particular world. But this is also skillful insofar as our worlds are constituted by practices of which we must gain aptitude, whether at an everyday level or as masters. Similarly, these practices must be enacted appropriately; they must be properly geared to our current context such that we are not enacting, say, a world of competition when we should be enacting a world of care or love. Beings, if they do appear, appear by virtue of man's clearing a space for them to appear (and by virtue of being's gift of being).

Read more!

Heidegger and Sponge Bob Square Pants

In a final comment in an article on labor in Australia, we find an unrelated, but utterly profound comment on the true significance of Sponge Bob Square Pants through the lens of Heidegger:

Science is a wonderful thing, is it not? According to the latest research, the origin of the human species is to be found at the bottom of the sea, not in an octopus's garden, but in a sponge bed. So Sponge Bob Square Pants is more than just a cartoon. Heidegger was right: In art, the truth.

Read more!

The Tao/Da (There) of Truth--Trungpa

While I'm still unconvinced of a strong coherence between Eastern thought and Heideggerian phenomenology, I thought this quote from Chögyam Trungpa's Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism is good food for thought:

If we really want to learn and see the experience of truth, we have to be where we are. (70)

Where else can truth appear than from my being-here, Da-sein?

Read more!

Han on Nietzschean Truth

As I do more work on Heideggerian authenticity, I've recently finished (for the second and a half time) Béatrice Han's "Nietzsche and the 'Masters of Truth': The Pre-Socratics and Christ," in Heidegger, Authenticity, and Modernity, 165-186. Han's analysis is useful because she provides a convincing account for how Nietzsche does not delve into either nihilism or contradiction in his understanding of truth by grounding his view in a pre-Socratic understanding of truth. This has direct ties to my summary/commentary on Guignon, which should be kept in mind, particularly his distinction between a "means-end" approach to actions and a "constituent-end" approach to actions. It also has a few thoughts relevant to the question of the supposed primacy of logic and reason by directing us to something that is prior to both.

Han begins by bringing up the usual interpretations of Nietzsche:

Nietzsche's position would be threatened either by a nihilistic and generalized leveling of all values, or by the argument used against the Skeptics from Antiquity: any proposition that denies the existence of truth reasserts by definition the reality of what is negated by it--either a universal relativism, or a contradiction between the propositional content and the very existence of the proposition. (165-166)

One common tactic by Nietzsche's interpreters is to distinguish between different levels of truth. Heidegger, however, is the first to propose that Nietzsche was not arguing against metaphysics, but was bringing it to its fruition. Still, Heidegger agrees with the other commentators that Nietzsche implicitly assumes the correspondence view of truth, which he is opposing. The other assumption, in discussing Nietzsche's understanding of truth, lies in Nietzsche's denial of the existence of a 'thing-in-itself'; all truths are found solely in one's active living and are true in virtue of their pragmatic value. But even this doesn't work as Nietzsche denies any pragmatic understanding of truth: even if something works, that doesn't mean that it is right.

In fact, the real meaning of genealogy is to denounce the unconscious pragmatism of science and of metaphysics, precisely by unveiling its original occultation by the adequationist understanding of truth: what we see as (adequationally) true is, to take up William James's favorite expression, what "works."

This is something that hasn't quite occurred to me: that the adequationist/correspondent view of truth might actually have a pragmatic basis. From a Heideggerian perspective I imagine that this could be interpreted in the following way: some notion of correspondence works in various situations, particularly those of scientific categorization; because it works in this way, then the correspondence view must be adequate. If we cannot understand Nietzsche's notion of truth through either correspondence or pragmatism (on which the former seems to rest), then how can we understand it?

Han proposes that we understand Nietzschean truth, not through invoking different notions of truth, but through Nietzsche's analysis of the rise of metaphysics and the adequationist understanding of truth. By doing so, Nietzsche sees truth in its prehistory in pre-Socratic thought: as founded in ethics, in the personal greatness of the individual.

I have selected those doctrines which sound most clearly the personality of the individual philosopher, whereas the complete enumeration of all the transmitted doctrines, as it is the custom of the ordinary handbooks to give, has but one sure result: the complete silencing of personality.¹ (168)

Here Nietzsche's psychological side comes through: one integral part of any philosophy is the personality of the philosopher; the two cannot be separated, even in principle. As such, one important part of the truth of any claim lies in the speaker's identity, not necessarily on some 'objective' state of affairs. "There is no impersonal access to truth: aletheia depends on ethos" (169). Drawing from the pre-Socratics, this ethical dimension is found in the "severe necessity between their thinking and their character."² The pre-Socratics were integrated individuals who have harmonized the various drives/humors and thoughts that are part of their lives: what they have is theirs, they exist authentically. Furthermore, for the pre-Socratics this harmony occurred naturally, without will or conscious decision. Modernity, by contrast, is driven by conscious reflection; any harmony that may be possible must occur through thorough self-reflection and conscious change. Furthermore, the modern scholar sees no necessity in the continuity between their being and their thought: that relationship is seen as arbitrary and inconsequential to their claims. This is a natural consequence when truth is thought to be found within propositions, such that one can speak truthfully regardless of one's personal excellence. Nietzsche is revolting against this view: "The man is the incarnation of what he thinks, and his thought, the necessary expression of his character" (170).

With this ethical element, the philosopher is the incarnation of his word, he embodies his work. Rather than the philosopher's system being metaphysically abstract and 'objective,' the genuine philosopher's system is grounded in their being: "Far from being abstract, the systematization now becomes organic, its totalizing aspect being referred to the individual as a living, concrete totality (they 'bring themselves into a system')" (171). The modern self, in its reflective attitude, is divided in this regard: they cannot ground their propositions in truth and thus are fundamentally ungrounded, disjointed, and unintegrated. In their ethical excellence, the Greek philosophers are "tyrants of truth": being self-secure in their possession of truth and fully integrated in their being (having integrity), their authority and command is sufficient for their words to be believed because they are truthful. This self-assurance would soon be replaced by the Socratic/Platonic dialecticians, whose focus on the abstract theoretical world as divorced from the philosopher's being transmuted the tyrannical element--being believable because one exists truthfully--into a poison. Being incapable of grounding their truth in their mode of being, they grasp for whatever 'external' justification they can find.

In discussing the historical precedence of Nietzsche's understanding, Han brings in Marcel Détienne's The Masters of Truth in Archaic Greece. There Détienne also addresses the adequationist understanding of truth: "In archaic Greece, [the Masters of Truth] have the privilege of dispensing the truth simply because they are endowed with the qualities that make them special."³ The poet and the king are to be believed because of their exceptional qualities, not because they can adequately argue for their beliefs through some application of reason. Han points out that, according Détienne, the individual's position was functional according to socio-cultural institutions, but still the connection between the character/being of the speaker and what they speak is a necessary element in the truthfulness of their claims. This is an important point: Nietzsche was not simply pulling a new view of truth out of thin air, but he drew on a genuine understanding of truth that existed prior to the adequationist/correspondence view.

