Being, Truth, and Presence in Heidegger's Thought

Inquiry, 41, 45±64

Being, Truth, and Presence in Heidegger’ s Thought Frederick A. Olafson University of California, San Diego

Although the status of the concept of being in Heidegger’ s thought is still the subject of controversy, textually it is quite clear that he held the fundamental character of being to be presence. Accordingly, this paper is not concerned to show that this was indeed Heidegger’ s conception of being. Instead, it undertakes to make a philosophical case for the prima facie paradoxical thesis that being is presence. It does so by first taking up Heidegger’ s account of truth in which it is identified with the mode of being of Dasein and thus with the `uncoveredness’ (Entdecktheit ) of entities that Dasein effects. This leads to a review of traditional conceptions of being. I argue that being is not just the character that makes an entity the kind of entity it is; it is that entity’ s be-ing whatever it is. As such, it has the structure of a state of affairs and it is a state of affairs that makes statements or thoughts about it true or false as the case may be. But a state of affairs is not a part or a property of the entity it is about. As what makes a true statement true, I argue, it belongs to the context of truth and thereby of presence. In a final section, the relevance of these matters to contemporary philosophical discussion is taken up.

I At the beginning of Being and Time (BT) Heidegger states that the goal of his inquiry is the concept of being as such. A little later, he also makes it clear that being is always the being of entities Ð das Sein des Seienden Ð and that it is to be understood in the broadest possible sense. It includes both the `What’ and the `That’ of entities, their being such-and-such and their being uÈberhaupt Ð what is usually called their existence. Because BT was never completed, the concept of being as such toward which Heidegger was working does not emerge in that work as we have it. This has led many students of Heidegger’ s thought to conclude that his project must have ended in failure and that it had been misconceived in some way which led Heidegger himself to abandon it. This, in turn, would suggest that he had concluded that the concept of being as such could not be reached by the route he had chosen Ð a route that led through an analysis of human being (Dasein) as the entity that already has at least some familiarity with being as such. This verdict has seemed to be confirmed by the way Heidegger subsequently turned away from Dasein and developed, in his later works, an account of

46

Frederick A. Olafson

being as such in which human being did not appear to figure at all prominently. The publication of Heidegger’ s lectures from this period has cast new light on all these matters. In my view, they show conclusively that the view of BT as an abandoned torso is mistaken. Most relevantly, the lectures from the Summer Semester of 1927 Ð the year BT was published Ð give the gist of what Heidegger evidently intended to say about `Time and Being’ in Division Three of Part I of BT.1 He sketches there the thesis that being as such is to be understood as presence Ð in German, Anwesenheit or PraÈsenz. This is also Heidegger’ s rendering of the Greek word, ousia, which is usually translated simply as `being’ . Unfortunately, this use of the word Anwesenheit has caused great confusion because in BT Heidegger criticized a conception of being as Anwesenheit that he also attributed to the Greeks. It seemed impossible that he should espouse the very concept of being that he had so plainly rejected; and so the passages in which he appeared to do so have often been interpreted as discussions of that same erroneous concept and as in no way committing Heidegger to it.2 There is an explanation by Heidegger himself of this apparent anomaly. In his lecture he tells us that he was trying, as he puts it, to `radicalize’ the Greek conception of being (ousia) as Anwesenheit/presence. 3 Although the Greeks were on the right track, he argues, they failed to make a place for time in the way they understood being as presence. Accordingly, Heidegger’ s theme was to be being and time; and the `radicalizing’ of which he speaks was accomplished by the introduction of time in the form of temporality in Division 2 of Part I of BT. A transition was thereby mediated from the analysis of Dasein to an account of being as such in Division 3. It is thus an enriched temporal concept of Anwesenheit/presence that Heidegger proposes as the concept of being. In this same connection, it should be noted that there is no conflict between this account of Heidegger’ s concept of being and the incomplete state of BT. Not only was Heidegger convinced that no one had correctly understood what he was trying to do in BT; he also made it clear that he was not satisfied with some of the characteristic formulations in that work.4 This does not mean that the work as a whole had been misconceived or that the identification of being with presence was up for revision. Instead, it was the relation in which being (Sein) stands to human being (Dasein) that was in question. In BT, the concept of Dasein had been pushed so far into the foreground that it seemed as though any concept of being as presence that was reached by this route would unavoidably make being derivative from Dasein. It may even be that at one time Heidegger was almost ready to accept that conclusion. 5 But since Dasein for all its distinctiveness as a kind of entity remained an entity Ð ein Seiendes Ð this could not be finally acceptable to him. He insisted strongly on the distinction between being and

Being, Truth, and Presence

47

entities and viewed the confusion of the one with the other as the primordial error of the Western philosophical tradition. Instead of making ek-sistence, the mode of being of Dasein, the ground of presence as he had at least appeared to do in BT, he made presence the ground of ek-sistence. What he did not do was simply to jettison Dasein as has sometimes been supposed. 6 My purpose in this paper is not to go over this ground again; I will simply take it as given that Heidegger did work out a concept of being as such and that it was a concept of presence. There are, however, two points that need to be made here before proceeding to the real business of this paper: a critical discussion of the independent philosophical merits of this association of being with presence. One of these has to do with the question of whether the Greeks really had a concept of being as presence as Heidegger claims they did. This claim had an important place in the way Heidegger’ s own conception of being as presence was introduced. Unfortunately, the effect of this appeal to the Greeks was to short-circuit the supporting argument he would otherwise have had to give for his construal of being by making it appear that he was simply reinstating the original concept of being that later became distorted out of all recognition. As a result, the problematic aspects of that identification never received the kind of critical scrutiny that was required if it was to be validated. The point I want to make about this is that it is really immaterial whether the Greeks did or did not have such a concept. Heidegger himself concedes that there was no actual use among the Greeks of `ousia’ , all by itself, to signify presence; and so his case has to rest mainly on the fact that ousia turns up in two Greek words Ð parousia and apousia Ð that do mean `presence’ and `absence’ .7 Heidegger’ s claim is that ousia, understood as presence, is the common element in these two concepts. For this to make sense it has to be understood that Heidegger construes absence as a modality of presence. When we look for someone somewhere and it turns out that, like Sartre’ s famous Pierre, he is not there, that person, it might be said, is present in absence. This would make ousia/presence the superordinate concept for both presence as it is ordinarily understood and absence as this paradoxical kind of negative presence. 8 Plainly, though, any such concept would be a pretty out-of-the-way notion and its occurrence in a language correspondingly hard to establish. It might just be simpler to suggest that it is the prepositions Ð para (beside) and apo (from) Ð and not ousia itself that do the relevant work in these words. The second point that needs to be made here concerns an inference that might be drawn Ð erroneously Ð from Heidegger’ s close association of being as such with presence. Because presence is a relational concept Ð it is always presence to someone Ð Heidegger’ s thesis could be interpreted as entailing that whatever is or, in ordinary parlance, exists will have to be present to someone. Heidegger himself might be thought to be endorsing this strange

