Gimme some Truth

What is truth? We have so many in our culture who seem to know it in its totality and will hand it to us (if not jam it down our throats) if we will only grasp for it. It seems only fair that they are usually well compensated for doing so. With so much “truth” being peddled out there, it must be some lack in ourselves if we do not feel we have it in our possession. A moral failing perhaps?

What is often confusing is that these claims are often at odds (to put it politely.) We are expected to choose the “right” one and there we will find repose. Of course, that repose is disturbed if our neighbor chooses the “wrong” one. If he is Guelph instead of Ghibelline; Red instead of Blue. Then that neighbor is a very deluded and dangerous person; he is probably unpatriotic to boot.

How different could things be if we just admitted that none of us finite and mortal creatures could ever have possession of the totality of truth which so many now claim in word and deed? What if we gave up the project of totality? What if we could “think” in a different way? Would this lead us out of our cultural impasse?

I don’t claim to be any more than a novice in the study of Heidegger and I have struggled with him for the last year. I am currently on my third copy of “Being and Time” as the first two were thrown in the fire. Thankfully, the summer months approach. But through the study encouraged by our group I do believe that Heidegger was offering a solution; an exit from the age. At least an exit in thought.

Heidegger claimed that truth is not a correspondence (proposition to object guaranteed by the mind of God or some such transcendent source) by rather an “event.” This event occurs in the movement between my solicitation of an entity and what the entity reveals. The space between my solicitation and the entity is the “open region.” It is in this “open region” that truth might be glimpsed.

Heidegger says that we must make an insistence (solicitation) for the entity to reveal itself. We do not impose meaning on the entity; we draw it out through the solicitation. Bucking virtually the whole Western Tradition, Heidegger is asserting that the entity has an agency. It is an active participant in “the event of truth.” Truth needs both the solicitation of Dasein and the revealing of the entity. In “The Letter on Humanism” Heidegger will make us the “lieutenants of Being”; receivers of what Being discloses to us. In “The Essence of Truth” Heidegger goes back to the Pre-Socratics, he insists that every revealing is also a concealing. We can never get the entity in its totality. Something always withdrawals. This is the notion of “aletheia.” This is not to deny that we get some truth; the entity does reveal itself in some way. I don’t think Heidegger can be counted as one who denies truth. What he does deny is our ability to get the totality of the truth. So aletheia gives us both truth and error. It gives it truth in so far as the entity reveals itself and error in what withdrew in the face of our insistence. Truth and error make up “the event of truth.” This is unavoidable; no insistence can get the totality of the entity. Error is as constitutive as truth is in “the event of truth.”

The problem is that we embrace what is revealed in our insistences and forget aletheia. We forget that error is an essential component of our “truth.” Instead of “letting beings be” so they can reveal themselves in manifold ways, we crush them through the weight of dogmatic insistence. The problem is the forgetting: the forgetting that has run through the course of the Western Philosophical tradition since Plato. We fall in love with our insistences and forget that something withdraws. We forget aletheia. According to the “Essence of Truth” we must insist. But we do not have to forget that something withdraws from that insistence. We need to remember that we have the freedom to make other solicitations that will lead to a different revealing (and concealing.) This road leads to Heidegger's engagement with the poets.

What if we learn to “think” differently? To think and remember aletheia? We would not have to deny truth or make it relative. We would have to accept the humility of realizing that we cannot ever expect to come in full possession of truth and maybe we could learn to thrive in the freedom that new solicitations could offer. We would understand that all of our insistences are only partial and that unavoidably there will be error. How would this change cultural and political discourse?

It is fair to ask exactly what is this “open region” where the insistence and entity meet in the event of truth? To learn to think differently Heidegger tells us not to think of it as "what" or an "entity" at all. Heidegger calls it “the mystery.” Could we learn to treat this “mystery” with reverence and gratitude as perhaps the antidote to a dispirited and fractured age? Heidegger gives us these intriguing alternatives.

