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To cite this article: Rufus Duits (2007) On Tugendhat's Analysis of Heidegger's Concept of Truth,
International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 15:2, 207-223, DOI: 10.1080/09672550701383491
On Tugendhat’s Analysis of
Heidegger’s Concept of Truth
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10.1080/09672550701383491
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0967-2559
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Rufus Duits
Abstract
This paper responds to Tugendhat’s well-known and influential critique of
Heidegger’s concept of truth with the resources of Heidegger’s texts, in partic-
ular §44 of Being and Time. To start with, Tugendhat’s primary critical argu-
ment is reconstructed. It is held to consist firstly in the charge of ambiguity
against Heidegger’s formulations of his concept of truth and secondly in the
claim that Heidegger’s concept of truth is incompatible with an adequate
concept of falsehood. It is shown that the supposedly ambiguous meanings
are, on the one hand, in fact clearly distinguished by Heidegger and, on the
other, that they merely amount to different extensions of the same meaning of
truth. It is then shown how this concept of truth is indeed compatible with an
adequate, albeit post-metaphysical, concept of falsehood. Finally, the grounds
of falsehood in the untruth of the existential of Verfallen are pursued and
further objections are dismissed.
Keywords: Heidegger; Tugendhat; truth; Verfallen; phenomenology;
metaphysics
texts, does not receive any philosophical import other than that which it was
given in Heidegger’s analyses in Sein und Zeit (henceforth, SZ). In any case,
for the purposes of this paper, I shall restrict myself for the most part to a
consideration of its presentation in this early work, since that is also the
focus of Tugendhat’s critique, which takes it as exemplary for Heidegger’s
consideration of truth in general. It is accepted that, whilst many of the
important texts that we now have which deal with the question of truth were
not available when Tugendhat was writing, one may not wish to subscribe
to this focus.
Tugendhat’s book has had a significant impact on the understanding and
critique of Heidegger’s thinking as a whole, especially in Germany. Apart
from the book’s obvious merits, this is no doubt due to the fact that
Heidegger’s questioning concerning truth is not at all a peripheral concern
of his thinking, one incidental to the project of raising the question of
being. It is rather the necessary preparation of this question, the Vorfrage
through which access is first gained to the fundamental ontological prob-
lematic, as Heidegger insists here in Beiträge zur Philosophie: ‘Die Frage
nach der Wahrheit … ist für uns die Vorfrage, durch die wir zuerst
hindurch müssen.’2 That this is so is emphasized also in the lecture Vom
Wesen der Wahrheit, first given in 1930, where the question of the essence
of truth is shown to prepare the question of being insofar as it illuminates
the path out of the categorical constellation of metaphysical thinking. Once
this is borne in mind, the philosophical significance of SZ’s discussion of
truth begins to emerge: since the existential analysis has the intention of
overcoming the metaphysico-epistemological perspective of philosophical
questioning, the explicit examination of the concept of truth is not one
more analysis in addition to the many others, as a cursory reading might
suggest; it is rather the case that the entire existential analysis, as the inter-
pretation of being-in-the-world as disclosure, of Dasein as Erschlossenheit,
is only to be understood properly as an analysis of the phenomenon of
truth. The moment of Heidegger’s overcoming of metaphysics is accom-
plished precisely as his reformulation of the concept of truth, beyond its
traditional representation and in re-appropriation of its original Greek
root. The question of truth is therefore inseparable from the question of
being. And thus the acceptance of Heidegger’s entire philosophical enter-
prise depends upon an agreement with his thematization of truth. Indeed,
if one refuses to accept Heidegger’s critique of the traditional schema of
truth, and his demonstration of its derivation, then one has contested not
merely the philosophical primacy of the question of being, but also its very
possibility – the possibility of retrieving the meaning of being from its
concealment beneath the metaphysical conceptual edifice.
