Heidegger

Heidegger and Unconcealment

Truth, Language, and History

This book includes ten essays that trace the notion of unconcealmentas it develops from Martin Heidegger’s early writings to his laterwork, shaping his philosophy of truth, language, and history.Unconcealment is the idea that what entities are depends on theconditions that allow them to manifest themselves. This concept,central to Heidegger’s work, also applies to worlds in a dual sense:first, a condition of entities manifesting themselves is the existence ofa 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 distinctworlds that have emerged and disappeared in history.Heidegger’s thought as a whole can profitably be seen as working

out the implications of the original understanding of unconcealment.

Mark A. Wrathall received his Ph.D. in philosophy from theUniversity of California, Berkeley, and is currently professor of phi-losophy at the University of California, Riverside. He is the author ofHow 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. WRATHALLUniversity of California, Riverside

For Amy, Hannah, Damon, Madeline, and Nicholas

Contents

Acknowledgments page ix

Credits xi

Introduction 1

PART I TRUTH AND DISCLOSURE

1 Unconcealment 11

Appendix on Tugendhat 34

2 The Conditions of Truth in Heideggerand Davidson 40

3 On the “Existential Positivity of Our Abilityto be Deceived” 57

4 Heidegger on Plato, Truth, and Unconcealment:The 1931–1932 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 andPascal on the Phenomenology of Religious Faith 156

PART I I I HISTOR ICAL WORLDS

8 Philosophers, Thinkers, and Heidegger’s Place in theHistory of Being 177

vii

9 Between the Earth and the Sky: Heidegger on Life After theDeath of God 195

10 Nietzsche and the Metaphysics of Truth 212

Works by Heidegger 243

Index 247

viii Contents

Acknowledgments

Reflecting on the genesis of this book, it is rather humbling to realize howmany people have contributed to its development over many years. Mygreatest debt is to my intellectual mentor and friend Bert Dreyfus. Bert hasgenerously read every draft that I have sent him, and unfailingly respondedwith his characteristic vigor and candor. His suggestions, insights, and hardquestions have propelled my thinking on Heidegger. While we don’t alwaysagree, I always profit from our discussions. I have discussed the ideascontained in this book with a number of philosophers in a variety ofsettings, including my students and colleagues at Brigham YoungUniversity and the University of California, Riverside; at meetings of theInternational Society for Phenomenological Studies, the American Societyfor Existential Phenomenology, the Parlement des Philosophes, the Martin-Heidegger-Forschungsgruppe, the British Society for PhenomenologySummer 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; theUniversity of Exeter; Georgetown University; Chengchi University;National Sun Yat-Sen University; Utah Valley University; the University ofNevada, Reno; Claremont Graduate School; the University of Montana,Missoula; and Södertorn University. I am grateful to all of those institutionsfor providing me with the opportunity to present my work and, moreimportantly, to learn from the people in attendance. I couldn’t possiblylist everyone who has helped me along with questions or suggestions inthese settings – not just because the list would be very long, but alsobecause in many instances I don’t know their names. With apologies tothose whom I will inevitably overlook, however, I would like to specificallythank Bill Blattner, Dave Bohn, Albert Borgmann, Taylor Carman,Dave Cerbone, Simon Critchley, Steve Crowell, Jim Faulconer, CharlieGuignon, Béatrice Han-Pile, Piotr Hoffman, Stephan Käufer, 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, Iam grateful to Beatrice Rehl, Emily Spangler, and Luane Hutchinsonat Cambridge University Press for their patience, encouragement, andprofessionalism.

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. 337–57. Reprinted by permission of Blackwell.

Chapter 2 was originally published in The Monist 82, no. 2 (1999): 304–23.Reprinted by permission of the publisher. © 1999 THE MONIST: AnInternational Quarterly Journal of General Philosophical Inquiry. La Salle,Illinois, USA 61301.

Chapter 3 was originally published in The Philosophy of Deception, ed. ClancyMartin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 67–81. Reprinted bypermission of Oxford University Press.

Chapter 4 was originally published in Inquiry 47, no. 5 (2004): 443–63.Inquiry can be found online at http://www.informaworld.com. Reprintedby permission of Taylor and Francis.

Chapter 5 was originally published in Philosophical Topics 27 (Fall 1999):25–46. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.

Chapter 7 was originally published in The Journal of the British Society forPhenomenology 37, no. 1 (January 2006): 75–88. Reprinted by permissionof the publisher; © 2006 The British Society for Phenomenology.

Chapter 8 was originally published in Appropriating Heidegger, ed. JamesE. Faulconer and Mark A. Wrathall (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 2000), pp. 9–29. Reprinted by permission of Cambridge UniversityPress.

Chapter 9 was originally published in Religion After Metaphysics, ed. MarkA. Wrathall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 69–87.Reprinted by permission of Cambridge University Press.

xi

Introduction

“Unconcealment,” “Unverborgenheit,” was a term that first entered Heidegger’sphilosophy as a translation for the ancient Greek word alêtheia. Themore standard translation of alêtheia is “truth” (Wahrheit in German), butHeidegger elected to go with a literal translation: a-lêtheia means literally“not-concealed.” He did this because he believed the early Greeks thoughtof “truth” as primarily a matter of “making available as unconcealed, asthere out in the open, what was previously concealed or covered up” (seeGA 63: 12).

Heidegger eventually came to believe that the Greeks themselves hadfailed to grasp what was essential to the notion of unconcealment, what hehad initially thought was hinted at in their word alêtheia. He thus set tothe task of thinking the original notion more originally than anyone hadbefore (see GA 9: 237–8). Heidegger’s thought can profitably be seen asworking out the implications of the original understanding of unconceal-ment. To think unconcealment as such is to reject the idea that there areentities, we know not what, existing as they are independently of theconditions under which they can manifest themselves. Unconcealment isan 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 areuniquely 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 invirtue of the world within which they can be disclosed and encountered.But these worlds are themselves subject to unconcealment – they emergehistorically and are susceptible to dissolution and destruction. Thus beingitself must be understood not as something determinate and stable, but interms of the conditions for the emergence of entities and worlds out ofconcealment 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,” Heideggerobserves, “a dual sense: 1. having no awareness of, and 2. no possiblecontext” (GA 36/37: 188). Sense (1) describes a superficial form of conceal-ment, where something is, but we lack a sense for it. Sense (2) points to themore profound and fundamental form of concealment. According toHeidegger, for an entity to be is for it to stand in a context of constitutiverelations. The lack of any possible context is thus an ontological conceal-ment – the absence of the conditions under which the entity in questioncouldmanifest itself in being. Thus there is a duality or productive ambiguitybuilt into the core notion of unconcealment: unconcealment consists inbringing things to awareness, but also creating the context within whichthings can be what they are.

The core notion of unconcealment functions as a methodological prin-ciple throughout Heidegger’s work. By methodological principle, I meanthat unconcealment was in Heidegger’s approach to philosophy the guide-line for discerning the role and constitutive structure of the elements ofontology. One can see this by considering how it is that Heidegger definedthe ontological features of his thought – for instance, the existentialia ofBeing and Time (Heidegger’s ontological categories for the human mode ofbeing), Ereignis, earth and world, language and the fourfold. All of thesenotions were understood in terms of the role they played in opening up aworld, and disclosing us and uncovering entities on the basis of the possibil-ities opened up by a particular world projection. Heidegger’s ontology wasgrounded in this way in the notion of unconcealment. The question inindividuating and understanding ontological structures was always “whatdoes this contribute to opening up a world and letting entities show up as thethings they are?” Put differently, “what disclosive function does it perform?”

The same methodological principle is crucial to Heidegger’s 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. Hisfocus on ontological structures and functions leads Heidegger to a ratheridiosyncratic use of terminology. Heidegger uses words like language, truth,and history in what he sometimes calls an “ontologically broad” sense.Indeed, the very first rule of thumb for interpreting Heidegger is to remindoneself constantly that Heidegger tends to use his terms in a way quitedistinct from the ordinary, everyday sense in which they are used. Indeed,this practice is so common that he typically alerts the reader when, for achange, he is using the word “in the usual sense” (im gewöhnlichen Sinne; imüblichen Sinne) or in the contemporary sense (im heutigen Sinne). Heideggersees words in their familiar or everyday sense as an ontic and thus derivative(abgeleitet) use of words, which are properly understood in their moreauthentic, ontological sense.

A complete analysis of Heidegger’s 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), theoriginal sense (der ursprünglichen Sinn), the authentic sense (der eigentlichenSinn), 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 wemust summarize.

Heidegger defines sense in general in the following way:

Sense is that within which the intelligibility of something holds itself, without itselfexpressly and thematically coming into view. “Sense” means the “onto which” of theprimary projection, from out of which something can be grasped as that which it isin its possibility. Projecting opens up possibilities, which is to say that it makespossible. (GA 2: H. 151)

Projecting is Heidegger’s term for the way that we understand something byseeing how it relates to other things and activities. I understand a knife, forinstance, by knowing in advance what a knife will do when brought intocontact with all manner of things – butter and meat and onions and graniteand so on. Or by understanding what place the knife plays in tying togethera whole network of activities in, say, a kitchen. In understanding the knife,I project, that is, I am led or directed to other entities and activities, and graspa certain pattern the knife makes in the world. The sense of the knife is thepattern of those activities or possibilities for use toward which I am orientedwhen I understand what the knife is and into which I am led when I use theknife. It is thus from out of or on the basis of some set of projected relationsthat 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 sensorimotorcontingencies. We can project an entity onto its possibilities of use, as withour knife example. Or we can project something onto the ontologicalstructures that allow it to be the kind of entity it is – for instance, projectinga knife onto the structures of equipmentality and the equipmental functionsthat allow it to be equipment, or projecting a human life onto the carestructure that allows it to be a human form of life. This last form of projectionshows us the being-sense (Seinssinn, often translated as “meaning of being”).One arrives at the being-sense of something, then, by discovering whatontological structure most fundamentally shapes the possibilities that con-stitute that something as the thing it is. The “broad sense” (weiten Sinne) of aterm 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, narrowsense. That is, he asks what the thing to which we normally refer contributesto unconcealment, and what structural elements allow it to make that con-tribution. He then uses the term in such a way that it includes in its extensioneverything that shares the same ontological structure or function.

Introduction 3

For example, we normally predicate truth of propositional entities likeassertions or beliefs. But we can grasp a proposition as potentially true orfalse only to the extent that we can understand how to use it to uncover ormake salient a fact or state of affairs. So we could say that the being of truthresides in uncovering. Thus Heidegger takes uncovering in a broad sense –

lifting into salience – to be the ontological function of truth. He then appliesthe term in a broad sense to anything that uncovers. So, for instance, if I drive anail into a board, I am uncovering the way a hammer is used. In this broadsense, my action, for Heidegger, is true – in hammering, I lift into saliencewhat a hammer is and how it is used. Or if a building like a medieval cathedralsupports the faithful in their efforts to inhabit a world opened up by God’sgrace, the cathedral is also true in the ontologically broad sense – it works bylifting into salience what is essential ormost important about such a world, andsupporting the disclosive practices of that world’s inhabitants.

Now, if one does not keep firmly inmind that Heidegger is using his termsin a sense that is ontologically broad, it leads to terrible errors in interpretingwhat he has to say. For example, it makes a complete mess of things if (a) onethinks that truth is propositional truth (full stop), (b) one reads Heideggerdiscussing how swinging a hammer shows the truth about a hammer, andthen (c) one concludes from this that Heidegger thinks swinging a hammeris true in the same way that a proposition is true, that it somehow must becashed out in terms of a series of propositions the hammer-swinger knowsabout hammer-swinging.

So whenHeidegger uses terms like truth, language, and history in a broadsense 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 dorefer to what we ordinarily refer to with these terms (along with a broaderrange of phenomena), they only do so insofar as they are picking them out ashaving a particular ontological structure or function, as playing a particularlyimportant role in unconcealment. One might say Heidegger’s terms func-tion to pick out what is ordinarily referred to by those terms “under anontological description,” and, consequently, they also pick out other thingsthat are not ordinarily referred to by those terms.

This book consists of ten essays that try to trace out the pattern thatthe logic of unconcealment makes in Heidegger’s thought about truth,language, and history. Although some chapters are more focused onHeidegger’s earlier writings, and some are more focused on his later essays,they cover the entire span of Heidegger’s work. In my view, Heidegger’sthought develops less in starts and stops and dramatic turnings, and more asa gradual recognition of the implications of pursuing an ontology of uncon-cealment. This gradual recognition unfolds as Heidegger explores differentways or paths of thought (Denkwege). His appreciation of unconcealmentexpands and deepens over time. But Heidegger’s ways of describing uncon-cealment are constantly changing too. The deepening and enriching of his


thought of unconcealment cannot be separated from the expanding andshifting vocabularies he has for talking about unconcealment. Indeed, acentral feature of Heidegger’s 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, hemeant a couple ofthings. First, that there was no final goal or destination to his thought, that itwas not possible to arrive at a point where everything was clear, where allproblems were solved, where we have definitive answers to philosophicalproblems. 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, noright way for the world to be organized, no single way that world disclosureworks. As a result, all we can hope for in philosophy is an ever renewed andrefined insight into the workings of unconcealment.

On this view of philosophy, progress consists in seeing and describing thephenomena of unconcealment more perspicuously, and communicatingthese insights more successfully. A philosopher’s task is to keep his or herthought constantly under way, trying out new ways to explore productivelythe philosophical domain, remaining on them as long as profitable, but alsoabandoning them and setting off in a different way when the former way isexhausted. The aim is to participate in unconcealment, bringing it to ourawareness, heightening our sensitivity and responsiveness to it. In his dia-logue “From a Conversation on Language,”Heidegger penned the followingexchange:

JAPANESE: One says: you have changed your standpoint.INQUIRER: I left an earlier standpoint, not in order to exchange it for another, but

rather because even the prior position was merely a stopover whileunderway. What is enduring in thinking is the way.

(GA 12: 94)

Or elsewhere:

The ways of reflection constantly are changing, according to the station along the wayat 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 questionworthy. (GA 7: 65)

What matters most in reading Heidegger is travelling at his side along hisways, letting him guide us through the philosophical landscape until webegin to discern the phenomena and understand the philosophical issuesposed by the phenomena. His philosophy is meant to afford us an appren-ticeship in seeing and describing unconcealment.

Heidegger’s account of unconcealment emerged from his efforts to thinkthrough the essence of truth, as well as the conditions that make truthpossible. The essays in the first section explore Heidegger’s account ofpropositional truth and his argument that propositional truth necessarilydepends on unconcealment. Chapter 1 looks at the various facets of

Introduction 5

unconcealment that emerge as Heidegger works his way from propositionaltruth to the ontological sense of truth that is unconcealment. This culmi-nates in his thought of a clearing, understood as something distinct from theunconcealment of entities and even of being.

The notion of unconcealment had, for much of Heidegger’s career, anintimate connection with truth. This is not because Heidegger thought truthas typically conceived in contemporary philosophy – that is, the success ofassertions or beliefs or other such propositional entities in agreeing with theway things are – had a special role to play in unconcealment. Rather, it isbecause he thought that unconcealment was an essential condition of therebeing truth in this narrower contemporary philosophical sense:

Alêtheia means, translated literally: unconcealment. Yet little is gained with liter-alness . . . . Alêtheia does not mean “truth,” if by that one means the validity ofassertions in the form of propositions. It is possible that what is to be thought inalêtheia, 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 everydetermination of “truth.” (GA 15: 403)

Because unconcealment was an ontological presupposition of truth, but notthe other way around, it is a mistake to take Heidegger as transferring tounconcealment the properties possessed by truth as it is ordinarily under-stood. A failure to realize that Heidegger was using the word truth in a broador ontological sense proved for many in Heidegger’s day (and many still)an insuperable obstacle to understanding what Heidegger meant withhis account of unconcealment. As the appendix to Chapter 1 explores,Heidegger used truth as a name for unconcealment, despite the risk ofmisunderstanding, 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 unconcealmentWahrheit, truth, because he hearsin the German word for truth, Wahrheit, the verb wahren, to preserve, tosafeguard, to maintain and protect and look after. The truth of an entity,what the entity really or truly is, is its essence. And, Heidegger argues,“‘essence’ (Wesen) is the same word as ‘enduring’ (währen), remaining”(GA 7: 44). The true entity is what, having been brought into unconceal-ment, can be stabilized and maintained so that it endures in presence: “wethink 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 weordinarily think of it. The German word for truth still contains an echo orresonance of this connection between the truth of entities and maintainingor preserving things in unconcealment.

Chapter 2 compares Heidegger’s approach to truth to DonaldDavidson’s, and helps to clarify the sense in which Heidegger believes thatunconcealment is “presupposed in every determination of ‘truth’.” The


third chapter explores how a phenomenology of unconcealment thinksthrough deception as a counterconcept to unconcealment. The final chap-ter in this section explores Heidegger’s 1931–2 lecture course on The Essenceof Truth. It argues that Heidegger read Platonic ideas, not only as stage settingfor the Western philosophical tradition’s privileging of conceptualizationover practice, and its correlative treatment of truth as correctness, but also asan early attempt to work through the fundamental experience of unconceal-ment. Several of Heidegger’s more famous claims about truth, for examplethat propositional truth is grounded in truth as world disclosure, or hiscritique of the self-evidence of truth as correspondence, are first revealedin 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 oflanguage needs to be understood as based on unconcealment: “unconceal-ment is not ‘dependent’ on saying, but rather every saying already needs thedomain of unconcealment.” He elaborates:

Only where unconcealment already prevails can something become sayable, visible,showable, perceivable. If we keep in view the enigmatic prevailing of Alêtheia, thedisclosing, then we come to the suspicion that even the whole essence of language isbased in dis-closing, in the prevailing of Alêtheia. (GA 9: 443)

The first chapter in the second section, Chapter 5, explores the sense inwhich, in Being and Time, Heidegger thinks of linguistic meaning as depend-ent on a socially disclosed world. The next essay explores themeaning of oneof Heidegger’s most famous assertions – “language is the house of being” – asa way of understanding how Heidegger’s account of language develops butalways remains closely tied to a notion of unconcealment. This chapterchronicles how Heidegger moved from using the word language in theordinary sense to an ontologically broad use of the term in his later worksto name the structure of gathering significations that characterizes anyparticular world disclosure. The final essay in the section can be thought ofas a particular application of this account of originary language, drawing onboth Heidegger and Pascal to explore a phenomenological account of therole the Bible plays in opening up the Christian world. By focusing onthe Christian world, this essay also serves as a transition to the final sectionof the book, which looks at Heidegger’s understanding of history as a seriesof epochs of unconcealment.

The first essay in the history section of the book offers an overview of theidea that history should be thought of in terms of unconcealment and thus asa sequence of different world disclosures. The history that interestsHeidegger is a history of different ways in which entities are able to showthemselves. The “essence of history,” Heidegger explains, shows itself inthe “separation of the truth of entities from possibilities of essence thatare kept in store and permitted but in each case not now implemented”

Introduction 7

(GA 69: 162). From the perspective of unconcealment, then, historical agesare understood as the establishment of a “truth of entities” – a truth aboutwhat entities really are – which is secured in its truth by separating off one setof possibilities from other admissible sets of possibilities, sets of ways tounderstand and use and relate the entities.

On this view, different entities show themselves in different historicalages, because each age is grounded in a different unconcealment of being,with correspondingly different possibilities showing up as definitive of enti-ties. The transition from one age to another thus poses a danger that entitieswill 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 aworld that understands constitutive relations in terms of efficient causality:

In whatever manner the destiny of disclosing may prevail, unconcealment, in whicheverything that is shows itself at any given time, holds the danger that human beingsmistake themselves in the midst of what is unconcealed and misinterpret it. In thisway, where everything presencing presents itself in the light of connections of causeand 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 acause, to the causa efficiens. He then even becomes the God of the philosophers,namely that which determines the unconcealed and concealed according to thecausality of making, without ever considering the origin of the essence of thiscausality. (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 thuswhat we are engaged in when we are most fully realizing what it is to behuman, is “to guard over the unconcealment of every essence on this earth”(GA 7: 36). Chapter 9 explores Heidegger’s hope that we could escape fromthe technological age by means of a new disclosure of the world, one openedup by our relationship to the fourfold of gods, mortals, the earth, and the sky.Chapter 10 draws the book full circle by using Heidegger’s critique ofNietzsche’s account of truth to illuminate how Heidegger understands ourcurrent historical age, as it reviews Heidegger’s interpretation of Nietzscheas the thinker of this technological epoch. It also outlines how Heideggerthinks of the history of philosophy as a history of metaphysics, and exploreshis account of metaphysics in terms of the truth of entities.

The chapters in this book span the last ten years of my own engagementwith Heidegger’s thought. Like Heidegger himself, I have experimentedwith different ways to approach the matter to be thought. These essaysmanifest a variety of approaches to understanding and expressing hisviews. For this collection, I have made some changes to these essays. But Ialso have tried to be tolerant of the fact that I would no longer express manyof these ideas in the way I did when I first set out on the trail ofunconcealment.


part i

TRUTH AND DISCLOSURE

1

Unconcealment

TRUTH AND UNCONCEALMENT

During the two decades between 1925 and 1945, the essence of truth is apervasive issue in Heidegger’s work. He offers several essay courses devotedto the nature of truth, starting in 1925 with Logik. Die Frage nach derWahrheit, (GA 21), and continuing with Vom Wesen der Wahrheit. Zu PlatonsHöhlengleichnis and Theätet (Winter Semester 1931–2, GA 34), Vom Wesen derWahrheit (Winter Semester 1933–4, GA 36–7), and Grundfragen derPhilosophie. Ausgewählte “Probleme” der “Logik” (Winter Semester 1937–8,GA 45). He also includes a significant discussion of the essence of truthin virtually every other lecture course taught during this period.Particularly notable in this regard are the Parmenides lecture course of1942–3 (GA 54), Einleitung in die Philosophie (Winter Semester 1928–9,GA 27), and Nietzsches Lehre vom Willen zur Macht als Erkenntnis (SummerSemester 1939, GA 47).

Heidegger’s writings during this period also reflect his preoccupationwith truth. In addition to the essay “Vom Wesen der Wahrheit” (GA 9),many of his other works include extended discussions of the essence oftruth. These include Being and Time (GA 2), essays like “Vom Wesen desGrundes” (GA 9), “Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes” (GA 5), and “Was istMetaphysik?” (GA 9), and unpublished works like the Beiträge (GA 65) andBesinnung (GA 66).

After 1946, by contrast, there are few extended discussions of truth inHeidegger’s writings. Indeed, in the last few decades of his work, Heideggerrarely even mentions the essence of truth (des Wesen der Wahrheit) or thequestion of truth (die Wahrheitsfrage; although other locutions like the truthof 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 Internationaland Area Studies at Brigham Young University.

11

see, for example, the 1973 “Seminar in Zähringen,” GA 15: 373). But thisshould be seen as a merely terminological shift. For Heidegger, the essenceof truth is always understood in terms of unconcealment, and Heideggernever stops inquiring into unconcealment. Indeed, one is hard-pressed tofind any work in Heidegger’s vast corpus that does not have some discussionof unconcealment.

The terminological shift from talk of truth to unconcealment is a resultof his recognition of the misleadingness of using the word truth to nameunconcealment – a recognition brought about by the gradual realizationthat the metaphysical tradition’s blindness to unconcealment is largely aresult of a rather narrow notion of truth. “In the beginning of metaphysics,it was decided that the essence of truth as alêtheia (unconcealment andrevealing) would henceforth retreat before the determination of truth aslikening (homoiôsis, adaequatio), . . . a determination that was first rooted intruth as unconcealment.” From that point on, Heidegger argues, truth’s“character of opening up and revealing sinks unquestioned into oblivion”(GA 6.2: 286). And as he explains in 1949:

In its answers to the question concerning entities as such, metaphysics operateswith a prior representation of being necessarily and hence continually. But meta-physics does not induce being itself to speak, for metaphysics does not give thoughtto being in its truth, nor does it think such truth as unconcealment, nor does itthink this unconcealment in its essence. (GA 9: 369/280)

From this point on, Heidegger speaks and writes consistently of the essenceof 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, hisprimary interest was always unconcealment. As he notes self-reflectivelyduring the “Heraclitus Seminar” (1966–7), “Alêtheia as unconcealmentoccupied 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 essenceof truth (see, e.g., GA 65: 351–2), his view of it remains unchanged in itsfundamental outline.

The fundamental outline, or what I call the platform, of Heidegger’sview of truth forms the basis both for his critique of the metaphysicaltradition of philosophy, and for his own constructive account of ontologyand 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 (Übereinstimmung) as the conditionof 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, itcorresponds with the matters and the states of affairs about which it says some-thing. The being true of an assertion thus signifies such corresponding. What

12 Truth and Disclosure

therefore is truth? Truth is correspondence. Such correspondence exists becausethe 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 beunderstood on a representational model of language. He argues insteadthat correspondence exists when our orientation to the world allows what isto show itself in a particular way, and thus it can be understood as abringing out of concealment.

2. The truth (uncoveredness or discoveredness, Entdecktheit) of entities.An entity is true when it is uncovered, that is, made available forcomportment.

Propositional truth (1) is grounded in the truth of entities, because a trueassertion can only correspond or fail to correspond with the way things areif entities are available as the standard against which the assertion orproposition 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 betrue in a derived sense” (GA 27: 78).

The truth – that is, the uncovering or making manifest – of entities canbe brought about through an assertion or a theoretical apprehension,but it normally occurs in our practical involvements with things in theworld. “Ontic manifesting . . . happens in accordance with an attuned[stimmungsmäßigen] and instinctive finding oneself in the midst of entities,and in accordance with the striving and moving comportment to entitiesthat is grounded along with it” (GA 9:131).

3. The truth of being. There is an unconcealment (Unverborgenheit) ofbeing when an understanding of the being or essence of everythingthat is shapes all the possibilities for comportment in the world.

Ontic truth (2) is grounded in the truth of being. Heidegger argued thatentities are constituted as the entities they are by the relationships they bearto things, people, activities, and so on. Nothing is what it is without theserelationships. There are then two sides to being as the constitutive groundof an entity. First, there must be more or less enduring relationships for theentity to inhabit. Second, it must be possible to distinguish between thoserelationships that are essential to the being of the entity, and those that arenot. The unconcealment of being involves both those two sides:

(a) The disclosure (Erschlossenheit) of Dasein and of the world. The idea isthat entities can only be available for comportment on the basis of aprior disclosure of the world as the meaningful relational structurewithin which entities can show up as what they are. In addition, sinceentities are uncovered in terms of their availability for comportment,

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their uncovering requires the prior disclosure of Dasein as an actingand understanding being. In Being and Time, Heidegger expressedthis idea as follows: “the uncoveredness of entities within-the-worldis grounded in the world’s disclosedness. But disclosedness is thatbasic character of Dasein according to which it is its ‘there.’Disclosedness is constituted by disposedness (Befindlichkeit), 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. Heidegger’scatchphrase 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 meansthat the unconcealment of beings requires first an unconcealment ofthe most fundamental, essential aspect of entities that makes themwhat they are. This works not by being thought about, but by disposingus to encounter entities in a particular way, as having a particularessence. We encounter entities, in other words, on the basis of “anoriginal view (form) that is not specifically 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 canonly 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 anunderstanding of being or essence can prevail while incompatiblepossibilities 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 orcharacteristic of things, or a kind of action we perform on things, or eventhe being of things. It names, instead, a domain or structure that allowsthere to be things with properties and characteristics, or modes of being.This is not a spatial domain or physical entity, or any sort of entity at all.It is something like a space of possibilities.

Planks 1–3 give us possibilities for different experiences of entities anddifferent actions with entities, for different goals to be pursued, or forms oflife to be lived. These possibilities are the possibilities opened up by theunderstanding of being and essences. But what is the space that allowsthose possibilities to be actual possibilities – that is, to be the possibilitiesthat actually shape a given historical existence? This is to ask “what, giventhat there has been a progression of different truths of being in history,allows any particular truth of being to prevail?”


Heidegger’s answer is the clearing. The clearing is that some truth ofbeing prevails because other truths of being do not.

I call 1–4 planks in Heidegger’s platform for thinking about truth. Themetaphor of a platform is meant to emphasize that these elements of hisview stand next to each other in the sense that no single plank encom-passes all the others. Each plank or element, in other words, involvesspecific features that distinguish them from one another. They are linkedtogether in such a way that they provide each other with mutual support,and they could not function independently of each other. But they alsocannot be reduced to each other. They are different modes or ways ofunconcealment, and together they provide the basis for our engagementin the world. The platform describes Heidegger’s considered view on truthand 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 discussin 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 inthe platform consists in, and how each plank is linked to the next one. Thefirst step is to say something about what holds them together. Heideggerproposes that each plank is a kind of truth, only because it involvesunconcealment. So, we might ask, what, in general, is unconcealment?We will then be in a position to explain each plank in more detail.

UNCONCEALMENT IN GENERAL

The word that is generally translated as unconcealment or unconcealed-ness is Unverborgenheit. This, in turn, is Heidegger’s preferred, and ratherliteral, translation for the Greek word alêtheia, itself ordinarily translated astruth. Heidegger uses truth (Wahrheit) and unconcealment interchange-ably for much of his career, well aware that this practice invites severalcontrary misunderstandings.

The first misunderstanding is to think that Heidegger defines propositio-nal truth as unconcealment; the second is to transfer to the notion ofunconcealment features present in our ordinary understanding of truth(see the Appendix to this chapter). Because the analysis of unconcealmentis an analysis of the ground of propositional truth, it should be clear thatunconcealment is not to be taken as a (re)definition of propositional truth.Heidegger was emphatic about this both early and late; compare, forinstance, comments from the 1931 lecture course on the essence of truth:

the meaning of the Greek word for truth, unconcealment, initially has absolutelynothing to do with assertion and with the factual context, set out in the customarydefinition of the essence of truth, with correspondence and correctness (GA 34:11)

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

Unconcealment 15

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

One could also compare the observation in Being and Time that

to translate this word [alêtheia] as ‘truth’, and, above all, to define this expressionconceptually in theoretical ways, is to cover up the meaning of what the Greeksmade ‘self-evidently’ basic for the terminological use of alêtheia as a pre-philosophicalway 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 certaintycan subsist only within the realm of unconcealment, then truth indeed has to dowith Alêtheia, but not Alêtheia with truth. (GA 9: 442/334)

Hence, it is essential to see that the analyses of the unconcealment ofbeings and the clearing of being are not being offered as definitions ofpropositional truth. And, just as importantly, propositional truth cannotaccount for the unconcealment of beings and the clearing of being: “itis not the case and never the case that an assertion as such – be it ever sotrue – could primarily reveal an entity as such” (GA 29/30: 493).

In addition, Heidegger’s argument for the dependence of propositionaltruth on the unconcealment of entities, being, and the clearing does nothang in any way on his etymological analysis of alêtheia. Nevertheless, hisargument for the dependence relationship is often confused with hisperhaps questionable etymology.

Finally, Heidegger’s warnings to the contrary, it is perhaps understand-able that readers often confuse unconcealment with what we ordinarilythink of as truth. In any event, in response to criticisms from Friedländerabout his etymology of alêtheia, and from Tugendhat regarding the naturalconception 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 withpropositional truth, the disavowal should not be taken to mean that hegave up on the platform or any of the planks of the platform. On thecontrary, to the extent that the platform was obscured by the tendency tothink of truth only in terms of correspondence, Heidegger hoped to makeclearer his commitment to it.

More important than changes in Heidegger’s use of the word truth, butless remarked upon, are changes in his use of the word unconcealment.Before 1928, Heidegger never spoke of the unconcealment of being orconnected unconcealment with a clearing. In Being and Time, for example,the word unconcealment only appears in one passage, and it is introducedonly to be equated with uncoveredness (Entdecktheit) (GA 2: H. 219). It wasonly starting in the 1928 lecture course Einleitung in die Philosophie thatHeidegger adopted unconcealment as a term for anything other than the


uncovering of entities (see GA 27: 202–3). 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 quitecritical (see GA 9: 132–3; also GA 5: 60, 69). This self-criticism is probablya result of the fact that, by 1948, Heidegger came to believe that themetaphysical tradition had only ever thought about the unconcealmentof entities, and thus that an important step toward overcoming themetaphysical 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, fromthat point on, the term unconcealment is used almost exclusively withregard 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, humanbeing, understandings of being, worlds, and the clearing itself). What wewant to know, however, is why Heidegger uses unconcealment to point outvery different elements contributing to our overall engagement with theworld, or of different ways that things are made available to us in ourdealings. What makes unconcealment and related terms1 applicable to allthese cases is the privative nature of the phenomenon of letting somethingbe encountered.

Something is privative when it can only be understood and specifiedin 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 wouldbe for something to be perfect, then you could not know what is atstake in calling it imperfect. The name for a privative aspect need notitself incorporate a semantic marker like “in-” or “un-.” To use one ofHeidegger’s own examples, reticence is a privative aspect in that reticenceis not simply not making any noise. Something is only reticent insofaras it could speak but does not. So what it is to be reticent is to be understoodby way of what the reticent person is not doing. Similarly, a stone can besightless but it is not blind. To be blind requires that one be in the sightgame – that one shows up as appropriately thinkable as capable of sight.Nietzsche’s famous account of the good/evil distinction is yet anotherexample. There, evil functions as the positive term – the one that is definedfirst and more clearly. Good then gets its meaning as a negation of eachof the properties associated with evil.2

Thus, given that privative aspects are specifically understood in relationto what they are not, having a privative aspect is different than merely

1 These include discoveredness (Entdecktheit) and uncoveredness (Unverdecktheit); disclosedness(Erschlossenheit), unveiledness (Enthülltheit), and disconcealedness (Entborgenheit).

2 Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals (Douglas Smith, Trans.). Oxford, England:Oxford University Press, 1996, p. 13.

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lacking a certain quality. Heidegger’s notion of unconcealment applies tothings that are privative in just this sense and, he believes, the Greeklanguage’s use of a privative word form to name truth shows that theGreeks too were aware of the privative nature of material and propositionaltruth. “The awakening and forming of the word alêtheia,” he writes, “isnot 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 aprivative state – here, whatever kind of concealment that does prevail inwhat is to be unconcealed. With respect to each plank in the platform,then, concealment is the positive term, and needs to be understood beforewe 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 theircontent a proposition – things like assertions and beliefs. The truth ofpropositions is, for Heidegger, the right starting point for thinking aboutunconcealment, because truth or unconcealment (alêtheia) has often beenunderstood exclusively as a property of propositions, but also because in aphenomenology of propositional truth, we quickly discover that the truthof propositions depends on the uncovering of entities. Thinking aboutpropositional truth thus leads to an inquiry into more fundamental formsof unconcealment.

Heidegger accepts that many propositions are true by corresponding to,or agreeing with, the way things are. But recognizing this fact, for Heidegger,is less an explanation of truth than a basis for further inquiry into its nature.

The old received definition of truth: veritas est adaequatio Intellectus ad rem, homoiôsis,measuring up, conformity of thinking to the matter about which it thinks – isindeed 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 thestarting point . . . for the question: in what in general is the possibility of measuringup 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 whatmakes such a relationship between an assertion and a proposition possible.By considering this problem, however, Heidegger believes that we are ledto a view of truth as uncovering.


The difficulty for the correspondence view is explaining in an illumi-nating way what a correspondence relationship consists in. There has beena tendency to explain correspondence as a relationship between mentalrepresentations and facts or states of affairs in the world. Heidegger, bycontrast, 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 oneentity (the subject) to another (the object)” (GA 2: H. 218–19). If we areto make sense of the idea of correspondence, he believes, we first need tojettison the idea that it consists in a relationship between a representationand things in the world. Instead, Heidegger suggests that correspondenceis a characteristic of our orientation to the world – in particular, of our“assertative being toward what is asserted” (GA 2: H. 218). Our beliefsand assertions correspond not by representing some state of affairs just asit is, but by giving us an orientation to things that lets the state of affairsappear just as it is (GA 21: 9–10). True beliefs and assertions are truebecause they make possible a perceiving that “lets what is itself be encoun-tered as it is” (GA 21: 167). A phenomenological description of caseswhere we confirm the truth of an assertion, Heidegger believes, shows usthat this is in fact how we ordinarily understand the truth of the assertion.“To say that an assertion ‘is true’,” Heidegger argues, “signifies that ituncovers 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 theassertion must be understood as being-uncovering” (GA 2: H. 218, trans-lation modified). A true assertion uncovers a state of affairs by elevating itinto salience or prominence, thus allowing it to be seen: “the basicachievement of speech,” Heidegger argues, “consist[s] in showing orrevealing that about which one is speaking, that concerning which thereis discussion. In such revealing, the thing that is addressed is mademanifest. It becomes perceivable, and, in discussion, the thing perceivedgets 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 reignsin a nonassertoric dealing with the world in the sense that, in such pre-predicative comportments, the world is experienced in a way that lacksdeterminacy, that is, propositional articulation. This means that the worldis not available for thought, for the discovery of inferential and justificatoryrelationships between propositional states and worldly states of affairs.

Heidegger believes that, in our everyday dealings with things, weexperience the world in precisely such a propositional concealment (seeGA 21: 111). In our prepredicative experience of the world, things areunderstood as the things they are in terms of our practical modes ofcoping with them. Such practically constituted things are implicated in acomplex 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 anexplicit 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 thesituation (GA 2: H. 155). The “assertoric determining of a thing,”Heidegger suggests, must be understood as a “levelling-off of the primaryunderstanding within [everyday] dealings” (GA 21: 156). He notes thatwhen we make an assertion about what we perceive in our fluid copingwith the world, the “assertion makes certain relations stand out from thematter, which is at first apprehended directly and simply in its unarticu-lated totality” (GA 20: 76–7).

In natural perception, then, we ordinarily perceive a whole context thatlacks the logical structure of linguistic categories. When we apprehendthings 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” “astate of affairs,” thus allowing the entity to “become expressly visibleprecisely in what it is” (GA 20: 86). In doing this, the assertion “disclosesanew” what is present at first in a nonconceptually articulated fashion,so that these things “come to explicit apprehension precisely in whatthey are” (GA 20: 84). Thus the assertion manifests things differentlythan they are given to natural perception. In it, things are defined ordetermined “as such and so” – as having a particular property or character-istic (see, e.g., GA 21: 66, 133–4). Those properties or characteristicswere present in the entity before, but through the assertion they areisolated and cut off from their context, thereby being highlighted or liftedinto prominence. This allows us to see an object with a thematic claritythat is not present in our natural perception of it, but we are no longerable to deal with it naturally – for that, we need to see it in its immediacy(GA 21: 141–7).

Thus the dimming down or leveling off that occurs when we suspendour everyday dealings with things is what first makes it possible to givesomething a conceptual character by uncovering the kind of determinatecontent that allows one to form conceptual connections, draw inferences,and justify one occurrent intentional state on the basis of another. Theprepredicative is a nonconceptual way of comporting ourselves toward thethings in the world around us. Rather than a conceptual or a logicalarticulation, the prepredicative manifestness of things is articulated alongthe lines of our practical comportment. In such an articulation, things showup as what they are but in the whole complexity of their involvements.

This makes propositional truth, on Heidegger’s view, a privative con-cept – it is defined relative to the richer, more primordial givenness of theworld, which is lost in propositional articulation. Because propositionalmodes of comportment (believing, asserting, and so on) function bydetermining and highlighting certain elements of our prepropositional


experience of things, they are a derivative form of comporting ourselvestoward things in the world, yet a form of unconcealment all the same.

We will explore the prepropositional experience of things in moredetail in the next section. Before going on, however, we can summarizeHeidegger’s views in the following way. Our most fundamental forms ofcomportment are practically rather than conceptually articulated. On thebasis of this practical articulation, things show up as calling for certainresponses from us, and constraining how we can use them. Throughlanguage, we are able to orient ourselves to objects in a way that isconceptually rather than pragmatically articulated. When our orientationallows us to see a state of affairs just as it is – when it uncovers an object inits condition – we say that it corresponds to the facts or the state of affairs.Thus we can understand assertions and propositions to be measured interms of the positive/privative pair “concealing/unconcealing (a fact orstate of affairs in the world).” That means that the proper basis for judgingthe success of a linguistic act is whether it makes manifest a fact towardwhich we can comport ourselves. The act will fail to the extent that it leavesa 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 Heidegger’s account of how toassess the success or failure of linguistic acts like, for example, assertion.An assertion most genuinely succeeds if it brings a state of affairs intounconcealment 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 formof making something available toward which we can comport. It finds itsspecificity as a mode of unconcealment in the way it makes somethingavailable – by providing it with the kind of content that lets us grasp thestate of affair “just as” it is. Truth as correspondence is a super-agreement,an Über-einstimmung in German, achieving a very precise and definiteorientation 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 answeris a prior uncovering of entities.

2. The Uncoveredness of Entities

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

Unconcealment 21

entities consists in entities not being available as that toward which or withwhich we can comport.

Comportment (Verhalten) is a very broad term that is meant to includeevery instance in which we experience something, and everything that wedo. Excluded from comportment, then, are physiological or merely causalevents or behaviors. When I grow hair or hiccup, there is no sense in whichI am comporting myself. Unlike such causal events or behaviors, comport-ments have a meaningful structure. But comportment is broader than theclass of deliberate actions (although, naturally it includes them), becausecomportment involves things I do or experience without an occurrentmental state in which I intend to do it or register the experience. Thuscomportment includes automatic reflexes, for example, which reflect aresponsiveness to the meaning of a situation.

All comportments involve relationships to entities. When I swat at a fly,I am comporting myself toward the fly. When I hear a symphony, I amcomporting myself to the symphony (as well as all the instruments, musi-cians, the conductor, etc.) An entity is concealed, then, when I cannotcomport myself toward it – when it is not available as something towardwhich I can direct myself in a basic intentional comportment or when itplays no role in setting the meaningful structure of the situation I am in.The opposite of uncoveredness, Heidegger says, “is not covering up, butrather lack of access for simple intending” (GA 21: 179). The fly isconcealed in a sense when I cannot find it to swat at it. And yet eventhen, it is uncovered to some extent, given that the situation I find myselfin is structured by my desire to swat the fly. A more radical concealmentof the fly, then, would obtain if I do not feel motivated in any way to reactto it. Similarly, the symphony would be concealed if I lacked an under-standing of symphonic form (that is, I might be able to hear beautifulmusic, 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 isbroader than intentional action, something is not necessarily concealed,even if I have no awareness of it whatsoever – there is a sense in which itis unconcealed as long as it figures meaningfully in my overall comport-mental stance.

The unconcealment of entities, then, will be a privation of the state ofaffairs in which something is unavailable for comportment. But, as I havebeen suggesting, there are a variety of different ways in which somethingcan be unavailable for comportment:

For that which is unconcealed, it is not only essential that it makes that whichappears accessible in some way or other and keeps it open in its appearing, butrather that it (that which is unconcealed) constantly overcomes a concealedness ofthe 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 inthe way of revealing. What is more, the concealment can be of various kinds: closingoff, hiding away, disguising, covering up, veiling, dissimulating. (GA 9: 223)

Thus the unconcealment of entities occurs in all the different ways we haveof making something available for comportment. But, Heidegger believes,in order to understand uncovering, the primary mode of comportment tofocus on is that in which we have a practical mastery of things. It should beobvious that this sort of uncovering does not require the mediation oflanguage. I can learn to deal with things without any explicit instruction inthem or even any names for them, simply by picking them up and startingto manipulate them, or by being shown how they work. Heidegger writes:

The predominant comportment through which in general we uncover innerworldlyentities 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 first get to know the equipment in dealing with it.It is not that we have beforehand a knowledge of these things in order then toput them to use, but rather the other way around . . . . The everyday dealing withinnerworldly entities is the primary mode – and for many often the only mode – ofuncovering the world. This dealing with innerworldly entities comports itself – asutilization, use, managing, producing and so forth – toward equipment and the contextof equipment . . . we make use of it in a “self-evident manner.” (GA 25: 21–2)

Indeed, Heidegger believes it is constitutive of our human mode of beingthat we always already encounter ourselves in the midst of a world that isuncovered in just such practical terms.

But now how does the idea that we always already find ourselves in themidst of uncovered entities square with the claim that the state of beingcovered up has some kind of priority in understanding our dealings withentities in the world? Heidegger insists upon both ideas: “when Daseincomes to existence, beings within the range of its existence are alreadyfamiliar, manifest. With it a certain concealedness has also alreadyoccurred” (GA 28: 360). Every uncoveredness of the world, in otherwords, occurs together with a concealing of entities. Moreover,Heidegger insists that the default state of entities in the world is beingcovered over – he even has a slogan for this idea: truth, understood asuncoveredness, is robbery. “The factical uncoveredness of anything is, as itwere,” 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 onit often: “If this robbery belongs to the concept of truth, then it says thatthe entity must first of all be wrested from concealedness, or its concealed-ness must be taken from the entity” (GA 27: 79; see also GA 19: 10–11;GA 28: 359; GA 29/30: 44; GA 34: 10,126; GA 9: 223). This seems likean odd thing for him to say, however – if entities are always alreadyuncovered, 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 aboutthem. This fact gives rise to a fundamental concealment in at least twoways. First, it means that uncovering an entity – making it something withwhich we can comport easily and transparently – demands something ofus. 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 letit show itself in its own essence. Heidegger illustrates this through theexample of walking into a shoemaker’s workshop. “Which entities arethere and how these entities are available, in line with their inherentcharacter, is unveiled for us only in dealing appropriately with equipmentsuch as tools, leather, and shoes. Only one who understands is ableto uncover by himself this environing world of the shoemaker’s” (GA24: 431). This means that, for most of us, the entities in the workshopare not fully uncovered, and could only become uncovered as we acquire ashoemaker’s skills. What holds of the shoemaker’s shop, of course, holdsfor the world as a whole:

it is only in the tiniest spheres of the beings with which we are acquainted that weare so well versed as to have at our command the specific way of dealing withequipment 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 anequally original way. There are many things we merely know something about butdo not know how to manage with them. They confront us as beings to be sure, butas unfamiliar beings. Many beings, including even those already uncovered, havethe character of unfamiliarity. (GA 24: 431–2)

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 usthe fact that we cannot practically uncover most things. The understand-ing, dispositions, and skills that Dasein has in the first instant are thebanalized understandings, dispositions, and skills of the one (das Man).Thus entities are initially manifest but nevertheless concealed in whatthey most authentically are. “Because the movements of being whichDasein so to speak makes in the one are a matter of course and arenot conscious and intentional, this means simply that the one does notuncover them, since the uncoveredness which the one cultivates is in fact acovering up” (GA 20: 389). Authenticity by contrast, consists in Daseinlearning to “uncover the world in its own way . . . this uncovering of the‘world’ [is] . . . always accomplished as a clearing away of concealmentsand obscurities, as a breaking up of the disguises with which Dasein barsits own way” (GA 2: H. 129).

A second consequence of the independence of entities from us is thatthere is always more to entities than we can deal with. No matter how


skillful we get in dealing with entities, Heidegger argues, there will alwaysbe something about them that we cannot focus on or pay attention to:“each being we encounter and which encounters us keeps to this curiousopposition 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 caseprimarily and merely the limit of knowledge,” rather, it is precisely whatmakes it possible for us to deal with the thing in the first place: it is “thebeginning of the clearing of what is cleared” (GA 5: 40/BW 178–9). Weget a grip on entities in the world, in other words, by generalizing, bydealing with them as instances of a known type. This leads to the possibilitythat established ways of dealing with things will make it harder to uncoverother possible ways of dealing with them. When “what is familiar becomesknown,” Heidegger notes, “with that the concealedness of the unfamiliardeepens, 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 familiargrasp on things leads to the possibility that we treat something as an instanceof the wrong type – that is, that based on a superficial similarity between astrange thing and a familiar thing, we take the strange thing as somethingit is not (or, as Heidegger puts it, “a being appears, but presents itself asother than it is”; GA 5: 40/BW 179). Thus something can be uncoveredin one sense but covered over in another sense.

To recap, the specific nature of the unconcealment involved in theuncoveredness of entities needs to be understood as a privation of thefundamental covered-up-ness of entities. They are covered up to the extentthat we lack the skills necessary to allow them to figure in the overall grasp weget on a situation. We uncover them by fostering a receptivity to them, areceptivity that helps us secure our practical grasp on the situation.

3. Unconcealment of the Being of Entities

In understanding the unconcealment of being, let’s start again by under-standing the positive state of concealment of being. When being is con-cealed, an entity cannot possibly be uncovered as an entity. In theconcealment of entities, of course, entities were not uncovered either. Butthey could be uncovered, if only we had the right skills, or if our purposesor activities were the sort that would make them salient, or if they were nolonger obscured by other entities. In the concealment of being, by contrast,the entity cannot under any circumstances be uncovered because there isno place for it in the world we inhabit.

Our ability to uncover practically, reflectively, and linguistically the waythings are requires that entities make themselves available to our thoughtand talk, and that our thought and talk holds itself open to and responsibleto the entities in the world around us. The unconcealment of beings is

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what lets us encounter entities toward which we can be directed in ourthought and talk – entities about which we can successfully get it right orfail to do so. Heidegger explains: “if our representations and assertions aresupposed to conform to the object, then this entity . . . must be accessiblein advance in order to present itself as a standard and measure for theconformity with it” (GA 45: 18). The unconcealment of being is whatsecures the accessibility of entities.

On Heidegger’s account, something can only be uncovered on the basisof our skillful ability to inhabit a world, because we uncover something onlyby knowing how it works together with other entities in a context (seeGA 2, Division I, chapter 3). Thus the uncoveredness of entities (plank 2)is dependent upon the disclosedness of a world and ways of being withinthe world (plank 3a). Until it is given at least some minimal foothold inour world by taking a place within a context of involvements, Heideggerargues, the object can at best appear as something that resists our way ofinhabiting the world.

But entities do not simply show up as involved with other things in atemporary configuration. They appear, rather, as things that have a moreor less stable and enduring presence through a variety of possible situa-tions and contexts of involvement. It is our ability to distinguish betweenrelations that are essential to the entity, and those that are not, thatpermits 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 oressence. This leads us to plank 3b.

This disclosure of the world – plank 3a – was the focus of Heidegger’sdiscussion of disclosedness in Being and Time (GA 2: H. 221–2). It was alsoto this that Heidegger refers in passages like the following from the 1928essay “On the Essence of Ground”:

Human Dasein – a being that finds itself situated in the midst of beings, comportingitself toward beings – in so doing exists in such a way that beings are alwaysmanifest as a whole. Here it is not necessary that this wholeness be expresslyconceptualized: its belonging to Dasein can be veiled, the expanse of this wholeis changeable. This wholeness is understood without the whole of those beings thatare manifest being explicitly grasped or indeed “completely” investigated in theirspecific connections, domains, and layers. Yet the understanding of this wholeness,an understanding that in each case reaches ahead and embraces it, is a surpassingin the direction of world . . . . World as a wholeness “is” not a being, but that fromout of which Dasein gives itself the signification of whatever beings it is able tocomport itself toward in whatever way. (GA 9: 156/121)

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


itself an original view (form) that is not explicitly grasped, yet functionsprecisely as a paradigmatic form for all manifest beings” (GA 9: 158/123).

Heidegger subsequently develops this idea in terms of the truth ofessence – plank 3b) In the 1929–30 lecture course on The FundamentalConcepts of Metaphysics, Heidegger argues that the world should be under-stood as the prevailing of a “pre-logical manifestness” of beings “as suchand as a whole” (GA 29/30: 512–13). But any sufficient inquiry into theorigin of the “as” in the “as such” and “as a whole” – that is, that as that entitiesshow up – “must open up for us the whole context in which that, whichwe intend with ‘manifestness of beings’ and with the ‘as a whole’, comesinto its essence (west)” (GA 29/30: 435–6). A comment is in order hereon the way that Heidegger thinks of essences.

For some reason, most translators and many commentators are hyper-sensitive about Heidegger’s use of Wesen (essence) and related neologismslike Wesung (essencing) and wesen with a small “w” – that is, wesen as a verb,meaning “to essence” or “to come into its essence.” These commentatorshave really taken to heart Heidegger’s warning that he does not mean touse Wesen in the traditional sense – so much so that they seem to translatethe word randomly (as, e.g., perdurance or presence or, my favoriteexample from the translation of the Beiträge, essential swaying). All suchchoices avoid any metaphysical baggage, but at the cost of confusion orincomprehensibility. 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, Heidegger’s disagreement with many views of es-sences are that they define what a thing is in terms of some necessaryproperty that all X things must have, or some universal property that all Xthings in fact have. In the “Origin of the Work of Art,” Heidegger calls thiskind of essence the unimportant/indifferent essence (das gleichgültigeWesen) or the unessential essence (des unwesentliche Wesen). The traditionalway of thinking of an essence, Heidegger notes, thinks of it in terms of thecommon features in which all things that share an essence agree.

The essence gives itself in the generic and universal concept, which represents theone 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 doesthe essential essence of something consist? Presumably it lies in what the entity isin truth. The true essence of a thing is determined from out of its true being, fromthe truth of the given entity. (GA 5: 37/BW 175–6, translation modified)

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

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essence view of essences, than puzzles arise whenever we encounter ahuman-like thing that happens to lack rationality – say a baby or a personin a vegetative state. There might well be a way around such puzzles if theessence of a thing is treated as a property that all X things possess, or anabstract concept that they instantiate; that does not matter for presentpurposes. The point is simply that, in light of such puzzles, a naturalalternative is to say that the essence is fixed not by the property that anentity now possesses or an abstract type that it presently instantiates, butby that in the view of which we take it as that thing it is. So even a personin a vegetative state is a human if she is understood in terms of the essenceof being human (in particular, she is understood precisely as failing insome way to measure up to what it is to be human). A person could be ahuman on this view, even if, in fact, it is factually impossible for her to berational.

Another example to illustrate how this works for Heidegger is hisaccount of technological entities – the standing reserve. To be a standingreserve, for example, is not a matter of possessing an aspect or trait suchas 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, andswitches things about ever anew. Because everything is experienced interms of enframing, particular things are experienced as in a state ofprivation when they are not always on call as standing reserve. This meansthat they can have the essence of enframing, even if they are not standingreserve yet. Their essence is determined technologically because they areseen as being defective when they are not always ordered and on call.

Now, the problem with essences so understood is that they presentsomething of a paradox. Heidegger demonstrates this by comparingthese 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: 77ff/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 importantobservations about such assertions. First, while it might well correspondwith the facts (the relevant facts would include all particular truths), itscorrespondence with the facts is not what makes it true. Rather, its beingtrue is what guarantees that it will correspond with the facts. We can seethis if we think about what facts we could possibly adduce for (B) tocorrespond to. If the notion of a fact or a state of affairs is meaningful, itmust be some actual (whether past, present, or future) condition of anobject or a state of affairs. But essential claims go beyond any claim about


past, present, or future conditions to include all possible conditions. This isbecause the essence of a thing is not picked out by a mere empiricalregularity 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 awooden item of furniture, for instance, it would not establish this claim tomerely show that all past, current, and future tables are wooden items offurniture (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, inaddition, have to be the case that a plastic object with exactly the sameshape, resistance, function, and so on would not be a table. This meansthat for essential definitions, correspondence to the facts is a necessary butnot sufficient condition for their being true.

Second, facts come too late for essential definitions, since we need toassume that the definition is true in order definitively to identify the fact orfacts to which it corresponds. To get a feel for this, compare two otheressential definitions, this time for gold:

(C) Gold is the noblest of the metals(D) Gold is an element with atomic number 79.

When it comes to definitively founding simple factual statements like(A), we begin by finding the fact to which it corresponds, and we can dothis by first finding the object referred to in the subject phrase – the lights –and then checking their condition. How about (C)? It seems like we wouldstart by locating the object referred to in the subject phrase – gold. Infact, if (C) is an essential definition, the only way we can determine thatgold is the noblest of the metals is by first finding some gold, and we dothis by looking for instances of the noblest metal. Thus we see that in orderto establish the truth of the essential specification, we first have to assumethat it is true. And that means that we are never in a position to proveempirically 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 theirdefinition. The advocates of (D) would round up all the elemental stuffwith atomic number 79 to test theirs. Neither camp could ever persuadethe other that their essential definition was correct, because, on the basis oftheir respective definitions, each would reject exactly those particularsubstances that the other took as decisive evidence in favor of his or herdefinition. As Heidegger summarizes the situation, “every time we attemptto prove an essential determination through single, or even all, actual andpossible facts, there results the remarkable state of affairs that we havealready presupposed the legitimacy of the essential determination, indeedmust presuppose it, just in order to grasp and produce the facts that aresupposed to serve as proof” (GA 45: 79).

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It seems that both definitions cannot be right. Even if it so happens that(C) and (D) agree in their extension, we could imagine cases or possibleworlds in which the definitions apply to some substance differently. Thatmeans that we would have reason to believe that they name, at best, anaccidental property of gold.

Such considerations show us that being cannot be disclosed in the sameway that an entity is uncovered. But if the facts give us no basis for decidingwhich of the competing essential definitions is right, then perhaps we haveto conclude that there are no genuine essences in the world. Instead, whatwe find in the universe is what we (arbitrarily) project into it. And if weconclude that, then we also might be forced to conclude that there is noway that the universe is independently of the way we conceive of it, becauseit seems that we are free to carve it up in any way that we want. Theunconcealment of being seems, then, to be a purely subjective projectionon our part.

Our ordinary experience of things belies this, however. We do notthink, for example, that one is free to decide arbitrarily whether to treatthe atomic number of gold as its essential property. To us, the atomicnumber seems to pick out something more essential about gold than anyof its other properties.

We can summarize the situation in the following way. It seems that ourability to have truly uncovering comportments and true beliefs and maketrue assertions about the world – comportments and beliefs and assertionsthat 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 consistsin a grasp of a propositional definition, then nothing in the world canmake the essential definition true, because nothing in the world couldestablish one definition as opposed to any other.

Heidegger, in fact, rejects this argument because he denies that ourunderstanding of essences consists in a grasp of a propositional definition.The “knowledge of essence,” he claims, “cannot be communicated in thesense of the passing on of a proposition, whose content is simply graspedwithout its foundation and its acquisition being accomplished again”(GA 45: 87). This is because the knowledge of essence he is interested inis a way of being attuned to the world; for that, we have to be introducedto the practices that will eventually teach us to have a particular sensibilityand readiness for the world. Thus “the knowledge of the essence must beaccomplished anew by each one who is to share it” (GA 45: 87). It is thislatter understanding of our knowledge of essences – seeing it as consistingin being attuned by the world to consider certain properties or featuresof things as definitive – that, Heidegger believes, allows us to see our wayclear of antiessentialism and antirealism. The unconcealment of being isprecisely the way a certain precognitive understanding of essences comesto 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 modified).

