Re: A Question about "On the Essence of Truth" (fwd)

Anthony Beavers writes:
>Still, may I ask you to translate the following sentence into terms that
>I might understand once again: "The relation of the presentative
>statement to the thing is the accomplishment of that *bearing* which
>originally and always comes to prevail as a comportment" (1977, 124).
>Please treat me as a philosophical neophyte and tell me exactly what you
>think the passage means. In fact, I would appreciate it if you (or
>anyone) could explain to me section 2. I can understand the first
>paragraph and the first half of the second, then I get hopelessly lost,
>though slowly but surely it is falling in to focus. I can tell I'm close
>to getting it. Thanks for your help.

This is how I understand what's going on here. I'm not sure if I am on the
right
track, but if I am maybe this will help, if not maybe someone can help redirect
me. The section was launched with the bewildering problem (metaphysical) of the
relation between the proposition and its object. Heidegger then moves toward
changing the terms of the approach. Thus at this point it is not a question of
describing "the relation of the presentative statement to the thing", but of
replacing the very notion of a relation with what appears to be the predicate of
the sentence in question: "the accomplishment of that *bearing* which originally
and always comes to prevail as a comportment." We direct our attention to this
new way of thinking, while keeping in mind that the "relation" that we have left
behind, is the metaphysical expression of what we are now talking about. Thus
as is a pattern with Heidegger, philosophy begins with a metaphysical question,
but then precedes into a different sort of questioning in which the terms on
which the original question is based are transformed and the original
formulation
is left behind. Thus, as he says of the "traditional assignment of truth
exclusively to statements", the metaphysical springboard of the current
discussion "falls away."

Thus it is no longer a question of the relationship between the statement
and the
thing, but "the accomplishment of a bearing which comes to prevail as a
comportment." We're now in the realm of something more like Dasein. You might
say that comportment is a mode of Dasein, with all of the elaborate
elements from
B&T such as circumspective concernful dealings in the world of equipmental
assignments, etc.

It seems to clear things up to think of it, at least provisionally, as a
process.
A being always becomes present in and through a process of comportment. It is
important that Heidegger point this out so that we are aware that what is termed
"present" in Western thinking is not simply present, but always part of a
particular manner and moment of being in the world, a particular instance of
being-in-the-world.

One of the moments of this "process" is the moment that the presentative
statement subordinates itself to a directive. Contained within this process of
comportment then is a moment of subordination when the presencing of the thing,
in conformance with the comportment, is accomplished in the statement. The
comportment is already "underway" when out of it emerges the presentative
statement which accomplishes, completes, brings to its fullness, consumates, the
comportment.

>To be sure, somehow this presentative statement, though it is not truth,
>is intimately related to truth. Heidegger writes, "Thus the traditional
>assignment of truth exclusively to statements as the sole essential locus
>of truth falls away" (1977, 125). The words "exclusively" and "sole"
>indicate to me that the proposition is still a part of truth, it is just
>not all of it.

I think that Heidegger is more concerned with plotting out a line of thought
which takes off from the traditional notion of truth as correspondence or
correctness of statements, and through a process of questioning arrives at the
essence of truth, through an interrogation of the condition of possibility
of the
correctness of statements. Section two gets us closer to the essence of
truth by
locating this condition of possibility within the open region of comportment.
The proposition is still a part of truth only insofar as it leads us to
trace the
essence of truth in this direction.


-Clay Thurmond






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