1

heidegger and unconcealment truth, language, and history

By Mark A. Wrathall

This book includes ten essays that trace the notion of unconcealment
as it develops from Martin Heidegger’s early writings to his later work,
shaping his philosophy of truth, language, and history. Unconcealment
is the idea that what entities are depends on the conditions that allow
them to manifest themselves. This concept, central to Heidegger’s
work, also applies to worlds in a dual sense: first, a condition of entities
manifesting themselves is the existence of a world; and second, worlds
themselves are disclosed. The unconcealment or disclosure of a world
is the most important historical event, and Heidegger believes there
have been a number of quite distinct worlds that have emerged and
disappeared in history. Heidegger’s thought as a whole can profitably
be seen as working out the implications of the original understanding
of unconcealment. Mark A. Wrathall received his Ph.D. in philosophy
from the University of California, Berkeley, and is currently professor
of philosophy at the University of California, Riverside. He is the author
of How to Read Heidegger (2005) and the editor of numerous
collections, including A Companion to Heidegger (2005), Religion after
Metaphysics (2003), and A Companion to Phenomenology and
Existentialism (2006). Heidegger and Unconcealment Truth, Language,
and History

2
Mark A. Wrathall
University of California, Riverside
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Publication data Wrathall, Mark A. Heidegger and unconcealment : truth, language, and
history / Mark A. Wrathall. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index.

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1. Heidegger, Martin, 1889–1976. 2. Secrecy. I. Title. B3279.H49W725 2010 193–dc22
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For Amy, Hannah, Damon, Madeline, and Nicholas Contents

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Acknowledgments
Credits
Introduction

Part I Truth and Disclosure

1 Unconcealment
Appendix on Tugendhat
2 The Conditions of Truth in Heidegger and Davidson
3 On the “Existential Positivity of Our Ability to be Deceived”
4 Heidegger on Plato, Truth, and Unconcealment: The 1931–1932
Lecture on The Essence of Truth

Part II Language
5 Social Constraints on Conversational Content: Heidegger on Rede
and Gerede

Appendix
6 Discourse Language, Saying, Showing
7 The Revealed Word and World Disclosure: Heidegger and Pascal on
the Phenomenology of Religious Faith
Part III Historical Worlds
8 Philosophers, Thinkers, and Heidegger’s Place in the History of Being
9 Between the Earth and the Sky: Heidegger on Life After the Death of
God
10 Nietzsche and the Metaphysics of Truth
Works by Heidegger
Index Acknowledgments

4
 Reflecting on the genesis of this book, it is rather humbling to realize
how many people have contributed to its development over many
years. My greatest debt is to my intellectual mentor and friend Bert
Dreyfus. Bert has generously read every draft that I have sent him, and
unfailingly responded with his characteristic vigor and candor. His
suggestions, insights, and hard questions have propelled my thinking
on Heidegger. While we don’t always agree, I always profit from our
discussions. I have discussed the ideas contained in this book with a
number of philosophers in a variety of settings, including my students
and colleagues at Brigham Young University and the University of
California, Riverside; at meetings of the International Society for
Phenomenological Studies, the American Society for Existential
Phenomenology, the Parlement des Philosophes, the Martin-Heidegger-
Forschungsgruppe, the British Society for Phenomenology Summer
Conference, the American Comparative Literature Association; and at
universities around the world, including: the University of California,
Berkeley; Brigham Young University, Idaho; Essex University; the
University of Exeter; Georgetown University; Chengchi University;
National Sun Yat-Sen University; Utah Valley University; the University
of Nevada, Reno; Claremont Graduate School; the University of
Montana, Missoula; and Södertorn University. I am grateful to all of
those institutions for providing me with the opportunity to present my
work and, more importantly, to learn from the people in attendance. I
couldn’t possibly list everyone who has helped me along with
questions or suggestions in these settings – not just because the list
would be very long, but also because in many instances I don’t know
their names. With apologies to those whom I will inevitably overlook,
however, I would like to specifically thank Bill Blattner, Dave Bohn,
Albert Borgmann, Taylor Carman, Dave Cerbone, Simon Critchley,
Steve Crowell, Jim Faulconer, Charlie Guignon, Béatrice Han-Pile, Piotr
Hoffman, Stephan Käufer, Sean Kelly, Cristina Lafont, Jeff Malpas,
Wayne Martin, Lenny Moss, Mark Okrent, Robert Pippin, Richard Rorty,
Hans Ruin, Charles Siewert, Hans Sluga, Charles Taylor, Iain Thomson,
Ari Uhlin, and Julian Young. Finally, I am grateful to Beatrice Rehl,
Emily Spangler, and Luane Hutchinson at Cambridge University Press
for their patience, encouragement, and professionalism. Credits

Chapter 1 was originally published in A Companion to Heidegger, ed.

Mark A. Wrathall and Hubert L. Dreyfus (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), pp.
337–57. Reprinted by permission of Blackwell. Chapter 2 was
originally published in The Monist 82, no. 2 (1999): 304–23. Reprinted
by permission of the publisher. © 1999 THE MONIST: An International

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Quarterly Journal of General Philosophical Inquiry. La Salle, Illinois,
USA 61301. Chapter 3 was originally published in The Philosophy of
Deception, ed. Clancy Martin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009),
pp. 67–81. Reprinted by permission of Oxford University Press.
Chapter 4 was originally published in Inquiry 47, no. 5 (2004): 443–63.
Inquiry can be found online at http://www.informaworld.com.
Reprinted by permission of Taylor and Francis. Chapter 5 was
originally published in Philosophical Topics 27 (Fall 1999): 25–46.
Reprinted by permission of the publisher. Chapter 7 was originally
published in The Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 37,
no. 1 (January 2006): 75–88. Reprinted by permission of the publisher;
© 2006 The British Society for Phenomenology. Chapter 8 was
originally published in Appropriating Heidegger, ed. James E. Faulconer
and Mark A. Wrathall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000),
pp. 9–29. Reprinted by permission of Cambridge University Press.
Chapter 9 was originally published in Religion After Metaphysics, ed.
Mark A. Wrathall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp.
69–87. Reprinted by permission of Cambridge University Press.
Introduction

“Unconcealment,” “Unverborgenheit,” was a term that first entered

Heidegger’s philosophy as a translation for the ancient Greek word
alêtheia. The more standard translation of alêtheia is “truth” (Wahrheit
in German), but Heidegger elected to go with a literal translation: a-
lêtheia means literally “not-concealed.” He did this because he believed
the early Greeks thought of “truth” as primarily a matter of “making
available as unconcealed, as there out in the open, what was previously
concealed or covered up” (see GA 63: 12). Heidegger eventually came
to believe that the Greeks themselves had failed to grasp what was
essential to the notion of unconcealment, what he had initially thought
was hinted at in their word alêtheia. He thus set to the task of thinking
the original notion more originally than anyone had before (see GA 9:
237–8). Heidegger’s thought can profitably be seen as working out the
implications of the original understanding of unconcealment. To think
unconcealment as such is to reject the idea that there are entities, we
know not what, existing as they are independently of the conditions
under which they can manifest themselves. Unconcealment is an event
– it happens, and it only happens “with human beings” through “the
creative projection of essence and the law of essence” (GA 36/37: 175).
The thought of unconcealment also rejects the idea that there are
uniquely right answers to questions like what entities are and what is
being. Instead, it holds that we encounter entities as being what they
are only in virtue of the world within which they can be disclosed and

6
encountered. But these worlds are themselves subject to
unconcealment – they emerge historically and are susceptible to
dissolution and destruction. Thus being itself must be understood not
as something determinate and stable, but in terms of the conditions for
the emergence of entities and worlds out of concealment into
unconcealment. Unconcealment is a privative notion – it consists in
removing concealment. Consequently, concealment is in some sense to
be given priority in understanding entities and worlds. But
“concealment has,” Heidegger observes, “a dual sense: 1. having no
awareness of, and 2. no possible context” (GA 36/37: 188). Sense (1)
describes a superficial form of concealment, where something is, but
we lack a sense for it. Sense (2) points to the more profound and
fundamental form of concealment. According to Heidegger, for an
entity to be is for it to stand in a context of constitutive relations. The
lack of any possible context is thus an ontological concealment – the
absence of the conditions under which the entity in question could
manifest itself in being. Thus there is a duality or productive ambiguity
built into the core notion of unconcealment: unconcealment consists in
bringing things to awareness, but also creating the context within
which things can be what they are. The core notion of unconcealment
functions as a methodological principle throughout Heidegger’s work.
By methodological principle, I mean that unconcealment was in
Heidegger’s approach to philosophy the guideline for discerning the
role and constitutive structure of the elements of ontology. One can see
this by considering how it is that Heidegger defined the ontological
features of his thought – for instance, the existentialia of Being and
Time (Heidegger’s ontological categories for the human mode of
being), Ereignis, earth and world, language and the fourfold. All of
these notions were understood in terms of the role they played in
opening up a world, and disclosing us and uncovering entities on the
basis of the possibilities opened up by a particular world projection.
Heidegger’s ontology was grounded in this way in the notion of
unconcealment. The question in individuating and understanding
ontological structures was always “what does this contribute to
opening up a world and letting entities show up as the things they are?”
Put differently, “what disclosive function does it perform?” The same
methodological principle is crucial to Heidegger’s understanding of the
main themes of study in this book: truth, language, and history. What is
essential about each is the way it contributes to unconcealment. His
focus on ontological structures and functions leads Heidegger to a
rather idiosyncratic use of terminology. Heidegger uses words like
language, truth, and history in what he sometimes calls an
“ontologically broad” sense. Indeed, the very first rule of thumb for

7
interpreting Heidegger is to remind oneself constantly that Heidegger
tends to use his terms in a way quite distinct from the ordinary,
everyday sense in which they are used. Indeed, this practice is so
common that he typically alerts the reader when, for a change, he is
using the word “in the usual sense” (im gewöhnlichen Sinne; im
üblichen Sinne) or in the contemporary sense (im heutigen Sinne).
Heidegger sees words in their familiar or everyday sense as an ontic
and thus derivative (abgeleitet) use of words, which are properly
understood in their more authentic, ontological sense. A complete
analysis of Heidegger’s use of terms would address his dizzying array
of different kinds of sense or meaning for a term. These include (and
this is a nonexhaustive list): the formal sense (der formale Sinn), the
original sense (der ursprünglichen Sinn), the authentic sense (der
eigentlichen Sinn), the essential sense (der wesentlichen Sinn), and the
ontological sense (der ontologische Sinn). It would be worthwhile to
tease out the subtle distinctions between each of these different senses,
but for present purposes we must summarize. Heidegger defines sense
in general in the following way: Sense is that within which the
intelligibility of something holds itself, without itself expressly and
thematically coming into view. “Sense” means the “onto which” of the
primary projection, from out of which something can be grasped as
that which it is in its possibility. Projecting opens up possibilities,
which is to say that it makes possible. (GA 2: H. 151)
Projecting is Heidegger’s term for the way that we understand
something by seeing how it relates to other things and activities. I
understand a knife, for instance, by knowing in advance what a knife
will do when brought into contact with all manner of things – butter
and meat and onions and granite and so on. Or by understanding what
place the knife plays in tying together a whole network of activities in,
say, a kitchen. In understanding the knife, I project, that is, I am led or
directed to other entities and activities, and grasp a certain pattern the
knife makes in the world. The sense of the knife is the pattern of those
activities or possibilities for use toward which I am oriented when I
understand what the knife is and into which I am led when I use the
knife. It is thus from out of or on the basis of some set of projected
relations that I understand what anything is. There are, of course,
different kinds of things that we can project onto. We can project the
perceptual properties of an entity onto sensorimotor contingencies.
We can project an entity onto its possibilities of use, as with our knife
example. Or we can project something onto the ontological structures
that allow it to be the kind of entity it is – for instance, projecting a
knife onto the structures of equipmentality and the equipmental
functions that allow it to be equipment, or projecting a human life onto

8
the care structure that allows it to be a human form of life. This last
form of projection shows us the being-sense (Seinssinn, often
translated as “meaning of being”). One arrives at the being-sense of
something, then, by discovering what ontological structure most
fundamentally shapes the possibilities that constitute that something
as the thing it is. The “broad sense” (weiten Sinne) of a term applies it
to everything that shares the same being-sense. The way Heidegger
usually proceeds is to examine the ontological structure and function of
whatever is picked out by a term in its normal, narrow sense. That is,
he asks what the thing to which we normally refer contributes to
unconcealment, and what structural elements allow it to make that
contribution. He then uses the term in such a way that it includes in its
extension everything that shares the same ontological structure or
function. For example, we normally predicate truth of propositional
entities like assertions or beliefs. But we can grasp a proposition as
potentially true or false only to the extent that we can understand how
to use it to uncover or make salient a fact or state of affairs. So we could
say that the being of truth resides in uncovering. Thus Heidegger takes
uncovering in a broad sense – lifting into salience – to be the
ontological function of truth. He then applies the term in a broad sense
to anything that uncovers. So, for instance, if I drive a nail into a board,
I am uncovering the way a hammer is used. In this broad sense, my
action, for Heidegger, is true – in hammering, I lift into salience what a
hammer is and how it is used. Or if a building like a medieval cathedral
supports the faithful in their efforts to inhabit a world opened up by
God’s grace, the cathedral is also true in the ontologically broad sense –
it works by lifting into salience what is essential or most important
about such a world, and supporting the disclosive practices of that
world’s inhabitants. Now, if one does not keep firmly in mind that
Heidegger is using his terms in a sense that is ontologically broad, it
leads to terrible errors in interpreting what he has to say. For example,
it makes a complete mess of things if (a) one thinks that truth is
propositional truth (full stop), (b) one reads Heidegger discussing how
swinging a hammer shows the truth about a hammer, and then (c) one
concludes from this that Heidegger thinks swinging a hammer is true in
the same way that a proposition is true, that it somehow must be
cashed out in terms of a series of propositions the hammer-swinger
knows about hammer-swinging. So when Heidegger uses terms like
truth, language, and history in a broad sense or a being sense (and he
almost always does use them in these ways), the terms do not have the
sense they do in ordinary discourse. And if they do refer to what we
ordinarily refer to with these terms (along with a broader range of
phenomena), they only do so insofar as they are picking them out as

9
having a particular ontological structure or function, as playing a
particularly important role in unconcealment. One might say
Heidegger’s terms function to pick out what is ordinarily referred to by
those terms “under an ontological description,” and, consequently, they
also pick out other things that are not ordinarily referred to by those
terms. This book consists of ten essays that try to trace out the pattern
that the logic of unconcealment makes in Heidegger’s thought about
truth, language, and history. Although some chapters are more focused
on Heidegger’s earlier writings, and some are more focused on his later
essays, they cover the entire span of Heidegger’s work. In my view,
Heidegger’s thought develops less in starts and stops and dramatic
turnings, and more as a gradual recognition of the implications of
pursuing an ontology of unconcealment. This gradual recognition
unfolds as Heidegger explores different ways or paths of thought
(Denkwege). His appreciation of unconcealment expands and deepens
over time. But Heidegger’s ways of describing unconcealment are
constantly changing too. The deepening and enriching of his thought of
unconcealment cannot be separated from the expanding and shifting
vocabularies he has for talking about unconcealment. Indeed, a central
feature of Heidegger’s approach to philosophy is his experimentalism –
that fact that his philosophy is always under way. “Everything lies on
the way,” Heidegger said. By that, he meant a couple of things. First,
that there was no final goal or destination to his thought, that it was
not possible to arrive at a point where everything was clear, where all
problems were solved, where we have definitive answers to
philosophical problems. The reason for this lies in the nature of
unconcealment itself – there is no right way to be human, no uniquely
right way to be an entity, no right way for the world to be organized, no
single way that world disclosure works. As a result, all we can hope for
in philosophy is an ever renewed and refined insight into the workings
of unconcealment. On this view of philosophy, progress consists in
seeing and describing the phenomena of unconcealment more
perspicuously, and communicating these insights more successfully. A
philosopher’s task is to keep his or her thought constantly under way,
trying out new ways to explore productively the philosophical domain,
remaining on them as long as profitable, but also abandoning them and
setting off in a different way when the former way is exhausted. The
aim is to participate in unconcealment, bringing it to our awareness,
heightening our sensitivity and responsiveness to it. In his dialogue
“From a Conversation on Language,” Heidegger penned the following
exchange: Japanese: One says: you have changed your standpoint.
Inquirer: I left an earlier standpoint, not in order to exchange it for
another, but rather because even the prior position was merely a

10
stopover while underway. What is enduring in thinking is the way. (GA
12: 94)
Or elsewhere: The ways of reflection constantly are changing,
according to the station along the way at which the journey begins,
according to the distance along the way that it traverses, according to
the vision that opens up while underway into what is question worthy.
(GA 7: 65)
What matters most in reading Heidegger is travelling at his side along
his ways, letting him guide us through the philosophical landscape
until we begin to discern the phenomena and understand the
philosophical issues posed by the phenomena. His philosophy is meant
to afford us an apprenticeship in seeing and describing unconcealment.
Heidegger’s account of unconcealment emerged from his efforts to
think through the essence of truth, as well as the conditions that make
truth possible. The essays in the first section explore Heidegger’s
account of propositional truth and his argument that propositional
truth necessarily depends on unconcealment. Chapter 1 looks at the
various facets of unconcealment that emerge as Heidegger works his
way from propositional truth to the ontological sense of truth that is
unconcealment. This culminates in his thought of a clearing,
understood as something distinct from the unconcealment of entities
and even of being. The notion of unconcealment had, for much of
Heidegger’s career, an intimate connection with truth. This is not
because Heidegger thought truth as typically conceived in
contemporary philosophy – that is, the success of assertions or beliefs
or other such propositional entities in agreeing with the way things are
– had a special role to play in unconcealment. Rather, it is because he
thought that unconcealment was an essential condition of there being
truth in this narrower contemporary philosophical sense: Alêtheia
means, translated literally: unconcealment. Yet little is gained with
literalness. . .. Alêtheia does not mean “truth,” if by that one means the
validity of assertions in the form of propositions. It is possible that
what is to be thought in alêtheia, speaking strictly for itself, does not
yet have anything to do with “truth,” whereas it has everything to do
with unconcealment, which is presupposed in every determination of
“truth.” (GA 15: 403)
Because unconcealment was an ontological presupposition of truth,
but not the other way around, it is a mistake to take Heidegger as
transferring to unconcealment the properties possessed by truth as it
is ordinarily understood. A failure to realize that Heidegger was using
the word truth in a broad or ontological sense proved for many in
Heidegger’s day (and many still) an insuperable obstacle to
understanding what Heidegger meant with his account of

11
unconcealment. As the appendix to Chapter 1 explores, Heidegger used
truth as a name for unconcealment, despite the risk of
misunderstanding, because he believed that the German word for
truth, Wahrheit, still bore the traces of an insight into what is at the
core of unconcealment. Heidegger calls unconcealment Wahrheit,
truth, because he hears in the German word for truth, Wahrheit, the
verb wahren, to preserve, to safeguard, to maintain and protect and
look after. The truth of an entity, what the entity really or truly is, is its
essence. And, Heidegger argues, “‘essence’ (Wesen) is the same word as
‘enduring’ (währen), remaining” (GA 7: 44). The true entity is what,
having been brought into unconcealment, can be stabilized and
maintained so that it endures in presence: “we think presence as the
enduring of that which, having arrived in unconcealment, remains
there” (GA 7: 44). Preserving and holding things in unconcealment,
Heidegger argues, forms the ontological sense of truth as we ordinarily
think of it. The German word for truth still contains an echo or
resonance of this connection between the truth of entities and
maintaining or preserving things in unconcealment. Chapter 2
compares Heidegger’s approach to truth to Donald Davidson’s, and
helps to clarify the sense in which Heidegger believes that
unconcealment is “presupposed in every determination of ‘truth’.” The
third chapter explores how a phenomenology of unconcealment thinks
through deception as a counterconcept to unconcealment. The final
chapter in this section explores Heidegger’s 1931–2 lecture course on
The Essence of Truth. It argues that Heidegger read Platonic ideas, not
only as stage setting for the Western philosophical tradition’s
privileging of conceptualization over practice, and its correlative
treatment of truth as correctness, but also as an early attempt to work
through the fundamental experience of unconcealment. Several of
Heidegger’s more famous claims about truth, for example that
propositional truth is grounded in truth as world disclosure, or his
critique of the self-evidence of truth as correspondence, are first
revealed in his powerful (if iconoclastic) reading of Plato. In the second
section, the focus is on the relationship between language,
unconcealment, and disclosure. Heidegger argues that the ordinary use
of language needs to be understood as based on unconcealment:
“unconcealment is not ‘dependent’ on saying, but rather every saying
already needs the domain of unconcealment.” He elaborates: Only
where unconcealment already prevails can something become sayable,
visible, showable, perceivable. If we keep in view the enigmatic
prevailing of Alêtheia, the disclosing, then we come to the suspicion
that even the whole essence of language is based in dis-closing, in the
prevailing of Alêtheia. (GA 9: 443)

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 The first chapter in the second section, Chapter 5, explores the sense
in which, in Being and Time, Heidegger thinks of linguistic meaning as
dependent on a socially disclosed world. The next essay explores the
meaning of one of Heidegger’s most famous assertions – “language is
the house of being” – as a way of understanding how Heidegger’s
account of language develops but always remains closely tied to a
notion of unconcealment. This chapter chronicles how Heidegger
moved from using the word language in the ordinary sense to an
ontologically broad use of the term in his later works to name the
structure of gathering significations that characterizes any particular
world disclosure. The final essay in the section can be thought of as a
particular application of this account of originary language, drawing on
both Heidegger and Pascal to explore a phenomenological account of
the role the Bible plays in opening up the Christian world. By focusing
on the Christian world, this essay also serves as a transition to the final
section of the book, which looks at Heidegger’s understanding of
history as a series of epochs of unconcealment. The first essay in the
history section of the book offers an overview of the idea that history
should be thought of in terms of unconcealment and thus as a sequence
of different world disclosures. The history that interests Heidegger is a
history of different ways in which entities are able to show themselves.
The “essence of history,” Heidegger explains, shows itself in the
“separation of the truth of entities from possibilities of essence that are
kept in store and permitted but in each case not now implemented”
(GA 69: 162). From the perspective of unconcealment, then, historical
ages are understood as the establishment of a “truth of entities” – a
truth about what entities really are – which is secured in its truth by
separating off one set of possibilities from other admissible sets of
possibilities, sets of ways to understand and use and relate the entities.
On this view, different entities show themselves in different historical
ages, because each age is grounded in a different unconcealment of
being, with correspondingly different possibilities showing up as
definitive of entities. The transition from one age to another thus poses
a danger that entities will be denied the context within which they can
show what they once were (or could be). This happened, for instance,
when God was drawn into a world that understands constitutive
relations in terms of efficient causality: In whatever manner the
destiny of disclosing may prevail, unconcealment, in which everything
that is shows itself at any given time, holds the danger that human
beings mistake themselves in the midst of what is unconcealed and
misinterpret it. In this way, where everything presencing presents
itself in the light of connections of cause and effect, in our
representations of him even God can lose all that is high and holy, the

13
mysteriousness of his distance. In the light of causality, God can be
degraded to a cause, to the causa efficiens. He then even becomes the
God of the philosophers, namely that which determines the
unconcealed and concealed according to the causality of making,
without ever considering the origin of the essence of this causality. (GA
7:30)
Heidegger was particular concerned that the technological age, our
contemporary age, was closing off possibilities that allow us to realize
the “highest dignity of our essence as human beings.” Our highest
dignity, and thus what we are engaged in when we are most fully
realizing what it is to be human, is “to guard over the unconcealment of
every essence on this earth” (GA 7: 36). Chapter 9 explores Heidegger’s
hope that we could escape from the technological age by means of a
new disclosure of the world, one opened up by our relationship to the
fourfold of gods, mortals, the earth, and the sky. Chapter 10 draws the
book full circle by using Heidegger’s critique of Nietzsche’s account of
truth to illuminate how Heidegger understands our current historical
age, as it reviews Heidegger’s interpretation of Nietzsche as the thinker
of this technological epoch. It also outlines how Heidegger thinks of the
history of philosophy as a history of metaphysics, and explores his
account of metaphysics in terms of the truth of entities. The chapters in
this book span the last ten years of my own engagement with
Heidegger’s thought. Like Heidegger himself, I have experimented with
different ways to approach the matter to be thought. These essays
manifest a variety of approaches to understanding and expressing his
views. For this collection, I have made some changes to these essays.
But I also have tried to be tolerant of the fact that I would no longer
express many of these ideas in the way I did when I first set out on the
trail of unconcealment. Part I Truth and Disclosure

14
 1 Unconcealment

Truth and Unconcealment

During the two decades between 1925 and 1945, the essence of truth
is a pervasive issue in Heidegger’s work. He offers several essay
courses devoted to the nature of truth, starting in 1925 with Logik. Die
Frage nach der Wahrheit, (GA 21), and continuing with Vom Wesen der
Wahrheit. Zu Platons Höhlengleichnis and Theätet (Winter Semester
1931–2, GA 34), Vom Wesen der Wahrheit (Winter Semester 1933–4,
GA 36–7), and Grundfragen der Philosophie. Ausgewählte “Probleme”
der “Logik” (Winter Semester 1937–8, GA 45). He also includes a
significant discussion of the essence of truth in virtually every other
lecture course taught during this period. Particularly notable in this
regard are the Parmenides lecture course of 1942–3 (GA 54),
Einleitung in die Philosophie (Winter Semester 1928–9, GA 27), and
Nietzsches Lehre vom Willen zur Macht als Erkenntnis (Summer
Semester 1939, GA 47). Heidegger’s writings during this period also
reflect his preoccupation with truth. In addition to the essay “Vom
Wesen der Wahrheit” (GA 9), many of his other works include
extended discussions of the essence of truth. These include Being and
Time (GA 2), essays like “Vom Wesen des Grundes” (GA 9), “Der
Ursprung des Kunstwerkes” (GA 5), and “Was ist Metaphysik?” (GA 9),
and unpublished works like the Beiträge (GA 65) and Besinnung (GA
66). After 1946, by contrast, there are few extended discussions of
truth in Heidegger’s writings. Indeed, in the last few decades of his
work, Heidegger rarely even mentions the essence of truth (des Wesen
der Wahrheit) or the question of truth (die Wahrheitsfrage; although
other locutions like the truth of being, die Wahrheit des Seins, persist,
albeit infrequently, right to the end; see, for example, the 1973
“Seminar in Zähringen,” GA 15: 373). But this should be seen as a
merely terminological shift. For Heidegger, the essence of truth is
always understood in terms of unconcealment, and Heidegger never
stops inquiring into unconcealment. Indeed, one is hard-pressed to find
any work in Heidegger’s vast corpus that does not have some
discussion of unconcealment. The terminological shift from talk of
truth to unconcealment is a result of his recognition of the
misleadingness of using the word truth to name unconcealment – a
recognition brought about by the gradual realization that the
metaphysical tradition’s blindness to unconcealment is largely a result
of a rather narrow notion of truth. “In the beginning of metaphysics, it

15
was decided that the essence of truth as alêtheia (unconcealment and
revealing) would henceforth retreat before the determination of truth
as likening (homoiôsis, adaequatio), . . . a determination that was first
rooted in truth as unconcealment.” From that point on, Heidegger
argues, truth’s “character of opening up and revealing sinks
unquestioned into oblivion” (GA 6.2: 286). And as he explains in 1949:
In its answers to the question concerning entities as such, metaphysics
operates with a prior representation of being necessarily and hence
continually. But metaphysics does not induce being itself to speak, for
metaphysics does not give thought to being in its truth, nor does it
think such truth as unconcealment, nor does it think this
unconcealment in its essence. (GA 9: 369/280)
From this point on, Heidegger speaks and writes consistently of the
essence of unconcealment, rather than the essence of truth. It is also
clear that, despite using the word truth to name the subject matter of
his thought, his primary interest was always unconcealment. As he
notes self-reflectively during the “Heraclitus Seminar” (1966–7),
“Alêtheia as unconcealment occupied me all along, but ‘truth’ slipped
itself in between” (GA 15: 262). But while he is occasionally critical of
his own earlier views of the essence of truth (see, e.g., GA 65: 351–2),
his view of it remains unchanged in its fundamental outline. The
fundamental outline, or what I call the platform, of Heidegger’s view of
truth forms the basis both for his critique of the metaphysical tradition
of philosophy, and for his own constructive account of ontology and the
nature of human being. It includes the following planks. 1.
Propositional truth (correctness, Richtigkeit). An assertion or
proposition is true when it corresponds with a state of affairs.
Heidegger understands correspondence (Übereinstimmung) as the
condition of being successfully directed toward the world in a
propositional attitude: What makes every one of these statements into
a true one? This: in what it says, it corresponds with the matters and
the states of affairs about which it says something. The being true of an
assertion thus signifies such corresponding. What therefore is truth?
Truth is correspondence. Such correspondence exists because the
assertion orients itself [sich richtet] according to that about which it
speaks. Truth is correctness [richtigkeit]. (GA 34: 2)
But this correspondence or agreement, Heidegger argues, cannot be
understood on a representational model of language. He argues instead
that correspondence exists when our orientation to the world allows
what is to show itself in a particular way, and thus it can be understood
as a bringing out of concealment. 2. The truth (uncoveredness or
discoveredness, Entdecktheit) of entities. An entity is true when it is
uncovered, that is, made available for comportment. Propositional

16
truth (1) is grounded in the truth of entities, because a true assertion
can only correspond or fail to correspond with the way things are if
entities are available as the standard against which the assertion or
proposition can be measured. Only because an entity is unconcealed,
Heidegger argues, “can we make assertions about it and also check
them. Only because the entity itself is true can propositions about the
entity be true in a derived sense” (GA 27: 78). The truth – that is, the
uncovering or making manifest – of entities can be brought about
through an assertion or a theoretical apprehension, but it normally
occurs in our practical involvements with things in the world. “Ontic
manifesting . . . happens in accordance with an attuned
[stimmungsmäßigen] and instinctive finding oneself in the midst of
entities, and in accordance with the striving and moving comportment
to entities that is grounded along with it” (GA 9:131). 3. The truth of
being. There is an unconcealment (Unverborgenheit) of being when an
understanding of the being or essence of everything that is shapes all
the possibilities for comportment in the world. Ontic truth (2) is
grounded in the truth of being. Heidegger argued that entities are
constituted as the entities they are by the relationships they bear to
things, people, activities, and so on. Nothing is what it is without these
relationships. There are then two sides to being as the constitutive
ground of an entity. First, there must be more or less enduring
relationships for the entity to inhabit. Second, it must be possible to
distinguish between those relationships that are essential to the being
of the entity, and those that are not. The unconcealment of being
involves both those two sides: (a) The disclosure (Erschlossenheit) of
Dasein and of the world. The idea is that entities can only be available
for comportment on the basis of a prior disclosure of the world as the
meaningful relational structure within which entities can show up as
what they are. In addition, since entities are uncovered in terms of
their availability for comportment, their uncovering requires the prior
disclosure of Dasein as an acting and understanding being. In Being
and Time, Heidegger expressed this idea as follows: “the
uncoveredness of entities within-the-world is grounded in the world’s
disclosedness. But disclosedness is that basic character of Dasein
according to which it is its ‘there.’ Disclosedness is constituted by
disposedness (Befindlichkeit), understanding, and discourse, and
pertains equiprimordially to the world, to being-in, and to the self” (GA
2: H. 221). (b) The truth of essence. Entities can be manifest in their
truth, that is, as what they really are, only if they are unconcealed in
their essence – which means, they (come to) have an essence.
Heidegger’s catchphrase for this is: “The essence of truth is the truth of
essence” (GA 9: 201; see also GA 45: 95; GA 65: 288; GA 5: 37). This

17
means that the unconcealment of beings requires first an
unconcealment of the most fundamental, essential aspect of entities
that makes them what they are. This works not by being thought about,
but by disposing us to encounter entities in a particular way, as having
a particular essence. We encounter entities, in other words, on the
basis of “an original view (form) that is not specifically grasped, yet
functions precisely as a paradigmatic form for all manifest beings” (GA
9: 158/123). What both (3a) and (3b) have in common is the insight
that entities can only be manifest on the basis of a prelinguistic
understanding of and affective disposedness to what makes something
the being that it is. Heidegger eventually comes to believe that the truth
of being depends on: 4. Truth as the clearing (Lichtung). There is a
clearing within which an understanding of being or essence can prevail
while incompatible possibilities of being are concealed or held back.
This is the most fundamental form of unconcealment. Unconcealment,
when understood as the clearing, does not name a thing, or a property
or characteristic of things, or a kind of action we perform on things, or
even the being of things. It names, instead, a domain or structure that
allows there to be things with properties and characteristics, or modes
of being. This is not a spatial domain or physical entity, or any sort of
entity at all. It is something like a space of possibilities. Planks 1–3 give
us possibilities for different experiences of entities and different
actions with entities, for different goals to be pursued, or forms of life
to be lived. These possibilities are the possibilities opened up by the
understanding of being and essences. But what is the space that allows
those possibilities to be actual possibilities – that is, to be the
possibilities that actually shape a given historical existence? This is to
ask “what, given that there has been a progression of different truths of
being in history, allows any particular truth of being to prevail?”
Heidegger’s answer is the clearing. The clearing is that some truth of
being prevails because other truths of being do not. I call 1–4 planks in
Heidegger’s platform for thinking about truth. The metaphor of a
platform is meant to emphasize that these elements of his view stand
next to each other in the sense that no single plank encompasses all the
others. Each plank or element, in other words, involves specific
features that distinguish them from one another. They are linked
together in such a way that they provide each other with mutual
support, and they could not function independently of each other. But
they also cannot be reduced to each other. They are different modes or
ways of unconcealment, and together they provide the basis for our
engagement in the world. The platform describes Heidegger’s
considered view on truth and unconcealment. This is not to say that he
is clear about the relationships between 1, 2, 3, and 4 at every stage of

18
his career. Indeed, as I discuss in the next section, he is quite critical of
his own earlier works on unconcealment for their failure to recognize
plank 4. In what follows, I want to try to explain more clearly what
each plank in the platform consists in, and how each plank is linked to
the next one. The first step is to say something about what holds them
together. Heidegger proposes that each plank is a kind of truth, only
because it involves unconcealment. So, we might ask, what, in general,
is unconcealment? We will then be in a position to explain each plank
in more detail. Unconcealment in General

The word that is generally translated as unconcealment or

unconcealedness is Unverborgenheit. This, in turn, is Heidegger’s
preferred, and rather literal, translation for the Greek word alêtheia,
itself ordinarily translated as truth. Heidegger uses truth (Wahrheit)
and unconcealment interchangeably for much of his career, well aware
that this practice invites several contrary misunderstandings. The first
misunderstanding is to think that Heidegger defines propositional
truth as unconcealment; the second is to transfer to the notion of
unconcealment features present in our ordinary understanding of truth
(see the Appendix to this chapter). Because the analysis of
unconcealment is an analysis of the ground of propositional truth, it
should be clear that unconcealment is not to be taken as a
(re)definition of propositional truth. Heidegger was emphatic about
this both early and late; compare, for instance, comments from the
1931 lecture course on the essence of truth: the meaning of the Greek
word for truth, unconcealment, initially has absolutely nothing to do
with assertion and with the factual context, set out in the customary
definition of the essence of truth, with correspondence and correctness
(GA 34:11)
with the 1964 essay “The End of Philosophy and the Task of
Thinking”: the question concerning alêtheia, concerning
unconcealment as such, is not the question concerning truth. (GA 14:
76)
One could also compare the observation in Being and Time that to
translate this word [alêtheia] as ‘truth’, and, above all, to define this
expression conceptually in theoretical ways, is to cover up the meaning
of what the Greeks made ‘self-evidently’ basic for the terminological
use of alêtheia as a pre-philosophical way of understanding it (GA 2: H.
219)
with the very late 1960 essay “Hegel and the Greeks”: if the essence
of truth that straightaway comes to reign as correctness and certainty
can subsist only within the realm of unconcealment, then truth indeed
has to do with Alêtheia, but not Alêtheia with truth. (GA 9: 442/334)

19
 Hence, it is essential to see that the analyses of the unconcealment of
beings and the clearing of being are not being offered as definitions of
propositional truth. And, just as importantly, propositional truth
cannot account for the unconcealment of beings and the clearing of
being: “it is not the case and never the case that an assertion as such –
be it ever so true – could primarily reveal an entity as such” (GA 29/30:
493). In addition, Heidegger’s argument for the dependence of
propositional truth on the unconcealment of entities, being, and the
clearing does not hang in any way on his etymological analysis of
alêtheia. Nevertheless, his argument for the dependence relationship is
often confused with his perhaps questionable etymology. Finally,
Heidegger’s warnings to the contrary, it is perhaps understandable that
readers often confuse unconcealment with what we ordinarily think of
as truth. In any event, in response to criticisms from Friedländer about
his etymology of alêtheia, and from Tugendhat regarding the natural
conception of truth (see the Appendix to this chapter), Heidegger
eventually disavowed the practice of calling unconcealment truth (GA
14: 76). But since Heidegger himself had never confused
unconcealment with propositional truth, the disavowal should not be
taken to mean that he gave up on the platform or any of the planks of
the platform. On the contrary, to the extent that the platform was
obscured by the tendency to think of truth only in terms of
correspondence, Heidegger hoped to make clearer his commitment to
it. More important than changes in Heidegger’s use of the word truth,
but less remarked upon, are changes in his use of the word
unconcealment. Before 1928, Heidegger never spoke of the
unconcealment of being or connected unconcealment with a clearing.
In Being and Time, for example, the word unconcealment only appears
in one passage, and it is introduced only to be equated with
uncoveredness (Entdecktheit) (GA 2: H. 219). It was only starting in the
1928 lecture course Einleitung in die Philosophie that Heidegger
adopted unconcealment as a term for anything other than the
uncovering of entities (see GA 27: 202–3). Between 1928 and 1948,
Heidegger wrote of both the unconcealment of being and the
unconcealment of entities – a practice of which his marginal notes
were later quite critical (see GA 9: 132–3; also GA 5: 60, 69). This self-
criticism is probably a result of the fact that, by 1948, Heidegger came
to believe that the metaphysical tradition had only ever thought about
the unconcealment of entities, and thus that an important step toward
overcoming the metaphysical tradition consists precisely in
understanding the unconcealment of being (see, e.g., GA 67: 234). In
any event, after about 1948, Heidegger seldom writes of the
unconcealment of entities. Instead, from that point on, the term

20
unconcealment is used almost exclusively with regard to planks 3 and
4 of the platform. Unconcealment in general involves, then, making a
variety things available to us in our dealings in the world (true
assertions, entities, human being, understandings of being, worlds, and
the clearing itself). What we want to know, however, is why Heidegger
uses unconcealment to point out very different elements contributing
to our overall engagement with the world, or of different ways that
things are made available to us in our dealings. What makes
unconcealment and related terms1 applicable to all these cases is the
privative nature of the phenomenon of letting something be
encountered. Something is privative when it can only be understood
and specified in relation to what it is not. For example, imperfection
can only be understood by reference to perfection – if you do not know
what it would be for something to be perfect, then you could not know
what is at stake in calling it imperfect. The name for a privative aspect
need not itself incorporate a semantic marker like “in-” or “un-.” To use
one of Heidegger’s own examples, reticence is a privative aspect in that
reticence is not simply not making any noise. Something is only
reticent insofar as it could speak but does not. So what it is to be
reticent is to be understood by way of what the reticent person is not
doing. Similarly, a stone can be sightless but it is not blind. To be blind
requires that one be in the sight game – that one shows up as
appropriately thinkable as capable of sight. Nietzsche’s famous account
of the good/evil distinction is yet another example. There, evil
functions as the positive term – the one that is defined first and more
clearly. Good then gets its meaning as a negation of each of the
properties associated with evil.2 Thus, given that privative aspects are
specifically understood in relation to what they are not, having a
privative aspect is different than merely lacking a certain quality.
Heidegger’s notion of unconcealment applies to things that are
privative in just this sense and, he believes, the Greek language’s use of
a privative word form to name truth shows that the Greeks too were
aware of the privative nature of material and propositional truth. “The
awakening and forming of the word alêtheia,” he writes, “is not a mere
accident . . . and not an external matter” (GA 34: 127). Unconcealment
is meant to be understood like blindness or reticence. That is, what it is
to be unconcealed is determined in relationship to a privative state –
here, whatever kind of concealment that does prevail in what is to be
unconcealed. With respect to each plank in the platform, then,
concealment is the positive term, and needs to be understood before
we can become clear about what unconcealment amounts to. So far,
this discussion is very formal. I now try to give it some
phenomenological content by looking at each plank in the platform in

21
turn. The Planks of the Platform

1. Propositional Truth

One typically thinks of truth as a property of things that have as their

content a proposition – things like assertions and beliefs. The truth of
propositions is, for Heidegger, the right starting point for thinking
about unconcealment, because truth or unconcealment (alêtheia) has
often been understood exclusively as a property of propositions, but
also because in a phenomenology of propositional truth, we quickly
discover that the truth of propositions depends on the uncovering of
entities. Thinking about propositional truth thus leads to an inquiry
into more fundamental forms of unconcealment. Heidegger accepts
that many propositions are true by corresponding to, or agreeing with,
the way things are. But recognizing this fact, for Heidegger, is less an
explanation of truth than a basis for further inquiry into its nature.
The old received definition of truth: veritas est adaequatio Intellectus
ad rem, homoiôsis, measuring up, conformity of thinking to the matter
about which it thinks – is indeed basically (im Ansatz) correct. But it is
also merely a starting point (Ansatz) and not at all that which it is
commonly taken to be, namely, an essential determination of truth or
the result of an essential determination of truth. It is merely the
starting point . . . for the question: in what in general is the possibility
of measuring up to something grounded? (GA 29/30: 497)
If we admit, in other words, that true assertions agree, measure up to,
correspond with the way things are, still we need to be able to explain
what makes such a relationship between an assertion and a
proposition possible. By considering this problem, however, Heidegger
believes that we are led to a view of truth as uncovering. The difficulty
for the correspondence view is explaining in an illuminating way what
a correspondence relationship consists in. There has been a tendency
to explain correspondence as a relationship between mental
representations and facts or states of affairs in the world. Heidegger, by
contrast, argues that truth “has by no means the structure of a
correspondence between knowing and the object in the sense of a
likening of one entity (the subject) to another (the object)” (GA 2: H.
218–19). If we are to make sense of the idea of correspondence, he
believes, we first need to jettison the idea that it consists in a
relationship between a representation and things in the world. Instead,
Heidegger suggests that correspondence is a characteristic of our
orientation to the world – in particular, of our “assertative being
toward what is asserted” (GA 2: H. 218). Our beliefs and assertions

22
correspond not by representing some state of affairs just as it is, but by
giving us an orientation to things that lets the state of affairs appear
just as it is (GA 21: 9–10). True beliefs and assertions are true because
they make possible a perceiving that “lets what is itself be encountered
as it is” (GA 21: 167). A phenomenological description of cases where
we confirm the truth of an assertion, Heidegger believes, shows us that
this is in fact how we ordinarily understand the truth of the assertion.
“To say that an assertion ‘is true’,” Heidegger argues, “signifies that it
uncovers what is as it is in itself. It asserts, it points out, it ‘lets’ what is
‘be seen’ (apophansis) in its uncoveredness. The being-true (truth) of
the assertion must be understood as being-uncovering” (GA 2: H. 218,
translation modified). A true assertion uncovers a state of affairs by
elevating it into salience or prominence, thus allowing it to be seen:
“the basic achievement of speech,” Heidegger argues, “consist[s] in
showing or revealing that about which one is speaking, that concerning
which there is discussion. In such revealing, the thing that is addressed
is made manifest. It becomes perceivable, and, in discussion, the thing
perceived gets determined” (GA 21: 6). We are now in a position to see
why Heidegger believes that propositional truth is a kind of bringing
out of concealment. Concealment reigns in a nonassertoric dealing with
the world in the sense that, in such prepredicative comportments, the
world is experienced in a way that lacks determinacy, that is,
propositional articulation. This means that the world is not available
for thought, for the discovery of inferential and justificatory
relationships between propositional states and worldly states of
affairs. Heidegger believes that, in our everyday dealings with things,
we experience the world in precisely such a propositional concealment
(see GA 21: 111). In our prepredicative experience of the world, things
are understood as the things they are in terms of our practical modes
of coping with them. Such practically constituted things are implicated
in a complex variety of involvements with other objects, practices,
purposes, and goals, and are understood immediately as reaching out
into a variety of involvements. In assertion, by contrast, our experience
undergoes an explicit restriction of our view, and we dim down the
whole richly articulated situation in front of us to focus on some
particular feature of the situation (GA 2: H. 155). The “assertoric
determining of a thing,” Heidegger suggests, must be understood as a
“levelling-off of the primary understanding within [everyday] dealings”
(GA 21: 156). He notes that when we make an assertion about what we
perceive in our fluid coping with the world, the “assertion makes
certain relations stand out from the matter, which is at first
apprehended directly and simply in its unarticulated totality” (GA 20:
76–7). In natural perception, then, we ordinarily perceive a whole

23
context that lacks the logical structure of linguistic categories. When
we apprehend things in such a way as to be able to express them in an
assertion, however, the act of perception now is brought under the
categories of the understanding. The assertion, Heidegger writes,
“draws out” or “accentuates” “a state of affairs,” thus allowing the
entity to “become expressly visible precisely in what it is” (GA 20: 86).
In doing this, the assertion “discloses anew” what is present at first in a
nonconceptually articulated fashion, so that these things “come to
explicit apprehension precisely in what they are” (GA 20: 84). Thus the
assertion manifests things differently than they are given to natural
perception. In it, things are defined or determined “as such and so” – as
having a particular property or characteristic (see, e.g., GA 21: 66, 133–
4). Those properties or characteristics were present in the entity
before, but through the assertion they are isolated and cut off from
their context, thereby being highlighted or lifted into prominence. This
allows us to see an object with a thematic clarity that is not present in
our natural perception of it, but we are no longer able to deal with it
naturally – for that, we need to see it in its immediacy (GA 21: 141–7).
Thus the dimming down or leveling off that occurs when we suspend
our everyday dealings with things is what first makes it possible to give
something a conceptual character by uncovering the kind of
determinate content that allows one to form conceptual connections,
draw inferences, and justify one occurrent intentional state on the
basis of another. The prepredicative is a nonconceptual way of
comporting ourselves toward the things in the world around us. Rather
than a conceptual or a logical articulation, the prepredicative
manifestness of things is articulated along the lines of our practical
comportment. In such an articulation, things show up as what they are
but in the whole complexity of their involvements. This makes
propositional truth, on Heidegger’s view, a privative concept – it is
defined relative to the richer, more primordial givenness of the world,
which is lost in propositional articulation. Because propositional
modes of comportment (believing, asserting, and so on) function by
determining and highlighting certain elements of our prepropositional
experience of things, they are a derivative form of comporting
ourselves toward things in the world, yet a form of unconcealment all
the same. We will explore the prepropositional experience of things in
more detail in the next section. Before going on, however, we can
summarize Heidegger’s views in the following way. Our most
fundamental forms of comportment are practically rather than
conceptually articulated. On the basis of this practical articulation,
things show up as calling for certain responses from us, and
constraining how we can use them. Through language, we are able to

24
orient ourselves to objects in a way that is conceptually rather than
pragmatically articulated. When our orientation allows us to see a state
of affairs just as it is – when it uncovers an object in its condition – we
say that it corresponds to the facts or the state of affairs. Thus we can
understand assertions and propositions to be measured in terms of the
positive/privative pair “concealing/unconcealing (a fact or state of
affairs in the world).” That means that the proper basis for judging the
success of a linguistic act is whether it makes manifest a fact toward
which we can comport ourselves. The act will fail to the extent that it
leaves a state of affairs in concealedness – that is, leaves it unavailable
to thought, or leaves thought out of touch with the world.
Correspondence, consequently, needs to be rethought in terms of
Heidegger’s account of how to assess the success or failure of linguistic
acts like, for example, assertion. An assertion most genuinely succeeds
if it brings a state of affairs into unconcealment for thought (which may
well go with a correlative concealing of the practical world). Like all
elements of unconcealment, then, propositional truth is a form of
making something available toward which we can comport. It finds its
specificity as a mode of unconcealment in the way it makes something
available – by providing it with the kind of content that lets us grasp
the state of affair “just as” it is. Truth as correspondence is a super-
agreement, an Über-einstimmung in German, achieving a very precise
and definite orientation to states of affairs. What we now need to
understand is the ground of propositional truth – what makes it
possible for an assertion to uncover in this way? The answer is a prior
uncovering of entities. 2. The Uncoveredness of Entities

We have seen that the concealment removed by propositional truth is

the unavailability of the world for a certain kind of comportment –
namely, thought about the conditions of entities in the world.
Propositional truth is, consequently, a specific form of a broader kind
of unconcealment where what is at issue is the availability of entities
for comportment in general. The uncoveredness of entities makes
entities available for comportment. The specific form of concealment
that is removed by the uncoveredness of entities consists in entities not
being available as that toward which or with which we can comport.
Comportment (Verhalten) is a very broad term that is meant to include
every instance in which we experience something, and everything that
we do. Excluded from comportment, then, are physiological or merely
causal events or behaviors. When I grow hair or hiccup, there is no
sense in which I am comporting myself. Unlike such causal events or
behaviors, comportments have a meaningful structure. But

25
comportment is broader than the class of deliberate actions (although,
naturally it includes them), because comportment involves things I do
or experience without an occurrent mental state in which I intend to do
it or register the experience. Thus comportment includes automatic
reflexes, for example, which reflect a responsiveness to the meaning of
a situation. All comportments involve relationships to entities. When I
swat at a fly, I am comporting myself toward the fly. When I hear a
symphony, I am comporting myself to the symphony (as well as all the
instruments, musicians, the conductor, etc.) An entity is concealed,
then, when I cannot comport myself toward it – when it is not available
as something toward which I can direct myself in a basic intentional
comportment or when it plays no role in setting the meaningful
structure of the situation I am in. The opposite of uncoveredness,
Heidegger says, “is not covering up, but rather lack of access for simple
intending” (GA 21: 179). The fly is concealed in a sense when I cannot
find it to swat at it. And yet even then, it is uncovered to some extent,
given that the situation I find myself in is structured by my desire to
swat the fly. A more radical concealment of the fly, then, would obtain
if I do not feel motivated in any way to react to it. Similarly, the
symphony would be concealed if I lacked an understanding of
symphonic form (that is, I might be able to hear beautiful music, but I
could not hear it as a symphony). The contrast of comportments with
behaviors allows us to see that something can be concealed, even if it is
physically operative on my body. But because comportment is broader
than intentional action, something is not necessarily concealed, even if
I have no awareness of it whatsoever – there is a sense in which it is
unconcealed as long as it figures meaningfully in my overall
comportmental stance. The unconcealment of entities, then, will be a
privation of the state of affairs in which something is unavailable for
comportment. But, as I have been suggesting, there are a variety of
different ways in which something can be unavailable for
comportment: For that which is unconcealed, it is not only essential
that it makes that which appears accessible in some way or other and
keeps it open in its appearing, but rather that it (that which is
unconcealed) constantly overcomes a concealedness of the concealed.
That which is unconcealed must be wrested away from concealment, it
must in a certain sense be stolen. . .. Truth is thus in each case a
wresting away in the way of revealing. What is more, the concealment
can be of various kinds: closing off, hiding away, disguising, covering
up, veiling, dissimulating. (GA 9: 223)
Thus the unconcealment of entities occurs in all the different ways we
have of making something available for comportment. But, Heidegger
believes, in order to understand uncovering, the primary mode of

26
comportment to focus on is that in which we have a practical mastery
of things. It should be obvious that this sort of uncovering does not
require the mediation of language. I can learn to deal with things
without any explicit instruction in them or even any names for them,
simply by picking them up and starting to manipulate them, or by being
shown how they work. Heidegger writes: The predominant
comportment through which in general we uncover innerworldly
entities is the utilization, the use of commonly used objects
(Gebrauchsdingen): dealing with vehicles, sewing kits, writing
equipment, work tools in order to . . . equipment in the widest sense.
We first get to know the equipment in dealing with it. It is not that we
have beforehand a knowledge of these things in order then to put them
to use, but rather the other way around. . .. The everyday dealing with
innerworldly entities is the primary mode – and for many often the
only mode – of uncovering the world. This dealing with innerworldly
entities comports itself – as utilization, use, managing, producing and
so forth – toward equipment and the context of equipment . . . we make
use of it in a “self-evident manner.” (GA 25: 21–2)
Indeed, Heidegger believes it is constitutive of our human mode of
being that we always already encounter ourselves in the midst of a
world that is uncovered in just such practical terms. But now how does
the idea that we always already find ourselves in the midst of
uncovered entities square with the claim that the state of being
covered up has some kind of priority in understanding our dealings
with entities in the world? Heidegger insists upon both ideas: “when
Dasein comes to existence, beings within the range of its existence are
already familiar, manifest. With it a certain concealedness has also
already occurred” (GA 28: 360). Every uncoveredness of the world, in
other words, occurs together with a concealing of entities. Moreover,
Heidegger insists that the default state of entities in the world is being
covered over – he even has a slogan for this idea: truth, understood as
uncoveredness, is robbery. “The factical uncoveredness of anything is,
as it were,” Heidegger claims in Being and Time, “always a robbery”
(GA 2: H. 294). This is not just a passing claim – he repeats it and
elaborates on it often: “If this robbery belongs to the concept of truth,
then it says that the entity must first of all be wrested from
concealedness, or its concealedness must be taken from the entity” (GA
27: 79; see also GA 19: 10–11; GA 28: 359; GA 29/30: 44; GA 34:
10,126; GA 9: 223). This seems like an odd thing for him to say,
however – if entities are always already uncovered, why is our
uncovering them a kind of robbery? The basic reason is that entities
are independent of us and our wishes, desires, intentions, and
purposes for them, as well as our beliefs about them. This fact gives

27
rise to a fundamental concealment in at least two ways. First, it means
that uncovering an entity – making it something with which we can
comport easily and transparently – demands something of us. It
requires us to struggle to foster and develop the right skills, attitudes,
and bodily dispositions for dealing with it, that is, those skills that will
let it show itself in its own essence. Heidegger illustrates this through
the example of walking into a shoemaker’s workshop. “Which entities
are there and how these entities are available, in line with their
inherent character, is unveiled for us only in dealing appropriately with
equipment such as tools, leather, and shoes. Only one who understands
is able to uncover by himself this environing world of the shoemaker’s”
(GA 24: 431). This means that, for most of us, the entities in the
workshop are not fully uncovered, and could only become uncovered
as we acquire a shoemaker’s skills. What holds of the shoemaker’s
shop, of course, holds for the world as a whole: it is only in the tiniest
spheres of the beings with which we are acquainted that we are so well
versed as to have at our command the specific way of dealing with
equipment which uncovers this equipment as such. The entire range of
intraworldly beings accessible to us at any time is not suitably
accessible to us in an equally original way. There are many things we
merely know something about but do not know how to manage with
them. They confront us as beings to be sure, but as unfamiliar beings.
Many beings, including even those already uncovered, have the
character of unfamiliarity. (GA 24: 431–2)
There is a tendency on our part, however, to cover over this
unfamiliarity. In point of fact, Heidegger believes that we always
inherit an understanding of and disposition for the world that tends to
conceal from us the fact that we cannot practically uncover most
things. The understanding, dispositions, and skills that Dasein has in
the first instant are the banalized understandings, dispositions, and
skills of the one (das Man). Thus entities are initially manifest but
nevertheless concealed in what they most authentically are. “Because
the movements of being which Dasein so to speak makes in the one are
a matter of course and are not conscious and intentional, this means
simply that the one does not uncover them, since the uncoveredness
which the one cultivates is in fact a covering up” (GA 20: 389).
Authenticity by contrast, consists in Dasein learning to “uncover the
world in its own way . . . this uncovering of the ‘world’ [is] . . . always
accomplished as a clearing away of concealments and obscurities, as a
breaking up of the disguises with which Dasein bars its own way” (GA
2: H. 129). A second consequence of the independence of entities from
us is that there is always more to entities than we can deal with. No
matter how skillful we get in dealing with entities, Heidegger argues,

28
there will always be something about them that we cannot focus on or
pay attention to: “each being we encounter and which encounters us
keeps to this curious opposition of presenting, in which it always holds
itself back in a concealment” (GA 5: 40/BW 178). But this concealment
“is not in every case primarily and merely the limit of knowledge,”
rather, it is precisely what makes it possible for us to deal with the
thing in the first place: it is “the beginning of the clearing of what is
cleared” (GA 5: 40/BW 178–9). We get a grip on entities in the world,
in other words, by generalizing, by dealing with them as instances of a
known type. This leads to the possibility that established ways of
dealing with things will make it harder to uncover other possible ways
of dealing with them. When “what is familiar becomes known,”
Heidegger notes, “with that the concealedness of the unfamiliar
deepens, and all that is not-known becomes more insistent in its
concealment” (GA 28: 361). That our familiarity depends on getting a
certain more or less familiar grasp on things leads to the possibility
that we treat something as an instance of the wrong type – that is, that
based on a superficial similarity between a strange thing and a familiar
thing, we take the strange thing as something it is not (or, as Heidegger
puts it, “a being appears, but presents itself as other than it is”; GA 5:
40/BW 179). Thus something can be uncovered in one sense but
covered over in another sense. To recap, the specific nature of the
unconcealment involved in the uncoveredness of entities needs to be
understood as a privation of the fundamental covered-up-ness of
entities. They are covered up to the extent that we lack the skills
necessary to allow them to figure in the overall grasp we get on a
situation. We uncover them by fostering a receptivity to them, a
receptivity that helps us secure our practical grasp on the situation. 3.
Unconcealment of the Being of Entities

In understanding the unconcealment of being, let’s start again by

understanding the positive state of concealment of being. When being
is concealed, an entity cannot possibly be uncovered as an entity. In the
concealment of entities, of course, entities were not uncovered either.
But they could be uncovered, if only we had the right skills, or if our
purposes or activities were the sort that would make them salient, or if
they were no longer obscured by other entities. In the concealment of
being, by contrast, the entity cannot under any circumstances be
uncovered because there is no place for it in the world we inhabit. Our
ability to uncover practically, reflectively, and linguistically the way
things are requires that entities make themselves available to our
thought and talk, and that our thought and talk holds itself open to and

29
responsible to the entities in the world around us. The unconcealment
of beings is what lets us encounter entities toward which we can be
directed in our thought and talk – entities about which we can
successfully get it right or fail to do so. Heidegger explains: “if our
representations and assertions are supposed to conform to the object,
then this entity . . . must be accessible in advance in order to present
itself as a standard and measure for the conformity with it” (GA 45:
18). The unconcealment of being is what secures the accessibility of
entities. On Heidegger’s account, something can only be uncovered on
the basis of our skillful ability to inhabit a world, because we uncover
something only by knowing how it works together with other entities
in a context (see GA 2, Division I, chapter 3). Thus the uncoveredness of
entities (plank 2) is dependent upon the disclosedness of a world and
ways of being within the world (plank 3a). Until it is given at least
some minimal foothold in our world by taking a place within a context
of involvements, Heidegger argues, the object can at best appear as
something that resists our way of inhabiting the world. But entities do
not simply show up as involved with other things in a temporary
configuration. They appear, rather, as things that have a more or less
stable and enduring presence through a variety of possible situations
and contexts of involvement. It is our ability to distinguish between
relations that are essential to the entity, and those that are not, that
permits us to uncover such stable and enduring entities. Thus the
uncovering of entities depends on things having an essence. Truth as
uncoveredness, in other words, depends on truth as the disclosure of
being or essence. This leads us to plank 3b. This disclosure of the world
– plank 3a – was the focus of Heidegger’s discussion of disclosedness in
Being and Time (GA 2: H. 221–2). It was also to this that Heidegger
refers in passages like the following from the 1928 essay “On the
Essence of Ground”: Human Dasein – a being that finds itself situated
in the midst of beings, comporting itself toward beings – in so doing
exists in such a way that beings are always manifest as a whole. Here it
is not necessary that this wholeness be expressly conceptualized: its
belonging to Dasein can be veiled, the expanse of this whole is
changeable. This wholeness is understood without the whole of those
beings that are manifest being explicitly grasped or indeed
“completely” investigated in their specific connections, domains, and
layers. Yet the understanding of this wholeness, an understanding that
in each case reaches ahead and embraces it, is a surpassing in the
direction of world. . .. World as a wholeness “is” not a being, but that
from out of which Dasein gives itself the signification of whatever
beings it is able to comport itself toward in whatever way. (GA 9:
156/121)

30
 What this transitional work added to Heidegger’s account in Being
and Time, however, was the claim that an important contribution of the
world to unconcealment consists in the way that “through the world,”
Dasein “gives itself an original view (form) that is not explicitly
grasped, yet functions precisely as a paradigmatic form for all manifest
beings” (GA 9: 158/123). Heidegger subsequently develops this idea in
terms of the truth of essence – plank 3b) In the 1929–30 lecture course
on The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, Heidegger argues that
the world should be understood as the prevailing of a “pre-logical
manifestness” of beings “as such and as a whole” (GA 29/30: 512–13).
But any sufficient inquiry into the origin of the “as” in the “as such” and
“as a whole” – that is, that as that entities show up – “must open up for
us the whole context in which that, which we intend with ‘manifestness
of beings’ and with the ‘as a whole’, comes into its essence (west)” (GA
29/30: 435–6). A comment is in order here on the way that Heidegger
thinks of essences. For some reason, most translators and many
commentators are hypersensitive about Heidegger’s use of Wesen
(essence) and related neologisms like Wesung (essencing) and wesen
with a small “w” – that is, wesen as a verb, meaning “to essence” or “to
come into its essence.” These commentators have really taken to heart
Heidegger’s warning that he does not mean to use Wesen in the
traditional sense – so much so that they seem to translate the word
randomly (as, e.g., perdurance or presence or, my favorite example
from the translation of the Beiträge, essential swaying). All such
choices avoid any metaphysical baggage, but at the cost of confusion or
incomprehensibility. I think it is better to translate Wesen in the
straightforward way as essence but then explain how Heidegger thinks
of essences (as hard as that might be). As I understand it, Heidegger’s
disagreement with many views of essences are that they define what a
thing is in terms of some necessary property that all X things must
have, or some universal property that all X things in fact have. In the
“Origin of the Work of Art,” Heidegger calls this kind of essence the
unimportant/indifferent essence (das gleichgültige Wesen) or the
unessential essence (des unwesentliche Wesen). The traditional way of
thinking of an essence, Heidegger notes, thinks of it in terms of the
common features in which all things that share an essence agree. The
essence gives itself in the generic and universal concept, which
represents the one feature that holds indifferently for many things.
This indifferent essence (essentiality in the sense of essentia) is,
however, only the unessential essence. In what does the essential
essence of something consist? Presumably it lies in what the entity is in
truth. The true essence of a thing is determined from out of its true
being, from the truth of the given entity. (GA 5: 37/BW 175–6,

31
translation modified)
The idea is, I believe, relatively straightforward: the essence of a thing
is given by that in the light of which it is brought into unconcealment.
This way of approaching the issue makes room for something being
essentially determined by an aspect or trait that, in fact, it lacks. For
example, suppose that the essence of human being is to be rational. If
we buy the unessential essence view of essences, than puzzles arise
whenever we encounter a human-like thing that happens to lack
rationality – say a baby or a person in a vegetative state. There might
well be a way around such puzzles if the essence of a thing is treated as
a property that all X things possess, or an abstract concept that they
instantiate; that does not matter for present purposes. The point is
simply that, in light of such puzzles, a natural alternative is to say that
the essence is fixed not by the property that an entity now possesses or
an abstract type that it presently instantiates, but by that in the view of
which we take it as that thing it is. So even a person in a vegetative
state is a human if she is understood in terms of the essence of being
human (in particular, she is understood precisely as failing in some
way to measure up to what it is to be human). A person could be a
human on this view, even if, in fact, it is factually impossible for her to
be rational. Another example to illustrate how this works for Heidegger
is his account of technological entities – the standing reserve. To be a
standing reserve, for example, is not a matter of possessing an aspect
or trait such as being always on call. Instead, it is to be experienced in
terms of enframing – that is, in terms of the challenging forth that
unlocks, exposes, and switches things about ever anew. Because
everything is experienced in terms of enframing, particular things are
experienced as in a state of privation when they are not always on call
as standing reserve. This means that they can have the essence of
enframing, even if they are not standing reserve yet. Their essence is
determined technologically because they are seen as being defective
when they are not always ordered and on call. Now, the problem with
essences so understood is that they present something of a paradox.
Heidegger demonstrates this by comparing these two assertions: (A)
The lights in this lecture hall are on now (B) Truth is the correctness of
an assertion where assertion (B) is intended to specify the essence of
truth (GA 45: 77 ff/69 ff). The truth of assertion (A) seems in a
straightforward and undeniable fashion to consist in its relating to a
particular fact or state of affairs – namely the condition of the lights in
the lecture hall right now. How about the truth of assertion (B)?
Heidegger makes two important observations about such assertions.
First, while it might well correspond with the facts (the relevant facts
would include all particular truths), its correspondence with the facts

32
is not what makes it true. Rather, its being true is what guarantees that
it will correspond with the facts. We can see this if we think about what
facts we could possibly adduce for (B) to correspond to. If the notion of
a fact or a state of affairs is meaningful, it must be some actual
(whether past, present, or future) condition of an object or a state of
affairs. But essential claims go beyond any claim about past, present, or
future conditions to include all possible conditions. This is because the
essence of a thing is not picked out by a mere empirical regularity but
must also be maintained in the face of counterfactual situations. If I
were to claim that (part of) the essence of a table is to be a wooden
item of furniture, for instance, it would not establish this claim to
merely show that all past, current, and future tables are wooden items
of furniture (even if I could, in point of fact, be certain that there is not,
never had been, and never would be such a plastic object). It would, in
addition, have to be the case that a plastic object with exactly the same
shape, resistance, function, and so on would not be a table. This means
that for essential definitions, correspondence to the facts is a necessary
but not sufficient condition for their being true. Second, facts come too
late for essential definitions, since we need to assume that the
definition is true in order definitively to identify the fact or facts to
which it corresponds. To get a feel for this, compare two other essential
definitions, this time for gold: (C) Gold is the noblest of the metals (D)
Gold is an element with atomic number 79. When it comes to
definitively founding simple factual statements like (A), we begin by
finding the fact to which it corresponds, and we can do this by first
finding the object referred to in the subject phrase – the lights – and
then checking their condition. How about (C)? It seems like we would
start by locating the object referred to in the subject phrase – gold. In
fact, if (C) is an essential definition, the only way we can determine that
gold is the noblest of the metals is by first finding some gold, and we do
this by looking for instances of the noblest metal. Thus we see that in
order to establish the truth of the essential specification, we first have
to assume that it is true. And that means that we are never in a position
to prove empirically that it is right. Suppose, for example, we are trying
to decide between (C) and (D). The advocates of (C) would round up all
the noblest metals to test their definition. The advocates of (D) would
round up all the elemental stuff with atomic number 79 to test theirs.
Neither camp could ever persuade the other that their essential
definition was correct, because, on the basis of their respective
definitions, each would reject exactly those particular substances that
the other took as decisive evidence in favor of his or her definition. As
Heidegger summarizes the situation, “every time we attempt to prove
an essential determination through single, or even all, actual and

33
possible facts, there results the remarkable state of affairs that we have
already presupposed the legitimacy of the essential determination,
indeed must presuppose it, just in order to grasp and produce the facts
that are supposed to serve as proof” (GA 45: 79). It seems that both
definitions cannot be right. Even if it so happens that (C) and (D) agree
in their extension, we could imagine cases or possible worlds in which
the definitions apply to some substance differently. That means that we
would have reason to believe that they name, at best, an accidental
property of gold. Such considerations show us that being cannot be
disclosed in the same way that an entity is uncovered. But if the facts
give us no basis for deciding which of the competing essential
definitions is right, then perhaps we have to conclude that there are no
genuine essences in the world. Instead, what we find in the universe is
what we (arbitrarily) project into it. And if we conclude that, then we
also might be forced to conclude that there is no way that the universe
is independently of the way we conceive of it, because it seems that we
are free to carve it up in any way that we want. The unconcealment of
being seems, then, to be a purely subjective projection on our part. Our
ordinary experience of things belies this, however. We do not think, for
example, that one is free to decide arbitrarily whether to treat the
atomic number of gold as its essential property. To us, the atomic
number seems to pick out something more essential about gold than
any of its other properties. We can summarize the situation in the
following way. It seems that our ability to have truly uncovering
comportments and true beliefs and make true assertions about the
world – comportments and beliefs and assertions that get at the way
things really are – depends on things having an essence, a way that
they really are. However, if an understanding of essences consists in a
grasp of a propositional definition, then nothing in the world can make
the essential definition true, because nothing in the world could
establish one definition as opposed to any other. Heidegger, in fact,
rejects this argument because he denies that our understanding of
essences consists in a grasp of a propositional definition. The
“knowledge of essence,” he claims, “cannot be communicated in the
sense of the passing on of a proposition, whose content is simply
grasped without its foundation and its acquisition being accomplished
again” (GA 45: 87). This is because the knowledge of essence he is
interested in is a way of being attuned to the world; for that, we have to
be introduced to the practices that will eventually teach us to have a
particular sensibility and readiness for the world. Thus “the knowledge
of the essence must be accomplished anew by each one who is to share
it” (GA 45: 87). It is this latter understanding of our knowledge of
essences – seeing it as consisting in being attuned by the world to

