Close Reading (Preview) of Heidegger on Truth

0:08 Mark: Life. What you're about to hear is 15 minutes near the beginning of a two and a half hour recording that Seth Paskin and I did of a close reading of Martin Heidegger's essay on the essence of Truth from 1943. You can get the full recording at partiallyexaminedlife.com store from the iTunes store or become a pel citizen and you get this and all of our bonus audio. We decided to do this reading because of the upcoming episode on Hans Georg Gadamer. Gadamer is very influenced by Heidegger. And one of his starting points is Heidegger's theory of truth, which involves things disclosing themselves as they are, whatever that means.

So to try and figure that out, Seth and I went line by line through the first half of this short essay. And I think even in this preview chunk, you get some idea where Heidegger's coming from. The clip you're going to hear here starts just a couple pages into the essay where he's trying to explain what the question itself what is truth? Means? We call for the goal which should be posited for man in and for his history. We want the actual truth. Well, then, truth. But in calling for the actual truth, we must already know what truth as such means.

Or do we know this only by feeling and in a general way? But is not such vague knowing and our indifference regarding it more desolate than sheer ignorance of the essence of truth?

1:22 Seth: So I think the subtext here is that if you ask the question, what is truth? When you're looking for the actual truth, you must have some idea about what truth means. If you're going to try to find the actual truth, you have to already have some sense of what truth is. And then he's, you know, it's that whole thing about how the point of your inquiry frames the boundaries for the. In the inquiry. Right. And so I think he's going to say, in order to explore the essence of truth, we have to go into it without the same kind of presupposition, without appealing to feeling or this vague, you know, some sense of knowing. And that's going to be this whatever discursive method goes through the rest of the essay.

2:10 Mark: Okay, I'm brought again to try to compare this with Plato that who, if I remember correctly, the whole idea of recollection means the whole reason that we can ask this question in the first place means we must already in some sense know it. I mean, I guess we must know there's something to look for in the first place, right? So yes, we have to have this vague knowing, but we shouldn't think that that's anywhere, that's going to be anywhere close to the actual mark that we're going to hit. Whereas I would think that for Plato, what we're really trying to do is uncover in its fullness that primary intuition, that sort of we. We already know really what truth and the good and that kind of thing is. We just can't articulate it.

2:53 Seth: I think that's fair.

2:56 Mark: All right, so we'll see. Try to figure out then what. What Heidegger's supposed more radical method than this is. All right, number one, so this is section one, the usual concept of truth. What do we ordinarily understand by truth? This elevated, yet at the same time worn and almost dulled word truth means what makes a true thing true? What is a true thing? So it's interesting that he's bringing up a thing is a possibility, a possible predicate for the term truth, you know, as opposed to a sentence, say I

3:29 Seth: think, and it'll lead us to something like correspondence. There he's saying he's not using the term proposition.

3:35 Mark: Right?

3:36 Seth: Like you could read that first sentence, what makes a true proposition true? And you'd say, oh, a state of affairs, right? Or the facts or whatever. I think he's got a broader characterization, but it's still the same framework we're looking for. In this usual concept of truth, there's something which obtains or exists that makes true something else, whether a statement or a disposition or whatever.

4:02 Mark: Alright, what is a true thing? We say, for example, it is a true joy to cooperate in the accomplishment of this task. We mean that it is purely and actually a joy. The true is the actual. Accordingly, we speak of true gold in distinction from false. So already we're. Even though he's setting up the usual concept of truth, he's taking it as his paradigm case of the point that he's arguing against. Talking about true versus counterfeit. He says false gold is not actually what it appears to be. It is merely a semblance and thus is not actual. What is not actual is taken to be the opposite of the actual.

But what merely seems to be gold is nevertheless something actual. Accordingly, we say more precisely, actual gold is genuine gold, yet both are actual, the circulating counterfeit no less than the genuine gold. What is true about genuine gold thus cannot be demonstrated merely by its actuality. The question recurs, what do genuine and true mean here? Genuine gold is that actual gold, the actuality of which is in accordance with what always in advance, we properly mean by gold. Conversely, wherever we expect false gold, we say, here is something that is not in accordance.

On the other hand, we say of whatever is as it should be, it is in accord. The matter is in accord.

