Inquiry

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Why Tugendhat's Critique of Heidegger's Concept

of Truth Remains a Critical Problem

William H. Smith

To cite this article: William H. Smith (2007) Why Tugendhat's Critique of Heidegger's Concept of
Truth Remains a Critical Problem , Inquiry, 50:2, 156-179, DOI: 10.1080/00201740701239749

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/00201740701239749

Published online: 29 Mar 2007.

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Inquiry,
Vol. 50, No. 2, 156–179, April 2007

Why Tugendhat’s Critique of

Heidegger’s Concept of Truth
Remains a Critical Problem1

WILLIAM H. SMITH
Rice University, USA

(Received 28 June 2006)

ABSTRACT With what right and with what meaning does Heidegger use the term
‘truth’ to characterize Dasein’s disclosedness? This is the question at the focal point of
Ernst Tugendhat’s long-standing critique of Heidegger’s understanding of truth, one to
which he finds no answer in Heidegger’s treatment of truth in 144 of Being and Time or
his later work. To put the question differently: insofar as unconcealment or
disclosedness is normally understood as the condition for the possibility of
propositional truth rather than truth itself, what does it mean to say – as Heidegger
does – that disclosedness is the ‘‘primordial phenomenon of truth’’ and what justifies
that claim? The central aim of this paper is to show that Tugendhat’s critique remains
unanswered. Recent Heidegger scholarship, though it confronts Tugendhat, has not
produced a viable answer to his criticism, in part because it overlooks his basic question
and therefore misconstrues the thrust of his objections. Ultimately, the paper suggests
that what is needed is a re-evaluation of Heidegger’s analysis of truth in light of a more
accurate understanding of Tugendhat’s critique. The paper concludes by sketching the
profile of a more satisfactory reply to Tugendhat’s critical question, advocating a return
to Heidegger’s ‘existential’ analyses in Being and Time in order to locate the normative
resources Tugendhat finds lacking in Heidegger’s concept of truth.

Martin Heidegger’s concept of truth, first elaborated in 144 of Being and

Time and revisited by him many times thereafter, poses a difficult puzzle for
any interpreter. The puzzle has at least two aspects. First, there is the change
in Heidegger’s view of truth that occurred at the end of his career. In Being
and Time, Heidegger argued that unconcealment, or alētheia, was truth,
exemplified most primordially by Dasein’s disclosedness. Yet after almost

Correspondence Address: William H. Smith, Rice University, 6100 Main Street, MS-14
Houston, Texas 77005, USA. Email: smithwil@rice.edu
0020-174X Print/1502-3923 Online/07/020156–24 # 2007 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/00201740701239749
 Tugendhat’s Critique of Heidegger’s Concept of Truth 157

forty years of elaborating and defending this position, he disavowed the

association of unconcealment and truth, saying, ‘‘it was immaterial and
therefore misleading to call, alētheia, in the sense of clearing, ‘truth’.’’2
Second, there is the viability of Heidegger’s concept of truth. Was
Heidegger’s late retraction a mere shift in terminology, or was it indicative
of a deeper change, an acknowledgement that his earlier position was
untenable? If the latter is correct, then what are we to make of Heidegger’s
claim in Being and Time that ‘‘only with Dasein’s disclosedness is the
primordial phenomenon of truth attained’’?3 In other words, is the concept
of truth as unconcealment or disclosedness one that must be given up? If one
takes up either of these interpretative concerns, one inevitably finds at their
intersection the figure of Ernst Tugendhat.
In February of 1964 at the University of Heidelberg, Tugendhat gave a
lecture entitled ‘‘Heideggers Idee von Wahrheit’’. Tugendhat’s claim was
that Heidegger, with his understanding of truth as unconcealment, effaced
the normative dimension of truth and sacrificed its specific sense – the
characteristic of distinguishing between a mere uncovering of things from
one that reveals them just as they are in themselves – a criticism he later
elaborated at length in his book, Der Wahrheitsbegriff bei Husserl und
Heidegger. Since its initiation, Tugendhat’s apparently devastating critique
has not only bedeviled those sympathetic to Heidegger, other critics have
canonized it as a quintessential problem in Heidegger’s thought (e.g. Jürgen
Habermas, K. O. Apel) and developed it profitably for their own critical
appraisals of Heidegger as well (e.g. Christina Lafont).4 While much of the
interpretative debate in Heidegger scholarship has focused on Heidegger’s
retraction, its upshot, and Tugendhat’s role in precipitating Heidegger’s
change of mind,5 what I would like to bring to the fore here is the viability of
Heidegger’s concept of truth, and more specifically, the trenchancy of
Tugendhat’s critique itself.
In light of the recent treatment of Tugendhat’s criticism by Heidegger
scholars, one might come to believe that this long-standing problem has at
last been put to rest. To draw such a conclusion, this paper argues, is to be
misled. Despite the latest efforts of Heidegger commentators like Mark
Wrathall, Taylor Carman, and Daniel Dahlstrom, Tugendhat’s critique of
Heidegger’s concept of truth remains a critical problem. Although the
current work admirably takes on Tugendhat’s problematic, because it
essentially misrepresents his critique, it fails to respond to the central thrust
of his criticism. In short, as I argue below, no one has yet formulated a
successful reply to Tugendhat because the emphasis of his critique is
continually misplaced, and therefore the full force of his objections remains
unaddressed.
The aim of this paper is two-fold: (1) to bring to light the fact that
Tugendhat’s critique continues to be an outstanding problem for those who
find Heidegger’s understanding of truth compelling; and (2) to clear the way
158 William H. Smith

for a solution to Tugendhat’s critique that more accurately represents, and

thus more adequately responds, to what is at issue in his objections. Because
the second objective follows from achieving the first, the primary task of this
paper is to show how the core of Tugendhat’s critique has been passed over
in recent work by Heidegger scholars. The paper will proceed first by briefly
outlining Heidegger’s position and Tugendhat’s critique thereof, then after
addressing Wrathall, Carman, and Dahlstrom respectively, by arguing that
each fails to offer a sufficient response to the critical question that lies at the
heart of Tugendhat’s critique. The paper concludes by tracing the outline of
a more satisfactory reply to Tugendhat’s critique, suggesting that a return to
Heidegger’s ‘existential’ analyses in Being and Time may reveal the
normative resources Tugendhat could not find for Heidegger’s concept of
truth.

I. Heidegger’s concept of truth

Insofar as Tugendhat primarily focuses his critique on Being and Time, it
will be useful for those unfamiliar with Heidegger’s basic claims about truth
in that work to rehearse them very briefly now.6 In 144, Heidegger takes as
his point of departure our traditional understanding of truth: truth is that
which is consistent with reality – or as it appears in the old Scholastic slogan
– truth understood as adaequatio intellectus et rei. Implicit in this
understanding of truth are two notions: that of correspondence – the
predicate ‘‘true’’ applies only to propositions that correctly describe or
correspond to things just as they are – and that of judgment – for inevitably
it is some evaluative act or statement that is said to be accurate or ‘‘true’’ of
reality. Heidegger, however, means to abandon both correspondence and
judgment as starting points for understanding truth. Toward this end,
Heidegger lays out three objectives for 144: (a) to expose the ontological
foundations of the ‘‘traditional concept of truth’’, i.e. the correspondence
theory of truth, or truth as correctness; (b) to make visible the ‘‘primordial
phenomenon of truth’’ that underlies the correspondence theory and to
‘‘exhibit the way in which the traditional conception of truth has been
derived from this phenomenon’’; and (c) to clarify the kind of being truth
has and the ontological meaning of several ways truth is commonly
discussed (BT 257/214).
Heidegger’s argument begins in (a) with a phenomenological analysis of a
true assertion. That an assertion is ‘‘true’’ implies it measures up to the
entity as it is itself, e.g. the assertion that ‘‘the picture hanging on the wall is
askew’’ is confirmed, and therefore made true, by a picture on the wall,
tilting to one side (BT 260/217). As in Husserl, for Heidegger the measure
for a correct or incorrect assertion is ‘‘the entity’s showing itself in its self-
sameness’’ (BT 261/218); it is the entity itself that confirms the assertion and
makes it worthy of the predicate ‘‘true’’. Thus, Heidegger argues, the
 Tugendhat’s Critique of Heidegger’s Concept of Truth 159

