The Heideggerian Engine: A Glimpse Under the Hood

In four days I shall begin taking another group of students through Heidegger's epic book, Being and Time.  What should they know when beginning the journey?  What words of wisdom do I have as they embark?

I think that the best thing I might say is that reading Heidegger is not about imparting knowledge at all. It is not a book fundamentally about things, but a book that happens in its reading. One might say that it is a text that happens in the happening of reading itself. 

The philosophy of Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) is often thought to be exceedingly difficult to grasp. Heidegger is a philosopher using the language of the philosophical tradition, but using it in ways that many regard as strikingly idiosyncratic. Clearly, we all know what being is, or at least we thought we knew before reading Heidegger. In fact, prior to reading Heidegger we might be tempted to believe some explanation is occurring in the following: 

• X asks, "What is being?" 
• Y responds, "That which is."  

If we have read Plato and Aristotle, we perhaps are prone to contrast the realm of being somehow with that of becoming. Plato thought being was stable and eternal, the kind of thing that can be known as something discrete and definite.  Aristotle regarded primary substances as the locus classicus of being. There are things that are, that are stable enough to carry properties, sometimes contrary properties over time. This particular cat is now hungry and later is sated. Bill is in Florence and now in Athens. The United States once had 13 states and now has 50. This seems simple enough, but Heidegger exposes the complexity of such simplicity.  

As a boy on an Iowa farm, I went into the barn and experienced life with animals. I experienced animals eating, drinking, congregating and defecating. Often they would be curious or frightened by me. Their life was part of the life of my five-year-old self.  I had not yet come to regard these animals as having some being apart from their basic intelligibility to me in the little world in which I dwelt. 

I don't know when it happened exactly, but at some point I came to recognize the animals in my world as beings existing apart from me with particular properties that didn't depend upon me.  Heidegger would say that I now had fallen, that I had, in fact, adopted a pretty complex and ultimately unsupported view on things.  But I knew nothing then about the Verfallenheit in which I now found myself.  

My father taught me that steers and heifers had to achieve a certain rate of gain in order for their lives among us to be profitable to us.  After all, we were farming, and we had to cashflow the animals.  Somehow we needed the market price of our animals to be greater than the feed we fed them, plus the labor we expended upon them, plus the costs of medical treatment for them, and some percentage of the cost of barns, fences and feeding mechanisms, manure spreaders, tractors and all of the rest of it. 

Farm kids soon learn that different breeds of animals have different properties, e.g., temperaments, disease resistance, ease of birth, propensities to convert feed into weight gain. It is important in livestock husbandry that one knows the properties animals have apart from us because the very profitability of one's enterprise depends upon such knowledge. I learned many things on the farm about animals, machinery, tilling practices and efficiencies, mechanical qualities of machinery, and the nature of the greatest variable for successful farming: the weather.  

I learned about cold and warm fronts, low and high pressure systems, and the related possibilities of precipitation and storms when lows, highs and fronts were located in particular places and had particular qualities. I thought about the conditions leading to drought and the possibilities of those conditions manifesting themselves given the current macro conditions. I wanted to know about the processes of weather in themselves. I had adopted a view of things, in which things were the more real the less meaningful they were to me. 

Maybe all of this led me to want at an earlier time in my life to be a scientist, actually I dreamt of becoming a physicist. I was deeply intrigued about the in itself of things, and believed that mathematics could describe that in itself and predict future changes in it. I remember watching the Feynman Lectures on Physics in my Honors Physics class as a college freshman.  I was intrigued about special and general relativity, about cosmology, about the fundamental laws of nature that determine the very contour of the in itself.  

Perhaps all of this made my first reading of Heidegger difficult.  Although I did not know it, I was deeply committed to a substance ontology quite early in life.  I thought the world consisted of objects that somehow self-identify as the objects they are, and I believed that these self-identifying objects (substances) could possess modifications while still being the substances they were.  In other words, I believed that substances could contingently take on differing properties while remaining what they essentially were.  

Early on in life, I already bought the distinction between necessary essential properties and contingent accidental properties. There was something that made me who I was -- or so I thought -- and that which made me who I was continued to perform its function apart from whether I wore my hair long or short, or whether I even had hair.  

It seemed the most natural thing to me that the world would be what it is apart from me, and that my dealings with the world, particularly my knowing of it, did not change the world. The worldhood of the world was, accordingly, logically, ontologically and epistemically independent from my subjective apprehension of it -- or so I assumed. 