48

Frederick A. Olafson

conclusion when he ties being, in the sense he is postulating, to the existence of the kind of entity to which something can be present, i.e. an entity of the Dasein type: no Dasein, no being. 9 In fact, any such inference would completely distort Heidegger’ s line of thought. It assumes that `being’ denotes entities Ð the ones we usually think of as making up the totality we call `the world’ . But he repeatedly insists that although being is always the being of entities, entities (Seiendes) are independent of the being or presence that accrues to them. It follows that nothing he says about the tie-in between being and Dasein applies to them. Evidently, then, the being of entities has to be thought of as somehow supervening upon them and entities themselves as detachable from their being. The identification of being with presence does not, therefore, mean that nothing can exist unless an entity to which it can be present does. It means simply that these would be entities without being. Admittedly, this conclusion is more likely to mystify than to satisfy, especially since it can be stated only by a use of the concept of being that it rules out. These questions, however, can best be dealt with at a later point when the whole relationship of being and presence has been more carefully examined.

II In my judgment, the best approach to that topic is through Heidegger’ s concept of truth which is, in any case, very closely linked with that of being. Perhaps the best-known aspect of his account of truth is his critique of the correspondence theory of truth. This critique has sometimes been interpreted as expressing a lack of interest, on his part, in truth as getting things right. Although that criticism is unjust, it is true that Heidegger’ s interest in truth was primarily ontological in character rather than epistemological. He was concerned to show that truth has a mode of being that is passed over and effectively obscured by correspondence theories. What such theories do is postulate a kind of match between a state of the world, on the one hand, and a thought or a statement, on the other. Heidegger argues that not only is the nature of this match itself thoroughly obscure, the terms between which it is supposed to hold are conceived in an ontologically inappropriate manner. Both are treated as entities, the one typically physical and the other mental, but both are thing-like in nature. This is because they are treated as items that simply turn up (and that we come upon, as it were) in the one domain and the other. They are thus, in Heidegger’ s terminology, vorhanden (present-athand). In this way, the availability of these terms themselves to anyone who might try to make a comparison, and thus establish a match, between the one and the other is simply being assumed. Heidegger interprets this availability as the `uncoveredness’ (Entdecktheit) of the terms in question and he holds

Being, Truth, and Presence

49

that uncoveredness to be essential to the truth relation. What this comes down to is the fact that something `shows itself’ and, by doing so, is there for or present to someone Ð that is, to an entity that is such that it can uncover something or have something present to it. When this uncoveredness is passed over, truth is reduced to a relation between entities that are conceived as logically and ontologically distinct from one another, and self-contained in a way that makes it altogether obscure how the one Ð the thought or statement Ð could be in any way an uncovering of the other. Although Heidegger did not use the term `presence’ in the radicalized temporal sense in BT, it is clear that the uncoveredness of which he speaks there is a synonym for presence. 10 It is a remarkable fact that in spite of all the attention that philosophers have given, in recent decades, to the reference of words to things, there has been no acknowledgement of the fact that this same uncoveredness/presence of things is a necessary condition for such reference. When words are conceived as word-things, and when things, generally, are conceived in a way that acknowledges no distinction between their status as simply actual and as present, reference becomes a transaction of some kind between what are in effect two objects. The trouble is that, among the relations in which objects in the world stand to one another, there simply are no plausible candidates for designation as such a relation; nothing that such entities do or are can establish that one is the reference of another. The result has been that words and things take on the status of parallel and independent sets of objects in a condition of what Heidegger calls `side-byside-ness’ (Nebeneinandersein ). In the absence of any account of the relation that is supposed to constitute reference, we can only rely on the prior (and tacit) understanding we all have of the modality of presence (in absence) by which words mediate the presence of things. The fact that this understanding is independent of, and in all likelihood irreconcilable with, any conception of words as word-things is kept discreetly in the background. 11 Heidegger sums up his discussion of truth by saying that `we are in the truth’ . By that he means, not that we are always right, but that since being-inthe-world is our distinctive mode of being, we live in the presence of things in the world which show themselves to us as what they are. This may seem a very paradoxical claim, since things so often show themselves to us as what they are not, as, for example, in perceptual illusions of various kinds. Arguably, however, an illusion in which, say, a round penny looks elliptical does show us something about the penny Ð namely, the way it looks when viewed from a certain angle. If we do not know that this elliptical look is one in a series of aspects the penny can present to us, we may indeed think that it cannot be a way in which a round penny is present. If we do understand that fact, however, the supposed difficulty disappears and, with it, the obstacle to a `realistic’ way of conceiving presence.

