Do the intimations of mortality in Heidegger’s thought evanesce once he has abandoned the project of fundamental ontology? Or does the object of his fundamental ontology—finite existence as the site of all understanding of Being—perdure even after the meta-ontological and frontal ontological turns? Does not the site of such understanding of Being, broaching as it does the questions of the truth and the clearing of Being, persist in bearing traces of finitude? That truth is always accompanied by untruth, and clearing by concealing and withdrawal—are these not also intimations of mortality in Heidegger’s work?
The following three chapters will try to trace these intimations in Heidegger’s interpretation of truth as alētheia and of the clearing of Being as revealing/concealing. They will do so by focusing on three quite specific themes: first, Heidegger’s early “discovery” of the question of truth and being in Brentano’s Aristotle; second, the burgeoning notion of “the clearing” in Being and Time and in the later work; and third, the question of the imputed “turning” from Man to Being in Heidegger’s career of thought.
Let me now address the first of these themes. One of the four senses attributed to “being” in Franz Brentano’s dissertation on Aristotle is on hōs alēthes, “being in the sense of the true.” Does Brentano’s account of “being in the sense of the true” have significant bearing on Heidegger’s response to alētheia as the unconcealment of beings in presence? This chapter tries to answer that question by offering (1) a general account of Brentano’s thesis, (2) a detailed résumé of its third chapter, concerning on hōs alēthes, (3) a condensed treatment of what John C. Caputo has called Heidegger’s “alethiological” notion of Being, and (4) a summary of results.
Of the four leading Aristotle scholars in nineteenth-century Germany three were intimately involved in the early history of phenomenology. In his Lectures on the History of Philosophy Hegel celebrated Aristotle as “more comprehensive and speculative than anyone” (19, 132–33). Hegel’s contemporary, the Prague philosopher Bernhard Bolzano (1781–1848), promoted serious study of Aristotle while developing the first rigorous critique of psychologism. While Friedrich Adolf Trendelenburg (1802–72) bitterly criticized the Hegelians and in general had little to do with the origins of phenomenology, one of his most gifted students of Aristotle ably compensated. Franz Brentano (1838–1917) dedicated his doctoral dissertation On the Manifold Meaning of Being according to Aristotle (1862) to Trendelenburg before becoming the single most important influence on Carl Stumpf (1848–1936), Alexius Meinong (1853–1920), and Edmund Husserl (1859–1938). If we therefore find Husserl’s young assistant at the University of Freiburg teaching courses from 1919 to 1923 that seem a curious compound of phenomenology and Aristotle, the historical precedents—Hegel, Bolzano, and Brentano—make the mélange perhaps a bit less exotic.
Heidegger lectured during the winter semester of 1919–20 on “Selected Problems of Recent Phenomenology” and that summer conducted a seminar for beginning students on Aristotle’s De anima. His seminar for the following winter semester consisted of “phenomenological exercises” while for the advanced students he read “phenomenological interpretations” of Aristotle’s Physics. In the summer semester of 1922 he lectured on “Phenomenological Interpretations of Selected Aristotelian Treatises on Ontology and Logic,” leading a seminar for younger students on the Nicomachean Ethics. For the winter and summer semesters preceding his departure for Marburg Heidegger conducted phenomenological exercises based on two texts: Husserl’s Ideas I and Aristotle’s Physics IV and V. Although a number of topics involved Augustine, Descartes, Kant, and others, the interlacing of the titles “Aristotle” and “phenomenology” remains striking.1
During his last year of gymnasial studies at Constance in 1907 Heidegger had received from his rector and fellow Messkirchner, Conrad Gröber, a copy of Brentano’s dissertation on “being” in Aristotle. It seems a strange gift for a rector to have presented to a young man who was on his way to the Jesuit seminary in Freiburg. Brentano had renounced the priesthood in 1873 as a result of struggles surrounding papal infallibility and the anti-Modernist attitude of the Roman hierarchy, left the Church altogether in 1879, gained a wife and simultaneously lost a Vienna professorship in 1880. A strange gift also because of its abstruse subject-matter, although the young Heidegger had shown a penchant for taking long walks in the company of difficult books. The peripatos with Brentano and Aristotle proved to be one of the longest for Heidegger. In 1963 he called Brentano’s book “the chief help and guide of my first awkward attempts to penetrate into philosophy.” He continued (ZSdD, 81):
The following question concerned me in quite a vague manner: If being is predicated with manifold significance, then what is its leading, fundamental signification? What does Being mean?
