Truth or Dare: The Risk Inherent in the Concealed

Truth and its opposite: Do we understand the essential contrast between the two ideas, the two words, in the way that is most illustrative of the full concepts at play? Or, have we — following centuries of tradition — lost the essence and inherited a false sense of the distinction, a false sense that can only lead us astray?

Heidegger spent the latter half of his life devoted to delving deeper into the essence of Being, of Thinking, and of the power of Language. He developed an approach best understood as “being on the way towards.”

We have much to learn from Heidegger, who may be the most important of the 20^th century’s thinkers. Certainly, his writings are relevant today, particularly his writings on thinking, on gathering, on truth, or on language, on Being, and on technology.

Despite the seeming difficulty of engaging his thought, Heidegger actually is pellucid, “thoroughly clear." It is time to bring his thought and his approach to questioning into our daily debates, our daily lives, and our daily living with others.

Heidegger can help us better think about our leaders and the future world we need them to help us co-create, a conversation we will have throughout the remainder of the 2012 election cycle and beyond.

We Americans work at living in strange ways. Many of us have come to believe that “blinking” is a better way than thinking. In fact, Malcolm Gladwell has written a highly-popular book extolling “the power of thinking without thinking” as somehow better than considered, deep thinking. We hear the word “true” and immediately say “false” — knowing in our heart of hearts that we get the true, essential difference between the essence of truth and the essence of un-truth. But, have we truly understood or are we dissembling, veiling the apparent, even to ourselves.

American politicians are expert at dissembling and hiding the truth. We know that: We just gloss over it with some gesture, having convinced ourselves that we are impotent to fight back. And yet, these Americans are sinning publicly and with our silent endorsement. Americans today want to surrender their personal responsibility and to be able to rely solely upon “group think” and “common sense."

We need to stop conceding our power and our responsibility to others. It is time to understand, to internalize, and to act upon the knowledge that “truth is un-concealing, truth is un-hiddenness."

Here are two simple cases that touch Wisconsin politics: one from our past, the other current — both hidden. The Bund and Wisconsin Congressman Paul Ryan. In the early part of Hitler’s career, a North American group (rumored by some to have been headquartered in Milwaukee) went on record endorsing and supporting Adolph Hitler’s Socialism.

Milwaukee families, whose last names began with H, F, U, and other prominent “Milwaukee Industrialists” stunningly, to us, were misled and tried to mislead others. Today, we have perhaps another such stunning mistake: Paul Ryan is on record noting his admiration for Ayn Rand. (http://swampland.time.com/2011/06/03/paul-ryans-ayn-rand-problem/). Hidden in these facts, concealed within these “truth," are very disturbing revelations. Both Hitler’s National Socialist Party and Ayn Rand posit principles concerning how one should live in society. Sadly, the principles of both are highly destructive of the general good and our Democratic republic.

It took a Holocaust to alert the world to the inherent human evil resident in Hitler. We cannot allow the same misguided passion to damage our future. Ryan, clearly a photogenic politician “groomed for greatness” is well-educated, articulate, and can communicate effectively both in writing, during interviews, and in speeches.

Ms. Rand’s “Objectivism,” however, is not a philosophy any Republican leader should aspire to use as the touchstone to her, or his, leadership principles. Whether it is the Bund, now devoid of its glamour and the seeming sway of power, or "Objectivism,” we cannot idly sit and listen in acquiescent silence: we cannot blink; we need deep questioning; we need to un-conceal that which has been hidden away from our view. 

Heidegger asserts in “The Origin of the Work of Art” that “[o]ne essential … way in which truth occurs is the act that founds a political state.”

Keep that in mind the next time you hear a politician speak: look into the depths hidden behind the language; seek to uncover and to bring into the clearing the un-hidden, the truth they want to conceal.

As always, "questioning is the piety of thought."

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