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17 Sep 17 UTC	Spring, 1: bigbodies.net
17 Sep 17 UTC	Autumn, 3: Thanks Alex. Great idea
17 Sep 17 UTC	Autumn, 3: Thanks Alex. Great idea
17 Sep 17 UTC	Spring, 6: Ok thomas. time to move on Alex
17 Sep 17 UTC	Spring, 11: Heidegger’s notion of truth could be understood as the extension of a project begun by Edmund Husserl. Husserl distanced himself from the so-called “logical account” of truth. This view, developed by Hermann Lotze, identifies truth with “valid affirmation.” As an example, suppose that I see a blue sky above me and form the judgement that “the sky is blue.” I have made a predication that affirms a state of affairs. That predication is “true” because it validly affirms the state of affairs. The predication would be false if it invalidly affirmed the state of affairs. Husserl criticizes the Lotzean view because it wrongly equivocates actuality with logical “affirmed-ness.” To Husserl, propositional correctness (“affirmed-ness”) cannot itself be truth, because truth depends upon a prior identity between judgement and intuition. In Cartesian Meditations, Husserl says of truth-telling that “the grounding is an agreement of the judgement with the judged state of affairs…itself.”[1] In other words, true judgements depend on evidences; a judgement cannot be called “true” unless it links up with a correlative state-of-affairs as a referent. Logical concepts must be grounded/evidenced in actualities The mistake of the Lotzean position is that it assumes that logical concepts are grounded within themselves, without need of evidence. Husserl disagrees: logical concepts are not actualities; rather, they emerge from actualities. The predication “the sky is blue” isn’t true within itself, as a mere sentence on a page. Rather, the predication is true because the terms “sky” and “blue” correlate to meaningful intentional content, content that arises prior to explicit, thematized predication. This distinction is far from trivial, for it breaks ties with the analytic tradition’s tendency to “forget” truth’s groundedness in actuality, in real being. Daniel Dahlstrom calls this tendency an “ontological naiveté.”[2] If the structure of truth (agreement between judgement with the judged state of affairs) arises prior to affirmation, it is unjustified to equate truth with affirmation itself; to do “forgets” the real beings that ultimately grounds truth. Truth cannot be a presence Although Heidegger agrees with Husserl that truth arises prior to predication, he thinks that Husserl fails to fully detach pre-predicative truth from the “ontologically naive” logical prejudice. Heidegger calls Husserl’s view “traditional,” that is, ultimately rooted in a justification of the intelligibility of things through assertions. Because Husserl persistently refers to truth as a form of description, assertion, judgement or interpretation, Heidegger accuses Husserl of equating truth with a sort of presence. This is problematic for Heidegger, because a phenomenology of truth requires that we discover not some specific sort of presence called “truth,” but rather the emergence of “what is given” and “what is meant” from absence to its presence, an emergence or “unconcealment” that we call truth. Truth must be pre-intuitive, but still normative Heidegger’s project is thus to complete the work that Husserl started, articulating a phenomenology of truth that is not just pre-predicative, but altogether pre-intuitive. His challenge, however, is to account for this “most original” truth without doing violence to truth’s normative sense, its conditions of success and failure. If Heideggerian truth-telling cannot fail (that is, if falsity is impossible), then the account proves insufficient. How, then, does Heidegger ground normativity in pre-intuitive being? Truth must be a way of “taking” things The answer to this question lies in Heidegger’s turn from the transcendental subject to being-in-the-world. Dahlstrom calls this turn a shift in truth’s “center of gravity,”[3] a re-configuring of Husserlian intentionality as something emerging not from theoretical justification, but rather from the way we “take” things. Before we are able to examine this shift in any detail, it is necessary to establish Husserl’s account of pre-predicative truth. HUSSERL’S ACCOUNT Normativity is given over in perception itself Husserl grounds normativity in perception itself, since perception is the original context in which we “get things right” (or wrong). To Husserl, predicative truth is rooted in prior intentional content given in perception. But the relationship is not merely causal, as if our judgements necessarily and immediately follow from the way we perceive things. From the first-person perspective, justifying truth claims is inseparable from the practice of “getting things right.”[4] To tell the truth is thus not merely to refer to or indicate something, but to do so successfully. This is because judgements do not merely indicate what is given, but also express what is meant. Perception is thus both receptive (given over by objects) and yet expressed in a determinate way that can either succeed or fail. The latter component is what we call the “normative” in perception. The normative is within the “as-structure” of meaningful perception What is the normative in perception? Heidegger locates it within the “as-structure” of rational perception, the manner in which rational beings can take things as things. This is in contrast with non-rational beings, which can only take things as “that-which” dis-inhibits some appetite or drive. In Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, Heidegger uses the example of a blade of grass. To a beetle, the grass is not conceivable “as” grass, that is, as a thing. It can only be taken as a “beetle-path,” or “that-which dis-inhibits the appetite to move towards food.” To the rational, linguistic subject, however, the blade of grass can be given over meaningfully, intentionally, as a thing itself. The “as-structure” gives over presences as entailing absences What do we mean by taking something as a “thing itself?” Stephen Crowell points to entailment, the way that temporally-structured perceiving gives things as both present and yet entailing the absent as belonging to the present. When we see the front side of a chair, the un-seen back side is given as belonging to the front, the back is “entailed by the front.” This entailment is not inferred through explicit reasoning, but rather immediately perceived. Alva Noë puts it nicely as a “perceptual sense” rather than a “thinking that.”[5] Entailment is evidence of the norm of interpretation/fulfillment Importantly, entailment is not itself the normative in the perception; it is merely evidence of it. But it points to a norm of interpretation, the immediate manner in which rational beings move from receptive sensation to active interpretation or “taking-as.” Crowell terms this the norm of “completion” or “adequation” of things;[6] Husserl calls it the “fulfillment of the intention.”[7] This language clarifies that it is things themselves that are intelligible and determined; we do not determine things. However, their intelligibility is unknown, incomplete, un-articulated. To perceive something is to receive one aspect of a larger whole, to take in a sliver that gives us enough determination to determine what is supposed to be “there” as a thing. This is achieved by what Crowell terms the “referential, symbolizing function” of perception[8]. This function is similar to that of a symbol, for it indicates a range of possible determinations through suggestion of similarity and contiguity. When we perceive the front of a cup, it immediately seems similar to other cups. Only when so taken “as a cup” does the front side of the cup imply a typical or “contiguous” back side and inside. [1] Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, trans. Dorion Cairns (Dordrecht, Kluwer, 1999), 10. [2] Daniel Dahlstrom, Heidegger’s Concept of Truth (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2001), 50. [3] CN Dahlstrom 2.5 [4] Steven Crowell, Normativity and Phenomenology in Husserl and Heidegger (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2013), 124. [5] Alva Noë, “Experience of the World in Time.” Analysis 66 (2006), 26. [6] CN Crowell (2013), 130. [7] CN Crowell 131 [8] Crowell (2013), 132.
17 Sep 17 UTC	Spring, 11: Heidegger’s notion of truth could be understood as the extension of a project begun by Edmund Husserl. Husserl distanced himself from the so-called “logical account” of truth. This view, developed by Hermann Lotze, identifies truth with “valid affirmation.” As an example, suppose that I see a blue sky above me and form the judgement that “the sky is blue.” I have made a predication that affirms a state of affairs. That predication is “true” because it validly affirms the state of affairs. The predication would be false if it invalidly affirmed the state of affairs. Husserl criticizes the Lotzean view because it wrongly equivocates actuality with logical “affirmed-ness.” To Husserl, propositional correctness (“affirmed-ness”) cannot itself be truth, because truth depends upon a prior identity between judgement and intuition. In Cartesian Meditations, Husserl says of truth-telling that “the grounding is an agreement of the judgement with the judged state of affairs…itself.”[1] In other words, true judgements depend on evidences; a judgement cannot be called “true” unless it links up with a correlative state-of-affairs as a referent. Logical concepts must be grounded/evidenced in actualities The mistake of the Lotzean position is that it assumes that logical concepts are grounded within themselves, without need of evidence. Husserl disagrees: logical concepts are not actualities; rather, they emerge from actualities. The predication “the sky is blue” isn’t true within itself, as a mere sentence on a page. Rather, the predication is true because the terms “sky” and “blue” correlate to meaningful intentional content, content that arises prior to explicit, thematized predication. This distinction is far from trivial, for it breaks ties with the analytic tradition’s tendency to “forget” truth’s groundedness in actuality, in real being. Daniel Dahlstrom calls this tendency an “ontological naiveté.”[2] If the structure of truth (agreement between judgement with the judged state of affairs) arises prior to affirmation, it is unjustified to equate truth with affirmation itself; to do “forgets” the real beings that ultimately grounds truth. Truth cannot be a presence Although Heidegger agrees with Husserl that truth arises prior to predication, he thinks that Husserl fails to fully detach pre-predicative truth from the “ontologically naive” logical prejudice. Heidegger calls Husserl’s view “traditional,” that is, ultimately rooted in a justification of the intelligibility of things through assertions. Because Husserl persistently refers to truth as a form of description, assertion, judgement or interpretation, Heidegger accuses Husserl of equating truth with a sort of presence. This is problematic for Heidegger, because a phenomenology of truth requires that we discover not some specific sort of presence called “truth,” but rather the emergence of “what is given” and “what is meant” from absence to its presence, an emergence or “unconcealment” that we call truth. Truth must be pre-intuitive, but still normative Heidegger’s project is thus to complete the work that Husserl started, articulating a phenomenology of truth that is not just pre-predicative, but altogether pre-intuitive. His challenge, however, is to account for this “most original” truth without doing violence to truth’s normative sense, its conditions of success and failure. If Heideggerian truth-telling cannot fail (that is, if falsity is impossible), then the account proves insufficient. How, then, does Heidegger ground normativity in pre-intuitive being? Truth must be a way of “taking” things The answer to this question lies in Heidegger’s turn from the transcendental subject to being-in-the-world. Dahlstrom calls this turn a shift in truth’s “center of gravity,”[3] a re-configuring of Husserlian intentionality as something emerging not from theoretical justification, but rather from the way we “take” things. Before we are able to examine this shift in any detail, it is necessary to establish Husserl’s account of pre-predicative truth. HUSSERL’S ACCOUNT Normativity is given over in perception itself Husserl grounds normativity in perception itself, since perception is the original context in which we “get things right” (or wrong). To Husserl, predicative truth is rooted in prior intentional content given in perception. But the relationship is not merely causal, as if our judgements necessarily and immediately follow from the way we perceive things. From the first-person perspective, justifying truth claims is inseparable from the practice of “getting things right.”[4] To tell the truth is thus not merely to refer to or indicate something, but to do so successfully. This is because judgements do not merely indicate what is given, but also express what is meant. Perception is thus both receptive (given over by objects) and yet expressed in a determinate way that can either succeed or fail. The latter component is what we call the “normative” in perception. The normative is within the “as-structure” of meaningful perception What is the normative in perception? Heidegger locates it within the “as-structure” of rational perception, the manner in which rational beings can take things as things. This is in contrast with non-rational beings, which can only take things as “that-which” dis-inhibits some appetite or drive. In Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, Heidegger uses the example of a blade of grass. To a beetle, the grass is not conceivable “as” grass, that is, as a thing. It can only be taken as a “beetle-path,” or “that-which dis-inhibits the appetite to move towards food.” To the rational, linguistic subject, however, the blade of grass can be given over meaningfully, intentionally, as a thing itself. The “as-structure” gives over presences as entailing absences What do we mean by taking something as a “thing itself?” Stephen Crowell points to entailment, the way that temporally-structured perceiving gives things as both present and yet entailing the absent as belonging to the present. When we see the front side of a chair, the un-seen back side is given as belonging to the front, the back is “entailed by the front.” This entailment is not inferred through explicit reasoning, but rather immediately perceived. Alva Noë puts it nicely as a “perceptual sense” rather than a “thinking that.”[5] Entailment is evidence of the norm of interpretation/fulfillment Importantly, entailment is not itself the normative in the perception; it is merely evidence of it. But it points to a norm of interpretation, the immediate manner in which rational beings move from receptive sensation to active interpretation or “taking-as.” Crowell terms this the norm of “completion” or “adequation” of things;[6] Husserl calls it the “fulfillment of the intention.”[7] This language clarifies that it is things themselves that are intelligible and determined; we do not determine things. However, their intelligibility is unknown, incomplete, un-articulated. To perceive something is to receive one aspect of a larger whole, to take in a sliver that gives us enough determination to determine what is supposed to be “there” as a thing. This is achieved by what Crowell terms the “referential, symbolizing function” of perception[8]. This function is similar to that of a symbol, for it indicates a range of possible determinations through suggestion of similarity and contiguity. When we perceive the front of a cup, it immediately seems similar to other cups. Only when so taken “as a cup” does the front side of the cup imply a typical or “contiguous” back side and inside. [1] Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, trans. Dorion Cairns (Dordrecht, Kluwer, 1999), 10. [2] Daniel Dahlstrom, Heidegger’s Concept of Truth (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2001), 50. [3] CN Dahlstrom 2.5 [4] Steven Crowell, Normativity and Phenomenology in Husserl and Heidegger (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2013), 124. [5] Alva Noë, “Experience of the World in Time.” Analysis 66 (2006), 26. [6] CN Crowell (2013), 130. [7] CN Crowell 131 [8] Crowell (2013), 132.
17 Sep 17 UTC	Spring, 15: Introduction From Assertion to Disclosure: Discovering the Originary Sense of Truth Thesis: Truth is most fundamentally the disclosure of things, not judgements about them. Intro: Truth has always been about giving us beings, but we’ve forgotten that “From time immemorial, philosophy has associated truth and Being.”[1] With these words, Martin Heidegger harkens back to an “originary” sense of truth: an uncovering of “the way things are,” of real being. Heidegger is concerned that we have forgotten truth’s grounding in being, instead equating truth with logical demonstrations and proofs. Continuing a project begun by Edmund Husserl, Heidegger critiques this “logical account” of truth through phenomenological analysis. In this chapter, we will argue Heidegger’s phenomenology of “originary truth.” First, we will consider Husserl’s critique of the “logical account” of truth. Second, we will discuss Husserl’s “philosophy of consciousness,” his attempt to link the sensory givenness of beings to our intentional grasp of their truth. Third, we will present Heidegger’s critique of Husserl, in which he calls for a shift in truth’s “center of gravity” from theoretical justification to being-in-the world. Fourth, we will discuss Heidegger’s own account of “originary truth.” Through this analysis, we will get a clearer picture of Heidegger’s sweeping phenomenological project: to ground truth in “getting things right,” not in forming valid judgements about them. According to Husserl, The “logical view” doesn’t link up with beings Heidegger’s notion of truth could be understood as the extension of a project begun by Edmund Husserl. Husserl distanced himself from the so-called “logical account” of truth. This view, developed by Hermann Lotze, identifies truth with “valid affirmation.” As an example, suppose that I see a blue sky above me and form the judgement that “the sky is blue.” I have made a predication that affirms a state of affairs. That predication is “true” because it validly affirms the state of affairs. The predication would be false if it invalidly affirmed the state of affairs. Husserl criticizes the Lotzean view because it wrongly equivocates actuality with logical “affirmed-ness.” To Husserl, propositional correctness (“affirmed-ness”) cannot itself be truth, because truth depends upon a prior identity between judgement and intuition. In Cartesian Meditations, Husserl says of truth-telling that “the grounding is an agreement of the judgement with the judged state of affairs…itself.”[2] In other words, true judgements depend on evidences; a judgement cannot be called “true” unless it links up with a correlative state-of-affairs as a referent. Logical concepts must be grounded/evidenced in actualities The mistake of the Lotzean position is that it assumes that logical concepts are grounded within themselves, without need of evidence. Husserl disagrees: logical concepts are not actualities; rather, they emerge from actualities. The predication “the sky is blue” isn’t true within itself, as a mere sentence on a page. Rather, the predication is true because the terms “sky” and “blue” correlate to meaningful intentional content, content that arises prior to explicit, thematized predication. This distinction is far from trivial, for it breaks ties with the analytic tradition’s tendency to “forget” truth’s groundedness in actuality, in real being. Daniel Dahlstrom calls this tendency an “ontological naiveté.”[3] If the structure of truth (agreement between judgement with the judged state of affairs) arises prior to affirmation, it is unjustified to equate truth with affirmation itself; to do “forgets” the real beings that ultimately grounds truth. Truth cannot be a presence Although Heidegger agrees with Husserl that truth arises prior to predication, he thinks that Husserl fails to fully detach pre-predicative truth from the “ontologically naive” logical prejudice. Heidegger calls Husserl’s view “traditional,” that is, ultimately rooted in a justification of the intelligibility of things through assertions. Because Husserl persistently refers to truth as a form of description, assertion, judgement or interpretation, Heidegger accuses Husserl of equating truth with a sort of presence. This is problematic for Heidegger, because a phenomenology of truth requires that we discover not some specific sort of presence called “truth,” but rather the emergence of “what is given” and “what is meant” from absence to its presence, an emergence or “unconcealment” that we call truth. Truth must be pre-intuitive, but still normative Heidegger’s project is thus to complete the work that Husserl started, articulating a phenomenology of truth that is not just pre-predicative, but altogether pre-intuitive. His challenge, however, is to account for this “most original” truth without doing violence to truth’s normative sense, its conditions of success and failure. If Heideggerian truth-telling cannot fail (that is, if falsity is impossible), then the account proves insufficient. How, then, does Heidegger ground normativity in pre-intuitive being? Truth must be a way of “taking” things The answer to this question lies in Heidegger’s turn from the transcendental subject to being-in-the-world. Dahlstrom calls this turn a shift in truth’s “center of gravity,”[4] a re-configuring of Husserlian intentionality as something emerging not from theoretical justification, but rather from the way we “take” things. Before we are able to examine this shift in any detail, it is necessary to establish Husserl’s account of pre-predicative truth. HUSSERL’S ACCOUNT Normativity is given over in perception itself Husserl grounds normativity in perception itself, since perception is the original context in which we “get things right” (or wrong). To Husserl, predicative truth is rooted in prior intentional content given in perception. But the relationship is not merely causal, as if our judgements necessarily and immediately follow from the way we perceive things. From the first-person perspective, justifying truth claims is inseparable from the practice of “getting things right.”[5] To tell the truth is thus not merely to refer to or indicate something, but to do so successfully. This is because judgements do not merely indicate what is given, but also express what is meant. Perception is thus both receptive (given over by objects) and yet expressed in a determinate way that can either succeed or fail. The latter component is what we call the “normative” in perception. The normative is within the “as-structure” of meaningful perception What is the normative in perception? Heidegger locates it within the “as-structure” of rational perception, the manner in which rational beings can take things as things. This is in contrast with non-rational beings, which can only take things as “that-which” dis-inhibits some appetite or drive. In Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, Heidegger uses the example of a blade of grass. To a beetle, the grass is not conceivable “as” grass, that is, as a thing. It can only be taken as a “beetle-path,” or “that-which dis-inhibits the appetite to move towards food.” To the rational, linguistic subject, however, the blade of grass can be given over meaningfully, intentionally, as a thing itself. The “as-structure” gives over presences as entailing absences What do we mean by taking something as a “thing itself?” Stephen Crowell points to entailment, the way that temporally-structured perceiving gives things as both present and yet entailing the absent as belonging to the present. When we see the front side of a chair, the un-seen back side is given as belonging to the front, the back is “entailed by the front.” This entailment is not inferred through explicit reasoning, but rather immediately perceived. Alva Noë puts it nicely as a “perceptual sense” rather than a “thinking that.”[6] Entailment is evidence of the norm of interpretation/fulfillment Importantly, entailment is not itself the normative in the perception; it is merely evidence of it. But it points to a norm of interpretation, the immediate manner in which rational beings move from receptive sensation to active interpretation or “taking-as.” Crowell terms this the norm of “completion” or “adequation” of things;[7] Husserl calls it the “fulfillment of the intention.”