being-true of an assertion in the traditional sense essentially means that it

‘‘points out, ‘lets’ the entity ‘be seen’ in its uncoveredness’’ (BT 261/218).
What is ‘‘true’’ about the assertion, then, is not some agreement between a
mental representation and its object, as some have postulated, but the
assertion as ‘‘being-uncovering’’, that is, the assertion as pointing out an
entity in the world, ‘‘uncovering’’ it, and allowing it to serve as a measure for
appraisal.
As Heidegger argues in (b), however, the intra-worldly uncovering of
assertions is possible only on the basis of Dasein as being-in-the-world (BT
261/219ff). That is, it is only insofar as an entity has already been disclosed
in a context of significance, a ‘‘world’’, that assertions or predications can
then be made of it. What is primarily ‘‘true’’ then, Heidegger contends, is
not the being-uncovering of an assertion, but the ‘‘being-uncovered
(uncoveredness)’’ of the entities themselves, the prior disclosure that makes
both the being-uncovering of assertions and, more broadly, the uncovering
of Dasein’s circumspective concern possible (BT 263/220). Insofar as the
uncoveredness of entities within the world is grounded in Dasein’s
disclosedness, as Heidegger claims to have shown earlier, he now concludes
that ‘‘only with Dasein’s disclosedness is the more primordial phenomenon
of truth attained’’ (BT 263/220). Here, finally, we have arrived at
Heidegger’s novel understanding of truth: truth is not a matter of correct
propositions or correspondence, but of ‘‘being-uncovering’’, and most
primordially, ‘‘disclosedness’’. This disclosure, which is unique to Dasein, is
opposed not to falsity, but rather to ‘‘hiddenness’’, or as Heidegger puts it,
to that which has been ‘‘covered up’’ and ‘‘disguised’’ (BT 265/222).
At this point, Heidegger’s treatment of truth in 144 is essentially
complete: Dasein’s disclosedness is the condition of the possibility of any
other kind of uncovering, and it is this original unconcealment, Heidegger
holds, that embodies the ancient sense of truth as alētheia.7 Heidegger uses
the remaining space in (b) to make good on his derivation claim and (c) to
describe the ontological connection and dependence of truth on Dasein. It is
important to note, however – as Tugendhat later does – that in reaching this
new understanding of truth, Heidegger does not take himself to have
supplanted the traditional understanding of truth as correctness. Rather, as
he writes, ‘‘in proposing our ‘definition of ‘‘truth’’ we have not shaken off
the tradition, but we have appropriated it primordially’’ (BT 262/220). The
question, as it will emerge in the next section, is whether this primordial
appropriation of the tradition took appropriate care to retain the crucial
normative aspects that are essential to any understanding of truth.

II. Tugendhat’s critique

On Tugendhat’s reading of 144, Heidegger phenomenologically interprets
the traditional truth-relation ‘‘correspondence’’ as ‘‘uncovering’’, and then,
160 William H. Smith

without justification, extends this notion of truth from propositional

uncovering to all kinds of uncovering, and ultimately, to Dasein’s
disclosedness in general. The critical question for Tugendhat is with ‘‘what
right with what meaning’’ does Heidegger use the term ‘truth’ to
characterize the conditions for the possibility of the truth of assertions?8
More pointedly: though clearly prior and necessary for the traditional
conception of propositional truth, how can these ontological conditions (i.e.
‘uncovering’, ‘disclosedness’) be rightly understood as truth themselves?
According to Tugendhat, the weight of Heidegger’s two-step treatment of
truth in 144(a)-(b) falls on the first step: the thesis that the truth of an
assertion lies in its ‘‘being-uncovering’’. ‘‘Once this has been conceded’’,
Tugendhat writes, ‘‘everything else follows almost deductively’’ (HIT,
p. 229). The crucial passage for Tugendhat is the penultimate paragraph of
(a).9 To this point, Tugendhat notes, Heidegger has merely recapitulated in
his own words Husserl’s argument in the Sixth Logical Investigation;
Heidegger’s decisive advance beyond Husserl – which Heidegger does not
even present as his own step – is discernable only when the three
formulations of truth found in the section are juxtaposed. In Tugendhat’s
words, the three theses are (HIT, p. 230–1):
(1) ‘‘The assertion is true when it so indicates or discloses the state of
affairs just as it is in itself.’’
(2) ‘‘The assertion is true means: it discloses the state of affairs in itself.’’
(3) ‘‘The assertion is true means: it uncovers the state of affairs.’’
Heidegger treats these formulations interchangeably, but for Tugendhat
there is a vital difference to be noted.10 In (3) Heidegger eliminates, without
explanation, both the crucial ‘in itself’ and ‘just as’ clauses: ‘‘The Being-true
(truth) of the assertion must be understood as Being-uncovering’’ (BT,
p. 261/218). In other words, ‘the assertion is true’ means it is uncovering; the
assertion is true because to assert is to pick out, to discover, to-be-
uncovering. Only with this last unjustified shift, Tugendhat writes, ‘‘does
Heidegger explicitly distance himself from Husserl and reach his own
concept of truth which, from now on, he upholds in this formulation alone’’
(HIT, p. 231). For Tugendhat, what is made clear in this final formulation,
insofar as the ‘just as’ and ‘in itself’ clauses are dispensed with, is that ‘how’
the entity is uncovered is superfluous for Heidegger’s concept of truth: truth
is simply the being-uncovering of the assertion. Yet this feature, which at
first appears as Heidegger’s advance on Husserl, is Heidegger’s critical flaw.
The problem is that the word ‘uncovering’ is ambiguous – it has both a
broad and narrow sense. Broadly, ‘uncovering’ means ‘to point out’ in
general, and as Tugendhat argues, ‘‘in this sense every assertion uncovers,
the false just as well as the true’’ (HIT, p. 232). In what Tugendhat calls ‘‘the
narrow and pregnant sense’’, ‘uncovering’ is the unique feature of true
assertions, while in contrast, false assertions merely ‘cover up’. Heidegger’s
 Tugendhat’s Critique of Heidegger’s Concept of Truth 161

new formulation of truth ‘‘only becomes enlightening’’ Tugendhat contends,

on this narrow reading; that is, if one claims Heidegger needs neither the
‘just as’ nor ‘in itself’ because only a true assertion uncovers an entity as it is
in itself, rendering further qualifications superfluous (HIT, p. 232). On
Tugendhat’s reading, however, Heidegger seems to go the other way:
‘‘Heidegger now says that, in the false assertion, the entity is ‘in a certain
sense already uncovered and still not represented’’’.11 But if this is the case,
Tugendhat writes, ‘‘the covering up of the false assertion does not exclude a
certain uncovering’’, which therefore indicates the broad reading of the term
‘uncovering’ (HIT, p. 232).
What is problematic about this conclusion is that true and false
statements are indistinguishable on the broad understanding of ‘uncover-
ing’. If false assertions uncover as well as the true, as Heidegger allows, then
we are forced to say that in a false assertion, an entity is not fully hidden,
but instead partly hidden and partly uncovered. As Tugendhat puts it, ‘‘the
false assertion would be put together in part out of truth and in part out of
ignorance’’ (HIT, p. 233). Of course, Tugendhat concludes, Heidegger never
meant to say this. Thus, for Tugendhat, because even false statements
successfully uncover entities in the broad sense – only not as the entities
actually are in themselves – truth as ‘‘being-uncovering’’ cannot account for
the necessary difference between true and false statements. Instead,
Tugendhat argues, ‘‘the specific sense of truth is, as it were, submerged in
the notion of uncovering as apophansis [i.e. pointing out in general]’’ (HIT,
p. 232). For Tugendhat, then, if ‘uncovering’ is going to be a determination
of truth at all, it must make use of the ‘just as’ or ‘in itself’ clause, the very
qualifications it was supposed to render otiose: ‘‘it is simply not possible to
get around the supplement ‘as it is itself’ in the course of characterizing the
true assertion’’, he writes (HIT, p. 233).
With this critical problem identified in (a), Tugendhat turns his attention
to (b). What he finds there is the same ambiguity repeated at another level:
the use of ‘uncovering’ becomes equivocal when Heidegger broadens the
application of his concept of truth, employing it to describe not only
assertions but also the meaning-horizon of Dasein’s understanding. As
Tugendhat writes, what Heidegger is able to accomplish in (a) is applied
immediately in (b) as ‘‘an unusual extension of the concept of truth over and
beyond the domain of assertion’’.12 This extension is itself two-fold.
First, on Tugendhat’s reading, Heidegger reasons from the thesis that
‘truth is being-uncovering’ to the conclusion that ‘‘in fact all letting be
encountered of inner-worldly beings is ‘true’’’, a move based on the premise
that ‘uncovering’ pertains to Dasein’s circumspective concern and not just
to assertions.13 Heidegger is now caught in an equivocation: in order for
Heidegger ‘‘to carry truth over’’ to the uncovering of circumspective
concern, the truth of the assertion must be understood as a function of
uncovering in a broad sense, that is, ‘‘not in the way it uncovers but only in
162 William H. Smith

