I'd mentioned that one of Bill Vallicella's papers on Heidegger is up on the web. The paper criticizes Heidegger for reducing Being to truth. It's an interesting paper and well worth reading. It basically argues that beings in their existence have one sort of being and beings in their unveiling to us has an other. The former is what Aristotle calls being whereas the latter is a relational property and perhaps ought not be called being at all.
The discussion is related to Taylor Carman's book Heidegger's Analytic that I discussed two years ago. Carman, like me, takes Heidegger as an ontic realist. This is basically the view Vallicella takes. That is that beings are there independent of Dasein. Carman (like me) further argues that Heidegger doesn't reject truth as correspondence but is more looking at the ontological categories which make this judgement possible. That is we have the ontological (in the Heideggarian sense of the term) analysis and the ontic analysis. The ontic analysis isn't that far removed from scientific realism. But the analysis of truth is the ontological question of what is "underneath" truth. Certainly in this ontological analysis truth and being are very closely related.
I should for clarity bring up the key passage in Being and Time for all this.
"There is" truth only insofar as and as long as Dasein is. Entities are only uncovered then and only disclosed as long as Dasein is at all. Newton's laws, the law of noncontradiction, and all truths in general are true only as long as Dasein is. Before there ever was any Deasein, there was no truth, and after Dasein is no longer, there will be none, since then it cannot be as disclosedness, discovery and uncoveredness. Before Newton's laws were discovered, they were not "true"; from that it does not follow that they were false, or even that they would be false if uncoveredness were no longer ontically possible. Just as little does this "restriction" involve any diminishment of the being-true of "truths." (SZ, 226-7)
As I understand it what Dr. Vallicella is raising is the distinction between what grounds beings (what makes their ontic nature possible) versus what gives them to us (what allows them to be for us). Now Heidegger focuses in on the latter issue. I think it is a mistake to characterize this as merely reducing being to truth however. That's because being both gives and takes away. Further there is the issue of illusion in what Heidegger calls semblance (Schein). That is a showing as something it is not. To speak in terms of the lie, to lie presupposes that we have something to disclose but it is disclosed as a lie. So to make a counterfeit cheque, for example, I still have to give something. So it is still dependent in a sense on truth as unveiling. A lie is to show something as something it is not.
Now exactly how truth as unveiling is to be taken for those who read Heidegger as an ontic realist isn't agreed upon. Ernst Tugendhat in a fairly influential text argued that truth as unconcealment makes falsehood unintelligible.1 This is because both true and false proposition uncover entities, just not as they are. Thus Heidegger moves to a contradiction with truth. John Sallis, a Heidegger supporter, has taken a similar stance. He takes Heidegger to be rejecting the principle of non-contradiction.2 Mark Wrathall argues that, "the inquiry into unconcealment . . . seeks to elucidate the way in which propositional truth is founded."3 Thus contra Tugendhat Heidegger largely accepts propositions as correspondence but seeks an ontological explanation of how this is so. Carman follows Wrathall up to a point.4 He feels though that Wrathall's account makes Heidegger's position too trivial. That is Wrathall's point (like mine above) is just that to lie one has to have some entities to lie with. To assert anything whether true or false requires some beings to present. Carman argues that Wrathall's mistake is to limit ontological truth merely to grounding assertions. However Carman argues that truth also throws light on the entities themselves. That is propositions aren't merely asserted, they are relevant, interesting, uninteresting, or so forth. Carman thus suggests truth as uncoverdness (alethia) is not Dasein's disclosedness nor propositions corresponding to the way things are. Rather it is the capacity of interpretations to bring entities to light against a background of prior practical uncoverdnesses. This enables truth as correspondence by giving us a background against which things can be judged true. Carman calls this hermeneutic salience.
The problem is that in all this we don't really ask what grounds the ontic nature of entities. That is their being in their Aristotilean sense. My sense is that Heidegger, for all his differences from Husserl, still is largely caught up in the project of phenomenology. Even after the Kehre (turn) Heidegger is simply moving beyond phenomenology in terms of breadth but not in terms of direction. Fundamentally he is asking how we are conscious of things. Even as he questions the traditional senses of both consciousness and things. So when Husserl says, "an actual world always precedes cognitive activity as its universal ground; and this means first of all aground of universal passive belief in being, which ever particular cognitive action presupposes," I think Heidegger largely follows. Thus the ontic demands Heidegger brings forth and Dr. Vallicella mentions are taken for granted as the basic assumption.
