What Is the Problem of the Meaning of Being? > 71


the priority of logos is that only an assertion can be a truth-bearer, can be true or false. And if true, then an assertion says how things are, corresponds with being.

But, as in the famous critique by Ernst Tugendhat,56 if Heidegger responds to this by claiming that such asserting presumes a prior “disclosure,” then, contrary to what Heidegger says, truth must still reside in some assertion about what is disclosed. An event cannot itself be true or false. There is no truth claim without a contrast with falsity, and a disclosure by itself is just that, a manifestation that, we have to say, could disclose something true or could only seem to. This would be to distinguish meaning from truth, and to link meaning with what it would be for the assertion to be true. If there is a form of Dasein’s openness that is originally receptive to this disclosure, should we not ask what would distinguish a spurious disclosure from a genuine one, if not that an assertion that it was genuine could be true or false?

It is important that Heidegger treats the disclosure as an event and, in the context of BT, where the primary focus is on aspects of the disclosure whereby the meaning of Dasein’s being can be said to be available to it, and important that he would insist on the experiential specificity and first-personal quality of the event. The meaning of one’s being is one’s “ownmost.” In that context, there are many cases where there is clearly something to be understood, but it would not be understood if it were formulated propositionally and simply delivered to the person. Psychoanalysis would be easy if, aft er a session or two, the analyst were to proclaim to the analysand, “You hate your father and you feel terrible about it.” Such knowledge can only be arrived at first-personally and in various diverse ways it is hard to summarize. Getting someone to understand a poem can be like this; in fact a great deal of teaching is such an attempt to “awaken,” to use Heidegger’s word, an experiential openness to a disclosure that can range from the trivial to life-altering, all of which require coming to the disclosure first-personally. (Telling the student the meaning of the poem in a series of paraphrases is not teaching.) This is not surprising. In phenomenological terms, what it is like to strive or fail or love or hate, what it is like for a world to bear on the possible course of a life, are all not available for reflection third-personally or by observation or by interviewing people. And so in cases like these (where the meaning of Dasein’s being is at issue), a propositional formulation would get us nowhere; its truth condition would have to be the disclosure itself. And in the domain of greatest importance to Heidegger, how things matter, how much they matter, why they matter, and so


56. Tugendhat 1970.


The Culmination by Robert Pippin