You have stated the issue in a manner that assumes that someday we shall come to an understanding of what constitutes "aletheia". I think that thee are positive steps taken by philosophers like Paul Ricoeur, MacIntyre and others. I am spending my last years reflecting rather than writng on an integrative approach. I leave that to younger and more promising philosophers such as yourself.

In the Greek mythology aletheia appears in the same function as veritas in the Roman mythology, as truth. It's not my special field, but in Germany the philosopher Hans Blumenberg (1920-1990) dealt insensitively with Heidegger, truth, mythology. A new book of the German medieval historian and philosopher Kurt Flasch (emeritus) is analyzing the early work of Blumenberg, his relation to Heidegger, it is perhaps interesting for you. English translations doesn't help if you are starting to study Heidegger, his philosophy is hidden in his language and not adequate to translate.

Kurt Flasch (2017): Hans Blumenberg. Philosoph in Deutschland. Die Jahre 1945 bis 1966. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann. - You may use WIKIPEDIA information at first, about the problem you mentioned.

Thank you very much for this clarification. I regret that I do not read German and has to rely on English translation. But scholars like yourself

can provide us with further insights.

Hi Marcel van der Watt,

if you're serious about this question you're going to have to study what's usually called 'German Idealism'. (In quotes, since neither 'German' nor 'Idealism' are all that useful if one is trying to probe what it is about this tradition that puts it apart from the 'analytic' mainstream.)

1) I challenge the statement to be found amongst the 'answers', above, which holds that Hans Blumenberg "... dealt insensitively with Heidegger, truth, mythology." On the contrary, I wouldn't know of a better place to start with an issue that's been at the centre of philosophical discourse for a century or more: whether the 'Western', secular, post-Cartesian conception of truth is one-sided, ahistorical, or has other aspects to it that are problematic. I.e. this whole issue is much broader than your way of formulating it seems to suggest: terms like 'functional', or 'lived experience' suggest that you are yourself firmly grounded in the tradition which from Kant to Heidegger is being *questioned*, or being 'bracketed'.

2) I challenge also the assumption that it's possible to deal seriously with these issues if you don't have at the very least a very thorough knowledge of German.

3) Eine Formulierung wie diese: "that still uncomprehended disclosedness and disclosure of being" müsste mit dem deutschen Original verglichen werden - es klingt wie eine schlechte Übersetzung. Der Unterschied zwischen 'Sein' und 'Seiendem', auf Deutsch, ist viel intuitiver als das auf Englisch der Fall ist, weil ja auf Deutsch alle möglichen 'universalhistorischen' und 'transzendentalphilosophischen' Konnotationen noch in die Alltagssprache transportiert werden. (Blumenberg ist ja nicht umsonst der Autor eines Werkes über 'Metaphorologie'.)

4) Diesem Unterschied zwischen 'Sein' und 'Seiendem' ist, in der Alltagssprache, und zwar erst recht auf Englisch, nicht mit Allerweltsintuitionen beizukommen.

5) Dit lyk nie vir my of jy baie ernstig is met hierdie dinge nie.

Dear James A Beshai, Hein Retter and Frederik van Gelder, apologies for my delayed response to your very kind and comprehensive inputs on my question. Notwithstanding my lack of understanding/training in the German language or 'German Idealism' (Frederik), I have sincerely probed the issue with close German friends who provided some valuable inputs. I don't see myself as a philosopher at all James, but definitely consider the role of philosophy as increasingly important in the times we find ourselves in. Thank you for providing valuable food for thought!

There's more to this than meets the eye. Those not 'au fait' with the crisis of higher education in South Africa (or in the US) will miss what it is that is being thematised here. By 'ordinary concept of truth' here is meant the empirical/scientific meaning of the term, that self-same meaning which is under such intense pressure from the direction of 'identity politics' worldwide - in South Africa: in the name of 'transformation', 'decolonization', 'anti-racism', 'anti-whitism'. Starting with Heidegger hence has the inestimable advantage of first of all 'contextualising' this whole debate historically - against the background of the very fierce controversy about these things in Europe from the late 19th Century onwards. (This is the reason why a thorough knowledge of the history of ideas of the last century or two is so essential - otherwise one misses just what the 'origins' of these controversies are. [If one doesn't do it this way then everything ends up in the usual shouting matches, threats of force, 'virtue signalling', so on.])

