Heidegger and Unconcealment: Truth, Language, and History

by Mark A. Wrathall

This book includes ten essays that trace the notion of unconcealment as it develops from Heidegger’s early writings to his later work, shaping his philosophy of truth, language, and history. “Unconcealment” is the idea that what entities are depends on the conditions that allow them to manifest themselves. This concept, central to Heidegger’s work, also applies to worlds in a dual first, a condition of entities manifesting themselves is the existence of a world; and second, worlds themselves are disclosed. The unconcealment or disclosure of a world is the most important historical event, and Heidegger believes there have been a number of quite distinct worlds that have emerged and disappeared in history. Heidegger’s thought as a whole can profitably be seen as working out the implications of the original understanding of unconcealment.

Genres: Philosophy

262 pages, Hardcover

First published October 31, 2010

Reviews

[Fergus, Weaver of Autistic Webs · Rating 4 out of 5]

There are a lot of urban myths out there. But one of my favourites is the ironic saying, ‘The truth is out there... SOMEWHERE!’

Somewhere over the rainbow, maybe, if you’re glued to the mass media!

Life’s not a spectator sport! If we think it is, we’ll sooner or later be ground to a helpless pulp in the grinding gears of its Underworld.

You know, the great modern composer and conductor Pierre Boulez, one of the original postwar Angry Young Men (rest in peace, old mentor!) once said life nowadays is a lot like looking at a bookshop window display.

You see all the jabbering best-sellers lined up there (‘Et les soldats faisaient la haie? Ils la faisaient!´) but you have to enter the store’s shadowy gloom in order to find its HIDDEN secrets!

Descend lower, descend only
Into the world of perpetual solitude...

There, in the store’s hidden recesses and depths, you MAY find what you’re seeking. And it most likely won’t be anything like what you expected.

Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the Night.

Don’t be afraid of the Dark! says Heidegger.

The truth is not obvious. We have to look into ourselves in deep reflection and LET IT BE UNCONCEALED:

"Heidegger says, ‘The ways of reflection (and perhaps we could substitute 'reading and reflection') constantly are changing, according to the station along the way at which the Journey begins, according to the distance along the way that it traverses, according to the Vision that opens up into what is question-worthy... “

Under Sleep, where all the waters meet!

The soul that rises with us, our life’s star
Has perhaps had elsewhere its setting...

One day several years ago, as I was arduously working my way through one of Heidegger’s more prolix works, I suddenly realized that this philosopher had been Leading Me On - but helpfully - for he had suddenly arrived, at the end of his “forest of symbols” and my own impatient wrestling with unfamiliar terms, at a CLEARING.

And I simultaneously Half-Understood.

Heidegger’s “Clearing” was the Precise Moment of Unconcealment. He had worked his writing Masterfully. I had seen the method in this madness! That’s why I bought this book.

I’ll explain a bit more in a minute...

Isn’t that the way of ALL Writing? To lead us “through certain half-deserted streets” to our Own Truth? A glimpse of an Answer to our own “overwhelming question?”

You know the life within books is fascinating, but it’s not obvious! It takes a lot of concentrated attention to discover a writer’s true motives in writing. A lot of what he tells us is couched in symbols.

And every symbol is important. If he or she is a writer worth their salt, those symbols should reverberate deeply within us, at a point of our thinking that seems shrouded in Mystery...

And if the writer is an abstruse Master like Heidegger, we will never see either rhyme or reason in what he says - but we’re Hooked on the Mystery - and we go on, unknowing, mesmerized, until suddenly, There you Are. In the CLEARING.

The Clearing - its Freedom and Spontaneous Joy - sums up Heidegger's dramatic late-life turnaround.

The world’s meaning has been Subconsciously Unlocked. The Door Half-Opens.

No, you don’t discover the meaning of books by peering through the windows of a dusty old bookshop!

And in the same way, you’ll never unlock the secrets - deep within yourself - of these books’ symbols unless you allow yourself to visit the places in your mind and your own highly individual cultural heritage where their meaning opens.