Such were the beginnings of the “question of Being.”
Beginnings are more consequential than they at first seem, Brentano warns at the outset of his own inquiry, for they determine all that follows.2 “And so it happens that whoever in the beginning brushes aside even a bit of the truth is led farther and farther along a path through errors a thousand times as large.” Thus Brentano paraphrases Aristotle (De coelo I, 5, 271b 8), taking as the starting-point of his own researches the various meanings of “being,” das Seiende, to on, in first philosophy. Yet the sundry meanings of being are not solely Brentano’s starting-point but Aristotle’s as well. Brentano argues that “first philosophy must take its departure precisely from this establishment of the meaning of the name ‘being’,” inasmuch as it constitutes “the threshold of Aristotelian metaphysics.”
The motto of Brentano’s dissertation, to on legetai pollachōs, appears at Metaphysics Zeta 1, 1028a 10, but may also be found in slightly altered form at Epsilon 2, 1026a 33 and Gamma 2, 1003a 33. “There are many senses in which a thing may be said to ‘be,’” Ross translates. Aristotle offers a list of such senses at each designated place, each list differing somewhat from the others. In Gamma 2 he elaborates the following meanings of “being”: (a) substances, ousiai; (b) affections of substance; (c) way toward substance; (d) destructions or privations or qualities of substance; (e) that which is productive or generative of substance; (f) things related to substance, and (g) negation of such things and of substance as well. Here Aristotle adds the thought-provoking remark that according to the last sense we can say—in spite of Parmenides’ stricture but in support of Plato’s Eleatic Stranger—that nonbeing is nonbeing. Brentano does not pause to comment on this last remark before reducing all these meanings to four: (1) being that has no existence outside the intellect—the being of privations and negations of substance; (2) being of movement, generation and corruption—“For these are indeed outside the mind but have no finished and complete existence,” Brentano adds, referring to Physics III, 1, 201a 9 on the various senses of “movement” (which prove to be as manifold as the senses of “being”!); (3) being that has a finished but dependent existence—such as affections and qualities of substance; and (4) the being of substances.
We notice that Brentano’s reduction of the Gamma 2 list proceeds on the basis of the Leibnizo-Wolffian categories, themselves rooted in medieval Christian ontology, of dependent and independent existences inside or outside the mind. Such a reduction seems quite natural on the basis of a systematic Thomistic-Aristotelian philosophy that is so tightly constructed that no opening for genuine inquiry can appear. Brentano assures us that all the other lists can be reduced in the same fashion, so that it is ultimately a matter of indifference which enumeration of the meanings of being he selects.3
As the basis for the structure of his book Brentano chooses the list at Epsilon 2, 1026a 33ff.4 The meanings of being there cited are: (a) being in the inessential sense, on kata symbebēkos, ens per accidens; (b) being in the sense of the true, on hōs alēthes, ens tanquam verum, as opposed to nonbeing as the false, mē on hōs þseudos; (c) being in various senses deriving from the schema of categories, such as the “what,” quality, quantity, place, time, etc.; and (d) being in potentiality and actuality, to dynamei kai energeiai on. Because Brentano wishes to stress the third of these meanings and because its treatment requires the most detailed elaboration, he reverses the places of (c) and (d), treating the problem of the categories last. Before taking up the meaning that most concerns us here, “being in the sense of the true,” I must add a word about Brentano’s treatment of the Kategorienlehre, which stands at the center of his own work.
Brentano elaborates the main thesis of his dissertation in its fifth chapter, on “being according to the schema of categories.” He calls this the most difficult and important of all the meanings. This one chapter alone constitutes two-thirds of the book; here the secondary sources (Zeller, Prantl, Bonitz, Brandis) are brought into play. Especially important is the Geschichte der Kategorienlehre (1846) by his “most honored teacher,” Adolf Trendelenburg. Brentano’s immediate purpose is to modify Trendelenburg’s view that the categories evolve from elements of grammar or parts of speech, by insisting that they are primarily significations of “real being.” As analogous significations of being the categories have their terminus in the first of their number, ousia or primary substance. “Being,” in the senses derived from the schema of the categories, is therefore not merely an “accidental” homonym; for all the other categories are directed “toward one and the same physis,” the one Being of ousia. And ousia is what is most real.
