Heidegger’s Platonism 9781472546777, 9781441184894, 9781441112293

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For Ratna and Iris

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The beginning of Western philosophy was without a system, but yet, or rather especially for that reason, this philosophizing was thoroughly “systematic,” that is, directed and supported by a quite definite inner jointure and order of questioning . . . Thus whoever speaks of Plato’s system . . . is falsifying history and blocking the way to the inner movement of this philosophizing and the understanding of its claim to truth. Heidegger, Schelling’s Treatise

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Preface

Calling Heidegger a Platonist is a bit like calling Plato an empiricist. It’s the sort of claim that earns you a failing grade in an introduction to philosophy course. If you know anything about Heidegger’s philosophy, then, you might be wondering, “What’s the deal with the title of this book?” Good question. The argument in the following eight chapters is my full answer, but let me say a few things straight away to clear up any immediate confusion. First, the meaning of “Platonism” is not as obvious as many of us suspect. We tend to define Platonism in terms of the theory of Forms and the immortality of the soul. Many of us take it for granted that Plato was committed to these and other doctrines, at least for a good part of his life and career, and that these doctrines constitute his philosophy—to know them is to possess Platonic philosophical knowledge. However, as I show in the first four chapters of this book, it is time to reconsider the nature of Plato’s philosophy. If we reconstruct the meaning of “Platonism,” using Heidegger as our unlikely guide, the apparent oxymoron in “Heidegger’s Platonism” disappears. In fact, I make the case that Heidegger’s interpretation of Plato in his lecture course The Essence of Truth is both an interesting solution to the problem of interpreting Plato’s philosophy, and, for Heidegger, the discovery of important concepts in his own later thought. Not only should we refuse to take Heidegger at his word when he vilifies Plato in his account of the history of Western thought, therefore; we also need to look again at the unparalleled influence that Plato exerted on Heidegger’s thinking during this critical time in his life. Second, if we set aside the differences between Plato’s metaphysics, traditionally understood, and Heidegger’s post-metaphysical philosophy of Being, there is actually a sense in which it is not uncommon to call Heidegger a Platonist. Some scholars have looked at Heidegger’s political aspirations in 1933 and suggested that he was working and writing under the influence of the political utopianism he discovered in Plato’s Republic. One cannot legislate authenticity, and one cannot command Being to send us a new epoch; Heidegger, therefore, must have been motivated by something foreign, something contrary to his most basic philosophical commitments,

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something utopian and forgetful of man’s finitude—something like Plato’s political ideology in the Republic. This is a common line of reasoning in the literature on Heidegger’s politics, but I argue that it is fundamentally mistaken, because it makes unwarranted assumptions about Plato’s politics. Plato was a dark and cynical political pessimist, who thought it challenging enough to lead a single person out of the cave, not a utopian social engineer like Heidegger, who tried to lead a collective breakout of the cave by means of nationwide, nihilism-ending educational reform. In other words, this book is an attempt to reverse several well-entrenched assumptions. Most people familiar with the Heidegger-Plato relationship would say that Heidegger’s politics, but not his philosophy of Being, was Platonic. My argument is that just the opposite is true.

Acknowledgments

Like many people in Academia, I was brought into my field, and then into my profession, by a person who turned my life upside-down. Bill Prior introduced me to Plato and effectively “converted” me to philosophy when I was a first-year undergraduate. After reading about the sea of beauty in the Symposium, and then hiking the trails of Yosemite and the Drakensberg Mountains of South Africa, I was hooked. I had fallen in love with the vision of life that Plato describes in his dialogues. I would like to thank Bill Prior for helping me develop a sense of Plato’s philosophy, for showing me the significance of the relationship between Plato and Alcibiades, and for being an important mentor and friend while I lived abroad in Africa and developed my research in graduate school. If it weren’t for him, I would have produced very different work; sometimes I think I might have been somebody else. I owe a special debt to Iain Thomson. Many of the ideas in this book were hatched while he and I took long walks through the foothills of New Mexico’s Sandia Mountains, and while I studied his path-finding work, Heidegger on Ontotheology. Iain and I did not always agree as I developed my arguments, and sometimes we disagreed quite strongly about fundamental questions, as is clear in Chapters 5 and 6. However, anyone familiar with Iain’s work will see its influence throughout this book, especially in Chapter 4, where I explain what Heidegger borrowed from Plato as he developed the early stages of his own later philosophy. Without Iain’s essay on Heidegger and ontological education, my interpretation of Heidegger’s The Essence of Truth would not have been possible. More than anyone, I am indebted to John Bussanich, whose generosity of spirit and friendship has helped me learn what it means to be a professional philosopher. He helped me discover the full scope of Plato’s inimitable philosophical vision, and enabled me to develop my own voice in the timeless activity of interpreting Plato’s dialogues. John and I disagree on several points about Plato’s philosophy, but we agree that reading Plato is personal. It isn’t about mastering his system, because there isn’t one. And it isn’t about crunching his arguments, because many of them are deliberately

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poor. It’s about what William James would call Plato’s temperament, that is, his sense of what life ultimately means and why it matters. This isn’t something one gets from trifling over Plato’s doctrinal development; it is his way of looking at the world and feeling the weight of the cosmos. John and I agree that, as far as that is concerned, we feel a certain kinship with Plato. I am grateful to him for helping me see this. In addition to the people who taught me directly, I would also like to express a considerable intellectual debt to Francisco Gonzalez and Drew Hyland. Lots of good work has been done on the relationship between Plato and Heidegger. Theirs is some of the best. I am especially grateful to Hyland for pointing out the kinship between Plato’s doctrine of the Good and Heidegger’s concept of Being as such. And I am equally grateful to Gonzalez for helping me rediscover Plato’s dialogues, and for helping me understand what is most problematic, and least Platonic, about Heidegger’s politics. I would like to thank several others who provided important support and guidance during the long development of this book: Carol White, who introduced me to Heidegger in 1995 and helped me learn to trust and critique the thought of such a controversial philosopher; Philip Kain, whose advice and support has been unlimited and unconditional, and whose courses on Hegel and Nietzsche made it possible for me to appreciate and understand the later Heidegger; William J. Richardson, who guided my master’s thesis at Boston College, served as an external reader on my dissertation, and forever shaped the way I read and understand Heidegger; David Benatar, who helped me appreciate the difficulty of making Heidegger intelligible to an audience of non-specialists; Kelly Becker, who helped me improve my arguments about Plato’s politics; and John Taber and Russell Goodman, who provided me with critical feedback and enthusiastic support at various stages of my research and writing. Writing a book like this is a lonely project. The guy with lots of opinions about “ontotheology” or “the history of ‘Platonism’” or “Schlegel’s relation to Schleiermacher” typically isn’t the life of the party or the guy with the nice car. As I am no exception to that rule, I would like to thank those who preserved my sanity while I finished this book. Thanks to Sameer Gupta, Matt Giudice, Jon Kuhn, Joaquin Casanueva, Steve Girolami, Brian Uffelman, Beau Schilz, Ryan Dunn, Jack Grimes, Erahm Machado, Damien Swendsen, Joe Delucchi, Matt McNelis, Dan Romanski, Keith Marshall, and Leo Girolami for their genuine friendship, that virtue that Aristotle ranked above justice in importance. Thanks to Misha Chkhenkeli and Noelle the penguin for the same and for the endless laughter. Thanks to Frances Trahar,

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who provided me with a view of Table Mountain while I wrote parts of Chapters 5 and 6. Thanks to my sister Manya for lifting me up when I needed it. And thanks to my parents for giving me unconditional support all along the way. I am simply overwhelmed with gratitude for everything they have done over the years to make this possible. I owe a very special thanks to Ratna Ralkowski. She accompanied me on my strange journey into academia, which took us from the Bay Area to the deserts of Namibia and Victoria Falls, and from Cape Town to Seattle and New Mexico. I am grateful to Ratna for her consistent and tireless support of me and my work, without which this book would not have been possible, for her generous friendship and sense of humor, and for introducing me to Iris, her cat, who “co-authored” this book, as she sat on my lap or on the couch next to me while I wrote it, yawning, purring, and playing with random pieces of string. If only philosophy were as easy for the rest of us mere mortals! Thanks for your help, Iris. Heidegger got what he deserved.

Abbreviations

AA

St. Augustine: Against the Academicians, by St. Augustine. Edited by D. J. O’Meara. New York: Paulist Press, 1978.

AF

“Athenaeum Fragments,” by F. Schlegel, in Lucinde and the Fragments. Translated by P. Firchow. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1971, pp. 161–240.

Alc. I

Alcibiades, by Plato, in Plato: Complete Works. Edited by J. Cooper. Translated by D. S. Hutchinson. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1997, pp. 557–95.

Anon. Prol. Anonymous Prolegomena to Plato’s Philosophy. Edited by L. G. Westerink. Amsterdam: North-Holland Publishing Company, 1962. Ap.

Apology, by Plato, in Plato: Complete Works. Edited by J. Cooper. Translated by G. M. A. Grube. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1997, pp. 17–36.

BGE

Beyond Good and Evil, by F. Nietzsche. Translated by W. Kaufman. New York: Vintage books, 1966.

BP

The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, by M. Heidegger. Translated by A. Hofstadter. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1982.

BT

Being and Time, by M. Heidegger. Translated by J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson. New York: Harper & Row, 1962.

D

Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality, by F. Nietzsche. Translated by R. J. Hollingdale. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982.

DT

Discourse on Thinking, by M. Heidegger. Translated by J. M. Anderson and E. H. Freund. New York: Harper & Row, 1959.

En.

The Enneads: Abridged Edition. Edited by J. Dillon. Translated by S. McKenna. London: Penguin Classics, 1991.

Abbreviations

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EP

The End of Philosophy, by M. Heidegger. Translated by J. Stambaugh. New York: Harper & Row, 1973.

Ep. VII

Seventh Letter, by Plato, in Plato: Complete Works. Edited by J. Cooper. Translated by G. R. Morrow. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1997, pp. 1646–67.

ET

The Essence of Truth: On Plato’s Cave Allegory and Theaetetus, by M. Heidegger. Translated by T. Sadler. London and New York: Continuum, 2005.

GA 9

Gesamtausgabe, Vol. 9: Wegmarken. Edited by Friedrich-Wilhelm von Hermann. Frankfurt: V. Klostermann, 1976.

GA 19

Gesamtausgabe, Vol. 19: Platon: Sophistes. Edited by Ingeborg Schüßler. Frankfurt: V. Klostermann, 1992.

GA 27

Gesamtausgabe, Vol. 27: Einleitung in die Philosophie. Edited by Ina Saame-Speidel. Frankfurt: V. Klostermann, 1996.

GA 34

Gesamtausgabe, Vol. 34. Vom Wesen der Wahrheit: Zu Platons Höhlengleichnis und Theätet. Edited by Hermann Mörchen. Frankfurt: V. Klostermann, 1988.

GA 36/37 Gesamtausgabe, Vol. 36/37: Sein und Wahreheit. Edited by Hartmut Tietjen. Frankfurt: V. Klostermann, 2001. GM

On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo, by F. Nietzsche. Translated by W. Kaufman. New York: Vintage, 1969.

Gorg.

Gorgias, by Plato, in Plato: Complete Works. Edited by J. Cooper. Translated by D. J. Zeyl. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1997.

GS

The Gay Science, by F. Nietzsche. Translated by W. Kaufmann. New York: Vintage, 1974.

HC

The Heidegger Controversy. Translated by R. Wolin. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992.

HCT

History of the Concept of Time: Prolegomena, by M. Heidegger. Translated by T. Kisiel. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1985.

HIC

Martin Heidegger in Conversation. Edited by R. Wisser. Translated by B. Murthy. New Delhi: Heinemann, 1977.

HJC

The Heidegger-Jaspers Correspondence (1920–1963), by M. Heidegger and K. Jaspers. Edited by W. Biemel and

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Abbreviations H. Saner. Translated by G. E. Avlesworth. Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 2003.

I

“Ideas,” in Lucinde and the Fragments, by F. Schlegel. Translated by P. Firchow. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1971, pp. 241–56.

ID

Identity and Difference, by M. Heidegger. Translated by J. Stambaugh. New York: Harper & Row, 1969.

IM

An Introduction to Metaphysics, by M. Heidegger. Translated by G. Fried and R. Polt. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000.

KPM

Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, by M. Heidegger. Translated by J. Churchill. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1962.

LH

“Letter on Humanism,” by M. Heidegger, in Basic Writings. Edited by David Farrell Krell. Translated by F. A. Capuzzi. New York: Harper & Row, 1977, pp. 213–66.

N4

Nietzsche: Nihilism, by M. Heidegger. Edited by D. F. Krell. Translated by J. Stambaugh, D. F. Krell, and F. A. Capuzzi. New York: Harper & Row, 1982.

P

Parmenides, by M. Heidegger. Translated by A. Schuwer and R. Rojcewicz. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1992.

Parm.

Parmenides, by Plato, in Plato: Complete Works. Edited by J. Cooper. Translated by G. Mary Louise and P. Ryan. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1997, pp. 359–97.

PDT

“Plato’s Doctrine of Truth,” by M. Heidegger, in Pathmarks. Edited by W. McNeill. Translated by T. Sheehan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998, pp. 155–82.

Phd.

Phaedo, by Plato, in Plato: Complete Works. Edited by J. Cooper. Translated by G. M. A. Grube. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1997, pp. 49–100.

Phdr.

Phaedrus, by Plato, in Plato: Complete Works. Edited by J. Cooper. Translated by A. Nehamas and P. Woodruff. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1997, 506–56.

PLT

Poetry, Language, Thought, by M. Heidegger. Edited and translated by A. Hofstadter. New York: Harper & Row, 1971.

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Plut. Alc.

Alcibiades, by Plutarch, in Plutarch’s Lives Volume 1. Edited by A. H. Clough. Translated by J. Dryden. New York: Random House, 2001.

QB

The Question of Being, by M. Heidegger. Translated by J. T. Wilde and W. Kluback. New Haven, CT: College and University Press, 1958.

QCT

The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, by M. Heidegger. Edited and translated by W. Lovitt. New York: Harper & Row, 1977.

RA

“The Self-Assertion of the German University,” by M. Heidegger, in The Heidegger Controversy. Edited and translated by R. Wolin. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992.

Rep.

Republic, by Plato, in Plato: Complete Works. Edited by J. Cooper. Translated by G. M. A. Grube, rev. C. D. C. Reeve. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1997, pp. 971–1223.

S

Plato’s Sophist, by M. Heidegger. Translated by R. Rojcewicz and A. Schuwer. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1997.

SI

“Spiegel Interview,” in Martin Heidegger and National Socialism. Edited by G. Neske and E. Kettering. New York: Paragon House, 1990, pp. 41–66.

Symp.

Symposium, by Plato, in Plato: Complete Works. Edited by J. Cooper. Translated by A. Nehamas and P. Woodruff. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1997, pp. 457–505.

TB

On Time and Being, by M. Heidegger. Translated by J. Stambaugh. New York: Harper & Row, 1972.

TD

“Friedrich Schlegel: On Philosophy. To Dorthea,” by F. Schlegel, in Theory as Practice. Edited and translated by J. Schulte-Sasse, H. Horne, E. Mittman, and L. C. Roetzel. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1997, pp. 419–39.

TDP

Towards the Definition of Philosophy, by M. Heidegger. Translated by T. Sadler. London: Athlone Press, 2000.

Tht.

Theaetetus, by Plato, in Plato: Complete Works. Edited by J. Cooper. Translated by M. J. Levett, rev. M. Burnyeat. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1997, pp. 157–234.

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Thuc.

The Peloponnesian War, by Thucydides. Translated by S. Lattimore. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1998.

TI

Twilight of the Idols and the Anti-Christ, by F. Nietzsche. Translated by R. J. Hollingdale. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977.

Tim.

Timaeus, by Plato, in Plato: Complete Works. Edited by J. Cooper. Translated by D. J. Zeyl. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1997, pp. 1224–91.

TSZ

Thus Spoke Zarathustra, by F. Nietzsche. Translated by W. Kaufmann. New York: Viking, 1966.

UM

Untimely Meditations, by F. Nietzsche. Translated by R. J. Hollingdale. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

WCT

What is Called Thinking?, by M. Heidegger. Translated by J. G. Gray and F. Wieck. New York: Harper & Row, 1968.

WM

“What is Metaphysics?” by M. Heidegger, in Pathmarks. Edited by W. McNeill. Translated by D. F. Krell. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998, pp. 82–96.

WMI

“Introduction to ‘What is Metaphysics?’” by M. Heidegger, in Pathmarks. Edited by W. McNeill. Translated by W. Kaufman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998, pp. 270–90.

WP

The Will to Power, by F. Nietzsche. Translated by W. Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale. New York: Vintage, 1968.

WWR

The World as Will and Representation, Vol. II, by Schopenhauer. Translated by E. F. J. Payne. New York: Dover, 1969.

Introduction

Everyone in philosophy is aware of the gulf dividing contemporary analytic and twentieth-century continental philosophy. In many cases, unfortunately, this gulf is the product of mutual misunderstanding and suspicion, and it has prevented us from developing points of intersection between these schools of thought, which for too long have resembled warring camps or feuding families more than like-minded disciplines with a shared desire for the truth. Fortunately, however, this is beginning to change. More and more, philosophers are following the lead of Hubert Dreyfus and Richard Rorty by building bridges between thinkers and ideas in these traditions. This is good news for the profession of philosophy, but it is only the beginning. There is an equally unnecessary and unfruitful divide separating continental philosophy from mainstream ancient Greek philosophy and vice versa. Very broadly speaking, Heidegger’s Platonism is an attempt to build a bridge across this gulf. I rethink the Heidegger-Plato relationship in light of what we have gained from new developments in Plato scholarship, and I advance these developments in Plato scholarship in light of Heidegger’s revolutionary but still underappreciated interpretation of Plato in the 1930s and early 1940s. Wherever possible, I avoid the alienating neologisms and terms of art that are so common in continental philosophy, and I push back against the unphilosophical dismissals of Heidegger’s treatment of the Greeks that are so common among mainstream ancient Greek philosophers. There is a mutually enriching dialogue to be had here. I do what I can to encourage it, and in the process I tell a new story about the development of Heidegger’s philosophy and its relation to Platonism. Unlike many other treatments of Heidegger’s interpretation of Plato, which focus on what Heidegger got wrong or uncritically restate his argument as the truth about Platonism, I offer a balanced approach. I present a new theory about Plato’s influence on Heidegger, show that Heidegger’s positive appropriation of Plato is as path-finding for us as interpreters of Plato’s dialogues as

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it was for Heidegger in the development of his own later thought, and offer suggestions for how Heidegger could have interpreted Plato differently, one of which, had Heidegger taken it seriously, might have saved him from his disastrous political decisions in 1933. Together these ideas contribute to our understanding of Heidegger and Plato in their own right, and as they relate to each other in the history of Western thought. We cannot understand the Heidegger-Plato relationship, or the extent to which Heidegger was a Platonist, until we get clear about the nature of Platonism. And we cannot understand Heidegger’s philosophical development in general, and the relationship of his thought to Platonism in particular, until we get clear about the extent to which Plato influenced Heidegger during the political and philosophical turning point of his life. I address each of these issues by offering a detailed account of how, generally speaking, we ought to understand Platonism, how Heidegger absorbed Plato’s philosophy into his own, and what Heidegger missed in his use and abuse of Plato’s politics. These are extremely complicated issues. I do not pretend to have said the final word on any of them. If anything, I consider this book to be the broad outline of a very long story that would take several book-length studies to tell completely. In Heidegger’s Platonism I challenge Heidegger’s 1940 interpretation of Plato as the philosopher who initiated the West’s ontological decline into contemporary nihilism, and I argue that, in his earlier lecture course, The Essence of Truth (1931–32), Heidegger discovered the two most important concepts of his later thought, namely (i) the difference between the Being of beings and Being as such, and (ii) the “belonging together” of Being and man in what he eventually calls Ereignis, the “event of Appropriation” (TB 21). Far from being the grand villain of metaphysics, therefore, Plato was the gateway to Heidegger’s later period. The Good is Heidegger’s Being as such. Because Heidegger discovers the seeds of his later thought in his positive appropriation of Plato, I argue that his later thought is a return to and phenomenological transformation of Platonism. This is ironic because Heidegger thought of himself as the West’s first truly post-Platonic philosopher. But it is ultimately tragic. If Heidegger had made Plato’s political pessimism his own, as he did with Plato’s discovery of the concealed source of unconcealment, he might have discovered an ancient analogue to his own critique of technology in Plato’s critique of Periclean Athens. Most importantly, he might have avoided his “greatest stupidity,” realizing with Plato that his “wanting to get to the bottom of beings and of Being as such” (ET 60) could be transformed, by circumstances and power, into a tyrannical desire to master the cave, the false whole and fool’s gold for which the tyrant settles.

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“Back from Syracuse?” was no doubt the correct question to ask Heidegger when he resigned from his position at Freiburg, but not because he had replayed the part of Plato trying to reform the tyrant. He had become the tyrant. Had Plato known Heidegger, he probably would have considered him a failed philosopher, at best another Alcibiades, who shattered the hopes and future of Athens on the rocks of Sicily’s coastline because he could not choose the love of wisdom over the love he felt from the demos. More than truth, Alcibiades wanted his “reputation and . . . influence to saturate all mankind” (Alc. I 105ac). He saw a beauty that dwarfed all earthly beauties in Socrates’ character and arguments (Symp. 218–22). But in the end it wasn’t enough (Symp. 216bc). He suffered from moral weakness and chose world conquest over transcendence. Instead of choosing Socrates and philosophy, he pursued a life of honor and recognition in conventional, democratic politics that destroyed him and Athens. Heidegger shattered the future of his own revolutionary philosophy when he repeated Alcibiades’ mistake and desired power before truth, that is, when he became more mesmerized by Hitler’s hands than he was by the liberating light of Being outside the cave.

Chapter 1

What is Platonism?

Shortly before his death, Plato dreamt of himself as a swan, darting from tree to tree, causing great trouble to the hunters who were unable to catch him. Plato’s early interpreters saw an image of the future in this dream: try as men would to grasp Plato’s philosophy, “none would succeed, but each would interpret him according to his own views, whether in a metaphysical or physical or any other sense” (Anon. Prol. I, 29–31). These dreams could not have been more prescient. Nearly two thousand years later, the hunt for Plato the swan rages on. The elusiveness of Plato’s philosophy is probably its least debated characteristic. The Republic, for example, has been interpreted both as a defense of democracy and as a blueprint for the modern fascist state. To some extent, of course, interpretive disagreements like this are a characteristic of philosophy in general, not just Plato’s dialogues—in fact, for some, such disagreements are a defining characteristic of philosophy. If you would like to watch philosophers squirm—and who wouldn’t?— pose this tough question: Suppose you may either a) solve a major philosophical problem so conclusively that there is nothing left to say (thanks to you, part of the field closes down forever, and you get a footnote in history); or b) write a book of such tantalizing perplexity and controversy that it stays on the required-reading list for centuries to come. Which would you choose? Many philosophers will reluctantly admit that they would go for option b). If they had to choose, they would rather be read than right. (Dennett 1999: 88) But as others have observed, the interpretive challenge with Plato is unusually pronounced.1 The problem is not that Plato was a bad writer, or that he was a technical philosopher whose concepts and arguments are themselves difficult to understand. Teenagers often read Plato’s early and middle dialogues with pleasure (Tigerstedt 1977: 13–18). The interpretive challenge with Plato seems to have two primary causes. First, he never told us what he

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thinks, at least not directly. And second, his writings never establish closure on the philosophical questions they discuss. In some cases they even seem directly opposed to closure, as if they are self-consciously incomplete and intended, by their form, their open-endedness and symbolism, to suggest that philosophers like Dennett are wrong to assume that closure is the only respectable goal of philosophy. Due to Plato’s use of the dialogue, we are still puzzled about extremely basic questions, such as whether the dialogues really are vehicles for his philosophy, or which philosophy they are intended to present. Was Plato a dogmatist or a skeptic, an un-systematical questioner or a rigid system-builder, a fervid mystic or a cool dialectician, a noble extoller of the freedom of the human spirit or a sinister herald of the totalitarian state? Are his thoughts to be found in his writings, open to every fairminded and careful reader, or are they hidden behind the work, a secret doctrine, to be extracted painfully from hints in him and other writers? (Tigerstedt 1977: 13) Diogenes Laertius may have been the first explicitly to thematize this dilemma (III.65), but by the time he wrote his biographies of the philosophers, a clear divide already existed between those who attributed certain doctrines to Plato and assumed that he was a systematic philosopher (the “dogmatists”), and those who believed Plato ultimately disavowed all knowledge and practiced a philosophy of refutation, just as Socrates had (the “skeptics”). Speusippus and Xenocrates, Plato’s immediate successors as heads of the Academy, were the earliest Platonists to attribute a system to Plato. Their leadership of the Academy lasted from 347 to 314 BC. Their followers, Heracleides and Hermodorus, maintained similar views about Plato’s philosophy and produced similar accounts of his doctrines (Merlan 1960: 2–4). Others, such as Speusippus and Xenocrates, had no doubt that Plato was a systematic philosopher, and perhaps for this reason they had no interest in his dialogues. Instead, like the contemporary “esotericists,” they reconstructed an unwritten metaphysical theory, which, according to Aristotle, Plato only communicated orally while he was head of the Academy. Their exclusive interest in Plato’s oral teaching led them, as it does the contemporary esotericists, to conclusions about Plato’s philosophy that downplay the significance of the dialogues.2 As time passed in the old Academy, some philosophers resisted the dogmatic interpretation of Plato by resurrecting the Socratic spirit of refutation, which they believed to be an indication of Socratic and Platonic skepticism.

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Eventually they openly and successfully challenged the dogmatists, and beginning in 268 BC Arcesilaus and Carneades redefined Platonic philosophy as a philosophy of skepticism. Like the dogmatists, they too neglected Plato’s dialogues, with the exception perhaps of the Theaetetus, but instead of building a system of Platonic doctrines about ultimate metaphysical principles, they privileged a Socratic style of oral teaching, which was designed to undermine any such claims to knowledge and promote speculation, doubt, and open-ended inquiry. Because their method was refutative rather than constructive, and because their opposition to knowledge claims was absolute, they were eventually accused of hijacking the Academy by presenting Pyrrhonian Skepticism under the banner of Platonism. Later critics and students of the New Academy—namely, St. Augustine, Sextus, and Cicero—simply did not believe the skeptics were sincere. Augustine could not believe that any Platonist would choose speculation and open-ended inquiry over the comforts of dogma, and—despite acknowledging that he had no grounds for doing so, other than his own faith in man’s ability to know the truth—he attributed a secret metaphysical doctrine to Arcesilaus and his followers. This theory about the Academics I have sometimes, as far as I could, thought probable. If it is false, I do not mind. It is enough for me that I no longer think that truth cannot be found by man. But if anyone thinks that the Academics were really of this opinion, let him hear Cicero himself. He assures us that the Academics had a practice of hiding their view, and of not revealing it to anyone except to those who lived with them up to old age. What that doctrine was, God knows! For my part, I do believe that it was Plato’s. (AA III.43) The New Academy’s skepticism, Augustine thought, was merely a façade projected to guard and preserve the “mysteries” of metaphysical Platonism from the evils and sophistries of the impure. Arcesilaus, in my opinion, acted in a most prudent and useful way, since the evil was spreading widely, in concealing completely the doctrine of the Academy and in burying it as gold to be found at some time by posterity. (AA III.38)3 Despite their radical departure from the earlier dogmatists and Plato’s apparently constructive dialogues, the skeptics maintained control of the

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Academy, and therefore of the essence of Platonism, until approximately 80 BC, concluding nearly two hundred years of leadership.4 The debate between these two schools of thought was silenced in the third century AD, when Plotinus developed a unique interpretation of Plato’s philosophical system, according to which the dialogues contain a hidden mystery religion that can be excavated from the dialogues when they are read correctly. Unlike the early dogmatists, the Neoplatonists did not ignore or oppose the dialogues to Plato’s oral teaching, although they did ignore the “early” aporetic dialogues and they certainly opposed their interpretation of Plato to the skeptical one (Reale 1990: 307). Today the Neoplatonic interpretation is usually rejected for a handful of reasons. Most importantly, it is considered question begging and unfalsifiable. As Tigerstedt argues, “the Neoplatonists did not read Plato as the Alexandrian philologists had read Homer, but as contemporary Christian theologians read the Bible” (Tigerstedt 1977: 66). Instead of solving the problem of interpreting Plato’s dialogues, the Neoplatonists sidestepped it. For example, they solve the problem of finding unity in Plato’s often-contradictory positions by simply ignoring some of the dialogues or interpreting important passages allegorically and suggesting their meaning is only available to the initiated. Because these problems were irrelevant to scholars working under the influence of Neoplatonism, Plotinus’ interpretation of Plato was so influential that it dominated the history of Plato interpretation until the sixteenth century, when Serranus and Stephanus seriously challenged it with a new interpretation of the dialogues as a whole, including the “early” aporetic dialogues that Plotinus and his followers had ignored. Serranus introduced the idea of a Platonic system independent of Neoplatonic presuppositions and entirely derived from Plato’s dialogues, rather than from an esoteric oral teaching. In this way, Serranus challenged the Academics’ skeptical interpretation, the ancient esotericist interpretation, and the Neoplatonic transformation of Plato into the prophet of an ancient mystery religion, but he maintained at least one basic element of the Neoplatonic interpretation— namely, its dogmatism, the assumption that Plato’s philosophy could be reconstructed into a coherent system of doctrines. This was one of the most important assumptions that influenced Tennemann and Schleiermacher, and thus the vast majority of contemporary scholars working on Plato. Schleiermacher’s interpretation of Plato turned out to be path-finding for several reasons. While he accepted the assumption that Plato’s philosophy was systematic, he also argued for the philosophical significance of

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dialogue form. Unlike any other interpreter before him, he claimed that we would not understand Plato until we appreciated him as a philosopherartist. There were three general ideas underlying his interpretive approach. First, because he saw a philosophical system laid out in constructive, scientific dialogues, he rejected the skeptical interpretation of Plato that emptied Plato of all positive philosophical content. Second, because he stressed the importance of Plato’s writings, he rejected the esotericists’ view that Plato’s philosophy could be located outside of the dialogues. And, third, while he had respect for the Neoplatonists, he rejected the Neoplatonic view because it was unjustifiably limited in its scope. In place of these once dominant views, Schleiermacher presented an interpretation of Plato that “saved the phenomena” by treating everything in Plato’s writings, including their artistic form, with equal care and attention. As we will see, however, the product of his interpretive principles turned out to be a Plato with a split personality.

Schleiermacher’s Pedagogical Interpretation of Plato In 1804, Schleiermacher finished his famous translation of Plato’s dialogues, in the general introduction of which he set the terms of the debate for more than two hundred years of Plato studies. In his path-finding introduction, he lays out his new interpretive approach by contrasting it with the mistaken interpretive approaches of his ancient and modern predecessors. The skeptics were wrong, he argues, because they mistook Plato’s destructive, apparently inconclusive, refutative method for his position. They assumed, wrongly, that Plato was “more of a dialectician than a logical philosopher, more desirous of contradicting others, than capable of, or caring to produce, a well-founded structure of his own,” and they argued from the apparent inconclusiveness of the dialogues to the conclusion that Plato was a skeptic. Schleiermacher objects that this view is therefore “founded on nothing, and explains nothing, but leaves the whole problem as it was before,” and may be contradicted by a comprehensive interpretation of the dialogues that renders intelligible “every detail with the doctrines therein contained” (Schleiermacher 1973: 8). While the skeptics were correct to observe and emphasize the aporetic quality of many of the dialogues, Schleiermacher argues that they were ultimately led astray by their inability to see the deep thematic unity and pedagogical purposes according to which Plato carefully strung the dialogues together. Schleiermacher is a little easier on the esotericists, to whom he attributes “more good will” than the skeptics, but he rejects their interpretation for

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two reasons. First, Plato’s writings are works of literary and philosophical genius in whose language one can discover Plato’s philosophy and necessary traces of Plato’s historical period, but the esotericists’ view ignores or downplays them in favor of an incomplete and much less impressive doctrine, at best the ethereal “lost riches of Platonic wisdom,” to which we have limited access. Second, the esoteric view conflicts with Aristotle’s testimony, according to which Plato was committed to views that strongly resemble what we find in many of the middle and late dialogues (Schleiermacher 1973: 9–13).5 Because Schleiermacher was absolutely convinced that the dialogues were better equipped than anything else to serve as the basis for our interpretation of Plato, he insisted that we make the dialogues our exclusive focus, and thereby became the archenemy of the contemporary esotericists.6 Of Schleiermacher’s positive interpretive principles, the most important were that (i) artistic form and philosophical content are inseparable in Plato’s dialogues (Schleiermacher 1973: 14), (Hereafter the “inseparability principle.”) (ii) Plato’s philosophy is scientific and systematic, complete from the beginning and gradually presented (ibid., 14, 19, 43),7 and (iii) Plato’s philosophy is entirely contained in his dialogues (ibid., 9–13). As Tigerstedt has shown, Schleiermacher inherited the basic idea of a non-Neoplatonic system based on the dialogues alone from Serranus’ work in the sixteenth century and Brucker’s in the eighteenth, although he developed both ideas in a highly original and influential way (Tigerstedt 1974: 39–42; cf. 1977: 66–9). A great example of this is Schleiermacher’s unique theory of development in the dialogues. Unlike Tenneman and many twentieth-century Plato scholars, Schleiermacher was not interested in dating the composition of the dialogues, which he thought was impossible. Instead, he argued that a careful treatment of the thematic unity in the dialogues could enable us to gather together the apparently distinct parts of Plato’s corpus, and then trace “the real and essential relation of Plato’s works to one another” (Schleiermacher 1973: 24). The standard twentieth-century developmentalist view is that the aporetic dialogues contain Plato’s undeveloped and incomplete ideas, some of which he inherited from Socrates, which he went on to develop, complete, and, in some cases, abandon. Schleiermacher saw something very different in the development of the ideas in Plato’s dialogues. Because he assumed that Plato was a perfect teacher and that he was a fully accomplished philosopher as long as he was a writer, Schleiermacher argued that the development in the dialogues reflects, not Plato’s own development, but Plato’s profound understanding of philosophical education: the stubbornness and laziness of the mind, the relationships between the elementary principles

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and the “composite theory,” and the pathway one must follow as one makes one’s way toward philosophical understanding. For Schleiermacher, the lynchpin for ordering the dialogues was his conception of developmental pedagogy. Some of the dialogues, for example, Phaedrus, Protagoras, and Parmenides, contained the “seeds” of Plato’s “composite theory,” while others, for example, Republic, Timaeus, and Critias, were “properly expositive works” (Schleiermacher 1973: 40–7). He divided the dialogues into three large groups: (i) preliminary works, which functioned like an overture to a symphony, containing but not developing the themes of the larger work they precede, in this case Plato’s system, (ii) indirect works, which indirectly expressed Plato’s system, and (iii) expositive works, which directly presented Plato’s fully developed “composite theory.” The preliminary and indirect works, in themselves, are “objectless and imperfect,” but as steps in Plato’s pedagogical scheme, they point beyond themselves to the properly expositive works in which Plato presents his system scientifically (ibid., 42). Schleiermacher’s idea of development in the dialogues, therefore, is a pedagogical concept, and is thus clearly quite different from the notion of development subscribed to by twentieth-century “developmentalists,” which is a hypothesis that Plato’s own intellectual development is reflected in the dialogues. Given Schleiermacher’s intellectual context, it is easy to see the roots of his commitment to a Platonic system, as well as his reaction against the esotericism of scholars such as Tenneman. In nineteenth-century Germany, it was assumed that all respectable philosophy was systematic. And as Lamm has explained, Schleiermacher produced his translations of Plato’s dialogues in the midst of a German philological renaissance that began in the late eighteenth century. German intellectuals at the time were convinced that “only a German, and only the German language, could uncover the soul of the classics” (Lamm 2000: 219). Schleiermacher is a great representative of this movement. He believed that the only way to recover the authentic Plato was to pierce the dissembling veil of traditional Platonism by means of the closest possible understanding of Plato’s language. The point was “to feel where and how Plato is cramped by [his language], and where he himself laboriously extends its grasp” (Schleiermacher 1973: 3). Schleiermacher’s second and third positive interpretive principles, therefore, are relatively easy to situate in his intellectual context. The origins of his first principle, however, that is, that in Plato’s philosophy “form and subject are inseparable, and no proposition is to be rightly understood, except in its own place, and with the combinations and limitations which Plato has assigned to it” (ibid., 14), is much more difficult to track down.

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But it seems most likely that it derives from the influence of Jena Romanticism in general and Friedrich Schlegel, Schleiermacher’s housemate and intellectual collaborator, in particular. The Jena Romantics were the first philosophers to argue that philosophy itself needed to become a work of art, and they looked to Plato as a visionary forerunner in this regard. If Jena Romanticism influenced Schleiermacher in this way, it would help us understand the otherwise puzzling tension between his interpretive principles: how can Plato’s philosophy be both inseparable from the artistic form of its presentation and systematic? It’s true that Plato may have had a variety of reasons for presenting a philosophical system in an artistic medium—for example, he may have chosen to distance himself from the sometimes subversive, anti-democratic views discussed in his dialogues to avoid Socrates’ fate. And while the ideas of philosophy as art and philosophy as system are not mutually exclusive, it is difficult to think of a medium less conducive to system-building than inconsistent, sometimes contradictory, dramatic dialogues. Schleiermacher never adequately solves this problem. He argues that Plato used his dialogues gradually to assimilate his readers to a system of philosophical doctrines, the details of which he had completely worked out before composing and publishing any of them. However appealing this thesis may be, given the privileged status Schleiermacher affords to the understanding that supervenes on dialogue, it isn’t clear why he insists that Plato’s philosophy is nevertheless systematic. In fact, there are two significant problems with Schleiermacher’s view. In addition to the implausibility of the hypothesis that Plato’s views were entirely worked out from the beginning to the end of his career, Schleiermacher fails to explain why and how the artistic form of the dialogues is significant for Plato’s philosophical system.8 The closest he comes is to say that dialogues imitate the interaction between teacher and pupil, and therefore encourage the active participation in problem solving that is necessary for philosophical understanding. One must pass through aporias and contradictions, tracking down all available “hints . . . which can only be found and understood by one who really does investigate with an activity of his own” (Schleiermacher 1973: 18). Moreover, Schleiermacher suggests that the target of this activity is “the spontaneous origination of ideas” (ibid., 43), whereby the philosopher “elevates himself . . . to the condition of one truly sensible of the inward spirit” (ibid., 16). This is all extremely intriguing, but Schleiermacher’s commitments don’t add up. On the one hand, he is committed to the view that Plato’s philosophy culminates in a philosophical system to which one must be

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gradually assimilated. But on the other hand, he suggests that the real purpose of philosophy is the “spontaneous activity” of thought evoked by dialogical communication, which written dialogues effectively imitate. Form and content are inseparable, because dialogue serves the necessary protreptic function of preparing and then elevating the mind of the reader. And because a spontaneous activity of thought is the goal of philosophy, and not “an ocular apprehension of words and letters” or a mere possession of the final result (Schleiermacher 1973: 15), it is requisite that the final object of the investigation not be directly enunciated and laid down in words, a process which might very easily serve to entangle many persons who are glad to rest content, provided only they are in possession of the final result, but that the mind be reduced to the necessity of seeking, and put into the way by which it may find it. The first is done by the mind’s being brought to so distinct a consciousness of its own state of ignorance, that it is impossible it should willingly continue therein. (18) There is a real tension here, and it seems Schleiermacher was unaware of it. While one may present a systematic philosophy in dialogues in order to suppress one’s own voice for political or other reasons, it isn’t clear that one can be committed to a systematic philosophy whose principles are only accessible via dialogue. Kramer’s explanation of this contradiction in Schleiermacher’s view is that he didn’t know what to do with Socrates’ critique of writing in the Phaedrus, according to which writing encourages forgetfulness and ignorance, as knowledge is externalized, written in ink rather than on the souls of students (Phdr. 275a). While the esotericists believe Socrates’ argument in the Phaedrus supports their view that the dialogues do not contain Plato’s real philosophical commitments, Schleiermacher saw it as confirmation of his inseparability principle. Whoever then will consider what that so exalted preference for oral instruction means and upon what it rests, will find no other ground but this, that in this case the teacher, standing as he does in the presence of the learner, and in living communication with him, can tell every moment what he understands and what not, and thus assist the activity of his understanding when it fails; but the actual attainment of this advantage rests, as any one must see, upon the form of the dialogue, which, accordingly, truly living instruction must necessarily have . . . Plato wrote so

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much from the period of his early manhood to that of his most advantaged age, it is clear that he must have endeavored to make written instruction as like as possible to that better kind, and he must also have succeeded in that attempt. (Schleiermacher 1973: 15–16) In other words, Schleiermacher’s view is that Plato’s method was Socratic insofar as writing could be Socratic—insofar as writing could imitate living instruction—and Plato chose the Socratic method because dialogue, whether spoken or written, was necessary to drive the reader to the “inward and selforiginated creation of the thought in view” that was constitutive of philosophical understanding (Schleiermacher 1973: 17). The problem with Schleiermacher’s view is that, unless we abandon the idea of a Platonic system, it is an account of the pedagogical value of the dialogues, not the philosophical content of their form. And the pedagogical story Schleiermacher gives us is incomplete. He doesn’t explain why Plato’s doctrines require this kind of pedagogy. This is an especially problematic explanatory hole in his account, since, if Plato’s philosophy is ultimately systematic, as he believes, its details could have been communicated more clearly and certainly more consistently in a systematic treatise. An alternative explanation of the tension between Schleiermacher’s principles is that it expresses deep indecision in Schleiermacher’s own thought, which in turn may have been caused by opposing theoretical assumptions in his intellectual culture—namely, the dominant assumption of his time that all respectable philosophy was systematic and the still unconventional assumption of Jena Romanticism that philosophy and literature must join forces to develop a people’s religion, a mythology of reason. Whatever the influences on Schleiermacher may have been when he wrote his introduction to Plato’s dialogues, his influence on current Plato scholarship is undeniable, if also largely forgotten (Lamm 2000: 208). In fact, his three hermeneutic principles have laid the foundations for two of the three most common modern schools of thought about how to interpret Plato’s dialogues (the “dogmatists” and the “holists,” as I shall call them below), and, as I discussed earlier, made him the archenemy of the third (the “esotericists”).

What’s Wrong with the Current Debate Without a doubt, the most common assumption among today’s Plato scholars is that Plato was a metaphysical dogmatist, whose aim in the dialogues

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was to present, develop, and defend the body of doctrines contained in his philosophical system (however loosely this “system” may have been conceived), and that the best way to discover this system is to examine the arguments and other claims defended by Socrates or Plato’s other mouthpiece(s) in the dialogues (hereafter the “dogmatic” view).9 There are many versions of the dogmatic view, but the shared assumption among dogmatists is that Plato’s thought consists of doctrines, especially a doctrine of two worlds, and that these doctrines are attempts accurately to represent the ultimate nature of reality. Although dogmatists disagree about details, most believe the basic features of Platonism are indisputable. On this view, Plato developed the theory of Forms and the closely related distinction between Being and Becoming in his middle dialogues. Only Forms can be objects of knowledge, because only Forms are unchanging, and only things that do not change can be known. Sensible objects are what they are—that is, have the properties they have—in virtue of their participation in Forms, which are ontologically independent, depending on nothing but perhaps other Forms for their existence. The defining characteristics of Forms are simplicity, eternality, intelligibility, motionlessness, and immutability. By contrast, everything sensible is generated and destroyed, defined not by any permanent characteristic but rather by impermanence itself. Sensible objects are so different from intelligible Forms that Plato suggests they occupy different worlds, of which only the intelligible is real. Human beings occupy both worlds, but only because we have in some sense fallen from the intelligible world and become prisoners of the illusions of this one. Despite our fallen nature, we are driven by an ever-present upward urge, by eros, to become what we really are, namely, gods, and return to the truth of Being in the intelligible world. Critics of the dogmatic view argue that the only way to extract such a system from Plato’s dialogues is to ignore their inconsistencies, contradictions, gaps, and inconclusiveness. The Parmenides, for example, seems to raise serious, perhaps even decisive, problems for both the theory of Forms and the distinction between Being and Becoming. These contradictions raise serious questions about how to attribute doctrinal commitments to Plato. For example, while Ryle and others have argued that the Parmenides or some other dialogue was Plato’s farewell to the theory of Forms (Ryle 1965: 97–147),10 others have been quick to point out that (i) Aristotle believed Plato maintained the separate existence of Forms in his later years (Met. A.6.987a34), and (ii) the theory of Forms is used frequently in the later dialogues, such as the Timaeus and Sophist, which renders Ryle’s farewell

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thesis extremely implausible, provided one accepts a late date for the Timaeus (Cherniss 1957).11 These are real challenges for the dogmatic view, but most of them haven’t proven to be insuperable. As early as the nineteenth century, Hermann made sense of the differences between the dialogues by suggesting the common sense view that Plato’s ideas developed as he matured (Tigerstedt 1977: 67). Hermann didn’t give up the assumption that Plato’s philosophy was systematic, or that the dialogues were generally constructive. Instead, he combined the idea of a Platonic system with a “developmentalist” interpretation of Plato that solved the problem of contradictions without relying on Schleiermacher’s less plausible assumption that Plato-the-master slowly presented his system in order to initiate the reader into his otherwise inaccessible ideas. Since Hermann’s groundbreaking work, dogmatists have generally accepted some version of the developmentalist hypothesis. The basics of this general approach are stated clearly by Kraut in his introduction to the Cambridge Companion to Plato. When the dialogues are read in their entirety, they take on the shape that we would expect of works that record the intellectual development of a single individual who is struggling to express and argue for the truth as he best understands it. There is development and perhaps there are even reversals, but there is at the same time the kind of continuity that indicates that Plato is using his main speaker to express his own views. (Kraut 1992: 26) While this approach is unquestionably the most common among Plato scholars, its defenders face serious pressure from critics who argue that it depends too much on the highly speculative project of establishing the order in which Plato wrote his dialogues.12 If we can’t determine the chronology of composition, there’s no basis for claims about development that aren’t inherently question begging: we know that Plato’s ideas developed from A to Z because we can see their development in chronology X, and we know chronology X is correct because they show that Plato’s ideas developed from A to Z. The more general, more philosophical, and thus more interesting objection to the dogmatic view is that, because it requires us to treat Plato’s dialogues as treatises rather than as works of literature, it unjustifiably limits our understanding of their philosophical contents, which are as much communicated by the literary devices as they are by the arguments (hereafter the “holistic” view).13 One obvious advantage of the holistic view is that it

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can analyze what Blondell calls “the play of character in Plato’s dialogues” alongside the arguments about character, and ask to what extent the two shed light on, underscore, or even undermine one another. For example, Lear argues that Alcibiades’ drunken and lustful, party-crashing entrance at the end of the Symposium suggests that what is being dramatized is not merely the undoing of the symposium, but the undoing of the Symposium’s account of love . . . the point is . . . to call into question the very idea of eros as a developmental force. (Lear 1998: 149; cf. Gribble 1999: 243) Lear wouldn’t have grounds for this thesis if he focused exclusively on the dialogue’s arguments, treating Diotima as Plato’s mouthpiece and Diotima’s speech as the sole source of Plato’s views. The holists’ method, therefore, gives them a much richer text to work with than they would otherwise have if they extracted the arguments from their contexts and situated them in the development of Plato’s system. Unfortunately for the credibility of their view, however, the proponents of the holistic view are a bit like the United States Democratic Party: they are united in opposition to their opponents and divided against themselves regarding how best to present their own agenda. Consequently, their agenda tends to get stuck in the mud, despite all of the good reasons to support it. The most likely reason the holistic view fails to produce a general consensus among Plato scholars is that many of its proponents continue to get over-dazzled by an unhelpful, and in fact self-defeating, hermeneutic principle introduced by Strauss in 1964, the claim that we don’t know what Plato thought because he never speaks in the first person. Plato’s Republic . . . is not a treatise but a dialogue among people other than Plato. Whereas in reading the Politics we hear Aristotle all the time, in reading the Republic we hear Plato never. In none of his dialogues does Plato ever say anything. Hence, we cannot know from them what Plato thought. If someone quotes a passage from the dialogues in order to prove that Plato held such a view, he acts about as reasonably as if he were to assert that according to Shakespeare life is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. (Strauss 1964: 50) As a more recent version of this argument goes, because “the self-effacement of Plato’s authorial voice is absolute . . . for simple formal reasons [i.e., because of the dialogue form], we are not entitled either to assume the equivalence of any of Plato’s characters with the voice of the author, or to

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infer it from the dialogues themselves” (Blondell 2002: 18–19). Plato’s authorial silence, in other words, is impenetrable. Our search for Plato’s philosophy, therefore, must begin by evaluating the significance of his deliberate authorial silence (hereafter the “argument from silence”). So far, so good, but does anything else follow? In fact, it merely establishes an unhelpful point about the historical Plato: we don’t know for sure what he thought. Some holists think this is an important point, but it is nothing more than a red herring. If pressed, most dogmatists would surely concede that they cannot know for sure whether they’ve uncovered Plato’s beliefs or intentions. But they might also insist that this is irrelevant. The point of interpreting Plato’s dialogues is not to find a magic bullet approach that gives us direct access to Plato’s mind. As Kahn correctly suggests, “the issue is: which assumptions provide us with the best interpretation of the texts?” (Kahn 1996: 59). What the holist clearly cannot do is use Plato’s authorial silence to assert that Plato was a skeptic, or that the dialogues’ drama or characterization gives us privileged access to Plato’s philosophy. Strauss’ principle only establishes that we ought to be skeptics about attributing beliefs to Plato. It does not establish that Plato himself was a skeptic, nor does it give us reason to privilege the literary features of the dialogues over the arguments. If we assume that (i) what the dialogues say cannot be attributed to Plato, and that (ii) the dialogue form says or means something—and surely we must assert at least that much in order to make sense of the dialogue form having a philosophical content—it follows that the holists have no grounds for treating the dramas as providing privileged access to Plato’s thought. If the dramas do indeed say something, what they say is, according to the argument from silence, just as untrustworthy (i.e., not attributable to Plato) as any of the views explicitly argued for in the dialogues. If Plato’s authorial silence is impenetrable, it is inconsistent to infer anything from it. This appears to be a decisive problem for the holistic view, but it turns out that Strauss’ principle is unnecessary. Although there are countless variations of the holistic view, the unifying principle holding this approach together is that every detail of a text is relevant to the meaning of the whole (hereafter the “holism” principle). If one accepts the holism principle, it follows that an interpretation is seriously deficient if it disregards or unjustifiably downplays the literary elements of the dialogues, and is based mostly or entirely on their arguments and other claims, evaluated in abstraction from their literary contexts. If each dialogue contains, nay, consists of one continuous dialectical process, how can we detach any single moment from the whole? Would not

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this imply a vain attempt to stop the living logos in its flow, to extract a wave out of the stream? (Tigerstedt 1969: 7) Holists don’t need to go outside of Plato’s dialogues to find justification for the holism principle. In the Phaedrus, Socrates applies the concept of organic unity, the unity of body parts in a living creature, to great writing in general and great speeches in particular (Phdr. 264c). Schleiermacher was the first interpreter to apply this passage in the Phaedrus to the interpretation of Plato’s dialogues. In his lengthy introduction to the Phaedrus, Schleiermacher used this passage to develop the principles of his general interpretive method. If properly employed, he thought this method could push students of Plato toward “the innermost soul of the whole work . . .,” which he identified with eros, the innermost impulse of the human being, and the “systematic art” of collection and division (Phdr. 276e), the method by virtue of which this impulse generates discursive knowledge by cutting up “each kind according to its natural joints” (Phdr. 265e). According to Schleiermacher, then, the “innermost soul” of the Phaedrus is philosophy itself, both the impulse to do philosophy and the method by virtue of which one satisfied the impulse.14 And he arrived at this conclusion about the Phaedrus—which is no easy conclusion to come by, as any reader of the Phaedrus knows—by applying the holism principle, as it is contained in the Phaedrus, to the Phaedrus itself. But he didn’t stop here. He thought the same principle could be applied to Plato’s corpus as a whole. On his view, the individual dialogues cannot be understood independent of one another. For one cannot advance in another dialogue unless he supposes the effect proposed in an earlier one to have been produced, so that the same subject which is completed in the termination of the one, must be supposed as the beginning and foundation of another. (Schleiermacher 1973: 19) This is where most contemporary holists part company with Schleiermacher. They suggest that there is a corollary to the holism principle according to which each dialogue must be interpreted on its own terms. As they say, this priority of the individual work seems to follow from the holism principle, since each dialogue is an organic whole presented by the author to his audience and there are very few intertextual references in the dialogues (Blondell 2002: 5–6). It isn’t obvious, however, that one cannot find a similar organic or thematic unity in Plato’s dialogues as a whole (Griswold 1986: 11; cf. 1990: 243). Schleiermacher clearly thought we could.

