Heidegger on Plato, truth, and unconcealment: The 1931–32 lecture on The Essence of Truth

Abstract This paper discusses Heidegger's 1931–32 lecture course on The Essence of Truth. It argues that Heidegger read Platonic ideas, not only as stage‐setting for the western philosophical tradition's privileging of conceptualization over practice, and its correlative treatment of truth as correctness, but also as an early attempt to work through truth as the fundamental experience of unhiddenness. Wrathall shows how several of Heidegger's more‐famous claims about truth, e.g. that propositional truth is grounded in truth as world‐disclosure, and including Heidegger's critique of the self‐evidence of truth as correspondence, are first revealed in a powerful (if iconoclastic) reading of Plato. Notes These essays are all published in Wegmarken (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1996), translated as Pathmarks, ed. William McNeill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Courses dedicated to truth include 'Logik. Die Frage nach der Wahrheit' (Winter Semester 1925–1926, GA 21), 'Vom Wesen der Wahrheit. Zu Platons Höhlengleichnis und Theätet' (Winter Semester 1931–1932, GA 34), 'Vom Wesen der Wahrheit' (Winter Semester 1933–1934, GA 36/37), and 'Grundfragen der Philosophie. Ausgewählte "Probleme" der "Logik"' (Winter Semester 1937–1938, GA 45). Virtually every other course taught during this period includes a significant discussion of the essence of truth. Particularly notable in this regard are 'Einleitung in die Philosophie' (Winter Semester 1928–1929, GA27), 'Nietzsches Lehre vom Willen zur Macht als Erkenntnis' (Summer Semester 1939, GA 47), and, a little later, the 'Parmenides' lecture course of 1942–1943 (GA 54). 'GA' references are to volumes of Heidegger's Gesamtausgabe (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann). Unless otherwise specified, parenthetical references in the text are to the English translation of GA 34: The Essence of Truth, trans. Ted Sadler (New York: Continuum, 2002). For a more detailed discussion of truth as a privative concept, see my 'Unconcealment' in The Blackwell Companion to Heidegger (2004). When Heidegger was writing and lecturing, the most widely accepted notion of propositional truth was that of correspondence. Like many others in the opening decades of the twentieth century, he questions whether we can arrive at a clear notion of correspondence – at least as long as correspondence is taken as a relationship that holds between a representation and a state of affairs in the world. For further discussion of Heidegger's views on correspondence, see my 'Truth and the Essence of Truth', in The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger, rev. ed. (Cambridge University Press, 2005), and 'Unconcealment', in The Blackwell Companion to Heidegger (Blackwell, 2004). 'The Thought', in Logical Investigations, ed. P. T. Geach (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1977), p. 2. See my 'Truth and the Essence of Truth' in The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger, rev'd. ed. See Republic 514 a. In the English translation of the lecture course, 'Gehaltenheit' is rendered as 'positionedness' (see p. 83 ff.). The reasoning behind this, I suppose, is that in being educated, we take up a new position or stance among beings. But the emphasis here is on our being held to a certain relationship to things in virtue of our having taken hold of them in a particular way. See, e.g., Waterfield's, Cornford's and Shorey's translations. Heidegger doesn't elaborate very much on this point in the lecture course. For an account of his views on a higher mode of intelligibility, see Hubert Dreyfus, 'Could anything be more intelligible than everyday intelligibility?' in Appropriating Heidegger, eds. James E. Faulconer and Mark A. Wrathall (Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 155–74. Perhaps the most striking difference between the lecture course and the later published essay on Plato's cave allegory is the extent to which Heidegger in the lecture course attempts to read Plato in phenomenological terms. This is one of Heidegger's most charitable and least critical readings of Plato. For more on this idea, see my 'Unconcealment' in The Blackwell Companion to Heidegger.