34
consider certain properties or features of things as definitive – that,
Heidegger believes, allows us to see our way clear of antiessentialism
and antirealism. The unconcealment of being is precisely the way a
certain precognitive understanding of essences comes to prevail in an
attunement. Through the unconcealment of being, Heidegger says,
“human comportment is tuned throughout by the openedness of beings
as a whole” (GA 9: 193/147, translation modified). So, the first thing to
say is that our disclosure of essences is not an explicit grasp of what
the essence is, nor is it a particular experience or comportment with a
particular entity. “Addressing something as something,” Heidegger
notes, “does not yet necessarily entail comprehending in its essence
whatever is thus addressed. The understanding of being (logos in a
quite broad sense) that guides and illuminates in advance all
comportment toward beings is neither a grasping of being as such, nor
is it a conceptual comprehending of what is thus grasped” (GA 9:
132/104). Heidegger illustrates this point: “we are acquainted with the
‘essence’ of the things surrounding us – house, tree, bird, road, vehicle,
man, etc. – and yet we have no knowledge of the essence. For we
immediately land in the uncertain, shifting, controversial, and
groundless, when we attempt to determine more closely, and above all
try to ground in its determinateness, what is certainly though still
indeterminately ‘known’: namely, house-ness, tree-ness, bird-ness,
humanness” (GA 45: 81). As a result, “the essence of things,” Heidegger
notes, is ordinarily something “which we know and yet do not know”
(GA 45: 81). The essence is “not first captured in a ‘definition’ and
made available for knowledge” (here, Heidegger is speaking specifically
of the essence of truth; GA 45: 115). This is because, as he explains, the
knowledge of essences is originally manifest in the way “that all acting
and creating, all thinking and speaking, all founding and proceeding
were determined by and thoroughly in accord with the unconcealment
of beings as something ungrasped” (GA 45: 115). We can say, then, that
the disclosure of being consists in our being disposed in a particular
way for the world. An understanding of being is concealed when it is
not operative in our experience of the things in the world. What
distinguishes each historical age from another, Heidegger claims, is
that each has a different style of “productive seeing,” of perceiving
things in advance in such a way that they are allowed to stand out as
essentially structured (see GA 45, section 24). We can illustrate this by
going back to the gold example above. The fight between medieval and
modern conceptions of gold is based ultimately in different ways of
picking out salient entities in the world – that is, different ways of
responding to some evident property or properties that they possess.
One way of being disposed might lead us to find the true being of a

35
thing in the extent to which it approaches God by being like Him.
Another way of being disposed might lead us to find the true being of a
thing in its ability to be turned into a resource, flexibly and efficiently
on call for use. When someone disposed to the world in the first way
uncovers a lump of gold, and subsequently defines gold as such and
such a kind of thing, what she takes to be an essential property will be
driven by her background sense that what is most essential in
everything is its nearness to God. When someone disposed to the world
in the second way uncovers it, she will take the essential properties to
be whatever it is about it that allows us to break it down into a
resource, and flexibly switch it around and order it, since our
background sense for technological efficiency shapes our experience of
everything. In fact, there is, in principle, an indefinite if not infinite
number of ways to characterize the properties of any particular thing.
A piece of gold, for instance, has a color and a weight and a texture and
a shape, but also all sorts of other properties like being good (or bad)
for making jewelry, gleaming in a way that seems divine, being directly
in front of my favorite chair, and so on. When we decide what kind or
type of thing this particular object is, we will do it on the basis of just
those particular properties we are responding to, and these properties
will be some subset of an indefinite or infinite set of properties we
could be responding to. Given that this is the case, before anything can
show up as anything, we must have some particular, prelinguistic
disposition or readiness for the world that leads us to see certain
features as more important than others. All understandings of what
things are thus arise on the basis of a background disposition to the
world. We disclose the essences that we do, according to Heidegger,
because the way we are moved by or disposed to things allows a
particular style of being “to be ascendent” (see GA 45: 129). As a result,
there is no longer any need to see (C) and (D) as incompatible. There
might be a culture whose sensibilities for the world lead it to uncover
an instance of gold as having just those essential properties specified in
(D) – in fact, Heidegger would probably argue, those are just the
essential properties we would find in a lump of gold if we were
oriented to the world in a technological fashion. We do not need to see
(D) as true a priori, because whether it is true is up to the world.
Instead, we will use our technological disposition to pick out objects as
instances of that kind of resource; from there, it is an empirical matter
which features of it make it that kind of a resource. In our age, it seems
plausible to say that gold’s essential features (in the traditional sense)
are found in its atomic structure, because knowledge of the atomic
structure gives us the best grasp on how to turn gold into a resource.
The possibility of truth is secured because there is a way that the world

36
opens itself up or is unconcealed, a coherent mode of being, and thus
the world can serve as a standard for our thoughts and words. In
summary, then, the unconcealment of beings is the “anticipatory
gathering” that lays out certain properties and relationships as salient
(see GA 45: 121). This means that essences are historical – they show
up differently as dispositions for the world change. The Revealing –
Concealing of the Clearing

This brings us to the last, and most difficult, feature of Heidegger’s

platform of unconcealment. Because of the historical nature of the
disclosure of essences/understandings of being discussed under plank
(3), Heidegger was pushed to ask what makes it possible for any one of
a plurality of understandings of being or essence to prevail. Part of the
answer he arrived at was that there must be a clearing that allows one
way of being disposed to the world to come into operation, while
withholding other potential ways of being disposed for the world. I
conclude with just a few words about the unconcealment of the
clearing. The historical nature of essences leads one to ask how it is
that changes in historical understandings can arise. Heidegger in
reflecting on this question noted: entities are reordered, and indeed
not merely by an entity that is not yet accessible to us, and perhaps
never will be, but by something concealed which conceals itself
precisely when we, holding ourselves in the clearing, are left to the
discretion of or even captivated by, entities. From this we derive an
essential insight: the clearing, in which beings are, is not simply
bounded and delimited by something hidden but by something self-
concealing. (GA 45: 210)
This is a phenomenological observation that Heidegger repeats often
in various forms, but without much clarification or argument. The idea
seems to be something like the following: the style of being that allows
things to show up as having an essence is most invisible when it is
most effective. That is, when everything is showing up to us in terms of
flexibility and efficiency, for example, we are captivated by things – we
are wholly absorbed in our dealings with them. That renders us unable
to make ourselves aware of the understanding of being that is shaping
our experience of the world. Looked at another way, the ready
availability of beings to us depends on our losing sight of the fact that
their availability is grounded in a particular understanding of the
essence of beings as a whole. Thus “the concealment of beings as a
whole . . . is older than every manifestness of this or that entity” (GA 9:
193–4/148). So a new understanding of being can establish itself, and a
new ordering of beings can become operative, only if there is

37
something like a clearing that conceals any other way of experiencing
the world in order to allow this particular way to come to the forefront.
The upside to this is it allows us to inhabit a world: the self-
concealment of being “leaves historical human beings in the sphere of
what is practicable with what they are capable of. Thus left, humanity
completes its ‘world’ on the basis of the latest needs and aims, and fills
out that world by means of proposing and planning” (GA 9: 195/149).
The downside is that, having lost sight of the concealment that makes it
all possible, we become convinced of the necessity and unique
correctness of our way of inhabiting the world: “human beings go
wrong as regards the essential genuineness of their standards” (GA 9:
196/149). As I have noted already, the clearing should be understood
as something like a space of possibilities – it “grants first of all the
possibility of the path to presence, and grants the possible presencing
of that presence itself” (GA 14: 75/BW 445). We will explore examples
of this function of unconcealment in the chapters on history (see
Chapters 8–10), because Heidegger understands the movement of
history as a series of different modes of presence. The clearing makes it
possible for a certain understanding of being – a particular mode of
presence – to come to prevail among entities. For possibilities to be live
possibilities, however, it requires a space from which other
incompatible possibilities are excluded. The clearing maintains a world
by keeping back (concealing) possibilities that are incompatible with
the essence that is currently operative. In order for some possibilities
to shape our experience of the world, any other possibilities cannot be
live possibilities, they cannot be possible for us, they must be kept from
us. This might make it sound like the clearing is a gallery of possibilities
– that it keeps different determinate ways of being in the world locked
in the back room while exhibiting one at a time. But this would be to
think about it incorrectly – it would be to treat ways of being as if they
were themselves in being. But ways of being are not unless entities are
constituted by them. So the clearing is not a hiding of other modes of
being, any more than a clearing in the forest is a hiding of trees. The
forest clearing does not work by keeping some particular trees or
shrubs on hand but out of the way. Rather, the forest clearing is
nothing but the condition that there are no trees or shrubs growing.
Similarly, the clearing makes some possibilities possible, not by putting
some determinate possibilities in cold storage, but by making it the
case that there are no other determinate possibilities available. For the
available possibilities to have authority as possibilities, moreover, we
cannot be aware that other possibilities are being ruled out or
concealed from us. Our experience of the natural world as resources,
for example, could not authoritatively shape our experience of the

38
world if we were aware that one would be equally justified in
experiencing it as God’s creation. This means that, paradoxically, the
clearing only works as a clearing when it is not uncovered – when it is
not something toward which we can comport. Thus the clearing does
not only keep back other possibilities, but it keeps back that it is
keeping back other possibilities. The clearing conceals the possibility of
other understandings of beings. It is not “the mere clearing of presence,
but the clearing of presence concealing itself, the clearing of a self-
concealing sheltering” (GA 14: 79/BW 448). Appendix on Tugendhat

Perhaps the most influential critique of Heidegger’s account of

propositional truth and unconcealment is Ernst Tugendhat’s, published
in Der Warheitsbegriff bei Husserl und Heidegger (Gruyter, 1967).
Tugendhat’s argument consists of the following three claims: 1.
Heidegger redefines propositional truth – the natural conception of
truth – as uncovering simpliciter. In doing so, he loses the specific
notion of propositional truth. 2. Heidegger extends his revised concept
of propositional truth to uncovering of entities and disclosure of being:
“Heidegger handles propositional truth and comes to the conclusion
that it must be understood as ‘uncovering’ (or – as Heidegger says later
– unconcealing). This finding then allows him to extend the concept of
truth to all that can be uncovered and to any disclosure.” 3 3.
Uncovering of entities and disclosure of being, however, lack the right
to be called truth, because they do not capture the specific notion of
truth contained in the natural conception of truth. (I’ll call this the
“rights” argument – that unconcealment in general has no right to be
called “truth”). As I have shown above, Tugendhat was simply wrong
about claim 1. Heidegger always saw propositional truth as being a
specific kind of unconcealment, one that consists in correspondence
with a fact or state of affairs. Thus propositional truth was neither
redefined, nor did it lose its specific sense. I have also shown that
Tugendhat is wrong about claim 2. As we saw, Heidegger was quite
clear that unconcealment of entities, being, and the clearing could not
be understood through propositional truth. His approach was not to
extend the account of propositional truth to the other elements of the
platform, but to explore the kind of unconcealment proper to each
feature of our engagement with the world. Tugendhat’s defenders,
however, maintain that in spite of Tugendhat’s errors with respect to
claims 1 and 2, claim 3 remains an important and viable critique.
(Indeed, they go so far as to insist that this was the real core of
Tugendhat’s argument all along – against, it seems to me, the weight of
Tugendhat’s book.) Thus, for example, Cristina Lafont argues in

39
Tugendhat’s defense that if we focus on these errors, “the central point
of Tugendhat’s critique is swept under the rug, namely, ‘What
justification and what significance does it have that Heidegger chooses
‘truth’, of all words, to designate this other phenomenon [of
unconcealment]?”4. And William Smith argues similarly that “the real
force” and “the essence of Tugendhat’s critique” lies in the questions:
“why call these conditions for the possibility of correctness [i.e., the
uncoveredness of entities and the disclosedness of being] ‘truth’, be it
qualified as ‘ontological’ or ‘primordial’? Whether Heidegger ‘reduces’
truth to unconcealment, or alternatively, whether Heidegger accepts
truth as correspondence is irrelevant to the question of whether
unconcealment itself deserves the title of ‘truth’ at all.” 5 In fact, I think
it is not at all irrelevant to Tugendhat’s argument that his first two
claims are simply wrong, since much of the force behind claim 3
derives from showing that by thinking of truth in terms of
unconcealment, Heidegger is forced to redefine illegitimately
propositional truth and then to extend, once again illegitimately, this
redefinition to the uncovering of entities and the disclosure of worlds.
But once we see that one can think of the “natural” conception of truth
in terms of unconcealment without losing its “specificity,” much of the
impetus for Tugendhat’s argument is lost. One is left simply to maintain
a rather dubious linguistic principle – that things either possess or lack
a right to a specific name. But why should we think that? Why should I
accept the Lafont/Smith insistence that only propositional truth has an
inherent right to be called truth? That flies, as Heidegger frequently
remarked, in the face of our ordinary linguistic practices. We predicate
truth not just of beliefs and assertion, but also people (true friends),
Gods (the living and true God), organizations, objects (true gold),
activities (true aim), and so on. Lafont announces as a principle that we
are only justified in using truth to mean uncovering” if “the ‘being-true
of the statement’ could be translated without loss as ‘being-
uncovering.’”6 Would we say the same of these other uses of the
predicate true – that only if we could derive the “truth of the
statement” without loss from the meaning of the truth predicate as
applied to an object, only then would we be justified in saying that an
object is true? And with what right would such a principle be asserted?
Since when has it been a condition of the use of a predicate that it may
only be used when the definition of it in one of its applications can be
transferred ‘without loss’ to all its other applications? But perhaps the
rights argument turns on a less demanding sense of entitlement.
Rather than demanding that the general understanding of
unconcealment apply without loss, thus capturing propositional truth
in all its specificity, perhaps the idea behind claim 3 is that there is

40
some core element of truth that is missing from unconcealment.
Tugendhat, Lafont, and Smith all emphasize the normativity involved in
propositional truth – the idea that assertions and beliefs succeed by
being true and fail by being false. Tugendhat suggests, again wrongly,
that Heidegger is illegitimately transferring the normativity of truth to
world disclosure. But we could still read the rights claim as asserting
that discovery of entities and disclosure of worlds lack the right to be
called truth unless they possess conditions of success or failure so that
we can be in a position to say definitively that something either
unconceals or it does not. Thus Lafont observes that since
unconcealment is “neither a normative concept that refers to the
question regarding what is the case (related to the correctness of
statements) nor a concept that shows the bivalent structure of ‘either–
or,’” we have “cause to doubt, with Tugendhat, that such a concept can
have anything at all to do with the concept of truth.”7 And Smith argues
that “what Tugendhat’s question calls for, then, is an interpretation of
disclosedness that shows how it has a normative dimension within its
own sphere.”8 But, of course, not everything that possesses conditions
of success or failure has a right to be called true. In baseball, a swing
that hits a home run is no more a true swing than a swing that results
in a strike out. Not every form of normativity is translatable into binary
terms of truth and falsehood. Deception and nondeception stand in a
normative relationship (see Chapter 3), but there can be deceptive
truths, just as there are fictional accounts and parables that free us
from deception. Things can be more or less deceptive – being deceptive
or nondeceptive is not a simple binary state. Thus we ought to be
suspicious when Smith suggests that the normative dimension for
unconcealment is the dimension of authenticity versus inauthenticity.
Smith thinks we should say that a true unconcealment is one that is
authentic, a false unconcealment one that is inauthentic. But why
should we think that authenticity has the right to be called true, any
more than a home run swing? What the advocates of the rights
argument owe us, but have never provided, is an explanation of the
sort of normativity that deserves to be called truth – one that
distinguishes all the legitimate uses of the predicate “is true” from all
illegitimate ones. Lacking such an explanation, the objection amounts
to little more than whining that it is too hard for us to wean ourselves
from thinking of truth as entailing a particular kind of normativity (the
kind exhibited by true propositions), and thus misleading to call
unconcealment truth. But, as we have seen, Heidegger himself
acknowledged that it was misleading – for that reason he tried, as I
catalogued above, to alert the reader consistently to the fact that he
was using the term in a nonstandard way. And when he discontinued

41
the use of truth to refer to unconcealment, that does not represent any
acknowledgment that he was unjustified in calling it truth. Instead, as
he suggested in responding to Tugendhat’s first presentations of the
rights argument, it was nothing more than a pragmatic response to the
refusal to pay attention to his warnings: “if one thinks of ‘truth’ only in
the sense of the truth of assertion, it certainly is confusing to also call
the ‘clearing’ ‘truth.’ It is certainly not truth in the ‘specific,’ that is, the
usual sense. As long as the usual use of the word ‘truth’ insists on
having the only definitive meaning, it is perhaps advisable to renounce
the philosophical use.”9 Indeed, a fundamental feature of Heidegger’s
philosophical practice – a feature to which his Tugendhat-inspired
critics seem particularly tone-deaf – is a refusal to defer to the
ordinary, natural, and commonsensical use of terms: The place of
language properly inhabited, and of its habitual words, is usurped by
common terms. The common speech becomes the current speech. We
meet it on all sides, and since it is common to all, we now accept it as
the only standard. Anything that departs from this commonness, in
order to inhabit the formerly habitual proper speech of language, is at
once considered a violation of the standard. It is branded as a frivolous
whim. All this is in fact quite in order, as soon as we regard the
common as the only legitimate standard, and become generally
incapable of fathoming the commonness of the common. This
floundering in a commonness which we have placed under the
protection of so-called natural common sense, is not accidental, nor are
we free to deprecate it. This floundering in commonness is part of the
high and dangerous game and gamble in which, by the nature of
language, we are the stakes. Is it playing with words when we attempt
to give heed to this game of language and to hear what language really
says when it speaks? If we succeed in hearing that, then it may happen
– provided we proceed carefully – that we get more truly to the matter
that is expressed in any telling and asking. (GA 8: 82–3/WCT 119)
If we understand what Heidegger means by the philosophical use of a
term, and what he is trying to accomplish with the high stakes game of
using words contrary to their natural sense, it will help us see how he
would respond to the question: why does Heidegger use the word truth
to refer to unconcealment, given that he understood all along how
misleading it was to do so? Heidegger argued that the philosopher has
a right to use words whenever doing so will draw our attention to
some phenomenon, and help us to understand its structure and
relations to other phenomena. As Heidegger liked to observe, that is
what Plato was doing when he used the word eidos for that which in
everything and in each particular thing endures as present. For eidos,
in the common speech, meant the outward aspect [Ansicht] that a

42
visible thing offers to the physical eye. Plato exacts of this word,
however, something utterly extraordinary: that it name what precisely
is not and never will be perceivable with physical eyes. But even this is
by no means the full extent of what is extraordinary here. For idea
names not only the nonsensuous aspect of what is physically visible.
Aspect, idea, names and also is that which constitutes the essence in
the audible, the tasteable, the tactile, in everything that is in any way
accessible. (GA 7: 23–4)
What right did the forms have to receive the name eidos, visible
aspect? The rights of philosophical usage, which shows us something
about the role that nonsensuous ideas play in forming our sensuous
apprehension of the world. And, in fact, Heidegger claimed the rights of
philosophical usage when it comes to calling unconcealment Wahrheit.
In doing so, he was in no way asserting that unconcealment, like
propositional truth, has an intrinsic, bivalent normative structure.
Instead, he was drawing our attention to the way all truths –
propositional, the truth of being, the truth of entities – preserve and
shelter a particular existential relationship between things in the
world. “The assertion is not primarily true (wahr) in the sense of
revealedness. But rather the assertion is the way in which we humans
preserve (wahren) and protect (verwahren) the truth (Wahrheit), that
is, the revealedness of entities: aletheuein” (GA 31: 90). Thought
philosophically, in other words, truth stabilizes and secures particular
ways of encountering entities. And the question is not what to transfer
from propositional truth to unconcealment, but the other way around –
what to transfer from unconcealment to propositional truth. For us
humans, formulating and passing around true assertions is one
primary way that we secure our ways of comporting ourselves in the
world we inhabit. Thus Heidegger hoped, overoptimistically, as the
reaction of his critics shows, that calling unconcealment Wahrheit (it
does not really work in English) would help us think about the
importance of stabilizing and securing an understanding of the world:
“One day we will learn to think our used up word ‘truth’ (Wahrheit) on
the basis of the true (Wahr), and experience that truth is the preserving
(Wahrnis) of being and that being as presence belongs to preserving”
(GA 5: 348). Why call unconcealment Wahrheit ? To provoke us to
reflect on our role in opening up, sheltering, preserving, and stabilizing
understandings of beings, entities, and thinkable states of affairs in the
world. Chapter 1 Research for this chapter was funded in part by the
David M. Kennedy Center for International and Area Studies at
Brigham Young University.
1 These include discoveredness (Entdecktheit) and uncoveredness

(Unverdecktheit); disclosedness (Erschlossenheit), unveiledness

43
(Enthülltheit), and disconcealedness (Entborgenheit).
2 Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals (Douglas Smith,

Trans.). Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1996, p. 13.

3 Ernst Tugendhat, “Heidegger’s Idea of Truth,” in Hermeneutics and

Truth (Brice R. Wachterhauser, Ed.). Evanston, IL: Northwestern

University Press, 1994, p. 85.
4 Heidegger, Language, and World Disclosure, p. 116.
5 “Why Tugendhat’s Critique of Heidegger’s Concept of Truth Remains

a Critical Problem,” Inquiry 50 (2007): 164.

6 Heidegger, Language, and World Disclosure, p. 123.
7 Ibid., p. 148.
8 “Why Tugendhat’s Critique of Heidegger’s Concept of Truth Remains

a Critical Problem,” p. 174.

9 “Letter to Ernst Tugendhat,” March 19, 1964.

2 The Conditions of Truth in Heidegger and Davidson

An indirect concern of this chapter is to show that, despite dramatic

differences in approach, “analytic” and “Continental” philosophers can
be brought into a productive dialogue with one another on topics
central to the philosophical agenda of both traditions. Their differences
tend to obscure the fact that both traditions have as a fundamental
project the critique of past accounts of language, intentionality, and
mind. Moreover, writers within the two traditions are frequently in
considerable agreement about the failings of past accounts. Where they
tend to differ is in the types of positive accounts they give. By exploring
the important areas of disagreement against the background of
agreement, however, it is possible to gain insights unavailable to those
rooted in a single tradition. The direct concern here is to illuminate
Heidegger’s account of truth and unconcealment through a comparison
with Davidson’s accounts of the conditions of truth. I begin, however,
with a brief discussion of some crucial differences between the analytic
and Continental ways of doing philosophy. An understanding of these
differences provides the basis for seeing how Heidegger and Davidson,
all appearances to the contrary, in fact follow a parallel course by
resisting theoretical attempts at the redefinition or reduction of our
pretheoretical notion of truth. Indeed, both writers believe that truth is
best illuminated by looking at the conditions of truth – that is, they
both try to understand what makes truth as a property of language and
thought possible in the first place. Both answer the question by
exploring how what we say or think can come to have content. I
conclude by suggesting that Heidegger’s “ontological foundations” of
“the traditional conception of truth” can be seen as an attempt at
solving a problem that Davidson recognizes but believes is incapable of

44
solution – namely, the way the existence of language and thought
presuppose our sharing a finely articulated structure that only
language and thought seem capable of producing. Analytic and
continental philosophy

If I were to reduce the difference between analytic and Continental

philosophy to a single anecdote, I would refer to two titles: Michael
Dummett’s The Logical Basis of Metaphysics,1 based on his 1976
William James Lectures, and Martin Heidegger’s Metaphysische
Anfangsgründe der Logik (GA 26), the published edition of a 1928
lecture course. Here, in a nutshell, one finds the analytic’s focus on
logical analysis as the means toward philosophical questioning, and the
Continental suspicion that all knowledge is tinged through and through
by hidden metaphysical presuppositions. As Dummett explains in his
introduction, analytic philosophy’s approach to metaphysical issues is
premised on the belief that “[p]hilosophy can take us no further than
enabling us to command a clear view of the concepts by means of
which we think about the world, and, by so doing, to attain a firmer
grasp of the way we represent the world in our thoughts.” 2 The analytic
philosopher’s assault on metaphysical heights, then, will only begin
after the exhaustive examination of more pedestrian subjects like
language and logic. This is in deliberate contrast to the philosophical
tradition, which Dummett views as deeply flawed due to “an
underestimation by even the deepest thinkers of the difficulty of the
questions they tackle. They consequently take perilous shortcuts in
their argumentation and flatter themselves that they have arrived at
definitive solutions when much in their reasoning is questionable. I
believe that we shall make faster progress only if we go at our task
more slowly and methodically, like mountain climbers making sure
each foothold is secure before venturing onto the next.”3 One needs
only contrast this position with Heidegger’s introduction to see the
profound difference in impetus between the analytical and Continental
style. Heidegger argues that we can make no progress at all in
philosophical understanding without “a critical dismantling of
traditional logic down to its hidden foundations” – “the metaphysical
foundations of logic” (GA 26: 27) This is because logic can provide
genuine insight into “the way we represent the world in our thoughts”
(as Dummett puts it) only if we understand why it is that we human
beings are constituted in such a way “as to be able to be thus governed
by laws”: “How ‘is’ Dasein [human being] according to its essence so
that such an obligation as that of being governed by logical laws can
arise in and for Dasein [human being]?” (GA 26: 24). As a result, “[a]

45
basic problem of logic, the law-governedness of thinking, reveals itself
to be a problem of human existence in its ground” (GA 26: 24).
Consequently, an understanding of logical form would be bootless, for
Heidegger, without a prior understanding of the constitution of human
existence – an understanding that can only be reached by reflection on
the fundamental concepts of metaphysics. Analytic philosophers, in
sum, see themselves as engaged in the painstaking process of clarifying
the logical structure of language and mind – a process they believe to
be prior to making inroads in metaphysical reflection. Continental
philosophers, while also often starting from the structure of language
and mind, seek to move from there directly to a reflection on the
historical, existential dimension of our language and thoughts. Because
Analytics see no evidence of careful and rigorous analysis in the work
of Continental thinkers, they consider Continental philosophy to be, at
best, “a more or less systematic reflection on the human situation . . . a
kind of reflection which can sometimes lead to a new perspective on
human life and experience.”4 At its worst, Continental philosophy is
viewed as hopelessly muddling about within a “wide-spread ignorance
of certain fundamental linguistic principles.”5 Continental
philosophers, on the other hand, are intensely suspicious of the
Analysts’ “fundamental linguistic principles,” certain that reliance on
them is premised on metaphysical naïveté or even ignorance. So
Heidegger argues that “[t]he appearance of a ‘philosophy of language’
is a striking sign that knowledge of the essence of the word, i.e., the
possibility of an experience of the primordial essence of the word, has
been lost for a long time. The word no longer preserves the relation of
Being to man, but instead the word is a formation and thing of
language” (GA 54: 101–2). And Derrida thinks it typical of the whole
analytic tradition that it conducts its investigations on the basis of “a
kind of ideal regulation,” which excludes the troublesome cases most in
need of examination – troublesome cases that in fact work to
deconstruct traditional philosophy.6 What is often lost in this mutual
dismissiveness is a surprising overlap in views concerning the shared
starting point of much of the work in both traditions – language. It
strikes me that the best way to overcome the Analytic/Continental
divide is therefore to ignore, at least provisionally, the differences in
approach and instead explore the areas of agreement. When left at the
level of mutual recrimination, it looks like there is so little in common
as to make the two traditions irrelevant to one another, for it seems to
both sides as if the other is either incapable of joining issue, or at least
willfully refusing to do so. But if one can get beyond the differences and
discover a common ground, then the disagreements can be seen to
have content, and the proponents of the two traditions can be made to

46
engage in productive ways. In the remainder of this paper, I hope to
illustrate this by showing how Heidegger’s and Davidson’s inquiries
into truth and the functioning of language, as different as they are, both
come to focus on the conditions of the possibility of truth as the means
to dissolving traditional philosophical problems. It is true that there
are important differences in their accounts of truth conditions. But by
seeing their disagreement against the background of an extensive
congruence in view, one can highlight in a way not easily available to
adherents of one tradition or another the presuppositions and
problems that remain for each thinker. Heidegger and davidson on
truth definitions

There are a variety of traditional answers to the question what makes

a true sentence (or belief or proposition, etc.) true – answers such as
correspondence, coherence, utility, and so on. What all these theories
share, as Davidson has pointed out, is a sense that truth is a concept for
which we should be able to provide an illuminating definition. From
the preceding observations on the difference between analytic and
Continental philosophy, as general as they were, it should come as no
surprise that both Davidson and Heidegger are critical of traditional
truth theories. The notable similarities between Davidson’s and
Heidegger’s views of truth, on the other hand, are perhaps unexpected.
Davidson, after all, has argued for a “correspondence” view, albeit a
“correspondence without confrontation.”7 And he pursues the question
of truth, in good analytic fashion, within the context of a semantic
analysis of the truth predicate. Heidegger, on the other hand, is widely
interpreted as denying a correspondence view in favor of a definition
of truth as “unconcealment.” And his criticism of correspondence
theories is based in a phenomenological, rather than a logical,
exploration of our experience of truth. But, on scrutiny, one discovers
that the differences are nowhere near as wide as one might believe.
Heidegger, in fact, views propositional truth as a sort of
correspondence, and Heidegger’s account of unconcealment is badly
misunderstood if taken as a definition of truth. 8 To the contrary,
Heidegger’s primary interest in propositional truth is not to redefine it
but to discover what makes propositional entities capable of being true
or false. And Davidson, likewise, believes that propositional truth
cannot meaningfully be defined in terms of correspondence. More
importantly, Davidson, like Heidegger, believes that progress cannot be
made on the issue of truth by defining it but only by understanding the
conditions of sentences and beliefs being true. The interesting
disagreement comes, then, not at the level of their respective accounts

47
of propositional truth, but rather in the details of their explanations of
the conditions of truth. In order to get to the point where we can
fruitfully compare and contrast Davidson and Heidegger on this topic,
however, we must get beyond the seemingly incompatible approaches
to propositional truth. By understanding the context that the
respective traditions provide for inquiries into truth, we can go a long
way toward separating the genuine from the merely apparent
disagreement. Within the analytic tradition of philosophy, the generally
accepted starting point for understanding truth is an analysis of our
use of the truth predicate. Many philosophers accept that “just about
everything there is to be said about truth” is said by noting that almost
all of our uses of “is true” can be understood in terms of “certain formal
features” of the predicate – “notably its disquotation feature.”9 These
features allow us to make certain generalizing statements about
sentences; “the truth predicate allows any sentence to be reformulated
so that its entire content will be expressed by the new subject – a
singular term open to normal objectival quantification.” 10 In addition,
we can account for certain vestigial uses of “true” (like “That’s true!”)
in terms of its use as an illocutionary device – for instance, to confirm
or endorse.11 Perhaps the best-known example of a definition of the
truth predicate is Tarski’s semantic theory of truth. Tarski’s
Convention T shows how to provide an extensionally adequate
description of the truth predicate for each of a number of well-behaved
languages. According to Convention T, a satisfactory truth theory for
that language must be such as to entail for every sentence of the
language a T-sentence of the form s is true if and only if p where “s” is
a description of the sentence, and “p” is replaced by that sentence, or a
translation of the sentence into the metalanguage.12 The problem of
restricting analysis to the truth predicate is, as many have noted, that
such a definition seems to fall far short of explaining our concept of
truth. Dummett, for instance, argues that the failing of a Tarskian truth
definition is best seen in the case where we are constructing a T-theory
for an object language we do not yet understand. In order to do this, we
must know the conditions under which truth can be predicated for
each and every sentence of the object-language – something we cannot
do unless “we know something about the concept of truth expressed by
that predicate which is not embodied in that, or any other truth-
definition.”13 Thus, if all we knew about truth were exhausted by a T-
theoretic description of the truth predicate for a language, we would
not be able to define truth for a new language. The implications for
analytic philosophers engaged in the Davidsonian project of defining
meaning in terms of truth are critical, for if the truth conditions of
sentences are to play any role in fixing their meaning, our ability to

48
learn a language depends on having a pretheoretic understanding of
truth. Thus Dummett explains that in order that someone should gain
from the explanation that P is true in such-and-such circumstances an
understanding of the sense of P, he must already know what it means
to say of P that it is true. If when he enquires into this he is told that the
only explanation is that to say that P is true is the same as to assert P, it
will follow that in order to understand what is meant by saying that P
is true, he must already know the sense of asserting P, which was
precisely what was supposed to be being explained to him. 14 So if
meaning is to be understood in terms of truth conditions, then
understanding language requires an account of truth above and
beyond a language-relative characterization of the truth predicate. But
what sense can be given to this pre-T-theoretic concept of truth? The
readily available traditional answer, which explains truth as
correspondence, is unable to do the work that needs to be done to
make truth useful in Davidson’s project. According to correspondence
theories, we accept that a statement is true if there is some fact to
which the statement corresponds. But, in order to do the work we need
it to do, the theory must specify the fact to which the sentence
corresponds independently of our recognizing the sentence as true.
And, as Davidson has shown, a definition of truth in terms of
correspondence to facts is unable to do this. For a correspondence
theory to be useful, it must be able to generate theorems of the form
(1) the statement that p corresponds to the fact that q But if q is an
extensional description of some fact or state of affairs in the world, p
will correspond not just to q, but to any sentence logically equivalent to
q, or to any sentence differing from q only in the substitution in q of a
coextensive singular term. Thus p will correspond not just to the fact
that q but to any fact at all.15 And so (1) will fail to assist us in
determining whether a sentence is true. Treating the description as
less than fully extensional (by, for example, denying the substitutivity
of logically equivalent sentences) is no more successful. The very
possibility of explaining truth through correspondence is undermined
by this move, since nonextensional descriptions rely on the concept of
truth in picking out the fact in the first place: “Suppose, to leave the
frying-pan of extensionality for the fires of intension, we distinguish
facts as finely as statements. Of course, not every statement has its fact;
only the true ones do. But then, unless we find another way to pick out
facts, we cannot hope to explain truth by appeal to them.” 16 Hence, the
real objection to correspondence theories is that they “fail to provide
entities to which truth vehicles (whether we take these to be
statements, sentences or utterances) can be said to correspond.” 17 But,
Davidson argues, rather than moving us to look for new definitions of

49
truth, this failure should lead us to question the belief that, to make the
concept of truth useful, we have to be able to specify what makes a true
sentence true. Davidson has argued that, in constructing a theory of
meaning, what we need beyond a T-theory for a language is not a
definition of truth, but an understanding of how we have the concept of
truth. It is thus not truth that we should be seeking, but rather a
clarification of “the necessary condition[s] of our possession of the
concept of truth.”18 To summarize, Davidson’s approach to truth has
two distinct sides to it. First, as against any attempt to define truth, he
takes the notion of truth itself to be “beautifully transparent” and
primitive, and thus denies that the general concept of truth is reducible
to any other concept or amenable to redefinition in other terms. 19 This
leaves intact our pretheoretic understanding of truth. He accepts a
Tarskian T-theory as providing an instructive description of the kind of
pattern truth makes in a language.20 But he resists the urge to believe
that such a definition fully captures the concept of truth. The second
part consists in saying enough about truth to shed light on the other
philosophical issues in which truth is implicated without succumbing
to the temptation to offer a full blown definition of truth: “what we
want to know is how to tell when T-sentences (and hence the theory as
a whole) describe the language of a group or an individual. This
obviously requires specifying at least part of the content of the concept
of truth which Tarski’s truth predicates fail to capture.” 21 Davidson’s
account of truth consequently turns to the conditions of truth –
specifically, the condition that sentences and other propositional
entities have content. Heidegger’s inquiry into truth follows a similar
strategy. For both Heidegger and Davidson, the problem with
correspondence theories is that they presuppose, but cannot explain,
the structure of our knowledge of the world. Of course, Heidegger is
not motivated by a desire to employ a definition of the truth predicate
in a theory of meaning. Instead, his interest in truth stems from the fact
that, as he explains, “the phenomenon of truth is so thoroughly coupled
with the problem of being” (GA 2: H. 154). By this, Heidegger means
that there is a necessary connection between our understanding of
truth and the way beings are present to the understanding. But he
insists that the relationship between being and truth cannot be
explained by existing correspondence theories because we only
recognize the correspondence relation between a statement and things
in the world posterior to our relating the statement to the world
through our “comportment.” Thus the notion of correspondence cannot
help us in knowing how to relate statements to the world (see GA 9:
184). But Heidegger’s criticism of correspondence theories should not
be taken to mean that Heidegger intended to redefine the truth of

50
assertions in other terms. Indeed, he accepts that the truth of
propositional entities is to be understood as a kind of
“correspondence” or agreement with the way the world is; a
“proposition is true,” he affirms, “insofar as it corresponds to things.” 22
Heidegger’s objection, then, is not to the notion of correspondence per
se, but rather to certain types of correspondence theories – namely,
those that understand correspondence as a relation holding between
mental representations and nonmental things. Such theories,
Heidegger argues, are unable to explain instructively the notion of a
relation of agreement. Thus, rather than seeking to provide a theory of
the correspondence relation, Heidegger believes it is enough to note
that an assertion is true when what is intended in the assertion “is just
as it gets pointed out in the assertion as being.”23 In so doing, he
accepts the intuition that the truth of propositional entities consists in
agreeing with the way the world is (see Chapter 1). In the place of a
truth theory, Heidegger proposes examining how it is that beliefs or
assertions are the sorts of things that can be true or false. His account
of unconcealment is meant not as a definition of truth, but rather as an
explanation of what makes it possible for propositions to point to the
world in just the way that the world is. And in a manner not unlike
Davidson, Heidegger sees the content of propositional states as fixed
through our interacting with others and our orientation toward things
within a world thereby “erasing,” in Davidson’s words, “the boundary
between knowing a language and knowing our way around in the
world generally.”24 It is in the details of their accounts of what fixes the
content of our intentional states that the interesting differences are
found between Davidson’s and Heidegger’s views. Intentional content
as a condition of truth

In this section of the chapter, I look in more detail at Davidson’s and

Heidegger’s respective accounts of the way intentional content gets
fixed. I will first examine Davidson’s view, and then show how
Heidegger’s account of unconcealment can be read in the context of
Davidson’s approach to the problem.25 Davidson begins from the fact
that human beings use language and succeed in understanding each
other, and asks what makes that use of language possible. Davidson’s
project of “Radical Interpretation” illuminates the conditions of
language by asking what would suffice for an interpreter to interpret
the speaker of an alien language. By imagining a radical interpretation
– that is, an interpretation that makes no assumptions about the
propositional content of the speaker’s behavior (linguistic or other) –
Davidson focuses us on those properties of languages that allow us to

51
learn them. A radical interpreter faces the problem that we cannot
understand what a speaker means by her words without knowing what
she believes, and we are deprived of the usual access to her beliefs –
her words. Thus, if we can explain how it is possible to interpret her
without the benefit of a prior knowledge of her beliefs and meanings,
we will learn something important about the way language works –
namely, what it takes to give content to the utterances and beliefs of
another. The issue, then, becomes one of understanding how it is that
we learn to ascribe meanings and beliefs to each other. Here is where
truth is implicated. To give content to the thoughts and assertions of
others, Davidson claims, we must be able to ascribe truth conditions to
their propositional states. But, as we have seen, a Tarskian “definition”
of truth is insufficient for this project because it is subsequent to our
having a meaningful language and propositional attitudes with content.
Rather, some account of the way in which we come to relate a theory of
truth (of the type Tarski has shown us to construct) to other rational
agents is required; “If we knew in general what makes a theory of truth
correctly apply to a speaker or group of speakers, we could plausibly
be said to understand the concept of truth.”26 Thus Davidson tries to
say something more about truth – not by way of defining truth, but
rather by way of understanding the conditions under which we can
apply a theory of truth to others. A theory of truth can only apply to a
speaker, however, if that speaker’s utterances have a content that is
about the world. Indeed, from the fact that a language can be learned
by one completely unfamiliar with that language, it follows that the
content of utterances must be, by and large, about the world. The same
holds for beliefs. We have no basis for attributing beliefs to others
beyond whatever correlations we can discover between their behavior
and the world.27 We can thus see that a condition of having a concept of
truth is having beliefs and utterances that are about objects in a public
world. But Davidson goes beyond simply noting that, in order to
interpret others, we need to correlate their behavior (verbal and other)
with the world. He makes the further argument that we cannot have
meaningful beliefs or utterances at all unless we are interpreted by
others. This is because, until we enter into relationships of
interpretation with others, there can be no way of determinately fixing
the cause that gives our beliefs and words their meaning, nor of
locating that cause in an independent world. The problem of locating
the cause in the world arises, in the first instance, from the fact that any
particular event is implicated in a number of different causal sequences
of interaction. These include causes prior to that event (for instance,
the event of our seeing a flower is itself caused by whatever made the
flower grow), as well as causal intermediaries between us and the

52
world (for instance, reflected light from the flower striking the
photoreceptors in our retinas). Once we determine which causes are
relevant to the content of the belief or utterance, we must determine
which features of that cause are included in the belief, and which are
excluded. For instance, if we decide that the relevant cause of our belief
that there is a flower is the presence of a flower, and subsequently
conclude that the content of our belief that there is a flower is fixed by
the presence of the flower (rather than the pattern of stimulation of
our sensory surfaces), it is still not clear which of the many features of
the presence of the flower are included in our belief that there is a
flower. It is a feature of beliefs and sentences that they in general are
not directed toward every particular of a thing – I can believe that
there is a flower without believing that the flower is red. Beliefs also
occur under a description – I can believe that there is a flower without
also believing that there is a plant’s reproductive structure. This
second problem, put another way, is that of explaining how the causal
interaction, which is extensionally described, becomes an intentional
content. Davidson’s way of both locating the cause and determining the
content of our propositional attitudes depends on “triangulation” – that
is, “two or more creatures simultaneously in interaction with each
other and with the world they share.”28 Davidson argues that we go
some way toward solving both problems by noting what he calls a
primitive or primal triangle. In this triangle, the two creatures observe
each other responding to objects in the world. For such a triangle to
exist, each creature must respond to a similarity between different
objects or different instances of the same object, and also respond to a
similarity in the other creature’s responses to that object. Once one
observer is able to correlate these similarities in this way, the stage is
set for locating and determining the cause of the other’s response. 29
This primitive triangle is necessary to solving the problems, but not
sufficient because the “baseline” connecting the two creatures is not
complete. The cause of the beliefs cannot be found in an objective
world until the creatures have some way of knowing that they both
occupy positions in a shared objective world, and this requires that
they have some access to the other’s perspective. 30 The primitive
triangle is also not sufficient for determining the intentional content of
propositional entities, for the causal relations that hold between
creatures and things are extensionally defined, while intentional
content is not. Our beliefs about flowers, for instance, cannot be
reduced to an extensional description of flowers, because the contents
of our beliefs are determined in part by their relations to other beliefs
(beliefs about plants, allergies, romance, etc.), but also because the
content of our beliefs, as already noted, generally includes less than all

53
that is true of some object extensionally defined. Without a more fine-
grained determination of the other’s orientation to the world than that
provided by the primal triangle, we cannot adequately fix the content
of the other’s beliefs. But how are we to complete the baseline?
Davidson argues that what is needed to connect the creatures is
language. Linguistic communication contributes several elements
missing from the primal triangle. First, language provides a sufficiently
rich pattern of behavior to allow an attribution of a determinate
intentional content to a person.31 In addition, communication lets us
pick out of this rich pattern of interaction with things some particular
cause that determines the content of any given belief or utterance:
[W]hat makes the particular aspect of the cause of the learner’s
responses the aspect that gives them the content they have is the fact
that this aspect of the cause is shared by the teacher and the learner.
Without such sharing, there would be no grounds for selecting one
cause rather than another as the content-fixing cause. A non-
communicating creature may be seen by us as responding to an
objective world; but we are not justified in attributing thoughts about
our world (or any other) to it.32 Finally, the communication of a
particular orientation to objects makes error, and hence objectivity,
possible because, by letting us know what the other is responding to, it
puts us in a position to expect the other’s past pattern of behavior to
continue in the future. The failure to satisfy this expectation is,
Davidson argues, the only basis for attributing error (or, conversely,
truth) to another. Of course, this does not really provide an explanation
of how intentional content gets fixed, because the advanced form of
triangulation depends on meaningful utterances – that is, utterances
with a content. To complete the account, Davidson claims, one would
need to explain a structure of being in the world and of relating to
objects in between the primitive account, which simply describes a
causal interaction, and the full-blown intentional account, by which
point intentional content is already fixed. And Davidson believes we
lack a vocabulary for describing this intermediate state: “We have
many vocabularies for describing nature when we regard it as
mindless, and we have a mentalistic vocabulary for describing thought
and intentional action; what we lack is a way of describing what is in
between.”33In summary, then, Davidson provides an account of the
fixing of intentional content that explains how truth is possible. That is,
it explains the conditions under which utterances and beliefs become
the sorts of things that can be true. Truth requires communication
between two or more interlocutors who share a largely similar
orientation to the world. As one interlocutor interprets the other – that
is, as she fixes the truth conditions of the other’s utterances – only then

54
does the utterance of the other come to have a definite content. But
Davidson cannot explain how the communication that allows the
interlocutors to interpret each other can itself be contentful. For this,
he would need some way to account for our ability to focus on some
intentionally defined subset of features of the thing – an ability,
moreover, which is independent of our propositional attitudes
regarding the thing. If we look at Heidegger’s work on the conditions of
truth in the context of Davidson’s problematic, we find that Heidegger
does not recognize the first problem outlined above – the problem of
identifying the relevant cause of beliefs. He is satisfied that a
phenomenology of perception resolves this issue, for it shows that the
object itself, and nothing else, is experienced in perception. 34 But the
second problem – the problem of fixing the intentional content – is one
to which Heidegger devotes a great deal of attention. We have seen
from the discussion of Davidson what sort of explanation would need
to be offered to provide an account of this. It would be necessary to
show both how our behavior is sufficiently rich and articulated as to be
meaningfully directed toward things in the world, and how we can be
aware of the possibility of error in our directedness toward those
things. While Heidegger does not offer a vocabulary for describing our
prepredicative experience of things, he does provide a detailed analysis
of the structure of a prepropositional, but nevertheless intentional,
familiarity with the world. Heidegger’s analysis of what makes truth
possible – he calls it “unconcealment” – has two parts to it. First, he
claims, for the content of an assertion to be fixed by things in the world,
those things must be manifest to us. Heidegger’s inquiry into discovery,
the making manifest of entities, aims at exhibiting the structural
features of our comportment with things – in particular, those features
that fix meaning. The second part of the investigation into
unconcealment focuses on disclosure – the structural features of
human existence that makes possible such uncovering comportment.
Although a discussion of disclosure would be essential to completing
Heidegger’s account – Heidegger argues that the uncovering of what is,
of entities, is possible only on the basis of a “disclosure” of an
understanding of Being35 – I will focus here only on discovery, because
it is Heidegger’s account of discovery that is most immediately
concerned with fixing the content of our intentional comportment
toward objects in the world. Discovery, making things manifest, is
analyzed by Heidegger on the basis of those situations in which we
have a practical mastery of things, because these are the situations in
which our discovery of things is most fully developed. In all such cases,
Heidegger claims, one can distinguish several structural features of our
relationship to the things we encounter in our everyday comportment

55
in the world. First, Heidegger notes, we recognize things and practices
as either belonging to or foreign to the context in which they appear.
Things present themselves as belonging together because they are, in
Heidegger’s terminology, “directionally lined up with each other” (GA
2: H. 102). Heidegger illustrates this through the example of an office:
“Equipment – in accordance with its equipmentality – always is in
terms of its belonging to other equipment: ink-stand, pen, ink, paper,
blotting pad, table, lamp, furniture, windows, doors, room” (GA 2: H.
97). This belonging is defined only in relation to a “context of
equipment” – the totality of other equipment that belongs in the
context: “[e]quipmental contexture has the characteristic that the
individual kinds and pieces of equipment are correlated among
themselves with each other, not only with reference to their inherent
character but also in such a way that each piece of equipment has the
place belonging to it” (GA 24: 441). Thus, Heidegger claims, our ability
to discover an object depends to some degree on our practical
familiarity with the context in which it belongs in virtue of its position
vis-à-vis other equipmental objects. In addition to this minimal sense of
uncoveredness – that is, having a place – which things receive from
their equipmental context, Heidegger notes that things are uncovered
in terms of their functionality, determined by (a) the way they are
typically used with other things and (b) the way they are typically used
in certain practices we engage in. Heidegger generally refers to (a) as
the “with which” of things (as in “the hammer is used with nails and
boards”). He refers to (b) as the “in which” of things (as in “the hammer
is used in hammering”). Together, (a) and (b) comprise what Heidegger
calls the context of involvements. Finally, Heidegger notes that things
we use with mastery present themselves as appropriate to certain
projects in virtue of which they get their meaning. When viewed from
the perspective of the purpose behind use of the thing (as when a
blender is used for the purpose of processing food), Heidegger calls
this feature of things their “in order to” (GA 2: H. 68). When viewed
from the perspective of the “work to be produced” through use of the
thing (as when a blender is used to make a milkshake), Heidegger calls
this being-appropriate-for of the thing its “towards which” (GA 2: H.
70). Any given thing, moreover, is linked into a complex and nested
series of “in order tos” and “towards whiches.” A hammer, for instance,
is used in order to drive nails, in order to fasten pieces of wood
together, in order to frame a wall, in order to build a house, and so on.
Heidegger calls these aspects of things their assignments or references.
He calls the network of assignments within which we use things the
context of assignments or references. Taken as a whole, our contexts of
equipment, contexts of involvements, and contexts of assignments

56
constitute a “world.” Discoveredness, in its fullest sense, consists in
having all three contexts well articulated. That is to say, it consists in
our articulating a “totality of equipment” or “totality of involvements”
within which objects can be understood as having a sense, direction,
and purpose. Only within such a context, Heidegger argues, can objects
stand out as something with which we can cope and about which we
can make assertions. Until it is given at least some minimal foothold in
our “world” in this way, Heidegger argues, the object can at best appear
in a privative manner – that is, as something that resists our world. In
order to uncover anything new, it must first be given at least some
minimal directionality within our “world.” On the basis of that
directionality, it is possible to work with the thing, discovering what
involvements and assignments are appropriate to it. The important
thing to note is that we can, in our practices alone, and without the use
of predicative language, embody a richly articulated way of dealing
with objects within the world. Each of the practical contexts discussed
above delineates and orients us to fine-grained features of individual
objects. Carpenters, for instance, are able to distinguish practically the
appropriateness of this hammer for driving this nail into this board.
This will give them a pragmatic sensitivity to aspects like weight and
hardness (as when this hammer is too heavy to drive this nail into that
soft wood without marring the surface). They can make very fine
distinctions in regard to those features of the totality of involvements
relevant to their work – features in fact more fine grained than they
may be able to express. As Davidson points out, the ability to make
discriminations is not the same as having a concept. To have something
like an intentional relationship to things, what is needed above and
beyond the ability to discriminate is an awareness of the possibility of
rightness and wrongness in our way of relating to things. But, as
Heidegger’s account shows, the practical totality of involvements
carries with it just such normativity. In the first place, human practices
are never something engaged in alone – we inherit them from others.
With the practices, Heidegger claims, we learn public norms for the
value and success of our activities (GA 2: H. 127–8). Human activities,
Heidegger claims, are marked by a constant concern for how others are
acting: “[i]n one’s concern with what one has taken hold of . . . there is
constant care as to the way one differs from [the others] “ (GA 2: H.
126). In addition, the way practices organize objects gives them a
normativity of their own. The world gives a right place for the hammer
to be and a right way for it to be used. In addition, we engage in
practices with a purpose that itself gives things a normative reference.
The carpenter knows, for instance, that this is the right hammer for the
job because the purpose of the job is such and such. Practical expertise

57
thus bestows a normativity on things, a normativity similar to (and
Heidegger would say a precursor to) the normative structure
discernable in our understanding of truth. With such practical
expertise, we can sense when things are going well or poorly, and we
can be moved to act in a way that will improve our practical grip on the
world. The normativity inherent in our engagement with a world is
usually transmitted practically rather than linguistically: “[i]n that with
which we concern ourselves environmentally the others are
encountered as what they are; they are what they do” (GA 2: H. 126). It
is thus on the basis of our pragmatic discovery of things that language
is possible, for it is the structure of equipment and involvements built
into our comportment that delineates the features of things that are
salient to us – the very features that form the content of our beliefs and
utterances. As Heidegger explains, language is based in our making
explicit the “signification” things have as a result of their
“involvements.” Any time we engage with an entity in the world, we
can do so because our understanding discloses these involvements, and
in dealing with it, we “interpret” it and “lay out” its significations. 36
When we speak of things, the “totality-of-significations of intelligibility
is put into words. To significations, words accrue” (GA 2: H. 161). For
Heidegger, then, the truth of assertions finds the conditions of its
possibility in discovery. To the extent that we share practical worlds,
we can come to “communicate” with each other, that is to say, share a
determinate and intentionalistic orientation to things, without
language. And this practical sharing of a world, in turn, allows
Heidegger to explain the puzzle of how to give language content
without language. Let me conclude by noting some consequences of
this comparison of Heidegger’s and Davidson’s accounts. The
distinction between Heidegger and Davidson is not simply that of a
practical versus a cognitive or linguistic account of human experience.
Davidson’s triangulation recognizes the practical basis of
interpretation and hence of thought. Nor is there room in Heidegger’s
account for human existence without any kind of linguistic interaction
at all (although I have not emphasized this here). Rather, the
distinction is found in Heidegger’s belief that there is a
nonpropositional form of intentionality – a form of intentionality,
moreover, that makes linguistic interaction possible. This commits
Heidegger to the view that propositional content is based in a
nonpropositional form of intentional content. Davidson, because he
starts his analysis of human activity with the radical interpretation of
language, ends up reading language’s propositional structure back into
all forms of human comportment. On the other hand, Davidson’s
trenchant analysis of the distinction between truth theories and a

58
pretheoretic understanding of truth, with its focus on the conditions of
truth, helps us better grasp what is at stake in Heidegger’s account of
truth and unconcealment. Chapter 2 My thanks to Donald Davidson,
Hubert Dreyfus, Sean Kelly, Jeffrey Malpas, and Michael McKeon for
their helpful criticisms, comments, and suggestions on earlier versions
of this chapter.
1 Michael Dummett, The Logical Basis of Metaphysics. Cambridge, MA:

Harvard University Press, 1991.

2 Ibid., p. 1.
3 Ibid., p. 19.
4 P. F. Strawson, Analysis and Metaphysics. Oxford, England: Oxford

University Press, .1992, p. 2.

5 John R. Searle, “Literary Theory and its Discontents,” in New Literary

History 25 (1994): 639.

6 Jacques Derrida, “Signature Event Context,” in Limited, Inc. Evanston,

IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988, p. 15.

7 Donald Davidson, “Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge,” in

Truth and Interpretation: Perspectives on the Philosophy of Donald

Davidson (Ernest LePore, Ed.). Cambridge: Blackwell, 1986, pp. 69–88.
Davidson has since issued a retraction of sorts – not that his view on
truth has changed, but he has come to recognize how misleading it is to
call his theory a correspondence theory. See Donald Davidson,
“Structure and Content of Truth,” Journal of Philosophy LXXXVII
(1990): 302.
8 See my “Heidegger on Truth as Correspondence,” International

Journal of Philosophical Studies 7 (1999).

9 Michael Williams, “Epistemological Realism and the Basis of

Skepticism,” Mind XCVII (1988): 424.

10 Paul Horwich, Truth. Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell, 1990, p. 33.

See also Scott Soames, “What Is a Theory of Truth?” Journal of

Philosophy 81 (1984): 413.
11 P. F. Strawson, “Truth,” in The Concept of a Person and Other

Essays. London: MacMillan, 1963, p. 147ff.

12 A. Tarski, “The Concept of Truth in Formalized Languages,” in Logic,

Semantics, Metamathematics. Oxford, England: Oxford University

Press, 1956, p. 155ff.
13 Michael Dummett, Truth and Other Enigmas. Cambridge, MA:

Harvard University Press, 1978, p. xxi.

14 Michael Dummett, “Truth,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society

59 (1959): 148–9.
15 The proof of this is provided by what has been dubbed the “Great

Fact” or “Slingshot” argument. The basic argument is that if “R” and “S”
abbreviate any two sentences alike in truth value, then (1) and (2) and

59
(3) and (4) corefer (by substitution of logical equivalence), as do (2)
and (3) (by substitution of coextensive singular terms): (1) R (2) (x =
x.R) = (x = x) (3) (x = x.S) = (x = x) (4) S Thus, if some sentence p
corresponds to the fact that R, it also corresponds to the fact that S, and
to any other fact, for that matter. Donald Davidson, “Truth and
Meaning,” in Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation. Oxford, England:
Clarendon Press, 1984, p. 19.
16 Donald Davidson, “True to the Facts,” in ibid., p. 43.
17 “The Structure and Content of Truth” (cited in n. 12, above), p. 304.
18 “Locating Literary Language,” in Literary Theory After Davidson

(Reed Way Dasenbrock, Ed.). University Park: Pennsylvania University

Press, 1993, p. 303.
19 “A Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge” (cited in n. 12,

above), p. 308.
20 “The Structure and Content of Truth” (cited in n. 12, above), p. 299.
21 Ibid., p. 297.
22 GA 41: 118/What Is a Thing? (W. B. Barton, Jr., & Vera Deutsch,

Eds.). Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1967, p. 117. See also GA 5:

38/“Origin of the Work of Art,” in Basic Writings, p. 176: “A proposition
is true by conforming to the unconcealed, to what is true. Propositional
truth is always, and always exclusively, this correctness.”
23 GA 2: H. 218. See also GA 9: 184–5/“On the Essence of Truth,” p.

122; “What is presents itself along with the presentative assertion so

that the latter subordinates itself to the directive that it speak of what
is just as it is. In following such a directive the assertion conforms to
what is. Speech that directs itself accordingly is correct (true).” For a
more complete discussion of this point, see my “Heidegger on Truth as
Correspondence” (cited in n. 8, above).
24 “A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs,” in Truth and Interpretation

(cited in n. 12, above), pp. 443–4.

25 I don’t address, however, whether Davidson would find Heidegger’s

account either acceptable or necessary.

26 “The Structure and Content of Truth,” p. 300.
27 See, e.g., “Empirical Content,” in Truth and Interpretation, p. 332.
28 Donald Davidson, “The Emergence of Thought,” in Subjective,

Intersubjective, Objective (Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 2001), p.

128.
29 Donald Davidson, “The Second Person,” Midwest Studies in

Philosophy 17 (1992): 263.

30 Donald Davidson, “Three Varieties of Knowledge,” in A. J. Ayer:

Memorial Essays (A. Phillips Griffiths, Ed.). Cambridge, England:

Cambridge University Press, 1991, p. 160. See also “The Conditions of
Thought,” in The Mind of Donald Davidson (J. Brandl & W. Gombocz,

60
Eds.). Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi, 1989, p. 199.
31 “But words, like thoughts, have a familiar meaning, a propositional

content, only if they occur in a rich context, for such a context is

required to give the words or thoughts a location and a meaningful
function.” “The Emergence of Thought,” p. 127.
32 Donald Davidson, “Epistemology Externalized,” Dialectica 45

(1991): 201.
33 Ibid.
34 See, for example, GA 20: 48–9: “I see no ‘representations’ of the

chair, register no image of the chair, sense no sensations of the chair. I

simply see it – it itself.”
35 GA 2: H. 137: “[T]he world which has already been disclosed

beforehand permits what is within-the-world to be encountered.”

