Heidegger

— Kevin Winters wrote:
> I’ve been trying to decipher a particular passage in “On the Essence of
> Truth” (using the _Basic Writings_ version) and was wondering if I could
> mine some of your minds. The passage is this:
>
> “In letting beings as a whole be, which discloses and at the same time
> conceals, it happens that concealing appears as what is first of all
> concealed. Insofar as it ek-sists, Da-sein conserves the first and broadest
> undisclosedness, untruth proper. The proper nonessence of truth is the
> mystery. Here nonessence does not yet have the sense of inferiority to
> essence in the sense of what is general (_koinon_, _genos_), its
> _possibilitas_ and the ground of its possibility. Nonessence is here what in
> such a sense would be a pre-essential essence. But ‘nonessence’ means at
> first and for the most part the deformation of that already inferior
> essence. Indeed, in each of these significations the nonessence remains
> always in its own way essential to the essence and never becomes unessential
> in the sense of irrelevant” (_Basic Writings_, 130-131).
>
> Here are my questions: first, is the “pre-essential essence” Heidegger’s
> view or is he attributing it to those who see the nonessence as “inferior”?
> I believe it is the former, but I can’t quite make it out (the English is
> too ambiguous: does the “is here” refer to the traditional view or his
> reformulation of it?).

“is here” refers to nonessence as the mystery.

> Second, how is this notion of nonessence a
> “deformation of that already inferior essence”?

If inferior essence is “general (_koinon_, _genos_)”,
then nonessence would be not-general (_psuedos_) or
falsity.

> Is his view of the
> nonessence a “deformation” of the traditional view or does he mean something
> else that does not come out in the translation?

His view of the nonessence is what is concealed. A concealment that
is not merely the reverse of the truth.

“To our way of thinking, this means that the counter-essence to truth
is not exhausted or fulfilled in falsity.” Parmenides, p. 67

Posted on Wednesday, May 31st, 2006 at 6:10 pm
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