Tugendhat’s critique is articulated primarily in §15, on which we shall
focus here, and begins with the clear programmatic claim that Heidegger is
justified in taking as the starting point of his analysis the most familiar
208
TUGENDHAT ON HEIDEGGER’S CONCEPT OF TRUTH
This second formulation leaves out the phrase ‘so, wie es an ihm selbst
ist’. Nevetheless, it is allowed by Tugendhat to count as equivalent to the
first formulation insofar as the ‘so, wie’ is included or incorporated in
‘selbst’. Whilst this may be acceptable, it is nevertheless the case that by
leaving aside in this second formulation the aspect, the ‘so–wie’, Heidegger
emphasizes the fundamental thought that the proposition is not to be
conceived as uncovering its object in terms of a representation of it in the
‘how’ of its being. Whilst Heidegger has already made himself explicit on
this point, it remains ambiguous in the extrapolation that Tugendhat
presents above. The purpose of this second formulation is once more to
bring this point to the centre.8 It is, however, the third formulation, accord-
ing to Tugendhat, which takes the decisive step.
rather in terms of the claim that the derivative manoeuvre, which Heidegger
apparently presumes to perform, the bridge across which Heidegger slips
between the two formulations above, the grounding of the specific uncov-
eredness of propositional truth in the original truth of disclosure as such, is
unjustified, at least in the terms of the text. But should there be a movement
of derivation here? Does Heidegger slip between the two? If disclosure as
such is understood, not as a state of affairs, or as a fact of the matter, or as
of the mode of being of Vorhandenheit, but rather as a happening, or as a
process, as the ontological event of emergence from concealment into
unconcealment, then these two ostensibly different characterizations of
truth – considered purely with regard to this determination – are not in fact
distinguishable. And Heidegger insists that it should be so understood inso-
far as he equates the ecstatic being of Dasein with it: ‘Erschlossenheit aber
ist die Grundart des Daseins, gemäß der es sein Da ist.’12 Rather than having
two different concepts here, we have two different employments or exten-
sions of the same concept, distinguished by their target domain – one ontic,
one ontological. Both extensions refer to the simple happening of emer-
gence from concealment to unconcealment.
Is not Heidegger then to be charged at least with inconsistency, or even
contradiction, since the talk of a grounding function is incompatible with
holding the revelatory function to be singular? The distinction here is
between the ontological and the ontic. The grounding function concerns
understanding. Ontic understanding, according to Heidegger, is grounded
in ontological understanding. The determination of the horizon of world is
Dasein’s unthematic understanding of being, which is so long as Dasein is.
Upon this horizon, inner-worldly beings are first disclosed in their particu-
larity. The ontic understanding of inner-worldly beings is thus grounded in
the ontologically prior understanding of being. Nevertheless, the revelatory
function as such, which accords with these forms of understanding, is the
same. The grounding concerns ‘levels’ of understanding, but the form of
disclosure proper to each is the same – the process of unconcealment.
Tugendhat’s mistake is to conceive uncovering, not as a process, but as a
factum, a stasis, according to the traditional categories of constant presence.
He then finds it necessary, in order to make sense of §44, to distinguish two,
as it were, ‘levels’ of manifestation of this stasis, one as propositional truth,
one as disclosure as such, and consequently finds no legitimation given in
the text for moving from one to the other whilst using the same name for
both. Once uncovering is conceived, as Heidegger conceives it, as ecstatic,
as a process or happening, there is no longer any ground on which they
might be separated: both are the fundamental ontological happening of
unconcealment ecstatically constitutive of the being of Dasein. Whilst one
may distinguish two different domains of application, the event of uncover-
ing is the same in both. Heidegger would not be slipping between two mean-
ings attributed to the word Entdecken, but between two applications of the
212
TUGENDHAT ON HEIDEGGER’S CONCEPT OF TRUTH
That the false proposition is also an uncovering, and that the event of
uncovering is primordial truth, implies that truth incorporates falsehood
within itself, that the false is part, an element, a mode perhaps, at least a
determination, of the true, rather than standing in stark opposition to it.
