Daniel O. Dahlstrom
The Greek word alētheia is typically translated as “truth”. Once this translation is in place, interpretations of alētheia trade on the meanings primarily associated with “truth”. The traditionally dominant meaning in this regard is correctness (the correctness of a thought or assertion) and, in fact, as early as Homer, a cognate of correctness, homoiōsis, served as a synonym for alētheia. Thus the correctness (orthotes) of a thought or assertion tends to be understood in terms of its agreement or correspondence (homoiōsis) with a state of affairs. Nevertheless, Heidegger takes exception to the interpretation of alētheia as correctness or correspondence alone, regarding it as a derivative notion of truth. This sort of interpretation overlooks the fact that alëetheia has a much richer significance that notions of correctness presuppose. Alētheia in that more basic sense signifies the “unhiddenness” (Unverborgenheit) of what is asserted. For example, “The tree is sprouting” is true, that is, correct, only if the tree shows sprouts. Since what is hidden is hidden from someone, truth as the unhiddenness of “things” also entails their actual or potential presence to someone, someone with an understanding of them. The unhiddenness signified by alētheia is accordingly irreducible to either subjects or objects. Not surprisingly, so taken were certain Greek thinkers with this sheer manifestness or presence of things that they identified it as a principal way of saying of something that it exists.
While a remarkable achievement, the appreciation of truth as unhiddenness is, Heidegger insists, far from the end of the story. For, as its privative nature suggests, “un-hiddenness” (a-lētheia) supposes a hiddenness. That hiddenness is not traceable simply to either the obstruction of some entities by others or the shortsightedness of some observers. Nor is it merely the absence in the past out of which the presence of what is present emerges (like the tree before and after sprouting). Also hidden is what it means for each respective entity as well as entities as a whole to be at all – not least when being is equated with the mani-festness or presence of things. Heidegger accordingly argues that the essence of truth is neither the correctness of assertions nor the unhid-denness of beings, but the truth of beyng, that is, the interplay of that hiddenness and unhiddenness (or, equivalently, absencing and presencing, the strife between earth and world). Truth in this most fundamental sense – the truth of beyng – is the hidden “openness” in the midst of beings that grounds their unhiddenness and, thereby, the correctness of assertions and thoughts about them (CP 239–46, 249–50 = GA 65: 342–51, 357).
Although Heidegger investigates truth as alētheia throughout his career, the investigations typically move through the three steps just noted: the correctness of thoughts and assertions, the unhiddenness of beings and the clearing for beyng’s self-concealment. He investigates these three conceptions with the understanding that, historically, truth in some sense defines human existence and human beings define themselves by the way they conceive truth. He accordingly emphasizes the enormity of the human transformation at the beginning of Western thinking, initiated by the Greek understanding of alētheia as the unhiddenness of beings. He also projects the need for a new beginning, a transformation that corresponds to the “truth of beyng”, the clearing presupposed by truth as alētheia (unhiddenness). This chapter traces the general steps in Heidegger’s investigation with an eye to exposing the human transformations that, in his eyes, the interpretations of truth as alētheia in the first beginning and in a new beginning respectively entail.