So, the first thing to say is that our disclosure of essences is not anexplicit grasp of what the essence is, nor is it a particular experience orcomportment with a particular entity. “Addressing something as some-thing,” Heidegger notes, “does not yet necessarily entail comprehending inits essence whatever is thus addressed. The understanding of being (logos in aquite broad sense) that guides and illuminates in advance all comportmenttoward beings is neither a grasping of being as such, nor is it a conceptualcomprehending of what is thus grasped” (GA 9: 132/104). Heideggerillustrates this point: “we are acquainted with the ‘essence’ of the thingssurrounding us – house, tree, bird, road, vehicle, man, etc. – and yet wehave no knowledge of the essence. For we immediately land in the uncer-tain, shifting, controversial, and groundless, when we attempt to determinemore closely, and above all try to ground in its determinateness, what iscertainly though still indeterminately ‘known’: namely, house-ness, tree-ness, bird-ness, humanness” (GA 45: 81). As a result, “the essence ofthings,” Heidegger notes, is ordinarily something “which we know andyet do not know” (GA 45: 81). The essence is “not first captured in a‘definition’ and made available for knowledge” (here, Heidegger is speak-ing specifically of the essence of truth; GA 45: 115). This is because, as heexplains, the knowledge of essences is originally manifest in the way “thatall 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 beingdisposed in a particular way for the world. An understanding of being isconcealed when it is not operative in our experience of the things in theworld. What distinguishes each historical age from another, Heideggerclaims, is that each has a different style of “productive seeing,” of perceivingthings in advance in such a way that they are allowed to stand out asessentially structured (see GA 45, section 24).

We can illustrate this by going back to the gold example above. The fightbetween medieval and modern conceptions of gold is based ultimately indifferent ways of picking out salient entities in the world – that is, differentways of responding to some evident property or properties that they possess.One way of being disposed might lead us to find the true being of a thing inthe extent to which it approaches God by being like Him. Another way ofbeing disposed might lead us to find the true being of a thing in its ability tobe turned into a resource, flexibly and efficiently on call for use. Whensomeone disposed to the world in the first way uncovers a lump of gold, andsubsequently defines gold as such and such a kind of thing, what she takes tobe an essential property will be driven by her background sense that what ismost essential in everything is its nearness to God. When someone disposed

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to the world in the second way uncovers it, she will take the essentialproperties to be whatever it is about it that allows us to break it down intoa resource, and flexibly switch it around and order it, since our backgroundsense for technological efficiency shapes our experience of everything.

In fact, there is, in principle, an indefinite if not infinite number ofways to characterize the properties of any particular thing. A piece ofgold, 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 makingjewelry, gleaming in a way that seems divine, being directly in front of myfavorite chair, and so on. When we decide what kind or type of thing thisparticular object is, we will do it on the basis of just those particularproperties we are responding to, and these properties will be some subsetof an indefinite or infinite set of properties we could be responding to.

Given that this is the case, before anything can show up as anything, wemust have some particular, prelinguistic disposition or readiness for theworld 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 tothings 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 touncover an instance of gold as having just those essential properties speci-fied in (D) – in fact, Heidegger would probably argue, those are just theessential properties we would find in a lump of gold if we were oriented tothe world in a technological fashion. We do not need to see (D) as true apriori, because whether it is true is up to the world. Instead, we will use ourtechnological disposition to pick out objects as instances of that kind ofresource; from there, it is an empirical matter which features of it make it thatkind of a resource. In our age, it seems plausible to say that gold’s essentialfeatures (in the traditional sense) are found in its atomic structure, becauseknowledge of the atomic structure gives us the best grasp on how to turngold into a resource. The possibility of truth is secured because there is a waythat 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 “anticipatorygathering” that lays out certain properties and relationships as salient(see GA 45: 121). This means that essences are historical – they show updifferently as dispositions for the world change.

THE REVEALING – CONCEALING OF THE CLEARING

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


of essences/understandings of being discussed under plank (3), Heideggerwas pushed to ask what makes it possible for any one of a plurality ofunderstandings of being or essence to prevail. Part of the answer he arrivedat was that there must be a clearing that allows one way of being disposedto the world to come into operation, while withholding other potentialways of being disposed for the world. I conclude with just a few wordsabout the unconcealment of the clearing.

The historical nature of essences leads one to ask how it is that changesin historical understandings can arise. Heidegger in reflecting on this ques-tion noted:

entities are reordered, and indeed not merely by an entity that is not yet accessibleto us, and perhaps never will be, but by something concealed which conceals itselfprecisely when we, holding ourselves in the clearing, are left to the discretion of oreven 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 butby something self-concealing. (GA 45: 210)

This is a phenomenological observation that Heidegger repeats oftenin various forms, but without much clarification or argument. The ideaseems to be something like the following: the style of being that allowsthings to show up as having an essence is most invisible when it is mosteffective. That is, when everything is showing up to us in terms of flexibilityand efficiency, for example, we are captivated by things – we are whollyabsorbed in our dealings with them. That renders us unable to makeourselves aware of the understanding of being that is shaping our experi-ence of the world. Looked at another way, the ready availability of beingsto us depends on our losing sight of the fact that their availability isgrounded in a particular understanding of the essence of beings as awhole. Thus “the concealment of beings as a whole . . . is older thanevery manifestness of this or that entity” (GA 9: 193–4/148).

So a new understanding of being can establish itself, and a new orderingof beings can become operative, only if there is something like a clearingthat conceals any other way of experiencing the world in order to allow thisparticular way to come to the forefront. The upside to this is it allows us toinhabit a world: the self-concealment of being “leaves historical humanbeings 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 andaims, and fills out that world by means of proposing and planning” (GA 9:195/149). The downside is that, having lost sight of the concealment thatmakes it all possible, we become convinced of the necessity and uniquecorrectness of our way of inhabiting the world: “human beings go wrong asregards the essential genuineness of their standards” (GA 9: 196/149).

As I have noted already, the clearing should be understood as somethinglike a space of possibilities – it “grants first of all the possibility of the path to

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presence, and grants the possible presencing of that presence itself” (GA 14:75/BW 445). We will explore examples of this function of unconcealmentin the chapters on history (see Chapters 8–10), 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 – aparticular mode of presence – to come to prevail among entities. Forpossibilities to be live possibilities, however, it requires a space from whichother incompatible possibilities are excluded. The clearing maintains aworld by keeping back (concealing) possibilities that are incompatible withthe essence that is currently operative. In order for some possibilities toshape our experience of the world, any other possibilities cannot be livepossibilities, 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 inthe back room while exhibiting one at a time. But this would be to thinkabout it incorrectly – it would be to treat ways of being as if they werethemselves 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, anymore than a clearing in the forest is a hiding of trees. The forest clearingdoes not work by keeping some particular trees or shrubs on hand but outof the way. Rather, the forest clearing is nothing but the condition thatthere are no trees or shrubs growing.

Similarly, the clearing makes some possibilities possible, not by puttingsome determinate possibilities in cold storage, but by making it the casethat there are no other determinate possibilities available. For the availablepossibilities to have authority as possibilities, moreover, we cannot beaware that other possibilities are being ruled out or concealed from us.Our experience of the natural world as resources, for example, could notauthoritatively shape our experience of the world if we were aware thatone would be equally justified in experiencing it as God’s creation. Thismeans that, paradoxically, the clearing only works as a clearing when it isnot uncovered – when it is not something toward which we can comport.Thus the clearing does not only keep back other possibilities, but it keepsback that it is keeping back other possibilities. The clearing conceals thepossibility of other understandings of beings. It is not “the mere clearingof presence, but the clearing of presence concealing itself, the clearing ofa self-concealing sheltering” (GA 14: 79/BW 448).

APPENDIX ON TUGENDHAT

Perhaps the most influential critique of Heidegger’s account of proposi-tional truth and unconcealment is Ernst Tugendhat’s, published in DerWarheitsbegriff bei Husserl und Heidegger (Gruyter, 1967). Tugendhat’s argu-ment consists of the following three claims:


1. Heidegger redefines propositional truth – the natural conception oftruth – as uncovering simpliciter. In doing so, he loses the specificnotion of propositional truth.

2. Heidegger extends his revised concept of propositional truth touncovering of entities and disclosure of being: “Heidegger handlespropositional truth and comes to the conclusion that it must beunderstood as ‘uncovering’ (or – as Heidegger says later – unconceal-ing). This finding then allows him to extend the concept of truth to allthat can be uncovered and to any disclosure.”3

3. Uncovering of entities and disclosure of being, however, lack the rightto be called truth, because they do not capture the specific notion oftruth contained in the natural conception of truth. (I’ll call this the“rights” argument – that unconcealment in general has no right tobe called “truth”).

As I have shown above, Tugendhat was simply wrong about claim1. Heidegger always saw propositional truth as being a specific kind ofunconcealment, one that consists in correspondence with a fact or state ofaffairs. Thus propositional truth was neither redefined, nor did it loseits specific sense. I have also shown that Tugendhat is wrong about claim2. As we saw, Heidegger was quite clear that unconcealment of entities,being, and the clearing could not be understood through propositionaltruth. His approach was not to extend the account of propositional truthto the other elements of the platform, but to explore the kind of uncon-cealment proper to each feature of our engagement with the world.

Tugendhat’s defenders, however, maintain that in spite of Tugendhat’serrors with respect to claims 1 and 2, claim 3 remains an important andviable critique. (Indeed, they go so far as to insist that this was the real coreof Tugendhat’s argument all along – against, it seems to me, the weight ofTugendhat’s book.) Thus, for example, Cristina Lafont argues inTugendhat’s defense that if we focus on these errors, “the central pointof Tugendhat’s critique is swept under the rug, namely, ‘What justificationand what significance does it have that Heidegger chooses ‘truth’, of allwords, to designate this other phenomenon [of unconcealment]?”4. AndWilliam Smith argues similarly that “the real force” and “the essence ofTugendhat’s critique” lies in the questions: “why call these conditions forthe possibility of correctness [i.e., the uncoveredness of entities and thedisclosedness of being] ‘truth’, be it qualified 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, “Heidegger’s Idea of Truth,” in Hermeneutics and Truth (BriceR. 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 Tugendhat’s argument thathis first two claims are simply wrong, since much of the force behindclaim 3 derives from showing that by thinking of truth in terms of uncon-cealment, Heidegger is forced to redefine illegitimately propositional truthand then to extend, once again illegitimately, this redefinition to theuncovering of entities and the disclosure of worlds. But once we see thatone can think of the “natural” conception of truth in terms of unconceal-ment without losing its “specificity,” much of the impetus for Tugendhat’sargument is lost. One is left simply to maintain a rather dubious linguisticprinciple – that things either possess or lack a right to a specific name. Butwhy should we think that? Why should I accept the Lafont/Smith insis-tence that only propositional truth has an inherent right to be calledtruth? That flies, as Heidegger frequently remarked, in the face of ourordinary linguistic practices. We predicate truth not just of beliefs andassertion, but also people (true friends), Gods (the living and true God),organizations, objects (true gold), activities (true aim), and so on. Lafontannounces as a principle that we are only justified in using truth to meanuncovering” 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 usesof the predicate true – that only if we could derive the “truth of thestatement” without loss from the meaning of the truth predicate as appliedto an object, only then would we be justified in saying that an object istrue? And with what right would such a principle be asserted? Since whenhas it been a condition of the use of a predicate that it may only be usedwhen the definition of it in one of its applications can be transferred‘without loss’ to all its other applications?

But perhaps the rights argument turns on a less demanding sense ofentitlement. Rather than demanding that the general understanding ofunconcealment apply without loss, thus capturing propositional truth inall its specificity, perhaps the idea behind claim 3 is that there is somecore element of truth that is missing from unconcealment. Tugendhat,Lafont, and Smith all emphasize the normativity involved in propositionaltruth – the idea that assertions and beliefs succeed by being true and failby being false. Tugendhat suggests, again wrongly, that Heidegger is illegiti-mately transferring the normativity of truth to world disclosure. But wecould still read the rights claim as asserting that discovery of entities anddisclosure of worlds lack the right to be called truth unless they possessconditions of success or failure so that we can be in a position to say

5 “Why Tugendhat’s Critique of Heidegger’s Concept of Truth Remains a Critical Problem,”Inquiry 50 (2007): 164.

6 Heidegger, Language, and World Disclosure, p. 123.


definitively that something either unconceals or it does not. Thus Lafontobserves that since unconcealment is “neither a normative concept thatrefers to the question regarding what is the case (related to the correctnessof statements) nor a concept that shows the bivalent structure of ‘either–or,’” we have “cause to doubt, with Tugendhat, that such a concept canhave anything at all to do with the concept of truth.”7 And Smith arguesthat “what Tugendhat’s question calls for, then, is an interpretation ofdisclosedness that shows how it has a normative dimension within its ownsphere.”8

But, of course, not everything that possesses conditions of success orfailure has a right to be called true. In baseball, a swing that hits a homerun is no more a true swing than a swing that results in a strike out. Notevery form of normativity is translatable into binary terms of truth andfalsehood. Deception and nondeception stand in a normative relationship(see Chapter 3), but there can be deceptive truths, just as there arefictional accounts and parables that free us from deception. Things canbe more or less deceptive – being deceptive or nondeceptive is not a simplebinary state. Thus we ought to be suspicious when Smith suggests that thenormative dimension for unconcealment is the dimension of authenticityversus 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 calledtrue, any more than a home run swing? What the advocates of the rightsargument owe us, but have never provided, is an explanation of the sort ofnormativity that deserves to be called truth – one that distinguishes all thelegitimate uses of the predicate “is true” from all illegitimate ones. Lackingsuch an explanation, the objection amounts to little more than whiningthat it is too hard for us to wean ourselves from thinking of truth asentailing a particular kind of normativity (the kind exhibited by truepropositions), and thus misleading to call unconcealment truth. But, aswe have seen, Heidegger himself acknowledged that it was misleading – forthat reason he tried, as I catalogued above, to alert the reader consistentlyto the fact that he was using the term in a nonstandard way. And when hediscontinued the use of truth to refer to unconcealment, that does notrepresent any acknowledgment that he was unjustified in calling it truth.Instead, as he suggested in responding to Tugendhat’s first presentationsof the rights argument, it was nothing more than a pragmatic response tothe refusal to pay attention to his warnings: “if one thinks of ‘truth’ only inthe sense of the truth of assertion, it certainly is confusing to also call the‘clearing’ ‘truth.’ It is certainly not truth in the ‘specific,’ that is, the usual

7 Ibid., p. 148.8 “Why Tugendhat’s Critique of Heidegger’s 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 onlydefinitive meaning, it is perhaps advisable to renounce the philosophicaluse.”9

Indeed, a fundamental feature of Heidegger’s philosophical practice –

a feature to which his Tugendhat-inspired critics seem particularly tone-deaf – is a refusal to defer to the ordinary, natural, and commonsensicaluse of terms:

The place of language properly inhabited, and of its habitual words, is usurped bycommon terms. The common speech becomes the current speech. We meet it onall 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 formerlyhabitual 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 weregard the common as the only legitimate standard, and become generally incapa-ble of fathoming the commonness of the common. This floundering 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 floundering in commonnessis part of the high and dangerous game and gamble in which, by the nature oflanguage, 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 itmay happen – provided we proceed carefully – that we get more truly to the matterthat is expressed in any telling and asking. (GA 8: 82–3/WCT 119)

If we understand what Heidegger means by the philosophical use of aterm, and what he is trying to accomplish with the high stakes game ofusing words contrary to their natural sense, it will help us see how he wouldrespond to the question: why does Heidegger use the word truth to refer tounconcealment, given that he understood all along how misleading itwas to do so? Heidegger argued that the philosopher has a right to usewords 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 usedthe word eidos

for that which in everything and in each particular thing endures as present. Foreidos, in the common speech, meant the outward aspect [Ansicht] that a visible thingoffers to the physical eye. Plato exacts of this word, however, something utterlyextraordinary: that it name what precisely is not and never will be perceivable withphysical eyes. But even this is by no means the full extent of what is extraordinaryhere. 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, thetasteable, the tactile, in everything that is in any way accessible. (GA 7: 23–4)

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 therole that nonsensuous ideas play in forming our sensuous apprehension ofthe world.

And, in fact, Heidegger claimed the rights of philosophical usage whenit comes to calling unconcealment Wahrheit. In doing so, he was in no wayasserting that unconcealment, like propositional truth, has an intrinsic,bivalent normative structure. Instead, he was drawing our attention tothe way all truths – propositional, the truth of being, the truth of entities –preserve and shelter a particular existential relationship between things inthe world. “The assertion is not primarily true (wahr) in the sense ofrevealedness. But rather the assertion is the way in which we humanspreserve (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 ofencountering entities. And the question is not what to transfer frompropositional truth to unconcealment, but the other way around – whatto transfer from unconcealment to propositional truth. For us humans,formulating and passing around true assertions is one primary way thatwe secure our ways of comporting ourselves in the world we inhabit.

Thus Heidegger hoped, overoptimistically, as the reaction of his criticsshows, that calling unconcealment Wahrheit (it does not really work inEnglish) would help us think about the importance of stabilizing andsecuring an understanding of the world: “One day we will learn to thinkour used up word ‘truth’ (Wahrheit) on the basis of the true (Wahr), andexperience that truth is the preserving (Wahrnis) of being and that being aspresence belongs to preserving” (GA 5: 348). Why call unconcealmentWahrheit ? To provoke us to reflect 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 Heideggerand Davidson

An indirect concern of this chapter is to show that, despite dramatic differ-ences in approach, “analytic” and “Continental” philosophers can bebrought into a productive dialogue with one another on topics central tothe philosophical agenda of both traditions. Their differences tend toobscure the fact that both traditions have as a fundamental project thecritique of past accounts of language, intentionality, and mind. Moreover,writers within the two traditions are frequently in considerable agreementabout the failings of past accounts. Where they tend to differ is in the types ofpositive accounts they give. By exploring the important areas of disagree-ment against the background of agreement, however, it is possible to gaininsights unavailable to those rooted in a single tradition.

The direct concern here is to illuminateHeidegger’s account of truth andunconcealment through a comparison with Davidson’s accounts of theconditions of truth. I begin, however, with a brief discussion of some crucialdifferences between the analytic and Continental ways of doing philosophy.An understanding of these differences provides the basis for seeing howHeidegger and Davidson, all appearances to the contrary, in fact follow aparallel course by resisting theoretical attempts at the redefinition or reduc-tion of our pretheoretical notion of truth. Indeed, both writers believe thattruth is best illuminated by looking at the conditions of truth – that is, theyboth try to understand what makes truth as a property of language andthought possible in the first place. Both answer the question by exploringhow what we say or think can come to have content. I conclude by suggestingthat Heidegger’s “ontological foundations” of “the traditional conception oftruth” 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 McKeonfor their helpful criticisms, comments, and suggestions on earlier versions of this chapter.

40

language and thought presuppose our sharing a finely articulated structurethat only language and thought seem capable of producing.

ANALYTIC AND CONTINENTAL PHILOSOPHY

If I were to reduce the difference between analytic and Continental philos-ophy to a single anecdote, I would refer to two titles: Michael Dummett’s TheLogical Basis of Metaphysics,1 based on his 1976 William James Lectures, andMartin Heidegger’s Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Logik (GA 26), the pub-lished edition of a 1928 lecture course. Here, in a nutshell, one finds theanalytic’s focus on logical analysis as the means toward philosophical ques-tioning, and the Continental suspicion that all knowledge is tinged throughand through by hidden metaphysical presuppositions.

As Dummett explains in his introduction, analytic philosophy’s approachto metaphysical issues is premised on the belief that “[p]hilosophy can takeus no further than enabling us to command a clear view of the concepts bymeans of which we think about the world, and, by so doing, to attain a firmergrasp of the way we represent the world in our thoughts.”2 The analyticphilosopher’s assault on metaphysical heights, then, will only begin after theexhaustive examination of more pedestrian subjects like language and logic.This is in deliberate contrast to the philosophical tradition, which Dummettviews as deeply flawed due to “an underestimation by even the deepestthinkers of the difficulty of the questions they tackle. They consequentlytake perilous shortcuts in their argumentation and flatter themselves thatthey have arrived at definitive solutions when much in their reasoning isquestionable. I believe that we shall make faster progress only if we go at ourtask more slowly andmethodically, like mountain climbers making sure eachfoothold is secure before venturing onto the next.”3

One needs only contrast this position with Heidegger’s introduction to seethe profound difference in impetus between the analytical and Continentalstyle. Heidegger argues that we can make no progress at all in philosophicalunderstanding without “a critical dismantling of traditional logic down to itshidden foundations” – “the metaphysical foundations of logic” (GA 26: 27)This is because logic can provide genuine insight into “the way we representthe world in our thoughts” (as Dummett puts it) only if we understand why itis that we human beings are constituted in such a way “as to be able to be thusgoverned by laws”: “How ‘is’ Dasein [human being] according to its essenceso that such an obligation as that of being governed by logical laws can arise inand for Dasein [human being]?” (GA 26: 24). As a result, “[a] basic problemof 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 canonly be reached by reflection 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 – aprocess they believe to be prior tomaking inroads inmetaphysical reflection.Continental philosophers, while also often starting from the structure oflanguage and mind, seek to move from there directly to a reflection on thehistorical, existential dimension of our language and thoughts. BecauseAnalytics see no evidence of careful and rigorous analysis in the work ofContinental thinkers, they consider Continental philosophy to be, at best, “amore or less systematic reflection on the human situation . . . a kind ofreflection which can sometimes lead to a new perspective on human lifeand 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, areintensely suspicious of the Analysts’ “fundamental linguistic principles,”certain that reliance on them is premised on metaphysical naïveté or evenignorance. So Heidegger argues that “[t]he appearance of a ‘philosophy oflanguage’ is a striking sign that knowledge of the essence of the word, i.e., thepossibility of an experience of the primordial essence of the word, has beenlost for a long time. The word no longer preserves the relation of Being toman, but instead the word is a formation and thing of language” (GA 54:101–2). And Derrida thinks it typical of the whole analytic tradition that itconducts its investigations on the basis of “a kind of ideal regulation,” whichexcludes the troublesome cases most in need of examination – troublesomecases that in fact work to deconstruct traditional philosophy.6

What is often lost in this mutual dismissiveness is a surprising overlap inviews concerning the shared starting point of much of the work in bothtraditions – language. It strikes me that the best way to overcome theAnalytic/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 incommon as to make the two traditions irrelevant to one another, for it seemsto both sides as if the other is either incapable of joining issue, or at leastwillfully refusing to do so. But if one can get beyond the differences anddiscover a common ground, then the disagreements can be seen to havecontent, 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: NorthwesternUniversity Press, 1988, p. 15.


productive ways. In the remainder of this paper, I hope to illustrate this byshowing how Heidegger’s and Davidson’s inquiries into truth and the func-tioning of language, as different as they are, both come to focus on theconditions of the possibility of truth as the means to dissolving traditionalphilosophical problems. It is true that there are important differences intheir accounts of truth conditions. But by seeing their disagreement againstthe background of an extensive congruence in view, one can highlight in away not easily available to adherents of one tradition or another the presup-positions and problems that remain for each thinker.

HEIDEGGER AND DAVIDSON ON TRUTH DEFINITIONS

There are a variety of traditional answers to the question what makes a truesentence (or belief or proposition, etc.) true – answers such as correspon-dence, coherence, utility, and so on. What all these theories share, asDavidson has pointed out, is a sense that truth is a concept for which weshould be able to provide an illuminating definition. From the precedingobservations on the difference between analytic andContinental philosophy,as general as they were, it should come as no surprise that both Davidson andHeidegger are critical of traditional truth theories. The notable similaritiesbetween Davidson’s and Heidegger’s views of truth, on the other hand, areperhaps unexpected. Davidson, after all, has argued for a “correspondence”view, albeit a “correspondence without confrontation.”7 And he pursues thequestion of truth, in good analytic fashion, within the context of a semanticanalysis of the truth predicate. Heidegger, on the other hand, is widelyinterpreted as denying a correspondence view in favor of a definition oftruth as “unconcealment.” And his criticism of correspondence theories isbased in a phenomenological, rather than a logical, exploration of ourexperience of truth.

But, on scrutiny, one discovers that the differences are nowhere near aswide as one might believe. Heidegger, in fact, views propositional truth as asort of correspondence, andHeidegger’s account of unconcealment is badlymisunderstood if taken as a definition of truth.8To the contrary, Heidegger’sprimary interest in propositional truth is not to redefine it but to discoverwhat makes propositional entities capable of being true or false. AndDavidson, 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. 69–88. Davidson has since issued a retraction of sorts – not that his view on truth haschanged, 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 PhilosophyLXXXVII (1990): 302.

8 See my “Heidegger on Truth as Correspondence,” International Journal of Philosophical Studies 7(1999).


be defined in terms of correspondence. More importantly, Davidson, likeHeidegger, believes that progress cannot be made on the issue of truth bydefining it but only by understanding the conditions of sentences and beliefsbeing true. The interesting disagreement comes, then, not at the level oftheir respective accounts of propositional truth, but rather in the details oftheir explanations of the conditions of truth.

In order to get to the point where we can fruitfully compare and contrastDavidson and Heidegger on this topic, however, we must get beyond theseemingly incompatible approaches to propositional truth. By understan-ding the context that the respective traditions provide for inquiries intotruth, we can go a long way toward separating the genuine from the merelyapparent disagreement.

Within the analytic tradition of philosophy, the generally accepted start-ing point for understanding truth is an analysis of our use of the truthpredicate. Many philosophers accept that “just about everything there is tobe said about truth” is said by noting that almost all of our uses of “is true” canbe understood in terms of “certain formal features” of the predicate –

“notably its disquotation feature.”9 These features allow us to make certaingeneralizing statements about sentences; “the truth predicate allows anysentence to be reformulated so that its entire content will be expressed bythe new subject – a singular term open to normal objectival quantifica-tion.”10 In addition, we can account for certain vestigial uses of “true” (like“That’s true!”) in terms of its use as an illocutionary device – for instance, toconfirm or endorse.11

Perhaps the best-known example of a definition of the truth predicate isTarski’s semantic theory of truth. Tarski’s Convention T shows how toprovide an extensionally adequate description of the truth predicate foreach of a number of well-behaved languages. According to Convention T,a satisfactory truth theory for that languagemust be such as to entail for everysentence 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 thatsentence, or a translation of the sentence into the metalanguage.12

The problem of restricting analysis to the truth predicate is, as many havenoted, that such a definition 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 truthdefinition is best seen in the case where we are constructing a T-theory for anobject language we do not yet understand. In order to do this, we must knowthe conditions under which truth can be predicated for each and everysentence of the object-language – something we cannot do unless “weknow something about the concept of truth expressed by that predicatewhich is not embodied in that, or any other truth-definition.”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 definetruth for a new language. The implications for analytic philosophersengaged in the Davidsonian project of defining meaning in terms of truthare critical, for if the truth conditions of sentences are to play any role infixing their meaning, our ability to learn a language depends on having apretheoretic understanding of truth. Thus Dummett explains that

in order that someone should gain from the explanation that P is true in such-and-suchcircumstances an understanding of the sense of P, hemust already know what it meansto say of P that it is true. If whenhe enquires into this he is told that the only explanationis that to say that P is true is the same as to assert P, it will follow that in order tounderstand what is meant by saying that P is true, he must already know the sense ofasserting 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 alanguage-relative characterization of the truth predicate.

But what sense can be given to this pre-T-theoretic concept of truth? Thereadily available traditional answer, which explains truth as correspondence,is unable to do the work that needs to be done to make truth useful inDavidson’s project. According to correspondence theories, we accept that astatement 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 factto which the sentence corresponds independently of our recognizing thesentence as true. And, as Davidson has shown, a definition of truth in termsof correspondence to facts is unable to do this. For a correspondence theoryto 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 theworld, p will correspond not just to q, but to any sentence logically equivalentto q, or to any sentence differing from q only in the substitution in q of acoextensive 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): 148–9.


but to any fact at all.15 And so (1) will fail to assist us in determining whethera sentence is true. Treating the description as less than fully extensional (by,for example, denying the substitutivity of logically equivalent sentences) isno more successful. The very possibility of explaining truth through corre-spondence is undermined by this move, since nonextensional descriptionsrely on the concept of truth in picking out the fact in the first place:“Suppose, to leave the frying-pan of extensionality for the fires of intension,we distinguish facts as finely as statements. Of course, not every statement hasits fact; only the true ones do. But then, unless we find another way to pickout facts, we cannot hope to explain truth by appeal to them.”16 Hence, thereal objection to correspondence theories is that they “fail to provide entitiesto which truth vehicles (whether we take these to be statements, sentences orutterances) can be said to correspond.”17

But, Davidson argues, rather thanmoving us to look for new definitions oftruth, this failure should lead us to question the belief that, to make theconcept of truth useful, we have to be able to specify what makes a truesentence 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 definition oftruth, but an understanding of how we have the concept of truth. It is thusnot truth that we should be seeking, but rather a clarification of “thenecessary condition[s] of our possession of the concept of truth.”18

To summarize, Davidson’s approach to truth has two distinct sides to it.First, as against any attempt to define truth, he takes the notion of truth itselfto be “beautifully transparent” and primitive, and thus denies that the gen-eral concept of truth is reducible to any other concept or amenable toredefinition 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 truthvalue, 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 andMeaning,” in Inquiries intoTruth 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 resiststhe urge to believe that such a definition fully captures the concept of truth.

The second part consists in saying enough about truth to shed light on theother philosophical issues in which truth is implicated without succumbingto the temptation to offer a full blown definition of truth: “what we want toknow 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 requiresspecifying at least part of the content of the concept of truth which Tarski’struth predicates fail to capture.”21 Davidson’s account of truth consequentlyturns to the conditions of truth – specifically, the condition that sentencesand other propositional entities have content.

Heidegger’s inquiry into truth follows a similar strategy. For bothHeidegger and Davidson, the problem with correspondence theories is thatthey presuppose, but cannot explain, the structure of our knowledge of theworld. Of course, Heidegger is not motivated by a desire to employ adefinition of the truth predicate in a theory of meaning. Instead, his interestin truth stems from the fact that, as he explains, “the phenomenon of truth isso 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. Buthe insists that the relationship between being and truth cannot be explainedby existing correspondence theories because we only recognize the corre-spondence relation between a statement and things in the world posterior toour relating the statement to the world through our “comportment.” Thusthe notion of correspondence cannot help us in knowing how to relatestatements to the world (see GA 9: 184).

But Heidegger’s criticism of correspondence theories should not betaken to mean that Heidegger intended to redefine the truth of assertionsin other terms. Indeed, he accepts that the truth of propositional entities is tobe understood as a kind of “correspondence” or agreement with the waythe world is; a “proposition is true,” he affirms, “insofar as it corresponds tothings.”22 Heidegger’s 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 mentalrepresentations and nonmental things. Such theories, Heidegger argues, areunable 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 BasicWritings, 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 isintended in the assertion “is just as it gets pointed out in the assertion asbeing.”23 In so doing, he accepts the intuition that the truth of propositionalentities 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 thatbeliefs or assertions are the sorts of things that can be true or false.His accountof unconcealment is meant not as a definition of truth, but rather as anexplanation of what makes it possible for propositions to point to the worldin just the way that the world is. And in a manner not unlike Davidson,Heidegger sees the content of propositional states as fixed through ourinteracting with others and our orientation toward things within a worldthereby “erasing,” in Davidson’s words, “the boundary between knowing alanguage and knowing our way around in the world generally.”24 It is in thedetails of their accounts of what fixes the content of our intentional states thatthe interesting differences are found between Davidson’s and Heidegger’sviews.

INTENTIONAL CONTENT AS A CONDITION OF TRUTH

In this section of the chapter, I look in more detail at Davidson’s andHeidegger’s respective accounts of the way intentional content gets fixed.I will first examine Davidson’s view, and then show howHeidegger’s accountof unconcealment can be read in the context of Davidson’s approach to theproblem.25

Davidson begins from the fact that human beings use language andsucceed in understanding each other, and asks what makes that use oflanguage possible. Davidson’s project of “Radical Interpretation” illuminatesthe conditions of language by asking what would suffice for an interpreter tointerpret the speaker of an alien language. By imagining a radical interpre-tation – that is, an interpretation that makes no assumptions about thepropositional content of the speaker’s behavior (linguistic or other) –

Davidson focuses us on those properties of languages that allow us to learnthem. A radical interpreter faces the problem that we cannot understandwhat a speaker means by her words without knowing what she believes, andwe are deprived of the usual access to her beliefs – her words. Thus, if we can

23 GA 2: H. 218. See also GA 9: 184–5/“On the Essence of Truth,” p. 122; “What is presentsitself along with the presentative assertion so that the latter subordinates itself to the directivethat it speak of what is just as it is. In following such a directive the assertion conforms to whatis. Speech that directs itself accordingly is correct (true).” For a more complete discussion ofthis 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. 443–4.

25 I don’t address, however, whether Davidson would find Heidegger’s account either accept-able or necessary.


explain how it is possible to interpret her without the benefit of a priorknowledge of her beliefs and meanings, we will learn something importantabout the way language works – namely, what it takes to give content to theutterances and beliefs of another.

The issue, then, becomes one of understanding how it is that we learn toascribemeanings and beliefs to each other. Here is where truth is implicated.To give content to the thoughts and assertions of others, Davidson claims, wemust be able to ascribe truth conditions to their propositional states. But, aswe have seen, a Tarskian “definition” of truth is insufficient for this projectbecause it is subsequent to our having a meaningful language and proposi-tional attitudes with content. Rather, some account of the way in which wecome 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 atheory of truth correctly apply to a speaker or group of speakers, we couldplausibly be said to understand the concept of truth.”26

Thus Davidson tries to say something more about truth – not by way ofdefining truth, but rather by way of understanding the conditions underwhich we can apply a theory of truth to others. A theory of truth can onlyapply to a speaker, however, if that speaker’s utterances have a content that isabout the world. Indeed, from the fact that a language can be learned by onecompletely unfamiliar with that language, it follows that the content ofutterances must be, by and large, about the world. The same holds forbeliefs. We have no basis for attributing beliefs to others beyond whatevercorrelations we can discover between their behavior and the world.27We canthus see that a condition of having a concept of truth is having beliefs andutterances 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. Hemakes the further argument that we cannot have meaningful beliefs orutterances at all unless we are interpreted by others. This is because, untilwe enter into relationships of interpretation with others, there can be no wayof determinately fixing the cause that gives our beliefs and words theirmeaning, nor of locating that cause in an independent world.

The problem of locating the cause in the world arises, in the first instance,from the fact that any particular event is implicated in a number of differentcausal sequences of interaction. These include causes prior to that event (forinstance, the event of our seeing a flower is itself caused by whatever made theflower grow), as well as causal intermediaries between us and the world (forinstance, reflected light from the flower striking the photoreceptors in ourretinas).

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 beliefor utterance, wemust determine which features of that cause are included inthe belief, and which are excluded. For instance, if we decide that therelevant cause of our belief that there is a flower is the presence of a flower,and subsequently conclude that the content of our belief that there is afloweris fixed by the presence of the flower (rather than the pattern of stimulationof our sensory surfaces), it is still not clear which of the many features of thepresence of the flower are included in our belief that there is a flower. It is afeature of beliefs and sentences that they in general are not directed towardevery particular of a thing – I can believe that there is a flower withoutbelieving that the flower is red. Beliefs also occur under a description – Ican believe that there is a flower without also believing that there is a plant’sreproductive structure. This second problem, put another way, is that ofexplaining how the causal interaction, which is extensionally described,becomes an intentional content.

Davidson’s way of both locating the cause and determining the content ofour propositional attitudes depends on “triangulation” – that is, “two ormore creatures simultaneously in interaction with each other and with theworld they share.”28 Davidson argues that we go some way toward solvingboth problems by noting what he calls a primitive or primal triangle. In thistriangle, the two creatures observe each other responding to objects in theworld. For such a triangle to exist, each creature must respond to a similaritybetween different objects or different instances of the same object, and alsorespond to a similarity in the other creature’s responses to that object. Onceone observer is able to correlate these similarities in this way, the stage is setfor locating and determining the cause of the other’s response.29

This primitive triangle is necessary to solving the problems, but not suffi-cient because the “baseline” connecting the two creatures is not complete.The cause of the beliefs cannot be found in an objective world until thecreatures have some way of knowing that they both occupy positions in ashared objective world, and this requires that they have some access to theother’s perspective.30The primitive triangle is also not sufficient for determin-ing the intentional content of propositional entities, for the causal relationsthat hold between creatures and things are extensionally defined, while inten-tional content is not. Our beliefs about flowers, for instance, cannot bereduced to an extensional description of flowers, 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

Griffiths, Ed.). Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1991, p. 160. See also “TheConditions 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 (beliefsabout plants, allergies, romance, etc.), but also because the content of ourbeliefs, as already noted, generally includes less than all that is true of someobject extensionally defined. Without a more fine-grained determination ofthe other’s orientation to the world than that provided by the primal triangle,we cannot adequately fix the content of the other’s beliefs.

But how are we to complete the baseline? Davidson argues that whatis needed to connect the creatures is language. Linguistic communicationcontributes several elements missing from the primal triangle. First,language provides a sufficiently 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 thingssome particular cause that determines the content of any given belief orutterance:

[W]hat makes the particular aspect of the cause of the learner’s responses theaspect that gives them the content they have is the fact that this aspect of the causeis shared by the teacher and the learner. Without such sharing, there would be nogrounds for selecting one cause rather than another as the content-fixing cause. Anon-communicating creature may be seen by us as responding to an objectiveworld; but we are not justified in attributing thoughts about our world (or anyother) to it.32

Finally, the communication of a particular orientation to objectsmakes error,and hence objectivity, possible because, by letting us know what the other isresponding to, it puts us in a position to expect the other’s past pattern ofbehavior to continue in the future. The failure to satisfy this expectation is,Davidson argues, the only basis for attributing error (or, conversely, truth) toanother.

Of course, this does not really provide an explanation of how intentionalcontent gets fixed, because the advanced form of triangulation depends onmeaningful utterances – that is, utterances with a content. To complete theaccount, Davidson claims, one would need to explain a structure of being inthe world and of relating to objects in between the primitive account, whichsimply describes a causal interaction, and the full-blown intentional account,by which point intentional content is already fixed. And Davidson believeswe lack a vocabulary for describing this intermediate state: “We have manyvocabularies for describing nature when we regard it as mindless, and wehave 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 familiarmeaning, a propositional content, only if they occurin a rich context, for such a context is required to give the words or thoughts a location and ameaningful 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 fixing of inten-tional content that explains how truth is possible. That is, it explains theconditions under which utterances and beliefs become the sorts of thingsthat 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 fixes the truth conditions of theother’s utterances – only then does the utterance of the other come to have adefinite content. But Davidson cannot explain how the communication thatallows the interlocutors to interpret each other can itself be contentful. Forthis, he would need some way to account for our ability to focus on someintentionally defined subset of features of the thing – an ability, moreover,which is independent of our propositional attitudes regarding the thing.

If we look at Heidegger’s work on the conditions of truth in the context ofDavidson’s problematic, we find that Heidegger does not recognize the firstproblem outlined above – the problem of identifying the relevant cause ofbeliefs. He is satisfied that a phenomenology of perception resolves thisissue, for it shows that the object itself, and nothing else, is experienced inperception.34 But the second problem – the problem of fixing 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 explanationwould need to be offered to provide an account of this. It would be necessaryto show both how our behavior is sufficiently rich and articulated as to bemeaningfully directed toward things in the world, and how we can be awareof the possibility of error in our directedness toward those things. WhileHeidegger does not offer a vocabulary for describing our prepredicativeexperience of things, he does provide a detailed analysis of the structure of aprepropositional, but nevertheless intentional, familiarity with the world.

Heidegger’s 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 tobe fixed by things in the world, those things must be manifest to us.Heidegger’s inquiry into discovery, the making manifest of entities, aims atexhibiting the structural features of our comportment with things – inparticular, those features that fix meaning. The second part of the investiga-tion into unconcealment focuses on disclosure – the structural features ofhuman existence that makes possible such uncovering comportment.Although a discussion of disclosure would be essential to completingHeidegger’s account – Heidegger argues that the uncovering of what is, ofentities, is possible only on the basis of a “disclosure” of an understanding ofBeing35 – I will focus here only on discovery, because it is Heidegger’s

34 See, for example, GA 20: 48–9: “I see no ‘representations’ of the chair, register no image ofthe 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 iswithin-the-world to be encountered.”


account of discovery that is most immediately concerned with fixing thecontent of our intentional comportment toward objects in the world.

Discovery, making things manifest, is analyzed by Heidegger on the basis ofthose situations in which we have a practical mastery of things, because theseare the situations in which our discovery of things ismost fully developed. In allsuch cases, Heidegger claims, one can distinguish several structural features ofour relationship to the things we encounter in our everyday comportment inthe world. First, Heidegger notes, we recognize things and practices as eitherbelonging to or foreign to the context in which they appear. Things presentthemselves as belonging together because they are, in Heidegger’s terminol-ogy, “directionally lined up with each other” (GA 2: H. 102). Heideggerillustrates this through the example of an office: “Equipment – in accordancewith its equipmentality – always is in terms of its belonging to other equipment:ink-stand, pen, ink, paper, blotting pad, table, lamp, furniture, windows,doors, room” (GA 2: H. 97). This belonging is defined only in relation to a“context of equipment” – the totality of other equipment that belongs in thecontext: “[e]quipmental contexture has the characteristic that the individualkinds and pieces of equipment are correlated among themselves with eachother, not only with reference to their inherent character but also in such away 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 somedegree on our practical familiarity with the context in which it belongs invirtue of its position vis-à-vis other equipmental objects.

In addition to this minimal sense of uncoveredness – that is, having aplace – which things receive from their equipmental context, Heideggernotes that things are uncovered in terms of their functionality, determinedby (a) the way they are typically used with other things and (b) the way theyare typically used in certain practices we engage in. Heidegger generallyrefers to (a) as the “with which” of things (as in “the hammer is used withnails and boards”). He refers to (b) as the “in which” of things (as in “thehammer is used in hammering”). Together, (a) and (b) comprise whatHeidegger 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 theirmeaning. When viewed from the perspective of the purpose behind use ofthe 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). Whenviewed from the perspective of the “work to be produced” through use of thething (as when a blender is used to make a milkshake), Heidegger calls thisbeing-appropriate-for of the thing its “towards which” (GA 2: H. 70). Anygiven thing, moreover, is linked into a complex and nested series of “in ordertos” and “towards whiches.” A hammer, for instance, is used in order to drivenails, in order to fasten pieces of wood together, in order to frame a wall, inorder to build a house, and so on. Heidegger calls these aspects of things


their assignments or references. He calls the network of assignments withinwhich 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, itconsists 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 objectsstand out as something with which we can cope and about which we canmake 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 aprivative manner – that is, as something that resists our world. In order touncover anything new, it must first be given at least some minimal direction-ality within our “world.” On the basis of that directionality, it is possible towork with the thing, discovering what involvements and assignments areappropriate to it.

The important thing to note is that we can, in our practices alone, andwithout the use of predicative language, embody a richly articulated way ofdealing with objects within the world. Each of the practical contexts dis-cussed above delineates and orients us to fine-grained features of individualobjects. Carpenters, for instance, are able to distinguish practically theappropriateness of this hammer for driving this nail into this board. Thiswill give them a pragmatic sensitivity to aspects like weight and hardness (aswhen this hammer is too heavy to drive this nail into that soft wood withoutmarring the surface). They canmake very fine distinctions in regard to thosefeatures of the totality of involvements relevant to their work – features in factmore fine grained than they may be able to express.

As Davidson points out, the ability tomake discriminations is not the sameas having a concept. To have something like an intentional relationship tothings, what is needed above and beyond the ability to discriminate is anawareness of the possibility of rightness and wrongness in our way of relatingto things. But, as Heidegger’s account shows, the practical totality of involve-ments carries with it just such normativity. In the first place, human practicesare never something engaged in alone – we inherit them from others. Withthe practices, Heidegger claims, we learn public norms for the value andsuccess of our activities (GA 2: H. 127–8). Human activities, Heideggerclaims, are marked by a constant concern for how others are acting: “[i]none’s concern with what one has taken hold of . . . there is constant care as tothe way one differs from [the others] “ (GA 2: H. 126). In addition, the waypractices organize objects gives them a normativity of their own. The worldgives a right place for the hammer to be and a right way for it to be used. Inaddition, we engage in practices with a purpose that itself gives things anormative reference. The carpenter knows, for instance, that this is the righthammer for the job because the purpose of the job is such and such.


Practical expertise thus bestows a normativity on things, a normativitysimilar to (and Heidegger would say a precursor to) the normative structurediscernable in our understanding of truth. With such practical expertise, wecan sense when things are going well or poorly, and we can be moved to actin a way that will improve our practical grip on the world. The normativityinherent in our engagement with a world is usually transmitted practicallyrather than linguistically: “[i]n that with which we concern ourselves envi-ronmentally the others are encountered as what they are; they are what theydo” (GA 2: H. 126).

It is thus on the basis of our pragmatic discovery of things that language ispossible, for it is the structure of equipment and involvements built into ourcomportment that delineates the features of things that are salient to us – thevery features that form the content of our beliefs and utterances. AsHeideggerexplains, language is based in our making explicit the “signification” thingshave as a result of their “involvements.” Any time we engage with an entity inthe world, we can do so because our understanding discloses these involve-ments, and in dealing with it, we “interpret” it and “lay out” its significations.36

When we speak of things, the “totality-of-significations of intelligibility is putinto words. To significations, words accrue” (GA 2: H. 161).

For Heidegger, then, the truth of assertions finds the conditions of itspossibility in discovery. To the extent that we share practical worlds, we cancome to “communicate” with each other, that is to say, share a determinateand intentionalistic orientation to things, without language. And this prac-tical sharing of a world, in turn, allows Heidegger to explain the puzzle ofhow to give language content without language.

Let me conclude by noting some consequences of this comparison ofHeidegger’s and Davidson’s accounts. The distinction between Heideggerand Davidson is not simply that of a practical versus a cognitive or linguisticaccount of human experience. Davidson’s triangulation recognizes thepractical basis of interpretation and hence of thought. Nor is there roomin Heidegger’s account for human existence without any kind of linguisticinteraction at all (although I have not emphasized this here). Rather, thedistinction is found in Heidegger’s belief that there is a nonpropositionalform of intentionality – a form of intentionality, moreover, that makeslinguistic interaction possible. This commits Heidegger to the view thatpropositional content is based in a nonpropositional form of intentionalcontent. 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 offeatures of things that I have been discussing. Thus he will say, for instance, that “[a]ny mereprepredicative seeing of the ready-to-hand is, in itself, something which already understandsand 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 language’s propositionalstructure back into all forms of human comportment.

On the other hand, Davidson’s trenchant analysis of the distinctionbetween truth theories and a pretheoretic understanding of truth, with itsfocus on the conditions of truth, helps us better grasp what is at stake inHeidegger’s account of truth and unconcealment.


3

On the “Existential Positivity of Our Abilityto be Deceived”

Illusory experiences have played and continue to play a significant role inshaping philosophical accounts of perception. By and large, the need toaccount for perceptual errors of various sorts has greased the skids for theslide into representationalist theories of mind. But the experience of per-ceptual errors – illusions, deceptions, and even hallucinations – has pushedthe existential-phenomenological tradition in a very different direction.When I speak about the existential-phenomenological tradition, I meanthe tradition of philosophers influenced by Heidegger, Sartre, andMerleau-Ponty. This tradition has its deep roots in Nietzsche.

Nietzsche insisted that “a perspectival, deceptive character belongs toexistence” (Kritische Gesamtausgabe VII-3.180). At the same time, he arguedthat “it is no more than amoral prejudice that truth is worth more thanmereappearance; it is even the worst proved assumption there is in the world.”Indeed, he believed that when it comes to appearances, we ought to questionthe supposition “that there is an essential opposition of ‘true’ and ‘false’”: “isit not sufficient,” he asked, “to assume degrees of apparentness and, as itwere, 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 involvedand to the constitution of which we contribute. This world, he argued, “isno matter of fact, but rather a composing and rounding up over a smallsum of observations; it is ‘in the flow’ as something becoming . . . that neverapproaches 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 responseto earlier drafts of this chapter. I am particularly indebted and grateful to Bert Dreyfus, CharlesSiewert, WayneMartin, Sean Kelly, Taylor Carman, lain Thomson, Bill Blattner, and Stefan Käuferfor 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 oughtnot in any event to be thought of in binary terms as “true” or “false” –

Nietzsche prefigured the work of twentieth-century phenomenologists. Inthis 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 upfor discussion regarding objects must be dealt with by exhibiting it directlyand demonstrating it directly” (GA 2: H. 35). Ultimately, then, phenom-enology aims to convince by directing its audience to their own experienceof 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, phenomenologistsdo not base their account on, for example, positing the existence ofhallucinations, understood as nonveridical experiences of nonexistingobjects or events or states of affairs, qualitatively indistinguishable fromveridical experiences of existing objects or events or states of affairs. Few, ifany of us, ever have such experiences.1 Instead, phenomenologists typicallystart with the kind of errors we do or can commit in the normal course ofevents. For instance, while walking through the park, I walk slowly andquietly to avoid startling a deer on the path ahead of me, only to discover asI draw closer that the “deer” is a shrub. I bite into my bagel, which iscovered, it seems to me, with a smoked salmon shmear, and realize aftera moment of shock that the pink shmear is actually flavored with straw-berry, not smoked salmon. As I’m walking down the path, I seem to seea stone ahead, which turns out merely to be a patch of sunlight on thepath. Or finally, we might consider the experience of a rather special caselike Zöllner’s illusion, where “objectively” parallel lines appear to beconverging.

I will refer to such cases in general as “deceptions” – errors produced bythe fact that we do not simply make a mistake, but rather we are taken in bythe way things present themselves. An issue to consider is whether some or allof these deceptions are properly categorized as perceptual errors. One might,for instance, maintain that they should be understood as errors of judgmentrather than perception – that, on the basis of appearances, we draw a wrongconclusion about the nature of the objects we encounter. As we will see,existential phenomenologists maintain that such a description of theseexperiences 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 theclinical literature. See “Merleau-Ponty’s Account of Hallucination,” European Journal ofPhilosophy 17 (2009): 76–90.


I do not intend to review or critique nonphenomenological accountsof perceptual deception in any detail. But before turning to the phenom-enological account, I do want to note a few strategies for categorizing andanalyzing such phenomena that the phenomenological tradition wouldreject.

First, one might be tempted to draw a sharp distinction between veridicaland nonveridical experiences, and to reserve perceptual categories (“see-ing,” “hearing,” “smelling,” “tasting,” “feeling,” etc.) for those cases in whichwe succeed in grasping things as they objectively are.When I look at Zöllner’sillusion, for example, it does not seem right to say of me that I see converginglines, even though they look like they’re converging to me. Or when Imistake a bush for a deer in the park, it does not seem right to say of methat I see a deer, even though it looks like a deer to me. So one might feelcompelled to draw a clear distinction between things looking a certain way,or our experience having a certain phenomenal character, or the mereappearing of things, and a genuine perceptual experience. Or, more pre-cisely, one might feel compelled to treat the mere appearing as a genuineperceptual experience only if it is veridical. (Allowing for the possibility ofdeviant causal chains, one would have to say that veridicality is a necessarybut not sufficient condition of a genuine perceptual experience.) In thegenuine perceptual experience, the phenomenal character of things corre-sponds to the way things actually are. One then accounts for deceptions bytreating them as the presentation of a certain phenomenal character in theabsence of the objects necessary to make that presentation true.2

This points us to a second temptation – that of assuming that there is somedeterminate, objective fact of the matter about the character of the things inthe world that we perceive.3 Of course, this is a hard assumption to avoidmaking – it seems that either there is a deer in the woods on the path in frontof 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 theway things objectively are.

And this, in turn, points us to a third temptation – the temptation to treatour 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 inwhich I perceive something slightly wrongly. I buy a green tie to go with my green suit, forexample, only to find when I get home that the tie was in fact brown. What did I see in thedepartment store? I saw a tie – there can be no denying that much. But it seems wrong to saythat I saw a green tie, given that the tie was brown. And yet, if I had seen a brown tie, I wouldn’thave bought it.

3 Resisting this temptation would not necessarily require one to deny that there is somedeterminate, objective fact of the matter about the makeup of the physical universe. But itwould require one to acknowledge a possible distinction between the physical universe – whatMerleau-Ponty sometimes refers to as the “world in itself” (see, e.g., PP: 10, 39) and theperceptual world.

Our Ability to be Deceived 59

are experiencing, as if it is possible to specify, at least in principle, how it isthat the world seems to us to be.

I suspect these three temptations hang together and reinforce oneanother. It is only because we believe in a set of determinate, objectivefacts about the perceived world – and only because we believe that the waythe world seems to us is equally objective and determinate – that it makessense to treat the success or failure of perception as a matter of truth orfalsity.

These temptations also might lead one into what I would call an unequaldivision of labor in accounting for perceptual deception. By this, I mean thatthe responsibility for the deception tends, unjustly, one might suppose, tofall on the deceived party. When there is a mismatch between the way theworld seems to us to be and the way the world actually is, we are at fault. Onereasons, for instance, that we have drawn a false inference from the evidenceabout the world with which we are presented in sensation, or that we havehastily judged that such and such is the case on the basis of flimsy evidence.But what makes cases I have described instances of deception as opposed tomere error is the sense that the deceived party did not really do anythingwrong. One’s perceptual systems may have been working properly. One mayhave been proceeding with due care. And yet one gets taken in.

The existential-phenomenological approach, however, does not finditself tempted by the experience of deception to think about perception inthese ways. Indeed, the phenomenology of deception is actually thought toreinforce our ability to resist these temptations. In particular, as I hope toshow in what follows, deceptions such as these help one to see perception ashaving not binary success conditions but of succeeding to greater or lesserdegrees – one can see the scene in better or worse ways. But it rarely makessense to say that I perceived either truly or falsely. Second, deception helps usto recognize that the perceptual domain is not the objective universe ofphysics. And finally, it helps us recognize the indeterminate quality of ourexperience of the perceptual domain.

THE PHENOMENOLOGICAL ACCOUNT

OF PERCEPTUAL DECEPTION

The starting point for the existential-phenomenological account of percep-tual deception is the recognition of what Heidegger calls in Being and Timethe “existential positivity of our ability to be deceived” (GA 2: H. 138). Thepoint is that deception does not show a momentary failing or accidentalshortcoming in us, but rather points the way to understanding somethingfundamental about us, the world, and our relationship to things in the world.As Heidegger explains, “every deception and every error” should be seen “asa modification of original being-in” (GA 2: H. 62). By this, Heidegger meansthat errors and deceptions are not meremental events, nor do they consist in


the possession of false representations about the world. Instead, they areparticular ways of being out in the world and involved with things. In arelated manner, perception itself is not “measured against the idea of anabsolute knowledge of the world” (GA 2: H. 38) – that is, Heidegger deniesthat veridicality, the measure of knowledge, is an appropriate categoryfor 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 viewthat deception shows us something essential about the nature of the world andthe things we encounter in the world – namely, that they are not objective anddeterminate. “It is precisely in the unstable seeing of the ‘world,’ a seeing thatflickers with ourmoods, that the available shows itself in its specific wordliness,which is never the same from day to day” (GA 2: H. 38).

Merleau-Ponty agrees. Writing in the context of thinking about halluci-nations (although the point applies broadly), he notes:

all the difficulties arise from the fact that objective thought, the reduction of things asexperienced to objects, of subjectivity to the cogitatio, leaves no room for the equivocaladherence of the subject to preobjective phenomena. The consequence is thereforeclear. We must stop constructing hallucination, or indeed consciousness generally,according to a certain essence or idea of itself which compels us to define it in termsof some sort of absolute adequation. (PP 336)

The experience of deception points us toward the unsteady, flickeringnature of the perceptual world, to the equivocal experience of “preobjectivephenomena,” for were experience always clear and the world of perceptionpopulated with determinate objects, we would not be taken in by deceptiveappearances.

Before going on, I should emphasize the tendentious nature of theseexistential-phenomenological claims. For many, sense experience is to bemeasured in the same way cognition is. It is either true or false, and it is trueby, to put it loosely, representing the way that the world is. Only true senseexperiences can qualify as perceptions. Deceptions, illusions, and hallucina-tions fail to represent the world, and therefore, there is no positive role tobe played by perceptual deception in disclosing the world to us. The sourceof the error must, therefore, be traced somehow back to us – for example,an error of judgment, a false conclusion drawn from the evidence of thesenses.

So the existential phenomenologist cannot rest content with this descrip-tion. We must confront the question: how does existential phenomenologyaccount for error? If we have abandoned the thesis of an objective, deter-minate world, what basis is there for distinguishing between successfuland unsuccessful experiences of the world? And if not veridicality, thenwhat is the criterion for success? To answer these questions, I want first toreconstruct 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 thinkabout our perceptual encounter with the world in the three ways outlinedearlier.

I turn first to Heidegger’s account of deception, offeredmost extensivelyin two Marburg lecture courses: the 1923–4 course in Gesamtausgabe vol-ume 17 (GA 17): Einführung in die phanomenologische Forschung, and the1925–6 course in GA 21: Logik. Die Frage nach der Wahrheit. Let’s look first atthe kind of example Heidegger draws on. Heidegger writes:4 “I am walkingin a dark forest and I see between the fir trees something coming towardme –‘a deer,’ I say. The assertion does not need to be explicit. Uponcoming 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 bedeceived by the shrub? First, Heidegger emphasizes that the error is notsimply one of having said the wrong thing about what I have seen or havingwrongly 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 tocover up” (GA 21: 187). Heidegger uses the term “comport,” to carryoneself or behave, in order to emphasize the primarily practical dimensionof our perceptual engagement with the world. Perceiving wrongly is notbelieving something false, for Heidegger; it is acting in the world in such away that the true nature of things is covered up.

Heidegger proposes that there are three “structural conditions” of oureveryday comportment in the world that we need to focus on in thinkingabout deception. The suggestion is that it is the very conditions of ourordinary engagement with things in the world that makes us susceptible tobeing deceived.