50

Frederick A. Olafson

There is another aspect of Heidegger’ s account of truth that must be noticed here. This is his thesis that there are no eternal truths. Many find this idea alarming because they regard the absolute stability of truth as the only real defense against relativistic views of various kinds. But Heidegger’ s claim is not that truth cannot be eternal because it is inherently changeable as Rorty, for example, takes it to be. It is rather that truth presupposes the existence of Dasein as the kind of entity to which things can be present, and there can be no guarantee that there must always be a Dasein. Thus, in discussing Newton’ s Laws of Motion, Heidegger says that they were not `true’ before Newton discovered them.12 They were not, of course, false either; they simply lacked a truth-value. It is important to understand what Heidegger is not saying about truth. He is not saying, for example, that the entities in question began behaving in accordance with these laws only when Newton `discovered’ them. But in that case it is hard to see why Newton (or we) should not say that these laws were true before he discovered them. By parity of reasoning, it would also surely follow that bodies will not stop behaving in these Newtonian ways when the last physicist (or human being) bites the dust. What inhibitions can there be, then, against our holding the laws of motion to be true for an indefinitely extensive tract of future time? It is conceivable, of course, that Newton’ s laws are not immutable and that matter will one day `obey’ other laws. But, in that case, would it not still be true that up to that point the movements of bodies had conformed to Newton’ s laws? In none of these eventualities does the fact that the human race might be wiped out appear to have any bearing on how bodies can be expected to move before or beyond that point. Such pre- and retrodictions as these are, of course, made by people who are alive now and project certain patterns of regularity forward and backward in time. The real issue here is what the thesis that truth is not eternal really amounts to when our ability to transcend our own lives in these ways is borne in mind. Does Heidegger’ s thesis entail that something could cease to be true, not because any change had occurred in the world but simply because of the disappearance of the kind of entity to which this something could be present? If it does, then anyone who affirms this will have to project a decidedly peculiar event Ð something’ s ceasing to be true although what it is about has not changed Ð into a future in which there will be no one like us around. What I am suggesting is that if truth can transcend our lives in the ways I have just described, the claim that ties truth to Dasein loses most of its apparently alarming implications. There could, no doubt, be a state of the world in which there are no entities to which anything could be present; and in such a world there would indeed be no truth. But once at least one Dasein exists and the possibility that there might be no Dasein becomes something that it envisages, perhaps after reading Heidegger, the world that is thus

Being, Truth, and Presence

51

imagined will be one characterized by the same presence in absence with which we are familiar within our own lives. We can certainly imagine that no one in that world `uncovers’ anything in it; but since we are doing so in a predictive-hypothetical mode, the idea that there would be no truth about such a world is very hard to make sense of. Surely, one such truth would be that there would be no human beings Ð no Dasein Ð in such a world. What is significant in Heidegger’ s account of truth is not, in my view, this thesis about a possible demise of truth, but rather the linkage he makes between truth and presence. What he is saying is in effect that between the words in which we say something about the world and the things we are saying this about there must be a tertium quid. The things we talk about must not just exist; they must be accessible as well to whoever says something true about them. They must, in other words, be phainomena; they must show themselves and in showing themselves become present to those who in perception or discourse uncover them. Traditionally, this requirement was taken care of by having representations of such things in the world show themselves to consciousness Ð that is, in the mind. The trouble with that was that a mind that is so conceived typically winds up as what Heidegger calls a `worldless subject’ , with the result that things in the world never show themselves at all. Heidegger’ s thought breaks in a quite radical way with that whole mentalistic tradition and the account he gives of truth reflects a shift from a purely intra-mental presence to one that can only be called `intramundane’ .

III In approaching Heidegger’ s conception of being as presence through his account of truth, one encounters an initial disparity between the ways in which we normally understand the one and the other. Truth is generally taken to be a relational concept. Something is true to something else Ð typically, a statement to what it is supposed to be about. It is not too difficult, therefore, to imagine a situation in which the first term in this relation might be missing, either because no one happens to think (or make a statement) about the thing in question or, conceivably, because there is no one around who can think or make statements at all. In the latter case, there would, putatively, be no truth. But in this respect, the case of being seems quite different. We are all strongly inclined to hold that something Ð anything Ð would be what it is, no matter what and, especially, whether anyone `knows’ what it is or not. Indeed, since the being of some object Ð its being such-andsuch Ð is what is supposed to make true statements true, this kind of independence of being is taken to be a necessary condition for any conception of truth as unchanging. Indeed, it seems likely that when people

52

Frederick A. Olafson

insist that there would be truth even if there were no truth-bearers Ð that is, no Dasein Ð what they are really insisting on is the absolute stability of being in this sense. If so, it can hardly come as a surprise that the idea that being is to be conceived as presence and thus on the dyadic model of truth should strike many as too paradoxical to be taken seriously. If being is the term in the truth-relation that remains even when the other one Ð the thought or statement Ð is missing, there are still a number of quite different ways in which it can be understood. One of these would be to hold that being is simply the character by virtue of which a thing Ð a dog or a planet or whatever Ð is the kind of thing it is, though not necessarily in any special or privileged sense. 13 The other possibility would be to concentrate not so much on what something is as on the way it is represented as being, and this means in its relation to the human mind. Heidegger’ s conception of being cannot be fitted under either of these rubrics; but I think its nature and motivation can best be understood through a brief critical review of these prior alternatives. In the ancient world, the concept of being as a thing’ s character, or essence gave rise to the idea of a hierarchic structure, sometimes called the tree of Porphyry, in which such characters are progressively subsumed under still more general ones until an all-inclusive summum genus is reached that is declared to be being as such (ens). Interestingly, at the bottom of this hierarchy of kinds there were a few small figures labelled Plato, Aristotle, and Socrates under the infima species, `rational animal’ . These were the names of sample individuals that were subject to the classifications that rose above them; but they were also, and more significantly, the names of particulars and not of qualities or characters. By this route, existence found its way into this map of being; but its presence there introduced an element of complexity into the import of `being’ as the summum genus. This difficulty was aggravated when an explicit distinction between essence and existence emerged in medieval philosophy as it had not in Greek thought. There was still an attempt to conceive existence in terms of the old model as a property that something might or might not have. It was understood, for example, to be an element within the concept of God as the most perfect being. But the evident contrast between a quality and a particular eventually led to a reconsideration of the idea that the two could be squeezed together under the same rubric. It was Kant who, much later, finally challenged, in a radical way, the conception of existence as a `real predicate’ . He argued that it added nothing to the concept of the object to which it was applied and should instead be understood, not as a property at all, but as a modal element in our knowledge of objects. In his table of categories, existence and the two other modal categories, possibility and necessity, express the relations in which an object can stand to the understanding as the cognitive faculty of the