that it uncovers’’ (HIT, p. 236). Thus, the ambiguity latent in thesis (3),
‘‘which is only insightful in so far as one takes the term [‘uncovering’] in the
narrow sense’’, has now been utilized by Heidegger to characterize concern
as a mode of truth ‘‘simply because it uncovers’’ (HIT, p. 236). Again for
Tugendhat, what is initially most promising about Heidegger’s position –
namely, ‘‘that Heidegger should have extended disclosure beyond intention-
ality’’ and thereby made gains for the problem of truth – in fact becomes his
most incorrigible flaw (HIT, p. 236). Tugendhat writes: ‘‘Instead of
broadening the specific concept of truth, Heidegger simply gave the word
truth another meaning. The broadening of the concept of truth, from the
truth of assertion to all modes of disclosing, becomes trivial if one sees the
truth of assertion as consisting simply in the fact that it is in general
disclosive’’ (HIT, p. 236).
Second, on Tugendhat’s reading, because Heidegger has already shown
that all uncovering of inner-worldly beings is itself founded on Dasein’s
disclosedness, he is able to conclude that the ‘‘disclosure of Dasein itself as
being-in-the-world, the disclosure of its world, is the ‘most original truth’’’
(HIT, p. 236). With this final move, insofar as the disclosure of Dasein’s
horizon of understanding is a feature of Dasein’s existence that simply
happens or does not happen, Tugendhat believes Heidegger makes truth
into an event. While Tugendhat allows that the question of whether a world-
horizon as such is ‘true’ is a meaningful – and even desirable – question, it is
precisely this question that Heidegger makes untenable by equating ‘truth’
with the disclosedness of any and every world-horizon. ‘‘That he calls
disclosure in and of itself truth’’, Tugendhat writes, ‘‘leads to the result that
[this disclosure] is precisely not related to the truth but is protected from the
question of truth’’ (HIT, p. 238). In other words, because the world-horizon
itself is simply defined as ‘truth’, ‘‘it becomes pointless to inquire into the
truth of this horizon since that would only mean inquiring into the truth of a
truth’’ (HIT, p. 237). What is troubling for Tugendhat is that this disclosure
retains the name ‘truth’, yet has no obvious recourse to a critical norm that
determines the success and failure of this disclosure. What is covered over by
Heidegger’s ‘‘simple equation of disclosure and truth’’ is precisely this
normative deficit, namely, that disclosedness has no resources to account for
the specific sense essential to any understanding of truth. For Tugendhat,
then, Heidegger’s understanding of truth as disclosedness not only converts
truth into its opposite, but also uncritically embraces – rather than puts to
the test – the opacity of this disclosure. That is, insofar as Heidegger
understands truth as Dasein’s historical world-projection, he merely accepts
the arbitrariness and relativity of this disclosure as part of his notion of
truth (HIT, p. 238).
In sum, the central thrust of Tugendhat’s critique is that Heidegger
nowhere justifies the right of ‘being-uncovering’ or ‘disclosure’ to be called
truth. Guided by his critical question, Tugendhat’s analysis of Heidegger’s
 Tugendhat’s Critique of Heidegger’s Concept of Truth 163

understanding of truth unearths two crucial problems in Heidegger’s

account: first, because Heidegger equivocally employs the term ‘uncovering’
in his phenomenological account of the correspondence-relation of true
propositions, the specific sense of truth is effaced at the level of assertions;
second, compounding the first problem, because Heidegger claims that
primordial truth simply is Dasein’s disclosedness, he renounces any claim to
critical consciousness at the level of world-disclosure. On Tugendhat’s
reading, because being-uncovering and disclosedness have no recourse to a
normative criterion that would account for their ability to differentiate
between the success and failure of particular ‘uncoverings’ or ‘disclosures’,
they are inadequate as definitions of truth: they lack the critical dimension
or ‘specific sense’ that is absolutely necessary for them to be understood as
truth. As a result, Tugendhat ultimately contends, Heidegger’s philosophy
as a whole lacks any appeal to critical consciousness; as he puts it:
‘‘Heidegger tied the philosophy of subjectivity down to the dogmatism of
self-certainty’’ (HIT, p. 240).

III. Recent attempts to respond

Though many commentators know of Tugendhat’s criticism of Heidegger,
few have realized how difficult Tugendhat’s critique is to overcome. One
who has is Christina Lafont.14 As a defender of Tugendhat, she complains
that he is often unfairly brushed aside by many Heidegger interpreters
writing in German. According to Lafont, the standard dismissal of
Tugendhat is completed in just two steps. First, one argues that ‘‘he
dogmatically presupposes the notion of propositional truth as the only
acceptable meaning of truth’’ (HLWD, p. 115). Second, one objects to this
‘‘supposed dogmatism’’ by arguing that Heidegger ‘‘does not have
propositional truth in mind at all’’, but instead aims at ‘disclosedness’ or
‘unconcealment’ (HLWD, p. 115). According to this standard procedure,
one then moves on to clarify this ‘‘other phenomenon’’ without considering
Tugendhat’s critique any further, the idea being that Tugendhat’s critique is
‘‘utterly external to Heidegger’s enterprise’’ and therefore ‘‘neutralized’’ by
the first step (HLWD, p. 116). ‘‘But in this way’’, Lafont points out, ‘‘the
central point of Tugendhat’s critique is swept under the rug, namely, ‘what
justification and what significance does it have that Heidegger chooses
‘truth’, of all words, to designate this other phenomenon [i.e. being-
uncovering or disclosedness]?’’ (HLWD, p. 116). This is exactly the point
being made here: as we will see, it is precisely Tugendhat’s critical question
that the recent work of Heidegger commentators overlooks. The represen-
tatives in this case, Wrathall, Carman, and Dahlstrom, all repeat versions of
the ‘standard treatment’ of Tugendhat, and do so without ever recognizing
the illegitimacy of this argumentative pattern. A brief evaluation is sufficient
to reveal this shortcoming in each commentator.
164 William H. Smith

(A) Wrathall
In his article ‘‘Heidegger and truth as correspondence’’, Mark Wrathall’s
first move is to single out Tugendhat as an example of a commentator who
trades on the ambiguity between Heidegger’s use of ‘truth’ to refer to
unconcealment and ‘truth’ as a reference to propositional truth.15 As he puts
it, Tugendhat’s view represents ‘‘a misunderstanding of Heidegger’s work –
a misunderstanding which grows out of conflating Heidegger’s views on
propositional truth with his discussion of unconcealment – ‘the ground of
the possibility’ of propositional truth’’ (HaTaC, p. 70). Once this conflation
is cleared up, Wrathall argues that Heidegger ‘‘accepts a central insight into
propositional truth – namely that propositional entities are true in virtue of
the way the world is – while denying a theory of correspondence gives us an
adequate definition of truth’’ (HaTaC, p. 70). Wrathall’s thesis, contra
Tugendhat, is that propositional truth is not reducible to unconcealment in
Heidegger’s work, nor is it intended as a replacement of truth as
‘correctness’; instead, Heidegger’s claim is simply that unconcealment is
the condition for the possibility of propositional truth, which identifies a
second sense of truth – ‘ontological’ or ‘primordial’ truth (HaTaC, p. 71).
It should be clear, however, that Wrathall is asking the wrong questions,
namely: ‘Does Heidegger ‘reduce’ truth to disclosedness?’ (HaTaC, p. 72)
and ‘Does Heidegger understand truth as correspondence or reject it as
such?’ (HaTaC, p. 69, 73). Wrathall attacks these points as if they constitute
the essence of Tugendhat’s critique, when in fact they do not. This is not to
say that Wrathall fails to propose demanding interpretative questions, for
example, whether or not the penultimate paragraph of 144(a) holds three
interchangeable definitions of truth, as Tugendhat contends, or that theses
(2) and (3) are in fact separate claims altogether, as Wrathall argues
(HaTaC, p. 72–73). The point is rather that this sort of argument is
insufficient as a reply to the real force of Tugendhat’s critique. Tugendhat,
like Wrathall, already understands that Heidegger intends truth as
disclosedness to elucidate the ‘‘ontological foundation’’ of a proposition’s
ability to be true; Tugendhat also understands that disclosedness reveals the
ontological conditions for the possibility for truth and falsity of proposi-
tions. Tugendhat’s critical question, however, is why call these conditions
for the possibility of correctness ‘truth’, be it qualified as ‘ontological’ or
‘primordial’? Whether Heidegger ‘reduces’ truth to unconcealment, or
alternatively, whether Heidegger accepts truth as correspondence is
irrelevant to the question of whether unconcealment itself deserves the title
of ‘truth’ at all, and this is precisely the question that Wrathall neglects.
However, if we take seriously Wrathall’s analysis of Heidegger’s late
retraction of the connection between unconcealment (alētheia) and truth, it
seems Wrathall forfeits his right to confront Tugendhat’s critical question
altogether. If Wrathall is simply prepared to say that Heidegger’s
 Tugendhat’s Critique of Heidegger’s Concept of Truth 165

‘‘abandonment of the use of ‘truth’ to name the conditions of the possibility

of truth, however, wasn’t so much a change in doctrine as it was a shift in
terminology’’, then he has already conceded the point to Tugendhat
(HaTaC, p. 71). That is, if truth as disclosedness simply names the
conditions of possibility of correctness, if it is merely a misnomer that has
no substantive bearing on Heidegger’s notion of truth once it is dropped, as
Wrathall apparently holds, then disclosedness indeed never had a right to
the name of truth.16 If this is the case, then Wrathall has not just swept
Tugendhat’s critical question under the rug, but grants Tugendhat’s central
objection without contention. Wrathall, it seems, hardly offers a promising
starting point for rebutting Tugendhat’s critique.

