Heidegger and Unconcealment: Truth, Language, and History

Heidegger and Unconcealment Truth, Language, and History This book includes ten essays that trace the notion of unconcealment as it develops from Martin Heidegger’s early writings to his later work, shaping his philosophy of truth, language, and history. Unconcealment is the idea that what entities are depends on the conditions that allow them to manifest themselves. This concept, central to Heidegger’s work, also applies to worlds in a dual sense: first, a condition of entities manifesting themselves is the existence of a world; and second, worlds themselves are disclosed. The unconcealment or disclosure of a world is the most important historical event, and Heidegger believes there have been a number of quite distinct worlds that have emerged and disappeared in history. Heidegger’s thought as a whole can profitably be seen as working out the implications of the original understanding of unconcealment. Mark A. Wrathall received his Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of California, Berkeley, and is currently professor of philosophy at the University of California, Riverside. He is the author of How to Read Heidegger (2005) and the editor of numerous collections, including A Companion to Heidegger (2005), Religion after Metaphysics (2003), and A Companion to Phenomenology and Existentialism (2006).

Heidegger and Unconcealment Truth, Language, and History

MARK A. WRATHALL University of California, Riverside

For Amy, Hannah, Damon, Madeline, and Nicholas

Contents

page ix

Acknowledgments Credits

xi

Introduction

1 PART I

TRUTH AND DISCLOSURE

1 Unconcealment

11 34

Appendix on Tugendhat

2 The Conditions of Truth in Heidegger and Davidson 3 On the “Existential Positivity of Our Ability to be Deceived” 4 Heidegger on Plato, Truth, and Unconcealment: The 1931–1932 Lecture on The Essence of Truth PART II

57 72

LANGUAGE

5 Social Constraints on Conversational Content: Heidegger on Rede and Gerede Appendix

6 Discourse Language, Saying, Showing 7 The Revealed Word and World Disclosure: Heidegger and Pascal on the Phenomenology of Religious Faith PART III

40

95 116 118 156

HISTORICAL WORLDS

8 Philosophers, Thinkers, and Heidegger’s Place in the History of Being vii

177

viii

Contents

9 Between the Earth and the Sky: Heidegger on Life After the Death of God 10 Nietzsche and the Metaphysics of Truth

195 212

Works by Heidegger

243

Index

247

Acknowledgments

Reflecting on the genesis of this book, it is rather humbling to realize how many people have contributed to its development over many years. My greatest debt is to my intellectual mentor and friend Bert Dreyfus. Bert has generously read every draft that I have sent him, and unfailingly responded with his characteristic vigor and candor. His suggestions, insights, and hard questions have propelled my thinking on Heidegger. While we don’t always agree, I always profit from our discussions. I have discussed the ideas contained in this book with a number of philosophers in a variety of settings, including my students and colleagues at Brigham Young University and the University of California, Riverside; at meetings of the International Society for Phenomenological Studies, the American Society for Existential Phenomenology, the Parlement des Philosophes, the MartinHeidegger-Forschungsgruppe, the British Society for Phenomenology Summer Conference, the American Comparative Literature Association; and at universities around the world, including: the University of California, Berkeley; Brigham Young University, Idaho; Essex University; the University of Exeter; Georgetown University; Chengchi University; National Sun Yat-Sen University; Utah Valley University; the University of Nevada, Reno; Claremont Graduate School; the University of Montana, Missoula; and Södertorn University. I am grateful to all of those institutions for providing me with the opportunity to present my work and, more importantly, to learn from the people in attendance. I couldn’t possibly list everyone who has helped me along with questions or suggestions in these settings – not just because the list would be very long, but also because in many instances I don’t know their names. With apologies to those whom I will inevitably overlook, however, I would like to specifically thank Bill Blattner, Dave Bohn, Albert Borgmann, Taylor Carman, Dave Cerbone, Simon Critchley, Steve Crowell, Jim Faulconer, Charlie Guignon, Béatrice Han-Pile, Piotr Hoffman, Stephan Käufer, Sean Kelly, Cristina Lafont, Jeff Malpas, Wayne Martin, Lenny Moss, Mark Okrent, ix

x

Acknowledgments

Robert Pippin, Richard Rorty, Hans Ruin, Charles Siewert, Hans Sluga, Charles Taylor, Iain Thomson, Ari Uhlin, and Julian Young. Finally, I am grateful to Beatrice Rehl, Emily Spangler, and Luane Hutchinson at Cambridge University Press for their patience, encouragement, and professionalism.

Credits

Chapter 1 was originally published in A Companion to Heidegger, ed. Mark A. Wrathall and Hubert L. Dreyfus (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), pp. 337–57. Reprinted by permission of Blackwell. Chapter 2 was originally published in The Monist 82, no. 2 (1999): 304–23. Reprinted by permission of the publisher. © 1999 THE MONIST: An International Quarterly Journal of General Philosophical Inquiry. La Salle, Illinois, USA 61301. Chapter 3 was originally published in The Philosophy of Deception, ed. Clancy Martin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 67–81. Reprinted by permission of Oxford University Press. Chapter 4 was originally published in Inquiry 47, no. 5 (2004): 443–63. Inquiry can be found online at http://www.informaworld.com. Reprinted by permission of Taylor and Francis. Chapter 5 was originally published in Philosophical Topics 27 (Fall 1999): 25–46. Reprinted by permission of the publisher. Chapter 7 was originally published in The Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 37, no. 1 (January 2006): 75–88. Reprinted by permission of the publisher; © 2006 The British Society for Phenomenology. Chapter 8 was originally published in Appropriating Heidegger, ed. James E. Faulconer and Mark A. Wrathall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 9–29. Reprinted by permission of Cambridge University Press. Chapter 9 was originally published in Religion After Metaphysics, ed. Mark A. Wrathall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 69–87. Reprinted by permission of Cambridge University Press.

xi

Introduction

“Unconcealment,” “Unverborgenheit,” was a term that first entered Heidegger’s philosophy as a translation for the ancient Greek word alêtheia. The more standard translation of alêtheia is “truth” (Wahrheit in German), but Heidegger elected to go with a literal translation: a-lêtheia means literally “not-concealed.” He did this because he believed the early Greeks thought of “truth” as primarily a matter of “making available as unconcealed, as there out in the open, what was previously concealed or covered up” (see GA 63: 12). Heidegger eventually came to believe that the Greeks themselves had failed to grasp what was essential to the notion of unconcealment, what he had initially thought was hinted at in their word alêtheia. He thus set to the task of thinking the original notion more originally than anyone had before (see GA 9: 237–8). Heidegger’s thought can profitably be seen as working out the implications of the original understanding of unconcealment. To think unconcealment as such is to reject the idea that there are entities, we know not what, existing as they are independently of the conditions under which they can manifest themselves. Unconcealment is an event – it happens, and it only happens “with human beings” through “the creative projection of essence and the law of essence” (GA 36/37: 175). The thought of unconcealment also rejects the idea that there are uniquely right answers to questions like what entities are and what is being. Instead, it holds that we encounter entities as being what they are only in virtue of the world within which they can be disclosed and encountered. But these worlds are themselves subject to unconcealment – they emerge historically and are susceptible to dissolution and destruction. Thus being itself must be understood not as something determinate and stable, but in terms of the conditions for the emergence of entities and worlds out of concealment into unconcealment. Unconcealment is a privative notion – it consists in removing concealment. Consequently, concealment is in some sense to be given priority 1

2

Heidegger and Unconcealment

in understanding entities and worlds. But “concealment has,” Heidegger observes, “a dual sense: 1. having no awareness of, and 2. no possible context” (GA 36/37: 188). Sense (1) describes a superficial form of concealment, where something is, but we lack a sense for it. Sense (2) points to the more profound and fundamental form of concealment. According to Heidegger, for an entity to be is for it to stand in a context of constitutive relations. The lack of any possible context is thus an ontological concealment – the absence of the conditions under which the entity in question could manifest itself in being. Thus there is a duality or productive ambiguity built into the core notion of unconcealment: unconcealment consists in bringing things to awareness, but also creating the context within which things can be what they are. The core notion of unconcealment functions as a methodological principle throughout Heidegger’s work. By methodological principle, I mean that unconcealment was in Heidegger’s approach to philosophy the guideline for discerning the role and constitutive structure of the elements of ontology. One can see this by considering how it is that Heidegger defined the ontological features of his thought – for instance, the existentialia of Being and Time (Heidegger’s ontological categories for the human mode of being), Ereignis, earth and world, language and the fourfold. All of these notions were understood in terms of the role they played in opening up a world, and disclosing us and uncovering entities on the basis of the possibilities opened up by a particular world projection. Heidegger’s ontology was grounded in this way in the notion of unconcealment. The question in individuating and understanding ontological structures was always “what does this contribute to opening up a world and letting entities show up as the things they are?” Put differently, “what disclosive function does it perform?” The same methodological principle is crucial to Heidegger’s understanding of the main themes of study in this book: truth, language, and history. What is essential about each is the way it contributes to unconcealment. His focus on ontological structures and functions leads Heidegger to a rather idiosyncratic use of terminology. Heidegger uses words like language, truth, and history in what he sometimes calls an “ontologically broad” sense. Indeed, the very first rule of thumb for interpreting Heidegger is to remind oneself constantly that Heidegger tends to use his terms in a way quite distinct from the ordinary, everyday sense in which they are used. Indeed, this practice is so common that he typically alerts the reader when, for a change, he is using the word “in the usual sense” (im gewöhnlichen Sinne; im üblichen Sinne) or in the contemporary sense (im heutigen Sinne). Heidegger sees words in their familiar or everyday sense as an ontic and thus derivative (abgeleitet) use of words, which are properly understood in their more authentic, ontological sense. A complete analysis of Heidegger’s use of terms would address his dizzying array of different kinds of sense or meaning for a term. These include

Introduction

3

(and this is a nonexhaustive list): the formal sense (der formale Sinn), the original sense (der ursprünglichen Sinn), the authentic sense (der eigentlichen Sinn), the essential sense (der wesentlichen Sinn), and the ontological sense (der ontologische Sinn). It would be worthwhile to tease out the subtle distinctions between each of these different senses, but for present purposes we must summarize. Heidegger defines sense in general in the following way: Sense is that within which the intelligibility of something holds itself, without itself expressly and thematically coming into view. “Sense” means the “onto which” of the primary projection, from out of which something can be grasped as that which it is in its possibility. Projecting opens up possibilities, which is to say that it makes possible. (GA 2: H. 151)

Projecting is Heidegger’s term for the way that we understand something by seeing how it relates to other things and activities. I understand a knife, for instance, by knowing in advance what a knife will do when brought into contact with all manner of things – butter and meat and onions and granite and so on. Or by understanding what place the knife plays in tying together a whole network of activities in, say, a kitchen. In understanding the knife, I project, that is, I am led or directed to other entities and activities, and grasp a certain pattern the knife makes in the world. The sense of the knife is the pattern of those activities or possibilities for use toward which I am oriented when I understand what the knife is and into which I am led when I use the knife. It is thus from out of or on the basis of some set of projected relations that I understand what anything is. There are, of course, different kinds of things that we can project onto. We can project the perceptual properties of an entity onto sensorimotor contingencies. We can project an entity onto its possibilities of use, as with our knife example. Or we can project something onto the ontological structures that allow it to be the kind of entity it is – for instance, projecting a knife onto the structures of equipmentality and the equipmental functions that allow it to be equipment, or projecting a human life onto the care structure that allows it to be a human form of life. This last form of projection shows us the being-sense (Seinssinn, often translated as “meaning of being”). One arrives at the being-sense of something, then, by discovering what ontological structure most fundamentally shapes the possibilities that constitute that something as the thing it is. The “broad sense” (weiten Sinne) of a term applies it to everything that shares the same being-sense. The way Heidegger usually proceeds is to examine the ontological structure and function of whatever is picked out by a term in its normal, narrow sense. That is, he asks what the thing to which we normally refer contributes to unconcealment, and what structural elements allow it to make that contribution. He then uses the term in such a way that it includes in its extension everything that shares the same ontological structure or function.

4

Heidegger and Unconcealment

For example, we normally predicate truth of propositional entities like assertions or beliefs. But we can grasp a proposition as potentially true or false only to the extent that we can understand how to use it to uncover or make salient a fact or state of affairs. So we could say that the being of truth resides in uncovering. Thus Heidegger takes uncovering in a broad sense – lifting into salience – to be the ontological function of truth. He then applies the term in a broad sense to anything that uncovers. So, for instance, if I drive a nail into a board, I am uncovering the way a hammer is used. In this broad sense, my action, for Heidegger, is true – in hammering, I lift into salience what a hammer is and how it is used. Or if a building like a medieval cathedral supports the faithful in their efforts to inhabit a world opened up by God’s grace, the cathedral is also true in the ontologically broad sense – it works by lifting into salience what is essential or most important about such a world, and supporting the disclosive practices of that world’s inhabitants. Now, if one does not keep firmly in mind that Heidegger is using his terms in a sense that is ontologically broad, it leads to terrible errors in interpreting what he has to say. For example, it makes a complete mess of things if (a) one thinks that truth is propositional truth (full stop), (b) one reads Heidegger discussing how swinging a hammer shows the truth about a hammer, and then (c) one concludes from this that Heidegger thinks swinging a hammer is true in the same way that a proposition is true, that it somehow must be cashed out in terms of a series of propositions the hammer-swinger knows about hammer-swinging. So when Heidegger uses terms like truth, language, and history in a broad sense or a being sense (and he almost always does use them in these ways), the terms do not have the sense they do in ordinary discourse. And if they do refer to what we ordinarily refer to with these terms (along with a broader range of phenomena), they only do so insofar as they are picking them out as having a particular ontological structure or function, as playing a particularly important role in unconcealment. One might say Heidegger’s terms function to pick out what is ordinarily referred to by those terms “under an ontological description,” and, consequently, they also pick out other things that are not ordinarily referred to by those terms. This book consists of ten essays that try to trace out the pattern that the logic of unconcealment makes in Heidegger’s thought about truth, language, and history. Although some chapters are more focused on Heidegger’s earlier writings, and some are more focused on his later essays, they cover the entire span of Heidegger’s work. In my view, Heidegger’s thought develops less in starts and stops and dramatic turnings, and more as a gradual recognition of the implications of pursuing an ontology of unconcealment. This gradual recognition unfolds as Heidegger explores different ways or paths of thought (Denkwege). His appreciation of unconcealment expands and deepens over time. But Heidegger’s ways of describing unconcealment are constantly changing too. The deepening and enriching of his

Introduction

5

thought of unconcealment cannot be separated from the expanding and shifting vocabularies he has for talking about unconcealment. Indeed, a central feature of Heidegger’s approach to philosophy is his experimentalism – that fact that his philosophy is always under way. “Everything lies on the way,” Heidegger said. By that, he meant a couple of things. First, that there was no final goal or destination to his thought, that it was not possible to arrive at a point where everything was clear, where all problems were solved, where we have definitive answers to philosophical problems. The reason for this lies in the nature of unconcealment itself – there is no right way to be human, no uniquely right way to be an entity, no right way for the world to be organized, no single way that world disclosure works. As a result, all we can hope for in philosophy is an ever renewed and refined insight into the workings of unconcealment. On this view of philosophy, progress consists in seeing and describing the phenomena of unconcealment more perspicuously, and communicating these insights more successfully. A philosopher’s task is to keep his or her thought constantly under way, trying out new ways to explore productively the philosophical domain, remaining on them as long as profitable, but also abandoning them and setting off in a different way when the former way is exhausted. The aim is to participate in unconcealment, bringing it to our awareness, heightening our sensitivity and responsiveness to it. In his dialogue “From a Conversation on Language,” Heidegger penned the following exchange: JAPANESE: INQUIRER:

One says: you have changed your standpoint. I left an earlier standpoint, not in order to exchange it for another, but rather because even the prior position was merely a stopover while underway. What is enduring in thinking is the way. (GA 12: 94)

Or elsewhere: The ways of reflection constantly are changing, according to the station along the way at which the journey begins, according to the distance along the way that it traverses, according to the vision that opens up while underway into what is question worthy. (GA 7: 65)

What matters most in reading Heidegger is travelling at his side along his ways, letting him guide us through the philosophical landscape until we begin to discern the phenomena and understand the philosophical issues posed by the phenomena. His philosophy is meant to afford us an apprenticeship in seeing and describing unconcealment. Heidegger’s account of unconcealment emerged from his efforts to think through the essence of truth, as well as the conditions that make truth possible. The essays in the first section explore Heidegger’s account of propositional truth and his argument that propositional truth necessarily depends on unconcealment. Chapter 1 looks at the various facets of

6

Heidegger and Unconcealment

unconcealment that emerge as Heidegger works his way from propositional truth to the ontological sense of truth that is unconcealment. This culminates in his thought of a clearing, understood as something distinct from the unconcealment of entities and even of being. The notion of unconcealment had, for much of Heidegger’s career, an intimate connection with truth. This is not because Heidegger thought truth as typically conceived in contemporary philosophy – that is, the success of assertions or beliefs or other such propositional entities in agreeing with the way things are – had a special role to play in unconcealment. Rather, it is because he thought that unconcealment was an essential condition of there being truth in this narrower contemporary philosophical sense: Alêtheia means, translated literally: unconcealment. Yet little is gained with literalness . . . . Alêtheia does not mean “truth,” if by that one means the validity of assertions in the form of propositions. It is possible that what is to be thought in alêtheia, speaking strictly for itself, does not yet have anything to do with “truth,” whereas it has everything to do with unconcealment, which is presupposed in every determination of “truth.” (GA 15: 403)

Because unconcealment was an ontological presupposition of truth, but not the other way around, it is a mistake to take Heidegger as transferring to unconcealment the properties possessed by truth as it is ordinarily understood. A failure to realize that Heidegger was using the word truth in a broad or ontological sense proved for many in Heidegger’s day (and many still) an insuperable obstacle to understanding what Heidegger meant with his account of unconcealment. As the appendix to Chapter 1 explores, Heidegger used truth as a name for unconcealment, despite the risk of misunderstanding, because he believed that the German word for truth, Wahrheit, still bore the traces of an insight into what is at the core of unconcealment. Heidegger calls unconcealment Wahrheit, truth, because he hears in the German word for truth, Wahrheit, the verb wahren, to preserve, to safeguard, to maintain and protect and look after. The truth of an entity, what the entity really or truly is, is its essence. And, Heidegger argues, “‘essence’ (Wesen) is the same word as ‘enduring’ (währen), remaining” (GA 7: 44). The true entity is what, having been brought into unconcealment, can be stabilized and maintained so that it endures in presence: “we think presence as the enduring of that which, having arrived in unconcealment, remains there” (GA 7: 44). Preserving and holding things in unconcealment, Heidegger argues, forms the ontological sense of truth as we ordinarily think of it. The German word for truth still contains an echo or resonance of this connection between the truth of entities and maintaining or preserving things in unconcealment. Chapter 2 compares Heidegger’s approach to truth to Donald Davidson’s, and helps to clarify the sense in which Heidegger believes that unconcealment is “presupposed in every determination of ‘truth’.” The

Introduction

7

third chapter explores how a phenomenology of unconcealment thinks through deception as a counterconcept to unconcealment. The final chapter in this section explores Heidegger’s 1931–2 lecture course on The Essence of Truth. It argues that Heidegger read Platonic ideas, not only as stage setting for the Western philosophical tradition’s privileging of conceptualization over practice, and its correlative treatment of truth as correctness, but also as an early attempt to work through the fundamental experience of unconcealment. Several of Heidegger’s more famous claims about truth, for example that propositional truth is grounded in truth as world disclosure, or his critique of the self-evidence of truth as correspondence, are first revealed in his powerful (if iconoclastic) reading of Plato. In the second section, the focus is on the relationship between language, unconcealment, and disclosure. Heidegger argues that the ordinary use of language needs to be understood as based on unconcealment: “unconcealment is not ‘dependent’ on saying, but rather every saying already needs the domain of unconcealment.” He elaborates: Only where unconcealment already prevails can something become sayable, visible, showable, perceivable. If we keep in view the enigmatic prevailing of Alêtheia, the disclosing, then we come to the suspicion that even the whole essence of language is based in dis-closing, in the prevailing of Alêtheia. (GA 9: 443)

The first chapter in the second section, Chapter 5, explores the sense in which, in Being and Time, Heidegger thinks of linguistic meaning as dependent on a socially disclosed world. The next essay explores the meaning of one of Heidegger’s most famous assertions – “language is the house of being” – as a way of understanding how Heidegger’s account of language develops but always remains closely tied to a notion of unconcealment. This chapter chronicles how Heidegger moved from using the word language in the ordinary sense to an ontologically broad use of the term in his later works to name the structure of gathering significations that characterizes any particular world disclosure. The final essay in the section can be thought of as a particular application of this account of originary language, drawing on both Heidegger and Pascal to explore a phenomenological account of the role the Bible plays in opening up the Christian world. By focusing on the Christian world, this essay also serves as a transition to the final section of the book, which looks at Heidegger’s understanding of history as a series of epochs of unconcealment. The first essay in the history section of the book offers an overview of the idea that history should be thought of in terms of unconcealment and thus as a sequence of different world disclosures. The history that interests Heidegger is a history of different ways in which entities are able to show themselves. The “essence of history,” Heidegger explains, shows itself in the “separation of the truth of entities from possibilities of essence that are kept in store and permitted but in each case not now implemented”

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Heidegger and Unconcealment

(GA 69: 162). From the perspective of unconcealment, then, historical ages are understood as the establishment of a “truth of entities” – a truth about what entities really are – which is secured in its truth by separating off one set of possibilities from other admissible sets of possibilities, sets of ways to understand and use and relate the entities. On this view, different entities show themselves in different historical ages, because each age is grounded in a different unconcealment of being, with correspondingly different possibilities showing up as definitive of entities. The transition from one age to another thus poses a danger that entities will be denied the context within which they can show what they once were (or could be). This happened, for instance, when God was drawn into a world that understands constitutive relations in terms of efficient causality: In whatever manner the destiny of disclosing may prevail, unconcealment, in which everything that is shows itself at any given time, holds the danger that human beings mistake themselves in the midst of what is unconcealed and misinterpret it. In this way, where everything presencing presents itself in the light of connections of cause and effect, in our representations of him even God can lose all that is high and holy, the mysteriousness of his distance. In the light of causality, God can be degraded to a cause, to the causa efficiens. He then even becomes the God of the philosophers, namely that which determines the unconcealed and concealed according to the causality of making, without ever considering the origin of the essence of this causality. (GA 7:30)

Heidegger was particular concerned that the technological age, our contemporary age, was closing off possibilities that allow us to realize the “highest dignity of our essence as human beings.” Our highest dignity, and thus what we are engaged in when we are most fully realizing what it is to be human, is “to guard over the unconcealment of every essence on this earth” (GA 7: 36). Chapter 9 explores Heidegger’s hope that we could escape from the technological age by means of a new disclosure of the world, one opened up by our relationship to the fourfold of gods, mortals, the earth, and the sky. Chapter 10 draws the book full circle by using Heidegger’s critique of Nietzsche’s account of truth to illuminate how Heidegger understands our current historical age, as it reviews Heidegger’s interpretation of Nietzsche as the thinker of this technological epoch. It also outlines how Heidegger thinks of the history of philosophy as a history of metaphysics, and explores his account of metaphysics in terms of the truth of entities. The chapters in this book span the last ten years of my own engagement with Heidegger’s thought. Like Heidegger himself, I have experimented with different ways to approach the matter to be thought. These essays manifest a variety of approaches to understanding and expressing his views. For this collection, I have made some changes to these essays. But I also have tried to be tolerant of the fact that I would no longer express many of these ideas in the way I did when I first set out on the trail of unconcealment.

part i TRUTH AND DISCLOSURE

1 Unconcealment

TRUTH AND UNCONCEALMENT

During the two decades between 1925 and 1945, the essence of truth is a pervasive issue in Heidegger’s work. He offers several essay courses devoted to the nature of truth, starting in 1925 with Logik. Die Frage nach der Wahrheit, (GA 21), and continuing with Vom Wesen der Wahrheit. Zu Platons Höhlengleichnis and Theätet (Winter Semester 1931–2, GA 34), Vom Wesen der Wahrheit (Winter Semester 1933–4, GA 36–7), and Grundfragen der Philosophie. Ausgewählte “Probleme” der “Logik” (Winter Semester 1937–8, GA 45). He also includes a significant discussion of the essence of truth in virtually every other lecture course taught during this period. Particularly notable in this regard are the Parmenides lecture course of 1942–3 (GA 54), Einleitung in die Philosophie (Winter Semester 1928–9, GA 27), and Nietzsches Lehre vom Willen zur Macht als Erkenntnis (Summer Semester 1939, GA 47). Heidegger’s writings during this period also reflect his preoccupation with truth. In addition to the essay “Vom Wesen der Wahrheit” (GA 9), many of his other works include extended discussions of the essence of truth. These include Being and Time (GA 2), essays like “Vom Wesen des Grundes” (GA 9), “Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes” (GA 5), and “Was ist Metaphysik?” (GA 9), and unpublished works like the Beiträge (GA 65) and Besinnung (GA 66). After 1946, by contrast, there are few extended discussions of truth in Heidegger’s writings. Indeed, in the last few decades of his work, Heidegger rarely even mentions the essence of truth (des Wesen der Wahrheit) or the question of truth (die Wahrheitsfrage; although other locutions like the truth of being, die Wahrheit des Seins, persist, albeit infrequently, right to the end;

Research for this chapter was funded in part by the David M. Kennedy Center for International and Area Studies at Brigham Young University.

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Truth and Disclosure

see, for example, the 1973 “Seminar in Zähringen,” GA 15: 373). But this should be seen as a merely terminological shift. For Heidegger, the essence of truth is always understood in terms of unconcealment, and Heidegger never stops inquiring into unconcealment. Indeed, one is hard-pressed to find any work in Heidegger’s vast corpus that does not have some discussion of unconcealment. The terminological shift from talk of truth to unconcealment is a result of his recognition of the misleadingness of using the word truth to name unconcealment – a recognition brought about by the gradual realization that the metaphysical tradition’s blindness to unconcealment is largely a result of a rather narrow notion of truth. “In the beginning of metaphysics, it was decided that the essence of truth as alêtheia (unconcealment and revealing) would henceforth retreat before the determination of truth as likening (homoiôsis, adaequatio), . . . a determination that was first rooted in truth as unconcealment.” From that point on, Heidegger argues, truth’s “character of opening up and revealing sinks unquestioned into oblivion” (GA 6.2: 286). And as he explains in 1949: In its answers to the question concerning entities as such, metaphysics operates with a prior representation of being necessarily and hence continually. But metaphysics does not induce being itself to speak, for metaphysics does not give thought to being in its truth, nor does it think such truth as unconcealment, nor does it think this unconcealment in its essence. (GA 9: 369/280)

From this point on, Heidegger speaks and writes consistently of the essence of unconcealment, rather than the essence of truth. It is also clear that, despite using the word truth to name the subject matter of his thought, his primary interest was always unconcealment. As he notes self-reflectively during the “Heraclitus Seminar” (1966–7), “Alêtheia as unconcealment occupied me all along, but ‘truth’ slipped itself in between” (GA 15: 262). But while he is occasionally critical of his own earlier views of the essence of truth (see, e.g., GA 65: 351–2), his view of it remains unchanged in its fundamental outline. The fundamental outline, or what I call the platform, of Heidegger’s view of truth forms the basis both for his critique of the metaphysical tradition of philosophy, and for his own constructive account of ontology and the nature of human being. It includes the following planks. 1. Propositional truth (correctness, Richtigkeit). An assertion or proposition is true when it corresponds with a state of affairs. Heidegger understands correspondence (Übereinstimmung) as the condition of being successfully directed toward the world in a propositional attitude: What makes every one of these statements into a true one? This: in what it says, it corresponds with the matters and the states of affairs about which it says something. The being true of an assertion thus signifies such corresponding. What

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therefore is truth? Truth is correspondence. Such correspondence exists because the assertion orients itself [sich richtet] according to that about which it speaks. Truth is correctness [richtigkeit]. (GA 34: 2)

But this correspondence or agreement, Heidegger argues, cannot be understood on a representational model of language. He argues instead that correspondence exists when our orientation to the world allows what is to show itself in a particular way, and thus it can be understood as a bringing out of concealment. 2. The truth (uncoveredness or discoveredness, Entdecktheit) of entities. An entity is true when it is uncovered, that is, made available for comportment. Propositional truth (1) is grounded in the truth of entities, because a true assertion can only correspond or fail to correspond with the way things are if entities are available as the standard against which the assertion or proposition can be measured. Only because an entity is unconcealed, Heidegger argues, “can we make assertions about it and also check them. Only because the entity itself is true can propositions about the entity be true in a derived sense” (GA 27: 78). The truth – that is, the uncovering or making manifest – of entities can be brought about through an assertion or a theoretical apprehension, but it normally occurs in our practical involvements with things in the world. “Ontic manifesting . . . happens in accordance with an attuned [stimmungsmäßigen] and instinctive finding oneself in the midst of entities, and in accordance with the striving and moving comportment to entities that is grounded along with it” (GA 9:131). 3. The truth of being. There is an unconcealment (Unverborgenheit) of being when an understanding of the being or essence of everything that is shapes all the possibilities for comportment in the world. Ontic truth (2) is grounded in the truth of being. Heidegger argued that entities are constituted as the entities they are by the relationships they bear to things, people, activities, and so on. Nothing is what it is without these relationships. There are then two sides to being as the constitutive ground of an entity. First, there must be more or less enduring relationships for the entity to inhabit. Second, it must be possible to distinguish between those relationships that are essential to the being of the entity, and those that are not. The unconcealment of being involves both those two sides: (a) The disclosure (Erschlossenheit) of Dasein and of the world. The idea is that entities can only be available for comportment on the basis of a prior disclosure of the world as the meaningful relational structure within which entities can show up as what they are. In addition, since entities are uncovered in terms of their availability for comportment,

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their uncovering requires the prior disclosure of Dasein as an acting and understanding being. In Being and Time, Heidegger expressed this idea as follows: “the uncoveredness of entities within-the-world is grounded in the world’s disclosedness. But disclosedness is that basic character of Dasein according to which it is its ‘there.’ Disclosedness is constituted by disposedness (Befindlichkeit), understanding, and discourse, and pertains equiprimordially to the world, to being-in, and to the self” (GA 2: H. 221). (b) The truth of essence. Entities can be manifest in their truth, that is, as what they really are, only if they are unconcealed in their essence – which means, they (come to) have an essence. Heidegger’s catchphrase for this is: “The essence of truth is the truth of essence” (GA 9: 201; see also GA 45: 95; GA 65: 288; GA 5: 37). This means that the unconcealment of beings requires first an unconcealment of the most fundamental, essential aspect of entities that makes them what they are. This works not by being thought about, but by disposing us to encounter entities in a particular way, as having a particular essence. We encounter entities, in other words, on the basis of “an original view (form) that is not specifically grasped, yet functions precisely as a paradigmatic form for all manifest beings” (GA 9: 158/123). What both (3a) and (3b) have in common is the insight that entities can only be manifest on the basis of a prelinguistic understanding of and affective disposedness to what makes something the being that it is. Heidegger eventually comes to believe that the truth of being depends on: 4. Truth as the clearing (Lichtung). There is a clearing within which an understanding of being or essence can prevail while incompatible possibilities of being are concealed or held back. This is the most fundamental form of unconcealment. Unconcealment, when understood as the clearing, does not name a thing, or a property or characteristic of things, or a kind of action we perform on things, or even the being of things. It names, instead, a domain or structure that allows there to be things with properties and characteristics, or modes of being. This is not a spatial domain or physical entity, or any sort of entity at all. It is something like a space of possibilities. Planks 1–3 give us possibilities for different experiences of entities and different actions with entities, for different goals to be pursued, or forms of life to be lived. These possibilities are the possibilities opened up by the understanding of being and essences. But what is the space that allows those possibilities to be actual possibilities – that is, to be the possibilities that actually shape a given historical existence? This is to ask “what, given that there has been a progression of different truths of being in history, allows any particular truth of being to prevail?”

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Heidegger’s answer is the clearing. The clearing is that some truth of being prevails because other truths of being do not. I call 1–4 planks in Heidegger’s platform for thinking about truth. The metaphor of a platform is meant to emphasize that these elements of his view stand next to each other in the sense that no single plank encompasses all the others. Each plank or element, in other words, involves specific features that distinguish them from one another. They are linked together in such a way that they provide each other with mutual support, and they could not function independently of each other. But they also cannot be reduced to each other. They are different modes or ways of unconcealment, and together they provide the basis for our engagement in the world. The platform describes Heidegger’s considered view on truth and unconcealment. This is not to say that he is clear about the relationships between 1, 2, 3, and 4 at every stage of his career. Indeed, as I discuss in the next section, he is quite critical of his own earlier works on unconcealment for their failure to recognize plank 4. In what follows, I want to try to explain more clearly what each plank in the platform consists in, and how each plank is linked to the next one. The first step is to say something about what holds them together. Heidegger proposes that each plank is a kind of truth, only because it involves unconcealment. So, we might ask, what, in general, is unconcealment? We will then be in a position to explain each plank in more detail. UNCONCEALMENT IN GENERAL

The word that is generally translated as unconcealment or unconcealedness is Unverborgenheit. This, in turn, is Heidegger’s preferred, and rather literal, translation for the Greek word alêtheia, itself ordinarily translated as truth. Heidegger uses truth (Wahrheit) and unconcealment interchangeably for much of his career, well aware that this practice invites several contrary misunderstandings. The first misunderstanding is to think that Heidegger defines propositional truth as unconcealment; the second is to transfer to the notion of unconcealment features present in our ordinary understanding of truth (see the Appendix to this chapter). Because the analysis of unconcealment is an analysis of the ground of propositional truth, it should be clear that unconcealment is not to be taken as a (re)definition of propositional truth. Heidegger was emphatic about this both early and late; compare, for instance, comments from the 1931 lecture course on the essence of truth: the meaning of the Greek word for truth, unconcealment, initially has absolutely nothing to do with assertion and with the factual context, set out in the customary definition of the essence of truth, with correspondence and correctness (GA 34:11)

with the 1964 essay “The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking”:

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the question concerning alêtheia, concerning unconcealment as such, is not the question concerning truth. (GA 14: 76)

One could also compare the observation in Being and Time that to translate this word [alêtheia] as ‘truth’, and, above all, to define this expression conceptually in theoretical ways, is to cover up the meaning of what the Greeks made ‘self-evidently’ basic for the terminological use of alêtheia as a pre-philosophical way of understanding it (GA 2: H. 219)

with the very late 1960 essay “Hegel and the Greeks”: if the essence of truth that straightaway comes to reign as correctness and certainty can subsist only within the realm of unconcealment, then truth indeed has to do with Alêtheia, but not Alêtheia with truth. (GA 9: 442/334)

Hence, it is essential to see that the analyses of the unconcealment of beings and the clearing of being are not being offered as definitions of propositional truth. And, just as importantly, propositional truth cannot account for the unconcealment of beings and the clearing of being: “it is not the case and never the case that an assertion as such – be it ever so true – could primarily reveal an entity as such” (GA 29/30: 493). In addition, Heidegger’s argument for the dependence of propositional truth on the unconcealment of entities, being, and the clearing does not hang in any way on his etymological analysis of alêtheia. Nevertheless, his argument for the dependence relationship is often confused with his perhaps questionable etymology. Finally, Heidegger’s warnings to the contrary, it is perhaps understandable that readers often confuse unconcealment with what we ordinarily think of as truth. In any event, in response to criticisms from Friedländer about his etymology of alêtheia, and from Tugendhat regarding the natural conception of truth (see the Appendix to this chapter), Heidegger eventually disavowed the practice of calling unconcealment truth (GA 14: 76). But since Heidegger himself had never confused unconcealment with propositional truth, the disavowal should not be taken to mean that he gave up on the platform or any of the planks of the platform. On the contrary, to the extent that the platform was obscured by the tendency to think of truth only in terms of correspondence, Heidegger hoped to make clearer his commitment to it. More important than changes in Heidegger’s use of the word truth, but less remarked upon, are changes in his use of the word unconcealment. Before 1928, Heidegger never spoke of the unconcealment of being or connected unconcealment with a clearing. In Being and Time, for example, the word unconcealment only appears in one passage, and it is introduced only to be equated with uncoveredness (Entdecktheit) (GA 2: H. 219). It was only starting in the 1928 lecture course Einleitung in die Philosophie that Heidegger adopted unconcealment as a term for anything other than the

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uncovering of entities (see GA 27: 202–3). Between 1928 and 1948, Heidegger wrote of both the unconcealment of being and the unconcealment of entities – a practice of which his marginal notes were later quite critical (see GA 9: 132–3; also GA 5: 60, 69). This self-criticism is probably a result of the fact that, by 1948, Heidegger came to believe that the metaphysical tradition had only ever thought about the unconcealment of entities, and thus that an important step toward overcoming the metaphysical tradition consists precisely in understanding the unconcealment of being (see, e.g., GA 67: 234). In any event, after about 1948, Heidegger seldom writes of the unconcealment of entities. Instead, from that point on, the term unconcealment is used almost exclusively with regard to planks 3 and 4 of the platform. Unconcealment in general involves, then, making a variety things available to us in our dealings in the world (true assertions, entities, human being, understandings of being, worlds, and the clearing itself). What we want to know, however, is why Heidegger uses unconcealment to point out very different elements contributing to our overall engagement with the world, or of different ways that things are made available to us in our dealings. What makes unconcealment and related terms1 applicable to all these cases is the privative nature of the phenomenon of letting something be encountered. Something is privative when it can only be understood and specified in relation to what it is not. For example, imperfection can only be understood by reference to perfection – if you do not know what it would be for something to be perfect, then you could not know what is at stake in calling it imperfect. The name for a privative aspect need not itself incorporate a semantic marker like “in-” or “un-.” To use one of Heidegger’s own examples, reticence is a privative aspect in that reticence is not simply not making any noise. Something is only reticent insofar as it could speak but does not. So what it is to be reticent is to be understood by way of what the reticent person is not doing. Similarly, a stone can be sightless but it is not blind. To be blind requires that one be in the sight game – that one shows up as appropriately thinkable as capable of sight. Nietzsche’s famous account of the good/evil distinction is yet another example. There, evil functions as the positive term – the one that is defined first and more clearly. Good then gets its meaning as a negation of each of the properties associated with evil.2 Thus, given that privative aspects are specifically understood in relation to what they are not, having a privative aspect is different than merely 1

2

These include discoveredness (Entdecktheit) and uncoveredness (Unverdecktheit); disclosedness (Erschlossenheit), unveiledness (Enthülltheit), and disconcealedness (Entborgenheit). Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals (Douglas Smith, Trans.). Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1996, p. 13.

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lacking a certain quality. Heidegger’s notion of unconcealment applies to things that are privative in just this sense and, he believes, the Greek language’s use of a privative word form to name truth shows that the Greeks too were aware of the privative nature of material and propositional truth. “The awakening and forming of the word alêtheia,” he writes, “is not a mere accident . . . and not an external matter” (GA 34: 127). Unconcealment is meant to be understood like blindness or reticence. That is, what it is to be unconcealed is determined in relationship to a privative state – here, whatever kind of concealment that does prevail in what is to be unconcealed. With respect to each plank in the platform, then, concealment is the positive term, and needs to be understood before we can become clear about what unconcealment amounts to. So far, this discussion is very formal. I now try to give it some phenomenological content by looking at each plank in the platform in turn. THE PLANKS OF THE PLATFORM

1. Propositional Truth One typically thinks of truth as a property of things that have as their content a proposition – things like assertions and beliefs. The truth of propositions is, for Heidegger, the right starting point for thinking about unconcealment, because truth or unconcealment (alêtheia) has often been understood exclusively as a property of propositions, but also because in a phenomenology of propositional truth, we quickly discover that the truth of propositions depends on the uncovering of entities. Thinking about propositional truth thus leads to an inquiry into more fundamental forms of unconcealment. Heidegger accepts that many propositions are true by corresponding to, or agreeing with, the way things are. But recognizing this fact, for Heidegger, is less an explanation of truth than a basis for further inquiry into its nature. The old received definition of truth: veritas est adaequatio Intellectus ad rem, homoiôsis, measuring up, conformity of thinking to the matter about which it thinks – is indeed basically (im Ansatz) correct. But it is also merely a starting point (Ansatz) and not at all that which it is commonly taken to be, namely, an essential determination of truth or the result of an essential determination of truth. It is merely the starting point . . . for the question: in what in general is the possibility of measuring up to something grounded? (GA 29/30: 497)

If we admit, in other words, that true assertions agree, measure up to, correspond with the way things are, still we need to be able to explain what makes such a relationship between an assertion and a proposition possible. By considering this problem, however, Heidegger believes that we are led to a view of truth as uncovering.

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The difficulty for the correspondence view is explaining in an illuminating way what a correspondence relationship consists in. There has been a tendency to explain correspondence as a relationship between mental representations and facts or states of affairs in the world. Heidegger, by contrast, argues that truth “has by no means the structure of a correspondence between knowing and the object in the sense of a likening of one entity (the subject) to another (the object)” (GA 2: H. 218–19). If we are to make sense of the idea of correspondence, he believes, we first need to jettison the idea that it consists in a relationship between a representation and things in the world. Instead, Heidegger suggests that correspondence is a characteristic of our orientation to the world – in particular, of our “assertative being toward what is asserted” (GA 2: H. 218). Our beliefs and assertions correspond not by representing some state of affairs just as it is, but by giving us an orientation to things that lets the state of affairs appear just as it is (GA 21: 9–10). True beliefs and assertions are true because they make possible a perceiving that “lets what is itself be encountered as it is” (GA 21: 167). A phenomenological description of cases where we confirm the truth of an assertion, Heidegger believes, shows us that this is in fact how we ordinarily understand the truth of the assertion. “To say that an assertion ‘is true’,” Heidegger argues, “signifies that it uncovers what is as it is in itself. It asserts, it points out, it ‘lets’ what is ‘be seen’ (apophansis) in its uncoveredness. The being-true (truth) of the assertion must be understood as being-uncovering” (GA 2: H. 218, translation modified). A true assertion uncovers a state of affairs by elevating it into salience or prominence, thus allowing it to be seen: “the basic achievement of speech,” Heidegger argues, “consist[s] in showing or revealing that about which one is speaking, that concerning which there is discussion. In such revealing, the thing that is addressed is made manifest. It becomes perceivable, and, in discussion, the thing perceived gets determined” (GA 21: 6). We are now in a position to see why Heidegger believes that propositional truth is a kind of bringing out of concealment. Concealment reigns in a nonassertoric dealing with the world in the sense that, in such prepredicative comportments, the world is experienced in a way that lacks determinacy, that is, propositional articulation. This means that the world is not available for thought, for the discovery of inferential and justificatory relationships between propositional states and worldly states of affairs. Heidegger believes that, in our everyday dealings with things, we experience the world in precisely such a propositional concealment (see GA 21: 111). In our prepredicative experience of the world, things are understood as the things they are in terms of our practical modes of coping with them. Such practically constituted things are implicated in a complex variety of involvements with other objects, practices, purposes, and goals, and are understood immediately as reaching out into a variety

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of involvements. In assertion, by contrast, our experience undergoes an explicit restriction of our view, and we dim down the whole richly articulated situation in front of us to focus on some particular feature of the situation (GA 2: H. 155). The “assertoric determining of a thing,” Heidegger suggests, must be understood as a “levelling-off of the primary understanding within [everyday] dealings” (GA 21: 156). He notes that when we make an assertion about what we perceive in our fluid coping with the world, the “assertion makes certain relations stand out from the matter, which is at first apprehended directly and simply in its unarticulated totality” (GA 20: 76–7). In natural perception, then, we ordinarily perceive a whole context that lacks the logical structure of linguistic categories. When we apprehend things in such a way as to be able to express them in an assertion, however, the act of perception now is brought under the categories of the understanding. The assertion, Heidegger writes, “draws out” or “accentuates” “a state of affairs,” thus allowing the entity to “become expressly visible precisely in what it is” (GA 20: 86). In doing this, the assertion “discloses anew” what is present at first in a nonconceptually articulated fashion, so that these things “come to explicit apprehension precisely in what they are” (GA 20: 84). Thus the assertion manifests things differently than they are given to natural perception. In it, things are defined or determined “as such and so” – as having a particular property or characteristic (see, e.g., GA 21: 66, 133–4). Those properties or characteristics were present in the entity before, but through the assertion they are isolated and cut off from their context, thereby being highlighted or lifted into prominence. This allows us to see an object with a thematic clarity that is not present in our natural perception of it, but we are no longer able to deal with it naturally – for that, we need to see it in its immediacy (GA 21: 141–7). Thus the dimming down or leveling off that occurs when we suspend our everyday dealings with things is what first makes it possible to give something a conceptual character by uncovering the kind of determinate content that allows one to form conceptual connections, draw inferences, and justify one occurrent intentional state on the basis of another. The prepredicative is a nonconceptual way of comporting ourselves toward the things in the world around us. Rather than a conceptual or a logical articulation, the prepredicative manifestness of things is articulated along the lines of our practical comportment. In such an articulation, things show up as what they are but in the whole complexity of their involvements. This makes propositional truth, on Heidegger’s view, a privative concept – it is defined relative to the richer, more primordial givenness of the world, which is lost in propositional articulation. Because propositional modes of comportment (believing, asserting, and so on) function by determining and highlighting certain elements of our prepropositional

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experience of things, they are a derivative form of comporting ourselves toward things in the world, yet a form of unconcealment all the same. We will explore the prepropositional experience of things in more detail in the next section. Before going on, however, we can summarize Heidegger’s views in the following way. Our most fundamental forms of comportment are practically rather than conceptually articulated. On the basis of this practical articulation, things show up as calling for certain responses from us, and constraining how we can use them. Through language, we are able to orient ourselves to objects in a way that is conceptually rather than pragmatically articulated. When our orientation allows us to see a state of affairs just as it is – when it uncovers an object in its condition – we say that it corresponds to the facts or the state of affairs. Thus we can understand assertions and propositions to be measured in terms of the positive/privative pair “concealing/unconcealing (a fact or state of affairs in the world).” That means that the proper basis for judging the success of a linguistic act is whether it makes manifest a fact toward which we can comport ourselves. The act will fail to the extent that it leaves a state of affairs in concealedness – that is, leaves it unavailable to thought, or leaves thought out of touch with the world. Correspondence, consequently, needs to be rethought in terms of Heidegger’s account of how to assess the success or failure of linguistic acts like, for example, assertion. An assertion most genuinely succeeds if it brings a state of affairs into unconcealment for thought (which may well go with a correlative concealing of the practical world). Like all elements of unconcealment, then, propositional truth is a form of making something available toward which we can comport. It finds its specificity as a mode of unconcealment in the way it makes something available – by providing it with the kind of content that lets us grasp the state of affair “just as” it is. Truth as correspondence is a super-agreement, an Über-einstimmung in German, achieving a very precise and definite orientation to states of affairs. What we now need to understand is the ground of propositional truth – what makes it possible for an assertion to uncover in this way? The answer is a prior uncovering of entities.

2. The Uncoveredness of Entities We have seen that the concealment removed by propositional truth is the unavailability of the world for a certain kind of comportment – namely, thought about the conditions of entities in the world. Propositional truth is, consequently, a specific form of a broader kind of unconcealment where what is at issue is the availability of entities for comportment in general. The uncoveredness of entities makes entities available for comportment. The specific form of concealment that is removed by the uncoveredness of

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entities consists in entities not being available as that toward which or with which we can comport. Comportment (Verhalten) is a very broad term that is meant to include every instance in which we experience something, and everything that we do. Excluded from comportment, then, are physiological or merely causal events or behaviors. When I grow hair or hiccup, there is no sense in which I am comporting myself. Unlike such causal events or behaviors, comportments have a meaningful structure. But comportment is broader than the class of deliberate actions (although, naturally it includes them), because comportment involves things I do or experience without an occurrent mental state in which I intend to do it or register the experience. Thus comportment includes automatic reflexes, for example, which reflect a responsiveness to the meaning of a situation. All comportments involve relationships to entities. When I swat at a fly, I am comporting myself toward the fly. When I hear a symphony, I am comporting myself to the symphony (as well as all the instruments, musicians, the conductor, etc.) An entity is concealed, then, when I cannot comport myself toward it – when it is not available as something toward which I can direct myself in a basic intentional comportment or when it plays no role in setting the meaningful structure of the situation I am in. The opposite of uncoveredness, Heidegger says, “is not covering up, but rather lack of access for simple intending” (GA 21: 179). The fly is concealed in a sense when I cannot find it to swat at it. And yet even then, it is uncovered to some extent, given that the situation I find myself in is structured by my desire to swat the fly. A more radical concealment of the fly, then, would obtain if I do not feel motivated in any way to react to it. Similarly, the symphony would be concealed if I lacked an understanding of symphonic form (that is, I might be able to hear beautiful music, but I could not hear it as a symphony). The contrast of comportments with behaviors allows us to see that something can be concealed, even if it is physically operative on my body. But because comportment is broader than intentional action, something is not necessarily concealed, even if I have no awareness of it whatsoever – there is a sense in which it is unconcealed as long as it figures meaningfully in my overall comportmental stance. The unconcealment of entities, then, will be a privation of the state of affairs in which something is unavailable for comportment. But, as I have been suggesting, there are a variety of different ways in which something can be unavailable for comportment: For that which is unconcealed, it is not only essential that it makes that which appears accessible in some way or other and keeps it open in its appearing, but rather that it (that which is unconcealed) constantly overcomes a concealedness of the concealed. That which is unconcealed must be wrested away from concealment,

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it must in a certain sense be stolen . . . . Truth is thus in each case a wresting away in the way of revealing. What is more, the concealment can be of various kinds: closing off, hiding away, disguising, covering up, veiling, dissimulating. (GA 9: 223)

Thus the unconcealment of entities occurs in all the different ways we have of making something available for comportment. But, Heidegger believes, in order to understand uncovering, the primary mode of comportment to focus on is that in which we have a practical mastery of things. It should be obvious that this sort of uncovering does not require the mediation of language. I can learn to deal with things without any explicit instruction in them or even any names for them, simply by picking them up and starting to manipulate them, or by being shown how they work. Heidegger writes: The predominant comportment through which in general we uncover innerworldly entities is the utilization, the use of commonly used objects (Gebrauchsdingen): dealing with vehicles, sewing kits, writing equipment, work tools in order to . . . equipment in the widest sense. We first get to know the equipment in dealing with it. It is not that we have beforehand a knowledge of these things in order then to put them to use, but rather the other way around . . . . The everyday dealing with innerworldly entities is the primary mode – and for many often the only mode – of uncovering the world. This dealing with innerworldly entities comports itself – as utilization, use, managing, producing and so forth – toward equipment and the context of equipment . . . we make use of it in a “self-evident manner.” (GA 25: 21–2)

Indeed, Heidegger believes it is constitutive of our human mode of being that we always already encounter ourselves in the midst of a world that is uncovered in just such practical terms. But now how does the idea that we always already find ourselves in the midst of uncovered entities square with the claim that the state of being covered up has some kind of priority in understanding our dealings with entities in the world? Heidegger insists upon both ideas: “when Dasein comes to existence, beings within the range of its existence are already familiar, manifest. With it a certain concealedness has also already occurred” (GA 28: 360). Every uncoveredness of the world, in other words, occurs together with a concealing of entities. Moreover, Heidegger insists that the default state of entities in the world is being covered over – he even has a slogan for this idea: truth, understood as uncoveredness, is robbery. “The factical uncoveredness of anything is, as it were,” Heidegger claims in Being and Time, “always a robbery” (GA 2: H. 294). This is not just a passing claim – he repeats it and elaborates on it often: “If this robbery belongs to the concept of truth, then it says that the entity must first of all be wrested from concealedness, or its concealedness must be taken from the entity” (GA 27: 79; see also GA 19: 10–11; GA 28: 359; GA 29/30: 44; GA 34: 10,126; GA 9: 223). This seems like an odd thing for him to say, however – if entities are always already uncovered, why is our uncovering them a kind of robbery?

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The basic reason is that entities are independent of us and our wishes, desires, intentions, and purposes for them, as well as our beliefs about them. This fact gives rise to a fundamental concealment in at least two ways. First, it means that uncovering an entity – making it something with which we can comport easily and transparently – demands something of us. It requires us to struggle to foster and develop the right skills, attitudes, and bodily dispositions for dealing with it, that is, those skills that will let it show itself in its own essence. Heidegger illustrates this through the example of walking into a shoemaker’s workshop. “Which entities are there and how these entities are available, in line with their inherent character, is unveiled for us only in dealing appropriately with equipment such as tools, leather, and shoes. Only one who understands is able to uncover by himself this environing world of the shoemaker’s” (GA 24: 431). This means that, for most of us, the entities in the workshop are not fully uncovered, and could only become uncovered as we acquire a shoemaker’s skills. What holds of the shoemaker’s shop, of course, holds for the world as a whole: it is only in the tiniest spheres of the beings with which we are acquainted that we are so well versed as to have at our command the specific way of dealing with equipment which uncovers this equipment as such. The entire range of intraworldly beings accessible to us at any time is not suitably accessible to us in an equally original way. There are many things we merely know something about but do not know how to manage with them. They confront us as beings to be sure, but as unfamiliar beings. Many beings, including even those already uncovered, have the character of unfamiliarity. (GA 24: 431–2)

There is a tendency on our part, however, to cover over this unfamiliarity. In point of fact, Heidegger believes that we always inherit an understanding of and disposition for the world that tends to conceal from us the fact that we cannot practically uncover most things. The understanding, dispositions, and skills that Dasein has in the first instant are the banalized understandings, dispositions, and skills of the one (das Man). Thus entities are initially manifest but nevertheless concealed in what they most authentically are. “Because the movements of being which Dasein so to speak makes in the one are a matter of course and are not conscious and intentional, this means simply that the one does not uncover them, since the uncoveredness which the one cultivates is in fact a covering up” (GA 20: 389). Authenticity by contrast, consists in Dasein learning to “uncover the world in its own way . . . this uncovering of the ‘world’ [is] . . . always accomplished as a clearing away of concealments and obscurities, as a breaking up of the disguises with which Dasein bars its own way” (GA 2: H. 129). A second consequence of the independence of entities from us is that there is always more to entities than we can deal with. No matter how

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skillful we get in dealing with entities, Heidegger argues, there will always be something about them that we cannot focus on or pay attention to: “each being we encounter and which encounters us keeps to this curious opposition of presenting, in which it always holds itself back in a concealment” (GA 5: 40/BW 178). But this concealment “is not in every case primarily and merely the limit of knowledge,” rather, it is precisely what makes it possible for us to deal with the thing in the first place: it is “the beginning of the clearing of what is cleared” (GA 5: 40/BW 178–9). We get a grip on entities in the world, in other words, by generalizing, by dealing with them as instances of a known type. This leads to the possibility that established ways of dealing with things will make it harder to uncover other possible ways of dealing with them. When “what is familiar becomes known,” Heidegger notes, “with that the concealedness of the unfamiliar deepens, and all that is not-known becomes more insistent in its concealment” (GA 28: 361). That our familiarity depends on getting a certain more or less familiar grasp on things leads to the possibility that we treat something as an instance of the wrong type – that is, that based on a superficial similarity between a strange thing and a familiar thing, we take the strange thing as something it is not (or, as Heidegger puts it, “a being appears, but presents itself as other than it is”; GA 5: 40/BW 179). Thus something can be uncovered in one sense but covered over in another sense. To recap, the specific nature of the unconcealment involved in the uncoveredness of entities needs to be understood as a privation of the fundamental covered-up-ness of entities. They are covered up to the extent that we lack the skills necessary to allow them to figure in the overall grasp we get on a situation. We uncover them by fostering a receptivity to them, a receptivity that helps us secure our practical grasp on the situation.

3. Unconcealment of the Being of Entities In understanding the unconcealment of being, let’s start again by understanding the positive state of concealment of being. When being is concealed, an entity cannot possibly be uncovered as an entity. In the concealment of entities, of course, entities were not uncovered either. But they could be uncovered, if only we had the right skills, or if our purposes or activities were the sort that would make them salient, or if they were no longer obscured by other entities. In the concealment of being, by contrast, the entity cannot under any circumstances be uncovered because there is no place for it in the world we inhabit. Our ability to uncover practically, reflectively, and linguistically the way things are requires that entities make themselves available to our thought and talk, and that our thought and talk holds itself open to and responsible to the entities in the world around us. The unconcealment of beings is

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what lets us encounter entities toward which we can be directed in our thought and talk – entities about which we can successfully get it right or fail to do so. Heidegger explains: “if our representations and assertions are supposed to conform to the object, then this entity . . . must be accessible in advance in order to present itself as a standard and measure for the conformity with it” (GA 45: 18). The unconcealment of being is what secures the accessibility of entities. On Heidegger’s account, something can only be uncovered on the basis of our skillful ability to inhabit a world, because we uncover something only by knowing how it works together with other entities in a context (see GA 2, Division I, chapter 3). Thus the uncoveredness of entities (plank 2) is dependent upon the disclosedness of a world and ways of being within the world (plank 3a). Until it is given at least some minimal foothold in our world by taking a place within a context of involvements, Heidegger argues, the object can at best appear as something that resists our way of inhabiting the world. But entities do not simply show up as involved with other things in a temporary configuration. They appear, rather, as things that have a more or less stable and enduring presence through a variety of possible situations and contexts of involvement. It is our ability to distinguish between relations that are essential to the entity, and those that are not, that permits us to uncover such stable and enduring entities. Thus the uncovering of entities depends on things having an essence. Truth as uncoveredness, in other words, depends on truth as the disclosure of being or essence. This leads us to plank 3b. This disclosure of the world – plank 3a – was the focus of Heidegger’s discussion of disclosedness in Being and Time (GA 2: H. 221–2). It was also to this that Heidegger refers in passages like the following from the 1928 essay “On the Essence of Ground”: Human Dasein – a being that finds itself situated in the midst of beings, comporting itself toward beings – in so doing exists in such a way that beings are always manifest as a whole. Here it is not necessary that this wholeness be expressly conceptualized: its belonging to Dasein can be veiled, the expanse of this whole is changeable. This wholeness is understood without the whole of those beings that are manifest being explicitly grasped or indeed “completely” investigated in their specific connections, domains, and layers. Yet the understanding of this wholeness, an understanding that in each case reaches ahead and embraces it, is a surpassing in the direction of world . . . . World as a wholeness “is” not a being, but that from out of which Dasein gives itself the signification of whatever beings it is able to comport itself toward in whatever way. (GA 9: 156/121)

What this transitional work added to Heidegger’s account in Being and Time, however, was the claim that an important contribution of the world to unconcealment consists in the way that “through the world,” Dasein “gives

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itself an original view (form) that is not explicitly grasped, yet functions precisely as a paradigmatic form for all manifest beings” (GA 9: 158/123). Heidegger subsequently develops this idea in terms of the truth of essence – plank 3b) In the 1929–30 lecture course on The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, Heidegger argues that the world should be understood as the prevailing of a “pre-logical manifestness” of beings “as such and as a whole” (GA 29/30: 512–13). But any sufficient inquiry into the origin of the “as” in the “as such” and “as a whole” – that is, that as that entities show up – “must open up for us the whole context in which that, which we intend with ‘manifestness of beings’ and with the ‘as a whole’, comes into its essence (west)” (GA 29/30: 435–6). A comment is in order here on the way that Heidegger thinks of essences. For some reason, most translators and many commentators are hypersensitive about Heidegger’s use of Wesen (essence) and related neologisms like Wesung (essencing) and wesen with a small “w” – that is, wesen as a verb, meaning “to essence” or “to come into its essence.” These commentators have really taken to heart Heidegger’s warning that he does not mean to use Wesen in the traditional sense – so much so that they seem to translate the word randomly (as, e.g., perdurance or presence or, my favorite example from the translation of the Beiträge, essential swaying). All such choices avoid any metaphysical baggage, but at the cost of confusion or incomprehensibility. I think it is better to translate Wesen in the straightforward way as essence but then explain how Heidegger thinks of essences (as hard as that might be). As I understand it, Heidegger’s disagreement with many views of essences are that they define what a thing is in terms of some necessary property that all X things must have, or some universal property that all X things in fact have. In the “Origin of the Work of Art,” Heidegger calls this kind of essence the unimportant/indifferent essence (das gleichgültige Wesen) or the unessential essence (des unwesentliche Wesen). The traditional way of thinking of an essence, Heidegger notes, thinks of it in terms of the common features in which all things that share an essence agree. The essence gives itself in the generic and universal concept, which represents the one feature that holds indifferently for many things. This indifferent essence (essentiality in the sense of essentia) is, however, only the unessential essence. In what does the essential essence of something consist? Presumably it lies in what the entity is in truth. The true essence of a thing is determined from out of its true being, from the truth of the given entity. (GA 5: 37/BW 175–6, translation modified)

The idea is, I believe, relatively straightforward: the essence of a thing is given by that in the light of which it is brought into unconcealment. This way of approaching the issue makes room for something being essentially determined by an aspect or trait that, in fact, it lacks. For example, suppose that the essence of human being is to be rational. If we buy the unessential

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essence view of essences, than puzzles arise whenever we encounter a human-like thing that happens to lack rationality – say a baby or a person in a vegetative state. There might well be a way around such puzzles if the essence of a thing is treated as a property that all X things possess, or an abstract concept that they instantiate; that does not matter for present purposes. The point is simply that, in light of such puzzles, a natural alternative is to say that the essence is fixed not by the property that an entity now possesses or an abstract type that it presently instantiates, but by that in the view of which we take it as that thing it is. So even a person in a vegetative state is a human if she is understood in terms of the essence of being human (in particular, she is understood precisely as failing in some way to measure up to what it is to be human). A person could be a human on this view, even if, in fact, it is factually impossible for her to be rational. Another example to illustrate how this works for Heidegger is his account of technological entities – the standing reserve. To be a standing reserve, for example, is not a matter of possessing an aspect or trait such as being always on call. Instead, it is to be experienced in terms of enframing – that is, in terms of the challenging forth that unlocks, exposes, and switches things about ever anew. Because everything is experienced in terms of enframing, particular things are experienced as in a state of privation when they are not always on call as standing reserve. This means that they can have the essence of enframing, even if they are not standing reserve yet. Their essence is determined technologically because they are seen as being defective when they are not always ordered and on call. Now, the problem with essences so understood is that they present something of a paradox. Heidegger demonstrates this by comparing these two assertions: (A) The lights in this lecture hall are on now (B) Truth is the correctness of an assertion where assertion (B) is intended to specify the essence of truth (GA 45: 77 ff/69 ff). The truth of assertion (A) seems in a straightforward and undeniable fashion to consist in its relating to a particular fact or state of affairs – namely the condition of the lights in the lecture hall right now. How about the truth of assertion (B)? Heidegger makes two important observations about such assertions. First, while it might well correspond with the facts (the relevant facts would include all particular truths), its correspondence with the facts is not what makes it true. Rather, its being true is what guarantees that it will correspond with the facts. We can see this if we think about what facts we could possibly adduce for (B) to correspond to. If the notion of a fact or a state of affairs is meaningful, it must be some actual (whether past, present, or future) condition of an object or a state of affairs. But essential claims go beyond any claim about

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past, present, or future conditions to include all possible conditions. This is because the essence of a thing is not picked out by a mere empirical regularity but must also be maintained in the face of counterfactual situations. If I were to claim that (part of) the essence of a table is to be a wooden item of furniture, for instance, it would not establish this claim to merely show that all past, current, and future tables are wooden items of furniture (even if I could, in point of fact, be certain that there is not, never had been, and never would be such a plastic object). It would, in addition, have to be the case that a plastic object with exactly the same shape, resistance, function, and so on would not be a table. This means that for essential definitions, correspondence to the facts is a necessary but not sufficient condition for their being true. Second, facts come too late for essential definitions, since we need to assume that the definition is true in order definitively to identify the fact or facts to which it corresponds. To get a feel for this, compare two other essential definitions, this time for gold: (C) Gold is the noblest of the metals (D) Gold is an element with atomic number 79. When it comes to definitively founding simple factual statements like (A), we begin by finding the fact to which it corresponds, and we can do this by first finding the object referred to in the subject phrase – the lights – and then checking their condition. How about (C)? It seems like we would start by locating the object referred to in the subject phrase – gold. In fact, if (C) is an essential definition, the only way we can determine that gold is the noblest of the metals is by first finding some gold, and we do this by looking for instances of the noblest metal. Thus we see that in order to establish the truth of the essential specification, we first have to assume that it is true. And that means that we are never in a position to prove empirically that it is right. Suppose, for example, we are trying to decide between (C) and (D). The advocates of (C) would round up all the noblest metals to test their definition. The advocates of (D) would round up all the elemental stuff with atomic number 79 to test theirs. Neither camp could ever persuade the other that their essential definition was correct, because, on the basis of their respective definitions, each would reject exactly those particular substances that the other took as decisive evidence in favor of his or her definition. As Heidegger summarizes the situation, “every time we attempt to prove an essential determination through single, or even all, actual and possible facts, there results the remarkable state of affairs that we have already presupposed the legitimacy of the essential determination, indeed must presuppose it, just in order to grasp and produce the facts that are supposed to serve as proof” (GA 45: 79).

