lacking a certain quality. Heidegger’s notion of unconcealment applies to things that are privative in just this sense and, he believes, the Greek language’s use of a privative word form to name truth shows that the Greeks too were aware of the privative nature of material and propositional truth. “The awakening and forming of the word alêtheia,” he writes, “is not a mere accident . . . and not an external matter” (GA 34: 127). Unconcealment is meant to be understood like blindness or reticence. That is, what it is to be unconcealed is determined in relationship to a privative state – here, whatever kind of concealment that does prevail in what is to be unconcealed. With respect to each plank in the platform, then, concealment is the positive term, and needs to be understood before we can become clear about what unconcealment amounts to.
So far, this discussion is very formal. I now try to give it some phenomenological content by looking at each plank in the platform in turn.
THE PLANKS OF THE PLATFORM
1. Propositional Truth
One typically thinks of truth as a property of things that have as their content a proposition – things like assertions and beliefs. The truth of propositions is, for Heidegger, the right starting point for thinking about unconcealment, because truth or unconcealment (alêtheia) has often been understood exclusively as a property of propositions, but also because in a phenomenology of propositional truth, we quickly discover that the truth of propositions depends on the uncovering of entities. Thinking about propositional truth thus leads to an inquiry into more fundamental forms of unconcealment.
Heidegger accepts that many propositions are true by corresponding to, or agreeing with, the way things are. But recognizing this fact, for Heidegger, is less an explanation of truth than a basis for further inquiry into its nature.
The old received definition of truth: veritas est adaequatio Intellectus ad rem, homoiôsis, measuring up, conformity of thinking to the matter about which it thinks – is indeed basically (im Ansatz) correct. But it is also merely a starting point (Ansatz) and not at all that which it is commonly taken to be, namely, an essential determination of truth or the result of an essential determination of truth. It is merely the starting point ... for the question: in what in general is the possibility of measuring up to something grounded? (GA 29/30: 497)
If we admit, in other words, that true assertions agree, measure up to, correspond with the way things are, still we need to be able to explain what makes such a relationship between an assertion and a proposition possible. By considering this problem, however, Heidegger believes that we are led to a view of truth as uncovering.