Heidegger On Plato.pdf

Inquiry , 47, 443–463

Heidegger on Plato, Truth, and

Unconcealment: The 1931–32 Lecture

on The Essence of Truth

Mark Wrathall

Brigham Young University

This paper discusses Heidegger’s 1931–32 lecture course on The Essence of Truth .It

argues that Heidegger read Platonic ideas, not only as stage-setting for the western

philosophical tradition’s privileging of conceptualization over practice, and its

correlative treatment of truth as correctness, but also as an early attempt to work

through truth as the fundamental experience of unhiddenness. Wrathall shows how

several of Heidegger’s more-famous claims about truth, e.g. that propositional truth is

grounded in truth as world-disclosure, and including Heidegger’s critique of the

self-evidence of truth as correspondence, are ﬁrst revealed in a powerful (if

iconoclastic) reading of Plato.

44 of Sein und Zeit (1927), and essays like ‘Vom Wesen

des Grundes’ (1929), ‘Vom Wesen des Wahrheit’ (1930), and ‘Platons Lehre

von der Wahrheit’ (1942). 1

With the publication of Heidegger’s notes from his lecture courses, it is

now becoming possible to connect the dots and ﬂesh out Heidegger’s

published account of truth. 2 These lecture courses are not just of

historiographical interest, however. In them we ﬁnd Heidegger working out

an account of the way that propositional truth is grounded in a more

fundamental notion of truth as world disclosure. He also struggles to develop

a phenomenology of world disclosure, and it is in these lecture courses that

Heidegger’s later view on the history of unconcealment and being develops.

He also argues that the phenomenologically enriched notion of truth has

normative implications for the way that we conduct ourselves in the world. I

review here some of Heidegger’s thought on these matters as developed in a

lecture course offered winter semester 1931–32: The Essence of Truth: On

Plato’s Cave Allegory and the Theaetetus (GA 34). 3

DOI 10.1080/00201740410004250

2004 Taylor & Francis

In the 1920s and 1930s, Heidegger repeatedly offered lectures and seminars

largely devoted to the topic of truth. His evolving thoughts on the nature and

philosophical signiﬁcance of truth, however, made their way into relatively

few publications, and when they were published, they tended to come in an

incredibly condensed and enigmatic form. The main published works from

this period include

444 Mark Wrathall

I. Basic Themes of the Course

The stated purpose of the 1931–32 lecture course is to understand the essence

of truth. The majority of the course is spent, however, in what might seem a

more historical than philosophical endeavor – an encounter with, and

appropriation of, Plato’s views on knowledge and truth. But it is in the course

of an interpretation of Plato’s cave allegory from the Republic and a review of

Plato’s inquiry into knowledge and error in the Theaetetus that Heidegger

develops the account of the nature and history of unconcealment that

characterizes much of his later work.

Plato’s famous allegory of the cave is a subject to which Heidegger

returned repeatedly. He offered interpretations of it in lecture courses like this

one, and the 1933 lecture course Vom Wesen der Wahrheit (GA 36/37), before

publishing an account of it in 1942 (‘Platons Lehre von der Wahrheit’, GA 9/

‘Plato’s Doctrine of Truth’, in Pathmarks ). In the published essay, as in the

lecture course, Heidegger argues that contemporary representational accounts

of truth as correspondence are an outgrowth of a change in thinking spurred

by Plato’s thought. This change, Heidegger argues, can be detected in an

ambiguity in the cave allegory surrounding the notion of truth – an ambiguity

between truth as a property of things, and truth as a property of our

representations of things. For Heidegger the decision to focus on truth as a

property of representational states has its root in the historical inﬂuence of

Plato’s doctrine of the ideas. Attention to the ambiguity in Plato’s account,

however, shows that what now seems a natural way to approach truth actually

hides at its basis a decision – namely, the decision to consider truth only

insofar as it is a property of propositions. One consequence of this decision

is that, given the subsequent orientation of truth to ideas or concepts, we

come to believe that ‘what matters in all our fundamental orientations

toward beings is the achieving of a correct view of the ideas’ ( Pathmarks ,

p. 179) – that is, a correct representation of things in terms of their essential

or unchanging properties. Heidegger’s interest in the cave allegory stems

from his belief that, while it lays the ground for an account of propositional

truth, it does so on the basis of a view of truth as a property of things. It

thus presents an opportunity to rethink the now widely accepted approach to

truth.