Accordingly, I was from a rather early age committed to the subject/object dichotomy.  As a knowing substance, I was that upon which the objectivity of the world manifested its effects.  The world was filled with substances being themselves, I was a substance being myself, and my substance was the subject in relationship to objects apart from me being substances in themselves.  As I said, all of this made my early reading of Heidegger difficult.  

What, after all, was Heidegger getting at in his phenomenological description of the world? Was he not finally describing the color, the projection of my subjectivity on the objects of a quite colorless world?  When I first read Heidegger I thought, "How can he escape idealism?  How can he not be committed to the assertion that the properties of my substance -- of the substance if one is an objective idealist -- are what they are, and that these properties determine the contour of the world so encountered?  Is this not simply another rerun of Kant's "Copernican Revolution?" 

But I will admit that I missed what was fundamental. By looking for something profoundly transcendental, I simply could not see what was before my eyes.  The mystique of Heidegger, the engine propelling his thinking, is nothing transcendental or profound at all. I could not see under the hood in those days, and had I seen I might have judged then that the car had no engine at all! 

I had to go back to my five-year-old self to see it, and those steps backwards did not seem to me to be steps forward at all.  I struggled with Heidegger's technical German vocabulary, hoping to find in his technical philosophical terms something foundantional, some ground upon which his philosophy was based. I searched for some deep ontological commitment or some fundamental presupposition that would explain what he was saying and why he was saying it. In all of this, I simply overlooked the fact that my five-year-old self would not have searched for, nor understood, what an ontological commitment or a fundamental presupposition even was.  

What Heidegger was inviting me to do in Being and Time was simply to look around me and notice everything I constantly overlooked and ignored. If there is any fundamental presupposition he has, it is simply this: Notice where you are and what you are doing. Even at five, I knew the way of the farm; I knew the smells, the rhythms, the places I could walk and the things I could do. These comprised my world, the world in which I found myself and the world in which I dwelt. I knew the way to the house, to the table, to my bedroom. When it rained I found myself under a roof, and when it snowed I wore my boots and mittens. String from mom's sewing box was that which made the barn cats excited. Barn hay was that in which new kittens were encountered.The rock on the barn ledge next to the milk cow was that by which ice in the pan was broken.  

How effortlessly I navigated the complexities of it all! I could "get around" on the farm; I knew how to deal with things. Of course, I did not abstractly know that there was a context that allowed my dealings, and I did not conceive that this context was part of my culture which itself was related to history.  My five-year-old self had neither read Dilthey nor Troeltsch -- I did not read much in those days -- so was unaware of the "historical problem" as a problem, but that did not matter.  I had agency, I could act and somehow my actions made sense in my farm world.  

My reading of Being and Time began to give me language to talk about my more primordial "gettings around" in the world, my facility to deal with the wholly meaningful world in which I found myself.  Heidegger taught me that human be-ing is that be-ing in and for which be-ing is at issue.  The word 'Dasein' even connotes this; I am being 'there' or 'here'.  Prior to any grown-up conception of the world in which I am a subject confronted by objects, I live a world of meaning and purpose.  It is only when reflecting on this world of meaning and purpose that I am aware of the clearing that is my being and the world's worldness all together. Heidegger calls all of this being-in-the-world, meaning that my be-ing, is a be-ing that already has a world. There is no world without be-ing in it, and there is no be-ing without a world to be in.  The 'in' is not a spatial term, but is what Heidegger terms an existential.  I am a being, who in my be-ing, is be-ing-in-the- world.  Accordingly, my being is being-in-the-world.  

Before I read Heidegger seriously, I had read books like Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and the Crack in the Cosmic Egg.  It is probably the case that I never did understand exactly what it was to "overcome the subject-object dichotomy" recommended in those books because I simply already knew that there were subjects and objects.  How does one overcome that which is?  I had also read Eliade on Eastern religious traditions and knew that moksha and nirvana got us to places where we were no longer isolated subjects, but could somehow become simply a "drop in the cosmic ocean."  But none of this actually dislodged my own commitment to substance ontology. One might say that such a commitment only dies with violence.  These texts were not violent enough. 

