Rudolf Bernet
This article traces how Heidegger’s development of a specific phenomenological understanding of truth in Being and Time owes a debt to Husserl’s conception of truth as laid out in the sixth logical investigation. The critique of “traditional conceptions of truth”—ubiquitous in Heidegger’s texts on the essence of truth—does not primarily have Husserl in its sights, and only pertains to his concept of truth in a very limited way. Furthermore, the article shows that Heidegger’s later determination of truth as “un-concealedness” [Un-Verborgenheit] does not entail any deep schism with his earlier theory and that it moves along certain paths that were not so foreign to Husserl. Even though Husserl never thematically analyzed the concept of “concealedness” [Verborgenheit], Heidegger nevertheless remains bound to a specific phenomenological concept of truth oriented to the conditions, circumstances, and scope of the manifestation [Offenbarung] of the true essence of beings.
An adequate presentation of either the chronological development of Heidegger’s concept of truth or of Heidegger’s relationship to Husserl’s concept of truth is beyond the scope of this article.1 However, given the extensive and concordant secondary literature on this theme,2 there is no pressing need for such a presentation. Rather, I wish to limit myself to casting new light on Husserl and Heidegger’s concepts of truth from their understanding of untruth [Unwahrheit]—not just because the question concerning the essence of truth has always already been closely linked with the experience of untruth in philosophy but also because it was precisely the uneasiness over untruth as a central philosophical problem that, above all else, led Heidegger beyond Husserl’s concept of truth. It remains to be seen how integrating untruth into truth’s essential being then compels Heidegger to develop a new concept of falsehood, separate from this true untruth, a falsehood that is entirely and essentially distinct from the traditional understanding of incorrect judgment (i.e., judgment not in accordance with reality). The question concerning untruth brings to the foreground of the investigation a negativity that inhabits not only truth as it is phenomenologically understood but also a phenomenological concept of falsehood, that is to say, one thought on the basis of the appearance of things. The practical interest in understanding true untruth as concealedness and mystery, as well as understanding falsehood as disguising, mixing up [Vertauschung], and explicit pseudo-manifestation [Pseudo-Offenbarung], forms the point of departure for the following perspectives on Husserl’s and Heidegger’s understanding of truth.
I will take my guiding conception of untruth (as distinct from falsehood) from Husserl’s discussion, in the sixth logical investigation, of “empty” talk concerning a state of affairs of which the speaker has no originary intuitive experience. According to Husserl, these empty assertions belong to the group of unfulfilled, purely “signitive” intentions which also comprises the unfulfilled, partial intentions of external perception.3 Heidegger, in Being and Time, understands this empty talk as a comportment, one that he more specifically determines as an “absorption in something that has been said” on the basis of “hearsay of something that has been said.”4 One can say that for Husserl too this presentation of the essence of untruth through the example of undemonstrated assertions does not in any way mean he modelled his concept of truth on assertions. Heidegger’s critique of what he considers to be a derived or degenerate [entartet] concept of truth—developed solely in the context of predicative sentences—therefore does not target the position of the Logical Investigations. That is because, according to Husserl, the truth of an assertion is never ultimately founded on the truth of another assertion but always on an originary, intuitive experience that verifies and demonstrates it.5 Also, Logical Investigations already reveals the concept of an experiential type of truth, which Husserl extends to include cases of perception unmediated by language. It is only through the relation to an intuitive experience that assertions gain a relation to truth; and since we also find relations of emptiness and fulfillment and of greater or lesser intuitive fullness within intuitive experience,6 there are also experiential truths, which lack any relation to an assertion.
Considered more closely, Husserl does not presuppose the traditional concept of true predication [Aussagewahrheit] when he determines empty talk as untrue; quite to the contrary, he disavows it. If one focuses solely on whether an assertion “agrees” with reality (as per tradition), then an empty statement could just as well be true as it could be false. It is only “untrue” if one understands truth (phenomenologically) as demonstrating [Ausweisung] (the meaning of) an assertion through originary, intuitive experience. In that case, Husserl agrees with Heidegger that truth does not concern an “agreement of two things which are present-at-hand,”7 but rather concerns the result (which is always open to revision) of searching for an agreement between saying (or supposing) something and experiencing it, as it shows itself from itself, that is to say, as it is intuitively self-given. We can experience empty talk as untrue only if a relation to truth belongs in principle to each performance of speech [Vollzug des Redens]. Empty talk is therefore “un-true” (and not simply lacking any truth), because the truth claim residing within it has not been redeemed. It lacks the readiness to measure its contents directly against a falsifying or verifying experience of the state of affairs to which it refers, although it does not lack the possibility or even the obligation to do so. The statement or supposition may indeed be unintuitive—“empty” of any intuition of the thing—but it is not therefore barren of any relation to truth. For Husserl, it is evident that—just as empty talk is enlivened by an implicit truth claim—man’s entire life is oriented toward the cognition of truth, at least in principle. According to Husserl, the relation to truth, which is presupposed in the experience of empty talk as untruth, is founded in an interest in knowledge [Erkenntnisinteresse], which is never entirely lacking in man. Logical Investigations presents this interest in knowledge primarily as a pretension to truth, in need of justification, or as a desire [Begehren] for intuitive confirmation.8 According to Husserl, this interest in knowledge ultimately comes to fulfillment exclusively through the intuitive self-givenness of the meant thing itself. The degree of satisfaction this interest enjoys is equivalent to how close the thing comes to intuitive, confirmatory appearance, how much the act of knowing is able to accommodate all the richness and nuance of the object, or how close the knower comes to the thing itself.
Heidegger too assumed (with Aristotle) that a relation to truth belongs to all human comportment and that this relation amounts to the most essential determination of human existence [menschlichen Sein].9 This ubiquitous relation to truth, according to Heidegger, must not be understood as a mere faculty or ability but as an existential [existenziell] and fundamental mode of Dasein’s comportment that it never ceases to enact: “to understand [the truth] as something for the sake of which Dasein is.”10 All his life, Heidegger, like Aristotle before him, put off Plato’s question concerning a Good “beyond being” (and thus beyond truth), and he had nothing but suspicion for the (Husserlian) efforts to differentiate between theoretical, axiological, and practical truth as well as their corresponding modes of human comportment.
For the early Heidegger, truth always stems from a mode of comportment, which Aristotle called “aletheuein” and which Heidegger called “uncovering” [Entdecken].11 A comportment is uncovering if it “[takes] entities out of their hiddenness” and allows them to show themselves “in the ‘how’ of their uncoveredness,”12 that is, if it opens up or discloses the being with its relevance [das Seiende mit der ihm eigenen Relevanz]. Truth then is not something simply “there” as something available and present-at-hand; it is the result of human effort. Unlike Husserl, Heidegger does not understand this effort as a consciousness of fulfillment, which brings a supposition and the intuitive givenness of a thing into agreement, but rather as a comportment that overcomes the concealedness of a thing and “let[s the thing] be seen in [its] unhiddenness ([its] uncoveredness).”13 This comportment of opening up a previously closed understanding of a being is so characteristic of a human that the human’s mode of being must be understood, within fundamental ontology, as existential “disclosedness” [existentiale “Erschlossenheit”] or as “being-uncovering” [Entdeckendsein].14 Now if a vital relation to truth is inherent in untrue comportment, and if, according to Heidegger, this relation to truth is grounded in a disclosedness’s mode of being [Seinsweise einer Erschlossenheit], which manifests itself in the comportment of disclosing, then (untrue) “hearsay” must also be understood as a mode of disclosedness.15 Like “empty talk” in Husserl before, “hearsay” in Heidegger is also untrue in the sense of an unrealized openness to, or striving for, the truth.
