BH:xxviii – Being-There and Being-True

The title “Being-There and Being-True According to Aristotle  ” suggests that this is Heidegger’s first attempt, following Aristotle  ’s statements to the effect that “the soul itself is true” and thus “in a way all things,” to make Dasein the locus of truth by equating Dasein with being-true, or uncovering, the favored term for Daseins truth in 1924. But one must wait until Being and Time   before Heidegger clearly proclaims that “Dasein is its disclosedness” (BT, 133). In a period in which it is repeatedly asserted that “We ourselves are history” and that “Dasein is its time” in each of its instantiations, this new identification clearly raises the question of the connection between time and truth, or “openness,” the later Heidegger’s favored “translation” of Dasein, which Aristotle   would have called the “passive/receptive/potential intellect.” A closer look at Being and Time   reveals that Heidegger in fact equates the “clearing of be-ing” with the unity of temporality (BT, 133,170, 350-51). The temporality (= clearing) of be-ing thus provides the standards for the practical “art” of making (paradigm of Division One) and the protopractical “prudence” of human action (paradigm of Division Two) and so serves as their vow-surrogate in this temporalized framework of the “five ways in which the human soul is true.” The most unique feature of this lecture of 1924 is however its location of truth in the speech (Rede) in which we already find ourselves situated, in the λόγος· which according to Aristotle   defines us as human beings and which, in Heidegger’s reading, possesses us as much as we possess it. The speech situation that Dasein is, in the terms of Aristode’s Rhetoric, is structured by the three modes of persuasion, the three “trusts’ that inspire confidence in the “truth” of the speech: right mood, right understanding, right speech. These become, in Heidegger’s ontological transposition of them into Being and Time  , the three equiprimordial modes of “being-in” and “being-there” disclosive of the human situation: disposedness, understanding, discursivity. “Dasein is its disclosedness” (BT, 133) in being properly disposed to its comprehensive situation and projected understand-ingly (“resolutely open”) in it by an overt articulation of its latent discursivity. [BH  :xxviii]