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Despite the common ground provided by the holism principle, critics continue to suggest that the holistic view fails to offer a coherent and consistent alternative to the dogmatic approach, and that this is the deathblow for holists.15 Many are satisfied with this tentative, suggestive thought-fragmentation which is certainly worth a pack of low-grade systematization, but the nisus of Plato’s thought is none the less towards systematic completion, and if we lose the willingness to run along with this nisus, the fragments lose all their meaning, become even trivial and ridiculous. (Findlay 1974: 6) Although this assessment rests on the outdated assumption that an unsystematic philosophy is “ridiculous” and “trivial,” even scholars who describe themselves as sympathetic to the holistic view often accept this sort of dismissive characterization of it. For example, Gonzalez calls the holists “skeptics” and suggests that their view leads to an interpretation of the dialogues on which Plato is reduced to a salesman for “empty philosophizing.” But this is misleading, since the vast majority of holists do not make the radical claim that Plato was a skeptic.16 In another place, he suggests the holists aim to defend a “non-doctrinal” interpretation of Plato. But this is equally misleading, since most holists argue that Plato at least defended a clearly definable conception of philosophy and its aims, even though they reject the dogmatic approach to the dialogues and deny that Plato had a system of philosophical doctrines.17 What’s missing in all of this chatter about doctrines and systems is simple, “brass tax” talk about what we mean by these terms. One can be a doctrinal philosopher (i.e., committed to certain teachings, concepts, or principles) without having a philosophical system (i.e., a fully worked out theoretical account of reality as a whole or some part of it, such as virtue or knowledge), and surely one can be committed to doctrines without being committed to Forms. Some scholars have thrown their hands in the air over the supposed indeterminateness or emptiness of the holistic conception of Platonism (suggested, I suppose, by the seemingly irresolvable competition of interpretations that arises for holists, especially those who reject the application of the holism principle to the dialogues as a whole) and the evident limitations of the dogmatists’ alternative. For this reason, following Tigerstedt, Gonzalez claims that we must develop a third way to interpret Plato’s dialogues, because the available alternatives are each deficient in some way.

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The “skeptical” interpretation can account for the form of Plato’s writings only by minimizing their positive philosophical content, while the “doctrinal” interpretation can uncover their content only at the cost of considering their form little more than a curiosity and even an embarrassment. (Gonzalez 1995: 13) This is an exaggeration, and it is based on a caricature of the holistic view. We don’t need a third way. We simply need to clarify what, if anything, is lacking in the dogmatic view, and we need to state clearly how, if at all, the holistic view can address these limitations. We also need to be clearer about what we can expect from the holists. Scholars like Gonzalez and Tigerstedt have confused consistency of interpretive principles with consistency of interpretations. We can expect the former from the holists, but not the latter. Because holists open up Plato’s dialogues to conflicting interpretations (which is an inevitable consequence of deemphasizing and recontextualizing the arguments), they cannot be expected to provide one conception of Plato’s philosophy. Holists will surely disagree about which elements of the dialogues are most important. In fact, we should expect the holists to produce several mutually incompatible conceptions of Platonism, and we should be ready to judge whether any of these conceptions is sufficiently intelligible and textually supportable. In the end, we may end up with something quite abstract and open-ended, but if this is what the dialogues suggest on the richest possible interpretation, then so be it. We certainly shouldn’t follow Augustine in assuming a priori that Plato couldn’t have preferred open-ended inquiry to dogmatic certainty. In fact, as I shall argue, Augustine’s dilemma expresses a false dichotomy, because it excludes the possibility that Plato was a non-dogmatic, transformative philosopher whose philosophy was a practice aimed at an ineffable experiential truth. This brings us much closer to the heart of the matter. The holists do not merely reject the dogmatists’ approach to interpreting Plato’s dialogues. They reject the dogmatists’ most basic assumptions about the nature of Platonism, and they reject Dennett’s assumption that closure is the only respectable goal for philosophy. Instead of assuming, as the dogmatists do, that Plato’s aim was to construct an exhaustive theory of reality, the holists often assume that Plato’s aim was to represent the nature of philosophy as such—how and why it arises, what its obstacles are, why it usually conflicts with society, what its experiential and existential payoffs are, and so on— including all of its longing for wisdom that is, tragically and comically, beyond the reach of man’s finite nature. What we find lurking in the gulf

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separating the dogmatists from the holists, in other words, is the same tension at the heart of Schleiermacher’s interpretation of the dialogues. Following in the footsteps of Aristotle, the dogmatists assume that Plato’s philosophy contains or attempts to build a philosophical system. The holists deny this basic understanding of Plato. They reject Aristotle’s dogmatic approach and argue for a new appreciation of the artistic form of Plato’s dialogues (Gadamer 1991: 7).18 In defense of their alternative, there are two things the holists usually say against the principle that Plato’s philosophy is systematic, and neither is decisive. First, they say, it seems highly unlikely that Plato intended to present and defend a systematic philosophy in his writings, since dialogues are particularly unsuited to the task.19 Second, it is anachronistic to impose the post-Aristotelian (and mostly posteighteenth-century German) idea of a philosophical system onto Plato (Ausland 1997: 379). As we’ve seen, however, neither of these reasons is sufficient. The first point is weak because Plato might have had pedagogical or political reasons for using dialogues to present his system. The problem with the second point is that we may be wrong to assume that Plato was not the inventor of the philosophical system. After all, there have been several very coherent, very compelling accounts of a Platonic system. What the holists need, then, are stronger reasons for resisting the imposition of a philosophical system on Plato’s dialogues. But where can we find such reasons? Holists often suggest that the question, “Why did Plato write dialogues?” is the most important question for the interpreter of Plato (Griswold 1981: 178). But I’m not sure why it isn’t more important, especially for a holist interested in challenging the systematization of Plato’s philosophy, to ask why Plato stressed, and in some cases embraced, nonrational phenomena—for example, myth, madness, religious experience, prophecy, charms, incantations, divine dispensation, mystery religions, and so on—in dialogues as different as Ion, Apology, Meno, Gorgias, Phaedrus, Symposium, Theaetetus, Republic, Phaedo, Timaeus, and Laws. These features of the dialogues, which easily connect to the ineffability of Plato’s philosophy, point much more directly than literary form to an unsystematic philosophy.

The Romantic Rediscovery of Plato’s Ineffable Ontology Ironically, the philosopher who came closest to untangling this interpretive knot, Friedrich Schlegel, originally planned to collaborate with Schleiermacher on his translation and interpretation of Plato’s dialogues, the texts that created the knot in the first place. As I explain above, Schleiermacher argued

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both that Plato’s philosophy is systematic and that it is inseparable from its artistic form. And as we’ve seen, the dogmatists have developed the first point and ignored the second, while the holists have developed the second, which they take to be undeniably true, and rejected the first, which they assume to be strictly incompatible with the second. Since the holism principle is difficult to deny, it would seem that the holists have the upper hand in this debate, at least in principle. The problem, however, is that the holists haven’t yet explained why the nature of Plato’s philosophy necessarily rules out the possibility that it was systematic and requires the use of dialogues or their equivalent for its presentation. Schleiermacher’s own explanation of this point provides us with a pedagogical explanation, rather than the philosophical one we’re seeking, so he fails to tell us why form and content are inseparable. If the dialogue is merely a pedagogical tool, then it is unnecessary, and thus separable from the philosophy, which could have been presented some other way. By contrast, Schlegel is quite clear on the necessary union of form and content in Plato’s philosophy. For him, the dialogue form itself is an expression of Plato’s ontology, which cannot be grasped by any system. If developmental pedagogy is the lynchpin in Schleiermacher’s interpretation of Plato, Schlegel’s is twofold: he assumed that (i) Plato’s philosophy is unsystematic, and as such it is a mirror of (ii) the conceptual inexhaustibility of “the whole,” “the Absolute,” or “the divine” (hereafter “Being”). Because Schleiermacher assumed that Plato’s philosophy culminated in a scientific system, it may have been this issue more than anything that drove Schlegel and Schleiermacher apart intellectually, even if there were several personal disagreements that drove them apart as collaborators (Lamm 2000: 210–18). Schlegel addresses precisely this tension in a letter to Schleiermacher in 1803, one year before the publication of Schleiermacher’s edition of the dialogues. I must actually confess to you something that you will perhaps find quite heretical; the whole concept of completeness seems to me a superstition as far as this undertaking is concerned. For this cannot be found unless it be in the spirit of Plato himself and the one who understands him. (Schlegel, in Bubner 2003: 37) As we’ve seen, Schleiermacher assumed that Plato’s philosophy was complete from the beginning and gradually revealed in the dialogues according to a protreptic pedagogical imperative. Schlegel rejected this assumption,

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and argued that, for Plato, philosophy was not just incomplete but, due to the nature of reality and man’s finite relation to it, entirely incapable of completion. Straight away, then, we can see a fundamental conflict between Schlegel’s understanding of Plato and the dogmatic view (as well as Schleiermacher’s), according to which a systematic understanding of nature is possible because nature is systematically ordered. Schlegel’s view is close to the contrary of this: the conceptual inexhaustibility of nature blocks a systematic understanding of it. Is nature systematically ordered? Is there a hierarchy of Being? Schlegel’s Plato, like Kant, says we cannot know. Undoubtedly, Schlegel’s view of Plato was influenced by his own philosophical presuppositions. The Jena Romantics believed that philosophy in general needed to become a work of art, and that philosophers needed to become artists. Like Nietzsche, although for different reasons, namely, metaphysical presuppositions rooted in Fichte’s thought, they questioned the traditional notion of truth and argued that either art ought to replace philosophy or philosophy ought to become artistic (AF 116). In particular, Schlegel believed that if philosophy became sufficiently suffused with the aesthetic powers of poetry it could help usher in a new era of collaborative intellectual activities between philosophers and artists (AF 125). These ideas were not unique to Schlegel in late eighteenth- and early nineteenthcentury Germany, even if they did not represent the mainstream of German philosophical thought. As the author of the Earliest System-Program of German Idealism (1796–97) writes, apparently appealing to Plato as a model, I am now convinced that the highest act of Reason, the one through which it encompasses all Ideas, is an aesthetic act, and that truth and goodness only become sisters in beauty—the philosopher must possess just as much aesthetic power as the poet. Men without aesthetic sense are what the philosophers-of-the-letter of our times are. The philosophy of the spirit is an aesthetic philosophy . . . Poetry gains thereby a higher dignity, she becomes at the end once more, what she was in the beginning— the teacher of mankind . . . we must have a new mythology, but this mythology must be in the service of the Ideas, it must be a mythology of Reason. (Earliest System-Program of German Idealism, in Harris 1972: 510–11) Schlegel was committed to this call for a philosopher-artist for philosophical reasons which he ultimately attributed to Plato. On his view, the dialogue allowed Plato to exhibit philosophical thinking itself, in all of its dialogical

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striving for Being. And this was crucially important to Schlegel, because philosophy is not designed to teach us this or that conclusion of thought, but rather thinking as such . . . one cannot teach thinking itself except by act and example, by actually thinking in the presence of someone, and not by simply communicating what has already been thought, but rather by representing to the other the process of thinking as it arises and comes to be. And that is precisely why the spirit of this science can only be rendered completely clear in and through a work of art. (Schlegel, in Bubner 2003: 34) Schlegel refers to Plato’s dialogues as instances of his ideal of philosophical art in other places as well. In his more developed lectures on Plato, he argues that Plato’s philosophy strives and consciously fails to depict Being. On this view, humans experience degrees of illumination, or degrees of reality, and because humans cannot delineate these gradations according to their “natural joints” (Phdr. 265e), Being, in all of its multiplicity, and man’s chameleon like relationship to it, must be represented negatively—that is, in a way that signifies its own incompleteness. In other words, because Being cannot be fully conceptualized, it defies direct presentation and, therefore, may only be indefinitely and indeterminately indicated. Assuming that philosophy is the positive cognition of infinite being, it must be granted that neither it nor philosophy as a science can ever be completed; although the first and certain principles from which the inquiry should begin can be established, but what can be developed from this is infinite, indeterminable. (Schlegel, in Kramer 1999: 81) Schlegel, in fact, attributes the form of Plato’s work, including his use of dialogue, symbol, myth, and allegory, to the conceptual inexhaustibility of Being. The dialogues are these self-consciously incomplete, indirect representations and indications. Examples of the indefinite and indeterminate characteristics of the dialogues are not difficult to find. For example, when Diotima tells Socrates he may not be able to follow her revelation (Symp. 210a), or when Socrates tells Glaucon their dialectical inquiry can proceed no further and that he must see the matter for himself (Rep. 533a), we witness the limits of what others have called “the positive language of presence.”20 It is even easier to find examples of inconclusiveness in the dialogues, and we needn’t restrict ourselves to the so-called early dialogues. On Lear’s interpretation,

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as I discuss above, the Symposium is much more inconclusive than scholars usually assume, and, as I argue in Chapter 7, even a dialogue like the Republic is incomplete, ironic, and open-ended. For Schlegel, Platonic and Socratic irony is equally important. Like the inconclusiveness of the dialogues, irony is designed to make us aware of the poverty of human wisdom, as Socrates suggests in the Apology, but it is also supposed to make us aware of the something else beyond all of our conceptual representations of Being (Kramer 1999: 83). Schlegel saw something more in Plato than just these abstract points. Like the other Jena Romantics, he argued that the philosophy of the future, which had to be beautiful, required artistic genius. Beauty was not something that could be mastered, exhaustively understood, or created by the employment of rules. Enthusiasm and inspiration were required, as was a poet’s understanding of the powers dormant in ordinary language. For where language is animated by enthusiasm there arises from the most common, simple, and understandable words and phrases, as if spontaneously, a language within language. (TD 438) For Schlegel, Plato possessed this philosophical-artistic genius more profoundly and more obviously than any other philosopher. There is no better evidence of his philosophical acumen than his recognition of the fact that the dialogue was required by his ontology. The dialogue is supposed to be a form of expression that self-consciously exhibits both its lofty ambitions and its necessary incompleteness and partiality, such that it—in virtue of its form—symbolizes an absent reality, a reality that must be absent from any of its representations. Irony, in particular the irony of his “fragmented” writing, was Plato’s way of suggesting that truth is too elusive to be fully and finally grasped by man. We might even say that, on Schlegel’s view, Plato’s entire project, his acting out the role of the elusive swan, was his best effort to imitate the intractability of truth. Plato used the dialogue because it allowed him to mirror man’s fragmented, partial, and finite grasp of the infinite. In all of these respects, Schlegel saw Plato as his forerunner. It should be no surprise, then, that he described Plato as the best preface to his own religion of the future (I 27).21

Conclusions: Ineffability and Dialogue Form It certainly is conceivable that Schlegel influenced the thinking of his close friend Schleiermacher with such ideas, especially when he commented so

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suggestively in the Athenaeum Fragments that a dialogue is a “chain or garland of fragments” (Schlegel 2001: 77). If Schlegel did influence Schleiermacher in this way, Schleiermacher either didn’t understand or didn’t accept Schlegel’s ontological interpretation of Plato. If he didn’t accept it, it’s a mystery why he nevertheless argued for the inseparability of form and content in Plato’s dialogues. His pedagogical explanation cannot establish inseparability, because it reduces the dialogue form to an unnecessary pedagogical tool. By contrast, as we’ve seen, Schlegel’s view can straightforwardly establish inseparability because on his view the representation of Plato’s ontology requires a self-consciously incomplete artistic form. To sum up, Schleiermacher caused the standoff between the dogmatists and the holists when he asserted but did not sufficiently explain his prima facie plausible inseparability principle. Because the holists have thus far failed to provide sufficient grounds for rejecting the principle that Plato’s philosophy was systematic, and because the dogmatists have done an excellent job of extracting a philosophical system from Plato’s middle and later dialogues, the holists’ alternative to the dogmatic view has yet to gain the support of most scholars. Ironically, however, before the debate between the holists and the dogmatists had begun, Schlegel suggested a doctrinal basis for the inseparability principle—namely, the conceptual inexhaustibility of Plato’s ontology—which should have harmonized Schleiermacher’s opposed principles, and thus prevented the divide between the holists and dogmatists. If I am right about this, we’re left with two very important questions. First, do we have good reasons, such as evidence that is somehow grounded in Plato’s texts, to accept Schlegel’s ontological explanation of the inseparability principle? Second, if we have this evidence, can a holist accept it, or have we merely renamed what we mean by “Plato’s system”? Differently put, what do we mean by “Plato’s ontology” if we reject the notion that Plato’s philosophy is systematic? I will answer these questions in the next chapter by reviewing the argument from Plato’s Seventh Letter and showing its consistency with key passages in Plato’s dialogues. As we will see, the argument of the letter, like some of his positions in the dialogues, is straightforwardly inconsistent with the notion of a Platonic system. Moreover, it is directly related to the ineffability of Plato’s ontology, and it provides us with three good reasons to believe that Plato’s choice to write dialogues was motivated by his general conception of philosophy and its objectives.

Chapter 2

Untying Schleiermacher’s Gordian Knot

The purpose of this chapter is to determine whether Plato’s commitment to ineffability explains his choice to write dialogues. I shall argue that it does, even if there is no open-and-shut case we can provide to prove it. In the end it should be clear that the ineffability of Plato’s philosophy provides us with the hermeneutic principle we need to dissolve the disagreement between the dogmatists and the holists. Before we can explore this possibility, however, we must be clearer about what we mean by a “commitment to ineffability.” I hope to distinguish three senses of it in what follows. My primary point of reference will be the Seventh Letter, but I will confirm each important step of my argument by showing its consistency with the evidence in the dialogues. First, as the concealed source of unconcealment that is beyond being, truth, and knowledge, and is not “named or spoken of” (Parm. 142a), the Good or One cannot be exhaustively known or described; this is doubly true—the Good is doubly withdrawn from knowledge—for a finite human subject, whose wisdom is incomplete and impoverished compared to that of the gods. As we will see below, Plato distinguishes between two senses of episteme in the Seventh Letter. One, “the fourth” (Ep. VII 342c2) is defective, while the other, which is the product of dialectic and takes Forms as its objects, is not (Ep. VII 342e1, 343e2).1 However, the superior episteme is also subject to important limitations: it is something we possess episodically, not permanently, and when it is of the Good—if it is ever of the Good—it is radically unlike any other kind of cognition, that is, if we can call it a cognition at all. Plato doesn’t clearly distinguish between knowledge of ordinary Forms and knowledge of the Good, but it seems we need to. As I discuss below, because episteme of the Good would have to be so far beyond the ordinary bounds of intentionality and subjectivity, it isn’t clear that it has anything at all to do with human cognition. Even the phrase “episteme of the Good” may be misleading: if all objects of knowledge must be (i) determinate entities and (ii) exist in a subject-object relation, it isn’t possible to

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know the Good, even if it is possible, in some sense, to identify with it. I will call this “metaphysical ineffability.” Second, in order to attain episteme of Forms, Plato thought one must undergo a transformation in one’s character and cognition. The philosopher practices for death by retraining the mind and educating the passions (Phd. 67de); he “imitates [the Forms] and tries to become as like them as he can” (Rep. 500c), “gazes aloft, paying no attention to what is down below—and this is what brings him the charge that he has gone mad” (Phdr. 249d); his soul “seethes and throbs in this condition” (Phdr. 251b); he transforms his vision of the world, finding an otherworldly beauty hidden in everything (Symp. 210a–212b), and harmonizes “the revolutions” in his soul by “coming to learn the harmonies and revolutions of the universe” (Tim. 90d). Borrowing from Pierre Hadot’s sense of “spiritual,” I will call this “spiritual ineffability.” The third sense of ineffability that appears in the letter and in the dialogues is closely related to the second, but it is different enough to warrant separate treatment. Plato understood philosophy as a life choice, and it seems that he wanted to represent it, together with its various characteristics—its experiential benefits, its strangeness, its conflicts with tradition and politics and religion, and so on—alongside competing life choices, such as the life of honor (Alcibiades), pleasure (Charmides), wealth (Cephalus), sophistry (Thrasymachus), rhetoric and conventional politics (Callicles), and others. And he hoped to make a case for philosophy by presenting Socrates as superior to his contemporaries in virtue and knowledge. I will call this “existential ineffability.” The dialogue form provided Plato with a perfect medium for representing philosophy in all of this irreducible complexity. Each of these senses of ineffability can be found in the Seventh Letter, where Plato famously explains his failed attempts to convert Dionysius II to philosophy. Plato had hoped Dionysius could be persuaded to live more philosophically. But, far from having a philosophic nature or being “on fire with philosophy,” he proved to be a hopeless charlatan, unable to appreciate the ineffability of philosophical knowledge and uninterested in the “marvelous quest” that Plato laid out before him (Ep. VII 340bc).

Metaphysical Ineffability: The Argument from Language and Human Finitude The most important philosophical claim in Plato’s letter is that philosophical knowledge cannot be committed to writing, because these matters

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cannot be expressed verbally as other subjects can. This claim alone, without any of the supporting arguments, should give pause to anyone who treats Plato’s dialogues as disguised treatises that secretly contain an indirectly communicated but otherwise fully worked out philosophical system: the subject of his philosophy cannot be put into words, let alone worked out into a totalizing system. We gain knowledge in philosophy, Plato suggests, through a kind of dawning insight, which is the product of long-continued discussions and a “laborious,” “orderly,” “disciplined” way of life, “suitable to the subject” pursued, “beset by many difficulties” (Ep. VII 341c–e). There is no writing of mine about these matters, nor will there ever be one. For this knowledge is not something that can be put into words like other sciences; but after long-continued discussion between teacher and pupil, in joint pursuit of the subject, suddenly, like light flashing forth when a fire is kindled, it is born in the soul and straightaway nourishes itself. (Ep. VII 341cd) The implications of the fire metaphor are very important. Knowledge emerges from dialogue, just as light flashes forth when fire is kindled. Definitions, names, images—all of the available means to knowledge (i.e., including philosophical doctrines, which are made up of these basic elements)—are necessary conditions for knowledge, just as flammable materials and a spark are necessary conditions for fire, but knowledge is something other than the doctrines that help produce it. And, provided Plato’s metaphor can be pushed this far, knowledge is all consuming. Doctrines aren’t merely like a ladder that one kicks away when one has made an ascent; they are consumed by the knowledge they produce, just as wood is consumed by the fire it produces. Plato distinguishes between the objects of knowledge, Forms, and everything else, (i) the means employed to bring the mind into contact with Forms: the name (onoma), the definition (logos), and the image (eidolon), and (ii) the cognitive states produced by these three: true opinion (alethes doxa), knowledge (episteme), and intelligence (nous). Of these last three, nous is most akin to Forms, such as the Beautiful, the Good, and the Just (Ep. VII 342d). But all of these cognitive states “are in our minds, not in words or bodily shapes, and therefore must be taken together as something distinct both from the [object of knowledge] itself and from the three things previously mentioned [the means to knowledge]” (Ep. VII 342c). When Plato writes that nous is distinct from both the object of knowledge, the circle or Forms in general, and the means to knowledge, he is reminding us that we are in-between beings: nous is in-between true being and

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language, just as Diotima suggests eros is in-between gods and mortals (Symp. 204b). Forms can be intuited, and dialectic is the activity that evokes these intuitions (Ep. VII 344b). But, as the offspring of Poros and Penia (Symp. 203b–204a), we can “barely” (mogis) attain this kind of cognition and only “at the very limits of human possibility” (Ep. VII 344b). The word “barely” in this passage is important, as Gonzalez rightly points out, “because it shows that this insight, here as in the dialogues, is not the kind of knowledge that will put an end to all inquiry or that can be ‘grasped’ once and for all” (Gonzalez 1998a: 267). Plato’s account of human finitude is reinforced by his argument in the Seventh Letter, where he focuses on the inexpressibility of true being and leaves us with a paradox. The means to knowledge are necessary but not sufficient for producing philosophical insight. We cannot attain insight without them (Ep. VII 342a) “for if with respect to these things one does not in some way lay hold of the four, one will never fully partake of knowledge of the fifth” (Ep. VII 342e). But each means, including episteme, “the fourth” (Ep. VII 342c), is insufficient for insight because each makes manifest “how a thing is qualified” rather than “what it is” (Ep. VII 342e, 343c). That is to say, “due to the weakness of language” (Ep. VII 343a), none of the means to knowledge can express the being of entities, what entities are, and yet this is what the mind seeks (Ep. VII 343c). Hence the need for dialectic, that is, a mode of inquiry that overcomes the weakness of language, like a dialogical via negativa, and thereby carries nous beyond the limitations of names, definitions, images, as well as its own ordinary, propositionally mediated mode of apprehending the world.2 Only barely, when the three, that is, names, propositions, as well as appearances and perceptions, are rubbed against each other, each of them being refuted through well-meaning refutations in a process of questioning and answering without envy, will wisdom (phronesis) along with insight commence to cast its light in an effort at the very limits of human possibility. (Ep. VII 344bc) “For this reason,” Plato says, a person “with insight” would not “dare fix his thoughts in language, especially if this language is unalterable, as is the case with written words” (Ep. VII 343a). What exactly are the limitations of the means to knowledge? Plato develops several specific problems with them. First, images are full of “what is opposite to the fifth, since it [i.e., a drawn circle] everywhere touches upon a straight line” (Ep. VII 343a). Second, names are unstable: “nothing prevents

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things presently called ‘round’ from being called ‘straight’ and things called ‘straight’ from being called ‘round.’” Third, definitions are no different, since they consist of propositions and every “proposition is made up of names and predicates.” However, none of these flaws, he insists, is as significant as the one he mentioned first: “given that the being of an object and its quality are two different things and that what the soul seeks to know is not the quality, but the being, each of the four offers the soul, both in words and in deeds, what it does not seek” (Ep. VII 343c). Alone, therefore, language is flawed, but it produces insight when it is complemented by the intellectual activity of dialectic. True being, the subject of philosophical knowledge, can be talked about, named, and represented in images, but none of these things can express it as what it really is. In this respect, philosophical knowledge, as Plotinus observed, is analogous to ordinary, everyday examples of knowledge by acquaintance, those instances when something is manifest but not fully describable (En. I.6.4). Consider knowledge of the color red. How might one impart this knowledge to a person who has been blind since birth? It doesn’t seem possible even to begin. We can compare it to the sound of a trumpet. But, as Nagel has suggested, such descriptions are obviously deficient to anyone who has both seen the color red and heard a trumpet (Nagel 2005: 162). Similarly, the greatest poets can evoke something similar to the feeling of standing in Yosemite Valley, and Ansel Adams can bring one as close as possible to its splendor with his photographs. But neither the poet nor the photographer can reproduce the irreducibly subjective feeling of actually standing there in the evening, with Yosemite Falls roaring somewhere in the darkness and the silhouette of El Capitan rising 3,000 feet straight up from the valley floor toward an open sky spackled white by the Milky Way. In each of these cases, we can talk about our knowledge by acquaintance, but such knowledge cannot be reduced to any of our talk or any of our representations, regardless of our skills in photography or poetry. The same surely can be said for love, the experience of childbirth, watching the sunrise from the summit of Kilimanjaro, and many other things. Each of them, to be known, must be experienced from the first-person point of view. We cannot express the actual character of these experiences, but we can talk about them for as long as an audience will indulge us. Plato wants to make an analogous point about the principles sought in philosophical inquiry. They can be talked about, but they cannot be expressed as what they are. “You won’t be able to follow me any longer, Glaucon, even though there is no lack of eagerness on my part to lead you, for you would no longer be seeing an image of what we’re describing, but

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the truth itself” (Rep. 533a). Instead of talking directly about the nature of the Good, or the nature of justice in the soul, for example, Socrates uses analogies and metaphors, and talks about both indirectly. The Seventh Letter explains why he does this. Philosophical knowledge cannot be expressed in words, and it cannot be learned through the mastery of doctrines, because it is the product of “living with the subject itself in frequent dialogue.” As the means to knowledge are refuted, “suddenly, as a light kindled from a leaping flame, [knowledge] comes to be in the soul where it presently nourishes itself” (Ep. VII 341cd). In other words, non-propositional knowledge of the fifth, which cannot be known via the means to knowledge, somehow emerges as the product of dialogue, which is propositional through and through: one moves up and down between the means to knowledge until insight is born, at which point the mind’s activities dispense with propositions and images altogether, “moving on from Forms to Forms, and ending in Forms” (Rep. 511c). In order for wisdom and intelligence to shine forth, each of the means to knowledge must be refuted through a process of non-adversarial, dialectical questioning and answering (Ep. VII 344b). As Plato says, phronesis and nous “commence to cast [their] light in [the] effort” of dialectic, when it is pursued without envy and at the absolute limits of human possibility. The light cast by dialectic is not cast once and for all, however. Because our insight into Being is finite and episodic, it calls for what Gadamer describes as “infinite” or unending reflection in the labor of dialectic (Gadamer 1980: 122; cf. 121). The point of engaging in dialectic, in other words, is to overcome the limitations of the individual means to knowledge by finding a way to see through or beyond their limited perspectives. Individually, “all these means [to knowledge] assert themselves as whatever they are, and in pushing to the fore . . . they suppress that which is displayed in them [Being]” (ibid., 105).3 As Plato says twice, we confuse what a thing truly is with what it is like, and yet what our minds naturally crave is knowledge of the being of entities. Dialectic, then, is the method one uses to remain open to what remains concealed in the disclosure of Being to man through the deficient means of knowing. If we read the Seventh Letter together with other details of the Republic and the account of the One in the Parmenides, there is a related reason for the incompleteness of human wisdom. The Good is not a Form like the others—it is not the being of any entity, but is beyond being, truth, and knowledge (Rep. 506de)—and therefore cannot be known, even if the other Forms can be. Plato didn’t merely believe that the Good was inexpressible, and he didn’t merely believe it was unknowable to our contingent mode of understanding. He argued for both of these views (Tim. 28c; Symp. 211a), but he also thought the Good was unknowable in itself, that is, not only

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unknowable to our finite faculties.4 Consider the account of the One in the Parmenides, for example. The One in no way is . . . Therefore neither is it in such a way as to be one, because it would then, by being and partaking of being, be. But, as it seems, the one neither is one nor is . . . If something is not, could anything belong to this thing that is not, or be of it? . . . Therefore no name belongs to it, nor is there an account or any knowledge or perception or opinion of it . . . Therefore it is not named or spoken of . . . nor does anything that is perceive it. (Parm. 142a) We cannot make any positive claims about the One. It does not host any predicates—it is neither at rest nor in motion, neither the same nor different, neither equal nor unequal, and so on—and it is beyond Being. It is not itself an entity of any kind. It transcends the phenomenal realm and the intelligible world, and cannot be perceived or known rationally. It is not and cannot be an object of knowledge. The most we can do is say what it is not. How, if at all, does the One fit into the letter’s epistemology? Here is one possibility. On Plato’s view, it is possible to transcend the limitations of ordinary cognition, including a defective form of episteme. But during these moments one of two things occurs, and Plato only describes one in the letter: either (i) nous apprehends individual Forms—this is the cognitive activity Plato means to refer to with the positive account of nous and phronesis (Ep. VII 344b), as well as the second sense of episteme (Ep. VII 343e2), the first two of which shine forth in the effort of dialectic as the product of non-adversarial refutation, and the third is the name for the insight they engender—or (ii) nous is absorbed into the One and merges with it (Rep. 490b), whereupon it ceases to be what it is and identifies with a thing that is nothing, the Good beyond being. While (ii) is consistent with the letter, and seems better to correspond to the account of dialectic at Republic 511c, which eschews images altogether and deals only with Forms, it isn’t explicitly described in the letter. However, Socrates’ account of the Good in the Republic seems to require it. According to the Republic, the Good is that which “gives truth to the things known and the power to know to the knower” (Rep. 508de1). Unlike the other Forms, it is not entirely distinct from nous, but is the ontological precondition for nous to enter into any relationship with the objects it apprehends, including Forms.5 As this ontological precondition for epistemic truth, the Good plays a preepistemic role in what Heidegger would call the happening, or event, of truth, which makes epistemological truth possible, and this explains why it

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is wrong, as I discuss in Chapter 4, to consider Plato a proto-subjectivist. In fact, because the highest form of philosophical knowledge, if we can call it “knowledge,” requires the absorption of the subject in the One, the category of subjectivism couldn’t be more inappropriate for Plato. Far from being a subjectivist, Plato understood subject and object as yoked together by the Good at a pre-epistemic level, that is, at a level that makes the subjectobject relationship possible and therefore bridges the gap between knower and known. “The supreme act of cognition,” as Dodds has observed, “will thus not be strictly cognitive at all, but will consist in the momentary actualization of a potential identity between the Absolute in man and the Absolute outside man” (Dodds 1928: 141). Nous has a divine origin (Tim. 90bd), and it can be divinized by reawakening and restoring its inborn powers insofar as this is possible (Tht. 176b). On this point, Plato anticipated Plotinus who describes an experience of completely surrendering oneself to the emanation of the One, and ceasing to see oneself as something other than it (En. VI 9, 10). None of this is to say, however, that Plato thought permanent, totalizing knowledge of the Good was possible. Plato’s qualifications—we must become like the divine so far as we can; we are capable of episodic, momentary communion with the divine; the Good is beyond being; the One is nothing—make all of the difference. In fact, Republic 490b should remind us of Aristophanes’ speech in the Symposium, in which he suggests that humans attempt to “make one out of two and heal the wound of human nature” (Symp. 191d) through sex, not knowing what it is they “really want from each other” (Symp. 192d), which is the completeness they cannot have as long as they are human, wounded as they are by Zeus’ punishment for ascending to the heavens to challenge the gods (Symp. 190c). When we read the 490b passage together with the Seventh Letter and the passages in the dialogues that emphasize human finitude, we have Plato’s full account of metaphysical ineffability: (i) as an “object of knowledge” that is not an object, the Good withdraws from our cognition, just as we withdraw from our subjectivity (i.e., from nous) and somehow merge with it, eliminating its otherness, (ii) because our cognition in these moments is supra-rational, that is, both beyond the bounds of ordinary intentionality and entirely unmediated by concepts, propositions, or any specific perspective, it is well beyond the limits of subjectivity, let alone language, (iii) because we are finite creatures, incapable of maintaining our union with the Good, we cannot enjoy the undivided and unlimited wisdom of the gods.

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These points are significant for understanding the Seventh Letter because they explain Plato’s view that human wisdom is necessarily incomplete, and incomplete-able.

Spiritual Ineffability: The Argument from Self-Transformation The limitations of language and the limitations of nous are only part of philosophy’s challenge, however. In order for knowledge to be possible, there must be an affinity between subject and object. As we saw above, it is “only . . . when reason and knowledge are at the very extremity of human effort, [that they can] illuminate the nature of any object” (Ep. VII 344b4–7)—and even in this case, “it is barely possible for knowledge to be engendered of an object naturally good, in a man naturally good” (Ep. VII 343e1–2). On Plato’s view, if one has not undergone what Socrates elsewhere calls “purification,” one cannot see the truth. If . . . a person’s nature is defective, as for most people the state of the soul with regard to learning and so-called morals is naturally defective (though in some cases this happens through corruption), not even a Lynceus could make people in such a state see. In short someone who has no affinity with the subject matter will not be made [to see] by memory or an ability to learn, for the principle or source [of knowledge] is not to be found in alien dispositions. (Ep. VII 343e2–344ab) There are clear connections with the Phaedo, Symposium, Meno, and Phaedrus in this passage. At 344a, for example, where Plato suggests that the principle or source of knowledge cannot be found in alien dispositions, he may be referring to his doctrine of recollection and the idea that philosophical insight is ultimately a kind of self-knowledge. The principles one comes to know are somehow a feature of one’s own soul (Gonzalez 1998a: 269–71). The philosophical life is a life of purification, “for it is not permitted to the impure to attain the pure” (Phd. 67b), whereby one ascends through love toward the Good and the Beautiful until nous reaches its goal, which Plato describes in various ways: it gazes upon the great sea of beauty (Symp. 210d) and begets upon the beautiful (Symp. 206e); it unites with the Forms in a cognitive rapture that is analogous to sexual intercourse (Rep. 490b); it becomes divine and rejoices in seeing reality (Phdr. 247d). Far from being

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colorful ornamentation, these passages help us make sense of Plato’s claims in the letter (i) that those who attempt to write about the principles of philosophy do not know themselves (Ep. VII 341b), (ii) that knowledge, once kindled, comes to be in the soul and immediately nourishes itself (Ep. VII 341d), and (iii) that “the truly serious things are laid away in the most noble part of [one who has attained philosophical insight]” (Ep. VII 344c, emphasis added). In some places, purification has a moral connotation and primarily involves turning away from the world. The philosopher must change his character by gathering his thoughts from the “trash” of ordinary cognition and purging himself of all vanity and unnecessary desires, that is, to quiet the soul enough to practice philosophical contemplation without the distractions of the body or worldly concerns and ambitions (Phd. 64de). Then he will do this most perfectly who approaches the object with thought alone, without associating any sight with his thought, or dragging any sense perception with his reasoning, but who, using pure thought alone, tries to track down each reality pure and by itself, freeing himself as far as possible from eyes and ears, and in a word, from the whole body, because the body confuses the soul and does not allow it to acquire truth and wisdom whenever it is associated with it. Will not that man reach reality . . . if anyone does? (Phd. 66a) In other places, however, the sense given to purification relates specifically to one’s vision of and comportment toward the world and oneself. In the Symposium, for example, Diotima explains the process whereby one moves from loving an individual body to loving all beautiful bodies, from bodies to souls, from souls to laws and institutions, from these to every kind of knowledge, and from knowledge to the Beautiful itself, at which point the lover contemplates divine beauty (Symp. 211e) and brings forth virtue in the souls of others (Symp. 212a). Socrates provides a similar account in the Phaedrus (243e–257b) and Republic (514a–518b): the soul is fundamentally transformed in its ascent toward the Beautiful and the Good. We find the same stages—awakening, purification, and life-transforming illumination— in the cave allegory. Here in the letter, then, with this reference to the dispositions of the philosopher versus the non-philosopher, we are reminded of just how difficult the epistemological problem is for Plato. Names, definitions, and images are the only available means to knowledge (Ep. VII 342a5–6), but they are incapable of conveying the non-propositional content of philosophical understanding. And even if they could convey such contents, non-philosophers,

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not being pure, wouldn’t be capable of grasping them. Dionysius’ book on Plato’s philosophy, therefore, was an attempt to do the impossible. For Plato, the book itself indicated Dionysius’ ignorance about the ultimate nature of reality (Ep. VII 342e–344d). It showed conclusively that he didn’t understand the nature of Platonic philosophy, whose final destination, as it were, is a noeton topon, as well as a radical transfiguration of the ordinary and a fundamental change of one’s self, not merely an intellectual grasp of discursively transmittable doctrines (Ep. VII 338e). Dionysius didn’t understand any of this. He was most likely a participant in the Sicily Plato distrusted and despised, which was characterized by the “happy life—a life filled with Italian and Syracusan banquets, with men gorging themselves twice a day and never sleeping alone at night, following all the other customs that go with this way of living.” If Dionysius lived this kind of life, it simply wouldn’t be possible, according to Plato, for him to have any philosophical understanding: “no man under heaven who has cultivated such practices from his youth could possibly grow up to be wise . . . or become temperate, or indeed acquire any other part of virtue” (Ep. VII 326b4–c4). I have called this feature of Platonic philosophy, that is, the requirement of self-transformation, “spiritual ineffability.” Given the abundance of meanings attributed to the word “spiritual,” this choice of language deserves some explanation. I borrow it from Pierre Hadot, who argues that it is a necessary term, despite its New Age baggage, because none of our other options—“psychic,” “moral,” “ethical,” “intellectual,” “of thought,” “of the soul”—is sufficiently polyvalent to express “all the aspects of reality we want to describe.” For example, because thought takes itself as its own subject matter, and thereby attempts to transform itself, one might think that “thought exercises” would suffice. But the word “thought” does not adequately reflect the role played by “imagination and sensibility.” Likewise, because spiritual exercises aim in part at educating the passions and providing their practitioners with guidance for the conduct of life, “ethical exercises” is also tempting. However, here too the focus is too narrow: “these exercises in fact correspond to a transformation in our vision of the world, and to a metamorphosis of our personality.” The advantage of the word “spiritual,” Hadot argues, is that it helps us understand that these exercises result in the transformation of an “individual’s entire psychism,” not merely his thought or his passions or his perception of the world. Above all, the word “spiritual” reveals the true dimensions of these exercises. By means of them, the individual raises himself up to the life of the Objective Spirit; that is to say, he re-places himself within the perspective of the Whole. (Hadot 1995: 81–2)

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Foucault has explained the principle of spiritual ineffability as well as anyone. As he says in his Hermeneutics of the Subject, philosophy in Antiquity both asked “what it is that enables the subject to have access to truth” and was “the search, practice, and experience through which the subject carries out the necessary transformations on himself in order to have access to the truth” (Foucault 2001: 15). The Platonists, Stoics, Epicureans, Cynics, Neoplatonists, and Pythagoreans worked with different metaphysical doctrines, but each of these schools postulated that, truth is never given to the subject by right . . . for the subject to have right of access to the truth he must be changed, transformed, shifted, and become, to some extent and up to a certain point, other than himself. The truth is only given to the subject at a price that brings the subject’s being into play. For as he is, the subject is not capable of truth. (ibid., 15) For each of the philosophical schools in Antiquity, the most important matter in philosophy was not any abstract theory, but the art of living that caused the practitioner “to be more fully,” raising “the individual from an inauthentic condition of life, darkened by unconsciousness and harassed by worry, to an authentic state of life, in which he attains self-consciousness . . . inner peace, and freedom” (Hadot 1995: 83). Theory was important insofar as it was a means to this end. The principles of philosophical knowledge cannot be found in an alien disposition, as Plato suggests, because the pure does not admit the pure. One must change oneself—one’s passions and desires, one’s thought processes and thought habits—before one can return to the divine origin in oneself (Tim. 90a) and ascend, through love, toward the divine beauty that Plato compares to the sublimity of the sea (Symp. 210d). We should care less about what we have and more about what we are, as Socrates suggests (Ap. 36c), because it is in caring for ourselves that we become capable of feeling what Plotinus called the “pangs of love” and desire “to be united” with the Good that cause one to “laugh at other loves,” such as the typical Athenian love of wealth or honor or conquest, and feel disdain for “the things [one] previously regarded as beautiful” (En. I.6.7; cf. Rep. 500c, Phdr. 249de), such as Pericles’ vision of the world as an enormous tomb filled with the bodies of Athenians who’d fallen in battle (Thuc. 2.43). Because philosophical knowledge requires this degree of selftransformation, and because such changes in one’s being clearly cannot be reduced to a set of doctrines, this is a second sense in which Platonic philosophical knowledge is ineffable. There is a third sense.

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Existential Ineffability: The Argument from Life Choice Before Plato begins the “philosophical digression” in the Seventh Letter, he describes a test he gave to Dionysius to determine whether he was “really on fire with philosophy, or whether the many reports that came to Athens were without foundation” (Ep. VII 340b). He wanted to assess Dionysius’ natural aptitude for philosophy and determine whether he really had been “seized by a love” for the ideal of the philosophical life, as Plato had heard and hoped was true. Did he possess the philosophic nature? Could he be persuaded to change his life and moderate his passions? Plato thought he could answer these questions by meeting with Dionysius. “Now there is a certain way of putting this to the test,” Plato suggests, “a dignified way and quite appropriate to tyrants” (Ep. VII 340b). Plato described the philosophical life to Dionysius—the demands on one’s daily life, the amount of learning that is entailed, and so on—and he watched for his reaction (Ep. VII 340bc). He knew Dionysius would respond in one of two ways. He would either demand that he get started at once, believing he had heard an account of the only life truly worth living, and thereby verify his kinship with philosophy. Or he would reject Plato’s prescribed life-changes as thoroughly undesirable, and thereby confirm Plato’s fears that he was insincere, interested only in waving the banner of philosophy and associating his name with Plato’s. For anyone who hears this, who is a true lover of wisdom, with the divine quality that makes him akin to it and worthy of pursuing it, thinks that he has heard of a marvelous quest that he must at once enter upon with all earnestness, or life is not worth living . . . [On the other hand] those who are really not philosophers . . . when they see how much learning is required, how great the labor, and how orderly their daily lives must be to suit the subject they are pursuing, conclude that the task is too difficult for their powers. (Ep. VII 340c) Unfortunately for Plato, his worst fears were confirmed. Dionysius turned out to have “only a coating of opinions, like men whose bodies are tanned by the sun,” and he proved to be thoroughly uninterested in the life of order, learning, and discipline that Plato laid out before him (Ep. VII 340e). As far as Plato was concerned, Dionysius literally could not appreciate the value of the philosophical life, because he was not akin to wisdom. I shall call this, that is, the obscurity of philosophy’s value to non-philosophers, “existential ineffability.”

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Plato knew he couldn’t directly communicate the value of philosophy and the philosophical life to non-philosophers. The pleasures of philosophical knowledge, like its intellectual content, had to be experienced to be fully appreciated. As Socrates says in the Phaedrus, the philosopher “stands outside human concerns and draws close to the divine. Ordinary people think he is disturbed and rebuke him for this, unaware that he is possessed by a god” (Phdr. 249d). But Plato also knew he had to encourage nonphilosophers to enter upon the path to virtue, even if they could not complete it—if he couldn’t do that, there was no hope for philosophy to reform the polis by changing the individuals within it, one soul at a time. Plato therefore faced a dilemma. How could he convert non-philosophers to philosophy, if he could not directly express the intellectual contents or pleasures of philosophical knowledge? Doesn’t the problem of existential ineffability suggest that any attempt to “sell” philosophy to non-philosophers is predetermined to be a fruitless Sisyphean task? Not necessarily. There is a problem here only if we forget that the love of wisdom begins with the love of beauty (Symp. 210a), the mere glimpse of which awakens the soul’s deepest and strongest desire for the Good (Phdr. 250d–252c), “and from that time forth [the awakened philosopher] pushes himself and urges on his leader without ceasing, until he has reached the end of the journey” (Ep. VII 340c). All Plato needed for success was an image of beauty that could serve as a reminder to his audience. He could not prove the superiority of the philosophical life to its popular alternatives, but he could produce images of its superiority, via the characterization of Socrates as an instantiation of the beauty that awakens the love of wisdom. Consider the unlikely but crucially important example of Alcibiades, for whom the experience of Socrates was analogous in existential significance to seeing the Forms themselves. He of all people (Symp. 215e7) saw a “beauty that [was] really beyond description” in Socrates’ character (Symp. 218e). It had “the power to make [him] a better man” (Symp. 218e). It made him feel shame (Symp. 216b). It made him weep (Symp. 215e), and it made him feel possessed by the Bacchic frenzy of philosophy (Symp. 218b). If Alcibiades could be affected this profoundly by Socrates, surely others could too. It seems reasonable to speculate that Plato thought he could use representations of Socrates’ character to reproduce Alcibiades’ experience of Socrates in the souls of potential philosophers. In addition to igniting the love of wisdom, the right representation of Socrates could literally show the way toward Platonic philosophy. Socrates did not write, did not impart doctrines, lived according to his convictions, and practiced philosophy by constantly sharing in dialogue with others. Socrates had many imitators (Ap. 23c). Plato wanted him to have many more.

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On this point I am indebted to Bill Prior, who has argued that we ought to view Plato’s dialogues, both early and middle, “as Plato’s attempts to depict, describe and justify the life of philosophy by placing the philosopher, in the person of Socrates, in dialectical confrontation with those defending other lives” (Prior 1997: 121–2). All of these dialogues, he says provocatively, not just the so-called middle and late ones, are Platonic. How do we arrive at this unconventional conclusion? We begin by rejecting the dominant contemporary account of Plato’s early dialogues (hereafter “the biographical hypothesis”), according to which the early dialogues reconstruct and represent the philosophical views of the historical Socrates, while the middle dialogues showcase Plato developing his own.6 Prior’s approach, which he derives from Kahn, treats the early dialogues as works of Platonic philosophy, rather than Platonic biography, even where the inspiration from Socrates is clear. Instead of treating the early dialogues as sources of data about the historical Socrates, therefore, we ought to “place the author of the dialogues . . . at center stage” and ask what he was attempting to do with these dialogues (ibid., 115–16). How can we answer that question fairly? Prior’s hypothesis, which I accept, is that one of Plato’s primary purposes in these dialogues was to present Socrates as an exemplar of the philosophical life (Cf. Friedlander 1964: 125–6). In the dialogues written before the Parmenides, Socrates is the only representative of the life devoted to philosophy. Nobody else in these dialogues is a philosopher. They are ordinary people, politicians, and professional teachers. Glaucon and Adeimantus are interested in philosophy, and Simmias and Cebes have converted to philosophy, “but only Socrates qualifies as a full-fledged exemplar of a life dedicated to philosophy and lived in accordance with its principles . . . Socrates is philosophy for Plato in these dialogues.” How do we know this? Prior’s hermeneutic principle is simple but compelling: “when we see a feature repeatedly displayed in a group of dialogues, it seems fair to assume that it is not accidental, but that Plato put it there deliberately.” It would follow that Plato intended to portray Socrates as an exemplar of the philosophical life, and that Plato’s interest in Socrates was philosophical, not historical. He used Socrates to “depict the nature of the philosophical life, not to portray the views of the historical Socrates” (Prior 1997: 115–16). How did dialogues enable Plato to address the problem of existential ineffability? We can answer this question by looking at Socrates’ interlocutors. They are non-philosophers, and none of them understands what Socrates values. Each of them turns his back on Socrates and the philosophical life he represents. These dialogues mostly end in failure, that is, with Socrates’ interlocutor walking away from Socrates either uninfluenced by the arguments

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and unwilling to examine his own shortcomings, as in the case of Euthyphro, or angry with Socrates and unimpressed by his destructive method, as in the case of Thrasymachus. At best, Socrates’ interlocutors struggle to follow his arguments. In the Phaedo, for example, Simmias laments that only Socrates can give an adequate account of the immortality of the soul and its kinship with the Forms (76b). Simmias and Cebes believe the conclusions of Socrates’ arguments, but they cannot provide the arguments for these beliefs without Socrates’ help in charming away their fears that the materialists are right after all (77e–78a). Alcibiades is perhaps the one exception, but his case is complicated. He sincerely wants to change his life, but suffers from moral weakness (Symp. 216bc). Why do the dialogues end in failure? This is where Prior’s reasonable hermeneutic principle helps us again: “Since the failure of the interlocutors is so regular, we must believe that it is an intentional feature of the dialogues . . . the point of the [unhappy encounters between philosopher and non-philosophers] is to show the incompatibility between the life of philosophy and that lived by non-philosophers,” including would-be philosophers like Alcibiades who possess the intellectual ability (Symp. 218e), are susceptible to the ad hominem argumentation (Symp. 216bc), but lack the character to follow through with their convictions (Prior 1997: 117). The dialogues do not end in failure because Socrates’ interlocutors are unintelligent. Protagoras seems to be Socrates’ intellectual equal. Callicles and Thrasymachus are eloquent and reflective, and Plato appears to be seriously concerned with their existential alternatives to the life he champions. Socrates’ interlocutors fail to understand him because they don’t share his values. Their lives are strictly incompatible with the philosophical life. What the dialogues showcase, in other words, is a competition between visions of life. The Apology is probably the best place to look for Plato’s representation of Socrates, the philosopher, at odds with non-philosophers, in this case the whole of society. As part of his defense, Socrates presents the philosophical commitments that gave shape to his life—Socratic wisdom, his belief that living well trumps the mere preservation of life, his appeal to Athenians to give up the fruits of imperialism and care more for the health of their souls, his faith that his life was a divine gift to Athens, and so on—“and the jury responds with about as much understanding as Cassandra’s hearers do to her prophecies” (ibid., 118). This incompatibility between philosophy and society, philosopher and non-philosopher, could not be addressed, corrected, or refuted by argument alone. Plato knew this better than anyone. As Dodds once observed, Plato was a realist about persuasion. He knew most people were motivated by psychological, not logical, reasons (Dodds 1959: 352).

