heidegger on plato

Heidegger on Plato, Truth, and Unconcealment: The 1931–32 Lecture on The Essence of Truth Mark Wrathall Brigham Young University This paper discusses Heidegger’s 1931–32 lecture course on The Essence of Truth. It argues that Heidegger read Platonic ideas, not only as stage-setting for the western philosophical tradition’s privileging of conceptualization over practice, and its correlative treatment of truth as correctness, but also as an early attempt to work through truth as the fundamental experience of unhiddenness. Wrathall shows how several of Heidegger’s more-famous claims about truth, e.g. that propositional truth is grounded in truth as world-disclosure, and including Heidegger’s critique of the self-evidence of truth as correspondence, are first revealed in a powerful (if iconoclastic) reading of Plato. In the 1920s and 1930s, Heidegger repeatedly offered lectures and seminars largely devoted to the topic of truth. His evolving thoughts on the nature and philosophical significance of truth, however, made their way into relatively few publications, and when they were published, they tended to come in an incredibly condensed and enigmatic form. The main published works from this period include �44 of Sein und Zeit (1927), and essays like ‘Vom Wesen des Grundes’ (1929), ‘Vom Wesen des Wahrheit’ (1930), and ‘Platons Lehre von der Wahrheit’ (1942).1 With the publication of Heidegger’s notes from his lecture courses, it is now becoming possible to connect the dots and flesh out Heidegger’s published account of truth.2 These lecture courses are not just of historiographical interest, however. In them we find Heidegger working out an account of the way that propositional truth is grounded in a more fundamental notion of truth as world disclosure. He also struggles to develop a phenomenology of world disclosure, and it is in these lecture courses that Heidegger’s later view on the history of unconcealment and being develops. He also argues that the phenomenologically enriched notion of truth has normative implications for the way that we conduct ourselves in the world. I review here some of Heidegger’s thought on these matters as developed in a lecture course offered winter semester 1931–32: The Essence of Truth: On Plato’s Cave Allegory and the Theaetetus (GA 34).3 Inquiry, 47, 443–463 DOI 10.1080/00201740410004250 � 2004 Taylor & Francis I. Basic Themes of the Course The stated purpose of the 1931–32 lecture course is to understand the essence of truth. The majority of the course is spent, however, in what might seem a more historical than philosophical endeavor – an encounter with, and appropriation of, Plato’s views on knowledge and truth. But it is in the course of an interpretation of Plato’s cave allegory from the Republic and a review of Plato’s inquiry into knowledge and error in the Theaetetus that Heidegger develops the account of the nature and history of unconcealment that characterizes much of his later work. Plato’s famous allegory of the cave is a subject to which Heidegger returned repeatedly. He offered interpretations of it in lecture courses like this one, and the 1933 lecture course Vom Wesen der Wahrheit (GA 36/37), before publishing an account of it in 1942 (‘Platons Lehre von der Wahrheit’, GA 9/ ‘Plato’s Doctrine of Truth’, in Pathmarks). In the published essay, as in the lecture course, Heidegger argues that contemporary representational accounts of truth as correspondence are an outgrowth of a change in thinking spurred by Plato’s thought. This change, Heidegger argues, can be detected in an ambiguity in the cave allegory surrounding the notion of truth – an ambiguity between truth as a property of things, and truth as a property of our representations of things. For Heidegger the decision to focus on truth as a property of representational states has its root in the historical influence of Plato’s doctrine of the ideas. Attention to the ambiguity in Plato’s account, however, shows that what now seems a natural way to approach truth actually hides at its basis a decision – namely, the decision to consider truth only insofar as it is a property of propositions. One consequence of this decision is that, given the subsequent orientation of truth to ideas or concepts, we come to believe that ‘what matters in all our fundamental orientations toward beings is the achieving of a correct view of the ideas’ (Pathmarks, p. 179) – that is, a correct representation of things in terms of their essential or unchanging properties. Heidegger’s interest in the cave allegory stems from his belief that, while it lays the ground for an account of propositional truth, it does so on the basis of a view of truth as a property of things. It thus presents an opportunity to rethink the now widely accepted approach to truth. The Theaetetus was also a staple of Heidegger’s lecture courses in the 1920s and early 1930s, figuring prominently not just in GA 34 and GA 36/ 37, but also in