(B) Carman
Writing in response to Wrathall, Taylor Carman agrees that Heidegger’s
account is neither primarily an analysis of propositional truth nor meant to
supplant the traditional concept of propositional truth as correspondence;
rather, Heidegger is offering an account of the ontological conditions of truth
as correspondence.17 But this does not go far enough for Carman. He writes:

Wrathall’s reconstruction [of Heidegger’s position] becomes question-

able, however, precisely by rendering Heidegger’s argument so
unobjectionable, indeed so innocuous. For Wrathall’s reading of 144
and related texts threatens to reduce Heidegger’s conclusion to a
virtual triviality, namely, that if no entities were disclosed or
uncovered by Dasein in any way, then assertions could never manage
to point anything out and be either true or false with respect to them.
(HA, p. 259–60)

For Carman, although Wrathall’s reading of Heidegger improves on ‘‘the

implausible claim’’ often ascribed to Heidegger by Tugendhat and the
supporters of his critique – i.e. that ‘‘propositional truth can be either
analyzed or supplanted by the concept of uncovering or disclosedness’’ –
Wrathall fails to make much progress beyond that point, in the end only
putting forward ‘‘the eminently plausible but philosophically uninteresting
point that the practice of assertion presupposes Dasein’s disclosedness’’
(HA, p. 260)
Carman instead attempts to stake out a middle way between Wrathall and
Tugendhat. While the former is ‘‘innocuous but trivializing’’ and the latter is
‘‘reductive and untenable’’, Carman believes his solution is neither: one
must read Heidegger’s concept of truth as hermeneutic salience.

What then is truth as uncovering? As I understand it, it is neither

simply Dasein’s disclosedness nor the correctness of sentences and
166 William H. Smith

propositional attitudes as they correspond to the way things are. It is

rather the peculiar capacity of interpretations – demonstrative,
expressive comportments of all kinds – to bring phenomena to light
against a background of prior practical uncoveredness, so that we can
then understand assertions as being either correct or incorrect, that is,
as either true or false relative to the way things are (HA, p. 261).

For Carman, understanding Heidegger’s notion of truth is a matter of

connecting ‘truth as unconcealment’ with discourse, where discourse is ‘‘the
expressive-communicative intelligibility governing our meaningful gestures
and marking them as sensible, reasonable, and well formed, whether they
happen to be true or false, or even propositionally articulated at all’’(HA,
p. 262). On Carman’s reading, Heidegger is not offering a new theory of
truth, but instead giving a phenomenological account of the ‘‘hermeneutic
conditions of our commonsense conception of truth as correctness and as
consisting in a kind of agreement with the way things are’’, or put
differently, of the ‘‘hermeneutic salience in virtue of which we come to
understand truth prephilosophically as a kind of agreement between
thoughts and things, between words and the world’’ (HA, p. 262, 263).
The key to Carman’s ‘middle’ position involves recognizing that the
discourse of our community has already interpreted for us the standards
that shape our thoughts and speech as intelligible communication. As
Carman puts it, above the level of the sheer intelligibility of entities that
emerges from our practices, yet below the level of assertions made about
entities as things present-at-hand in terms of correctness, there is the level of
discourse, which provides for us ‘‘the particular way in which we are prone
to express and communicate what makes sense to us as it makes sense’’ (HA,
p. 261).
The advance Carman’s position makes over Wrathall’s non-contentious
understanding of ‘truth as unconcealment’ is that he attempts to identify the
normative dimension Tugendhat found lacking in Heidegger’s account.
Read as hermeneutic salience, ‘truth as unconcealment’ does not merely
stand for another ‘background’ condition for the possibility of propositional
truth, but in addition identifies the normative conditions for the success or
failure of our thoughts and speech as supplied by discourse. As Carman puts
it, truth as hermeneutic salience is ‘‘the way in which what we say and think
is always already organized and articulated according to some dominant
interpretation of things that holds sway in our local discursive commu-
nity’’.18 To say that disclosedness is truth, then, is to say that Dasein’s
understanding ‘‘always has some definite cultural and historical shape’’ that
is formed by discourse (HA, p. 261), or put differently, that ‘truth as
unconcealment’ should be understood as ‘‘the hermeneutic salience that
allows expressive gestures to bring things to light as subject to sensible and
relevant assertoric discourse, both true and false’’ (HA, p. 262).
 Tugendhat’s Critique of Heidegger’s Concept of Truth 167

But Carman is too facile here, and he sidesteps rather than confronts
Tugendhat’s critique. First of all, Carman never squarely answers
Tugendhat’s critical question: with what meaning and what justification
can this condition for the possibility of propositional truth, hermeneutic
salience, be called ‘primordial truth’? That discourse illuminates a ground of
interpretive prominence on which apophantic assertions can be true or false
does not yet explain how this concept of hermeneutic salience can be
understood as truth. It is left to the reader to make good on the claim that
the unfamiliar phenomenon identified under the name ‘truth as unconceal-
ment’ – in this case hermeneutic salience described as the ‘‘ontological
condition of truth conventionally understood’’ – can be regarded as a
definition of truth itself (HA, p. 259).
It could be argued on Carman’s behalf that the implication – though it is
not made explicit – is that hermeneutic salience offers us an understanding
of truth because the norms provided by one’s discursive community recoup
the normative dimension of truth that was lost, according to Tugendhat, in
Heidegger’s formulation of disclosedness as primordial truth. However, this
moves us into a second problem: to make discourse the normative ground of
truth seems to reinforce rather than combat Tugendhat’s claim that
Heidegger’s understanding of truth ultimately ends in dogmatism. To say, as
Carman does, that hermeneutic salience is the ‘‘dominant interpretation’’ of
things that holds sway in our discursive community explicitly ties truth
down to some definite cultural and historical world-horizon. But this makes
truth qua hermeneutic salience utterly relative to one’s discursive commu-
nity, an understanding of truth which no longer resembles the ‘critical’
notion of truth we are most interested in, namely, a notion of truth that is
trans-historically true. It is precisely this notion of truth – one which
transcends Dasein’s discrete world disclosure – that Heidegger appears to
forfeit on Tugendhat’s reading. Rather than give an indication how the loss
of a critical perspective on Dasein’s disclosure might be overcome, Carman
seems to further entrench the problem of relativism that Tugendhat already
highlighted in Heidegger’s account.
If one were to diagnose the basic error of Carman’s account, it is that he
misconstrues Tugendhat’s critique, and consequently, adopts the wrong
argumentative response to it. Like Wrathall, Carman first denies that
Heidegger is concerned with analyzing or displacing propositional truth,
and second argues instead that under the rubric ‘truth as unconcealment’
Heidegger is attempting to clarify the ontological conditions for truth as
correctness – for Carman, this amounts to ‘hermeneutic salience’; for
Wrathall, ‘ontological truth’. However, to clarify the meaning of
hermeneutic salience as if it refuted Tugendhat’s critique, or to point out
that hermeneutic salience has access to a normative dimension that
Wrathall’s understanding of ‘ontological truth’ lacked (without qualifying
how this justifies it as an understanding of truth), as Carman does, testifies
168 William H. Smith

to the fact that this approach in general misses the point – for it implies
Tugendhat’s criticism is primarily that Heidegger equates propositional
truth with or reduces it to unconcealment, and therefore, seeks to displace
the traditional understanding of truth. However, as has been argued here,
this is a straw man – in fact Tugendhat’s critique is that ‘unconcealment’ or
‘disclosure’ have no right to the title of truth, that they cannot be
meaningfully understood as truth at all. Because Carman misrepresents
Tugendhat’s argument in the same fashion as Wrathall, albeit with more
nuance, he unsurprisingly fails to respond to the full force of Tugendhat’s
criticism in an adequate fashion as well.