Brentano’s third chapter treats the question of “being in the sense of the true.” It begins by asserting that for Aristotle truth and falsity are found only in judgments, which may be affirmative or negative. Brentano cites among other sources De anima III, 8, 432a 11, “Truth or falsity is a binding of concepts in the intellect.” He adduces a passage from Metaphysics Gamma 8, 1012b 8, “Truth or falsity is nothing other than affirmation or negation.”
But, Brentano now observes, “however much Aristotle in these and other places makes judgment the sole bearer of truth and falsity, however much he denies things outside the intellect and concepts outside of combination all participation in truth and falsity, he still seems in other places to assert precisely the opposite” (23). In the “lexicon” of his Metaphysics, Delta 29, 1024b 17ff., Aristotle notes that pragmata or things “that do have being” can be called “false” when they appear otherwise than as they (truly) are, for example, in sketches or dreams. Brentano affirms that this passage, “at least as it is formulated,” contradicts those first cited. The issue is further complicated by Aristotle’s attribution of truth and falsity also to the senses and the imagination in De anima II, 3, 428a 11 and 428b 18ff. Later (430b 26) Aristotle ascribes alētheia to both the thought that thinks the “what” of a thing in accord with what that thing essentially is and to the vision that perceives what is proper to it (for example, colors). Finally, in Metaphysics Delta 29, 1024b 26, Aristotle ascribes truth and falsity to logoi in the sense of definitions, or as Brentano translates, Begriffe, “concepts.”
Brentano hopes to resolve the apparent contradiction—that truth and falsity reside only in judgment or predication but also in things, in imagination and the senses, in the mind (nous) and in definitions (logoi)—by distinguishing several senses of “true” and “false.” Not only “being” but also “truth” has manifold meaning. The second of the meanings of “being” hence reenacts the drama of the whole: it does not so much say what being means as show how being is, which is to say, as manifesting various senses.
One may speak of “true” and “false” with regard to the judging intellect, simple representations and definitions, things imagined, or the things themselves. This does not involve one and the same predication of truth but implies a kind of relation. It does not name in the same way but analogously. Truth and falsity are predicated “not kath’ hen, but perhaps pros hen kai mian physin (Met. Gamma 2, 1003a 33), not kata mian idean, but rather kat’ analogian (Nic. Eth. I, 4, 1096b 25).” At this point (25 n. 11) Brentano refers his readers to the problem of analogy in his fifth chapter, section 3, the very section where we find the thesis of Brentano’s work most clearly expressed. Brentano argues that “being” in the various senses derived from the schema of categories is a homonym, not of an accidental type, but unified by analogy—and not merely by the analogy of proportionality but by analogy with respect to the same terminus.5 Like the Good and the One, Being is something other than a genus that disperses into species upon the addition of a difference.6 The unity of analogy extends farther than that of genus, for it embraces even homonyms. Brentano argues that the unity of being with respect to the categories is stronger than that of proportionality. He reviews again at length the famous opening words of Metaphysics Gamma 2, 1003a 33ff.
We speak of being in many senses but always with a view to one [pros hen] and to one nature [mian physin]. Not simply in the way we use identical expressions [homonymōs] but in the way everything healthy is related to health, inasmuch as it preserves or restores health, or is a sign of health. . . . In precisely this way we speak of being in many senses, but always with a view to one source [pros mian archēn]. . . . And just as there is one science of the healthy, so it is in all such cases. For not only that which is expressed univocally [kath’ hen legomenōn] is to be studied by one science but also that which is expressed in relation to one nature [tōn pros mian legomenōn physin]. For the last-named too in a certain sense is expressed univocally.
. . . Obviously therefore it is proper for one science to study being insofar as it is being.
“Being” is not merely a homonym—a word whose sound accidentally suggests various things, like the “bear” who “bears” her cubs. Because it is not a synonym either it must be some curious third thing, to be pursued toward the terminus of primary substance.
However, what does all that have to do with “the true”? What is the terminus of truth? If it is spoken neither univocally nor simply homonymously, what is that archē and physis toward which it tends? Brentano’s third chapter (26ff.) takes up these questions.