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It seems that both definitions cannot be right. Even if it so happens that (C) and (D) agree in their extension, we could imagine cases or possible worlds in which the definitions apply to some substance differently. That means that we would have reason to believe that they name, at best, an accidental property of gold. Such considerations show us that being cannot be disclosed in the same way that an entity is uncovered. But if the facts give us no basis for deciding which of the competing essential definitions is right, then perhaps we have to conclude that there are no genuine essences in the world. Instead, what we find in the universe is what we (arbitrarily) project into it. And if we conclude that, then we also might be forced to conclude that there is no way that the universe is independently of the way we conceive of it, because it seems that we are free to carve it up in any way that we want. The unconcealment of being seems, then, to be a purely subjective projection on our part. Our ordinary experience of things belies this, however. We do not think, for example, that one is free to decide arbitrarily whether to treat the atomic number of gold as its essential property. To us, the atomic number seems to pick out something more essential about gold than any of its other properties. We can summarize the situation in the following way. It seems that our ability to have truly uncovering comportments and true beliefs and make true assertions about the world – comportments and beliefs and assertions that get at the way things really are – depends on things having an essence, a way that they really are. However, if an understanding of essences consists in a grasp of a propositional definition, then nothing in the world can make the essential definition true, because nothing in the world could establish one definition as opposed to any other. Heidegger, in fact, rejects this argument because he denies that our understanding of essences consists in a grasp of a propositional definition. The “knowledge of essence,” he claims, “cannot be communicated in the sense of the passing on of a proposition, whose content is simply grasped without its foundation and its acquisition being accomplished again” (GA 45: 87). This is because the knowledge of essence he is interested in is a way of being attuned to the world; for that, we have to be introduced to the practices that will eventually teach us to have a particular sensibility and readiness for the world. Thus “the knowledge of the essence must be accomplished anew by each one who is to share it” (GA 45: 87). It is this latter understanding of our knowledge of essences – seeing it as consisting in being attuned by the world to consider certain properties or features of things as definitive – that, Heidegger believes, allows us to see our way clear of antiessentialism and antirealism. The unconcealment of being is precisely the way a certain precognitive understanding of essences comes to prevail in an attunement. Through the unconcealment of being,

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Heidegger says, “human comportment is tuned throughout by the openedness of beings as a whole” (GA 9: 193/147, translation modified). So, the first thing to say is that our disclosure of essences is not an explicit grasp of what the essence is, nor is it a particular experience or comportment with a particular entity. “Addressing something as something,” Heidegger notes, “does not yet necessarily entail comprehending in its essence whatever is thus addressed. The understanding of being (logos in a quite broad sense) that guides and illuminates in advance all comportment toward beings is neither a grasping of being as such, nor is it a conceptual comprehending of what is thus grasped” (GA 9: 132/104). Heidegger illustrates this point: “we are acquainted with the ‘essence’ of the things surrounding us – house, tree, bird, road, vehicle, man, etc. – and yet we have no knowledge of the essence. For we immediately land in the uncertain, shifting, controversial, and groundless, when we attempt to determine more closely, and above all try to ground in its determinateness, what is certainly though still indeterminately ‘known’: namely, house-ness, treeness, bird-ness, humanness” (GA 45: 81). As a result, “the essence of things,” Heidegger notes, is ordinarily something “which we know and yet do not know” (GA 45: 81). The essence is “not first captured in a ‘definition’ and made available for knowledge” (here, Heidegger is speaking specifically of the essence of truth; GA 45: 115). This is because, as he explains, the knowledge of essences is originally manifest in the way “that all acting and creating, all thinking and speaking, all founding and proceeding were determined by and thoroughly in accord with the unconcealment of beings as something ungrasped” (GA 45: 115). We can say, then, that the disclosure of being consists in our being disposed in a particular way for the world. An understanding of being is concealed when it is not operative in our experience of the things in the world. What distinguishes each historical age from another, Heidegger claims, is that each has a different style of “productive seeing,” of perceiving things in advance in such a way that they are allowed to stand out as essentially structured (see GA 45, section 24). We can illustrate this by going back to the gold example above. The fight between medieval and modern conceptions of gold is based ultimately in different ways of picking out salient entities in the world – that is, different ways of responding to some evident property or properties that they possess. One way of being disposed might lead us to find the true being of a thing in the extent to which it approaches God by being like Him. Another way of being disposed might lead us to find the true being of a thing in its ability to be turned into a resource, flexibly and efficiently on call for use. When someone disposed to the world in the first way uncovers a lump of gold, and subsequently defines gold as such and such a kind of thing, what she takes to be an essential property will be driven by her background sense that what is most essential in everything is its nearness to God. When someone disposed

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to the world in the second way uncovers it, she will take the essential properties to be whatever it is about it that allows us to break it down into a resource, and flexibly switch it around and order it, since our background sense for technological efficiency shapes our experience of everything. In fact, there is, in principle, an indefinite if not infinite number of ways to characterize the properties of any particular thing. A piece of gold, for instance, has a color and a weight and a texture and a shape, but also all sorts of other properties like being good (or bad) for making jewelry, gleaming in a way that seems divine, being directly in front of my favorite chair, and so on. When we decide what kind or type of thing this particular object is, we will do it on the basis of just those particular properties we are responding to, and these properties will be some subset of an indefinite or infinite set of properties we could be responding to. Given that this is the case, before anything can show up as anything, we must have some particular, prelinguistic disposition or readiness for the world that leads us to see certain features as more important than others. All understandings of what things are thus arise on the basis of a background disposition to the world. We disclose the essences that we do, according to Heidegger, because the way we are moved by or disposed to things allows a particular style of being “to be ascendent” (see GA 45: 129). As a result, there is no longer any need to see (C) and (D) as incompatible. There might be a culture whose sensibilities for the world lead it to uncover an instance of gold as having just those essential properties specified in (D) – in fact, Heidegger would probably argue, those are just the essential properties we would find in a lump of gold if we were oriented to the world in a technological fashion. We do not need to see (D) as true a priori, because whether it is true is up to the world. Instead, we will use our technological disposition to pick out objects as instances of that kind of resource; from there, it is an empirical matter which features of it make it that kind of a resource. In our age, it seems plausible to say that gold’s essential features (in the traditional sense) are found in its atomic structure, because knowledge of the atomic structure gives us the best grasp on how to turn gold into a resource. The possibility of truth is secured because there is a way that the world opens itself up or is unconcealed, a coherent mode of being, and thus the world can serve as a standard for our thoughts and words. In summary, then, the unconcealment of beings is the “anticipatory gathering” that lays out certain properties and relationships as salient (see GA 45: 121). This means that essences are historical – they show up differently as dispositions for the world change. THE REVEALING

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CONCEALING OF THE CLEARING

This brings us to the last, and most difficult, feature of Heidegger’s platform of unconcealment. Because of the historical nature of the disclosure

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of essences/understandings of being discussed under plank (3), Heidegger was pushed to ask what makes it possible for any one of a plurality of understandings of being or essence to prevail. Part of the answer he arrived at was that there must be a clearing that allows one way of being disposed to the world to come into operation, while withholding other potential ways of being disposed for the world. I conclude with just a few words about the unconcealment of the clearing. The historical nature of essences leads one to ask how it is that changes in historical understandings can arise. Heidegger in reflecting on this question noted: entities are reordered, and indeed not merely by an entity that is not yet accessible to us, and perhaps never will be, but by something concealed which conceals itself precisely when we, holding ourselves in the clearing, are left to the discretion of or even captivated by, entities. From this we derive an essential insight: the clearing, in which beings are, is not simply bounded and delimited by something hidden but by something self-concealing. (GA 45: 210)

This is a phenomenological observation that Heidegger repeats often in various forms, but without much clarification or argument. The idea seems to be something like the following: the style of being that allows things to show up as having an essence is most invisible when it is most effective. That is, when everything is showing up to us in terms of flexibility and efficiency, for example, we are captivated by things – we are wholly absorbed in our dealings with them. That renders us unable to make ourselves aware of the understanding of being that is shaping our experience of the world. Looked at another way, the ready availability of beings to us depends on our losing sight of the fact that their availability is grounded in a particular understanding of the essence of beings as a whole. Thus “the concealment of beings as a whole . . . is older than every manifestness of this or that entity” (GA 9: 193–4/148). So a new understanding of being can establish itself, and a new ordering of beings can become operative, only if there is something like a clearing that conceals any other way of experiencing the world in order to allow this particular way to come to the forefront. The upside to this is it allows us to inhabit a world: the self-concealment of being “leaves historical human beings in the sphere of what is practicable with what they are capable of. Thus left, humanity completes its ‘world’ on the basis of the latest needs and aims, and fills out that world by means of proposing and planning” (GA 9: 195/149). The downside is that, having lost sight of the concealment that makes it all possible, we become convinced of the necessity and unique correctness of our way of inhabiting the world: “human beings go wrong as regards the essential genuineness of their standards” (GA 9: 196/149). As I have noted already, the clearing should be understood as something like a space of possibilities – it “grants first of all the possibility of the path to

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presence, and grants the possible presencing of that presence itself” (GA 14: 75/BW 445). We will explore examples of this function of unconcealment in the chapters on history (see Chapters 8–10), because Heidegger understands the movement of history as a series of different modes of presence. The clearing makes it possible for a certain understanding of being – a particular mode of presence – to come to prevail among entities. For possibilities to be live possibilities, however, it requires a space from which other incompatible possibilities are excluded. The clearing maintains a world by keeping back (concealing) possibilities that are incompatible with the essence that is currently operative. In order for some possibilities to shape our experience of the world, any other possibilities cannot be live possibilities, they cannot be possible for us, they must be kept from us. This might make it sound like the clearing is a gallery of possibilities – that it keeps different determinate ways of being in the world locked in the back room while exhibiting one at a time. But this would be to think about it incorrectly – it would be to treat ways of being as if they were themselves in being. But ways of being are not unless entities are constituted by them. So the clearing is not a hiding of other modes of being, any more than a clearing in the forest is a hiding of trees. The forest clearing does not work by keeping some particular trees or shrubs on hand but out of the way. Rather, the forest clearing is nothing but the condition that there are no trees or shrubs growing. Similarly, the clearing makes some possibilities possible, not by putting some determinate possibilities in cold storage, but by making it the case that there are no other determinate possibilities available. For the available possibilities to have authority as possibilities, moreover, we cannot be aware that other possibilities are being ruled out or concealed from us. Our experience of the natural world as resources, for example, could not authoritatively shape our experience of the world if we were aware that one would be equally justified in experiencing it as God’s creation. This means that, paradoxically, the clearing only works as a clearing when it is not uncovered – when it is not something toward which we can comport. Thus the clearing does not only keep back other possibilities, but it keeps back that it is keeping back other possibilities. The clearing conceals the possibility of other understandings of beings. It is not “the mere clearing of presence, but the clearing of presence concealing itself, the clearing of a self-concealing sheltering” (GA 14: 79/BW 448). APPENDIX ON TUGENDHAT

Perhaps the most influential critique of Heidegger’s account of propositional truth and unconcealment is Ernst Tugendhat’s, published in Der Warheitsbegriff bei Husserl und Heidegger (Gruyter, 1967). Tugendhat’s argument consists of the following three claims:

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1. Heidegger redefines propositional truth – the natural conception of truth – as uncovering simpliciter. In doing so, he loses the specific notion of propositional truth. 2. Heidegger extends his revised concept of propositional truth to uncovering of entities and disclosure of being: “Heidegger handles propositional truth and comes to the conclusion that it must be understood as ‘uncovering’ (or – as Heidegger says later – unconcealing). This finding then allows him to extend the concept of truth to all that can be uncovered and to any disclosure.”3 3. Uncovering of entities and disclosure of being, however, lack the right to be called truth, because they do not capture the specific notion of truth contained in the natural conception of truth. (I’ll call this the “rights” argument – that unconcealment in general has no right to be called “truth”). As I have shown above, Tugendhat was simply wrong about claim 1. Heidegger always saw propositional truth as being a specific kind of unconcealment, one that consists in correspondence with a fact or state of affairs. Thus propositional truth was neither redefined, nor did it lose its specific sense. I have also shown that Tugendhat is wrong about claim 2. As we saw, Heidegger was quite clear that unconcealment of entities, being, and the clearing could not be understood through propositional truth. His approach was not to extend the account of propositional truth to the other elements of the platform, but to explore the kind of unconcealment proper to each feature of our engagement with the world. Tugendhat’s defenders, however, maintain that in spite of Tugendhat’s errors with respect to claims 1 and 2, claim 3 remains an important and viable critique. (Indeed, they go so far as to insist that this was the real core of Tugendhat’s argument all along – against, it seems to me, the weight of Tugendhat’s book.) Thus, for example, Cristina Lafont argues in Tugendhat’s defense that if we focus on these errors, “the central point of Tugendhat’s critique is swept under the rug, namely, ‘What justification and what significance does it have that Heidegger chooses ‘truth’, of all words, to designate this other phenomenon [of unconcealment]?”4. And William Smith argues similarly that “the real force” and “the essence of Tugendhat’s critique” lies in the questions: “why call these conditions for the possibility of correctness [i.e., the uncoveredness of entities and the disclosedness of being] ‘truth’, be it qualified as ‘ontological’ or ‘primordial’? Whether Heidegger ‘reduces’ truth to unconcealment, or alternatively, whether Heidegger accepts truth as correspondence is irrelevant to 3

4

Ernst Tugendhat, “Heidegger’s Idea of Truth,” in Hermeneutics and Truth (Brice R. Wachterhauser, Ed.). Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1994, p. 85. Heidegger, Language, and World Disclosure, p. 116.

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the question of whether unconcealment itself deserves the title of ‘truth’ at all.”5 In fact, I think it is not at all irrelevant to Tugendhat’s argument that his first two claims are simply wrong, since much of the force behind claim 3 derives from showing that by thinking of truth in terms of unconcealment, Heidegger is forced to redefine illegitimately propositional truth and then to extend, once again illegitimately, this redefinition to the uncovering of entities and the disclosure of worlds. But once we see that one can think of the “natural” conception of truth in terms of unconcealment without losing its “specificity,” much of the impetus for Tugendhat’s argument is lost. One is left simply to maintain a rather dubious linguistic principle – that things either possess or lack a right to a specific name. But why should we think that? Why should I accept the Lafont/Smith insistence that only propositional truth has an inherent right to be called truth? That flies, as Heidegger frequently remarked, in the face of our ordinary linguistic practices. We predicate truth not just of beliefs and assertion, but also people (true friends), Gods (the living and true God), organizations, objects (true gold), activities (true aim), and so on. Lafont announces as a principle that we are only justified in using truth to mean uncovering” if “the ‘being-true of the statement’ could be translated without loss as ‘being-uncovering.’”6 Would we say the same of these other uses of the predicate true – that only if we could derive the “truth of the statement” without loss from the meaning of the truth predicate as applied to an object, only then would we be justified in saying that an object is true? And with what right would such a principle be asserted? Since when has it been a condition of the use of a predicate that it may only be used when the definition of it in one of its applications can be transferred ‘without loss’ to all its other applications? But perhaps the rights argument turns on a less demanding sense of entitlement. Rather than demanding that the general understanding of unconcealment apply without loss, thus capturing propositional truth in all its specificity, perhaps the idea behind claim 3 is that there is some core element of truth that is missing from unconcealment. Tugendhat, Lafont, and Smith all emphasize the normativity involved in propositional truth – the idea that assertions and beliefs succeed by being true and fail by being false. Tugendhat suggests, again wrongly, that Heidegger is illegitimately transferring the normativity of truth to world disclosure. But we could still read the rights claim as asserting that discovery of entities and disclosure of worlds lack the right to be called truth unless they possess conditions of success or failure so that we can be in a position to say 5

6

“Why Tugendhat’s Critique of Heidegger’s Concept of Truth Remains a Critical Problem,” Inquiry 50 (2007): 164. Heidegger, Language, and World Disclosure, p. 123.

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definitively that something either unconceals or it does not. Thus Lafont observes that since unconcealment is “neither a normative concept that refers to the question regarding what is the case (related to the correctness of statements) nor a concept that shows the bivalent structure of ‘either– or,’” we have “cause to doubt, with Tugendhat, that such a concept can have anything at all to do with the concept of truth.”7 And Smith argues that “what Tugendhat’s question calls for, then, is an interpretation of disclosedness that shows how it has a normative dimension within its own sphere.”8 But, of course, not everything that possesses conditions of success or failure has a right to be called true. In baseball, a swing that hits a home run is no more a true swing than a swing that results in a strike out. Not every form of normativity is translatable into binary terms of truth and falsehood. Deception and nondeception stand in a normative relationship (see Chapter 3), but there can be deceptive truths, just as there are fictional accounts and parables that free us from deception. Things can be more or less deceptive – being deceptive or nondeceptive is not a simple binary state. Thus we ought to be suspicious when Smith suggests that the normative dimension for unconcealment is the dimension of authenticity versus inauthenticity. Smith thinks we should say that a true unconcealment is one that is authentic, a false unconcealment one that is inauthentic. But why should we think that authenticity has the right to be called true, any more than a home run swing? What the advocates of the rights argument owe us, but have never provided, is an explanation of the sort of normativity that deserves to be called truth – one that distinguishes all the legitimate uses of the predicate “is true” from all illegitimate ones. Lacking such an explanation, the objection amounts to little more than whining that it is too hard for us to wean ourselves from thinking of truth as entailing a particular kind of normativity (the kind exhibited by true propositions), and thus misleading to call unconcealment truth. But, as we have seen, Heidegger himself acknowledged that it was misleading – for that reason he tried, as I catalogued above, to alert the reader consistently to the fact that he was using the term in a nonstandard way. And when he discontinued the use of truth to refer to unconcealment, that does not represent any acknowledgment that he was unjustified in calling it truth. Instead, as he suggested in responding to Tugendhat’s first presentations of the rights argument, it was nothing more than a pragmatic response to the refusal to pay attention to his warnings: “if one thinks of ‘truth’ only in the sense of the truth of assertion, it certainly is confusing to also call the ‘clearing’ ‘truth.’ It is certainly not truth in the ‘specific,’ that is, the usual 7 8

Ibid., p. 148. “Why Tugendhat’s Critique of Heidegger’s Concept of Truth Remains a Critical Problem,” p. 174.

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sense. As long as the usual use of the word ‘truth’ insists on having the only definitive meaning, it is perhaps advisable to renounce the philosophical use.”9 Indeed, a fundamental feature of Heidegger’s philosophical practice – a feature to which his Tugendhat-inspired critics seem particularly tonedeaf – is a refusal to defer to the ordinary, natural, and commonsensical use of terms: The place of language properly inhabited, and of its habitual words, is usurped by common terms. The common speech becomes the current speech. We meet it on all sides, and since it is common to all, we now accept it as the only standard. Anything that departs from this commonness, in order to inhabit the formerly habitual proper speech of language, is at once considered a violation of the standard. It is branded as a frivolous whim. All this is in fact quite in order, as soon as we regard the common as the only legitimate standard, and become generally incapable of fathoming the commonness of the common. This floundering in a commonness which we have placed under the protection of so-called natural common sense, is not accidental, nor are we free to deprecate it. This floundering in commonness is part of the high and dangerous game and gamble in which, by the nature of language, we are the stakes. Is it playing with words when we attempt to give heed to this game of language and to hear what language really says when it speaks? If we succeed in hearing that, then it may happen – provided we proceed carefully – that we get more truly to the matter that is expressed in any telling and asking. (GA 8: 82–3/WCT 119)

If we understand what Heidegger means by the philosophical use of a term, and what he is trying to accomplish with the high stakes game of using words contrary to their natural sense, it will help us see how he would respond to the question: why does Heidegger use the word truth to refer to unconcealment, given that he understood all along how misleading it was to do so? Heidegger argued that the philosopher has a right to use words whenever doing so will draw our attention to some phenomenon, and help us to understand its structure and relations to other phenomena. As Heidegger liked to observe, that is what Plato was doing when he used the word eidos for that which in everything and in each particular thing endures as present. For eidos, in the common speech, meant the outward aspect [Ansicht] that a visible thing offers to the physical eye. Plato exacts of this word, however, something utterly extraordinary: that it name what precisely is not and never will be perceivable with physical eyes. But even this is by no means the full extent of what is extraordinary here. For idea names not only the nonsensuous aspect of what is physically visible. Aspect, idea, names and also is that which constitutes the essence in the audible, the tasteable, the tactile, in everything that is in any way accessible. (GA 7: 23–4)

9

“Letter to Ernst Tugendhat,” March 19, 1964.

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39

What right did the forms have to receive the name eidos, visible aspect? The rights of philosophical usage, which shows us something about the role that nonsensuous ideas play in forming our sensuous apprehension of the world. And, in fact, Heidegger claimed the rights of philosophical usage when it comes to calling unconcealment Wahrheit. In doing so, he was in no way asserting that unconcealment, like propositional truth, has an intrinsic, bivalent normative structure. Instead, he was drawing our attention to the way all truths – propositional, the truth of being, the truth of entities – preserve and shelter a particular existential relationship between things in the world. “The assertion is not primarily true (wahr) in the sense of revealedness. But rather the assertion is the way in which we humans preserve (wahren) and protect (verwahren) the truth (Wahrheit), that is, the revealedness of entities: aletheuein” (GA 31: 90). Thought philosophically, in other words, truth stabilizes and secures particular ways of encountering entities. And the question is not what to transfer from propositional truth to unconcealment, but the other way around – what to transfer from unconcealment to propositional truth. For us humans, formulating and passing around true assertions is one primary way that we secure our ways of comporting ourselves in the world we inhabit. Thus Heidegger hoped, overoptimistically, as the reaction of his critics shows, that calling unconcealment Wahrheit (it does not really work in English) would help us think about the importance of stabilizing and securing an understanding of the world: “One day we will learn to think our used up word ‘truth’ (Wahrheit) on the basis of the true (Wahr), and experience that truth is the preserving (Wahrnis) of being and that being as presence belongs to preserving” (GA 5: 348). Why call unconcealment Wahrheit ? To provoke us to reflect on our role in opening up, sheltering, preserving, and stabilizing understandings of beings, entities, and thinkable states of affairs in the world.

2 The Conditions of Truth in Heidegger and Davidson

An indirect concern of this chapter is to show that, despite dramatic differences in approach, “analytic” and “Continental” philosophers can be brought into a productive dialogue with one another on topics central to the philosophical agenda of both traditions. Their differences tend to obscure the fact that both traditions have as a fundamental project the critique of past accounts of language, intentionality, and mind. Moreover, writers within the two traditions are frequently in considerable agreement about the failings of past accounts. Where they tend to differ is in the types of positive accounts they give. By exploring the important areas of disagreement against the background of agreement, however, it is possible to gain insights unavailable to those rooted in a single tradition. The direct concern here is to illuminate Heidegger’s account of truth and unconcealment through a comparison with Davidson’s accounts of the conditions of truth. I begin, however, with a brief discussion of some crucial differences between the analytic and Continental ways of doing philosophy. An understanding of these differences provides the basis for seeing how Heidegger and Davidson, all appearances to the contrary, in fact follow a parallel course by resisting theoretical attempts at the redefinition or reduction of our pretheoretical notion of truth. Indeed, both writers believe that truth is best illuminated by looking at the conditions of truth – that is, they both try to understand what makes truth as a property of language and thought possible in the first place. Both answer the question by exploring how what we say or think can come to have content. I conclude by suggesting that Heidegger’s “ontological foundations” of “the traditional conception of truth” can be seen as an attempt at solving a problem that Davidson recognizes but believes is incapable of solution – namely, the way the existence of

My thanks to Donald Davidson, Hubert Dreyfus, Sean Kelly, Jeffrey Malpas, and Michael McKeon for their helpful criticisms, comments, and suggestions on earlier versions of this chapter.

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language and thought presuppose our sharing a finely articulated structure that only language and thought seem capable of producing. ANALYTIC AND CONTINENTAL PHILOSOPHY

If I were to reduce the difference between analytic and Continental philosophy to a single anecdote, I would refer to two titles: Michael Dummett’s The Logical Basis of Metaphysics,1 based on his 1976 William James Lectures, and Martin Heidegger’s Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Logik (GA 26), the published edition of a 1928 lecture course. Here, in a nutshell, one finds the analytic’s focus on logical analysis as the means toward philosophical questioning, and the Continental suspicion that all knowledge is tinged through and through by hidden metaphysical presuppositions. As Dummett explains in his introduction, analytic philosophy’s approach to metaphysical issues is premised on the belief that “[p]hilosophy can take us no further than enabling us to command a clear view of the concepts by means of which we think about the world, and, by so doing, to attain a firmer grasp of the way we represent the world in our thoughts.”2 The analytic philosopher’s assault on metaphysical heights, then, will only begin after the exhaustive examination of more pedestrian subjects like language and logic. This is in deliberate contrast to the philosophical tradition, which Dummett views as deeply flawed due to “an underestimation by even the deepest thinkers of the difficulty of the questions they tackle. They consequently take perilous shortcuts in their argumentation and flatter themselves that they have arrived at definitive solutions when much in their reasoning is questionable. I believe that we shall make faster progress only if we go at our task more slowly and methodically, like mountain climbers making sure each foothold is secure before venturing onto the next.”3 One needs only contrast this position with Heidegger’s introduction to see the profound difference in impetus between the analytical and Continental style. Heidegger argues that we can make no progress at all in philosophical understanding without “a critical dismantling of traditional logic down to its hidden foundations” – “the metaphysical foundations of logic” (GA 26: 27) This is because logic can provide genuine insight into “the way we represent the world in our thoughts” (as Dummett puts it) only if we understand why it is that we human beings are constituted in such a way “as to be able to be thus governed by laws”: “How ‘is’ Dasein [human being] according to its essence so that such an obligation as that of being governed by logical laws can arise in and for Dasein [human being]?” (GA 26: 24). As a result, “[a] basic problem of logic, the law-governedness of thinking, reveals itself to be a problem of 1

2

Michael Dummett, The Logical Basis of Metaphysics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991. Ibid., p. 1. 3 Ibid., p. 19.

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human existence in its ground” (GA 26: 24). Consequently, an understanding of logical form would be bootless, for Heidegger, without a prior understanding of the constitution of human existence – an understanding that can only be reached by reflection on the fundamental concepts of metaphysics. Analytic philosophers, in sum, see themselves as engaged in the painstaking process of clarifying the logical structure of language and mind – a process they believe to be prior to making inroads in metaphysical reflection. Continental philosophers, while also often starting from the structure of language and mind, seek to move from there directly to a reflection on the historical, existential dimension of our language and thoughts. Because Analytics see no evidence of careful and rigorous analysis in the work of Continental thinkers, they consider Continental philosophy to be, at best, “a more or less systematic reflection on the human situation . . . a kind of reflection which can sometimes lead to a new perspective on human life and experience.”4 At its worst, Continental philosophy is viewed as hopelessly muddling about within a “wide-spread ignorance of certain fundamental linguistic principles.”5 Continental philosophers, on the other hand, are intensely suspicious of the Analysts’ “fundamental linguistic principles,” certain that reliance on them is premised on metaphysical naïveté or even ignorance. So Heidegger argues that “[t]he appearance of a ‘philosophy of language’ is a striking sign that knowledge of the essence of the word, i.e., the possibility of an experience of the primordial essence of the word, has been lost for a long time. The word no longer preserves the relation of Being to man, but instead the word is a formation and thing of language” (GA 54: 101–2). And Derrida thinks it typical of the whole analytic tradition that it conducts its investigations on the basis of “a kind of ideal regulation,” which excludes the troublesome cases most in need of examination – troublesome cases that in fact work to deconstruct traditional philosophy.6 What is often lost in this mutual dismissiveness is a surprising overlap in views concerning the shared starting point of much of the work in both traditions – language. It strikes me that the best way to overcome the Analytic/Continental divide is therefore to ignore, at least provisionally, the differences in approach and instead explore the areas of agreement. When left at the level of mutual recrimination, it looks like there is so little in common as to make the two traditions irrelevant to one another, for it seems to both sides as if the other is either incapable of joining issue, or at least willfully refusing to do so. But if one can get beyond the differences and discover a common ground, then the disagreements can be seen to have content, and the proponents of the two traditions can be made to engage in 4 5 6

P. F. Strawson, Analysis and Metaphysics. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1992, p. 2. John R. Searle, “Literary Theory and its Discontents,” in New Literary History 25 (1994): 639. Jacques Derrida, “Signature Event Context,” in Limited, Inc. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988, p. 15.

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productive ways. In the remainder of this paper, I hope to illustrate this by showing how Heidegger’s and Davidson’s inquiries into truth and the functioning of language, as different as they are, both come to focus on the conditions of the possibility of truth as the means to dissolving traditional philosophical problems. It is true that there are important differences in their accounts of truth conditions. But by seeing their disagreement against the background of an extensive congruence in view, one can highlight in a way not easily available to adherents of one tradition or another the presuppositions and problems that remain for each thinker. HEIDEGGER AND DAVIDSON ON TRUTH DEFINITIONS

There are a variety of traditional answers to the question what makes a true sentence (or belief or proposition, etc.) true – answers such as correspondence, coherence, utility, and so on. What all these theories share, as Davidson has pointed out, is a sense that truth is a concept for which we should be able to provide an illuminating definition. From the preceding observations on the difference between analytic and Continental philosophy, as general as they were, it should come as no surprise that both Davidson and Heidegger are critical of traditional truth theories. The notable similarities between Davidson’s and Heidegger’s views of truth, on the other hand, are perhaps unexpected. Davidson, after all, has argued for a “correspondence” view, albeit a “correspondence without confrontation.”7 And he pursues the question of truth, in good analytic fashion, within the context of a semantic analysis of the truth predicate. Heidegger, on the other hand, is widely interpreted as denying a correspondence view in favor of a definition of truth as “unconcealment.” And his criticism of correspondence theories is based in a phenomenological, rather than a logical, exploration of our experience of truth. But, on scrutiny, one discovers that the differences are nowhere near as wide as one might believe. Heidegger, in fact, views propositional truth as a sort of correspondence, and Heidegger’s account of unconcealment is badly misunderstood if taken as a definition of truth.8 To the contrary, Heidegger’s primary interest in propositional truth is not to redefine it but to discover what makes propositional entities capable of being true or false. And Davidson, likewise, believes that propositional truth cannot meaningfully 7

8

Donald Davidson, “Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge,” in Truth and Interpretation: Perspectives on the Philosophy of Donald Davidson (Ernest LePore, Ed.). Cambridge: Blackwell, 1986, pp. 69–88. Davidson has since issued a retraction of sorts – not that his view on truth has changed, but he has come to recognize how misleading it is to call his theory a correspondence theory. See Donald Davidson, “Structure and Content of Truth,” Journal of Philosophy LXXXVII (1990): 302. See my “Heidegger on Truth as Correspondence,” International Journal of Philosophical Studies 7 (1999).

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be defined in terms of correspondence. More importantly, Davidson, like Heidegger, believes that progress cannot be made on the issue of truth by defining it but only by understanding the conditions of sentences and beliefs being true. The interesting disagreement comes, then, not at the level of their respective accounts of propositional truth, but rather in the details of their explanations of the conditions of truth. In order to get to the point where we can fruitfully compare and contrast Davidson and Heidegger on this topic, however, we must get beyond the seemingly incompatible approaches to propositional truth. By understanding the context that the respective traditions provide for inquiries into truth, we can go a long way toward separating the genuine from the merely apparent disagreement. Within the analytic tradition of philosophy, the generally accepted starting point for understanding truth is an analysis of our use of the truth predicate. Many philosophers accept that “just about everything there is to be said about truth” is said by noting that almost all of our uses of “is true” can be understood in terms of “certain formal features” of the predicate – “notably its disquotation feature.”9 These features allow us to make certain generalizing statements about sentences; “the truth predicate allows any sentence to be reformulated so that its entire content will be expressed by the new subject – a singular term open to normal objectival quantification.”10 In addition, we can account for certain vestigial uses of “true” (like “That’s true!”) in terms of its use as an illocutionary device – for instance, to confirm or endorse.11 Perhaps the best-known example of a definition of the truth predicate is Tarski’s semantic theory of truth. Tarski’s Convention T shows how to provide an extensionally adequate description of the truth predicate for each of a number of well-behaved languages. According to Convention T, a satisfactory truth theory for that language must be such as to entail for every sentence of the language a T-sentence of the form s is true if and only if p

where “s” is a description of the sentence, and “p” is replaced by that sentence, or a translation of the sentence into the metalanguage.12 The problem of restricting analysis to the truth predicate is, as many have noted, that such a definition seems to fall far short of explaining our concept 9

10

11

12

Michael Williams, “Epistemological Realism and the Basis of Skepticism,” Mind XCVII (1988): 424. Paul Horwich, Truth. Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell, 1990, p. 33. See also Scott Soames, “What Is a Theory of Truth?” Journal of Philosophy 81 (1984): 413. P. F. Strawson, “Truth,” in The Concept of a Person and Other Essays. London: MacMillan, 1963, p. 147ff. A. Tarski, “The Concept of Truth in Formalized Languages,” in Logic, Semantics, Metamathematics. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1956, p. 155ff.

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of truth. Dummett, for instance, argues that the failing of a Tarskian truth definition is best seen in the case where we are constructing a T-theory for an object language we do not yet understand. In order to do this, we must know the conditions under which truth can be predicated for each and every sentence of the object-language – something we cannot do unless “we know something about the concept of truth expressed by that predicate which is not embodied in that, or any other truth-definition.”13 Thus, if all we knew about truth were exhausted by a T-theoretic description of the truth predicate for a language, we would not be able to define truth for a new language. The implications for analytic philosophers engaged in the Davidsonian project of defining meaning in terms of truth are critical, for if the truth conditions of sentences are to play any role in fixing their meaning, our ability to learn a language depends on having a pretheoretic understanding of truth. Thus Dummett explains that in order that someone should gain from the explanation that P is true in such-and-such circumstances an understanding of the sense of P, he must already know what it means to say of P that it is true. If when he enquires into this he is told that the only explanation is that to say that P is true is the same as to assert P, it will follow that in order to understand what is meant by saying that P is true, he must already know the sense of asserting P, which was precisely what was supposed to be being explained to him.14

So if meaning is to be understood in terms of truth conditions, then understanding language requires an account of truth above and beyond a language-relative characterization of the truth predicate. But what sense can be given to this pre-T-theoretic concept of truth? The readily available traditional answer, which explains truth as correspondence, is unable to do the work that needs to be done to make truth useful in Davidson’s project. According to correspondence theories, we accept that a statement is true if there is some fact to which the statement corresponds. But, in order to do the work we need it to do, the theory must specify the fact to which the sentence corresponds independently of our recognizing the sentence as true. And, as Davidson has shown, a definition of truth in terms of correspondence to facts is unable to do this. For a correspondence theory to be useful, it must be able to generate theorems of the form (1) the statement that p corresponds to the fact that q

But if q is an extensional description of some fact or state of affairs in the world, p will correspond not just to q, but to any sentence logically equivalent to q, or to any sentence differing from q only in the substitution in q of a coextensive singular term. Thus p will correspond not just to the fact that q 13

14

Michael Dummett, Truth and Other Enigmas. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978, p. xxi. Michael Dummett, “Truth,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 59 (1959): 148–9.

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but to any fact at all.15 And so (1) will fail to assist us in determining whether a sentence is true. Treating the description as less than fully extensional (by, for example, denying the substitutivity of logically equivalent sentences) is no more successful. The very possibility of explaining truth through correspondence is undermined by this move, since nonextensional descriptions rely on the concept of truth in picking out the fact in the first place: “Suppose, to leave the frying-pan of extensionality for the fires of intension, we distinguish facts as finely as statements. Of course, not every statement has its fact; only the true ones do. But then, unless we find another way to pick out facts, we cannot hope to explain truth by appeal to them.”16 Hence, the real objection to correspondence theories is that they “fail to provide entities to which truth vehicles (whether we take these to be statements, sentences or utterances) can be said to correspond.”17 But, Davidson argues, rather than moving us to look for new definitions of truth, this failure should lead us to question the belief that, to make the concept of truth useful, we have to be able to specify what makes a true sentence true. Davidson has argued that, in constructing a theory of meaning, what we need beyond a T-theory for a language is not a definition of truth, but an understanding of how we have the concept of truth. It is thus not truth that we should be seeking, but rather a clarification of “the necessary condition[s] of our possession of the concept of truth.”18 To summarize, Davidson’s approach to truth has two distinct sides to it. First, as against any attempt to define truth, he takes the notion of truth itself to be “beautifully transparent” and primitive, and thus denies that the general concept of truth is reducible to any other concept or amenable to redefinition in other terms.19 This leaves intact our pretheoretic understanding of truth. He accepts a Tarskian T-theory as providing an instructive

15

The proof of this is provided by what has been dubbed the “Great Fact” or “Slingshot” argument. The basic argument is that if “R” and “S” abbreviate any two sentences alike in truth value, then (1) and (2) and (3) and (4) corefer (by substitution of logical equivalence), as do (2) and (3) (by substitution of coextensive singular terms): (1) (2) (3) (4)

R xˆ (x = x.R) = xˆ (x = x) xˆ (x = x.S) = xˆ (x = x) S

Thus, if some sentence p corresponds to the fact that R, it also corresponds to the fact that S, and to any other fact, for that matter. Donald Davidson, “Truth and Meaning,” in Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1984, p. 19. 16 Donald Davidson, “True to the Facts,” in ibid., p. 43. 17 “The Structure and Content of Truth” (cited in n. 12, above), p. 304. 18 “Locating Literary Language,” in Literary Theory After Davidson (Reed Way Dasenbrock, Ed.). University Park: Pennsylvania University Press, 1993, p. 303. 19 “A Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge” (cited in n. 12, above), p. 308.

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description of the kind of pattern truth makes in a language.20 But he resists the urge to believe that such a definition fully captures the concept of truth. The second part consists in saying enough about truth to shed light on the other philosophical issues in which truth is implicated without succumbing to the temptation to offer a full blown definition of truth: “what we want to know is how to tell when T-sentences (and hence the theory as a whole) describe the language of a group or an individual. This obviously requires specifying at least part of the content of the concept of truth which Tarski’s truth predicates fail to capture.”21 Davidson’s account of truth consequently turns to the conditions of truth – specifically, the condition that sentences and other propositional entities have content. Heidegger’s inquiry into truth follows a similar strategy. For both Heidegger and Davidson, the problem with correspondence theories is that they presuppose, but cannot explain, the structure of our knowledge of the world. Of course, Heidegger is not motivated by a desire to employ a definition of the truth predicate in a theory of meaning. Instead, his interest in truth stems from the fact that, as he explains, “the phenomenon of truth is so thoroughly coupled with the problem of being” (GA 2: H. 154). By this, Heidegger means that there is a necessary connection between our understanding of truth and the way beings are present to the understanding. But he insists that the relationship between being and truth cannot be explained by existing correspondence theories because we only recognize the correspondence relation between a statement and things in the world posterior to our relating the statement to the world through our “comportment.” Thus the notion of correspondence cannot help us in knowing how to relate statements to the world (see GA 9: 184). But Heidegger’s criticism of correspondence theories should not be taken to mean that Heidegger intended to redefine the truth of assertions in other terms. Indeed, he accepts that the truth of propositional entities is to be understood as a kind of “correspondence” or agreement with the way the world is; a “proposition is true,” he affirms, “insofar as it corresponds to things.”22 Heidegger’s objection, then, is not to the notion of correspondence per se, but rather to certain types of correspondence theories – namely, those that understand correspondence as a relation holding between mental representations and nonmental things. Such theories, Heidegger argues, are unable to explain instructively the notion of a relation of agreement. Thus, rather than seeking to provide a theory of the correspondence relation, 20 21 22

“The Structure and Content of Truth” (cited in n. 12, above), p. 299. Ibid., p. 297. GA 41: 118/What Is a Thing? (W. B. Barton, Jr., & Vera Deutsch, Eds.). Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1967, p. 117. See also GA 5: 38/“Origin of the Work of Art,” in Basic Writings, p. 176: “A proposition is true by conforming to the unconcealed, to what is true. Propositional truth is always, and always exclusively, this correctness.”

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Heidegger believes it is enough to note that an assertion is true when what is intended in the assertion “is just as it gets pointed out in the assertion as being.”23 In so doing, he accepts the intuition that the truth of propositional entities consists in agreeing with the way the world is (see Chapter 1). In the place of a truth theory, Heidegger proposes examining how it is that beliefs or assertions are the sorts of things that can be true or false. His account of unconcealment is meant not as a definition of truth, but rather as an explanation of what makes it possible for propositions to point to the world in just the way that the world is. And in a manner not unlike Davidson, Heidegger sees the content of propositional states as fixed through our interacting with others and our orientation toward things within a world thereby “erasing,” in Davidson’s words, “the boundary between knowing a language and knowing our way around in the world generally.”24 It is in the details of their accounts of what fixes the content of our intentional states that the interesting differences are found between Davidson’s and Heidegger’s views. INTENTIONAL CONTENT AS A CONDITION OF TRUTH

In this section of the chapter, I look in more detail at Davidson’s and Heidegger’s respective accounts of the way intentional content gets fixed. I will first examine Davidson’s view, and then show how Heidegger’s account of unconcealment can be read in the context of Davidson’s approach to the problem.25 Davidson begins from the fact that human beings use language and succeed in understanding each other, and asks what makes that use of language possible. Davidson’s project of “Radical Interpretation” illuminates the conditions of language by asking what would suffice for an interpreter to interpret the speaker of an alien language. By imagining a radical interpretation – that is, an interpretation that makes no assumptions about the propositional content of the speaker’s behavior (linguistic or other) – Davidson focuses us on those properties of languages that allow us to learn them. A radical interpreter faces the problem that we cannot understand what a speaker means by her words without knowing what she believes, and we are deprived of the usual access to her beliefs – her words. Thus, if we can 23

24

25

GA 2: H. 218. See also GA 9: 184–5/“On the Essence of Truth,” p. 122; “What is presents itself along with the presentative assertion so that the latter subordinates itself to the directive that it speak of what is just as it is. In following such a directive the assertion conforms to what is. Speech that directs itself accordingly is correct (true).” For a more complete discussion of this point, see my “Heidegger on Truth as Correspondence” (cited in n. 8, above). “A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs,” in Truth and Interpretation (cited in n. 12, above), pp. 443–4. I don’t address, however, whether Davidson would find Heidegger’s account either acceptable or necessary.

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explain how it is possible to interpret her without the benefit of a prior knowledge of her beliefs and meanings, we will learn something important about the way language works – namely, what it takes to give content to the utterances and beliefs of another. The issue, then, becomes one of understanding how it is that we learn to ascribe meanings and beliefs to each other. Here is where truth is implicated. To give content to the thoughts and assertions of others, Davidson claims, we must be able to ascribe truth conditions to their propositional states. But, as we have seen, a Tarskian “definition” of truth is insufficient for this project because it is subsequent to our having a meaningful language and propositional attitudes with content. Rather, some account of the way in which we come to relate a theory of truth (of the type Tarski has shown us to construct) to other rational agents is required; “If we knew in general what makes a theory of truth correctly apply to a speaker or group of speakers, we could plausibly be said to understand the concept of truth.”26 Thus Davidson tries to say something more about truth – not by way of defining truth, but rather by way of understanding the conditions under which we can apply a theory of truth to others. A theory of truth can only apply to a speaker, however, if that speaker’s utterances have a content that is about the world. Indeed, from the fact that a language can be learned by one completely unfamiliar with that language, it follows that the content of utterances must be, by and large, about the world. The same holds for beliefs. We have no basis for attributing beliefs to others beyond whatever correlations we can discover between their behavior and the world.27 We can thus see that a condition of having a concept of truth is having beliefs and utterances that are about objects in a public world. But Davidson goes beyond simply noting that, in order to interpret others, we need to correlate their behavior (verbal and other) with the world. He makes the further argument that we cannot have meaningful beliefs or utterances at all unless we are interpreted by others. This is because, until we enter into relationships of interpretation with others, there can be no way of determinately fixing the cause that gives our beliefs and words their meaning, nor of locating that cause in an independent world. The problem of locating the cause in the world arises, in the first instance, from the fact that any particular event is implicated in a number of different causal sequences of interaction. These include causes prior to that event (for instance, the event of our seeing a flower is itself caused by whatever made the flower grow), as well as causal intermediaries between us and the world (for instance, reflected light from the flower striking the photoreceptors in our retinas).

26 27

“The Structure and Content of Truth,” p. 300. See, e.g., “Empirical Content,” in Truth and Interpretation, p. 332.

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Once we determine which causes are relevant to the content of the belief or utterance, we must determine which features of that cause are included in the belief, and which are excluded. For instance, if we decide that the relevant cause of our belief that there is a flower is the presence of a flower, and subsequently conclude that the content of our belief that there is a flower is fixed by the presence of the flower (rather than the pattern of stimulation of our sensory surfaces), it is still not clear which of the many features of the presence of the flower are included in our belief that there is a flower. It is a feature of beliefs and sentences that they in general are not directed toward every particular of a thing – I can believe that there is a flower without believing that the flower is red. Beliefs also occur under a description – I can believe that there is a flower without also believing that there is a plant’s reproductive structure. This second problem, put another way, is that of explaining how the causal interaction, which is extensionally described, becomes an intentional content. Davidson’s way of both locating the cause and determining the content of our propositional attitudes depends on “triangulation” – that is, “two or more creatures simultaneously in interaction with each other and with the world they share.”28 Davidson argues that we go some way toward solving both problems by noting what he calls a primitive or primal triangle. In this triangle, the two creatures observe each other responding to objects in the world. For such a triangle to exist, each creature must respond to a similarity between different objects or different instances of the same object, and also respond to a similarity in the other creature’s responses to that object. Once one observer is able to correlate these similarities in this way, the stage is set for locating and determining the cause of the other’s response.29 This primitive triangle is necessary to solving the problems, but not sufficient because the “baseline” connecting the two creatures is not complete. The cause of the beliefs cannot be found in an objective world until the creatures have some way of knowing that they both occupy positions in a shared objective world, and this requires that they have some access to the other’s perspective.30 The primitive triangle is also not sufficient for determining the intentional content of propositional entities, for the causal relations that hold between creatures and things are extensionally defined, while intentional content is not. Our beliefs about flowers, for instance, cannot be reduced to an extensional description of flowers, because the contents of 28

29 30

Donald Davidson, “The Emergence of Thought,” in Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective (Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 2001), p. 128. Donald Davidson, “The Second Person,” Midwest Studies in Philosophy 17 (1992): 263. Donald Davidson, “Three Varieties of Knowledge,” in A. J. Ayer: Memorial Essays (A. Phillips Griffiths, Ed.). Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1991, p. 160. See also “The Conditions of Thought,” in The Mind of Donald Davidson (J. Brandl & W. Gombocz, Eds.). Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi, 1989, p. 199.

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our beliefs are determined in part by their relations to other beliefs (beliefs about plants, allergies, romance, etc.), but also because the content of our beliefs, as already noted, generally includes less than all that is true of some object extensionally defined. Without a more fine-grained determination of the other’s orientation to the world than that provided by the primal triangle, we cannot adequately fix the content of the other’s beliefs. But how are we to complete the baseline? Davidson argues that what is needed to connect the creatures is language. Linguistic communication contributes several elements missing from the primal triangle. First, language provides a sufficiently rich pattern of behavior to allow an attribution of a determinate intentional content to a person.31 In addition, communication lets us pick out of this rich pattern of interaction with things some particular cause that determines the content of any given belief or utterance: [W]hat makes the particular aspect of the cause of the learner’s responses the aspect that gives them the content they have is the fact that this aspect of the cause is shared by the teacher and the learner. Without such sharing, there would be no grounds for selecting one cause rather than another as the content-fixing cause. A non-communicating creature may be seen by us as responding to an objective world; but we are not justified in attributing thoughts about our world (or any other) to it.32

Finally, the communication of a particular orientation to objects makes error, and hence objectivity, possible because, by letting us know what the other is responding to, it puts us in a position to expect the other’s past pattern of behavior to continue in the future. The failure to satisfy this expectation is, Davidson argues, the only basis for attributing error (or, conversely, truth) to another. Of course, this does not really provide an explanation of how intentional content gets fixed, because the advanced form of triangulation depends on meaningful utterances – that is, utterances with a content. To complete the account, Davidson claims, one would need to explain a structure of being in the world and of relating to objects in between the primitive account, which simply describes a causal interaction, and the full-blown intentional account, by which point intentional content is already fixed. And Davidson believes we lack a vocabulary for describing this intermediate state: “We have many vocabularies for describing nature when we regard it as mindless, and we have a mentalistic vocabulary for describing thought and intentional action; what we lack is a way of describing what is in between.”33

31

32

“But words, like thoughts, have a familiar meaning, a propositional content, only if they occur in a rich context, for such a context is required to give the words or thoughts a location and a meaningful function.” “The Emergence of Thought,” p. 127. Donald Davidson, “Epistemology Externalized,” Dialectica 45 (1991): 201. 33 Ibid.

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In summary, then, Davidson provides an account of the fixing of intentional content that explains how truth is possible. That is, it explains the conditions under which utterances and beliefs become the sorts of things that can be true. Truth requires communication between two or more interlocutors who share a largely similar orientation to the world. As one interlocutor interprets the other – that is, as she fixes the truth conditions of the other’s utterances – only then does the utterance of the other come to have a definite content. But Davidson cannot explain how the communication that allows the interlocutors to interpret each other can itself be contentful. For this, he would need some way to account for our ability to focus on some intentionally defined subset of features of the thing – an ability, moreover, which is independent of our propositional attitudes regarding the thing. If we look at Heidegger’s work on the conditions of truth in the context of Davidson’s problematic, we find that Heidegger does not recognize the first problem outlined above – the problem of identifying the relevant cause of beliefs. He is satisfied that a phenomenology of perception resolves this issue, for it shows that the object itself, and nothing else, is experienced in perception.34 But the second problem – the problem of fixing the intentional content – is one to which Heidegger devotes a great deal of attention. We have seen from the discussion of Davidson what sort of explanation would need to be offered to provide an account of this. It would be necessary to show both how our behavior is sufficiently rich and articulated as to be meaningfully directed toward things in the world, and how we can be aware of the possibility of error in our directedness toward those things. While Heidegger does not offer a vocabulary for describing our prepredicative experience of things, he does provide a detailed analysis of the structure of a prepropositional, but nevertheless intentional, familiarity with the world. Heidegger’s analysis of what makes truth possible – he calls it “unconcealment” – has two parts to it. First, he claims, for the content of an assertion to be fixed by things in the world, those things must be manifest to us. Heidegger’s inquiry into discovery, the making manifest of entities, aims at exhibiting the structural features of our comportment with things – in particular, those features that fix meaning. The second part of the investigation into unconcealment focuses on disclosure – the structural features of human existence that makes possible such uncovering comportment. Although a discussion of disclosure would be essential to completing Heidegger’s account – Heidegger argues that the uncovering of what is, of entities, is possible only on the basis of a “disclosure” of an understanding of Being35 – I will focus here only on discovery, because it is Heidegger’s 34

35

See, for example, GA 20: 48–9: “I see no ‘representations’ of the chair, register no image of the chair, sense no sensations of the chair. I simply see it – it itself.” GA 2: H. 137: “[T]he world which has already been disclosed beforehand permits what is within-the-world to be encountered.”

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account of discovery that is most immediately concerned with fixing the content of our intentional comportment toward objects in the world. Discovery, making things manifest, is analyzed by Heidegger on the basis of those situations in which we have a practical mastery of things, because these are the situations in which our discovery of things is most fully developed. In all such cases, Heidegger claims, one can distinguish several structural features of our relationship to the things we encounter in our everyday comportment in the world. First, Heidegger notes, we recognize things and practices as either belonging to or foreign to the context in which they appear. Things present themselves as belonging together because they are, in Heidegger’s terminology, “directionally lined up with each other” (GA 2: H. 102). Heidegger illustrates this through the example of an office: “Equipment – in accordance with its equipmentality – always is in terms of its belonging to other equipment: ink-stand, pen, ink, paper, blotting pad, table, lamp, furniture, windows, doors, room” (GA 2: H. 97). This belonging is defined only in relation to a “context of equipment” – the totality of other equipment that belongs in the context: “[e]quipmental contexture has the characteristic that the individual kinds and pieces of equipment are correlated among themselves with each other, not only with reference to their inherent character but also in such a way that each piece of equipment has the place belonging to it” (GA 24: 441). Thus, Heidegger claims, our ability to discover an object depends to some degree on our practical familiarity with the context in which it belongs in virtue of its position vis-à-vis other equipmental objects. In addition to this minimal sense of uncoveredness – that is, having a place – which things receive from their equipmental context, Heidegger notes that things are uncovered in terms of their functionality, determined by (a) the way they are typically used with other things and (b) the way they are typically used in certain practices we engage in. Heidegger generally refers to (a) as the “with which” of things (as in “the hammer is used with nails and boards”). He refers to (b) as the “in which” of things (as in “the hammer is used in hammering”). Together, (a) and (b) comprise what Heidegger calls the context of involvements. Finally, Heidegger notes that things we use with mastery present themselves as appropriate to certain projects in virtue of which they get their meaning. When viewed from the perspective of the purpose behind use of the thing (as when a blender is used for the purpose of processing food), Heidegger calls this feature of things their “in order to” (GA 2: H. 68). When viewed from the perspective of the “work to be produced” through use of the thing (as when a blender is used to make a milkshake), Heidegger calls this being-appropriate-for of the thing its “towards which” (GA 2: H. 70). Any given thing, moreover, is linked into a complex and nested series of “in order tos” and “towards whiches.” A hammer, for instance, is used in order to drive nails, in order to fasten pieces of wood together, in order to frame a wall, in order to build a house, and so on. Heidegger calls these aspects of things

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their assignments or references. He calls the network of assignments within which we use things the context of assignments or references. Taken as a whole, our contexts of equipment, contexts of involvements, and contexts of assignments constitute a “world.” Discoveredness, in its fullest sense, consists in having all three contexts well articulated. That is to say, it consists in our articulating a “totality of equipment” or “totality of involvements” within which objects can be understood as having a sense, direction, and purpose. Only within such a context, Heidegger argues, can objects stand out as something with which we can cope and about which we can make assertions. Until it is given at least some minimal foothold in our “world” in this way, Heidegger argues, the object can at best appear in a privative manner – that is, as something that resists our world. In order to uncover anything new, it must first be given at least some minimal directionality within our “world.” On the basis of that directionality, it is possible to work with the thing, discovering what involvements and assignments are appropriate to it. The important thing to note is that we can, in our practices alone, and without the use of predicative language, embody a richly articulated way of dealing with objects within the world. Each of the practical contexts discussed above delineates and orients us to fine-grained features of individual objects. Carpenters, for instance, are able to distinguish practically the appropriateness of this hammer for driving this nail into this board. This will give them a pragmatic sensitivity to aspects like weight and hardness (as when this hammer is too heavy to drive this nail into that soft wood without marring the surface). They can make very fine distinctions in regard to those features of the totality of involvements relevant to their work – features in fact more fine grained than they may be able to express. As Davidson points out, the ability to make discriminations is not the same as having a concept. To have something like an intentional relationship to things, what is needed above and beyond the ability to discriminate is an awareness of the possibility of rightness and wrongness in our way of relating to things. But, as Heidegger’s account shows, the practical totality of involvements carries with it just such normativity. In the first place, human practices are never something engaged in alone – we inherit them from others. With the practices, Heidegger claims, we learn public norms for the value and success of our activities (GA 2: H. 127–8). Human activities, Heidegger claims, are marked by a constant concern for how others are acting: “[i]n one’s concern with what one has taken hold of . . . there is constant care as to the way one differs from [the others] “ (GA 2: H. 126). In addition, the way practices organize objects gives them a normativity of their own. The world gives a right place for the hammer to be and a right way for it to be used. In addition, we engage in practices with a purpose that itself gives things a normative reference. The carpenter knows, for instance, that this is the right hammer for the job because the purpose of the job is such and such.

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Practical expertise thus bestows a normativity on things, a normativity similar to (and Heidegger would say a precursor to) the normative structure discernable in our understanding of truth. With such practical expertise, we can sense when things are going well or poorly, and we can be moved to act in a way that will improve our practical grip on the world. The normativity inherent in our engagement with a world is usually transmitted practically rather than linguistically: “[i]n that with which we concern ourselves environmentally the others are encountered as what they are; they are what they do” (GA 2: H. 126). It is thus on the basis of our pragmatic discovery of things that language is possible, for it is the structure of equipment and involvements built into our comportment that delineates the features of things that are salient to us – the very features that form the content of our beliefs and utterances. As Heidegger explains, language is based in our making explicit the “signification” things have as a result of their “involvements.” Any time we engage with an entity in the world, we can do so because our understanding discloses these involvements, and in dealing with it, we “interpret” it and “lay out” its significations.36 When we speak of things, the “totality-of-significations of intelligibility is put into words. To significations, words accrue” (GA 2: H. 161). For Heidegger, then, the truth of assertions finds the conditions of its possibility in discovery. To the extent that we share practical worlds, we can come to “communicate” with each other, that is to say, share a determinate and intentionalistic orientation to things, without language. And this practical sharing of a world, in turn, allows Heidegger to explain the puzzle of how to give language content without language. Let me conclude by noting some consequences of this comparison of Heidegger’s and Davidson’s accounts. The distinction between Heidegger and Davidson is not simply that of a practical versus a cognitive or linguistic account of human experience. Davidson’s triangulation recognizes the practical basis of interpretation and hence of thought. Nor is there room in Heidegger’s account for human existence without any kind of linguistic interaction at all (although I have not emphasized this here). Rather, the distinction is found in Heidegger’s belief that there is a nonpropositional form of intentionality – a form of intentionality, moreover, that makes linguistic interaction possible. This commits Heidegger to the view that propositional content is based in a nonpropositional form of intentional content. Davidson, because he starts his analysis of human activity with the 36

GA 2: H. 150. Heidegger in fact has an “explicit” and an “implicit” form of interpretation. The implicit interpretation seems to be one way of describing the pragmatic articulation of features of things that I have been discussing. Thus he will say, for instance, that “[a]ny mere prepredicative seeing of the ready-to-hand is, in itself, something which already understands and interprets” (GA 2: H. 149). In speaking of things, however, we perform an explicit or “thematic” interpretation of them.

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radical interpretation of language, ends up reading language’s propositional structure back into all forms of human comportment. On the other hand, Davidson’s trenchant analysis of the distinction between truth theories and a pretheoretic understanding of truth, with its focus on the conditions of truth, helps us better grasp what is at stake in Heidegger’s account of truth and unconcealment.

3 On the “Existential Positivity of Our Ability to be Deceived”

Illusory experiences have played and continue to play a significant role in shaping philosophical accounts of perception. By and large, the need to account for perceptual errors of various sorts has greased the skids for the slide into representationalist theories of mind. But the experience of perceptual errors – illusions, deceptions, and even hallucinations – has pushed the existential-phenomenological tradition in a very different direction. When I speak about the existential-phenomenological tradition, I mean the tradition of philosophers influenced by Heidegger, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty. This tradition has its deep roots in Nietzsche. Nietzsche insisted that “a perspectival, deceptive character belongs to existence” (Kritische Gesamtausgabe VII-3.180). At the same time, he argued that “it is no more than a moral prejudice that truth is worth more than mere appearance; it is even the worst proved assumption there is in the world.” Indeed, he believed that when it comes to appearances, we ought to question the supposition “that there is an essential opposition of ‘true’ and ‘false’”: “is it not sufficient,” he asked, “to assume degrees of apparentness and, as it were, lighter and darker shadows and shades of appearance – different ‘values,’ to use the language of painters?” (Beyond Good and Evil, sec. 34). For Nietzsche, the world of experience, “the world which matters to us,” is not an objective state of affairs but something in which we are involved and to the constitution of which we contribute. This world, he argued, “is no matter of fact, but rather a composing and rounding up over a small sum of observations; it is ‘in the flow’ as something becoming . . . that never approaches the truth; for – there is no ‘truth’” (Beyond Good and Evil, sec. 34). A number of people have posed challenging questions and offered helpful comments in response to earlier drafts of this chapter. I am particularly indebted and grateful to Bert Dreyfus, Charles Siewert, Wayne Martin, Sean Kelly, Taylor Carman, lain Thomson, Bill Blattner, and Stefan Käufer for the fascinating discussions this article occasioned.

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With these claims – that the world of experience is not an objective world, that deception belongs to perceptual experience, and that perception ought not in any event to be thought of in binary terms as “true” or “false” – Nietzsche prefigured the work of twentieth-century phenomenologists. In this chapter, I would like to explore the existential-phenomenological treatment of the phenomenon of perceptual deception. Phenomenology adheres to the principle that “everything which is up for discussion regarding objects must be dealt with by exhibiting it directly and demonstrating it directly” (GA 2: H. 35). Ultimately, then, phenomenology aims to convince by directing its audience to their own experience of phenomena, and allowing the “things themselves” as they show themselves to demonstrate the accuracy of the phenomenological description. Thus, in dealing with instances of perceptual deception, phenomenologists do not base their account on, for example, positing the existence of hallucinations, understood as nonveridical experiences of nonexisting objects or events or states of affairs, qualitatively indistinguishable from veridical experiences of existing objects or events or states of affairs. Few, if any of us, ever have such experiences.1 Instead, phenomenologists typically start with the kind of errors we do or can commit in the normal course of events. For instance, while walking through the park, I walk slowly and quietly to avoid startling a deer on the path ahead of me, only to discover as I draw closer that the “deer” is a shrub. I bite into my bagel, which is covered, it seems to me, with a smoked salmon shmear, and realize after a moment of shock that the pink shmear is actually flavored with strawberry, not smoked salmon. As I’m walking down the path, I seem to see a stone ahead, which turns out merely to be a patch of sunlight on the path. Or finally, we might consider the experience of a rather special case like Zöllner’s illusion, where “objectively” parallel lines appear to be converging. I will refer to such cases in general as “deceptions” – errors produced by the fact that we do not simply make a mistake, but rather we are taken in by the way things present themselves. An issue to consider is whether some or all of these deceptions are properly categorized as perceptual errors. One might, for instance, maintain that they should be understood as errors of judgment rather than perception – that, on the basis of appearances, we draw a wrong conclusion about the nature of the objects we encounter. As we will see, existential phenomenologists maintain that such a description of these experiences is unsupported by the phenomena.

1

Thus, as Komarine Romdenh-Romluc points out, even when addressing cases of hallucination, Merleau-Ponty draws on “actual cases of hallucinatory experience” as described in the clinical literature. See “Merleau-Ponty’s Account of Hallucination,” European Journal of Philosophy 17 (2009): 76–90.

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I do not intend to review or critique nonphenomenological accounts of perceptual deception in any detail. But before turning to the phenomenological account, I do want to note a few strategies for categorizing and analyzing such phenomena that the phenomenological tradition would reject. First, one might be tempted to draw a sharp distinction between veridical and nonveridical experiences, and to reserve perceptual categories (“seeing,” “hearing,” “smelling,” “tasting,” “feeling,” etc.) for those cases in which we succeed in grasping things as they objectively are. When I look at Zöllner’s illusion, for example, it does not seem right to say of me that I see converging lines, even though they look like they’re converging to me. Or when I mistake a bush for a deer in the park, it does not seem right to say of me that I see a deer, even though it looks like a deer to me. So one might feel compelled to draw a clear distinction between things looking a certain way, or our experience having a certain phenomenal character, or the mere appearing of things, and a genuine perceptual experience. Or, more precisely, one might feel compelled to treat the mere appearing as a genuine perceptual experience only if it is veridical. (Allowing for the possibility of deviant causal chains, one would have to say that veridicality is a necessary but not sufficient condition of a genuine perceptual experience.) In the genuine perceptual experience, the phenomenal character of things corresponds to the way things actually are. One then accounts for deceptions by treating them as the presentation of a certain phenomenal character in the absence of the objects necessary to make that presentation true.2 This points us to a second temptation – that of assuming that there is some determinate, objective fact of the matter about the character of the things in the world that we perceive.3 Of course, this is a hard assumption to avoid making – it seems that either there is a deer in the woods on the path in front of me or there is not; either it is a salmon schmear on the bagel or it is not. We successfully perceive things only if the way things seem agrees with the way things objectively are. And this, in turn, points us to a third temptation – the temptation to treat our experiences as if there is a determinate fact of the matter about what we 2

3

It is not at all clear how this move can accommodate the many, perhaps prevalent, cases in which I perceive something slightly wrongly. I buy a green tie to go with my green suit, for example, only to find when I get home that the tie was in fact brown. What did I see in the department store? I saw a tie – there can be no denying that much. But it seems wrong to say that I saw a green tie, given that the tie was brown. And yet, if I had seen a brown tie, I wouldn’t have bought it. Resisting this temptation would not necessarily require one to deny that there is some determinate, objective fact of the matter about the makeup of the physical universe. But it would require one to acknowledge a possible distinction between the physical universe – what Merleau-Ponty sometimes refers to as the “world in itself” (see, e.g., PP: 10, 39) and the perceptual world.

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are experiencing, as if it is possible to specify, at least in principle, how it is that the world seems to us to be. I suspect these three temptations hang together and reinforce one another. It is only because we believe in a set of determinate, objective facts about the perceived world – and only because we believe that the way the world seems to us is equally objective and determinate – that it makes sense to treat the success or failure of perception as a matter of truth or falsity. These temptations also might lead one into what I would call an unequal division of labor in accounting for perceptual deception. By this, I mean that the responsibility for the deception tends, unjustly, one might suppose, to fall on the deceived party. When there is a mismatch between the way the world seems to us to be and the way the world actually is, we are at fault. One reasons, for instance, that we have drawn a false inference from the evidence about the world with which we are presented in sensation, or that we have hastily judged that such and such is the case on the basis of flimsy evidence. But what makes cases I have described instances of deception as opposed to mere error is the sense that the deceived party did not really do anything wrong. One’s perceptual systems may have been working properly. One may have been proceeding with due care. And yet one gets taken in. The existential-phenomenological approach, however, does not find itself tempted by the experience of deception to think about perception in these ways. Indeed, the phenomenology of deception is actually thought to reinforce our ability to resist these temptations. In particular, as I hope to show in what follows, deceptions such as these help one to see perception as having not binary success conditions but of succeeding to greater or lesser degrees – one can see the scene in better or worse ways. But it rarely makes sense to say that I perceived either truly or falsely. Second, deception helps us to recognize that the perceptual domain is not the objective universe of physics. And finally, it helps us recognize the indeterminate quality of our experience of the perceptual domain. THE PHENOMENOLOGICAL ACCOUNT OF PERCEPTUAL DECEPTION

The starting point for the existential-phenomenological account of perceptual deception is the recognition of what Heidegger calls in Being and Time the “existential positivity of our ability to be deceived” (GA 2: H. 138). The point is that deception does not show a momentary failing or accidental shortcoming in us, but rather points the way to understanding something fundamental about us, the world, and our relationship to things in the world. As Heidegger explains, “every deception and every error” should be seen “as a modification of original being-in” (GA 2: H. 62). By this, Heidegger means that errors and deceptions are not mere mental events, nor do they consist in

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the possession of false representations about the world. Instead, they are particular ways of being out in the world and involved with things. In a related manner, perception itself is not “measured against the idea of an absolute knowledge of the world” (GA 2: H. 38) – that is, Heidegger denies that veridicality, the measure of knowledge, is an appropriate category for thinking about perception. Heidegger, for example, tends to speak of “genuine” and “deceptive” perceptions (Echt- and Trugwahrnehmungen), rather than “true” and “false” perceptions. This, in turn, leads to the view that deception shows us something essential about the nature of the world and the things we encounter in the world – namely, that they are not objective and determinate. “It is precisely in the unstable seeing of the ‘world,’ a seeing that flickers with our moods, that the available shows itself in its specific wordliness, which is never the same from day to day” (GA 2: H. 38). Merleau-Ponty agrees. Writing in the context of thinking about hallucinations (although the point applies broadly), he notes: all the difficulties arise from the fact that objective thought, the reduction of things as experienced to objects, of subjectivity to the cogitatio, leaves no room for the equivocal adherence of the subject to preobjective phenomena. The consequence is therefore clear. We must stop constructing hallucination, or indeed consciousness generally, according to a certain essence or idea of itself which compels us to define it in terms of some sort of absolute adequation. (PP 336)

The experience of deception points us toward the unsteady, flickering nature of the perceptual world, to the equivocal experience of “preobjective phenomena,” for were experience always clear and the world of perception populated with determinate objects, we would not be taken in by deceptive appearances. Before going on, I should emphasize the tendentious nature of these existential-phenomenological claims. For many, sense experience is to be measured in the same way cognition is. It is either true or false, and it is true by, to put it loosely, representing the way that the world is. Only true sense experiences can qualify as perceptions. Deceptions, illusions, and hallucinations fail to represent the world, and therefore, there is no positive role to be played by perceptual deception in disclosing the world to us. The source of the error must, therefore, be traced somehow back to us – for example, an error of judgment, a false conclusion drawn from the evidence of the senses. So the existential phenomenologist cannot rest content with this description. We must confront the question: how does existential phenomenology account for error? If we have abandoned the thesis of an objective, determinate world, what basis is there for distinguishing between successful and unsuccessful experiences of the world? And if not veridicality, then what is the criterion for success? To answer these questions, I want first to reconstruct some paradigmatic existential-phenomenological descriptions

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of deception. I will then consider how it is that, as the existential phenomenologists suggest, these descriptions help us to resist the temptation to think about our perceptual encounter with the world in the three ways outlined earlier. I turn first to Heidegger’s account of deception, offered most extensively in two Marburg lecture courses: the 1923–4 course in Gesamtausgabe volume 17 (GA 17): Einführung in die phanomenologische Forschung, and the 1925–6 course in GA 21: Logik. Die Frage nach der Wahrheit. Let’s look first at the kind of example Heidegger draws on. Heidegger writes:4 “I am walking in a dark forest and I see between the fir trees something coming toward me –‘a deer,’ I say. The assertion does not need to be explicit. Upon coming closer it turns out that it is a shrub, toward which I am heading” (GA 21: 187). How are we to understand this error? What allows me to be deceived by the shrub? First, Heidegger emphasizes that the error is not simply one of having said the wrong thing about what I have seen or having wrongly judged that there was a deer between the trees. Rather, my fundamental error, he says, is that I have “comported myself in such a way as to cover up” (GA 21: 187). Heidegger uses the term “comport,” to carry oneself or behave, in order to emphasize the primarily practical dimension of our perceptual engagement with the world. Perceiving wrongly is not believing something false, for Heidegger; it is acting in the world in such a way that the true nature of things is covered up. Heidegger proposes that there are three “structural conditions” of our everyday comportment in the world that we need to focus on in thinking about deception. The suggestion is that it is the very conditions of our ordinary engagement with things in the world that makes us susceptible to being deceived. The first structural condition of comportment that Heidegger analyzes is the fact that our comportment has an inherent “tendency to discover something” (GA 21: 187), and does this on the basis of “the always already prior disclosure of the world” (GA 21: 187). By this, he means that we are always already poised for things to show up to us, and we encounter them as meaningful things in terms of our understanding of our world. So as I walk through the park in the dark, my skills for park walking are activated. As Merleau-Ponty puts it, “if there can be, in front of [my body], important 4

I should note that in these passages, Heidegger’s ultimate goal is to understand how it is possible to say something that is deceptive, rather than something that is simply false. A false assertion need not be deceptive if it couldn’t possibly induce you to believe it. So Heidegger tackles the problem of the lie by first asking how it is that we can perceive erroneously, since it is such a perception that ultimately makes the lie believable. I note this only because Heidegger introduces language into the discussion at certain points, and I’m going to completely ignore those for my purposes. I don’t think that by systematically ignoring that side of Heidegger’s analysis I’m doing any violence to his account of deceptive perceptual experiences.

