Heideggerian unconcealment—truth as aletheia and constrained archeology—Draft 1

Heidegger talks of truth as unconcealment—Greek aletheia—and an essential part of his view is that along with uncovering there is always a covering up. So there is no possibility of raw truth, of full exposure.

No time for the reasons why but I think he's right; in short we are humans, we have our perspectives and ontologically we are part of that which is uncovered so the model of being an outside observer looking at the object that is the truth of something is not open to us.

So why this post? To offer a metaphor that may have (surely has?) been used before to help describe the concealment/unconcealment dynamic. It's a metaphor that is not unlike that of rebuilding the ship at sea, which serves epistemology as an alternative to foundationalism.

For Heidegger, truth is revealed just as an archeological dig reveals its object (he wouldn't use that word), but with a limitation: Imagine a dig constrained by its location, say jammed in a V between two cliffs and on the third side a river. There is ample space to work but nowhere to put the excavated material that is not also part of the site. And no, it can't be thrown in the river for fear of losing precious fragments.

So with painstaking effort soil is removed from one part of the dig to reveal what lies below but in the same process another part of the dig is covered. In the process of digging and moving and removing and uncovering only to cover over elsewhere, the diggers come to a fuller knowledge of the site—of the truth that they seek. But that truth will never be exposed fully for camera to take in as a whole. Yet truth it is, existent, partially covered, but known nevertheless.