Heidgger's "On the Essence of Truth" Lecture I

so today we want to begin talking about the lecture on the essence of truth like starts existentialism is a humanism this too was a lecture given by Ida and if you can imagine sitting in this lecture trying to make sense of what he was saying you understand that it would be all but impossible on this unless you were already a student with his had some sense of not only how he uses its terms but what his stance on the history of philosophy is last time we did talk about his basic project and being in time the question of being correct we talked about the question of being what doesn't need to be and his answer in being in time is that to be is to become present and things become present in the present and presencing is what we do we bring things into an open space now in this article Heidegger is already talking about being as almost appropriating design that freedom is not a property of us but rather we belong to freedom that being uses us in order to make itself present whereas in the earlier Heidegger and being in time the focus was more on design itself as the open okay but let's focus now upon exactly what he's doing in this lecture he's asking about truth what is truth at its most fundamental character and he begins with our common-sense understanding of the meaning of truth he talks about material truth and propositional truth now we have talked about propositional truth the truth of propositions is correspondence between the intellect and the thing and if you did the reading then you saw how you're using the Latin formulation Veritas as a tack washio intellectus at Bray truth is a correspondence between intellect and thing or a beating but propositional truth he seems to suggest in this article itself points back to an earlier conception of truth a medieval perception of truth because in the medieval world truth meant being what a thing is intended to be according to the divine plan of creation when I say that this is a true tree I mean it's an actual tree a real tree as opposed to a counterfeit tree or a fake one meaning that it's the thing the being corresponds to God's plan in the modern period the correspondence was not between beings and the mind of God but between human intellect and things but at the heart of what he's arguing in the essence of truth lecture is that both material and propositional truth which he calls Veritas using the Latin designation or the modern experience of truth our derivative of a more primordial a more fundamental meaning of truth and that is closer to the way the Greeks experienced truth truth as the unconcealed montañés and so when he refers to truth as unconcealed it which is a more original sense of truth he uses the Greek term Alethea when he refers to the truth of propositions such as when I say the doors close my proposition is guaranteed by the fact that the door actually is closed correspondence between the intellect and what is actually but what does this unconcealed into me it means simply to give an example that before I can say the door is closed and achieve truth in proposition the being the door must come into the open it must present itself as he puts it in this lecture it must traverse an open region presented self to my consciousness but what makes that open space possible is what he calls human comportment toward beings what is comportment it essentially means behavior okay how you comport yourself how you conduct your existence now when I simply do something as simple as open the door I let the door be the very thing that it is I allow it to show itself as itself but as we were discussing last time for the most part we comport ourselves in an everyday average kind of way in a way that renders our surroundings familiar comfortable and in fact our familiarity with the world is so automatic and taken for granted but naturally when I deal with this or that although I let these particular beings be not by leaving them alone quite the opposite by engaging myself with them by picking up the chalk and using it that revealing at the same time conceals something else it conceals the mystery that there is anything at all and in this lecture he calls that mystery the mystery of being as a whole namely the question of why there is anything at all rather than nothing okay maybe you're talking incanting language instead of speaking in terms of faculties like COD does although Heidegger is very much pursuing the same line of thought Scott he's asking what are the conditions that make a world possible Heidegger talks in terms of the manner in which we tempura lies time okay now I'm using being in time language here but for the most part we seduce ourselves with the conception that there is plenty of time that there's always tomorrow as opposed to actively anticipating the one possibility which can't be outstripped the possibility of my own death he makes a very fleeting reference to it in this lecture and it's easy to walk right past and not see I think I'm Thursday oh I'll find it for you it isn't that I have a perception of the being in this case the door and then synthesize that perception with certain concepts like the concept that it exists and that it is that it has possibilities of being open closed rather for Heidegger we exist which means that we stand open for the manifestation of beings and for the most part I do this simply through my familiarity with things now when I am engaged with things when I open and close the door and I use the piece of chalk when I look at the clock to check the time I let these things be be what be the things that