Heidegger on Truth: Its Essence and Its Fate by Graeme Nicholson

Abstract

Reviewed by: Heidegger on Truth: Its Essence and Its Fate by Graeme Nicholson Frank Schalow NICHOLSON, Graeme. Heidegger on Truth: Its Essence and Its Fate. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2019. xi + 181 pp. Cloth, $69.00 Martin Heidegger’s lecture “On the Essence of Truth” (1930) is one of his most pivotal inquiries. It provides a bridge between his magnum opus, Being and Time (1927) and his later writings. In Heidegger on Truth: Its Essence and Its Fate, Graeme Nicholson provides a meticulous exposition of this lecture as well as its revision into an essay in 1943 and 1949. “This essay was the harbinger of many studies Heidegger makes of art and poetry later in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950, which were influential in encouraging currents of hermeneutical philosophy and poetics in all European countries after the Second World War.” In Part I Nicholson examines the impact that Heidegger’s essay has on the development of his thought, and also considers the implications that it has for unraveling his political entanglement in 1930s Germany. Heidegger’s Rectoral Address (April 1933) marks the convergence of philosophical and “political storms,” which could be resolved only through a discourse that unifies disparate academic disciplines via the pursuit of truth as aletheia or unconcealment. In a period of two decades from 1930 to 1949, Heidegger appropriates the ancient Greek concept of aletheia. He weaves together a confluence of issues into a complex hermeneutic mosaic: (1) the derivative character of the correspondence theory of truth, (2) primordial truth as entry into an “open region,” (3) the twofold dynamic of truth as Da-sein’s participation in and unfolding of this openness or freedom, (4) the enactment of freedom as “letting-be,” and (5) the interplay of unconcealment with its opposite, concealment, as the ground of error. Nicholson argues that there is an “objective duality” in the tension between the openness and the beings that are revealed, appear, and come to presence therein, and a duality in the way that Da-sein is both engaged with and transported into the openness. “We can say that the whole argument works by tracing the correlation between the dualities: (1) the duality between a given being and the whole, the world; and (2) the duality in Da-sein between letting-be and conduct.” This problematic way of pitting “objective” versus “subjective” gives way to Nicholson’s equally unusual rendering of Verhalten as “conduct” (rather than “comportment”), in order to call into question the origin of the agency within freedom. “Not only does letting-be penetrate the conduct—it ‘outreaches’ (vorgreifen), and reaches up (umgreifen) to the attuning totality.” According to Nicholson, Heidegger creates an ambiguity in which freedom is related to conduct but does not necessarily include a corollary dimension of responsibility. “The letting-be of beings is the medium in which all conduct is consummated, and it permeates the conduct, but it brings no information.” Within this phenomenological context, Heidegger underestimates the degree to which Da-sein is bound by the dynamic of truth as unconcealing-concealing, and thereby does not emphasize (as he does later) the reciprocal response of humility as a primary element of freedom as letting-be. In Part II Nicholson advances a familiar argument that after resigning as chancellor of the University of Freiburg (April 1934) Heidegger [End Page 414] “rectifies” his earlier version of truth by removing the element of voluntarism that misled him to seek political power under the National Socialist regime. In the mid-1930s Heidegger transforms his conception of truth upon confronting a new problematic: the global outreach of machination (Machenschaft). The occurrence of truth as concealing-unconcealing assumes a historical trajectory, such that in the modern age of technology concealment prevails by accenting the beings that become present in terms of their potential for production, consumption, and exploitation. Heidegger emphasizes that the negativity of concealment (Verborgenheit) as untruth includes a positive dimension of sheltering (Bergung) as the source of the mystery of being. “While the concealment is, to be sure, the mystery, what is specific to mystery is that it is the unity of concealment with unconcealment.” This historical configuration of truth entails a transformation of what it...