Aristotle says7 that the true affirms where there is combination and negates where there is separation—in the things. “For him truth is accordance of knowledge with states of affairs.” Brentano therefore considers the kind of truth or knowledge to depend upon the kinds of substance (for example, simple noncomposite substance) and asserts the priority of the known in the relation between knowing and the known (referring to Metaphysics Iota 6, 1057a 9). Contrary to the fundamental direction of Idealism, so vigorously opposed by his teacher Trendelenburg,8 Brentano affirms that “our thought is dependent upon things” and that in order to be true it “must direct itself toward them” (29). He cites Categories 5, 4b 8: “It is because the matter [to pragma] is or is not that it may be said of speech [die Rede, ho logos] that it is true or false.” Nevertheless, Brentano concedes that while the goal of desire remains “outside” the goal of knowledge “is found in the mind [im Geiste, en dianoia] itself.” “But the mind knows the truth only when it judges” (30). Hence judgment or predication remains for Brentano that terminus to which all the analogous senses of “the true”—in aisthēsis, phantasia, or the pragmata themselves—tend. Just as health is predicated first of the body, and only by extension of diet and exercise, so is truth first ascribed to true judgments, and only by extension to those faculties or things judgment involves. There is a sense in which we may properly speak of false money or a false man, or of true coin and a true friend; but “the fundamental concept of truth remains always that of accordance of the cognizing mind with the thing cognized” (33).
Now, if the primary sense of “being” is ousia or substance, while that of “truth” is accordance of knowledge and thing, what does Aristotle mean by on hōs alēthes? Again citing Metaphysics Epsilon 4, 1027b 18, a passage whose clarity “leaves nothing to be desired,” Brentano argues that truth and falsity are found only in dianoia or “judgment.” Yet this answers only the “where?” question, not the “what?” question Brentano is asking. He now makes a somewhat daring attempt based on Metaphysics Theta 10, 1052a 5ff. He makes judgment—the affirmation or negation of a combination or separation in things—the subject (grammatical) of which being (das Seiende) is predicated. Of course, this cannot be merely the copulative “is” of normal predication; the kind of Being (das Sein) Brentano now means expresses the truth of the judgment as a whole. He offers an example.
Suppose someone wishes to prove to a friend that the sum of the angles of a triangle equals that of two right angles, and elicits from him agreement that the exterior angles of the intersecting line segments equal the opposite interior angles. The proof proceeds until a certain point in the demonstration is reached. The question then arises, “Is this, or is this not?” That means, “Is it true or is it false?”—“It is!” That is to say, it is true. This kind of Being is clearly of the highest importance—yet how can its “truth” be judged? The basic principles of all the sciences cannot be demonstrated. At the outset of the Posterior Analytics, 71a 11, Aristotle says that their “that they are” must be known beforehand.
Thus the meaning of “being in the sense of the true” appears to be decided. Truth of predication is grounded in the ultimately nondemonstrable Being of beings. Yet this decision soon falters.
Brentano now (36–37) introduces the curious cases where the being true of a judgment has no ontological (reele) implications, for example, in self-contradiction (“Every statement is false”) and in affirmations involving things purely imaginary (“Centaurs are fabulous creatures”). Another such curious case is the affirmation that nonbeing is. In order to account for these cases Brentano must concede that the copulative “is,” even when the subject of the sentence is a “real” concept, does not assure us of “the existent nature of being outside the mind” (38). Being in the sense of the true “has its ground in the operations of the human intellect, which combines and separates, affirms and negates, and not in the highest Realprincipien in terms of which metaphysics strives to know its on hē on” (39). It therefore has to do solely with logic, which has nothing to say about Being outside the mind. For logic “there is nothing left but the on hōs alēthes; and for this reason too, logic, as a merely formal science, is separated from the other parts of philosophy, which are devoted to the real.”9
At this point Brentano’s observations on “being in the sense of the true” come to an end. Yet something astonishing has happened here. As though in conformity to his reputation for being a dogged realist—a reputation based largely on his late work, however, much of it posthumously published—Brentano has been trying to demonstrate the analogical unity of both “being” and “the true.” His major effort has been to show how “the true” expresses the accordance of judgment and thing (dianoia and pragma) and how the mind has to direct itself toward things and to conform to them in order to judge truly. True judgment must rest in the manifest Being of the Sache: “It is true” can be abbreviated to the expression, “It is.” Such abbreviation actually directs judgment toward its ground. Thus on hōs alēthes would mean the substantiality of what is combined or separated in judgment. In other words, alētheia promises to reveal “being” in its supreme categorial determination. Yet in the end, because of arguments raised in traditional ontology and theory of knowledge (Epimenidean contradiction, dependent existence of things merely imagined in the mind, the problem of nonbeing), the meaning of being as truth collapses into something very much like solipsism.