Nietzsche describes the decline of the archaic understanding of truth in three stages. First, "the 'great concepts' seem to benefit from the metaphysical turn in that they are freed from the magisterial relationship (they become 'liberated ideas')" (173). Thought becomes separated from the individual to some intelligible realm, but in doing so they lose their "local source," they are like plants taken out of their soil, leading to a "phony autonomy" (174). Second, concepts become the "foci of truth," which Han describes as "the reactive character of Platonic nihilism" against the archaic understanding of truth as grounded in one's integrity (174). This reversal of nihilism--where Platonism is seen as nihilistic, despite its professed realism--is interesting: it is because of the way that Platonism seeks to ground meaning in some transcendental realm that it is nihilistic, that it loses its meaning and cogency. Third, and lastly, a new world wherein these falsely liberated concepts is created. Because of their inauthentic living and the disconnect between their personal excellence and their philosophies, truth needs to find a new home elsewhere, so the transcendental world was created to ground their nihilism. Most philosophy textbooks characterize this change as the move from a world steeped in authority to a world where reasons and arguments are needed to be believed. Nietzsche's point is that such a focus on reason and argument as an improvement on 'blindly' following authority in fact misses (and in fact buries) an important part of ancient authority--its being grounded in the excellence of the individual speaking.

This covering-up dynamic, which insensibly transforms the concrete deep-rootedness of values in the contingency of a spatio-temporal set of conditions (the "soil") into a transcendent foundation, is thus the hallmark of the slowly emerging metaphysics. (174)

Han quotes Nietzsche (174):

This degeneration of the archaic model is accompanied by the birth of a new type of man, the "abstractly perfect man," who is the ethical counter-part of the "theoretical man" already exemplified by Socrates in the Birth of Tragedy.

One had need to invent the abstractly perfect man as well--good, just, wise, a dialectician--in short, the scarecrow of the ancient philosopher: a plant removed from all soil... The perfectly absurd "individuum" in itself!⁴ (174)

The individuum in itself is absurd because, as with the universalized concept, it loses its nature by being so universalized: its particularity (its alterity) is lost and the magisterial relationship is covered up or even denigrated. Dialectic essentially spoils the magisterial relationship by disassociating the speaker from what is spoken and focusing exclusively on the latter. The truth had by the "Master of Truth," by comparison, is accepted because of his authority by virtue of the kind of person he is. Socrates, incapable of attaining the level of integrity had by the Master of Truth, becomes tyrannized by the abstract reason that he has 'released.' No longer able to naturally harmonize his life, he is dominated by his need for rigorous thought rather than the natural authenticity, majesty, and nobility that the Master possesses.

Nietzsche sees the same opposition in Christ and Paul. Here it would be good to state the common truism: you often learn more about the interpreter of a thinker than you do about the person interpreted. I, for one, think that Paul does not ignore the existential aspects in his writing, as Nietzsche proposes, such as in Romans 8. Still, Nietzsche's analysis is useful for accentuating his claim. It is also informative to show Nietzsche's relation to Christianity: he had enormous respect for Christ, but little respect for the abstract understanding that traditional Christianity developed, which he first sees in Paul.

Nietzsche sees three magisterial aspects of Christ's life: first, "one of the Messiah's most prominent characteristics is the impossibility of dissociating the content of his teaching from his person and from his life" (176). Christ did not present theoretical reasons or analytical demonstrations of his authority; rather, he showed us a way of being, a way of living, he performed good works and essentially answered arguments with, "What fault do you find in my life?" Second, "Christ is endowed, like the ancient Masters, with the internal harmony that allows him to ground in his personal ethos the truthfulness of his words" (176). In short, Christ knew how to live a divine life, a life which is lived and not argued for. Thus, he possessed the magisterial and noble mode of life that made him believable: he was, or existed as, the Truth, the Way, and the Life. Jonathan Erdman has an interesting paper, titled Aletheia and the Correspondence Theory of Truth, where he discusses the Gospel of John's multiple uses of aletheia, one of which has affinities with the magisterial understanding Nietzsche is espousing. Third, quoting Nietzsche, "Dialectic is equally lacking: the very idea is lacking that a faith, a 'truth,' might be proved by reasons"⁵ (177). One more useful quote by Nietzsche: "Christ's faith is not set in formulas--it lives, it is diffident of formulas... The experience of 'life,' as he alone knows it, is adverse to any kind of letter, formula, law, faith, tenet"⁶ (177). This is particularly seen in the Gospel of Mark, where knowledge is only possible from divine sources, from inspiration rather than argument, from regeneration rather than syllogisms.

Christ is the incarnate Word (Logos) and thus his being and his words are inextricably combined and fully integrated--he is to be believed because of who he is, of the excellence he exhibits in his life. This has two consequences: first, Christ is incomparable with anyone else and, thus, his words have more credence. Not because he can give reasons for his words, but because of the excellence of his being. Second, Christ's life is exemplary. Like the famous book by the same title, the imitation of Christ is our goal: "For even hereunto were ye called: because Christ also suffered for us, leaving us an example, that ye should follow his steps" (1 Peter 2:21). Hence Nietzsche's claim: "Christianity is a way of life, not a system of beliefs"⁷ (177). By thus imitating Christ (imitatio Christi), the disciples are then able to be "partakers of the divine nature" (2 Peter 1:4), thereby partaking in the magisterial relationship. Put one more way, Christ's true disciples exemplify Christ's ethos and thus dwell in the truth, are the truth incarnated in their lives. It is because of this exceptional existential mode of being that they are to be believed, not because they are skilled dialecticians (see Acts 4:13; see also Ephesians 4:16, 18).

Paul, in comparison, is described by Nietzsche as "passionate" and "violent," demonstrating the unintegrated nature of his being. As a paradigm Modern, he is introspective and sees himself as preyed upon by his natural desires rather than finding harmony in them. As with the Dialecticians, Paul then seeks to validate his views by demonizing that which is out of his grasp. Furthermore, according to Nietzsche, Paul becomes "obsessed" with a single question: "what is the Jewish law really concerned with? And in particular, what is the fulfillment of this law?"⁸ (178). Rather than seeing Christ's death as something to be imitated, Paul sought to explain it, to give reasons, thus giving it a formal meaning divorced from the ethos of the individual. By taking this approach to Christ, Paul "proceeds by inventing 'counterfeits of true Christianity,'⁹ formal counterfeits that are best characterized by their impoverished existential content" (179). By thus formalizing Christianity, Paul betrayed the life of Christ by making it into an abstract "motif."

By reversing the former priority of the practical over the theoretical, or more precisely by abolishing the necessity of grounding an individual's ability to speak the truth on his ethos, Paul--ironically enough--"annulled primitive Christianity as a matter of principle."^[10] (180)

The above shows the reasons behind Nietzsche's disrespect for his contemporaries: the lack of respect for individual philosophers (rather than just their thought) has led to a lack of respect for philosophy as a whole. "The main evil that Modernity suffers from is the loss of the magisterial relationship" (180). Philosophy is now reduced to a theory of knowledge, a theoretical web of propositions and beliefs, which itself lacks genuine efficacy. In such a state, "the exaggerated manner in which the 'unselfing' and depersonalization of the spirit is being celebrated nowadays as if it were the goal itself and redemption and transfiguration"¹¹ (180). I should point out that this is not merely taking account of a philosopher's moral or immoral actions, but rather in reuniting the primordial relationship between what a philosopher thinks and the kind of person they are. Eclectically bringing together ethics and epistemology/metaphysics is not sufficient as the tie needs to be seen as essential.