In ordinary discourse, we typically use the adjective “true” to designate a property of some thing or some thought or assertion. These usages are related. For example, we say that someone is a true friend because she corresponds to our idea of what a friend should be; we say an assertion is true (“‘She’s a friend’ is true”) because it corresponds to the state of affairs of which it is asserted. Truth, on this view, is the correctnesss of that correspondence. Beginning with Plato and Aristotle, Heidegger claims, this general conception of truth has been regnant in philosophy as well. As one piece of evidence, he cites Aquinas’s definition of truth as “the correspondence of the thing and how it is understood” (adaequatio rei et intellectus), while noting that modern thinkers tend to focus on the correspondence of what is understood to the thing (adaequatio intellectus ad rem). Equating what is understood with what can be asserted or judged of the thing, modern thinkers largely take their bearings from the logical prejudice that the assertion or judgement, silent or spoken, is the site of truth and truth itself is the correctness of the assertion.1
Yet the correspondence theory of truth is beset with some basic problems. Correspondence is not identity or even likeness. Assertions are not pictures that can be compared for their accuracy with something pictured. The term “correspondence” would appear to be highly figurative at best, tacitly drawing on uses of a family of words (e.g. “agreement”, “similarity”) that tenuously lend it significance. Moreover, any truthful account of truth as correct correspondence seems either to beg the question of what “truth” means or to suppose as its warrant some further correspondence that must be similarly warranted in turn, and so on ad infinitum.2
Nevertheless, we distinguish true (correct) assertions from false ones and Heidegger has an explanation for this capacity. An assertion, he submits, correctly corresponds to a thing when it manages to represent what presents itself and, indeed, represent it “as it is”. The ordinary notion of truth as correct correspondence, far from being the last word on the subject, draws on, even “presupposes” a process of presenting or “uncovering” things as they are. The relevant thought or assertion can be said to correspond correctly to something because it forms part of a way of behaving towards the thing in question, that lets it present itself such as it is in itself. Not everything that we think or say is of this sort; indeed, we may speak of things’ origins (“that’s from China”) or their utility (“that’ll be a big help to us”). But we also think and speak of things precisely in terms of how they present themselves. For this attentiveness to things as such to take place or, in other words, for us to be bound by such standards of correctness, we have to be free for what can open itself up in our midst (SZ 218, 224; PM 140–41, 143–4; BW 177–8). Allowing things to present themselves-as-they-are is an openness to them, precisely in so far as they are said to be. But this openness amounts to nothing if things do not also open themselves up to us. The Greeks, Heidegger stresses, already experienced this openness as the unhiddenness (Unverborgenheit) of things and, indeed, grounded the conception of truth as correctness on this notion of unhiddenness (even when it was not really obvious to them that they were doing so). For the Greeks this “unhiddenness is a determination of entities themselves and not somehow – like correctness – a character of an assertion about them” (BQP 106 = GA 45: 121, trans. mod.). Indeed, our ordinary notion of truth as correctness “stands and falls” with truth as the unhid-denness of entities (BW 177; see BQP 85–91, 112ff. = GA 45: 96–103, 129ff.). As noted earlier, Heidegger submits that this experience of truth as unhiddenness is captured by the Greek word usually rendered as “truth”, namely, alētheia. In this word, the first letter a serves as a privative prefix for lētheia, a term that derives from a family of expressions, such as lēthē (forgetfulness) and lanthanein (remaining hidden) (SZ 219; EGT 104 =VA 251; CP 237–8 = GA 65: 339).3
In his 1937–8 lectures Heidegger expands the account of the openness presupposed by t ruth as correctness to include, in addition to the openness (unhiddenness) of things to us and our openness (freedom) towards them, the openness of the realm “between the thing and the human being” as well as the openness of one person (Mensch) to another. Thus he refers to a fourfold yet unitary openness that underlies and enables the idea of truth as correctness. “Correctness of representing anything is only possible if, in each case, it can establish itself in this openness as what carries it and spans over it. The openness is the ground and soil and play-space of correctness” (BQP 19 = GA 45: 20, trans. mod.).4 But that openness is more than the unhiddenness of things or even that unhiddenness together with the freedom of being-here (Dasein). It is the “enowning event” that makes possible that un-hiddenness and the freedom of being-here precisely by sustaining the hiddenness or self-concealing of things.5
Exploiting a familiar trope throughout his writings, Heidegger refers to this openness as a clearing (Lichtung) and “the truth of beyng” (given that the being of beings is equated with their unhiddenness). The straightforward significance of Lichtung in German is, like “clearing” in English, an open space in a forest, for example a glade. For Heidegger’s purposes, it is particularly relevant that the open region of a clearing allows for light but also supposes the density and darkness of the surrounding forest and that it signals human handiwork (ausgeholzte Stelle im Wald, “cleared land in the woods”). In Being and Time Heidegger alludes to the significance of “clearing” in connection with uses of “light” (Licht) and cognate metaphors, for example “illuminate” (erleuchten) and Descartes’ lumen naturale (natural light). Given the grounding role that the metaphor of light plays in Plato’s thinking, these allusions suggest modes of retrieving the original experiences at work in the very beginnings of Western thinking. At the same time, however, already in Being and Time Heidegger distinguishes these senses of “light” from the clearing constitutive of them and making them possible (SZ 133, 350–51). In later writings, Heidegger is even more explicit about this relationship between the grounding sense of the “clearing” and the derivative metaphors of “light” in regard to the question of truth. As Heidegger puts it in one of his last works, “Light can stream into the clearing, into its openness, and let brightness play with darkness in it. But light never first creates the clearing. Rather light presupposes it …. The clearing is the open region for everything that becomes present and absent” (BW 442).