In contrast to Husserl’s Logical Investigations, in Being and Time Heidegger barely touches on the difference between predicative and pre-predicative truth and not at all on the (synthetic) experience of an intuitive fulfillment with its degrees of evidence or truth. He devotes himself primarily to the examination of those modes of comportment that let beings show themselves as they are in truth. What interests him especially is how man’s being must be constituted if he is to be the privileged being who not only reveals [offenbart] the true being of beings but also, and above all, his own true being. One can (in agreement with the positive footnotes on Husserl) read Being and Time’s elucidations of the essence of truth (especially in §44c) as an attempt to give expression to the preconditions of verifying, fulfilling experiences, which were passed over silently in Logical Investigations. Thus, the most important preconditions do not so much concern man (who is constantly open to truth) in his modes of comportment or his specific interests but their grounding in Da-sein, whose mode of being is essentially always already under the spell of the manifestation [Offenbarung] of the true being of beings. Following this interpretation, we must understand the theory of truth in Being and Time as a (still transcendental) alternative to the phenomenology of the transcendentally constituting subject, which Husserl advanced in Ideas I as an answer to the question he neglected in Logical Investigations, namely, what is man’s mode of being such that he is capable of true knowledge?
This interpretation finds support in the fact that Heidegger does not speak of a transcendental subject constituting a thing’s true being but of a correlation or “correspondence” [Entsprechung] between Dasein’s comportment and things showing themselves as they are. Like Husserl, Heidegger emphasizes in Being and Time the dynamic or active effort of the subject (understood anew as Dasein),16 although this “activity” is already understood, even in the early Heidegger, as a sort-of-prompted response to the manifestation of the being of beings. This (intentional) comportment, described as an “uncovering” or (synonymously) as a “letting-show-itself” of the true being of beings is now grounded (transcendentally) in Dasein’s openness or “transcendence” or authentic “disclosedness” [“Erschlossenheit”] or “resoluteness” [“Entschlossenheit”]. Resoluteness, as Dasein’s most fundamental mode of being, is thus the condition of possibility for uncovering the true being of beings, considered from the standpoint of fundamental ontology. Since we must now understand this condition existentially as an actually performed mode of being (i.e., as a possibility that is always already and necessarily actualized), then disclosedness means that Dasein always exists with some relation to the truth: “What is primarily ‘true’—that is, uncovering—is Dasein. ‘Truth’ in the second sense does not mean Being-uncovering (uncovering), but Being-uncovered (uncoveredness).”17
Now what of Dasein’s comportment [daseinsmäßiges Verhalten], which does not uncover a being’s true being but rather ascribes to it a false being? And what are the fundamental-ontological conditions of such a distorted [verfälschenden] comportment, that is, Dasein’s mode of being wherein he mistakes the true being of things and (especially) his own true being? In the case of such a false comportment [Fehlverhalten], is Dasein’s being-in-the-truth (or its existing in relation to the truth) negated or only led in a false direction? And since Dasein is especially inclined to be mistaken about his own being, does this false comportment exhaust the whole scope of what “untruth” (as distinct from “hearsay”) means?
“Truth” in Logical Investigations is equivalent to “agreement,” more specifically, to an agreement between supposing, positing, or claiming that a state of affairs is so and so and its intuitive appearance or self-givenness as such. Insofar as this is a specifically phenomenological (and not traditional) concept of truth, Husserl determines the agreement as a phenomenon, which is grounded in the mode of givenness or appearance of a determinate supposition and a determinate state of affairs.18 The supposition is an act of consciousness, and as such it is always self-given as an experience (although not as an object of a perception)—self-given, incidentally, as already noted, not just as an intention but also as an experience enlivened by an interest in knowledge inclined toward truth. The state of affairs too must first be self-given so that the extent of its agreement with the supposition can come to intuitive givenness. Since the supposition can only be verified [bewahrheiten] in the thing’s intuitive mode of appearance, Husserl tellingly identifies truth with the experience of “evidence,”19 or the phenomenon of accordance with the phenomenon, or the experience of the supposition with the phenomenon of the self-given thing. As the phenomenon of agreement between a subjective and an objective phenomenon, truth has different facets and, according to the theory in Logical Investigations, it can be unfolded into four different concepts of truth.20 The agreement always reveals itself in the experience of an intuitive fulfillment of a supposition, which consciousness experiences through a corresponding appearance of the object. Husserl’s third concept of truth makes it particularly clear that a being can never be true in itself, that is, independent of its agreement with a supposition or claim. For Husserl, the appearing of a thing is not true but rather makes a supposition true. The mere appearing of a thing (without any relation to a supposition) is, for Husserl, not just untrue (like empty talk) but indeed lacks any relation to truth in general. Conversely, the knowing subject, with its interest in knowledge, can only actually (and not just potentially) stand in the truth, when it repeatedly tests its suppositions against the givenness of the things themselves.
Heidegger’s understanding of truth as Dasein’s “being-uncovering” and as the being’s “being-uncovered,”21 or as “unhiddenness,”22 still follows the Logical Investigation’s model of the theory of truth, despite his renunciation of the concepts of knowing and consciousness, and in spite of the characterization of Dasein as a subject and the thing as an object. In Being and Time Heidegger also holds that the appearing thing, in and of itself, cannot be true without a relation to an uncovering Dasein.23 However, if one accepts the position that Heidegger increasingly adopted himself—that is, that the mere appearing of a being can already be called true—then this is only possible because he came to understand the appearing as “un-hiddenness,” which is not the result of some effort on the part of Dasein to uncover or to “[take] entities out of their hiddenness,”24 but rather the result of the being’s own emerging out of hiddenness or its self-uncovering-being.