they are but of course I can I can also conceal the meaning of these things which is what heightened refers to here is untruth in the form of errand see or error like when I dominate something with an inappropriate understanding of the thing it is remember the truth here means I'm concealing or disclosing ok when design or human being here he comes so self-assured and dogmatic about its interpretation of the world then it dominates that world and as I put it in my dissertation it's almost as if design casts its own shadow into the open and eclipses beings in their being whereas to let things be in an authentic way is to let the possibilities for things show themselves and in doing so I allow the meaning of my own being to show itself to become unconcealed to enter into the open but that is the moment of anxiety that's what Sartre was talking about by English by realizing that the world literally rests on my shoulders because without me there is no world a stone is world list it has only that meaning which I ascribe to it or let it present so to backtrack a moment the ordinary conception of truth the common sensical conception of truth like when I say it is true that the lights are on or this is a true piece of gold as opposed to a counterfeit piece of gold always involves a kind of accordance or correspondence when I say this is true gold I mean that this being accords with what gold is supposed to be or my idea of what gold is supposed to be when I say that it is true that the door is closed by statement or proposition accords with the way things are but before that sort of accordance is possible first things must come into the open and what ruptures that space is us we create room for beings to be by our free comportment toward beings and so Heidegger says that the essence of truth in this more original sense and by essence again of course we mean what truth at bottom is what makes truth truth is freedom my free interaction with veins is the essential element that allows there to be anything at all such that sometime later they can accord with our ideas for our statements but at the essence of truth is freedom then in order to understand truth we have to understand what he means by freedom and he tells us freedom is beings be but letting them be themselves letting them speak for themselves but untruth as the opposite of truth must then be a concealing or closing off and there are different ways in which we can exist in untruth I can simply make errors but there's as there is a fundamental sense of truth as unconceived there is also a fundamental truth or fundamental sense of untruth because all can see all under concealing or disclosing opening up a space within which things can arise to present at the same time must conceal something else what I'm engaged in my daily affairs I let beams be but in so doing of course what gets covered up is the fact that this letting B is the result of my freedom and in fact I forget that I am free to comport myself in one way or another it's easier to hide out in the anonymity of the ordinary everyday interpretation of things but when the possibility the one possibility which cannot but be actualized namely the possibility of my death enters into the open then I become individualized because nobody can die my death for me I can't experience my death as everyone experiences it because I don't know how anyone else experiences it and so with the disclosure of the possibility of mine no longer being here comes the anxiety of realizing how radically free we are and toward the end of the article he uses this self-admittedly paradoxical even cryptic or deliberately confounding expression that the essence of truth is the truth of essence and he says am I just playing word games here I just tried to sound profound is this a bunch of nonsense well let's unpack it the essence of truth what makes truth as presencing unconcealed meant possible is the unconcealed of the essence of things the essence of truth is the activity of letting the essence of things show themselves each show itself and perhaps the most frightening disclosure possible is when I disclose my own essence and for a Heidegger I do have an essence which is why he didn't want to be called an existentialist the essence of design is to exist to excist to stand open but to stand open to be open two unfamiliar possibilities requires resolve it doesn't happen automatically our default comportment is to flee into the anonymity of the world but when I resolved upon letting possibilities that had hitherto remained concealed come into the open in the realization that I myself in my freedom and the ground of possibility then there is no one left to hide behind and when I when I and when I expose myself in that way expose myself to myself as having been hiding out in concealment my conscience tears me out of that anonymity and I experienced it as guilt guilt for having not owned my freedom okay so if you haven't yet attempted to read this thing try it the prints it's interesting because the first few paragraphs are not that difficult for them suddenly things to turn okay and we'll look at some of the passages in being in time he calls the call of conscience which is authentic design calling itself back to itself it's like we are hiding in the anyone even no one and we hear the voice of conscience beckoning us back to ourselves yes we do yeah

Channel: Michael B Brezinsky, Ph.D.

Views: 9,732

Rating: 4.9047618 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: Igo4U-JgZm4

Length: 34min 36sec (2076 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 29 2014