Heidegger and Unconcealment

Heidegger and Unconcealment
Truth, Language, and History

This book includes ten essays that trace the notion of unconcealment
as it develops from Martin Heideggers 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 Heideggers work, also applies to worlds in a dual sense:
rst, a condition of entities manifesting themselves is the existence of
a world; and second, worlds themselves are disclosed. The unconceal-
ment 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.
Heideggers thought as a whole can protably 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 phi-
losophy 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
Acknowledgments page ix
Credits xi
Introduction 1
PART I TRUTH AND DI S CLOS URE
1 Unconcealment 11
Appendix on Tugendhat 34
2 The Conditions of Truth in Heidegger
and Davidson 40
3 On the Existential Positivity of Our Ability
to be Deceived 57
4 Heidegger on Plato, Truth, and Unconcealment:
The 19311932 Lecture on The Essence of Truth 72
PART I I LANGUAGE
5 Social Constraints on Conversational Content:
Heidegger on Rede and Gerede 95
Appendix 116
6 Discourse Language, Saying, Showing 118
7 The Revealed Word and World Disclosure: Heidegger and
Pascal on the Phenomenology of Religious Faith 156
PART I I I HI S TORI CAL WORLDS
8 Philosophers, Thinkers, and Heideggers Place in the
History of Being 177
vii
9 Between the Earth and the Sky: Heidegger on Life After the
Death of God 195
10 Nietzsche and the Metaphysics of Truth 212
Works by Heidegger 243
Index 247
viii Contents
Acknowledgments
Reecting 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 dont always
agree, I always prot 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 Martin-
Heidegger-Forschungsgruppe, the British Society for Phenomenology
Summer Conference, the American Comparative Literature Association;
and at universities around the world, including: the University of Califor-
nia, 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 Sdertorn 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 couldnt 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 dont know their names. With apologies to
those whom I will inevitably overlook, however, I would like to specically
thank Bill Blattner, Dave Bohn, Albert Borgmann, Taylor Carman,
Dave Cerbone, Simon Critchley, Steve Crowell, Jim Faulconer, Charlie
Guignon, Batrice Han-Pile, Piotr Hoffman, Stephan Kufer, Sean Kelly,
Cristina Lafont, Jeff Malpas, Wayne Martin, Lenny Moss, Mark Okrent,
ix
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.
x Acknowledgments
Credits
Chapter 1 was originally published in A Companion to Heidegger, ed.
Mark A. Wrathall and Hubert L. Dreyfus (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005),
pp. 33757. Reprinted by permission of Blackwell.
Chapter 2 was originally published in The Monist 82, no. 2 (1999): 30423.
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. 6781. Reprinted by
permission of Oxford University Press.
Chapter 4 was originally published in Inquiry 47, no. 5 (2004): 44363.
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):
2546. 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): 7588. 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. 929. 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. 6987.
Reprinted by permission of Cambridge University Press.
xi
Introduction
Unconcealment, Unverborgenheit, was a term that rst entered Heideggers
philosophy as a translation for the ancient Greek word altheia. The
more standard translation of altheia is truth (Wahrheit in German), but
Heidegger elected to go with a literal translation: a-ltheia 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 altheia. He thus set to
the task of thinking the original notion more originally than anyone had
before (see GA 9: 2378). Heideggers thought can protably be seen as
working out the implications of the original understanding of unconceal-
ment. 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 conceal-
ment. Consequently, concealment is in some sense to be given priority
1
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 supercial formof conceal-
ment, 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 conceal-
ment 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 prin-
ciple throughout Heideggers work. By methodological principle, I mean
that unconcealment was in Heideggers approach to philosophy the guide-
line for discerning the role and constitutive structure of the elements of
ontology. One can see this by considering how it is that Heidegger dened
the ontological features of his thought for instance, the existentialia of
Being and Time (Heideggers 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 possibil-
ities opened up by a particular world projection. Heideggers 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 Heideggers understand-
ing 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 rst 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 gewhnlichen Sinne; im
blichen 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 Heideggers use of terms would address his dizzy-
ing array of different kinds of sense or meaning for a term. These include
2 Heidegger and Unconcealment
(and this is a nonexhaustive list): the formal sense (der formale Sinn), the
original sense (der ursprnglichen 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 distinc-
tions between each of these different senses, but for present purposes we
must summarize.
Heidegger denes 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 Heideggers 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 amled 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 formof life. This last formof 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 con-
stitute 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 struc-
ture 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 con-
tribution. He then uses the termin such a way that it includes in its extension
everything that shares the same ontological structure or function.
Introduction 3
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 termina 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 Gods
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 worlds inhabitants.
Now, if one does not keep rmly 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 themout as
having a particular ontological structure or function, as playing a particularly
important role in unconcealment. One might say Heideggers terms func-
tion 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 Heideggers thought about truth,
language, and history. Although some chapters are more focused on
Heideggers earlier writings, and some are more focused on his later essays,
they cover the entire span of Heideggers work. In my view, Heideggers
thought develops less in starts and stops and dramatic turnings, and more as
a gradual recognition of the implications of pursuing an ontology of uncon-
cealment. This gradual recognition unfolds as Heidegger explores different
ways or paths of thought (Denkwege). His appreciation of unconcealment
expands and deepens over time. But Heideggers ways of describing uncon-
cealment are constantly changing too. The deepening and enriching of his
thought of unconcealment cannot be separated from the expanding and
shifting vocabularies he has for talking about unconcealment. Indeed, a
central feature of Heideggers approach to philosophy is his experimental-
ism 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 nal 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 denitive 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
rened 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 philosophers 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 protable, 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 dia-
logue Froma Conversation on Language, Heidegger penned the following
exchange:
J APANESE: One says: you have changed your standpoint.
I NQUI RER: 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 reection 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 appren-
ticeship in seeing and describing unconcealment.
Heideggers 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 rst section explore Heideggers account of
propositional truth and his argument that propositional truth necessarily
depends on unconcealment. Chapter 1 looks at the various facets of
Introduction 5
unconcealment that emerge as Heidegger works his way from propositional
truth to the ontological sense of truth that is unconcealment. This culmi-
nates 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 Heideggers 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:
Altheia means, translated literally: unconcealment. Yet little is gained with liter-
alness . . . . Altheia 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
altheia, 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 under-
stood. A failure to realize that Heidegger was using the word truth in a broad
or ontological sense proved for many in Heideggers 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 uncon-
cealment. 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 (whren), remaining
(GA 7: 44). The true entity is what, having been brought into unconceal-
ment, can be stabilized and maintained so that it endures in presence: we
think presence as the enduring of that which, having arrived in unconceal-
ment, remains there (GA 7: 44). Preserving and holding things in uncon-
cealment, 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 Heideggers approach to truth to Donald
Davidsons, and helps to clarify the sense in which Heidegger believes that
unconcealment is presupposed in every determination of truth. The
third chapter explores how a phenomenology of unconcealment thinks
through deception as a counterconcept to unconcealment. The nal chap-
ter in this section explores Heideggers 19312 lecture course on The Essence
of Truth. It argues that Heidegger read Platonic ideas, not only as stage setting
for the Western philosophical traditions 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 unconceal-
ment. Several of Heideggers 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 rst 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: unconceal-
ment 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 Altheia, the
disclosing, then we come to the suspicion that even the whole essence of language is
based in dis-closing, in the prevailing of Altheia. (GA 9: 443)
The rst chapter in the second section, Chapter 5, explores the sense in
which, in Being and Time, Heidegger thinks of linguistic meaning as depend-
ent on a socially disclosed world. The next essay explores the meaning of one
of Heideggers most famous assertions language is the house of being as
a way of understanding how Heideggers 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 signications that characterizes any
particular world disclosure. The nal 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 nal section
of the book, which looks at Heideggers understanding of history as a series
of epochs of unconcealment.
The rst 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
Introduction 7
(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 denitive of enti-
ties. 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 efcient 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 efciens. 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 con-
temporary age, was closing off possibilities that allow us to realize the high-
est 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 Heideggers 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 Heideggers critique of
Nietzsches account of truth to illuminate how Heidegger understands our
current historical age, as it reviews Heideggers 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 Heideggers 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 rst 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 Heideggers 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
Hhlengleichnis and Thetet (Winter Semester 19312, GA 34), Vom Wesen der
Wahrheit (Winter Semester 19334, GA 367), and Grundfragen der
Philosophie. Ausgewhlte Probleme der Logik (Winter Semester 19378,
GA 45). He also includes a signicant 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
19423 (GA 54), Einleitung in die Philosophie (Winter Semester 19289,
GA 27), and Nietzsches Lehre vom Willen zur Macht als Erkenntnis (Summer
Semester 1939, GA 47).
Heideggers writings during this period also reect 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 Beitrge (GA 65) and
Besinnung (GA 66).
After 1946, by contrast, there are few extended discussions of truth in
Heideggers 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.
11
see, for example, the 1973 Seminar in Zhringen, 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
nd any work in Heideggers 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 traditions 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 altheia (unconcealment and
revealing) would henceforth retreat before the determination of truth as
likening (homoisis, adaequatio), . . . a determination that was rst rooted in
truth as unconcealment. From that point on, Heidegger argues, truths
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 meta-
physics 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-reectively
during the Heraclitus Seminar (19667), Altheia 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: 3512), his view of it remains unchanged in its
fundamental outline.
The fundamental outline, or what I call the platform, of Heideggers
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 proposi-
tion is true when it corresponds with a state of affairs.
Heidegger understands correspondence (bereinstimmung) 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 some-
thing. The being true of an assertion thus signies such corresponding. What
12 Truth and Disclosure
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
[stimmungsmigen] and instinctive nding 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,
Unconcealment 13
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 worlds disclosedness. But disclosedness is that
basic character of Dasein according to which it is its there.
Disclosedness is constituted by disposedness (Bendlichkeit), under-
standing, 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. Heideggers
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 rst 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 specically grasped, yet functions pre-
cisely 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 affec-
tive 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 13 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?
Heideggers answer is the clearing. The clearing is that some truth of
being prevails because other truths of being do not.
I call 14 planks in Heideggers 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 encom-
passes all the others. Each plank or element, in other words, involves
specic 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 Heideggers considered view on truth
and unconcealment. This is not to say that he is clear about the relation-
ships 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 uncon-
cealment 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
rst 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 I N GENERAL
The word that is generally translated as unconcealment or unconcealed-
ness is Unverborgenheit. This, in turn, is Heideggers preferred, and rather
literal, translation for the Greek word altheia, itself ordinarily translated as
truth. Heidegger uses truth (Wahrheit) and unconcealment interchange-
ably for much of his career, well aware that this practice invites several
contrary misunderstandings.
The rst misunderstanding is to think that Heidegger denes propositio-
nal 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)denition 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
denition of the essence of truth, with correspondence and correctness (GA34:11)
with the 1964 essay The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking:
Unconcealment 15
the question concerning altheia, 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 [altheia] as truth, and, above all, to dene 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 altheia 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 Altheia, but not Altheia 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 denitions 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, Heideggers 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 altheia. Nevertheless, his
argument for the dependence relationship is often confused with his
perhaps questionable etymology.
Finally, Heideggers warnings to the contrary, it is perhaps understand-
able that readers often confuse unconcealment with what we ordinarily
think of as truth. In any event, in response to criticisms from Friedlnder
about his etymology of altheia, and from Tugendhat regarding the natural
conception of truth (see the Appendix to this chapter), Heidegger even-
tually 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 Heideggers 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
uncovering of entities (see GA 27: 2023). Between 1928 and 1948,
Heidegger wrote of both the unconcealment of being and the unconceal-
ment of entities a practice of which his marginal notes were later quite
critical (see GA 9: 1323; 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 unconceal-
ment 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 avail-
able 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 terms
1
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 specied
in relation to what it is not. For example, imperfection can only be under-
stood 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
Heideggers 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.
Nietzsches famous account of the good/evil distinction is yet another
example. There, evil functions as the positive term the one that is dened
rst 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 specically understood in relation
to what they are not, having a privative aspect is different than merely
1
These include discoveredness (Entdecktheit) and uncoveredness (Unverdecktheit); disclosedness
(Erschlossenheit), unveiledness (Enthlltheit), and disconcealedness (Entborgenheit).
2
Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals (Douglas Smith, Trans.). Oxford, England:
Oxford University Press, 1996, p. 13.
Unconcealment 17
lacking a certain quality. Heideggers notion of unconcealment applies to
things that are privative in just this sense and, he believes, the Greek
languages 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 altheia, 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 pheno-
menological 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 (altheia) 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 denition of truth: veritas est adaequatio Intellectus ad rem, homoisis,
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 determi-
nation 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.
The difculty for the correspondence view is explaining in an illumi-
nating 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 correspon-
dence between knowing and the object in the sense of a likening of one
entity (the subject) to another (the object) (GA 2: H. 21819). If we are
to make sense of the idea of correspondence, he believes, we rst 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: 910). True beliefs and assertions are true
because they make possible a perceiving that lets what is itself be encoun-
tered as it is (GA 21: 167). A phenomenological description of cases
where we conrm 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, signies 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, trans-
lation modied). 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 proposi-
tional truth is a kind of bringing out of concealment. Concealment reigns
in a nonassertoric dealing with the world in the sense that, in such pre-
predicative 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 justicatory
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
Unconcealment 19
of involvements. In assertion, by contrast, our experience undergoes an
explicit restriction of our view, and we dim down the whole richly articu-
lated 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 uid coping
with the world, the assertion makes certain relations stand out from the
matter, which is at rst apprehended directly and simply in its unarticu-
lated totality (GA 20: 767).
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 under-
standing. 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 rst 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 dened or
determined as such and so as having a particular property or character-
istic (see, e.g., GA 21: 66, 1334). 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: 1417).
Thus the dimming down or leveling off that occurs when we suspend
our everyday dealings with things is what rst 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 Heideggers view, a privative con-
cept it is dened 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
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
Heideggers 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, conse-
quently, needs to be rethought in terms of Heideggers 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 conceal-
ing 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 nds its
specicity 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 ber-einstimmung in German, achieving a very precise and denite
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 specic 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
specic form of concealment that is removed by the uncoveredness of
Unconcealment 21
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, comport-
ments 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 reexes, for example, which reect a
responsiveness to the meaning of a situation.
All comportments involve relationships to entities. When I swat at a y,
I am comporting myself toward the y. When I hear a symphony, I am
comporting myself to the symphony (as well as all the instruments, musi-
cians, 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 y is
concealed in a sense when I cannot nd it to swat at it. And yet even
then, it is uncovered to some extent, given that the situation I nd myself
in is structured by my desire to swat the y. A more radical concealment
of the y, 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 under-
standing 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 comport-
ments 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 gures meaningfully in my overall comport-
mental 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,
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): deal-
ing with vehicles, sewing kits, writing equipment, work tools in order to . . . equip-
ment in the widest sense. We rst 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: 212)
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 nd 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 rst of all be wrested from concealedness, or its concealed-
ness must be taken from the entity (GA 27: 79; see also GA 19: 1011;
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?
Unconcealment 23
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 shoemakers 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 shoemakers (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
shoemakers skills. What holds of the shoemakers 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 specic way of dealing with
equipment which uncovers this equipment as such. The entire range of intra-
worldly 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: 4312)
There is a tendency on our part, however, to cover over this unfami-
liarity. In point of fact, Heidegger believes that we always inherit an under-
standing of and disposition for the world that tends to conceal from us
the fact that we cannot practically uncover most things. The understand-
ing, dispositions, and skills that Dasein has in the rst 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
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 conceal-
ment (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 rst place: it is the
beginning of the clearing of what is cleared (GA 5: 40/BW 1789). 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 conceal-
ment (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 supercial 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 specic 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 themto gure 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, lets start again by under-
standing the positive state of concealment of being. When being is con-
cealed, 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, reectively, 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
Unconcealment 25
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 Heideggers 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 conguration. They appear, rather, as things that have a more
or less stable and enduring presence through a variety of possible situa-
tions 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 uncov-
ering of entities depends on things having an essence. Truth as uncovered-
ness, 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 Heideggers
discussion of disclosedness in Being and Time (GA 2: H. 2212). 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 nds 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
specic 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 signication of whatever beings it is able to
comport itself toward in whatever way. (GA 9: 156/121)
What this transitional work added to Heideggers 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
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 192930 lecture course on The Fundamental
Concepts of Metaphysics, Heidegger argues that the world should be under-
stood as the prevailing of a pre-logical manifestness of beings as such
and as a whole (GA 29/30: 51213). But any sufcient 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: 4356). A comment is in order here
on the way that Heidegger thinks of essences.
For some reason, most translators and many commentators are hyper-
sensitive about Heideggers 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 Heideggers 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 Beitrge, 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 straight-
forward way as essence but then explain how Heidegger thinks of essences
(as hard as that might be).