But I see it, and Heidegger wants you to see it as well. He wants you to look under the hood of your commitments about being, to the be-ing that is be-ing in and through your commitments about being. Heidegger wants to give you an "a ha" experience, and the koan he chants is substance ontology itself. So what is the sound of one hand clapping? So how can an isolated subject build a bridge to the external world?  How indeed?  

Read Being and Time freshly by taking off your glasses of substance ontology. Look and see what it is to be.  To be is actually everything we do in the everyday.  We get around pretty well, and there must be some structure to this getting around. What are then the ontological possibilities of our being which allow any of our concretely actual gettings around in the world?  It is here, I admit, that the smell of the transcendental returns.  

Heidegger is a philosopher, after all, and his description of getting around in A-fashion or getting around in B-fashion finally must lead him to ask what is common to A-fashion getting around and B-fashion getting around.  In a faint echo of Kant who asked about the transcendental conditions for the possibility of experience as such, Heidegger asks about the ontological conditions which make possible the actuality of what he calls the ontic, the actual and concrete what is in which one deals in one's world.  What might it be to uncover the conditions for the possibility of any dealings, conditions which are endemic to experience as such, conditions which are deeper than person X or Y or fashion A or B?  

I will write more later, but for now simply enjoy reading Being and Time, my students, and be ready for adventure! 

Transcendental Self-Reference, Spirit and God

I remember distinctly my first reading of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. I had learned about the semantic distinction between analytic and synthetic judgments, and the epistemological distinction between a priori and a posteriori judgments. Kant famously asked in the Critique about the legitimacy of synthetic a priori judgments, that is, judgments that are not dependent upon empirical experience in which, nevertheless, the meaning of the predicate is not included in the meaning of the subject. Traditional metaphysics consists in such synthetic a priori judgments, and for a host of reasons, Kant concludes that traditional metaphysics built on synthetic a priori judgments is wholly dubious. No amount of thinking things through conceptually can add to knowledge. For knowledge to occur, intuitions (that which is given through sensibility) are necessary. Kant does argue, however, that geometry and arithmetic has recourse to the pure forms of intuition, i.e., space and time, and that both are justified as synthetic a priori endeavors. 

Kant thus admitted that there are analytic a priori judgments, propositions that are analytically true, and he allowed for synthetic a posteriori judgments, empirical propositions known on the basis of experience alone.   He denied that analytic a priori judgments exist, and was thus left with the question of the synthetic a priori. The results of the Critique are that the traditional synthetic a priori judgments of metaphysics are  unwarranted, but that the synthetic a priori judgments appearing in geometry and arithmetic are permissible. 

I remember being troubled the first time I read The Crique of Pure Reason by the transcendental analysis he undertakes. He is writing a book, after all, that is making claims about the transcendental structure of things, a book seemingly claiming a transcends structure that might be known. Clearly, this knowledge is neither empirical knowledge constituted by synthetic a posteriori judgments, nor is this knowledge merely dealing with the  conceptual, that is, the results of analytic a priori judgments. So what is this knowledge? Prima facie, Kant believes these transcendental structures hold, that he (and we) are justified in holding they exist -- he speaks often of the warrant for his claims about the necessary conditions for the possibility of experience as such -- and that we should believe they obtain.  

Knowledge of the existence and structure of the transcendental unity of apperception must be a matter of synthetic a priori propositions, I thought, but this seems incorrect, because Kant had just proved that synthetic a priori judgments are legitimate only in the fields of arithmetic and geometry, and the structure of the transcendental unity of apperception is neither a matter of arithmetic or geometry. So what is it?  Clearly, it is not traditional metaphysics either. Kant spends much ink in showing that traditional metaphysics dealing with the transcendent is bankrupt because it employs synthetic a priori judgments beyond the realm of possible experience. It is clear that the transcendental structure Kant explores is  prior to the transcendent, for it is through his exploration of the transcendental that we are warranted in drawing the limits of the synthetic a priori. 

German philosophy after Kant clearly understood the great philosopher's critique of metaphysics, but also grasped the transcendental conditions for the possibility of this critique. Kant knew that there was no warrant to claim that the "I" was a substance as Descartes had supposed. But his transcendental investigation had indeed uncovered the presence of a transcendental unity of apperception, a unity of experience that was not an experience of unity as Descartes had thought. So what is the ontological nature of this transcendental unity that is not a unity within the transcendent? How can we know it? What language can speak about it? 