The first structural condition of comportment that Heidegger analyzes isthe 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 priordisclosure of the world” (GA 21: 187). By this, he means that we are alwaysalready poised for things to show up to us, and we encounter them asmeaningful things in terms of our understanding of our world. So as I walkthrough the park in the dark, my skills for park walking are activated. AsMerleau-Ponty puts it, “if there can be, in front of [my body], important

4 I should note that in these passages, Heidegger’s ultimate goal is to understand how it ispossible to say something that is deceptive, rather than something that is simply false. A falseassertion need not be deceptive if it couldn’t possibly induce you to believe it.

So Heidegger tackles the problem of the lie by first asking how it is that we can perceiveerroneously, since it is such a perception that ultimately makes the lie believable. I note thisonly because Heidegger introduces language into the discussion at certain points, and I’mgoing to completely ignore those for my purposes. I don’t think that by systematically ignoringthat side of Heidegger’s analysis I’mdoing any violence to his account of deceptive perceptualexperiences.


figures against indifferent backgrounds, this occurs in virtue of its beingpolarized by its tasks, of its existence towards them, of its collecting togetherof itself in its pursuit of its aims” (PP 101). So the first thing that sets us up tobe deceived is the way we are always disposed or primed, through the aimsimplicit in what we are doing, to find things in such and such a way.

This leads us to the second structural condition of our comportment. Thiscondition has to do with the kind of entities we encounter in our everydaydealings in the world: “the entity itself must have its being constituted in sucha way that, as the entity that it is, it offers and calls for the possibility of atogetherness with others, and it does so on the basis of its being. That is, itonly is what it is in the unity of such a togetherness” (GA 21: 185). Theentities we are primed or disposed to discover in comportment are entitiesthat are not what they are in themselves alone, irrespective of the relation-ships they bear to other entities. Instead, entities are what they are holisticallyin virtue of the way they exist together with other entities. The classicexample of this is Heidegger’s ubiquitous hammer: the hammer is what itis only because of the way it relates to nails and boards. The “togetherness”that Heidegger mentions is, I take it, the meaning or significance of a thing,where to be meaningful is to lead those who grasp the meaning from onething to another. An entity is the entity it is in terms of the way it directs us tothe context of other entities and activities within which it belongs. Thetogetherness, in turn, makes an entity the thing it is only to the degree thatit “offers” and can “call for,” that is, affords5 and solicits, us to be directedfrom the entity to the things and activities with which it is involved. The worldis the organized totality of such relationships of offering and calling for us tomove from one thing and one situation to the next. And something only is anentity insofar as it presents us with a “unity of togetherness,” that is, shows upas holding amore or less coherent and organized place in such ameaningfulstructure. We comport ourselves in the world by responding to the signifi-cations that the world affords and solicits.

Together, the first and second structural conditions mean that we alwaysencounter the things in the world in terms of something else. We neverencounter something that is meaningless: “in the field of everyday experi-ences, I do not just stand there – for example, in the forest – and simply havesomething before me. That is a purely fictitious situation. Instead, I amalways 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 importantdifference betweenHeidegger’s notion of what the world offers andGibson’s notion of environ-mental affordances. For Gibson, an affordance is a physical fact about what the environment“offers,” “provides,” or “furnishes” an organism of such and such a type. See Ecological Approach toVisual 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 theworld.


understand, something that is laid out in advance as something, and that inthis way is accepted and expected in the comportment of coping with theworld” (GA 21: 187). So when I mistakenly see a deer, for instance, it isbecause certain features of the scene in front of me draw on my abilities toidentify and respond to deer solicitations.

Finally, the third structural condition Heidegger identifies is the fact thatwithin the range of possible significations in terms of which we encounterthings, the situation within which we find ourselves disposes us to respond tocertain solicitations rather than others. In the forest, for example, nothingcould solicit us to see “the cubed root of sixty-nine coming towards me” (GA21: 188). Even though it is logically possible that we could see the Shah ofIran coming through the forest, we will not be motivated to see this in theBlack Forest of Germany either (see GA 21: 188). But both deer and shrubsare live possibilities.

To review briefly, then, Heidegger observes that our ordinary ways ofengaging 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 withaffordances), and, in fact, they also call for us to follow up thoseaffordances (they solicit us to act on the affordances); finally,

3. The world presents us with a meaningful context of entities andactivities that disposes us to encounter some things but not others.

These conditions are not just the conditions of everyday comportment – theconditions under which we are able to smoothly and fluidly deal with things.They are also the conditions that make it possible for us to be deceived bythings. How so?

Consider the example of the salmon schmear. It is because I ordered asalmon, not a strawberry, schmear and because, in the context of bagel shops,one’s order is generally fulfilled, that I am primed for my bagel to come with asalmon schmear. The pinkish color of the schmear in that context leads me toanticipate the fishy flavor of a salmon schmear. But it is also the case that thesignifications in the context lead me to experience the color in a particularway (in fact, once I realized that I had the wrong schmear on my bagel, thecolor thereafter looked strawberry pink, not salmon pink). So the deceptionarose through a confluence of my dispositions, the world context, and thecolor of the entity itself, all conspiring to indicate the existence of somethingthat was not there. But the deception was also uncovered as such through thecourse of further perceptual comportment – it was the sweet, creamy, straw-berry flavor that changed the way I was disposed to see the color and,consequently, let me see the schmear for what it was.

But, as Heidegger points out, there is a distinction between a perceptualerror andmerely failing to see something – between, for example, seeing the


bush as a deer, and not seeing the bush. This distinction parallels thedistinction between calling someone by a pseudonym and calling him orher by the wrong name.6 A pseudonym is “a designation behind which theauthor hides, an alias that covers him up” (GA 36/37: 227). It is not false inthe sense that there is nobody who answers to it. To the contrary, thepseudonym directs one to the author of the book, but does it in such a waythat “one does not see how he or she genuinely is.” Likewise, in a perceptualerror, we do see something (it is not a hallucination). But we see it in such away that it does not show itself as it genuinely is. “Pseudos is a showing thatpasses something off as something; thus it is more than a mere covering upwithout passing it off as other than it is” (GA 17: 32).

The discussion of the structural conditions of perception, moreover, letsus recognize that the possibility of perceptual deception is built into thevery structure of our world. It is a “basic fact, in the sphere of dealing withthe world,”Heidegger insists, that error and deception “are interwoven in acompletely fundamental way, and do not merely occur as defective proper-ties that one must overcome” (GA 17: 39). Heidegger thus offers a moreequitable division of labor, attributing the blame for the deception to theworld and to the things in the world as much as to our way of comportingourselves in the world. It could be the case, of course, that we are primarilyresponsible for the error, insofar as we might respond wrongly to thesolicitation. We might, for instance, lack the skills to respond appropriatelyto what the situation calls on us to do. It might be that I would be moresusceptible to being deceived by the bush than a deer hunter would – heprobably has much better skills for distinguishing deer from other thingsthat might suggest a deer. At least, given that he goes looking for deer with aloaded gun, I hope he has better skills. But, even in this case, my deceptionis motivated to a considerable degree by the skills I have and use effectivelyin coping with this sort of context. As Heidegger puts it in the 1923–4lecture course, “the possibility of deception lies . . . in an erroneous seeing,which is not motivated by a careless consideration, but rather in themanner in which the existing [human] being lives and encounters theworld itself” (GA 17: 36).

Thus we are not solely responsible for being deceived. It is also the casethat, at least sometimes, things in the world conspire to lead us to perceivethem wrongly: “there are entities that in their specific being have the char-acteristic that they pass themselves of as something that they are not, or as socharacterized as they are not – where the possibility of deception thus doesnot lie primarily in a wrong way of taking them up, but rather in the entityitself” (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, thefalse. “This is the fundamental meaning of the Greek pseudos : to so twist something that onedoes 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 thingscomes to life by virtue of the fact that we encounter them circumstantially. We do notsee things as objects, as when they are the object of scientific investigation. Thisexistence of things is much richer and offers muchmore fluctuating possibilities thanare thematically prepared. Because the world in its richness is only there in theparticular concreteness of living, the elusiveness is also much more encompassingand, 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 contextsnecessarily orient us toward more than can possibly be present to us at anygiven moment. Merleau-Ponty makes a similar point in noting that vision is“an operation which fulfills more than it promises” (PP 377). For instance,when I see the facade of a house, I am oriented already to the back and sidesof the house. My vision of the front “promises” an experience of the othersides. But the experience of seeing the other sides is always much richer thanwhat the promise preparedme for. So, likeHeidegger, Merleau-Ponty sees inthe present experience an orientation toward much more than can bepresently experienced. Thus perception

throws me open to a world, but can do so only by outrunning bothme and itself. Thusthe 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 thatthe 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 ofwhich we can understand and intend more than is present to us at any givenmoment.

RESISTING TEMPTATION

Unfortunately, Heidegger does not develop his view of perceptual deceptionmuch further. But, in this final section, I would like to look at the implica-tions of acknowledging the positive character of deception, and to hazardsome preliminary suggestions about the lessons existential phenomenologyhas drawn from the experience of perceptual deception. I will focus, inparticular, on Merleau-Ponty, to see how his account stands with respect tothe temptations I discussed at the outset. But the summary of Merleau-Ponty’s views that I offer here will be very tentative. I will present his viewas a loose collection of theses about the lessons to be drawn from theexperience of being deceived, cognizant that much work remains to bedone in order to provide a coherent theory of perceptual deception.

With a suitable description of the experience of deception in place, wecan begin to ask: how must we, the world, and our relationship to the worldbe 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 thething really looks like what we take it as. At the same time, things will lookdifferently once the deception is uncovered. And the deception is uncoveredin the course of further perception/action/exploration of the world.

Let’s look at each of these features of the description in turn, and see whatlessons are to be drawn from them.

For one thing, in many ordinary cases of perceptual deception, we aredeceived because the thing we mistakenly perceive really does look like orsound like or taste like or feel like something else. The bush in the forestdoes, from such and such a vantage point, and in such and such light, looklike a deer. The strawberry schmear does look in many respects like thesalmon schmear. This is in direct contrast to some traditional modes ofthinking about deception – modes Merleau-Ponty calls “sketchy reasoning.”If we start not with an appreciation of the positive character of deception butinstead with an assumption that deception is a kind of negation, a departurefrom the objective world as it determinately presents itself to us, then thetendency is to see deception as the result of our erroneous contribution towhat 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 therewith some memory of or past experience of a deer. So the deception, onthis account, is the result of the contributions of memory to what is actuallyexperienced.

But, Merleau-Ponty points out, this way of thinking about deception infact fails to accomplish what it sets out to, because the present experiencemust already have “form and meaning,” it must already look like something,in order to call forth just these memories as opposed to others (see PP 20–1).But that means that, in order to call forth the memory of a deer to make thebush 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 agorilla or the Shah of Iran, or anything else. Indeed, it is this looking like adeer that makes the deception deceptive – it “passes itself off as genuineperception precisely in those cases where the meaning originates in thesource of sensation and nowhere else.” If that is so, then the supplement ofmemories comes too late to explain the deception (PP 20).

The phenomenology of deception, then, points us to the inherentlymeaningful structure of the perceptual world; indeed, it expands our under-standing of it. It shows up as unmotivated the belief in a meaningless stratumof sensations, to which meanings subsequently are attached. Merleau-Pontyillustrates this through a discussion of Zöllner’s illusion, an optical illusion inwhich parallel lines are made to seem to be converging (Fig. 3.1).

For Merleau-Ponty, it is wrongheaded to start from the assumption thatthe lines must actually be given in perception as parallel, and then to try toexplain how the lines end up being experienced as converging. Instead, theinteresting question to ask about this illusion is


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

Illusions and other such deceptions point up the fact that we first of allencounter meaningful structures, and we encounter particular entities interms of their meanings. Something is meaningful when it leads one whograsps the meaning beyond what is presented. To say that perception ismeaningful through and through is to say that there is nothing experiencedin perception that is absolutely and fully given in the present; everything weperceive directs us beyond itself, attunes us to anticipate further experiences.A color leads us to anticipate a modulation of color as lighting conditionschange. A shape or form leads us to anticipate further adumbrations of theform as it moves relative to us. Thus what everything is is experienced inperception in virtue of what Merleau-Ponty calls “the mode of existence andco-existence of perceived objects . . . the life which steals across the visualfield and secretly binds its parts together” (PP 35).

Given the inherently meaningful structure of perception, it follows thatthere is no particular thing about which we might not be deceived. There is

figure 3.1


no bedrock component of our experience about which we could not get itwrong, because everything has the meaning that it has only in virtue of thestructure of meanings that solicit us to further exploration.7 The schmearexample illustrates this – the perceived color of the schmear varies along withmy expectations about the taste. Or consider the example Merleau-Pontyintroduces when making this point – the light patch on the path that ismistaken for a stone. “Every sensation is already pregnant with meaning,” heobserves, “and there is no sense-datum which remains unchanged when Ipass from the illusory stone to the real patch of sunlight” (PP 297). Whatbefore looked to be a broad, flat stone with a different color from thesurrounding earth showed itself to be a differently lighted patch of dirt ofthe same color. Perhaps what seemed to be a shadow cast by the stone mightnow 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 recognizethat different attunements will result in different experiences of the percep-tual field, then we will have to conclude that there is no final, objective fact ofthe matter about what is given to us in perception. And, indeed, Merleau-Ponty argues that this kind of indeterminacy in the perceptual world is acondition of our being deceived perceptually. Only if the world has room forand accommodates deceptive as well as correct perceptions, only then is itpossible to be deceived, since the deception presents itself as accuratelyopening us up to the world. This means that the world must be somethingmore than all that is the case; it must be rather a setting: “the world is not asum 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 itwhile contracting into a solid appearance, and because in this way, always beingopen upon a horizon of possible verifications, it does not cut me off from truth.But, for the same reason, I am not immune from error, since the world which Iseek to achieve through each appearance, and which endows that appearance,rightly or wrongly, with the weight of truth, never necessarily requires this particularappearance. (PP 297)

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

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


perceptual field?We start from the notion of the inherentmeaningfulness ofperception. This means that to perceive is to be drawn into or pointedtoward paths of further perceptual exploration and action. The distinctionbetween genuine and deceptive perceptions is found in the degree to whichthey lead us well, in the sense that they allow us to keep our grip on the worldaround us. As Merleau-Ponty puts it:

my perception brings into coexistence an indefinite number of perceptual chainswhich, if followed up, would confirm it in all respects and accord with it. My eyes andmy hand know that any actual change of place would produce a sensible responseentirely according to my anticipation, and I can feel swarming beneath my gaze thecountless mass of more detailed perceptions that I anticipate, and upon which Ialready have a hold. (PP 338, translation modified)

In the genuine perception, then, the perception is followed up with andconfirmed by further perceptions that were already anticipated in terms ofthe meaning of the genuine perception. With a deceptive perception, bycontrast, what I am led to anticipate by the perception is not encountered inthe perceptual field: “my body has no grip on it, and . . . I cannot unfold itbefore me by any exploratory action” (PP 295).

It is thus further perceptions – perceptions that restore our grip on theworld – that annul the deceptive perception and show it for the deceptionit was.

I place my confidence in the world. Perceiving is pinning one’s faith, at a stroke, in awhole future of experiences, and doing so in a present which never strictly guaranteesthe future; it is placing one’s belief in a world. It is this opening upon a world whichmakes possible perceptual truth and . . . thus enabling us to “cross out” the previousillusion and regard it as null and void. (PP 297)

But now the fact that we can be deceived in perception, and yet neverthelesscorrect our being deceived through further perception, shows somethingimportant about the relationship in which we stand to our perceptualexperiences – namely, that “the percept is and remains, despite all criticaleducation, on the hither side of doubt and demonstration” (PP 344). It isimportant to attend to the nuances of this claim: MerleauPonty is not claim-ing that I’m always correct about what I perceive. Rather, that in the act ofperceiving, my perception is not in the game of being true or false. I cannotbemistaken inmy perception in the sense that what I perceive is false. Butmyperception is nevertheless correctible in the sense that a prior perceptioncan be “cancelled” or “crossed out” – we come to recognize that the way wewere seeing the world was not optimal, given the practical aims implicit inourmode of engagement with the world. “I say that I perceive correctly whenmy body has a precise hold on the spectacle, but that does not mean that myhold is ever all-embracing” (PP 297) – that is, for any given perceptual holdon 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 theworld, 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 thesuccess conditions of perception in the same way we think of the successconditions of belief. But the paradox dissolves when we see perceptioninstead in terms of action – practical engagement with the world. If I ampouring water into a glass, we do not say that my way of gripping the pitcherand holding the glass is “false.” It might be a mistaken way of pouring thewater in the sense that it will lead me to spill the water. And there areundoubtedly 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 isa matter of the action unfolding itself in such a way that it allows me toachieve my goals in the world.

And this, in turn, suggests that it is wrong to think of perception in termsof the possession of propositional contents. To see that there is a stone on thepath is not necessarily to have a particular attitude toward the propositionalcontent: there is a stone on the path. “I see the illusory stone,”Merleau-Pontyargues instead, “in the sense that my whole perceptual and motor fieldendows the bright spot with the significance ‘stone on the path’. And alreadyI ready myself to feel under my foot this smooth, firm surface” (PP 297,translation modified). I am, correspondingly, deceived in seeing the stone if,for example, the resulting bodily attitude causes me to stumble, or to changedirections into a less optimal path.


4

Heidegger on Plato, Truth, and Unconcealment

The 1931–1932 Lecture on The Essence of Truth

In the 1920s and 1930s, Heidegger repeatedly offered lectures and seminarslargely devoted to the topic of truth. His evolving thoughts on the nature andphilosophical significance of truth, however, made their way into relativelyfew publications, and when they were published, they tended to come in anincredibly condensed and enigmatic form. The main published works fromthis period include Sein and Zeit (1927), and essays like “Vom Wesen desGrundes” (1929), “Vom Wesen des Wahrheit” (1930), and “Platons Lehrevon der Wahrheit” (1942).1

With the publication of Heidegger’s notes from his lecture courses, it isnow becoming possible to connect the dots and flesh out Heidegger’spublished account of truth.2 These lecture courses are not just of historio-graphical interest, however. In them, we find Heidegger working out anaccount of the way that propositional truth is grounded in a more funda-mental notion of truth as world disclosure. He also struggles to develop aphenomenology of world disclosure, and it is in these lecture courses thatHeidegger’s later view on the history of unconcealment and being develops.He also argues that the phenomenologically enriched notion of truth hasnormative 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 UniversityPress, 1998.

2 Courses dedicated to truth include: “Logik. Die Frage nach der Wahrheit” (Winter Semester1925–1926, GA 21); Vom Wesen der Wahrheit. Zu Platons Höhlengleichnis and Theätet(Winter Semester 1931–1932, GA 34); “Vom Wesen der Wahrheit” (Winter Semester 1933–1934, GA 36/37); and “Grundfragen der Philosophie. Ausgewählte ‘Probleme’ der ‘Logik’”(Winter Semester 1937–1938, GA 45). Virtually every other course taught during this periodincludes a significant discussion of the essence of truth. Particularly notable in this regard are“Einleitung in die Philosophie” (Winter Semester 1928–1929, GA 27), “Nietzsches Lehre vomWillen zur Macht als Erkenntnis” (Summer Semester 1939, GA 47), and, a little later, the“Parmenides” lecture course of 1942–1943 (GA 54).

72

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

1. BASIC THEMES OF THE COURSE

The stated purpose of the 1931–2 lecture course is to understand theessence of truth. The majority of the course is spent, however, in whatmight seem a more historical than philosophical endeavor – an encounterwith, and appropriation of, Plato’s views on knowledge and truth. But it is inthe course of an interpretation of Plato’s cave allegory from the Republic anda review of Plato’s inquiry into knowledge and error in the Theaetetus thatHeidegger develops the account of the nature and history of unconcealmentthat characterizes much of his later work.

Plato’s famous allegory of the cave is a subject to which Heideggerreturned repeatedly. He offered interpretations of it in lecture courses likethis one, and the 1933 lecture course Vom Wesen der Wahrheit (GA 36/37),before publishing an account of it in 1942 (‘Platons Lehre von derWahrheit’, GA 9/‘Plato’s Doctrine of Truth’, in Pathmarks). In the publishedessay, as in the lecture course, Heidegger argues that contemporary repre-sentational accounts of truth as correspondence are an outgrowth of achange in thinking spurred by Plato’s thought. This change, Heideggerargues, can be detected in an ambiguity in the cave allegory surroundingthe notion of truth – an ambiguity between truth as a property of things, andtruth as a property of our representations of things. For Heidegger, thedecision to focus on truth as a property of representational states has itsroot in the historical influence of Plato’s doctrine of the ideas. Attention tothe ambiguity in Plato’s account, however, shows that what now seems anatural 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 oftruth to ideas or concepts, we come to believe that “what matters in all ourfundamental orientations toward beings is the achieving of a correct view ofthe ideas” (GA 9: 234/Pathmarks, p. 179) – that is, a correct representation ofthings in terms of their essential or unchanging properties. Heidegger’sinterest in the cave allegory stems fromhis belief that, while it lays the groundfor an account of propositional truth, it does so on the basis of a view of truthas a property of things. It thus presents an opportunity to rethink the nowwidely accepted approach to truth.

The Theaetetus was also a staple of Heidegger’s lecture courses in the1920s and early 1930s, figuring prominently not just in GA 34 and GA 36/37, but also in the 1924 course on Plato’s Sophist (GA 19), and the 1926course on The Basic Concepts of Ancient Philosophy (GA 22). One reason for hisinterest 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 byunderstanding its negation (see Chapter 1). Heidegger argued that theGreek language reflects an awareness of this in the fact that Greek uses aprivative word-formation (a-lêtheia, un-concealedness) to name “truth.” “Theawakening and forming of the word alêtheia,” he writes, “is not a mereaccident . . . and not an external matter” (GA 34: 127). What it is to beunconcealed is thus determined in relationship to a positive state of conceal-ment. The Theaetetus thus becomes of interest, given its focus on trying tounderstand 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. Theaccount we give of error will therefore affect the understanding we have oftruth. If we think of truth as a privative state, we will think of it as the absenceof error. But Heidegger also wants to question the idea that error as conven-tionally understood ought to be the positive state from which truth ingeneral is defined. To the contrary, he contends that the proper positiveconcept is concealment.3

Before turning to the details of the lecture course, a final word of warningis in order. In this, as in all of Heidegger’s commentaries on other philoso-phers, it is not always easy to distinguish between views that Heideggerattributes to others in order to reject and those that he is endorsing. Thisis, in part, a function of the fact that Heidegger’s readings of philosophersare so often extremely unconventional; one tends to believe that, whenHeidegger 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 thathe attributes to Plato. Indeed, he thinks that, with Plato’s thought, “Westernphilosophy 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 unsaidis 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 manywords, 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 notprimarily oriented toward explaining what Plato actually thought or wrote,but rather toward how what he thought and wrote was shaped by certainquestionable background assumptions – assumptions that need to be revis-ited. In the course of his readings of philosophers, Heidegger ends upoffering an interesting and philosophically important reconstruction of thelogic that supports their philosophical views. This is usually worth workingthrough, even if one ultimately dismisses Heidegger’s accounts as historicallyinvalid.

3 Error, however, might well be the positive state from which a subcategory of truth –

propositional truth as correctness – is defined.


I now turn to a review of some of the salient themes of the lecture course.This will be a selective review, as I try to give a general sense of Heidegger’sgoal 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, wecannot give an account of the essence of truth if we do not know what anessence is and if we do not know what truth is. The tradition has ready-madeanswers to both questions.

When it comes to truth, for example, the generally accepted starting pointfor understanding truth, at least within the analytic tradition of philosophy, isan analysis of our use of the truth predicate. Moreover, most philosophershave followed Frege in only considering those uses of the truth predicate inwhich truth is predicated of propositions (or certain propositional states andacts like beliefs, sentences, assertions, etc.). The main theories for definingthe truth of propositions take truth either as a correspondence of thepropositional entity with a fact,4 or a coherence of a proposition with aheld set of propositions, or, finally, a kind of deflationism, in which it ispointed out that saying that a proposition is true does not really do anythingmore than simply asserting the proposition.

But, Heidegger asks, why should we limit our considerations of truth topropositional truth in the first place? Frege, to his credit, recognized that hewas dismissing other uses of the truth predicate, and gave some sort of reasonfor it. His purpose, he said, was to understand “that kind of truth . . . whoserecognition is the goal of sciences.”5 Most philosophical treatments of truthare not so self-conscious about the matter. So what happens if we revisit thedecision to focus only on truth as predicated of propositions or collections ofpropositions? Think for a moment about the ways in which, in our commonnonphilosophical discourse, we actually use the “truth predicate.”We are aslikely to say “she is a true friend” as “what she said is true” – that is, wepredicate 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 propositionaltruth was that of correspondence. Like many others in the opening decades of the twentiethcentury, he questions whether we can arrive at a clear notion of correspondence – at least aslong as correspondence is taken as a relationship that holds between a representation and astate of affairs in the world. For further discussion of Heidegger’s views on correspondence,see my “Truth and the Essence of Truth,” in The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger, rev. ed.Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2005, and Chapter 1 above.

5 “The Thought,” in Logical Investigations (P. T. Geach, Ed.). Oxford, England: Basil Blackwell,1977, p. 2.


which we think or speak (think Jack Nicholson’s character inA Few GoodMen:“You can’t handle the truth!”) In religious discourse, “truth” is even lessamenable to standard definitions. In the Gospel of John, for example, Jesusproclaims: “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 mademanifest, that they are wrought in God” (John 3: 21). Whatever “doing thetruth” is, it is clearly not a matter of holding true beliefs or making trueassertions. Such examples lend credence to Heidegger’s view that, in under-standing truth, we should not be too quick to focus exclusively on the truth ofpropositions. Indeed, Heidegger believes that propositional truth must begrounded in the truth or unhiddenness of entities: “what is originally true,that is, unconcealed, is not the assertion about an entity, but rather the entityitself – a thing, a fact. . . . The assertion is true in so far as it conforms tosomething 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 oftruth, 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). Sothe essence of truth will be whatever applies to every true proposition,

But what sort of “whatever” are we looking for? Typically, essences arethought of either as a property or characteristic possessed by the particularthings, or as a true description that can be applied to everything that sharesthat essence. So, we might think of the essence of gold as some physicalproperty 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 toall and only tables. But truths are not, on the face of it, like tables or lumps ofgold – that is objects with properties. On what basis are we justified in treatingtruths in the same way that we treat (physical) objects? The sort of thing welook for as the essence of an entity might actually depend on the kind ofentity 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 todifferent kinds of beings. We first have to ask about being – in this case, whatis the being of truths? Do they have the kind of being that objects do? At anyrate, such considerations should give us pause before we confidently assumethat we know what the essence of truth is, or look for an account of theessence of truth – for example in terms of a property that all true assertionspossess (GA 34: 3–5).

Heidegger notes another important feature of essences – namely, that itseems we cannot decide what the essence of a thing is unless we already knowwhat it is (this is an argument he develops in more detail in GA 45). Supposewe want to know what the essence of a table is. We’ll try to figure out whatdescription 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 them up unless we already know which things are tablesand which are not. So, it seems, we can never discover the essence of a thing orground it empirically; we can only act on the basis of a prior understandingof its essence. So, when it comes to truth, “clearly we must necessarily alreadyknow the essence. For how otherwise could we know how to respond to therequest to name [in this case] truths?” (GA 34: 2). If this is right, thenessences are neither something that can be discovered, nor something thatcan conclusively be proven and established to be true. But nor are theyexempt from questioning and, in the lecture course that follows,Heidegger tries to think through the historical roots of our understandingof the essence of truth. Later in the course, Heidegger develops the idea ofsuch an understanding as something we strive for, rather than discover ordeduce or prove (see Section 3).

Finally, Heidegger attacks the very notion of self-evidence. First, he makesthe obvious point that being self-evident does not necessarily constitute agood reason for accepting a proposition. Many things that have beenthought 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 isalways self-evident for somebody. But that means that we cannot judge thetenability of self-evidence without understanding who we are and why certainthings seem so self-evident to us. Thus the observation that the essence oftruth is self-evident ought to be the starting point of inquiry into why we are soconstituted that this particular understanding of truth will strike us as so veryself-evident. “Wemust first of all ask how it comes about that we quite naturallymove and feel comfortable within such self-evidences?” (GA 34: 6–7).

1.2. Why Plato?

The self-evident but nonetheless questionable nature of the essence of truthas correspondence is, Heidegger concludes, just another indication of apervasive fact about human beings: when we become comfortable withsomething, it becomes invisible to us, so that we actually understand it verypoorly. To justify our ready acceptance of the traditional notion of truth – if itcan be justified – thus requires that we “step back from it” (GA 34: 7), that is,find a standpoint from which it no longer seems so obvious or natural. Wewill then be in a position to examine its foundations and search out itsmeaning. 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 isPlato’s philosophy that first laid the foundations for our own notion of truth.

To understand what Heidegger is trying to accomplish with this historicalreturn to Plato, we need to take a short detour through his philosophy oflanguage. Heidegger believes that words accrue to articulations in a


prelinguistically structured experience of the world. So our word “desk,” forexample, succeeds in referring to a desk only because we have articulated aparticular space (say, an office) in terms of certain tasks, relations betweenequipment, identities (or for-the-sake-of-whichs), in such a way that one ofthe things we do there is sit and write. Our word “desk,” then, accrues to thispractically structured node in the overall context of equipment andactivities.

One of the powers and dangers of language, however, is that it is possiblefor the word to refer to an object, even without the rich experience of theworld that articulated the object to which it refers. So it is possible forsomeone to refer to a desk with the word “desk,” even if he or she does notknow how to comport him- or herself in an office. It is even possible that,without this original experience of the office, what we understand by andrefer to with the word “desk” could shift and drift over time, thus eventuallyobscuring what was originally understood.

This, Heidegger believes, is precisely what has happened with words like“truth” and “essence.” Of alêtheia, the Greek word for truth, for instance, heclaims that it “loses its fundamental meaning and is uprooted from thefundamental experience of unhiddenness” (GA 34: 138). Elsewhere hesuggests that two quite different things are both named by the same word:“truth as unhiddenness and truth as correctness are quite different things;they arise from quite different fundamental experiences and cannot at all beequated” (GA 34: 11). But nor does this mean that the different thingsnamed by the word “truth” are only accidentally related to each other (inthe way that, for example, the machines and birds named by the Englishword “crane” are). “Truth” names these “quite different things” because thedifferent “fundamental experiences” have a great deal to do with each other.The former (the experience of unhiddenness) is, Heidegger believes, thehistorical and logical foundation of the latter. To recognize this, and tounderstand better our own notion of truth as correctness, Heidegger holdsthat we need to reawaken an experience of hiddenness and unhiddenness:“instead of speaking about it [a return to the experience of unhiddenness]in general terms, we want to attempt it” (GA 34: 10). That is the ultimate goalof the lecture course, and another reason for the return to Plato’s thought.When introducing the Theaetetus, he notes that Plato’s dialogue is simply theoccasion for “developing” and “awakening” (GA 34: 129) the question: “forthe immediate purpose of these lectures it is therefore not necessary for youto have an autonomous command of the Greek text. In fact you should alsobe able to co-enact the questioning itself without the text. . . . The task andgoal of the interpretation must be to bring the questioning of this dialogue toyou in the actual proximity of your ownmost being [Dasein] . . . so that youhave in yourselves a question that has become awake” (GA 34: 130).

One should note, as an aside, that this quote implies that inquiry into thenature 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 isbecause, 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 mostsuperficial level, that most or at least many of the things we believe are true.But this superficial level is a consequence of the fact that we understandbeing and “stand in the midst of beings” (GA 34: 146), that is, that we arealways already in a world that we understand amidst entities with which wecomport: “the only way in which we can really understand man is as a beingbound to his own possibilities, bound in a way that itself frees the space withinwhich he pursues his own being in this or that manner” (GA 34: 76). So, it ispart of what it is to be a human being (at the first, most superficial level) thatmuch of what we believe is true, and (at the deeper, more profound level)that this is the case because to be humanmeans that beings are discovered tous and a world is disclosed to us: “it belongs to being human . . . to stand inthe unhidden, or as we say, in the true, in the truth. Being humanmeans . . .to comport oneself to the unhidden” (GA 34: 25).

So far, this discussion of our essential being in the truth is merely anelaboration of Heidegger’s views as presented in Sein and Zeit. But the 1931–2 lecture course adds a new twist to the relationship between our essence andtruth – namely, Heidegger now claims that the history of our understandingof truth is connected to “the history of man’s essence as an existing being”(GA 34: 146). This idea, that there is a history to our essence, becomes veryimportant in Heidegger’s later work. Heidegger comes to believe that es-sences are historical – and this includes human essence. What it means to bea human being, or, put differently, that in the light of which something showsup as human, changes through history. This changing essence is tied to achange in truth and unconcealment, since the way that we understandourselves is grounded in the way that the world discloses itself. So, onceagain, we can see that Heidegger’s encounter with Plato is meant to domuchmore than provide a historical example of a different view of truth. Instead,he intends to discover in Plato’s discussion of truth a different underlyingexperience of the world and sense for our human essence.

But, returning now to the question of what the word “truth” names, we cansee that, on Heidegger’s view, it is a word that has been subject to historicalchange and drift. Because Heidegger uses “truth” to refer to at least two“quite different things,” the careless reader is prone mistakenly to takeHeidegger to be proposing a new definition of propositional truth: uncon-cealment rather than correspondence. The final reason for Heidegger’sfocus on Plato and the cave allegory in particular is that, Heidegger believes,Plato’s work is the point at which the old fundamental experience, while stillalive, is fading and the new experience is opened up. Thus the cave allegory,on Heidegger’s view, both lays the foundation for thinking truth exclusivelyas correspondence, but at the same time should be understood as an inquiryinto the nature of unconcealment.


2. PLATO’S CAVE ALLEGORY AS AN ACCOUNT OF FOUR

STAGES OF THE OCCURRENCE OF TRUTH

(AS UNHIDDENNESS)

The cave allegory, as Plato’s Socrates himself explains to us, is meant toillustrate paideia, education, or, as Heidegger translates it, Gehaltenheit, obli-gatedness or beholdenness, being held to something.6,7 In education, welearn new comportments, which consist in different ways of holding our-selves out toward things in the world, thereby allowing those things to beuncovered in correspondingly different ways. We are then bound to thethings as they show up. When one learns to drive a car, for example, onebecomes sensitive to all kinds of new features of the world (downshiftingsituations, drivers who follow too closely, etc.), and one then experiencesoneself as bound or obligated to respond to those things. Thus education inPlato’s sense (and Heidegger endorses this) should be understood primarilyin terms of learning comportments that allow us to disclose the world in anew way.

If the education is a good one, beings becomemore unhidden, more fullyavailable for use, and, consequently, more compellingly binding in the waythat they appear to us. Central to Plato’s thesis is that there is a highest or bestway in which things can show themselves to us: namely, in the light of theideas. Education, then, will be learning how to hold ourselves to objects inthe light of the ideas.

Before looking in more detail at Heidegger’s reading of the cave allegory,let me make another quick observation about Heidegger’s translation ofalêtheia and related words in terms of unconcealedness or unhiddenness. Inthe context of the cave allegory, it is clear that the “truth” or alêtheia at stakehas 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 ideasthat are more true than the things themselves. That the “truth” at issue hereis not easily assimilable to propositional truth is reflected in the fact that asubstantial number of, if not most, English language translators translate theGreek words alêthes, alêthestera, and so on, as “real,” or “more real,” or “havingmore 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 SeeRepublic 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 beingeducated, we take up a new position or stance among beings. But the emphasis here is onour being held to a certain relationship to things in virtue of our having taken hold of them ina particular way.

8 See, e.g., Waterfield’s, Cornford’s and Shorey’s translations.


act, or he means something different from “truth” with alêtheia. Given thatthe Western tradition in philosophy has come to regard such uses of thepredicate “is true” as, at best, parasitical upon the idea of truth as proposi-tional correspondence, if one were to translate alêtheia as truth, one wouldexploit an unfamiliar and unelucidated concept. “Real,” on the other hand,is a potentially misleading interpolation. Of course, when a thing is a “true”thing, we often say that it is real – we might say of a true friend, for instance,that “she’s a real friend.” But it would be amistake to equate the true with thereal, since a false friend is no less a real entity than a true friend. In thiscontext, then, Heidegger’s decision to translate alêtheia as “unhiddenness”seems to me no more contentious than translating it as “reality,” nor moreopaque than translating it as “truth.”

What is at stake, then, in the allegory of the cave, is, first (and tacitly), whatit means for a thing to be genuinely unhidden (or real or true – i.e., availableto us in its essence), and second (and explicitly), what is involved in ourpreparing ourselves to apprehend things in their unhiddenness (reality,truth). The allegory, of course, discusses four stages in this process. Let mebriefly review Heidegger’s account of these stages in terms of unhiddenness.

First stage: The prisoners in the cave are forced to see only shadows. Butthey do not see the shadows as shadows (because they have no relationshipyet to the things and the light that produce the shadows). They are entirelygiven over to what they immediately encounter – that means, they have norelationship to themselves as perceivers (GA 34: 26–7).

This stage, Heidegger argues, is the “everyday situation ofman” (GA 34: 28),and the things show themselves in terms of our everyday understanding or“knowing our way around” the everyday situations that we encounter (GA 34:29).Our familiarity with the everyday world reveals beings in one particular way.But we are completely absorbed in the world with the everyday significance itholds for us, and thus are not aware that there could be any other way touncover things. Thus we do not know ourselves as uncoverers of beings.

Second stage: The prisoners are turned around and forced to look at theobjects themselves, rather than the shadows. A new form of unhiddennessoccurs as they learn the distinction between what is seen immediately andwhat can be shown to themwhen they are torn out of their everydaymodes ofcomportment. For the prisoners at this stage, the shadows remain moreunhidden (GA 34: 32) – presumably because they have practices for dealingwith the shadows but do not know how to cope with things as they show upoutside of their everyday way of dealing with them. The “standard” employedby the prisoner in deciding what is more true is the standard of what he canmost easily deal with, what

demands no great effort of him, and happens of its own accord so to speak. Thereamidst the shadows, in his shackles, he finds his familiar ground, where no exertion isrequired, where he is unhindered . . . . Themain 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 reflection (GA 34: 35)

For the liberator, however, the things are more unhidden than the shadows.The things, as opposed to the shadows, are articulated not according to oureveryday practices but according to the ideas. Since the prisoners do not yethave practices for dealing with the ideas, they will be confused by objectsarticulated in terms of ideas (GA 34: 36). Thus the liberation fails because itsimply shows the prisoner things in a new light without also equipping theprisoner with the practices needed to be able to cope with the things soapprehended. Until the prisoner is given the practices and habits necessaryto deal with the things that are articulated according to the ideas – until he isliberated or set free for these things – he will not be able to give up theeveryday situation (GA 34: 36–7).

Third stage: The prisoners are removed from the cave and forced to look atthe objects in the higher world – the ideas themselves. This is the stage inwhich a true liberation for the idea-articulated world is effected. The liber-ation requires force, work, exertion, strain, and suffering to break out of oureveryday orientation to the world (GA 34: 42). It gives the prisoner a “newstandpoint” (GA 34: 43), from which the everyday comportments of men areshown to be empty.

Fourth stage: The liberated prisoner returns to the cave, and, with his neworientation toward the ideas, learns to discern the truth of beings and ofman. Only in the fourth stage, in the return from contemplation of themeaning on the basis of which or through which things are seen, to theseeing itself, does it become clear how everything hangs together. Withoutthe return, the liberator would treat the ideas as beings – as things towardwhich she can comport and nothing more. Only with the return do the ideasplay their proper role – namely, they give us that intelligibility on the basis ofwhich beings can appear as what they are.

It is at the latter stages that the “struggle between the two concepts of truth”(GA 34: 46) becomesmost pronounced. Plato wants to judge between kinds ofunhiddenness and say that one is more unhidden than another. The “shad-ows” in the cave, the everyday objects and situations with which we are familiarin our ordinary lives, are also unhidden (meaning available for comport-ment). What allows us to say that the objects and situations as they appear inthe light of the ideas are more unhidden? Plato makes tacit use of a criterionfor 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 formpossible. In arguing that the world disclosed in the light of the ideas is moreunhidden (or “true”), then, Plato is basing his argument on an assumptionabout the primacy of ideas and cognition over other practices or kinds offamiliarity with the world – that is, about the role that cognition and a facilitywith 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 ascorrespondence – is given primacy over, for example, practical success incoping with a situation. It is only on some such basis that one could holdthat, 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 theworld (a skill developed at stage 4), we are given access to amore fundamentalunderstanding 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 toPlato are also views he can endorse.9 The views Heidegger endorses includethe 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

ofwhichahigherdisclosureof theworld andouressence could takeplace.For the higher disclosure of the world, we need to become oriented to

something other than the everyday beings with which we are involved.

Heidegger’s argument for the existence of higher and lower modes ofunhiddenness is similar to the view he attributes to Plato in the way that itdraws on the phenomenology of perception. Our ability to perceive anythingat all – especially everyday objects and states of affairs – depends, Heideggerargues, on our having an understanding of being, of essences. When I seesomething, I do not simply see the qualities to which the eye, as an organ,is physically responsive. I also see things as having a meaning or significance(I see not just colors and shapes but also books and doors). I could not see atall if my seeing did not already contain “an understanding of what it is that oneencounters” (GA 34: 50).

But there are two important points at which Heidegger disagrees with hisversion of Plato. First, he rejects Plato’s account of the content of this highermode 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 (seeGA 34: 70: “the whole problem of ideas was forced along a false track”).Heidegger agrees that the possibility of apprehending things depends onsome kind of prior grasp or understanding of what they are. But he rejects

9 Perhaps themost striking difference between this lecture course and the later published essayon Plato’s cave allegory is the extent to which Heidegger in the lecture course attempts toread Plato in phenomenological terms. This lecture presents one of Heidegger’s mostcharitable and least critical readings of Plato.

10 Heidegger doesn’t elaborate very much on this point in the lecture course. For an account ofhis views on a higher mode of intelligibility, see Hubert Dreyfus, “Could anything be moreintelligible than everyday intelligibility?” in Appropriating Heidegger (James E. Faulconer &MarkA. Wrathall, Eds.). Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2000, pp. 155–74.


the notion that what enables being and perception is an idea, if this is takento mean a conceptual grasp of things. Nevertheless, he acknowledges thatPlato’s account of the ascent to the idea of the good represents a depth ofinsight that Western philosophy has never again achieved: “what this empow-erment is and how it occurs has not been answered to the present day; indeedthe 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 theform of his later work on unconcealment.

Second, Heidegger argues that, given the importance and the priority ofhiddenness in Plato’s account, it is essential that the allegory of the cave befollowed up by an analysis of the nature of the hiddenness that prevails in thecave, and constantly threatens the understanding that we win throughphilosophy (GA 34: 92–3). This is something that Plato does not do in TheRepublic, although there are suggestions on how the analysis would go inPlato’s discussion of error in the Theaetetus.

3. THE THEAETETUS AND THE QUESTION CONCERNING THE

ESSENCE OF UNTRUTH – HOW UNHIDDENNESS BECAME

CORRECTNESS

To summarize, Heidegger sees in the cave allegory the moment at which aprimordial experience of unconcealment begins to fade (GA 34: 119). Onceunhiddenness is understood as produced through having a grasp of an idea,a kind ofmental comportment toward things, then hiddenness consequentlycomes to be understood as the result of a failure on our part – namely, as acognitive failure in which we distort the facts. The opposite of truth, alêtheia,becomes distortion, pseudos. This is in contrast to the original experience ofhiddenness, lathê, which was an occurrence having as much to do with thingsas with us. The original Greek experience of concealment, Heideggerclaims, is that of the things refusing themselves, withdrawing into hiddenness(GA 34: 139–40).11 Prior to Plato, the opposite of truth, in other words, wasan “objectively” occurring unavailableness of things. With Plato’s thought,however, hiddenness becomes a matter of having a distorted cognition, theopposite 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 accountHeidegger offers is meant as a rejection of the idea of correspondence orthe possibility of correspondence. Rather, it is an argument that focusingexclusively 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 ofthinking of other, perhaps better, modes of unhiddenness.

Thus, Heidegger concludes, unconcealment in Plato’s cave allegory “is atheme, and at the same time not a theme” (GA 34: 125). The whole allegoryis about the process by which we become capable of bringing things intounhiddenness, 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 thenature of hiddenness (GA 34: 125). This focus is something Heideggerhopes to arrive at through Plato’s Theaetetus.

In turning toHeidegger’s reading of that dialogue, wemust note that he istrying to do two things simultaneously. First, he is trying to discover thesource for the traditional philosophical orientation toward cognition, andconceptuality, second, he is trying to recover a more fundamental grasp ofwhat is involved in our knowing being-in-the-world. The reading Heideggeroffers of the Theaetetus thus both develops Plato’s arguments in a phenom-enological direction and situates Plato in the history of philosophy. Thesetwo aspects of Heidegger’s reading tend to pull him in different directions –on the one hand, to take the concepts that seem to have an explicitlyconceptual content in Plato and reinterpret them in noncognitivist or non-conceptualist ways; on the other hand, to see how Plato’s doctrines lentthemselves to the development of conceptualism or cognitivism.

In the Theaetetus, Socrates turns to the question of error within the contextof a broader inquiry into knowledge as such. A consequence of the privilegegiven to correspondence in truth theories is, Heidegger argues, that acomplementary privilege is accorded to scientific knowledge over otherforms of knowing. The seeds of this latter privilege are planted by thePlatonic idea that a theoretical grasp of the ideas provides the highest formof unhiddenness of things. But Heidegger argues that, in the Theaetetus, atany rate, it is not scientific knowledge per se that is at stake but knowledge inthe broadest sense as that comportment which makes us distinctively human(GA 34: 156–7). To be human is to know – not in the scientific sense (as if wewould not be human if we lacked scientific knowledge) but in a broadersense of knowing how to comport oneself in the world. This, Heideggerargues, is the original sense of the Greek concept of knowledge: “Epistamaimeans: I direct myself to something, come closer to it, occupy myself with it,in a way that is fitting and measures up to it. This placing of myself towardsomething is at the same time a coming to stand, a standing over the thing andin this way to understand it” (GA 34: 153). Thus the kind of knowledge atstake in the Theaetetus is knowledge in the general sense of knowing how todeal with something in a fitting manner: “epistêmê originally means all this:the commanding knowing-one’s-way-around in something, familiarity in dealingwith something” (GA 34: 153). “All possible human activities and all possibledomains” (GA 34: 153) are characterized by this sort of familiarity; scientificknowledge 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 knowingas familiarity with the world cannot be captured in terms of the proposi-tional/logical structure and conceptual apparatus of strictly scientific modesof knowing.

The a-conceptuality of fundamental knowledge has implications for thekind of philosophical enterprise Heidegger is engaged in. Philosophicalthinking is, of course, a kind of conceptualization, and thus it consists inbringing a preconceptual understanding of things to a concept (see GA 34:210). But what kind of a concept can do this adequately? Not, Heideggersuggests, a type-name or type-concept (GA 34: 154–5) – that is, the ability toname some property that all X things have in common. Rather, “the ‘con-cept’ that is sought for . . . [is] an attacking intervention in the essentialpossibility of human existence” (GA 34: 157). There is a play here onwords formed from the German verb greifen, which means to take hold ofor grasp. The word for concept, Begriff’ is formed from this root. Literally, aBegriff is a kind of grasp of a thing. Attacking intervention is angreifenderEingriff. Eingriff means an intervention or engagement in something; liter-ally, it is a “grasp on” something, the idea being that in intervening orbecoming engaged, we’re getting into and getting a grasp on the situation.Likewise, angreifenmeans to attack, but literally it is “to grasp at,” that is, to tryto get a hold on something, to bring something into one’s grasp or control.So, a philosophical “concept” for Heidegger is not necessarily an abstract,logical content but an attempt to come to grips with a thing or a situation inorder to engage oneself with it. This can happen without exhaustively ordeterminately capturing the content of a thing. Indeed, the kind of contentthat will be appropriate will depend on the kind of thing with which we aretrying to cope and the kind of involvement we have with it.

Thus knowledge, as a familiarity with things, always involves a kind ofgrasp of them – a “concept” in the broad sense. But what kind of grasp isessential to knowledge? For the Greeks, and subsequently for the entireWestern tradition (according to Heidegger), there is a tendency to equateknowledge per se with the kind of grasp we get of things in seeing that suchand such is the case (GA 34: 159–60). This privileges the conceptual grasp inthe narrow sense – what you see when you’re merely seeing, where what isseen is taken in regard to what can be said about it. This is the kind of contentthat can be passed around and shared with even a minimal familiarity withthe entity. A conceptual grasp provides one with a kind of “disposal oversomething in its presence and persistence” (GA 34: 161, but not necessarilyan ability to engage practically with it.

In Plato’s dialogue, Theaetetus’s first effort to define knowledge treats itprecisely as a kind of perception. This definition fails, as Socrates getsTheaetetus to admit, if we think of perception as mere sensation, for sensa-tion provides us only with certain sensory qualities but not evidence of thebeing or truth (unhiddenness) of things (see Theaetetus 186 c9–e12, and


Heidegger’s discussion at GA 34: 242–5). In other words, perception deliv-ers knowledge (in either the broad or the narrow sense) only if it goesbeyond sensation.

Theaetetus’s next answer is that knowledge is a kind of doxazein, a kind ofthinking or supposing or holding an opinion. Heidegger translates doxazeinas “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 isambiguous between the view we have on the matter and the view the matteritself presents. Heidegger exploits this ambiguity to suggest that our familiarknowledge of something involves both our having a particular take on ororientation to it and its offering itself to us as something, holding out to us acertain view of itself. The translation of doxazein as having a view also, onceagain, expands the consideration beyond the merely cognitive domain ofmaking or entertaining judgments. A judgment is a “view,” but not all viewsare judgments (“from that point, one has a beautiful view of the valley” doesnot imply that at that point onemust form a judgment about the valley). Thedoxa or view is capable of truth or falsity but in a broader sense than thecorrespondence of a judgment with a state of affairs. A true view is not just acorrect 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. Becausehaving a view involves both a certain orientation on the viewer’s part, and acertain giving of itself of the thing that is viewed, a distorted view occurs wheneither the viewer takes up an orientation to the thing that does not allowitself to show itself as it is, or it gives itself in some way that it is not.

In general, the double structure involves, on the viewer’s part, an 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 isgiven by any particular sensory experience of a chair (it includes the backside of the chair, as well as other chairs). In the lecture course, Heideggerdiscusses several other kinds of “movement beyond” involved in unconceal-ment, which also bear the same kind of double structure, and each of which

figure 4.1


has its own kind of characteristic hiddenness. They are summarized andcondensed in Figure 4.1 (GA 34: 321).

The knowing agent stands where the lines converge at the lower left of thediagram.The base line is the line of sensory connectionwith an entity (aisthesis),the next line up is the first kind of going beyond entities – the going beyond inan intentional orientation to an entity (a “retention and making present,”Heidegger’s interpretation of the idea of mnêmoneuein in the Theaetetus, GA34: 311). The arrows going between the object as sensed and the object asintended show that it is possible to make a judgment, either that the object assensed is such and such kind of object, or that the object intended is satisfied bysuch and such sensed object (see GA 34: 311 ff.). This double structure makesan error possible because it allows, for example, that the sensed object isbrought under an idea that is not appropriate for it (GA 34: 316).

But there are more ways in which our understanding comportment goesbeyond any particular object. In the diagram, these are represented in thethird and fourth lines up from the bottom. The third line is a second kind ofgoing beyond that grounds both sensory perception and intentional direct-edness – an understanding of being. Finally, this is grounded in a striving forbeing that goes beyond an understanding of being and back to beings.

The going beyond involved in the third line points to the fact that weperceive objects in the world on the basis of our having taken in advance anunderstanding of notions like being and nonbeing, identity and difference –these notions are koina, that is, common to all the sensory modalities, but notsensed through any of them: “so we see that the koina (being – nonbeing,sameness – difference) are precisely what allow us to grasp more concretelythis region of inner perceivability. In their total constellation, it is preciselythese koina which co-constitute the region of perceivability” (GA 34: 194–5).Thus, for instance, I can see a table because I have laid out in advance aregion 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 formgood concepts of being and nonbeing, sameness and difference (or even oftables, for that matter). If we do not have them in virtue of possessing aconcept of them, then in what sense do we have them?Heidegger argues thatwe have them as a “striving” for them, represented in the highest line in thediagram.

To get clearer about this, let’s reflect on the natural experience ofperception. It seems, on the face of it, that perception is anything but astriving. Rather, it is a kind of losing yourself in what is given to you, lettingyourself be taken by the things that surround you. Heidegger illustrates thisthrough the example of a person lying in a meadow, perceiving the blue skyand a lark’s song:

In our situation, lying in the meadow, we are not at all disposed to occupy ourselveswith 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 thatthey surround us. To be sure, beings surround us, and not nothing, neither anythingimaginary. 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 loseourselves in the perception of them, and thus to disregard them as we werepreviously 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 perceivingof beings – which means that we occupy ourselves neither with beings assuch . . . nor do we grasp their being conceptually. . . . Perception is notconceiving of beings in their being” (GA 34: 210). That is, in my everydayperceptual 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, ofcourse, perceived by me, but it is, in the normal course of sitting, thought ofneither as a being nor as a chair.

In his 1925 lecture course on logic (GA 21), Heidegger offers his best andmost complete description of this kind of natural, everyday experience ofobjects. In our familiar dealings with the world, we experience things primarilyin terms of theirWozu, translated in Being and Time as their “towards-which” ortheir “in-order-to,” but perhaps it ismost naturally rendered as their “for-what”(in the sense of “what one uses it for,” “for what purpose it is employed”). Myprimary, familiar understanding of things, in other words, is not an under-standing of them as satisfying some description or other, but rather simply inaffording something else. As I walk through a building, the door is not there asa door as such, but it is there for going in and out, the chairs are there forsitting, the pens and desk and paper are there for writing (GA 21: 144). Thestructure of this understanding is, Heidegger argues, not “primarily andproperly given in a simple propositional assertion,” (GA 21: 144), nor can itbe “thematically grasped,” at least not as long as one is living in it (GA 21: 145).

This is because I understand how to do things with tables, doors, and allthe other things with which I am familiar, only by being “always alreadyfurther” than what is physically present to me – for instance, in using thedoor, I am already at that for which it is: I’m already oriented to the roominto which I am moving. When I grasp the thing explicitly as the thing it is, Ido this by “coming back from” that for which the thing is understood – to thething itself (GA 21: 147). So, in ordinary comportment, I understand thedoor not by focusing on the door per se but by already directing myselfbeyond the door to the room on the other side. In grasping the doorexplicitly, I have to draw my intention back from the room beyond to thedoor itself. A grasp of being functions in the same way – I take something as abeing precisely by not occupying myself with it as a being, but rather in termsof 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 thebeing that belongs to it. In so doing, however, already and in advance, we understandthis 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 everymoment in theunderstanding of being) we also cannot say how this being belongs to the being towhich we attribute it. . . . But despite this non-conceptual mode of understanding, wecan 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 onour part – indeed, it is only because we pay no regard to being that we arefree to encounter beings in a fluid, everyday way. Thus our understanding ofthe things around is a familiarity with . . . , not a conceptualization of . . . .

So there is an important sense in which there is no “striving” involved inmuch 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 astand is not a thing that exists in the world, and not something that we areused 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 astand on being? Heidegger distinguishes between two kinds of striving – anauthentic and an inauthentic version (GA 34: 213). An inauthentic striving isa “mere chasing after what is striven for” (GA 34: 214). It has as its object notour being but some entity – “a thing which as such can be taken intopossession” (GA 34: 216). We are inauthentically striving for being whenwe are “ensnared” within a particular understanding of being, and thus feelcompelled to chase after certain things that are presented as important orunimportant within that understanding of being.

The authentic striving does not try to take possession of a thing but to ownup to it as “themeasure and law for the striver’s comportment to beings” (GA34: 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 projectingit as that on the basis of which I will understand myself, it gives me a basis formy experience of beings.

So the way in which we “have” an excess that then determines how weexperience particular things is in a striving to be something, to take up aparticular stance on the being of the world. This projecting toward some-thing, which is never present or possessed, lays out a unified field (GA 34:223–4) within which I can have a bodily perception of things because it gives


a determinate view on things. It gives me a basis for reckoning with or copingwith things (see GA 34: 224–5). But we should not think that this is asubjective projection, an act of will by which we impose intelligibility on theworld. The things that we encounter themselves “demand a comportmentwhich takes them in as such” (GA 34: 229; see also GA 34:235–7). So themost fundamental basis for our making sense of the world is nothing natural,nothing fixed or necessary, but in it we are attuned by the natural worldaround us. This fact is represented in the diagram by the way the arrowcurves back around to the beings themselves.

We are in the condition, then, of always striving to establish a particularunderstanding of ourselves and the world by using the entities we encounterin the world – by projecting ourselves into actions and possibilities, conse-quently comporting ourselves in particular ways, and thereby making senseof 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 withor irrelevant to our understanding. If one focuses on error as the opposite oftruth, Heidegger believes, it makes one lose sight of this more fundamentalinterplay between revealing and concealing in our projective action in theworld. Likewise, if one’s orientation to the world is understood as mediatedby linguistic or conceptual ideas, then failure to orient oneself correctly isnaturally understood in terms of the application of an incorrect predicate tothe subject involved. Plato’s interpretation of the look or view of a thing interms 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 doxaconcept, so that the primordial elements of the doxa disappear behind thischaracteristic, and the doxa, as ‘opinion,’ is linked to assertion and thegenuine phenomenon disappears” (GA 34: 284).

But Plato himself, Heidegger argues, points us in the direction of thephenomena of hiddenness and unhiddenness. Thinking beyond Plato, then,Heidegger argues that we need to think through the way that unhiddennessand unconcealment in general occur. This, in fact, is the central project ofmost of Heidegger’s later work.


part ii

LANGUAGE

5

Social Constraints on Conversational Content

Heidegger on Rede and Gerede

1. INTRODUCTION

What role does one’s community play in determining one’s meaning – infixing 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 areheavily constrained by social factors. We always act within a public realm,which is already organized and interpreted in a determinate way. As aconsequence, Heidegger explains, we are “constantly delivered over to thisinterpretedness, which controls and distributes the possibilities” available tous for action (GA 2: H. 167). Indeed, Heidegger argues that our being“delivered over” to the public interpretation of things is an inescapablefeature of human existence. What is true of action in general is also truefor our use of language. Heidegger claims that in language itself there ishidden an “understanding of the disclosed world” (GA 2: H. 168). So not justour possibilities for practical engagement with the things and peoplearound us but even the possible range of what we can say is subject in someway to others.

