Date: Sun, 12 Jul 1998 10:19:17 -0700
Subject: Re: truth


Jdbarrett1-AT-aol.com wrote:

> I find it somewhat difficult to understand Heidegger’s rethinking of
> the
> notion of truth in terms of _aletheia_  or unconcealment (or as I have
> seen in
> Dr. Eldred’s post "unencrypteness"), mainly because this ancient term
> signifies both what comes to presence and is manifest _and_ that which
> recedes
> into concealment and that which yet lies concealed.  The difficulty
> for me
> arises in trying to keep in mind both what _is_  and what _is not_ or
> is _not
> yet_. I also find it hard to reconcile this broader and deeper notion
> of truth
> with a way in which it can find some practical currency in the way we
> speak
> about what is true.  For, with Heidegger's notion, it appears to me
> that truth
> is rather all encompassing.

Jason, you have an eloquent way of putting this.  I too have difficulty
getting my hands around this idea of truth. Psychotherapeutically, I
would think that it is truth as correspondence that is generally
addressed with clients. For example, when I was in school we had a class
on remembered trauma syndrom. This is where someone goes to therapy for
some problem of some sort and during the course of therapy he or she
"remembers" being traumatized as a child.

It seems to me that my problem with the way this whole experience was
being presented runs close to the discussion about truth as
correspondence versus truth as the decryptedness of phenomena. The
emphasis, always, was on establishing the "truth" of the situation by
way of the image's correspondence to a proposed event that may have
taken place in the past.

So I'm not going to go into more detail about this here, but in an
attempt to get my hands around this notion of truth, I was thinking that
this might be an example of two different ways truth is. On the one hand
is the correspondence versions of truth (as a deficient case of truth?),
on the other hand is the decryptedness of a phenomenon. It is
interesting to me that both cases here are tied up with remembering, and
remembering is central to aletheia. I guess the story in mythology is
that the soul housed knowledge that was forgotten when it was forced to
drink from the river lethei on its way to being re-born into the world.
This was the river of forgetfullness. A so Plato hooked up the two words
aletheia and truth (is this right?).

Operating from a strictly instinctive level, I admitedly argued that in
remembed trama syndrom cases, the truth as correspondence was something
that lawyers might be interested in (their kind of truth seems
especially well tied into the correspondence of propositions to events),
but that psychotherapy's interest could only (or mostly) lie with the
decryptedness of the image (phenomena).

So I got an "F".

Michael Staples




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