Questions of epistemology, ontology and semantics arise immediately with regard to putative transcendental structures. The German Idealists strove mightily to bring into focus the dynamism of the transcendental. Hegel's critique of Shelling was based not upon which philosophical system was more felicitous, but rather on which was true. It is clear to anybody reading Hegel that he is making truth claims, claims that are presupposed in his treatment of absolute knowledge. Obviously, these claims cannot be divorced from questions of being and meaning. 

The problem of knowing transcendental structures involves self-reference because it is an act within the transcendental unity of apperception to know that transcendental unity. The phenomenologists were also acutely aware of the problem of intending structures of consciousness that are utilized in intentionality itself. Although the 20th century positivist tradition attempted to leave behind these problems of self-reference by limiting knowledge to the positive sciences, their attempt to limit such knowledge to these sciences clearly was not something that could be known factually through these sciences. In divers and sundry ways, the intellectual tradition, since the days of Descartes, has had to do with paradox. We might say that the paradox of self-reference has been at the center of all the paradoci generated by the Enlightenment: After all, how is it possible to know X, when knowing X seems ultimately to rest upon what X is? Simply put, what is the epistemic and ontological status of the form of thinking, when that form seems to deal with the very matter of thinking.  

The German tradition understood that the Geisteswissenschaften differ from the Naturwissenschaften.  While in the latter, we can safely assume that the thinking form independently grasps (and structures) the matter of the thing thought, in the former the grasping is of that which itself grasps; it is a grasping through forms that it itself is! It is nature of spirit to relate itself to itself in these ways. When grasping what is the nature of human being, human be-ing is involved in the grasping. Martin Heidegger famously spoke of Dasein -- which includes human be-ing -- as that being, who in its be-ing, has be-ing at issue for it. There is no view from the outside when it comes to examining the basic structure of human be-ing, for asking the question belongs to the basic structure of human be-ing. Any asking of the ontological question is immanent to the ontology of the questioner.

So it is that we talk about the spirit that constitutes human be-ing. It is the nature of this spirit to question and seek to know about itself. To know who we are means to know the one who seeks to know who we are. To know ourselves is to know ourselves in the process of knowing ourselves, and knowing our knowing of ourselves. This knowing of ourselves as the knowers of ourselves constitutes the spirit that is us. Aristotle conceived God as thought thinking itself. Human beings are beings who are be-ing in their relationship to their own be-ing. It is the nature of spirit to be itself subjectively when relating to itself objectively. Spirit in-itself is being ultimately in-itself when spirit is being for-itself, that is, spirit is that relation between subject and object that can neither be described either as subject or object. Spirit in-itself takes up the subjective spirit in-itself and the objective spirit for-itself.  Hegel was clearly not wrong on any of this, if we have the perseverance and patience to think what he thought. 

So if the paradox of self-reference pushes towards human beings being spirit, trinunely constituted as beings forever what they are in relationship to what they are in-itself and for-itself, then why would we think God to  be otherwise?  It is the nature of the Triune God to relate Himself to what God is in Himself and how God expresses Himself as other than that self. We use the word "Spirit" to talk about the life of God, a life forever relating God to God. Divine knowledge involves the same dialectics of self-reference that confronts human beings. God is God in relating God to God. We are who we are in relation to ourselves. We know ourselves dynamically as we find ourselves in that which is other than ourselves.  God too finds His full divine life in relating to that which is other than God. 

There is much here about which to be careful in its saying because I do not want to fall victim to the historical heresies in thinking or speaking God.  However, it is clear that the life of both human beings and the divine is a spiritual life, and that these parallel lives have something to do with the problem of self-reference: Where can one find a position outside of the life of God or human beings from which to describe the life of God or human beings? Any attempt to find that position outside of the life from which to describe the life is an illusion, a fallacy of aseity. Such a fallacy ignores the paradox of self-reference. Gods and human beings have a similar spiritual structure. To grasp them as objects means not to so grasp them. Both are objects, whose being it is to be subjects forever related to themselves objectively. 

Given that human beings are spiritual beings, and the God they seek has spiritual divine life, how might it be that God and human being might relate to each other? Clearly, the answer is that the relationship is a spiritual one. While human beings in their be-ing can have their own be-ing at issue for them, they cannot in their own being have divine be-ing at issue for them. The life of God cannot be reflected in human spiritual life without human spiritual life being gifted with a new subjective standpoint, a subjectivity that is provided different capabilities, a subjectivity that can now grasp (however obliquely) the objectivity of God -- not a human projection or chimera -- a subjectivity that is a divine subjectivity gifted to human beings. Human access to God demands the elevation of standpoint that is best characterized as a human participation in the life of God.  

