Truth and Being
09
Oct
For Socrates, the truth was not with men, but
between men, and with this he opposed Protagoras who said that “man is the measure of all things”, the relativism of the Sophists.
Heidegger updates the concept of the truth of being (allétheia) and clarifies the misunderstanding that being as a present to the being of man, the misunderstanding that could occur, which would be to take the openness of being (geschlosenheit) as the determining element for understanding the truth of being (allétheia), the truth is not of man, but of being.
This dynamic relationship proper to the re-vealing of being (re-veiling, i.e. other veils) is not about the “function of the transcendental subject” who has the power of the keys to open up the true and the not true, which remains in the field of binary logic, but rather the power to unveil being.
The ambivalence of the play of tensions between Being and Appearance lies in the field of re-revelation, where truth is also ambivalent, but if thought of as Being, both can lead to a new re-revelation, says Heidegger: “Being, as appearance, is no less powerful than being, as re-revelation and discovery (unverbogenheit)” (Heidegger, 1984, p. 254).
In a way, for both Descartes and Kant, Heidegger sees them as looking at the world as something simply given, such as the physical and material world, since traditional ontology is structured in this way, being lives in a relationship between the thing and the intellect.
Thomas Aquinas already saw it this way, and what changes from Franz Brentano onwards is a Thomist sub-category of consciousness, which is consciousness of something, and then Husserl extends it to a return to the “thing in itself” (nature for Kant and Descartes) as intentionality and reduction (aidética, a name that comes from idea, but for the Greeks) which for him means creating a mental object.
Heidegger unveils this truth of being by realizing that there is an ek-sistent being of a being that flits from one object to another in everyday life, deviating from the mystery of Dasein.
In Heidegger’s view, there is no pure contemplation of Being, but rather a relationship between Being and Being, between appearance and essence, but, in our view, there is still a veiling of its finitude, of still remaining a being-of-the-sent, in other words, a thing even though it has an ontological relationship, transcendence remains in the object, what are we beyond the being?
We return to Heidegger’s partially-answered question: “What preserves being in this relationship with concealment?” I don’t want to force a theological hypothesis, but I’ll leave it up in the air: pure Being can enter into Being, without losing its essence, what will return from this finitude?
Heidegger, M. (1984) A tese de Kant sobre o ser. Brazil, São Paulo: Abril Cultural (Col. Os Pensadores).