i) If one takes it from the 'analytic' side of things - i.e. approaches this 'Heidegger'-topic from the direction of post-war philosophy of science - then the controversy revolves around the question of whether, when ego says 'p', alter reacts only to the cognitive 'content' of that 'speech act', or whether, when examining whether 'p' is true, it's impossible exclude in that debate the so-called 'performative' aspects thereof as well. That then forces the scientific community (hopefully that's what 'researchgate' makes possible, give this a 'voice') to start reflecting/discussing difficult questions not usually regarded as part of scientific research - which during the sixties focusses especially on the relationship between 'Knowledge' and 'Human Interests'. (A Jürgen Habermas title with which he became internationally famous.) The 'opposite' to this philosophy of science approach is of course usually called either 'continental' or 'dialects', which in turn means that whatever etymology one comes up with on that 'aletheia' has to be compared with both the empirical understanding of 'p' and the dialectical one. (There's a third 'large' paradigm in this, which is psychoanalysis.) So from a history of ideas point of view, this whole 'adaequatio' debate (which is what it's usually called) has to be 'situated' somewhere between three different 'opposites': Kant/Hegel, or Marx/Dialectics, or Psychoanalysis. Another way of saying the same: the usual post-war way of expressing these things was to say that it's a choice between a 'correspondence' or a 'coherence' theory of truth, but that, in the meantime, has been superseded by the very much less civil 'culture wars'. 'Correspondence/coherence' is obviously no longer the frame of reference for the class/gender/race battles going on. (Nowhere more fiercely than in South Africa.) When I say 'p', is that statement judged on its factual value, or on some other basis? (e.g. my 'gender orientation'/melanin concentration/bank balance?)

ii) There's something that may be specific to the South African situation: this decision to frame the discussion with ideas coming from Heidegger. Many South African intellectuals between the wars, especially those with an Afrikaans background, studied in Germany rather than in in the UK. British 'Positivism', with its cult of the natural sciences and its culmination in Darwinism, made it next to impossible to talk about cultural identity, and it was exactly this that riles all of the peoples and cultures that had once been colonised by the British. Here there was an 'elective affinity' between the Afrikaners and the Germans; both felt, between the wars, deeply wronged. So: many with an Afrikaans background land up with Heidegger, not realizing where it's going to lead, in time, when questions of truth get confounded with questions of biology. That's not in the least where a study of Heidegger leads, but it's just as true that his oeuvre (the last time I looked it comprised 80-plus volumes) doesn't really provide one with criteria to understand today's 'politics of rage and narcissism'. A politics destroying the university, and not just in South Africa. A much more fruitful way to go would be Max Horkheimer's "Egoism and the Freedom Movement: on the Anthropology of the Bourgeois Age". Much more intelligible than Heidegger, much easier to defend in the face of today's race/gender/'epistemic colonialism' fundamentalisms. A much easier text if one is trying to explain what's wrong with today's popular essentialisms.

Best,

fvg

Thanks to all of you for suggesting thoughts and books on Heidegger whose word continues to enrich our thinking about the human condition.

At this stage of my life I do not have anything more to say. But it is good

to share one's new readings with an intelligent community like this one.

I consider the work of Paul Ricoeur and Jean-Luc Marion as good examples

for taking the linguistic turn instead of the onto-theology of Heidegger.

At age 91 I can read but I have difficulty using the computer to sum up

the contributions of Ricoeur and Marion on this distinction between alethia as unconealment.and veritas as truth. The import of my reading is that one

needs to take the long route of how meaning is disclosed in a gestalt that

is hidden, but also able to make a call of its own.