Being, Truth, and Presence

53

human mind. In the case of existence, that relation is mediated by sensation as the sole guarantee of the actuality of any object. Taking being out of the object in this way and construing it as a relation to a mind Ð that is, to an entity capable of `knowing’ the world Ð proved to be an extremely significant step. Although it does not equate being with presence, it is hard to imagine Heidegger’ s treatment of being otherwise than against the background of this Kantian move.14 There is, to be sure, this difference that Kant’ s account of existence as positing (Setzen) is a meÂlange of logical and psychological elements and Heidegger’ s is straightforwardly ontological. But it is just the logical character of Kant’ s account that was to set the direction for the subsequent treatment of being by philosophers. Although, in our own day, `being’ itself has become far too suspect a term in the eyes of many philosophers to be deemed worthy of much attention, the verb `to be’ has not shared in the disgrace of its nominalization. Pretty clearly, too, its function is not to name a property. Instead, in propositions that express states of affairs, it may be said to supply the constitutive logical form of a state of affairs Ð that is, of something’ s being the case. This suggests a conception of being as essentially bound up with the fact that there are states of affairs at all and not just things. 15 The issue this poses is then whether a purely logical account of states of affairs, and thus of being, can dispense with any affirmation of presence as a necessary condition for the one and for the other. The difference between a thing and a state of affairs was presupposed in what has just been said, but it needs to be clarified. Plainly, without things there could be no states of affairs since a state of affairs is something’ s being something. These things that are something are most certainly themselves within the world if anything is. We think of them as being, in a way, pieces of the world, each of them filling its slot in world-space. But it would make no sense to conceive states of affairs in these terms. One could say that they do not fit into the kind of slot that a thing occupies in the world; but even that, while true, would tend to reify states of affairs and thereby suggest that it is the disparity of two things that makes it impossible for the one to occupy the slot in world-space of the other. But if states of affairs Ð a thing’ s being something Ð are not in the world, where are they? The obvious place for whatever has turned out not to be within the world has long been the `mind’ . The objections to such a strategy have already been stated and need not be reviewed here. What is of interest is the further developments of this line of thought that have stripped away the psychological side of Kant’ s account and have interpreted the copula in purely logical and linguistic terms. As a result, states of affairs (and, by implication, being as well) have been assigned a domicile in language. The insight that is implicit in this strategy is that a state of affairs cannot be accommodated in the world in the way a thing or a property of a thing can.

54

Frederick A. Olafson

Unfortunately, this insight is formulated in a way that creates insoluble new problems. Language may indeed be the `house of being’ as Heidegger so often declared it to be, but only if `language’ is not taken in its commonsense acceptation as utterance and without any deeper ontological analysis. Without such analysis, language as what Heidegger calls stimmliche Verlautbarung can easily lend itself to being conceived in naturalistic terms as verbal behavior. When that happens, it becomes simply a sequence of word-things Ð sounds or marks that, as such, can hardly express a state of affairs or, indeed, anything at all about the world. By contrast, in Heidegger’ s ontology of language, it is a modality of presence and is understood in its uncovering function. It thus appears that being as the fact that there are states of affairs can be understood neither as a property of the entities to which it applies nor as a function of the mind that makes knowledge of entities possible. This might seem to suggest that being should be understood as somehow intermediate between these two terms Ð the thing and the mind Ð and that it may have more the character of a field that encompasses both these terms. In order to explore this possibility, it will be useful to examine more closely the concept of the world that is implicit in both the interpretations of being that have been rejected. The world is generally understood to be simply the totality of all the things or entities that exist. 16 These entities are distributed through space and time and stand in a variety of causal relations to one another. Neither of these relations is internal to its terms, however, in any sense that would make them undetachable in principle from one another. Accordingly, in the world as so conceived, each thing is very emphatically itself and not any other thing; and while its occurrence is doubtless causally dependent on that of other things, it is supposed to be conceivable independently of anything other than itself. Among the causal effects that one such thing can have on another are those that occur in the beings we call `animate’ . These are endowed with special sensitivities that enable them to `respond’ to the action upon them of other entities in ways that are far more complex and variable than is the case with inanimate entities. Sometimes these responses reach the level of intelligence, and can even extend to the construction of theories about the very natural processes in which these entities are themselves involved. In every case, however, from the most ordinary perception to the most abstract thought, these responses are understood as events in the entity that has been acted on from without, although these effects, in turn, may also produce others that go beyond it. In this way, the human beings in question (and what they do) would not constitute an exception to the claim that the entities that are within the world stand in external causal relations to one another. It has already been noted that even language-use, whether in practical everyday

Being, Truth, and Presence

55

contexts or theory construction or otherwise, comes to be treated as such a form of behavior. What I have been describing is an effort, conceived in naturalistic terms, to marry logic with physicalism by reducing being to language and language to behavior. In this way, it is thought, language (as well as everything else about human beings) can be shown to be something that is within the natural world. The outcome of this line of thought is a conception of the world that, as already noted, recognizes only spatiotemporal and causal relations among the things that are properly conceived as being within it. There is no possibility under these conditions that any one of these entities could `show itself’ to or, in Heidegger’ s sense, `be there’ for another such entity, since that would mean that some entities, at least, are bound up with other entities Ð the ones that are present to them Ð in a way for which no provision is made in this conception of things. And yet to require that all references to such an occurrence disappear from the ontology of science entails the sacrifice of our most primordial sense of ourselves as human beings. This is the sense of ourselves as in the presence of a world of things as well as of other animate beings, some of them human. But an entity that has a world is not one that stands only in some kind of spatiotemporal relation or external causal relation to the things in that world that are in one way or another present to it. `Having a world’ means that it is impossible to define the entity that is so described in a way that seals it off Ð logically and ontologically Ð from its world by allowing only external relations to hold between it and anything else. But in that case this fact about human beings Ð their having a world of things in the mode of these things being present to them Ð cannot pass over into the conception of the world that was just outlined, because there simply is no place in the latter for anything like presence. On the other hand, if we accept that conception, we are in the position of having to revise our view of ourselves quite drastically and to drop the idea of our being in the world in the mode of presence as, in effect, a superseded theory. As such, it is supposed to leave behind no residue other than the memory of an illusion to which we were once subject. It was, really, nothing at all. What becomes of the concept of being under these circumstances? One thing, at least, is clear. If an entity can never show itself to another, there will be no way in which it can show itself as what it is. But does that mean that, in order to be anything, an entity must be present, and that its presence, therefore, is somehow equivalent to its being? A distinction must be made here between being as an entity’ s having the specific character it has and the fact itself of something’ s being something, whatever that may be. Presence manifestly does not make something the kind of thing it is in the sense of conferring a specific character upon it. Instead, it makes it possible for an entity to show itself to someone as what it is. As such, it constitutes the openness between two such entities that makes it possible for the one to

