Heidegger's Reflection on Aletheia: Merely a Teminological Shift?

Abstract

In The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking, Heidegger discusses the need to move beyond prior philosophical thinking to the determination of the proper matter of thinking. In first encountering this idea, which has the form of an injunction to think the philosophical tradition in a way which enables us to overcome that tradition, one may be seized with the inclination to lodge the kind of thoroughgoing critique of the tradition which puts one in position to bury and forget it as if it were a bad dream. Some self-styled Heideggerians employ this tack in an attempt to exponge from philosophy the notions of and presence, as if these notions were nothing more than an elaborate and painfully embarrassing mistake which should simply be forgotten; then the task of philosophy, if there still is one, is to articulate a realm of non-metaphysical discourse in which anything goes as long as it does not involve the dirty words Subjectivity and .presence. But at best such a posture bears only a superficial resemblance to Heidegger's position. While Heidegger does seek to overcome the tradition and its fundamental presuppositions about Being, he is not enjoining us to jettison the tradition but rather to appropriate it productively, to transform its concepts in the way in which concepts become aufgehoben in Hegelian dialectic. It is in this spirit that Heidegger devoted his life to the study of the history of philosophy. (Here we should bear in mind that Heidegger considered philosophy to be a peculiarly occidental pursuit.) And it is in this spirit that we must interpret Heidegger's reflection on aletheia in The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking: if we try to think unconcealment in isolation from the traditional understanding of Being as presence, and if we try to understand our own being in isolation from traditional concepts of human being which culminate in the modern notion of Subjectivity, then we fail to think the matter of philosophy authentically and end up engaging in meaningless word-play. It is true that on Heidegger's account the tradition has gone astray, but it is the very crux of his account that we are destined to do so. And perhaps the most conspicuous example of this er-