Nihilism has now come into its own: "the individual, instead of being the living proof of the virtues expressed by his discourse, becomes the point in which these virtues, unable to root themselves in his ethical substance, degenerate and perish" (181). Against this depersonalization of thought, we must regain the magisterial relationship and understand that truth is, in fact, rare. "This ideal of a scarcity of truth...is the only way truth can recover its value: the greatness of philosophical conceptions must become again the reflection of the achievements of the individual... Theoretical comprehension must be rooted in existential experience: understanding something means living it" (181). Correct beliefs do not allow for ethical living; rather, ethical living must proceed and ground correct beliefs. Thus, rather than proclaiming, as does Descartes, that I will endeavor to not be deceived, I should endeavor never to deceive anyone, myself included. It is only from this determination that truth can be spoken.

This return to a magisterial relationship between ethos and truth requires a self-making: "one must become worthy of truth in order to be able to found it as true" (183). As with the pre-Socratics, one must integrate all aspects of one's life into a harmony wherein truth can appear and dwell. Reminiscent of my own thoughts, we must enter into a receptive state whereby we can see properly; this existential ground for the appearing of truth needs to receive again the importance that it lost after Socrates.

Thus, Nietzsche's reconstruction of the pre-Socratic understanding of truth plays an architectonic part in the Nietzschean corpus: going back to the very origins of our history, it enables us to grasp the common point between such diverse events as the invention of metaphysics and of adequationist truth by Socrates, on the one hand, and the reformulation/betrayal of Christ's teaching by Paul on the other. In both cases, the truth-speaking power that the Master derived from his personal excellence is brought down. In both cases, the principal cause of this fall is ressentiment: because they were by definition unable to enter the magisterial relationship, Socrates and Paul turned against it and replaced it by an abstract, impersonal understanding of truth. Moreover, the ideal horizon outlined by the possibility of recovering the archaic conception of truth allows for a better understanding of the importance devoted by Nietzsche to the theme of self-creation and to such heroic figures as Goethe or Zarathustra. (184-185)

To summarize, it will not do to force Nietzsche into one of the traditional theories of truth: each option still lies within the stark dissociation of what is spoken from the speaker. It is because we try to force Nietzsche into one of these moulds that his views appear relativistic or contradictory. Instead, we should see Nietzsche as a champion of an older view of truth: the magisterial relationship wherein someone speaks the truth because they are truthful. We are asked to reverse our 'common' conception: one is not truthful because they give true propositions; rather, one speaks true propositions because one is truthful. Given our modern reflective attitude, we cannot fully return to the pre-Socratic understanding, nor is such a complete return desirable. What is needed, however, is a new emphasis on the existential relationship between what is spoken and the speaker, of seeing the importance of this relationship in tandem with our modern reflectivity.

Notes:

1. Early Greek Philosophy, quoted in Leslie P. Thiele, Nietzsche and the Politics of the Soul: A Study of Heroic Individualism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 25.
2. Ibid, 79.
3. Les Maîtres de vérité dans la Grèce archaïque, 7.
4. The Will to Power §430, 235; emphasis supplied.
5. The Antichrist, §33, 607.
6. Ibid, §32, 606.
7. The Will to Power, §212, 125.
8. Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality, §68, 40.
9. The Will to Power §169, 101.
10. Ibid, §167, 101.
11. Beyond Good and Evil, §207, 122-123.

Read more!

On the Essence of Truth--Untruth as Concealing

6. Untruth as Concealing
Concealment does not allow aletheia to have full disclosure of beings; “concealment preserves what is most proper to aletheia as its own.” This concealment does not occur simply because the “knowledge of beings is always fragmentary” as unconcealment “is older than every openedness of this or that being” and “letting-be itself, which in disclosing already holds concealed and comports itself toward concealing.” In order for a being to unconceal beings there must be concealment, it must preexist any particular unconcealing of beings that let’s them be as they are. That which is ‘conserved’/‘preserved’ is exactly that which is concealed--“beings as such.” Since every comportment is a comportment of beings (see 121-122), “beings as such” are “what [are] most proper to aletheia as its own.” Hence, untruth/unconcealment is also that which is “most proper to aletheia as its own.” This is “the one mystery” that “holds sway throughout man’s Da-sein.”

Concealing at first appears in what is concealed. Da-sein, through ecstatic comportment, “conserves the first and broadest undisclosedness, untruth proper” in every unconcealing of beings. This is the mystery--the “nonessence of truth.” Here nonessence is not seen as something inferior, as in the distinction between being and becoming, necessity and contingency, actuality and possibilitas. Rather the nonessence is taken to be a “pre-essential essence,” the essence that is both prior to and part of every essence (every being as something).⁶ But we should at first understand the nonessence of truth as a “deformation of that already inferior essence” since this nonessence, unlike the traditional understanding of nonessence, will always [131] be essential for (it belongs with) the essence--the uncovered (unlike the traditional understanding of essence and nonessence) “never becomes unessential in the sense of irrelevant.” This is an unconventional way of speaking about nonessence/untruth and “goes very much against the grain of ordinary opinion and looks like a dragging up of forcibly contrived paradoxa.” But this understanding of the nonessence directly follows from our path--we first examined the claims of the traditional understanding of truth (i.e. correspondence) and found that it required the appearing of beings; this appearing of beings furthermore required ecstatic (ek-static) comportment towards beings. From here, so that beings may be the “standard” for our true statements, freedom for beings was needed--the freedom to let beings appear as they are. Lastly, freedom required that we allow for untruth, for the nonessence of truth as concealing “beings as a whole,” which occurs with every unconcealing; the nonessence of truth must be understood positively in terms of being covered over, hidden. Thus, understanding the essence of the nonessence of truth is needed in order to understand truth; understanding the covering is needed to understand the uncovering. Because of this, it is more prudent to reject “ordinary opinion” than to reject where the phenomenon of truth has led us--that “the primordial nonessence of truth, as untruth, points to the still unexperienced domain of the truth of Being (not merely of beings).”

This may require a little more explication: every unconcealing of beings as something necessarily conceals other aspects of those beings, those aspects that are unimportant for the given comportment. When kicking a soccer ball, its scuff marks or even its design is irrelevant to the activity, thus they get covered over. This covering over is an important part of our experience of the soccer ball in that comportment: it drastically reduces the aspects of the soccer ball that we must take notice of, that we must focus on in our activity. Thus, in the activity of kicking the soccer ball, the fact that some aspects of the ball do not become salient is important in that it allows for those salient aspects to come to light and be relevant in the situation. If we needed to take explicit notice of every aspect of every being that we come upon in the world we would be incapable of action; we would be too engrossed in trying to ‘register’ everything in our environment and the objects we are interacting with. It is because we can in a sense ignore those aspects that are irrelevant to our current purposes that beings can appear as this or that. It is because of this that every unconcealing requires concealment, that every truth requires untruth.

