Friday, May 25, 2007
Sean Dorrance Kelly ends a paper on the understanding of time as Retention versus the understanding of time as the Specious Present, with this.
The temporally articulated understanding of being that characterizes our existence, according to Heidegger, is the condition of the possibility of truth. This is because it is only in virtue of Dasein’s understanding of being that it can encounter entities at all. And truth, the agreement of knowledge with its object, is possible only if the knowing being can encounter the being that is to be known. The capacity to encounter objects in the full-fledged way that truth requires is unique to Dasein. And temporality of the sort that Husserl begins to understand is the condition of the possibility of encounter. Thus Heidegger writes:While truth may be only understood in the context of Dasein, I don't find Heidegger indicating that: transcendence, as truth = "the agreement of knowledge with its object"; i.e., agreeing that truth is correspondence. ¶ 8:27 AM[I]f Dasein is to be able to have any dealings with a context of equipment … a world must have been disclosed to it. …[T]his world has been disclosed, if Dasein indeed exists essentially as Being-in-the-world. And if Dasein’s Being is completely grounded in temporality, then temporality must make possible Being-in-the-world and therewith Dasein’s transcendence [i.e., truth].[P. 415]
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But he does agree with the standard correspondence understanding, even if he doesn't think it primordial.
"In proposing our 'definition' of 'truth' we have not shaken off the tradition, but we have appropriated it primordially; and we shall have done so all the more if we succeed in demonstrating that the idea of agreement is one to which theory had to come on the basis of the primordial phenomenon of truth, and if we can show how this came about" (Being and Time 262/H220).
In "On the Essence of Truth" Heidegger is concerned with demonstrating "the inner possibility of accordance" and "the ground of the possibility of correctness." Truth is not simply correspondence (it has a three-fold significance: correspondence, uncovering, clearing), but it is one of the viable understandings of it (though in itself ungrounded).
"In proposing our 'definition' of 'truth' we have not shaken off the tradition, but we have appropriated it primordially; and we shall have done so all the more if we succeed in demonstrating that the idea of agreement is one to which theory had to come on the basis of the primordial phenomenon of truth, and if we can show how this came about" (Being and Time 262/H220).
In "On the Essence of Truth" Heidegger is concerned with demonstrating "the inner possibility of accordance" and "the ground of the possibility of correctness." Truth is not simply correspondence (it has a three-fold significance: correspondence, uncovering, clearing), but it is one of the viable understandings of it (though in itself ungrounded).
I concur completely that Heidegger is not against truth as correspondence, just as he is not against mathematics nor empiral science as such.
But it is my impression that there is a chain of reasoning (perhaps I infer too much here...), at the end of the paper, from "truth, the agreement of knowledge with its object", through temporality, to the phrase "i.e., truth", inserted at the end of the quoted passage from B&T, referring to "Dasein's transcendence".
And it seems to me, in light of Heidegger's later comments, that the truth in "Dasein's transcendence" must be the "truth of beyng", and not correspondence.
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But it is my impression that there is a chain of reasoning (perhaps I infer too much here...), at the end of the paper, from "truth, the agreement of knowledge with its object", through temporality, to the phrase "i.e., truth", inserted at the end of the quoted passage from B&T, referring to "Dasein's transcendence".
And it seems to me, in light of Heidegger's later comments, that the truth in "Dasein's transcendence" must be the "truth of beyng", and not correspondence.
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