As I understand it, Heideggers disagreement with many views of es-
sences are that they dene 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 gleichgltige
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 (essen-
tiality 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 1756, translation modied)
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
Unconcealment 27
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 xed 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 enfram-
ing 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 unde-
niable 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
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 sit-
uations. 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 denitions, correspondence to the facts is a necessary but
not sufcient condition for their being true.
Second, facts come too late for essential denitions, since we need to
assume that the denition is true in order denitively to identify the fact or
facts to which it corresponds. To get a feel for this, compare two other
essential denitions, 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 denitively founding simple factual statements like
(A), we begin by nding the fact to which it corresponds, and we can do
this by rst nding 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 denition, the only way we can determine that
gold is the noblest of the metals is by rst nding 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 specication, we rst 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
denition. 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 denition was correct, because, on the basis of
their respective denitions, each would reject exactly those particular
substances that the other took as decisive evidence in favor of his or her
denition. 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).
Unconcealment 29
It seems that both denitions 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 denitions 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 denitions is right, then perhaps we have
to conclude that there are no genuine essences in the world. Instead, what
we nd 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 denition, then nothing in the world can
make the essential denition true, because nothing in the world could
establish one denition 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 denition.
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 denitive 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,
Heidegger says, human comportment is tuned throughout by the opened-
ness of beings as a whole (GA 9: 193/147, translation modied).
So, the rst 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 some-
thing, 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 uncer-
tain, 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, tree-
ness, 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 rst captured in a
denition and made available for knowledge (here, Heidegger is speak-
ing specically 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 pro-
ceeding were determined by and thoroughly in accord with the unconceal-
ment 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 ght
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 nd 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 nd the true being of a thing in its ability to
be turned into a resource, exibly and efciently on call for use. When
someone disposed to the world in the rst way uncovers a lump of gold, and
subsequently denes 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
Unconcealment 31
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 exibly switch it around and order it, since our background
sense for technological efciency shapes our experience of everything.
In fact, there is, in principle, an indenite if not innite 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 indenite or innite 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 back-
ground 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 incompat-
ible. There might be a culture whose sensibilities for the world lead it to
uncover an instance of gold as having just those essential properties speci-
ed in (D) in fact, Heidegger would probably argue, those are just the
essential properties we would nd 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 golds 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 REVEALI NG CONCEALI NG OF THE CLEARI NG
This brings us to the last, and most difcult, feature of Heideggers plat-
form of unconcealment. Because of the historical nature of the disclosure
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 reecting on this ques-
tion 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 clarication 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 exibility
and efciency, 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 experi-
ence 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: 1934/148).
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 lls 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 rst of all the possibility of the path to
Unconcealment 33
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 810), because Heidegger under-
stands 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 consti-
tuted 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 justied in experiencing it as Gods 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).
APPENDI X ON TUGENDHAT
Perhaps the most inuential critique of Heideggers account of proposi-
tional truth and unconcealment is Ernst Tugendhats, published in Der
Warheitsbegriff bei Husserl und Heidegger (Gruyter, 1967). Tugendhats argu-
ment consists of the following three claims:
1. Heidegger redenes propositional truth the natural conception of
truth as uncovering simpliciter. In doing so, he loses the specic
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 unconceal-
ing). This nding 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 specic notion of
truth contained in the natural conception of truth. (Ill 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 specic kind of
unconcealment, one that consists in correspondence with a fact or state of
affairs. Thus propositional truth was neither redened, nor did it lose
its specic 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 uncon-
cealment proper to each feature of our engagement with the world.
Tugendhats defenders, however, maintain that in spite of Tugendhats
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 Tugendhats argument all along against, it seems to me, the weight of
Tugendhats book.) Thus, for example, Cristina Lafont argues in
Tugendhats defense that if we focus on these errors, the central point
of Tugendhats critique is swept under the rug, namely, What justication
and what signicance 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
Tugendhats 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 qualied as ontological or primor-
dial? Whether Heidegger reduces truth to unconcealment, or alterna-
tively, whether Heidegger accepts truth as correspondence is irrelevant to
3
Ernst Tugendhat, Heideggers Idea of Truth, in Hermeneutics and Truth (Brice
R. Wachterhauser, Ed.). Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1994, p. 85.
4
Heidegger, Language, and World Disclosure, p. 116.
Unconcealment 35
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 Tugendhats argument that
his rst two claims are simply wrong, since much of the force behind
claim 3 derives from showing that by thinking of truth in terms of uncon-
cealment, Heidegger is forced to redene illegitimately propositional truth
and then to extend, once again illegitimately, this redenition 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 unconceal-
ment without losing its specicity, much of the impetus for Tugendhats
argument is lost. One is left simply to maintain a rather dubious linguistic
principle that things either possess or lack a right to a specic name. But
why should we think that? Why should I accept the Lafont/Smith insis-
tence that only propositional truth has an inherent right to be called
truth? That ies, 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 justied in using truth to mean
uncovering if the being-true of the statement could be translated with-
out 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 justied 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 denition 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 specicity, 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 illegiti-
mately 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
Why Tugendhats Critique of Heideggers Concept of Truth Remains a Critical Problem,
Inquiry 50 (2007): 164.
6
Heidegger, Language, and World Disclosure, p. 123.
denitively 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 Tugendhats 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
ctional 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 unconceal-
ment is one that is authentic, a false unconcealment one that is inauthen-
tic. 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 unjustied in calling it truth.
Instead, as he suggested in responding to Tugendhats rst 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 specic, that is, the usual
7
Ibid., p. 148.
8
Why Tugendhats Critique of Heideggers Concept of Truth Remains a Critical Problem,
p. 174.
Unconcealment 37
sense. As long as the usual use of the word truth insists on having the only
denitive meaning, it is perhaps advisable to renounce the philosophical
use.
9
Indeed, a fundamental feature of Heideggers philosophical practice
a feature to which his Tugendhat-inspired critics seem particularly tone-
deaf 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 stand-
ard. 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 incapa-
ble of fathoming the commonness of the common. This oundering in a common-
ness which we have placed under the protection of so-called natural common sense,
is not accidental, nor are we free to deprecate it. This oundering 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: 823/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: 234)
9
Letter to Ernst Tugendhat, March 19, 1964.
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 philo-
sophically, 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 reect on our role in opening up, sheltering,
preserving, and stabilizing understandings of beings, entities, and think-
able states of affairs in the world.
Unconcealment 39
2
The Conditions of Truth in Heidegger
and Davidson
An indirect concern of this chapter is to show that, despite dramatic differ-
ences 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 disagree-
ment 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 Heideggers account of truth and
unconcealment through a comparison with Davidsons 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 redenition or reduc-
tion 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 rst place. Both answer the question by exploring
how what we say or think can come to have content. I conclude by suggesting
that Heideggers ontological foundations of the traditional conception of
truth can be seen as an attempt at solving a problem that Davidson recog-
nizes 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.
40
language and thought presuppose our sharing a nely articulated structure
that only language and thought seem capable of producing.
ANALYTI C AND CONTI NENTAL PHI LOSOPHY
If I were to reduce the difference between analytic and Continental philos-
ophy to a single anecdote, I would refer to two titles: Michael Dummetts The
Logical Basis of Metaphysics,
1
based on his 1976 William James Lectures, and
Martin Heideggers Metaphysische Anfangsgrnde der Logik (GA 26), the pub-
lished edition of a 1928 lecture course. Here, in a nutshell, one nds the
analytics focus on logical analysis as the means toward philosophical ques-
tioning, and the Continental suspicion that all knowledge is tinged through
and through by hidden metaphysical presuppositions.
As Dummett explains in his introduction, analytic philosophys 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 rmer
grasp of the way we represent the world in our thoughts.
2
The analytic
philosophers 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 awed due to an underestimation by even the deepest
thinkers of the difculty of the questions they tackle. They consequently
take perilous shortcuts in their argumentation and atter themselves that
they have arrived at denitive 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 Heideggers 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 canarise 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
Michael Dummett, The Logical Basis of Metaphysics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1991.
2
Ibid., p. 1.
3
Ibid., p. 19.
The Conditions of Truth 41
human existence in its ground (GA 26: 24). Consequently, an understand-
ing of logical form would be bootless, for Heidegger, without a prior under-
standing of the constitution of human existence an understanding that can
only be reached by reection on the fundamental concepts of metaphysics.
Analytic philosophers, in sum, see themselves as engaged in the painstak-
ing process of clarifying the logical structure of language and mind a
process they believe to be prior to making inroads in metaphysical reection.
Continental philosophers, while also often starting from the structure of
language and mind, seek to move from there directly to a reection 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 reection on the human situation . . . a kind of
reection which can sometimes lead to a new perspective on human life
and experience.
4
At its worst, Continental philosophy is viewed as hope-
lessly muddling about within a wide-spread ignorance of certain fundamen-
tal 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 navet 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:
1012). 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
P. F. Strawson, Analysis and Metaphysics. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1992, p. 2.
5
John R. Searle, Literary Theory and its Discontents, in New Literary History 25 (1994): 639.
6
Jacques Derrida, Signature Event Context, in Limited, Inc. Evanston, IL: Northwestern
University Press, 1988, p. 15.
productive ways. In the remainder of this paper, I hope to illustrate this by
showing how Heideggers and Davidsons inquiries into truth and the func-
tioning 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 presup-
positions and problems that remain for each thinker.
HEI DEGGER AND DAVI DSON ON TRUTH DEFI NI TI ONS
There are a variety of traditional answers to the question what makes a true
sentence (or belief or proposition, etc.) true answers such as correspon-
dence, 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 denition. From the preceding
observations onthe difference betweenanalytic 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 Davidsons and Heideggers 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 denition 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 Heideggers account of unconcealment is badly
misunderstood if taken as a denition of truth.
8
To the contrary, Heideggers
primary interest in propositional truth is not to redene it but to discover
what makes propositional entities capable of being true or false. And
Davidson, likewise, believes that propositional truth cannot meaningfully
7
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. 6988. 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 correspond-
ence theory. See Donald Davidson, Structure and Content of Truth, Journal of Philosophy
LXXXVII (1990): 302.
8
See my Heidegger on Truth as Correspondence, International Journal of Philosophical Studies 7
(1999).
be dened in terms of correspondence. More importantly, Davidson, like
Heidegger, believes that progress cannot be made on the issue of truth by
dening 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 understan-
ding 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 start-
ing 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 quantica-
tion.
10
In addition, we can account for certain vestigial uses of true (like
Thats true!) in terms of its use as an illocutionary device for instance, to
conrm or endorse.
11
Perhaps the best-known example of a denition of the truth predicate is
Tarskis semantic theory of truth. Tarskis 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 denition seems to fall far short of explaining our concept
9
Michael Williams, Epistemological Realism and the Basis of Skepticism, Mind XCVII
(1988): 424.
10
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.
11
P. F. Strawson, Truth, in The Concept of a Person and Other Essays. London: MacMillan, 1963,
p. 147ff.
12
A. Tarski, The Concept of Truth in Formalized Languages, in Logic, Semantics,
Metamathematics. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1956, p. 155ff.
of truth. Dummett, for instance, argues that the failing of a Tarskian truth
denition 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-denition.
13
Thus, if all we knew about truth were exhausted by a T-theoretic descrip-
tion of the truth predicate for a language, we would not be able to dene
truth for a new language. The implications for analytic philosophers
engaged in the Davidsonian project of dening meaning in terms of truth
are critical, for if the truth conditions of sentences are to play any role in
xing 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 fromthe 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 whenhe enquires into this he is toldthat 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 under-
standing 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
Davidsons 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 denition 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
Michael Dummett, Truth and Other Enigmas. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978,
p. xxi.
14
Michael Dummett, Truth, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 59 (1959): 1489.
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 corre-
spondence is undermined by this move, since nonextensional descriptions
rely on the concept of truth in picking out the fact in the rst place:
Suppose, to leave the frying-pan of extensionality for the res of intension,
we distinguish facts as nely as statements. Of course, not every statement has
its fact; only the true ones do. But then, unless we nd 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 denitions 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 mean-
ing, what we need beyond a T-theory for a language is not a denition 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 clarication of the
necessary condition[s] of our possession of the concept of truth.
18
To summarize, Davidsons approach to truth has two distinct sides to it.
First, as against any attempt to dene truth, he takes the notion of truth itself
to be beautifully transparent and primitive, and thus denies that the gen-
eral concept of truth is reducible to any other concept or amenable to
redenition in other terms.
19
This leaves intact our pretheoretic under-
standing 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 argu-
ment. 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) R
(2) x(x = x.R) = x(x = x)
(3) x(x = x.S) = x(x = x)
(4) 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.
description of the kind of pattern truth makes in a language.
20
But he resists
the urge to believe that such a denition 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 denition 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 Tarskis
truth predicates fail to capture.
21
Davidsons account of truth consequently
turns to the conditions of truth specically, the condition that sentences
and other propositional entities have content.
Heideggers 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
denition of the truth predicate in a theory of meaning. Instead, his interest
in truth stems fromthe 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 under-
standing 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 corre-
spondence 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 Heideggers criticism of correspondence theories should not be
taken to mean that Heidegger intended to redene 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 afrms, insofar as it corresponds to
things.
22
Heideggers objection, then, is not to the notion of correspon-
dence 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
The Structure and Content of Truth (cited in n. 12, above), p. 299.
21
Ibid., p. 297.
22
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.
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 canbe true or false. His account
of unconcealment is meant not as a denition 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 xed through our
interacting with others and our orientation toward things within a world
thereby erasing, in Davidsons 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 xes the content of our intentional states that
the interesting differences are found between Davidsons and Heideggers
views.
I NTENTI ONAL CONTENT AS A CONDI TI ON OF TRUTH
In this section of the chapter, I look in more detail at Davidsons and
Heideggers respective accounts of the way intentional content gets xed.
I will rst examine Davidsons view, and then show how Heideggers account
of unconcealment can be read in the context of Davidsons 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. Davidsons project of Radical Interpretation illuminates
the conditions of language by asking what would sufce for an interpreter to
interpret the speaker of an alien language. By imagining a radical interpre-
tation that is, an interpretation that makes no assumptions about the
propositional content of the speakers 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
GA 2: H. 218. See also GA 9: 1845/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).
24
A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs, in Truth and Interpretation (cited in n. 12, above),
pp. 4434.
25
I dont address, however, whether Davidson would nd Heideggers account either accept-
able or necessary.
explain how it is possible to interpret her without the benet 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 denition of truth is insufcient for this project
because it is subsequent to our having a meaningful language and proposi-
tional 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
dening 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 speakers utterances have a content that is
about the world. Indeed, fromthe 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 xing 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 rst 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 ower is itself caused by whatever made the
ower grow), as well as causal intermediaries between us and the world (for
instance, reected light from the ower striking the photoreceptors in our
retinas).
26
The Structure and Content of Truth, p. 300.
27
See, e.g., Empirical Content, in Truth and Interpretation, p. 332.
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 ower is the presence of a ower,
andsubsequently conclude that the content of our belief that there is a ower
is xed by the presence of the ower (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 ower are included in our belief that there is a ower. 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 ower without
believing that the ower is red. Beliefs also occur under a description I
can believe that there is a ower without also believing that there is a plants
reproductive structure. This second problem, put another way, is that of
explaining how the causal interaction, which is extensionally described,
becomes an intentional content.
Davidsons 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 creatures 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 others response.
29
This primitive triangle is necessary to solving the problems, but not suf-
cient 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
others perspective.
30
The primitive triangle is also not sufcient for determin-
ing the intentional content of propositional entities, for the causal relations
that hold between creatures and things are extensionally dened, while inten-
tional content is not. Our beliefs about owers, for instance, cannot be
reduced to an extensional description of owers, because the contents of
28
Donald Davidson, The Emergence of Thought, in Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective
(Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 2001), p. 128.
29
Donald Davidson, The Second Person, Midwest Studies in Philosophy 17 (1992): 263.
30
Donald Davidson, Three Varieties of Knowledge, in A. J. Ayer: Memorial Essays (A. Phillips
Grifths, 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.
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 dened. Without a more ne-grained determination of
the others orientation to the world than that provided by the primal triangle,
we cannot adequately x the content of the others 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 sufciently rich pattern of behavior to allow an attribu-
tion of a determinate intentional content to a person.
31
In addition, com-
munication 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 learners 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-xing cause. A
non-communicating creature may be seen by us as responding to an objective
world; but we are not justied in attributing thoughts about our world (or any
other) to it.
32
Finally, the communicationof a particular orientationtoobjects 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 others 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 xed, 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 xed. 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
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.
32
Donald Davidson, Epistemology Externalized, Dialectica 45 (1991): 201.
33
Ibid.
In summary, then, Davidson provides an account of the xing of inten-
tional 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 inter-
locutors who share a largely similar orientation to the world. As one inter-
locutor interprets the other that is, as she xes the truth conditions of the
others utterances only then does the utterance of the other come to have a
denite 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 dened subset of features of the thing an ability, moreover,
which is independent of our propositional attitudes regarding the thing.