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Plato’s only hope for communicating with non-philosophers, therefore, was to show Socrates winning the debates both intellectually and existentially. Socrates died nobly, choosing death over dishonor like Achilles (Ap. 28cd), whereas Alcibiades, say, who represented the political life and the life of pleasure, died shamefully after betraying his own city and contributing directly to her devastating humiliation at the end of the Peloponnesian War. Surely Plato wanted us to see these stark differences, and to compare Socrates’ life with the lives of his interlocutors, not just to compare their respective arguments. Alcibiades betrayed his city, but he wouldn’t have if he hadn’t betrayed philosophy—this, I take it, is one of the various inferences Plato wants his audience to make—since all wars, but especially wars of conquest, are the products of uneducated and lawless desires (Phd. 66c), that is, the kind of desires that characterized Alcibiades’ life of depravity. If this is right, we have discovered yet another way to confirm Schleiermacher’s claim that the form of Plato’s dialogues was philosophically significant. The dialogue form gave Plato a medium with which to depict the unhappy encounters between Socrates and his interlocutors while exposing his interlocutors’ hypocrisy. By showing Socrates in action, Plato tried to provide “great proofs” of Socrates’ relative nobility, and not merely with “words but [with] what [Athenians most] esteem, deeds” (Ap. 32a). Plato’s hope was simple: he wanted at least some of his fellow Athenians to see that Socrates was right, “the unexamined life is not worth living for men” (Ap. 38a). Dionysius didn’t see it, and neither did the majority of Socrates’ jury. But Plato maintained hope, against his own deep political cynicism, that the next Alcibiades who saw great beauty in Socrates’ soul (Symp. 218e) or its equivalent somewhere else, and felt his life upended by such an encounter (Symp. 215e), could be persuaded to resist the temptation to please the crowd (Symp. 216b) or any other corrupting desire that conflicted with the life of philosophy.

Platonism Reconsidered If we return to the debate between the holists and the dogmatists regarding how best to characterize and interpret Plato’s philosophy, it should be clear at this point that both the dogmatists and the holists are committed to untenable views, just as the early skeptics and dogmatists were. While the holists are correct to stress the inseparability principle and the unsystematic character of Plato’s philosophy, and they are also correct to be suspicious about attributing positive metaphysical views to Plato, they are nevertheless

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wrong to argue that Plato’s philosophy and method are not grounded in his ontology. Their mistake is to think that Plato’s ambiguous method entails or implies a purely non-doctrinal philosophy. Plato had doctrines, and the dialogues represent Socrates in pursuit of philosophical insight. But Plato’s doctrines were never more than means to knowledge. Things are not much better for the dogmatists, who stand on equally limited interpretive ground. The holists often argue that the dogmatists are wrong to assume that Plato’s philosophy is systematic. Plato wrote dialogues, the holists say, and dialogues are not proper vehicles for presenting a philosophical system. The holists are no doubt right about this general point. If Plato really was interested in developing and presenting a philosophical system, his choice to use ambiguous dialogues for this purpose was clumsy at best. But their criticism here is not specific enough. The deepest problem with the dogmatic view is that it fails to understand why Plato did philosophy. We can see this more clearly if we consider an example. Dogmatists sometimes read the Phaedo against the Timaeus in order to trace Plato’s developing conceptions of Forms and causation, as well as his changing attitudes toward the phenomenal world and sensory experience, and they assume that between the time of writing these two dialogues Plato worked like a modern physicist, slowly constructing and revising his theory of everything.7 In other words, dogmatists assume Plato did philosophy for the same reasons Dennett does, namely, to add bricks to the edifice of philosophical knowledge, to be right rather than read. This sense of closure, as Rorty suggests, is what analytic philosophers strive for, and it is what dogmatists assume Plato sought as well (Rorty 1999). On my interpretation of the Seventh Letter, however, this general understanding of Plato must be wrong, because the ultimate “principles” of reality—the “principles” that would constitute the foundations of one’s theory of everything—cannot be fully known or written about directly. The contents of Platonic philosophy cannot be adequately expressed in words, and they certainly cannot be developed into a totalizing system, as many of Plato’s most famous postmodern critics assume.8 Plato is very clear about this in the letter: one does philosophy to undergo self-transformation and to become capable of gaining access to truth, albeit episodically and incompletely, not to build a complete theory that provided one with an exhaustive explanation of phenomena. The dogmatists are not wrong to think the details of the arguments in the dialogues are important. Indeed, the dogmatists are usually much more willing than the holists to suggest that Plato was primarily interested in deep ontological problems, which is surely correct. Plato cared about these ideas

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enough to think and write about them throughout his life. The dogmatists’ mistake is something more fundamental. As Foucault has argued, the ancients in general were not committed to the development of knowledge in the same way contemporary analytic philosophers are. When the subject’s being is not put in question by the necessity of having access to truth, I think we have entered a different age of the history of relations between subjectivity and truth. And the consequence . . . is that access to truth, whose sole condition is henceforth knowledge, will find reward and fulfillment in nothing else but the development of knowledge. (Foucault 2001: 18) In other words, the dogmatists do not fully appreciate that Plato’s doctrines, like his dialogues more generally, were intended to be transformative rather than informative. They were not advertisements to “empty philosophizing”—a mere playing around with notions and arguments, as Findlay worries—but they also were not meant to be treated as treatises whose aim was to approach the truth disinterestedly, and whose most basic assumption was that the truth could be fully captured theoretically. This model of the relationship between subjectivity and truth (hereafter the “modern view”) is blind to what Foucault calls the “rebound effect” in Platonic philosophy. The point of enlightenment and fulfillment, the moment of the subject’s transfiguration by the “rebound effect” on himself of the truth he knows, and which passes through, permeates, and transfigures his being, can no longer exist [on the modern view]. We can no longer think that access to the truth will complete in the subject, like a crowning or a reward, the work or the sacrifice, the price paid to arrive at it. Knowledge will simply open out onto the indefinite dimension of progress. (Foucault 2001: 18–19) Consider the Phaedo again. It is particularly relevant here. It contains several indications that the arguments are primarily intended to have a certain psychological affect on Simmias and Cebes. When Cebes confesses to Socrates that, despite his acceptance of Socrates’ “cyclical” and “recollection” arguments, there is nevertheless a child in him who fears death “like a bogey,” Socrates does not review his arguments in an effort to find the premise that Cebes cannot understand. He suggests that he “sing a charm over [the child] every day until you have charmed away his fears” (Phd. 77e). In response, Cebes suggests that Socrates is this charmer, and that Greece

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will suffer without Socrates’ services: “Where shall we find a good charmer for these fears, Socrates, he said, now that you are leaving us?” (Phd. 78a). The implication here is that the arguments are intended to dispel exaggerated fears about death, not to provide watertight rational grounds for belief in the immortality of the soul. Like Socrates’ view in the Apology that we should only fear what we know to be harmful, these arguments are examples of ideas intended to transform consciousness—moderate fears and introduce hope—by changing one’s vision of the world. Much later in the dialogue, when Socrates finishes his myth about the afterlife, this point is confirmed. Socrates suggests to Cebes and Simmias that his account be repeated to oneself “as if it were an incantation” (Phd. 114d). Far from being an isolated point, it is possible to link this understanding of the therapeutic function of logoi to Socrates’ method in general. We have already seen that Cebes associates Socratic philosophy with the practice of “charming.” In the Theaetetus, just before Socrates describes himself as the midwife of ideas (151c), he suggests that midwifes bring on the pains of labor by “singing incantations” (149d3).9 These are by no means trivial points for our understanding of Plato. Taken together, the three senses of ineffability encourage us to conclude that all of the positive metaphysical claims, as well as the moral and political claims that depend on them, were not matters on which Plato would insist. The distinction between Being and becoming, the immortality and immateriality of the soul, the superiority of justice to injustice, and so on—perhaps all of these matters, and not just the details of Socrates’ myth about the afterlife, were the sorts of issues about which one needed to risk belief to charm away one’s exaggerated fears (Phd. 114d) and thereby make the pursuit of philosophical knowledge possible (Phd. 66d). As we have seen, the Seventh Letter straightforwardly undermines the positive metaphysical claims in the dialogues, and it forces us radically to rethink the essence of Platonism, which is often associated most closely with the doctrines of two worlds and the immortality of the soul. If we take Plato’s commitment to ineffability seriously, we cannot make these associations without contradicting ourselves. Philosophical knowledge is either expressible or inexpressible. If it is inexpressible, positive metaphysical claims are strictly impermissible. Plato can say neither that truth is timeless nor that it is conditioned by time, but he can entertain both possibilities. He cannot demonstrate that the soul is immortal, but he can risk the belief (Phd. 114d). He can never silence the cynicism of Thrasymachus or Callicles, but he can gently turn the eye of the soul upwards (Rep. 533d). This will seem like heresy to traditional Platonists

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and Neoplatonists, who will insist on the maintenance of elaborate Platonic doctrine, but I am not alone in suggesting it. In fact, some philosophers have gone even further. For example, Gadamer argues that the “indeterminacy of the Two” implies “that for us there is no clear, unambiguous structure of Being” (Gadamer 1980: 110).10 Gadamer derives this conclusion from his understanding of Plato’s esoteric doctrines of the One and the Indefinite Dyad. We might derive a similar, though more agnostic, conclusion from the Seventh Letter. On my interpretation of the letter, Plato cannot suggest that true being, the “object” intuited in dialectic, is indeterminate. But he also cannot say that it is determinate. The reason for agnosticism is this: man’s finite comprehension of true being requires what we can call “ontological humility,” a recognition of the limits of human wisdom and judgment. What is the being of the Forms? Plato’s ultimate view is that we cannot answer this question exhaustively. What we can do is bring the mind into contact with the mystery of being and, through practicing dialectic, engage in an activity that allows us to transform our vision of the world and our place in it. Plato’s philosophy was a “spiritual practice,” and his doctrines, it seems, were like Wittgenstein’s ladder. They were meant to be used “like rising stairs” (Symp. 211c) until one is turned to “the great sea of beauty, and, gazing upon this, [one] gives birth to many gloriously beautiful ideas and theories, in unstinting love of wisdom” (Symp. 210d).

Conclusions I have argued that metaphysical, spiritual, and existential ineffability are at the heart of Plato’s philosophy. If so, we can reasonably infer that Plato wrote dialogues, employing irony, metaphor, and myth, all of which reveal and conceal, (i) in part because his aim was to reveal, without pretending fully to represent, the mystery of being, which gives philosophical insight in the form of divine possession to those who are pure, and (ii) in part because he wanted to depict and defend the life of philosophy against challenges from its popular rivals. Each of these senses of ineffability tells an important part of a plausible story about why Plato chose to write dialogues. The chief reason for reviewing the philosophical argument in the Seventh Letter was to provide evidence for Schlegel’s view that Plato’s conceptually inexhaustible ontology was his motivation for writing dialogues. Along the way we have also discovered spiritual and existential reasons underpinning Plato’s commitment to ineffability. These reasons, however, are subordinate

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to the ontological reason. Without the ineffable ontology, the other senses of ineffability make very little sense: spiritual ineffability is clearly a function of Plato’s ontology, and existential ineffability is grounded in the psychological payoff of philosophical insight. How do we get from these three senses of ineffability to the conclusion that they explain Plato’s choice to write dialogues? The inference is reasonable, even if it is not conclusive: the incompleteness and a-systematic character of the dialogues was itself an image of man’s wisdom, which is finite, incomplete, and incomplete-able. Differently put, if Plato had ontological reasons for thinking his philosophy could not be presented adequately in treatises, then it would be understandable, although not logically required, that he would turn to an artistic form in order to indicate or symbolically represent what could not be expressed directly. We can never know for certain that this was the reason Plato chose to write dialogues. But if one were committed to the view Plato defends in the Seventh Letter, one would have reason to write philosophical works that were self-consciously incomplete, works that pointed beyond themselves toward that activity and that way of life which alone were capable of producing philosophical insight—just as Schlegel suggests. One would want to write philosophical works that were capable of commenting on and perhaps even undermining themselves, as Lear suggests the Symposium does in his interpretation of the psychoanalytic significance of Alcibiades’ speech, so as to make all claims as if under erasure.11 While the Seventh Letter does not provide us with an open-and-shut-case for Schlegel’s version of the inseparability principle, it does give us plenty of reason to think Plato’s motivation for writing dialogues was ontological. And that may be all we will ever have.

Chapter 3

The Context of Heidegger’s Interpretation of Plato: Ontotheology and the Ontological Difference

Some would argue that in the previous chapter we turned Plato into either a skeptic or the salesman of “empty philosophizing” that Findlay claims is unworthy of serious study. But we have not. In order to show this, however, we need a coherent account of Plato’s philosophy that preserves its orientation toward ultimate ontological questions, including its focus on visionary states, which does not turn Plato into a dogmatic, positive metaphysician. In fact, we might list five conditions that an adequate interpretation of Plato must satisfy: z z z z z

Self-transformation as a precondition for access to truth The “rebound effect” of philosophical insight Ineffability as a defining characteristic of philosophical insight Agnosticism about the concealed source of unconcealment Openness to that which is concealed in all acts of knowing

Is there any such account? Indeed there is, as I will show, and it comes from Heidegger’s lecture course The Essence of Truth and the positive part of his famous essay, “Plato’s Doctrine of Truth”—perhaps the most unlikely of sources, in view of the fact that Heidegger’s work on Plato is most famous for its interpretation of Plato as the beginning of the West’s forgetfulness of Being and consequent ontological decline. What makes Heidegger’s 1931 interpretation of Plato doubly interesting and important is that, in addition to solving the problem of Plato interpretation, it supplies Heidegger with insights that influence his politics in 1933 and the content of his revolutionary, supposedly “post-Platonic,” later thought. Most of the commentators on Heidegger’s interpretation of Plato have either uncritically repeated Heidegger’s argument for the view that “in place

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of unhiddenness another essence of truth pushes to the fore” in the allegory of the cave (PDT 172), or they have focused on what Heidegger gets wrong in the details of his interpretation, sometimes completely disregarding his warning that his intention is to make explicit what is unsaid in Plato.1 Consequently, they have overlooked more important questions, such as what, if anything, did Heidegger get right? And to what extent, if any, was Heidegger himself influenced by Plato? These are my guiding questions in this chapter and the next. The mistakes and the “violence” in Heidegger’s interpretation of Plato are important problems to sort out, especially if one believes, as I do, that he could have found a profound philosophical ally in Plato, if he had not always read Plato through the lens of Aristotle— and not any ordinary ally, but one who “could have assisted his later thinking much better than his complete absorption in Hölderlin” (Hahn 1997: 458). I will discuss the problems with Heidegger’s later interpretation of Plato in Chapter 8. But we should not let Heidegger’s later mistakes obscure his earlier discoveries. Before I discuss the details of Plato’s influence on Heidegger (hereafter the “Platonic influence” question), or make sense of his highly unconventional phenomenological approach to Plato, it is necessary to set the stage with some general remarks about his philosophical presuppositions. However, because Heidegger’s thought was beginning to undergo profound changes during the 1930s, it is not at all clear where we ought to begin. I want to avoid this hornets’ nest of interpretive problems and controversies, that is, questions about when Heidegger’s “turn” really began, what it really consisted of, and when it was finally complete. Instead, as regards the Platonic influence question, I hope merely to show the compatibility of Heidegger’s later thought with his interpretation of Plato’s cave allegory. Moreover, I will suggest that, given (i) the early date of Heidegger’s The Essence of Truth lectures, (ii) the extent of the parallels between his reading of Plato and the details of his own later thought, and (iii) the novelty of some of these ideas for Heidegger in 1931, we can speculate that Heidegger discovered something new during this encounter with Plato, and that the Platonic influence on Heidegger is profound. While this is impossible to prove once and for all, I hope to let the texts speak for themselves.

The Context of Heidegger’s Interpretation of Plato Heidegger’s thought, throughout his career, is devoted in one way or another to discovering the foundations of metaphysics. In Being and Time,

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this meant articulating the ontological structures of Dasein in virtue of which man comes to have a meaningful world and ask metaphysical questions, and inquiring into the meaning of Being in general on the basis of the analytic of Dasein: If to interpret the meaning of Being becomes our task, Dasein is not only the primary entity to be interrogated; it is also the entity which already comports itself, in its Being, towards what we are asking about when we ask this question. (BT 35) While the project of Being and Time was incomplete, and Heidegger failed to provide his much promised account of Time as the meaning of Being in general, in the late 1920s he continued to treat the analysis of Dasein as the lynchpin for understanding the essence of metaphysics. As he wrote in 1929, Dasein is metaphysics, and as such is determined in its being to engage in metaphysical questioning. This means the analysis of Dasein’s way of being was, in part, an analysis of what Kant called man’s propensity to ask metaphysical questions. Being held out into the nothing—as Dasein is—on the ground of concealed anxiety is its surpassing of beings as a whole . . . Metaphysics is inquiry beyond or over beings that aims to recover them as such and as a whole for our grasp. (WM 93) Going beyond beings occurs in the essence of Dasein. But this going beyond is metaphysics itself. This implies that metaphysics belongs to the “nature of the human being” . . . Metaphysics is the fundamental occurrence in our Dasein. It is Dasein itself. (WM 96)2 In his later thought, laying the foundations of metaphysics meant articulating “the difference” underpinning the “ontotheological constitution of metaphysics” (WMI 287), and describing how metaphysics, on the basis of Dasein’s ek-sistence (Dasein’s standing out into the clearing of Being), establishes the categories in terms of which man comes to have a meaningful world and ask metaphysical questions (LH 235). In these respects, the early and late projects are closely related. Heidegger hoped that, by laying the foundations of metaphysics, he could take the “untrod path” beyond the boundaries of metaphysical thinking (ID 73), because what matters most is “undertaking the transition from metaphysics to recalling the truth of Being” (WMI 288), which “mean[s]

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overcoming metaphysics” (WMI 279). But why must metaphysics be overcome? On Heidegger’s view, the essence of metaphysics consists in passing beyond entities to their Being, but in such a way that entities are considered as entities (WMI 277), albeit recovered “as such and as a whole for our grasp” (WM 93). Heidegger thought this kind of thinking was problematic for two reasons: metaphysics is limited by its exclusive focus, and it is ignorant of its own limitations (in fact, as we will see, by nature, it reinforces its own forgetfulness of Being). “It means beings as a whole, although it speaks of Being. It names Being and means beings as beings” (WMI 281). This raises two important questions: what exactly does it mean to say that the focus of metaphysics is restricted to entities as entities, and in what respect is metaphysics limited by this focus? First, what does it mean to say metaphysics only considers entities as entities? Heidegger extracts an “interior structure” from the history of metaphysics, which he calls ontotheology (Richardson 1963: 9). Although he traces this formula through the entirety of Western metaphysics, and suggests it originates in Plato (EP 4), he discovered the formula in Aristotle, who explicitly defined “first philosophy” as the study of “being in general and the highest being” (KPM 6; cf. 154–5). Metaphysics states what beings are as beings . . . Its representing concerns beings as beings. In this manner, metaphysics always represents beings as such in their totality; it represents the beingness of beings (the ousia of the on). But metaphysics represents the beingness of beings in a twofold manner: in the first place, the totality of beings as such with an eye to their most universal traits . . . but at the same time also the totality of beings as such in the sense of the highest and therefore divine being. In the metaphysics of Aristotle, the unconcealedness of beings as such has specifically developed in this twofold manner. (WMI 287) In passages like this, Heidegger wants to underscore that as ontology metaphysics asks what entities are in general, that is, what entities share in common, and as theology it attempts to identify and define the nature of the highest entity, which is usually conceived of as one entity among others, and sometimes, though not always, as divine. As we see in the passages from “What is Metaphysics?” quoted above, sometimes Heidegger describes the “theological” element of metaphysics as a question about entities as a whole, such that abstract conceptions of the divine are also captured by his formula. He returns to his old (1929) lecture in 1956–57 to make precisely this point:

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For this reason my inaugural lecture What is Metaphysics? (1929) defines metaphysics as the question about beings as such and as a whole. The wholeness of this whole is the unity of all beings that unifies as the generative ground. To those who can read, this means: metaphysics is onto-theo-logy. (ID 54) Because metaphysics provides an account of what things are “from the inside-out” and “from the outside-in,” as Thomson says, and thereby establishes the most basic categories in terms of which entities are understood, it shapes intelligibility, endowing the world with the meaning and value revealed by those categories and allowing things to “lie before us” as the entities they are (ID 69).3 There is a question here whether Dasein’s pretheoretical understanding of Being is more basic than metaphysics, or vice versa, but in his later period Heidegger suggests unambiguously that the historically fluctuating categories of metaphysics, not Dasein’s existentialia, are the basis of intelligibility. Metaphysics grounds an age, in that through a specific interpretation of what is and through a specific comprehension of truth it gives to that age the basis upon which it is essentially formed. (QCT 115) Metaphysics determines the categories that shape and give meaning to our experience, establishing what things are by defining their whatness, and how they are “ranked” by defining their mode of existence, that is, their thatness (hereafter I will refer to such intelligibility-granting, meaning-determining, rank-establishing categories as “metaphysical paradigms”). As if this alone were not challenging enough, Heidegger adds his doctrine of ‘historicity’ to this picture. Because metaphysical paradigms determine how we understand and experience Being, and because these paradigms have changed historically, Heidegger argues that our understanding and experience of Being (i.e., our understanding of what and how things are, our world) has also changed historically.4 For Heidegger, one’s world is specific to one’s historical epoch.5 One might grant some or all of the above and wonder, “What’s the matter with ontotheology?” Even if one would reject all of the above, it is still worth asking why Heidegger argues that ontotheology is limited and must be overcome. Why must we overcome it, and how do we do it? Wouldn’t the alternative be to live in an unintelligible world, a Jamesian blooming, buzzing confusion? Heidegger seems to have at least two separate answers to this question, although they relate to one and the same problem: ontotheology

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forgets Being, and the forgetfulness of Being could ultimately cause the West to collapse under the weight of nihilism (IM 40). Before I discuss Heidegger’s diagnosis of Western nihilism and his prescriptions for overcoming it, however, let’s look more closely at his specific objections to ontotheology. The most important problem with ontotheology is that, because it considers entities as entities, it is oblivious to the Being process that Heidegger tries to recover through the analysis of the ancient Greek concepts of phusis and alêtheia. Wherever the question is asked what beings are, beings as such are in sight. Metaphysical representation owes this sight to the light of Being. The light itself, i.e., that which such thinking experiences as light, no longer comes within the range of metaphysical thinking; for metaphysics only represents beings as beings. (WMI 277) Because the metaphysical gaze remains focused on entities, studying their whatness and thatness, giving an exhaustive account of what they are from the inside-out and the outside-in, it ignores the lighting process—the process of phusis-alêtheia—in virtue of which entities come to presence, lie before us, and constitute a world. This process is the “generative ground” of metaphysics, since it is that by reason of which entities come to presence and offer their “looks” to man. The looks of beings are the exclusive focus of metaphysics, and as a consequence, Being as the process of manifestation is concealed and reified as metaphysics “says Being” but “means beings or Being of beings.” Metaphysics “turns away from its own ground” and therefore “continues to prevent the relation of Being to man from lighting up, out of the essence of this very relation, in such a way as to bring human beings into a belonging to Being” (WMI 280). In other words, metaphysics does not simply neglect Being. Because it focuses exclusively on entities “as such and as a whole,” and assumes that such a focus can provide an exhaustive and final understanding of reality, it is blind to the lighting process of phusis-alêtheia and therefore acts as an obstacle to Being’s recovery.6 Heidegger identifies Being with alêtheia, the process of unconcealment, which is not an entity but the light that illuminates entities for Dasein. It cannot serve as an ontological ground or a theological causa sui, because it is more basic than and presupposed by both. It is that which encourages us to think of the world in terms of such metaphysical categories, and as such it, not the world it reveals, requires our philosophical attention. As the light that illuminates entities as entities, Being is revealed in or as the

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entities it reveals, but at the same time it is concealed insofar as it is not itself any one, or all, of the entities it illuminates, but rather the light in which they show up. Being is farther than all beings and is yet nearer to man than every being, be it a rock, a beast, a work of art, a machine, be it an angel or God. Being is the nearest. Yet the near remains farthest from man. Man at first clings always and only to beings. But when thinking represents beings as beings it no doubt relates itself to Being. In truth, however, it always thinks only of beings as such; precisely not, and never, Being as such. The “question of Being” always remains a question about beings. It is still not at all what its elusive name indicates: the question in the direction of Being. Philosophy . . . always follows the course of metaphysical representation. It thinks from beings back to beings with a glance in passing toward Being. For every departure from beings and every return to them stands already in the light of Being. (LH 234) Ontotheology is oblivious to Being, and thus pretends to a closure on the question of Being that is impossible in principle. As Heidegger says, Being is both nearest to and farthest from Dasein. It is nearest because it is the precondition of Dasein having a world. But it is farthest because, as it is not itself an entity, it cannot be an object of Dasein’s comportment or knowledge. As such, it eludes the metaphysical gaze, which is the representation of Being as beings. Metaphysics has no choice. As metaphysics, it is by its very essence excluded from the experience of Being; for it always represents beings (on) only with an eye to that aspect of them that has already manifested itself as being . . . But metaphysics never pays attention to what has concealed itself in this very on insofar as it became concealed. (WMI 288) Why is metaphysics excluded by its essence from the experience of Being? Because its focus is attached to that “aspect” of Being that is made manifest in the Being of beings, while it “never pays attention” to what is thereby concealed, namely, the open region, the light in virtue of which entities are able to come to presence, and thus it always “speaks from out of the unnoticed manifestness of Being” (WMI 278). The paradox, then, is that metaphysics’ “own ground withdraws from it,” because concealedness “remains absent in favor of that which is unconcealed, which can thereby first appear as beings” (WMI 281). Being is revealed as entities but it is concealed as light.

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Heidegger’s name for this paradox of revealing-concealing is a-lêtheia, the original Greek word for truth. When Heidegger says that Western metaphysics is the metaphysics of presence, he means that metaphysics remains focused on what is present, the consequence of the emerging-manifestation process, and therefore ignores the difference between presencing and that which is present (IM 194). A second and related problem with ontotheology is its pursuit of closure on a problem that is, as Heidegger says, eminently question-worthy. Because ontotheology aims to give an exhaustive account of what entities are as such and as a whole, it closes off further questioning by (i) establishing the point beyond which “the metaphysician’s investigations cannot ‘penetrate’” and (ii) identifying, without sufficient phenomenological warrant, “the source from which all entities ultimately issue” (Thomson 2005: 17). But why is this a problem? Why would philosophers not want to construct an account of reality that provides us with a “theory of everything”? Might not such an account help in maximizing human welfare by answering Socrates’ question about how we ought to live, among other things? And couldn’t such knowledge be liberating by helping us acquire the resources we need to engage in Mill’s “experiments in living”? Heidegger’s implicit answer to these questions is complicated. He is not interested in undermining or destroying metaphysics or science.7 The thinking of the truth of Being “does not oppose and think against metaphysics . . . it does not tear up the root of philosophy. It tills the ground and plows the soil for this root” (WMI 279). Heidegger’s view was never that scientific reductionism is false, and he never denied that science makes progress. He might even accept the idea of theoretical closure, although he would adamantly deny closure on the question of Being. His charges against the reification of Being in the hands of science are meant to point beyond the world revealed in the theoretical gaze toward those aspects of presencing that are not or cannot be studied scientifically. He has no problem with the story that science tells us. He merely denies that science’s story is the only one to tell. One of the most important claims that Heidegger makes over and over again, from the beginning of his career to the end, is that untruth is part of the essence of truth. The easiest way to understand the meaning of this claim is to think of it as suggesting that there cannot be any terminus to philosophical inquiry. Because the pursuit of closure denies this, it closes us off from Being, which is only accessible, as the conceptually inexhaustible process that it is, through a “questioning that experiences.” The difficulty is not a matter of indulging in a special sort of profundity and of building complicated concepts; rather, it is concealed in the step

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back that lets thinking enter into a questioning that experiences—and lets the habitual opining of philosophy fall away. (LH 246) Our answer to the question, “What’s wrong with closure?”, then, is straightforward. As long as we are satisfied with scientific or metaphysical closure, we are closed off from Being, which is problematic for two reasons. First, we fail to discover the ultimate foundations of metaphysical and scientific thinking, and thus fail to discover the ultimate foundations of all knowledge, that is, the soil in which the root of philosophy grows. But, more importantly, we also run the risk of remaining trapped in the disenchanted world revealed by our current categories. That may be a good thing for the mastery of the earth, but it could not be any worse for the spiritual fate of Dasein (IM 40). While the formal structure of ontotheology is not itself responsible for the current metaphysical paradigm, das Gestell (“enframing”), it was perhaps just a matter of time, given the finite possibilities opened up by the metaphysical question (N4 206), before enframing took hold of intelligibility and reduced everything to the status of standing reserve (QCT 26–7). Like any other metaphysical paradigm, das Gestell determines the meaning and significance of the world that is revealed to humans. In its light, the world is revealed as a storehouse of resources. As Heidegger says, das Gestell is “nothing technological, nothing on the order of a machine. It is the way in which the real reveals itself as standing reserve” (QCT 23). Like every other metaphysical paradigm, there is nothing necessary about das Gestell. But because it is rooted in Nietzsche’s unthought metaphysics of eternally recurring will to power, according to which beings as such and as a whole are conceived of as purposeless forces seeking their own increase, we face a world emptied of intrinsic meaning and value, and we run the risk of losing ourselves in the standing reserve of resources awaiting optimization and exploitation. Heidegger worried that Nietzsche’s understanding of Being could be so self-reinforcing that it maintains a stranglehold on intelligibility, such that Being as such is rendered as evanescent and “intangible as a vapor” (IM 42). As he says in the introduction of Being and Time, we assume that the question of Being is not worth asking, since the meaning of Being is either self-evident and trivial or indefinable and empty (BT 23). Heidegger’s diagnosis of our forgetfulness of Being and consequent nihilism, coupled with his belief that the pre-Socratic and pre-philosophical Greeks lived in the experience of Being as such, led him to describe a narrative of decline in the West. This decline was characterized by “the flight of the gods” and the “darkening of the earth” (IM 40). Despite all of his cynicism about the modern period, however, Heidegger had hope for

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a new beginning.8 Before the West became completely absorbed in the metaphysics of presence, and before metaphysics became entirely focused on defining the nature and origin of that which is, the pre-metaphysical Greeks were awestruck by the process of unconcealment. We see this expressed in the pre-Socratics—in particular Parmenides and Heraclitus—whose language reflects an experience of Being as such. While Parmenides and Heraclitus do not explicitly thematize an experience of Being as such, the names they use for Being (alêtheia and phusis) testify to a sensitivity to presencing that is entirely forgotten by metaphysics. Heidegger thought we could recover their experience for ourselves. If we return into the foundations of metaphysics and recover the Being process, he thought we could return to the inception from which the West has declined into nihilism (IM 202). The step back out of the forgetfulness of the ontological difference, “out of metaphysics into the active essence of metaphysics . . . opens and points out” (ID 72–3) an untrod path that leads beyond das Gestell to a new beginning. Although Heidegger’s opinions about the significance of Plato’s philosophy change between 1931 and 1940, in the early 1930s he argued that Plato’s cave allegory contained a similarly path-finding, tradition-rehabilitating expression of the Greek experience of truth as alêtheia.9 In his lectures on Plato’s Republic, he explains unambiguously that he was interested in Plato because, despite the fact that the original experience of unhiddenness begins to wane in Plato’s thought, the cave allegory nevertheless illustrates that truth is “the ground of [man’s] existence” (ET 86), not a property of his judgments. Heidegger was convinced that “the allegory as a whole predominantly treats of alêtheia” (ET 31, 60), and that the West could be renewed, that is, saved from the groundless leveling of nihilism that is the consequence of forgetting alêtheia (PDT 181–2), by (i) returning to Plato as a philosopher in whom alêtheia is still manifest and (ii) recovering that experience for ourselves “so that we can arrive in the same domain” (ET 85). Heidegger’s interest in Plato, therefore, was not a matter of historical curiosity, and it was not strictly critical. He believed that a return into history—in this case, through Plato’s doctrine of truth—could “determine our existence” by “determining our questioning” (ET 86): through Plato, not just the Preocratics, alêtheia could become “our occurrence, such that our own history is renewed,” although he was certain he had not accomplished this lofty task in his lectures (ET 87). Only a philosopher-king could achieve that goal.10 Nevertheless, Heidegger argued that, if we are to save the West from what he later calls the “technological age,” and “if we are

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resolved to exist out of this understanding,” alêtheia must occur for us. For this to remain even “the most external and remote possibility,” however, “our only recourse is that we should ask after it” (ET 89). And that’s the purpose of his lectures on Plato: to reawaken the essence of our Dasein and thereby restore unhiddenness as the guiding light of the West.

What It All Means and Why It Matters At this point we would be well served by a “step back” of our own that assesses how we got here and where we’re going. In the previous chapter I argued that, for Plato, knowledge of true being is incomplete and incomplete-able, and I suggested that dialectic is an effort to remain open to what remains concealed in the disclosure of Being to man through the deficient means of knowing. When we combined this interpretation of the Seventh Letter with the idea that self-transformation is a necessary precondition for such openness, we found that the dogmatic and holistic interpretations of Plato were equally flawed. The holistic view generally fails to accomplish more than a statement of its unique interpretive principles, which typically do not include a general conception of Platonic philosophy that does justice to Plato’s obvious interests in visionary states, self-transformation, and speculation about the nature of reality. On the other hand, the dogmatic view rests on a conception of Platonic philosophy that downplays or ignores what Foucault calls the “rebound effect,” according to which the subject is transformed by the truth he knows, not to mention Plato’s own emphasis on ineffability. Because the dogmatic view ignores the transformative aspect of Platonic philosophy, it approaches Plato from the modern point of view regarding the relations between subjectivity and truth, the ultimate consequence of which is that Plato is transformed into a primitive modern philosopher, one who sought but failed to obtain an adequate theory of everything. In rejecting both the dogmatic and holistic views, however, we ran headlong into an apparently insuperable problem: we realized that we needed an account of Plato’s philosophy that preserved its orientation toward ultimate ontological questions but did not turn Plato into a dogmatic metaphysician. This was the problem that our turn to Heidegger was supposed to solve. While we haven’t yet seen the details of Heidegger’s interpretation of Plato, we are in a good position to anticipate what Heidegger will say, because we have looked closely at the philosophical context of his interpretation. As we saw above, Heidegger argues that we must overcome metaphysics

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because it is forgetful of Being. Because metaphysics exclusively studies the whatness and thatness of beings, telling us what they are from the inside-out and the outside-in, it ignores the lighting process in virtue of which entities are opened up as such to Dasein. One of the names Heidegger gives to this process is alêtheia. Since we know that Heidegger looks to Plato’s cave allegory “as a clue to understanding the essence of unhiddenness (alêtheia)” (ET 17), we can expect that he will find some recognition of Being as such there, even if this recognition is only implicit, and even if it is forgotten by the subsequent tradition in favor of the other senses of Being and truth that emerge in the allegory (PDT 172). In fact, this is precisely what Heidegger finds in Plato’s cave allegory. As we will see next, Heidegger appropriates and transforms Plato’s thought as he unpacks the phenomenological significance of the cave allegory. The bulk of the next chapter is devoted to figuring out the meaning and significance of these conceptual developments by answering three questions: (i) how exactly does Heidegger interpret Plato, (ii) how does this interpretation correspond to Heidegger’s critique of metaphysics, and (iii) how does Heidegger’s Plato enable us to “solve” the problem of Plato interpretation? We have made some preliminary remarks about answers to the first two questions, but we will not be able to understand how Heidegger’s Plato helps us navigate a middle path between the false dichotomy offered by the holists and dogmatists until we’ve actually looked closely at the details of Heidegger’s view. As we will see, for Heidegger, Plato’s philosophy is highly paradoxical. On the one hand, he heralds Plato as a philosopher in whom alêtheia can “come alive for us” and “grow in the domain of this fundamental experience, so that we can arrive in this same domain” (ET 85). On this view, Plato’s thought contains an account of alêtheia that is rich enough to provide us with insight into the ancient Greek experience of primordial truth and thereby transform our own vision of the world (hereafter Heidegger’s “positive view”). But on the other hand, he claims that Plato’s thought marks the beginning of a devolution in thought and the ontological decline of the West, “a history of mere decline” (TB 59), caused by a transformation in the essence of truth and a forgetting of truth as unhiddenness (PDT 181) (hereafter Heidegger’s “narrative of decline”).11 In Chapter 8, I explain Heidegger’s narrative of decline and challenge both the claim that Plato transforms the essence of truth and the application of Heidegger’s ontotheology formula to Plato’s philosophy, that is, the grand claim that “Plato’s thinking remains decisive in changing forms . . . throughout the whole history of philosophy”

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such that “metaphysics is Platonism” (TB 57). In the next chapter, however, I will focus on Heidegger’s positive view, because it is best equipped to help us recover Plato from the false dichotomy presented by the dogmatists and the holists.12

Chapter 4

Heidegger’s Platonism

There is no question that Plato’s thought had a significant impact on Heidegger’s during the early 1930s. In his correspondence with Karl Jaspers and Elisabeth Blochmann at this time, we find an image of one great philosopher literally stunned by his encounter with another. He writes to Jaspers that he considers himself a curator in the museum of great ideas, where his primary duty is to make sure “the curtains in the windows are correctly opened and closed so that the few great works of the tradition are more or less properly illuminated for the randomly gathering spectators” (Heidegger to Jaspers, December 20, 1931, HJC 140). One year later, less than a year after his first lectures on Plato’s cave allegory, he writes to Elisabeth Blochmann that he wonders whether he could do more good if he abandoned his own work and devoted himself to revitalizing the tradition of ancient Greek philosophy. The more strongly I get into my work, the more securely I am invariably forced back into the great beginnings among the Greeks. And frequently I hesitate over whether it would not be more essential to abandon all my own attempts and merely make sure that this world does not become only a pale tradition, but that it once more stands before our eyes in its exciting greatness and exemplariness. (Heidegger to Blochmann, December 19, 1932, in Safranski 1998: 215) Heidegger’s encounter with Plato’s philosophy is so profound, in fact, he worries that “the little that is my own becomes more and more hazy to me in this keen air” (Heidegger to Jaspers, December 8, 1932, HJC 143). When we look at the work that Heidegger produced on Plato’s cave allegory at this time, it’s clear that he means what he says in his letters. Between 1931 and 1934, for example, Heidegger argued that Plato’s cave allegory could help us “more clearly to grasp the essence of alêtheia as unhiddenness” (ET 85) because it gives expression to a “fundamental experience, an experience which

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tells us something about the fundamental stance of man in his philosophical comportment to beings”—namely, Dasein’s comportment toward “gradations” of simultaneously revealing and concealing disclosure (ET 26). During this time Heidegger’s attitude toward Plato is mostly positive. He both confirms elements of the Dasein analytic of Being and Time and discovers the most important ingredients of his later thought—namely, the distinction between Being as such and the Being of entities—in his positive appropriation of Plato’s cave allegory. In his lecture course on Plato and the essence of truth in 1931–32, for example, one finds the following conceptual transformations: Table 1

Heidegger’s appropriation of Plato’s cave allegory

Elements of the allegory zRealm of shadows zThe fire zRealm of light zThe light itself

Plato’s interpretation Î Î Î Î

Sensibles Doxa Forms The Good

Heidegger’s interpretation Î Î Î Î

Entities Dasein/World Being of beings Being as such

At some point during the 1930s, however, for reasons he never fully explained, Heidegger’s understanding of Plato’s place and role in the history of Western philosophy changed significantly. By the time Heidegger published “Plato’s Doctrine of Truth” in 1940, Plato was no longer the philosopher in whose thought we might recover “the history of man’s essence” (ET 84), who witnessed but did not cause the waning of the ancient Greek experience of truth as alêtheia. Thanks to his subordination of alêtheia to idêa (PDT 179), Plato had become the cause, the source of subjectivism and ontotheology, the fraternal twin evils of Heidegger’s history of Being that lead toward the crisis of European nihilism and the ontological decline of the West.1 This is the interpretation of Plato for which Heidegger is famous. But these charges were something new in his later narrative. Things between Heidegger and Plato hadn’t always been so bad. In his 1931–32 lecture course on Plato’s cave allegory, Heidegger presented the interpretation of Plato to his students as an opportunity for world-renewal, not a mere intellectual exercise aimed at “historical familiarity” or new historical knowledge (ET 87), and certainly not as an opportunity to diagnose the West with a world-threatening affliction of “unrestrained,” Beingforgetting Platonism (PDT 174). The return to Plato afforded Heidegger and his students an opportunity to “return into history, such that this becomes

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our occurrence, such that our own history is renewed.” There is a tangible excitement in these lectures. Heidegger invites his students to give themselves over to their texts and find themselves reflected in them (ET 13). This is the way to be “moved by the power of Plato’s presentation” (ET 17) and to gain access to that “indescribable and improvable something,” the experience of alêtheia in Plato’s philosophy, which is what “the whole effort of philosophizing is about” (ET 13). If we do this correctly, Heidegger promises the cave allegory’s “testimony to alêtheia” will “come alive for us” and “grow in the domain of this fundamental experience, so that we can arrive in this same domain” (ET 85). Heidegger certainly found himself and his moment in history reflected in his text. As Safranski observes, “Heidegger interpreted the 1933 revolution as a collective breakout from the cave.”2 Just as Hegel saw the victory of the ideals of the French Revolution reflected in Napoleon’s defeat of the Prussian monarchy at the Battle of Jena, Heidegger thought the essence of truth and a people’s destiny were at stake in Germany’s political crisis (GA 36/37 98–9). As he delivered his lectures he seems to have imagined himself hard at work in the cave, turning the cave dwellers around to see themselves and their world anew, and he believed his work could have world-historical consequences. Again and again he argues that Western man has forfeited his “specific fundamental stance toward beings,” his openness to alêtheia. We are no longer capable of “awakening the innermost power of the essence of man” (ET 82), he argues. Consequently, “we are no longer touched by this alêtheia of Plato. It is not an occurrence which touches us intimately” (ET 87). Western man has “lost his ground as an existing being, in order to end up in contemporary groundlessness” (ET 87), that is, the horizon-less, directionless “infinite nothing” that Nietzsche’s madman warns us of in §125 of The Gay Science. Dasein was in decline, Heidegger thought, but Plato could save us. His testimony to alêtheia, that “basic and primal word . . . that arises from the fundamental experience of ancient man” (ET 9), could clear a path “long overgrown with the weeds of mere opinions” (ET 93) and lead us out of our contemporary crisis toward a new beginning.

Stage One: The Realm of Shadows Heidegger divides the allegory into four stages: (i) the realm of shadows, (ii) the realm of fire, (iii) the realm of light, and (iv) the return to the shadows. What matters most in the allegory, he insists, is not the stages in their own

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right but the transitions between them, which show us how man comes to have a world and exist ontologically, that is, as a being for whom its being is an issue, while also representing the process in virtue of which man’s experience of himself and his world is fundamentally transformed (PDT 167–8). Heidegger thinks the allegory as a whole “gives precisely the history in which man comes to himself as a being in the midst of beings” by illustrating the essence of man, which is Existenz (Ek-sistenz), to be “set out into the truth” (ET 55), “given over to beings in their totality . . . not closed in upon itself like plants, nor restricted like animals . . . nor simply occurring like a stone” (ET 56). This is the case even in the earliest stage of the allegory, which Heidegger thinks is an illustration of Dasein in its everydayness, its pre-theoretical being-alongside the world of its concerns where it is at home (PDT 164). At this stage, the prisoners take their measure of “the real” and “the true” from their immediate environment. “What surrounds and concerns them there is for them, ‘the real,’ i.e., that which is” (PDT 164).3 In one respect, the prisoners are not wrong. They are in contact with the unhidden. While the shadows cast on the wall of the cave are not as beingful as the realities outside, they are nevertheless, as Plato describes them, to alethês, the unhidden. Heidegger thinks this is significant because it shows that, even in the cave, man comports himself to the unhidden (ET 20). This is not the full story, however. The prisoners are held captive by the shadows because they do not see them as shadows, that is, as the barest traces of what they really are. “The prisoners do indeed see the shadows but not as shadows of something” (ET 20). When Glaucon interrupts Socrates to describe the condition of the prisoners as atopon, as out of place or “extra-ordinary” (ET 22), Socrates assures him that it does not appear that way to man in his everydayness, who has no standard other than his everyday situation with which to compare it (ET 21–2). This is why, in addition to observing that being human “means . . . to comport oneself to the unhidden” (ET 20), it is equally important to say that “being human also means . . . to stand within the hidden, to be surrounded by the hidden . . . so much so . . . that the unhidden is not at all understood as such” (ET 21). Because the prisoners are entirely given over to and ensnared by what they “immediately encounter” (ET 20), and therefore lack self-knowledge (ET 21), they fail to imagine that the shadows, and they themselves, could be understood and revealed differently. This is represented by their ignorance of the fire, the “man-made” (PDT 169) light in whose luminosity the world of their concerns appears to them and becomes meaningful in the first place.

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[T]hey do not know anything about a fire which gives off a glow, and in whose luminosity something like shadows can first of all be cast. Thus, when . . . we said it could be asked “what that is” which is unhidden there, this is not a question the prisoners themselves could raise. For the essence of their being is such that, to them, precisely this unhidden before them suffices—so much so indeed that they also do not know that it suffices. (ET 20) From the perspective of the shadows, the concepts of “the real” and “that which is” are so foreign to the prisoners that the Being of the shadows is not, and cannot be, a question for them (ET 20). They stand out into the truth, but they have yet to take a stand toward it. In the language of Being and Time, they live in a meaningful and intelligible world that matters to them, but they have not yet asked what it is that makes their world meaningful and intelligible, and they do not wonder why things matter to them as they do. Their lives are entirely “pre-ontological.” They live in an understanding of Being without knowing it.

Stage Two: The Fire Stage two of the allegory provides the first indication that “what is admits of degrees” (ET 27). The prisoner is released from her shackles, turned around toward the fire, and offered freedom from captivity. But he turns away from the light and wishes to return to the shadows. How does Heidegger interpret this famous moment in the allegory? We know that he understands the shadows as beings as they appear to us in the context of our everyday concerns: “cave-existence stands for the everyday activity and business of man” (ET 33). Since the fire produces the light in virtue of which the shadows are able to appear as they do, and since the fire is “man-made,” it would seem that Heidegger understands the fire as the metaphysical paradigm that grounds an age. However, as we will see momentarily, this is how Heidegger understands the Forms, not the fire. The Forms are that which determines whatbeing and how-being, defining what entities are and structuring intelligibility by “let[ting] beings through as the interpretation of ‘Being’” (ET 42). The Forms are Plato’s response to the Being question—they are his name for the Being of beings—and the Good is Plato’s name for Being as such. But if Heidegger does not understand the fire as metaphysics, then how does he understand it? Although he does not say so explicitly, and although he does not distinguish the fire from the Forms as carefully as one might

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expect, it seems most plausible that Heidegger understands the fire (or the light of the fire, to be more exact) as “World,” which is Heidegger’s technical term for the (i) totality of significations in which entities become meaningful, (ii) the locus of the tradition into which Dasein is thrown and out of which it cannot help but stand, and (iii) that in terms of which it understands itself. Because World derives from Dasein’s tradition-determined understanding of Being, it is analogous, though not quite functionally equivalent, to metaphysics. We should recall our discussion of the relationship between Dasein’s existentialia and metaphysics in the previous chapter. Whereas before it was difficult to specify the nature of this relationship, in the context of the cave allegory it is much clearer. The light of World is parasitic upon the light of Being, which is let through by metaphysics, just as the fire is parasitic upon the sun in the allegory. It seems most plausible, therefore, to say that Heidegger understands the fire in terms of Dasein’s World. Because World derives directly from metaphysics, Heidegger collapses the ontological distance between the fire and the Forms. For this reason, following Heidegger, I will treat World and metaphysics as essentially the same, and distinguish stages two and three, as Heidegger does, in terms of failed and successful liberation to the light of Being. For Heidegger, therefore, the turn toward the fire represents the moment when one is introduced to one’s metaphysical paradigm and shown that it, like the world it reveals, is unnecessary. Suddenly, one is introduced to what is more unhidden. The unhidden can therefore be more or less unhidden . . . the things themselves are more unhidden, the things which the now unshackled prisoner, as he turns around, is supposed to see. The unhidden, therefore, has gradations and levels. (ET 25) The “things themselves” and “the more unhidden” that Heidegger has in mind here are the statues. What Heidegger means to say, then, is that entities appear more fully (he says they are more beingful) when they are allowed to show themselves independent of the metaphysical mold. We might recall that on Heidegger’s view a metaphysical paradigm opens up a world, but in so doing it conceals the entities of that world as much as it reveals them. This is why Heidegger insists we come closer to beings as they are in themselves (ET 26), that is, independent of a particular understanding of their Being, when we are liberated from the shackles of the metaphysical paradigm grounding our age. Be that as it may, because the prisoner (man in his everydayness) is distracted by the “hustle-bustle” of his everyday

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preoccupations (subduing the standing reserve, immersed in “idle chatter,” “curiosity,” and “ambiguity”), confused by the blinding light of the fire (the intangibility of metaphysical concepts or the network of significance that grounds intelligibility), and attracted to the comforts of the shadows (being relieved of one’s responsibility to choose what one does and determine what one believes), he cannot see that the statues “are to a greater degree, are more beingful than the shadows.” To the prisoner, the opposite seems to be the case: what “immediately shows itself” seems “to be more true, more unhidden, more clear, more present” (ET 25), and so he wishes to turn back from the fire. But why does this happen? Why does the prisoner want to return to the shadows, and by what standard does he claim that they are more unhidden than the statues? Heidegger’s answer to this question is partly an allusion to Being and Time’s discussion of Dasein’s inbuilt tendency to fall, and partly a translation of that discussion into the categories of the later period. Consider a telling passage. There in the cave, turned to the shadows, he has no inkling of what will happen when he must see in the light; he has no pain in his eyes, and above all, there amidst the shadows he moves within that which . . . he is capable of, which demands no great effort of him, and happens of its own accord so to speak. There amidst the shadows, in his shackles, he finds his familiar ground, where no exertion is required, where he is unhindered, where nothing recoils upon him, where there is no confusion, and where everyone is in agreement. The main standard for his estimation of higher or lower unhiddenness is preservation of the undisturbedness of his ordinary activities, without being set out to any kind of reflection, demand, or command. (ET 27) On the one hand, this passage clearly resonates with Being and Time’s discussion of Dasein’s tendency to refuse its responsibility to choose its future, that is, its responsibility to own its ability-to-be by choosing to choose, and its preference to let itself be absorbed in the world of its conventional preoccupations. But on the other hand, since Heidegger has couched this discussion in the cave allegory, he also seems to be broadening the meaning of what it means to fall and what it means to choose to choose: “the occurrence and existence of unhiddenness as such is connected with the liberation of man, more precisely with the success of liberation, i.e. with genuine being-free” (ET 29). In this context, then, the choice is between the more and the less unhidden, not between doing one’s own thing and doing what

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they do. Despite their differences, there is a clear parallel between these choices: both require “familiarity with the world” and “insight into oneself ” (ET 27), and both radically disrupt one’s normal activities. And in both cases, resistance to the light of the fire is understandable, if also regrettable, since the light offers “healing from delusion,” the “sickness” that characterizes man’s existence in the cave (ET 27). The reason the light’s healing properties fail to heal the prisoner is because, at this stage, he is not really released from captivity to the shadows. Instead, he is simply removed from what he formerly saw and placed before things glimmering in the light. For him, these latter can only be things which are somehow different from what he formerly saw. Through this bare difference there arises nothing but confusion. What is shown to him does not take on any clarity and definiteness. For this reason he wants to return to his shackles. (ET 27–8) If the previous passage seemed clearly to allude to the discussion of authenticity in Being and Time, this one seems just as clearly to allude to the task of overcoming metaphysics. As one pulls back the veil of metaphysical categories, so to speak, and finds oneself “placed before things glimmering in the light,” one first faces James’ blooming, buzzing confusion, and therefore assumes there is nothing more beingful beyond the veil. In the context of Being and Time’s discussion of restoring philosophy to her rightful place as queen of the sciences, this means that, when we inquire into the ontological posits of the natural and social sciences—concepts as fundamental as life, consciousness, personhood, materiality, and so on—we enter a realm that lacks “clarity and definiteness,” as well as the guarantee of practical and marketable applications, and so our immediate inclination is to consider this realm less, not more, unhidden. In so doing, however, we refuse metaphysics’ responsibility to carry the torch illuminating the future of the West.4 On the other hand, in the context of Being and Time’s analysis of anxiety, the cave allegory’s account of paralysis in the face of the fire is analogous to the feeling of no longer being at home, that is, when one flees toward entities within-the-world and refuses the responsibilities of existence (BT 233–4). Removal from shackles is not genuine emancipation, for it remains external and fails to penetrate to man in his ownmost self. The circumstances of the prisoner change, but his inner condition, his willing does not.