This is the thought which decisively distinguishes Heidegger’s concept of
truth from that of the tradition, and accomplishes the phenomenological
step that Tugendhat is no longer prepared to follow. That this is so is given
testimony by the incredulity with which Tugendhat writes, for example:
One may object that this categorical homology of truth and authenticity,
untruth and inauthenticity, is contrived and too formal, and cannot possibly
do justice to the multifarious phenomena of daily life. Surely, one thinks,
despite the dissimulation of beings in the world, inauthentic Dasein is capa-
ble at least of uttering true propositions. Heidegger’s illustration in §44 does
not necessarily thematize an authentic Dasein’s utterance. Similarly, is it not
plausible to imagine that authentic Dasein is capable of making mistakes of
one kind or another, and therefore of erring? Even resolute authentic
Dasein does not have complete control over its corporeality and is subject
to the basic finitude of existence. Indeed, typically perhaps the person
whom we should like to call authentic is quite hopeless at making her way
in the world – she falls down wells, fails in the economic system, is socially
inept, etc., whilst the inauthentic person, she who is continually adapting
herself to the exigencies of circumstance, to her society and company, who
is always willing to deceive, to be disingenuous and dishonest, is precisely
the one who ‘succeeds’.20
Such criticisms ought not to be simply dismissed as irrelevant to the
fundamental ontological enterprise. This enterprise must remain faithful to
the phenomenology. Nevertheless, it is important to remember that Dasein
is a structure, the structural possibility of disclosure – temporality – and that
the various analyses of SZ are structural analyses or analyses of structural
possibilities of the being of Dasein.21 Conceived as the structural, and that
means formal, possibility of untruth, Verfallen may not appear wholly
congruous with the apparent facts whilst retaining fundamental ontological
explanatory value. Of course inauthentic Dasein is capable of uttering true
propositions. As we have already noted, inauthenticity and authenticity are
not at all factically mutually exclusive. They are structural possibilities –
abstractions, even – within a dynamic whole, and at the same time, authen-
ticity is only a modification, itself a mode of inauthenticity. Dasein is always
inauthentic. Untruth in its various forms thus remains a permanent possibil-
ity of its being, just as truth never fully emerges into the clearing within the
darkness of concealment.
The analysis of Verfallen attempted to show that inauthentic Dasein is cut
off from an original and thus genuine relation to beings insofar as, in accor-
dance with its structural constitution, it conceals its own being and thus exis-
tential possibility as such. But only a genuine relation to beings grounded in
a revelatory relation to being as such, authenticity as resoluteness,22 could
guarantee the truth of one’s utterances, the correctness of one’s decisions,
the proper use of one’s time, remembering, etc., in general: the avoidance
of error. Nevertheless, it can be pointed out that this does not preclude inau-
thentic Dasein from, as it were, uttering true propositions fortuitously. This
would not conflict with the analysis, since there we have to do with a formal
grounding of the possibility of truth, for which truth cannot remain merely
something fortuitous. Indeed, if there is to be an existential analysis at all, if
219
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES
Notes
1 2nd ed (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1970).
2 Beiträge zur Philosophie, Gesamtausgabe Bd 65, 2nd edn (Frankfurt am Main:
Vittorio Klostermann, 1994), p. 345: ‘The question concerning truth … is for us
the prior question, which we must go through first.’ All English translations in this
paper are my own, except where otherwise indicated.
3 WHH, p. 331: ‘That a concept of truth accords with propositional truth is the
minimum condition it must fulfil in order to count as a concept of truth at all.’
220
TUGENDHAT ON HEIDEGGER’S CONCEPT OF TRUTH
4 For the Husserl of the Logische Untersuchungen truth is ‘the ideal adequation of
a relational act to the corresponding adequate percept of a state of affairs’ (trans.
J. N. Findlay), or in general the absolute adequation that obtains in the unity of
coincidence between the epistemic essences of an intention and a fully given
state of affairs or object. See Vol. II, §39.
5 ‘The being intended itself shows itself as it is in itself, that is, that it is in sameness
just as it is indicated to be in the proposition.’
6 WHH, p. 332: ‘The proposition is true if it indicates, uncovers, the being as it is
in itself.’