(C) Dahlstrom
Unlike Wrathall and Carman, Daniel Dahlstrom’s treatment of Tugendhat
is immediately more promising, not only because he has Tugendhat as his
primary interlocutor (and therefore offers a more sophisticated argument
against him), but also because he appears to acknowledge Tugendhat’s
critical question at the outset of his account of Heidegger’s understanding of
truth. He writes as an aside: ‘‘Tugendhat, it bears noting, is not denying the
phenomenon of disclosedness, but rejecting the use of the term ‘truth’ to
designate it.’’19 This is, of course, exactly the point we have been
emphasizing: that Tugendhat’s critique turns on justifying the right and
the meaning of being-uncovering and disclosedness to be understood as
truth. Dahlstrom’s characterization of the central thrust of Tugendhat’s
critique also seems to be on the mark:

Tugendhat is not simply objecting to the fact that Heidegger turns

from the problem of truth and toward another theme (disclosedness).
What principally bothers him is that this theme takes the place of the
problem of truth and, indeed, does so on the basis of equivocations. In
the process, the specific meaning of ‘truth’ is not explained but
‘‘obscured’’ and ultimately ‘‘forfeited’’.20

Given this description, Dahlstrom proceeds to break Tugendhat’s critique

into two parts: first, the main charge that Heidegger ‘‘carelessly and
dangerously forfeits the specific sense of truth’’ with his characterizations of
truth as being-uncovering and disclosedness; second, the lesser charge that
Heidegger commits a non sequitur in support of his contention that truth is
disclosedness, i.e. that ‘‘from the fact that disclosedness is a condition of
uncovering and thereby of propositional truth, Heidegger draws the
conclusion that disclosedness must itself be a type of truth’’ (HCT, p. 397,
395). Dahlstrom’s thesis in reply to Tugendhat is also two-fold: first, that
‘‘Heidegger’s way of proceeding does not cancel or forfeit the principle of
bivalence’’, and second, that ‘‘this adherence to the principle of bivalence
 Tugendhat’s Critique of Heidegger’s Concept of Truth 169

does not prohibit (as Tugendhat erroneously maintains) a consistent and

meaningful interpretation of a sense of truth that is distinct from, and
presupposed by, perceptual and propositional truth’’ (HCT, p. 398).
Dahlstrom addresses the lesser charge first, and to begin, he grants that
Tugendhat’s non sequitur objection seems to be right. In order for
Heidegger’s inference that disclosedness is ‘original truth’ to follow from
the fact that disclosedness is the ultimate condition of the possibility for the
truth of assertions, there must be ‘‘something further’’ that justifies
Heidegger’s interpretation of disclosedness as primordial truth (HCT,
p. 399–400). Dahlstrom locates the missing justification in Heidegger’s
analysis of sense and his distinction of three senses or hermeneutic
horizons.21 On the basis of these distinctions, Dahlstrom argues that
Heidegger characterizes disclosedness as the ‘most original truth’ because
disclosedness (i.e. the existential-hermeneutic sense or Dasein’s temporal-
world horizon), ‘‘discloses itself and, indeed, as it is in itself’’ (HCT, p. 402).
As the so-to-speak ‘highest’ level of horizon (sense), Dasein’s disclosedness
cannot help but disclose itself as it is in itself: there is no other horizon
against which it could ‘fail’ to disclose itself, or cover over itself. In other
words, however Dasein’s temporal-world horizon discloses itself, that
horizon simply is what it discloses itself to be; thus, it always succeeds in
disclosing itself just as it is in itself, and therefore, must always be a ‘truth’.
Dahlstrom continues, ‘‘Heidegger labels this truth ‘‘most original’’ because
it is the horizon of every other ‘‘truth’’, that is, because it is necessarily –
albeit unthematically – presupposed by (posited with) every other truth’’
(HCT, p. 402). Heidegger is entitled to call disclosedness ‘original truth’,
then, because it ‘‘reveals itself as it is in itself’’ – and is therefore true – and
because ‘‘this self-disclosing co-constitutes the process whereby entities are
uncovered or concealed’’ – it is therefore original (HCT, p. 402).
The initial promise of Dahlstrom’s account, however, begins to unravel
already in this reply to the lesser non sequitur charge. What Dahlstrom’s
thesis promises to deliver over and against Tugendhat’s critique is a ‘‘sense
of truth’’ that is distinct from and presupposed by propositional truth. What
he in fact delivers, if his analysis of Heidegger’s notions of sense and
disclosedness is correct, is a particular truth, namely, Dasein’s disclosure of
its temporal-world horizon. Conspicuously absent, however, is some
explanation of how this truth (albeit the ‘most original’) offers us a new,
critical understanding of truth itself. Dahlstrom’s failure to articulate this
distinct sense of truth is not insurmountable however. Presumably, we can
abstract from the instance of truth (i.e. disclosedness), to the larger concept
of truth that it is said to embody. The question, then, is on what
understanding is ‘self-showing’ criterial for truth?
But here an equivocation emerges at the very foundation of Dahlstrom’s
reply: on his account, disclosedness is the ‘most original truth’ because, qua
‘self-showing’, it uncovers itself just as it is in itself, and also co-constitutes the
170 William H. Smith

horizon for every other instance of truth. Yet this uncovering ‘just as it is in
itself’ emerges as distinctively normative only when we are discussing truth in
terms of correctness. In fact, it is just this kind of uncovering or ‘‘the entity’s
showing itself in its selfsameness’’ that features prominently in Heidegger’s
account of propositional truth in 144 (BT, p. 261/218). Yet if Dahlstrom
intends to call disclosedness the ‘original truth’ based on the criteria specified
by correctness, then he undercuts his own reply to Tugendhat. Dahlstrom’s
claim is that Heidegger has a distinct, consistent, and meaningful interpreta-
tion of a sense of truth that must be presupposed by perceptual and
propositional truth. However, if Dahlstrom means to justify his characteriza-
tion of disclosedness as the ‘original truth’ on the grounds that it discloses
itself just as it is in itself, then we have not really been supplied with some new
sense of truth after all: rather, what we encounter is a curious extension of the
norms of propositional truth into the very phenomenon that was supposed to
ground it. On this reading, Heidegger would have to presuppose the very
notion of truth he sets out to clarify, namely, correctness, in order for the end
result of his phenomenological reflection to be meaningful; he would not have
advanced our understanding of truth at all.
Dahlstrom’s reply to the non sequitur charge, then, gets no real traction
on the problem that Tugendhat raises. Rather, because in calling
disclosedness the ‘original truth’ he merely appeals to its self-showing
ability, Dahlstrom does not go far enough – he leaves unclarified the
grounds on which disclosedness is said to offer a new, critical understanding
of truth. Dahlstrom’s promise to show how disclosedness can be understood
as a ‘distinct sense of truth’, an understanding which ought to turn away
Tugendhat’s claims to the contrary, in the end amounts to an understanding
of disclosedness that is merely parasitical on correctness. This is clearly
insufficient as an interpretation of Heidegger, however, for Heidegger’s aim
is precisely to go beyond propositional truth, not to couple disclosedness as
primordial truth with correctness once again. In this light, Dahlstrom’s reply
seems less a substantive development of Heidegger’s thought than a
desperate measure adopted in the face of Tugendhat’s critique.
Dahlstrom’s reply to Tugendhat’s main charge fares little better. As
Dahlstrom recapitulates, Tugendhat’s main charge claims ‘‘that Heidegger
effectively abandons the specific sense of truth’’ with his characterization of
disclosedness as truth, and therefore also forfeits his appeal to critical
consciousness (HCT, p. 403, 303). Dahlstrom’s reply to this objection, offered
first in truncated form (HCT, p. 403–7) and then again after a long
comparison with Kant’s notion of transcendental truth (HCT, p. 421–3), is
simply that Heidegger does not give up bivalence in characterizing
disclosedness as the ‘original truth’. Instead, Dahlstrom writes, the specific
sense of truth is not compromised or sacrificed but ‘‘continues to be upheld’’
(HCT, p. 405). For Dahlstrom, Heidegger’s ‘‘entire analysis aims at
interpreting or laying out – disclosing – that disclosedness as it is in itself’’
 Tugendhat’s Critique of Heidegger’s Concept of Truth 171