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The released prisoner does indeed will, but he wills to return to his shackles. Thus willing, he wills not-willing: he does not want to be involved with himself. He avoids and shrinks back from the demand to fully give up his previous situation. He is also a long way from understanding that man truly is only in so far as he demands this of himself. (ET 28) The emancipation of the prisoner from the shadows toward the fire is thwarted at this level, because it is superficial and therefore “not a liberation at all” (ET 31). In the context of paideia, that is, “schooling in the nature of non-concealment” (Richardson 1963: 303; cf. Thomson 2001), the initial liberation encourages the prisoner to think outside of the metaphysical mold of her age and understand the Being of what-is differently. But it fails because it does not become a practical, operational part of her life, gripping her at the ground of her essence and changing “the fundamental direction of [her] striving” (PDT 166), that is, her “willing” (ET 28). The epoch of Gestell does not just reveal the world as a standing reserve of power to be channeled for human purposes. Because it reveals the world in such a light, it also determines the direction of human willing and, worst of all, shuts down man’s capacity to disclose new worlds. Under the influence of Gestell, man is a long way from understanding that he “is only in so far as” he gives up his “previous situation” (ET 28). This is why, in order for liberation to be genuine, the prisoner must become “free for himself” and come to “stand in the ground of his essence” (ET 28). He must reclaim his capacity to stand out into the truth, see entities “glimmering in the light,” and recognize the difference between the two, because this is the capacity that characterizes his existence (ET 28).

Stage Three: The Realm of Light These might seem like vague and unhelpful prescriptions, but we must look more carefully at what Heidegger has already told us: we know that man’s essence is Existenz, which literally means to stand out into the truth. And we know that Heidegger believes there are gradations of the unhidden, and that one becomes free as one moves from the less to the more unhidden. To be free for oneself, therefore, one must stand out into the more unhidden by moving toward the light of intelligibility (toward the fire), and then beyond it (out into the light of day) toward what is most unhidden, so that beings are allowed to “become more beingful” (ET 29), which in turn

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(i) frees one from the dictates of the they-self and the reifying categories of one’s age, and (ii) enables one to understand the shadows differently (i.e., as shadows, aspects of reality, partial revelations of what is). This is what Heidegger calls “genuine liberation.” It occurs when the prisoner is removed from his shackles in the cave, dragged up a rugged path, and released into the light of day, “i.e., to the sun, completely away from the artificial light of the cave” (ET 31). It is a “sudden ripping loose, followed by . . . a slow adaptation not so much to the things as to illumination and light itself” (ET 32). Unlike the initial liberation toward the fire, this one is self-authenticating. Because the freed prisoner is afforded a “new standpoint” on the shadows, he “no longer wants to go back, for he now sees through the shadowy character of his whole cave-existence” (ET 32). How does Heidegger interpret this important moment in the allegory? His general view is that, at this stage, one is not merely free from the sources of resistance and confusion in everyday intelligibility; one is also freed by one’s exposure to “the primordial light” (ET 31) to take control of one’s ability-to-be and to let beings be what they are, that is, richer in meaning and possibilities than our everyday, metaphysical understanding of them is capable of recognizing. “This is what genuine positive freedom offers; it is not only freedom from but freedom for” (ET 43). The prisoner (man in his everydayness) is completely ignorant of the role played by “Forms” (historically fluctuating metaphysical paradigms) in his everyday experience.5 He only experiences entities as such, the play of shadows on the walls of the cave, and he cannot imagine that there might be something other than the entities as they appear in the context of his everyday concerns. He cannot imagine, and does not even wonder about, the conditions for the possibility of his intelligible experience. Led along by the apron strings of the everyday, we are forced into what is ordinary and accepted. In such a situation, which looks to us like freedom, we experience only beings. (ET 35) In order to know something about Being, the prisoner must remove himself from the shadows and take an ascent from “everything in the lower region—also from the fire in the cave . . . for the light and brightness of day” (ET 39).6 This is precisely what he accomplishes when he ascends out of the cave into the open region above. But what exactly is this light, and why is it the lynchpin for “genuine liberation”? The light outside of the cave turns out to have two important

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characteristics: (i) it in its own right accomplishes the liberation of the prisoner from his captivity to shadows, and (ii) it “rules over the fire,” giving it the light that it gives to the prisoners in the cave. Finally he is able to see the sun as what gives the light, as what gives time, as what rules over everything, and which is the ground of everything, and which is the ground even of what is seen in the cave, of the shadows and the light of the fire. (ET 32) This is the first indication that Heidegger identifies the open region (illumination and light) with the Being of beings, and the sun (the source of light) with Being as such, the mysterious and concealed source of unconcealment that gives Being and time. The idea that the Forms are more real, or “more beingful,” than the entities they light up should remind us of Heidegger’s views about the relationship between metaphysical paradigms and the worlds they illuminate. In the mutual confrontation of man and Being we discern the claim that determines the constellation of our age. The framework concerns us everywhere, immediately. The frame . . . is more real than all of the atomic energy and the whole world of machinery, more real than the driving power of organization, communications, and automation. Because we no longer encounter what is called the frame within the purview of representation which lets us think the Being of beings as presence—the frame no longer concerns us as something that is present—therefore the frame seems at first strange. It remains strange above all because it is not an ultimate, but rather first gives us That which prevails throughout the constellation of Being and man. (ID 36, emphasis added) These correlations give us a great deal of insight into how Heidegger understood the relationship between Being as such (“That which prevails throughout the constellation of Being and man”), metaphysics (“the frame”), and intelligibility (in this case, “the whole world of machinery,” etc.). We know that he identifies the shadows with the entities of our everyday comportment, and the fire with the “man-made” light (i.e., intelligibility) of metaphysics. Now, however, we see that the intelligibility provided by metaphysics is man-made in quite a limited sense, since it is parasitic upon, and given by, “the light” of Being as such. Being is not “posited first by man . . . Man and Being are appropriated to each other” (ID 31). This is absolutely crucial to understanding Heidegger’s interpretation of the Forms.

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When Heidegger begins to explain his interpretation of the Forms, it immediately becomes clear that he goes beyond what is explicit in Plato (ET 51), because he identifies the Forms with the metaphysical paradigm that grounds an age. While they are “different from the beings that daily occupy us” (ET 35) in that they give structure and meaning to intelligibility by furnishing us with an “understanding of what-being and how-being, in short of being” (i.e., the Being of beings), which “allows beings to be recognized as the beings they are” (ET 38–9), they are “nothing ‘in themselves’” and they “are never objects” (ET 52)—indeed, it is a fundamental mistake to treat the Forms “as just beings of a higher order” (ET 66). Plato didn’t engage in “far flung speculation” when he constructed his theory of Forms, on Heidegger’s view. He extricated himself from the shadows and “pointed . . . out with previously unknown power and assurance . . . what everyone sees and grasps in comportment to beings” (ET 38), namely, that the perception of “shadows” is made possible by an understanding-inadvance of the shadows, which is characterized by de-concealing (ET 53). “If the soul did not already understand what being means, man could not exist as the being that comports itself to beings and to itself” (ET 82). On Heidegger’s reading of Plato, the Forms stand for that which “allows beings through as the interpretation of Being” (ET 42). They are what we perceive in objects when we perceive objects as objects. Without them, without a metaphysical paradigm, man’s experience would be blind, that is, a blooming, buzzing confusion of “tones, sounds . . . colors, colored things . . . brightness and darkness” (ET 36). We have color sensations, but not, say, “book-cover” sensations. “What is sensed with our eyes,” Heidegger suggests, “is not the book, but the reddish brown, grayish white, black, and so forth” (ET 37). We would never see anything like a book were we not able to see in another more primordial sense. To this latter kind of “seeing” there belongs an understanding of what it is that one encounters . . . We recognize the thing as a book . . . We see what the thing is from the way it looks: we see its what-being . . . In the idea we see what every being is and how it is, in short the being of beings. (ET 37) Heidegger invites his students to imagine what this implies. In order to be capable of having a world, man must “enact a projection of Being” and hold up a picture (Bild) in advance, “so that in viewing this look one can relate to beings as such” (ET 45). While this “pre-modeling projection of Being” is what “prepares the way” for beings to come to presence by removing their

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hiddenness (ET 51), it is not a human construction or production. The Forms “are neither things, objective, nor are they thought up, subjective” (ET 52). As we will see, they are given to man by the Good, just as Being is given to Dasein. In Heidegger’s later thought this becomes the idea that Dasein, although distinguished from Being in some sense, is dominated by and grounded in Being, which gives itself to Dasein. On Heidegger’s view, reality does not correspond to man; man is no more than the place where alêtheia occurs, that is, where Being becomes manifest as beings. To the extent that Plato recognized that, albeit in his own way and in his own terminology, Heidegger thinks he got the phenomenology right, even if his followers did not. He recognized what we don’t see in what we see, namely, the “light” of intelligibility, or the open region, that makes the subjectobject relationship possible (ET 52). It is “intangible, almost like nothingness and the void” (ET 39), but it is “that through which we see,” both (i) letting objects through “to be viewed” and (ii) letting the view through “to the visible object” (ET 41). I return to this important point below. Let us quickly recall that, on Heidegger’s own view, metaphysics shapes intelligibility, and thereby determines the direction of man’s willing, by establishing the most basic categories in terms of which entities are understood, which define what and how beings are by giving an account of them from the inside-out and the outside-in. In the light of metaphysics, intelligibility is organized into a hierarchy, and entities that otherwise would be meaningless and impossible to experience as entities are thereby lit up and rendered accessible and meaningful to human beings. There is no question that this is how Heidegger understands the Forms. They are Plato’s account of what Heidegger calls the Being of beings. “Idea” is . . . the look of something as something. It is through these looks that individual things present themselves as this and that, as being-present . . . The look . . . thus gives what something presences as, i.e., what a thing is, its being . . . The seeing of the idea, i.e., the understanding of what-being and how-being, in short of being, first allows beings to be recognized as the beings they are. (ET 38–9)7 Because the Forms give what something “presences as” (ET 38), like the metaphysical paradigm that grounds an age, they are “the genuine truth of beings . . . [the] something different from the beings which daily occupy us” (ET 35) that we see outside the cave, that is, that we see when we pull back the veil of metaphysics and recognize it for what it is. “We see first of all from being, through the understanding of what a particular thing is.

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Through its what-being the being shows itself as this and this” (ET 42). When we see beyond the ordinary entities that “daily occupy us” to the essences of objects, we see the Being of beings, what entities are. However, at this stage we do not yet see brightness and visibility itself, “the opening and spreading out of the open” (ET 41). That is what we see when we recognize the difference between the Good and all of the other Forms.

The Good: Heidegger’s Plato is the Later Heidegger Heidegger’s initial discussion of the realm outside the cave does not include an interpretation of the Good. It is too important to treat briefly, so he sets aside a separate lecture for it. This is significant for us. It suggests that Heidegger saw something special in Plato’s brief remarks about the Good beyond being, indeed, special enough to warrant an entirely separate interpretation. He could not simply observe that the Good was one among many Forms, distinguished only by its high rank or by its unique function. Something about the Good, especially its relationship with the other Forms, and what that meant for the relationship between Forms and sensible entities, gave Heidegger pause and seems to have sparked new reflections in his own thought. That, at any rate, is what I hope to show in this section. As we will see, Heidegger appears to have discovered his own later distinction between Being as such and the Being of beings in his appropriation of Plato’s sun analogy. In Heidegger’s lecture on the Good, we see precisely what is unique about the realm outside of the cave, and why he wants to distinguish it from the light of the fire: from the perspective outside the cave, the prisoner is able to recognize the difference between (i) Being as such, the light that is “let through” the Forms as beings, (ii) the Being of beings, the Forms that do the letting through, and (iii) beings, the shadows on the wall of the cave, the “furniture” of our everydayness. Because the prisoner can recognize the difference between Being and entities at this stage, this liberation succeeds. Unlike the failed liberation into the light of the fire, this one offers the prisoner (i) an alternative to the reifying categories of the cave and thus (ii) the genuinely liberating, possibility-opening insight that there is something beyond the metaphysical veil. When we see the ideas we understand the what-being and how-being, the Being of beings (ET 44), and because the unhiddenness of entities originates in the Forms, they are what is most unhidden (ET 48). But even the most unhidden, the Being of beings, is different from the light of the Good that illuminates and unconceals (i.e., opens) the

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open region where the Forms reside. As Heidegger says, the genuinely liberated prisoner is able to distinguish between “the stuff that is illuminated” (beings), “the illumination” (Being of beings), and “the source of light” (Being as such) (ET 39). To open something means: To make something light, free and open, e.g., to make the forest free of trees at one place. The openness thus originating is the clearing . . . Light can stream into the clearing, into its openness, and let brightness play with darkness in it. But light never first creates openness. Rather, light presupposes openness. (TB 65) While Heidegger does not systematically draw these distinctions here in his 1931 lectures, that he draws them at all is what makes his encounter with Plato so important. Far from providing a mere glimpse of what will later become the beating heart of his own thought, Plato’s idea of the Good is Heidegger’s Being as such. Plato gave him the idea. This becomes clear as we look at the details of Heidegger’s lecture and compare them with several passages from his later thought. Heidegger begins by calling Plato’s idea of the Good the “highest point of his philosophy” (ET 70). He did not give it up later in his career, as some scholars have suggested, since that would mean “giv[ing] up the idea of philosophy!” (ET 80). On the contrary, Heidegger argues, “wherever being and truth are interrogated, so is the good” (ET 80). Understanding the good, therefore, is a necessary condition for understanding Plato’s thought in general. But what exactly is it? Heidegger insists we cannot say directly. In fact, as long as we ask for a “propositional explanation” of what the Good is, we “deviate from the path of authentic questioning” (ET 70), which is more of a transformative experience—a “reaching down into the deepest perceiving possible for man as an existing being” (ET 81)—than a purely theoretical exercise. As Young says, paraphrasing Schopenhauer in a different context, the point of philosophy, for Heidegger, is not to circle “the fortress of mystery from without,” but, “as if by a secret, underground passage,” to “place us directly in it” (Young 2002: 19). In Time and Being, for example, Heidegger says the purpose of his lecture “was to bring before our eyes Being itself as the event of Appropriation” (TB 21), not by means of discursive reasoning, but through “a reflection which persists in questioning,” because “if the answer could be given, [it] would consist in a transformation in thinking, not a propositional statement about the matter at stake” (TB 55, emphasis added).

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This is what I called “spiritual ineffability” in Chapter 2. Heidegger deserves credit for recognizing and appreciating this feature of Plato’s thought. As we will see next, he correctly connects it with the related feature of “metaphysical ineffability.” Heidegger observes that Plato himself only speaks of the Good “indirectly and symbolically, insisting always on the correspondences of the symbolism” (ET 70). Our task, he says, is to track these correspondences, because it is by asking fundamental philosophical questions that “the faculty of nonsensory seeing” (ET 69) is elevated beyond entities and the Being of beings to the light of the Good itself. On this point Heidegger is clearly influenced by his interpretation of the Seventh Letter, which he cites three times in this lecture, and he anticipates his own view that “thinking which represents and gives an account corresponds to Appropriation as little as does the saying that merely states” (TB 23).8 The Good is the “object” sought by the dialectic described in the letter (ET 80), which itself is Plato’s account of the “whole path of liberation” that must be “traversed in all its stages,” from shadows to light and back to shadows, before “the flash and illumination of understanding” occurs (ET 81). It is “only in the rigor of questioning,” Heidegger says, that “we come into the vicinity of the unsayable” (ET 71). It is Plato’s basic conviction, which he expresses . . . in the so-called Seventh Letter . . . that the highest idea can be brought into view only through the method of stepwise philosophical questioning of beings (asking down into the essential depth of man). The viewing succeeds, if at all, only in the comportment of questioning and learning. Even so what is viewed is not . . . sayable like other things we can learn. Nevertheless we can understand the unsayable only on the basis of what has already been said in a proper way, namely in and from the work of philosophizing. (ET 71) In light of the Good’s ineffability, Heidegger’s expository strategy is to compare it to the other Forms, which can be described, if only in terms of their powers to structure intelligibility. He reminds us that the Forms were considered the most beingful and the most unhidden because “they make Being [the Being of beings] comprehensible,” and they were said to be that “‘in whose light’ . . . a particular being is a being and is what it is” (ET 72). The Forms let Being through as beings and allow beings to show themselves as what they are. By contrast, the Good becomes visible “over all ideas” and exists beyond the Being of beings (ET 71), “which is already most beingful”

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and most unhidden. If we can say that it is anything, we can only say that it is empowerment as such, that is, that which “empowers” and “grants” both the Being of beings and unhiddenness (ET 32, 78, 79).9 The ideas are what they are, namely the most beingful beings, and the most unhidden in the indicated sense of letting through, only by virtue of an empowerment which exceeds them both. (ET 76) This empowerment makes beings accessible in their unhiddenness and thus accessible as beings, i.e., in their being. (ET 79) But if there is a highest idea, which can become visible over all ideas, then it must exist out beyond being (which is already most beingful) and primordial unhiddenness. (ET 72) This is Heidegger’s contrast between the Good and the other Forms. How exactly should we understand it? In fact, we should consider these passages very closely, because this is Heidegger’s discovery of Being as such and his distinction between it and the Being of beings. The Forms structure and organize intelligibility by letting Being through as beings, and in this respect they represent Plato’s name for what Heidegger calls the “comprehending perceiving” that grounds his age and allows beings to become accessible. The Forms can be said to “enable something,” namely, the visibility and intelligibility of entities as such. “This enablement, however, is itself empowered by a higher one,” that of the Good, which gives the dunamis to the perceiving—“it lights up the eye itself [and] makes it free to receive” objects—and to the perceivable. It opens the world for Dasein, and Dasein for the world (ET 74–5), and it does this as that which is beyond both “being (which is already most primordial) and primordial unhiddenness” (ET 72). This idea resurfaces in Heidegger’s later essay, “Plato’s Doctrine of Truth.” Heidegger is fascinated by it himself. How is it that we live in a world that is ordered and intelligible to us? What are the conditions of possibility for this experience? In what sense does the essence of man belong to Being and vice versa? What does Being mean? Who, or what, is man? Everybody can see easily that without sufficient answer to these questions we lack the foundation for determining anything reliable about the belonging together of man and Being. But as long as we ask our questions in this way, we are confined within the attempt to represent the “together” of man and Being as

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a coordination, and to establish and explain this coordination either in terms of man or in terms of Being. In this procedure, the traditional concepts of man and Being constitute the toe-hold for the coordination of the two. (ID 30) Heidegger’s solution to the problem of misrepresenting the belonging together of Being and man, that is, by asking about subjects and objects and thinking of the relationship in terms of a “coordination of the two,” is to define man as openness to Being: man, “as the being who thinks, is open to Being . . . thus man remains referred to Being and so answers to it. Man is essentially this relationship of responding to Being, and he is only this” (ID 31). If we look closely at Heidegger’s lecture on the Good, we can see that he is extracting these ideas, albeit in an undeveloped form, from Plato’s sun analogy. Heidegger proceeds by asking questions about the Forms. If the Being of beings, Forms, in Plato’s case, structure intelligibility, giving our world order and meaning, what “structures” or “empowers” them, and how are they related to man? Translated into the language of Heidegger’s later thought, this question becomes, how is man open to the Being of beings such that he “lets Being [as such] arrive as presence” (ID 31)? Indeed, this is one of the guiding questions for Heidegger’s later thought—more than anything, he wants to grasp “the constellation of Being and man in terms of that which joins the two” (ID 40, emphasis added)—and he thinks he can see it being raised and answered, in the only way it can be answered, here in Plato’s text. Subject and object are epiphenomena in the nous-Forms-Good triad. For it is in no way self-evident that a being, a thing itself, should be visible. These two elements, however, the ability to see and the visible itself, cannot occur in simple juxtaposition; there must be something which enables seeing on the one hand, and being-seen on the other hand. What enables must be one and the same, must be the ground of both, or, as Plato expresses it, the ability to see and the ability to be seen must both be harnessed together under one yoke . . . This yoke, which makes possible the reciprocal connectedness of each to the other, is . . . brightness, light. (ET 74) We can see here that Heidegger links the Good with the light that gives intelligibility, “manifestness, understanding of being” (ET 81). It is neither of these, but rather their source and origin. It is not an entity, and it is not the Being of beings. Insofar as it empowers the Being of beings and unhiddenness, opening the world to us and us to the world, it is that in whose light

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entities are intelligible and visible as such.10 However, because it is beyond the Being of beings, what it is remains an ineluctable mystery. When Heidegger mentions “sight” in this context, he is referring to the pre-modeling projection that enables sense perception by opening up an intelligible world (ET 74–5). It would not be possible to perceive any thing if we did not already understand the world as divided up into distinct objects. The light of the Good is what enables this kind of sight, because it harnesses both (i) the capacity for such seeing, what he calls the “understanding of Being” (ET 75, 81) (his substitute for the “subject”), and (ii) the intelligibility of what is seen, what he calls the “manifestness” of Being (ET 75, 81) (his substitute for “object”), under one yoke, namely the “yoke” of its enabling light. If we put this in more modern terminology, the Good is what gives the subject its objects (ET 81). It is precisely that which empowers all objectivity and subjectivity to what they are, by establishing a yoke between subject and object, a yoke under which they can first become subject and object. (ET 81) The Forms are “the most beingful beings,” because they let the light of Being through as entities (ET 75–6), but they are what they are “only by virtue of an empowerment that exceeds them” (ET 76). Empowerment as such, Heidegger says, is the Good, since, like the other Forms, it is not an ontologically independent entity, as the tradition would have us believe, and “is nothing outside this perceiving” (ET 76). It is what appropriates man and Being “to each other” (ID 31), and as such it is something we gain access to only by means of a leap “away from the attitude of representational thinking . . . away from the habitual idea of man as the rational animal who in modern times has become a subject for his objects” (ID 32). We must enter “into this realm of mutual appropriation” (the belonging together of nous and Forms) in order fully to enjoy the “experience of thinking” (ID 33), whose object, as it were, is “this owning in which man and Being are delivered over to each other” (ID 36) (the yoking together of nous and Forms by the Good). And to think this we must “enter into what we call the event of appropriation” (ID 36). As Plato says, we must merge with the truth of being (Rep. 490b). This accounts for why we must study the Good with an indirect method of questioning. When we ask about the essence of Being and truth “our questioning goes out beyond these” (ET 77, 78), and we encounter something with the character of nothing more than enablement: “we never experience anything tangible and of substantive content, but we always gain access to it

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only as something decisive in the enablement of being and truth . . . Enablement is the limit of philosophy” (ET 76–7). The difficulty, as Heidegger says elsewhere, is to avoid the “almost ineradicable habit of representing ‘Being’ as something standing somewhere on its own,” completely independent of human beings (QB 310). But we must block this habit, because “we can never place Appropriation [the yoking together of nous and Forms, manifestness of Being and understanding of Being] in front of us, neither as something opposite us nor as something all-encompassing” (TB 23). How do we make sense of these claims? The first thing to notice is that we are outside the framework of ontotheology: To think Being itself explicitly requires disregarding Being to the extent that it is only grounded and interpreted in terms of beings and for beings as their ground, as in all metaphysics. To think Being explicitly requires us to relinquish Being as the ground of beings in favor of the giving which prevails concealed in unconcealment, that is, in favor of the It gives. (TB 6) The Good satisfies these requirements. It gives the Being of beings, which in turn supplies the ground for beings. It is beyond both essence and existence, because, “as the source of light,” it is the source of both: it is “the condition of this being’s . . . existence” (ET 76) and it gives the Forms the light they give to entities in determining what they are: “just as light requires another source, so do the ideas themselves presuppose another idea standing over them” (ET 77). As we will see below, Plato’s Good is Heidegger’s mysterious, unfathomable “It” that gives Being and time. Given the importance of this point, and its obvious difficulty, it is worth considering this point in more familiar language. Thomson explains Heidegger’s critique of ontotheology as follows: [I]f metaphysics’ ontotheological postulates concerning the being of entities doubly “ground” those entities, [Heidegger asks] what in turn grounds the being of entities? Only two kinds of answers can halt the regress. Either there must be something beyond the being of entities in or by which the being of entities can itself be grounded, or else the being of entities must be self-grounding (emphasis added) . . . Heidegger develops a variation of the former answer himself: “Being as such” will be his problematic name for that which makes possible—but does not ontotheologically “ground”— metaphysics’ various epochal postulates of the being of entities. (Thomson 2005: 19)

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This is the view Heidegger discovers in Plato’s distinction between the Good and the rest of the Forms. Consider Heidegger’s various descriptions of Being as such. Whereas the Being of beings is what Being and Time calls the “horizon of disclosure,” that is, unhiddenness and intelligibility, Being as such is that “wherein unconcealment is grounded” (HIC 45), “that in which alêtheia is grounded” (QB 314), “the origin” (TB 7) and “source” (TB 12). As Heidegger says in Time and Being, the Being of beings is “the constant abiding that approaches man, reaches him, is extended to him. But what is the source of this extending reach to which the present belongs as presencing, insofar as there is presence?” (TB 12–13, emphasis added).11 “What speaks in the ‘It gives’?” (TB 73). Heidegger argues that metaphysics cannot answer this question because it does not ask it. It represents beings in their Being (the Being of beings), but it does not think Being as such and is therefore oblivious to “the truth of Being itself” (LH 226). In the beginning of Western thinking, Being is thought, but not the “It gives” as such. The latter withdraws in favor of the gift which It gives. That gift is thought and conceptualized from then on exclusively as Being with regard to beings. (TB 8) The matter of philosophy as metaphysics is the Being of beings. (TB 62) To think Being without beings means: to think Being without regard to metaphysics. (TB 24) We have already seen several passages where it is clear that Heidegger finds this sense of Being as such, and its difference from the Being of beings, in Plato’s text, but there is another passage where the influence is simply undeniable. Just as . . . the sun cannot be becoming [nicht Werden sein kann], but rather grants becoming, so to agathon cannot be a being [nicht ein Sein sein kann], therefore also cannot be unhiddenness, but is beyond (epekeina), out beyond both being and unhiddenness . . . this idea surpasses being as such and truth. This empowerment which surpasses pertains precisely to the possibility of the ideas, to the enablement of that which the ideas are: namely that itself which makes beings accessible in their unhiddenness and thus accessible as beings, i.e. in their being . . . What Plato calls the good is that which empowers being and unhiddennes to their own essence, i.e. what is prior to everything else, that upon which everything else depends. We are inquiring here into what grants being and unhiddenness. (ET 78–9)

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Heidegger says that, with Plato’s “doctrine” of the Good, we are inquiring into what grants and empowers being and truth, not the Being of beings and not unhiddenness themselves. The Good, like Heidegger’s Being as such, is what “gives” the Being of beings (Forms); “[the] Being [of beings]—that which It [Being as such] gives—is what is sent” (TB 8). What exactly this enablement is and how it occurs we literally cannot say, because it is out beyond what-being and how-being as the condition for their possibility, allowing them to arise and be understood (ET 72, 80) (albeit as the “changing forms,” rather than eternal and static ones, of the “whole history of philosophy” (TB 57), that is, the different metaphysical paradigms that make up Heidegger’s history of Being).12 The Good, then, is what Heidegger will later call the “mystery,” the unfathomable and concealed source of unconcealment that “in giving holds itself back and withdraws” (TB 8), the dark side of Rilke’s “globe of Being” (PLT 121), the “side” of intelligibility facing away from us (DT 64) that Heidegger describes interchangeably as “mystical,” “awesome,” “the unknown god,” and “the holy.” The sending in the destiny of Being has been characterized as a giving in which the sending source keeps itself back and, thus, withdraws from unconcealment. (TB 22) Whereas Plato says we are governed by an erotic longing for the Good, and that we love or long for what we lack, Heidegger suggests we are drawn toward Being as it withdraws: “we are drawing into what withdraws, into the enigmatic and therefore mutable nearness of its appeal” (WCT 17). The deepest philosophical insight recognizes that the mystery must “remain . . . veiled” (WCT 17), that man’s search for wisdom is incomplete and incomplet-able. Because Socrates recognized this and “did nothing else than place himself into this draft, this current, and maintain himself in it,” Heidegger considers him “the purest thinker of the West” (WCT 17). And because Plato’s symbolism respects the intractability of the concealed source of unconcealment, Heidegger found the same quality in Plato’s thought. Plato’s path-finding influence on Heidegger becomes explicit near the end of his lecture on the Good. He argues that it is time to renew interest in Plato’s question: “What this empowerment is and how it occurs has not been answered to the present day. Indeed the question is no longer even asked in the original Platonic sense” (ET 80). We no longer ask what empowerment is or how it occurs, but we must ask these questions, albeit in full recognition of the poverty of propositions and discursive or definitional approaches, because this alone can initiate “the liberation and awakening of

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the innermost power of the essence of man” (ET 82). Plato said nous descended from a divine origin (Tim. 90bd). Heidegger is phenomenologizing Plato’s mythological language, not to reduce it to something less transformative but to renew the transformative “power and wisdom” (ET 40) in Plato’s symbolism. Indeed, this is Heidegger’s strategy throughout his exposition of Plato’s cave allegory. Like Plato, he wants to understand how “the essence of man belongs to the truth of Being” (LH 226), “the essential light of appropriation” (ID 39), and Plato has shown him the way. If we compare a final passage from Heidegger’s lecture on the Good to a relevant example from the “Letter on Humanism,” the parallels are simply arresting. The highest idea holds sway most primordially and authentically by allowing both the unhiddenness of beings to arise, and the being of beings to be understood . . . The highest idea, although itself barely visible, is what makes possible both being and unhiddenness, i.e. it is what empowers being and unhiddenness as what they are. The highest idea, therefore, is this empowering, the empowering for being which as such gives itself simultaneously with the empowerment of unhiddenness as occurrence. (ET 72) To embrace a “thing” or a “person” in its essence means to love it, to favor it. Thought in a more original way such favoring [Mögen] means to bestow essence as a gift. Such favoring is the proper essence of enabling, which not only can achieve this or that but also can let something essentially unfold in its provenance, that is, let it be. It is on the “strength” of such enabling by favoring that something is properly able to be . . . Being is the enabling favoring . . . (LH 220) When one reaches this perspective on the philosophical trek, that is, on one’s journey in and out of the cave, one has transcended what, in his later period, Heidegger calls the focus of the metaphysical gaze and achieved the pinnacle of philosophical thinking. The meditative man is to experience the untrembling heart of unconcealment. What does the word about the untrembling heart of unconcealment mean? It means unconcealment itself in what is most its own, means the place of stillness which gathers in itself what grants unconcealment to begin with. That is the opening of what is open . . . The quiet heart of the opening is the place of stillness from which alone the possibility of the belonging together of Being and thinking, that is, presence and perceiving, can arise at all. (TB 68)

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This is the moment when one can understand the Being of what-is differently, because one can see both (i) that the Being of what-is (the Forms) is given by Being as such (the Good), and (ii) that the light of the Good is revealed but also concealed by the Forms, which unconceal the Good as beings but conceal the Good as light. Once one has asked this far “down into the essential depth of man” (ET 71), and witnessed the degrees of unconcealment through the “oppressing flash of the appropriation” (ID 38), a “path . . . open[s] for man to experience beings in a more originary way” (ID 40). Heidegger explains what this path is and how it enables us to experience beings in a more originary way in his account of the return to the cave.

Stage Four: The Return to the Shadows While this may be the peak of philosophical thinking, it is not the culmination of the cave allegory, and it does not constitute what Heidegger calls “genuine freedom.” There is a fourth stage, and Heidegger insists that it is the most important for understanding the nature of alêtheia, because it shows that untruth is an ineluctable part of the essence of truth. There is no permanent dwelling outside the cave: “the essence of truth as unhiddenness consists in the overcoming of concealing, meaning that unhiddenness contains an essential connection with hiddenness and concealing” (ET 66). In this final stage, the liberated prisoner becomes the liberator and returns to the cave as “someone who has become free in that he looks into the light, has the illuminating view, and thus has a surer footing in the ground of human-historical Dasein” (ET 59). He has become a philosopher, because it is only as a philosopher that man is able to realize his nature as “transcending himself into the unhiddenness of beings.” Indeed, “apart from philosophy,” which Heidegger defines as “openness to the questioning of being and essence, a wanting to get to the bottom of beings and of being as such” (ET 60), “man is something else” (ET 56, emphasis added). He is not fully developed as what he is. We do not become what we are until we return to the cave with “an eye for being” and a recognition of the shadows as shadows. The Heideggerian philosopher practices philosophy, therefore, not as a matter of his general education, but as the basic character of his being, as that which fulfills his nature. The “rebound effect” of philosophy in this sense (hereafter “genuine philosophy”), in other words, could not be more substantial. This is why, following the Stoics, Heidegger insisted that ontology was originary ethics

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and, therefore, the highest form of practice. These claims were not meant merely to be provocative and paradoxical: on Heidegger’s view, when one engaged in genuine philosophy, one literally acted in and upon the world by transforming it for oneself and for others. One changed oneself, as we saw above, because one changed the “direction of one’s striving” by transforming one’s vision of the world. And one changed the world itself, because one did the same for others. Heidegger calls this letting-be, and he considered it the ground of authenticity. The liberator is able to live more authentically (ET 44), because he is free from the dictates of his they-self and the reifying metaphysical categories of his age. But he is also free to discover new existential possibilities and new possibilities in entities, because, having discovered that the shadows are given by the Being of beings, which itself is given by Being as such, he has become like the poet in his newfound capacity to “bring out the inner possibilities of beings [and] for making man see what it really is with which he so blindly busies himself” (ET 47).13 When he returns to the cave, therefore, he returns as an educator in the deepest sense, that is, as one who opens up a new world for his “students,” disclosing the truth of beings, discovering as yet unseen possibilities, and thereby helping them become who they are, namely, beings whose essence is Existenz (ET 60). The liberator has something to teach when he returns to the cave because his journey has given him “an eye for Being . . . an illuminating view for the being of beings” (ET 64). He can see “what ‘shadows’ mean, and upon what their possibility is grounded” (ET 64)—he sees what they don’t see in what they see. He can “distinguish between beings and being” and so insists on a “divorce between . . . the unhidden [entities as such] and what . . . conceals itself precisely in its self-showing [Being as such]” (ET 66). What specifically does he teach? His most important lesson is that the manifestness of beings is in itself necessarily an overcoming of concealment . . . Concealment belongs essentially to unhiddenness, like the valley belongs to the mountain. (ET 65) Truth, therefore, is not something one obtains once and for all or in its entirety (ET 66). It is that which one tears away from concealment in an ongoing “primordial struggle” (ET 66).14 If one hopes to distinguish between what is unhidden (i.e., beings) and that which is concealed in the self-showing of the unhidden (i.e., Being), and live in light of this distinction, one must be committed to ongoing effort,15 work on the self, and, because Dasein is defined in part by being-with, work on others.

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It is clear from this that liberation does not achieve its final goal merely by ascent to the sun. Freedom is not just a matter of being unshackled, nor just a matter of being free for the light. Rather, genuine freedom means to be a liberator from the dark. The descent back into the cave is not some subsequent diversion on the part of those who have become free, perhaps undertaken from curiosity about how cave life looks from above, but is the only manner through which freedom is genuinely realized. (ET 66) Unlike the prisoners, for whom Being is not yet an issue, the liberator knows that the shadows on the wall of the cave (the beings of everyday concerns) are produced by the fire (World), which itself is grounded in the Forms (Being of beings) and ultimately given by the sun (Being as such). He intends to share his liberated and liberating perspective on cave-existence, but to accomplish this he must overcome great obstacles, among which the most important is the prospect of death, not physical death but “the constant presence of death before one during existence” (ET 61). This raises two new questions for us. Whose death is Heidegger referring to, and why is it an obstacle for the liberator? The answers to both questions are certainly unconventional. Heidegger argues that, in addition to referring directly to Socrates, the murder of the liberator is “symbolic,” indicating that “philosophy is powerless within the region of prevailing self-evidences” (ET 61), that is, the “all too obligatory cave-chatter” (ET 62). The “death” Plato has in mind here, according to Heidegger, is “the forfeiture and rendering powerless of one’s own essence” (ET 61) that occurs when one fails to do primordial philosophy. What does this mean? Is this an example of Heidegger over-interpreting his text? Not necessarily. As we will see in Chapter 7, what Heidegger calls the philosopher’s death in cave-existence is what Plato calls the corruption of the philosophic nature. It is important to recall that Heidegger thinks the human essence (or “ergon,” as Aristotle would say) is world-disclosure, and that primordial philosophy is the “virtue” that enables us to fulfill or perfect our essence. With philosophy, man discloses new worlds: What is essential in the discovery of reality happened and happens not through science, but through primordial philosophy, as well as through great poetry and its projections. (ET 47) “Man apart from philosophy,” however, “is something else” (ET 56). Because the liberator is filled with “the illuminating view for the being of beings,” he

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can “recognize the shadows as shadows” and understand why the prisoners mistake them for the extent of reality.16 But only as long as “he remains true to himself in his liberated stance” (ET 64), the perspective on the cave that affords him insight into what imprisons the others. This is not easy, however. The liberator’s insight into the limitations of cave-existence is disturbing to those who do not share it. He seems strange and out of place (atopos). He does not value what the others value, and he does not say what they say.17 Eventually his eccentricity becomes too much for the others to bear, so they attempt to appropriate his message and translate it into terms with which they are already familiar. When this happens, that is, when the prisoners popularize his world-disclosing philosophy, stripping it of its transformative powers, they prevent him from perfecting his nature, thus “killing” him and closing down the possibility of revealing their world and themselves anew. The casualties in the cave, therefore, are numerous: the liberator dies; the world he would have disclosed remains concealed, and insofar as he would have enabled the prisoners to perfect their essences, they “die” with him. The poisoning would happen by becoming interested in the cavephilosophers, such that everyone says to one another that these philosophers must be read, such that one hands out prizes and honors within the cave, such that one gradually creates a newspaper and magazine fame for the philosopher, and admires him . . . The philosopher would in this way be quietly killed, made harmless and unthreatening. While still alive he would die his own death in the cave. (ET 61–2) It would seem that the only way to enable philosophy to “have its say,” is to change these self-evidences in the cave, because otherwise the liberator’s revolutionary perspective on the shadows is bound to be “poisoned,” and the liberator “quietly killed,” as the idle chatter of the cave co-opts his liberating perspective, adding it to the furniture of the shadow realm by rendering it “harmless and unthreatening” (ET 62). But it turns out there is no hope of reforming life in the cave en bloc. Because the liberator faces several forces of resistance, and because he knows that he cannot challenge the idle chatter of the cave by himself, he will “leave it to itself” and instead seize hold of “one person,” or perhaps a select “few,” and violently drag him (or them) away “on the long journey out of the cave” (ET 62–3). As Heidegger suggests here, the philosopher is condemned to the solitude of an ironic distance from society, one which enables him to work as a liberator with those who are receptive to his vision (ET 63).

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The Virtues of Heidegger’s Plato We concluded the previous chapter with three questions: (i) how exactly does Heidegger interpret Plato, (ii) how does his interpretation of Plato correspond to his critique of metaphysics, and (iii) how, if at all, does Heidegger’s Plato help us solve the problem of Plato interpretation? We’ve already provided detailed answers to the first two questions. Our close reading of Heidegger’s lectures on the cave allegory confirmed that Heidegger made, or began to make, several conceptual transformations in his interpretation of Plato that fit directly into his own distinctions between beings, the Being of beings, and Being as such. The significance of these conceptual transformations only became apparent in the context of Heidegger’s own philosophical commitments. Because he finds an expression of “the difference” and a preeminent expression of the experience and concept of truth as alêtheia in Plato’s Republic, there is a sense in which Plato is a pre-ontotheological thinker, despite Heidegger’s later failures to recall or recognize this.18 With all of this analysis behind us, our final task is to determine how (or whether) Heidegger’s Plato can help us untie Schleiermacher’s Gordian knot, the tension between interpreting Plato as a philosopher-artist for whom form is a necessary expression of content, and as a systematic philosopher for whom the purpose of philosophy is to give a unified account of the ultimate structure of reality. We’ve already discussed why there is a tension between these rival interpretations of Plato (each is the negation of the other), and we’ve also determined why each of them is flawed when considered individually: both failed adequately to characterize the nature of Plato’s commitment to ineffability. In an effort to avoid this problem, we suggested at the outset of the previous chapter that an adequate interpretation of Plato must recognize (i) self-transformation as a precondition for access to truth, (ii) the “rebound effect” of philosophical insight, (iii) ineffability as a defining characteristic of philosophical insight, (iv) agnosticism about the concealed source of unconcealment, and (v) openness to that which is concealed in all acts of knowing. In the remainder of this chapter, I will quickly review the important points of Heidegger’s interpretation of Plato to show that it satisfies all five of these conditions in an exemplary fashion. At the beginning of the previous chapter, we considered Foucault’s view that Plato made self-transformation a necessary precondition for gaining access to truth. As he says, one must become other than oneself, because

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one is incapable of truth as one is. Heidegger undoubtedly would accept this claim, but he deepens it by phenomenologizing Plato’s prescription that we recognize our reflection in the mirror of the divine and become as godlike as possible. In place of Plato’s talk about divinization, Heidegger does not demythologize Plato in favor of a crude reductionism. He suggests that paideia, that is, what he takes to be the central idea at stake in the cave allegory, consists in recognizing oneself as belonging to Being so that one can be free to participate in its manifestation. It is a curious leap, “presumably yielding us the insight that we do not reside sufficiently as yet where in reality we already are” (ID 33). And it is an “unearthly thing that we must first leap onto the soil on which we really stand” (WCT 41). Indeed, the guiding principle underpinning Heidegger’s positive appropriation of Plato is that the cave allegory can be understood as schooling in unconcealment, which does not consist in imparting or imbibing technical knowledge, but rather in undergoing a fundamental change in one’s being, such that one is turned around “in the very ground of one’s essence” (PDT 166) and attuned to the world in a new way. Heidegger’s name for this process is paideia. The essence of paideia does not consist in merely pouring knowledge into the unprepared soul as if it were some container held out empty and waiting. On the contrary real education lays hold of the soul itself and transforms it in its entirety by first of all leading us to the place of our essential being and accustoming us to it. (PDT 167) Paideia is a turning around of the soul in its entirety, because, as we saw above, in order to liberate the prisoner from the cave, one must counteract both (i) man’s inbuilt tendency to fall and (ii) the self-reinforcing and world-reifying ontotheological categories in terms of which man understands himself and his place in the world.19 These elements of resistance account for Heidegger’s claim that paideia requires a reorientation in “the fundamental direction” of one’s striving (PDT 166). The prisoner’s radical change of perspective upon returning to the cave is what Foucault calls the “rebound effect.” Whereas Foucault spoke evocatively but vaguely about the truth passing through, permeating, and transfiguring the philosopher’s being, Heidegger is able to give a precise account of what happens in the philosopher’s being when he moves from one gradation of Being to another. He and his world are literally revealed anew, and if he liberates others, they and their worlds are similarly transformed.

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Paideia means turning around the whole human being. It means removing human beings from the region where they first encounter things and transferring and accustoming them to another realm where beings appear. This transfer is possible only by the fact that everything that has been heretofore manifest to human beings, as well as the way in which it has been manifest, gets transformed. (PDT 167–8) Everything that has been manifest to the prisoner (the totality of what-is), including himself, and the way in which it has been manifest (the Being of what-is), gets transformed. Exposure to the light of the Good frees him (i) from his tradition, since it allows him to see that his metaphysical mold and the world it reveals are unnecessary, and (ii) for his future, since it enables him to understand the Being of beings differently. Despite the liberating properties of viewing the Good, however, it is not possible to give an account of its nature. “What [the Good] is and how it occurs has not been answered to the present day” (ET 80). And it cannot be answered. In fact, the attempt to answer this question is what Heidegger later calls the beginning of metaphysics and the forgetfulness of Being. To give an account of what the Good is and how it occurs would be to subordinate it under the Being of beings, and thus to lose track of it as the light that empowers and enables the Being of beings and unhiddenness. Truth as alêtheia is therefore nothing that man can possess or fail to possess in certain propositions or formulas learned and repeated, and which ultimately correspond with things. Instead, it is something that empowers his ownmost essence to what it is, in so far as he comports himself to beings as such, and in so far as man, in the midst of beings, himself a being, exists. (ET 82) This is why, as much as we might like one, we cannot expect “a propositional explanation” of the Good. In fact, one who asks for such an account, for example, Dionysius II, “deviate[s] from the path of authentic questioning” (ET 70) and is doomed to fail in his pursuit, since “the viewing succeeds, if at all, only in the comportment of questioning” (ET 71).20 With all of this before us, it is fair to say that Heidegger’s unconventional appropriation of the cave allegory meets all five of our conditions for an adequate interpretation of Plato. His understanding of paideia captures and develops Foucault’s concepts of (i) self-transformation and (ii) the rebound effect. As Heidegger says, the interrogation of that which empowers being

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and unhiddenness is a “questioning which in a fundamental way changes Dasein, man, and the understanding of being” (ET 84). (iii) The ineffable light of the Good that accomplishes the liberation of man from his captivity to shadows is both revealed as beings and concealed as light by the Being of beings that opens up an intelligible world for man. Because man cannot overcome his finite perspective, the Good always remains the concealed source of unconcealment, about whose nature (iv) one must suspend judgment, even if one can experience its light directly by means of a method of “stepwise philosophical questioning,” that is, a method that (v) remains open to what is concealed in all acts of knowing and every kind of comportment. At this point, one might still be wondering how Heidegger’s Plato helps us resolve the tension between the holists and the dogmatiats. His interpretation satisfies all five of our conditions, but because it is so unconventional we might have lost sight of why this is significant. Let’s review. Like the holists, Heidegger is critical of the analytic approach that attempts to reconstruct Plato’s philosophy by summing up the conclusions of the dialogues’ arguments and assuming that Plato wanted to develop a systematic theory of everything. He is also less interested in whether we can divine “Plato’s mind,” as Kahn says, than he is in understanding what the texts imply about Plato’s experience of alêtheia, regardless of whether Plato was fully aware of this. Heidegger’s implicit objection to the dogmatists’ method and assumptions, however, is not that they ignore or downplay the inconsistencies between the dialogues, or that they fail to treat every detail of the dialogues as equally important—in fact, Heidegger makes global claims about Platonic philosophy on the basis of the cave allegory, a very short passage in one of Plato’s longest dialogues. If he shares any positive principle with the holists it is that the literary form of Plato’s dialogues is philosophically significant. As he argues in The Essence of Truth, the most important matters in Plato’s philosophy could only be presented in the form of an allegory, not because Plato was unsure of what he needed to say, but because he was absolutely certain that the “object” of his thought could not be described or proved discursively (ET 13). His dialogues, like Socrates’ inconclusive method, are images of man’s finite wisdom. This comes very close to Schlegel’s position, according to which the artistic form of the dialogues was itself an expression of Plato’s ontology and epistemology. While Heidegger’s view is more critical of the dogmatic interpretation of Plato, “the usual hackneyed way of proceeding” (ET 13), than it is of the holistic alternative, he would share the dogmatists’ objection to the holists’ neglect of Plato’s interest in ontology, even if he would give an entirely

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different sense to “Plato’s ontology” than most or all contemporary dogmatists. If we recall the epigraph to this book, Heidegger thought Plato’s philosophy was systematic in the sense that it was directed and supported by a “definite inner jointure and order of questioning,” even if it did not aim at an exhaustive ontotheological account of what beings are from the outside-in and the inside-out. Heidegger thought philosophy ought to characterize human existence, because, independent of philosophy, man is not just unfulfilled but undeveloped as the sort of being he is. It is through philosophical questioning that man comes to ek-sist, to rise up out of his everyday slumber, stand out into what is more unhidden, and liberate himself from his tradition and for an open future in whose manifestation he can participate. Heidegger thought the cave allegory was significant because it clearly illustrated this, that is, man’s relation to Being’s self-concealing revelation-withdrawal. He would undoubtedly argue that the holists’ interpretations of Plato are blind to all of this. They are blind to the ontological significance of Plato’s philosophy and ignorant of the inner jointure and order of Plato’s questioning, which “presses through to Being and unhiddenness, that is to what empowers unhiddenness” (ET 83), and recognizes that untruth is a necessary, ineluctable feature of truth. Perhaps the greatest paradox of Heidegger’s lecture courses on Plato’s cave allegory in the early 1930s is that they help us recognize the problems with his 1940 essay, “Plato’s Doctrine of Truth.” For example, we can now explain very precisely what is wrong with Heidegger’s thesis that Plato’s cave allegory laid the foundations for ontotheology.21 If one (i) accepts the mainstream analytic assumption that Plato was a doctrinal philosopher, (ii) understands the Forms as universals or formal causes, as they are described in some dialogues, (iii) believes the Good is a wholly intelligible efficient cause, as Heidegger once did (BP 286), and (iv) sees the other doctrines in Plato’s dialogues as features of a developing philosophical system that was intended to mirror the metaphysical structure of reality once and for all, then there is little doubt that Plato initiated the line of philosophical inquiry that Heidegger calls ontotheology. However, if one rejects the analysts’ assumptions and instead appreciates the extent to which Plato was deliberately a-systematic about the concealed source of unconcealment and deeply concerned to remain open to that which is concealed in all acts of knowing, then Heidegger’s thesis fails.22 Plato employed various means to remind his readers not to interpret the ultimate telos of all philosophical inquiry, namely, the Good, as well as everything that issues from it (such as Being), as a subject of exhaustive analytic explanation or systematic theory. Plato was not an analytic philosopher, and

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he was not a system-builder. As long as we treat him as either, we distort the content of his thought. There are at least four reasons for this. z

z

z

z

His accounts of the ideas are diverse, inconsistent, and incomplete; he often uses poetry, myth, and rhetoric in ways that seem intended primarily to persuade and transform, not to inform. In the Seventh Letter he straightforwardly denied that he was a doctrinal philosopher, and he argues that philosophical knowledge cannot be expressed directly in language. When he did speak of the Good, he spoke indirectly, offering an account of its offspring rather than the Good itself, and he wrote as if under erasure, employing images whose truth he undermined with a strident critique of all mimesis. The language he used was hyperbolic: the Good is the brightest of the Ideas, the ultimate and highest, the most perfect, and so on. While these descriptions automatically identify the Good with the other Ideas, they also underscore its preeminence.

Plotinus and Pseudo Dionysus understood this aspect of Plato’s thought better than anyone. They supplemented the hyperboles used to describe the Good with negations and denials that it belongs with the Ideas. They “systematically combined the strategy of negation, denying that ‘the good’ is either being itself or a being . . . spirit, essence or . . . good, with the strategies of hyperbolic and iconic languages” (Peperzak 1993: 108) because it is everything and nothing, everywhere and nowhere. Plato’s account of the One in the Parmenides (142a) suggests as strongly as possible that the Good is not an entity. It is the concealed source of unconcealment, which withdraws from every act of knowing. Not only was Plato well aware of the difference between Being and entities; it is arguable that, like Heraclitus before him, he developed a writing method that was self-consciously incomplete and thereby able to symbolize man’s position with respect to what Heidegger calls the ontological difference and the self-concealing source of unconcealment.23 “The Platonic cosmos, rather than a rational, ordered whole, contains a deep sense of mystery and uncertainty that is imitated by the aporetic character of the Platonic dialogues as a whole” (Smith 2000: 792). Plato did not think Being was a wholly intelligible or present object for thought. In the Seventh Letter he explicitly argues that true being cannot exhaustively known or articulated in objectifying language. Only someone with Dionysius’ philosophical temperament, someone whose wits have been taken away by men rather than gods, would think otherwise (Ep. VII 344d).

