The Experience of Truth

136 Pages·2017·0.883 MB·English

by  Gaetano Chiurazzi

The Experience of Truth
SUNY series in Contemporary Italian Philosophy
Silvia Benso and Brian Schroeder, editors
The Experience of Truth
Gaetano Chiurazzi
Translated by Robert T. Valgenti
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2011 Mimesis Edizioni, L'esperienza della verità
© 2017 State University of New York
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Chiurazzi, Gaetano, author.
Title: The experience of truth / Gaetano Chiurazzi ; English translation by
Robert T. Valgenti.
Other titles: L'esperienza della verità. Italian
Description: Albany, NY : State University of New York, 2017. | Series:
SUNY series in contemporary Italian philosophy | Includes bibliograph-
ical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016047189 (print) | LCCN 2017039126 (ebook) |
ISBN 9781438466460 (e-book) | ISBN 9781438466453 (hardcover
: alk. paper)
Subjects:  LCSH: Truth.
Classification: LCC BD171 (ebook) | LCC BD171 .C5413 2017 (print)
| DDC 121—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016047189
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Introduction vii
Chapter 1 Before Judgment 1
Judgment and Truth 1
Hypárchein en tiní: Ontological Antecedence 2
Hypárchein tiní: The Essential Antecedence 4
The Inesse: From Boethius to Leibniz 7
The Presupposition of Truth 10
Chapter 2 Verbum Consignificat Tempus 13
The Nominal Phrase: The Presence and the Absence of 13
the Copula
The Elimination of the Copula: Truth without Time 18
Signifying the Non-objectual: Synthesis and Time 21
The Speculative Proposition: The Time of Knowing 25
From Time to Consignificatio Existentiae 29
Chapter 3 The Experience of Truth as the Experience of Time 33
The Form of Truth: Deixis and the Elliptical Character 33
of Judgment
Correspondence and Metaphysics 35
Beyond Parmenides: Excess as Future and Anticipation 37
The Ontological Background of Alétheia: Ontology of 41
the Possible
v
(cid:2) (cid:3)
vi Contents
Chapter 4 Truth and Transformation 45
Truth Changes 45
The Pragmatization of Hermeneutics 46
The Hermeneuticization of Pragmatism 48
The Truth of Experience: The Myth of the Cave 50
The “Anticonformist” Character of Truth 53
Chapter 5 More Than the Real 57
The Extra-Methodicalness of Truth as the Objectivity 57
of Happening
The Abstraction of the Experimental Consciousness 60
and the Temporality of Presentation
Truth as Transmutation into Form 64
Formation as Elevation to an Intensional Universality 69
Chapter 6 The Sense of Truth 73
Force and Interpretation 73
An Experimental Ontology 76
For Whom Is Truth? 78
Chapter 7 A Non-alienated Conception of Truth 83
The Form of Truth: Truth and Experiential Realism 83
Against the Equivalence-Thesis 87
Beyond Domination: Truth as Countervailing Power 90
Notes and Bibliography 97
Index 117
Introduction
Today one can say of truth what Kant wrote about metaphysics in 1787,
namely, that “the changed fashion of the time brings her only scorn; a matron
outcast and forsaken, she mourns like Hecuba.”1 And the brief yet effective
chronicle of the destiny of metaphysics that Kant traces in the lines imme-
diately following this passage could also be adapted nicely to the destiny
of truth:
Her government, under the administration of the dogmatists, was at first
despotic. But inasmuch as the legislation still bore traces of the ancient bar-
barism, her empire gradually through intestine wars gave way to complete
anarchy; and the sceptics, a species of nomads, despising all settled modes
of life, broke up from time to time all civil society.2
The contemporary debate over truth seems to be caught in a similar sit-
uation: between the defense of the metaphysical meaning of truth and its
complete negation, between dogmatism and skepticism, or even between
absolutism and relativism.3 However, as Kant attempted in his critique,
one ought to ask if the negation of metaphysical knowledge is in fact the
negation of all knowledge tout court, or if instead this brings about the val-
orization of a more “terrestrial,” physical, form of knowledge that, as Kant
would say, is limited to the field of possible experience. The expression “expe-
rience of truth” is assumed in this book to have a similar intent, and above
all to mark a problematic question: whether it makes any sense to speak
of truth as something potentially extraneous to our experience in general,
or whether it is not instead something intrinsic and constitutive of our expe-
rience, real or possible.
vii
(cid:2) (cid:3)
viii Introduction
In fact it is the return to experience that allows Kant to separate himself
both from dogmatic rationalism and also skeptical empiricism, and to resolve,
on these grounds, the conflict of reason. The goal of this book is to adopt
a strategy similar to the one Kant uses in relation to metaphysics: bringing the
problem of truth back to experience, intended not solely in epistemological
terms but as the background that constitutes—and results from—every one
of our relations with the world. This occurs in the way that Hegel, after