I think the way to respond to Vallicella then is not to discount his critique (and I'll return to it in a subsequent post) but to acknowledge it. I think what we have to do is bifurcate being and consider for Heidegger the being of entities to not being being in the Aristotlean sense (although he takes this for granted) but just as the hermeneutic conditions in which entities can be for me. That is how a hammer is a hammer for me. Yet the more fundamental ontic question of why the universe has the nature it has ontically seems remarkably uncommented on by Heidegger and is probably seen primarily as something for science to address. The problem is that I'm not sure science can do this.
1 Tugendhat, Der Wahreheitbegriff bei Husserl und Heidegger, 350. I've not read the paper and am merely following Carman's presentation. (page 258) However many may have encountered the influence of Tugendhat in Habermas' anti-Heidegger writings such as The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity.
2 Sallis, Double Truth, 100. Once again I'm going second hand although I have read a lot of Sallis.
3 Wrathall, "Heidegger and Truth as Correspondence," International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 7:69-88
4 Carman, Heidegger's Analytic, 259-263
Carman, like me, takes Heidegger as an ontic realist. This is basically the view Vallicella takes. That is that beings are there independent of Dasein.
I came across an interesting paper by J. Jeremy Wisnewski, East Carolina University on “Heidegger and the Natural Ontological Attitude” which states that Carman’s analysis of Heidegger’s ontic realism is in error. Carman’s interpretation of Heidegger’s ontic realism has Heidegger taking a realist position while Heidegger denies any realist position. The quote you provide Clark does not seem to support a realist position.
What Wisnewski says is that because of Heidegger’s phenomenology Heideggers ontic realism means that part of the intelligibility of objects is the THINKING of them as having an independent existence. This is not the same as claiming they do have a separate existence.
http://personal.ecu.edu/wisnewskij/heidegger.htm
Rich
That's a fair criticism, and of course that element of belief in their existence is explicitly claimed. Of course one could easily argue that to believe something has independent existence entails claiming that they do. I'll check out the paper.
I should note that while that is the key quote it isn't the only quote. Carman's most interesting analysis is in the early pages where he analyzes the joint paper on defining phenomenology by Hurssel and Heidegger for Encyclopedia Brittanica. (It is an interesting document, although the version I have doesn't have all the interesting notes back and forth that Carman makes use of)
I've not finished it but he appears to take Fine's deflationary approach. I have a hard time buying that (although I admit I did enjoy Fine's book). Davidson also takes a deflationary approach. I'll see if I can't write a post on this soon.
I should also note that I do agree that there is a lot of ambiguity over the term realism. So the label is always up for debate. A similar problem arises in pragmatism with both Peirce and Dewey. Certainly neither Heidegger (nor the pragmatists) are either idealists nor realists strictly speaking in terms of the way the debate was framed in the early 20th century and late 19th century.
I should also bring up this point of Wisnewski's paper which addresses Vallicella's argument.
One possibility here (compatible with Heidegger's method) is to read the above remark as claiming that the notion of an occurrent entity is the notion of one that exists independently of us. To put it in Merleau-Ponty?s expression, we might claim that an occurrent object is one that is encountered as 'in-itself-for-us.' This is arguably what Heidegger has in mind when he claims that "once entities have been uncovered, they show themselves precisely as beings that already were" (269, H: 227). This does not mean that entities did already exist; it means, rather, that we understand them as having an existence independent of us. To put this in a slightly different idiom: part of the intelligibility of present-at-hand objects lies in thinking of them as having an independent existence. This is not equivalent to claiming they do have such an existence.
I finished the paper. I don't buy it. Roughly the idea he asserts is that to be a realist is to take de-worlded entities as present-at-hand. But this as I see it is to confuse the Other (to use Levinasian language) with the present-at-hand phenomena. But one can acknowledge the Other as other without taking it as present at hand. So I think he's merely moving the goal post by defining realism the way he wants it and then critiquing Carman, Wrathall, etc. in terms of this goal post.
Having said that giving an answer to the deflationist still is of use.
Just a note that Enowning has commented on this post. It's worth reading. He also noted the Zimmerman response to Vallicella that I'd mentioned earlier on the sidebar on my main page.
Those interested in this discussion might find my post on Heidegger's philosophy of science of interest, even though it doesn't get at this ultimate ontic ground question.
My followup to this post ties Vallicella and Derrida together. Something I know Vallicella won't like. But it probably gets at how I read both Derrida and Heidegger as realists and as engaged in roughly the same project even if they focus on different questions.
I've closed comments in order to avoid spam since I don't check this older blog as much anymore.
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