DASEIN AND THE PRECURSORY QUESTION OF TRUTH | 105
truth as a Vorfrage to this other Grundfrage, it is not simply a propaedeutic. Truth forms an essential register of the event itself – in the ontological sense – and its dynamic structure: ‘beyng qua event essentially occurs as truth’.3 In Chapters 3 and 4, I reconstruct how the problematic of truth serves both methodologically as a path to an account of beyng as event and as an essential aspect of the event itself. Though there is extensive literature on Heidegger’s concept of truth, these two crucial relations have remained poorly explained. I will argue the standard picture of Heidegger’s account of truth is in fact incomplete: there are important changes that account undergoes in Beiträge that directly impact how we should understand his concept of event, but that have not been registered by most scholarship.
As is well known, dating back to his early work, Heidegger argues that the primary form of truth cannot be logical (formal), propositional, calculative, epistemological, or, more broadly, representational. These models are unable to explain essential aspects of the inner workings of truth. His position follows from the view that a true statement or judgement, for instance, is not nothing, but is in its own right; it’s truth cannot be reduced to some ontologically negligible, merely ephemeral quality that arises when humans get to know reality and do away with illusion. A true statement or judgement (and likewise a false one) is part of reality, or in Heideggerian terminology, something that is. Sufficiently accounting for truth, then, requires explaining the being of truth, not just its ontic components and criteria. Heidegger takes this a step further, maintaining that in its primary sense, truth is ontological in character.4 That is to say, ‘truth’ or what he comes to call ‘the essence of truth’ designates aspects or structures of being. These structures serve as the ground making possible the epistemological qualities of truth and their representational forms (to whatever extent they might in fact hold), which are diagenically secondary or derivative.
As emphasised earlier, Sein und Zeit grounds the problematic of being in the existence of Dasein, the analysis of which forms the methodological arena for fundamental ontology. Consequently, Heidegger explains truth within that arena – at least until the Kehre, when this is diagenically surpassed. In this chapter I reconstruct the ontology of truth in Sein und Zeit and perhaps the earliest text in which the Kehre is visible, ‘Vom Wesen der Wahrheit’ (lecture 1930, print 1943). In Chapter 4 I turn to Beiträge and its account of the relation between truth and event. As this all suggests, Heidegger’s conception of truth undergoes a series of important transformations. I focus on three, which correspond with these three texts and are sequenced along a diagenic axis.
In the 1920s and early-to-mid-1930s Heidegger develops what I will call an a-lēthic account of the essence of truth. That is, he casts truth and
3 GA65 348/275: ‘Seyn . . . als Ereignis west als Wahrheit’.
4 Capobianco has a nice discussion of this in HWB, insisting that ‘on this point, Heidegger drew his inspiration from Aristotle (not Husserl) and specifically from Aristotle’s Metaphysics, Theta 10 at 1051b . . . where Aristotle states that “being” is spoken of not only in terms of the categories and with respect to the potentiality and actuality of these, but also in the most proper sense (reading kyriotaton) as the “true”’ (HWB 12).