36 GA 2: H. 150. Heidegger in fact has an “explicit” and an “implicit”

form of interpretation. The implicit interpretation seems to be one way

of describing the pragmatic articulation of features of things that I have
been discussing. Thus he will say, for instance, that “[a]ny mere
prepredicative seeing of the ready-to-hand is, in itself, something
which already understands and interprets” (GA 2: H. 149). In speaking
of things, however, we perform an explicit or “thematic” interpretation
of them.
3 On the “Existential Positivity of Our Ability to be Deceived”

Illusory experiences have played and continue to play a significant

role in shaping philosophical accounts of perception. By and large, the
need to account for perceptual errors of various sorts has greased the
skids for the slide into representationalist theories of mind. But the
experience of perceptual errors – illusions, deceptions, and even
hallucinations – has pushed the existential-phenomenological tradition
in a very different direction. When I speak about the existential-
phenomenological tradition, I mean the tradition of philosophers
influenced by Heidegger, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty. This tradition has
its deep roots in Nietzsche. Nietzsche insisted that “a perspectival,
deceptive character belongs to existence” (Kritische Gesamtausgabe
VII-3.180). At the same time, he argued that “it is no more than a moral
prejudice that truth is worth more than mere appearance; it is even the
worst proved assumption there is in the world.” Indeed, he believed
that when it comes to appearances, we ought to question the
supposition “that there is an essential opposition of ‘true’ and ‘false’”:
“is it not sufficient,” he asked, “to assume degrees of apparentness and,
as it were, lighter and darker shadows and shades of appearance –
different ‘values,’ to use the language of painters?” (Beyond Good and
Evil, sec. 34). For Nietzsche, the world of experience, “the world which

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matters to us,” is not an objective state of affairs but something in
which we are involved and to the constitution of which we contribute.
This world, he argued, “is no matter of fact, but rather a composing and
rounding up over a small sum of observations; it is ‘in the flow’ as
something becoming . . . that never approaches the truth; for – there is
no ‘truth’” (Beyond Good and Evil, sec. 34). With these claims – that the
world of experience is not an objective world, that deception belongs to
perceptual experience, and that perception ought not in any event to be
thought of in binary terms as “true” or “false” – Nietzsche prefigured
the work of twentieth-century phenomenologists. In this chapter, I
would like to explore the existential-phenomenological treatment of
the phenomenon of perceptual deception. Phenomenology adheres to
the principle that “everything which is up for discussion regarding
objects must be dealt with by exhibiting it directly and demonstrating
it directly” (GA 2: H. 35). Ultimately, then, phenomenology aims to
convince by directing its audience to their own experience of
phenomena, and allowing the “things themselves” as they show
themselves to demonstrate the accuracy of the phenomenological
description. Thus, in dealing with instances of perceptual deception,
phenomenologists do not base their account on, for example, positing
the existence of hallucinations, understood as nonveridical experiences
of nonexisting objects or events or states of affairs, qualitatively
indistinguishable from veridical experiences of existing objects or
events or states of affairs. Few, if any of us, ever have such
experiences.1 Instead, phenomenologists typically start with the kind of
errors we do or can commit in the normal course of events. For
instance, while walking through the park, I walk slowly and quietly to
avoid startling a deer on the path ahead of me, only to discover as I
draw closer that the “deer” is a shrub. I bite into my bagel, which is
covered, it seems to me, with a smoked salmon shmear, and realize
after a moment of shock that the pink shmear is actually flavored with
strawberry, not smoked salmon. As I’m walking down the path, I seem
to see a stone ahead, which turns out merely to be a patch of sunlight
on the path. Or finally, we might consider the experience of a rather
special case like Zöllner’s illusion, where “objectively” parallel lines
appear to be converging. I will refer to such cases in general as
“deceptions” – errors produced by the fact that we do not simply make
a mistake, but rather we are taken in by the way things present
themselves. An issue to consider is whether some or all of these
deceptions are properly categorized as perceptual errors. One might,
for instance, maintain that they should be understood as errors of
judgment rather than perception – that, on the basis of appearances,
we draw a wrong conclusion about the nature of the objects we

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encounter. As we will see, existential phenomenologists maintain that
such a description of these experiences is unsupported by the
phenomena. I do not intend to review or critique
nonphenomenological accounts of perceptual deception in any detail.
But before turning to the phenomenological account, I do want to note
a few strategies for categorizing and analyzing such phenomena that
the phenomenological tradition would reject. First, one might be
tempted to draw a sharp distinction between veridical and
nonveridical experiences, and to reserve perceptual categories
(“seeing,” “hearing,” “smelling,” “tasting,” “feeling,” etc.) for those cases
in which we succeed in grasping things as they objectively are. When I
look at Zöllner’s illusion, for example, it does not seem right to say of
me that I see converging lines, even though they look like they’re
converging to me. Or when I mistake a bush for a deer in the park, it
does not seem right to say of me that I see a deer, even though it looks
like a deer to me. So one might feel compelled to draw a clear
distinction between things looking a certain way, or our experience
having a certain phenomenal character, or the mere appearing of
things, and a genuine perceptual experience. Or, more precisely, one
might feel compelled to treat the mere appearing as a genuine
perceptual experience only if it is veridical. (Allowing for the possibility
of deviant causal chains, one would have to say that veridicality is a
necessary but not sufficient condition of a genuine perceptual
experience.) In the genuine perceptual experience, the phenomenal
character of things corresponds to the way things actually are. One
then accounts for deceptions by treating them as the presentation of a
certain phenomenal character in the absence of the objects necessary
to make that presentation true.2 This points us to a second temptation
– that of assuming that there is some determinate, objective fact of the
matter about the character of the things in the world that we perceive. 3
Of course, this is a hard assumption to avoid making – it seems that
either there is a deer in the woods on the path in front of me or there is
not; either it is a salmon schmear on the bagel or it is not. We
successfully perceive things only if the way things seem agrees with the
way things objectively are. And this, in turn, points us to a third
temptation – the temptation to treat our experiences as if there is a
determinate fact of the matter about what we are experiencing, as if it
is possible to specify, at least in principle, how it is that the world
seems to us to be. I suspect these three temptations hang together and
reinforce one another. It is only because we believe in a set of
determinate, objective facts about the perceived world – and only
because we believe that the way the world seems to us is equally
objective and determinate – that it makes sense to treat the success or

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failure of perception as a matter of truth or falsity. These temptations
also might lead one into what I would call an unequal division of labor
in accounting for perceptual deception. By this, I mean that the
responsibility for the deception tends, unjustly, one might suppose, to
fall on the deceived party. When there is a mismatch between the way
the world seems to us to be and the way the world actually is, we are at
fault. One reasons, for instance, that we have drawn a false inference
from the evidence about the world with which we are presented in
sensation, or that we have hastily judged that such and such is the case
on the basis of flimsy evidence. But what makes cases I have described
instances of deception as opposed to mere error is the sense that the
deceived party did not really do anything wrong. One’s perceptual
systems may have been working properly. One may have been
proceeding with due care. And yet one gets taken in. The existential-
phenomenological approach, however, does not find itself tempted by
the experience of deception to think about perception in these ways.
Indeed, the phenomenology of deception is actually thought to
reinforce our ability to resist these temptations. In particular, as I hope
to show in what follows, deceptions such as these help one to see
perception as having not binary success conditions but of succeeding to
greater or lesser degrees – one can see the scene in better or worse
ways. But it rarely makes sense to say that I perceived either truly or
falsely. Second, deception helps us to recognize that the perceptual
domain is not the objective universe of physics. And finally, it helps us
recognize the indeterminate quality of our experience of the perceptual
domain. The Phenomenological Account of Perceptual Deception

The starting point for the existential-phenomenological account of

perceptual deception is the recognition of what Heidegger calls in
Being and Time the “existential positivity of our ability to be deceived”
(GA 2: H. 138). The point is that deception does not show a momentary
failing or accidental shortcoming in us, but rather points the way to
understanding something fundamental about us, the world, and our
relationship to things in the world. As Heidegger explains, “every
deception and every error” should be seen “as a modification of
original being-in” (GA 2: H. 62). By this, Heidegger means that errors
and deceptions are not mere mental events, nor do they consist in the
possession of false representations about the world. Instead, they are
particular ways of being out in the world and involved with things. In a
related manner, perception itself is not “measured against the idea of
an absolute knowledge of the world” (GA 2: H. 38) – that is, Heidegger
denies that veridicality, the measure of knowledge, is an appropriate

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category for thinking about perception. Heidegger, for example, tends
to speak of “genuine” and “deceptive” perceptions (Echt- and
Trugwahrnehmungen), rather than “true” and “false” perceptions. This,
in turn, leads to the view that deception shows us something essential
about the nature of the world and the things we encounter in the world
– namely, that they are not objective and determinate. “It is precisely in
the unstable seeing of the ‘world,’ a seeing that flickers with our moods,
that the available shows itself in its specific wordliness, which is never
the same from day to day” (GA 2: H. 38). Merleau-Ponty agrees. Writing
in the context of thinking about hallucinations (although the point
applies broadly), he notes: all the difficulties arise from the fact that
objective thought, the reduction of things as experienced to objects, of
subjectivity to the cogitatio, leaves no room for the equivocal
adherence of the subject to preobjective phenomena. The consequence
is therefore clear. We must stop constructing hallucination, or indeed
consciousness generally, according to a certain essence or idea of itself
which compels us to define it in terms of some sort of absolute
adequation. (PP 336)
The experience of deception points us toward the unsteady, flickering
nature of the perceptual world, to the equivocal experience of
“preobjective phenomena,” for were experience always clear and the
world of perception populated with determinate objects, we would not
be taken in by deceptive appearances. Before going on, I should
emphasize the tendentious nature of these existential-
phenomenological claims. For many, sense experience is to be
measured in the same way cognition is. It is either true or false, and it
is true by, to put it loosely, representing the way that the world is. Only
true sense experiences can qualify as perceptions. Deceptions,
illusions, and hallucinations fail to represent the world, and therefore,
there is no positive role to be played by perceptual deception in
disclosing the world to us. The source of the error must, therefore, be
traced somehow back to us – for example, an error of judgment, a false
conclusion drawn from the evidence of the senses. So the existential
phenomenologist cannot rest content with this description. We must
confront the question: how does existential phenomenology account
for error? If we have abandoned the thesis of an objective, determinate
world, what basis is there for distinguishing between successful and
unsuccessful experiences of the world? And if not veridicality, then
what is the criterion for success? To answer these questions, I want
first to reconstruct some paradigmatic existential-phenomenological
descriptions of deception. I will then consider how it is that, as the
existential phenomenologists suggest, these descriptions help us to
resist the temptation to think about our perceptual encounter with the

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world in the three ways outlined earlier. I turn first to Heidegger’s
account of deception, offered most extensively in two Marburg lecture
courses: the 1923–4 course in Gesamtausgabe volume 17 (GA 17):
Einführung in die phanomenologische Forschung, and the 1925–6
course in GA 21: Logik. Die Frage nach der Wahrheit. Let’s look first at
the kind of example Heidegger draws on. Heidegger writes:4 “I am
walking in a dark forest and I see between the fir trees something
coming toward me –‘a deer,’ I say. The assertion does not need to be
explicit. Upon coming closer it turns out that it is a shrub, toward
which I am heading” (GA 21: 187). How are we to understand this
error? What allows me to be deceived by the shrub? First, Heidegger
emphasizes that the error is not simply one of having said the wrong
thing about what I have seen or having wrongly judged that there was
a deer between the trees. Rather, my fundamental error, he says, is that
I have “comported myself in such a way as to cover up” (GA 21: 187).
Heidegger uses the term “comport,” to carry oneself or behave, in order
to emphasize the primarily practical dimension of our perceptual
engagement with the world. Perceiving wrongly is not believing
something false, for Heidegger; it is acting in the world in such a way
that the true nature of things is covered up. Heidegger proposes that
there are three “structural conditions” of our everyday comportment in
the world that we need to focus on in thinking about deception. The
suggestion is that it is the very conditions of our ordinary engagement
with things in the world that makes us susceptible to being deceived.
The first structural condition of comportment that Heidegger analyzes
is the fact that our comportment has an inherent “tendency to discover
something” (GA 21: 187), and does this on the basis of “the always
already prior disclosure of the world” (GA 21: 187). By this, he means
that we are always already poised for things to show up to us, and we
encounter them as meaningful things in terms of our understanding of
our world. So as I walk through the park in the dark, my skills for park
walking are activated. As Merleau-Ponty puts it, “if there can be, in
front of [my body], important figures against indifferent backgrounds,
this occurs in virtue of its being polarized by its tasks, of its existence
towards them, of its collecting together of itself in its pursuit of its
aims” (PP 101). So the first thing that sets us up to be deceived is the
way we are always disposed or primed, through the aims implicit in
what we are doing, to find things in such and such a way. This leads us
to the second structural condition of our comportment. This condition
has to do with the kind of entities we encounter in our everyday
dealings in the world: “the entity itself must have its being constituted
in such a way that, as the entity that it is, it offers and calls for the
possibility of a togetherness with others, and it does so on the basis of

66
its being. That is, it only is what it is in the unity of such a togetherness”
(GA 21: 185). The entities we are primed or disposed to discover in
comportment are entities that are not what they are in themselves
alone, irrespective of the relationships they bear to other entities.
Instead, entities are what they are holistically in virtue of the way they
exist together with other entities. The classic example of this is
Heidegger’s ubiquitous hammer: the hammer is what it is only because
of the way it relates to nails and boards. The “togetherness” that
Heidegger mentions is, I take it, the meaning or significance of a thing,
where to be meaningful is to lead those who grasp the meaning from
one thing to another. An entity is the entity it is in terms of the way it
directs us to the context of other entities and activities within which it
belongs. The togetherness, in turn, makes an entity the thing it is only
to the degree that it “offers” and can “call for,” that is, affords5 and
solicits, us to be directed from the entity to the things and activities
with which it is involved. The world is the organized totality of such
relationships of offering and calling for us to move from one thing and
one situation to the next. And something only is an entity insofar as it
presents us with a “unity of togetherness,” that is, shows up as holding
a more or less coherent and organized place in such a meaningful
structure. We comport ourselves in the world by responding to the
significations that the world affords and solicits. Together, the first and
second structural conditions mean that we always encounter the things
in the world in terms of something else. We never encounter
something that is meaningless: “in the field of everyday experiences, I
do not just stand there – for example, in the forest – and simply have
something before me. That is a purely fictitious situation. Instead, I am
always encountered in an unexpressed way by something that I
already understand, something that is laid out in advance as
something, and that in this way is accepted and expected in the
comportment of coping with the world” (GA 21: 187). So when I
mistakenly see a deer, for instance, it is because certain features of the
scene in front of me draw on my abilities to identify and respond to
deer solicitations. Finally, the third structural condition Heidegger
identifies is the fact that within the range of possible significations in
terms of which we encounter things, the situation within which we find
ourselves disposes us to respond to certain solicitations rather than
others. In the forest, for example, nothing could solicit us to see “the
cubed root of sixty-nine coming towards me” (GA 21: 188). Even
though it is logically possible that we could see the Shah of Iran coming
through the forest, we will not be motivated to see this in the Black
Forest of Germany either (see GA 21: 188). But both deer and shrubs
are live possibilities. To review briefly, then, Heidegger observes that

67
our ordinary ways of engaging with the world have the following
structural conditions: 1. We are always poised to have meaningful
entities show up for us; 2. These entities are meaningful insofar as they
offer us a certain way of relating them to other entities and activities
(they present us with affordances), and, in fact, they also call for us to
follow up those affordances (they solicit us to act on the affordances);
finally, 3. The world presents us with a meaningful context of entities
and activities that disposes us to encounter some things but not others.
These conditions are not just the conditions of everyday comportment
– the conditions under which we are able to smoothly and fluidly deal
with things. They are also the conditions that make it possible for us to
be deceived by things. How so? Consider the example of the salmon
schmear. It is because I ordered a salmon, not a strawberry, schmear
and because, in the context of bagel shops, one’s order is generally
fulfilled, that I am primed for my bagel to come with a salmon schmear.
The pinkish color of the schmear in that context leads me to anticipate
the fishy flavor of a salmon schmear. But it is also the case that the
significations in the context lead me to experience the color in a
particular way (in fact, once I realized that I had the wrong schmear on
my bagel, the color thereafter looked strawberry pink, not salmon
pink). So the deception arose through a confluence of my dispositions,
the world context, and the color of the entity itself, all conspiring to
indicate the existence of something that was not there. But the
deception was also uncovered as such through the course of further
perceptual comportment – it was the sweet, creamy, strawberry flavor
that changed the way I was disposed to see the color and,
consequently, let me see the schmear for what it was. But, as Heidegger
points out, there is a distinction between a perceptual error and merely
failing to see something – between, for example, seeing the bush as a
deer, and not seeing the bush. This distinction parallels the distinction
between calling someone by a pseudonym and calling him or her by the
wrong name.6 A pseudonym is “a designation behind which the author
hides, an alias that covers him up” (GA 36/37: 227). It is not false in the
sense that there is nobody who answers to it. To the contrary, the
pseudonym directs one to the author of the book, but does it in such a
way that “one does not see how he or she genuinely is.” Likewise, in a
perceptual error, we do see something (it is not a hallucination). But
we see it in such a way that it does not show itself as it genuinely is.
“Pseudos is a showing that passes something off as something; thus it is
more than a mere covering up without passing it off as other than it is”
(GA 17: 32). The discussion of the structural conditions of perception,
moreover, lets us recognize that the possibility of perceptual deception
is built into the very structure of our world. It is a “basic fact, in the

68
sphere of dealing with the world,” Heidegger insists, that error and
deception “are interwoven in a completely fundamental way, and do
not merely occur as defective properties that one must overcome” (GA
17: 39). Heidegger thus offers a more equitable division of labor,
attributing the blame for the deception to the world and to the things
in the world as much as to our way of comporting ourselves in the
world. It could be the case, of course, that we are primarily responsible
for the error, insofar as we might respond wrongly to the solicitation.
We might, for instance, lack the skills to respond appropriately to what
the situation calls on us to do. It might be that I would be more
susceptible to being deceived by the bush than a deer hunter would –
he probably has much better skills for distinguishing deer from other
things that might suggest a deer. At least, given that he goes looking for
deer with a loaded gun, I hope he has better skills. But, even in this
case, my deception is motivated to a considerable degree by the skills I
have and use effectively in coping with this sort of context. As
Heidegger puts it in the 1923–4 lecture course, “the possibility of
deception lies . . . in an erroneous seeing, which is not motivated by a
careless consideration, but rather in the manner in which the existing
[human] being lives and encounters the world itself” (GA 17: 36). Thus
we are not solely responsible for being deceived. It is also the case that,
at least sometimes, things in the world conspire to lead us to perceive
them wrongly: “there are entities that in their specific being have the
characteristic that they pass themselves of as something that they are
not, or as so characterized as they are not – where the possibility of
deception thus does not lie primarily in a wrong way of taking them up,
but rather in the entity itself” (GA 17: 32). He goes on to explain: the
things can elude us, and that is not to say they disappear. The
elusiveness of things comes to life by virtue of the fact that we
encounter them circumstantially. We do not see things as objects, as
when they are the object of scientific investigation. This existence of
things is much richer and offers much more fluctuating possibilities
than are thematically prepared. Because the world in its richness is
only there in the particular concreteness of living, the elusiveness is
also much more encompassing and, with it, the possibility of deception
is there. The more concretely I am in the world, the more genuine is the
existence of deception. (GA 17: 37)
I think that Heidegger is pointing here to the way real entities and
contexts necessarily orient us toward more than can possibly be
present to us at any given moment. Merleau-Ponty makes a similar
point in noting that vision is “an operation which fulfills more than it
promises” (PP 377). For instance, when I see the facade of a house, I am
oriented already to the back and sides of the house. My vision of the

69
front “promises” an experience of the other sides. But the experience of
seeing the other sides is always much richer than what the promise
prepared me for. So, like Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty sees in the present
experience an orientation toward much more than can be presently
experienced. Thus perception throws me open to a world, but can do
so only by outrunning both me and itself. Thus the perceptual
“synthesis” has to be incomplete; it cannot present me with a “reality”
otherwise than by running the risk of error. It is absolutely necessarily
the case that the thing, if it is to be a thing, should have sides of itself
hidden from me. (PP 377)
We are thus always both open to the world and lacking certainty
about it. The lack of certainty is not a negative but a positive – it is that
in virtue of which we can understand and intend more than is present
to us at any given moment. Resisting Temptation

Unfortunately, Heidegger does not develop his view of perceptual

deception much further. But, in this final section, I would like to look at
the implications of acknowledging the positive character of deception,
and to hazard some preliminary suggestions about the lessons
existential phenomenology has drawn from the experience of
perceptual deception. I will focus, in particular, on Merleau-Ponty, to
see how his account stands with respect to the temptations I discussed
at the outset. But the summary of Merleau-Ponty’s views that I offer
here will be very tentative. I will present his view as a loose collection
of theses about the lessons to be drawn from the experience of being
deceived, cognizant that much work remains to be done in order to
provide a coherent theory of perceptual deception. With a suitable
description of the experience of deception in place, we can begin to ask:
how must we, the world, and our relationship to the world be if we are
to experience deception in this way? As I see it, the key features of the
description are the following. When we are deceived, it is because the
thing really looks like what we take it as. At the same time, things will
look differently once the deception is uncovered. And the deception is
uncovered in the course of further perception/action/exploration of
the world. Let’s look at each of these features of the description in turn,
and see what lessons are to be drawn from them. For one thing, in
many ordinary cases of perceptual deception, we are deceived because
the thing we mistakenly perceive really does look like or sound like or
taste like or feel like something else. The bush in the forest does, from
such and such a vantage point, and in such and such light, look like a
deer. The strawberry schmear does look in many respects like the
salmon schmear. This is in direct contrast to some traditional modes of

70
thinking about deception – modes Merleau-Ponty calls “sketchy
reasoning.” If we start not with an appreciation of the positive
character of deception but instead with an assumption that deception
is a kind of negation, a departure from the objective world as it
determinately presents itself to us, then the tendency is to see
deception as the result of our erroneous contribution to what is truly
given in experience. There is not, in fact, a deer on the path. And thus,
the “sketchy reasoning” goes, we must associate what is there with
some memory of or past experience of a deer. So the deception, on this
account, is the result of the contributions of memory to what is actually
experienced. But, Merleau-Ponty points out, this way of thinking about
deception in fact fails to accomplish what it sets out to, because the
present experience must already have “form and meaning,” it must
already look like something, in order to call forth just these memories
as opposed to others (see PP 20–1). But that means that, in order to
call forth the memory of a deer to make the bush seem like a deer, for
example, the bush must already look like a deer. Otherwise, there is no
reason why we would see it as a deer as opposed to a gorilla or the
Shah of Iran, or anything else. Indeed, it is this looking like a deer that
makes the deception deceptive – it “passes itself off as genuine
perception precisely in those cases where the meaning originates in
the source of sensation and nowhere else.” If that is so, then the
supplement of memories comes too late to explain the deception (PP
20). The phenomenology of deception, then, points us to the inherently
meaningful structure of the perceptual world; indeed, it expands our
understanding of it. It shows up as unmotivated the belief in a
meaningless stratum of sensations, to which meanings subsequently
are attached. Merleau-Ponty illustrates this through a discussion of
Zöllner’s illusion, an optical illusion in which parallel lines are made to
seem to be converging (Fig. 3.1). For Merleau-Ponty, it is wrongheaded
to start from the assumption that the lines must actually be given in
perception as parallel, and then to try to explain how the lines end up
being experienced as converging. Instead, the interesting question to
ask about this illusion is

71
 How does it come about that it is so difficult . . . to compare in
isolation the very lines that have to be compared according to the task
set? Why do they thus refuse to be separated from the auxiliary lines?
It should be recognized that acquiring auxiliary lines, the main lines
have ceased to be parallel, that they have lost that meaning and
acquired another, that the auxiliary lines introduce into the figure a
new meaning which henceforth clings to it and cannot be shifted. It is
this meaning inseparable from the figure, this transformation of the
phenomenon, which motivates the false judgment and which is so to
speak behind it. (PP 35)
Illusions and other such deceptions point up the fact that we first of
all encounter meaningful structures, and we encounter particular
entities in terms of their meanings. Something is meaningful when it
leads one who grasps the meaning beyond what is presented. To say
that perception is meaningful through and through is to say that there
is nothing experienced in perception that is absolutely and fully given
in the present; everything we perceive directs us beyond itself, attunes
us to anticipate further experiences. A color leads us to anticipate a
modulation of color as lighting conditions change. A shape or form
leads us to anticipate further adumbrations of the form as it moves

72
relative to us. Thus what everything is is experienced in perception in
virtue of what Merleau-Ponty calls “the mode of existence and co-
existence of perceived objects . . . the life which steals across the visual
field and secretly binds its parts together” (PP 35). Given the inherently
meaningful structure of perception, it follows that there is no particular
thing about which we might not be deceived. There is no bedrock
component of our experience about which we could not get it wrong,
because everything has the meaning that it has only in virtue of the
structure of meanings that solicit us to further exploration. 7 The
schmear example illustrates this – the perceived color of the schmear
varies along with my expectations about the taste. Or consider the
example Merleau-Ponty introduces when making this point – the light
patch on the path that is mistaken for a stone. “Every sensation is
already pregnant with meaning,” he observes, “and there is no sense-
datum which remains unchanged when I pass from the illusory stone
to the real patch of sunlight” (PP 297). What before looked to be a
broad, flat stone with a different color from the surrounding earth
showed itself to be a differently lighted patch of dirt of the same color.
Perhaps what seemed to be a shadow cast by the stone might now be
seen as a darker gravelly patch. Such experiences call into question the
idea that there is an objective, stable, determinate perceptual world. If
we suppose that there is an indefinite number of meanings to which we
could be attuned, and we recognize that different attunements will
result in different experiences of the perceptual field, then we will have
to conclude that there is no final, objective fact of the matter about
what is given to us in perception. And, indeed, Merleau-Ponty argues
that this kind of indeterminacy in the perceptual world is a condition of
our being deceived perceptually. Only if the world has room for and
accommodates deceptive as well as correct perceptions, only then is it
possible to be deceived, since the deception presents itself as
accurately opening us up to the world. This means that the world must
be something more than all that is the case; it must be rather a setting:
“the world is not a sum of things which might always be called into
question, but the inexhaustible reservoir from which things are taken”
(PP 344): In the very moment of illusion this possibility of correction
was presented to me, because illusion too makes use of this belief in
the world and is dependent upon it while contracting into a solid
appearance, and because in this way, always being open upon a
horizon of possible verifications, it does not cut me off from truth. But,
for the same reason, I am not immune from error, since the world
which I seek to achieve through each appearance, and which endows
that appearance, rightly or wrongly, with the weight of truth, never
necessarily requires this particular appearance. (PP 297)

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 But this is not to say that anything goes. How are we to preserve the
distinction between deceptive and genuine perceptions, once we grant
that there are an indefinite number of different ways to perceive any
given perceptual field? We start from the notion of the inherent
meaningfulness of perception. This means that to perceive is to be
drawn into or pointed toward paths of further perceptual exploration
and action. The distinction between genuine and deceptive perceptions
is found in the degree to which they lead us well, in the sense that they
allow us to keep our grip on the world around us. As Merleau-Ponty
puts it: my perception brings into coexistence an indefinite number of
perceptual chains which, if followed up, would confirm it in all respects
and accord with it. My eyes and my hand know that any actual change
of place would produce a sensible response entirely according to my
anticipation, and I can feel swarming beneath my gaze the countless
mass of more detailed perceptions that I anticipate, and upon which I
already have a hold. (PP 338, translation modified)
In the genuine perception, then, the perception is followed up with
and confirmed by further perceptions that were already anticipated in
terms of the meaning of the genuine perception. With a deceptive
perception, by contrast, what I am led to anticipate by the perception is
not encountered in the perceptual field: “my body has no grip on it, and
. . . I cannot unfold it before me by any exploratory action” (PP 295). It
is thus further perceptions – perceptions that restore our grip on the
world – that annul the deceptive perception and show it for the
deception it was. I place my confidence in the world. Perceiving is
pinning one’s faith, at a stroke, in a whole future of experiences, and
doing so in a present which never strictly guarantees the future; it is
placing one’s belief in a world. It is this opening upon a world which
makes possible perceptual truth and . . . thus enabling us to “cross out”
the previous illusion and regard it as null and void. (PP 297)
But now the fact that we can be deceived in perception, and yet
nevertheless correct our being deceived through further perception,
shows something important about the relationship in which we stand
to our perceptual experiences – namely, that “the percept is and
remains, despite all critical education, on the hither side of doubt and
demonstration” (PP 344). It is important to attend to the nuances of
this claim: MerleauPonty is not claiming that I’m always correct about
what I perceive. Rather, that in the act of perceiving, my perception is
not in the game of being true or false. I cannot be mistaken in my
perception in the sense that what I perceive is false. But my perception
is nevertheless correctible in the sense that a prior perception can be
“cancelled” or “crossed out” – we come to recognize that the way we
were seeing the world was not optimal, given the practical aims

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implicit in our mode of engagement with the world. “I say that I
perceive correctly when my body has a precise hold on the spectacle,
but that does not mean that my hold is ever all-embracing” (PP 297) –
that is, for any given perceptual hold on the world, we could recognize
that other holds are possible, that this way of getting to grips with the
world has not come to terms with everything in the world, that other
ways of engaging the world might be more or less successful, or guided
by different concerns. This view of perception will seem paradoxical as
long as we think of the success conditions of perception in the same
way we think of the success conditions of belief. But the paradox
dissolves when we see perception instead in terms of action – practical
engagement with the world. If I am pouring water into a glass, we do
not say that my way of gripping the pitcher and holding the glass is
“false.” It might be a mistaken way of pouring the water in the sense
that it will lead me to spill the water. And there are undoubtedly better
and worse ways of holding the pitcher and the glass. But success here
is not a matter of our grip conforming to an ideal grip – it is a matter of
the action unfolding itself in such a way that it allows me to achieve my
goals in the world. And this, in turn, suggests that it is wrong to think of
perception in terms of the possession of propositional contents. To see
that there is a stone on the path is not necessarily to have a particular
attitude toward the propositional content: there is a stone on the path.
“I see the illusory stone,” Merleau-Ponty argues instead, “in the sense
that my whole perceptual and motor field endows the bright spot with
the significance ‘stone on the path’. And already I ready myself to feel
under my foot this smooth, firm surface” (PP 297, translation
modified). I am, correspondingly, deceived in seeing the stone if, for
example, the resulting bodily attitude causes me to stumble, or to
change directions into a less optimal path. Chapter 3 A number of
people have posed challenging questions and offered helpful comments
in response to earlier drafts of this chapter. I am particularly indebted
and grateful to Bert Dreyfus, Charles Siewert, Wayne Martin, Sean
Kelly, Taylor Carman, lain Thomson, Bill Blattner, and Stefan Käufer for
the fascinating discussions this article occasioned.
1 Thus, as Komarine Romdenh-Romluc points out, even when

addressing cases of hallucination, Merleau-Ponty draws on “actual

cases of hallucinatory experience” as described in the clinical
literature. See “Merleau-Ponty’s Account of Hallucination,” European
Journal of Philosophy 17 (2009): 76–90.
2 It is not at all clear how this move can accommodate the many,

perhaps prevalent, cases in which I perceive something slightly

wrongly. I buy a green tie to go with my green suit, for example, only to
find when I get home that the tie was in fact brown. What did I see in

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the department store? I saw a tie – there can be no denying that much.
But it seems wrong to say that I saw a green tie, given that the tie was
brown. And yet, if I had seen a brown tie, I wouldn’t have bought it.
3 Resisting this temptation would not necessarily require one to deny

that there is some determinate, objective fact of the matter about the
makeup of the physical universe. But it would require one to
acknowledge a possible distinction between the physical universe –
what Merleau-Ponty sometimes refers to as the “world in itself” (see,
e.g., PP: 10, 39) and the perceptual world.
4 I should note that in these passages, Heidegger’s ultimate goal is to

understand how it is possible to say something that is deceptive, rather

than something that is simply false. A false assertion need not be
deceptive if it couldn’t possibly induce you to believe it. So Heidegger
tackles the problem of the lie by first asking how it is that we can
perceive erroneously, since it is such a perception that ultimately
makes the lie believable. I note this only because Heidegger introduces
language into the discussion at certain points, and I’m going to
completely ignore those for my purposes. I don’t think that by
systematically ignoring that side of Heidegger’s analysis I’m doing any
violence to his account of deceptive perceptual experiences.
5 Although I borrow the language of affordances from J. J. Gibson,

there is one important difference between Heidegger’s notion of what

the world offers and Gibson’s notion of environmental affordances. For
Gibson, an affordance is a physical fact about what the environment
“offers,” “provides,” or “furnishes” an organism of such and such a type.
See Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence
Erlbaum Associates, 1986, p. 127. For Heidegger, however, affordances
for Dasein – the kind of beings we humans are – are world dependent.
That is, is a function of not just the kind of organism we are but also
our way of being in the world.
6 Heidegger thinks that we need to understand this to grasp the Greek

notion of the pseudos, the false. “This is the fundamental meaning of

the Greek pseudos: to so twist something that one does not see how it
genuinely is. Pseudos is that which distorts and twists” (GA 36/37:
227).
7 This, incidentally, suggests the incompleteness of Husserl’s account

of the experience of perceptual deception as an “explosion” of the

perceptual noema as new “perceptual data” are experienced that fail to
fit with preceding noema. What this story doesn’t account for is the
way the character of the perceptual data themselves changes along
with the “noema.”
4 Heidegger on Plato, Truth, and Unconcealment
The 1931–1932 Lecture on The Essence of Truth

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 In the 1920s and 1930s, Heidegger repeatedly offered lectures and
seminars largely devoted to the topic of truth. His evolving thoughts on
the nature and philosophical significance of truth, however, made their
way into relatively few publications, and when they were published,
they tended to come in an incredibly condensed and enigmatic form.
The main published works from this period include Sein and Zeit
(1927), and essays like “Vom Wesen des Grundes” (1929), “Vom Wesen
des Wahrheit” (1930), and “Platons Lehre von der Wahrheit” (1942). 1
With the publication of Heidegger’s notes from his lecture courses, it is
now becoming possible to connect the dots and flesh out Heidegger’s
published account of truth.2 These lecture courses are not just of
historiographical interest, however. In them, we find Heidegger
working out an account of the way that propositional truth is grounded
in a more fundamental notion of truth as world disclosure. He also
struggles to develop a phenomenology of world disclosure, and it is in
these lecture courses that Heidegger’s later view on the history of
unconcealment and being develops. He also argues that the
phenomenologically enriched notion of truth has normative
implications for the way that we conduct ourselves in the world. I
review in this chapter Heidegger’s thought on these matters as
developed in a lecture course offered winter semester 1931–2: The
Essence of Truth: On Plato’s Cave Allegory and the Theaetetus (GA 34).
1. Basic themes of the course

The stated purpose of the 1931–2 lecture course is to understand the

essence of truth. The majority of the course is spent, however, in what
might seem a more historical than philosophical endeavor – an
encounter with, and appropriation of, Plato’s views on knowledge and
truth. But it is in the course of an interpretation of Plato’s cave allegory
from the Republic and a review of Plato’s inquiry into knowledge and
error in the Theaetetus that Heidegger develops the account of the
nature and history of unconcealment that characterizes much of his
later work. Plato’s famous allegory of the cave is a subject to which
Heidegger returned repeatedly. He offered interpretations of it in
lecture courses like this one, and the 1933 lecture course Vom Wesen
der Wahrheit (GA 36/37), before publishing an account of it in 1942
(‘Platons Lehre von der Wahrheit’, GA 9/‘Plato’s Doctrine of Truth’, in
Pathmarks). In the published essay, as in the lecture course, Heidegger
argues that contemporary representational accounts of truth as
correspondence are an outgrowth of a change in thinking spurred by
Plato’s thought. This change, Heidegger argues, can be detected in an

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ambiguity in the cave allegory surrounding the notion of truth – an
ambiguity between truth as a property of things, and truth as a
property of our representations of things. For Heidegger, the decision
to focus on truth as a property of representational states has its root in
the historical influence of Plato’s doctrine of the ideas. Attention to the
ambiguity in Plato’s account, however, shows that what now seems a
natural way to approach truth actually hides at its basis a decision –
namely, the decision to consider truth only insofar as it is a property of
propositions. One consequence of this decision is that, given the
subsequent orientation of truth to ideas or concepts, we come to
believe that “what matters in all our fundamental orientations toward
beings is the achieving of a correct view of the ideas” (GA 9:
234/Pathmarks, p. 179) – that is, a correct representation of things in
terms of their essential or unchanging properties. Heidegger’s interest
in the cave allegory stems from his belief that, while it lays the ground
for an account of propositional truth, it does so on the basis of a view of
truth as a property of things. It thus presents an opportunity to rethink
the now widely accepted approach to truth. The Theaetetus was also a
staple of Heidegger’s lecture courses in the 1920s and early 1930s,
figuring prominently not just in GA 34 and GA 36/37, but also in the
1924 course on Plato’s Sophist (GA 19), and the 1926 course on The
Basic Concepts of Ancient Philosophy (GA 22). One reason for his
interest in this dialogue, as we shall see, was his belief that truth or
unconcealment is a “privative” concept, and thus needs to be
approached by understanding its negation (see Chapter 1). Heidegger
argued that the Greek language reflects an awareness of this in the fact
that Greek uses a privative word-formation (a-lêtheia, un-
concealedness) to name “truth.” “The awakening and forming of the
word alêtheia,” he writes, “is not a mere accident . . . and not an
external matter” (GA 34: 127). What it is to be unconcealed is thus
determined in relationship to a positive state of concealment. The
Theaetetus thus becomes of interest, given its focus on trying to
understand the concept of, and discover the conditions of the
possibility of, error. Error is, of course, one way to conceive of the
opposite of truth. The account we give of error will therefore affect the
understanding we have of truth. If we think of truth as a privative state,
we will think of it as the absence of error. But Heidegger also wants to
question the idea that error as conventionally understood ought to be
the positive state from which truth in general is defined. To the
contrary, he contends that the proper positive concept is concealment. 3
Before turning to the details of the lecture course, a final word of
warning is in order. In this, as in all of Heidegger’s commentaries on
other philosophers, it is not always easy to distinguish between views

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that Heidegger attributes to others in order to reject and those that he
is endorsing. This is, in part, a function of the fact that Heidegger’s
readings of philosophers are so often extremely unconventional; one
tends to believe that, when Heidegger articulates a novel view, it must
be his own view. This is a mistake, and one must not assume that
Heidegger is endorsing all the positions that he attributes to Plato.
Indeed, he thinks that, with Plato’s thought, “Western philosophy takes
off on an erroneous and fateful course” (GA 34: 17). In addition,
Heidegger is a notoriously violent reader of other philosophers – he
reads them to discover the “unsaid” in their thought. The unsaid is the
background assumptions, dispositions, conceptual systems, and so on,
which ground the actual views they accept. “In all genuine works of
philosophy,” he argues, “the decisive content does not stand there in so
many words, but is what brings into motion the totality of a living
interpretation” (GA 34: 193). When Heidegger offers a reading of Plato,
then, it is not primarily oriented toward explaining what Plato actually
thought or wrote, but rather toward how what he thought and wrote
was shaped by certain questionable background assumptions –
assumptions that need to be revisited. In the course of his readings of
philosophers, Heidegger ends up offering an interesting and
philosophically important reconstruction of the logic that supports
their philosophical views. This is usually worth working through, even
if one ultimately dismisses Heidegger’s accounts as historically invalid.
I now turn to a review of some of the salient themes of the lecture
course. This will be a selective review, as I try to give a general sense of
Heidegger’s goal and to focus on what I think are some of his more
interesting contributions to thinking about truth. 1.1. Setting the Stage:
Truth, Essence, Self-Evidence

Heidegger begins the course by calling into question our everyday or

“self-evident” understanding of the notions of truth and essence.
Obviously, we cannot give an account of the essence of truth if we do
not know what an essence is and if we do not know what truth is. The
tradition has ready-made answers to both questions. When it comes to
truth, for example, the generally accepted starting point for
understanding truth, at least within the analytic tradition of
philosophy, is an analysis of our use of the truth predicate. Moreover,
most philosophers have followed Frege in only considering those uses
of the truth predicate in which truth is predicated of propositions (or
certain propositional states and acts like beliefs, sentences, assertions,
etc.). The main theories for defining the truth of propositions take truth
either as a correspondence of the propositional entity with a fact, 4 or a

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coherence of a proposition with a held set of propositions, or, finally, a
kind of deflationism, in which it is pointed out that saying that a
proposition is true does not really do anything more than simply
asserting the proposition. But, Heidegger asks, why should we limit our
considerations of truth to propositional truth in the first place? Frege,
to his credit, recognized that he was dismissing other uses of the truth
predicate, and gave some sort of reason for it. His purpose, he said, was
to understand “that kind of truth . . . whose recognition is the goal of
sciences.”5 Most philosophical treatments of truth are not so self-
conscious about the matter. So what happens if we revisit the decision
to focus only on truth as predicated of propositions or collections of
propositions? Think for a moment about the ways in which, in our
common nonphilosophical discourse, we actually use the “truth
predicate.” We are as likely to say “she is a true friend” as “what she
said is true” – that is, we predicate truth of particular entities, not just
sentences or propositions. Or “truth” can also be used to name whole
states of affairs or domains about which we think or speak (think Jack
Nicholson’s character in A Few Good Men: “You can’t handle the
truth!”) In religious discourse, “truth” is even less amenable to
standard definitions. In the Gospel of John, for example, Jesus
proclaims: “I am the way, the truth, and the life” (John 14: 6), or better
yet: “he that doeth truth cometh to the light, that his deeds may be
made manifest, that they are wrought in God” (John 3: 21). Whatever
“doing the truth” is, it is clearly not a matter of holding true beliefs or
making true assertions. Such examples lend credence to Heidegger’s
view that, in understanding truth, we should not be too quick to focus
exclusively on the truth of propositions. Indeed, Heidegger believes
that propositional truth must be grounded in the truth or
unhiddenness of entities: “what is originally true, that is, unconcealed,
is not the assertion about an entity, but rather the entity itself – a thing,
a fact. . . . The assertion is true in so far as it conforms to something
already true, that is, to an entity that is unconcealed in its being. Truth
as such a correctness presupposes unconcealedness” (GA 34: 118). Just
as he calls into question the self-evidence of our understanding of
truth, Heidegger also argues that the self-evident idea of essences is
problematic. The traditional approach to essences holds that the
essence of a thing is “just what makes it what it is,” where this is
understood as something universal, something that “applies to
everything” that is such a thing (GA 34: 1). So the essence of truth will
be whatever applies to every true proposition, But what sort of
“whatever” are we looking for? Typically, essences are thought of
either as a property or characteristic possessed by the particular
things, or as a true description that can be applied to everything that

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shares that essence. So, we might think of the essence of gold as some
physical property or characteristic, say, the atomic number, which all
gold possesses, or we might think of the essence of a table as a
description that will apply to all and only tables. But truths are not, on
the face of it, like tables or lumps of gold – that is objects with
properties. On what basis are we justified in treating truths in the same
way that we treat (physical) objects? The sort of thing we look for as
the essence of an entity might actually depend on the kind of entity it
is. Since the essence is the what-being of a thing – that is, what it is –
we cannot simply assume that the same understanding of essence
applies to different kinds of beings. We first have to ask about being –
in this case, what is the being of truths? Do they have the kind of being
that objects do? At any rate, such considerations should give us pause
before we confidently assume that we know what the essence of truth
is, or look for an account of the essence of truth – for example in terms
of a property that all true assertions possess (GA 34: 3–5). Heidegger
notes another important feature of essences – namely, that it seems we
cannot decide what the essence of a thing is unless we already know
what it is (this is an argument he develops in more detail in GA 45).
Suppose we want to know what the essence of a table is. We’ll try to
figure out what description applies to every table, what feature or
property every table possesses. To do this, we need to round up all the
tables and examine them. But we cannot round them up unless we
already know which things are tables and which are not. So, it seems,
we can never discover the essence of a thing or ground it empirically;
we can only act on the basis of a prior understanding of its essence. So,
when it comes to truth, “clearly we must necessarily already know the
essence. For how otherwise could we know how to respond to the
request to name [in this case] truths?” (GA 34: 2). If this is right, then
essences are neither something that can be discovered, nor something
that can conclusively be proven and established to be true. But nor are
they exempt from questioning and, in the lecture course that follows,
Heidegger tries to think through the historical roots of our
understanding of the essence of truth. Later in the course, Heidegger
develops the idea of such an understanding as something we strive for,
rather than discover or deduce or prove (see Section 3). Finally,
Heidegger attacks the very notion of self-evidence. First, he makes the
obvious point that being self-evident does not necessarily constitute a
good reason for accepting a proposition. Many things that have been
thought self-evident in the past have turned out to be false. More
importantly, he points out that self-evidence does not exist in itself –
something is always self-evident for somebody. But that means that we
cannot judge the tenability of self-evidence without understanding who

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we are and why certain things seem so self-evident to us. Thus the
observation that the essence of truth is self-evident ought to be the
starting point of inquiry into why we are so constituted that this
particular understanding of truth will strike us as so very self-evident.
“We must first of all ask how it comes about that we quite naturally
move and feel comfortable within such self-evidences?” (GA 34: 6–7).
1.2. Why Plato?

The self-evident but nonetheless questionable nature of the essence of

truth as correspondence is, Heidegger concludes, just another
indication of a pervasive fact about human beings: when we become
comfortable with something, it becomes invisible to us, so that we
actually understand it very poorly. To justify our ready acceptance of
the traditional notion of truth – if it can be justified – thus requires that
we “step back from it” (GA 34: 7), that is, find a standpoint from which
it no longer seems so obvious or natural. We will then be in a position
to examine its foundations and search out its meaning. This is one of
the motivations for turning to Plato, for, Heidegger claims, the
understanding of the current self-evident understanding of the essence
of truth was not yet taken for granted in Plato, but it is Plato’s
philosophy that first laid the foundations for our own notion of truth.
To understand what Heidegger is trying to accomplish with this
historical return to Plato, we need to take a short detour through his
philosophy of language. Heidegger believes that words accrue to
articulations in a prelinguistically structured experience of the world.
So our word “desk,” for example, succeeds in referring to a desk only
because we have articulated a particular space (say, an office) in terms
of certain tasks, relations between equipment, identities (or for-the-
sake-of-whichs), in such a way that one of the things we do there is sit
and write. Our word “desk,” then, accrues to this practically structured
node in the overall context of equipment and activities. One of the
powers and dangers of language, however, is that it is possible for the
word to refer to an object, even without the rich experience of the
world that articulated the object to which it refers. So it is possible for
someone to refer to a desk with the word “desk,” even if he or she does
not know how to comport him- or herself in an office. It is even
possible that, without this original experience of the office, what we
understand by and refer to with the word “desk” could shift and drift
over time, thus eventually obscuring what was originally understood.
This, Heidegger believes, is precisely what has happened with words
like “truth” and “essence.” Of alêtheia, the Greek word for truth, for
instance, he claims that it “loses its fundamental meaning and is

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uprooted from the fundamental experience of unhiddenness” (GA 34:
138). Elsewhere he suggests that two quite different things are both
named by the same word: “truth as unhiddenness and truth as
correctness are quite different things; they arise from quite different
fundamental experiences and cannot at all be equated” (GA 34: 11). But
nor does this mean that the different things named by the word “truth”
are only accidentally related to each other (in the way that, for
example, the machines and birds named by the English word “crane”
are). “Truth” names these “quite different things” because the different
“fundamental experiences” have a great deal to do with each other. The
former (the experience of unhiddenness) is, Heidegger believes, the
historical and logical foundation of the latter. To recognize this, and to
understand better our own notion of truth as correctness, Heidegger
holds that we need to reawaken an experience of hiddenness and
unhiddenness: “instead of speaking about it [a return to the experience
of unhiddenness] in general terms, we want to attempt it” (GA 34: 10).
That is the ultimate goal of the lecture course, and another reason for
the return to Plato’s thought. When introducing the Theaetetus, he
notes that Plato’s dialogue is simply the occasion for “developing” and
“awakening” (GA 34: 129) the question: “for the immediate purpose of
these lectures it is therefore not necessary for you to have an
autonomous command of the Greek text. In fact you should also be able
to co-enact the questioning itself without the text. . . . The task and goal
of the interpretation must be to bring the questioning of this dialogue
to you in the actual proximity of your ownmost being [Dasein] . . . so
that you have in yourselves a question that has become awake” (GA 34:
130). One should note, as an aside, that this quote implies that inquiry
into the nature of truth forces us to confront our own being or essence
– a fact easily overlooked if truth is taken exclusively as a property of
propositions. This is because, as Heidegger puts it, it is part of our
essence that we are in the truth (see also Sein and Zeit, GA 34: 221). To
be in the truth means, at its most superficial level, that most or at least
many of the things we believe are true. But this superficial level is a
consequence of the fact that we understand being and “stand in the
midst of beings” (GA 34: 146), that is, that we are always already in a
world that we understand amidst entities with which we comport: “the
only way in which we can really understand man is as a being bound to
his own possibilities, bound in a way that itself frees the space within
which he pursues his own being in this or that manner” (GA 34: 76). So,
it is part of what it is to be a human being (at the first, most superficial
level) that much of what we believe is true, and (at the deeper, more
profound level) that this is the case because to be human means that
beings are discovered to us and a world is disclosed to us: “it belongs to

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being human . . . to stand in the unhidden, or as we say, in the true, in
the truth. Being human means . . . to comport oneself to the unhidden”
(GA 34: 25). So far, this discussion of our essential being in the truth is
merely an elaboration of Heidegger’s views as presented in Sein and
Zeit. But the 1931–2 lecture course adds a new twist to the relationship
between our essence and truth – namely, Heidegger now claims that
the history of our understanding of truth is connected to “the history of
man’s essence as an existing being” (GA 34: 146). This idea, that there
is a history to our essence, becomes very important in Heidegger’s later
work. Heidegger comes to believe that essences are historical – and
this includes human essence. What it means to be a human being, or,
put differently, that in the light of which something shows up as
human, changes through history. This changing essence is tied to a
change in truth and unconcealment, since the way that we understand
ourselves is grounded in the way that the world discloses itself. So,
once again, we can see that Heidegger’s encounter with Plato is meant
to do much more than provide a historical example of a different view
of truth. Instead, he intends to discover in Plato’s discussion of truth a
different underlying experience of the world and sense for our human
essence. But, returning now to the question of what the word “truth”
names, we can see that, on Heidegger’s view, it is a word that has been
subject to historical change and drift. Because Heidegger uses “truth”
to refer to at least two “quite different things,” the careless reader is
prone mistakenly to take Heidegger to be proposing a new definition of
propositional truth: unconcealment rather than correspondence. The
final reason for Heidegger’s focus on Plato and the cave allegory in
particular is that, Heidegger believes, Plato’s work is the point at which
the old fundamental experience, while still alive, is fading and the new
experience is opened up. Thus the cave allegory, on Heidegger’s view,
both lays the foundation for thinking truth exclusively as
correspondence, but at the same time should be understood as an
inquiry into the nature of unconcealment. 2. Plato’s cave allegory as an
account of four stages of the occurrence of truth (as unhiddenness)

The cave allegory, as Plato’s Socrates himself explains to us, is meant

to illustrate paideia, education, or, as Heidegger translates it,
Gehaltenheit, obligatedness or beholdenness, being held to
something.6,7 In education, we learn new comportments, which consist
in different ways of holding ourselves out toward things in the world,
thereby allowing those things to be uncovered in correspondingly
different ways. We are then bound to the things as they show up. When
one learns to drive a car, for example, one becomes sensitive to all

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kinds of new features of the world (downshifting situations, drivers
who follow too closely, etc.), and one then experiences oneself as
bound or obligated to respond to those things. Thus education in
Plato’s sense (and Heidegger endorses this) should be understood
primarily in terms of learning comportments that allow us to disclose
the world in a new way. If the education is a good one, beings become
more unhidden, more fully available for use, and, consequently, more
compellingly binding in the way that they appear to us. Central to
Plato’s thesis is that there is a highest or best way in which things can
show themselves to us: namely, in the light of the ideas. Education,
then, will be learning how to hold ourselves to objects in the light of the
ideas. Before looking in more detail at Heidegger’s reading of the cave
allegory, let me make another quick observation about Heidegger’s
translation of alêtheia and related words in terms of unconcealedness
or unhiddenness. In the context of the cave allegory, it is clear that the
“truth” or alêtheia at stake has more to do with things other than
propositions. It is the things themselves that are true or more true than
the shadows in the cave, and the ideas that are more true than the
things themselves. That the “truth” at issue here is not easily
assimilable to propositional truth is reflected in the fact that a
substantial number of, if not most, English language translators
translate the Greek words alêthes, alêthestera, and so on, as “real,” or
“more real,” or “having more reality,” rather than “true,” or “truer.”8
This shows that either Plato thinks that the “locus” of truth – that of
which “truth” is most characteristically predicated – is not a
propositional state or act, or he means something different from
“truth” with alêtheia. Given that the Western tradition in philosophy
has come to regard such uses of the predicate “is true” as, at best,
parasitical upon the idea of truth as propositional correspondence, if
one were to translate alêtheia as truth, one would exploit an unfamiliar
and unelucidated concept. “Real,” on the other hand, is a potentially
misleading interpolation. Of course, when a thing is a “true” thing, we
often say that it is real – we might say of a true friend, for instance, that
“she’s a real friend.” But it would be a mistake to equate the true with
the real, since a false friend is no less a real entity than a true friend. In
this context, then, Heidegger’s decision to translate alêtheia as
“unhiddenness” seems to me no more contentious than translating it as
“reality,” nor more opaque than translating it as “truth.” What is at
stake, then, in the allegory of the cave, is, first (and tacitly), what it
means for a thing to be genuinely unhidden (or real or true – i.e.,
available to us in its essence), and second (and explicitly), what is
involved in our preparing ourselves to apprehend things in their
unhiddenness (reality, truth). The allegory, of course, discusses four

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stages in this process. Let me briefly review Heidegger’s account of
these stages in terms of unhiddenness. First stage: The prisoners in the
cave are forced to see only shadows. But they do not see the shadows
as shadows (because they have no relationship yet to the things and
the light that produce the shadows). They are entirely given over to
what they immediately encounter – that means, they have no
relationship to themselves as perceivers (GA 34: 26–7). This stage,
Heidegger argues, is the “everyday situation of man” (GA 34: 28), and
the things show themselves in terms of our everyday understanding or
“knowing our way around” the everyday situations that we encounter
(GA 34: 29). Our familiarity with the everyday world reveals beings in
one particular way. But we are completely absorbed in the world with
the everyday significance it holds for us, and thus are not aware that
there could be any other way to uncover things. Thus we do not know
ourselves as uncoverers of beings. Second stage: The prisoners are
turned around and forced to look at the objects themselves, rather than
the shadows. A new form of unhiddenness occurs as they learn the
distinction between what is seen immediately and what can be shown
to them when they are torn out of their everyday modes of
comportment. For the prisoners at this stage, the shadows remain
more unhidden (GA 34: 32) – presumably because they have practices
for dealing with the shadows but do not know how to cope with things
as they show up outside of their everyday way of dealing with them.
The “standard” employed by the prisoner in deciding what is more true
is the standard of what he can most easily deal with, what demands no
great effort of him, and happens of its own accord so to speak. There
amidst the shadows, in his shackles, he finds his familiar ground, where
no exertion is required, where he is unhindered. . .. The main standard
for his estimation of higher or lower unhiddenness is preservation of
the undisturbedness of his ordinary activities, without being set out to
any kind of reflection (GA 34: 35) For the liberator, however, the
things are more unhidden than the shadows. The things, as opposed to
the shadows, are articulated not according to our everyday practices
but according to the ideas. Since the prisoners do not yet have
practices for dealing with the ideas, they will be confused by objects
articulated in terms of ideas (GA 34: 36). Thus the liberation fails
because it simply shows the prisoner things in a new light without also
equipping the prisoner with the practices needed to be able to cope
with the things so apprehended. Until the prisoner is given the
practices and habits necessary to deal with the things that are
articulated according to the ideas – until he is liberated or set free for
these things – he will not be able to give up the everyday situation (GA
34: 36–7). Third stage: The prisoners are removed from the cave and

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forced to look at the objects in the higher world – the ideas themselves.
This is the stage in which a true liberation for the idea-articulated
world is effected. The liberation requires force, work, exertion, strain,
and suffering to break out of our everyday orientation to the world (GA
34: 42). It gives the prisoner a “new standpoint” (GA 34: 43), from
which the everyday comportments of men are shown to be empty.
Fourth stage: The liberated prisoner returns to the cave, and, with his
new orientation toward the ideas, learns to discern the truth of beings
and of man. Only in the fourth stage, in the return from contemplation
of the meaning on the basis of which or through which things are seen,
to the seeing itself, does it become clear how everything hangs
together. Without the return, the liberator would treat the ideas as
beings – as things toward which she can comport and nothing more.
Only with the return do the ideas play their proper role – namely, they
give us that intelligibility on the basis of which beings can appear as
what they are. It is at the latter stages that the “struggle between the
two concepts of truth” (GA 34: 46) becomes most pronounced. Plato
wants to judge between kinds of unhiddenness and say that one is
more unhidden than another. The “shadows” in the cave, the everyday
objects and situations with which we are familiar in our ordinary lives,
are also unhidden (meaning available for comportment). What allows
us to say that the objects and situations as they appear in the light of
the ideas are more unhidden? Plato makes tacit use of a criterion for
deciding when something is uncovered in a more real or true way –
namely, the higher form of uncovering is the one that makes the lower
form possible. In arguing that the world disclosed in the light of the
ideas is more unhidden (or “true”), then, Plato is basing his argument
on an assumption about the primacy of ideas and cognition over other
practices or kinds of familiarity with the world – that is, about the role
that cognition and a facility with ideas plays in enabling more practical
forms of comportment. The result is that the kind of success that is
characteristic of ideas – that is, truth as correspondence – is given
primacy over, for example, practical success in coping with a situation.
It is only on some such basis that one could hold that, in learning to
recognize the ideas explicitly (a skill developed at stage 3), and then in
developing the ability to recognize how the ideas articulate the world
(a skill developed at stage 4), we are given access to a more
fundamental understanding of the world than the prisoners already
possessed in the cave (see GA 34: 65 ff.). It is worth asking, at this
point, which of the views Heidegger attributes to Plato are also views
he can endorse.9 The views Heidegger endorses include the claims that:
There are different modes of unhiddenness. There are higher and
lower forms of unhiddenness.10 The everyday mode of unhiddenness is

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a lower form. In our everyday comportment to the world, we are
blinded to that in virtue of which a higher disclosure of the world and
our essence could take place. For the higher disclosure of the world, we
need to become oriented to something other than the everyday beings
with which we are involved. Heidegger’s argument for the existence of
higher and lower modes of unhiddenness is similar to the view he
attributes to Plato in the way that it draws on the phenomenology of
perception. Our ability to perceive anything at all – especially everyday
objects and states of affairs – depends, Heidegger argues, on our having
an understanding of being, of essences. When I see something, I do not
simply see the qualities to which the eye, as an organ, is physically
responsive. I also see things as having a meaning or significance (I see
not just colors and shapes but also books and doors). I could not see at
all if my seeing did not already contain “an understanding of what it is
that one encounters” (GA 34: 50). But there are two important points
at which Heidegger disagrees with his version of Plato. First, he rejects
Plato’s account of the content of this higher mode of comportment – for
Heidegger, it does not consist in a grasp of ideas, at least not if ideas are
conceived of in the way that Plato thinks of them (see GA 34: 70: “the
whole problem of ideas was forced along a false track”). Heidegger
agrees that the possibility of apprehending things depends on some
kind of prior grasp or understanding of what they are. But he rejects
the notion that what enables being and perception is an idea, if this is
taken to mean a conceptual grasp of things. Nevertheless, he
acknowledges that Plato’s account of the ascent to the idea of the good
represents a depth of insight that Western philosophy has never again
achieved: “what this empowerment is and how it occurs has not been
answered to the present day; indeed the question is no longer even
asked in the original Platonic sense” (GA 34: 111). Heidegger took for
himself the project of addressing this failing in the form of his later
work on unconcealment. Second, Heidegger argues that, given the
importance and the priority of hiddenness in Plato’s account, it is
essential that the allegory of the cave be followed up by an analysis of
the nature of the hiddenness that prevails in the cave, and constantly
threatens the understanding that we win through philosophy (GA 34:
92–3). This is something that Plato does not do in The Republic,
although there are suggestions on how the analysis would go in Plato’s
discussion of error in the Theaetetus. 3. The theaetetus and the
question concerning the essence of untruth – how unhiddenness
became correctness

To summarize, Heidegger sees in the cave allegory the moment at

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which a primordial experience of unconcealment begins to fade (GA 34:
119). Once unhiddenness is understood as produced through having a
grasp of an idea, a kind of mental comportment toward things, then
hiddenness consequently comes to be understood as the result of a
failure on our part – namely, as a cognitive failure in which we distort
the facts. The opposite of truth, alêtheia, becomes distortion, pseudos.
This is in contrast to the original experience of hiddenness, lathê,
which was an occurrence having as much to do with things as with us.
The original Greek experience of concealment, Heidegger claims, is that
of the things refusing themselves, withdrawing into hiddenness (GA
34: 139–40).11 Prior to Plato, the opposite of truth, in other words, was
an “objectively” occurring unavailableness of things. With Plato’s
thought, however, hiddenness becomes a matter of having a distorted
cognition, the opposite of which is having a correct representation of
things (GA 34: 143–4). And it is this background understanding of
unhiddenness that underwrites truth as correspondence. Whether this
account is historiologically accurate is, in some sense, irrelevant. As an
account of the logic behind the notion of truth as correspondence, it is
compelling. Note, however, that nothing in the account Heidegger
offers is meant as a rejection of the idea of correspondence or the
possibility of correspondence. Rather, it is an argument that focusing
exclusively on correspondence will obscure the way to any other
experience of concealment, and consequently will tend to occlude the
possibility of thinking of other, perhaps better, modes of unhiddenness.
Thus, Heidegger concludes, unconcealment in Plato’s cave allegory “is a
theme, and at the same time not a theme” (GA 34: 125). The whole
allegory is about the process by which we become capable of bringing
things into unhiddenness, and yet unhiddenness as an event itself is
not fully thematized. To make it a theme fully, Heidegger argues, we
need to focus on the nature of hiddenness (GA 34: 125). This focus is
something Heidegger hopes to arrive at through Plato’s Theaetetus. In
turning to Heidegger’s reading of that dialogue, we must note that he is
trying to do two things simultaneously. First, he is trying to discover
the source for the traditional philosophical orientation toward
cognition, and conceptuality, second, he is trying to recover a more
fundamental grasp of what is involved in our knowing being-in-the-
world. The reading Heidegger offers of the Theaetetus thus both
develops Plato’s arguments in a phenomenological direction and
situates Plato in the history of philosophy. These two aspects of
Heidegger’s reading tend to pull him in different directions – on the
one hand, to take the concepts that seem to have an explicitly
conceptual content in Plato and reinterpret them in noncognitivist or
nonconceptualist ways; on the other hand, to see how Plato’s doctrines

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lent themselves to the development of conceptualism or cognitivism. In
the Theaetetus, Socrates turns to the question of error within the
context of a broader inquiry into knowledge as such. A consequence of
the privilege given to correspondence in truth theories is, Heidegger
argues, that a complementary privilege is accorded to scientific
knowledge over other forms of knowing. The seeds of this latter
privilege are planted by the Platonic idea that a theoretical grasp of the
ideas provides the highest form of unhiddenness of things. But
Heidegger argues that, in the Theaetetus, at any rate, it is not scientific
knowledge per se that is at stake but knowledge in the broadest sense
as that comportment which makes us distinctively human (GA 34: 156–
7). To be human is to know – not in the scientific sense (as if we would
not be human if we lacked scientific knowledge) but in a broader sense
of knowing how to comport oneself in the world. This, Heidegger
argues, is the original sense of the Greek concept of knowledge:
“Epistamai means: I direct myself to something, come closer to it,
occupy myself with it, in a way that is fitting and measures up to it. This
placing of myself toward something is at the same time a coming to
stand, a standing over the thing and in this way to understand it” (GA
34: 153). Thus the kind of knowledge at stake in the Theaetetus is
knowledge in the general sense of knowing how to deal with something
in a fitting manner: “epistêmê originally means all this: the
commanding knowing-one’s-way-around in something, familiarity in
dealing with something” (GA 34: 153). “All possible human activities
and all possible domains” (GA 34: 153) are characterized by this sort of
familiarity; scientific knowledge is just one such way of knowing our
way around (GA 34: 154). In fact, Heidegger wants to argue that the
most fundamental sort of knowing as familiarity with the world cannot
be captured in terms of the propositional/logical structure and
conceptual apparatus of strictly scientific modes of knowing. The a-
conceptuality of fundamental knowledge has implications for the kind
of philosophical enterprise Heidegger is engaged in. Philosophical
thinking is, of course, a kind of conceptualization, and thus it consists in
bringing a preconceptual understanding of things to a concept (see GA
34: 210). But what kind of a concept can do this adequately? Not,
Heidegger suggests, a type-name or type-concept (GA 34: 154–5) – that
is, the ability to name some property that all X things have in common.
Rather, “the ‘concept’ that is sought for . . . [is] an attacking intervention
in the essential possibility of human existence” (GA 34: 157). There is a
play here on words formed from the German verb greifen, which
means to take hold of or grasp. The word for concept, Begriff’ is formed
from this root. Literally, a Begriff is a kind of grasp of a thing. Attacking
intervention is angreifender Eingriff. Eingriff means an intervention or

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engagement in something; literally, it is a “grasp on” something, the
idea being that in intervening or becoming engaged, we’re getting into
and getting a grasp on the situation. Likewise, angreifen means to
attack, but literally it is “to grasp at,” that is, to try to get a hold on
something, to bring something into one’s grasp or control. So, a
philosophical “concept” for Heidegger is not necessarily an abstract,
logical content but an attempt to come to grips with a thing or a
situation in order to engage oneself with it. This can happen without
exhaustively or determinately capturing the content of a thing. Indeed,
the kind of content that will be appropriate will depend on the kind of
thing with which we are trying to cope and the kind of involvement we
have with it. Thus knowledge, as a familiarity with things, always
involves a kind of grasp of them – a “concept” in the broad sense. But
what kind of grasp is essential to knowledge? For the Greeks, and
subsequently for the entire Western tradition (according to
Heidegger), there is a tendency to equate knowledge per se with the
kind of grasp we get of things in seeing that such and such is the case
(GA 34: 159–60). This privileges the conceptual grasp in the narrow
sense – what you see when you’re merely seeing, where what is seen is
taken in regard to what can be said about it. This is the kind of content
that can be passed around and shared with even a minimal familiarity
with the entity. A conceptual grasp provides one with a kind of
“disposal over something in its presence and persistence” (GA 34: 161,
but not necessarily an ability to engage practically with it. In Plato’s
dialogue, Theaetetus’s first effort to define knowledge treats it
precisely as a kind of perception. This definition fails, as Socrates gets
Theaetetus to admit, if we think of perception as mere sensation, for
sensation provides us only with certain sensory qualities but not
evidence of the being or truth (unhiddenness) of things (see
Theaetetus 186 c9–e12, and Heidegger’s discussion at GA 34: 242–5).
In other words, perception delivers knowledge (in either the broad or
the narrow sense) only if it goes beyond sensation. Theaetetus’s next
answer is that knowledge is a kind of doxazein, a kind of thinking or
supposing or holding an opinion. Heidegger translates doxazein as
“having a view of or about something, which shows itself as such and
such” (GA 34: 257). The German term for a view or an opinion is
Ansicht, which is ambiguous between the view we have on the matter
and the view the matter itself presents. Heidegger exploits this
ambiguity to suggest that our familiar knowledge of something
involves both our having a particular take on or orientation to it and its
offering itself to us as something, holding out to us a certain view of
itself. The translation of doxazein as having a view also, once again,
expands the consideration beyond the merely cognitive domain of

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making or entertaining judgments. A judgment is a “view,” but not all
views are judgments (“from that point, one has a beautiful view of the
valley” does not imply that at that point one must form a judgment
about the valley). The doxa or view is capable of truth or falsity but in a
broader sense than the correspondence of a judgment with a state of
affairs. A true view is not just a correct one but also an undistorted one.
The possibility of error, and of hiddenness in general, is, for Heidegger,
attributable to the double structure implied in the idea of a view.
Because having a view involves both a certain orientation on the
viewer’s part, and a certain giving of itself of the thing that is viewed, a
distorted view occurs when either the viewer takes up an orientation
to the thing that does not allow itself to show itself as it is, or it gives
itself in some way that it is not. In general, the double structure
involves, on the viewer’s part, an orientation that goes beyond or
“strives” beyond any particular object of knowledge. When I intend a
chair, for example, my intention goes beyond what is given by any
particular sensory experience of a chair (it includes the back side of the
chair, as well as other chairs). In the lecture course, Heidegger
discusses several other kinds of “movement beyond” involved in
unconcealment, which also bear the same kind of double structure, and

each of which
Figure 4.1
has its own kind of characteristic hiddenness. They are summarized
and condensed in Figure 4.1 (GA 34: 321). The knowing agent stands
where the lines converge at the lower left of the diagram. The base line
is the line of sensory connection with an entity (aisthesis), the next line
up is the first kind of going beyond entities – the going beyond in an
intentional orientation to an entity (a “retention and making present,”
Heidegger’s interpretation of the idea of mnêmoneuein in the
Theaetetus, GA 34: 311). The arrows going between the object as
sensed and the object as intended show that it is possible to make a
judgment, either that the object as sensed is such and such kind of
object, or that the object intended is satisfied by such and such sensed
object (see GA 34: 311 ff.). This double structure makes an error
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possible because it allows, for example, that the sensed object is
brought under an idea that is not appropriate for it (GA 34: 316). But
there are more ways in which our understanding comportment goes
beyond any particular object. In the diagram, these are represented in
the third and fourth lines up from the bottom. The third line is a second
kind of going beyond that grounds both sensory perception and
intentional directedness – an understanding of being. Finally, this is
grounded in a striving for being that goes beyond an understanding of
being and back to beings. The going beyond involved in the third line
points to the fact that we perceive objects in the world on the basis of
our having taken in advance an understanding of notions like being and
nonbeing, identity and difference – these notions are koina, that is,
common to all the sensory modalities, but not sensed through any of
them: “so we see that the koina (being – nonbeing, sameness –
difference) are precisely what allow us to grasp more concretely this
region of inner perceivability. In their total constellation, it is precisely
these koina which co-constitute the region of perceivability” (GA 34:
194–5). Thus, for instance, I can see a table because I have laid out in
advance a region within which objects like tables are, and are what
they are. But what kind of a grasp do I have of such things? Most of us
never form good concepts of being and nonbeing, sameness and
difference (or even of tables, for that matter). If we do not have them in
virtue of possessing a concept of them, then in what sense do we have
them? Heidegger argues that we have them as a “striving” for them,
represented in the highest line in the diagram. To get clearer about
this, let’s reflect on the natural experience of perception. It seems, on
the face of it, that perception is anything but a striving. Rather, it is a
kind of losing yourself in what is given to you, letting yourself be taken
by the things that surround you. Heidegger illustrates this through the
example of a person lying in a meadow, perceiving the blue sky and a
lark’s song: In our situation, lying in the meadow, we are not at all
disposed to occupy ourselves with anything. On the contrary, we lose
ourselves in the blue, in what gives itself; we follow the song along, we
let ourselves be taken, as it were, by these beings, such that they
surround us. To be sure, beings surround us, and not nothing, neither
anything imaginary. But we do not occupy ourselves with them as
beings. (GA 34: 206) Indeed, Heidegger argues, to regard them as
beings is to no longer lose ourselves in the perception of them, and
thus to disregard them as we were previously taking them. “In
immediate perception,” Heidegger concludes, “beings are perceived, as
we say, in a manner which is non-regarding” (GA 34: 206). So my
perception of things is anything but a kind of striving, an effort. Natural
perception is, then, “non-regarding and non-conceptual perceiving of

93
beings – which means that we occupy ourselves neither with beings as
such . . . nor do we grasp their being conceptually. . . . Perception is not
conceiving of beings in their being” (GA 34: 210). That is, in my
everyday perceptual experience of things, I neither regard them
explicitly as beings, nor do I grasp them as instances of a concept. The
chair that I sit in is, of course, perceived by me, but it is, in the normal
course of sitting, thought of neither as a being nor as a chair. In his
1925 lecture course on logic (GA 21), Heidegger offers his best and
most complete description of this kind of natural, everyday experience
of objects. In our familiar dealings with the world, we experience
things primarily in terms of their Wozu, translated in Being and Time
as their “towards-which” or their “in-order-to,” but perhaps it is most
naturally rendered as their “for-what” (in the sense of “what one uses it
for,” “for what purpose it is employed”). My primary, familiar
understanding of things, in other words, is not an understanding of
them as satisfying some description or other, but rather simply in
affording something else. As I walk through a building, the door is not
there as a door as such, but it is there for going in and out, the chairs
are there for sitting, the pens and desk and paper are there for writing
(GA 21: 144). The structure of this understanding is, Heidegger argues,
not “primarily and properly given in a simple propositional assertion,”
(GA 21: 144), nor can it be “thematically grasped,” at least not as long
as one is living in it (GA 21: 145). This is because I understand how to
do things with tables, doors, and all the other things with which I am
familiar, only by being “always already further” than what is physically
present to me – for instance, in using the door, I am already at that for
which it is: I’m already oriented to the room into which I am moving.
When I grasp the thing explicitly as the thing it is, I do this by “coming
back from” that for which the thing is understood – to the thing itself
(GA 21: 147). So, in ordinary comportment, I understand the door not
by focusing on the door per se but by already directing myself beyond
the door to the room on the other side. In grasping the door explicitly, I
have to draw my intention back from the room beyond to the door
itself. A grasp of being functions in the same way – I take something as
a being precisely by not occupying myself with it as a being, but rather
in terms of that for which it exists in my world. In the natural, everyday
perception, then, we understand what things are, their being, but we do
not grasp their being as such. We lack a concept of it (in the narrow
sense): When we perceive what is encountered as something that is,
we take it in respect of the being that belongs to it. In so doing,
however, already and in advance, we understand this being of the
being in a non-conceptual way. Precisely because we do not grasp
being (most people never obtain a concept of being and yet they live at

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every moment in the understanding of being) we also cannot say how
this being belongs to the being to which we attribute it. . . . But despite
this non-conceptual mode of understanding, we can accept, take in, and
intend the beings in diverse aspects of their being and so-being. (GA
34: 208) Our lack of a concept for what we understand is by no means
a failure on our part – indeed, it is only because we pay no regard to
being that we are free to encounter beings in a fluid, everyday way.
Thus our understanding of the things around is a familiarity with. . .,
not a conceptualization of. . .. So there is an important sense in which
there is no “striving” involved in much of my experience of things.
There is no experience of effort at understanding, nothing that I am
trying to grasp. At the same time, however, Heidegger argues that the
easy familiarity with beings is rooted in a “ground-stance,” a historical
taking a stand on being and the world. This taking a stand is not a thing
that exists in the world, and not something that we are used to thinking
about or dealing with. But having such a stance is a background
condition to all our everyday dealings with things. What does it mean
to say that we strive for a groundstance that takes a stand on being?
Heidegger distinguishes between two kinds of striving – an authentic
and an inauthentic version (GA 34: 213). An inauthentic striving is a
“mere chasing after what is striven for” (GA 34: 214). It has as its object
not our being but some entity – “a thing which as such can be taken
into possession” (GA 34: 216). We are inauthentically striving for being
when we are “ensnared” within a particular understanding of being,
and thus feel compelled to chase after certain things that are presented
as important or unimportant within that understanding of being. The
authentic striving does not try to take possession of a thing but to own
up to it as “the measure and law for the striver’s comportment to
beings” (GA 34: 216). I take a stand on the world, decide to be such and
such a person, and strive after this way of being. I can never accomplish
it, but by projecting it as that on the basis of which I will understand
myself, it gives me a basis for my experience of beings. So the way in
which we “have” an excess that then determines how we experience
particular things is in a striving to be something, to take up a particular
stance on the being of the world. This projecting toward something,
which is never present or possessed, lays out a unified field (GA 34:
223–4) within which I can have a bodily perception of things because it
gives a determinate view on things. It gives me a basis for reckoning
with or coping with things (see GA 34: 224–5). But we should not think
that this is a subjective projection, an act of will by which we impose
intelligibility on the world. The things that we encounter themselves
“demand a comportment which takes them in as such” (GA 34: 229; see
also GA 34:235–7). So the most fundamental basis for our making

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sense of the world is nothing natural, nothing fixed or necessary, but in
it we are attuned by the natural world around us. This fact is
represented in the diagram by the way the arrow curves back around
to the beings themselves. We are in the condition, then, of always
striving to establish a particular understanding of ourselves and the
world by using the entities we encounter in the world – by projecting
ourselves into actions and possibilities, consequently comporting
ourselves in particular ways, and thereby making sense of the objects
and situations we encounter. This way of projecting ourselves
(striving) will allow certain things and situations to make their
appearance, but it will also conceal other things and situations that are
incompatible with or irrelevant to our understanding. If one focuses on
error as the opposite of truth, Heidegger believes, it makes one lose
sight of this more fundamental interplay between revealing and
concealing in our projective action in the world. Likewise, if one’s
orientation to the world is understood as mediated by linguistic or
conceptual ideas, then failure to orient oneself correctly is naturally
understood in terms of the application of an incorrect predicate to the
subject involved. Plato’s interpretation of the look or view of a thing in
terms of logos, Heidegger argues, “is important in so far as it [the
‘logos-character of doxa’] alone is retained in the later development of
the doxa concept, so that the primordial elements of the doxa
disappear behind this characteristic, and the doxa, as ‘opinion,’ is
linked to assertion and the genuine phenomenon disappears” (GA 34:
284). But Plato himself, Heidegger argues, points us in the direction of
the phenomena of hiddenness and unhiddenness. Thinking beyond
Plato, then, Heidegger argues that we need to think through the way
that unhiddenness and unconcealment in general occur. This, in fact, is
the central project of most of Heidegger’s later work. Chapter 4 1
These essays are all published in GA 9: Wegmarken. Frankfurt am
Main: Klostermann, 1996). Translated as: Pathmarks (William McNeill,
Ed.). Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
2 Courses dedicated to truth include: “Logik. Die Frage nach der

Wahrheit” (Winter Semester 1925–1926, GA 21); Vom Wesen der

Wahrheit. Zu Platons Höhlengleichnis and Theätet (Winter Semester
1931–1932, GA 34); “Vom Wesen der Wahrheit” (Winter Semester
1933–1934, GA 36/37); and “Grundfragen der Philosophie.
Ausgewählte ‘Probleme’ der ‘Logik’” (Winter Semester 1937–1938, GA
45). Virtually every other course taught during this period includes a
significant discussion of the essence of truth. Particularly notable in
this regard are “Einleitung in die Philosophie” (Winter Semester 1928–
1929, GA 27), “Nietzsches Lehre vom Willen zur Macht als Erkenntnis”
(Summer Semester 1939, GA 47), and, a little later, the “Parmenides”

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lecture course of 1942–1943 (GA 54).
3 Error, however, might well be the positive state from which a

subcategory of truth – propositional truth as correctness – is defined.