[8] This language clarifies that it is things themselves that are intelligible and determined; we do not determine things. However, their intelligibility is unknown, incomplete, un-articulated. To perceive something is to receive one aspect of a larger whole, to take in a sliver that gives us enough determination to determine what is supposed to be “there” as a thing. This is achieved by what Crowell terms the “referential, symbolizing function” of perception[9]. This function is similar to that of a symbol, for it indicates a range of possible determinations through suggestion of similarity and contiguity. When we perceive the front of a cup, it immediately seems similar to other cups. Only when so taken “as a cup” does the front side of the cup imply a typical or “contiguous” back side and inside. Fulfillment is inherent to perception because objects, not the subject, are “what-is-fulfilled” Our concern is that this apparent norm of “fulfillment” might not actually be inherent to perception, but merely accidentally related to it. Husserl addresses this issue with his notion of indeterminacy, a term that Heidegger also adopts. To Husserl, indeterminacy means “incompleteness,” not a lack of determination. The perceiver does not determine objects, but merely articulates, presents, and knows them. Intelligible, determinate properties are indeed “in” objects, not “in” the intentional subject. Determinacy or knowledge is thus the intentional completion of the indeterminacy presented in object. This is why Husserl uses the language of “filled” intentions: the present object entails the absent object, and this entailment “fills” the indeterminate. Objects uphold standards of fulfillment Husserl’s account thus maintains an important tension: truth is neither “objective” nor “subjective” in the simplistic sense, but rather is co-constituted by both subject and object. The present object “mediates” the absent object, upholding a “standard for determining what is indirectly presented[10].” Only an intentional subject can fulfill intentions It is important to note that this determination can only be accomplished by an intentional subject who can receive entailments. Non-linguistic animals would not be able to receive entailments, since such creatures cannot “take” the absent as belonging to a present experience. Thus it is not raw sense-data that equips the subject for the norm of fulfillment, but rather an intentional structure capable of taking things as things. But how does this structure emerge, since “nothing predestines the sensations for such a role?”[11] Perception is predestined for intentional fulfillment because being is fundamentally intelligible Kinesthesia is evidence of the intelligibility of being The answer found in Husserl’s later work is his so-called “genetic phenomenology,” which grounds the intelligibility or “primordial lawfulness”[12] of being in the structure of perception itself. The argument has two prongs: first, Husserl argues that intentionality is present even on the level of sensation. Second, he argues that perception is structured both intentionally and yet non-conceptually in a temporal unfolding of intention and fulfillment.[13] This unfolding is law-like and can be described as typical or atypical. Dahlstrom uses the example of kinesthesia to describe the lawfulness of “raw” perception. Kinesthesia takes our physical body parts and “makes them the body,” the sensing thing. Even the very notion of “body” is meaningless without the time-constituted organization of our sensory fields. As an example, the notion of “my eye” is tied to the kinesthetic link between a sense field and my eye as a physical object. This link emerges in my perceiving law-like relations between the two (such as “when I turn my eye to the left, the sense-field moves to the right”). It is a passive or “informative” perception, but it requires intentionality. Normativity emerges when this intelligibility is given over “as” entailing lawfulness (rules?) Normativity emerges when these passive perceptions give rise to expectations or entailments. Returning to our earlier example, suppose that our eye has had many years of practice looking at objects. Countless law-like perceptions have given rise to norms of expectation and entailment. If I were to turn my eye to the left, I expect the image before me to move to the right. If this don’t occur, there would be a breakdown in the lawful connection expected between object and perception. But this breakdown isn’t merely “atypical” but truly “abnormal” in the strongest sense. It’s not that the image merely isn’t moving typically, it’s that the image ought to move. This is how perception itself gives rise to norms of acting. Perception of objective phenomena are normative not just as a typical “is” but as an “ought” Perception of this “ought” is a skill or “know-how” To better illustrate the difference between passive, informative perceptions and intentional, object-constituting perceptions, Dahlstrom draws a distinction between “kinesthetic” and “presenting” sensations.[14] Kinesthetic sensations are always taken as “normal” or “abnormal” not in the sense of an ought but rather an is: the sensory input can be meaningfully described as typical or atypical. ”Presenting” sensations reveal things and are normative in the true sense of an ought: “If the eye turns in this way, then so does the ‘image.’”[15] This is because presenting sensations are motivated by and dependent on kinesthetic sensations in a conditional way, not merely a correlative one. It isn’t “If the eye turns in this way, the image usually turns as well.” Presenting sensations smack of necessity and yet arise out of our “sensorimotor knowledge,” a knowledge of the dependent, motivated correlation between the fulfillment of intention and “knowing how to look.”[16] This is distinct from an explicit or thematic predication, and occurs altogether prior to predications about objects. THE NEED FOR HEIDEGGER’S ACCOUNT If beings are most fundamentally disclosed through skills/coping, then disclosure cannot be equated with an assertion (?) Here we come to the formal beginning of Heidegger’s account of the “most originary sense of truth.” If meaning and entailment arise not out of a thematic predication but rather a “know-how,” then the truth of things in turn must likewise arise not in the structure of an assertion, but rather in the disclosure of things. Put another way, the intentional subject first “gets things right” when the subject deals or copes with things successfully, not when the subject thematically deems an action “suitable.” For example, I first “get chairs right” when I find a thing to sit on, not when I explicitly deem some object “suitable for sitting.” Dreyfus notes that thematization only occurs when this “mindless coping” is obtruded or “hits a snag”[17]. I don’t explicitly consider whether a chair is good for sitting until I find my current chair uncomfortable, or until I must choose between two chairs. In short, predication presupposes a “know-how” or skill that arises—prior to thematization—through the disclosure of beings. If truth is not a mere presence, then its ground cannot be found by mere “philosophy of consciousness” Heidegger’s conclusion is that, given this shift in truth’s center of gravity, Husserl’s “philosophy of consciousness” is no longer an adequate approach to the discover of original truth. Because truth arrives through disclosure (in which objects emerge from absence to presence), it cannot be reduced to a mere presence, even a pre-predicative, intentional presence. Rather, truth must be grounded in the interplay of absence and presence prior even to intentionality. It is the truth of disclosure constituted in Being-in-the-world. Thus, Husserl’s philosophy of consciousness is replaced with Heidegger’s fundamental ontology, through which he investigates the most original meaning of Being. This lens of fundamental ontology produces Heidegger’s famous exposition of truth as “unconcealment” in Being and Time. HEIDEGGER’S ACCOUNT PROPER Heidegger tries to locate truth prior to predication and intention through fundamental ontology In Paragraph 44 of Being and Time, Heidegger sets the stage for his radically “originary” view of truth, saying, “From time immemorial, philosophy has associated truth and Being.”[18] This is a fitting introduction to Heidegger’s entire project with regard to truth. Heidegger is trying to locate a sufficient account of truth on the order of Being that is prior to the formulation of predications, and indeed prior to any intention. He sets out to achieve this task in a three-fold analysis: first, the “laying-bare” of the ontological foundations of the “traditional” view of truth; second, the articulation of the primordial phenomenon of truth and the subsequently derivative character of the “traditional” view; third, the clarification of the “kind of Being” enjoyed by this primordial truth. Uncovering (not correspondence or judgement) serves as an adequate starting point for truth Heidegger’s deconstruction of the “traditional” concept of truth begins with the distillation of two essential features. The first feature is correspondence, or truth’s status as a predicate of successful adequation between assertions and entities “just as they are in themselves.” The second is judgement, that is, the mediate activity necessarily involved in the formulation of an assertion from a given situation. Heidegger holds that neither correspondence nor judgement forms an adequate starting point for a primordial foundation of truth. Instead, he proposes “uncovering” as the foundation of truth. When an assertion is predicated as true in the traditional sense, Heidegger charges that the “being-true” of said assertion is its pointing out an entity in its “uncovered-ness,” its originary showing of itself. This is a distinct phenomenon from any sort of correspondence and prior to any “assertive” predication on the part of the intellect. Unconcealment not a thing, but the disclosedness of being-in-the-world The originary phenomenon of propositional truth thus located, Heidegger moves to his articulation of the primordial phenomenon of truth itself. To this end, he traces the etymology of the Greek aletheia: “unconcealment.” Unconcealment is not merely that-which-is-unconcealed, that is, some factical entity. Rather, it is made possible specifically through Dasein’s being-in-the-world; it is Dasein as being-uncovering. Indeed, unconcealment is the very ontological condition revealed in Dasein’s having-a-world. Put differently, truth is the “disclosedness” of Dasein; it is “the ontological condition for that possibility that assertions can be either true or false—that they may uncover or cover things up.”[19] This sense of truth, as Heidegger notes in The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, “has nothing to do with the business of proving propositions at the writing desk.”[20] The primordial phenomenon of truth shows up entirely prior to the formulation of assertions. Simultaneously, this phenomenon grounds the ontic phenomena of being-uncovering and being-covering, which in turn precondition the respective truth or falsity of assertions. Truth is equiprimordial with Dasein The final step of Heidegger’s treatment of truth in Being and Time clarifies the sort of Being enjoyed by truth-as-unconcealment. In short, Heidegger claims that the Being of truth is relative to and equiprimordial with the Being of Dasein. There can be no truth apart from Dasein. Importantly, however, truth is said to manifest prior to any predication made by Dasein. Insofar as Dasein “is,” truth likewise “is.” This is because Dasein’s Being is a Being-in-the-world, a world which discloses. The disclosedness of Dasein is truth itself in Heidegger’s view. In this chapter, we have traced Heidegger’s reorientation of Husserl’s phenomenology of truth. We began with Husserl’s project of overcoming the Lotzean “logical prejudice,” which equates truth with logical affirmedness. Husserl’s solution was to ground truth in actuality, which occurs prior to predication. While Heidegger likewise opposed the Lotzean view, he felt that Husserl’s solution was not sufficiently radical. In order to completely overthrow the logical prejudice, Heidegger held that truth must be not only pre-predicative, but pre-intuitive. To better understand this position, we laid out Husserl’s argument for grounding the normative in perception. We concluded that truth was grounded ultimately in a “knowing-how,” not a “knowing-what.” Care and the Truth of Being-in-the-World Heidegger argues that truth’s ultimate grounding lies not in some presence, but rather in being-in-the world. Being-in-the-world, co-constituted between objects and normative skills (the ability to “take-as”), is the horizon of disclosure that Dahlstrom calls the “existential sense” of truth. Dahlstrom traces this view all the way back to Aristotle, who distinguishes the truth of simple entities not as a matter of correctness, but one of being or non-being. To “have” the truth of a simple entity is the “have” the entity itself, just as it is. To “not have” the truth of a simple entity is to “not have” the entity, to tarry on without it. In this existential context, truth is not merely “a being ascertained” but also “a being used” (and thereby “identified, indexed and articulated”)[21]. Truth is thus “had” in an essential relation to time, the horizon of truth’s disclosure in its most originary sense. In transforming Husserlian “philosophy of consciousness,” Heidegger replaces “intentionality” with “being-here” as the ground-level realm of metaphysical analysis. He does so to double down against the Lotzean “logical prejudice” that reduces truth to a mere presence-at-hand. Husserl’s “intentionality” fights the logical prejudice by positioning truth prior to predication; Heidegger’s “Dasein” moves one step further, positioning truth prior to predication and intuition. To Heidegger, truth isn’t some “thing” that is correct or incorrect; rather, is is a “way of taking” that either discloses the thing or fails to do so, all within an essential relatedness to time. In order to understand the existential sense of truth, we must understand the existential structure of Dasein disclosed by “care.” Dahlstrom articulates this existential structure as a “three-fold unity of world,” constituted by the work-world, the shared world, and the very care which beings take as themselves. From this structure, Dahlstrom reasons that truth, both in thematic and pre-thematic senses, is a presencing of the “worldliness of the world.” He thus adds fourth element to the unity of the world of care: the establishment of authentic care, or that care which presences the worldliness of the world. This sense of presencing is encountered “in the logos of conscience, in silently but resolutely hearing one’s conscience,”[22] a call which relates oneself to the originary phenomenon of future being. This yields a fifth element of the world of care: the original timeliness of authentic Dasein, the manner in which Dasein relates to its future by way of listening to conscience. Dahlstrom calls attention to Heidegger’s differentiation between existentials and categories as key to understanding his view of truth, especially as distinct from Aquinas (who though being to be a transcendental). An existential is the manner of being proper to human existence of being-here, whereas a category is the manner of being proper to non-human ontology. Heidegger’s sensitivity to the originary relatedness of truth to being-here does not mean that truth cannot be thematized into propositions and discourse. It does mean that thematization must be grounded in the existential unity of care. Dahlstrom calls this grounding the “paradox of thematization,” which arises in three separate contexts: the scientific, epistemic and theoretical. In the scientific context, the paradox in one of insufficient grounding: science asserts as binding what is merely an interpretation of pre theoretical experience. In the epistemic context, it seems clear that genuine knowing cannot be thematic because a given knowledge presupposes already being-in-the-world in a pre-thematic manner. Moreover, this cannot be avoided with the Husserlian move to intentionality, because doing so yields an “artificial and ultimately intractable divide between knowing and being.”[23] Furthermore, the process of justification in epistemic contexts is indeed a nonepistemic procedure, one intimately related to primary “ways of being—“ that is, norms of skillful (or “knowledgable”) handling of situations. We justify knowledge by way of practical engagement, not by propositional assertion. The final context of the “paradox of thematization” is that of theory, namely the “forgetful” quality of theoretical talk about things, a tendency to obscure the originary phenomenon of things by the use of deductive, mathematical language. Note that this strategy characterizes the fundamental error in Descartes’ method, which Heidegger calls “objectivity of the grasp of nature by way of calculation and measurement.”[24] Grasping the worldliness of the world is different than grasping a theoretical nature, an idea central to understand Heidegger’s alternative strategy. How, then, do we address this threefold paradox? How do we link thematization to the existential unity of being-here? Heidegger’s answer is found in his account of formal indication. Formal indication is the articulation of something in the very way that one originally “has” it, that is, the way we encounter something in a pre-thematic, pre-intuitive encounter. This articulation is achieved through philosophy; indeed, such articulation is the primary task of authentic philosophizing. One must first understand, then retrieve and articulate the precise meaning of being-here in a relationship with the given entity; only then can a formal indication emerge that avoids the pitfalls of traditional thematizing strategies. The formal indication “signals” the originary phenomena, “pointing out” not a fact but a manner of being, a “reenacting of what ‘to be’ means.”[25] The functions of formal indication are two-fold: Dahlstrom identifies them as the “referential-constraining” and “reversing-transformational” functions. The “referential-constraining” function utilizes the “formal” quality of formal indication to properly constrain a certain “taking” of something within the “as-structure.” The fact that the formal indication “constrains” one’s relationship with a thing calls upon one to take something “as” some particular sense of the thing. The “reversing-transformational” sense, on the other hand, directs concretely the meaning of someone’s authentic existence. Though emerging from concrete situations, such indications can transform one’s deep-seated commitments in a fundamental philosophical disruption. All of this presupposes, however, the taking up of a philosophical viewpoint, the “reversal” of one’s mode worldly consideration that clears the way for the subsequent “transformation.” Dahlstrom then moves to articulate the distinct yet unified structure of being-here as being-in-the-world, articulated in three aspects (the work-world, being-with-others, and being oneself). The work-world is the existential of “care” (besorgen), a sort of concernedness arising from always already being involved with things. The world of concern is a network, the implements of which always “point out” the whole, the surroundings, the environment relevant to the immediate concern.[26] This environment is often forgotten, since it doesn’t “stick out” or obtrude in our daily familiarity with situations. It is in defection or obtrusion from familiarity that the work-world’s referential context “shows up” as the work-world itself, not merely as accessible or handy (that is, founded on a context of concern). Heidegger discusses this “showing up” or “presence” in several different senses, which are not distinct domains but “ways of showing up.” There is the inconspicuous presence of concernedness, the inconspicuous presence (Anwesenheit) of the available (“the handiness of what is handy”), and the related presence of a nature always on hand as either useful or obtrusive, threatening, etc. This inconspicuous presencing (Präzens) must be considered as distinct from on-handed presencing via theoretical perception or assertion. Dahlstrom notes a major unanswered question in Heidegger’s account: what, then, is the relationship between articulated, theoretical presencing and pre-theoretical presencing? His closest answer is that such theorizing is “concern founded on a world of concern” (264). “He does not move that handiness is a more original mode of being than on-handedness” (265). “The plants of the botanist are not the flowers in the rain” (SZ 70, 211). Thus, Dahlstrom adds a third macro-category of presencing: the presence of the always on-hand nature from theoretical perspective. The fundamental bias of the logical prejudice is to ground truth in this category of presence, ignoring the first two (and a half) modes of concern with the world. Dahlstrom notes another unanswered question: why does theory arise from practice, and how is this a possible movement (267)? “The access to the underlying presence of the work-world is not some fixed stare of intuition, but instead a matter of understanding, that is, ‘know-how’ or, better, ‘knowing one’s way around’ in a given referential context” (267). Meaningfulness is thus a context of references, not just words or statements. This encounter with meaning grounds the world of concern. The corresponding on-handed theory of a context of references is a “founded” presence, but not the “original” means of concerned encounter. A question arises: what is the referential whole “about?” What closes the cycle? Heidegger’s answer: being-oneself. “What we are in ourselves is our handiness” (270). Kant attempts to categorize this human manner of being, but thus objectifies it, reduces it to the being of entities. Distinctly human being, being-in-the-world, demands what Dahlstrom calls the “meta-categorial distinction:” that human beings exist “as purposes in themselves” (271, many sub-references). SZ 167, 301 is a puzzling explication of the ethical fallout (272, check this out). Nonetheless, being-with-others is a distinct mode of being, in which other being are also-here but never in the “identical” world. They are “also being-here with me.” German words are important: Mitsein, one’s own being-here; Mitdasein, the way others are to us; Miteinandersein, the togetherness of those two modes of being-here. The absence of others shows the fundamentality of our being-with-others and the possibility of authentically being-so (273). What is at stake is still being-oneself, but in a concerned way that either liberates (authentic) or dominates (ingenuine) in relation to the other’s being-here. Everyday being-with-others is the “they-self” or “the crowd.” It is not something handy, but a way of being-here in fallenness. It prefigures the world and being-in-the-world by identifying the aims of the crowd with one’s network of concern (277, see Haugeland). It maintains and identifies one’s “coming-of-age” in a network of public responsibility; but the tendency to lapse into this mode of being involves a corresponding “flight from oneself.” Dahlstrom draws considerable insight into the “ambivalence” of this fallenness, as a sort of consequential state akin to original sin, not some discrete mistake or failure. Solicitude is authentic care for the other not in the way one cares for the work-world (Besorge). It is overturning the they-self and being-with-one-another, “caring with one another for the same world” (L 224). Dahlstrom notes a glaring omission: lack of a philosophical, ontic anthropology as rooting these ontological structures. A more humble reading is required if these questions retain their force. Heidegger’s answer is to tie authenticity to truth. Inauthentic being, the they-self, does not allow the truth of being-here to come into question in the first place. It neglect the essential diversity in manners of being, obscuring and forgetting the human mode of being and relegating it to the status of object, something handy. Formal indication returns as the means of “pointing-out” and reversing the self-evident truths forgotten in everydayness. Dahlstrom concludes that Heidegger’s account of being-with-others is “intimately linked to his method of construing philosophical concepts as formal indications” (282, check back for key quotes). The opposite of this authentic being-with-others is “palaver” or idle talk; it is the “vernacular of the work-world” (283). Plato sought to overcome palaver (sophistry) through dialectic. Palaver is necessarily public, occurring through being-in-the-world’s self-articulation, but in a manner that does not demand that the subject of articulation be handy or on hand. Thus, the articulation may not be understood in its original sense, but rather in a “washed-out” one. This is the way that falsity presents itself in Heidegger’s account of truth. Something reminds “hidden” or “closed-off” about a thing because it is articulated through palaver. Palaver corrupts talk by stripping talk of its grounding in original modes of access. “Truth becomes a question of public opinion” (285). Genuine talk is possible via two modes. The first is communication, of genuine concern for other within the context of the work-world. The second is the call of conscience, investigated later in greater detail. Heidegger connects care to the most original phenomenon of truth. Care, thus understood, is not some particular worry or mood, but the “ever-anxious companion,” as Goethe puts it (288, see reference). It is the formal indication of a manner of being “in which what is at stake is the respective manner of being itself” (288). It