DASEIN AND THE PRECURSORY QUESTION OF TRUTH | 110
be successful – are underwritten by the phenomenal access one has to the thing. If the being of the one who asserts or makes the proposition were such that access is impossible, the adequacy or inadequacy of the proposition could never be demonstrated. Truth as adaequatio would be structurally impossible (barring, for instance, a Thomistic appeal to a benevolent metaphysical guarantor).
Likewise, what is interesting about asserting or making a proposition here is not its role in adaequatio, but the fact that, as Heidegger puts it, ‘asserting is a way of being towards the Thing itself that is’.31 More specifically, it is a way of being in which the one who makes the proposition gains phenomenal access to the thing, that is, encounters it meaningfully in a world, and does so in such a way that it might be encountered ‘just as it is in itself’. This is not to suggest that one accesses the thing as noumenon in the Kantian sense. Rather, what Heidegger means by ‘the thing’ here is the thing exactly as an encountered phenomenon. Needless to say, Heidegger thinks his recasting of philosophy as fundamental ontology undermines Kant’s epistemological framework not because it somehow gives us access to noumena, but instead because it denies the validity of the transcendental subject and its cognitive apparatus, and thus the validity of the phenomenon/ noumenon distinction itself. Heidegger, of course, replaces the Kantian concept of phenomenon with his own: ‘that which shows itself in itself, the manifest’; for Heidegger, phenomena ‘are the totality of what lies in the light of day or can be brought into the light – what the Greeks sometimes identified simply with τὰ ὄντα (beings)’.32 Thus, the diagenic move of enquiring into the essence of truth in this manner implies the eventual elimination of the illusion of the subject/object split.
Heidegger uses the term ‘entdecken’ (to uncover or discover) to describe the way we gain access to phenomenal beings. Making a proposition is one way (among others) of being towards something such that it might get uncovered. Asserting or making a proposition might also fail, of course. For Heidegger, ‘to say that a proposition “is true” signifies that it uncovers the being [Seiende] as it is in itself. Such a proposition asserts, points out, “lets” the being be seen [läßt sehen] (ἀπόφανσις) in its uncoveredness.’33 On this basis, Heidegger claims that we can identify the kind of being a proposition has when it is true: ‘the being-true [Wahrsein] (truth) of the proposition must be understood as being-uncovering [entdeckend-sein]’.34 Since, in his view, being-uncovering is what constitutes the truth of a proposition in this originary sense, as well as the ontological ground on which adaequatio might be possible at all, he claims that ‘“being-true” (“truth”) means being-uncovering’.35 In an effort to lend this thesis historical support, Heidegger suggests it was ‘understood in a pre-phenomenological manner’ by the ancients and translates it into Greek terms:
33 SZ 218/261, translation modified.
34 Ibid., translation modified.