Freedom, in letting beings be as they are, is the “resolutely open bearing that does not close up in itself.” This is a strange way of putting it: to be resolute usually means to be closed off, not to be open. John Sallis, the translator, provides the following note that is informative:

”Resolutely open bearing” seeks to translate das entschlossene Verhältnis. Entschlossen is usually rendered as “resolute,” but such a translation fails to retain the word’s structural relation to verschlossen, “closed” or “shut up.” Significantly, this connection is what makes it possible for Heidegger to transform the sense of the word: he takes the prefix as a privation rather than as indicating establishment of the condition designated by the word to which it is affixed. Thus, as the text here makes quite clear, entschlossen signifies just the opposite of that kind of “resolve” in which one makes up one’s mind in such fashion as to close off all other possibilities: it is rather a kind of keeping un-closed.

Heidegger’s use of “resolute” here is emphasizing the pervasiveness and active character of this openness: it must be sustained as an event of uncovering/covering. All possible comportments are made possible by and grounded in this resolute openness; it is because I am resolutely open to beings (because I am free for beings), because I have a ‘here’ whereby I can direct myself towards a ‘there,’ that comportment is possible. But as we saw above, this bearing towards what is concealed (in order to unconceal it) is also concealed in every unconcealment, “letting a forgottenness of the mystery take precedence and disappearing in it.” In this forgottenness man still “takes his bearings [verhält sich]” through comportment, but in forgetting the essential relationship between unconcealing and concealing he allows himself to comfortably dwell in a particular way with beings. He takes up those particular modes of comportment--those particular ways in which he unconceals beings--and remains in that mode of unconcealment. To use one historical example, philosophers and scientists have long interpreted beings in terms of properties, thus when they disclose beings (at least consciously; if Heidegger is right then they disclose beings in other ways all the time) they see an object in terms of its properties and categorize it accordingly. When it is suggested that there are other ways to disclose beings, other ways that a being is, they are often incredulous--how can beings be other than as a substance with properties? The dominance of metaphysics, then, is sustained in this forgetfulness of beings as a whole, of the nature of comportment and unconcealing/concealing. Heidegger put it aptly:

Man clings to what is readily available and controllable even where ultimate matters are concerned. And if he sets out to extend, change, newly assimilate, or secure the openedness of the beings pertaining to the most various domains of his activity and interest, then he still takes his directives from the sphere of readily available intentions and needs.

Already confident that we know what we are talking about (see 115-117), we rely on those modes of comportment that we are familiar with and thus constrain how beings can appear by limiting our modes of bringing them to light. By doing so we forget our own disclosing of beings through open comportment and, hence, forget the nonessence of truth that is the mystery of being itself. Despite this forgetting, we commonly express this phenomena, for example those times when we say, “He thinks like an engineer,” or, “Can you stop being a philosopher for just a moment!” We all naturally deal with things in those modes of comportment with which we are familiar; the key is understanding the nature of comportment to beings as a whole, including the relation between unconcealment and concealment.

By remaining in our common modes of comportment, we are not letting “the concealing of what is concealed hold sway.” Instead of retaining the concealed as the pre-essential essence of truth, we reduce it to mere puzzlement and [132] ignorance of some of the beings that we come in contact with; it is a mere deficiency in our knowledge/understanding of things, a temporary stopping point on our way to better understanding them through our already established modes of unconcealing. In doing so we do not allow the nonessence of truth to have its peculiar sort of presence.⁷

Wherever the concealment of beings as a whole is conceded only as a limit that occasionally announces itself, concealing as a fundamental occurrence has sunk into forgottenness.

This forgetting of the mystery of being/the concealed does not annihilate the mystery, but gives it a “peculiar presence [Gegenwart].” By forgetting the relationship between our unconcealing of beings and the excess that remains concealed in that unconcealing, man is left to his own devices, appropriating the world in terms of “the latest needs and aims” in terms of “purposing and planning.” In the modern age this is seen in technology: everything is reduced to a resource or reserve that can be used for thus-and-such a purpose, whether it be time, materials, or people that are ‘contracted’ for their work. When this occurs, it is the needs and aims that determine the “standards” for beings (compare 125-126)--beings are disclosed in terms of these needs and their ‘worth’ are determined according to how they can fulfill them; utility becomes the standard, not beings. This implies an inherent pragmatism: beings of all kinds are useful because they can be used for some purpose, they ‘work.’ Because of this, man “persists in [needs and aims] and continually supplies himself with new standards, yet without considering either the ground for taking up standards [freedom through open comportment] or the essence of what gives the standard [the nonessence of truth].” By being left to himself man mistakes the “genuineness of his standards,” projecting his standard onto beings themselves rather than on its ground (see 118-119).

By thus unconcealing beings according to our own desires, man can then quickly assume that they are the standard for beings: that beings are for his use and consumption and must continually be referred to himself. Here he is again forgetting that being--the unconcealed--is our standard. This phenomena demonstrates that man, while ek-sistent, is also in-sistent--“Dasein...holds fast to what is offered by beings, as if they were open of and in themselves.” While the mystery of the unconcealed (i.e. being) still holds sway, it is forgotten and seen as “unessential” to truth proper. The primary fault, then, is not in disclosing beings in a particular way--as technological resources for our use and manipulation--but in forgetting the nonessence of truth, namely being. Here yet again we find Heidegger returning to his primary question: the question of being. This is simply one more way that the question of being has been forgotten, including the consequences of that forgettfullness.

Notes:

6. In his later thought Heidegger often speaks about ‘essencing’ in terms of a verb, not as a noun or property of entities. Man, in disclosing beings, essences them, partially constitutes their being in relation to how they are disclosed as something, how it is gathered into a context. This “partially” is seen in the essential relatedness of unconcealing and concealing--being/physis enters or upsurges into the open comportment that is man; as it relates to the ‘correctness’ (Richtigkeit) of the uncovering of beings, being/the concealed pre-essential essence itself limits what I can truthfully disclose. This imposes some specific restrictions on the claim that ‘everything is interpretation,’ while not denying the claim itself. For Heidegger, this understanding asserts it more essentially and authentically.
7. This expresses a common theme in Heidegger’s thought, first given in Being and Time, that the ‘nothing’ has a particular presence; primordially it is not simply the empty absence of things, but a positive phenomena, whether it relates to anxiety or truth’s nonessence. To put it one more way, it is a felt absence, such as when we lose a loved one who nevertheless remains an important part of our everyday activities.

Read more!

