Date: Fri, 10 Jul 1998 17:05:01 -0500
Subject: Re: truth


Henry wrote:

> Jim, Anthony, Michael S, Steven, Rafael, George, Alan
> TMB, (& welcome back Herr Scheetz) --et al-- where do you
> "stand" on the "openness" in which representaitonal truth
> must appear?  

I would focus upon the following part of the passage you quoted:

> >> If it were not for this 
> >> openness, there could never occur a representing that conforms 
> >> to a thing.  For this conforming to...does not first create the openness 
> >> of the things and the openness of humanity for what it might encounter.  
> >> On the contrary, it settles into an openness already holding sway and 
> >> does so, as it were, each time anew.  This openness is therefore the 
> >> ground of the possibility of correctness and as this ground it is something 
> >> worthy of questioning and inquiry.  

Before we accept the "therefore" in the last sentence, we must note that 
Heidegger's conclusion there depends on what he says in the previous 
sentence - that truth as conformity "settles into an openness ALREADY 
holding sway," so that it "does not first create the openness." For if truth as 
conformity were the primary way in which things are open to us, then there 
would be no openness prior to truth as conformity. Philosophy would then 
ultimately be conceptual/metaphysical. So we must ask why there must be an 
openness prior to truth as conformity? 

It is difficult for me to see any answer to this question other than the avalanche 
towards utter nihilism to which the primacy of conformity led. I can see 
abslutely nothing simply in the phenomena themselves which cannot be "re-
explained" in terms of truth as conformity being primary. For example, the way 
a poet encounters beings would be "explained" simply in terms of emoting, or 
feelings, not in terms of something transcending representational thought itself. 
What Heidegger calls "readiness to hand" would be "explained" in terms of just 
using something without thinking about it (ie, as itself the deficient mode, 
instead of Heidegger's characterization of knowing as the deficient mode). So 
before we accept Heidegger's "therefore" in the last sentence (which I do 
accept, by the way), we must ask why truth as conformity cannot itself be the 
primary way in which things are open to us. Only then will Heidegger's 
conclusion in the last sentence have force.

Anthony Crifasi


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