56

Frederick A. Olafson

show itself to the other and sometimes even for this showing to be a reciprocal one. Heidegger occasionally uses the German word for `between’ as a noun Ð das Zwischen Ð to suggest the character of this overcoming of the closure that obtains between any two entities within the world.17 It is that closure that has been notionally transferred, as a result of the suppression of presence, to the relation between Dasein and the things with which it deals. In that way, being itself is simply blocked out of the picture. What has been said suggests that presence is a necessary condition for being but not being itself. If that were so, the concept of being would take on a primarily epistemic cast; being, in Heidegger’ s sense of presence, would be simply an avenue of access to being understood as what something is. But to reduce presence to the status of an epistemic condition would be to miss the whole point of the foregoing argument about how entities are with one another in the world. That was that the ontology of side-by-side-ness simply cannot make a place for the presence of entities in the world and that this presence has an ontological status as well as an epistemic one. In any case, it is presence so understood that Heidegger equates with being; and that decision is not an arbitrary one Ð something like a blind preference for the That over the What. I think the basic reason why he does so is that the `There is . . .’ of existential statements is always an `. . . is there’ and as such expresses the being of one entity for another. By contrast, the usual view of existential statements is that they simply declare a fact and do so in a way that does not at the same time express the being-in-the-world of some particular entity and the uncoveredness of its `objects’ . More concretely, his reasons for doing so can, I think, be gathered by contrasting the existential with the predicative use of the verb `to be’ . The verb `to be’ Ð the so-called copula Ð is generally thought to have the function of linking a property to the thing of which it is a property. Plainly, however, this idea does not fit the existential use of the verb `to be’ . If, with G. E. Moore, I say, `There are tame tigers’ , the `are’ in this statement does not express any kind of link between a thing and one of its properties. What it does do is signalize the fact that there are entities of a certain kind and this can only mean that they are there. In doing so, it expresses the presence or the presence in absence of those entities to the person who makes this statement. This is not to say that such statements do not also perform the function with which they are usually associated: that of asserting that the class of entities having a certain character is not empty. The point is rather that they cannot do that without at the same time expressing the presence of such entities and thus belying the constraints of the ontological model we habitually apply to them and to ourselves. Moreover, even when `to be’ is used in predicative statements like `The apple is red’ , the reference made to the apple is equivalent to a `There is . . .’ and the character attributed to the apple, its being red, is something that shows itself with the apple. Since this

Being, Truth, and Presence

57

showing is the same in the situation rendered by an existential statement and in a predicative one, what the copula expresses in the latter case is what it expresses in the former: the fact of presence. 18 The nexus between being and presence has now come into view; but it is still extremely difficult to bring it into the right kind of focus. It is difficult because we stubbornly fail to grasp the difference between the kind of partes extra partes world in which things are simply side-by-side with one another, and the world as what we dwell in and may be said to have since it is there for us. The difference may be crudely expressed by saying that in the former nothing faces anything else. That possibility is excluded by the underlying assumption that everything in that world conforms to the same ontological type Ð that of objects Ð and that spatiotemporal location and causality exhaust the modes of relatedness of such objects to one another. One thing that a causal relation does not require is that the entity that is acting upon another show itself to the latter. But when causality is the only relation other than spatiotemporal location that receives philosophical recognition, everything that does not conform to the causal model, as something’ s being there for someone surely does not, has to be `edited out’ in such a way that it is denied any acknowledgement in the official picture. Does what has been said thus far rule out the possibility that something might have a certain character (or even exist) without showing itself as such and thus without benefit of presence? We certainly tend to suppose that this is the case; but there is reason to think that in doing so we are confusing an ontic hiddenness with an ontological one. In ordinary life, we are all familiar with the possibility that something may have a certain character without showing itself as such. But this sort of thing takes place in a context within which it is understood that this thing may, and certainly can, show itself. Its hiddenness is, therefore, ontic and, as such, provisional and conditional. But when we try to upgrade this hiddenness to ontological status by excluding the very possibility of anything like disclosure, we get into difficulties. For one thing, the thought in which we formulate this idea is itself a modality of presence since the entities in question are assumed to be there for it as what it addresses. They are present in absence and yet these are just the entities that were supposed to be devoid of any presence at all. Plainly, any such thoughtexperiment violates the thesis it was meant to confirm. One obvious question about being as presence still remains to be dealt with. That is to decide what to make of Heidegger’ s thesis about the relation of being to Dasein Ð the `no Dasein, no being’ thesis. This is linked to the claim that entities (Seiendes) are not dependent on Dasein or on being, and that they would, therefore, persist in the absence of either one. Heidegger says very much the same thing about truth in its relation to Dasein as he does about being, and both being and truth have been identified with presence. There is this difference, to be sure, that, according to Heidegger, it is Dasein

