Phenomenology of Truth

*Page numbers refer to the Macquarrie translation unless otherwise specified.

When considering Heidegger's understanding of truth, it is easiest to begin from what understanding of truth we already have, that is, to begin from the modern traditional conception of truth. These ideas lie historically closer to us and foremost in our minds, and we can from them work incrementally towards Heidegger's conception. Heidegger himself took this approach in his Sein und Zeit, in hopes of showing-not-telling, of demonstrating, that the traditional modern conception of truth in fact depends on and derives from a more primordial notion. To work backwards from the modern conception of truth to the most primordial is not the logical order of things. But it is the most pedagogical order, because what Heidegger considers the most primordial notion of truth actually lies furthest from our conscious knowledge. The foremost notion of truth in our modern minds, in the current Zeitgeist, is, according to Heidegger, unfortunately the most derivative notion of truth. We are talking about the Correspondence theory of Truth.

1. The traditional conception of Truth

The Western philosophical tradition after the Ancient Greeks tended to understand and define Truth, either explicitly or implicitly, as in accordance with two axioms: First, the locus of truth is propositional content. That is, truth is a kind of 'property' which applies to, can be possessed by, can be predicated of: assertions, judgments, statements, propositions, any kind of 'ideal content'. And truth only applies to ideal contents and no other kinds of entities. Now, what is this property of truth? What does it mean for a judgment to possess the property of truth? According to the traditional conception, the essence of truth, truth as a 'property', consisted in 'agreement' between an ideal content and the object, which the content is about. Here, Heidegger points out that the nature of this agreement always remained unsatisfactorily specified by these traditional philosophers. He asks: What is 'agreement' exactly? It is obviously a kind of relation between the terms of the agreement. But what is the nature of this relation between Ideal content and Real object? Many traditional positions understood 'agreement' as equality. But Heidegger objects that equality is impossible between entities of different natures, of different ontological species. Ideal contents and Real things are not of the same species. But the problem is broader than equality. In general relations between Ideal contents and Real thing are problematic. Is the relation itself ideal or real, when its terms are one of each? "How are we to take ontologically the relation between an ideal entity and something that is Real and present-at-hand?" (259)

Heidegger diagnoses that the conundrum stems from the very presupposing that the relation’s terms are respectively ideal and real entities. That is, the traditional conception presupposes an ontological separation between the Ideal and the Real, and that truth is a relation between entities separated thus. At best, such a separation is not self-evident and requires defense. At worst, Heidegger even thinks the ideal-real distinction is the root of the problem. The ontological divide is artificial, not actual (thereby misleading the rest of the inquiry, which now depends on a mistaken presupposition). "Does not the actuality of knowing and judging get broken asunder into two ways of Being— two 'levels' which can never be pieced together in such a manner as to reach the kind of Being that belongs to knowing?" (259) Indeed, there may be conceptual divides stemming from Dasein interpreting the phenomenon of truth at many different levels of analysis. For example, there is a conceptual difference between the ideal content of the judgment and the act of judgment. The first is an abstraction,1 the latter a phenomenon, 'a Real psychical process'. (259) But with regards to truth, the traditional conception takes this conceptual distinction between content and act to be an ontological distinction. It then restricts truth to the ideal contents of the judgment, as its locus. This removes the relevance of the human act of judgment from truth, making the traditional notion of truth completely independent of the process by which we acquire truth. This splitting of the whole phenomenon of truth into parts, and relocation of truth to the one part, chosen without defense and hence arbitrarily, is hardly plausible. Heidegger's implicit reasoning is that until sufficient argument is given for otherwise, the whole phenomenon of truth remains without ontological divide. Any philosophizing on truth must remain true to this fact of truth’s phenomenal wholeness. Theories which deviate from the actual wholeness of the truth phenomenon will forget the primordial essence of Truth, and consequently have difficulties accounting for what precisely the ‘property’ of truth is. This is Heidegger’s analysis of why modern traditional conceptions of Truth have had trouble specifying the nature of their proposed ‘agreement’ relation.