If we look at Heideggers work on the conditions of truth in the context of
Davidsons problematic, we nd that Heidegger does not recognize the rst
problem outlined above the problem of identifying the relevant cause of
beliefs. He is satised 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 xing the inten-
tional 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 sufciently 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.
Heideggers analysis of what makes truth possible he calls it unconceal-
ment has two parts to it. First, he claims, for the content of an assertion to
be xed by things in the world, those things must be manifest to us.
Heideggers inquiry into discovery, the making manifest of entities, aims at
exhibiting the structural features of our comportment with things in
particular, those features that x meaning. The second part of the investiga-
tion 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
Heideggers account Heidegger argues that the uncovering of what is, of
entities, is possible only on the basis of a disclosure of an understanding of
Being
35
I will focus here only on discovery, because it is Heideggers
34
See, for example, GA 20: 489: 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.
35
GA 2: H. 137: [T]he world which has already been disclosed beforehand permits what is
within-the-world to be encountered.
account of discovery that is most immediately concerned with xing 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 inwhich 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 Heideggers terminol-
ogy, directionally lined up with each other (GA 2: H. 102). Heidegger
illustrates this through the example of an ofce: Equipment in accordance
withits equipmentality always is interms 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 dened 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--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 them-
selves 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 fromthe 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
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 full-
est 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 involve-
ments 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 rst be given at least some minimal direction-
ality 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 dis-
cussed above delineates and orients us to ne-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 ne distinctions in regard to those
features of the totality of involvements relevant to their work features in fact
more ne 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 Heideggers account shows, the practical totality of involve-
ments carries with it just such normativity. In the rst 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. 1278). Human activities, Heidegger
claims, are marked by a constant concern for how others are acting: [i]n
ones 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.
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 envi-
ronmentally 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 formthe content of our beliefs and utterances. As Heidegger
explains, language is based in our making explicit the signication 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 involve-
ments, and in dealing with it, we interpret it and lay out its signications.
36
When we speak of things, the totality-of-signications of intelligibility is put
into words. To signications, words accrue (GA 2: H. 161).
For Heidegger, then, the truth of assertions nds 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 prac-
tical 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
Heideggers and Davidsons accounts. The distinction between Heidegger
and Davidson is not simply that of a practical versus a cognitive or linguistic
account of human experience. Davidsons triangulation recognizes the
practical basis of interpretation and hence of thought. Nor is there room
in Heideggers 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 Heideggers 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.
radical interpretation of language, ends up reading languages propositional
structure back into all forms of human comportment.
On the other hand, Davidsons 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
Heideggers 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 signicant 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 per-
ceptual 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 inuenced 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 sufcient, 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
sumof observations; it is in the ow 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 Kufer
for the fascinating discussions this article occasioned.
57
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 pregured the work of twentieth-century phenomenologists. In
this chapter, I would like to explore the existential-phenomenological treat-
ment 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, phenom-
enology aims to convince by directing its audience to their own experience
of phenomena, and allowing the things themselves as they show them-
selves 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 avored with straw-
berry, not smoked salmon. As Im 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 nally, we might consider the experience of a rather special case
like Zllners 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 hallucina-
tion, Merleau-Ponty draws on actual cases of hallucinatory experience as described in the
clinical literature. See Merleau-Pontys Account of Hallucination, European Journal of
Philosophy 17 (2009): 7690.
I do not intend to review or critique nonphenomenological accounts
of perceptual deception in any detail. But before turning to the phenom-
enological 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 (see-
ing, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling, etc.) for those cases in which
we succeed in grasping things as they objectively are. When I look at Zllners
illusion, for example, it does not seemright to say of me that I see converging
lines, even though they look like theyre 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 pre-
cisely, 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 sufcient condition of a genuine perceptual experience.) In the
genuine perceptual experience, the phenomenal character of things corre-
sponds 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
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 nd 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 wouldnt
have bought it.
3
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.
Our Ability to be Deceived 59
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 imsy 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. Ones 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 nd
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 nally, it helps us recognize the indeterminate quality of our
experience of the perceptual domain.
THE PHENOMENOLOGI CAL ACCOUNT
OF PERCEPTUAL DECEPTI ON
The starting point for the existential-phenomenological account of percep-
tual 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 modication 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
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
ickers with our moods, that the available shows itself in its specic wordliness,
which is never the same from day to day (GA 2: H. 38).
Merleau-Ponty agrees. Writing in the context of thinking about halluci-
nations (although the point applies broadly), he notes:
all the difculties arise fromthe fact that objective thought, the reduction of things as
experienced to objects, of subjectivity to the cogitatio, leaves no roomfor 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 dene it in terms
of some sort of absolute adequation. (PP 336)
The experience of deception points us toward the unsteady, ickering
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 hallucina-
tions 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 descrip-
tion. We must confront the question: how does existential phenomenology
account for error? If we have abandoned the thesis of an objective, deter-
minate 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 rst to
reconstruct some paradigmatic existential-phenomenological descriptions
of deception. I will then consider how it is that, as the existential phenom-
enologists 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 rst to Heideggers account of deception, offered most extensively
in two Marburg lecture courses: the 19234 course in Gesamtausgabe vol-
ume 17 (GA 17): Einfhrung in die phanomenologische Forschung, and the
19256 course in GA 21: Logik. Die Frage nach der Wahrheit. Lets look rst at
the kind of example Heidegger draws on. Heidegger writes:
4
I am walking
in a dark forest and I see between the r 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 funda-
mental 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 rst structural condition of comportment that Heidegger analyzes is
the fact that our comportment has an inherent tendency to discover some-
thing (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, Heideggers 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 couldnt possibly induce you to believe it.
So Heidegger tackles the problem of the lie by rst 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 Im
going to completely ignore those for my purposes. I dont think that by systematically ignoring
that side of Heideggers analysis Imdoing any violence to his account of deceptive perceptual
experiences.
gures 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 rst 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 nd 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 relation-
ships 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 Heideggers 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 signicance 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, affords
5
and solicits, us to be directed
fromthe 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 fromone 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 signi-
cations that the world affords and solicits.
Together, the rst 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 eld of everyday experi-
ences, I do not just stand there for example, in the forest and simply have
something before me. That is a purely ctitious 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 Heideggers notion of what the world offers and Gibsons notionof environ-
mental affordances. For Gibson, an affordance is a physical fact about what the environment
offers, provides, or furnishes an organismof suchand sucha 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.
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 identies is the fact that
within the range of possible signications in terms of which we encounter
things, the situation within which we nd 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 briey, 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); nally,
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 uidly 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,
ones order is generally fullled, that I amprimed for my bagel to come with a
salmon schmear. The pinkish color of the schmear in that context leads me to
anticipate the shy avor of a salmon schmear. But it is also the case that the
signications 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 conuence 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, straw-
berry avor 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
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 proper-
ties 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 19234
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 specic being have the char-
acteristic 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).
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 scientic investigation. This
existence of things is much richer and offers much more uctuating 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 fullls 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.
RESI STI NG TEMPTATI ON
Unfortunately, Heidegger does not develop his view of perceptual deception
much further. But, in this nal section, I would like to look at the implica-
tions 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 Merleau-
Pontys 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
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.
Lets 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 201).
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 under-
standing 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 Zllners 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
How does it come about that it is so difcult . . . 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 gure a new meaning
which henceforth clings to it and cannot be shifted. It is this meaning inseparable
from the gure, 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 rst 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
eld 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
fi gure 3. 1
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, at 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 indef-
inite number of meanings to which we could be attuned, and we recognize
that different attunements will result in different experiences of the percep-
tual eld, then we will have to conclude that there is no nal, objective fact of
the matter about what is given to us in perception. And, indeed, Merleau-
Ponty 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 inexhaus-
tible 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 verications, 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 indenite number of different ways to perceive any given
7
This, incidentally, suggests the incompleteness of Husserls account of the experience of
perceptual deception as an explosion of the perceptual noema as new perceptual data
are experienced that fail to t with preceding noema. What this story doesnt account for is the
way the character of the perceptual data themselves changes along with the noema.
perceptual eld? We start fromthe 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 indenite number of perceptual chains
which, if followed up, would conrm 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 modied)
In the genuine perception, then, the perception is followed up with and
conrmed 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 eld: 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 condence in the world. Perceiving is pinning ones 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 ones 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 claim-
ing that Im 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
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 success-
ful, 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 eld
endows the bright spot with the signicance stone on the path. And already
I ready myself to feel under my foot this smooth, rm surface (PP 297,
translation modied). 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 19311932 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 signicance 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 Heideggers notes from his lecture courses, it is
now becoming possible to connect the dots and esh out Heideggers
published account of truth.
2
These lecture courses are not just of historio-
graphical interest, however. In them, we nd Heidegger working out an
account of the way that propositional truth is grounded in a more funda-
mental notion of truth as world disclosure. He also struggles to develop a
phenomenology of world disclosure, and it is in these lecture courses that
Heideggers 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
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.
2
Courses dedicated to truth include: Logik. Die Frage nach der Wahrheit (Winter Semester
19251926, GA 21); Vom Wesen der Wahrheit. Zu Platons Hhlengleichnis and Thetet
(Winter Semester 19311932, GA 34); Vom Wesen der Wahrheit (Winter Semester 1933
1934, GA 36/37); and Grundfragen der Philosophie. Ausgewhlte Probleme der Logik
(Winter Semester 19371938, GA 45). Virtually every other course taught during this period
includes a signicant discussion of the essence of truth. Particularly notable in this regard are
Einleitung in die Philosophie (Winter Semester 19281929, GA27), Nietzsches Lehre vom
Willen zur Macht als Erkenntnis (Summer Semester 1939, GA 47), and, a little later, the
Parmenides lecture course of 19421943 (GA 54).
72
I review in this chapter Heideggers thought on these matters as developed
in a lecture course offered winter semester 19312: The Essence of Truth: On
Platos Cave Allegory and the Theaetetus (GA 34).
1. BASI C THEMES OF THE COURSE
The stated purpose of the 19312 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, Platos views on knowledge and truth. But it is in
the course of an interpretation of Platos cave allegory from the Republic and
a review of Platos 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.
Platos 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/Platos Doctrine of Truth, in Pathmarks). In the published
essay, as in the lecture course, Heidegger argues that contemporary repre-
sentational accounts of truth as correspondence are an outgrowth of a
change in thinking spurred by Platos 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 inuence of Platos doctrine of the ideas. Attention to
the ambiguity in Platos 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 (GA9: 234/Pathmarks, p. 179) that is, a correct representation of
things in terms of their essential or unchanging properties. Heideggers
interest in the cave allegory stems fromhis 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 Heideggers lecture courses in the
1920s and early 1930s, guring prominently not just in GA 34 and GA 36/
37, but also in the 1924 course on Platos 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
Plato, Truth, and Unconcealment 73
unconcealment is a privative concept, and thus needs to be approached by
understanding its negation (see Chapter 1). Heidegger argued that the
Greek language reects an awareness of this in the fact that Greek uses a
privative word-formation (a-ltheia, un-concealedness) to name truth. The
awakening and forming of the word altheia, 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 conceal-
ment. 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 conven-
tionally understood ought to be the positive state from which truth in
general is dened. To the contrary, he contends that the proper positive
concept is concealment.
3
Before turning to the details of the lecture course, a nal word of warning
is in order. In this, as in all of Heideggers commentaries on other philoso-
phers, 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 Heideggers 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 Platos thought, Western
philosophy takes off on an erroneous and fateful course (GA 34: 17).
In addition, Heidegger is a notoriously violent reader of other philoso-
phers 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 philos-
ophy, 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 revis-
ited. 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 Heideggers accounts as historically
invalid.
3
Error, however, might well be the positive state from which a subcategory of truth
propositional truth as correctness is dened.
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 Heideggers
goal and to focus on what I think are some of his more interesting contribu-
tions to thinking about truth.
1.1. Setting the Stage: Truth, Essence, Self-Evidence
Heidegger begins the course by calling into question our everyday or self-
evident 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 dening
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, nally, a kind of deationism, 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 rst 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
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 Heideggers 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.
5
The Thought, in Logical Investigations (P. T. Geach, Ed.). Oxford, England: Basil Blackwell,
1977, p. 2.
which we think or speak (think Jack Nicholsons character in AFew Good Men:
You cant handle the truth!) In religious discourse, truth is even less
amenable to standard denitions. 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 Heideggers view that, in under-
standing 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 problem-
atic. 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 univer-
sal, 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 justied 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 rst 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 condently 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: 35).
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. Well try to gure out what
description applies to every table, what feature or property every table
possesses. To do this, we need to round up all the tables and examine them.
But we cannot round themup 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 impor-
tantly, 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 rst of all ask howit comes about that we quite naturally
move and feel comfortable within such self-evidences? (GA 34: 67).
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 justied thus requires that we step back from it (GA 34: 7), that is,
nd 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 understand-
ing of the essence of truth was not yet taken for granted in Plato, but it is
Platos philosophy that rst 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
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 ofce) 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 ofce. It is even possible that,
without this original experience of the ofce, 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 altheia, 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 fromquite 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 (GA34: 10). That is the ultimate goal
of the lecture course, and another reason for the return to Platos thought.
When introducing the Theaetetus, he notes that Platos 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
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
supercial level, that most or at least many of the things we believe are true.
But this supercial 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 rst, most supercial 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 Heideggers views as presented in Sein and Zeit. But the 1931
2 lecture course adds a newtwist 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 mans essence as an existing being
(GA 34: 146). This idea, that there is a history to our essence, becomes very
important in Heideggers later work. Heidegger comes to believe that es-
sences 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 Heideggers 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 Platos discussion of truth a different underlying
experience of the world and sense for our human essence.
But, returning nowto the question of what the word truth names, we can
see that, on Heideggers 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 denition of propositional truth: uncon-
cealment rather than correspondence. The nal reason for Heideggers
focus on Plato and the cave allegory in particular is that, Heidegger believes,
Platos 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 Heideggers 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.
2. PLATOS CAVE ALLEGORY AS AN ACCOUNT OF FOUR
STAGES OF THE OCCURRENCE OF TRUTH
(AS UNHI DDENNESS)
The cave allegory, as Platos Socrates himself explains to us, is meant to
illustrate paideia, education, or, as Heidegger translates it, Gehaltenheit, obli-
gatedness or beholdenness, being held to something.
6,7
In education, we
learn new comportments, which consist in different ways of holding our-
selves 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
Platos 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 Platos 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 Heideggers reading of the cave allegory,
let me make another quick observation about Heideggers translation of
altheia and related words in terms of unconcealedness or unhiddenness. In
the context of the cave allegory, it is clear that the truth or altheia at stake
has more to do with things other than propositions. It is the things them-
selves 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 reected in the fact that a
substantial number of, if not most, English language translators translate the
Greek words althes, althestera, 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
See my Truth and the Essence of Truth, in The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger, rev. ed.
7
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.
8
See, e.g., Waterelds, Cornfords and Shoreys translations.
act, or he means something different from truth with altheia. 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 proposi-
tional correspondence, if one were to translate altheia 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 shes 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, Heideggers decision to translate altheia 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, rst (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
briey review Heideggers 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: 267).
This stage, Heidegger argues, is the everyday situation of man (GA34: 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 withthe everyday world reveals beings inone particular way.
But we are completely absorbed in the world with the everyday signicance 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 themwhen 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 nds his familiar ground, where no exertion is
required, where he is unhindered . . . . The main standard for his estimation of higher
or lower unhiddenness is preservation of the undisturbedness of his ordinary activ-
ities, without being set out to any kind of reection (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: 367).
Third stage: The prisoners are removed fromthe 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 liber-
ation 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 (GA34: 43), fromwhich 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
(GA34: 46) becomes most pronounced. Plato wants tojudge betweenkinds of
unhiddenness and say that one is more unhidden than another. The shad-
ows in the cave, the everyday objects and situations with which we are familiar
in our ordinary lives, are also unhidden (meaning available for comport-
ment). 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
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 givenaccess 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 whicha higher disclosureof theworldandour essencecouldtakeplace.
For the higher disclosure of the world, we need to become oriented to
something other than the everyday beings with which we are involved.
Heideggers 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 signicance
(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 Platos 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
Perhaps the most striking difference between this lecture course and the later published essay
on Platos cave allegory is the extent to which Heidegger in the lecture course attempts to
read Plato in phenomenological terms. This lecture presents one of Heideggers most
charitable and least critical readings of Plato.
10
Heidegger doesnt 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. 15574.
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
Platos account of the ascent to the idea of the good represents a depth of
insight that Western philosophy has never again achieved: what this empow-
erment 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 Platos 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: 923). This is something that Plato does not do in The
Republic, although there are suggestions on how the analysis would go in
Platos discussion of error in the Theaetetus.