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figures against indifferent backgrounds, this occurs in virtue of its being polarized by its tasks, of its existence towards them, of its collecting together of itself in its pursuit of its aims” (PP 101). So the first thing that sets us up to be deceived is the way we are always disposed or primed, through the aims implicit in what we are doing, to find things in such and such a way. This leads us to the second structural condition of our comportment. This condition has to do with the kind of entities we encounter in our everyday dealings in the world: “the entity itself must have its being constituted in such a way that, as the entity that it is, it offers and calls for the possibility of a togetherness with others, and it does so on the basis of its being. That is, it only is what it is in the unity of such a togetherness” (GA 21: 185). The entities we are primed or disposed to discover in comportment are entities that are not what they are in themselves alone, irrespective of the relationships they bear to other entities. Instead, entities are what they are holistically in virtue of the way they exist together with other entities. The classic example of this is Heidegger’s ubiquitous hammer: the hammer is what it is only because of the way it relates to nails and boards. The “togetherness” that Heidegger mentions is, I take it, the meaning or significance of a thing, where to be meaningful is to lead those who grasp the meaning from one thing to another. An entity is the entity it is in terms of the way it directs us to the context of other entities and activities within which it belongs. The togetherness, in turn, makes an entity the thing it is only to the degree that it “offers” and can “call for,” that is, affords5 and solicits, us to be directed from the entity to the things and activities with which it is involved. The world is the organized totality of such relationships of offering and calling for us to move from one thing and one situation to the next. And something only is an entity insofar as it presents us with a “unity of togetherness,” that is, shows up as holding a more or less coherent and organized place in such a meaningful structure. We comport ourselves in the world by responding to the significations that the world affords and solicits. Together, the first and second structural conditions mean that we always encounter the things in the world in terms of something else. We never encounter something that is meaningless: “in the field of everyday experiences, I do not just stand there – for example, in the forest – and simply have something before me. That is a purely fictitious situation. Instead, I am always encountered in an unexpressed way by something that I already 5

Although I borrow the language of affordances from J. J. Gibson, there is one important difference between Heidegger’s notion of what the world offers and Gibson’s notion of environmental affordances. For Gibson, an affordance is a physical fact about what the environment “offers,” “provides,” or “furnishes” an organism of such and such a type. See Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1986, p. 127. For Heidegger, however, affordances for Dasein – the kind of beings we humans are – are world dependent. That is, is a function of not just the kind of organism we are but also our way of being in the world.

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understand, something that is laid out in advance as something, and that in this way is accepted and expected in the comportment of coping with the world” (GA 21: 187). So when I mistakenly see a deer, for instance, it is because certain features of the scene in front of me draw on my abilities to identify and respond to deer solicitations. Finally, the third structural condition Heidegger identifies is the fact that within the range of possible significations in terms of which we encounter things, the situation within which we find ourselves disposes us to respond to certain solicitations rather than others. In the forest, for example, nothing could solicit us to see “the cubed root of sixty-nine coming towards me” (GA 21: 188). Even though it is logically possible that we could see the Shah of Iran coming through the forest, we will not be motivated to see this in the Black Forest of Germany either (see GA 21: 188). But both deer and shrubs are live possibilities. To review briefly, then, Heidegger observes that our ordinary ways of engaging with the world have the following structural conditions: 1. We are always poised to have meaningful entities show up for us; 2. These entities are meaningful insofar as they offer us a certain way of relating them to other entities and activities (they present us with affordances), and, in fact, they also call for us to follow up those affordances (they solicit us to act on the affordances); finally, 3. The world presents us with a meaningful context of entities and activities that disposes us to encounter some things but not others. These conditions are not just the conditions of everyday comportment – the conditions under which we are able to smoothly and fluidly deal with things. They are also the conditions that make it possible for us to be deceived by things. How so? Consider the example of the salmon schmear. It is because I ordered a salmon, not a strawberry, schmear and because, in the context of bagel shops, one’s order is generally fulfilled, that I am primed for my bagel to come with a salmon schmear. The pinkish color of the schmear in that context leads me to anticipate the fishy flavor of a salmon schmear. But it is also the case that the significations in the context lead me to experience the color in a particular way (in fact, once I realized that I had the wrong schmear on my bagel, the color thereafter looked strawberry pink, not salmon pink). So the deception arose through a confluence of my dispositions, the world context, and the color of the entity itself, all conspiring to indicate the existence of something that was not there. But the deception was also uncovered as such through the course of further perceptual comportment – it was the sweet, creamy, strawberry flavor that changed the way I was disposed to see the color and, consequently, let me see the schmear for what it was. But, as Heidegger points out, there is a distinction between a perceptual error and merely failing to see something – between, for example, seeing the

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bush as a deer, and not seeing the bush. This distinction parallels the distinction between calling someone by a pseudonym and calling him or her by the wrong name.6 A pseudonym is “a designation behind which the author hides, an alias that covers him up” (GA 36/37: 227). It is not false in the sense that there is nobody who answers to it. To the contrary, the pseudonym directs one to the author of the book, but does it in such a way that “one does not see how he or she genuinely is.” Likewise, in a perceptual error, we do see something (it is not a hallucination). But we see it in such a way that it does not show itself as it genuinely is. “Pseudos is a showing that passes something off as something; thus it is more than a mere covering up without passing it off as other than it is” (GA 17: 32). The discussion of the structural conditions of perception, moreover, lets us recognize that the possibility of perceptual deception is built into the very structure of our world. It is a “basic fact, in the sphere of dealing with the world,” Heidegger insists, that error and deception “are interwoven in a completely fundamental way, and do not merely occur as defective properties that one must overcome” (GA 17: 39). Heidegger thus offers a more equitable division of labor, attributing the blame for the deception to the world and to the things in the world as much as to our way of comporting ourselves in the world. It could be the case, of course, that we are primarily responsible for the error, insofar as we might respond wrongly to the solicitation. We might, for instance, lack the skills to respond appropriately to what the situation calls on us to do. It might be that I would be more susceptible to being deceived by the bush than a deer hunter would – he probably has much better skills for distinguishing deer from other things that might suggest a deer. At least, given that he goes looking for deer with a loaded gun, I hope he has better skills. But, even in this case, my deception is motivated to a considerable degree by the skills I have and use effectively in coping with this sort of context. As Heidegger puts it in the 1923–4 lecture course, “the possibility of deception lies . . . in an erroneous seeing, which is not motivated by a careless consideration, but rather in the manner in which the existing [human] being lives and encounters the world itself” (GA 17: 36). Thus we are not solely responsible for being deceived. It is also the case that, at least sometimes, things in the world conspire to lead us to perceive them wrongly: “there are entities that in their specific being have the characteristic that they pass themselves of as something that they are not, or as so characterized as they are not – where the possibility of deception thus does not lie primarily in a wrong way of taking them up, but rather in the entity itself” (GA 17: 32). He goes on to explain: 6

Heidegger thinks that we need to understand this to grasp the Greek notion of the pseudos, the false. “This is the fundamental meaning of the Greek pseudos: to so twist something that one does not see how it genuinely is. Pseudos is that which distorts and twists” (GA 36/37: 227).

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the things can elude us, and that is not to say they disappear. The elusiveness of things comes to life by virtue of the fact that we encounter them circumstantially. We do not see things as objects, as when they are the object of scientific investigation. This existence of things is much richer and offers much more fluctuating possibilities than are thematically prepared. Because the world in its richness is only there in the particular concreteness of living, the elusiveness is also much more encompassing and, with it, the possibility of deception is there. The more concretely I am in the world, the more genuine is the existence of deception. (GA 17: 37)

I think that Heidegger is pointing here to the way real entities and contexts necessarily orient us toward more than can possibly be present to us at any given moment. Merleau-Ponty makes a similar point in noting that vision is “an operation which fulfills more than it promises” (PP 377). For instance, when I see the facade of a house, I am oriented already to the back and sides of the house. My vision of the front “promises” an experience of the other sides. But the experience of seeing the other sides is always much richer than what the promise prepared me for. So, like Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty sees in the present experience an orientation toward much more than can be presently experienced. Thus perception throws me open to a world, but can do so only by outrunning both me and itself. Thus the perceptual “synthesis” has to be incomplete; it cannot present me with a “reality” otherwise than by running the risk of error. It is absolutely necessarily the case that the thing, if it is to be a thing, should have sides of itself hidden from me. (PP 377)

We are thus always both open to the world and lacking certainty about it. The lack of certainty is not a negative but a positive – it is that in virtue of which we can understand and intend more than is present to us at any given moment. RESISTING TEMPTATION

Unfortunately, Heidegger does not develop his view of perceptual deception much further. But, in this final section, I would like to look at the implications of acknowledging the positive character of deception, and to hazard some preliminary suggestions about the lessons existential phenomenology has drawn from the experience of perceptual deception. I will focus, in particular, on Merleau-Ponty, to see how his account stands with respect to the temptations I discussed at the outset. But the summary of MerleauPonty’s views that I offer here will be very tentative. I will present his view as a loose collection of theses about the lessons to be drawn from the experience of being deceived, cognizant that much work remains to be done in order to provide a coherent theory of perceptual deception. With a suitable description of the experience of deception in place, we can begin to ask: how must we, the world, and our relationship to the world be if we are to experience deception in this way? As I see it, the key features of

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the description are the following. When we are deceived, it is because the thing really looks like what we take it as. At the same time, things will look differently once the deception is uncovered. And the deception is uncovered in the course of further perception/action/exploration of the world. Let’s look at each of these features of the description in turn, and see what lessons are to be drawn from them. For one thing, in many ordinary cases of perceptual deception, we are deceived because the thing we mistakenly perceive really does look like or sound like or taste like or feel like something else. The bush in the forest does, from such and such a vantage point, and in such and such light, look like a deer. The strawberry schmear does look in many respects like the salmon schmear. This is in direct contrast to some traditional modes of thinking about deception – modes Merleau-Ponty calls “sketchy reasoning.” If we start not with an appreciation of the positive character of deception but instead with an assumption that deception is a kind of negation, a departure from the objective world as it determinately presents itself to us, then the tendency is to see deception as the result of our erroneous contribution to what is truly given in experience. There is not, in fact, a deer on the path. And thus, the “sketchy reasoning” goes, we must associate what is there with some memory of or past experience of a deer. So the deception, on this account, is the result of the contributions of memory to what is actually experienced. But, Merleau-Ponty points out, this way of thinking about deception in fact fails to accomplish what it sets out to, because the present experience must already have “form and meaning,” it must already look like something, in order to call forth just these memories as opposed to others (see PP 20–1). But that means that, in order to call forth the memory of a deer to make the bush seem like a deer, for example, the bush must already look like a deer. Otherwise, there is no reason why we would see it as a deer as opposed to a gorilla or the Shah of Iran, or anything else. Indeed, it is this looking like a deer that makes the deception deceptive – it “passes itself off as genuine perception precisely in those cases where the meaning originates in the source of sensation and nowhere else.” If that is so, then the supplement of memories comes too late to explain the deception (PP 20). The phenomenology of deception, then, points us to the inherently meaningful structure of the perceptual world; indeed, it expands our understanding of it. It shows up as unmotivated the belief in a meaningless stratum of sensations, to which meanings subsequently are attached. Merleau-Ponty illustrates this through a discussion of Zöllner’s illusion, an optical illusion in which parallel lines are made to seem to be converging (Fig. 3.1). For Merleau-Ponty, it is wrongheaded to start from the assumption that the lines must actually be given in perception as parallel, and then to try to explain how the lines end up being experienced as converging. Instead, the interesting question to ask about this illusion is

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figure 3.1 How does it come about that it is so difficult . . . to compare in isolation the very lines that have to be compared according to the task set? Why do they thus refuse to be separated from the auxiliary lines? It should be recognized that acquiring auxiliary lines, the main lines have ceased to be parallel, that they have lost that meaning and acquired another, that the auxiliary lines introduce into the figure a new meaning which henceforth clings to it and cannot be shifted. It is this meaning inseparable from the figure, this transformation of the phenomenon, which motivates the false judgment and which is so to speak behind it. (PP 35)

Illusions and other such deceptions point up the fact that we first of all encounter meaningful structures, and we encounter particular entities in terms of their meanings. Something is meaningful when it leads one who grasps the meaning beyond what is presented. To say that perception is meaningful through and through is to say that there is nothing experienced in perception that is absolutely and fully given in the present; everything we perceive directs us beyond itself, attunes us to anticipate further experiences. A color leads us to anticipate a modulation of color as lighting conditions change. A shape or form leads us to anticipate further adumbrations of the form as it moves relative to us. Thus what everything is is experienced in perception in virtue of what Merleau-Ponty calls “the mode of existence and co-existence of perceived objects . . . the life which steals across the visual field and secretly binds its parts together” (PP 35). Given the inherently meaningful structure of perception, it follows that there is no particular thing about which we might not be deceived. There is

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no bedrock component of our experience about which we could not get it wrong, because everything has the meaning that it has only in virtue of the structure of meanings that solicit us to further exploration.7 The schmear example illustrates this – the perceived color of the schmear varies along with my expectations about the taste. Or consider the example Merleau-Ponty introduces when making this point – the light patch on the path that is mistaken for a stone. “Every sensation is already pregnant with meaning,” he observes, “and there is no sense-datum which remains unchanged when I pass from the illusory stone to the real patch of sunlight” (PP 297). What before looked to be a broad, flat stone with a different color from the surrounding earth showed itself to be a differently lighted patch of dirt of the same color. Perhaps what seemed to be a shadow cast by the stone might now be seen as a darker gravelly patch. Such experiences call into question the idea that there is an objective, stable, determinate perceptual world. If we suppose that there is an indefinite number of meanings to which we could be attuned, and we recognize that different attunements will result in different experiences of the perceptual field, then we will have to conclude that there is no final, objective fact of the matter about what is given to us in perception. And, indeed, MerleauPonty argues that this kind of indeterminacy in the perceptual world is a condition of our being deceived perceptually. Only if the world has room for and accommodates deceptive as well as correct perceptions, only then is it possible to be deceived, since the deception presents itself as accurately opening us up to the world. This means that the world must be something more than all that is the case; it must be rather a setting: “the world is not a sum of things which might always be called into question, but the inexhaustible reservoir from which things are taken” (PP 344): In the very moment of illusion this possibility of correction was presented to me, because illusion too makes use of this belief in the world and is dependent upon it while contracting into a solid appearance, and because in this way, always being open upon a horizon of possible verifications, it does not cut me off from truth. But, for the same reason, I am not immune from error, since the world which I seek to achieve through each appearance, and which endows that appearance, rightly or wrongly, with the weight of truth, never necessarily requires this particular appearance. (PP 297)

But this is not to say that anything goes. How are we to preserve the distinction between deceptive and genuine perceptions, once we grant that there are an indefinite number of different ways to perceive any given 7

This, incidentally, suggests the incompleteness of Husserl’s account of the experience of perceptual deception as an “explosion” of the perceptual noema as new “perceptual data” are experienced that fail to fit with preceding noema. What this story doesn’t account for is the way the character of the perceptual data themselves changes along with the “noema.”

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perceptual field? We start from the notion of the inherent meaningfulness of perception. This means that to perceive is to be drawn into or pointed toward paths of further perceptual exploration and action. The distinction between genuine and deceptive perceptions is found in the degree to which they lead us well, in the sense that they allow us to keep our grip on the world around us. As Merleau-Ponty puts it: my perception brings into coexistence an indefinite number of perceptual chains which, if followed up, would confirm it in all respects and accord with it. My eyes and my hand know that any actual change of place would produce a sensible response entirely according to my anticipation, and I can feel swarming beneath my gaze the countless mass of more detailed perceptions that I anticipate, and upon which I already have a hold. (PP 338, translation modified)

In the genuine perception, then, the perception is followed up with and confirmed by further perceptions that were already anticipated in terms of the meaning of the genuine perception. With a deceptive perception, by contrast, what I am led to anticipate by the perception is not encountered in the perceptual field: “my body has no grip on it, and . . . I cannot unfold it before me by any exploratory action” (PP 295). It is thus further perceptions – perceptions that restore our grip on the world – that annul the deceptive perception and show it for the deception it was. I place my confidence in the world. Perceiving is pinning one’s faith, at a stroke, in a whole future of experiences, and doing so in a present which never strictly guarantees the future; it is placing one’s belief in a world. It is this opening upon a world which makes possible perceptual truth and . . . thus enabling us to “cross out” the previous illusion and regard it as null and void. (PP 297)

But now the fact that we can be deceived in perception, and yet nevertheless correct our being deceived through further perception, shows something important about the relationship in which we stand to our perceptual experiences – namely, that “the percept is and remains, despite all critical education, on the hither side of doubt and demonstration” (PP 344). It is important to attend to the nuances of this claim: MerleauPonty is not claiming that I’m always correct about what I perceive. Rather, that in the act of perceiving, my perception is not in the game of being true or false. I cannot be mistaken in my perception in the sense that what I perceive is false. But my perception is nevertheless correctible in the sense that a prior perception can be “cancelled” or “crossed out” – we come to recognize that the way we were seeing the world was not optimal, given the practical aims implicit in our mode of engagement with the world. “I say that I perceive correctly when my body has a precise hold on the spectacle, but that does not mean that my hold is ever all-embracing” (PP 297) – that is, for any given perceptual hold on the world, we could recognize that other holds are possible, that this way

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of getting to grips with the world has not come to terms with everything in the world, that other ways of engaging the world might be more or less successful, or guided by different concerns. This view of perception will seem paradoxical as long as we think of the success conditions of perception in the same way we think of the success conditions of belief. But the paradox dissolves when we see perception instead in terms of action – practical engagement with the world. If I am pouring water into a glass, we do not say that my way of gripping the pitcher and holding the glass is “false.” It might be a mistaken way of pouring the water in the sense that it will lead me to spill the water. And there are undoubtedly better and worse ways of holding the pitcher and the glass. But success here is not a matter of our grip conforming to an ideal grip – it is a matter of the action unfolding itself in such a way that it allows me to achieve my goals in the world. And this, in turn, suggests that it is wrong to think of perception in terms of the possession of propositional contents. To see that there is a stone on the path is not necessarily to have a particular attitude toward the propositional content: there is a stone on the path. “I see the illusory stone,” Merleau-Ponty argues instead, “in the sense that my whole perceptual and motor field endows the bright spot with the significance ‘stone on the path’. And already I ready myself to feel under my foot this smooth, firm surface” (PP 297, translation modified). I am, correspondingly, deceived in seeing the stone if, for example, the resulting bodily attitude causes me to stumble, or to change directions into a less optimal path.

4 Heidegger on Plato, Truth, and Unconcealment The 1931–1932 Lecture on The Essence of Truth

In the 1920s and 1930s, Heidegger repeatedly offered lectures and seminars largely devoted to the topic of truth. His evolving thoughts on the nature and philosophical significance of truth, however, made their way into relatively few publications, and when they were published, they tended to come in an incredibly condensed and enigmatic form. The main published works from this period include Sein and Zeit (1927), and essays like “Vom Wesen des Grundes” (1929), “Vom Wesen des Wahrheit” (1930), and “Platons Lehre von der Wahrheit” (1942).1 With the publication of Heidegger’s notes from his lecture courses, it is now becoming possible to connect the dots and flesh out Heidegger’s published account of truth.2 These lecture courses are not just of historiographical interest, however. In them, we find Heidegger working out an account of the way that propositional truth is grounded in a more fundamental notion of truth as world disclosure. He also struggles to develop a phenomenology of world disclosure, and it is in these lecture courses that Heidegger’s later view on the history of unconcealment and being develops. He also argues that the phenomenologically enriched notion of truth has normative implications for the way that we conduct ourselves in the world. 1

2

These essays are all published in GA 9: Wegmarken. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1996). Translated as: Pathmarks (William McNeill, Ed.). Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Courses dedicated to truth include: “Logik. Die Frage nach der Wahrheit” (Winter Semester 1925–1926, GA 21); Vom Wesen der Wahrheit. Zu Platons Höhlengleichnis and Theätet (Winter Semester 1931–1932, GA 34); “Vom Wesen der Wahrheit” (Winter Semester 1933– 1934, GA 36/37); and “Grundfragen der Philosophie. Ausgewählte ‘Probleme’ der ‘Logik’” (Winter Semester 1937–1938, GA 45). Virtually every other course taught during this period includes a significant discussion of the essence of truth. Particularly notable in this regard are “Einleitung in die Philosophie” (Winter Semester 1928–1929, GA 27), “Nietzsches Lehre vom Willen zur Macht als Erkenntnis” (Summer Semester 1939, GA 47), and, a little later, the “Parmenides” lecture course of 1942–1943 (GA 54).

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I review in this chapter Heidegger’s thought on these matters as developed in a lecture course offered winter semester 1931–2: The Essence of Truth: On Plato’s Cave Allegory and the Theaetetus (GA 34).

1.

BASIC THEMES OF THE COURSE

The stated purpose of the 1931–2 lecture course is to understand the essence of truth. The majority of the course is spent, however, in what might seem a more historical than philosophical endeavor – an encounter with, and appropriation of, Plato’s views on knowledge and truth. But it is in the course of an interpretation of Plato’s cave allegory from the Republic and a review of Plato’s inquiry into knowledge and error in the Theaetetus that Heidegger develops the account of the nature and history of unconcealment that characterizes much of his later work. Plato’s famous allegory of the cave is a subject to which Heidegger returned repeatedly. He offered interpretations of it in lecture courses like this one, and the 1933 lecture course Vom Wesen der Wahrheit (GA 36/37), before publishing an account of it in 1942 (‘Platons Lehre von der Wahrheit’, GA 9/‘Plato’s Doctrine of Truth’, in Pathmarks). In the published essay, as in the lecture course, Heidegger argues that contemporary representational accounts of truth as correspondence are an outgrowth of a change in thinking spurred by Plato’s thought. This change, Heidegger argues, can be detected in an ambiguity in the cave allegory surrounding the notion of truth – an ambiguity between truth as a property of things, and truth as a property of our representations of things. For Heidegger, the decision to focus on truth as a property of representational states has its root in the historical influence of Plato’s doctrine of the ideas. Attention to the ambiguity in Plato’s account, however, shows that what now seems a natural way to approach truth actually hides at its basis a decision – namely, the decision to consider truth only insofar as it is a property of propositions. One consequence of this decision is that, given the subsequent orientation of truth to ideas or concepts, we come to believe that “what matters in all our fundamental orientations toward beings is the achieving of a correct view of the ideas” (GA 9: 234/Pathmarks, p. 179) – that is, a correct representation of things in terms of their essential or unchanging properties. Heidegger’s interest in the cave allegory stems from his belief that, while it lays the ground for an account of propositional truth, it does so on the basis of a view of truth as a property of things. It thus presents an opportunity to rethink the now widely accepted approach to truth. The Theaetetus was also a staple of Heidegger’s lecture courses in the 1920s and early 1930s, figuring prominently not just in GA 34 and GA 36/ 37, but also in the 1924 course on Plato’s Sophist (GA 19), and the 1926 course on The Basic Concepts of Ancient Philosophy (GA 22). One reason for his interest in this dialogue, as we shall see, was his belief that truth or

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unconcealment is a “privative” concept, and thus needs to be approached by understanding its negation (see Chapter 1). Heidegger argued that the Greek language reflects an awareness of this in the fact that Greek uses a privative word-formation (a-lêtheia, un-concealedness) to name “truth.” “The awakening and forming of the word alêtheia,” he writes, “is not a mere accident . . . and not an external matter” (GA 34: 127). What it is to be unconcealed is thus determined in relationship to a positive state of concealment. The Theaetetus thus becomes of interest, given its focus on trying to understand the concept of, and discover the conditions of the possibility of, error. Error is, of course, one way to conceive of the opposite of truth. The account we give of error will therefore affect the understanding we have of truth. If we think of truth as a privative state, we will think of it as the absence of error. But Heidegger also wants to question the idea that error as conventionally understood ought to be the positive state from which truth in general is defined. To the contrary, he contends that the proper positive concept is concealment.3 Before turning to the details of the lecture course, a final word of warning is in order. In this, as in all of Heidegger’s commentaries on other philosophers, it is not always easy to distinguish between views that Heidegger attributes to others in order to reject and those that he is endorsing. This is, in part, a function of the fact that Heidegger’s readings of philosophers are so often extremely unconventional; one tends to believe that, when Heidegger articulates a novel view, it must be his own view. This is a mistake, and one must not assume that Heidegger is endorsing all the positions that he attributes to Plato. Indeed, he thinks that, with Plato’s thought, “Western philosophy takes off on an erroneous and fateful course” (GA 34: 17). In addition, Heidegger is a notoriously violent reader of other philosophers – he reads them to discover the “unsaid” in their thought. The unsaid is the background assumptions, dispositions, conceptual systems, and so on, which ground the actual views they accept. “In all genuine works of philosophy,” he argues, “the decisive content does not stand there in so many words, but is what brings into motion the totality of a living interpretation” (GA 34: 193). When Heidegger offers a reading of Plato, then, it is not primarily oriented toward explaining what Plato actually thought or wrote, but rather toward how what he thought and wrote was shaped by certain questionable background assumptions – assumptions that need to be revisited. In the course of his readings of philosophers, Heidegger ends up offering an interesting and philosophically important reconstruction of the logic that supports their philosophical views. This is usually worth working through, even if one ultimately dismisses Heidegger’s accounts as historically invalid. 3

Error, however, might well be the positive state from which a subcategory of truth – propositional truth as correctness – is defined.

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I now turn to a review of some of the salient themes of the lecture course. This will be a selective review, as I try to give a general sense of Heidegger’s goal and to focus on what I think are some of his more interesting contributions to thinking about truth.

1.1. Setting the Stage: Truth, Essence, Self-Evidence Heidegger begins the course by calling into question our everyday or “selfevident” understanding of the notions of truth and essence. Obviously, we cannot give an account of the essence of truth if we do not know what an essence is and if we do not know what truth is. The tradition has ready-made answers to both questions. When it comes to truth, for example, the generally accepted starting point for understanding truth, at least within the analytic tradition of philosophy, is an analysis of our use of the truth predicate. Moreover, most philosophers have followed Frege in only considering those uses of the truth predicate in which truth is predicated of propositions (or certain propositional states and acts like beliefs, sentences, assertions, etc.). The main theories for defining the truth of propositions take truth either as a correspondence of the propositional entity with a fact,4 or a coherence of a proposition with a held set of propositions, or, finally, a kind of deflationism, in which it is pointed out that saying that a proposition is true does not really do anything more than simply asserting the proposition. But, Heidegger asks, why should we limit our considerations of truth to propositional truth in the first place? Frege, to his credit, recognized that he was dismissing other uses of the truth predicate, and gave some sort of reason for it. His purpose, he said, was to understand “that kind of truth . . . whose recognition is the goal of sciences.”5 Most philosophical treatments of truth are not so self-conscious about the matter. So what happens if we revisit the decision to focus only on truth as predicated of propositions or collections of propositions? Think for a moment about the ways in which, in our common nonphilosophical discourse, we actually use the “truth predicate.” We are as likely to say “she is a true friend” as “what she said is true” – that is, we predicate truth of particular entities, not just sentences or propositions. Or “truth” can also be used to name whole states of affairs or domains about 4

5

When Heidegger was writing and lecturing, the most widely accepted notion of propositional truth was that of correspondence. Like many others in the opening decades of the twentieth century, he questions whether we can arrive at a clear notion of correspondence – at least as long as correspondence is taken as a relationship that holds between a representation and a state of affairs in the world. For further discussion of Heidegger’s views on correspondence, see my “Truth and the Essence of Truth,” in The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger, rev. ed. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2005, and Chapter 1 above. “The Thought,” in Logical Investigations (P. T. Geach, Ed.). Oxford, England: Basil Blackwell, 1977, p. 2.

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which we think or speak (think Jack Nicholson’s character in A Few Good Men: “You can’t handle the truth!”) In religious discourse, “truth” is even less amenable to standard definitions. In the Gospel of John, for example, Jesus proclaims: “I am the way, the truth, and the life” (John 14: 6), or better yet: “he that doeth truth cometh to the light, that his deeds may be made manifest, that they are wrought in God” (John 3: 21). Whatever “doing the truth” is, it is clearly not a matter of holding true beliefs or making true assertions. Such examples lend credence to Heidegger’s view that, in understanding truth, we should not be too quick to focus exclusively on the truth of propositions. Indeed, Heidegger believes that propositional truth must be grounded in the truth or unhiddenness of entities: “what is originally true, that is, unconcealed, is not the assertion about an entity, but rather the entity itself – a thing, a fact. . . . The assertion is true in so far as it conforms to something already true, that is, to an entity that is unconcealed in its being. Truth as such a correctness presupposes unconcealedness” (GA 34: 118). Just as he calls into question the self-evidence of our understanding of truth, Heidegger also argues that the self-evident idea of essences is problematic. The traditional approach to essences holds that the essence of a thing is “just what makes it what it is,” where this is understood as something universal, something that “applies to everything” that is such a thing (GA 34: 1). So the essence of truth will be whatever applies to every true proposition, But what sort of “whatever” are we looking for? Typically, essences are thought of either as a property or characteristic possessed by the particular things, or as a true description that can be applied to everything that shares that essence. So, we might think of the essence of gold as some physical property or characteristic, say, the atomic number, which all gold possesses, or we might think of the essence of a table as a description that will apply to all and only tables. But truths are not, on the face of it, like tables or lumps of gold – that is objects with properties. On what basis are we justified in treating truths in the same way that we treat (physical) objects? The sort of thing we look for as the essence of an entity might actually depend on the kind of entity it is. Since the essence is the what-being of a thing – that is, what it is – we cannot simply assume that the same understanding of essence applies to different kinds of beings. We first have to ask about being – in this case, what is the being of truths? Do they have the kind of being that objects do? At any rate, such considerations should give us pause before we confidently assume that we know what the essence of truth is, or look for an account of the essence of truth – for example in terms of a property that all true assertions possess (GA 34: 3–5). Heidegger notes another important feature of essences – namely, that it seems we cannot decide what the essence of a thing is unless we already know what it is (this is an argument he develops in more detail in GA 45). Suppose we want to know what the essence of a table is. We’ll try to figure out what description applies to every table, what feature or property every table

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possesses. To do this, we need to round up all the tables and examine them. But we cannot round them up unless we already know which things are tables and which are not. So, it seems, we can never discover the essence of a thing or ground it empirically; we can only act on the basis of a prior understanding of its essence. So, when it comes to truth, “clearly we must necessarily already know the essence. For how otherwise could we know how to respond to the request to name [in this case] truths?” (GA 34: 2). If this is right, then essences are neither something that can be discovered, nor something that can conclusively be proven and established to be true. But nor are they exempt from questioning and, in the lecture course that follows, Heidegger tries to think through the historical roots of our understanding of the essence of truth. Later in the course, Heidegger develops the idea of such an understanding as something we strive for, rather than discover or deduce or prove (see Section 3). Finally, Heidegger attacks the very notion of self-evidence. First, he makes the obvious point that being self-evident does not necessarily constitute a good reason for accepting a proposition. Many things that have been thought self-evident in the past have turned out to be false. More importantly, he points out that self-evidence does not exist in itself – something is always self-evident for somebody. But that means that we cannot judge the tenability of self-evidence without understanding who we are and why certain things seem so self-evident to us. Thus the observation that the essence of truth is self-evident ought to be the starting point of inquiry into why we are so constituted that this particular understanding of truth will strike us as so very self-evident. “We must first of all ask how it comes about that we quite naturally move and feel comfortable within such self-evidences?” (GA 34: 6–7).

1.2. Why Plato? The self-evident but nonetheless questionable nature of the essence of truth as correspondence is, Heidegger concludes, just another indication of a pervasive fact about human beings: when we become comfortable with something, it becomes invisible to us, so that we actually understand it very poorly. To justify our ready acceptance of the traditional notion of truth – if it can be justified – thus requires that we “step back from it” (GA 34: 7), that is, find a standpoint from which it no longer seems so obvious or natural. We will then be in a position to examine its foundations and search out its meaning. This is one of the motivations for turning to Plato, for, Heidegger claims, the understanding of the current self-evident understanding of the essence of truth was not yet taken for granted in Plato, but it is Plato’s philosophy that first laid the foundations for our own notion of truth. To understand what Heidegger is trying to accomplish with this historical return to Plato, we need to take a short detour through his philosophy of language. Heidegger believes that words accrue to articulations in a

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prelinguistically structured experience of the world. So our word “desk,” for example, succeeds in referring to a desk only because we have articulated a particular space (say, an office) in terms of certain tasks, relations between equipment, identities (or for-the-sake-of-whichs), in such a way that one of the things we do there is sit and write. Our word “desk,” then, accrues to this practically structured node in the overall context of equipment and activities. One of the powers and dangers of language, however, is that it is possible for the word to refer to an object, even without the rich experience of the world that articulated the object to which it refers. So it is possible for someone to refer to a desk with the word “desk,” even if he or she does not know how to comport him- or herself in an office. It is even possible that, without this original experience of the office, what we understand by and refer to with the word “desk” could shift and drift over time, thus eventually obscuring what was originally understood. This, Heidegger believes, is precisely what has happened with words like “truth” and “essence.” Of alêtheia, the Greek word for truth, for instance, he claims that it “loses its fundamental meaning and is uprooted from the fundamental experience of unhiddenness” (GA 34: 138). Elsewhere he suggests that two quite different things are both named by the same word: “truth as unhiddenness and truth as correctness are quite different things; they arise from quite different fundamental experiences and cannot at all be equated” (GA 34: 11). But nor does this mean that the different things named by the word “truth” are only accidentally related to each other (in the way that, for example, the machines and birds named by the English word “crane” are). “Truth” names these “quite different things” because the different “fundamental experiences” have a great deal to do with each other. The former (the experience of unhiddenness) is, Heidegger believes, the historical and logical foundation of the latter. To recognize this, and to understand better our own notion of truth as correctness, Heidegger holds that we need to reawaken an experience of hiddenness and unhiddenness: “instead of speaking about it [a return to the experience of unhiddenness] in general terms, we want to attempt it” (GA 34: 10). That is the ultimate goal of the lecture course, and another reason for the return to Plato’s thought. When introducing the Theaetetus, he notes that Plato’s dialogue is simply the occasion for “developing” and “awakening” (GA 34: 129) the question: “for the immediate purpose of these lectures it is therefore not necessary for you to have an autonomous command of the Greek text. In fact you should also be able to co-enact the questioning itself without the text. . . . The task and goal of the interpretation must be to bring the questioning of this dialogue to you in the actual proximity of your ownmost being [Dasein] . . . so that you have in yourselves a question that has become awake” (GA 34: 130). One should note, as an aside, that this quote implies that inquiry into the nature of truth forces us to confront our own being or essence – a fact easily

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overlooked if truth is taken exclusively as a property of propositions. This is because, as Heidegger puts it, it is part of our essence that we are in the truth (see also Sein and Zeit, GA 34: 221). To be in the truth means, at its most superficial level, that most or at least many of the things we believe are true. But this superficial level is a consequence of the fact that we understand being and “stand in the midst of beings” (GA 34: 146), that is, that we are always already in a world that we understand amidst entities with which we comport: “the only way in which we can really understand man is as a being bound to his own possibilities, bound in a way that itself frees the space within which he pursues his own being in this or that manner” (GA 34: 76). So, it is part of what it is to be a human being (at the first, most superficial level) that much of what we believe is true, and (at the deeper, more profound level) that this is the case because to be human means that beings are discovered to us and a world is disclosed to us: “it belongs to being human . . . to stand in the unhidden, or as we say, in the true, in the truth. Being human means . . . to comport oneself to the unhidden” (GA 34: 25). So far, this discussion of our essential being in the truth is merely an elaboration of Heidegger’s views as presented in Sein and Zeit. But the 1931– 2 lecture course adds a new twist to the relationship between our essence and truth – namely, Heidegger now claims that the history of our understanding of truth is connected to “the history of man’s essence as an existing being” (GA 34: 146). This idea, that there is a history to our essence, becomes very important in Heidegger’s later work. Heidegger comes to believe that essences are historical – and this includes human essence. What it means to be a human being, or, put differently, that in the light of which something shows up as human, changes through history. This changing essence is tied to a change in truth and unconcealment, since the way that we understand ourselves is grounded in the way that the world discloses itself. So, once again, we can see that Heidegger’s encounter with Plato is meant to do much more than provide a historical example of a different view of truth. Instead, he intends to discover in Plato’s discussion of truth a different underlying experience of the world and sense for our human essence. But, returning now to the question of what the word “truth” names, we can see that, on Heidegger’s view, it is a word that has been subject to historical change and drift. Because Heidegger uses “truth” to refer to at least two “quite different things,” the careless reader is prone mistakenly to take Heidegger to be proposing a new definition of propositional truth: unconcealment rather than correspondence. The final reason for Heidegger’s focus on Plato and the cave allegory in particular is that, Heidegger believes, Plato’s work is the point at which the old fundamental experience, while still alive, is fading and the new experience is opened up. Thus the cave allegory, on Heidegger’s view, both lays the foundation for thinking truth exclusively as correspondence, but at the same time should be understood as an inquiry into the nature of unconcealment.

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2.

PLATO’S CAVE ALLEGORY AS AN ACCOUNT OF FOUR STAGES OF THE OCCURRENCE OF TRUTH

(AS

UNHIDDENNESS)

The cave allegory, as Plato’s Socrates himself explains to us, is meant to illustrate paideia, education, or, as Heidegger translates it, Gehaltenheit, obligatedness or beholdenness, being held to something.6,7 In education, we learn new comportments, which consist in different ways of holding ourselves out toward things in the world, thereby allowing those things to be uncovered in correspondingly different ways. We are then bound to the things as they show up. When one learns to drive a car, for example, one becomes sensitive to all kinds of new features of the world (downshifting situations, drivers who follow too closely, etc.), and one then experiences oneself as bound or obligated to respond to those things. Thus education in Plato’s sense (and Heidegger endorses this) should be understood primarily in terms of learning comportments that allow us to disclose the world in a new way. If the education is a good one, beings become more unhidden, more fully available for use, and, consequently, more compellingly binding in the way that they appear to us. Central to Plato’s thesis is that there is a highest or best way in which things can show themselves to us: namely, in the light of the ideas. Education, then, will be learning how to hold ourselves to objects in the light of the ideas. Before looking in more detail at Heidegger’s reading of the cave allegory, let me make another quick observation about Heidegger’s translation of alêtheia and related words in terms of unconcealedness or unhiddenness. In the context of the cave allegory, it is clear that the “truth” or alêtheia at stake has more to do with things other than propositions. It is the things themselves that are true or more true than the shadows in the cave, and the ideas that are more true than the things themselves. That the “truth” at issue here is not easily assimilable to propositional truth is reflected in the fact that a substantial number of, if not most, English language translators translate the Greek words alêthes, alêthestera, and so on, as “real,” or “more real,” or “having more reality,” rather than “true,” or “truer.”8 This shows that either Plato thinks that the “locus” of truth – that of which “truth” is most characteristically predicated – is not a propositional state or 6 7

8

See my “Truth and the Essence of Truth,” in The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger, rev. ed. See Republic 514 a. In the English translation of the lecture course, “Gehaltenheit” is rendered as “positionedness” (see p. 83 ff.). The reasoning behind this, I suppose, is that in being educated, we take up a new position or stance among beings. But the emphasis here is on our being held to a certain relationship to things in virtue of our having taken hold of them in a particular way. See, e.g., Waterfield’s, Cornford’s and Shorey’s translations.

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act, or he means something different from “truth” with alêtheia. Given that the Western tradition in philosophy has come to regard such uses of the predicate “is true” as, at best, parasitical upon the idea of truth as propositional correspondence, if one were to translate alêtheia as truth, one would exploit an unfamiliar and unelucidated concept. “Real,” on the other hand, is a potentially misleading interpolation. Of course, when a thing is a “true” thing, we often say that it is real – we might say of a true friend, for instance, that “she’s a real friend.” But it would be a mistake to equate the true with the real, since a false friend is no less a real entity than a true friend. In this context, then, Heidegger’s decision to translate alêtheia as “unhiddenness” seems to me no more contentious than translating it as “reality,” nor more opaque than translating it as “truth.” What is at stake, then, in the allegory of the cave, is, first (and tacitly), what it means for a thing to be genuinely unhidden (or real or true – i.e., available to us in its essence), and second (and explicitly), what is involved in our preparing ourselves to apprehend things in their unhiddenness (reality, truth). The allegory, of course, discusses four stages in this process. Let me briefly review Heidegger’s account of these stages in terms of unhiddenness. First stage: The prisoners in the cave are forced to see only shadows. But they do not see the shadows as shadows (because they have no relationship yet to the things and the light that produce the shadows). They are entirely given over to what they immediately encounter – that means, they have no relationship to themselves as perceivers (GA 34: 26–7). This stage, Heidegger argues, is the “everyday situation of man” (GA 34: 28), and the things show themselves in terms of our everyday understanding or “knowing our way around” the everyday situations that we encounter (GA 34: 29). Our familiarity with the everyday world reveals beings in one particular way. But we are completely absorbed in the world with the everyday significance it holds for us, and thus are not aware that there could be any other way to uncover things. Thus we do not know ourselves as uncoverers of beings. Second stage: The prisoners are turned around and forced to look at the objects themselves, rather than the shadows. A new form of unhiddenness occurs as they learn the distinction between what is seen immediately and what can be shown to them when they are torn out of their everyday modes of comportment. For the prisoners at this stage, the shadows remain more unhidden (GA 34: 32) – presumably because they have practices for dealing with the shadows but do not know how to cope with things as they show up outside of their everyday way of dealing with them. The “standard” employed by the prisoner in deciding what is more true is the standard of what he can most easily deal with, what demands no great effort of him, and happens of its own accord so to speak. There amidst the shadows, in his shackles, he finds his familiar ground, where no exertion is required, where he is unhindered . . . . The main standard for his estimation of higher

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or lower unhiddenness is preservation of the undisturbedness of his ordinary activities, without being set out to any kind of reflection (GA 34: 35)

For the liberator, however, the things are more unhidden than the shadows. The things, as opposed to the shadows, are articulated not according to our everyday practices but according to the ideas. Since the prisoners do not yet have practices for dealing with the ideas, they will be confused by objects articulated in terms of ideas (GA 34: 36). Thus the liberation fails because it simply shows the prisoner things in a new light without also equipping the prisoner with the practices needed to be able to cope with the things so apprehended. Until the prisoner is given the practices and habits necessary to deal with the things that are articulated according to the ideas – until he is liberated or set free for these things – he will not be able to give up the everyday situation (GA 34: 36–7). Third stage: The prisoners are removed from the cave and forced to look at the objects in the higher world – the ideas themselves. This is the stage in which a true liberation for the idea-articulated world is effected. The liberation requires force, work, exertion, strain, and suffering to break out of our everyday orientation to the world (GA 34: 42). It gives the prisoner a “new standpoint” (GA 34: 43), from which the everyday comportments of men are shown to be empty. Fourth stage: The liberated prisoner returns to the cave, and, with his new orientation toward the ideas, learns to discern the truth of beings and of man. Only in the fourth stage, in the return from contemplation of the meaning on the basis of which or through which things are seen, to the seeing itself, does it become clear how everything hangs together. Without the return, the liberator would treat the ideas as beings – as things toward which she can comport and nothing more. Only with the return do the ideas play their proper role – namely, they give us that intelligibility on the basis of which beings can appear as what they are. It is at the latter stages that the “struggle between the two concepts of truth” (GA 34: 46) becomes most pronounced. Plato wants to judge between kinds of unhiddenness and say that one is more unhidden than another. The “shadows” in the cave, the everyday objects and situations with which we are familiar in our ordinary lives, are also unhidden (meaning available for comportment). What allows us to say that the objects and situations as they appear in the light of the ideas are more unhidden? Plato makes tacit use of a criterion for deciding when something is uncovered in a more real or true way – namely, the higher form of uncovering is the one that makes the lower form possible. In arguing that the world disclosed in the light of the ideas is more unhidden (or “true”), then, Plato is basing his argument on an assumption about the primacy of ideas and cognition over other practices or kinds of familiarity with the world – that is, about the role that cognition and a facility with ideas plays in enabling more practical forms of comportment. The result

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is that the kind of success that is characteristic of ideas – that is, truth as correspondence – is given primacy over, for example, practical success in coping with a situation. It is only on some such basis that one could hold that, in learning to recognize the ideas explicitly (a skill developed at stage 3), and then in developing the ability to recognize how the ideas articulate the world (a skill developed at stage 4), we are given access to a more fundamental understanding of the world than the prisoners already possessed in the cave (see GA 34: 65 ff.). It is worth asking, at this point, which of the views Heidegger attributes to Plato are also views he can endorse.9 The views Heidegger endorses include the claims that: There are different modes of unhiddenness. There are higher and lower forms of unhiddenness.10 The everyday mode of unhiddenness is a lower form. In our everyday comportment to the world, we are blinded to that in virtue of which a higher disclosure of the world and our essence could take place. For the higher disclosure of the world, we need to become oriented to something other than the everyday beings with which we are involved. Heidegger’s argument for the existence of higher and lower modes of unhiddenness is similar to the view he attributes to Plato in the way that it draws on the phenomenology of perception. Our ability to perceive anything at all – especially everyday objects and states of affairs – depends, Heidegger argues, on our having an understanding of being, of essences. When I see something, I do not simply see the qualities to which the eye, as an organ, is physically responsive. I also see things as having a meaning or significance (I see not just colors and shapes but also books and doors). I could not see at all if my seeing did not already contain “an understanding of what it is that one encounters” (GA 34: 50). But there are two important points at which Heidegger disagrees with his version of Plato. First, he rejects Plato’s account of the content of this higher mode of comportment – for Heidegger, it does not consist in a grasp of ideas, at least not if ideas are conceived of in the way that Plato thinks of them (see GA 34: 70: “the whole problem of ideas was forced along a false track”). Heidegger agrees that the possibility of apprehending things depends on some kind of prior grasp or understanding of what they are. But he rejects 9

10

Perhaps the most striking difference between this lecture course and the later published essay on Plato’s cave allegory is the extent to which Heidegger in the lecture course attempts to read Plato in phenomenological terms. This lecture presents one of Heidegger’s most charitable and least critical readings of Plato. Heidegger doesn’t elaborate very much on this point in the lecture course. For an account of his views on a higher mode of intelligibility, see Hubert Dreyfus, “Could anything be more intelligible than everyday intelligibility?” in Appropriating Heidegger (James E. Faulconer & Mark A. Wrathall, Eds.). Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2000, pp. 155–74.

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the notion that what enables being and perception is an idea, if this is taken to mean a conceptual grasp of things. Nevertheless, he acknowledges that Plato’s account of the ascent to the idea of the good represents a depth of insight that Western philosophy has never again achieved: “what this empowerment is and how it occurs has not been answered to the present day; indeed the question is no longer even asked in the original Platonic sense” (GA 34: 111). Heidegger took for himself the project of addressing this failing in the form of his later work on unconcealment. Second, Heidegger argues that, given the importance and the priority of hiddenness in Plato’s account, it is essential that the allegory of the cave be followed up by an analysis of the nature of the hiddenness that prevails in the cave, and constantly threatens the understanding that we win through philosophy (GA 34: 92–3). This is something that Plato does not do in The Republic, although there are suggestions on how the analysis would go in Plato’s discussion of error in the Theaetetus.

3.

THE THEAETETUS AND THE QUESTION CONCERNING THE ESSENCE OF UNTRUTH

–

HOW UNHIDDENNESS BECAME

CORRECTNESS

To summarize, Heidegger sees in the cave allegory the moment at which a primordial experience of unconcealment begins to fade (GA 34: 119). Once unhiddenness is understood as produced through having a grasp of an idea, a kind of mental comportment toward things, then hiddenness consequently comes to be understood as the result of a failure on our part – namely, as a cognitive failure in which we distort the facts. The opposite of truth, alêtheia, becomes distortion, pseudos. This is in contrast to the original experience of hiddenness, lathê, which was an occurrence having as much to do with things as with us. The original Greek experience of concealment, Heidegger claims, is that of the things refusing themselves, withdrawing into hiddenness (GA 34: 139–40).11 Prior to Plato, the opposite of truth, in other words, was an “objectively” occurring unavailableness of things. With Plato’s thought, however, hiddenness becomes a matter of having a distorted cognition, the opposite of which is having a correct representation of things (GA 34: 143– 4). And it is this background understanding of unhiddenness that underwrites truth as correspondence. Whether this account is historiologically accurate is, in some sense, irrelevant. As an account of the logic behind the notion of truth as correspondence, it is compelling. Note, however, that nothing in the account Heidegger offers is meant as a rejection of the idea of correspondence or the possibility of correspondence. Rather, it is an argument that focusing exclusively on correspondence will obscure the way to any other experience 11

For more on this idea, see Chapter 1.

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of concealment, and consequently will tend to occlude the possibility of thinking of other, perhaps better, modes of unhiddenness. Thus, Heidegger concludes, unconcealment in Plato’s cave allegory “is a theme, and at the same time not a theme” (GA 34: 125). The whole allegory is about the process by which we become capable of bringing things into unhiddenness, and yet unhiddenness as an event itself is not fully thematized. To make it a theme fully, Heidegger argues, we need to focus on the nature of hiddenness (GA 34: 125). This focus is something Heidegger hopes to arrive at through Plato’s Theaetetus. In turning to Heidegger’s reading of that dialogue, we must note that he is trying to do two things simultaneously. First, he is trying to discover the source for the traditional philosophical orientation toward cognition, and conceptuality, second, he is trying to recover a more fundamental grasp of what is involved in our knowing being-in-the-world. The reading Heidegger offers of the Theaetetus thus both develops Plato’s arguments in a phenomenological direction and situates Plato in the history of philosophy. These two aspects of Heidegger’s reading tend to pull him in different directions – on the one hand, to take the concepts that seem to have an explicitly conceptual content in Plato and reinterpret them in noncognitivist or nonconceptualist ways; on the other hand, to see how Plato’s doctrines lent themselves to the development of conceptualism or cognitivism. In the Theaetetus, Socrates turns to the question of error within the context of a broader inquiry into knowledge as such. A consequence of the privilege given to correspondence in truth theories is, Heidegger argues, that a complementary privilege is accorded to scientific knowledge over other forms of knowing. The seeds of this latter privilege are planted by the Platonic idea that a theoretical grasp of the ideas provides the highest form of unhiddenness of things. But Heidegger argues that, in the Theaetetus, at any rate, it is not scientific knowledge per se that is at stake but knowledge in the broadest sense as that comportment which makes us distinctively human (GA 34: 156–7). To be human is to know – not in the scientific sense (as if we would not be human if we lacked scientific knowledge) but in a broader sense of knowing how to comport oneself in the world. This, Heidegger argues, is the original sense of the Greek concept of knowledge: “Epistamai means: I direct myself to something, come closer to it, occupy myself with it, in a way that is fitting and measures up to it. This placing of myself toward something is at the same time a coming to stand, a standing over the thing and in this way to understand it” (GA 34: 153). Thus the kind of knowledge at stake in the Theaetetus is knowledge in the general sense of knowing how to deal with something in a fitting manner: “epistêmê originally means all this: the commanding knowing-one’s-way-around in something, familiarity in dealing with something” (GA 34: 153). “All possible human activities and all possible domains” (GA 34: 153) are characterized by this sort of familiarity; scientific knowledge is just one such way of knowing our way around (GA 34: 154). In

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fact, Heidegger wants to argue that the most fundamental sort of knowing as familiarity with the world cannot be captured in terms of the propositional/logical structure and conceptual apparatus of strictly scientific modes of knowing. The a-conceptuality of fundamental knowledge has implications for the kind of philosophical enterprise Heidegger is engaged in. Philosophical thinking is, of course, a kind of conceptualization, and thus it consists in bringing a preconceptual understanding of things to a concept (see GA 34: 210). But what kind of a concept can do this adequately? Not, Heidegger suggests, a type-name or type-concept (GA 34: 154–5) – that is, the ability to name some property that all X things have in common. Rather, “the ‘concept’ that is sought for . . . [is] an attacking intervention in the essential possibility of human existence” (GA 34: 157). There is a play here on words formed from the German verb greifen, which means to take hold of or grasp. The word for concept, Begriff’ is formed from this root. Literally, a Begriff is a kind of grasp of a thing. Attacking intervention is angreifender Eingriff. Eingriff means an intervention or engagement in something; literally, it is a “grasp on” something, the idea being that in intervening or becoming engaged, we’re getting into and getting a grasp on the situation. Likewise, angreifen means to attack, but literally it is “to grasp at,” that is, to try to get a hold on something, to bring something into one’s grasp or control. So, a philosophical “concept” for Heidegger is not necessarily an abstract, logical content but an attempt to come to grips with a thing or a situation in order to engage oneself with it. This can happen without exhaustively or determinately capturing the content of a thing. Indeed, the kind of content that will be appropriate will depend on the kind of thing with which we are trying to cope and the kind of involvement we have with it. Thus knowledge, as a familiarity with things, always involves a kind of grasp of them – a “concept” in the broad sense. But what kind of grasp is essential to knowledge? For the Greeks, and subsequently for the entire Western tradition (according to Heidegger), there is a tendency to equate knowledge per se with the kind of grasp we get of things in seeing that such and such is the case (GA 34: 159–60). This privileges the conceptual grasp in the narrow sense – what you see when you’re merely seeing, where what is seen is taken in regard to what can be said about it. This is the kind of content that can be passed around and shared with even a minimal familiarity with the entity. A conceptual grasp provides one with a kind of “disposal over something in its presence and persistence” (GA 34: 161, but not necessarily an ability to engage practically with it. In Plato’s dialogue, Theaetetus’s first effort to define knowledge treats it precisely as a kind of perception. This definition fails, as Socrates gets Theaetetus to admit, if we think of perception as mere sensation, for sensation provides us only with certain sensory qualities but not evidence of the being or truth (unhiddenness) of things (see Theaetetus 186 c9–e12, and

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Heidegger’s discussion at GA 34: 242–5). In other words, perception delivers knowledge (in either the broad or the narrow sense) only if it goes beyond sensation. Theaetetus’s next answer is that knowledge is a kind of doxazein, a kind of thinking or supposing or holding an opinion. Heidegger translates doxazein as “having a view of or about something, which shows itself as such and such” (GA 34: 257). The German term for a view or an opinion is Ansicht, which is ambiguous between the view we have on the matter and the view the matter itself presents. Heidegger exploits this ambiguity to suggest that our familiar knowledge of something involves both our having a particular take on or orientation to it and its offering itself to us as something, holding out to us a certain view of itself. The translation of doxazein as having a view also, once again, expands the consideration beyond the merely cognitive domain of making or entertaining judgments. A judgment is a “view,” but not all views are judgments (“from that point, one has a beautiful view of the valley” does not imply that at that point one must form a judgment about the valley). The doxa or view is capable of truth or falsity but in a broader sense than the correspondence of a judgment with a state of affairs. A true view is not just a correct one but also an undistorted one. The possibility of error, and of hiddenness in general, is, for Heidegger, attributable to the double structure implied in the idea of a view. Because having a view involves both a certain orientation on the viewer’s part, and a certain giving of itself of the thing that is viewed, a distorted view occurs when either the viewer takes up an orientation to the thing that does not allow itself to show itself as it is, or it gives itself in some way that it is not. In general, the double structure involves, on the viewer’s part, an orientation that goes beyond or “strives” beyond any particular object of knowledge. When I intend a chair, for example, my intention goes beyond what is given by any particular sensory experience of a chair (it includes the back side of the chair, as well as other chairs). In the lecture course, Heidegger discusses several other kinds of “movement beyond” involved in unconcealment, which also bear the same kind of double structure, and each of which

figure 4.1

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has its own kind of characteristic hiddenness. They are summarized and condensed in Figure 4.1 (GA 34: 321). The knowing agent stands where the lines converge at the lower left of the diagram. The base line is the line of sensory connection with an entity (aisthesis), the next line up is the first kind of going beyond entities – the going beyond in an intentional orientation to an entity (a “retention and making present,” Heidegger’s interpretation of the idea of mnêmoneuein in the Theaetetus, GA 34: 311). The arrows going between the object as sensed and the object as intended show that it is possible to make a judgment, either that the object as sensed is such and such kind of object, or that the object intended is satisfied by such and such sensed object (see GA 34: 311 ff.). This double structure makes an error possible because it allows, for example, that the sensed object is brought under an idea that is not appropriate for it (GA 34: 316). But there are more ways in which our understanding comportment goes beyond any particular object. In the diagram, these are represented in the third and fourth lines up from the bottom. The third line is a second kind of going beyond that grounds both sensory perception and intentional directedness – an understanding of being. Finally, this is grounded in a striving for being that goes beyond an understanding of being and back to beings. The going beyond involved in the third line points to the fact that we perceive objects in the world on the basis of our having taken in advance an understanding of notions like being and nonbeing, identity and difference – these notions are koina, that is, common to all the sensory modalities, but not sensed through any of them: “so we see that the koina (being – nonbeing, sameness – difference) are precisely what allow us to grasp more concretely this region of inner perceivability. In their total constellation, it is precisely these koina which co-constitute the region of perceivability” (GA 34: 194–5). Thus, for instance, I can see a table because I have laid out in advance a region within which objects like tables are, and are what they are. But what kind of a grasp do I have of such things? Most of us never form good concepts of being and nonbeing, sameness and difference (or even of tables, for that matter). If we do not have them in virtue of possessing a concept of them, then in what sense do we have them? Heidegger argues that we have them as a “striving” for them, represented in the highest line in the diagram. To get clearer about this, let’s reflect on the natural experience of perception. It seems, on the face of it, that perception is anything but a striving. Rather, it is a kind of losing yourself in what is given to you, letting yourself be taken by the things that surround you. Heidegger illustrates this through the example of a person lying in a meadow, perceiving the blue sky and a lark’s song: In our situation, lying in the meadow, we are not at all disposed to occupy ourselves with anything. On the contrary, we lose ourselves in the blue, in what gives itself; we

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follow the song along, we let ourselves be taken, as it were, by these beings, such that they surround us. To be sure, beings surround us, and not nothing, neither anything imaginary. But we do not occupy ourselves with them as beings. (GA 34: 206)

Indeed, Heidegger argues, to regard them as beings is to no longer lose ourselves in the perception of them, and thus to disregard them as we were previously taking them. “In immediate perception,” Heidegger concludes, “beings are perceived, as we say, in a manner which is non-regarding” (GA 34: 206). So my perception of things is anything but a kind of striving, an effort. Natural perception is, then, “non-regarding and non-conceptual perceiving of beings – which means that we occupy ourselves neither with beings as such . . . nor do we grasp their being conceptually. . . . Perception is not conceiving of beings in their being” (GA 34: 210). That is, in my everyday perceptual experience of things, I neither regard them explicitly as beings, nor do I grasp them as instances of a concept. The chair that I sit in is, of course, perceived by me, but it is, in the normal course of sitting, thought of neither as a being nor as a chair. In his 1925 lecture course on logic (GA 21), Heidegger offers his best and most complete description of this kind of natural, everyday experience of objects. In our familiar dealings with the world, we experience things primarily in terms of their Wozu, translated in Being and Time as their “towards-which” or their “in-order-to,” but perhaps it is most naturally rendered as their “for-what” (in the sense of “what one uses it for,” “for what purpose it is employed”). My primary, familiar understanding of things, in other words, is not an understanding of them as satisfying some description or other, but rather simply in affording something else. As I walk through a building, the door is not there as a door as such, but it is there for going in and out, the chairs are there for sitting, the pens and desk and paper are there for writing (GA 21: 144). The structure of this understanding is, Heidegger argues, not “primarily and properly given in a simple propositional assertion,” (GA 21: 144), nor can it be “thematically grasped,” at least not as long as one is living in it (GA 21: 145). This is because I understand how to do things with tables, doors, and all the other things with which I am familiar, only by being “always already further” than what is physically present to me – for instance, in using the door, I am already at that for which it is: I’m already oriented to the room into which I am moving. When I grasp the thing explicitly as the thing it is, I do this by “coming back from” that for which the thing is understood – to the thing itself (GA 21: 147). So, in ordinary comportment, I understand the door not by focusing on the door per se but by already directing myself beyond the door to the room on the other side. In grasping the door explicitly, I have to draw my intention back from the room beyond to the door itself. A grasp of being functions in the same way – I take something as a being precisely by not occupying myself with it as a being, but rather in terms of that for which it exists in my world.

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In the natural, everyday perception, then, we understand what things are, their being, but we do not grasp their being as such. We lack a concept of it (in the narrow sense): When we perceive what is encountered as something that is, we take it in respect of the being that belongs to it. In so doing, however, already and in advance, we understand this being of the being in a non-conceptual way. Precisely because we do not grasp being (most people never obtain a concept of being and yet they live at every moment in the understanding of being) we also cannot say how this being belongs to the being to which we attribute it. . . . But despite this non-conceptual mode of understanding, we can accept, take in, and intend the beings in diverse aspects of their being and sobeing. (GA 34: 208)

Our lack of a concept for what we understand is by no means a failure on our part – indeed, it is only because we pay no regard to being that we are free to encounter beings in a fluid, everyday way. Thus our understanding of the things around is a familiarity with . . . , not a conceptualization of . . . . So there is an important sense in which there is no “striving” involved in much of my experience of things. There is no experience of effort at understanding, nothing that I am trying to grasp. At the same time, however, Heidegger argues that the easy familiarity with beings is rooted in a “groundstance,” a historical taking a stand on being and the world. This taking a stand is not a thing that exists in the world, and not something that we are used to thinking about or dealing with. But having such a stance is a background condition to all our everyday dealings with things. What does it mean to say that we strive for a groundstance that takes a stand on being? Heidegger distinguishes between two kinds of striving – an authentic and an inauthentic version (GA 34: 213). An inauthentic striving is a “mere chasing after what is striven for” (GA 34: 214). It has as its object not our being but some entity – “a thing which as such can be taken into possession” (GA 34: 216). We are inauthentically striving for being when we are “ensnared” within a particular understanding of being, and thus feel compelled to chase after certain things that are presented as important or unimportant within that understanding of being. The authentic striving does not try to take possession of a thing but to own up to it as “the measure and law for the striver’s comportment to beings” (GA 34: 216). I take a stand on the world, decide to be such and such a person, and strive after this way of being. I can never accomplish it, but by projecting it as that on the basis of which I will understand myself, it gives me a basis for my experience of beings. So the way in which we “have” an excess that then determines how we experience particular things is in a striving to be something, to take up a particular stance on the being of the world. This projecting toward something, which is never present or possessed, lays out a unified field (GA 34: 223–4) within which I can have a bodily perception of things because it gives

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a determinate view on things. It gives me a basis for reckoning with or coping with things (see GA 34: 224–5). But we should not think that this is a subjective projection, an act of will by which we impose intelligibility on the world. The things that we encounter themselves “demand a comportment which takes them in as such” (GA 34: 229; see also GA 34:235–7). So the most fundamental basis for our making sense of the world is nothing natural, nothing fixed or necessary, but in it we are attuned by the natural world around us. This fact is represented in the diagram by the way the arrow curves back around to the beings themselves. We are in the condition, then, of always striving to establish a particular understanding of ourselves and the world by using the entities we encounter in the world – by projecting ourselves into actions and possibilities, consequently comporting ourselves in particular ways, and thereby making sense of the objects and situations we encounter. This way of projecting ourselves (striving) will allow certain things and situations to make their appearance, but it will also conceal other things and situations that are incompatible with or irrelevant to our understanding. If one focuses on error as the opposite of truth, Heidegger believes, it makes one lose sight of this more fundamental interplay between revealing and concealing in our projective action in the world. Likewise, if one’s orientation to the world is understood as mediated by linguistic or conceptual ideas, then failure to orient oneself correctly is naturally understood in terms of the application of an incorrect predicate to the subject involved. Plato’s interpretation of the look or view of a thing in terms of logos, Heidegger argues, “is important in so far as it [the ‘logoscharacter of doxa’] alone is retained in the later development of the doxa concept, so that the primordial elements of the doxa disappear behind this characteristic, and the doxa, as ‘opinion,’ is linked to assertion and the genuine phenomenon disappears” (GA 34: 284). But Plato himself, Heidegger argues, points us in the direction of the phenomena of hiddenness and unhiddenness. Thinking beyond Plato, then, Heidegger argues that we need to think through the way that unhiddenness and unconcealment in general occur. This, in fact, is the central project of most of Heidegger’s later work.

part ii LANGUAGE

5 Social Constraints on Conversational Content Heidegger on Rede and Gerede

1.