The metaphor of a clearing would be misleading if it were taken for something already in place and static, unmoved either by the encroaching forest or by our arrival. The clearing, as Heidegger understands the openness grounding other senses of truth, is not like that any more than an actual clearing is. Instead, the clearing is the event, the timespace that enables things to come into the open, precisely by keeping the hiddenness itself hidden. The clearing (or, as Heidegger at times also puts it, the clearing in contention with concealment) is the end of Heidegger’s analysis of truth, as the un-grounded ground – or, in other words, the grounding abyss (Ab-grund) – of the other levels of truth (BW 178, 186–7, 441–6; CP 230–31, 243–50 = GA 65: 329–30, 348–57; M 279–80 = GA 66: 314).
This gloss on the significance that Heidegger attaches to the clearing helps explain why he also speaks of the “truth of beyng” to characterize the openness underlying the other senses of truth. Whereas “being” (Sein) signifies the sense in which particular beings (Seiendes) are understood to be, “beyng” (Seyn) refers to the event (Ereignis) in which that signification and understanding historically take hold – even if only to be forgotten or treated with indifference. The historical determination of an understanding of the being of beings arises out of the dynamic event of beyng taking hold of being-here (Da-sein), unfolding (wesend) but concealing itself in the process. Heidegger accordingly observes that truth in the primordial and essential sense is the truth of beyng and the truth of beyng is not the clearing simply but the clearing for the self-concealing of beyng – although it remains an open question, Heidegger tellingly adds, whether we will succeed in owning up to it (CP 182ff., 192, 239–40, 243–4, 327–8 = GA 65: 259ff., 273, 342–3, 348–9, 465–6).
The clearing, the most basic sense of truth entailed by conceiving truth as alētheia, includes, as noted, an openness on our part, namely, an openness to what can open itself up in our midst. Inasmuch as truth as correctness presupposes our being-free for the self-presentation on the part of beings, freedom in the sense designated is essential to truth (PM 142). Freedom, understood as letting entities be, consummates (vollzieht) what Heidegger deems the original Greek intimation of truth as alētheia, the unhidden character of entities (PM 146).
By construing human freedom as essential to truth, Heidegger opens himself up to the objection that he violates the traditional, “metaphysical” sense of truth’s objectivity, where truth is conceived as one of the conditions of knowledge (“suitably justified true belief”), and not vice versa (PM 143). What Heidegger understands by freedom in this connection is, of course, by no means equivalent to knowledge; nevertheless, introducing freedom as a constitutive condition of truth exposes his account to an analogous objection. If the truth depends on human freedom, how can its vital role as an objective, unbiased constraint on knowledge and action be sustained?
Heidegger responds to this objection by noting that the freedom in question is anything but caprice or even something at a human being’s disposal. Instead, in advance of any sense of “negative” and “positive” senses of freedom (being unencumbered and empowered), a freedom for the truth consists in an active engagement with beings precisely with a view to letting them present themselves as they are. Opening oneself up in this way to the unhidden character of things is a matter not of losing oneself in them, but of “stepping back in the face of them [the entities] so that they can reveal themselves in what and how they are and the correspondence that presents them can take the correct measure [Richtmaß] from that” (PM 144). The freedom that is essential to truth is, in other words, a matter of letting beings be and opening ourselves to them in all their manifestness. This exposedness to beings’ unhid-denness both defines our existence (ek-sistieren) and co-constitutes the dynamic clearing described above (PM 143–4).