4 When Heidegger was writing and lecturing, the most widely

accepted notion of propositional truth was that of correspondence.

Like many others in the opening decades of the twentieth century, he
questions whether we can arrive at a clear notion of correspondence –
at least as long as correspondence is taken as a relationship that holds
between a representation and a state of affairs in the world. For further
discussion of Heidegger’s views on correspondence, see my “Truth and
the Essence of Truth,” in The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger, rev.
ed. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2005, and
Chapter 1 above.
5 “The Thought,” in Logical Investigations (P. T. Geach, Ed.). Oxford,

England: Basil Blackwell, 1977, p. 2.

6 See my “Truth and the Essence of Truth,” in The Cambridge

Companion to Heidegger, rev. ed.

7 See Republic 514 a. In the English translation of the lecture course,

“Gehaltenheit” is rendered as “positionedness” (see p. 83 ff.). The

reasoning behind this, I suppose, is that in being educated, we take up a
new position or stance among beings. But the emphasis here is on our
being held to a certain relationship to things in virtue of our having
taken hold of them in a particular way.
8 See, e.g., Waterfield’s, Cornford’s and Shorey’s translations.
9 Perhaps the most striking difference between this lecture course and

the later published essay on Plato’s cave allegory is the extent to which
Heidegger in the lecture course attempts to read Plato in
phenomenological terms. This lecture presents one of Heidegger’s
most charitable and least critical readings of Plato.
10 Heidegger doesn’t elaborate very much on this point in the lecture

course. For an account of his views on a higher mode of intelligibility,

see Hubert Dreyfus, “Could anything be more intelligible than everyday
intelligibility?” in Appropriating Heidegger (James E. Faulconer & Mark
A. Wrathall, Eds.). Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press,
2000, pp. 155–74.
11 For more on this idea, see Chapter 1.

Part II Language

5 Social Constraints on Conversational Content

Heidegger on Rede and Gerede

1. Introduction

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 What role does one’s community play in determining one’s meaning –
in fixing the content of what is available to individual members of that
community to do or to say? Heidegger, for one, has argued that our
activities are heavily constrained by social factors. We always act
within a public realm, which is already organized and interpreted in a
determinate way. As a consequence, Heidegger explains, we are
“constantly delivered over to this interpretedness, which controls and
distributes the possibilities” available to us for action (GA 2: H. 167).
Indeed, Heidegger argues that our being “delivered over” to the public
interpretation of things is an inescapable feature of human existence.
What is true of action in general is also true for our use of language.
Heidegger claims that in language itself there is hidden an
“understanding of the disclosed world” (GA 2: H. 168). So not just our
possibilities for practical engagement with the things and people
around us but even the possible range of what we can say is subject in
some way to others. One consequence of social constraints on
language, Heidegger believes, is a tendency on the part of speakers to
fall into a superficial imitation of the kinds of things that others in their
linguistic community say. He calls such speech Gerede, which is
generally translated as “idle talk.” Gerede is the everyday mode of
Rede, which is generally translated as “discourse.” For reasons to be
explained later, I will translate Rede as “conversation,” and Gerede as
“idle conversation.” Heidegger tells us that in idle conversation, one
understands things “only approximately and superficially”: “one does
not so much understand those entities about which one converses [das
beredete Seiende], but rather one listens only to what is said in the
conversation as such [das Geredete als solches]” (GA 2: H. 168). Or, as
he puts it elsewhere, this kind of idle conversation “releases one from
the task of true understanding” (GA 2: H. 169). Because Heidegger
believes that idle conversation is a pervasive phenomenon, he is often
taken to hold that language itself is essentially and necessarily limited
to public norms of understanding and interpretation. Because our
language is constrained by social factors, the argument goes, we are
forced to express things that are either banal or untrue whenever we
use language. For example, Hubert Dreyfus attributes to Heidegger the
view that “language by its very structure leads Dasein away from a
primordial relation to being and to its own being.”1 Taylor Carman also
argues that, because the public form of discourse is necessarily
banalized, and because public language “provides the only vocabulary
in which interpretation can in fact proceed,” the inevitable result of
language use is a fallen form of understanding: “There is no alternative

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to expressing and communicating one’s understanding in the given
idiom of one’s social and cultural milieu. To make sense of oneself at all
is to make sense of oneself on the basis of the banal, indeed flattened
out and leveled off, language of das Man.”2 In this paper, I explore
Heidegger’s view about the role of a community in determining or
constraining linguistic meaning. In the course of doing this, I will argue
against the view that Dreyfus and Carman, among others, attribute to
Heidegger by demonstrating that language is not responsible for the
banalizing and leveling of everyday human modes of existence. To the
contrary, there are for Heidegger social constraints on meaning only
because meaningful activities are inextricably caught up in a social
world. But this fact in and of itself does not entail that any public use of
language will be driven to banalization. Instead, the leveling and
banalization that occurs is a result of the fact that all our practices are
implicated in a network of social activities and concerns – activities
that no individual can master, and concerns about which no individual
can get clear. Nevertheless, once idle conversation is properly
understood, we will see that Heidegger is not committed to the view
that conversational content is necessarily subject to public norms.
Although the interpenetration of language and practices means that it
is possible to use language to talk about things we do not genuinely
understand, it does not mean that we have to do so. In Chapter 2, I
argued that philosophy stands to benefit from the ability to read past
the boundaries of “analytic” or “Continental” philosophy. In the spirit of
that argument, I will begin by comparing Heidegger’s analysis of the
social constraints on meaning with arguments made for social
externalism in analytic philosophy. Philosophers like Putnam, Burge,
and Dummett have worked out a detailed explanation of how the
content of our thoughts, beliefs, and words is determined at least in
part by things external to us, including the social context in which
words come to have the meaning that they have.3 An understanding of
these arguments provides a helpful background for examining
Heidegger’s view. The social externalists tell us that the meaning of a
particular utterance is determined by the language in which it is
uttered. So we can make a meaningful utterance in the sense of saying
something that can be understood by a competent speaker of the
language without ourselves knowing much about the thing of which we
speak or without knowing what our words are taken to mean. This
consequence of the externalist view – that is, that the speakers of a
language often lack a genuine understanding of the things they are
saying – might, on the face of it, seem like a promising basis for
justifying Heidegger’s claim that Gerede, idle conversation, is a
pervasive phenomenon. I shall ultimately argue, however, that this is

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not how Heidegger understands idle conversation. The analytic
discussion of social externalism is nevertheless illuminating, if only to
show how Heidegger’s account of idle conversation should not be
construed. In fact, I believe the comparison does more than that. It also
helps us see how limited the consequences of Gerede are for
understanding the essential features of linguistic communication in
general. 2. Setting the Stage: Social Externalism

One traditional view of the influence of a linguistic community on an

individual’s meaning denies that there is any essential influence at all –
that is, it insists that what those around me mean by their words or
imagine my words to mean has no bearing on the meaning of what I
say. What I mean when I speak is entirely dependent on what I intend
to say, and what I intend to say is determined by what I believe – not by
what those around me believe. In other words, what I can express is
restricted to what, on the basis of my personal history, I could intend to
mean. What others believe cannot figure in understanding what I
intend to say (although I will, of course, often find it useful to speak in
the way that I believe others would speak). My words are thus to be
understood without any necessary reference to the linguistic
community to which I belong. Externalists, in contrast, take the view
that, to quote Putnam’s now-famous phrase, “‘meanings’ just ain’t in
the head.”4 Putnam’s pioneering argument for this proceeds by trying
to demonstrate, through a variety of hypothetical examples, that two
traditional internalist theses about meaning are incompatible. These
theses are: 1. “That knowing the meaning of a term is just a matter of
being in a certain psychological state;” and 2. “That the meaning of a
term (in the sense of ‘intension’) determines its extension.” 5 From
these two theses, it would seem to follow that the psychological state
associated with knowing the meaning of a term determines the
extension of that term. But, according to Putnam, there are cases in
which, given differing conditions external to the psychological state of
the speaker, the same psychological state will determine different
extensions. If that is true, then there must be more to knowing the
meaning of a term than being in a given psychological state. One set of
examples to which Putnam alludes in demonstrating that “inner”
psychological states are not sufficient to determine extension are cases
arising from what he calls the “social division of linguistic labor.” There
are many instances in which it is useful for us to acquire a word for
something without also acquiring an expertise in recognizing if
something genuinely belongs to the extension of the word. We leave
this work to others, thus dividing the “linguistic labor”: The features

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that are generally thought to be present in connection with a general
name – necessary and sufficient conditions for membership in the
extension, ways of recognizing if something is in the extension
(“criteria”), etc. – are all present in the linguistic community
considered as a collective body; but that collective body divides the
“labor” of knowing and employing these various parts of the
“meaning.”6 Putnam cites such examples as a given individual’s
confusion over the difference between beeches and elms, or between
aluminum and molybdenum, or an inability to determine the exact
extension of “gold.” Putnam claims that, for any English speaker, the
extension of such terms will be the same, regardless of how rich or
impoverished that speaker’s understanding of the extension of the
term might be. Of course, the poorer my concept of an elm is, the more
likely I am to make mistaken claims and hold mistaken beliefs about
the elm. But because the extension of the term is determined by other,
more competent speakers of English than I, it is possible for me to
make illuminating, useful, and even true claims about elms without
knowing much at all about them. In a series of articles, 7 Burge has
argued along similar lines that the content of our intentional states is at
least partly determined by the language and concepts of the people
with whom we interact – language and concepts of which we often
have, at best, an incomplete understanding. Thus, according to Burge,
we can think things and say things without necessarily knowing what
we think and mean. Like Putnam, Burge begins with the supposition
that meaning determines extension. Consequently, if two terms have
different extensions, they must also express different meanings. The
problem is that, for a variety of reasons, any given individual is often
unable to fix the extension of a term. Even if individuals are capable of
articulating a term’s meaning, thereby explicating the basis on which
things are included in or excluded from its extension, they often lack
the present ability to do so. For instance, we often have a precognitive
familiarity with examples of a certain kind of thing without having
conceptualized on what basis the examples count as the kind of thing
that we take them to be. Perhaps, despite all our experience with
insects and arachnids, we have never really thought about what makes
us class ants with bees but not with spiders. Or it may be that we lack
the sort of direct experience with the things in question that would
allow us to clarify our conception of what it takes to count as such a
thing – perhaps we think of mammals as furry, land-dwelling creatures
because we have never come across whales. Or it could be that we have
developed only the discriminatory capacities and abilities made
relevant by our current normal environment but lack the ability to
discriminate between things that belong and do not belong in the

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extension in nonnormal environments. Imagine the difficulty for
someone raised in the United States of categorizing all the creatures
one encounters in Australia. In all such cases, Burge argues, our ability
to determine the extension of our words and concepts is inferior to
that of the people we recognize as experts concerning those concepts.
This might lead us to conclude that our terms mean something
different in our mouths than they do in the mouths of the experts, since
we would assign a different extension to those terms. But, for the social
externalist, such a conclusion is not justified. To the contrary, Burge
contends, we hold ourselves responsible to using words as they are
understood in our community. When we lack the ability to determine
the extension of certain terms and concepts on our own, we defer to
others who possess the ability. There are thus many instances in which
we depend on others to determine our content for us. Our recognition
of this dependence, Burge points out, is readily manifest in our
willingness to stand corrected by others in the meaning of our words.
Burge would claim that this is not a matter of having others foist their
meanings on us. Rather, we are willing to stand corrected because we
recognize that we speak the same language as the experts do, and they
understand portions of our common language better than we do. Or we
recognize that, in many instances, we rely on the experts for our access
to the examples on which our understanding of our words and
concepts is based. There is thus good reason for accepting correction
from them in the explication of our concepts and words: Our
explicational abilities, and indeed all our cognitive mastery, regarding
the referents of such words and concepts do not necessarily fix the
referents. Nor therefore . . . do they necessarily fix the translational
meanings or concepts associated with the words. . . . Others are often in
a better position to arrive at a correct articulation of our word or
concept, because they are in a better position to determine relevant
empirical features of the referents. . .. Since the referents play a
necessary role in individuating the person’s concept or translational
meaning, individuation of an individual’s concepts or translational
meanings may depend on the activity of others on whom the individual
is dependent for acquisition of and access to the referents. If the others
by acting differently had put one in touch with different referents,
compatibly with one’s minimum explicational abilities, one would have
had different concepts or translational meanings. 8 It follows that we
sometimes intend to be understood in a way that we do not ourselves
understand. The plausibility of these social externalist arguments
hinges entirely on the extent to which the examples they use convince
us that a proper understanding of the speaker’s meaning requires a
necessary reference to others in her linguistic community. To appraise

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the social externalist argument better, therefore, it is worthwhile to
examine the examples more closely. The examples as Putnam and
Burge typically present them fail to distinguish carefully between those
speakers who know the subject matter well but who do not fully
understand what others refer to with their terms, and those who know
neither. For instance, in Burge’s example of a man with arthritis, the
man in question knows the following kinds of things about his arthritis:
he thinks (correctly) that he has had arthritis for years, that his
arthritis in his wrists and fingers is more painful than his arthritis in
his ankles, that it is better to have arthritis than cancer of the liver, that
stiffening joints is a symptom of arthritis, that certain sorts of aches are
characteristic of arthritis, that there are various kinds of arthritis, and
so forth.9 The man does not know that “informed” members of his
speech community use the term “arthritis” to refer to an inflammation
of a joint. Presumably, the man also does not know (although Burge is
not explicit on this point) that his pain is caused by an inflammation of
the joints. But this distinction – between not knowing some fact about
the object in question and not knowing how others refer to that fact –
is a crucial distinction to draw if we are correctly to understand what
the speaker means to say when, to take Burge’s hypothetical example,
he says things like “I’ve developed arthritis in my thigh.” To help see
the importance of drawing this distinction, I want to set out a couple of
my own examples – examples that I have tailored to highlight what are,
for me, the important features of these kinds of situations. First
example. Until I built my own house, I thought that a gable was a kind
of peaked roof, and consequently I believed that the phrase “gable roof’
was redundant. It was only while constructing the gables on my house
that I discovered that a gable is not actually a roof, but rather the
triangular exterior wall section bounded by the roof rafters. A gable
roof is, in fact, a roof that ends in a gable. Of course, this was a difficult
mistake to correct, since what I thought was a gable was in almost all
instances adjoined by a gable, meaning that my improper use was as
difficult for others to detect as their proper use was for me. As a result,
even though I did not know what the term “gable” actually meant,
many (if not most) of the utterances in which I used the term were
understood by others in a way that was appropriate under the
circumstances, if not actually true in a literal sense. So, while I had no
particular misconceptions about the matters being talked about – I did
not, for instance, ever think a wall was a roof – I did lack a proper
understanding of the way the term “gable” is typically used. Second
example. When ordering a new computer last week, I told the
computer-purchasing agent at the university that I wanted an extra
128 megabytes of RAM for the computer. Although I know that “RAM”

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is an acronym for “random access memory,” and I have actually
installed RAM in my laptop before, I do not really understand what it is
or how it works. I do, however, have a vague sense that, in general, a
computer with more RAM works better than a computer with less
RAM, and this was enough to allow me to say sensible things to the
computer-purchasing agent about it. Nevertheless, my use of the term
was limited in important ways. For instance, I would be unable on my
own to determine the extension of my term “RAM” with any degree of
precision. Moreover, there is a comparatively small set of inferences I
could draw from any particular claim about RAM – much smaller, for
instance, than a computer expert could draw. Now, the issue is, what
do such examples teach us about social constraints on linguistic
meaning? Let me briefly review. These two different examples are
intended to illustrate two different senses in which information
available to a speaker underdetermines the meaning of the speaker’s
utterance (or at least the meaning it has for an informed audience). In
the first example, the speaker lacks information about how other
speakers of the language determine the extension of a term. We
assume, however, that the speaker is competent to determine the
extension of the term as he himself uses it. In the second example, the
speaker lacks even this much – he is unable on his own to determine
the extension of the term either as he uses it or as others use it. In
addition, or perhaps as a consequence, the speaker is also very
constrained in his understanding of the inferential relations his
utterance would bear to other possible utterances.10 To the extent that
Putnam and Burge rely on cases like my “gable” example, it is not clear
that they are entitled to draw any general conclusions about social
constraints on meaning. This is because, given my ignorance of the way
others use the term “gable,” we can plausibly take me to refer to a gable
when I say “gable” only if we already have some compelling reason to
hold me accountable to the way that others are using their words.
Burge’s point that I depend on others for my access to the referents of
the term does not hold in this case. And, as Davidson has pointed out,
without a compelling reason, it would not be good policy to hold me to
a meaning of which I am not aware.11 My readiness to alter my use of
“gable” to accord with community norms is taken by Burge as evidence
that we hold ourselves responsible to the public language. Davidson, by
contrast, sees me as employing a pragmatic flexibility in altering my
mode of speech to accommodate my listeners. That is, on Davidson’s
account, my reason for shifting my usage is simply to avoid confusion
on the part of my hearers (deeming it easier to do so than to preface
my remarks about gable roofs with an explanation to the effect that I
idiosyncratically refer to them as “gables”). But this willingness to shift

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one’s use of terms does not change the fact that knowing how the
speaker intends for her words to be understood is the most important
factor in understanding a speaker. Of course, a speaker cannot
reasonably intend for her words to be understood in a way that she
knows the hearers cannot understand. A wise speaker will often adopt,
as a pragmatic strategy, the use of words that she believes is common
in the linguistic community. But there is nothing intrinsic to successful
language use that requires her to do so. And it would have been
manifestly wrong, before I got clear about how other speakers use the
term, to say of me: “Wrathall thinks that gable there is covered with
asphalt shingles, but anyone can see it is made of brick.” The right thing
to say would be: “Wrathall says the gable is covered with asphalt
shingles, but he thinks a gable is a gable roof.” But what of cases like my
“RAM” example? In such cases, I speak with the intention of taking
advantage of the division of linguistic labor. And if one were to set out
to interpret radically the things I say about RAM, it is not clear how
much content one could attribute to me given that I know so little
about the subject matter. In such cases, what is said can only have a
determinate content by appealing to someone else’s knowledge of the
subject matter. The right way to interpret me – that is, the way I want
to be interpreted – is to see me as using “RAM” in the way computer
experts do. I would in fact be misunderstood if the interpretation
restricted itself to my own pallid understanding of computers. It would
be manifestly wrong, for instance, for the purchasing agent to
conclude: “Wrathall says he wants more RAM, but he’ll settle for
anything that improves the performance of the computer.” Now the
question is, should we understand Heidegger’s “idle conversation” in
terms of my “RAM” example – that is, in terms of those instances where
we surrender to others our authority over the meaning of what we say?
Before directly comparing Heidegger’s account of idle conversation to
Putnam’s account of the social division of linguistic labor, or Burge’s
argument for our dependence on others in determining the content of
our words, let me make a couple of observations. First, as Putnam
notes, it is not a necessary feature of language that meaning be
determined by experts: “some words do not exhibit any division of
linguistic labor.”12 Putnam’s example is “chair”; many others are easily
imaginable. The point is that for many things in our world, everyone
(or almost everyone) is competent not just in the use of the word but in
recognizing the thing. The linguistic division of labor is driven by the
demands of efficiency, not by the very structure of language itself.
Putnam does not give us any reason to think that there could not be a
language in which speakers spoke only about those things of which
they had a sufficient understanding. Similarly, Burge argues that the

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social character of language is a psychological rather than conceptual
necessity, which is to say that there is nothing in Burge’s account that
requires that meaning be socially determined. One way to see this is to
note that the very fact that some in a linguistic community rely on
others to fix the extension of their terms shows that not everyone can
fail to know what they are talking about. There are necessarily some
people in the community – the experts – who do not rely on others to
fix the extension.13 Language can function, and often does function,
therefore, without any essential reference to the way in which the
community at large understands a term. Thus considerations of the
sort that Putnam and Burge advance will not support the strong
conclusion about the structural necessity of Gerede that people like
Dreyfus and Carman see in Heidegger. At best, they would support an
empirical or psychological claim to the effect that idle conversation is
in fact pervasive. Second, even in examples like the “RAM” case,
nothing about Putnam’s or Burge’s arguments supports the drive
toward leveling and banalization that Heidegger finds in Gerede. As
already noted, the idea that some people do not fully understand what
they’re talking about only makes sense, for both Putnam and Burge, on
the assumption that others do. So in some cases it may be true that
many or even most of the speakers of a language do not know what
they mean. But they can get away with it precisely because some (the
experts) do know. For both Putnam and Burge, then, public language is
not leveled down to an average understanding – to the contrary, it
preserves a genuine understanding because its content is determined
by what the experts think, not by what the public at large can think.
With these notes in the background, we can begin to see why the
Putnam/Burge account of the social division of linguistic labor is not
what Heidegger has in mind with his notion of idle conversation. What
is crucial to Heidegger’s account is not the speaker’s ability or inability
to determine the extension of her terms, or even to see what is entailed
by her utterances. Rather, Heidegger sees both these kinds of failings
on the speaker’s part as derived from her lack of experience with the
objects, and the situations in which the objects are typically found. That
lack of experience, and the corresponding lack of sensibility that such
experience fosters, is the real source of idle conversation. To illustrate
this point, I offer a third example of a kind of disparity between what a
speaker can express and what a speaker understands about the subject
of her expression. This will orient us to the way Heidegger’s concern
differs from the kind of linguistic incompetence on which Putnam and
Burge focus. The U.K. Department of the Environment, Transport, and
Regions issues the following instructions on using a roundabout: On
approaching a roundabout take notice and act on all the information

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available to you, including traffic signs, traffic lights and lane markings
which direct you into the correct lane. You should • decide as early as
possible which exit you need to take • give an appropriate signal. Time
your signals so as not to confuse other road users • get into the correct
lane • adjust your speed and position to fit in with traffic conditions •
be aware of the speed and position of all the traffic around you. When
reaching the roundabout you should • give priority to traffic
approaching from your right, unless directed otherwise by signs, road
markings or traffic lights • check whether road markings allow you to
enter the roundabout without giving way. If so, proceed, but still look
to the right before joining • watch out for vehicles already on the
roundabout; be aware they may not be signalling correctly or at all •
look forward before moving off to make sure traffic in front has moved
off.14 I consider myself a competent driver, and I am conversant both
in the use of all the terms employed in these rules of the Highway Code
and in the operation of an automobile. Nevertheless, my brief
experience with driving in Britain has convinced me that there is an
important sense in which I do not really understand what I am being
told to do when directed, for instance, to “adjust your speed and
position to fit in with traffic conditions,” or to “get into the correct
lane,” or to “be aware of the speed and position of the traffic around
you.” In saying that I do not really understand these things, I do not
mean either that I would not use the terms in the same way that the
Highway Code does, or that I do not understand what those directions
are directing me to do. Instead, I mean that, in virtue of my lack of
experience in navigating roundabouts in Britain, those directions give
me, at best, an approximate and superficial sense for what I would
need to do if I found myself in that situation. If I were now, on the basis
of having read those guidelines, to instruct a colleague on driving in
preparation for her upcoming trip to London, I would be engaging in
idle conversation because I would, in an important respect, lack
understanding about that of which I spoke. Unlike the previous
examples, however, I am not ignorant of either how other speakers use
their words, or how to go about determining the extension of my own
words. What precisely it is that I lack needs further elaboration – a
project to which I will return. But whatever it is, I believe it is best
understood on the basis of Heidegger’s account of Gerede. Before
expanding further on this example, therefore, I turn to a more
exegetical discussion of Heidegger’s account of idle conversation. 3.
Language, Conversation, and Idle Conversation

To understand Heidegger’s account of idle conversation, Gerede, we

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need to start with his account of conversation, or Rede. Let me begin
with a review of the role played by conversation in Heidegger’s overall
account of being-in-the-world. Conversation is one of the constitutive
moments of the disclosedness of the world. A world is disclosed when
we have a background readiness to act in ways that make sense, that is,
which give unity and coherence to our activities in the world. In saying
that disclosing is a background readiness, I am trying to emphasize that
it is not any particular active engagement with the people and things
around us. Heidegger calls the way in which particular activities open
up a relation to things in the world “discovering” to distinguish it from
the background readiness that is disclosure. When I say that disclosing
is a kind of background readiness, I mean to distinguish it from a mere
capacity or ability to do something. To illustrate this distinction,
imagine someone fluent in both German and English but who has never
had any exposure to Finnish. We might say of this person that she has a
(mere) capacity to understand Finnish but is able – has an ability – to
understand German and English. In addition, when in the United States,
she will ordinarily be ready to hear English but not German. Indeed, if
someone began speaking German to her, it might actually take a
moment before she understood what was being said. My claim is, in
short, that Heidegger’s concept of disclosure is meant to demonstrate
how our active response to things and people in the world around us is
made possible by a readiness for the things that ordinarily show up in
the world. Heidegger believes that if we want to understand the way
humans exist in a world, we first need to recognize the importance of
this kind of readiness in priming us for the particular activities in
which one typically engages in that world. One of the key features in
constituting any particular form of readiness for the world is mood, the
ontic mode of disposedness. Disposedness makes us ready for things
by determining in advance how they will matter to us: Being-in as
such has been determined existentially beforehand in such a manner
that what it encounters within-the-world can “matter” to it in this way.
The fact that this sort of thing can “matter” to it is grounded in one’s
disposedness. . . . Existentially, disposedness implies a disclosive
submission to the world, out of which we can encounter something
that matters to us. (GA 2: H. 137–8)
For example, as Heidegger notes, one consequence of being in a mood
of fear is that things in the world tend to matter to us insofar as they
are threatening or offer safety. We experience them, in other words, as
having their significance illuminated by our fear. Another key feature
in the constitution of readiness is our understanding – our knowing
how to do things, knowing what is appropriate, necessary, what makes
sense, and so on. A particular kind of readiness has the “shape” it does

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in virtue of the ontic appropriation of the understanding in an
interpretation. As I understand it, in interpretation, I appropriate an
overall understanding of the world by deciding which things are
appropriate or necessary for me, make sense for me. Once I have such
an interpretation of the world in reference to my own particular
involvements, goals, identity, and so on, I am ready to undertake
particular actions in response to the situation that confronts me. For
instance, I have a background understanding of a variety of pieces of
equipment and equipmental contexts – things like chalkboards and
classrooms, airplanes and airports, jigsaws and wood shops. I also have
a background understanding of a variety of human activities and
identities – writing on a board and being a teacher, reading what is
written on a board and being a student, erasing what is on the board
and being a janitor, and so on. When I act in the world on the basis of
my understanding of objects, activities, contexts, and identities, my
action both decides for me how all those worldly things will line up
with one another, and expresses an understanding of those things and
activities and contexts and identities by actualizing the way in which
they stand in a particular organized field of significance. Thus, when I
draw a chart on a chalkboard in a classroom, the action is not just a
communicative action; it is also an action in which I interpret myself
and the world around me in a teacherly way. In this way, the action
looks beyond the communicative intention toward a “future”
realization of an identity through which I interpret the world around
me. This action is opened up for me, in other words, by a background
understanding of the kind of things teachers do in general and in the
abstract, together with my interpretation of the world around me in
terms of my being a teacher in this particular situation. Finally, any
particular readiness is correlated with the particular activities in which
we are absorbed, such absorption being the ontic mode of falling. When
I am in the classroom teaching a class, for instance, I am at that
moment ready for classroom events. I would not be ready for, say, one
of the people seated in the class to come spontaneously to the board
while I’m talking and erase what I have written. But the same act would
not strike me as at all strange if I were absorbed in a different sort of
activity, such as preparing the classroom for my next lecture. In
disclosedness, then, a world is opened up for us in the sense that we
have a coherent way of being ready to respond to whatever we
encounter as we go about our business. The role of conversation,
Heidegger explains, is the articulation of this readiness: “The complete
disclosedness of the there – a disclosedness which is constituted
through understanding, disposedness, and falling – is articulated
through conversation” (GA 2: H. 349). Although one might hear a

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phrase like “articulated through conversation” as denoting an explicit,
verbal explication of something, this is not primarily what Heidegger
has in mind. Indeed, my reason for preferring “conversation” to
“discourse” as a translation for Rede is that the English term and its
cognates still bear something of the original connotation of living with,
having intercourse with, or being skillfully engaged with a person or
thing. The Latin root, versor, has the sense of dwelling, living, or
remaining in a place. In the participle, it has the sense of busying
oneself with or being engaged in something. It is this kind of skillful
capacity for dealings that Heidegger was drawing on when he
described Rede in terms of “conversance in the sense of a
circumspection which knows its way around” (GA 33: 126/107). The
notion of a verbal conversation is, in its original English use, just one
species of the broader sense of living with or being involved together
with others in some activity. That “conversation” has come to be
limited to verbal interaction is understandable, I suppose, given that
one of the primary forms of human involvement with others is that of
linguistic discourse. The earlier, broader sense is still present in
English terms like “conversance” – being conversant with, that is,
knowing how to deal with something or someone – but even a
“conversation” was once understandable in nonlinguistic terms, as the
King James Translation of the Bible readily attests. I cite a single
example: St. Peter advised the Christian wives of unbelieving husbands
to set an example of faith for their husbands without preaching to
them, so that their husbands “may without the word be won by the
conversation of the wives; while they behold your chaste
conversation.”15 To say that the Christian wives “converse” with their
husbands without the word means that, by their actions, they exhibit or
make something manifest through their comportment in such a way
that their husbands can recognize and understand it – namely, their
Christian understanding of the world. This way of thinking about
conversation is fully compatible with Heidegger’s account of Rede as
articulation. Heidegger actually uses two different words for talking
about articulation – the verbs gliedern and artikulieren, together with
their various adjectival and nominal forms. Gliedern has slightly more
of the sense of the English verb “to parse” – to separate into parts in
such a way that the organization or connection between the parts is
manifest. Artikulieren, on the other hand, places the emphasis more on
highlighting the separated parts, distinguishing them. “Artikulation
says,” according to Heidegger, “making distinct, lifting out, shaping,
cutting out” (GA 58: 115). So in explaining Rede, Heidegger writes:
“conversation is existentially equiprimordial with disposedness and
understanding. The intelligibility of something has always been parsed

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[gegliedert], even before there is any appropriative interpretation of it.
Conversation is the making distinct [Artikulation] of intelligibility.
Therefore it underlies both interpretation and assertion. That which
can be distinguished in interpretation, and thus even more
primordially in conversation, is what we have called ‘meaning.’” (GA 2:
H. 161). Conversation, verbal or otherwise, consists then in making
particular meanings distinct, in parsing a meaningful situation into its
component meanings. To say that conversation is “existentially
equiprimordial” with our understanding and disposedness means that
I never encounter something that is not meaningful, and as I
experience and act in the world, my experiences and actions are guided
and directed by the meanings I encounter. This is true even when I am
not engaging in specifically linguistic activities. When Heidegger writes
of articulation in general, for instance, he notes that our
comportments, lived experiences taken in the broadest sense, are
through and through expressed [ausgedrückte] experiences; even if
they are not uttered in words, they are nonetheless expressed in a
definite articulation by an understanding that I have of them as I
simply live in them without regarding them thematically. 16 That is to
say, in all our comportments and experiences – in simply living and
doing things – we act in accordance with the structure of significance
opened up by a world. Thus all our actions and experiences “express”
the way people and things have been coordinated into meaningful
forms of interaction. For instance, in “conversing” with a workshop – in
being engaged with the workshop in such a way that one’s very
mannerisms and habits are shaped by the activities in which one is
engaged – two things happen. First, the objects in the workshop
become manifest in terms of their use within the workshop. This is an
example of the kind of thing Heidegger is talking about when he says
that “conversation is conversation about something, such that the
about which becomes manifest in the conversation. This becoming
manifest . . . for all that does not need to become known expressly and
thematically” (GA 2: 361). Second, as we become conversant in the
workshop, thereby modifying in concrete terms our readiness for the
world (which is disclosive comportment), that world becomes
available for an interpretive appropriation, and thereby for assertion:
That which gets parsed as such in conversing distinguishing, we call
the “totality-of-significations” [Bedeutungsganze]. This can be
dissolved or broken up into significations. Significations, as what has
been made distinct from that which can be made distinct, always carry
meaning [sind . . . sinnhaft]. . .. The intelligibility of Being-in-the-world –
an intelligibility which goes with disposedness – expresses itself as
conversation. The totality-of-significations of intelligibility is put into

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words. To significations, words accrue. (GA 2: H. 161)
It is here that we can see most clearly that the Putnam/Burge mode of
arguing for the necessarily social character of meaning is inapplicable
to Heidegger – at least as a constitutive structure of being-in-the-world.
Meaning is prior to language, for Heidegger, in the sense that what
others say about us, and indeed what we say about ourselves, depends
on our prior meaningful engagement with the world. It thus cannot be
the case that the meanings things hold for us, including our
expressions, are structurally dependent on a public language. But this
is not to deny that social features play an important role in determining
the kind of meaning that is available to us. To see this, we turn at last to
an analysis of Gerede – idle conversation. Gerede in Heidegger’s
account is the everyday mode of conversation. Although a bit of a loose
translation, the turn of phrase “idle talk” used in most English
translations of Heidegger is actually quite fortuitous in that Gerede
differs from Rede precisely in being a particular kind of idleness. This
is because the content articulated in Gerede – the meanings that are
“parsed” and lifted into salience by it – cannot be put to work. To
preserve the structural identity between Rede and Gerede, I translate
the latter as the somewhat nonidiomatic “idle conversation” (hoping, of
course, that “conversation” retains some echoes of its archaic English
use). To understand the idleness of idle conversation, we need to say a
word or two about the communicative function of conversation.
Heidegger insists that “conversation is . . . essentially communication,”
which means simply that it is always characterized by the possibility of
being shared with others. But this does not mean that what is
communicated is necessarily understood by some particular person in
each case. “Communication,” Heidegger explains, “means making it
possible to acquire or pick up for oneself that about which the
conversation is, that is, making it possible to come into a relationship of
coping and being toward it” (GA 20: 362). So conversation is
communication – or, perhaps more accurately, communicative – in that
it articulates meanings which open up a way of acting in the world.
Communications “are to be grasped as possibilities” (GA 24: 298). The
possibility is fulfilled in understanding the conversation, where this
means responding to the meanings articulated for the one who is
conversing: “the understanding of the communication is participation
in the revealing” (GA 20: 362). The communicative function of
conversation, Heidegger also notes, “can recede, but it is never absent”
(GA 20: 364). Thus conversation is, as communicative, something that
tends toward or aims toward achieving a participation with others in a
common orientation to the world (GA 2: H. 168). When we articulate
meanings through our conversant comportment, they “become

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accessible” to others (GA 2: H. 272). When others understand or
become aware of our communication, they join us in “an uncovering
being-towards the entities discussed” (GA 2: H. 224). Heidegger is quite
clear that this communication need not take a linguistic form, although
it often or usually does (see GA 2: H. 272). In The Basic Problems of
Phenomenology, Heidegger coins the phrase “existential
communication” [existenzielle Mitteilung] to refer to this broad form of
communication. When existential communication succeeds, the result
is that the parties share a form of comportment toward things in the
world. In Being and Time, he described such communication in the
following way: It is letting someone see with us what we have pointed
out by way of giving it a definite character. Letting someone see with us
shares with [teilt mit] the other that entity which has been pointed out
in its definite character. That which is “shared” is our being towards
what has been pointed out – a being in which we see it in common. (GA
2: H. 155)
He thereby differentiates the communication involved in
conversation from merely linguistic communication (see GA 24: 421–
2). Language may, but need not, be involved in producing a shared
being-toward entities as we comport ourselves in the world. I could
existentially communicate something simply by setting to work, for
instance, preparing food. This might “existentially communicate” to
others the fact that it is time to eat, and draw them also into
comportments appropriate to the situation that my action discloses.
Thus communication should not be understood as primarily linguistic.
When a conversation succeeds, when the parties pick up what is being
communicated to each other, they are made ready for an engagement
with people and things in the world by sharing with each other a mode
of understanding comportment toward the common things we
encounter in the world, as well as a disposedness or a sense for the
way things matter.17 In the process, conversation articulates or lifts
into salience that about which we converse [das Beredete], and the way
in which we understand or relate to that thing [das Geredete]. Das
Geredete is manifest because “that with which the conversation is
concerned [das Beredete] is always, in conversation, ‘talked to’ in a
definite regard and within certain limits” (GA 2: H. 162). In idle
conversation, something gets communicated but in such a way that the
parties cannot successfully participate in a shared orientation toward
things in the world. There are a number of ways in which the
participation can break down – a number of ways in which what is
communicated cannot be put to work. For instance, as in the RAM
example, the communication might fail to make salient that about
which we converse. We know how to use the words in forming

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meaningful sentences, but we do not know how to identify the things in
the world referred to in the sentence. Or the communication might
even succeed in getting us to share with others certain attitudes about
the thing, or a shared sense of what is appropriate to say about the
thing. But such sharing is compatible with a failure to communicate a
“primordial understanding” – a background familiarity with that thing
– of the sort gained by familiarity with das Beredete itself. What
individual speakers lack and, consequently, what their community
supplies for them in idle conversation is, then, not necessarily an ability
to fix determinately the extension of our terms. In fact, in learning das
Geredete –what is understood and said about the subject of the
conversation – we may learn precisely how to define it, how to
articulate its extension, and what other things are conventionally seen
to follow from the kind of claims conventionally made about it. But, at
the same time, we lack a sense for the way a conversance with the
object primes us to respond to the world by showing us what is
relevant in the current situation, given our self-understanding and self-
interpretation. Without such a sense, we would be practically
disoriented, unready to act, uncertain how to continue in our self-
interpretation. And so in its place we orient ourselves to the situation
by arrogating the things “one” says and “one” does. In the process, we
surrender, at least for the moment, our own interpretation in favor of
an anonymous interpretation of what is important and relevant here
and now. We can now see why neither the “RAM” nor the “gable”
examples are well suited for clarifying exactly what it is that Heidegger
targets with the notion “idle conversation.” In both these examples, it is
true, the speaker lacks a kind of expertise. But the “gable” example
does not demonstrate a lack of conversance with gables – just a
terminological confusion. The “RAM” example, on the other hand, is a
rather extreme form of lack of conversance with a subject – in fact, too
extreme to be a good example. The speaker lacks not only the kind of
conversance that articulates his understanding and interpretation but
actually knows so little about the situation that he could get almost no
practical grip on it at all. The example of my lack of conversance with
driving in Britain helps us home in on this type of idle conversation.
The driving example illustrates the difference between linguistic
understanding and a practical conversance with a matter. It is possible
to understand every sentence in the British Highway Code and still be
ill prepared for driving in Britain. To be at home on British roads and in
British cars, one needs an altered receptivity to the world, a receptivity
that will shift the significance of all kinds of features one encounters
while driving. To begin with, British cars, being designed to drive on
the left-hand side of the road, have controls (such as turn signals and

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gear shifters) on the opposite side of the steering column from their
location in an American car, requiring them to be operated by the
opposite hand. Other vehicles are in different places, and moving in
different directions, than one typically finds them in the United States;
an American driver will thus find herself intuitively looking in just the
wrong places in her attempt to “be aware of the speed and position of
all the traffic around you.”18 Finally, most Americans lack exposure to
roundabouts, and have little sense for gauging distances, or judging
when to yield, in such environments. Instructions such as those quoted
above may help an American driver think about what she must do
when she approaches a roundabout, but they will not help her to
intuitively key in on the relevant features of the roundabout. The
situation is not meaningfully “parsed” for the American driver in the
same way that it is for the British driver. For that, nothing can help but
extensive experience in navigating through roundabouts. In idly
discussing some thing or state of affairs, then, one thing that cannot be
conveyed is the way an actual familiarity with a situation affects our
general readiness for the world. If I am correct in this interpretation,
then we can see that Heidegger is in fact not committed to the claim
that there is something essential about linguistic expression that
alienates us from an authentic understanding, or that it necessarily
covers over the truth. Rather, language is guilty at most of a sin of
omission – of failing to do something for our readiness for the world. In
particular, if we converse idly, rather than become conversant with a
situation, we settle for a public interpretation of what the situation
calls for. Idle conversation thus “closes off” because it gives us a sort of
understanding, but only by allowing us to evade the need to learn to
respond authentically, in our own way, to the specific situation. This
explains why Heidegger sees our social interactions as tending toward
a kind of fallenness. We gain through social and, in particular, linguistic
interaction a richly articulated ability to isolate and discriminate
features of the world of which we have little or no actual experience
whatsoever. Idle conversation, by exploiting a ready-made sense for
things, offers us the convenience of getting a certain (albeit
anonymous) grasp on the circumstances. In fact, if one is already fairly
skilled in the area of discussion, what is said might be enough to open
up new possibilities for practical involvement in the world. But what is
said is not, in and of itself, sufficient to convey what is relevant, given
the particularities of the situation, and thus does not convey to the
listener the readiness for action that is necessary to disclose a world
genuinely. Heidegger uses the example of a scientist hearing of
experimental results to illustrate both how idle conversation can be
genuinely informative, and how it nevertheless is unable to convey a

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disclosive readiness. Idle conversation, Heidegger emphasizes, can take
the form of “picking up” what is characteristically said of some matter
through reading. This idly obtained conversance with a matter can
even take place “in such a way that the reader – there are purported to
be such readers in the sciences as well – acquires the possibility of
dealing with the matters with great skill without ever having seen
them.” Although they have a certain kind of expertise, they lack what is
crucial to an authentic disclosure: Accordingly, when men who have
to deal with a matter do so solely on the basis of idle conversation
about it, they bring the various opinions, views, and perceptions
together on an equal basis. In other words, they do so on the basis of
what they have picked up from reading and hearing. They pass along
what they have read and heard about the matter without any
sensitivity for the distinction of whether or not that opinion or their
own is actually relevant to the matter. Their care in discovering does
not apply to the matter but to the conversation. (GA 20: 372)
Scientists tend to fall into this kind of idle conversation, Heidegger
observes later in an offhand note, whenever “there are no apparatuses
and the like” (GA 20: 417). This note makes perfect sense in light of the
idea that idle conversation is a kind of failure of conversance with what
is being talked about, the point being that as much as we can learn
from reading or hearing about experimental results, we are missing
something crucial as long as we fail to conduct the experiment
ourselves. Heidegger’s critique of the social constraints on language
use is committed, then, to no more than the unsurprising view that
language cannot give one a full conversance with its subject matter –
the kind of conversance necessary for articulating an authentic space of
disclosedness. This entails neither that (a) whenever we speak in a
public language, we fail to communicate a genuine disclosedness of the
world or discovery of that with which we cope, nor that (b) whenever
we speak in a way that is amenable to be understood by others, what
we are saying is untrue. Not (a), because one who does have a genuine
conversance with things can speak and converse with another expert,
who will have, in addition to an understanding of das Geredete, a
familiarity with das Beredete. By pointing out linguistically the
relevant feature of the environment – the one relevant for those who
possess a certain kind of expertise – the speaker can use language to
trigger an appropriate response in the hearer: “These boards are
splitting,” one carpenter says to another, and she instantly begins
hammering with a smaller nail. Not (b), because (as Davidson’s
criticism of social externalism makes clear) what we mean is not
altered by being spoken out loud. If anything, rather than constraining
what its speaker can mean, idle conversation limits the ability of its

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hearer to understand, since it allows her to imagine that she
understands everything that she needs to know: “the conversation
which is communicated can be understood to a considerable extent,
even if the hearer does not bring himself into such a kind of being
towards what the discourse is about to have a primordial
understanding of it” (GA 2: H 168). Idle conversation, in short, is a
mode of engagement with people and things in which a genuine
readiness is not cultivated. Heidegger calls the result a kind of
“floating” – a failure to be grabbed or disposed in any way by the things
we encounter. We “keep ourselves in” the idle conversation, meaning:
we have no “original” and “genuine” relationships to entities in the
world (GA 2: H. 170). 4. The Necessity of Banalization, Leveling, and
Untruth

If my interpretation of idle conversation is right, one consequence is

that Dreyfus and Carman are unjustified in seeing the very structure of
language as necessitating the banalization and leveling of human
existence. How do they reach this unjustified conclusion? It is because,
like Putnam and Burge, they see individuals as responsible to public
modes of discourse, a responsibility that consists in subjecting the
content of one’s own utterances to the domination of others. Or more
precisely, they see Heidegger as an anti-Putnam – as holding that the
meaning of what we say is determined not by the experts but by the
lowest common denominator of a linguistic community. It seems to me
that this misses the real thrust of Heidegger’s position. Both Carman
and Dreyfus make the mistake of thinking that everyday language, to
function, must be available to everybody. Dreyfus writes, for instance,
that language is “necessarily public and general, that is, meant to be
used by anyone, skilled or not, as a tool for communication.”19 Because
language requires such generality and universality, they suppose that it
cannot possibly capture all the particularities of a situation. This, in
turn, allows them to conclude that the moment we employ a public
language, we fall into a banalized and leveled understanding of the
world. But what justifies the assumption that what is said in language
must be available to everyone? Like Putnam, Dreyfus appeals to a
division of labor – the meaning of our utterances is reduced to a
“generality that tends towards banality” dictated by the need for “the
diversity and specialization characteristic of the equipmental whole.” 20
The idea seems to be that it is a useful thing to be able to talk about all
kinds of equipment – all the equipment that makes up our world – but
it is not possible for everyone to acquire a primordial understanding of
all that equipment. This much is quite right, and is compatible with the

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interpretation of Heidegger that I am advancing. But it does not follow
from this that our words can only mean what anyone in our linguistic
community can understand them to mean. From the fact that we are
not conversant with everything we can talk about, it does not follow
that we can only intend to say what anyone and everyone is capable of
understanding. As Putnam and Burge have shown, the premise of a
social division of labor, if anything, tends in the opposite direction.
What we should say, then, is that speakers are often misunderstood by
some members of the community, not that a speaker can only mean
what anyone can understand her to mean. As a matter of fact, language
communicates perfectly well in situations where what it communicates
is inaccessible to almost everyone – as philosophical prose in general
attests, and Heidegger’s work demonstrates it more clearly than most.
A good language user aims her use to her actual listeners, not every
conceivable member of the linguistic community. Of course, something
uttered can always be misconstrued by those incapable of
understanding the assertion as it is intended, but this possibility does
not change what the speaker means by her words. And so, while there
very well may be, from time to time, good reasons for meaning only
what we know everyone in the culture can understand, there is nothing
inherent in public language that requires this. I return at last to the
question with which I started: What role does our community play in
determining meaning? Heidegger’s answer has little to do with the role
of a public language in determining the meaning of utterances made in
that language. Instead, our community affects meaning indirectly by
structuring the normal range of activities in which we can engage. We
find ourselves already in a world, Heidegger points out. All our
activities, in turn, are implicated in a series of interactions with others
in the world. Because it is our familiarity with things as articulated in
our activities that determines our meaning, it follows that what we can
mean is always shaped (but not determined) by the people and things
around us. Appendix

In response to an earlier version of this chapter, William Bracken has

pointed out that one form of idle conversation – perhaps the form
Heidegger is most interested in – does not seem to be assimilable to my
roundabout example. One of the central types of idle conversation is
idle conversation about being and the structures associated with being
– the structure of being-in, of the world, of the context of references, for
instance. Heidegger insists that we are all “in some way familiar” with
such things (see, e.g., GA 2: H. 58). And yet, Heidegger warns that
concepts and propositions about such matters are constantly in danger

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of deterioration into idle conversation: “every originally created
phenomenological concept and proposition stands, as a communicated
assertion, in the possibility of degenerating. It is passed along in an
empty understanding, loses its rootedness, and becomes a free-floating
thesis” (GA 2: H. 36). Given our familiarity with that about which
phenomenological ontology speaks, it seems like idle conversation
should not threaten. Or should it? As I tried to emphasize, there are
different sources for the idleness of idle conversation. What all forms
share in common is the inability to put to work the meaningful parsing
of the world relied on in the communication. As the roundabout
example shows, communication can fail (meaning that the articulations
relied on by the speaker cannot be put to work by the hearer) as a
result of a failure to understand which meanings are being called upon
in the assertion. The failure occurs, even though the hearer
understands in general and in other contexts the meanings of the terms
employed. The source of this failure is the hearer’s lack of familiarity
with the world that would parse and make salient the meanings
necessary to understand the communication. But there can be other
reasons for our inability to use the conversation to orient us to
meanings in the world. The RAM example is an example of idle talk too:
there, the source is both a lack of understanding about the meaning of
the terms or concepts employed and a lack of familiarity with the
things spoken about. A third possibility is one where we have a kind of
familiarity with what is spoken about – at least of a practical sort, so
that we can successfully comport ourselves with respect to it – but we
do not understand the meaning of the terms employed in talking about
it. For example, all of us know how to cope with gravity – how to use it
and respond to it, to walk, lie down, stand up, perhaps even ski. And yet
it would be idle conversation for many of us to pass along the assertion
“the gravitational mass of a body is equal to its inertial law.” We simply
lack a grasp of the concepts employed such that we could do any work
with the assertion. Idle talk about being should be understood along
the lines of idle conversation about Einstein’s theory of the
gravitational field. Heidegger says that its meaning is in a certain sense
available to us, and we always act on the basis of an understanding of
it. But we’re very poor at talking and thinking about it conceptually,
and grasp it in those terms only vaguely at best, and in an “average”
way – that is, the way that everybody in general thinks about it (see GA
2: H. 5). Thus, when it comes to being, we understand how to move
about within an understanding of being. We have a familiarity with it
sufficient to act and, indeed, even to formulate questions about it. The
problem is that we are not able to “fix conceptually” the meaning of the
terms we use to talk about it. This is the source of our idle

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conversation. As a result of this combination of intimate practical
familiarity and conceptual confusion, the idle conversation is
particularly pernicious, since it seems to us that we must know what
we’re talking about but in fact we do not. Chapter 5 This paper was
first presented at the inaugural meeting of the International Society for
Phenomenological Studies, held in Asilomar, California, July 19–23,
1999. I’m grateful to all the participants in that meeting for their
constructive help. My thinking on these matters has been aided
considerably by conversations with Bert Dreyfus, Taylor Carman,
George Handley, and James Siebach. I’d also like to thank Cynthia Munk
for her considerable assistance in preparing this manuscript for
publication.
1 Hubert L. Dreyfus, Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on

Heidegger’s Being and Time, Division I. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,

1991, p. 229.
2 Taylor Carman, “Must We Be Inauthentic?” in Heidegger,

Authenticity, and Modernity (Mark A. Wrathall & Jeff Malpas, Eds.).

Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000, p. 21.
3 I will not consider here the other version of externalism, based on

the role external objects play in fixing the content of our propositional
states. While this externalism is in fact amenable to Heidegger’s view of
things, it is not relevant to the topic under consideration here – namely,
whether it is the social character of language that leads to idle
conversation and other inauthentic modes of inhabiting the world.
4 Hilary Putnam, “The Meaning of ‘Meaning,’” in The Twin Earth

Chronicles: Twenty Years of Reflection on Hilary Putnam’s “The

Meaning of ‘Meaning’” (Andrew Pessin & Sanford Goldberg, Eds.).
Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1996, pp. 3–59, quotation on 13.
5 Ibid., 6.
6 Ibid., 13.
7 See Tyler Burge, “Wherein Is Language Social?” in Reflections on

Chomsky (A. George, Ed.). New York: Blackwell, 1989, pp. 175–91;
“Individualism and the Mental,” in Midwest Studies in Philosophy, vol.
4: Studies in Metaphysics (Peter French, Theodore Uehling Jr., &
Howard Wettstein, Eds.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1979, pp. 73–121; “Individualism and Psychology,” Philosophical
Review 125 (1986): 3–45.
8 Burge, “Wherein Is Language Social?” pp. 186–7.
9 Burge, “Individualism and the Mental,” p. 77.
10 One could imagine further examples that would distinguish

between the ability to determine the extension of a term and the

mastery of the inferential relations that accrue to sentences employing
that term. But there is a limit to how far these two features of linguistic

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mastery can be isolated; at some point, if a speaker lacks knowledge of
one type, we are inclined to say that he also lacks knowledge of the
other.
11 Many of the comments that follow are inspired by Davidson’s

discussion of Burge’s social externalism in “Knowing One’s Own Mind,”

Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association
(1987): 441–58, and “Epistemology Externalized,” Dialectica 45
(1991): 191–202.
12 Putnam, “Meaning of ‘Meaning,”’ p. 14.
13 Davidson makes this point in “The Social Aspect of Language,” in

The Philosophy of Michael Dummett (Brian McGuinness & Gianluigi

Oliveri, Eds.). Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1994, p. 5.
14 U.K. Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions,

Driving Standards Agency, The Highway Code: For Pedestrians,

Cyclists, Motorcyclists and Drivers, New expanded ed. London, 1999,
General rules 160 and 161.
15 1 Peter 3: 1–2, KJV.
16 GA 20: 65. It is important to note here that for Heidegger,

ausdrücklichkeit is not explicitness in the sense of having a thematic or

conscious awareness of a thing. Rather, something is ausdrücklich if it
is expressed or made manifest by our activities, and thus capable of
being made explicit, even if it is not presently explicit.
17 The disposedness can be shared because conversation involves a

“making manifest” [Bekundung] how things matter (GA 2: H. 162).

18 In many crosswalks in London, the warning “look right” has been

painted on the crosswalk, apparently in response to the tendency of

visitors to step into the path of traffic coming from the right, having
first instinctively looked left (as one ought when cars drive on the right
side of the road).
19 “Reply to Taylor Carman,” in Heidegger, Authenticity, Modernity (M.

A. Wrathall & J. Malpas, Eds.). p. 307.

20 Dreyfus, Being-in-the-World, p. 231.

6 Discourse Language, Saying, Showing

We are guided by a completely different conception of the word and

of language. (GA 54: 31)
Besides, to pay heed to what the words say is particularly difficult
for us moderns, because we find it hard to detach ourselves from the
“at first” of what is common; and if we succeed for once, we relapse all
too easily. (GA 8: 88)
“Language is the house of being.” This is undoubtedly one of
Heidegger’s most memorable and most often repeated slogans. (To
avoid cumbersome and unnecessarily complex sentences, I will, for the

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remainder of this chapter, refer to this as simply “the slogan.”)
Heidegger himself uses some variant of the slogan in at least a dozen
different essays or lecture courses between 1937 and 1966. Since then,
it has been repeated in hundreds of different articles and books on
Heidegger’s work. The reason for its popularity, I suspect, is that it
seems to encapsulate, in one concise statement, Heidegger’s answer to
one of the central problems in his later work – the problem of the
relationship between being and language. It also seems to launch
Heidegger into the orbit of the linguistic turn in twentieth century
philosophy, and thus promises to set up an interesting and profitable
comparison between Heidegger and analytic philosophy. “Language is
the house of being” sounds like a distant but clearly recognizable
German cousin to other claims like “the limits of language . . . mean the
limits of my world,” or “to be is to be the value of a variable,” or more
recently, McDowell’s somewhat less punchy claim that “human beings
mature into being at home in the space of reasons or, what comes to
the same thing, living their lives in the world; we can make sense of
that by noting that the language into which a human being is first
initiated stands over against her as a prior embodiment of mindedness,
of the possibility of an orientation to the world” (Mind and World, p.
125).1 I think bringing Heidegger’s slogan into conversation with these
other related claims is a worthwhile project – albeit a project that will
have to wait for another occasion. This is because we ought to see if we
cannot clarify what Heidegger’s slogan means before we presume to
compare it to other recent positions on the relationship between
language and being. Now it might seem at first glance that the meaning
of the slogan is perfectly straightforward, if somewhat metaphorical. In
secondary literature on Heidegger, the slogan is often invoked but
rarely deemed to warrant any kind of extended discussion. Almost
everybody acts as if it is immediately apparent what Heidegger is
trying to say: they take it as a declaration of the view that the being of
entities somehow depends on the linguistic expressions we use in
thinking or talking about those entities. It is of course right to think of
the slogan in particular and Heidegger’s views on language in general
against the background of traditional philosophical concerns about the
role that language or thought plays in unconcealment, in opening up a
world and constituting entities as what they are. The problem of
language’s role in constituting our world might be as old as philosophy
itself – Heidegger liked to quote Heraclitus and Parmenides as his
antecedents in thinking about the issue. According to Heidegger’s
reading of the pre-Socratics, Parmenides’ central claim was that being
and thinking are the same thing (to gar auto noein estin te kai einai);
according to Heidegger’s Heraclitus, we find out the nature of being

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when we listen to the logos, to language (fragment B50). Thus
Heidegger sees these early philosophers as focused on the problem of
the relationship between what things are and what we think or say
about them. The slogan is typically taken as staking out a particular
position within this problem domain, a position we might call
“linguistic idealism” or “linguistic constitutionalism”: the view that our
experiences of the world, or the entities that we experience, or both,
have their content fixed and exhaustively determined by the concepts
or linguistic categories we use to describe or think about those entities
or our experiences of them. Cristina Lafont is admirably clear and
forthright in embracing this way of reading the slogan. According to
her, Heidegger declare[s] language to be the court of appeal that (as
the “house of being”) judges beforehand what can be encountered
within the world. With this reification of the world-disclosing function
of language, what things are becomes thoroughly dependent on what is
contingently “disclosed” for a historical linguistic community through a
specific language. Thus, the world-disclosure that is contained in a
given language becomes the final authority for judging the intraworldly
knowledge that this world-disclosure has made possible in the first
place; in this sense, it comes to be regarded as “the essence of truth.”
But this world-disclosure is itself not open to revision on the basis of
intraworldly experience and therefore cannot be understood as
codetermined by our processes of learning. (Heidegger, Language and
World Disclosure, p. 7, emphasis in original)
I want to emphasize a couple of elements of Lafont’s gloss on the
slogan. First of all, Lafont understands “language” to mean any specific
language spoken by an historical linguistic community. The languages
that house being, then, are natural languages like contemporary
American English, old High German, or Attic Greek. Second, on her
reading, to say that language is the house of being means that we
cannot encounter anything that we cannot already express in our
language. Language is, in American slang, the “big house” of being: it
keeps us locked up within its preexisting expressive capacities. As we
see in this passage, Lafont attributes to Heidegger a particularly severe,
indeed, patently absurd version of linguistic idealism – language itself
decides which claims made within the language are true or false, thus
restricting what we can know about the world. Indeed, so severe are
the restrictions that language imposes on us that it cannot be revised
by us in any way – we cannot even learn new words, or alter the
meaning of existing words or phrases in response to our encounter
with the world, because we can only encounter what we can mean by
using the words already included in our language. That no sensible
person would hold such a view of the relationship between language

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and our experience of the world does not stop Lafont from attributing
the view to Heidegger. Not all interpretations of the slogan are this
extreme, but most share to some degree Lafont’s suspicions of
linguistic idealism. For instance, Karl Jaspers’ first reaction to the
slogan suggests that he also took it as an expression of linguistic
idealism – but with an important difference: he did not presume that
he knew definitively what the slogan meant. “I have read the ‘Letter on
Humanism,’” he noted, but continued, “with your sentences, I still
continually stumble. . .. I can not understand some of your central
words. Language as ‘house of being’ – I bristle, as all language seem to
me to be merely a bridge. In communication, language is to be brought
to the annulment of itself in reality. . .. I could say almost the opposite:
where there is language, there is not yet or no longer being itself.” 2 This
passage is noteworthy in a couple of respects, and I will return to it in
due course. But for the time being, I find interesting Jaspers’ expression
of surprise and confusion upon his reading the slogan. To the extent
that he can understand the thesis, it seems to him to run contrary to his
intuitions about the independent existence of reality. Jaspers proposes
a second metaphor in opposition to the idea of language as the “house
of being”: language for Jaspers is a mere “bridge” to being. A bridge lets
us reach the far shore, but it does not determine what we will find
when we get there. Similarly, where language is viewed as a bridge, it is
seen as a tool we use to gain access to entities that are what they are
independently of whatever we might happen to say or think about
them. Heidegger’s only direct response to Jaspers, unfortunately, was
the following: “the letter on humanism, which I was forced to publish
because, due to indiscretions, it already circulated around Paris for half
a year before in uncontrollable transcripts and translations, will
certainly produce new misunderstandings and catchphrases”
(Heidegger to Jaspers, Letter of August 12, 1949). With that warning in
mind, let’s see if we can make an effort to understand the slogan on its
own terms, rather than reducing it to a catchphrase. We can start by
getting clearer about what it would take for the slogan to count as an
expression of linguistic idealism. There are two important elements of
linguistic idealism. One is a particular understanding of what language
is. As Heidegger expresses it so concisely, the usual, “natural”
conception of language thinks of it as “a stock of individual terms
[einen Bestand von Wörtern] and rules for linguistic construction” (GA
4: 39). The second element is the attribution to language, so
understood, of an ineliminable role in the constitution of entities or our
experience of the world. It is not always clear how exactly linguistic
constitutionalists conceive of language’s contribution to the
constitution of things. But however it works, once we have a language

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we henceforth experience entities in terms of the linguistic categories
we use to speak or think about them. We can think of each element of
linguistic constitutionalism, together with its denial, as forming an axis
of a simple chart. (See Chart 6.1.) Linguistic Chart 6.1. Positions in the
Problem Domain of the Relationship Between Language and Entities

constitutionalism would require the presence of both elements, and

is represented in box A of the chart. As the chart illustrates, there are
different ways to fail to be a linguistic constitutionalist. One (box B) is
to think that there can be more to the content of our experiences or to
the structure of our world than we can capture in language – if one
thinks that we have experiences or that there are entities that we
cannot adequately describe or explain, then one is not a linguistic
constitutionalist. Likewise, if one thinks of language as a bridge that
lets us reach entities that are constituted independently of language,
then one is not a linguistic constitutionalist. But one might also reject
the first element of the linguistic constitutionalist view, and think of
language as something other than a stock of words with rules for the
combination of words into sentences, or think of language as
functioning otherwise than by articulating something conceptually or
propositionally. This would be to conceive of language so differently
from the linguistic constitutionalists that, even if one then attributed to
language a constitutive role, the structure of things so constituted
would not necessarily be expressible in the way that linguistic
constitutionalists think they are – for instance, by making assertions
within a particular natural language (box C). The standard
interpretation of Heidegger seems to go like this: the early Heidegger
was not a linguistic constitutionalist (for the first reason), but at some
point during the notorious “turning” in his philosophy, he became one.
The minority view is that Heidegger was always a linguistic
constitutionalist, although he may or may not have realized it himself
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prior to the “turning.”3 I think neither the standard nor the minority
view is correct. Heidegger, I believe, was never a linguistic
constitutionalist – he never believed that our experience is necessarily
conceptually constituted, nor that everything we apprehend in
experience can be captured in linguistic terms. In Heidegger’s earlier
work, he did believe that, at least much of the time, we experience what
one (Man) ordinarily says about the matter. But this is an inauthentic
experience of things. Authentic contact with the world, of which we are
all capable, is decidedly not cut to the measure of what we are able to
say about the entities we encounter. Thus, in Being and Time, he
argued that in authentic experience, we are reduced to silence or
reticence in the face of the world. So whatever is the case in banalized
everyday life, in an authentic encounter with the world, at least, the
world and our experiences of it are not linguistically constituted. Thus
the early Heidegger belongs in box B of the chart. But what of
Heidegger’s later work, with its emphasis on language (an emphasis
that is crystallized in the slogan)? I do not mean to deny that
Heidegger’s views on language undergo significant changes. Something
important shifts between his early treatment of language as accruing to
nonlinguistic meanings in Being and Time, and his later account of
language as that which shows us everything by “forming ways” (GA 12:
203). But, I will argue, the shift is in large part a change in thinking
about what the word “language” names, and thus it cannot be reduced
to a simple change of view about the role of language in mediating our
access to the world or in constituting the world.4 In any event, in his
later works, Heidegger also fails to be a linguistic constitutionalist for
both of the reasons I articulated above. Even though “language is the
house of being,” Heidegger continues to adhere to his earlier position
that there are things that cannot be expressed in ordinary language.
Most notably, what language itself is is something that cannot be
spoken or explained: “there is no word, that means no saying, that
would be capable of bringing the essence of language to language” (GA
12: 223). Thus, the later Heidegger continues to hold the box B view
that language as ordinarily understood cannot fully capture and does
not constitute our experience of entities. In addition, while it is true
that Heidegger thinks that something called language plays a
constitutive role in the organization and articulation of the world, it is
also the case that that something is not what a linguistic
constitutionalist would recognize as language. As Heidegger puts it –
perhaps surprisingly and paradoxically – “the essence of language
cannot be anything linguistic” (GA 12: 108). The widespread
impression that the later Heidegger is a linguistic constitutionalist is a
direct result of this misleading homonym, and a failure to respect

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Heidegger’s insistence that what he calls language is not the same as
what we ordinarily refer to as language. The epigraphs to this chapter
are typical in this regard, and we must struggle to avoid the relapse
from Heidegger’s “completely different conception of the word and of
language” back into ordinary and common conceptions. In its most
fundamental form, language for Heidegger is not a conceptual
articulation of experience, nor is it something that we can say in our
ordinary language. Only poetic language lets us apprehend the
originary language, but even then, we are never in a position to grasp it
fully, only to be “spoken” by it. Thus the later Heidegger also occupies
box C on the chart, as we will explore in the following sections of this
chapter. But, one might now ask, if Heidegger is not a linguistic
constitutionalist, why use the word “language” in this unusual and
misleading way? What is at stake in Heidegger’s strange terminological
practice? I will argue that it is nothing less than an effort to transform
our experience of that on the basis of which linguistic acts are what
they are. This transformed experience, Heidegger believed, also
required “a transformation of language,” a transformation that “does
not result from the creation of neologisms and novel phrases” (GA 12:
255/“Way to Language,” p. 424). He hoped to change the way we hear
and respond to familiar words like “language.” Derrida was quite right
to observe that a claim like “language is the house of beings” is an
example of what Derrida dubbed “catastrophic metaphors.” 5 A
catastrophic metaphor is a metaphor that is turned on its head,
illuminating the apparently more familiar term through the less
familiar term. For instance, Heidegger insists that “house” in the slogan
is not meant to help us understand being but the other way around:
Talk about the house of being is no metaphorical transfer of the image
of the “house” to Being, but rather it is from out of an appropriately
thought account of the essence of being that we will one day be able to
think what “house” and “dwelling” are. (GA 9: 358)
The same catastrophic move is in effect for “language” in the slogan.
Heidegger does not assume an everyday, commonsense notion of
language but sees it as an idea to be developed on the basis of an
understanding of being: the phrase “house of being” does not supply
any concept of the essence of language, to the annoyance of
philosophers who are vexed to find yet another corruption of thinking
in such phrases. (GA 12: 112)6
But the “catastrophe” does not amount to a mere reversal in which
being now functions as a metaphor for language, since being is not
something about which Heidegger thinks we can ever have a thematic
understanding. We are not in a position to apply our understanding of
the properties of being to our conception of language. “We are

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therefore,” Derrida concludes, “no longer dealing with a metaphor in
the usual sense, nor with a simple inversion permutating the places in
a usual tropical structure” (“The Retrait of Metaphor,” p. 25). The
catastrophic–metaphoric structure of the slogan, in other words,
compels us to rethink how it is that language functions, and thus
directs our renewed attention to thinking about how language could be
the house of being. We undergo the promised experience with
language when the slogan focuses us squarely on the question how we
can talk about or name being, which is not a thing, but rather a nothing.
Without a thing to refer to, the normal functioning of simple assertions,
whether literal or metaphorical, is undermined. Thus we are not meant
to plug a preexisting conception of language into Heidegger’s claims
about language, as too many commentators on Heidegger are prone to
do. Heidegger warns us that “the reflective use of language cannot be
guided by the common, usual understanding of meanings” (GA 12:
186/“Nature of Language,” p. 92), a warning repeated in some form in
each of his essays on language. Rather, as we accompany Heidegger in
his reflections on language, the word “language” is meant to come to
function differently than it did when we first set out. As Heidegger
explains, quoting Wilhelm von Humboldt, “time often introduces into
[language] an enhanced power of thought and a more penetrating
sensibility than it possessed hitherto. . .. It is as though a variant sense
occupies the old husk, something different is given in the unaltered
coinage, and a differently scaled sequence of ideas is intimated
according to unchanged syntactical laws” (GA 12: 257/“Way to
Language,” p. 426). Heidegger’s hope is that, as we think through his
account of language, we will suspend our presuppositions about what
language is, thus allowing a new sense to occupy the old husk. Or, as
Heidegger prefers to think of it, we will allow an older but nearly lost
sense to emerge from hiding to reanimate the word. Heidegger uses the
slogan and other “guide words” (like “the essence of language is the
language of essence,” or “to bring language as language to language”) in
order to “beckon us away from current notions about language” (GA
12: 191/“Nature of Language,” p. 96) into a more ontologically broad
use (for more on the ontologically broad use of terms, see
Introduction). Consider the following passage (one of the few where
Heidegger provides a direct example to illustrate the slogan): Some
time ago, in a rather clumsy fashion, I named language the house of
being. If human beings, through their language, live as they are called
upon by being, then we Europeans presumably live in a very different
house than the East Asians do. (GA 12: 85)
What does this passage suggest about the meaning of language in the
slogan? First, notice that all Europeans inhabit the same house, as do

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all East Asians. This immediately rules out the proposal that “language”
is really to be identified with a particular ordinary, historically specific
language like French or German or Japanese or Chinese or Korean.
Another, related, example is provided by Heidegger’s bewailing in 1942
the fact that his compatriots in 1942 “indeed speak ‘German,’ and yet
talk entirely ‘American’” (GA 53: 80). Of course, Germans at the height
of the Second World War were not conversing in English with
American accents and idioms. Rather, Heidegger believed that their
“language” in an ontologically broad sense was shared in common with
their enemies. American, or European, or East Asian – these are
examples of languages that are “nothing linguistic,” that is, languages
which are “neither expression nor a human activity” (GA 12: 16). So as
we turn now to an examination of Heidegger’s account of language, we
need to keep in mind that Heidegger will be talking about language in
an ontologically broad sense. That is, he will proceed by (1) identifying
the world-disclosive function of language, (2) analyzing language in
terms of the structures that allow it to perform that world-disclosive
function, and (3) using the word “language” indiscriminately to refer to
different things that perform this same function. If this is not confusing
enough, there is the added wrinkle that the vocabulary Heidegger uses
to talk about this world-disclosive function changes over time. In the
next section, I will review the development of Heidegger’s conception
of these originary, nonlinguistic languages together with his changing
use of terminology, before turning to an account of the core, ontological
sense of language that Heidegger is interested in. The Road to
Originary Language

For those who believe that there is a dramatic difference between

Heidegger’s earlier and later views of language, the transition seems to
be signaled in one of Heidegger’s marginal comments in his personal
copy of Being and Time. There, in response to his remark in Being and
Time that the being of words and language is founded on prelinguistic
significations, Heidegger wrote: “Untrue. Language is not another
storey raised on top, but rather it is the original essence of truth as the
there.” There is no denying that this represents some sort of change in
Heidegger’s views on the matter. But it is not clear on the face of it
what that change is. There are at least two possibilities. One is that at
the moment he makes his marginal note, Heidegger continues to mean
by “language” the same thing he meant in 1927, but that he has come to
believe that his earlier work failed to appreciate the role that this thing
plays in the constitution of the world. Another possibility is that he
now understands “language” differently, and retrospectively

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reinterprets the passage in question. A careful review of Heidegger’s
work shows that the latter is the case. A great deal of attention in
Heidegger scholarship has been devoted to the “turn” his thought
underwent as he came to accord to language central importance in his
work, starting roughly a decade after the publication of Being and
Time. But the significance of this “turn” can only be truly understood in
the context of a terminological shift in Heidegger’s work during the
same period – a shift almost completely overlooked by scholars: the
waning of “Rede,” “discourse” as a central concept for Heidegger.
Without noticing that “language” came to displace “discourse” as
Heidegger’s preferred translation for the Greek “logos,” one simply
cannot properly assess Heidegger’s newfound emphasis on language.
In fact, the substitution of “language” for “discourse” as a translation
for “logos” did not represent a final resting place for Heidegger’s
thought on the matter. “Language” as a translation of “logos” was itself
replaced later by “saying,” “Sage.” Each of these translations was an
effort to capture what Heidegger thought was the most basic or
fundamental sense of logos (see Chart 6.2). And yet, underlying his
various translational experiments was a more or less constant sense of
“logos” as a gathering of meaningful elements Chart 6.2. Translations
of Logos. There are two consistent features of the way Heidegger
defines each of the terms that he uses to translate logos: (1) logos is
understood as performing the function of primarily disclosing entities
as meaningful, thus enabling linguistic meanings; (2) it does (1) in
virtue of its structure, which consists in a stable style that characterizes
the pattern of relations that gather entities into constitutive relations.