One consequence of social constraints on language, Heidegger believes,is a tendency on the part of speakers to fall into a superficial imitation of thekinds of things that others in their linguistic community say. He calls suchspeech Gerede, which is generally translated as “idle talk.” Gerede is theeveryday mode of Rede, which is generally translated as “discourse.” Forreasons to be explained later, I will translate Rede as “conversation,” andGerede as “idle conversation.” Heidegger tells us that in idle conversation,

This paper was first presented at the inaugural meeting of the International Society forPhenomenological Studies, held in Asilomar, California, July 19–23, 1999. I’m grateful to allthe participants in that meeting for their constructive help. My thinking on these matters hasbeen aided considerably by conversations with Bert Dreyfus, Taylor Carman, George Handley,and James Siebach. I’d also like to thank Cynthia Munk for her considerable assistance inpreparing this manuscript for publication.

95

one understands things “only approximately and superficially”: “one doesnot so much understand those entities about which one converses [dasberedete 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 itelsewhere, this kind of idle conversation “releases one from the task of trueunderstanding” (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 andnecessarily 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 weuse language. For example, Hubert Dreyfus attributes to Heidegger theview 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 arguesthat, because the public form of discourse is necessarily banalized, andbecause public language “provides the only vocabulary in which interpre-tation can in fact proceed,” the inevitable result of language use is a fallenform of understanding: “There is no alternative to expressing and commu-nicating one’s understanding in the given idiom of one’s social and culturalmilieu. To make sense of oneself at all is to make sense of oneself onthe basis of the banal, indeed flattened out and leveled off, language ofdas Man.”2

In this paper, I explore Heidegger’s view about the role of a community indetermining or constraining linguisticmeaning. In the course of doing this, Iwill argue against the view that Dreyfus and Carman, among others, attributeto Heidegger by demonstrating that language is not responsible for thebanalizing and leveling of everyday human modes of existence. To thecontrary, there are for Heidegger social constraints on meaning onlybecause 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 willbe driven to banalization. Instead, the leveling and banalization that occursis a result of the fact that all our practices are implicated in a network of socialactivities and concerns – activities that no individual can master, and con-cerns about which no individual can get clear. Nevertheless, once idleconversation is properly understood, we will see that Heidegger is notcommitted to the view that conversational content is necessarily subject topublic norms. Although the interpenetration of language and practicesmeans that it is possible to use language to talk about things we do notgenuinely understand, it does not mean that we have to do so.

1 Hubert L. Dreyfus, Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger’s Being and Time, Division I.Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991, p. 229.

2 Taylor Carman, “Must We Be Inauthentic?” in Heidegger, Authenticity, and Modernity (MarkA. Wrathall & Jeff Malpas, Eds.). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000, p. 21.

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In Chapter 2, I argued that philosophy stands to benefit from the ability toread past the boundaries of “analytic” or “Continental” philosophy. In thespirit of that argument, I will begin by comparing Heidegger’s analysis of thesocial constraints onmeaning with arguments made for social externalism inanalytic philosophy. Philosophers like Putnam, Burge, and Dummett haveworked 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 thatthey have.3 An understanding of these arguments provides a helpful back-ground for examining Heidegger’s view.

The social externalists tell us that the meaning of a particular utterance isdetermined 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 acompetent speaker of the language without ourselves knowing much aboutthe thing of which we speak or without knowing what our words are taken tomean. This consequence of the externalist view – that is, that the speakers ofa language often lack a genuine understanding of the things they are saying –might, on the face of it, seem like a promising basis for justifying Heidegger’sclaim that Gerede, idle conversation, is a pervasive phenomenon. I shallultimately argue, however, that this is not how Heidegger understands idleconversation. The analytic discussion of social externalism is neverthelessilluminating, if only to show how Heidegger’s account of idle conversationshould not be construed. In fact, I believe the comparison does more thanthat. It also helps us see how limited the consequences of Gerede are forunderstanding the essential features of linguistic communication in general.

2. SETTING THE STAGE: SOCIAL EXTERNALISM

One traditional view of the influence of a linguistic community on anindividual’s meaning denies that there is any essential influence at all –that is, it insists that what those around me mean by their words or imaginemy words to mean has no bearing on the meaning of what I say. What I meanwhen I speak is entirely dependent on what I intend to say, and what I intendto 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 mypersonal history, I could intend to mean. What others believe cannot figurein understanding what I intend to say (although I will, of course, often find ituseful 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 objectsplay in fixing the content of our propositional states.While this externalism is in fact amenabletoHeidegger’s view of things, it is not relevant to the topic under consideration here – namely,whether it is the social character of language that leads to idle conversation and otherinauthentic modes of inhabiting the world.

Heidegger on Rede and Gerede 97

thus to be understood without any necessary reference to the linguisticcommunity to which I belong.

Externalists, in contrast, take the view that, to quote Putnam’s now-famousphrase, “‘meanings’ just ain’t in the head.”4 Putnam’s pioneering argumentfor this proceeds by trying to demonstrate, through a variety of hypotheticalexamples, 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 acertain psychological state;”

and2. “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 stateassociated with knowing the meaning of a term determines the extension ofthat term. But, according to Putnam, there are cases in which, given differingconditions external to the psychological state of the speaker, the samepsychological state will determine different extensions. If that is true, thenthere must be more to knowing the meaning of a term than being in a givenpsychological state.

One set of examples to which Putnam alludes in demonstrating that“inner” psychological states are not sufficient to determine extension arecases arising from what he calls the “social division of linguistic labor.” Therearemany instances in which it is useful for us to acquire a word for somethingwithout also acquiring an expertise in recognizing if something genuinelybelongs to the extension of the word. We leave this work to others, thusdividing the “linguistic labor”:

The features that are generally thought to be present in connection with a generalname – necessary and sufficient conditions for membership in the extension, ways ofrecognizing if something is in the extension (“criteria”), etc. – are all present in thelinguistic community considered as a collective body; but that collective body divides the“labor” of knowing and employing these various parts of the “meaning.”6

Putnam cites such examples as a given individual’s confusion over thedifference between beeches and elms, or between aluminum and molybde-num, or an inability to determine the exact extension of “gold.” Putnamclaims that, for any English speaker, the extension of such terms will be thesame, regardless of how rich or impoverished that speaker’s understandingof 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 ofReflection on Hilary Putnam’s “The Meaning of ‘Meaning’” (Andrew Pessin & Sanford Goldberg,Eds.). Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1996, pp. 3–59, quotation on 13.

5 Ibid., 6. 6 Ibid., 13.

98 Language

an elm is, the more likely I am to make mistaken claims and hold mistakenbeliefs about the elm. But because the extension of the term is determinedby other, more competent speakers of English than I, it is possible for me tomake illuminating, useful, and even true claims about elms without knowingmuch at all about them.

In a series of articles,7 Burge has argued along similar lines that thecontent of our intentional states is at least partly determined by the languageand concepts of the people with whom we interact – language and conceptsof which we often have, at best, an incomplete understanding. Thus, accord-ing to Burge, we can think things and say things without necessarily knowingwhat we think and mean.

Like Putnam, Burge begins with the supposition thatmeaning determinesextension. Consequently, if two terms have different extensions, they mustalso express different meanings. The problem is that, for a variety of reasons,any given individual is often unable to fix the extension of a term. Even ifindividuals are capable of articulating a term’s meaning, thereby explicatingthe 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 aprecognitive familiarity with examples of a certain kind of thing withouthaving conceptualized on what basis the examples count as the kind of thingthat we take them to be. Perhaps, despite all our experience with insects andarachnids, we have never really thought about what makes us class ants withbees but not with spiders. Or it may be that we lack the sort of directexperience with the things in question that would allow us to clarify ourconception of what it takes to count as such a thing – perhaps we think ofmammals as furry, land-dwelling creatures because we have never comeacross whales. Or it could be that we have developed only the discriminatorycapacities and abilities made relevant by our current normal environmentbut lack the ability to discriminate between things that belong and do notbelong in the extension in nonnormal environments. Imagine the difficultyfor someone raised in the United States of categorizing all the creatures oneencounters 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 thepeople we recognize as experts concerning those concepts. This mightlead us to conclude that our terms mean something different in our mouthsthan they do in the mouths of the experts, since we would assign a differentextension to those terms. But, for the social externalist, such a conclusion isnot justified. To the contrary, Burge contends, we hold ourselves responsible

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


to using words as they are understood in our community. When we lack theability 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 inwhich we depend on others to determine our content for us.

Our recognition of this dependence, Burge points out, is readily manifestin 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 theirmeanings on us. Rather, we are willing to stand corrected because werecognize that we speak the same language as the experts do, and theyunderstand portions of our common language better than we do. Or werecognize that, in many instances, we rely on the experts for our access to theexamples 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 thereferents of such words and concepts do not necessarily fix the referents. Northerefore . . . do they necessarily fix the translational meanings or concepts associ-ated with the words. . . . Others are often in a better position to arrive at a correctarticulation 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 anecessary role in individuating the person’s concept or translational meaning, indi-viduation of an individual’s concepts or translational meanings may depend on theactivity of others on whom the individual is dependent for acquisition of and access tothe referents. If the others by acting differently had put one in touch with differentreferents, compatibly with one’sminimum explicational abilities, one would have haddifferent concepts or translational meanings.8

It follows that we sometimes intend to be understood in a way that we do notourselves understand.

The plausibility of these social externalist arguments hinges entirely onthe extent to which the examples they use convince us that a proper under-standing of the speaker’s meaning requires a necessary reference to othersin her linguistic community. To appraise the social externalist argumentbetter, therefore, it is worthwhile to examine the examples more closely. Theexamples as Putnam and Burge typically present them fail to distinguishcarefully between those speakers who know the subject matter well but whodo not fully understand what others refer to with their terms, and those whoknow neither. For instance, in Burge’s example of a man with arthritis, theman 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 wristsand fingers is more painful than his arthritis in his ankles, that it is better to havearthritis than cancer of the liver, that stiffening joints is a symptom of arthritis, that

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

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

The man does not know that “informed” members of his speech communityuse the term “arthritis” to refer to an inflammation of a joint. Presumably, theman also does not know (although Burge is not explicit on this point) that hispain is caused by an inflammation of the joints. But this distinction – betweennot knowing some fact about the object in question and not knowing howothers refer to that fact – is a crucial distinction to draw if we are correctly tounderstand what the speaker means to say when, to take Burge’s hypotheticalexample, he says things like “I’ve developed arthritis in my thigh.”

To help see the importance of drawing this distinction, I want to set out acouple of my own examples – examples that I have tailored to highlight whatare, 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 kindof peaked roof, and consequently I believed that the phrase “gable roof’ wasredundant. It was only while constructing the gables on my house that Idiscovered that a gable is not actually a roof, but rather the triangularexterior wall section bounded by the roof rafters. A gable roof is, in fact, aroof that ends in a gable. Of course, this was a difficult mistake to correct,since what I thought was a gable was in almost all instances adjoined by agable, meaning that my improper use was as difficult for others to detect astheir proper use was for me. As a result, even though I did not know what theterm “gable” actually meant, many (if not most) of the utterances in which Iused the term were understood by others in a way that was appropriate underthe circumstances, if not actually true in a literal sense. So, while I had noparticular misconceptions about the matters being talked about – I did not,for instance, ever think a wall was a roof – I did lack a proper understandingof the way the term “gable” is typically used.

Second example. When ordering a new computer last week, I told thecomputer-purchasing agent at the university that I wanted an extra 128megabytes of RAM for the computer. Although I know that “RAM” is anacronym for “random access memory,” and I have actually installed RAM inmy 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 RAMworks better than a computer with less RAM, and this was enough to allowme 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 ofinferences I could draw from any particular claim about RAM – muchsmaller, 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 constraintson linguistic meaning? Let me briefly review. These two different examplesare intended to illustrate two different senses in which information availableto a speaker underdetermines the meaning of the speaker’s utterance (or atleast the meaning it has for an informed audience). In the first example, thespeaker lacks information about how other speakers of the language deter-mine the extension of a term. We assume, however, that the speaker iscompetent to determine the extension of the term as he himself uses it. Inthe second example, the speaker lacks even this much – he is unable on hisown to determine the extension of the term either as he uses it or as othersuse it. In addition, or perhaps as a consequence, the speaker is also veryconstrained in his understanding of the inferential relations his utterancewould 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 conclusionsabout social constraints on meaning. This is because, given my ignorance ofthe way others use the term “gable,” we can plausibly take me to refer to agable when I say “gable” only if we already have some compelling reason tohold me accountable to the way that others are using their words. Burge’spoint that I depend on others for my access to the referents of the term doesnot hold in this case. And, as Davidson has pointed out, without a compellingreason, it would not be good policy to hold me to a meaning of which I amnot 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 tothe public language. Davidson, by contrast, sees me as employing a prag-matic flexibility in alteringmymode of speech to accommodate my listeners.That is, on Davidson’s account, my reason for shifting my usage is simply toavoid confusion on the part of my hearers (deeming it easier to do so than topreface my remarks about gable roofs with an explanation to the effect that Iidiosyncratically refer to them as “gables”). But this willingness to shift one’suse of terms does not change the fact that knowing how the speaker intendsfor 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 tobe understood in a way that she knows the hearers cannot understand. A wisespeaker will often adopt, as a pragmatic strategy, the use of words that shebelieves is common in the linguistic community. But there is nothing

10 One could imagine further examples that would distinguish between the ability to determinethe extension of a term and the mastery of the inferential relations that accrue to sentencesemploying that term. But there is a limit to how far these two features of linguisticmastery canbe isolated; at some point, if a speaker lacks knowledge of one type, we are inclined to say thathe also lacks knowledge of the other.

11 Many of the comments that follow are inspired by Davidson’s discussion of Burge’s socialexternalism in “KnowingOne’sOwnMind,” Proceedings and Addresses of the American PhilosophicalAssociation (1987): 441–58, and “Epistemology Externalized,” Dialectica 45 (1991): 191–202.

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intrinsic to successful language use that requires her to do so. And it wouldhave been manifestly wrong, before I got clear about how other speakers usethe term, to say of me: “Wrathall thinks that gable there is covered withasphalt shingles, but anyone can see it is made of brick.” The right thing tosay would be: “Wrathall says the gable is covered with asphalt shingles, but hethinks a gable is a gable roof.”

But what of cases like my “RAM” example? In such cases, I speak with theintention of taking advantage of the division of linguistic labor. And if onewere to set out to interpret radically the things I say about RAM, it is not clearhowmuch content one could attribute to me given that I know so little aboutthe subject matter. In such cases, what is said can only have a determinatecontent by appealing to someone else’s knowledge of the subjectmatter. Theright way to interpret me – that is, the way I want to be interpreted – is to seeme as using “RAM” in the way computer experts do. I would in fact bemisunderstood if the interpretation restricted itself to my own pallid under-standing of computers. It would be manifestly wrong, for instance, for thepurchasing agent to conclude: “Wrathall says he wants more RAM, but he’llsettle for anything that improves the performance of the computer.”

Now the question is, should we understand Heidegger’s “idle conversa-tion” in terms of my “RAM” example – that is, in terms of those instanceswhere we surrender to others our authority over themeaning of what we say?Before directly comparing Heidegger’s account of idle conversation toPutnam’s account of the social division of linguistic labor, or Burge’s argu-ment for our dependence on others in determining the content of ourwords, let me make a couple of observations.

First, as Putnam notes, it is not a necessary feature of language thatmeaning be determined by experts: “some words do not exhibit any divisionof linguistic labor.”12 Putnam’s example is “chair”; many others are easilyimaginable. The point is that for many things in our world, everyone (oralmost everyone) is competent not just in the use of the word but inrecognizing the thing. The linguistic division of labor is driven by thedemands of efficiency, not by the very structure of language itself. Putnamdoes not give us any reason to think that there could not be a language inwhich speakers spoke only about those things of which they had a sufficientunderstanding. Similarly, Burge argues that the social character of languageis a psychological rather than conceptual necessity, which is to say that thereis nothing in Burge’s 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 linguisticcommunity rely on others to fix the extension of their terms shows that noteveryone can fail to know what they are talking about. There are necessarilysome people in the community – the experts – who do not rely on others to

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


fix the extension.13 Language can function, and often does function, there-fore, without any essential reference to the way in which the community atlarge understands a term.

Thus considerations of the sort that Putnam and Burge advance will notsupport the strong conclusion about the structural necessity of Gerede thatpeople like Dreyfus and Carman see in Heidegger. At best, they wouldsupport 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 Putnam’sor Burge’s arguments supports the drive toward leveling and banalizationthat Heidegger finds in Gerede. As already noted, the idea that some peopledo not fully understand what they’re talking about onlymakes sense, for bothPutnam and Burge, on the assumption that others do. So in some cases it maybe true that many or even most of the speakers of a language do not knowwhat they mean. But they can get away with it precisely because some (theexperts) do know. For both Putnam and Burge, then, public language is notleveled down to an average understanding – to the contrary, it preserves agenuine understanding because its content is determined by what theexperts 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 Heideggerhas inmind with his notion of idle conversation.What is crucial toHeidegger’saccount is not the speaker’s ability or inability to determine the extension ofher terms, or even to see what is entailed by her utterances. Rather, Heideggersees both these kinds of failings on the speaker’s part as derived from herlack of experience with the objects, and the situations in which the objectsare typically found. That lack of experience, and the corresponding lack ofsensibility that such experience fosters, is the real source of idle conversation.

To illustrate this point, I offer a third example of a kind of disparitybetween what a speaker can express and what a speaker understands aboutthe subject of her expression. This will orient us to the way Heidegger’sconcern differs from the kind of linguistic incompetence on which Putnamand Burge focus. The U.K. Department of the Environment, Transport, andRegions issues the following instructions on using a roundabout:

On approaching a roundabout take notice and act on all the information available toyou, including traffic signs, traffic lights and lane markings which direct you into thecorrect 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 MichaelDummett (Brian McGuinness & Gianluigi Oliveri, Eds.). Dordrecht: Kluwer AcademicPublishers, 1994, p. 5.

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

When reaching the roundabout you should

* give priority to traffic approaching from your right, unless directed otherwise bysigns, road markings or traffic lights

* check whether road markings allow you to enter the roundabout without givingway. If so, proceed, but still look to the right before joining

* watch out for vehicles already on the roundabout; be aware they may not besignalling correctly or at all

* look forward before moving off to make sure traffic in front has moved off.14

I consider myself a competent driver, and I am conversant both in the use ofall the terms employed in these rules of the Highway Code and in theoperation of an automobile. Nevertheless, my brief experience with drivingin Britain has convinced me that there is an important sense in which I do notreally understand what I am being told to do when directed, for instance, to“adjust your speed and position to fit in with traffic conditions,” or to “get intothe correct lane,” or to “be aware of the speed and position of the trafficaround you.” In saying that I do not really understand these things, I donot mean either that I would not use the terms in the same way that theHighway Code does, or that I do not understand what those directions aredirecting me to do. Instead, I mean that, in virtue of my lack of experiencein navigating roundabouts in Britain, those directions give me, at best, anapproximate and superficial sense for what I would need to do if I foundmyself in that situation. If I were now, on the basis of having read thoseguidelines, to instruct a colleague on driving in preparation for her upcomingtrip to London, I would be engaging in idle conversation because I would, inan important respect, lack understanding about that of which I spoke. Unlikethe 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 ownwords. What precisely it is that I lack needs further elaboration – a project towhich I will return. But whatever it is, I believe it is best understood on the basisof Heidegger’s account of Gerede. Before expanding further on this example,therefore, I turn to amore exegetical discussion ofHeidegger’s account of idleconversation.

3. LANGUAGE, CONVERSATION, AND IDLE CONVERSATION

To understand Heidegger’s account of idle conversation, Gerede, we need tostart 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 StandardsAgency, The Highway Code: For Pedestrians, Cyclists, Motorcyclists and Drivers, New expandeded. London, 1999, General rules 160 and 161.


the role played by conversation in Heidegger’s overall account of being-in-the-world.

Conversation is one of the constitutive moments of the disclosedness ofthe world. A world is disclosed when we have a background readiness to actin ways that make sense, that is, which give unity and coherence to ouractivities in the world. In saying that disclosing is a background readiness, Iam trying to emphasize that it is not any particular active engagement withthe people and things around us. Heidegger calls the way in which particularactivities open up a relation to things in the world “discovering” to distin-guish it from the background readiness that is disclosure. When I say thatdisclosing is a kind of background readiness, I mean to distinguish it from amere capacity or ability to do something. To illustrate this distinction,imagine someone fluent in both German and English but who has neverhad 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 – tounderstand German and English. In addition, when in the United States,she will ordinarily be ready to hear English but not German. Indeed, ifsomeone began speaking German to her, it might actually take a momentbefore she understood what was being said. My claim is, in short, thatHeidegger’s concept of disclosure is meant to demonstrate how our activeresponse to things and people in the world around us is made possible by areadiness for the things that ordinarily show up in the world. Heideggerbelieves that if we want to understand the way humans exist in a world, wefirst need to recognize the importance of this kind of readiness in priming usfor the particular activities in which one typically engages in that world.

One of the key features in constituting any particular form of readiness forthe world is mood, the ontic mode of disposedness. Disposedness makes usready for things by determining in advance how they will matter to us:

Being-in as such has been determined existentially beforehand in such amanner thatwhat it encounters within-the-world can “matter” to it in this way. The fact that this sortof thing can “matter” to it is grounded in one’s disposedness. . . . Existentially, disposed-ness implies a disclosive submission to the world, out of which we can encounter something thatmatters to us. (GA 2: H. 137–8)

For example, as Heidegger notes, one consequence of being in a mood offear is that things in the world tend to matter to us insofar as they arethreatening or offer safety. We experience them, in other words, as havingtheir significance 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” itdoes in virtue of the ontic appropriation of the understanding in an inter-pretation. As I understand it, in interpretation, I appropriate an overallunderstanding of the world by deciding which things are appropriate or

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necessary for me, make sense for me. Once I have such an interpretation ofthe world in reference to my own particular involvements, goals, identity,and so on, I am ready to undertake particular actions in response to thesituation that confronts me. For instance, I have a background understand-ing of a variety of pieces of equipment and equipmental contexts – thingslike chalkboards and classrooms, airplanes and airports, jigsaws and woodshops. I also have a background understanding of a variety of humanactivities and identities – writing on a board and being a teacher, readingwhat is written on a board and being a student, erasing what is on the boardand being a janitor, and so on. When I act in the world on the basis of myunderstanding of objects, activities, contexts, and identities, my action bothdecides forme how all those worldly things will line up with one another, andexpresses an understanding of those things and activities and contexts andidentities by actualizing the way in which they stand in a particular organizedfield of significance. 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 inwhich I interpret myself and the world around me in a teacherly way. In thisway, 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 aroundme in terms ofmy beinga teacher in this particular situation.

Finally, any particular readiness is correlated with the particular activitiesin 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 thatmoment ready for classroom events. I would not be ready for, say, one ofthe people seated in the class to come spontaneously to the board while I’mtalking and erase what I have written. But the same act would not strike me asat 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 wehave a coherent way of being ready to respond to whatever we encounter aswe go about our business. The role of conversation, Heidegger explains, isthe 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 primarilywhat Heidegger has inmind. Indeed, my reason for preferring “conversation”to “discourse” as a translation for Rede is that the English term and its cognatesstill 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 drawingon 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 onespecies of the broader sense of living with or being involved together withothers in some activity. That “conversation” has come to be limited to verbalinteraction is understandable, I suppose, given that one of the primary formsof human involvement with others is that of linguistic discourse. The earlier,broader sense is still present in English terms like “conversance” – beingconversant with, that is, knowing how to deal with something or someone –

but even a “conversation”was once understandable in nonlinguistic terms, asthe 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 anexample of faith for their husbands without preaching to them, so that theirhusbands “may without the word be won by the conversation of the wives;while they behold your chaste conversation.”15 To say that the Christianwives “converse” with their husbands without the word means that, by theiractions, 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 withHeidegger’s account of Rede as articulation. Heidegger actually uses twodifferent words for talking about articulation – the verbs gliedern and artiku-lieren, together with their various adjectival and nominal forms. Gliedern hasslightly more of the sense of the English verb “to parse” – to separate intoparts in such a way that the organization or connection between the parts ismanifest. Artikulieren, on the other hand, places the emphasis more onhighlighting 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 isexistentially equiprimordial with disposedness and understanding. Theintelligibility of something has always been parsed [gegliedert], even beforethere is any appropriative interpretation of it. Conversation is the makingdistinct [Artikulation] of intelligibility. Therefore it underlies both interpre-tation and assertion. That which can be distinguished in interpretation, andthus even more primordially in conversation, is what we have called ‘mean-ing.’” (GA 2: H. 161). Conversation, verbal or otherwise, consists then inmaking particular meanings distinct, in parsing a meaningful situation intoits 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: 1–2, KJV.

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not meaningful, and as I experience and act in the world, my experiencesand actions are guided and directed by the meanings I encounter. This istrue even when I am not engaging in specifically linguistic activities. WhenHeidegger writes of articulation in general, for instance, he notes

that our comportments, lived experiences taken in the broadest sense, are throughand through expressed [ausgedrückte] experiences; even if they are not uttered inwords, they are nonetheless expressed in a definite articulation by an understandingthat 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 livingand doing things – we act in accordance with the structure of significanceopened up by a world. Thus all our actions and experiences “express” theway people and things have been coordinated into meaningful forms ofinteraction.

For instance, in “conversing” with a workshop – in being engaged with theworkshop in such a way that one’s very mannerisms and habits are shaped bythe activities in which one is engaged – two things happen. First, the objectsin 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 hesays that “conversation is conversation about something, such that the about whichbecomes manifest in the conversation. This becoming manifest . . . for allthat does not need to become known expressly and thematically” (GA 2:361). Second, as we become conversant in the workshop, thereby modifyingin concrete terms our readiness for the world (which is disclosive comport-ment), that world becomes available for an interpretive appropriation, andthereby for assertion:

That which gets parsed as such in conversing distinguishing, we call the “totality-of-significations” [Bedeutungsganze]. This can be dissolved or broken up into significa-tions. Significations, as what has been made distinct from that which can be madedistinct, 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-significations of intelligibility is put into words. To significations, wordsaccrue. (GA 2: H. 161)

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

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


meanings things hold for us, including our expressions, are structurallydependent on a public language.

But this is not to deny that social features play an important role indetermining the kind of meaning that is available to us. To see this, weturn at last to an analysis of Gerede – idle conversation.

Gerede in Heidegger’s account is the everyday mode of conversation.Although a bit of a loose translation, the turn of phrase “idle talk” used inmost English translations of Heidegger is actually quite fortuitous in thatGerede differs from Rede precisely in being a particular kind of idleness. This isbecause the content articulated in Gerede – the meanings that are “parsed”and lifted into salience by it – cannot be put to work. To preserve thestructural identity between Rede and Gerede, I translate the latter as thesomewhat 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 ortwo about the communicative function of conversation. Heidegger insiststhat “conversation is . . . essentially communication,” which means simplythat it is always characterized by the possibility of being shared with others.But this does not mean that what is communicated is necessarily understoodby some particular person in each case. “Communication,” Heideggerexplains, “means making it possible to acquire or pick up for oneself thatabout which the conversation is, that is, making it possible to come into arelationship of coping and being toward it” (GA 20: 362). So conversation iscommunication – or, perhaps more accurately, communicative – in that itarticulates meanings which open up a way of acting in the world.Communications “are to be grasped as possibilities” (GA 24: 298). Thepossibility is fulfilled in understanding the conversation, where this meansresponding to the meanings articulated for the one who is conversing: “theunderstanding of the communication is participation in the revealing” (GA20: 362). The communicative function of conversation, Heidegger alsonotes, “can recede, but it is never absent” (GA 20: 364). Thus conversationis, as communicative, something that tends toward or aims toward achievinga 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 understandor become aware of our communication, they join us in “an uncoveringbeing-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 BasicProblems of Phenomenology, Heidegger coins the phrase “existential communi-cation” [existenzielle Mitteilung] to refer to this broad form of communication.When existential communication succeeds, the result is that the partiesshare a form of comportment toward things in the world. In Being andTime, he described such communication in the following way:

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

He thereby differentiates the communication involved in conversation frommerely linguistic communication (see GA 24: 421–2). Language may, butneed not, be involved in producing a shared being-toward entities as wecomport 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 drawthem also into comportments appropriate to the situation that my actiondiscloses. Thus communication should not be understood as primarilylinguistic.

When a conversation succeeds, when the parties pick up what is beingcommunicated to each other, they are made ready for an engagement withpeople and things in the world by sharing with each other a mode of under-standing comportment toward the common things we encounter in theworld, as well as a disposedness or a sense for the way things matter.17 Inthe process, conversation articulates or lifts into salience that about which weconverse [das Beredete], and the way in which we understand or relate to thatthing [das Geredete]. Das Geredete is manifest because “that with which theconversation is concerned [das Beredete] is always, in conversation, ‘talked to’in a definite regard and within certain limits” (GA 2: H. 162).

In idle conversation, something gets communicated but in such a way thatthe parties cannot successfully participate in a shared orientation towardthings in the world. There are a number of ways in which the participationcan break down – a number of ways in which what is communicated cannotbe put to work. For instance, as in the RAM example, the communicationmight fail to make salient that about which we converse. We know how to usethe words in forming meaningful sentences, but we do not know how toidentify the things in the world referred to in the sentence. Or the commu-nication might even succeed in getting us to share with others certainattitudes about the thing, or a shared sense of what is appropriate to sayabout the thing. But such sharing is compatible with a failure to communi-cate a “primordial understanding” – a background familiarity with thatthing – of the sort gained by familiarity with das Beredete itself.

What individual speakers lack and, consequently, what their communitysupplies for them in idle conversation is, then, not necessarily an ability to fixdeterminately 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 define it, how to articulate its extension, and whatother things are conventionally seen to follow from the kind of claimsconventionally made about it. But, at the same time, we lack a sense for theway a conversance with the object primes us to respond to the world byshowing us what is relevant in the current situation, given our self-understanding and self-interpretation. Without such a sense, we would bepractically disoriented, unready to act, uncertain how to continue in our self-interpretation. And so in its place we orient ourselves to the situation byarrogating 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 wellsuited 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 kindof 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 asubject – in fact, too extreme to be a good example. The speaker lacks not onlythe kind of conversance that articulates his understanding and interpretationbut actually knows so little about the situation that he could get almost nopractical grip on it at all. The example of my lack of conversance with drivingin Britain helps us home in on this type of idle conversation.

The driving example illustrates the difference between linguistic under-standing and a practical conversancewith amatter. It is possible to understandevery sentence in the BritishHighway Code and still be ill prepared for drivingin Britain. To be at home on British roads and in British cars, one needs analtered receptivity to the world, a receptivity that will shift the significance of allkinds 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 (suchas turn signals and gear shifters) on the opposite side of the steering columnfrom their location in an American car, requiring them to be operated by theopposite hand. Other vehicles are in different places, and moving in differentdirections, than one typically finds them in the United States; an Americandriver will thus find herself intuitively looking in just the wrong places in herattempt to “be aware of the speed and position of all the traffic around you.”18

Finally, most Americans lack exposure to roundabouts, and have little sensefor gauging distances, or judging when to yield, in such environments.Instructions such as those quoted above may help an American driver thinkabout what she must do when she approaches a roundabout, but they will not

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

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help her to intuitively key in on the relevant features of the roundabout. Thesituation is notmeaningfully “parsed” for the American driver in the same waythat it is for the British driver. For that, nothing can help but extensiveexperience in navigating through roundabouts.

In idly discussing some thing or state of affairs, then, one thing that cannotbe conveyed is the way an actual familiarity with a situation affects our generalreadiness for the world. If I am correct in this interpretation, then we can seethat Heidegger is in fact not committed to the claim that there is somethingessential about linguistic expression that alienates us from an authentic under-standing, or that it necessarily covers over the truth. Rather, language is guiltyat most of a sin of omission – of failing to do something for our readiness forthe world. In particular, if we converse idly, rather than become conversantwith a situation, we settle for a public interpretation of what the situation callsfor. 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 respondauthentically, in our own way, to the specific situation.

This explains why Heidegger sees our social interactions as tendingtoward a kind of fallenness. We gain through social and, in particular,linguistic interaction a richly articulated ability to isolate and discriminatefeatures of the world of which we have little or no actual experience what-soever. Idle conversation, by exploiting a ready-made sense for things, offersus the convenience of getting a certain (albeit anonymous) grasp on thecircumstances. 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 practicalinvolvement in the world. But what is said is not, in and of itself, sufficientto convey what is relevant, given the particularities of the situation, and thusdoes not convey to the listener the readiness for action that is necessary todisclose a world genuinely.

Heidegger uses the example of a scientist hearing of experimental resultsto illustrate both how idle conversation can be genuinely informative, andhow it nevertheless is unable to convey a disclosive readiness. Idle conversa-tion, Heidegger emphasizes, can take the form of “picking up” what ischaracteristically said of some matter through reading. This idly obtainedconversance with amatter can even take place “in such a way that the reader –there are purported to be such readers in the sciences as well – acquires thepossibility of dealing with the matters with great skill without ever havingseen them.” Although they have a certain kind of expertise, they lack what iscrucial to an authentic disclosure:

Accordingly, whenmen who have to deal with amatter do so solely on the basis of idleconversation about it, they bring the various opinions, views, and perceptionstogether on an equal basis. In other words, they do so on the basis of what theyhave picked up from reading and hearing. They pass along what they have read andheard 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 notapply to the matter but to the conversation. (GA 20: 372)

Scientists tend to fall into this kind of idle conversation, Heidegger observeslater 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 idleconversation is a kind of failure of conversance with what is being talkedabout, the point being that as much as we can learn from reading or hearingabout experimental results, we are missing something crucial as long as wefail to conduct the experiment ourselves.

Heidegger’s critique of the social constraints on language use is commit-ted, then, to no more than the unsurprising view that language cannot giveone a full conversance with its subject matter – the kind of conversancenecessary for articulating an authentic space of disclosedness. This entailsneither 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 wecope, nor that (b) whenever we speak in a way that is amenable to beunderstood by others, what we are saying is untrue. Not (a), because onewho does have a genuine conversance with things can speak and conversewith another expert, who will have, in addition to an understanding of dasGeredete, a familiarity with das Beredete. By pointing out linguistically therelevant feature of the environment – the one relevant for those who possessa certain kind of expertise – the speaker can use language to trigger anappropriate response in the hearer: “These boards are splitting,” one car-penter says to another, and she instantly begins hammering with a smallernail. Not (b), because (as Davidson’s criticism of social externalism makesclear) what we mean is not altered by being spoken out loud. If anything,rather than constraining what its speaker can mean, idle conversation limitsthe ability of its hearer to understand, since it allows her to imagine that sheunderstands everything that she needs to know: “the conversation which iscommunicated can be understood to a considerable extent, even if thehearer does not bring himself into such a kind of being towards what thediscourse is about to have a primordial understanding of it” (GA 2: H 168).

Idle conversation, in short, is a mode of engagement with people andthings in which a genuine readiness is not cultivated. Heidegger calls theresult a kind of “floating” – a failure to be grabbed or disposed in any way bythe things we encounter. We “keep ourselves in” the idle conversation,meaning: we have no “original” and “genuine” relationships to entities inthe world (GA 2: H. 170).

4. THE NECESSITY OF BANALIZATION, LEVELING, AND UNTRUTH

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

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as necessitating the banalization and leveling of human existence. How dothey reach this unjustified 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 one’s own utterances to thedomination of others. Or more precisely, they see Heidegger as an anti-Putnam – as holding that the meaning of what we say is determined not bythe experts but by the lowest common denominator of a linguistic commun-ity. It seems to me that this misses the real thrust of Heidegger’s position.

Both Carman and Dreyfus make the mistake of thinking that everydaylanguage, to function, must be available to everybody. Dreyfus writes, forinstance, that language is “necessarily public and general, that is, meant to beused by anyone, skilled or not, as a tool for communication.”19 Becauselanguage requires such generality and universality, they suppose that itcannot possibly capture all the particularities of a situation. This, in turn,allows them to conclude that the moment we employ a public language, wefall into a banalized and leveled understanding of the world.

But what justifies the assumption that what is said in language must beavailable to everyone? Like Putnam, Dreyfus appeals to a division of labor –the meaning of our utterances is reduced to a “generality that tends towardsbanality” 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 usefulthing to be able to talk about all kinds of equipment – all the equipment thatmakes up our world – but it is not possible for everyone to acquire aprimordial understanding of all that equipment. This much is quite right,and is compatible with the interpretation of Heidegger that I am advancing.

But it does not follow from this that our words can only mean what anyonein our linguistic community can understand them to mean. From the factthat we are not conversant with everything we can talk about, it does notfollow that we can only intend to say what anyone and everyone is capable ofunderstanding. As Putnam and Burge have shown, the premise of a socialdivision of labor, if anything, tends in the opposite direction. What we shouldsay, then, is that speakers are often misunderstood by some members of thecommunity, not that a speaker can only mean what anyone can understandher to mean. As a matter of fact, language communicates perfectly wellin situations where what it communicates is inaccessible to almost everyone –as philosophical prose in general attests, and Heidegger’s work demon-strates it more clearly than most. A good language user aims her use to heractual listeners, not every conceivable member of the linguistic community.Of course, something uttered can always bemisconstrued by those incapableof 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 wellmay be, from time to time, good reasons for meaning only what we knoweveryone in the culture can understand, there is nothing inherent in publiclanguage that requires this.

I return at last to the question with which I started: What role does ourcommunity play in determining meaning? Heidegger’s answer has little todo with the role of a public language in determining the meaning of utter-ances made in that language. Instead, our community affects meaningindirectly by structuring the normal range of activities in which we canengage. We find ourselves already in a world, Heidegger points out. All ouractivities, in turn, are implicated in a series of interactions with others in theworld. Because it is our familiarity with things as articulated in our activitiesthat determines our meaning, it follows that what we can mean is alwaysshaped (but not determined) by the people and things around us.

APPENDIX

In response to an earlier version of this chapter, William Bracken haspointed out that one form of idle conversation – perhaps the formHeidegger is most interested in – does not seem to be assimilable to myroundabout example. One of the central types of idle conversation is idleconversation about being and the structures associated with being – thestructure 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 propositionsabout 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, andbecomes a free-floating thesis” (GA 2: H. 36). Given our familiarity withthat about which phenomenological ontology speaks, it seems like idleconversation should not threaten. Or should it?

As I tried to emphasize, there are different sources for the idleness of idleconversation. What all forms share in common is the inability to put to workthe meaningful parsing of the world relied on in the communication. As theroundabout example shows, communication can fail (meaning that thearticulations 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 uponin the assertion. The failure occurs, even though the hearer understands ingeneral and in other contexts the meanings of the terms employed. Thesource of this failure is the hearer’s lack of familiarity with the world thatwould parse and make salient the meanings necessary to understand thecommunication.

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But there can be other reasons for our inability to use the conversation toorient us to meanings in the world. The RAM example is an example of idletalk too: there, the source is both a lack of understanding about the meaningof the terms or concepts employed and a lack of familiarity with the thingsspoken about. A third possibility is one where we have a kind of familiaritywith what is spoken about – at least of a practical sort, so that we cansuccessfully comport ourselves with respect to it – but we do not understandthe meaning of the terms employed in talking about it. For example, all of usknow how to cope with gravity – how to use it and respond to it, to walk, liedown, stand up, perhaps even ski. And yet it would be idle conversation formany of us to pass along the assertion “the gravitational mass of a body isequal to its inertial law.” We simply lack a grasp of the concepts employedsuch that we could do any work with the assertion.

Idle talk about being should be understood along the lines of idle con-versation about Einstein’s theory of the gravitational field. Heidegger saysthat its meaning is in a certain sense available to us, and we always act on thebasis of an understanding of it. But we’re very poor at talking and thinkingabout it conceptually, and grasp it in those terms only vaguely at best, and inan “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 moveabout within an understanding of being. We have a familiarity with it suffi-cient to act and, indeed, even to formulate questions about it. The problem isthat we are not able to “fix conceptually” the meaning of the terms we use totalk about it. This is the source of our idle conversation. As a result of thiscombination of intimate practical familiarity and conceptual confusion, theidle conversation is particularly pernicious, since it seems to us that we mustknow what we’re talking about but in fact we do not.


6

Discourse Language, Saying, Showing

We are guided by a completely different conception of the word and oflanguage.

(GA 54: 31)

Besides, to pay heed to what the words say is particularly difficult for usmoderns, because we find it hard to detach ourselves from the “at first” ofwhat is common; and if we succeed for once, we relapse all too easily.

(GA 8: 88)

“Language is the house of being.” This is undoubtedly one of Heidegger’smost memorable and most often repeated slogans. (To avoid cumbersomeand unnecessarily complex sentences, I will, for the remainder of thischapter, refer to this as simply “the slogan.”) Heidegger himself usessome variant of the slogan in at least a dozen different essays or lecturecourses between 1937 and 1966. Since then, it has been repeated inhundreds of different articles and books on Heidegger’s work. The reasonfor its popularity, I suspect, is that it seems to encapsulate, in one concisestatement, Heidegger’s answer to one of the central problems in hislater work – the problem of the relationship between being and language.It also seems to launch Heidegger into the orbit of the linguistic turn intwentieth century philosophy, and thus promises to set up an interestingand profitable 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,” ormore recently, McDowell’s somewhat less punchy claim that “humanbeings mature into being at home in the space of reasons or, what comesto the same thing, living their lives in the world; we can make sense of thatby noting that the language into which a human being is first initiatedstands over against her as a prior embodiment of mindedness, of the

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possibility of an orientation to the world” (Mind and World, p. 125).1 I thinkbringing Heidegger’s slogan into conversation with these other relatedclaims is a worthwhile project – albeit a project that will have to wait foranother occasion. This is because we ought to see if we cannot clarify whatHeidegger’s slogan means before we presume to compare it to otherrecent positions on the relationship between language and being.

Now it might seem at first glance that the meaning of the slogan isperfectly straightforward, if somewhat metaphorical. In secondary litera-ture on Heidegger, the slogan is often invoked but rarely deemed towarrant any kind of extended discussion. Almost everybody acts as if it isimmediately apparent what Heidegger is trying to say: they take it as adeclaration of the view that the being of entities somehow depends on thelinguistic expressions we use in thinking or talking about those entities.

It is of course right to think of the slogan in particular and Heidegger’sviews 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 theyare. The problem of language’s role in constituting our world might be asold as philosophy itself – Heidegger liked to quote Heraclitus andParmenides as his antecedents in thinking about the issue. According toHeidegger’s reading of the pre-Socratics, Parmenides’ central claim wasthat being and thinking are the same thing (to gar auto noein estin te kaieinai); according to Heidegger’s Heraclitus, we find out the nature ofbeing when we listen to the logos, to language (fragment B50). ThusHeidegger sees these early philosophers as focused on the problem ofthe relationship between what things are and what we think or say aboutthem. The slogan is typically taken as staking out a particular positionwithin this problem domain, a position we might call “linguistic idealism”

or “linguistic constitutionalism”: the view that our experiences of theworld, or the entities that we experience, or both, have their contentfixed and exhaustively determined by the concepts or linguistic categorieswe use to describe or think about those entities or our experiences ofthem.

Cristina Lafont is admirably clear and forthright in embracing this wayof 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 reifica-tion of the world-disclosing function of language, what things are becomes thor-oughly dependent on what is contingently “disclosed” for a historical linguisticcommunity through a specific language. Thus, the world-disclosure that is containedin a given language becomes the final authority for judging the intraworldly

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

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

I want to emphasize a couple of elements of Lafont’s gloss on the slogan.First of all, Lafont understands “language” to mean any specific languagespoken by an historical linguistic community. The languages that housebeing, then, are natural languages like contemporary American English,old High German, or Attic Greek. Second, on her reading, to say thatlanguage is the house of being means that we cannot encounter anythingthat we cannot already express in our language. Language is, in Americanslang, the “big house” of being: it keeps us locked up within its preexistingexpressive capacities. As we see in this passage, Lafont attributes toHeidegger 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 itcannot be revised by us in any way – we cannot even learn new words, oralter 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 byusing the words already included in our language. That no sensible personwould hold such a view of the relationship between language and ourexperience of the world does not stop Lafont from attributing the viewto Heidegger.

Not all interpretations of the slogan are this extreme, but most share tosome degree Lafont’s suspicions of linguistic idealism. For instance, KarlJaspers’ first reaction to the slogan suggests that he also took it as anexpression of linguistic idealism – but with an important difference: hedid not presume that he knew definitively what the slogan meant. “I haveread the ‘Letter on Humanism,’” he noted, but continued, “with yoursentences, I still continually stumble . . . . I can not understand some ofyour central words. Language as ‘house of being’ – I bristle, as all languageseem to me to be merely a bridge. In communication, language is to bebrought to the annulment of itself in reality . . . . I could say almost theopposite: where there is language, there is not yet or no longer beingitself.”2 This passage is noteworthy in a couple of respects, and I willreturn to it in due course. But for the time being, I find interestingJaspers’ expression of surprise and confusion upon his reading the slogan.To the extent that he can understand the thesis, it seems to him to runcontrary to his intuitions about the independent existence of reality.

2 “Karl Jaspers to Heidegger,” Letter of August 6, 1949,Martin Heidegger/Karl Jaspers Briefwechsel1920–1963. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann/München: Piper, 1990, p. 179.

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Jaspers proposes a second metaphor in opposition to the idea of lan-guage as the “house of being”: language for Jaspers is a mere “bridge” tobeing. A bridge lets us reach the far shore, but it does not determinewhat we will find when we get there. Similarly, where language is viewedas a bridge, it is seen as a tool we use to gain access to entities that arewhat they are independently of whatever we might happen to say orthink about them. Heidegger’s only direct response to Jaspers, unfortu-nately, was the following: “the letter on humanism, which I was forced topublish because, due to indiscretions, it already circulated around Parisfor half a year before in uncontrollable transcripts and translations, willcertainly produce new misunderstandings and catchphrases” (Heideggerto Jaspers, Letter of August 12, 1949). With that warning in mind, let’ssee 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 tocount as an expression of linguistic idealism. There are two importantelements of linguistic idealism. One is a particular understanding of whatlanguage is. As Heidegger expresses it so concisely, the usual, “natural”conception of language thinks of it as “a stock of individual terms [einenBestand von Wörtern] and rules for linguistic construction” (GA 4: 39). Thesecond element is the attribution to language, so understood, of an in-eliminable role in the constitution of entities or our experience of theworld. It is not always clear how exactly linguistic constitutionalists conceiveof language’s contribution to the constitution of things. But however itworks, once we have a language we henceforth experience entities in termsof the linguistic categories we use to speak or think about them. We canthink of each element of linguistic constitutionalism, together with itsdenial, as forming an axis of a simple chart. (See Chart 6.1.) Linguistic

chart 6.1. Positions in the Problem Domain of the Relationship BetweenLanguage and Entities

Ordinary View of Language(language as a stock of termsand rules for construction)

Unconventional View ofLanguage

Entities/ExperiencesConstituted byLanguage

A. Linguistic Constitutionalism(McDowell)

C. Later Heidegger(Originary language as thefitted structure ofrelationships)

Entities/Experiences notConstituted byLanguage

B. Various Realisms: Jaspers(language as a “bridge”)Heidegger’s ontic realism(early and late)

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constitutionalism would require the presence of both elements, and isrepresented in box A of the chart. As the chart illustrates, there are differentways to fail to be a linguistic constitutionalist. One (box B) is to think thatthere can be more to the content of our experiences or to the structure ofour world than we can capture in language – if one thinks that we haveexperiences or that there are entities that we cannot adequately describe orexplain, then one is not a linguistic constitutionalist. Likewise, if one thinksof language as a bridge that lets us reach entities that are constitutedindependently of language, then one is not a linguistic constitutionalist.But one might also reject the first element of the linguistic constitutionalistview, and think of language as something other than a stock of words withrules for the combination of words into sentences, or think of language asfunctioning otherwise than by articulating something conceptually or prop-ositionally. This would be to conceive of language so differently from thelinguistic constitutionalists that, even if one then attributed to language aconstitutive role, the structure of things so constituted would not necessarilybe expressible in the way that linguistic constitutionalists think they are – forinstance, by making assertions within a particular natural language (box C).

The standard interpretation of Heidegger seems to go like this: the earlyHeidegger was not a linguistic constitutionalist (for the first reason), but atsome point during the notorious “turning” in his philosophy, he becameone. 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 neverbelieved that our experience is necessarily conceptually constituted, nor thateverything we apprehend in experience can be captured in linguistic terms.

In Heidegger’s earlier work, he did believe that, at least much of thetime, we experience what one (Man) ordinarily says about the matter. Butthis is an inauthentic experience of things. Authentic contact with theworld, of which we are all capable, is decidedly not cut to the measure ofwhat we are able to say about the entities we encounter. Thus, in Being andTime, he argued that in authentic experience, we are reduced to silenceor reticence in the face of the world. So whatever is the case in banalizedeveryday life, in an authentic encounter with the world, at least, the worldand our experiences of it are not linguistically constituted. Thus the earlyHeidegger belongs in box B of the chart.

But what of Heidegger’s later work, with its emphasis on language (anemphasis that is crystallized in the slogan)? I do not mean to deny thatHeidegger’s views on language undergo significant changes. Somethingimportant 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 languageas that which shows us everything by “forming ways” (GA 12: 203). But, I willargue, 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 viewabout the role of language in mediating our access to the world or inconstituting the world.4 In any event, in his later works, Heidegger alsofails to be a linguistic constitutionalist for both of the reasons I articulatedabove. Even though “language is the house of being,” Heidegger continuesto adhere to his earlier position that there are things that cannot beexpressed in ordinary language. Most notably, what language itself is issomething that cannot be spoken or explained: “there is no word, thatmeans no saying, that would be capable of bringing the essence of languageto language” (GA 12: 223). Thus, the later Heidegger continues to hold thebox B view that language as ordinarily understood cannot fully capture anddoes not constitute our experience of entities. In addition, while it is truethat Heidegger thinks that something called language plays a constitutiverole in the organization and articulation of the world, it is also the case thatthat something is not what a linguistic constitutionalist would recognize aslanguage. As Heidegger puts it – perhaps surprisingly and paradoxically –

“the essence of language cannot be anything linguistic” (GA 12: 108). Thewidespread impression that the later Heidegger is a linguistic constitution-alist is a direct result of this misleading homonym, and a failure to respectHeidegger’s insistence that what he calls language is not the same as what weordinarily refer to as language. The epigraphs to this chapter are typical inthis regard, and we must struggle to avoid the relapse from Heidegger’s“completely different conception of the word and of language” back intoordinary and common conceptions. In its most fundamental form, languagefor 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 usapprehend the originary language, but even then, we are never in a positionto grasp it fully, only to be “spoken” by it. Thus the later Heidegger alsooccupies box C on the chart, as we will explore in the following sections ofthis 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 atstake in Heidegger’s strange terminological practice? I will argue that it isnothing less than an effort to transform our experience of that on the basisof 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 novelphrases” (GA 12: 255/“Way to Language,” p. 424). He hoped to change

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

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the way we hear and respond to familiar words like “language.” Derrida wasquite right to observe that a claim like “language is the house of beings” isan example of what Derrida dubbed “catastrophic metaphors.”5 A cata-strophic metaphor is a metaphor that is turned on its head, illuminatingthe apparently more familiar term through the less familiar term. Forinstance, Heidegger insists that “house” in the slogan is not meant tohelp 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 accountof 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 languagebut sees it as an idea to be developed on the basis of an understanding of being:

the phrase “house of being” does not supply any concept of the essence oflanguage, to the annoyance of philosophers who are vexed to find yet anothercorruption of thinking in such phrases. (GA 12: 112)6

But the “catastrophe” does not amount to a mere reversal in which beingnow functions as a metaphor for language, since being is not somethingabout which Heidegger thinks we can ever have a thematic understanding.We are not in a position to apply our understanding of the properties ofbeing to our conception of language. “We are therefore,” Derrida con-cludes, “no longer dealing with a metaphor in the usual sense, nor with asimple inversion permutating the places in a usual tropical structure”(“The Retrait of Metaphor,” p. 25).

The catastrophic–metaphoric structure of the slogan, in other words,compels us to rethink how it is that language functions, and thus directsour renewed attention to thinking about how language could be the houseof being. We undergo the promised experience with language when theslogan focuses us squarely on the question how we can talk about or namebeing, which is not a thing, but rather a nothing. Without a thing to referto, the normal functioning of simple assertions, whether literal or meta-phorical, is undermined.

Thus we are not meant to plug a preexisting conception of languageinto Heidegger’s claims about language, as too many commentators onHeidegger are prone to do. Heidegger warns us that “the reflective useof language cannot be guided by the common, usual understanding ofmeanings” (GA 12: 186/“Nature of Language,” p. 92), a warning repeated

5 “The Retrait of Metaphor,” Enclitic 2 (1978): 6–33.6 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 accompanyHeidegger in his reflections on language, the word “language” is meant tocome to function differently than it did when we first set out. As Heideggerexplains, 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 occupiesthe old husk, something different is given in the unaltered coinage, and adifferently scaled sequence of ideas is intimated according to unchangedsyntactical laws” (GA 12: 257/“Way to Language,” p. 426). Heidegger’shope is that, as we think through his account of language, we will suspendour presuppositions about what language is, thus allowing a new sense tooccupy the old husk. Or, as Heidegger prefers to think of it, we will allow anolder but nearly lost sense to emerge from hiding to reanimate the word.

Heidegger uses the slogan and other “guide words” (like “the essence oflanguage is the language of essence,” or “to bring language as language tolanguage”) in order to “beckon us away from current notions about lan-guage” (GA 12: 191/“Nature of Language,” p. 96) into a more ontologicallybroad use (for more on the ontologically broad use of terms, seeIntroduction). Consider the following passage (one of the few whereHeidegger 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 EastAsians do. (GA 12: 85)

What does this passage suggest about the meaning of language in theslogan? First, notice that all Europeans inhabit the same house, as do allEast Asians. This immediately rules out the proposal that “language” isreally to be identified with a particular ordinary, historically specific lan-guage like French or German or Japanese or Chinese or Korean. Another,related, example is provided by Heidegger’s bewailing in 1942 the fact thathis compatriots in 1942 “indeed speak ‘German,’ and yet talk entirely‘American’” (GA 53: 80). Of course, Germans at the height of theSecond World War were not conversing in English with American accentsand 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 ahuman activity” (GA 12: 16).

So as we turn now to an examination of Heidegger’s account oflanguage, we need to keep in mind that Heidegger will be talkingabout language in an ontologically broad sense. That is, he will proceedby (1) identifying the world-disclosive function of language, (2) analyzinglanguage 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 isnot confusing enough, there is the added wrinkle that the vocabularyHeidegger uses to talk about this world-disclosive function changes overtime. In the next section, I will review the development of Heidegger’sconception of these originary, nonlinguistic languages together with hischanging use of terminology, before turning to an account of the core,ontological sense of language that Heidegger is interested in.

THE ROAD TO ORIGINARY LANGUAGE

For those who believe that there is a dramatic difference betweenHeidegger’s earlier and later views of language, the transition seems tobe signaled in one of Heidegger’s marginal comments in his personal copyof Being and Time. There, in response to his remark in Being and Time thatthe being of words and language is founded on prelinguistic significations,Heidegger wrote: “Untrue. Language is not another storey raised on top,but rather it is the original essence of truth as the there.” There is nodenying that this represents some sort of change in Heidegger’s views onthe matter. But it is not clear on the face of it what that change is. Thereare at least two possibilities. One is that at the moment he makes hismarginal note, Heidegger continues to mean by “language” the samething he meant in 1927, but that he has come to believe that his earlierwork failed to appreciate the role that this thing plays in the constitution ofthe world. Another possibility is that he now understands “language” differ-ently, and retrospectively reinterprets the passage in question. A carefulreview of Heidegger’s work shows that the latter is the case.

A great deal of attention in Heidegger scholarship has been devotedto the “turn” his thought underwent as he came to accord to languagecentral importance in his work, starting roughly a decade after the publica-tion of Being and Time. But the significance of this “turn” can only be trulyunderstood in the context of a terminological shift in Heidegger’s workduring 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” asHeidegger’s preferred translation for the Greek “logos,” one simply cannotproperly assess Heidegger’s newfound emphasis on language. In fact, thesubstitution of “language” for “discourse” as a translation for “logos” did notrepresent a final resting place for Heidegger’s thought on the matter.“Language” as a translation of “logos” was itself replaced later by “saying,”“Sage.” Each of these translations was an effort to capture what Heideggerthought was the most basic or fundamental sense of logos (see Chart 6.2).

And yet, underlying his various translational experiments was a moreor less constant sense of “logos” as a gathering of meaningful elements


chart6.2

.Translationsof

Logos.T

herearetwoconsistent

featuresoftheway

Heideggerdefineseach

oftheterm

sthat

heusestotran

slate

logo

s:(1)logo

sisun

derstood

asperformingthefunctionofprimarily

disclosing

entitiesas

meaningful,thus

enablin

glin

guistic

meanings;

(2)itdoes(1)in

virtue

ofits

structure,which

consistsin

astablestylethat

characterizesthepattern

ofrelations

that

gatherentitiesinto

constitutiverelations.

Translatingterm

(1)DisclosiveFu

nction

(2)Logos

asgatheringof

constitu

tive

relatio

ns(struc

ture)

1920s

Rede:Discourse“T

heGreek

sactuallyhave

nowordforlangu

age,

anotew

orthy

fact.T

hey

haveon

lylogos,discou

rse”

(GA19:5

90[1924])“T

heterm

logos

goes

back

tolegein

...itmeans

discou

rse,

discou

rseab

outsom

ething”

(GA20:1

15[1925])“theba

sic

meaningof

logosisdiscou

rse”

(GA2:

H.3

2[1927])

“How

didtheGreeksde

fine

legein

,‘to

discou

rse,’‘discoursing

’?Legein

does

not

merelymeanto

form

andto

recite

words.T

hesenseof

legein

israther

deloun

,makingman

ifest,w

here

wha

tismad

eman

ifestinclud

eswha

tthe

discou

rseis

abou

tand

howitshou

ldbe

talked

abou

t.Aristotle

define

sits

sensemoreprecisely

asapophainesthai,lettin

gsomething

beseen

initselfa

ndinde

ed–apo–from

itself”(G

A20:1

15)“Logosa

sdiscou

rse

means

...deloun

,makingman

ifestthat

abou

twhich

inthediscou

rse‘th

ediscou

rse’

is”(G

A2:H

.32).