Already in the sixth logical investigation, Husserl’s specific phenomenological concept of truth corresponds to a specific phenomenological concept of falsehood. Like truth, falsehood must also make itself manifest, and it does this, according to Husserl, in the experience of nonfulfillment, or nonevidence, which reveals the nonagreement of the supposition with the supposed thing’s appearing. Husserl called this experience of nonfulfillment “disappointment,” and the nonagreement manifest therein he called “conflict.”25 The conflict shows itself in its own phenomenon, namely, disappointment, and Husserl specifies that this disappointment is the experience wherein a state of affairs shows itself to be (or appears as) “other” than it was supposed to be: I was wrong to think that “A [is] red, when it shows itself to be ‘in fact’ green.”26
As this quote shows, Husserl considered falsehood to be a mode or modification of “truth” and specifically as an untruth that is more intimately connected with truth than empty talk. Hence he follows Aristotle’s well-known theory, although he understands falsehood (consistent with his phenomenological concept of truth) as an experience of a nonagreement, a conflict that “we may say, presupposes a certain basis of agreement.”27 The experience of falsehood only comes to light when one seeks to establish an agreement between one’s own supposition and the self-given thing, but this attempt fails, already putting one on to a new path toward truth. Husserl rightly remarks that the experience of disappointment preserves within it the basic conditions of a synthesis of fulfillment, even as the object presents itself otherwise from the way we meant it.28 If the conflict between the supposition of the thing and the thing’s self-givenness were total, then the supposed thing would not be given at all, and thus my suppositions pertaining to it could neither be true nor false. Diverging slightly from Husserl, who defined “evidence” as the “ ‘experience’ of truth,”29 one could also say that the experience of disappointment (which shows that a supposed determination of the object is false) is an experience of evidence [Evidenzerlebnis] through and through and indeed an especially beneficial realization [Erkenntnis].
The description of untruth in the sense of falsehood in Being and Time still follows largely the model of Logical Investigations. Like Husserl (and Aristotle), Heidegger still understood falsehood (in which one misses [verfehlt] the sense of the being) as a mode or negative modification of the truth. If truth is understood as the interplay of Dasein’s uncovering-being and the being’s covered-being, then this suggests that untruth in the sense of falsehood is grounded in a covering-over comportment of Dasein. This miscomportment [Fehlverhalten] thoroughly modifies the being’s mode of appearing: “That which has been uncovered and disclosed stands in a mode in which it has been disguised and closed off.”30 If this covering up is nevertheless able to come to light as a failed [verfehltes] comportment, then it must be because the being’s true being still shines through its disguised and closed-off way of appearing, that is, in its appearing “in the mode of semblance.” For falsehood to reveal itself as such, then, illusion [Täuschung] must already give way to dis-illusion [Ent-täuschung]. It is necessary to experience a nonagreement, a conflict, and indeed this experience must not only concern the interrelation of Dasein’s comportment and the being’s self-showing but also—more exactly—the discrepancy between an uncovering and a covering comportment, on the one hand, and the discrepancy between the revelation and concealment of the being’s sense, on the other. Parallel to the truth-constituting, uncovering comportment, Heidegger is pursuing the existential-ontological foundation of the covering-over miscomportment [Fehltverhalten]. Authentic “disclosedness” [“Erschlossenheit”] or “resoluteness” [“Entschlossenheit”] accompanies “fallenness” as a mode of being of the Dasein who mistakes [verfehlt] the true being of beings and mistakes its own true being: “Because Dasein is essentially falling, its state of Being is such that it is in ‘untruth.’ ”31
Husserl’s exploration of falsehood’s conditions of possibility takes a different path—at least in Logical Investigations. Husserl places all his hopes in the investigation of possible or impossible meanings and compatible or incompatible objects as logical conditions of true and false knowledge.32 Considered more closely, this concerns the analytic and synthetic conditions of truth and falsehood, that is, the clarification of whether intuitive fulfillment is a priori and in principle possible or impossible, especially in the case of statements [Aussagen]. It is only in Husserl’s later work that this logical theory of truth, which investigates the “laws of authentic thinking,”33 is made complete by a transcendental logic of truth.34 One can find, however, already in the Freiburg lectures on logic of 1920/21 a phenomenological description of the modes of comportment that mistake or cover over the true sense of objects. Husserl here specifically mentions “distortion” [Ausmalung] as well as “mixing,” “overlapping,” “obscuring,” “fusion,” and “repression.”35
That Heidegger founds untruth (in the sense of falsehood) upon a disguising and closing-off comportment of Dasein, which in turn is existential-ontologically founded on Dasein’s fallen mode of being, still does not clarify how untruth can reveal itself as such. We have seen that, in order to describe this, Husserl appeals to “disappointment” as an experience of contrast and determines this as the experience of the truth of an untruth. Being and Time proceeds in an analogous way. A disguised being is un-coveringly covered over [entdeckend verdeckt]; it appears with the sheen of superficial evidence.36 Dasein is never completely and definitively ensnared by this lure of false evidence or untruth—at least when it comes to its own being—because it can, of course, forget but never actually lose its true being. The experience of false untruth as semblance-truth [Scheinwahrheit] is, for Heidegger, ultimately derived from the fact that Dasein is “in the truth and in untruth equiprimordially.”37 Dasein preserves—even in the fallenness which covers up its own true being—the possibility of a disclosing relationship to its own true being. Even in fallenness, the “voice of conscience” still calls.38 Even if a being should appear in a disguised or obscured way, the light of its true being sometimes shines through.
Interestingly, in Being and Time Heidegger does indeed give an account of truth as “unhiddenness” [Unverborgenheit] and yet still lacks the concept of a true hiddenness.39 For Heidegger, hiddenness is still synonymous with closedness and thus with falsehood or an untruth that mistakes [verfehlenden] true being. Nevertheless, insofar as this untrue self-hiding of true being [unwahre Sich-Verbergen des wahren Seins] stems from a covering-over comportment, it will always remain in principle open to the possibility of being uncovered in a disclosing comportment of Dasein. In Being and Time, therefore, not only is there no true hiddenness, there is also no absolute or definitive untrue hiddenness. The fact that (disclosed) truth is primarily the result of overcoming (covered) concealment or untrue hiddenness does not permit us to say that Being and Time already understands the authentic disclosure of truth as its simultaneous concealment or as a disclosure that is equiprimordial with a true hiddenness. Noting that Heidegger’s later theory of aletheia as “un-hiddenness” stems from a progressive unfolding of the concept “unhiddenness” as we find it in Being and Time cannot permit us to forget the differences between those accounts, as that would lead us into an anachronistic interpretation of his early magnum opus. In Being and Time, unhiddenness and hiddenness remain opposed concepts, much like the traditional concept of negation retains its validity there. Only his renewed reflection [Besinnung] on the alpha privatum of the Greek concept of truth leads Heidegger to think disclosedness and hiddenness through one another—not in a dialectical unity but rather a unity based on conflict.