2. Phenomenon of Truth

Heidegger suggests that the clue to the essence of truth lies precisely in human action, not apart from it, as the modern traditional conception would have it. This clue can be found in studying the phenomenology of our procedure for verifying whether certain assertions, propositions, are true. He uses the example of someone with their back to a painting, which hangs on the wall behind them. The person makes the assertion that 'The painting hangs crooked'. How would we, if we were that person, verify whether such an assertion, such ideal content, is true? We would turn around, and look at the painting, to see whether it was crooked. The fact that we turn directly towards the painting itself in order to verify the assertion, i.e. the object of verification is the painting, suggests that assertions (ideal contents) in general are directed towards the Real objects themselves (and not towards, say, 'ideal' mental representations of such objects). "Asserting is a way of Being towards the Thing itself that is." (260) Assertions are towards the Real things which they are about, directly and without intermediaries. Via this Being-towards, the relation between assertion and Real object is thus maintained. So the modern traditionals at least got this right, that the terms in the relation of truth are Ideal content on the one hand, and Real entity on the other.

But the relation itself is not one of equality, as the traditional conception maintained. The example shows us that the mechanism of verification is the perceiving of the fact. What we consider an adequate demonstration of an assertion being-true consists precisely in the act of uncovering. The property of truth in an assertion is a phenomenon! Being a phenomenal property, truth cannot be a logical metaphysical relation such as equality, but must be a phenomenal relation. Let us specify this phenomenal relation in more detail. An assertion is Being-towards a Real entity, directly and without intermediary. If the assertion is true, this Being-towards uncovers the entity, reveals the entity as it is.2 The phenomenon of truth can thus be defined as a Being-towards which is uncovering, a Being-uncovering. Note that this phenomenon of uncovering manifests itself in two mutually implying ways: The act of uncovering on the part of the knower (e.g. an assertion or Dasein), and the state of uncoveredness on the part of the entity.3 This dual manifestation of the phenomenon of truth, as uncovering and uncoveredness, suggests that truth, rather than being a relation of ‘agreement’ whatever that means, is a relation of actor-recipient interaction, or a perpetrator-victim relation. A perpetrator and a victim are two terms related not by equality, but by an act, executed by the perpetrator upon the victim. In the same way, the true assertion does something to the Real object, towards which the assertion is: namely, the assertion 'uncovers' the Real object. “The Being-true (truth) of the assertion must be understood as Being-uncovering*. Thus truth has by no means the structure of an agreement between knowing and the object in the sense of a likening of one entity (the subject) to another (the Object).” (261)

To conclude this section: Propositional truth is grounded in the dual phenomenon of uncovering and uncoveredness. The phenomenon of truth is thus a more primordial notion of truth than propositional truth. This is not surprising. Propositions are merely a way of expressing Dasein's actual engaged having-to-do-with entities (phenomena). These non-propositional phenomena are 'translated' into propositions, which predicate something of the phenomena or entities. Naturally, the veracity of propositions would depend on the 'pre-predicative' phenomena, which were the‘original material’ for the translation. In Heidegger's words, “The truth of statements as predicative uncovering is only possible as a modification of the pre-predicative uncovering of entities within-the-world. “ (Gorner 2007, 101) This is something the traditional conception of truth as agreement forgot to take into account, or more likely they forgot the primordial sources of truth altogether.

3. Disclosedness of Dasein

The phenomenon of truth is more primordial than propositional truth. But phenomenal truth itself depends on certain conditions for its possibility. The phenomenon of truth consists in an act of uncovering and the state of uncoveredness of an entity. The act of uncovering requires, depends on, a capacity to uncover on the part of the agent. The state of uncoveredness requires, depends on, accessibility on the part of the entities. But then, the phenomenon of truth must be a secondary notion of truth, derivative of the conditions for its possibility. Such conditions for the existential-ontological possibility of the phenomenon of truth must be true in an even more primordial sense, Heidegger reasons. They must together form the most primordial notion of truth. So Heidegger applies transcendental analysis to the phenomenon of truth, to find the most primordial notion of truth.