Unless you Believe in the Mystery. Not in patented, worn, useless dictums of dry, disappointed experience!

That takes time, attention, and patient meditation and recollection - recollecting, as Plato says, the memories of that soul that rises with us:

Through a glass, darkly!

If you Ever wanted to really Understand Heidegger...

Read this little book!

You won’t be disappointed.

It’s EXCELLENT.

[BlackOxford · Rating 4 out of 5]

Deception Is Good For the Soul

Conspiracy theorists have the right instinct: they are being deceived. Their mistake is not in taking what they’ve been told by Fox News and Q as more authoritative than the so-called mainstream media but that they attenuate their suspicions. They then fall into the trap of belief and become suckers.

According to Martin Heidegger, the world is continuously hiding from us. Essentially there is a conspiracy at large, not just among governments or big corporations but by the universe, to prevent us from knowing about what we casually call reality. It was Nietzsche who first insisted that “a perspectival, deceptive character belongs to existence,” thus suggesting that whatever it is we mean by the term reality isn’t even stable.

Heidegger has taken that insight and turned into a methodological principle. For him, the best we are able to achieve either philosophically or scientifically is a progressive ‘unconcealment’ of the world. Such unconcealment is prompted by the deception which confronts us continuously, not only in the lies of other people but also in the distortions of our senses and our lack of judgment about what we perceive.

But there’s a catch. The process of unconcealment doesn’t have a termination point in anything resembling what we call the truth, that is, a correspondence between a proposition and the way the world is. The reason for this indeterminateness is obvious - the way the world is, its ontology, is in a constant state of flux. What is ‘there’ depends on a complex of interests, history, cultural presumptions, and arbitrary designations of language among other things. As the author explains:

“The reason for this [indeterminacy] lies in the nature of unconcealment itself. There is no right way to be human, no uniquely right way to be an entity, no right way for the world to be organized, no single way that world disclosure works. As a result, all we can hope for in philosophy is an ever renewed and refined insight into the workings of unconcealment.”

So deception feeds our impulse to intellectual search, to scientific understanding, and indeed to conspiracy theories. But what our endeavours to unconceal must lead us to is… well, yet further layers of concealment. Progress cannot be measured in terms of some closer approximation to the truth, but only in terms of the increasingly scrupulous techniques we use to pursue the search for what is concealed. Advancement in addressing deception“consists in seeing and describing the phenomena of unconcealment more perspicuously, and communicating these insights more successfully.”

What we are doing constantly is “lifting things to salience,” that is, establishing, modifying, and changing, what is considered of importance. In a sense, therefore, we are thus discovering ourselves in our apparently infinite variability. The problem the conspiracy theorists have, therefore, is not their gullibility, or the zaniness of their speculations but what can be called their suspension of disbelief. They simply stop thinking at all. And this is fatal because

”[T]he task is to keep his or her thought constantly under way, trying out new ways to explore productively the philosophical domain, remaining on them as long as profitable, but also abandoning them and setting off in a different way when the former way is exhausted. The aim is to participate in unconcealment, bringing it to our awareness, heightening our sensitivity and responsiveness to it.”

Heidegger calls this continuous search for unconcealment a “way of being in the world.” He proposes this as one we are well-advised to adopt:

“It is precisely in the unstable seeing of the ‘world,’ a seeing that flickers with our moods, that the available shows itself in its specific wordliness, which is never the same from day to day.”

The alternative is some form of ideology that claims that it has overcome the inherent deception in the world. But a claim cannot be sustained because “were experience always clear and the world of perception populated with determinate objects, we would not be taken in by deceptive appearances.”

So more power to you who think the world is out to get you through paedophile politicians, poisonous contrails, rigged election machines, and invading aliens. You may be deceived but then so are we all. But please, please, do not let your quest get bogged down. Take it that the rest of us will remain deluded, and move on in your crusade to unconceal the hidden secrets of the universe. We are depending on you for inspiration. Don’t let us down. After all, as the Canadian psychologist Robert Hare has said, “If we believe in the fundamental goodness of man we’re doomed.”