One can still detect a reference (of which perhaps even Heidegger was not aware) to Husserl’s theory of truth from the sixth logical investigation in Heidegger’s later understanding of hiddenness, a conception of untruth that no longer has anything in common with untruth in the sense of “disguisedness and closedness.” In the sixth logical investigation, Husserl distinguished the case of a false cognition [Erkenntnis], which announces itself in the experience of a disappointment, from the case of a cognition that is indeed true but nonetheless incomplete. He understood this incomplete or “inadequate” cognition as an experience where the supposition about a thing and its intuitive givenness, even though not in conflict with one another, nevertheless only partially agree with one another.40 This is a genuine consciousness of fulfillment, but it is the kind where the thing, as it appears, intuitively fulfills the correlated supposition only partially. As Husserl would say: the supposition reaches “beyond” the scope of the thing’s actual self-givenness.41 According to Husserl, then, there are more or less complete agreements between the supposition and the self-given thing, that is, “gradations” and “graded series of fulfillment”42 and thus “degrees and levels of evidence” as well.43 There is adequate and inadequate truth.44
Each supposition or perception directed at an external object “oversteps” the thing’s essentially adumbrative and (therefore) always incomplete self-givenness insofar as the supposition concerns the whole thing, which can never come to full appearance. Nevertheless, the intuitive fulfillment of such a supposition can become richer as more and more of the thing steadily appears through perceptual processes, as one draws nearer and nearer to the thing’s complete self-givenness. In a supposition concerning a spatial thing, those determinations that are not (yet) fulfilled through adumbrative appearances need not, of course, be false. They are like dependent moments of a supposition that intuitive fulfillment has already confirmed as being more likely true than untrue, although the truth of those moments has yet to be proven and the possibility of their turning out to be false cannot, in principle, be excluded. These are essentially distinct from the case of empty talk, in that the currently unfolding course of experience not only motivates their pretension to truth but also supports it.
Although the Heideggerian vocabulary of hiddenness and closedness remains foreign to Husserl,45 one can also say that the intuitively empty or unfulfilled “partial intentions” within a consciousness of fulfillment are related to the aspects of a thing that have not yet to come to appearance or that remain hidden.46 The unfulfillment or untruth of the partial intentions is so closely connected with the already displayed truth of the rest of the supposition’s moments that it would be better to designate them as potential truths. This type of untruth, in the sense of potential truth, must be distinguished just as much from the untruth of empty talk as from false untruth, and should rather be more precisely designated as hiddenness, as that which has not yet come to appearance [einem noch nicht in Erscheinung Getretenen] or an untruth that belongs essentially to what appears and what has already appeared. Putting a finer point on it, one could say that where a supposition is only partially fulfilled, the supposed thing simultaneously shows and conceals itself, or the shown truth is connected to the untruth of a withdrawing revelation. If the appearing of a thing is less an accomplished fact than it is a promise, then what reveals itself remains mysterious. Given the essential inadequacy of all experience of things [Dingerfahrung], which Husserl always emphasized, this permits us to understand that the appearing of a thing is, at the same time, a concealing. The more that shows the more it hides, since each thoughtful response [denkenden Eingehen] to the thing intensifies its ultimately unsolvable mystery.
Such an account essentially agrees with the new understanding of hiddenness as true untruth, as Heidegger first articulated it in his 1930 summer semester lectures and then expressly worked out in his 1930 article “On the Essence of Truth.”47 The first precondition of this new understanding of truth is that we no longer identify hiddenness with false untruth, nor with closedness or disguisedness. The second precondition is that false untruth is no longer grounded in fallenness, that is, in one of Dasein’s modes of being, wherein Dasein misunderstands, disguises, forgets, or misses its own being. The most important consequence of this new understanding of truth (as un-hiddenness) is that the understanding of falsehood as “unhiddenness [where] distortion predominates, i.e., where something is, but where this something presents itself as what it is not”48 expands the concept to include a pseudos, which can no longer be blamed on a false comportment of Dasein. A second consequence is that it becomes conceivable for Dasein’s own true being to withdraw in a way that is not grounded in a fallenness and thus does not imply any self-deception. This new determination of untruth arises from the insight that unhiddenness and hiddenness—and thus truth—do not primarily concern the uncovering of beings but the unconcealment [Entbergung] of their modes of being—regardless of whether or not it concerns a being such as Dasein [daseinsmäßiges Seiende].
Already in Heidegger’s lecture course from the summer semester of 1930, the contribution that an active comportment of Dasein makes to the disclosedness of the true being of beings is diminished. “Unhiddenness” is no longer understood as a kind of “robbery,” that “snatch[es beings] out of their hiddenness”49—as it was in Being and Time—but rather designates the mode of being of something that “has been brought out of its hiddenness [“der Verborgenheit enthoben” ist].” “Uncoveredness” becomes “de-concealment” [Ent-borgenheit] and the role of “man” is to “preserve and secure [Wahren und Verwahren]” this.50 Parallel to this new understanding of unhiddenness, there is also a modification to the meaning of “hiddenness.” Unlike in Being and Time, here Heidegger clearly sets hiddenness apart from “distortion” [Verstelltheit] and falsehood, but he does not designate it as “untruth” or as an essential aspect of the truth [Wesensmoment].51 Finally, in this lecture course, even “distortion” is no longer a false comportment of Dasein, or something to be blamed on Dasein’s fallenness; instead it concerns the way a being gives itself, in that it pregives itself as being something which in truth it is not at all.52 Hence a new possibility opens to ascribe falsehood to a being in cases where Dasein does not allow itself to be deceived or play any immediate role in the genesis of the illusory appearance. With this new concept of falsehood, philosophy finds its way back to the everyday meaning of “false.” For instance, we speak of “false gold” when a deceit is exposed, and we recognize the metal as worthless. On the basis of this new phenomenological understanding of falsehood as the pseudo-unconcealment of a pseudo-being, we can also clarify the power of the false to resist unveiling [erklärt sich auch die durch keine Enthüllung zu brechende Macht des Falschen].