The first requirement for the phenomenon of truth, as a relation between knower and entity, is the possibility of interaction between the agent who uncovers and the entity uncovered. This possibility of interaction, Heidegger states, is ensured by Dasein Being-in-the-world. This is Dasein's basic mode of Being, where Dasein is interconnected with entities, has access to them, can interact with them, even needs other entities in order to define itself. In this context, the World is an interdependent web of meaningful relations. Such a World ensures that entities are accessible and can be revealed as they are (i.e. their uncoveredness is possible). However, it is not enough that the entities are accessible to Dasein through the disclosedness (Erschlossenheit) of World. Dasein, as an uncovering agent, must possess the capacity to uncover entities. Disclosedness is the name Heidegger gives to the whole aggregate of faculties which enable Dasein to uncover. Disclosedness is constituted by state-of-mind, understanding and discourse, and enables Dasein to uncover and engage with, respectively: the world (this is Erscholssenheit), the Self (Dasein's own being), and other entities with which Dasein engages. Disclosedness is a mode of Being that enables Dasein to uncover, and is thus the most primordial notion of Truth.

The Inborn Capacity is the origin of a notion

It is important to understand that Disclosedness isn't the most primordial notion of truth merely because of its logical anteriority (being a presupposition to the phenomenal act of uncovering). The capacity to uncover is most primordial in an evolutionary chronological sense: it is the original source of the very notion of truth, that which gave birth to the notion of truth in Dasein. The capacity gives birth to the concept and not the other way around. The capacity to uncover (the capacity for truth) gave birth to the notion of truth, and not the other way around. The reasoning for this claim can be explained by the analogy of color-vision. Color-vision is the primordial source for the concept of color. If Dasein did not possess color-vision as an inborn capacity, it would not have come up with the concept of color. Concepts aren't created out of nothing. The capacity came first, then the notion of color derived from it. The inborn capacity is the most primordial source of the concept. Applying this analogy to truth: The capacity to uncover is the primordial source of the concept 'unhiddenness' i.e. truth. Without the capacity to uncover, we wouldn't have the concept truth. The proponents of the Correspondence theory claim that truth is a property possessed by propositions, i.e. that the 'location' of truth is in ideal contents. So truth exists independently of Dasein, has existed before Dasein and will exist after Dasein. But this is analogous to saying that color is a property possessed by objects themselves, i.e the location of color is in objects. This is false. There are light waves, and there are chemical compositions of objects that make them absorb and reflect certain light wave frequencies. Different light wave frequencies are registered by humans as different colors, but they may be perceived completely differently or not at all by other creatures with other capacities. Color is a distinctly human concept, pertaining only to humans. There is no color without Dasein's color-vision. Color did not exist before humans, and will not exist after. Color is strictly in the eye of the beholder! Without beholder or eye, there is no color. In the same way, truth is strictly in the Disclosedness of Dasein. Without Dasein or Disclosedness, i.e. the capacity to uncover, there is no truth. We have moved so far in our development that we forgot the primordial original of our concept of 'truth'. This is understandable. The origin of truth is more easily forgotten than color, because 'uncovering' applies to all sorts of entities, with a great diversity of 'hows' of uncovering which muddle their common single origin: that of perceptual uncovering.4