The deepest paradox of human life is that the standpoint we must employ in the grasping of our lives is always underdetermined by the life we grasp.  In this position, there could never be hope that human beings might relate to God. But as the theological tradition has always taught, it is God's Spirit that constitutes the conditions for human beings to relate to God. Clearly, as Luther said, "it is not by our own reason or strength that we might believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and come to him . . . "

Thoughts on Stewardship and Sorge

Stewardship is about care, and Heidegger showed us that Sorge (care) is the way in which Dasein exists. To be Dasein is to be a creature, and Sorge is the sine qua non of Dasein. This seemingly puts Sorge squarely in the order of creation.

Since the care of Dasein is an existential-ontological state tied to temporality, our creaturely stewardship in time is seemingly grounded in the temporality of care, and Dasein's "running ahead" (Vorlaufen) to the possibility of there being no more possibilities for it (death).

But for the Christian, care of the other cannot be simply one ontic possibility among others grounded in something more fundamental, the condition of our possibilities. It is commanded, after all, and the otherness of the command is constitutive of the creature in a way that an ontology making possible mere ontic possibilities is not. The problem is that transcendental subjectivity finally makes the Other merely a pole within the subject. But it is precisely because stewardship is not a possibility for Dasein that entails that the ex-stasis of its acts must be grounded in the Other. What is more Other than the Cross? Where better to encounter la differance upon which human existence ultimately and uneasily rests?

Christian "existence" is ex-static, grounded not in that which makes the everyday possible, but in that which reveals this ground as ungrounded. Revelation can never be a move within transcendental subjectivity nor of the Being within which such subjectivity hides and finds itself. It is the knife that pierces the veil, the veil constituted in the ease of our temporal exstasis, the veil finally blotting out the orthogonal. It is as if moving right or left with dispatch and profundity could move one up or down even a bit.

What if we took seriously the Otherness of God, an inescapable otherness of which the face holds no trace? What if existence itself is constituted upon an Abyss not synonymous with a Ground? What if to talk of this is not to domesticate it, that is, it is not to find a place for it in the Temple of the transcendental subject? What if we have mis-identified the non-being at the heart of our dis-ease?

Limits in theology do not work like in mathematics. We cannot get close to the former as we do the latter. Think a limit that is infinitely qualitatively different than anything most proximate to it. And so we have an analogy to God and Being.

Getting Outside the World

Once I came to understand Heidegger's account of "world" and "the world-ing of the world" in Sein und Zeit, I have thought it fundamentally correct.  If one begins with Descartes' cogito, there simply is not a way to "build a bridge" to the world.  (Descartes famously tried to justify the existence of, and the determinate shape of, the external world on the fact that God is not a deceiver, and we are justified in asserting God because we have an idea of perfection.)  Far better to begin with Heidegger with the fact that our be-ing is always already be-ing-in-the-world, that consciousness is always consciousness of a world. 

Husserl famously developed the method of phenomenological inquiry that putatively bracketed the metaphysical questions of materialism and naturalism and advocated an ad fontes return to the things themselves in introspection, grasping, as it were, through the eidetic reduction things in their essential thingness.   The method was to choose an object, vary imaginatively the features of it, and ultimately grasp what it is that cannot be eliminated if the object is to be the object it is. 

While Husserl's phenomenological reduction of bracketing judgments about the ultimate nature of the world in favor of describing carefully one's experience of the world was supposed to leave in abeyance the metaphysical question of materialism and idealism, it is pretty clear that an argument can be built plausibly claiming that Husserl is committed to a type of idealism.  (The transcendental reduction abandons our natural attitude on the world in favor of a description of the intersubjective space of the transcendental ego.) 

The question that concerns me is whether Husserl's student, Martin Heidegger is also finally committed to a type of idealism.  After all, is not his world the sum of significances in which one pre-reflectively finds oneself, a world in which one finds one's way?  Is not this world and its complex relationships of meaning present only for Da-sein (Being-there), a world which is itself a pole of Da-sein and thus forever within its arena of consciousness.  (My apologies to Heidegger for using "consciousness," but I think that an argument can be made that being-in-the-world just is to be conscious.)  We are pre-reflectively always coping with the world, a world that tends to disclose itself when our regular coping breaks down.  (Heidegger famously points out that we don't really know what a hammer is -- what it means -- until we are without it in a relevant context.) 