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131
 into a unified structure, a meaningful, but prelinguistic articulation of
the world on the basis of which entities can be unconcealed and
linguistic acts can be performed. Thus, despite the appearance of a
change from Heidegger’s earlier to his later work on the role of
language, Heidegger’s view remains remarkably consistent in its broad
outlines. The consistency is achieved because his “turn” to language is
offset by a counterturning movement in the meaning of the term
“language.” During the period leading up to and including the
publication of Being and Time, Heidegger understood language as a
totality of words (Wortganzheit) (Being and Time, pp. 161/204) – that

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is as a vocabulary with rules for combining words into sentences (see
GA 4: 39). As such, language was for him dependent on and derivative
of the meanings we encounter as we inhabit an intelligible world.
These “primary meanings,” according to Heidegger, constituted what
he began calling in 1925 the “basic structure” (Grundstruktur) of the
logos (GA 21: 26). These primary meanings are the relationships or
involvements that entities have with us and other things in a practical
situation. For example, the meaning of a door when I’m navigating
through a building is: “for going in and out” (see GA 21: 141). This
meaning (Bedeutung) thus arises within our activity of comporting
ourselves purposefully and understandingly in the world. Meaning (die
Bedeutung) is dependent on an act of making sense (das Bedeuten): In
the primary understanding of a dealing-with, what is understood or
made sense of [das Bedeutete] is disclosed. In this way, the
understanding gains the possibility of taking for itself and preserving
what is disclosed, the “result” so to speak. The result of the act of
makings sense [das Bedeuten] is in each case a meaning [eine
Bedeutung], not a so-called “word meaning,” but this primary meaning
to which a word can then accrue. (GA 21: 151 n. 6)
This “primary meaning,” then, is the way that thing or activity itself
(rather than a linguistic sign) refers to or relates to other activities or
entities. The “making sense that understands” (das verstehende
Bedeuten), which discloses meanings, is not dependent on our
possessing a system of signs, but is rather the foundation for language,
which consists of a unified and systematic totality of the “word
meanings” that “accrue” to the primary meanings articulated for and
through our dealings with entities: only insofar as such intelligibility –
meaning – already belongs to Dasein, can Dasein express itself
phonetically in such a way that these utterances are words which now
have something like meaning. Because Dasein in its very being is itself
something that makes sense (bedeutend), it lives in meanings and can
express itself as these meanings. And only because there are such
utterances, that is, words, accruing to meanings, therefore there are
particular words. That is, only now can linguistic forms, which
themselves are shaped by the meaning, be detachable from that
meaning. Such a totality of utterances, in which the understanding of a
Dasein in a certain sense arises and is existentially, we call “language.”
(GA 21: 151)
“Language” in these early works, then, names a totality of words or a
totality of utterances – a systematic whole of signs that we can draw on
in expressing ourselves linguistically (see GA 36/37: 105ff for the view
of language as kind of sign giving). It is interesting, however, that in GA
21, Heidegger did not yet have a translation for logos into German that

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he was willing to stick with. He leads off the lecture by translating logos
with Rede, but in a very telling passage, he qualifies this translation: “in
order to provide an example that directs us to the logos,” he explains,
consider “not the legein – discoursing and discussing, but rather the
legomenon – what is said as such, what in each case is sayable and
what is posited, the lekton” (GA 21: 54). That is, the Greek
understanding of logos is not oriented to the words we say in
discursive interaction, but rather the meaningful world that is capable
of being talked about linguistically. There is a distinction to be drawn,
in other words, between what we might call the “communicative”
aspect of discourse and the “meaning articulating aspect.” The meaning
articulating aspect consists in lifting referential relations into salience.
The communicative aspect consists in sharing these referential
relations with others, or in helping others become responsive to these
relations.7 I suspect that a lot of the confusion in understanding
Heidegger’s notion of discourse stems from failing to take the paradigm
of discourse to be what is sayable – the meaningful articulation – rather
than the action of saying itself – the communicative aspect. In any
event, by the time he writes Being and Time, it seems to me that
Heidegger is comfortable translating logos as Rede (“conversance” or
“discourse”), but only because he understands discourse primarily in
terms of the articulation of meanings (in just the way he had described
meaning articulation in GA 21): “that which is parsed (das Gegliederte)
in discursive articulation as such we call the totality of meanings
(Bedeutungsganze). This can be separated into meanings. . .. Words
accrue to meanings” (Being and Time, 204/161). The primary sense of
Rede or discourse is that which performs the function of establishing
and stabilizing the referential relations of meaningfulness: The
intelligibility of something has always been articulated, even before
there is any appropriative interpretation of it. Discourse is the
Articulation of intelligibility. . .. That which can be Articulated in
interpretation, and thus even more primordially in discourse, is what
we have called “meaning.” That which gets articulated as such in
discursive Articulation, we call the “totality-of-meanings”
[Bedeutungsganze]. This can be dissolved or broken up into meanings.
(GA 2: H. 161)
Because the individual words and utterances can only have a
meaning on the basis of a prelinguistic but meaningful disclosure of the
world, Heidegger also thought of language as a derivative phenomenon
– both Sprache as a sign system and Rede in the communicative sense
depend on discourse as meaning articulation. That Heidegger does not
more rigorously divorce the two elements of Rede is a result of his
ontologically broad use of the term. The disclosive function of both

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discourse as communication, and discourse as meaning articulation is
to let entities be discovered by providing a referential context within
which they can appear as meaningful. Heidegger does distinguish the
two, as passages like the following make clear: The current translation
of logos as “reason,” “judgment,” and “sense” do not capture the
decisive meaning: gathering joining and making known. They overlook
what is originally and properly ancient and thus at once essential to the
word and concept. Whether, then, in the history of the origin of the
word logos the meaning of the gathering joining [sammelnden Fügens
– i.e. meaning articulation] was immediately accompanied by the
meaning of gathering saying [i.e. meaning communication], a meaning
that language always already has assumed, and in fact in the manner of
conversance; whether, in fact, originally language and discourse was
directly experienced as the primary and genuine basic way of gathering
joining, or whether the meaning of gathering and joining together was
only subsequently carried over onto language, I am not able to decide
on the basis of my knowledge of the matter, assuming that the question
is at all decideable. (GA 33: 122/Aristotle’s Metaphysics Theta, 103–4;
some emphasis in original)
Similarly, when he argues in Being and Time that the call of
conscience is a mode of discourse that may not be heard as offering any
communicative content (see GA 2: H. 273–4), Heidegger acknowledges
that something can perform the discursive function of meaning
articulation without also being communicable. Both aspects of
discourse, however, bear a common structure – the structure of
gathering or collecting references into a coherent context. That
gathering can occur in either communicative action (“saying”), or in the
fundamental structural joining together or fitting together of
references. But the latter is the more fundamental sense because it
establishes the stabilized relational context that is exploited in
discursive communication: the original meaning of logos [is] . . .
legein: to read, to read together, to gather, to lay the one to the other
and in this way to set the one into a relationship to the other, and
thereby to posit this relationship itself. Logos: the connecting, the
relationship. The relationship is what holds together that which stands
within it. The unity of this “together” governs and regulates the
connection of the self relating entities. Logos is therefore a rule, a law,
yet not as something which is suspended somewhere above what is
ruled, but rather as that which is itself the relationship: the inner
fitting-together and fitness (Fügung und Fuge) of the entities which
stand in relation. Logos is the regulating structure (regelnde Gefüge),
the gathering of entities which are related among themselves. Such a
gathering, which now gathers up, makes accessible, and holds ready

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the connections of what is connected, and with this the connection
itself and thus individual entities, and so at the same time lets them be
governed, this is the structure that we call “language,” speaking; but
not understood as vocalizing, rather in the sense of a speaking that says
something, intends something: to discourse of or about something to
someone or for someone. Logos is discourse, the gathering laying out,
unifying making something known. (GA 33: 121)
As this passage makes clear, at this point (1931), Heidegger has
begun phasing out the use of Rede, and has started using Rede and
Sprache interchangeably. But it is equally clear that he can do so only
because he no longer thinks of language in the way that he did in the
years leading up to and surrounding the publication of Being and Time.
The change occurs as Heidegger draws a distinction between the
prereflective use of the word “language” to refer to the “foreground
aspect of language” – that is, a totality of words (GA 4: 39) – and a more
thoughtful use of the term to refer to the deeper, background
phenomenon of a preverbal articulative gathering of meanings. He
begins, in other words, to use the term “language” in a manner that is
ontologically broad. He can do this because he no longer holds that the
defining characteristic of language is found in its character as a sign.
This changed view of the meaning of “language” frees the term up to be
substituted for “discourse” (Rede) as Heidegger’s preferred term for
translating logos and, as I will show, as a name for a particular
constitutive structure of our being-in-the-world. Rede, in turn, loses its
technical being-sense in Heidegger’s works after about 1934.8 To
appreciate how much (or rather, how little) is at stake in this change,
we need to say more about this constitutive structure, the explanation
of which was always linked with an effort to appropriate the ancient
Greek notion of logos. The idea expressed in the passage quoted above
– that human beings always already live in meanings and act
meaningfully – is Heidegger’s version of the Greek claim that the
essence of man is to be the zôon logon echon, the living being that
possesses the logos or language.9 Rede, Sprache, and Sage were each
efforts to translate and thus capture what was essential about this
claim. Rede, discourse, was initially adopted as a translation for logos
because of the etymological connections between the German Rede and
the Latin ratio, which, in turn, was the Latin translation of logos (see,
e.g., GA 20: 365 ff.). By 1935, however, Rede fell out of favor as a
translation for logos, a change in Heidegger’s view that coincides
precisely with the development of his conviction that the translation of
Greek terms into Latin “destroyed the authentic philosophical naming
force of the Greek words” (GA 40: 15/10). So when he now holds that
the “originary meaning” of logos “has at first nothing to do with

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language and word and discourse [Rede]” (GA 40: 133/95), this does
not mean that he’s rejecting his earlier account of the fundamental role
of primary, prelinguistic meanings in disclosing a world. Nor is he
repudiating the claim that the originary meaning of logos has nothing
to do with language when, a mere four years later, he writes that “We
can – in fact, we must – translate anthrôpos – zôon logon echon as: ‘the
human being is the living entity to whom the word belongs.’ Instead of
‘word’ we can even say ‘language,’ provided we think the nature of
language adequately and originally, namely, from the essence of logos
correctly understood.” (GA 9: 348). Nor, finally, should we see it as a
late repudiation of his work on language, and a return to his earlier
view when he writes in 1957 that “‘discourse’ and the verb ‘to
discourse’ do not mean ‘language’ and ‘to speak’ in the sense of the
pronouncement of expressions; discourse (Rede) means precisely what
legein and logos meant from early on: to bring forward, to bring to
appearance by gathering” (GA 79: 160). All of these superficially
inconsistent pronouncements exhibit one consistent, largely stable
view about what Heidegger calls the “originary meaning” or “basic
meaning” of language. To recognize this, we need to focus on the
ontological structure and disclosive function of discourse, language,
and saying respectively. As Chart 6.2 suggests, when seen from the
perspective of structure and function, the different terms are near
synonyms. The originary language is an ontological structure
responsible for the disclosure of the world. Language plays this role in
virtue of imposing a particular structure on the world – the gathering
of relationships of meaning or reference that we have already touched
on: “the basic meaning of logos is collection, to collect” (GA 40: 133) –
namely, the collection or gathering of significations or “the relationship
of one thing to another” (GA 40: 133) into a more or less stable
structure. It is in terms of such a gathering or collecting into
relationships that we are to understand the idea of language as “the
house of being.” It is to a more detailed exposition of this notion of
gathering that I now turn. The Core Phenomenon of Gathering

To understand properly the sense in which language is for Heidegger

a “gathering” or “collecting,” we need to recognize the background
understanding of ontology against which such pronouncements are
made. This will bring us back to the slogan and the question of
linguistic constitutionalism in Heidegger’s thought. We noted at the
outset Jaspers’ puzzled response to the slogan. In contrast to the
linguistic constitutionalism he thought he detected in the slogan,
Jaspers expressed the view of language as a “bridge” that brings us to

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an independently existing reality. Jaspers’ reaction to the slogan shows
that he recognized something that few other commentators have
noted: the phrase “house of being” is not originally Heidegger’s. It is an
unattributed quotation of a passage from Nietzsche’s Zarathustra – a
passage that Heidegger lectured on in the years during which he was
developing his views on language (see GA 44: 56).10 Some attention to
the original source of the phrase is quite helpful for appreciating what’s
going on with Heidegger’s use of the slogan. The “language as a bridge”
view is advanced by Zarathustra himself: “Oh my animals,” answered
Zarathustra. “Just keep babbling and let me listen! It invigorates me so
when you babble: where there is babbling the world indeed lies before
me like a garden. How lovely it is that there are words and sounds; are
not words and sounds rainbows and illusory bridges between the
eternally separated? To each soul belongs another world, for each soul
every other soul is a hinterworld. Illusion tells its loveliest lies about
the things that are most similar, because the tiniest gap is hardest to
bridge. . .. Have names and sounds not been bestowed on things so that
human beings can invigorate themselves on things? It is a beautiful
folly, speaking: with it humans dance over all things. How lovely is all
talking and all lying of sounds! With sounds our love dances on colorful
rainbows.” (Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Third Part: “The Convalescent,”
2, translation modified)
On this view, then, language does not play a role in constituting
entities. Rather, it is an adornment that creates the illusion of
connections between speakers, and the illusion of relations between
things. But the things themselves do not depend for their being on our
babbling or on the way we talk about their relations to each other.
Thus “language is a bridge” means that language brings us before
independently existing entities, connects them to each other in our
representations, and beautifies and adorns them in our
representations. But Zarathustra’s animals respond by suggesting that
language is not just a bridge to things and an adornment that dances
over fixed entities. Rather, entities themselves “dance” in the way
words do: “Oh Zarathustra,” said the animals then. “To those who
think as we do, all things themselves approach dancing; they come and
reach out their hands and laugh and retreat – and come back.
Everything goes, everything comes back; the wheel of being rolls
eternally. Everything dies, everything blossoms again, the year of being
runs eternally. Everything breaks, everything is joined (gefügt) anew;
the same house of being builds itself eternally.” (ibid., emphasis
supplied)
The animals, in other words, invoke the phrase “house of being” to
suggest a view of ontology according to which there are no stable,

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independently existing things – entities are constituted and
reconstituted by being “joined” (gefügt) or fitted together. In all his
works, early and late, Heidegger adheres to some version of the thesis
that entities are constituted by the relationships they bear to each
other. Something only is the entity that it is in terms of the way it is
referred to and aligned with activities and other entities. One might
refer to this as a relational ontology. To take language as a bridge, and
words as beautifying and dancing over things, is to hold that entities
are fixed and constituted independently of the meaningful
relationships they bear with other things. The view of dancing things,
by contrast, is the view that there is no stable ontology apart from the
meaningful relationships that things bear toward one another within a
world. Heidegger seems to allude to the same passage in Zarathustra
when he discusses the importance of learning to renounce the idea that
“words were like handles (Griffe) that grasp that which already is and
that which is held to be, secure it tightly (dicht machen), express it and
in this way help it to beauty” (GA 12: 161). Or again In trying to clarify
how chaos came to be posited as what is knowable and to be known,
we happened to stumble across what knows – the living being that
grasps the world and takes it over. That is not a matter of chance, for
what is knowable and what knows are each determined in their
essence in a unified way from the same essential ground. We may not
separate either one, nor wish to encounter them separately. Knowing is
not like a bridge that somehow subsequently connects two existent
banks of a stream, but is itself a stream that in its flow first creates the
banks and turns them toward each other in a more original way than a
bridge ever could. (GA 6.1: 512–13)
Heidegger returns repeatedly to the imagery that Nietzsche invokes
in contrasting these two different ways of thinking about the
relationship between language and entities in the world. 11 So we can
see that in appropriating Nietzsche’s phrase “house of being,”
Heidegger is invoking a relational ontology and endorsing the dancing
things understanding of entities. It is in terms of the relational ontology
that we are to understand the idea that the logos is a “gathering fitting”
(sammelnden Fügens) (GA 33: 122). For Heidegger, “logos is the
structure of fitting (Gefüge)” (GA 33: 121), just as for Zarathustra’s
animals, the house of being is constructed when “everything is joined
or fitted together” (gefügt). In the slogan, then, language is to be
understood as the gathering together of meanings that allows there to
be entities at all.12 In particular, language is the unity to the structure of
relations: the Gefüge. “Language is, as saying that forms the world’s
ways, the relation of all relations. It relates, maintains, proffers, holds,
and keeps them” (107). To be the “relation of all relations” means that

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language exerts a kind of stylistic constraint on the way that particular
relations are established and made salient. By drawing and
constraining and stylizing the constitutive relationships between
entities, language is “the relation on the basis of which what is present
gathers itself for the first time as such around and for human beings”
(GA 9: 280). The slogan reaffirms that we encounter things on the basis
of a grasp of their meanings or the way they relate to other things.
Language stabilizes these meanings or relationships, holds them open,
and makes them salient and communicable. Something is
communicable if it is capable of being picked up and responded to be
others, that is, capable of soliciting others. Words

So far, we have seen a continuity in Heidegger’s account of the logos

running throughout his work and across the supposed divide between
“early” and “later Heidegger.” The logos is the structure of worldly
meanings and references, the relationships that constitute things as the
things they are. This continuity is obscured by changes in Heidegger’s
terminology – in particular, his preferred name for the logos structure.
Perhaps confusingly, where the early Heidegger distinguished between
the logos structure and language (which he understands in ordinary
sense of linguistic structures and forms), the later Heidegger names the
logos structure “language.” I have also already suggested that calling
this logos structure “language” in no way is meant to suggest that it has
the structure and form that we ordinarily associate with language. The
originary language of the logos is decidedly not something like a stock
of terms, each with its associated meaning and reference, together with
rules for constructing sentences out of those terms. But to make this
point more evident, we need to consider what Heidegger does say
about the relationship between words and the originary language or
the Gefüge. We also need to think through the relationship between
words and entities in order to come to a clearer understanding of the
slogan and Heidegger’s alleged linguistic constitutionalism. Heidegger’s
interpretation of the Stefan George poem “The Word” (“Das Wort”)
plays a central role in his effort to reorient our thinking about the word
and thus to rethink the relationship between language and entities.
This poem is also, in light of its final line, especially prone to be
misunderstood as supporting a linguistic constitutionalist
interpretation of Heidegger’s account of language. With apologies for
the rather literal and unpoetic translation, the poem reads:

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To understand Heidegger’s interpretation of this poem, we need to
begin by considering his reason for introducing a discussion of poetry
into his work in the first place. What, one ought to ask, is Heidegger
trying to accomplish? Does he think the poem offers an argument about
language or a particularly insightful philosophical analysis of the
nature of the word? Obviously not. Does he want to adorn his dense
and ungainly prose with some beautiful poetic embellishments? To the
contrary, the poem is not an ornament but a central element in
Heidegger’s discussion of the word. Does he think the poet is an
authority figure who can resolve a philosophical question about
language for us? With this, we are coming closer to the truth. The poet
is not a philosophical authority, but, Heidegger believes, he can be
regarded as an authoritative voice on at least one thing – the
experience of being struck by the power and limits of language itself.
And this leads us, finally, to the main reason for introducing the poem:
Heidegger wants us to break out of our ordinary facility with language
in order to actually have an experience with language itself. Our
everyday speech is so habitual, so commonplace, and so familiar that
language itself escapes notice, indeed, is nearly invisible. As a result, to
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gain insight into it, we need to be able to attend to it, experience it, and
reflect on it, and this might require that we somehow defamiliarize
ourselves with it. The poem is explicitly introduced “to show ways to
bring us before the possibility of having an experience with language”
(GA 12: 151). This particular poem is selected because it is by a master
poet, reporting on his own experience of language. As we approach the
poem, then, we miss the point if we quickly tear a line or two out of
context as authority for an argument or to add interest and beauty to
philosophical prose. We are meant rather to dwell upon the poem, and
to experience the working of language in the poem. That requires in
this instance our attending thoughtfully and painstakingly to the poetic
description of the poet’s experience of a poetic word. Indeed, the first
thing one realizes when engaging seriously with a poem is that poetic
language rarely offers clear, unequivocal propositions as the content of
its sentences. To reduce a poem to a punch line, to a readily intelligible
and unambiguous claim is somehow to miss what is essential. Poetic
words, moreover, have what one might call a “productive ambiguity”
or, as Heidegger puts it, they “oscillate,” thus opening up multiple paths
of understanding. As frustrating as this might be to those of an analytic
or scientific mindset, this is not a weakness of the poem but its strength
– and precisely one of the elements of the poem we must attend to in
order to experience language. For one of the essential features of
language is its ability to oscillate and thus to lead us into any of an
indefinite number of paths. We do violence to a poem if we try to pin it
down to a single “correct” reading, and Heidegger insists that “we must
pay attention so that the oscillation of the poetic saying is not forced
onto the inflexible rail of an unequivocal assertion and in this way is
destroyed” (GA 12: 157). The words of a masterful poet have a
particular kind of oscillation, one that Heidegger aspired to achieve in
his own work. They hover right at the boundary between our
commonplace, ready understanding of terms and insight into rare,
unfamiliar meanings in the world. By helping us to get caught up in this
oscillation between the most familiar meanings of all – ordinary
linguistic meanings – and the mysterious unfathomable ways that the
world itself silently speaks and calls to us, the poet brings us to
understand two things we lose track of in our ordinary commerce with
the world: the potential power of language and the authentic
significance of the things and people and possibilities around us.
Heidegger immediately alerts us to several words in George’s poem
that oscillate in this way, reminding us that we should not be too quick
to assume we know what the final lines mean: One is tempted to
transform the final line into an assertion with the content: there is no
thing where the word is lacking. Where something is lacking, a rupture

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exists, a breaking off that is an impairment or detriment. To cause an
impairment in a matter means: to withdraw something from it, to let it
miss something. It is lacking means: it is missing. Where the word is
missing, there is no thing. Only the available word confers being to the
thing. What is the word that it is able to do such a thing? What is the
thing, such that it requires the word in order to be? What does being
mean here that it appears as an award that is conferred on the thing
from the word? (GA 12: 209)
We cannot hope to make sense of the poem without asking what a
word is, what a thing is, and what being means. Given that the whole
point of the poem is to cause an experience with language that will
compel us to reflect on such things, we should be particularly hesitant
to take these terms in their ordinary, everyday sense. As we bring into
play different possible ways of understanding each of these words –
“word,” “thing,” “to be” – the poem will begin to oscillate productively
between several different possible interpretations. 1. Words and Terms

Let’s start by exploring possible meanings of the word “word.” “Word”

is an ideal case for illustrating Heidegger’s notion of oscillation. The
German language has two different plural forms to the singular word
for “word” (“Wort”), which correlate with two quite different meanings
of the word “word.” On the first meaning, which takes the plural form
“Worte,” a word is a complete utterance or expression: “a verbal or
written expression, which consists of a group of individual terms and
presents a unified mental sense.”13 This meaning of “word” is attested
in English as well. Shakespeare, for instance, has King Henry VI say:
“My Lord of Warwick, hear me but one word: Let me for this my life-
time reign as king” (King Henry VI, act 1, scene 1). The “one word” is a
complete thought, not a single term. This sense lives on in such English
expressions “I’d like a word with you,” or “I will keep my word” – that
is, words are understood as complete expressions, not individual
terms. The other meaning, which takes the plural form “Wörter,”
corresponds with the way we typically tend to think of the ordinary
meaning of the English word “word.” Words, Wörter, are “single,
independent, isolable meanings with a definite vocal form which, as
discourse’s smallest unit of sense, produce, by means of their
accumulation and linking together, words in the first sense as
connected discourse.”14 In the singular, “Wort,” word will oscillate
between these two senses, and can be taken in either way (depending
on context). And this is not accidental, of course – words as expressions
of whole thoughts, and words as units of sense stand in an intimate
relationship to each other. Part of the richness of the word “word”

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derives from the fact that it can move in both directions of meaning,
and can even do so simultaneously. But to mark the distinction for the
English reader, I will translate “Wörter” as “terms,” and “Worte” as
“words.” The distinction as it is drawn in Grimm and in the ordinary
German usage, however, is not quite the distinction Heidegger wants to
make. In general, Heidegger thinks of terms as occurrent linguistic
forms that are detachable from their meanings, and are thus thought of
as denoting concepts, as opposed to directly expressing significations
(see GA 2: H. 159, 161; GA 21: 151). Thus a term is a certain type of
sound or graphic mark, with its associated particular meaning or
concept. Of course, it is phenomenologically incorrect to describe my
experience of language as involving first a sensory perception of a
sound or graphic mark, followed by a recognition of the sound or mark
as a linguistic form, followed by an association of the linguistic form
with its meaning, followed by a construction of a unified sense from the
individual meanings. In the living use of language, I respond to what is
written or spoken fluently, nonreflectively, nondeliberately. For
instance, when I hear the term “chalkboard” in the utterance “the
chalkboard is black,” I do not hear a sound that I recognize as a word
and then associate it with a meaning in order to construct a sense for
the utterance as a whole. Instead, as Heidegger says, I “live in
meanings,” and the spoken language as I encounter it in the utterances
of ordinary involved coping orients or reorients me immediately to the
world I am in, to the meanings I inhabit (see GA 21: 151). The words
immediately orient me so that I can comport myself with respect to the
chalkboard. I can, of course, detach myself from a lived immersion in
meanings, and regard “chalkboard” as a term – that is, as a noise or
graphic mark that can be detached from its meanings. A beginning
speaker of a foreign language will often encounter terms. But with
increasing fluency, the terms recede from salience. The contrast
between a deliberate and fluent experience of language suggests a
different way of thinking about what words are as opposed to terms.
Words for Heidegger are not representations, and have neither a
verbal nor a written form: they are “not palpable to the senses” (GA 12:
181). Indeed, Heidegger claims, the word, like being itself, “is not an
entity” (GA 12: 182). Instead, he thinks of words as the relational
structures that allow there to be entities in the first place: “the relation
of the word to the thing . . . is not a relationship between the thing on
one side and the word on the other. The word itself is the relation,
which in each case keeps in itself the thing in such a way that it ‘is’ a
thing” (GA 12: 159). To understand this, we need to recall the
discussion of dancing things above. On Heidegger’s view, entities are
constituted by the relationships they have to other entities. For there to

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be a stable thing, the relationships that constitute it as a thing need also
to be stabilized, held open, and maintained. The stabilization takes the
form of establishing nexuses or nodes of relations that can be, and are,
filled by particular entities. Of course, “filled” is a misleading verb to
use here if it is heard as suggesting that entities are something
independently of the structure of relations, something that can then be
inserted into a particular place in the network of relations. Entities do
not fill nexuses the way water fills glasses or concrete fills building
forms. Water is water, after all, whether it is in a glass or pond. A more
apt analogy is the way someone fills the position of an aunt or uncle.
One cannot be an aunt first, and only subsequently take up
relationships to nieces and nephews. To be an aunt at all is to be
constituted by one’s relationships to other people. Aunthood, then, is a
particular nexus of relationships to siblings and siblings’ children.
When we grasp the significance of aunthood, we have gained the ability
to recognize a stable pattern of relationships, secured this nexus as that
into which something can enter, and, in entering, be constituted as the
entity it is. We have grasped, one could say, the word “aunt.” To
understand words in general, then, is to be able to discern an entity as
standing in the structure of relationships that allows it to be an entity.
About the “word” we also said that it does not simply stand in a
relation to the thing, but rather that the word is what first brings the
particular entity as the entity that it is into this “is,” holds it therein,
relates it, and, as it were, provides it the support with which to be a
thing. Accordingly, we said, the word does not simply stand in a
relation to the thing, but rather the word “is” itself what holds and
relates the thing as thing; the word is as this relating: the relation itself.
(GA 12: 177)
The entity will thus stand at a kind of nexus of relationships. The
word, in the original sense, is the nexus of significative relationships.
Words are prior to terms because it is only through a grasp of the
meaningful relations that entities bear to one another that their
associated names have the meaning that they have. If we consider this
distinction in the context of George’s poem, we can see that the
different ways of hearing “word” will lead us to imagine different
reasons why the word might be missing. If we think of words as terms,
a “word is missing” when some ordinary language lacks a term
uniquely associated with some specific sense. Take, for instance the
Persian term “zirad,” the name of “a rope fastened round a camel’s
neck, to prevent him from bringing up his food when chewing the cud,
and throwing it on his rider.”15 English lacks this term, or any single
equivalent term. But we English speakers have little trouble
understanding the idea of a specific type of rope-equipment designed

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for that particular task (even if we are unable to imagine exactly what
such a rope would look like, or how it would be attached to the camel’s
neck, or even how a camel manages to vomit on its rider in the first
place). We know, after all, what camels are, and have a fairly good grip
on all the relationships involved in a zirad (the relationship between
animals and their riders, between necks and ropes, etc.). By contrast, if
we think of words in Heidegger’s sense, then a “word is missing” when
a world lacks a stable network of relationships that would let a
particular entity show up within the world. Of course, such a world will
also necessarily lack a term (since a term accrues to the word or nexus
of relationships). But it lacks a term in this case because it lacks a
constitutive place for such a thing as the term names. It is no accident
that English has had to borrow its term for a Samurai, for our culture
lacks the points of reference that are definitive of such a being (for
example, the Bushid , with the particular confluence of virtues that it
incorporates, or the Japanese feudal structure that constituted the
place and role of the Samurai in Japanese society). When such a word is
missing, then, the absence of a term is just a symptom of a deeper lack.
What is responsible for the word being missing is not a limitation in
the expressive capacities of ordinary language, but the stable
relationships in terms of which the “wonder” or “dream” or “rich and
frail jewel” can be that entity that it is. 2. Things and Nothings

The second oscillating term in the George poem is “thing.” In the

broadest sense, “thing” can refer to any entity, anything that “is in any
way at all,” whatever “is not nothing” (see, e.g., GA 41: 5; GA 5: 5). If we
pull the last line out of context, it is easy to default to this broadest
sense of the word “thing.” But if we read it in the context of the poem as
a whole, we might be induced to take the word more narrowly. The
things that the poet talks about are “wonders,” “dreams,” and “rich and
delicate treasures.” These are things that, as we just noted, are foreign
to his world. In addition, Heidegger long argued that we need to
recognize that nonentities are “given” or otherwise play a role in the
disclosure of a world and thus are not absolute nothings. They are not
things, hence “nothings,” but they nevertheless shape and structure
and open up possibilities for our being in the world. Being itself, for
instance, “is no entity, no thing, and no thing-like property, nothing
occurrent. But it nevertheless signifies something” (GA 29/30: 471).16
Other examples of things that are not things or entities include
language, the world, and modes of being (like the human mode of
being, existence). Recognition of such nothings and their role in
disclosing the world is a crucial part of Heidegger’s attack on the

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ontology of the occurrent that he argues has dominated Western
Metaphysics since the beginning. Thus “no thing’ in the poem might be
referring to such nothings, rather than functioning to deny the
existence of ordinary entities. 3. Being and Giving

All but the most casual reader of Heidegger’s work will recognize that
“is” and “be” are paradigmatic instances of oscillating terms for
Heidegger. Questions about the meaning of being are always in play for
Heidegger. A wide range of options for construing this word are
available. “Is” or “be” might mean to have any kind of existence
whatsoever. Or, as the context of the poem might suggest, “be” might
mean “to have a secure, stable presence in the world.” 17 But Heidegger
identifies other ways to think of something being. The German
language has an alternative construction for asserting that something
is – one can say: “es gibt,” literally, “it gives” to mean “there is.” As we
will see, Heidegger exploited this to talk about things that are, but lack
the stability and presence that metaphysics took as definitive of being.
Something can be “given,” that is, play a role in the disclosure of the
world, without “being,” that is, having stable presence. Finally, it is
worth observing, as Heidegger does, that the poem uses the
subjunctive rather than the indicative form of the verb “to be.” This
allows the verb to be construed as either the present indicative
expressed in indirect discourse (“no thing is. . .”), or an imperative or
demand (“no thing may be. . .”). 4. Interpreting George’s Poem

With all these potential points of oscillation in play, it should be clear

that the poem is now open to a wide range of interpretations. In fact, at
various points, in different writings on the poem, Heidegger considers
a number of different ways of interpreting the closing lines, depending
on how “word” and “no thing” and “be” are understood. One of these
interpretations – the one seized on by those commentators who see in
Heidegger a linguistic constitutionalist – Heidegger rejects. He accepts
several others as part of the productive ambiguity of the phrase. Let’s
look at the one he rejects, before turning to the others. 4.1. The
Linguistic Constitutionalist Interpretation

The first, linguistic constitutionalist reading of the verse understands

words as terms – as meaningful linguistic forms of ordinary language.
It takes things as any entity whatsoever. And it takes being in the
broadest sense possible. The result is to see the verse as declaring the

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view that nothing at all can exist in any way unless and until there is a
term in some ordinary language for referring to the entity. Anticipating
that casual readers might mistakenly take the final line of the poem
and, along with it, the slogan as an endorsement of just such a crude
linguistic constitutionalism,18 Heidegger immediately alerts us that we
are not to read it in this fashion. I quote at length from Heidegger’s
discussion of this last line: We ventured the paraphrase: No thing is
where the word is missing. “Thing” is here understood in the
traditional comprehensive sense that means any something that is in
any way. Taken in this way, even God is a thing. Only when the word is
found for the thing is the thing a thing. In this way only is it.
Accordingly we must emphasize: no thing is where the word, that is the
name, is missing. Only the word provides being to the thing. But how
can a mere word achieve this – to bring something into being? The true
state of affairs is in fact the other way around. (GA 12: 154, emphasis in
original)
Heidegger could hardly be clearer. If the last verse is intended as a
flat-footed expression of the view that all entities depend for their very
existence on a linguistic term to name them, then it must be wrong. He
summarizes as follows: We listen to the poem that we read. Have we
heard it? Hardly. We have merely – and almost crudely – seized the last
verse and what’s more have rewritten it into an unpoetic assertion: No
thing is where the word is missing. We could even go further and
advance the assertion: Something is only where the suitable and thus
appropriate word names something as being and in this way causes the
particular entity as such. Does this mean at the same time: there is only
being where the suitable word speaks? From where does the word get
its suitability? The poet says nothing about that. But the content of the
final verse nevertheless contains the assertion: the being of any
particular thing that is resides in the word. Thus the proposition is
valid: language is the house of being. Proceeding in this way, we would
have supplied the most beautiful confirmation for a proposition of
thinking that we pronounced previously – and in truth we would have
thrown everything into confusion. We would have reduced poetry to a
footnote for thinking and taken thinking too lightly, and also already
have forgotten what really matters: namely to have an experience with
language. (GA 12: 155–6, emphasis in original)
This first interpretation is thus rejected on a variety of grounds. It
takes the concluding lines out of context. It treats the line as an
authority to cite or refer to, rather than taking it up as an occasion to
have an experience with language. And, devastatingly, it posits an
absurd relationship between terms and entities – any entity at all, even
God, would be dependent for its existence on there being a term in a

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human language to name it. The error of the linguistic constitutionalist
reading of Heidegger is that it sees him as advancing a changed
understanding of the relationship between words and things, without
also noting how the understanding of the very nature of words itself is
altered by this changed understanding of the relationship between
words and things. In fact, on Heidegger’s reading, the central theme of
the poem is the question of the nature of the word, as it is illuminated
by the poet’s experience with words. The poet gains both a deeper
understanding of the relationship between words and things, and the
nature of words themselves. A better interpretation of the poem will
thus not focus myopically on the final line but will work its way into the
experience described by the entire poem, attending to the changes that
the poem itself marks in the poet’s way of understanding words. 4.2.
Post-Linguistic-Constitutionalist Interpretations

According to Heidegger’s interpretation, then, the poem describes a

transition from one way of understanding words and language to
another. This is a transition, moreover, that we can all make provided
we allow ourselves to have an experience with language of the sort the
poet describes. At the start of the poem, words are understood simply
as a means to present (darstellen) an entity descriptively. When the
poet encounters something wonderful or dreamlike, something that
does not ordinarily belong to his world, he takes the thing to the
goddess of fate to learn from her the words and names by which to
describe the thing. The poet acts in “unclouded confidence” that he
“need only bring the wonders which enchanted him or the dreams
which entranced him to the source of language in order to have drawn
out of it the words that fit everything to which he had set his mind” (GA
12: 161). He understands his fate, in other words, as a constraint on the
particular mode of talking about entities, not on what entities could be
encountered, or ultimately on what could be said about them. As for
the relationship between entities and things, the poet subscribed to
the opinion, and was confirmed in this opinion through the success of
his poems, that poetic things, wonders and dreams, would already
stand well established in being, on their own and separately; art is only
needed to find for them too the word that describes and presents them.
At first and for a long time it appeared as if the words were grips that
grasp what is already an entity and considered to be an entity, making
it substantial, expressing it and in this way helping it to beauty. (GA 12:
161)
This view is clearly a variant of the language-as-a-bridge view, which
sees words as modes of access to independently existing entities. On

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this view, if words contribute anything to the being of the entity, they
serve only as beautifying embellishments that dance over things:
through the poet’s words, the entity “henceforth shines and blossoms
and in this way rules throughout the country as the beautiful” (GA 12:
212). The poet’s task is to find words that will make each entity
graspable and substantial enough that others can be directed to it: “he
does not want, however, to keep it to himself, but rather wants to
descriptively present it. For that purpose, names are required.” Making
an entity graspable and substantial, on this view, is not an operation
that affects the being of the entity, but rather one that affects our
receptivity to the entity by making us able to represent it: “Names are
words to present and describe. They deliver what is already an entity
to representation” (GA 12: 212). Finally, on this view, the words are
themselves entities: “the names which the well contains are regarded
as something sleeping, which merely needs to be woken in order to
find its application as a descriptive presentation of the thing. The
names and words are like a fixed supply which is assigned to the
things” (GA 12: 214). The poet’s view of the nature of words and their
relationship to entities is shaken, however, when the poet seeks words
for a “rich and delicate jewel.” The words for a descriptive presentation
of this thing cannot be found, and, consequently, the jewel escapes
from the poet’s hand – it cannot be contained within his world.
Heidegger emphasizes that, contrary to the linguistic constitutionalist
interpretation of the poem, “the jewel escapes. But at the same time it
by no means disintegrates into nothingness. It remains a treasure
which, however, the poet may never hold within his country” (GA 12:
214–5). These details of the poem must be attended to in
understanding the significance of the conclusion “no thing may be” in
the final line. Heidegger considers two possible ways of understanding
what has happened here (these are different but not exclusive
possibilities, and part of the productive ambiguity of the poem comes
from keeping them both in play). One way to take the “no thing may be”
is to see it as an indicative statement (German uses the subjunctive
tense for indicatives in indirect discourse): “no thing is where the word
is lacking.” But since the thing does not dissolve into absolute
nothingness but escapes from the insecure grasp of the poet, we must
conclude that “being,” here, is the being of the metaphysical tradition:
stable enduring presence. On this reading, then, the poem is teaching
us that words bestow stable presence on entities. But along with this
changed understanding of the relation between words and entities
comes a changed understanding of the nature of the word. The word is
no longer thought of as a term, an entity (a tool for representation) that
is correlated with other existing entities. The word is now understood

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as the nexus of relations that allows an entity to exist at all. This nexus
of relations in turn must be sought in the world’s “fate,” as it is the fate
that is unable to allow the entity to be descriptively presented. Fate
now is seen, not just as a linguistic heritage in the narrow sense, but
also as including the inherited referential network of our world, and
thus the things with their constitutive possibilities that can manifest
themselves in that world. As Heidegger explains, this fate needs to be
understood not as a necessitating but as an enabling configuration: Of
the use of the word “fate” in talk of the fate of being, the following
should be noted: We usually understand by “fate” (Geschick) that
which is determined and imposed through fate: a sad, an evil, a good
fate. This meaning is a derivative one. For the root meaning of the
German word for fate originally says: to prepare, arrange, bring
something to the place where it belongs, thus also to permit and
instruct; in German to beschicken a house or a room means: to
maintain it in the right organization, arranged and put in order. (GA 10:
90)
So a “word is lacking” on this reading when there is no nexus of
relationships, no arrangement or organization of the connections
between entities, that would allow the entity to be at home and belong
in the world. Without a stable nexus, then, the entity could not attain
being, that is, stable presence in the world. When George writes of the
word lacking or, literally, “breaking off,” he does not mean simply that
we lack a term to designate a thing. Rather, he is referring to a situation
where the constitutive relations are lacking for a thing to show itself as
the thing it is. “The word is lacking,” Heidegger explains, means “it is
not at our disposal [verfügbar].” Keeping in mind here that the word is
a stabilized nexus of relationships, this could occur in different ways. It
could be that the other entities, events, activities, and so on to which
the thing is essentially related are lacking. Or it could mean that we do
not have the skills or dispositions for picking up the apt or fitting
relations that constitute a thing. Heidegger unfortunately considers
very few concrete examples of entities that receive their being from a
word. We need to pay close attention to the subtleties of Heidegger’s
discussion of his most developed example (especially since a sloppy
reading of this example is used to buttress the linguistic
constitutionalist interpretation of Heidegger – see footnote 18 above).
Heidegger writes: Take the Sputnik. This thing, if such it is, is surely
independent of this name which was subsequently attached to it. But
perhaps it is ordered differently with that type of things – with rockets,
atom bombs, reactors and the such – than it is with that which the poet
names in the first stanza of the first triad: Wonder from far off or a
dream I brought to my country’s border Still, innumerable people

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consider this “thing” Sputnik to be a wonder also, this “thing,” which
races wildly around in a worldless “world”-space; and for many it was
and is still a dream, wonder and dream of modern technology, who
would not be ready in the least to accept the thought that the word
provides the thing its being. Not words but rather actions count in the
calculation of the planetary number crunching. What use are poets. . .?
And yet! Let’s for once refrain from hurried thinking. Is not even this
“thing” what it is and how it is in the name of its name? Indeed it is. If
that hurry in the sense of the greatest possible technological increase
of speed, in whose ambit only the modern machines and equipment
can be what they are – if that hurry had not challenged human beings
and arranged them at its command, if the word of this arranging had
not spoken, then there also would be no Sputnik. No thing is where the
word is missing. Therefore it remains a mysterious matter: the word of
language and its relation to the thing, to any thing that is – that it is and
how it is. (GA 12: 154–5)
We must ask, then, how is Heidegger suggesting that we understand
“word” here? It is clearly not understood as a term of a natural
language. He does not claim that Sputnik depends for its existence on
the word “Sputnik”, or any other noun in German, English, or Russian
that we might use to refer to the spaceship. Indeed, as Heidegger
acknowledges elsewhere, the existence of synonymous terms and
expressions in a language, as well as across languages, is itself evidence
that the being of an entity is independent of and prior to the terms we
use to talk about it. For how else could we recognize the terms as
synonyms? But precisely that which characterizes the table as a table
– that which it is and according to its what-being distinguishes it from
the window – precisely this is independent in a certain manner from
the words and their language-specific and vocal form. For the word of
another language is as a vocal and written form different, and
nevertheless it means the same thing, “table.” This “one and the same”
[essence] first confers a goal and support to the agreement in linguistic
usage. Accordingly the essence must already be posited in advance, in
order to be expressible as the same in the same word. (GA 45: 80)
We thus need to reflect on the fact that the word Heidegger identifies
as responsible for Sputnik’s being is not “Sputnik” but die Eile, hurry. In
terms of the distinction we outlined above, the spaceship depends for
its existence not on any term but on a word. And this same word is a
setting in order that is responsible for the being not just of Sputnik, but
all technological machines and equipment. For clearly the Russian
space program does not depend for the existence of its spaceships on a
German word for “hurry” (I think it is obvious that Heidegger does not
mean that the German scientists working in the Russian space program

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were ordering their workers to hurry up). Indeed, the word is not
spoken by human being, but rather to human beings. This passage, if
we take Heidegger seriously and do not hurry past it dismissively, calls
on us to reflect on what it means for a word to speak, to command us,
to order us and things – this is not the same as a person speaking a
word. But in any event, it is clear that on this reading, the being of a
thing does not depend on the term we use to refer to it, but it does
depend on the word, the constitutive relations, of the “time and space”
in which it appears. The word on which Sputnik depends, then, is the
drive to hurry – to increased efficiency – that organizes and sets in
order all the relationships within the technological world. This is the
“name of names,” that is, the organizing style of all the particular nodes
of relationship that determine individual entities as the things they are.
In the Sputnik example, Heidegger alludes to the network of
relationship that constitutes something as a Sputnik. Unless there is a
world organized by a certain technological drive for speed and
efficiency, the constitutive relations between things will not settle into
the kind of patterns typical of technological devices. The existence of
the term “Sputnik” is not decisive here; what is decisive is a mode of
relating things that establishes certain nodes of relations – the hurried
and harried style of technological life. Sticking with the interpretation
of the closing line as an indicative statement, there is yet another way
to take the “no thing may be,” one that takes being in a
postmetaphysical sense to mean “contributing to the disclosure of the
world.” This interpretation grants that even something absent can be
when it, through its absence, plays a role in world disclosure. “When
the word is lacking – beyng denies itself. But in this denial it manifests
itself in its refusal – as silence, as the ‘in between,’ as there. Now for the
first time essential nearness” (GA 85: 72, emphasis in original). “Where
the word is lacking, no thing is” now means the lack of a word is what
allows the world-disclosive nothings to be, to play their role as the
silence and opening that allows entities to stand out into prominence.
As we indicated above, such nothings “are” by giving a world while
withdrawing into the background. Language in Heidegger’s originary
sense as the structure of relations is a paradigm case of withdrawing-
giving. The structure of relations, with its coherent style, withdraws in
favor of the entities that are what they are only in terms of the
relations. So what we attend to are the things themselves, rather than
the relational structure. The essence of a thing, being, befits neither
the “is” nor the “word,” and it absolutely does not befit the relationship
between the “is” and the word, to which it is given in each case to
bestow an “is.” All the same, neither the “is” nor the word and its saying
can be exiled into the void of sheer nothingness. What does the poetic

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experience with the word show, if thinking thinks about it? It points at
something worthy of thought. . .. It shows something which is given,
and all the same “is” not. To that which is given, the word also belongs,
perhaps not merely also, but rather above all else and even in such a
way that in the word, in its essence that which gives conceals itself. Of
the word then we may, thinking appropriately, never say: it is, but
rather – it gives – and not in the sense that “it” gives words, but rather
that the word itself gives. The word. That which is giving. What then
does it give? According to the poetic experience and the oldest
tradition of thinking the word gives: being. Then we would have to
seek the word thinkingly in that “it, that gives” as the giving itself, but
never the given. (GA 12: 182)
On this interpretation, we simultaneously rethink the nature of words
and the dependence of words on things. Words are not entities, they
are “nothings.” But they are not “sheer nothingness.” They lack
metaphysical being, stable presence, it is true. But they nevertheless
“are” in the sense of giving us a world. Heidegger explains: This
simple, ungraspable state of affairs that we name with the phrase
“there is a word, and it, the word, gives,” reveals itself as that which is
authentically worthy of thought, for whose determination all measure
is still missing. Perhaps the poet knows the measure. But his way of
writing poetry has learned renunciation and nevertheless did not lose
anything through the renunciation. Meanwhile, the jewel escapes him
nonetheless. Certainly. But it escapes in the way that the word is
denied. The denial is a withholding. In it appears precisely what is
astounding about the power that the word owns. The jewel in no way
dissolves into a nothing that is good for nothing. The word does not
deflate into the flat inability to say. The poet does not reject the word.
The jewel, however, withdraws into hiding in that which is
mysteriously astonishing, which is to be marveled at. (GA 12: 183)
The poem succeeds through language, after all, at directing us toward
an experience that cannot be descriptively presented. It does this by
orienting and directing us toward the constitutive relations that allow
entities to be. Thus, with a changed understanding of the relationship
between his words and things, and the deeper understanding of what
words are, the poet also arrives at a different sense of his task. No
longer does poetry only represent and beautify and make shine what
already exists. It can also attune us to that which does not belong in
presence in our world. The poet thus does not give up on the word. But
he uses his words differently. They illuminate the region of the word’s
absence and thus attune us and guide us to the phenomenon, rather
than descriptively presenting it. On the prior reading of “may be,” then,
the lesson of the poem is that words (whatever they are) are required

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for the stable presence of entities in a world. On the current reading,
the lesson is that the nonpresence of words (constitutive relational
nodes) is required for them to “be,” that is, give entities. Words are the
relations that maintain entities in being, but they are not themselves
entities. This latter insight directs us to yet another way to take the “no
thing may be” – as a kind of impersonal imperative, rather than an
indicative claim. The last line gives the content of the renunciation the
poet learns in the penultimate line. The poet henceforth will “not
permit any thing to be where the word is lacking” (GA 12: 157). That is,
he gives up the view of the relationship between words and things that
he held before, and renounces the expectation of always being able to
find a descriptive presentation of things. In so doing, he stops forcing
entities into a world where they do not belong. In renunciation, he
learns that a world has a normative style, within which some things
simply are not at home. Language is the house of being, then, in the
sense that each constitutive structure of relations offers a home for
some possibilities while excluding others: “a world only becomes a
world in the word, that means.” Heidegger explains: “a world is at
home in the language.” Language is the house of being means language
is “the house of the world” (GA 16: 547). The world has a house in
language because particular styles of being belong to particular
referential structures. The poet’s renunciation amounts to letting
entities be what they are, and releasing them when the conditions do
not exist for them to be. But there is more to the poet’s renunciation
than this. He also stops expecting everything that plays a disclosive role
in the world to have existence on the order of entities. In renunciation,
he allows the nothings to be. In particular, Heidegger argues, the poem
teaches us that the word may be what it is only when it is not forced
into a descriptive presentation. The poet no longer thinks of words as
terms, and thus imagines them as having a clear and definite content:
Words at first easily appear as terms. For their part, terms first appear
as spoken in a word sound. This in turn is at first a noise. It is sensorily
perceived. The sensory is taken as what is immediately given. The
word’s meaning is associated with the sound. This component of the
word is sensorily perceivable. What is non-sensory in the terms is their
sense, their meaning. One speaks therefore of sense-giving acts that
endow the word sounds with a sense. The terms are then either filled
with sense or more meaningful. Terms are like buckets and barrels,
from which one can draw the sense. (GA 8: 87)
The ordinary conception of language, the one the poet begins with,
thinks of words as terms with an associated sense, a sense that is fixed
and that has a more or less determinate content. The terms, “sense-
containers,” can be arrayed scientifically in dictionaries, which set forth

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their two constituents: the “sound form” and “sense content” (ibid.). In
the end, the poet takes to heart the thought that our words are
wellsprings: “words are not terms, and they are thus not like buckets
and barrels from which we draw some occurrent content. Words are
wellsprings, which ‘telling’” – the poetic and thoughtful use of language
(see GA 8: 86)– “excavates, and which need to be found and dug up
again and again, which are easily filled back in again, but also from time
to time gush up unexpectedly. Without the constantly renewed journey
to the wellspring, the buckets and barrels remain empty, or their
contents remain stale” (GA 8: 88). Words, constitutive nodes of
relations, are never completely within our grasp. We cannot capture
their sense with a name or designating term, but at best, we highlight
some portion of the rich web of relations they draw together. Thought
and poetry, the essential uses of language (see GA 8: 86), do not
pretend to possess exhaustively the meaning of the words. They
uncover the meanings of the world through a tireless effort of
excavation. Part of the renunciation the poet learns, then, is giving up
the pretension to mastery or control of words – because words are not
the kind of thing that lie completely within our control. The encounter
with George’s poem is meant to illustrate for us what it is like to treat
language as a wellspring. As we give the words the space they need to
oscillate, the poem guides us to an underlying structure of meanings
that illuminates our relationship to the words we speak. And it
encourages us to reflect on the way that our language provides a home
for certain entities, experiences, ranges of human possibilities, and so
on. Conclusion

We can now bring to a close the question with which we began. What
does the slogan mean – how is language the house of being? In his 1959
“Dialogue on Language,” one of the best and most detailed accounts of
the slogan, Heidegger noted, “for a long time, I have not liked to use the
word ‘language’ when I reflect on its essence” (GA 12: 136). The
exchange that follows in the dialogue is crucial for understanding the
slogan. Heidegger’s interlocutor asks, “but can you find a more
appropriate word?” Heidegger responds, “I think I have found it. I
would like, however, to protect it from being used as a familiar title and
from being distorted into a designation for a concept.” The “more
appropriate” word is “saying.” Heidegger proceeds to explain saying in
terms of unconcealment – it means, he says, “the same as to show in
the sense of: letting appear and letting seem, but that, however, in the
manner of a hinting. . .. ‘saying,’ then, is not the name for human
speaking . . . but for essencing.” In its core, most fundamental meaning,

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“language” in the slogan is not “human speaking” – it is not the words,
noises and marks, the rules, and so on that we normally think of when
we talk about language. Instead, “language” in the slogan means
“saying,” which Heidegger defines in terms of “a showing.” But this is
not just any old showing. The language or saying he is interested in is
that showing that lets things appear and seem to be something. It does
this by establishing the ways, the primary relations by which a thing is
understood as the thing it is. Language is thus tied to what Heidegger
calls “essencing,” the way that essences are established as that on the
basis of which entities can be what they are. The slogan is thus meant
to direct our reflection to the way that some relations are given
priority in determining the essence of a thing within a particular world.
Saying enables particular human languages by giving them the salient
significations to which terms can (but need not) accrue. So saying is the
“house of being” because saying determines the way that things are
able to show up and be expressed in our ordinary language. But this is
consistent with holding, as Heidegger does, that some things cannot be
appropriately said in a language because the way they are permitted to
show up would distort them or would not allow them to come into
their own. Thus certain activities, self-understandings, projects, hopes,
and so on are “at home” in some languages and not at home in others.
“Language is the house of being” means, then, that a world is kept and
preserved by a consolidation of the relationships that determine a
thing as the thing it is. It is this settling, keeping, preserving of relations
that lets us inhabit, come to be at home in, a world: “the domain of
language is domain where all relationships of things and essence play
with each other and mirror each other” (GA 79: 168). It is not the terms
and associated concepts of ordinary language that house being. It is
language understood as the fitted structure of relations: “language is
not a collection of terms for the designation of individual familiar
things, but rather the original ringing out of the truth of a world” (GA
6.1: 325). Thus, the slogan points to a relational ontology, in which the
constitution of the world is determined by the (temporary)
stabilization of salient nodes of constitutive relationships. And this, in
turn, highlights the idea that housing being means providing it a home,
a coherent style of organizing the world. Things and forms of life can
thus either be at home in a language or distorted and threatened by it.
All of this supports the contention that, even in his later works,
Heidegger is not a linguistic constitutionalist (and thus holds a position
in box C of Chart 6.2). This is because originary language is something
that cannot be grasped by ordinary linguistic categories and concepts.
And words are not something that articulate the world conceptually,
even if they do constitute entities as the entities they are by affording

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them a more-or-less stable structure of meanings to inhabit. To
complete the analysis, though, we would need to work out with more
care the relationship between ordinary language and originary
language – a task to be deferred. Chapter 6 1 Monika Betzler suggested
this in her review of Mind and World in Erkenntnis 48 (1998): 115.
2 “Karl Jaspers to Heidegger,” Letter of August 6, 1949, Martin

Heidegger/Karl Jaspers Briefwechsel 1920–1963. Frankfurt am Main:

Klostermann/München: Piper, 1990, p. 179.
3 See Cristina LaFont, Heidegger, Language and World Disclosure

(Graham Harman, Trans.). Cambridge, England: Cambridge University

Press, 2000.
4 There is also a development in Heidegger’s understanding of

Ereignis as the source of originary language. But that is a topic for

another occasion.
5 “The Retrait of Metaphor,” Enclitic 2 (1978): 6–33.
6 See also the passage previously cited: “the essence of language

cannot be anything linguistic. And thus it is also with the expression

‘the house of being’” (GA 12: 108).
7 In 1925, however, Heidegger still hadn’t rigorously distinguished

between the communicative aspect of discourse and the meaning-

articulating aspect. See: “discourse has a distinctive function in the
development of the discoveredness of Dasein: it lays out, that is, it
brings the referential relations of meaningfulness into relief in
communication” (GA 20: 370).
8 Although I take it as a sign of Heidegger’s never-ending experimental

approach to the use of terms that Rede stages a comeback in one late
course, the Freiburger Vorträge of 1957 (GA 79).
9 Heidegger discusses this claim in both lectures and lecture courses

devoted exclusively to Greek thinkers, as well as extended discussions

in lecture courses more broadly conceived. Among the former are two
lecture courses in 1931: Aristotles: Metaphysiks IX, GA 33 and Vom
Wesen der Wahrheit. Zu Platons Höhlengleichnis und Theätet, GA 34;
in 1932 the lecture course Der Anfang der abendländischen
Philosophie (Anaximander und Parmenides) (GA 35) and a lecture on
“Platos Phaidros.”
10 In the Nietzsche lectures, Heidegger rejects the animals’ account of

recurrence advanced in this passage because it advocates a view of

eternal recurrence as a cyclical repetition. He does not explicitly
comment at that time on the idea of language implicit in this passage.
11 See also GA 7: 148.
12 Heidegger rejects, of course, the idea that entities move in a circle –

that they get broken down and reconstituted over and over again in
exactly the same ways. See GA 6.1: 263ff, where Heidegger explains

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that interpreting the eternal recurrence as a circling of entities is too
easy, and fails to appreciate the importance of the moment as a
collision between past and future.
13 “Wort,” in Deutsches Wörterbuch von Jacob und Wilhelm Grimm,

vol. 30. Leipzig: S. Hirzel, 1960, p. 1473.

14 Ibid., p. 1529.
15 F. Steingass, A Comprehensive Persian-English Dictionary. London:

Routledge, 1977, p. 613; see Adam Jacot de Boinod, The Meaning of

Tingo. New York: Penguin, 2007, p. 153.
16 See also GA 10: 104: “But being is not a thing that some one of us

takes away and puts to the side. Rather self-withdrawing is the manner
that being essentially comes to be, that is, proffers itself as presencing.
The withdrawal does not shunt being to the side; rather, self-
withdrawing belongs, as self-concealing, in the property of being. Being
preserves its propriety in self-revealing insofar as it simultaneously
conceals itself as this self-concealing. Self-concealing, the withdrawal,
is a manner in which being qua being lasts, proffers itself, that is,
vouchsafes itself.”
17 “The only ‘being’ that metaphysics knows is being as stability and

presencing” (GA 66: 394).