On the Essence of Truth--The Essence of Truth

5. The Essence of Truth
“The essence of truth reveals itself as freedom.” Freedom, we may recall, has an ek-sistent character--it stands outside itself by disclosing beings. Every comportment “flourishes in letting beings be” and is always going to be concerned in any particular instance with some particular being. But comportment itself goes beyond any particular being; it is “attuned” (Stimmung) to “beings as a whole.” It is from this more basic (or, for Heidegger, the most basic) attunement that any given disclosure of a being as a being occurs. As such, attunement can never be reduced to some “experience” or “feeling” as such particular (ontic) designations cover over attunement’s (ontological) essence. By reducing attunement to such things [129] attunement is understood in terms of something other than itself, which understanding can prevail only by sustaining this distorted understanding of attunement. This can easily be seen when we understand that any particular “experience” or “feeling” is possible only because man is essentially attuned to beings as a whole. What has been lost (or “forgotten,” as Heidegger will later put it) is our understanding of this attunement. This is because “[t]he openedness of being as a whole does not coincide with the sum of all immediately familiar beings.” In fact, it is often where beings are not familiar that our essential openness to beings as a whole “can prevail more essentially.” When we are dealing with everyday objects we do not question their being; their use is obvious and we see no reason to question or see the openness in which they appear as common objects (compare 116).

Precisely in the leveling and planning of this omniscience, this mere knowing, the openedness of beings gets flattened out into the apparent nothingness of what is no longer even a matter of indifference, but rather is simply forgotten.

Freedom, as an attunement to beings as a whole that lets beings be what they are, “prevails throughout and anticipates all the open comportment that flourishes in it.” As the ontological/existential essence of the appearing of any particular being, freedom as openness enables the appearing of beings and continually sustains each appearing, thereby making correctness/accordance possible. The “as a whole,” as it is understood here, will seem to be “incalculable and incomprehensible” to our modern conceptions; we cannot understand it in terms of how beings are revealed today, for “[a]lthough [comportment] ceaselessly brings everything into definite accord, still it remains indefinite, indeterminable; it then coincides for the most part with what is most fleeting and most unconsidered.” While this is true, the indeterminable aspect of comportment as openness to beings as a whole cannot be reduced to “nothing” or some empty formality (as in a transcendental unity of apperception), but must be given a positive meaning (as with “letting be”): every comportment of a being is also “a concealing of beings as a whole.”

Precisely because letting be always lets beings be in a particular comportment [130] that relates to them and thus discloses them, it conceals beings as a whole. Letting-be is intrinsically at the same time a concealing.

Every unconcealing of a being as something in particular conceals other ways that that being can be unconcealed. By doing so it conceals “beings as a whole,” or the open comportment that lets beings appear (see 127), forgetting the manner of its showing as presencing through unconcealment in preference to what is shown. By doing so man forgets the basis of every appearing and takes as self-evident a given mode of comportment and a particular way of appearing (see 115-116). As every unconcealing is a concealing, every aletheia is a lethe, untruth must be part of our analysis and cannot simply be ignored (see 119). We must, then, understand untruth positively as concealment/concealing.

Read more!

On the Essence of Truth--The Essence of Freedom

4. The Essence of Freedom
From the analysis already given we have little reason to give much credence to these criticisms, though we must be prepared for “a transformation of thinking” as we address what is lacking. Addressing the essence of freedom demands that we now examine “the essence of man in a regard that assures us an experience of a concealed essential ground of man (of Dasein) [this “ground” being freedom], and in such a manner that the experience transposes us in advance into the originally essential domain of truth.” One of the surprising claims Heidegger will make is that, if anything, freedom possess man, not the other way around: freedom is the ground upon which man must stand or, better put, man is freedom (later, Ereignis). Freedom allows for “the [125] inner possibility of correctness” because its own essence is found in “the more original essence of uniquely essential truth” which is open comportment that presences beings (see 122).

Recall that freedom was first spoken of as “freedom for what is opened up in an open region.” That which is “opened up” are beings (see 121-122) and these beings appear only within an open comportment that ‘creates a space’ wherein beings can appear.³ As the ground of this opening, the essence of freedom consists in “letting beings be” as they are. We usually speak of “letting be” in a negative sense in terms of relinquishing action; we do not ‘deal’ with something, but simply ‘let it be.’ But the notion of freedom we’ve given here, in terms of presencing beings (i.e. making beings present in an opening), does not allow for this negative definition: “To let be is to engage oneself with beings.” By letting beings be, we are open to beings in such a way that the beings can appear as they are. In other words, freedom is the capacity to allow beings to appear as they are, not as we would want them to be or as some preconceived theory demands. No other ground would allow us to make beings “the standard for the presentative correspondence” (122) as any predetermination on how beings can appear would, by definition, not let them appear as they are. The necessity of this should be apparent.

In the beginning of philosophy, the term used for the “open region” was ta alethea, or (literally translated) the unconcealed (a-lethea). Our use of a literal translation is not capricious; rather the literal translation “contains the directive⁴ to rethink the ordinary concept of truth in the sense of the correctness of statements and to think it back to that still uncomprehended disclosedness and disclosure of beings.” Disclosing beings through open comportment is to engage with beings in such a way that one’s preconceptions (see 118-119) withdraw so that beings can “reveal themselves with respect to what and how they are, and in order that representative correspondence might take its standard from them.” If it were the case that beings could only appear as they are constrained by our preconceptions (perhaps in a Kantian sense), then we would be incapable of letting beings be and we could not allow beings the privilege of being the “standard” for propositions. This “letting-be,” then, is [126] “intrinsically exposing, ek-sistent,” it is essentially tied to that which is transcendent from itself--being/beings.

With this understanding, freedom is not mere capriciousness or the absence of constraint (negative freedom); “[p]rior to all this...freedom is engagement in the disclosure of beings as such.” The disclosing itself, in its ek-static character, is preserved in comportment and even defines what it is, as “the ‘there’ [‘Da’].” By being Da-sein (literally, there-being, or being-there), by being and establishing a “there” (a context), man is able to exist, not in the sense of simply being present at a spatiotemporal coordinate nor as “man’s moral endeavor on behalf of his ‘self,’ based on his psychophysical constitution” (possibly alluding to Sartre’s appropriation [or mis-appropriation] of Heidegger’s thought), but being “rooted in truth as freedom” through openness to the disclosure of “beings as such.” On this primordial ground, “the ek-sistence of historical man begins at the moment when the first thinker takes a questioning [i.e. open] stand with regard to the unconcealment of beings by asking: what are beings?” By thus opening himself up to beings and by directing himself to the world around him, “unconcealment is experienced for the first time.” Within this openness, “Being as a whole” is seen in terms of physis, but not yet understood in the sense of a “particular sphere of beings” through mathematics/science, but beings in their “upsurgent presence.” The openness that man is can only be efficacious if there is something that enters into that opening; being/physis, then, is that which exudes, that upsurges, that flows into the opening.[127]

If “ek-sistent Da-sein” is grounded in freedom as the essence of truth and letting beings be, then caprice has no place in freedom. Freedom is constrained by beings, by our ability to disclose beings as they are. Similarly, we cannot say that man “possess” freedom as the opposite is the case: as the “there” (Da) of its being (Sein), openness “possess man” as it “secures for humanity that distinctive relatedness to being as a whole as such” which makes man what he is. Freedom, as disclosure (as Heidegger will later put it, as appropriation [Ereignis]) of beings, makes man what he is; he is understood in terms of his comportment with beings--as a teacher among students, blackboards, lessons, assignments, etc.; as a construction worker among buildings, power tools, foremen, engineering, etc.; as a Christian among rites, scriptures, beliefs, etc.--and cannot ‘be’ anything apart from this comportment, apart from some context (Da). This contextuality is what binds together everything we’ve already discussed:

Freedom, understood as letting beings be, is the fulfillment and consummation of the essence of truth in the sense of the disclosure of beings. “Truth” is not a feature of correct propositions which are asserted of an “object” by a human “subject” and then “are valid” somewhere, in what sphere we know not. Rather, truth is disclosure of beings through which an openness essentially unfolds [west]. All human comportment and bearing are exposed in its open region. Therefore man is in the manner of ek-sistence.