Heidegger's distinction between Zuhandenheit and Vorhandenheit is meant to get at the distinction between our everyday dwelling in the world of the "ready to hand" and our occasional examination of objects in this world with a critical distantiation, a distance that allows us to investigate the object as it is in itself.  (We might translate the latter as "present at hand.")  When our hammering no longer happens pre-reflectively, we might instead attend to the properties of the hammer and thus attempt to consider the hammer as it is in itself, as disconnected from the web of significances within our being-in-the-world.  In so doing, we might try to correct the hammer so that it can again recede into the ready-to-hand significances of our primordial dwelling in the world.

But this distinction between Zuhandenheit and Vorhandenheit seems to be a distinction in and for Dasein in its own consciousness as it attempts to grasp objects in its world in different ways.  The reading off of the objective properties of the hammer is a function of the attitude in which Dasein engages the world, and it is difficult to locate the grounds to claim that the adoption of this attitude of reading off succeeds in getting us to the thing as it might be out beyond the world of Dasein.  If ready-to-hand is a dwelling of Dasein in its being-in-the-world, then is not present-at-hand also a type of comporting, a comporting that is ultimately found in a web of meaning in and for Dasein, and thus not a deworld-ing of the world in favor of the objectivity of the thing? 

Hubert Dreyfus has famously claimed that Heidegger escapes idealism through the de-worlding move of "formal indication" (formale Anzeige).  He points out that Heidegger was really quite interested in questions of what the world is in itself, and that Heidegger thus thought it possible to refer to objects as the objects they are without the nature of the objects being determined within the holism of the context of meaning in which they are ingredient.  Comparing this move to Kripke's notion of rigid designation, Dreyfus argues that Heidegger too could have understood reference to objects apart from their descriptions and contexts.

Kripke talked about an "initial baptism" that connected name to thing, and allowed for increasing understanding of the thing and finally a grasp of the essence of that thing apart from the ways we might describe or pick out the thing.  (The atomic number of gold is essential to gold, its necessity is, however, a posteriori.  That which first allowed examination of gold, those properties by which we might unreflectively pick it out, turn out not to be essential to the thing.  Analogously, water is identified by being H2O, not by the properties of colorless, odorless, and tasteless.)   Dreyfus suggests that Heidegger's formal indication functions like Kripke's rigid designation, and that this move allows Heidegger, like Kripke, to escape the idealist net.  If this is so, then Heidegger like Kripke is committed to the ontology of natural kinds, the notion that there are, as Putnam says, self-identifying objects that exist apart from human perception and conception. 

There is quite a literature on the formale Anzeige in Heidegger, and clearly there is no consensus that such a move takes one to realism.  However, I do like the attempt to connect Heidegger's excellent analysis of what it is to be-in-the-world with resources that would allow the world to be in some sense without our being in it.  But the problem here does seem Kantian.  If the formale Anzeige takes us beyond the fuer sich of the world to the an sich of things, then how exactly does the an sich connect to the fuer sich?  In other words, how exactly is deworlding of the world possible? How are natural kinds possible beyond descriptions when they themselves are articulated in terms of descriptions?  What could a natural kind be apart from the language that articulates the kind as the kind it is, a language that operates both at the deworlding and worlding levels? What kind of faith is necessary to assert theoretical entities as having self-identifying being apart from their ingrediency in theories?  Can we find this primal place before language when, as Heidegger later says, language itself is the house of being?  Ultimately, can we locate essences out and beyond the results of an eidetic reduction?  If so, what would be the grounds of this conceivability?

Thinking Truth Non-Propositionally

"I am the Way and the Truth and the Life."

I regard the statement as true.  As such, it is a  propositional truth.   Precisely how a  statement is a propositional truth is a matter of considerable debate, of course.   Some say it is true because regarding it so issues in desirable effects.  "Truth is what works," declares the confident pragmatist.

Others say it is true because it coheres appropriately with a wider class of statements.  It is consistent  with them, and it, and the wider class of statements, mutually presuppose each other so that there are no arbitrary and disconnected statements from which the statement is deducible.   Getting clear on the coherence theory of truth is never easy because it is not perspicuous what the precise boundaries of coherence are.  