3. THE THEAETETUS AND THE QUESTI ON CONCERNI NG THE
ESSENCE OF UNTRUTH HOW UNHI DDENNESS BECAME
CORRECTNESS
To summarize, Heidegger sees in the cave allegory the moment at which a
primordial experience of unconcealment begins to fade (GA34: 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, altheia,
becomes distortion, pseudos. This is in contrast to the original experience of
hiddenness, lath, 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: 13940).
11
Prior to Plato, the opposite of truth, in other words, was
an objectively occurring unavailableness of things. With Platos 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 under-
writes 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 corre-
spondence, 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.
of concealment, and consequently will tend to occlude the possibility of
thinking of other, perhaps better, modes of unhiddenness.
Thus, Heidegger concludes, unconcealment in Platos 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 thema-
tized. 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 Platos Theaetetus.
In turning to Heideggers 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 Platos arguments in a phenom-
enological direction and situates Plato in the history of philosophy. These
two aspects of Heideggers 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 non-
conceptualist ways; on the other hand, to see how Platos 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 scientic 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 scientic knowledge per se that is at stake but knowledge in
the broadest sense as that comportment which makes us distinctively human
(GA 34: 1567). To be human is to know not in the scientic sense (as if we
would not be human if we lacked scientic 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 tting 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 tting manner: epistm originally means all this:
the commanding knowing-ones-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; scientic
knowledge is just one such way of knowing our way around (GA 34: 154). In
fact, Heidegger wants to argue that the most fundamental sort of knowing
as familiarity with the world cannot be captured in terms of the proposi-
tional/logical structure and conceptual apparatus of strictly scientic 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: 1545) that is, the ability to
name some property that all X things have in common. Rather, the con-
cept 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; liter-
ally, it is a grasp on something, the idea being that in intervening or
becoming engaged, were 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 ones 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 (GA34: 15960). This privileges the conceptual grasp in
the narrow sense what you see when youre 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 Platos dialogue, Theaetetuss rst effort to dene knowledge treats it
precisely as a kind of perception. This denition fails, as Socrates gets
Theaetetus to admit, if we think of perception as mere sensation, for sensa-
tion provides us only with certain sensory qualities but not evidence of the
being or truth (unhiddenness) of things (see Theaetetus 186 c9e12, and
Heideggers discussion at GA 34: 2425). In other words, perception deliv-
ers knowledge (in either the broad or the narrow sense) only if it goes
beyond sensation.
Theaetetuss 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 forma 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 viewers 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 viewers part, an orien-
tation that goes beyond or strives beyond any particular object of knowl-
edge. 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 unconceal-
ment, which also bear the same kind of double structure, and each of which
fi gure 4. 1
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 connectionwithanentity (aisthesis),
the next line up is the rst kind of going beyond entities the going beyond in
an intentional orientation to an entity (a retention and making present,
Heideggers interpretation of the idea of mnmoneuein 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 satised 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 direct-
edness 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: 1945).
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, lets reect 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 larks 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
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. Inour familiar dealings withthe 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 under-
standing 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 init (GA21: 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: Im 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.
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 so-
being. (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 uid, 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 under-
standing, nothing that I am trying to grasp. At the same time, however,
Heidegger argues that the easy familiarity with beings is rooted in a ground-
stance, 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 back-
ground 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 (GA34: 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 strivers 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 some-
thing, which is never present or possessed, lays out a unied eld (GA 34:
2234) within which I can have a bodily perception of things because it gives
a determinate view on things. It gives me a basis for reckoning with or coping
with things (see GA 34: 2245). 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 34:2357). So the
most fundamental basis for our making sense of the world is nothing natural,
nothing xed 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, conse-
quently 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 ones 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. Platos interpretation of the look or view of a thing in
terms of logos, Heidegger argues, is important in so far as it [the logos-
character 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 Heideggers later work.
part ii
LANGUAGE
5
Social Constraints on Conversational Content
Heidegger on Rede and Gerede
1. I NTRODUCTI ON
What role does ones community play in determining ones meaning in
xing the content of what is available to individual members of that com-
munity 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 (GA2: 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 supercial 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 rst presented at the inaugural meeting of the International Society for
Phenomenological Studies, held in Asilomar, California, July 1923, 1999. Im 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. Id also like to thank Cynthia Munk for her considerable assistance in
preparing this manuscript for publication.
95
one understands things only approximately and supercially: 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 conversa-
tion 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 phe-
nomenon, 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 primor-
dial 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 interpre-
tation can in fact proceed, the inevitable result of language use is a fallen
form of understanding: There is no alternative to expressing and commu-
nicating ones understanding in the given idiomof ones social and cultural
milieu. To make sense of oneself at all is to make sense of oneself on
the basis of the banal, indeed attened out and leveled off, language of
das Man.
2
In this paper, I explore Heideggers 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 con-
cerns 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
Hubert L. Dreyfus, Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heideggers Being and Time, Division I.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991, p. 229.
2
Taylor Carman, Must We Be Inauthentic? in Heidegger, Authenticity, and Modernity (Mark
A. Wrathall & Jeff Malpas, Eds.). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000, p. 21.
96 Language
In Chapter 2, I argued that philosophy stands to benet fromthe ability to
read past the boundaries of analytic or Continental philosophy. In the
spirit of that argument, I will begin by comparing Heideggers 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 back-
ground for examining Heideggers 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 mean-
ingful 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, seemlike a promising basis for justifying Heideggers
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 Heideggers 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. SETTI NG THE STAGE: SOCI AL EXTERNALI SM
One traditional view of the inuence of a linguistic community on an
individuals meaning denies that there is any essential inuence 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 gure
in understanding what I intend to say (although I will, of course, often nd 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 xing the content of our propositional states. While this externalismis in fact amenable
to Heideggers viewof 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.
thus to be understood without any necessary reference to the linguistic
community to which I belong.
Externalists, in contrast, take the viewthat, to quote Putnams now-famous
phrase, meanings just aint in the head.
4
Putnams pioneering argument
for this proceeds by trying to demonstrate, through a variety of hypothetical
examples, that two traditional internalist theses about meaning are incom-
patible. 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 sufcient 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 sufcient 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 individuals confusion over the
difference between beeches and elms, or between aluminum and molybde-
num, 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 speakers understanding
of the extension of the term might be. Of course, the poorer my concept of
4
Hilary Putnam, The Meaning of Meaning, in The Twin Earth Chronicles: Twenty Years of
Reection on Hilary Putnams The Meaning of Meaning (Andrew Pessin & Sanford Goldberg,
Eds.). Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1996, pp. 359, quotation on 13.
5
Ibid., 6.
6
Ibid., 13.
98 Language
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, accord-
ing 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 x the extension of a term. Even if
individuals are capable of articulating a terms 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 difculty
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 deter-
mine 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 justied. To the contrary, Burge contends, we hold ourselves responsible
7
See Tyler Burge, Wherein Is Language Social? in Reections on Chomsky (A. George, Ed.).
New York: Blackwell, 1989, pp. 17591; Individualism and the Mental, in Midwest Studies in
Philosophy, vol. 4: Studies in Metaphysics (Peter French, Theodore Uehling Jr., &HowardWettstein,
Eds.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1979, pp. 73121; Individualism and
Psychology, Philosophical Review 125 (1986): 345.
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 expli-
cation 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 x the referents. Nor
therefore . . . do they necessarily x the translational meanings or concepts associ-
ated 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 deter-
mine relevant empirical features of the referents . . . . Since the referents play a
necessary role in individuating the persons concept or translational meaning, indi-
viduation of an individuals concepts or translational meanings may depend on the
activity of others on whomthe 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 ones minimumexplicational 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 under-
standing of the speakers 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 Burges 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 ngers 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. 1867.
100 Language
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 inammation 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 inammation 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 Burges hypothetical
example, he says things like Ive 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 difcult 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 difcult 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 termwere 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.
Now, the issue is, what do such examples teach us about social constraints
on linguistic meaning? Let me briey review. These two different examples
are intended to illustrate two different senses in which information available
to a speaker underdetermines the meaning of the speakers utterance (or at
least the meaning it has for an informed audience). In the rst example, the
speaker lacks information about how other speakers of the language deter-
mine 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. Burges
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 commun-
ity norms is taken by Burge as evidence that we hold ourselves responsible to
the public language. Davidson, by contrast, sees me as employing a prag-
matic exibility in altering my mode of speech to accommodate my listeners.
That is, on Davidsons 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 ones
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 understand-
ing 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. Awise
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
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 howfar 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.
11
Many of the comments that follow are inspired by Davidsons discussion of Burges social
externalisminKnowing Ones OwnMind, Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical
Association (1987): 44158, and Epistemology Externalized, Dialectica 45 (1991): 191202.
102 Language
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 elses 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 under-
standing of computers. It would be manifestly wrong, for instance, for the
purchasing agent to conclude: Wrathall says he wants more RAM, but hell
settle for anything that improves the performance of the computer.
Now the question is, should we understand Heideggers idle conversa-
tion 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 Heideggers account of idle conversation to
Putnams account of the social division of linguistic labor, or Burges argu-
ment 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
Putnams 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 efciency, 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 sufcient
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 Burges account that requires that meaning be socially deter-
mined. One way to see this is to note that the very fact that some in a linguistic
community rely on others to x 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.
x the extension.
13
Language can function, and often does function, there-
fore, 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 conversa-
tion is in fact pervasive.
Second, even in examples like the RAM case, nothing about Putnams
or Burges arguments supports the drive toward leveling and banalization
that Heidegger nds in Gerede. As already noted, the idea that some people
do not fully understand what theyre talking about only makes sense, for both
Putnamand 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 inmind withhis notion of idle conversation. What is crucial to Heideggers
account is not the speakers 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 speakers 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 Heideggers
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 trafc signs, trafc lights and lane markings which direct you into the
correct lane. You should
*
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
13
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.
104 Language
*
get into the correct lane
*
adjust your speed and position to t in with trafc conditions
*
be aware of the speed and position of all the trafc around you.
When reaching the roundabout you should
*
give priority to trafc approaching fromyour right, unless directed otherwise by
signs, road markings or trafc 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 trafc 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 t in with trafc conditions, or to get into
the correct lane, or to be aware of the speed and position of the trafc
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 supercial 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 speak-
ers 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 onthe basis
of Heideggers account of Gerede. Before expanding further on this example,
therefore, I turntoa more exegetical discussionof Heideggers account of idle
conversation.
3. LANGUAGE, CONVERSATI ON, AND I DLE CONVERSATI ON
To understand Heideggers 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.
the role played by conversation in Heideggers overall account of being-in-
the-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 distin-
guish 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 uent 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
Heideggers 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
rst 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 formof 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 ones disposedness. . . . Existentially, disposed-
ness implies a disclosive submission to the world, out of which we can encounter something that
matters to us. (GA 2: H. 1378)
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 signicance illuminated by our fear.
Another key feature in the constitution of readiness is our understand-
ing 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 inter-
pretation. As I understand it, in interpretation, I appropriate an overall
understanding of the world by deciding which things are appropriate or
106 Language
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 understand-
ing 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 howall 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
eld of signicance. Thus, when I draw a chart on a chalkboard in a class-
room, 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 under-
standing 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 Im
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 prepar-
ing 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 termand its cognates
still bear something of the original connotation of living with, having inter-
course 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
participle, it has the sense of busying oneself with or being engaged in some-
thing. 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 circum-
spection 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 exam-
ple: 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 comport-
ment 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
Heideggers account of Rede as articulation. Heidegger actually uses two
different words for talking about articulation the verbs gliedern and artiku-
lieren, 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 interpre-
tation and assertion. That which can be distinguished in interpretation, and
thus even more primordially in conversation, is what we have called mean-
ing. (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 under-
standing and disposedness means that I never encounter something that is
15
1 Peter 3: 12, KJV.
108 Language
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 specically 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 [ausgedrckte] experiences; even if they are not uttered in
words, they are nonetheless expressed in a denite 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 signicance
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 ones 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 comport-
ment), 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-of-
signications [Bedeutungsganze]. This can be dissolved or broken up into signica-
tions. Signications, as what has been made distinct from that which can be made
distinct, always carry meaning [sind . . . sinnhaft] . . . . The intelligibility of Being-in-the-
world an intelligibility which goes with disposedness expresses itself as conversation.
The totality-of-signications of intelligibility is put into words. To signications, 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, ausdrcklichkeit is not explicitness
in the sense of having a thematic or conscious awareness of a thing. Rather, something is
ausdrcklich if it is expressed or made manifest by our activities, and thus capable of being
made explicit, even if it is not presently explicit.
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 Heideggers 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 fromRede 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 con-
versation 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 fullled 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 linguis-
tic form, although it often or usually does (see GA 2: H. 272). In The Basic
Problems of Phenomenology, Heidegger coins the phrase existential communi-
cation [existenzielle Mitteilung] to refer to this broad formof 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:
110 Language
It is letting someone see with us what we have pointed out by way of giving it a
denite character. Letting someone see with us shares with [teilt mit] the other that
entity which has been pointed out in its denite 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: 4212). 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 some-
thing 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 under-
standing 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 denite 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 commu-
nication 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 communi-
cate 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 x
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).
learn precisely how to dene 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 self-
understanding and self-interpretation. Without such a sense, we would be
practically disoriented, unready to act, uncertain how to continue in our self-
interpretation. And so in its place we orient ourselves to the situation by
arrogating the things one says and one does. In the process, we surren-
der, at least for the moment, our own interpretation in favor of an anony-
mous 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 con-
versance 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 under-
standing and a practical conversance witha 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 signicance 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 nds them in the United States; an American
driver will thus nd herself intuitively looking in just the wrong places in her
attempt to be aware of the speed and position of all the trafc 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 trafc coming from
the right, having rst instinctively looked left (as one ought when cars drive on the right side
of the road).
112 Language
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 fromanauthentic under-
standing, 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 under-
standing, but only by allowing us to evade the need to learn to respond
authentically, in our own way, to the specic 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 what-
soever. 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, sufcient
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 conversa-
tion, Heidegger emphasizes, can take the form of picking up what is
characteristically said of some matter through reading. This idly obtained
conversance witha matter caneventake place insucha 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
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.
Heideggers critique of the social constraints on language use is commit-
ted, 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 commu-
nicate 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 car-
penter says to another, and she instantly begins hammering with a smaller
nail. Not (b), because (as Davidsons 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 oating 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 NECESSI TY OF BANALI ZATI ON, LEVELI NG, AND UNTRUTH
If my interpretation of idle conversation is right, one consequence is that
Dreyfus and Carman are unjustied in seeing the very structure of language
114 Language
as necessitating the banalization and leveling of human existence. How do
they reach this unjustied conclusion? It is because, like Putnam and Burge,
they see individuals as responsible to public modes of discourse, a responsi-
bility that consists in subjecting the content of ones own utterances to the
domination of others. Or more precisely, they see Heidegger as an anti-
Putnam as holding that the meaning of what we say is determined not by
the experts but by the lowest common denominator of a linguistic commun-
ity. It seems to me that this misses the real thrust of Heideggers 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 justies 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 character-
istic 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 fromthis 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 Heideggers work demon-
strates 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
Reply to Taylor Carman, in Heidegger, Authenticity, Modernity (M. A. Wrathall & J. Malpas,
Eds.). p. 307.
20
Dreyfus, Being-in-the-World, p. 231.
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? Heideggers answer has little to
do with the role of a public language in determining the meaning of utter-
ances made in that language. Instead, our community affects meaning
indirectly by structuring the normal range of activities in which we can
engage. We nd 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.
APPENDI X
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 con-
versation: every originally created phenomenological concept and propo-
sition 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-oating 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 hearers lack of familiarity with the world that
would parse and make salient the meanings necessary to understand the
communication.
116 Language
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 con-
versation about Einsteins theory of the gravitational eld. 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 were 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 suf-
cient to act and, indeed, even to formulate questions about it. The problemis
that we are not able to x 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 were 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 difcult for us
moderns, because we nd it hard to detach ourselves from the at rst 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 Heideggers
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 Heideggers work. The reason
for its popularity, I suspect, is that it seems to encapsulate, in one concise
statement, Heideggers 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 protable comparison between Heidegger and analytic philosophy.
Language is the house of being sounds like a distant but clearly recog-
nizable 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, McDowells 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 rst initiated
stands over against her as a prior embodiment of mindedness, of the
119
possibility of an orientation to the world (Mind and World, p. 125).
1
I think
bringing Heideggers 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
Heideggers slogan means before we presume to compare it to other
recent positions on the relationship between language and being.
Now it might seem at rst glance that the meaning of the slogan is
perfectly straightforward, if somewhat metaphorical. In secondary litera-
ture 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 Heideggers
views on language in general against the background of traditional philo-
sophical concerns about the role that language or thought plays in uncon-
cealment, in opening up a world and constituting entities as what they
are. The problem of languages 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
Heideggers 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 Heideggers Heraclitus, we nd 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
xed 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 reica-
tion of the world-disclosing function of language, what things are becomes thor-
oughly dependent on what is contingently disclosed for a historical linguistic
community through a specic language. Thus, the world-disclosure that is contained
in a given language becomes the nal authority for judging the intraworldly
1
Monika Betzler suggested this in her review of Mind and World in Erkenntnis 48 (1998): 115.