According to Heidegger’s own assertion in 1930, the article “On the Essence of Truth” takes a decisive step beyond both the above-mentioned lecture course as well as Being and Time. Here, Heidegger not only thinks of truth as “unhiddenness” through the Greek word aletheia as deconcealment [Entborgenheit] but he also determines it through the Greek notion of physis as “upsurgent presencing [aufgehende(s) Anwese(n)].”53 The paper also clarifies the essence of that which finally unconceals itself in this unhiddenness. This essence does not concern an individual being (whether it be a being like Dasein or not), nor does it concern one of its modes of being (be it authentic or inauthentic); instead it concerns “beings as a whole.”54 Parallel to this is a shift in the understanding of Dasein’s contribution to the event of the unconcealment of the true being of beings. The talk of a violent “robbery” gives way to “letting” the event of unconcealment happen, or “letting things be [Seinlassen].”55 Even the “disclosing” of the true being of beings is no longer thought on the basis of an uncovering comportment of Dasein; rather Heidegger describes it as “openness”56 to the event of unconcealment, which no longer has its ultimate foundation in one of Dasein’s authentic comportments or modes of being. Thus, it is not as if Dasein had no role to play in the event. But it corresponds to an authentic mode of existing that no longer fits with the vocabulary of “resoluteness.” In determining the authentic mode of being that responds to the unconcealment of true being, Heidegger places the concept of “freedom” alongside the concept of “letting-be” from “On the Essence of Truth” and other writings from the 1930s: “Ek-sistence, rooted in truth as freedom, is exposure to the disclosedness of beings as such.”57 More carefully considered, Dasein possesses neither freedom nor truth but the truth as freedom possesses or commands Dasein.58
Heidegger’s own peculiar concept of “freedom” has at least this in common with the more familiar conception, namely, that it concerns a freedom “to” [zu] and a freedom “from” [von]. As regards the first, Heidegger speaks of a “being free for [zum] what is opened up in an open region.”59 Now, however, Heidegger describes “the concealing of what is concealed” as an inseparable, essential moment of this unconcealment,60 understood as being open in an open region. If what is hidden belongs essentially to what is open, then this can only mean that what appears to a Dasein characterized by “openness” will remain immersed in a depth-dimension of mystery. If we follow Heidegger and determine truth as unconcealment, we must then designate mystery’s own mode of concealing as “untruth.” However, because mystery’s concealment is supposed to belong to the essence of unconcealment, conversely, we cannot avoid acknowledging that “untrue” mysterious concealment belongs to the essence of truth. What we earlier designated as “true untruth” and distinguished from untruth as “falsehood,” Heidegger now calls “un-truth proper [eigentliche Un-wahrheit]” which he identifies with mystery, considered as the “proper counter-essence of truth [das eigentliche Un-wesen der Wahrheit].”61
Such a paradoxical understanding of truth is only intelligible if, first, the supposed co-belonging of the unconcealed and concealed preserves their difference. The unconcealed and the concealed cannot be the same with respect to their mode of givenness or mode of being. Second, this theory of the essence and nonessence of truth can only satisfy the demands of a specifically phenomenological concept of truth on the condition that not only does the unconcealed reveal itself but the concealed as well, that is, the concealed must announce itself in the unconcealed. “On the Essence of Truth” fulfills the first condition by pointing to the ontological difference between a being and “beings as a whole”: “Precisely because letting-be always lets beings be in a particular comportment that relates to them and thus discloses them, it conceals beings as a whole.”62 The second condition, then, would only be satisfied if there is a mode of unconcealing or letting-be of beings, which at the same time allows the mystery of beings as a whole to shine through, which “lets it in” or does not “forget” it. Heidegger’s text clearly draws our attention to how the mystery of beings as a whole always appears alongside the self-showing of a determinate being,63 but that man may or may not let in this appearing of the concealed as concealed. This letting in of the mystery of beings as a whole constitutes the essence of human freedom or, more precisely, the essence of “Da-sein,” who “preserves the first and broadest un-disclosedness, un-truth proper.”64 This proper un-truth of concealment is the origin of all truth, it is “older” than Dasein and Dasein’s letting concealment be.65 Dasein can only preserve it but not produce it. Taken as pure hiddenness, “un-truth proper” is not, however, a “truth” or “un-hiddenness,” and as such Being and Time’s thesis that there is no truth without Dasein remains valid despite the new understanding of the un-truth of the concealed.66
Heidegger rethinks Dasein’s “letting-be”—wherein a being reveals its true being—on the basis of the concealment of beings as a whole or, more precisely, on the basis of the unconcealment of this concealment. “Freedom” is first and foremost the free “openness” to the mystery that circumscribes each revelation of a being. This freedom, however, remains a freedom from, namely, the liberation from the “forgottenness of the mystery” or “forgottenness of concealment.”67 Such a forgetting of concealment is indeed a human comportment, but it is one that does not arise “from mere human incapacity and negligence” but rather has its source in concealment itself,68 that is, in the “proper counter-essence of truth.” What holds for the forgetting of beings as a whole (i.e., for un-truth proper) also holds for covering up [Verdecken] an individual being’s true being (i.e., for untruth in the sense of falsehood). False uncovering, which consists in “not let[ting] beings be the beings that they are and as they are” and which “cover[s] up and distort[s]” beings, “must derive from the essence of truth”69—and thus not from the essence of Dasein as fallen. Thus, it is certainly no coincidence that Heidegger replaces “fallenness” [Verfallens] with the term “errancy” in “On the Essence of Truth.”70 Errancy and fallenness share a common “turning toward what is readily available,” but this turning toward is now understood as a “turning away from the mystery,”71 which again does not have its ground in the being of Dasein but rather in the concealment of the mystery, that is, an event that as the proper counter-essence of truth whose essence it always codetermines. If the concealment that belongs to truth only shows itself insofar as it conceals, then it is no wonder that Dasein forgets or overlooks, first and foremost, the mystery that belongs to the essence of truth.
The most important difference between the theory of truth in “On the Essence of Truth” and the one in Being and Time does not so much lie in the transition of Dasein’s mode of being as “disclosedness” to “letting-be” or from “fallenness” to “errancy”; rather it lies in the introduction of the concept of “mystery” as a concealment or un-truth proper that essentially belongs to the unconcealment of truth. In this respect, Heidegger’s description of Dasein’s “turning toward and from” true being, that is, its “to-and-fro,” has not changed much from the one in Being and Time.72 The essential difference between the two texts rather results from the foundation of these true and false modes of Dasein’s being and comportment in the unconcealing concealment of the truth of the “Being of beings.”73 In “preserving” the mystery of being and in forgetting it, Heidegger affirms that true being’s unconcealment depends on man, but human comportment can no longer be understood as the transcendental condition of truth’s emergence. The appearing of a being’s true being has its condition in its own happening or in a hiddenness, which underlies all unconcealment of truth as un-truth proper.
We can interpret Heidegger’s revaluation of hiddenness as a coherent development of his understanding of truth on the model of the Greek aletheia that he already laid out in his earlier masterpiece, although in “On the Essence of Truth,” Heidegger frees hiddenness from Being and Time’s merely negative description of it as undisclosedness or distortion. Yet one cannot deny that despite its fidelity to a phenomenological determination of truth and its mystery, this development of Heidegger’s thinking takes a further step away from Husserl’s thinking. Now indeed one can call a thing’s intuitive self-givenness “true” according to Husserl’s theory in Logical Investigations, but its truth is derived from its ability to verify a subjective supposition or assertion. This intuitive self-givenness of a thing for Husserl (in opposition to the later Heidegger) can never be untrue; rather at most it can conflict with or falsify a supposition about it. For Husserl, truth may indeed concern the phenomenon of an agreement between noetic and noematic phenomena, but the primordial phenomenon [Grundphänomen] thus remains the intentional supposition of a conscious subject, which can comply with the appearing thing or set itself against it. It is not as though the phenomenon of the knowing-subject’s openness to the way things show themselves intuitively were completely foreign to Husserl. Rather, the meant thing’s intuitive self-givenness is the ultimate criterion of truth for Husserl. Yet what shows itself does not open its own framework for an understanding proper to it; rather, it places itself in the pregiven framework of a subjective supposition, which it then either confirms or disappoints. In Heidegger’s “On the Essence of Truth,” however, the primordial phenomenon of truth is the way that a being’s true being removes itself from hiddenness and steps into unhiddenness. Dasein’s freedom, to either turn toward or away from the event of truth, first arises from the presuppositionless event of such a (mysterious) unconcealment. We can no longer speak of a confirmation or disappointment of a preconceived opinion, but we may still speak of a movement, one that Husserl never ceased to strongly emphasize, namely, a mutual rapprochement between a thing that never completely appears all at once and a human comportment that allows itself to be taught by the thing’s appearing. We can understand this mutual rapprochement between human comportment and thingly appearance as an approach toward an agreement, but from Heidegger’s standpoint (even the early Heidegger), we can no longer understand this agreement as a synthesis—neither as a synthesis of identification nor as a synthesis of intuitive fulfilment. Furthermore, we could, with Husserl, understand hiddenness as an essential moment of (inadequate) truth, and thus ascribe falsehood to a rash neglect of this hiddenness, but we cannot make—as we can with Heidegger—the understanding of falsehood’s true being into a condition of access to the truth. For Husserl, falsehood is the negation of truth, and thus truth cannot be understood as the overcoming of a double—false and true—hiddenness.