Marcel Van der Watt seems to have given up on this discussion (where are you Marcel?), so a couple of reflections on 'situating' this whole Heidegger thing. (I mean: it's important enough, since it's a way of articulating a widely experienced disenchantment with the meaning of science and scholarship, as taught especially in the social sciences and humanities nowadays.)

i) I suspect that Marcel 'is coming from' a Dutch Reformed tradition, within Southern Africa, trying to re-establish a common moral ground within a deeply fractured society, and it does so by connecting to Continental Philosophy. (Which has always been better at this than the arid 'logic-chopping' coming from the British Isles, at least since Russell and Moore.) The word 'Aletheia' comes up, e.g., in exactly this context, in the Pretoria theologian Danie Goosen's (2017) "Die metafisiese traditie vandag". ( https://www.litnet.co.za/die-metafisiese-tradisie-vandag-n-interpretasie-van-eric-d-perl/ ) Faced with the gender and race essentialisms now dominating the universities in the West, is there a way of 'reconnecting' to a universal moral code that isn't from the outset simply defamed as 'value judgement' or 'ideology'? (Jordan Peterson is a rather kindred spirit, in Canada. The same moral passion, the same dislike of postmodernism/nihilism.)

ii) Goosen, and I guess Marcel, are asking whether it's possible to re-connect to a venerable natural law tradition represented during the seventies by Gadamer and 'hermeneutics', or a return to some kind of neo-Platonism. 'Truth', 'beauty', 'justice' - these are not empirically *real*, and yet everyone knows what a hell life becomes when they disappear. (And how difficult it is to live up to them in our personal lives.)

iii) Goosen uses 'Aletheia' in the following sentence: "Heidegger beskryf dié “werklikheid” oor tyd heen met ’n veelheid van begrippe (of eerder kwasibegrippe) soos Lichtung, Aletheia, Ereignis, Aus-trag, en ander. Hulle is kwasibegrippe omdat hulle nie na ’n statiese werklikheid verwys wat konseptueel begrens en binne die synsorde tuisgemaak kan word nie. Hulle verwys eerder na ’n gebeure. Maar watter gebeure?" There's a reality or a world 'behind' or 'beyond' ordinary sense perception, our ordinary understanding of language - 'Being', in the sense of Heidegger, points to something that can't be handled by the Positivists (or the various essentialists), and it can't be handled by the Marxists. (Quite how powerful these ideas were, during the thirties, can be gleaned from Peter Gordon [2010]: Continental Divide - Heidegger, Cassirer, Davos.)

iv) Marcel's own way of formulating all this - his assumption that 'comparative methods' or 'everyday examples' is the way to go - shows however that he has at least one foot firmly within the very empiricism that Heidegger (and everyone coming from the phenomenological or Kantian or transcendental philosophy direction) is trying to 'bracket', i.e. 'raise to consciousness', in the sense of becoming 'historically aware' of them. My own feeling is that if one really wants to 're-connect' to the now badly mauled Dutch Reformed tradition it would have to be done via a historical study of its origins during the early Enlightenment - the work of Jonathan Israel would be the place to start, Radical Enlightenment, and his Dutch Republic.

Dear Mr Frederik van Gelder, I thoroughly enjoyed reading your response and further analysis of this topic. Thank you for taking the time to respond so comprehensively and insightful. I really think your analysis would be considered gems when published and shared with the international community. Maybe a book? You are correct with the deduction that I come from a Dutch Reformed tradition, but things have radically changed in how I view the world. In fact, I think there is much value in postmodern thinking, especially when we engage with the complexity of the VUCA environments in which we find ourselves. Postmodernism is sensitive to complexity and confirms that there is in fact multilayered truths - this is where I enjoy thinking about Heidegger and how Heidegger, complexity and postmodernism intersperse. I still hold the Bible very dear though and try my best to live by it - the Bible (my reference to it stemming from your reference to my DR tradition) is living and active (Hebrews 4:12-13) and remains steadfast and relevant in an ever-changing and pluralistic world. I realize that my inability to read and understand German is a constraining factor in fully grasping Heideggerian philosophy - thank you for providing some very insightful glimpses Mr Van Gelder!