“Theintelligibilityof

somethinghas

always

been

artic

ulated

,evenbe

fore

thereis

anyap

prop

riativeinterpretatio

nof

it.Disco

urse

istheartic

ulationof

intelligibility....That

whichcanbe

artic

ulated

ininterpretatio

n,andthus

even

moreprim

ordiallyin

discou

rse,

iswhat

wehavecalle

d‘m

eaning.’That

whichge

tsartic

ulated

assuch

indiscursive

artic

ulation,w

ecallthe

‘totality-of-m

eanings’

[Bedeutungsgan

ze].Thiscanbe

dissolved

orbrok

enup

into

meanings.”(G

A2:

H.1

61)

1930s

Sprache:Lan

guage“W

ecan–in

fact,w

emust–

tran

slatean

thrôpos–zôon

logon

echonas:‘thehum

anbe

ingistheliving

entityto

whom

thewordbe

longs.’

Insteadof

‘word’

wecaneven

say

‘langu

age,’provided

wethinkthe

natureof

langu

agead

equa

telyan

doriginally,n

amely,from

theessence

of

“Lan

guageisthat

hap

peningin

which,

each

time,

beings

arefirstd

isclosed

asbe

ings”(G

A5:6

2[1936])

“Lan

guageisthe

legislatinggatheringan

das

aresulttheman

ifestnessofthestructurethat

fitsentitiestogether”(G

efügesdesS

eienden).

Wenow

seewith

outd

ifficu

ltythe

connectio

nbe

twee

nlangu

age,

logos,

andtruth,a

lêtheia.

Thegathering

setting-forthan

destablishingisa

bringingou

tandin

thisway

making

things

visiblean

dob

viou

s,thus

a

logosco

rrectly

unde

rstood

.”(G

A9:3

48

[1939])

hap

peningin

whichsomething

previouslyinaccessible,veiled,

issnatch

edou

tofitsco

ncealed

ness

andplaced

into

un-con

cealmen

t,alêtheia,that

is,truth.”(G

A36/3

7:1

16

[1933])

“Theessence

oflangu

ageessenceswhere

ithap

pensas

aworld-fo

rmingpo

wer,

that

is,w

hereitfirstp

reform

sthebe

ing

ofen

titiesin

advance

andbrings

them

into

astructure”

(GA38:1

70[1934]).

“Becau

setheessence

oflangaug

eisfoun

din

thegatheringof

thegathered

nessof

being,

thereforelangu

ageas

everyday

discou

rseon

lyco

mes

into

itstruthwhen

thesayingan

dhearingisrelatedto

the

Logosas

thegathered

nessinto

thesense

ofbe

ing.”(G

A40:1

81/1

32[1935])

1950s

Sage:S

aying“T

heolde

stwordforthe...

prevailin

gof

theword,

forsaying,

islogos”

(GA12:2

24[1959])

“But

what

does

“tosay”

actuallymean?We

received

afirsta

nswer

inou

rlistening

towhat

theGreek

words

legeinan

dlogos

say:to

appe

ar–an

dleta

ppear–to

conjure.O

urword“sagan

”meansthe

samething:itmeanstoshow

,pointo

ut,

seean

dletb

epe

rceived.

Tosayisthe

revealing-co

ncealingshow

ingan

dpo

intin

gou

t,thepresen

ting-to

...that

isde

term

ined

byit,

andthegiving-to

andgiving-from

.Thesayingisthe

region

ofthishintin

g-show

inggiving”

(GA79:1

70–1[1957])

“Lan

guage,

then

,isnot

amerehum

anfacu

lty....Lan

guageis,asform

ingof

theworld’sways,therelatio

nof

all

relatio

ns.Itrelates,maintains,proffers,

anden

rich

estheface-to

-face

enco

unter

oftheworld’sregion

s,holds

andke

eps

them

,inthat

itholds

itself–

Saying–in

reserve.

(GA12:2

03[1957])

into a unified structure, a meaningful, but prelinguistic articulation of theworld on the basis of which entities can be unconcealed and linguisticacts can be performed.

Thus, despite the appearance of a change from Heidegger’s earlier to hislater work on the role of language, Heidegger’s view remains remarkablyconsistent in its broad outlines. The consistency is achieved because his“turn” to language is offset by a counterturning movement in the meaningof the term “language.” During the period leading up to and including thepublication of Being and Time, Heidegger understood language as a totalityof 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 1925the “basic structure” (Grundstruktur) of the logos (GA 21: 26). These primarymeanings are the relationships or involvements that entities have with usand other things in a practical situation. For example, the meaning of a doorwhen I’mnavigating through a building is: “for going in and out” (see GA 21:141). This meaning (Bedeutung) thus arises within our activity of comportingourselves purposefully and understandingly in the world. Meaning (dieBedeutung) is dependent on an act of making sense (das Bedeuten):

In the primary understanding of a dealing-with, what is understood or made senseof [das Bedeutete] is disclosed. In this way, the understanding gains the possibility oftaking for itself and preserving what is disclosed, the “result” so to speak. The resultof 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 canthen accrue. (GA 21: 151 n. 6)

This “primary meaning,” then, is the way that thing or activity itself (ratherthan a linguistic sign) refers to or relates to other activities or entities. The“making sense that understands” (das verstehende Bedeuten), which disclosesmeanings, is not dependent on our possessing a system of signs, but israther the foundation for language, which consists of a unified and system-atic totality of the “word meanings” that “accrue” to the primary meaningsarticulated for and through our dealings with entities:

only insofar as such intelligibility –meaning – already belongs to Dasein, can Daseinexpress itself phonetically in such a way that these utterances are words which nowhave something like meaning. Because Dasein in its very being is itself somethingthat makes sense (bedeutend), it lives in meanings and can express itself as thesemeanings. And only because there are such utterances, that is, words, accruing tomeanings, therefore there are particular words. That is, only now can linguisticforms, which themselves are shaped by the meaning, be detachable from thatmeaning. Such a totality of utterances, in which the understanding of a Dasein ina 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 ofutterances – a systematic whole of signs that we can draw on in expressingourselves linguistically (see GA 36/37: 105ff for the view of language as kindof sign giving). It is interesting, however, that in GA 21, Heidegger did not yethave a translation for logos into German that he was willing to stick with. Heleads off the lecture by translating logos with Rede, but in a very telling passage,he qualifies this translation: “in order to provide an example that directs usto 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 andwhat is posited, the lekton” (GA 21: 54). That is, the Greek understanding oflogos is not oriented to the words we say in discursive interaction, but rather themeaningful world that is capable of being talked about linguistically. Thereis 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 intosalience. 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 Heidegger’s notionof discourse stems from failing to take the paradigm of discourse to be what issayable – the meaningful articulation – rather than the action of sayingitself – the communicative aspect. In any event, by the time he writes Beingand Time, it seems to me that Heidegger is comfortable translating logosas Rede (“conversance” or “discourse”), but only because he understandsdiscourse primarily in terms of the articulation of meanings (in just the wayhe had described meaning articulation in GA 21): “that which is parsed (dasGegliederte) in discursive articulation as such we call the totality of meanings(Bedeutungsganze). This can be separated into meanings . . . . Words accrue tomeanings” (Being and Time, 204/161). The primary sense of Rede or dis-course is that which performs the function of establishing and stabilizingthe referential relations of meaningfulness:

The intelligibility of something has always been articulated, even before there is anyappropriative interpretation of it. Discourse is the Articulation of intelligibility . . . .That which can be Articulated in interpretation, and thus even more primordiallyin discourse, is what we have called “meaning.” That which gets articulated as suchin 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 meaningon the basis of a prelinguistic but meaningful disclosure of the world,Heidegger also thought of language as a derivative phenomenon – both

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


Sprache as a sign system and Rede in the communicative sense depend ondiscourse as meaning articulation.

That Heidegger does not more rigorously divorce the two elements ofRede is a result of his ontologically broad use of the term. The disclosivefunction of both discourse as communication, and discourse as meaningarticulation 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 capturethe decisive meaning: gathering joining and making known. They overlook what isoriginally 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 thegathering joining [sammelnden Fügens – i.e. meaning articulation] was immediatelyaccompanied by the meaning of gathering saying [i.e. meaning communication], ameaning that language always already has assumed, and in fact in the manner ofconversance; whether, in fact, originally language and discourse was directly expe-rienced as the primary and genuine basic way of gathering joining, or whether themeaning of gathering and joining together was only subsequently carried over ontolanguage, I am not able to decide on the basis of my knowledge of the matter,assuming that the question is at all decideable. (GA 33: 122/Aristotle’s MetaphysicsTheta, 103–4; some emphasis in original)

Similarly, when he argues in Being and Time that the call of conscience is amode of discourse that may not be heard as offering any communicativecontent (see GA 2: H. 273–4), Heidegger acknowledges that somethingcan perform the discursive function of meaning articulation without alsobeing communicable.

Both aspects of discourse, however, bear a common structure – thestructure of gathering or collecting references into a coherent context.That gathering can occur in either communicative action (“saying”), or inthe fundamental structural joining together or fitting together of referen-ces. But the latter is the more fundamental sense because it establishes thestabilized relational context that is exploited in discursive communication:

the original meaning of logos [is] . . . legein: to read, to read together, to gather, to laythe 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 istherefore a rule, a law, yet not as something which is suspended somewhere abovewhat is ruled, but rather as that which is itself the relationship: the inner fitting-together and fitness (Fügung und Fuge) of the entities which stand in relation. Logosis the regulating structure (regelnde Gefüge), the gathering of entities which are relatedamong themselves. Such a gathering, which now gathers up, makes accessible,and holds ready the connections of what is connected, and with this the connectionitself 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: todiscourse of or about something to someone or for someone. Logos is discourse, thegathering laying out, unifying making something known. (GA 33: 121)

As this passagemakes clear, at this point (1931), Heidegger has begun phasingout the use ofRede, and has started usingRede and Sprache interchangeably. Butit is equally clear that he can do so only because he no longer thinks oflanguage in the way that he did in the years leading up to and surroundingthe publication of Being and Time. The change occurs as Heidegger draws adistinction between the prereflective use of the word “language” to refer to the“foreground aspect of language” – that is, a totality of words (GA 4: 39) – anda more thoughtful use of the term to refer to the deeper, background pheno-menon of a preverbal articulative gathering of meanings. He begins, inother words, to use the term “language” in a manner that is ontologicallybroad. He can do this because he no longer holds that the defining 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 besubstituted for “discourse” (Rede) as Heidegger’s preferred term for trans-lating logos and, as I will show, as a name for a particular constitutive structureof our being-in-the-world. Rede, in turn, loses its technical being-sense inHeidegger’s works after about 1934.8 To appreciate how much (or rather,how little) is at stake in this change, we need to say more about this con-stitutive structure, the explanation of which was always linked with an effortto appropriate the ancient Greek notion of logos. The idea expressed in thepassage quoted above – that human beings always already live in meaningsand act meaningfully – is Heidegger’s version of the Greek claim that theessence of man is to be the zôon logon echon, the living being that possesses thelogos or language.9 Rede, Sprache, and Sage were each efforts to translate andthus capture what was essential about this claim.

Rede, discourse, was initially adopted as a translation for logos because ofthe 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 changein Heidegger’s view that coincides precisely with the development of hisconviction that the translation of Greek terms into Latin “destroyed theauthentic philosophical naming force of the Greek words” (GA 40: 15/10).

8 Although I take it as a sign of Heidegger’s never-ending experimental approach to the use ofterms that Rede stages a comeback in one late course, the Freiburger Vorträge of 1957 (GA 79).

9 Heidegger discusses this claim in both lectures and lecture courses devoted exclusively to Greekthinkers, as well as extended discussions in lecture courses more broadly conceived. Amongthe former are two lecture courses in 1931: Aristotles: Metaphysiks IX, GA 33 and Vom Wesen derWahrheit. Zu Platons Höhlengleichnis und Theätet, GA 34; in 1932 the lecture course Der Anfang derabendländischenPhilosophie (Anaximander undParmenides) (GA35) anda lectureon “PlatosPhaidros.”


So when he now holds that the “originary meaning” of logos “has at firstnothing to do with language and word and discourse [Rede]” (GA 40: 133/95), this does not mean that he’s rejecting his earlier account of thefundamental role of primary, prelinguistic meanings in disclosing aworld. Nor is he repudiating the claim that the originary meaning of logoshas nothing to do with language when, a mere four years later, he writesthat “We can – in fact, we must – translate anthrôpos – zôon logon echon as: ‘thehuman 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 correctlyunderstood.” (GA 9: 348). Nor, finally, should we see it as a late repudiationof his work on language, and a return to his earlier view when he writesin 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 logosmeant from early on:to bring forward, to bring to appearance by gathering” (GA 79: 160).

All of these superficially 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 onthe ontological structure and disclosive function of discourse, language, andsaying respectively. As Chart 6.2 suggests, when seen from the perspective ofstructure and function, the different terms are near synonyms. The originarylanguage is an ontological structure responsible for the disclosure of theworld. Language plays this role in virtue of imposing a particular structureon the world – the gathering of relationships of meaning or reference thatwe have already touched on: “the basic meaning of logos is collection, tocollect” (GA 40: 133) – namely, the collection or gathering of significationsor “the relationship of one thing to another” (GA 40: 133) into amore or lessstable 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 GATHERING

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. Thiswill bring us back to the slogan and the question of linguistic constitution-alism in Heidegger’s thought. We noted at the outset Jaspers’ puzzledresponse to the slogan. In contrast to the linguistic constitutionalism hethought he detected in the slogan, Jaspers expressed the view of languageas a “bridge” that brings us to an independently existing reality. Jaspers’reaction to the slogan shows that he recognized something that few othercommentators have noted: the phrase “house of being” is not originally

134 Language

Heidegger’s. It is an unattributed quotation of a passage from Nietzsche’sZarathustra – a passage that Heidegger lectured on in the years duringwhich he was developing his views on language (see GA 44: 56).10

Some attention to the original source of the phrase is quite helpfulfor appreciating what’s going on with Heidegger’s use of the slogan. The“language as a bridge” view is advanced by Zarathustra himself:

“Oh my animals,” answered Zarathustra. “Just keep babbling and let me listen! Itinvigorates me so when you babble: where there is babbling the world indeed liesbefore me like a garden. How lovely it is that there are words and sounds; are notwords 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, becausethe tiniest gap is hardest to bridge . . . . Have names and sounds not been bestowedon things so that human beings can invigorate themselves on things? It is abeautiful folly, speaking: with it humans dance over all things. How lovely is alltalking and all lying of sounds! With sounds our love dances on colorfulrainbows.” (Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Third Part: “The Convalescent,” §2, translationmodified)

On this view, then, language does not play a role in constituting entities.Rather, it is an adornment that creates the illusion of connections betweenspeakers, and the illusion of relations between things. But the thingsthemselves do not depend for their being on our babbling or on the waywe talk about their relations to each other. Thus “language is a bridge”means that language brings us before independently existing entities,connects them to each other in our representations, and beautifies andadorns them in our representations.

But Zarathustra’s animals respond by suggesting that language is not justa bridge to things and an adornment that dances over fixed entities.Rather, entities themselves “dance” in the way words do:

“Oh Zarathustra,” said the animals then. “To those who think as we do, all thingsthemselves approach dancing; they come and reach out their hands and laugh andretreat – and come back. Everything goes, everything comes back; the wheel ofbeing rolls eternally. Everything dies, everything blossoms again, the year of beingruns eternally. Everything breaks, everything is joined (gefügt) anew; the same houseof being builds itself eternally.” (ibid., emphasis supplied)

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

10 In the Nietzsche lectures, Heidegger rejects the animals’ account of recurrence advanced inthis passage because it advocates a view of eternal recurrence as a cyclical repetition. He doesnot 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 thethesis that entities are constituted by the relationships they bear to eachother. Something only is the entity that it is in terms of the way it is referredto and aligned with activities and other entities. One might refer to this asa relational ontology. To take language as a bridge, and words as beautifyingand dancing over things, is to hold that entities are fixed and constitutedindependently of the meaningful relationships they bear with other things.The view of dancing things, by contrast, is the view that there is no stableontology apart from the meaningful relationships that things bear towardone another within a world. Heidegger seems to allude to the same passagein Zarathustra when he discusses the importance of learning to renouncethe idea that “words were like handles (Griffe) that grasp that which alreadyis and that which is held to be, secure it tightly (dicht machen), express it andin 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 worldand takes it over. That is not a matter of chance, for what is knowable and what knowsare each determined in their essence in a unified way from the same essential ground.We may not separate either one, nor wish to encounter them separately. Knowing isnot like a bridge that somehow subsequently connects two existent banks of a stream,but is itself a stream that in its flow first creates the banks and turns them toward eachother in a more original way than a bridge ever could. (GA 6.1: 512–13)

Heidegger returns repeatedly to the imagery that Nietzsche invokes incontrasting these two different ways of thinking about the relationshipbetween language and entities in the world.11 So we can see that in appro-priating Nietzsche’s 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 ideathat the logos is a “gathering fitting” (sammelnden Fügens) (GA 33: 122). ForHeidegger, “logos is the structure of fitting (Gefüge)” (GA 33: 121), just as forZarathustra’s animals, the house of being is constructed when “everythingis joined or fitted together” (gefügt). In the slogan, then, language is to beunderstood as the gathering together of meanings that allows there tobe entities at all.12 In particular, language is the unity to the structure ofrelations: the Gefüge. “Language is, as saying that forms the world’s ways,the relation of all relations. It relates, maintains, proffers, holds, andkeeps them” (107). To be the “relation of all relations”means that languageexerts 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, whereHeidegger explains that interpreting the eternal recurrence as a circling of entities is too easy,and fails to appreciate the importance of the moment as a collision between past and future.

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

WORDS

So far, we have seen a continuity in Heidegger’s account of the logos runningthroughout 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. Thiscontinuity is obscured by changes in Heidegger’s terminology – in partic-ular, his preferred name for the logos structure. Perhaps confusingly, wherethe 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” inno way is meant to suggest that it has the structure and form that weordinarily associate with language. The originary language of the logos isdecidedly not something like a stock of terms, each with its associated mean-ing and reference, together with rules for constructing sentences out ofthose terms. But to make this point more evident, we need to considerwhat Heidegger does say about the relationship between words and theoriginary language or the Gefüge. 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 Heidegger’s alleged linguistic constitutionalism.

Heidegger’s interpretation of the Stefan George poem “The Word”(“Das Wort”) plays a central role in his effort to reorient our thinkingabout the word and thus to rethink the relationship between language andentities. This poem is also, in light of its final line, especially prone to bemisunderstood as supporting a linguistic constitutionalist interpretationof Heidegger’s account of language. With apologies for the rather literaland unpoetic translation, the poem reads:

Das Wort The WordWunder von ferne oder traum Wonder from far off or a dreamBracht ich an meines landes saum I brought to my country’s border

Und harrte bis die graue norn And waited until the grey NornDen namen fand in ihrem born – Found the name within her wellspring –


Drauf konnt ichs greifen dichtund stark

Thereupon I could grasp it tightly and strong

Nun blüht und glänzt es durch diemark . . .

Now it blossoms and shines throughout theborderland . . .

Einst langt ich an nach guter fahrt Once I arrived after a good journeyMit 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 schläft hier nichts auf tiefemgrund»

“No such sleeps here on the deep ground”

Worauf es meiner hand entrann Whereupon it escaped from my handUnd nie mein land den schatzgewann . . .

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 Heidegger’s interpretation of this poem, we need to begin byconsidering his reason for introducing a discussion of poetry into his workin the first place. What, one ought to ask, is Heidegger trying to accomplish?Does he think the poem offers an argument about language or a particularlyinsightful philosophical analysis of the nature of the word? Obviously not.Does he want to adorn his dense and ungainly prose with some beautifulpoetic embellishments? To the contrary, the poem is not an ornament but acentral element in Heidegger’s discussion of the word. Does he think thepoet is an authority figure who can resolve a philosophical question aboutlanguage for us? With this, we are coming closer to the truth. The poet is nota philosophical authority, but, Heidegger believes, he can be regarded asan authoritative voice on at least one thing – the experience of being struckby the power and limits of language itself. And this leads us, finally, to themain reason for introducing the poem: Heidegger wants us to break out ofour ordinary facility with language in order to actually have an experiencewith 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, experienceit, and reflect on it, and this might require that we somehow defamiliarizeourselves with it. The poem is explicitly introduced “to show ways to bring usbefore the possibility of having an experience with language” (GA 12: 151).This particular poem is selected because it is by a master poet, reporting onhis own experience of language. As we approach the poem, then, we miss thepoint if we quickly tear a line or two out of context as authority for an argumentor to add interest and beauty to philosophical prose. We are meant ratherto dwell upon the poem, and to experience the working of language in thepoem. That requires in this instance our attending thoughtfully and painsta-kingly to the poetic description of the poet’s experience of a poetic word.

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Indeed, the first thing one realizes when engaging seriously with a poemis that poetic language rarely offers clear, unequivocal propositions as thecontent of its sentences. To reduce a poem to a punch line, to a readilyintelligible 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 pathsof understanding. As frustrating as this might be to those of an analytic orscientific mindset, this is not a weakness of the poem but its strength – andprecisely one of the elements of the poem we must attend to in order toexperience language. For one of the essential features of language is itsability to oscillate and thus to lead us into any of an indefinite number ofpaths. 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 sothat the oscillation of the poetic saying is not forced onto the inflexible railof an unequivocal assertion and in this way is destroyed” (GA 12: 157).

The words of a masterful poet have a particular kind of oscillation, onethat Heidegger aspired to achieve in his own work. They hover right at theboundary between our commonplace, ready understanding of terms andinsight into rare, unfamiliar meanings in the world. By helping us to getcaught up in this oscillation between the most familiar meanings of all –ordinary linguistic meanings – and the mysterious unfathomable ways thatthe 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 significance of thethings and people and possibilities around us.

Heidegger immediately alerts us to several words in George’s poem thatoscillate in this way, reminding us that we should not be too quick toassume we know what the final lines mean:

One is tempted to transform the final line into an assertion with the content: thereis 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 amatter means: to withdraw something from it, to let it miss something. It is lackingmeans: it is missing. Where the word is missing, there is no thing. Only the availableword 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 beingmean here that it appears as an award that is conferred on the thing from theword? (GA 12: 209)

We cannot hope to make sense of the poem without asking what a wordis, what a thing is, and what being means. Given that the whole point ofthe poem is to cause an experience with language that will compel us toreflect on such things, we should be particularly hesitant to take theseterms in their ordinary, everyday sense. As we bring into play differentpossible 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

Let’s start by exploring possible meanings of the word “word.” “Word”is an ideal case for illustrating Heidegger’s notion of oscillation. TheGerman language has two different plural forms to the singular wordfor “word” (“Wort”), which correlate with two quite different meaningsof the word “word.” On the first meaning, which takes the plural form“Worte,” a word is a complete utterance or expression: “a verbal or writtenexpression, which consists of a group of individual terms and presentsa unified mental sense.”13 This meaning of “word” is attested in Englishas well. Shakespeare, for instance, has King Henry VI say: “My Lordof Warwick, hear me but one word: Let me for this my life-time reignas king” (King Henry VI, act 1, scene 1). The “one word” is a completethought, not a single term. This sense lives on in such English expressions“I’d like a word with you,” or “I will keep my word” – that is, words areunderstood as complete expressions, not individual terms.

The other meaning, which takes the plural form “Wörter,” correspondswith the way we typically tend to think of the ordinary meaning of theEnglish word “word.” Words, Wörter, are “single, independent, isolablemeanings with a definite vocal form which, as discourse’s smallest unit ofsense, produce, by means of their accumulation and linking together,words in the first sense as connected discourse.”14

In the singular, “Wort,” word will oscillate between these two senses, andcan be taken in either way (depending on context). And this is notaccidental, of course – words as expressions of whole thoughts, andwords 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 canmove in both directions of meaning, and can even do so simultaneously.But to mark the distinction for the English reader, I will translate “Wörter”as “terms,” and “Worte” as “words.”

The distinction as it is drawn in Grimm and in the ordinary Germanusage, however, is not quite the distinction Heidegger wants to make. Ingeneral, Heidegger thinks of terms as occurrent linguistic forms that aredetachable from their meanings, and are thus thought of as denotingconcepts, as opposed to directly expressing significations (see GA 2: H.159, 161; GA 21: 151). Thus a term is a certain type of sound or graphicmark, with its associated particular meaning or concept. Of course, it is

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

14 Ibid., p. 1529.

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phenomenologically incorrect to describe my experience of language asinvolving first a sensory perception of a sound or graphic mark, followedby a recognition of the sound or mark as a linguistic form, followed by anassociation of the linguistic form with its meaning, followed by a construc-tion of a unified sense from the individual meanings. In the living use oflanguage, I respond to what is written or spoken fluently, nonreflectively,nondeliberately. For instance, when I hear the term “chalkboard” in theutterance “the chalkboard is black,” I do not hear a sound that I recognizeas a word and then associate it with a meaning in order to construct a sensefor 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 ordinaryinvolved coping orients or reorients me immediately to the world I am in, tothe meanings I inhabit (see GA 21: 151). The words immediately orient meso 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 itsmeanings. A beginning speaker of a foreign language will often encounterterms. But with increasing fluency, the terms recede from salience.

The contrast between a deliberate and fluent experience of languagesuggests a different way of thinking about what words are as opposed toterms. Words for Heidegger are not representations, and have neither averbal nor a written form: they are “not palpable to the senses” (GA 12:181). Indeed, Heidegger claims, the word, like being itself, “is not anentity” (GA 12: 182). Instead, he thinks of words as the relational struc-tures that allow there to be entities in the first place: “the relation of theword to the thing . . . is not a relationship between the thing on one sideand the word on the other. The word itself is the relation, which in each casekeeps in itself the thing in such a way that it ‘is’ a thing” (GA 12: 159). Tounderstand this, we need to recall the discussion of dancing thingsabove. On Heidegger’s view, entities are constituted by the relationshipsthey have to other entities. For there to be a stable thing, the relationshipsthat constitute it as a thing need also to be stabilized, held open, andmaintained. The stabilization takes the form of establishing nexuses ornodes of relations that can be, and are, filled by particular entities. Ofcourse, “filled” is a misleading verb to use here if it is heard as suggestingthat entities are something independently of the structure of relations,something that can then be inserted into a particular place in the networkof relations. Entities do not fill nexuses the way water fills glasses orconcrete fills building forms. Water is water, after all, whether it is in aglass or pond. A more apt analogy is the way someone fills the position ofan aunt or uncle. One cannot be an aunt first, and only subsequently takeup relationships to nieces and nephews. To be an aunt at all is to beconstituted by one’s relationships to other people. Aunthood, then, is aparticular nexus of relationships to siblings and siblings’ children. When


we grasp the significance of aunthood, we have gained the ability torecognize a stable pattern of relationships, secured this nexus as that intowhich something can enter, and, in entering, be constituted as the entity itis. We have grasped, one could say, the word “aunt.” To understand wordsin general, then, is to be able to discern an entity as standing in thestructure of relationships that allows it to be an entity.

About the “word” we also said that it does not simply stand in a relation to the thing,but rather that the word is what first brings the particular entity as the entity that itis into this “is,” holds it therein, relates it, and, as it were, provides it the supportwith which to be a thing. Accordingly, we said, the word does not simply stand in arelation to the thing, but rather the word “is” itself what holds and relates the thingas 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, inthe original sense, is the nexus of significative relationships. Words areprior to terms because it is only through a grasp of the meaningful relationsthat 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 George’s poem, we cansee that the different ways of hearing “word” will lead us to imaginedifferent reasons why the word might be missing. If we think of words asterms, a “word is missing” when some ordinary language lacks a termuniquely associated with some specific sense. Take, for instance thePersian term “zirad,” the name of “a rope fastened round a camel’s neck,to prevent him from bringing up his food when chewing the cud, andthrowing it on his rider.”15 English lacks this term, or any single equivalentterm. But we English speakers have little trouble understanding the ideaof a specific type of rope-equipment designed for that particular task(even if we are unable to imagine exactly what such a rope would looklike, or how it would be attached to the camel’s neck, or even how a camelmanages to vomit on its rider in the first place). We know, after all, whatcamels are, and have a fairly good grip on all the relationships involved in azirad (the relationship between animals and their riders, between necksand ropes, etc.). By contrast, if we think of words in Heidegger’s sense,then a “word is missing” when a world lacks a stable network of relation-ships that would let a particular entity show up within the world. Ofcourse, such a world will also necessarily lack a term (since a term accruesto the word or nexus of relationships). But it lacks a term in this casebecause it lacks a constitutive place for such a thing as the term names. It isno accident that English has had to borrow its term for a Samurai, for ourculture lacks the points of reference that are definitive of such a being (for

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

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example, the Bushido, with the particular confluence of virtues that it incor-porates, or the Japanese feudal structure that constituted the place and roleof the Samurai in Japanese society). When such a word is missing, then, theabsence of a term is just a symptom of a deeper lack. What is responsiblefor the word being missing is not a limitation in the expressive capacitiesof ordinary language, but the stable relationships in terms of which the“wonder” or “dream” or “rich and frail jewel” can be that entity that it is.

2. THINGS AND NOTHINGS

The second oscillating term in the George poem is “thing.” In the broadestsense, “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 lastline 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 mightbe induced to take the word more narrowly. The things that the poet talksabout are “wonders,” “dreams,” and “rich and delicate treasures.” Theseare things that, as we just noted, are foreign to his world.

In addition, Heidegger long argued that we need to recognize thatnonentities are “given” or otherwise play a role in the disclosure of a worldand thus are not absolute nothings. They are not things, hence “nothings,”but they nevertheless shape and structure and open up possibilities for ourbeing in the world. Being itself, for instance, “is no entity, no thing, and nothing-like property, nothing occurrent. But it nevertheless signifies some-thing” (GA 29/30: 471).16 Other examples of things that are not things orentities include language, the world, and modes of being (like the humanmode of being, existence). Recognition of such nothings and their role indisclosing the world is a crucial part of Heidegger’s attack on the ontology ofthe occurrent that he argues has dominated Western Metaphysics since thebeginning. Thus “no thing’ in the poem might be referring to such noth-ings, rather than functioning to deny the existence of ordinary entities.

3. BEING AND GIVING

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

16 See alsoGA10: 104: “But being is not a thing that someone of us takes away andputs to the side.Rather self-withdrawing is themanner that being essentially comes to be, that is, proffers itself aspresencing. 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 insofaras it simultaneously conceals itself as this self-concealing. Self-concealing, the withdrawal, is amanner 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 ofthe poem might suggest, “be” might mean “to have a secure, stable pres-ence in the world.”17

But Heidegger identifies other ways to think of something being. TheGerman 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 willsee, Heidegger exploited this to talk about things that are, but lack thestability and presence that metaphysics took as definitive of being.Something can be “given,” that is, play a role in the disclosure of the world,without “being,” that is, having stable presence.

Finally, it is worth observing, as Heidegger does, that the poem uses thesubjunctive rather than the indicative form of the verb “to be.” This allowsthe verb to be construed as either the present indicative expressed inindirect discourse (“no thing is . . . ”), or an imperative or demand (“nothing may be . . . ”).

4. INTERPRETING GEORGE’S POEM

With all these potential points of oscillation in play, it should be clear that thepoem 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 differentways of interpreting the closing lines, depending on how “word” and “no thing”and “be” are understood. One of these interpretations – the one seized on bythose commentators who see in Heidegger a linguistic constitutionalist –

Heidegger rejects. He accepts several others as part of the productive ambiguityof the phrase. Let’s look at the one he rejects, before turning to the others.

4.1. The Linguistic Constitutionalist Interpretation

The first, linguistic constitutionalist reading of the verse understands wordsas terms – as meaningful linguistic forms of ordinary language. It takesthings as any entity whatsoever. And it takes being in the broadest sensepossible. The result is to see the verse as declaring the view that nothing atall can exist in any way unless and until there is a term in some ordinarylanguage for referring to the entity. Anticipating that casual readers mightmistakenly take the final line of the poem and, along with it, the slogan asan 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 Themost 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 contingentlydisclosed by a language” (Lafont, Heidegger, Language, and World Disclosure, p. 193). Tosupport her claim that Heidegger believes that we can only encounter things that we can

(continued)

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Heidegger immediately alerts us that we are not to read it in this fashion.I quote at length from Heidegger’s discussion of this last line:

We ventured the paraphrase: No thing is where the word is missing. “Thing” is hereunderstood in the traditional comprehensive sense that means any something thatis in any way. Taken in this way, even God is a thing. Only when the word is found forthe thing is the thing a thing. In this way only is it. Accordingly wemust emphasize: nothing is where the word, that is the name, is missing. Only the word provides being tothe thing. But how can amere word achieve this – to bring something into being? Thetrue 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 flat-footed expression of the view that all entities depend for their very

18 (continued) already name, Lafont quotes this passage, but selectively elides precisely thoseparts where Heidegger warns against such a reading. In addition, she strings togetherquotations spread out over several pages – in one case, completing a sentence with a phrasethat appears one page and two paragraphs later. Here is Lafont’s use of the passage inquestion:

[Heidegger’s] conclusion is as follows: “The thing is a thing only where the word isfound for the thing . . . . The word alone supplies being to the thing [i.e.,] what it is andhow it is . . . . Something only is, where the appropriate word names something as existingand in this way institutes the particular entity as such.” Therefore, “the essence of all thatis resides in the word. For this reason, the following phrase holds good: language is the houseof being” (Lafont, Heidegger, Language, and World Disclosure, pp. 193, quoting Heidegger,UzS, pp. 164–6; ellipses are in Lafont’s text).

Here is the passage with the elided warnings restored in bold:

[Heidegger’s] conclusion is as follows: “The thing is a thing only where the word is found forthe thing . . . . The word alone supplies being to the thing. Yet how can a mere wordaccomplish 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 waslater tacked on to it . . . . We listen to the poem that we read. Did we hear it? Barely. We havemerely picked up the last line – and done so almost crudely – and have even ventured torewrite it into an unpoetical statement: No thing is where the word is lacking. We could gofurther and propose this statement: Something only is, where the appropriate word namessomething 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 wordderive its appropriateness? The poet says nothing about it. But the content of the closing linedoes after all include the statement: “the essence of all that is resides in the word. For thisreason, the following phrase holds good: language is the house of being. By this procedure,we would seem to have adduced from poetry the most handsome confirmation for a principleof thinking which we had stated at some time in the past – and in truth would have throwneverything into utter confusion. We would have reduced poetry to the servant’s role asdocumentary proof for our thinking, and taken thinking too lightly; in fact we would alreadyhave forgotten the whole point: to undergo an experience with language.

It takes no great hermeneutic sensitivity to see that Lafont is attributing to Heideggerpositions 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 theexercise.


existence on a linguistic term to name them, then it must be wrong. Hesummarizes as follows:

We listen to the poem that we read. Have we heard it? Hardly. We have merely –

and almost crudely – seized the last verse and what’s more have rewritten it into anunpoetic assertion: No thing is where the word is missing. We could even go furtherand 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 entityas such. Does this mean at the same time: there is only being where the suitableword speaks? From where does the word get its suitability? The poet says nothingabout that. But the content of the final verse nevertheless contains the assertion:the being of any particular thing that is resides in the word. Thus the proposition isvalid: language is the house of being. Proceeding in this way, we would have suppliedthe most beautiful confirmation for a proposition of thinking that we pronounced previously –and in truth we would have thrown everything into confusion. We would have reducedpoetry to a footnote for thinking and taken thinking too lightly, and also alreadyhave forgotten what really matters: namely to have an experience withlanguage. (GA 12: 155–6, emphasis in original)

This first interpretation is thus rejected on a variety of grounds. It takesthe concluding lines out of context. It treats the line as an authority to citeor refer to, rather than taking it up as an occasion to have an experiencewith language. And, devastatingly, it posits an absurd relationship betweenterms and entities – any entity at all, even God, would be dependent forits existence on there being a term in a human language to name it.

The error of the linguistic constitutionalist reading of Heidegger is thatit sees him as advancing a changed understanding of the relationshipbetween words and things, without also noting how the understanding ofthe very nature of words itself is altered by this changed understandingof the relationship between words and things. In fact, on Heidegger’sreading, the central theme of the poem is the question of the nature ofthe word, as it is illuminated by the poet’s experience with words. The poetgains both a deeper understanding of the relationship between words andthings, and the nature of words themselves. A better interpretation of thepoem will thus not focus myopically on the final line but will work its wayinto the experience described by the entire poem, attending to the changesthat the poem itself marks in the poet’s way of understanding words.

4.2. Post-Linguistic-Constitutionalist Interpretations

According to Heidegger’s interpretation, then, the poem describes a tran-sition from one way of understanding words and language to another. Thisis a transition, moreover, that we can all make provided we allow ourselvesto have an experience with language of the sort the poet describes.

At the start of the poem, words are understood simply as a means topresent (darstellen) an entity descriptively. When the poet encounters

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something wonderful or dreamlike, something that does not ordinarilybelong to his world, he takes the thing to the goddess of fate to learn fromher the words and names by which to describe the thing. The poet acts in“unclouded confidence” that he “need only bring the wonders whichenchanted him or the dreams which entranced him to the source oflanguage in order to have drawn out of it the words that fit everything towhich he had set his mind” (GA 12: 161). He understands his fate, in otherwords, as a constraint on the particular mode of talking about entities,not on what entities could be encountered, or ultimately on what couldbe said about them. As for the relationship between entities and things,

the poet subscribed to the opinion, and was confirmed in this opinion through thesuccess of his poems, that poetic things, wonders and dreams, would already standwell established in being, on their own and separately; art is only needed to findfor them too the word that describes and presents them. At first and for a long timeit appeared as if the words were grips that grasp what is already an entity andconsidered to be an entity, making it substantial, expressing it and in this wayhelping it to beauty. (GA 12: 161)

This view is clearly a variant of the language-as-a-bridge view, which seeswords as modes of access to independently existing entities. On this view,if words contribute anything to the being of the entity, they serve only asbeautifying embellishments that dance over things: through the poet’swords, the entity “henceforth shines and blossoms and in this way rulesthroughout the country as the beautiful” (GA 12: 212). The poet’s task isto find words that will make each entity graspable and substantial enoughthat others can be directed to it: “he does not want, however, to keep it tohimself, but rather wants to descriptively present it. For that purpose,names are required.” Making an entity graspable and substantial, on thisview, is not an operation that affects the being of the entity, but ratherone 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 isalready an entity to representation” (GA 12: 212). Finally, on this view,the words are themselves entities: “the names which the well contains areregarded as something sleeping, which merely needs to be woken inorder to find its application as a descriptive presentation of the thing.The names and words are like a fixed supply which is assigned to thethings” (GA 12: 214).

The poet’s view of the nature of words and their relationship to entitiesis shaken, however, when the poet seeks words for a “rich and delicatejewel.” The words for a descriptive presentation of this thing cannot befound, and, consequently, the jewel escapes from the poet’s hand – itcannot be contained within his world. Heidegger emphasizes that, contraryto the linguistic constitutionalist interpretation of the poem, “the jewelescapes. But at the same time it by no means disintegrates into nothingness.


It remains a treasure which, however, the poet may never hold within hiscountry” (GA 12: 214–5). These details of the poem must be attended to inunderstanding the significance of the conclusion “no thing may be” in thefinal line. Heidegger considers two possible ways of understanding whathas happened here (these are different but not exclusive possibilities,and part of the productive ambiguity of the poem comes from keepingthem both in play).

One way to take the “no thing may be” is to see it as an indicativestatement (German uses the subjunctive tense for indicatives in indirectdiscourse): “no thing is where the word is lacking.” But since the thingdoes not dissolve into absolute nothingness but escapes from the insecuregrasp of the poet, we must conclude that “being,” here, is the being of themetaphysical tradition: stable enduring presence. On this reading, then,the poem is teaching us that words bestow stable presence on entities. Butalong with this changed understanding of the relation between words andentities comes a changed understanding of the nature of the word. Theword 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 nowunderstood as the nexus of relations that allows an entity to exist at all.This nexus of relations in turn must be sought in the world’s “fate,” as it isthe 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, butalso as including the inherited referential network of our world, and thusthe things with their constitutive possibilities that can manifest themselvesin that world. As Heidegger explains, this fate needs to be understood notas a necessitating but as an enabling configuration:

Of the use of the word “fate” in talk of the fate of being, the following should benoted: We usually understand by “fate” (Geschick) that which is determined andimposed 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 andinstruct; in German to beschicken a house or a room means: to maintain it in the rightorganization, 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. Withouta stable nexus, then, the entity could not attain being, that is, stablepresence 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 athing. Rather, he is referring to a situation where the constitutive relationsare lacking for a thing to show itself as the thing it is. “The word is lacking,”Heidegger explains, means “it is not at our disposal [verfügbar].” Keepingin mind here that the word is a stabilized nexus of relationships, this could

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occur in different ways. It could be that the other entities, events, activities,and so on to which the thing is essentially related are lacking. Or it couldmean that we do not have the skills or dispositions for picking up the aptor fitting 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 tothe subtleties of Heidegger’s discussion of his most developed example(especially since a sloppy reading of this example is used to buttress thelinguistic constitutionalist interpretation of Heidegger – see footnote 18above). Heidegger writes:

Take the Sputnik. This thing, if such it is, is surely independent of this name whichwas subsequently attached to it. But perhaps it is ordered differently with that typeof things – with rockets, atom bombs, reactors and the such – than it is with thatwhich the poet names in the first stanza of the first triad:

Wonder from far off or a dreamI brought to my country’s border

Still, innumerable people consider this “thing” Sputnik to be a wonder also, this“thing,” which races wildly around in a worldless “world”-space; and for many it wasand is still a dream, wonder and dream of modern technology, who would notbe ready in the least to accept the thought that the word provides the thing itsbeing. Not words but rather actions count in the calculation of the planetary numbercrunching. What use are poets . . . ? And yet!Let’s for once refrain from hurried thinking. Is not even this “thing” what it is

and how it is in the name of its name? Indeed it is. If that hurry in the sense of thegreatest possible technological increase of speed, in whose ambit only the modernmachines and equipment can be what they are – if that hurry had not challengedhuman beings and arranged them at its command, if the word of this arranging hadnot spoken, then there also would be no Sputnik. No thing is where the word ismissing. Therefore it remains a mysterious matter: the word of language and itsrelation to the thing, to any thing that is – that it is and how it is. (GA 12: 154–5)

We must ask, then, how is Heidegger suggesting that we understand “word”here? It is clearly not understood as a term of a natural language. Hedoes not claim that Sputnik depends for its existence on the word“Sputnik”, or any other noun in German, English, or Russian that wemight use to refer to the spaceship. Indeed, as Heidegger acknowledgeselsewhere, the existence of synonymous terms and expressions in a lan-guage, as well as across languages, is itself evidence that the being of anentity is independent of and prior to the terms we use to talk about it. Forhow else could we recognize the terms as synonyms?

But precisely that which characterizes the table as a table – that which it is andaccording to its what-being distinguishes it from the window – precisely this isindependent in a certain manner from the words and their language-specific andvocal 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]first confers a goal and support to the agreement in linguistic usage. Accordingly theessence must already be posited in advance, in order to be expressible as the samein the same word. (GA 45: 80)

We thus need to reflect on the fact that the word Heidegger identifies asresponsible for Sputnik’s being is not “Sputnik” but die Eile, hurry. In termsof 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 inorder that is responsible for the being not just of Sputnik, but all techno-logical machines and equipment. For clearly the Russian space programdoes 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 theGerman scientists working in the Russian space program were orderingtheir workers to hurry up). Indeed, the word is not spoken by humanbeing, but rather to human beings. This passage, if we take Heideggerseriously and do not hurry past it dismissively, calls on us to reflect on whatit means for a word to speak, to command us, to order us and things – thisis not the same as a person speaking a word. But in any event, it is clearthat on this reading, the being of a thing does not depend on the term weuse 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 – toincreased efficiency – that organizes and sets in order all the relationshipswithin the technological world. This is the “name of names,” that is, theorganizing style of all the particular nodes of relationship that determineindividual 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 efficiency, the constitutive relations betweenthings will not settle into the kind of patterns typical of technologicaldevices. The existence of the term “Sputnik” is not decisive here; what isdecisive is a mode of relating things that establishes certain nodes ofrelations – the hurried and harried style of technological life.

Sticking with the interpretation of the closing line as an indicativestatement, there is yet another way to take the “no thing may be,” onethat takes being in a postmetaphysical sense to mean “contributing to thedisclosure of the world.” This interpretation grants that even somethingabsent 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 itmanifests itself in its refusal – as silence, as the ‘in between,’ as there. Nowfor the first time essential nearness” (GA 85: 72, emphasis in original).“Where the word is lacking, no thing is” now means the lack of a word iswhat allows the world-disclosive nothings to be, to play their role as the

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silence and opening that allows entities to stand out into prominence.As we indicated above, such nothings “are” by giving a world whilewithdrawing into the background. Language in Heidegger’s originarysense as the structure of relations is a paradigm case of withdrawing-giving. The structure of relations, with its coherent style, withdraws infavor 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 relationalstructure.

The essence of a thing, being, befits neither the “is” nor the “word,” and it absolutelydoes not befit the relationship between the “is” and the word, to which it is given ineach case to bestow an “is.” All the same, neither the “is” nor the word and its sayingcan be exiled into the void of sheer nothingness. What does the poetic experiencewith the word show, if thinking thinks about it? It points at something worthy ofthought . . . . It shows something which is given, and all the same “is” not. To thatwhich is given, the word also belongs, perhaps not merely also, but rather above allelse and even in such a way that in the word, in its essence that which gives concealsitself. Of the word then we may, thinking appropriately, never say: it is, but rather – itgives – and not in the sense that “it” gives words, but rather that the word itselfgives. The word. That which is giving. What then does it give? According to thepoetic 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 givingitself, but never the given. (GA 12: 182)

On this interpretation, we simultaneously rethink the nature of wordsand the dependence of words on things. Words are not entities, they are“nothings.” But they are not “sheer nothingness.” They lack metaphysicalbeing, stable presence, it is true. But they nevertheless “are” in the sense ofgiving 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 themeasure. But his way of writing poetry has learned renunciation and neverthelessdid not lose anything through the renunciation. Meanwhile, the jewel escapes himnonetheless. Certainly. But it escapes in the way that the word is denied. The denial isa withholding. In it appears precisely what is astounding about the power that theword owns. The jewel in no way dissolves into a nothing that is good for nothing.The word does not deflate into the flat inability to say. The poet does not reject theword. The jewel, however, withdraws into hiding in that which is mysteriouslyastonishing, which is to be marveled at. (GA 12: 183)

The poem succeeds through language, after all, at directing us towardan experience that cannot be descriptively presented. It does this byorienting and directing us toward the constitutive relations that allowentities to be. Thus, with a changed understanding of the relationshipbetween his words and things, and the deeper understanding of what


words are, the poet also arrives at a different sense of his task. No longerdoes poetry only represent and beautify and make shine what alreadyexists. It can also attune us to that which does not belong in presence inour world. The poet thus does not give up on the word. But he uses hiswords differently. They illuminate the region of the word’s absence andthus attune us and guide us to the phenomenon, rather than descriptivelypresenting it.

On the prior reading of “may be,” then, the lesson of the poem is thatwords (whatever they are) are required for the stable presence of entitiesin a world. On the current reading, the lesson is that the nonpresence ofwords (constitutive relational nodes) is required for them to “be,” that is,give entities. Words are the relations that maintain entities in being, butthey are not themselves entities.

This latter insight directs us to yet another way to take the “no thing maybe” – as a kind of impersonal imperative, rather than an indicative claim.The last line gives the content of the renunciation the poet learns in thepenultimate line. The poet henceforth will “not permit any thing to bewhere the word is lacking” (GA 12: 157). That is, he gives up the view of therelationship between words and things that he held before, and renouncesthe expectation of always being able to find a descriptive presentation ofthings. In so doing, he stops forcing entities into a world where they do notbelong. In renunciation, he learns that a world has a normative style, withinwhich 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 homefor some possibilities while excluding others: “a world only becomes a worldin the word, that means.” Heidegger explains: “a world is at home in thelanguage.” Language is the house of being means language is “the house ofthe world” (GA 16: 547). The world has a house in language becauseparticular styles of being belong to particular referential structures. Thepoet’s renunciation amounts to letting entities be what they are, andreleasing them when the conditions do not exist for them to be.

But there is more to the poet’s renunciation than this. He also stopsexpecting everything that plays a disclosive role in the world to have exis-tence on the order of entities. In renunciation, he allows the nothings tobe. In particular, Heidegger argues, the poem teaches us that the word maybe 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 ashaving a clear and definite content:

Words at first easily appear as terms. For their part, terms first appear as spoken ina word sound. This in turn is at first a noise. It is sensorily perceived. The sensoryis taken as what is immediately given. The word’s meaning is associated with thesound. This component of the word is sensorily perceivable. What is non-sensoryin the terms is their sense, their meaning. One speaks therefore of sense-givingacts that endow the word sounds with a sense. The terms are then either filled

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

The ordinary conception of language, the one the poet begins with, thinksof words as terms with an associated sense, a sense that is fixed and that hasa more or less determinate content. The terms, “sense-containers,” can bearrayed scientifically in dictionaries, which set forth their two constituents:the “sound form” and “sense content” (ibid.). In the end, the poet takes toheart the thought that our words are wellsprings: “words are not terms,and they are thus not like buckets and barrels from which we draw someoccurrent content. Words are wellsprings, which ‘telling’” – the poetic andthoughtful use of language (see GA 8: 86)– “excavates, and which need tobe found and dug up again and again, which are easily filled back in again,but also from time to time gush up unexpectedly. Without the constantlyrenewed journey to the wellspring, the buckets and barrels remain empty,or their contents remain stale” (GA 8: 88). Words, constitutive nodes ofrelations, are never completely within our grasp. We cannot capture theirsense with a name or designating term, but at best, we highlight someportion of the rich web of relations they draw together. Thought andpoetry, the essential uses of language (see GA 8: 86), do not pretend topossess exhaustively the meaning of the words. They uncover the meaningsof the world through a tireless effort of excavation. Part of the renunciationthe poet learns, then, is giving up the pretension to mastery or control ofwords – because words are not the kind of thing that lie completely withinour control.

The encounter with George’s poem is meant to illustrate for us what it islike to treat language as a wellspring. As we give the words the space theyneed to oscillate, the poem guides us to an underlying structure of meaningsthat illuminates our relationship to the words we speak. And it encouragesus to reflect on the way that our language provides a home for certainentities, experiences, ranges of human possibilities, and so on.

CONCLUSION

We can now bring to a close the question with which we began. Whatdoes the slogan mean – how is language the house of being? In his 1959“Dialogue on Language,” one of the best and most detailed accounts ofthe slogan, Heidegger noted, “for a long time, I have not liked to use theword ‘language’ when I reflect on its essence” (GA 12: 136).

The exchange that follows in the dialogue is crucial for understandingthe slogan. Heidegger’s interlocutor asks, “but can you find 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 beingdistorted 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: lettingappear 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 soon that we normally think of when we talk about language. Instead,“language” in the slogan means “saying,” which Heidegger defines interms of “a showing.” But this is not just any old showing. The languageor saying he is interested in is that showing that lets things appear and seemto be something. It does this by establishing the ways, the primary relationsby which a thing is understood as the thing it is. Language is thus tied towhat Heidegger calls “essencing,” the way that essences are established asthat on the basis of which entities can be what they are. The slogan is thusmeant to direct our reflection to the way that some relations are givenpriority in determining the essence of a thing within a particular world.Saying enables particular human languages by giving them the salientsignifications to which terms can (but need not) accrue. So saying is the“house of being” because saying determines the way that things are able toshow up and be expressed in our ordinary language. But this is consistentwith holding, as Heidegger does, that some things cannot be appropriatelysaid in a language because the way they are permitted to show up woulddistort them or would not allow them to come into their own. Thus certainactivities, self-understandings, projects, hopes, and so on are “at home” insome languages and not at home in others.

“Language is the house of being” means, then, that a world is kept andpreserved by a consolidation of the relationships that determine a thing asthe thing it is. It is this settling, keeping, preserving of relations that lets usinhabit, come to be at home in, a world: “the domain of language isdomain where all relationships of things and essence play with eachother and mirror each other” (GA 79: 168). It is not the terms andassociated concepts of ordinary language that house being. It is languageunderstood as the fitted structure of relations: “language is not a collectionof terms for the designation of individual familiar things, but ratherthe original ringing out of the truth of a world” (GA 6.1: 325). Thus, theslogan points to a relational ontology, in which the constitution of theworld is determined by the (temporary) stabilization of salient nodes ofconstitutive relationships. And this, in turn, highlights the idea that housingbeing 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 ordistorted 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 positionin box C of Chart 6.2). This is because originary language is something that

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cannot be grasped by ordinary linguistic categories and concepts. Andwords are not something that articulate the world conceptually, even ifthey 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 relationshipbetween ordinary language and originary language – a task to be deferred.


7

The Revealed Word and World Disclosure

Heidegger and Pascal on the Phenomenologyof 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 waythat everything about them which is up for discussion must be treated byexhibiting them directly and demonstrating them directly” (GA 2: H. 35).That means that phenomenology always proceeds from out of a directexperience of the objects in question, and it attempts to address and resolveproblems in philosophy by producing a direct apprehension of the relevantphenomena.

A phenomenology will be in order, then, whenever a problem is affectedby the fact that the object under discussion is something that “proximallyand for the most part does not show itself” (GA 2: H. 35), or when itsappearance is distorted by theories or concepts inappropriate to the objectin question.

It is for this reason that, when it came to religious faith, Heidegger accordsto phenomenology a “corrective” role, meaning that it clarifies and correctsthe content of theological concepts. This is necessary to the extent that theseconcepts are surreptitiously drawn from a “pre-Christian” context, anddrawn in such a way as to obscure the true essence of Christian faith. Faithitself does not need philosophy – philosophical argumentation cannot estab-lish faith, nor even lend it support. At most, philosophy can clear awaytheoretical distortions that create obstacles to the practice of religious faith.

Earlier versions of this paper were presented at “Questioning Religion,” The British Society forPhenomenology Summer Conference, the University of Greenwich, July 13, 2003, and at theUniversity of Nevada, Reno, on September 24, 2004. I would like to thank all those present onthose occasions for their helpful comments and responses to this paper. My thinking on thesematters has benefitted immensely from Piotr Hoffmann’s extensive, detailed, and pointeddisagreements with my interpretation of Pascal. Piotr will undoubtedly be disappointed thatI persist in the mainlines of my noncognitivist reading of faith in Pascal. But I am neverthelessgrateful and indebted to him for forcing me to enrich and expand my appreciation of thecomplexity of these issues in Pascal’s thought.

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In this paper, I want to focus on a distortion of faith that is produced by aparticular view of language. The relationship to language, to the revealedword, is, of course, a central and essential element to many faiths, includingthe Christian faith. As all phenomenology ought to grow out of experience,however, we ought first to try to bring an experience of religious faith intoview. Toward this end, let us start with Pascal’s description of the Christianlife:

Not only is it through Jesus Christ alone that we knowGod, but it is only through JesusChrist 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, norourselves really are. In the same way without the Scriptures, which have Jesus Christ astheir sole object, we know nothing and see only darkness and confusion in the natureof God and in nature itself.1

In what follows, I will focus on two parts of this description of the Christianlife. First, that to be a Christian – to have faith in Christ – is to experience theworld (including nature and our selves) as revealed in and through JesusChrist. Faith, on this view, is not primarily an epistemic state. Second, thatthis experience of the world depends on having a certain relationship to thescriptures – in particular, one in which they teach one how to see.

Heidegger, incidentally, shares both elements of Pascal’s view:

the essence of faith can formally be sketched as a way of existence of human Daseinthat, according to its own testimony . . . arises not from Dasein or spontaneouslythrough Dasein, but rather from that which is revealed in and with this way ofexistence, from what is believed. For the “Christian” faith, that being which isprimarily revealed to faith, and only to it, and which, as revelation, first gives rise tofaith, is Christ, the crucifiedGod . . . . The crucifixion, however, and all that belongs toit is a historical event, and indeed this event gives testimony to itself as such in itsspecifically historical character only for faith in the scriptures. One “knows” about thisfact only in believing. (GA 9: 52/Pathmarks, p. 44)

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

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

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a way of living in the world that arises from the world being disclosed throughpeople (having the skills and dispositions for) playing baseball. But thecircularity does present a problem – namely, how to get into the circle inthe first place. The answer, for both Heidegger and Pascal, is found in therole played by the revealed word – the scriptures – in introducing people intothe life of faith.2

I will argue that to account for this understanding of the relation betweenfaith and the scriptures, we need a different view of the function of languagethan 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 revealedword to this model, then it, too, is taken to function as a kind of speech act.Faith, as a consequence, finds its fulfillment in the satisfaction of the speechact – for example, verification of assertions about the incarnation of God inChrist, or his crucifixion and resurrection. But with such claims, the verifi-cation is perpetually deferred. In addition, on the communicative model,we are not entitled to assert or assent to a proposition unless we undertakethe “discursive commitments” entailed by that proposition – that we, forexample, are prepared to offer proof of or justification for the proposition inquestion, or that we at a minimum understand and can explain what otherpropositions we are committed to in virtue of accepting the one in question.But with their acceptance of claims about, for example, the creation or theresurrection, the faithful find it impossible to fulfil such rational obligations.This makes them look and sometime even feel as if their faith requires themto abandon a commitment to rationality.

But all this arises, I shall argue, from the mistaken belief that religiousassertions are in the game of communicating propositions. There is adifferent view of language, only implicit in Pascal’s thought but developedin the later Heidegger, that is compatible with Pascal’s phenomenology ofChristian life – a view of language, in other words, free of the backgroundassumptions about language that subtly distort the way faith in the revealedword is typically understood today. The aim here is to illuminate an under-standing of language that provides the background against which religiousfaith 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 tofunction by orienting us to the world in such a way that it can disclose itselfto us anew. If faith succeeds in disclosing a world, and empowering us to livein the world, then the fulfillment of faith is not deferred but can beconfirmed through our experience of inhabiting a world. This is so, evenif we are not in a position to verify any of the central assertions made in therevealed word.

