The clearing and the truth
20
Feb
The concept of truth in Greek philosophy does
not arise from logic, mathematics or physics, the allegory of the Cave in Plato, where those in the cave see only the shadows and not the truth as it is, in Heidegger’s interpretation, he will demonstrate that forgetting the true Being of things produced by modern thought (Kant and Descartes) is nothing more than the necessary result of a metaphysical way of thinking.
This metaphysics underwent a change in determining the essence of the concept of truth: in this passage there was a transformation from the notion of truth as unveiling to the notion of truth as correction or correspondence of thought as the thing.
This interpretation begins by correcting the Greek word eidos and idea (Idea) by “aspect”, this aspect of an entity is not its mere appearance as perceived immediately by the senses, it is what the entity shows itself through what it presents itself.
It is in this self-showing of its aspect that the entity appears and can be captured by the intellect (Heidegger, 2007, p. 3), just as the eye sees sensitive objects in their external appearance thanks to sunlight, man “sees ” being in the light of ideas, thus Ideas illuminate the being of beings, make their essence visible (in Heidegger’s terminology: the entitative of beings), and allow the soul to contemplate it.
As Heidegger (2007, p. 6) states: “The aspects of which the things themselves are, that is, the eidee (the ideas in the Greek sense), constitute the essence in whose light every particular being, this or that, shows itself in whose showing itself what appears becomes newly uncovered and accessible”.
Heidegger states in a passage from Being and Time that the traditional conception of truth (this one from Kant and Descartes) is based on the premise that the essence of truth resides in the agreement of the judgment with the object (adequatio intellectos et rei) a correspondence (or omoiosis) without explaining what the notion of correspondence is.
The ontological proposition of showing what and discovering what it is (Heidegger, 2005, p. 288) is thus something that “discovers the being in itself, proposes, shows, allows us to see (apofánsis) the being in its discovered state” , reveals the being in itself, but the Being was forgotten.
As Heidegger states: “The true being of logos as apophasis is the aletheien”. Aletheia, the unveiling, therefore, is “the foundation of the original phenomenon of truth” (Heidegger, 2005, p. 288).
HEIDEGGER, M. (2005) Being and Time. Brazil, Petrópolis: Vozes, 2005. (in portuguese)
HEIDEGGER, M. (2007) Platón’s doctrine concerning truth. Eikasia, Revista de Filosofía, v. 12, Extraordinary I. (in Spanish).
