Heidegger and Unconcealment: Truth, Language, and History by Mark A. Wrathall
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Deception Is Good For the Soul

Conspiracy theorists have the right instinct: they are being deceived. Their mistake is not in taking what they’ve been told by Fox News and Q as more authoritative than the so-called mainstream media but that they attenuate their suspicions. They then fall into the trap of belief and become suckers.

According to Martin Heidegger, the world is continuously hiding from us. Essentially there is a conspiracy at large, not just among governments or big corporations but by the universe, to prevent us from knowing about what we casually call reality. It was Nietzsche who first insisted that “a perspectival, deceptive character belongs to existence,” thus suggesting that whatever it is we mean by the term reality isn’t even stable.

Heidegger has taken that insight and turned into a methodological principle. For him, the best we are able to achieve either philosophically or scientifically is a progressive ‘unconcealment’ of the world. Such unconcealment is prompted by the deception which confronts us continuously, not only in the lies of other people but also in the distortions of our senses and our lack of judgment about what we perceive.

But there’s a catch. The process of unconcealment doesn’t have a termination point in anything resembling what we call the truth, that is, a correspondence between a proposition and the way the world is. The reason for this indeterminateness is obvious - the way the world is, its ontology, is in a constant state of flux. What is ‘there’ depends on a complex of interests, history, cultural presumptions, and arbitrary designations of language among other things. As the author explains:

“The reason for this [indeterminacy] lies in the nature of unconcealment itself. There is no right way to be human, no uniquely right way to be an entity, no right way for the world to be organized, no single way that world disclosure works. As a result, all we can hope for in philosophy is an ever renewed and refined insight into the workings of unconcealment.”

So deception feeds our impulse to intellectual search, to scientific understanding, and indeed to conspiracy theories. But what our endeavours to unconceal must lead us to is… well, yet further layers of concealment. Progress cannot me measured in terms of some closer approximation to the truth, but only in terms of the increasingly scrupulous techniques we use to pursue the search for what is concealed. Advancement in addressing deception“consists in seeing and describing the phenomena of unconcealment more perspicuously, and communicating these insights more successfully.”

What we are doing constantly is “lifting things to salience,” that is, establishing, modifying, and changing, what is considered of importance. In a sense, therefore, we are thus discovering ourselves in our apparently infinite variability. The problem the conspiracy theorists have, therefore, is not their gullibility, or the zaniness of their speculations but what can be called their suspension of disbelief. They simply stop thinking at all. And this is fatal because

”[T]he task is to keep his or her thought constantly under way, trying out new ways to explore productively the philosophical domain, remaining on them as long as profitable, but also abandoning them and setting off in a different way when the former way is exhausted. The aim is to participate in unconcealment, bringing it to our awareness, heightening our sensitivity and responsiveness to it.”

Heidegger calls this continuous search for unconcealment a “way of being in the world.” He proposes this as one we are well-advised to adopt:

“It is precisely in the unstable seeing of the ‘world,’ a seeing that flickers with our moods, that the available shows itself in its specific wordliness, which is never the same from day to day.”

The alternative is some form of ideology that claims that it has overcome the inherent deception in the world. But a claim cannot be sustained because “were experience always clear and the world of perception populated with determinate objects, we would not be taken in by deceptive appearances.”

So more power to you who think the world is out to get you through paedophile politicians, poisonous contrails, rigged election machines, and invading aliens. You may be deceived but then so are we all. But please, please, do not let your quest get bogged down. Take it that the rest of us will remain deluded, and move on in your crusade to unconceal the hidden secrets of the universe. We are depending on you for inspiration. Don’t let us down. After all, as the Canadian psychologist Robert Hare has said, “If we believe in the fundamental goodness of man we’re doomed.”

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