INTRODUCTION

What role does one’s community play in determining one’s meaning – in fixing the content of what is available to individual members of that community to do or to say? Heidegger, for one, has argued that our activities are heavily constrained by social factors. We always act within a public realm, which is already organized and interpreted in a determinate way. As a consequence, Heidegger explains, we are “constantly delivered over to this interpretedness, which controls and distributes the possibilities” available to us for action (GA 2: H. 167). Indeed, Heidegger argues that our being “delivered over” to the public interpretation of things is an inescapable feature of human existence. What is true of action in general is also true for our use of language. Heidegger claims that in language itself there is hidden an “understanding of the disclosed world” (GA 2: H. 168). So not just our possibilities for practical engagement with the things and people around us but even the possible range of what we can say is subject in some way to others. One consequence of social constraints on language, Heidegger believes, is a tendency on the part of speakers to fall into a superficial imitation of the kinds of things that others in their linguistic community say. He calls such speech Gerede, which is generally translated as “idle talk.” Gerede is the everyday mode of Rede, which is generally translated as “discourse.” For reasons to be explained later, I will translate Rede as “conversation,” and Gerede as “idle conversation.” Heidegger tells us that in idle conversation, This paper was first presented at the inaugural meeting of the International Society for Phenomenological Studies, held in Asilomar, California, July 19–23, 1999. I’m grateful to all the participants in that meeting for their constructive help. My thinking on these matters has been aided considerably by conversations with Bert Dreyfus, Taylor Carman, George Handley, and James Siebach. I’d also like to thank Cynthia Munk for her considerable assistance in preparing this manuscript for publication.

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one understands things “only approximately and superficially”: “one does not so much understand those entities about which one converses [das beredete Seiende], but rather one listens only to what is said in the conversation as such [das Geredete als solches]” (GA 2: H. 168). Or, as he puts it elsewhere, this kind of idle conversation “releases one from the task of true understanding” (GA 2: H. 169). Because Heidegger believes that idle conversation is a pervasive phenomenon, he is often taken to hold that language itself is essentially and necessarily limited to public norms of understanding and interpretation. Because our language is constrained by social factors, the argument goes, we are forced to express things that are either banal or untrue whenever we use language. For example, Hubert Dreyfus attributes to Heidegger the view that “language by its very structure leads Dasein away from a primordial relation to being and to its own being.”1 Taylor Carman also argues that, because the public form of discourse is necessarily banalized, and because public language “provides the only vocabulary in which interpretation can in fact proceed,” the inevitable result of language use is a fallen form of understanding: “There is no alternative to expressing and communicating one’s understanding in the given idiom of one’s social and cultural milieu. To make sense of oneself at all is to make sense of oneself on the basis of the banal, indeed flattened out and leveled off, language of das Man.”2 In this paper, I explore Heidegger’s view about the role of a community in determining or constraining linguistic meaning. In the course of doing this, I will argue against the view that Dreyfus and Carman, among others, attribute to Heidegger by demonstrating that language is not responsible for the banalizing and leveling of everyday human modes of existence. To the contrary, there are for Heidegger social constraints on meaning only because meaningful activities are inextricably caught up in a social world. But this fact in and of itself does not entail that any public use of language will be driven to banalization. Instead, the leveling and banalization that occurs is a result of the fact that all our practices are implicated in a network of social activities and concerns – activities that no individual can master, and concerns about which no individual can get clear. Nevertheless, once idle conversation is properly understood, we will see that Heidegger is not committed to the view that conversational content is necessarily subject to public norms. Although the interpenetration of language and practices means that it is possible to use language to talk about things we do not genuinely understand, it does not mean that we have to do so. 1

2

Hubert L. Dreyfus, Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger’s Being and Time, Division I. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991, p. 229. Taylor Carman, “Must We Be Inauthentic?” in Heidegger, Authenticity, and Modernity (Mark A. Wrathall & Jeff Malpas, Eds.). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000, p. 21.

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In Chapter 2, I argued that philosophy stands to benefit from the ability to read past the boundaries of “analytic” or “Continental” philosophy. In the spirit of that argument, I will begin by comparing Heidegger’s analysis of the social constraints on meaning with arguments made for social externalism in analytic philosophy. Philosophers like Putnam, Burge, and Dummett have worked out a detailed explanation of how the content of our thoughts, beliefs, and words is determined at least in part by things external to us, including the social context in which words come to have the meaning that they have.3 An understanding of these arguments provides a helpful background for examining Heidegger’s view. The social externalists tell us that the meaning of a particular utterance is determined by the language in which it is uttered. So we can make a meaningful utterance in the sense of saying something that can be understood by a competent speaker of the language without ourselves knowing much about the thing of which we speak or without knowing what our words are taken to mean. This consequence of the externalist view – that is, that the speakers of a language often lack a genuine understanding of the things they are saying – might, on the face of it, seem like a promising basis for justifying Heidegger’s claim that Gerede, idle conversation, is a pervasive phenomenon. I shall ultimately argue, however, that this is not how Heidegger understands idle conversation. The analytic discussion of social externalism is nevertheless illuminating, if only to show how Heidegger’s account of idle conversation should not be construed. In fact, I believe the comparison does more than that. It also helps us see how limited the consequences of Gerede are for understanding the essential features of linguistic communication in general.

2.

SETTING THE STAGE: SOCIAL EXTERNALISM

One traditional view of the influence of a linguistic community on an individual’s meaning denies that there is any essential influence at all – that is, it insists that what those around me mean by their words or imagine my words to mean has no bearing on the meaning of what I say. What I mean when I speak is entirely dependent on what I intend to say, and what I intend to say is determined by what I believe – not by what those around me believe. In other words, what I can express is restricted to what, on the basis of my personal history, I could intend to mean. What others believe cannot figure in understanding what I intend to say (although I will, of course, often find it useful to speak in the way that I believe others would speak). My words are 3

I will not consider here the other version of externalism, based on the role external objects play in fixing the content of our propositional states. While this externalism is in fact amenable to Heidegger’s view of things, it is not relevant to the topic under consideration here – namely, whether it is the social character of language that leads to idle conversation and other inauthentic modes of inhabiting the world.

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thus to be understood without any necessary reference to the linguistic community to which I belong. Externalists, in contrast, take the view that, to quote Putnam’s now-famous phrase, “‘meanings’ just ain’t in the head.”4 Putnam’s pioneering argument for this proceeds by trying to demonstrate, through a variety of hypothetical examples, that two traditional internalist theses about meaning are incompatible. These theses are: 1. “That knowing the meaning of a term is just a matter of being in a certain psychological state;” and 2. “That the meaning of a term (in the sense of ‘intension’) determines its extension.”5 From these two theses, it would seem to follow that the psychological state associated with knowing the meaning of a term determines the extension of that term. But, according to Putnam, there are cases in which, given differing conditions external to the psychological state of the speaker, the same psychological state will determine different extensions. If that is true, then there must be more to knowing the meaning of a term than being in a given psychological state. One set of examples to which Putnam alludes in demonstrating that “inner” psychological states are not sufficient to determine extension are cases arising from what he calls the “social division of linguistic labor.” There are many instances in which it is useful for us to acquire a word for something without also acquiring an expertise in recognizing if something genuinely belongs to the extension of the word. We leave this work to others, thus dividing the “linguistic labor”: The features that are generally thought to be present in connection with a general name – necessary and sufficient conditions for membership in the extension, ways of recognizing if something is in the extension (“criteria”), etc. – are all present in the linguistic community considered as a collective body; but that collective body divides the “labor” of knowing and employing these various parts of the “meaning.”6

Putnam cites such examples as a given individual’s confusion over the difference between beeches and elms, or between aluminum and molybdenum, or an inability to determine the exact extension of “gold.” Putnam claims that, for any English speaker, the extension of such terms will be the same, regardless of how rich or impoverished that speaker’s understanding of the extension of the term might be. Of course, the poorer my concept of 4

5

Hilary Putnam, “The Meaning of ‘Meaning,’” in The Twin Earth Chronicles: Twenty Years of Reflection on Hilary Putnam’s “The Meaning of ‘Meaning’” (Andrew Pessin & Sanford Goldberg, Eds.). Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1996, pp. 3–59, quotation on 13. Ibid., 6. 6 Ibid., 13.

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an elm is, the more likely I am to make mistaken claims and hold mistaken beliefs about the elm. But because the extension of the term is determined by other, more competent speakers of English than I, it is possible for me to make illuminating, useful, and even true claims about elms without knowing much at all about them. In a series of articles,7 Burge has argued along similar lines that the content of our intentional states is at least partly determined by the language and concepts of the people with whom we interact – language and concepts of which we often have, at best, an incomplete understanding. Thus, according to Burge, we can think things and say things without necessarily knowing what we think and mean. Like Putnam, Burge begins with the supposition that meaning determines extension. Consequently, if two terms have different extensions, they must also express different meanings. The problem is that, for a variety of reasons, any given individual is often unable to fix the extension of a term. Even if individuals are capable of articulating a term’s meaning, thereby explicating the basis on which things are included in or excluded from its extension, they often lack the present ability to do so. For instance, we often have a precognitive familiarity with examples of a certain kind of thing without having conceptualized on what basis the examples count as the kind of thing that we take them to be. Perhaps, despite all our experience with insects and arachnids, we have never really thought about what makes us class ants with bees but not with spiders. Or it may be that we lack the sort of direct experience with the things in question that would allow us to clarify our conception of what it takes to count as such a thing – perhaps we think of mammals as furry, land-dwelling creatures because we have never come across whales. Or it could be that we have developed only the discriminatory capacities and abilities made relevant by our current normal environment but lack the ability to discriminate between things that belong and do not belong in the extension in nonnormal environments. Imagine the difficulty for someone raised in the United States of categorizing all the creatures one encounters in Australia. In all such cases, Burge argues, our ability to determine the extension of our words and concepts is inferior to that of the people we recognize as experts concerning those concepts. This might lead us to conclude that our terms mean something different in our mouths than they do in the mouths of the experts, since we would assign a different extension to those terms. But, for the social externalist, such a conclusion is not justified. To the contrary, Burge contends, we hold ourselves responsible 7

See Tyler Burge, “Wherein Is Language Social?” in Reflections on Chomsky (A. George, Ed.). New York: Blackwell, 1989, pp. 175–91; “Individualism and the Mental,” in Midwest Studies in Philosophy, vol. 4: Studies in Metaphysics (Peter French, Theodore Uehling Jr., & Howard Wettstein, Eds.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1979, pp. 73–121; “Individualism and Psychology,” Philosophical Review 125 (1986): 3–45.

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to using words as they are understood in our community. When we lack the ability to determine the extension of certain terms and concepts on our own, we defer to others who possess the ability. There are thus many instances in which we depend on others to determine our content for us. Our recognition of this dependence, Burge points out, is readily manifest in our willingness to stand corrected by others in the meaning of our words. Burge would claim that this is not a matter of having others foist their meanings on us. Rather, we are willing to stand corrected because we recognize that we speak the same language as the experts do, and they understand portions of our common language better than we do. Or we recognize that, in many instances, we rely on the experts for our access to the examples on which our understanding of our words and concepts is based. There is thus good reason for accepting correction from them in the explication of our concepts and words: Our explicational abilities, and indeed all our cognitive mastery, regarding the referents of such words and concepts do not necessarily fix the referents. Nor therefore . . . do they necessarily fix the translational meanings or concepts associated with the words. . . . Others are often in a better position to arrive at a correct articulation of our word or concept, because they are in a better position to determine relevant empirical features of the referents . . . . Since the referents play a necessary role in individuating the person’s concept or translational meaning, individuation of an individual’s concepts or translational meanings may depend on the activity of others on whom the individual is dependent for acquisition of and access to the referents. If the others by acting differently had put one in touch with different referents, compatibly with one’s minimum explicational abilities, one would have had different concepts or translational meanings.8

It follows that we sometimes intend to be understood in a way that we do not ourselves understand. The plausibility of these social externalist arguments hinges entirely on the extent to which the examples they use convince us that a proper understanding of the speaker’s meaning requires a necessary reference to others in her linguistic community. To appraise the social externalist argument better, therefore, it is worthwhile to examine the examples more closely. The examples as Putnam and Burge typically present them fail to distinguish carefully between those speakers who know the subject matter well but who do not fully understand what others refer to with their terms, and those who know neither. For instance, in Burge’s example of a man with arthritis, the man in question knows the following kinds of things about his arthritis: he thinks (correctly) that he has had arthritis for years, that his arthritis in his wrists and fingers is more painful than his arthritis in his ankles, that it is better to have arthritis than cancer of the liver, that stiffening joints is a symptom of arthritis, that 8

Burge, “Wherein Is Language Social?” pp. 186–7.

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certain sorts of aches are characteristic of arthritis, that there are various kinds of arthritis, and so forth.9

The man does not know that “informed” members of his speech community use the term “arthritis” to refer to an inflammation of a joint. Presumably, the man also does not know (although Burge is not explicit on this point) that his pain is caused by an inflammation of the joints. But this distinction – between not knowing some fact about the object in question and not knowing how others refer to that fact – is a crucial distinction to draw if we are correctly to understand what the speaker means to say when, to take Burge’s hypothetical example, he says things like “I’ve developed arthritis in my thigh.” To help see the importance of drawing this distinction, I want to set out a couple of my own examples – examples that I have tailored to highlight what are, for me, the important features of these kinds of situations. First example. Until I built my own house, I thought that a gable was a kind of peaked roof, and consequently I believed that the phrase “gable roof’ was redundant. It was only while constructing the gables on my house that I discovered that a gable is not actually a roof, but rather the triangular exterior wall section bounded by the roof rafters. A gable roof is, in fact, a roof that ends in a gable. Of course, this was a difficult mistake to correct, since what I thought was a gable was in almost all instances adjoined by a gable, meaning that my improper use was as difficult for others to detect as their proper use was for me. As a result, even though I did not know what the term “gable” actually meant, many (if not most) of the utterances in which I used the term were understood by others in a way that was appropriate under the circumstances, if not actually true in a literal sense. So, while I had no particular misconceptions about the matters being talked about – I did not, for instance, ever think a wall was a roof – I did lack a proper understanding of the way the term “gable” is typically used. Second example. When ordering a new computer last week, I told the computer-purchasing agent at the university that I wanted an extra 128 megabytes of RAM for the computer. Although I know that “RAM” is an acronym for “random access memory,” and I have actually installed RAM in my laptop before, I do not really understand what it is or how it works. I do, however, have a vague sense that, in general, a computer with more RAM works better than a computer with less RAM, and this was enough to allow me to say sensible things to the computer-purchasing agent about it. Nevertheless, my use of the term was limited in important ways. For instance, I would be unable on my own to determine the extension of my term “RAM” with any degree of precision. Moreover, there is a comparatively small set of inferences I could draw from any particular claim about RAM – much smaller, for instance, than a computer expert could draw. 9

Burge, “Individualism and the Mental,” p. 77.

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Now, the issue is, what do such examples teach us about social constraints on linguistic meaning? Let me briefly review. These two different examples are intended to illustrate two different senses in which information available to a speaker underdetermines the meaning of the speaker’s utterance (or at least the meaning it has for an informed audience). In the first example, the speaker lacks information about how other speakers of the language determine the extension of a term. We assume, however, that the speaker is competent to determine the extension of the term as he himself uses it. In the second example, the speaker lacks even this much – he is unable on his own to determine the extension of the term either as he uses it or as others use it. In addition, or perhaps as a consequence, the speaker is also very constrained in his understanding of the inferential relations his utterance would bear to other possible utterances.10 To the extent that Putnam and Burge rely on cases like my “gable” example, it is not clear that they are entitled to draw any general conclusions about social constraints on meaning. This is because, given my ignorance of the way others use the term “gable,” we can plausibly take me to refer to a gable when I say “gable” only if we already have some compelling reason to hold me accountable to the way that others are using their words. Burge’s point that I depend on others for my access to the referents of the term does not hold in this case. And, as Davidson has pointed out, without a compelling reason, it would not be good policy to hold me to a meaning of which I am not aware.11 My readiness to alter my use of “gable” to accord with community norms is taken by Burge as evidence that we hold ourselves responsible to the public language. Davidson, by contrast, sees me as employing a pragmatic flexibility in altering my mode of speech to accommodate my listeners. That is, on Davidson’s account, my reason for shifting my usage is simply to avoid confusion on the part of my hearers (deeming it easier to do so than to preface my remarks about gable roofs with an explanation to the effect that I idiosyncratically refer to them as “gables”). But this willingness to shift one’s use of terms does not change the fact that knowing how the speaker intends for her words to be understood is the most important factor in understanding a speaker. Of course, a speaker cannot reasonably intend for her words to be understood in a way that she knows the hearers cannot understand. A wise speaker will often adopt, as a pragmatic strategy, the use of words that she believes is common in the linguistic community. But there is nothing 10

11

One could imagine further examples that would distinguish between the ability to determine the extension of a term and the mastery of the inferential relations that accrue to sentences employing that term. But there is a limit to how far these two features of linguistic mastery can be isolated; at some point, if a speaker lacks knowledge of one type, we are inclined to say that he also lacks knowledge of the other. Many of the comments that follow are inspired by Davidson’s discussion of Burge’s social externalism in “Knowing One’s Own Mind,” Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association (1987): 441–58, and “Epistemology Externalized,” Dialectica 45 (1991): 191–202.

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intrinsic to successful language use that requires her to do so. And it would have been manifestly wrong, before I got clear about how other speakers use the term, to say of me: “Wrathall thinks that gable there is covered with asphalt shingles, but anyone can see it is made of brick.” The right thing to say would be: “Wrathall says the gable is covered with asphalt shingles, but he thinks a gable is a gable roof.” But what of cases like my “RAM” example? In such cases, I speak with the intention of taking advantage of the division of linguistic labor. And if one were to set out to interpret radically the things I say about RAM, it is not clear how much content one could attribute to me given that I know so little about the subject matter. In such cases, what is said can only have a determinate content by appealing to someone else’s knowledge of the subject matter. The right way to interpret me – that is, the way I want to be interpreted – is to see me as using “RAM” in the way computer experts do. I would in fact be misunderstood if the interpretation restricted itself to my own pallid understanding of computers. It would be manifestly wrong, for instance, for the purchasing agent to conclude: “Wrathall says he wants more RAM, but he’ll settle for anything that improves the performance of the computer.” Now the question is, should we understand Heidegger’s “idle conversation” in terms of my “RAM” example – that is, in terms of those instances where we surrender to others our authority over the meaning of what we say? Before directly comparing Heidegger’s account of idle conversation to Putnam’s account of the social division of linguistic labor, or Burge’s argument for our dependence on others in determining the content of our words, let me make a couple of observations. First, as Putnam notes, it is not a necessary feature of language that meaning be determined by experts: “some words do not exhibit any division of linguistic labor.”12 Putnam’s example is “chair”; many others are easily imaginable. The point is that for many things in our world, everyone (or almost everyone) is competent not just in the use of the word but in recognizing the thing. The linguistic division of labor is driven by the demands of efficiency, not by the very structure of language itself. Putnam does not give us any reason to think that there could not be a language in which speakers spoke only about those things of which they had a sufficient understanding. Similarly, Burge argues that the social character of language is a psychological rather than conceptual necessity, which is to say that there is nothing in Burge’s account that requires that meaning be socially determined. One way to see this is to note that the very fact that some in a linguistic community rely on others to fix the extension of their terms shows that not everyone can fail to know what they are talking about. There are necessarily some people in the community – the experts – who do not rely on others to 12

Putnam, “Meaning of ‘Meaning,”’ p. 14.

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fix the extension.13 Language can function, and often does function, therefore, without any essential reference to the way in which the community at large understands a term. Thus considerations of the sort that Putnam and Burge advance will not support the strong conclusion about the structural necessity of Gerede that people like Dreyfus and Carman see in Heidegger. At best, they would support an empirical or psychological claim to the effect that idle conversation is in fact pervasive. Second, even in examples like the “RAM” case, nothing about Putnam’s or Burge’s arguments supports the drive toward leveling and banalization that Heidegger finds in Gerede. As already noted, the idea that some people do not fully understand what they’re talking about only makes sense, for both Putnam and Burge, on the assumption that others do. So in some cases it may be true that many or even most of the speakers of a language do not know what they mean. But they can get away with it precisely because some (the experts) do know. For both Putnam and Burge, then, public language is not leveled down to an average understanding – to the contrary, it preserves a genuine understanding because its content is determined by what the experts think, not by what the public at large can think. With these notes in the background, we can begin to see why the Putnam/ Burge account of the social division of linguistic labor is not what Heidegger has in mind with his notion of idle conversation. What is crucial to Heidegger’s account is not the speaker’s ability or inability to determine the extension of her terms, or even to see what is entailed by her utterances. Rather, Heidegger sees both these kinds of failings on the speaker’s part as derived from her lack of experience with the objects, and the situations in which the objects are typically found. That lack of experience, and the corresponding lack of sensibility that such experience fosters, is the real source of idle conversation. To illustrate this point, I offer a third example of a kind of disparity between what a speaker can express and what a speaker understands about the subject of her expression. This will orient us to the way Heidegger’s concern differs from the kind of linguistic incompetence on which Putnam and Burge focus. The U.K. Department of the Environment, Transport, and Regions issues the following instructions on using a roundabout: On approaching a roundabout take notice and act on all the information available to you, including traffic signs, traffic lights and lane markings which direct you into the correct lane. You should * *

13

decide as early as possible which exit you need to take give an appropriate signal. Time your signals so as not to confuse other road users

Davidson makes this point in “The Social Aspect of Language,” in The Philosophy of Michael Dummett (Brian McGuinness & Gianluigi Oliveri, Eds.). Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1994, p. 5.

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get into the correct lane adjust your speed and position to fit in with traffic conditions be aware of the speed and position of all the traffic around you.

When reaching the roundabout you should *

*

*

*

give priority to traffic approaching from your right, unless directed otherwise by signs, road markings or traffic lights check whether road markings allow you to enter the roundabout without giving way. If so, proceed, but still look to the right before joining watch out for vehicles already on the roundabout; be aware they may not be signalling correctly or at all look forward before moving off to make sure traffic in front has moved off.14

I consider myself a competent driver, and I am conversant both in the use of all the terms employed in these rules of the Highway Code and in the operation of an automobile. Nevertheless, my brief experience with driving in Britain has convinced me that there is an important sense in which I do not really understand what I am being told to do when directed, for instance, to “adjust your speed and position to fit in with traffic conditions,” or to “get into the correct lane,” or to “be aware of the speed and position of the traffic around you.” In saying that I do not really understand these things, I do not mean either that I would not use the terms in the same way that the Highway Code does, or that I do not understand what those directions are directing me to do. Instead, I mean that, in virtue of my lack of experience in navigating roundabouts in Britain, those directions give me, at best, an approximate and superficial sense for what I would need to do if I found myself in that situation. If I were now, on the basis of having read those guidelines, to instruct a colleague on driving in preparation for her upcoming trip to London, I would be engaging in idle conversation because I would, in an important respect, lack understanding about that of which I spoke. Unlike the previous examples, however, I am not ignorant of either how other speakers use their words, or how to go about determining the extension of my own words. What precisely it is that I lack needs further elaboration – a project to which I will return. But whatever it is, I believe it is best understood on the basis of Heidegger’s account of Gerede. Before expanding further on this example, therefore, I turn to a more exegetical discussion of Heidegger’s account of idle conversation.

3.

LANGUAGE, CONVERSATION, AND IDLE CONVERSATION

To understand Heidegger’s account of idle conversation, Gerede, we need to start with his account of conversation, or Rede. Let me begin with a review of 14

U.K. Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions, Driving Standards Agency, The Highway Code: For Pedestrians, Cyclists, Motorcyclists and Drivers, New expanded ed. London, 1999, General rules 160 and 161.

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the role played by conversation in Heidegger’s overall account of being-inthe-world. Conversation is one of the constitutive moments of the disclosedness of the world. A world is disclosed when we have a background readiness to act in ways that make sense, that is, which give unity and coherence to our activities in the world. In saying that disclosing is a background readiness, I am trying to emphasize that it is not any particular active engagement with the people and things around us. Heidegger calls the way in which particular activities open up a relation to things in the world “discovering” to distinguish it from the background readiness that is disclosure. When I say that disclosing is a kind of background readiness, I mean to distinguish it from a mere capacity or ability to do something. To illustrate this distinction, imagine someone fluent in both German and English but who has never had any exposure to Finnish. We might say of this person that she has a (mere) capacity to understand Finnish but is able – has an ability – to understand German and English. In addition, when in the United States, she will ordinarily be ready to hear English but not German. Indeed, if someone began speaking German to her, it might actually take a moment before she understood what was being said. My claim is, in short, that Heidegger’s concept of disclosure is meant to demonstrate how our active response to things and people in the world around us is made possible by a readiness for the things that ordinarily show up in the world. Heidegger believes that if we want to understand the way humans exist in a world, we first need to recognize the importance of this kind of readiness in priming us for the particular activities in which one typically engages in that world. One of the key features in constituting any particular form of readiness for the world is mood, the ontic mode of disposedness. Disposedness makes us ready for things by determining in advance how they will matter to us: Being-in as such has been determined existentially beforehand in such a manner that what it encounters within-the-world can “matter” to it in this way. The fact that this sort of thing can “matter” to it is grounded in one’s disposedness. . . . Existentially, disposedness implies a disclosive submission to the world, out of which we can encounter something that matters to us. (GA 2: H. 137–8)

For example, as Heidegger notes, one consequence of being in a mood of fear is that things in the world tend to matter to us insofar as they are threatening or offer safety. We experience them, in other words, as having their significance illuminated by our fear. Another key feature in the constitution of readiness is our understanding – our knowing how to do things, knowing what is appropriate, necessary, what makes sense, and so on. A particular kind of readiness has the “shape” it does in virtue of the ontic appropriation of the understanding in an interpretation. As I understand it, in interpretation, I appropriate an overall understanding of the world by deciding which things are appropriate or

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necessary for me, make sense for me. Once I have such an interpretation of the world in reference to my own particular involvements, goals, identity, and so on, I am ready to undertake particular actions in response to the situation that confronts me. For instance, I have a background understanding of a variety of pieces of equipment and equipmental contexts – things like chalkboards and classrooms, airplanes and airports, jigsaws and wood shops. I also have a background understanding of a variety of human activities and identities – writing on a board and being a teacher, reading what is written on a board and being a student, erasing what is on the board and being a janitor, and so on. When I act in the world on the basis of my understanding of objects, activities, contexts, and identities, my action both decides for me how all those worldly things will line up with one another, and expresses an understanding of those things and activities and contexts and identities by actualizing the way in which they stand in a particular organized field of significance. Thus, when I draw a chart on a chalkboard in a classroom, the action is not just a communicative action; it is also an action in which I interpret myself and the world around me in a teacherly way. In this way, the action looks beyond the communicative intention toward a “future” realization of an identity through which I interpret the world around me. This action is opened up for me, in other words, by a background understanding of the kind of things teachers do in general and in the abstract, together with my interpretation of the world around me in terms of my being a teacher in this particular situation. Finally, any particular readiness is correlated with the particular activities in which we are absorbed, such absorption being the ontic mode of falling. When I am in the classroom teaching a class, for instance, I am at that moment ready for classroom events. I would not be ready for, say, one of the people seated in the class to come spontaneously to the board while I’m talking and erase what I have written. But the same act would not strike me as at all strange if I were absorbed in a different sort of activity, such as preparing the classroom for my next lecture. In disclosedness, then, a world is opened up for us in the sense that we have a coherent way of being ready to respond to whatever we encounter as we go about our business. The role of conversation, Heidegger explains, is the articulation of this readiness: “The complete disclosedness of the there – a disclosedness which is constituted through understanding, disposedness, and falling – is articulated through conversation” (GA 2: H. 349). Although one might hear a phrase like “articulated through conversation” as denoting an explicit, verbal explication of something, this is not primarily what Heidegger has in mind. Indeed, my reason for preferring “conversation” to “discourse” as a translation for Rede is that the English term and its cognates still bear something of the original connotation of living with, having intercourse with, or being skillfully engaged with a person or thing. The Latin root, versor, has the sense of dwelling, living, or remaining in a place. In the

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participle, it has the sense of busying oneself with or being engaged in something. It is this kind of skillful capacity for dealings that Heidegger was drawing on when he described Rede in terms of “conversance in the sense of a circumspection which knows its way around” (GA 33: 126/107). The notion of a verbal conversation is, in its original English use, just one species of the broader sense of living with or being involved together with others in some activity. That “conversation” has come to be limited to verbal interaction is understandable, I suppose, given that one of the primary forms of human involvement with others is that of linguistic discourse. The earlier, broader sense is still present in English terms like “conversance” – being conversant with, that is, knowing how to deal with something or someone – but even a “conversation” was once understandable in nonlinguistic terms, as the King James Translation of the Bible readily attests. I cite a single example: St. Peter advised the Christian wives of unbelieving husbands to set an example of faith for their husbands without preaching to them, so that their husbands “may without the word be won by the conversation of the wives; while they behold your chaste conversation.”15 To say that the Christian wives “converse” with their husbands without the word means that, by their actions, they exhibit or make something manifest through their comportment in such a way that their husbands can recognize and understand it – namely, their Christian understanding of the world. This way of thinking about conversation is fully compatible with Heidegger’s account of Rede as articulation. Heidegger actually uses two different words for talking about articulation – the verbs gliedern and artikulieren, together with their various adjectival and nominal forms. Gliedern has slightly more of the sense of the English verb “to parse” – to separate into parts in such a way that the organization or connection between the parts is manifest. Artikulieren, on the other hand, places the emphasis more on highlighting the separated parts, distinguishing them. “Artikulation says,” according to Heidegger, “making distinct, lifting out, shaping, cutting out” (GA 58: 115). So in explaining Rede, Heidegger writes: “conversation is existentially equiprimordial with disposedness and understanding. The intelligibility of something has always been parsed [gegliedert], even before there is any appropriative interpretation of it. Conversation is the making distinct [Artikulation] of intelligibility. Therefore it underlies both interpretation and assertion. That which can be distinguished in interpretation, and thus even more primordially in conversation, is what we have called ‘meaning.’” (GA 2: H. 161). Conversation, verbal or otherwise, consists then in making particular meanings distinct, in parsing a meaningful situation into its component meanings. To say that conversation is “existentially equiprimordial” with our understanding and disposedness means that I never encounter something that is 15

1 Peter 3: 1–2, KJV.

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not meaningful, and as I experience and act in the world, my experiences and actions are guided and directed by the meanings I encounter. This is true even when I am not engaging in specifically linguistic activities. When Heidegger writes of articulation in general, for instance, he notes that our comportments, lived experiences taken in the broadest sense, are through and through expressed [ausgedrückte] experiences; even if they are not uttered in words, they are nonetheless expressed in a definite articulation by an understanding that I have of them as I simply live in them without regarding them thematically.16

That is to say, in all our comportments and experiences – in simply living and doing things – we act in accordance with the structure of significance opened up by a world. Thus all our actions and experiences “express” the way people and things have been coordinated into meaningful forms of interaction. For instance, in “conversing” with a workshop – in being engaged with the workshop in such a way that one’s very mannerisms and habits are shaped by the activities in which one is engaged – two things happen. First, the objects in the workshop become manifest in terms of their use within the workshop. This is an example of the kind of thing Heidegger is talking about when he says that “conversation is conversation about something, such that the about which becomes manifest in the conversation. This becoming manifest . . . for all that does not need to become known expressly and thematically” (GA 2: 361). Second, as we become conversant in the workshop, thereby modifying in concrete terms our readiness for the world (which is disclosive comportment), that world becomes available for an interpretive appropriation, and thereby for assertion: That which gets parsed as such in conversing distinguishing, we call the “totality-ofsignifications” [Bedeutungsganze]. This can be dissolved or broken up into significations. Significations, as what has been made distinct from that which can be made distinct, always carry meaning [sind . . . sinnhaft] . . . . The intelligibility of Being-in-theworld – an intelligibility which goes with disposedness – expresses itself as conversation. The totality-of-significations of intelligibility is put into words. To significations, words accrue. (GA 2: H. 161)

It is here that we can see most clearly that the Putnam/Burge mode of arguing for the necessarily social character of meaning is inapplicable to Heidegger – at least as a constitutive structure of being-in-the-world. Meaning is prior to language, for Heidegger, in the sense that what others say about us, and indeed what we say about ourselves, depends on our prior meaningful engagement with the world. It thus cannot be the case that the 16

GA 20: 65. It is important to note here that for Heidegger, ausdrücklichkeit is not explicitness in the sense of having a thematic or conscious awareness of a thing. Rather, something is ausdrücklich if it is expressed or made manifest by our activities, and thus capable of being made explicit, even if it is not presently explicit.

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meanings things hold for us, including our expressions, are structurally dependent on a public language. But this is not to deny that social features play an important role in determining the kind of meaning that is available to us. To see this, we turn at last to an analysis of Gerede – idle conversation. Gerede in Heidegger’s account is the everyday mode of conversation. Although a bit of a loose translation, the turn of phrase “idle talk” used in most English translations of Heidegger is actually quite fortuitous in that Gerede differs from Rede precisely in being a particular kind of idleness. This is because the content articulated in Gerede – the meanings that are “parsed” and lifted into salience by it – cannot be put to work. To preserve the structural identity between Rede and Gerede, I translate the latter as the somewhat nonidiomatic “idle conversation” (hoping, of course, that “conversation” retains some echoes of its archaic English use). To understand the idleness of idle conversation, we need to say a word or two about the communicative function of conversation. Heidegger insists that “conversation is . . . essentially communication,” which means simply that it is always characterized by the possibility of being shared with others. But this does not mean that what is communicated is necessarily understood by some particular person in each case. “Communication,” Heidegger explains, “means making it possible to acquire or pick up for oneself that about which the conversation is, that is, making it possible to come into a relationship of coping and being toward it” (GA 20: 362). So conversation is communication – or, perhaps more accurately, communicative – in that it articulates meanings which open up a way of acting in the world. Communications “are to be grasped as possibilities” (GA 24: 298). The possibility is fulfilled in understanding the conversation, where this means responding to the meanings articulated for the one who is conversing: “the understanding of the communication is participation in the revealing” (GA 20: 362). The communicative function of conversation, Heidegger also notes, “can recede, but it is never absent” (GA 20: 364). Thus conversation is, as communicative, something that tends toward or aims toward achieving a participation with others in a common orientation to the world (GA 2: H. 168). When we articulate meanings through our conversant comportment, they “become accessible” to others (GA 2: H. 272). When others understand or become aware of our communication, they join us in “an uncovering being-towards the entities discussed” (GA 2: H. 224). Heidegger is quite clear that this communication need not take a linguistic form, although it often or usually does (see GA 2: H. 272). In The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, Heidegger coins the phrase “existential communication” [existenzielle Mitteilung] to refer to this broad form of communication. When existential communication succeeds, the result is that the parties share a form of comportment toward things in the world. In Being and Time, he described such communication in the following way:

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It is letting someone see with us what we have pointed out by way of giving it a definite character. Letting someone see with us shares with [teilt mit] the other that entity which has been pointed out in its definite character. That which is “shared” is our being towards what has been pointed out – a being in which we see it in common. (GA 2: H. 155)

He thereby differentiates the communication involved in conversation from merely linguistic communication (see GA 24: 421–2). Language may, but need not, be involved in producing a shared being-toward entities as we comport ourselves in the world. I could existentially communicate something simply by setting to work, for instance, preparing food. This might “existentially communicate” to others the fact that it is time to eat, and draw them also into comportments appropriate to the situation that my action discloses. Thus communication should not be understood as primarily linguistic. When a conversation succeeds, when the parties pick up what is being communicated to each other, they are made ready for an engagement with people and things in the world by sharing with each other a mode of understanding comportment toward the common things we encounter in the world, as well as a disposedness or a sense for the way things matter.17 In the process, conversation articulates or lifts into salience that about which we converse [das Beredete], and the way in which we understand or relate to that thing [das Geredete]. Das Geredete is manifest because “that with which the conversation is concerned [das Beredete] is always, in conversation, ‘talked to’ in a definite regard and within certain limits” (GA 2: H. 162). In idle conversation, something gets communicated but in such a way that the parties cannot successfully participate in a shared orientation toward things in the world. There are a number of ways in which the participation can break down – a number of ways in which what is communicated cannot be put to work. For instance, as in the RAM example, the communication might fail to make salient that about which we converse. We know how to use the words in forming meaningful sentences, but we do not know how to identify the things in the world referred to in the sentence. Or the communication might even succeed in getting us to share with others certain attitudes about the thing, or a shared sense of what is appropriate to say about the thing. But such sharing is compatible with a failure to communicate a “primordial understanding” – a background familiarity with that thing – of the sort gained by familiarity with das Beredete itself. What individual speakers lack and, consequently, what their community supplies for them in idle conversation is, then, not necessarily an ability to fix determinately the extension of our terms. In fact, in learning das Geredete – what is understood and said about the subject of the conversation – we may 17

The disposedness can be shared because conversation involves a “making manifest” [Bekundung] how things matter (GA 2: H. 162).

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learn precisely how to define it, how to articulate its extension, and what other things are conventionally seen to follow from the kind of claims conventionally made about it. But, at the same time, we lack a sense for the way a conversance with the object primes us to respond to the world by showing us what is relevant in the current situation, given our selfunderstanding and self-interpretation. Without such a sense, we would be practically disoriented, unready to act, uncertain how to continue in our selfinterpretation. And so in its place we orient ourselves to the situation by arrogating the things “one” says and “one” does. In the process, we surrender, at least for the moment, our own interpretation in favor of an anonymous interpretation of what is important and relevant here and now. We can now see why neither the “RAM” nor the “gable” examples are well suited for clarifying exactly what it is that Heidegger targets with the notion “idle conversation.” In both these examples, it is true, the speaker lacks a kind of expertise. But the “gable” example does not demonstrate a lack of conversance with gables – just a terminological confusion. The “RAM” example, on the other hand, is a rather extreme form of lack of conversance with a subject – in fact, too extreme to be a good example. The speaker lacks not only the kind of conversance that articulates his understanding and interpretation but actually knows so little about the situation that he could get almost no practical grip on it at all. The example of my lack of conversance with driving in Britain helps us home in on this type of idle conversation. The driving example illustrates the difference between linguistic understanding and a practical conversance with a matter. It is possible to understand every sentence in the British Highway Code and still be ill prepared for driving in Britain. To be at home on British roads and in British cars, one needs an altered receptivity to the world, a receptivity that will shift the significance of all kinds of features one encounters while driving. To begin with, British cars, being designed to drive on the left-hand side of the road, have controls (such as turn signals and gear shifters) on the opposite side of the steering column from their location in an American car, requiring them to be operated by the opposite hand. Other vehicles are in different places, and moving in different directions, than one typically finds them in the United States; an American driver will thus find herself intuitively looking in just the wrong places in her attempt to “be aware of the speed and position of all the traffic around you.”18 Finally, most Americans lack exposure to roundabouts, and have little sense for gauging distances, or judging when to yield, in such environments. Instructions such as those quoted above may help an American driver think about what she must do when she approaches a roundabout, but they will not 18

In many crosswalks in London, the warning “look right” has been painted on the crosswalk, apparently in response to the tendency of visitors to step into the path of traffic coming from the right, having first instinctively looked left (as one ought when cars drive on the right side of the road).

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help her to intuitively key in on the relevant features of the roundabout. The situation is not meaningfully “parsed” for the American driver in the same way that it is for the British driver. For that, nothing can help but extensive experience in navigating through roundabouts. In idly discussing some thing or state of affairs, then, one thing that cannot be conveyed is the way an actual familiarity with a situation affects our general readiness for the world. If I am correct in this interpretation, then we can see that Heidegger is in fact not committed to the claim that there is something essential about linguistic expression that alienates us from an authentic understanding, or that it necessarily covers over the truth. Rather, language is guilty at most of a sin of omission – of failing to do something for our readiness for the world. In particular, if we converse idly, rather than become conversant with a situation, we settle for a public interpretation of what the situation calls for. Idle conversation thus “closes off” because it gives us a sort of understanding, but only by allowing us to evade the need to learn to respond authentically, in our own way, to the specific situation. This explains why Heidegger sees our social interactions as tending toward a kind of fallenness. We gain through social and, in particular, linguistic interaction a richly articulated ability to isolate and discriminate features of the world of which we have little or no actual experience whatsoever. Idle conversation, by exploiting a ready-made sense for things, offers us the convenience of getting a certain (albeit anonymous) grasp on the circumstances. In fact, if one is already fairly skilled in the area of discussion, what is said might be enough to open up new possibilities for practical involvement in the world. But what is said is not, in and of itself, sufficient to convey what is relevant, given the particularities of the situation, and thus does not convey to the listener the readiness for action that is necessary to disclose a world genuinely. Heidegger uses the example of a scientist hearing of experimental results to illustrate both how idle conversation can be genuinely informative, and how it nevertheless is unable to convey a disclosive readiness. Idle conversation, Heidegger emphasizes, can take the form of “picking up” what is characteristically said of some matter through reading. This idly obtained conversance with a matter can even take place “in such a way that the reader – there are purported to be such readers in the sciences as well – acquires the possibility of dealing with the matters with great skill without ever having seen them.” Although they have a certain kind of expertise, they lack what is crucial to an authentic disclosure: Accordingly, when men who have to deal with a matter do so solely on the basis of idle conversation about it, they bring the various opinions, views, and perceptions together on an equal basis. In other words, they do so on the basis of what they have picked up from reading and hearing. They pass along what they have read and heard about the matter without any sensitivity for the distinction of whether or not that

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opinion or their own is actually relevant to the matter. Their care in discovering does not apply to the matter but to the conversation. (GA 20: 372)

Scientists tend to fall into this kind of idle conversation, Heidegger observes later in an offhand note, whenever “there are no apparatuses and the like” (GA 20: 417). This note makes perfect sense in light of the idea that idle conversation is a kind of failure of conversance with what is being talked about, the point being that as much as we can learn from reading or hearing about experimental results, we are missing something crucial as long as we fail to conduct the experiment ourselves. Heidegger’s critique of the social constraints on language use is committed, then, to no more than the unsurprising view that language cannot give one a full conversance with its subject matter – the kind of conversance necessary for articulating an authentic space of disclosedness. This entails neither that (a) whenever we speak in a public language, we fail to communicate a genuine disclosedness of the world or discovery of that with which we cope, nor that (b) whenever we speak in a way that is amenable to be understood by others, what we are saying is untrue. Not (a), because one who does have a genuine conversance with things can speak and converse with another expert, who will have, in addition to an understanding of das Geredete, a familiarity with das Beredete. By pointing out linguistically the relevant feature of the environment – the one relevant for those who possess a certain kind of expertise – the speaker can use language to trigger an appropriate response in the hearer: “These boards are splitting,” one carpenter says to another, and she instantly begins hammering with a smaller nail. Not (b), because (as Davidson’s criticism of social externalism makes clear) what we mean is not altered by being spoken out loud. If anything, rather than constraining what its speaker can mean, idle conversation limits the ability of its hearer to understand, since it allows her to imagine that she understands everything that she needs to know: “the conversation which is communicated can be understood to a considerable extent, even if the hearer does not bring himself into such a kind of being towards what the discourse is about to have a primordial understanding of it” (GA 2: H 168). Idle conversation, in short, is a mode of engagement with people and things in which a genuine readiness is not cultivated. Heidegger calls the result a kind of “floating” – a failure to be grabbed or disposed in any way by the things we encounter. We “keep ourselves in” the idle conversation, meaning: we have no “original” and “genuine” relationships to entities in the world (GA 2: H. 170).

4.

THE NECESSITY OF BANALIZATION, LEVELING, AND UNTRUTH

If my interpretation of idle conversation is right, one consequence is that Dreyfus and Carman are unjustified in seeing the very structure of language

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as necessitating the banalization and leveling of human existence. How do they reach this unjustified conclusion? It is because, like Putnam and Burge, they see individuals as responsible to public modes of discourse, a responsibility that consists in subjecting the content of one’s own utterances to the domination of others. Or more precisely, they see Heidegger as an antiPutnam – as holding that the meaning of what we say is determined not by the experts but by the lowest common denominator of a linguistic community. It seems to me that this misses the real thrust of Heidegger’s position. Both Carman and Dreyfus make the mistake of thinking that everyday language, to function, must be available to everybody. Dreyfus writes, for instance, that language is “necessarily public and general, that is, meant to be used by anyone, skilled or not, as a tool for communication.”19 Because language requires such generality and universality, they suppose that it cannot possibly capture all the particularities of a situation. This, in turn, allows them to conclude that the moment we employ a public language, we fall into a banalized and leveled understanding of the world. But what justifies the assumption that what is said in language must be available to everyone? Like Putnam, Dreyfus appeals to a division of labor – the meaning of our utterances is reduced to a “generality that tends towards banality” dictated by the need for “the diversity and specialization characteristic of the equipmental whole.”20 The idea seems to be that it is a useful thing to be able to talk about all kinds of equipment – all the equipment that makes up our world – but it is not possible for everyone to acquire a primordial understanding of all that equipment. This much is quite right, and is compatible with the interpretation of Heidegger that I am advancing. But it does not follow from this that our words can only mean what anyone in our linguistic community can understand them to mean. From the fact that we are not conversant with everything we can talk about, it does not follow that we can only intend to say what anyone and everyone is capable of understanding. As Putnam and Burge have shown, the premise of a social division of labor, if anything, tends in the opposite direction. What we should say, then, is that speakers are often misunderstood by some members of the community, not that a speaker can only mean what anyone can understand her to mean. As a matter of fact, language communicates perfectly well in situations where what it communicates is inaccessible to almost everyone – as philosophical prose in general attests, and Heidegger’s work demonstrates it more clearly than most. A good language user aims her use to her actual listeners, not every conceivable member of the linguistic community. Of course, something uttered can always be misconstrued by those incapable of understanding the assertion as it is intended, but this possibility does not 19

20

“Reply to Taylor Carman,” in Heidegger, Authenticity, Modernity (M. A. Wrathall & J. Malpas, Eds.). p. 307. Dreyfus, Being-in-the-World, p. 231.

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change what the speaker means by her words. And so, while there very well may be, from time to time, good reasons for meaning only what we know everyone in the culture can understand, there is nothing inherent in public language that requires this. I return at last to the question with which I started: What role does our community play in determining meaning? Heidegger’s answer has little to do with the role of a public language in determining the meaning of utterances made in that language. Instead, our community affects meaning indirectly by structuring the normal range of activities in which we can engage. We find ourselves already in a world, Heidegger points out. All our activities, in turn, are implicated in a series of interactions with others in the world. Because it is our familiarity with things as articulated in our activities that determines our meaning, it follows that what we can mean is always shaped (but not determined) by the people and things around us. APPENDIX

In response to an earlier version of this chapter, William Bracken has pointed out that one form of idle conversation – perhaps the form Heidegger is most interested in – does not seem to be assimilable to my roundabout example. One of the central types of idle conversation is idle conversation about being and the structures associated with being – the structure of being-in, of the world, of the context of references, for instance. Heidegger insists that we are all “in some way familiar” with such things (see, e.g., GA 2: H. 58). And yet, Heidegger warns that concepts and propositions about such matters are constantly in danger of deterioration into idle conversation: “every originally created phenomenological concept and proposition stands, as a communicated assertion, in the possibility of degenerating. It is passed along in an empty understanding, loses its rootedness, and becomes a free-floating thesis” (GA 2: H. 36). Given our familiarity with that about which phenomenological ontology speaks, it seems like idle conversation should not threaten. Or should it? As I tried to emphasize, there are different sources for the idleness of idle conversation. What all forms share in common is the inability to put to work the meaningful parsing of the world relied on in the communication. As the roundabout example shows, communication can fail (meaning that the articulations relied on by the speaker cannot be put to work by the hearer) as a result of a failure to understand which meanings are being called upon in the assertion. The failure occurs, even though the hearer understands in general and in other contexts the meanings of the terms employed. The source of this failure is the hearer’s lack of familiarity with the world that would parse and make salient the meanings necessary to understand the communication.

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But there can be other reasons for our inability to use the conversation to orient us to meanings in the world. The RAM example is an example of idle talk too: there, the source is both a lack of understanding about the meaning of the terms or concepts employed and a lack of familiarity with the things spoken about. A third possibility is one where we have a kind of familiarity with what is spoken about – at least of a practical sort, so that we can successfully comport ourselves with respect to it – but we do not understand the meaning of the terms employed in talking about it. For example, all of us know how to cope with gravity – how to use it and respond to it, to walk, lie down, stand up, perhaps even ski. And yet it would be idle conversation for many of us to pass along the assertion “the gravitational mass of a body is equal to its inertial law.” We simply lack a grasp of the concepts employed such that we could do any work with the assertion. Idle talk about being should be understood along the lines of idle conversation about Einstein’s theory of the gravitational field. Heidegger says that its meaning is in a certain sense available to us, and we always act on the basis of an understanding of it. But we’re very poor at talking and thinking about it conceptually, and grasp it in those terms only vaguely at best, and in an “average” way – that is, the way that everybody in general thinks about it (see GA 2: H. 5). Thus, when it comes to being, we understand how to move about within an understanding of being. We have a familiarity with it sufficient to act and, indeed, even to formulate questions about it. The problem is that we are not able to “fix conceptually” the meaning of the terms we use to talk about it. This is the source of our idle conversation. As a result of this combination of intimate practical familiarity and conceptual confusion, the idle conversation is particularly pernicious, since it seems to us that we must know what we’re talking about but in fact we do not.

6 Discourse Language, Saying, Showing

We are guided by a completely different conception of the word and of language. (GA 54: 31) Besides, to pay heed to what the words say is particularly difficult for us moderns, because we find it hard to detach ourselves from the “at first” of what is common; and if we succeed for once, we relapse all too easily. (GA 8: 88)

“Language is the house of being.” This is undoubtedly one of Heidegger’s most memorable and most often repeated slogans. (To avoid cumbersome and unnecessarily complex sentences, I will, for the remainder of this chapter, refer to this as simply “the slogan.”) Heidegger himself uses some variant of the slogan in at least a dozen different essays or lecture courses between 1937 and 1966. Since then, it has been repeated in hundreds of different articles and books on Heidegger’s work. The reason for its popularity, I suspect, is that it seems to encapsulate, in one concise statement, Heidegger’s answer to one of the central problems in his later work – the problem of the relationship between being and language. It also seems to launch Heidegger into the orbit of the linguistic turn in twentieth century philosophy, and thus promises to set up an interesting and profitable comparison between Heidegger and analytic philosophy. “Language is the house of being” sounds like a distant but clearly recognizable German cousin to other claims like “the limits of language . . . mean the limits of my world,” or “to be is to be the value of a variable,” or more recently, McDowell’s somewhat less punchy claim that “human beings mature into being at home in the space of reasons or, what comes to the same thing, living their lives in the world; we can make sense of that by noting that the language into which a human being is first initiated stands over against her as a prior embodiment of mindedness, of the 119

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possibility of an orientation to the world” (Mind and World, p. 125).1 I think bringing Heidegger’s slogan into conversation with these other related claims is a worthwhile project – albeit a project that will have to wait for another occasion. This is because we ought to see if we cannot clarify what Heidegger’s slogan means before we presume to compare it to other recent positions on the relationship between language and being. Now it might seem at first glance that the meaning of the slogan is perfectly straightforward, if somewhat metaphorical. In secondary literature on Heidegger, the slogan is often invoked but rarely deemed to warrant any kind of extended discussion. Almost everybody acts as if it is immediately apparent what Heidegger is trying to say: they take it as a declaration of the view that the being of entities somehow depends on the linguistic expressions we use in thinking or talking about those entities. It is of course right to think of the slogan in particular and Heidegger’s views on language in general against the background of traditional philosophical concerns about the role that language or thought plays in unconcealment, in opening up a world and constituting entities as what they are. The problem of language’s role in constituting our world might be as old as philosophy itself – Heidegger liked to quote Heraclitus and Parmenides as his antecedents in thinking about the issue. According to Heidegger’s reading of the pre-Socratics, Parmenides’ central claim was that being and thinking are the same thing (to gar auto noein estin te kai einai); according to Heidegger’s Heraclitus, we find out the nature of being when we listen to the logos, to language (fragment B50). Thus Heidegger sees these early philosophers as focused on the problem of the relationship between what things are and what we think or say about them. The slogan is typically taken as staking out a particular position within this problem domain, a position we might call “linguistic idealism” or “linguistic constitutionalism”: the view that our experiences of the world, or the entities that we experience, or both, have their content fixed and exhaustively determined by the concepts or linguistic categories we use to describe or think about those entities or our experiences of them. Cristina Lafont is admirably clear and forthright in embracing this way of reading the slogan. According to her, Heidegger declare[s] language to be the court of appeal that (as the “house of being”) judges beforehand what can be encountered within the world. With this reification of the world-disclosing function of language, what things are becomes thoroughly dependent on what is contingently “disclosed” for a historical linguistic community through a specific language. Thus, the world-disclosure that is contained in a given language becomes the final authority for judging the intraworldly 1

Monika Betzler suggested this in her review of Mind and World in Erkenntnis 48 (1998): 115.

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knowledge that this world-disclosure has made possible in the first place; in this sense, it comes to be regarded as “the essence of truth.” But this world-disclosure is itself not open to revision on the basis of intraworldly experience and therefore cannot be understood as codetermined by our processes of learning. (Heidegger, Language and World Disclosure, p. 7, emphasis in original)

I want to emphasize a couple of elements of Lafont’s gloss on the slogan. First of all, Lafont understands “language” to mean any specific language spoken by an historical linguistic community. The languages that house being, then, are natural languages like contemporary American English, old High German, or Attic Greek. Second, on her reading, to say that language is the house of being means that we cannot encounter anything that we cannot already express in our language. Language is, in American slang, the “big house” of being: it keeps us locked up within its preexisting expressive capacities. As we see in this passage, Lafont attributes to Heidegger a particularly severe, indeed, patently absurd version of linguistic idealism – language itself decides which claims made within the language are true or false, thus restricting what we can know about the world. Indeed, so severe are the restrictions that language imposes on us that it cannot be revised by us in any way – we cannot even learn new words, or alter the meaning of existing words or phrases in response to our encounter with the world, because we can only encounter what we can mean by using the words already included in our language. That no sensible person would hold such a view of the relationship between language and our experience of the world does not stop Lafont from attributing the view to Heidegger. Not all interpretations of the slogan are this extreme, but most share to some degree Lafont’s suspicions of linguistic idealism. For instance, Karl Jaspers’ first reaction to the slogan suggests that he also took it as an expression of linguistic idealism – but with an important difference: he did not presume that he knew definitively what the slogan meant. “I have read the ‘Letter on Humanism,’” he noted, but continued, “with your sentences, I still continually stumble . . . . I can not understand some of your central words. Language as ‘house of being’ – I bristle, as all language seem to me to be merely a bridge. In communication, language is to be brought to the annulment of itself in reality . . . . I could say almost the opposite: where there is language, there is not yet or no longer being itself.”2 This passage is noteworthy in a couple of respects, and I will return to it in due course. But for the time being, I find interesting Jaspers’ expression of surprise and confusion upon his reading the slogan. To the extent that he can understand the thesis, it seems to him to run contrary to his intuitions about the independent existence of reality. 2

“Karl Jaspers to Heidegger,” Letter of August 6, 1949, Martin Heidegger/Karl Jaspers Briefwechsel 1920–1963. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann/München: Piper, 1990, p. 179.

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Jaspers proposes a second metaphor in opposition to the idea of language as the “house of being”: language for Jaspers is a mere “bridge” to being. A bridge lets us reach the far shore, but it does not determine what we will find when we get there. Similarly, where language is viewed as a bridge, it is seen as a tool we use to gain access to entities that are what they are independently of whatever we might happen to say or think about them. Heidegger’s only direct response to Jaspers, unfortunately, was the following: “the letter on humanism, which I was forced to publish because, due to indiscretions, it already circulated around Paris for half a year before in uncontrollable transcripts and translations, will certainly produce new misunderstandings and catchphrases” (Heidegger to Jaspers, Letter of August 12, 1949). With that warning in mind, let’s see if we can make an effort to understand the slogan on its own terms, rather than reducing it to a catchphrase. We can start by getting clearer about what it would take for the slogan to count as an expression of linguistic idealism. There are two important elements of linguistic idealism. One is a particular understanding of what language is. As Heidegger expresses it so concisely, the usual, “natural” conception of language thinks of it as “a stock of individual terms [einen Bestand von Wörtern] and rules for linguistic construction” (GA 4: 39). The second element is the attribution to language, so understood, of an ineliminable role in the constitution of entities or our experience of the world. It is not always clear how exactly linguistic constitutionalists conceive of language’s contribution to the constitution of things. But however it works, once we have a language we henceforth experience entities in terms of the linguistic categories we use to speak or think about them. We can think of each element of linguistic constitutionalism, together with its denial, as forming an axis of a simple chart. (See Chart 6.1.) Linguistic c h a r t 6 . 1 . Positions in the Problem Domain of the Relationship Between Language and Entities Ordinary View of Language (language as a stock of terms and rules for construction) Entities/ Experiences Constituted by Language

Unconventional View of Language

A. Linguistic Constitutionalism C. Later Heidegger (McDowell) (Originary language as the fitted structure of relationships)

B. Various Realisms: Jaspers Entities/ (language as a “bridge”) Experiences not Heidegger’s ontic realism Constituted by (early and late) Language

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constitutionalism would require the presence of both elements, and is represented in box A of the chart. As the chart illustrates, there are different ways to fail to be a linguistic constitutionalist. One (box B) is to think that there can be more to the content of our experiences or to the structure of our world than we can capture in language – if one thinks that we have experiences or that there are entities that we cannot adequately describe or explain, then one is not a linguistic constitutionalist. Likewise, if one thinks of language as a bridge that lets us reach entities that are constituted independently of language, then one is not a linguistic constitutionalist. But one might also reject the first element of the linguistic constitutionalist view, and think of language as something other than a stock of words with rules for the combination of words into sentences, or think of language as functioning otherwise than by articulating something conceptually or propositionally. This would be to conceive of language so differently from the linguistic constitutionalists that, even if one then attributed to language a constitutive role, the structure of things so constituted would not necessarily be expressible in the way that linguistic constitutionalists think they are – for instance, by making assertions within a particular natural language (box C). The standard interpretation of Heidegger seems to go like this: the early Heidegger was not a linguistic constitutionalist (for the first reason), but at some point during the notorious “turning” in his philosophy, he became one. The minority view is that Heidegger was always a linguistic constitutionalist, although he may or may not have realized it himself prior to the “turning.”3 I think neither the standard nor the minority view is correct. Heidegger, I believe, was never a linguistic constitutionalist – he never believed that our experience is necessarily conceptually constituted, nor that everything we apprehend in experience can be captured in linguistic terms. In Heidegger’s earlier work, he did believe that, at least much of the time, we experience what one (Man) ordinarily says about the matter. But this is an inauthentic experience of things. Authentic contact with the world, of which we are all capable, is decidedly not cut to the measure of what we are able to say about the entities we encounter. Thus, in Being and Time, he argued that in authentic experience, we are reduced to silence or reticence in the face of the world. So whatever is the case in banalized everyday life, in an authentic encounter with the world, at least, the world and our experiences of it are not linguistically constituted. Thus the early Heidegger belongs in box B of the chart. But what of Heidegger’s later work, with its emphasis on language (an emphasis that is crystallized in the slogan)? I do not mean to deny that Heidegger’s views on language undergo significant changes. Something important shifts between his early treatment of language as accruing to 3

See Cristina LaFont, Heidegger, Language and World Disclosure (Graham Harman, Trans.). Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

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nonlinguistic meanings in Being and Time, and his later account of language as that which shows us everything by “forming ways” (GA 12: 203). But, I will argue, the shift is in large part a change in thinking about what the word “language” names, and thus it cannot be reduced to a simple change of view about the role of language in mediating our access to the world or in constituting the world.4 In any event, in his later works, Heidegger also fails to be a linguistic constitutionalist for both of the reasons I articulated above. Even though “language is the house of being,” Heidegger continues to adhere to his earlier position that there are things that cannot be expressed in ordinary language. Most notably, what language itself is is something that cannot be spoken or explained: “there is no word, that means no saying, that would be capable of bringing the essence of language to language” (GA 12: 223). Thus, the later Heidegger continues to hold the box B view that language as ordinarily understood cannot fully capture and does not constitute our experience of entities. In addition, while it is true that Heidegger thinks that something called language plays a constitutive role in the organization and articulation of the world, it is also the case that that something is not what a linguistic constitutionalist would recognize as language. As Heidegger puts it – perhaps surprisingly and paradoxically – “the essence of language cannot be anything linguistic” (GA 12: 108). The widespread impression that the later Heidegger is a linguistic constitutionalist is a direct result of this misleading homonym, and a failure to respect Heidegger’s insistence that what he calls language is not the same as what we ordinarily refer to as language. The epigraphs to this chapter are typical in this regard, and we must struggle to avoid the relapse from Heidegger’s “completely different conception of the word and of language” back into ordinary and common conceptions. In its most fundamental form, language for Heidegger is not a conceptual articulation of experience, nor is it something that we can say in our ordinary language. Only poetic language lets us apprehend the originary language, but even then, we are never in a position to grasp it fully, only to be “spoken” by it. Thus the later Heidegger also occupies box C on the chart, as we will explore in the following sections of this chapter. But, one might now ask, if Heidegger is not a linguistic constitutionalist, why use the word “language” in this unusual and misleading way? What is at stake in Heidegger’s strange terminological practice? I will argue that it is nothing less than an effort to transform our experience of that on the basis of which linguistic acts are what they are. This transformed experience, Heidegger believed, also required “a transformation of language,” a transformation that “does not result from the creation of neologisms and novel phrases” (GA 12: 255/“Way to Language,” p. 424). He hoped to change 4

There is also a development in Heidegger’s understanding of Ereignis as the source of originary language. But that is a topic for another occasion.

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the way we hear and respond to familiar words like “language.” Derrida was quite right to observe that a claim like “language is the house of beings” is an example of what Derrida dubbed “catastrophic metaphors.”5 A catastrophic metaphor is a metaphor that is turned on its head, illuminating the apparently more familiar term through the less familiar term. For instance, Heidegger insists that “house” in the slogan is not meant to help us understand being but the other way around: Talk about the house of being is no metaphorical transfer of the image of the “house” to Being, but rather it is from out of an appropriately thought account of the essence of being that we will one day be able to think what “house” and “dwelling” are. (GA 9: 358)

The same catastrophic move is in effect for “language” in the slogan. Heidegger does not assume an everyday, commonsense notion of language but sees it as an idea to be developed on the basis of an understanding of being: the phrase “house of being” does not supply any concept of the essence of language, to the annoyance of philosophers who are vexed to find yet another corruption of thinking in such phrases. (GA 12: 112)6

But the “catastrophe” does not amount to a mere reversal in which being now functions as a metaphor for language, since being is not something about which Heidegger thinks we can ever have a thematic understanding. We are not in a position to apply our understanding of the properties of being to our conception of language. “We are therefore,” Derrida concludes, “no longer dealing with a metaphor in the usual sense, nor with a simple inversion permutating the places in a usual tropical structure” (“The Retrait of Metaphor,” p. 25). The catastrophic–metaphoric structure of the slogan, in other words, compels us to rethink how it is that language functions, and thus directs our renewed attention to thinking about how language could be the house of being. We undergo the promised experience with language when the slogan focuses us squarely on the question how we can talk about or name being, which is not a thing, but rather a nothing. Without a thing to refer to, the normal functioning of simple assertions, whether literal or metaphorical, is undermined. Thus we are not meant to plug a preexisting conception of language into Heidegger’s claims about language, as too many commentators on Heidegger are prone to do. Heidegger warns us that “the reflective use of language cannot be guided by the common, usual understanding of meanings” (GA 12: 186/“Nature of Language,” p. 92), a warning repeated 5 6

“The Retrait of Metaphor,” Enclitic 2 (1978): 6–33. See also the passage previously cited: “the essence of language cannot be anything linguistic. And thus it is also with the expression ‘the house of being’” (GA 12: 108).