Marcel Van der Watt,

thank you for that. I hadn’t considered the possibility that in some contexts postmodernism and Heidegger are taken together, as a kind of ‘counter’ to too much ‘positivism’ in the social sciences. The ‘Aleitheia’ discussion then becomes part of the strongly anti-positivist epistemologies coming out of Europe since the war - and indeed long before that. I’ve often noticed that what people find so appealing about ‘critical theory’ is that it doesn’t treat ‘subjectivity’ (the ‘within’ of things, the world of emotions and feelings) from a scientific perspective. But that comes with a price: one either resigns oneself to the eternal ‘egoism versus egoism’, or one heads for that very difficult project called ‘philosophy’, trying to figure out in what sense it’s possible to speak, despite of all empiricism and functionalism, of a ‘transcendental’ aspect to all human experience. SA has had the bad luck of being a ‘test bed’ for both the best and the worst of the ideologies coming out of the 20th century. But it’s like everything else: either you gain the competence and the skills to come to a judgement of your own, or you’re dependent on others. The generation of Husserl, Heidegger, Cassirer, the Hegelians (then after the war: Gadamer, Habermas, Merleau-Ponty, Lacan so on) were simply fluent in all the European languages, and then the classical ones. I had a prof once who could simply translate from old Italian/Latin ‘on the fly’, standing in front of a lecture hall. My generation didn’t have that any more. Then again: a lot has been translated, more is coming ‘online’ all the time. One does what one can ... I think the dislike of the new ‘essentialisms’ (which is another way of saying: the new tribalisms) is a common bond.

Best,

f

One of the oddest things about the current crisis in SA - a crisis manifesting itself first and foremost in the question of the foundation of public ethics (what else could a fight about the constitution be all about?) - is the complete ignorance, right across the board, about the history of the Dutch Reformed Church (DRC), both in Europe and SA. (Let's just exclude the Stellenbosch Theology Dept here.) World-renowned names like Beyers Naudé and Desmond Tutu made hardly a dent in that inter-racial consensus between Marxists and White (English-speaking) liberals, so decisive for the early 'rainbow nation' phase of SA politics, according to which the Churches were 'reactionary' and 'racist' - starting with the DRC. (Nelson Mandela's very obvious respect for the Afrikaners, is not something a later generation of ANC was ever interested in probing. So ferocious were the instincts unleashed after Morogorro that the memory of Luthuli, Hurley, Paton is simply effaced by today's romanticisation of armed insurrection - with all which that implies for the ethics of, say, the 'average' South African university student.) That whatever it is that could offer an alternative to today's 'identity politics' (another word for tribalism), comes from that self-same 'enlightenment' thinking that was once rooted in European Protestantism, is an insight that, at the moment, seems to be confined to theologians. It's this, I think, this brief sketch of the 'context' of the renewed interest in 'Continental' philosophy in SA, that needs to be borne in mind in the discussion about Heidegger. (I don't think it's at all clear, to most of those involved in this debate, that a discussion of Heidegger's epistemology takes one to an ethical 'space', a long time ago, that the DRC and Marxism once shared; one could call it their shared 'anti-positivism'. It's this that's the common thread in the face of contemporary liberalism, which is entirely an ethics of 'possessive individualism'. If you doubt that, then start thinking about the two words 'private property'.)

i) In that 'aleitheia/veritas' distinction of Heidegger there's a premiss that makes up, as it were, the 'demarcation criterion' vis a vis all analytic philosophy since Bertrand Russell: what we mean when we say that something is 'true' can't be reduced to *propositional* truth. The truth of 'p' (standing for any 'natural language' sentence whatsoever) can't be thought of as an 'identity' between the symbols contained in that 'p' and what it is that they 'denote'. It's not sufficient to 'nail' an opponent in a debate by 'proving' that 'they don't have their facts straight', or by 'proving' that they are being 'illogical' - that's not an apology for ignorance of the facts or woolly logic, but rather the thematisation of something fundamental to all philosophy since Kant: namely that the Cartesianism on which all modern science is based breaks down as soon as we're talking anything other than technology. It's not at all difficult to show that in that 'aleitheia/veritas' distinction of Heidegger there is, at the very least, Kant's 'categorical' distinction between the 'phenomenal' and the 'noumenal' world, and no doubt the older Christian one between 'civitas terrana/civitas dei' as well. But Heidegger goes much further than this, because what bothers him about Kant - something he has in common with the 'dialectical' thinkers from Hegel onwards - is what usually goes under the title of Kant's 'idealism'. (Idealism in the philosophical sense of it being 'all in the mind', as opposed to in reality.) Heidegger comes from Husserl rather than Hegel, he's no doubt reacting to the strongly neo-Kantian philosophy in Germany at the end of the 19th Century, his notion of objectivity is much closer to Platonism in its patristic and pagan versions than it is to the 'Vermittlung' ('mediation') of the dialecticians, but what he shares with the dialecticians (in contradistinction to the analytic philosophers) is that he takes not so much 'reason' seriously as its 'other'. This is a general trend of all philosophy that has its roots in the Protestantism of Northern Europe from the 16th Century onwards: its visceral dislike of Cartesianism in all its variants, including Spinozism. Hence this 'move' in Heidegger that is so disconcerting for all modern students of philosophy: this 'return to the Greeks', and a return to a controversy much older than anything to be found today: the controversy between Platonism and Aristotelianism, a controversy about the meaning of the word *metaphysics*. (The best easily understood book on this, in English, is Adorno's eponymous Metaphysics - Concept and Problems, of 2000.) One could mention the ‘querelle ancient et moderne’ here, since Heidegger does indeed pick up on some of that. He insists that if we want to understand intellectual currents in today's world (including the ferocious polemics concerning ethics, which always seems to end up with Darwin) we could do worse than go back to some rather fundamental distinctions about our mental processes first codified by the Greeks.