is Husserl’s intentionality, but viewed “from the outside” (P 420; PRL 248). This care constitutes the holistic structure of human existence or Dasein. Dasein must be understood as a “here” or “home,” a “clearing,” but not is the spatial sense of naturalistic location. The “here” is the locus of disclosedness, the “illumination,” the clearing itself. The being-here “is its disclosedness” (291, see reference). To be-here is to disclose, not merely to be “on hand. The disclosedness of Dasein is the “most original phenomenon of truth.” This is not some judgment or assertion, but the “here” or “clearing” of being-here. It is the “timely site…of the coincidence of the manner in which something comes to present itself…” (292). Its fundamental existentials are threefold: disposedness, understanding and fallenness. Disposedness is the way in which Dasein finds itself thrown into the world, then discovers the holistic character of Dasein, then is open to the world. This is prior to any talk. Disposedness bears with it “the propensity to self-evasion” (293). Befindlichkeit must be translated with a caveat to its existential character, as a way “in which being-here is constituted and discloses” (295). We are disposed to things; to laugh, to cry, to jealousy. Any living entity (organism?) is disposed, but non-organic entities are not disposed; they are simply on hand. The “here” of Dasein is not a graspable theme, but is disclosed unthematically. It is discloses only as a manner of being. However, it is neither “automatic or explicit” (299), requiring the disposition of anxiety to bring it back to itself, thus disclosing authentically. One’s disposition must therefore be suitable, properly based for our encounters with the world. The second existential of care is understanding, or the manner of “being-possible which is handed over to itself” (SZ 143). “To be-here is precisely to project oneself as one’s own potential-to-be” (302). Understanding is thus the way by which the disclosure-by-projection occurs as a possibility. To grasp these possibilities is to thematize them, to “pull them down” (SZ 145); on their own they are not concrete plans but original, pre-thematic possibilities. Understanding is more akin to “know-how” in the most fundamental, normative sense. Because understanding preconceives what is understood, this being-ahead-of-oneself involved in projection is an interpretive understanding. This is not pragmatism, insists Dahlstrom, because is understood is not properly a what; rather, it is being-as-existing (305). Understanding as an existential is thus not a practice, nor does is “make an ontic difference” (306). The third existential is fallenness, already covered in part with the discussion of palaver. Of note: authentic discourse is possible even for fallen Dasein, but it can never eliminate fallenness in total of Dasein. Palaver is necessary for us, and it necessarily points to the “urge and propensity” or “Drang und Hang” for Dasein to flee from itself. Urge is the compulsion to satisfy care only with respect to the particular compulsion; it is a care that obscures its fullness and is not free. Propensity is the deposition to cling to the world, akin to a sort of fixation for “destiny.” Luckily, we can learn to “fall” in a way that utilizes urge and propensity as modes of authentic being, akin to “athletes, tumbler and dancers” (311) or “the Kierkegaardian leap.” Fallenness has nothing to do with morality, according to Heidegger. We have the possibility of two kinds of anxiety: anxiety about and for our potential-to-be. The former grounds inauthentic being, the worries of “the crowd.” The latter ground authentic or genuine being, truth. “To be-here is to disclose in a way that is structured by care, projecting one’s possibilities of being-in-the-world while never escaping one’s thrownness and lapse into the world” (313). Note that truth, understood through this structure of care, is the “site of” true assertions, not the most original truth. The logos of care is not an assertion, but a “call of conscience” (Gewissen). It is a mode of talking or discourse (Rede). Conscience calls Dasein out of listening to the crowd into ownmost possibility. It discloses the uncanniness or eeriness of existence (check German), of being-in-the-world. It find itself not at home in the world. Conscience confirm that what is ultimately at stake is being-oneself (318). The content of the call of conscience is guilt, Dasein’s own not-being-the-ground for its own existence. It owes a debt, it is the reason for an ultimate nullity. Being-here is thus not just being thrown and projecting, but also lapsing, falling into the guilt or not-being at the very heart of Dasein. Resoluteness concerns Dasein with its ultimate and ownmost potential-to-be. It can only disclose itself to factual possibilities (321). This anticipating resoluteness of not of something on hand; but rather the truth of existence, authentic being-here. This authenticity assures Dasein of an utter certainty of resolute being-here, maintaining a freedom to be-true. (323). Conscience summons Dasein to the truth with a “cold certainty.” Dahlstrom then moves to a discussion of time as the sense of being-here. He identifies five aspects of genuine timeliness: the integrated character of its modes, the primacy of the future, the finitude (genuine future is anticipating death), the ecstases and horizon (the ways in which being-here is “outside” oneself, and that onto which said ecstases is projected). Genuine timeliness is to allow our ownmost possibility to coming to us, to not run from death. This anticipation of death is discloses in the original phenomenon of the future: “coming-to-oneself” (328). It takes over ourselves, but exactly as we already are: als ich bin-gewesen in Heidegger’s own terms. It is the way in which being here is “always-already” or “foregone” (329). Thus, Heidegger terms authentic being-towards-death as a “retrieval” or “repetition.” Dahlstrom connects this to disposition, that is, the way the ways that we disclose how we already are (330). Heidegger specifically adds that this disposition is made possible by timeliness, not deduced from it. The “original and genuine future” is an allowing of the possible to come to it (332). It is a way of decisively “attending to things” (334) by projecting towards them. Dahlstrom pays particular attention to the spatial-ecstatic language used by Heidegger to characterize Husserl’s view of transcendence. Heidegger used spatial terms to describe Husserlian intentionality, demonstrating the metaphorical “here” as a way of unfolding in time. “It ‘is here’ with the outside-itself of the ecstases. If no being-here exists, no world is also ‘here’” (335, SZ 365). Dahlstrom thus labels timeliness “the transcendental truth,” since it is only in timeliness that the structure of care is constituted (336). Dahlstrom focuses on a particular German word, Gegenwärtigen, as a “rendering present.” This “presenting” constitutes the modes of both neutral and inauthentic senses of the present. Inauthentic presenting is “oblivious to the situation…springing…from expectations that hold thing together in the abiding wherewithal of a world of concern” (348, see SZ 326f, 338, 410). Dahlstrom calls such inauthentic timeliness the “horizon” of inauthentic care, existence that has fallen away from its situation. Dahlstrom raises a crucial question demanding further input: “Is theory, like curiosity, a lapsed or fallen way of presenting things, of disclosing their manners of being” (351)? Dahlstrom ventures a guess, supposing a distinction between science’s potentially “excellent way of presenting” (SZ 363) and its tendency to fixate within the realm of on-handedness (353). To melt philosophy into science is to strip philosophy of its own emergence from finite being-here. He then moves to give an account of the origins of theory. He begins with a “looking-around,” which interprets things prior to predication. From this “overview” comes a dual sense of “presenting” theoretically: first, within and “overview of the complex;” second, informing a way of “thinking over” the situation (355). Dahlstrom uses the example of “there is too much sand in the soil.” In the first sense, the particular situation is the emergent concern; a set of expectations and retentions pertinent to this soil and this situation. The second sense views the soil as itself the object of concern, yielding measurement of the sand content and assertions of which type of soil is best for which crops. It does not immediately answer the question of whether this soil is too sandy for this situation. Note that Heidegger allows for both senses to be “objectifying” the situation without doing harm to the connectedness to the original situation. These thematizations are themselves ecstases; they are not things themselves. Clocks express objective time “publicly,” whereas subjective time is time’s manner of appearing to beings in the world. It is di-mensional in its presence, constantly on-hand and able to be expressed in numbers. It is the “numerable, exposed, encompassing, and transitional character of a sequence of nows” (365, GP 362f). When people in situations look at the clock, they reckon with time within a context of worldly concern. Time is meaningful when deal with in such a way. Time discloses itself as “suitable:” four o’clock is a suitable break-time, et cetera. Some time is more or less intensive in its concern to us; time “tenses” or “stretches” (368). Thus the use of the term “tense” in our everyday vocabulary. The time of concern is “meaningful (worldly), datable, tensed (stretched), and public” (369, SZ 406-411, GP 369-374, see F 57-60). Time of concern can occupy a “porous” space between authentic and inauthentic timeliness. It “sets the stage” for both. Heidegger aims to show that our common conception of time depends on world-time and world-time in turn on ecstatic timeliness. Ecstatic-horizonal timeliness is constituted by expecting, retaining and thereby presenting things (370). This presenting is articulated as an ecstatic unity. This unity is a pre-thematic “caring,” our being-concerned with time as something meaningful, public, tensed and dated. The “now” is articulated, not as something on hand, but as an ambiguity in our manner of caring (375). Time is given over to us, and we thus reckon with it, giving time, measuring time, “orienting ourselves” to time (377). It is rooted in a futural timeliness, the way in which we spring from a “distended” obliviousness with regard to ourselves toward an authoring anticipation of our ownmost possibility. “Time is our becoming” (379), the manner in which we anticipate our death, retrieve its facticity and thus authentically comport ourselves towards it. World-time is simply the time that we measure publicly. This entire account of ecstatic-horizontal timeliness (outlined formally on 383-384) depends entirely on the lapsed character of this comportment towards our death, our fallenness. Just an idea!
17 Sep 17 UTC	Introduction From Assertion to Disclosure: Discovering the Originary Sense of Truth Thesis: Truth is most fundamentally the disclosure of things, not judgements about them. Intro: Truth has always been about giving us beings, but we’ve forgotten that “From time immemorial, philosophy has associated truth and Being.”[1] With these words, Martin Heidegger harkens back to an “originary” sense of truth: an uncovering of “the way things are,” of real being. Heidegger is concerned that we have forgotten truth’s grounding in being, instead equating truth with logical demonstrations and proofs. Continuing a project begun by Edmund Husserl, Heidegger critiques this “logical account” of truth through phenomenological analysis. In this chapter, we will argue Heidegger’s phenomenology of “originary truth.” First, we will consider Husserl’s critique of the “logical account” of truth. Second, we will discuss Husserl’s “philosophy of consciousness,” his attempt to link the sensory givenness of beings to our intentional grasp of their truth. Third, we will present Heidegger’s critique of Husserl, in which he calls for a shift in truth’s “center of gravity” from theoretical justification to being-in-the world. Fourth, we will discuss Heidegger’s own account of “originary truth.” Through this analysis, we will get a clearer picture of Heidegger’s sweeping phenomenological project: to ground truth in “getting things right,” not in forming valid judgements about them. According to Husserl, The “logical view” doesn’t link up with beings Heidegger’s notion of truth could be understood as the extension of a project begun by Edmund Husserl. Husserl distanced himself from the so-called “logical account” of truth. This view, developed by Hermann Lotze, identifies truth with “valid affirmation.” As an example, suppose that I see a blue sky above me and form the judgement that “the sky is blue.” I have made a predication that affirms a state of affairs. That predication is “true” because it validly affirms the state of affairs. The predication would be false if it invalidly affirmed the state of affairs. Husserl criticizes the Lotzean view because it wrongly equivocates actuality with logical “affirmed-ness.” To Husserl, propositional correctness (“affirmed-ness”) cannot itself be truth, because truth depends upon a prior identity between judgement and intuition. In Cartesian Meditations, Husserl says of truth-telling that “the grounding is an agreement of the judgement with the judged state of affairs…itself.”[2] In other words, true judgements depend on evidences; a judgement cannot be called “true” unless it links up with a correlative state-of-affairs as a referent. Logical concepts must be grounded/evidenced in actualities The mistake of the Lotzean position is that it assumes that logical concepts are grounded within themselves, without need of evidence. Husserl disagrees: logical concepts are not actualities; rather, they emerge from actualities. The predication “the sky is blue” isn’t true within itself, as a mere sentence on a page. Rather, the predication is true because the terms “sky” and “blue” correlate to meaningful intentional content, content that arises prior to explicit, thematized predication. This distinction is far from trivial, for it breaks ties with the analytic tradition’s tendency to “forget” truth’s groundedness in actuality, in real being. Daniel Dahlstrom calls this tendency an “ontological naiveté.”[3] If the structure of truth (agreement between judgement with the judged state of affairs) arises prior to affirmation, it is unjustified to equate truth with affirmation itself; to do “forgets” the real beings that ultimately grounds truth. Truth cannot be a presence Although Heidegger agrees with Husserl that truth arises prior to predication, he thinks that Husserl fails to fully detach pre-predicative truth from the “ontologically naive” logical prejudice. Heidegger calls Husserl’s view “traditional,” that is, ultimately rooted in a justification of the intelligibility of things through assertions. Because Husserl persistently refers to truth as a form of description, assertion, judgement or interpretation, Heidegger accuses Husserl of equating truth with a sort of presence. This is problematic for Heidegger, because a phenomenology of truth requires that we discover not some specific sort of presence called “truth,” but rather the emergence of “what is given” and “what is meant” from absence to its presence, an emergence or “unconcealment” that we call truth. Truth must be pre-intuitive, but still normative Heidegger’s project is thus to complete the work that Husserl started, articulating a phenomenology of truth that is not just pre-predicative, but altogether pre-intuitive. His challenge, however, is to account for this “most original” truth without doing violence to truth’s normative sense, its conditions of success and failure. If Heideggerian truth-telling cannot fail (that is, if falsity is impossible), then the account proves insufficient. How, then, does Heidegger ground normativity in pre-intuitive being? Truth must be a way of “taking” things The answer to this question lies in Heidegger’s turn from the transcendental subject to being-in-the-world. Dahlstrom calls this turn a shift in truth’s “center of gravity,”[4] a re-configuring of Husserlian intentionality as something emerging not from theoretical justification, but rather from the way we “take” things. Before we are able to examine this shift in any detail, it is necessary to establish Husserl’s account of pre-predicative truth. HUSSERL’S ACCOUNT Normativity is given over in perception itself Husserl grounds normativity in perception itself, since perception is the original context in which we “get things right” (or wrong). To Husserl, predicative truth is rooted in prior intentional content given in perception. But the relationship is not merely causal, as if our judgements necessarily and immediately follow from the way we perceive things. From the first-person perspective, justifying truth claims is inseparable from the practice of “getting things right.”[5] To tell the truth is thus not merely to refer to or indicate something, but to do so successfully. This is because judgements do not merely indicate what is given, but also express what is meant. Perception is thus both receptive (given over by objects) and yet expressed in a determinate way that can either succeed or fail. The latter component is what we call the “normative” in perception. The normative is within the “as-structure” of meaningful perception What is the normative in perception? Heidegger locates it within the “as-structure” of rational perception, the manner in which rational beings can take things as things. This is in contrast with non-rational beings, which can only take things as “that-which” dis-inhibits some appetite or drive. In Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, Heidegger uses the example of a blade of grass. To a beetle, the grass is not conceivable “as” grass, that is, as a thing. It can only be taken as a “beetle-path,” or “that-which dis-inhibits the appetite to move towards food.” To the rational, linguistic subject, however, the blade of grass can be given over meaningfully, intentionally, as a thing itself. The “as-structure” gives over presences as entailing absences What do we mean by taking something as a “thing itself?” Stephen Crowell points to entailment, the way that temporally-structured perceiving gives things as both present and yet entailing the absent as belonging to the present. When we see the front side of a chair, the un-seen back side is given as belonging to the front, the back is “entailed by the front.” This entailment is not inferred through explicit reasoning, but rather immediately perceived. Alva Noë puts it nicely as a “perceptual sense” rather than a “thinking that.”[6] Entailment is evidence of the norm of interpretation/fulfillment Importantly, entailment is not itself the normative in the perception; it is merely evidence of it. But it points to a norm of interpretation, the immediate manner in which rational beings move from receptive sensation to active interpretation or “taking-as.” Crowell terms this the norm of “completion” or “adequation” of things;[7] Husserl calls it the “fulfillment of the intention.”[8] This language clarifies that it is things themselves that are intelligible and determined; we do not determine things. However, their intelligibility is unknown, incomplete, un-articulated. To perceive something is to receive one aspect of a larger whole, to take in a sliver that gives us enough determination to determine what is supposed to be “there” as a thing. This is achieved by what Crowell terms the “referential, symbolizing function” of perception[9]. This function is similar to that of a symbol, for it indicates a range of possible determinations through suggestion of similarity and contiguity. When we perceive the front of a cup, it immediately seems similar to other cups. Only when so taken “as a cup” does the front side of the cup imply a typical or “contiguous” back side and inside. Fulfillment is inherent to perception because objects, not the subject, are “what-is-fulfilled” Our concern is that this apparent norm of “fulfillment” might not actually be inherent to perception, but merely accidentally related to it. Husserl addresses this issue with his notion of indeterminacy, a term that Heidegger also adopts. To Husserl, indeterminacy means “incompleteness,” not a lack of determination. The perceiver does not determine objects, but merely articulates, presents, and knows them. Intelligible, determinate properties are indeed “in” objects, not “in” the intentional subject. Determinacy or knowledge is thus the intentional completion of the indeterminacy presented in object. This is why Husserl uses the language of “filled” intentions: the present object entails the absent object, and this entailment “fills” the indeterminate. Objects uphold standards of fulfillment Husserl’s account thus maintains an important tension: truth is neither “objective” nor “subjective” in the simplistic sense, but rather is co-constituted by both subject and object. The present object “mediates” the absent object, upholding a “standard for determining what is indirectly presented[10].” Only an intentional subject can fulfill intentions It is important to note that this determination can only be accomplished by an intentional subject who can receive entailments. Non-linguistic animals would not be able to receive entailments, since such creatures cannot “take” the absent as belonging to a present experience. Thus it is not raw sense-data that equips the subject for the norm of fulfillment, but rather an intentional structure capable of taking things as things. But how does this structure emerge, since “nothing predestines the sensations for such a role?”[11] Perception is predestined for intentional fulfillment because being is fundamentally intelligible Kinesthesia is evidence of the intelligibility of being The answer found in Husserl’s later work is his so-called “genetic phenomenology,” which grounds the intelligibility or “primordial lawfulness”[12] of being in the structure of perception itself. The argument has two prongs: first, Husserl argues that intentionality is present even on the level of sensation. Second, he argues that perception is structured both intentionally and yet non-conceptually in a temporal unfolding of intention and fulfillment.[13] This unfolding is law-like and can be described as typical or atypical. Dahlstrom uses the example of kinesthesia to describe the lawfulness of “raw” perception. Kinesthesia takes our physical body parts and “makes them the body,” the sensing thing. Even the very notion of “body” is meaningless without the time-constituted organization of our sensory fields. As an example, the notion of “my eye” is tied to the kinesthetic link between a sense field and my eye as a physical object. This link emerges in my perceiving law-like relations between the two (such as “when I turn my eye to the left, the sense-field moves to the right”). It is a passive or “informative” perception, but it requires intentionality. Normativity emerges when this intelligibility is given over “as” entailing lawfulness (rules?) Normativity emerges when these passive perceptions give rise to expectations or entailments. Returning to our earlier example, suppose that our eye has had many years of practice looking at objects. Countless law-like perceptions have given rise to norms of expectation and entailment. If I were to turn my eye to the left, I expect the image before me to move to the right. If this don’t occur, there would be a breakdown in the lawful connection expected between object and perception. But this breakdown isn’t merely “atypical” but truly “abnormal” in the strongest sense. It’s not that the image merely isn’t moving typically, it’s that the image ought to move. This is how perception itself gives rise to norms of acting. Perception of objective phenomena are normative not just as a typical “is” but as an “ought” Perception of this “ought” is a skill or “know-how” To better illustrate the difference between passive, informative perceptions and intentional, object-constituting perceptions, Dahlstrom draws a distinction between “kinesthetic” and “presenting” sensations.[14] Kinesthetic sensations are always taken as “normal” or “abnormal” not in the sense of an ought but rather an is: the sensory input can be meaningfully described as typical or atypical. ”Presenting” sensations reveal things and are normative in the true sense of an ought: “If the eye turns in this way, then so does the ‘image.’”[15] This is because presenting sensations are motivated by and dependent on kinesthetic sensations in a conditional way, not merely a correlative one. It isn’t “If the eye turns in this way, the image usually turns as well.” Presenting sensations smack of necessity and yet arise out of our “sensorimotor knowledge,” a knowledge of the dependent, motivated correlation between the fulfillment of intention and “knowing how to look.”