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in some form in each of his essays on language. Rather, as we accompany Heidegger in his reflections on language, the word “language” is meant to come to function differently than it did when we first set out. As Heidegger explains, quoting Wilhelm von Humboldt, “time often introduces into [language] an enhanced power of thought and a more penetrating sensibility than it possessed hitherto . . . . It is as though a variant sense occupies the old husk, something different is given in the unaltered coinage, and a differently scaled sequence of ideas is intimated according to unchanged syntactical laws” (GA 12: 257/“Way to Language,” p. 426). Heidegger’s hope is that, as we think through his account of language, we will suspend our presuppositions about what language is, thus allowing a new sense to occupy the old husk. Or, as Heidegger prefers to think of it, we will allow an older but nearly lost sense to emerge from hiding to reanimate the word. Heidegger uses the slogan and other “guide words” (like “the essence of language is the language of essence,” or “to bring language as language to language”) in order to “beckon us away from current notions about language” (GA 12: 191/“Nature of Language,” p. 96) into a more ontologically broad use (for more on the ontologically broad use of terms, see Introduction). Consider the following passage (one of the few where Heidegger provides a direct example to illustrate the slogan): Some time ago, in a rather clumsy fashion, I named language the house of being. If human beings, through their language, live as they are called upon by being, then we Europeans presumably live in a very different house than the East Asians do. (GA 12: 85)

What does this passage suggest about the meaning of language in the slogan? First, notice that all Europeans inhabit the same house, as do all East Asians. This immediately rules out the proposal that “language” is really to be identified with a particular ordinary, historically specific language like French or German or Japanese or Chinese or Korean. Another, related, example is provided by Heidegger’s bewailing in 1942 the fact that his compatriots in 1942 “indeed speak ‘German,’ and yet talk entirely ‘American’” (GA 53: 80). Of course, Germans at the height of the Second World War were not conversing in English with American accents and idioms. Rather, Heidegger believed that their “language” in an ontologically broad sense was shared in common with their enemies. American, or European, or East Asian – these are examples of languages that are “nothing linguistic,” that is, languages which are “neither expression nor a human activity” (GA 12: 16). So as we turn now to an examination of Heidegger’s account of language, we need to keep in mind that Heidegger will be talking about language in an ontologically broad sense. That is, he will proceed by (1) identifying the world-disclosive function of language, (2) analyzing language in terms of the structures that allow it to perform that

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world-disclosive function, and (3) using the word “language” indiscriminately to refer to different things that perform this same function. If this is not confusing enough, there is the added wrinkle that the vocabulary Heidegger uses to talk about this world-disclosive function changes over time. In the next section, I will review the development of Heidegger’s conception of these originary, nonlinguistic languages together with his changing use of terminology, before turning to an account of the core, ontological sense of language that Heidegger is interested in. THE ROAD TO ORIGINARY LANGUAGE

For those who believe that there is a dramatic difference between Heidegger’s earlier and later views of language, the transition seems to be signaled in one of Heidegger’s marginal comments in his personal copy of Being and Time. There, in response to his remark in Being and Time that the being of words and language is founded on prelinguistic significations, Heidegger wrote: “Untrue. Language is not another storey raised on top, but rather it is the original essence of truth as the there.” There is no denying that this represents some sort of change in Heidegger’s views on the matter. But it is not clear on the face of it what that change is. There are at least two possibilities. One is that at the moment he makes his marginal note, Heidegger continues to mean by “language” the same thing he meant in 1927, but that he has come to believe that his earlier work failed to appreciate the role that this thing plays in the constitution of the world. Another possibility is that he now understands “language” differently, and retrospectively reinterprets the passage in question. A careful review of Heidegger’s work shows that the latter is the case. A great deal of attention in Heidegger scholarship has been devoted to the “turn” his thought underwent as he came to accord to language central importance in his work, starting roughly a decade after the publication of Being and Time. But the significance of this “turn” can only be truly understood in the context of a terminological shift in Heidegger’s work during the same period – a shift almost completely overlooked by scholars: the waning of “Rede,” “discourse” as a central concept for Heidegger. Without noticing that “language” came to displace “discourse” as Heidegger’s preferred translation for the Greek “logos,” one simply cannot properly assess Heidegger’s newfound emphasis on language. In fact, the substitution of “language” for “discourse” as a translation for “logos” did not represent a final resting place for Heidegger’s thought on the matter. “Language” as a translation of “logos” was itself replaced later by “saying,” “Sage.” Each of these translations was an effort to capture what Heidegger thought was the most basic or fundamental sense of logos (see Chart 6.2). And yet, underlying his various translational experiments was a more or less constant sense of “logos” as a gathering of meaningful elements

(2) Logos as gathering of constitutive relations (structure)

“Language is the legislating gathering and as a result the manifestness of the structure that fits entities together” (Gefüges des Seienden). We now see without difficulty the connection between language, logos, and truth, alêtheia. The gathering setting-forth and establishing is a bringing out and in this way making things visible and obvious, thus a

“How did the Greeks define legein, ‘to “The intelligibility of something has always discourse,’ ‘discoursing’? Legein does not been articulated, even before there is merely mean to form and to recite any appropriative interpretation of it. words. The sense of legein is rather deloun, Discourse is the articulation of making manifest, where what is made intelligibility . . . . That which can be manifest includes what the discourse is articulated in interpretation, and thus about and how it should be talked about. even more primordially in discourse, is Aristotle defines its sense more precisely what we have called ‘meaning.’ That as apophainesthai, letting something be which gets articulated as such in seen in itself and indeed – apo – from discursive articulation, we call the itself” (GA 20: 115)“Logos as discourse ‘totality-of-meanings’ [Bedeutungsganze]. This can be dissolved means . . . deloun, making manifest that or broken up into meanings.” (GA 2: about which in the discourse ‘the H. 161) discourse’ is” (GA 2: H. 32).

(1) Disclosive Function

“Language is that happening in which, 1930s Sprache: Language “We can – in fact, we each time, beings are first disclosed must – translate anthrôpos – zôon logon as beings” (GA 5: 62 [1936]) echon as: ‘the human being is the living entity to whom the word belongs.’ Instead of ‘word’ we can even say ‘language,’ provided we think the nature of language adequately and originally, namely, from the essence of

1920s Rede: Discourse “The Greeks actually have no word for language, a noteworthy fact. They have only logos, discourse” (GA 19: 590 [1924])“The term logos goes back to legein . . . it means discourse, discourse about something” (GA 20: 115 [1925])“the basic meaning of logos is discourse” (GA 2: H. 32 [1927])

Translating term

c h a r t 6 . 2 . Translations of Logos. There are two consistent features of the way Heidegger defines each of the terms that he uses to translate logos: (1) logos is understood as performing the function of primarily disclosing entities as meaningful, thus enabling linguistic meanings; (2) it does (1) in virtue of its structure, which consists in a stable style that characterizes the pattern of relations that gather entities into constitutive relations.

1950s Sage: Saying “The oldest word for the . . . prevailing of the word, for saying, is logos” (GA 12: 224 [1959])

logos correctly understood.” (GA 9: 348 [1939]) happening in which something previously inaccessible, veiled, is snatched out of its concealedness and placed into un-concealment, alêtheia, that is, truth.” (GA 36/37: 116 [1933]) “The essence of language essences where it happens as a world-forming power, that is, where it first preforms the being of entities in advance and brings them into a structure” (GA 38: 170 [1934]). “Because the essence of langauge is found in the gathering of the gatheredness of being, therefore language as everyday discourse only comes into its truth when the saying and hearing is related to the Logos as the gatheredness into the sense of being.” (GA 40: 181/132 [1935]) “But what does “to say” actually mean? We “Language, then, is not a mere human received a first answer in our listening faculty . . . . Language is, as forming of to what the Greek words legein and logos the world’s ways, the relation of all say: to appear – and let appear – to relations. It relates, maintains, proffers, conjure. Our word “sagan” means the and enriches the face-to-face encounter of the world’s regions, holds and keeps same thing: it means to show, point out, them, in that it holds itself – Saying – in see and let be perceived. To say is the reserve. (GA 12: 203 [1957]) revealing-concealing showing and pointing out, the presenting-to . . . that is determined by it, and the giving-to and giving-from. The saying is the region of this hinting-showing giving” (GA 79: 170–1 [1957])

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into a unified structure, a meaningful, but prelinguistic articulation of the world on the basis of which entities can be unconcealed and linguistic acts can be performed. Thus, despite the appearance of a change from Heidegger’s earlier to his later work on the role of language, Heidegger’s view remains remarkably consistent in its broad outlines. The consistency is achieved because his “turn” to language is offset by a counterturning movement in the meaning of the term “language.” During the period leading up to and including the publication of Being and Time, Heidegger understood language as a totality of words (Wortganzheit) (Being and Time, pp. 161/204) – that is as a vocabulary with rules for combining words into sentences (see GA 4: 39). As such, language was for him dependent on and derivative of the meanings we encounter as we inhabit an intelligible world. These “primary meanings,” according to Heidegger, constituted what he began calling in 1925 the “basic structure” (Grundstruktur) of the logos (GA 21: 26). These primary meanings are the relationships or involvements that entities have with us and other things in a practical situation. For example, the meaning of a door when I’m navigating through a building is: “for going in and out” (see GA 21: 141). This meaning (Bedeutung) thus arises within our activity of comporting ourselves purposefully and understandingly in the world. Meaning (die Bedeutung) is dependent on an act of making sense (das Bedeuten): In the primary understanding of a dealing-with, what is understood or made sense of [das Bedeutete] is disclosed. In this way, the understanding gains the possibility of taking for itself and preserving what is disclosed, the “result” so to speak. The result of the act of makings sense [das Bedeuten] is in each case a meaning [eine Bedeutung], not a so-called “word meaning,” but this primary meaning to which a word can then accrue. (GA 21: 151 n. 6)

This “primary meaning,” then, is the way that thing or activity itself (rather than a linguistic sign) refers to or relates to other activities or entities. The “making sense that understands” (das verstehende Bedeuten), which discloses meanings, is not dependent on our possessing a system of signs, but is rather the foundation for language, which consists of a unified and systematic totality of the “word meanings” that “accrue” to the primary meanings articulated for and through our dealings with entities: only insofar as such intelligibility – meaning – already belongs to Dasein, can Dasein express itself phonetically in such a way that these utterances are words which now have something like meaning. Because Dasein in its very being is itself something that makes sense (bedeutend), it lives in meanings and can express itself as these meanings. And only because there are such utterances, that is, words, accruing to meanings, therefore there are particular words. That is, only now can linguistic forms, which themselves are shaped by the meaning, be detachable from that meaning. Such a totality of utterances, in which the understanding of a Dasein in a certain sense arises and is existentially, we call “language.” (GA 21: 151)

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“Language” in these early works, then, names a totality of words or a totality of utterances – a systematic whole of signs that we can draw on in expressing ourselves linguistically (see GA 36/37: 105ff for the view of language as kind of sign giving). It is interesting, however, that in GA 21, Heidegger did not yet have a translation for logos into German that he was willing to stick with. He leads off the lecture by translating logos with Rede, but in a very telling passage, he qualifies this translation: “in order to provide an example that directs us to the logos,” he explains, consider “not the legein – discoursing and discussing, but rather the legomenon – what is said as such, what in each case is sayable and what is posited, the lekton” (GA 21: 54). That is, the Greek understanding of logos is not oriented to the words we say in discursive interaction, but rather the meaningful world that is capable of being talked about linguistically. There is a distinction to be drawn, in other words, between what we might call the “communicative” aspect of discourse and the “meaning articulating aspect.” The meaning articulating aspect consists in lifting referential relations into salience. The communicative aspect consists in sharing these referential relations with others, or in helping others become responsive to these relations.7 I suspect that a lot of the confusion in understanding Heidegger’s notion of discourse stems from failing to take the paradigm of discourse to be what is sayable – the meaningful articulation – rather than the action of saying itself – the communicative aspect. In any event, by the time he writes Being and Time, it seems to me that Heidegger is comfortable translating logos as Rede (“conversance” or “discourse”), but only because he understands discourse primarily in terms of the articulation of meanings (in just the way he had described meaning articulation in GA 21): “that which is parsed (das Gegliederte) in discursive articulation as such we call the totality of meanings (Bedeutungsganze). This can be separated into meanings . . . . Words accrue to meanings” (Being and Time, 204/161). The primary sense of Rede or discourse is that which performs the function of establishing and stabilizing the referential relations of meaningfulness: The intelligibility of something has always been articulated, even before there is any appropriative interpretation of it. Discourse is the Articulation of intelligibility . . . . That which can be Articulated in interpretation, and thus even more primordially in discourse, is what we have called “meaning.” That which gets articulated as such in discursive Articulation, we call the “totality-of-meanings” [Bedeutungsganze]. This can be dissolved or broken up into meanings. (GA 2: H. 161)

Because the individual words and utterances can only have a meaning on the basis of a prelinguistic but meaningful disclosure of the world, Heidegger also thought of language as a derivative phenomenon – both 7

In 1925, however, Heidegger still hadn’t rigorously distinguished between the communicative aspect of discourse and the meaning-articulating aspect. See: “discourse has a distinctive function in the development of the discoveredness of Dasein: it lays out, that is, it brings the referential relations of meaningfulness into relief in communication” (GA 20: 370).

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Sprache as a sign system and Rede in the communicative sense depend on discourse as meaning articulation. That Heidegger does not more rigorously divorce the two elements of Rede is a result of his ontologically broad use of the term. The disclosive function of both discourse as communication, and discourse as meaning articulation is to let entities be discovered by providing a referential context within which they can appear as meaningful. Heidegger does distinguish the two, as passages like the following make clear: The current translation of logos as “reason,” “judgment,” and “sense” do not capture the decisive meaning: gathering joining and making known. They overlook what is originally and properly ancient and thus at once essential to the word and concept. Whether, then, in the history of the origin of the word logos the meaning of the gathering joining [sammelnden Fügens – i.e. meaning articulation] was immediately accompanied by the meaning of gathering saying [i.e. meaning communication], a meaning that language always already has assumed, and in fact in the manner of conversance; whether, in fact, originally language and discourse was directly experienced as the primary and genuine basic way of gathering joining, or whether the meaning of gathering and joining together was only subsequently carried over onto language, I am not able to decide on the basis of my knowledge of the matter, assuming that the question is at all decideable. (GA 33: 122/Aristotle’s Metaphysics Theta, 103–4; some emphasis in original)

Similarly, when he argues in Being and Time that the call of conscience is a mode of discourse that may not be heard as offering any communicative content (see GA 2: H. 273–4), Heidegger acknowledges that something can perform the discursive function of meaning articulation without also being communicable. Both aspects of discourse, however, bear a common structure – the structure of gathering or collecting references into a coherent context. That gathering can occur in either communicative action (“saying”), or in the fundamental structural joining together or fitting together of references. But the latter is the more fundamental sense because it establishes the stabilized relational context that is exploited in discursive communication: the original meaning of logos [is] . . . legein: to read, to read together, to gather, to lay the one to the other and in this way to set the one into a relationship to the other, and thereby to posit this relationship itself. Logos: the connecting, the relationship. The relationship is what holds together that which stands within it. The unity of this “together” governs and regulates the connection of the self relating entities. Logos is therefore a rule, a law, yet not as something which is suspended somewhere above what is ruled, but rather as that which is itself the relationship: the inner fittingtogether and fitness (Fügung und Fuge) of the entities which stand in relation. Logos is the regulating structure (regelnde Gefüge), the gathering of entities which are related among themselves. Such a gathering, which now gathers up, makes accessible, and holds ready the connections of what is connected, and with this the connection itself and thus individual entities, and so at the same time lets them be governed,

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this is the structure that we call “language,” speaking; but not understood as vocalizing, rather in the sense of a speaking that says something, intends something: to discourse of or about something to someone or for someone. Logos is discourse, the gathering laying out, unifying making something known. (GA 33: 121)

As this passage makes clear, at this point (1931), Heidegger has begun phasing out the use of Rede, and has started using Rede and Sprache interchangeably. But it is equally clear that he can do so only because he no longer thinks of language in the way that he did in the years leading up to and surrounding the publication of Being and Time. The change occurs as Heidegger draws a distinction between the prereflective use of the word “language” to refer to the “foreground aspect of language” – that is, a totality of words (GA 4: 39) – and a more thoughtful use of the term to refer to the deeper, background phenomenon of a preverbal articulative gathering of meanings. He begins, in other words, to use the term “language” in a manner that is ontologically broad. He can do this because he no longer holds that the defining characteristic of language is found in its character as a sign. This changed view of the meaning of “language” frees the term up to be substituted for “discourse” (Rede) as Heidegger’s preferred term for translating logos and, as I will show, as a name for a particular constitutive structure of our being-in-the-world. Rede, in turn, loses its technical being-sense in Heidegger’s works after about 1934.8 To appreciate how much (or rather, how little) is at stake in this change, we need to say more about this constitutive structure, the explanation of which was always linked with an effort to appropriate the ancient Greek notion of logos. The idea expressed in the passage quoted above – that human beings always already live in meanings and act meaningfully – is Heidegger’s version of the Greek claim that the essence of man is to be the zôon logon echon, the living being that possesses the logos or language.9 Rede, Sprache, and Sage were each efforts to translate and thus capture what was essential about this claim. Rede, discourse, was initially adopted as a translation for logos because of the etymological connections between the German Rede and the Latin ratio, which, in turn, was the Latin translation of logos (see, e.g., GA 20: 365 ff.). By 1935, however, Rede fell out of favor as a translation for logos, a change in Heidegger’s view that coincides precisely with the development of his conviction that the translation of Greek terms into Latin “destroyed the authentic philosophical naming force of the Greek words” (GA 40: 15/10). 8

9

Although I take it as a sign of Heidegger’s never-ending experimental approach to the use of terms that Rede stages a comeback in one late course, the Freiburger Vorträge of 1957 (GA 79). Heidegger discusses this claim in both lectures and lecture courses devoted exclusively to Greek thinkers, as well as extended discussions in lecture courses more broadly conceived. Among the former are two lecture courses in 1931: Aristotles: Metaphysiks IX, GA 33 and Vom Wesen der Wahrheit. Zu Platons Höhlengleichnis und Theätet, GA 34; in 1932 the lecture course Der Anfang der abendländischen Philosophie (Anaximander und Parmenides) (GA 35) and a lecture on “Platos Phaidros.”

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So when he now holds that the “originary meaning” of logos “has at first nothing to do with language and word and discourse [Rede]” (GA 40: 133/ 95), this does not mean that he’s rejecting his earlier account of the fundamental role of primary, prelinguistic meanings in disclosing a world. Nor is he repudiating the claim that the originary meaning of logos has nothing to do with language when, a mere four years later, he writes that “We can – in fact, we must – translate anthrôpos – zôon logon echon as: ‘the human being is the living entity to whom the word belongs.’ Instead of ‘word’ we can even say ‘language,’ provided we think the nature of language adequately and originally, namely, from the essence of logos correctly understood.” (GA 9: 348). Nor, finally, should we see it as a late repudiation of his work on language, and a return to his earlier view when he writes in 1957 that “‘discourse’ and the verb ‘to discourse’ do not mean ‘language’ and ‘to speak’ in the sense of the pronouncement of expressions; discourse (Rede) means precisely what legein and logos meant from early on: to bring forward, to bring to appearance by gathering” (GA 79: 160). All of these superficially inconsistent pronouncements exhibit one consistent, largely stable view about what Heidegger calls the “originary meaning” or “basic meaning” of language. To recognize this, we need to focus on the ontological structure and disclosive function of discourse, language, and saying respectively. As Chart 6.2 suggests, when seen from the perspective of structure and function, the different terms are near synonyms. The originary language is an ontological structure responsible for the disclosure of the world. Language plays this role in virtue of imposing a particular structure on the world – the gathering of relationships of meaning or reference that we have already touched on: “the basic meaning of logos is collection, to collect” (GA 40: 133) – namely, the collection or gathering of significations or “the relationship of one thing to another” (GA 40: 133) into a more or less stable structure. It is in terms of such a gathering or collecting into relationships that we are to understand the idea of language as “the house of being.” It is to a more detailed exposition of this notion of gathering that I now turn. THE CORE PHENOMENON OF GATHERING

To understand properly the sense in which language is for Heidegger a “gathering” or “collecting,” we need to recognize the background understanding of ontology against which such pronouncements are made. This will bring us back to the slogan and the question of linguistic constitutionalism in Heidegger’s thought. We noted at the outset Jaspers’ puzzled response to the slogan. In contrast to the linguistic constitutionalism he thought he detected in the slogan, Jaspers expressed the view of language as a “bridge” that brings us to an independently existing reality. Jaspers’ reaction to the slogan shows that he recognized something that few other commentators have noted: the phrase “house of being” is not originally

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Heidegger’s. It is an unattributed quotation of a passage from Nietzsche’s Zarathustra – a passage that Heidegger lectured on in the years during which he was developing his views on language (see GA 44: 56).10 Some attention to the original source of the phrase is quite helpful for appreciating what’s going on with Heidegger’s use of the slogan. The “language as a bridge” view is advanced by Zarathustra himself: “Oh my animals,” answered Zarathustra. “Just keep babbling and let me listen! It invigorates me so when you babble: where there is babbling the world indeed lies before me like a garden. How lovely it is that there are words and sounds; are not words and sounds rainbows and illusory bridges between the eternally separated? To each soul belongs another world, for each soul every other soul is a hinterworld. Illusion tells its loveliest lies about the things that are most similar, because the tiniest gap is hardest to bridge . . . . Have names and sounds not been bestowed on things so that human beings can invigorate themselves on things? It is a beautiful folly, speaking: with it humans dance over all things. How lovely is all talking and all lying of sounds! With sounds our love dances on colorful rainbows.” (Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Third Part: “The Convalescent,” §2, translation modified)

On this view, then, language does not play a role in constituting entities. Rather, it is an adornment that creates the illusion of connections between speakers, and the illusion of relations between things. But the things themselves do not depend for their being on our babbling or on the way we talk about their relations to each other. Thus “language is a bridge” means that language brings us before independently existing entities, connects them to each other in our representations, and beautifies and adorns them in our representations. But Zarathustra’s animals respond by suggesting that language is not just a bridge to things and an adornment that dances over fixed entities. Rather, entities themselves “dance” in the way words do: “Oh Zarathustra,” said the animals then. “To those who think as we do, all things themselves approach dancing; they come and reach out their hands and laugh and retreat – and come back. Everything goes, everything comes back; the wheel of being rolls eternally. Everything dies, everything blossoms again, the year of being runs eternally. Everything breaks, everything is joined (gefügt) anew; the same house of being builds itself eternally.” (ibid., emphasis supplied)

The animals, in other words, invoke the phrase “house of being” to suggest a view of ontology according to which there are no stable, independently existing things – entities are constituted and reconstituted by being “joined” (gefügt) or fitted together. 10

In the Nietzsche lectures, Heidegger rejects the animals’ account of recurrence advanced in this passage because it advocates a view of eternal recurrence as a cyclical repetition. He does not explicitly comment at that time on the idea of language implicit in this passage.

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In all his works, early and late, Heidegger adheres to some version of the thesis that entities are constituted by the relationships they bear to each other. Something only is the entity that it is in terms of the way it is referred to and aligned with activities and other entities. One might refer to this as a relational ontology. To take language as a bridge, and words as beautifying and dancing over things, is to hold that entities are fixed and constituted independently of the meaningful relationships they bear with other things. The view of dancing things, by contrast, is the view that there is no stable ontology apart from the meaningful relationships that things bear toward one another within a world. Heidegger seems to allude to the same passage in Zarathustra when he discusses the importance of learning to renounce the idea that “words were like handles (Griffe) that grasp that which already is and that which is held to be, secure it tightly (dicht machen), express it and in this way help it to beauty” (GA 12: 161). Or again In trying to clarify how chaos came to be posited as what is knowable and to be known, we happened to stumble across what knows – the living being that grasps the world and takes it over. That is not a matter of chance, for what is knowable and what knows are each determined in their essence in a unified way from the same essential ground. We may not separate either one, nor wish to encounter them separately. Knowing is not like a bridge that somehow subsequently connects two existent banks of a stream, but is itself a stream that in its flow first creates the banks and turns them toward each other in a more original way than a bridge ever could. (GA 6.1: 512–13)

Heidegger returns repeatedly to the imagery that Nietzsche invokes in contrasting these two different ways of thinking about the relationship between language and entities in the world.11 So we can see that in appropriating Nietzsche’s phrase “house of being,” Heidegger is invoking a relational ontology and endorsing the dancing things understanding of entities. It is in terms of the relational ontology that we are to understand the idea that the logos is a “gathering fitting” (sammelnden Fügens) (GA 33: 122). For Heidegger, “logos is the structure of fitting (Gefüge)” (GA 33: 121), just as for Zarathustra’s animals, the house of being is constructed when “everything is joined or fitted together” (gefügt). In the slogan, then, language is to be understood as the gathering together of meanings that allows there to be entities at all.12 In particular, language is the unity to the structure of relations: the Gefüge. “Language is, as saying that forms the world’s ways, the relation of all relations. It relates, maintains, proffers, holds, and keeps them” (107). To be the “relation of all relations” means that language exerts a kind of stylistic constraint on the way that particular relations are 11 12

See also GA 7: 148. Heidegger rejects, of course, the idea that entities move in a circle – that they get broken down and reconstituted over and over again in exactly the same ways. See GA 6.1: 263ff, where Heidegger explains that interpreting the eternal recurrence as a circling of entities is too easy, and fails to appreciate the importance of the moment as a collision between past and future.

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established and made salient. By drawing and constraining and stylizing the constitutive relationships between entities, language is “the relation on the basis of which what is present gathers itself for the first time as such around and for human beings” (GA 9: 280). The slogan reaffirms that we encounter things on the basis of a grasp of their meanings or the way they relate to other things. Language stabilizes these meanings or relationships, holds them open, and makes them salient and communicable. Something is communicable if it is capable of being picked up and responded to be others, that is, capable of soliciting others. WORDS

So far, we have seen a continuity in Heidegger’s account of the logos running throughout his work and across the supposed divide between “early” and “later Heidegger.” The logos is the structure of worldly meanings and references, the relationships that constitute things as the things they are. This continuity is obscured by changes in Heidegger’s terminology – in particular, his preferred name for the logos structure. Perhaps confusingly, where the early Heidegger distinguished between the logos structure and language (which he understands in ordinary sense of linguistic structures and forms), the later Heidegger names the logos structure “language.” I have also already suggested that calling this logos structure “language” in no way is meant to suggest that it has the structure and form that we ordinarily associate with language. The originary language of the logos is decidedly not something like a stock of terms, each with its associated meaning and reference, together with rules for constructing sentences out of those terms. But to make this point more evident, we need to consider what Heidegger does say about the relationship between words and the originary language or the Gefüge. We also need to think through the relationship between words and entities in order to come to a clearer understanding of the slogan and Heidegger’s alleged linguistic constitutionalism. Heidegger’s interpretation of the Stefan George poem “The Word” (“Das Wort”) plays a central role in his effort to reorient our thinking about the word and thus to rethink the relationship between language and entities. This poem is also, in light of its final line, especially prone to be misunderstood as supporting a linguistic constitutionalist interpretation of Heidegger’s account of language. With apologies for the rather literal and unpoetic translation, the poem reads: Das Wort Wunder von ferne oder traum Bracht ich an meines landes saum

The Word Wonder from far off or a dream I brought to my country’s border

Und harrte bis die graue norn Den namen fand in ihrem born –

And waited until the grey Norn Found the name within her wellspring –

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Drauf konnt ichs greifen dicht und stark Nun blüht und glänzt es durch die mark . . .

Thereupon I could grasp it tightly and strong

Einst langt ich an nach guter fahrt Mit einem kleinod reich und zart

Once I arrived after a good journey With a jewel rich and delicate

Sie suchte lang und gab mir kund: «So schläft hier nichts auf tiefem grund»

She searched long and announced to me: “No such sleeps here on the deep ground”

Worauf es meiner hand entrann Und nie mein land den schatz gewann . . .

Whereupon it escaped from my hand And my country never obtained the treasure

So lernt ich traurig den verzicht: Kein ding sei wo das wort gebricht.

In this way I sadly learned the renunciation: No thing may be where the word is lacking

Now it blossoms and shines throughout the borderland . . .

To understand Heidegger’s interpretation of this poem, we need to begin by considering his reason for introducing a discussion of poetry into his work in the first place. What, one ought to ask, is Heidegger trying to accomplish? Does he think the poem offers an argument about language or a particularly insightful philosophical analysis of the nature of the word? Obviously not. Does he want to adorn his dense and ungainly prose with some beautiful poetic embellishments? To the contrary, the poem is not an ornament but a central element in Heidegger’s discussion of the word. Does he think the poet is an authority figure who can resolve a philosophical question about language for us? With this, we are coming closer to the truth. The poet is not a philosophical authority, but, Heidegger believes, he can be regarded as an authoritative voice on at least one thing – the experience of being struck by the power and limits of language itself. And this leads us, finally, to the main reason for introducing the poem: Heidegger wants us to break out of our ordinary facility with language in order to actually have an experience with language itself. Our everyday speech is so habitual, so commonplace, and so familiar that language itself escapes notice, indeed, is nearly invisible. As a result, to gain insight into it, we need to be able to attend to it, experience it, and reflect on it, and this might require that we somehow defamiliarize ourselves with it. The poem is explicitly introduced “to show ways to bring us before the possibility of having an experience with language” (GA 12: 151). This particular poem is selected because it is by a master poet, reporting on his own experience of language. As we approach the poem, then, we miss the point if we quickly tear a line or two out of context as authority for an argument or to add interest and beauty to philosophical prose. We are meant rather to dwell upon the poem, and to experience the working of language in the poem. That requires in this instance our attending thoughtfully and painstakingly to the poetic description of the poet’s experience of a poetic word.

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Indeed, the first thing one realizes when engaging seriously with a poem is that poetic language rarely offers clear, unequivocal propositions as the content of its sentences. To reduce a poem to a punch line, to a readily intelligible and unambiguous claim is somehow to miss what is essential. Poetic words, moreover, have what one might call a “productive ambiguity” or, as Heidegger puts it, they “oscillate,” thus opening up multiple paths of understanding. As frustrating as this might be to those of an analytic or scientific mindset, this is not a weakness of the poem but its strength – and precisely one of the elements of the poem we must attend to in order to experience language. For one of the essential features of language is its ability to oscillate and thus to lead us into any of an indefinite number of paths. We do violence to a poem if we try to pin it down to a single “correct” reading, and Heidegger insists that “we must pay attention so that the oscillation of the poetic saying is not forced onto the inflexible rail of an unequivocal assertion and in this way is destroyed” (GA 12: 157). The words of a masterful poet have a particular kind of oscillation, one that Heidegger aspired to achieve in his own work. They hover right at the boundary between our commonplace, ready understanding of terms and insight into rare, unfamiliar meanings in the world. By helping us to get caught up in this oscillation between the most familiar meanings of all – ordinary linguistic meanings – and the mysterious unfathomable ways that the world itself silently speaks and calls to us, the poet brings us to understand two things we lose track of in our ordinary commerce with the world: the potential power of language and the authentic significance of the things and people and possibilities around us. Heidegger immediately alerts us to several words in George’s poem that oscillate in this way, reminding us that we should not be too quick to assume we know what the final lines mean: One is tempted to transform the final line into an assertion with the content: there is no thing where the word is lacking. Where something is lacking, a rupture exists, a breaking off that is an impairment or detriment. To cause an impairment in a matter means: to withdraw something from it, to let it miss something. It is lacking means: it is missing. Where the word is missing, there is no thing. Only the available word confers being to the thing. What is the word that it is able to do such a thing? What is the thing, such that it requires the word in order to be? What does being mean here that it appears as an award that is conferred on the thing from the word? (GA 12: 209)

We cannot hope to make sense of the poem without asking what a word is, what a thing is, and what being means. Given that the whole point of the poem is to cause an experience with language that will compel us to reflect on such things, we should be particularly hesitant to take these terms in their ordinary, everyday sense. As we bring into play different possible ways of understanding each of these words – “word,” “thing,” “to

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be” – the poem will begin to oscillate productively between several different possible interpretations.

1.

WORDS AND TERMS

Let’s start by exploring possible meanings of the word “word.” “Word” is an ideal case for illustrating Heidegger’s notion of oscillation. The German language has two different plural forms to the singular word for “word” (“Wort”), which correlate with two quite different meanings of the word “word.” On the first meaning, which takes the plural form “Worte,” a word is a complete utterance or expression: “a verbal or written expression, which consists of a group of individual terms and presents a unified mental sense.”13 This meaning of “word” is attested in English as well. Shakespeare, for instance, has King Henry VI say: “My Lord of Warwick, hear me but one word: Let me for this my life-time reign as king” (King Henry VI, act 1, scene 1). The “one word” is a complete thought, not a single term. This sense lives on in such English expressions “I’d like a word with you,” or “I will keep my word” – that is, words are understood as complete expressions, not individual terms. The other meaning, which takes the plural form “Wörter,” corresponds with the way we typically tend to think of the ordinary meaning of the English word “word.” Words, Wörter, are “single, independent, isolable meanings with a definite vocal form which, as discourse’s smallest unit of sense, produce, by means of their accumulation and linking together, words in the first sense as connected discourse.”14 In the singular, “Wort,” word will oscillate between these two senses, and can be taken in either way (depending on context). And this is not accidental, of course – words as expressions of whole thoughts, and words as units of sense stand in an intimate relationship to each other. Part of the richness of the word “word” derives from the fact that it can move in both directions of meaning, and can even do so simultaneously. But to mark the distinction for the English reader, I will translate “Wörter” as “terms,” and “Worte” as “words.” The distinction as it is drawn in Grimm and in the ordinary German usage, however, is not quite the distinction Heidegger wants to make. In general, Heidegger thinks of terms as occurrent linguistic forms that are detachable from their meanings, and are thus thought of as denoting concepts, as opposed to directly expressing significations (see GA 2: H. 159, 161; GA 21: 151). Thus a term is a certain type of sound or graphic mark, with its associated particular meaning or concept. Of course, it is 13

14

“Wort,” in Deutsches Wörterbuch von Jacob und Wilhelm Grimm, vol. 30. Leipzig: S. Hirzel, 1960, p. 1473. Ibid., p. 1529.

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phenomenologically incorrect to describe my experience of language as involving first a sensory perception of a sound or graphic mark, followed by a recognition of the sound or mark as a linguistic form, followed by an association of the linguistic form with its meaning, followed by a construction of a unified sense from the individual meanings. In the living use of language, I respond to what is written or spoken fluently, nonreflectively, nondeliberately. For instance, when I hear the term “chalkboard” in the utterance “the chalkboard is black,” I do not hear a sound that I recognize as a word and then associate it with a meaning in order to construct a sense for the utterance as a whole. Instead, as Heidegger says, I “live in meanings,” and the spoken language as I encounter it in the utterances of ordinary involved coping orients or reorients me immediately to the world I am in, to the meanings I inhabit (see GA 21: 151). The words immediately orient me so that I can comport myself with respect to the chalkboard. I can, of course, detach myself from a lived immersion in meanings, and regard “chalkboard” as a term – that is, as a noise or graphic mark that can be detached from its meanings. A beginning speaker of a foreign language will often encounter terms. But with increasing fluency, the terms recede from salience. The contrast between a deliberate and fluent experience of language suggests a different way of thinking about what words are as opposed to terms. Words for Heidegger are not representations, and have neither a verbal nor a written form: they are “not palpable to the senses” (GA 12: 181). Indeed, Heidegger claims, the word, like being itself, “is not an entity” (GA 12: 182). Instead, he thinks of words as the relational structures that allow there to be entities in the first place: “the relation of the word to the thing . . . is not a relationship between the thing on one side and the word on the other. The word itself is the relation, which in each case keeps in itself the thing in such a way that it ‘is’ a thing” (GA 12: 159). To understand this, we need to recall the discussion of dancing things above. On Heidegger’s view, entities are constituted by the relationships they have to other entities. For there to be a stable thing, the relationships that constitute it as a thing need also to be stabilized, held open, and maintained. The stabilization takes the form of establishing nexuses or nodes of relations that can be, and are, filled by particular entities. Of course, “filled” is a misleading verb to use here if it is heard as suggesting that entities are something independently of the structure of relations, something that can then be inserted into a particular place in the network of relations. Entities do not fill nexuses the way water fills glasses or concrete fills building forms. Water is water, after all, whether it is in a glass or pond. A more apt analogy is the way someone fills the position of an aunt or uncle. One cannot be an aunt first, and only subsequently take up relationships to nieces and nephews. To be an aunt at all is to be constituted by one’s relationships to other people. Aunthood, then, is a particular nexus of relationships to siblings and siblings’ children. When

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we grasp the significance of aunthood, we have gained the ability to recognize a stable pattern of relationships, secured this nexus as that into which something can enter, and, in entering, be constituted as the entity it is. We have grasped, one could say, the word “aunt.” To understand words in general, then, is to be able to discern an entity as standing in the structure of relationships that allows it to be an entity. About the “word” we also said that it does not simply stand in a relation to the thing, but rather that the word is what first brings the particular entity as the entity that it is into this “is,” holds it therein, relates it, and, as it were, provides it the support with which to be a thing. Accordingly, we said, the word does not simply stand in a relation to the thing, but rather the word “is” itself what holds and relates the thing as thing; the word is as this relating: the relation itself. (GA 12: 177)

The entity will thus stand at a kind of nexus of relationships. The word, in the original sense, is the nexus of significative relationships. Words are prior to terms because it is only through a grasp of the meaningful relations that entities bear to one another that their associated names have the meaning that they have. If we consider this distinction in the context of George’s poem, we can see that the different ways of hearing “word” will lead us to imagine different reasons why the word might be missing. If we think of words as terms, a “word is missing” when some ordinary language lacks a term uniquely associated with some specific sense. Take, for instance the Persian term “zirad,” the name of “a rope fastened round a camel’s neck, to prevent him from bringing up his food when chewing the cud, and throwing it on his rider.”15 English lacks this term, or any single equivalent term. But we English speakers have little trouble understanding the idea of a specific type of rope-equipment designed for that particular task (even if we are unable to imagine exactly what such a rope would look like, or how it would be attached to the camel’s neck, or even how a camel manages to vomit on its rider in the first place). We know, after all, what camels are, and have a fairly good grip on all the relationships involved in a zirad (the relationship between animals and their riders, between necks and ropes, etc.). By contrast, if we think of words in Heidegger’s sense, then a “word is missing” when a world lacks a stable network of relationships that would let a particular entity show up within the world. Of course, such a world will also necessarily lack a term (since a term accrues to the word or nexus of relationships). But it lacks a term in this case because it lacks a constitutive place for such a thing as the term names. It is no accident that English has had to borrow its term for a Samurai, for our culture lacks the points of reference that are definitive of such a being (for 15

F. Steingass, A Comprehensive Persian-English Dictionary. London: Routledge, 1977, p. 613; see Adam Jacot de Boinod, The Meaning of Tingo. New York: Penguin, 2007, p. 153.

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example, the Bushidoˉ , with the particular confluence of virtues that it incorporates, or the Japanese feudal structure that constituted the place and role of the Samurai in Japanese society). When such a word is missing, then, the absence of a term is just a symptom of a deeper lack. What is responsible for the word being missing is not a limitation in the expressive capacities of ordinary language, but the stable relationships in terms of which the “wonder” or “dream” or “rich and frail jewel” can be that entity that it is.

2.

THINGS AND NOTHINGS

The second oscillating term in the George poem is “thing.” In the broadest sense, “thing” can refer to any entity, anything that “is in any way at all,” whatever “is not nothing” (see, e.g., GA 41: 5; GA 5: 5). If we pull the last line out of context, it is easy to default to this broadest sense of the word “thing.” But if we read it in the context of the poem as a whole, we might be induced to take the word more narrowly. The things that the poet talks about are “wonders,” “dreams,” and “rich and delicate treasures.” These are things that, as we just noted, are foreign to his world. In addition, Heidegger long argued that we need to recognize that nonentities are “given” or otherwise play a role in the disclosure of a world and thus are not absolute nothings. They are not things, hence “nothings,” but they nevertheless shape and structure and open up possibilities for our being in the world. Being itself, for instance, “is no entity, no thing, and no thing-like property, nothing occurrent. But it nevertheless signifies something” (GA 29/30: 471).16 Other examples of things that are not things or entities include language, the world, and modes of being (like the human mode of being, existence). Recognition of such nothings and their role in disclosing the world is a crucial part of Heidegger’s attack on the ontology of the occurrent that he argues has dominated Western Metaphysics since the beginning. Thus “no thing’ in the poem might be referring to such nothings, rather than functioning to deny the existence of ordinary entities.

3.

BEING AND GIVING

All but the most casual reader of Heidegger’s work will recognize that “is” and “be” are paradigmatic instances of oscillating terms for Heidegger. Questions about the meaning of being are always in play for Heidegger. 16

See also GA 10: 104: “But being is not a thing that some one of us takes away and puts to the side. Rather self-withdrawing is the manner that being essentially comes to be, that is, proffers itself as presencing. The withdrawal does not shunt being to the side; rather, self-withdrawing belongs, as self-concealing, in the property of being. Being preserves its propriety in self-revealing insofar as it simultaneously conceals itself as this self-concealing. Self-concealing, the withdrawal, is a manner in which being qua being lasts, proffers itself, that is, vouchsafes itself.”

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A wide range of options for construing this word are available. “Is” or “be” might mean to have any kind of existence whatsoever. Or, as the context of the poem might suggest, “be” might mean “to have a secure, stable presence in the world.”17 But Heidegger identifies other ways to think of something being. The German language has an alternative construction for asserting that something is – one can say: “es gibt,” literally, “it gives” to mean “there is.” As we will see, Heidegger exploited this to talk about things that are, but lack the stability and presence that metaphysics took as definitive of being. Something can be “given,” that is, play a role in the disclosure of the world, without “being,” that is, having stable presence. Finally, it is worth observing, as Heidegger does, that the poem uses the subjunctive rather than the indicative form of the verb “to be.” This allows the verb to be construed as either the present indicative expressed in indirect discourse (“no thing is . . . ”), or an imperative or demand (“no thing may be . . . ”).

4.

INTERPRETING GEORGE’S POEM

With all these potential points of oscillation in play, it should be clear that the poem is now open to a wide range of interpretations. In fact, at various points, in different writings on the poem, Heidegger considers a number of different ways of interpreting the closing lines, depending on how “word” and “no thing” and “be” are understood. One of these interpretations – the one seized on by those commentators who see in Heidegger a linguistic constitutionalist – Heidegger rejects. He accepts several others as part of the productive ambiguity of the phrase. Let’s look at the one he rejects, before turning to the others.

4.1. The Linguistic Constitutionalist Interpretation The first, linguistic constitutionalist reading of the verse understands words as terms – as meaningful linguistic forms of ordinary language. It takes things as any entity whatsoever. And it takes being in the broadest sense possible. The result is to see the verse as declaring the view that nothing at all can exist in any way unless and until there is a term in some ordinary language for referring to the entity. Anticipating that casual readers might mistakenly take the final line of the poem and, along with it, the slogan as an endorsement of just such a crude linguistic constitutionalism,18 17 18

“The only ‘being’ that metaphysics knows is being as stability and presencing” (GA 66: 394). The most egregious case of this is provided by Cristina Lafont, who uses the following passage to try to prove that for Heidegger,” what things are is equated with what is contingently disclosed by a language” (Lafont, Heidegger, Language, and World Disclosure, p. 193). To support her claim that Heidegger believes that we can only encounter things that we can

(continued)

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Heidegger immediately alerts us that we are not to read it in this fashion. I quote at length from Heidegger’s discussion of this last line: We ventured the paraphrase: No thing is where the word is missing. “Thing” is here understood in the traditional comprehensive sense that means any something that is in any way. Taken in this way, even God is a thing. Only when the word is found for the thing is the thing a thing. In this way only is it. Accordingly we must emphasize: no thing is where the word, that is the name, is missing. Only the word provides being to the thing. But how can a mere word achieve this – to bring something into being? The true state of affairs is in fact the other way around. (GA 12: 154, emphasis in original)

Heidegger could hardly be clearer. If the last verse is intended as a flatfooted expression of the view that all entities depend for their very 18

(continued) already name, Lafont quotes this passage, but selectively elides precisely those parts where Heidegger warns against such a reading. In addition, she strings together quotations spread out over several pages – in one case, completing a sentence with a phrase that appears one page and two paragraphs later. Here is Lafont’s use of the passage in question: [Heidegger’s] conclusion is as follows: “The thing is a thing only where the word is found for the thing . . . . The word alone supplies being to the thing [i.e.,] what it is and how it is . . . . Something only is, where the appropriate word names something as existing and in this way institutes the particular entity as such.” Therefore, “the essence of all that is resides in the word. For this reason, the following phrase holds good: language is the house of being” (Lafont, Heidegger, Language, and World Disclosure, pp. 193, quoting Heidegger, UzS, pp. 164–6; ellipses are in Lafont’s text). Here is the passage with the elided warnings restored in bold: [Heidegger’s] conclusion is as follows: “The thing is a thing only where the word is found for the thing . . . . The word alone supplies being to the thing. Yet how can a mere word accomplish this – to bring a thing into being? The true situation is obviously the reverse. Take the sputnik. This thing, if such it is, is obviously independent of that name which was later tacked on to it . . . . We listen to the poem that we read. Did we hear it? Barely. We have merely picked up the last line – and done so almost crudely – and have even ventured to rewrite it into an unpoetical statement: No thing is where the word is lacking. We could go further and propose this statement: Something only is, where the appropriate word names something as existing and in this way institutes the particular entity as such. Does this mean, also, that there is being only where the appropriate word is speaking? Where does the word derive its appropriateness? The poet says nothing about it. But the content of the closing line does after all include the statement: “the essence of all that is resides in the word. For this reason, the following phrase holds good: language is the house of being. By this procedure, we would seem to have adduced from poetry the most handsome confirmation for a principle of thinking which we had stated at some time in the past – and in truth would have thrown everything into utter confusion. We would have reduced poetry to the servant’s role as documentary proof for our thinking, and taken thinking too lightly; in fact we would already have forgotten the whole point: to undergo an experience with language. It takes no great hermeneutic sensitivity to see that Lafont is attributing to Heidegger positions from which he is explicitly distancing himself – positions which are “crude,” which “throw everything into confusion,” and, most importantly, which miss the whole point of the exercise.

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existence on a linguistic term to name them, then it must be wrong. He summarizes as follows: We listen to the poem that we read. Have we heard it? Hardly. We have merely – and almost crudely – seized the last verse and what’s more have rewritten it into an unpoetic assertion: No thing is where the word is missing. We could even go further and advance the assertion: Something is only where the suitable and thus appropriate word names something as being and in this way causes the particular entity as such. Does this mean at the same time: there is only being where the suitable word speaks? From where does the word get its suitability? The poet says nothing about that. But the content of the final verse nevertheless contains the assertion: the being of any particular thing that is resides in the word. Thus the proposition is valid: language is the house of being. Proceeding in this way, we would have supplied the most beautiful confirmation for a proposition of thinking that we pronounced previously – and in truth we would have thrown everything into confusion. We would have reduced poetry to a footnote for thinking and taken thinking too lightly, and also already have forgotten what really matters: namely to have an experience with language. (GA 12: 155–6, emphasis in original)

This first interpretation is thus rejected on a variety of grounds. It takes the concluding lines out of context. It treats the line as an authority to cite or refer to, rather than taking it up as an occasion to have an experience with language. And, devastatingly, it posits an absurd relationship between terms and entities – any entity at all, even God, would be dependent for its existence on there being a term in a human language to name it. The error of the linguistic constitutionalist reading of Heidegger is that it sees him as advancing a changed understanding of the relationship between words and things, without also noting how the understanding of the very nature of words itself is altered by this changed understanding of the relationship between words and things. In fact, on Heidegger’s reading, the central theme of the poem is the question of the nature of the word, as it is illuminated by the poet’s experience with words. The poet gains both a deeper understanding of the relationship between words and things, and the nature of words themselves. A better interpretation of the poem will thus not focus myopically on the final line but will work its way into the experience described by the entire poem, attending to the changes that the poem itself marks in the poet’s way of understanding words.

4.2. Post-Linguistic-Constitutionalist Interpretations According to Heidegger’s interpretation, then, the poem describes a transition from one way of understanding words and language to another. This is a transition, moreover, that we can all make provided we allow ourselves to have an experience with language of the sort the poet describes. At the start of the poem, words are understood simply as a means to present (darstellen) an entity descriptively. When the poet encounters

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something wonderful or dreamlike, something that does not ordinarily belong to his world, he takes the thing to the goddess of fate to learn from her the words and names by which to describe the thing. The poet acts in “unclouded confidence” that he “need only bring the wonders which enchanted him or the dreams which entranced him to the source of language in order to have drawn out of it the words that fit everything to which he had set his mind” (GA 12: 161). He understands his fate, in other words, as a constraint on the particular mode of talking about entities, not on what entities could be encountered, or ultimately on what could be said about them. As for the relationship between entities and things, the poet subscribed to the opinion, and was confirmed in this opinion through the success of his poems, that poetic things, wonders and dreams, would already stand well established in being, on their own and separately; art is only needed to find for them too the word that describes and presents them. At first and for a long time it appeared as if the words were grips that grasp what is already an entity and considered to be an entity, making it substantial, expressing it and in this way helping it to beauty. (GA 12: 161)

This view is clearly a variant of the language-as-a-bridge view, which sees words as modes of access to independently existing entities. On this view, if words contribute anything to the being of the entity, they serve only as beautifying embellishments that dance over things: through the poet’s words, the entity “henceforth shines and blossoms and in this way rules throughout the country as the beautiful” (GA 12: 212). The poet’s task is to find words that will make each entity graspable and substantial enough that others can be directed to it: “he does not want, however, to keep it to himself, but rather wants to descriptively present it. For that purpose, names are required.” Making an entity graspable and substantial, on this view, is not an operation that affects the being of the entity, but rather one that affects our receptivity to the entity by making us able to represent it: “Names are words to present and describe. They deliver what is already an entity to representation” (GA 12: 212). Finally, on this view, the words are themselves entities: “the names which the well contains are regarded as something sleeping, which merely needs to be woken in order to find its application as a descriptive presentation of the thing. The names and words are like a fixed supply which is assigned to the things” (GA 12: 214). The poet’s view of the nature of words and their relationship to entities is shaken, however, when the poet seeks words for a “rich and delicate jewel.” The words for a descriptive presentation of this thing cannot be found, and, consequently, the jewel escapes from the poet’s hand – it cannot be contained within his world. Heidegger emphasizes that, contrary to the linguistic constitutionalist interpretation of the poem, “the jewel escapes. But at the same time it by no means disintegrates into nothingness.

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It remains a treasure which, however, the poet may never hold within his country” (GA 12: 214–5). These details of the poem must be attended to in understanding the significance of the conclusion “no thing may be” in the final line. Heidegger considers two possible ways of understanding what has happened here (these are different but not exclusive possibilities, and part of the productive ambiguity of the poem comes from keeping them both in play). One way to take the “no thing may be” is to see it as an indicative statement (German uses the subjunctive tense for indicatives in indirect discourse): “no thing is where the word is lacking.” But since the thing does not dissolve into absolute nothingness but escapes from the insecure grasp of the poet, we must conclude that “being,” here, is the being of the metaphysical tradition: stable enduring presence. On this reading, then, the poem is teaching us that words bestow stable presence on entities. But along with this changed understanding of the relation between words and entities comes a changed understanding of the nature of the word. The word is no longer thought of as a term, an entity (a tool for representation) that is correlated with other existing entities. The word is now understood as the nexus of relations that allows an entity to exist at all. This nexus of relations in turn must be sought in the world’s “fate,” as it is the fate that is unable to allow the entity to be descriptively presented. Fate now is seen, not just as a linguistic heritage in the narrow sense, but also as including the inherited referential network of our world, and thus the things with their constitutive possibilities that can manifest themselves in that world. As Heidegger explains, this fate needs to be understood not as a necessitating but as an enabling configuration: Of the use of the word “fate” in talk of the fate of being, the following should be noted: We usually understand by “fate” (Geschick) that which is determined and imposed through fate: a sad, an evil, a good fate. This meaning is a derivative one. For the root meaning of the German word for fate originally says: to prepare, arrange, bring something to the place where it belongs, thus also to permit and instruct; in German to beschicken a house or a room means: to maintain it in the right organization, arranged and put in order. (GA 10: 90)

So a “word is lacking” on this reading when there is no nexus of relationships, no arrangement or organization of the connections between entities, that would allow the entity to be at home and belong in the world. Without a stable nexus, then, the entity could not attain being, that is, stable presence in the world. When George writes of the word lacking or, literally, “breaking off,” he does not mean simply that we lack a term to designate a thing. Rather, he is referring to a situation where the constitutive relations are lacking for a thing to show itself as the thing it is. “The word is lacking,” Heidegger explains, means “it is not at our disposal [verfügbar].” Keeping in mind here that the word is a stabilized nexus of relationships, this could

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occur in different ways. It could be that the other entities, events, activities, and so on to which the thing is essentially related are lacking. Or it could mean that we do not have the skills or dispositions for picking up the apt or fitting relations that constitute a thing. Heidegger unfortunately considers very few concrete examples of entities that receive their being from a word. We need to pay close attention to the subtleties of Heidegger’s discussion of his most developed example (especially since a sloppy reading of this example is used to buttress the linguistic constitutionalist interpretation of Heidegger – see footnote 18 above). Heidegger writes: Take the Sputnik. This thing, if such it is, is surely independent of this name which was subsequently attached to it. But perhaps it is ordered differently with that type of things – with rockets, atom bombs, reactors and the such – than it is with that which the poet names in the first stanza of the first triad: Wonder from far off or a dream I brought to my country’s border Still, innumerable people consider this “thing” Sputnik to be a wonder also, this “thing,” which races wildly around in a worldless “world”-space; and for many it was and is still a dream, wonder and dream of modern technology, who would not be ready in the least to accept the thought that the word provides the thing its being. Not words but rather actions count in the calculation of the planetary number crunching. What use are poets . . . ? And yet! Let’s for once refrain from hurried thinking. Is not even this “thing” what it is and how it is in the name of its name? Indeed it is. If that hurry in the sense of the greatest possible technological increase of speed, in whose ambit only the modern machines and equipment can be what they are – if that hurry had not challenged human beings and arranged them at its command, if the word of this arranging had not spoken, then there also would be no Sputnik. No thing is where the word is missing. Therefore it remains a mysterious matter: the word of language and its relation to the thing, to any thing that is – that it is and how it is. (GA 12: 154–5)

We must ask, then, how is Heidegger suggesting that we understand “word” here? It is clearly not understood as a term of a natural language. He does not claim that Sputnik depends for its existence on the word “Sputnik”, or any other noun in German, English, or Russian that we might use to refer to the spaceship. Indeed, as Heidegger acknowledges elsewhere, the existence of synonymous terms and expressions in a language, as well as across languages, is itself evidence that the being of an entity is independent of and prior to the terms we use to talk about it. For how else could we recognize the terms as synonyms? But precisely that which characterizes the table as a table – that which it is and according to its what-being distinguishes it from the window – precisely this is independent in a certain manner from the words and their language-specific and vocal form. For the word of another language is as a vocal and written form different,

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and nevertheless it means the same thing, “table.” This “one and the same” [essence] first confers a goal and support to the agreement in linguistic usage. Accordingly the essence must already be posited in advance, in order to be expressible as the same in the same word. (GA 45: 80)

We thus need to reflect on the fact that the word Heidegger identifies as responsible for Sputnik’s being is not “Sputnik” but die Eile, hurry. In terms of the distinction we outlined above, the spaceship depends for its existence not on any term but on a word. And this same word is a setting in order that is responsible for the being not just of Sputnik, but all technological machines and equipment. For clearly the Russian space program does not depend for the existence of its spaceships on a German word for “hurry” (I think it is obvious that Heidegger does not mean that the German scientists working in the Russian space program were ordering their workers to hurry up). Indeed, the word is not spoken by human being, but rather to human beings. This passage, if we take Heidegger seriously and do not hurry past it dismissively, calls on us to reflect on what it means for a word to speak, to command us, to order us and things – this is not the same as a person speaking a word. But in any event, it is clear that on this reading, the being of a thing does not depend on the term we use to refer to it, but it does depend on the word, the constitutive relations, of the “time and space” in which it appears. The word on which Sputnik depends, then, is the drive to hurry – to increased efficiency – that organizes and sets in order all the relationships within the technological world. This is the “name of names,” that is, the organizing style of all the particular nodes of relationship that determine individual entities as the things they are. In the Sputnik example, Heidegger alludes to the network of relationship that constitutes something as a Sputnik. Unless there is a world organized by a certain technological drive for speed and efficiency, the constitutive relations between things will not settle into the kind of patterns typical of technological devices. The existence of the term “Sputnik” is not decisive here; what is decisive is a mode of relating things that establishes certain nodes of relations – the hurried and harried style of technological life. Sticking with the interpretation of the closing line as an indicative statement, there is yet another way to take the “no thing may be,” one that takes being in a postmetaphysical sense to mean “contributing to the disclosure of the world.” This interpretation grants that even something absent can be when it, through its absence, plays a role in world disclosure. “When the word is lacking – beyng denies itself. But in this denial it manifests itself in its refusal – as silence, as the ‘in between,’ as there. Now for the first time essential nearness” (GA 85: 72, emphasis in original). “Where the word is lacking, no thing is” now means the lack of a word is what allows the world-disclosive nothings to be, to play their role as the

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silence and opening that allows entities to stand out into prominence. As we indicated above, such nothings “are” by giving a world while withdrawing into the background. Language in Heidegger’s originary sense as the structure of relations is a paradigm case of withdrawinggiving. The structure of relations, with its coherent style, withdraws in favor of the entities that are what they are only in terms of the relations. So what we attend to are the things themselves, rather than the relational structure. The essence of a thing, being, befits neither the “is” nor the “word,” and it absolutely does not befit the relationship between the “is” and the word, to which it is given in each case to bestow an “is.” All the same, neither the “is” nor the word and its saying can be exiled into the void of sheer nothingness. What does the poetic experience with the word show, if thinking thinks about it? It points at something worthy of thought . . . . It shows something which is given, and all the same “is” not. To that which is given, the word also belongs, perhaps not merely also, but rather above all else and even in such a way that in the word, in its essence that which gives conceals itself. Of the word then we may, thinking appropriately, never say: it is, but rather – it gives – and not in the sense that “it” gives words, but rather that the word itself gives. The word. That which is giving. What then does it give? According to the poetic experience and the oldest tradition of thinking the word gives: being. Then we would have to seek the word thinkingly in that “it, that gives” as the giving itself, but never the given. (GA 12: 182)

On this interpretation, we simultaneously rethink the nature of words and the dependence of words on things. Words are not entities, they are “nothings.” But they are not “sheer nothingness.” They lack metaphysical being, stable presence, it is true. But they nevertheless “are” in the sense of giving us a world. Heidegger explains: This simple, ungraspable state of affairs that we name with the phrase “there is a word, and it, the word, gives,” reveals itself as that which is authentically worthy of thought, for whose determination all measure is still missing. Perhaps the poet knows the measure. But his way of writing poetry has learned renunciation and nevertheless did not lose anything through the renunciation. Meanwhile, the jewel escapes him nonetheless. Certainly. But it escapes in the way that the word is denied. The denial is a withholding. In it appears precisely what is astounding about the power that the word owns. The jewel in no way dissolves into a nothing that is good for nothing. The word does not deflate into the flat inability to say. The poet does not reject the word. The jewel, however, withdraws into hiding in that which is mysteriously astonishing, which is to be marveled at. (GA 12: 183)

The poem succeeds through language, after all, at directing us toward an experience that cannot be descriptively presented. It does this by orienting and directing us toward the constitutive relations that allow entities to be. Thus, with a changed understanding of the relationship between his words and things, and the deeper understanding of what

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words are, the poet also arrives at a different sense of his task. No longer does poetry only represent and beautify and make shine what already exists. It can also attune us to that which does not belong in presence in our world. The poet thus does not give up on the word. But he uses his words differently. They illuminate the region of the word’s absence and thus attune us and guide us to the phenomenon, rather than descriptively presenting it. On the prior reading of “may be,” then, the lesson of the poem is that words (whatever they are) are required for the stable presence of entities in a world. On the current reading, the lesson is that the nonpresence of words (constitutive relational nodes) is required for them to “be,” that is, give entities. Words are the relations that maintain entities in being, but they are not themselves entities. This latter insight directs us to yet another way to take the “no thing may be” – as a kind of impersonal imperative, rather than an indicative claim. The last line gives the content of the renunciation the poet learns in the penultimate line. The poet henceforth will “not permit any thing to be where the word is lacking” (GA 12: 157). That is, he gives up the view of the relationship between words and things that he held before, and renounces the expectation of always being able to find a descriptive presentation of things. In so doing, he stops forcing entities into a world where they do not belong. In renunciation, he learns that a world has a normative style, within which some things simply are not at home. Language is the house of being, then, in the sense that each constitutive structure of relations offers a home for some possibilities while excluding others: “a world only becomes a world in the word, that means.” Heidegger explains: “a world is at home in the language.” Language is the house of being means language is “the house of the world” (GA 16: 547). The world has a house in language because particular styles of being belong to particular referential structures. The poet’s renunciation amounts to letting entities be what they are, and releasing them when the conditions do not exist for them to be. But there is more to the poet’s renunciation than this. He also stops expecting everything that plays a disclosive role in the world to have existence on the order of entities. In renunciation, he allows the nothings to be. In particular, Heidegger argues, the poem teaches us that the word may be what it is only when it is not forced into a descriptive presentation. The poet no longer thinks of words as terms, and thus imagines them as having a clear and definite content: Words at first easily appear as terms. For their part, terms first appear as spoken in a word sound. This in turn is at first a noise. It is sensorily perceived. The sensory is taken as what is immediately given. The word’s meaning is associated with the sound. This component of the word is sensorily perceivable. What is non-sensory in the terms is their sense, their meaning. One speaks therefore of sense-giving acts that endow the word sounds with a sense. The terms are then either filled

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with sense or more meaningful. Terms are like buckets and barrels, from which one can draw the sense. (GA 8: 87)

The ordinary conception of language, the one the poet begins with, thinks of words as terms with an associated sense, a sense that is fixed and that has a more or less determinate content. The terms, “sense-containers,” can be arrayed scientifically in dictionaries, which set forth their two constituents: the “sound form” and “sense content” (ibid.). In the end, the poet takes to heart the thought that our words are wellsprings: “words are not terms, and they are thus not like buckets and barrels from which we draw some occurrent content. Words are wellsprings, which ‘telling’” – the poetic and thoughtful use of language (see GA 8: 86)– “excavates, and which need to be found and dug up again and again, which are easily filled back in again, but also from time to time gush up unexpectedly. Without the constantly renewed journey to the wellspring, the buckets and barrels remain empty, or their contents remain stale” (GA 8: 88). Words, constitutive nodes of relations, are never completely within our grasp. We cannot capture their sense with a name or designating term, but at best, we highlight some portion of the rich web of relations they draw together. Thought and poetry, the essential uses of language (see GA 8: 86), do not pretend to possess exhaustively the meaning of the words. They uncover the meanings of the world through a tireless effort of excavation. Part of the renunciation the poet learns, then, is giving up the pretension to mastery or control of words – because words are not the kind of thing that lie completely within our control. The encounter with George’s poem is meant to illustrate for us what it is like to treat language as a wellspring. As we give the words the space they need to oscillate, the poem guides us to an underlying structure of meanings that illuminates our relationship to the words we speak. And it encourages us to reflect on the way that our language provides a home for certain entities, experiences, ranges of human possibilities, and so on. CONCLUSION

We can now bring to a close the question with which we began. What does the slogan mean – how is language the house of being? In his 1959 “Dialogue on Language,” one of the best and most detailed accounts of the slogan, Heidegger noted, “for a long time, I have not liked to use the word ‘language’ when I reflect on its essence” (GA 12: 136). The exchange that follows in the dialogue is crucial for understanding the slogan. Heidegger’s interlocutor asks, “but can you find a more appropriate word?” Heidegger responds, “I think I have found it. I would like, however, to protect it from being used as a familiar title and from being distorted into a designation for a concept.” The “more appropriate” word is

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“saying.” Heidegger proceeds to explain saying in terms of unconcealment – it means, he says, “the same as to show in the sense of: letting appear and letting seem, but that, however, in the manner of a hinting . . . . ‘saying,’ then, is not the name for human speaking . . . but for essencing.” In its core, most fundamental meaning, “language” in the slogan is not “human speaking” – it is not the words, noises and marks, the rules, and so on that we normally think of when we talk about language. Instead, “language” in the slogan means “saying,” which Heidegger defines in terms of “a showing.” But this is not just any old showing. The language or saying he is interested in is that showing that lets things appear and seem to be something. It does this by establishing the ways, the primary relations by which a thing is understood as the thing it is. Language is thus tied to what Heidegger calls “essencing,” the way that essences are established as that on the basis of which entities can be what they are. The slogan is thus meant to direct our reflection to the way that some relations are given priority in determining the essence of a thing within a particular world. Saying enables particular human languages by giving them the salient significations to which terms can (but need not) accrue. So saying is the “house of being” because saying determines the way that things are able to show up and be expressed in our ordinary language. But this is consistent with holding, as Heidegger does, that some things cannot be appropriately said in a language because the way they are permitted to show up would distort them or would not allow them to come into their own. Thus certain activities, self-understandings, projects, hopes, and so on are “at home” in some languages and not at home in others. “Language is the house of being” means, then, that a world is kept and preserved by a consolidation of the relationships that determine a thing as the thing it is. It is this settling, keeping, preserving of relations that lets us inhabit, come to be at home in, a world: “the domain of language is domain where all relationships of things and essence play with each other and mirror each other” (GA 79: 168). It is not the terms and associated concepts of ordinary language that house being. It is language understood as the fitted structure of relations: “language is not a collection of terms for the designation of individual familiar things, but rather the original ringing out of the truth of a world” (GA 6.1: 325). Thus, the slogan points to a relational ontology, in which the constitution of the world is determined by the (temporary) stabilization of salient nodes of constitutive relationships. And this, in turn, highlights the idea that housing being means providing it a home, a coherent style of organizing the world. Things and forms of life can thus either be at home in a language or distorted and threatened by it. All of this supports the contention that, even in his later works, Heidegger is not a linguistic constitutionalist (and thus holds a position in box C of Chart 6.2). This is because originary language is something that

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cannot be grasped by ordinary linguistic categories and concepts. And words are not something that articulate the world conceptually, even if they do constitute entities as the entities they are by affording them a moreor-less stable structure of meanings to inhabit. To complete the analysis, though, we would need to work out with more care the relationship between ordinary language and originary language – a task to be deferred.

7 The Revealed Word and World Disclosure Heidegger and Pascal on the Phenomenology of Religious Faith

In what may be his most concise explanation of the nature of phenomenology, Heidegger explains that it consists in grasping “its objects in such a way that everything about them which is up for discussion must be treated by exhibiting them directly and demonstrating them directly” (GA 2: H. 35). That means that phenomenology always proceeds from out of a direct experience of the objects in question, and it attempts to address and resolve problems in philosophy by producing a direct apprehension of the relevant phenomena. A phenomenology will be in order, then, whenever a problem is affected by the fact that the object under discussion is something that “proximally and for the most part does not show itself” (GA 2: H. 35), or when its appearance is distorted by theories or concepts inappropriate to the object in question. It is for this reason that, when it came to religious faith, Heidegger accords to phenomenology a “corrective” role, meaning that it clarifies and corrects the content of theological concepts. This is necessary to the extent that these concepts are surreptitiously drawn from a “pre-Christian” context, and drawn in such a way as to obscure the true essence of Christian faith. Faith itself does not need philosophy – philosophical argumentation cannot establish faith, nor even lend it support. At most, philosophy can clear away theoretical distortions that create obstacles to the practice of religious faith. Earlier versions of this paper were presented at “Questioning Religion,” The British Society for Phenomenology Summer Conference, the University of Greenwich, July 13, 2003, and at the University of Nevada, Reno, on September 24, 2004. I would like to thank all those present on those occasions for their helpful comments and responses to this paper. My thinking on these matters has benefitted immensely from Piotr Hoffmann’s extensive, detailed, and pointed disagreements with my interpretation of Pascal. Piotr will undoubtedly be disappointed that I persist in the mainlines of my noncognitivist reading of faith in Pascal. But I am nevertheless grateful and indebted to him for forcing me to enrich and expand my appreciation of the complexity of these issues in Pascal’s thought.