120 Language
knowledge that this world-disclosure has made possible in the rst 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 Lafonts gloss on the slogan.
First of all, Lafont understands language to mean any specic 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 linguis-
tic idealism language itself decides which claims made within the lan-
guage 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 encoun-
ter 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 Lafonts suspicions of linguistic idealism. For instance, Karl
Jaspers rst 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 denitively 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 nd 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
19201963. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann/Mnchen: Piper, 1990, p. 179.
Discourse Language, Saying, Showing 121
Jaspers proposes a second metaphor in opposition to the idea of lan-
guage 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 nd 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. Heideggers only direct response to Jaspers, unfortu-
nately, 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, lets
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 Wrtern] and rules for linguistic construction (GA 4: 39). The
second element is the attribution to language, so understood, of an in-
eliminable role in the constitution of entities or our experience of the
world. It is not always clear how exactly linguistic constitutionalists conceive
of languages 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
chart 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)
Unconventional View of
Language
Entities/
Experiences
Constituted by
Language
A. Linguistic Constitutionalism
(McDowell)
C. Later Heidegger
(Originary language as the
tted structure of
relationships)
Entities/
Experiences not
Constituted by
Language
B. Various Realisms: Jaspers
(language as a bridge)
Heideggers ontic realism
(early and late)
122 Language
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 rst 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 prop-
ositionally. 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 rst 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 constitu-
tionalist, 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 Heideggers 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 Heideggers later work, with its emphasis on language (an
emphasis that is crystallized in the slogan)? I do not mean to deny that
Heideggers views on language undergo signicant 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.
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 constitution-
alist is a direct result of this misleading homonym, and a failure to respect
Heideggers 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 Heideggers
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 some-
thing 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 Heideggers 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 trans-
formation 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 Heideggers understanding of Ereignis as the source of
originary language. But that is a topic for another occasion.
124 Language
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 cata-
strophic 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 anidea tobe developedonthe basis of anunderstanding 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 nd 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 con-
cludes, 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 catastrophicmetaphoric 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 meta-
phorical, is undermined.
Thus we are not meant to plug a preexisting conception of language
into Heideggers claims about language, as too many commentators on
Heidegger are prone to do. Heidegger warns us that the reective 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
The Retrait of Metaphor, Enclitic 2 (1978): 633.
6
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).
in some form in each of his essays on language. Rather, as we accompany
Heidegger in his reections on language, the word language is meant to
come to function differently than it did when we rst set out. As Heidegger
explains, quoting Wilhelm von Humboldt, time often introduces into
[language] an enhanced power of thought and a more penetrating sensi-
bility 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). Heideggers
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 lan-
guage (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 identied with a particular ordinary, historically specic lan-
guage like French or German or Japanese or Chinese or Korean. Another,
related, example is provided by Heideggers 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 onto-
logically 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 Heideggers 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
126 Language
world-disclosive function, and (3) using the word language indiscrimin-
ately 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 Heideggers
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 ORI GI NARY LANGUAGE
For those who believe that there is a dramatic difference between
Heideggers earlier and later views of language, the transition seems to
be signaled in one of Heideggers 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 signications,
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 Heideggers 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 differ-
ently, and retrospectively reinterprets the passage in question. A careful
review of Heideggers 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 publica-
tion of Being and Time. But the signicance of this turn can only be truly
understood in the context of a terminological shift in Heideggers 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
Heideggers preferred translation for the Greek logos, one simply cannot
properly assess Heideggers newfound emphasis on language. In fact, the
substitution of language for discourse as a translation for logos did not
represent a nal resting place for Heideggers 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
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into a unied 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 Heideggers earlier to his
later work on the role of language, Heideggers 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 vocabu-
lary with rules for combining words into sentences (see GA 4: 39).
As such, language was for him dependent on and derivative of the mean-
ings we encounter as we inhabit an intelligible world. These primary mean-
ings, 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 Imnavigating through a building is: for going in and out (see GA21:
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 unied and system-
atic 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)
130 Language
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 qualies 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 indiscursive 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 rela-
tions with others, or in helping others become responsive to these relations.
7
I suspect that a lot of the confusion in understanding Heideggers notion
of discourse stems fromfailing to take the paradigmof 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 dis-
course 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 hadnt 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).
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 con-
text within which they can appear as meaningful. Heidegger does distin-
guish 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 Fgens 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 expe-
rienced 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/Aristotles Metaphysics
Theta, 1034; 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. 2734), 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 tting together of referen-
ces. 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 tting-
together and tness (Fgung und Fuge) of the entities which stand in relation. Logos
is the regulating structure (regelnde Gefge), 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,
132 Language
this is the structure that we call language, speaking; but not understood as vocaliz-
ing, 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 begunphasing
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 betweenthe prereective 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 pheno-
menon 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 dening character-
istic 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 Heideggers preferred term for trans-
lating 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
Heideggers 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 con-
stitutive 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 Heideggers version of the Greek claim that the
essence of man is to be the zon 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 Heideggers 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
Although I take it as a sign of Heideggers never-ending experimental approach to the use of
terms that Rede stages a comeback in one late course, the Freiburger Vortrge of 1957 (GA 79).
9
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 Hhlengleichnis und Thetet, GA 34; in 1932 the lecture course Der Anfang der
abendlndischenPhilosophie (Anaximander undParmenides) (GA35) andalectureonPlatos Phaidros.
So when he now holds that the originary meaning of logos has at rst
nothing to do with language and word and discourse [Rede] (GA 40: 133/
95), this does not mean that hes 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 anthrpos zon 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 lan-
guage adequately and originally, namely, from the essence of logos correctly
understood. (GA 9: 348). Nor, nally, 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 lan-
guage 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 supercially inconsistent pronouncements exhibit one con-
sistent, largely stable view about what Heidegger calls the originary mean-
ing 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 signications
or the relationship of one thing to another (GA40: 133) into a more or less
stable structure. It is in terms of such a gathering or collecting into relation-
ships 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 GATHERI NG
To understand properly the sense in which language is for Heidegger a
gathering or collecting, we need to recognize the background under-
standing of ontology against which such pronouncements are made. This
will bring us back to the slogan and the question of linguistic constitution-
alism in Heideggers 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
134 Language
Heideggers. It is an unattributed quotation of a passage from Nietzsches
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 whats going on with Heideggers 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 hinter-
world. 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
modied)
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 beauties and
adorns them in our representations.
But Zarathustras animals respond by suggesting that language is not just
a bridge to things and an adornment that dances over xed 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 (gefgt) 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 (gefgt) or tted 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.
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 xed 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 unied way fromthe 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 ow rst creates the banks and turns them toward each
other in a more original way than a bridge ever could. (GA 6.1: 51213)
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 appro-
priating Nietzsches phrase house of being, Heidegger is invoking a rela-
tional 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 tting (sammelnden Fgens) (GA 33: 122). For
Heidegger, logos is the structure of tting (Gefge) (GA 33: 121), just as for
Zarathustras animals, the house of being is constructed when everything
is joined or tted together (gefgt). 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 Gefge. Language is, as saying that forms the worlds 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
See also GA 7: 148.
12
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.
136 Language
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 rst time as such
around and for human beings (GA 9: 280). The slogan reafrms 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 Heideggers 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 refer-
ences, the relationships that constitute things as the things they are. This
continuity is obscured by changes in Heideggers terminology in partic-
ular, 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 mean-
ing 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 Gefge. We also need to think through the rela-
tionship between words and entities in order to come to a clearer under-
standing of the slogan and Heideggers alleged linguistic constitutionalism.
Heideggers 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 nal line, especially prone to be
misunderstood as supporting a linguistic constitutionalist interpretation
of Heideggers account of language. With apologies for the rather literal
and unpoetic translation, the poem reads:
Das Wort The Word
Wunder von ferne oder traum Wonder from far off or a dream
Bracht ich an meines landes saum I brought to my countrys border
Und harrte bis die graue norn And waited until the grey Norn
Den namen fand in ihrem born Found the name within her wellspring
Drauf konnt ichs greifen dicht
und stark
Thereupon I could grasp it tightly and strong
Nun blht und glnzt es durch die
mark . . .
Now it blossoms and shines throughout the
borderland. . .
Einst langt ich an nach guter fahrt Once I arrived after a good journey
Mit einem kleinod reich und zart With a jewel rich and delicate
Sie suchte lang und gab mir kund: She searched long and announced to me:
So schlft hier nichts auf tiefem
grund
No such sleeps here on the deep ground
Worauf es meiner hand entrann Whereupon it escaped from my hand
Und nie mein land den schatz
gewann. . .
And my country never obtained the treasure
So lernt ich traurig den verzicht: In this way I sadly learned the renunciation:
Kein ding sei wo das wort gebricht. No thing may be where the word is lacking
To understand Heideggers interpretation of this poem, we need to begin by
considering his reason for introducing a discussion of poetry into his work
in the rst 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 Heideggers discussion of the word. Does he think the
poet is an authority gure 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, nally, 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 reect 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 anargument
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 painsta-
kingly to the poetic description of the poets experience of a poetic word.
138 Language
Indeed, the rst 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
scientic 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 indenite 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 inexible 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 under-
stand two things we lose track of in our ordinary commerce with the world:
the potential power of language and the authentic signicance of the
things and people and possibilities around us.
Heidegger immediately alerts us to several words in Georges poem that
oscillate in this way, reminding us that we should not be too quick to
assume we know what the nal lines mean:
One is tempted to transform the nal 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
reect 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
be the poem will begin to oscillate productively between several diffe-
rent possible interpretations.
1. WORDS AND TERMS
Lets start by exploring possible meanings of the word word. Word
is an ideal case for illustrating Heideggers 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 rst 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 unied 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
Id 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 Wrter, corresponds
with the way we typically tend to think of the ordinary meaning of the
English word word. Words, Wrter, are single, independent, isolable
meanings with a denite vocal form which, as discourses smallest unit of
sense, produce, by means of their accumulation and linking together,
words in the rst 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 Wrter
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 signications (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
Wort, in Deutsches Wrterbuch von Jacob und Wilhelm Grimm, vol. 30. Leipzig: S. Hirzel, 1960,
p. 1473.
14
Ibid., p. 1529.
140 Language
phenomenologically incorrect to describe my experience of language as
involving rst 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 construc-
tion of a unied sense from the individual meanings. In the living use of
language, I respond to what is written or spoken uently, nonreectively,
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 uency, the terms recede from salience.
The contrast between a deliberate and uent 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 struc-
tures that allow there to be entities in the rst 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 Heideggers 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, lled by particular entities. Of
course, lled 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 ll nexuses the way water lls glasses or
concrete lls building forms. Water is water, after all, whether it is in a
glass or pond. A more apt analogy is the way someone lls the position of
an aunt or uncle. One cannot be an aunt rst, and only subsequently take
up relationships to nieces and nephews. To be an aunt at all is to be
constituted by ones relationships to other people. Aunthood, then, is a
particular nexus of relationships to siblings and siblings children. When
we grasp the signicance 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 rst 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 signicative 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 mean-
ing that they have.
If we consider this distinction in the context of Georges 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 specic sense. Take, for instance the
Persian term zirad, the name of a rope fastened round a camels 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 specic 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 camels neck, or even how a camel
manages to vomit on its rider in the rst 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 Heideggers sense,
then a word is missing when a world lacks a stable network of relation-
ships 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 denitive 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.
142 Language
example, the Bushido
, with the particular conuence of virtues that it incor-

porates, 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. THI NGS AND NOTHI NGS
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 signies some-
thing (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 Heideggers 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 noth-
ings, rather than functioning to deny the existence of ordinary entities.
3. BEI NG AND GI VI NG
All but the most casual reader of Heideggers 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 GA10: 104: But being is not a thing that some one of us takes away andputs tothe 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.
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 pres-
ence in the world.
17
But Heidegger identies other ways to think of something being. The
German language has an alternative construction for asserting that some-
thing 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 denitive 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. I NTERPRETI NG 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. Lets look at the one he rejects, before turning to the others.
4.1. The Linguistic Constitutionalist Interpretation
The rst, 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 nal line of the poem and, along with it, the slogan as
an endorsement of just such a crude linguistic constitutionalism,
18
17
The only being that metaphysics knows is being as stability and presencing (GA 66: 394).
18
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)
144 Language
Heidegger immediately alerts us that we are not to read it in this fashion.
I quote at length from Heideggers 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 at-
footed 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 Lafonts use of the passage in
question:
[Heideggers] 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. 1646; ellipses are in Lafonts text).
Here is the passage with the elided warnings restored in bold:
[Heideggers] 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 seemto have adduced from poetry the most handsome conrmation 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 servants 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.
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 whats 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 appro-
priate 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 nal 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 conrmation 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: 1556, emphasis in original)
This rst 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 Heideggers
reading, the central theme of the poem is the question of the nature of
the word, as it is illuminated by the poets 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 nal 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 poets way of understanding words.
4.2. Post-Linguistic-Constitutionalist Interpretations
According to Heideggers interpretation, then, the poem describes a tran-
sition 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
146 Language
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 condence 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 t 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 conrmed 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 nd
for them too the word that describes and presents them. At rst 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 poets
words, the entity henceforth shines and blossoms and in this way rules
throughout the country as the beautiful (GA 12: 212). The poets task is
to nd 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 repre-
sent 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 nd its application as a descriptive presentation of the thing.
The names and words are like a xed supply which is assigned to the
things (GA 12: 214).
The poets 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 poets 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.
It remains a treasure which, however, the poet may never hold within his
country (GA 12: 2145). These details of the poem must be attended to in
understanding the signicance of the conclusion no thing may be in the
nal 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 representa-
tion) 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 worlds 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 conguration:
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 relation-
ships, 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 [verfgbar]. Keeping
in mind here that the word is a stabilized nexus of relationships, this could
148 Language
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 tting relations that constitute a thing.
Heidegger unfortunately considers very few concrete examples of enti-
ties that receive their being from a word. We need to pay close attention to
the subtleties of Heideggers 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 rst stanza of the rst triad:
Wonder from far off or a dream
I brought to my countrys 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!
Lets 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: 1545)
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 lan-
guage, 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-specic and
vocal form. For the word of another language is as a vocal and written form different,
and nevertheless it means the same thing, table. This one and the same [essence]
rst 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 reect on the fact that the word Heidegger identies as
responsible for Sputniks being is not Sputnik but die Eile, hurry. In terms
of the distinction we outlined above, the spaceship depends for its exis-
tence 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 techno-
logical 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 reect 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 efciency 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 some-
thing as a Sputnik. Unless there is a world organized by a certain techno-
logical drive for speed and efciency, 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 rst 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
150 Language
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 Heideggers originary
sense as the structure of relations is a paradigm case of withdrawing-
giving. 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, bets neither the is nor the word, and it absolutely
does not bet 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 deate into the at 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
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 words 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 nd 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
poets 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 poets renunciation than this. He also stops
expecting everything that plays a disclosive role in the world to have exis-
tence 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 denite content:
Words at rst easily appear as terms. For their part, terms rst appear as spoken in
a word sound. This in turn is at rst a noise. It is sensorily perceived. The sensory
is taken as what is immediately given. The words 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 lled
152 Language
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 xed and that has
a more or less determinate content. The terms, sense-containers, can be
arrayed scientically 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 lled 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 Georges 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 reect on the way that our language provides a home for certain
entities, experiences, ranges of human possibilities, and so on.
CONCLUSI ON
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 reect on its essence (GA 12: 136).
The exchange that follows in the dialogue is crucial for understanding
the slogan. Heideggers interlocutor asks, but can you nd a more appro-
priate 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
saying. Heidegger proceeds to explain saying in terms of unconceal-
ment 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 denes 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 reection 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
signications 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 tted 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
154 Language
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 more-
or-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 phenomenol-
ogy, 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 claries 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 estab-
lish 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 benetted immensely from Piotr Hoffmanns 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 Pascals thought.
156
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 rst to try to bring an experience of religious faith into
view. Toward this end, let us start with Pascals 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 Pascals 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, rst gives rise to
faith, is Christ, the crucied God. . . . The crucixion, however, and all that belongs to
it is a historical event, and indeed this event gives testimony to itself as such in its
specically 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 Heideggers and Pascals 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, Penses (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.
The Revealed Word and World Disclosure 157
a way of living in the world that arises fromthe 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 rst 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 commu-
nicative model, according to which, language is a means by which we com-
municate 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, nds its fulllment in the satisfaction of the speech
act for example, verication of assertions about the incarnation of God in
Christ, or his crucixion and resurrection. But with such claims, the veri-
cation 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 justication 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 nd it impossible to full 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 Pascals thought but developed
in the later Heidegger, that is compatible with Pascals 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 under-
standing of language that provides the background against which religious
faith can be seen for what it genuinely is. On this view, language is under-
stood 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 fulllment of faith is not deferred but can be
conrmed 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.