5:29 Seth: This translation has some of the German words because they're trying to emphasize the notion of stimmen, which is accordance, which I think brings me back to that point earlier about correspondence that this is him characterizing. But it's an odd thing for him to say false gold and real gold are both actual. Right. He started off making it actual versus not actual, but that's not where he took it. He said, no, no, no. The false gold is actual. It's just somehow not proper. There's a slight shift here, I think, from proposition to facts of the world or state of affairs to a judgment that there's a set of conditions which when we say gold, we mean the substance that has a certain chemical property or whatever.

But that's not really what we mean. We don't mean something that has an atomic weight of, you know, x. What we mean when we say gold is the thing that has value as a precious metal in our everyday life versus false gold, which is, you know, merely a semblance of that. It's something that's not right. And so you're kind of slightly moving from simply looking at the concordance between facts and the proposition or the disposition to something having to do with value or judgment.

6:49 Mark: Yeah, it's interesting. So accord, of course, sounds like correspondence, this Stimmen, but he's not putting it here that this true gold corresponds to other true gold in the world or something. He just says here something is not in accord or in it is in accord. The matter is in accord that presenting it not as a relational property, correspondence with something else, but that it in itself, at least the way he's stating it is in accord. Which sounds more like it's bad. We'll see what he makes of that.

7:21 Seth: Yeah, it's in accord with our expectations of what should be.

7:25 Mark: Mm, Right.

7:27 Seth: Okay.

7:28 Mark: However, we call true not only actual joy, genuine gold in all beings of such kind, but also, and above all we call true or false, are statements about beings which can themselves be genuine or not with regard to their kind, which can be thus or otherwise in their actuality. That seems a weird way of putting it. Our statements can be genuine or not with regard to their kind. That seems like a very weird way of saying which can be true.

7:57 Seth: Well, he says it before. He says, we call True or false, Our statements about beings. Mm.

8:02 Mark: And the statements can themselves be genuine or not with regard to their kind, which can be thus or otherwise in their actuality. I think he's stating this in this weird way, and he started with the gold example, to say that unlike for somebody like Russell or something, one of the analytic guys, truth is not primarily something that just applies to propositions or statements. And I would think some of these folks would say, so far, if you actually call a thing true, then you're just misusing the word. What you really mean is a statement about the thing.

So the gold is not true gold. It's the statement. This gold has the atomic weight, blah, blah, blah. This substance is actually gold. It's that statement that's true or false. It's not the thing. But I think here he's trying to set it up that it is primarily a wider term than that. And it's just that statements are one of the kind of things that apply to you.

8:56 Seth: Yeah. I think you could probably read the second half of this sentence, which can be thus or otherwise in their actuality, is that you can make statement like unicorns have a horn. That's true. But of course there are no actual unicorns. So this opens the door and he's just talking about propositions or statements. And of course there can be analytic or mathematical or whatever. Right. That don't necessarily have to do with things. In actuality, a statement is true if

9:25 Mark: what it means and says is in accordance with the matter about which the statement is made. Okay, so the straight up correspondence here, we too say it is in accord. Now, though it is not the matter that is in accord, but rather the proposition. The true, whether it be a matter or a proposition, is what accords the accordant. That is das Stimmende being true and truth here signify accord and that in a double sense. On the one hand, the consonance of a matter with what is supposed in advance regarding it. So that, like you said, Seth, it is with our expectations. And on the other hand, the accordance of what is meant in the statement with the matter. So that sounds more like what we would think of as correspondence theory of truth.

10:08 Seth: Yep.

10:09 Mark: This dual character of the accord is brought to light by the traditional definition of truth. Veritas est adaequatio rei et intellectus. This can be taken to mean truth is the correspondence of the matter to knowledge. I don't know if he's actually giving us a literal translation of the Latin or he's assuming we know what the Latin is. And he's giving an interpretation of it and.

10:30 Seth: No, he's definitely not giving us a literal translation. Here. Let me.

10:34 Mark: Veritas truth est adaequatio is adequate. Rei et intellectus.

10:41 Seth: Truth is the adequation or equation of things and intellect.

10:46 Mark: Right. That's Thomas Aquinas. Yep.

10:48 Seth: Which he attributed to somebody else. But a judgment is said to be true when it conforms to the external reality. So it's kind of like old school correspondence theory.