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In this paper, I want to focus on a distortion of faith that is produced by a particular view of language. The relationship to language, to the revealed word, is, of course, a central and essential element to many faiths, including the Christian faith. As all phenomenology ought to grow out of experience, however, we ought first to try to bring an experience of religious faith into view. Toward this end, let us start with Pascal’s description of the Christian life: Not only is it through Jesus Christ alone that we know God, but it is only through Jesus Christ that we know ourselves. We know life and death only through Jesus Christ. Without Jesus Christ we do not know what our life, nor our death, nor God, nor ourselves really are. In the same way without the Scriptures, which have Jesus Christ as their sole object, we know nothing and see only darkness and confusion in the nature of God and in nature itself.1

In what follows, I will focus on two parts of this description of the Christian life. First, that to be a Christian – to have faith in Christ – is to experience the world (including nature and our selves) as revealed in and through Jesus Christ. Faith, on this view, is not primarily an epistemic state. Second, that this experience of the world depends on having a certain relationship to the scriptures – in particular, one in which they teach one how to see. Heidegger, incidentally, shares both elements of Pascal’s view: the essence of faith can formally be sketched as a way of existence of human Dasein that, according to its own testimony . . . arises not from Dasein or spontaneously through Dasein, but rather from that which is revealed in and with this way of existence, from what is believed. For the “Christian” faith, that being which is primarily revealed to faith, and only to it, and which, as revelation, first gives rise to faith, is Christ, the crucified God . . . . The crucifixion, however, and all that belongs to it is a historical event, and indeed this event gives testimony to itself as such in its specifically historical character only for faith in the scriptures. One “knows” about this fact only in believing. (GA 9: 52/Pathmarks, p. 44)

For Heidegger too, in other words, faith is not an epistemic state but a mode of existence that reveals the world, and Christian faith arises out of the world as it is revealed through faith in the scriptural word. Note the circular character of both Heidegger’s and Pascal’s descriptions – faith is a way of living in the world that arises from the world being disclosed or revealed through faith. To have faith, then, the world must be able to support a certain mode of existence – certain practices, dispositions, and so on – but the world only shows up in a such a way that it can support that mode of existence to one who already has the mode of existence. There is an obvious circularity here, but it is not a vicious circle. We are familiar with similar forms of circularity. You could say, for example, that being a baseball player is 1

Blaise Pascal, Pensées (H. Levi, Trans.). Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1995, §36; from now on referred to as P in the text, followed by the section number.

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a way of living in the world that arises from the world being disclosed through people (having the skills and dispositions for) playing baseball. But the circularity does present a problem – namely, how to get into the circle in the first place. The answer, for both Heidegger and Pascal, is found in the role played by the revealed word – the scriptures – in introducing people into the life of faith.2 I will argue that to account for this understanding of the relation between faith and the scriptures, we need a different view of the function of language than is now commonplace. Language is typically understood on a communicative model, according to which, language is a means by which we communicate intentional contents to one another. If we assimilate the revealed word to this model, then it, too, is taken to function as a kind of speech act. Faith, as a consequence, finds its fulfillment in the satisfaction of the speech act – for example, verification of assertions about the incarnation of God in Christ, or his crucifixion and resurrection. But with such claims, the verification is perpetually deferred. In addition, on the communicative model, we are not entitled to assert or assent to a proposition unless we undertake the “discursive commitments” entailed by that proposition – that we, for example, are prepared to offer proof of or justification for the proposition in question, or that we at a minimum understand and can explain what other propositions we are committed to in virtue of accepting the one in question. But with their acceptance of claims about, for example, the creation or the resurrection, the faithful find it impossible to fulfil such rational obligations. This makes them look and sometime even feel as if their faith requires them to abandon a commitment to rationality. But all this arises, I shall argue, from the mistaken belief that religious assertions are in the game of communicating propositions. There is a different view of language, only implicit in Pascal’s thought but developed in the later Heidegger, that is compatible with Pascal’s phenomenology of Christian life – a view of language, in other words, free of the background assumptions about language that subtly distort the way faith in the revealed word is typically understood today. The aim here is to illuminate an understanding of language that provides the background against which religious faith can be seen for what it genuinely is. On this view, language is understood in terms of world disclosure, and the revealed word is taken to function by orienting us to the world in such a way that it can disclose itself to us anew. If faith succeeds in disclosing a world, and empowering us to live in the world, then the fulfillment of faith is not deferred but can be confirmed through our experience of inhabiting a world. This is so, even if we are not in a position to verify any of the central assertions made in the revealed word. 2

This circular structure makes religious faith analogous to a hermeneutic approach to a text. My thanks to Steven Crowell and Taylor Carman for pointing this fact out to me.

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Before turning to the role of language in religious faith, however, I would like to develop in more detail how faith can be understood in terms of world disclosure. As Pascal’s phenomenology of religious faith is much better developed than Heidegger’s, I will focus on Pascal’s description of the Christian life.

1.

FAITH AS A MODE OF EXISTENCE

“Faith” is often taken as naming an epistemic state. In particular, it is heard as denoting a degree of confidence in the truth of a proposition – typically, one in which the subjective probability assigned to the truth of the sentence is greater than one half but less than one. One has faith that, for example, God exists when one has confidence that the proposition “God exists” is more likely true than not true. For thinkers like Pascal and Kierkegaard, however, such a degree of confidence is a derivative of faith understood in existential terms – confidence in the truth of certain propositions grows out of the way that faith in Christ produces a changed experience of the world. “The Christian thesis,” Kierkegaard wrote, “goes not: intelligere ut credam, nor credere ut intelligam. No it goes: Act according to the commands and orders of Christ; do the Father’s will – and you will become a believing-one.”3 Pascal, in a similar way, noted that “it is clear that those with a keen faith in their hearts can see straightaway that everything which exists is the work of the God they worship.” On the other hand, “those in whom this light [of faith] has been extinguished . . . , scrutinising with all their intelligence everything they see in nature which can lead them to this knowledge . . . find only obscurity and darkness” (P §644). Thus faith is to be understood, in the first instance, as the state of those who are able to act and live in a Christian way. Without an ability to live a Christian life and inhabit a Christian world, mere belief in God or the truth of religious claims is not faith, it is superstition. Superstition is belief in the existence of entities and events that do not manifest themselves in the ordinary course of experience. My belief that my son will clean his room is not a superstition because, while the degree of probability that he will clean his room might be objectively low, children cleaning their rooms are events that do occur in the normal course of affairs in the world (or, at least, that’s what other parents tell me). By contrast, if I hold the belief that there is a God in spite of the fact that there is no place for God in my experience of the world, then the belief is a superstition. It is not just that there is a low probability that God does exist, it is rather that, 3

Søren Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers, vol. 3 (Howard V. Hong & Edna H. Hong, Eds. and Trans.). Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1975, p. 363. I am grateful to James Faulconer for bringing this passage to my attention.

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given my experience of the world, it is utterly incomprehensible how there could be a God. Of course, we do not typically use the word “faith” to denote a mere mental state of belief. Faith also involves actually relying on or having confidence in the object of one’s faith. We would not ordinarily say of someone that she has faith in something if she is incapable of acting in reliance on that thing. Pascal captures this by noting that faith is a “disposition within [the] heart” (P §412). But the idea of a disposition of the heart goes beyond simply being disposed to act in a certain way. It also includes being primed to feel or experience things in a certain way. If we say that someone has a “sunny disposition,” we are saying that she responds to all situations cheerfully, and generally focuses on the bright side of even bad events. So what kind of disposition is Christian faith? It involves both a kind of feeling or readiness to experience things in such and such a way, and a kind of practical orientation or readiness to act in a certain way. Pascal gets at this in a backhanded way in the following passage: There are few true Christians. Even as far as faith goes. There are many who believe, but through superstition. There are many who do not believe, but through licentiousness. There are few in between. I do not include those who lead a truly devout life, nor all those who believe through a feeling of the heart. (P §210; cf.§142)

We would not say, in other words, that someone has Christian faith who is unable to live a Christian life. This is true, even if that person had a rationally grounded knowledge of God.4 So faith is located in the existential register, meaning the presence or absence of faith is a matter of the kind of stance one takes on life, the practices one engages in, the ways one feels about things. True faith is found in one’s disposition (feelings of the heart) and the actions that arise from those dispositions (living a devout life). True disbelief, by the same token, is found in a corrupt and licentious life (taking pleasure in what is not pleasing to God, doing actions that God condemns). Philosophers from Aristotle to Hubert Dreyfus have shown how, in developing habits and practicing actions for dealing with a particular domain, we acquire skillful dispositions so attuned to that domain that we can perceive things of which we were oblivious before. As I practice baking bread, for example, I gradually become sensitized to notice things like texture and elasticity in the dough, fine variations in color as the bread browns in the oven, and so on. The skills allow me to experience the world in a way that I could not without them. For Pascal, religious faith works the same way. He explains: 4

Pensées, §690: “Such knowledge,” Pascal argues, “is useless and sterile. Even if someone could be persuaded that the proportions between numbers are intangible, eternal truths, dependent on an earlier truth in which they exist, called God, I would not consider that he had made much progress towards his salvation.”

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You want to find faith and you do not know the way? You want to cure yourself of unbelief and you ask for the remedies? Learn from those who have been bound like you, and who now wager all they have. They are people who know the road you want to follow and have been cured of the affliction of which you want to be cured. Follow the way by which they began: by behaving just as if they believed, taking holy water, having masses said, etc. That will make you believe quite naturally, and according to your animal reactions. (P §680)

Acquiring the skills of religious living, and thus having the dispositions to feel and act appropriately in the world that appears when one has those skills, is then an enabling condition of having faith. Notice that this description replicates the circularity in Heidegger’s and Pascal’s earlier descriptions of faith – faith is “a way of existence that arises from the world revealed by this way of existence.” At the same time, this does not mean that faith is reducible to these skills. Something further might well be needed in addition to having these skills – perhaps the grace of God in changing our fundamental dispositions. But the point here is simply that the fact that faith must be grounded in practices rather than cognitive assent changes the kind of proof we can demand of faith. Faith will then not be amenable to proof in the way one verifies an epistemic state or proposition (i.e., demonstrating that it is true). But it will have the kind of confirmation or success conditions that all other skills have. Baking skills are confirmed or successful when they allow me to cope with the kitchen. Religious faith will be confirmed or successful when it gives me the practices and dispositions I need to cope with the world as a whole. As Father Zosima notes in Dostoevsky’s classic depiction of existential Christianity, “one cannot prove anything here, but it is possible to be convinced.” He goes on to explain that one is convinced “by the experience of active love . . . . The more you succeed in loving, the more you’ll be convinced of the existence of God and the immortality of your soul. And if you reach complete selflessness in the love of your neighbour, then undoubtedly you will believe, and no doubt will even be able to enter your soul.”5 The confirmation and conviction come, in other words, through one’s success in living in the world in the way indicated by faith. To argue for the necessity of religious faith, as thinkers like Pascal, Kierkegaard, and Dostoevsky do, however, one would need to show not just that faith allows one successfully to live in the world but that, without it, one cannot cope successfully with the world. Pascal and other existential Christians do this by arguing that all men are in despair (whether they realize this or not), and that it is only the Christian who, through the saving grace of Christ, is able to resolve that despair. We have already seen that, for Pascal, Christian faith is such that the Christian understands the nature of the world 5

Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov (R. Pevear & L. Volokhonsky, Trans.). New York: Vintage Classics, 1990, p. 56.

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and herself through Christ. Christ shows us that we have a dual nature of wretchedness and greatness. Our greatness is found in the fact that we long for happiness, the good, truth, justice, love, glory, and eternity, and that we have an understanding that there is a good, truth, and eternity (even if we cannot quite grasp intellectually what the good, the true, the eternal, etc., is). Our wretchedness is seen in the fact that, rather than pursuing what can bring us happiness (good, truth, justice, love, glory, eternity, etc.), our concupiscence drives us to seek transitory pleasures. And our reason shows us that we are not happy, that we do not know the good, truth, or justice; that we are not worthy of love or glory; and that, in the face of death, our eternity is in doubt. The inability to reconcile this dual nature, to find anything in this world that could satisfy our longing for greatness, leads to a despair that many feel, and which others attest to by their efforts to find diversion in various pursuits and pleasures. It is only faith in Christ, Pascal believes, that can ultimately resolve the contradiction of our essential natures.6 But before addressing that issue in more detail, there is another feature of our initial characterization of Christianity that we need to address. We said at the outset that, for both Pascal and Heidegger, Christian faith is (1) a worlddisclosive mode of existence that (2) arises from a particular relationship to the scriptures. We have discussed this first feature of Christianity but not the second. In fact, the way we have discussed the first problematizes the second, since, as we have seen, the mode of existence arises not from the acceptance of religious-dogmatic propositions but from the development of religious practices. Moreover, for Pascal, a cognizance of, and assent to, the propositions contained in the scriptures is not enough for religious faith. For example, merely assenting to scriptural claims regarding the resurrection, when done so against the background of an experience of the world in causal terms, remains mere superstition – a belief that God will intervene as a cause in the causal order of a universe that has no place for God. But the revealed claims one finds in the scriptures seem to be propositions that are addressed to the understanding. How then could the scriptures, which seem to be primarily concerned to communicate certain propositions to the believers, be essential to Christian faith? Pascal gives us only a few clues to his thinking on the matter. To this point, I have perhaps been overemphasizing the noncognitivist grounds of Pascal’s experience of the revealed word. But having done so, I think we can now consider the proper and limited place of reason in Pascal’s account. Commenting on Acts 17:11, for example (“These were more noble than those in Thessalonica, in that they received the word with all readiness of mind, and searched the scriptures daily, whether those things were so”), Pascal notes that “the way of God, who disposes all things gently, is to implant 6

For a characteristic discussion of these features of Pascal’s view, see Pensées, §164.

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religion into our mind through reason and into our heart through grace” (P §203). Just preceding this passage, Pascal observed: We must know where to doubt, where to affirm and where to submit when necessary. Whoever does not do this does not understand the force of reason. There are some who fall short of these three principles, either by affirming that everything can be demonstrated, lacking all knowledge of the demonstration; or doubting everything, lacking the knowledge of where to submit, or by submitting to everything, lacking the knowledge of where to discriminate. (P §201)

In the conduct of our lives, in other words, there are appropriate places to doubt and to seek a rational justification. But there are also times where this is inappropriate. And to doubt, or to insist on rational demonstration where one ought simply to submit, is to destroy the disposing power of faith: “if we submit everything to reason, our religion will contain nothing mysterious” (P §204). To a cognitivist ear, that does not sound like such a loss. But for Pascal, the mysteries of religion, for all their rational incomprehensibility, lend to life an order and coherence. He illustrates this with the example of the mystery of the doctrine of original sin. The idea that we are guilty and condemned for the sin of another “seems not only impossible to us, but also quite unjust. For what is more contrary to the laws of our wretched justice than eternally to damn a child with no will of its own for a sin in which the child has so small a part to play that it was committed six thousand years before the child came into existence?” (P §164). If the doctrine is irrationalizable and incomprehensible, however, it also makes sense of a central feature of human existence – our simultaneous depravity and transcendent dignity. And so, Pascal concludes, “without this most incomprehensible of all mysteries we are incomprehensible to ourselves. Within this gnarled chasm lie the twists and turns of our condition. So, humanity is more inconceivable without this mystery than this mystery is conceivable to humanity” (ibid.). Note that Pascal does not claim even a transcendental-style proof or verification of the mystery. It remains inconceivable, incomprehensible. Indeed, to try to prove it would probably distort our understanding of God’s nature and justice or the nature of culpability. Nothing would distort our picture of justice more, for instance, than to make the principles of justice cohere with the idea that someone is culpable for the wrongdoing of another. The mystery works best, then, precisely by being kept as a mystery and accepted as such. And yet, by simply accepting the doctrine and letting it work on us, we can begin to get a grip on a key existential feature of human existence. If we return, then, to the commentary on Acts, we see that the revealed word has a power to work simultaneously on our minds and our hearts. There is a place in Pascal’s picture for cognition. But it is a limited place, and the cognitive content of the word works alongside a quite different and independent force that the word has on our hearts. The principle by which this force operates is not reason but grace. The idea seems to be that simply by

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dedicated and loving attention to the scriptures, our dispositions will gradually be shaped by them. Another passage likewise indicates the view that scriptural assertions somehow act on the heart – the dispositions – rather than or in addition to the mind. Considering “the objection that Scripture has no order,” Pascal responds by noting, “The heart has its order, the mind has its own, which is based on principles and demonstration. The heart has another one. We do not prove that we ought to be loved by setting forth the causes of love; that would be absurd” (P §329). The idea here is that scriptural assertions do not function as arguments, and call for a different response on our part than ordinary assertions. It is in this altered response that the revealed word will shape our dispositions rather than our understanding. But how they are meant to do this is something that Pascal never really explains. To make sense of these clues about the role of scriptures in the Christian life, we will need to be able to see assertions as engaged in something other than the communication of propositions.

2.

LANGUAGE AND THE REVEALED WORD

On the communicative view of language, the essence of language is to communicate a propositional content. Different kinds of speech acts do different things by communicating a propositional content. But the communication of a propositional content is common to them all. This view has formed the background to a variety of attacks on religious belief – for example, A. J. Ayer’s famous argument against the meaningfulness of religious claims, given the inability of the faithful to specify the propositional content of those claims in such a way that they would be verifiable.7 Even if we reject Ayer’s verificationism, thinking of language on the communicative model imposes on all who would assent to certain assertions an obligation to be ready and willing to cash out the propositional content of those assertions – on pain of being shown to be speaking nonsense. It is quite possible, however, that the function of certain religious claims is actually distorted if they are cashed out in this manner. Rather than say more about this thought directly, however, I want to focus on a related consequence of the communicative view of language, namely, the pragmatic implications. These implications have been most recently and clearly articulated by Robert Brandom. According to Brandom, to perform a speech act is to undertake certain practical commitments. “At the core of discursive practice is the game of giving and asking for reasons.”8 To assent to an assertion, for example, is to put oneself in the position of being responsible 7

8

See A. J. Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic. New York: Dover Publications, 1952, especially chapter 6. Brandom, Robert, Making It Explicit. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994, p. 159.

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to answer challenges to the truth of the assertion, and to make further assertions that justify or tend to prove the truth of the original assertion, and so on. This idea seems on the face of it unobjectionable – indeed, perhaps trivially true and, I suspect, very widely if tacitly accepted. But this truism could be elevated into a falsism by insisting that an unwillingness or inability to play the game in certain instances deprives the claim of any meaning. To the degree that being a Christian is, in fact, determined through assenting to certain assertions contained in the scriptures, the idea of discursive commitments subtly informs most interpretations of what it is to be a Christian. The Bible, without question, contains a number of assertions to which a believer is expected to assent: “In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth” (Gen. 1: 1), or Christ “was buried, and he arose again the third day” (1 Cor. 15: 4). A scriptural assertion has done its job, one might say, if we understand the proposition to which God (or the prophets) is committed in making the assertion, and we believe it, meaning we accept it as true. This is because the most important thing about assertions and beliefs – the conditions under which they succeed – is being true. An assertion or belief is true, of course, if it agrees with the way things really are. On the communicative account, therefore, scriptural assertions are fulfilled when they are true, and our relationship to the scriptural assertions is fulfilled when we accept that they are true. In such acceptance, we commit ourselves to answering for the truthfulness of the assertion. The problem for the Christian is that, for so many of the assertions to which a believer assents, it simply lies beyond our ability to justify or prove them. Scriptural assertions are empirically challenging because they often are either assertions about metaphysical facts (facts that lie beyond the ken of any human experience), or historical facts that might as well be metaphysical, because they are incapable of being verified in any of the ways we ordinarily verify historical facts. To make it worse, many of the assertions appear on the face of it to be incredible or at least empirically superfluous. Given the normal course of worldly events, it is improbable, to say the least, that Christ arose on the third day from the tomb. Given the state of contemporary physics, it seems unnecessary to suppose that God created the heavens and the earth. As a result, two alternatives arise for someone who wants to take scriptural assertions seriously (the other option, of course, is to not take them seriously). We either accept their irrelevance to the ordinary course of worldly experience, in which case we lapse into what Pascal called superstition. Or, we reinterpret them, understanding them no longer as claims about an unseen world, but instead reduce them to rather mundane truths about worldly experience. Let me start first with the latter. Having been put off by the improbability and superfluity of scriptural accounts of the world, the strategy here is to

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treat scriptural assertions as metaphors or allegories for some mundane reality. This view, too, is beholden to the idea that in assenting to the truth of a proposition, we commit ourselves to playing the game of giving and asking for reasons. Indeed, the reason for departing from a literal interpretation is precisely that one wants (charitably, of course) to understand the speaker as committing herself to propositions that accord with the best state of our current understanding of the world. But this amounts to giving up on the religious belief as such, and, in fact, renders the Bible inferior to other texts that do not need to resort to allegory to communicate their mundane truths. Kant is a prime example of this approach: “we should not interpret the text literally,” he notes, “unless we are willing to charge it with error.” Since we do not want to do that with the sacred text, it follows that we ought to read it metaphorically whenever necessary to preserve its truth: “Reason,” he simply asserts, is “entitled to interpret the text in a way it finds consistent with its own principles.”9 Since Kant, history has given us a steady stream of others who aim to make Christianity intellectually respectable by “demythologizing” the sacred text. The first approach, by contrast, affirms, in the face of all contradictory evidence, that scriptural assertions are meant to be literally true of an unseen reality – even when the assertions conflict with what we can ascertain through direct experience. The problem with the literal approach is that, so long as we think that the assent to an assertion commits us to offering proof about the state of an unseen reality, then the fulfillment of our responsibility as believers and the satisfaction of our faith in the scriptures is continually deferred. To the unbeliever and the believer alike, this looks like irrationality on the part of the believer – like she is abandoning a commitment to reason because she is forced to forfeit the game of giving and asking of reasons.10 But this is to reduce faith to superstition, for it is to believe in something that has no place in our ordinary experience of the world. By contrast, the view of faith that we have been articulating shows us how our assent to propositions is supported by, although not verified by or 9

10

Immanuel Kant, “The Conflict of the Faculties,” in Religion and Rational Theology (A. W. Wood & G. di Giovanni, Trans.). Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1996, pp. 233–327. I think the literalist attitude has another quite serious side effect. The assumption about the discursive commitments of belief tends to promote a fundamentally pessimistic stance to the world, deferring satisfaction of our beliefs and responsibilities until “the kingdom come.” The pessimist discharges his or her rational obligations by treating the world as an illusion, and as unworthy of our commitments. Faith rests on an ultimate truth that cannot possibly manifest itself in this fallen world. To the extent that we can free ourselves completely from our passionate attachment to this world, Christian pessimism is a viable option. But if, as Pascal holds, our passionate attachment to the world is an essential part of being human, a radical pessimism can only lead to despair. For more on the Pascalian response to despair, see section 3 of this chapter.

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justified by, our living in the world disclosed by faith. We are now in a position to say how this view of faith is in tension with any position that would reduce meaningful language to only those assertions for which we are able and willing to undertake such discursive commitments. First, on this view of faith, we cannot in fact offer justification for a belief other than observing that holding the belief supports and arises from a particular existential stance in the world. Second, this kind of “justification” is only available to those who already accept the belief. It cannot meaningfully be offered to someone who is not living in the world revealed by faith. As Pascal noted, to say to them that they only have to look at the least of the things surrounding them and they will see God revealed there, and then to give them as a complete proof of this great and important matter the course of the moon and the planets, and to claim to have achieved a proof with such an argument, is to give them cause to believe that the proofs of our religion are indeed weak. I see by reason and experience that nothing is more likely to arouse their contempt. (P §644)

All this suggests that being a Christian amounts to having a different sort of relationship to the sacred word than that suggested by the account of language in terms of the communication of propositions, the assent to which generates discursive commitments. Our accepting scriptural assertions as literally true may well be a necessary, if not sufficient, condition for our being – existing as – a Christian. Such assertions will only finally fulfil their function if they effect a change in the way we experience the world. This means that assenting to the truth of such assertions commits us not to the game of giving and asking for reasons but to acting and responding to the world as it appears in the light of those assertions. In fact, as Pascal’s comments about love suggest, we have fundamentally misunderstood the assertion if we see it as committing us to offering proof. This might seem like a paradoxical view to attribute to Pascal who, after all, is most famous for supposedly offering a proof of the rationality of faith in God in the form of his “Wager.” To me, the almost exclusive attention this passage has received to the neglect of the rest of the Pensées, together with the way it is widely reproduced and anthologized completely divorced from its context, speaks to the prevalence of cognitivist prejudices in contemporary philosophy. Pascal included the wager in his “discourse concerning the machine” – the machine being the metaphor for our automatic, unthinking responses to the world. Thus the purpose of this discourse, Pascal explained, was to encourage us to seek God “by removing the obstacles, which is the argument of the machine, of preparing the machine by reason to seek” (P §45, trans. modified). The use of reason, in other words, is to redirect our dispositions and unthinking responses, thus opening us up to the possibility of seeking God. But the pursuit of God is not itself conducted by reason. The wager shows that it is not irrational to live a religious life (it does not “sin

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against reason”), given that one loses nothing through such a life but stands to gain infinity, an eternity of life and happiness. Indeed, Pascal acknowledges that the wager does not prove the truth of anything about Christianity. All it can do is remove obstacles to belief by recruiting reason to the task of “urging you to believe.” The moral of the wager is not that there are reasons justifying or verifying religious belief, but rather that any obstacles to belief arise not from reason but from the passions, from our dispositional responses to the world. He concludes: “so concentrate not on convincing yourself by increasing the number of proofs of God but on diminishing your passions” (P §680). Reason can assist in this by convincing us to engage in the practices that will change our dispositions. But it is not itself directly capable of establishing religious faith. Along the same lines, Pascal argues elsewhere: “There are three ways to believe: reason, custom, inspiration. The Christian religion, which alone has reason, does not admit for its true children those who believe without inspiration. It is not that it excludes reason and custom, on the contrary; but we must open our minds to the proofs, confirm ourselves in it through custom, yet offer ourselves through humiliations to inspirations, which alone can produce the true and salutary effect” (P §655). Pascal’s faith does not abandon reason, but it understands the limits of reason in the religious life. The famous wager itself, then, is an instance of a linguistic expression that includes assertions and rational arguments, but which finds its fulfillment not in being verified as true but in orienting us to the things and people and events in the world around us. We are responsible to such assertions not by committing to offer proof of them but by allowing them to perform their dispositional reorientation. It does not follow that their truth or falsity is irrelevant to us. Indeed, it may be the case that such expressions only serve to orient us correctly to the world if we actually believe that they are true. But it does follow that establishing their truth or falsity is not our primary concern. Take, for example, Pascal’s suggestion about love. Suppose I make the assertion: “my wife loves me.” There is a fact of the matter whether she does, in fact, love me; the assertion is either true or false. And it really matters to me whether it is true or false. But I would misunderstand my commitment to the assertion if I then set out to prove that it is true. Indeed, to devote attention to establishing whether it is true or false might very well destroy my ability to let my faith in her love illuminate our relationship. Such linguistic acts, then, do not find their fulfillment in communicating truths, although they do also communicate truths. And we do not hold ourselves responsible to them by giving and asking for reasons. Instead, their primary function is that of showing us something new, and helping us discern how we ought to orient ourselves with respect to the things that they show us. It is in such terms that I understand Heidegger’s claim that poetic

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language “speaks by saying; that is, by showing . . . . Language speaks by pointing, reaching out to every region of presencing, letting what is present in each case appear in such regions or vanish from them” (GA 12: 243/Basic Writings, p. 411). Let us look at one of Heidegger’s examples of how such poetic language works. In a discussion of Trakl’s poem, “Ein Winterabend,” Heidegger notes that “the Christian world comes into play in the poem.” Here is one strophe from the poem: A Winter Evening Window with falling snow is arrayed, Long tolls the vesper bell, The house is provided well The table is for many laid.

Ein Winterabend Wenn der Schnee ans Fenster fallt, Lang die Abendglocke lautet, Vielen ist der Tisch bereitet Und das Haus ist wohlbestellt.

Viewed as a set of assertions, Heidegger notes, we could say that the poem describes a winter evening (GA 12: 16/PLT: 196). The assertions contained in the poem may or may not have been true of some actual window and table and bell. But in a real sense, their truth or falsity is not at stake here – not because the window and table and bell are symbols or metaphors for a nonsensuous reality, but because the key to understanding the poem is learning to see other tables and windows and bells related in the way that it shows. The ordinary world shows up as a setting for the communion of believers. When the poem really works, it shows us how the objects in a Christian world hang together, how things could matter to us if we had the right disposition for the world. Heidegger calls this act of showing us how things matter to us “naming.” When the poem names, it brings things “near” to us (GA 12: 18/PLT: 198); that means, it makes them matter to us or concern us in a way that they did not before: “it invites things in, so that they may bear upon men as things” (GA 12: 19/PLT: 199). In this particular case, the poem can only do this if the world to which it orients us can, for instance, actually open up in a way that allows tables to be laid out in preparation for communal meals, and in a way that allows vesper bells actually to call us together so that religious services give order and purpose to our lives. The poetic word calls us to a world that can actually be disclosed as a space and time for living a Christian life.

3.

SCRIPTURES AS WORLD DISCLOSURE

If we approach scriptural claims from this perspective – that is, against a background according to which the highest task and paradigmatic functioning of language is not communication of information, but world disclosure – then things look somewhat different. We can now accept scriptural claims as

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literally true of an unseen reality, but their being true does not exhaust their function – nor is it even the highest realization of their purpose. Instead, their paradigmatic function is to disclose the world to us in a new way. As we allow the scriptures to attune us to the world as God’s creation and people as God’s children, we are affectively reoriented to the world. That is, the important thing is not that we think differently about the world, but rather that we feel it differently, see it differently. On such a view, we are no longer worried about the probability or implausibility of the claims as metaphysical claims. Instead, we are satisfied if our faith shows us how to see this world. Cognitively, the saint’s Christian faith remains deferred – that is, her literal acceptance of claims about, for example, the resurrection is not something she can conclusively justify. But that literal acceptance disposes her for the world in such a way that she can inhabit the world without despair. She succeeds in living in the world that is disclosed by faith, and is thus convinced of the truth of her faith (just as I am convinced that my wife loves me when I can succeed in sustaining a loving relationship with her). This might sound to some dangerously close to the allegorical reading. But it only appears so to the extent that one continues to believe that assenting to the literal truth of an assertion commits one to unpacking its propositional content, or justifying or proving it. Having gotten over thinking this, we not only can accept the literal truth of scriptural claims, but we can see that they may not do their job unless we do accept their literal truth. At the same time, the scriptural assertions have also not done their job if they merely show us what to accept cognitively – and this is true even if we successfully rise to the challenge of offering reasons in their support. They need also to attune us to the world so that we can see it opened up to us. I only intend here to give some bare indications of how Pascal thinks this works. Take, for example, Pascal’s observation that belief in the incarnation shows us how to deal with the despair stemming from our dual nature of wretchedness and greatness. The human condition, Pascal argues, is a hopeless contradiction of possessing both carnal and passionate appetites, and high spiritual longings. There is a long tradition of trying to resolve the contradictions by getting rid of one side or the other of our nature. In the Christian tradition, this has typically taken the form of denying our passionate side, “renouncing everything” the world offers to satisfy our passions, and thus achieving, in Kierkegaard’s words, “peace and repose and consolation in pain”11 – that is, resigning ourselves to never finding satisfaction in this world. Such a solution, Pascal notes, cannot succeed because the passions are an ineliminable part of what it is to be human: 11

Soren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling (A. Hannay, Trans.). New York: Penguin 1985, pp. 74, 77.

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This interior war between reason and the passions meant that those who wanted peace divided into two sects. Some wanted to renounce the passions and become gods, the others wanted to renounce reason and become brute beasts . . . . But neither group succeeded, and reason is still there accusing the baseness and injustice of the passions and disturbing the peace of those who give way to them, and the passions are still alive in those who want to reject them.12

If this is right, then traditional Christian pessimism necessarily gives rise to despair – a despair of needing to, but being unable to, find in this world the fulfillment of our profoundest longings. But thinkers like Kierkegaard, Pascal, and Dostoevsky have long suggested that the Christian doctrine of our embodiment entails that we are not simply spirits, and thus that we have a necessary, essential attachment to the world that must be fulfilled. “The will itself will never provide satisfaction, even if it had power over all it wanted,” Pascal notes. And yet, “without it we cannot be unhappy, though we cannot be happy” (P §394). What we need is to find some way to satisfy our will in order to achieve happiness. God’s incarnation in Christ, Pascal believes, teaches us that “we do not show greatness by being at one extreme, but rather by touching both at once and filling all the space in between” (P §560). It is only the scriptural account of Jesus which can teach us this: “that is the new and astonishing conjunction that only a single God could teach, that he alone could achieve, and which is merely the image and effect of the inexpressible marriage of two natures in the single person of Man-God” (P §34). Belief in Christ’s incarnation, in other words, shows us our human existence not as something to despair at but as something to affirm. Only by accepting the literal truth of the scriptural account, in other words, can we be attuned to the world not as something to despair over but as an opportunity to show our greatness. The examples the scriptures provide of Christ’s deeds teach us specifically how to accept both sides of our nature, and free ourselves from being constantly driven by a lack. According to Pascal, for example, being attuned for the world by the scriptural account of Christ’s life disposes us not to put our reliance on anything temporal (cf. P §§15 & 511). But if this were all, of course, it would lead to despair. The trick is to find out how not to become attached to particular worldly things while also being able to live joyfully in the world. So what Jesus teaches us is how to relate to all the finite things without either (a) making them absolute, or (b) giving up on the longing for the absolute. We learn not to make them absolute because, by imitating Christ, we become disposed to all the supposed great things of the earth as being vanity and emptiness. At the same time, we do not give up on longing for the absolute because Christ promises us that, through a meek and loving relationship to things in the world, we can become joint heirs with him in the 12

Blaise Pascal, Pensées, §29. See also §557: “Man is neither angel nor beast, and unhappily whoever wants to act the angel, acts the beast.”

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life to come. And, more importantly, through our faithful practices, we open ourselves to an experience of God’s grace here in the world. God’s grace works by making us capable of joy in this world: To save his elect, God sent Jesus Christ to carry out his justice and to merit with his mercy the grace of Redemption, medicinal grace; the grace of Jesus Christ which is nothing other than complaisance and delectation in God’s law diffused into the heart by the Holy Ghost, which, not only equalling but even surpassing the concupiscence of the flesh, fills the will with a greater delight in good than concupiscence offers in evil; and so free will, entranced by the sweetness and pleasures which the Holy Ghost inspires in it, more than the attractions of sin, infallibly chooses God’s law for the simple reason that it finds greater satisfaction there, and feels his beatitude and happiness.13

For Pascal, then, we find satisfaction not in any particular worldly thing but through living a Christ-like life. That is to say, when we follow Christ’s example as set forth in the revealed word, we allow our dispositions to be changed in such a way that we can live joyfully in this world, no matter what happens to us. I hold out my arms to my Saviour, who, having been foretold for four thousand years, came to suffer and to die for me on earth, at the time and in the circumstances which were foretold. And through his grace I await death peacefully, in the hope of being eternally united with him, and meanwhile I live joyfully, either in the blessings which he is pleased to bestow on me, or in the afflictions which he sends me for my good and which he taught me to endure by his example.14

Because the Christian life changes our dispositions in such a way that we find joy in the Christian life itself, we are able to defer our longing for something 13

14

“Treatise Concerning Predestination,” in Pensées and Other Writings (Honor Levi, Trans.). Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1995, p. 223. Pascal, Pensées, §646. Piotr Hoffman has helped me to recognize that there is a deep pessimistic streak in Pascal that separates him in important ways from existential Christians like Dostoevsky. For Pascal does hold that nothing we encounter on earth is truly good, and that the earth and the things of the earth are incapable of satisfying our deepest longings: “Do not look for satisfaction on earth, do not hope for anything from humanity. Your good is only in God, and ultimate happiness lies in knowing God, in becoming united with him for ever in eternity” (P §182). But Pascal’s pessimism is a pessimism without despair, because it embraces earthly existence as capable of profound happiness or joy, even if nothing we encounter in the world has a transcendent worth. See P §681: “You do not need a greatly elevated soul to realize that in this life there is no true and firm satisfaction, that all our pleasures are simply vanity, that our afflictions are infinite, and lastly that death, which threatens us at every moment, must in a few years infallibly present us with the appalling necessity of being either annihilated or wretched for all eternity. Nothing is more real nor more dreadful than that. We may put on as brave a face as we like: that is the end which awaits the finest life on earth. Let us think about it, then say whether it is not beyond doubt that the only good in this life lies in the hope of another life, that we are only happy the closer we come to it, and that, just as there will be no more unhappiness for those who were completely certain of eternity, there is no hope either of happiness for those who have no glimmer of it!”

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absolute. The joy comes because, by giving up trying to satisfy oneself, one learns to be open to the needs of the situation and of others. By imitating Christ in this respect, we develop habits and foster a particular predisposition, namely, one in which we enjoy things as they present themselves without trying to turn them into something eternal (this is Pascal’s existential specification of the Christian virtues of humility and charity). The result is a life of meek submission, tragic but hopeful – a minimal happiness with intermittent mystical moments of Joy.15

15

See “The Memorial,” Pensées, p. 178.

part iii HISTORICAL WORLDS

8 Philosophers, Thinkers, and Heidegger’s Place in the History of Being

THE END OF PHILOSOPHY

The response to Heidegger in the analytical world is, to a considerable degree, a paraphrase of Rudolf Carnap’s 1932 essay “Überwindung der Metaphysik durch Logische Analyse der Sprache.” To the extent Heidegger intends to make philosophical claims with assertions like “the nothing nothings,” Carnap charges, his writings are utterly meaningless; to the extent that Heidegger is creating art, he does it poorly. Or, more likely, Heidegger’s work, like that of all metaphysicians, confounds art and philosophy: Metaphysicians are musicians without musical ability. Instead they have a strong inclination to work within the medium of the theoretical, to connect concepts and thoughts. Now, instead of activating, on the one hand, this inclination in the domain of science, and satisfying, on the other hand, the need for expression in art, the metaphysician confuses the two and produces a structure which achieves nothing for knowledge and something inadequate for the expression of attitude.1

To respond to such charges with a defense of the meaningfulness of Heidegger’s claims about “the nothing” would, however, miss the deeper point. Carnap’s analysis of Heidegger’s alleged “pseudosentences” is really ancillary to the project of rehabilitating philosophy as a discipline – a project driven by Carnap’s view of language. For Carnap, assertions are meaningless unless they have empirical content. And if they have that, they belong properly to the empirical sciences. Thus, for Carnap and many others in the analytical tradition,2 philosophy (at least, when properly done) has no

1

2

Rudolf Carnap, “The Elimination of Metaphysics Through Logical Analysis of Language,” in Logical Positivism (A. J. Aver, Ed.). Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1959, p. 80. See, for instance, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (C. K. Ogden, Trans.). London: Routledge, 1922, paragraph 6.53.

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substantive content; instead, it is “only a method: the method of logical analysis.”3 This narrow view of philosophy – philosophy as a method of analysis – is grounded in a profound skepticism regarding our ability to discover truths about ourselves and our world through reason alone. Thus even analytical philosophers like Dummett – philosophers who “no longer regard the traditional questions of philosophy as pseudoquestions to which no meaningful answer can be given” – believe that “philosophy can take us no further than enabling us to command a clear view of the concepts by means of which we think about the world, and, by so doing, to attain a firmer grasp of the way we represent the world in our thought.”4 Philosophy, the analytical philosopher concludes, ought to abandon metaphysics (thereby leaving the empirical sciences in charge of the pursuit of substantive knowledge) and restrict itself to conceptual analysis. Heidegger’s response to this view of philosophy can be seen in a concentrated form in a series of notes that draw their title, “Überwindung der Metaphysik,” from Carnap’s, and which Heidegger began writing shortly after the publication of Carnap’s essay. Indeed, the notes cannot be understood except as articulating an alternative to Carnap’s view of the failings of the metaphysical tradition. Like Carnap, Heidegger believes in the need to criticize and, eventually, overcome the metaphysical tradition, but Heidegger denies that Carnap’s approach is competent for that task. Heidegger explains: “this title [‘The Elimination of Metaphysics’] gives rise to a great deal of misunderstanding because it does not allow experience to get to the ground from which alone the history of Being reveals its essence.”5 That is to say, Carnap’s conception of metaphysics (as something that can be eliminated simply through the logical analysis of metaphysical claims) will prevent us from understanding that to which the metaphysical tradition has been a response – the background understanding of being. If we are genuinely to overcome or eliminate the metaphysical tradition, Heidegger believes, we can only do so by thinking through the history of metaphysical efforts to understand the being of what is. Only working through our history in this way can we own up to the task of thinking being nonmetaphysically. Thus, in Heidegger’s way of understanding the task of eliminating or overcoming metaphysics, “overcoming does not mean pushing a discipline out of the scope of philosophical ‘education.’”6 Instead, the response to metaphysics begins, for Heidegger, with an understanding of metaphysics 3 4

5

6

“The Elimination of Metaphysics Through Logical Analysis of Language,” p. 77 Michael Dummett, The Logical Basis of Metaphysics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991, p. 1. “Überwindung der Metaphysik,” in Vorträge and Aufsätze. Stuttgart: Gunther Neske, 1954, p. 67. Ibid.

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“as the destiny of the truth of beings, i.e., of beingness, as a still hidden but distinctive event, namely the oblivion of Being.”7 On this view, two things characterize metaphysical thinkers. First, metaphysical thinkers manifest in their works an understanding of the being of everything that is – that is, “beingness,” the one character or feature of things in virtue of which they are what they are. Second, metaphysical thinkers are unaware of this understanding as a background understanding – that is, they work out of an “oblivion of being.” If we see metaphysics in this way, Heidegger argues, it will become apparent that “metaphysics cannot be dismissed like an opinion.”8 One cannot simply change one’s mind about metaphysics, simply decide to stop treating it as a serious and worthwhile branch of philosophy, because eliminating metaphysics in this way will, in fact, only heighten our oblivion to the way our understanding of the world is based on a background understanding of being and, in the process, make us more subject to it than ever. In fact, Heidegger believes, the desire to eliminate metaphysics in the way Carnap proposes is itself a sign of the “technological” understanding of being. The elimination of metaphysics, he writes, might more appropriately be called the “Passing of Metaphysics,” where “passing” means the simultaneous departing of metaphysics (i.e., its apparently perishing, and hence being remembered only as something that is past), even while the technological understanding of being “takes possession of its absolute domination over what is.”9 I take this to mean that, in the technological age, the understanding of the being of what is becomes so completely dominant that metaphysical reflection seems superfluous. Even philosophy itself no longer worries about the nature of what is but simply works out a view of language and mind on the basis of the current understanding of being.10 In fact, Heidegger would agree that the method of analysis is the “end” or “completion” of philosophy. Philosophy is able to restrict itself to conceptual analysis, and to cede all questions of theory and ontology to the empirical sciences, precisely because the scientific-technological understanding of being is so completely dominant: “philosophy is ending in the present age. It has found its place in the scientific attitude of socially active humanity” (GA 14: 63/BW: 434). In short, Heidegger sees the effort to restrict philosophy to conceptual analysis, thereby ignoring or dismissing metaphysics, as a sign not that metaphysics is something past but that philosophy is more subject than 7 10

8 9 Ibid. Ibid., p. 68. Ibid., p. 67. Heidegger frequently makes offhand remarks to the effect that analytical philosophy is thoroughly enmeshed in the technological understanding of being. He notes, for instance, that analytical philosophy (which he typically refers to as “logistics”) is “in many places, above all in the Anglo-Saxon countries, . . . today considered the only possible form of strict philosophy, because its result and procedures yield an assured profit for the construction of the technological universe” (GA 8: 23/WCT: 21).

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ever to the errors of the metaphysical past. Like the metaphysicians, contemporary philosophy works under the dominance of an understanding of being that is, for it, unquestionable. And like the metaphysicians, contemporary philosophy is oblivious to the need to think the background. The task of thinking at the end of philosophy is to overcome this oblivion, and to do this, we must become aware of our own place in the history of being. But we can arrive at such an historical awareness only through an engagement with the metaphysical past that Carnap and analytical philosophers in general would as soon ignore. PHILOSOPHY AND ITS HISTORY

At this point, it might sound as if the disagreement between Heidegger and the analytical philosophers is shaping up as a familiar argument over the place of history in philosophy. On the one hand, there are those who see philosophy, like science, as a rigorous and timeless pursuit of truth, abstracted from any particular cultural and historical locus. From this perspective, philosophy’s history is an accidental feature of philosophy properly understood. We might, out of a kind of curiosity, review the history of philosophy as if it were a catalogue of opinions people formerly held on current philosophical issues. But in the final analysis, philosophy’s concern is solving its current problems – problems for which historical figures have no authority, and can offer at most a little insight into an answer. Against ahistoricism in philosophy are those who see philosophy as an ineliminably historical endeavor, and argue that the problems philosophers tackle and their approach to those problems are themselves dictated by the particularities of their historical age. To do philosophy is thus to work through the problems inherited from the past, problems made pressing by the philosopher’s current historical situation. On this view, an effort to abstract philosophical problems and forms of reasoning from their history will misunderstand the philosophical past and, more importantly, obscure contemporary philosophy’s most pressing task – that of responding to contemporary tensions and crises. From what I have said so far, one might see Heidegger as advocating the historical picture of philosophy in opposition to the ahistorical. And there is some truth to that, provided that “history” is properly understood. But it would be a very crude misreading of Heidegger to attribute to him the view that philosophy is simply a cultural-historical phenomenon. To the contrary, he holds that cultural changes and crises are governed by a background understanding of being, and it is to this ontological background that philosophy is first responsible. To the extent that philosophers are responsive to the call to think being, they and their work are removed from ordinary historical and cultural influences. Heidegger thus argues that it is a mistake to treat the thought of a thinker as circumscribed by “the

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influences of the milieu and the effects of their actual ‘life’ situation” (GA 6.1: 447/N4: 22). At work here is distinction between two different ways of thinking about history: history (Geschichte) versus historiology or historiography (Historie). We’ll return to this distinction later; for now, a brief introduction to the distinction must suffice. Historiology is concerned with thoughts, words, experiences, deeds, and rules – in short, all the stuff of ordinary history. But historical events are, according to Heidegger, determined by a background understanding that shapes and constitutes foreground activities. Heidegger refers to this background as “the open region of ends, standards, motives, possible results, and powers” (GA 45: 36) – namely, of everything in terms of which any particular action or experience is what it is. The series of different background understandings is what constitutes history in the deeper sense. That there are fundamentally different ways in which to be an entity testifies, for Heidegger, to the fact that there is no necessary way that the background must function. Thus the background is itself dependent on “the nothing” that we alluded to earlier. Contra Carnap, “the nothing” is misunderstood if it is construed as a negative existential quantification (although it entails the following proposition that does employ a negative existential quantification: there is no thing that determines the character of the background understanding of being). To call the background “nothing” is to point out that it is not a thing, and does not operate in the same way that things in the foreground do. Metaphysics, as I indicated above, is the attempt to think and name the being of what is. But because metaphysicians do not understand that there is a background, which is not itself an entity, that constitutes the foreground as what it is, they interpret the unity of the foreground in terms of some uniform thing or feature in virtue of which everything is what it is; that is, metaphysics “thinks what is as a whole – the world, men, God – with respect to being, with respect to the unity of what is in being” (GA 14: 60/BW: 432). The history of the West and of metaphysics on Heidegger’s interpretation consists in a series of ways in which the being of what is – that characteristic or feature in virtue of which anything is what it is – has been given or “unconcealed” to human beings. With each “unconcealment of being,” human beings have become progressively more oblivious to the fact that their everyday thoughts, activities, identities, and so on are grounded in a background understanding of being that is neither necessary in its structure nor within human control. While Heidegger believed that the metaphysical tradition has failed to think the background or “clearing” within which everything is what it is, he also believed that philosophers have nevertheless played a privileged role in opening up for their culture the possibilities given by the prevailing understanding of being. The history of being, a history traceable in the work of the metaphysicians, falls, according to Heidegger, into four distinct periods: the Greek (in which what is was primarily understood as

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phusis or self-arising nature), the Medieval (in which what is was understood as “God’s creation”), the Modern (where “beings became objects that could be controlled and penetrated by calculation”) (GA 5: 65/BW: 201), and finally an intensification of the Modern, the Technological (in which what is is understood as standing reserve – that is, as being constantly available for flexible reconfiguration, and thus maximally exploitable). Metaphysics, on this view, affects much more than philosophy. The metaphysical thinkers actually help open a space of possibilities for a culture by articulating, and thus making available to our practices in general, the understanding of being that characterizes (or is coming to characterize) the age. The best way to explain what Heidegger means is to review one of his examples of the way in which a philosopher, by responding to a new understanding of being, articulated it and, in the process, made it possible to experience the world in a new way. Heidegger agrees with traditional historiological accounts that an important distinction between the modern and the medieval ages lies in the extent to which modern man “disengages himself from the constraints of biblical Christian revealed truth and church doctrine” (GA 6.2: 126/N4: 97). But, Heidegger contends, historiology misunderstands this change by not appreciating how it was enabled by an altered understanding of being. What gave medieval life its coherence was a pursuit of salvation. The idea of salvation, however, as it was understood only made sense on the basis of an experience of all entities as God’s creation: “the truth of salvation does not restrict itself to a relation of faith, a relation to God; rather the truth of salvation at the same time decides about beings . . . . Beings in their sundry orders are the creation of a creator God, a creation rescued from the Fall and elevated to the suprasensuous realm once again through the redeemer God” (GA 6.2: 288/N3: 239–40). An ideal of intellectual freedom would be nearly incoherent against the medieval background understanding, for it would appear as, at best, a rejection of not just the saving ordinances offered by the Church but also as a departure from the God-given intelligibility inherent in things. Consequently, political and intellectual liberation was impossible for the medievals because science and politics had to operate in harmony with God’s order. In modernity, however, there is a gradual shift away from understanding what is in terms of its relationship to God and toward a sense that beings are what they are in virtue of being representable to a perceiving subject. This, in turn, made man responsible for himself and his thoughts in a way not possible so long as man was a child of God in the midst of God’s creation. This background shift is discernible in Descartes’ work: “Descartes’ metaphysics is the decisive beginning of the foundation of metaphysics in the Modern age. It was his task to ground the metaphysical ground of man’s liberation in the new freedom of self-assured self-legislation” (GA 6.2: 129/ N4: 100). For example, when Descartes declares that the first rule of his

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philosophic method is “never to accept anything as true if I did not have evident knowledge of its truth,”11 he does so not because he is a skeptic, Heidegger argues, but rather because the emerging modern style required man to take responsibility for his own knowledge and situation. The method of doubt – that is, that I am “to include nothing more in my judgments than what presented itself to my mind with such clarity and distinctness that I would have no occasion to put it in doubt”12 – is justified by Descartes’ famous analogy between human understanding and a building. Noting that “buildings undertaken and completed by a single architect are usually more attractive and better planned than those which several have tried to patch up,” Descartes argues that we should become our own architects, dispensing with the “old walls” inherited from teachers and past scholars, and rebuilding ourselves from the ground up.13 In so doing, Descartes is responding to an emerging background understanding of us and our place in the world: “man becomes that being upon which all that is, is grounded as regards the manner of its being and its truth. Man becomes the relational center of that which is as such” (GA 5: 88/QCT: 128) In articulating his philosophical project in accordance with the new understanding, Descartes opens up ways of relating things that is then used to justify other shifts in the practices of the age, thereby ushering in a new understanding of being. To summarize, the new possibilities available to modern man, including the possibility of becoming the “architect” of his own thoughts, are opened up by a fundamental shift in the metaphysical background. The task of the history of philosophy, for Heidegger, is to uncover such fundamental shifts. We can now return to the questions with which this section began: what is the nature of Heidegger’s disagreement with analytical philosophers? And what does Heidegger mean in saying that the task for thinking is necessarily historical? As to the latter question, we can see why Heidegger would reject both of the views discussed in the beginning of this section on the role of history in philosophy. Both undoubtedly have a degree of truth to them. Insofar as a philosopher is a thinker, however, both views fail to capture what is most essential to the philosopher’s task. A metaphysician’s historical and cultural inheritance is at most the departure point for articulating a new understanding of being. Consequently, the content of the metaphysical thinker’s thought cannot be reduced to its cultural setting. Likewise, while advances are certainly made in philosophy, to focus on the advances as an ahistorical march of progress is to ignore the question of the historical constitution of the problematics, facts, and so on with which philosophers as logical or conceptual analysts deal. 11

12

Descartes, Discourse on Method, in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. I (John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, & Duguld Murdoch). Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1985, p. 120. Ibid., p. 120. 13 Ibid., p. 116.

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This leads us, then, to the nature of Heidegger’s disagreement with the thought that philosophy should be restricted to conceptual analysis. To begin with, philosophy as a mere method of analysis does not genuinely eliminate the metaphysical, it merely ignores it. It fails to account adequately for the back-groundedness of our concepts, even while it, as a human endeavor, is intrinsically shaped by current background sensibilities. This is why, in the passages quoted above, Heidegger sees Carnap’s essay as itself more proof of the need for a genuinely historical reflection on metaphysics – Carnap is himself oblivious to the need to think about the background that shapes him as much as the metaphysical past. This oblivion, Heidegger believes, poses a unique threat to our historical essence as human beings. As Heidegger understands it, ever since the earliest Greek thinkers, human action in the world has been shaped and guided by a unified, background understanding of what it means to be. We are now in a technological age that has completely occluded the fact that our foreground activities are grounded by a background understanding of being. And this makes it almost impossible to own up to the way we are, in all our activities, essentially responsible to a background.14 Heidegger believes that metaphysics can only genuinely be overcome if we can somehow recover a sensibility for the background, and if we can learn to see how it constitutes the present and opens up futural possibilities. And this, Heidegger insists, requires an historical inquiry for two main reasons. First, because the background is so completely entrenched as to escape our notice, it is only an historical thought that can loosen the grasp that our metaphysical understanding of being has on us. If we immerse ourselves in an historical reflection on the understanding of a past age, our current presuppositions and practices may come to seem strange and ungrounded. And if that happens, we will be prepared to confront the fact that we ourselves are thoroughly shaped by an understanding of the being of beings – an understanding that, while once revolutionary, is now so commonplace as to go unnoticed. As Heidegger notes, “in order to rescue the beginning, and consequently the future [i.e., the background understanding of being that shapes our current practices and future possibilities], from time to time the domination of the ordinary and all too ordinary must be broken.” History, by giving us a “genuine relation to the beginning,” brings about just such an “upheaval of what is habitual” (GA 45: 40). Second, historical thought calls to our attention what Hubert Dreyfus has called “marginal practices” – that is, ways of acting that draw their intelligibility from a different background understanding of being than now 14

For a perspicuous discussion of Heidegger’s understanding of the danger of our oblivion to metaphysics, see Hubert L. Dreyfus, “Heidegger on the Connection Between Nihilism, Art, Technology, and Politics,” in The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger (Charles Guignon, Ed.). Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1993, pp. 289–316.

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prevails. By learning to take these practices seriously, something we can only do when we see them against the background of the understanding of being that first grounded them, we can foster a readiness that will allow us to respond differently to the people and things we encounter in our everyday world. As Heidegger puts it, historical thought is “preparatory” in the sense that it prepares us for an escape from the metaphysics of our current age. HISTORY AND HISTORIOLOGY

How is a genuinely historical reflection, one capable of loosening the grip of our metaphysical understanding of being, to proceed? This question is made pressing by the fact that Heidegger’s own treatment of the history of philosophy is held in some disrepute. He is notorious for his “violent” interpretations of the key figures in the history of philosophy. His interpretive method is often quite disconcerting to the classical philologist, as well as the historian of philosophy. Mourelatos, for instance, objects to Heidegger’s “capricious use of etymology in ‘hermeneutic’ interpretations of the pre-Socratics,”15 complaining that Heidegger and his followers have given etymology a bad name. Heidegger’s interpretations of the pre-socratics, Mourelatos explains dismissively, “are correctly appreciated (as it is now generally conceded) not as contributions to the history of Greek philosophy, but as dialectical, rhetorical, and heuristic devices for the development of Heidegger’s own philosophy.”16 Mourelatos’s conclusion, I would argue, overstates the issue. There are in fact standards for judging Heidegger’s histories beyond whether they successfully articulate his own philosophy. But he is quite right that Heidegger’s work is not meant as a contribution to philological or historiological accounts of the philosophical past. Of course, Heidegger was himself aware of his notoriety as a willful interpreter of historical philosophers. In 1935, he wrote: “in the usual present-day view what has been said here [in an interpretation of Parmenides] is a mere product of the farfetched and one-sided Heideggerian method of exegesis, which has already become proverbial” (GA 40: 184/IM: 176). And in the preface to the second edition of Heidegger’s Kant book, he noted that “readers have taken constant offense at the violence of my interpretations. Their allegation of violence can indeed by supported by this text” (GA 3: xvii). But there was a reason behind his approach – one that he was careful to explain and defend. Heidegger’s response to his critics consists in emphasizing the distinction outlined above – the distinction between the historiological study of the foreground events and activities in our past, and an historical reflection on the open region within which those events transpire, “that from which all 15

16

Alexander P. D. Mourelatos, The Route of Parmenides. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1970, p. 197 Ibid., p. xiv.

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human happenings begin” (GA 45: 40). As a result, the stuff of ordinary history – historical actions and events – are not the principal objects of Heidegger’s history, although it would be a mistake to say that Heidegger’s history is unconcerned with them. The subsidiary role accorded to ordinary historiology in Heidegger’s accounts brings with it the risk that his history will lose touch with reality, and critics like Richard Rorty have been quick to charge that Heidegger’s histories are vacuous and mystical.17 Rorty argues that Heidegger’s history of being is nothing but the history of what philosophers have said about being. But because these pronouncements cannot be understood without seeing them in their connection to the “plain history” of peoples and things, Rorty argues that Heidegger fails to give content to his history of philosophy: “Without the reference to the history of nations, we should obviously have only what Versenyi suggests is all we get anyway: ‘an all too empty and formal, though often emotionally charged and mystically-religious, thinking of absolute unity.’”18 Along similar lines, Bernasconi argues that Heidegger’s account of the history of philosophy deconstructs itself because every time Heidegger tells the history of philosophy, he does so in historiological terms. As a result, he concludes that “the distinction between Geschichte and Historie is here, as always, impossible to maintain.”19 Such critiques fail to appreciate Heidegger’s own explanation of history, historiology, and their interdependence. Bernasconi, for instance, interprets the distinction between historiology and history as the distinction between accounts that follow “the guiding thread of a story,” and those that do not.20 But this is a misunderstanding. It is quite right to say that historiology provides a “journalist’s” account, describing things in terms of a series of passing events (see GA 54: 94). And such an account might even follow “the guiding thread of a story,” but this is not what is determinative of historiology as historiology. Rather, historiology is what it is because in it the past is treated without regard for the background understanding of being that constitutes these events as the events that they are. Historiology proceeds as if the events it considers are interpretable without remainder in the terms that make sense given our current understanding of being. So, where historiology understands the passage of time in terms of “years and days,” history investigates the passage of time in terms of changes in the

17

18

19 20

For a more detailed response to Rorty, see Mark B. Okrent, “The Truth of Being and the History of Philosophy,” in Heidegger: A Critical Reader (Hubert L. Dreyfus & Harrison Hall, Eds.). Oxford, England: Blackwell, 1992, pp. 143–59. Richard Rorty, “Overcoming the Tradition: Heidegger and Dewey,” Review of Metaphysics 30 (1976): 297. Robert Bernasconi, “Descartes in the History of Being,” Research in Phenomenology 17 (1987): 94. Ibid., p. 87.

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“age” – that is, “the situation of human things and man’s dwelling place therein” (GA 54: 10). History traces the “movement of being,” that is, changes in the background norms of intelligibility and the general style of the practices most central to an age. History thus seeks to uncover the ways in which identities and objects have been constituted and experienced, and the general kinds of constraints working on the field of possibilities open to historical actors. The goal is to draw nearer to what is “happening” in the history of the Modern age. What is happening means what sustains and compels history, what triggers chance events and in advance gives leeway to resolutions, what within beings represented as objects and as states of affairs basically is what is. We never experience what is happening by ascertaining through historical inquiry what is “going on.” As this expression tells us very well, what is “going on” passes before us in the foreground and background of the public stage of events and varying opinions. What happens can never be made historiologically cognizable. It can only be thoughtfully known by grasping what the metaphysics that predetermines the age has elevated to thought and word. (GA 6.1: 431–2/N3: 8)

Thus Heidegger’s distinction between history and historiology is not a distinction between the history of nations and peoples on the one hand, and the history of philosophy on the other. Rather, it is a distinction between ways of approaching the history of all human phenomena namely, a historiological reporting on past events, a reporting that “touches only the foremost of the foreground” (GA 45: 42) – versus historical recovery of the understanding of an age which constituted what happened as the event it was. Heidegger believes that, at least within the history of philosophy, his history is a prerequisite to doing Rorty’s “plain history”: Since historiographical considerations are always subordinated to historical reflections, the erroneous opinion can arise to the effect that historiography is altogether superfluous for history. But from the order of rank just mentioned the only conclusion to be drawn is this: historiographical considerations are essential only insofar as they are supported by a historical reflection, are directed by it in their very way of questioning, and are determined by it in the delimitation of their tasks. But this also implies the converse, that historigraphical considerations and cognitions are indeed indispensable. (GA 45: 50)

Historiological considerations are indispensable, I take it, precisely because an investigation of the background understanding of being only makes sense as an investigation of the way the background grounds the foreground. If history is properly conceived as the movement in background understandings of being, we can see why one ought to reject the merely historiological approach to philosophy, which proceeds by tracing the influence of foreground events on one another. A historiology will inevitably read our own understanding of being back into the events of the past. A foreground event, as we noted earlier, is constituted as the event it is only by fitting it into a context of ends or goals, standards of performance, motives or

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intentions, possible results, and so on, and these all have the determinate shape they do given an understanding of what it is for something to be at all. Unless we are aware that we understand the world only in virtue of a background sense for things, we will drag along our own background as we confront the historiological record. As Heidegger explains in the context of a discussion of the history of the concept of truth, “we find only what we seek, and in historiography we are seeking only what we [already] may know” (GA 45: 219–20). Or, as he observes elsewhere, historiology necessarily works with “images of the past determined by the present” (GA 5: 327/EGT: 17): “Historiographical research never discloses history, because such research is always attended by an opinion about history, an unthought one, a so-called obvious one, which it would like to confirm by this very research and in so doing only rigidifies the unthought obviousness” (GA 54: 142). This tendency is compounded, in Heidegger’s view, when we approach philosophers historiologically. Philosophers not only work out of a different background understanding of being, but their work responds directly to that background. To the extent that they are doing metaphysics, their writings need to be seen as alethic rather than assertoric – that is, as tending to open up, clarify, and articulate the understanding of being rather than as making assertions about foreground events and objects. If we interpret philosophers as performing foreground acts – as thinking and writing about entities and their interactions – and in addition interpret those foreground acts on the basis of our own background, we doubly obscure their true import. For instance, the historiology of philosophy is dependent on philological research into how certain terms were used in the surviving literature of the philosopher’s linguistic community. It also relies on the transcultural tracing of dependencies between philosophers. But both of these methods have their shortcomings if our aim is the ontological background. Philology is limited by its reliance on nonphilosophical sources as a basis for interpreting philosophical texts. Philology will fail to shed light on the ontological background to the degree that it depends on an everyday vocabulary, which draws its meaning from foreground events and objects. Consequently, unless the philologist employs metaphysical reflection to illuminate her reading of past texts, rather than relying on conclusions about language drawn from other sources, she will make little progress in understanding metaphysical discourse. Thus where one seeks to understand the most fundamental underpinnings of a metaphysical position, Heidegger argues, one will require a thinker’s insight into being. In addition, the discovery of dependencies and philosophical influences is itself only illuminating if we comprehend the reason for those dependencies. Historiology of ideas, Heidegger explains, is no more than “scholarly historical detective work, searching out dependencies, [with which] we

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do not advance a step; we never get to what is essential, but only get stuck in external associations and relations” (GA 6.1: 456/N3: 31). The point is that, unless we are capable of an independent inquiry into the background, and thus capable of comprehending a philosopher’s place in the history of being, we will not understand the significance of the fact that philosophers appropriate one another’s work: “To search for influences and dependencies among thinkers is to misunderstand thinking. Every thinker is dependent – upon the address of being” (GA 5: 369/EGT: 55). The illuminating question to ask is thus not what problem or answer one philosopher borrowed from another, but rather why did certain philosophical predecessors and problems show up as relevant sources in the first place? Exploring this question, Heidegger argues, would lead us to ask about the understanding of being that guided the appropriation. Heidegger’s defense of his use of history, then, consists of a reminder that what needs to be understood is the background understanding of a thinker. This understanding will seem violent by the historiologist’s lights for two reasons. First, since metaphysical thinkers themselves are unable to get fully clear about their background and the way that it guides them to think the things they do, a historical interpretation may even run contrary to the things they explicitly say. In addition, the violence of his appropriation is a result of an attempt to think independently of contemporary standards of understanding – something made necessary by the goal of overthrowing the complacency with which we inhabit our own background and project it on the philosophers of the past. Abandoning, as he did, traditional approaches to the interpretation of philosophy, Heidegger’s readings bear little of the sort of support often advanced within traditional historiology. He acknowledged this fact: “We cannot demonstrate the adequacy of the translation by scholarly means” (GA 5: 372/EGT: 57). But this was not to say that “scholarly means” were irrelevant; rather, that they would “not carry us far enough,” since at best they could only point to the surface phenomena supported by a background understanding of being (see GA 6.2: 232/N3: 188). Or, as he explained elsewhere, the “doctrinal systems and the expressions of an age” tell us something, insofar as they are an “aftereffect or veneer” supported by the understanding of being of that age.” But to read the philosophical veneer correctly, one must be well versed in the thought of being. This does not mean, as Rorty charges and Mourelatos suggests, that Heidegger has rendered his account of the history of philosophy immune to challenge. But it does mean that a challenge conducted at the level of an interpretation of what philosophers have said, without any sensitivity to the background that makes that interpretation plausible, will miss the mark. It is the background that is Heidegger’s primary concern. Thus a debate with Heidegger’s reading ought to be addressed to showing how he has misunderstood this background.

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We can now say more clearly what it means to be a metaphysical thinker – a philosopher – and how Heidegger’s historical thinking is meant to evade the problems of metaphysical thought. The history of philosophy is, Heidegger tells us, the “thinker’s struggle for a word for beings as whole” (GA 6.1: 443/N3: 19). The great philosophers, in Heidegger’s way of understanding things, are those who receive an understanding of the being of the age, and struggle to articulate that understanding. Often, in the process, thinkers contribute to changing the background. This, in turn, makes possible a whole new range of foreground activities and events: “the thinker,” Heidegger claims, “stands within the decision concerning what is in general, what beings are” (GA 6.1: 428/N3: 6). Another way of putting this point is to say, like Carnap, that the metaphysical thinker is a kind of artist – provided, however, that one does not understand art as Carnap does (i.e., as a means of “expression” for the artist’s “emotional and volitional reaction to the environment, to society, to the tasks to which he devotes himself, to the misfortunes that befall him”21). Heidegger, following Nietzsche, argues that art, rather than serving as mere subjective expression, actually “creates and gives form” to our experience of the world. The metaphysician is an artist in the sense of “giv[ing] form to beings as a whole” (GA 6.1: 71/N1: 73). Metaphysical thought, in short, reflects and gives expression to the background understanding of being that determines, in any given age, the way things are. This thought concerning the essence of an age opens up a space of possibilities, or in the case of creative thinkers, anticipates a new space of possibilities. But it would be a mistake to look for a philosopher’s influence in the foreground events, at least in the short term. Philosophy has, Heidegger notes, an “historically ascertainable yet irrelevant influence” (GA 6.1: 431/ N3: 8). I take this to mean that the philosopher as a thinker of being does not usually affect particular practices or activities in a demonstrable way but instead gives room for a change in all the practices of an age. The classical case of this is, in Heidegger’s view, that of Descartes as articulated above. The direct influence of Descartes’s writings on any particular scientist, politician, or other historical figure is irrelevant compared to the influence on the Modern age that the whole new background sensibility for man’s place in the world had. As Heidegger explained with reference to Nietzsche, a thinker’s thought “needs neither renown nor impact in order to gain dominance” (GA 6.1: 427/N3: 4). Instead, the thought the thinker experiences – that is, the insight into the changed being of beings in the age – works itself out in the practices of the age as a whole. 21

“The Elimination of Metaphysics Through Logical Analysis of Language,” p. 79.