To summarize: The most primordial truth is Disclosedness, a mode of Being of Dasein, a capacity belonging to uncover entities. Disclosedness is an existential: it belongs to Dasein essentially, i.e. it belongs to the basic constitution of Dasein. It follows that truth is relative to Dasein. Entities can exist independently of Dasein, but their uncovering, their truth, is relative to Dasein. For an entity to be uncovered, to show itself, requires someone for it to show itself to, and that someone is Dasein. That truth is relative to Dasein does not mean, however, that truth is relative to each person's subjective opinion. The truth is fixed by the entities and how they actually are. Entities are the way they are, and when uncovered, show themselves as they are. Dasein cannot choose to uncover whatever it wants. Truth is not the "least impaired by the fact that it is ontically possible only in the 'subject' and that it stands and falls with the Being of that 'subject'" (270) Nor does Truth being a capacity of Dasein mean that Dasein is always right. Truth, as a mode of Being, can either be activated or not. In the face of entities, Dasein can either uncover them or leave them hidden, depending on whether it activates its capacity or not. Heidegger also attributes this view to Aristotle: “[According to Aristotle,] the logos is that way of Being in which Dasein can either uncover or cover up. This double possibility is what is distinctive in the Being-true of the logos: the logos is that way of comporting oneself which can also cover things up.” (268) This is why Heidegger says Dasein is both in truth and untruth. Dasein even tends more towards untruth it its everyday life, through what Heidegger calls ‘falling’— falling into the patterns set by society, to live unthinkingly and without reflection…

4. Truth and Being – In the context of Sein und Zeit

How does Heidegger's understanding of Disclosedness as the most primordial truth fit into the context of his entire book? The big question that ‘Sein und Zeit’ tries to answer is: What is Being, that is, what is the meaning of entities? The meaning of something is an interpretation of it, an assessment of its value, of why or how it matters. The meaning or value of something is always relative to an interpreter, and this interpreter is Dasein. Being i.e. the meaning of entities is relative to Dasein. There is no Being without Dasein. Furthermore, for Heidegger, there are no facts without interpretation for Dasein. Dasein's experiences are inevitably imbued with meaning. There is no such thing as a fact without assigned value— every thing matters in one way or another, more or less. Dasein's fundamentally interpretive experience is made manifest in its Care. Care, or concern, is Dasein's inclination, desire, to interact and engage with entities and understand the world. Care opens up Dasein, makes it receptive and responsive to things, care about them and evaluate them. As soon as Dasein is, it cares. Dasein cannot help but care about things; things matter to Dasein.

But caring about something requires that you have access to it. You cannot care about something you don't have access to, something you don't even know exists, or something that you cannot engage with whatsoever. This is where Dasein's Disclosedness comes in. Disclosedness enables Dasein to access and engage with the entities which it Cares about. But Dasein tends to forget about this prerequisite capacity. It is ahead of itself, and jumps straight to the Caring, to the meaning of entities i.e. Being. This is why Disclosedness tends to remain hidden in Care. In line with Disclosedness being a precondition for the possibility of Caring, Heidegger states that Disclosedness is Dasein's primary characteristic. It "is that basic character of Dasein according to which it is its ‘there’.5” (263) To be ‘there’ is to be present, to be open to experience, to not be static, but rather, to be dynamic and responsive, to the world, to other entities, to life. All such ways of being are enabled by state-of-mind, understanding, and discourse i.e. Disclosedness. "[O]nly because Dasein is as constituted by disclosedness (that is, by understanding), can anything like Being be understood ; only so is it possible to understand Being. Being (not entities) is something which 'there is' only in so far as truth is. And truth is only in so far as and as long as Dasein is." (272)