Heidegger, even in his later writings and lecture courses, held on to this “negative” understanding of truth and “positive” understanding of falsehood. He thus lands himself in the predicament of wanting to ground false untruth in the proper un-truth of hiddenness, while still maintaining a distinction between them. Heidegger’s lecture course of the 1942/43 winter semester is representative of this line of inquiry; I will conclude with this text which bears the (unfitting) title Parmenides, published as volume 54 of the Gesamtausgabe. This lecture course, which is remarkable by any standard, provides detailed phenomenological descriptions of true and false beings’ modes of appearance as well as the appropriate [angemessenen] human acquaintance with mystery—all of which “On the Essence of Truth” only formally designates.74 Here I will limit myself to a brief presentation of Heidegger’s analysis of the false being’s mode of appearing and I will put aside his historical-conceptual [begriffsgeschichtlichen] investigation of the transformation of meaning that occurred in the transition from the Greek pseudos to the Latin falsum.
In his 1942/43 lecture course, Heidegger was no longer satisfied with merely pointing to the origin of untruth (in the sense of falsehood) in un-truth proper (in the sense of hiddenness and mystery). He now grounds their relationship by proving that neither form of untruth implies a negation of truth and showing that both forms of untruth derive from two forms of hiddenness, the first of which is explicitly manifest as true unhiddenness and the second as false unhiddenness.75 What I have termed “true untruth” is called “lethe” in Greek, and “untrue untruth” is called “pseudos.”76 Both forms of untruth have an essential relation to truth, and since truth is understood as the Greek aletheia, that is, as unhiddenness, both forms of hiddenness have their own kind of unconcealing or appearance. The mode of appearance of the “secret in the mystery [Geheime(n) des Geheimnissvollen]” as a form of (proper) hiddenness that essentially belongs to the essence of unhiddenness, is “characterized by its insignificance, in virtue of which the mystery is an open one.… The ‘open mystery’ in the genuine and strict sense … occurs where the concealing of the mysterious is simply experienced as concealedness and is lodged in a historically arisen reticence.”77 How, then, is one supposed to conceive of pseudos or false untruth’s mode of appearance, since it differs from mystery as lethe? How does the unhiddenness of a false hiddenness differ from the mystery’s true unhiddenness? How can false concealment appear in such a way that one would take it to be a true unhiddenness? How does the false, usurped form of unhiddenness betray itself in the appearance of the pseudos? How does one find one’s way back from falsehood to truth as genuine unhiddenness?
To characterize false untruth, or improper concealment [uneigentlichen Verbergung], in his 1942/43 lecture course, Heidegger remains faithful to the already familiar vocabulary of “covering [Verdecken],” “dissembling [Verstellen],” “veiling [Verhüllen],” and he adds to their ranks the new term “hiding [Verhehlen].”78 Heidegger understands this false concealment as a specific form of appearing, that is, as a false unhiddenness: “The covering involved in pseudos, however, is always at the same moment an unveiling, a showing, and a bringing into appearance.”79 Heidegger’s earlier texts designated these pseudos-appearances as “mere seeming [Schein]” and determined this mere seeming as an event “where something is, but where this something presents itself as what it is not.”80 The 1942/43 lecture course notably abandons the use of negation in trying to determine mere seeming and replaces the expression “what it is not” with “appear[ing] differently than it is ‘in truth’ ”: “insofar as dissembling not only sets ‘something else’ before [us] … but lets something appear otherwise than it is ‘in truth,’ dissembling also unveils and hence is a kind of disclosure.”81 The main focus of Heidegger’s account of the difference between a true and a false unhiddenness shifts from the “as what” something appears to be (or not to be), to the “how” of its appearing, or to its “kind of disclosure.” If one thinks of truth on this basis, how a mystery discloses itself while remaining concealed, that is, on the basis of its “inconspicuous openness [unscheinbaren Offenheit]” and its “retrieval in secrecy [Bergung in Verschwiegenheit],” then false appearances must be given in a conspicuous mode of pseudo-revelation that sticks out like a sore thumb. Unlike the earlier texts, here Heidegger is no longer satisfied with the remark that “one” lets such pseudo-disclosures go unnoticed and is thus “turned toward what is accessible”; instead he gives expression to the ontological-historical conditions of the triumphant march that false seeming celebrates in our culture.
Our culture hardly admits any more that “what is closed off” [das Verschlossene] (as it is still called in Being and Time) makes itself known as such. Our culture covers over the hiddenness of the mysterious as much as it does the distorted superficiality of false seeming (and thus all attentiveness to the “how” of appearing) with a massive layer of information that is supposedly factual, since it is “objective.” The relentless production of ever new things and new information about them not only conceals the hiddenness of a mysterious world but also systematically conceals its own work of concealment. Once our culture loses its sense for the mysterious and its inconspicuous openness, it will also completely fail to understand how promoting the hasty disclosure and public display of anything and everything is in truth bound to a process of massive repression and concealment. Foucault—like the true Heideggerian that he was—devoted exemplary analyses to this process of concealment, on the basis of which the compulsion toward unlimited public-ization [Ver-öffentlichung] and public supervision [öffentlichen Kontrolle] first becomes intelligible, primarily through the example of how our culture deals with human sexuality.
