Aletheia
“Pilate saith unto him, What is truth?”
John 18:38, New Testament
Aletheia as Truth
Western philosophy has been preoccupied with the notion of truth since its very beginnings, and yet it is paradoxical that, whereas philosophy is regarded as the search for truth, few philosophers have inquired deeply into the question of what truth is. The question of truth lies at the center of Heidegger's philosophical reflections. According to Walter Biemel, the core of Heidegger's questioning is twofold: It is an inquiry into Being, and at the same time, it is an inquiry into aletheia.
The hermeneutical interpretation of the word 'truth' forced Heidegger to rethink and question the modern experience of truth. He claimed that there was an essential difference between viewing truth as correctness, and truth as unconcealment - the hermeneutical meaning he saw hidden in the more common meaning of the word. For Plato, and those that followed, aletheia meant correctness, a correspondence between knowledge and the object.
According to Heidegger, ever since Plato, we have been asking what ourselves and the universe must be like if we are going to have the sort of certainty and clarity that Plato felt we ought to have. Thus, Heidegger says that ‘all metaphysics, including its opponent, positivism, speaks the language of Plato.’
Heidegger argues that the history of the discourse on truth has ignored the experience of truth as an opening that lets unconcealment occur. He claims that the primordial phenomenon of truth has been concealed by Dasein's forgetfulness of Being - its reduction of the Being of beings to the ready-to-hand. Heidegger does note, however, that although the Greeks may have thought of truth in terms of correctness, they at least continued to call truth by a word with etymological traces that allude to a primordial experience with unconcealment. He says:
At the same time, we must not overlook the fact that for the Greeks, who were the first to develop this initial understanding of being as a branch of knowledge and to bring it to dominance, this primordial understanding of truth was also alive, even if pre-ontologically, and it even held its own against the concealment implicit in their ontology - at least in Aristotle.
Modernity, however, is permeated by the correspondence theory of truth correctness, or agreement with the matter at hand. This view of truth implies that the experience of truth is necessarily structured in terms of the relationship between a subject and an object. As we have seen in the previous chapter, one of Heidegger's aims was to decenter the subject, and I believe that his conception of truth extends this task. Thus, Heidegger's interpretation of aletheia as unconcealment opens up a dimension of truth that was not visible to the philosophers of modernity.
Heidegger's Concept of Truth in Being and Time (§ 44)
The exposition of care as the being of Dasein culminates in the inquiry into the connection between Being and truth. This section of Being and Time is the point at which the pre-temporal analysis of Dasein ends. Now, Heidegger shows how philosophical thought centers on the connection between Being and truth since its very beginnings. His investigation begins with a discussion of the traditional concept of truth and its ontological foundations. Heidegger then moves on to an investigation into the primordial phenomenon of truth and an account of how the traditional concept was derived from this view. Lastly, he discusses the mode of being of truth and the presupposition of truth.
The customary concept of truth takes a statement as the true locus of truth and sees its essence as being situated in the correspondence of a judgement with its object. Thus, Heidegger distinguishes between the truth ascribed to judgements and a more fundamental sense that should be attached to the term 'truth'.7 The truth of judgements may be described as the agreement of the thing and the intellect, in the Aristotelian tradition. The statement of Aristotle that the 'experiences' of the soul are in the likeness of things, which is not meant to be taken as a definition of the essential nature of truth, led in the Middle Ages to the definition of veritas as adaequatio intellecus et rei, a definition which maintained its popularity beyond Kant.
For Heidegger, in addition to the truth of judgment there exists a more essential form of truth that lies not largely in a judgement, but in the human ek-sistence itself, insofar as it is a revealing. The agreement of the judgment with the real thing presupposes that reality has already been drawn from concealedness in a more fundamental ways. To draw real things from concealedness to unconcealedness (aletheia) requires a certain 'light'. This light is Dasein's ek-sistence itself, its being-in-the-world from which originally all meaning draws its Iight.
The expression Dasein is 'in the truth,’ does not mean that Oasein is in possession of all truth. It means that because of its overtness or open stance (Offenstandigkeit), which includes its to-be-discovering, Dasein is able to 'disclose'. Heidegger tells us that 'Dasein is equiprimordially in truth and untruth'. What does he mean here? Heidegger conceives Dasein as being-in-the-world. This means that the openness of Dasein involves the articulated structure of care as a whole, including the factor of projection (the temporalisation of the future). In other words,
Dasein projects itself on its possibilities, opening up its world for itself. Also included is the factor of thrownness - the fact that Dasein always finds itself in a particular world.
In projecting, Dasein may understand himself on the basis of his very own possibilities (authenticity). When this happens, we have the 'truth of existence'. Or, Dasein may understand himself in terms of the world, to which he has ever already forfeited itself (inauthenticity). Dasein is then in untruth. In this way, Heidegger can say that Dasein is in truth and untruth. When Parmenides places the goddess of truth in front of two paths, those of discovering and concealing, this marks for Heidegger an early insight into the fact that Dasein stands in truth, as well as in untruth.
It is important to remember that by saying that Dasein is in truth does not mean that truths are planted in him by some mysterious power, but that by virtue of being-in-the-world, he is always open for all that is part of his world.
We find the continuation of Heidegger's inquiry into truth in the lecture On the Essence of Truth. How does it differ from the preceding conception in Being and Time, where Heidegger has located truth, in an essential sense, in human ek-sistence insofar that this ek-sistence is a revealing?
“Man can embody the truth, but he cannot know it.”
