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forth—the primary mode of availability in the everyday world—is available to us only in disclosures, not as objects of propositional attitudes.
And second, the phenomenon in dispute should not be held hostage to whether a genuine disclosure can be detected from a spurious one, as if there should be a method to do so or clear confirmation conditions. There might have to be a reliance on such a disclosure even if this distinction cannot be clearly made or only with great difficulty. Heidegger could not be more explicit about this than in his 1936 essay on Hölderlin.
The word as work therefore never directly offers a guarantee [Gewähr] as to whether it is an essential word or a delusion [Blendwerk]. On the contrary—an essential word oft en looks in its simplicity like an inessential one. And what on the other hand presents itself in its finery as the look of the essential is only said by rote or repeated. Thus is language ever obliged to place itself in a seeming [Schein] produced by itself, and thereby threaten what is uniquely its own—true saying. (EH 37)57
He appears to mean that there can be something like or parallel to bivalence in the disclosure itself. In fact, he thinks that any disclosure of any significance is always accompanied by a concealing, is never just straightforwardly manifest. The disclosure of the meaningfulness of Being involves the partial emergence into presence from obscurity or hiddenness into disclosure, and this is not the result of true judgments but their condition, and that emergence is never complete. It is especially important that the disclosure is a disclosure of meaningfulness, something that does not play the role one might expect in the criticisms of Heidegger. Meaningfulness could be expressed, but not determinately as some matter of fact, as when we ask, without a clear referent, “what it meant to a person” that her child is estranged, or that his circle of friends all died in the war. If we ask such a question, we do not expect a list of assertions. Very often we expect some sort of narrative. This copresence of uncovering and concealment clearly admits of all sorts of ambiguities in and qualifications on what is disclosed.58 The event itself then should not be said to be simply true or false, as if every
57. He is of course here talking about literary interpretation, but the same challenge posed for interpretation by any “seeming” bears on the issue of a genuine versus a merely seeming disclosure, which is the heart of the controversy about truth.
58. See Rorty 1991: “Only when we escape from the verificationist impulse to ask ‘How can we tell a right answer when we hear one?’ are we asking questions that Heidegger thinks worth asking. Only then are we Dasein, because only then do we have the possibility of being authentic Dasein, Dasein which knows itself to be ‘thrown’” (44). Rorty’s point is undermined somewhat when he himself asks how we know that something counts as “primordial” (43).