[Kamakana · Rating 4 out of 5]

290411: my brain hurts- in a good way. reading this, i can imagine why he would be such an inspiring lecturer. he always comes at ideas from new angles, he has entire new arguments that seem very convincing, about truth conditions more than correspondence, on ‘unconcealment’, on ‘idle talk’, on ‘conversation’ more than ‘discourse’, on religious world ‘disclosure’. this work was wrathall’s ten year project, so he has done the heavy lifting in translations and various interpretations, thus this work is easy to read without too much jargon, yet wonderfully engaging with ideas...

first essay is the most difficult, most essential to follow his other chapters. ‘on our positive ability to be deceived’ was my favorite, referenced merleau-ponty, characterized exactly what ‘phenomenology’ means. his reading of ‘plato, truth, and unconcealment’ was another great chapter. his ‘history’ did not really interest me, his religious concepts of ‘the fourfold’, his critique on neitzsche’s anti-metaphysics… all these will reward the second reading they deserve...

i do not know what analytic philosophers would get out of it, but it certainly convinces me that this mode of philosophical thinking can be very fruitful, very engaging, much more than obsessive logic-chopping. arguments against technological world view, against the real as calculation, are interesting but not to me more than ranting of dangers of what seems to me an original description of the human, as a toolmaker, as a technologist, as embodying various ‘stances’ to the world that predate any modern tech...

maybe it is true he is not a sentimentalist, but i read once he was a ‘black forest-redneck’. his adventures with the nazis make him an inherently controversial thinker. how can you be so brilliant and yet so wrong? m-p is probably still my favorite philosopher...

020220: more The Philosophy of Heidegger
Heidegger: Thinking of Being
The Heidegger Reader
The New Heidegger
What is Called Thinking?
Poetry, Language, Thought
The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays
Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil

[Cameron · Rating 5 out of 5]

An outstanding work of Heideggerian scholarship and one of my best reads of the year. These ten essays are clear and compelling expositions of the hugely complex conceptual core of Heidegger's work. To visit the late Heidegger's world is to travel through a Borgesian labyrinth to a control room containing the pure ontological machinery of human reality. Wrathall's essays, the labors of a decade of living inside that world, are perhaps the best introduction to the rewards of reading this difficult and important philosopher.

[Lindsay Moore · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wrathall offers us a collection of essay focussed on understanding Heidegger analysis of alethia. Some essays shed a lot of light on the absence of the divine in our world.

[Alina · Rating 5 out of 5]

It’s fascinating to return to Heidegger after 8 years of study. I initially read Being and Time back in undergrad, and that was formative for my thought. Wrathall is also great to read. He focuses on an aspect of Heidegger’s thought which I find most interesting; it’s the very aspect that has influenced me so much over these years. His interpretations also align with mine but go to levels of detail I haven’t considered. I’ll first summarize certain views that I most enjoyed among these essays and then ramble about ideas these evoke.

In essay 1 “Unconcealment” Wrathall introduces the concept which unifies the essays. Unconcealment refers to a particular way of understanding truth under Heidegger’s framework. We need to distinguish between truth as a property of assertions and truth as a concept that can be used to illuminate what goes on when we go about perceiving and experiencing the world independently of our use of natural language. Unconcealment gets at the latter sense of truth. The world may be understood as full of possible things for us to encounter, and we can only encounter and “unconceal” them if we have a sufficient background for doing so. This background may be understood in terms of our skills/habits and the values/norms we’ve internalized from our society and history.

With this concept of truth as unconcealment in place, it offers a new way of thinking about truth as a property of propositions. Propositional thought does not represent the world, and truth is not a matter of correspondence between thought and world. Rather, truth here may be understood as a matter of propositional thought successfully or appropriately opening to us in experience some view of the world. In effect, Heidegger welcomes us to think about epistemology in experiential or phenomenological terms, and he gives an account of the sort of experience we get when we use language, which can explain why we arrive at the epistemological concept of truth/falsity that we do.