(HCT, p. 406). On his reading, the ‘‘transcendental argument’’ of Being and

Time is to show ‘‘how other concepts of truth (perceptual truth, propositional
truth)’’ must presuppose the original character of truth as disclosedness,
‘‘such that this original truth co-constitutes the derivative truths and thereby
discloses itself’’ (HCT, p. 406). However, Dahlstrom contends, insofar as
Heidegger’s interpretation ‘‘takes the form of a transcendental argument or a
scientific discourse, the original truth is construed in assertions for which
there are contraries’’ (HCT, p. 406, 423). Thus, he argues, ‘‘propositional
truth or, more precisely, the bivalency criterion of meaningful talk about
truth, on which Tugendhat rightly insists, remains in force’’ (HCT, p. 423). In
other words, Heidegger retains a claim to bivalence because his statements
about the ‘most original truth’ make a claim to correctness: Heidegger both
holds his interpretation of disclosedness to this standard, and utilizes
assertions which can be either true or false in his account of the ‘original
truth’, thereby keeping the specific sense of truth in play (HCT, p. 406).
Dahlstrom’s suggestion here, like his previous reply to the non sequitur
charge, fails to make contact with Tugendhat’s critique. The structure of
Dahlstrom’s argument is such that, in order to show that Heidegger does
not ‘‘careless and recklessly’’ forfeit the specific sense of truth, he must first
show that disclosedness can be understood as the ‘original truth’, a sense of
truth distinct from and presupposed by propositional and perceptual truth.
With this shown, he can argue that Heidegger does not sacrifice the specific
sense of truth because Heidegger appeals to it in the course of his
transcendental argument. However, the latter claim is moot if one cannot
show that disclosedness offers a distinct sense of truth, which is precisely
what Dahlstrom cannot do. Consequently, the force of Tugendhat’s critique
remains unaddressed – how can disclosedness itself function as an
understanding of truth? To say that Heidegger works within and appeals
to the normative constraints of correctness in developing disclosedness as
the ‘original truth’ says nothing about whether or not truth understood as
disclosedness retains the specific sense of bivalence. More precisely,
Dahlstrom’s assertion that Heidegger retains the specific sense of truth
because bivalence is binding on his work reveals nothing about whether or
not Heidegger’s conclusion – i.e. that disclosedness is the primordial
phenomenon of truth – can itself retain the specific sense of truth as part of
its normative valence. In short, Tugendhat’s criticism that Heidegger forfeits
the specific sense of truth is never adequately confronted by Dahlstrom,
largely because Dahlstrom never describes how disclosedness itself can be
understood and justified as truth in a sense distinct from correctness.

IV. The way forward

As it has been argued here, Tugendhat’s critique of Heidegger’s concept of
truth remains a critical problem because nowhere do we have an answer to
172 William H. Smith

the question of what justifies disclosedness as a viable notion of truth. How

is it that the disclosure of Dasein’s world-horizon has recourse to a
normative dimension, to some critical aspect that is necessary for it to be
understood as truth? It is this question that the recent efforts in Heidegger
scholarship have not answered. Each of the interpretations surveyed in this
essay either failed to give appropriate weight to Tugendhat’s critical
question or failed to acknowledge it at all. The outcome, put simply, is that
Tugendhat’s critique stands.
But for those sympathetic to Heidegger’s understanding of truth, where
does this leave us? Are we forced to accept Apel’s thesis that Heidegger
ought never to have called disclosedness ‘truth’ and that Heidegger’s
retraction was a direct response to Tugendhat?22 Lafont, for one, argues
that this is precisely what we should do. She claims, ‘‘Heidegger himself
seems to have been one of the few authors to have appreciated the value of
[Tugendhat’s] argument (or to take notice of it at all)’’ (HLWD, p. 116). For
Lafont, Heidegger’s statement that ‘‘to raise the question of unconcealment
is not yet to raise the question of truth’’ (EPTT, p. 446) constitutes
Heidegger’s ‘‘quite unequivocal retraction of the conception of truth as
unconcealment’’ (HLWD, p. 115). She asserts that here Heidegger ‘‘tacitly
acknowledges the full force of Tugendhat’s critique’’, and therefore, it was
in fact Tugendhat who provided the impetus for Heidegger’s recantation
(HLWD, p. 115). What is surprising to Lafont is that commentators would
try to explain away rather than accept this retraction. Support for her view,
Lafont argues, is supplied by the fact that in his lecture Heidegger states,
‘‘already in Homer, the word alētheia was always only used… with respect
to statements, and therefore in the sense of correctness and reliability, not in
the sense of unconcealment’’ (EPTT, p. 447), a passage that mirrors almost
‘‘word for word’’ Tugendhat’s argument in ‘‘Heidegger’s Idea of Truth’’
delivered just two months earlier (HLWD, p. 116). Tugendhat writes there:

Heidegger certainly did not recognize this requirement [i.e. that in

order to qualify as a concept of truth in general, a concept of truth
must measure up to the idea of truth as correctness] as clearly because
he was of the opinion that propositional truth was first brought to the
fore by Plato and Aristotle (probably the opposite is nearer to the
truth: it is precisely Homer who in general only speaks of truth in
connection with assertions and Heidegger could only arrive at his
position because he let himself be guided less by actual word usage
than by a loose interpretation of the etymology) (HIT, p. 229).

Drawing upon these similarities, Lafont concludes that the explicit nature of
Heidegger’s retraction is testimony to the veracity of Tugendhat’s criticism.
Needing little further convincing, Lafont concurs with Apel that Tugendhat
‘‘ultimately can be regarded as the motive force behind Heidegger’s retreat
 Tugendhat’s Critique of Heidegger’s Concept of Truth 173

from his original position’’, and treats Heidegger’s apparent acquiescence as

a springboard for her own thoroughgoing critique of Heidegger (HLWD,
p. 115).
However, we need not treat Tugendhat’s critique as a foregone
conclusion. Ultimately, whether or not Heidegger’s statements constitute a
retraction in the face Tugendhat’s critique is peripheral to the matter of
answering Tugendhat’s critical question itself. Dahlstrom offers the helpful
reminder that ‘‘the self-interpretation of a thinker is, of course, important,
but hardly the last word to the meaning of his or her work’’ (HCT, p. 404).
Even if Heidegger’s early use of truth as unconcealment was misleading,
Dahlstrom notes, it hardly follows that Tugendhat’s critique holds: ‘‘what
matters, in other words, is not Heidegger’s choice of terms, but their
function in his argument’’ (HCT, p. 404). Keeping this in mind, the outcome
of this paper is not wholly negative. Rather, if the arguments offered here
are sufficient to demonstrate that the question at heart of Tugendhat’s
critique has not been addressed, the way has been prepared for a decisive
response to Tugendhat’s critique to emerge. In fact, the terms of such a
response have already been adumbrated by the grounds on which this
critical appraisal of recent scholarship has been carried out: one cannot
simply claim Heidegger has two senses of truth, one ontic and another
ontological, then move to clarify this latter phenomenon (i.e. disclosedness
as the ontological condition of truth traditionally understood) without first
addressing the way in which this ‘other’ sense of truth has the normative
resources necessary to deserve its title. The question that must be at the
forefront of this reply is: how can disclosedness be understood as the
primordial phenomenon of truth and what justifies that claim?
In order to give some indication of how a more adequate reply to
Tugendhat might be carried out, we can return to what was initially most
promising about Dahlstrom’s position. The potential we saw in Dahlstrom’s
account, one which he failed to fulfill, derived from the fact that he
acknowledged Tugendhat’s critical question at the outset. At bottom,
however, Dahlstrom’s failure was that his promised description of
disclosedness as a distinct sense of truth never materialized. What he
produced instead was a monolithic, ‘self-showing’ notion of disclosedness
that presupposed correctness for its intelligibility as the ‘original truth’.
Nowhere did Dahlstrom successfully demonstrate the way in which this
notion of disclosedness had recourse to an independent normative axis that
would account for its success and failure, or more precisely, a critical
moment that retained the specific sense of truth for disclosedness itself.
Instead, Dahlstrom put the burden of the specific sense of truth on the
propositions and descriptive statements that Heidegger uses to articulate the
ontological structure of disclosedness as the ‘original truth’. Dahlstrom’s
hope was to demonstrate with his two-part appeal that Heidegger does not
sacrifice truth’s critical dimension, but in fact invokes bivalence in the
174 William H. Smith

course of his phenomenological account. Yet we have already seen this last
ditch maneuver for what it is.23 The question that goes unanswered is how
disclosedness itself, the opening of up Dasein’s historical world, is more than
a non-normative event, more than – to draw an analogy – merely
illuminating a previously darkened room by flicking on the light switch.
This, of course, is precisely Tugendhat’s question: in what sense can
disclosure itself be true or false in a critical sense?
What Tugendhat’s question calls for, then, is an interpretation of
disclosedness that shows how it has a normative dimension within its own
sphere, how it can be understood as a critical as opposed to a mere showing
up of the world. Speaking metaphorically, what needs to be shown is that
disclosedness is not simply two-dimensional, but in fact has a dimension of
depth, a dimension beyond the simple manifestation of a field of play in
which practical comportments take place. My suggestion is that this
normative dimension – which both Tugendhat and recent commentators
failed to locate in Heidegger’s account of truth – can be found in the
resources already available in Heidegger’s ‘existential’ analysis of death,
authenticity, and resoluteness. In contrast to Dahlstrom, for whom
disclosedness cannot fail to be what it is (recall that it is the self-disclosing
horizon of its own background, and therefore always reveals itself just as it
is in itself), the suggestion here is that disclosedness be understood as
achievement, an uncovering of the world that is not always successful.
To show how this might work, we must bring Heidegger’s understanding
of truth itself briefly back into focus.24 In the introduction to Being and
Time, Heidegger offers a working definition of his understanding of truth as
unconcealment, one which he intends to fill out with his later analyses in
144. As we saw above, Heidegger claims truth is not in the first case the
agreement of a judgment with reality, but rather the precognitive,
prejudicative opening up of reality itself – truth means letting-something-
be-seen, uncovering, or more precisely, discovery. Heidegger writes:

Pure noeı̂n [noein, understanding] is the perception of the simplest

determinate ways of Being which entities as such may possess, and
it perceives them just by looking at them. This noeı̂n is what is ‘true’
in the purest and most primordial sense; that is to say, it merely
discovers, and does so in such a way that it can never cover up
(BT 57/33).