Chapter 5

Nihilism: Heidegger’s Crisis and Opportunity

When Heidegger published “Plato’s Doctrine of Truth” in 1940, his general story of ontological decline remained more or less the same as it was in the early 1930s, as did his hope that a recovery of the ancient Greek experience of alêtheia could save the West from the crisis of European nihilism. However, instead of continuing to play the role of savior in Heidegger’s narrative, Plato became the villain. As we saw in the previous chapter, Heidegger’s earlier view had been that Plato’s “testimony to alêtheia” could come alive for his students and usher in an era of world-renewal. He invited his students to give themselves over to their texts so that they could rediscover the “innermost power of the essence of man” (ET 82) and reposition themselves in “the domain” of Plato’s “fundamental experience” (ET 85). But by 1940 Heidegger began to attribute our ontological decline to Plato’s transformation of truth from alêtheia to orthotes because he thought it paved the way to Nietzsche’s ontotheology of eternally recurring will to power (PDT 181–2). This is quite a change of heart. What happened? How could Plato go from being the savior of the West in the 1930s to the unrecognized seed from which all of modernity’s deepest crises grow? We can only speculate about the content of Heidegger’s mind, but I have two hypotheses. First, it is possible that Heidegger suffered from the anxiety of influence and so vilified Plato in an effort to hide his profound debt for the discovery of the two most important concepts of his own later thought. We have already seen that, as Heidegger worked and lectured on Plato in the early 1930s, he worried in a letter to Elizabeth Blochmann about having very little to contribute to philosophy. At one point he even confesses that “the little that is [his] own becomes more and more hazy to [him] in [the] keen air” of Plato’s philosophy. If I am right that Plato helped Heidegger discover a new pathway for his thought, indeed the pathway that leads to his later philosophy, it would be natural for him to feel the anxiety of influence, and perhaps even understandable that he would turn on the philosopher who had served as his guide.

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It is also possible that Heidegger was motivated by a basic desire for retribution. As we will see in the next three chapters, Plato’s politics, or a certain understanding of them, exerted a profound influence over Heidegger when he joined the Nazi Party in 1933. Perhaps Heidegger vilified Plato because he wanted revenge for encouraging his “greatest stupidity.”

Setting the Stage There are many shopworn but still unresolved questions in the debate about Heidegger’s politics. Among these, two are more important than others. How, if at all, did his philosophy influence his political ideology and choices? And if it did, what does that say about his philosophy?1 Julian Young has argued that Heidegger must have been under the influence of something foreign when he joined the Nazi Party in 1933, because his politics were inconsistent with both his early and later thought. And since Heidegger’s Rectoral Address contains unmistakable allusions to the Republic’s tripartite division of the state, Heidegger’s politics are best explained by Plato’s thought, not his own (Young 1997: 19).2 This appears to be a reasonable position. Heidegger’s lectures on Plato’s Republic between 1931 and 1934 contain Nazi rhetoric and an interpretation of the cave allegory as an account of Germany battling internal and external enemies for the truth of its essence. Heidegger may have appropriated Plato’s thought and transformed it to suit his own circumstances, but the basic idea underpinning Heidegger’s politics seems to be pulled directly from the Republic: ascend from the cave, obtain a vision of Being, and reform the state in its light. Against the Platonic influence thesis, however, I shall argue that there are significant differences between Heidegger’s politics and Plato’s. If Plato inspired Heidegger’s delusions about leading the leader, he shouldn’t have, and he wouldn’t have if Heidegger had read Plato more sympathetically.3 As I will show in Chapter 7, Plato’s political proposals were ironic. He was a pessimist about radical political reform, whereas Heidegger seems to have been an unabashed utopian, at least for a brief period of time during his tenure as Rector. And as I show in Chapter 8, Heidegger might have made different political decisions if he had adopted Plato’s profound cynicism about the demos and distrust of tyrants. This is only half of the story I must tell here, however. One could object that Heidegger didn’t have to understand Plato to be influenced by him, just as the Christian or Islamic fundamentalist need not understand her sacred text to be influenced by it. In fact, Heidegger seems to have been

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deeply influenced by his misunderstanding of Plato. What we must try to explain, therefore, is twofold. We must unpack the political philosophy contained in Heidegger’s Rectoral Address and determine the extent to which it is Platonic. But just as importantly, we must determine how and why Heidegger misunderstood Plato. My suggestion is indebted to Gadamer’s general observation that Heidegger always understood Plato through the lens of Aristotle. If we look closely at the Rectoral Address, it is hard to miss the influence of Plato in the general program to reform the state. In this respect, the Platonic influence thesis is correct. But if we compare Heidegger’s Address to his lectures on Plato and Aristotle in 1924, and read these lectures in connection with Heidegger’s project of fundamental ontology in Being and Time, it is clear that the particulars of Heidegger’s positive vision for university reform derive from his appropriation of Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics, not Plato’s Republic. In order to explain all of this, I need to tell a long story that involves Nietzsche as much as Plato and Aristotle. In the end we will see that Heidegger eventually gets Plato right, but not until long after the war. This is both tragic and ironic. It is tragic because Heidegger could have avoided his “greatest stupidity” if he had understood Plato better in 1933. And it is ironic because Heidegger’s supposedly postPlatonic later philosophy, which is designed to save the West from the hidden evils of Platonic ontotheology, turns out to be a recovery of authentic Platonism.

Heidegger’s Crisis It is well known that Heidegger immersed himself in Nietzsche’s philosophy in the late 1930s and early 1940s, during which time he offered four lecture courses and wrote several essays that dealt specifically with the importance of Nietzsche’s thought for his own evolving ideas about the history of Being.4 It is evident as early as 1925, however, and especially in 1933 and 1935, that Heidegger shared Nietzsche’s concerns about the “death of God,” even if his narrative about the origins of this phenomenon, his analysis of the opportunities it creates, and his proposals for solving the problems it produces, differed greatly from Nietzsche’s. In 1925, Heidegger focuses on the upside of God’s death in his explicit reference to Nietzsche. Philosophical research is and remains atheism, which is why philosophy can allow itself the “arrogance of thinking.” Not only will it allow itself as

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much; this arrogance is the inner necessity of philosophy and its strength. Precisely in this atheism philosophy becomes what a great man called “joyful science.” (HCT 80) The upside of atheism, then, is the liberation of philosophy from the ball and chain of dogma. But there is also a downside. For Heidegger and Nietzsche, the “death of God” was shorthand for significant changes in Europe’s self-understanding and way of life. And if our most authentic existence itself stands before a great transformation, and if it is true what that passionate seeker of God and last German philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, said: “God is dead”—and if we must be serious about this forsakenness of modern human beings in the midst of what is, then what is the situation of science? (RA 8) Heidegger thought the changes were deep, occurring at the level of Dasein’s relation to Being. But they were showing up as changes in the social and political orders of the day, including the arts and sciences. Capitalism was spreading. Europe was struggling to keep up with its own industrial revolution, and agricultural countries like Germany were undergoing radical urbanization. Instead of truly facing the horrors of nihilism, that is, the devaluation of the highest values entailed by the death of God (WP §2), the West, as it were, decided to go shopping.5 Why? Because it could. There was no longer any reason to feel guilty for being egoistic. Because the Will to Power had shrugged off the anchor of slave morality, it was only a matter of time before it ran roughshod over the earth for the sake of its own increase. Heidegger argued that as a consequence of this metaphysics, Germany had subordinated the sciences, and therefore Dasein, to the nihilistic ends of global capitalism. And he wanted to reverse this ontological decline by rediscovering the question of Being and reshaping the university in its image.6 In 1933, Heidegger explicitly argued that philosophy needed to be restored to her throne as the queen of the sciences so that she could become the center of university existence and serve as the light in virtue of which the university, and then the state, was reformed.7 The logic underlying Heidegger’s political ideology in the early 1930s is essentially this: God is dead (RA 8) and the West suffers from a loss of “spiritual strength” (RA 13). However, the Geist of the West can be saved if we recover the power of “our spiritual-historical existence . . . the setting out of Greek philosophy” by restoring the destiny of the West through university reform (RA 6). In a

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display of breathtaking hubris and naiveté, Heidegger convinced himself, and attempted to convince his university colleagues, that he could use his position as rector to “lead the leader” by making the professions and the state serve knowledge, rather than the reverse (RA 11).8 Before he could do that, however, the debris of several failed centuries would need to be cleared away, and “the staleness and falseness of superficial professional training” (RA 12) would have to be replaced by a university mission rooted in the essence of science, which turns out to be identical with the Being of Dasein. Since “the state of our Dasein” is one of decline and disempowerment (IM 53), however, we need a guiding light to lead us back to this lost essence. Heidegger chose the Greeks to be his. Like Nietzsche, Heidegger rejected Christian otherworldliness and challenged the sciences’ claim to privileged access to the truth. Neither science nor religion succeeded in supplying the West with spiritual guidance capable of rediscovering the earth, that is, returning to the ordinary with reverence for the mystery of phusis-alêtheia, that process “by virtue of which beings first become and remain observable” (IM 15). He thought the world could be so much more than the West’s previous worldviews allowed, if only the West could recover its oldest understanding of Being (BT 42–3). “The Christian-theological interpretation of the world” had lost its weight and authority, and “the later mathematical-technological thinking of the modern age” (RA 8) was not “strong enough to stand up to the greatness, breadth, and originality of that spiritual world” (IM 48). Christianity had misinterpreted the spirit in metaphysical terms and thereby accelerated the oblivion of Being—it discouraged Dasein from using the “originary power” of questioning to achieve its world-disclosing potential (IM 7–8)— while modernity’s exclusive faith in science had completely disfigured the enchanted world of the premoderns, transforming what had appeared to be an embodiment of the highest values, in which man saw his own reflection, into a lifeless and inert collection of brute objects, among which man struggled to feel at home. These changes in the West’s self-understanding were deep and pervasive, causing Dasein’s relation to Being to decline. Dasein began to slide into a world that lacked that depth from which the essential always comes and returns to human beings, thereby forcing them to superiority and allowing them to act on the basis of rank. All things sank to the same level, to a surface resembling a blind mirror that no longer mirrors, that casts nothing back. The prevailing dimension became that of extension and number . . . This is the onslaught of . . . the

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demonic . . . One such omen is the disempowering of the spirit in the sense of its misinterpretation . . . as intelligence. (IM 49) Like many others before him, Heidegger found the Enlightenment intellectually and spiritually oppressive in (i) its disguised absolutism, (ii) its blindness to its own deep, disenchanting metaphysical presuppositions, and (iii) its “Platonic” assumption that there is one right answer to theoretical, moral, and political problems, and that reason alone can shed light on those answers. Instrumental and scientific rationality, that is, the “intelligence” exalted by the Enlightenment, had replaced the Geist of German idealism, that “originary power” with which Dasein “unveils” the “inexhaustible wealth” of the Being question (IM 8). And as a consequence, Dasein was left homeless and powerless in a disenchanted, spiritually impoverished world. Heidegger thought Europe was in a state of crisis, and he sincerely believed profound danger was imminent: “in its unholy blindness,” Europe is “always on the verge of cutting its own throat” (IM 40). The world was darkening. The earth was being destroyed. Humans were being “reduced to a mass.” Everything “creative and free” was considered secondary to the “practical and technical business of culture,” and the mediocre had become preeminent (IM 40, 47). Unless this crisis was addressed, the West would collapse from inner decay. The choice, as he saw it, was “between the will to greatness and the acceptance of decline” (RA 9). But no one will even ask us whether we do or do not will, when the spiritual strength of the West fails and its joints crack, when this moribund semblance of a culture caves in and drags all forces into confusion and lets them suffocate in madness. (RA 13) The loss of spiritual strength was potentially catastrophic because the Geist was the lifeblood of the West. The fate of civilization itself depended on its strength: “all true energy and beauty of the body, all sureness and boldness of the sword, but also all genuineness and ingenuity of the understanding, are grounded in the spirit, and they rise or fall only according to the current power or powerlessness of the spirit” (IM 50). The West is strong— physically, politically, and intellectually—when the spirit of the West is strong. But the enchanted world of the Greeks and the premoderns had dried up under the unrelenting light of modernity’s piercing theoretical gaze. The gods had fled. God was dead. Man was no longer at home in his world.

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This, in short, is Heidegger’s disconcerting diagnosis about “how things stand with Being.” What is his prescription? How can the West avoid perishing from suffocating madness? Despite all of the doomsday rhetoric, Heidegger insisted that all was not yet lost. In fact, much had been gained thanks to the death of God: “anyone for whom the Bible is divine revelation and truth already has the answer” (IM 7) to the questioning that is “the highest form of knowing” (RA 8). Just as Nietzsche thought the crisis of nihilism presented the West with new philosophical opportunities, “as if a new dawn shone on us” and there had “never been such an ‘open sea’” of possibilities, and just as he encouraged “free spirits” to venture out again and “face any danger” on this reopened “sea” (GS §343), Heidegger encouraged his followers to “advance to the outermost post, endangered by constant uncertainty about the world” (RA 9) in order to restore spiritual strength to the West by relearning the art of philosophical questioning that asks “down into the essential depth of man” (ET 71) and “the bottom of beings and being as such” (ET 60). Working within a tradition of German exceptionalism that dates back to Fichte, Heidegger argued that the Germans were uniquely capable of rising to the challenge posed by modernity’s spiritual forsakenness. Because the Germans are the metaphysical people (IM 41), and because of “the relentlessness of that spiritual mission that forces the destiny of the German people into the shape of its history” (RA 5), Heidegger thought they could save Europe by providing renewed spiritual leadership.9 They could initiate the “liberation and awakening of the innermost power of the essence of man” (ET 82) by retrieving and repeating “the inception of [Europe’s] spiritual-historical Dasein, in order to transform it into another inception” (IM 41). In other words, if guided by appropriate spiritual leadership, the Germans could save the West by recovering a long lost pre-metaphysical relation to being through “paideia . . . the questioning that presses through to being and unhiddenness, that is to what itself empowers unhiddenness” (ET 83). Nothing less could fill the spiritual void left by the death of God and the failure of modernity to respond to the West’s spiritual needs. All very interesting, but how does this work? How can the West recapture and repeat the inception of its “spiritual-historical Dasein”? What exactly is this pre-metaphysical relation to Being? And how can it save the West from the crisis of nihilism? Heidegger’s not so simple answer to the first question is that the inception of the West can be recovered and repeated through the spiritual reeducation of the nation via university reform aimed at exposing “science to its innermost necessity” (RA 6), hence Heidegger’s

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identification of his role as rector with “spiritual leadership” (RA 5). In the opening remarks of his Rectoral Address, Heidegger explains that he intends to “awaken” and “strengthen” his following of students and teachers by connecting them to a “true and common rootedness in the essence of the German university” (RA 5). This is his role as rector. Like Plato’s philosopher-king, he must look to the essence of the university and paint it into the faculties and student body working under him. He directs the educators who shape the students, and the students in turn become the future “leaders and guardians of the destiny of the German people.” The stakes could not be higher: “the German destiny is in its most extreme distress.” Heidegger suggests that science is the solution to this crisis, but only if we discover how science can exist “for us and through us” (RA 6). And we discover that by “unlocking” the essence of the university through the rigor of questioning aimed at the essential (RA 9). This raises new questions. What essence? Which university? What questioning? What destiny? Heidegger is aware of these problems, and his answer to them is Aristotelian through and through, albeit an appropriated and updated Aristotelianism: the essence of the university derives from the essence of man. It isn’t something we will discover by studying “the present state of the university nor [through] acquaintance with its previous history” (RA 6). And it isn’t something subjective, such as an arbitrary construct projected by the Will to Power. The spiritual mission of the German people determines the essence of the university (RA 5), which we discover through “self-examination” (RA 6). To someone unfamiliar with Heidegger, this might seem hopelessly obscure. What he means is relatively straightforward, however, if we understand it in terms of Aristotle’s perfectionism. The German Volk has a function, namely, a spiritual destiny grounded in theoria (RA 7), and the properly reformed university supplies the German Volk with the characteristics necessary to fulfill that function. Heidegger understands his program won’t be clear to his audience, and he realizes that those who enjoy their “much-lauded academic freedom” (RA 10), that is, nearly all of his colleagues, will reject it because of its call for radical reform, including the “shattering” of traditional departmental divisions (RA 9, 11). This is why he sets out to convince his audience with a tightly woven, highly philosophical defense of his proposals.10 He agrees that the essence of the university is self-administration, which he promises to preserve (RA 5). But he insists that true self-administration requires selfunderstanding, and he denies that the university truly understands itself or its role in the larger spiritual mission of the German people.

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In all its areas, science today is a technical, practical matter of gaining information and communicating it. No awakening of the spirit at all can proceed from it as science. Science itself needs such an awakening. (IM 51) We have “fallen out of Being, without knowing it,” and our fall out of Being is the “innermost and most powerful ground of [our] decline” (IM 39). While science ought to be a source of spiritual awakening, it has become just another symptom of our fall. Instead of triggering, deepening, and guiding man’s natural desire to understand, the current practice of science disparages questions about foundations and encourages practical research that will attract more funding. Heidegger thinks the university can reverse this downward spiral and restore spiritual strength to our relation to Being. But only if it is first reorganized so as to “place us under the power of the beginning of our spiritual-historical existence. This beginning is the departure, the setting out, of Greek philosophy” (RA 6).11 If we retrieve and repeat the inception of Greek philosophy, which Heidegger associates with the inception of the West in general, we will discover an illuminating path leading us out of this dark age of nihilism and spiritual disempowerment. This is a very important part of Heidegger’s Address. He tells us at least three things: (i) he intends to reform the university to make its most basic aims compliant with the essence of the university, (ii) he thinks the essence of the German university derives from the function of the German Volk, and (iii) he argues that the function of the German Volk ultimately derives from the beginning of its “spiritual-historical existence” in Greek philosophy, that moment when, “for the first time, Western man rises up, from a base in popular culture and by means of his language, against the totality of what is and questions and comprehends it as the being that it is” (RA 6–7). He intends to reform the university, therefore, by reorganizing it in light of a special mode of questioning. From Heidegger’s perspective at this time, the West was imprisoned in the cave, absorbed in the shadows cast by communist and capitalist value systems, as well as a metaphysical worldview that caused the flight of the gods and reduced everything to a mass (IM 40). As he saw it, his role was to lead Germany, and then the West in general, out of the cave into the light of Being by liberating and awakening the innermost power of the essence of man. Unlike Plato, who hoped at most to liberate a small handful of guardians, by leading them into the light, Heidegger thought he could liberate everyone, by, so to speak, turning on the lights inside the cave (ET 83).

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In other words, Heidegger intends to use his conception of the essence of science, which is rooted in his unique understanding of the Greeks, as his blueprint for university reform. But to do this, first he must unearth and revitalize this “atrophied” root, the forgotten essence of science, by recovering the abandoned art of philosophical questioning (WM 83). There is no doubt that Heidegger thinks philosophy is the essential ground of the sciences that has atrophied: “from each and every science . . . there is a way leading back to its origin, to primordial science, to philosophy” (TDP 20). As he says in his address, all of science is philosophy, “whether it knows and wills it or not,” and is “bound to that beginning of philosophy” from which it “draws the strength of its essence” (RA 7). Why, then, is science unaware of its roots in philosophy, and why does that matter for science? Moreover, why does it matter for the West? How could science’s ignorance of its roots in philosophy have world-historical significance? Heidegger’s answer to the first question in “What is Metaphysics?” and the Rectoral Address is that the modern university has carved up the original philosophical question, “What is reality?” into disparate, disconnected intellectual territories that value increased specialization in research and vocationalism in education (RA 12, WM 83). That may be good for the applied sciences that serve the ends of global capitalism or communism, since it assists in the transformation of individuals into dehumanized resources without consciences or any sense of social responsibility. But Heidegger considered it a disaster for man’s relation to Being, which must be awakened and shepherded by “a people that knows itself in its state” (RA 6). Polis is the polos, the pole, the place around which everything appearing to the Greeks as a being turns in a peculiar way. The pole is the place around which all beings turn and precisely in such a way that in the domain of this place beings show their turning and their condition. The pole, as this place, lets beings appear in their Being and show the totality of their condition . . . Because the polis lets the totality of beings come in this or that way into the unconcealedness of its condition, the polis is therefore essentially related to the Being of beings. (P 89–90) The people must know itself in its state, in other words, because the state is the locus of intelligibility. Change it, and you can reestablish the boundaries of intelligibility. The university, therefore, was Heidegger’s Archimedean lever, and herein lies the world-historical significance of science’s forgetfulness of its roots. Because the question of Being “is the fundamental

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occurrence in our Dasein” (WM 96), the territoriality of the university has stifled the being of Dasein itself, whose ontological constitution is “not to amass and classify bits of knowledge, but to disclose in ever-renewed fashion the entire expanse of truth in nature and history” (WM 95). How? By means of a “questioning [that] goes out beyond [Being and truth] in asking what empowers [them] in their essence, as that which carries the essence of human existence” (ET 83). This questioning is what “changes Dasein, man, and the understanding of Being” (ET 84). Heidegger thought the university had transformed its truth-seeking students and researchers into unthinking participants in the march toward world conquest led by America and Russia, the metaphysically equivalent twin evils of the twentieth century. Both are characterized by “the same hopeless frenzy of technology and . . . rootless organization of the average man” (IM 40).12 Heidegger didn’t share Marx’s view that economic activity was the most basic foundation for the epiphenomenon (or “superstructure”) of culture. He thought culture’s foundation was something still more fundamental. A Marxist can’t explain why some Third World cultures resort to suicide bombing while others do not. Most of these cultures are equally impoverished, equally uneducated, and equally exploited. Heidegger would have us look at the metaphysics and eschatology of the suicide bombers, not their economic conditions, because, on his view, metaphysics is fundamental. It shapes a worldview and determines people’s values, desires, beliefs, and behavior.13 Within and by means of such fundamental conceptions of the world, man acquires the “explanations” and interpretations of his individual and social life. The meaning and purpose of human existence, and of human creation as culture, are discovered . . . Objectively stated: every great philosophy realizes itself in a worldview—every philosophy is, where its innermost tendency comes to unrestricted expression, metaphysics. (TDP 7)14 We literally behave according to our metaphysics. As Young says, glossing this fundamental idea of Heidegger’s: “how you (roughly speaking) see things is how you act” (Young 2002: 40). Heidegger “brought the question of Being into connection with the fate of Europe,” therefore, because “the fate of the earth is being decided” by the architects of the modern worldview, that is, scientists and philosophers, “while for Europe itself our historical Dasein proves to be the center” (IM 44). Heidegger believed we would change the world by recovering our Dasein through a questioning that

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reopens the world and empowers the spirit, not by redistributing the means of production. Asking about beings as such and as a whole, asking the question of Being, is then one of the essential fundamental conditions for awakening the spirit, and thus for an originary world of historical Dasein, and thus for subduing the danger of the darkening world, and thus for taking over the historical mission of our people, the people of the center of the West. (IM 52) Why is questioning Heidegger’s remedy to the problem of nihilism? Because “man apart from philosophy,” as we saw in Chapter 4, “is something else” (ET 56). In particular he is unable to live in the “domain” of alêtheia (ET 85). He cannot recognize the “co-belonging” of truth and untruth (ET 66), and he cannot recognize, or even imagine, that which “grants being and unhiddenness” (ET 79). Insofar as genuine philosophy liberates and awakens the essence of man in “his philosophical comportment with beings” and gives him the “fundamental experience” of alêtheia, it is the best, and perhaps the only, remedy to the problem of nihilism (ET 85). For Heidegger, philosophical questioning is the highest form of knowing because it “unlocks the essential in all things”—it “bring[s] out the inner possibilities of beings [and makes] man see what it really is with which he so blindly busies himself” (ET 47)—by forcing “our vision to focus” (RA 8–9). But because Dasein is in the truth and the untruth, that is, because every act of knowing is simultaneously an act of concealing, the essential in things is itself in flux. Through questioning, “beings as a whole are first opened up as such . . . and they are kept open in the questioning” (IM 5) because “for us, questioning means: exposing oneself to the sublimity of things” (HC 51). Beings are kept open, that is, open to reveal themselves as something other than (i) mere stepping-stones for the immortal soul to resist and discard as evil temptations or imperfect representations of a fixed and transcendent reality, (ii) meaningless, self-sufficient objects available for detached reflection, or (iii) resources for the Will to Power to optimize. If we “compel ourselves into the state of this questioning” (IM 1), we perfect ourselves in the sense of fulfilling the innermost tendency in the Being of Dasein, which is to be ontological, and we prevent the world from sinking into the meaningless void characteristic of the post-death-of-God modern worldview. We are philosophy—it is our “ontic distinction”—and the aim of philosophy is to inquire “beyond or over beings . . . to recover them as such and as a whole for our grasp” (WM 93) and “into what grants being and

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unhiddenness” (ET 79), which is also the “innermost empowerment of our own essence” (ET 83). Heidegger thought the university would continue to fail in its function to perfect our ontological nature as long as it went unreformed and philosophy was left forlorn and abused by mere professors of philosophy (IM 12), hence his call for deep and immediate change in the light of primordial philosophy.

Understanding Heidegger’s Crisis: Nietzsche We might think of Heidegger as the second coming of Nietzsche’s madman, who lights a lantern on a bright morning and announces the death of God in the marketplace, only to be greeted with laughter and derision.15 God is no longer relevant, the madman insisted. We have killed him. There “may still be caves for millennia in which [God’s] shadow is displayed” (GS §108), but at the most basic level the world isn’t what it used to be. The West’s center of gravity has shifted. Today people do things for money that they used to do for God (D §204). But how could we have done this? How could we have drunk up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to erase the whole horizon? What were we doing when we unchained the Earth from its sun? Now where is it going? Where are we moving? Away from all suns? Aren’t we falling constantly? Backwards, sideways, forwards, in every direction? Is there still an above and a below? Aren’t we wandering as if through an endless nothing? Isn’t empty space breathing upon us? Hasn’t it gotten colder? Isn’t night and more night continuously coming upon us? Don’t lanterns have to be lit in the morning? (GS §125) The madman’s message falls on deaf ears. His audience laughs at him because they aren’t ready to accept his message or its implications, namely, the dark, continuous night of nihilism and the weight of existential responsibility it entails. They don’t want to admit to themselves that they invented their metaphysical comforts in order to give meaning to their suffering. Man’s problem “was not suffering itself,” Nietzsche says, “but that there was no answer to the crying question, ‘why do I suffer?’” (GM III §28) The madman’s message, therefore, couldn’t be darker. His announcement, in short, is that “‘why?’ finds no answer” (WP §2). The search for meaning in all events must go unfulfilled, and so “the seeker must eventually [become] discouraged” (WP §12). If the madman’s audience listened to him, they

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would have to face the “fearful void” alone. But that would produce “a kind of suicidal nihilism” (GM III §28), so they don’t. They prefer to be victims and passive recipients of a meaning that is “put up” and “demanded from outside—by some superhuman authority” (WP §20) rather than assertive creators who legislate their own purposes and create their own values (BGE §211). Frustrated, the madman throws his lantern on the ground and claims that he has come too early. The colossal event that he has seen so clearly is “still farther from them than the farthest stars—even though they were the ones that did it!” (GS §125). Nietzsche was concerned that the West had lost its “center of gravity,” what Max Weber later called its enchanted garden. The sciences had replaced religion and metaphysics as the West’s guiding light for developing its self-understanding and worldview, and it had left us in a cold, pitiless universe that lacked the intrinsic meaning and moral structure of the Greeks’ teleological, intelligently designed cosmos. Thanks to the Enlightenment, we suddenly realized that “we lack the least right to posit a beyond or an in-itself of things that might be ‘divine’ or morality incarnate” (WP §3). Science had transformed the West’s enchanted garden into a vast receptacle of meaningless brute objects. The Earth was no longer at the center of the universe, and humans were no longer regarded as images of the gods or distinguished guests in God’s creation. According to Nietzsche, all of these profound changes, once fully understood and internalized, lead to nihilism, the devaluation of the highest values (WP §1). Nihilism . . . is reached . . . when one has posited a totality, a systematization, indeed any organization in all events, and underneath all events . . . Some sort of unity, some form of “monism”: this faith suffices to give man a deep feeling of standing in the context of, and being dependent on, some whole that is infinitely superior to him, and he sees himself as a mode of the deity. “The well-being of the universal demands the devotion of the individual”—but behold, there is no such universal! At bottom, man has lost the faith in his own value when no infinitely valuable whole works through him; i.e., he conceived such a whole in order to be able to believe in his own value. (WP §12) For Nietzsche this change in worldview was both terrifying and inspiring. It was inspiring because it opened up a new horizon of possibilities and confirmed that humans have the capacity to endow an empty universe with deep meaning. They did it with religion. They could do it again with a philosophy of the future that remained faithful to the earth. On the other

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hand, however, this change in worldview was terrifying because morality had been given a religious foundation. As that foundation gave way to science, the old values vanished and everything seemed permitted. The time has come when we have to pay for having been Christians for two thousand years: we are losing the center of gravity by virtue of which we lived; we are lost for awhile. Abruptly we plunge into the opposite valuations, with all the energy that such an extreme overvaluation of man has generated in man. (WP §30) This is the madman’s message. He isn’t understood, however, because people prefer their metaphysical comforts to the fearful void. For the time being, therefore, nothing had changed and nothing would. “Those who have abandoned God cling that much more firmly to their faith in morality” (WP §18). Enlightenment reason had undermined the traditional foundation for morality, but people still had faith in its requirements and prescriptions. Even Kant, one of philosophy’s greatest critics of dogmatic metaphysics, was unwilling to question the existence of the Moral Law, hence Nietzsche’s insistence that, despite all appearances to the contrary, Kant was “a dogmatist through and through” (WP §101). In cosmology, the ultimate explanatory principle, God, had been unmasked as a comforting myth told by our ancient ancestors to satisfy their emotional needs for an ally more powerful than any force in nature. Nevertheless, even atheists had not yet faced the implications of their abandonment. Nietzsche feared what would happen once they did. He saw the possibility for widespread madness and barbarity, and he worried it was only a matter of time before his apocalyptic vision became a brutal reality. “Everything on our way is slippery and dangerous, and the ice that still supports us has become thin: all of us feel the warm, uncanny breath of the thawing wind; where we still walk, soon no one will be able to walk” (WP §57). For Nietzsche and Heidegger, some concepts are fundamental. They shape our worldview and self-understanding, and determine our responses to the world and to other people. Religious beliefs are not just abstractions to which one is committed in theory. They are representations of the world that utterly transform a person’s expectations, desires, values, and behavior. Nietzsche’s fear was that people would eventually realize that they no longer had “a right” to their religious beliefs, and they would discard them. The unparalleled social and political changes occurring throughout Europe in the nineteenth century suggested that many of these beliefs had already been abandoned in practice. It was only a matter of time before all of Europe

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fell through the paper-thin ice on which morality, and ultimately civilization, depended for its foundation. If people truly faced and acted on the new worldview, life could become unbearable, perhaps even unsustainable. If . . . the doctrines of sovereign becoming, of the fluidity of all concepts, types and species, of the lack of any cardinal distinction between man and animal—doctrines which I consider true but deadly—are thrust upon the people for another generation with the rage for instruction that has by now become normal, no one should be surprised if the people perishes of petty egoism, ossification and greed, falls apart and ceases to be a people; in its place systems of individualist egoism, brotherhoods for the rapacious exploitation of the non-brothers, and similar creations of utilitarian vulgarity may perhaps appear in the arena of the future. (UM II §9)16 Nietzsche was among the first to acknowledge the horror of the modern worldview, and he brooded over the dangers it introduced to the West. Despite his fears, however, he welcomed the empty universe with open arms (GS §382). The crisis of nihilism was also an opportunity for a new beginning, a healthier, more life-affirming philosophy of existence that liberated us from the exhausted possibilities of the past: “whoever has at some time built a ‘new heaven’ has found the power to do so only in his own hell” (BGE §203). Anticipating Heidegger’s criticism of all varieties of humanism and metaphysics, Nietzsche suggests that, “the world might be far more valuable than we used to believe . . . we may not even have given our human existence a moderately fair value” (WP §32). Heidegger will reject Nietzsche’s fixation on value, but he shares Nietzsche’s general idea that traditional metaphysics had failed to understand the depths of the human essence. For Nietzsche the idea of a world without absolutes was liberating, a call to action and experiments in living conducted by philosophers of the future, that is, those who are capable of inventing or legislating new values (BGE §211). He envisions free spirits who understand the purely human origin of all meaning and value, and thus take it upon themselves to play “from overflowing fullness and power, with all that up to now was called holy, good, untouchable, divine” (GS §382). The Nietzschean philosopher dismantles his tradition and rebuilds it, finding his highest fulfillment in the creative appropriation and reinterpretation of old categories and traditional perspectives, that is, by discovering how these old possibilities can once again

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become new. All “that is and has been becomes a means for them, an instrument, a hammer. Their knowing is creating, their creating is a legislation, their will to truth is—will to power” (BGE §211). Nietzsche’s philosopher of the future must be capable of facing the fearful void without any metaphysical comforts, and he must construct a new worldview that refuses the escapism of otherworldliness. Some might consider this a tragic loss. Not Nietzsche. He sees the death of God as man’s greatest liberation. Post-theological man loses the otherworldly beyond, but he rediscovers the earth, which Nietzsche floods with all of the ecstasy and bliss traditionally associated with the divine. “The forces of transcendence are to be preserved,” as Safranski observes, “but redirected into immanence” (1998: 303). He will know that his worldview is yet another projection onto an empty canvas, and he will understand the “necessity of lies” (WP §15). But he will avoid the perils of building his “new heaven” (GM III §10) on the thin ice of metaphysics. Why would he bother at all, if every meaning-creation is just a lie? Nietzsche’s answer is simple: there is no higher satisfaction of the Will to Power. He will bother because he can. “Philosophy is the tyrannical urge itself,” Nietzsche says, “the most spiritual will to power” (BGE §9). It conquers the world with ideas and makes “all of being thinkable” (TSZ II §12), telling people what and who they are, where they are, how they ought to live, and that for which they may hope. Nietzsche realizes that such a legislator may not exist today. But some day, in a stronger age than this decaying, self-doubting present, he must yet come to us, the redeeming man of great love and contempt, the creative spirit whose compelling strength will not let him rest in any aloofness or any beyond . . . This man of the future, who will redeem us not only from the hitherto reigning ideal but also from that which was bound to grow out of it, the great nausea, the will to nothingness, nihilism; the bell-stroke at noon and of the great decision that liberates the will again and restores its goal to the earth and his hope to man; this Antichrist and antinihilist; this victor over God and nothingness—he must come one day. (GM II §24) Here Nietzsche anticipates the arrival of the Übermensch, someone who can annihilate nihilism by enabling the individuals to reinternalize their own powers, those they have projected onto God, and initiate a new era of creativity and free, joyful play in the ruins of collapsed traditions (GS §283). From Nietzsche’s perspective, God was worse than irrelevant. He had

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become an obstacle, stifling our creative potential and silencing our propensity for intellectual curiosity. This is why we “must still defeat even his shadow” wherever it appears on the walls of caves (GS §108).

Heidegger as Reformed “Madman” Heidegger accepts Nietzsche’s diagnosis of the rise of nihilism in the West, and he shares Nietzsche’s concerns that it could precipitate a cultural catastrophe.17 But he challenges Nietzsche’s solution to this problem, suggesting that Nietzsche’s doctrine of the will to power merely increased the strength of nihilism’s stranglehold on the West, and he tells a different story about nihilism’s origins, defining Nietzsche as a disguised metaphysician and suggesting that, despite all of his criticisms of Plato, Nietzsche failed to escape the oblivion of Being characteristic of Platonic metaphysics. According to Nietzsche, Christianity—what he famously calls “Platonism for the people” in the preface to Beyond Good and Evil—sewed the seeds of its own undoing in two ways. First, it encouraged an attitude of skepticism about pagan superstitions that eventually undermined people’s faith in the uncritical beliefs of Christianity itself (GS §122). As Nietzsche writes in the Genealogy of Morals, atheism is “the awe-inspiring catastrophe of two thousand years of training in truthfulness that finally forbids itself the lie involved in belief in God” (GM III §27). Second, it encouraged people to devalue the sensible world, seeing it as a mere stepping stone one uses for earning one’s rewards and advancing to one’s true home in a supersensible Beyond. The same is true of human life. Our only concern, therefore, ought to be the health and fate of our immortal souls. For Nietzsche, nobody embodies this attitude more completely than Socrates on his deathbed (TI II §1).18 When modern science provided the conceptual tools necessary for completely replacing the pagan worldview with a mechanized one, it was only finishing the process of disenchantment that had been underway since the origins of Platonism and Christianity, both of which taught that we don’t belong to this world but inhabit it temporarily and perhaps even as a form of punishment (Phd. 81e). Nietzsche argues that this Platonic narrative makes sense of human suffering, but it does so at a great cost to the value of this world and our lives in it. The moment humanity discovers that the “true world,” the “world beyond” the realm of becoming, is “fabricated solely from psychological needs . . . the last form of nihilism comes into being.” Modern nihilism arises because we lose the Beyond without rediscovering the world. If the influence of God caused humanity to disparage embodied life, the death of God marks

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the beginning of the age when our disparaged embodied life is all we are left with. The attempt “to pass sentence on this whole world of becoming” (WP §12), therefore, only intensifies modernity’s general feeling that human existence is aimless: once we realize that moral values have a purely human origin, “the universe seems to have lost value, seems ‘meaningless’” (WP §7). Hence the need, social and psychological, for an Übermensch. Without a new philosophy that remains faithful to the earth, we may perish. Nietzsche worried that nihilism would follow the moment the West collectively and fully appreciated the human source of meaning and value. But he also encouraged us boldly and passionately to embrace our freedom by striving to become creators of new values that served life by preserving it, enhancing it, and giving it style (GS §290). Heidegger was less enthusiastic. He worried that Nietzsche’s conception of a Will to Power that posits new values does nothing fundamentally to alter the worldview of modern science—in fact, because it makes man the measure of everything, it is Cartesian subject-object dualism in the extreme—and thus easily leads to our current predicament, where we think of the world as a storehouse of resources to be optimized for human ends, whatever they may be.19 Although Nietzsche’s metaphysics differ from Descartes’, he remains within the Cartesian framework “in a way that no other modern thinker does” (N4 103). Nietzsche’s doctrine, which makes everything that is, and as it is, into the “property and product of man,” merely carries out the final development of Descartes’ doctrine, according to which truth is grounded on the selfcertainty of the human subject. (N4 86, 129–30) Nietzsche unchains us from Plato’s sun, but he leaves us straying through the infinite abyss envisioned by the madman in the marketplace (QCT 69). Why? Because he strips reality of any intrinsic value or meaning, all of which is taken back within the subject and made into a product of its tyrannical urge to transfix the whole of Being with meaning-creating, world-transfiguring concepts. The subject does not merely represent her reality; she makes the real what it is as a product of Will to Power. Philosophy is the tyrannical urge itself, as Nietzsche says, the most spiritual Will to Power (BGE §9), because it strives to make all of being, including what it is worth, thinkable (TSZ II §12). Heidegger accepts and develops this description of metaphysics (QCT 115), but he ultimately calls for us to overcome its dangerous limitations. As Nietzsche himself recognized, nihilism “awakens the suspicion that all interpretations are false” (WP §1). If all interpretations are false, the Übermensch cannot hope for more than a limited and temporary fix for the problem of nihilism, the lawlessness that

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accompanies humanity’s recognition of the abyss. In an unmodified modern scientific worldview, nothing is left to constrain the Will to Power (i.e., nothing other than the Will to Power itself), whose capacity to control and dominate the earth is enhanced with each new technological innovation (QCT 320–2). Nietzsche’s thought, therefore, fulfills the metaphysical possibilities opened up by Descartes’ cogito by rendering the Will to Power the ultimate source of intelligibility. But this is only half the problem. In rejecting the Platonic tradition’s transcendent metaphysics and endorsing a life-affirming, sensuous philosophy of aesthetic illusion as an alternative, Nietzsche simply inverted the old metaphysical hierarchy, upending Diotima’s ladder, and therefore failed to escape its most basic conceptual parameters. The reversal of Platonism, according to which for Nietzsche the sensuous becomes the true world and the suprasensuous becomes the untrue world, is thoroughly caught in metaphysics. This kind of overcoming of metaphysics, which Nietzsche has in mind in the spirit of nineteenthcentury positivism, is only the final entanglement in metaphysics, although in a higher form. It looks as if the “meta,” the transcendence of sensuousness, whereas actually the oblivion of being is only completed and the suprasensuous is let loose and furthered by the will to power. (EP 92) Since Nietzsche began with the supersensible and the sensible, that is, the binary opposition handed down to him by the Platonic tradition, and because he rejected the supersensible in favor of the sensible, he had no choice but to argue that “the new values and their standard of measure can only be drawn from the realm of beings themselves” (EP 6). There literally was no other option for him. Heidegger calls this “the oblivion of Being,” but why? Why is Nietzsche’s turn away from the supersensible toward the sensuous a problem and not a move in the right direction, that is, away from metaphysics toward a sort of naturalism? This is a fundamentally important question. It helps us see what Heidegger is not saying. We won’t be able to accept Heidegger’s claim, or understand its significance, however, unless we situate it against the background of his critique of ontotheology, which I explain in Chapter 3. We must recall from that discussion that Heidegger believes the essence of metaphysics is to account for the truth of Being as a whole by defining the totality of beings as such ontologically and theologically. Since that is precisely what Nietzsche’s doctrines of Will to Power and Eternal Recurrence do, Nietzsche’s thought is metaphysical and thus forgetful of Being as such.

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The Japanese philosopher Nishida has described religions, meaning creations, and cultures as fragile rafts that men build on the open sea and on which they drift through the ages. Nietzsche, in Heidegger’s view, intoxicated by his inventive work and by his triumph over completing his raft, has failed to consider the tides and the open sea. That is oblivion-of-being. (Safranski 1998: 305)20 Nietzsche’s philosophy is both inverted Platonism and the fulfillment of Cartesianism, neither of which will do for riding out the storm of “transitional nihilism” (WP §13), since both are features of the metaphysics that must be overcome before the storm will open up a new horizon, that is, the “tides and the open sea” of Being as such. Heidegger hasn’t worked out the details of his history of Being by 1933, but he has developed the basic picture of a decline from primordial truth as alêtheia to the nihilism of the technological age on the coattails of metaphysical thinking. He has also begun to connect Nietzsche’s assessment of European nihilism with his own deepest philosophical commitments. In the Rectoral Address, Heidegger argues that if we hope to solve the problems caused by the death of God, we must recover a pre-Cartesian, and ultimately ancient Greek, understanding of being. How do we do this? According to Being and Time, we must supplement the modern scientific worldview with a phenomenological account of its existential foundations (BT 30) and recover a more original understanding of the human essence beneath this.21 Differently put, we must recapture the ancient Greek sense of philosophy as a way of life that transfigures the world and transports us into the wonder of alêtheia, “because it is only by retrieving the wonder of that originary beginning that the German Volk can come to its own concealed essence” (Bambach 2003: 96). This is not an experience of a supersensible Beyond, but rather a deepened appreciation for the conceptual inexhaustibility of reality and an evocation of wonder and astonishment at the process whereby the world becomes intelligible and meaningful to us. Does Heidegger recommend that we abandon science and replace naturalism with a renewed commitment to the enchanted garden worldview of the premodern periods? No (IM 41), but he does challenge our assumptions that Being is exclusively and exhaustively revealed through the detached and disinterested theoretical stance of the sciences. We might say that Heidegger hopes to rediscover the enchanted garden of the pre-Socratic Greeks, the “fundamental experience [of] alêtheia” (ET 85), the true soil underpinning the later Aristotelian and medieval views with which it was confused and forgotten. Heidegger’s positive recommendation

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is that we analyze the experience of how the world shows up for us in pretheoretical, everyday, lived activities—the contexts of meaning and understanding that are prior to, and the ultimate basis of, all theory—so that we can awaken and focus our awareness of phusis-alêtheia. The point of philosophy, for Heidegger, is to recognize that all of our representations of the world are both revealing and concealing so that we can remain open to what is concealed in any act of knowing or everyday coping. But what exactly does this mean in the concrete? What precisely did Heidegger recommend and why? These are the questions we must address next.

Chapter 6

Heidegger and the Greeks: Revolutionary Thinker or Utopian Social Engineer?

Thus far we have reviewed Heidegger’s diagnosis of modernity’s crisis. He follows Nietzsche in treating the rise of modern nihilism as both a potential catastrophe for the fate of the West and a unique opportunity for philosophy to be reborn. But he ultimately rejects Nietzsche’s solution to the problem of meaninglessness because it reinforces the Cartesian subjectivism that is nihilism’s innermost cause. Despite his differences with Nietzsche, however, Heidegger’s concerns about modernity clearly derive from Nietzsche’s. They both consider the world revealed by the posttheological, modern scientific worldview to be an alienating place where humans are condemned to a seemingly hopeless search for meaning. And they both embrace the death of God, albeit for very different reasons. Heidegger welcomes the death of God because it gives the West a reason to relearn the art of philosophical questioning, an activity whose supervening experience he considers the highest form of knowing. As we saw in Chapters 3 and 4, Heidegger thought the purpose of philosophy was to transfigure the world and allow it to flood with deep significance, not to project beautiful illusions onto an empty universe—indeed, the very idea that the universe is a receptacle of meaningless, brute objects is merely one among many metaphysical representations of the world that are forgetful of Being. We may not be able to do anything with philosophy, since “philosophy can never directly supply the forces and create the mechanisms and opportunities that bring about a historical state of affairs” (IM 11). But, Heidegger asks, “may not philosophy in the end do something with us?” (IM 13). That was certainly his hope. For it to become more than a hope something radical was necessary, something capable of turning the German Volk around in “the direction of [their] striving” (PDT 166). Why? Because “in the head of a man filled with his own aims,” as Schopenhauer points out, anticipating Heidegger’s critique of technology, “the world appears just as

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a beautiful landscape does on the plan of a battlefield” (WWR 381).1 We cannot comprehend the “being-in-itself” of things until we step out of the ordinary, our everyday relation to the world, and appreciate things as more than mere resources for our projects. Heidegger thought that, if the university was reshaped in light of the essence of science, and Dasein was rehabilitated with the strength of its world-disclosing questioning, the West could be saved from its “most extreme distress.” How we “see” things, Heidegger argues, is how we act—one changes the world, therefore, by changing the way it is “perceived.” If this is the general story of Heidegger’s political motivations, what are the specifics of his plans? The first step is to give the West a new spiritual law (RA 10). Heidegger sees himself as the person best suited for the job of drafting such “legislation,” and he looks to the Greeks for his precedent. But why the Greeks? What did Heidegger see in “the beginning of our spiritual-historical existence” that he thought we should retrieve and repeat (IM 41)? These questions turn out to be very difficult to answer because Heidegger’s comments about the Greeks are so condensed in his Rectoral Address. He provides a few clues, however, and one passage stands out as particularly important. He asks what theoria meant for the Greeks, and he immediately denies that it meant the same thing for them that “the theoretical attitude” means for him. We should expect this move. If Heidegger is going to use the ancient Greek concept of theoria as his clue for discovering the essence of science, first he must distinguish it from the kind of theory he critiques in Being and Time, namely, the detached reflection that distorts our Umwelt by objectifying it and emptying it of lived significance. Heidegger begins to make this distinction by rejecting the traditional assumption that theoria referred to pure contemplation enjoyed and valued for its own sake, and arguing that theoria was literally a way of living and being for Dasein. For on the one hand, “theory” is not pursued for its own sake, but only in the passion to remain close to and under the pressure of what is. On the other, the Greeks fought precisely to comprehend and carry out this contemplative questioning as one, indeed as the highest, mode of human energeia, of human being at work. They were not concerned with aligning practice with theory. Rather, the reverse was true: theory was to be understood as the highest realization of genuine practice . . . The Greeks thought [of] science [as] . . . the power that hones and encompasses all of existence. (RA 7)

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The full meaning of this passage will become clearer as we go. For now it is important to point out that, because Heidegger’s plans for university reform hang on this conception of Greek philosophy, this short passage is arguably the most important moment in Heidegger’s Address. And yet it hasn’t been sufficiently explained. Most scholars either ignore it or give it such a superficial gloss that it ends up saying something trivially true about Heidegger’s interest in ancient Greek philosophy, such as Heidegger hoped “to recapture the form of thinking practiced by the Greek philosophers” (Sluga 1993: 26). That is certainly correct, but what exactly does it mean? How does it relate to Heidegger’s program for university reform? Which Greeks does Heidegger have in mind, why, and in what respect?

The Greeks and University Reform As we saw in the previous chapter, Heidegger’s plan is to reform the university in accordance with its essence. The essence of the German university derives from the function of the German Volk. And the function of the German Volk ultimately derives from the “spiritual-historical mission” of the West, which is initiated and empowered by its inception in Greek philosophy. On Heidegger’s view, Being explicitly becomes an issue for Dasein in Greek philosophy, that moment when “Western man” finally stands back from his absorption in the world of his concerns and asks the fundamental metaphysical question, “Why are there beings at all instead of nothing?” Heidegger calls this the fundamental question of metaphysics, and he argues that we are compelled to ask it by virtue of our own ontological makeup (IM 1; WM 96). It is an expression of man’s relation to Being, that is, an expression of what Dasein already is. Kant said man has a propensity to ask metaphysical questions. Heidegger goes one step further: we are metaphysics. Metaphysics is the Being of Dasein (KPM 162). Going beyond beings occurs in the essence of Dasein. But this going beyond is metaphysics itself. This implies that metaphysics belongs to the “nature of the human being.” It is neither a division of academic philosophy nor a field of arbitrary notions. Metaphysics is the fundamental occurrence in our Dasein. It is that Dasein itself. (WM 96) As he says earlier in the same essay, metaphysics is an inquiry beyond or over beings that attempts to recover them “as such and as a whole for our

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grasp” (WM 93). If we put these ideas together, Heidegger’s suggestion is that the Being of Dasein is characterized by wonder, namely, wonder about who and what we are, how we ought to live, and why we (and the world) exist at all. Our capacity to answer these questions is finite. Like Diotima’s Eros, we are driven by our own finitude toward the completeness we can never fully obtain. But we try to understand anyway, and our lives reflect the stances we take, that is, the implicit answers we give ourselves to the most basic existential questions. We don’t wonder about such matters to pass the time. Wonder is our defining characteristic. We care about what our lives mean by nature and always. We are ontological. Heidegger thought this movement in our Dasein, which is fully realized by philosophy, is most evident in the Greeks, who were first to “rise up from a base in popular culture . . . against the totality of what is” and ask the fundamental question of metaphysics. The same movement defines the Dasein of our age. But it is muddied and concealed by the oblivion of Being we see reflected everywhere, including the structure of our universities, which have shattered the fundamental question of metaphysics, and thus the most fundamental occurrence in our Dasein, into disconnected intellectual territories that mistake applied science for the pursuit of truth and replace the empowerment of the spirit, a proper philosophical education, with the vocational training that reinforces nihilism’s stranglehold on the Dasein of our age. It is precisely this clarity of movement in the Greeks, and the comparative forsakenness in our Dasein, that explains Heidegger’s choice of the Greeks as his clue to the essence of science. This explains the general connection between Heidegger’s interest in the Greeks and his plans for university reform. Our next task is to determine which of the Greeks Heidegger has in mind and what it is in particular that he finds in them.

Theoria and Fundamental Ontology We have several clues, but they create new problems. For example, Heidegger argues that the Greeks did not pursue contemplation for its own sake, but rather to “remain close to and under the pressure of what is.” This should give us pause, since “what is” does not refer to a metaphysical beyond transcending or underlying the beings of one’s immediate concern, and Heidegger appears to include Plato and Aristotle in his gloss on “the Greeks.” Clearly, he is challenging the conventional understanding of these philosophers. Let us quickly remind ourselves why.