7 SZ, p. 218: ‘The proposition is true means: it uncovers the being in itself.’
8 There are two German words that can be translated with the English ‘as’: als
and wie. Prior to §44, Heidegger has given his well-known analysis of what he
calls the Als-Struktur, which is found in the context of discussions of interpreta-
tion and the proposition. Whilst Heidegger does not incorporate this figure
once more into the explicit argument of §44, nevertheless it is clearly of rele-
vance to the determination of propositional truth in terms of a wie. Heidegger
distinguishes two nomenclatorial meanings of Als: the existential-hermeneutic,
which is primordial and concerns the projection of interpretation onto the
determining horizon of world; and the apophantic, derivative of the latter,
which concerns the determination of the propositioned being in the mode of
being of Vorhandenheit. The discussion of propositional truth in §44 obviously
has in the first place to do with the latter. The determination of something as
something requires primordially, for Heidegger, the structure of projective
understanding. The explicitation of understanding through speech is clearly
structurally homologous. Language is to be conceived existentially. The as that
accords with any uttered proposition is thus relative to the given understanding
or interpretative projection as part of which the proposition is uttered. This
means that the determination of any proposition is relative to an existential
scheme, which in turn precludes propositional truth from being thematized in
terms of universal validity, a notion decisive for both the Husserlian and the
neo-Kantian theorizations of truth. Although this is not the primary focus of
Tugendhat’s critique, it is nevertheless of relevance to it. The as-structure can
be seen to deprive all determination of any intrinsic character: there is no deter-
mination, no meaning in-itself, that is, outside all existential reference.
Tugendhat’s insistence on the concept of truth maintaining reference to an ‘as it
is in-itself’ can, consequently, be understood as an attempt to retain the essen-
tial connection between truth and universal validity.
9 SZ, p. 218: ‘The being-true (truth) of the proposition must be understood as
being-uncovering.’
10 WHH, p. 335: ‘It is, however, precisely this distinction [between an immediate
and, as it were, ostensible givenness … and the thing itself] in terms of which the
word “truth” first receives a meaning at all.’
11 SZ, p. 220: ‘The uncoveredness of inner-worldly beings is grounded in the disclo-
sure of world.’
12 SZ, p. 220: ‘Disclosure is, however, the basic character of Dasein, in virtue of
which it is its “there”.’
13 SZ, p. 222: ‘Through chatter, curiosity and ambiguity, that which is uncovered
and disclosed stands in the mode of dissimulation and closure. Being towards
beings is not extinguished but is uprooted. Beings are not fully concealed, rather
they are precisely uncovered, but they are at the same time dissimulated, they
show themselves – but in the mode of apparentness. At the same time, that which
was previously uncovered sinks back again into dissimulation and concealment.’
221
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES
14 WHH, p. 336: ‘What could have induced Heidegger to use the word “truth” in
this case? Perhaps that disclosure “grounds” truth? And that even justifies its
being understood as “original truth”? But then with the same justification one
could also refer to it as original falsehood.’
15 It can be no argument against this thesis that the objects of false propositions
often are not, since that can also be true of true propositions: ‘The holy Roman
Empire no longer exists’, for example. The logical problems of non-referring
terms are well known, and I should only add that insofar as Heidegger’s most
basic philosophical categories are presence and absence (Anwesenheit and
Abwesenheit), he himself outlines a new logic of absence, of non-being, of the
nothing.
16 Although at this point, it might be considered fair to pause in order to contextu-
alize, to some extent at least, the motivation and precedent behind the critique
issued here by Tugendhat. Earlier work of his (in particular his doctoral disser-
tation, Ti Kata Tinos (Freiburg im Breisgau: K. Alber, 1958)) had taken issue
with Heidegger’s interpretations of Greek philosophy, specifically of Plato and
Aristotle and their particular doctrines of being and truth. As is well known,
Heidegger considers the origin of the metaphysical understanding of being –
being as presence, Anwesenheit – to lie at the very beginning of philosophy, with
the pre-Socratics. He points out that the Greek word that we translate with
‘truth’, aletheia, meant, literally conceived, un-concealment, and not simply
correctness. It is not difficult to imagine that the determination of being as pres-
ence – for the Greeks, phusis – and the determination of truth as unconcealment
are conceptually implicatory – being is, after all, ‘that’ which is true. The change
in the conception of truth, from aletheia, or unconcealment, to correctness – that
is, to the metaphysical conception – which goes hand in hand with a change in the
way being is understood, took place, according to a relatively early essay of
Heidegger’s, in Plato’s philosophy. Heidegger later came, at least in a certain
sense, to retract this consideration of a change in what he termed the essence of
truth, but at the time Tugendhat was writing his dissertation the claim was gener-
ally held to be a key thesis of Heidegger’s philosophy of the history of being.