Every comportment of man has this openness and directedness toward beings, which thing is possible only through “the restraint of letting-be”--freedom. Similarly, it is only on this ground that correspondence is possible: only if we can let beings appears as they are can we give them the priority needed in correspondence. If man is currently ek-sistent (and he cannot be any other way), then he now possesses man’s “essential possibilities” through “the disclosure of beings as a whole”; the basic openness to beings, found in comportment through freedom, is available to all and is even the ground of history itself. It is the manner in which truth is unfolded through comportment at various points in history that creates an epoch, but the essence of comportment remains the same (which has been forgotten in technology). It is because things have been unconcealed as ‘resources’ that the ‘atomic age’ came about through such things as the Industrial Revolution (though, as we have seen, this manner of unconcealing began at least in the theism of the Middle Ages [see 118-119]).

If we understand truth’s essence as freedom, we must also admit to the possibility that “man can, in letting beings be, also not let beings be the beings which they are and as they are.” In this case, beings are covered (lethe) and mere “semblance” is made possible--a being can appear like something else in its appearing. “In [freedom] the nonessence of truth comes to the fore.” Since “ek-sistent freedom” is not [128] a property of man (see 127), as this ecstatic (etymologically--being outside oneself; ek--out--and stasis--place) freedom is itself what facilitates his historical mode of being, truth’s “nonessence” does not first appear because of man’s “incapacity and negligence” but derives its very essence from truth itself. In fact, it is because truth and untruth “belong together”⁵ that we can compare a true proposition with a false proposition. We now begin to see truth in a more essential way by including untruth in its essence; untruth does not fulfill this essential role by filling in gaps, but it plays an important role in “an adequate posing of the question concerning the essence of truth.” We have moved in our discussion from correctness (as the “usual concept of truth”) to the need of ecstatic (ek-sistent) comportment (which essentially includes man and being) to the place of freedom (which allows beings to appear as they are) and now we need to examine how untruth belongs to truth and freedom. Heidegger gives us a hint: “If the essence of truth is not exhausted by the correctness of the statement [requiring, as we have seen, presencing by open comportment which is made possible by freedom], then neither can untruth be equated with the incorrectness of judgments.”

Notes:

3. A comment from “The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking” might help us understand Heidegger’s point:

   We call this openness that grants a possible letting-appear and show “opening.” In the history of language the German word Lichtung is a translation derived from the French clairiere. It is formed in accordance with the older words Waldung (foresting) and Feldung> (fielding).

   The forest clearing (or opening) is experienced in contrast to dense forest, called Dickung in our older language. The substantive “opening” [Lichtung] goes back to the verb “open” [lichten]. The adjective licht “open” is the same word as “light.” To open something means: To make something light, free and open, e.g., to make the forest free of trees at one place. The openness thus originating is the clearing. What is light in the sense of being free and open has nothing in common with the adjective “light,” meaning “bright”--neither linguistically nor factually. This is to be observed for the difference between openness and light. Still, it is possible that a factual relation between the two exists. Light can stream into the clearing, into its openness, and let brightness play with darkness in it. But light never first creates openness. Rather, light presupposes openness. However, the clearing, the opening, is not only free for brightness and darkness, but also for resonance and echo, for sounding and the diminishing of sound. The clearing is the open region for everything that becomes present and absent.
   Joan Stambaugh, trans., in On Time and Being (New York: University of Chicago Press, 1972), 65.

   Light cannot penetrate a dense forest; a clearing, or opening, is needed for the light to appear. As such, man is the opening in which beings appear, the clearing that being can enter.

4. Heidegger is not dabbling in ‘word mysticism,’ but is being consistent with his own philosophy: he is letting language direct him towards being. Aletheia is one term that the ancients used to discuss truth (or, as the later Heidegger viewed it, the essence of truth [i.e. open comportment]) and perhaps, as is the nature of language, it is directing us towards being in a certain way, allowing us to see being more primordially. A critic, then, must not focus on Heidegger’s drawing upon ancient Greek itself and his (often) poor etymology, but either on Heidegger’s understanding of language or what the Greek shows (i.e. makes present) in relation to beings and truth.

5. In “The Principle of Identity,” Heidegger differentiates between “belonging together” (Zusammengehören) and “belonging together” (Zusammengehören). In the former we understand the “belonging” in terms of the “together,” as in just about anything can be placed in the vicinity of each other and hence can be “together.” On the other hand, when we understand the “together” in terms of the “belonging,” we see a tighter essential connection between the two, that they “belong” in their togetherness, or perhaps that they are ‘at home’ with one another (Identity and Difference, Joan Stambaugh, trans. (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1969), 29-30). It is the second essential belonging together that Heidegger means here--truth and untruth essentially belong together.

Read more!

On the Essence of Truth--The Ground of the Possibility of Correctness

3. The Ground of the Possibility of Correctness
Heidegger next asks the question: “How can something like the accomplishment of a pregiven directedness [i.e. comportment] occur?” The answer lies in freedom: “To free oneself for a binding directedness is possible only by being free for what is opened up in an open region... The essence of truth is freedom.” This is a notion of freedom that has thus far been “uncomprehended” in the history of philosophy; most discussion of freedom is spoken of in terms of ‘freedom from’ (or ‘negative freedom’), leaving us with the question of what is freedom for (‘positive freedom’)? For Heidegger, this means that existential freedom is an ubiquitous but ‘unthought’ ontological assumption within philosophy. As an existential ground for truth, freedom in this sense must be present in every truthful utterance or proposition. But Heidegger is not claiming that freedom is “an unconstrained act” of giving or receiving a proposition, as if freedom were restricted to such actions. Rather, “freedom is the essence of truth”; just as comportment grounds the possibility of accordance, freedom is the ground for the possibility of comportment. Hence, “essence” means “the ground of the inner possibility of what is initially and generally admitted as known [i.e. correctness].”