In essay 5 “Social constraints on conversational content” Wrathall compares Heidegger’s view on how society influences meaning to the varieties of semantic externalism we find in certain analytic philosophers like Putnam, Burge, and Dummett. Putnam, for example, holds that we can understand one concept differently on the basis of background expertise. In contrast, Heidegger focuses less on our understanding of concepts as found in language use as the source of social influence on meaning; rather, he focuses on how we experience the world in the first place prior to using language.

My favorite essays were essays 2 and 7.

Essay 2 “The conditions of truth in Heidegger and Davidson” consists in an incisive analysis of the communities and differences between these two thinkers. It has upshots for thinking about the relationship between analytic and continental philosophy. It’s inspiring for thinking about how philosophers across these traditions may be synthesized, methodologically speaking. Both Heidegger and Davidson are interested in understanding a concept of truth which stands in contrast to the logical notion of truth which defines epistemology. Davidson argues in his paper “The second person” that successful communication and interpretation of another’s verbal or bodily behavior does not depend upon having a shared language, contra what Kripke and many other philosophers of his timed believed. Instead, successful interpretation only requires that at least two speakers are joined in a special social interaction which he calls “triangulation” (and which might be similar to joint attentional situations as studied by contemporary developmental psychologists—that’s another thought for another time, however).

In triangulation, each person of a dyad is sensitive to how oneself is responding to the world, how the other is responding to the world, and how oneself and the other are each responding to the pattern of each’s responsiveness to the world. There is some common cause for both of their responses to the world (e.g., an apple as a food item, rather than other stimuli which suffice for the same effects upon one’s mind as an apple like a pattern of stimulation of light waves at the surface of one’s retina), and one learns to tell what that cause is through social interaction, through tracking one’s own responses to the world in relationship to these other patterns of response (i.e., the other’s responses to the world, and oneself and the other’s responses to each other).

An implication of this is that to have concepts of objects or kinds of objects in the first place requires social interaction. Without social interaction, there’s no way of being right or wrong about one’s conceptual categories; this right and wrongness is a property, ultimately, of one’s communicative intention. If one can successfully get another to see what oneself sees, one’s concept can be understood to be right or truthful; and if one cannot, then one’s concept can be understood to be wrong or false. So, for Davidson, truth is social in the sense that it enters the scene only once we socially interact with one another. Wrathall points out, however, how this account of truth is incomplete. Davidson doesn’t offer any explanation as to how we can have enough alignment in how we see the world in the first place, which is necessary for being able to do triangulation.

According to Wrathall, Heidegger fills this lacuna in his account of truth as unconcealment. As such, truth is social insofar as to encounter the same objects of the world requires that we share a cultural, historical, or practical background; we need to overlap in habits and skills, etc.

Wrathall shows where the two thinkers diverge. Davidson believes that rightness and wrongness requires that we be self-aware of how the way by which we represent something could be wrong. Heidegger, in contrast, locates a different, more basic sense of normativity in our social practices. I can sense how I’m not playing the violin well, for example, without taking my activity to represent something out there and there being misalignment between the two. As a whole, according to Wrathall, Davidon’s starting point for analyzing truth is examining speech. This gives him an understanding of normativity of meaning which is distinctive of assertions, and he assumes that all forms of normativity must fit into that mold. In contrast, Heidegger’s starting point for analyzing truth is examining embodied practices. This gives him a different understanding of normativity of meaning, which can then be employed for illuminating the traditional, epistemic normativity under a new light.

In essay 7 “The revealed word and world disclosure” Wrathall applies Heidegger’s concept of unconcealment to understanding Pascal’s claims about faith. Pascal holds that if one has religious faith, it is impossible for them to be irrational or superstitious. To apply the concepts of irrationality and superstition to some person’s view requires that it is appropriate to hold the person’s view accountable to the epistemic standards of rationality. In having faith, we reject those standards. We are no longer playing the games of reason. Instead of caring about the truth or falsity of assertions, in having faith, we care about how we conduct ourselves in life. Faith consists in how we see the world and what we’re prone to doing in response to that. I’ve seen accounts of faith along these lines before, but Wrathall’s analysis here was clearer and more-in depth than any I’ve seen.