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In the Phaedo, Socrates describes the philosopher’s activity as practice for disembodiment. He withdraws his attention from his senses, turns inward, and takes an upward journey out of the sensible world into the intelligible realm of the Forms. Aristotle’s metaphysical principles are immanent, but he famously separates the theoretical life from the practical life in Book X of the Nichomachean Ethics, and he describes the philosopher’s activity as more than merely human (NE 1177b31–4), because the intellect takes on the form of the objects it contemplates, and the objects of theoretical contemplation are the highest objects of knowledge because they are divine (NE 1177a21–2). When Aristotle catalogs his six reasons for selecting the theoretical life over the practical life, he says explicitly that one of theoria’s advantages is that a wise person can study by himself, that is, apart from others and the hodgepodge of daily life. He might be better off with the company of colleagues, but that doesn’t change the fact that theoria is the most self-sufficient activity of all because it can be practiced alone (NE 1177a32b). The same seems to be true for Plato, who represents philosophy as an activity practiced outside the cave. For both Plato and Aristotle, therefore, the life of contemplation is portrayed as a life apart from society in the company of the divine insofar as this is possible for humans. How would Heidegger deal with these obvious counterexamples? The short answer is that he would insist that we must understand Plato and Aristotle better than they understood themselves. And that means we must extract the phenomenological insight from the unwarranted metaphysical overreaching. Heidegger explains his phenomenological approach to the history of philosophy, and Plato in particular, most clearly in his 1919 lecture course, Towards the Definition of Philosophy: For example, the concept of anamnesis in Platonic philosophy: does this simply mean recollection, comprehended in the context of Plato’s doctrine of the immortality of the soul? Genuine philosophy as primordial science finds that with this concept and its intended essence Plato saw deeply into the problematic of consciousness (emphasis added) . . . Clearly, a comprehension of Platonic philosophy that is guided by the idea of genuine philosophy will draw out something of philosophical benefit from history. (TDP 17) Heidegger’s appeal to theoria in the Rectoral Address is a good example of this method. Because the “contemplative questioning” of theoria was considered the highest possibility of being for humans, that is, the “highest . . . mode . . . of human being-at-work,” Heidegger argues that the Greeks did

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not struggle to align theory with practice. Theory was always “understood as the highest realization of genuine practice.” Skeptics will write this off as Heideggerian wordplay at its worst, the substitution of linguistic sleight-ofhand (theory is practice) for genuine philosophy. But that is a mistake. What Heidegger is saying here is important and compelling. For the Greeks, philosophy was a way of life that changed its practitioner by fully realizing his nature and bringing to completion the innermost movement of his Being, “the innermost power of our own essence” (ET 83), not an abstract discourse reserved for specialists—that is the philosophy enjoyed by the philosophy professors he criticizes, that is, the ones who are failing to address the West’s severe distress (RA 6). It might be helpful to interpret Heidegger’s claims about theoria in light of Foucault’s notion of the “rebound effect,” according to which philosophical knowledge “passes through, permeates, and transfigures” the being of the one who knows (Foucault 2001: 18–19). If this is what Heidegger has in mind, he means to say that philosophy was a transformational practice for the Greeks. It was not an abstraction away from the world, which is how Heidegger characterizes modern theory, but a transformation of one’s relationship with it thanks to which one develops an “eye for Being” (ET 64). And in these respects it was a kind of work, namely, work upon one’s self and work upon the world. This conception of science seems to be the goal of Heidegger’s university reforms, and it may have been a goal of his since he was thirty. The idea of science . . . means a transforming intervention in the immediate consciousness of life; it involves a transition to a new attitude of consciousness, and thus its own form of the movement of spiritual life. (TDP 3) Skeptics might not be alone in raising questions here, however. Someone familiar with Heidegger’s thought may wonder how Heidegger, who argues for an existential basis to all theory, can endorse theoria as the essence of science and the essence of Dasein. It isn’t enough to insist that theory is the highest form of practice. We must explain this claim in terms that are consistent with the rest of Heidegger’s thought. Fair enough. Is this possible? It is if we turn to Heidegger’s lecture course on the Sophist. In these lectures Heidegger argues that Aristotle’s theoria is not theoretical in the bad sense. It is not the sort of detached reflection that empties life of its existential significance, but rather constitutes the kind of activity that completes the movement of Dasein’s Being and reveals the concealed significance of

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the ordinary. Such contemplation is not a distortion of Dasein’s existence, but a way of being that sees through the distortions of ambiguity (Zweideutigkeit) and idle talk (Gerede), that is, of doxa, and reveals the true nature of Dasein’s possibilities. Theoria, in other words, is related to authenticity. It is the telos of human Dasein insofar as Dasein becomes authentic (his translation of eudaimon) through the theorein of sophia. Theoria is the disposition, or mode of Being, “in which man most properly has at his disposal that which he can be” (S 119). As he says in another lecture course from this time period, The fundamental theoretical attitude is that kind of praxis in which the human being can be authentically human. It is proper to note that theoria is not merely a particular kind of praxis but the most authentic kind of all. (GA 27 174)2 In the Sophist course, Heidegger calls philosophy “one of Dasein’s most extreme possibilities,” and he specifies that it is an existence, a way of being and a way of life (S 8). We live in theoria (S 116) insofar as it is the way of Being-in-the-world “in which man attains his highest mode of Being, his proper spiritual health” (S 117). In fact, it is the Being of Dasein in its fulfillment (S 425), the “deepest perceiving possible for man as an existing being, a questioning of the history of man’s essence that aims at understanding what empowers being and unhiddenness” (ET 81). This is Heidegger’s phenomenologization of Aristotle’s perfectionism. One does not contemplate the means to becoming happy in theoria (NE 1143b19–20), as Aristotle points out. Theoria literally is one’s happiness because it is the activity that fulfills the human function. Heidegger’s appropriation of theoria is predicated upon a more general appropriation of Platonic and Aristotelian philosophy, according to which Plato and Aristotle occupy “the same position with regard to the basic questions of Dasein” (S 16). In the opening pages of this lecture course, Heidegger has us reflect on Plato’s distinction between the philosopher and the sophist. Unlike the philosopher, whose life is oriented around truth (understood as alêtheia) and thus dedicated to uncovering what is buried beneath the distortions of idle talk, the sophist never sees beyond doxa, which Heidegger understands as a kind of sight focused exclusively on what is immediately given and manifest in its distorted light. Heidegger thinks this distinction tells us something about Plato’s unstated understanding of truth, our everyday relationship to truth through doxa, and our heightened relationship to truth through philosophy (S 11).

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Everyday Dasein lives in a “double coveredness.” The world is primarily, “if not completely,” concealed, and yet we are inclined not to think so. As world-disclosing beings, we are capable of “breaking through for the first time to the matters themselves,” but idle talk, doxa, turns “what has been uncovered into untruth.” As Heidegger says in Being and Time, “it soon becomes impossible to decide what is disclosed in a genuine understanding, and what is not,” creating an ambiguity that extends to the world, to our Being-with-one-another, and even to Dasein’s self-understanding (BT 217). The task of philosophy, therefore, is twofold: “[i] to cut through idle talk and [ii] penetrate to Being itself” (S 11). And as we saw in Chapter 3, since penetrating to Being itself means recognizing the finitude of truth, philosophy’s battle with the sophists and the rhetoricians was a battle fought for a way of seeing and Being-in-the-world, a way of comporting oneself toward beings, not mere propositions or opinions, which lose their disclosive power as they are repeated and passed along without understanding. Heidegger thinks we see the beginning stages of this struggle against rhetoric and sophistry in “the spiritual work” of Socrates and Plato (S 11). But everything culminates in Aristotle, who catalogs and describes Dasein’s various modes of disclosing in the Nichomachean Ethics. Since the Sophist is about truth in this sense, and since Aristotle “said more radically and developed more scientifically” what Plato “placed at his disposal” (S 8), Heidegger devotes the first seven weeks of his lectures on Plato’s Sophist to an exegesis of the Nichomachean Ethics. What we find in Aristotle is the view that truth is “a character of beings” and “a determination of the Being of human Dasein itself. For all of Dasein’s strivings toward knowledge must maintain themselves against the concealedness of beings” (S 16). To be as clear as possible, Heidegger thinks Aristotle discovered that we can be in the truth well or badly. While Heidegger examines five modes of human comportment or uncovering, he is really interested in two, namely, contemplative comportment (sophia), which is the highest, and deliberative comportment (phronesis), which is important but inferior (S 15–16). Sophia has a “priority over phronesis” because sophia is “the highest possibility of the Being of Dasein” (S 43). When we do philosophy, in other words, we are in the truth well, and for two reasons: (i) we cut through the distortions of idle chatter, and (ii) we break through the original and natural concealment of the world to the things themselves. Heidegger understands that Aristotle privileged sophia because of its divine object, and he realizes that, for Aristotle, the divine is eternal and unchanging. But this is what he considers unnecessary and extraneous in Greek philosophy. Heidegger parts ways with Aristotle and

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Plato when he changes the object of sophia from the metaphysical structure of reality to the Being of Dasein, and therefore redirects philosophy’s attention from the being of nature to man’s own being, whose temporality and tendency to fall are the ultimate sources of substance ontology and the metaphysics of presence. The link between Heidegger’s lectures on Aristotle and his own project in Being and Time, then, is direct and illuminating. As he says in the Sophist course, Dasein is defined by an inner tendency to see and to understand, which is manifested in the practical forms of unconcealing that Dasein exhibits in its absorbed coping with the everyday world, that is, in the different modes of deliberative comportment, such as poiesis and phronesis. But it is completed in theoria (S 425). In Being and Time, Heidegger’s name for this inner tendency to see and to understand is Dasein’s “pre-ontological understanding of Being.” If to Interpret the meaning of Being becomes our task, Dasein is not only the primary entity to be interrogated; it is also that entity which already comports itself, in its Being, towards what we are asking about when we ask this question. But in that case the question of Being is nothing other than the radicalization of an essential tendency-of-Being which belongs to Dasein itself—the pre-ontological understanding of Being. (BT 35) Theoria, therefore, is the “radicalization of” Dasein’s pre-ontological understanding of Being, the tendency-of-Being that belongs to the Being of Dasein itself. Our self-understanding and worldview are generally inauthentic and incomplete because they are distorted by the misguided metaphysical concepts of the tradition and the leveling chatter of everyday Dasein (S 11). But they also contain a deeper meaning that is pre-theoretical. We have an understanding of Being, “and yet we lack the concept” (KPM 159). In theoria, these lived forms of disclosing the world and our selves are not abandoned. Their implicit understanding is rendered explicit (S 44). Contemplation is the fulfillment of man’s natural concern with his existence and inborn capacity to be in the truth. In Heidegger’s mind, then, theoria is identical with metaphysics understood as fundamental ontology, the point of which is not deep insight into the eternal structure of reality, as Aristotle thought. As a finite, historically determined entity that dwells simultaneously in the truth and the untruth, Dasein is literally incapable of knowing the Truth that traditional metaphysics once promised. Metaphysical paradigms that make claims about the timelessness and universality of their truths, therefore, are rejected

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in principle. Heideggerian theoria makes us aware of this—authentic questioning “rebounds upon the questioning itself” (IM 5)—while also generating a certain transparency for our Being-in-the-world. The point of theoria, in other words, is twofold: authenticity and insight into the existential foundations of metaphysics. We free ourselves from the superficiality of das Man and take over our projects as our own as we make our implicit selfunderstanding explicit. And we free ourselves from the metaphysical baggage of the tradition as we analyze the existential foundations of science and ask, “Why the Why?” (IM 5). In the end, we recognize and become what we are, namely, self-reflexive, world-disclosing beings. If we put all of the above together, there is an important link between theoria, authenticity, and metaphysics, that is, the inquiry beyond or over beings in an effort to recover them as such and as a whole for our grasp, provided beings are kept open by the rebound of metaphysical questioning upon the entity that asks the questions. As Heidegger says in “What is Metaphysics?” and Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, Dasein is metaphysics. Metaphysics is the Being of Dasein. And as he says in the Sophist lectures, theoria is the Being of Dasein. By a simple application of the principle of transitivity, we can see that theoria is metaphysics. Heidegger’s thought in the Rectoral Address, therefore, seems to be this: we ought to reform the university in the light of metaphysics so that its researchers recognize themselves as participants in a community-wide effort to do metaphysics, that is, to complete the Being of Dasein by fulfilling its tendency to understand itself and its world, to ask and answer the Being question. But what exactly is metaphysics? We have already seen that Heidegger rejects traditional metaphysics because it distorts the “primordial ‘sources’ from which the categories and concepts handed down to us have been in part quite genuinely drawn” (BT 43). Moreover, when Heidegger recommends making the Greeks his model of theoria, we know he doesn’t mean the Greeks as we conventionally understand them. As he argues in Being and Time, we must go back to the Greeks and make them “productively [our] own” (BT 43). We have shown at the outset not only that the question of the meaning of Being is one that has not been attended to and one that has been inadequately formulated, but that it has become quite forgotten in spite of all our interest in “metaphysics.” Greek ontology and its history—which, in their numerous filiations and distortions, determine the conceptual character of philosophy even today—prove that when Dasein understands itself or Being in general, it does so in terms of the “world,” and that the

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ontology which has thus arisen has deteriorated to a tradition in which it gets reduced to something self-evident—merely material for reworking. (BT 43) The promise of fundamental ontology in Being and Time is that it alone can enable us to remember these lost wellsprings of understanding in ancient Greek thought because, unlike other philosophical methods that work within traditional metaphysical categories, it prevents us from falling back upon our world and extricates our understanding from “the tradition” that keeps us from providing our “own guidance, whether in inquiring or in choosing” (BT 42–3, emphasis added). This, I take it, is the “metaphysics” Heidegger hopes to inscribe into the structure of the university. If we want to understand Heidegger’s plans for university reform, then, we need to figure out what fundamental ontology is, how it is intended to serve as a model for university reform, and why Heidegger believes it, better than anything else, can address the crisis of European nihilism. Once we’ve answered these questions we will be in a better position to ask whether there is, in fact, anything Platonic in Heidegger’s plans.

A Community of Similarly Striving Researchers Heidegger insisted that, in philosophy, metaphysics is fundamental. The other areas of philosophy presuppose a metaphysics of the entities they study. Epistemology presupposes a metaphysics of mind and world ethics, a metaphysics of man’s nature and relationship with others, and so on. Heidegger thought the priority of the Being question also held for the rest of the sciences. Every discipline with a clearly defined subject matter presupposes what Thomson calls an “ontological posit,” that is, a basic concept or set of basic concepts that define the being of the entities it studies. These basic concepts are unstated and taken for granted, but they nevertheless establish the paradigms within which scientists do their empirical research, determining what they study and how they study it. In anthropology, for example, we study cultural practices and evolution, not the metaphysics of personhood or fetal development. Anthropologists must have some implicit understanding of what a human being is in order to do their work properly, that is, to pick out the right subjects for their study. But anthropology will not tell us what a human being is. During normal scientific research there is no reason for scientists to question or challenge their ontological posits.

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If a biologist stops his empirical research to wonder what “life” is, he will lose his job. It is only during periods of crisis in the sciences that such questions are raised by scientists.3 When Heidegger suggests that his university reforms will (i) “[shatter] the encapsulation of the sciences in separate specialties,” (ii) “[bring] them back from their boundless and aimless dispersal in individual fields and corners,” and (iii) “directly expose science once again to the productivity and blessing of all world-shaping powers of human-historical existence” (RA 9), he means something more straightforward than it might seem. He wants scientists in all fields to step back from their paradigms and unite as “a community of similarly striving researchers” (TDP 4) in a study of the paradigms themselves. This is something they should do in addition to their empirical research, not instead of it. As soon as they take this step back, however, they are no longer doing positive science; they are united in philosophical questioning aimed at unlocking the essential in things. In addition to gathering information on the basis of their ontological posits, Heidegger thinks the sciences ought to study the ontological posits themselves, and for a few reasons. First, this is the activity that moves science forward as science. Reflection on ontological posits is the “productive logic” that leaps ahead . . . into some area of Being, discloses it for the first time in the constitution of its Being, and, after thus arriving at the structures within it, makes these available to the positive sciences as transparent assignments for their inquiry. (BT 31) But this isn’t the only reason, and it certainly isn’t the primary one, for reuniting the university in common philosophical questioning. If it were, one could argue that Heidegger’s recommendations would only enhance the power of science as it is, and thus would change nothing essential. Indeed, it would seem merely to promote greater specialization through the discovery and mapping out of new areas of Being, in which case one could ask how such reform has anything to do with Heidegger’s interests in protecting Europe from the dangers of nihilism. Biologists must reflect on the essence of life. Physicists must reflect on their assumptions about “the being of lifeless nature in its lawfulness” (TDP 21). Anthropologists must reflect on human nature, and so on. This is stage one, which, on its own, does nothing to “[tear] down the departmental barriers” that lock the university in the “staleness and falseness of superficial professional training” (RA 12). Only the next two radical steps

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accomplish these goals. The second stage is regional ontology (the natural sciences join forces to discover the Being of nature; the social sciences do the same to discover the Being of the social, etc.), and the final stage is to join in a university-wide search for the meaning of Being in general that underpins all of these taken for granted ontological posits. If we can find that, Heidegger thinks we’ll be able to trace the various branches of science back to a common root and soil, namely, Dasein’s experience of Being as such. And this will enable us to transform the university from the ground up. Science, in this sense, must become the power that shapes the body of the German university. This contains a twofold task: Teachers and students, each in their own way, must become seized and remain seized by the concept of science. At the same time, however, this concept of science must intervene in and rearrange the basic forms in which the teachers and students each act in a scientific community: in the faculties and as student bodies of specific departments. (RA 11) Heidegger suggests that all science is philosophy (RA 7) because each of the ontological posits in the positive sciences rests on an unstated but common and world-shaping experience of Being. If the sciences advance to a stage of cooperative reflection on the common ground uniting their disparate ontological posits, they can discover the general meaning of Being that illuminates the regional ontologies of the positive sciences. Heidegger’s stunning conclusion is that this common root of the sciences is not a concept at all but rather Dasein’s ek-sistence, the existential foundation of all theory, whether scientific or ontological, hence his suggestion that science be exposed to the “world-shaping powers of human-historical existence” (RA 9). When we examine the meaning of Being in general we are led back to the being who asks the Being question. We are led back to Dasein. Instead of the object of knowledge, we can focus on the knowledge of the object. With knowledge, we come to a phenomenon which must truly apply to all sciences, which indeed makes every science what it is. (TDP 23) We tend to think that the meaning of Being in general will turn out to be a kind of substance (e.g., the “object” of science as a whole) or common but unrecognized meaning that underlies all of the sciences’ ontological posits. But that is only a consequence of our failure to understand the Greek ontology

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that determines “the conceptual character of philosophy even today” (BT 43). As Heidegger says in 1919, “science as a whole,” that is, all of the ontological posits taken together, “is also a particular science” (TDP 21, emphasis added). There is considerable disagreement among scholars on this crucially important point because Heidegger is famously unclear about what he means by “fundamental ontology.” In Being and Time, for example, Heidegger promises that fundamental ontology, which he identifies with the analytic of Dasein (BT 34), is merely preparation for an account of the meaning of Being in general, which he calls “ontology taken in the widest sense” (BT 31). But this is misleading. It gives us the impression that Being can be defined independent of Dasein, that is, in such a way that it will provide the sciences with an unambiguous foundational concept or set of concepts, as if Being were after all an entity like those studied by the positive sciences, only universal, subterranean, and still unrecognized—the tradition was essentially correct that Being was the hypokeimenon; it just failed to identify its real properties. This cannot be Heidegger’s view, given his consistent attacks on the tradition of substance ontology throughout Being and Time, and his earlier critique of using the “object domains” of the positive sciences as the primary clue for constructing a primordial science. If the sciences are our guide, and not Dasein, the definition of philosophy is dependent on the final results of the particular sciences, to the extent that these are at all oriented to the general. In other words, this science would have no cognitive function whatever to call its own; it would be nothing else than a more or less uncertain, hypothetical repetition and overview of what the particular sciences, through the exactness of their methods, have already established. Above all, since this science would be result rather than origin, and would itself be founded through the individual sciences, it would not in the slightest degree correspond to the idea of primordial science. (TDP 22) Not all accounts of fundamental ontology recognize this problem. It has been argued, for example, that the regional ontologies underlying the ontological posits of the positive sciences are grounded in a “transhistorically binding ontology,” “a substantive fundamental ontology waiting beneath history to be recovered.”4 Because Heidegger intends to define Being in terms of time, however, we must be very clear about what is and is not timeless. Being certainly is not, and neither is its meaning. If anything is timeless, it is the structures of Dasein’s understanding of Being.

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This raises new questions. If we cannot fully and finally define the meaning of Being because of Dasein’s embedded position in a historical tradition that conditions its understanding of everything, what can we say about Being that isn’t historically conditioned, rooted in tradition, and therefore merely contingent? If Dasein is thrown into, and understands itself in terms of, a world whose intelligibility is partly constituted by a changing metaphysical tradition that has fallen away from the primordial experiences of its beginning, how can anything be timeless about Dasein’s understanding of Being? Heidegger’s answer is given above. While we cannot define Being as such the way we define other things, we can give an account of the a priori conditions for the possibility of the sciences and the regional ontologies on which they rest. We can explain the makeup of our understanding so as to become aware of its sources, structure, and limitations. This is where the priority of Dasein, the one who asks the question, is relevant. Because fundamental ontology aims to explain the meaning of Being, it must give us an account of the entity for whom Being is an issue. It must account for how Dasein comes to understand Being, and why it asks the Being question the way it does. What we are seeking is the answer to the question about the meaning of Being in general, and, prior to that, the possibility of working out in a radical manner this basic question of all ontology. But to lay bare the horizon within which something like Being in general becomes intelligible, is tantamount to clarifying the possibility of having any understanding of Being at all—an understanding which belongs to the constitution of the entity called Dasein. (BT 274) Our account of the meaning of Being in general, therefore, will be cashed out in terms of human understanding because the Being question is possible only if Dasein has a prior understanding of Being (BT 244). If we can explain the ontological makeup of this entity, and discover how the “primordial experiences in which we achieved our first ways of determining the nature of Being” have been distorted and obscured by the tradition, we will be able to trace our way back to these experiential wellsprings, that is, the understanding of Being as alêtheia (ET 85). Consider Heidegger’s argumentative strategy in Being and Time, which consists almost entirely of working out the horizon for the understanding of Being and the possibility of interpreting it (BT 63). Because he intends to lay the foundations for the sciences, his conceptual framework must be

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more basic than theirs. “Primordial scientific method cannot be derived from non-primordial, derivative science” (TDP 13). It must be pre-theoretical and yet intimately connected to all theory. What could satisfy these requirements? Only Dasein’s everydayness can, that is, that manner of existing where we exhibit a pre-ontological understanding of Being, the precondition not just of all theory, but of encountering anything as given to consciousness. Since Heidegger denies the possibility of a view from nowhere, this vague and average understanding of Being is the only possible foundation for Heidegger’s account of the meaning of Being. His account of the meaning of Being in general, therefore, will simultaneously be an account of Dasein and vice versa. We ask what the relation is between man’s nature and the Being of beings. But—as soon as I thoughtfully say “man’s nature,” I have already said relatedness to Being. Likewise, as soon as I say thoughtfully: Being of beings, the relatedness to man’s nature has been named. Each of the two members of the relation between man’s nature and Being already implies the relation itself. To speak to the heart of the matter: there is no such thing here as members of the relation, nor the relation as such. Accordingly, the situation we have named between man’s nature and the Being of beings allows no dialectical maneuvers in which one member of the relation is played off against the other. (WCT 79, emphasis added) When we put these passages together it should be clear that the project of fundamental ontology is not “incompatible with the results of [the] radical historicization of ontology,” as Thomson has suggested (Thomson 2005: 114n76). While Heidegger had not fully developed his account of historicity in 1927, and he hadn’t yet unlocked the formula for ontotheology, the basics are in place in his plans to destroy the history of ontology in order to reveal (i) the primordial sources of our understanding of Being and (ii) the extent to which (as well as how and why) Dasein’s intelligibility is shaped by its tradition.5 If the question of Being is to have its own history made transparent, then this hardened tradition must be loosened up, and the concealments which it has brought about must be dissolved. We understand this task as one in which by taking the question of Being as our clue, we are to destroy the traditional content of ancient ontology until we arrive at those primordial experiences in which we achieved our first ways of determining

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the nature of Being—the ways which have guided us ever since. (BT 44, emphasis added) Already in Being and Time Heidegger defines the human condition in terms of its openness to a fluctuating history of metaphysics that must be overcome so that the primordial experience of Being can be recovered. The point of fundamental ontology is not to uncover some mysterious and unrecognized ground, but to recover the ground on which we already stand. What a curious leap, Heidegger says much later, “presumably yielding us the insight that we do not reside sufficiently as yet where in reality we already are” (ID 33). Indeed, it is an “unearthly thing that we must first leap onto the soil on which we really stand” (WCT 41). The intelligibility of Dasein’s everydayness, that is, its self-understanding and worldview, including the range of existential possibilities open to Dasein, are determined and articulated by the misguided metaphysical “categories and concepts” handed down to it by the tradition (BT 43). Our task is to free ourselves from the misleading light of these categories. In Heidegger’s 1931–32 lecture course on Plato, we learn what it is that the history of ontology has gotten wrong: it has buried over the primordial experience of truth as alêtheia. When Heidegger calls for a retrieval and repetition of the inception of ancient Greek philosophy, therefore, he means we must pierce through the dissembling veil of our forgetful tradition to recover an experience of Being as alêtheia. We must “learn to conceive the possibilities which the ‘Ancients’ have made ready for us” (BT 40) so that we can think outside the limitations of the metaphysics of enduring presence (BT 47). The details follow in the later period, as does a new focus, but not the basic theory.

University Reform and Nihilism The pieces of the puzzle are now laid out in front of us. It is time to begin putting them together. As we saw above, Heidegger intends to restore the West “into the shape of its history” by reforming the university in accordance with its essence. To most ears that will probably sound like intellectually dishonest obscurantism at best. But for Heidegger it means something relatively straightforward. The essence of the university derives from the essence of man, and the essence of man is something we can see exhibited in ancient Greek philosophy, provided we know how and where to look. It turns out we should look at ourselves—or, better, we should look at our

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reflection in the mirror of ancient Greek philosophy. Heidegger thinks we’ll find two things staring back at us: (i) an image of what we were, are, and ought to be, and (ii) a reminder that we have work to do if we want to find our way back to our own nature—and we should, since it is our only hope for a future beyond the nihilism that suffocates us. The beginning still is. It does not lie behind us, as something that was long ago, but stands before us . . . The beginning has invaded our future. There it stands as the distant command to us to catch up with its greatness. (RA 8) The Greeks are our past and our future, our “inception” and our “destiny,” and they are both despite being alarmingly far removed from us in the present. They are, so to speak, our efficient, formal, and final causes, even though we think of them merely as intellectual primitives “in comparison to whom modern science has progressed infinitely far” (IM 16). For us, philosophy is one among many specialties at the university, and one among many professions in society. For the Greeks, philosophy was pursued “in the passion to remain close to and under the pressure of what is.” They considered “this contemplative questioning” the highest form of practice (RA 7) because it transfigured the practical realm, revealing the essential in things and letting them be. The difference between us and the Greeks, therefore, couldn’t be greater. We make philosophy peripheral to life. The Greeks made it a central, world-shaping activity. Now we face a crisis and an opportunity. If we make the Greeks our guiding star, we can rediscover our origins, reawaken our nature, and bring our Dasein into fulfillment (IM 11). If we don’t, the spiritual strength of the West will fail and its joints will crack. Theoria is the lynchpin, the model for Heidegger’s university reform plans. He identifies it with the Being of Dasein, just as he says Dasein is “metaphysics.” We have an inner tendency to see and to understand that is born in wonder and completed in “a questioning that experiences,” that is, theoria, the movement of Dasein’s Being that radicalizes its pre-ontological understanding of Being. Dasein is theoria, and “Metaphysics” is Dasein. Theoria, therefore, is “metaphysics,” and Heidegger, therefore, wants to make the university do metaphysics, that is, pass beyond beings in order to recover them as such and as a whole for our grasp so that they are kept open. Heidegger realizes this is a tall order because we’ve lost our way. The imperatives of the increasingly competitive global market (i.e., the American and Soviet “technological frenzy” of the early twentieth century) encourage vocational training and pre-professionalism, neither of which leaves much time for the pursuit of wisdom. Heidegger wanted to change

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this by reminding us that we all desire wisdom, whether we recognize it or not, just as all sciences are philosophy, whether they recognize it or not. He intended to unite the sciences at the level of their shared foundations in ontology, because he thought this would encourage us to remember and thereby become what we are, namely, world-disclosing beings who ask the Being question thanks to an inborn desire to understand. The advantage of this interpretation is that it can explain why Heidegger thought his reforms would suffice as a response to the problem of nihilism. We might criticize him for being unrealistically optimistic about such an ambitious social engineering project. And we might wonder how his optimism squares with his low opinion of das Man. But at least we get a consistent story from him this way. As we saw above, Heidegger thought the rise of nihilism was caused by the Cartesian metaphysics that begins with Plato’s doctrine of truth. Once we think of our relationship to Being in terms of a subjectobject dichotomy, we open up the problems of moral and epistemological skepticism, and we pave the way to Nietzsche’s doctrine of the Will to Power, according to which values are merely human projections onto an empty and horrifying universe that is characterized in itself by nothing more than the will to will. Far from resolving the problem of nihilism, Nietzsche’s call for creative philosophers of the future to recreate our relationship to the world with a life-affirming philosophy of the earth that disguises its intrinsic emptiness will only reinforce the subjectivism that is nihilism’s innermost cause. Heidegger’s reform plans, by contrast, aim at recovering our nature from the world-distorting metaphysics of our misguided Cartesian tradition. As Heidegger says famously in Being and Time, the scandal of philosophy is not that the problem of skepticism has yet to be solved, but that we still consider it a problem worth solving (BT 249). Because our subjectivity is partly constituted by our world, it is utter foolishness to ask whether the world exists apart from our subjectivity. Heidegger’s reforms were meant to bring all of this to light, eliminate Cartesian metaphysics, and recover a more primordial understanding of man’s essence and relationship with his world, especially his participation in its intelligibility. The regional ontologies and ontological posits of the positive sciences are not all there is to Being. Deeper still is our experience of Being as alêtheia. Heidegger thought that we would change our practice when we got our theory right. The gap between man and world would close, and the feeling of homelessness in an empty universe would give way to awestruck wonder at the conceptual inexhaustibility of reality. The problem of nihilism would simply vanish. The disadvantage of this interpretation, however, is that it doesn’t explain why Heidegger thought he could institutionalize his reforms and, in a sense,

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legislate nationwide authenticity. The curious leap in Heidegger’s reasoning is his inference from his diagnosis of Europe’s nihilism problem to the conclusion that institutionalized theoria was our only hope for a future. Part of the problem here is that the relationship between the Being of Dasein, the regional ontologies, and the ontological posits of the positive sciences is too murky (Thomson 2005: 117). Dasein is Heidegger’s model for reform, not Being, and the ontological structures of Dasein are revealed through fundamental ontology. But even Heidegger could not explain how the regional ontologies stem from Dasein’s temporality. How could the university’s administration iron out these details if Heidegger could not? The other problem is Heidegger’s assumption that the state could mould the Volk into a society of resolute and autonomous individuals who reject the dictatorship of the One. As Young argues, “Authenticity . . . cannot be made to happen by totalitarian means . . . Authenticity, being, like art, essentially creative, demands, in a word, freedom” (Young 1997: 77–8). These are significant problems, but Heidegger seems to have recognized them as early as 1935. He concedes that philosophy can “never directly supply” the resources necessary for an ontological revolution because “philosophy is always the direct concern of the few.” Philosophers cannot cause a nation to take up philosophy at the level required for laying the foundations of a new culture, because philosophy spreads only indirectly, on back roads that can never be chartered in advance, and then finally—sometime, when it has long since been forgotten as originary philosophy—it sinks away in the form of one of Dasein’s truisms. (IM 11) This is genuinely confusing. If philosophy cannot lay the foundations for a revolution, what was Heidegger doing in 1933? Young develops this problem to show that Heidegger’s authoritarian reform plans as rector were inconsistent with his early and later philosophy. On the one hand, the state cannot legislate authenticity. On the other hand, Heidegger’s own emphasis on powerlessness, receptivity, and a kind of fatalism in his later period conflict with his Promethean dream of becoming history’s master puppeteer in the early 1930s. How do we explain this strange aberration in Heidegger’s thought? Some have suggested that Heidegger’s work on Plato can help us answer this question. But, as we will see in the next two chapters, it isn’t clear there is any truth in this claim.

Chapter 7

Back from Syracuse? Four Reasons to Rethink Heidegger’s Politics

Gadamer reports that when Heidegger resigned from his position as rector, one of his friends from Freiburg saw him in a streetcar and greeted him by asking, “Back from Syracuse?” (Gadamer 1989: 429). The question clearly implies that Heidegger, like Plato, tried and failed to convert a tyrant to philosophy. As we saw in Chapter 2, Dionysius could not have failed “his test for tyrants” more dramatically. He was so confident Plato had overstated the need to live with the subject matter of philosophy that he composed a handbook of Plato’s thought and promoted it as a document containing his own, not realizing that the content of Platonic philosophy cannot be expressed verbally (Ep. VII 341bd). Plato was appalled by Dionysius’ intellectual hubris and moral depravity, and eventually gave up on him altogether. The question, “Back from Syracuse?” therefore, suggests that Heidegger wanted to provide a tyrant with philosophical leadership, to “lead the leader,” not to endorse his politics. Nobody would argue that Plato’s trip to Sicily suggests he secretly admired Dionysius’ tyrannical rule over Syracuse. Why should we treat Heidegger any differently? That is one way to understand the comparison of Heidegger’s involvement in the Nazi Party with Plato’s involvement in Sicilian politics. There is another, however, and it encourages us to draw very different conclusions about the relationship between Plato’s thought and Heidegger’s politics. Schmidt, for example, argues that Plato simply corrupted Heidegger. He argues that, because of its “self-aggrandizement of philosophizing” and “forgetting of the relation of truth and praxis,” the Rectoral Address could not be more Platonic or less Heideggerian. Not only did Heidegger explicitly distinguish himself from ideologues who preconceive reality, much of his philosophy was devoted to exposing “the finitude of truth and the hermeneutic obscurity of every judgment.” He rejected all ideology that did not originate in praxis, and he was particularly critical of Platonism because of its willingness to promote the myth of human infallibility with its doctrine

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of the Forms and the philosopher’s unmediated, unlimited knowledge of the Good. No more pointed, and appropriate question [than “Back from Syracuse?”] could be put to Heidegger. No greater parallel can be found in the history of philosophy to serve as a sort of model for understanding Heidegger’s astonishing political naïveté than the case of Plato . . . It is a kinship found both in the circumstantial parallels to Plato’s dealings with the tyrant at Syracuse and the philosophical argument that Plato makes regarding political life. In the Seventh Letter, which Schmidt calls a “protracted defense of the most basic metaphysical conviction about the relation of philosophy to politics,” Plato supposedly struggles to defend his conviction that “the proper vantage point of thinking’s relation to truth,” including the truths of the political realm, is through “the idea,” which is a relationship of “detachment from practical life.” It isn’t until we get to Aristotle that we find an acknowledgment of “the limits of the idea in matters of practical life . . . which will become so decisive for Heidegger in Being and Time.” Because Heidegger abandons his Aristotelian good sense about “the limits of theoretical reflection, of the idea,” and mysteriously embraces Plato’s theoretical optimism in politics, “the Rectoral Address is the most Platonic of Heidegger’s texts.” It fails, therefore, to be an “expression of the revolutionary move to overcome metaphysics and the culture built upon its presumptions.” On the contrary, “this address stands as the epitome of a metaphysical conception of the relation of thinking to political life” (Schmidt 2002: 162–5).1 It is an instance of the nihilism that Heidegger supposedly opposed. Schmidt’s argument is understandable. Like most philosophers, he takes it for granted that Plato believed the ideal state proposed in the Republic was both possible and desirable. I will call this the “standard view.” According to the standard view, Plato believed philosophy and society could exist in a state of perfect harmony. The ills of man, as Socrates says famously in Book V of the Republic, will end only when political power and philosophy coincide (Rep. 473de). Proponents of the standard view interpret this passage and those that support it literally. They argue that Plato did not merely set out a city in theory or a city in heaven (369a, 473a, 592b), but rather presented a blueprint for what he thought was a genuinely realizable utopia. The existence of this ideal state may be improbable, but Socrates is careful to point out that he, Glaucon, and Adeimantus would be wasting their time if it were impossible in principle (Rep. 499c). As for its desirability, Socrates

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admits that the guardian class may be unhappy with the abolition of private property and the nuclear family, not to mention the state’s regulation of sexual activity, but the purpose of the state is to provide for the welfare of the whole, not individuals or individual classes within it (Rep. 420b–421c). The defining characteristic of the standard view, then, is that it interprets all of the Republic’s political proposals literally. In this chapter I will challenge the standard view and argue for a version of the thesis that, regarding the political question, the Republic really means something other than what it literally says.2 If Heidegger was inspired by the Republic’s politics, therefore, it was only because he did not understand Plato’s playful irony and political pessimism.3 Against the standard view, Strauss and Bloom famously argue that Plato did not intend for his description of the kallipolis to be taken seriously. On the contrary, they both suggest that these proposals—especially the discussion of gender equality and coed communal life among the guardians in Book V—were suggested in jest: Plato was attempting to rival the comedies of Aristophanes with these proposals.4 Strauss describes the Republic as “the most magnificent cure ever devised for every form of political ambition” (Strauss 1964: 65, 138), while Bloom calls it “the greatest critique of political idealism ever written” (Bloom 1968: 408, 410).5 On this view Plato was not merely pessimistic about the probability of enacting radical political reform. He gave every indication that such reform was (i) impossible because the philosopher never acquires perfect knowledge of justice,6 (ii) unnatural because of its abstraction from the body,7 and (iii) unjust because it is contrary to the philosopher’s own good to return to the cave.8 An important corollary of (i) is that even if perfect, sustainable knowledge of justice were possible, a perfect instantiation of justice, either in the soul or in politics, still would not be. All images or instances of Forms, by definition, fall short of perfection. And the philosopher’s knowledge of the Forms is of limited value to him upon his return to the unknowable sensible particulars of the cave. The conclusion they draw from this is that the Republic’s political argument is riddled with ironies, including one that is decisive for determining the text’s meaning: the kallipolis cannot exist unless a philosopher-king establishes it, but there can be no philosopher-king without the kallipolis. And so it seems the kallipolis cannot exist. These are radical conclusions. They warrant a very careful supporting argument. Unfortunately, however, neither Bloom nor Strauss provides sufficient evidence for accepting their primary claims, points (i)–(iii) above. This imbalance between conclusion and evidence has generated a great deal of debate about the merits of the ironic interpretation of the Republic.

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For example, some critics have felt that Strauss unjustifiably claims privileged access to what the historical Plato thought, which they take to be a sign of either scholarly hubris or intellectual naïveté.9 I hope to show that there are at least four problems which, taken together, give us reason to believe Plato was a political moderate who did not think the kallipolis could or should be established. Strauss and Bloom argue for two of these problems, what I call the “ontological” and “epistemological” problems.10 By themselves, these problems are unconvincing as evidence for the ironic view. However, if we add them to what I call the “moral” and “political” problems, the standard view quickly unravels. Once we are clearer about the nature and depth of Plato’s political pessimism, I shall return to the questions about Heidegger’s politics with which this chapter began.

The Ontological Problem Plato establishes the impossibility of the kallipolis as a metaphysical fact, rather than merely a historical or contingent one. The problem is not a failure of leadership; it is a problem intrinsic to the phenomenal world. Because forms cannot be perfectly instantiated, any city that comes into being will suffer from the imperfections characteristic of all earthly things. All instantiations of Forms are mixed with their opposites, which is why we come closer to the truth in theory than we do in practice (Rep. 472e–473a, 479ae). The imperfection problem is stressed in Book VIII when Socrates argues that the ideal city, if instantiated, would be a mortal creature at best; it would eventually be destroyed by mistakes in calculation and sense perception (Rep. 546ad). The only sense in which it seems possible for the kallipolis as such to come into being, therefore, is in speech or thought. I will call this the “ontological problem.”11

The Epistemological Problem If we can read the Republic in connection with other closely related dialogues, there is also an “epistemological problem.” Sustainable knowledge of justice is impossible for an embodied knower (Phd. 66d). An embodied person can only have knowledge of the Forms episodically and partially. And no embodied person can eliminate the limits of his condition. As Gerson has put this point, embodied cognition is a mere image of disembodied cognition (Gerson 2003: 277). For Plato, philosophy is between knowledge and ignorance (Symp. 204b4–5). It is not an activity of the immortal gods

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(Symp. 204a1–2) who enjoy pure, unmediated knowledge of the Forms. According to the Symposium’s myth of eros, human beings have a natural propensity to pursue wisdom, but this propensity remains unsatisfied, or at best is only episodically satisfied. Diotima tells Socrates that the philosopher attains a vision of Beauty itself, but it is clear in the Phaedrus that mortals are not capable of maintaining this state (Phdr. 248a4–6). This poses a fundamental problem for Plato’s political proposals. It was the philosopherkings’ knowledge of the Forms, as well as their invulnerable goodness, that warranted granting them unchecked political power. If it turns out they cannot possess such knowledge, or cannot attain such moral invulnerability, it would be unjust nevertheless to give them unchecked power. One might object here that what is true of the Symposium or the Phaedrus is not necessarily true of the Republic. After all, doesn’t Socrates devote Books V, VI, and VII of the Republic to arguing that philosophers should rule because they alone have the knowledge necessary to rule well? As Socrates says in Book V, lovers of sights and sounds are familiar with beautiful things, whereas philosophers inquire after Beauty itself and understand the difference between Forms and particulars (Rep. 476d). In Book VI, Socrates makes the same point, but much more memorably: philosophers, he says, are extremely familiar with Forms, indeed, intimately familiar with them; in fact, they have sex with them (Rep. 490b).12 Later in Book VI, Plato describes the philosophers’ knowledge with several other relevant metaphors. At one point Socrates describes the philosopher as someone who paints justice into the state, using the Forms as his divine model (Rep. 500e, 501c). And the point of the sea captain analogy (Rep. 488) is that the ship of state is bound for shipwreck as long as the true captains (i.e., philosophers) are ignored and their knowledge of navigation (i.e., governing) is neglected. In light of these passages, one might argue that Plato couldn’t be clearer about the philosopher’s capacity for knowledge. In fact, he is so convinced of this capacity he abandons his own ocular metaphor and opts for a sexual one! But if that’s right, how could there possibly be an epistemological problem in the Republic? This objection would be decisive if all of these metaphors were consistent with the rest of the Republic. But they are not. Consider the painting metaphor. Socrates says the philosopher looks to the Forms as a divine model and paints justice into the city. The idea seems straightforward enough, but given the abuse to which Socrates subjects painting in Book X, the choice of painting as the metaphor here looks like a red flag. At best, it highlights the ontological problem, that is, the fact that philosophers can merely produce images of justice in the polis, reducing their role in the city to that of mere “game-playing” (Rep. 602b). In fact, there seems to be another layer of irony

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here. In order to govern, the philosopher must return to the cave and permit his eyes to readjust to the dark. When he returns, his ability to see in the cave will be far superior to that of the other cave dwellers (Rep. 520c). But he cannot have knowledge there. At the end of Book V, Socrates explicitly restricts knowledge to Forms (Rep. 477ab). The divided line underscores this problem. Conspicuously missing from the line’s list of cognitive states is a name for the kind of cognition that corresponds to the philosopher who has returned to the cave. He doesn’t have knowledge of sensible particulars, since knowledge is restricted to Forms. But he is not limited to mere belief, the cognitive state that mistakes images for originals (Rep. 476–80). One might think he possesses dianoia, because he has the capacity to recognize sensible particulars as images of originals (Rep. 520cd), but dianoia does not take the Good as its object. By definition, dianoia does not go back to a genuine first principle (Rep. 510bc), which is the defining characteristic of the philosopher’s knowledge. If we were to place the enlightened cave dweller’s cognition anywhere on the line, it would have to be between dianoia and noesis, but still beneath episteme, and therefore still insufficient to legitimize the philosopher’s rule. The problem Plato wants to highlight here, illustrated by the spatial imagery of the cave, is the gap between contemplation (pure theory) and action (governing), which Socrates himself recognizes (Rep. 472e–473a, 479ae). To justify his unchecked political power, the philosopher must have episteme in the cave, as the painting metaphor implies, but they cannot have episteme in the cave, because one cannot have episteme of sensible particulars or actions.13 Can he paint knowledge into the polis? Not unless he is outside the cave sending his paintings down to the cave dwellers (Gonzalez 2003: 43). In other words, the painting analogy must be disingenuous, an instance of Platonic sleight-of-hand intended to red flag the epistemological and ontological problems. While immersed in the darkness of the cave, philosophers literally cannot look to the Forms as they paint justice into the state. The gap between the philosopher’s knowledge outside the cave and the practical activity of ruling is unbridgeable. In fact, it is precisely this gap that causes the kallipolis to come undone at the beginning of Book VIII, where philosophers make poor judgments about breeding the next generation of philosopher-kings (Rep. 546b).

The Moral Problem At this point one might argue that the ontological and epistemological problems prove nothing regarding the question of irony in the Republic.

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If perfect reform is impossible, and the limited reform that is possible is unsustainable, why not produce approximations of the kallipolis and maintain them for as long as one can (the “approximation objection”)? Surely Plato would find that preferable to accepting the democratic status quo that he subjects to such incisive criticism in Book VIII. The approximation objection would have some force if it weren’t for the related “moral” and “political” problems. Consider the implications of the ban on private property. Why does Plato not allow the guardians to own private property? The obvious answer is that this will prevent them from having divided interests (Rep. 416d). The same argument supports the abolition of the nuclear family in Book V (463e–464d). These limitations on the guardians’ freedom, however, pose a fundamental problem for Plato’s political proposals. If the idea behind the ban on private property is to limit the guardians’ temptations, that is, to prevent them from developing appetites for material goods and social benefits (417a3–7), it would seem that Plato harbors a severe distrust of the guardians’ self-control. And if the reason for abolishing the nuclear family is to make it impossible for them to favor their biological children over the others, this indicates that the guardians’ devotion to the city’s interests, on Plato’s view, is similarly precarious. At the very least, both measures imply that the guardians’ characters are vulnerable to moral corruption, and they suggest that Plato was uncertain about the possibility of moral perfection. We should find this puzzling. It isn’t consistent with the standard view, and it isn’t consistent with Plato’s own suggestion that the philosopher’s love of learning and truth (i) exhausts his desires for pleasure and money (485de) and (ii) identifies his interests with those of the state (Rep. 412de). Consider Vlastos’ gloss on this feature of Plato’s argument. Assured of access to the world of Forms, [the philosopher-kings] will come to know the form of the Good and be themselves transformed by that knowledge. Their initiation into that eternal world Plato calls a “turnabout of the soul from a day that is like night to the true day” (521c). The change is so profound that not only the mind, but the whole psyche, down to the libido, is transformed. It is a translation into a world of the mind whose magnificence beggars the prizes of the world of sense. Sub specie aeternitatis sensual attractions pale: Plato’s imagery makes them fugitive, flat, unsubstantial—shadows on a wall. This in the last analysis is what he expects will keep his philosophers from misusing their unchecked authority. Their power will not corrupt them because to denizens of eternity the bribes and lures of power are trash. (Vlastos 1995: 140)

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Vlastos’ gloss accurately represents Socrates’ explicit claims about the transformative effect of coming to know the Good, but it ignores the problems I discuss above. If the philosopher really is transformed “down to the libido,” why the sex festivals and their lotteries, the abolition of private property, and the elimination of the nuclear family? These goods are supposed to be “pale . . . fugitive, flat, unsubstantial,” not temptations powerful enough to destroy the city. Herein lies the decisive problem: if the identification of the philosophers’ interests with the interests of the state turns out to be vulnerable, it is highly risky at best to grant unchecked power to the incompletely cultivated philosophers. Moreover, given Plato’s firsthand experience with severe abuses of political power, it is highly improbable that he of all people would be willing to take this risk. There is a second feature to the moral problem, and this one cuts even deeper. In Book V, near the end of Socrates’ response to the “first wave” of objections, Socrates argues that he has not been “legislating impossibilities or indulging in mere wishful thinking, since the law we established is in accord with nature” (Rep. 456c). The implication here is that he would be guilty of legislating impossibilities, and therefore engaging in mere wishful thinking, if his proposals were against nature. Nature, therefore, is his guide to determining whether his proposals are viable. How does that work out for him? On the standard view, it is taken for granted that Plato believed the communal life of the guardians, in all of its austerity, was sufficiently attuned with nature. But did he believe this? Could he have believed it? There are several reasons to think he couldn’t have. I will consider two. First, the controlled breeding only satisfies the sexual desires of a select few of the guardians, namely, the very best among them (Rep. 459a), and thus contradicts the most basic and powerful natural urge among the guardians, that is, the “innate necessity” that they will feel “to have sex with one another” (Rep. 458d). Year after year, the lottery picks the same guardians to have reproductive intercourse (Rep. 460a). Everyone else, therefore, remains sexually starved, their innate drives stunted and frustrated. This is only half of the problem. Second, mothers aren’t allowed to be mothers. Within the kallipolis, none of the female guardians are allowed to raise their own children (Rep. 457d). And in order to establish the kallipolis in the first place, the founders must persuade the mothers among the city’s original inhabitants to abandon their children (Rep. 541ab). Moreover, if anyone disobeys the state and has reproductive intercourse outside the regulations of the annual sex festivals, the offspring of such pairings will be exposed (Rep. 460c).

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We must ask whether anything could be more contrary to nature than these particular proposals. Mothers aren’t allowed to satisfy their maternal instincts to care for their own children, and sexually starved men are supposed to be convinced year after year that their luck might be better in next year’s lottery! Could Plato have believed this, using nature as his guiding light? Wouldn’t he have had to be wildly confused about the nature of human inclinations?