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Now, how does Heidegger conceive of his place in this history? In particular, how does Heidegger conceive of the difference between himself and metaphysical thinkers? Heidegger conceives of himself as a preparatory thinker – that is, as being concerned with preparing us for a transformation of the current age of being, rather than himself participating in changing the understanding of being: “the thinking in question remains unassuming, because its task is only of a preparatory, not of a founding character. It is content with awakening a readiness in man for a possibility whose contour remains obscure, whose coming remains uncertain” (GA 14: 66/BW: 436). To do this, he tries to show how, despite the oblivion of being that marks the present age, there is a coherence and unity to our practices given by the technological understanding of being. But this attempt to “name” the background understanding of being does not itself open up a clearing for a new metaphysics, nor does it articulate the understanding of being in order to help establish it. Instead, Heidegger hopes that by showing us the understanding of being that forms the background of modern technological practices, he can encourage us to reflect on the nature of the “open region” itself that harbors any given understanding of being: “what matters to preparatory thinking is to light up that space within which being itself might again be able to take man, with respect to his essence, into a primal relationship. To be preparatory is the essence of such thinking” (GA 5: 210/QCT: 55). The background is “lit up” by means of the historical illustration of the contingency or ungroundedness of our current understanding of being. And this will not happen without awakening an awareness of the background itself, and our reliance as human beings on a background understanding of the being of beings. The next step is to take us “into a primal relationship” to this contingent background, something that happens only if we get adapted to the contingency and ungroundedness of our way of being the world, learning to embrace it and take responsibility for our lives. HEIDEGGER’S PLACE IN THE HISTORY OF BEING

In response to persistent questioning on the role of philosophy and of his own thought in dealing with the problems of the technological age, Heidegger finally responded: “It is not for me to decide how far I will get with my attempt to think and in what way it will be accepted in the future and transformed in a fruitful way”22 Of course, there is an obvious sense in which Heidegger is unable to control his reception – he has no say over what use readers will make of his work. But Heidegger meant to point to something more than the ordinary dependence of a work on an audience. As we have 22

“‘Only a God Can Save Us’: Der Spiegel’s Interview with Martin Heidegger” (Maria P. Alter & John D. Caputo, Trans.). Philosophy Today 20 (1976): 281.

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learned from Heidegger’s view of history, the appropriation of historical works in philosophy is always driven by a background sense of the task for thought (as determined by the understanding of being that prevails in our age). Heidegger’s comment, then, should be seen as recognition of the fact that he cannot decide how useful his work will prove for the task of thought. For instance, as I have suggested in the discussion of Carnap’s response to Heidegger, the perceived uselessness of Heidegger’s work in the analytic world is a function of a prior decision about the nature of philosophy, a decision shaped by the ontological background of the age. The same holds true of all the ways in which Heidegger’s thought has been accepted and transformed. Using the categories Heidegger has provided us, we can ask of any use of Heidegger whether it treats his work historically, historiographically, or analytically. Of course, these are not mutually exclusive approaches to Heidegger. The historical question is given traction by the historiography. The historiography, in turn, should be guided by our sense for history. And an “analytical” reading of Heidegger – that is, using his analysis of contemporary problems to counteract mistaken philosophical views, particularly when those views contribute to the “oblivion of being,” may in some ways be truer to his own project than more self-consciously historicist readings of his work. After all, Being and Time, with its detailed treatment of various problems in intentionality, lends itself readily to a reading that pursues a traditional philosophical aim of the analysis of the content of our concepts. Along these lines, one could articulate Heidegger’s response to analytical philosophy rather differently than I have here. Rather than seeing the disagreement between Heidegger and analytical philosophy as an argument over the role of historical reflection in philosophy, one could cast it in terms of different views about the philosophy of mind and language. One might also approach Heidegger and his work as a product of the cultural and historiological forces operating in Germany in the first half of this century – a particularly sensational issue in Heidegger’s case. Indeed, one can read Heidegger’s mythological account of the history of being as itself a historiological event. Likewise, a considerable amount of scholarship is devoted to discovering and articulating Heidegger’s dependence on, for instance, Husserl. But, in the final analysis, neither a narrowly analytic nor a historiographic reading of Heidegger is able to confront the problems with which Heidegger was most concerned (at least in the decades following the publication of Being and Time). These problems include the nature of our background understanding of being, the meaning of the oblivion of being, and the task of preparing a way to overcome that oblivion. But even with a commitment to the project of historical reflection as Heidegger articulated it, further decisions are in order. Do we accept his description of the background, his account of the history of being? It would, of course, be possible to treat the

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details of his readings of Anaximander, Parmenides, Heraclitus, Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Descartes, Kant, Nietzsche, and so on, as dispensable or indeed as fundamentally mistaken. For instance, one might agree that the history of philosophy needs to be understood in terms of the prevailing background understanding that shaped each thinker, but nevertheless reject his unified account of that background.23 Another pressing issue that arises from Heidegger’s history is the question of what to make of his diagnosis of the ills and dangers confronting the current age, and of the need to prepare for the overcoming of the metaphysical age. Here again, there is a range of responses to Heidegger that, while broadly sympathetic to his analysis of the dangers of technology, nevertheless depart from that analysis in important ways. One might, for instance, find his enigmatic claims about the “saving power” useless in coming to terms with the problem of technology. Thus, even if one accepts the task of Heidegger’s preparatory thinking, there remains the question of how best to carry on that task. Other related issues arise in any thoughtful reception of Heidegger’s work. For example, one inescapable but central element of Heidegger’s work was his particularity as a thinker. Heidegger explicitly saw himself as preparing for the overcoming of metaphysics on the basis of the resources inherent in the German language and culture. This presents a constant obstacle in working with Heidegger’s writings, as one must decide how much weight to give to the often archaic, German-based terminology/jargon that Heidegger employs. Heidegger’s particularity gives rise, in turn, to sometimes heated disagreements over the appropriateness of different translations of Heidegger’s thought – into, for instance, a vocabulary more accessible to analytical philosophers. Viewed from the perspective of “the history of being,” however, it becomes clear that what, at least for the past few decades, have seemed to be the most divisive dimensions of Heidegger scholarship are, in fact, not so important. Differences between schools of Heidegger interpretation have, to a considerable degree, been defined in terms of literary style and the canon of other philosophical works typically consulted (for example, does one refer to Levinas and Derrida, or Wittgenstein and Searle for illuminating comparisons with Heidegger’s work?). While the question of style is, on Heideggerian grounds, something to take seriously, neither it nor the authors one reads are, in and of themselves, determinative of one’s fidelity to the Heideggerian project. To the extent that divisions between schools of Heidegger studies are premised on a historiological assessment regarding intellectual dependencies, they are based on the kind of factors that Heidegger’s approach to history has taught us to look beyond. For even a 23

See, for instance, Jacques Derrida, Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles (Barbara Harlow, Trans.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978.

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similarity of style and shared intellectual dependencies can easily mask a wide diversity of approaches to a problem. More importantly, a diversity of styles and influences can obscure a more fundamental agreement in thoughtful reflection on the matter to be thought. This kind of agreement, if Heidegger himself is to be believed, is what marks the continuation of the Heideggerian project in the fullest sense. Afraid that his work would be taken, in historiological or analytical fashion, as a set of doctrines, Heidegger urged his readers instead to treat his writings “as directions for the road of independent reflection on the matter pointed out which each must travel for himself.”24 Thus appropriating Heidegger’s thought is, from Heidegger’s own perspective, a matter of taking his project as one’s own.25

24

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Martin Heidegger, “Preface,” in William J. Richardson, Heidegger: Through Phenomenology to Thought. The Hague: Martinus Nijhof, 1974, p. viii. I am indebted to James Faulconer and Hubert Dreyfus; they have saved me from a variety of errors through their careful attention to earlier drafts of this paper and their willingness to discuss the matters addressed herein.

9 Between the Earth and the Sky Heidegger on Life After the Death of God

In the last decades of his life, Heidegger was preoccupied with the dangers of technology, and tried to articulate a nontechnological form of “poetical dwelling” that could save us from those dangers. On Heidegger’s account, dwelling consists in achieving a nearness to the earth, the sky, mortals, and divinities. Viewed with the kind of historical detachment exemplified in Charles Taylor’s paper, “Closed World Structures,”1 Heidegger’s reaction against technology is just one ripple in the “wave of protests” that formed what Taylor calls the “nova effect” – that is, “the multiplication of more and more spiritual and anti-spiritual positions.”2 Such a multiplication, in turn, “further fragilizes any of the positions it contains” in the sense that it undermines the claim of each position to legitimacy. This is because the disagreements between positions are disagreements at the most fundamental levels. As a consequence, Taylor argues, “there is no longer any clear, unambiguous way of drawing the main issue” – the issue at hand being the nature and place of religion in a postmetaphysical, technological age. Taylor’s observations are valuable as a reminder that Heidegger’s diagnosis of our age is itself couched in terms that are not only contestable from a number of sides but perhaps almost unintelligible to other splinter positions in the overall fragmentation of modern culture. If, then, Heidegger’s view of religious life after the death of God is to have an importance to anyone beyond the initiates in Heideggerese, it can only do so by helping to bring this overall pattern of fragmentation into some kind of focus. I would like to try making the case that it does. In particular, as I read the later Heidegger’s work on the divinities and the fourfold, Heidegger is offering us a way of pulling into focus a problem that is scarcely articulable 1

2

Charles Taylor, “Closed World Structures,” in Religion After Metaphysics (Mark A. Wrathall, Ed.). Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2003, pp. 47–68. Ibid., p. 66.

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from a detached, historiographical perspective – namely, why is it that a religious life should remain an appealing possibility, that a religious life, in any incarnation – new age or traditional – should seem a plausible way to redress the failings of our technological and secular age? To answer this question, one has to say something specific about the deficiencies of the technological age. One needs to articulate what crucial element of a worthwhile life is lost with the death of God, and why we should think that a religious life after the death of God can correct that loss. I would like to present Heidegger’s reflections on the fourfold as responses to just these questions. THE DEATH OF GOD

Because Heidegger’s account of the technological age grew out of his reading of Nietzsche, the place to start is with Heidegger’s interpretation of the “death of God.” Although I will refer to a number of passages from Nietzsche, I am not concerned here either to argue that Heidegger interpreted Nietzsche correctly, or that Heidegger’s critique of Nietzsche found its mark. Instead, I am interested in what Heidegger thought he learned from Nietzsche; this can stand or fall independently of questions about what Nietzsche really thought. Heidegger interprets the death of God in ontological terms – that is, according to Heidegger’s understanding of ontology, in terms of the “mode” in which “whatever is, as such, comes to appearance” (see GA 5: 257). In particular, the death of God is understood as the process by which everything is turned into resource. Thus, from Heidegger’s perspective, it is a terrible misreading of Nietzsche’s proclamation of the death of God to take it as a bald atheism, an undisguised declaration of the end of everything that is divine. As Heidegger points out, those who think that the proclamation could mean this must themselves be starting with an inadequate conception of God. To think that Nietzsche is a bald atheist, Heidegger claims, they would have to “deal with and treat their God the same way they deal with a pocketknife If a pocketknife is lost, it is just gone. But to lose God means something other” (GA 39: 5). Heidegger’s point is that the loss of a God, properly understood, is an apocalyptic event – one that cannot be treated with the same equanimity that we might treat the loss of some mundane object. To own up to the loss of God requires of us that we reach for a new kind of divinity – a divinity that can withstand the loss of the old God. Heidegger sees this as apparent already in the very passages in which Nietzsche proclaims the death of God. These explicitly place the focus on discovering a sort of divinity that would render us able to endure a world from which the old God is gone. The madman in Gay Science §125, for

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instance, follows up the proclamation of God’s death with a series of questions – questions that culminate in the following: How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?3

Heidegger does not pass over such questions lightly. He closes the “Word of Nietzsche” essay with a reflection on the fact that the madman seeks God: “the madman . . . is clearly, according to the first, and more clearly still according to the last, sentences of the passage, for him who can hear, the one who seeks God, since he cries out after God. Has a thinking man perhaps here really cried out de profundis? (GA 5: 267/QCT: 112). The proclamation of the death of God, then, means something other than a mere denial of the real existence of the Christian God. It is rather an attempt to really come to grips with the loss we suffer when religious practices become marginalized. The Christian God was important because our practices for devotion to him provided us with a source of meaning and intelligibility. We kill God, Nietzsche’s madman declares, when we “drink up the sea,” when we “wipe away the entire horizon,” when we “unchain this earth from its sun.” Heidegger reads the sea as Nietzsche’s metaphor for the sensible world – a world in flux, constantly changing, malleable and flexible in the paths it permits us to take. God served as a land and horizon, giving the sensible world a fixed point of reference. The horizon is thus Nietzsche’s metaphor for focal practices that give us a place, determining what is important to us, and what counts as unimportant or trivial. Finally, the sun is the God in whose light everything appears as what it is. When we drink up the sea, we become responsible for the way the sensible world shows up – that is, we ourselves, rather than a fixed suprasensible God, encompass the world. When we wipe away the horizon, we destroy any fixed point of reference for valuing the world. When we unchain the earth from the sun, we deprive things of any fixed or stable essence (GA 5: 261/QCT: 107). The history of Western culture prior to the advent of the technological age can be seen in terms of a transition through a long series of Gods, each of which has filled the position of giver of meaning, setter of norms, source of gravity and value. Heidegger, commenting on Nietzsche, observed that since the Reformation, the role of highest value has been played by “the authority of conscience,” “the authority of reason,” “historical progress,” “the earthly happiness of the greatest number,” “the creating of a culture 3

Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage, 1974.

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or the spreading of civilization,” and finally “the business enterprise.” However, all these are “variations on the Christian-ecclesiastical and theological interpretation of the world” (GA 5: 221/QCT: 64). Thus the Christian God has long since ceased, at least for most in the West, to serve as horizon and sun. What is unique about this moment in history is that there is no candidate to step into the position of shared source of meaning and value. Our form of life has changed in such a way that we are no longer able to submit ourselves to such a God. The sea-drinking, horizon-wiping, earth-unchaining process is a process not of filling in the position of God with yet another God in the same mold but of overturning the whole onto-theological interpretation of the world, which sets things under some suprasensory value. This interpretation of the death of God ultimately underwrites Heidegger’s reading of Nietzsche as the thinker of the technological epoch. According to Heidegger, every thinker, Nietzsche included, “has at any given time his fundamental philosophical position within metaphysics.” But by this he does not refer to the thinker’s explicit doctrine on metaphysical issues; rather he means that their work manifests a particular understanding about the nature “of what is as such in its entirety.” Heidegger’s interest in Nietzsche, then, is driven by a desire to gain insight into the most fundamental way in which our age understands what is: “The thinking through of Nietzsche’s metaphysics becomes a reflection on the situation and place of contemporary man, whose destiny is still but little experienced with respect to its truth” (GA 5: 210/QCT: 54). Heidegger’s ultimate aim, then, was to use Nietzsche to get clear about the ontological structure of what is becoming the most prominent feature of the place of contemporary man – namely, the technologizing of everyday life. The technological world, Heidegger argues, is grounded in the fact that everything that is shows up as lacking in any inherent significance, use, or purpose. Heidegger’s name for the way in which entities appear and are experienced in the technological world is “resource.” Resources are removed from their natural conditions and contexts, and reorganized in such away as to be completely available, flexible, interchangeable, and ready to be employed in an indefinite variety of manners.4 In the technological age, even people are reduced from modern subjects with fixed desires and a deep immanent truth to “functionaries of enframing” (GA 79: 30). In such a world, nothing is encountered as really mattering, that is, as having a worth that exceeds its purely instrumental value for satisfying transitory urges. This is, by the way, the Heideggerian way of cashing out Nietzsche’s claim that the death of God results in a lack of gravity. As Heidegger notes (GA 44: 192–3), Nietzsche connects the death of the Christian God with 4

See “The Question Concerning Technology” in QCT.

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the emptiness of a life in which “it will appear for a long time as if all weightiness were gone from things.”5 By a loss of “weightiness,” Nietzsche means that nothing really matters to us any more; that everything is equally value-less. I will refer to weightiness as “mattering” or “importance.” With the death of the old God, we lose a sense that our understanding of things – including having a shared vision of the good, or a notion of the correct way to live a life, or an idea of justness, and so on – is grounded in something more than our willing it to be so. And without such a grounding, Heidegger worries, it is not just our lives but also all the things with which we deal that will lose a weightiness or importance. All becomes equally trivial, equally lacking in goodness and rightness and worth. The decisive question for our age, then, is “whether we let every being weightlessly drive into nothingness or whether we want to give a weightiness to things again and especially to ourselves; whether we become master over ourselves, in order to find ourselves in essence, or whether we lose ourselves in and with the existing nothingness” (GA 44: 193–4). What the old God gave us, in short, was a way of being attuned to objects as having a transcendental importance or weightiness. Heidegger believes that a living God attunes a whole culture to objects in a particular way and as having a transcendent meaning. For example, when God was the JudeoChristian creator God of the theologians, we were attuned to things as instantiations of the ideal forms created by God. We, in turn, were called by all of creation to a certain reverence for the handiwork of God, and we were provoked to the intellectual project of coming to understand the mind of God as manifest in the world. In other words, God’s attunement required of us particular modes of comportment. Because things could show up as making demands on us, things mattered. But now, we as a culture find ourselves in the position of being unable to share a reverence for God – that is, for some such source of attunement. Without God to attune us to objects as having weight or importance for us, the danger is that nothing will matter, and consequently life will not be worthwhile. The search for a new source of divinity, then, becomes a question of finding a mood, a mode of attunement, which will allow things once more to show up as having weight or importance. By the same token, the inquiry into the death of God needs to be understood in affective terms – that is, as oriented around the question of the mood appropriate to the death of God. In particular, as we get in tune with the mood of the technological age, things will begin to show up as lacking any set purpose, any determinate inherent value, but instead as ready and on call to be taken up in any way 5

Sämtliche Werke: Kritische Studienausgabe, vol. II: Nachgelassene Fragmente 1884–1885 (Giorgio Colli & Mazzino Montinari, Eds.). Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1980, p. 424.

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that we choose. The problem of this chapter can now be posed in the following way: Why does Heidegger believe that an experience of the divine is necessary in order to live a worthwhile life in the kind of world that shows up after the death of God? MEANING AND MATTERING

Before turning directly to this question, I want to develop a framework for the ensuing account. I begin with a brief discussion of the idea of meaning. Things have meaning when they hold a place in what Heidegger calls a “referential context,” by which he refers to the way each object is defined by a network of practices in which it is employed, the result toward which it is directed, and the other objects with which it is used. So a hammer has the meaning it has both because of the function it plays in human activities (like making houses) and because of the way it “refers” to things like nails and boards. Although the world is meaningful or intelligible to me when I grasp the practical and equipmental contexts that embed all the things that populate the world, nothing in the world matters to me on the basis of this intelligibility alone. It is only when I am engaged in activities myself that any particular object comes to hold a special significance for me. As a result, in a world where I am not active, where I have no purposes and goals, where I am drawn into no involvements, no thing or person could matter to me. Everything would be spread out before me in an undifferentiated (albeit meaningful) irrelevance. We can now, on the basis of this, distinguish what I call an instrumental importance from an existential importance. Things have an instrumental importance anytime we take up some of the purposes made available by the intelligible structure of the world. In a world where it makes sense to be a doctor, for instance, one can take up the objects that a doctor employs, and come into relation with the people a doctor relates to in her doctoring activities. These people and objects will matter to her, just as long as she continues to be a doctor. But outside of her doctoring activity, these devices and people need not make any claim on her. Existential importance, by contrast, would consist in some practice or object or person having an importance for our self-realization. That is, the object or person or practice is something without which we would cease to be who we are. Such objects or persons or practices thus make a demand on us – require of us that we value them, respect them, respond to them on pain of losing ourselves. As we noted, a defining trait of resources is precisely that they do not make any demands on us but instead stand ready and available to be ordered as we demand, given our current aims We can now get a clearer picture of one threat posed by the technological world. In the technological

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world, because everything presents itself as a mere resource, and thus has at best instrumental importance, nothing is capable of existential importance. There is also another, closely related danger posed by our becoming attuned to the world through technology – the danger that we will lose a sense of having a place in the world. A life organized (however temporarily) around an end or goal, in addition to giving us instrumentally important objects, also acquires at least a thin “sense of place.” To illustrate, suppose that I am engaged in being a teacher. Then everything else I do (reading a book, learning a new software program, sleeping in on Saturday) has its value as an activity in terms of how it contributes to or detracts from my realization of my vocation as a teacher. A purposive life is a coherent pattern of activity, and activities require things with which to be active. My activities give me a sense of place by ranging over particular entities – these students, this classroom, this campus, and so on. These are the things I relate to in realizing who I am. Another way to say this is to say that my activities determine what is near to me and what is far from me. A thing is far from me if it plays no role in helping me be the person I am trying to be. (Of course, as Heidegger likes to point out, the “near” and “far” here are not primarily spatial – if something on the other side of the world were important to my work, I could be closer to it even while sitting in my office in Utah than someone else might be who happened to be just next door to it.) But as technology begins to increase the range of our activities, it by the same token undermines nearness and farness in our world, thus threatening to undercut our belonging to a place and, by the same token, the sense that anything genuinely matters. Thanks to technological devices like the Internet, I, in fact, can act at the greatest possible distances. The subsequent extension of reach, in turn, leads to a homogenization of objects, which need to be placed on call for exploitation in the widest imaginable set of contexts. The result we are driving toward is that no particular thing or location will matter at all to our ability to live our lives because an indistinguishable alternative is readily available. The perfectly technological world will be one in which we can be completely indifferent to particular places, people, and things. Or, in other words, all that is left is resources, the “formless formations of technological production” in which pretechnological natures “can no longer pierce through . . . to show their own” (GA 5: 291/PLT: 113). In justifying these claims, Heidegger quotes approvingly the following passage from a letter by Rilke: To our grandparents, a “house,” a “well,” a familiar steeple, even their own clothes, their cloak still meant infinitely more, were infinitely more intimate . . . Now there are intruding, from America, empty indifferent things, sham things, dummies of life . . . A house, as the Americans understand it, an American apple or a winestock

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from over there, have nothing in common with the house, the fruit, the grape into which the hope and thoughtfulness of our forefathers had entered.6

Before the advent of technology, even merely instrumentally important objects had a veneer of existential importance, given that a substitute was often not readily available. Before the advent of technology, instrumentally important objects could give us a sense of place (or at least an analogue of a genuine, existential sense of place) in virtue of the fact that objects tended to be shaped by local and regional factors. But these thin forms of existential importance and place are undermined as the globalization and the technologization of the economy has made for easy interchangeability, and has created pressure toward standardization. “Everything becomes equal and indifferent,” Heidegger argues, “in consequence of the uniformly calculated availability of the whole earth” (GA 12: 201/ OWL: 105). For Heidegger, a worthwhile life in the technological age demands that we rediscover existentially important objects and a sense of place. The divinities play a crucial role in his account of this rediscovery. But before turning directly to an account of Heidegger’s divinities, I would like to focus the issue more clearly by exploring a nonreligious solution to the problem. One response to the loss of importance and place would be to overcome our addiction to a life of existential importance, and instead find fulfillment in experiencing ourselves as disclosers of the technological world.7 This possibility has recently been articulated by Dreyfus and Spinosa in the course of an exploration of the possibility of learning to affirm technology.8 Dreyfus and Spinosa suggest that we could have a fulfilling life in a technological age if we could learn to enjoy the excitement of being able to respond flexibly to a situation, rather than being constrained by the inherent nature of the objects in the situation that confronts us. The reason I think that Heidegger does not pursue this option is that, in affirming technology, we embrace a style of living that 6 7

8

“Letter to Muzot,” quoted at GA 5: 291/PLT: 113. Nietzsche seems to think that this is the kind of experience that will properly attune us to the world as it appears after the death of God. After the death of God, he wrote in an unpublished note, all that is left is the issue “whether to abolish our reverences or us ourselves. The latter is nihilism.” The former course – that of abolishing our reverences – is the course which will open us up to enjoying the thrill of responding freely to the world as technology offers it. Nietzsche’s primary metaphor for the world after the death of God – a world in which there are no fixed points of reference, and in which no object has a real gravity or weight – is a sea with infinite horizons: “At long last the horizon appears free to us again, even if it should not be bright; at long last our ships may venture out again, venture out to face any danger; all the daring of the lover of knowledge is permitted again; the sea, our sea, lies open again; perhaps there has never yet been such an ‘open sea’” (Gay Science, sec. 343). Hubert L. Dreyfus and Charles Spinosa, “Highway Bridges and Feasts: Heidegger and Borgmann on how to Affirm Technology,” Man and World 30 (1997): 159–77.

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actively seeks to empty objects of the kind of worth that would allow them to make demands on us. In the process, we might recover at least one thing with more than merely instrumental importance – namely, it matters that there are numerous different possible ways to respond to each situation. But we disclose these multiple possibilities precisely to the extent that no particular possibility is inherently worthwhile, and no particular action or involvement makes a demand on us, because no particular object or action plays a unique role in realizing who we are. In short, in such a life, nothing and nobody can make a claim on us. For Heidegger, such a life makes us “homesick” – that is, makes us long for the fulfillment found in inhabiting a place populated with objects, people, and activities that themselves have existential as opposed to merely instrumental importance. We can thus see that, from Heidegger’s perspective, Dreyfus and Spinosa offer us at best a contingency plan for addressing the dangers of our age. They show us how it is possible to have a life that is significant in the sense of making sense, of being intelligible, and in which it is even possible to have one thing – the existential space of free possibilities – show up as more than simply instrumentally important. But Heidegger takes the incessant appetite for amusement and entertainment, as well as the excitement over open possibilities that Dreyfus and Spinosa focus on, as an effort to cover over the attunement of profound boredom that overtakes us in a world where nothing matters to us. This attempt at a cover up, for Heidegger, attests to a continued longing for home (GA 16: 578 ff.). Thus if it were possible to have more – to have objects and practices themselves show up as important – such a life would be preferable. To have this kind of life, however, requires a role for the divinities that no life of attunement to technological things permits. On Heidegger’s account, then, the appeal of a religious life after the death of God is rooted in the possibility of repopulating the world with things that have a deep importance – indeed, of perhaps genuinely relating to such things for the first time. To explain this, let me start by restating how Heidegger understands the way in which the technological age has destroyed the possibility of existentially important things. Heidegger’s analysis, to frame it as succinctly as I can, is as follows: it is a relationship to things that have intrinsic importance that makes a life genuinely fulfilling. It is only our belonging in a particular place (existentially understood) that makes some things really matter. The technological age has undermined our ability to feel rooted in a particular place. Therefore, the technological age has made it difficult to live a worthwhile life. I now want to say more carefully how a sense of place contributes to the existential importance of things. I note first that the thin sense of place discussed above – where my place is a function of the things I happen to be dealing with – seems inadequate to provide things with existential importance. A sense of place in the thin sense only decides over which particular

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objects our activities will range. It does not necessarily make those objects ultimately worthwhile. To return to my teacher example, one could ask, “Why be the teacher of these students? There’s nothing really special about them, and there are students all over the world who need a teacher.” If that is true, it seems that my life is only contingently worthwhile. Once I have a sense of being the teacher of these particular students, my life gets the order that it has. But there is nothing that ultimately grounds my being their teacher as opposed to somebody else’s, and so my life ultimately lacks real significance. What we would really need is a deeply rooted belonging to a place – a kind of belonging in which the things we deal with really matter, that is, they make demands on us that we cannot ignore. But how can anything really come to matter in this thick sense in a world that is moving swiftly toward abolishing all sense of place? This sort of mattering or importance is not something we can bestow upon things by a free act of will. The only way to get it would be as a gift – a gift of place or a gift of a thing of intrinsic worth. An attunement that allows things to show up as having an intrinsic worth, however, is precisely what we lost with the death of God. So, it seems that a worthwhile life after the death of God requires some new endowment of divine grace, an endowment in which we can once again be attuned to the sacred and divine. To finish this thought, however, I need to say something more about the role the divinities play for Heidegger in determining our place in the world. BETWEEN THE EARTH AND THE SKY

Heidegger’s discussion of the divinities is part of his attempt to uncover the way that real things, as opposed to mere resources and technological devices, show up. We have already outlined the role that a relationship to the old God plays in allowing things and a world to “show up” (Heidegger calls it “unconcealment”). The old God attuned us to the sacred in the sense that he made objects have a significance independent of their usefulness to our current projects. The divinities we strive to encounter in the fourfold will likewise attune us to the sacred. Heidegger tells us that for a real thing, a thing with existential importance, to show up, we must have practices for dealing with the earth and the sky, the divinities and our own mortality. Real things themselves, in turn, will embody the way earth, sky, mortals, and divinities condition each other. Heidegger’s name for the interrelation of earth, sky, mortals, and divinities is “the fourfold.” Initially, Heidegger’s claim that things and dwelling require the mutual “appropriation” of earth and sky, “mortals and divinities,” is anything but clear. He tends to use each of the terms in an infuriatingly literal fashion – and does so frequently enough that the passages cannot simply be ignored.

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To cite a couple of my favorite examples, Heidegger tells us that the sky contributes to the essence of a jug as a jug-thing because the jug holds and pours out wine and thus gathers the sky. The holding and pouring of the wine gathers the sky, he explains, because the grapes from which the wine is made “receive the rain and dew of the sky” (GA 7: 163–4/PLT: 172). As a second example, the Black Forest peasant’s farmhouse gathers the earth, he says, because it is placed on a “mountain slope . . . among the meadows close to the spring” (GA 7: 155/PLT: 260). Philosophers are not used to such talk, so it is tempting either simply to ignore these passages or to impose a metaphorical reading, which, given the densely poetical nature of Heidegger’s musings, can only be loosely connected to the actual text.9 The unappealing alternative is to repeat lamely his semipoetic musings about the sky in the dew on the grapes (and so on). In terms of doing any philosophical work with Heidegger’s notion of the fourfold, the metaphorical reading is certainly preferable to a mere repetition. But it seems, at the least, to do violence to the text. I think, however, that such approaches are mistaken and miss the whole point of Heidegger’s discussion of the fourfold. The four are meant, by Heidegger, quite literally. The earth is the earth beneath our feet, the earth that spreads out all around us as mountains and in trees, in rivers and streams. The sky is the sky above our heads, the stars and constellations, the sun and the moon, the shifting weather that brings the changing seasons. We are the mortals – we and our companions – living our lives and dying our deaths. And the divinities – the most elusive members of the fourfold in this age – are divine beings, the “beckoning messengers of the Godhead.” To justify such a literal, straightforward reading of the fourfold, I need to be able to say how a discussion of the earth, sky, mortals, and divinities shows us how to dwell and thereby recover a sense of place. We can see this if we remember that what is at issue is the problem of discovering things with existential importance. Heidegger’s insight is this: we do not have things that matter to us if all there is is isolated, selfcontained, interchangeable entities – in other words, resources. Such entities cannot matter to us, cannot have existential importance for us, because none of them is essential to being who we are. Their flexibility and interchangeability make them efficient but also prevent any of them from playing a unique role in our lives: “In enframing [i.e., the technological 9

Dreyfus and Spinosa, for instance, explain earth, sky, mortals, and divinities without a single quotation from, or citation of, Heidegger’s discussion of the fourfold. For interpretations which approach the literalness with which I think Heidegger should be read, see James C. Edwards, The Plain Sense of Things: The Fate of Religion in an Age of Normal Nihilism. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997; Julian Young, Heidegger’s Later Philosophy. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2002; and Charles Taylor, “Heidegger, Language, and Ecology,” in Heidegger: A Critical Reader (Hubert L. Dreyfus & Harrison Hall, Eds.). Oxford, England: Blackwell, 1992, pp. 247–69.

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understanding that orders our world], everything is set up in the constant replaceability of the same through the same” (GA 79: 44). Real things, by contrast, are of a nature to make demands on us and, in the process, condition us. We can clarify this idea of conditioning by noting that even instrumental importance is a result of a certain degree of conditioning of one object by another. It is only because our activities are conditioned or constrained by the objects with which we act that any particular object has instrumental importance. It is only because I want to build a house, for example, that a hammer matters more than a fountain pen. This is because the need to drive nails, and the nature of nails and boards, conditions the kind of tools I can use successfully. If objects make no demands on us or each other, and thus do not condition us or each other, then no object can be of any more weight than any other. Therefore, for things to matter, there must be mutual conditioning. Heidegger’s name for the process of mutual condition is Ereignis, probably best translated as “appropriation,” where this is heard not as saying that we take over as our own something that does not belong to us, but rather as the mutual conditioning through which we and the things around us “come into our own” – that is, become what each can be when conditioned by the other.10 The danger of the technological age is that we are turning everything (things, earth, sky, our own mortality, divinities) into entities that cannot condition and thus cannot matter to us. The way to counteract the technological age, then, is to allow ourselves to be conditioned. Precisely here is where the fourfold becomes important – namely, as a source of conditioning in our lives. Heidegger’s name for living in such a way that we are conditioned or appropriated by the fourfold is “dwelling.” What does it mean to “dwell” – that is, to be conditioned by the fourfold? We are conditioned by the earth when we incorporate into our practices the particular features of the environment around us. “Mortals dwell in that they save the earth,” Heidegger explains, where “saving the earth” consists in not exploiting it, not mastering it, and not subjugating it (GA 7: 144/BDT: 150). In Utah, for instance, one way to be conditioned by the earth would be to live in harmony with the desert, rather than pushing it aside by planting grass and lawns to replicate the gardens of the East. The technology of modern irrigation and sprinkler systems allow us to push our own earth aside, to master it and subjugate it, rather than being conditioned by it (as Borgmann has beautifully demonstrated).11 Human beings 10

11

See, for example, “Seminar in Le Thor,” in GA 15: 363: “es ist das Ereignis des Seins als Bedingung der Ankunft des Seienden: das Sein läßt das Seiende anwesen.” Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987.

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“only experience the appropriation of the earth in the home-coming to their land,”12 that is, when we come to be at home with our land in its own characteristics, not those enforced upon it. We are conditioned by our sky when we incorporate into our practices the peculiar features of the temporal cycles of the heavens, the day and the night, the seasons and the weather. We push aside the sky when, for example, our eating habits demand food on call, out of season, or when our patterns of work, rest, and play make no allowance for the times of day and year, or recognize no holy days or festivals. We are conditioned by our mortality when our practices acknowledge our temporal course on earth – both growth and suffering, health and disease. Heidegger illustrates this through the example of the Black Forest peasant hut, which was intimately conditioned by (and correspondingly conditioning of) mortality: “It did not forget the altar corner behind the community table; it made room in its chamber for the hallowed places of childbed and the ‘tree of the dead’ – for that is what they call a coffin there: the Totenbaum – and in this way it designed for the different generations under one roof the character of their journey through time” (GA 7: 155/ BDT: 160). We push our mortality aside when we seek immediate gratification without discipline, when we set aside our own local culture, when we try to engineer biologically and pharmacologically an end to all infirmity, including even death. We are conditioned by the divinities when, for instance, we incorporate into our practices a recognition of holy times and holy precincts – perhaps manifested where one experiences the earth as God’s creation, or feels a reverence for holy days or the sanctity of human life (GA 5: 27–8/BW: 167). Hölderlin’s Hyperion expresses such a sense for divinity in the world: And often, when I lay there among the flowers, basking in the delicate spring light, and looked up into the serene blue that embraced the warm earth, when I sat under the elms and willows on the side of the mountain, after a refreshing rain, when the branches were yet astir from the touch of the sky and golden clouds moved over the dripping woods; or when the evening star, breathing the spirit of peace, rose with the age-old youths and the other heroes of the sky, and I saw how the life in them moved on through the ether in eternal, effortless order, and the peace of the world surrounded and rejoiced me, so that I was suddenly alert and listening, yet did not know what was befalling me – “Do you love me, dear Father in Heaven,” I whispered, and felt his answer so certainly and so blissfully in my heart.13

As suggested by this quotation, earth, sky, mortals, and divinities do not just condition us, however; they also condition each other. Heidegger says that the fourfold mirror each other by ringing or wrestling with each other. 12 13

Besinnung auf unser Wesen. Messkirch: Martin-Heidegger-Gesellschaft, 1994. Friedrich Hölderlin, “Hyperion,” in Hyperion and Selected Poems (Eric L. Santner, Ed.). New York: Continuum, 1990, pp. 5–6.

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Mirroring, Heidegger explains, consists in each member of the four becoming lighted, or intelligible, in the process of reflecting the others. I take this to mean, for instance, that the sky is only intelligible as the sky it is in terms of the interaction it has with the earth striving to spring forth as the earth it is (or in terms of the mortal activities it blesses or restricts) – for example, the weather the sky brings is only intelligible as inclement weather given the fruits the earth bears (or the activities of mortals), and the earth first comes into its essence as the earth it is when “blossoming in the grace of the sky.”14 More importantly for our purposes here, the divinities only are divinities to the extent that they mirror and, mirroring, light up the other regions of the four. The implication is that Heidegger’s divinities have to be beings who can condition and be conditioned by the earth, the sky, and mortals. Conversely, the “default of the gods” that characterizes our age is understood in terms of the failure of any divine being to condition us and the things around us: “The default of God means that no god any longer gathers men and things unto himself, visibly and unequivocally, and by such gathering disposes the world’s history and man’s sojourn in it” (GA 5: 269/PLT: 91). With this in mind, let’s turn now to the question how such conditioning can give us things that “near” – that have an importance that orients our whole life and not just the particular activities in which we are currently engaged. It is important to emphasize that we cannot have such things through a mere change of attitude – through merely deciding to treat resources as things. Things are not things in virtue of being represented or valued in some special way, but rather by being shaped in light of the receptivity that we have developed for our local earth, sky, mortals, and divinities. If the objects with which our world is populated have not been conditioned in that way (and resources are not), then they will not solicit the practices we have developed for living on the earth, beneath the sky, before the divinities. As Heidegger explains, “nothing that stands today as an object in the distanceless can ever be simply switched over into a thing.”15 By the same token, Heidegger cannot be advocating a nostalgic return to living in Black Forest peasant farmhouses. He notes that “things as things do not ever come about if we merely avoid [technological] objects and recollect former objects which perhaps were once on the way to becoming things and even to actually presencing as things” (GA 7: 174/PLT: 182). To the extent that the former things gathered a receptivity to a particular 14

15

Besinnung auf unser Wesen (“die Erde als Erde wesen läßt; das ist: Erblühen in der Huld des Himmels”). GA 7: 174/PLT: 182. This passage, by the way, shows that the earlier reference to highway bridges gathering must have been sloppiness on Heidegger’s part. If gathering is a term of art for what things do – as Heidegger sometimes indeed uses it – then highway bridges cannot thing because they do not gather the divinities; they push them aside. Cf. Dreyfus and Spinosa, “Highway Bridges and Feasts.”

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sky, a particular earth, particular divinities, and particular mortal practices, they cannot thing for us, because our sky, earth, divinities, and mortals have a different configuration. They might once have been things, in other words, but they cannot thing in our fourfold. Thus, if we are to live with things, we ourselves need to “bring the fourfold’s essence into things” (GA 7: 146/PLT: 151). In other words, on the basis of our reawakened receptivity to the four, we need to learn to make things and nurture things into being more than mere resource, hence to let them embody the essence of our place or home – our earth, our sky, our mortality, and our divinities. Heidegger’s name for the activity of constructing and cultivating things in such a way that they contain or gather the fourfold is “building.” The idea is that, in building, things secure the fourfold because, in the way they draw us into action, they draw upon just the kind of responsiveness that we have acquired by dwelling before our local divinities, earth, sky, and mortal practices. As Heidegger puts it, “building takes its standard over from the fourfold” (GA 7: 161). When our practices incorporate the fourfold, such things will have importance beyond their instrumental use in our current activities because they and only they are geared to our way of inhabiting the world. As a result, they, and only they, can be used to be who we are. We will thus finally be at home in our places because our practices are oriented to our places alone. We might now wonder, however, why a relation to divinities is important if things with existential importance are secured by a sense of place. It seems that if we could foster practices for our earth, our sky, and our mortality, we could have a receptivity to the world that could only be satisfied by particular things, not generic resources. Those things would then, at least if the argument I have outlined is correct, have existential importance without any mention of divinities. Thus the divinities seem superfluous. I think that there are two answers to this problem. First, there is the tactical observation that given the seductiveness of resources and technological devices, it would take an experience of the divine to awaken us to the flaws in the technological age. The God, Heidegger says, “deranges us” – in the sense that he calls us beyond the existing configuration of objects to see things that shine forth with a kind of holiness (i.e., a dignity and worth that exceeds our will). Heidegger understands receptivity to the sacred as the experience of being beheld – of recognizing that there is a kind of intellegibility to the world that we do not ourselves produce. If God is part of the fourfold, then he wrestles with each region of the four, and brings it into a sacred own-ness. If we, in turn, are receptive to God, our practices will embody a recognition that the technological reduction of objects to resources is an act of presumption, for it proceeds on the assumption that we are free to employ anything we encounter in any way whatsoever. Once attuned by the divinities, technology will no longer be able to seduce us into an endless and empty “switching about ever

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anew” because we will see certain things around us as invested with holiness – with an intelligibility inherent to them, which shines forth out of them. So attuned, we may be able to establish what Heidegger calls a “free relation” to technology – a relation in which we are able to use technological devices to support our dwelling with things. But because the draw of technology is so strong, it is only a God who can save us, as Heidegger once asserted.16 Second, there is something substantive that being conditioned by a God adds to our sense of place – namely, it shows us our place as necessary for us. In fact, the old theological interpretation of God and the world was never able to do the job of giving us existential importance (we only had it in spite of the theological interpretation). The God of the philosophers was a God removed from time and us personally. His primary role was the establishment of meaning. But unless he could somehow be present to us, manifest himself in conditioning particular things in this world, be embodied, so to speak, so that we could become dependent on the intelligibility he helps light up, God could do no more than guarantee the intelligibility of the world (and the thin instrumental mattering that comes with that intelligibility). I alluded above to the idea that, for Heidegger, the death of the ontotheological God actually might allow for a richer, more fulfilling sense of the divine. I can at this point start to redeem this claim. The ontotheological God gave things an importance that we were not free to change. As the source of all intelligibility, that God decided what things really were. But because he was beyond any being that we have experience of, there was no way he could attune us directly, that is, no way he could help give us a place in the whole cosmos that he had made intelligible, and thus no guarantee that we would live in such a way that the objects as God knew them were existentially important to us.17 An openness to divinities that themselves attune us, however, makes it possible to experience things in the world as sacred, and as making demands on us, which in turn allows them to have existential importance for us. The death of the metaphysical God thus presents us with a great danger but also a unique opportunity to find a relationship to the divine that can endow our lives with deep importance. To be conditioned by the divinities is to discover God embodied – to find him present in our world. The death of the theologian’s God offers us at least the possibility of a recovery of 16

17

“‘Only a God Can Save Us’: Der Spiegel’s Interview with Martin Heidegger,” in The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader (Richard Wolin, Ed.). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992, pp. 91–116. Kierkegaard makes just this point in Fear and Trembling, when he notes that if God “is understood in an altogether abstract sense . . . God becomes an invisible, vanishing point, an impotent thought.” Fear and Trembling (Alastair Hannay, Trans.). London: Penguin Books, 1985, p. 96.

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an immediate experience of the divine that has only rarely been achieved – that is, an experience of a living God with a presence in our world. Such a God would have an importance incommensurate with any object. As the source of our attunement, God would matter to us not just in the sense that our practices require his presence for their fulfillment. He would also matter as the being that calls us into the kind of engagement with the world that we would embody. He would, in short, be a God before whom we could pray, to whom we could sacrifice, in front of whom we could fall to our knees in awe (see GA 11: 77). It should be obvious that the hope of finding this sort of divinity is something we cannot bring about ourselves. All we can do is try to keep alive the practices that will attune us in such a way that we can experience the divine in the world. The only means we have available to this end are the religious practices we have inherited. Those who are conditioned by the divine, Heidegger explains, “await the divinities as divinities. In hope they hold up to the divinities what is unhoped for. They wait for intimations of their coming and do not mistake the signs of their absence. They do not make their gods for themselves and do not worship idols. In the very depth of misfortune they wait for the weal that has been withdrawn” (GA 7: 145/PLT: 150). Despite the obviously Christian overtones of this and other such passages, it is important to see that Heidegger is not a nostalgic and sentimental thinker. His claim here is not that lapse into an accustomed mode of religious life is an end in itself. To the contrary, we can only be conditioned by the divine if we find our own authentic relationship to divinities. The problem is that, barring a new revelation, the only practices we have left for getting in tune with the divine are the remnants of past religious practices. These, Heidegger thinks, must therefore be nurtured in order to preserve a sense for the holy because God can only appear as a god in the dimension of the holy. This, I take it, is the point of the somewhat enigmatic comments Heidegger made about religion in the course of his “Conversations with a Buddhist Monk”: “I consider only one thing to be decisive: to follow the words of the founder. That alone – and neither the systems nor the doctrines and dogmas are important. Religion is succession . . . Without the sacred we remain out of contact with the divinities. Without being touched by the divinities, the experience of God fails to come” (GA 16: 590). But even remaining true to the practices we inherit from the founders of religions provides no guarantee of an advent of God. All we can do, Heidegger argued, is prepare ourselves for the advent in the hope that, through a gift of grace, we can receive our own revelation. “I see the only possibility of a salvation in preparing a readiness, in thinking and poetizing, for the appearance of the God or for the absence of God in the case of decline; that we not, to put it coarsely, ‘come to a wretched end,’ but rather if we decline, we decline in the face of the absent God” (GA 16: 671).

10 Nietzsche and the Metaphysics of Truth

For Heidegger, the history of Western philosophy is “from Plato until Nietzsche the history of metaphysics” (GA 48: 296). More precisely, the history that connects Plato to Nietzsche is the “unfolding of the essence of metaphysics as the history of the truth of entities as such as a whole” (GA 66: 40). One might think that Nietzsche would be an obvious ally for Heidegger in his project of criticizing the metaphysical tradition, given Nietzsche’s own attacks on metaphysical and philosophical understandings of truth. And yet, Heidegger insists that Nietzsche too remains entangled in a metaphysical account of truth. Understanding why this is so illuminates both Heidegger’s understanding of metaphysics and his views on truth. Now, it would be ludicrous to try to read Nietzsche as adhering to a metaphysical account of truth in any traditional way. Nietzsche himself described metaphysical views of truth as “the history of an error,” the history of “how the ‘true world’ finally became a fable” (Twilight of the Idols). The “true world,” he wrote, has become “an idea that is of no further use.” “The true world is gone.” Moreover, he famously declared our holding things to be true to be an error, “the kind of error without which a certain kind of living beings could not live” (WP: 493). For Nietzsche, it is an illusion that there are true things, and thus our reverence for the truth is error because it is directed at an illusion: “we have created the world that possesses values! Knowing this, we know, too, that reverence for truth is already the consequence of an illusion–and that one should value more than truth the force that forms, simplifies, shapes, invents” (WP: 602). The idea of a metaphysical truth is the result of our practical need for stability: that something must be held to be true is necessary; not that something is true. “The true and the apparent world” – I have traced this contrast back to relations of value. We have projected our conditions of preservation as predicates of being in general. That we must be stable in our beliefs in order to thrive, from this it follows that we have made the “true” world something that is not changeable and becoming, but rather something that is being. (WP: 507) 212

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Thus, given his obvious pains to distance himself from metaphysical notions of a true world or a truth in itself, it is prima facie implausible to charge Nietzsche with a continued adherence to traditional accounts of truth. To understand Heidegger’s interpretation and critique of Nietzsche, then, we need to specify what exactly Heidegger considers to be objectionably metaphysical about traditional approaches to truth, and why it is that he thinks Nietzsche’s rejection of traditional approaches did not succeed in extricating him from metaphysical entanglements. Toward that end, let’s clarify what Heidegger means when he talks about “the truth of entities as such and as a whole.”

1.

THE MATERIAL AND ATTITUDINAL DIMENSIONS OF TRUTH

In contemporary philosophy, talk of truth is almost automatically construed as talk of propositional truth, of the conditions under which things like beliefs and assertions succeed or fail in getting at the way things are in the world. Heidegger is, in fact, only indirectly interested in theories about what makes a proposition true or false. To the extent that he considers such theories at all, he accepts that propositional truth amounts to some kind of agreement with the way things are (see Chapters 1 and 2). A key to understanding Heidegger’s account of the history of truth in metaphysics, and especially his interpretation of Nietzsche’s account of truth is to keep squarely in mind that he is not offering a theory of propositional truth. Heidegger reads Nietzsche’s pronouncements about truth as pronouncements about ontological truth – truth as the truth about what entities are. “Truth for Nietzsche always means that which is true, and this means for him: the entities which are made steady as that which is stable.” Indeed, Heidegger claims that it is precisely this that renders Nietzsche’s understanding of truth metaphysical, for all metaphysical ages have shared the view the truth of entities is found in that about them which is stable: But what then does “true” mean here? We said that Nietzsche, as to the broadest basic conception of the true, is in agreement with the tradition. The true is also for him that which is sometimes called “the real,” for example in expressions like: something is “in truth” such and such – it is “in reality” such and such. The true is the entity, which as an entity is arranged and made steady, to which representation holds itself and must hold itself in order to be “correct,” that is, true. (GA 47: 108)

Heidegger’s discussion of the history of truth explores the history of different understandings of what entities truly are, which amounts to thinking through historically different ways of determining what is steady and stable in the entities we encounter. Given the contemporary orientation toward propositional truth, this way of talking and thinking about truth can seem quite foreign. But we can work our way into Heidegger’s thought on the truth of entities by noting that our

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ordinary concept of truth, as Heidegger frequently observed, is ambiguous, incorporating both a notion of “material truth” (Sachwahrheit) and “propositional truth” (Satzwahrheit or Aussagewahrheit).1 Material truth is in play when we ascribe truth to entities in ordinary language, and distinguish between true and false entities. We talk, for example, of the “true blackberry,” the rubus fruticosus, as opposed to various “false” blackberries – hybrids, or, for example, the himalayan blackberry (rubus discolor). False blackberries exist every bit as much as true ones; so what is the basis for privileging one above the other as “true”? As we saw, Heidegger traces the privileging back to a preference for what he calls the steady (das Feste) or the stable (das Beständige). The steady or stable is that which we can count on finding despite any superficial or accidental variations in appearance or constitution, and thus that which we can reliably and consistently depend on to support the attitudes we take toward the entity. “That entity is true, the ‘truth,’” Heidegger explains, “when one can, every time and genuinely hold onto it as something stable and not-withdrawing; it is that on the basis of which one can get a hold” (GA 6.1: 488). The “false” blackberries, for instance, are not true blackberries because they present themselves as what they are not. They look like the “true blackberry,” leading us to believe that we can use them to produce fruit, or plant them in certain settings. But when we do so, they will eventually not support our attitudes toward them because, appearances to the contrary, they will produce a different fruit, or grow too vigorously, overwhelming the rest of the garden. The truth of the true blackberry is ultimately found in the fact that what it seems to offer to us remains stably present; it does not deceive us into mistaking it for something it is not. True blackberries can thus be used reliably in the ways gardeners typically use blackberries. This example points to the fact that the material truth of entities is not determined independently of our ways of engaging with them – of, broadly speaking, our attitudes toward them. Entities show themselves for what they are only within a context of activities and other related entities. An entity is “uncovered” in Heidegger’s vernacular when it is available to be readily taken up into our activities; it meshes with our practices. The falseness of the false entities consists in the fact that what is relevant to our activities is hidden or concealed, and thus it does not lend itself to our practices. On the basis of this relationship between attitudes and material truth, however, we are also in a position to distinguish between true and false attitudes. A true attitude is one that uncovers the entity for what it is. If we intend to grow true blackberries but plant the himalayan blackberry, then our act of planting was a false attitude. This means that this kind of ontic or material dimension of truth, the truth of entities, implies the notion of a right attitude or right 1

See, e.g., GA 31: 87 (on the ambiguity of the Greek concept of truth), GA 9: 179–80 (on the double character of agreement).

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perspective from which to view things, and vice versa. So it is only in the context of horticulture that it makes sense to talk of “true” blackberries and false blackberries. And within that context, certain attitudes will succeed and others will fail at discovering the truth about entities. Likewise, a “true friend” can only appear within the context or setting of friendship practices and the entities that support those practices – acting, intending, and being disposed in the way that friends are. Within that context, some attitudes will be true if they allow the true friend to show herself as the friend that she is. It should be obvious by now that we have moved some considerable distance away from mainstream philosophical uses of “true” and “truth” – first, by giving the notion of material truth pride of place in the account of truth. I noted at the outset of this section that Heidegger had an indirect interest in propositional truth. It is at this point that we reach the context for understanding the indirect nature of this interest. Propositional attitudes are understood as one (often privileged way) of allowing entities to show themselves as what they are. But our interest in propositional truths is presumably driven by the sense that having true propositional attitudes is a good way to get a grip on the surrounding world. And if that interest is determinative of what counts as a true attitude, then there is no reason not to expand the “truth” bearing attitudes to include practical attitudes like intentions and desires. Practical attitudes, after all, can succeed or fail at getting us in touch with the way the world really is just as much as cognitive attitudes: “truth is correctness of representation, where ‘representation’ means having entities before oneself and bringing entities before oneself in perceiving and intending, remembering and planning, hoping and rejecting. Representation conforms to entities, adjusts itself to them, and reflects them. Truth means the adjustment of representation to what entities are and how they are” (GA 6.1: 460). This passage makes clear that Heidegger wants to understand the truth-bearing attitudes quite broadly to include any attitude in which our comportment toward entities can succeed or fail in being well adjusted to the circumstances and, in the process, allow entities to be seen in their truth. Attitudes, including propositional attitudes, are true when they “conform to and are determined by entities.” These two notions – the notion of material truth, manifested in our talk of true and false friends, blackberries, gold, or what have you, and the notion of attitudinal truth as a matter of which attitudes disclose the material truth of entities – together give us a preliminary grasp on the way Heidegger uses the word true (and interprets Nietzsche’s use of the word true). But it is only a preliminary grasp, because Heidegger’s focus is not the truth of this or that particular thing, but rather the truth of “entities as such and as a whole.” He is interested in the truth of being – the truth of what entities are insofar as they are entities at all. “The essence of truth,” Heidegger explains, “is the truth of essence,” where ‘essence’ means what entities really and truly are insofar as they are entities at all.

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2.

THE TRUTH OF ENTITIES AS SUCH AND AS A WHOLE

Another example will help us develop the idea of a truth of the being of entities. As we saw in discussing material truth, the truth of what a thing is is relative to a background context within which it appears. This context will involve both characteristic practices and uses of the thing, as well as a rich set of relations to other entities that belong to the context. Consider the ways entities show up in a carpenter’s workshop. In a workshop, things show what they are most perspicuously when we are using them in some project of repair or production. They are defined relative to practices (like hammering, sawing, planing, and so on) but also through their relationships to other entities. A nail, for example, shows itself most clearly as a nail when we are driving it with a hammer, inserting it into boards in order to attach boards to each other, and so on. So far, we have said nothing more than we did in talking about the material truth of blackberries. But let’s focus now on the context itself, rather than the particular entities. It is the context that determines what the truth of any particular entity is, and thus understanding the context gives us access to the truth of particular entities. A nail, for instance, is a nail because of the role it plays within the context of a carpenter’s workshop or workspace, and we understand what a nail is by understanding this role relative to the whole network of activities, entities, aims, and standards for successful performance within the context. The context is not a random assortment of objects and practices. It has a coherence – all the entities and practices within the context mesh and support and draw on one another. But this means that there is not just a truth about what any particular entity in the workshop is. It is also the case that there is a truth about the workshop itself – what kind of a coherence it has and what kind of a whole it is. To the extent that entities belong within this whole, there’s a general truth about what entities as a whole and as such are. They are all in truth the kind of things that belong in this whole. Within the workshop, entities as such and as a whole are equipment. It is only because the nail is in truth equipment, that it is also in truth a nail. That is, its belonging to the context of the workshop determines that the equipmental use-properties and relations of the nail (as opposed to all the other properties and relationships it has) will define it as the thing it is. We can better appreciate this by contrasting the way the “very same” entities show up in different settings – for example, the way tools show up in a retail hardware store. As a whole, they do not show up as equipment in the hardware store. They show up as mercantile goods. A mercantile good is revealed not in the workman’s practices but in the shopper’s stance. This involves different forms of inspection and use (it would, in general, be inappropriate to drive nails into the boards on display in the hardware store). And it involves different forms of arrangement of entities vis-à-vis

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each other (for instance, all the different kinds of hammers are shelved together in the hardware store, rather than right next to the nails or boards). In the workshop, the arrangement of entities is dictated by the need to have them readily available for working. Not so in the hardware store. There the arrangement is dictated by concerns about maximizing sales – popular items, for instance, are located in the rear of the store so that shoppers will walk past other items on their way in and out of the store, thus increasing the likelihood of an impulse buy. Thus we might say that the same entities have a different truth in the different contexts: the tools and equipment of the workshop are really mercantile goods in the hardware store. So just as a particular entity has a material truth about what it is, there is a material dimension to entities as a whole and as such within a context. It is their being as equipment that dictates how the entities are to be related to each other in the workshop; it is their being as mercantile goods that dictates how entities are to be related to each other in the store. And just as we grasp the material truth of particular entities in an attitude, there is an attitudinal dimension to grasping entities as a whole and as such. We disclose the workshop as such by a general readiness to build and repair things; we disclose the hardware store as such by a general readiness to engage in mercantile exchanges. Whether we are perceiving and thinking about the workshop in the right or “true” way (that is, in a way that adequately assimilates our activities to the kind of entities we encounter within the world) is determined in the workshop by whether we successfully and competently and reliably repair what we need to repair or produce what we need to produce. When we are shopping in a store, by contrast, the rightness or truth of our attitudes is determined by whether we competently and reliably are able to carry out successfully a commercial transaction. Of course, in one sense it seems right to say that, even in the hardware store, the individual tools are still determined as what they are by the context of the workshop (a hammer is still for driving nails, a nail is still for attaching boards, and so on). This is because the hardware store is in a sense oriented to the equipmental context of the various different types of workshop and workspace. It is one of the many contexts that support practices of production and repair. And this fact, in turn, points to the existence of an ultimate context that organizes all the different practices and settings available to us: the world. At the highest level, Heidegger thinks, there is a truth about all the entities that belong to a world – a truth about what they are in virtue of which they can find a place within the world. But now, to move squarely from our illustrative examples to what Heidegger has in mind when he discusses metaphysics as the history of the truth of entities as such and as a whole, we need to ask not about any particular context but about the whole world as organizing and determining all the different contexts.

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Metaphysical Worlds For Heidegger, metaphysics is not a subfield within philosophy, nor is it a doctrine of a particular philosopher. Rather, a metaphysic “is the truth of entities as such and as a whole” (GA 66: 382). The history of metaphysics is the history of different “epochs” of truth, that is, different unified understandings of what entities truly are, and correspondingly different views of what the privileged attitudes are for disclosing and grasping the truth. It is not possible to appreciate Heidegger’s reading of truth in Nietzsche without some sense for his overall narrative of the history of truth in metaphysics. Accordingly, let me briefly sketch out how Heidegger understands the permutations of truth leading up to Nietzsche. I’ll proceed by discussing a few of the major metaphysical epochs, with an eye to saying how they understand truth in general, and how the material and attitudinal dimensions of truth are understood in those ages. For the earliest metaphysical epoch, the epoch of the Greek philosophers, the true entities (the material dimension of truth) were the ideas: “the genuine entity is the idea, and this is the model” or “archetype” (GA 40: 193). The truth of the particular concrete entities we encounter in the world around us is found in the ideas or forms that they instantiate. The idea was regarded as the truth of an entity because it was stable and would endure across a variety of changes that a particular entity might undergo. The attitudinal dimension of truth was understood as homoiôsis, which Heidegger interprets as “adjustment” (Angleichung). A true attitude is a conforming attitude, that is, one in which our attitudes are “suited to” or “adjusted to” the true entities, the ideas: “all opening up of entities must proceed so as to compare itself with the archetype, conform itself to the model, adjust itself according to the idea. Truth . . . now becomes homoiôsis and mimêsis, adjusting, conforming oneself to [the entity], correctness of seeing, of perceiving as representing” (GA 40: 195). For the Greeks, theôria is the paradigmatic activity in which we achieve conformity with the truth, that is, with the ideas. Through theory, concerned as it is with the ideas and conceptual structures of the world they make up, our attitudes become shaped by the ideas. We thus learn to see the sensory world in terms of the ideas. The Christian age grows out of this material understanding of truth. In Christianity, the truth of entities continues to be understood as an idea. But the ideas, the true entities, are ens creatum, the creations of God. What an entity truly or really is is the entity as it is thought of by God. According to the “Christian theological belief,” Heidegger explained, “in what it is and whether it is, the matter only is insofar as it, as something in each case created (ens creatum), corresponds to the idea preconceived in the intellectus divinus, that is, in the mind of God, and thus is adapted to the idea (correct), and in this sense ‘true’” (GA 9: 181). The eternal and

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unchanging nature of God’s understanding fixes what things really are, in contrast to the unstable and shifting way they appear to us humans when viewed from our fallen and corrupted perspective. But the mind of God is not something that shows itself of its own accord. Rather, access to the truth requires our first correcting our attitudes so that they become oriented to things in the way that God thinks them. This occurs through faith. Thus correctness comes to be understood not as conforming ourselves to the selfdisclosing truth but as bringing ourselves into a fit state, so that we can measure up or be equal to the truth that is to be revealed. The true attitudes are thus characterized in terms of adaequatio, which Heidegger translates as Anmessung, “fitting,” “measuring up to” the truth. In the Christian world, we are called to think and believe and experience entities in such a way that our thoughts are adequate to God’s understanding of the world: “the understanding is adapted to the idea only by accomplishing in its propositions the conformity of the thought to the matter, which for its part must be in accordance with the idea” (GA 9: 181). The paradigmatic activities for getting our attitudes to fit or measure up to God’s understanding are cognitive ones – belief in the revealed word, or the study and learning of church doctrine: Biblical revelation, which represents itself as based on what is divinely given (“inspiration”), teaches that entities are created by a personal creator God and preserved and guided by him . . . . The being of entities consists in their being created by God (omne ens est ens creatum). If human knowledge wants to experience the truth about entities, then the only reliable way for it remains to diligently compile and preserve the doctrine of the revelation and its transmission through the church teachers. Authentic truth is only mediated through the doctrina of the doctores. Truth has the essential character of “doctrine.” The medieval world and its history is based on this doctrina. The appropriate form in which alone knowledge can completely express itself as doctrine is the “Summa,” the compilation of doctrinal writings in which the totality of the traditional doctrinal content is organized and the different doctrinal opinions are thoroughly examined, used, or rejected on the basis of their correspondence with church doctrine. (GA 6.2: 115)

In attitudes like belief and doctrinal understanding, Christians grasp the truth of what things are because these attitudes enable them to see most perspicuously the nature of God’s creation. The Modern age, too, locates the material dimension of truth, the truth of what entities really are, in the domain of the idea. But these ideas are no longer conceived of as self-disclosive and self-subsistent forms (as for the philosophic Greeks), nor as fixed in the mind of God and revealed to the faithful (as for Christian metaphysics). Rather, the truth of what things are becomes what is representable to us as knowing subjects, whether the representation is arrived at empirically and inductively from the observation of entities, through introspection, or through a transcendental deduction. But without an independent domain of the forms or the mind of a creator

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God to fix and stabilize the truth of what things are, how are we to determine which of the infinitely many possible modes of representing an entity is the one which delivers the entity to us as it truly is? As with the Greek and the Christian epochs, the Modern locates the material dimension of truth in something stable, fixed, and unchanging – this time, what is reliably discoverable when our cognitive faculties are operating correctly and optimally. In the Christian world, human beings were called upon to measure up to God’s understanding of us – indeed, it was Christian practices of repentance and faith that brought us into a condition of being able to apprehend God’s truth. According to Heidegger, this practice of securing our salvation by suiting or adapting our faculties to God’s understanding is translated at the dawn of the Modern age into a concern with the correct functioning of our rational capacities in order to secure the certainty of representation. Drawing a straight line from Luther’s concern with a good conscience for securing salvation (GA 54: 75), to Descartes’ imposition of rules for right reasoning (GA 54: 76), to Kant’s “critique of pure reason” as the “essential delimitation of the correct and incorrect use of the human faculty of reason” (GA 54: 76), Heidegger concludes that in Modernity, the true attitudes – the ones in which we see most perspicuously the truth of entities – are those in which we achieve certainty: In order to reach what is true as the right and correct things, human beings must be certain and secure of the right use of his basic abilities. The essence of truth is determined by this security and certainty. That which is true becomes what is secured and certain. Verum becomes certum. The question concerning truth becomes the question whether and how human beings could be certain and assured of both the entity that he himself is, as well as the entity that he himself is not. (GA 54: 75)

Consequently, the true entity, what the entity really is, is what can be securely and certainly grasped by the subject. The true entity is “no longer ens creatum, it is ens certum, indubitatem.” We can summarize this brief history of the metaphysics of truth in the following chart:

chart 10.1(a)

Philosophic Greek

Material Dimension

Attitudinal Dimension

idea – self-subsistent forms. The true entities are ideas; concrete particulars are instantiations of ideas

homoiôsis – adjustment (Angleichung) of our thoughts to forms

Paradigmatic Activity theôria idein

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Nietzsche and the Metaphysics of Truth c h a r t 1 0 . 1 ( a ) (cont.) Material Dimension

Attitudinal Dimension

Paradigmatic Activity

Christian

ens creatum – an entity truly is what God conceives it to be

adaequatio – measuring faith in the revealed up to (Anmessung) or word, being fit to receive learning God’s ideas church doctrines

Modern

ens certum – an entity truly is that about it which serves as a reliable basis for cognition

certainty – ascertain in advance the interactions that entities could have with each other

calculation

?

?