10:56 Mark: Yep. This can be taken to mean truth is the correspondence of the matter to knowledge. But it can also be taken as saying truth is a correspondence of knowledge to the matter. Admittedly, the above definition is usually stated only in the formula veritas est adaequatio intellectus ad rem. That is, truth is the adequation of intellect to the thing. Yet truth, so conceived propositional truth is possible only on the basis of material truth. Of adaequatio of adequation of the thing to intellect. I'm not going to read the Latin anymore if it gives the translation.

11:29 Seth: Both concepts of the essence of veritas have continually in view a conforming to, and hence think truth as correctness.

11:40 Mark: So do we want to make anything of this? How close the matter is to your knowledge versus how close your knowledge is to the matter?

11:47 Seth: No. So the move here is that he's saying this correspondence theory of truth ultimately has a notion of correctness, that truth here means there's a correlation between these two things, either your idea or your the proposition or the matter and reality or actuality, or the thing. And that truth here is a matter of looking at the thing and looking at the statement and making sure that there's a correct correspondence.

12:17 Mark: Okay. Nevertheless, the one is not the mere inversion of the other. On the contrary, in each case intellectus and res, in other words, our expectation, or the adequation of the thing to intellect and res, the intellect and the thing, on the contrary, in each case, intellectus, that is intellect and res, the thing, are thought differently. In order to recognize this, we must trace the usual formula for the ordinary concept of truth back to its most recent, that is the medieval origin veritas as adaequatio rei ad intellectum does not imply the later transcendental conception of Kant, possible only on the basis of the subjectivity of man's essence, that objects conform to our knowledge.

Rather, it implies the Christian theological belief that with respect to what it is and whether it is a matter as created, ENS creatum is only insofar as it corresponds to the idea preconceived by the intellectus divinus, that is the mind of God, and thus measures up to the idea that is is correct and is in, in this sense is true.

13:22 Seth: This is one where I don't have enough scholarship to say whether he's making this up or if this is. This is a fair representation of the medieval position, but so the original medieval position was that this correspondence was not a correspondence between objects in the world and the mind of the, and the ideas of the mind of individual of human beings, but rather that the world of creation, insofar as it corresponded to the mind of God, can then be judged correct or true, and that we are derivative. Human beings are derivative because we, we ourselves are created things. And so the move from the medievals is always for us to try and determine the mind of God, so to speak, and not look directly at the world and see how it conforms to our ideas, but rather try to understand how the mind of God is reflected and mirrored in the created world.

14:21 Mark: All right, the intellectus humanus too is an ENS creatum, is a created thing. Our human intellect as a capacity bestowed upon man by God, it must satisfy its idea. But the understanding measures up to the idea only by accomplishing in its propositions the correspondence of what is thought to the matter, which in turn must be in conformity with the idea. Alright, let's unpack that. The Christian theological belief with respect to what it is and whether it is a matter that is something created, is only insofar as it corresponds to the idea preconceived that you would want to say something is only real insofar as it corresponds to what was divinely thought out first, which I have a hard time again without, like you, I don't know the medieval scholarship here figuring out what specifically he might look at by that.

But maybe you could use that to say, you know, like evil is not real or something, that only the good, you know, something like that.

15:20 Seth: Yeah. The problem of evil is a great example here, because if you're going to say that there's evil in the world, or that some person is evil or something like that, then in the medieval conception that he's characterizing here, that would assume that the possibility of evil was preconceived by God. If it's true that there's evil in the world, then God made it that way. And then you get stuck into, okay, well, why would God allow there to be evil if he's divinely good and so on and so forth. But if you take the position that, you know, God would not allow that, then there's not evil.

There's something defective about. And you have to try to what is the truth of the situation if. If it's not, you know, if the person's not evil at all, if evil's not present? So I think that's really what he's driving at here, is just that we don't use reason to directly connect with things in the world in order to establish correspondence. It gets mediated by the mind of God, this idea of God, so that we're not creating a correspondence between our idea and things, but rather our idea of God's idea and things. It's mediated.

16:35 Mark: All right. That's all you're going to get here. Go to partiallyexaminedlife. Com store, become a pel? Citizen, or go to the itunes store to get the full recording. Thanks.