158 Language
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 Pascals phenomenology of religious faith is much better
developed than Heideggers, I will focus on Pascals description of the
Christian life.
1. FAI TH AS A MODE OF EXI STENCE
Faith is often taken as naming an epistemic state. In particular, it is heard
as denoting a degree of condence 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 condence that the proposition God exists is
more likely true than not true.
For thinkers like Pascal and Kierkegaard, however, such a degree
of condence is a derivative of faith understood in existential terms
condence 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 Fathers 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 . . .
nd only obscurity and darkness (P 644). Thus faith is to be understood,
in the rst 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 super-
stition. 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, thats 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
Sren Kierkegaards 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.
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 con-
dence in the object of ones 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 licen-
tiousness. 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 ones disposition (feelings of the heart) and the
actions that arise from those dispositions (living a devout life). True disbe-
lief, 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 devel-
oping 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, ne 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
Penses, 690: Such knowledge, Pascal argues, is useless and sterile. Even if someone could
be persuaded that the proportions between numbers are intangible, eternal truths, depend-
ent on an earlier truth in which they exist, called God, I would not consider that he had made
much progress towards his salvation.
160 Language
You want to nd 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 afiction 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 Heideggers and Pascals 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 dispo-
sitions. 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 veries an
epistemic state or proposition (i.e., demonstrating that it is true). But it will
have the kind of conrmation or success conditions that all other skills have.
Baking skills are conrmed or successful when they allowme to cope with the
kitchen. Religious faith will be conrmed 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 Dostoevskys 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 youll be convinced of the
existence of God and the immortality of your soul. And if you reach complete
selessness in the love of your neighbour, then undoubtedly you will believe,
and no doubt will even be able to enter your soul.
5
The conrmation and
conviction come, in other words, through ones 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.
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 nd 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 nd 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 world-
disclosive mode of existence that (2) arises from a particular relationship to
the scriptures. We have discussed this rst feature of Christianity but not the
second. In fact, the way we have discussed the rst 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 proposi-
tions 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 nds 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 Pascals
experience of the revealed word. But having done so, I think we can now
consider the proper and limited place of reason in Pascals 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 Pascals view, see Penses, 164.
162 Language
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 afrm 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 afrming 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 justication. 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 irration-
alizable 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 verica-
tion of the mystery. It remains inconceivable, incomprehensible. Indeed, to
try to prove it would probably distort our understanding of Gods 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 Pascals picture for cognition. But it is a limited place, and the
cognitive content of the word works alongside a quite different and inde-
pendent 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
dedicated and loving attention to the scriptures, our dispositions will grad-
ually 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 commu-
nication 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. Ayers famous argument against the meaning-
fulness 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
veriable.
7
Even if we reject Ayers vericationism, 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 non-
sense. 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 articu-
lated 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
See A. J. Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic. New York: Dover Publications, 1952, especially
chapter 6.
8
Brandom, Robert, Making It Explicit. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994, p. 159.
164 Language
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 dis-
cursive 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
fullled when they are true, and our relationship to the scriptural assertions
is fullled 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 meta-
physical, because they are incapable of being veried 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 superuous.
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 con-
temporary 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 seri-
ously). 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 rst with the latter. Having been put off by the improbability
and superuity of scriptural accounts of the world, the strategy here is to
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 interpre-
tation 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 nds consistent with
its own principles.
9
Since Kant, history has given us a steady streamof others
who aimto make Christianity intellectually respectable by demythologizing
the sacred text.
The rst approach, by contrast, afrms, in the face of all contradictory
evidence, that scriptural assertions are meant to be literally true of an unseen
reality even when the assertions conict 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 fulllment 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 veried by or
9
Immanuel Kant, The Conict of the Faculties, in Religion and Rational Theology (A. W. Wood&
G. di Giovanni, Trans.). Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1996, pp. 233327.
10
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 kingdomcome.
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 pessimismcan only lead to despair. For more on the Pascalian response to despair, see
section 3 of this chapter.
166 Language
justied 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 justication 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 justication 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 themas 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 themcause 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 sufcient, condition for our
being existing as a Christian. Such assertions will only nally full 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 Pascals
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 Penses, 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. modied). 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
against reason), given that one loses nothing through such a life but stands
to gain innity, an eternity of life and happiness. Indeed, Pascal acknowl-
edges 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, conrm ourselves in it through
custom, yet offer ourselves through humiliations to inspirations, which
alone can produce the true and salutary effect (P 655). Pascals 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 nds its fulll-
ment not in being veried 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, Pascals 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 nd their fulllment 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 Heideggers claim that poetic
168 Language
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 Heideggers examples of how such poetic language
works. In a discussion of Trakls 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 Ein Winterabend
Window with falling snow is arrayed, Wenn der Schnee ans Fenster fallt,
Long tolls the vesper bell, Lang die Abendglocke lautet,
The house is provided well Vielen ist der Tisch bereitet
The table is for many laid. 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. SCRI PTURES AS WORLD DI SCLOSURE
If we approach scriptural claims from this perspective that is, against a
background according to which the highest task and paradigmatic function-
ing of language is not communication of information, but world disclosure
then things look somewhat different. We can now accept scriptural claims as
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 Gods creation and people as
Gods 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 satised
if our faith shows us how to see this world. Cognitively, the saints 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 think-
ing 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, Pascals 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 hope-
less 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 pas-
sionate side, renouncing everything the world offers to satisfy our passions,
and thus achieving, in Kierkegaards words, peace and repose and consola-
tion in pain
11
that is, resigning ourselves to never nding satisfaction in
this world. Such a solution, Pascal notes, cannot succeed because the pas-
sions 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.
170 Language
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, nd in this world the
fulllment 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 fullled. 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 nd some way to satisfy our will in
order to achieve happiness.
Gods 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 lling 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 Christs incarnation, in
other words, shows us our human existence not as something to despair at
but as something to afrm. Only by accepting the literal truth of the scrip-
tural account, in other words, can we be attuned to the world not as some-
thing to despair over but as an opportunity to show our greatness.
The examples the scriptures provide of Christs deeds teach us specically
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 Christs 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 nd 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 nite 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 himin the
12
Blaise Pascal, Penses, 29. See also 557: Man is neither angel nor beast, and unhappily
whoever wants to act the angel, acts the beast.
life to come. And, more importantly, through our faithful practices, we open
ourselves to an experience of Gods grace here in the world. Gods 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 Gods lawdiffused into the heart
by the Holy Ghost, which, not only equalling but even surpassing the concupiscence
of the esh, lls 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 Gods law for
the simple reason that it nds greater satisfaction there, and feels his beatitude and
happiness.
13
For Pascal, then, we nd satisfaction not in any particular worldly thing but
through living a Christ-like life. That is to say, when we follow Christs
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 afictions 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 nd
joy in the Christian life itself, we are able to defer our longing for something
13
Treatise Concerning Predestination, in Penses and Other Writings (Honor Levi, Trans.).
Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1995, p. 223.
14
Pascal, Penses, 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 fromhumanity. Your good is only
in God, and ultimate happiness lies in knowing God, in becoming united with himfor ever in
eternity (P 182). But Pascals pessimism is a pessimism without despair, because it embra-
ces 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 rm satisfaction, that all our pleasures are simply
vanity, that our afictions are innite, 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 nest 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!
172 Language
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 predisposi-
tion, namely, one in which we enjoy things as they present themselves with-
out trying to turn them into something eternal (this is Pascals existential
specication 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, Penses, p. 178.
part iii
HISTORICAL WORLDS
8
Philosophers, Thinkers, and Heideggers Place
in the History of Being
THE END OF PHI LOSOPHY
The response to Heidegger in the analytical world is, to a consider-
able degree, a paraphrase of Rudolf Carnaps 1932 essay berwindung
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,
Heideggers 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
Heideggers claims about the nothing would, however, miss the deeper
point. Carnaps analysis of Heideggers alleged pseudosentences is really
ancillary to the project of rehabilitating philosophy as a discipline a project
driven by Carnaps 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
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.
2
See, for instance, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (C. K. Ogden, Trans.).
London: Routledge, 1922, paragraph 6.53.
177
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 tradi-
tional 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 rmer 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.
Heideggers response to this view of philosophy can be seen in a concen-
trated form in a series of notes that draw their title, berwindung der
Metaphysik, from Carnaps, and which Heidegger began writing shortly
after the publication of Carnaps essay. Indeed, the notes cannot be under-
stood except as articulating an alternative to Carnaps 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 Carnaps 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,
Carnaps 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 under-
stand 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 Heideggers 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
The Elimination of Metaphysics Through Logical Analysis of Language, p. 77
4
Michael Dummett, The Logical Basis of Metaphysics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1991, p. 1.
5
berwindung der Metaphysik, in Vortrge and Aufstze. Stuttgart: Gunther Neske, 1954,
p. 67.
6
Ibid.
178 Historical Worlds
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 under-
standing 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 opin-
ion.
8
One cannot simply change ones 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 appropri-
ately 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 reection seems superuous. 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 scientic-technological under-
standing of being is so completely dominant: philosophy is ending in the
present age. It has found its place in the scientic 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
Ibid.
8
Ibid., p. 68.
9
Ibid., p. 67.
10
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 prot for the construction
of the technological universe (GA 8: 23/WCT: 21).
Heideggers Place in the History of Being 179
ever to the errors of the metaphysical past. Like the metaphysicians, con-
temporary philosophy works under the dominance of an understanding of
being that is, for it, unquestionable. And like the metaphysicians, contem-
porary 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.
PHI LOSOPHY AND I TS HI STORY
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 per-
spective, philosophys 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 nal analysis, philosophys concern is
solving its current problems problems for which historical gures 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 philosophers 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 philosophys most pressing task that of responding to con-
temporary 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 con-
trary, he holds that cultural changes and crises are governed by a back-
ground understanding of being, and it is to this ontological background
that philosophy is rst 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 inuences. Heidegger thus argues that it
is a mistake to treat the thought of a thinker as circumscribed by the
inuences 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).
Well return to this distinction later; for now, a brief introduction to the
distinction must sufce. 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 back-
ground 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 testies, 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 quantication
(although it entails the following proposition that does employ a negative
existential quantication: 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 Heideggers 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 uncon-
cealed to human beings. With each unconcealment of being, human
beings have become progressively more oblivious to the fact that their every-
day 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
phusis or self-arising nature), the Medieval (in which what is was understood
as Gods creation), the Modern (where beings became objects that could
be controlled and penetrated by calculation) (GA 5: 65/BW: 201), and
nally an intensication of the Modern, the Technological (in which what is
is understood as standing reserve that is, as being constantly available for
exible reconguration, and thus maximally exploitable).
Metaphysics, on this view, affects much more than philosophy. The meta-
physical 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 reviewone of his
examples of the way in which a philosopher, by responding to a new under-
standing 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 impor-
tant 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 appre-
ciating 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 Gods 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: 23940). An ideal of intellectual freedom would be nearly inco-
herent 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
Gods 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 Gods creation.
This background shift is discernible in Descartes work: Descartes meta-
physics is the decisive beginning of the foundation of metaphysics in the
Modern age. It was his task to ground the metaphysical ground of mans
liberation in the new freedom of self-assured self-legislation (GA 6.2: 129/
N4: 100). For example, when Descartes declares that the rst rule of his
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 justied 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 Heideggers 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 philosophers task. A metaphysicians historical and
cultural inheritance is at most the departure point for articulating a new
understanding of being. Consequently, the content of the metaphysical
thinkers 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
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.
12
Ibid., p. 120.
13
Ibid., p. 116.
This leads us, then, to the nature of Heideggers 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 Carnaps essay as itself
more proof of the need for a genuinely historical reection 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 unied, 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 impos-
sible 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 reection 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 anunderstanding 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 intelligi-
bility from a different background understanding of being than now
14
For a perspicuous discussion of Heideggers 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. 289316.
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 rst 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.
HI STORY AND HI STORI OLOGY
How is a genuinely historical reection, one capable of loosening the grip of
our metaphysical understanding of being, to proceed? This question is made
pressing by the fact that Heideggers own treatment of the history of philos-
ophy is held in some disrepute. He is notorious for his violent interpreta-
tions of the key gures 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 Heideggers capricious
use of etymology in hermeneutic interpretations of the pre-Socratics,
15
complaining that Heidegger and his followers have given etymology a bad
name. Heideggers 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, rhe-
torical, and heuristic devices for the development of Heideggers own phi-
losophy.
16
Mourelatoss conclusion, I would argue, overstates the issue.
There are in fact standards for judging Heideggers histories beyond
whether they successfully articulate his own philosophy. But he is quite
right that Heideggers 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 inter-
preter 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 Heideggers Kant book, he noted that read-
ers 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. Heideggers 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 reection
on the open region within which those events transpire, that from which all
15
Alexander P. D. Mourelatos, The Route of Parmenides. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
1970, p. 197
16
Ibid., p. xiv.
human happenings begin (GA 45: 40). As a result, the stuff of ordinary
history historical actions and events are not the principal objects of
Heideggers history, although it would be a mistake to say that Heideggers
history is unconcerned with them.
The subsidiary role accorded to ordinary historiology in Heideggers
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 Heideggers
histories are vacuous and mystical.
17
Rorty argues that Heideggers 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 abso-
lute unity.
18
Along similar lines, Bernasconi argues that Heideggers
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 Heideggers own explanation of history,
historiology, and their interdependence. Bernasconi, for instance, inter-
prets 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 journalists 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 determi-
native of historiology as historiology. Rather, historiology is what it is
because in it the past is treated without regard for the background under-
standing 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
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. 14359.
18
Richard Rorty, Overcoming the Tradition: Heidegger and Dewey, Review of Metaphysics 30
(1976): 297.
19
Robert Bernasconi, Descartes inthe History of Being, Research inPhenomenology 17(1987): 94.
20
Ibid., p. 87.
age that is, the situation of human things and mans 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 eld 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 ascertain-
ing 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 cannever 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: 4312/N3: 8)
Thus Heideggers distinction between history and historiology is not a dis-
tinction 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 (GA45: 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 pre-
requisite to doing Rortys plain history:
Since historiographical considerations are always subordinated to historical reec-
tions, the erroneous opinion can arise to the effect that historiography is altogether
superuous for history. But from the order of rank just mentioned the only con-
clusion to be drawn is this: historiographical considerations are essential only insofar
as they are supported by a historical reection, 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 under-
standings of being, we can see why one ought to reject the merely histor-
iological approach to philosophy, which proceeds by tracing the inuence
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 tting it
into a context of ends or goals, standards of performance, motives or
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 con-
text of a discussion of the history of the concept of truth, we nd only what
we seek, and in historiography we are seeking only what we [already] may
know (GA 45: 21920). Or, as he observes elsewhere, historiology neces-
sarily 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 conrm by
this very research and in so doing only rigidies the unthought obvious-
ness (GA 54: 142).
This tendency is compounded, in Heideggers 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
philosophers 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 reection 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 thinkers insight into being.
In addition, the discovery of dependencies and philosophical inuences
is itself only illuminating if we comprehend the reason for those depen-
dencies. Historiology of ideas, Heidegger explains, is no more than schol-
arly historical detective work, searching out dependencies, [with which] we
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 philosophers place in the history of being,
we will not understand the signicance of the fact that philosophers appro-
priate one anothers work: To search for inuences and dependencies
among thinkers is to misunderstand thinking. Every thinker is dependent
upon the address of being (GA5: 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 prob-
lems show up as relevant sources in the rst place? Exploring this question,
Heidegger argues, would lead us to ask about the understanding of being
that guided the appropriation.
Heideggers 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 historiologists 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 under-
standing 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, Heideggers 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 Heideggers primary concern. Thus a debate with
Heideggers reading ought to be addressed to showing howhe has misunder-
stood this background.
HEI DEGGERS USE OF HI STORY
We can now say more clearly what it means to be a metaphysical thinker a
philosopher and how Heideggers historical thinking is meant to evade the
problems of metaphysical thought.
The history of philosophy is, Heidegger tells us, the thinkers struggle for
a word for beings as whole (GA 6.1: 443/N3: 19). The great philosophers,
in Heideggers way of understanding things, are those who receive an under-
standing of the being of the age, and struggle to articulate that understand-
ing. 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 concern-
ing 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 artists 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, follow-
ing Nietzsche, argues that art, rather than serving as mere subjective expres-
sion, 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, reects 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 philosophers inuence in the
foreground events, at least in the short term. Philosophy has, Heidegger
notes, an historically ascertainable yet irrelevant inuence (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 Heideggers view, that of Descartes as articulated above. The
direct inuence of Descartess writings on any particular scientist, politician,
or other historical gure is irrelevant compared to the inuence on the
Modern age that the whole newbackground sensibility for mans place in the
world had. As Heidegger explained with reference to Nietzsche, a thinkers
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
.