[16] This is distinct from an explicit or thematic predication, and occurs altogether prior to predications about objects. THE NEED FOR HEIDEGGER’S ACCOUNT If beings are most fundamentally disclosed through skills/coping, then disclosure cannot be equated with an assertion (?) Here we come to the formal beginning of Heidegger’s account of the “most originary sense of truth.” If meaning and entailment arise not out of a thematic predication but rather a “know-how,” then the truth of things in turn must likewise arise not in the structure of an assertion, but rather in the disclosure of things. Put another way, the intentional subject first “gets things right” when the subject deals or copes with things successfully, not when the subject thematically deems an action “suitable.” For example, I first “get chairs right” when I find a thing to sit on, not when I explicitly deem some object “suitable for sitting.” Dreyfus notes that thematization only occurs when this “mindless coping” is obtruded or “hits a snag”[17]. I don’t explicitly consider whether a chair is good for sitting until I find my current chair uncomfortable, or until I must choose between two chairs. In short, predication presupposes a “know-how” or skill that arises—prior to thematization—through the disclosure of beings. If truth is not a mere presence, then its ground cannot be found by mere “philosophy of consciousness” Heidegger’s conclusion is that, given this shift in truth’s center of gravity, Husserl’s “philosophy of consciousness” is no longer an adequate approach to the discover of original truth. Because truth arrives through disclosure (in which objects emerge from absence to presence), it cannot be reduced to a mere presence, even a pre-predicative, intentional presence. Rather, truth must be grounded in the interplay of absence and presence prior even to intentionality. It is the truth of disclosure constituted in Being-in-the-world. Thus, Husserl’s philosophy of consciousness is replaced with Heidegger’s fundamental ontology, through which he investigates the most original meaning of Being. This lens of fundamental ontology produces Heidegger’s famous exposition of truth as “unconcealment” in Being and Time. HEIDEGGER’S ACCOUNT PROPER Heidegger tries to locate truth prior to predication and intention through fundamental ontology In Paragraph 44 of Being and Time, Heidegger sets the stage for his radically “originary” view of truth, saying, “From time immemorial, philosophy has associated truth and Being.”[18] This is a fitting introduction to Heidegger’s entire project with regard to truth. Heidegger is trying to locate a sufficient account of truth on the order of Being that is prior to the formulation of predications, and indeed prior to any intention. He sets out to achieve this task in a three-fold analysis: first, the “laying-bare” of the ontological foundations of the “traditional” view of truth; second, the articulation of the primordial phenomenon of truth and the subsequently derivative character of the “traditional” view; third, the clarification of the “kind of Being” enjoyed by this primordial truth. Uncovering (not correspondence or judgement) serves as an adequate starting point for truth Heidegger’s deconstruction of the “traditional” concept of truth begins with the distillation of two essential features. The first feature is correspondence, or truth’s status as a predicate of successful adequation between assertions and entities “just as they are in themselves.” The second is judgement, that is, the mediate activity necessarily involved in the formulation of an assertion from a given situation. Heidegger holds that neither correspondence nor judgement forms an adequate starting point for a primordial foundation of truth. Instead, he proposes “uncovering” as the foundation of truth. When an assertion is predicated as true in the traditional sense, Heidegger charges that the “being-true” of said assertion is its pointing out an entity in its “uncovered-ness,” its originary showing of itself. This is a distinct phenomenon from any sort of correspondence and prior to any “assertive” predication on the part of the intellect. Unconcealment not a thing, but the disclosedness of being-in-the-world The originary phenomenon of propositional truth thus located, Heidegger moves to his articulation of the primordial phenomenon of truth itself. To this end, he traces the etymology of the Greek aletheia: “unconcealment.” Unconcealment is not merely that-which-is-unconcealed, that is, some factical entity. Rather, it is made possible specifically through Dasein’s being-in-the-world; it is Dasein as being-uncovering. Indeed, unconcealment is the very ontological condition revealed in Dasein’s having-a-world. Put differently, truth is the “disclosedness” of Dasein; it is “the ontological condition for that possibility that assertions can be either true or false—that they may uncover or cover things up.”[19] This sense of truth, as Heidegger notes in The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, “has nothing to do with the business of proving propositions at the writing desk.”[20] The primordial phenomenon of truth shows up entirely prior to the formulation of assertions. Simultaneously, this phenomenon grounds the ontic phenomena of being-uncovering and being-covering, which in turn precondition the respective truth or falsity of assertions. Truth is equiprimordial with Dasein The final step of Heidegger’s treatment of truth in Being and Time clarifies the sort of Being enjoyed by truth-as-unconcealment. In short, Heidegger claims that the Being of truth is relative to and equiprimordial with the Being of Dasein. There can be no truth apart from Dasein. Importantly, however, truth is said to manifest prior to any predication made by Dasein. Insofar as Dasein “is,” truth likewise “is.” This is because Dasein’s Being is a Being-in-the-world, a world which discloses. The disclosedness of Dasein is truth itself in Heidegger’s view. In this chapter, we have traced Heidegger’s reorientation of Husserl’s phenomenology of truth. We began with Husserl’s project of overcoming the Lotzean “logical prejudice,” which equates truth with logical affirmedness. Husserl’s solution was to ground truth in actuality, which occurs prior to predication. While Heidegger likewise opposed the Lotzean view, he felt that Husserl’s solution was not sufficiently radical. In order to completely overthrow the logical prejudice, Heidegger held that truth must be not only pre-predicative, but pre-intuitive. To better understand this position, we laid out Husserl’s argument for grounding the normative in perception. We concluded that truth was grounded ultimately in a “knowing-how,” not a “knowing-what.” Care and the Truth of Being-in-the-World Heidegger argues that truth’s ultimate grounding lies not in some presence, but rather in being-in-the world. Being-in-the-world, co-constituted between objects and normative skills (the ability to “take-as”), is the horizon of disclosure that Dahlstrom calls the “existential sense” of truth. Dahlstrom traces this view all the way back to Aristotle, who distinguishes the truth of simple entities not as a matter of correctness, but one of being or non-being. To “have” the truth of a simple entity is the “have” the entity itself, just as it is. To “not have” the truth of a simple entity is to “not have” the entity, to tarry on without it. In this existential context, truth is not merely “a being ascertained” but also “a being used” (and thereby “identified, indexed and articulated”)[21]. Truth is thus “had” in an essential relation to time, the horizon of truth’s disclosure in its most originary sense. In transforming Husserlian “philosophy of consciousness,” Heidegger replaces “intentionality” with “being-here” as the ground-level realm of metaphysical analysis. He does so to double down against the Lotzean “logical prejudice” that reduces truth to a mere presence-at-hand. Husserl’s “intentionality” fights the logical prejudice by positioning truth prior to predication; Heidegger’s “Dasein” moves one step further, positioning truth prior to predication and intuition. To Heidegger, truth isn’t some “thing” that is correct or incorrect; rather, is is a “way of taking” that either discloses the thing or fails to do so, all within an essential relatedness to time. In order to understand the existential sense of truth, we must understand the existential structure of Dasein disclosed by “care.” Dahlstrom articulates this existential structure as a “three-fold unity of world,” constituted by the work-world, the shared world, and the very care which beings take as themselves. From this structure, Dahlstrom reasons that truth, both in thematic and pre-thematic senses, is a presencing of the “worldliness of the world.” He thus adds fourth element to the unity of the world of care: the establishment of authentic care, or that care which presences the worldliness of the world. This sense of presencing is encountered “in the logos of conscience, in silently but resolutely hearing one’s conscience,”[22] a call which relates oneself to the originary phenomenon of future being. This yields a fifth element of the world of care: the original timeliness of authentic Dasein, the manner in which Dasein relates to its future by way of listening to conscience. Dahlstrom calls attention to Heidegger’s differentiation between existentials and categories as key to understanding his view of truth, especially as distinct from Aquinas (who though being to be a transcendental). An existential is the manner of being proper to human existence of being-here, whereas a category is the manner of being proper to non-human ontology. Heidegger’s sensitivity to the originary relatedness of truth to being-here does not mean that truth cannot be thematized into propositions and discourse. It does mean that thematization must be grounded in the existential unity of care. Dahlstrom calls this grounding the “paradox of thematization,” which arises in three separate contexts: the scientific, epistemic and theoretical. In the scientific context, the paradox in one of insufficient grounding: science asserts as binding what is merely an interpretation of pre theoretical experience. In the epistemic context, it seems clear that genuine knowing cannot be thematic because a given knowledge presupposes already being-in-the-world in a pre-thematic manner. Moreover, this cannot be avoided with the Husserlian move to intentionality, because doing so yields an “artificial and ultimately intractable divide between knowing and being.”[23] Furthermore, the process of justification in epistemic contexts is indeed a nonepistemic procedure, one intimately related to primary “ways of being—“ that is, norms of skillful (or “knowledgable”) handling of situations. We justify knowledge by way of practical engagement, not by propositional assertion. The final context of the “paradox of thematization” is that of theory, namely the “forgetful” quality of theoretical talk about things, a tendency to obscure the originary phenomenon of things by the use of deductive, mathematical language. Note that this strategy characterizes the fundamental error in Descartes’ method, which Heidegger calls “objectivity of the grasp of nature by way of calculation and measurement.”[24] Grasping the worldliness of the world is different than grasping a theoretical nature, an idea central to understand Heidegger’s alternative strategy. How, then, do we address this threefold paradox? How do we link thematization to the existential unity of being-here? Heidegger’s answer is found in his account of formal indication. Formal indication is the articulation of something in the very way that one originally “has” it, that is, the way we encounter something in a pre-thematic, pre-intuitive encounter. This articulation is achieved through philosophy; indeed, such articulation is the primary task of authentic philosophizing. One must first understand, then retrieve and articulate the precise meaning of being-here in a relationship with the given entity; only then can a formal indication emerge that avoids the pitfalls of traditional thematizing strategies. The formal indication “signals” the originary phenomena, “pointing out” not a fact but a manner of being, a “reenacting of what ‘to be’ means.”[25] The functions of formal indication are two-fold: Dahlstrom identifies them as the “referential-constraining” and “reversing-transformational” functions. The “referential-constraining” function utilizes the “formal” quality of formal indication to properly constrain a certain “taking” of something within the “as-structure.” The fact that the formal indication “constrains” one’s relationship with a thing calls upon one to take something “as” some particular sense of the thing. The “reversing-transformational” sense, on the other hand, directs concretely the meaning of someone’s authentic existence. Though emerging from concrete situations, such indications can transform one’s deep-seated commitments in a fundamental philosophical disruption. All of this presupposes, however, the taking up of a philosophical viewpoint, the “reversal” of one’s mode worldly consideration that clears the way for the subsequent “transformation.” Dahlstrom then moves to articulate the distinct yet unified structure of being-here as being-in-the-world, articulated in three aspects (the work-world, being-with-others, and being oneself). The work-world is the existential of “care” (besorgen), a sort of concernedness arising from always already being involved with things. The world of concern is a network, the implements of which always “point out” the whole, the surroundings, the environment relevant to the immediate concern.[26] This environment is often forgotten, since it doesn’t “stick out” or obtrude in our daily familiarity with situations. It is in defection or obtrusion from familiarity that the work-world’s referential context “shows up” as the work-world itself, not merely as accessible or handy (that is, founded on a context of concern). Heidegger discusses this “showing up” or “presence” in several different senses, which are not distinct domains but “ways of showing up.” There is the inconspicuous presence of concernedness, the inconspicuous presence (Anwesenheit) of the available (“the handiness of what is handy”), and the related presence of a nature always on hand as either useful or obtrusive, threatening, etc. This inconspicuous presencing (Präzens) must be considered as distinct from on-handed presencing via theoretical perception or assertion. Dahlstrom notes a major unanswered question in Heidegger’s account: what, then, is the relationship between articulated, theoretical presencing and pre-theoretical presencing? His closest answer is that such theorizing is “concern founded on a world of concern” (264). “He does not move that handiness is a more original mode of being than on-handedness” (265). “The plants of the botanist are not the flowers in the rain” (SZ 70, 211). Thus, Dahlstrom adds a third macro-category of presencing: the presence of the always on-hand nature from theoretical perspective. The fundamental bias of the logical prejudice is to ground truth in this category of presence, ignoring the first two (and a half) modes of concern with the world. Dahlstrom notes another unanswered question: why does theory arise from practice, and how is this a possible movement (267)? “The access to the underlying presence of the work-world is not some fixed stare of intuition, but instead a matter of understanding, that is, ‘know-how’ or, better, ‘knowing one’s way around’ in a given referential context” (267). Meaningfulness is thus a context of references, not just words or statements. This encounter with meaning grounds the world of concern. The corresponding on-handed theory of a context of references is a “founded” presence, but not the “original” means of concerned encounter. A question arises: what is the referential whole “about?” What closes the cycle? Heidegger’s answer: being-oneself. “What we are in ourselves is our handiness” (270). Kant attempts to categorize this human manner of being, but thus objectifies it, reduces it to the being of entities. Distinctly human being, being-in-the-world, demands what Dahlstrom calls the “meta-categorial distinction:” that human beings exist “as purposes in themselves” (271, many sub-references). SZ 167, 301 is a puzzling explication of the ethical fallout (272, check this out). Nonetheless, being-with-others is a distinct mode of being, in which other being are also-here but never in the “identical” world. They are “also being-here with me.” German words are important: Mitsein, one’s own being-here; Mitdasein, the way others are to us; Miteinandersein, the togetherness of those two modes of being-here. The absence of others shows the fundamentality of our being-with-others and the possibility of authentically being-so (273). What is at stake is still being-oneself, but in a concerned way that either liberates (authentic) or dominates (ingenuine) in relation to the other’s being-here. Everyday being-with-others is the “they-self” or “the crowd.” It is not something handy, but a way of being-here in fallenness. It prefigures the world and being-in-the-world by identifying the aims of the crowd with one’s network of concern (277, see Haugeland). It maintains and identifies one’s “coming-of-age” in a network of public responsibility; but the tendency to lapse into this mode of being involves a corresponding “flight from oneself.” Dahlstrom draws considerable insight into the “ambivalence” of this fallenness, as a sort of consequential state akin to original sin, not some discrete mistake or failure. Solicitude is authentic care for the other not in the way one cares for the work-world (Besorge). It is overturning the they-self and being-with-one-another, “caring with one another for the same world” (L 224). Dahlstrom notes a glaring omission: lack of a philosophical, ontic anthropology as rooting these ontological structures. A more humble reading is required if these questions retain their force. Heidegger’s answer is to tie authenticity to truth. Inauthentic being, the they-self, does not allow the truth of being-here to come into question in the first place. It neglect the essential diversity in manners of being, obscuring and forgetting the human mode of being and relegating it to the status of object, something handy. Formal indication returns as the means of “pointing-out” and reversing the self-evident truths forgotten in everydayness. Dahlstrom concludes that Heidegger’s account of being-with-others is “intimately linked to his method of construing philosophical concepts as formal indications” (282, check back for key quotes). The opposite of this authentic being-with-others is “palaver” or idle talk; it is the “vernacular of the work-world” (283). Plato sought to overcome palaver (sophistry) through dialectic. Palaver is necessarily public, occurring through being-in-the-world’s self-articulation, but in a manner that does not demand that the subject of articulation be handy or on hand. Thus, the articulation may not be understood in its original sense, but rather in a “washed-out” one. This is the way that falsity presents itself in Heidegger’s account of truth. Something reminds “hidden” or “closed-off” about a thing because it is articulated through palaver. Palaver corrupts talk by stripping talk of its grounding in original modes of access. “Truth becomes a question of public opinion” (285). Genuine talk is possible via two modes. The first is communication, of genuine concern for other within the context of the work-world. The second is the call of conscience, investigated later in greater detail. Heidegger connects care to the most original phenomenon of truth. Care, thus understood, is not some particular worry or mood, but the “ever-anxious companion,” as Goethe puts it (288, see reference). It is the formal indication of a manner of being “in which what is at stake is the respective manner of being itself” (288). It is Husserl’s intentionality, but viewed “from the outside” (P 420; PRL 248). This care constitutes the holistic structure of human existence or Dasein. Dasein must be understood as a “here” or “home,” a “clearing,” but not is the spatial sense of naturalistic location. The “here” is the locus of disclosedness, the “illumination,” the clearing itself. The being-here “is its disclosedness” (291, see reference). To be-here is to disclose, not merely to be “on hand. The disclosedness of Dasein is the “most original phenomenon of truth.” This is not some judgment or assertion, but the “here” or “clearing” of being-here. It is the “timely site…of the coincidence of the manner in which something comes to present itself…” (292). Its fundamental existentials are threefold: disposedness, understanding and fallenness. Disposedness is the way in which Dasein finds itself thrown into the world, then discovers the holistic character of Dasein, then is open to the world. This is prior to any talk. Disposedness bears with it “the propensity to self-evasion” (293). Befindlichkeit must be translated with a caveat to its existential character, as a way “in which being-here is constituted and discloses” (295). We are disposed to things; to laugh, to cry, to jealousy. Any living entity (organism?) is disposed, but non-organic entities are not disposed; they are simply on hand. The “here” of Dasein is not a graspable theme, but is disclosed unthematically. It is discloses only as a manner of being. However, it is neither “automatic or explicit” (299), requiring the disposition of anxiety to bring it back to itself, thus disclosing authentically. One’s disposition must therefore be suitable, properly based for our encounters with the world. The second existential of care is understanding, or the manner of “being-possible which is handed over to itself” (SZ 143). “To be-here is precisely to project oneself as one’s own potential-to-be” (302). Understanding is thus the way by which the disclosure-by-projection occurs as a possibility. To grasp these possibilities is to thematize them, to “pull them down” (SZ 145); on their own they are not concrete plans but original, pre-thematic possibilities. Understanding is more akin to “know-how” in the most fundamental, normative sense. Because understanding preconceives what is understood, this being-ahead-of-oneself involved in projection is an interpretive understanding. This is not pragmatism, insists Dahlstrom, because is understood is not properly a what; rather, it is being-as-existing (305). Understanding as an existential is thus not a practice, nor does is “make an ontic difference” (306). The third existential is fallenness, already covered in part with the discussion of palaver. Of note: authentic discourse is possible even for fallen Dasein, but it can never eliminate fallenness in total of Dasein. Palaver is necessary for us, and it necessarily points to the “urge and propensity” or “Drang und Hang” for Dasein to flee from itself. Urge is the compulsion to satisfy care only with respect to the particular compulsion; it is a care that obscures its fullness and is not free. Propensity is the deposition to cling to the world, akin to a sort of fixation for “destiny.” Luckily, we can learn to “fall” in a way that utilizes urge and propensity as modes of authentic being, akin to “athletes, tumbler and dancers” (311) or “the Kierkegaardian leap.” Fallenness has nothing to do with morality, according to Heidegger. We have the possibility of two kinds of anxiety: anxiety about and for our potential-to-be. The former grounds inauthentic being, the worries of “the crowd.” The latter ground authentic or genuine being, truth. “To be-here is to disclose in a way that is structured by care, projecting one’s possibilities of being-in-the-world while never escaping one’s thrownness and lapse into the world” (313). Note that truth, understood through this structure of care, is the “site of” true assertions, not the most original truth. The logos of care is not an assertion, but a “call of conscience” (Gewissen). It is a mode of talking or discourse (Rede). Conscience calls Dasein out of listening to the crowd into ownmost possibility. It discloses the uncanniness or eeriness of existence (check German), of being-in-the-world. It find itself not at home in the world. Conscience confirm that what is ultimately at stake is being-oneself (318). The content of the call of conscience is guilt, Dasein’s own not-being-the-ground for its own existence. It owes a debt, it is the reason for an ultimate nullity. Being-here is thus not just being thrown and projecting, but also lapsing, falling into the guilt or not-being at the very heart of Dasein. Resoluteness concerns Dasein with its ultimate and ownmost potential-to-be. It can only disclose itself to factual possibilities (321). This anticipating resoluteness of not of something on hand; but rather the truth of existence, authentic being-here. This authenticity assures Dasein of an utter certainty of resolute being-here, maintaining a freedom to be-true. (323). Conscience summons Dasein to the truth with a “cold certainty.” Dahlstrom then moves to a discussion of time as the sense of being-here. He identifies five aspects of genuine timeliness: the integrated character of its modes, the primacy of the future, the finitude (genuine future is anticipating death), the ecstases and horizon (the ways in which being-here is “outside” oneself, and that onto which said ecstases is projected). Genuine