18 The most egregious case of this is provided by Cristina Lafont, who

uses the following passage to try to prove that for Heidegger,” what
things are is equated with what is contingently disclosed by a
language” (Lafont, Heidegger, Language, and World Disclosure, p. 193).
To support her claim that Heidegger believes that we can only
encounter things that we can already name, Lafont quotes this passage,
but selectively elides precisely those parts where Heidegger warns
against such a reading. In addition, she strings together quotations
spread out over several pages – in one case, completing a sentence with
a phrase that appears one page and two paragraphs later. Here is
Lafont’s use of the passage in question: [Heidegger’s] conclusion is as
follows: “The thing is a thing only where the word is found for the
thing. . .. The word alone supplies being to the thing [i.e.,] what it is and
how it is. . .. Something only is, where the appropriate word names
something as existing and in this way institutes the particular entity as
such.” Therefore, “the essence of all that is resides in the word. For this
reason, the following phrase holds good: language is the house of
being” (Lafont, Heidegger, Language, and World Disclosure, pp. 193,
quoting Heidegger, UzS, pp. 164–6; ellipses are in Lafont’s text).
Here is the passage with the elided warnings restored in bold:
[Heidegger’s] conclusion is as follows: “The thing is a thing only where
the word is found for the thing. . .. The word alone supplies being to the
thing. Yet how can a mere word accomplish this – to bring a thing into

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being? The true situation is obviously the reverse. Take the sputnik.
This thing, if such it is, is obviously independent of that name which
was later tacked on to it. . .. We listen to the poem that we read. Did we
hear it? Barely. We have merely picked up the last line – and done so
almost crudely – and have even ventured to rewrite it into an
unpoetical statement: No thing is where the word is lacking. We could
go further and propose this statement: Something only is, where the
appropriate word names something as existing and in this way
institutes the particular entity as such. Does this mean, also, that there
is being only where the appropriate word is speaking? Where does the
word derive its appropriateness? The poet says nothing about it. But
the content of the closing line does after all include the statement: “the
essence of all that is resides in the word. For this reason, the following
phrase holds good: language is the house of being. By this procedure,
we would seem to have adduced from poetry the most handsome
confirmation for a principle of thinking which we had stated at some
time in the past – and in truth would have thrown everything into utter
confusion. We would have reduced poetry to the servant’s role as
documentary proof for our thinking, and taken thinking too lightly; in
fact we would already have forgotten the whole point: to undergo an
experience with language. It takes no great hermeneutic sensitivity to
see that Lafont is attributing to Heidegger positions from which he is
explicitly distancing himself – positions which are “crude,” which
“throw everything into confusion,” and, most importantly, which miss
the whole point of the exercise.
7 The Revealed Word and World Disclosure
Heidegger and Pascal on the Phenomenology of Religious Faith

In what may be his most concise explanation of the nature of

phenomenology, Heidegger explains that it consists in grasping “its
objects in such a way that everything about them which is up for
discussion must be treated by exhibiting them directly and
demonstrating them directly” (GA 2: H. 35). That means that
phenomenology always proceeds from out of a direct experience of the
objects in question, and it attempts to address and resolve problems in
philosophy by producing a direct apprehension of the relevant
phenomena. A phenomenology will be in order, then, whenever a
problem is affected by the fact that the object under discussion is
something that “proximally and for the most part does not show itself”
(GA 2: H. 35), or when its appearance is distorted by theories or
concepts inappropriate to the object in question. It is for this reason
that, when it came to religious faith, Heidegger accords to
phenomenology a “corrective” role, meaning that it clarifies and

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corrects the content of theological concepts. This is necessary to the
extent that these concepts are surreptitiously drawn from a “pre-
Christian” context, and drawn in such a way as to obscure the true
essence of Christian faith. Faith itself does not need philosophy –
philosophical argumentation cannot establish faith, nor even lend it
support. At most, philosophy can clear away theoretical distortions
that create obstacles to the practice of religious faith. In this paper, I
want to focus on a distortion of faith that is produced by a particular
view of language. The relationship to language, to the revealed word, is,
of course, a central and essential element to many faiths, including the
Christian faith. As all phenomenology ought to grow out of experience,
however, we ought first to try to bring an experience of religious faith
into view. Toward this end, let us start with Pascal’s description of the
Christian life: Not only is it through Jesus Christ alone that we know
God, but it is only through Jesus Christ that we know ourselves. We
know life and death only through Jesus Christ. Without Jesus Christ we
do not know what our life, nor our death, nor God, nor ourselves really
are. In the same way without the Scriptures, which have Jesus Christ as
their sole object, we know nothing and see only darkness and
confusion in the nature of God and in nature itself.1 In what follows, I
will focus on two parts of this description of the Christian life. First,
that to be a Christian – to have faith in Christ – is to experience the
world (including nature and our selves) as revealed in and through
Jesus Christ. Faith, on this view, is not primarily an epistemic state.
Second, that this experience of the world depends on having a certain
relationship to the scriptures – in particular, one in which they teach
one how to see. Heidegger, incidentally, shares both elements of
Pascal’s view: the essence of faith can formally be sketched as a way of
existence of human Dasein that, according to its own testimony . . .
arises not from Dasein or spontaneously through Dasein, but rather
from that which is revealed in and with this way of existence, from
what is believed. For the “Christian” faith, that being which is primarily
revealed to faith, and only to it, and which, as revelation, first gives rise
to faith, is Christ, the crucified God. . .. The crucifixion, however, and all
that belongs to it is a historical event, and indeed this event gives
testimony to itself as such in its specifically historical character only for
faith in the scriptures. One “knows” about this fact only in believing.
(GA 9: 52/Pathmarks, p. 44)
For Heidegger too, in other words, faith is not an epistemic state but a
mode of existence that reveals the world, and Christian faith arises out
of the world as it is revealed through faith in the scriptural word. Note
the circular character of both Heidegger’s and Pascal’s descriptions –
faith is a way of living in the world that arises from the world being

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disclosed or revealed through faith. To have faith, then, the world must
be able to support a certain mode of existence – certain practices,
dispositions, and so on – but the world only shows up in a such a way
that it can support that mode of existence to one who already has the
mode of existence. There is an obvious circularity here, but it is not a
vicious circle. We are familiar with similar forms of circularity. You
could say, for example, that being a baseball player is a way of living in
the world that arises from the world being disclosed through people
(having the skills and dispositions for) playing baseball. But the
circularity does present a problem – namely, how to get into the circle
in the first place. The answer, for both Heidegger and Pascal, is found in
the role played by the revealed word – the scriptures – in introducing
people into the life of faith.2 I will argue that to account for this
understanding of the relation between faith and the scriptures, we
need a different view of the function of language than is now
commonplace. Language is typically understood on a communicative
model, according to which, language is a means by which we
communicate intentional contents to one another. If we assimilate the
revealed word to this model, then it, too, is taken to function as a kind
of speech act. Faith, as a consequence, finds its fulfillment in the
satisfaction of the speech act – for example, verification of assertions
about the incarnation of God in Christ, or his crucifixion and
resurrection. But with such claims, the verification is perpetually
deferred. In addition, on the communicative model, we are not entitled
to assert or assent to a proposition unless we undertake the “discursive
commitments” entailed by that proposition – that we, for example, are
prepared to offer proof of or justification for the proposition in
question, or that we at a minimum understand and can explain what
other propositions we are committed to in virtue of accepting the one
in question. But with their acceptance of claims about, for example, the
creation or the resurrection, the faithful find it impossible to fulfil such
rational obligations. This makes them look and sometime even feel as if
their faith requires them to abandon a commitment to rationality. But
all this arises, I shall argue, from the mistaken belief that religious
assertions are in the game of communicating propositions. There is a
different view of language, only implicit in Pascal’s thought but
developed in the later Heidegger, that is compatible with Pascal’s
phenomenology of Christian life – a view of language, in other words,
free of the background assumptions about language that subtly distort
the way faith in the revealed word is typically understood today. The
aim here is to illuminate an understanding of language that provides
the background against which religious faith can be seen for what it
genuinely is. On this view, language is understood in terms of world

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disclosure, and the revealed word is taken to function by orienting us
to the world in such a way that it can disclose itself to us anew. If faith
succeeds in disclosing a world, and empowering us to live in the world,
then the fulfillment of faith is not deferred but can be confirmed
through our experience of inhabiting a world. This is so, even if we are
not in a position to verify any of the central assertions made in the
revealed word. Before turning to the role of language in religious faith,
however, I would like to develop in more detail how faith can be
understood in terms of world disclosure. As Pascal’s phenomenology of
religious faith is much better developed than Heidegger’s, I will focus
on Pascal’s description of the Christian life. 1. Faith as a Mode of
Existence

“Faith” is often taken as naming an epistemic state. In particular, it is

heard as denoting a degree of confidence in the truth of a proposition –
typically, one in which the subjective probability assigned to the truth
of the sentence is greater than one half but less than one. One has faith
that, for example, God exists when one has confidence that the
proposition “God exists” is more likely true than not true. For thinkers
like Pascal and Kierkegaard, however, such a degree of confidence is a
derivative of faith understood in existential terms – confidence in the
truth of certain propositions grows out of the way that faith in Christ
produces a changed experience of the world. “The Christian thesis,”
Kierkegaard wrote, “goes not: intelligere ut credam, nor credere ut
intelligam. No it goes: Act according to the commands and orders of
Christ; do the Father’s will – and you will become a believing-one.”3
Pascal, in a similar way, noted that “it is clear that those with a keen
faith in their hearts can see straightaway that everything which exists
is the work of the God they worship.” On the other hand, “those in
whom this light [of faith] has been extinguished. . ., scrutinising with all
their intelligence everything they see in nature which can lead them to
this knowledge . . . find only obscurity and darkness” (P 644). Thus
faith is to be understood, in the first instance, as the state of those who
are able to act and live in a Christian way. Without an ability to live a
Christian life and inhabit a Christian world, mere belief in God or the
truth of religious claims is not faith, it is superstition. Superstition is
belief in the existence of entities and events that do not manifest
themselves in the ordinary course of experience. My belief that my son
will clean his room is not a superstition because, while the degree of
probability that he will clean his room might be objectively low,
children cleaning their rooms are events that do occur in the normal
course of affairs in the world (or, at least, that’s what other parents tell

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me). By contrast, if I hold the belief that there is a God in spite of the
fact that there is no place for God in my experience of the world, then
the belief is a superstition. It is not just that there is a low probability
that God does exist, it is rather that, given my experience of the world,
it is utterly incomprehensible how there could be a God. Of course, we
do not typically use the word “faith” to denote a mere mental state of
belief. Faith also involves actually relying on or having confidence in
the object of one’s faith. We would not ordinarily say of someone that
she has faith in something if she is incapable of acting in reliance on
that thing. Pascal captures this by noting that faith is a “disposition
within [the] heart” (P 412). But the idea of a disposition of the heart
goes beyond simply being disposed to act in a certain way. It also
includes being primed to feel or experience things in a certain way. If
we say that someone has a “sunny disposition,” we are saying that she
responds to all situations cheerfully, and generally focuses on the
bright side of even bad events. So what kind of disposition is Christian
faith? It involves both a kind of feeling or readiness to experience
things in such and such a way, and a kind of practical orientation or
readiness to act in a certain way. Pascal gets at this in a backhanded
way in the following passage: There are few true Christians. Even as
far as faith goes. There are many who believe, but through superstition.
There are many who do not believe, but through licentiousness. There
are few in between. I do not include those who lead a truly devout life,
nor all those who believe through a feeling of the heart. (P 210; cf.
142)
We would not say, in other words, that someone has Christian faith
who is unable to live a Christian life. This is true, even if that person
had a rationally grounded knowledge of God.4 So faith is located in the
existential register, meaning the presence or absence of faith is a
matter of the kind of stance one takes on life, the practices one engages
in, the ways one feels about things. True faith is found in one’s
disposition (feelings of the heart) and the actions that arise from those
dispositions (living a devout life). True disbelief, by the same token, is
found in a corrupt and licentious life (taking pleasure in what is not
pleasing to God, doing actions that God condemns). Philosophers from
Aristotle to Hubert Dreyfus have shown how, in developing habits and
practicing actions for dealing with a particular domain, we acquire
skillful dispositions so attuned to that domain that we can perceive
things of which we were oblivious before. As I practice baking bread,
for example, I gradually become sensitized to notice things like texture
and elasticity in the dough, fine variations in color as the bread browns
in the oven, and so on. The skills allow me to experience the world in a
way that I could not without them. For Pascal, religious faith works the
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same way. He explains: You want to find faith and you do not know
the way? You want to cure yourself of unbelief and you ask for the
remedies? Learn from those who have been bound like you, and who
now wager all they have. They are people who know the road you want
to follow and have been cured of the affliction of which you want to be
cured. Follow the way by which they began: by behaving just as if they
believed, taking holy water, having masses said, etc. That will make you
believe quite naturally, and according to your animal reactions. (P
680)
Acquiring the skills of religious living, and thus having the
dispositions to feel and act appropriately in the world that appears
when one has those skills, is then an enabling condition of having faith.
Notice that this description replicates the circularity in Heidegger’s and
Pascal’s earlier descriptions of faith – faith is “a way of existence that
arises from the world revealed by this way of existence.” At the same
time, this does not mean that faith is reducible to these skills.
Something further might well be needed in addition to having these
skills – perhaps the grace of God in changing our fundamental
dispositions. But the point here is simply that the fact that faith must be
grounded in practices rather than cognitive assent changes the kind of
proof we can demand of faith. Faith will then not be amenable to proof
in the way one verifies an epistemic state or proposition (i.e.,
demonstrating that it is true). But it will have the kind of confirmation
or success conditions that all other skills have. Baking skills are
confirmed or successful when they allow me to cope with the kitchen.
Religious faith will be confirmed or successful when it gives me the
practices and dispositions I need to cope with the world as a whole. As
Father Zosima notes in Dostoevsky’s classic depiction of existential
Christianity, “one cannot prove anything here, but it is possible to be
convinced.” He goes on to explain that one is convinced “by the
experience of active love. . .. The more you succeed in loving, the more
you’ll be convinced of the existence of God and the immortality of your
soul. And if you reach complete selflessness in the love of your
neighbour, then undoubtedly you will believe, and no doubt will even
be able to enter your soul.”5 The confirmation and conviction come, in
other words, through one’s success in living in the world in the way
indicated by faith. To argue for the necessity of religious faith, as
thinkers like Pascal, Kierkegaard, and Dostoevsky do, however, one
would need to show not just that faith allows one successfully to live in
the world but that, without it, one cannot cope successfully with the
world. Pascal and other existential Christians do this by arguing that all
men are in despair (whether they realize this or not), and that it is only
the Christian who, through the saving grace of Christ, is able to resolve

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that despair. We have already seen that, for Pascal, Christian faith is
such that the Christian understands the nature of the world and herself
through Christ. Christ shows us that we have a dual nature of
wretchedness and greatness. Our greatness is found in the fact that we
long for happiness, the good, truth, justice, love, glory, and eternity, and
that we have an understanding that there is a good, truth, and eternity
(even if we cannot quite grasp intellectually what the good, the true,
the eternal, etc., is). Our wretchedness is seen in the fact that, rather
than pursuing what can bring us happiness (good, truth, justice, love,
glory, eternity, etc.), our concupiscence drives us to seek transitory
pleasures. And our reason shows us that we are not happy, that we do
not know the good, truth, or justice; that we are not worthy of love or
glory; and that, in the face of death, our eternity is in doubt. The
inability to reconcile this dual nature, to find anything in this world
that could satisfy our longing for greatness, leads to a despair that
many feel, and which others attest to by their efforts to find diversion
in various pursuits and pleasures. It is only faith in Christ, Pascal
believes, that can ultimately resolve the contradiction of our essential
natures.6 But before addressing that issue in more detail, there is
another feature of our initial characterization of Christianity that we
need to address. We said at the outset that, for both Pascal and
Heidegger, Christian faith is (1) a world-disclosive mode of existence
that (2) arises from a particular relationship to the scriptures. We have
discussed this first feature of Christianity but not the second. In fact,
the way we have discussed the first problematizes the second, since, as
we have seen, the mode of existence arises not from the acceptance of
religious-dogmatic propositions but from the development of religious
practices. Moreover, for Pascal, a cognizance of, and assent to, the
propositions contained in the scriptures is not enough for religious
faith. For example, merely assenting to scriptural claims regarding the
resurrection, when done so against the background of an experience of
the world in causal terms, remains mere superstition – a belief that
God will intervene as a cause in the causal order of a universe that has
no place for God. But the revealed claims one finds in the scriptures
seem to be propositions that are addressed to the understanding. How
then could the scriptures, which seem to be primarily concerned to
communicate certain propositions to the believers, be essential to
Christian faith? Pascal gives us only a few clues to his thinking on the
matter. To this point, I have perhaps been overemphasizing the
noncognitivist grounds of Pascal’s experience of the revealed word. But
having done so, I think we can now consider the proper and limited
place of reason in Pascal’s account. Commenting on Acts 17:11, for
example (“These were more noble than those in Thessalonica, in that

166
they received the word with all readiness of mind, and searched the
scriptures daily, whether those things were so”), Pascal notes that “the
way of God, who disposes all things gently, is to implant religion into
our mind through reason and into our heart through grace” (P 203).
Just preceding this passage, Pascal observed: We must know where to
doubt, where to affirm and where to submit when necessary. Whoever
does not do this does not understand the force of reason. There are
some who fall short of these three principles, either by affirming that
everything can be demonstrated, lacking all knowledge of the
demonstration; or doubting everything, lacking the knowledge of
where to submit, or by submitting to everything, lacking the knowledge
of where to discriminate. (P 201)
In the conduct of our lives, in other words, there are appropriate
places to doubt and to seek a rational justification. But there are also
times where this is inappropriate. And to doubt, or to insist on rational
demonstration where one ought simply to submit, is to destroy the
disposing power of faith: “if we submit everything to reason, our
religion will contain nothing mysterious” (P 204). To a cognitivist
ear, that does not sound like such a loss. But for Pascal, the mysteries of
religion, for all their rational incomprehensibility, lend to life an order
and coherence. He illustrates this with the example of the mystery of
the doctrine of original sin. The idea that we are guilty and condemned
for the sin of another “seems not only impossible to us, but also quite
unjust. For what is more contrary to the laws of our wretched justice
than eternally to damn a child with no will of its own for a sin in which
the child has so small a part to play that it was committed six thousand
years before the child came into existence?” (P 164). If the doctrine is
irrationalizable and incomprehensible, however, it also makes sense of
a central feature of human existence – our simultaneous depravity and
transcendent dignity. And so, Pascal concludes, “without this most
incomprehensible of all mysteries we are incomprehensible to
ourselves. Within this gnarled chasm lie the twists and turns of our
condition. So, humanity is more inconceivable without this mystery
than this mystery is conceivable to humanity” (ibid.). Note that Pascal
does not claim even a transcendental-style proof or verification of the
mystery. It remains inconceivable, incomprehensible. Indeed, to try to
prove it would probably distort our understanding of God’s nature and
justice or the nature of culpability. Nothing would distort our picture of
justice more, for instance, than to make the principles of justice cohere
with the idea that someone is culpable for the wrongdoing of another.
The mystery works best, then, precisely by being kept as a mystery and
accepted as such. And yet, by simply accepting the doctrine and letting
it work on us, we can begin to get a grip on a key existential feature of
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human existence. If we return, then, to the commentary on Acts, we see
that the revealed word has a power to work simultaneously on our
minds and our hearts. There is a place in Pascal’s picture for cognition.
But it is a limited place, and the cognitive content of the word works
alongside a quite different and independent force that the word has on
our hearts. The principle by which this force operates is not reason but
grace. The idea seems to be that simply by dedicated and loving
attention to the scriptures, our dispositions will gradually be shaped by
them. Another passage likewise indicates the view that scriptural
assertions somehow act on the heart – the dispositions – rather than or
in addition to the mind. Considering “the objection that Scripture has
no order,” Pascal responds by noting, “The heart has its order, the mind
has its own, which is based on principles and demonstration. The heart
has another one. We do not prove that we ought to be loved by setting
forth the causes of love; that would be absurd” (P 329). The idea here
is that scriptural assertions do not function as arguments, and call for a
different response on our part than ordinary assertions. It is in this
altered response that the revealed word will shape our dispositions
rather than our understanding. But how they are meant to do this is
something that Pascal never really explains. To make sense of these
clues about the role of scriptures in the Christian life, we will need to
be able to see assertions as engaged in something other than the
communication of propositions. 2. Language and the Revealed Word

On the communicative view of language, the essence of language is to

communicate a propositional content. Different kinds of speech acts do
different things by communicating a propositional content. But the
communication of a propositional content is common to them all. This
view has formed the background to a variety of attacks on religious
belief – for example, A. J. Ayer’s famous argument against the
meaningfulness of religious claims, given the inability of the faithful to
specify the propositional content of those claims in such a way that
they would be verifiable.7 Even if we reject Ayer’s verificationism,
thinking of language on the communicative model imposes on all who
would assent to certain assertions an obligation to be ready and willing
to cash out the propositional content of those assertions – on pain of
being shown to be speaking nonsense. It is quite possible, however,
that the function of certain religious claims is actually distorted if they
are cashed out in this manner. Rather than say more about this thought
directly, however, I want to focus on a related consequence of the
communicative view of language, namely, the pragmatic implications.
These implications have been most recently and clearly articulated by

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Robert Brandom. According to Brandom, to perform a speech act is to
undertake certain practical commitments. “At the core of discursive
practice is the game of giving and asking for reasons.” 8 To assent to an
assertion, for example, is to put oneself in the position of being
responsible to answer challenges to the truth of the assertion, and to
make further assertions that justify or tend to prove the truth of the
original assertion, and so on. This idea seems on the face of it
unobjectionable – indeed, perhaps trivially true and, I suspect, very
widely if tacitly accepted. But this truism could be elevated into a
falsism by insisting that an unwillingness or inability to play the game
in certain instances deprives the claim of any meaning. To the degree
that being a Christian is, in fact, determined through assenting to
certain assertions contained in the scriptures, the idea of discursive
commitments subtly informs most interpretations of what it is to be a
Christian. The Bible, without question, contains a number of assertions
to which a believer is expected to assent: “In the beginning, God
created the heaven and the earth” (Gen. 1: 1), or Christ “was buried,
and he arose again the third day” (1 Cor. 15: 4). A scriptural assertion
has done its job, one might say, if we understand the proposition to
which God (or the prophets) is committed in making the assertion, and
we believe it, meaning we accept it as true. This is because the most
important thing about assertions and beliefs – the conditions under
which they succeed – is being true. An assertion or belief is true, of
course, if it agrees with the way things really are. On the
communicative account, therefore, scriptural assertions are fulfilled
when they are true, and our relationship to the scriptural assertions is
fulfilled when we accept that they are true. In such acceptance, we
commit ourselves to answering for the truthfulness of the assertion.
The problem for the Christian is that, for so many of the assertions to
which a believer assents, it simply lies beyond our ability to justify or
prove them. Scriptural assertions are empirically challenging because
they often are either assertions about metaphysical facts (facts that lie
beyond the ken of any human experience), or historical facts that might
as well be metaphysical, because they are incapable of being verified in
any of the ways we ordinarily verify historical facts. To make it worse,
many of the assertions appear on the face of it to be incredible or at
least empirically superfluous. Given the normal course of worldly
events, it is improbable, to say the least, that Christ arose on the third
day from the tomb. Given the state of contemporary physics, it seems
unnecessary to suppose that God created the heavens and the earth. As
a result, two alternatives arise for someone who wants to take
scriptural assertions seriously (the other option, of course, is to not
take them seriously). We either accept their irrelevance to the ordinary

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course of worldly experience, in which case we lapse into what Pascal
called superstition. Or, we reinterpret them, understanding them no
longer as claims about an unseen world, but instead reduce them to
rather mundane truths about worldly experience. Let me start first
with the latter. Having been put off by the improbability and
superfluity of scriptural accounts of the world, the strategy here is to
treat scriptural assertions as metaphors or allegories for some
mundane reality. This view, too, is beholden to the idea that in
assenting to the truth of a proposition, we commit ourselves to playing
the game of giving and asking for reasons. Indeed, the reason for
departing from a literal interpretation is precisely that one wants
(charitably, of course) to understand the speaker as committing herself
to propositions that accord with the best state of our current
understanding of the world. But this amounts to giving up on the
religious belief as such, and, in fact, renders the Bible inferior to other
texts that do not need to resort to allegory to communicate their
mundane truths. Kant is a prime example of this approach: “we should
not interpret the text literally,” he notes, “unless we are willing to
charge it with error.” Since we do not want to do that with the sacred
text, it follows that we ought to read it metaphorically whenever
necessary to preserve its truth: “Reason,” he simply asserts, is “entitled
to interpret the text in a way it finds consistent with its own
principles.”9 Since Kant, history has given us a steady stream of others
who aim to make Christianity intellectually respectable by
“demythologizing” the sacred text. The first approach, by contrast,
affirms, in the face of all contradictory evidence, that scriptural
assertions are meant to be literally true of an unseen reality – even
when the assertions conflict with what we can ascertain through direct
experience. The problem with the literal approach is that, so long as we
think that the assent to an assertion commits us to offering proof about
the state of an unseen reality, then the fulfillment of our responsibility
as believers and the satisfaction of our faith in the scriptures is
continually deferred. To the unbeliever and the believer alike, this
looks like irrationality on the part of the believer – like she is
abandoning a commitment to reason because she is forced to forfeit
the game of giving and asking of reasons.10 But this is to reduce faith to
superstition, for it is to believe in something that has no place in our
ordinary experience of the world. By contrast, the view of faith that we
have been articulating shows us how our assent to propositions is
supported by, although not verified by or justified by, our living in the
world disclosed by faith. We are now in a position to say how this view
of faith is in tension with any position that would reduce meaningful
language to only those assertions for which we are able and willing to

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undertake such discursive commitments. First, on this view of faith, we
cannot in fact offer justification for a belief other than observing that
holding the belief supports and arises from a particular existential
stance in the world. Second, this kind of “justification” is only available
to those who already accept the belief. It cannot meaningfully be
offered to someone who is not living in the world revealed by faith. As
Pascal noted, to say to them that they only have to look at the least of
the things surrounding them and they will see God revealed there, and
then to give them as a complete proof of this great and important
matter the course of the moon and the planets, and to claim to have
achieved a proof with such an argument, is to give them cause to
believe that the proofs of our religion are indeed weak. I see by reason
and experience that nothing is more likely to arouse their contempt. (P
644)
All this suggests that being a Christian amounts to having a different
sort of relationship to the sacred word than that suggested by the
account of language in terms of the communication of propositions, the
assent to which generates discursive commitments. Our accepting
scriptural assertions as literally true may well be a necessary, if not
sufficient, condition for our being – existing as – a Christian. Such
assertions will only finally fulfil their function if they effect a change in
the way we experience the world. This means that assenting to the
truth of such assertions commits us not to the game of giving and
asking for reasons but to acting and responding to the world as it
appears in the light of those assertions. In fact, as Pascal’s comments
about love suggest, we have fundamentally misunderstood the
assertion if we see it as committing us to offering proof. This might
seem like a paradoxical view to attribute to Pascal who, after all, is
most famous for supposedly offering a proof of the rationality of faith
in God in the form of his “Wager.” To me, the almost exclusive attention
this passage has received to the neglect of the rest of the Pensées,
together with the way it is widely reproduced and anthologized
completely divorced from its context, speaks to the prevalence of
cognitivist prejudices in contemporary philosophy. Pascal included the
wager in his “discourse concerning the machine” – the machine being
the metaphor for our automatic, unthinking responses to the world.
Thus the purpose of this discourse, Pascal explained, was to encourage
us to seek God “by removing the obstacles, which is the argument of
the machine, of preparing the machine by reason to seek” (P 45,
trans. modified). The use of reason, in other words, is to redirect our
dispositions and unthinking responses, thus opening us up to the
possibility of seeking God. But the pursuit of God is not itself conducted
by reason. The wager shows that it is not irrational to live a religious
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life (it does not “sin against reason”), given that one loses nothing
through such a life but stands to gain infinity, an eternity of life and
happiness. Indeed, Pascal acknowledges that the wager does not prove
the truth of anything about Christianity. All it can do is remove
obstacles to belief by recruiting reason to the task of “urging you to
believe.” The moral of the wager is not that there are reasons justifying
or verifying religious belief, but rather that any obstacles to belief arise
not from reason but from the passions, from our dispositional
responses to the world. He concludes: “so concentrate not on
convincing yourself by increasing the number of proofs of God but on
diminishing your passions” (P 680). Reason can assist in this by
convincing us to engage in the practices that will change our
dispositions. But it is not itself directly capable of establishing religious
faith. Along the same lines, Pascal argues elsewhere: “There are three
ways to believe: reason, custom, inspiration. The Christian religion,
which alone has reason, does not admit for its true children those who
believe without inspiration. It is not that it excludes reason and custom,
on the contrary; but we must open our minds to the proofs, confirm
ourselves in it through custom, yet offer ourselves through
humiliations to inspirations, which alone can produce the true and
salutary effect” (P 655). Pascal’s faith does not abandon reason, but it
understands the limits of reason in the religious life. The famous wager
itself, then, is an instance of a linguistic expression that includes
assertions and rational arguments, but which finds its fulfillment not in
being verified as true but in orienting us to the things and people and
events in the world around us. We are responsible to such assertions
not by committing to offer proof of them but by allowing them to
perform their dispositional reorientation. It does not follow that their
truth or falsity is irrelevant to us. Indeed, it may be the case that such
expressions only serve to orient us correctly to the world if we actually
believe that they are true. But it does follow that establishing their
truth or falsity is not our primary concern. Take, for example, Pascal’s
suggestion about love. Suppose I make the assertion: “my wife loves
me.” There is a fact of the matter whether she does, in fact, love me; the
assertion is either true or false. And it really matters to me whether it
is true or false. But I would misunderstand my commitment to the
assertion if I then set out to prove that it is true. Indeed, to devote
attention to establishing whether it is true or false might very well
destroy my ability to let my faith in her love illuminate our
relationship. Such linguistic acts, then, do not find their fulfillment in
communicating truths, although they do also communicate truths. And
we do not hold ourselves responsible to them by giving and asking for
reasons. Instead, their primary function is that of showing us
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something new, and helping us discern how we ought to orient
ourselves with respect to the things that they show us. It is in such
terms that I understand Heidegger’s claim that poetic language “speaks
by saying; that is, by showing. . .. Language speaks by pointing, reaching
out to every region of presencing, letting what is present in each case
appear in such regions or vanish from them” (GA 12: 243/Basic
Writings, p. 411). Let us look at one of Heidegger’s examples of how
such poetic language works. In a discussion of Trakl’s poem, “Ein
Winterabend,” Heidegger notes that “the Christian world comes into
play in the poem.” Here is one strophe from the poem:

Viewed as a set of assertions, Heidegger notes, we could say that the

poem describes a winter evening (GA 12: 16/PLT: 196). The assertions
contained in the poem may or may not have been true of some actual
window and table and bell. But in a real sense, their truth or falsity is
not at stake here – not because the window and table and bell are
symbols or metaphors for a nonsensuous reality, but because the key
to understanding the poem is learning to see other tables and windows
and bells related in the way that it shows. The ordinary world shows
up as a setting for the communion of believers. When the poem really
works, it shows us how the objects in a Christian world hang together,
how things could matter to us if we had the right disposition for the
world. Heidegger calls this act of showing us how things matter to us
“naming.” When the poem names, it brings things “near” to us (GA 12:
18/PLT: 198); that means, it makes them matter to us or concern us in
a way that they did not before: “it invites things in, so that they may
bear upon men as things” (GA 12: 19/PLT: 199). In this particular case,
the poem can only do this if the world to which it orients us can, for
instance, actually open up in a way that allows tables to be laid out in
preparation for communal meals, and in a way that allows vesper bells
actually to call us together so that religious services give order and
purpose to our lives. The poetic word calls us to a world that can
actually be disclosed as a space and time for living a Christian life. 3.
Scriptures as World Disclosure

If we approach scriptural claims from this perspective – that is,

against a background according to which the highest task and
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paradigmatic functioning of language is not communication of
information, but world disclosure – then things look somewhat
different. We can now accept scriptural claims as literally true of an
unseen reality, but their being true does not exhaust their function –
nor is it even the highest realization of their purpose. Instead, their
paradigmatic function is to disclose the world to us in a new way. As
we allow the scriptures to attune us to the world as God’s creation and
people as God’s children, we are affectively reoriented to the world.
That is, the important thing is not that we think differently about the
world, but rather that we feel it differently, see it differently. On such a
view, we are no longer worried about the probability or implausibility
of the claims as metaphysical claims. Instead, we are satisfied if our
faith shows us how to see this world. Cognitively, the saint’s Christian
faith remains deferred – that is, her literal acceptance of claims about,
for example, the resurrection is not something she can conclusively
justify. But that literal acceptance disposes her for the world in such a
way that she can inhabit the world without despair. She succeeds in
living in the world that is disclosed by faith, and is thus convinced of
the truth of her faith (just as I am convinced that my wife loves me
when I can succeed in sustaining a loving relationship with her). This
might sound to some dangerously close to the allegorical reading. But it
only appears so to the extent that one continues to believe that
assenting to the literal truth of an assertion commits one to unpacking
its propositional content, or justifying or proving it. Having gotten over
thinking this, we not only can accept the literal truth of scriptural
claims, but we can see that they may not do their job unless we do
accept their literal truth. At the same time, the scriptural assertions
have also not done their job if they merely show us what to accept
cognitively – and this is true even if we successfully rise to the
challenge of offering reasons in their support. They need also to attune
us to the world so that we can see it opened up to us. I only intend here
to give some bare indications of how Pascal thinks this works. Take, for
example, Pascal’s observation that belief in the incarnation shows us
how to deal with the despair stemming from our dual nature of
wretchedness and greatness. The human condition, Pascal argues, is a
hopeless contradiction of possessing both carnal and passionate
appetites, and high spiritual longings. There is a long tradition of trying
to resolve the contradictions by getting rid of one side or the other of
our nature. In the Christian tradition, this has typically taken the form
of denying our passionate side, “renouncing everything” the world
offers to satisfy our passions, and thus achieving, in Kierkegaard’s
words, “peace and repose and consolation in pain”11 – that is, resigning
ourselves to never finding satisfaction in this world. Such a solution,

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Pascal notes, cannot succeed because the passions are an ineliminable
part of what it is to be human: This interior war between reason and
the passions meant that those who wanted peace divided into two
sects. Some wanted to renounce the passions and become gods, the
others wanted to renounce reason and become brute beasts. . .. But
neither group succeeded, and reason is still there accusing the
baseness and injustice of the passions and disturbing the peace of
those who give way to them, and the passions are still alive in those
who want to reject them.12 If this is right, then traditional Christian
pessimism necessarily gives rise to despair – a despair of needing to,
but being unable to, find in this world the fulfillment of our
profoundest longings. But thinkers like Kierkegaard, Pascal, and
Dostoevsky have long suggested that the Christian doctrine of our
embodiment entails that we are not simply spirits, and thus that we
have a necessary, essential attachment to the world that must be
fulfilled. “The will itself will never provide satisfaction, even if it had
power over all it wanted,” Pascal notes. And yet, “without it we cannot
be unhappy, though we cannot be happy” (P 394). What we need is to
find some way to satisfy our will in order to achieve happiness. God’s
incarnation in Christ, Pascal believes, teaches us that “we do not show
greatness by being at one extreme, but rather by touching both at once
and filling all the space in between” (P 560). It is only the scriptural
account of Jesus which can teach us this: “that is the new and
astonishing conjunction that only a single God could teach, that he
alone could achieve, and which is merely the image and effect of the
inexpressible marriage of two natures in the single person of Man-God”
(P 34). Belief in Christ’s incarnation, in other words, shows us our
human existence not as something to despair at but as something to
affirm. Only by accepting the literal truth of the scriptural account, in
other words, can we be attuned to the world not as something to
despair over but as an opportunity to show our greatness. The
examples the scriptures provide of Christ’s deeds teach us specifically
how to accept both sides of our nature, and free ourselves from being
constantly driven by a lack. According to Pascal, for example, being
attuned for the world by the scriptural account of Christ’s life disposes
us not to put our reliance on anything temporal (cf. P 15 & 511).
But if this were all, of course, it would lead to despair. The trick is to
find out how not to become attached to particular worldly things while
also being able to live joyfully in the world. So what Jesus teaches us is
how to relate to all the finite things without either (a) making them
absolute, or (b) giving up on the longing for the absolute. We learn not
to make them absolute because, by imitating Christ, we become
disposed to all the supposed great things of the earth as being vanity
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and emptiness. At the same time, we do not give up on longing for the
absolute because Christ promises us that, through a meek and loving
relationship to things in the world, we can become joint heirs with him
in the life to come. And, more importantly, through our faithful
practices, we open ourselves to an experience of God’s grace here in
the world. God’s grace works by making us capable of joy in this world:
To save his elect, God sent Jesus Christ to carry out his justice and to
merit with his mercy the grace of Redemption, medicinal grace; the
grace of Jesus Christ which is nothing other than complaisance and
delectation in God’s law diffused into the heart by the Holy Ghost,
which, not only equalling but even surpassing the concupiscence of the
flesh, fills the will with a greater delight in good than concupiscence
offers in evil; and so free will, entranced by the sweetness and
pleasures which the Holy Ghost inspires in it, more than the attractions
of sin, infallibly chooses God’s law for the simple reason that it finds
greater satisfaction there, and feels his beatitude and happiness.13 For
Pascal, then, we find satisfaction not in any particular worldly thing but
through living a Christ-like life. That is to say, when we follow Christ’s
example as set forth in the revealed word, we allow our dispositions to
be changed in such a way that we can live joyfully in this world, no
matter what happens to us. I hold out my arms to my Saviour, who,
having been foretold for four thousand years, came to suffer and to die
for me on earth, at the time and in the circumstances which were
foretold. And through his grace I await death peacefully, in the hope of
being eternally united with him, and meanwhile I live joyfully, either in
the blessings which he is pleased to bestow on me, or in the afflictions
which he sends me for my good and which he taught me to endure by
his example.14 Because the Christian life changes our dispositions in
such a way that we find joy in the Christian life itself, we are able to
defer our longing for something absolute. The joy comes because, by
giving up trying to satisfy oneself, one learns to be open to the needs of
the situation and of others. By imitating Christ in this respect, we
develop habits and foster a particular predisposition, namely, one in
which we enjoy things as they present themselves without trying to
turn them into something eternal (this is Pascal’s existential
specification of the Christian virtues of humility and charity). The
result is a life of meek submission, tragic but hopeful – a minimal
happiness with intermittent mystical moments of Joy. 15 Chapter 7
Earlier versions of this paper were presented at “Questioning Religion,”
The British Society for Phenomenology Summer Conference, the
University of Greenwich, July 13, 2003, and at the University of Nevada,
Reno, on September 24, 2004. I would like to thank all those present on
those occasions for their helpful comments and responses to this

176
paper. My thinking on these matters has benefitted immensely from
Piotr Hoffmann’s extensive, detailed, and pointed disagreements with
my interpretation of Pascal. Piotr will undoubtedly be disappointed
that I persist in the mainlines of my noncognitivist reading of faith in
Pascal. But I am nevertheless grateful and indebted to him for forcing
me to enrich and expand my appreciation of the complexity of these
issues in Pascal’s thought.
1 Blaise Pascal, Pensées (H. Levi, Trans.). Oxford, England: Oxford

University Press, 1995, 36; from now on referred to as P in the text,

followed by the section number.
2 This circular structure makes religious faith analogous to a

hermeneutic approach to a text. My thanks to Steven Crowell and

Taylor Carman for pointing this fact out to me.
3 Søren Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers, vol. 3 (Howard V. Hong &

Edna H. Hong, Eds. and Trans.). Indiana: Indiana University Press,

1975, p. 363. I am grateful to James Faulconer for bringing this passage
to my attention.
4 Pensées, 690: “Such knowledge,” Pascal argues, “is useless and
sterile. Even if someone could be persuaded that the proportions
between numbers are intangible, eternal truths, dependent on an
earlier truth in which they exist, called God, I would not consider that
he had made much progress towards his salvation.”
5 Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov (R. Pevear & L.

Volokhonsky, Trans.). New York: Vintage Classics, 1990, p. 56.

6 For a characteristic discussion of these features of Pascal’s view, see

Pensées, 164.
7 See A. J. Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic. New York: Dover

Publications, 1952, especially chapter 6.

8 Brandom, Robert, Making It Explicit. Cambridge, MA: Harvard

University Press, 1994, p. 159.

9 Immanuel Kant, “The Conflict of the Faculties,” in Religion and

Rational Theology (A. W. Wood & G. di Giovanni, Trans.). Cambridge,

England: Cambridge University Press, 1996, pp. 233–327.
10 I think the literalist attitude has another quite serious side effect.

The assumption about the discursive commitments of belief tends to

promote a fundamentally pessimistic stance to the world, deferring
satisfaction of our beliefs and responsibilities until “the kingdom
come.” The pessimist discharges his or her rational obligations by
treating the world as an illusion, and as unworthy of our commitments.
Faith rests on an ultimate truth that cannot possibly manifest itself in
this fallen world. To the extent that we can free ourselves completely
from our passionate attachment to this world, Christian pessimism is a
viable option. But if, as Pascal holds, our passionate attachment to the
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world is an essential part of being human, a radical pessimism can only
lead to despair. For more on the Pascalian response to despair, see
section 3 of this chapter.
11 Soren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling (A. Hannay, Trans.). New

York: Penguin 1985, pp. 74, 77.

12 Blaise Pascal, Pensées, 29. See also 557: “Man is neither angel
nor beast, and unhappily whoever wants to act the angel, acts the
beast.”
13 “Treatise Concerning Predestination,” in Pensées and Other

Writings (Honor Levi, Trans.). Oxford, England: Oxford University

Press, 1995, p. 223.
14 Pascal, Pensées, 646. Piotr Hoffman has helped me to recognize
that there is a deep pessimistic streak in Pascal that separates him in
important ways from existential Christians like Dostoevsky. For Pascal
does hold that nothing we encounter on earth is truly good, and that
the earth and the things of the earth are incapable of satisfying our
deepest longings: “Do not look for satisfaction on earth, do not hope for
anything from humanity. Your good is only in God, and ultimate
happiness lies in knowing God, in becoming united with him for ever in
eternity” (P 182). But Pascal’s pessimism is a pessimism without
despair, because it embraces earthly existence as capable of profound
happiness or joy, even if nothing we encounter in the world has a
transcendent worth. See P 681: “You do not need a greatly elevated
soul to realize that in this life there is no true and firm satisfaction, that
all our pleasures are simply vanity, that our afflictions are infinite, and
lastly that death, which threatens us at every moment, must in a few
years infallibly present us with the appalling necessity of being either
annihilated or wretched for all eternity. Nothing is more real nor more
dreadful than that. We may put on as brave a face as we like: that is the
end which awaits the finest life on earth. Let us think about it, then say
whether it is not beyond doubt that the only good in this life lies in the
hope of another life, that we are only happy the closer we come to it,
and that, just as there will be no more unhappiness for those who were
completely certain of eternity, there is no hope either of happiness for
those who have no glimmer of it!”
15 See “The Memorial,” Pensées, p. 178.

Part III Historical Worlds

8 Philosophers, Thinkers, and Heidegger’s Place in the History of

Being

The End of Philosophy

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 The response to Heidegger in the analytical world is, to a considerable
degree, a paraphrase of Rudolf Carnap’s 1932 essay “Überwindung der
Metaphysik durch Logische Analyse der Sprache.” To the extent
Heidegger intends to make philosophical claims with assertions like
“the nothing nothings,” Carnap charges, his writings are utterly
meaningless; to the extent that Heidegger is creating art, he does it
poorly. Or, more likely, Heidegger’s work, like that of all
metaphysicians, confounds art and philosophy: Metaphysicians are
musicians without musical ability. Instead they have a strong
inclination to work within the medium of the theoretical, to connect
concepts and thoughts. Now, instead of activating, on the one hand, this
inclination in the domain of science, and satisfying, on the other hand,
the need for expression in art, the metaphysician confuses the two and
produces a structure which achieves nothing for knowledge and
something inadequate for the expression of attitude. 1 To respond to
such charges with a defense of the meaningfulness of Heidegger’s
claims about “the nothing” would, however, miss the deeper point.
Carnap’s analysis of Heidegger’s alleged “pseudosentences” is really
ancillary to the project of rehabilitating philosophy as a discipline – a
project driven by Carnap’s view of language. For Carnap, assertions are
meaningless unless they have empirical content. And if they have that,
they belong properly to the empirical sciences. Thus, for Carnap and
many others in the analytical tradition,2 philosophy (at least, when
properly done) has no substantive content; instead, it is “only a
method: the method of logical analysis.”3 This narrow view of
philosophy – philosophy as a method of analysis – is grounded in a
profound skepticism regarding our ability to discover truths about
ourselves and our world through reason alone. Thus even analytical
philosophers like Dummett – philosophers who “no longer regard the
traditional questions of philosophy as pseudoquestions to which no
meaningful answer can be given” – believe that “philosophy can take us
no further than enabling us to command a clear view of the concepts by
means of which we think about the world, and, by so doing, to attain a
firmer grasp of the way we represent the world in our thought.” 4
Philosophy, the analytical philosopher concludes, ought to abandon
metaphysics (thereby leaving the empirical sciences in charge of the
pursuit of substantive knowledge) and restrict itself to conceptual
analysis. Heidegger’s response to this view of philosophy can be seen in
a concentrated form in a series of notes that draw their title,
“Überwindung der Metaphysik,” from Carnap’s, and which Heidegger
began writing shortly after the publication of Carnap’s essay. Indeed,

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the notes cannot be understood except as articulating an alternative to
Carnap’s view of the failings of the metaphysical tradition. Like Carnap,
Heidegger believes in the need to criticize and, eventually, overcome
the metaphysical tradition, but Heidegger denies that Carnap’s
approach is competent for that task. Heidegger explains: “this title
[‘The Elimination of Metaphysics’] gives rise to a great deal of
misunderstanding because it does not allow experience to get to the
ground from which alone the history of Being reveals its essence.” 5
That is to say, Carnap’s conception of metaphysics (as something that
can be eliminated simply through the logical analysis of metaphysical
claims) will prevent us from understanding that to which the
metaphysical tradition has been a response – the background
understanding of being. If we are genuinely to overcome or eliminate
the metaphysical tradition, Heidegger believes, we can only do so by
thinking through the history of metaphysical efforts to understand the
being of what is. Only working through our history in this way can we
own up to the task of thinking being nonmetaphysically. Thus, in
Heidegger’s way of understanding the task of eliminating or
overcoming metaphysics, “overcoming does not mean pushing a
discipline out of the scope of philosophical ‘education.’”6 Instead, the
response to metaphysics begins, for Heidegger, with an understanding
of metaphysics “as the destiny of the truth of beings, i.e., of beingness,
as a still hidden but distinctive event, namely the oblivion of Being.” 7
On this view, two things characterize metaphysical thinkers. First,
metaphysical thinkers manifest in their works an understanding of the
being of everything that is – that is, “beingness,” the one character or
feature of things in virtue of which they are what they are. Second,
metaphysical thinkers are unaware of this understanding as a
background understanding – that is, they work out of an “oblivion of
being.” If we see metaphysics in this way, Heidegger argues, it will
become apparent that “metaphysics cannot be dismissed like an
opinion.”8 One cannot simply change one’s mind about metaphysics,
simply decide to stop treating it as a serious and worthwhile branch of
philosophy, because eliminating metaphysics in this way will, in fact,
only heighten our oblivion to the way our understanding of the world
is based on a background understanding of being and, in the process,
make us more subject to it than ever. In fact, Heidegger believes, the
desire to eliminate metaphysics in the way Carnap proposes is itself a
sign of the “technological” understanding of being. The elimination of
metaphysics, he writes, might more appropriately be called the
“Passing of Metaphysics,” where “passing” means the simultaneous
departing of metaphysics (i.e., its apparently perishing, and hence
being remembered only as something that is past), even while the

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technological understanding of being “takes possession of its absolute
domination over what is.”9 I take this to mean that, in the technological
age, the understanding of the being of what is becomes so completely
dominant that metaphysical reflection seems superfluous. Even
philosophy itself no longer worries about the nature of what is but
simply works out a view of language and mind on the basis of the
current understanding of being.10 In fact, Heidegger would agree that
the method of analysis is the “end” or “completion” of philosophy.
Philosophy is able to restrict itself to conceptual analysis, and to cede
all questions of theory and ontology to the empirical sciences, precisely
because the scientific-technological understanding of being is so
completely dominant: “philosophy is ending in the present age. It has
found its place in the scientific attitude of socially active humanity” (GA
14: 63/BW: 434). In short, Heidegger sees the effort to restrict
philosophy to conceptual analysis, thereby ignoring or dismissing
metaphysics, as a sign not that metaphysics is something past but that
philosophy is more subject than ever to the errors of the metaphysical
past. Like the metaphysicians, contemporary philosophy works under
the dominance of an understanding of being that is, for it,
unquestionable. And like the metaphysicians, contemporary
philosophy is oblivious to the need to think the background. The task of
thinking at the end of philosophy is to overcome this oblivion, and to
do this, we must become aware of our own place in the history of
being. But we can arrive at such an historical awareness only through
an engagement with the metaphysical past that Carnap and analytical
philosophers in general would as soon ignore. Philosophy and its
History

At this point, it might sound as if the disagreement between Heidegger

and the analytical philosophers is shaping up as a familiar argument
over the place of history in philosophy. On the one hand, there are
those who see philosophy, like science, as a rigorous and timeless
pursuit of truth, abstracted from any particular cultural and historical
locus. From this perspective, philosophy’s history is an accidental
feature of philosophy properly understood. We might, out of a kind of
curiosity, review the history of philosophy as if it were a catalogue of
opinions people formerly held on current philosophical issues. But in
the final analysis, philosophy’s concern is solving its current problems
– problems for which historical figures have no authority, and can offer
at most a little insight into an answer. Against ahistoricism in
philosophy are those who see philosophy as an ineliminably historical
endeavor, and argue that the problems philosophers tackle and their

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approach to those problems are themselves dictated by the
particularities of their historical age. To do philosophy is thus to work
through the problems inherited from the past, problems made pressing
by the philosopher’s current historical situation. On this view, an effort
to abstract philosophical problems and forms of reasoning from their
history will misunderstand the philosophical past and, more
importantly, obscure contemporary philosophy’s most pressing task –
that of responding to contemporary tensions and crises. From what I
have said so far, one might see Heidegger as advocating the historical
picture of philosophy in opposition to the ahistorical. And there is
some truth to that, provided that “history” is properly understood. But
it would be a very crude misreading of Heidegger to attribute to him
the view that philosophy is simply a cultural-historical phenomenon.
To the contrary, he holds that cultural changes and crises are governed
by a background understanding of being, and it is to this ontological
background that philosophy is first responsible. To the extent that
philosophers are responsive to the call to think being, they and their
work are removed from ordinary historical and cultural influences.
Heidegger thus argues that it is a mistake to treat the thought of a
thinker as circumscribed by “the influences of the milieu and the
effects of their actual ‘life’ situation” (GA 6.1: 447/N4: 22). At work
here is distinction between two different ways of thinking about
history: history (Geschichte) versus historiology or historiography
(Historie). We’ll return to this distinction later; for now, a brief
introduction to the distinction must suffice. Historiology is concerned
with thoughts, words, experiences, deeds, and rules – in short, all the
stuff of ordinary history. But historical events are, according to
Heidegger, determined by a background understanding that shapes
and constitutes foreground activities. Heidegger refers to this
background as “the open region of ends, standards, motives, possible
results, and powers” (GA 45: 36) – namely, of everything in terms of
which any particular action or experience is what it is. The series of
different background understandings is what constitutes history in the
deeper sense. That there are fundamentally different ways in which to
be an entity testifies, for Heidegger, to the fact that there is no
necessary way that the background must function. Thus the
background is itself dependent on “the nothing” that we alluded to
earlier. Contra Carnap, “the nothing” is misunderstood if it is construed
as a negative existential quantification (although it entails the
following proposition that does employ a negative existential
quantification: there is no thing that determines the character of the
background understanding of being). To call the background “nothing”
is to point out that it is not a thing, and does not operate in the same

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way that things in the foreground do. Metaphysics, as I indicated above,
is the attempt to think and name the being of what is. But because
metaphysicians do not understand that there is a background, which is
not itself an entity, that constitutes the foreground as what it is, they
interpret the unity of the foreground in terms of some uniform thing or
feature in virtue of which everything is what it is; that is, metaphysics
“thinks what is as a whole – the world, men, God – with respect to
being, with respect to the unity of what is in being” (GA 14: 60/BW:
432). The history of the West and of metaphysics on Heidegger’s
interpretation consists in a series of ways in which the being of what is
– that characteristic or feature in virtue of which anything is what it is –
has been given or “unconcealed” to human beings. With each
“unconcealment of being,” human beings have become progressively
more oblivious to the fact that their everyday thoughts, activities,
identities, and so on are grounded in a background understanding of
being that is neither necessary in its structure nor within human
control. While Heidegger believed that the metaphysical tradition has
failed to think the background or “clearing” within which everything is
what it is, he also believed that philosophers have nevertheless played
a privileged role in opening up for their culture the possibilities given
by the prevailing understanding of being. The history of being, a
history traceable in the work of the metaphysicians, falls, according to
Heidegger, into four distinct periods: the Greek (in which what is was
primarily understood as phusis or self-arising nature), the Medieval (in
which what is was understood as “God’s creation”), the Modern (where
“beings became objects that could be controlled and penetrated by
calculation”) (GA 5: 65/BW: 201), and finally an intensification of the
Modern, the Technological (in which what is is understood as standing
reserve – that is, as being constantly available for flexible
reconfiguration, and thus maximally exploitable). Metaphysics, on this
view, affects much more than philosophy. The metaphysical thinkers
actually help open a space of possibilities for a culture by articulating,
and thus making available to our practices in general, the
understanding of being that characterizes (or is coming to
characterize) the age. The best way to explain what Heidegger means is
to review one of his examples of the way in which a philosopher, by
responding to a new understanding of being, articulated it and, in the
process, made it possible to experience the world in a new way.
Heidegger agrees with traditional historiological accounts that an
important distinction between the modern and the medieval ages lies
in the extent to which modern man “disengages himself from the
constraints of biblical Christian revealed truth and church doctrine”
(GA 6.2: 126/N4: 97). But, Heidegger contends, historiology

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misunderstands this change by not appreciating how it was enabled by
an altered understanding of being. What gave medieval life its
coherence was a pursuit of salvation. The idea of salvation, however, as
it was understood only made sense on the basis of an experience of all
entities as God’s creation: “the truth of salvation does not restrict itself
to a relation of faith, a relation to God; rather the truth of salvation at
the same time decides about beings. . .. Beings in their sundry orders
are the creation of a creator God, a creation rescued from the Fall and
elevated to the suprasensuous realm once again through the redeemer
God” (GA 6.2: 288/N3: 239–40). An ideal of intellectual freedom would
be nearly incoherent against the medieval background understanding,
for it would appear as, at best, a rejection of not just the saving
ordinances offered by the Church but also as a departure from the God-
given intelligibility inherent in things. Consequently, political and
intellectual liberation was impossible for the medievals because
science and politics had to operate in harmony with God’s order. In
modernity, however, there is a gradual shift away from understanding
what is in terms of its relationship to God and toward a sense that
beings are what they are in virtue of being representable to a
perceiving subject. This, in turn, made man responsible for himself and
his thoughts in a way not possible so long as man was a child of God in
the midst of God’s creation. This background shift is discernible in
Descartes’ work: “Descartes’ metaphysics is the decisive beginning of
the foundation of metaphysics in the Modern age. It was his task to
ground the metaphysical ground of man’s liberation in the new
freedom of self-assured self-legislation” (GA 6.2: 129/N4: 100). For
example, when Descartes declares that the first rule of his philosophic
method is “never to accept anything as true if I did not have evident
knowledge of its truth,”11 he does so not because he is a skeptic,
Heidegger argues, but rather because the emerging modern style
required man to take responsibility for his own knowledge and
situation. The method of doubt – that is, that I am “to include nothing
more in my judgments than what presented itself to my mind with such
clarity and distinctness that I would have no occasion to put it in
doubt”12 – is justified by Descartes’ famous analogy between human
understanding and a building. Noting that “buildings undertaken and
completed by a single architect are usually more attractive and better
planned than those which several have tried to patch up,” Descartes
argues that we should become our own architects, dispensing with the
“old walls” inherited from teachers and past scholars, and rebuilding
ourselves from the ground up.13 In so doing, Descartes is responding to
an emerging background understanding of us and our place in the
world: “man becomes that being upon which all that is, is grounded as

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regards the manner of its being and its truth. Man becomes the
relational center of that which is as such” (GA 5: 88/QCT: 128) In
articulating his philosophical project in accordance with the new
understanding, Descartes opens up ways of relating things that is then
used to justify other shifts in the practices of the age, thereby ushering
in a new understanding of being. To summarize, the new possibilities
available to modern man, including the possibility of becoming the
“architect” of his own thoughts, are opened up by a fundamental shift
in the metaphysical background. The task of the history of philosophy,
for Heidegger, is to uncover such fundamental shifts. We can now
return to the questions with which this section began: what is the
nature of Heidegger’s disagreement with analytical philosophers? And
what does Heidegger mean in saying that the task for thinking is
necessarily historical? As to the latter question, we can see why
Heidegger would reject both of the views discussed in the beginning of
this section on the role of history in philosophy. Both undoubtedly
have a degree of truth to them. Insofar as a philosopher is a thinker,
however, both views fail to capture what is most essential to the
philosopher’s task. A metaphysician’s historical and cultural
inheritance is at most the departure point for articulating a new
understanding of being. Consequently, the content of the metaphysical
thinker’s thought cannot be reduced to its cultural setting. Likewise,
while advances are certainly made in philosophy, to focus on the
advances as an ahistorical march of progress is to ignore the question
of the historical constitution of the problematics, facts, and so on with
which philosophers as logical or conceptual analysts deal. This leads
us, then, to the nature of Heidegger’s disagreement with the thought
that philosophy should be restricted to conceptual analysis. To begin
with, philosophy as a mere method of analysis does not genuinely
eliminate the metaphysical, it merely ignores it. It fails to account
adequately for the back-groundedness of our concepts, even while it, as
a human endeavor, is intrinsically shaped by current background
sensibilities. This is why, in the passages quoted above, Heidegger sees
Carnap’s essay as itself more proof of the need for a genuinely
historical reflection on metaphysics – Carnap is himself oblivious to the
need to think about the background that shapes him as much as the
metaphysical past. This oblivion, Heidegger believes, poses a unique
threat to our historical essence as human beings. As Heidegger
understands it, ever since the earliest Greek thinkers, human action in
the world has been shaped and guided by a unified, background
understanding of what it means to be. We are now in a technological
age that has completely occluded the fact that our foreground activities
are grounded by a background understanding of being. And this makes

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it almost impossible to own up to the way we are, in all our activities,
essentially responsible to a background.14 Heidegger believes that
metaphysics can only genuinely be overcome if we can somehow
recover a sensibility for the background, and if we can learn to see how
it constitutes the present and opens up futural possibilities. And this,
Heidegger insists, requires an historical inquiry for two main reasons.
First, because the background is so completely entrenched as to escape
our notice, it is only an historical thought that can loosen the grasp that
our metaphysical understanding of being has on us. If we immerse
ourselves in an historical reflection on the understanding of a past age,
our current presuppositions and practices may come to seem strange
and ungrounded. And if that happens, we will be prepared to confront
the fact that we ourselves are thoroughly shaped by an understanding
of the being of beings – an understanding that, while once
revolutionary, is now so commonplace as to go unnoticed. As
Heidegger notes, “in order to rescue the beginning, and consequently
the future [i.e., the background understanding of being that shapes our
current practices and future possibilities], from time to time the
domination of the ordinary and all too ordinary must be broken.”
History, by giving us a “genuine relation to the beginning,” brings about
just such an “upheaval of what is habitual” (GA 45: 40). Second,
historical thought calls to our attention what Hubert Dreyfus has called
“marginal practices” – that is, ways of acting that draw their
intelligibility from a different background understanding of being than
now prevails. By learning to take these practices seriously, something
we can only do when we see them against the background of the
understanding of being that first grounded them, we can foster a
readiness that will allow us to respond differently to the people and
things we encounter in our everyday world. As Heidegger puts it,
historical thought is “preparatory” in the sense that it prepares us for
an escape from the metaphysics of our current age. History and
Historiology

How is a genuinely historical reflection, one capable of loosening the

grip of our metaphysical understanding of being, to proceed? This
question is made pressing by the fact that Heidegger’s own treatment
of the history of philosophy is held in some disrepute. He is notorious
for his “violent” interpretations of the key figures in the history of
philosophy. His interpretive method is often quite disconcerting to the
classical philologist, as well as the historian of philosophy. Mourelatos,
for instance, objects to Heidegger’s “capricious use of etymology in
‘hermeneutic’ interpretations of the pre-Socratics,”15 complaining that

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Heidegger and his followers have given etymology a bad name.
Heidegger’s interpretations of the pre-socratics, Mourelatos explains
dismissively, “are correctly appreciated (as it is now generally
conceded) not as contributions to the history of Greek philosophy, but
as dialectical, rhetorical, and heuristic devices for the development of
Heidegger’s own philosophy.”16 Mourelatos’s conclusion, I would
argue, overstates the issue. There are in fact standards for judging
Heidegger’s histories beyond whether they successfully articulate his
own philosophy. But he is quite right that Heidegger’s work is not
meant as a contribution to philological or historiological accounts of
the philosophical past. Of course, Heidegger was himself aware of his
notoriety as a willful interpreter of historical philosophers. In 1935, he
wrote: “in the usual present-day view what has been said here [in an
interpretation of Parmenides] is a mere product of the farfetched and
one-sided Heideggerian method of exegesis, which has already become
proverbial” (GA 40: 184/IM: 176). And in the preface to the second
edition of Heidegger’s Kant book, he noted that “readers have taken
constant offense at the violence of my interpretations. Their allegation
of violence can indeed by supported by this text” (GA 3: xvii). But there
was a reason behind his approach – one that he was careful to explain
and defend. Heidegger’s response to his critics consists in emphasizing
the distinction outlined above – the distinction between the
historiological study of the foreground events and activities in our past,
and an historical reflection on the open region within which those
events transpire, “that from which all human happenings begin” (GA
45: 40). As a result, the stuff of ordinary history – historical actions and
events – are not the principal objects of Heidegger’s history, although it
would be a mistake to say that Heidegger’s history is unconcerned with
them. The subsidiary role accorded to ordinary historiology in
Heidegger’s accounts brings with it the risk that his history will lose
touch with reality, and critics like Richard Rorty have been quick to
charge that Heidegger’s histories are vacuous and mystical.17 Rorty
argues that Heidegger’s history of being is nothing but the history of
what philosophers have said about being. But because these
pronouncements cannot be understood without seeing them in their
connection to the “plain history” of peoples and things, Rorty argues
that Heidegger fails to give content to his history of philosophy:
“Without the reference to the history of nations, we should obviously
have only what Versenyi suggests is all we get anyway: ‘an all too
empty and formal, though often emotionally charged and mystically-
religious, thinking of absolute unity.’”18 Along similar lines, Bernasconi
argues that Heidegger’s account of the history of philosophy
deconstructs itself because every time Heidegger tells the history of

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philosophy, he does so in historiological terms. As a result, he
concludes that “the distinction between Geschichte and Historie is
here, as always, impossible to maintain.”19 Such critiques fail to
appreciate Heidegger’s own explanation of history, historiology, and
their interdependence. Bernasconi, for instance, interprets the
distinction between historiology and history as the distinction between
accounts that follow “the guiding thread of a story,” and those that do
not.20 But this is a misunderstanding. It is quite right to say that
historiology provides a “journalist’s” account, describing things in
terms of a series of passing events (see GA 54: 94). And such an
account might even follow “the guiding thread of a story,” but this is
not what is determinative of historiology as historiology. Rather,
historiology is what it is because in it the past is treated without regard
for the background understanding of being that constitutes these
events as the events that they are. Historiology proceeds as if the
events it considers are interpretable without remainder in the terms
that make sense given our current understanding of being. So, where
historiology understands the passage of time in terms of “years and
days,” history investigates the passage of time in terms of changes in
the “age” – that is, “the situation of human things and man’s dwelling
place therein” (GA 54: 10). History traces the “movement of being,” that
is, changes in the background norms of intelligibility and the general
style of the practices most central to an age. History thus seeks to
uncover the ways in which identities and objects have been constituted
and experienced, and the general kinds of constraints working on the
field of possibilities open to historical actors. The goal is to draw
nearer to what is “happening” in the history of the Modern age. What is
happening means what sustains and compels history, what triggers
chance events and in advance gives leeway to resolutions, what within
beings represented as objects and as states of affairs basically is what
is. We never experience what is happening by ascertaining through
historical inquiry what is “going on.” As this expression tells us very
well, what is “going on” passes before us in the foreground and
background of the public stage of events and varying opinions. What
happens can never be made historiologically cognizable. It can only be
thoughtfully known by grasping what the metaphysics that
predetermines the age has elevated to thought and word. (GA 6.1: 431–
2/N3: 8)
Thus Heidegger’s distinction between history and historiology is not
a distinction between the history of nations and peoples on the one
hand, and the history of philosophy on the other. Rather, it is a
distinction between ways of approaching the history of all human
phenomena namely, a historiological reporting on past events, a

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reporting that “touches only the foremost of the foreground” (GA 45:
42) – versus historical recovery of the understanding of an age which
constituted what happened as the event it was. Heidegger believes that,
at least within the history of philosophy, his history is a prerequisite to
doing Rorty’s “plain history”: Since historiographical considerations
are always subordinated to historical reflections, the erroneous
opinion can arise to the effect that historiography is altogether
superfluous for history. But from the order of rank just mentioned the
only conclusion to be drawn is this: historiographical considerations
are essential only insofar as they are supported by a historical
reflection, are directed by it in their very way of questioning, and are
determined by it in the delimitation of their tasks. But this also implies
the converse, that historigraphical considerations and cognitions are
indeed indispensable. (GA 45: 50)
Historiological considerations are indispensable, I take it, precisely
because an investigation of the background understanding of being
only makes sense as an investigation of the way the background
grounds the foreground. If history is properly conceived as the
movement in background understandings of being, we can see why one
ought to reject the merely historiological approach to philosophy,
which proceeds by tracing the influence of foreground events on one
another. A historiology will inevitably read our own understanding of
being back into the events of the past. A foreground event, as we noted
earlier, is constituted as the event it is only by fitting it into a context of
ends or goals, standards of performance, motives or intentions,
possible results, and so on, and these all have the determinate shape
they do given an understanding of what it is for something to be at all.
Unless we are aware that we understand the world only in virtue of a
background sense for things, we will drag along our own background
as we confront the historiological record. As Heidegger explains in the
context of a discussion of the history of the concept of truth, “we find
only what we seek, and in historiography we are seeking only what we
[already] may know” (GA 45: 219–20). Or, as he observes elsewhere,
historiology necessarily works with “images of the past determined by
the present” (GA 5: 327/EGT: 17): “Historiographical research never
discloses history, because such research is always attended by an
opinion about history, an unthought one, a so-called obvious one,
which it would like to confirm by this very research and in so doing
only rigidifies the unthought obviousness” (GA 54: 142). This tendency
is compounded, in Heidegger’s view, when we approach philosophers
historiologically. Philosophers not only work out of a different
background understanding of being, but their work responds directly
to that background. To the extent that they are doing metaphysics,

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their writings need to be seen as alethic rather than assertoric – that is,
as tending to open up, clarify, and articulate the understanding of being
rather than as making assertions about foreground events and objects.
If we interpret philosophers as performing foreground acts – as
thinking and writing about entities and their interactions – and in
addition interpret those foreground acts on the basis of our own
background, we doubly obscure their true import. For instance, the
historiology of philosophy is dependent on philological research into
how certain terms were used in the surviving literature of the
philosopher’s linguistic community. It also relies on the transcultural
tracing of dependencies between philosophers. But both of these
methods have their shortcomings if our aim is the ontological
background. Philology is limited by its reliance on nonphilosophical
sources as a basis for interpreting philosophical texts. Philology will
fail to shed light on the ontological background to the degree that it
depends on an everyday vocabulary, which draws its meaning from
foreground events and objects. Consequently, unless the philologist
employs metaphysical reflection to illuminate her reading of past texts,
rather than relying on conclusions about language drawn from other
sources, she will make little progress in understanding metaphysical
discourse. Thus where one seeks to understand the most fundamental
underpinnings of a metaphysical position, Heidegger argues, one will
require a thinker’s insight into being. In addition, the discovery of
dependencies and philosophical influences is itself only illuminating if
we comprehend the reason for those dependencies. Historiology of
ideas, Heidegger explains, is no more than “scholarly historical
detective work, searching out dependencies, [with which] we do not
advance a step; we never get to what is essential, but only get stuck in
external associations and relations” (GA 6.1: 456/N3: 31). The point is
that, unless we are capable of an independent inquiry into the
background, and thus capable of comprehending a philosopher’s place
in the history of being, we will not understand the significance of the
fact that philosophers appropriate one another’s work: “To search for
influences and dependencies among thinkers is to misunderstand
thinking. Every thinker is dependent – upon the address of being” (GA
5: 369/EGT: 55). The illuminating question to ask is thus not what
problem or answer one philosopher borrowed from another, but
rather why did certain philosophical predecessors and problems show
up as relevant sources in the first place? Exploring this question,
Heidegger argues, would lead us to ask about the understanding of
being that guided the appropriation. Heidegger’s defense of his use of
history, then, consists of a reminder that what needs to be understood
is the background understanding of a thinker. This understanding will

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seem violent by the historiologist’s lights for two reasons. First, since
metaphysical thinkers themselves are unable to get fully clear about
their background and the way that it guides them to think the things
they do, a historical interpretation may even run contrary to the things
they explicitly say. In addition, the violence of his appropriation is a
result of an attempt to think independently of contemporary standards
of understanding – something made necessary by the goal of
overthrowing the complacency with which we inhabit our own
background and project it on the philosophers of the past. Abandoning,
as he did, traditional approaches to the interpretation of philosophy,
Heidegger’s readings bear little of the sort of support often advanced
within traditional historiology. He acknowledged this fact: “We cannot
demonstrate the adequacy of the translation by scholarly means” (GA
5: 372/EGT: 57). But this was not to say that “scholarly means” were
irrelevant; rather, that they would “not carry us far enough,” since at
best they could only point to the surface phenomena supported by a
background understanding of being (see GA 6.2: 232/N3: 188). Or, as
he explained elsewhere, the “doctrinal systems and the expressions of
an age” tell us something, insofar as they are an “aftereffect or veneer”
supported by the understanding of being of that age.” But to read the
philosophical veneer correctly, one must be well versed in the thought
of being. This does not mean, as Rorty charges and Mourelatos
suggests, that Heidegger has rendered his account of the history of
philosophy immune to challenge. But it does mean that a challenge
conducted at the level of an interpretation of what philosophers have
said, without any sensitivity to the background that makes that
interpretation plausible, will miss the mark. It is the background that is
Heidegger’s primary concern. Thus a debate with Heidegger’s reading
ought to be addressed to showing how he has misunderstood this
background. Heidegger’s Use of History

We can now say more clearly what it means to be a metaphysical

thinker – a philosopher – and how Heidegger’s historical thinking is
meant to evade the problems of metaphysical thought. The history of
philosophy is, Heidegger tells us, the “thinker’s struggle for a word for
beings as whole” (GA 6.1: 443/N3: 19). The great philosophers, in
Heidegger’s way of understanding things, are those who receive an
understanding of the being of the age, and struggle to articulate that
understanding. Often, in the process, thinkers contribute to changing
the background. This, in turn, makes possible a whole new range of
foreground activities and events: “the thinker,” Heidegger claims,
“stands within the decision concerning what is in general, what beings

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are” (GA 6.1: 428/N3: 6). Another way of putting this point is to say,
like Carnap, that the metaphysical thinker is a kind of artist – provided,
however, that one does not understand art as Carnap does (i.e., as a
means of “expression” for the artist’s “emotional and volitional
reaction to the environment, to society, to the tasks to which he
devotes himself, to the misfortunes that befall him” 21). Heidegger,
following Nietzsche, argues that art, rather than serving as mere
subjective expression, actually “creates and gives form” to our
experience of the world. The metaphysician is an artist in the sense of
“giv[ing] form to beings as a whole” (GA 6.1: 71/N1: 73). Metaphysical
thought, in short, reflects and gives expression to the background
understanding of being that determines, in any given age, the way
things are. This thought concerning the essence of an age opens up a
space of possibilities, or in the case of creative thinkers, anticipates a
new space of possibilities. But it would be a mistake to look for a
philosopher’s influence in the foreground events, at least in the short
term. Philosophy has, Heidegger notes, an “historically ascertainable
yet irrelevant influence” (GA 6.1: 431/N3: 8). I take this to mean that
the philosopher as a thinker of being does not usually affect particular
practices or activities in a demonstrable way but instead gives room
for a change in all the practices of an age. The classical case of this is, in
Heidegger’s view, that of Descartes as articulated above. The direct
influence of Descartes’s writings on any particular scientist, politician,
or other historical figure is irrelevant compared to the influence on the
Modern age that the whole new background sensibility for man’s place
in the world had. As Heidegger explained with reference to Nietzsche, a
thinker’s thought “needs neither renown nor impact in order to gain
dominance” (GA 6.1: 427/N3: 4). Instead, the thought the thinker
experiences – that is, the insight into the changed being of beings in the
age – works itself out in the practices of the age as a whole. Now, how
does Heidegger conceive of his place in this history? In particular, how
does Heidegger conceive of the difference between himself and
metaphysical thinkers? Heidegger conceives of himself as a
preparatory thinker – that is, as being concerned with preparing us for
a transformation of the current age of being, rather than himself
participating in changing the understanding of being: “the thinking in
question remains unassuming, because its task is only of a preparatory,
not of a founding character. It is content with awakening a readiness in
man for a possibility whose contour remains obscure, whose coming
remains uncertain” (GA 14: 66/BW: 436). To do this, he tries to show
how, despite the oblivion of being that marks the present age, there is a
coherence and unity to our practices given by the technological
understanding of being. But this attempt to “name” the background

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understanding of being does not itself open up a clearing for a new
metaphysics, nor does it articulate the understanding of being in order
to help establish it. Instead, Heidegger hopes that by showing us the
understanding of being that forms the background of modern
technological practices, he can encourage us to reflect on the nature of
the “open region” itself that harbors any given understanding of being:
“what matters to preparatory thinking is to light up that space within
which being itself might again be able to take man, with respect to his
essence, into a primal relationship. To be preparatory is the essence of
such thinking” (GA 5: 210/QCT: 55). The background is “lit up” by
means of the historical illustration of the contingency or
ungroundedness of our current understanding of being. And this will
not happen without awakening an awareness of the background itself,
and our reliance as human beings on a background understanding of
the being of beings. The next step is to take us “into a primal
relationship” to this contingent background, something that happens
only if we get adapted to the contingency and ungroundedness of our
way of being the world, learning to embrace it and take responsibility
for our lives. Heidegger’s Place in the History of Being

In response to persistent questioning on the role of philosophy and of

his own thought in dealing with the problems of the technological age,
Heidegger finally responded: “It is not for me to decide how far I will
get with my attempt to think and in what way it will be accepted in the
future and transformed in a fruitful way”22 Of course, there is an
obvious sense in which Heidegger is unable to control his reception –
he has no say over what use readers will make of his work. But
Heidegger meant to point to something more than the ordinary
dependence of a work on an audience. As we have learned from
Heidegger’s view of history, the appropriation of historical works in
philosophy is always driven by a background sense of the task for
thought (as determined by the understanding of being that prevails in
our age). Heidegger’s comment, then, should be seen as recognition of
the fact that he cannot decide how useful his work will prove for the
task of thought. For instance, as I have suggested in the discussion of
Carnap’s response to Heidegger, the perceived uselessness of
Heidegger’s work in the analytic world is a function of a prior decision
about the nature of philosophy, a decision shaped by the ontological
background of the age. The same holds true of all the ways in which
Heidegger’s thought has been accepted and transformed. Using the
categories Heidegger has provided us, we can ask of any use of
Heidegger whether it treats his work historically, historiographically,

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or analytically. Of course, these are not mutually exclusive approaches
to Heidegger. The historical question is given traction by the
historiography. The historiography, in turn, should be guided by our
sense for history. And an “analytical” reading of Heidegger – that is,
using his analysis of contemporary problems to counteract mistaken
philosophical views, particularly when those views contribute to the
“oblivion of being,” may in some ways be truer to his own project than
more self-consciously historicist readings of his work. After all, Being
and Time, with its detailed treatment of various problems in
intentionality, lends itself readily to a reading that pursues a traditional
philosophical aim of the analysis of the content of our concepts. Along
these lines, one could articulate Heidegger’s response to analytical
philosophy rather differently than I have here. Rather than seeing the
disagreement between Heidegger and analytical philosophy as an
argument over the role of historical reflection in philosophy, one could
cast it in terms of different views about the philosophy of mind and
language. One might also approach Heidegger and his work as a
product of the cultural and historiological forces operating in Germany
in the first half of this century – a particularly sensational issue in
Heidegger’s case. Indeed, one can read Heidegger’s mythological
account of the history of being as itself a historiological event.
Likewise, a considerable amount of scholarship is devoted to
discovering and articulating Heidegger’s dependence on, for instance,
Husserl. But, in the final analysis, neither a narrowly analytic nor a
historiographic reading of Heidegger is able to confront the problems
with which Heidegger was most concerned (at least in the decades
following the publication of Being and Time). These problems include
the nature of our background understanding of being, the meaning of
the oblivion of being, and the task of preparing a way to overcome that
oblivion. But even with a commitment to the project of historical
reflection as Heidegger articulated it, further decisions are in order. Do
we accept his description of the background, his account of the history
of being? It would, of course, be possible to treat the details of his
readings of Anaximander, Parmenides, Heraclitus, Plato, Aristotle,
Augustine, Descartes, Kant, Nietzsche, and so on, as dispensable or
indeed as fundamentally mistaken. For instance, one might agree that
the history of philosophy needs to be understood in terms of the
prevailing background understanding that shaped each thinker, but
nevertheless reject his unified account of that background.23 Another
pressing issue that arises from Heidegger’s history is the question of
what to make of his diagnosis of the ills and dangers confronting the
current age, and of the need to prepare for the overcoming of the
metaphysical age. Here again, there is a range of responses to

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Heidegger that, while broadly sympathetic to his analysis of the
dangers of technology, nevertheless depart from that analysis in
important ways. One might, for instance, find his enigmatic claims
about the “saving power” useless in coming to terms with the problem
of technology. Thus, even if one accepts the task of Heidegger’s
preparatory thinking, there remains the question of how best to carry
on that task. Other related issues arise in any thoughtful reception of
Heidegger’s work. For example, one inescapable but central element of
Heidegger’s work was his particularity as a thinker. Heidegger
explicitly saw himself as preparing for the overcoming of metaphysics
on the basis of the resources inherent in the German language and
culture. This presents a constant obstacle in working with Heidegger’s
writings, as one must decide how much weight to give to the often
archaic, German-based terminology/jargon that Heidegger employs.
Heidegger’s particularity gives rise, in turn, to sometimes heated
disagreements over the appropriateness of different translations of
Heidegger’s thought – into, for instance, a vocabulary more accessible
to analytical philosophers. Viewed from the perspective of “the history
of being,” however, it becomes clear that what, at least for the past few
decades, have seemed to be the most divisive dimensions of Heidegger
scholarship are, in fact, not so important. Differences between schools
of Heidegger interpretation have, to a considerable degree, been
defined in terms of literary style and the canon of other philosophical
works typically consulted (for example, does one refer to Levinas and
Derrida, or Wittgenstein and Searle for illuminating comparisons with
Heidegger’s work?). While the question of style is, on Heideggerian
grounds, something to take seriously, neither it nor the authors one
reads are, in and of themselves, determinative of one’s fidelity to the
Heideggerian project. To the extent that divisions between schools of
Heidegger studies are premised on a historiological assessment
regarding intellectual dependencies, they are based on the kind of
factors that Heidegger’s approach to history has taught us to look
beyond. For even a similarity of style and shared intellectual
dependencies can easily mask a wide diversity of approaches to a
problem. More importantly, a diversity of styles and influences can
obscure a more fundamental agreement in thoughtful reflection on the
matter to be thought. This kind of agreement, if Heidegger himself is to
be believed, is what marks the continuation of the Heideggerian project
in the fullest sense. Afraid that his work would be taken, in
historiological or analytical fashion, as a set of doctrines, Heidegger
urged his readers instead to treat his writings “as directions for the
road of independent reflection on the matter pointed out which each
must travel for himself.”24 Thus appropriating Heidegger’s thought is,

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from Heidegger’s own perspective, a matter of taking his project as
one’s own.25 Chapter 8 1 Rudolf Carnap, “The Elimination of

Metaphysics Through Logical Analysis of Language,” in Logical

Positivism (A. J. Aver, Ed.). Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1959, p. 80.
2 See, for instance, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-
Philosophicus (C. K. Ogden, Trans.). London: Routledge, 1922,
paragraph 6.53.
3 “The Elimination of Metaphysics Through Logical Analysis of

Language,” p. 77
4 Michael Dummett, The Logical Basis of Metaphysics. Cambridge, MA:

Harvard University Press, 1991, p. 1.