Yet the foregoing account, while accurate in some respects, is misleading to the extent that it suggests (a) that the clearing is essentially that unhiddenness, (b) that beings and human beings are somehow already in the clearing and (c) that we accordingly know (possess the truth of) who we are as human beings. The clearing makes possible that unhiddenness of things (truth as alētheia) because it is a clearing for beyng’s self-concealing. Moreover, as itself a hidden, grounding event, this truth of beyng is not a transcendental feature of human subjects, the ahistorical condition of the possibility of the unhiddenness of beings and the correctness of assertions. Indeed, this event is by no means foregone and we are not by ourselves in a position to make it happen (although there is reason to think that it can happen and that we can prepare for it). For similar reasons, it remains an open question whether we are truly here (da). To be sure, there can be no openness to the being of beings without a projection, on our part, of their being. In this sense, the truth of beyng supposes our being-here (Da-sein) as the very disclosiveness of being. But this projection is suitable only to the extent that it corresponds to beyng itself or, in other words, to the extent that it is brought into its own by beyng itself. As Heidegger puts it in the 1930s, this reciprocal movement of beyng (Seyn) and being-here (Da-sein) – the former needing the latter, the latter belonging to the former – is the “turning” (Kehre) in beyng that constitutes it as an “event” or, more precisely, the “enowning” (Ereignis) of being-here by beyng (see Chapters 6 and 10). But our being-here in this way, corresponding to beyng, requires our transformation from preservers of the unhiddenness of beings to guardians of the openness for beyng’s self-concealment (CP 177, 184, 286–7 = GA 65: 251, 261, 407; BQP 163–4 = GA 45: 189–90).
While derivative, the conception of truth as correctness is the startingpoint for enquiry into truth as alētheia.6 Its relevance lies, among other things, in the centrality of bivalence, the possibility of correctness or incorrectness. When someone describes an unusual or surprising event (“the glacier is melting”) and someone who has not seen it expresses scepticism, she may feel the need to say “No, it’s true”. These words are not simply an iteration; they assert that the opposite state of affairs does not obtain and, indeed, that its not-obtaining (like what does obtain) is not based simply on its being asserted. Without the possibility of the opposite, the adjective “true” is superfluous. “Only because truth and untruth are in essence not indifferent to one another, but instead belong together, can in general a true sentence enter into pointed opposition to the corresponding untrue sentence” (PM 146).
The truth of beyng grounds this bivalence, just as it grounds truth as alētheia. We have already noted how the possibility of correct assertions depends on both our openness to entities and their openness to us. But neither of these conditions need be met or, better, fully met; nor, for that matter, can they be. That is to say, truth entails untruth across subjective and objective dimensions. We may intentionally try to dissemble or we may innocently overlook some things or aspects in the course of presenting others; this errancy on our part – caught up in untruth as fundamentally as truth (SZ 222–3) – goes hand in hand with our freedom. But, even more fundamentally, things also present themselves to us in puzzling and misleading ways that give rise to illusions and error (BW 179). We noted earlier how, according to Heidegger, being-free-for the way entities are, while constitutive of truth’s essence, is not a matter of anyone’s arbitrary whim. But if truth is not simply a prerogative of a human stance towards things, nor is un-truth (PM 146–7).
Moreover, just as t ruth is not primarily an assertion, so untruth cannot be traced invariably to an incorrect judgement alone. Indeed, in so far as we understand the openness of entities to us and, correlatively, our being-free-for that openness as essential to truth, then the very opposite of truth in this sense, a hiddenness, is essential to truth. While not to be confused with falsity, this hiddenness, like falsity, is essential to truth as alētheia, since the unhiddenness of things, as noted earlier, supposes the clearing, as both the openness in the midst of beings and the enowning event in which being conceals itself.
