Heidegger on Truth: Its Essence and Its Fate

196 Pages·2019·0.811 MB·English

by  Graeme Nicholson

HEIDEGGER ON TRUTH
Its Essence and Its Fate
New Studies in Phenomenology and Hermeneutics
Kenneth Maly, General Editor
New Studies in Phenomenology and Hermeneutics aims to open
up new approaches to classical issues in phenomenology and
hermeneutics. Thus its intentions are the following: to f urther
the work of Edmund Husserl, Maurice Merleau- Ponty, and Martin
Heidegger – as well as that of Paul Ricoeur, Hans- Georg Gadamer, and
Emmanuel Levinas; to enhance phenomenological thinking today
by means of insightful interpretations of texts in phenomenology
as they inform current issues in p hilosophical study; to inquire
into the role of interpretation in phenomenological thinking: to
take seriously Husserl’s term phenomenology as “a science which is
intended to supply the basic instrument for a rigorously scientific
philosophy and, in its consequent application, to make possible a
methodical reform of all the sciences”; to take up Heidegger’s claim
that “what is own to phenomenology, as a philosophical ‘direction,’
does not rest in being real. Higher than reality stands possibility.
Understanding phenomenology consists solely in grasping it as
possibility”; to practise phenomenology as “underway,” as “the praxis
of the self- showing of the matter for thinking,” as “entering into
the movement of enactment- thinking.”
The commitment of this book series is also to provide E nglish
translations of significant works from other languages. In summary,
New Studies in Phenomenology and H ermeneutics intends to
provide a forum for a full and fresh thinking and rethinking of the
way of phenomenology and interpretive p henomenology, that is,
hermeneutics.
For a list of books published in this series, see page 183.
Heidegger on Truth
Its Essence and Its Fate
GRAEME NICHOLSON
UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS
Toronto Buffalo London
© University of Toronto Press 2019
Toronto Buffalo London
utorontopress.com
Printed in Canada
ISBN 978- 1- 4875- 0441- 0
Printed on acid- free, 100% post- consumer recycled paper with vegetable-
based inks.
_____________________________________________________________________
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Title: Heidegger on truth : its essence and its fate / Graeme Nicholson.
Names: Nicholson, Graeme, author.
Series: New studies in phenomenology and hermeneutics (Toronto, Ont.)
De scription: Series statement: New studies in phenomenology and hermeneutics |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: Canadiana 20190137789 | ISBN 9781487504410 (hardcover)
Su bjects: LCSH: Heidegger, Martin, 1889–1976. Vom Wesen der Wahrheit. |
LCSH: Truth.
Classification: LCC B3279.H49 N52 2019 | DDC 121—dc23
___________________________________________________________________________________
This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Federation
for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly
Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and
Humanities Research Council of Canada.
University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its
publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts
Council, an agency of the Government of Ontario.
Funded by the Financé par le
Government gouvernement
of Canada du Canada
Contents
Preface vii
Acknowledgments ix
Key to References xi
Introduction 3
1. Truth, Untruth, and Heidegger 3
2. Heidegger’s Texts on Truth 7
Part I: The Early Pathway of Thinking: Freiburg, December 1930 13
1. Heidegger’s Introduction: Questioning and the Public 17
2. Accordance of Statement and Thing: Section I(a) 23
3. Truth Prior to the Statement: Section I(b) 29
4. Freedom as Spontaneity: Section I(c) 38
5. Freedom as Letting- Be: Section II(a)(i) 43
6. Truth as Unconcealedness – The Greek Beginning:
Section II(a)(ii) 47
7. Da- sein the Human Essence: Section II(a)(iii) 53
8. Truth and Concealedness – Attunement: Section II(b)(i) 56
9. Concealment: Section II(b)(ii) 64
10. Erring: Section II(b)(iii) 68
11. The End of the Pathway 73
(A) From Erring to Philosophy: A Fourth Arc 73
(B) Philosophy and the Academic Disciplines 76
Intermission: Political Storms 83
vi Contents
Part II: Later Work: The Pathway Rectified 95
(A) Unconcealedness and Correctness 98
1. The Plato Lectures 98