Technological/ ? Nietzsche

To decide whether the Nietzschean account of truth continues this metaphysical tradition or breaks with it, we need now to ask what characterizes metaphysics in general. What are the traits of a metaphysical account of truth as such? Although there are significant changes from epoch to epoch, Heidegger identifies what we might call a network of common background assumptions that shape the approach to truth from the Greek age through the modern. I will refer to these background assumptions as “theses,” although they are rarely if ever formulated as such. The point is rather that the various metaphysical views on truth can be understood as having been shaped by a background understanding that these theses are trying to capture or at least indicate. Let us consider first the material dimension of truth. Although different metaphysical ages have identified different characteristics or traits as determinative of the truth of entities, each one of these characteristics was an effort to capture what was most stable, and thus reliably and predictably encounterable in the world. Thus the metaphysical tradition has always distinguished between a true world and mere appearances, and has taken the truth of the true world to consist in some form of stability (Beständigkeit). For instance, in platonic metaphysics, the truth of entities is found in the unchanging forms that they instantiate because these remain stable throughout generation, variation, and corruption in the concrete particulars. In Christian metaphysics, the true world is the eternal world, in contrast to the transient and perishable world we inhabit in mortality. For metaphysics, then, the truth of what a thing is is determined by its stable features – what we can count on finding in it, what is stably or reliably discoverable. It is on the

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basis of some form of stability that metaphysics can draw a distinction between a true world and the world of appearances. The truth of things is what is stably, reliable, predictably ascertainable about them, while mere appearances are transient, and fluctuating. Thus, a primary feature of the metaphysics of truth is the background assumption of stability. We will articulate this as: 1. The Stability Thesis: What entities truly are is found in that about them that is stable across changes. Closely related to this assumption of stability is an assumption of independence – that is, that what things really are cannot depend on us and what we happen to think about them. A second background assumption of the metaphysics of truth is thus: 2. The Independence Thesis: What entities truly are is independent of the particular thoughts, practices, and attitudes we have regarding them. The independence thesis might be seen as a consequence of the stability thesis. If what things truly are is what is stable about them, the reasoning goes, then the truth of entities cannot depend on what any of us happen to think of them, or how we use them, feel about them, relate to them, and so on. Our thoughts, practices, and attitudes are susceptible to considerable change. If the truth of things were dependent on us in this way, then there could be no stable truth about how things are. Within a metaphysical age, moreover, it is not simply that case that each true entity is stabilized into some way or other of being. Rather, the age achieves a kind of coherence insofar as all the true entities share a characteristic way of being. Already in his “Ontology” course of 1923, Heidegger had observed that cultural forms – he lists art, literature, religion, morality, society, science, and the economy – are expressions of a single “character of being,” a “pervasive uniformity” of “style” in which the “life of a culture comes to expression, holds itself therein, and becomes obsolete” (GA 63: 36). Later, when he had developed an account of distinct epochs, he discerned in each of these a pervasive uniformity. In the Beiträge, he noted “that dark priority that the One and that unity have everywhere in the thought of being” and identified this predilection for uniformity as something from which we must free ourselves in order to make a transition out of metaphysical modes of thought. He traced the metaphysical emphasis on unity and uniformity back to the “Greek interpretation of the on he on as hen [being qua being as one]” (GA 65:459). In the Christian age, for instance, things are experienced in “the uniform region of the ens creatum” (GA 17: 187). Or in the Modern age, there is a “uniformity of entities” resulting from the “the uniformity of a calculation that can be planned on” (GA 7: 93). Thus we can articulate:

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3. The Uniformity Thesis: All true entities share a single, uniform characteristic style. These three metaphysical background assumptions about the material dimension of truth contribute to the form that the attitudinal dimension takes within a metaphysics of truth. Because of the independence thesis – the sense that the truth about what things are is independent of the way they show themselves within many of the particular attitudes that we take toward them, it follows that our access to the truth requires our taking up the correct attitude toward them. Indeed, the name for attitudinal truth in general across the entire metaphysical tradition is “correctness”: “to take something for that which it is, to present it as being in such and such a way, in presenting it to conform oneself to that which emerges and encounters one – that is the essence of truth as correctness” (GA 6.1: 462). This is in contrast to the way one would think of attitudinal truth if truth is understood as unconcealedness. Then, rather than looking for the uniquely right attitude for conforming oneself to what exists independently, one would open oneself to the self-disclosing welling-up of being (phusis). The decisive transformation toward a notion of attitudinal truth as taking up the right attitude and conforming oneself to what entities are, Heidegger argues, can be seen in Plato’s cave allegory: If everywhere and in every comportment with entities it depends on the idein of the idea, on seeing the “visible form” of entities, then all efforts must first be concentrated on enabling such a seeing. That requires correct looking. The one freed within the cave, when turning away from the shadows and toward the things, already directs the look at that which is “more in being” than the mere shadows: prosseite mallon onta tetrammenos orthoteron blepoi (515 d, 3/4), “thus turned toward what is more in being, they no doubt should look more correctly.” The transition from one situation to another consists in the looking becoming more correct. Everything is due to the orthotes, the correctness of the looking. Through this correctness, seeing and knowing become a correct seeing and knowing, so that in the end it goes directly to the highest idea and fixes itself in this “adjustment” (Ausrichtung). As a result of this conformity (Angleichung) of perception as an idein to the idea, a homoiôsis, a correspondence of knowing with the things themselves, exists. In this way, a transformation of the essence of truth arises from the priority of the idea and of idein over alêtheia. Truth becomes orthotes, correctness of perceiving and asserting. (GA 9: 230–1)

We see in this passage, first of all, the two dimensions of truth. The idea is truth in the material dimension, the true entity, the entity that is “more in being” than the things and shadows of the cave. The looking at entities in the light of the ideas, the idein, is the attitudinal dimension, the correct perception of material truth. There are, in addition, two aspects involved in this correctness: an aspect of conformity to the true entities, entities that exist independently of the particular comportment or attitude we adopt toward them. Second, there is an aspect of proper adjustment by means of which the

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attitude gets oriented toward the true entities so that it can conform to them. These two aspects are in Plato scarcely distinguishable, yet we need to articulate them separately to allow for the possibility that some metaphysical ages (like the modern) will put decidedly more emphasis on the proper adjustment of the mind than on the conformity with an independently existing reality. Thus we can say that in a metaphysics of truth, the attitudinal dimension involves: 4. The Conformity Thesis: Our attitudes are true by conforming to the way entities are independently of our attitudes. and 5. The Adjustment Thesis: The truth of entities is only accessible when we have properly adjusted our attitudes so as to orient them to reality. The conformity thesis emphasizes the priority of the material dimension over the attitudinal dimension, and is primarily responsible for the overshadowing of an understanding of truth as alêtheia – that is, of truth as something that only exists in a disclosure. As a result of a metaphysic’s understanding of the truth of entities in general, it also holds a view about which human attitudes give us the most lucid access to the truth of what entities are. Different metaphysical positions on what entities truly are privilege different attitudes as best discovering the truth about entities. But all of them have privileged some propositional attitude or other as giving us the best access to the truth about entities. This is not just a coincidence; the privileging of the cognitive attitudes is supported by the emphasis on stability in the material dimension of truth, for to be oriented toward what can be conceptually predicated of entities is to be oriented to what can stably and reliably be discovered in a variety of contexts and situations. Thus the final background assumption of the metaphysics of truth is: 6. The Cognitivist Thesis: The best attitude for grasping what things truly are is some species of cognitive attitude. In Platonism, as we noted, we grasp the truth of what things are through theôria, that is, when we perceive and grasp them in the light of the ideas. In the Christian era, truth is discerned through understanding and believing the revealed word. In the Cartesian form of modernity, for instance, truth is grasped in a clear and distinct representation. As a result, there was a tendency in the metaphysical tradition to think of the attitudinal dimension as some form of agreement between complete cognitive units – propositions – and states of affairs in the world. But Heidegger’s interest in the attitudinal dimension of truth differs in important ways from a theory of propositional truth. He makes no pretense, for instance, of offering necessary and sufficient conditions for the truth of a proposition. His question is not what are the conditions under which a proposition is true? The question

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is rather under what conditions does an attitude, propositional or otherwise, give us a grip on what things really are? These are importantly different questions – a proposition could be true without it giving us any kind of grip at all on the world. Because I trust the physicist down the hall, I might assent to and hold the proposition that there is a Higgs field. And this proposition might very well be true (that is, it might correspond with the facts, or cohere with a maximal set of other beliefs, and so on – fill in your own favorite theory of propositional truth here). And yet, I scarcely understand what it means. It thus gives me almost no insight into the way things are, and I lack any way of actually using this proposition in my ordinary everyday engagements with the world. Conversely, an attitude might give us a good grip on what things are without having a true proposition as its “content.” Indeed, a falsehood or a work of fiction might be better at orienting me to the important features of the world than a true proposition. It is possible, for instance, that the works of Hesiod and Homer introduce their listeners to what things are in the Greek world, to what is important, salient, and compelling about things in that world, and thus help them successfully navigate the prephilosophical Greek world, even though there are almost no true propositions at all in those works. So when, in the context of talking about the truth of entities, Heidegger discusses “true” attitudes – beliefs, thoughts, but also intentions, desires, actions, perceptions, and so on – he is interested in the question of what attitudes will let me grasp the truth of what entities are within a particular world. He is also interested, albeit less so, in the question of how the propositional content of those attitudes could agree with some fact or state of affairs in the world (assuming, that is, that they even have a propositional content). But he has no interest at all in offering a theory that would explain how to distinguish the true propositions from the false ones. Rather, he is content to observe that metaphysical epochs have tended to privilege propositional attitudes in general as the best attitudes for discerning the truth about entities (he disputes this privilege, by the way). He also observes that the epochs have differed in the particular type of propositional attitude they have privileged. For example, we have seen that modernity has privileged those cognitions that are certain (when, for instance, Descartes makes clear and distinct perceptions foundational for determining what things are), whereas the Christian age privileged faith in the revealed word and doctrinal understanding. But in making such claims about the different epochs, Heidegger is not claiming, for instance, that modernity has defined the truth of the proposition as certainty. There might well be – there almost certainly are – true propositions that are not certain. But uncertain propositions could not be foundational for discovering the truth about what entities are. Still, there is just enough overlap between the question of the nature of propositional truth and the question of which attitudes are understood as disclosing the truth of entities to mislead many into thinking that Heidegger’s discussion of the latter are inquiries into the former.

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With the transition from the Modern age to its completion in the Technological age, Heidegger believes that something important changes in the metaphysics of truth. The six background assumptions we have identified take a decidedly different form, although Heidegger insists that one cannot understand our age without recognizing the extent to which they remain in force. Heidegger’s reflection on Nietzsche’s philosophy is aimed primarily at working through these hidden metaphysical elements of the contemporary Technological age. With this more detailed account of the metaphysics of truth in place, we are now in a position to understand Heidegger’s critique of Nietzsche, and his charge that Nietzsche, even while overturning the metaphysical tradition, remains entangled in a metaphysics of truth.

3.

NIETZSCHE AND THE METAPHYSICS OF TRUTH

Let’s return now to the passages from Nietzsche with which we began this chapter. As long as one has only a vague sense of a metaphysics of truth as somehow involving a belief in suprasensuous or transcendent or ultimate truths, then it might seem that Nietzsche has overcome metaphysical tendencies with regard to truth simply by insisting that the idea of a true world is an error or an illusion. I do not mean to downplay the significance of Nietzsche’s critique of truth as an error. Heidegger himself acknowledges that Nietzsche’s views of truth represent an important departure from the metaphysical tradition. In fact, Heidegger’s own approach to overcoming metaphysics is heavily indebted to his reading of Nietzsche’s critique of metaphysics and efforts to discover a postmetaphysical mode of thought. And yet, Heidegger insists that Nietzsche, and with him the contemporary age, continues to hold to certain core features of the metaphysical view of the truth of entities, albeit in a way that significantly transforms traditional approaches to metaphysics. Thinking in terms of the six background assumptions about truth allows us to explain why. Heidegger’s interpretation of Nietzsche is summarized in the following passage: The truth, which is conceived [by Nietzsche] as error, was defined as what has been made secure, the stable. But what is thought to be error in this way necessarily thinks truth in the sense of being attuned2 to the real, that is, with becoming chaos. Truth as error is a missing the truth. Truth is a missing the truth. In the unambiguous essential determination of truth as error, truth is necessarily thought twice and each time 2

The German term that is translated as “being attuned,” Einstimmigkeit, typically means unanimity. It comes, however, from the root einstimmig, which means literally to be of one voice or to be in tune with each other. It is formed from the verb einstimmen, which means “to join in” or “to get in the right mood or attunement.” Heidegger clearly means the term to have that kind of force.

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differently, thus ambiguously: once as making secure of what is stable, and the other time as being attuned with what is real. Only on the basis of this essence of truth as being attuned can truth as stability be an error. The essence of truth taken here as the basis of the concept of error is what has been determined since ancient times in metaphysical thinking as conformity to the real and as being attuned with it, as homoiôsis. (GA 6.1: 559–60)

This is an extremely dense passage, involving a series of claims made in very short order. Heidegger begins by invoking the material dimension of truth and arguing that Nietzsche accepts the stability thesis: what is true is the stable or secured. Nietzsche accepts the thesis, but only in order to deny that it succeeds in capturing the way things really are. But to insist without contradiction that truth is an illusion or error, Nietzsche must draw on the distinction between the material and attitudinal dimensions of truth, where attitudinal truth in general is being correctly attuned with what is. Attitudinal truth in the metaphysical tradition is a matter of getting attuned to or properly disposed so that the true can show itself as it is in itself. The distinction between the attitudinal and the material dimension opens up the conceptual possibility for something to be both true and false – materially true but attitudinally false, for instance. But in order to be realized, this conceptual possibility requires us to draw another distinction that will let the attitudinal and material dimensions actually come apart – a distinction between truth – what is true – and reality. With that second distinction in place, we can say that, materially speaking, something is true if it is stable. And yet, our attitudes are nonetheless false if it turns out that to be attuned so that true, that is, stable, entities show up is to fail to be attuned to the way the world really is. And this is in fact the case for Nietzsche, as he holds that reality itself is not composed of stable entities, but rather consists of a constant flow of becoming. Heidegger explains: Truth in the sense of what is true – the purported entities in the sense of that which is stable, fixed and immutable – is then illusion if the world “is” not something that is in being but rather it is something “becoming.” A knowledge that as true takes something to be “being” in the sense of the stable and fixed, holds onto entities and yet does not find that which is real: the world as a becoming world. (GA 6.1: 493)

On Heidegger’s interpretation, then, when Nietzsche says that truth is an error, this means that when we are so adapted that we can perceive stable entities, we miss the reality of the world. Tuning our perceptive capacities for stable entities means that we lose a grip on the world as it really is – a constant becoming or “chaos.” An understanding and apprehension of the truth is “knowledge.” Thus we find Nietzsche arguing that what is needed is not “‘to know’ but rather to schematize, to impose on chaos as much regularity and form as our practical needs require” (WP §515). What does it mean to say that ultimate reality is “chaos”? Chaos is, first of all, as we just noted, something that cannot be grasped by attitudes oriented

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toward what is stable, reliable, what can be counted on in advance. Thus chaos cannot be grasped by a propositional attitude. But this does not mean that chaos is some kind of raw, propertyless given: “‘chaos’ speaks for Nietzsche as a name that does not mean any sort of arbitrary confusion in the field of sensations, perhaps it does not mean a confusion at all . . . . Nietzsche also does not mean with ‘chaos’ what is simply disorganized in its disorganization, nor that which stands in disarray arising from the removal of every order” (GA 6.1: 509). The chaotic is not conceptually graspable and yet it has an order to it: “chaos is that which is urging, flowing, moved, whose order is concealed, whose law we do not know immediately” (ibid.). The ultimate reality is an “unmastered richness” that can only ever be known partially, and only through our bodily understanding of how to cope with the flowing and streaming, constantly altering domain of perception and action: “we encounter chaos bodily, that is, in bodily states, chaos being included in these states and related back to them” (GA 6.1: 512). Our skillful bodies – themselves chaotic in that they move in and respond to the particularities of the situation in ways that we can scarcely understand and describe very poorly – are able to make sense of and find their way in the constantly changing, moving, altering “chaotic” perceptual array (see GA 6.1: 509). Heidegger calls this skillful bodily action “bodying” (Leiben) to capture the way in which our body responds smoothly to demands of the concrete situation without needing any deliberate, reflective, or cognitive guidance. For skillful embodied beings who are “bodying,” there are no fixed and stable entities; only a constantly shifting and flowing domain of perception and action – in other words, “chaos.” “‘Chaos’, the world as chaos, means: projecting entities as a whole relative to the body and its bodying” (GA 6.1: 511). At its foundation, then, the claim that truth is an error turns on Nietzsche’s ability to pull apart the true and the real, to hold that what is true (that is, stable) is not real (that is, chaos). By distinguishing truth and reality in this way, Nietzsche is in a position to deny many of the metaphysical theses with regard to truth. But, Heidegger argues, this position is won by simply shifting the locus of Nietzsche’s metaphysical commitments from truth to reality. Nietzsche remains entangled in the metaphysical understanding of the material dimension of truth insofar as he continues to hold that what an entity really or truly is is found in some notion of stability. So when Nietzsche writes: we have made the “true” world something that is not changeable and becoming, but rather something that is being

Heidegger takes this to mean: the truth that is conceived as an error would be defined as that which is made secure, the stable. (GA 6.1: 230)

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And to say that this “truth is an error” means: there is no stable, reliable, enduring truth about what things are. (ibid.)

For the stable to be an error, however, it must be the case that reality is not stable. Thus, Nietzsche simultaneously affirms the stability thesis with regard to truth, but also denies it with regard to reality: the truth that was conceived as error” by Nietzsche “would be defined as what is made secure, that which is stable. But error understood in this way necessarily thinks truth in the sense of agreement with the real, that is, with the becoming chaos. (GA 6.1: 559)

He holds, in other words, 1. The Stability Thesis with respect to truth: What entities truly are is found in that about them which is stable across changes, but denies: 10 . The Stability Thesis with respect to reality: Reality is found in that about entities which is stable across changes. So Nietzsche accepts the metaphysical understanding of truth as stability. But whereas in previous metaphysical ages the commitment to the true entity as a stable entity simply was a commitment to a stable reality of things, Nietzsche now argues that the true entities are temporary stabilizations of an ultimate reality that is unstable, chaotic, and in constant flux. Thus, although he retains the stability thesis with respect to truth, he relativizes truth to a background understanding of chaos as ultimate reality and in this way frees himself of a metaphysical commitment to the essential stability of reality. This is, from Heidegger’s perspective, a genuine advance, a step out of metaphysics. Rather than seeing stability as an inherent feature of reality, Nietzsche holds that stability arises only with respect to particular, relatively stable and enduring human practices and perspectives. But to hold this amounts to denying the independence thesis with respect to truth, to denying that what entities truly are is independent of the particular thoughts, practices, and attitudes we have regarding them. It is along these lines that Heidegger reads Nietzsche’s claim that Truth is the kind of error without which a certain type of living being could not live. In the end, the value for life decides. (WP §493)

On Heidegger’s interpretation, to say that the “value for life” decides the truth does not mean that we hold true those propositions, the belief in which enhances life. Rather, it is to say that what entities truly are is determined by seeing them in the light of what is required for the practical conduct of our lives to succeed. On a crudely biologistic reading, for instance, one might say that this entity (indicating a pizza) is truly food as opposed to something else because it is as food that it is most directly relevant to the preservation of

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bodily functions and thus contributes to the successful transmission and perpetuation of genetic material. But, we must immediately add, Heidegger insists that Nietzsche not be read in such crudely biological terms. Instead, there are a variety of ways to understand the successful conduct of life, just as there are a variety of possible perspectives one can take on what is of value to life (including the biological). One lives one’s life by taking up a particular perspective on life, by inhabiting a particular possibility or range of possibilities. One’s perspective on the world is laid out by the aims one adopts (aims opened up by the possibilities one inhabits). So the truth of what entities are will be relative to each individual’s current perspective on existence. But Nietzsche also has a view about how to understand life in general. The essence of life is understood in terms of the capacity for self-transformation and, in the highest instance, the opening up of whole new registers of meaning and domains of possibilities: Which essential characteristics value has as a condition of life depends on the essence of “life,” depends on what is distinctive about this essence. When Nietzsche says the essence of life is life-enhancement, then the question arises: what belongs to the essence of such enhancement? Enhancement, and especially such an enhancement as is performed in and through the one who is enhanced him- or herself, is an outbeyond-itself. This means that in enhancement, life projects higher possibilities of itself before itself and shows itself and admits itself into a possibility that is as yet unattained. (GA 6.1: 439)

Thus what is most valuable for life, because it lets life most fully realize its essence, is whatever allows life enhancement, where life enhancement means the ability to open up new, previously unavailable possibilities, and to do this not in response to outside compulsion but by oneself. The truth of what things are, then, is a function of the way they contribute to our capacity for life enhancement understood as self-overcoming. That means that truth is fixed or determined by praxis in the broad sense – praxis as living a life, rather than pursuing this or that particular practical aim or goal. The aim of praxis in general is to live life in such way as to be able to “admit oneself into an as yet unattained possibility” (see GA 6.1: 514 ff.). And yet, most of the time, one must conduct one’s life within a particular perspective, and that means one must deal with entities as stabilized relative to the practices of that perspective, rather than destabilizing them by shifting into new possibilities. Even within a particular perspective, however, one holds onto the transformative, enhancing essence of life by seeing truth as a value – that is, by recognizing that what things truly are is a temporary function of the particular perspective one inhabits at this moment. If truths are values and thus posited only relative to some particular practical engagement with the world, then it follows that there is no single, uniform, unchanging character or style that all true entities have. What is true, in

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other words, is a product of the present particular way I am inhabiting the world, my particular momentary perspective. Thus Nietzsche rejects: 3. The Uniformity Thesis with respect to truth: All true entities share a single, uniform characteristic style. Drawing together these observations on the background assumptions of Nietzsche’s account of material truth, we can say that for him the true entity is a value, and to experience something as a value is precisely to see it as a stabilization, and thus as a distortion of the underlying chaotic reality: What is true has, as something stable, the character of a value. Truth is a necessary value for the will to power. In each case, however, the stabilizing solidifies becoming. Hence what is true, because it is something stable, presents the real which essences in becoming in precisely such a way that it is not. What is true is in this way that which is not adequate to what is in the sense of the becoming, that is, the genuinely real, and thus the true is the false – when indeed the essence of truth is thought as conformity of representation to the matter, according to the long-familiar metaphysical definition. And Nietzsche in fact thinks the essence of truth in this sense. How else could he express his corresponding essential delimitation of truth thus: “Truth is the kind of error without which a certain type of living being could not live. In the end, the value for life decides.” (GA 6.2: 283, quoting WM, n. 493)

In this sense, to experience truth as a value is decidedly different from the way material truth has been opened up within the metaphysical tradition. There is now no absolute, unchanging, independent, uniform way of fixing what entities truly are: There is no “true world” in the sense of a world that is unchanging, eternally valid. The thought of the true world, as something that first provides the measure on its own and for everything, thinks nothing. The thought of a true world conceived in this way must be abolished. (GA 6.1: 561)

But that’s not to abolish the notion of truth all together. What is true (in the material sense) is what was formerly dismissed as a mere appearance – namely, the values that appear to a particular individual from a particular perspective. Entities can show up as values because, in reality, there are no stable and enduring entities. So if Nietzsche rejects that independence thesis with respect to truth, he nevertheless accepts: 20 . The Independence Thesis with respect to reality: What really is is independent of the particular thoughts, practices, and attitudes we have regarding it. In particular, reality is chaos in the sense outlined above, and remains so regardless of whether we understand it as such or not. In addition, if there is no uniform style that all entities share (since they are constituted as entities only within the horizon of a particular practical engagement with the world), there is nevertheless a uniform style that reality has – a uniformity that allows

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us to take up a variety of incompatible perspectives in our engagement with the world. Thus Nietzsche accepts: 30 . The Uniformity Thesis with respect to reality: What is real has a single, uniform characteristic style. To be specific, the real is eternally recurring will to power. No matter how particular entities show up, they do so against the background of reality as chaos. What is it like for every entity, as an entity, to manifest itself as will to power? Nothing shows up as having a fixed nature, inherent uses, set goals, or limits on permissible use. To inhabit a world where everything is as will to power is to experience everything in the world as permitting a constant overcoming. This means that no entity could or would demand of us that we use it in a particular way. Each shows up as inviting us to rearrange it, reorder it, incorporate it into new practices and relationships, and so on. To say that the chaos is eternally recurring means that there is no fixed and binding way of relating things, no standing obligations to prior arrangements, and so on. We find ourselves constantly returned to a situation where we are free to rearrange and reestablish our own interpretation of the world. What things are is open to reconfiguration (thus, entities are unstable), but that they are open to reconfiguration is uniformly the case. Before turning to the attitudinal dimension of truth, let’s briefly summarize what we have learned about Nietzsche’s take on the material dimension. Nietzsche holds on to the notion of the true entity as a stable entity. But because he rejects the idea of a true world in itself (an independent truth), as well as a nonperspectival truth (a uniform truth), there’s a sense in which Nietzsche has rejected the metaphysics of material truth. The stability is only a relative stability of a particular value for a particular perspective. Heidegger is in fact tremendously indebted to Nietzsche’s recognition of the nonstable nature of ultimate reality – this underlying ontology is what allows for the possibility of a sequence of historical worlds. His engagement with Nietzsche’s thought is thus an important stage in Heidegger’s own effort to overcome metaphysics. And yet, Heidegger contends, Nietzsche’s rejection of a metaphysics of material truth is purchased by reinscribing metaphysics at the level of reality – to be specific, by positing an independent and uniform reality. Nietzsche has unthinkingly succumbed to a metaphysics of the real by positing that ultimate reality is uniformly and independently recurring will to power. To overcome metaphysics truly, we would need to abandon the idea that there is any one way things are in themselves, independently of us. Instead, we would accept a “logic” of unconcealment – of being and our human existence or Dasein mutually adapting to each other, and thus being able to emerge into an indefinite variety of distinct ways of being. Heidegger’s critique of Nietzsche’s account of attitudinal truth follows a similar pattern. That is, Heidegger acknowledges that Nietzsche has in an

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important respect rejected a metaphysical understanding of truth, but only on the basis of reinscribing metaphysics at a higher level by according a privilege to some attitudes as those by which we gain access to the independent and uniform reality. But even here, Heidegger finds certain aspects of Nietzsche’s account of our grasp of reality quite salutary. For instance, Heidegger finds in Nietzsche a valuable ally in combatting cognitivism. This is because Nietzsche denies not just the cognitivist thesis with respect to truth (6), but he also denies its analogue: 60 . The Cognitivist Thesis with respect to reality: The best attitude for grasping reality is some species of cognitive attitude. We saw this in the discussion of chaos and bodying above – the becoming character of existence is disclosed most perspicuously not in a cognitive and rationally articulable understanding of things, but in our bodily skills for coping with the constantly shifting worldly situation. Thus our cognitive grasp of the truth about entities is for both thinkers derivative of our precognitive practices and coping skills for engaging with the world (see Chapters 1 and 2). According to Heidegger, Nietzsche quite rightly understands our attitudes as “stances,” ways of poising ourselves and prefiguring in advance what entities and objects we can encounter. By privileging reason, the metaphysical tradition adopted a basic stance (Grundhaltung) (GA 6.1: 498) on the world that “anticipated similarity and sameness as the ground for stability” (GA 6.1: 555). An attitude is true for the metaphysical tradition if it discloses true, that is, stable, entities. But, as we have seen, what shows up as stable is itself an illusion, according to Nietzsche. Thus an attitude that anticipates stability is itself untrue, an error: that which is true [i.e., stable entities] for this truth [i.e., the attitudinal orientation of the metaphysical tradition] is not the true [i.e., not what really exists], for the true of this truth means that which is represented as stable, that which is made secure as an entity. In the guiding perspective on chaos, this securing proves to be a mistaken solidification of becoming; the solidification becomes the denial of that which flows and presses beyond itself; the solidification is a turning away from the genuinely real. The true as that which is mistakenly solidified and made secure is, through this denial of chaos, excluded from agreement with the genuinely real. That which is true in this truth is from the perspective of chaos not adequate to this chaos, thus untrue, thus error. Nietzsche expresses this unequivocally in the proposition to which we already referred: ‘truth is the kind of error without which a certain kind of living being could not live.’ (WP, n. 493; 1885) (GA 6.1: 558)

Heidegger calls the attitudinal dimension of truth a “Für-wahr-halten,” a stance that holds something to be true. Each metaphysical epoch has supposed that some stances give us a hold on things that lets them show up as they really are – for the ancient Greeks, this was theôria; for the medieval Christians, it was faith in the revealed word; and for the moderns, it was the

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state of certainty in which we can calculate and reckon up the interactions the entity could have with other entities in the world. Once again, this does not mean that a proposition is true if and only if (for Christian metaphysics) it is one in which we have faith or (for modern metaphysics) it is one of which we are certain. Rather, the claim is that what entities truly are can only be ascertained within such an attitudinal hold on the world, or that only in such a stance can we distinguish between what is true of an entity and what is false. I’ll refer to an attitude which is oriented toward that in entities which is stable and independent as a “truth-directed” attitude. Nietzsche remains entangled in metaphysics because his continued adherence to the metaphysical understanding of attitudinal truth underwrites both his dismissal of the truth-directed attitudes as falsification, as well as his privileging of art over truth. It is because attitudinal truth is conformity to independent entities – the entities as they are in themselves – that the attitudes that are directed toward truths (i.e., values) are falsifications. For values only exist within a practice of stabilizing the chaotic flow into perspectival values, and they are only disclosed when we take up a perspective within a horizon of possibilities and evaluate the world from that perspective. Thus Nietzsche’s view is not a rejection of: 4. The Conformity Thesis with respect to truth: Our attitudes are true by conforming to the way entities are independently of our attitudes. It is rather an embrace of it. Nietzsche accepts the conformity thesis – so much so that it is his basis for holding that the truth-directed attitudes are false, for they precisely do not conform to an attitude independent reality. But the commitment to the conformity thesis alone is not a serious entanglement with metaphysics because of the way the conformity thesis and the adjustment thesis come apart in Nietzsche’s work. The reason our truth-directed attitudes are an error is that to hold them, and thus to be able to perceive stable entities, is precisely to fail to be properly adjusted by the chaotic reality of a flowing and becoming world. Thus, in calling truth an illusion, Nietzsche implicitly rejects: 5. The Adjustment Thesis with respect to truth: The truth of entities is only accessible when we have properly adjusted our attitudes so as to orient them to reality. He rejects this thesis because to orient our attitudes toward reality is to lose our grip on the values as valuable – it is to see them rather as something to be overcome. Thus an attitude oriented to chaos is an attitude in which “true” entities are not genuinely accessible as such, that is, as stable, independent, and uniform. Rather, truths are momentary and perspectivally indexed takes on a reality that cannot be definitively established or fixed. Heidegger does think Nietzsche remains entangled in the metaphysics of truth in another significant way, however, because he maintains the ideal of

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conformity and adjustment in our relationship to reality. We can detect Nietzsche’s continued adherence to the background metaphysical assumptions in his claim that “art is worth more than truth” (WP §853). The reason for privileging art over truth is precisely that, in artistic creation, we more perspicuously disclose chaotic reality than in ordinary estimations of value. The notion of conformity has to change, of course, in that there are no longer any independently existing entities to which we need to conform. But there is an independently existing reality to which we need to accommodate ourselves. Heidegger signals this difference by saying that, rather than “conformity” (Angleichung), art succeeds as an assimilation (Eingleichung) – a meshing into or getting our lives into gear with the chaotic reality of the word. Homoiôsis in Nietzsche’s thought becomes: “assimilation (Eingleichung) and admission (Einweisung) of human life into chaos. . . . This assimilation is not an imitating and reproducing conformity to what is occurrent, but rather: a perspectival-horizonal transfiguration that commands-dictates” (GA 6.1: 573). Thus Heidegger sees Nietzsche as abandoning the conformity thesis with respect to truth but adhering to: 40 . The Conformity Thesis with respect to reality: Our attitudes succeed by assimilating us to the way reality is independently of our attitudes. Finally, something like the adjustment thesis with respect to truth is also reincribed at the level of chaotic reality. Nietzsche “in no way rejects this traditional and, as it would like to appear, most natural essential definition of truth. Rather, it remains the guideline for positing the essence of truth as making secure in contrast with art, which is as a transfiguration an attunement with that which becomes and its possibilities, and is precisely on the basis of this attunement with what becomes a higher value” (GA 6.1: 560). Art is understood here in the broadest possible sense as a way of conducting oneself that is open to possibilities for transfiguration, of moving beyond currently available possibilities, and thus overcoming the constraints of past perspectival evaluations of the world. The higher value accorded to art is grounded in something like: 50 . The Adjustment Thesis with respect to reality: Reality is only accessible when we have properly adjusted our attitudes so as to orient them to reality (i.e., chaos). Because what entities truly are is not independent of us and our forms of life, there is no uniquely true or right way to attitudinally adjust ourselves to them. We do not get access to the true entities by bringing our cognitive and perceptual capacities into proper adjustment or conformity with the way things really are. Rather, the true entities are perspectival values, which are posited relative to our way of existence. The truth presupposes a form of life rather than waiting for us to get into the right form of life to access it. The only question is whether we will experience this truth as an error, and thus, in

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the process, adjust ourselves and assimilate ourselves to the chaotic reality of the world. Nietzsche’s objection to the attitudinal dimension of the metaphysical tradition, then, is first of all its assumption that getting a grip on things is a matter of “adapting to an entity that is occurrently ‘true’ ‘in itself’” (GA 6.1: 572; Anmessung an ein an «sich» vorhandenes «Wahres»), when in fact there is no objective, occurrent truth in itself. The stance in which we get a hold on the way things really are is thus not an adaptive stance but a “dictating positing in advance,” a stance in which we set them up as what they truly are. Nietzsche’s name for this stance, Heidegger claims, is “justness” (Gerechtigkeit):3 “by justness Nietzsche understands that which makes truth possible and necessary – truth in the sense of holding-for-true, that is, the assimilation to chaos” (GA 6.1: 575). Nietzsche’s view of truth as justness is a rejection of previous metaphysical accounts of truth because the stances that metaphysics heretofore privileged for delivering truth are precisely the ones that Nietzsche believes obscure the way things really are. And yet, truth as justness remains shaped by metaphysical background assumptions. When “truth becomes justness . . . the initial essence of truth is transformed in such a way that the transformation amounts to a sidelining of the essence (not its destruction)” (GA 6.2: 13). Truth is sidelined in the sense that a correct grasp of stable entities is no longer an end or aim in itself, but rather a means to something higher: self-overcoming. The essence of truth – stability – is preserved, but it is given a subsidiary role in the project of overcoming: “all correctness is merely a preliminary stage and occasion for surpassing, every making firm merely a base for the dissolution into becoming and in this way into the stabilizing of ‘chaos’. . . . When truth is sidelined in this way, then the essence of truth loses its domination” (GA 6.2: 13). But what precisely is involved in truth becoming justness? The word “justness” is meant to indicate both sides to the change in truth – the devaluation of truth as traditionally understood following the separation of truth and reality, and the continued entanglement of reality in the metaphysical background assumptions of truth. The attitude of justness, Heidegger explains, is concerned with what is just or right, which Nietzsche defines as “the will to make eternal a particular relationship of power” (GA 6.2: 28, quoting Nietzsche XIII, 205). “But that which is right, that which shows the direction and gives the measure,” on 3

I translate “Gerechtigkeit” as “justness” rather than the more conventional “justice,” because Heidegger insists that “Gerechtigkeit” is to be understood freed from the overtones of conventional morality or legality. If one thinks that we get in tune with chaos by living a life that is conventionally just in either a legal or moral sense, one has completely missed the point. What one is to hear in “Gerechtigkeit” is rightness, justice as “just-right-ness” (to indulge in a pun), in particular, the attitude that is just right or suitable for disclosing the world as chaos. The archaic English word “justness” had the sense of rightness or suitableness, rather than a connotation of moral justice.

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Nietzsche’s account, “does not exist in itself” (GA 6.2: 28–9). So the “particular relationship of power” that justness wills to make eternal, is one in which we “bring out entities as a form of will to power” (GA 6.2: 295–6). That power relationship demanded by the will to power is one the permits a constant enhancement of power. What ought to characterize our attitudes, then, is that we always act and think and intend and otherwise direct ourselves toward the world so as to facilitate constant empowering: “the mode of justification proper to the new justness” – that is, the success conditions of our world-directed attitudes – “consists neither in measuring up to occurrent entities, nor in the appeal to laws that are valid in themselves. Within the domain of the will to power, every demand for a justification of this type remains without either ground or a response” (GA 6.2: 295). The attitudes are not justified in the way truths were – by adjusting and conforming to a stable reality. Instead, they are adjusted to a chaotic reality, and will succeed in giving us a grip on this reality only if they “remain exclusively related to the preservation” of “the will to power. This new ‘justness’ no longer has anything to do with a decision about right and wrong according to a true relationship of measure and rank that subsists in itself, but rather the new justness is active and before all else ‘aggressive’: it first sets up from its own power what should be called right and wrong” (GA 6.2: 176). Justness is being always prepared to encounter entities as amenable to revaluation. In a technological world, a properly adjusted attitude is one that experiences the minimal constraints possible on what things are, how they can be used and exploited, or how they should be related to each other. Justness in the defined sense is the general property or trait of those attitudes that will help us get such a grip on a technological world. Thus justness is the general characteristic of all attitudes that permit us constantly to go beyond current arrangements toward new ways of valuing and organizing things. In Heidegger’s words, “justness is a perspectivepositing passage beyond previous perspectives” (GA 6.2: 294). The old value of orientation toward stability is useful only during periods of consolidation, during which we prepare for the next transformative revaluation. In claiming that, for Nietzsche, truth becomes justice, or more precisely, claiming that the metaphysical ideal of proper adjustment is now realized in justice, Heidegger puts considerable weight on an unpublished note that Nietzsche wrote in 1884, entitled “the ways of freedom.” Among the ways of freedom that Nietzsche lists, he includes “cutting oneself off from one’s past (against fatherland, faith, parents, companions),” “dealings with outcasts of all kinds (in history and society),” “overthrowing that which is most revered, accepting what is most forbidden,” “committing all crimes,” and “attempting a new valuation” (KGA VII-2: 136). Following the list of ways of freedom, Nietzsche concludes with two observations. First, of justness, he notes: “justness as a constructive, sorting out, and annihilating mode of thought, arising from assessments of value: the highest representative of life itself.” Then, of

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wisdom, he notes: “wisdom and its relationship to power: some day power will be more influential – up until now error was, the rabble’s assessment of value is still too great even in those who are wise” (ibid.). In this passage, then, Nietzsche offers first a set of practical means to liberate our tastes and dispositions from fixed, inherited, and conventional ways of experiencing and engaging with the world. But as the concluding remarks make clear, the point is not simply to promote sociopathic criminality and immorality. Rather, the aim is freedom as control over one’s perspectives, a control that attains life in its highest dignity, a control that lets the true nature of power emerge as definitive of wisdom. In Heidegger’s terms, this passage shows that for Nietzsche, “authentically being free is justness” (GA 6.1: 576). The passage concludes by distinguishing “the rabble’s assessment of value” from power. The rabble believes that values are fixed and inherent in the world. The perspective of justness, oriented toward power, understands that values are temporary consolidations in the service of ever-enhanced power. An important dimension of justness will be the ability not merely to respond to things as values, but also to create a whole new horizon for valuation. Nietzsche calls the latter ability “art,” a practical orientation in which one both responds to the richness of meanings that the situation offers, but also uncovers and creates different meanings – meanings that might well be incompatible with the current range of meanings we are responding to. Art discloses chaos because chaos involves the idea that no single way of making sense of the world can exhaust its richness. Such an attitudinal orientation to the world is well characterized as freedom – both freedom to respond to possibilities offered to us (i.e., the capacity to pick up and employ significations in the world), and also freedom from getting caught in any single way of responding to the world. It will involve, as Nietzsche’s note suggests, moments of construction, sorting out, and annihilating. To say that it is constructive, Heidegger explains, means that it does not simply deal with what is given to it on the basis of existing skills and dispositions. Such an attitude: “first creates such a thing as never yet and perhaps never at all stands and endures as something occurrent. It does not appeal to and support itself on the basis of what is given; it is no conforming, but rather that which announces itself as the dictating character of the positing of a horizon within a perspective” (GA 6.1: 577–8). Unlike traditions attitudes of truth, then, the point is not to correctly represent or bring into view what exists independently of us. Rather, it is to dictate, to reach out and anticipate in a new way, so that the world gets restructured. That means that “constructing” is not simply an activity of producing entities. Rather, it is a whole new orientation to the world – an orientation in which we take responsibility for establishing new determinative possibilities: “‘Constructing’ means not merely production of something not occurrent, but rather means the erecting and setting up, going into the height. Put more precisely, it first gains a height, secures it and thus sets up a direction.

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From this point of view, ‘constructing’ is a commanding, which first raises the claim to command and creates a domain of command” (GA 6.1: 577–8). A height is a position from which we attain a new view on the world, one that goes beyond the limitations of our previous perspective. Justice, as the attitude that discloses the chaotic nature of the world, must constantly be setting up new views, perspectives, ways of being oriented in the world. But, of course, the world does not permit us to do just anything we please. The chaos we encounter has meanings, significations of its own, and that means that it resists us. Thus the attitude that allows chaos to appear as such cannot merely be a dictating and commanding, it must also be a sorting out, that is, taking in what is offered and making decisions about how to respond to it as it develops a new form of responsiveness to the chaos that impinges on us. Heidegger explains that this constructing attitude “is at the same time a ‘sorting’. The constructing thus in advance never moves in a vacuum; it moves within something that pushes forward and forces itself on us as ostensibly measure-giving, and it does not merely hinder the constructing, but rather would like to make it unnecessary. The constructing, as erecting, must at the same time constantly decide and pass excluding judgement regarding measures and heights, and first form itself in the time-space in which it erects its measures and heights and opens its views. Constructing proceeds through decisions” (GA 6.1: 578). Thus, in responding to chaos, we need to sort through what the world offers, adjusting ourselves to the world, but also holding onto what supports our way of projecting, and working around or excluding what would threaten the current perspective: “it makes and holds onto what can support the construction, and rejects what endangers it. In this way it secures the building site and selects the materials of construction” (GA 6.2: 290). In order to build, the attitude must clear a space for the new orientation to the world, and that requires it to clear away old modes of responsiveness to the world. Thus it is also “annihilative”: “it removes what previously and up until now had secured the stability of life. This removing clears the road of solidifications, which might hinder the execution of the erection of a height” (GA 6.1: 578–9). The “solidifications” are the ways the chaotic world has settled into more or less stable arrangements through our acquiring habitual forms of response, fixed dispositions for encountering the world. Justice gets us into synch with chaos by refusing to itself such stable habits and dispositions. It will destroy whatever would promote a decline into a fixed state. Justice can tolerate only temporary stabilizations, and hence views such stabilizations – values – as values, and thus as determined only relative to a particular temporally limited perspective. To summarize, in a world where truth has become justice, we will come to see particular truths as values – as relative to and dependent on our first positing a perspective. Heidegger thinks that we can detect this sort of understanding of truth wherever, as Nietzsche puts it, “what is necessary is

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that something must be held to be true – not that something is true.”4 Heidegger argues that such an attitude is spreading, and becoming evident in “the propaganda wars adapted to the enormity” of “the historical totalized condition of our planet,” or the way “all life makes itself known in that which is appropriate to the facade, or on the order of a theatrical show, or advertisement.” Such examples are signs of “a boundless distress of all confidence and every trustworthiness drawing over the planet,” which, in turn, points to the deeper phenomenon: “that not only some specific truth, but rather the essence of truth is shaken and an original grounding of its essence must be taken over and achieved by human beings” (GA 6.1: 484). The idea, I take it, is that forms of discourse that in the past would have been dismissed – superficial forms of theater and drama, advertisements, “news shows” that are manifestly vehicles for propaganda, can come to be taken seriously when we think that the truth is inherently perspectival, that is, that it must be presented from a particular perspective. At the same time, truth becoming justice involves the sense that there is an independent reality, a chaotic becoming, which we disclose as such by experiencing the world as calling us to overcome prior perspectives.

Conclusion: The Critique of Nietzsche’s Metaphysics of Truth, and What that Teaches Us about Overcoming Metaphysics I would like to close this chapter by redeeming the promissory note that I made at the outset – that by understanding Heidegger’s critique of Nietzsche, we would illuminate Heidegger’s own views on metaphysics and truth. We have seen that Heidegger accepts Nietzsche’s critique of the distinction between a true and an apparent world, and his rejection of the notion of stability that gave rise to that distinction. There is no stable way the world is in itself; thus there is no true world in itself. Heidegger also accepts Nietzsche’s rejection of reason and cognition as providing a privileged mode of access to the way the world is. And yet, Heidegger argues that Nietzsche remains entangled in a metaphysical account of truth. He does not object on the grounds that Nietzsche remains committed to a view of attitudinal truth as an agreement with the way things truly are – Heidegger too is committed to the idea that our attitudes can succeed or fail in giving us veridical access to the world. Instead, Heidegger’s objection is somewhat more subtle than that: namely, that in Nietzsche’s way of repudiating the metaphysical tradition, he continues to hold fast to what is most pernicious about metaphysics. And he does so in a way that conceals the metaphysical tendencies in his own work. We can best illustrate this by completing Chart 10.1: 4

Friedrich Nietzsche, Nietzsche Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe, vol. VIII.2 (Giorgio Colli & Mazzino Montinari, Eds.). Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1970, p. 16.

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Nietzsche and the Metaphysics of Truth chart 10.1(b) Material Dimension

Attitudinal Dimension

Philosophic Greek

idea – self-subsistent forms. The true entities are ideas; concrete particulars are instantiations of ideas

homoiôsis – adjustment (Angleichung) of our thoughts to forms

Christian

ens creatum – an entity truly is what God conceives it to be

adaequatio – measuring faith in the revealed up to (Anmessung) or word, being fit to receive learning God’s ideas church doctrines

Modern

ens certum – an entity truly is that about it which serves as a reliable basis for cognition

certainty – ascertain in advance the interactions that entities could have with each other

Technological/ value – to be an entity is justness – assimilation to chaos by positing Nietzsche to be a value posited our own values relative to a perspective

Paradigmatic Activity theôria idein

calculation

propaganda artistic creation

When Nietzsche denies that reality is found in stability and grasped in cognition, it looks like he is freeing himself from any stable conception of what entities really are and how we really get a grip on them. And yet, Heidegger argues, his view is nevertheless metaphysical insofar as it accepts that there is some general feature that all entities share as such – they are temporary stabilizations, valued relative to the practical purposes of a particular form of life. And this, in turn, points to an ultimate reality – chaos. That entities can be values is a result of the fact that reality imposes no right interpretation on what anything is. Chaos is not a true world, for that requires stability. But it is nevertheless a unified, general understanding of what things are and, moreover, Nietzsche attributes to chaos a kind of independence of us and our particular projects or perspectives. When Nietzsche denies the priority of cognition and representational modes of thought in granting us access to reality, it looks like he has freed himself from traditional ways of thinking of truth. And yet, he continues to hold that there is some privileged attitude by means of which we adjust ourselves to reality – art. When we become artists of our own lives, we allow chaos to show itself as it is in itself, as chaotic, and do so in such a way that we

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are able to incorporate it into our lives. Truth thus becomes justice – an attitude in which we are oriented to entities as values, and to chaos as something allowing us the freedom of constant overcoming. In fact, these two metaphysicalish components of Nietzsche’s thought are connected: it is because Nietzsche privileges one form of attitudinal orientation to the world that he commits himself to one general understanding of reality. For Heidegger, the deepest lesson to be drawn from Nietzsche’s critique of metaphysics – a lesson Nietzsche himself failed to take to heart – is that there are a plurality of equally legitimate worlds, thus a plurality of ways for entities to really and truly be, and thus a plurality of equally valid types of attitude to take up in disclosing the truth. So if Nietzsche remains entangled in metaphysics through his continuing commitment to some version of each of the six theses, what does that teach us about the proper way to overcome metaphysics? The problem is not a commitment to a notion of attitudinal truth as some form of agreeing with the way things are. Nor is the problem a commitment to a notion of a material truth and/or reality, provided that truth and reality are indexed to a particular world disclosure. One problem is thinking that there is a single independent, uniform, and eternal reality – chaos – when in fact reality showing up as chaos is itself but one way for the world to be disclosed. This then leads to the further problem of thinking that there is one privileged type of attitude for getting at the way things are, one proper form of life for adjusting ourselves to reality. By contrast, Heidegger believes that our highest, postmetaphysical dignity is to be disclosers of different understandings of being, none of which can be understood as getting closer to or further away from the ultimate truth and reality.

Works by Heidegger

Note: Unlike references to other works in the Gesamtausgabe, page references to GA 2 will list the “H” numbers, which are based on the pagination of the original German edition of Sein und Zeit (Verlag Max Niemeyer, 1927), and which can be found in the margins of both English language translations of Being and Time, as well as in the margins of the Gesamtausgabe edition of Sein und Zeit (Klostermann, 1977). BW Basic Writings, rev. edn. (David Farrell Krell, Ed.). San Francisco: Harper, 1993. EGT Early Greek Thinking (David Farrell Krell & Frank A. Capuzzi, Eds.). San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1975. GA 1 Frühe Schriften. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1978. GA 2 Sein und Zeit. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1977. GA 3 Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1991. Translated as: Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics (R. Taft, Trans.). Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997. GA 4 Erläuterungen zu Hölderlins Dichtung. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1981. Translated as: Elucidations of Hölderlin’s Poetry (K. Hoeller, Trans.). Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 2000. GA 5 Holzwege. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1977. Translated as: Off The Beaten Track (J. Young & K. Haynes, Trans.). Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2002. GA 6.1 Nietzsche I. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1996. GA 6.2 Nietzsche II. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1997. GA 7 Vorträge und Aufsätze. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 2000. GA 8 Was heisst Denken? Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 2002. Translated as: What Is Called Thinking? (J. G. Gray, Trans.). New York: Harper & Row, 1968. GA 9 Wegmarken. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1996. Translated as: Pathmarks (W. McNeill, Ed.). Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1998. GA 10 Der Satz vom Grund. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1997. Translated as: The Principle of Reason (R. Lilly, Trans.). Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991. GA 12 Unterwegs zur Sprache. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1985. GA 14 Zur Sache des Denkens. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 2007.

243

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Works by Heidegger

GA 15 Seminare. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1986. GA 16 Reden und andere Zeugnisse eines Lebensweges, 1910–1976. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 2000. GA 17 Einführung in die phänomenologische Forschung. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1994. GA 19 Platon, Sophistes. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1992. Translated as: Plato’s Sophist (R. Rojcewicz & A. Schuwer, Trans.). Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997. GA 20 Prolegomena zur Geschichte des Zeitbegriffs. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1979. Translated as: History of the Concept of Time (T. Kisiel, Trans.). Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985. GA 21 Logik: Die Frage nach der Wahrheit. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1976. GA 22 Die Grundbegriffe der antiken Philosophie. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1993. GA 24 Die Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1975. Translated as: Basic Problems of Phenomenology (A. Hofstadter, Trans.). Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982. GA 25 Phänomenologische Interpretation von Kants Kritik der reinen Vernunft. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1977. Translated as: Phenomenological Interpretation of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (P. Emad & K. Maly, Trans.). Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997. GA 26 Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Logik. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1978. Translated as: The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic (M. Heim, Trans.). Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984. GA 27 Einleitung in die Philosophie. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1996. GA 28 Der deutsche Idealismus. Fichte, Schelling, Hegel) und die philosophische Problemlage der Gegenwart. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1997. GA 29/30 Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik: Welt, Endlichkeit, Einsamkeit. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1983. Translated as: The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics World, Finitude, Solitude (W. McNeill & N. Walker, Trans.). Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995. GA 31 Vom Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit: Einleitung in die Philosophie. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1982. Translated as: The Essence of Human Freedom (T. Sadler, Trans.). London: Continuum, 2002. GA 32 Hegels Phänomenologie des Geistes. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1980. Translated as: Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (P. Emad & K. Maly, Trans.). Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988. GA 33 Aristoteles, Metaphysik Θ 1–3. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1981. Translated as: Aristotle’s Metaphysics Theta 1–3 (W. Brogan & P. Warnek, Trans.). Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995. GA 34 Vom Wesen der Wahrheit: zu Platons Höhlengleichnis und Theätet. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1988. Translated as: The Essence of Truth (T. Sadler, Trans.). London: Continuum, 2002. GA 36/37 Sein und Wahrheit. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 2001. GA 38 Logik als die Frage nach dem Wesen der Sprache. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1998. GA 39 Hölderlins Hymnen “Germanien” und “Der Rhein.” Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1980.

Works by Heidegger

245

GA 40 Einführung in die Metaphysik. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1983. Translated as: Introduction to Metaphysics (G. Fried & R. Polt, Trans.). New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000. (Original work published 1953.) GA 41 Die Frage nach dem Ding: zu Kants Lehre von den transzendentalen Grundsätzen. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1984. Translated as: What Is A Thing? (W. B. Barton, Jr. & V. Deutsch, Trans.). Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1967. GA 44 Nietzsches metaphysische Grundstellung im abendländischen Denken: die ewige Wiederkehr des Gleichen. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1986. GA 45 Grundfragen der Philosophie: ausgewählte “Probleme” der “Logik.” Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1984. Translated as: Basic Questions of Philosophy. Selected “Problems” of “Logic” (R. Rojcewicz & A. Schuwer, Trans.). Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994. GA 47 Nietzsches Lehre vom Willen zur Macht als Erkenntnis. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1989. GA 48 Nietzsche, der europäische Nihilismus. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1986. GA 53 Hölderlins Hymne “Der Ister.” Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1984. Translated as: Hölderlin’s Hymn “The Ister” (W. McNeill & Julia Davis, Trans.). Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996. GA 54 Parmenides. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1982. Translated as: Parmenides (A. Schuwer & R. Rojcewicz, Trans.). Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992. GA 58 Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1993. GA 63 Ontologie: Hermeneutik der Faktizität. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1988. Translated as: Ontology: The Hermeneutics of Facticity (J. van Buren, Trans.). Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999. GA 65 Beiträge zur Philosophie (vom Ereignis). Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1989. GA 66 Besinnung. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1997. GA 67 Metaphysik und Nihilismus. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1999. GA 69 Die Geschichte des Seyns. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1998. GA 79 Bremer und Freiburger Vorträge. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1994. GA 85 Vom Wesen der Sprache. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1999. IM Introduction to Metaphysics (Ralph Manheim, Trans.). Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1961. N1 Nietzsche, vol. 1 (David Farrell Krell, Trans.). San Francisco: Harper, 1979. N3 Nietzsche, vol. 3 (David Farrell Krell, Trans.). San Francisco: Harper, 1987. N4 Nietzsche, vol. 4 (David Farrell Krell, Trans.). San Francisco: Harper, 1982. OWL On the Way to Language (Peter D. Hertz, Trans.). New York: Harper & Row, 1971. QCT The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays (William Lovitt, Trans.). New York: Harper & Row, 1977.

Index

adaptation, 191, 232, See Ereignis, appropriation alêtheia, 1, 6, 12, 15, 16, 18, 74, 78, 80, 81, 84, 128, 223, 224 Anaximander, 133n9, 193 appropriation, 204, 206, 207, See adaptation, Ereignis art, 147, 177, 190, 208n15, 222, 234, 235, 238, 241 attunement, 13, 30, 69, 91, 160, 171, 199, 201, 203, 204, 209, 210, 211, 226, 226n2, 227, 235 authenticity, 24, 37, 90, 96n2, 113, 115n19, 123 Ayer, Alfred J., 164 background, 31, 32, 74, 84, 106, 107, 111, 133, 151, 169, 178–84, 186, 187–92, 216, 221, 222, 223, 229, 232, 235, 236 being, understanding of, 14, 31, 33, 34, 83, 88, 90, 117, 125, 178, 179–92 Bernasconi, Robert, 186 Borgmann, Albert, 202n8, 206 Bracken, William, 116 Brandom, Robert, 164, 164n8, Burge, Tyler, 97, 99, 99n7, 100, 100n8, 101, 101n9, 102, 102n11, 103, 104, 109, 115 Carman, Taylor, 57n, 95n, 96, 96n2, 104, 114, 115, 115n19, 158n2 Carnap, Rudolf, 177, 177n1, 178, 179, 180, 181, 184, 190, 192 chaos, 136, 226–9, 231–6, 236n3, 238, 239, 241, 242

Christian age, the, 7, 108, 156–62, 164–73, 182, 197–9, 211, 218–22, 224, 225, 234, 241, See also history – historical epochs clearing, 6, 14–17, 24, 25, 32–5, 37, 181, 191 cognitivism, 85, 156n, 162, 163, 167, 233, communication, 51, 52, 97, 107, 110, 111, 115, 116, 121, 131, 131n7, 132, 158, 164, 167, 169 existential, 110, 111 concealment, 1, 13, 18, 19, 21–5, 33, 74, 84, 85, 129 conceptual, 7, 20, 31, 74, 84, 85, 86, 89, 90, 91, 103, 117, 124, 178, 179, 183, 184, 218, 227 conversation, 95–7, 97n3, 103, 104, 105, 107–14, 116, 117, 120, See also discourse idle, 95–7, 97n3, 103, 104, 105, 110–14, 116, 117 Davidson, Donald, 6, 40, 40n, 43–52, 54–6, 102, 102n11, 104n13, 114 death, 157, 162, 172, 172n14, 195–200, 202n7, 203, 204, 207, 210 Derrida, Jacques, 42, 42n6, 125, 193, 193n23 Descartes, René, 182, 183, 183n11, 186n19, 190, 193, 220, 225 despair, 161, 166n10, 170, 171, 172n14 disclosure, 5, 7, 8, 13, 26, 31, 32, 35, 36, 52, 62, 72, 83, 106, 113, 120, 131, 134, 143, 144, 150, 158, 159, 169, 224, 242

247

248 discourse, 4, 14, 75, 95, 96, 107, 108, 114, 115, 127, 128, 129, 131, 131n7, 132, 133, 134, 140, 144, 148, 167, 188, 240, See also conversation discovering, 106, See uncovering disposedness, 14, 106, 107, 108, 109, 111, 111n17 divinities, 195, 202–11, See also fourfold Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 161, 161n5, 171, 172n14 Dreyfus, Hubert, 40n, 57n, 83n10, 95n, 96, 96n1, 104, 114, 115, 115n20, 160, 184, 184n14, 186n17, 194n25, 202, 202n8, 203, 205n9, 208n15 Dummett, Michael, 41, 41n1, 45, 45n13, 45n14, 97, 104n13, 178, 178n4 dwelling, 138, 187, 195, 204, 205, 206, 209, 210 earth, 2, 8, 69, 165, 171, 172, 172n14, 195, 197, 198, 202, 204–9, See also fourfold enframing, 28, 198, 205, See also technology equipment, 3, 23, 24, 53, 54, 55, 78, 107, 115, 142, 149, 150, 200, 216, 217 Ereignis, 2, 124n4, 206, 206n10, 245, See adaptation, appropriation error, 51, 52, 60–2, 64–6, 69, 73, 74, 84, 85, 87, 88, 91, 146, 166, 212, 226–9, 231, 233–5, 238 essence, 1, 5–8, 11–16, 24, 26–35, 38, 41, 42, 61, 72n2, 73, 75–9, 81, 83, 121, 124–6, 128, 133, 134, 136, 145n18, 150, 151, 153, 154, 156, 157, 164, 178, 184, 190, 191, 197, 199, 205, 208, 209, 212, 215, 220, 223, 227, 230, 231, 235, 236, 240 as a verb, 27, 154 eternal return, 135, 232, 237 externalism, 97–100, 102n11, 114 faith, 70, 108, 156–68, 170, 182, 219, 220, 221, 225, 233, 237, 241 Faith, 158

Index fourfold, 2, 8, 195, 196, 204, 205, 205n9, 206, 207, 209 Frege, Gottlob, 75 Friedländer, Paul, 16 gathering, 7, 32, 127–9, 132–4, 136, 208, 208n15 George, Stefan, 95n, 99n7, 137, 139, 142, 143, 144, 148, 153 god, 205 God, 4, 8, 31, 34, 36, 76, 145, 146, 157–63, 165, 167, 170, 171, 172, 172n14, 181, 182, 191n22, 195–200, 202n7, 203, 204, 207–11, 218, 219, 221, 241 Heraclitus, 12, 120, 193 historiography, 181, 187, 188, 192, See historiology historiology, 181, 182, 185–9, 193, 194, See historiography history historical epochs, 7, 8, 31, 32, 179–87, 189–93, 195–9, 202, 203, 205–9, 218–22, 224–6, 233 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 207, 207n13, 243, 245 homesickness, 203 Humboldt, Wilhelm von, 126 Husserl, Edmund, 34, 69n7, 192 inauthenticity, 37, 90, 97n3, 123 intentionality, 40, 55, 192 Jaspers, Karl, 121, 121n2, 122, 134 justice, 162, 163, 172, See also truth – as justness justness. See truth – as justness Kant, Immanuel, 166, 166n9, 185, 193, 220, 243, 244 Kierkegaard, Søren, 159, 159n3, 161, 170, 170n11, 171, 210n17 Lafont, Cristina, 35, 36, 37, 120, 121, 144n18, 145n18 language, 2, 4, 7, 13, 38, 40–2, 44–9, 51, 54–7, 62n4, 63n5, 77, 78, 95–7,

Index 97n3, 99, 100, 102, 103, 104, 109, 113–16, 119–39, 141, 143–7, 149, 151–4, 157–9, 164, 167, 169, 177, 179, 188, 192, 193, 214, 243 as house of being, 7, 119, 120, 121, 124, 125, 126, 134, 136, 146, 152, 154 linguistic constitutionalism, 120, 122, 123, 134, 137, 144 natural. See language – ordinary ordinary, 7, 21, 23, 96, 97, 100, 102, 104, 116, 121, 122, 123, 124, 126, 130, 142, 143, 144, 146, 149, 153, 154, 155 originary, 7, 124, 124n4, 127, 134, 134, 137, 151, 154, 155 poetic, 124, 139, 168 Language, 7 logos, 31, 91, 120, 127–34, 136, 137 Luther, Martin, 220 McDowell, John, 119, 123 meaning, 2, 3, 7, 15–17, 22, 27, 36, 38, 45–7, 49, 51n31, 52, 53, 63, 64, 65n6, 67–70, 77, 78, 82, 83, 95–103, 108–10, 114–17, 120, 121, 124–5, 128, 130–4, 136, 137, 139–43, 148, 152–6, 160, 165, 188, 192, 197, 199, 200, 210, 230, 238, 239 Meaning, 109 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 57, 58n1, 59n3, 61, 62, 66–71 metaphysics, 8, 12, 17, 27, 41, 42, 144, 144n17, 148, 150, 151, 165, 170, 178–85, 187–91, 193, 195, 198, 210, 212, 213, 217–29, 231–7, 240–2, See history – historical epochs modern. See history: historical epochs modernity, 149, 182, 183, 191, 195, 198, 206, 224, 234, See history – historical epochs mood, 106, 199, 226n2 mortals, 8, 195, 204, 205, 205n9, 207, 208, See also fourfold Mourelatos, Alexander, 185, 185n15, 189

249 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 8, 17, 17n2, 57, 58, 135, 136, 190, 193, 193n23, 196–9, 202n7, 212, 213, 215, 218, 221, 226–43, 245 oblivion, 12, 179, 180, 184, 184n14, 191, 192 ontology, 2, 3, 4, 12, 116, 134, 135, 136, 143, 154, 179, 196, 232 Parmenides, 120, 185, 193 Pascal, Blaise, 7, 156–68, 170–3 passion, 166n10, 168, 170, 171 perception, 20, 52, 57, 58, 60, 61, 62n4, 65–71, 83, 84, 86, 88, 89, 90, 141, 223, 228 phenomenology, 7, 18, 52, 58, 60, 67, 72, 83, 110, 156, 156n, 157, 158, 159, 186n19, 194n24, 244, 245 existential, 61, 66 philosophy, 1, 2, 5, 6, 8, 12, 40–4, 74, 75, 77, 81, 84, 85, 97, 115, 119, 120, 123, 156, 167, 177–80, 182–93, 212, 213, 218, 226 phusis, 181, 223 Plato, 7, 38, 73, 74, 77–80, 82–6, 91, 193, 212, 223, 224, 244 poetry, 137–40, 142–8, 151–3, 169 Putnam, Hilary, 97–100, 102–4, 109, 115 references, 54, 116, 132, 137, 243 relations, 2, 3, 8, 13, 20, 26, 32, 38, 39, 50, 63, 78, 102, 102n10, 123, 128, 128–32, 134–7, 141, 142, 143, 148, 150–4, 183, 189, 212, 216 renunciation, 136, 138, 151, 152, 153 representationalism, 13, 73, 241 revaluation, 237 revealing, 12, 19, 23, 32, 91, 110, 129, 143n16 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 201 Rorty, Richard, 186, 186n17, 186n18, 187, 189 Shakespeare, William, 140 signification, 26, 55, 63, 71, 81, 83, 107, 109, 142

250 sky, 8, 88, 195, 204–9, See also fourfold Socrates, 80, 85, 86 talk, idle, 95, See conversation, idle Tarski, Alfred, 44–7, 49 Taylor, Charles, 195 technology, 8, 28, 32, 149, 150, 179, 179n10, 184, 191, 193, 195–206, 208, 209, 210, 226, 237, See also enframing resources, 31, 32, 196, 198, 201, 209 Trakl, Georg, 169 truth agreement, 13, 21, 40, 42, 47, 150, 194, 213, 214n1, 224, 229, 233, 240 as adaequatio, 12, 18, 219, 221, 241 as correctness, 18, 29, 48n23, 69, 70, 73, 84, 87, 100, 101, 104, 105, 113, 123, 139, 196, 199, 209, 213, 218, 220, 223, 236 as correspondence, 7, 12, 13, 15, 16, 19, 21, 28, 29, 35, 43–7, 73, 75, 75n4, 77, 79, 81, 83–5, 87, 219, 223

Index as homoiôsis, 12, 18, 218, 220, 223, 227, 241 as justness, 199, 236–42 ontic, 6, 7, 8, 13, 27, 39, 75, 82, 179, 212, 214–18 ontological, 11, 13, 14, 39, 213, 215, 216, 218–22, 224–6, 230 propositional, 4–7, 12, 13, 15, 16, 18–21, 30, 34–6, 39, 43, 44, 47–52, 55, 56, 71–6, 79–81, 86, 89, 97n3, 164, 170, 213–15, 224, 225, 228 Tugendhat, Ernst, 16, 34–8, 38n9 turning, 4, 123, 130 unconcealment, 1–8, 11–18, 21–3, 25–7, 30–2, 34–40, 43, 48, 52, 56, 72, 73, 79, 84, 85, 87, 91, 120, 154, 181, 204, 232 uncovering, 2, 4, 13, 14, 16–26, 30, 32, 34–6, 52–5, 64, 67, 80–2, 106, 110, 114, 153, 183, 187, 204, 214, 238 will to power, 231, 232, 237 worlds, 1, 2, 17, 30, 36, 55, 232, 242