Now, how does Heidegger conceive of his place in this history? In partic-
ular, 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 understand-
ing 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
reect 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.
HEI DEGGERS PLACE I N THE HI STORY OF BEI NG
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 nally 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 Spiegels Interview with Martin Heidegger (Maria P. Alter &
John D. Caputo, Trans.). Philosophy Today 20 (1976): 281.
learned from Heideggers 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). Heideggers 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 Carnaps response to
Heidegger, the perceived uselessness of Heideggers 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 Heideggers 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 contem-
porary 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 Heideggers 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 reection 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 rst half of
this century a particularly sensational issue in Heideggers case. Indeed,
one can read Heideggers mythological account of the history of being as
itself a historiological event. Likewise, a considerable amount of scholarship
is devoted to discovering and articulating Heideggers dependence on, for
instance, Husserl.
But, in the nal 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 reection as Heidegger articulated it, further deci-
sions 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
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 unied account of that background.
23
Another pressing issue that arises fromHeideggers 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 meta-
physical age. Here again, there is a range of responses to Heidegger that,
while broadly sympathetic to his analysis of the dangers of technology, never-
theless depart from that analysis in important ways. One might, for instance,
nd 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
Heideggers preparatory thinking, there remains the question of how best
to carry on that task.
Other related issues arise in any thoughtful reception of Heideggers
work. For example, one inescapable but central element of Heideggers
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 Heideggers writings, as one must decide how
much weight to give to the often archaic, German-based terminology/jargon
that Heidegger employs. Heideggers particularity gives rise, in turn, to
sometimes heated disagreements over the appropriateness of different trans-
lations of Heideggers 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 dened 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 Heideggers 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 ones delity
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
Heideggers approach to history has taught us to look beyond. For even a
23
See, for instance, Jacques Derrida, Spurs: Nietzsches Styles (Barbara Harlow, Trans.). Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1978.
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 inuences can obscure a more fundamental agreement in
thoughtful reection 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 reection on the matter pointed out which each must travel for
himself.
24
Thus appropriating Heideggers thought is, from Heideggers
own perspective, a matter of taking his project as ones own.
25
24
Martin Heidegger, Preface, in William J. Richardson, Heidegger: Through Phenomenology to
Thought. The Hague: Martinus Nijhof, 1974, p. viii.
25
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 Heideggers account,
dwelling consists in achieving a nearness to the earth, the sky, mortals, and
divinities.
Viewed with the kind of historical detachment exemplied in Charles
Taylors paper, Closed World Structures,
1
Heideggers 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, fur-
ther fragilizes any of the positions it contains in the sense that it under-
mines the claim of each position to legitimacy. This is because the
disagreements between positions are disagreements at the most fundamen-
tal 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.
Taylors observations are valuable as a reminder that Heideggers diag-
nosis 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 posi-
tions in the overall fragmentation of modern culture. If, then, Heideggers
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 Heideggers work on the divinities and the fourfold, Heidegger is
offering us a way of pulling into focus a problem that is scarcely articulable
1
Charles Taylor, Closed World Structures, in Religion After Metaphysics (Mark A. Wrathall,
Ed.). Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2003, pp. 4768.
2
Ibid., p. 66.
195
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 specic about the
deciencies 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 Heideggers reections on the fourfold as
responses to just these questions.
THE DEATH OF GOD
Because Heideggers account of the technological age grew out of his
reading of Nietzsche, the place to start is with Heideggers 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 inter-
preted Nietzsche correctly, or that Heideggers 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 Heideggers 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 Heideggers perspective, it is a terrible misreading of
Nietzsches 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). Heideggers 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
instance, follows up the proclamation of Gods 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 reection on the fact that the madman seeks God:
the madman . . . is clearly, according to the rst, 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, Nietzsches 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 Nietzsches
metaphor for the sensible world a world in ux, constantly changing,
malleable and exible in the paths it permits us to take. God served as
a land and horizon, giving the sensible world a xed point of reference.
The horizon is thus Nietzsches metaphor for focal practices that give us
a place, determining what is important to us, and what counts as unim-
portant 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
xed suprasensible God, encompass the world. When we wipe away the
horizon, we destroy any xed point of reference for valuing the world.
When we unchain the earth from the sun, we deprive things of any xed
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 lled 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.
Between the Earth and the Sky 197
or the spreading of civilization, and nally the business enterprise.
However, all these are variations on the Christian-ecclesiastical and theo-
logical 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 lling 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
Heideggers 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 meta-
physics. But by this he does not refer to the thinkers explicit doctrine
on metaphysical issues; rather he means that their work manifests a parti-
cular understanding about the nature of what is as such in its entirety.
Heideggers 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 Nietzsches metaphysics becomes a reection
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).
Heideggers 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 signicance,
use, or purpose. Heideggers 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, exible, interchangeable, and
ready to be employed in an indenite variety of manners.
4
In the techno-
logical age, even people are reduced from modern subjects with xed
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 Nietzsches
claim that the death of God results in a lack of gravity. As Heidegger notes
(GA 44: 1923), Nietzsche connects the death of the Christian God with
4
See The Question Concerning Technology in QCT.
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 weighti-
ness 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 nd ourselves in
essence, or whether we lose ourselves in and with the existing nothingness
(GA 44: 1934).
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 Judeo-
Christian 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, Gods 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 nd 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 nding 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
Smtliche Werke: Kritische Studienausgabe, vol. II: Nachgelassene Fragmente 18841885 (Giorgio
Colli & Mazzino Montinari, Eds.). Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1980, p. 424.
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?
MEANI NG AND MATTERI NG
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 dened
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 intelligi-
bility alone. It is only when I am engaged in activities myself that any
particular object comes to hold a special signicance 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 dening 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
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 tempora-
rily) around an end or goal, in addition to giving us instrumentally impor-
tant 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 ofce 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 threat-
ening 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 innitely more, were innitely 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
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 interchange-
ability, 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 Heideggers 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
nd fulllment in experiencing ourselves as disclosers of the technologi-
cal world.
7
This possibility has recently been articulated by Dreyfus and
Spinosa in the course of an exploration of the possibility of learning to
afrm technology.
8
Dreyfus and Spinosa suggest that we could have a
fullling life in a technological age if we could learn to enjoy the excite-
ment of being able to respond exibly 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 afrming technology, we embrace a style of living that
6
Letter to Muzot, quoted at GA 5: 291/PLT: 113.
7
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.
Nietzsches primary metaphor for the world after the death of God a world in which there
are no xed points of reference, and in which no object has a real gravity or weight is a sea
with innite 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).
8
Hubert L. Dreyfus and Charles Spinosa, Highway Bridges and Feasts: Heidegger and
Borgmann on how to Afrm Technology, Man and World 30 (1997): 15977.
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 fulllment 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 Heideggers perspec-
tive, 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 signicant 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 entertain-
ment, 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 Heideggers 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 rst 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. Heideggers ana-
lysis, 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 fullling.
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 difcult 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 rst 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 impor-
tance. A sense of place in the thin sense only decides over which particular
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? Theres 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 elses, and so my life ultimately
lacks real signicance. 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 nish
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
Heideggers 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 signicance independent of their use-
fulness 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 impor-
tance, 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. Heideggers name for the interrelation of earth, sky, mortals, and
divinities is the fourfold.
Initially, Heideggers 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.
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: 1634/PLT:
172). As a second example, the Black Forest peasants 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 Heideggers 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 Heideggers
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 Heideggers 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. Heideggers insight is this:
we do not have things that matter to us if all there is is isolated, self-
contained, interchangeable entities in other words, resources. Such enti-
ties cannot matter to us, cannot have existential importance for us, because
none of them is essential to being who we are. Their exibility and
interchangeability make them efcient 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, Heideggers 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, Heideggers 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. 24769.
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.
Heideggers 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 techno-
logical 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.
Heideggers 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 condi-
tioned by it (as Borgmann has beautifully demonstrated).
11
Human beings
10
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 lt das Seiende anwesen.
11
Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987.
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 cofn 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 grati-
cation without discipline, when we set aside our own local culture, when
we try to engineer biologically and pharmacologically an end to all inr-
mity, 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 Gods creation, or feels a
reverence for holy days or the sanctity of human life (GA 5: 278/BW:
167). Hlderlins Hyperion expresses such a sense for divinity in the world:
And often, when I lay there among the owers, 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
Besinnung auf unser Wesen. Messkirch: Martin-Heidegger-Gesellschaft, 1994.
13
Friedrich Hlderlin, Hyperion, in Hyperion and Selected Poems (Eric L. Santner, Ed.).
New York: Continuum, 1990, pp. 56.
Mirroring, Heidegger explains, consists in each member of the four
becoming lighted, or intelligible, in the process of reecting 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 rst 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 Heideggers
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 worlds history and
mans sojourn in it (GA 5: 269/PLT: 91).
With this in mind, lets 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
Besinnung auf unser Wesen (die Erde als Erde wesen lt; das ist: Erblhen in der Huld des
Himmels).
15
GA 7: 174/PLT: 182. This passage, by the way, shows that the earlier reference to highway
bridges gathering must have been sloppiness on Heideggers 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.
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 conguration. 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
fourfolds 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. Heideggers 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 nally 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 satised
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 superuous.
I think that there are two answers to this problem. First, there is the
tactical observation that given the seductiveness of resources and techno-
logical devices, it would take an experience of the divine to awaken us to
the aws in the technological age. The God, Heidegger says, deranges
us in the sense that he calls us beyond the existing conguration 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 reduc-
tion 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
anew because we will see certain things around us as invested with holi-
ness 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 techno-
logical 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 embod-
ied, 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 onto-
theological God actually might allow for a richer, more fullling sense of
the divine. I can at this point start to redeem this claim. The onto-
theological 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 nd 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 nd him present in our world. The death
of the theologians God offers us at least the possibility of a recovery of
16
Only a God Can Save Us: Der Spiegels Interview with Martin Heidegger, in The Heidegger
Controversy: ACritical Reader (Richard Wolin, Ed.). Cambridge, MA: MITPress, 1992, pp. 91116.
17
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.
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 fulll-
ment. 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 sacrice, in
front of whom we could fall to our knees in awe (see GA 11: 77).
It should be obvious that the hope of nding 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 intima-
tions 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 pas-
sages, it is important to see that Heidegger is not a nostalgic and sentimen-
tal 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 nd 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 com-
ments 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 Nietzsches 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 Heideggers
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 nally 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 conse-
quence of an illusionand that one should value more than truth the force
that forms, simplies, 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
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 Heideggers interpretation and critique of Nietzsche, then, we
need to specify what exactly Heidegger considers to be objectionably meta-
physical about traditional approaches to truth, and why it is that he thinks
Nietzsches rejection of traditional approaches did not succeed in extricat-
ing him from metaphysical entanglements. Toward that end, lets clarify
what Heidegger means when he talks about the truth of entities as such
and as a whole.
1. THE MATERI AL AND ATTI TUDI NAL DI MENSI ONS 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 Heideggers account of the history of truth in
metaphysics, and especially his interpretation of Nietzsches account of truth
is to keep squarely in mind that he is not offering a theory of propositional
truth. Heidegger reads Nietzsches pronouncements about truth as pro-
nouncements 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 Nietzsches under-
standing 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 himthat
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)
Heideggers discussion of the history of truth explores the history of differ-
ent 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 Heideggers thought on the truth of entities by noting that our
Nietzsche and the Metaphysics of Truth 213
ordinary concept of truth, as Heidegger frequently observed, is ambiguous,
incorporating both a notion of material truth (Sachwahrheit) and propo-
sitional 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 black-
berry, 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 Bestndige). The steady or stable is that which we can count on
nding despite any supercial 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 thembecause,
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 black-
berry 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 Heideggers 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: 17980 (on the
double character of agreement).
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
rst, 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 them-
selves 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 intend-
ing, remembering and planning, hoping and rejecting. Representation con-
forms to entities, adjusts itself to them, and reects 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 Nietzsches use of the word true). But it is only
a preliminary grasp, because Heideggers 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.
2. THE TRUTH OF ENTI TI ES 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 carpenters 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 dened relative to practices (like hammer-
ing, 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 lets 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 carpenters 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, theres 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
dene 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 workmans practices but in the shoppers 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--vis
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 com-
petently 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 produc-
tion 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 nd 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.
Metaphysical Worlds
For Heidegger, metaphysics is not a subeld 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 unied under-
standings 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 Heideggers reading of truth in Nietzsche
without some sense for his overall narrative of the history of truth in meta-
physics. Accordingly, let me briey sketch out how Heidegger understands
the permutations of truth leading up to Nietzsche. Ill 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 dimen-
sions 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 homoisis, 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 homoisis
and mimsis, adjusting, conforming oneself to [the entity], correctness of
seeing, of perceiving as representing (GA 40: 195). For the Greeks, theria 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
unchanging nature of Gods understanding xes 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 rst 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 self-
disclosing truth but as bringing ourselves into a t 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, tting, 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 Gods understanding of the world: the under-
standing 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 t or measure up to Gods 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 (inspi-
ration), 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 corre-
spondence 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 Gods 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 xed 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
God to x and stabilize the truth of what things are, how are we to determine
which of the innitely 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, xed, and unchanging this time, what is reliably discov-
erable when our cognitive faculties are operating correctly and optimally. In
the Christian world, human beings were called upon to measure up to Gods
understanding of us indeed, it was Christian practices of repentance and
faith that brought us into a condition of being able to apprehend Gods
truth. According to Heidegger, this practice of securing our salvation by
suiting or adapting our faculties to Gods 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 Luthers concern with a good conscience for
securing salvation (GA 54: 75), to Descartes imposition of rules for right
reasoning (GA 54: 76), to Kants 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)
Material Dimension Attitudinal Dimension Paradigmatic
Activity
Philosophic
Greek
idea self-subsistent
forms. The true
entities are ideas;
concrete particulars
are instantiations of
ideas
homoisis adjustment
(Angleichung) of our
thoughts to forms
theria idein
To decide whether the Nietzschean account of truth continues this meta-
physical 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 signicant changes from epoch to epoch,
Heidegger identies 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 rst the material dimension of truth. Although different
metaphysical ages have identied different characteristics or traits as deter-
minative 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 (Bestndigkeit).
For instance, in platonic metaphysics, the truth of entities is found in the
unchanging forms that they instantiate because these remain stable through-
out 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 nding in it, what is stably or reliably discoverable. It is on the
chart 10. 1(a) (cont.)
Activity
Christian ens creatum an entity
truly is what God
conceives it to be
adaequatio measuring
up to (Anmessung) or
being t to receive
Gods ideas
faith in the
revealed
word,
learning
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
? ? ?
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 uctuating. 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 inde-
pendence 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 charac-
teristic 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 charac-
ter of being, a pervasive uniformity of style in which the life of a
culture comes to expression, holds itself therein, and becomes obsolete
(GA63: 36). Later, when he had developed an account of distinct epochs, he
discerned in each of these a pervasive uniformity. In the Beitrge, he noted
that dark priority that the One and that unity have everywhere in the
thought of being and identied this predilection for uniformity as some-
thing 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:
3. The Uniformity Thesis: All true entities share a single, uniformcharacteristic
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 uncon-
cealedness. 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 transforma-
tion 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
Platos 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 rst 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 xes itself in this adjustment (Ausrichtung). As a result of this conformity
(Angleichung) of perception as an idein to the idea, a homoisis, 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 altheia. Truth
becomes orthotes, correctness of perceiving and asserting. (GA 9: 2301)
We see in this passage, rst 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 percep-
tion 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
attitude gets oriented toward the true entities so that it can conformto 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 over-
shadowing of an understanding of truth as altheia that is, of truth as
something that only exists in a disclosure.
As a result of a metaphysics 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 nal 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
theria, 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 proposi-
tions and states of affairs in the world. But Heideggers 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 neces-
sary and sufcient conditions for the truth of a proposition. His question is
not what are the conditions under which a proposition is true? The question
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 eld. 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 ll 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 ction 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, eventhoughthere are almost notrue propositions at all inthose
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 partic-
ular 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 prop-
ositional 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 dened the
truth of the proposition as certainty. There might well be there almost
certainly are true propositions that are not certain. But uncertain proposi-
tions 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
Heideggers discussion of the latter are inquiries into the former.
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 iden-
tied take a decidedly different form, although Heidegger insists that one
cannot understand our age without recognizing the extent to which they
remain in force. Heideggers reection on Nietzsches 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
Heideggers critique of Nietzsche, and his charge that Nietzsche, even
while overturning the metaphysical tradition, remains entangled in a meta-
physics of truth.