58

Frederick A. Olafson

that is true, sensu eminenti, and that what has been uncovered is true in a derivative and secondary sense. But that still implies that being as a thing’ s being what it is constitutes truth; and the thesis about truth and Dasein does indeed entail that being as truth presupposes the existence of Dasein. This thesis is especially paradoxical because it is so hard to make sense of the notion of entities without being when the very name we give them derives from words for being Ð on/ousia, entities/ens and Seiendes/Sein. How then, one may ask, can `entities’ be independent of that which is supposed to make them entities to begin with? The same point that was made earlier in discussing Heidegger’ s claim that truth is not eternal may be made again in connection with the conception of being as detachable from entities. This is that, even if we were to imagine a world without presence, we could do so only if it were present in absence to us Ð that is, in a way that violates the supposition we are trying to realize in thought. This means that entities, on all the occasions when we have to deal with them, will, ex hypothesi, not be detached from their being since their being is just their being there for us and for anyone. It thus appears that Heidegger’ s thesis about being need be no more alarming than the similar one about truth proved to be. What is found alarming in the case of being is the idea that the independence of entities from their being would entail the loss by such entities of their character as the kind of thing they are. If that were really entailed by Heidegger’ s thesis, there would not only be no truth about them; there would be nothing in re that could serve as the basis for such truth. But since Heidegger does not understand being in terms of such characters, this fear is needless. The import of the distinction between entities and their being is simply that the being of an entity is not one of its properties; it has rather the character of a field or milieu Ð a milieu of presence Ð in which an entity can be there and be something for another entity and indeed for itself. Now such a milieu may or may not obtain and, in that sense, what counts as an entity when embedded within it must have another status when it is not, although this status is one which we cannot conceive. But since any attempt we make to think about such entities reintroduces being as presence, there is really no effective limitation implied in this inability to conceive what is not conceived by us. What all this comes to is simply an acknowledgement that being as a milieu of presence does not necessarily obtain and that entities can persist outside it. Heidegger’ s way of dealing with these anomalies is to claim that the world as we know it is the outcome of the supervening of being as presence upon a very different kind of `world’ . This `event’ is what he calls `das Ereignis’ .19 Needless to say, such an occurrence would be inexplicable by any of the methods that we use for purposes of common-sense or scientific explanation, whether these be physical or psychological in character; and it certainly finds no place in current accounts of cosmic evolution. Even so, and for all its

Being, Truth, and Presence

59

strangeness, this notion is not without some plausibility. If we consider the natural world, for example, and abstract to the degree we can from its relation to us, it becomes apparent that we conceive it to be self-contained as it would be, in a still more radical sense, in a world from which entities like us were altogether absent. The entities that make up nature are present to us as they are not to each other; and the difference between our world as a milieu of presence and a nature of this kind is radical and uneliminable. Heidegger evidently conceives this Ereignis as a kind of gift, with a suggestion of divine beings, whose passage it marks, as donors. For those who do not find this language palatable there remains the fact that we do not have a way of conceiving the world that gives presence a place within it. At the same time, however, there is nothing more familiar to us than just this `being in the world’ which we have so much trouble reconciling with our scientific world-view. One inference we might draw from this paradoxical situation is that a principal desideratum for philosophical thought in our time must be that it not require us to be as unfaithful to our own selfunderstanding as we would be if we continue to embrace an account of the nature of things in which there is no place for us in any guise in which we can recognize ourselves.

IV This last point can be developed a little further in a way that may clarify the relevance of this whole discussion to the current situation in philosophy. Admittedly, characterizations of that `situation’ are not themselves very likely to be neutral, and they often have a partisan character even when an attempt is made to avoid it. Still, it does seem that the place that is assigned to human beings within a conception of the topics with which philosophy has to deal can hardly be an indifferent matter to anyone. Consequently, although Heidegger is known in some quarters as an anti-humanist, I am going to use this matter of the status accorded to human beings within contemporary philosophy as the basis of a contrast with his thought. 20 In the aspect that is relevant here Heidegger’ s thought addresses itself to a classical aporia in Western philosophy. This is the question of how we are to domicile the entity that thinks and perceives and acts, in the same world with what we call the object of its perception and thought and the scene of its actions. The difficulty about this is that it has not been possible to show how this entity, which, in Heideggerian parlance uncovers the world, can do so if its ontological status is identical with that of the entities that are so uncovered. Kant gave this puzzle a classical formulation when he said that `I cannot know as an object that which I must presuppose in order to know any object’ .21

60

Frederick A. Olafson

In a general way, one can say that attempts to solve this puzzle have taken one or the other of two lines of thought. Each of these takes one of the terms in the underlying contrast Ð things in the world or our `consciousness’ of them Ð as a given and tries to show that the other term can be derived from analyses conducted in the idiom peculiar to the favored term. It does not seem, however, that anything that has been worked out along these inevitably reductionistic lines of thought has scored a convincing success. Just in the last few decades, for example, the philosophical pendulum has swung from a logico-linguistic transcendentalism to a science-based physicalism as the key to an understanding of Ð among other things Ð what a human being is. Accordingly, it is the natural sciences and their philosophical co-adjutors that are now trying to develop, in their own language, a theory of the world that makes a place within it for human beings and their most characteristic functions. Since these philosopher-scientists are themselves human beings, this effort is in effect an attempt at selfcharacterization, and to be successful it must make a place within its world for the situation in which their own inquiries, like those of all other human beings, begin and, it might be added, end. It must, in other words, refute the long-standing suspicion that physicists themselves cannot be accommodated in the world of physics any more successfully than any other human beings can. This situation is not the one to which Heidegger addressed himself directly although it has evolved out of one that he did. His concern was still with the Cartesian tradition in which the soul/mind was given the status of what he calls a `spiritual thing’ Ð that is, of something that is like things in the world in being a substance, though of a very special kind, and at the same time carries out in its `interior’ the cognitive functions that could not be assigned to the body. But it is not just the substance-ontology of the mind that is borrowed from the natural world; the way in which consciousness as the defining function of the mind is construed also seems to have been adapted from the way in which common sense understands the presence of things to human percipients. More concretely, as has already been pointed out, the states that are internal to the mind were supposed to be present to consciousness in a kind of intra-mental `There is . . .’ . Consistently with this idea, traditional descriptions of consciousness have emphasized its peculiarly diaphanous character and the fact that it has no `nature’ of its own that would block or distort the reception in it of qualities representing things in the `external’ world. Sometimes it has even been claimed that the mind is so transparent to itself that nothing in it can be hidden from it. In all these respects, then, the mind has been conceived as a place of presence although it is mental states (and not the full-blown entities these states were supposed to represent) that are supposed to be immediately present to consciousness. What these states are present to is thus not so much a human being as a