The Theaetetus was also a staple of Heidegger’s lecture courses in the

1920s and early 1930s, ﬁguring prominently not just in GA 34 and GA 36/

37, but also in the 1924 course on Plato’s Sophist (GA 19), and the 1926

course on The Basic Concepts of Ancient Philosophy (GA 22). One reason

for his interest in this dialogue, as we shall see, was his belief that truth or

unconcealment is a ‘privative’ concept, and thus needs to be approached by

understanding its negation. 4 Heidegger argued that the Greek language

reﬂects an awareness of this in the fact that Greek uses a privative

Heidegger on Plato, Truth, and Unconcealment 445

word-form ( a-l¯theia , un-concealedness) to name ‘truth’. ‘The awakening

and forming of the word al ¯ theia ’, he writes, ‘is not a mere accident … and

not an external matter’ (GA 34, p. 127). What it is to be unconcealed is

thus determined in relationship to a positive state of concealment. The

Theaetetus thus becomes of interest, given its focus on trying to understand

the concept of, and discover the conditions of the possibility of, error. Error

is, of course, one way to conceive of the opposite of truth. The account

we give of error will therefore affect the understanding we have of truth. If

we think of truth as a privative state, we will think of it as the absence

of error. But Heidegger also wants to question the idea that error as

conventionally understood ought to be the positive state from which truth

is deﬁned. To the contrary, he contends that the proper positive concept is

concealment.

Before turning to the details of the lecture course, a ﬁnal word of warning

is in order. In this, like all of Heidegger’s commentaries on other philo-

sophers, it is not always easy to distinguish between views that Heidegger

attributes to others in order to reject, and those that he is endorsing. This is,

in part, a function of the fact that Heidegger’s readings of philosophers are

so often extremely unconventional; one tends to believe that, when

Heidegger articulates a novel view, it must be his own view. This is a

mistake, and one must not assume that Heidegger is endorsing all the

positions that he attributes to Plato. Indeed, he thinks that with Plato’s

thought ‘Western philosophy takes off on an erroneous and fateful course’

(p. 12).

In addition, Heidegger is a notoriously violent reader of other philo-

sophers – he reads them to discover the ‘unsaid’ in their thought. The unsaid

is the background assumptions, dispositions, conceptual systems, etc., which

ground the actual views they accept. ‘In all genuine works of philosophy’,

he argues, ‘the decisive content does not stand there in so many words, but

is what brings into motion the totality of a living interpretation’ (p. 140).

When Heidegger offers a reading of Plato, then, it is not primarily oriented

toward explaining what Plato actually thought or wrote but rather toward

how what he thought and wrote was shaped by certain questionable

background assumptions – assumptions which need to be revisited. In the

course of his readings of philosophers, Heidegger ends up offering an

interesting and philosophically important reconstruction of the logic that

supports certain philosophical views. This is usually worth working through,

even if one ultimately dismisses Heidegger’s accounts as historically

invalid.

I now turn to a review of some of the salient themes of the lecture course.

Given space constraints, this will obviously be a selective review as I try to

give a general sense of Heidegger’s goal, and to focus on what I think are

some of his more interesting contributions to thinking about truth.

446 Mark Wrathall

A. Setting the Stage: Truth, Essence, Self-Evidence

Heidegger begins the course by calling into question our everyday or ‘self-

evident’ understanding of the notions of truth and essence. Obviously, we

can’t give an account of the essence of truth if we don’t know what an essence

is, and if we don’t know what truth is. The tradition has ready-made answers

to both questions.

When it comes to truth, for example, the generally accepted starting point

for understanding truth, at least within the analytic tradition of philosophy, is

an analysis of our use of the truth predicate. Moreover, most philosophers

have followed Frege in only considering those uses of the truth predicate in

which truth is predicated of propositions (or certain propositional states and

acts like beliefs, sentences, assertions, etc.). The main theories for deﬁning

the truth of propositions take truth either as a correspondence of the

propositional entity with a fact, 5 or a coherence of a proposition with a held

set of propositions, or, ﬁnally, a kind of deﬂationism, in which it is pointed out

that saying that a proposition is true doesn’t really do anything more than

simply asserting the proposition.