The hiddenness or absence (lēthē) entailed by experiencing truth as alētheia is the hiddenness not simply of this or that particular entity but entities as a whole. “The hiddenness of entities as a whole, the genuine non-truth, is older than every manifestness of this or that entity” (PM 148). But hidden as well is the fact of this hiddenness itself. Heidegger refers to the fact that this hiddenness itself is hidden as the mystery (Geheimnis). This mystery pervades our being-here (Da-sein) and our being-here preserves this mystery. This mystery is not simply what is enigmatic, unexplained or questionable within the domain of what is manifest and accessible. As long as such enigmas are construed as merely way-stations on the way to what is or can make them accessible, that is, as long as “the hiddenness of entities as a whole” is indulged merely as a limit that occasionally announces itself, “the hiding as the basic happening has sunk in forgetfulness” (PM 149).
The basic sense of freedom that consists in letting entities be, bringing them into the open and being open for them, is foundational for all behaviour. But this freedom has come to be “resolutely” oriented to the presence of things, having “closed itself off” from any hiddenness or absence (PM 149). That very freedom at work in the original Greek conception of truth as the unhiddenness of things facilitates forgetfulness not only of the mystery (the underlying “truth of beyng”) but even of the unhiddenness itself (as the being of beings). At times Heidegger identifies Plato’s Cave Allegory – the yoking (sugon) of alētheia to the manifest way things look in the light, that is, the look or idea of them – as the “key place” for this devolution from unhiddenness to correctness (homōiosis).7 As a result, that treedom itself disappears in this forgetfulness, exemplified by our proneness to become absorbed in what is at any moment apparent, accessible and manipulable.
Heidegger’s interpretation of truth as alētheia is, in his terms, thoroughly historical (see Chapter 11), requiring an understanding of ourselves as something that began with the groundbreaking, Greek experience of truth. The aim of interpreting truth as alētheia is to make another beginning, based on appreciation of the limits of that understanding. But for this reason Heidegger recognizes that he must explain the unquestioned status that truth as unhiddenness largely enjoyed among the Greeks (BQP 114–15, 119–20 = GA 45: 132, 138). The explanation lies, he submits, in the fundamental mood principally motivating Greek thinking, namely, the astonishment (thaumazein) at something quite ordinary, indeed, the most ordinary aspect of things: the fact that they are and that they are what they are. Thanks to this wonder, that most ordinary aspect of things becomes the most extraordinary, the wonder at beings in so far as they exist (on hēion) or, equivalently, are manifest and unhidden. “The basic mood of thaumazein necessitates the pure recognition of the extraordinariness of the ordinary” (BQP 147 = GA 45: 171, trans. mod.). This wonder at “the being of beings” (Sein des Seienden) first sets them in the midst of beings as such (i.e. as unhidden) and, in the process, attunes human beings to truth and inaugurates Western thinking. This thinking is so taken by the unhid-denness of things and so committed to attending to things in so far as they are unhidden that it finds nothing in that unhiddenness (alētheia) to question.8 The human transformation initiated by Plato and Aristotle consists in corresponding to the prevailing unhiddenness of things (their physis), actively cultivating and sustaining as much, in a mode of knowing that the Greeks called technē (see Chapter 13).9
This “technical” way with things, necessitated by wonder, provides fertile soil for distorting alētheia as unhiddenness into mere correctness. The more the recognition of the entities in their unhiddenness develops into technē, the more unavoidable it becomes that the looks of entities (the “ideas”) alone provide the measure of them and require constant correspondence with those “looks”. The original essence of alētheia is ineluctably lost and, with it, the fundamental mood necessitating it. Beings become objects, truth becomes the correctness of representing them, and astonishment at the sheer existence (unhiddenness) of things gives way to indifference to being as simply the most commonplace of commonplaces. Along the way, a desire to become increasingly familiar with ever more things and to become facile in reckoning and computing with them gradually takes hold (BQP 155–6, 158 = GA 45: 180–81, 184; M 91–2, 154–5 = GA 66: 109–10, 177).
