What Is the Problem of the Meaning of Being? > 75


Further, that this is not a form of constitutive idealism, as if truth is whatever Dasein takes to be disclosed to itself, as if Dasein’s experience as such counts as a truth about Being, is clear already in BT: “In so far as Dasein is its disclosedness essentially, and discloses and uncovers as something disclosed to this extent it is essentially ‘true.’ Dasein is ‘in the truth.’ This assertion has meaning ontologically. It does not purport to say that ontically Dasein is introduced ‘to all the truth’ either always or just in every case, but rather that the disclosedness of its ownmost Being belongs to its existential constitution” (263). This is why he can say in EnP, commenting on his own claim, “‘Dasein is in truth’ does not imply a bad relativization of truth to man, but rather the other way around” (155).

Would it not still be the case that what it would be to make such a distinction is the work of possibly true or false assertions? We might be tempted to say so if we forget, as is, I think, often forgotten in the discussion around Tugendhat and his critics, that another of Heidegger’s most radical innovations is his insistence that our access to such a disclosure, the mode of being of Dasein “open” to such an unconcealment, is not cognitive, at least not as that notion is commonly understood. Correspondingly, we should not think of the content of any disclosure as being of the sort that could have propositional form. The condition for the possible accessibility of the meaning of Being is Stimmung, attunement, and being attuned, being “gripped” by something mattering, is not an object of “seeing” something of significance, that it is significant. Likewise, what we are attuned to is a register of meaningfulness or mattering that can’t be determinately identified in a way required by judgment, can’t be qualified or even directly characterized. In the matter of mattering, what matters, how much, compared to what, and so forth are impossible to set out neatly in discursive form, at least without greatly distorting how we are onto such matters at all.

Accordingly, it is important to keep in mind Heidegger’s own examples of what he means by the event of unconcealment. There is a striking example in BP, when he cites and comments on a passage in Rilke’s The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. (We shall return to this passage in more detail in chap. 9.) Here is some of the passage from Rilke. Malte is considering


The Culmination by Robert Pippin