What is true, then, is the unconcealed: the openness of entities as they are
grasped in their being. As Heidegger puts it, ‘‘the sheer sensory perception
of something is ‘true’ it the Greek sense, and indeed more primordially than
the locoz [logos]’’ (BT 57/33).
Here Heidegger seems to flaunt those very characteristics that Tugendhat
criticizes. Disclosedness, understood as Heidegger’s analog of the Greek
 Tugendhat’s Critique of Heidegger’s Concept of Truth 175

sense of pure noein, seems plainly to be a naı̈ve perceptive event, a mere

grasping of the world that in no way retains the specific sense of truth with
which Tugendhat is concerned. Heidegger seems to even admit as much
straightforwardly: ‘‘this noeı̂n can never cover up; it can never be false; it can
at worst remain a non-perceiving, àcnoeı̂n, not sufficing for straightforward
access’’ (BT 57/34). Thus, it seems Heidegger unrelentingly pushes forward
into Tugendhat’s critique. If disclosedness cannot be false, if it cannot cover
up, then how can disclosedness be a phenomenon of truth in the specific
sense – that is, in what way can this notion of disclosedness account for
misdiscovery, for some norm of success and failure in the uncovering itself?
The answer is that disclosedness is not just an opening up of world, but of
self as well. As Heidegger writes, ‘‘in so far as Dasein is its disclosedness
essentially, and discloses and uncovers as something disclosed to this extent
it is essentially ‘true’. Dasein is ‘in the truth’’’ (BT 263/221). Dasein, in other
words, discloses itself as the being that discloses the world; it uncovers itself
as the source of this world-disclosure. Simplifying greatly, for Heidegger,
this self-disclosing aspect of Dasein’s disclosedness opens the possibility of
Dasein being either authentic or inauthentic about itself and its world.
Authenticity identifies Dasein’s ability to recognize itself as the finite,
groundless entity that is the source of the world’s meaning and intelligibility.
As authentic, Dasein confronts death – Dasein’s inability-to-be in the world
– or in the sense relevant here, the breakdown of a world-disclosure and the
practices that opened it. That is, only in the mode of authenticity does
Dasein recognize that its world-disclosure is not an absolute one, that its
disclosure may have left something out. Inauthentic Dasein, in contrast,
flees the specter of death and breakdown. It concerns itself with idle talk,
curiosity, ambiguity – but never with confronting entities on their own
terms. For if it did so, inauthentic Dasein would have to come to grips with
‘insufficient access’ as Heidegger puts it, that is, with the possibility of
entities returning to their concealment and hiddenness – the failure of a
world-disclosure.
My suggestion, though it must be worked out in detail elsewhere, is that the
twin possibilities of authenticity and inauthenticity might allow us to resist
Tugendhat’s conclusions, for here we have a kind of measure for the success
and failure of Dasein’s disclosedness that is distinct from the norm of
correctness. That is, if it is only as authentic that Dasein confronts death, or
breakdown, then it is only in the mode of authenticity that Dasein can
recognizes that its ‘‘pure noein’’ (i.e. world-disclosure) can remain a ‘‘non-
perceiving’’ (i.e. a misdiscovery or failure) – Heidegger’s ‘worst case’ identified
above. Yet this self-transparency would not amount to much were Dasein to do
nothing about it. Rather, it is when Dasein not only hears the call of conscience,
the call to authenticity, but accepts it as its own call to self-responsibility that the
normative dimension is restored to disclosedness: namely, as resoluteness. It is
through resoluteness that the perspective of authenticity, which allows Dasein
176 William H. Smith

to adopt a critical stance towards its world-disclosure, becomes an existential

metric for success and failure of disclosedness.
According to Heidegger, what resolute Dasein ‘‘exacts’’ from itself, on the
one hand, is a commitment to the ‘‘being-certain’’ of what it discloses, and
on the other, an openness towards ‘‘the possibility of taking it back’’ (BT,
p.355/307). Resoluteness, then, is a kind of double move in which Dasein
makes a commitment to its concrete factical situation, and yet at the same
time, takes responsibility for the finitude of this world-disclosure by
constantly holding open the possibility of taking it back, of facing up to
death; resoluteness is a continual re-commitment, a commitment ‘‘which
resolves to keep repeating itself’’, a perseverance despite the omnipresence of
breakdown (BT, p.355/307). It is only as resolute that Dasein can make the
modes of authenticity and inauthenticity normative for itself in a critical
sense. That is, it is only through resoluteness that Dasein binds itself to
authenticity, and through this self-transparency about breakdown, resolves
to work out the inconsistencies in its skills and standards in light of the
things themselves. The ability of these entities to resist our practices and
interpretive schemes is the ontological meaning of death for Heidegger, and
only resolute Dasein seriously takes on this death as it own responsibility.
That is, as resolute, Dasein understands that the very intelligibility of
entities and the world itself is not pre-given but grounded by its existential
commitment to them; it realizes that the possibilities through which Dasein
understands itself and entities are not free-floating, but make a claim on
Dasein as the one responsible for their existence. Resolute Dasein, then,
faces up to these claims: it recognizes that it must ‘‘explicitly appropriate
what has already been uncovered, defend it against semblance and disguise,
and assure itself of its uncoveredness again and again’’ (BT, p.265/222).
Thus, on this proposal, resoluteness is not only, as Heidegger calls it, the
‘‘primordial truth of existence’’: it is the normative fulcrum of truth as
disclosedness as well (BT, p.355/307).
By way of conclusion, then, my tentative reply to Tugendhat’s critical
question is that the meaning of Heidegger’s notion of ‘truth as disclosedness’
is truth understood as a kind of self-responsibility, and the criterion for the
success and failure of this understanding is resoluteness, a committed self-
transparency with regard to the practices and norms that disclose this world
as meaningful. This understanding of truth – truth in the sense of ‘being true
to oneself’ rather than truth as ‘getting it right’ (correctness) – finds its
justification in the normative senses of authenticity and inauthenticity:
resolute Dasein takes up the world as it is disclosed in the mode of
authenticity, anticipating the possibility of breakdown and resistance to its
world-disclosure; irresolute Dasein takes up the world inauthentically,
preferring to treat entities ‘as one does’, rather than let them show
themselves as they are. If this suggestion is correct, then Heidegger’s claim
that ‘disclosedness is truth’ can be redeemed only to the degree that Dasein
 Tugendhat’s Critique of Heidegger’s Concept of Truth 177

is beholden to itself; that is, disclosedness is truth only to the extent Dasein
is committed to self-responsibility, to resoluteness.25 Regardless of whether
or not this alternative interpretive path will ultimately be successful, what
has been overlooked – perhaps even by Tugendhat himself – is the scope of
Heidegger’s argument: for Heidegger’s analysis of truth is not completed in
144, but arguably finds it fullest expression in the ‘existential’ analyses in
Division II of Being and Time. Drawing upon these resources, it seems
possible to reconstruct from the ground up an interpretation of Heidegger’s
concept of truth that keeps Tugendhat’s critical question at its focal point –
and it is perhaps this project that will provide Tugendhat’s critique with its
long overdue response.