Does Heidegger mean that truth is merely a subjective whim based on “human caprice”? [124] It appears as if truth has been “driven back to the subjectivity of the human subject,” losing its connection with the world. This possibility is strengthened when we readily admit that all sorts of falsehood--“deceit and dissimulation, lies and deception, illusion and semblance”--are attributable to humans. Previously, though, we defined truth in relation to accordance, so referencing the human basis of error seems irrelevant: “This human origin of untruth indeed only serves to confirm by contrast the essence of truth ‘in itself’ as holding sway ‘beyond’ man,” perhaps in some “imperishable and eternal” world. Truth seems to exist in some extra-human world, perhaps in the intellectus divinus or, as more recent theorists propose, in independently existing propositions/universals. But this resistance to freedom as the essence of truth “is based on preconceptions, the most obstinate of which is that freedom is a property of man.” Since “[e]veryone knows what man is,” any further questioning seems unnecessary. Here we see the same roadblocks that we had in relation to truth: stubborn “common sense” and an indifference to the question.

Read more!

On the Essence of Truth--The Inner Possibility of Accordance

2. The Inner Possibility of Accordance
We speak of accordance in a number of ways: two coins on the table can be said to accord because they materially resemble each other, both in composition and form. But we also speak of accordance when we say, “The coin is round.” But how does the proposition accord with the object? It obviously cannot be like the first correspondence, that they are materially similar:

Now the relation obtains, not between thing and thing, but rather between a statement and a thing. But wherein are the thing and the statement supposed to be in accordance, considering that the relata are manifestly different in their outward appearance? The coin is made of metal. The statement is not material at all. The coin is round. The statement has nothing at all spatial about it. With the coin something can be purchased. The statement about it is never a means of payment.

We then ask the question: “How can what is completely dissimilar, the statement, correspond to the coin?” [121] The proposition could not become the coin without changing its nature; we must retain the proposition as a proposition. So, the relation must consist in something else; unless we can make this relation explicit then all talk of correspondence is meaningless.

The proposition “relates ‘itself’ to the thing in that it presents [vor-stellt] it and says of the presented how, according to the particular perspective that guides it, it is disposed.” “[T]o present” means to let the thing stand out as an object, as something (or some thing)--as a dog, as a mathematical equation, as a piece of art, etc. As it stands out, the object also “withstands” or is “opposed” to me: it is there, opposite me, and presents itself in its solidarity, singularity, and presence.² Furthermore, this object only appears “within an open region” that precedes the appearing, which region is defined as “a domain of relatedness.” Within this domain entities are related and contextualized in terms of human comportments: the hammer is intelligible in the domain of construction, nails, wood, needs/desires (for shelter, convenience, as a job), etc. from which it gains its identity and meaning. From the above, the relation between the proposition and the thing is “the accomplishment” of the presencing (or making present) of the being through comportment.

Comportment is understood in terms of its ‘adherence’ to something, [122] namely what is made present, or “being.” Unlike Husserlian comportment that is related to subjective sense data, Heidegger sees comportment as being essentially towards beings that transcend the individual and her consciousness. “Every relatedness is a comportment,” or every relatedness is a gathering together of beings into a context whereby they are not made merely spatially present (spatial coordination to the other objects is not even necessary), but they are related in their manner of being--the hammer’s hardness is related to the hardness of the nails and wood, which is related to the nature of construction/building, etc. How man comports towards beings depends on the beings he is directing himself towards and the manner of his comportment. For example, hammers and pens each allow for different uses, hence they each determine how I can use them; similarly, the mode of my comportment will vary if I am playing soccer rather than playing chess, as each requires a different way of relating to the world (and confusing them will cause problems in doing either). It is only in this “open region” of comportment that beings first appear, which itself is a necessary precursor to saying things--making propositions--about beings.

This can occur only if beings present themselves along with the representative statement so that the latter subordinates itself to the directive that it speaks of beings such-as they are. In following such a directive the statement conforms to beings.

A statement can be “correct” only insofar as it opens up a region (and occurs within an open region; one must inhabit an open region in order to open up another region), through comportment, in which beings can appear in the manner prescribed by the statement. “Open comportment must let itself be assigned this standard,” even prior to any “pregiven standard for all presenting” (compare 117-119). Since this open comportment is itself the ground for the appearing of beings, of making propositions about beings, and the correctness of a proposition, then comportment itself “must with more original right be taken as the essence of truth.” Not only this, but open comportment also aligns us with the privative meaning of aletheia--the active un-concealing of beings, the presencing of that which is remote--which is missing from the usual understanding of truth. With this more primordial understanding, the traditional assumption that truth essentially deals with propositions is fundamentally faulty: “Truth does not originally reside in the proposition,” but necessarily comes both before and after it; before, because beings must appear prior to our propositions, and after, because the truth of the proposition itself depends on comportment making beings present (presencing beings). But this raises another question concerning the ground of this “inner possibility of correctness,” whereby it itself is made possible. [123]

Notes:

2. This is the resistance of the “earth” to being controlled by a “world,” or the excess of beings in terms of any way we can make them “present” (see “Origin of the Work of Art”). It withstands any attempt to dominate it, or subsume it under a single interpretation. Within this lecture, this shows itself in terms of “untruth” and the “mystery of being.”

Read more!

On the Essence of Truth--The Usual Concept of Truth

1. The Usual Concept of Truth
We ordinarily understand truth as “what [117] makes a true thing true.” From this, “[t]he true is the actual.” For example, we can detect true gold from fools gold because the latter is “merely a ‘semblance’,” it only looks like gold, whereas true gold actually is gold. But we cannot base our understanding in terms of ‘actuality’ since the fools gold also is also something “actual,” even if it is not “genuine” gold. What, then, do the terms “genuine” and “true” mean? It is often spoken of in terms of “accordance”--that the object conforms to our understanding of what “gold” is.

Genuine gold is that actual gold the actuality of which is in accordance [in der Übereinstimmung steht] with what, always and in advance, we “properly” mean by “gold.” Conversely, wherever we suspect false gold, we say: “Here something is not in accord” [stimmt nicht]. On the other hand, we say of whatever is “as it should be”: “It is in accord.” The matter is in accord [Die S a c h e stimmt].

This raises another issue: we do not only call facts/objects (“the matter”) “true,” but also “our statements about beings.” Thus, a proposition is true if “what it means and says is in accordance with the matter about which the statement is made.” But in this case, contrary to our previous exposition, it is the proposition, not the matter, that is “in accord.” Whereas before we were concerned with whether an object itself is genuine or false according to some established criteria, now we are concerned with whether a proposition that is about an object is genuine or false. Truth, then, is seen in a double relationship: first, that an object accords with a previously understood meaning, and second, that a proposition accords with an object.

Understanding this double nature, truth is that which “accords” in two senses: “on the one hand, the consonance [Einstimmigkeit] of a matter with what is supposed in advance regarding it and, on the other hand, the accordance of what is meant in the statement with the matter.” This is seen in “the traditional definition of truth: veritas est adaequatio rei et intellectūs.” [118] While this is traditionally translated as “truth is the adequation of intellect to thing,” this translation only makes sense on the basis of the “adequation of thing to intellect” (the more literal translation). Either way, both conceptions about “the essence of veritas have continually in view a conforming to... [Sichrichten nach...), and hence think truth as correctness [Richtigkeit].”