5 “Überwindung der Metaphysik,” in Vorträge and Aufsätze. Stuttgart:

Gunther Neske, 1954, p. 67.

6 Ibid.
7 Ibid.
8 Ibid., p. 68.
9 Ibid., p. 67.
10 Heidegger frequently makes offhand remarks to the effect that

analytical philosophy is thoroughly enmeshed in the technological

understanding of being. He notes, for instance, that analytical
philosophy (which he typically refers to as “logistics”) is “in many
places, above all in the Anglo-Saxon countries, . . . today considered the
only possible form of strict philosophy, because its result and
procedures yield an assured profit for the construction of the
technological universe” (GA 8: 23/WCT: 21).
11 Descartes, Discourse on Method, in The Philosophical Writings of

Descartes, vol. I (John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, & Duguld

Murdoch). Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1985, p.
120.
12 Ibid., p. 120.
13 Ibid., p. 116.
14 For a perspicuous discussion of Heidegger’s understanding of the

danger of our oblivion to metaphysics, see Hubert L. Dreyfus,

“Heidegger on the Connection Between Nihilism, Art, Technology, and
Politics,” in The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger (Charles Guignon,
Ed.). Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1993, pp. 289–
316.
15 Alexander P. D. Mourelatos, The Route of Parmenides. New Haven,

CT: Yale University Press, 1970, p. 197

16 Ibid., p. xiv.
17 For a more detailed response to Rorty, see Mark B. Okrent, “The

Truth of Being and the History of Philosophy,” in Heidegger: A Critical

Reader (Hubert L. Dreyfus & Harrison Hall, Eds.). Oxford, England:

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Blackwell, 1992, pp. 143–59.
18 Richard Rorty, “Overcoming the Tradition: Heidegger and Dewey,”

Review of Metaphysics 30 (1976): 297.

19 Robert Bernasconi, “Descartes in the History of Being,” Research in

Phenomenology 17 (1987): 94.

20 Ibid., p. 87.
21 “The Elimination of Metaphysics Through Logical Analysis of

Language,” p. 79.
22 “‘Only a God Can Save Us’: Der Spiegel’s Interview with Martin

Heidegger” (Maria P. Alter & John D. Caputo, Trans.). Philosophy Today

20 (1976): 281.
23 See, for instance, Jacques Derrida, Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles

(Barbara Harlow, Trans.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978.

24 Martin Heidegger, “Preface,” in William J. Richardson, Heidegger:

Through Phenomenology to Thought. The Hague: Martinus Nijhof,

1974, p. viii.
25 I am indebted to James Faulconer and Hubert Dreyfus; they have

saved me from a variety of errors through their careful attention to

earlier drafts of this paper and their willingness to discuss the matters
addressed herein.
9 Between the Earth and the Sky
Heidegger on Life After the Death of God

In the last decades of his life, Heidegger was preoccupied with the
dangers of technology, and tried to articulate a nontechnological form
of “poetical dwelling” that could save us from those dangers. On
Heidegger’s account, dwelling consists in achieving a nearness to the
earth, the sky, mortals, and divinities. Viewed with the kind of
historical detachment exemplified in Charles Taylor’s paper, “Closed
World Structures,”1 Heidegger’s reaction against technology is just one
ripple in the “wave of protests” that formed what Taylor calls the “nova
effect” – that is, “the multiplication of more and more spiritual and anti-
spiritual positions.”2 Such a multiplication, in turn, “further fragilizes
any of the positions it contains” in the sense that it undermines the
claim of each position to legitimacy. This is because the disagreements
between positions are disagreements at the most fundamental levels.
As a consequence, Taylor argues, “there is no longer any clear,
unambiguous way of drawing the main issue” – the issue at hand being
the nature and place of religion in a postmetaphysical, technological
age. Taylor’s observations are valuable as a reminder that Heidegger’s
diagnosis of our age is itself couched in terms that are not only
contestable from a number of sides but perhaps almost unintelligible to
other splinter positions in the overall fragmentation of modern culture.

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If, then, Heidegger’s view of religious life after the death of God is to
have an importance to anyone beyond the initiates in Heideggerese, it
can only do so by helping to bring this overall pattern of fragmentation
into some kind of focus. I would like to try making the case that it does.
In particular, as I read the later Heidegger’s work on the divinities and
the fourfold, Heidegger is offering us a way of pulling into focus a
problem that is scarcely articulable from a detached, historiographical
perspective – namely, why is it that a religious life should remain an
appealing possibility, that a religious life, in any incarnation – new age
or traditional – should seem a plausible way to redress the failings of
our technological and secular age? To answer this question, one has to
say something specific about the deficiencies of the technological age.
One needs to articulate what crucial element of a worthwhile life is lost
with the death of God, and why we should think that a religious life
after the death of God can correct that loss. I would like to present
Heidegger’s reflections on the fourfold as responses to just these
questions. The Death of God

Because Heidegger’s account of the technological age grew out of his

reading of Nietzsche, the place to start is with Heidegger’s
interpretation of the “death of God.” Although I will refer to a number
of passages from Nietzsche, I am not concerned here either to argue
that Heidegger interpreted Nietzsche correctly, or that Heidegger’s
critique of Nietzsche found its mark. Instead, I am interested in what
Heidegger thought he learned from Nietzsche; this can stand or fall
independently of questions about what Nietzsche really thought.
Heidegger interprets the death of God in ontological terms – that is,
according to Heidegger’s understanding of ontology, in terms of the
“mode” in which “whatever is, as such, comes to appearance” (see GA 5:
257). In particular, the death of God is understood as the process by
which everything is turned into resource. Thus, from Heidegger’s
perspective, it is a terrible misreading of Nietzsche’s proclamation of
the death of God to take it as a bald atheism, an undisguised
declaration of the end of everything that is divine. As Heidegger points
out, those who think that the proclamation could mean this must
themselves be starting with an inadequate conception of God. To think
that Nietzsche is a bald atheist, Heidegger claims, they would have to
“deal with and treat their God the same way they deal with a
pocketknife If a pocketknife is lost, it is just gone. But to lose God
means something other” (GA 39: 5). Heidegger’s point is that the loss of
a God, properly understood, is an apocalyptic event – one that cannot
be treated with the same equanimity that we might treat the loss of

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some mundane object. To own up to the loss of God requires of us that
we reach for a new kind of divinity – a divinity that can withstand the
loss of the old God. Heidegger sees this as apparent already in the very
passages in which Nietzsche proclaims the death of God. These
explicitly place the focus on discovering a sort of divinity that would
render us able to endure a world from which the old God is gone. The
madman in Gay Science 125, for instance, follows up the
proclamation of God’s death with a series of questions – questions that
culminate in the following: How shall we comfort ourselves, the
murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that
the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will
wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves?
What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to
invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we
ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?3 Heidegger
does not pass over such questions lightly. He closes the “Word of
Nietzsche” essay with a reflection on the fact that the madman seeks
God: “the madman . . . is clearly, according to the first, and more clearly
still according to the last, sentences of the passage, for him who can
hear, the one who seeks God, since he cries out after God. Has a
thinking man perhaps here really cried out de profundis? (GA 5:
267/QCT: 112). The proclamation of the death of God, then, means
something other than a mere denial of the real existence of the
Christian God. It is rather an attempt to really come to grips with the
loss we suffer when religious practices become marginalized. The
Christian God was important because our practices for devotion to him
provided us with a source of meaning and intelligibility. We kill God,
Nietzsche’s madman declares, when we “drink up the sea,” when we
“wipe away the entire horizon,” when we “unchain this earth from its
sun.” Heidegger reads the sea as Nietzsche’s metaphor for the sensible
world – a world in flux, constantly changing, malleable and flexible in
the paths it permits us to take. God served as a land and horizon, giving
the sensible world a fixed point of reference. The horizon is thus
Nietzsche’s metaphor for focal practices that give us a place,
determining what is important to us, and what counts as unimportant
or trivial. Finally, the sun is the God in whose light everything appears
as what it is. When we drink up the sea, we become responsible for the
way the sensible world shows up – that is, we ourselves, rather than a
fixed suprasensible God, encompass the world. When we wipe away
the horizon, we destroy any fixed point of reference for valuing the
world. When we unchain the earth from the sun, we deprive things of
any fixed or stable essence (GA 5: 261/QCT: 107). The history of
Western culture prior to the advent of the technological age can be

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seen in terms of a transition through a long series of Gods, each of
which has filled the position of giver of meaning, setter of norms,
source of gravity and value. Heidegger, commenting on Nietzsche,
observed that since the Reformation, the role of highest value has been
played by “the authority of conscience,” “the authority of reason,”
“historical progress,” “the earthly happiness of the greatest number,”
“the creating of a culture or the spreading of civilization,” and finally
“the business enterprise.” However, all these are “variations on the
Christian-ecclesiastical and theological interpretation of the world” (GA
5: 221/QCT: 64). Thus the Christian God has long since ceased, at least
for most in the West, to serve as horizon and sun. What is unique about
this moment in history is that there is no candidate to step into the
position of shared source of meaning and value. Our form of life has
changed in such a way that we are no longer able to submit ourselves
to such a God. The sea-drinking, horizon-wiping, earth-unchaining
process is a process not of filling in the position of God with yet
another God in the same mold but of overturning the whole onto-
theological interpretation of the world, which sets things under some
suprasensory value. This interpretation of the death of God ultimately
underwrites Heidegger’s reading of Nietzsche as the thinker of the
technological epoch. According to Heidegger, every thinker, Nietzsche
included, “has at any given time his fundamental philosophical position
within metaphysics.” But by this he does not refer to the thinker’s
explicit doctrine on metaphysical issues; rather he means that their
work manifests a particular understanding about the nature “of what is
as such in its entirety.” Heidegger’s interest in Nietzsche, then, is driven
by a desire to gain insight into the most fundamental way in which our
age understands what is: “The thinking through of Nietzsche’s
metaphysics becomes a reflection on the situation and place of
contemporary man, whose destiny is still but little experienced with
respect to its truth” (GA 5: 210/QCT: 54). Heidegger’s ultimate aim,
then, was to use Nietzsche to get clear about the ontological structure
of what is becoming the most prominent feature of the place of
contemporary man – namely, the technologizing of everyday life. The
technological world, Heidegger argues, is grounded in the fact that
everything that is shows up as lacking in any inherent significance, use,
or purpose. Heidegger’s name for the way in which entities appear and
are experienced in the technological world is “resource.” Resources are
removed from their natural conditions and contexts, and reorganized
in such away as to be completely available, flexible, interchangeable,
and ready to be employed in an indefinite variety of manners. 4 In the
technological age, even people are reduced from modern subjects with
fixed desires and a deep immanent truth to “functionaries of

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enframing” (GA 79: 30). In such a world, nothing is encountered as
really mattering, that is, as having a worth that exceeds its purely
instrumental value for satisfying transitory urges. This is, by the way,
the Heideggerian way of cashing out Nietzsche’s claim that the death of
God results in a lack of gravity. As Heidegger notes (GA 44: 192–3),
Nietzsche connects the death of the Christian God with the emptiness
of a life in which “it will appear for a long time as if all weightiness
were gone from things.”5 By a loss of “weightiness,” Nietzsche means
that nothing really matters to us any more; that everything is equally
value-less. I will refer to weightiness as “mattering” or “importance.”
With the death of the old God, we lose a sense that our understanding
of things – including having a shared vision of the good, or a notion of
the correct way to live a life, or an idea of justness, and so on – is
grounded in something more than our willing it to be so. And without
such a grounding, Heidegger worries, it is not just our lives but also all
the things with which we deal that will lose a weightiness or
importance. All becomes equally trivial, equally lacking in goodness
and rightness and worth. The decisive question for our age, then, is
“whether we let every being weightlessly drive into nothingness or
whether we want to give a weightiness to things again and especially to
ourselves; whether we become master over ourselves, in order to find
ourselves in essence, or whether we lose ourselves in and with the
existing nothingness” (GA 44: 193–4). What the old God gave us, in
short, was a way of being attuned to objects as having a transcendental
importance or weightiness. Heidegger believes that a living God
attunes a whole culture to objects in a particular way and as having a
transcendent meaning. For example, when God was the Judeo-Christian
creator God of the theologians, we were attuned to things as
instantiations of the ideal forms created by God. We, in turn, were
called by all of creation to a certain reverence for the handiwork of
God, and we were provoked to the intellectual project of coming to
understand the mind of God as manifest in the world. In other words,
God’s attunement required of us particular modes of comportment.
Because things could show up as making demands on us, things
mattered. But now, we as a culture find ourselves in the position of
being unable to share a reverence for God – that is, for some such
source of attunement. Without God to attune us to objects as having
weight or importance for us, the danger is that nothing will matter, and
consequently life will not be worthwhile. The search for a new source
of divinity, then, becomes a question of finding a mood, a mode of
attunement, which will allow things once more to show up as having
weight or importance. By the same token, the inquiry into the death of
God needs to be understood in affective terms – that is, as oriented

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around the question of the mood appropriate to the death of God. In
particular, as we get in tune with the mood of the technological age,
things will begin to show up as lacking any set purpose, any
determinate inherent value, but instead as ready and on call to be
taken up in any way that we choose. The problem of this chapter can
now be posed in the following way: Why does Heidegger believe that
an experience of the divine is necessary in order to live a worthwhile
life in the kind of world that shows up after the death of God? Meaning
and Mattering

Before turning directly to this question, I want to develop a

framework for the ensuing account. I begin with a brief discussion of
the idea of meaning. Things have meaning when they hold a place in
what Heidegger calls a “referential context,” by which he refers to the
way each object is defined by a network of practices in which it is
employed, the result toward which it is directed, and the other objects
with which it is used. So a hammer has the meaning it has both because
of the function it plays in human activities (like making houses) and
because of the way it “refers” to things like nails and boards. Although
the world is meaningful or intelligible to me when I grasp the practical
and equipmental contexts that embed all the things that populate the
world, nothing in the world matters to me on the basis of this
intelligibility alone. It is only when I am engaged in activities myself
that any particular object comes to hold a special significance for me.
As a result, in a world where I am not active, where I have no purposes
and goals, where I am drawn into no involvements, no thing or person
could matter to me. Everything would be spread out before me in an
undifferentiated (albeit meaningful) irrelevance. We can now, on the
basis of this, distinguish what I call an instrumental importance from
an existential importance. Things have an instrumental importance
anytime we take up some of the purposes made available by the
intelligible structure of the world. In a world where it makes sense to
be a doctor, for instance, one can take up the objects that a doctor
employs, and come into relation with the people a doctor relates to in
her doctoring activities. These people and objects will matter to her,
just as long as she continues to be a doctor. But outside of her
doctoring activity, these devices and people need not make any claim
on her. Existential importance, by contrast, would consist in some
practice or object or person having an importance for our self-
realization. That is, the object or person or practice is something
without which we would cease to be who we are. Such objects or
persons or practices thus make a demand on us – require of us that we

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value them, respect them, respond to them on pain of losing ourselves.
As we noted, a defining trait of resources is precisely that they do not
make any demands on us but instead stand ready and available to be
ordered as we demand, given our current aims We can now get a
clearer picture of one threat posed by the technological world. In the
technological world, because everything presents itself as a mere
resource, and thus has at best instrumental importance, nothing is
capable of existential importance. There is also another, closely related
danger posed by our becoming attuned to the world through
technology – the danger that we will lose a sense of having a place in
the world. A life organized (however temporarily) around an end or
goal, in addition to giving us instrumentally important objects, also
acquires at least a thin “sense of place.” To illustrate, suppose that I am
engaged in being a teacher. Then everything else I do (reading a book,
learning a new software program, sleeping in on Saturday) has its
value as an activity in terms of how it contributes to or detracts from
my realization of my vocation as a teacher. A purposive life is a
coherent pattern of activity, and activities require things with which to
be active. My activities give me a sense of place by ranging over
particular entities – these students, this classroom, this campus, and so
on. These are the things I relate to in realizing who I am. Another way
to say this is to say that my activities determine what is near to me and
what is far from me. A thing is far from me if it plays no role in helping
me be the person I am trying to be. (Of course, as Heidegger likes to
point out, the “near” and “far” here are not primarily spatial – if
something on the other side of the world were important to my work, I
could be closer to it even while sitting in my office in Utah than
someone else might be who happened to be just next door to it.) But as
technology begins to increase the range of our activities, it by the same
token undermines nearness and farness in our world, thus threatening
to undercut our belonging to a place and, by the same token, the sense
that anything genuinely matters. Thanks to technological devices like
the Internet, I, in fact, can act at the greatest possible distances. The
subsequent extension of reach, in turn, leads to a homogenization of
objects, which need to be placed on call for exploitation in the widest
imaginable set of contexts. The result we are driving toward is that no
particular thing or location will matter at all to our ability to live our
lives because an indistinguishable alternative is readily available. The
perfectly technological world will be one in which we can be
completely indifferent to particular places, people, and things. Or, in
other words, all that is left is resources, the “formless formations of
technological production” in which pretechnological natures “can no
longer pierce through . . . to show their own” (GA 5: 291/PLT: 113). In

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justifying these claims, Heidegger quotes approvingly the following
passage from a letter by Rilke: To our grandparents, a “house,” a
“well,” a familiar steeple, even their own clothes, their cloak still meant
infinitely more, were infinitely more intimate . . . Now there are
intruding, from America, empty indifferent things, sham things,
dummies of life . . . A house, as the Americans understand it, an
American apple or a winestock from over there, have nothing in
common with the house, the fruit, the grape into which the hope and
thoughtfulness of our forefathers had entered.6 Before the advent of
technology, even merely instrumentally important objects had a veneer
of existential importance, given that a substitute was often not readily
available. Before the advent of technology, instrumentally important
objects could give us a sense of place (or at least an analogue of a
genuine, existential sense of place) in virtue of the fact that objects
tended to be shaped by local and regional factors. But these thin forms
of existential importance and place are undermined as the
globalization and the technologization of the economy has made for
easy interchangeability, and has created pressure toward
standardization. “Everything becomes equal and indifferent,”
Heidegger argues, “in consequence of the uniformly calculated
availability of the whole earth” (GA 12: 201/OWL: 105). For Heidegger,
a worthwhile life in the technological age demands that we rediscover
existentially important objects and a sense of place. The divinities play
a crucial role in his account of this rediscovery. But before turning
directly to an account of Heidegger’s divinities, I would like to focus the
issue more clearly by exploring a nonreligious solution to the problem.
One response to the loss of importance and place would be to
overcome our addiction to a life of existential importance, and instead
find fulfillment in experiencing ourselves as disclosers of the
technological world.7 This possibility has recently been articulated by
Dreyfus and Spinosa in the course of an exploration of the possibility of
learning to affirm technology.8 Dreyfus and Spinosa suggest that we
could have a fulfilling life in a technological age if we could learn to
enjoy the excitement of being able to respond flexibly to a situation,
rather than being constrained by the inherent nature of the objects in
the situation that confronts us. The reason I think that Heidegger does
not pursue this option is that, in affirming technology, we embrace a
style of living that actively seeks to empty objects of the kind of worth
that would allow them to make demands on us. In the process, we
might recover at least one thing with more than merely instrumental
importance – namely, it matters that there are numerous different
possible ways to respond to each situation. But we disclose these
multiple possibilities precisely to the extent that no particular

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possibility is inherently worthwhile, and no particular action or
involvement makes a demand on us, because no particular object or
action plays a unique role in realizing who we are. In short, in such a
life, nothing and nobody can make a claim on us. For Heidegger, such a
life makes us “homesick” – that is, makes us long for the fulfillment
found in inhabiting a place populated with objects, people, and
activities that themselves have existential as opposed to merely
instrumental importance. We can thus see that, from Heidegger’s
perspective, Dreyfus and Spinosa offer us at best a contingency plan for
addressing the dangers of our age. They show us how it is possible to
have a life that is significant in the sense of making sense, of being
intelligible, and in which it is even possible to have one thing – the
existential space of free possibilities – show up as more than simply
instrumentally important. But Heidegger takes the incessant appetite
for amusement and entertainment, as well as the excitement over open
possibilities that Dreyfus and Spinosa focus on, as an effort to cover
over the attunement of profound boredom that overtakes us in a world
where nothing matters to us. This attempt at a cover up, for Heidegger,
attests to a continued longing for home (GA 16: 578 ff.). Thus if it were
possible to have more – to have objects and practices themselves show
up as important – such a life would be preferable. To have this kind of
life, however, requires a role for the divinities that no life of
attunement to technological things permits. On Heidegger’s account,
then, the appeal of a religious life after the death of God is rooted in the
possibility of repopulating the world with things that have a deep
importance – indeed, of perhaps genuinely relating to such things for
the first time. To explain this, let me start by restating how Heidegger
understands the way in which the technological age has destroyed the
possibility of existentially important things. Heidegger’s analysis, to
frame it as succinctly as I can, is as follows: it is a relationship to things
that have intrinsic importance that makes a life genuinely fulfilling. It is
only our belonging in a particular place (existentially understood) that
makes some things really matter. The technological age has
undermined our ability to feel rooted in a particular place. Therefore,
the technological age has made it difficult to live a worthwhile life. I
now want to say more carefully how a sense of place contributes to the
existential importance of things. I note first that the thin sense of place
discussed above – where my place is a function of the things I happen
to be dealing with – seems inadequate to provide things with
existential importance. A sense of place in the thin sense only decides
over which particular objects our activities will range. It does not
necessarily make those objects ultimately worthwhile. To return to my
teacher example, one could ask, “Why be the teacher of these students?

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There’s nothing really special about them, and there are students all
over the world who need a teacher.” If that is true, it seems that my life
is only contingently worthwhile. Once I have a sense of being the
teacher of these particular students, my life gets the order that it has.
But there is nothing that ultimately grounds my being their teacher as
opposed to somebody else’s, and so my life ultimately lacks real
significance. What we would really need is a deeply rooted belonging to
a place – a kind of belonging in which the things we deal with really
matter, that is, they make demands on us that we cannot ignore. But
how can anything really come to matter in this thick sense in a world
that is moving swiftly toward abolishing all sense of place? This sort of
mattering or importance is not something we can bestow upon things
by a free act of will. The only way to get it would be as a gift – a gift of
place or a gift of a thing of intrinsic worth. An attunement that allows
things to show up as having an intrinsic worth, however, is precisely
what we lost with the death of God. So, it seems that a worthwhile life
after the death of God requires some new endowment of divine grace,
an endowment in which we can once again be attuned to the sacred
and divine. To finish this thought, however, I need to say something
more about the role the divinities play for Heidegger in determining
our place in the world. Between the Earth and the Sky

Heidegger’s discussion of the divinities is part of his attempt to

uncover the way that real things, as opposed to mere resources and
technological devices, show up. We have already outlined the role that
a relationship to the old God plays in allowing things and a world to
“show up” (Heidegger calls it “unconcealment”). The old God attuned
us to the sacred in the sense that he made objects have a significance
independent of their usefulness to our current projects. The divinities
we strive to encounter in the fourfold will likewise attune us to the
sacred. Heidegger tells us that for a real thing, a thing with existential
importance, to show up, we must have practices for dealing with the
earth and the sky, the divinities and our own mortality. Real things
themselves, in turn, will embody the way earth, sky, mortals, and
divinities condition each other. Heidegger’s name for the interrelation
of earth, sky, mortals, and divinities is “the fourfold.” Initially,
Heidegger’s claim that things and dwelling require the mutual
“appropriation” of earth and sky, “mortals and divinities,” is anything
but clear. He tends to use each of the terms in an infuriatingly literal
fashion – and does so frequently enough that the passages cannot
simply be ignored. To cite a couple of my favorite examples, Heidegger
tells us that the sky contributes to the essence of a jug as a jug-thing

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because the jug holds and pours out wine and thus gathers the sky. The
holding and pouring of the wine gathers the sky, he explains, because
the grapes from which the wine is made “receive the rain and dew of
the sky” (GA 7: 163–4/PLT: 172). As a second example, the Black
Forest peasant’s farmhouse gathers the earth, he says, because it is
placed on a “mountain slope . . . among the meadows close to the
spring” (GA 7: 155/PLT: 260). Philosophers are not used to such talk,
so it is tempting either simply to ignore these passages or to impose a
metaphorical reading, which, given the densely poetical nature of
Heidegger’s musings, can only be loosely connected to the actual text. 9
The unappealing alternative is to repeat lamely his semipoetic musings
about the sky in the dew on the grapes (and so on). In terms of doing
any philosophical work with Heidegger’s notion of the fourfold, the
metaphorical reading is certainly preferable to a mere repetition. But it
seems, at the least, to do violence to the text. I think, however, that such
approaches are mistaken and miss the whole point of Heidegger’s
discussion of the fourfold. The four are meant, by Heidegger, quite
literally. The earth is the earth beneath our feet, the earth that spreads
out all around us as mountains and in trees, in rivers and streams. The
sky is the sky above our heads, the stars and constellations, the sun and
the moon, the shifting weather that brings the changing seasons. We
are the mortals – we and our companions – living our lives and dying
our deaths. And the divinities – the most elusive members of the
fourfold in this age – are divine beings, the “beckoning messengers of
the Godhead.” To justify such a literal, straightforward reading of the
fourfold, I need to be able to say how a discussion of the earth, sky,
mortals, and divinities shows us how to dwell and thereby recover a
sense of place. We can see this if we remember that what is at issue is
the problem of discovering things with existential importance.
Heidegger’s insight is this: we do not have things that matter to us if all
there is is isolated, self-contained, interchangeable entities – in other
words, resources. Such entities cannot matter to us, cannot have
existential importance for us, because none of them is essential to
being who we are. Their flexibility and interchangeability make them
efficient but also prevent any of them from playing a unique role in our
lives: “In enframing [i.e., the technological understanding that orders
our world], everything is set up in the constant replaceability of the
same through the same” (GA 79: 44). Real things, by contrast, are of a
nature to make demands on us and, in the process, condition us. We
can clarify this idea of conditioning by noting that even instrumental
importance is a result of a certain degree of conditioning of one object
by another. It is only because our activities are conditioned or
constrained by the objects with which we act that any particular object

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has instrumental importance. It is only because I want to build a house,
for example, that a hammer matters more than a fountain pen. This is
because the need to drive nails, and the nature of nails and boards,
conditions the kind of tools I can use successfully. If objects make no
demands on us or each other, and thus do not condition us or each
other, then no object can be of any more weight than any other.
Therefore, for things to matter, there must be mutual conditioning.
Heidegger’s name for the process of mutual condition is Ereignis,
probably best translated as “appropriation,” where this is heard not as
saying that we take over as our own something that does not belong to
us, but rather as the mutual conditioning through which we and the
things around us “come into our own” – that is, become what each can
be when conditioned by the other.10 The danger of the technological
age is that we are turning everything (things, earth, sky, our own
mortality, divinities) into entities that cannot condition and thus
cannot matter to us. The way to counteract the technological age, then,
is to allow ourselves to be conditioned. Precisely here is where the
fourfold becomes important – namely, as a source of conditioning in
our lives. Heidegger’s name for living in such a way that we are
conditioned or appropriated by the fourfold is “dwelling.” What does it
mean to “dwell” – that is, to be conditioned by the fourfold? We are
conditioned by the earth when we incorporate into our practices the
particular features of the environment around us. “Mortals dwell in
that they save the earth,” Heidegger explains, where “saving the earth”
consists in not exploiting it, not mastering it, and not subjugating it (GA
7: 144/BDT: 150). In Utah, for instance, one way to be conditioned by
the earth would be to live in harmony with the desert, rather than
pushing it aside by planting grass and lawns to replicate the gardens of
the East. The technology of modern irrigation and sprinkler systems
allow us to push our own earth aside, to master it and subjugate it,
rather than being conditioned by it (as Borgmann has beautifully
demonstrated).11 Human beings “only experience the appropriation of
the earth in the home-coming to their land,”12 that is, when we come to
be at home with our land in its own characteristics, not those enforced
upon it. We are conditioned by our sky when we incorporate into our
practices the peculiar features of the temporal cycles of the heavens,
the day and the night, the seasons and the weather. We push aside the
sky when, for example, our eating habits demand food on call, out of
season, or when our patterns of work, rest, and play make no
allowance for the times of day and year, or recognize no holy days or
festivals. We are conditioned by our mortality when our practices
acknowledge our temporal course on earth – both growth and
suffering, health and disease. Heidegger illustrates this through the

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example of the Black Forest peasant hut, which was intimately
conditioned by (and correspondingly conditioning of) mortality: “It did
not forget the altar corner behind the community table; it made room
in its chamber for the hallowed places of childbed and the ‘tree of the
dead’ – for that is what they call a coffin there: the Totenbaum – and in
this way it designed for the different generations under one roof the
character of their journey through time” (GA 7: 155/BDT: 160). We
push our mortality aside when we seek immediate gratification
without discipline, when we set aside our own local culture, when we
try to engineer biologically and pharmacologically an end to all
infirmity, including even death. We are conditioned by the divinities
when, for instance, we incorporate into our practices a recognition of
holy times and holy precincts – perhaps manifested where one
experiences the earth as God’s creation, or feels a reverence for holy
days or the sanctity of human life (GA 5: 27–8/BW: 167). Hölderlin’s
Hyperion expresses such a sense for divinity in the world: And often,
when I lay there among the flowers, basking in the delicate spring light,
and looked up into the serene blue that embraced the warm earth,
when I sat under the elms and willows on the side of the mountain,
after a refreshing rain, when the branches were yet astir from the
touch of the sky and golden clouds moved over the dripping woods; or
when the evening star, breathing the spirit of peace, rose with the age-
old youths and the other heroes of the sky, and I saw how the life in
them moved on through the ether in eternal, effortless order, and the
peace of the world surrounded and rejoiced me, so that I was suddenly
alert and listening, yet did not know what was befalling me – “Do you
love me, dear Father in Heaven,” I whispered, and felt his answer so
certainly and so blissfully in my heart.13 As suggested by this
quotation, earth, sky, mortals, and divinities do not just condition us,
however; they also condition each other. Heidegger says that the
fourfold mirror each other by ringing or wrestling with each other.
Mirroring, Heidegger explains, consists in each member of the four
becoming lighted, or intelligible, in the process of reflecting the others.
I take this to mean, for instance, that the sky is only intelligible as the
sky it is in terms of the interaction it has with the earth striving to
spring forth as the earth it is (or in terms of the mortal activities it
blesses or restricts) – for example, the weather the sky brings is only
intelligible as inclement weather given the fruits the earth bears (or the
activities of mortals), and the earth first comes into its essence as the
earth it is when “blossoming in the grace of the sky.” 14 More
importantly for our purposes here, the divinities only are divinities to
the extent that they mirror and, mirroring, light up the other regions of
the four. The implication is that Heidegger’s divinities have to be

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beings who can condition and be conditioned by the earth, the sky, and
mortals. Conversely, the “default of the gods” that characterizes our age
is understood in terms of the failure of any divine being to condition us
and the things around us: “The default of God means that no god any
longer gathers men and things unto himself, visibly and unequivocally,
and by such gathering disposes the world’s history and man’s sojourn
in it” (GA 5: 269/PLT: 91). With this in mind, let’s turn now to the
question how such conditioning can give us things that “near” – that
have an importance that orients our whole life and not just the
particular activities in which we are currently engaged. It is important
to emphasize that we cannot have such things through a mere change
of attitude – through merely deciding to treat resources as things.
Things are not things in virtue of being represented or valued in some
special way, but rather by being shaped in light of the receptivity that
we have developed for our local earth, sky, mortals, and divinities. If
the objects with which our world is populated have not been
conditioned in that way (and resources are not), then they will not
solicit the practices we have developed for living on the earth, beneath
the sky, before the divinities. As Heidegger explains, “nothing that
stands today as an object in the distanceless can ever be simply
switched over into a thing.”15 By the same token, Heidegger cannot be
advocating a nostalgic return to living in Black Forest peasant
farmhouses. He notes that “things as things do not ever come about if
we merely avoid [technological] objects and recollect former objects
which perhaps were once on the way to becoming things and even to
actually presencing as things” (GA 7: 174/PLT: 182). To the extent that
the former things gathered a receptivity to a particular sky, a particular
earth, particular divinities, and particular mortal practices, they cannot
thing for us, because our sky, earth, divinities, and mortals have a
different configuration. They might once have been things, in other
words, but they cannot thing in our fourfold. Thus, if we are to live with
things, we ourselves need to “bring the fourfold’s essence into things”
(GA 7: 146/PLT: 151). In other words, on the basis of our reawakened
receptivity to the four, we need to learn to make things and nurture
things into being more than mere resource, hence to let them embody
the essence of our place or home – our earth, our sky, our mortality,
and our divinities. Heidegger’s name for the activity of constructing
and cultivating things in such a way that they contain or gather the
fourfold is “building.” The idea is that, in building, things secure the
fourfold because, in the way they draw us into action, they draw upon
just the kind of responsiveness that we have acquired by dwelling
before our local divinities, earth, sky, and mortal practices. As
Heidegger puts it, “building takes its standard over from the fourfold”

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(GA 7: 161). When our practices incorporate the fourfold, such things
will have importance beyond their instrumental use in our current
activities because they and only they are geared to our way of
inhabiting the world. As a result, they, and only they, can be used to be
who we are. We will thus finally be at home in our places because our
practices are oriented to our places alone. We might now wonder,
however, why a relation to divinities is important if things with
existential importance are secured by a sense of place. It seems that if
we could foster practices for our earth, our sky, and our mortality, we
could have a receptivity to the world that could only be satisfied by
particular things, not generic resources. Those things would then, at
least if the argument I have outlined is correct, have existential
importance without any mention of divinities. Thus the divinities seem
superfluous. I think that there are two answers to this problem. First,
there is the tactical observation that given the seductiveness of
resources and technological devices, it would take an experience of the
divine to awaken us to the flaws in the technological age. The God,
Heidegger says, “deranges us” – in the sense that he calls us beyond the
existing configuration of objects to see things that shine forth with a
kind of holiness (i.e., a dignity and worth that exceeds our will).
Heidegger understands receptivity to the sacred as the experience of
being beheld – of recognizing that there is a kind of intellegibility to the
world that we do not ourselves produce. If God is part of the fourfold,
then he wrestles with each region of the four, and brings it into a
sacred own-ness. If we, in turn, are receptive to God, our practices will
embody a recognition that the technological reduction of objects to
resources is an act of presumption, for it proceeds on the assumption
that we are free to employ anything we encounter in any way
whatsoever. Once attuned by the divinities, technology will no longer
be able to seduce us into an endless and empty “switching about ever
anew” because we will see certain things around us as invested with
holiness – with an intelligibility inherent to them, which shines forth
out of them. So attuned, we may be able to establish what Heidegger
calls a “free relation” to technology – a relation in which we are able to
use technological devices to support our dwelling with things. But
because the draw of technology is so strong, it is only a God who can
save us, as Heidegger once asserted.16 Second, there is something
substantive that being conditioned by a God adds to our sense of place
– namely, it shows us our place as necessary for us. In fact, the old
theological interpretation of God and the world was never able to do
the job of giving us existential importance (we only had it in spite of the
theological interpretation). The God of the philosophers was a God
removed from time and us personally. His primary role was the

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establishment of meaning. But unless he could somehow be present to
us, manifest himself in conditioning particular things in this world, be
embodied, so to speak, so that we could become dependent on the
intelligibility he helps light up, God could do no more than guarantee
the intelligibility of the world (and the thin instrumental mattering that
comes with that intelligibility). I alluded above to the idea that, for
Heidegger, the death of the onto-theological God actually might allow
for a richer, more fulfilling sense of the divine. I can at this point start
to redeem this claim. The onto-theological God gave things an
importance that we were not free to change. As the source of all
intelligibility, that God decided what things really were. But because he
was beyond any being that we have experience of, there was no way he
could attune us directly, that is, no way he could help give us a place in
the whole cosmos that he had made intelligible, and thus no guarantee
that we would live in such a way that the objects as God knew them
were existentially important to us.17 An openness to divinities that
themselves attune us, however, makes it possible to experience things
in the world as sacred, and as making demands on us, which in turn
allows them to have existential importance for us. The death of the
metaphysical God thus presents us with a great danger but also a
unique opportunity to find a relationship to the divine that can endow
our lives with deep importance. To be conditioned by the divinities is
to discover God embodied – to find him present in our world. The
death of the theologian’s God offers us at least the possibility of a
recovery of an immediate experience of the divine that has only rarely
been achieved – that is, an experience of a living God with a presence in
our world. Such a God would have an importance incommensurate
with any object. As the source of our attunement, God would matter to
us not just in the sense that our practices require his presence for their
fulfillment. He would also matter as the being that calls us into the kind
of engagement with the world that we would embody. He would, in
short, be a God before whom we could pray, to whom we could
sacrifice, in front of whom we could fall to our knees in awe (see GA 11:
77). It should be obvious that the hope of finding this sort of divinity is
something we cannot bring about ourselves. All we can do is try to
keep alive the practices that will attune us in such a way that we can
experience the divine in the world. The only means we have available
to this end are the religious practices we have inherited. Those who are
conditioned by the divine, Heidegger explains, “await the divinities as
divinities. In hope they hold up to the divinities what is unhoped for.
They wait for intimations of their coming and do not mistake the signs
of their absence. They do not make their gods for themselves and do
not worship idols. In the very depth of misfortune they wait for the

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weal that has been withdrawn” (GA 7: 145/PLT: 150). Despite the
obviously Christian overtones of this and other such passages, it is
important to see that Heidegger is not a nostalgic and sentimental
thinker. His claim here is not that lapse into an accustomed mode of
religious life is an end in itself. To the contrary, we can only be
conditioned by the divine if we find our own authentic relationship to
divinities. The problem is that, barring a new revelation, the only
practices we have left for getting in tune with the divine are the
remnants of past religious practices. These, Heidegger thinks, must
therefore be nurtured in order to preserve a sense for the holy because
God can only appear as a god in the dimension of the holy. This, I take
it, is the point of the somewhat enigmatic comments Heidegger made
about religion in the course of his “Conversations with a Buddhist
Monk”: “I consider only one thing to be decisive: to follow the words of
the founder. That alone – and neither the systems nor the doctrines
and dogmas are important. Religion is succession . . . Without the
sacred we remain out of contact with the divinities. Without being
touched by the divinities, the experience of God fails to come” (GA 16:
590). But even remaining true to the practices we inherit from the
founders of religions provides no guarantee of an advent of God. All we
can do, Heidegger argued, is prepare ourselves for the advent in the
hope that, through a gift of grace, we can receive our own revelation. “I
see the only possibility of a salvation in preparing a readiness, in
thinking and poetizing, for the appearance of the God or for the
absence of God in the case of decline; that we not, to put it coarsely,
‘come to a wretched end,’ but rather if we decline, we decline in the
face of the absent God” (GA 16: 671). Chapter 9 1 Charles Taylor,
“Closed World Structures,” in Religion After Metaphysics (Mark A.
Wrathall, Ed.). Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2003,
pp. 47–68.
2 Ibid., p. 66.
3 Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage, 1974.
4 See “The Question Concerning Technology” in QCT.
5 Sämtliche Werke: Kritische Studienausgabe, vol. II: Nachgelassene

Fragmente 1884–1885 (Giorgio Colli & Mazzino Montinari, Eds.).

Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1980, p. 424.
6 “Letter to Muzot,” quoted at GA 5: 291/PLT: 113.
7 Nietzsche seems to think that this is the kind of experience that will

properly attune us to the world as it appears after the death of God.

After the death of God, he wrote in an unpublished note, all that is left
is the issue “whether to abolish our reverences or us ourselves. The
latter is nihilism.” The former course – that of abolishing our
reverences – is the course which will open us up to enjoying the thrill

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of responding freely to the world as technology offers it. Nietzsche’s
primary metaphor for the world after the death of God – a world in
which there are no fixed points of reference, and in which no object has
a real gravity or weight – is a sea with infinite horizons: “At long last
the horizon appears free to us again, even if it should not be bright; at
long last our ships may venture out again, venture out to face any
danger; all the daring of the lover of knowledge is permitted again; the
sea, our sea, lies open again; perhaps there has never yet been such an
‘open sea’” (Gay Science, sec. 343).
8 Hubert L. Dreyfus and Charles Spinosa, “Highway Bridges and

Feasts: Heidegger and Borgmann on how to Affirm Technology,” Man

and World 30 (1997): 159–77.
9 Dreyfus and Spinosa, for instance, explain earth, sky, mortals, and

divinities without a single quotation from, or citation of, Heidegger’s

discussion of the fourfold. For interpretations which approach the
literalness with which I think Heidegger should be read, see James C.
Edwards, The Plain Sense of Things: The Fate of Religion in an Age of
Normal Nihilism. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press,
1997; Julian Young, Heidegger’s Later Philosophy. Cambridge, England:
Cambridge University Press, 2002; and Charles Taylor, “Heidegger,
Language, and Ecology,” in Heidegger: A Critical Reader (Hubert L.
Dreyfus & Harrison Hall, Eds.). Oxford, England: Blackwell, 1992, pp.
247–69.
10 See, for example, “Seminar in Le Thor,” in GA 15: 363: “es ist das

Ereignis des Seins als Bedingung der Ankunft des Seienden: das Sein
läßt das Seiende anwesen.”
11 Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life. Chicago:

University of Chicago Press, 1987.

12 Besinnung auf unser Wesen. Messkirch: Martin-Heidegger-

Gesellschaft, 1994.
13 Friedrich Hölderlin, “Hyperion,” in Hyperion and Selected Poems

(Eric L. Santner, Ed.). New York: Continuum, 1990, pp. 5–6.

14 Besinnung auf unser Wesen (“die Erde als Erde wesen läßt; das ist:

Erblühen in der Huld des Himmels”).

15 GA 7: 174/PLT: 182. This passage, by the way, shows that the

earlier reference to highway bridges gathering must have been

sloppiness on Heidegger’s part. If gathering is a term of art for what
things do – as Heidegger sometimes indeed uses it – then highway
bridges cannot thing because they do not gather the divinities; they
push them aside. Cf. Dreyfus and Spinosa, “Highway Bridges and
Feasts.”
16 “‘Only a God Can Save Us’: Der Spiegel’s Interview with Martin

Heidegger,” in The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader (Richard

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Wolin, Ed.). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992, pp. 91–116.
17 Kierkegaard makes just this point in Fear and Trembling, when he

notes that if God “is understood in an altogether abstract sense . . . God

becomes an invisible, vanishing point, an impotent thought.” Fear and
Trembling (Alastair Hannay, Trans.). London: Penguin Books, 1985, p.
96.
10 Nietzsche and the Metaphysics of Truth

For Heidegger, the history of Western philosophy is “from Plato until

Nietzsche the history of metaphysics” (GA 48: 296). More precisely, the
history that connects Plato to Nietzsche is the “unfolding of the essence
of metaphysics as the history of the truth of entities as such as a whole”
(GA 66: 40). One might think that Nietzsche would be an obvious ally
for Heidegger in his project of criticizing the metaphysical tradition,
given Nietzsche’s own attacks on metaphysical and philosophical
understandings of truth. And yet, Heidegger insists that Nietzsche too
remains entangled in a metaphysical account of truth. Understanding
why this is so illuminates both Heidegger’s understanding of
metaphysics and his views on truth. Now, it would be ludicrous to try
to read Nietzsche as adhering to a metaphysical account of truth in any
traditional way. Nietzsche himself described metaphysical views of
truth as “the history of an error,” the history of “how the ‘true world’
finally became a fable” (Twilight of the Idols). The “true world,” he
wrote, has become “an idea that is of no further use.” “The true world is
gone.” Moreover, he famously declared our holding things to be true to
be an error, “the kind of error without which a certain kind of living
beings could not live” (WP: 493). For Nietzsche, it is an illusion that
there are true things, and thus our reverence for the truth is error
because it is directed at an illusion: “we have created the world that
possesses values! Knowing this, we know, too, that reverence for truth
is already the consequence of an illusion–and that one should value
more than truth the force that forms, simplifies, shapes, invents” (WP:
602). The idea of a metaphysical truth is the result of our practical need
for stability: that something must be held to be true is necessary; not
that something is true. “The true and the apparent world” – I have
traced this contrast back to relations of value. We have projected our
conditions of preservation as predicates of being in general. That we
must be stable in our beliefs in order to thrive, from this it follows that
we have made the “true” world something that is not changeable and
becoming, but rather something that is being. (WP: 507)
Thus, given his obvious pains to distance himself from metaphysical
notions of a true world or a truth in itself, it is prima facie implausible
to charge Nietzsche with a continued adherence to traditional accounts

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of truth. To understand Heidegger’s interpretation and critique of
Nietzsche, then, we need to specify what exactly Heidegger considers
to be objectionably metaphysical about traditional approaches to truth,
and why it is that he thinks Nietzsche’s rejection of traditional
approaches did not succeed in extricating him from metaphysical
entanglements. Toward that end, let’s clarify what Heidegger means
when he talks about “the truth of entities as such and as a whole.” 1.
The material and attitudinal dimensions of truth

In contemporary philosophy, talk of truth is almost automatically

construed as talk of propositional truth, of the conditions under which
things like beliefs and assertions succeed or fail in getting at the way
things are in the world. Heidegger is, in fact, only indirectly interested
in theories about what makes a proposition true or false. To the extent
that he considers such theories at all, he accepts that propositional
truth amounts to some kind of agreement with the way things are (see
Chapters 1 and 2). A key to understanding Heidegger’s account of the
history of truth in metaphysics, and especially his interpretation of
Nietzsche’s account of truth is to keep squarely in mind that he is not
offering a theory of propositional truth. Heidegger reads Nietzsche’s
pronouncements about truth as pronouncements about ontological
truth – truth as the truth about what entities are. “Truth for Nietzsche
always means that which is true, and this means for him: the entities
which are made steady as that which is stable.” Indeed, Heidegger
claims that it is precisely this that renders Nietzsche’s understanding of
truth metaphysical, for all metaphysical ages have shared the view the
truth of entities is found in that about them which is stable: But what
then does “true” mean here? We said that Nietzsche, as to the broadest
basic conception of the true, is in agreement with the tradition. The
true is also for him that which is sometimes called “the real,” for
example in expressions like: something is “in truth” such and such – it
is “in reality” such and such. The true is the entity, which as an entity is
arranged and made steady, to which representation holds itself and
must hold itself in order to be “correct,” that is, true. (GA 47: 108)
Heidegger’s discussion of the history of truth explores the history of
different understandings of what entities truly are, which amounts to
thinking through historically different ways of determining what is
steady and stable in the entities we encounter. Given the contemporary
orientation toward propositional truth, this way of talking and thinking
about truth can seem quite foreign. But we can work our way into
Heidegger’s thought on the truth of entities by noting that our ordinary
concept of truth, as Heidegger frequently observed, is ambiguous,

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incorporating both a notion of “material truth” (Sachwahrheit) and
“propositional truth” (Satzwahrheit or Aussagewahrheit). 1 Material
truth is in play when we ascribe truth to entities in ordinary language,
and distinguish between true and false entities. We talk, for example, of
the “true blackberry,” the rubus fruticosus, as opposed to various
“false” blackberries – hybrids, or, for example, the himalayan
blackberry (rubus discolor). False blackberries exist every bit as much
as true ones; so what is the basis for privileging one above the other as
“true”? As we saw, Heidegger traces the privileging back to a
preference for what he calls the steady (das Feste) or the stable (das
Beständige). The steady or stable is that which we can count on finding
despite any superficial or accidental variations in appearance or
constitution, and thus that which we can reliably and consistently
depend on to support the attitudes we take toward the entity. “That
entity is true, the ‘truth,’” Heidegger explains, “when one can, every
time and genuinely hold onto it as something stable and not-
withdrawing; it is that on the basis of which one can get a hold” (GA
6.1: 488). The “false” blackberries, for instance, are not true
blackberries because they present themselves as what they are not.
They look like the “true blackberry,” leading us to believe that we can
use them to produce fruit, or plant them in certain settings. But when
we do so, they will eventually not support our attitudes toward them
because, appearances to the contrary, they will produce a different
fruit, or grow too vigorously, overwhelming the rest of the garden. The
truth of the true blackberry is ultimately found in the fact that what it
seems to offer to us remains stably present; it does not deceive us into
mistaking it for something it is not. True blackberries can thus be used
reliably in the ways gardeners typically use blackberries. This example
points to the fact that the material truth of entities is not determined
independently of our ways of engaging with them – of, broadly
speaking, our attitudes toward them. Entities show themselves for
what they are only within a context of activities and other related
entities. An entity is “uncovered” in Heidegger’s vernacular when it is
available to be readily taken up into our activities; it meshes with our
practices. The falseness of the false entities consists in the fact that
what is relevant to our activities is hidden or concealed, and thus it
does not lend itself to our practices. On the basis of this relationship
between attitudes and material truth, however, we are also in a
position to distinguish between true and false attitudes. A true attitude
is one that uncovers the entity for what it is. If we intend to grow true
blackberries but plant the himalayan blackberry, then our act of
planting was a false attitude. This means that this kind of ontic or
material dimension of truth, the truth of entities, implies the notion of a

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right attitude or right perspective from which to view things, and vice
versa. So it is only in the context of horticulture that it makes sense to
talk of “true” blackberries and false blackberries. And within that
context, certain attitudes will succeed and others will fail at
discovering the truth about entities. Likewise, a “true friend” can only
appear within the context or setting of friendship practices and the
entities that support those practices – acting, intending, and being
disposed in the way that friends are. Within that context, some
attitudes will be true if they allow the true friend to show herself as the
friend that she is. It should be obvious by now that we have moved
some considerable distance away from mainstream philosophical uses
of “true” and “truth” – first, by giving the notion of material truth pride
of place in the account of truth. I noted at the outset of this section that
Heidegger had an indirect interest in propositional truth. It is at this
point that we reach the context for understanding the indirect nature
of this interest. Propositional attitudes are understood as one (often
privileged way) of allowing entities to show themselves as what they
are. But our interest in propositional truths is presumably driven by
the sense that having true propositional attitudes is a good way to get a
grip on the surrounding world. And if that interest is determinative of
what counts as a true attitude, then there is no reason not to expand
the “truth” bearing attitudes to include practical attitudes like
intentions and desires. Practical attitudes, after all, can succeed or fail
at getting us in touch with the way the world really is just as much as
cognitive attitudes: “truth is correctness of representation, where
‘representation’ means having entities before oneself and bringing
entities before oneself in perceiving and intending, remembering and
planning, hoping and rejecting. Representation conforms to entities,
adjusts itself to them, and reflects them. Truth means the adjustment of
representation to what entities are and how they are” (GA 6.1: 460).
This passage makes clear that Heidegger wants to understand the
truth-bearing attitudes quite broadly to include any attitude in which
our comportment toward entities can succeed or fail in being well
adjusted to the circumstances and, in the process, allow entities to be
seen in their truth. Attitudes, including propositional attitudes, are true
when they “conform to and are determined by entities.” These two
notions – the notion of material truth, manifested in our talk of true
and false friends, blackberries, gold, or what have you, and the notion
of attitudinal truth as a matter of which attitudes disclose the material
truth of entities – together give us a preliminary grasp on the way
Heidegger uses the word true (and interprets Nietzsche’s use of the
word true). But it is only a preliminary grasp, because Heidegger’s
focus is not the truth of this or that particular thing, but rather the

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truth of “entities as such and as a whole.” He is interested in the truth
of being – the truth of what entities are insofar as they are entities at
all. “The essence of truth,” Heidegger explains, “is the truth of essence,”
where ‘essence’ means what entities really and truly are insofar as they
are entities at all. 2. The truth of entities as such and as a whole

Another example will help us develop the idea of a truth of the being
of entities. As we saw in discussing material truth, the truth of what a
thing is is relative to a background context within which it appears.
This context will involve both characteristic practices and uses of the
thing, as well as a rich set of relations to other entities that belong to
the context. Consider the ways entities show up in a carpenter’s
workshop. In a workshop, things show what they are most
perspicuously when we are using them in some project of repair or
production. They are defined relative to practices (like hammering,
sawing, planing, and so on) but also through their relationships to
other entities. A nail, for example, shows itself most clearly as a nail
when we are driving it with a hammer, inserting it into boards in order
to attach boards to each other, and so on. So far, we have said nothing
more than we did in talking about the material truth of blackberries.
But let’s focus now on the context itself, rather than the particular
entities. It is the context that determines what the truth of any
particular entity is, and thus understanding the context gives us access
to the truth of particular entities. A nail, for instance, is a nail because
of the role it plays within the context of a carpenter’s workshop or
workspace, and we understand what a nail is by understanding this
role relative to the whole network of activities, entities, aims, and
standards for successful performance within the context. The context is
not a random assortment of objects and practices. It has a coherence –
all the entities and practices within the context mesh and support and
draw on one another. But this means that there is not just a truth about
what any particular entity in the workshop is. It is also the case that
there is a truth about the workshop itself – what kind of a coherence it
has and what kind of a whole it is. To the extent that entities belong
within this whole, there’s a general truth about what entities as a
whole and as such are. They are all in truth the kind of things that
belong in this whole. Within the workshop, entities as such and as a
whole are equipment. It is only because the nail is in truth equipment,
that it is also in truth a nail. That is, its belonging to the context of the
workshop determines that the equipmental use-properties and
relations of the nail (as opposed to all the other properties and
relationships it has) will define it as the thing it is. We can better

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appreciate this by contrasting the way the “very same” entities show
up in different settings – for example, the way tools show up in a retail
hardware store. As a whole, they do not show up as equipment in the
hardware store. They show up as mercantile goods. A mercantile good
is revealed not in the workman’s practices but in the shopper’s stance.
This involves different forms of inspection and use (it would, in
general, be inappropriate to drive nails into the boards on display in
the hardware store). And it involves different forms of arrangement of
entities vis-à-vis each other (for instance, all the different kinds of
hammers are shelved together in the hardware store, rather than right
next to the nails or boards). In the workshop, the arrangement of
entities is dictated by the need to have them readily available for
working. Not so in the hardware store. There the arrangement is
dictated by concerns about maximizing sales – popular items, for
instance, are located in the rear of the store so that shoppers will walk
past other items on their way in and out of the store, thus increasing
the likelihood of an impulse buy. Thus we might say that the same
entities have a different truth in the different contexts: the tools and
equipment of the workshop are really mercantile goods in the
hardware store. So just as a particular entity has a material truth about
what it is, there is a material dimension to entities as a whole and as
such within a context. It is their being as equipment that dictates how
the entities are to be related to each other in the workshop; it is their
being as mercantile goods that dictates how entities are to be related to
each other in the store. And just as we grasp the material truth of
particular entities in an attitude, there is an attitudinal dimension to
grasping entities as a whole and as such. We disclose the workshop as
such by a general readiness to build and repair things; we disclose the
hardware store as such by a general readiness to engage in mercantile
exchanges. Whether we are perceiving and thinking about the
workshop in the right or “true” way (that is, in a way that adequately
assimilates our activities to the kind of entities we encounter within
the world) is determined in the workshop by whether we successfully
and competently and reliably repair what we need to repair or produce
what we need to produce. When we are shopping in a store, by
contrast, the rightness or truth of our attitudes is determined by
whether we competently and reliably are able to carry out successfully
a commercial transaction. Of course, in one sense it seems right to say
that, even in the hardware store, the individual tools are still
determined as what they are by the context of the workshop (a
hammer is still for driving nails, a nail is still for attaching boards, and
so on). This is because the hardware store is in a sense oriented to the
equipmental context of the various different types of workshop and

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workspace. It is one of the many contexts that support practices of
production and repair. And this fact, in turn, points to the existence of
an ultimate context that organizes all the different practices and
settings available to us: the world. At the highest level, Heidegger
thinks, there is a truth about all the entities that belong to a world – a
truth about what they are in virtue of which they can find a place
within the world. But now, to move squarely from our illustrative
examples to what Heidegger has in mind when he discusses
metaphysics as the history of the truth of entities as such and as a
whole, we need to ask not about any particular context but about the
whole world as organizing and determining all the different contexts.
Metaphysical Worlds

For Heidegger, metaphysics is not a subfield within philosophy, nor is

it a doctrine of a particular philosopher. Rather, a metaphysic “is the
truth of entities as such and as a whole” (GA 66: 382). The history of
metaphysics is the history of different “epochs” of truth, that is,
different unified understandings of what entities truly are, and
correspondingly different views of what the privileged attitudes are for
disclosing and grasping the truth. It is not possible to appreciate
Heidegger’s reading of truth in Nietzsche without some sense for his
overall narrative of the history of truth in metaphysics. Accordingly, let
me briefly sketch out how Heidegger understands the permutations of
truth leading up to Nietzsche. I’ll proceed by discussing a few of the
major metaphysical epochs, with an eye to saying how they understand
truth in general, and how the material and attitudinal dimensions of
truth are understood in those ages. For the earliest metaphysical
epoch, the epoch of the Greek philosophers, the true entities (the
material dimension of truth) were the ideas: “the genuine entity is the
idea, and this is the model” or “archetype” (GA 40: 193). The truth of
the particular concrete entities we encounter in the world around us is
found in the ideas or forms that they instantiate. The idea was
regarded as the truth of an entity because it was stable and would
endure across a variety of changes that a particular entity might
undergo. The attitudinal dimension of truth was understood as
homoiôsis, which Heidegger interprets as “adjustment” (Angleichung).
A true attitude is a conforming attitude, that is, one in which our
attitudes are “suited to” or “adjusted to” the true entities, the ideas: “all
opening up of entities must proceed so as to compare itself with the
archetype, conform itself to the model, adjust itself according to the
idea. Truth . . . now becomes homoiôsis and mimêsis, adjusting,
conforming oneself to [the entity], correctness of seeing, of perceiving

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as representing” (GA 40: 195). For the Greeks, theôria is the
paradigmatic activity in which we achieve conformity with the truth,
that is, with the ideas. Through theory, concerned as it is with the ideas
and conceptual structures of the world they make up, our attitudes
become shaped by the ideas. We thus learn to see the sensory world in
terms of the ideas. The Christian age grows out of this material
understanding of truth. In Christianity, the truth of entities continues
to be understood as an idea. But the ideas, the true entities, are ens
creatum, the creations of God. What an entity truly or really is is the
entity as it is thought of by God. According to the “Christian theological
belief,” Heidegger explained, “in what it is and whether it is, the matter
only is insofar as it, as something in each case created (ens creatum),
corresponds to the idea preconceived in the intellectus divinus, that is,
in the mind of God, and thus is adapted to the idea (correct), and in this
sense ‘true’” (GA 9: 181). The eternal and unchanging nature of God’s
understanding fixes what things really are, in contrast to the unstable
and shifting way they appear to us humans when viewed from our
fallen and corrupted perspective. But the mind of God is not something
that shows itself of its own accord. Rather, access to the truth requires
our first correcting our attitudes so that they become oriented to things
in the way that God thinks them. This occurs through faith. Thus
correctness comes to be understood not as conforming ourselves to the
self-disclosing truth but as bringing ourselves into a fit state, so that we
can measure up or be equal to the truth that is to be revealed. The true
attitudes are thus characterized in terms of adaequatio, which
Heidegger translates as Anmessung, “fitting,” “measuring up to” the
truth. In the Christian world, we are called to think and believe and
experience entities in such a way that our thoughts are adequate to
God’s understanding of the world: “the understanding is adapted to the
idea only by accomplishing in its propositions the conformity of the
thought to the matter, which for its part must be in accordance with the
idea” (GA 9: 181). The paradigmatic activities for getting our attitudes
to fit or measure up to God’s understanding are cognitive ones – belief
in the revealed word, or the study and learning of church doctrine:
Biblical revelation, which represents itself as based on what is divinely
given (“inspiration”), teaches that entities are created by a personal
creator God and preserved and guided by him. . .. The being of entities
consists in their being created by God (omne ens est ens creatum). If
human knowledge wants to experience the truth about entities, then
the only reliable way for it remains to diligently compile and preserve
the doctrine of the revelation and its transmission through the church
teachers. Authentic truth is only mediated through the doctrina of the
doctores. Truth has the essential character of “doctrine.” The medieval

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world and its history is based on this doctrina. The appropriate form in
which alone knowledge can completely express itself as doctrine is the
“Summa,” the compilation of doctrinal writings in which the totality of
the traditional doctrinal content is organized and the different
doctrinal opinions are thoroughly examined, used, or rejected on the
basis of their correspondence with church doctrine. (GA 6.2: 115)
In attitudes like belief and doctrinal understanding, Christians grasp
the truth of what things are because these attitudes enable them to see
most perspicuously the nature of God’s creation. The Modern age, too,
locates the material dimension of truth, the truth of what entities really
are, in the domain of the idea. But these ideas are no longer conceived
of as self-disclosive and self-subsistent forms (as for the philosophic
Greeks), nor as fixed in the mind of God and revealed to the faithful (as
for Christian metaphysics). Rather, the truth of what things are
becomes what is representable to us as knowing subjects, whether the
representation is arrived at empirically and inductively from the
observation of entities, through introspection, or through a
transcendental deduction. But without an independent domain of the
forms or the mind of a creator God to fix and stabilize the truth of what
things are, how are we to determine which of the infinitely many
possible modes of representing an entity is the one which delivers the
entity to us as it truly is? As with the Greek and the Christian epochs,
the Modern locates the material dimension of truth in something
stable, fixed, and unchanging – this time, what is reliably discoverable
when our cognitive faculties are operating correctly and optimally. In
the Christian world, human beings were called upon to measure up to
God’s understanding of us – indeed, it was Christian practices of
repentance and faith that brought us into a condition of being able to
apprehend God’s truth. According to Heidegger, this practice of
securing our salvation by suiting or adapting our faculties to God’s
understanding is translated at the dawn of the Modern age into a
concern with the correct functioning of our rational capacities in order
to secure the certainty of representation. Drawing a straight line from
Luther’s concern with a good conscience for securing salvation (GA 54:
75), to Descartes’ imposition of rules for right reasoning (GA 54: 76), to
Kant’s “critique of pure reason” as the “essential delimitation of the
correct and incorrect use of the human faculty of reason” (GA 54: 76),
Heidegger concludes that in Modernity, the true attitudes – the ones in
which we see most perspicuously the truth of entities – are those in
which we achieve certainty: In order to reach what is true as the right
and correct things, human beings must be certain and secure of the
right use of his basic abilities. The essence of truth is determined by
this security and certainty. That which is true becomes what is secured

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and certain. Verum becomes certum. The question concerning truth
becomes the question whether and how human beings could be certain
and assured of both the entity that he himself is, as well as the entity
that he himself is not. (GA 54: 75)
Consequently, the true entity, what the entity really is, is what can be
securely and certainly grasped by the subject. The true entity is “no
longer ens creatum, it is ens certum, indubitatem.” We can summarize
this brief history of the metaphysics of truth in the following chart:
Chart 10.1(a)