3. NI ETZSCHE AND THE METAPHYSI CS OF TRUTH
Lets 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 ten-
dencies 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 signicance of
Nietzsches critique of truth as an error. Heidegger himself acknowledges
that Nietzsches views of truth represent an important departure from the
metaphysical tradition. In fact, Heideggers own approach to overcoming
metaphysics is heavily indebted to his reading of Nietzsches 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 signicantly transforms traditional
approaches to metaphysics. Thinking in terms of the six background
assumptions about truth allows us to explain why.
Heideggers interpretation of Nietzsche is summarized in the following
passage:
The truth, which is conceived [by Nietzsche] as error, was dened 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 attuned
2
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 una-
nimity. 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 fromthe 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.
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
homoisis. (GA 6.1: 55960)
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 materi-
ally 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 ow of becoming. Heidegger explains:
Truth in the sense of what is true the purported entities in the sense of that which is
stable, xed 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 some-
thing to be being in the sense of the stable and xed, holds onto entities and yet
does not nd that which is real: the world as a becoming world. (GA 6.1: 493)
On Heideggers 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 nd 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, rst of
all, as we just noted, something that cannot be grasped by attitudes oriented
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 eld 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 fromthe 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, owing, 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
owing 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 nd 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, reective, or cognitive guidance.
For skillful embodied beings who are bodying, there are no xed and
stable entities; only a constantly shifting and owing domain of percep-
tion 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
Nietzsches 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
Nietzsches 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 dened as that which is made secure,
the stable. (GA 6.1: 230)
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 afrms 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 dened 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:
1
0
. 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 ux. 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 Heideggers 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
Nietzsches 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 Heideggers 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
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 ones life
by taking up a particular perspective on life, by inhabiting a particular
possibility or range of possibilities. Ones perspective on the world is laid
out by the aims one adopts (aims opened up by the possibilities one inhab-
its). So the truth of what entities are will be relative to each individuals
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 out-
beyond-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 xed 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 ones 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 themby 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 engage-
ment 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
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
Nietzsches 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 solidies 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 deni-
tion. 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 xing
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 rst 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 thats 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:
2
0
. The Independence Thesis with respect to reality: What really is is inde-
pendent 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
us to take up a variety of incompatible perspectives in our engagement with
the world. Thus Nietzsche accepts:
3
0
. The Uniformity Thesis with respect to reality: What is real has a single,
uniform characteristic style.
To be specic, 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 xed 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 xed and
binding way of relating things, no standing obligations to prior arrange-
ments, and so on. We nd 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 reconguration (thus, entities are
unstable), but that they are open to reconguration is uniformly the case.
Before turning to the attitudinal dimension of truth, lets briey summa-
rize what we have learned about Nietzsches 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), theres 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 Nietzsches 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 Nietzsches thought is thus an important stage in Heideggers own effort
to overcome metaphysics. And yet, Heidegger contends, Nietzsches rejec-
tion of a metaphysics of material truth is purchased by reinscribing meta-
physics at the level of reality to be specic, 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, inde-
pendently 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 indenite variety of distinct ways
of being.
Heideggers critique of Nietzsches account of attitudinal truth follows a
similar pattern. That is, Heidegger acknowledges that Nietzsche has in an
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 indepen-
dent and uniform reality. But even here, Heidegger nds certain aspects of
Nietzsches account of our grasp of reality quite salutary. For instance,
Heidegger nds 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:
6
0
. 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 atti-
tudes as stances, ways of poising ourselves and preguring 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
solidication of becoming; the solidication becomes the denial of that which ows
and presses beyond itself; the solidication is a turning away from the genuinely real.
The true as that which is mistakenly solidied 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 Fr-wahr-halten, a
stance that holds something to be true. Each metaphysical epoch has sup-
posed that some stances give us a hold on things that lets them show up as
they really are for the ancient Greeks, this was theria; for the medieval
Christians, it was faith in the revealed word; and for the moderns, it was the
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.
Ill 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 under-
writes both his dismissal of the truth-directed attitudes as falsication, 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 falsications. For
values only exist within a practice of stabilizing the chaotic ow into perspec-
tival 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
Nietzsches 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 Nietzsches 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 owing 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 denitively established or xed.
Heidegger does think Nietzsche remains entangled in the metaphysics of
truth in another signicant way, however, because he maintains the ideal of
conformity and adjustment in our relationship to reality. We can detect
Nietzsches continued adherence to the background metaphysical assump-
tions 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 con-
formity (Angleichung), art succeeds as an assimilation (Eingleichung) a
meshing into or getting our lives into gear with the chaotic reality of the
word. Homoisis in Nietzsches 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 transguration that commands-dictates
(GA 6.1: 573). Thus Heidegger sees Nietzsche as abandoning the conform-
ity thesis with respect to truth but adhering to:
4
0
. 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 denition of
truth. Rather, it remains the guideline for positing the essence of truth as
making secure in contrast with art, which is as a transguration an attune-
ment 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 transguration, 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:
5
0
. 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
the process, adjust ourselves and assimilate ourselves to the chaotic reality of
the world.
Nietzsches objection to the attitudinal dimension of the metaphysical
tradition, then, is rst 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. Nietzsches 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).
Nietzsches 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 meta-
physical 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 rm 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 becom-
ing justness? The word justness is meant to indicate both sides to the
change in truth the devaluation of truth as traditionally understood follow-
ing 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 denes 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 conven-
tional 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.
Nietzsches account, does not exist in itself (GA 6.2: 289). So the partic-
ular relationship of power that justness wills to make eternal, is one in which
we bring out entities as a formof will to power (GA6.2: 2956). 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
justication 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 justication of this type
remains without either ground or a response (GA 6.2: 295). The attitudes
are not justied 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 any-
thing 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 rst 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
dened 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 Heideggers words, justness is a perspective-
positing 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 ones 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: just-
ness as a constructive, sorting out, and annihilating mode of thought, arising
from assessments of value: the highest representative of life itself. Then, of
wisdom, he notes: wisdomand its relationship to power: some day power will
be more inuential up until now error was, the rabbles assessment of value
is still too great even in those who are wise (ibid.). In this passage, then,
Nietzsche offers rst a set of practical means to liberate our tastes and
dispositions from xed, 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 ones perspectives, a control
that attains life in its highest dignity, a control that lets the true nature of
power emerge as denitive of wisdom. In Heideggers terms, this passage
shows that for Nietzsche, authentically being free is justness (GA 6.1: 576).
The passage concludes by distinguishing the rabbles assessment of value
from power. The rabble believes that values are xed 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 signications in the world), and also freedom from getting
caught in any single way of responding to the world. It will involve, as
Nietzsches note suggests, moments of construction, sorting out, and anni-
hilating. 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: rst 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: 5778). Unlike tradi-
tions 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 rst gains a height, secures it and thus sets up a direction.
Fromthis point of view, constructing is a commanding, which rst raises the
claim to command and creates a domain of command (GA 6.1: 5778). 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, signications 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 newformof 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 rst 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 work-
ing 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 neworientation 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
solidications, which might hinder the execution of the erection of a height
(GA 6.1: 5789). The solidications are the ways the chaotic world has
settled into more or less stable arrangements through our acquiring habitual
forms of response, xed dispositions for encountering the world. Justice gets
us into synch with chaos by refusing to itself such stable habits and disposi-
tions. It will destroy whatever would promote a decline into a xed 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 rst
positing a perspective. Heidegger thinks that we can detect this sort of
understanding of truth wherever, as Nietzsche puts it, what is necessary is
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 advertise-
ment. Such examples are signs of a boundless distress of all condence and
every trustworthiness drawing over the planet, which, in turn, points to the
deeper phenomenon: that not only some specic 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
supercial 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 Nietzsches 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 Heideggers critique of
Nietzsche, we would illuminate Heideggers own views on metaphysics and
truth. We have seen that Heidegger accepts Nietzsches 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 Nietzsches rejection of reason and cognition as providing a privi-
leged 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, Heideggers objection is somewhat
more subtle than that: namely, that in Nietzsches 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.
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 partic-
ular 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 unied, 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
chart 10. 1(b)
Activity
Philosophic
Greek
idea self-subsistent
forms. The true
entities are ideas;
concrete particulars
are instantiations of
ideas
homoisis adjustment
(Angleichung) of our
thoughts to forms
theria idein
Christian ens creatum an entity
truly is what God
conceives it to be
adaequatio measuring
up to (Anmessung) or
being t to receive
Gods ideas
faith in the
revealed
word,
learning
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
value to be an entity is
to be a value posited
relative to a
perspective
justness assimilation
to chaos by positing
our own values
propaganda
artistic
creation
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 Nietzsches thought are
connected: it is because Nietzsche privileges one form of attitudinal orienta-
tion to the world that he commits himself to one general understanding of
reality. For Heidegger, the deepest lesson to be drawn from Nietzsches
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 priv-
ileged 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 dig-
nity 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 Frhe 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 Erluterungen zu Hlderlins Dichtung. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1981.
Translated as: Elucidations of Hlderlins 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 Vortrge und Aufstze. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 2000.
GA8 Was heisst Denken? Frankfurt amMain: 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
GA 15 Seminare. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1986.
GA 16 Reden und andere Zeugnisse eines Lebensweges, 19101976. Frankfurt am Main:
Klostermann, 2000.
GA 17 Einfhrung in die phnomenologische Forschung. Frankfurt am Main:
Klostermann, 1994.
GA 19 Platon, Sophistes. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1992. Translated as: Platos
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:
GA 21 Logik: Die Frage nach der Wahrheit. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1976.
GA 22 Die Grundbegriffe der antiken Philosophie. Frankfurt amMain: Klostermann, 1993.
GA 24 Die Grundprobleme der Phnomenologie. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1975.
Translated as: Basic Problems of Phenomenology (A. Hofstadter, Trans.). Bloomington:
GA 25 Phnomenologische Interpretation von Kants Kritik der reinen Vernunft. Frankfurt am
Main: Klostermann, 1977. Translated as: Phenomenological Interpretation of Kants
Critique of Pure Reason (P. Emad & K. Maly, Trans.). Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1997.
GA 26 Metaphysische Anfangsgrnde 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
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 Phnomenologie des Geistes. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1980.
Translated as: Hegels Phenomenology of Spirit (P. Emad & K. Maly, Trans.).
GA 33 Aristoteles, Metaphysik 13. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1981.
Translated as: Aristotles Metaphysics Theta 13 (W. Brogan & P. Warnek, Trans.).
GA 34 Vom Wesen der Wahrheit: zu Platons Hhlengleichnis und Thetet. 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 Hlderlins Hymnen Germanien und Der Rhein. Frankfurt am Main:
Klostermann, 1980.
244 Works by Heidegger
GA 40 Einfhrung 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 Grundstzen.
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 abendlndischen Denken: die ewige
Wiederkehr des Gleichen. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1986.
GA 45 Grundfragen der Philosophie: ausgewhlte 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
GA 47 Nietzsches Lehre vom Willen zur Macht als Erkenntnis. Frankfurt am Main:
Klostermann, 1989.
GA 48 Nietzsche, der europische Nihilismus. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1986.
GA 53 Hlderlins Hymne Der Ister. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1984.
Translated as: Hlderlins Hymn The Ister (W. McNeill & Julia Davis, Trans.).
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 Phnomenologie. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1993.
GA 63 Ontologie: Hermeneutik der Faktizitt. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1988.
Translated as: Ontology: The Hermeneutics of Facticity (J. van Buren, Trans.).
GA 65 Beitrge 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 Vortrge. 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.
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.
Works by Heidegger 245
Index
adaptation, 191, 232, See Ereignis,
appropriation
altheia, 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, 17884, 186,
18792, 216, 221, 222, 223, 229,
232, 235, 236
being, understanding of, 14, 31, 33, 34,
83, 88, 90, 117, 125, 178, 17992
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, 2269, 2316, 236n3, 238,
239, 241, 242
Christian age, the, 7, 108, 15662,
16473, 182, 1979, 211, 21822,
224, 225, 234, 241, See also history
historical epochs
clearing, 6, 1417, 24, 25, 325, 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, 215, 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, 957, 97n3, 103, 104, 105,
10714, 116, 117, 120, See also
discourse
idle, 957, 97n3, 103, 104, 105,
11014, 116, 117
Davidson, Donald, 6, 40, 40n, 4352,
546, 102, 102n11, 104n13, 114
death, 157, 162, 172, 172n14, 195200,
202n7, 203, 204, 207, 210
Derrida, Jacques, 42, 42n6, 125, 193,
193n23
Descartes, Ren, 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
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, 20211, 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, 2049, 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, 602, 646, 69, 73, 74, 84,
85, 87, 88, 91, 146, 166, 212,
2269, 231, 2335, 238
essence, 1, 58, 1116, 24, 2635, 38,
41, 42, 61, 72n2, 73, 759, 81, 83,
121, 1246, 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, 97100, 102n11, 114
faith, 70, 108, 15668, 170, 182, 219,
220, 221, 225, 233, 237, 241
Faith, 158
fourfold, 2, 8, 195, 196, 204, 205, 205n9,
206, 207, 209
Frege, Gottlob, 75
Friedlnder, Paul, 16
gathering, 7, 32, 1279, 1324, 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,
15763, 165, 167, 170, 171, 172,
172n14, 181, 182, 191n22,
195200, 202n7, 203, 204, 20711,
218, 219, 221, 241
Heraclitus, 12, 120, 193
historiography, 181, 187, 188, 192, See
historiology
historiology, 181, 182, 1859, 193, 194,
See historiography
history
historical epochs, 7, 8, 31, 32, 17987,
18993, 1959, 202, 203, 2059,
21822, 2246, 233
Hlderlin, 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, Sren, 159, 159n3, 161,
170, 170n11, 171, 210n17
Lafont, Cristina, 35, 36, 37, 120, 121,
144n18, 145n18
language, 2, 4, 7, 13, 38, 402, 449, 51,
547, 62n4, 63n5, 77, 78, 957,
248 Index
97n3, 99, 100, 102, 103, 104, 109,
11316, 11939, 141, 1437, 149,
1514, 1579, 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, 12734, 136, 137
Luther, Martin, 220
McDowell, John, 119, 123
meaning, 2, 3, 7, 1517, 22, 27, 36, 38,
457, 49, 51n31, 52, 53, 63, 64,
65n6, 6770, 77, 78, 82, 83,
95103, 10810, 11417, 120, 121,
1245, 128, 1304, 136, 137,
13943, 148, 1526, 160, 165, 188,
192, 197, 199, 200, 210, 230, 238,
239
Meaning, 109
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 57, 58n1,
59n3, 61, 62, 6671
metaphysics, 8, 12, 17, 27, 41, 42, 144,
144n17, 148, 150, 151, 165, 170,
17885, 18791, 193, 195, 198,
210, 212, 213, 21729, 2317,
2402, 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
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 8, 17, 17n2, 57, 58,
135, 136, 190, 193, 193n23, 1969,
202n7, 212, 213, 215, 218, 221,
22643, 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, 15668, 1703
passion, 166n10, 168, 170, 171
perception, 20, 52, 57, 58, 60, 61, 62n4,
6571, 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, 404, 74, 75,
77, 81, 84, 85, 97, 115, 119, 120,
123, 156, 167, 17780, 18293,
212, 213, 218, 226
phusis, 181, 223
Plato, 7, 38, 73, 74, 7780, 826, 91,
193, 212, 223, 224, 244
poetry, 13740, 1428, 1513, 169
Putnam, Hilary, 97100, 1024, 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,
12832, 1347, 141, 142, 143, 148,
1504, 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
signication, 26, 55, 63, 71, 81, 83, 107,
109, 142
Index 249
sky, 8, 88, 195, 2049, See also fourfold
Socrates, 80, 85, 86
talk, idle, 95, See conversation, idle
Tarski, Alfred, 447, 49
Taylor, Charles, 195
technology, 8, 28, 32, 149, 150, 179,
179n10, 184, 191, 193, 195206,
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, 437, 73, 75,
75n4, 77, 79, 81, 835, 87, 219, 223
as homoisis, 12, 18, 218, 220, 223,
227, 241
as justness, 199, 23642
ontic, 6, 7, 8, 13, 27, 39, 75, 82, 179,
212, 21418
ontological, 11, 13, 14, 39, 213, 215,
216, 21822, 2246, 230
propositional, 47, 12, 13, 15, 16,
1821, 30, 346, 39, 43, 44, 4752,
55, 56, 716, 7981, 86, 89, 97n3,
164, 170, 21315, 224, 225, 228
Tugendhat, Ernst, 16, 348, 38n9
turning, 4, 123, 130
unconcealment, 18, 1118, 213, 257,
302, 3440, 43, 48, 52, 56, 72, 73,
79, 84, 85, 87, 91, 120, 154, 181,
204, 232
uncovering, 2, 4, 13, 14, 1626, 30, 32,
346, 525, 64, 67, 802, 106, 110,
114, 153, 183, 187, 204, 214, 238
will to power, 231, 232, 237
worlds, 1, 2, 17, 30, 36, 55, 232, 242
250 Index

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