Kant, utilized the term: “experience” is for Hegel a formative journey, which
implicates not only our relation to the natural world, to objects, but also our
relation to the human world, to others and to those “spiritual objects” that
are cultural formations.
In my view, the hermeneutic treatment of truth has to be set against such
a background. “The experience of truth” is in fact a recurring expression
in philosophical hermeneutics: Heidegger refers to the “primordial” experi-
ence of truth that the Greeks had when he seeks to illustrate the significance
of the word alétheia; Gadamer refers to the concrete experience of historical
life in his attempt to rehabilitate an extra-methodical dimension of truth
that supports the claim to truth of the human sciences.4 A hermeneutic con-
ception of the experience of truth first of all requires a clarification of the
hermeneutic conception of experience, such as the one Gadamer sets forth
in the second part of Truth and Method. This makes it possible to avoid the
risk of intuitionism,5 namely, to avoid considering the hermeneutic notion
of truth as alétheia or disclosedness as another formulation of the phenom-
enological concept of “evidence.” For Husserl, evidence is not Cartesian
certitude, the imposition upon consciousness of an absolutely true content,
but is the pure givenness—the “in the flesh”—of something to consciousness:
To speak of self-evidence, of self-evident givenness, then, here signifies
nothing other than self-givenness, the way in which an object in its given-
ness can be characterized relative to consciousness as “itself there,” “there
in the flesh,” in contrast to its mere presentification [Vergegenwärtigung],
the empty, merely indicative idea of it.6
In comparison to this objectivistic conception of evidence as the appre-
hension of something simple7 given to consciousness, in Heidegger evidence
is thought rather as a “coming foremost into view.” It is defined in relation
to a background, as occurs in a game between two elements or between
two levels. Now, if there is a difference that radically distinguishes intuition
(cid:2) (cid:3)
Introduction ix
from understanding, it is precisely the fact that the former concerns simple
objects and the latter concerns relations,8 namely, senses, understood as forms
or modes of relating to something rather than as objects to which a noun refers.
In experience, understood in this way and thus in hermeneutical terms as a
phenomenon of understanding, we are no longer dealing with objects, but
above all with senses, relations, which in turn are only defined on the basis of a
point of coordination, namely, the origin-point that for Heidegger is Dasein.
The way that Heidegger develops his “existential analytic” not only recalls
a similar chapter in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason entitled “The Analytic
of Concepts”; I believe it also recalls certain assumptions of the modern sci-
entific revolution that derive from Descartes. Analytic geometry has shown
that it is possible to describe the world not by describing objects, but relations:
in order to do this, it is no longer necessary to make reference to some essences,
but rather it is necessary to single out an Archimedean point, an origin-point,
from which such relations can be established. The deictic definition of Dasein
that Heidegger gives in Being and Time is, in my view, nothing other than
the transposition onto a semantic plane of the revolution brought about
by Descartes’s analytic geometry in the physical field: the describability of the
world (understood as a web of senses) is grounded in the same principle that
allows the describability of physical space—the definition of an origin-point.
In my view, one can thus with good reason speak of a “Cartesian aspect”
in Heidegger, which does not consist in the resumption of the metaphysics
of the cogito, as happens with Husserl, even if it lacks its apodictic moment,
but in the resumption of the methodological formulation of analytic geome-
try: the invention of a system of coordinates that for Heidegger have their zero
point in Dasein, namely, in that “absolute deixis” that is the Sum. According
to Heidegger, no description of the world can leave out the deictic reference
to this Sum. The result of this “semantic schema” is that there is no longer
sense9 (and therefore, a fortiori, truth) without Dasein, which involves neither
a negation nor a subjectification of truth, but the elaboration of a concept
of truth formally more complex than the traditional version,10 more complex
than the representational notion of truth, understood thus as the simple cor-
respondence to sensorial data or a state of affairs. Only in this way can the
full semantic content of truth finally be appreciated.
What in fact do we mean when we say that something “is true”?
A hermeneutic approach to the problem of truth must begin with this
question, which is not the question “what is” truth, but rather a question
about its significance in our experience. Posing the question in these terms