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

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Before turning to the role of language in religious faith, however, I wouldlike to develop in more detail how faith can be understood in terms of worlddisclosure. As Pascal’s phenomenology of religious faith is much betterdeveloped than Heidegger’s, I will focus on Pascal’s description of theChristian life.

1. FAITH AS A MODE OF EXISTENCE

“Faith” is often taken as naming an epistemic state. In particular, it is heardas denoting a degree of confidence in the truth of a proposition – typically,one in which the subjective probability assigned to the truth of the sentenceis greater than one half but less than one. One has faith that, for example,God exists when one has confidence that the proposition “God exists” ismore likely true than not true.

For thinkers like Pascal and Kierkegaard, however, such a degreeof confidence is a derivative of faith understood in existential terms –

confidence in the truth of certain propositions grows out of the way thatfaith in Christ produces a changed experience of the world. “The Christianthesis,” Kierkegaard wrote, “goes not: intelligere ut credam, nor credere utintelligam. No it goes: Act according to the commands and orders ofChrist; do the Father’s will – and you will become a believing-one.”3

Pascal, in a similar way, noted that “it is clear that those with a keen faithin their hearts can see straightaway that everything which exists is the workof the God they worship.”On the other hand, “those in whom this light [offaith] has been extinguished . . . , scrutinising with all their intelligenceeverything they see in nature which can lead them to this knowledge . . .find only obscurity and darkness” (P §644). Thus faith is to be understood,in the first instance, as the state of those who are able to act and live in aChristian 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 donot manifest themselves in the ordinary course of experience. My belief thatmy son will clean his room is not a superstition because, while the degree ofprobability that he will clean his room might be objectively low, childrencleaning their rooms are events that do occur in the normal course of affairsin the world (or, at least, that’s what other parents tell me). By contrast, ifI hold the belief that there is a God in spite of the fact that there is no placefor God in my experience of the world, then the belief is a superstition. It isnot just that there is a low probability that God does exist, it is rather that,

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


given my experience of the world, it is utterly incomprehensible how therecould be a God.

Of course, we do not typically use the word “faith” to denote a meremental state of belief. Faith also involves actually relying on or having con-fidence in the object of one’s faith. We would not ordinarily say of someonethat she has faith in something if she is incapable of acting in reliance on thatthing. 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 simplybeing disposed to act in a certain way. It also includes being primed to feel orexperience things in a certain way. If we say that someone has a “sunnydisposition,” we are saying that she responds to all situations cheerfully, andgenerally focuses on the bright side of even bad events. So what kind ofdisposition is Christian faith? It involves both a kind of feeling or readiness toexperience things in such and such a way, and a kind of practical orientationor readiness to act in a certain way. Pascal gets at this in a backhanded way inthe 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 devoutlife, 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 isunable to live a Christian life. This is true, even if that person had a rationallygrounded 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 stanceone takes on life, the practices one engages in, the ways one feels aboutthings. True faith is found in one’s disposition (feelings of the heart) and theactions that arise from those dispositions (living a devout life). True disbe-lief, by the same token, is found in a corrupt and licentious life (takingpleasure 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, weacquire skillful dispositions so attuned to that domain that we can perceivethings of which we were oblivious before. As I practice baking bread, forexample, I gradually become sensitized to notice things like texture andelasticity in the dough, fine variations in color as the bread browns in theoven, and so on. The skills allow me to experience the world in a way thatI could not without them. For Pascal, religious faith works the same way. Heexplains:

4 Pensées, §690: “Such knowledge,” Pascal argues, “is useless and sterile. Even if someone couldbe 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 mademuch progress towards his salvation.”

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You want to find faith and you do not know the way? You want to cure yourself ofunbelief and you ask for the remedies? Learn from those who have been bound likeyou, and who now wager all they have. They are people who know the road you wantto follow and have been cured of the affliction of which you want to be cured. Followthe 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 toyour animal reactions. (P §680)

Acquiring the skills of religious living, and thus having the dispositions to feeland act appropriately in the world that appears when one has those skills, isthen an enabling condition of having faith. Notice that this descriptionreplicates the circularity in Heidegger’s and Pascal’s earlier descriptions offaith – faith is “a way of existence that arises from the world revealed by thisway of existence.” At the same time, this does not mean that faith is reducibleto these skills. Something further might well be needed in addition to havingthese 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 groundedin practices rather than cognitive assent changes the kind of proof we candemand of faith.

Faith will then not be amenable to proof in the way one verifies anepistemic state or proposition (i.e., demonstrating that it is true). But it willhave the kind of confirmation or success conditions that all other skills have.Baking skills are confirmed or successful when they allowme to cope with thekitchen. Religious faith will be confirmed or successful when it gives me thepractices and dispositions I need to cope with the world as a whole. As FatherZosima notes in Dostoevsky’s classic depiction of existential Christianity,“one cannot prove anything here, but it is possible to be convinced.” Hegoes on to explain that one is convinced “by the experience of active love . . . .The more you succeed in loving, the more you’ll be convinced of theexistence of God and the immortality of your soul. And if you reach completeselflessness in the love of your neighbour, then undoubtedly you will believe,and no doubt will even be able to enter your soul.”5 The confirmation andconviction come, in other words, through one’s success in living in the worldin 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 justthat faith allows one successfully to live in the world but that, without it, onecannot cope successfully with the world. Pascal and other existentialChristians do this by arguing that all men are in despair (whether they realizethis or not), and that it is only the Christian who, through the saving grace ofChrist, 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 ofwretchedness and greatness. Our greatness is found in the fact that we longfor happiness, the good, truth, justice, love, glory, and eternity, and that wehave an understanding that there is a good, truth, and eternity (even if wecannot quite grasp intellectually what the good, the true, the eternal, etc., is).Our wretchedness is seen in the fact that, rather than pursuing what canbring us happiness (good, truth, justice, love, glory, eternity, etc.), ourconcupiscence drives us to seek transitory pleasures. And our reason showsus that we are not happy, that we do not know the good, truth, or justice; thatwe are not worthy of love or glory; and that, in the face of death, our eternityis in doubt. The inability to reconcile this dual nature, to find anything inthis world that could satisfy our longing for greatness, leads to a despair thatmany feel, and which others attest to by their efforts to find diversion invarious pursuits and pleasures. It is only faith in Christ, Pascal believes, thatcan ultimately resolve the contradiction of our essential natures.6

But before addressing that issue inmore detail, there is another feature ofour initial characterization of Christianity that we need to address. We said atthe outset that, for both Pascal and Heidegger, Christian faith is (1) a world-disclosive mode of existence that (2) arises from a particular relationship tothe scriptures. We have discussed this first feature of Christianity but not thesecond. In fact, the way we have discussed the first problematizes the second,since, as we have seen, the mode of existence arises not from the acceptanceof religious-dogmatic propositions but from the development of religiouspractices. Moreover, for Pascal, a cognizance of, and assent to, the proposi-tions contained in the scriptures is not enough for religious faith. Forexample, merely assenting to scriptural claims regarding the resurrection,when done so against the background of an experience of the world in causalterms, remains mere superstition – a belief that God will intervene as a causein the causal order of a universe that has no place for God. But the revealedclaims one finds in the scriptures seem to be propositions that are addressedto the understanding. How then could the scriptures, which seem to beprimarily concerned to communicate certain propositions to the believers,be essential to Christian faith?

Pascal gives us only a few clues to his thinking on thematter. To this point,I have perhaps been overemphasizing the noncognitivist grounds of Pascal’sexperience of the revealed word. But having done so, I think we can nowconsider the proper and limited place of reason in Pascal’s account.Commenting on Acts 17:11, for example (“These were more noble thanthose in Thessalonica, in that they received the word with all readiness ofmind, and searched the scriptures daily, whether those things were so”),Pascal notes that “the way of God, who disposes all things gently, is to implant

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

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religion into our mind through reason and into our heart through grace”(P §203). Just preceding this passage, Pascal observed:

We must know where to doubt, where to affirm and where to submit when necessary.Whoever does not do this does not understand the force of reason. There are somewho fall short of these three principles, either by affirming that everything can bedemonstrated, lacking all knowledge of the demonstration; or doubting everything,lacking the knowledge of where to submit, or by submitting to everything, lacking theknowledge of where to discriminate. (P §201)

In the conduct of our lives, in other words, there are appropriate places todoubt and to seek a rational justification. But there are also times where thisis inappropriate. And to doubt, or to insist on rational demonstration whereone ought simply to submit, is to destroy the disposing power of faith: “if wesubmit everything to reason, our religion will contain nothing mysterious”(P §204). To a cognitivist ear, that does not sound like such a loss. But forPascal, the mysteries of religion, for all their rational incomprehensibility,lend to life an order and coherence. He illustrates this with the example ofthe mystery of the doctrine of original sin. The idea that we are guilty andcondemned for the sin of another “seems not only impossible to us, but alsoquite unjust. For what is more contrary to the laws of our wretched justicethan eternally to damn a child with no will of its own for a sin in which thechild has so small a part to play that it was committed six thousand yearsbefore the child came into existence?” (P §164). If the doctrine is irration-alizable and incomprehensible, however, it also makes sense of a centralfeature of human existence – our simultaneous depravity and transcendentdignity. And so, Pascal concludes, “without this most incomprehensible of allmysteries we are incomprehensible to ourselves. Within this gnarled chasmlie the twists and turns of our condition. So, humanity is more inconceivablewithout this mystery than this mystery is conceivable to humanity” (ibid.).Note that Pascal does not claim even a transcendental-style proof or verifica-tion of the mystery. It remains inconceivable, incomprehensible. Indeed, totry to prove it would probably distort our understanding of God’s nature andjustice or the nature of culpability. Nothing would distort our picture ofjustice more, for instance, than to make the principles of justice cohere withthe idea that someone is culpable for the wrongdoing of another. Themystery works best, then, precisely by being kept as a mystery and acceptedas 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. Ifwe return, then, to the commentary on Acts, we see that the revealed wordhas a power to work simultaneously on our minds and our hearts. There is aplace in Pascal’s picture for cognition. But it is a limited place, and thecognitive content of the word works alongside a quite different and inde-pendent force that the word has on our hearts. The principle by which thisforce 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 assertionssomehow act on the heart – the dispositions – rather than or in addition tothe mind. Considering “the objection that Scripture has no order,” Pascalresponds by noting, “The heart has its order, the mind has its own, which isbased on principles and demonstration. The heart has another one. We donot prove that we ought to be loved by setting forth the causes of love; thatwould be absurd” (P §329). The idea here is that scriptural assertions do notfunction as arguments, and call for a different response on our part thanordinary assertions. It is in this altered response that the revealed word willshape our dispositions rather than our understanding. But how they aremeant to do this is something that Pascal never really explains. To makesense of these clues about the role of scriptures in the Christian life, we willneed to be able to see assertions as engaged in something other than thecommunication of propositions.

2. LANGUAGE AND THE REVEALED WORD

On the communicative view of language, the essence of language is tocommunicate a propositional content. Different kinds of speech acts dodifferent 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 religiousbelief – for example, A. J. Ayer’s famous argument against the meaning-fulness of religious claims, given the inability of the faithful to specify thepropositional content of those claims in such a way that they would beverifiable.7 Even if we reject Ayer’s verificationism, thinking of language onthe communicative model imposes on all who would assent to certainassertions an obligation to be ready and willing to cash out the propositionalcontent of those assertions – on pain of being shown to be speaking non-sense. It is quite possible, however, that the function of certain religiousclaims is actually distorted if they are cashed out in this manner. Rather thansay more about this thought directly, however, I want to focus on a relatedconsequence of the communicative view of language, namely, the pragmaticimplications. These implications have been most recently and clearly articu-lated by Robert Brandom. According to Brandom, to perform a speech act isto undertake certain practical commitments. “At the core of discursivepractice is the game of giving and asking for reasons.”8 To assent to anassertion, 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, especiallychapter 6.

8 Brandom, Robert,Making It Explicit. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994, p. 159.

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to answer challenges to the truth of the assertion, and to make furtherassertions 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 thistruism could be elevated into a falsism by insisting that an unwillingness orinability to play the game in certain instances deprives the claim of anymeaning.

To the degree that being a Christian is, in fact, determined throughassenting to certain assertions contained in the scriptures, the idea of dis-cursive commitments subtly informs most interpretations of what it is to be aChristian. The Bible, without question, contains a number of assertions towhich a believer is expected to assent: “In the beginning, God created theheaven and the earth” (Gen. 1: 1), or Christ “was buried, and he arose againthe third day” (1 Cor. 15: 4). A scriptural assertion has done its job, onemight say, if we understand the proposition to which God (or the prophets)is committed inmaking the assertion, and we believe it, meaning we accept itas true. This is because the most important thing about assertions andbeliefs – the conditions under which they succeed – is being true. Anassertion or belief is true, of course, if it agrees with the way things reallyare. On the communicative account, therefore, scriptural assertions arefulfilled when they are true, and our relationship to the scriptural assertionsis fulfilled when we accept that they are true. In such acceptance, we commitourselves to answering for the truthfulness of the assertion.

The problem for the Christian is that, for so many of the assertions towhich a believer assents, it simply lies beyond our ability to justify or provethem. Scriptural assertions are empirically challenging because they oftenare either assertions about metaphysical facts (facts that lie beyond the kenof any human experience), or historical facts that might as well be meta-physical, because they are incapable of being verified in any of the ways weordinarily verify historical facts. To make it worse, many of the assertionsappear on the face of it to be incredible or at least empirically superfluous.Given the normal course of worldly events, it is improbable, to say the least,that Christ arose on the third day from the tomb. Given the state of con-temporary physics, it seems unnecessary to suppose that God created theheavens and the earth.

As a result, two alternatives arise for someone who wants to take scripturalassertions seriously (the other option, of course, is to not take them seri-ously). We either accept their irrelevance to the ordinary course of worldlyexperience, in which case we lapse into what Pascal called superstition. Or,we reinterpret them, understanding them no longer as claims about anunseen world, but instead reduce them to rather mundane truths aboutworldly experience.

Let me start first with the latter. Having been put off by the improbabilityand superfluity of scriptural accounts of the world, the strategy here is to


treat scriptural assertions as metaphors or allegories for some mundanereality. This view, too, is beholden to the idea that in assenting to the truthof a proposition, we commit ourselves to playing the game of giving andasking for reasons. Indeed, the reason for departing from a literal interpre-tation is precisely that one wants (charitably, of course) to understand thespeaker as committing herself to propositions that accord with the best stateof our current understanding of the world. But this amounts to giving up onthe religious belief as such, and, in fact, renders the Bible inferior to othertexts that do not need to resort to allegory to communicate their mundanetruths. Kant is a prime example of this approach: “we should not interpretthe text literally,” he notes, “unless we are willing to charge it with error.”Since we do not want to do thatwith the sacred text, it follows that we ought toread it metaphorically whenever necessary to preserve its truth: “Reason,” hesimply asserts, is “entitled to interpret the text in a way it finds consistent withits own principles.”9 Since Kant, history has given us a steady stream of otherswho aim tomake Christianity intellectually respectable by “demythologizing”the sacred text.

The first approach, by contrast, affirms, in the face of all contradictoryevidence, that scriptural assertions aremeant to be literally true of an unseenreality – even when the assertions conflict with what we can ascertainthrough direct experience. The problem with the literal approach is that,so long as we think that the assent to an assertion commits us to offeringproof about the state of an unseen reality, then the fulfillment of ourresponsibility as believers and the satisfaction of our faith in the scripturesis continually deferred. To the unbeliever and the believer alike, this lookslike irrationality on the part of the believer – like she is abandoning acommitment to reason because she is forced to forfeit the game of givingand asking of reasons.10 But this is to reduce faith to superstition, for it is tobelieve in something that has no place in our ordinary experience of theworld.

By contrast, the view of faith that we have been articulating shows us howour assent to propositions is supported by, although not verified by or

9 Immanuel Kant, “TheConflict of the Faculties,” inReligion and Rational Theology (A.W.Wood&G. di Giovanni, Trans.). Cambridge, England: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1996, pp. 233–327.

10 I think the literalist attitude has another quite serious side effect. The assumption about thediscursive commitments of belief tends to promote a fundamentally pessimistic stance tothe world, deferring satisfaction of our beliefs and responsibilities until “the kingdom come.”The pessimist discharges his or her rational obligations by treating the world as an illusion,and as unworthy of our commitments. Faith rests on an ultimate truth that cannot possiblymanifest itself in this fallen world. To the extent that we can free ourselves completely fromour passionate attachment to this world, Christian pessimism is a viable option. But if, asPascal holds, our passionate attachment to the world is an essential part of being human, aradical pessimism can only lead to despair. Formore on the Pascalian response to despair, seesection 3 of this chapter.

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justified by, our living in the world disclosed by faith. We are now in aposition to say how this view of faith is in tension with any position thatwould reduce meaningful language to only those assertions for which we areable and willing to undertake such discursive commitments. First, on thisview of faith, we cannot in fact offer justification for a belief other thanobserving that holding the belief supports and arises from a particularexistential stance in the world. Second, this kind of “justification” is onlyavailable to those who already accept the belief. It cannot meaningfully beoffered to someone who is not living in the world revealed by faith. As Pascalnoted,

to say to them that they only have to look at the least of the things surrounding themand they will see God revealed there, and then to give them as a complete proof of thisgreat and important matter the course of the moon and the planets, and to claim tohave achieved a proof with such an argument, is to give them cause to believe that theproofs of our religion are indeed weak. I see by reason and experience that nothing ismore likely to arouse their contempt. (P §644)

All this suggests that being a Christian amounts to having a different sortof relationship to the sacred word than that suggested by the account oflanguage in terms of the communication of propositions, the assent to whichgenerates discursive commitments. Our accepting scriptural assertions asliterally true may well be a necessary, if not sufficient, condition for ourbeing – existing as – a Christian. Such assertions will only finally fulfil theirfunction if they effect a change in the way we experience the world. Thismeans that assenting to the truth of such assertions commits us not tothe game of giving and asking for reasons but to acting and responding tothe world as it appears in the light of those assertions. In fact, as Pascal’scomments about love suggest, we have fundamentally misunderstood theassertion if we see it as committing us to offering proof.

This might seem like a paradoxical view to attribute to Pascal who, afterall, is most famous for supposedly offering a proof of the rationality of faith inGod in the form of his “Wager.” To me, the almost exclusive attention thispassage has received to the neglect of the rest of the Pensées, together with theway it is widely reproduced and anthologized completely divorced from itscontext, speaks to the prevalence of cognitivist prejudices in contemporaryphilosophy. Pascal included the wager in his “discourse concerning themachine” – the machine being the metaphor for our automatic, unthinkingresponses to the world. Thus the purpose of this discourse, Pascal explained,was to encourage us to seek God “by removing the obstacles, which isthe argument of the machine, of preparing the machine by reason to seek”(P §45, trans. modified). The use of reason, in other words, is to redirect ourdispositions and unthinking responses, thus opening us up to the possibilityof seeking God. But the pursuit of God is not itself conducted by reason. Thewager 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 standsto gain infinity, 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 reasonsjustifying or verifying religious belief, but rather that any obstacles to beliefarise not from reason but from the passions, from our dispositionalresponses to the world. He concludes: “so concentrate not on convincingyourself by increasing the number of proofs of God but on diminishing yourpassions” (P §680). Reason can assist in this by convincing us to engage in thepractices that will change our dispositions. But it is not itself directly capableof establishing religious faith.

Along the same lines, Pascal argues elsewhere: “There are three ways tobelieve: reason, custom, inspiration. The Christian religion, which alone hasreason, does not admit for its true children those who believe withoutinspiration. It is not that it excludes reason and custom, on the contrary;but we must open our minds to the proofs, confirm ourselves in it throughcustom, yet offer ourselves through humiliations to inspirations, whichalone can produce the true and salutary effect” (P §655). Pascal’s faithdoes not abandon reason, but it understands the limits of reason in thereligious life.

The famous wager itself, then, is an instance of a linguistic expressionthat includes assertions and rational arguments, but which finds its fulfill-ment not in being verified as true but in orienting us to the things andpeople and events in the world around us. We are responsible to suchassertions not by committing to offer proof of them but by allowing themto perform their dispositional reorientation. It does not follow that theirtruth or falsity is irrelevant to us. Indeed, it may be the case that suchexpressions only serve to orient us correctly to the world if we actuallybelieve that they are true. But it does follow that establishing their truthor falsity is not our primary concern.

Take, for example, Pascal’s suggestion about love. Suppose I make theassertion: “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 tome whether it is true or false. But I would misunderstand my commitmentto the assertion if I then set out to prove that it is true. Indeed, to devoteattention to establishing whether it is true or false might very well destroy myability to let my faith in her love illuminate our relationship.

Such linguistic acts, then, do not find their fulfillment in communicatingtruths, although they do also communicate truths. And we do not holdourselves responsible to them by giving and asking for reasons. Instead,their primary function is that of showing us something new, and helping usdiscern how we ought to orient ourselves with respect to the things that theyshow us. It is in such terms that I understand Heidegger’s claim that poetic

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language “speaks by saying; that is, by showing . . . . Language speaks bypointing, reaching out to every region of presencing, letting what is presentin each case appear in such regions or vanish from them” (GA 12: 243/BasicWritings, p. 411).

Let us look at one of Heidegger’s examples of how such poetic languageworks. In a discussion of Trakl’s poem, “Ein Winterabend,” Heidegger notesthat “the Christian world comes into play in the poem.”Here is one strophefrom the poem:

A Winter Evening Ein WinterabendWindow 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 bereitetThe table is for many laid. Und das Haus ist wohlbestellt.

Viewed as a set of assertions, Heidegger notes, we could say that the poemdescribes a winter evening (GA 12: 16/PLT: 196). The assertions containedin the poemmay or may not have been true of some actual window and tableand bell. But in a real sense, their truth or falsity is not at stake here – notbecause the window and table and bell are symbols or metaphors for anonsensuous reality, but because the key to understanding the poem islearning to see other tables and windows and bells related in the way that itshows. The ordinary world shows up as a setting for the communion ofbelievers. When the poem really works, it shows us how the objects in aChristian world hang together, how things could matter to us if we had theright 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 didnot 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 whichit orients us can, for instance, actually open up in a way that allows tablesto be laid out in preparation for communal meals, and in a way thatallows vesper bells actually to call us together so that religious services giveorder and purpose to our lives. The poetic word calls us to a worldthat can actually be disclosed as a space and time for living a Christianlife.

3. SCRIPTURES AS WORLD DISCLOSURE

If we approach scriptural claims from this perspective – that is, against abackground 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 theirfunction – 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 weallow the scriptures to attune us to the world as God’s creation and people asGod’s children, we are affectively reoriented to the world. That is, theimportant thing is not that we think differently about the world, but ratherthat we feel it differently, see it differently.

On such a view, we are no longer worried about the probability orimplausibility of the claims as metaphysical claims. Instead, we are satisfiedif our faith shows us how to see this world. Cognitively, the saint’s Christianfaith remains deferred – that is, her literal acceptance of claims about, forexample, the resurrection is not something she can conclusively justify. Butthat literal acceptance disposes her for the world in such a way that she caninhabit the world without despair. She succeeds in living in the world that isdisclosed by faith, and is thus convinced of the truth of her faith (just as I amconvinced that my wife loves me when I can succeed in sustaining a lovingrelationship 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 thatassenting to the literal truth of an assertion commits one to unpacking itspropositional content, or justifying or proving it. Having gotten over think-ing this, we not only can accept the literal truth of scriptural claims, butwe can see that they may not do their job unless we do accept their literaltruth. At the same time, the scriptural assertions have also not done theirjob if they merely show us what to accept cognitively – and this is true even ifwe 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 thisworks.

Take, for example, Pascal’s observation that belief in the incarnationshows us how to deal with the despair stemming from our dual nature ofwretchedness 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 resolvethe contradictions by getting rid of one side or the other of our nature. In theChristian 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 Kierkegaard’s words, “peace and repose and consola-tion in pain”11 – that is, resigning ourselves to never finding satisfaction inthis 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.

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This interior war between reason and the passions meant that those who wantedpeace divided into two sects. Some wanted to renounce the passions and becomegods, the others wanted to renounce reason and become brute beasts . . . . But neithergroup succeeded, and reason is still there accusing the baseness and injustice ofthe passions and disturbing the peace of those who give way to them, and the passionsare still alive in those who want to reject them.12

If this is right, then traditional Christian pessimism necessarily gives rise todespair – a despair of needing to, but being unable to, find in this world thefulfillment of our profoundest longings. But thinkers like Kierkegaard,Pascal, and Dostoevsky have long suggested that the Christian doctrine ofour embodiment entails that we are not simply spirits, and thus that we havea necessary, essential attachment to the world that must be fulfilled. “The willitself 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 cannotbe happy” (P §394). What we need is to find some way to satisfy our will inorder to achieve happiness.

God’s incarnation in Christ, Pascal believes, teaches us that “we do notshow greatness by being at one extreme, but rather by touching both at onceand filling all the space in between” (P §560). It is only the scriptural accountof Jesus which can teach us this: “that is the new and astonishing conjunctionthat only a single God could teach, that he alone could achieve, and whichis merely the image and effect of the inexpressible marriage of two natures inthe single person of Man-God” (P §34). Belief in Christ’s incarnation, inother words, shows us our human existence not as something to despair atbut as something to affirm. 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 Christ’s deeds teach us specificallyhow to accept both sides of our nature, and free ourselves from beingconstantly driven by a lack. According to Pascal, for example, being attunedfor the world by the scriptural account of Christ’s life disposes us not to putour reliance on anything temporal (cf. P §§15 & 511). But if this were all, ofcourse, it would lead to despair. The trick is to find out how not to becomeattached to particular worldly things while also being able to live joyfully inthe world. So what Jesus teaches us is how to relate to all the finite thingswithout either (a) making them absolute, or (b) giving up on the longing forthe absolute. We learn not to make them absolute because, by imitatingChrist, we become disposed to all the supposed great things of the earth asbeing vanity and emptiness. At the same time, we do not give up on longingfor the absolute because Christ promises us that, through a meek and lovingrelationship to things in the world, we can become joint heirs with him in the

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


life to come. And, more importantly, through our faithful practices, we openourselves to an experience of God’s grace here in the world. God’s graceworks 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 hismercy the grace of Redemption, medicinal grace; the grace of Jesus Christ which isnothing other than complaisance and delectation in God’s law diffused into the heartby the Holy Ghost, which, not only equalling but even surpassing the concupiscenceof the flesh, fills the will with a greater delight in good than concupiscence offers inevil; and so free will, entranced by the sweetness and pleasures which the HolyGhost inspires in it, more than the attractions of sin, infallibly chooses God’s law forthe simple reason that it finds greater satisfaction there, and feels his beatitude andhappiness.13

For Pascal, then, we find satisfaction not in any particular worldly thing butthrough living a Christ-like life. That is to say, when we follow Christ’sexample as set forth in the revealed word, we allow our dispositions to bechanged in such a way that we can live joyfully in this world, no matter whathappens to us.

I hold out my arms to my Saviour, who, having been foretold for four thousandyears, came to suffer and to die for me on earth, at the time and in the circumstanceswhich were foretold. And through his grace I await death peacefully, in the hope ofbeing eternally united with him, and meanwhile I live joyfully, either in the blessingswhich he is pleased to bestow on me, or in the afflictions which he sends me for mygood and which he taught me to endure by his example.14

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

13 “Treatise Concerning Predestination,” in Pensées and Other Writings (Honor Levi, Trans.).Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1995, p. 223.

14 Pascal, Pensées, §646. Piotr Hoffman has helped me to recognize that there is a deeppessimistic streak in Pascal that separates him in important ways from existential Christianslike Dostoevsky. For Pascal does hold that nothing we encounter on earth is truly good, andthat the earth and the things of the earth are incapable of satisfying our deepest longings: “Donot look for satisfaction on earth, do not hope for anything from humanity. Your good is onlyin God, and ultimate happiness lies in knowing God, in becoming united with him for ever ineternity” (P §182). But Pascal’s pessimism is a pessimism without despair, because it embra-ces earthly existence as capable of profound happiness or joy, even if nothing we encounterin the world has a transcendent worth. See P §681: “You do not need a greatly elevated soul torealize that in this life there is no true and firm satisfaction, that all our pleasures are simplyvanity, that our afflictions are infinite, and lastly that death, which threatens us at everymoment, must in a few years infallibly present us with the appalling necessity of being eitherannihilated or wretched for all eternity. Nothing is more real nor more dreadful than that.We may put on as brave a face as we like: that is the end which awaits the finest life on earth.Let us think about it, then say whether it is not beyond doubt that the only good in this life liesin the hope of another life, that we are only happy the closer we come to it, and that, just asthere will be no more unhappiness for those who were completely certain of eternity, there is no hopeeither of happiness for those who have no glimmer of it!”

172 Language

absolute. The joy comes because, by giving up trying to satisfy oneself, onelearns to be open to the needs of the situation and of others. By imitatingChrist 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 Pascal’s existentialspecification of the Christian virtues of humility and charity). The result isa life of meek submission, tragic but hopeful – a minimal happiness withintermittent mystical moments of Joy.15

15 See “The Memorial,” Pensées, p. 178.


part iii

HISTORICAL WORLDS

8

Philosophers, Thinkers, and Heidegger’s Placein the History of Being

THE END OF PHILOSOPHY

The response to Heidegger in the analytical world is, to a consider-able degree, a paraphrase of Rudolf Carnap’s 1932 essay “Überwindungder Metaphysik durch Logische Analyse der Sprache.” To the extentHeidegger intends to make philosophical claims with assertions like “thenothing nothings,” Carnap charges, his writings are utterly meaningless; tothe extent that Heidegger is creating art, he does it poorly. Or, more likely,Heidegger’s work, like that of all metaphysicians, confounds art andphilosophy:

Metaphysicians are musicians without musical ability. Instead they have a stronginclination to work within the medium of the theoretical, to connect concepts andthoughts. Now, instead of activating, on the one hand, this inclination in the domainof science, and satisfying, on the other hand, the need for expression in art, themetaphysician confuses the two and produces a structure which achieves nothing forknowledge and something inadequate for the expression of attitude.1

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

1 Rudolf Carnap, “The Elimination of Metaphysics Through Logical Analysis of Language,” inLogical 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 logicalanalysis.”3

This narrow view of philosophy – philosophy as a method of analysis – isgrounded in a profound skepticism regarding our ability to discover truthsabout ourselves and our world through reason alone. Thus even analyticalphilosophers like Dummett – philosophers who “no longer regard the tradi-tional questions of philosophy as pseudoquestions to which no meaningfulanswer can be given” – believe that “philosophy can take us no further thanenabling us to command a clear view of the concepts by means of which wethink about the world, and, by so doing, to attain a firmer grasp of the way werepresent the world in our thought.”4 Philosophy, the analytical philosopherconcludes, ought to abandon metaphysics (thereby leaving the empiricalsciences in charge of the pursuit of substantive knowledge) and restrict itselfto conceptual analysis.

Heidegger’s response to this view of philosophy can be seen in a concen-trated form in a series of notes that draw their title, “Überwindung derMetaphysik,” from Carnap’s, and which Heidegger began writing shortlyafter the publication of Carnap’s essay. Indeed, the notes cannot be under-stood except as articulating an alternative to Carnap’s view of the failings ofthe metaphysical tradition. Like Carnap, Heidegger believes in the need tocriticize and, eventually, overcome the metaphysical tradition, but Heideggerdenies that Carnap’s approach is competent for that task. Heidegger explains:“this title [‘The Elimination of Metaphysics’] gives rise to a great deal ofmisunderstanding because it does not allow experience to get to the groundfrom which alone the history of Being reveals its essence.”5 That is to say,Carnap’s conception of metaphysics (as something that can be eliminatedsimply through the logical analysis of metaphysical claims) will prevent usfrom understanding that to which the metaphysical tradition has been aresponse – the background understanding of being. If we are genuinely toovercome or eliminate the metaphysical tradition, Heidegger believes, we canonly 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 weown up to the task of thinking being nonmetaphysically.

Thus, in Heidegger’s way of understanding the task of eliminating orovercoming metaphysics, “overcoming does not mean pushing a disciplineout of the scope of philosophical ‘education.’”6 Instead, the response tometaphysics begins, for Heidegger, with an understanding of metaphysics

3 “The Elimination of Metaphysics Through Logical Analysis of Language,” p. 774 Michael Dummett, The Logical Basis of Metaphysics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,1991, p. 1.

5 “Überwindung der Metaphysik,” in Vorträge and Aufsätze. 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 butdistinctive event, namely the oblivion of Being.”7 On this view, two thingscharacterize metaphysical thinkers. First, metaphysical thinkers manifest intheir works an understanding of the being of everything that is – that is,“beingness,” the one character or feature of things in virtue of which theyare 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, itwill become apparent that “metaphysics cannot be dismissed like an opin-ion.”8 One cannot simply change one’s mind about metaphysics, simplydecide to stop treating it as a serious and worthwhile branch of philosophy,because eliminating metaphysics in this way will, in fact, only heighten ouroblivion to the way our understanding of the world is based on a backgroundunderstanding of being and, in the process, make us more subject to itthan ever.

In fact, Heidegger believes, the desire to eliminate metaphysics in theway Carnap proposes is itself a sign of the “technological” understanding ofbeing. The elimination of metaphysics, he writes, might more appropri-ately be called the “Passing of Metaphysics,” where “passing” means thesimultaneous departing of metaphysics (i.e., its apparently perishing, andhence being remembered only as something that is past), even while thetechnological understanding of being “takes possession of its absolutedomination over what is.”9 I take this to mean that, in the technologicalage, the understanding of the being of what is becomes so completelydominant that metaphysical reflection seems superfluous. Even philosophyitself no longer worries about the nature of what is but simply works out aview of language and mind on the basis of the current understanding ofbeing.10 In fact, Heidegger would agree that the method of analysis is the“end” or “completion” of philosophy. Philosophy is able to restrict itself toconceptual analysis, and to cede all questions of theory and ontology to theempirical sciences, precisely because the scientific-technological under-standing of being is so completely dominant: “philosophy is ending in thepresent age. It has found its place in the scientific attitude of socially activehumanity” (GA 14: 63/BW: 434).

In short, Heidegger sees the effort to restrict philosophy to conceptualanalysis, thereby ignoring or dismissing metaphysics, as a sign not thatmetaphysics 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, aboveall in the Anglo-Saxon countries, . . . today considered the only possible form of strictphilosophy, because its result and procedures yield an assured profit for the constructionof the technological universe” (GA 8: 23/WCT: 21).

Heidegger’s 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 ofbeing that is, for it, unquestionable. And like the metaphysicians, contem-porary philosophy is oblivious to the need to think the background. The taskof thinking at the end of philosophy is to overcome this oblivion, and to dothis, we must become aware of our own place in the history of being. But wecan arrive at such an historical awareness only through an engagement withthe metaphysical past that Carnap and analytical philosophers in generalwould as soon ignore.

PHILOSOPHY AND ITS HISTORY

At this point, it might sound as if the disagreement between Heidegger andthe analytical philosophers is shaping up as a familiar argument over theplace of history in philosophy. On the one hand, there are those who seephilosophy, like science, as a rigorous and timeless pursuit of truth,abstracted from any particular cultural and historical locus. From this per-spective, philosophy’s history is an accidental feature of philosophy properlyunderstood. We might, out of a kind of curiosity, review the history ofphilosophy as if it were a catalogue of opinions people formerly held oncurrent philosophical issues. But in the final analysis, philosophy’s concern issolving its current problems – problems for which historical figures have noauthority, and can offer at most a little insight into an answer.

Against ahistoricism in philosophy are those who see philosophy as anineliminably historical endeavor, and argue that the problems philosopherstackle and their approach to those problems are themselves dictated by theparticularities of their historical age. To do philosophy is thus to workthrough the problems inherited from the past, problems made pressing bythe philosopher’s current historical situation. On this view, an effort toabstract philosophical problems and forms of reasoning from their historywill misunderstand the philosophical past and, more importantly, obscurecontemporary philosophy’s 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 thehistorical picture of philosophy in opposition to the ahistorical. And thereis some truth to that, provided that “history” is properly understood. But itwould be a very crude misreading of Heidegger to attribute to him the viewthat 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 backgroundthat philosophy is first responsible. To the extent that philosophers areresponsive to the call to think being, they and their work are removed fromordinary historical and cultural influences. Heidegger thus argues that itis a mistake to treat the thought of a thinker as circumscribed by “the


influences of the milieu and the effects of their actual ‘life’ situation” (GA6.1: 447/N4: 22).

At work here is distinction between two different ways of thinking abouthistory: history (Geschichte) versus historiology or historiography (Historie).We’ll return to this distinction later; for now, a brief introduction to thedistinction must suffice. Historiology is concerned with thoughts, words,experiences, deeds, and rules – in short, all the stuff of ordinary history.But historical events are, according to Heidegger, determined by a 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 interms of which any particular action or experience is what it is. The series ofdifferent background understandings is what constitutes history in thedeeper sense. That there are fundamentally different ways in which to bean entity testifies, for Heidegger, to the fact that there is no necessary waythat the backgroundmust function. Thus the background is itself dependenton “the nothing” that we alluded to earlier. Contra Carnap, “the nothing” ismisunderstood if it is construed as a negative existential quantification(although it entails the following proposition that does employ a negativeexistential quantification: there is no thing that determines the character ofthe 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 thatthings in the foreground do.

Metaphysics, as I indicated above, is the attempt to think and name thebeing of what is. But because metaphysicians do not understand that there isa background, which is not itself an entity, that constitutes the foreground aswhat it is, they interpret the unity of the foreground in terms of someuniform 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 tobeing, with respect to the unity of what is in being” (GA 14: 60/BW: 432).

The history of the West and of metaphysics on Heidegger’s interpretationconsists in a series of ways in which the being of what is – that characteristic orfeature in virtue of which anything is what it is – has been given or “uncon-cealed” to human beings. With each “unconcealment of being,” humanbeings have become progressively more oblivious to the fact that their every-day thoughts, activities, identities, and so on are grounded in a backgroundunderstanding of being that is neither necessary in its structure nor withinhuman control. While Heidegger believed that the metaphysical traditionhas failed to think the background or “clearing” within which everything iswhat it is, he also believed that philosophers have nevertheless played aprivileged role in opening up for their culture the possibilities given by theprevailing understanding of being. The history of being, a history traceablein the work of the metaphysicians, falls, according to Heidegger, into fourdistinct periods: the Greek (in which what is was primarily understood as


phusis or self-arising nature), the Medieval (in which what is was understoodas “God’s creation”), the Modern (where “beings became objects that couldbe controlled and penetrated by calculation”) (GA 5: 65/BW: 201), andfinally an intensification of the Modern, the Technological (in which what isis understood as standing reserve – that is, as being constantly available forflexible reconfiguration, 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 byarticulating, and thus making available to our practices in general, theunderstanding of being that characterizes (or is coming to characterize)the age. The best way to explain what Heideggermeans is to review one of hisexamples 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 toexperience 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 extentto which modern man “disengages himself from the constraints of biblicalChristian 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 gavemedieval 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 experienceof all entities as God’s creation: “the truth of salvation does not restrict itselfto a relation of faith, a relation to God; rather the truth of salvation at thesame time decides about beings . . . . Beings in their sundry orders are thecreation of a creator God, a creation rescued from the Fall and elevated tothe suprasensuous realm once again through the redeemer God” (GA 6.2:288/N3: 239–40). An ideal of intellectual freedom would be nearly inco-herent against the medieval background understanding, for it would appearas, at best, a rejection of not just the saving ordinances offered by the Churchbut also as a departure from the God-given intelligibility inherent in things.Consequently, political and intellectual liberation was impossible for themedievals because science and politics had to operate in harmony withGod’s order.

In modernity, however, there is a gradual shift away from understandingwhat is in terms of its relationship to God and toward a sense that beings arewhat they are in virtue of being representable to a perceiving subject. This, inturn, made man responsible for himself and his thoughts in a way notpossible so long as man was a child of God in the midst of God’s creation.This background shift is discernible in Descartes’ work: “Descartes’ meta-physics is the decisive beginning of the foundation of metaphysics in theModern age. It was his task to ground the metaphysical ground of man’sliberation in the new freedom of self-assured self-legislation” (GA 6.2: 129/N4: 100). For example, when Descartes declares that the first rule of his


philosophic method is “never to accept anything as true if I did not haveevident knowledge of its truth,”11 he does so not because he is a skeptic,Heidegger argues, but rather because the emerging modern style requiredman to take responsibility for his own knowledge and situation. The methodof doubt – that is, that I am “to include nothing more in my judgments thanwhat presented itself to my mind with such clarity and distinctness that Iwould have no occasion to put it in doubt”12 – is justified by Descartes’famous analogy between human understanding and a building. Notingthat “buildings undertaken and completed by a single architect are usuallymore attractive and better planned than those which several have tried topatch 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 isresponding to an emerging background understanding of us and our placein the world: “man becomes that being upon which all that is, is grounded asregards the manner of its being and its truth. Man becomes the relationalcenter of that which is as such” (GA 5: 88/QCT: 128) In articulating hisphilosophical project in accordance with the new understanding, Descartesopens up ways of relating things that is then used to justify other shifts in thepractices of the age, thereby ushering in a new understanding of being.

To summarize, the new possibilities available to modern man, includingthe possibility of becoming the “architect” of his own thoughts, are openedup by a fundamental shift in the metaphysical background. The task of thehistory of philosophy, for Heidegger, is to uncover such fundamental shifts.

We can now return to the questions with which this section began: what isthe nature of Heidegger’s disagreement with analytical philosophers? Andwhat does Heidegger mean in saying that the task for thinking is necessarilyhistorical? As to the latter question, we can see why Heidegger would rejectboth of the views discussed in the beginning of this section on the role ofhistory in philosophy. Both undoubtedly have a degree of truth to them.Insofar as a philosopher is a thinker, however, both views fail to capture whatis most essential to the philosopher’s task. A metaphysician’s historical andcultural inheritance is at most the departure point for articulating a newunderstanding of being. Consequently, the content of the metaphysicalthinker’s thought cannot be reduced to its cultural setting. Likewise, whileadvances are certainly made in philosophy, to focus on the advances as anahistorical march of progress is to ignore the question of the historicalconstitution of the problematics, facts, and so on with which philosophersas logical or conceptual analysts deal.

11 Descartes,Discourse onMethod, in The PhilosophicalWritings of Descartes, vol. I (JohnCottingham,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 Heidegger’s disagreement with thethought that philosophy should be restricted to conceptual analysis. Tobegin with, philosophy as a mere method of analysis does not genuinelyeliminate the metaphysical, it merely ignores it. It fails to account adequatelyfor the back-groundedness of our concepts, even while it, as a humanendeavor, is intrinsically shaped by current background sensibilities. This iswhy, in the passages quoted above, Heidegger sees Carnap’s essay as itselfmore proof of the need for a genuinely historical reflection onmetaphysics –Carnap is himself oblivious to the need to think about the background thatshapes him as much as the metaphysical past. This oblivion, Heideggerbelieves, poses a unique threat to our historical essence as human beings.As Heidegger understands it, ever since the earliest Greek thinkers, humanaction in the world has been shaped and guided by a unified, backgroundunderstanding of what it means to be.We are now in a technological age thathas completely occluded the fact that our foreground activities are groundedby 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 responsibleto a background.14

Heidegger believes that metaphysics can only genuinely be overcome ifwe can somehow recover a sensibility for the background, and if we can learnto see how it constitutes the present and opens up futural possibilities. Andthis, Heidegger insists, requires an historical inquiry for two main reasons.

First, because the background is so completely entrenched as to escapeour notice, it is only an historical thought that can loosen the grasp that ourmetaphysical understanding of being has on us. If we immerse ourselves inan historical reflection on the understanding of a past age, our currentpresuppositions and practices may come to seem strange and ungrounded.And if that happens, we will be prepared to confront the fact that weourselves are thoroughly shaped by an understanding of the being of beings –an understanding that, while once revolutionary, is now so commonplace asto go unnoticed. As Heidegger notes, “in order to rescue the beginning, andconsequently the future [i.e., the background understanding of being thatshapes our current practices and future possibilities], from time to time thedomination of the ordinary and all too ordinary must be broken.”History, bygiving 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 hascalled “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 Heidegger’s understanding of the danger of our oblivion tometaphysics, see Hubert L. Dreyfus, “Heidegger on the Connection Between Nihilism, Art,Technology, and Politics,” in The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger (Charles Guignon, Ed.).Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1993, pp. 289–316.


prevails. By learning to take these practices seriously, something we can onlydo when we see them against the background of the understanding of beingthat first grounded them, we can foster a readiness that will allow us torespond differently to the people and things we encounter in our everydayworld. As Heidegger puts it, historical thought is “preparatory” in the sensethat it prepares us for an escape from the metaphysics of our current age.

HISTORY AND HISTORIOLOGY

How is a genuinely historical reflection, one capable of loosening the grip ofour metaphysical understanding of being, to proceed? This question is madepressing by the fact that Heidegger’s own treatment of the history of philos-ophy is held in some disrepute. He is notorious for his “violent” interpreta-tions of the key figures in the history of philosophy. His interpretive methodis often quite disconcerting to the classical philologist, as well as the historianof philosophy. Mourelatos, for instance, objects to Heidegger’s “capricioususe of etymology in ‘hermeneutic’ interpretations of the pre-Socratics,”15

complaining that Heidegger and his followers have given etymology a badname. Heidegger’s interpretations of the pre-socratics, Mourelatos explainsdismissively, “are correctly appreciated (as it is now generally conceded) notas contributions to the history of Greek philosophy, but as dialectical, rhe-torical, and heuristic devices for the development of Heidegger’s own phi-losophy.”16 Mourelatos’s conclusion, I would argue, overstates the issue.There are in fact standards for judging Heidegger’s histories beyondwhether they successfully articulate his own philosophy. But he is quiteright that Heidegger’s work is not meant as a contribution to philologicalor 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-dayview what has been said here [in an interpretation of Parmenides] is a mereproduct of the farfetched and one-sided Heideggerian method of exegesis,which has already become proverbial” (GA 40: 184/IM: 176). And in thepreface to the second edition of Heidegger’s Kant book, he noted that “read-ers have taken constant offense at the violence of my interpretations. Theirallegation of violence can indeed by supported by this text” (GA 3: xvii). Butthere was a reason behind his approach – one that he was careful to explainand defend. Heidegger’s response to his critics consists in emphasizing thedistinction outlined above – the distinction between the historiological studyof the foreground events and activities in our past, and an historical reflectionon 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 ordinaryhistory – historical actions and events – are not the principal objects ofHeidegger’s history, although it would be a mistake to say that Heidegger’shistory is unconcerned with them.

The subsidiary role accorded to ordinary historiology in Heidegger’saccounts brings with it the risk that his history will lose touch with reality,and critics like Richard Rorty have been quick to charge that Heidegger’shistories are vacuous andmystical.17 Rorty argues that Heidegger’s history ofbeing is nothing but the history of what philosophers have said about being.But because these pronouncements cannot be understood without seeingthem in their connection to the “plain history” of peoples and things, Rortyargues that Heidegger fails to give content to his history of philosophy:“Without the reference to the history of nations, we should obviously haveonly 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 Heidegger’saccount of the history of philosophy deconstructs itself because every timeHeidegger tells the history of philosophy, he does so in historiological terms.As a result, he concludes that “the distinction between Geschichte and Historieis here, as always, impossible to maintain.”19

Such critiques fail to appreciate Heidegger’s own explanation of history,historiology, and their interdependence. Bernasconi, for instance, inter-prets the distinction between historiology and history as the distinctionbetween accounts that follow “the guiding thread of a story,” and those thatdo not.20 But this is a misunderstanding. It is quite right to say thathistoriology provides a “journalist’s” account, describing things in termsof a series of passing events (see GA 54: 94). And such an account mighteven follow “the guiding thread of a story,” but this is not what is determi-native of historiology as historiology. Rather, historiology is what it isbecause 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 withoutremainder in the terms that make sense given our current understandingof being.

So, where historiology understands the passage of time in terms of “yearsand 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 theHistory of Philosophy,” in Heidegger: A Critical Reader (Hubert L. Dreyfus & Harrison Hall,Eds.). Oxford, England: Blackwell, 1992, pp. 143–59.

18 Richard Rorty, “Overcoming the Tradition: Heidegger and Dewey,” Review of Metaphysics 30(1976): 297.

19 Robert Bernasconi, “Descartes in theHistory of Being,”Research in Phenomenology 17 (1987):94.20 Ibid., p. 87.


“age” – that is, “the situation of human things and man’s dwelling placetherein” (GA 54: 10). History traces the “movement of being,” that is,changes in the background norms of intelligibility and the general style ofthe practices most central to an age. History thus seeks to uncover the ways inwhich identities and objects have been constituted and experienced, and thegeneral kinds of constraints working on the field of possibilities open tohistorical actors. The goal is

to draw nearer to what is “happening” in the history of the Modern age. What ishappening means what sustains and compels history, what triggers chance events andin advance gives leeway to resolutions, what within beings represented as objects and asstates 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 publicstage of events and varying opinions.What happens can never bemadehistoriologicallycognizable. It can only be thoughtfully known by grasping what the metaphysics thatpredetermines the age has elevated to thought and word. (GA 6.1: 431–2/N3: 8)

Thus Heidegger’s distinction between history and historiology is not a dis-tinction between the history of nations and peoples on the one hand, and thehistory of philosophy on the other. Rather, it is a distinction between ways ofapproaching the history of all human phenomena namely, a historiologicalreporting on past events, a reporting that “touches only the foremost of theforeground” (GA 45: 42) – versus historical recovery of the understanding ofan age which constituted what happened as the event it was. Heideggerbelieves that, at least within the history of philosophy, his history is a pre-requisite to doing Rorty’s “plain history”:

Since historiographical considerations are always subordinated to historical reflec-tions, the erroneous opinion can arise to the effect that historiography is altogethersuperfluous for history. But from the order of rank just mentioned the only con-clusion to be drawn is this: historiographical considerations are essential only insofaras they are supported by a historical reflection, are directed by it in their very way ofquestioning, and are determined by it in the delimitation of their tasks. But this alsoimplies the converse, that historigraphical considerations and cognitions are indeedindispensable. (GA 45: 50)

Historiological considerations are indispensable, I take it, precisely becausean investigation of the background understanding of being only makes senseas 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 influenceof foreground events on one another. A historiology will inevitably read ourown understanding of being back into the events of the past. A foregroundevent, as we noted earlier, is constituted as the event it is only by fitting itinto a context of ends or goals, standards of performance, motives or


intentions, possible results, and so on, and these all have the determinateshape 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 abackground sense for things, we will drag along our own background aswe confront the historiological record. As Heidegger explains in the con-text of a discussion of the history of the concept of truth, “we find only whatwe seek, and in historiography we are seeking only what we [already] mayknow” (GA 45: 219–20). 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, anunthought one, a so-called obvious one, which it would like to confirm bythis very research and in so doing only rigidifies the unthought obvious-ness” (GA 54: 142).

This tendency is compounded, in Heidegger’s view, when we approachphilosophers historiologically. Philosophers not only work out of a differentbackground understanding of being, but their work responds directly tothat background. To the extent that they are doing metaphysics, theirwritings need to be seen as alethic rather than assertoric – that is, as tendingto open up, clarify, and articulate the understanding of being rather than asmaking assertions about foreground events and objects. If we interpretphilosophers as performing foreground acts – as thinking and writingabout entities and their interactions – and in addition interpret thoseforeground acts on the basis of our own background, we doubly obscuretheir true import.

For instance, the historiology of philosophy is dependent on philologicalresearch into how certain terms were used in the surviving literature of thephilosopher’s linguistic community. It also relies on the transcultural tracingof dependencies between philosophers. But both of these methods havetheir shortcomings if our aim is the ontological background.

Philology is limited by its reliance on nonphilosophical sources as abasis for interpreting philosophical texts. Philology will fail to shed light onthe ontological background to the degree that it depends on an everydayvocabulary, which draws its meaning from foreground events and objects.Consequently, unless the philologist employs metaphysical reflection toilluminate her reading of past texts, rather than relying on conclusionsabout language drawn from other sources, she will make little progress inunderstanding metaphysical discourse. Thus where one seeks to understandthe most fundamental underpinnings of a metaphysical position, Heideggerargues, one will require a thinker’s insight into being.

In addition, the discovery of dependencies and philosophical influencesis 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 inexternal associations and relations” (GA 6.1: 456/N3: 31). The point is that,unless we are capable of an independent inquiry into the background, andthus capable of comprehending a philosopher’s place in the history of being,we will not understand the significance of the fact that philosophers appro-priate one another’s work: “To search for influences and dependenciesamong thinkers is to misunderstand thinking. Every thinker is dependent –upon the address of being” (GA 5: 369/EGT: 55). The illuminating questionto ask is thus not what problem or answer one philosopher borrowed fromanother, but rather why did certain philosophical predecessors and prob-lems show up as relevant sources in the first place? Exploring this question,Heidegger argues, would lead us to ask about the understanding of beingthat guided the appropriation.

Heidegger’s defense of his use of history, then, consists of a reminder thatwhat needs to be understood is the background understanding of a thinker.This understanding will seem violent by the historiologist’s lights for tworeasons. First, since metaphysical thinkers themselves are unable to get fullyclear about their background and the way that it guides them to think thethings they do, a historical interpretationmay even run contrary to the thingsthey explicitly say. In addition, the violence of his appropriation is a result ofan attempt to think independently of contemporary standards of under-standing – something made necessary by the goal of overthrowing thecomplacency with which we inhabit our own background and project it onthe philosophers of the past.

Abandoning, as he did, traditional approaches to the interpretation ofphilosophy, Heidegger’s readings bear little of the sort of support oftenadvanced within traditional historiology. He acknowledged this fact: “Wecannot demonstrate the adequacy of the translation by scholarly means” (GA5: 372/EGT: 57). But this was not to say that “scholarly means” wereirrelevant; rather, that they would “not carry us far enough,” since at bestthey could only point to the surface phenomena supported by a backgroundunderstanding of being (see GA 6.2: 232/N3: 188). Or, as he explainedelsewhere, the “doctrinal systems and the expressions of an age” tell ussomething, insofar as they are an “aftereffect or veneer” supported by theunderstanding of being of that age.” But to read the philosophical veneercorrectly, one must be well versed in the thought of being.

This does not mean, as Rorty charges and Mourelatos suggests, thatHeidegger has rendered his account of the history of philosophy immuneto challenge. But it does mean that a challenge conducted at the level of aninterpretation of what philosophers have said, without any sensitivity to thebackground that makes that interpretation plausible, will miss the mark. It isthe background that is Heidegger’s primary concern. Thus a debate withHeidegger’s reading ought to be addressed to showing how he hasmisunder-stood this background.


HEIDEGGER’S USE OF HISTORY

We can now say more clearly what it means to be a metaphysical thinker – aphilosopher – and how Heidegger’s historical thinking is meant to evade theproblems of metaphysical thought.

The history of philosophy is, Heidegger tells us, the “thinker’s struggle fora word for beings as whole” (GA 6.1: 443/N3: 19). The great philosophers,in Heidegger’s way of understanding things, are those who receive an 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 andevents: “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 ofputting this point is to say, like Carnap, that the metaphysical thinker is akind of artist – provided, however, that one does not understand art asCarnap does (i.e., as a means of “expression” for the artist’s “emotionaland volitional reaction to the environment, to society, to the tasks to whichhe devotes himself, to themisfortunes 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. Themetaphysician is an artist in the sense of “giv[ing] form to beings as a whole”(GA 6.1: 71/N1: 73). Metaphysical thought, in short, reflects and givesexpression to the background understanding of being that determines, inany given age, the way things are. This thought concerning the essence of anage opens up a space of possibilities, or in the case of creative thinkers,anticipates a new space of possibilities.

But it would be a mistake to look for a philosopher’s influence in theforeground events, at least in the short term. Philosophy has, Heideggernotes, an “historically ascertainable yet irrelevant influence” (GA 6.1: 431/N3: 8). I take this tomean that the philosopher as a thinker of being does notusually affect particular practices or activities in a demonstrable way butinstead gives room for a change in all the practices of an age. The classicalcase of this is, in Heidegger’s view, that of Descartes as articulated above. Thedirect influence of Descartes’s writings on any particular scientist, politician,or other historical figure is irrelevant compared to the influence on theModern age that the whole new background sensibility for man’s place in theworld had. As Heidegger explained with reference to Nietzsche, a thinker’sthought “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 inthe 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 andmetaphysical thinkers?

Heidegger conceives of himself as a preparatory thinker – that is, as beingconcerned with preparing us for a transformation of the current age ofbeing, rather than himself participating in changing the understanding ofbeing: “the thinking in question remains unassuming, because its task is onlyof a preparatory, not of a founding character. It is content with awakening areadiness in man for a possibility whose contour remains obscure, whosecoming remains uncertain” (GA 14: 66/BW: 436). To do this, he tries toshow how, despite the oblivion of being that marks the present age, there is acoherence and unity to our practices given by the technological understand-ing of being. But this attempt to “name” the background understanding ofbeing does not itself open up a clearing for a new metaphysics, nor does itarticulate the understanding of being in order to help establish it. Instead,Heidegger hopes that by showing us the understanding of being that formsthe background of modern technological practices, he can encourage us toreflect on the nature of the “open region” itself that harbors any givenunderstanding of being: “what matters to preparatory thinking is to lightup that space within which being itself might again be able to take man, withrespect to his essence, into a primal relationship. To be preparatory is theessence of such thinking” (GA 5: 210/QCT: 55). The background is “lit up”by means of the historical illustration of the contingency or ungroundednessof our current understanding of being. And this will not happen withoutawakening an awareness of the background itself, and our reliance as humanbeings on a background understanding of the being of beings. The next stepis to take us “into a primal relationship” to this contingent background,something that happens only if we get adapted to the contingency andungroundedness of our way of being the world, learning to embrace it andtake responsibility for our lives.

HEIDEGGER’S PLACE IN THE HISTORY OF BEING

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

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


learned from Heidegger’s view of history, the appropriation of historicalworks in philosophy is always driven by a background sense of the task forthought (as determined by the understanding of being that prevails in ourage). Heidegger’s comment, then, should be seen as recognition of the factthat he cannot decide how useful his work will prove for the task of thought.For instance, as I have suggested in the discussion of Carnap’s response toHeidegger, the perceived uselessness of Heidegger’s work in the analyticworld is a function of a prior decision about the nature of philosophy, adecision shaped by the ontological background of the age. The same holdstrue of all the ways in which Heidegger’s thought has been accepted andtransformed.

