enowning
Tuesday, November 25, 2014
 
Marburg, winter semester, 1925/26, unveiling the deer.
Before going on with our discussion, let’s take some examples of deception and the covering-over of beings. Say I am walking in a dark woods and see something coming toward me through the fir trees. “It’s a deer,” I say. The statement need not be explicit. As I get nearer to it, I see it’s just a bush that I’m approaching. In understanding, addressing, and being concerned with this thing, I have acted as one who covers-over: the unexpressed statement shows the being as something other than it is.
We can point out how the three conditions are present in this deception:
1. It is necessary that beforehand I already have something given to me, something coming toward me. If something did not already encounter me from the outset, there would be no occasion to regard it as . . . Always already there is a priori disclosure of world.
2. It is also necessary that, as I approach the thing, I take it as something. In other words, in the field of everyday experience, I don’t just stand there, as it were, in the woods and have something simply and immediately in front of me. A situation like that is pure fiction. Rather, in an unexpressed way, I encounter something that I already understand, something that is already articulated as something and, as such, is expected and accepted in my way of dealing with the world. Only because I let whatever encounters me encounter me on the basis of the act of envisioning something (say, a deer), can that thing appear as a deer.
3. And the encountering-being can show itself to my act of envisioning “as this thing” and “in this way” only because, along with the encountering-being and the other things present in this world (particularly in the lived world of “forest”), something like “a deer” can indeed be present among the trees. This is so insofar as the encountering-being entails the general possibility of synthesis, a possibility which, with regard to concrete deception, is always oriented objectively, i.e., includes within itself a range of indications. To take the above example, I would not, in fact, think that what was approaching me was the Shah of Iran, even though something like that is intrinsically possible. The Shah is a being that could appear among the trees in a German forest at night, whereas there is not a chance that I would see anything like the cubed root of sixty-nine coming toward me.
These three conditions of the possibility of falsehood are obviously interconnected. The decisive question is: How?
Pp. 158-9
 
Comments:
"These three conditions of the possibility of falsehood are obviously interconnected. The decisive question is: How?"

There is a very brief indication of how these conditions of falsehood are related, which, even if only superficial and structural in its nature as a formal indication, is nevertheless somewhat helpful. It is as follows:

1. "It is necessary that beforehand I already have something given to me, something coming toward me."

This first condition of falsehood is analogous to the first moment of the structure of Interpretation (from SZ 33), i.e. Vorhaben; what is already given to me is that which I fore-have. This condition of falsehood has as its ultimate ontologico-transcendental condition Gewesenheit.

2.)"It is also necessary that, as I approach the thing, I take it as something." This second condition of falsehood is analogous to Vorsicht. In fact, even Heidegger's language of "approaching" is identical to his characterization of Vorsicht as "a fore-sight that approaches what has been taken in fore-having with a definite interpretation" (SZ 33). This condition of falsehood is enabled by the ontologico-transcendental condition of Zu-kunft.

3.)"...the encountering-being entails the general possibility of synthesis, a possibility which, with regard to concrete deception, is always oriented objectively, i.e., includes within itself a range of indications." This final condition of falsehood corresponds to the Vorgriff, i.e. the pre-conceiving which enables the synthesis whereby the thing is identified and made present ("something like “a deer” CAN indeed be PRESENT among the trees"). The kind of Being of the cubed root of sixty-nine is an impossibility for the synthesis altogether. It is excluded from the fore-conception. The Shah of Iran is included in the possibility of synthesis but it is more specifically, i.e. factically, excluded. This is because the possibility of synthesis is, as Heidegger says, "objectively oriented" having only a certain range of factically limited indications. This confinement to factical locality is grounded in the factical wherein that happens to be the PRESENT one. In other words, the third condition for the possibility of falsehood is grounded in the ontologico-transcendental condition of Gegenwart.

One way--but not the only way --of characterizing the unity of the condition of possibility is, not surprisingly, through temporalitaet as the ground of Interpretation.

 
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