The Political Problem Let’s reconsider the approximation objection. One might argue that Plato was aware of all three of these problems, but he was willing to settle for an approximation of his ideal. As Socrates says, he does not hope to prove that the city can come into existence exactly as he describes, but rather in some way that “closely approximates [his] description” (Rep. 473a6). After all, it would be irrational for him to expect to overcome his own metaphysical, epistemological, and psychological impossibilities. On this view, Plato recognized the impossibility of creating a perfectly ideal state, but nevertheless believed philosophy could solve man’s political problem better than any alternative. This seems to be the point of the sea captain analogy (Rep. 488ae). The kallipolis is analogous to the sea captain’s guiding star: it doesn’t end all storms, but it provides the best available guidance for avoiding most and surviving the rest. The kallipolis-as-guiding-star is a compelling idea, and it is exactly right for Plato’s ethics. But in the political context, it raises a crucially important question: should there be an approximation of the kallipolis in society? Plato’s answer is subtle but negative, although he offers one qualification: things will be fine if a god lends us a hand.14 The reason for this difference between his ethical and political theories is surprisingly straightforward. Despite the important analogies between city and soul, the relations between the parts of an individual’s soul are fundamentally different from the relations between the parts of the city.15 Most importantly, reason can be overthrown but not corrupted by the appetites and passions, whereas the guardian, thanks to his tripartite soul, is always vulnerable to both threats. The guardian, therefore, can have a reason for exploiting the economic class, and he will have this reason unless a god intervenes (Rep. 492e). Due to his moral imperfections, a guardian with unchecked political power will be consumed by his immunity (Rep. 360bc), and he will turn on the economic class like

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a wolf to sheep (Rep. 415e). Once this happens, positive social and political reform is doomed. As Socrates says, it is men with corrupted philosophic natures who “do the greatest evils to cities and individuals . . . ” (Rep. 495b). By contrast, reason can never have this type of motivation. It has nothing to gain from exploiting the emotions and appetites. In politics but not in ethics, therefore, anything short of Plato’s ideal is monstrous. Since all approximations of the kallipolis fall short of Plato’s ideal (see the ontological, epistemological, and moral problems above), all approximations of the kallipolis are monstrous. When Socrates concludes his account of the philosophic nature (Rep. 487a), Adeimantus objects that, because of their poor reputation in society, philosophers could never be accepted as rulers of the state, and he challenges Socrates to show that this bad reputation is illegitimate. Socrates responds in three steps. He explains that true philosophers are misunderstood, causing them to be neglected; potential philosophers are corrupted, causing their value to the state to be squandered; and imposters hijack philosophy, practicing it dishonestly and thereby giving it a bad name that forever cripples philosophy in the political realm (Rep. 487b–503b). At the conclusion of this long response, Socrates has indeed shown that philosophy’s bad reputation is illegitimate. At the same time, however, he has also quietly shown all of his cards: philosophy cannot change society because the demos are incorrigible. The demos cannot help but corrupt the potential philosopher, who then turns upon the demos and exploits them for his personal gain. This self-reinforcing cycle repeats itself, making radical political reform impossible without divine dispensation (Rep. 492e). “I should like to believe that you will persevere,” Socrates says to Alcibiades, “but I’m afraid—not because I distrust your nature, but because I know how powerful the city is—I’m afraid it might get the better of both me and you” (Alc. I 135e). By the end of his life, Plato explicitly entertains the idea of fatalism in general. In the Laws, the Athenian suggests that our choices and our characters are determined by our emotions, which he compares to puppet strings controlled by the gods. Whether we are tugged around for play or for some serious purpose is beyond the Athenian’s judgment, but that we are not free is something he says he knows for certain (Laws 644e, 803c–804b).16 Plato’s political fatalism in the Republic is much subtler. There is no explicit talk of being the playthings of the gods, but Socrates does describe something analogous to a necessity that is at work against the potential philosopher, namely, a necessity which only the gods can influence. In the section on the corruption of the philosophic nature, Socrates explains that potential philosophers are undone and tempted away from philosophy by precisely those

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characteristics that make them suitable for philosophy (Rep. 494c, 495a). Young people with these qualities, such as Alcibiades, are potential philosophers, but they are also potential politicians (Rep. 491b6–8).17 If the potential philosopher happens to be beautiful, wealthy, strong, and connected to powerful political offices in the city through relatives, it is improbable that he would choose philosophy over a more prestigious public life (Rep. 491c).18 In addition to the philosopher himself feeling driven away from philosophy, social pressures will actively pull him away. Powerful men in the city will recognize his talents and attempt to develop them into instruments of their own power (Rep 494bc). If such a young man has been raised badly, he is almost guaranteed to become vicious, harmful, and “outstandingly bad” (Rep. 491e), for such a person’s reason will be turned by his corrupted desires “to serve evil ends.” Reason “never loses its power but is either useful and beneficial or useless and harmful, depending on the way it is turned” (Rep. 519a). A proper upbringing can help protect against complete corruption, but only a god can save the potential philosopher for philosophy. I think the philosophic nature as we defined it will inevitably grow to possess every virtue if it happens to receive appropriate instruction, but if it is sown, planted, and grown in an inappropriate environment, it will develop in quite the opposite way, unless some god happens to come to its rescue. (Rep. 492a) The “inappropriate environment” turns out to be the demos, not the sophists and not the philosophers. Perhaps expanding on the debate from Socrates’ trial, Plato has Socrates argue that the sophists are not to blame for the corruption of the youth. They don’t have sufficient influence on the young, and they merely serve the city’s whims (Rep. 493a). The “greatest sophists of all” are the members of the assembly: they shower people with praise and blame in the form of thunderous clapping and shouting, and there is no consistency to their passions. The effect on a young person’s heart and intellect is profoundly damaging (Rep. 492bc). In such an environment, self-knowledge, which for Plato is the starting point of true philosophy, becomes virtually impossible.19 One is thrust, powerless and unprepared, into a culture of intense conformity. What private training can hold out and not be swept away by that kind of praise or blame and be carried by the flood wherever it goes, so that he’ll say that the same things are beautiful and ugly as the crowd does, follow

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the same way of life as they do, and be the same sort of person as they are? (Rep. 492cd) Instead of developing self-knowledge and pursuing knowledge of justice, the potential philosopher will learn to define good and bad, just and unjust, “in accordance with how the beast reacts—calling what it enjoys good and what angers it bad. He has no other account to give of these terms” (Rep. 493c). Socrates asks whether there is “any chance that such a person will practice philosophy,” and Glaucon responds quite coolly, “None at all” (Rep. 495a). In the concrete, this means a young man like Alcibiades is taught to think that his guardian Pericles, who famously separated his private goals from his public life (Th. 2.13, 2.60), had been tricked by the weak.20 As Glaucon says in Book II of the Republic, most people believe it is irrational for the powerful to observe the requirements of justice (Rep. 358–359b).21 It is best to seem, not to be, just. These opinions haunted Plato’s idealism. He had seen others like them destroy Socrates (Ep. VII 324–5), and he was convinced they would overwhelm any efforts in the name of substantial political reform. When Socrates describes the degeneration of the kallipolis, he cites the disrespect of the son for the father who minds his own business as one of the causes (Rep. 549c–550b). Plato is so convinced this kind of corruption is inevitable, he has Socrates claim that, absent divine intervention, there cannot be a true philosopher in society. The education the potential philosopher receives from the mob is too powerful to counteract. [T]here isn’t now, hasn’t been in the past, nor ever will be in the future anyone with a character so unusual that he has been educated to virtue in spite of the contrary education he received from the mob—I mean a human character; the divine, as the saying goes, is an exemption to the rule. You should realize that if anyone is saved and becomes what he ought to be under our present constitutions, he has been saved—you might rightly say—by a divine dispensation. (Rep. 492e) This passage should give pause to anyone who seriously believes Plato thought his political proposals could be enacted without profound, humanly insurmountable resistance from the political status quo.22 In this passage we see that only a god can save us, because only a god can bring about the political reform necessary for educating the potential philosopher. Plato thought some people were naturally suited for philosophy, and that such people had the capacity to secure the good for their societies, but

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these people were predetermined, in a way that was tragic, either to be rejected by society or corrupted by it. Socrates and Theages are Plato’s only examples of philosophers who managed to avoid the corrupting influence of their societies. Theages’ success was due entirely to his physical illness, which prevented him from being tempted away from philosophy (Rep. 496b–c). Since Socrates’ daimonic sign was necessary for his exemplary philosophical development (Rep. 496c), and since such divine dispensation was hardly the norm, the fate of the philosopher in society is really Alcibiades’ fate, which is one of failure. The corruption of the philosophic nature is what I call the “political problem.” It is the fourth obstacle blocking any commitment to Platonic utopianism.

What was Plato Doing in Syracuse? Someone like Schmidt might object that the Seventh Letter conflicts with my interpretation of Plato’s politics. If Plato was indeed a political pessimist, what was he doing in Sicily with Dion and Dionysius II? This is an extremely important objection because it rests on a very common but mistaken assumption about Plato’s intentions in Sicily, namely, that he was there to create the kallipolis or something roughly similar. A brief look at the relevant details of Plato’s letter will confirm that Plato went to Syracuse to moderate a despot and establish “the rule of laws”—“this is the doctrine that I endeavored to bring home, first to Dion, next to Dionysius, and now for the third time do so to you” (Ep. VII 334d)—not, as Schmidt assumes, to engage in an ambitious social engineering project with a tyrant whose requests were all “mingled with compulsion” (Ep. VII 329d), and certainly not in a morally depraved city like Sicily, where there was no hope for the cultivation of wisdom, temperance, or any other virtue (Ep. VII 326cd), let alone hope for a cure to the ills of man. Plato and Dion intended to convert Dionysius away from hedonism toward the love of virtue, not in an effort to establish Dionysius as a philosopher-king in Sicily, but to allow Sicilians to live free from “massacres and deaths and the other evils that [had] come to pass” (Ep. VII 327d) under Dionysius’ reign of terror.23 Dion’s ambitions were no different from Plato’s. As Plato says, if Dion had obtained power in Sicily he would have “cleansed her of servitude and put on her the garment of freedom, adorned “her citizens with the best and most suitable laws, and resettled all Sicily and liberat[ed] her from the barbarians” (Ep. VII 336ab). The kallipolis simply wasn’t part of their plans.

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The more general point of Plato’s letter confirms this. He opens the letter by explaining that as a young man he intended to enter politics. He felt encouraged by the initial prospect of helping the Thirty reshape Athens. Many of them were acquaintances, others were relatives, and they were granted unlimited power, which he believed they would use “to lead the city out of the unjust life she had been living and establish her in the path of justice” (Ep. VII 324d). He watched them closely and with great hope for positive reform, but he quickly discerned from their iron fisted, exploitative rule that their “absolute powers” had corrupted them. Their attempts to implicate Socrates in their illegal actions were so alarming to Plato that he felt he could only draw back “from the reign of injustice” and conclude, ironically, that the “preceding constitution,” the one that laid the foundations for the Periclean Athens that he despised, was a “precious thing” by comparison (Ep. VII 324e). When the Thirty were overthrown and the democracy restored, Plato temporarily regained hope and even reconsidered a career change to public service (Ep. VII 325b). But then “certain powerful persons” brought Socrates to trial and had him executed unfairly (Ep. VII 325c). The experience of this extreme political turmoil and injustice was devastating for Plato. He admits that it changed his life, and it appears to have destroyed his political idealism. The more I reflected upon what was happening, upon what kind of men were active in politics, and upon the state of our laws and customs, and the older I grew, the more I realized how difficult it is to manage a city’s affairs rightly. For I saw it was impossible to do anything without friends and loyal followers . . . At last I came to the conclusion that all existing states are badly governed and the condition of their laws practically incurable, without some miraculous remedy and the assistance of fortune. (Ep. VII 325c–326a) Plato’s worst fears were confirmed when he went to Sicily for the first time and found an entire city ruined by hedonism, “a life filled with Italian and Syracusan banquets, with men gorging themselves twice a day and never sleeping alone at night” (Ep. VII 326b). When he saw this he knew there was very little hope for any positive reform toward the path of justice, because “no man under heaven who has cultivated such practices from his youth could possibly grow up to be wise—so miraculous a temper is against nature—or become temperate, or indeed acquire any other part of virtue” (Ep. VII 326cd). Cities like Syracuse, governed as they are by men who “think they must spend their all on excesses,” are destined to change into tyrannies,

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oligarchies, or democracies, and their rulers reject the demands of true justice (Ep. VII 326d). In the end, Dionysius deeply frustrated Plato. Contrary to Dion’s hopes, and exactly as Plato suspected, Dionysius turned out to be like a sick man who refuses to obey his doctor’s orders, that is, precisely the sort of person who is unworthy of earnest philosophical counseling (Ep. VII 330d). The problem with Schmidt’s thesis that Plato corrupted Heidegger, therefore, is that it is so insensitive to these important details.

Back from Syracuse or Eros Tyrannos? There are several obstacles—what I have called the ontological, epistemological, moral, and political problems—blocking the standard interpretation of the Republic as a work of utopianism. The first three of these problems are sufficient to show that the ideal state cannot come into existence, and the fourth informs us that an approximation of it is improbable and extremely undesirable. The potential philosopher, if neglected in his youth, is easily turned into a tyrant, precisely because of his unlimited desire for the all (Rep. 486a). It is of paramount importance to the welfare of the state, therefore, that such men and women be given a proper upbringing and education. The only education that is sufficient, however, is the one provided by the kallipolis. This leads to a paradox: the philosopher-king must bring the kallipolis into existence, but the kallipolis must bring the philosopher-king into existence. Since you can have neither without the other, you can have neither. Plato’s kallipolis cannot come into existence, at least not without divine dispensation. And even in the event of divine dispensation, the kallipolis inevitably fails because the philosopher-king’s judgment is distorted by sense perception (Rep. 546b). The meaning of the political proposals in the Republic, therefore, must be something other than their literal meaning. They must be ironic, and Schmidt’s view that Plato’s politics corrupted Heidegger, therefore, is wrong from beginning to end. Whereas Plato stressed the gulf between theory and practice, and foresaw the problems entailed by philosophical rule—forms cannot be perfectly instantiated, philosophers are corruptible, philosophical knowledge has severe limitations when applied to sensible particulars— Heidegger saw no such gulf or problems and therefore did not share Plato’s ontological humility or political pessimism. Mysteriously, Heidegger, the philosopher of the everyday and the ordinary, never really returned to the cave.24 The cave dwellers could come to him, whereupon he would lead them on a new course through the history of Being, navigating a safe path

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between the twin evils of communism and capitalism. Instead of following in Plato’s footsteps and actually going to Sicily, Heidegger seems to have been one of the many European intellectuals [who] stayed at their desks, visiting Syracuse only in their imaginations, developing interesting, sometimes brilliant ideas to explain away the sufferings of peoples whose eyes they would never meet. Distinguished professors, gifted poets, and influential journalists summoned their talents to convince all who would listen that modern tyrants were liberators and that their unconscionable crimes were noble, when seen in the proper perspective. (Lilla 2001: 198) Heidegger called upon his fellow Germans, the uniquely philosophical people, to restore the essence of truth from orthotes to alêtheia by recovering and perfecting their own essence (GA 36/37 86–7). It wouldn’t be easy. The struggle for truth is a battle, a war, against Being’s self-concealment and man’s tendency to choose not to choose. For Heidegger it was the only war that mattered, and that was the problem (Gonzalez 2003: 52). Because he was only interested in the essence of truth, his concerns drifted past concrete realities, such as Hitler’s motivations for withdrawing from the League of Nations, to ontological realities, such as “the German people’s choice of its essence and future,” Heidegger’s interpretation of Germany’s withdrawal from the League of Nations (GA 36/37 86–7). Some of Heidegger’s friends can help us confirm this. During the semester break following Heidegger’s lectures on the allegory of the cave, Hermann Mörchen visited Heidegger at his cabin in Todtnauberg and recorded the following impression in his diary. He doesn’t understand much about politics, and that is probably why his detestation of all mediocre halfness lets him expect great things of the party that promises to do something decisive and, above all effectively to oppose communism . . . that was why a dictatorship that does not shrink from draconian measures must be approved . . . He doesn’t seem to concern himself with political details. If a man lives up here, he has different yardsticks for everything. (Quoted in Safranski 1998: 227) Here Mörchen makes the crucial point in a few sentences. Heidegger “didn’t understand much about politics” because his “yardsticks” were Being as such and man’s relation to Being. The German Volk were choosing their essence when Hitler broke with the League of Nations (GA 36/37 98–9).25

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Liberalism and democratic idealism were among the shadows on the wall (for Heidegger, the “internal enemies”) that threatened the essence of the German Volk (GA 36/37 119). The racism of a National Socialist like Guido Kolbenheyer did not indicate that the National Socialist worldview was morally depraved; it merely suggested that some National Socialists were still dwelling in the cave, blinded by an untenable biologism that had nothing to do with the “inner truth and greatness” of National Socialism (GA 36/ 37 210–2).26 In each of these examples, Heidegger clearly absorbs Nazi rhetoric and actions into his thinking about the essence of truth. From this perspective, the actual referents of the rhetoric and the actual motivations and consequences of the actions were simply irrelevant. What do we make of this? How should we understand Heidegger’s inexcusably myopic perspective on the monstrous events and rhetoric of his time? Gonzalez argues that Heidegger’s politics were the logical consequence of his exclusive focus on a “purely ontological plane where [he was concerned with] essences and nothing but essences” (Gonzalez 2003: 52). Heidegger was blinded by his purely ontological perspective on the world. He didn’t see people suffering or countries fighting, and he didn’t hear any racist rhetoric; he saw the drama of Being’s history unfolding before him, and he wanted to play the part of Being’s shepherd. No doubt there is something to this account of Heidegger’s delusions of grandeur. But it cannot possibly be right as a causal analysis of those delusions. The notion that ontology can be done “outside the cave” at the level of essences with “no possibility of fundamental failure or danger in politics” (emphasis in original) is not at all a Heideggerian idea (ibid., 61). “The roots of the existential analytic” in Being and Time, for example, “are ultimately existentiell, that is, ontical” (BT 34). Heidegger calls this the “ontical priority” of the question of Being, and he insists that the objects of his phenomenological inquiry, unlike those of Husserl’s, are not given directly to consciousness. They do not show themselves. Phenomenology proceeds through the ontic in order to reveal what lies hidden. What is called a phenomenon “is something that proximally and for the most part does not show itself at all: it is something that lies hidden” (BT 59). Truth is finite. Heidegger insisted on it. There is no view from nowhere, or noeton topon, where one can enjoy a purely ontological perspective on the world. Heidegger’s philosophy, even at this time, in other words, called for radical humility in politics. Since his politics were anything but humble, however, we are still left with Schmidt’s question. What inspired Heidegger to forget his own better judgment about the obscurity of human knowledge?

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Why did he think he had infallible access to the ontological significance of the events happening throughout Europe? Why did he think he could unify the university and thereby decide the essence of truth for an entire people? Schmidt and Young argue that Heidegger picked up his theoretical optimism and political utopianism from Plato’s philosopher-king ideal. If we look closely at Heidegger’s lectures on the cave allegory, however, it seems that Heidegger correctly discovered the opposite in Plato. The philosopher will not himself challenge this all too obligatory cavechatter, but will leave it to itself and instead immediately seize hold of one person (or a few) and pull him out, attempting to lead him on the long journey out of the cave. The philosopher must remain solitary, because this is what he is according to his nature. (ET 62–3)27 Plato did not advocate radical political reform. He advised against it because of his pessimism about the incorrigibility of the demos. Heidegger seems to have recognized and appreciated this feature of Plato’s thought, which isn’t surprising, given his low opinion of das Man. What is surprising is that he didn’t act on his pessimism, but instead embarked on a utopian social engineering project that presupposed a universal capacity for radical existential and moral reform. If Heidegger had maintained his low opinion of the masses, he might have avoided his “greatest stupidity,” knowing his plans for reform were likely to be imperfect and therefore dangerous, and that the Nazis would never take them seriously even if they were perfect. Plato could have provided Heidegger with firsthand testimony confirming that substantive political reform is like pushing against the ocean, especially when dealing with a tyrant (Ep. VII 329ce). And he would have insisted that Heidegger think seriously about the difficulties of translating the conclusions of Being and Time, unfinished as they were, into administrative policy. As he learned from Socrates during his trial, human wisdom, even at its best, is worth little or nothing (Ap. 23ab). The passage above (ET 62–3) suggests that Heidegger understood and shared Plato’s suspicions about the plausibility of sweeping political reform. And yet, as we know all too well, this wasn’t enough to prevent him from seeing the 1933 revolution as his opportunity to lead a collective breakout from the cave. How was Heidegger capable of maintaining such contradictory positions? This is the unsolved mystery of Heidegger’s politics. We can only speculate. Maybe it was due to his philosophical confusion, caused by

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the beginning stages of a turn in the direction of his thinking or the influence of other philosophers, such as Nietzsche and Junger. I find this unlikely, mostly because it exaggerates the differences between Heidegger’s early and later thought. My own suspicion is that Heidegger was motivated by political intoxication, what Plato called eros tyrannos, caused by the prospect of the power to play a foundational role in spearheading a new epoch in the history of Being. Heidegger did not try and fail to lead the leader. He became the tyrant. Some tyrannical souls become rulers of cities and nations, and when they do entire peoples are subjugated by the rulers’ erotic madness . . . There is another, more common class of tyrannical souls that Socrates considers, those who enter public life not as rulers, but as teachers, orators, poets—what today we would call intellectuals . . . Socrates suggests that such intellectuals play an important role in driving democracies toward tyranny by whipping the minds of the young into a frenzy, until some of them, perhaps the most brilliant and courageous, take the step from thought to action and try to realize their tyrannical ambitions in politics. Then, gratified to see their own ideas take effect, these intellectuals become the tyrant’s servile flatterers, composing “hymns to tyranny” once he is in power. (Lilla 2001: 210–11) Even a cursory glance at Heidegger’s political rhetoric and lectures from the early 1930s leaves little doubt that his politics were ideologically motivated. At some point, for some reason, he began to understand his place and time through the perspective of his philosophy. However, given the contradiction between his philosophical commitments at this time (reform is and is not possible), and the related contradiction between his politics and his philosophy (ontology informs practice; practice informs ontology) we must conclude that something other than ideology, something as basic as the desire for power, eventually corrupted his better judgment. At some point between giving his lectures on Plato and joining the Nazi party with the hope of becoming Germany’s philosopher-king, Heidegger forgot Plato’s ontological humility, which he had previously recognized and emphasized in his lectures. Like Alcibiades, Heidegger’s “wanting to get to the bottom of beings and of Being as such” (ET 60)—his longing for the light outside the cave—was tragically transformed into a tyrannical desire to master the cave, the false whole and fool’s gold for which the tyrant settles. “Back from Syracuse?” was no doubt the correct question to ask Heidegger

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when he resigned from his position at Freiburg, but not because he had replayed the part of Plato trying to reform the tyrant. He had become the tyrant.28 Had Plato known Heidegger, he probably would have considered him a failed philosopher, at best another Alcibiades, who shattered the hopes and future of Athens on the rocks of Sicily’s coastline because he could not choose the love of wisdom over the love he felt from the demos. More than truth, Alcibiades wanted his “reputation and . . . influence to saturate all mankind” (Alc. I 105ac). He saw a beauty that dwarfed all earthly beauties in Socrates’ character and arguments (Symp. 218–22). But in the end it wasn’t enough. He suffered from moral weakness and chose world conquest over transcendence. Instead of choosing Socrates and philosophy, he pursued a life of honor and recognition in conventional, democratic politics that destroyed him and Athens. Heidegger shattered the future of his own revolutionary philosophy when he repeated Alcibiades’ mistake and desired power before truth, that is, when he became more mesmerized by Hitler’s hands than he was by the liberating light of Being outside the cave.

Chapter 8

How Heidegger Should Have Read Plato

In the first four chapters of this book, I distinguished Plato’s philosophy from “Platonism” and explained several objections to “Plato’s Doctrine of Truth” with this distinction in mind: Heidegger is wrong to give the cave allegory a one-sidedly epistemological interpretation because this distorts the function of the Good as the mysterious ontological precondition for epistemological truth. He is wrong to treat Plato as an ontotheologian and proto-subjectivist because Plato’s ineffable, incomplete-able philosophy fits neither mold. And he is wrong to downplay the similarities between his thought and Plato’s because he discovered his own distinction between the Being of beings and Being as such in his phenomenological return to Plato’s cave. These criticisms sum up one set of problems with Heidegger’s interpretation of Plato. There is another, and it may be even more important because it concerns Plato’s influence on Heidegger’s politics in 1933, not just subtle mistakes in his understanding of Plato’s metaphysics. Instead of forcing Plato’s thought into the framework of ontotheology and the overarching narrative of historical decline, and instead of interpreting the cave allegory as an image of Germany’s struggle to decide the essence of truth, Heidegger should have recognized a kindred spirit lying behind Plato’s grand philosophical vision: a political pessimist who did not trust the demos, and a humble philosophical therapist whose model philosopher was a midwife of ideas, not a utopian social engineer who remade the world from the top down. We can think of Heidegger’s concerns about the fate of the West in the age of technology as a new species of Plato’s concerns about the fate of Greece in the age of Periclean imperialism. The parallels are illuminating. Heidegger thought modernity was characterized by nihilism and the violence of modern technology. What [Plato] attacks is the whole way of life of a society which measures its “power” by the number of ships in its harbors and dollars in its treasury, its “well-being” by the standard of living of its citizens. Such a society,

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he holds, was Periclean Athens, a society whose basically corrupt principles led to the corruption of all its institutions. (Dodds 1959: 33)1 Just as Heidegger thought the West would be saved as soon as a postmetaphysical epoch of Being dawned and Being was no longer misinterpreted as “a gigantic gasoline station” (DT 50), Plato’s solution to the problem of Periclean Athens, which perceived Sicily as an opportunity for everlasting pay (Thuc. 6.24), was to reshape the polis by fundamentally redirecting the eros of the demos, a task which required what Heidegger would call changing man’s relation to Being, that is, paideia.2 When we recognize this shared sensibility between Heidegger’ critique of technology and Plato’s critique of Periclean Athens, we can also isolate an important but unrecognized difference between their respective philosophical therapies. Whereas Heidegger prescribes a new understanding of Being as his remedy to the problem of nihilism, a sensitivity to the presencing of alêtheia, and in a sense reidentifies virtue with knowledge—“Man is the being that understands being and exists on the basis of this understanding” (ET 57)—Plato’s solution to the problem of Periclean Athens entails both a new understanding of Being and the education of desire through the care of the soul, that is, the transformative activities that Socrates calls the “true art of politics” in the Gorgias (Gorg. 521d6–8).3 Plato thought lawless desire and ignorance were at the root of Greece’s maladies, not merely a misinterpretation of reality. He worried at length, and especially in the tragic case of Alcibiades, that knowledge alone was insufficient for virtue.4 This is why the Socratic way of life, not a top-down program for radical political reform, was Plato’s ultimate “solution” to the political problem. The polis could be changed, although not once and for all, and only from the bottom up, one individual’s soul at a time. If Heidegger had recognized this in 1933, his life might have taken quite a different course. Instead of finding philosophical support for his Promethean political ambitions in his utopian reading of Plato’s Republic, for example, he might have better appreciated Plato’s political pessimism and avoided his own political catastrophe.

Did Plato Anticipate Heidegger’s Critique of Technology? Heidegger’s later philosophy is dominated by his analysis of the destitution of modernity. He provides symptomatic and causal analyses of this problem, and prescribes a sort of philosophical therapy for overcoming it: “releasement

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toward things” and “openness to the mystery” through “meditative thinking” (DT 54–5). Modernity, Heidegger says, is the age of the world’s night. It is characterized by the flight of the gods, the disenchantment of the earth, alienation, and the violence of modern technology, whose representation of Being reduces the earth, along with all of its inhabitants, to resources to be optimized. The world now appears as an object open to the attacks of calculative thought, attacks that nothing is believed able any longer to resist. Nature becomes a giant gasoline station, an energy source for modern technology and industry. This relation of man to the world as such, in principle a technical one, developed in the seventeenth century first and only in Europe. It long remained unknown in other continents, and it was altogether alien to former ages and histories. (DT 50) There is nothing particularly original about Heidegger’s list of symptoms. Many other philosophers and novelists from the modern period provided similar diagnoses of the West’s cultural maladies and existential disorder. But Heidegger’s causal analysis of the West’s symptoms is unlike anything else in modern thought. He accounts for modernity’s destitution in terms of man’s perverted relation to the truth of Being: the cause of each symptom is modern metaphysics, the “mode of revealing” that Heidegger calls das Gestell, the “setting upon that challenges forth” and forces the presencing of entities into the stamp or mold of resources awaiting optimization. Why is this? Why is metaphysics the cause? Recall that for Heidegger metaphysics is not merely an insignificant and esoteric activity carried out by intellectuals in their ivory towers, lacking a direct relation to the world. In its study of what makes entities be entities, metaphysics exerts a deep influence on our understanding of everything, shaping our worldview at such a basic and profound level that it “grounds an age” (QCT 115), telling us what things are, as well as how and why they matter. “Metaphysics is at bottom, and from the ground up, what grounds, what gives account of the ground” (ID 58). Once a metaphysical paradigm seeps into the common sense of an epoch, and as Discourse articulates the intelligibility of Dasein’s World (BT 204), it determines how we respond to events, how we interact with and perceive our environments. It sustains and guides our “comportment toward entities,” including ourselves, by first telling us what things are (N4 205). As Heidegger says, das Gestell is “nothing technological, nothing on the order of a machine. It is the way in which the real reveals itself as standing reserve” (QCT 23).

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Like any other metaphysical paradigm, das Gestell determines the meaning and significance of the world that is revealed to us. In its light, the world is stripped of its mystery and sublimity and revealed as a stockpile of resources, “a gigantic gasoline station,” valuable only insofar as it can be used to serve human purposes. From the perspective of das Gestell, human beings and the earth in general are little more than anonymous units of instrumental value. The Rhine River no longer appears to us as the home of the Rhine Maidens (Zimmerman 1981: 223). Its “divine radiance” has vanished so that, for us, the Rhine is just one more resource to be exploited as a source of hydroelectric energy (QCT 16). As long as we transform forests into paper cups for lattes, or treat people infected with H.I.V. as commodities for pharmaceutical companies, or respond to the September 11 attacks by wondering, “Well, how much is gold up?”5 we become some of the ugliest expressions of the technological age, and embodiments of its gravest dangers. There is nothing necessary or permanent about das Gestell. But because it is rooted in Nietzsche’s unthought metaphysics of eternally recurring will to power, according to which beings as such and as a whole are conceived of as purposeless forces seeking their own increase, Heidegger worried that das Gestell could be so self-reinforcing that it maintains a stranglehold on intelligibility. In the concrete that would mean more wars of conquest, more environmental degradation, more sweatshops in the Third World, more harmful corporations seeking their own interests at the expense of human health, and so on, and no possibility of reform. Heidegger thought the Europe of his day was in a state of crisis, and he sincerely believed profound danger was imminent. “In its unholy blindness,” Europe is “always on the verge of cutting its own throat” (IM 40). The world was darkening. The gods had fled. The earth was being destroyed. Humans were being “reduced to a mass.” Everything “creative and free” was considered secondary to the “practical and technical business of culture,” and the mediocre had become preeminent (IM 40, 47). But no one will even ask us whether we do or do not will, when the spiritual strength of the West fails and its joints crack, when this moribund semblance of a culture caves in and drags all forces into confusion and lets them suffocate in madness. (RA 13) Unless this crisis was addressed and the problem of metaphysics was solved, the West would collapse from inner decay. The choice, as Heidegger saw it, was “between the will to greatness and the acceptance of decline” (RA 9).

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His prescription for restoring the West’s spiritual health, therefore, is to overcome metaphysics via schooling in unconcealment, the liberation of Western man from the shackles of the metaphysical enframing that invites us to follow Nietzsche in perceiving Being as nothing, and entities as resources (Richardson 1963: 19). The way out of modernity’s various predicaments, in other words, is to see and understand the world anew, to be “touched by [the] alêtheia of Plato” (ET 87), that is, to experience a transformative vision of Being. This was certainly the original promise of the phenomenological return to Plato. In fact, Plato had much more to offer than Heidegger realized at the time. Plato thought Athens needed spiritual reform, and he believed reform could only be accomplished by a transformative vision of Being. He did not talk about the disenchantment of the earth, the flight of the gods, alienation, or the violence of technology as a mode of revealing Being. These are distinctly modern worries. But he did think an implicit misinterpretation of the world, human nature, the good life, and man’s place in the polis, was the engine driving Periclean Athens. For example, he fundamentally disagreed with the “Athenian experiment,” the liberation of individual talent and initiative through unprecedented political freedom and individualism.6 Unlike Thucydides, who celebrated Athenian daring and endorsed Athenian expansionism and individualism, the defining characteristics of Periclean Athens, Plato blamed them for Athens’ political collapse at the end of the Peloponnesian War (Gorg. 481d).7 He was convinced that bad governing principles were just as dangerous as corrupt individuals, because they establish the character of an entire city by determining how people can live and specifying a city’s highest ideals. What Athenians needed was to see and understand their world anew, bathed in the sea of Beauty (Symp. 210d) emanating from the Good. In the Symposium Diotima explains the process whereby one moves from loving an individual body to loving all beautiful bodies, from bodies to souls, from souls to laws and institutions, from these to every kind of knowledge, and from knowledge to the Beautiful itself, at which point the lover contemplates divine beauty (Symp. 211e) and brings forth virtue in the souls of others (Symp. 212a). The vision of the beautiful is what finally and completely turns the soul around from vice and ignorance toward virtue and knowledge. Socrates provides a similar account in the Phaedrus (243e–257b) and Republic (514a–518b). The soul is fundamentally transformed in its ascent toward the Beautiful and the Good. First, thanks to the sudden, transformative appearance of beauty, one wakes up from one’s fallen, benumbed slumber in the ordinary. Then, just as suddenly, as if one has been transfixed or possessed

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by a superior reality, one remembers one’s old visions and enjoys the divine madness that is a gift from the gods, the madness that is not at all an evil or an illness but a loving, awestruck response to an unspeakable, enrapturing beauty (Phdr. 251a–252c). At this stage, provided one is capable of self-control, it is possible to cultivate virtue and reach out toward the final goal of contemplating divine beauty (Phdr. 247d; cf. Tim. 90bc). We find the same stages—awakening, purification, and life-transforming illumination—in the cave allegory. The cave dweller isn’t completely free from the leaden weights of the cave, that is, released from her pursuit of the trivial and unimportant, until she undergoes a transformative vision of Being outside. At the end of the Symposium Plato brings these two features of his thought—social affliction and philosophical therapy—together in the speech of Alcibiades. As his speech unfolds we learn that Alcibiades saw a great beauty reflected in Socrates’ character (Symp. 218e) and arguments (Symp. 222a3–5), and he saw tremendous value in the philosophical life, suggesting that he had also learned to love virtue. “Nothing is more important to me than becoming the best man I can be,” Alcibiades says, “and no one can help me more than you to reach that aim” (Symp. 218b). Diotima does not mention beautiful arguments, but she does discuss the love of knowledge, and she places it near the top of the ladder (Symp. 210d). If Alcibiades has ascended this high, he has accomplished something extraordinary indeed. Even Socrates is impressed by Alcibiades’ philosophical progress: “you are more accomplished than you think . . . if you can see in me a beauty that is really beyond description” (Symp. 218e). But it isn’t quite enough. Despite his intellectual desires, and despite being rationally persuaded of the merits of Socrates’ prescriptions, Alcibiades failed to maintain his commitment to philosophy (Symp. 216bc). Whenever Socrates was away, the appeal of the political life and his desire to please the demos overpowered his inclinations to live more philosophically (Symp. 216ab). Alcibiades was rationally persuaded that the philosophical life was superior to its alternatives, including his own chosen life in politics and military conquest. But he could not make this theoretical understanding an operational part of his life. He failed to commit himself to philosophy because he suffered from moral weakness. Socrates’ failure with Alcibiades must have stood out to Plato for very personal reasons. Both men were enraptured by their encounter with Socrates, and both men faced the dilemma of pursuing philosophy or choosing a career in politics. Against his better judgment, Alcibiades pursued a life of honor and recognition in conventional, democratic politics that destroyed him and Athens. Plato, on the other hand, maintained his commitment to

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the philosophical life, knowing that politics would consume him, as it did Alcibiades and members of his family. He had tasted how sweet and blessed a possession philosophy is, and at the same time . . . seen the madness of the majority and realized . . . that hardly anyone acts sanely in public affairs . . . [He] would perish before [he] could profit either [his] city or [his] friends. (Rep. 496cd) If Dodds is correct that the Gorgias records certain elements of Plato’s autobiography, Plato faced intense social pressures not to turn his back on the privileges and opportunities afforded by his family’s wealth and status (Dodds 1959: 31). These pressures are best articulated by Callicles, who characterizes Plato’s choice of life—ducked behind a wall (Rep. 496d)— as undignified and unmanly (Gorg. 485de). And if Vickers is correct that “Callicles” is just a literary mask that Plato used to disguise his political commentary, some of those pressures came from Alcibiades himself.8 Socrates was the philosopher that Alcibiades failed to become, and this famously made Alcibiades feel shame (Symp. 215e–216b). In the Gorgias we get the opposite confession: Alcibiades was the statesman that Plato might have been, and, at least for a time, this made Plato feel a related kind of shame, namely, the shame of the man who lives his life in private, rather than on the battlefield or in the assembly or in the agora, wondering whether he has said or done anything important or apt (Gorg. 485d)e. In the end, however, Plato overcomes his doubts, and condemns the men who made him feel them. What good were such men, and what good were their politics, if they led to the Peloponnesian War and all of its devastation? Dodds might be right that the Gorgias records the inner struggle of Plato’s experience as a gifted and conflicted young man. But it also indicts the dysfunctional political order of his humiliated city. As we will see below, Alcibiades and the Periclean problem he symbolized seem to be at the heart of Plato’s social and political philosophy.9 There may be no greater or more personal influence on the content of Plato’s postwar thought. Alcibiades’ experience of Socrates was similar to Plato’s, and his moral weakness was likely the impetus for Plato’s lifelong reflection on the political problem. Other philosophers, such as Parmenides, Heraclitus, and Pythagoras, obviously were a greater influence on the metaphysics and epistemology of Plato’s dialogues. But it was Socrates and Alcibiades, as representatives of two opposing forms of life, the philosophical life and the political life, who influenced Plato so deeply that, in the end, they seem to have represented at least two features of Plato’s own identity.

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Plato’s Problems with Periclean Athens The Peloponnesian War has just begun. Athens has lost many soldiers, and Pericles decides to deliver a speech in honor of their sacrifices. In addition to praising the dead, he praises Athens’ democracy and empire. He extols the virtues of Athenian imperialism, and he attributes Athens’ great imperial successes to its underlying political principles, which, more than any others, liberate the powers latent in human potential and help produce individual and collective excellence. After praising prior generations for building the Athenian empire, and his fellow countrymen for providing the city with “the fullest resources for war,” Pericles celebrates “the principles” and “the form of government by reason of which Athens “came into this position [of dominance]” (Thuc. 2.36). Athens sets an example for others to follow, and it follows no one (Thuc. 2.37). It is an open society (Thuc. 2.39), characterized by the rule of law rather than individuals, democratic deliberation and decision-making, individual freedom (Thuc. 2.37), and cultural variety (Thuc. 2.38). Its “greatness” is evident in the fact that, while it enjoys a “more relaxed way of life” than “those who are constantly straining,” it engages in “easily won” unilateral military strikes—“we attack other lands by ourselves”—whereas even Sparta never acts alone (Thuc. 2.39). Pericles attributed Athens’ successes to the strength of her spirit, which is restless and endlessly enterprising. The most shameful lot in life, among Athenians, he says, is not poverty but inactivity, and the apolitical are considered useless. Athenians are also “distinguished from other men” by their daring, risk-taking, thorough calculating, generosity from abundance, and the “confidence of [their] freedom” (Thuc. 2.40). As such, the “city as a whole is an education for Hellas.” Better than any other governing principles, Athens’ produce “self-sufficient” individuals capable of “the most varied forms of conduct” and possessing “the most attractive qualities”—indeed, the city’s power, which has “compelled every sea and land to be open to [Athenian] daring and populated every region with lasting monuments of [Athenian] acts,” was “acquired because of these characteristics” (Thuc. 2.41, emphasis added). For these reasons and others, Pericles invites Athenians to gaze adoringly on their city’s power, and to “become her lovers” (Thuc. 2.43). He implores Athenians to take pride in the fact that “the whole earth is the tomb of famous [Athenians],” and he asks them to “emulate [such men] now.” He equates happiness with freedom, and freedom with courage: “do not stand aside from the dangers of war,” he says (Thuc. 2.43). Embrace them as an opportunity for a glorious end to one’s life (Thuc. 2.44).

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Had Plato been in the audience listening to Pericles’ famous speech, it is easy to imagine that he would have thought, “wrong on all accounts, dangerously wrong.” If we judge from his critique of democracy and individualism in Book VIII of the Republic (561cd), Plato could not have disagreed more when Pericles told Athenians they offered the world the most resplendent view of humanity. His condemnation of Pericles is implicit in the Republic, but it is explicit and uncompromising in the Gorgias, where he is ultimately concerned with the corrupted “existential order” (Voegelin 2000: 38) of Athens (Gorg. 515d). Pericles may have celebrated Athenian variety and individual achievement, but Plato thought variety and diversity were the root causes of Athens’ worst social, psychological, and political problems. And Alcibiades’ disordered soul was his clearest living example, the most pronounced symptom of Athens’ metaphysical-cultural affliction. As Gribble observes, “there is something of Alcibiades in the Democratic Man and conversely something of the familiar Platonic critique of Athens in the depiction of Alcibiades” (Gribble 1999: 258). When Plato criticized Athenian democracy, he had Alcibiades in mind; when he critiqued Alcibiades, he had Athens in mind. They were one and the same, both desperately in need of immediate moral reform. If we recall Plato’s famous critique of democracy in Book VIII of the Republic, it is easy to get the impression that he is responding directly to Pericles’ Funeral Oration. Consider Plato’s portrait of the democratic man: And so he lives on, yielding day by day to the desire at hand. Sometimes he drinks heavily while listening to the flute; at other times, he drinks only water and is on a diet; sometimes he goes in for physical training; at other times, he’s idle and neglects everything; and sometimes he even occupies himself with what he takes to be philosophy. He often engages in politics, leaping up from his seat and saying and doing whatever comes into his mind. If he happens to admire soldiers, he’s carried in that direction, if money-makers, in that one. There’s neither order nor necessity in his life, but he calls it pleasant, free, and blessedly happy, and he follows it for as long as he lives. (Rep. 561cd) His general assessment of individual liberty: Freedom: Surely you’d hear a democratic city say that this is the finest thing it has, so that as a result it is the only city worth living in for someone

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who is by nature free . . . [But] doesn’t the insatiable desire for freedom and the neglect of other things change this constitution and put it in need of a dictatorship? (Rep. 562c) And his assessment of the corrosive effect of freedom on the cultivation of individual excellence: What private training can hold out and not be swept away by that kind of praise or blame and be carried by the flood wherever it goes, so that he’ll say that the same things are beautiful and ugly as the crowd does, follow the same way of life as they do, and be the same sort of person as they are? (Rep. 492cd) From Plato’s perspective the costs of freedom are excessive. Cities are driven to war to satisfy the unlimited desires of their people (Phd. 66cd) and, as we see in these three passages from the Republic, individuals lose their souls (the rule of reason and the capacity for self-knowledge) in the effort to conform to the whims of the demos. Democracy produces self-interested, lawless citizens, not perfected ones, and they corrupt or murder the few individuals who could change the polis for the better. As Plato argues in the Republic, only a philosopher-king can create the Kallipolis, but only the Kallipolis can create a philosopher-king. Since you can’t have one, you can’t have the other. And Plato thought the devil was in the principles of Pericleanism. In a democracy that prizes individual liberty, as Athens’ did, the principles of justice are neutral among ends. They do not, and cannot, encourage the cultivation of individual talents and capacities that Plato thought necessary for the good life. When Athens allowed its citizens to develop all of their powers, free of restraints, and devoted itself to “pushing human power as far as it would go, in the name of ambitions that are grounded in human nature” (Forde 1989: 49),10 Plato became “appalled and drew back from the reign of injustice” that followed (Ep. VII 325a). He thought Athens needed “spiritual regeneration,” a reorientation of its collective eros, because “the people of Athens [had] lost its soul” from overindulging in “the unmixed wine of freedom” (Rep. 562d), which inevitably leads to “extreme slavery . . . whether for a private individual or for a city” (Rep. 564a).11 Democracy is so bad, Socrates says, it even “breeds anarchy among the animals” (Rep. 562e, 563c). Everything everyone does, whether it is parenting or teaching, is polluted by the “fear of appearing disagreeable and authoritarian” (Rep. 563a). Instead of educating human desire, democracy encourages its lawlessness.

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Plato was certain Pericles was wrong. Far from perfecting human nature, Athenian democracy had fundamentally corrupted it.

Alcibiades as Embodiment of Periclean Athens Plato clearly rejected the implicit account of human nature and the explicit endorsements of the imperialistic Athenian character in political discourse such as the Funeral Oration, just as he rejected the ambitions, narrow self-interest, and political daring that issued from them.12 To the extent that Athens had a soul, Plato thought it was diseased with Pericleanism (Rep. 564ab). One of the clearest ways to see this is to compare Alcibiades’ speeches in Thucydides to Socrates’ defense of philosophy in the Apology, as well as his related remarks in several other dialogues.13 Consider Forde’s insightful gloss on the significance of Alcibiades in Thucydides’ narrative: The Athens of Thucydides is a city that prides itself on its freedom and its individualism, and it is distinguished from all other cities by its enrichment of these concepts at the very center of its political order. Thucydides’ Athens can even be seen as a study in the long-term consequences of building a city on these foundations. The Athenians allowed human nature freer reign than did any other city, and they encouraged fuller development of individual human faculties. The city’s uniquely brilliant leaders were products of this milieu. Alcibiades is the latest and most “liberated” of the Athenian leaders, and this is one reason that his case is so significant. In Alcibiades we see Athenian individualism, if not human nature itself, in its purest state. (Forde 1989: 8)14 What emerges from this comparison is that the values Alcibiades espouses in his speeches are just the inverse of those that Socrates defends. Socrates prescribed a philosophical life characterized by the care of the soul, and he explicitly argued against wars of conquest; Alcibiades by contrast valued opulence, glory, power, and militarism. And he didn’t just defend Athenian imperialism. He used his exceptional rhetorical talents to silence people like Socrates who objected to it. In the case of Sicily, he spoke with so much enthusiasm for the invasion that he effectively shut down the opposition: “because of the extremes of eagerness among the majority, if anyone felt at all unhappy he was afraid of seeming unpatriotic by an opposing vote, and he kept quiet” (Thuc. 6.16–6.24).

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The rhetorical strategy behind Alcibiades’ case for invading Sicily is revealing in its appeals to Athenian appetites for power and wealth. It is hard to imagine a more anti-Platonic speech. Sicily will be one big pushover, Alcibiades promises, and Athens owes it to its daring and honorable forefathers to seize this opportunity for imperial gain. The Sicilians are a divided people with no shared ethos. They are relatively unarmed. They are governed by self-interest, not patriotism. They are incapable of unified action, and they will greet the Athenians as liberators who bring new opportunities and freedom from tyranny (Thuc. 6.17). As for the Athenians, they should remember how they became who they are, and live up to that standard so as to avoid internal decay and failure. Do not be deterred by this apathy in Nicias’ speech and this division of young against old, but in our well-tried order, just as our fathers as young men took counsel with their elders and raised our power to this level, in the same fashion strive now to lead it on . . . the city, like anything else, will cause its own deterioration if left idle, and internally its skills will age, but when engaged it will keep adding to its experience and become further accustomed to defending itself, not by words but by actions. I have no doubt whatsoever in my mind that a city never inactive would be soonest ruined by change to inaction, and that men who conduct their affairs with the least violence to their normal character and customs, even if these are less than ideal, are the ones who live in greatest security. (Thuc. 6.18) You can hear echoes of Pericles’ Funeral Oration in Alcibiades’ speech. Athenians are required by their way of life, Pericles argued, to be endlessly restless and continually enterprising. Alcibiades certainly agreed. In his Sicily speech he challenges Nicias’ argument that Athens should not risk its current possessions for unseen and uncertain future gains by appealing to this central principle of Pericles’ famous speech: if the city doesn’t stay active, continue to expand, and maintain the pursuit of power initiated by the generation whose navy defeated the Persians, “the insignificance of our additions to the empire would put its very existence in danger” (Thuc. 6.18). Great cities stay great, he says, by resisting the temptations of military idleness and remaining committed to an aggressive military policy that guarantees the city’s sovereignty by stripping other cities of theirs. Alcibiades fundamentally changed the terms of the Sicilian debate. By the time he finished his speech, Athens was no longer deliberating about

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a single military expedition. Alcibiades had redefined the debate as the moment when Athens would choose its future. Would it go to war with Sicily and maintain a tradition of hegemony and independence, or would it listen to the fear-mongering of Nicias’ sclerotic pessimism, slowly wither away from internal aging and decay, and thus fall subject to foreign rule? Alcibiades knew his audience well. The effect of his arguments was profound. When he finished his case for invasion, and Nicias failed badly in his rebuttal, “a passion for the expedition afflicted everyone alike” (Thuc. 6.24). Invasion was no longer a question. Alcibiades had intoxicated his peers with a desire for transcendence through militarism. He had made Sicily represent more than an ordinary imperial conquest. In his portrait of Athens’ proud history and future power, “the lure of Sicily [became] the lure of a politically, even a humanly impossible fulfillment, the hope almost of transcending the human condition.” The invasion would satisfy the “longing of youth for faraway sights and experiences” (Forde 1989: 49), and it promised the masses an opportunity to acquire “dominion that would provide unending service for pay” (Thuc. 6.24). By the end of Alcibiades’ intoxicating sketch of limitless Athenian prosperity, “the majority of the Athenians,” like twentieth-century imperialists blinded by the metaphysics of das Gestell, “seem even to forget their own mortality in their erotic transports,” not to mention the humanity of those whom they hope to conquer (Forde 1989: 49). What the young seem to forget . . . is that the first sight they implicitly hope to see is a great battle in which many will be killed and entire cities will be enslaved . . . The majority of Athenians, who yearn for eternal pay, do not seem to contemplate the eternal servitude of the human beings who will be forced to provide it. It is safe to say that the freedom and splendor of their city obscures the Athenians’ appreciation of the subjection that it is built upon. (Forde 1989: 57, emphasis added) Athens had chosen the militaristic option in Alcibiades’ false dichotomy, and it had thus become blind to the humanity of others. The peak of Periclean Athens, then, is the nadir of Greek humanism. From the perspective of lustful Athenian power, the Sicilians had been reduced to mere commodities, mere resources to be optimized. This mindset was the target of Plato’s criticism of Periclean Athens and Alcibiades, her most illustrious and disordered son.

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Alcibiades as Inverted Image of Socrates We don’t know whether Plato knew Thucydides, and we cannot be certain that Plato read Thucydides’ work.15 We also cannot know whether Thucydides and Plato provide us with accurate portraits of the historical Alcibiades. But it is undeniable that Thucydides’ portrait of Alcibiades fits Plato’s seamlessly. And this makes him an apt target of Socrates’ withering critique of lives unworthy of living. Like Callicles, Alcibiades is “a representative of Athenian democracy,” and he “is existentially disordered” (Voegelin 2000: 39), despite knowing that he is guilty of neglecting what really matters (Symp. 216ab).16 In the Apology Socrates says he greeted every Athenian the same way. He went around doing nothing but persuading young and old to care less for wealth, glory, and pleasure, and more for the state of their souls (Ap. 30ab). Sir, you are an Athenian, a citizen of the greatest city with the greatest reputation for both wisdom and power; are you not ashamed of your eagerness to possess as much wealth, reputation and honors as possible, while you do not care for nor give thought to wisdom or truth, or the best possible state of your soul? (Ap. 29de) Most people ignored Socrates. Some wrote comedies about him. Alcibiades is a unique case in Plato’s dialogues because he listened to Socrates, and he was rationally persuaded that the philosophical life is superior to its alternatives. But he could not resist his “desire to please the crowd” when he left Socrates’ side (Symp. 216b). He had become too attached to displaying his brilliance in the city (Thuc. 6.16), and, like Callicles, he had grown to love the demos more than wisdom (Gorg 481d), just as Socrates feared he would (Alc. I 132a). This was tragic for Plato. Alcibiades had the potential to be a great philosopher, but he had been corrupted by Athens’ corrosive value system. Instead of developing into a philosopher, he developed into a tyrant, filled with “impractical expectations” and thinking himself capable of “managing the affairs, not only of the Greeks, but of the barbarians as well” (Rep. 494c).17 To draw out the inverse relationship between the lives and values of Alcibiades and Socrates, consider the following handful of comparisons: z

Alcibiades prescribed continuous activity and wars of conquest; Socrates prescribed a care of the soul that eliminates the unnecessary and lawless desires that account for the origins of war (Rep. 373e; Phd. 66bc), and his introduction of a guardian class to the original city in Book II of the

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Republic is clearly designed to cure the city of its luxury-based fever and obviate wars of conquest (Rep. 372e). Alcibiades was an optimist about free enterprise, arguing that an individual’s unobstructed pursuit of self-interest would, in the end, also benefit his city (Thuc. 6.16); Socrates thought the union of self-interest with state interests via the education of desire (Rep. 412de) was a necessary condition for truly benefiting the city, for example, avoiding war, leading a life free from injustice and impious acts, and departing from life with “good hope, blameless and content” (Rep. 496de). Alcibiades justified his opulent life by relating its extravagance to the city’s reputation for power; Socrates argued that a life like Alcibiades’ is no better than the most miserable slave’s (Symp. 216a) because it “enslaves the best part of himself to the most vicious” (Rep. 589d), and therefore renders one incapable of actualizing one’s highest possibilities of being. “So if a man has become absorbed in his appetites or his ambitions and takes great pains to further them, all his thoughts are bound to become merely mortal” (Tim. 90bc). Alcibiades appeals to the military successes of Athens’ early leaders in order to persuade the Athenian assembly to live up to the demands of its heritage; Socrates argues that those early leaders left the city “swollen and festering” with feverish ambitions and a perverted standard of excellence which measured the city’s greatness in terms of the military’s strength and the treasury’s size (Gorg. 519a).18 Alcibiades aroused Athenian eros with the prospect of transcendence via militarism; Socrates awakened his audience’s eros to a beauty that transcended all earthly beauties (Symp. 218e), and invited them on a philosophical trek that would enable them to live the “most excellent life offered to humankind by the gods” (Tim. 90d).19 Alcibiades justifies treason, that is, joining the Spartans rather than facing the humiliation of trial in Athens, by redefining his responsibilities as a citizen to make himself a paragon of patriotism (Thuc. 6.92); Socrates sacrifices his own life to the Laws of Athens in order to preserve their authority, arguing that his commitment to the state is absolute as long as it is just (Crit. 49e).

In all of the relevant respects Thucydides’ Alcibiades is an inverted image of Plato’s Socrates. From the perspective of Plato’s philosophical life, Alcibiades’ desires and ambitions, his way of life and his values, are utterly foolish. The objects of all his longing are the fool’s gold that prevents one from realizing one’s highest possibilities of being (Tim. 90d) and instead produces ineluctable psychological, social, and political disorder.