timeliness is to allow our ownmost possibility to coming to us, to not run from death. This anticipation of death is discloses in the original phenomenon of the future: “coming-to-oneself” (328). It takes over ourselves, but exactly as we already are: als ich bin-gewesen in Heidegger’s own terms. It is the way in which being here is “always-already” or “foregone” (329). Thus, Heidegger terms authentic being-towards-death as a “retrieval” or “repetition.” Dahlstrom connects this to disposition, that is, the way the ways that we disclose how we already are (330). Heidegger specifically adds that this disposition is made possible by timeliness, not deduced from it. The “original and genuine future” is an allowing of the possible to come to it (332). It is a way of decisively “attending to things” (334) by projecting towards them. Dahlstrom pays particular attention to the spatial-ecstatic language used by Heidegger to characterize Husserl’s view of transcendence. Heidegger used spatial terms to describe Husserlian intentionality, demonstrating the metaphorical “here” as a way of unfolding in time. “It ‘is here’ with the outside-itself of the ecstases. If no being-here exists, no world is also ‘here’” (335, SZ 365). Dahlstrom thus labels timeliness “the transcendental truth,” since it is only in timeliness that the structure of care is constituted (336). Dahlstrom focuses on a particular German word, Gegenwärtigen, as a “rendering present.” This “presenting” constitutes the modes of both neutral and inauthentic senses of the present. Inauthentic presenting is “oblivious to the situation…springing…from expectations that hold thing together in the abiding wherewithal of a world of concern” (348, see SZ 326f, 338, 410). Dahlstrom calls such inauthentic timeliness the “horizon” of inauthentic care, existence that has fallen away from its situation. Dahlstrom raises a crucial question demanding further input: “Is theory, like curiosity, a lapsed or fallen way of presenting things, of disclosing their manners of being” (351)? Dahlstrom ventures a guess, supposing a distinction between science’s potentially “excellent way of presenting” (SZ 363) and its tendency to fixate within the realm of on-handedness (353). To melt philosophy into science is to strip philosophy of its own emergence from finite being-here. He then moves to give an account of the origins of theory. He begins with a “looking-around,” which interprets things prior to predication. From this “overview” comes a dual sense of “presenting” theoretically: first, within and “overview of the complex;” second, informing a way of “thinking over” the situation (355). Dahlstrom uses the example of “there is too much sand in the soil.” In the first sense, the particular situation is the emergent concern; a set of expectations and retentions pertinent to this soil and this situation. The second sense views the soil as itself the object of concern, yielding measurement of the sand content and assertions of which type of soil is best for which crops. It does not immediately answer the question of whether this soil is too sandy for this situation. Note that Heidegger allows for both senses to be “objectifying” the situation without doing harm to the connectedness to the original situation. These thematizations are themselves ecstases; they are not things themselves. Clocks express objective time “publicly,” whereas subjective time is time’s manner of appearing to beings in the world. It is di-mensional in its presence, constantly on-hand and able to be expressed in numbers. It is the “numerable, exposed, encompassing, and transitional character of a sequence of nows” (365, GP 362f). When people in situations look at the clock, they reckon with time within a context of worldly concern. Time is meaningful when deal with in such a way. Time discloses itself as “suitable:” four o’clock is a suitable break-time, et cetera. Some time is more or less intensive in its concern to us; time “tenses” or “stretches” (368). Thus the use of the term “tense” in our everyday vocabulary. The time of concern is “meaningful (worldly), datable, tensed (stretched), and public” (369, SZ 406-411, GP 369-374, see F 57-60). Time of concern can occupy a “porous” space between authentic and inauthentic timeliness. It “sets the stage” for both. Heidegger aims to show that our common conception of time depends on world-time and world-time in turn on ecstatic timeliness. Ecstatic-horizonal timeliness is constituted by expecting, retaining and thereby presenting things (370). This presenting is articulated as an ecstatic unity. This unity is a pre-thematic “caring,” our being-concerned with time as something meaningful, public, tensed and dated. The “now” is articulated, not as something on hand, but as an ambiguity in our manner of caring (375). Time is given over to us, and we thus reckon with it, giving time, measuring time, “orienting ourselves” to time (377). It is rooted in a futural timeliness, the way in which we spring from a “distended” obliviousness with regard to ourselves toward an authoring anticipation of our ownmost possibility. “Time is our becoming” (379), the manner in which we anticipate our death, retrieve its facticity and thus authentically comport ourselves towards it. World-time is simply the time that we measure publicly. This entire account of ecstatic-horizontal timeliness (outlined formally on 383-384) depends entirely on the lapsed character of this comportment towards our death, our fallenness. Just an idea!
17 Sep 17 UTC	Introduction From Assertion to Disclosure: Discovering the Originary Sense of Truth Thesis: Truth is most fundamentally the disclosure of things, not judgements about them. Intro: Truth has always been about giving us beings, but we’ve forgotten that “From time immemorial, philosophy has associated truth and Being.”[1] With these words, Martin Heidegger harkens back to an “originary” sense of truth: an uncovering of “the way things are,” of real being. Heidegger is concerned that we have forgotten truth’s grounding in being, instead equating truth with logical demonstrations and proofs. Continuing a project begun by Edmund Husserl, Heidegger critiques this “logical account” of truth through phenomenological analysis. In this chapter, we will argue Heidegger’s phenomenology of “originary truth.” First, we will consider Husserl’s critique of the “logical account” of truth. Second, we will discuss Husserl’s “philosophy of consciousness,” his attempt to link the sensory givenness of beings to our intentional grasp of their truth. Third, we will present Heidegger’s critique of Husserl, in which he calls for a shift in truth’s “center of gravity” from theoretical justification to being-in-the world. Fourth, we will discuss Heidegger’s own account of “originary truth.” Through this analysis, we will get a clearer picture of Heidegger’s sweeping phenomenological project: to ground truth in “getting things right,” not in forming valid judgements about them. According to Husserl, The “logical view” doesn’t link up with beings Heidegger’s notion of truth could be understood as the extension of a project begun by Edmund Husserl. Husserl distanced himself from the so-called “logical account” of truth. This view, developed by Hermann Lotze, identifies truth with “valid affirmation.” As an example, suppose that I see a blue sky above me and form the judgement that “the sky is blue.” I have made a predication that affirms a state of affairs. That predication is “true” because it validly affirms the state of affairs. The predication would be false if it invalidly affirmed the state of affairs. Husserl criticizes the Lotzean view because it wrongly equivocates actuality with logical “affirmed-ness.” To Husserl, propositional correctness (“affirmed-ness”) cannot itself be truth, because truth depends upon a prior identity between judgement and intuition. In Cartesian Meditations, Husserl says of truth-telling that “the grounding is an agreement of the judgement with the judged state of affairs…itself.”[2] In other words, true judgements depend on evidences; a judgement cannot be called “true” unless it links up with a correlative state-of-affairs as a referent. Logical concepts must be grounded/evidenced in actualities The mistake of the Lotzean position is that it assumes that logical concepts are grounded within themselves, without need of evidence. Husserl disagrees: logical concepts are not actualities; rather, they emerge from actualities. The predication “the sky is blue” isn’t true within itself, as a mere sentence on a page. Rather, the predication is true because the terms “sky” and “blue” correlate to meaningful intentional content, content that arises prior to explicit, thematized predication. This distinction is far from trivial, for it breaks ties with the analytic tradition’s tendency to “forget” truth’s groundedness in actuality, in real being. Daniel Dahlstrom calls this tendency an “ontological naiveté.”[3] If the structure of truth (agreement between judgement with the judged state of affairs) arises prior to affirmation, it is unjustified to equate truth with affirmation itself; to do “forgets” the real beings that ultimately grounds truth. Truth cannot be a presence Although Heidegger agrees with Husserl that truth arises prior to predication, he thinks that Husserl fails to fully detach pre-predicative truth from the “ontologically naive” logical prejudice. Heidegger calls Husserl’s view “traditional,” that is, ultimately rooted in a justification of the intelligibility of things through assertions. Because Husserl persistently refers to truth as a form of description, assertion, judgement or interpretation, Heidegger accuses Husserl of equating truth with a sort of presence. This is problematic for Heidegger, because a phenomenology of truth requires that we discover not some specific sort of presence called “truth,” but rather the emergence of “what is given” and “what is meant” from absence to its presence, an emergence or “unconcealment” that we call truth. Truth must be pre-intuitive, but still normative Heidegger’s project is thus to complete the work that Husserl started, articulating a phenomenology of truth that is not just pre-predicative, but altogether pre-intuitive. His challenge, however, is to account for this “most original” truth without doing violence to truth’s normative sense, its conditions of success and failure. If Heideggerian truth-telling cannot fail (that is, if falsity is impossible), then the account proves insufficient. How, then, does Heidegger ground normativity in pre-intuitive being? Truth must be a way of “taking” things The answer to this question lies in Heidegger’s turn from the transcendental subject to being-in-the-world. Dahlstrom calls this turn a shift in truth’s “center of gravity,”[4] a re-configuring of Husserlian intentionality as something emerging not from theoretical justification, but rather from the way we “take” things. Before we are able to examine this shift in any detail, it is necessary to establish Husserl’s account of pre-predicative truth. HUSSERL’S ACCOUNT Normativity is given over in perception itself Husserl grounds normativity in perception itself, since perception is the original context in which we “get things right” (or wrong). To Husserl, predicative truth is rooted in prior intentional content given in perception. But the relationship is not merely causal, as if our judgements necessarily and immediately follow from the way we perceive things. From the first-person perspective, justifying truth claims is inseparable from the practice of “getting things right.”[5] To tell the truth is thus not merely to refer to or indicate something, but to do so successfully. This is because judgements do not merely indicate what is given, but also express what is meant. Perception is thus both receptive (given over by objects) and yet expressed in a determinate way that can either succeed or fail. The latter component is what we call the “normative” in perception. The normative is within the “as-structure” of meaningful perception What is the normative in perception? Heidegger locates it within the “as-structure” of rational perception, the manner in which rational beings can take things as things. This is in contrast with non-rational beings, which can only take things as “that-which” dis-inhibits some appetite or drive. In Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, Heidegger uses the example of a blade of grass. To a beetle, the grass is not conceivable “as” grass, that is, as a thing. It can only be taken as a “beetle-path,” or “that-which dis-inhibits the appetite to move towards food.” To the rational, linguistic subject, however, the blade of grass can be given over meaningfully, intentionally, as a thing itself. The “as-structure” gives over presences as entailing absences What do we mean by taking something as a “thing itself?” Stephen Crowell points to entailment, the way that temporally-structured perceiving gives things as both present and yet entailing the absent as belonging to the present. When we see the front side of a chair, the un-seen back side is given as belonging to the front, the back is “entailed by the front.” This entailment is not inferred through explicit reasoning, but rather immediately perceived. Alva Noë puts it nicely as a “perceptual sense” rather than a “thinking that.”[6] Entailment is evidence of the norm of interpretation/fulfillment Importantly, entailment is not itself the normative in the perception; it is merely evidence of it. But it points to a norm of interpretation, the immediate manner in which rational beings move from receptive sensation to active interpretation or “taking-as.” Crowell terms this the norm of “completion” or “adequation” of things;[7] Husserl calls it the “fulfillment of the intention.”[8] This language clarifies that it is things themselves that are intelligible and determined; we do not determine things. However, their intelligibility is unknown, incomplete, un-articulated. To perceive something is to receive one aspect of a larger whole, to take in a sliver that gives us enough determination to determine what is supposed to be “there” as a thing. This is achieved by what Crowell terms the “referential, symbolizing function” of perception[9]. This function is similar to that of a symbol, for it indicates a range of possible determinations through suggestion of similarity and contiguity. When we perceive the front of a cup, it immediately seems similar to other cups. Only when so taken “as a cup” does the front side of the cup imply a typical or “contiguous” back side and inside. Fulfillment is inherent to perception because objects, not the subject, are “what-is-fulfilled” Our concern is that this apparent norm of “fulfillment” might not actually be inherent to perception, but merely accidentally related to it. Husserl addresses this issue with his notion of indeterminacy, a term that Heidegger also adopts. To Husserl, indeterminacy means “incompleteness,” not a lack of determination. The perceiver does not determine objects, but merely articulates, presents, and knows them. Intelligible, determinate properties are indeed “in” objects, not “in” the intentional subject. Determinacy or knowledge is thus the intentional completion of the indeterminacy presented in object. This is why Husserl uses the language of “filled” intentions: the present object entails the absent object, and this entailment “fills” the indeterminate. Objects uphold standards of fulfillment Husserl’s account thus maintains an important tension: truth is neither “objective” nor “subjective” in the simplistic sense, but rather is co-constituted by both subject and object. The present object “mediates” the absent object, upholding a “standard for determining what is indirectly presented[10].” Only an intentional subject can fulfill intentions It is important to note that this determination can only be accomplished by an intentional subject who can receive entailments. Non-linguistic animals would not be able to receive entailments, since such creatures cannot “take” the absent as belonging to a present experience. Thus it is not raw sense-data that equips the subject for the norm of fulfillment, but rather an intentional structure capable of taking things as things. But how does this structure emerge, since “nothing predestines the sensations for such a role?”[11] Perception is predestined for intentional fulfillment because being is fundamentally intelligible Kinesthesia is evidence of the intelligibility of being The answer found in Husserl’s later work is his so-called “genetic phenomenology,” which grounds the intelligibility or “primordial lawfulness”[12] of being in the structure of perception itself. The argument has two prongs: first, Husserl argues that intentionality is present even on the level of sensation. Second, he argues that perception is structured both intentionally and yet non-conceptually in a temporal unfolding of intention and fulfillment.[13] This unfolding is law-like and can be described as typical or atypical. Dahlstrom uses the example of kinesthesia to describe the lawfulness of “raw” perception. Kinesthesia takes our physical body parts and “makes them the body,” the sensing thing. Even the very notion of “body” is meaningless without the time-constituted organization of our sensory fields. As an example, the notion of “my eye” is tied to the kinesthetic link between a sense field and my eye as a physical object. This link emerges in my perceiving law-like relations between the two (such as “when I turn my eye to the left, the sense-field moves to the right”). It is a passive or “informative” perception, but it requires intentionality. Normativity emerges when this intelligibility is given over “as” entailing lawfulness (rules?) Normativity emerges when these passive perceptions give rise to expectations or entailments. Returning to our earlier example, suppose that our eye has had many years of practice looking at objects. Countless law-like perceptions have given rise to norms of expectation and entailment. If I were to turn my eye to the left, I expect the image before me to move to the right. If this don’t occur, there would be a breakdown in the lawful connection expected between object and perception. But this breakdown isn’t merely “atypical” but truly “abnormal” in the strongest sense. It’s not that the image merely isn’t moving typically, it’s that the image ought to move. This is how perception itself gives rise to norms of acting. Perception of objective phenomena are normative not just as a typical “is” but as an “ought” Perception of this “ought” is a skill or “know-how” To better illustrate the difference between passive, informative perceptions and intentional, object-constituting perceptions, Dahlstrom draws a distinction between “kinesthetic” and “presenting” sensations.[14] Kinesthetic sensations are always taken as “normal” or “abnormal” not in the sense of an ought but rather an is: the sensory input can be meaningfully described as typical or atypical. ”Presenting” sensations reveal things and are normative in the true sense of an ought: “If the eye turns in this way, then so does the ‘image.’”[15] This is because presenting sensations are motivated by and dependent on kinesthetic sensations in a conditional way, not merely a correlative one. It isn’t “If the eye turns in this way, the image usually turns as well.” Presenting sensations smack of necessity and yet arise out of our “sensorimotor knowledge,” a knowledge of the dependent, motivated correlation between the fulfillment of intention and “knowing how to look.”[16] This is distinct from an explicit or thematic predication, and occurs altogether prior to predications about objects. THE NEED FOR HEIDEGGER’S ACCOUNT If beings are most fundamentally disclosed through skills/coping, then disclosure cannot be equated with an assertion (?) Here we come to the formal beginning of Heidegger’s account of the “most originary sense of truth.” If meaning and entailment arise not out of a thematic predication but rather a “know-how,” then the truth of things in turn must likewise arise not in the structure of an assertion, but rather in the disclosure of things. Put another way, the intentional subject first “gets things right” when the subject deals or copes with things successfully, not when the subject thematically deems an action “suitable.” For example, I first “get chairs right” when I find a thing to sit on, not when I explicitly deem some object “suitable for sitting.” Dreyfus notes that thematization only occurs when this “mindless coping” is obtruded or “hits a snag”[17]. I don’t explicitly consider whether a chair is good for sitting until I find my current chair uncomfortable, or until I must choose between two chairs. In short, predication presupposes a “know-how” or skill that arises—prior to thematization—through the disclosure of beings. If truth is not a mere presence, then its ground cannot be found by mere “philosophy of consciousness” Heidegger’s conclusion is that, given this shift in truth’s center of gravity, Husserl’s “philosophy of consciousness” is no longer an adequate approach to the discover of original truth. Because truth arrives through disclosure (in which objects emerge from absence to presence), it cannot be reduced to a mere presence, even a pre-predicative, intentional presence. Rather, truth must be grounded in the interplay of absence and presence prior even to intentionality. It is the truth of disclosure constituted in Being-in-the-world. Thus, Husserl’s philosophy of consciousness is replaced with Heidegger’s fundamental ontology, through which he investigates the most original meaning of Being. This lens of fundamental ontology produces Heidegger’s famous exposition of truth as “unconcealment” in Being and Time. HEIDEGGER’S ACCOUNT PROPER Heidegger tries to locate truth prior to predication and intention through fundamental ontology In Paragraph 44 of Being and Time, Heidegger sets the stage for his radically “originary” view of truth, saying, “From time immemorial, philosophy has associated truth and Being.”[18] This is a fitting introduction to Heidegger’s entire project with regard to truth. Heidegger is trying to locate a sufficient account of truth on the order of Being that is prior to the formulation of predications, and indeed prior to any intention. He sets out to achieve this task in a three-fold analysis: first, the “laying-bare” of the ontological foundations of the “traditional” view of truth; second, the articulation of the primordial phenomenon of truth and the subsequently derivative character of the “traditional” view; third, the clarification of the “kind of Being” enjoyed by this primordial truth. Uncovering (not correspondence or judgement) serves as an adequate starting point for truth Heidegger’s deconstruction of the “traditional” concept of truth begins with the distillation of two essential features. The first feature is correspondence, or truth’s status as a predicate of successful adequation between assertions and entities “just as they are in themselves.” The second is judgement, that is, the mediate activity necessarily involved in the formulation of an assertion from a given situation. Heidegger holds that neither correspondence nor judgement forms an adequate starting point for a primordial foundation of truth. Instead, he proposes “uncovering” as the foundation of truth. When an assertion is predicated as true in the traditional sense, Heidegger charges that the “being-true” of said assertion is its pointing out an entity in its “uncovered-ness,” its originary showing of itself. This is a distinct phenomenon from any sort of correspondence and prior to any “assertive” predication on the part of the intellect. Unconcealment not a thing, but the disclosedness of being-in-the-world The originary phenomenon of propositional truth thus located, Heidegger moves to his articulation of the primordial phenomenon of truth itself. To this end, he traces the etymology of the Greek aletheia: “unconcealment.” Unconcealment is not merely that-which-is-unconcealed, that is, some factical entity. Rather, it is made possible specifically through Dasein’s being-in-the-world; it is Dasein as being-uncovering. Indeed, unconcealment is the very ontological condition revealed in Dasein’s having-a-world. Put differently, truth is the “disclosedness” of Dasein; it is “the ontological condition for that possibility that assertions can be either true or false—that they may uncover or cover things up.”[19] This sense of truth, as Heidegger notes in The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, “has nothing to do with the business of proving propositions at the writing desk.”