FREEDOM TO FAIL: HEIDEGGER’S ANARCHY
justification. From there the subject, in being right, raises the claim to also being privileged on the basis of the correctness of its statements. Indeed, the assertion of its own claims becomes the primary motivation for speech. Sophistry and the argument grow from the same stem.
Being right, which invokes a justification that is internal to the various claims, is often enough an element of philosophical discussions in which the matter discussed melds with the opinions that the subject is advocating. It may be that even the matter discussed profits from the dynamic of the argumentation. In the end, however, the facticity of the argumentative vanity produces such a one-sided effect that nothing appears any more other than the subject, which, in light of the truth that has been gained, puts everything else in the shadows. That the subject is right is, then, identical with the place in the sun for which it is always striving.
Heidegger’s conception of truth has nothing to do with all that. For him, the criterion is not the logical organization of statements, speech acts, or arguments, but rather the truth of being, the appropriative event of the interplay of
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