To sum up, I'd highly recommend this book to anyone interested in Heidegger or criticism of the continental/analytic divide. The interpretations are solid, and the writing is clear.

Okie doke, here’s some riffing. (This is for my own purposes; I’m not aiming here for legibility). I’ve been thinking about the indeterminacy of “meaning” when understood in terms of the significance our situation has for us, understood in terms of the emotions we have in response to our situation. It is indeterminate relative to the “meaning” we find in the propositional content of thought. Heidegger’s and Davidson’s views clearly touch upon these issues. Heidegger’s distinction between unconcealment and truth of assertions seems to quite closely mirror my distinction. A difference comes out in how unconcealment anchors us into concepts of activities, practices, and social norms, whereas my understanding of emotional significance anchors us into concepts of emotion regulation (and concepts contained therein, such as how our emotional responses can be unconscious or more “conscious” when we reflect upon them, and how doing so will change our overall emotional state). In other words, my approach foregrounds how our creativity and agency is integral to emotion and this pre-reflective significance of the world, whereas Heidegger’s approach does not necessarily do that. It is easy to think about habit and social norms as automated things, which can change only over long periods of time (as opposed to how the unfolding of an emotion can radically change over one experiential episode, depending upon how we regulate it). There are probably further differences, but that’s a preliminary one.

Moreover, I’d like to explore further Wrathall’s comparison between Heidegger’s and Davidson’s notions of normativity. I doubt that the practical appropriateness and inappropriateness of how we execute a social practice (e.g., playing violin) is the same in nature as the epistemic truth and falsity of assertions. Making assertions is not just one social practice among others; here, we have a specific interpretation of our experience of the world, so there is a representation of the world that can legitimately be modeled in terms of correspondence. Other social practices are non-representational and can’t be modeled as such (e.g., in playing a violin, we’re not representing something that exists in any way).

Moreover, the practical appropriateness/inappropriateness which is Heidegger’s concern might be pushed further. When we bring emotion and emotion regulation into the picture, this illuminates how when we have emotions, they’re often unconscious, and often we implicitly regulate them in a way which presupposes some sense of normativity. This normativity is special. When an emotion is unconscious, we might have an intuitive sense that something’s off, for example, without any specification of what it is which is “off,” and what this “off-ness” amounts to (e.g., practical v ethical inappropriateness, epistemic falsity, etc). This vague or indeterminate sense is enough, however, for us to adjust our conduct or orientation, and we can adjust as such without being aware of what we’re doing. Consciously, we may just sense some tension and be driven to do anything which will relieve that tension; at no point do we become conscious of what we’re doing, interpret our situation, and bring into the world particular meaning of what’s going on, how we’ve gone wrong, and what’s truthful.

This notion of normativity may more directly hook onto epistemic normativity than the practical appropriateness/inappropriateness Wrathall attributes to Heidegger. We can play a violin or make coffee in more or less appropriate manners. This claim does not betray any way of connecting up with notions of representation and correspondence. In contrast, when we think about the significance of our situation which is constituted by our unconscious emotions, now we can look into how this significance (i.e., the “read” you have of a situation) (1) compares with other reads on this situation (e.g., as done by other people or as imagined as some archetype), (2) may be consistent or inconsistent with facts of the matter (e.g., the weights of objects, the colors of objects), and (3) may be more or less in tension with other behaviors, emotions, and attitudes you hold in other situations (and I’m sure there are other relevant dimensions of assessment; these are some preliminary ones). Epistemic truth is connected to some of these dimensions of assessment. For example, if a significance one reads of a situation is incompatible with some hard facts (e.g., a person is caught up in a delusion and senses herself to be Napoleon), it cannot be epistemically true. Also, for example, (3) gets close to the epistemic notion of consistency, or the absence of contradiction, as essential to truth. (1) also has some representational or correspondence basis of truth vibes; we can compare interpretations of emotional significance across people and see whether they “correspond” to one another.