If this chronico-historical [zeitgeschichtliche] and ontological-historical [seinsgeschichtliche] diagnosis is correct, then this means that, for contemporary humanity, more than ever, any direct access to truth as the unconcealment of the mystery of being is irremediably blocked. On the basis of this tragic insight it becomes more understandable why Heidegger, in the lecture course of 1942/43, would hold that the origin of untrue untruth is true untruth, while nevertheless at the same time emphasizing that already with the Greeks the access to true hiddenness necessarily leads to the examination of untrue unhiddenness, in the sense of falsehood.82 The contemporary un-Greek man’s openness to the event of the unconcealment of truth as mysterious unhiddenness only amounts to the effort of “de-concealing” [Enthehlen] a “concealed” hiddenness [“verhehlten” Verborgenheit].83 The “letting-be” of true being’s unconcealment indeed remains a “gift” [Geschenk], but not one that strikes us like a lightning bolt out of the blue. Philosophical thought and artistic creativity must first reawaken in us the sense for the meaning of the hidden and show us the path toward a distinction between true and false hiddenness. The question concerning the essence of truth, as the question of the truth of being, can no longer spare—indeed less so than ever—the arduous detour of questioning after the true essence of the false and its ontological-historically conditioned way of appearing in a culture of pseudo-phenomena of pseudo-truths of pseudo-things:84 “It could indeed be so difficult to find the truth, and therefore we find it so rarely, because we do not know, and do not want to know, anything about the essence of the false.”85
Translated by Patrick Eldridge
NOTES
1. The most important texts for Heidegger’s concept of truth include: M. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, ed. F.-W. von Herrmann, in Gesamtausgabe, Bd. 2 (Frankfurt a. M.: Vittorio Klostermann, 1977) [translated by J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson Being and Time (Oxford: Blackwell, 1962)], §44; Einführung in die phänomenologische Forschung, ed. F.-W. von Herrmann, in Gesamtausgabe, Bd. 17 (Frankfurt a. M.: Vittorio Klostermann, 1994) [translated by D. Dahlstrom as Introduction to Phenomenological Research (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005)], chap. 1 and §50; Grundbegriffe der aristotelischen Philosophie, ed. M. Michalski, in Gesamtausgabe, Bd. 18 (Frankfurt a. M.: Vittorio Klostermann, 2002) [translated by R. Metcalf and M. Tanzer as Basic Concepts of Aristotelian Philosophy (Bloominton: Indiana University Press, 2009)], §22; Platon: Sophistes, ed. I. Schüßler, in Gesamtausgabe, Bd. 19 (Frankfurt a. M.: Vittorio Klostermann, 1992) [translated by R. Rojcewicz and A. Schuwer as Plato’s Sophist (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997)]; Prolegomena zur Geschichte des Zeitbegriffs, ed. P. Jaeger, in Gesamtausgabe, Bd. 20 (Frankfurt a. M.: Vittorio Klostermann, 1979) [translated by T. Kisiel as History of the Concept of Time: Prolegomena (Bloomington: Indiana Unviersity Press, 1985)], §31c; Logik: Die Frage nach der Wahrheit, ed. W. Biemel, in Gesamtausgabe, Bd. 21 (Frankfurt a. M.: Vittorio Klostermann, 1976) [translated by T. Sheehan as Logic: The Question of Truth (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016)]; Grundbegriffe der antiken Philosophie, ed. F.-K. Blust, in Gesamtausgabe, Bd. 22 (Frankfurt a. M.: Vittorio Klostermann, 1993) [translated by R. Rojcewicz as Basic Concepts of Ancient Philosophy (Bloomington: Indiana Unviersity Press, 2007)], §59; Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Logik im Ausgang von Leibniz, ed. K. Held, in Gesamtausgabe, Bd. 26 (Frankfurt a. M.: Vittorio Klostermann, 1978) [translated by M. Heim as The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984); Einleitung in die Philosophie, ed. O. Saame and I. Saame-Speidel, in Gesamtausgabe, Bd. 27 (Frankfurt a. M.: Vittorio Klostermann, 1996); Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik: Welt—Endlichkeit—Einsamkeit, ed. F.-W. von Herrmann, in Gesamtausgabe, Bd. 29/30 (Frankfurt a. M.: Vittorio Klostermann, 1983) [translated by W. McNeill and N. Walker as The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995)], §§71–73; Vom Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit. Einleitung in die Philosophie, ed. H. Tietjen, in Gesamtausgabe, Bd. 31 (Frankfurt a. M.: Vittorio Klostermann, 1982) [translated by T. Sadler as The Essence of Human Freedom: An Introduction to Philosophy (London: Continuum, 2002)]; Vom Wesen der Wahrheit: Zu Platons Höhlengleichnis und Theätet, ed. H. Mörchen, in Gesamtausgabe, Bd. 34 (Frankfurt a. M.: Vittorio Klostermann, 1988); Sein und Wahrheit, Teil 1, Die Grundfrage der Philosophie and Teil 2, Vom Wesen der Wahrheit, ed. H. Tietjen, Gesamtausgabe, Bd. 36–37 (Frankfurt a. M.: Vittorio Klostermann, 2001) [translated by G. Fried and R. Polt as Being and Truth (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015)]; Beiträge zur Philosophie: Vom Ereignis, ed. F.-W. von Herrmann, in Gesamtausgabe, Bd. 65 (Frankfurt a. M.: Vittorio Klostermann, 1989) [traslated by R. Rojcewicz and D. Vallega-Neu as Contributions to Philosophy: Of the Event (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012)]; Besinnung, ed. F.-W. von Herrmann, in Gesamtausgabe, Bd. 66 (Frankfurt a. M.: Vittorio Klostermann, 1997) [translated by P. Emad and T. Kalary as Mindfulness (London: Continuum, 2006)]; Parmenides, ed. M. S. Frings, in Gesamtausgabe, Bd. 54 (Frankfurt a. M.: Vittorio Klostermann, 1982) [translated by R. Rojcewicz and A. Schuwer as Parmenides (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992)]; Wegmarken, ed. F.-W. von Herrmann, in Gesamtausgabe, Bd. 9 (Frankfurt a. M.: Vittorio Klostermann, 1976, 2004) [translated by W. McNeil as Pathmarks (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998)]; Vorträge und Aufsätze, ed. F.-W. von Herrmann, in Gesamtausgabe, Bd. 7 (Frankfurt a. M.: Vittorio Klostermann, 2000); Holzwege, ed. F.-W. von Herrmann, in Gesamtausgabe, Bd. 5 (Frankfurt a. M.: Vittorio Klostermann, 1977) [translated by J. Youn and K. Haynes as Off the Beaten Track (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002)].
2. The most influential and still current standard monograph is E. Tugendhat, Der Wahrheitsbegriff bei Husserl und Heidegger (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1970). D. Dahlstrom’s Heidegger’s Concept of Truth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001) is especially commendable for its consideration of Heidegger’s texts only recently made available in volumes of the Gesamtausgabe. Other texts worth recommending include J.-F. Courtine, “Le préconcept de la phénoménologie et la problématique de la vérité dans Sein und Zeit,” in Heidegger et la phénoménologie, ed. J.-F. Courtine (Paris: Vrin, 1990), 349–379; C.-F. Gethmann, Dasein: Erkennen und Handeln: Heidegger im phänomenologischen Kontext (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1993); F.-E. Schürch, “Le sens de la négativité dans l’aletheia. Heidegger et les deux voiles,” Revue philosophique de Louvain 106 (2008): 304–329; F.-W. von Herrmann, Hermeneutische Phänomenologie des Daseins. Ein Kommentar zu “Sein und Zeit,” vol. 3 (Frankfurt a. M.: Klostermann, 2008); R. Bernet, “Intention und Erfüllung, Evidenz und Wahrheit,” in Edmund Husserl: Logischen Untersuchungen, ed. V. Mayer (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2008), 189–208.