the 1924 course on Plato’s Sophist (GA 19), and the 1926 course on The Basic Concepts of Ancient Philosophy (GA 22). One reason for his interest in this dialogue, as we shall see, was his belief that truth or unconcealment is a ‘privative’ concept, and thus needs to be approached by understanding its negation.4 Heidegger argued that the Greek language reflects an awareness of this in the fact that Greek uses a privative 444 Mark Wrathall word-form (a-le¯theia, un-concealedness) to name ‘truth’. ‘The awakening and forming of the word ale¯theia’, he writes, ‘is not a mere accident … and not an external matter’ (GA 34, p. 127). What it is to be unconcealed is thus determined in relationship to a positive state of concealment. The Theaetetus thus becomes of interest, given its focus on trying to understand the concept of, and discover the conditions of the possibility of, error. Error is, of course, one way to conceive of the opposite of truth. The account we give of error will therefore affect the understanding we have of truth. If we think of truth as a privative state, we will think of it as the absence of error. But Heidegger also wants to question the idea that error as conventionally understood ought to be the positive state from which truth is defined. To the contrary, he contends that the proper positive concept is concealment. Before turning to the details of the lecture course, a final word of warning is in order. In this, like all of Heidegger’s commentaries on other philo- sophers, it is not always easy to distinguish between views that Heidegger attributes to others in order to reject, and those that he is endorsing. This is, in part, a function of the fact that Heidegger’s readings of philosophers are so often extremely unconventional; one tends to believe that, when Heidegger articulates a novel view, it must be his own view. This is a mistake, and one must not assume that Heidegger is endorsing all the positions that he attributes to Plato. Indeed, he thinks that with Plato’s thought ‘Western philosophy takes off on an erroneous and fateful course’ (p. 12). In addition, Heidegger is a notoriously violent reader of other philo- sophers – he reads them to discover the ‘unsaid’ in their thought. The unsaid is the background assumptions, dispositions, conceptual systems, etc., which ground the actual views they accept. ‘In all genuine works of philosophy’, he argues, ‘the decisive content does not stand there in so many words, but is what brings into motion the totality of a living interpretation’ (p. 140). When Heidegger offers a reading of Plato, then, it is not primarily oriented toward explaining what Plato actually thought or wrote but rather toward how what he thought and wrote was shaped by certain questionable background assumptions – assumptions which need to be revisited. In the course of his readings of philosophers, Heidegger ends up offering an interesting and philosophically important reconstruction of the logic that supports certain philosophical views. This is usually worth working through, even if one ultimately dismisses Heidegger’s accounts as historically invalid. I now turn to a review of some of the salient themes of the lecture course. Given space constraints, this will obviously be a selective review as I try to give a general sense of Heidegger’s goal, and to focus on what I think are some of his more interesting contributions to thinking about truth. Heidegger on Plato, Truth, and Unconcealment 445 A. Setting the Stage: Truth, Essence, Self-Evidence Heidegger begins the course by calling into question our everyday or ‘self- evident’ understanding of the notions of truth and essence. Obviously, we can’t give an account of the essence of truth if we don’t know what an essence is, and if we don’t know what truth is. The tradition has ready-made answers to both questions. When it comes to truth, for example, the generally accepted starting point for understanding truth, at least within the analytic tradition of philosophy, is an analysis of our use of the truth predicate. Moreover, most philosophers have followed Frege in only considering those uses of the truth predicate in which truth is predicated of propositions (or certain propositional states and acts like beliefs, sentences, assertions, etc.). The main theories for defining the truth of propositions take truth either as a correspondence of the propositional entity with a fact,5 or a coherence of a proposition with a held set of propositions, or, finally, a kind of deflationism, in which it is pointed out that saying that a proposition is true doesn’t really do anything more than simply asserting the proposition. But, Heidegger asks, why should we limit our considerations of truth to propositional truth in the first place? Frege, to his credit, recognized that he was dismissing other uses of the truth predicate, and gave some sort of reason for it. His purpose, he said, was to understand ‘that kind of truth … whose