5. Discussion: Neither Truth nor Being can be ‘proven’

It seems, however, like Heidegger hasn’t ‘proven’ any of his claims. He has merely asserted that Dasein indeed possesses the capacity to uncover i.e. Disclosedness, and that this capacity is the Truth and truth-generating. To this Heidegger replies that indeed, neither Truth nor Being can ever be ‘proved’ in the deductive sense. Heidegger nonetheless thinks that there is a good reason to accept the presupposition of Truth. The reason is that Being presupposes Truth. As soon as we experience, and as soon as we become conscious, and conscious of our own thoughts, we cannot help but presuppose that we do indeed exist, à la 'Cogito ergo sum'. We believe that we exist, or entities exist, based on our perceptions of our own thoughts or them. This presuposes that what we perceive is what there is; that our perceptions are trustworthy; that our perceptions uncover. In turn, this presupposes that we are capable of uncovering. So in believing in existence, we presuppose Truth. This is how Being depends on Truth. There is no Being without Truth. This can also be seen in a biological perspective. Think of Truth as perception (the most primordial faculties of uncovering are perceptive). Perception (Truth) is an essential characteristic of all life (Being). All life-forms can change of their own ‘power’, in order to adapt, and this requires at the very least some perceptive capacities to receive of inputs from and interact with the world. This is why Being and Truth ‘are’ equiprimordially. (272) If you assume the opposite, namely that, your perceptions are not trustworthy, then you would not conclude from your perceptions that anything is at all. You end up denying both Truth and Being. Dasein, compelled to believe in its own existence, is compelled by the same to believe in Truth. In this way, Truth itself is an 'existential presupposition' (analogous to performative presupposition, but an assumption is made as soon as one exists or believes that one exists).

Perhaps a deductive proof of Being and Truth isn’t impossible on certain definitions of existence. The ancient Greeks identified phenomena with entities i.e. existent things. (51) On this definition, existence is nothing more than the perception. It seems undeniable that we (or at least I) have at least some perceptions. But even if such a proof is impossible, Heidegger’s position seems less at risk of self-contradiction than theories that seek to deny Being and Truth. At best, it is an existential contradiction to deny one's existence, and the same is true for denying Truth. More than this, it seems very plausible that anyone who denies Being and Truth would performatively contradict themselves. How many people can be said to truly live in accordance with total indifference, or nihilism, or some other attitude to be expected in one who truly did not believe in existence? Anyone who truly lived in accordance with such a belief would be adopting quite a ‘suicidal’ attitude, to borrow Heidegger’s expression. Between alternative theories of equal uncertainty, one might as well choose the one more pleasant to act out.

References

  • Gorner, Paul. Heidegger’s Being and Time : an Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Print.
  • Gorner, Paul. Twentieth Century German Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Print.
  • Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time: Transl. by John Macquarrie & Edward Robinson. (Repr.). Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1973. Print.
  • Polt, Richard. Heidegger: an Introduction. London: UCL Press, 1999. Print.

  1. Ideal contents, propositions, are ways of expressing phenomena. See the last paragraph of the second section.↩︎

  2. Note that regardless of whether the assertion is true or false, the assertion is still Being-towards the same Real object. The false assertion just doesn't reveal that same object as it truly is. But the falsity doesn't somehow force the creation of a new a physical object, to which the false content must now Be towards. Here is a way of visualizing this point, and the idea of 'Being-towards': A camera is pointed at (Being-towards) the object of which takes pictures (makes assertions) of. A bad camera would take a 'warped' picture (false assertion) of that same object. The object taken a picture of doesn't change, just because the camera is bad. ↩︎

  3. This dual manifestation can be illustrated with an example of Google searching: A description (assertion) is typed into Google, in order to find (uncover) a story (the entity which the assertion is Being-towards). Many descriptions (false assertions) fail to find the story. But then finally a description succeeds in yielding, as search result, the story aimed at. In this phenomenon of a successful search attempt, there are two simultaneous, mutually implying phenomena: That of the search description (true assertion) uncovering the story, and that of the story revealing itself. To summarize, the phenomenon of truth is dual: it consists both of the act of uncovering entities and the uncoveredness of the entities themselves. ↩︎

  4. “Parmenides was the first to discover the Being of entities, and he 'identified' Being with the perceptive understanding of Being” (256)↩︎

  5. Da-Sein is literally translated as Being-There.↩︎