Hegel had written: “Aristotle thinks objects, and since they are as thoughts, they are in their truth; that is their ousia” (19, 164). In the effort to aid his mentor Trendelenburg in depriving Hegel of his metaphysico-material logic, Brentano deprives metaphysics of speech and leaves logic nothing to say.
Before achieving his own decisive response to the question of the meaning of Being in Being and Time, Heidegger had occasion to get involved once again with Franz Brentano’s work. The brief third division of Heidegger’s doctoral dissertation, The Doctrine of Judgment in Psychologism (1913),10 offers a critical reply to Brentano’s Psychology from the Empirical Standpoint (1874). Yet in this reply Heidegger himself remains absorbed in the problems of neo-Kantian and phenomenological epistemology—and that means in the tradition that caused Brentano to stress the importance of judgment and predication for the meaning of “the true.” Heidegger’s criticism of Brentano here has nothing to do with his later understanding of truth as disclosure, and I take note of it only in order to show how far Heidegger’s own path was to take him.
Brentano allows the distinction between existential and categorial predication to collapse: the “is” of the existential statement “A sick man is” corresponds to the copula of the categorial assertion “Some man is sick.” “Whether I say that an affirmative judgment is true or that its object is existing, whether I say that a negative judgment is true or that its object is not existing, in both cases I say one and the same thing.”11 We recognize this argument as the one that appeared at the climax of Brentano’s consideration of “being in the sense of the true” in Aristotle, for which “it is true” means simply “it is.”
Unlike Brentano, Husserl in the sixth of his Logical Investigations had preserved the distinction between the Being of the copular “is” of categorial assertion and the “is” that expresses totale Deckung, “total coverage” between meaning-intention and meaning-fulfillment or objective givenness.12 In his doctoral dissertation Heidegger follows Husserl by criticizing briefly the meaning of the existential “is” in Brentano’s psychology. When I assert that A is, where A first means “tree” and then the mathematical relation “a > b,” the “is” has an equivocal sense. The mathematical relation especially must be seen “in its peculiar mode of actuality” as radically free from any psychic act that affirms or denies it. Heidegger thus raises the question “of the meaning of ‘Being’” in judgment (FS, 35, 120, and 128). However, he adopts the solution suggested in the Logic of Rudolf Hermann Lotze—itself based on an understanding of the Platonic Ideas—that the peculiar mode of actuality for judment is validity, das Gelten.
From the perspective of Heidegger’s later work it is not difficult to criticize Brentano for emphasizing the meaning of being according to the schema of the categories.13 Yet Heidegger too in his youth, pursuing the problem of being in terms of judgment and validity, does obeisance to the Kategorienlehre. His Habilitation dissertation treats—as we saw in chapter one—the problem of the categories in Scotist philosophy. But in his introduction and conclusion to that work (FS, 135–48; 341–53) Heidegger expresses growing dissatisfaction with any purely formal approach to the problem of the categories—that is to say, any approach that fails to take into account the general culture of the epoch in which the categories are discussed. Neither objectivistic Realism nor subjectivistic Idealism solves the problem of the kind of validity the categories may have. The answer seems to lie “in a group of problems that lies deeper, disclosed in the concept of the living Spirit . . .” (347). The latter has its metaphysically most important sense, not in the Subject of knowledge theory, but in an essentially historical, cultural development. In order to understand the categories in the Middle Ages, for example, study of medieval mysticism, moral theology, and ascetic tracts is indispensable (FS, 147 and 351).