Many say that the statement is propositionally true because it appropriately states what is the case.   Getting precision on what is the case apart from the statement, and what the appropriate way is in which the statement and the extra-linguistic states of affairs relate, is not altogether facile.  What constitutes the criterion by which to adjudicate when a statement appropriately states the case?  If there is an isomorphism between statement and the reality it depicts?  If so, what are the relata of the relations isomorphically obtaining?

In the absence of clear criteria which unfailingly picks out the truth of a putative propositional truth, some claim that the truth of propositional truth is primitive.  One need not have some elaborate theory of meaning which, when appropriately satisfied, delivers truth.   One could start with truth and discern that  meaning in some way is derivative upon that.

Whatever be one's theory, the notion that truth is propositional is standard fare in philosophical thinking.   A philosopher can give alternative accounts of how the truth of "I am the Way and the Truth and the Life" is true.  This much is certain.   But the philosopher runs into a brick wall when trying to think the content of the proposition in which  utterer is identified with Truth itself.  What could this mean?   How could truth be non-propositional?   How can truth be non-linguistic?  What does it mean to say that 'Jesus' is 'Truth'?

One might at this point say that 'truth' just means 'reality', and that Jesus is thus 'real'.   But this way of proceeding is fraught with much difficulty because to say 'Jesus is Truth' is clearly intended to say more than 'Jesus is real', for one would quite glibly say 'the ball is real', but never aver 'the ball is truth'.

There are two more promising steps forward, one Hegelian and one Heideggerian.   Hegel famously claimed, "Diese Gegenstaende sind wahr, wenn sie das sind, was sie sein sollen, d.h. wenn ihre Realitaet ihrem Begriff entspricht" ("Objects are true if they are as they ought to be, that is, when their reality corresponds to their notion."). [Enzyklopaedie, Wissenschaft der Logik (1830), 213, n. 127] Accordingly, Jesus is 'truth' in that he corresponds fully to the concept of what it is to be the God-man.  But is this "correspondence" really non-propositional?   Think what it would be to specify how a thing corresponds without using concepts expressible in language.  How could one thing not be another thing in the absence of that which differentiates?   And how can that which differentiates not finally be expressible in language?

Another way forward is Heideggerian.  Famously Heidegger argued that alethia (truth) is a unconcealing (Unverborgenheit) or as an Entbergung or "unveiling."   Early on Heidegger found the phenomenon of unveiling as the ontological ground for the possibility of truth.  However, later Heidegger admitted that die Frage nach der Unverborgenheit als solcher ist nicht die Frage nach die Wahrheit.  (Maybe he realized that if truth needed an ontological ground in unconcealing, falsity needed one in concealing.)   Whatever might be thought of Heidegger's turn away from truth as unconcealing in his Das Ende der Philosophie und die Aufgabe des Denkens, he remained convinced that truth had something to do with correctness, and that correctness had everything to do with unveiling.  But how can one claim that the experience of unveiling ontologically grounds truth when this experience could as easily be described as truth's effect?

Given what has been said, how is it unquestionably possible for Jesus to be 'the Truth'?   Moreover, if Jesus is identified with God's self-revelation, then how can that revelation be true?   The standard move here is to distinguish between the objective, historical process of revelation and the subjective interpretation of that revelation.  (One might claim a la Pannenberg that a distinction holds between the "outer revelation" and the "inspiration" as the interpretation of these events in the Biblical witnesses.)  While the first is putatively non-propositional, the second is not.  But what is it to be a manifestation of God in and through historical events, that is, in and through particular things?  Furthermore, how could such a manifestation be non-linguistic?  If Stacia is a "true friend," but Bob is not, then what is it about Stacia that distinguishes her over and against Bob; what is that "it" that is not in principle capturable by language?

Twentieth century theology, in its effort to escape the "propositional theory of truth" with respect to divine revelation - - the generally-regarded spurious claim that divine revelation is an impartation of information -- seems to lurch into a semantic crevasse of vanquished lucidity.   Simply put, one  does not know what one is talking about when discoursing about a revelation that is in principle non-propositional.   That God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself could, after all, be true, but what is true is the fact that God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself.  A revelation that cannot be expressed as fact is finally too amorphous to be revelatory; such a revelation is ultimately a night in which all cows are black.