Heidegger and Plato: Toward Dialogue

Heidegger on Truth and Being

There is hardly a topic on which philosophers have spawned more nonsense than the analysis of the nature and meaning of truth. Indeed, the twentieth century has spent an inordinate amount of capital on the question , much of it tendentious and utterly pointless. It literally lost its way among both analytic and continental theorists, who of course implacably opposed one another’s answers.1 Analysts, on the whole, favor a semantic account of the use of “true” confined to propositional contexts, notably with regard to the work of the natural sciences; nevertheless, they do not usually examine the relationship between, say, language and praxis (or action) where the deeper issues seem to lie.2 Continental thinkers, by contrast , fault the propositional doctrine as misguided and superficial, possibly even dangerous to the well-being of humanity! Certainly, Heidegger was obsessed with the latter prospect. The propositional orientation of the analysts has always been and still is overwhelmingly supported by mainstream Western philosophy running , in great profusion, from Plato and Aristotle down the centuries to the deliberately thin views of figures like Russell and Carnap and Wittgenstein and Tarski and Quine and Davidson. By contrast, daunting though it may be, the most sustained challenge in our time to the entire propositional account is to be found in the work of very nearly one figure, Martin Heidegger, who claims that Western philosophy has wandered (indeed, has “erred”) from the original vision of the pre-Socratics! Yet, what, momentously , the pre-Socratics discerned twenty-five hundred years ago— which Heidegger seems to have “rescued” from complete “oblivion”—remains as murky as before. Both lines of theorizing have captured a disjoint strand of the entire analysis wanted, and each has pursued its exclusionary inquiry in such a way as to have finally arrived at a preposterous cul-de-sac. Heidegger on Truth and Being Joseph Margolis 121 Heidegger managed to convince an immense cohort of loyal professionals , who, in a matter of a few generations, made it well-nigh impossible to avoid comparing his claims with those that still dominate the mainstream tendency. There is a distinctly Hesiodic archaism in Heidegger ’s opposition to the modern or modernist commitments of the world, which, without invoking questionable genealogies, worrisomely recalls Heidegger’s dreadful mistakes linking the political and the ontological. Fear of the Gestell and the “new age” are perhaps still palpable, but can they rightly account for the persistence of Heidegger’s claims beyond his own lifetime?3 I think not. I confine myself, therefore, to assessing Heidegger’s essential argument , though not solely by textual means. The reason is a triple one: first, because Heidegger’s principal texts bearing on Parmenides and Plato feature certain provocative readings of their texts which cannot, by themselves , sustain Heidegger’s theory of truth; second, because the opposed theories of truth that Heidegger distinguishes (roughly) as the “propositional ” (or “orthotic”) and the “alethic” cannot stand as independent theories , though as far as I know, Heidegger nowhere addresses the need to bring them into accord; and, third, because, strange to say, there is as yet no well-formed line of reasoning that yields a compelling and unified account. The corrective I have in mind is modest enough. I argue that the central use of “true” fitted in an undistorted way to the whole of the Western tradition is surely its realist intent. Needless to say, both Heidegger and the analysts attempt to escape that particular stricture: the analysts, by falling back to “semantic analysis”; Heidegger, by probing more deeply in the direction of the “truth of Being.” To be perfectly candid, both maneuvers fail for the same reason. I don’t deny that “realist” is a disputed notion ; I also have no wish to trade on my own metaphysical bias in advancing the point. But I have no doubt at all that the “realist intent” of “true” can be specified in a perfectly straightforward way that leaves entirely open the full space of philosophical quarrel regarding what, finally, to adopt as the “best” possible realist formula. I will come to that formulation shortly. For the moment, I emphasize only the constraint and the dearth of suitably ramified answers. The analysts, for instance, have tended to restrict their accounts to very narrow semantic concerns, so that the epistemological and metaphysical aspects of a realist account of truth, even when narrowly addressed to the propositional issue, are shortsightedly subverted.4 For the record, though I am concerned here primarily with Heidegger...