The conception of truth as correctness is, Heidegger contends, no more a question today than the conception of alētheia as unhiddenness was for most Greeks. The seemingly self-evidential character of conceiving truth in terms of correctness alone reinforces and is reinforced by an indifference to the question of what it means to be at all, an indifference that Heidegger famously dubs “the forgottenness of being”. With this forgottenness, he maintains, “the truth of beyng is denied entities. The entities are and yet remain abandoned by beyng and left over to themselves in order thus to become only the object of machination” (BQP 159 = GA 45: 185, trans. mod.). Heidegger suggests that the nihilism of denying entities and human beings “the truth of beyng” might be “the concealed ground of a still concealed, fundamental mood that would compel [nötigte] us to a different necessity, [that] of a different primordial questioning and beginning” (BQP 160 = GA 45: 186, trans. mod.). (Indeed, he implies that this necessity has been shaping his entire deliberation on the question of truth; BQP 161 = GA 45: 187.) That fundamental mood would involve, among other things, a kind of restraint (Verhaltenheit) in which questioning turns to what deserves to be questioned above all else, the hiddenness of beyng, and does so “for the sake of the beyng of beings as a whole” (CP 12 = GA 65: 16, trans. mod.). Heidegger’s characterization of this restraint is complex and multifaceted.10 However, in conclusion we can perhaps allude to its significance by recalling the observation, cited earlier, that beyng (Seyn) and being-here (Da-sein) – the former needing the latter, the latter belonging to the former – are in a constant interplay (kehriges Verhältnis), a process of presencing-and-absencing that Heidegger characterizes as the “enowning event” (Ereignis). Restraint attunes us to this enownment and, in the process, demands that we begin to think anew, thinking “from out of this enownment”, as it were, steadfastly and decisively yet humbly about the truth of the beyng of beings: as the enowning event that grounds their unhiddenness to us and our openness to them. Although we are no longer preservers of the astonishing unhiddenness of beings (as the Greeks putatively were), restraint transforms us into vigilant guardians of the clearing for the self-concealing of beyng (CP 177, 184, 286–7 = GA 65: 251, 261, 407; BQP 163 = GA 45: 189–90).
1. See SZ214, 226; PM 137–8 =VWW 177–8; ETP 1–2 = GA 34: 2; BQP9, 14–18, 22–3 = GA 45: 8–9, 15–18, 23–4.
2. For many contemporaries this is a false dilemma, generated by failing to recognize the equivalence of ascription of truth to a proposition (“p” is true) and the (disquoted) proposition itself (p) as in Tarski’s formulation “’p’ is true if and only if p”. On this disquotational, deflationist approach, see Quine (1992: 79–82).
3. Paul Friedländer criticizes the notion that with Plato the meaning of alētheia degenerates – epochally – from unhiddenness to correctness (1969: 221–9). While Heidegger acknowledges the Greeks’ acquaintance with both senses, he contends that the sense of unhiddenness is largely taken for granted and accordingly tacit and unquestioned by them (BQP 95, 174ff. = GA 45: 108, 204ff.). Yet he does later concede that it was misleading to name alētheia in the sense of the clearing “truth” (BW 446–7 = ZSD 77).
4. Ernst Tugendhat famously charges that construing disclosedness as more basic than correctness forfeits the traditional, critical function of setting truth set off from falsity (1970: 331–62). But Heidegger insists that since truth as correctness is derivative and since the primordial truth is a projection (Entwurf), correctness does not apply to it (CP 229 = GA 65: 327).