ii) I tend, personally, to put that 'aleitheia/veritas' distinction of Heidegger in relation to a somewhat more well-known one, a distinction used by both the phenomenologists and dialecticians since the war: that between 'thesis' and 'physis'. The latter then corresponds to the 'veritas', i.e. the notion that truth is a matter of 'intentio recta', something that is 'obvious' in the meaning of 'sense certainty': 'tree' means this large plant in front of me waving in the wind, not 'tree' in the sense of a symbol available to me as a 'normally socialised' speaker of the English language, one that I use to communicate this 'perception' to a second speaker of selfsame language. (This latter meaning, this 'thesis' aspect, the 'aleiteia' aspect, would then be the 'intentio obliqua' element to that word, that part of it that is not intelligible as part of an 'ordinary language' with a specific history and past.)

iii) Heidegger was the theorist 'par excellance' of German philosophy after WWI - and what he 'theorised about' was a 'world in crisis'. This was already there in a late work of his teacher Husserl: The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, and it's no doubt *this* aspect, this 'the-world-is-in-crisis-so-let's-find-out-why', that was so attractive to the Cape liberals, the Stellenbosch/Potch/Pretoria theologians after WWI, whose memories of the Boer War were a lot longer than those of their English-speaking compatriots. But there's an 'internal' reason for the popularity of Heidegger amongst Afrikaner intellectuals that was perhaps even more important than the explicitly political ones: that 'phenomenological' approach of which Heidegger was the most prominent exponent before WWII had something in common with the older Protestantism of the 17th and 18th Centuries. Namely this: like the whole hermeneutics tradition from Schleiermacher to Ricoeur, it's emphasis lies on texts, on interpretation, on the 'inside' of things. Theologians familiar with Arminius and Gomarus - the Jansenism of the Huegenots -, the Europe-wide controversy over Cartesianism, the 'all-rationalism' and 'pantheism' triggered by Spinoza - had no problem at all with a Heidegger who insisted on an intense and serious study of the Greek classics. They'd have said to themselves: huh, where's my Lipsius, where's my Pascal? There's nothing new about this approach, this emphasis on the immersion in canonic texts. That's been a constant of European Protestantism since 'Dort' (i.e. the Synod of Dordrecht 1618/1619), and the controversies between Remonstrants and Calvinists. 'Truth' requires the immersion in the 'great works', in the classics, in the canonic texts of the European tradition. Gadamer would be saying pretty much the same thing four hundred years later. The opposite to Truth is Method - the latter is great for technology but useless as an ethics.

iv) That is: the Afrikaner intellectuals recognised, in Heidegger, a spirit kindred to that of the DRC, an emphasis on interpretation, community, ethics, rather than on 'instrumental reason' and empire-building. ('Groot Constantia' is a direct reference to the stoicism taught at Leiden in the 1580's.) But then came the European disaster, and the decision that would in time lead to the end of the Afrikaners in Africa, at least as a culture: to rally behind Herzog rather than Smuts ... Heidegger "showed the cloven hoof too plainly in 1933" (a formulation of George Lichtheim, referring to Heideggers 'Rectoratrede' of that year); Afrikanerdom did the same by choosing Herzog over Smuts - though I'm old enough to remember Bram Fischer, just to show that they weren't all 'bittereinders'. Without a knowledge of history no philosophy, and vice versa..

Marcel Van der Watt : I've started putting some material online, in case you're interested: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Frederik_Van_Gelder/research