2. The Phenomenology of 1949: Experience in WW 2 107
3. The Standard and the Directive: WW 2.4–3.1 113
4. Presence and Being: WW 2.2 117
5. Freedom and Letting- Be: WW 4.1–4.4 121
6. Unconcealedness in the Later Heidegger: WW 4.3–4.5 125
(B) Governance and Certainty 133
7. Medieval Philosophy and Its Continuing Influence:
WW 1.5–1.6 133
8. The Rational World- Order 135
9. Attunement in WW 5 140
(C) The Present Age: En- owning and Mystery 142
10. A Reversal of Thinking 142
11. The Concealment of Al¯etheia: WW 6.1 148
12. T he Truth of Being: The Clearing for Its Concealment –
WW 8 and 9 154
13. Philosophy among the Disciplines 159
Conclusion: Against Self- Expression 165
Notes 167
Index 179
Preface
This book’s Introduction begins by singling out some distinctive features
of Martin Heidegger’s account of truth, not only for the sake of a con-
trast with other philosophers, but also because he has said something
that we need to hear, we who live in the twenty-fi rst century and who
read and think in English. The historical profiling of a philosopher is
certainly valuable, but it is always more urgent to inquire what his work
might mean to us in our own time.
After that first orientation, the Introduction will pinpoint one princi-
pal source for our study, one text (admittedly it exists in several versions)
that will be submitted to a close reading in the body of this book. For I
find that Heidegger’s intricate compositions all need more individual
attention than they have usually been given.
Then the introduction to Part I will outline what movements of
thought there are in this text of Heidegger’s, what course of questioning
and answering it pursues. The reader who follows the “pathway of think-
ing” in the body of this book will discover there many distinctive facets of
truth. The text we are studying exists in both an earlier and a later ver-
sion, and that is why this book is divided into Part I and Part II.
The quotations from Heidegger will be drawn, wherever possible, from
published English translations that the reader will find cited in the end-
notes. But Part I will be devoted to early work on truth from 1930 that has
only recently been published in German. I have translated this material
and included the key passages in my text, together with an account of
the movements of thought and the sources on which Heidegger drew. I
hope that, by printing the quotations in boldface and indented, the text
will encourage the reader to pause over them. Heidegger also offered
two different lecture courses on Plato in the early 1930s that dealt cen-
trally with truth; they are both available in English translation, but, to
make sure that we not confuse them, I refer to them, not by title, but by
the date, in boldface.
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Acknowledgments
I am happy to acknowledge with gratitude the work of the late Walter
Biemel, who did so much to pass along to later generations the sub-
stance of Heidegger’s studies on truth. And I must acknowledge the
generous teaching of his own contemporaries in phenomenology, Hans-
Georg Gadamer and Paul Ricoeur, two outstanding philosophers in the
generation after Heidegger. I want to express my gratitude to Friedrich-
Wilhelm von Herrmann of Freiburg, whose writings and correspon-
dence have helped direct my studies. Many members of the Heidegger
Circle of North America have enlivened the current reception of his
work, and given me all sorts of stimulation – I must particularly thank
Babette Babich, Richard Capobianco, Richard Polt, and the indefatiga-
ble Thomas Sheehan, with whom I have often disagreed but who forced
me, with cordiality, to look at the texts and the “things themselves” again
and again. Closer to home, in the Toronto area, my wife Linda and I
have enjoyed years of friendship and Heidegger discussion with Art Davis
and Laurell Ritchie, Nelson Roland and Judith Levasseur, Bill Stratton
and Suzanne Keppler. More recently, I have to thank Dieter Misgeld and
Trevor Norris.
The philosophy editor at the University of Toronto Press, Len Hus-
band, received several drafts of this book over a period of years and
secured several appraisals that have proved very helpful to me. I am
grateful for his patience and support. And it was Len who proposed the
format of setting off the translated quotations in bold type, which I am
sure readers will appreciate.