Being, Truth, and Presence

61

whole as it is a part thereof Ð a mind or a consciousness that views the `ideas’ or `representations’ that hang on the walls of the mind.22 Modern Western thought invested heavily in this paradigm which is now often referred to Ð dismissively Ð as `the philosophy of consciousness’ . That it had serious shortcomings cannot be denied; but an acknowledgement of these weaknesses hardly prepares one for the desperate strategy on the part of many philosophers that developed out of its demise. Instead of an attempt to work out a revised ontology of the subject, there has been a widespread disposition to conclude that nothing of the kind is needed and that the subject as such is expendable. The argument is made that what can be learned about the various departments of human functioning that were traditionally assigned to the mind is best left to hard sciences like neurophysiology. In effect, this attitude makes the science of man one of the sciences of nature. In the deeply confused situation that has resulted, Heidegger’ s philosophy may be best understood as a demonstration that this was not the only direction in which philosophy could have gone. He, too, has no use for the `mind’ as a repository for `representations’ any more than he does for nature as a thing-in-itself, and so he does not begin with either the one or the other but rather with what he calls `being-in-the-world’ . Although this terminology may be unfamiliar, the concept itself is remarkably close to a common-sense understanding of what it is like to be a human being before it is denatured by various philosophical and religious preconceptions. 23 It is as though the Cartesian idea of mind as an enclosure had been dropped and the openness or presence, that was supposed to obtain within it, transferred to the world where it becomes the clearing (Lichtung) that each Dasein constitutes. Being-in-the-world is thus the mode of being of the kind of entity Ð human beings Ð that lives in the presence of a world of things and does so in a mode of active caring about possible outcomes. Much of what Heidegger has to say about these matters is, accordingly, a giving of names to elements in our otherwise inarticulate common-sense understanding of what it is like to be a human being. Unfortunately, the unfamiliarity of the names Heidegger proposes has made it look as though they must designate something very esoteric and remote from common understanding. What is perhaps most distinctive of Heidegger’ s procedure here is the fact that he rejects all attempts to construct this situation in which we have a world out of conceptual materials that are derived from other sources, whether these be the mind or nature. This means that the only valid startingpoint for philosophical thought is what was previously understood as the relation between two already constituted entities, the mind and the world. Most emphatically, there is no room for the idea that we could begin with one or another of the latter and then somehow conjure up this `relation’ between them as a by-product of a world-process conceived in quite different terms. Being-in-the-world is a truly primitive concept in the sense that any

62

Frederick A. Olafson

attempt to demote it to the status of something relative to, or produced by, something else will inevitably denature it. The claim Heidegger makes for it is that even in our most sophisticated epistemic undertakings we always rely and must rely on the implicit understanding we have of it. But to say this is to say that we begin with a situation that we are already in some inarticulate way familiar with although we have no concept for it. It is not, of course, as though we had to have such a concept in order to live distinctively human lives. But since we are offered so many concepts that make no place for being as presence, or for those aspects of our lives that presuppose it, a concept is needed if only as an antidote to these insistently offered surrogates. In judging this alternative to the assumptions currently entertained by many scientists and philosophers, it would be well to bear in mind what Heidegger has to say about what he calls the `forgetfulness of being’ (Seinsvergessenheit ). This is a condition remarkably similar to the scientific vision of the world in which everything has been reduced to the status of an object. `Consciousness’ becomes at best an old-fashioned name for a brainstate; and of being as presence no word is heard. All this has a certain logic once we begin to grasp what is implicit in this forgetfulness. If we expected that, since being is the presence and thus the unhiddenness of entities, being itself would necessarily be unhidden as well, this expectation has proved to be grievously mistaken. In fact, something like the opposite seems to have been and still to be the case, and for a reason that, once it is understood, makes this seem a natural and even unavoidable outcome. Being, after all, is not itself an entity; it is that which makes the disclosure of entities possible. But then, if someone who is familiar with entities, courtesy of being as presence, asks himself the Quinean question, `What is there?’ , the obvious answer will be, `What there is, is the entities there are’ . In a sense, that will also be the right answer as long as no questions are raised about the ontological import of the `There is/are’ as such. Heidegger’ s way of expressing this is to say that no sooner does being as presence come on the scene than it is eclipsed by the very entities for which it Ð being Ð makes it possible to be there. However that may be, the situation to which this leads cannot simply be our fate as Heidegger sometimes appears to imply. It is surely something that we have brought about, for the most part unknowingly, but also out of a misguided sense that only under such a regime will we be truly masters in our own house, that is, the world. The great issue for philosophy must accordingly now be to test the assumptions that underlie and sustain this whole program. Only in that way will we be able to form a better idea of what kind of life we are committing ourselves to when we deny and, to the extent possible, suppress being as presence.