3. E. Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, Zweiter Band, Untersuchungen zur Phänomenologie und Theorie der Erkenntnis, ed. U. Panzer (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1984), 586–592 [translated by J. N. Findlay as Logical Investigations, 2 vols. (London: Routledge, 1970), 710–715].
4. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, §44b; 296 [266–267].
5. Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, 2:599–606 [722–728], where Husserl introduces the distinctions between mediate and immediate, as well as authentic and inauthentic fulfillment.
6. On the “gradations of fullness,” see Husserl, 2:610–614 [731–735]; on the “graded series of fulfilment” in external perception, see Husserl, 2:614–631 [735–748].
7. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 299 [267].
8. In the sixth investigation of the Logische Untersuchungen Husserl writes that an empty “meaning intention … is as it were desirous of [its object]” (2:605 [2:726]), is aware of its “privation,” that is, it is “in need of fullness” (2:607–608 [2:728–729]), and that without intuitive fulfilment it remains “unsatisfied” (2:567 [695]).
9. Cf. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 299 [269]: “Dasein, as constituted by disclosedness, is essentially in the truth.”
10. Heidegger, 301 [270].
11. Heidegger, 288 [260].
12. Heidegger, 290 [262].
13. Heidegger, 290 [262].
14. Heidegger, 301 [271].
15. Heidegger, 295 [265–266].
16. Cf. Heidegger, 294 [265]: “Truth (uncoveredness) is something that must always first be wrested from entities. Entities get snatched out of their hiddenness. The factical uncoveredness of anything is always, as it were, a kind of robbery.”
17. Heidegger, 292 [263].
18. Cf. Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, 2:566 [694]: “In this transitional experience, the mutual belongingness of the two acts, the act of meaning, on the one hand, and the intuition which more or less corresponds to it, on the other, reveals its phenomenological roots.”
19. Husserl, 2:650–651 [764–765].
20. Husserl, 2:651–656 [765–770
21. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 220 [263].
22. Cf. Heidegger, 290 [263]: “letting [entities] be seen in their unhiddenness (their uncoveredness).”
23. Cf. Heidegger, 300 [270]: “Because the kind of Being that is essential to truth is of the character of Dasein, all truth is relative to Dasein’s Being.”
24. Heidegger, 290 [262].
25. Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, 2:574–576 [701–702].
26. Husserl, 2:575 [702].
27. Husserl, 2:575 [702].
28. Cf. Husserl, 2:575 [702]: “Each conflict presupposes something which directs its intention to the object of the conflicting act; only a synthesis of fulfilment can give it this direction.”
29. Husserl, 2:652 [2:766].
30. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 293 [264].
31. Heidegger, 294 [264].
32. Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, 2:632–641 [749–756].
33. Husserl, 2:716–720 [820–824].
34. E. Husserl, Formale und transzendentale Logik: Versuch einer Kritik der logischen Vernunft, ed. P. Janssen (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974) [translated by D. Cairns as Formal and Transcendental Logic (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1977)].
35. E. Husserl, Analysen zur passiven Synthesis: Aus Vorlesungs- und Forschungsmanuskripten 1918–1926, ed. M. Fleischer (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1966), 78–83, 192–200 [translated by A. Steinbock as Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Syntheses: Lectures on Transcendental Logic (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2001), 121–126, 243–251].
36. Cf. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 293–294 [264]: “Being towards entities has not been extinguished, but it has been uprooted. Entities have not been completely hidden; they are precisely the sort of thing that has been uncovered, but at the same time they have been disguised. They show themselves, but in the mode of semblance.”
37. Heidegger, 303 [272] and also already in §44b (295 [265]).
38. Cf. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, §§54–60.
39. Heidegger, 290 [262].
40. Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, 2:646–651 [761–765].
41. Husserl, 2:574–575 [701–702].
42. Husserl, 2:610–616 [731–736].
43. Husserl, 2:651 [765].
44. Husserl, 2:646–650 [761–764].
45. Regarding Heidegger’s expression “But only insofar as Dasein has been disclosed has it also been closed off” (Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 294 [265], Husserl remarked in the margins of his own copy: “Witty, but self-evident, when properly boiled down” [my translation—PE].
46. Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, 2:574–575 [701–702].
47. See M. Heidegger, Vom Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit, 88 [62]. M. Heidegger, “Vom Wesen der Wahrheit (1930),” in Wegmarken, 177–202 [136–154].
48. Heidegger, Vom Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit, 91 [64].
49. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 294 [265].
50. Heidegger, Vom Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit, 90 [64].
51. Cf. Heidegger, 91 [64]: “Untruth is not just hiddenness, but distortion.”
52. Cf. Heidegger, 91 [64]: “distortion … where something is, but where this something presents itself as what it is not.”
53. Heidegger, “Vom Wesen der Wahrheit (1930),” 189–190 [145].
54. Heidegger, 189 [145].
55. Heidegger, 188, passim [144, passim].
56. Heidegger, 184–185 [142].
57. Heidegger, 189 [145].
58. Cf. Heidegger, 191 [146]: “However, because ek-sistent freedom as the essence of truth is not a property of human beings; because on the contrary humans ek-sist … only as the property of this freedom.”
59. Heidegger, 186 [142].
60. Heidegger, 194 [148].
61. Heidegger, 194 [148].
62. Heidegger, 193 [148].
63. Heidegger, 194 [148]: “it happens that concealing appears as what is first of all concealed.”
64. Heidegger, 194 [148].
65. Cf. Heidegger, 193–194 [148]: “The concealment of beings as a whole, un-truth proper, is older … than letting-be itself, which in disclosing already holds concealed and comports itself toward concealing.”
66. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 300 [270].
67. Heidegger, “Vom Wesen der Wahrheit (1930),” 195, 197 [149, 150].
68. Heidegger, 191 [146].
69. Heidegger, 191 [146].
70. Heidegger, 196 [150].
71. Heidegger, 196 [150].
72. Heidegger, 196 [150].
73. Heidegger, 198 [151].
74. Cf. Rudolf Bernet, “Le secret selon Heidegger et ‘La lettre volée’ de Poe,” Archives de Philosophie 68 (2005): 379–400.
75. Martin Heidegger, Parmenides, 30–37 [20–25].
76. Heidegger, 42–44 [29–30].
77. Heidegger, 93 [63].
78. Heidegger, 45, 47 [30, 32].
79. Heidegger, 45 [30].
80. Heidegger, Vom Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit, 91 [64].
81. Heidegger, Parmenides, 64–65 [44].
82. Cf. Heidegger, 32 [22]: “If for the Greeks the counter-essence to unconcealedness is falsity and accordingly truth is unfalsity, then concealedness must be determined on the basis of falsity. If, in addition to this, concealedness permeates the essence of unconcealedness, then the enigma arises that in the Greek sense the essence of truth receives its character from the essence of falsity.”
83. Heidegger, 55 [37].
84. Heidegger, 64 [43–44]: “And the essence of the false is not itself something false. It is so far removed from that that the essence of the false might even participate in what is most essential to the essence of the true.”
85. Heidegger, 64 [44].