To decide whether the Nietzschean account of truth continues this

metaphysical tradition or breaks with it, we need now to ask what
characterizes metaphysics in general. What are the traits of a
metaphysical account of truth as such? Although there are significant
changes from epoch to epoch, Heidegger identifies what we might call a
network of common background assumptions that shape the approach
to truth from the Greek age through the modern. I will refer to these
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background assumptions as “theses,” although they are rarely if ever
formulated as such. The point is rather that the various metaphysical
views on truth can be understood as having been shaped by a
background understanding that these theses are trying to capture or at
least indicate. Let us consider first the material dimension of truth.
Although different metaphysical ages have identified different
characteristics or traits as determinative of the truth of entities, each
one of these characteristics was an effort to capture what was most
stable, and thus reliably and predictably encounterable in the world.
Thus the metaphysical tradition has always distinguished between a
true world and mere appearances, and has taken the truth of the true
world to consist in some form of stability (Beständigkeit). For instance,
in platonic metaphysics, the truth of entities is found in the unchanging
forms that they instantiate because these remain stable throughout
generation, variation, and corruption in the concrete particulars. In
Christian metaphysics, the true world is the eternal world, in contrast
to the transient and perishable world we inhabit in mortality. For
metaphysics, then, the truth of what a thing is is determined by its
stable features – what we can count on finding in it, what is stably or
reliably discoverable. It is on the basis of some form of stability that
metaphysics can draw a distinction between a true world and the
world of appearances. The truth of things is what is stably, reliable,
predictably ascertainable about them, while mere appearances are
transient, and fluctuating. Thus, a primary feature of the metaphysics
of truth is the background assumption of stability. We will articulate
this as: 1. The Stability Thesis: What entities truly are is found in that
about them that is stable across changes. Closely related to this
assumption of stability is an assumption of independence – that is, that
what things really are cannot depend on us and what we happen to
think about them. A second background assumption of the metaphysics
of truth is thus: 2. The Independence Thesis: What entities truly are is
independent of the particular thoughts, practices, and attitudes we
have regarding them. The independence thesis might be seen as a
consequence of the stability thesis. If what things truly are is what is
stable about them, the reasoning goes, then the truth of entities cannot
depend on what any of us happen to think of them, or how we use
them, feel about them, relate to them, and so on. Our thoughts,
practices, and attitudes are susceptible to considerable change. If the
truth of things were dependent on us in this way, then there could be
no stable truth about how things are. Within a metaphysical age,
moreover, it is not simply that case that each true entity is stabilized
into some way or other of being. Rather, the age achieves a kind of
coherence insofar as all the true entities share a characteristic way of

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being. Already in his “Ontology” course of 1923, Heidegger had
observed that cultural forms – he lists art, literature, religion, morality,
society, science, and the economy – are expressions of a single
“character of being,” a “pervasive uniformity” of “style” in which the
“life of a culture comes to expression, holds itself therein, and becomes
obsolete” (GA 63: 36). Later, when he had developed an account of
distinct epochs, he discerned in each of these a pervasive uniformity. In
the Beiträge, he noted “that dark priority that the One and that unity
have everywhere in the thought of being” and identified this
predilection for uniformity as something from which we must free
ourselves in order to make a transition out of metaphysical modes of
thought. He traced the metaphysical emphasis on unity and uniformity
back to the “Greek interpretation of the on he on as hen [being qua
being as one]” (GA 65:459). In the Christian age, for instance, things are
experienced in “the uniform region of the ens creatum” (GA 17: 187).
Or in the Modern age, there is a “uniformity of entities” resulting from
the “the uniformity of a calculation that can be planned on” (GA 7: 93).
Thus we can articulate: 3. The Uniformity Thesis: All true entities share
a single, uniform characteristic style. These three metaphysical
background assumptions about the material dimension of truth
contribute to the form that the attitudinal dimension takes within a
metaphysics of truth. Because of the independence thesis – the sense
that the truth about what things are is independent of the way they
show themselves within many of the particular attitudes that we take
toward them, it follows that our access to the truth requires our taking
up the correct attitude toward them. Indeed, the name for attitudinal
truth in general across the entire metaphysical tradition is
“correctness”: “to take something for that which it is, to present it as
being in such and such a way, in presenting it to conform oneself to
that which emerges and encounters one – that is the essence of truth as
correctness” (GA 6.1: 462). This is in contrast to the way one would
think of attitudinal truth if truth is understood as unconcealedness.
Then, rather than looking for the uniquely right attitude for conforming
oneself to what exists independently, one would open oneself to the
self-disclosing welling-up of being (phusis). The decisive
transformation toward a notion of attitudinal truth as taking up the
right attitude and conforming oneself to what entities are, Heidegger
argues, can be seen in Plato’s cave allegory: If everywhere and in
every comportment with entities it depends on the idein of the idea, on
seeing the “visible form” of entities, then all efforts must first be
concentrated on enabling such a seeing. That requires correct looking.
The one freed within the cave, when turning away from the shadows
and toward the things, already directs the look at that which is “more

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in being” than the mere shadows: prosseite mallon onta tetrammenos
orthoteron blepoi (515 d, 3/4), “thus turned toward what is more in
being, they no doubt should look more correctly.” The transition from
one situation to another consists in the looking becoming more correct.
Everything is due to the orthotes, the correctness of the looking.
Through this correctness, seeing and knowing become a correct seeing
and knowing, so that in the end it goes directly to the highest idea and
fixes itself in this “adjustment” (Ausrichtung). As a result of this
conformity (Angleichung) of perception as an idein to the idea, a
homoiôsis, a correspondence of knowing with the things themselves,
exists. In this way, a transformation of the essence of truth arises from
the priority of the idea and of idein over alêtheia. Truth becomes
orthotes, correctness of perceiving and asserting. (GA 9: 230–1)
We see in this passage, first of all, the two dimensions of truth. The
idea is truth in the material dimension, the true entity, the entity that is
“more in being” than the things and shadows of the cave. The looking at
entities in the light of the ideas, the idein, is the attitudinal dimension,
the correct perception of material truth. There are, in addition, two
aspects involved in this correctness: an aspect of conformity to the true
entities, entities that exist independently of the particular
comportment or attitude we adopt toward them. Second, there is an
aspect of proper adjustment by means of which the attitude gets
oriented toward the true entities so that it can conform to them. These
two aspects are in Plato scarcely distinguishable, yet we need to
articulate them separately to allow for the possibility that some
metaphysical ages (like the modern) will put decidedly more emphasis
on the proper adjustment of the mind than on the conformity with an
independently existing reality. Thus we can say that in a metaphysics
of truth, the attitudinal dimension involves: 4. The Conformity Thesis:
Our attitudes are true by conforming to the way entities are
independently of our attitudes. and 5. The Adjustment Thesis: The
truth of entities is only accessible when we have properly adjusted our
attitudes so as to orient them to reality. The conformity thesis
emphasizes the priority of the material dimension over the attitudinal
dimension, and is primarily responsible for the overshadowing of an
understanding of truth as alêtheia – that is, of truth as something that
only exists in a disclosure. As a result of a metaphysic’s understanding
of the truth of entities in general, it also holds a view about which
human attitudes give us the most lucid access to the truth of what
entities are. Different metaphysical positions on what entities truly are
privilege different attitudes as best discovering the truth about entities.
But all of them have privileged some propositional attitude or other as
giving us the best access to the truth about entities. This is not just a

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coincidence; the privileging of the cognitive attitudes is supported by
the emphasis on stability in the material dimension of truth, for to be
oriented toward what can be conceptually predicated of entities is to
be oriented to what can stably and reliably be discovered in a variety of
contexts and situations. Thus the final background assumption of the
metaphysics of truth is: 6. The Cognitivist Thesis: The best attitude for
grasping what things truly are is some species of cognitive attitude. In
Platonism, as we noted, we grasp the truth of what things are through
theôria, that is, when we perceive and grasp them in the light of the
ideas. In the Christian era, truth is discerned through understanding
and believing the revealed word. In the Cartesian form of modernity,
for instance, truth is grasped in a clear and distinct representation. As a
result, there was a tendency in the metaphysical tradition to think of
the attitudinal dimension as some form of agreement between
complete cognitive units – propositions – and states of affairs in the
world. But Heidegger’s interest in the attitudinal dimension of truth
differs in important ways from a theory of propositional truth. He
makes no pretense, for instance, of offering necessary and sufficient
conditions for the truth of a proposition. His question is not what are
the conditions under which a proposition is true? The question is
rather under what conditions does an attitude, propositional or
otherwise, give us a grip on what things really are? These are
importantly different questions – a proposition could be true without it
giving us any kind of grip at all on the world. Because I trust the
physicist down the hall, I might assent to and hold the proposition that
there is a Higgs field. And this proposition might very well be true (that
is, it might correspond with the facts, or cohere with a maximal set of
other beliefs, and so on – fill in your own favorite theory of
propositional truth here). And yet, I scarcely understand what it
means. It thus gives me almost no insight into the way things are, and I
lack any way of actually using this proposition in my ordinary everyday
engagements with the world. Conversely, an attitude might give us a
good grip on what things are without having a true proposition as its
“content.” Indeed, a falsehood or a work of fiction might be better at
orienting me to the important features of the world than a true
proposition. It is possible, for instance, that the works of Hesiod and
Homer introduce their listeners to what things are in the Greek world,
to what is important, salient, and compelling about things in that
world, and thus help them successfully navigate the prephilosophical
Greek world, even though there are almost no true propositions at all
in those works. So when, in the context of talking about the truth of
entities, Heidegger discusses “true” attitudes – beliefs, thoughts, but
also intentions, desires, actions, perceptions, and so on – he is

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interested in the question of what attitudes will let me grasp the truth
of what entities are within a particular world. He is also interested,
albeit less so, in the question of how the propositional content of those
attitudes could agree with some fact or state of affairs in the world
(assuming, that is, that they even have a propositional content). But he
has no interest at all in offering a theory that would explain how to
distinguish the true propositions from the false ones. Rather, he is
content to observe that metaphysical epochs have tended to privilege
propositional attitudes in general as the best attitudes for discerning
the truth about entities (he disputes this privilege, by the way). He also
observes that the epochs have differed in the particular type of
propositional attitude they have privileged. For example, we have seen
that modernity has privileged those cognitions that are certain (when,
for instance, Descartes makes clear and distinct perceptions
foundational for determining what things are), whereas the Christian
age privileged faith in the revealed word and doctrinal understanding.
But in making such claims about the different epochs, Heidegger is not
claiming, for instance, that modernity has defined the truth of the
proposition as certainty. There might well be – there almost certainly
are – true propositions that are not certain. But uncertain propositions
could not be foundational for discovering the truth about what entities
are. Still, there is just enough overlap between the question of the
nature of propositional truth and the question of which attitudes are
understood as disclosing the truth of entities to mislead many into
thinking that Heidegger’s discussion of the latter are inquiries into the
former. With the transition from the Modern age to its completion in
the Technological age, Heidegger believes that something important
changes in the metaphysics of truth. The six background assumptions
we have identified take a decidedly different form, although Heidegger
insists that one cannot understand our age without recognizing the
extent to which they remain in force. Heidegger’s reflection on
Nietzsche’s philosophy is aimed primarily at working through these
hidden metaphysical elements of the contemporary Technological age.
With this more detailed account of the metaphysics of truth in place,
we are now in a position to understand Heidegger’s critique of
Nietzsche, and his charge that Nietzsche, even while overturning the
metaphysical tradition, remains entangled in a metaphysics of truth. 3.
Nietzsche and the metaphysics of truth

Let’s return now to the passages from Nietzsche with which we began
this chapter. As long as one has only a vague sense of a metaphysics of
truth as somehow involving a belief in suprasensuous or transcendent

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or ultimate truths, then it might seem that Nietzsche has overcome
metaphysical tendencies with regard to truth simply by insisting that
the idea of a true world is an error or an illusion. I do not mean to
downplay the significance of Nietzsche’s critique of truth as an error.
Heidegger himself acknowledges that Nietzsche’s views of truth
represent an important departure from the metaphysical tradition. In
fact, Heidegger’s own approach to overcoming metaphysics is heavily
indebted to his reading of Nietzsche’s critique of metaphysics and
efforts to discover a postmetaphysical mode of thought. And yet,
Heidegger insists that Nietzsche, and with him the contemporary age,
continues to hold to certain core features of the metaphysical view of
the truth of entities, albeit in a way that significantly transforms
traditional approaches to metaphysics. Thinking in terms of the six
background assumptions about truth allows us to explain why.
Heidegger’s interpretation of Nietzsche is summarized in the following
passage: The truth, which is conceived [by Nietzsche] as error, was
defined as what has been made secure, the stable. But what is thought
to be error in this way necessarily thinks truth in the sense of being
attuned2 to the real, that is, with becoming chaos. Truth as error is a
missing the truth. Truth is a missing the truth. In the unambiguous
essential determination of truth as error, truth is necessarily thought
twice and each time differently, thus ambiguously: once as making
secure of what is stable, and the other time as being attuned with what
is real. Only on the basis of this essence of truth as being attuned can
truth as stability be an error. The essence of truth taken here as the
basis of the concept of error is what has been determined since ancient
times in metaphysical thinking as conformity to the real and as being
attuned with it, as homoiôsis. (GA 6.1: 559–60)
This is an extremely dense passage, involving a series of claims made
in very short order. Heidegger begins by invoking the material
dimension of truth and arguing that Nietzsche accepts the stability
thesis: what is true is the stable or secured. Nietzsche accepts the
thesis, but only in order to deny that it succeeds in capturing the way
things really are. But to insist without contradiction that truth is an
illusion or error, Nietzsche must draw on the distinction between the
material and attitudinal dimensions of truth, where attitudinal truth in
general is being correctly attuned with what is. Attitudinal truth in the
metaphysical tradition is a matter of getting attuned to or properly
disposed so that the true can show itself as it is in itself. The distinction
between the attitudinal and the material dimension opens up the
conceptual possibility for something to be both true and false –
materially true but attitudinally false, for instance. But in order to be
realized, this conceptual possibility requires us to draw another

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distinction that will let the attitudinal and material dimensions actually
come apart – a distinction between truth – what is true – and reality.
With that second distinction in place, we can say that, materially
speaking, something is true if it is stable. And yet, our attitudes are
nonetheless false if it turns out that to be attuned so that true, that is,
stable, entities show up is to fail to be attuned to the way the world
really is. And this is in fact the case for Nietzsche, as he holds that
reality itself is not composed of stable entities, but rather consists of a
constant flow of becoming. Heidegger explains: Truth in the sense of
what is true – the purported entities in the sense of that which is stable,
fixed and immutable – is then illusion if the world “is” not something
that is in being but rather it is something “becoming.” A knowledge that
as true takes something to be “being” in the sense of the stable and
fixed, holds onto entities and yet does not find that which is real: the
world as a becoming world. (GA 6.1: 493)
On Heidegger’s interpretation, then, when Nietzsche says that truth is
an error, this means that when we are so adapted that we can perceive
stable entities, we miss the reality of the world. Tuning our perceptive
capacities for stable entities means that we lose a grip on the world as
it really is – a constant becoming or “chaos.” An understanding and
apprehension of the truth is “knowledge.” Thus we find Nietzsche
arguing that what is needed is not “‘to know’ but rather to schematize,
to impose on chaos as much regularity and form as our practical needs
require” (WP 515). What does it mean to say that ultimate reality is
“chaos”? Chaos is, first of all, as we just noted, something that cannot be
grasped by attitudes oriented toward what is stable, reliable, what can
be counted on in advance. Thus chaos cannot be grasped by a
propositional attitude. But this does not mean that chaos is some kind
of raw, propertyless given: “‘chaos’ speaks for Nietzsche as a name that
does not mean any sort of arbitrary confusion in the field of sensations,
perhaps it does not mean a confusion at all. . .. Nietzsche also does not
mean with ‘chaos’ what is simply disorganized in its disorganization,
nor that which stands in disarray arising from the removal of every
order” (GA 6.1: 509). The chaotic is not conceptually graspable and yet
it has an order to it: “chaos is that which is urging, flowing, moved,
whose order is concealed, whose law we do not know immediately”
(ibid.). The ultimate reality is an “unmastered richness” that can only
ever be known partially, and only through our bodily understanding of
how to cope with the flowing and streaming, constantly altering
domain of perception and action: “we encounter chaos bodily, that is, in
bodily states, chaos being included in these states and related back to
them” (GA 6.1: 512). Our skillful bodies – themselves chaotic in that
they move in and respond to the particularities of the situation in ways

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that we can scarcely understand and describe very poorly – are able to
make sense of and find their way in the constantly changing, moving,
altering “chaotic” perceptual array (see GA 6.1: 509). Heidegger calls
this skillful bodily action “bodying” (Leiben) to capture the way in
which our body responds smoothly to demands of the concrete
situation without needing any deliberate, reflective, or cognitive
guidance. For skillful embodied beings who are “bodying,” there are no
fixed and stable entities; only a constantly shifting and flowing domain
of perception and action – in other words, “chaos.” “‘Chaos’, the world
as chaos, means: projecting entities as a whole relative to the body and
its bodying” (GA 6.1: 511). At its foundation, then, the claim that truth
is an error turns on Nietzsche’s ability to pull apart the true and the
real, to hold that what is true (that is, stable) is not real (that is, chaos).
By distinguishing truth and reality in this way, Nietzsche is in a
position to deny many of the metaphysical theses with regard to truth.
But, Heidegger argues, this position is won by simply shifting the locus
of Nietzsche’s metaphysical commitments from truth to reality.
Nietzsche remains entangled in the metaphysical understanding of the
material dimension of truth insofar as he continues to hold that what
an entity really or truly is is found in some notion of stability. So when
Nietzsche writes: we have made the “true” world something that is
not changeable and becoming, but rather something that is being
Heidegger takes this to mean: the truth that is conceived as an error
would be defined as that which is made secure, the stable. (GA 6.1:
230)
And to say that this “truth is an error” means: there is no stable,
reliable, enduring truth about what things are. (ibid.) For the stable to
be an error, however, it must be the case that reality is not stable. Thus,
Nietzsche simultaneously affirms the stability thesis with regard to
truth, but also denies it with regard to reality: the truth that was
conceived as error” by Nietzsche “would be defined as what is made
secure, that which is stable. But error understood in this way
necessarily thinks truth in the sense of agreement with the real, that is,
with the becoming chaos. (GA 6.1: 559)
He holds, in other words, 1. The Stability Thesis with respect to truth:
What entities truly are is found in that about them which is stable
across changes, but denies: 1 . The Stability Thesis with respect to
reality: Reality is found in that about entities which is stable across
changes. So Nietzsche accepts the metaphysical understanding of truth
as stability. But whereas in previous metaphysical ages the
commitment to the true entity as a stable entity simply was a
commitment to a stable reality of things, Nietzsche now argues that the
true entities are temporary stabilizations of an ultimate reality that is

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unstable, chaotic, and in constant flux. Thus, although he retains the
stability thesis with respect to truth, he relativizes truth to a
background understanding of chaos as ultimate reality and in this way
frees himself of a metaphysical commitment to the essential stability of
reality. This is, from Heidegger’s perspective, a genuine advance, a step
out of metaphysics. Rather than seeing stability as an inherent feature
of reality, Nietzsche holds that stability arises only with respect to
particular, relatively stable and enduring human practices and
perspectives. But to hold this amounts to denying the independence
thesis with respect to truth, to denying that what entities truly are is
independent of the particular thoughts, practices, and attitudes we
have regarding them. It is along these lines that Heidegger reads
Nietzsche’s claim that Truth is the kind of error without which a
certain type of living being could not live. In the end, the value for life
decides. (WP 493)
On Heidegger’s interpretation, to say that the “value for life” decides
the truth does not mean that we hold true those propositions, the belief
in which enhances life. Rather, it is to say that what entities truly are is
determined by seeing them in the light of what is required for the
practical conduct of our lives to succeed. On a crudely biologistic
reading, for instance, one might say that this entity (indicating a pizza)
is truly food as opposed to something else because it is as food that it is
most directly relevant to the preservation of bodily functions and thus
contributes to the successful transmission and perpetuation of genetic
material. But, we must immediately add, Heidegger insists that
Nietzsche not be read in such crudely biological terms. Instead, there
are a variety of ways to understand the successful conduct of life, just
as there are a variety of possible perspectives one can take on what is
of value to life (including the biological). One lives one’s life by taking
up a particular perspective on life, by inhabiting a particular possibility
or range of possibilities. One’s perspective on the world is laid out by
the aims one adopts (aims opened up by the possibilities one inhabits).
So the truth of what entities are will be relative to each individual’s
current perspective on existence. But Nietzsche also has a view about
how to understand life in general. The essence of life is understood in
terms of the capacity for self-transformation and, in the highest
instance, the opening up of whole new registers of meaning and
domains of possibilities: Which essential characteristics value has as a
condition of life depends on the essence of “life,” depends on what is
distinctive about this essence. When Nietzsche says the essence of life
is life-enhancement, then the question arises: what belongs to the
essence of such enhancement? Enhancement, and especially such an
enhancement as is performed in and through the one who is enhanced

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him- or herself, is an out-beyond-itself. This means that in
enhancement, life projects higher possibilities of itself before itself and
shows itself and admits itself into a possibility that is as yet unattained.
(GA 6.1: 439)
Thus what is most valuable for life, because it lets life most fully
realize its essence, is whatever allows life enhancement, where life
enhancement means the ability to open up new, previously unavailable
possibilities, and to do this not in response to outside compulsion but
by oneself. The truth of what things are, then, is a function of the way
they contribute to our capacity for life enhancement understood as
self-overcoming. That means that truth is fixed or determined by praxis
in the broad sense – praxis as living a life, rather than pursuing this or
that particular practical aim or goal. The aim of praxis in general is to
live life in such way as to be able to “admit oneself into an as yet
unattained possibility” (see GA 6.1: 514 ff.). And yet, most of the time,
one must conduct one’s life within a particular perspective, and that
means one must deal with entities as stabilized relative to the practices
of that perspective, rather than destabilizing them by shifting into new
possibilities. Even within a particular perspective, however, one holds
onto the transformative, enhancing essence of life by seeing truth as a
value – that is, by recognizing that what things truly are is a temporary
function of the particular perspective one inhabits at this moment. If
truths are values and thus posited only relative to some particular
practical engagement with the world, then it follows that there is no
single, uniform, unchanging character or style that all true entities
have. What is true, in other words, is a product of the present
particular way I am inhabiting the world, my particular momentary
perspective. Thus Nietzsche rejects: 3. The Uniformity Thesis with
respect to truth: All true entities share a single, uniform characteristic
style. Drawing together these observations on the background
assumptions of Nietzsche’s account of material truth, we can say that
for him the true entity is a value, and to experience something as a
value is precisely to see it as a stabilization, and thus as a distortion of
the underlying chaotic reality: What is true has, as something stable,
the character of a value. Truth is a necessary value for the will to
power. In each case, however, the stabilizing solidifies becoming.
Hence what is true, because it is something stable, presents the real
which essences in becoming in precisely such a way that it is not. What
is true is in this way that which is not adequate to what is in the sense
of the becoming, that is, the genuinely real, and thus the true is the false
– when indeed the essence of truth is thought as conformity of
representation to the matter, according to the long-familiar
metaphysical definition. And Nietzsche in fact thinks the essence of

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truth in this sense. How else could he express his corresponding
essential delimitation of truth thus: “Truth is the kind of error without
which a certain type of living being could not live. In the end, the value
for life decides.” (GA 6.2: 283, quoting WM, n. 493)
In this sense, to experience truth as a value is decidedly different
from the way material truth has been opened up within the
metaphysical tradition. There is now no absolute, unchanging,
independent, uniform way of fixing what entities truly are: There is no
“true world” in the sense of a world that is unchanging, eternally valid.
The thought of the true world, as something that first provides the
measure on its own and for everything, thinks nothing. The thought of
a true world conceived in this way must be abolished. (GA 6.1: 561)
But that’s not to abolish the notion of truth all together. What is true
(in the material sense) is what was formerly dismissed as a mere
appearance – namely, the values that appear to a particular individual
from a particular perspective. Entities can show up as values because,
in reality, there are no stable and enduring entities. So if Nietzsche
rejects that independence thesis with respect to truth, he nevertheless
accepts: 2 . The Independence Thesis with respect to reality: What
really is is independent of the particular thoughts, practices, and
attitudes we have regarding it. In particular, reality is chaos in the
sense outlined above, and remains so regardless of whether we
understand it as such or not. In addition, if there is no uniform style
that all entities share (since they are constituted as entities only within
the horizon of a particular practical engagement with the world), there
is nevertheless a uniform style that reality has – a uniformity that
allows us to take up a variety of incompatible perspectives in our
engagement with the world. Thus Nietzsche accepts: 3 . The
Uniformity Thesis with respect to reality: What is real has a single,
uniform characteristic style. To be specific, the real is eternally
recurring will to power. No matter how particular entities show up,
they do so against the background of reality as chaos. What is it like for
every entity, as an entity, to manifest itself as will to power? Nothing
shows up as having a fixed nature, inherent uses, set goals, or limits on
permissible use. To inhabit a world where everything is as will to
power is to experience everything in the world as permitting a
constant overcoming. This means that no entity could or would
demand of us that we use it in a particular way. Each shows up as
inviting us to rearrange it, reorder it, incorporate it into new practices
and relationships, and so on. To say that the chaos is eternally
recurring means that there is no fixed and binding way of relating
things, no standing obligations to prior arrangements, and so on. We
find ourselves constantly returned to a situation where we are free to

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rearrange and reestablish our own interpretation of the world. What
things are is open to reconfiguration (thus, entities are unstable), but
that they are open to reconfiguration is uniformly the case. Before
turning to the attitudinal dimension of truth, let’s briefly summarize
what we have learned about Nietzsche’s take on the material
dimension. Nietzsche holds on to the notion of the true entity as a
stable entity. But because he rejects the idea of a true world in itself (an
independent truth), as well as a nonperspectival truth (a uniform
truth), there’s a sense in which Nietzsche has rejected the metaphysics
of material truth. The stability is only a relative stability of a particular
value for a particular perspective. Heidegger is in fact tremendously
indebted to Nietzsche’s recognition of the nonstable nature of ultimate
reality – this underlying ontology is what allows for the possibility of a
sequence of historical worlds. His engagement with Nietzsche’s
thought is thus an important stage in Heidegger’s own effort to
overcome metaphysics. And yet, Heidegger contends, Nietzsche’s
rejection of a metaphysics of material truth is purchased by
reinscribing metaphysics at the level of reality – to be specific, by
positing an independent and uniform reality. Nietzsche has
unthinkingly succumbed to a metaphysics of the real by positing that
ultimate reality is uniformly and independently recurring will to
power. To overcome metaphysics truly, we would need to abandon the
idea that there is any one way things are in themselves, independently
of us. Instead, we would accept a “logic” of unconcealment – of being
and our human existence or Dasein mutually adapting to each other,
and thus being able to emerge into an indefinite variety of distinct
ways of being. Heidegger’s critique of Nietzsche’s account of attitudinal
truth follows a similar pattern. That is, Heidegger acknowledges that
Nietzsche has in an important respect rejected a metaphysical
understanding of truth, but only on the basis of reinscribing
metaphysics at a higher level by according a privilege to some attitudes
as those by which we gain access to the independent and uniform
reality. But even here, Heidegger finds certain aspects of Nietzsche’s
account of our grasp of reality quite salutary. For instance, Heidegger
finds in Nietzsche a valuable ally in combatting cognitivism. This is
because Nietzsche denies not just the cognitivist thesis with respect to
truth (6), but he also denies its analogue: 6 . The Cognitivist Thesis
with respect to reality: The best attitude for grasping reality is some
species of cognitive attitude. We saw this in the discussion of chaos and
bodying above – the becoming character of existence is disclosed most
perspicuously not in a cognitive and rationally articulable
understanding of things, but in our bodily skills for coping with the
constantly shifting worldly situation. Thus our cognitive grasp of the

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truth about entities is for both thinkers derivative of our precognitive
practices and coping skills for engaging with the world (see Chapters 1
and 2). According to Heidegger, Nietzsche quite rightly understands
our attitudes as “stances,” ways of poising ourselves and prefiguring in
advance what entities and objects we can encounter. By privileging
reason, the metaphysical tradition adopted a basic stance
(Grundhaltung) (GA 6.1: 498) on the world that “anticipated similarity
and sameness as the ground for stability” (GA 6.1: 555). An attitude is
true for the metaphysical tradition if it discloses true, that is, stable,
entities. But, as we have seen, what shows up as stable is itself an
illusion, according to Nietzsche. Thus an attitude that anticipates
stability is itself untrue, an error: that which is true [i.e., stable
entities] for this truth [i.e., the attitudinal orientation of the
metaphysical tradition] is not the true [i.e., not what really exists], for
the true of this truth means that which is represented as stable, that
which is made secure as an entity. In the guiding perspective on chaos,
this securing proves to be a mistaken solidification of becoming; the
solidification becomes the denial of that which flows and presses
beyond itself; the solidification is a turning away from the genuinely
real. The true as that which is mistakenly solidified and made secure is,
through this denial of chaos, excluded from agreement with the
genuinely real. That which is true in this truth is from the perspective
of chaos not adequate to this chaos, thus untrue, thus error. Nietzsche
expresses this unequivocally in the proposition to which we already
referred: ‘truth is the kind of error without which a certain kind of
living being could not live.’ (WP, n. 493; 1885) (GA 6.1: 558)
Heidegger calls the attitudinal dimension of truth a “Für-wahr-
halten,” a stance that holds something to be true. Each metaphysical
epoch has supposed that some stances give us a hold on things that lets
them show up as they really are – for the ancient Greeks, this was
theôria; for the medieval Christians, it was faith in the revealed word;
and for the moderns, it was the state of certainty in which we can
calculate and reckon up the interactions the entity could have with
other entities in the world. Once again, this does not mean that a
proposition is true if and only if (for Christian metaphysics) it is one in
which we have faith or (for modern metaphysics) it is one of which we
are certain. Rather, the claim is that what entities truly are can only be
ascertained within such an attitudinal hold on the world, or that only in
such a stance can we distinguish between what is true of an entity and
what is false. I’ll refer to an attitude which is oriented toward that in
entities which is stable and independent as a “truth-directed” attitude.
Nietzsche remains entangled in metaphysics because his continued
adherence to the metaphysical understanding of attitudinal truth

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underwrites both his dismissal of the truth-directed attitudes as
falsification, as well as his privileging of art over truth. It is because
attitudinal truth is conformity to independent entities – the entities as
they are in themselves – that the attitudes that are directed toward
truths (i.e., values) are falsifications. For values only exist within a
practice of stabilizing the chaotic flow into perspectival values, and
they are only disclosed when we take up a perspective within a horizon
of possibilities and evaluate the world from that perspective. Thus
Nietzsche’s view is not a rejection of: 4. The Conformity Thesis with
respect to truth: Our attitudes are true by conforming to the way
entities are independently of our attitudes. It is rather an embrace of it.
Nietzsche accepts the conformity thesis – so much so that it is his basis
for holding that the truth-directed attitudes are false, for they precisely
do not conform to an attitude independent reality. But the commitment
to the conformity thesis alone is not a serious entanglement with
metaphysics because of the way the conformity thesis and the
adjustment thesis come apart in Nietzsche’s work. The reason our
truth-directed attitudes are an error is that to hold them, and thus to be
able to perceive stable entities, is precisely to fail to be properly
adjusted by the chaotic reality of a flowing and becoming world. Thus,
in calling truth an illusion, Nietzsche implicitly rejects: 5. The
Adjustment Thesis with respect to truth: The truth of entities is only
accessible when we have properly adjusted our attitudes so as to
orient them to reality. He rejects this thesis because to orient our
attitudes toward reality is to lose our grip on the values as valuable – it
is to see them rather as something to be overcome. Thus an attitude
oriented to chaos is an attitude in which “true” entities are not
genuinely accessible as such, that is, as stable, independent, and
uniform. Rather, truths are momentary and perspectivally indexed
takes on a reality that cannot be definitively established or fixed.
Heidegger does think Nietzsche remains entangled in the metaphysics
of truth in another significant way, however, because he maintains the
ideal of conformity and adjustment in our relationship to reality. We
can detect Nietzsche’s continued adherence to the background
metaphysical assumptions in his claim that “art is worth more than
truth” (WP 853). The reason for privileging art over truth is precisely
that, in artistic creation, we more perspicuously disclose chaotic reality
than in ordinary estimations of value. The notion of conformity has to
change, of course, in that there are no longer any independently
existing entities to which we need to conform. But there is an
independently existing reality to which we need to accommodate
ourselves. Heidegger signals this difference by saying that, rather than
“conformity” (Angleichung), art succeeds as an assimilation

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(Eingleichung) – a meshing into or getting our lives into gear with the
chaotic reality of the word. Homoiôsis in Nietzsche’s thought becomes:
“assimilation (Eingleichung) and admission (Einweisung) of human life
into chaos. . .. This assimilation is not an imitating and reproducing
conformity to what is occurrent, but rather: a perspectival-horizonal
transfiguration that commands-dictates” (GA 6.1: 573). Thus Heidegger
sees Nietzsche as abandoning the conformity thesis with respect to
truth but adhering to: 4 . The Conformity Thesis with respect to
reality: Our attitudes succeed by assimilating us to the way reality is
independently of our attitudes. Finally, something like the adjustment
thesis with respect to truth is also reincribed at the level of chaotic
reality. Nietzsche “in no way rejects this traditional and, as it would like
to appear, most natural essential definition of truth. Rather, it remains
the guideline for positing the essence of truth as making secure in
contrast with art, which is as a transfiguration an attunement with that
which becomes and its possibilities, and is precisely on the basis of this
attunement with what becomes a higher value” (GA 6.1: 560). Art is
understood here in the broadest possible sense as a way of conducting
oneself that is open to possibilities for transfiguration, of moving
beyond currently available possibilities, and thus overcoming the
constraints of past perspectival evaluations of the world. The higher
value accorded to art is grounded in something like: 5 . The
Adjustment Thesis with respect to reality: Reality is only accessible
when we have properly adjusted our attitudes so as to orient them to
reality (i.e., chaos). Because what entities truly are is not independent
of us and our forms of life, there is no uniquely true or right way to
attitudinally adjust ourselves to them. We do not get access to the true
entities by bringing our cognitive and perceptual capacities into proper
adjustment or conformity with the way things really are. Rather, the
true entities are perspectival values, which are posited relative to our
way of existence. The truth presupposes a form of life rather than
waiting for us to get into the right form of life to access it. The only
question is whether we will experience this truth as an error, and thus,
in the process, adjust ourselves and assimilate ourselves to the chaotic
reality of the world. Nietzsche’s objection to the attitudinal dimension
of the metaphysical tradition, then, is first of all its assumption that
getting a grip on things is a matter of “adapting to an entity that is
occurrently ‘true’ ‘in itself’” (GA 6.1: 572; Anmessung an ein an sich
vorhandenes Wahres ), when in fact there is no objective,
occurrent truth in itself. The stance in which we get a hold on the way
things really are is thus not an adaptive stance but a “dictating positing
in advance,” a stance in which we set them up as what they truly are.
Nietzsche’s name for this stance, Heidegger claims, is “justness”

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(Gerechtigkeit):3 “by justness Nietzsche understands that which makes
truth possible and necessary – truth in the sense of holding-for-true,
that is, the assimilation to chaos” (GA 6.1: 575). Nietzsche’s view of
truth as justness is a rejection of previous metaphysical accounts of
truth because the stances that metaphysics heretofore privileged for
delivering truth are precisely the ones that Nietzsche believes obscure
the way things really are. And yet, truth as justness remains shaped by
metaphysical background assumptions. When “truth becomes justness
. . . the initial essence of truth is transformed in such a way that the
transformation amounts to a sidelining of the essence (not its
destruction)” (GA 6.2: 13). Truth is sidelined in the sense that a correct
grasp of stable entities is no longer an end or aim in itself, but rather a
means to something higher: self-overcoming. The essence of truth –
stability – is preserved, but it is given a subsidiary role in the project of
overcoming: “all correctness is merely a preliminary stage and
occasion for surpassing, every making firm merely a base for the
dissolution into becoming and in this way into the stabilizing of ‘chaos’.
. .. When truth is sidelined in this way, then the essence of truth loses
its domination” (GA 6.2: 13). But what precisely is involved in truth
becoming justness? The word “justness” is meant to indicate both sides
to the change in truth – the devaluation of truth as traditionally
understood following the separation of truth and reality, and the
continued entanglement of reality in the metaphysical background
assumptions of truth. The attitude of justness, Heidegger explains, is
concerned with what is just or right, which Nietzsche defines as “the
will to make eternal a particular relationship of power” (GA 6.2: 28,
quoting Nietzsche XIII, 205). “But that which is right, that which shows
the direction and gives the measure,” on Nietzsche’s account, “does not
exist in itself” (GA 6.2: 28–9). So the “particular relationship of power”
that justness wills to make eternal, is one in which we “bring out
entities as a form of will to power” (GA 6.2: 295–6). That power
relationship demanded by the will to power is one the permits a
constant enhancement of power. What ought to characterize our
attitudes, then, is that we always act and think and intend and
otherwise direct ourselves toward the world so as to facilitate constant
empowering: “the mode of justification proper to the new justness” –
that is, the success conditions of our world-directed attitudes –
“consists neither in measuring up to occurrent entities, nor in the
appeal to laws that are valid in themselves. Within the domain of the
will to power, every demand for a justification of this type remains
without either ground or a response” (GA 6.2: 295). The attitudes are
not justified in the way truths were – by adjusting and conforming to a
stable reality. Instead, they are adjusted to a chaotic reality, and will

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succeed in giving us a grip on this reality only if they “remain
exclusively related to the preservation” of “the will to power. This new
‘justness’ no longer has anything to do with a decision about right and
wrong according to a true relationship of measure and rank that
subsists in itself, but rather the new justness is active and before all
else ‘aggressive’: it first sets up from its own power what should be
called right and wrong” (GA 6.2: 176). Justness is being always
prepared to encounter entities as amenable to revaluation. In a
technological world, a properly adjusted attitude is one that
experiences the minimal constraints possible on what things are, how
they can be used and exploited, or how they should be related to each
other. Justness in the defined sense is the general property or trait of
those attitudes that will help us get such a grip on a technological
world. Thus justness is the general characteristic of all attitudes that
permit us constantly to go beyond current arrangements toward new
ways of valuing and organizing things. In Heidegger’s words, “justness
is a perspective-positing passage beyond previous perspectives” (GA
6.2: 294). The old value of orientation toward stability is useful only
during periods of consolidation, during which we prepare for the next
transformative revaluation. In claiming that, for Nietzsche, truth
becomes justice, or more precisely, claiming that the metaphysical
ideal of proper adjustment is now realized in justice, Heidegger puts
considerable weight on an unpublished note that Nietzsche wrote in
1884, entitled “the ways of freedom.” Among the ways of freedom that
Nietzsche lists, he includes “cutting oneself off from one’s past (against
fatherland, faith, parents, companions),” “dealings with outcasts of all
kinds (in history and society),” “overthrowing that which is most
revered, accepting what is most forbidden,” “committing all crimes,”
and “attempting a new valuation” (KGA VII-2: 136). Following the list
of ways of freedom, Nietzsche concludes with two observations. First,
of justness, he notes: “justness as a constructive, sorting out, and
annihilating mode of thought, arising from assessments of value: the
highest representative of life itself.” Then, of wisdom, he notes:
“wisdom and its relationship to power: some day power will be more
influential – up until now error was, the rabble’s assessment of value is
still too great even in those who are wise” (ibid.). In this passage, then,
Nietzsche offers first a set of practical means to liberate our tastes and
dispositions from fixed, inherited, and conventional ways of
experiencing and engaging with the world. But as the concluding
remarks make clear, the point is not simply to promote sociopathic
criminality and immorality. Rather, the aim is freedom as control over
one’s perspectives, a control that attains life in its highest dignity, a
control that lets the true nature of power emerge as definitive of

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wisdom. In Heidegger’s terms, this passage shows that for Nietzsche,
“authentically being free is justness” (GA 6.1: 576). The passage
concludes by distinguishing “the rabble’s assessment of value” from
power. The rabble believes that values are fixed and inherent in the
world. The perspective of justness, oriented toward power,
understands that values are temporary consolidations in the service of
ever-enhanced power. An important dimension of justness will be the
ability not merely to respond to things as values, but also to create a
whole new horizon for valuation. Nietzsche calls the latter ability “art,”
a practical orientation in which one both responds to the richness of
meanings that the situation offers, but also uncovers and creates
different meanings – meanings that might well be incompatible with
the current range of meanings we are responding to. Art discloses
chaos because chaos involves the idea that no single way of making
sense of the world can exhaust its richness. Such an attitudinal
orientation to the world is well characterized as freedom – both
freedom to respond to possibilities offered to us (i.e., the capacity to
pick up and employ significations in the world), and also freedom from
getting caught in any single way of responding to the world. It will
involve, as Nietzsche’s note suggests, moments of construction, sorting
out, and annihilating. To say that it is constructive, Heidegger explains,
means that it does not simply deal with what is given to it on the basis
of existing skills and dispositions. Such an attitude: “first creates such a
thing as never yet and perhaps never at all stands and endures as
something occurrent. It does not appeal to and support itself on the
basis of what is given; it is no conforming, but rather that which
announces itself as the dictating character of the positing of a horizon
within a perspective” (GA 6.1: 577–8). Unlike traditions attitudes of
truth, then, the point is not to correctly represent or bring into view
what exists independently of us. Rather, it is to dictate, to reach out and
anticipate in a new way, so that the world gets restructured. That
means that “constructing” is not simply an activity of producing
entities. Rather, it is a whole new orientation to the world – an
orientation in which we take responsibility for establishing new
determinative possibilities: “‘Constructing’ means not merely
production of something not occurrent, but rather means the erecting
and setting up, going into the height. Put more precisely, it first gains a
height, secures it and thus sets up a direction. From this point of view,
‘constructing’ is a commanding, which first raises the claim to
command and creates a domain of command” (GA 6.1: 577–8). A height
is a position from which we attain a new view on the world, one that
goes beyond the limitations of our previous perspective. Justice, as the
attitude that discloses the chaotic nature of the world, must constantly

242
be setting up new views, perspectives, ways of being oriented in the
world. But, of course, the world does not permit us to do just anything
we please. The chaos we encounter has meanings, significations of its
own, and that means that it resists us. Thus the attitude that allows
chaos to appear as such cannot merely be a dictating and commanding,
it must also be a sorting out, that is, taking in what is offered and
making decisions about how to respond to it as it develops a new form
of responsiveness to the chaos that impinges on us. Heidegger explains
that this constructing attitude “is at the same time a ‘sorting’. The
constructing thus in advance never moves in a vacuum; it moves within
something that pushes forward and forces itself on us as ostensibly
measure-giving, and it does not merely hinder the constructing, but
rather would like to make it unnecessary. The constructing, as erecting,
must at the same time constantly decide and pass excluding judgement
regarding measures and heights, and first form itself in the time-space
in which it erects its measures and heights and opens its views.
Constructing proceeds through decisions” (GA 6.1: 578). Thus, in
responding to chaos, we need to sort through what the world offers,
adjusting ourselves to the world, but also holding onto what supports
our way of projecting, and working around or excluding what would
threaten the current perspective: “it makes and holds onto what can
support the construction, and rejects what endangers it. In this way it
secures the building site and selects the materials of construction” (GA
6.2: 290). In order to build, the attitude must clear a space for the new
orientation to the world, and that requires it to clear away old modes
of responsiveness to the world. Thus it is also “annihilative”: “it
removes what previously and up until now had secured the stability of
life. This removing clears the road of solidifications, which might
hinder the execution of the erection of a height” (GA 6.1: 578–9). The
“solidifications” are the ways the chaotic world has settled into more or
less stable arrangements through our acquiring habitual forms of
response, fixed dispositions for encountering the world. Justice gets us
into synch with chaos by refusing to itself such stable habits and
dispositions. It will destroy whatever would promote a decline into a
fixed state. Justice can tolerate only temporary stabilizations, and
hence views such stabilizations – values – as values, and thus as
determined only relative to a particular temporally limited perspective.
To summarize, in a world where truth has become justice, we will
come to see particular truths as values – as relative to and dependent
on our first positing a perspective. Heidegger thinks that we can detect
this sort of understanding of truth wherever, as Nietzsche puts it,
“what is necessary is that something must be held to be true – not that
something is true.”4 Heidegger argues that such an attitude is

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spreading, and becoming evident in “the propaganda wars adapted to
the enormity” of “the historical totalized condition of our planet,” or
the way “all life makes itself known in that which is appropriate to the
facade, or on the order of a theatrical show, or advertisement.” Such
examples are signs of “a boundless distress of all confidence and every
trustworthiness drawing over the planet,” which, in turn, points to the
deeper phenomenon: “that not only some specific truth, but rather the
essence of truth is shaken and an original grounding of its essence
must be taken over and achieved by human beings” (GA 6.1: 484). The
idea, I take it, is that forms of discourse that in the past would have
been dismissed – superficial forms of theater and drama,
advertisements, “news shows” that are manifestly vehicles for
propaganda, can come to be taken seriously when we think that the
truth is inherently perspectival, that is, that it must be presented from
a particular perspective. At the same time, truth becoming justice
involves the sense that there is an independent reality, a chaotic
becoming, which we disclose as such by experiencing the world as
calling us to overcome prior perspectives. Conclusion: The Critique of
Nietzsche’s Metaphysics of Truth, and What that Teaches Us about
Overcoming Metaphysics

I would like to close this chapter by redeeming the promissory note

that I made at the outset – that by understanding Heidegger’s critique
of Nietzsche, we would illuminate Heidegger’s own views on
metaphysics and truth. We have seen that Heidegger accepts
Nietzsche’s critique of the distinction between a true and an apparent
world, and his rejection of the notion of stability that gave rise to that
distinction. There is no stable way the world is in itself; thus there is no
true world in itself. Heidegger also accepts Nietzsche’s rejection of
reason and cognition as providing a privileged mode of access to the
way the world is. And yet, Heidegger argues that Nietzsche remains
entangled in a metaphysical account of truth. He does not object on the
grounds that Nietzsche remains committed to a view of attitudinal
truth as an agreement with the way things truly are – Heidegger too is
committed to the idea that our attitudes can succeed or fail in giving us
veridical access to the world. Instead, Heidegger’s objection is
somewhat more subtle than that: namely, that in Nietzsche’s way of
repudiating the metaphysical tradition, he continues to hold fast to
what is most pernicious about metaphysics. And he does so in a way
that conceals the metaphysical tendencies in his own work. We can
best illustrate this by completing Chart 10.1: Chart 10.1(b)

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 When Nietzsche denies that reality is found in stability and grasped in
cognition, it looks like he is freeing himself from any stable conception
of what entities really are and how we really get a grip on them. And
yet, Heidegger argues, his view is nevertheless metaphysical insofar as
it accepts that there is some general feature that all entities share as
such – they are temporary stabilizations, valued relative to the
practical purposes of a particular form of life. And this, in turn, points
to an ultimate reality – chaos. That entities can be values is a result of
the fact that reality imposes no right interpretation on what anything
is. Chaos is not a true world, for that requires stability. But it is
nevertheless a unified, general understanding of what things are and,
moreover, Nietzsche attributes to chaos a kind of independence of us
and our particular projects or perspectives. When Nietzsche denies the
priority of cognition and representational modes of thought in granting
us access to reality, it looks like he has freed himself from traditional
ways of thinking of truth. And yet, he continues to hold that there is

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some privileged attitude by means of which we adjust ourselves to
reality – art. When we become artists of our own lives, we allow chaos
to show itself as it is in itself, as chaotic, and do so in such a way that
we are able to incorporate it into our lives. Truth thus becomes justice
– an attitude in which we are oriented to entities as values, and to
chaos as something allowing us the freedom of constant overcoming. In
fact, these two metaphysicalish components of Nietzsche’s thought are
connected: it is because Nietzsche privileges one form of attitudinal
orientation to the world that he commits himself to one general
understanding of reality. For Heidegger, the deepest lesson to be
drawn from Nietzsche’s critique of metaphysics – a lesson Nietzsche
himself failed to take to heart – is that there are a plurality of equally
legitimate worlds, thus a plurality of ways for entities to really and
truly be, and thus a plurality of equally valid types of attitude to take up
in disclosing the truth. So if Nietzsche remains entangled in
metaphysics through his continuing commitment to some version of
each of the six theses, what does that teach us about the proper way to
overcome metaphysics? The problem is not a commitment to a notion
of attitudinal truth as some form of agreeing with the way things are.
Nor is the problem a commitment to a notion of a material truth
and/or reality, provided that truth and reality are indexed to a
particular world disclosure. One problem is thinking that there is a
single independent, uniform, and eternal reality – chaos – when in fact
reality showing up as chaos is itself but one way for the world to be
disclosed. This then leads to the further problem of thinking that there
is one privileged type of attitude for getting at the way things are, one
proper form of life for adjusting ourselves to reality. By contrast,
Heidegger believes that our highest, postmetaphysical dignity is to be
disclosers of different understandings of being, none of which can be
understood as getting closer to or further away from the ultimate truth
and reality. Chapter 10 1 See, e.g., GA 31: 87 (on the ambiguity of the
Greek concept of truth), GA 9: 179–80 (on the double character of
agreement).
2 The German term that is translated as “being attuned,”

Einstimmigkeit, typically means unanimity. It comes, however, from

the root einstimmig, which means literally to be of one voice or to be in
tune with each other. It is formed from the verb einstimmen, which
means “to join in” or “to get in the right mood or attunement.”
Heidegger clearly means the term to have that kind of force.
3 I translate “Gerechtigkeit” as “justness” rather than the more

conventional “justice,” because Heidegger insists that “Gerechtigkeit” is

to be understood freed from the overtones of conventional morality or
legality. If one thinks that we get in tune with chaos by living a life that

246
is conventionally just in either a legal or moral sense, one has
completely missed the point. What one is to hear in “Gerechtigkeit” is
rightness, justice as “just-right-ness” (to indulge in a pun), in particular,
the attitude that is just right or suitable for disclosing the world as
chaos. The archaic English word “justness” had the sense of rightness
or suitableness, rather than a connotation of moral justice.
4 Friedrich Nietzsche, Nietzsche Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe, vol.

VIII.2 (Giorgio Colli & Mazzino Montinari, Eds.). Berlin: Walter de

Gruyter, 1970, p. 16.
Works by Heidegger

Note: Unlike references to other works in the Gesamtausgabe, page

references to GA 2 will list the “H” numbers, which are based on the
pagination of the original German edition of Sein und Zeit (Verlag Max
Niemeyer, 1927), and which can be found in the margins of both
English language translations of Being and Time, as well as in the
margins of the Gesamtausgabe edition of Sein und Zeit (Klostermann,
1977). BW Basic Writings, rev. edn. (David Farrell Krell, Ed.). San
Francisco: Harper, 1993. EGT Early Greek Thinking (David Farrell Krell
& Frank A. Capuzzi, Eds.). San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1975. GA 1
Frühe Schriften. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1978. GA 2 Sein und
Zeit. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1977. GA 3 Kant und das
Problem der Metaphysik. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1991.
Translated as: Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics (R. Taft, Trans.).
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997. GA 4 Erläuterungen zu
Hölderlins Dichtung. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1981.
Translated as: Elucidations of Hölderlin’s Poetry (K. Hoeller, Trans.).
Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 2000. GA 5 Holzwege. Frankfurt am
Main: Klostermann, 1977. Translated as: Off The Beaten Track (J.
Young & K. Haynes, Trans.). Cambridge, England: Cambridge University
Press, 2002. GA 6.1 Nietzsche I. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1996.
GA 6.2 Nietzsche II. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1997. GA 7
Vorträge und Aufsätze. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 2000. GA 8
Was heisst Denken? Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 2002.
Translated as: What Is Called Thinking? (J. G. Gray, Trans.). New York:
Harper & Row, 1968. GA 9 Wegmarken. Frankfurt am Main:
Klostermann, 1996. Translated as: Pathmarks (W. McNeill, Ed.).
Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1998. GA 10 Der Satz
vom Grund. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1997. Translated as: The
Principle of Reason (R. Lilly, Trans.). Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1991. GA 12 Unterwegs zur Sprache. Frankfurt am Main:
Klostermann, 1985. GA 14 Zur Sache des Denkens. Frankfurt am Main:
Klostermann, 2007. GA 15 Seminare. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann,

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1986. GA 16 Reden und andere Zeugnisse eines Lebensweges, 1910–
1976. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 2000. GA 17 Einführung in die
phänomenologische Forschung. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann,
1994. GA 19 Platon, Sophistes. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1992.
Translated as: Plato’s Sophist (R. Rojcewicz & A. Schuwer, Trans.).
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997. GA 20 Prolegomena zur
Geschichte des Zeitbegriffs. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1979.
Translated as: History of the Concept of Time (T. Kisiel, Trans.).
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985. GA 21 Logik: Die Frage
nach der Wahrheit. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1976. GA 22 Die
Grundbegriffe der antiken Philosophie. Frankfurt am Main:
Klostermann, 1993. GA 24 Die Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie.
Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1975. Translated as: Basic Problems
of Phenomenology (A. Hofstadter, Trans.). Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1982. GA 25 Phänomenologische Interpretation von
Kants Kritik der reinen Vernunft. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann,
1977. Translated as: Phenomenological Interpretation of Kant’s
Critique of Pure Reason (P. Emad & K. Maly, Trans.). Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1997. GA 26 Metaphysische Anfangsgründe
der Logik. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1978. Translated as: The
Metaphysical Foundations of Logic (M. Heim, Trans.). Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1984. GA 27 Einleitung in die Philosophie.
Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1996. GA 28 Der deutsche
Idealismus. Fichte, Schelling, Hegel) und die philosophische
Problemlage der Gegenwart. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1997.
GA 29/30 Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik: Welt, Endlichkeit,
Einsamkeit. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1983. Translated as: The
Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics World, Finitude, Solitude (W.
McNeill & N. Walker, Trans.). Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1995. GA 31 Vom Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit: Einleitung in die
Philosophie. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1982. Translated as:
The Essence of Human Freedom (T. Sadler, Trans.). London:
Continuum, 2002. GA 32 Hegels Phänomenologie des Geistes. Frankfurt
am Main: Klostermann, 1980. Translated as: Hegel’s Phenomenology of
Spirit (P. Emad & K. Maly, Trans.). Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1988. GA 33 Aristoteles, Metaphysik Θ 1–3. Frankfurt am Main:
Klostermann, 1981. Translated as: Aristotle’s Metaphysics Theta 1–3
(W. Brogan & P. Warnek, Trans.). Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1995. GA 34 Vom Wesen der Wahrheit: zu Platons
Höhlengleichnis und Theätet. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1988.
Translated as: The Essence of Truth (T. Sadler, Trans.). London:
Continuum, 2002. GA 36/37 Sein und Wahrheit. Frankfurt am Main:
Klostermann, 2001. GA 38 Logik als die Frage nach dem Wesen der

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Sprache. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1998. GA 39 Hölderlins
Hymnen “Germanien” und “Der Rhein.” Frankfurt am Main:
Klostermann, 1980. GA 40 Einführung in die Metaphysik. Frankfurt am
Main: Klostermann, 1983. Translated as: Introduction to Metaphysics
(G. Fried & R. Polt, Trans.). New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000.
(Original work published 1953.) GA 41 Die Frage nach dem Ding: zu
Kants Lehre von den transzendentalen Grundsätzen. Frankfurt am
Main: Klostermann, 1984. Translated as: What Is A Thing? (W. B.
Barton, Jr. & V. Deutsch, Trans.). Chicago: Henry Regnery Company,
1967. GA 44 Nietzsches metaphysische Grundstellung im
abendländischen Denken: die ewige Wiederkehr des Gleichen.
Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1986. GA 45 Grundfragen der
Philosophie: ausgewählte “Probleme” der “Logik.” Frankfurt am Main:
Klostermann, 1984. Translated as: Basic Questions of Philosophy.
Selected “Problems” of “Logic” (R. Rojcewicz & A. Schuwer, Trans.).
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994. GA 47 Nietzsches Lehre
vom Willen zur Macht als Erkenntnis. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann,
1989. GA 48 Nietzsche, der europäische Nihilismus. Frankfurt am Main:
Klostermann, 1986. GA 53 Hölderlins Hymne “Der Ister.” Frankfurt am
Main: Klostermann, 1984. Translated as: Hölderlin’s Hymn “The Ister”
(W. McNeill & Julia Davis, Trans.). Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1996. GA 54 Parmenides. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann,
1982. Translated as: Parmenides (A. Schuwer & R. Rojcewicz, Trans.).
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992. GA 58 Grundprobleme
der Phänomenologie. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1993. GA 63
Ontologie: Hermeneutik der Faktizität. Frankfurt am Main:
Klostermann, 1988. Translated as: Ontology: The Hermeneutics of
Facticity (J. van Buren, Trans.). Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1999. GA 65 Beiträge zur Philosophie (vom Ereignis). Frankfurt am
Main: Klostermann, 1989. GA 66 Besinnung. Frankfurt am Main:
Klostermann, 1997. GA 67 Metaphysik und Nihilismus. Frankfurt am
Main: Klostermann, 1999. GA 69 Die Geschichte des Seyns. Frankfurt
am Main: Klostermann, 1998. GA 79 Bremer und Freiburger Vorträge.
Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1994. GA 85 Vom Wesen der
Sprache. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1999. IM Introduction to
Metaphysics (Ralph Manheim, Trans.). Garden City, NY: Anchor Books,
1961. N1 Nietzsche,> vol. 1 (David Farrell Krell, Trans.). San Francisco:
Harper, 1979. N3 Nietzsche,> vol. 3 (David Farrell Krell, Trans.). San
Francisco: Harper, 1987. N4 Nietzsche,> vol. 4 (David Farrell Krell,
Trans.). San Francisco: Harper, 1982. OWL On the Way to Language
(Peter D. Hertz, Trans.). New York: Harper & Row, 1971. QCT The
Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays (William Lovitt,
Trans.). New York: Harper & Row, 1977. Index

249
adaptation 191, 232 See Ereignis, appropriation alêtheia 1, 6, 12, 15,
16, 18, 74, 78, 80, 81, 84, 128, 223, 224 Anaximander 133n9, 193
appropriation 204, 206, 207 See adaptation, Ereignis art 147, 177, 190,
208n15, 222, 234, 235, 238, 241 attunement 13, 30, 69, 91, 160, 171,
199, 201, 203, 204, 209, 210, 211, 226, 226n2, 227, 235 authenticity
24, 37, 90, 96n2, 113, 115n19, 123, Ayer, Alfred J. 164, background 31,
32, 74, 84, 106, 107, 111, 133, 151, 169, 178–84, 186, 187–92, 216,
221, 222, 223, 229, 232, 235, 236 being, understanding of 14, 31, 33,
34, 83, 88, 90, 117, 125, 178, 179–92, Bernasconi, Robert 186,
Borgmann, Albert 202n8, 206 Bracken, William 116 Brandom, Robert
164, 164n8, Burge, Tyler 97, 99, 99n7, 100, 100n8, 101, 101n9, 102,
102n11, 103, 104, 109, 115, Carman, Taylor 57n, 95n, 96, 96n2, 104,
114, 115, 115n19, 158n2 Carnap, Rudolf 177, 177n1, 178, 179, 180,
181, 184, 190, 192 chaos 136, 226–9, 231–6, 236n3, 238, 239, 241, 242
Christian age, the 7, 108, 156–62, 164–73, 182, 197–9, 211, 218–22,
224, 225, 234, 241See also history – historical epochs clearing 6, 14–
17, 24, 25, 32–5, 37, 181, 191 cognitivism 85, 156n, 162, 163, 167, 233,
communication 51, 52, 97, 107, 110, 111, 115, 116, 121, 131, 131n7,
132, 158, 164, 167, 169existential 110, 111 concealment 1, 13, 18, 19,
21–5, 33, 74, 84, 85, 129, conceptual 7, 20, 31, 74, 84, 85, 86, 89, 90, 91,
103, 117, 124, 178, 179, 183, 184, 218, 227 conversation 95–7, 97n3,
103, 104, 105, 107–14, 116, 117, 120See also discourse idle 95–7,
97n3, 103, 104, 105, 110–14, 116, 117, Davidson, Donald 6, 40, 40n,
43–52, 54–6, 102, 102n11, 104n13, 114 death 157, 162, 172, 172n14,
195–200, 202n7, 203, 204, 207, 210, Derrida, Jacques 42, 42n6, 125,
193, 193n23 Descartes, René 182, 183, 183n11, 186n19, 190, 193, 220,
225 despair 161, 166n10, 170, 171, 172n14 disclosure 5, 7, 8, 13, 26,
31, 32, 35, 36, 52, 62, 72, 83, 106, 113, 120, 131, 134, 143, 144, 150,
158, 159, 169, 224, 242discourse 4, 14, 75, 95, 96, 107, 108, 114, 115,
127, 128, 129, 131, 131n7, 132, 133, 134, 140, 144, 148, 167, 188,
240See also conversation discovering 106 See uncovering
disposedness 14, 106, 107, 108, 109, 111, 111n17 divinities 195, 202–
11, See also fourfold Dostoevsky, Fyodor 161, 161n5, 171, 172n14
Dreyfus, Hubert 40n, 57n, 83n10, 95n, 96, 96n1, 104, 114, 115,
115n20, 160, 184, 184n14, 186n17, 194n25, 202, 202n8, 203, 205n9,
208n15 Dummett, Michael 41, 41n1, 45, 45n13, 45n14, 97, 104n13,
178, 178n4 dwelling 138, 187, 195, 204, 205, 206, 209, 210 earth 2, 8,
69, 165, 171, 172, 172n14, 195, 197, 198, 202, 204–9, See also fourfold
enframing 28, 198, 205See also technology equipment 3, 23, 24, 53, 54,
55, 78, 107, 115, 142, 149, 150, 200, 216, 217, Ereignis 2, 124n4, 206,
206n10, 245 See adaptation, appropriation error 51, 52, 60–2, 64–6,
69, 73, 74, 84, 85, 87, 88, 91, 146, 166, 212, 226–9, 231, 233–5, 238

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essence 1, 5–8, 11–16, 24, 26–35, 38, 41, 42, 61, 72n2, 73, 75–9, 81, 83,
121, 124–6, 128, 133, 134, 136, 145n18, 150, 151, 153, 154, 156, 157,
164, 178, 184, 190, 191, 197, 199, 205, 208, 209, 212, 215, 220, 223,
227, 230, 231, 235, 236, 240as a verb 27, 154, eternal return 135, 232,
237 externalism 97–100, 102n11, 114 faith 70, 108, 156–68, 170, 182,
219, 220, 221, 225, 233, 237, 241 Faith 158 fourfold 2, 8, 195, 196, 204,
205, 205n9, 206, 207, 209, Frege, Gottlob 75, Friedländer, Paul 16
gathering 7, 32, 127–9, 132–4, 136, 208, 208n15 George, Stefan 95n,
99n7, 137, 139, 142, 143, 144, 148, 153 god 205 God 4, 8, 31, 34, 36,
76, 145, 146, 157–63, 165, 167, 170, 171, 172, 172n14, 181, 182,
191n22, 195–200, 202n7, 203, 204, 207–11, 218, 219, 221, 241
Heraclitus 12, 120, 193 historiography 181, 187, 188, 192 See
historiology historiology 181, 182, 185–9, 192, 193, 194 See
historiography historyhistorical epochs 7, 8, 31, 32, 179–87, 189–93,
195–9, 202, 203, 205–9, 218–22, 224–6, 233 Hölderlin, Friedrich 207,
207n13, 243, 245, homesickness 203 Humboldt, Wilhelm von 126
Husserl, Edmund 34, 69n7, 192 inauthenticity 37, 90, 97n3, 123
intentionality 40, 55, 192 Jaspers, Karl 121, 121n2, 122, 134, justice
162, 163, 172truth – as justness justness.truth – as justness Kant,
Immanuel 166, 166n9, 185, 193, 220, 243, 244 Kierkegaard, Søren 159,
159n3, 161, 170, 170n11, 171, 210n17 Lafont, Cristina 35, 36, 37, 120,
121, 144n18, 145n18, language 2, 4, 7, 13, 38, 40–2, 44–9, 51, 54–7,
62n4, 63n5, 77, 78, 95–7, 97n3, 99, 100, 102, 103, 104, 109, 113–16,
119–39, 141, 143–7, 149, 151–4, 157–9, 164, 167, 169, 177, 179, 188,
192, 193, 214, 243as house of being 7, 119, 120, 121, 124, 125, 126,
134, 136, 146, 152, 154 linguistic constitutionalism 120, 122, 123, 134,
137, 144 natural. See language – ordinary ordinary 7, 21, 23, 96, 97,
100, 102, 104, 116, 121, 122, 123, 124, 126, 130, 142, 143, 144, 146,
149, 153, 154, 155 originary 7, 124, 124n4, 127, 134, 134, 137, 151,
154, 155 poetic 124, 139, 168 Language 7 logos 31, 91, 120, 127–34,
136, 137, Luther, Martin 220 McDowell, John 119, 123 meaning 2, 3, 7,
15–17, 22, 27, 36, 38, 45–7, 49, 51n31, 52, 53, 63, 64, 65n6, 67–70, 77,
78, 82, 83, 95–103, 108–10, 114–17, 120, 121, 124–5, 128, 130–4, 136,
137, 139–43, 148, 152–6, 160, 165, 188, 192, 197, 199, 200, 210, 230,
238, 239 Meaning 109 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 57, 58n1, 59n3, 61, 62,
66–71, metaphysics 8, 12, 17, 27, 41, 42, 144, 144n17, 148, 150, 151,
165, 170, 178–85, 187–91, 193, 195, 198, 210, 212, 213, 217–29, 231–
7, 240–2, See history – historical epochs modern. See history:
historical epochs modernity 149, 182, 183, 191, 195, 198, 206, 224,
234 See history – historical epochs mood 106, 199, 226n2 mortals 8,
195, 204, 205, 205n9, 207, 208See also fourfold Mourelatos, Alexander
185, 185n15, 189 Nietzsche, Friedrich 8, 17, 17n2, 57, 58, 135, 136,
190, 193, 193n23, 196–9, 202n7, 212, 213, 215, 218, 221, 226–43, 245,

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oblivion 12, 179, 180, 184, 184n14, 191, 192, ontology 2, 3, 4, 12, 116,
134, 135, 136, 143, 154, 179, 196, 232 Parmenides 120, 185, 193
Pascal, Blaise 7, 156–68, 170–3, passion 166n10, 168, 170, 171,
perception 20, 52, 57, 58, 60, 61, 62n4, 65–71, 83, 84, 86, 88, 89, 90,
141, 223, 228 phenomenology 7, 18, 52, 58, 60, 67, 72, 83, 110, 156,
156n, 157, 158, 159, 186n19, 194n24, 244, 245existential 61, 66
philosophy 1, 2, 5, 6, 8, 12, 40–4, 74, 75, 77, 81, 84, 85, 97, 115, 119,
120, 123, 156, 167, 177–80, 182–93, 212, 213, 218, 226 phusis 181,
223 Plato 7, 38, 73, 74, 77–80, 82–6, 91, 193, 212, 223, 224, 244 poetry
137–40, 142–8, 151–3, 169, Putnam, Hilary 97–100, 102–4, 109, 115,
references 54, 116, 132, 137, 243 relations 2, 3, 8, 13, 20, 26, 32, 38, 39,
50, 63, 78, 102, 102n10, 123, 128, 128–32, 134–7, 141, 142, 143, 148,
150–4, 183, 189, 212, 216, renunciation 136, 138, 151, 152, 153
representationalism 13, 73, 241 revaluation 237, revealing 12, 19, 23,
32, 91, 110, 129, 143n16 Rilke, Rainer Maria 201 Rorty, Richard 186,
186n17, 186n18, 187, 189 Shakespeare, William 140 signification 26,
55, 63, 71, 81, 83, 107, 109, 142sky 8, 88, 195, 204–9, See also fourfold
Socrates 80, 85, 86 talk, idle 95 See conversation, idle Tarski, Alfred
44–7, 49, Taylor, Charles 195, technology 8, 28, 32, 149, 150, 179,
179n10, 184, 191, 193, 195–206, 208, 209, 210, 226, 237See also
enframing resources 31, 32, 196, 198, 201, 209 Trakl, Georg 169
truthagreement 13, 21, 40, 42, 47, 150, 194, 213, 214n1, 224, 229, 233,
240 as adaequatio 12, 18, 219, 221, 241 as correctness 18, 29, 48n23,
69, 70, 73, 84, 87, 100, 101, 104, 105, 113, 123, 139, 196, 199, 209, 213,
218, 220, 223, 236 as correspondence 7, 12, 13, 15, 16, 19, 21, 28, 29,
35, 43–7, 73, 75, 75n4, 77, 79, 81, 83–5, 87, 219, 223 as homoiôsis 12,
18, 218, 220, 223, 227, 241 as justness 199, 236–42, ontic 6, 7, 8, 13,
27, 39, 75, 82, 179, 212, 214–18, ontological 11, 13, 14, 39, 213, 215,
216, 218–22, 224–6, 230 propositional 4–7, 12, 13, 15, 16, 18–21, 30,
34–6, 39, 43, 44, 47–52, 55, 56, 71–6, 79–81, 86, 89, 97n3, 164, 170,
213–15, 224, 225, 228 Tugendhat, Ernst 16, 34–8, 38n9 turning 4, 123,
130 unconcealment 1–8, 11–18, 21–3, 25–7, 30–2, 34–40, 43, 48, 52,
56, 72, 73, 79, 84, 85, 87, 91, 120, 154, 181, 204, 232 uncovering 2, 4,
13, 14, 16–26, 30, 32, 34–6, 52–5, 64, 67, 80–2, 106, 110, 114, 153, 183,
187, 204, 214, 238 will to power 231, 232, 237 worlds 1, 2, 17, 30, 36,
55, 232, 242

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