Being, Truth, and Presence

63

NOTES 1 I have in mind especially volume II, 24, of the Gesamtausgabe , Grundprobleme der PhaÈnomenologie (Frankfurt am Main: V. Klostermann, 1975), henceforth GPP. This volume has been translated by A. Hofstadter as Basic Problems of Phenomenology (Bloomington, IV: Indiana University Press, 1984). The pagination of the original German edition is preserved in this translation. 2 In this connection, see the exchanges on this subject between Taylor Carman and the author of this article that appeared in Inquiry. They can be found in vol. 37 (1994), nos 1, 2 and 3; vol. 38 (1995), no. 4; and vol. 39 (1996), no. 4. 3 See his statement to this effect in GPP, p. 449. 4 See Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche (Pfullingen: Verlag Gunther Neske, 1961), p. 194. 5 See, e.g., the rhetorical question in GPP, p. 318, where Heidegger asks whether one might say that `das Sein existiert’ . On page 313 he had already said that truth `exists’ Ð that is, it shares the mode of being of Dasein. Since a very close linkage of being to truth is asserted throughout, it would indeed seem to follow that being, too, must `exist’ . 6 I have defended this claim at some length in Heidegger and the Philosophy of Mind (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987) henceforth HPM, esp. in ch. 7, pp. 60Ð61. As I did there, I use Heidegger’ s variant spelling of `existence’ whenever this word is used to denote the mode of being of Dasein. 7 See Heidegger’ s discussion in GA vol. II, 31, Vom Wesen der nenschlichen Freiheit: Einleitung in die Philosophie , pp. 60Ð62. 8 A more detailed account of this conception of presence in absence can be found in ch. 3 of HPM. 9 `Sein Ð nicht Seiendes Ð ``gibt es’ ’ nur, so fern Wahrheit ist. Und sie ist nur, sofern und solange Dasein ist. Sein und Wahrheit ``sind’’ gleichursprunglich.’ Sein und Zeit (Tubingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1957), p. 230. 10 Entdecktheit is not a straightforward synonym for Anwesenheit , however, and Heidegger uses the word Erschlossenheit when it is the uncoveredness of Dasein that is in question. 11 In his recent book, From Stimulus To Science (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), W. V. Quine has considered this objection and has argued that it is invalid. He claims that we would always be able to observe the responses of a given human being to the perception of these marks or sounds and thereby infer what they mean to that individual. This seems to deal with the dif® culty by interposing another person who presumably already knows that these are words and understands what they mean; and that person can hardly know this by observing his own responses to his own perception of those marks and sounds. But if he cannot do this, then neither can the original individual. Pretty clearly, then, this kind of account can tell us nothing about any ® rst-personal understandings of what these marks and sounds mean. 12 See SZ, pp. 226Ð7 and GPP, p. 314. 13 It is true that the notion of `what a thing is’ has typically been understood as signifying not just any attribute a thing might have, but rather the one that makes it what it, in some preeminent sense, is Ð its `real’ and not just its nominal essence. Such a property is supposed to outrank others as the humanity or rationality of Socrates does his having a snub-nose. But this use of the term is irrelevant to the issues I want to discuss here. Being snub-nosed raises all the same questions as does being human even though the one represents something more comprehensive and arguably more important than the other. 14 For Heidegger’ s account of Kant’ s treatment of being, see his essay, `Kants These uÈber das Sein’ , in Wegmarken (Frankfurt am Main: V. Klostermann, 1967), pp. 273Ð308. There is also an important discussion of Kant’ s interpretation of being in GPP, pp. 448Ð52. 15 A defense of this interpretation is presented in HPM, ch. 10. 16 Heidegger makes an important distinction between entities that are `in the world’ as human beings are and those that are `innerweltlich ’ or `within the world’ . The former are in the world in the mode of things in the world being present to them; the latter are completely devoid of presence. Entities of both of these kinds have been bundled up in the traditional concept of the world; but Heidegger makes a radical distinction between the ways in which they are in/within the world.

64

Frederick A. Olafson

17 See, e.g. SZ, p. 132, where Heidegger says that `das Dasein ist das Sein dieses Zwischen’ . In GPP, p. 310, He also says that `das Wahrsein etwas ist, was ``zwischen’ ’ dem Subjekt und dem Objekt ``liegt’’ ’ . Although I know of no passage in which Heidegger explicitly uses this term to characterize being itself, the following passage in the `Brief uÈber den Humanismus’ in Wegmarken comes very close. `Vielmehr ist der Mensch zuvor in seinem Wesen ek-sistent in die Offenheit des Seins, welches Offene erst das ``Zwischen’ ’ lichtet, innerhalb dessen eine ``Beziehung’ ’ vom ``Subjekt’’ zum Objekt ``sein’ ’ kann’ (pp. 180Ð1). Besides, the close af® nity between being and truth seems to me to make it legitimate to extend the use of `das Zwischen’ in the way I propose. It also seems very compatible with Heidegger’ s notion of being as a clearing (Lichtung). 18 It is interesting to note that Heidegger sometimes speaks of the `being’ of a certain kind of entity when it is evident that what he has in mind is the kind of entity something is. As far as I know, he never discusses this use of the term or explains how it ® ts into his own conception of being as presence. 19 The concept of das Ereignis is not simply that of an event, as the customary meaning of the word would suggest, but of an appropriation in which being makes Dasein (and thus human beings) its own. One apparent implication of this idea would seem to be that being has some kind of priority to Dasein in order to be able to appropriate it. Such a priority would, of course, be hard to reconcile with the original thesis that makes the being of entities coaeval with Dasein. 20 Heidegger’ s reputation as an anti-humanist is due almost entirely to the way in which his Letter on Humanism was received and interpreted in France. But what he is attacking there is what he calls `metaphysical humanism’ and he wants to replace it with a humanism for which the basis of the special distinction of human being is precisely its relation to being as such. He is, in short, re-de® ning humanism and not rejecting it root and branch. 21 See the Critique of Pure Reason , trans. N. Kemp-Smith (London: Macmillan & Co., 1958), p. 365. 22 The in¯ uence of the notion of the mind as an enclosure extends far beyond the world of professional philosophy. I have heard people on television talking about what is painted on the walls of their minds; and Virginia Woolf is said to have spoken of occasions on which `the walls of the mind grow thinner’ with the result that certain apprehensions become possible that would otherwise not have been. In this connection, it may be noted that Heidegger at times appears to imply that, among the great Western philosophers, Aristotle was in some measure free from the disabling assumptions of this tradition. In Being and Time, p. 14, he quotes, with apparent approval, Aristotle’ s statement in De Anima that the soul in a certain way is all things. This at least sounds as though it might mean that the soul is somehow the being of ta onta or das Seiende. On closer examination, however, the af® nity between what Aristotle is saying in this passage and Heidegger’ s thought seems much more problematic. Aristotle says that these entities Ð ta onta Ð are not themselves in the soul, but that their form is. To the extent that his account centers on the notion of something being in something else Ð a soul or mind Ð it might even be thought to anticipate the inclusion metaphors of the full-blown mindÐbody dualism that came on the scene much later. As such, it would be very hard to reconcile with Heidegger’ s pronouncedly anti-dualistic position. There are, of course, many other elements in Aristotle’ s account of the soul that go in quite different directions from this, so not too much should be made of this point. 23 Heidegger’ s point here is similar to what Merleau-Ponty says about what he calls `le pre jugeÂdu monde’ and the `chosiste’ tendency of our ways of understanding a great many matters. See his Phenomenology of Perception , trans. C. Smith (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962). Received 7 August 1997 Frederick A. Olafson, Department of Philosophy, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093-0119, USA