But, Heidegger asks, why should we limit our considerations of truth to

propositional truth in the ﬁrst place? Frege, to his credit, recognized that he

was dismissing other uses of the truth predicate, and gave some sort of reason

for it. His purpose, he said, was to understand ‘that kind of truth … whose

recognition is the goal of sciences’. 6 Most analysts are not self-conscious

about the matter. So what happens if we revisit the decision to focus only on

truth as predicated of propositions or collections of propositions? Think for a

moment about the ways in which, in our common non-philosophical

discourse, we actually use the ‘truth predicate’. We are as likely to say ‘she

is a true friend’ as ‘what she said is true’ – that is, we predicate truth of

particular entities, not just sentences or propositions. Or ‘truth’ can also be

used to name whole states of affairs or domains about which we think or

speak (think Jack Nicholson’s character in A Few Good Men : ‘You can’t

handle the truth!’). In religious discourse, ‘truth’ is even less amenable to

standard deﬁnitions. In the Gospel of John, for example, Jesus proclaims: ‘I

am the way, the truth, and the life’ (John 14:6), or better yet: ‘he that doeth

truth cometh to the light, that his deeds may be made manifest, that they are

wrought in God’ (John 3:21). Whatever ‘doing the truth’ is, it’s clearly not a

matter of holding true beliefs or making true assertions. Such examples lend

credence to Heidegger’s view that, in understanding truth, we should not be

too quick to focus exclusively on the truth of propositions. Indeed, Heidegger

believes that propositional truth must be grounded in the truth or

unhiddenness of entities: ‘what is primordially true, i.e., unhidden, is not

the proposition about a being, but the being itself – a thing, a fact. … The

proposition is true in so far as it conforms to something already true, i.e., to a

Heidegger on Plato, Truth, and Unconcealment 447

being that is unhidden in its being. Truth in this sense of correctness

presupposes unhiddenness’ (p. 86).

Just as he calls into question the self-evidence of our understanding of

truth, Heidegger also argues that the self-evident idea of essences is

problematic. The traditional approach to essences holds that the essence of a

thing is ‘just what makes it what it is’, where this is understood as some-

thing universal, something that ‘applies to everything ’ that is such a thing

(p. 1). So the essence of truth will be whatever applies to every true

proposition.

But what sort of ‘whatever’ are we looking for? Typically, essences are

thought of either as a property or characteristic possessed by the particular

things, or as a true description that can be applied to everything that shares

that essence. So, we might think of the essence of gold as some physical

property or characteristic, say, the atomic number, which all gold possesses,

or we might think of the essence of table as a description that will apply to all

and only tables. But truths are not, on the face of it, like tables or lumps of

gold – that is objects with properties. On what basis are we justiﬁed in treating

truths in the same way that we treat (physical) objects? The sort of thing we

look for as the essence of an entity might actually depend on the kind of entity

it is. Since the essence is the what-being of a thing – that is, what it is – we

can’t simply assume that the same understanding of essence applies to

different kinds of beings. We ﬁrst have to ask about being – in this case, what

is the being of truths? Do they have the kind of being that objects do? At any

rate, such considerations should give us pause before we conﬁdently assume

that we know what the essence of truth is, or look for an account of the

essence in, for example, terms of a property that all true assertions possess

(pp. 3–4).

Heidegger notes another important feature of essences – namely, that it

seems we can’t decide what the essence of a thing is unless we already know

what it is (this is an argument he develops in more detail in GA 45). Suppose

we want to know what the essence of a table is. We’ll try to ﬁgure out what

description applies to every table, what feature or property every table

possesses. To do this, we need to round up all the tables and examine them.

But we can’t round them up unless we already know which things are tables

and which are not. So, it seems, we can never discover the essence of a thing

or ground it empirically; we can only act on the basis of a prior understanding

of essence. ‘Clearly we must necessarily already know the essence. For how

otherwise could we know how to respond to the request to name [in this case]

truths?’ (p. 2). If this is right, then essences are neither something that can be

discovered, nor something that can conclusively be proven and established to

be true. But nor are they exempt from questioning and, in the lecture course

that follows, Heidegger tries to think through the historical roots of our

understanding of the essence of truth. Later in the course, Heidegger develops

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