Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Credits
- Introduction
- Part I Truth and Disclosure
- 1 Unconcealment
- 2 The Conditions of Truth in Heidegger and Davidson
- 3 On the “Existential Positivity of Our Ability to be Deceived”
- 4 Heidegger on Plato, Truth, and Unconcealment: The 1931–1932 Lecture on The Essence of Truth
- Part II Language
- Part III Historical Worlds
- Works by Heidegger
- Index
3 - On the “Existential Positivity of Our Ability to be Deceived”
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Credits
- Introduction
- Part I Truth and Disclosure
- 1 Unconcealment
- 2 The Conditions of Truth in Heidegger and Davidson
- 3 On the “Existential Positivity of Our Ability to be Deceived”
- 4 Heidegger on Plato, Truth, and Unconcealment: The 1931–1932 Lecture on The Essence of Truth
- Part II Language
- Part III Historical Worlds
- Works by Heidegger
- Index
Summary
Illusory experiences have played and continue to play a significant role in shaping philosophical accounts of perception. By and large, the need to account for perceptual errors of various sorts has greased the skids for the slide into representationalist theories of mind. But the experience of perceptual errors – illusions, deceptions, and even hallucinations – has pushed the existential-phenomenological tradition in a very different direction. When I speak about the existential-phenomenological tradition, I mean the tradition of philosophers influenced by Heidegger, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty. This tradition has its deep roots in Nietzsche.
Nietzsche insisted that “a perspectival, deceptive character belongs to existence” (Kritische Gesamtausgabe VII-3.180). At the same time, he argued that “it is no more than a moral prejudice that truth is worth more than mere appearance; it is even the worst proved assumption there is in the world.” Indeed, he believed that when it comes to appearances, we ought to question the supposition “that there is an essential opposition of ‘true’ and ‘false’”: “is it not sufficient,” he asked, “to assume degrees of apparentness and, as it were, lighter and darker shadows and shades of appearance – different ‘values,’ to use the language of painters?” (Beyond Good and Evil, sec. 34).
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Heidegger and UnconcealmentTruth, Language, and History, pp. 57 - 71Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2010