truth, etc.

Lois, you wrote:
> Do my questions above lead us in useful places for better questions?

Yes! And thanks for your thoughts, which I'm coming to realize are always
worth listening to. Let me try to clarify some things (clarify for myself,
I mean, too...). I'm going to try to put things as clearly and as simply as
I can and I will as usual fail.

No one wants a correspondence theory because of the realism it implies. (So
we know if we end up with such a theory, we have misstepped somewhere.)
Ditto a coherence theory which seems to imply idealism for the most part.
What I'm attributing to H. is neither of these, but I'm not sure if it's any
more palatable in the end.

Truth is an experience, an affair of Dasein, we might say. I mean it in a
very mundane way. Like being hungry, scratching an itch, or on a more
refined level, the gestalt "aha!" experience of solving a math problem,
"feeling" love for someone, "listening" to the call of conscience. All of
these things have biological, cultural, historical, etc., that is, ontic
aspects to them. But that is not the whole story, or even the most
interesting part maybe. So it is with truth.

Truth as a-letheia un-concealing, unveiling (but without the implication
that there is some substance underlying that you get to eventually.) Truth
IS the unveiling itself, the experience of it. In this sense falsity is not
an opposite, which on your interpretation (am I right?) would have to be an
opposite of truth, namely something "not THERE." But H. writes of Dasein
always already being in truth and in un-truth. (BTW, a wonderful recent
political- moral appropriation of this is in the Heideggerian Vaclav Havel's
notion of "living-in-the-truth.") So I would say that maybe you are the
one who smuggles in correspondence when you talk about "what is there." (At
which point you say "Oh Yeah?" and I respond "Yeah!, ad infinitum, :-). If
you want to speak in terms of "what is there," then my question back is "as
opposed to what?, what is NOT there?, then in what sense...?

We don't ever "leave" un-truth and get to a place of "truth," then, on my
reading. It's in the movement itself that you find truth. (In the "what is
called thinking" lectures and, again, somewhere in one of the technology
essays, I think, H. asks auditors to pay less attention to "what" he is
saying than to the movement of the thinking, the path, the movement of the
showing, etc.) It's not in discovering an antecedent reality because it's
an ongoing hermeneutic. Truth, then denotes the intensification of a
certain type of interpretive experience, one always already "there" for us
to have.

The agency problem lies in the fact that the understanding-context
(fore-structures. etc.) are not of our own making, really. We're too caught
up in historicity, etc. for the individual "will" to make much difference.
(Shades of the infamous Hegel line at the end of the Phenomenology's
Preface!) We see what we're SHOWN (language, history, culture, Being
itself?) for the most part. It is not a matter of my heroic will that I
"get" truth. Late H. I read as less and less anthropocentric in this
regard, it's Being that shows or doesn't show itself in certain ways, the
history of western metaphysics is more Being-unveiling than human beings
finding out about things by some collective volition. We wait for a new God
to save us now...etc. There's really nothing much for us to DO. But all
the while there is lots of truth to be had, pragmatic truth, "what works,"
etc. becaues that's the way Being shows itself to us in this epoch(?). When
you say ">But the agency of DASEIN does seem lost in your system." I agree
because that's precisely what I think happens in later H.

I've probably just made things more confusing than they were... (Sorry if I
prattled at too great a length.)

David










+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+
David Blacker
Illinois State University
djblacke@xxxxxxxxx



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