-----
--- 21918033
What exactly does Heidegger mean by semblance? I started focusing more on this concept in an attempt to understand how Heidegger is "anti-representationalist", and now I think I hardly understand what Heidegger was speaking about at all. Semblance seems to be a form of "mistaken", "underwhelming", "illusory", or "deceptive" showing, like an appearance. But doesn't this kind of concept go against the spirit of Heidegger's work, especially with "truth"? How many layers of machinery can something like "truth as aletheia, uncovering, etc.) have without resorting back to some kind of metaphysics of presence?
--- 21918947
>>21918033 (OP)
Don't overthink it anon, from my experience its one of the more straightforward concepts in his works, and it is tied to truth(unconcealment). You have the truth of the phenomenon of Being concealed so its space, the Da, is filled by semblance to it. I understand its how this can be seen as going back to metaphysics of presence, but I think Heidegger would answer that as the ground for this understand is wholly different and is based on Dasein its phenomenological, because what he posits as the unconcealed truth of Being has is well... not presence
--- 21918973
If I'm remembering correctly, his discussion of "semblance" was part of his larger discussion of different ways in which we can take or approach the phenomenon of "appearance" (Scheinen), with the ultimate aim in view, of course, of reaching a phenomenologically perspicuous (in Heidegger's terms: ontological) "view" of or "onto" the phenomenon. Again if I'm recalling correctly, semblance was mostly negated as a possible understanding of appearance, in Heidegger's typical gradual and "narrowing-in" way of getting at the phenomena. In order to say what "appearing" is in the phenomenologically interesting, primordial sense, we say what it is NOT, to clear a space for its uniqueness to come to the fore. 

It's been a long time since I've read it, but I think semblance was described as being parasitic on the real phenomenon of appearing/presencing, or as being simply a wrong way of looking at Scheinen. Similarly, Heidegger talks about subtle differences in the phenomenon of appearance, like how something that is NOT "directly" "apparent," like a disease, can nevertheless "appear" THROUGH "symptoms" or "manifestations" (Erscheinung, which can mean just "appearance" too) as intermediaries. Again, the point being to phenomenologically exhibit the nature of appearance as something beyond other forms of appearing (like "merely appearing to be, but not actually being [something]," and appearing in an immediate way but only a sign of an actual appearance). All of this is way harder to understand in the English and if you don't closely follow Heidegger's analysis of phainesthai. 

>Heidegger is "anti-representationalist"
This usually has the specific meaning that Heidegger is denying correspondence theories of truth and cognition, in which there is a mind knowing an external object via an intermediary, representative concept. Concepts do not just "re-present" external objects in simple relations. To use analytic philosophy jargon, Heidegger is an extreme coherentist who, frankly, almost never talks about extra-human (extra-Dasein?) reality, although he is usually read as a transcendental philosopher who didn't deny the existence of external reality. Just never talked about it much.
--- 21918975
>>21918973
The critique of the metaphysics of presence is aimed at the way "traditional" metaphysics (very broadly conceived, basically from the Greeks down to today) attempts to understand Being by making it present-at-hand, i.e., by treating it as a being. But the way in which we make beings present-at-hand is a secondary mode of appearing, parasitic on the more phenomenologically/ontologically primordial mode of en-worlded ready-to-handness, i.e., the simple everyday way in which the original phenomena "are" in their everyday, preontological contexts. The goal is to reach phenomenologically/ontologically reflexive awareness of these phenomena without simple forcing them into a present-at-hand scheme of concepts, whether those concepts are matter, or categories of being, etc. We want to learn to SEE the phenomenon of hammering, and through hammering the general phenomena of en-worlded intra-contextual being-with-things and being-with-others (etc.), rather than CONCEPTUALIZING these things merely ontically, i.e., via abstractions severed from the phenomena. The understanding of truth as aletheia or un-covering is aimed at this, similar to Husserl's mandate to go back to "the things themselves" (i.e., the phenomena - not the things-in-themselves in a Kantian sense). 

Sorry if I misunderstood you. Have you been using Dreyfus' lectures?
--- 21919713
Damn, I thought I knew something about Heidegger. I guess I don't. Thank you for the in-depth responses. I truly appreciate it. It's just that I was left with a lot more questions than answers.
--- 21921206
bump