Yet historical understanding cannot result from the mere collation of traditional views—a fault one may find in Brentano’s dissertation and in Heidegger’s own doctoral thesis as well. As I also noted in chapter one, however, by 1921 Heidegger’s nascent philosophical project is bound to a “destructuring of the history of ontology.” We may surmise from Heidegger’s teaching activity of this period that his approach to Aristotle is essential to the destructuring. His novel approach to that philosopher induced Paul Natorp to secure Heidegger’s appointment as a professor at Marburg in 1922. The contents of the manuscript on Aristotle that so impressed Natorp are unknown to us; but we do know that two years later Heidegger introduced a course on Plato’s Sophist—where the problem of “being” is central—by discussing the meaning of alētheuein in Nicomachean Ethics VI, 3. Whatever Heidegger’s approach to the question of Being may have been there, we may be sure that it had little to do with “clever games with categories and modalities” and much to do with alētheia.14
In Being and Time Heidegger attempts to recover the question of the meaning of Being and to seek an answer that goes beyond manipulation of the traditional categories. That the notion of Being is the most “universal” concept, characterized by the unity of analogy, undefinable by reference to beings and yet “obvious” in its meaning and import (SZ, 3–4), Heidegger learned from many sources—Brentano not the least among these. But his essential insight of 1922–23, that the meaning of Being was determined in advance for Greek ontology by a certain conception of Time, that ousia was not primarily the category of substance but the phenomenon of presence, is radically his own (SZ, 26). It is also important to note how quickly and decisively the question of the meaning of Being in Being and Time involves the question of truth. Section 7, “The phenomenological method of the investigation,” defines phainomenon as “what shows itself from itself” and identifies this with “being”; it defines logos as apophainesthai, letting what is talked about be seen in its own terms. At this point the problem of true and false logos arises—and Heidegger rejects the primacy of the notion of correspondence between knowledge and state of affairs that dominated Brentano’s account of truth. “The ‘being true’ of logos as alētheuein, in legein as apophainesthai, suggests taking the being that is being talked about out of its concealment and letting it be seen as unconcealed (alēthes), uncovering it” (SZ, 33). Here as well as in section 44 Heidegger reverses the traditional priorities that dominate Brentano’s understanding of “the true.” Aisthēsis and noēsis, as Aristotle cites them in De anima III, 3, 428b 26, are more original senses of the true, that is to say, of uncovering, than correctness of judgment (SZ, 33, 219, and especially 226). Predication or assertion is a derivative mode of interpretation, itself founded in the understanding of Being that Dasein always already possesses (SZ, sections 32 and 33). Such understanding of Being is in turn rooted in the disclosedness of world, Dasein, and Being; disclosedness founds all discovery and thus constitutes the original sense of truth.
In section 44 Heidegger reproduces a whole series of quotations from Aristotle’s Metaphysics, culminating in the definition of philosophy as the science of truth (epistēmē tis tēs alētheias) and the science that studies being as being (to on hē on). For Heidegger’s analysis of Dasein, the confluence of Being and Truth is fundamental: on hōs alēthes is not one among the many meanings of being but the very phenomenon of Being, a phenomenon that requires—as Heidegger had already insisted to Jaspers—einen neuen Ansatz, “a new starting-point” (SZ, 214).15
Heidegger himself was by now dubious as to whether a fundamental ontology of Dasein, conducted along the guideline of temporality, could provide that new departure. In addition to the problems adumbrated in Part One of these Intimations, one confronts the fact that no explicit “recovery” of section 44 takes place in the second division of Being and Time Part One. It is as though the failure of the ecstatic analysis of temporality to locate the unified horizon of Time, such failure devolving upon the interminably open horizon of presence/absence, requires a radicalization of the very themes of disclosedness, unconcealment, and the “lighted” or “cleared” Da of Dasein. Nevertheless, the decisive transition from the notion of truth as accordance or correspondence to that of uncovering is achieved in Part One of that work. Already in Being and Time, and not merely after some sort of Kehre conceived of as a “conversion” to Being, the double leitmotif of Heidegger’s thought is the question of Being and the question of Truth.16
Earlier in this account of Brentano’s treatment of “being in the sense of the true” I asked what terminus could serve as the focal point of the meanings of truth—in the manner that ousia served as the terminus for being. If we say “truth” always with a view to one, pros hen, whether it be one “source,” archē, or one “nature,” physis, what is that fundamental meaning of truth? We say “source,” but as Heidegger notes at the outset of “On the Essence of Grounds” (W, 21) the word archē also has “manifold meanings.” We say “nature,” but the quotation marks suggest that this is not the sole possible translation of physis. Indeed, Heidegger’s way of advancing the question of truth after Being and Time is to ask: What is the physis of alētheia?