The Broken Circle

I have had an interesting experience the last couple of months. I abandoned my own discussion group. I suppose any attempt to compare such an action to real life begs bemused contempt. A boy running away from home; a husband from his wife; a captain jumping his sinking ship. Leaving a virtual reality is extraordinarily easy by comparison - virtual feelings and virtual loyalties run shallow, a truism Dreyfus, as usual, sniffed out early and loudly outed (see his book On the Internet).

So now I'll do the obvious Tysonian thing and discuss, in public, on my discussion's blog, what it feels like to reject my discussion's "on the basis of which" and like so many others, just break the wrist, and walk away.

First, the technical points to review. The Whooshup discussion was meant to draw in a crowd of Dreyfus' podcast lecture devotees as a sort of adjunct classroom. In Fall 2007, I sent polite email invitations to hundreds of contactees and got polite responses from many dozens, some enthusiastic. We held an inaugural meeting in Second Life, which drew a dozen or more curious participants, who got to converse, after a fashion, with Bert Dreyfus in the budding metaverse, the "basis of which" he has so presciently criticized most of his life. Our group, following a stumbling statistical tail curve, soon diminished to five, then four, then three. The three of us got to know each other too well, until we could describe each other's philosophical undergarments, and then I dropped out myself. I'm not sure if the other two virtual souls I left behind still virtually meet at the Garden Spot at EdTech to talk about Martin Heidegger (arguably the greatest philosopher of the last century), Bert Dreyfus (arguably Heidegger's strongest living proponent), and the constellation of worthies that surrounds them. Well, do you?

So that's the scenario. But why did I leave? Well, the easy answer is that I just got too busy. Things came up. Absorbing things, that turned out to be more compelling than virtual discussion groups. But that is only one aspect of the answer. Another aspect of the explanation, brighter but even more contrived, is that I left in order to find out why everybody else left. What did it feel like to the other critical members, who could have kept something afloat if they had really tried to, after they just stopped showing up every weekend? Because now I could feel that way. A little remorse, a twinge of regret at not getting in to a good philosophy discussion every week, perhaps even guilt (virtual guilt?). Now I can feel it too.

But there's a darker aspect too, and I'll dive right into it. Religion and politics, they say, are two things strangers cannot discuss safely. Philosophy is a sinewy matrix that encompasses and entwines religion and politics. One thinks to escape them in pure speculation but gets tripped up nevertheless, and I believe our discussion group mirrors, in our palpably bumbling and amateur way, the wider picture in contemporary philosophy, even in its academic stratosphere. Dreyfus, like Heidegger, is tangibly conservative. Rorty, like Derrida, is bona fide liberal. These labels are almost meaningless in terms of pure thought, but can we ever really escape them?

So if you want to follow my justification for leaving farther than it may justifiably go, and franker than it ever needed to get, here it is: Those Dreyfus fans who got as far as the "real" but "virtual" discussion group ended up peeling away by ideological idiosyncrasies. The buddhist Deleuzian left first. Then the Rortian liberal secularist. The existential christian Heideggerian (me) left (experimentally?) the ground occupied by the neo-pagan Heideggerian. The best of us, just a good man looking for a good world view, stayed to the end.

But is this the end? If we all faced our own deep religious and political insecurities, picked them up and laid them on the table along with all the "safe" but equally bizarre and ultimately ridiculous concepts such as Heideggerian authenticity, Neitszchean free will, Kierkegaardian commitment, could we still come together for continued discussions? Could we put humpty dumpty together again? I'm open to it.

I am grasping for a meta-narrative of this entire whooshup episode, acting inside and outside of it, myself as object and subject simultaneously. Some may find it embarrassing or distasteful, but it is clearly the only thing to be done beyond brushing our hands and walking away. It is a form of group analysis. A learning experience inside a failed learning experience: What is the "basis upon which" a freely organized high-level philosophy discussion group remains susceptible to such an apparently weak contingency as cultural alignment, and is it possible for the group disbanded by such contingencies to seek its explanation? Or better: Can the patient who has died on the operating table evaluate the cause of the mishap? Or better still: Can the society, the civilization, that tears itself apart in violent strife over political (who gets what) and religious (who believes right) issues, successfully analyze the "basis upon which" that urge to fight, or any other social tendency can be caught, diverted, subsumed, survived?