Notes
1. This paper was written during the course of a research seminar supported by the Andrew
W. Mellon Foundation and sponsored by the Center for the Study of Cultures at Rice
University during the 2005–2006 academic year. The members of this Mellon Seminar,
titled ‘‘The Existential Sources of Normativity’’, deserve to be thanked individually as
each made valuable comments to the final drafts of this paper: Matthew Burch, Irene
McMullin, David Snyder, Matthew Schunke, Aaron Hinkley and Vinod
Lakschmipathy. A note of thanks also goes to a reviewer from Inquiry whose
suggestions for improvement were very helpful in preparing this essay for publication.
Finally, I would especially like to thank Steven Crowell, the leader of the Mellon
Seminar, who provided the initial spark for this project and who, with unerring insight,
tirelessly read each draft of this paper from start to finish.
2. M. Heidegger [1966] (1977) ‘‘The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking’’ in:
David Farrell Krell (Ed.) Basic Writings (New York: Harper & Row) p. 446. Hereafter
cited parenthetically as EPTT.
3. M. Heidegger [1927] (1962) Being and Time (Trans.) J. Macquarrie & E. Robinson (New
York: Harper & Row) p. 263/220. The latter number refers to the German edition.
Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as BT with English, followed by German,
pagination.
4. For Habermas’ comments, see J. Habermas (1987) Philosophical Discourse of Modernity
(Trans.) F. Lawerence (Cambridge: MIT Press) p.154ff. The relevant citations for Apel
and Lafont appear below.
5. Heidegger’s statements in ‘‘The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking’’ were
delivered in April 1964, just two months after Tugendhat gave his lecture. For more
detailed treatment of the role of Tugendhat’s critique in Heidegger’s retraction, see D.
Dahlstrom (2003) ‘‘The clearing and its truth: reflections on Tugendhat’s criticisms and
Heidegger’s concessions’’ Études Phénoménologiques 37–38 pp. 3–25.
6. For Tugendhat, Heidegger’s writing on truth after 1930, with its emphasis on the ‘‘truth
of Being’’, and later, on the ‘‘clearing’’ and Lichtung, only exacerbates the basic error
already latent in the analyses of Being and Time (144). Although it is not often
acknowledged, Tugendhat is in part being charitable to Heidegger by focusing his
attention on Being and Time: this allows Heidegger to put his best foot – at least in
Tugendhat’s view – forward.
7. Heidegger calls on his own etymology of the Greek word for truth, ‘‘alētheia’’, to
support his understanding of truth as unconcealment. According to Heidegger’s
philological interpretation, alētheia is formed with a privative ‘a-’attached to the stem ‘-
lethe’, meaning ‘‘forgetting’’; thus, aletheia literally means ‘‘unforgetting’’, or ‘‘bringing
178 William H. Smith

out of concealment’’. This reading was contested by other philologists, like Paul
Friedlander, with whom Heidegger had a long-running debate. Although I will not be
able to pursue it further here, Heidegger’s reading of the Greeks and his understanding
of alētheia has generated a large body of literature in its own right, and it constitutes a
third prong to the puzzle surrounding his concept of truth.
8. E, Tugendhat. [1984] (1996) ‘‘Heidegger’s Idea of Truth’’ in: C. Macann (Ed.) Critical
Heidegger (New York: Routledge) p. 228. All further references to this work are made
parenthetically in the text by means of HIT and the appropriate page number.
9. The passage, which Tugendhat does not cite in full, reads: ‘‘To say that an assertion ‘‘is
true’’ signifies that it uncovers the entity as it is in itself. Such an assertion asserts, points
out, ‘lets’ the entity ‘be seen’ [apophansis] in its uncoveredness. The Being-true (truth) of
the assertion must be understood as Being-uncovering. Thus truth has by no means the
structure of an agreement between knowing and the object in the sense of a likening of
one entity (the subject) to another (the Object).’’ (BT, p. 261/218.)
10. I presume that the reference of (1) is Heidegger’s claim that an assertion is confirmed,
and therefore true, when: ‘‘The entity itself which one has in mind shows itself just as it is
in itself; that is to say, it shows that it, in its selfsameness, is just as it gets pointed out in
the assertion as being’’ (BT, p. 261/218), which occurs on the page just above the
penultimate paragraph of (a).
11. HIT, p. 232. The embedded quotation is from BT, p. 264/222.
12. HIT, p. 235. Emphasis added.
13. HIT, p. 236. The embedded quotation is from BT, p. 263/220.
14. C. Lafont (2000) Heidegger Language and World-Disclosure (Trans.) G. Harmon
(Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press). Hereafter cited parenthetically as
HLWD.
15. M. Wrathall (1999) ‘‘Heidegger and truth as correspondence’’ International Journal of
Philosophical Studies 7/1 pp. 69–77. Hereafter cited parenthetically as HaTaC.
16. It remains to be seen whether Wrathall is correct in his interpretation of Heidegger’s
retraction, and moreover, whether Wrathall is right to simply accept it at face value –
perhaps Heidegger was wrong to retract the notion of disclosedness as truth; however,
both these questions cannot be pursued here and are immaterial to my criticism of
Wrathall, given what he does in fact say about the issue of alētheia and Heidegger’s
retraction.
17. C. Taylor (2003) Heidegger’s Analytic (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press)
p. 259. Hereafter cited parenthetically as HA.
18. HA, p. 261. Emphasis added.
19. D. Dahlstrom (2001) Heidegger’s Concept of Truth (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press) p. 395. Hereafter cited parenthetically as HCT.
20. HCT, p. 396. Dahlstrom here cites Tugendhat’s book (E. Tugendhat (1967) Der
Wahrheitsbegriff bei Husserl und Heidegger (Berlin: de Gruyter) p. 337, 350f, 405).
21. The three senses, for Dahlstrom, are as follows: (1) an original, existential-hermeneutic
sense, which is the sense of Dasein, the horizon of disclosedness against which Dasein is
always already projecting itself; (2) a derivative, existentiel-hermeneutic sense, the
horizon by which the function or use of something is determined; (3) a derivative,
apophantic sense, the horizon against which the significance of a word or assertion can
be brought to light through mention rather than use. (HCT, p. 400–1)
22. K.O. Apel (1996) ‘‘Regulative Ideas or Truth-Happening: An Attempt to Answer the
Question of the Conditions of the Possibility of Valid Understanding’’ in: L. E. Hahn
(Ed.) The Philosophy of Hans-Georg Gadamer (Chicago: Open Court) p. 72. See also
Dahlstrom, D. (forthcoming) ‘‘Transcendental Truth and the Truth that Prevails’’.
23. To be fair, it should be noted that Dahlstrom offers something of disclaimer to his work,
indicating that he is perhaps not wholly satisfied with his reply to Tugendhat’s critique:
 Tugendhat’s Critique of Heidegger’s Concept of Truth 179

‘‘In the present section, each charge is contested (thought it cannot be said that they are
refuted)’’ (HCT, p. 397–8). However, even in Dahlstrom’s more recent article, ‘‘The
clearing and its truth: reflections on Tugendhat’s criticisms and Heidegger’s conces-
sions’’, I think he continues to misconstrue the central thrust of Tugendhat’s critique.
For a representative statement of this misconstrual, Dahlstrom takes the upshot of
Tugendhat’s critique to be that ‘‘Heidegger has no means of questioning (no measure of)
the truthfulness of his account of an original truth and the derivativeness of truth as
correctness and correspondence’’ (p.15) and writes later that ‘‘Tugendhat’s fundamental
challenge, by contrast, concerns the questionability of the truthfulness of Heidegger’s
account of the clearing’’ (p.24). Though it would take another essay to make this critique
explicit while also doing justice to Dahlstrom’s work, again the problem is that
Dahlstrom gives no answer to Tugendhat’s critical question. The fundamental challenge
of Tugendhat’s critique is not that Heidegger precludes the questioning of the
truthfulness of his account of disclosedness or the clearing (although Tugendhat
believes this is a consequence of Heidegger’s understanding of truth as unconcealment,
as discussed briefly in section II of this essay); rather, Tugendhat’s challenge is that
disclosedness – which apparently embodies none of the characteristics typical of an
understanding of truth, e.g. the specific normative aspects of what one finds in truth as
correctness – does not merit being called an understanding of truth at all, much less the
primordial manifestation of that phenomenon. Once again, Dahlstrom overlooks this
problem, and though his reading of Heidegger’s retraction may have merits on its own,
he makes no real headway against the central feature of Tugendhat’s critique.
24. My reading of Heidegger’s understanding of truth, and also my reading of death,
authenticity and resoluteness, which appears below, is greatly influenced by John
Haugeland’s discussion of Heidegger and what he calls Heidegger’s ‘‘beholdeness theory
of truth’’. For Haugeland’s development of these views, see especially ‘‘Truth and Rule-
Following’’ in Having Thought (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998) pp. 305–
361 and ‘‘Truth and Finitude: Heidegger’s Transcendental Existentialism’’ in Heidegger,
Authenticity, and Modernity: Essays in Honor of Hubert Dreyfus Vol. I (Eds.) Mark
Wrathall and Jeff Malpas (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000).
25. One could point to the etymological connection between ‘Entschlossenheit’ (resolute-
ness) and ‘Erschlossenheit’ (disclosedness) to emphasize this point as well; see
Macquarrie and Robinson’s note (BT, p.343, n.1) This solution, though, is but a
sketch, and much remains to be done, especially elaborating the connection between
resoluteness and correctness if both are to be understood as distinct senses of ‘truth’.