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.

The myth of the given?

My thesis: the world is objectively given but it is not given objectively.

Hence we can have truth without proof; we can live, love and die for causes without the certainty that the sceptic demands.

Michael Polanyi’s tacit hermeneutic philosophy of science—for the layperson!

Recently a friend of mine by the name of skandalon (skandalon.net) gave a talk in the US. Here is the text of his talk.

The abstract for today’s talk makes some wild promises. I’ve promised to talk of Martin Heidegger’s Being-in-the-world and Hans-Georg Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics as well as making connections between them and Michael Polanyi’s understanding of science. And I’ve promised to do so in a way that is accessible to the layperson. We’ll see how we go!

I have decided that the best way forward is to let you in on a conversation I had recently with a renowned biochemist and Nobel laureate. He’s an Australian acquaintance who likes fishing and hunting crocodiles.

Professor Hermen E. Utic is responsible for a number of significant advances in his field over the last 25 years. And he’s the quintessential Polanyian scientist. He’s engaging to listen to; his eyes light up as he talks of his research; and his passionate commitment to the search for truth is obvious. Professor Utic is convinced that the secret to his success lies in a combination of two things; firstly, his own innate attitudes, abilities and personality; and secondly that he works for a university that values theoretical research and gives him freedom to pursue possibilities where they lead.

Utic enjoyed philosophy in his student years and says he particularly enjoyed the renowned continental philosophers Martin Heidegger and Hans-Georg Gadamer. But Professor Utic soon turned to science, somewhat influenced by an Australian philosophical climate, which was not known for its love of continental philosophy.

Given that some of the roots of Utic’s views on science lay with the German philosophers of interpretation, it was there we had to start. My personal experience of trying to read Heidegger and Gadamer decades ago was not pleasant; I particularly found Heidegger convoluted, obscure, and I was not at all convinced he was actually on to something. Talk of ‘Dasein’s Being-in-the-world’ and speaking of ‘language as the house of being’ mystified me.

As one wit said, analytic philosophers typically accuse the continental ones of being insufficiently clear, while the continental philosophers accuse the analytic ones of Being insufficiently. I hope today’s talk is both clear and takes account of Being.

Anyway, I started by asking Professor Utic what it was that he had learned from Heidegger and Gadamer. Here’s some of what he had to say—though I should apologise for the recording quality; he’s a busy man so I had to catch up with him at a cricket match as he was preparing to go in to bat.

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Language and truth

Our choice of language is a matter of life or death because language creates candidates for truth.

The fallacy of ontic entailment

The fallacy of ontic entailment consists in drawing ontological conclusions from epistemological convictions. There is an explanatory gap—an epistemic one—which means we cannot prove what we claim to know. But the epistemic gap in no way entails ontological conclusions: we exist and so does the world, irrespective of our epistemic limitations. And, strictly speaking, we can’t explicitly explain how we can know. This is a function of human finitude. So the two erroneous conclusions commonly drawn from the ‘fact’ of human finitude are that we can’t know the world and that the world itself is relative to our thinking and acting. Roughly.

The onto-epistemic circle

Ontology dictates epistemic practices and not vice versa. But we know what is (ontology) through epistemic practices, therefore neither can serve as foundation of the other. And neither can be taken up before the other. Therefore there is an iterative process at work between the two: the onto-epistemic circle. This is another example of the hermeneutic circle at work.

Postmodern postmortem

Postmodernism is a case of epistemic despair leading to ontological suicide.

Richard Rorty, the Pope: truth, ethics and relativisms

Pragmatist philosopher Richard Rorty gave one of his last public presentations in a 2005 lecture in Italy called “An ethics for today: finding common ground for philosophy and religion.” In his lecture Rorty contrasts his own view with that of the Catholic Church and clarifies his own understanding of relativism.

Rorty describes the Church as affirming the reality of a “structure of human existence, which can serve as a moral reference point.” For his part, Rorty sides with John Stuart Mill in holding that the only moral obligation humans have is that of “helping one another satisfy our desires, thus achieving the greatest possible amount of happiness.”[1] This clearly utilitarian ethic is one for which Rorty makes no apology. In the face of the Church’s view that utilitarianism makes animals of human beings, Rorty claims, in revealing phraseology, that on the contrary, “utilitarianism exalts us by offering us a challenging moral ideal. Utilitarianism leads to heroic and self-sacrificing efforts on behalf of social justice.”[2]

One must assume that the irony of his positive moral appraisal of heroism, self-sacrifice and social justice is not lost on Rorty who describes himself as a liberal ironist. But irrespective of whether Rorty acknowledges the strange juxtaposition of utilitarianism and moral virtues such as heroism, there is a clear appeal to moral values above and beyond, or at least additional to, that of increasing the net amount of happiness on the planet. While social justice might conceivably be defined in utilitarian terms as maximising human happiness or desire satisfaction, that is not the case with heroism and self-sacrifice. As normally understood, and when not distorted to fit a utilitarian scheme, one can imagine classic situations of heroism or self-sacrifice that neither increase net happiness nor were even intended to do so.

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