[20] The primordial phenomenon of truth shows up entirely prior to the formulation of assertions. Simultaneously, this phenomenon grounds the ontic phenomena of being-uncovering and being-covering, which in turn precondition the respective truth or falsity of assertions. Truth is equiprimordial with Dasein The final step of Heidegger’s treatment of truth in Being and Time clarifies the sort of Being enjoyed by truth-as-unconcealment. In short, Heidegger claims that the Being of truth is relative to and equiprimordial with the Being of Dasein. There can be no truth apart from Dasein. Importantly, however, truth is said to manifest prior to any predication made by Dasein. Insofar as Dasein “is,” truth likewise “is.” This is because Dasein’s Being is a Being-in-the-world, a world which discloses. The disclosedness of Dasein is truth itself in Heidegger’s view. In this chapter, we have traced Heidegger’s reorientation of Husserl’s phenomenology of truth. We began with Husserl’s project of overcoming the Lotzean “logical prejudice,” which equates truth with logical affirmedness. Husserl’s solution was to ground truth in actuality, which occurs prior to predication. While Heidegger likewise opposed the Lotzean view, he felt that Husserl’s solution was not sufficiently radical. In order to completely overthrow the logical prejudice, Heidegger held that truth must be not only pre-predicative, but pre-intuitive. To better understand this position, we laid out Husserl’s argument for grounding the normative in perception. We concluded that truth was grounded ultimately in a “knowing-how,” not a “knowing-what.” Care and the Truth of Being-in-the-World Heidegger argues that truth’s ultimate grounding lies not in some presence, but rather in being-in-the world. Being-in-the-world, co-constituted between objects and normative skills (the ability to “take-as”), is the horizon of disclosure that Dahlstrom calls the “existential sense” of truth. Dahlstrom traces this view all the way back to Aristotle, who distinguishes the truth of simple entities not as a matter of correctness, but one of being or non-being. To “have” the truth of a simple entity is the “have” the entity itself, just as it is. To “not have” the truth of a simple entity is to “not have” the entity, to tarry on without it. In this existential context, truth is not merely “a being ascertained” but also “a being used” (and thereby “identified, indexed and articulated”)[21]. Truth is thus “had” in an essential relation to time, the horizon of truth’s disclosure in its most originary sense. In transforming Husserlian “philosophy of consciousness,” Heidegger replaces “intentionality” with “being-here” as the ground-level realm of metaphysical analysis. He does so to double down against the Lotzean “logical prejudice” that reduces truth to a mere presence-at-hand. Husserl’s “intentionality” fights the logical prejudice by positioning truth prior to predication; Heidegger’s “Dasein” moves one step further, positioning truth prior to predication and intuition. To Heidegger, truth isn’t some “thing” that is correct or incorrect; rather, is is a “way of taking” that either discloses the thing or fails to do so, all within an essential relatedness to time. In order to understand the existential sense of truth, we must understand the existential structure of Dasein disclosed by “care.” Dahlstrom articulates this existential structure as a “three-fold unity of world,” constituted by the work-world, the shared world, and the very care which beings take as themselves. From this structure, Dahlstrom reasons that truth, both in thematic and pre-thematic senses, is a presencing of the “worldliness of the world.” He thus adds fourth element to the unity of the world of care: the establishment of authentic care, or that care which presences the worldliness of the world. This sense of presencing is encountered “in the logos of conscience, in silently but resolutely hearing one’s conscience,”[22] a call which relates oneself to the originary phenomenon of future being. This yields a fifth element of the world of care: the original timeliness of authentic Dasein, the manner in which Dasein relates to its future by way of listening to conscience. Dahlstrom calls attention to Heidegger’s differentiation between existentials and categories as key to understanding his view of truth, especially as distinct from Aquinas (who though being to be a transcendental). An existential is the manner of being proper to human existence of being-here, whereas a category is the manner of being proper to non-human ontology. Heidegger’s sensitivity to the originary relatedness of truth to being-here does not mean that truth cannot be thematized into propositions and discourse. It does mean that thematization must be grounded in the existential unity of care. Dahlstrom calls this grounding the “paradox of thematization,” which arises in three separate contexts: the scientific, epistemic and theoretical. In the scientific context, the paradox in one of insufficient grounding: science asserts as binding what is merely an interpretation of pre theoretical experience. In the epistemic context, it seems clear that genuine knowing cannot be thematic because a given knowledge presupposes already being-in-the-world in a pre-thematic manner. Moreover, this cannot be avoided with the Husserlian move to intentionality, because doing so yields an “artificial and ultimately intractable divide between knowing and being.”[23] Furthermore, the process of justification in epistemic contexts is indeed a nonepistemic procedure, one intimately related to primary “ways of being—“ that is, norms of skillful (or “knowledgable”) handling of situations. We justify knowledge by way of practical engagement, not by propositional assertion. The final context of the “paradox of thematization” is that of theory, namely the “forgetful” quality of theoretical talk about things, a tendency to obscure the originary phenomenon of things by the use of deductive, mathematical language. Note that this strategy characterizes the fundamental error in Descartes’ method, which Heidegger calls “objectivity of the grasp of nature by way of calculation and measurement.”[24] Grasping the worldliness of the world is different than grasping a theoretical nature, an idea central to understand Heidegger’s alternative strategy. How, then, do we address this threefold paradox? How do we link thematization to the existential unity of being-here? Heidegger’s answer is found in his account of formal indication. Formal indication is the articulation of something in the very way that one originally “has” it, that is, the way we encounter something in a pre-thematic, pre-intuitive encounter. This articulation is achieved through philosophy; indeed, such articulation is the primary task of authentic philosophizing. One must first understand, then retrieve and articulate the precise meaning of being-here in a relationship with the given entity; only then can a formal indication emerge that avoids the pitfalls of traditional thematizing strategies. The formal indication “signals” the originary phenomena, “pointing out” not a fact but a manner of being, a “reenacting of what ‘to be’ means.”[25] The functions of formal indication are two-fold: Dahlstrom identifies them as the “referential-constraining” and “reversing-transformational” functions. The “referential-constraining” function utilizes the “formal” quality of formal indication to properly constrain a certain “taking” of something within the “as-structure.” The fact that the formal indication “constrains” one’s relationship with a thing calls upon one to take something “as” some particular sense of the thing. The “reversing-transformational” sense, on the other hand, directs concretely the meaning of someone’s authentic existence. Though emerging from concrete situations, such indications can transform one’s deep-seated commitments in a fundamental philosophical disruption. All of this presupposes, however, the taking up of a philosophical viewpoint, the “reversal” of one’s mode worldly consideration that clears the way for the subsequent “transformation.” Dahlstrom then moves to articulate the distinct yet unified structure of being-here as being-in-the-world, articulated in three aspects (the work-world, being-with-others, and being oneself). The work-world is the existential of “care” (besorgen), a sort of concernedness arising from always already being involved with things. The world of concern is a network, the implements of which always “point out” the whole, the surroundings, the environment relevant to the immediate concern.[26] This environment is often forgotten, since it doesn’t “stick out” or obtrude in our daily familiarity with situations. It is in defection or obtrusion from familiarity that the work-world’s referential context “shows up” as the work-world itself, not merely as accessible or handy (that is, founded on a context of concern). Heidegger discusses this “showing up” or “presence” in several different senses, which are not distinct domains but “ways of showing up.” There is the inconspicuous presence of concernedness, the inconspicuous presence (Anwesenheit) of the available (“the handiness of what is handy”), and the related presence of a nature always on hand as either useful or obtrusive, threatening, etc. This inconspicuous presencing (Präzens) must be considered as distinct from on-handed presencing via theoretical perception or assertion. Dahlstrom notes a major unanswered question in Heidegger’s account: what, then, is the relationship between articulated, theoretical presencing and pre-theoretical presencing? His closest answer is that such theorizing is “concern founded on a world of concern” (264). “He does not move that handiness is a more original mode of being than on-handedness” (265). “The plants of the botanist are not the flowers in the rain” (SZ 70, 211). Thus, Dahlstrom adds a third macro-category of presencing: the presence of the always on-hand nature from theoretical perspective. The fundamental bias of the logical prejudice is to ground truth in this category of presence, ignoring the first two (and a half) modes of concern with the world. Dahlstrom notes another unanswered question: why does theory arise from practice, and how is this a possible movement (267)? “The access to the underlying presence of the work-world is not some fixed stare of intuition, but instead a matter of understanding, that is, ‘know-how’ or, better, ‘knowing one’s way around’ in a given referential context” (267). Meaningfulness is thus a context of references, not just words or statements. This encounter with meaning grounds the world of concern. The corresponding on-handed theory of a context of references is a “founded” presence, but not the “original” means of concerned encounter. A question arises: what is the referential whole “about?” What closes the cycle? Heidegger’s answer: being-oneself. “What we are in ourselves is our handiness” (270). Kant attempts to categorize this human manner of being, but thus objectifies it, reduces it to the being of entities. Distinctly human being, being-in-the-world, demands what Dahlstrom calls the “meta-categorial distinction:” that human beings exist “as purposes in themselves” (271, many sub-references). SZ 167, 301 is a puzzling explication of the ethical fallout (272, check this out). Nonetheless, being-with-others is a distinct mode of being, in which other being are also-here but never in the “identical” world. They are “also being-here with me.” German words are important: Mitsein, one’s own being-here; Mitdasein, the way others are to us; Miteinandersein, the togetherness of those two modes of being-here. The absence of others shows the fundamentality of our being-with-others and the possibility of authentically being-so (273). What is at stake is still being-oneself, but in a concerned way that either liberates (authentic) or dominates (ingenuine) in relation to the other’s being-here. Everyday being-with-others is the “they-self” or “the crowd.” It is not something handy, but a way of being-here in fallenness. It prefigures the world and being-in-the-world by identifying the aims of the crowd with one’s network of concern (277, see Haugeland). It maintains and identifies one’s “coming-of-age” in a network of public responsibility; but the tendency to lapse into this mode of being involves a corresponding “flight from oneself.” Dahlstrom draws considerable insight into the “ambivalence” of this fallenness, as a sort of consequential state akin to original sin, not some discrete mistake or failure. Solicitude is authentic care for the other not in the way one cares for the work-world (Besorge). It is overturning the they-self and being-with-one-another, “caring with one another for the same world” (L 224). Dahlstrom notes a glaring omission: lack of a philosophical, ontic anthropology as rooting these ontological structures. A more humble reading is required if these questions retain their force. Heidegger’s answer is to tie authenticity to truth. Inauthentic being, the they-self, does not allow the truth of being-here to come into question in the first place. It neglect the essential diversity in manners of being, obscuring and forgetting the human mode of being and relegating it to the status of object, something handy. Formal indication returns as the means of “pointing-out” and reversing the self-evident truths forgotten in everydayness. Dahlstrom concludes that Heidegger’s account of being-with-others is “intimately linked to his method of construing philosophical concepts as formal indications” (282, check back for key quotes). The opposite of this authentic being-with-others is “palaver” or idle talk; it is the “vernacular of the work-world” (283). Plato sought to overcome palaver (sophistry) through dialectic. Palaver is necessarily public, occurring through being-in-the-world’s self-articulation, but in a manner that does not demand that the subject of articulation be handy or on hand. Thus, the articulation may not be understood in its original sense, but rather in a “washed-out” one. This is the way that falsity presents itself in Heidegger’s account of truth. Something reminds “hidden” or “closed-off” about a thing because it is articulated through palaver. Palaver corrupts talk by stripping talk of its grounding in original modes of access. “Truth becomes a question of public opinion” (285). Genuine talk is possible via two modes. The first is communication, of genuine concern for other within the context of the work-world. The second is the call of conscience, investigated later in greater detail. Heidegger connects care to the most original phenomenon of truth. Care, thus understood, is not some particular worry or mood, but the “ever-anxious companion,” as Goethe puts it (288, see reference). It is the formal indication of a manner of being “in which what is at stake is the respective manner of being itself” (288). It is Husserl’s intentionality, but viewed “from the outside” (P 420; PRL 248). This care constitutes the holistic structure of human existence or Dasein. Dasein must be understood as a “here” or “home,” a “clearing,” but not is the spatial sense of naturalistic location. The “here” is the locus of disclosedness, the “illumination,” the clearing itself. The being-here “is its disclosedness” (291, see reference). To be-here is to disclose, not merely to be “on hand. The disclosedness of Dasein is the “most original phenomenon of truth.” This is not some judgment or assertion, but the “here” or “clearing” of being-here. It is the “timely site…of the coincidence of the manner in which something comes to present itself…” (292). Its fundamental existentials are threefold: disposedness, understanding and fallenness. Disposedness is the way in which Dasein finds itself thrown into the world, then discovers the holistic character of Dasein, then is open to the world. This is prior to any talk. Disposedness bears with it “the propensity to self-evasion” (293). Befindlichkeit must be translated with a caveat to its existential character, as a way “in which being-here is constituted and discloses” (295). We are disposed to things; to laugh, to cry, to jealousy. Any living entity (organism?) is disposed, but non-organic entities are not disposed; they are simply on hand. The “here” of Dasein is not a graspable theme, but is disclosed unthematically. It is discloses only as a manner of being. However, it is neither “automatic or explicit” (299), requiring the disposition of anxiety to bring it back to itself, thus disclosing authentically. One’s disposition must therefore be suitable, properly based for our encounters with the world. The second existential of care is understanding, or the manner of “being-possible which is handed over to itself” (SZ 143). “To be-here is precisely to project oneself as one’s own potential-to-be” (302). Understanding is thus the way by which the disclosure-by-projection occurs as a possibility. To grasp these possibilities is to thematize them, to “pull them down” (SZ 145); on their own they are not concrete plans but original, pre-thematic possibilities. Understanding is more akin to “know-how” in the most fundamental, normative sense. Because understanding preconceives what is understood, this being-ahead-of-oneself involved in projection is an interpretive understanding. This is not pragmatism, insists Dahlstrom, because is understood is not properly a what; rather, it is being-as-existing (305). Understanding as an existential is thus not a practice, nor does is “make an ontic difference” (306). The third existential is fallenness, already covered in part with the discussion of palaver. Of note: authentic discourse is possible even for fallen Dasein, but it can never eliminate fallenness in total of Dasein. Palaver is necessary for us, and it necessarily points to the “urge and propensity” or “Drang und Hang” for Dasein to flee from itself. Urge is the compulsion to satisfy care only with respect to the particular compulsion; it is a care that obscures its fullness and is not free. Propensity is the deposition to cling to the world, akin to a sort of fixation for “destiny.” Luckily, we can learn to “fall” in a way that utilizes urge and propensity as modes of authentic being, akin to “athletes, tumbler and dancers” (311) or “the Kierkegaardian leap.” Fallenness has nothing to do with morality, according to Heidegger. We have the possibility of two kinds of anxiety: anxiety about and for our potential-to-be. The former grounds inauthentic being, the worries of “the crowd.” The latter ground authentic or genuine being, truth. “To be-here is to disclose in a way that is structured by care, projecting one’s possibilities of being-in-the-world while never escaping one’s thrownness and lapse into the world” (313). Note that truth, understood through this structure of care, is the “site of” true assertions, not the most original truth. The logos of care is not an assertion, but a “call of conscience” (Gewissen). It is a mode of talking or discourse (Rede). Conscience calls Dasein out of listening to the crowd into ownmost possibility. It discloses the uncanniness or eeriness of existence (check German), of being-in-the-world. It find itself not at home in the world. Conscience confirm that what is ultimately at stake is being-oneself (318). The content of the call of conscience is guilt, Dasein’s own not-being-the-ground for its own existence. It owes a debt, it is the reason for an ultimate nullity. Being-here is thus not just being thrown and projecting, but also lapsing, falling into the guilt or not-being at the very heart of Dasein. Resoluteness concerns Dasein with its ultimate and ownmost potential-to-be. It can only disclose itself to factual possibilities (321). This anticipating resoluteness of not of something on hand; but rather the truth of existence, authentic being-here. This authenticity assures Dasein of an utter certainty of resolute being-here, maintaining a freedom to be-true. (323). Conscience summons Dasein to the truth with a “cold certainty.” Dahlstrom then moves to a discussion of time as the sense of being-here. He identifies five aspects of genuine timeliness: the integrated character of its modes, the primacy of the future, the finitude (genuine future is anticipating death), the ecstases and horizon (the ways in which being-here is “outside” oneself, and that onto which said ecstases is projected). Genuine timeliness is to allow our ownmost possibility to coming to us, to not run from death. This anticipation of death is discloses in the original phenomenon of the future: “coming-to-oneself” (328). It takes over ourselves, but exactly as we already are: als ich bin-gewesen in Heidegger’s own terms. It is the way in which being here is “always-already” or “foregone” (329). Thus, Heidegger terms authentic being-towards-death as a “retrieval” or “repetition.” Dahlstrom connects this to disposition, that is, the way the ways that we disclose how we already are (330). Heidegger specifically adds that this disposition is made possible by timeliness, not deduced from it. The “original and genuine future” is an allowing of the possible to come to it (332). It is a way of decisively “attending to things” (334) by projecting towards them. Dahlstrom pays particular attention to the spatial-ecstatic language used by Heidegger to characterize Husserl’s view of transcendence. Heidegger used spatial terms to describe Husserlian intentionality, demonstrating the metaphorical “here” as a way of unfolding in time. “It ‘is here’ with the outside-itself of the ecstases. If no being-here exists, no world is also ‘here’” (335, SZ 365). Dahlstrom thus labels timeliness “the transcendental truth,” since it is only in timeliness that the structure of care is constituted (336). Dahlstrom focuses on a particular German word, Gegenwärtigen, as a “rendering present.” This “presenting” constitutes the modes of both neutral and inauthentic senses of the present. Inauthentic presenting is “oblivious to the situation…springing…from expectations that hold thing together in the abiding wherewithal of a world of concern” (348, see SZ 326f, 338, 410). Dahlstrom calls such inauthentic timeliness the “horizon” of inauthentic care, existence that has fallen away from its situation. Dahlstrom raises a crucial question demanding further input: “Is theory, like curiosity, a lapsed or fallen way of presenting things, of disclosing their manners of being” (351)? Dahlstrom ventures a guess, supposing a distinction between science’s potentially “excellent way of presenting” (SZ 363) and its tendency to fixate within the realm of on-handedness (353). To melt philosophy into science is to strip philosophy of its own emergence from finite being-here. He then moves to give an account of the origins of theory. He begins with a “looking-around,” which interprets things prior to predication. From this “overview” comes a dual sense of “presenting” theoretically: first, within and “overview of the complex;” second, informing a way of “thinking over” the situation (355). Dahlstrom uses the example of “there is too much sand in the soil.” In the first sense, the particular situation is the emergent concern; a set of expectations and retentions pertinent to this soil and this situation. The second sense views the soil as itself the object of concern, yielding measurement of the sand content and assertions of which type of soil is best for which crops. It does not immediately answer the question of whether this soil is too sandy for this situation. Note that Heidegger allows for both senses to be “objectifying” the situation without doing harm to the connectedness to the original situation. These thematizations are themselves ecstases; they are not things themselves. Clocks express objective time “publicly,” whereas subjective time is time’s manner of appearing to beings in the world. It is di-mensional in its presence, constantly on-hand and able to be expressed in numbers. It is the “numerable, exposed, encompassing, and transitional character of a sequence of nows” (365, GP 362f). When people in situations look at the clock, they reckon with time within a context of worldly concern. Time is meaningful when deal with in such a way. Time discloses itself as “suitable:” four o’clock is a suitable break-time, et cetera. Some time is more or less intensive in its concern to us; time “tenses” or “stretches” (368). Thus the use of the term “tense” in our everyday vocabulary. The time of concern is “meaningful (worldly), datable, tensed (stretched), and public” (369, SZ 406-411, GP 369-374, see F 57-60). Time of concern can occupy a “porous” space between authentic and inauthentic timeliness. It “sets the stage” for both. Heidegger aims to show that our common conception of time depends on world-time and world-time in turn on ecstatic timeliness. Ecstatic-horizonal timeliness is constituted by expecting, retaining and thereby presenting things (370). This presenting is articulated as an ecstatic unity. This unity is a pre-thematic “caring,” our being-concerned with time as something meaningful, public, tensed and dated. The “now” is articulated, not as something on hand, but as an ambiguity in our manner of caring (375). Time is given over to us, and we thus reckon with it, giving time, measuring time, “orienting ourselves” to time (377). It is rooted in a futural timeliness, the way in which we spring from a “distended” obliviousness with regard to ourselves toward an authoring anticipation of our ownmost possibility. “Time is our becoming” (379), the manner in which we anticipate our death, retrieve its facticity and thus authentically comport ourselves towards it. World-time is simply the time that we measure publicly. This entire account of ecstatic-horizontal timeliness (outlined formally on 383-384) depends entirely on the lapsed character of this comportment towards our death, our fallenness. Just an idea!