In his essay “On The Essence of Truth” (W, 85; BW, 129) Heidegger briefly refers to physis, which for early Greek thinking is not so much a delimited region of beings as the upsurgence of presence. Presence is the meaning of ousia; upsurgence the meaning of physis; unconcealment the meaning of alētheia; and the gathering of these three into one is logos. Upsurgence into unconcealment is the primal phenomenon, by which the Being of beings, however much it loves to hide, does show itself. The one, whether it be conceived as the one physis or the one archē, is Being as movement (kinēsis) into unconcealment and return to concealment. Such is the transformed sense of the on hōs alēthes, which in Heidegger’s view designates the fundamental task of all ontology from Aristotle onward.17
If I truncate the chapter at this point it is because the double leitmotif of Being and Truth dominates literally all of Heidegger’s later work. To give an adequate account of it would take these Intimations quite beyond their bounds. Let me now summarize the chapter’s findings and come to a conclusion.
Brentano offers an account of the manifold significance of being; Heidegger formulates the question of the meaning of Being. Brentano follows the tradition by emphasizing the importance of the categories, especially substance, in determining the primary sense of being; Heidegger puts these categories in question by reinterpreting the first of them as presence and by thematizing the problem of Time. Brentano again follows the tradition by designating assertion or judgment the primary locus of truth, although he tries (unsuccessfully as it turns out) to prevent the gap between judgment and thing from expanding into the subject-object split and the solipsistic chasm; Heidegger’s interpretation of truth as unconcealment rather than correctness of judgment offers Brentano’s interpretation what it needs in order to prevent the collapse into a solipsism that Brentano wishes to escape but cannot.
Heidegger’s attempt to ponder ousia and alētheia as a unity concentric with physis/logos goes far beyond anything Brentano might have conceived under the title on hōs alēthes. (Yet when Heidegger insists that Aristotle’s categories cannot be reduced to elements of grammar [EGT, 38] we recall Brentano’s resistance to Trendelenburg’s main thesis.) Perhaps Brentano’s most positive achievement, viewed from the perspective of Heidegger’s project, is best expressed in the following way.18 For traditional metaphysics “being” is fundamentally “one.” It is what perdures and subsists, embracing all in unity and identity. It is at the same time so broad in scope that it defies explanation and so obvious in meaning that it requires none. It is totality, Hegel says, and is therefore absolute indifference; and there is a sense in which it deserves to be met with absolute indifference. Pure Being is pure abstraction, destitution, really Nothing. It is the beginning, but, as the metaphysical definition of God, it is a beginning that can see to itself. For metaphysics Being is ultimately not a problem. For Brentano it becomes one. Brentano’s problem is that the meaning of “being” is unclear in its historic beginnings in Aristotle. By exposing the manifold meaning of being according to Aristotle, Brentano paves the way for putting an entire tradition into question. That is not his express intention. His intentions are (1) to reach the threshold of Aristotelian ontology and (2) not to allow even a bit of the truth in the beginning to be brushed aside. Although it seems clear in retrospect—and it may only be the dazzling clarity of what Sartre and Merleau-Ponty call l’illusion rétrospective—that Brentano leaves a large part of “the true” unconsidered, it is nonetheless the case that the question of the “manifold significance of being” prompts the question of the “meaning of Being” and does so principally by drawing attention to the essential correlation expressed by on hōs alēthes.
Does Brentano’s account of “being in the sense of the true” have significant bearing on Heidegger’s response to alētheia as the unconcealment of beings in presence? On the occasion of his nomination to the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences in 1957 Heidegger replied (FS, x): “The question concerning the simple ‘onefold’ of what is manifold in Being—at that time [1907–8] churning helplessly, obscure and unstable—remained the single, unrelenting impulse, through many upsets, false turns, and perplexities, for the treatise Being and Time, which appeared two decades later.”
Being as presence, and truth as Lichtung or the clearing of unconcealment, do remain unthought in Brentano’s treatment of “being in the sense of the true.” Yet Brentano names being and truth together and tries to think them together. His attempt therefore makes all the difference. It is the gift of a question given by one young thinker to another.