Using the categories Heidegger has provided us, we can ask of any use ofHeidegger whether it treats his work historically, historiographically, oranalytically. Of course, these are not mutually exclusive approaches toHeidegger. The historical question is given traction by the historiography.The historiography, in turn, should be guided by our sense for history. Andan “analytical” reading of Heidegger – that is, using his analysis of contem-porary problems to counteract mistaken philosophical views, particularlywhen those views contribute to the “oblivion of being,” may in some waysbe truer to his own project than more self-consciously historicist readings ofhis work. After all, Being and Time, with its detailed treatment of variousproblems in intentionality, lends itself readily to a reading that pursues atraditional philosophical aim of the analysis of the content of our concepts.Along these lines, one could articulate Heidegger’s response to analyticalphilosophy rather differently than I have here. Rather than seeing thedisagreement between Heidegger and analytical philosophy as an argumentover the role of historical reflection in philosophy, one could cast it in termsof different views about the philosophy of mind and language.

One might also approach Heidegger and his work as a product of thecultural and historiological forces operating in Germany in the first half ofthis century – a particularly sensational issue in Heidegger’s case. Indeed,one can read Heidegger’s mythological account of the history of being asitself a historiological event. Likewise, a considerable amount of scholarshipis devoted to discovering and articulating Heidegger’s dependence on, forinstance, Husserl.

But, in the final analysis, neither a narrowly analytic nor a historiographicreading of Heidegger is able to confront the problems with whichHeideggerwas most concerned (at least in the decades following the publication ofBeing and Time). These problems include the nature of our backgroundunderstanding of being, the meaning of the oblivion of being, and the taskof preparing a way to overcome that oblivion. But even with a commitment tothe project of historical reflection as Heidegger articulated it, further deci-sions are in order. Do we accept his description of the background, hisaccount 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 dispensableor indeed as fundamentally mistaken. For instance, onemight agree that thehistory of philosophy needs to be understood in terms of the prevailingbackground understanding that shaped each thinker, but nevertheless rejecthis unified account of that background.23

Another pressing issue that arises fromHeidegger’s history is the questionof what to make of his diagnosis of the ills and dangers confronting thecurrent 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,find his enigmatic claims about the “saving power” useless in coming to termswith the problem of technology. Thus, even if one accepts the task ofHeidegger’s preparatory thinking, there remains the question of how bestto carry on that task.

Other related issues arise in any thoughtful reception of Heidegger’swork. For example, one inescapable but central element of Heidegger’swork was his particularity as a thinker. Heidegger explicitly saw himself aspreparing for the overcoming of metaphysics on the basis of the resourcesinherent in the German language and culture. This presents a constantobstacle in working with Heidegger’s writings, as one must decide howmuch weight to give to the often archaic, German-based terminology/jargonthat Heidegger employs. Heidegger’s particularity gives rise, in turn, tosometimes heated disagreements over the appropriateness of different trans-lations of Heidegger’s thought – into, for instance, a vocabulary moreaccessible to analytical philosophers.

Viewed from the perspective of “the history of being,” however, itbecomes clear that what, at least for the past few decades, have seemed tobe the most divisive dimensions of Heidegger scholarship are, in fact, not soimportant. Differences between schools of Heidegger interpretation have, toa considerable degree, been defined in terms of literary style and thecanon of other philosophical works typically consulted (for example, doesone refer to Levinas and Derrida, orWittgenstein and Searle for illuminatingcomparisons with Heidegger’s work?). While the question of style is, onHeideggerian grounds, something to take seriously, neither it nor theauthors one reads are, in and of themselves, determinative of one’s fidelityto the Heideggerian project. To the extent that divisions between schools ofHeidegger studies are premised on a historiological assessment regardingintellectual dependencies, they are based on the kind of factors thatHeidegger’s approach to history has taught us to look beyond. For even a

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


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

24 Martin Heidegger, “Preface,” in William J. Richardson, Heidegger: Through Phenomenology toThought. The Hague: Martinus Nijhof, 1974, p. viii.

25 I am indebted to James Faulconer and Hubert Dreyfus; they have saved me from a variety oferrors through their careful attention to earlier drafts of this paper and their willingness todiscuss 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 dangersof technology, and tried to articulate a nontechnological form of “poeticaldwelling” that could save us from those dangers. On Heidegger’s account,dwelling consists in achieving a nearness to the earth, the sky, mortals, anddivinities.

Viewed with the kind of historical detachment exemplified in CharlesTaylor’s paper, “Closed World Structures,”1 Heidegger’s reaction againsttechnology is just one ripple in the “wave of protests” that formed whatTaylor calls the “nova effect” – that is, “the multiplication of more and morespiritual 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 thedisagreements 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 thenature and place of religion in a postmetaphysical, technological age.

Taylor’s observations are valuable as a reminder that Heidegger’s diag-nosis of our age is itself couched in terms that are not only contestable froma number of sides but perhaps almost unintelligible to other splinter posi-tions in the overall fragmentation of modern culture. If, then, Heidegger’sview of religious life after the death of God is to have an importance toanyone beyond the initiates in Heideggerese, it can only do so by helpingto 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 thelater Heidegger’s work on the divinities and the fourfold, Heidegger isoffering 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. 47–68.

2 Ibid., p. 66.

195

from a detached, historiographical perspective – namely, why is it that areligious life should remain an appealing possibility, that a religious life, in anyincarnation – new age or traditional – should seem a plausible way to redressthe failings of our technological and secular age?

To answer this question, one has to say something specific about thedeficiencies of the technological age. One needs to articulate what crucialelement of a worthwhile life is lost with the death of God, and why weshould think that a religious life after the death of God can correct thatloss. I would like to present Heidegger’s reflections on the fourfold asresponses to just these questions.

THE DEATH OF GOD

Because Heidegger’s account of the technological age grew out of hisreading of Nietzsche, the place to start is with Heidegger’s interpretationof the “death of God.” Although I will refer to a number of passages fromNietzsche, I am not concerned here either to argue that Heidegger inter-preted Nietzsche correctly, or that Heidegger’s critique of Nietzsche foundits mark. Instead, I am interested in what Heidegger thought he learnedfrom Nietzsche; this can stand or fall independently of questions aboutwhat Nietzsche really thought.

Heidegger interprets the death of God in ontological terms – that is,according to Heidegger’s understanding of ontology, in terms of the“mode” in which “whatever is, as such, comes to appearance” (see GA 5:257). In particular, the death of God is understood as the process by whicheverything is turned into resource.

Thus, from Heidegger’s perspective, it is a terrible misreading ofNietzsche’s proclamation of the death of God to take it as a bald atheism,an undisguised declaration of the end of everything that is divine. AsHeidegger points out, those who think that the proclamation couldmean this must themselves be starting with an inadequate conception ofGod. To think that Nietzsche is a bald atheist, Heidegger claims, theywould have to “deal with and treat their God the same way they deal witha pocketknife If a pocketknife is lost, it is just gone. But to lose Godmeans something other” (GA 39: 5). Heidegger’s point is that the loss ofa God, properly understood, is an apocalyptic event – one that cannot betreated with the same equanimity that we might treat the loss of somemundane object. To own up to the loss of God requires of us that wereach for a new kind of divinity – a divinity that can withstand the loss ofthe old God.

Heidegger sees this as apparent already in the very passages in whichNietzsche proclaims the death of God. These explicitly place the focus ondiscovering a sort of divinity that would render us able to endure a worldfrom which the old God is gone. The madman in Gay Science §125, for


instance, follows up the proclamation of God’s death with a series ofquestions – questions that culminate in the following:

How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiestand mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under ourknives: 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 notthe greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become godssimply to appear worthy of it?3

Heidegger does not pass over such questions lightly. He closes the “Word ofNietzsche” essay with a reflection on the fact that the madman seeks God:“the madman . . . is clearly, according to the first, and more clearly stillaccording to the last, sentences of the passage, for him who can hear, theone who seeks God, since he cries out after God. Has a thinking manperhaps here really cried out de profundis? (GA 5: 267/QCT: 112).

The proclamation of the death of God, then, means something otherthan a mere denial of the real existence of the Christian God. It is rather anattempt to really come to grips with the loss we suffer when religiouspractices become marginalized. The Christian God was important becauseour practices for devotion to him provided us with a source of meaningand intelligibility. We kill God, Nietzsche’s madman declares, when we“drink up the sea,” when we “wipe away the entire horizon,” when we“unchain this earth from its sun.” Heidegger reads the sea as Nietzsche’smetaphor for the sensible world – a world in flux, constantly changing,malleable and flexible in the paths it permits us to take. God served asa land and horizon, giving the sensible world a fixed point of reference.The horizon is thus Nietzsche’s metaphor for focal practices that give usa place, determining what is important to us, and what counts as unim-portant or trivial. Finally, the sun is the God in whose light everythingappears as what it is. When we drink up the sea, we become responsiblefor the way the sensible world shows up – that is, we ourselves, rather than afixed suprasensible God, encompass the world. When we wipe away thehorizon, we destroy any fixed point of reference for valuing the world.When we unchain the earth from the sun, we deprive things of any fixedor stable essence (GA 5: 261/QCT: 107).

The history of Western culture prior to the advent of the technologicalage can be seen in terms of a transition through a long series of Gods, eachof which has filled the position of giver of meaning, setter of norms, sourceof gravity and value. Heidegger, commenting on Nietzsche, observed thatsince the Reformation, the role of highest value has been played by “theauthority 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 finally “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 theChristian God has long since ceased, at least for most in the West, toserve as horizon and sun. What is unique about this moment in history isthat there is no candidate to step into the position of shared source ofmeaning and value. Our form of life has changed in such a way that we areno longer able to submit ourselves to such a God. The sea-drinking,horizon-wiping, earth-unchaining process is a process not of filling in theposition of God with yet another God in the same mold but of overturningthe whole onto-theological interpretation of the world, which sets thingsunder some suprasensory value.

This interpretation of the death of God ultimately underwritesHeidegger’s reading of Nietzsche as the thinker of the technologicalepoch. According to Heidegger, every thinker, Nietzsche included, “hasat any given time his fundamental philosophical position within meta-physics.” But by this he does not refer to the thinker’s explicit doctrineon metaphysical issues; rather he means that their work manifests a parti-cular understanding about the nature “of what is as such in its entirety.”Heidegger’s interest in Nietzsche, then, is driven by a desire to gain insightinto the most fundamental way in which our age understands what is:“The thinking through of Nietzsche’s metaphysics becomes a reflectionon the situation and place of contemporary man, whose destiny is still butlittle experienced with respect to its truth” (GA 5: 210/QCT: 54).

Heidegger’s ultimate aim, then, was to use Nietzsche to get clear aboutthe ontological structure of what is becoming the most prominent featureof the place of contemporary man – namely, the technologizing of everydaylife. The technological world, Heidegger argues, is grounded in the factthat everything that is shows up as lacking in any inherent significance,use, or purpose. Heidegger’s name for the way in which entities appear andare experienced in the technological world is “resource.” Resources areremoved from their natural conditions and contexts, and reorganized insuch away as to be completely available, flexible, interchangeable, andready to be employed in an indefinite variety of manners.4 In the techno-logical age, even people are reduced from modern subjects with fixeddesires 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 forsatisfying transitory urges.

This is, by the way, the Heideggerian way of cashing out Nietzsche’sclaim that the death of God results in a lack of gravity. As Heidegger notes(GA 44: 192–3), Nietzsche connects the death of the Christian God with

4 See “The Question Concerning Technology” in QCT.


the emptiness of a life in which “it will appear for a long time as if allweightiness were gone from things.”5

By a loss of “weightiness,” Nietzsche means that nothing really matters tous any more; that everything is equally value-less. I will refer to weightinessas “mattering” or “importance.” With the death of the old God, we lose asense that our understanding of things – including having a shared visionof the good, or a notion of the correct way to live a life, or an idea ofjustness, and so on – is grounded in something more than our willing itto be so. And without such a grounding, Heidegger worries, it is not justour 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 goodnessand rightness and worth. The decisive question for our age, then, is“whether we let every being weightlessly drive into nothingness or whetherwe want to give a weightiness to things again and especially to ourselves;whether we become master over ourselves, in order to find ourselves inessence, or whether we lose ourselves in and with the existing nothingness”(GA 44: 193–4).

What the old God gave us, in short, was a way of being attuned to objectsas having a transcendental importance or weightiness. Heidegger believesthat a living God attunes a whole culture to objects in a particular way andas having a transcendent meaning. For example, when God was the Judeo-Christian creator God of the theologians, we were attuned to things asinstantiations of the ideal forms created by God. We, in turn, were called byall of creation to a certain reverence for the handiwork of God, and wewere provoked to the intellectual project of coming to understand themind of God as manifest in the world. In other words, God’s attunementrequired of us particular modes of comportment. Because things couldshow up as making demands on us, things mattered.

But now, we as a culture find ourselves in the position of being unable toshare a reverence for God – that is, for some such source of attunement.Without God to attune us to objects as having weight or importance forus, the danger is that nothing will matter, and consequently life will notbe worthwhile. The search for a new source of divinity, then, becomes aquestion of finding a mood, a mode of attunement, which will allow thingsonce 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 affectiveterms – that is, as oriented around the question of the mood appropriateto 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 determinateinherent value, but instead as ready and on call to be taken up in any way

5 Sämtliche Werke: Kritische Studienausgabe, vol. II: Nachgelassene Fragmente 1884–1885 (GiorgioColli & 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 thefollowing way: Why does Heidegger believe that an experience of thedivine is necessary in order to live a worthwhile life in the kind of worldthat shows up after the death of God?

MEANING AND MATTERING

Before turning directly to this question, I want to develop a framework forthe 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 definedby a network of practices in which it is employed, the result toward which itis directed, and the other objects with which it is used. So a hammer hasthe 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 nailsand boards.

Although the world is meaningful or intelligible to me when I grasp thepractical and equipmental contexts that embed all the things that populatethe 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 anyparticular object comes to hold a special significance for me. As a result,in a world where I am not active, where I have no purposes and goals,where I am drawn into no involvements, no thing or person could matterto 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 instrumentalimportance from an existential importance. Things have an instrumentalimportance anytime we take up some of the purposes made available bythe intelligible structure of the world. In a world where it makes sense to bea 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 doctoringactivities. These people and objects will matter to her, just as long as shecontinues to be a doctor. But outside of her doctoring activity, thesedevices and people need not make any claim on her.

Existential importance, by contrast, would consist in some practice orobject or person having an importance for our self-realization. That is, theobject or person or practice is something without which we would cease tobe who we are. Such objects or persons or practices thus make a demandon us – require of us that we value them, respect them, respond to themon pain of losing ourselves.

As we noted, a defining trait of resources is precisely that they do notmake any demands on us but instead stand ready and available to beordered as we demand, given our current aims We can now get a clearerpicture of one threat posed by the technological world. In the technological


world, because everything presents itself as a mere resource, and thushas at best instrumental importance, nothing is capable of existentialimportance.

There is also another, closely related danger posed by our becomingattuned to the world through technology – the danger that we will lose asense 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 onSaturday) has its value as an activity in terms of how it contributes to ordetracts from my realization of my vocation as a teacher. A purposive lifeis a coherent pattern of activity, and activities require things with whichto be active. My activities give me a sense of place by ranging over particularentities – these students, this classroom, this campus, and so on. Theseare the things I relate to in realizing who I am. Another way to say this isto say that my activities determine what is near to me and what is farfrom me. A thing is far from me if it plays no role in helping me be theperson 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 theother side of the world were important to my work, I could be closer to iteven while sitting in my office in Utah than someone else might be whohappened to be just next door to it.)

But as technology begins to increase the range of our activities, it by thesame token undermines nearness and farness in our world, thus threat-ening to undercut our belonging to a place and, by the same token, thesense that anything genuinely matters. Thanks to technological deviceslike the Internet, I, in fact, can act at the greatest possible distances. Thesubsequent extension of reach, in turn, leads to a homogenization ofobjects, which need to be placed on call for exploitation in the widestimaginable set of contexts. The result we are driving toward is that noparticular thing or location will matter at all to our ability to live our livesbecause an indistinguishable alternative is readily available. The perfectlytechnological world will be one in which we can be completely indifferentto particular places, people, and things. Or, in other words, all that is leftis resources, the “formless formations of technological production” inwhich pretechnological natures “can no longer pierce through . . . toshow their own” (GA 5: 291/PLT: 113). In justifying these claims,Heidegger quotes approvingly the following passage from a letter by Rilke:

To our grandparents, a “house,” a “well,” a familiar steeple, even their own clothes,their cloak still meant infinitely more, were infinitely more intimate . . . Now thereare intruding, from America, empty indifferent things, sham things, dummies oflife . . . 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 intowhich the hope and thoughtfulness of our forefathers had entered.6

Before the advent of technology, even merely instrumentally importantobjects had a veneer of existential importance, given that a substitute wasoften not readily available. Before the advent of technology, instrumentallyimportant objects could give us a sense of place (or at least an analogue ofa genuine, existential sense of place) in virtue of the fact that objectstended to be shaped by local and regional factors. But these thin formsof existential importance and place are undermined as the globalizationand the technologization of the economy has made for easy interchange-ability, and has created pressure toward standardization. “Everythingbecomes equal and indifferent,” Heidegger argues, “in consequence ofthe uniformly calculated availability of the whole earth” (GA 12: 201/OWL: 105).

For Heidegger, a worthwhile life in the technological age demands thatwe rediscover existentially important objects and a sense of place. Thedivinities play a crucial role in his account of this rediscovery. But beforeturning directly to an account of Heidegger’s divinities, I would like tofocus the issue more clearly by exploring a nonreligious solution to theproblem. One response to the loss of importance and place would be toovercome our addiction to a life of existential importance, and insteadfind fulfillment in experiencing ourselves as disclosers of the technologi-cal world.7 This possibility has recently been articulated by Dreyfus andSpinosa in the course of an exploration of the possibility of learning toaffirm technology.8 Dreyfus and Spinosa suggest that we could have afulfilling life in a technological age if we could learn to enjoy the excite-ment of being able to respond flexibly to a situation, rather than beingconstrained by the inherent nature of the objects in the situation thatconfronts us. The reason I think that Heidegger does not pursue thisoption is that, in affirming 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 theworld as it appears after the death of God. After the death of God, he wrote in an unpublishednote, all that is left is the issue “whether to abolish our reverences or us ourselves. The latter isnihilism.” The former course – that of abolishing our reverences – is the course which willopen us up to enjoying the thrill of responding freely to the world as technology offers it.Nietzsche’s primary metaphor for the world after the death of God – a world in which thereare no fixed points of reference, and in which no object has a real gravity or weight – is a seawith infinite horizons: “At long last the horizon appears free to us again, even if it should notbe bright; at long last our ships may venture out again, venture out to face any danger; all thedaring of the lover of knowledge is permitted again; the sea, our sea, lies open again; perhapsthere has never yet been such an ‘open sea’” (Gay Science, sec. 343).

8 Hubert L. Dreyfus and Charles Spinosa, “Highway Bridges and Feasts: Heidegger andBorgmann on how to Affirm Technology,” Man and World 30 (1997): 159–77.


actively seeks to empty objects of the kind of worth that would allow themto make demands on us. In the process, we might recover at least one thingwith more than merely instrumental importance – namely, it matters thatthere are numerous different possible ways to respond to each situation.But we disclose these multiple possibilities precisely to the extent that noparticular possibility is inherently worthwhile, and no particular action orinvolvement makes a demand on us, because no particular object or actionplays a unique role in realizing who we are. In short, in such a life, nothingand nobody can make a claim on us.

For Heidegger, such a life makes us “homesick” – that is, makes us longfor the fulfillment found in inhabiting a place populated with objects,people, and activities that themselves have existential as opposed to merelyinstrumental importance. We can thus see that, from Heidegger’s perspec-tive, Dreyfus and Spinosa offer us at best a contingency plan for addressingthe dangers of our age. They show us how it is possible to have a life thatis significant in the sense of making sense, of being intelligible, and inwhich it is even possible to have one thing – the existential space of freepossibilities – 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 andSpinosa focus on, as an effort to cover over the attunement of profoundboredom that overtakes us in a world where nothing matters to us. Thisattempt at a cover up, for Heidegger, attests to a continued longing forhome (GA 16: 578 ff.). Thus if it were possible to have more – to haveobjects and practices themselves show up as important – such a life wouldbe preferable. To have this kind of life, however, requires a role for thedivinities that no life of attunement to technological things permits.

On Heidegger’s account, then, the appeal of a religious life after thedeath of God is rooted in the possibility of repopulating the world withthings that have a deep importance – indeed, of perhaps genuinely relatingto such things for the first time. To explain this, let me start by restatinghow Heidegger understands the way in which the technological age hasdestroyed the possibility of existentially important things. Heidegger’s ana-lysis, to frame it as succinctly as I can, is as follows: it is a relationship tothings that have intrinsic importance that makes a life genuinely fulfilling.It is only our belonging in a particular place (existentially understood) thatmakes some things really matter. The technological age has underminedour ability to feel rooted in a particular place. Therefore, the technologicalage has made it difficult to live a worthwhile life.

I now want to say more carefully how a sense of place contributes to theexistential importance of things. I note first that the thin sense of placediscussed above – where my place is a function of the things I happen to bedealing 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 objectsultimately worthwhile. To return to my teacher example, one could ask,“Why be the teacher of these students? There’s nothing really special aboutthem, and there are students all over the world who need a teacher.” Ifthat is true, it seems that my life is only contingently worthwhile. OnceI have a sense of being the teacher of these particular students, my lifegets the order that it has. But there is nothing that ultimately grounds mybeing their teacher as opposed to somebody else’s, and so my life ultimatelylacks real significance. What we would really need is a deeply rootedbelonging to a place – a kind of belonging in which the things we dealwith 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 worldthat is moving swiftly toward abolishing all sense of place? This sort ofmattering or importance is not something we can bestow upon things bya free act of will. The only way to get it would be as a gift – a gift of placeor a gift of a thing of intrinsic worth. An attunement that allows thingsto show up as having an intrinsic worth, however, is precisely what we lostwith the death of God. So, it seems that a worthwhile life after the deathof God requires some new endowment of divine grace, an endowment inwhich we can once again be attuned to the sacred and divine. To finishthis thought, however, I need to say something more about the role thedivinities play for Heidegger in determining our place in the world.

BETWEEN THE EARTH AND THE SKY

Heidegger’s discussion of the divinities is part of his attempt to uncover theway that real things, as opposed to mere resources and technologicaldevices, show up. We have already outlined the role that a relationship tothe old God plays in allowing things and a world to “show up” (Heideggercalls it “unconcealment”). The old God attuned us to the sacred in thesense that he made objects have a significance independent of their use-fulness to our current projects. The divinities we strive to encounter in thefourfold 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 andthe sky, the divinities and our own mortality. Real things themselves, inturn, will embody the way earth, sky, mortals, and divinities condition eachother. Heidegger’s name for the interrelation of earth, sky, mortals, anddivinities is “the fourfold.”

Initially, Heidegger’s claim that things and dwelling require the mutual“appropriation” of earth and sky, “mortals and divinities,” is anythingbut clear. He tends to use each of the terms in an infuriatingly literalfashion – and does so frequently enough that the passages cannot simplybe ignored.


To cite a couple of my favorite examples, Heidegger tells us that the skycontributes to the essence of a jug as a jug-thing because the jug holdsand pours out wine and thus gathers the sky. The holding and pouring ofthe wine gathers the sky, he explains, because the grapes from which thewine is made “receive the rain and dew of the sky” (GA 7: 163–4/PLT:172). As a second example, the Black Forest peasant’s farmhouse gathersthe earth, he says, because it is placed on a “mountain slope . . . among themeadows close to the spring” (GA 7: 155/PLT: 260).

Philosophers are not used to such talk, so it is tempting either simply toignore these passages or to impose a metaphorical reading, which, giventhe densely poetical nature of Heidegger’s musings, can only be looselyconnected to the actual text.9 The unappealing alternative is to repeatlamely his semipoetic musings about the sky in the dew on the grapes(and so on). In terms of doing any philosophical work with Heidegger’snotion of the fourfold, the metaphorical reading is certainly preferable toa 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 wholepoint of Heidegger’s discussion of the fourfold. The four are meant, byHeidegger, quite literally. The earth is the earth beneath our feet, the earththat spreads out all around us as mountains and in trees, in rivers andstreams. The sky is the sky above our heads, the stars and constellations, thesun and the moon, the shifting weather that brings the changing seasons.We are the mortals – we and our companions – living our lives and dyingour deaths. And the divinities – the most elusive members of the fourfoldin this age – are divine beings, the “beckoning messengers of the Godhead.”To justify such a literal, straightforward reading of the fourfold, I need tobe able to say how a discussion of the earth, sky, mortals, and divinitiesshows 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 ofdiscovering things with existential importance. Heidegger’s 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, becausenone of them is essential to being who we are. Their flexibility andinterchangeability make them efficient but also prevent any of them fromplaying 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 singlequotation from, or citation of, Heidegger’s discussion of the fourfold. For interpretationswhich approach the literalness with which I think Heidegger should be read, see JamesC. Edwards, The Plain Sense of Things: The Fate of Religion in an Age of Normal Nihilism.University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997; Julian Young, Heidegger’s LaterPhilosophy. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2002; and Charles Taylor,“Heidegger, Language, and Ecology,” in Heidegger: A Critical Reader (Hubert L. Dreyfus &Harrison Hall, Eds.). Oxford, England: Blackwell, 1992, pp. 247–69.


understanding that orders our world], everything is set up in the constantreplaceability of the same through the same” (GA 79: 44). Real things, bycontrast, 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 instrumentalimportance is a result of a certain degree of conditioning of one object byanother. It is only because our activities are conditioned or constrainedby the objects with which we act that any particular object has instrumentalimportance. It is only because I want to build a house, for example, that ahammer matters more than a fountain pen. This is because the need todrive nails, and the nature of nails and boards, conditions the kind of toolsI 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 anymore weight than any other.

Therefore, for things to matter, there must be mutual conditioning.Heidegger’s name for the process of mutual condition is Ereignis, probablybest translated as “appropriation,” where this is heard not as saying thatwe take over as our own something that does not belong to us, but ratheras the mutual conditioning through which we and the things around us“come into our own” – that is, become what each can be when conditionedby 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 cannotcondition and thus cannot matter to us. The way to counteract the techno-logical age, then, is to allow ourselves to be conditioned. Precisely here iswhere the fourfold becomes important – namely, as a source of conditioningin our lives.

Heidegger’s name for living in such a way that we are conditioned orappropriated 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 practicesthe particular features of the environment around us. “Mortals dwell inthat 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 theearth would be to live in harmony with the desert, rather than pushing itaside by planting grass and lawns to replicate the gardens of the East. Thetechnology of modern irrigation and sprinkler systems allow us to push ourown 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 alsBedingung der Ankunft des Seienden: das Sein läßt 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 totheir land,”12 that is, when we come to be at home with our land in its owncharacteristics, not those enforced upon it.

We are conditioned by our sky when we incorporate into our practicesthe peculiar features of the temporal cycles of the heavens, the day andthe night, the seasons and the weather. We push aside the sky when, forexample, our eating habits demand food on call, out of season, or when ourpatterns of work, rest, and play make no allowance for the times of dayand year, or recognize no holy days or festivals.

We are conditioned by our mortality when our practices acknowledgeour temporal course on earth – both growth and suffering, health anddisease. Heidegger illustrates this through the example of the Black Forestpeasant hut, which was intimately conditioned by (and correspondinglyconditioning of) mortality: “It did not forget the altar corner behind thecommunity table; it made room in its chamber for the hallowed places ofchildbed and the ‘tree of the dead’ – for that is what they call a coffin there:the Totenbaum – and in this way it designed for the different generationsunder one roof the character of their journey through time” (GA 7: 155/BDT: 160). We push our mortality aside when we seek immediate grati-fication without discipline, when we set aside our own local culture, whenwe try to engineer biologically and pharmacologically an end to all infir-mity, including even death.

We are conditioned by the divinities when, for instance, we incorporateinto our practices a recognition of holy times and holy precincts – perhapsmanifested where one experiences the earth as God’s creation, or feels areverence for holy days or the sanctity of human life (GA 5: 27–8/BW:167). Hölderlin’s Hyperion expresses such a sense for divinity in the world:

And often, when I lay there among the flowers, basking in the delicate spring light,and looked up into the serene blue that embraced the warm earth, when I satunder 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 cloudsmoved over the dripping woods; or when the evening star, breathing the spirit ofpeace, rose with the age-old youths and the other heroes of the sky, and I saw howthe life in them moved on through the ether in eternal, effortless order, and thepeace of the world surrounded and rejoiced me, so that I was suddenly alert andlistening, yet did not know what was befalling me – “Do you love me, dear Father inHeaven,” 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 notjust condition us, however; they also condition each other. Heidegger saysthat the fourfold mirror each other by ringing or wrestling with each other.

12 Besinnung auf unser Wesen. Messkirch: Martin-Heidegger-Gesellschaft, 1994.13 Friedrich Hölderlin, “Hyperion,” in Hyperion and Selected Poems (Eric L. Santner, Ed.).

New York: Continuum, 1990, pp. 5–6.


Mirroring, Heidegger explains, consists in each member of the fourbecoming lighted, or intelligible, in the process of reflecting the others.I take this to mean, for instance, that the sky is only intelligible as the sky itis in terms of the interaction it has with the earth striving to spring forthas 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 inclementweather given the fruits the earth bears (or the activities of mortals), andthe earth first comes into its essence as the earth it is when “blossoming inthe grace of the sky.”14 More importantly for our purposes here, thedivinities only are divinities to the extent that they mirror and, mirroring,light up the other regions of the four. The implication is that Heidegger’sdivinities have to be beings who can condition and be conditioned bythe earth, the sky, and mortals. Conversely, the “default of the gods” thatcharacterizes our age is understood in terms of the failure of any divinebeing to condition us and the things around us: “The default of God meansthat no god any longer gathers men and things unto himself, visibly andunequivocally, and by such gathering disposes the world’s history andman’s sojourn in it” (GA 5: 269/PLT: 91).

With this in mind, let’s turn now to the question how such conditioningcan give us things that “near” – that have an importance that orients ourwhole life and not just the particular activities in which we are currentlyengaged. It is important to emphasize that we cannot have such thingsthrough a mere change of attitude – through merely deciding to treatresources as things. Things are not things in virtue of being represented orvalued in some special way, but rather by being shaped in light of thereceptivity that we have developed for our local earth, sky, mortals, anddivinities. If the objects with which our world is populated have not beenconditioned in that way (and resources are not), then they will not solicitthe practices we have developed for living on the earth, beneath the sky,before the divinities. As Heidegger explains, “nothing that stands todayas an object in the distanceless can ever be simply switched over into athing.”15 By the same token, Heidegger cannot be advocating a nostalgicreturn to living in Black Forest peasant farmhouses. He notes that “thingsas things do not ever come about if we merely avoid [technological] objectsand recollect former objects which perhaps were once on the way to becomingthings 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 läßt; das ist: Erblühen in der Huld desHimmels”).

15 GA 7: 174/PLT: 182. This passage, by the way, shows that the earlier reference to highwaybridges gathering must have been sloppiness on Heidegger’s part. If gathering is a term ofart for what things do – as Heidegger sometimes indeed uses it – then highway bridges cannotthing because they do not gather the divinities; they push them aside. Cf. Dreyfus andSpinosa, “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 mortalshave a different configuration. They might once have been things, in otherwords, but they cannot thing in our fourfold.

Thus, if we are to live with things, we ourselves need to “bring thefourfold’s essence into things” (GA 7: 146/PLT: 151). In other words, onthe basis of our reawakened receptivity to the four, we need to learn tomake things and nurture things into being more than mere resource,hence to let them embody the essence of our place or home – our earth,our sky, our mortality, and our divinities. Heidegger’s name for the activity ofconstructing and cultivating things in such a way that they contain orgather the fourfold is “building.” The idea is that, in building, things securethe fourfold because, in the way they draw us into action, they draw uponjust the kind of responsiveness that we have acquired by dwelling beforeour local divinities, earth, sky, and mortal practices. As Heidegger putsit, “building takes its standard over from the fourfold” (GA 7: 161). Whenour practices incorporate the fourfold, such things will have importancebeyond their instrumental use in our current activities because they andonly they are geared to our way of inhabiting the world. As a result, they,and only they, can be used to be who we are. We will thus finally be at homein our places because our practices are oriented to our places alone.

We might now wonder, however, why a relation to divinities is importantif things with existential importance are secured by a sense of place. Itseems that if we could foster practices for our earth, our sky, and ourmortality, we could have a receptivity to the world that could only be satisfiedby particular things, not generic resources. Those things would then, at leastif the argument I have outlined is correct, have existential importancewithout any mention of divinities. Thus the divinities seem superfluous.

I think that there are two answers to this problem. First, there is thetactical observation that given the seductiveness of resources and techno-logical devices, it would take an experience of the divine to awaken us tothe flaws in the technological age. The God, Heidegger says, “derangesus” – in the sense that he calls us beyond the existing configuration ofobjects to see things that shine forth with a kind of holiness (i.e., a dignityand worth that exceeds our will). Heidegger understands receptivity tothe sacred as the experience of being beheld – of recognizing that thereis 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 thefour, and brings it into a sacred own-ness. If we, in turn, are receptive toGod, our practices will embody a recognition that the technological reduc-tion of objects to resources is an act of presumption, for it proceeds onthe assumption that we are free to employ anything we encounter in anyway whatsoever. Once attuned by the divinities, technology will no longerbe 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 ofthem. So attuned, we may be able to establish what Heidegger calls a “freerelation” to technology – a relation in which we are able to use techno-logical devices to support our dwelling with things. But because the drawof technology is so strong, it is only a God who can save us, as Heideggeronce asserted.16

Second, there is something substantive that being conditioned by a Godadds to our sense of place – namely, it shows us our place as necessary forus. In fact, the old theological interpretation of God and the world wasnever able to do the job of giving us existential importance (we only had itin spite of the theological interpretation). The God of the philosophers wasa God removed from time and us personally. His primary role was theestablishment 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 intelligibilityhe helps light up, God could do no more than guarantee the intelligibilityof the world (and the thin instrumental mattering that comes with thatintelligibility).

I alluded above to the idea that, for Heidegger, the death of the onto-theological God actually might allow for a richer, more fulfilling sense ofthe divine. I can at this point start to redeem this claim. The onto-theological God gave things an importance that we were not free tochange. As the source of all intelligibility, that God decided what thingsreally were. But because he was beyond any being that we have experienceof, there was no way he could attune us directly, that is, no way he couldhelp give us a place in the whole cosmos that he had made intelligible, andthus no guarantee that we would live in such a way that the objects as Godknew them were existentially important to us.17 An openness to divinitiesthat themselves attune us, however, makes it possible to experience thingsin the world as sacred, and as making demands on us, which in turn allowsthem to have existential importance for us.

The death of the metaphysical God thus presents us with a great dangerbut also a unique opportunity to find a relationship to the divine that canendow our lives with deep importance. To be conditioned by the divinitiesis to discover God embodied – to find him present in our world. The deathof the theologian’s God offers us at least the possibility of a recovery of

16 “‘Only a God Can Save Us’: Der Spiegel’s Interview with Martin Heidegger,” in The HeideggerControversy: A Critical Reader (RichardWolin, Ed.). Cambridge,MA:MIT Press, 1992, pp. 91–116.

17 Kierkegaard makes just this point in Fear and Trembling, when he notes that if God “isunderstood 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 anyobject. As the source of our attunement, God would matter to us notjust in the sense that our practices require his presence for their fulfill-ment. He would also matter as the being that calls us into the kind ofengagement with the world that we would embody. He would, in short,be a God before whom we could pray, to whom we could sacrifice, infront of whom we could fall to our knees in awe (see GA 11: 77).

It should be obvious that the hope of finding this sort of divinity issomething we cannot bring about ourselves. All we can do is try to keepalive the practices that will attune us in such a way that we can experiencethe divine in the world. The only means we have available to this endare the religious practices we have inherited. Those who are conditionedby the divine, Heidegger explains, “await the divinities as divinities. In hopethey 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. Theydo not make their gods for themselves and do not worship idols. In thevery 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 ofreligious life is an end in itself. To the contrary, we can only be conditionedby the divine if we find our own authentic relationship to divinities. Theproblem is that, barring a new revelation, the only practices we have left forgetting in tune with the divine are the remnants of past religious practices.These, Heidegger thinks, must therefore be nurtured in order to preserve asense for the holy because God can only appear as a god in the dimensionof the holy. This, I take it, is the point of the somewhat enigmatic com-ments Heidegger made about religion in the course of his “Conversationswith a Buddhist Monk”: “I consider only one thing to be decisive: to followthe words of the founder. That alone – and neither the systems nor thedoctrines and dogmas are important. Religion is succession . . . Without thesacred we remain out of contact with the divinities. Without being touchedby the divinities, the experience of God fails to come” (GA 16: 590). Buteven remaining true to the practices we inherit from the founders ofreligions 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 onlypossibility 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 ofdecline; that we not, to put it coarsely, ‘come to a wretched end,’ but ratherif 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 untilNietzsche the history of metaphysics” (GA 48: 296). More precisely, thehistory that connects Plato to Nietzsche is the “unfolding of the essence ofmetaphysics 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 Heideggerin his project of criticizing the metaphysical tradition, given Nietzsche’s ownattacks on metaphysical and philosophical understandings of truth. And yet,Heidegger insists that Nietzsche too remains entangled in a metaphysicalaccount of truth. Understanding why this is so illuminates both Heidegger’sunderstanding of metaphysics and his views on truth.

Now, it would be ludicrous to try to read Nietzsche as adhering to ametaphysical account of truth in any traditional way. Nietzsche himselfdescribed metaphysical views of truth as “the history of an error,” the historyof “how the ‘true world’ finally became a fable” (Twilight of the Idols). The“true world,” he wrote, has become “an idea that is of no further use.” “Thetrue world is gone.”Moreover, he famously declared our holding things to betrue to be an error, “the kind of error without which a certain kind of livingbeings could not live” (WP: 493). For Nietzsche, it is an illusion that there aretrue things, and thus our reverence for the truth is error because it isdirected 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 illusion–and that one should value more than truth the forcethat forms, simplifies, shapes, invents” (WP: 602). The idea of ametaphysicaltruth 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 ofvalue. We have projected our conditions of preservation as predicates of being ingeneral. That we must be stable in our beliefs in order to thrive, from this it followsthat we have made the “true” world something that is not changeable and becoming,but rather something that is being. (WP: 507)

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Thus, given his obvious pains to distance himself from metaphysical notionsof a true world or a truth in itself, it is prima facie implausible to chargeNietzsche with a continued adherence to traditional accounts of truth. Tounderstand Heidegger’s interpretation and critique of Nietzsche, then, weneed to specify what exactly Heidegger considers to be objectionably meta-physical about traditional approaches to truth, and why it is that he thinksNietzsche’s rejection of traditional approaches did not succeed in extricat-ing him from metaphysical entanglements. Toward that end, let’s clarifywhat Heidegger means when he talks about “the truth of entities as suchand as a whole.”

1. THE MATERIAL AND ATTITUDINAL DIMENSIONS OF TRUTH

In contemporary philosophy, talk of truth is almost automatically construedas talk of propositional truth, of the conditions under which things likebeliefs and assertions succeed or fail in getting at the way things are in theworld. Heidegger is, in fact, only indirectly interested in theories about whatmakes a proposition true or false. To the extent that he considers suchtheories at all, he accepts that propositional truth amounts to some kind ofagreement with the way things are (see Chapters 1 and 2).

A key to understanding Heidegger’s account of the history of truth inmetaphysics, and especially his interpretation of Nietzsche’s account of truthis to keep squarely in mind that he is not offering a theory of propositionaltruth. Heidegger reads Nietzsche’s pronouncements about truth as pro-nouncements about ontological truth – truth as the truth about what entitiesare. “Truth for Nietzsche always means that which is true, and this means forhim: the entities which are made steady as that which is stable.” Indeed,Heidegger claims that it is precisely this that renders Nietzsche’s under-standing of truth metaphysical, for all metaphysical ages have shared theview 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 basicconception of the true, is in agreement with the tradition. The true is also for him thatwhich is sometimes called “the real,” for example in expressions like: something is “intruth” such and such – it is “in reality” such and such. The true is the entity, which asan entity is arranged and made steady, to which representation holds itself and musthold itself in order to be “correct,” that is, true. (GA 47: 108)

Heidegger’s discussion of the history of truth explores the history of differ-ent understandings of what entities truly are, which amounts to thinkingthrough historically different ways of determining what is steady and stable inthe entities we encounter.

Given the contemporary orientation toward propositional truth, this wayof talking and thinking about truth can seem quite foreign. But we can workour way into Heidegger’s 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 playwhen we ascribe truth to entities in ordinary language, and distinguishbetween 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). Falseblackberries exist every bit as much as true ones; so what is the basis forprivileging one above the other as “true”? As we saw, Heidegger traces theprivileging back to a preference for what he calls the steady (das Feste) or thestable (das Beständige). The steady or stable is that which we can count onfinding despite any superficial or accidental variations in appearance orconstitution, and thus that which we can reliably and consistently dependon to support the attitudes we take toward the entity. “That entity is true, the‘truth,’” Heidegger explains, “when one can, every time and genuinelyhold onto it as something stable and not-withdrawing; it is that on the basisof which one can get a hold” (GA 6.1: 488). The “false” blackberries, forinstance, are not true blackberries because they present themselves as whatthey are not. They look like the “true blackberry,” leading us to believe thatwe can use them to produce fruit, or plant them in certain settings. But whenwe do so, they will eventually not support our attitudes toward them because,appearances to the contrary, they will produce a different fruit, or grow toovigorously, 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 remainsstably 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 typicallyuse blackberries.

This example points to the fact that the material truth of entities is notdetermined independently of our ways of engaging with them – of, broadlyspeaking, our attitudes toward them. Entities show themselves for what theyare only within a context of activities and other related entities. An entity is“uncovered” in Heidegger’s vernacular when it is available to be readilytaken up into our activities; it meshes with our practices. The falseness ofthe false entities consists in the fact that what is relevant to our activities ishidden or concealed, and thus it does not lend itself to our practices. On thebasis of this relationship between attitudes and material truth, however, weare also in a position to distinguish between true and false attitudes. A trueattitude is one that uncovers the entity for what it is. If we intend to grow trueblackberries but plant the himalayan blackberry, then our act of planting wasa false attitude. This means that this kind of ontic or material dimension oftruth, the truth of entities, implies the notion of a right attitude or right

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


perspective from which to view things, and vice versa. So it is only in thecontext of horticulture that it makes sense to talk of “true” blackberries andfalse blackberries. And within that context, certain attitudes will succeed andothers will fail at discovering the truth about entities. Likewise, a “truefriend” can only appear within the context or setting of friendship practicesand the entities that support those practices – acting, intending, and beingdisposed in the way that friends are. Within that context, some attitudes willbe 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 considerabledistance away from mainstream philosophical uses of “true” and “truth” –first, by giving the notion of material truth pride of place in the account oftruth. I noted at the outset of this section that Heidegger had an indirectinterest in propositional truth. It is at this point that we reach the context forunderstanding the indirect nature of this interest. Propositional attitudes areunderstood as one (often privileged way) of allowing entities to show them-selves as what they are. But our interest in propositional truths is presumablydriven by the sense that having true propositional attitudes is a good way toget a grip on the surrounding world. And if that interest is determinative ofwhat counts as a true attitude, then there is no reason not to expand the“truth” bearing attitudes to include practical attitudes like intentions anddesires. Practical attitudes, after all, can succeed or fail at getting us in touchwith the way the world really is just as much as cognitive attitudes: “truth iscorrectness of representation, where ‘representation’means having entitiesbefore 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 reflects them. Truth means theadjustment of representation to what entities are and how they are” (GA 6.1:460). This passage makes clear that Heidegger wants to understand thetruth-bearing attitudes quite broadly to include any attitude in which ourcomportment toward entities can succeed or fail in being well adjusted to thecircumstances and, in the process, allow entities to be seen in their truth.Attitudes, including propositional attitudes, are true when they “conform toand are determined by entities.”

These two notions – the notion of material truth, manifested in our talk oftrue and false friends, blackberries, gold, or what have you, and the notionof attitudinal truth as a matter of which attitudes disclose the material truthof entities – together give us a preliminary grasp on the way Heidegger usesthe word true (and interprets Nietzsche’s use of the word true). But it is onlya preliminary grasp, because Heidegger’s focus is not the truth of this or thatparticular thing, but rather the truth of “entities as such and as a whole.”Heis interested in the truth of being – the truth of what entities are insofar asthey are entities at all. “The essence of truth,” Heidegger explains, “is thetruth of essence,” where ‘essence’ means what entities really and truly areinsofar as they are entities at all.


2. THE TRUTH OF ENTITIES AS SUCH AND AS A WHOLE

Another example will help us develop the idea of a truth of the being ofentities. As we saw in discussing material truth, the truth of what a thing is isrelative to a background context within which it appears. This context willinvolve both characteristic practices and uses of the thing, as well as a rich setof relations to other entities that belong to the context. Consider the waysentities show up in a carpenter’s workshop. In a workshop, things show whatthey are most perspicuously when we are using them in some project ofrepair or production. They are defined relative to practices (like hammer-ing, sawing, planing, and so on) but also through their relationships to otherentities. A nail, for example, shows itself most clearly as a nail when we aredriving it with a hammer, inserting it into boards in order to attach boards toeach other, and so on.

So far, we have said nothing more than we did in talking about thematerial truth of blackberries. But let’s focus now on the context itself,rather than the particular entities. It is the context that determines whatthe truth of any particular entity is, and thus understanding the contextgives us access to the truth of particular entities. A nail, for instance, is a nailbecause of the role it plays within the context of a carpenter’s workshop orworkspace, and we understand what a nail is by understanding this rolerelative to the whole network of activities, entities, aims, and standards forsuccessful performance within the context. The context is not a randomassortment of objects and practices. It has a coherence – all the entities andpractices 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 entityin the workshop is. It is also the case that there is a truth about the workshopitself – what kind of a coherence it has and what kind of a whole it is. To theextent that entities belong within this whole, there’s a general truth aboutwhat entities as a whole and as such are. They are all in truth the kind ofthings that belong in this whole. Within the workshop, entities as such andas 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 theworkshop determines that the equipmental use-properties and relations ofthe nail (as opposed to all the other properties and relationships it has) willdefine 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 ina retail hardware store. As a whole, they do not show up as equipment in thehardware store. They show up as mercantile goods. A mercantile good isrevealed not in the workman’s practices but in the shopper’s stance. Thisinvolves different forms of inspection and use (it would, in general, beinappropriate to drive nails into the boards on display in the hardwarestore). And it involves different forms of arrangement of entities vis-à-vis


each other (for instance, all the different kinds of hammers are shelvedtogether in the hardware store, rather than right next to the nails orboards). In the workshop, the arrangement of entities is dictated by theneed to have them readily available for working. Not so in the hardwarestore. There the arrangement is dictated by concerns about maximizingsales – popular items, for instance, are located in the rear of the store sothat shoppers will walk past other items on their way in and out of the store,thus increasing the likelihood of an impulse buy. Thus wemight say that thesame entities have a different truth in the different contexts: the tools andequipment of the workshop are really mercantile goods in the hardwarestore.

So just as a particular entity has a material truth about what it is, there is amaterial dimension to entities as a whole and as such within a context. It istheir being as equipment that dictates how the entities are to be related toeach other in the workshop; it is their being as mercantile goods that dictateshow entities are to be related to each other in the store. And just as we graspthe material truth of particular entities in an attitude, there is an attitudinaldimension to grasping entities as a whole and as such. We disclose theworkshop as such by a general readiness to build and repair things; wedisclose the hardware store as such by a general readiness to engage inmercantile exchanges. Whether we are perceiving and thinking about theworkshop in the right or “true” way (that is, in a way that adequatelyassimilates our activities to the kind of entities we encounter within theworld) is determined in the workshop by whether we successfully and com-petently and reliably repair what we need to repair or produce what we needto produce. When we are shopping in a store, by contrast, the rightness ortruth of our attitudes is determined by whether we competently and reliablyare able to carry out successfully a commercial transaction.

Of course, in one sense it seems right to say that, even in the hardwarestore, the individual tools are still determined as what they are by the contextof the workshop (a hammer is still for driving nails, a nail is still for attachingboards, and so on). This is because the hardware store is in a sense orientedto the equipmental context of the various different types of workshop andworkspace. 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 ultimatecontext 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 theentities that belong to a world – a truth about what they are in virtue of whichthey can find a place within the world.

But now, to move squarely from our illustrative examples to whatHeidegger has in mind when he discusses metaphysics as the history of thetruth of entities as such and as a whole, we need to ask not about anyparticular context but about the whole world as organizing and determiningall the different contexts.


Metaphysical Worlds

For Heidegger, metaphysics is not a subfield within philosophy, nor is it adoctrine of a particular philosopher. Rather, a metaphysic “is the truth ofentities as such and as a whole” (GA 66: 382). The history of metaphysics isthe history of different “epochs” of truth, that is, different unified under-standings of what entities truly are, and correspondingly different views ofwhat the privileged attitudes are for disclosing and grasping the truth.

It is not possible to appreciate Heidegger’s reading of truth in Nietzschewithout some sense for his overall narrative of the history of truth in meta-physics. Accordingly, let me briefly sketch out how Heidegger understandsthe permutations of truth leading up to Nietzsche. I’ll proceed by discussinga few of the major metaphysical epochs, with an eye to saying how theyunderstand 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: “thegenuine 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 worldaround us is found in the ideas or forms that they instantiate. The idea wasregarded as the truth of an entity because it was stable and would endureacross a variety of changes that a particular entity might undergo. Theattitudinal dimension of truth was understood as homoiôsis, whichHeidegger interprets as “adjustment” (Angleichung). A true attitude is aconforming attitude, that is, one in which our attitudes are “suited to” or“adjusted to” the true entities, the ideas: “all opening up of entities mustproceed so as to compare itself with the archetype, conform itself to themodel, adjust itself according to the idea. Truth . . . now becomes homoiôsisand mimêsis, adjusting, conforming oneself to [the entity], correctness ofseeing, of perceiving as representing” (GA 40: 195). For the Greeks, theôria isthe paradigmatic activity in which we achieve conformity with the truth, thatis, with the ideas. Through theory, concerned as it is with the ideas andconceptual structures of the world they make up, our attitudes becomeshaped by the ideas. We thus learn to see the sensory world in terms of theideas.

The Christian age grows out of this material understanding of truth.In Christianity, the truth of entities continues to be understood as anidea. 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, “inwhat it is and whether it is, the matter only is insofar as it, as somethingin each case created (ens creatum), corresponds to the idea preconceived inthe intellectus divinus, that is, in the mind of God, and thus is adapted to theidea (correct), and in this sense ‘true’” (GA 9: 181). The eternal and


unchanging nature of God’s understanding fixes what things really are, incontrast to the unstable and shifting way they appear to us humans whenviewed from our fallen and corrupted perspective. But the mind of God isnot something that shows itself of its own accord. Rather, access to the truthrequires our first correcting our attitudes so that they become oriented tothings in the way that God thinks them. This occurs through faith. Thuscorrectness comes to be understood not as conforming ourselves to the self-disclosing truth but as bringing ourselves into a fit state, so that we canmeasure up or be equal to the truth that is to be revealed. The true attitudesare thus characterized in terms of adaequatio, which Heidegger translates asAnmessung, “fitting,” “measuring up to” the truth. In the Christian world, weare called to think and believe and experience entities in such a way that ourthoughts are adequate to God’s understanding of the world: “the under-standing is adapted to the idea only by accomplishing in its propositions theconformity of the thought to the matter, which for its part must be inaccordance with the idea” (GA 9: 181). The paradigmatic activities forgetting our attitudes to fit or measure up to God’s understanding arecognitive ones – belief in the revealed word, or the study and learning ofchurch 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 preservedand 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 aboutentities, then the only reliable way for it remains to diligently compile and preservethe doctrine of the revelation and its transmission through the church teachers.Authentic truth is only mediated through the doctrina of the doctores. Truth has theessential character of “doctrine.” The medieval world and its history is based on thisdoctrina. The appropriate form in which alone knowledge can completely expressitself as doctrine is the “Summa,” the compilation of doctrinal writings in which thetotality of the traditional doctrinal content is organized and the different doctrinalopinions 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 thetruth of what things are because these attitudes enable them to see mostperspicuously the nature of God’s creation.

TheModern age, too, locates thematerial dimension of truth, the truth ofwhat entities really are, in the domain of the idea. But these ideas are nolonger conceived of as self-disclosive and self-subsistent forms (as for thephilosophic Greeks), nor as fixed in the mind of God and revealed tothe faithful (as for Christian metaphysics). Rather, the truth of what thingsare becomes what is representable to us as knowing subjects, whether therepresentation is arrived at empirically and inductively from the observationof entities, through introspection, or through a transcendental deduction.But without an independent domain of the forms or the mind of a creator


God to fix and stabilize the truth of what things are, how are we to determinewhich of the infinitely many possible modes of representing an entity is theone which delivers the entity to us as it truly is? As with the Greek and theChristian epochs, the Modern locates the material dimension of truth insomething stable, fixed, and unchanging – this time, what is reliably discov-erable when our cognitive faculties are operating correctly and optimally. Inthe Christian world, human beings were called upon to measure up to God’sunderstanding of us – indeed, it was Christian practices of repentance andfaith that brought us into a condition of being able to apprehend God’struth. According to Heidegger, this practice of securing our salvation bysuiting or adapting our faculties to God’s understanding is translated at thedawn of the Modern age into a concern with the correct functioning of ourrational capacities in order to secure the certainty of representation.Drawing a straight line from Luther’s concern with a good conscience forsecuring salvation (GA 54: 75), to Descartes’ imposition of rules for rightreasoning (GA 54: 76), to Kant’s “critique of pure reason” as the “essentialdelimitation of the correct and incorrect use of the human faculty of reason”(GA 54: 76), Heidegger concludes that inModernity, the true attitudes – theones in which we see most perspicuously the truth of entities – are those inwhich we achieve certainty:

In order to reach what is true as the right and correct things, human beings must becertain and secure of the right use of his basic abilities. The essence of truth isdetermined by this security and certainty. That which is true becomes what is securedand certain. Verum becomes certum. The question concerning truth becomes thequestion whether and how human beings could be certain and assured of both theentity 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 securelyand 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 thefollowing chart:

chart 10.1(a)

Material Dimension Attitudinal Dimension ParadigmaticActivity

PhilosophicGreek

idea – self-subsistentforms. The trueentities are ideas;concrete particularsare instantiations ofideas

homoiôsis – adjustment(Angleichung) of ourthoughts to forms

theôria idein


To decide whether the Nietzschean account of truth continues this meta-physical tradition or breaks with it, we need now to ask what characterizesmetaphysics in general. What are the traits of ametaphysical account of truthas such? Although there are significant changes from epoch to epoch,Heidegger identifies what we might call a network of common backgroundassumptions that shape the approach to truth from the Greek age throughthe modern. I will refer to these background assumptions as “theses,”although they are rarely if ever formulated as such. The point is rather thatthe various metaphysical views on truth can be understood as having beenshaped by a background understanding that these theses are trying tocapture or at least indicate.

Let us consider first the material dimension of truth. Although differentmetaphysical ages have identified different characteristics or traits as deter-minative of the truth of entities, each one of these characteristics was aneffort to capture what was most stable, and thus reliably and predictablyencounterable in the world. Thus the metaphysical tradition has alwaysdistinguished between a true world and mere appearances, and has takenthe truth of the true world to consist in some form of stability (Beständigkeit).For instance, in platonic metaphysics, the truth of entities is found in theunchanging forms that they instantiate because these remain stable through-out generation, variation, and corruption in the concrete particulars. InChristian metaphysics, the true world is the eternal world, in contrast tothe 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 wecan count on finding in it, what is stably or reliably discoverable. It is on the

chart 10.1(a) (cont.)


Christian ens creatum – an entitytruly is what Godconceives it to be

adaequatio – measuringup to (Anmessung) orbeing fit to receiveGod’s ideas

faith in therevealedword,learningchurchdoctrines

Modern ens certum – an entitytruly is that about itwhich serves as areliable basis forcognition

certainty – ascertain inadvance theinteractions thatentities could havewith each other

calculation

Technological/Nietzsche

? ? ?


basis of some form of stability that metaphysics can draw a distinctionbetween a true world and the world of appearances. The truth of things iswhat is stably, reliable, predictably ascertainable about them, while mereappearances are transient, and fluctuating. Thus, a primary feature of themetaphysics of truth is the background assumption of stability. We willarticulate this as:

1. The Stability Thesis : What entities truly are is found in that about themthat 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 whatwe happen to think about them. A second background assumption of themetaphysics of truth is thus:

2. The Independence Thesis : What entities truly are is independent ofthe particular thoughts, practices, and attitudes we have regardingthem.

The independence thesis might be seen as a consequence of the stabilitythesis. If what things truly are is what is stable about them, the reasoninggoes, then the truth of entities cannot depend on what any of us happen tothink of them, or how we use them, feel about them, relate to them, and soon. Our thoughts, practices, and attitudes are susceptible to considerablechange. If the truth of things were dependent on us in this way, then therecould be no stable truth about how things are.