17 Sep 17 UTC	Introduction From Assertion to Disclosure: Discovering the Originary Sense of Truth Thesis: Truth is most fundamentally the disclosure of things, not judgements about them. Intro: Truth has always been about giving us beings, but we’ve forgotten that “From time immemorial, philosophy has associated truth and Being.”[1] With these words, Martin Heidegger harkens back to an “originary” sense of truth: an uncovering of “the way things are,” of real being. Heidegger is concerned that we have forgotten truth’s grounding in being, instead equating truth with logical demonstrations and proofs. Continuing a project begun by Edmund Husserl, Heidegger critiques this “logical account” of truth through phenomenological analysis. In this chapter, we will argue Heidegger’s phenomenology of “originary truth.” First, we will consider Husserl’s critique of the “logical account” of truth. Second, we will discuss Husserl’s “philosophy of consciousness,” his attempt to link the sensory givenness of beings to our intentional grasp of their truth. Third, we will present Heidegger’s critique of Husserl, in which he calls for a shift in truth’s “center of gravity” from theoretical justification to being-in-the world. Fourth, we will discuss Heidegger’s own account of “originary truth.” Through this analysis, we will get a clearer picture of Heidegger’s sweeping phenomenological project: to ground truth in “getting things right,” not in forming valid judgements about them. According to Husserl, The “logical view” doesn’t link up with beings Heidegger’s notion of truth could be understood as the extension of a project begun by Edmund Husserl. Husserl distanced himself from the so-called “logical account” of truth. This view, developed by Hermann Lotze, identifies truth with “valid affirmation.” As an example, suppose that I see a blue sky above me and form the judgement that “the sky is blue.” I have made a predication that affirms a state of affairs. That predication is “true” because it validly affirms the state of affairs. The predication would be false if it invalidly affirmed the state of affairs. Husserl criticizes the Lotzean view because it wrongly equivocates actuality with logical “affirmed-ness.” To Husserl, propositional correctness (“affirmed-ness”) cannot itself be truth, because truth depends upon a prior identity between judgement and intuition. In Cartesian Meditations, Husserl says of truth-telling that “the grounding is an agreement of the judgement with the judged state of affairs…itself.”[2] In other words, true judgements depend on evidences; a judgement cannot be called “true” unless it links up with a correlative state-of-affairs as a referent. Logical concepts must be grounded/evidenced in actualities The mistake of the Lotzean position is that it assumes that logical concepts are grounded within themselves, without need of evidence. Husserl disagrees: logical concepts are not actualities; rather, they emerge from actualities. The predication “the sky is blue” isn’t true within itself, as a mere sentence on a page. Rather, the predication is true because the terms “sky” and “blue” correlate to meaningful intentional content, content that arises prior to explicit, thematized predication. This distinction is far from trivial, for it breaks ties with the analytic tradition’s tendency to “forget” truth’s groundedness in actuality, in real being. Daniel Dahlstrom calls this tendency an “ontological naiveté.”[3] If the structure of truth (agreement between judgement with the judged state of affairs) arises prior to affirmation, it is unjustified to equate truth with affirmation itself; to do “forgets” the real beings that ultimately grounds truth. Truth cannot be a presence Although Heidegger agrees with Husserl that truth arises prior to predication, he thinks that Husserl fails to fully detach pre-predicative truth from the “ontologically naive” logical prejudice. Heidegger calls Husserl’s view “traditional,” that is, ultimately rooted in a justification of the intelligibility of things through assertions. Because Husserl persistently refers to truth as a form of description, assertion, judgement or interpretation, Heidegger accuses Husserl of equating truth with a sort of presence. This is problematic for Heidegger, because a phenomenology of truth requires that we discover not some specific sort of presence called “truth,” but rather the emergence of “what is given” and “what is meant” from absence to its presence, an emergence or “unconcealment” that we call truth. Truth must be pre-intuitive, but still normative Heidegger’s project is thus to complete the work that Husserl started, articulating a phenomenology of truth that is not just pre-predicative, but altogether pre-intuitive. His challenge, however, is to account for this “most original” truth without doing violence to truth’s normative sense, its conditions of success and failure. If Heideggerian truth-telling cannot fail (that is, if falsity is impossible), then the account proves insufficient. How, then, does Heidegger ground normativity in pre-intuitive being? Truth must be a way of “taking” things The answer to this question lies in Heidegger’s turn from the transcendental subject to being-in-the-world. Dahlstrom calls this turn a shift in truth’s “center of gravity,”[4] a re-configuring of Husserlian intentionality as something emerging not from theoretical justification, but rather from the way we “take” things. Before we are able to examine this shift in any detail, it is necessary to establish Husserl’s account of pre-predicative truth. HUSSERL’S ACCOUNT Normativity is given over in perception itself Husserl grounds normativity in perception itself, since perception is the original context in which we “get things right” (or wrong). To Husserl, predicative truth is rooted in prior intentional content given in perception. But the relationship is not merely causal, as if our judgements necessarily and immediately follow from the way we perceive things. From the first-person perspective, justifying truth claims is inseparable from the practice of “getting things right.”[5] To tell the truth is thus not merely to refer to or indicate something, but to do so successfully. This is because judgements do not merely indicate what is given, but also express what is meant. Perception is thus both receptive (given over by objects) and yet expressed in a determinate way that can either succeed or fail. The latter component is what we call the “normative” in perception. The normative is within the “as-structure” of meaningful perception What is the normative in perception? Heidegger locates it within the “as-structure” of rational perception, the manner in which rational beings can take things as things. This is in contrast with non-rational beings, which can only take things as “that-which” dis-inhibits some appetite or drive. In Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, Heidegger uses the example of a blade of grass. To a beetle, the grass is not conceivable “as” grass, that is, as a thing. It can only be taken as a “beetle-path,” or “that-which dis-inhibits the appetite to move towards food.” To the rational, linguistic subject, however, the blade of grass can be given over meaningfully, intentionally, as a thing itself. The “as-structure” gives over presences as entailing absences What do we mean by taking something as a “thing itself?” Stephen Crowell points to entailment, the way that temporally-structured perceiving gives things as both present and yet entailing the absent as belonging to the present. When we see the front side of a chair, the un-seen back side is given as belonging to the front, the back is “entailed by the front.” This entailment is not inferred through explicit reasoning, but rather immediately perceived. Alva Noë puts it nicely as a “perceptual sense” rather than a “thinking that.”[6] Entailment is evidence of the norm of interpretation/fulfillment Importantly, entailment is not itself the normative in the perception; it is merely evidence of it. But it points to a norm of interpretation, the immediate manner in which rational beings move from receptive sensation to active interpretation or “taking-as.” Crowell terms this the norm of “completion” or “adequation” of things;[7] Husserl calls it the “fulfillment of the intention.”[8] This language clarifies that it is things themselves that are intelligible and determined; we do not determine things. However, their intelligibility is unknown, incomplete, un-articulated. To perceive something is to receive one aspect of a larger whole, to take in a sliver that gives us enough determination to determine what is supposed to be “there” as a thing. This is achieved by what Crowell terms the “referential, symbolizing function” of perception[9]. This function is similar to that of a symbol, for it indicates a range of possible determinations through suggestion of similarity and contiguity. When we perceive the front of a cup, it immediately seems similar to other cups. Only when so taken “as a cup” does the front side of the cup imply a typical or “contiguous” back side and inside. Fulfillment is inherent to perception because objects, not the subject, are “what-is-fulfilled” Our concern is that this apparent norm of “fulfillment” might not actually be inherent to perception, but merely accidentally related to it. Husserl addresses this issue with his notion of indeterminacy, a term that Heidegger also adopts. To Husserl, indeterminacy means “incompleteness,” not a lack of determination. The perceiver does not determine objects, but merely articulates, presents, and knows them. Intelligible, determinate properties are indeed “in” objects, not “in” the intentional subject. Determinacy or knowledge is thus the intentional completion of the indeterminacy presented in object. This is why Husserl uses the language of “filled” intentions: the present object entails the absent object, and this entailment “fills” the indeterminate. Objects uphold standards of fulfillment Husserl’s account thus maintains an important tension: truth is neither “objective” nor “subjective” in the simplistic sense, but rather is co-constituted by both subject and object. The present object “mediates” the absent object, upholding a “standard for determining what is indirectly presented[10].” Only an intentional subject can fulfill intentions It is important to note that this determination can only be accomplished by an intentional subject who can receive entailments. Non-linguistic animals would not be able to receive entailments, since such creatures cannot “take” the absent as belonging to a present experience. Thus it is not raw sense-data that equips the subject for the norm of fulfillment, but rather an intentional structure capable of taking things as things. But how does this structure emerge, since “nothing predestines the sensations for such a role?”[11] Perception is predestined for intentional fulfillment because being is fundamentally intelligible Kinesthesia is evidence of the intelligibility of being The answer found in Husserl’s later work is his so-called “genetic phenomenology,” which grounds the intelligibility or “primordial lawfulness”[12] of being in the structure of perception itself. The argument has two prongs: first, Husserl argues that intentionality is present even on the level of sensation. Second, he argues that perception is structured both intentionally and yet non-conceptually in a temporal unfolding of intention and fulfillment.[13] This unfolding is law-like and can be described as typical or atypical. Dahlstrom uses the example of kinesthesia to describe the lawfulness of “raw” perception. Kinesthesia takes our physical body parts and “makes them the body,” the sensing thing. Even the very notion of “body” is meaningless without the time-constituted organization of our sensory fields. As an example, the notion of “my eye” is tied to the kinesthetic link between a sense field and my eye as a physical object. This link emerges in my perceiving law-like relations between the two (such as “when I turn my eye to the left, the sense-field moves to the right”). It is a passive or “informative” perception, but it requires intentionality. Normativity emerges when this intelligibility is given over “as” entailing lawfulness (rules?) Normativity emerges when these passive perceptions give rise to expectations or entailments. Returning to our earlier example, suppose that our eye has had many years of practice looking at objects. Countless law-like perceptions have given rise to norms of expectation and entailment. If I were to turn my eye to the left, I expect the image before me to move to the right. If this don’t occur, there would be a breakdown in the lawful connection expected between object and perception. But this breakdown isn’t merely “atypical” but truly “abnormal” in the strongest sense. It’s not that the image merely isn’t moving typically, it’s that the image ought to move. This is how perception itself gives rise to norms of acting. Perception of objective phenomena are normative not just as a typical “is” but as an “ought” Perception of this “ought” is a skill or “know-how” To better illustrate the difference between passive, informative perceptions and intentional, object-constituting perceptions, Dahlstrom draws a distinction between “kinesthetic” and “presenting” sensations.[14] Kinesthetic sensations are always taken as “normal” or “abnormal” not in the sense of an ought but rather an is: the sensory input can be meaningfully described as typical or atypical. ”Presenting” sensations reveal things and are normative in the true sense of an ought: “If the eye turns in this way, then so does the ‘image.’”[15] This is because presenting sensations are motivated by and dependent on kinesthetic sensations in a conditional way, not merely a correlative one. It isn’t “If the eye turns in this way, the image usually turns as well.” Presenting sensations smack of necessity and yet arise out of our “sensorimotor knowledge,” a knowledge of the dependent, motivated correlation between the fulfillment of intention and “knowing how to look.”[16] This is distinct from an explicit or thematic predication, and occurs altogether prior to predications about objects. THE NEED FOR HEIDEGGER’S ACCOUNT If beings are most fundamentally disclosed through skills/coping, then disclosure cannot be equated with an assertion (?) Here we come to the formal beginning of Heidegger’s account of the “most originary sense of truth.” If meaning and entailment arise not out of a thematic predication but rather a “know-how,” then the truth of things in turn must likewise arise not in the structure of an assertion, but rather in the disclosure of things. Put another way, the intentional subject first “gets things right” when the subject deals or copes with things successfully, not when the subject thematically deems an action “suitable.” For example, I first “get chairs right” when I find a thing to sit on, not when I explicitly deem some object “suitable for sitting.” Dreyfus notes that thematization only occurs when this “mindless coping” is obtruded or “hits a snag”[17]. I don’t explicitly consider whether a chair is good for sitting until I find my current chair uncomfortable, or until I must choose between two chairs. In short, predication presupposes a “know-how” or skill that arises—prior to thematization—through the disclosure of beings. If truth is not a mere presence, then its ground cannot be found by mere “philosophy of consciousness” Heidegger’s conclusion is that, given this shift in truth’s center of gravity, Husserl’s “philosophy of consciousness” is no longer an adequate approach to the discover of original truth. Because truth arrives through disclosure (in which objects emerge from absence to presence), it cannot be reduced to a mere presence, even a pre-predicative, intentional presence. Rather, truth must be grounded in the interplay of absence and presence prior even to intentionality. It is the truth of disclosure constituted in Being-in-the-world. Thus, Husserl’s philosophy of consciousness is replaced with Heidegger’s fundamental ontology, through which he investigates the most original meaning of Being. This lens of fundamental ontology produces Heidegger’s famous exposition of truth as “unconcealment” in Being and Time. HEIDEGGER’S ACCOUNT PROPER Heidegger tries to locate truth prior to predication and intention through fundamental ontology In Paragraph 44 of Being and Time, Heidegger sets the stage for his radically “originary” view of truth, saying, “From time immemorial, philosophy has associated truth and Being.”[18] This is a fitting introduction to Heidegger’s entire project with regard to truth. Heidegger is trying to locate a sufficient account of truth on the order of Being that is prior to the formulation of predications, and indeed prior to any intention. He sets out to achieve this task in a three-fold analysis: first, the “laying-bare” of the ontological foundations of the “traditional” view of truth; second, the articulation of the primordial phenomenon of truth and the subsequently derivative character of the “traditional” view; third, the clarification of the “kind of Being” enjoyed by this primordial truth. Uncovering (not correspondence or judgement) serves as an adequate starting point for truth Heidegger’s deconstruction of the “traditional” concept of truth begins with the distillation of two essential features. The first feature is correspondence, or truth’s status as a predicate of successful adequation between assertions and entities “just as they are in themselves.” The second is judgement, that is, the mediate activity necessarily involved in the formulation of an assertion from a given situation. Heidegger holds that neither correspondence nor judgement forms an adequate starting point for a primordial foundation of truth. Instead, he proposes “uncovering” as the foundation of truth. When an assertion is predicated as true in the traditional sense, Heidegger charges that the “being-true” of said assertion is its pointing out an entity in its “uncovered-ness,” its originary showing of itself. This is a distinct phenomenon from any sort of correspondence and prior to any “assertive” predication on the part of the intellect. Unconcealment not a thing, but the disclosedness of being-in-the-world The originary phenomenon of propositional truth thus located, Heidegger moves to his articulation of the primordial phenomenon of truth itself. To this end, he traces the etymology of the Greek aletheia: “unconcealment.” Unconcealment is not merely that-which-is-unconcealed, that is, some factical entity. Rather, it is made possible specifically through Dasein’s being-in-the-world; it is Dasein as being-uncovering. Indeed, unconcealment is the very ontological condition revealed in Dasein’s having-a-world. Put differently, truth is the “disclosedness” of Dasein; it is “the ontological condition for that possibility that assertions can be either true or false—that they may uncover or cover things up.”[19] This sense of truth, as Heidegger notes in The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, “has nothing to do with the business of proving propositions at the writing desk.”[20] The primordial phenomenon of truth shows up entirely prior to the formulation of assertions. Simultaneously, this phenomenon grounds the ontic phenomena of being-uncovering and being-covering, which in turn precondition the respective truth or falsity of assertions. Truth is equiprimordial with Dasein The final step of Heidegger’s treatment of truth in Being and Time clarifies the sort of Being enjoyed by truth-as-unconcealment. In short, Heidegger claims that the Being of truth is relative to and equiprimordial with the Being of Dasein. There can be no truth apart from Dasein. Importantly, however, truth is said to manifest prior to any predication made by Dasein. Insofar as Dasein “is,” truth likewise “is.” This is because Dasein’s Being is a Being-in-the-world, a world which discloses. The disclosedness of Dasein is truth itself in Heidegger’s view. In this chapter, we have traced Heidegger’s reorientation of Husserl’s phenomenology of truth. We began with Husserl’s project of overcoming the Lotzean “logical prejudice,” which equates truth with logical affirmedness. Husserl’s solution was to ground truth in actuality, which occurs prior to predication. While Heidegger likewise opposed the Lotzean view, he felt that Husserl’s solution was not sufficiently radical. In order to completely overthrow the logical prejudice, Heidegger held that truth must be not only pre-predicative, but pre-intuitive. To better understand this position, we laid out Husserl’s argument for grounding the normative in perception. We concluded that truth was grounded ultimately in a “knowing-how,” not a “knowing-what.” Care and the Truth of Being-in-the-World Heidegger argues that truth’s ultimate grounding lies not in some presence, but rather in being-in-the world. Being-in-the-world, co-constituted between objects and normative skills (the ability to “take-as”), is the horizon of disclosure that Dahlstrom calls the “existential sense” of truth. Dahlstrom traces this view all the way back to Aristotle, who distinguishes the truth of simple entities not as a matter of correctness, but one of being or non-being. To “have” the truth of a simple entity is the “have” the entity itself, just as it is. To “not have” the truth of a simple entity is to “not have” the entity, to tarry on without it. In this existential context, truth is not merely “a being ascertained” but also “a being used” (and thereby “identified, indexed and articulated”)[21]. Truth is thus “had” in an essential relation to time, the horizon of truth’s disclosure in its most originary sense. In transforming Husserlian “philosophy of consciousness,” Heidegger replaces “intentionality” with “being-here” as the ground-level realm of metaphysical analysis. He does so to double down against the Lotzean “logical prejudice” that reduces truth to a mere presence-at-hand. Husserl’s “intentionality” fights the logical prejudice by positioning truth prior to predication; Heidegger’s “Dasein” moves one step further, positioning truth prior to predication and intuition. To Heidegger, truth isn’t some “thing” that is correct or incorrect; rather, is is a “way of taking” that either discloses the thing or fails to do so, all within an essential relatedness to time. In order to understand the existential sense of truth, we must understand the existential structure of Dasein disclosed by “care.” Dahlstrom articulates this existential structure as a “three-fold unity of world,” constituted by the work-world, the shared world, and the very care which beings take as themselves. From this structure, Dahlstrom reasons that truth, both in thematic and pre-thematic senses, is a presencing of the “worldliness of the world.” He thus adds fourth element to the unity of the world of care: the establishment of authentic care, or that care which presences the worldliness of the world. This sense of presencing is encountered “in the logos of conscience, in silently but resolutely hearing one’s conscience,”[22] a call which relates oneself to the originary phenomenon of future being. This yields a fifth element of the world of care: the original timeliness of authentic Dasein, the manner in which Dasein relates to its future by way of listening to conscience. Dahlstrom calls attention to Heidegger’s differentiation between existentials and categories as key to understanding his view of truth, especially as distinct from Aquinas (who though being to be a transcendental). An existential is the manner of being proper to human existence of being-here, whereas a category is the manner of being proper to non-human ontology. Heidegger’s sensitivity to the originary relatedness of truth to being-here does not mean that truth cannot be thematized into propositions and discourse. It does mean that thematization must be grounded in the existential unity of care. Dahlstrom calls this grounding the “paradox of thematization,” which arises in three separate contexts: the scientific, epistemic and theoretical. In the scientific context, the paradox in one of insufficient grounding: science asserts as binding what is merely an interpretation of pre theoretical experience. In the epistemic context, it seems clear that genuine knowing cannot be thematic because a given knowledge presupposes already being-in-the-world in a pre-thematic manner. Moreover, this cannot be avoided with the Husserlian move to intentionality, because doing so yields an “artificial and ultimately intractable divide between knowing and being.”