Tugendhat, however, gives both the pre-Platonic concept of truth and the
Platonic concept of truth a different determination and thereby contests Heideg-
ger’s thesis concerning an essential change. For Tugendhat, aletheia, before
Plato, meant unconcealment, but unconcealment that excludes from itself all
concealment, that has left all concealment behind itself; simple revealedness
(schlechthinniges Enthülltsein (p. 9)); it did not mean, as per Heidegger’s early
contention, an un-concealment that includes or incorporates the moment of
concealment, that carries with it, precisely in and through its unconcealment, an
oblivion. On the other hand, Plato’s doctrine of forms, in which being as such is
newly cast as presence before or for apprehension or perception, does not
initiate a change in this conception of aletheia, but rather simply amounts to a
precise determination of it. Being as presence for perception again implicates
truth as simple unconcealment – and subsequently as the correctness of the
perception. It is not that the moment of concealment was driven out of the
concept of truth by Plato’s doctrine of forms, and thus it is not, as for Heidegger,
that truth’s determination was essentially modified.
Our task in this paper is restricted to Tugendhat’s critique of Heidegger’s own
concept of truth, and therefore differences in the reception of Greek philosophy
are not immediately relevant to our discussion. Nevertheless, it is significant to
note that here the charge against Heidegger takes a similar form: Tugendhat
wants to drive a radical wedge between truth and falsity, and cannot accept that
222
TUGENDHAT ON HEIDEGGER’S CONCEPT OF TRUTH
truth and untruth are inseparable. His most basic diagnosis of Heidegger’s
deception also occurs in his dissertation. The characterization of the metaphysi-
cal understanding of being as presence (Anwesenheit) contains a vital ambiguity.
On the one hand, it is true that presence corresponds to that which all metaphys-
ical theory understood as being in its authentic sense – the intelligibility of the
intelligible; in fact, that which is super-sensuous. On the other hand, it also corre-
sponds to that which metaphysical theory considered to be precisely not being in
its authentic sense, namely, appearance, the phenomenal, mere seeming. For
Heidegger, the characterization of being as presence has the virtue of capturing
both of these determinations; for Tugendhat, in contrast, it is precisely this ambi-
guity, or the forgetting of this distinction, which distorts Heidegger’s conception
of truth. But here it again becomes clear to what extent Tugendhat remains
within a metaphysical conceptuality.
17 Wegmarken, 3rd edn (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1996), p. 197:
‘All comportment has its own manner of erring, according to its openness and its
relation to beings as a whole. Error extends from the most ordinary wasting of
time, making mistakes, miscalculating, to going astray and venturing too far in
essential attitudes and decisions.’
18 WHH, p. 326: ‘“Verfallen” should not, however, be a particular concrete
tendency of Dasein, but rather stands simply for the formal structure of the
tendency for covering up as such.’
19 WHH, p. 314: ‘This tendency for covering up is to be sharply distinguished from
the possibility of self-closure.’
20 Of course, in general, failure is only to be determined within the configuration of
an existential projection. The phenomenon of regret is particularly illustrative. It
is only possible to regret something that is incongruous with some current
project. Insofar as authenticity and inauthenticity determine essentially different
projective horizons of possibility, their respective understandings of regret or
failure will be incommensurable.
21 Thus, it must, it seems, always be re-emphasized that Dasein is not simply a
synonym for ‘human’. Dasein is best perhaps understood as the structure which
determines the essence of the human to be disclosure of being. Or simply: Dasein
is the structural possibility of disclosure.
22 From Latin resolutus, past participle of resolvere, to unbind, loosen, open. The
etymology of Entschlossenheit, meaning originally Aufschließen, to unlock, is
essentially the same.
223