recognition is the goal of sciences’.6 Most analysts are not self-conscious about the matter. So what happens if we revisit the decision to focus only on truth as predicated of propositions or collections of propositions? Think for a moment about the ways in which, in our common non-philosophical discourse, we actually use the ‘truth predicate’. We are as likely to say ‘she is a true friend’ as ‘what she said is true’ – that is, we predicate truth of particular entities, not just sentences or propositions. Or ‘truth’ can also be used to name whole states of affairs or domains about which we think or speak (think Jack Nicholson’s character in A Few Good Men: ‘You can’t handle the truth!’). In religious discourse, ‘truth’ is even less amenable to standard definitions. In the Gospel of John, for example, Jesus proclaims: ‘I am the way, the truth, and the life’ (John 14:6), or better yet: ‘he that doeth truth cometh to the light, that his deeds may be made manifest, that they are wrought in God’ (John 3:21). Whatever ‘doing the truth’ is, it’s clearly not a matter of holding true beliefs or making true assertions. Such examples lend credence to Heidegger’s view that, in understanding truth, we should not be too quick to focus exclusively on the truth of propositions. Indeed, Heidegger believes that propositional truth must be grounded in the truth or unhiddenness of entities: ‘what is primordially true, i.e., unhidden, is not the proposition about a being, but the being itself – a thing, a fact. … The proposition is true in so far as it conforms to something already true, i.e., to a 446 Mark Wrathall being that is unhidden in its being. Truth in this sense of correctness presupposes unhiddenness’ (p. 86). Just as he calls into question the self-evidence of our understanding of truth, Heidegger also argues that the self-evident idea of essences is problematic. The traditional approach to essences holds that the essence of a thing is ‘just what makes it what it is’, where this is understood as some- thing universal, something that ‘applies to everything’ that is such a thing (p. 1). So the essence of truth will be whatever applies to every true proposition. But what sort of ‘whatever’ are we looking for? Typically, essences are thought of either as a property or characteristic possessed by the particular things, or as a true description that can be applied to everything that shares that essence. So, we might think of the essence of gold as some physical property or characteristic, say, the atomic number, which all gold possesses, or we might think of the essence of table as a description that will apply to all and only tables. But truths are not, on the face of it, like tables or lumps of gold – that is objects with properties. On what basis are we justified in treating truths in the same way that we treat (physical) objects? The sort of thing we look for as the essence of an entity might actually depend on the kind of entity it is. Since the essence is the what-being of a thing – that is, what it is – we can’t simply assume that the same understanding of essence applies to different kinds of beings. We first have to ask about being – in this case, what is the being of truths? Do they have the kind of being that objects do? At any rate, such considerations should give us pause before we confidently assume that we know what the essence of truth is, or look for an account of the essence in, for example, terms of a property that all true assertions possess (pp. 3–4). Heidegger notes another important feature of essences – namely, that it seems we can’t decide what the essence of a thing is unless we already know what it is (this is an argument he develops in more detail in GA 45). Suppose we want to know what the essence of a table is. We’ll try to figure out what description applies to every table, what feature or property every table possesses. To do this, we need to round up all the tables and examine them. But we can’t round them up unless we already know which things are tables and which are not. So, it seems, we can never discover the essence of a thing or ground it empirically; we can only act on the basis of a prior understanding of essence. ‘Clearly we must necessarily already know the essence. For how otherwise could we know how to respond to the request to name [in this case] truths?’ (p. 2). If this is right, then essences are neither something that can be discovered, nor something that can conclusively be proven and established to be true. But nor are they exempt from questioning and, in the lecture course that follows, Heidegger tries to think through the historical roots of our understanding of the essence of truth. Later in the course, Heidegger develops Heidegger on Plato, Truth, and Unconcealment 447 the idea of such an understanding as something we strive for, rather than discover or deduce or prove (see section 3 below). Finally, Heidegger attacks the very notion of self-evidence. First, he makes the obvious point that being self-evident doesn’t necessarily constitute a good reason for accepting a proposition. Many things that have been thought self- evident in the past have turned out to be false. More importantly, he points out that self-evidence does not exist in itself – something is always self-evident for somebody. But that means that we can’t judge the reliability of self- evidence without understanding who we are, and why certain things seem so self-evident to us. Thus, the observation that the essence of truth is self- evident ought to be the starting point of inquiry into why we are so constituted that this particular understanding of truth will strike us as so very self-evident. ‘We must first of all ask how it comes about that we quite naturally move and feel comfortable within such self-evidences?’ (p. 5). B. Why Plato? The self-evident but nonetheless questionable nature of the essence of truth as correspondence is, Heidegger concludes, just another indication of a pervasive fact about human beings: when we become comfortable with something, it becomes invisible to us, so that we actually understand it very poorly. To justify our ready acceptance of the traditional notion of truth – if it can be justified – thus requires that we ‘step back from it’ (p. 5), that is, find a standpoint from which it no longer seems so obvious or natural. We will then be in a position to examine its foundations and search out its meaning. This is one of the motivations for turning to Plato, for, Heidegger claims, the understanding of the current self-evident understanding of the essence of truth was not yet taken for granted in Plato, but it is Plato’s philosophy that first laid the foundations for our own notion of truth. To understand what Heidegger is trying to accomplish with this historical return to Plato, we need to take a short detour through his philosophy of language. Heidegger believes that words accrue to articulations in a pre- linguistically structured experience of the world. So our word ‘desk’, for example, succeeds in referring to a desk only because we have articulated a particular space (say, an office) in terms of certain tasks, relations between equipment, identities (or for-the-sake-of-whichs), in such a way that one of the things we do there is sit and write. Our word ‘desk’, then, accrues to this practically structured node in the overall context of equipment and activities. One of the powers and dangers of language, however, is that it is possible for the word to refer to an object even without the rich experience of the world that articulated the object to which it refers. So it is possible for someone to refer to a desk with the word ‘desk’, even if he or she doesn’t know how to 448 Mark Wrathall comport him- or herself in an office. It is even possible that, without this original experience of the office, what we understand by and refer to with the word ‘desk’ could shift and drift over time, thus eventually obscuring what was originally understood. This, Heidegger believes, is precisely what has happened with words like ‘truth’ and ‘essence’. Of ale¯theia, the Greek word for truth, for instance, he claims that it ‘loses its fundamental meaning and is uprooted from the fundamental experience of unhiddenness’ (p. 99). Elsewhere he suggests that two quite different things are both named by the same word: ‘truth as unhiddenness and truth as correctness are quite different things; they arise from quite different fundamental experiences and cannot at all be equated’ (p. 8). But nor does this mean that the different things named by the word ‘truth’ are only accidentally related to each other (in the way that, for example, the machines and birds named by the English word ‘crane’ are). ‘Truth’ names these ‘quite different things’ because the different ‘fundamental experiences’ have a great deal to do with each other. The former (the experience of unhiddenness) is, Heidegger believes, the historical and logical foundation of the latter. To recognize this, and to better understand our own notion of truth as correctness, Heidegger holds that we need to reawaken an experience of hiddenness and unhiddenness: ‘instead of speaking about it [a return to the experience of unhiddenness] in general terms, we want to attempt it’ (p. 7). That is the ultimate goal of the lecture course, and another reason for the return to Plato’s thought. When introducing the Theaetetus, he notes that Plato’s dialogue is simply the occasion for ‘developing’ and ‘awakening’ (p. 93) the question: ‘for the immediate purpose of these lectures it is therefore not necessary for you to have an autonomous command of the Greek text. In fact you should also be able to co-enact the questioning itself without the text. … The task and goal of the interpretation must be to bring the questioning of this dialogue to you in the actual proximity of your ownmost being [Dasein] … so that you have in yourselves a question