We need to understand that these two notions of truth are not mere inversions: depending on which translation we focus on the intellectus and res have different meanings. In its medieval manifestation, the adequation of thing to intellect is not a Kantian transcendental unity of apperception, but the Christian notion that the object, as a creation (ens creatum) of God, “corresponds to the idea preconceived in the intellectus divinus, i.e., in the mind of God, and thus measures up to the idea (is correct) and in this sense is ‘true.’” For the God who micromanages, as he does in traditional Christian thought, this means that everything--every object, event, being, no matter how small or seemingly inconsequential--accomplishes some divine intent, some divine telos by virtue of being created by God. The human mind, as a gift from God, must also be adequate according to God’s intent and this intent is only realized in “the correspondence of what is thought to the matter” which, ultimately, returns to the ideas of God. In this way, the human intellect must be able to correspond to the matter in the same way as God’s ideas/intents, “on the basis of the unity of the divine plan of creation.” An object’s ‘true’ meaning depends on where that object fits within God’s plan; it is ordered in terms of the divine intention. With this understanding, “veritas essentially im-[119]plies convenientia, the coming of beings themselves, as created, into agreement with the Creator, an ‘accord’ with regard to the way they are determined in the order of creation.”

This, then, can be generalized: the theologically motivated understanding of creation can be replaced by “the capacity of all objects to be planned by means of a worldly reason [Weltvernunft] which supplies the law for itself and thus also claims that its procedure is immediately intelligible (what is considered ‘logical’).” With this teleological interpretation of the medieval conception of adaequatio rei ad intellectum, truth itself needs no more elucidation: correctness is essentially established by the intent of the agent; even material entities are correct only as they accord “with the ‘rational’ concept of its essence.” This interpretation seems to be far removed from questions of “the Being of all beings” and, thus, it seems to have a self-evident (or fundamental) feel to it: it apparently occurs prior to the question of being (it certainly does in its theological basis) and thus seems to escape any ontological commitments. This is seen in many modern approaches to rationality: it is the formal gateway through which all ontologies must pass, hence it is temporally and logically prior to all existence(s). Furthermore, it seems to account for the fact of untruth: untruth is “the nonaccordance of the statement with the matter.” Since truth is defined by its accordance, any discussion of truth itself can safely ignore the question of untruth. This notion, as Heidegger will later argue, misses the fundamental connection between truth and untruth, concealing their ontological intertwining. It is also worth pointing out the precursors of ‘technology’ in the above: the reduction of the essence of beings to their telic use, as ‘resources’ that are utilized through ‘planning.’

But where can we go from here when this conception of truth [120] seems to be fundamental and “obvious”? In seeing the theological ground for this notion of truth, even “the philosophical definition completely pure of all admixture of theology” is seen as “an old--though not the oldest--tradition of thinking.” With such a pedigree, what is still “worthy of question”? Fundamentally, we have yet to question the notion and nature of the “accordance of a statement with the matter.”

Read more!

On the Essence of Truth--Introduction

The more I read Heidegger’s work the more I realize that his understanding of ‘truth’ is central to understanding his thought as a whole, particularly his later work. As such I want to inaugurate my posting of summaries and commentaries by starting with Heidegger’s On the Essence of Truth (all page references [bolded numbers] taken from John Sallis’ translation in Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings, David Farrell Krell, ed. (New York: HarperCollins, 1993), 111-138). Many of my own current interests stem from Heideggerian aletheia, so a close study of this work will be good exercise for myself and (hopefully) a good introduction for others.

[NOTE: This is an ongoing project and will be posted by section in line with Heidegger's own work. Also, this is a work-in-progress, so I may make some changes to already-posted sections; I'll let you know if/when that happens.]

Written in 1943 (about a decade after Heidegger’s “turn”), “On the Essence of Truth” stands at a changing point in Heidegger’s understanding of truth, directing us back to his exposition in Being and Time and pointing forward to his reformulation of the idea in “Time and Being” and “The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking.” This is seen particularly in his exposition of truth as “freedom” and his discussion of “errancy” and “forgetfulness” (both important for understanding Heidegger’s elucidation of the rise and [possible] ‘end’ of “technology”). Heidegger primarily deals with the correspondence/representational views of truth, attempting to ground it in something more primordial--the appearing of entities.

Introduction
[115]We are discussing “the essence of truth”; not the (ontic) question of the truth of science, of art, or even that of belief, but what truth itself is (ontologically). Some might think that this too abstract; aren’t we depriving truth of its real-world relevance when we push it to such a level of generalization? A philosophy that “turns to what is actual [ontology] must surely from the first insist bluntly on establishing the actual truth that today gives us a measure and a stand against the confusion of opinions and reckonings” (emphasis mine). Here we are thinking of science or modern epistemology with their ‘methods’ for determining and validating the nature of entities: through experimentation, normative rules, verification, logical coherence, etc. While no one can avoid “the evident certainty” of this claim or the seriousness with which it is given, [116] this demand inherently rejects the “essential knowledge” of beings, or philosophy.

“[C]ommon sense” has its own peculiar kind of “necessity” because it appeals to “the ‘obviousness’ of its claims and considerations,” for why should we doubt what ‘everyone’ (das Man) knows? But philosophy itself is defenseless against such, if only for the fact that “common sense” lacks the ability to hear what philosophy has to say. The average person does not want to be questioned, to be excised from their comfortable everyday understanding of things; allow them to be content with what everyone knows, that which does not need to be questioned because it is “obvious.”

[W]e ourselves remain within the sensibleness of common sense to the extent that we suppose ourselves to be secure in those multiform “truths” of practical experience and action, of research, composition, and belief. We ourselves intensify that resistance which the “obvious” has to every demand made by what is questionable.

Because of this, even if do question truth, we want to know “where we stand today” on the issue (compare 115); we want to start with the question of how our current notion of truth developed historically (through “research, composition, and belief”). We look at what philosophers and scientists are saying now and catalogue the possibilities that they have given, trying to find the strongest case among them. In doing so, “we call for the goal that should be posited for man in and for his history” by looking for the “actual ‘truth’” in what has already been accomplished. By putting things in these terms, we intimate that we already know “what truth as such means” and we think that we already have a grasp of it “today,” hence our appeal to the current situation. By looking closer at “where we stand today,” what we already know, what “common sense” dictates, truth is known only “in a general way” and the insistence that we already know what truth means shows our “indifference” to the question.¹ Such are the roadblocks that an examination of the essence of truth comes up against: stubborn “common sense” and a resultant indifference to the question.

Notes:

1. No doubt the philosophers who may read this will think (perhaps ironically, from Heidegger’s point of view) that this claim is patently false: surely ‘truth theory’ in the last century has amounted to more than a “vague” or “general” understanding of truth. Given Heidegger’s approach to philosophy, this may not be the case: much of 20^th century thought on the issue of truth all began from the wrong ground, whether that be logic/rationalism, empiricism, or scientism. By ignoring the question of being, and with it the question of man, modern thought on the question of truth will largely amount to vague generalities that are truly ungrounded. For Heidegger, only a thought that is grounded in being can bring truth-itself to light.

Read more!