Another thought. Davidson thinks about the indeterminacy of meaning in terms of the ambiguity of the many possible ways of carving up an object amidst the stimuli that hits you in a situation. For example, the apple can be an object on a table or the patterns of light reflection that hit your retina. Or, across a broader temporal scale, the apple might be a time slice of a process of a seed becoming apple tree, etc. These many possible ways of carving up an object is based in the causal complexity of the world.

I’ve been thinking about indeterminacy differently. A significance is indeterminate relative to a certain gold standard of determinacy that is given by our familiarity with propositions and the logical relations that hold of them. It is indeterminate because, causally speaking, any one emotion responds to many different parts of reality, both spatially-temporally distal and distant (e.g., in being fearful of a snake, my fear could respond to the snake itself but also to distant parts of reality, like evil doers, intrusive strangers, the phallus, etc.), and it takes our reflection and active creativity to decide what our emotion is about, which may or may not touch upon any of the many things our emotion actually responds to. In other words, indeterminacy arises from (1) the fact that a particular sense of being conscious, as opposed to unconscious, requires that we use language or propositional thought, (2) the proposition is a different “medium” than emotional significance, (3) in making sense of emotional significance via “drawing” in this medium of the proposition, we must be creative. (There are probably other or further ways of analyzing emotion and figuring out the components which justify or explain what I’ve been intuiting as “indeterminacy,” but here’s one go).

So more broadly, both for me and Davidson the causal complexity of the world matters for making sense of indeterminacy. When I introduce the distinction between what emotion responds to and what we believe our emotions to be about, however, this adds an important stage which “mediates” between the causal complexity of the world and our consciousness. At this time I don’t know anything further about what this distinction that holds within emotion does to this issue other than that it implies that not just any causal events of the world are relevant to indeterminacy, but only the ones which we can emotionally respond to are. Moreover, my introduction of emotion might secure that meaning is indeterminate, not merely ambiguous. When we reflect upon the emotional significance of our situation and “sculpt” it in thought, this is a creative act, and so what we end up creating need not be thought of as one option among a set of pre-formed options which we merely select or choose between. In contrast, when we only sit with the notion of causal complexity and locating objects therein on Davidson’s picture, we have an easier time thinking about how there is a set of pre-formed options of different objects that could be carved up admits that causal complexity. This is because the relationship between possible objects and a causally complex situation is describable in terms that need not introduce a human agent. On my picture, this agency is necessary.

A last thought. I was struck again by the obscurity of Heidegger's language. I wonder about the methodological claim that it is crucial to use obfuscatory terminology because this allows us to be de-familiarized with the everyday, to have distance from it, to approach it from new angles, and ultimately to arrive at deeper understandings. I'm sure there's truth here. But also there seems to be serious cons to this approach. If at the end of the day we still rely upon this terminology, as opposed to return to use of primarily or only ordinary language (where terms are now newly deepened in meaning), we put ourselves at certain risks. The idiosyncratic terms of Heidegger's theory, when used, will provoke intuitions that are confined to the space within his theory.

When seeing "being-towards," or "equipmentality," for example, our intuitions about Heidegger's extant claims about relevant phenomena will be activated. Intuitions about phenomena which could be related to these but which are not yet included in Heidegger's theory are less likely to be activated; this is because these new, potential phenomena currently go under only commonplace or everyday terms, not Heidegger's idiolect. If we're unlikely to activate new intuitions when proceeding with Heidegger's claims, then we're unlikely to make progress in finding new details to Heidegger's framework. It's more likely for work on Heidegger, then, to consist in debates about proper interpretation of Heidegger's claims, as opposed to gripping onto the parts of the world Heidegger aimed to explain and deepening our understanding of those parts.

I'm inclined to think that the ideal methodology is to sometimes use idiosyncratic or obfuscatory terms to help deepen our understanding of phenomena that usually go by everyday terms, but to aim at returning to relying upon those everyday terms.

[Richard · Rating 5 out of 5]

My favourite book on the later Heidegger. Wrathall convincingly argues that truth as unconcealment is the key to understanding the later Heidegger’s thought.