5. The foregoing account is drawn from “On the Essence of Truth” (PM 136–54), drafted between 1930 and 1943. In Being and Time Heidegger also identifies a truth more fundamental than correctness. After characterizing the uncovering of entities and Dasein’s disclosure of being (its own and others’) as respectively ontic and ontological levels of the understanding constitutive of its being-in-the-world, Heidegger concludes that Dasein’s disclosedness (or “clearing”) is “the most primordial phenomenon of the truth” and “the ontological condition of the possibility that assertions can be true or false” (SZ 226; see SZ 132–3, 147, 170, 220, 350–51). In Being and Time talk of the unhiddenness of entities is couched in the manner of their being uncovered; in “On the Essence of Truth”, Heidegger emphasizes how entities open themselves up to us. In the 1929 essay “On the Essence of Ground”, the account is even more streamlined: propositional truth (correctness) is grounded in ontic truth – the “manifestness of entities” – and ontic truth is grounded in ontological truth – the “unveiledness of being” (including Dasein’s foregoing understanding of an entity’s being) (PM 103–4). By the mid 1930s Heidegger speaks of the clearing as a process of Da-sein’s being enowned (er-eignet) by Seyn; hence the translation of Ereignis here as the “enowning event”.
6. By challenging the equation of truth with correctness, Heidegger also hopes to expose its alliance with certain conceptions of being. Underlying the medieval version of this correspondence (adaequatio) is the divinely created character of things (res) and understanding (intellectus): a structure surviving in post-medieval notions that everything can be made subject to planning by a self-legislating world-reason (PM 138–9).
7. PM 155–82, esp. 173, 176–7; ETP 17–81 = GA 34: 21–112; BQP 155–6 = GA 45: 180–81; CP 232–5 = GA 65: 331–5; M 91–2 = GA 66: 109–10. Repeatedly revising his interpretations of Plato and Aristotle, Heidegger occasionally traces modern logical prejudices (truth exclusively as correctness) to them, joint saboteurs of the “early Greek construal of truth” as unhiddenness (BQP 15, 89ff., 97–8 = GA 45: 15, 101ff., 111). But the story also runs back to Presocratic thinkers (notably, Heraclitus) who did appreciate the hiddenness supposed by truth as alētheia.
8. BQP 144–51, 158 = GA 45: 167–74, 184. Plato, Theaetetus 155d2ff; Aristotle, Metaphysics 982b11ff; Heidegger contrasts thaumazein (Er-staunen) with other phenomena (Sichwundern, Verwunderung, Bewunderung, Staunen, Bestaunen) that, instead of construing the ordinary as extraordinary, focus on something extraordinary relative to the ordinary; see BQP 136–7, 142ff., 149–50 = GA 45: 157–8, 163ff., 173–4.
9. BQP 153ff. = GA 45: 178ff. As the knowing and basic behaviour in which the preservation of what is astonishing – the beingness of beings – is preserved, techneē is something wholly other than physis that belongs most essentially to it.
10. Heidegger characterizes Verhaltenheit in numerous ways, for example holding back from any pretension to ground the truth of beyng in beings or being, holding out creatively in that grounding truth as itself an abyss (Ab-grund), and holding on to (controlling) itself as it leaps ahead into the event of the conflict of earth and world, the interplay of presences and absences, and Seyn and Dasein (BQP 4 = GA 45: 2; CP 10–17, 23–5, 261–2, 277 = GA 65: 14–23, 33–6, 375, 395–6).
Friedländer, P. 1969. Plato, 2nd rev. edn. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Quine, W. V. O. 1992. Pursuit of Truth, rev. edn. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Tugendhat, E. 1970. Der Wahrheitsbegriff bei Husserl und Heidegger. Berlin: de Gruyter.
See Heidegger’s Basic Writings, esp. “The Origin of the Work of Art”,139–212; Being and Time, §44; Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning), pt V; Mindfulness, pt V; and Pathmarks, esp. “On the Essence of Truth”, 136–54, and “Plato’s Doctrine of Truth”, 155–82.
See Dahlstrom (2001), Sallis (1995b) and M. Wrathall, “Unconcealment”, in Dreyfus & Wrathall (2007), 337–357. See also J. Hersey, The Question of Ground and the Truth of Being: Heidegger’s WS 1931/2 Lecture Course, dissertation, Catholic University of America (2007); and K. Maly, “From Truth to alētheia to Opening and Rapture”, Heidegger Studies 6 (1990), 27–42.