[23] Furthermore, the process of justification in epistemic contexts is indeed a nonepistemic procedure, one intimately related to primary “ways of being—“ that is, norms of skillful (or “knowledgable”) handling of situations. We justify knowledge by way of practical engagement, not by propositional assertion. The final context of the “paradox of thematization” is that of theory, namely the “forgetful” quality of theoretical talk about things, a tendency to obscure the originary phenomenon of things by the use of deductive, mathematical language. Note that this strategy characterizes the fundamental error in Descartes’ method, which Heidegger calls “objectivity of the grasp of nature by way of calculation and measurement.”[24] Grasping the worldliness of the world is different than grasping a theoretical nature, an idea central to understand Heidegger’s alternative strategy. How, then, do we address this threefold paradox? How do we link thematization to the existential unity of being-here? Heidegger’s answer is found in his account of formal indication. Formal indication is the articulation of something in the very way that one originally “has” it, that is, the way we encounter something in a pre-thematic, pre-intuitive encounter. This articulation is achieved through philosophy; indeed, such articulation is the primary task of authentic philosophizing. One must first understand, then retrieve and articulate the precise meaning of being-here in a relationship with the given entity; only then can a formal indication emerge that avoids the pitfalls of traditional thematizing strategies. The formal indication “signals” the originary phenomena, “pointing out” not a fact but a manner of being, a “reenacting of what ‘to be’ means.”[25] The functions of formal indication are two-fold: Dahlstrom identifies them as the “referential-constraining” and “reversing-transformational” functions. The “referential-constraining” function utilizes the “formal” quality of formal indication to properly constrain a certain “taking” of something within the “as-structure.” The fact that the formal indication “constrains” one’s relationship with a thing calls upon one to take something “as” some particular sense of the thing. The “reversing-transformational” sense, on the other hand, directs concretely the meaning of someone’s authentic existence. Though emerging from concrete situations, such indications can transform one’s deep-seated commitments in a fundamental philosophical disruption. All of this presupposes, however, the taking up of a philosophical viewpoint, the “reversal” of one’s mode worldly consideration that clears the way for the subsequent “transformation.” Dahlstrom then moves to articulate the distinct yet unified structure of being-here as being-in-the-world, articulated in three aspects (the work-world, being-with-others, and being oneself). The work-world is the existential of “care” (besorgen), a sort of concernedness arising from always already being involved with things. The world of concern is a network, the implements of which always “point out” the whole, the surroundings, the environment relevant to the immediate concern.[26] This environment is often forgotten, since it doesn’t “stick out” or obtrude in our daily familiarity with situations. It is in defection or obtrusion from familiarity that the work-world’s referential context “shows up” as the work-world itself, not merely as accessible or handy (that is, founded on a context of concern). Heidegger discusses this “showing up” or “presence” in several different senses, which are not distinct domains but “ways of showing up.” There is the inconspicuous presence of concernedness, the inconspicuous presence (Anwesenheit) of the available (“the handiness of what is handy”), and the related presence of a nature always on hand as either useful or obtrusive, threatening, etc. This inconspicuous presencing (Präzens) must be considered as distinct from on-handed presencing via theoretical perception or assertion. Dahlstrom notes a major unanswered question in Heidegger’s account: what, then, is the relationship between articulated, theoretical presencing and pre-theoretical presencing? His closest answer is that such theorizing is “concern founded on a world of concern” (264). “He does not move that handiness is a more original mode of being than on-handedness” (265). “The plants of the botanist are not the flowers in the rain” (SZ 70, 211). Thus, Dahlstrom adds a third macro-category of presencing: the presence of the always on-hand nature from theoretical perspective. The fundamental bias of the logical prejudice is to ground truth in this category of presence, ignoring the first two (and a half) modes of concern with the world. Dahlstrom notes another unanswered question: why does theory arise from practice, and how is this a possible movement (267)? “The access to the underlying presence of the work-world is not some fixed stare of intuition, but instead a matter of understanding, that is, ‘know-how’ or, better, ‘knowing one’s way around’ in a given referential context” (267). Meaningfulness is thus a context of references, not just words or statements. This encounter with meaning grounds the world of concern. The corresponding on-handed theory of a context of references is a “founded” presence, but not the “original” means of concerned encounter. A question arises: what is the referential whole “about?” What closes the cycle? Heidegger’s answer: being-oneself. “What we are in ourselves is our handiness” (270). Kant attempts to categorize this human manner of being, but thus objectifies it, reduces it to the being of entities. Distinctly human being, being-in-the-world, demands what Dahlstrom calls the “meta-categorial distinction:” that human beings exist “as purposes in themselves” (271, many sub-references). SZ 167, 301 is a puzzling explication of the ethical fallout (272, check this out). Nonetheless, being-with-others is a distinct mode of being, in which other being are also-here but never in the “identical” world. They are “also being-here with me.” German words are important: Mitsein, one’s own being-here; Mitdasein, the way others are to us; Miteinandersein, the togetherness of those two modes of being-here. The absence of others shows the fundamentality of our being-with-others and the possibility of authentically being-so (273). What is at stake is still being-oneself, but in a concerned way that either liberates (authentic) or dominates (ingenuine) in relation to the other’s being-here. Everyday being-with-others is the “they-self” or “the crowd.” It is not something handy, but a way of being-here in fallenness. It prefigures the world and being-in-the-world by identifying the aims of the crowd with one’s network of concern (277, see Haugeland). It maintains and identifies one’s “coming-of-age” in a network of public responsibility; but the tendency to lapse into this mode of being involves a corresponding “flight from oneself.” Dahlstrom draws considerable insight into the “ambivalence” of this fallenness, as a sort of consequential state akin to original sin, not some discrete mistake or failure. Solicitude is authentic care for the other not in the way one cares for the work-world (Besorge). It is overturning the they-self and being-with-one-another, “caring with one another for the same world” (L 224). Dahlstrom notes a glaring omission: lack of a philosophical, ontic anthropology as rooting these ontological structures. A more humble reading is required if these questions retain their force. Heidegger’s answer is to tie authenticity to truth. Inauthentic being, the they-self, does not allow the truth of being-here to come into question in the first place. It neglect the essential diversity in manners of being, obscuring and forgetting the human mode of being and relegating it to the status of object, something handy. Formal indication returns as the means of “pointing-out” and reversing the self-evident truths forgotten in everydayness. Dahlstrom concludes that Heidegger’s account of being-with-others is “intimately linked to his method of construing philosophical concepts as formal indications” (282, check back for key quotes). The opposite of this authentic being-with-others is “palaver” or idle talk; it is the “vernacular of the work-world” (283). Plato sought to overcome palaver (sophistry) through dialectic. Palaver is necessarily public, occurring through being-in-the-world’s self-articulation, but in a manner that does not demand that the subject of articulation be handy or on hand. Thus, the articulation may not be understood in its original sense, but rather in a “washed-out” one. This is the way that falsity presents itself in Heidegger’s account of truth. Something reminds “hidden” or “closed-off” about a thing because it is articulated through palaver. Palaver corrupts talk by stripping talk of its grounding in original modes of access. “Truth becomes a question of public opinion” (285). Genuine talk is possible via two modes. The first is communication, of genuine concern for other within the context of the work-world. The second is the call of conscience, investigated later in greater detail. Heidegger connects care to the most original phenomenon of truth. Care, thus understood, is not some particular worry or mood, but the “ever-anxious companion,” as Goethe puts it (288, see reference). It is the formal indication of a manner of being “in which what is at stake is the respective manner of being itself” (288). It is Husserl’s intentionality, but viewed “from the outside” (P 420; PRL 248). This care constitutes the holistic structure of human existence or Dasein. Dasein must be understood as a “here” or “home,” a “clearing,” but not is the spatial sense of naturalistic location. The “here” is the locus of disclosedness, the “illumination,” the clearing itself. The being-here “is its disclosedness” (291, see reference). To be-here is to disclose, not merely to be “on hand. The disclosedness of Dasein is the “most original phenomenon of truth.” This is not some judgment or assertion, but the “here” or “clearing” of being-here. It is the “timely site…of the coincidence of the manner in which something comes to present itself…” (292). Its fundamental existentials are threefold: disposedness, understanding and fallenness. Disposedness is the way in which Dasein finds itself thrown into the world, then discovers the holistic character of Dasein, then is open to the world. This is prior to any talk. Disposedness bears with it “the propensity to self-evasion” (293). Befindlichkeit must be translated with a caveat to its existential character, as a way “in which being-here is constituted and discloses” (295). We are disposed to things; to laugh, to cry, to jealousy. Any living entity (organism?) is disposed, but non-organic entities are not disposed; they are simply on hand. The “here” of Dasein is not a graspable theme, but is disclosed unthematically. It is discloses only as a manner of being. However, it is neither “automatic or explicit” (299), requiring the disposition of anxiety to bring it back to itself, thus disclosing authentically. One’s disposition must therefore be suitable, properly based for our encounters with the world. The second existential of care is understanding, or the manner of “being-possible which is handed over to itself” (SZ 143). “To be-here is precisely to project oneself as one’s own potential-to-be” (302). Understanding is thus the way by which the disclosure-by-projection occurs as a possibility. To grasp these possibilities is to thematize them, to “pull them down” (SZ 145); on their own they are not concrete plans but original, pre-thematic possibilities. Understanding is more akin to “know-how” in the most fundamental, normative sense. Because understanding preconceives what is understood, this being-ahead-of-oneself involved in projection is an interpretive understanding. This is not pragmatism, insists Dahlstrom, because is understood is not properly a what; rather, it is being-as-existing (305). Understanding as an existential is thus not a practice, nor does is “make an ontic difference” (306). The third existential is fallenness, already covered in part with the discussion of palaver. Of note: authentic discourse is possible even for fallen Dasein, but it can never eliminate fallenness in total of Dasein. Palaver is necessary for us, and it necessarily points to the “urge and propensity” or “Drang und Hang” for Dasein to flee from itself. Urge is the compulsion to satisfy care only with respect to the particular compulsion; it is a care that obscures its fullness and is not free. Propensity is the deposition to cling to the world, akin to a sort of fixation for “destiny.” Luckily, we can learn to “fall” in a way that utilizes urge and propensity as modes of authentic being, akin to “athletes, tumbler and dancers” (311) or “the Kierkegaardian leap.” Fallenness has nothing to do with morality, according to Heidegger. We have the possibility of two kinds of anxiety: anxiety about and for our potential-to-be. The former grounds inauthentic being, the worries of “the crowd.” The latter ground authentic or genuine being, truth. “To be-here is to disclose in a way that is structured by care, projecting one’s possibilities of being-in-the-world while never escaping one’s thrownness and lapse into the world” (313). Note that truth, understood through this structure of care, is the “site of” true assertions, not the most original truth. The logos of care is not an assertion, but a “call of conscience” (Gewissen). It is a mode of talking or discourse (Rede). Conscience calls Dasein out of listening to the crowd into ownmost possibility. It discloses the uncanniness or eeriness of existence (check German), of being-in-the-world. It find itself not at home in the world. Conscience confirm that what is ultimately at stake is being-oneself (318). The content of the call of conscience is guilt, Dasein’s own not-being-the-ground for its own existence. It owes a debt, it is the reason for an ultimate nullity. Being-here is thus not just being thrown and projecting, but also lapsing, falling into the guilt or not-being at the very heart of Dasein. Resoluteness concerns Dasein with its ultimate and ownmost potential-to-be. It can only disclose itself to factual possibilities (321). This anticipating resoluteness of not of something on hand; but rather the truth of existence, authentic being-here. This authenticity assures Dasein of an utter certainty of resolute being-here, maintaining a freedom to be-true. (323). Conscience summons Dasein to the truth with a “cold certainty.” Dahlstrom then moves to a discussion of time as the sense of being-here. He identifies five aspects of genuine timeliness: the integrated character of its modes, the primacy of the future, the finitude (genuine future is anticipating death), the ecstases and horizon (the ways in which being-here is “outside” oneself, and that onto which said ecstases is projected). Genuine timeliness is to allow our ownmost possibility to coming to us, to not run from death. This anticipation of death is discloses in the original phenomenon of the future: “coming-to-oneself” (328). It takes over ourselves, but exactly as we already are: als ich bin-gewesen in Heidegger’s own terms. It is the way in which being here is “always-already” or “foregone” (329). Thus, Heidegger terms authentic being-towards-death as a “retrieval” or “repetition.” Dahlstrom connects this to disposition, that is, the way the ways that we disclose how we already are (330). Heidegger specifically adds that this disposition is made possible by timeliness, not deduced from it. The “original and genuine future” is an allowing of the possible to come to it (332). It is a way of decisively “attending to things” (334) by projecting towards them. Dahlstrom pays particular attention to the spatial-ecstatic language used by Heidegger to characterize Husserl’s view of transcendence. Heidegger used spatial terms to describe Husserlian intentionality, demonstrating the metaphorical “here” as a way of unfolding in time. “It ‘is here’ with the outside-itself of the ecstases. If no being-here exists, no world is also ‘here’” (335, SZ 365). Dahlstrom thus labels timeliness “the transcendental truth,” since it is only in timeliness that the structure of care is constituted (336). Dahlstrom focuses on a particular German word, Gegenwärtigen, as a “rendering present.” This “presenting” constitutes the modes of both neutral and inauthentic senses of the present. Inauthentic presenting is “oblivious to the situation…springing…from expectations that hold thing together in the abiding wherewithal of a world of concern” (348, see SZ 326f, 338, 410). Dahlstrom calls such inauthentic timeliness the “horizon” of inauthentic care, existence that has fallen away from its situation. Dahlstrom raises a crucial question demanding further input: “Is theory, like curiosity, a lapsed or fallen way of presenting things, of disclosing their manners of being” (351)? Dahlstrom ventures a guess, supposing a distinction between science’s potentially “excellent way of presenting” (SZ 363) and its tendency to fixate within the realm of on-handedness (353). To melt philosophy into science is to strip philosophy of its own emergence from finite being-here. He then moves to give an account of the origins of theory. He begins with a “looking-around,” which interprets things prior to predication. From this “overview” comes a dual sense of “presenting” theoretically: first, within and “overview of the complex;” second, informing a way of “thinking over” the situation (355). Dahlstrom uses the example of “there is too much sand in the soil.” In the first sense, the particular situation is the emergent concern; a set of expectations and retentions pertinent to this soil and this situation. The second sense views the soil as itself the object of concern, yielding measurement of the sand content and assertions of which type of soil is best for which crops. It does not immediately answer the question of whether this soil is too sandy for this situation. Note that Heidegger allows for both senses to be “objectifying” the situation without doing harm to the connectedness to the original situation. These thematizations are themselves ecstases; they are not things themselves. Clocks express objective time “publicly,” whereas subjective time is time’s manner of appearing to beings in the world. It is di-mensional in its presence, constantly on-hand and able to be expressed in numbers. It is the “numerable, exposed, encompassing, and transitional character of a sequence of nows” (365, GP 362f). When people in situations look at the clock, they reckon with time within a context of worldly concern. Time is meaningful when deal with in such a way. Time discloses itself as “suitable:” four o’clock is a suitable break-time, et cetera. Some time is more or less intensive in its concern to us; time “tenses” or “stretches” (368). Thus the use of the term “tense” in our everyday vocabulary. The time of concern is “meaningful (worldly), datable, tensed (stretched), and public” (369, SZ 406-411, GP 369-374, see F 57-60). Time of concern can occupy a “porous” space between authentic and inauthentic timeliness. It “sets the stage” for both. Heidegger aims to show that our common conception of time depends on world-time and world-time in turn on ecstatic timeliness. Ecstatic-horizonal timeliness is constituted by expecting, retaining and thereby presenting things (370). This presenting is articulated as an ecstatic unity. This unity is a pre-thematic “caring,” our being-concerned with time as something meaningful, public, tensed and dated. The “now” is articulated, not as something on hand, but as an ambiguity in our manner of caring (375). Time is given over to us, and we thus reckon with it, giving time, measuring time, “orienting ourselves” to time (377). It is rooted in a futural timeliness, the way in which we spring from a “distended” obliviousness with regard to ourselves toward an authoring anticipation of our ownmost possibility. “Time is our becoming” (379), the manner in which we anticipate our death, retrieve its facticity and thus authentically comport ourselves towards it. World-time is simply the time that we measure publicly. This entire account of ecstatic-horizontal timeliness (outlined formally on 383-384) depends entirely on the lapsed character of this comportment towards our death, our fallenness. Just an idea!