Within a metaphysical age, moreover, it is not simply that case that eachtrue entity is stabilized into some way or other of being. Rather, the ageachieves a kind of coherence insofar as all the true entities share a charac-teristic way of being. Already in his “Ontology” course of 1923, Heideggerhad 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 aculture comes to expression, holds itself therein, and becomes obsolete”(GA 63: 36). Later, when he had developed an account of distinct epochs, hediscerned in each of these a pervasive uniformity. In the Beiträge, he noted“that dark priority that the One and that unity have everywhere in thethought of being” and identified this predilection for uniformity as some-thing from which we must free ourselves in order to make a transition out ofmetaphysical modes of thought. He traced the metaphysical emphasis onunity 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 fromthe “the uniformity of a calculation that can be planned on” (GA 7: 93).Thus we can articulate:


3. TheUniformity Thesis: All true entities share a single, uniform characteristicstyle.

These three metaphysical background assumptions about the materialdimension of truth contribute to the form that the attitudinal dimensiontakes within ametaphysics of truth. Because of the independence thesis – thesense that the truth about what things are is independent of the way theyshow themselves within many of the particular attitudes that we take towardthem, it follows that our access to the truth requires our taking up the correctattitude toward them. Indeed, the name for attitudinal truth in generalacross the entire metaphysical tradition is “correctness”: “to take somethingfor that which it is, to present it as being in such and such a way, in presentingit to conform oneself to that which emerges and encounters one – that isthe essence of truth as correctness” (GA 6.1: 462). This is in contrast to theway one would think of attitudinal truth if truth is understood as uncon-cealedness. Then, rather than looking for the uniquely right attitude forconforming oneself to what exists independently, one would open oneselfto the self-disclosing welling-up of being (phusis). The decisive transforma-tion toward a notion of attitudinal truth as taking up the right attitude andconforming oneself to what entities are, Heidegger argues, can be seen inPlato’s cave allegory:

If everywhere and in every comportment with entities it depends on the idein of theidea, on seeing the “visible form” of entities, then all efforts must first be concentratedon enabling such a seeing. That requires correct looking. The one freed within thecave, when turning away from the shadows and toward the things, already directs thelook at that which is “more in being” than the mere shadows: prosseite mallon ontatetrammenos 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 toanother consists in the looking becoming more correct. Everything is due to theorthotes, the correctness of the looking. Through this correctness, seeing and knowingbecome a correct seeing and knowing, so that in the end it goes directly to the highestidea and fixes itself in this “adjustment” (Ausrichtung). As a result of this conformity(Angleichung) of perception as an idein to the idea, a homoiôsis, a correspondence ofknowing with the things themselves, exists. In this way, a transformation of theessence of truth arises from the priority of the idea and of idein over alêtheia. Truthbecomes orthotes, correctness of perceiving and asserting. (GA 9: 230–1)

We see in this passage, first of all, the two dimensions of truth. The idea istruth in the material dimension, the true entity, the entity that is “more inbeing” than the things and shadows of the cave. The looking at entities in thelight of the ideas, the idein, is the attitudinal dimension, the correct percep-tion of material truth. There are, in addition, two aspects involved in thiscorrectness: an aspect of conformity to the true entities, entities that existindependently of the particular comportment or attitude we adopt towardthem. Second, there is an aspect of proper adjustment bymeans of which the


attitude gets oriented toward the true entities so that it can conform to them.These two aspects are in Plato scarcely distinguishable, yet we need toarticulate them separately to allow for the possibility that some metaphysicalages (like the modern) will put decidedly more emphasis on the properadjustment of the mind than on the conformity with an independentlyexisting reality. Thus we can say that in a metaphysics of truth, the attitudinaldimension involves:

4. The Conformity Thesis : Our attitudes are true by conforming to the wayentities are independently of our attitudes.

and5. 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 dimensionover the attitudinal dimension, and is primarily responsible for the over-shadowing of an understanding of truth as alêtheia – that is, of truth assomething that only exists in a disclosure.

As a result of a metaphysic’s understanding of the truth of entities ingeneral, it also holds a view about which human attitudes give us the mostlucid access to the truth of what entities are. Different metaphysical positionson what entities truly are privilege different attitudes as best discovering thetruth about entities. But all of them have privileged some propositionalattitude 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 issupported by the emphasis on stability in thematerial dimension of truth, forto be oriented toward what can be conceptually predicated of entities is to beoriented to what can stably and reliably be discovered in a variety of contextsand situations. Thus the final background assumption of the metaphysics oftruth is:

6. The Cognitivist Thesis : The best attitude for grasping what things trulyare is some species of cognitive attitude.

In Platonism, as we noted, we grasp the truth of what things are throughtheôria, that is, when we perceive and grasp them in the light of the ideas. Inthe Christian era, truth is discerned through understanding and believingthe revealed word. In the Cartesian form of modernity, for instance, truth isgrasped in a clear and distinct representation. As a result, there was atendency in the metaphysical tradition to think of the attitudinal dimensionas some form of agreement between complete cognitive units – proposi-tions – and states of affairs in the world. But Heidegger’s interest in theattitudinal dimension of truth differs in important ways from a theory ofpropositional truth. He makes no pretense, for instance, of offering neces-sary and sufficient conditions for the truth of a proposition. His question isnot 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 differentquestions – a proposition could be true without it giving us any kind of gripat all on the world. Because I trust the physicist down the hall, I might assentto and hold the proposition that there is a Higgs field. And this propositionmight very well be true (that is, it might correspond with the facts, or coherewith amaximal set of other beliefs, and so on – fill in your own favorite theoryof propositional truth here). And yet, I scarcely understand what it means. Itthus gives me almost no insight into the way things are, and I lack any way ofactually using this proposition inmy ordinary everyday engagements with theworld. Conversely, an attitude might give us a good grip on what things arewithout having a true proposition as its “content.” Indeed, a falsehood or awork of fiction might be better at orienting me to the important features ofthe world than a true proposition. It is possible, for instance, that the works ofHesiod and Homer introduce their listeners to what things are in theGreek world, to what is important, salient, and compelling about things inthat world, and thus help them successfully navigate the prephilosophicalGreekworld, even though there are almost no true propositions at all in thoseworks. 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 ofwhat 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 thepropositional content of those attitudes could agree with some fact or state ofaffairs in the world (assuming, that is, that they even have a propositionalcontent). But he has no interest at all in offering a theory that would explainhow to distinguish the true propositions from the false ones. Rather, he iscontent to observe that metaphysical epochs have tended to privilege prop-ositional attitudes in general as the best attitudes for discerning the truthabout entities (he disputes this privilege, by the way). He also observes thatthe epochs have differed in the particular type of propositional attitude theyhave privileged. For example, we have seen that modernity has privilegedthose cognitions that are certain (when, for instance, Descartes makes clearand distinct perceptions foundational for determining what things are),whereas the Christian age privileged faith in the revealed word and doctrinalunderstanding. But in making such claims about the different epochs,Heidegger is not claiming, for instance, that modernity has defined thetruth of the proposition as certainty. There might well be – there almostcertainly are – true propositions that are not certain. But uncertain proposi-tions could not be foundational for discovering the truth about what entitiesare. Still, there is just enough overlap between the question of the nature ofpropositional truth and the question of which attitudes are understood asdisclosing the truth of entities to mislead many into thinking thatHeidegger’s discussion of the latter are inquiries into the former.


With the transition from the Modern age to its completion in theTechnological age, Heidegger believes that something important changesin the metaphysics of truth. The six background assumptions we have iden-tified take a decidedly different form, although Heidegger insists that onecannot understand our age without recognizing the extent to which theyremain in force. Heidegger’s reflection on Nietzsche’s philosophy is aimedprimarily at working through these hidden metaphysical elements of thecontemporary Technological age. With this more detailed account of themetaphysics of truth in place, we are now in a position to understandHeidegger’s critique of Nietzsche, and his charge that Nietzsche, evenwhile overturning the metaphysical tradition, remains entangled in a meta-physics of truth.

3. NIETZSCHE AND THE METAPHYSICS OF TRUTH

Let’s return now to the passages from Nietzsche with which we began thischapter. As long as one has only a vague sense of a metaphysics of truth assomehow involving a belief in suprasensuous or transcendent or ultimatetruths, 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 isan error or an illusion. I do not mean to downplay the significance ofNietzsche’s critique of truth as an error. Heidegger himself acknowledgesthat Nietzsche’s views of truth represent an important departure from themetaphysical tradition. In fact, Heidegger’s own approach to overcomingmetaphysics is heavily indebted to his reading of Nietzsche’s critiqueof metaphysics and efforts to discover a postmetaphysical mode of thought.And yet, Heidegger insists that Nietzsche, and with him the contemporaryage, continues to hold to certain core features of the metaphysical view ofthe truth of entities, albeit in a way that significantly transforms traditionalapproaches to metaphysics. Thinking in terms of the six backgroundassumptions about truth allows us to explain why.

Heidegger’s interpretation of Nietzsche is summarized in the followingpassage:

The truth, which is conceived [by Nietzsche] as error, was defined as what has beenmade secure, the stable. But what is thought to be error in this way necessarily thinkstruth in the sense of being attuned2 to the real, that is, with becoming chaos. Truth aserror is a missing the truth. Truth is a missing the truth. In the unambiguous essentialdetermination 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, whichmeans literally to be of one voice orto be in tune with each other. It is formed from the verb einstimmen, whichmeans “to join in” or“to get in the right mood or attunement.”Heidegger clearly means the term to have that kindof force.


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

This is an extremely dense passage, involving a series of claims made in veryshort order. Heidegger begins by invoking the material dimension of truthand arguing that Nietzsche accepts the stability thesis: what is true is thestable or secured. Nietzsche accepts the thesis, but only in order to deny thatit succeeds in capturing the way things really are. But to insist withoutcontradiction that truth is an illusion or error, Nietzsche must draw on thedistinction between the material and attitudinal dimensions of truth, whereattitudinal truth in general is being correctly attuned with what is. Attitudinaltruth in the metaphysical tradition is a matter of getting attuned to orproperly disposed so that the true can show itself as it is in itself. Thedistinction between the attitudinal and the material dimension opens upthe conceptual possibility for something to be both true and false – materi-ally true but attitudinally false, for instance. But in order to be realized, thisconceptual possibility requires us to draw another distinction that will let theattitudinal and material dimensions actually come apart – a distinctionbetween truth – what is true – and reality. With that second distinction inplace, 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 sothat true, that is, stable, entities show up is to fail to be attuned to the way theworld really is. And this is in fact the case for Nietzsche, as he holds thatreality itself is not composed of stable entities, but rather consists of aconstant flow of becoming. Heidegger explains:

Truth in the sense of what is true – the purported entities in the sense of that which isstable, fixed and immutable – is then illusion if the world “is” not something that is inbeing but rather it is something “becoming.” A knowledge that as true takes some-thing to be “being” in the sense of the stable and fixed, holds onto entities and yetdoes not find that which is real: the world as a becoming world. (GA 6.1: 493)

On Heidegger’s interpretation, then, when Nietzsche says that truth is anerror, this means that when we are so adapted that we can perceive stableentities, we miss the reality of the world. Tuning our perceptive capacities forstable entities means that we lose a grip on the world as it really is – a constantbecoming or “chaos.” An understanding and apprehension of the truth is“knowledge.” Thus we find Nietzsche arguing that what is needed is not “‘toknow’ but rather to schematize, to impose on chaos as much regularity andform as our practical needs require” (WP §515).

What does it mean to say that ultimate reality is “chaos”? Chaos is, first ofall, as we just noted, something that cannot be grasped by attitudes oriented


toward what is stable, reliable, what can be counted on in advance. Thuschaos cannot be grasped by a propositional attitude. But this does not meanthat chaos is some kind of raw, propertyless given: “‘chaos’ speaks forNietzsche as a name that does not mean any sort of arbitrary confusion inthe field of sensations, perhaps it does not mean a confusion at all . . . .Nietzsche also does not mean with ‘chaos’ what is simply disorganized in itsdisorganization, nor that which stands in disarray arising from the removal ofevery order” (GA 6.1: 509). The chaotic is not conceptually graspable andyet it has an order to it: “chaos is that which is urging, flowing, moved, whoseorder is concealed, whose law we do not know immediately” (ibid.). Theultimate reality is an “unmastered richness” that can only ever be knownpartially, and only through our bodily understanding of how to cope with theflowing and streaming, constantly altering domain of perception and action:“we encounter chaos bodily, that is, in bodily states, chaos being included inthese 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 ofthe situation in ways that we can scarcely understand and describe verypoorly – are able to make sense of and find their way in the constantlychanging, moving, altering “chaotic” perceptual array (see GA 6.1: 509).Heidegger calls this skillful bodily action “bodying” (Leiben) to capture theway in which our body responds smoothly to demands of the concretesituation without needing any deliberate, reflective, or cognitive guidance.For skillful embodied beings who are “bodying,” there are no fixed andstable entities; only a constantly shifting and flowing 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 onNietzsche’s ability to pull apart the true and the real, to hold that what istrue (that is, stable) is not real (that is, chaos). By distinguishing truth andreality in this way, Nietzsche is in a position to denymany of themetaphysicaltheses with regard to truth.

But, Heidegger argues, this position is won by simply shifting the locus ofNietzsche’s metaphysical commitments from truth to reality. Nietzscheremains entangled in the metaphysical understanding of the materialdimension of truth insofar as he continues to hold that what an entity reallyor 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, butrather something that is being

Heidegger takes this to mean:

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


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 notstable. Thus, Nietzsche simultaneously affirms the stability thesis with regardto truth, but also denies it with regard to reality:

the truth that was conceived as error” by Nietzsche “would be defined as what is madesecure, that which is stable. But error understood in this way necessarily thinks truth inthe 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 inthat about them which is stable across changes,

but denies:10. The Stability Thesis with respect to reality: Reality is found in that about

entities which is stable across changes.

So Nietzsche accepts the metaphysical understanding of truth as stability.But whereas in previousmetaphysical ages the commitment to the true entityas a stable entity simply was a commitment to a stable reality of things,Nietzsche now argues that the true entities are temporary stabilizations ofan ultimate reality that is unstable, chaotic, and in constant flux. Thus,although he retains the stability thesis with respect to truth, he relativizestruth to a background understanding of chaos as ultimate reality and in thisway frees himself of a metaphysical commitment to the essential stability ofreality. This is, from Heidegger’s perspective, a genuine advance, a step outof metaphysics.

Rather than seeing stability as an inherent feature of reality, Nietzscheholds that stability arises only with respect to particular, relatively stable andenduring human practices and perspectives. But to hold this amounts todenying the independence thesis with respect to truth, to denying that whatentities truly are is independent of the particular thoughts, practices, andattitudes we have regarding them. It is along these lines that Heidegger readsNietzsche’s claim that

Truth is the kind of error without which a certain type of living being could not live. Inthe end, the value for life decides. (WP §493)

On Heidegger’s interpretation, to say that the “value for life” decides thetruth does notmean that we hold true those propositions, the belief in whichenhances life. Rather, it is to say that what entities truly are is determined byseeing them in the light of what is required for the practical conduct of ourlives to succeed. On a crudely biologistic reading, for instance, one might saythat this entity (indicating a pizza) is truly food as opposed to something elsebecause it is as food that it is most directly relevant to the preservation of


bodily functions and thus contributes to the successful transmissionand perpetuation of genetic material. But, we must immediately add,Heidegger insists that Nietzsche not be read in such crudely biologicalterms. Instead, there are a variety of ways to understand the successfulconduct of life, just as there are a variety of possible perspectives one cantake on what is of value to life (including the biological). One lives one’s lifeby taking up a particular perspective on life, by inhabiting a particularpossibility or range of possibilities. One’s perspective on the world is laidout 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 individual’scurrent perspective on existence.

But Nietzsche also has a view about how to understand life in general. Theessence of life is understood in terms of the capacity for self-transformationand, in the highest instance, the opening up of whole new registers ofmeaning and domains of possibilities:

Which essential characteristics value has as a condition of life depends on the essenceof “life,” depends on what is distinctive about this essence. When Nietzsche says theessence of life is life-enhancement, then the question arises: what belongs to theessence of such enhancement? Enhancement, and especially such an enhancementas 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 ofitself before itself and shows itself and admits itself into a possibility that is as yetunattained. (GA 6.1: 439)

Thus what is most valuable for life, because it lets life most fully realize itsessence, is whatever allows life enhancement, where life enhancementmeans the ability to open up new, previously unavailable possibilities, andto do this not in response to outside compulsion but by oneself. The truth ofwhat things are, then, is a function of the way they contribute to our capacityfor life enhancement understood as self-overcoming. That means that truthis fixed or determined by praxis in the broad sense – praxis as living a life,rather than pursuing this or that particular practical aim or goal. The aim ofpraxis in general is to live life in such way as to be able to “admit oneself intoan as yet unattained possibility” (see GA 6.1: 514 ff.).

And yet, most of the time, one must conduct one’s life within a particularperspective, and that means one must deal with entities as stabilized relativeto the practices of that perspective, rather than destabilizing them by shiftinginto new possibilities. Even within a particular perspective, however, oneholds onto the transformative, enhancing essence of life by seeing truth as avalue – that is, by recognizing that what things truly are is a temporaryfunction of the particular perspective one inhabits at this moment. If truthsare 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 theworld, 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 ofNietzsche’s account of material truth, we can say that for him the true entityis a value, and to experience something as a value is precisely to see it as astabilization, 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 necessaryvalue for the will to power. In each case, however, the stabilizing solidifies becoming.Hence what is true, because it is something stable, presents the real which essences inbecoming in precisely such a way that it is not. What is true is in this way that which isnot adequate to what is in the sense of the becoming, that is, the genuinely real, andthus the true is the false – when indeed the essence of truth is thought as conformityof representation to the matter, according to the long-familiar metaphysical defini-tion. And Nietzsche in fact thinks the essence of truth in this sense. How else could heexpress his corresponding essential delimitation of truth thus: “Truth is the kind oferror without which a certain type of living being could not live. In the end, the valuefor life decides.” (GA 6.2: 283, quoting WM, n. 493)

In this sense, to experience truth as a value is decidedly different from theway material truth has been opened up within the metaphysical tradition.There is now no absolute, unchanging, independent, uniform way of fixingwhat entities truly are:

There is no “true world” in the sense of a world that is unchanging, eternally valid.The thought of the true world, as something that first provides themeasure on its ownand for everything, thinks nothing. The thought of a true world conceived in this waymust be abolished. (GA 6.1: 561)

But that’s not to abolish the notion of truth all together. What is true (inthe material sense) is what was formerly dismissed as a mere appearance –

namely, the values that appear to a particular individual from a particularperspective. Entities can show up as values because, in reality, there are nostable and enduring entities. So if Nietzsche rejects that independence thesiswith respect to truth, he nevertheless accepts:

20. The Independence Thesis with respect to reality: What really is is inde-pendent of the particular thoughts, practices, and attitudes we haveregarding it.

In particular, reality is chaos in the sense outlined above, and remains soregardless of whether we understand it as such or not. In addition, if there isno uniform style that all entities share (since they are constituted as entitiesonly 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 withthe world. Thus Nietzsche accepts:

30. The Uniformity Thesis with respect to reality: What is real has a single,uniform characteristic style.

To be specific, the real is eternally recurring will to power. No matter howparticular entities show up, they do so against the background of reality aschaos. What is it like for every entity, as an entity, to manifest itself as will topower? Nothing shows up as having a fixed nature, inherent uses, set goals,or limits on permissible use. To inhabit a world where everything is as will topower is to experience everything in the world as permitting a constantovercoming. This means that no entity could or would demand of us thatwe 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. Tosay that the chaos is eternally recurring means that there is no fixed andbinding way of relating things, no standing obligations to prior arrange-ments, and so on. We find ourselves constantly returned to a situationwhere we are free to rearrange and reestablish our own interpretation ofthe world. What things are is open to reconfiguration (thus, entities areunstable), but that they are open to reconfiguration is uniformly the case.

Before turning to the attitudinal dimension of truth, let’s briefly summa-rize what we have learned about Nietzsche’s take on the material dimension.Nietzsche holds on to the notion of the true entity as a stable entity. Butbecause he rejects the idea of a true world in itself (an independent truth), aswell as a nonperspectival truth (a uniform truth), there’s a sense in whichNietzsche has rejected the metaphysics of material truth. The stability isonly a relative stability of a particular value for a particular perspective.Heidegger is in fact tremendously indebted to Nietzsche’s recognition ofthe nonstable nature of ultimate reality – this underlying ontology is whatallows for the possibility of a sequence of historical worlds. His engagementwith Nietzsche’s thought is thus an important stage inHeidegger’s own effortto overcome metaphysics. And yet, Heidegger contends, Nietzsche’s rejec-tion of a metaphysics of material truth is purchased by reinscribing meta-physics at the level of reality – to be specific, by positing an independent anduniform reality. Nietzsche has unthinkingly succumbed to a metaphysics ofthe real by positing that ultimate reality is uniformly and independentlyrecurring will to power. To overcome metaphysics truly, we would need toabandon the idea that there is any one way things are in themselves, inde-pendently of us. Instead, we would accept a “logic” of unconcealment – ofbeing and our human existence or Dasein mutually adapting to each other,and thus being able to emerge into an indefinite variety of distinct waysof being.

Heidegger’s critique of Nietzsche’s account of attitudinal truth follows asimilar pattern. That is, Heidegger acknowledges that Nietzsche has in an


important respect rejected a metaphysical understanding of truth, but onlyon the basis of reinscribing metaphysics at a higher level by according aprivilege to some attitudes as those by which we gain access to the indepen-dent and uniform reality. But even here, Heidegger finds certain aspects ofNietzsche’s account of our grasp of reality quite salutary. For instance,Heidegger finds in Nietzsche a valuable ally in combatting cognitivism.This is because Nietzsche denies not just the cognitivist thesis with respectto truth (6), but he also denies its analogue:

60. The Cognitivist Thesis with respect to reality: The best attitude for graspingreality is some species of cognitive attitude.

We saw this in the discussion of chaos and bodying above – the becomingcharacter of existence is disclosed most perspicuously not in a cognitive andrationally articulable understanding of things, but in our bodily skills forcoping with the constantly shifting worldly situation. Thus our cognitivegrasp of the truth about entities is for both thinkers derivative of ourprecognitive practices and coping skills for engaging with the world (seeChapters 1 and 2).

According to Heidegger, Nietzsche quite rightly understands our atti-tudes as “stances,” ways of poising ourselves and prefiguring in advancewhat entities and objects we can encounter. By privileging reason, themetaphysical tradition adopted a basic stance (Grundhaltung) (GA 6.1:498) on the world that “anticipated similarity and sameness as the groundfor stability” (GA 6.1: 555). An attitude is true for the metaphysical traditionif it discloses true, that is, stable, entities. But, as we have seen, what shows upas stable is itself an illusion, according to Nietzsche. Thus an attitude thatanticipates stability is itself untrue, an error:

that which is true [i.e., stable entities] for this truth [i.e., the attitudinal orientation ofthe metaphysical tradition] is not the true [i.e., not what really exists], for the true ofthis truth means that which is represented as stable, that which is made secure as anentity. In the guiding perspective on chaos, this securing proves to be a mistakensolidification of becoming; the solidification becomes the denial of that which flowsand presses beyond itself; the solidification is a turning away from the genuinely real.The true as that which is mistakenly solidified andmade secure is, through this denialof chaos, excluded from agreement with the genuinely real. That which is true in thistruth is from the perspective of chaos not adequate to this chaos, thus untrue, thuserror. Nietzsche expresses this unequivocally in the proposition to which we alreadyreferred: ‘truth is the kind of error without which a certain kind of living being couldnot live.’ (WP, n. 493; 1885) (GA 6.1: 558)

Heidegger calls the attitudinal dimension of truth a “Für-wahr-halten,” astance 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 asthey really are – for the ancient Greeks, this was theôria; for the medievalChristians, 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 interactionsthe entity could have with other entities in the world. Once again, this doesnot mean that a proposition is true if and only if (for Christian metaphysics)it is one in which we have faith or (formodernmetaphysics) it is one of whichwe are certain. Rather, the claim is that what entities truly are can only beascertained within such an attitudinal hold on the world, or that only in sucha stance can we distinguish between what is true of an entity and what is false.I’ll refer to an attitude which is oriented toward that in entities which is stableand independent as a “truth-directed” attitude.

Nietzsche remains entangled in metaphysics because his continuedadherence to the metaphysical understanding of attitudinal truth under-writes both his dismissal of the truth-directed attitudes as falsification, as wellas his privileging of art over truth. It is because attitudinal truth is conformityto independent entities – the entities as they are in themselves – that theattitudes that are directed toward truths (i.e., values) are falsifications. Forvalues only exist within a practice of stabilizing the chaotic flow into perspec-tival values, and they are only disclosed when we take up a perspective withina horizon of possibilities and evaluate the world from that perspective. ThusNietzsche’s view is not a rejection of:

4. The Conformity Thesis with respect to truth: Our attitudes are true byconforming to the way entities are independently of our attitudes.

It is rather an embrace of it. Nietzsche accepts the conformity thesis – somuch so that it is his basis for holding that the truth-directed attitudes arefalse, for they precisely do not conform to an attitude independent reality.

But the commitment to the conformity thesis alone is not a seriousentanglement with metaphysics because of the way the conformity thesisand the adjustment thesis come apart in Nietzsche’s work. The reason ourtruth-directed attitudes are an error is that to hold them, and thus to be ableto perceive stable entities, is precisely to fail to be properly adjusted by thechaotic reality of a flowing and becoming world. Thus, in calling truth anillusion, Nietzsche implicitly rejects:

5. The Adjustment Thesis with respect to truth: The truth of entities is onlyaccessible when we have properly adjusted our attitudes so as to orientthem to reality.

He rejects this thesis because to orient our attitudes toward reality is to loseour grip on the values as valuable – it is to see them rather as something to beovercome. 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 aremomentary and perspectivally indexed takeson a reality that cannot be definitively established or fixed.

Heidegger does think Nietzsche remains entangled in the metaphysics oftruth in another significant way, however, because he maintains the ideal of


conformity and adjustment in our relationship to reality. We can detectNietzsche’s continued adherence to the background metaphysical assump-tions in his claim that “art is worth more than truth” (WP §853). The reasonfor privileging art over truth is precisely that, in artistic creation, we moreperspicuously disclose chaotic reality than in ordinary estimations of value.The notion of conformity has to change, of course, in that there are nolonger any independently existing entities to which we need to conform. Butthere is an independently existing reality to which we need to accommodateourselves. Heidegger signals this difference by saying that, rather than “con-formity” (Angleichung), art succeeds as an assimilation (Eingleichung) – ameshing into or getting our lives into gear with the chaotic reality of theword.Homoiôsis in Nietzsche’s thought becomes: “assimilation (Eingleichung)and admission (Einweisung) of human life into chaos. . . . This assimilation isnot an imitating and reproducing conformity to what is occurrent, butrather: a perspectival-horizonal transfiguration that commands-dictates”(GA 6.1: 573). Thus Heidegger sees Nietzsche as abandoning the conform-ity thesis with respect to truth but adhering to:

40. The Conformity Thesis with respect to reality: Our attitudes succeed byassimilating us to the way reality is independently of our attitudes.

Finally, something like the adjustment thesis with respect to truth is alsoreincribed at the level of chaotic reality. Nietzsche “in no way rejects thistraditional and, as it would like to appear, most natural essential definition oftruth. Rather, it remains the guideline for positing the essence of truth asmaking secure in contrast with art, which is as a transfiguration an attune-ment with that which becomes and its possibilities, and is precisely on thebasis 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 conductingoneself that is open to possibilities for transfiguration, of moving beyondcurrently available possibilities, and thus overcoming the constraints of pastperspectival evaluations of the world. The higher value accorded to art isgrounded in something like:

50. The Adjustment Thesis with respect to reality: Reality is only accessible whenwe 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 andperceptual capacities into proper adjustment or conformity with the waythings really are. Rather, the true entities are perspectival values, which areposited relative to our way of existence. The truth presupposes a form of liferather than waiting for us to get into the right form of life to access it. Theonly 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 ofthe world.

Nietzsche’s objection to the attitudinal dimension of the metaphysicaltradition, then, is first of all its assumption that getting a grip on things is amatter 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 isno objective, occurrent truth in itself. The stance in which we get a hold onthe way things really are is thus not an adaptive stance but a “dictatingpositing in advance,” a stance in which we set them up as what they trulyare. Nietzsche’s name for this stance, Heidegger claims, is “justness”(Gerechtigkeit):3 “by justness Nietzsche understands that which makes truthpossible and necessary – truth in the sense of holding-for-true, that is, theassimilation to chaos” (GA 6.1: 575).

Nietzsche’s view of truth as justness is a rejection of previous metaphysicalaccounts of truth because the stances that metaphysics heretofore privilegedfor delivering truth are precisely the ones that Nietzsche believes obscurethe way things really are. And yet, truth as justness remains shaped by meta-physical background assumptions. When “truth becomes justness . . . theinitial essence of truth is transformed in such a way that the transformationamounts 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 nolonger 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 givena subsidiary role in the project of overcoming: “all correctness is merely apreliminary stage and occasion for surpassing, every making firm merely abase 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 losesits 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 thechange in truth – the devaluation of truth as traditionally understood follow-ing the separation of truth and reality, and the continued entanglement ofreality in the metaphysical background assumptions of truth.

The attitude of justness, Heidegger explains, is concerned with what is justor right, which Nietzsche defines as “the will to make eternal a particularrelationship of power” (GA 6.2: 28, quoting Nietzsche XIII, 205). “But thatwhich is right, that which shows the direction and gives the measure,” on

3 I translate “Gerechtigkeit” as “justness” rather than the more conventional “justice,” becauseHeidegger 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 isconventionally just in either a legal or moral sense, one has completely missed the point. Whatone is to hear in “Gerechtigkeit” is rightness, justice as “just-right-ness” (to indulge in a pun), inparticular, the attitude that is just right or suitable for disclosing the world as chaos. Thearchaic English word “justness” had the sense of rightness or suitableness, rather than aconnotation of moral justice.


Nietzsche’s account, “does not exist in itself” (GA 6.2: 28–9). So the “partic-ular relationship of power” that justness wills to make eternal, is one in whichwe “bring out entities as a form of will to power” (GA 6.2: 295–6). That powerrelationship demanded by the will to power is one the permits a constantenhancement of power. What ought to characterize our attitudes, then, isthat we always act and think and intend and otherwise direct ourselvestoward the world so as to facilitate constant empowering: “the mode ofjustification proper to the new justness” – that is, the success conditions ofour world-directed attitudes – “consists neither inmeasuring up to occurrententities, nor in the appeal to laws that are valid in themselves. Within thedomain of the will to power, every demand for a justification of this typeremains without either ground or a response” (GA 6.2: 295). The attitudesare not justified in the way truths were – by adjusting and conforming to astable reality. Instead, they are adjusted to a chaotic reality, and will succeedin giving us a grip on this reality only if they “remain exclusively related to thepreservation” 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 truerelationship of measure and rank that subsists in itself, but rather the newjustness is active and before all else ‘aggressive’: it first sets up from its ownpower what should be called right and wrong” (GA 6.2: 176). Justness isbeing always prepared to encounter entities as amenable to revaluation. In atechnological world, a properly adjusted attitude is one that experiences theminimal constraints possible on what things are, how they can be used andexploited, or how they should be related to each other. Justness in thedefined sense is the general property or trait of those attitudes that willhelp us get such a grip on a technological world.

Thus justness is the general characteristic of all attitudes that permit usconstantly to go beyond current arrangements toward new ways of valuingand organizing things. In Heidegger’s words, “justness is a perspective-positing passage beyond previous perspectives” (GA 6.2: 294). The old valueof 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 injustice, Heidegger puts considerable weight on an unpublished note thatNietzsche wrote in 1884, entitled “the ways of freedom.” Among the ways offreedom that Nietzsche lists, he includes “cutting oneself off from one’s past(against fatherland, faith, parents, companions),” “dealings with outcasts ofall kinds (in history and society),” “overthrowing that which is most revered,accepting what is most forbidden,” “committing all crimes,” and “attemptinga 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, arisingfrom assessments of value: the highest representative of life itself.” Then, of


wisdom, he notes: “wisdom and its relationship to power: some day power willbe more influential – up until now error was, the rabble’s assessment of valueis still too great even in those who are wise” (ibid.). In this passage, then,Nietzsche offers first a set of practical means to liberate our tastes anddispositions from fixed, inherited, and conventional ways of experiencingand engaging with the world. But as the concluding remarks make clear, thepoint is not simply to promote sociopathic criminality and immorality.Rather, the aim is freedom as control over one’s perspectives, a controlthat attains life in its highest dignity, a control that lets the true nature ofpower emerge as definitive of wisdom. In Heidegger’s terms, this passageshows that for Nietzsche, “authentically being free is justness” (GA 6.1: 576).The passage concludes by distinguishing “the rabble’s assessment of value”from power. The rabble believes that values are fixed and inherent in theworld. The perspective of justness, oriented toward power, understands thatvalues are temporary consolidations in the service of ever-enhanced power.

An important dimension of justness will be the ability not merely torespond to things as values, but also to create a whole new horizon forvaluation. Nietzsche calls the latter ability “art,” a practical orientation inwhich one both responds to the richness of meanings that the situationoffers, but also uncovers and creates different meanings – meanings thatmight well be incompatible with the current range of meanings we areresponding to. Art discloses chaos because chaos involves the idea that nosingle way of making sense of the world can exhaust its richness. Such anattitudinal orientation to the world is well characterized as freedom – bothfreedom to respond to possibilities offered to us (i.e., the capacity to pick upand employ significations in the world), and also freedom from gettingcaught in any single way of responding to the world. It will involve, asNietzsche’s note suggests, moments of construction, sorting out, and anni-hilating. To say that it is constructive, Heidegger explains, means that it doesnot simply deal with what is given to it on the basis of existing skills anddispositions. Such an attitude: “first creates such a thing as never yet andperhaps never at all stands and endures as something occurrent. It does notappeal 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 thepositing of a horizon within a perspective” (GA 6.1: 577–8). Unlike tradi-tions attitudes of truth, then, the point is not to correctly represent or bringinto view what exists independently of us. Rather, it is to dictate, to reachout and anticipate in a new way, so that the world gets restructured. Thatmeans that “constructing” is not simply an activity of producing entities.Rather, it is a whole new orientation to the world – an orientation inwhich 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. Putmore precisely, it first gains a height, secures it and thus sets up a direction.


From this point of view, ‘constructing’ is a commanding, which first raises theclaim to command and creates a domain of command” (GA 6.1: 577–8). Aheight is a position from which we attain a new view on the world, one thatgoes beyond the limitations of our previous perspective. Justice, as theattitude that discloses the chaotic nature of the world, must constantly besetting up new views, perspectives, ways of being oriented in the world.

But, of course, the world does not permit us to do just anything we please.The chaos we encounter has meanings, significations of its own, and thatmeans that it resists us. Thus the attitude that allows chaos to appear as suchcannot 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 respondto it as it develops a new form of responsiveness to the chaos that impinges onus. Heidegger explains that this constructing attitude “is at the same time a‘sorting’. The constructing thus in advance never moves in a vacuum; itmoves within something that pushes forward and forces itself on us asostensibly 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 judgementregarding measures and heights, and first form itself in the time-space inwhich it erects its measures and heights and opens its views. Constructingproceeds through decisions” (GA 6.1: 578). Thus, in responding to chaos,we need to sort through what the world offers, adjusting ourselves to theworld, but also holding onto what supports our way of projecting, and work-ing around or excluding what would threaten the current perspective: “itmakes and holds onto what can support the construction, and rejects whatendangers it. In this way it secures the building site and selects the materialsof construction” (GA 6.2: 290).

In order to build, the attitudemust clear a space for the new orientation tothe world, and that requires it to clear away old modes of responsiveness tothe world. Thus it is also “annihilative”: “it removes what previously and upuntil now had secured the stability of life. This removing clears the road ofsolidifications, whichmight hinder the execution of the erection of a height”(GA 6.1: 578–9). The “solidifications” are the ways the chaotic world hassettled into more or less stable arrangements through our acquiring habitualforms of response, fixed dispositions for encountering the world. Justice getsus into synch with chaos by refusing to itself such stable habits and disposi-tions. It will destroy whatever would promote a decline into a fixed state.Justice can tolerate only temporary stabilizations, and hence views suchstabilizations – values – as values, and thus as determined only relative to aparticular temporally limited perspective.

To summarize, in a world where truth has become justice, we will come tosee particular truths as values – as relative to and dependent on our firstpositing a perspective. Heidegger thinks that we can detect this sort ofunderstanding 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 evidentin “the propaganda wars adapted to the enormity” of “the historical totalizedcondition of our planet,” or the way “all life makes itself known in that whichis 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 confidence andevery trustworthiness drawing over the planet,” which, in turn, points to thedeeper phenomenon: “that not only some specific truth, but rather theessence of truth is shaken and an original grounding of its essence must betaken over and achieved by human beings” (GA 6.1: 484). The idea, I take it,is that forms of discourse that in the past would have been dismissed –

superficial forms of theater and drama, advertisements, “news shows” thatare manifestly vehicles for propaganda, can come to be taken seriously whenwe think that the truth is inherently perspectival, that is, that it must bepresented from a particular perspective. At the same time, truth becomingjustice involves the sense that there is an independent reality, a chaoticbecoming, which we disclose as such by experiencing the world as callingus to overcome prior perspectives.

Conclusion: The Critique of Nietzsche’s Metaphysics of Truth, and Whatthat Teaches Us about Overcoming Metaphysics

I would like to close this chapter by redeeming the promissory note that Imade at the outset – that by understanding Heidegger’s critique ofNietzsche, we would illuminate Heidegger’s own views on metaphysics andtruth. We have seen that Heidegger accepts Nietzsche’s critique of thedistinction between a true and an apparent world, and his rejection of thenotion of stability that gave rise to that distinction. There is no stable waythe world is in itself; thus there is no true world in itself. Heidegger alsoaccepts Nietzsche’s rejection of reason and cognition as providing a privi-leged mode of access to the way the world is. And yet, Heidegger argues thatNietzsche remains entangled in ametaphysical account of truth. He does notobject on the grounds that Nietzsche remains committed to a view ofattitudinal truth as an agreement with the way things truly are – Heideggertoo is committed to the idea that our attitudes can succeed or fail in giving usveridical access to the world. Instead, Heidegger’s objection is somewhatmore subtle than that: namely, that in Nietzsche’s way of repudiating themetaphysical tradition, he continues to hold fast to what is most perniciousabout metaphysics. And he does so in a way that conceals the metaphysicaltendencies 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 incognition, it looks like he is freeing himself from any stable conception ofwhat entities really are and how we really get a grip on them. And yet,Heidegger argues, his view is nevertheless metaphysical insofar as it acceptsthat there is some general feature that all entities share as such – they aretemporary stabilizations, valued relative to the practical purposes of a partic-ular form of life. And this, in turn, points to an ultimate reality – chaos. Thatentities can be values is a result of the fact that reality imposes no rightinterpretation on what anything is. Chaos is not a true world, for thatrequires stability. But it is nevertheless a unified, general understanding ofwhat things are and, moreover, Nietzsche attributes to chaos a kind ofindependence of us and our particular projects or perspectives.

When Nietzsche denies the priority of cognition and representationalmodes of thought in granting us access to reality, it looks like he has freedhimself from traditional ways of thinking of truth. And yet, he continues tohold that there is some privileged attitude by means of which we adjustourselves to reality – art. When we become artists of our own lives, we allowchaos to show itself as it is in itself, as chaotic, and do so in such a way that we

chart 10.1(b)


PhilosophicGreek

idea – self-subsistentforms. The trueentities are ideas;concrete particularsare instantiations ofideas

homoiôsis – adjustment(Angleichung) of ourthoughts to forms

theôria idein

Christian ens creatum – an entitytruly is what Godconceives it to be

adaequatio – measuringup to (Anmessung) orbeing fit to receiveGod’s ideas

faith in therevealedword,learningchurchdoctrines

Modern ens certum – an entitytruly is that about itwhich serves as areliable basis forcognition

certainty – ascertain inadvance theinteractions thatentities could havewith each other

calculation

Technological/Nietzsche

value – to be an entity isto be a value positedrelative to aperspective

justness – assimilationto chaos by positingour own values

propagandaartisticcreation


are able to incorporate it into our lives. Truth thus becomes justice – anattitude in which we are oriented to entities as values, and to chaos assomething allowing us the freedom of constant overcoming.

In fact, these two metaphysicalish components of Nietzsche’s thought areconnected: it is because Nietzsche privileges one form of attitudinal orienta-tion to the world that he commits himself to one general understanding ofreality. For Heidegger, the deepest lesson to be drawn from Nietzsche’scritique of metaphysics – a lesson Nietzsche himself failed to take toheart – is that there are a plurality of equally legitimate worlds, thus aplurality of ways for entities to really and truly be, and thus a plurality ofequally valid types of attitude to take up in disclosing the truth.

So if Nietzsche remains entangled in metaphysics through his continuingcommitment to some version of each of the six theses, what does that teachus about the proper way to overcome metaphysics? The problem is not acommitment to a notion of attitudinal truth as some form of agreeing withthe way things are. Nor is the problem a commitment to a notion of amaterial truth and/or reality, provided that truth and reality are indexedto a particular world disclosure. One problem is thinking that there is asingle independent, uniform, and eternal reality – chaos – when in factreality 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 oflife 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 whichcan be understood as getting closer to or further away from the ultimatetruth and reality.


Works by Heidegger

Note: Unlike references to other works in theGesamtausgabe, page referencesto GA 2 will list the “H” numbers, which are based on the pagination of theoriginal German edition of Sein und Zeit (Verlag Max Niemeyer, 1927), andwhich can be found in the margins of both English language translations ofBeing and Time, as well as in themargins of the Gesamtausgabe edition of Seinund 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.). SanFrancisco: Harper & Row, 1975.

GA 1 Frühe Schriften. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1978.GA 2 Sein und Zeit. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1977.GA 3 Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1991.Translated as: Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics (R. Taft, Trans.). Bloomington:Indiana University Press, 1997.

GA 4 Erläuterungen zu Hölderlins Dichtung. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1981.Translated as: Elucidations of Hölderlin’s Poetry (K. Hoeller, Trans.). Amherst, NY:Humanity Books, 2000.

GA 5 Holzwege. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1977. Translated as: Off The BeatenTrack (J. Young & K. Haynes, Trans.). Cambridge, England: Cambridge UniversityPress, 2002.

GA 6.1 Nietzsche I. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1996.GA 6.2 Nietzsche II. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1997.GA 7 Vorträge und Aufsätze. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 2000.GA 8Was heisst Denken? Frankfurt amMain: Klostermann, 2002. Translated as:What IsCalled 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 amMain: Klostermann, 1997. Translated as: ThePrinciple 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, 1910–1976. Frankfurt am Main:Klostermann, 2000.

GA 17 Einführung in die phänomenologische Forschung. Frankfurt am Main:Klostermann, 1994.

GA 19 Platon, Sophistes. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1992. Translated as: Plato’sSophist (R. Rojcewicz & A. Schuwer, Trans.). Bloomington: Indiana UniversityPress, 1997.

GA 20 Prolegomena zur Geschichte des Zeitbegriffs. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann,1979. Translated as: History of the Concept of Time (T. Kisiel, Trans.). Bloomington:Indiana University Press, 1985.

GA 21 Logik: Die Frage nach der Wahrheit. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1976.GA 22Die Grundbegriffe der antiken Philosophie. Frankfurt amMain: Klostermann, 1993.GA 24 Die Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1975.Translated as: Basic Problems of Phenomenology (A. Hofstadter, Trans.). Bloomington:Indiana University Press, 1982.

GA 25 Phänomenologische Interpretation von Kants Kritik der reinen Vernunft. Frankfurt amMain: Klostermann, 1977. Translated as: Phenomenological Interpretation of Kant’sCritique of Pure Reason (P. Emad & K. Maly, Trans.). Bloomington: IndianaUniversity Press, 1997.

GA 26Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Logik. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1978.Translated as: The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic (M. Heim, Trans.).Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984.

GA 27 Einleitung in die Philosophie. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1996.GA 28 Der deutsche Idealismus. Fichte, Schelling, Hegel) und die philosophische Problemlageder Gegenwart. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1997.

GA 29/30 Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik: Welt, Endlichkeit, Einsamkeit. Frankfurt amMain: Klostermann, 1983. Translated as: The Fundamental Concepts of MetaphysicsWorld, Finitude, Solitude (W. McNeill & N. Walker, Trans.). Bloomington: IndianaUniversity Press, 1995.

GA 31 Vom Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit: Einleitung in die Philosophie. Frankfurt amMain: Klostermann, 1982. Translated as: The Essence of Human Freedom (T. Sadler,Trans.). London: Continuum, 2002.

GA 32 Hegels Phänomenologie des Geistes. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1980.Translated as: Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (P. Emad & K. Maly, Trans.).Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988.

GA 33 Aristoteles, Metaphysik Θ 1–3. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1981.Translated as: Aristotle’s Metaphysics Theta 1–3 (W. Brogan & P. Warnek, Trans.).Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995.

GA 34 Vom Wesen der Wahrheit: zu Platons Höhlengleichnis und Theätet. Frankfurt amMain: 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 amMain: Klostermann,1998.

GA 39 Hölderlins Hymnen “Germanien” und “Der Rhein.” Frankfurt am Main:Klostermann, 1980.

244 Works by Heidegger

GA 40 Einführung in die Metaphysik. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1983.Translated as: Introduction to Metaphysics (G. Fried & R. Polt, Trans.). New Haven,CT: Yale University Press, 2000. (Original work published 1953.)

GA 41 Die Frage nach dem Ding: zu Kants Lehre von den transzendentalen Grundsätzen.Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1984. Translated as: What Is A Thing? (W. B.Barton, Jr. & V. Deutsch, Trans.). Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1967.

GA 44 Nietzsches metaphysische Grundstellung im abendländischen Denken: die ewigeWiederkehr des Gleichen. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1986.

GA 45 Grundfragen der Philosophie: ausgewählte “Probleme” der “Logik.” Frankfurt amMain: Klostermann, 1984. Translated as: Basic Questions of Philosophy. Selected“Problems” of “Logic” (R. Rojcewicz & A. Schuwer, Trans.). Bloomington: IndianaUniversity Press, 1994.

GA 47 Nietzsches Lehre vom Willen zur Macht als Erkenntnis. Frankfurt am Main:Klostermann, 1989.

GA 48 Nietzsche, der europäische Nihilismus. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1986.GA 53 Hölderlins Hymne “Der Ister.” Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1984.Translated as: Hölderlin’s Hymn “The Ister” (W. McNeill & Julia Davis, Trans.).Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996.

GA 54 Parmenides. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1982. Translated as: Parmenides(A. Schuwer & R. Rojcewicz, Trans.). Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992.

GA 58 Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1993.GA 63 Ontologie: Hermeneutik der Faktizität. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1988.Translated as: Ontology: The Hermeneutics of Facticity (J. van Buren, Trans.).Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999.

GA 65 Beiträge zur Philosophie (vom Ereignis). Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1989.GA 66 Besinnung. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1997.GA 67 Metaphysik und Nihilismus. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1999.GA 69 Die Geschichte des Seyns. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1998.GA 79 Bremer und Freiburger Vorträge. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1994.GA 85 Vom Wesen der Sprache. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1999.IM Introduction to Metaphysics (Ralph Manheim, Trans.). Garden City, NY: AnchorBooks, 1961.

N1 Nietzsche, vol. 1 (David Farrell Krell, Trans.). San Francisco: Harper, 1979.N3 Nietzsche, vol. 3 (David Farrell Krell, Trans.). San Francisco: Harper, 1987.N4 Nietzsche, vol. 4 (David Farrell Krell, Trans.). San Francisco: Harper, 1982.OWL On the Way to Language (Peter D. Hertz, Trans.). New York: Harper & Row,1971.

QCT The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays (William Lovitt, Trans.). NewYork: Harper & Row, 1977.

Works by Heidegger 245

Index

adaptation, 191, 232, See Ereignis,appropriation

alêtheia, 1, 6, 12, 15, 16, 18, 74, 78, 80,81, 84, 128, 223, 224

Anaximander, 133n9, 193appropriation, 204, 206, 207, See

adaptation, Ereignisart, 147, 177, 190, 208n15, 222, 234,

235, 238, 241attunement, 13, 30, 69, 91, 160, 171,

199, 201, 203, 204, 209, 210, 211,226, 226n2, 227, 235

authenticity, 24, 37, 90, 96n2, 113,115n19, 123

Ayer, Alfred J., 164

background, 31, 32, 74, 84, 106, 107,111, 133, 151, 169, 178–84, 186,187–92, 216, 221, 222, 223, 229,232, 235, 236

being, understanding of, 14, 31, 33, 34,83, 88, 90, 117, 125, 178, 179–92

Bernasconi, Robert, 186Borgmann, Albert, 202n8, 206Bracken, William, 116Brandom, Robert, 164, 164n8,Burge, Tyler, 97, 99, 99n7, 100, 100n8,

101, 101n9, 102, 102n11, 103, 104,109, 115

Carman, Taylor, 57n, 95n, 96, 96n2,104, 114, 115, 115n19, 158n2

Carnap, Rudolf, 177, 177n1, 178, 179,180, 181, 184, 190, 192

chaos, 136, 226–9, 231–6, 236n3, 238,239, 241, 242

Christian age, the, 7, 108, 156–62,164–73, 182, 197–9, 211, 218–22,224, 225, 234, 241, See also history –historical epochs

clearing, 6, 14–17, 24, 25, 32–5, 37, 181,191

cognitivism, 85, 156n, 162, 163,167, 233,

communication, 51, 52, 97, 107, 110,111, 115, 116, 121, 131, 131n7,132, 158, 164, 167, 169

existential, 110, 111concealment, 1, 13, 18, 19, 21–5, 33, 74,

84, 85, 129conceptual, 7, 20, 31, 74, 84, 85, 86, 89,

90, 91, 103, 117, 124, 178, 179,183, 184, 218, 227

conversation, 95–7, 97n3, 103, 104, 105,107–14, 116, 117, 120, See alsodiscourse

idle, 95–7, 97n3, 103, 104, 105,110–14, 116, 117

Davidson, Donald, 6, 40, 40n, 43–52,54–6, 102, 102n11, 104n13, 114

death, 157, 162, 172, 172n14, 195–200,202n7, 203, 204, 207, 210

Derrida, Jacques, 42, 42n6, 125, 193,193n23

Descartes, René, 182, 183, 183n11,186n19, 190, 193, 220, 225

despair, 161, 166n10, 170, 171, 172n14disclosure, 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 uncoveringdisposedness, 14, 106, 107, 108, 109,

111, 111n17divinities, 195, 202–11, See also fourfoldDostoevsky, Fyodor, 161, 161n5, 171,

172n14Dreyfus, Hubert, 40n, 57n, 83n10, 95n,

96, 96n1, 104, 114, 115, 115n20,160, 184, 184n14, 186n17,194n25, 202, 202n8, 203, 205n9,208n15

Dummett, Michael, 41, 41n1, 45, 45n13,45n14, 97, 104n13, 178, 178n4

dwelling, 138, 187, 195, 204, 205, 206,209, 210

earth, 2, 8, 69, 165, 171, 172, 172n14,195, 197, 198, 202, 204–9, See alsofourfold

enframing, 28, 198, 205, See alsotechnology

equipment, 3, 23, 24, 53, 54, 55, 78, 107,115, 142, 149, 150, 200, 216, 217

Ereignis, 2, 124n4, 206, 206n10, 245, Seeadaptation, appropriation

error, 51, 52, 60–2, 64–6, 69, 73, 74, 84,85, 87, 88, 91, 146, 166, 212,226–9, 231, 233–5, 238

essence, 1, 5–8, 11–16, 24, 26–35, 38,41, 42, 61, 72n2, 73, 75–9, 81, 83,121, 124–6, 128, 133, 134, 136,145n18, 150, 151, 153, 154, 156,157, 164, 178, 184, 190, 191,197, 199, 205, 208, 209, 212, 215,220, 223, 227, 230, 231, 235,236, 240

as a verb, 27, 154eternal return, 135,

232, 237externalism, 97–100, 102n11, 114

faith, 70, 108, 156–68, 170, 182, 219,220, 221, 225, 233, 237, 241

Faith, 158

fourfold, 2, 8, 195, 196, 204, 205, 205n9,206, 207, 209

Frege, Gottlob, 75Friedländer, Paul, 16

gathering, 7, 32, 127–9, 132–4, 136,208, 208n15

George, Stefan, 95n, 99n7, 137, 139,142, 143, 144, 148, 153

god, 205God, 4, 8, 31, 34, 36, 76, 145, 146,

157–63, 165, 167, 170, 171, 172,172n14, 181, 182, 191n22,195–200, 202n7, 203, 204, 207–11,218, 219, 221, 241

Heraclitus, 12, 120, 193historiography, 181, 187, 188, 192, See

historiologyhistoriology, 181, 182, 185–9, 193, 194,

See historiographyhistory

historical epochs, 7, 8, 31, 32, 179–87,189–93, 195–9, 202, 203, 205–9,218–22, 224–6, 233

Hölderlin, Friedrich, 207, 207n13,243, 245

homesickness, 203Humboldt, Wilhelm von, 126Husserl, Edmund, 34, 69n7, 192

inauthenticity, 37, 90, 97n3, 123intentionality, 40, 55, 192

Jaspers, Karl, 121, 121n2, 122, 134justice, 162, 163, 172, See also truth – as

justnessjustness. See truth – as justness

Kant, Immanuel, 166, 166n9, 185, 193,220, 243, 244

Kierkegaard, Søren, 159, 159n3, 161,170, 170n11, 171, 210n17

Lafont, Cristina, 35, 36, 37, 120, 121,144n18, 145n18

language, 2, 4, 7, 13, 38, 40–2, 44–9, 51,54–7, 62n4, 63n5, 77, 78, 95–7,

248 Index

97n3, 99, 100, 102, 103, 104, 109,113–16, 119–39, 141, 143–7, 149,151–4, 157–9, 164, 167, 169, 177,179, 188, 192, 193, 214, 243

as house of being, 7, 119, 120, 121,124, 125, 126, 134, 136, 146, 152,154

linguistic constitutionalism, 120, 122,123, 134, 137, 144

natural. See language – ordinaryordinary, 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, 168Language, 7logos, 31, 91, 120, 127–34, 136, 137Luther, Martin, 220

McDowell, John, 119, 123meaning, 2, 3, 7, 15–17, 22, 27, 36, 38,

45–7, 49, 51n31, 52, 53, 63, 64,65n6, 67–70, 77, 78, 82, 83,95–103, 108–10, 114–17, 120, 121,124–5, 128, 130–4, 136, 137,139–43, 148, 152–6, 160, 165, 188,192, 197, 199, 200, 210, 230, 238,239

Meaning, 109Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 57, 58n1,

59n3, 61, 62, 66–71metaphysics, 8, 12, 17, 27, 41, 42, 144,

144n17, 148, 150, 151, 165, 170,178–85, 187–91, 193, 195, 198,210, 212, 213, 217–29, 231–7,240–2, See history – historicalepochs

modern. See history: historical epochsmodernity, 149, 182, 183, 191, 195, 198,

206, 224, 234, See history – historicalepochs

mood, 106, 199, 226n2mortals, 8, 195, 204, 205, 205n9, 207,

208, See also fourfoldMourelatos, Alexander, 185, 185n15,

189

Nietzsche, Friedrich, 8, 17, 17n2, 57, 58,135, 136, 190, 193, 193n23, 196–9,202n7, 212, 213, 215, 218, 221,226–43, 245

oblivion, 12, 179, 180, 184, 184n14,191, 192

ontology, 2, 3, 4, 12, 116, 134, 135, 136,143, 154, 179, 196, 232

Parmenides, 120, 185, 193Pascal, Blaise, 7, 156–68, 170–3passion, 166n10, 168, 170, 171perception, 20, 52, 57, 58, 60, 61, 62n4,

65–71, 83, 84, 86, 88, 89, 90, 141,223, 228

phenomenology, 7, 18, 52, 58, 60, 67,72, 83, 110, 156, 156n, 157, 158,159, 186n19, 194n24, 244, 245

existential, 61, 66philosophy, 1, 2, 5, 6, 8, 12, 40–4, 74, 75,

77, 81, 84, 85, 97, 115, 119, 120,123, 156, 167, 177–80, 182–93,212, 213, 218, 226

phusis, 181, 223Plato, 7, 38, 73, 74, 77–80, 82–6, 91,

193, 212, 223, 224, 244poetry, 137–40, 142–8, 151–3, 169Putnam, Hilary, 97–100, 102–4, 109,

115

references, 54, 116, 132, 137, 243relations, 2, 3, 8, 13, 20, 26, 32, 38, 39,

50, 63, 78, 102, 102n10, 123, 128,128–32, 134–7, 141, 142, 143, 148,150–4, 183, 189, 212, 216

renunciation, 136, 138, 151, 152, 153representationalism, 13, 73, 241revaluation, 237revealing, 12, 19, 23, 32, 91, 110, 129,

143n16Rilke, Rainer Maria, 201Rorty, Richard, 186, 186n17, 186n18,

187, 189

Shakespeare, William, 140signification, 26, 55, 63, 71, 81, 83, 107,

109, 142

Index 249

sky, 8, 88, 195, 204–9, See also fourfoldSocrates, 80, 85, 86

talk, idle, 95, See conversation, idleTarski, Alfred, 44–7, 49Taylor, Charles, 195technology, 8, 28, 32, 149, 150, 179,

179n10, 184, 191, 193, 195–206,208, 209, 210, 226, 237, See alsoenframing

resources, 31, 32, 196, 198, 201, 209Trakl, Georg, 169truthagreement, 13, 21, 40, 42, 47, 150,

194, 213, 214n1, 224, 229, 233,240

as adaequatio, 12, 18, 219, 221, 241as correctness, 18, 29, 48n23, 69, 70,

73, 84, 87, 100, 101, 104, 105, 113,123, 139, 196, 199, 209, 213, 218,220, 223, 236

as correspondence, 7, 12, 13, 15, 16,19, 21, 28, 29, 35, 43–7, 73, 75,75n4, 77, 79, 81, 83–5, 87, 219, 223

as homoiôsis, 12, 18, 218, 220, 223,227, 241

as justness, 199, 236–42ontic, 6, 7, 8, 13, 27, 39, 75, 82, 179,212, 214–18

ontological, 11, 13, 14, 39, 213, 215,216, 218–22, 224–6, 230

propositional, 4–7, 12, 13, 15, 16,18–21, 30, 34–6, 39, 43, 44, 47–52,55, 56, 71–6, 79–81, 86, 89, 97n3,164, 170, 213–15, 224, 225, 228

Tugendhat, Ernst, 16, 34–8, 38n9turning, 4, 123, 130

unconcealment, 1–8, 11–18, 21–3, 25–7,30–2, 34–40, 43, 48, 52, 56, 72, 73,79, 84, 85, 87, 91, 120, 154, 181,204, 232

uncovering, 2, 4, 13, 14, 16–26, 30, 32,34–6, 52–5, 64, 67, 80–2, 106, 110,114, 153, 183, 187, 204, 214, 238

will to power, 231, 232, 237worlds, 1, 2, 17, 30, 36, 55, 232, 242

250 Index

Heidegger

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