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This is exactly what we should expect from Alcibiades. He had the philosophic nature, but he was raised badly, and Plato believes that those with the best natures become “outstandingly bad when they receive a bad upbringing” (Rep. 491e), and “do the greatest evils to cities and individuals” (Rep. 495b). Thanks to his vicious lifestyle, Alcibiades never completes the ascent up Diotima’s heavenly ladder. Socrates makes Alcibiades feel shame because he cannot prove Socrates is wrong when he tells him he should change his life, but shame isn’t enough (Symp. 216ac). Plato seems to imply that if he had finished his ascent, his life and Athens’ war might have ended differently. As the Platonic philosopher reaches out “to grasp everything both divine and human as a whole” (Rep. 486a) and has “intercourse” with true being (Rep. 490b), he is so fundamentally transformed that he no longer fears death (Rep. 486b). And because the “river” of his desire is no longer diverted toward trivial and unimportant goods (Rep. 485d) such as glory and everlasting pay, all of his longing is directed toward the Good. Had Alcibiades made it this far and undergone this kind of psychological transformation, it would have been inconceivable for him to give the speech he gave during the debate over Sicily. Athens probably wouldn’t have invaded Sicily, and who knows what Alcibiades might have accomplished as a philosopher? What does this mean? Insofar as Alcibiades is an embodiment of the Athenian experiment in general, that is, the liberation of individual talents and capacities through maximum political freedom, and Athens’ selfaggrandizing imperialism in particular, Socrates’ critique of Alcibiades’ chosen life is at the same time an extended critique of Athens’ morally defective collective character. The philosophical life, a city refashioned by a citizenry living more ascetically, was Plato’s solution to the political problem. As the inversion of this ideal, and an embodiment of Athens’ daring expansionism, Alcibiades offered Plato a rhetorical goldmine: to refute Plato’s criticisms of democracy was to accept Alcibiades, but to accept Alcibiades was to accept the seeds of Athenian demise. Better, therefore, to think twice about Plato’s criticisms. The intimate but inverse relationship between the souls of Socrates and Alcibiades, therefore, is one way for Plato to illustrate the dangerous perversion of the established social and political order, and the need for profound change that can affect what Voegelin calls “the substance of society.”20

Conclusions: What Heidegger Missed At this point we have a much clearer sense of why Plato diagnosed Athens with spiritual disorder, and what he prescribed to restore her spiritual

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health. Athenians had devoted themselves to pale reflections of the Good, such as wealth and glory in battle, and they had neglected what really mattered, namely, the care of their souls and the ascent from particular instances of beauty to the sublime sea of Beauty. Their collective failures showed up as bellicose military policy, lawless desires for imperial gain, and political institutions that enabled both, but the underlying cause of it all was their distorted relation to Being. Under the reign of Periclean political principles, the ancient world appeared to Athenians as a storehouse of resources. A place like Sicily contained much-needed trees for their navy, and countless men, women, and children to be used for free labor. Nobody represented this worldview more clearly than Alcibiades. He had internalized the principles of Pericleanism, and he ushered Athenians to war against Sicily in a manner that destroyed Athens and crushed her empire. What makes Alcibiades so interesting for us, however, is that while he embodied all of Athens’ worst vices, he was correctable. Plato’s Symposium suggests that Alcibiades’ life would have ended much differently if he had maintained his commitment to philosophy and found his way out of the cave. Like Heidegger, in other words, Plato thought the social and political problems of his day could be solved with a transformative vision of Being. If someone as perverse and existentially disordered as Alcibiades was correctable, surely there was hope for the rest of Athens.21 Like Heidegger’s critique of technology, then, Plato’s critique of Periclean Athens has causal and prescriptive components. On Plato’s view, as with Heidegger’s, the cause of man’s greatest evils, whether these are understood as will to power and world domination or unrestrained imperialism and political failure is his perverted relation to the truth of Being. The prescriptive components are equally close. Plato counsels falling in love with the light of the Good that is refracted through everything (even bodies as physically monstrous as Socrates’!); Heidegger suggests that the dawn following the world’s night will break when we rediscover the art of meditative thinking, “which contemplates the meaning which reigns in everything that is” (DT 46). Heidegger said that we live in a “needy age.” We are in need of a kind of conversion which would grant us a new vision of reality, free us from the drive to power, from the tendency to look at all things as commodities, and open us to our most authentic possibility, which is to allow beings in the world to manifest their own intrinsic worth. (Zimmerman 1981: 226) Unlike Heidegger, however, Plato didn’t think knowledge was sufficient for virtue. The liberated cave dweller can only feel pity for those who continue to dwell in the shadows (Rep. 516d), but she cannot see the Good until she

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has freed herself from the “leaden weights” that pull her soul’s “vision downwards” (Rep. 519ab). In other words, whereas Heidegger thought “knowledge” (a new, post-metaphysical understanding of Being, a sensitivity to presencing) was sufficient for “virtue” (a correction of praxis that respects the meaning “which reigns in everything that is”), Plato thought virtue, and in particular the education of desire, was necessary for knowledge.22 Alcibiades would have been transformed “down to the libido” (Vlastos 1995: 140) if he had made it out of the cave. But he cannot make it out of the cave until he changes his life and commits himself to the cultivation of virtue, “for it is not permitted to the impure to attain the pure” (Phd. 67b). As Voegelin puts this point, “the good and the bad Eros lie close together in the soul as its potentiality either to gain itself by transcendence, or to lose itself by closure and reliance on its own resources” (Voegelin 2000: 127). Plato’s hardnosed psychological realism suggests that eros is always corruptible. Heidegger’s ontological perspective, which aims to work at a level deeper than psychology, seems to have been dangerously blind to this problem. The caricature of Plato is that “he tried to develop into a way of life . . . what can be only a fleeting moment or, to take Plato’s own metaphor, the flying spark of fire between two flint stones” (Arendt 1990: 101). But, in light of the above comparison with Heidegger, we should ask whether this is a better description of Heidegger’s thought, and in particular his thought about politics and education. In the 1966 Spiegel interview, for example, Heidegger’s only complaint about his earlier university reform plans was that he articulated them in nationalistic rhetoric, not that its ideology was unrealistically optimistic about the capacity of higher education to address the problem of nihilism. “But today, and today more resolutely than ever, I would repeat the speech on ‘The Self-Assertion of the German University,’ though admittedly without referring to nationalism” (SI 46). Plato would have found Heidegger’s optimism dangerously naïve. He was highly skeptical about the human capacity for moral perfection. The ban on private property and the abolition of the nuclear family in the Republic both suggest that Plato was not convinced his guardians could resist the corrupting influences of power. Heidegger didn’t share Plato’s worries about these matters. On his view, even the worst atrocities of World War II were the product of the world being revealed reductively as a stockpile of resources—correct the reductive revelation of Being, and the world’s other problems, whether they be the abuse of the environment or wars of conquest, simply go away. Plato wouldn’t have understood this feature of Heidegger’s thought. He was too pessimistic about the possibility of enacting the radical, top-down political reform that is necessary for solving the Periclean Problem. In fact,

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an important collection of passages leaves “no doubt about the philosopher’s withdrawal from politics” and suggests that he thought the “true art of politics” could not be practiced in public (Voegelin 2000: 91).23 First, the majority are intellectually defective, incapable of appreciating the weight of reason, especially when gathered in large groups. For I do know how to produce one witness to whatever I’m saying, and that’s the man I’m having a discussion with. The majority I disregard. And I do know how to call for a vote from one man, but I don’t even discuss things with the majority. (Gorg. 474ab) Second, and much more importantly, the majority are incorrigible and the forces resisting moderation are overwhelming: “no man will survive who genuinely opposes you or any other crowd and prevents the occurrence of many unjust and illegal happenings in the city. A man who really fights for justice must lead a private, not a public, life if he is to survive for even a short time” (Ap. 32a). Nobody acts sanely in public affairs, and there is no one with whom one might “go to the aid of justice and survive.” The philosopher in society is like “a man who has fallen among wild animals and is neither willing to join them in doing injustice nor sufficiently strong to oppose the general savagery alone.” When philosophers take all of this into account “they lead a quiet life and do their own work” (Rep. 496cd). They reshape the polis by persuading individuals to live differently, to care for virtue and the health of their souls (Ap. 30ab). As an elenctic philosopher, but not as a reformer, Socrates was “quintessentially political” (Reeve 1990: 160). If Heidegger had recognized Plato’s political pessimism, his belief that a true commitment to making the polis better left no “leisure to engage in public affairs to any extent” (Ap. 23b), he might have exercised more restraint in his own life and political involvements. Instead of reading Plato’s Republic as a blueprint for top-down political reform, for example, he might have recognized that, according to Plato, it is hard enough to introduce an individual to the “speechless wonder which is at the beginning and the end of philosophy” (Arendt 1990: 101), and that the hope of reforming the West through an ontological revolution is the wishful thinking of a man fallen among wild animals who hopes to oppose their savagery alone.

Notes

Chapter 1: What is Platonism? 1

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Schleiermacher observed, “For of all philosophers who have ever lived, none have had so good a right as Plato . . . to [complain] of being misunderstood, or even not understood at all” (1973: 4). For detailed accounts of these developments, see Guthrie (1978: 446–92) and Reale (1985: 67–83). For a detailed account of the philosophical views of Plato’s immediate successors, see Dillon (2003). For more details on Augustine and the New Academy, see Long (1974: 93). Today, only a few scholars accept the skeptical interpretation of Plato’s dialogues in general. See Gonzalez (1995: 9n21). For more developed accounts of the New Academy, see Stough (1969), Long (1974), Schofield et al. (1980), Long and Sedley (1987), Annas (1992), and Algra et al. (1999). For an account of the Old Academy, see Dillon (2003). Gerson (2005) discusses the problem of defining Platonism in the face of these and other fundamental differences between Platonists. Schleiermacher’s controversial claim that Aristotle’s comments on Plato’s oral lectures do not contain “any thing unheard of in the writings we possess, or completely different from them” has been significantly supported by Sayre (1983), who argues in his Plato’s Late Ontology that the contents of Plato’s oral lecture can in fact be found in several of Plato’s late dialogues. Some contemporary scholars have argued against the esotericists by suggesting that their view rests on a misunderstanding of the Seventh Letter, which makes a case against language in general, not merely writing, as a vehicle for presenting ontology. See Sayre (1993: 167–84). The other criticism of the esotericists’ position is that it ignores the passages in Aristotle’s Metaphysics where Aristotle attributes views to Plato that are consistent with the metaphysics of Plato’s middle and late dialogues (e.g., 1078b, 990b, 991a). These are fair criticisms of the esotericists, provided one trusts Aristotle’s testimony. But they miss the more basic contradiction in the esotericists’ view, which renders it meaningless. On the one hand, the esotericists say that Plato communicated his teaching orally because it could not be communicated in writing. But on the other hand, they reconstruct this oral teaching on the basis of Aristotle’s writings about it. It doesn’t matter that Aristotle’s writings on these matters are cryptic, incomplete, and self-serving. If the esotericists’ interpretation of the Seventh Letter were correct, Aristotle could have written an entire work on Plato’s oral teaching without capturing it sufficiently for reconstruction. Indeed, if the esotericists were correct, Plato’s philosophy would have perished when he did.

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In 1812, Schleiermacher explicitly claims that Plato was the first “systematic philosopher” (1839: 98). In Schleiermacher’s defense, we should note that several eminent scholars, most notably Paul Shorey (1960) and most recently Charles Kahn (1996), have argued for unitarian interpretations of Plato’s dialogues. For a critique of Kahn’s thesis, as it is presented in his 1981, 1986, 1988a, 1988b, and 1988c, see Griswold (1990). There are innumerable examples of this approach to Plato. For some classic examples, see Vlastos (1970a, 1970b, 1991), Irwin (1977), White (1976), and Kraut (1992). Woodruff and Nehamas have suggested something similar about the Phaedrus. See Woodruff and Nehamas (1995: xlv). The easiest way to solve this problem is to challenge the late date of the Timaeus, and many scholars, beginning with Owen ([1953] 1965), have been eager to do this. Owen argued that the political philosophy of the Timaeus corresponds to the Republic, not the Laws or the Statesman, two (supposedly) undeniably late dialogues. Moreover, the reflections on astronomy also matched the Republic. Owen accepted the view that the Parmenides’ criticisms caused Plato to revise his theory of Forms, but he rejected Ryle’s claim that they were enough for him to abandon it. The evidence of stylometry was against him, however, as were arguments connecting the Timaeus with the Sophist, and the critical arguments of the Parmenides with the Republic. See Howland (1991) and Nails (1992, 1993, 1994). I have chosen the term “holistic” because the suggested alternatives, “skeptic,” “literary,” “dramatic,” and “non-doctrinal” are either too narrow or seriously misleading. “Literary” and “dramatic” imply that holists ignore Plato’s arguments, while “skeptic” and “non-doctrinal” imply that holists think Plato’s philosophy entirely lacks positive content. I don’t know of any holists who ignore Plato’s arguments or deny that Plato’s philosophy has a positive content. For examples of the holistic approach to Plato, see Friedlander (1964), Strauss (1964), Hyland (1968), Gadamer (1980), Rosen (1983), Griswold (1986), Klein (1965), Press (1993), Gonzalez (1995; 1998a), Ausland (1997), Gordon (1999), and Blondell (2002). Ausland (1997: 372n2) points out that the attention to the dialogue form is ancient, as it shows up in the Neoplatonic Anon. Prol. IV (14.1–15.50). He also cites several eighteenth- and nineteenth-century scholars who considered it seriously, such as MacFait, Schleiermacher, Gaiser, Dobson, Ast, Hegel, Heusde, Brandis, Zeller, Stein, Hirzel, and Wilamowitz. It is no surprise, therefore, that Schleiermacher suggested the Phaedrus contained the “seeds” of Plato’s entire project, which in turn led him to place the Phaedrus at the head of Plato’s corpus, the first dialogue to be read, regardless of whether it was the first dialogue composed. For an account of the holists’ interpretive confusions, see Press (1996). See Gonzalez (1995: 1–22, esp. 12–13); cf. Tigerstedt (1977: 103) and Annas (1992: 60). See Gonzalez (1998a: 1–16). For an excellent example of a holist who supplies her reader with a clear alternative to the traditional understanding of Platonism, see Gordon (1999).

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Scholars often make the mistake of assuming that because Aristotle was brilliant, and because he was Plato’s student and colleague, he couldn’t possibly have misunderstood him. But this is a horrible inference, as is clear if we consider any number of contemporary examples. Here’s one: John Searle is brilliant, and he is Hubert Dreyfus’ colleague; therefore, he must understand Dreyfus, perhaps even better than Dreyfus understands himself—just admire the analytic clarity in his writing! See Ausland (1997: 380), Gordon (1999: 7), Gonzalez (1995: 11; 1998a: 1–16), Rutherford (1995: 7–10), and Blondell (2002: 18–19). “Mystics over the centuries have never been able to convey their message solely through the positive language of presence. The paradoxical necessity of both presence and absence is one of the most important of all verbal strategies by means of which mystical transformation has been symbolized” (McGinn 1991: xviii). Schlegel also explained his choice of the fragment as the vehicle for his own philosophy in similar terms, albeit with metaphysical presuppositions derived from Kant and Fichte. The ideal romantic philosopher-artist hovers between empirical reality and its unknowable transcendental foundations. For Schlegel, philosophy aimed at reconciliation with the self-creating powers of the transcendental subject. See Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy ([1978] 1988: 39–58).

Chapter 2: Untying Schleiermacher’s Gordian Knot 1

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See White (1988: 52): “These passages would be nonsense if he did not mean to distinguish two types of episteme, one of which he does not disparage.” Cf. Gonzalez (1998a: 254, 256, 383n38): “Clearly, knowledge as a means and knowledge as the end toward which the means are directed cannot be the same thing” (254). Plato never says explicitly that the defective episteme is mediated by propositions, but it is strongly implied at 342e when he explains the deficiencies of “the four things mentioned” in terms of “the weakness of language,” which causes the means to knowledge to be exclusively focused on qualities of objects, and not their being (Ep. VII 343a). See White (1988: 253–4) and Gonzalez (1998a: 255). Cf. Gonzalez (1998a: 263) For a detailed account of these distinctions in negative theology, see Gersh (1986: 266–72). White (1988: 249) makes a similar distinction in his portrayal of Gadamer’s interpretation of Plato. See Miller (1985: 175) and Sallis (2007: 25–6, 50–2). For classic examples of this view, see Burnet (1911 and 1914), Taylor (1917–1918, 1933), Vlastos (1991: ch. 2), and Penner (1992). They also assume that we know what work was like in the Academy, when in fact we don’t know even the most basic details about the building, or if there was a building at all. See Dillon (2003: ch. 1). Zuckert (1996) provides an excellent synoptic view of many postmodern interpretations of Plato, and Hyland (2004) lays the foundations for critiquing several of them.

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In connection with these passages, Gadamer (1980) has observed that the four arguments for the immortality of the soul in the Phaedo “all have something deeply dissatisfying about them . . . The arguments themselves are unconvincing, however much the human presence of Socrates is convincing” (22). But Plato was aware of the deficiencies in his arguments. In fact, the real point of the dialogue is to illustrate the limitations of science and reason in answering existential questions. Cf. White (1988: 248–9). While White disagrees with Gadamer, he treats his view as a serious possibility warranting serious consideration. “Plato in opposition to Derrida not as a metaphysical dogmatist but as a kind of deconstructionist avant la lettre, a cunning writer fully alive to the doubleness of his rhetoric who embraces differance and who actively courts in his writing an effect of undecidability” (Halperin 1992: 118).

Chapter 3: The Context of Heidegger’s Interpretation of Plato 1 2

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See PDT 155; cf. ET 51–2. Heidegger’s later view is that, due to its openness to Being, the essence of man is open to radical transformation. “As long as man remains the animal rationale, he is the animal metaphysicum. As long as man understands himself as the rational animal, metaphysics belongs, as Kant said, to the nature of man. But if our thinking should succeed in its efforts to go back into the ground of metaphysics, it might well help to bring about a change in the human essence, a change accompanied by a transformation of metaphysics” (WMI 279). Heidegger must make this move in order to make sense of overcoming the epoch of Gestell, which would otherwise be reinforced by Dasein’s very essence. See Thomson (2001: 247); cf. Thomson (2005: 7–43, esp. 17–19). Heidegger’s emphasis on the historically fluctuating experience of truth might seem “spooky” or “mystical” to some philosophers, but it is crucial to Heidegger’s philosophical presuppositions, and it is rooted in a phenomenological analysis of everyday, ordinary experience. Being and Time was supposed to show that it is Dasein’s essence to “stand out,” on the basis of its thrown, articulated essence, into intelligibility, that is, unhiddenness, whereby Dasein becomes the there, the site, where Being is “cleared” and a World is opened up. This basic picture of the essence of man hasn’t changed in the later period (WMI 284). Geschichte des Seins merely clarifies that the intelligibility into which man stands is not fixed. This too is reflected in alêtheia, which connotes a dynamic, temporal world, not a static, eternally present one. Dasein is a kind of barometer, standing out into and registering the fluctuations of Being, whose concealed source remains an intractable, awe-inspiring, World-determining mystery. The essence of truth, therefore, is the process in virtue of which intelligibility crystallizes, breaks apart, and recrystallizes in a succession of World-determining and World-shattering epochs. And while the concealed source of unconcealment is unknowable, the fluctuations of Being are manifest as the history of the West.

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As radical as this may sound, it is not altogether different from Kuhn’s thesis in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. See Kuhn (1996: 16–18): “after discovering oxygen, Lavoisier lived in a different world . . . after Copernicus, astronomers lived in a different world.” Though not an insuperable obstacle. While philosophy “does not recall Being itself” and “does not gather itself upon its ground,” and despite the fact that it “always leaves its ground—leaves it by means of metaphysics,” it “never escapes its ground,” and so can always be recalled (WMI 278). As Heidegger says, “overcoming metaphysics” means “recalling the truth of Being” (WMI 279). In Being and Time, Heidegger argued that fundamental ontology could serve as a torchbearer for the positive sciences by enabling scientists to engage in lively philosophical debate about the ontological posits underlying their research programs. At this stage, Heidegger’s view was that science, as science, is blind to its own categories, just as the eye that sees is invisible to itself. Fundamental ontology was supposed to correct this by making the sciences aware of their foundations in unthought regional ontologies. See Thomson (2005: 104–14). In his later period, Heidegger’s project changes in its orientation, but the crucially important thought that untruth is an ineluctable feature of truth does not. For a much fuller treatment of the theme of Heidegger on nihilism, see Zimmerman (1990) and Young (2002). For detailed discussions of the changes in Heidegger’s attitude toward Plato, see Fritsche (2005) and Rockmore (2005). As I discuss in Chapter 5, Heidegger believed that, to reawaken the essence of man and renew our history, he would need a much larger stage, namely, some kind of political influence. Foucault also talks about “the great ‘paradox of Platonism,’” albeit for different, although intimately related, reasons. See Foucault (2001: 78). One of the fortuitous byproducts of this analysis is that we will see how the later Heidegger is developed out of his work on Plato. Richardson claims (in a summary of Heidegger’s thought that Heidegger himself approved of) that “Heidegger I becomes Heidegger II” in Introduction to Metaphysics (1935). As Richardson says, this is the place where “the main lines of the new position are firmly drawn” (Richardson 1977: 33). My own view is that these lines are drawn between 1931 and 1934, when Heidegger worked closely on Plato’s Republic and discovered these lines in Plato’s distinction between the Forms and the Good beyond Being. If I am correct about this, it would make sense that Heidegger’s transformation of the Platonic categories into his own philosophical vocabulary occurred just one year later.

Chapter 4: Heidegger’s Platonism 1

While, in 1940, Heidegger still thinks the cave allegory illustrates the essence of “real” education, his emphasis in “Plato’s Doctrine of Truth” is on the “transformation in the essence of truth that becomes the hidden law governing what the thinker says” (PDT 167) and the “distinguishing mark of what is later called ‘metaphysics’” and “humanism” (PDT 180–1).

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See Safranski (1998: 233); cf. Bambach (2003: 70): “Caught in the mood of euphoric self-renewal . . . Heidegger . . . interpreted the events of early 1933 not as a political transfer of power, but as an epochal shift within being itself, a radical awakening from the slumbers of Weimar politics as usual.” As Heidegger says in a letter to Blochmann in March of 1933, Germans must prepare themselves “for a second, more profound revolution.” Cf. ET 21–2 See ET 60; cf. Thomson (2005: 106). If one denies that the concept of “historicity” is implicit in these lectures, it is impossible to make sense of Heidegger’s view that we approach Plato, just as we approach the pre-Socratics, from a defective understanding of Being (ET 10–11), that our defective understanding of Being is caused by changes in the essence of truth (ET 87), that this has left “our Dasein impoverished” (ET 11), that the modern period was initiated by the projection of a new worldview according to which reality was best understood as “a spatio-temporally determined totality of movement of masspoints” (ET 45), that “the question of the essence of truth is the history of man’s essence” (ET 84), and that the aim of the lecture course, like the aim of his university reform plans, was “to make a testimony to alêtheia come alive for us . . . so that we can arrive in this same domain . . . we strove for a return into history, such that this becomes our occurrence, such that our own history is renewed” (ET 85). If these claims do not express the idea that our understanding and experience of what entities are changes, what does? If we return to the perspective of Being and Time, we can understand this stage as the moment when Dasein becomes free for itself, since “comportment to . . . the light is itself becoming free . . . To become free now means to see in the light . . . such that the view becomes an illuminating view . . . In this comportment I am able to be authentically free (eigentlich frei sein)” (ET 43). That Heidegger is not equating Being as such with the Being of beings in this passage should become abundantly clear when we get to Heidegger’s lecture on the Good, where he distinguishes the Good from the other Forms. I discuss the connection between Heidegger’s “Appropriation” and Plato’s sun analogy below. In his later period, Heidegger explains the nature of Being as such in the same language, although he changes his mind on one important matter. See the “Letter on Humanism” (LH 238–40), where Being is described as the giver, and Time and Being, where Being itself is said to be given with time (TB 8–10). Heidegger’s name for this co-opening of man and world in his Beiträge (1936–38) and Time and Being (1960) is Ereignis. See Young (2002: 16): “while [the Being of beings] is the transcendental ground of our world of beings, Being [as such], as the generative ground of [the Being of beings], is its generative ground.” See also (2002: 15): “[The Being of beings] is the ‘condition of the possibility’ of our apprehension of beings, as the visual field is the ‘condition of the possibility’ of our apprehension of visual objects . . . [whereas] Being [as such] is the ‘ground’ of [the Being of beings].” See Sallis (2007: 30): “For to ask ‘What is . . .?’ is to presuppose both the what and the is, whereas the ancient, founding discourse declares the good beyond being;

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and it determines the good as that which first enables the what and as that which therefore first makes it possible to interrogate things by asking what they are.” Here we can see why the sharp division that some people draw between Heidegger’s Dasein-centric early philosophy and his Being-centric later thought is mistaken. Heidegger thinks the question of the essence of truth is a question about the history of man’s essence. As he says in these lectures, “insofar as both questions are posed, questioning goes out beyond them in asking what empowers both being and truth in their essence, as that which carries the essence of human existence. The essence of truth as alêtheia is de-concealment, in which occurs the history of man’s essence . . . the question of the essence of truth is the question of the history of man’s essence” (ET 83). He says the same thing much later in his career: the question of Being asks after “the hidden nature of truth” (DT 83). “Truth, in other words, is not something one abidingly possesses, and whose enjoyment we put aside at some point in order to instruct or lecture other people, but unhiddenness occurs only in the history of permanent freeing” (ET 66). In his lecture on the Good, Heidegger says that to know is to appropriate what is known in the proper way, and to ever again appropriate it by continually taking the same path back and forth (ET 73). This is why Heidegger, following Plato’s view in the Seventh Letter, insists that Being as such can only be brought into view by “the method of stepwise philosophical questioning” (ET 71). In these lectures, therefore, if not in his earlier lectures on the Sophist, Heidegger seems to have recognized that Plato’s method was rooted in his commitment to the finitude of man and the consequent need to remain open to what is concealed in every mode of knowing and comportment. Cf. ET 20, 22, 23, 28, 32. For discussions of Socrates’ strangeness, see Hadot (1995: 158), Friedlander (1964: 80), Nightingale (1995: 42–3), Howland (1998: 46–8), Barabas (1986), Blondell (2002: 73–4), and Kahn (1996: 69). Anyone familiar with Heidegger’s work on Plato should be well aware of Heidegger’s claim that Plato was the first ontotheological thinker: “Throughout the whole history of philosophy, Plato’s thinking remains decisive in changing forms. Metaphysics is Platonism” (TB 57). Given our reading of Heidegger’s lectures on the cave allegory, however, this well-known claim should seem a lot less obvious, and even puzzling. Heidegger hasn’t discovered the ontotheological constitution of metaphysics by 1927, but he discusses a related idea: “Dasein is inclined to fall back upon its world (the world in which it is) and to interpret itself in terms of that world by its reflected light, but also . . . Dasein simultaneously falls prey to the tradition of which it has more or less taken hold” (BT 42). It is out of respect for the ineffability of the Good that Heidegger sticks so closely to Plato’s metaphor of light throughout his interpretation of the allegory. We should also note Heidegger’s focus on what is phenomenologically warranted. Instead of making metaphysical claims about the nature of the objects one encounters as one moves in and out of the cave, Heidegger speaks of gradations of unconcealment, brightness and darkness, the transcendental conditions for experience, liberation from the ordinary and re-attunement to the world. The details of Heidegger’s argument in “Plato’s Doctrine of Truth” are too well known to warrant repeating here. The same might be said about the many

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problems with Heidegger’s reasoning in this peculiar essay. However, because the shift in Heidegger’s attitude toward Plato between 1931 and 1940 is important to my argument in the next chapter, I would like briefly to discuss a few of the most important objections. The list of specific criticisms is long, but the consistent complaint is that Heidegger is wrong to give the cave allegory what Galston calls a “one-sidedly epistemological” interpretation that ignores or minimizes the role of the Good, which is beyond being, as the concealed source of unconcealment and the mysterious ontological precondition for epistemological truth. See Rosen (1967: 490), Galston (1982: 371), Dostal (1985: 80–1), Hyland (1995: 139; 2004: 53–64), Zuckert (1996: 51), Peperzak (1997: 103), and Gonzalez (2002: 376n41; 2008). Dostal (1985: 72) observes that Friedlander, Heidegger’s colleague at Marburg, was the first to raise this objection to Heidegger’s interpretation of Plato. As Dostal explains this criticism, the problem with Heidegger’s interpretation is not the suggestion that both epistemological and ontological tendencies exist in Plato’s account of truth. “They surely do. My complaint is that Heidegger does not deal with them more sympathetically. In fact, these two aspects of truth are just the two that Heidegger in Being and Time recognizes as necessary for any account of truth” (Dostal 1985: 81). Cf. Berti (2005: 102), Gonzalez (2008), and Galston (1982: 373): “[Heidegger’s] contention that the allegory moves from one theory of truth to another . . . ignores the unity of the Platonic view.” One of the most puzzling features of “Plato’s Doctrine of Truth” is that, on this extremely important point, it contradicts Heidegger’s earlier view in his lecture courses. In 1931–32, Heidegger suggests that the cave represents degrees of disclosure, and he argues that the highest degree of disclosure enables one to see more correctly. But he is very careful to underscore that orthotes is grounded in alêtheia: “Truth as correctness is grounded in truth as unhiddenness . . . Truth as correctness of assertion is quite impossible without truth as the unhiddenness of beings.” Plato allows us to see the “connection between . . . these two concepts of truth for the first time” (ET 26). Other scholars have observed an important kinship between the thought of Heidegger and Plato, which Heidegger seems to have recognized and consciously suppressed. See Hyland (1995: 143; 2004: 54), Zuckert (1996: 51), Rosen (1967: 478), Dostal (1985:83), Peperzak (1997: 94, 98–9, 104), Sallis (2007: 17), and Hankey (2004: 435): “Largely, but not exclusively, the most effective criticism of Heidegger’s ‘history’ of metaphysics is that it leaves out Neoplatonism. Significantly, the Being of Heidegger, of everything else in the history of philosophy, most resembles the Neoplatonic One or Good.” As Hankey observes, Hadot, who argues that Heidegger’s thought is “une sorte de neo-platonisme,” may have been the first to see this. See Hadot (1959: 540–2), quoted in Hankey (2004: 436n28). One might think this sets the bar too high for Heidegger because he was interested in the historical effect of Plato’s philosophy, not Plato’s intention. But there are at least two problems with such an argument. First, this is not Heidegger’s view in his 1940 essay, in the opening paragraph of which he says explicitly that he is interested in Plato’s unstated doctrine of truth: “the ‘doctrine’ of a thinker is that which, within what is said, remains unsaid, that to which we are exposed so that we might expend ourselves on it . . . What remains unsaid in Plato’s thinking is a change in what determines the essence of truth” (PDT 155, emphasis added).

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Second, this is not Heidegger’s strategy in his interpretation of the preSocratics, to whom he turns for evidence of a fundamentally different relation to Being at the inception of Western thought. Heidegger is not at all interested in the historical effect of their thought—the tradition has misunderstood and distorted their testimony to a fundamental experience of Being as alêtheia, and his task is to recover this long lost experiential insight from the forgetfulness of the tradition. My argument is that Heidegger could have found better evidence in Plato’s thought, but only if he had read Plato sympathetically against the tradition, as he did in the early 1930s, and as he did with the pre-Socratics. As Rosen argues, “Plato recognizes the difference between Being and beings, between the light and what is uncovered or illuminated. For this reason, Plato sought to avoid a speech which would temporalize, objectify, or rationalize Being itself” (1967: 482).

Chapter 5: Nihilism: Heidegger’s Crisis and Opportunity 1

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Predictably this debate has divided into warring camps. Some argue that the relationship between Heidegger’s philosophy and politics is direct, and that we should therefore condemn Heidegger’s thought to the graveyard of bad and dangerous ideas. See, for example, Wolin (1990), Farias (1989), and Bourdieu (1991). Others say there is no philosophically damning relationship here. See Rorty (1988: 31–4), Schürmann (1990), Olafson (1998: 13), and Gadamer (1989: 428). Others agree. See Taminiaux (1997: 45, 49) and Schmidt (2002: 162–3). Cf. Lilla (2001: 44). Several commentators have picked up on the theme of world-historical crisis in Heidegger’s Rectoral Address. For excellent examples, see Young (1997: 11–51), Sluga (1993: 23–8), Zimmerman (1990: 34–45), and Safranski (1998: 225–47). For a view closer to mine, where Heidegger’s Address is directly linked to Nietzsche’s analysis of nihilism and Heidegger’s earlier view that the origins of nihilism must be traced back to Plato, see Bambach (2003: 89–90) and Zimmerman (1990: 21). For additional examples of philosophical discussions of Heidegger’s Address, see Scott (1991), Fehér (1992), Fynsk (1993), Crowell (1997), and Milchman and Rosenberg (1997). According to Berghahn, “the development of modern Germany is best understood against the background of the Industrial Revolution which affected Central Europe with full force in the final decades of the nineteenth century . . . [N]owhere else in Europe did the transition from an economy based on agriculture to one dominated by industry occur with the same rapidity as in Germany. Inevitably, the Industrial Revolution also had a profound effect on social structures, on lifestyles and political behavior of people as well as on their perceptions of the world around them. These, too, changed more rapidly in Germany than in other European countries.” See Berghahn (1982: 1), quoted in Zimmerman (1990: 7), who illustrates Berghahn’s thesis by observing that, “from 1880 to 1913,

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German coal output quadrupled; during the same period, steel production increased tenfold and outstripped British production by 1913.” Zimmerman (1990: 22) observes that, in addition to revealing something new about the ontological structures of Dasein, Heidegger’s descriptions of everydayness in Being and Time were “critical evaluations of everyday life in industrial urban society.” See Bambach (2003: 77); cf. Thomson (2005: 104–14). Heidegger was not unique in believing the nation could be restructured via radical university reform. See Sluga (1993: 201). For an excellent discussion of Fichte’s influence on Heidegger’s thinking about German exceptionalism, see Sluga (1993: esp. 29–52); cf. Bambach (2003: 72, 74, 85–6, 99). I tend to agree with Bambach’s assessment of Heidegger’s Rectoral Address as “a kind of philosophical manifesto for Heidegger, containing in nuce the broad outlines of his sweeping history of Being and mythic vision of a German Sonderweg rooted in a profound affiliation with the Greeks” (Bambach 2003: 70). However, if Heidegger intended his address to put his colleagues’ concerns at ease, he vastly overestimated his skills as a communicator. By the end of his speech, “the listener was in doubt as to whether he should start reading the pre-Socratics or enlist in the SA” (Löwith 1988: 125). This is challenging rhetoric. In order to avoid getting lost in it, we can think of Heidegger as recommending something highly intelligible, namely, that we recover a sense of philosophy that is practiced as a way of life, a philosophy that “is a conversion which turns our entire life upside-down, changing the life of the person who goes through it,” thanks to a “philosophical act that is not situated merely on the cognitive level, but on that of the self and of being,” that is, a philosophy that is fundamentally Greek in character. See Hadot (1995: 83). For a very strong statement of the mindset that Heidegger rejects, see Friedman’s The World is Flat, especially chapter seven, “The Quiet Crisis” (2005: 250–75). Heidegger would share Friedman’s frustration with a society that primarily values wealth, and he would endorse Friedman’s call for talented young people to pursue careers in the pure sciences rather than only medicine, law, and investment banking, the three professions where one acquires maximum wealth and thus maximum social status. Cf. Bambach (2003: 99). But Heidegger would reject Friedman’s objectives. In “The Quiet Crisis,” Friedman argues that Americans need another Kennedy, a president who encourages Americans to study science, engineering, and mathematics so that the United States can continue to lead the world as the economic and technological superpower, not for the sake of discovering truth and changing our relationship with the world we exploit. Friedman’s concerns are surely shared by many Americans, and Heidegger, I think, would find that revealing. Cf. Harris (2004: 109, 132, 133, 147). This thesis is no different in principle from Heidegger’s later account of metaphysics as ontotheology, according to which metaphysics “grounds an age” by “articulating intelligibility, telling us what and who we are, what beings are, and how they exist. Even in 1919, in other words, Heidegger was aware of the

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problems with worldview philosophies, and determined to provide such metaphysical theories with a non-metaphysical foundation. Guignon makes this point much more forcefully. As he says, the fact that Heidegger “was largely ignored by the Nazis makes his dream of a life-transforming ‘natural religion’ almost pathetic” (Guignon 1993: 36). For an illuminating and original discussion of Heidegger’s indebtedness to Nietzsche’s second Untimely Meditation in Being and Time, see Taminiaux (1991: 175–89). For an insightful discussion of these issues in Heidegger’s thought, see Zimmerman (1990: 3–93). On Nietzsche’s view, Plato’s otherworldly metaphysics and eschatology, the centrality of the derivative doctrine of salvation in Christianity, and even Kant’s location of the moral subject in the noumenal realm—these dominant metaphysical views, despite their doctrinal differences, are equally life-denying because each has a story to tell about this world’s imperfections and impurities with respect to a supersensible origin, destination, or thing in itself. Cf. Guignon (2004: 32). In addition to citing this helpful metaphor, Safranski suggests that Nietzsche could easily criticize Heidegger’s “Being merely as a Platonic behind-world offered to us for protection and safety” (306). Since Heidegger seems to attribute agency to Being in his later period, and because he must make Being (and not Dasein) an important contributor in the production of meaning, he is certainly open to this Nietzschean criticism. See Richardson (1977: 23): “Nietzsche fails . . . to overcome metaphysical nihilism. In fact, he adds to its momentum, for to the extent that superman responds to the exigencies of Being conceived as Will-unto-Power, he seeks (and must) domination over the earth.”

Chapter 6: Heidegger and the Greeks: Revolutionary Thinker or Utopian Social Engineer? 1 2 3

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Quoted in Young (2002: 56). Quoted in Kisiel (1993: 233). Cf. Kuhn (1996) on “The Priority of Paradigms” (43–51), “Crisis and the Emergence of Scientific Theories” (66–76), and “The Response to Crisis” (77–91). Thomson (2005: 116, 117). I generally agree with Thomson’s account of Heidegger’s plans for university reform. However, he and I attribute different primary meanings to the term “fundamental ontology.” I believe it refers primarily to the analytic of Dasein, whereas Thomson suggests that it refers primarily to a “transhistorically binding” fundamental understanding of being, one that fulfills a foundationalist role insofar as it grounds the regional ontologies of the positive sciences (ibid., 116–18). Both meanings are correct insofar as Heidegger used the term in both senses. But the former is used more often (see BT 33–5, 61, 170, 196, 238, 244, 256, 275, 313, 348, 358, 364, 429) and more decisively: “fundamental ontology, from which alone all other ontologies can take their rise, must be sought in the existential

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analytic of Dasein . . . the ontological analytic of Dasein in general is what makes up fundamental ontology” (BT 34–5). Moreover, in Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics Heidegger defines fundamental ontology straightforwardly as “the metaphysics of Dasein” (KPM 162). At other points in the Being and Time, however, fundamental ontology refers to the study of the meaning of Being in general for which the Dasein-analytic is preparatory: “the analytic of Dasein is to prepare the way for the problematic of fundamental ontology—the question of the meaning of Being in general ” (BT 227). And while Heidegger never makes the turn to the question of Being as such in Being and Time, he concedes on the penultimate page of his text that, “our way of exhibiting the constitution of Dasein’s Being remains only one way which we may take” (BT 487). For a helpful discussion of Heidegger’s confusion on this point see Guignon (1992: 66). There is no need for us to be confused on this point, however. The reason for Dasein’s priority in the question of Being is straightforward: any understanding of Being that fulfills a foundationalist role by grounding the regional ontologies of the positive sciences will necessarily be an understanding of Being for Dasein, and as such it will be parasitic upon Dasein’s way of Being, namely, its temporality. Fundamental ontology, therefore, asks about the ontological preconditions that determine the categories in terms of which Dasein has understood, and continues to understand, the Being of entities. Regardless of which meaning we privilege, it is a mistake to think Heidegger believed the meaning of Being in general could be cashed out in terms of a heretofore unrecognized substance, a metaphysical conception to which we tread dangerously close with the notion of a “substantive,” transhistorically binding, foundationalist ontology that grounds the sciences’ regional ontologies (Thomson 2005: 122). “The way to anticipate the latter thought on the destiny of Being from the perspective of Being and Time is to think through what was presented in Being and Time about the dismantling of the ontological doctrine of the Being of beings” (TB 9).

Chapter 7: Back from Syracuse? Four Reasons to Rethink Heidegger’s Politics 1 2

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See also Taminiaux (1997: 49), Young (1997: 19), and Bambach (2003: 105). See Bloom (1968: 309, 380–432) and Strauss (1964: 65); cf. Guthrie (1969: 469), Annas (1981: 185–9), Hyland (1995: 59–86), and Rosen (1965: 460). For a strong statement of the view that Plato’s political proposals were sincere, see Popper (1962: 153) and Burnyeat (1992). For a detailed critique of Popper, see Barrow (1975). Annas’ view is close to my own. She suggests, “it does not matter if the just society is an unattainable ideal, as long as it does serve as an ideal for the just person to try to realize in his or her life” (185). The same goes for Schmidt and Heidegger’s other apologists who wish to defend Heidegger’s philosophy by insulating it from the charges that it led to his own catastrophic political decisions.

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See Strauss (1964: 61, 116); cf. Bloom (1968: 380–1) and Burnyeat (1992: 302–8). Cf. Randall (1973: 116). Bloom (1968: 409); cf. Hyland (1995: 73n70) and Rosen (1965: 468). See Strauss (1964: 116–17) and Bloom (1968: 382); cf. Hyland (1995: 73, 74). Bloom (1968: 403); cf. Strauss (1964: 124) and Voegelin (2000: 88, 116–17). The most famous of such responses to Strauss is Burnyeat’s 1985 New York Review article, in which Burnyeat claims, “Strauss’ interpretation of Plato is wrong from beginning to end,” and, to be taken seriously, requires the “surrender of the critical intellect” (Burnyeat 1985: 35–6). For an excellent discussion of the problems with Burnyeat’s criticisms, see Smith (2000). See Strauss (1964: 116–17) and Bloom (1968: 382); cf. Hyland (1995: 73, 74). Of course, Strauss also argues that the Republic contains a hidden paradox because the philosophers, who won’t want to rule, have to persuade the demos, who despise philosophers, to persuade them to persuade the demos to let them rule, which is absurd. See Strauss (1964: 124); cf. Bloom (1968: 407). It’s a vicious circle. The opposition between city and state, therefore, seems irreconcilable. Burnyeat’s famous rejection of Strauss’ interpretation of the Republic is based entirely on these passages from City and Man, which he calls “sheer invention on Strauss’ part” (Burnyeat 1985: 36). For a detailed response to Burnyeat, see Ferrari (1997: 36–65). I do not intend to enter this debate here. Cf. Voegelin (2000: 88). It’s an uncommon metaphor for knowledge, to be sure (it certainly makes the ocular metaphor seem stuffy by comparison), but the idea is that philosophers commune with and become like the divine objects they contemplate (Rep. 500c). See Gerson (2005: 166–89). Cf. Lilla (2001: 212). Cf. Annas (1981: 187): “[F]or him justice in the state is an all-or-nothing affair, [while] individual justice is a matter of degree: one can be more or less just, and can improve gradually.” Dodds (1951: 215–16) links this passage to Plato’s firsthand experience with wasted political potential in Athens and Syracuse. For a similar list of qualities, see Alcibiades I: beauty (104a), courage (115d7), high birth (104b), wealth (104c), rhetorical talents (113d6–8). See Voegelin (2000: 80–1). See Gribble (1999: 241). For a discussion of the theme of self-knowledge in the so-called early Platonic dialogues, see Annas (1985: 111–38); cf. Johnson (1999: 1–19). The general view in Alcibiades I is that we obtain self-knowledge after progressing through the following stages: first we are supposed to identify ourselves with our souls (Alc. I 129b–130d), then with the divine part of the soul, and finally with the divine intellect, which is God (Alc. I 132c–133c). Cf. Gribble (1999: 177, 209) and Forde (1989: 8). Pericles is a significant contrast to Alcibiades in another respect as well: he advised the Athenians not to engage in any new conquests during the Peloponnesian War (Thuc. 1.143, 2.65). See also Gorgias 483ac. “The pessimistic conclusion of the Republic . . . is that no teacher has a chance of persuading the philosophical phusis against the powerful attraction of the city” (Gribble 1999: 241; cf. 243–5). Cf. Ep. VII 330e–331a. If a society is corrupt to the

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point that it is incorrigible, a self-respecting philosopher “would break off counseling” it, just as a self-respecting doctor would stop seeing a patient who refused to obey his orders (Ep. VII 330d). Cf. Lilla (2001: 194). I am indebted to Gonzalez (2003) for thinking of Heidegger’s politics in connection with the cave allegory this way. See Wolin (1990: 49). Cf. Bambach (2003: 83): “For those who became seduced by the political opportunities of the present and who missed the essentially ‘futural’ meaning of the National Socialist revolution, Heidegger had little patience.” Cf. Bloom (1968: 403). Cf. Lilla (2001: 46): “What [Jaspers] thought [he and Heidegger] shared in the early years of their friendship was the conviction that philosophy was a means of wresting one’s existence from the grip of the commonplace and assuming responsibility for it. Then he saw a new tyrant enter his friend’s soul, a wild passion that misled him into supporting the worst of political dictatorships and then enticed him into intellectual sorcery.”

Chapter 8: How Heidegger Should Have Read Plato 1

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If Heidegger had considered the historical context of Plato’s writing, he might have seen various parallels with his own time. Just as Heidegger’s political thought was, in part, a response to Nietzsche’s discovery that God was dead, Plato was arguably responding to the fact that Athens had discarded the traditional restraints of justice and divine law, and the unparalleled power this afforded her. See Forde (1989: 38; cf. 47, 150). As McGuinn observes, “if society is out of joint,” for Plato “it can only be because humanity’s whole attitude toward the universe and its divine source was in need of repair” (1991: 25). See Zimmerman (1981: 224): “Apparently, man can only be freed from his worldmobilizing will to power if he can somehow cease to view reality as something which is his to control as he sees fit.” In this respect Plato is closer to Nietzsche than he is to Heidegger, since Nietzsche postulated the death of God and the Will to Power as the engines driving the shift in the West’s center of gravity, making people do things for money that they once did for God (D §204). That is to say, both Nietzsche and Plato posit the existence of a deep, seemingly intractable motivating drive (eros for Plato, Will to Power for Nietzsche) in addition to concepts to explain human behavior, whereas Heidegger seems to think human behavior can be exhaustively explained in terms of the understanding of Being. These chilling words come from a commodities broker named Carlton Brown who is quoted in Joel Bakan’s The Corporation. As he continues, the nihilism of his worldview becomes even clearer: “[September 11th] was a blessing in disguise . . . for my clients that were in the gold market. They all made money” (Bakan 2004: 111).

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For discussions of “individualism” as a characteristic of Periclean Athens, see Gribble (1999: 172), Forde (1989: 29), Finley (1942: 301), and Cochrane (1965: 23). It is notable that Thucydides never argues that the Sicilian expedition was wrong, or that it was a mistake. His only complaint is that it was “poorly carried out” (Forde 1989: 14). Forde also observes that “daring” (tolma) is reserved almost exclusively for describing Athens, Athenian acts, and the Athenian character. “It is practically a technical term” (Forde 1989: 18), although it is also ascribed to the Syracusans as they defeat the Athenians (6.69, 7.21, 8.96). Vickers (2008: 153–75) argues persuasively that Callicles, who is “not heard of in Athenian politics outside of the Gorgias,” is a mask for Alcibiades. Cf. Dodds (1951: 215–16): “I think we have to recognize two strains or tendencies in Plato’s thinking about the status of man. There is the faith and pride in human reason which he inherited from the fifth century, and for which he found religious sanction by equating reason with the occult self of the shamanistic tradition. And there is the bitter recognition of human worthlessness which was forced upon him by his experience of contemporary Athens and Syracuse.” “Alcibiades’ ambitions seem to represent political ambition as such—ambition in its purest and most uninhibited form” (Forde 1992: 17). Voegelin (2000: 39). Pericles describes the Athenian triumph over the Persians as a turning point in Athens’ history, and he attributes Athens’ success to the “daring” of the Athenians who fought “the barbarian” (Thuc. 1.144). The Athenian representatives who spoke to the Spartan assembly about the Persian war make many of the same points as they celebrate the greatness of their city and recount the birth of its daring character (Thuc. 1.74). See Forde’s account of the relationship between Thucydides’ presentation of Alcibiades and the character of Athenian imperialism (Forde 1989: 6–8, 17, 47–9, 68–70, 208). Gribble (1999) suggests that Alcibiades can be strongly felt in the background of both the Gorgias and the Republic (217), and he argues that the Gorgias in particular “mirrors the trial of Socrates itself, becoming a trial or agon of two opposing ways of life” (231). I share this approach to the Gorgias and the Republic. Cf. Gribble (1999: 175): “the seeds of the Athenian defeat were already latent in the political system and the characteristics praised in the Funeral Speech.” Scholars are unsure whether, or to what extent, Thucydides influenced Plato. Rutherford (1995: 66) observes that this is primarily because we don’t know exactly when Thucydides’ history was made available to the public. Hornblower (1987: ch. 5) speculates that Thucydides actually knew Socrates. At the very least, Plato seems to have been influenced by Thucydides, either through Socrates or through carefully studying Thucydides’ work. For example, they offer similar accounts of the rhetorical prowess and tyrannical ambitions of Alcibiades, Athenian imperialism and empire-building, and the political ideology embodied in Plato’s Callicles and Thrasymachus (Rutherford 1995: 67; cf. Gribble 1999: 236; Forde 1992: 10, 30). Moreover, they both blame the demos for corrupting those who are most qualified to lead. On the relationship between Plato’s Alcibiades and Thucydides’, see Gribble (1999: 246). It is tempting to believe that Plato did read Thucydides’ work, and

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that he agreed with Thucydides’ claim to have discovered a “permanent truth” in the ebb and flow of the war. Consider Thucydides’ attempt to explain the causes of the war with an account of the Athenian character and “its grounding in permanent and universal human traits. One of these is the erotic passion seen at the moment of the Sicilian expedition” (Forde 1989: 17). Apart from the idea that the Athenian character is a product of permanent and universal human traits, Plato would surely agree with Thucydides’ character-based account of the war’s deepest causes, and he would also appreciate Thucydides’ reflections on the compatibility or incompatibility between politics and individuals with great abilities. “In [Plato’s] thinking, Alcibiades becomes a symbol of the inevitability of the conflict between philosopher and society” (Gribble 1999: 245). Commentators since Plutarch (Plut. Alc. 4.1) have associated this passage with the historical Alcibiades. Annas (1981: 187) asserts that there is no such reference here, but she provides no reasons for her view. Adam (1902: 25) reviews the history of commentary on this passage and agrees with the ancient historians who see Alcibiades’ likeness clearly reflected in it. Friedlander expands on Adam, suggesting Alcibiades I is integrated in the Republic as well (Friedlander 1964: 110). Lee (1974: 290n2) argues that Plato had himself in mind as he described the philosophical type. I am happy with this disagreement, because it seems perfectly reasonable to hedge our bets on this question and suggest that Plato had himself and Alcibiades in mind, in part because he saw so many reflections of himself in Alcibiades. There are several examples of the Periclean style of leadership in Thucydides that Plato would have found objectionable, given his opposition to imperialistic wars of conquest. Consider Pericles’ strategy for raising the spirits of Athens as it suffers from the war and the plague: he gives them hope by inviting them to imagine the true reach of their naval power (Thuc. 2.62). Earlier in the same speech, he argues that self-interest, and in particular concern for one’s own welfare, make one a better citizen (2.60). Cf. Hadot (1995: 163). For a discussion of eros in Thucydides’ account of Alcibiades, see Forde (1989: 31, 41, 148). Cf. Forde (1989: 68, 169). Gribble suggests that the Socratics in general depicted Alcibiades in conversation with Socrates because it enabled them to give Socratic philosophy an overtly political stage. “The confrontation between Alcibiades and Socrates was used to illustrate the direct political relevance of Socratic ethical analysis, and the consequences of the failure to pursue philosophy . . . In Plato . . . Alcibiades becomes a means of exploring the relationship between philosophy and the political life and between the philosopher and the city” (Gribble 1999: 216). See Voegelin (2000: 24): “‘War and battle’ are the opening words of the Gorgias, and the declaration of war against the corrupt society is its content. The battle is engaged in as a struggle for the soul of the younger generation. Who will form the future leaders of the polity: the rhetor who teaches the tricks of political success, or the philosopher who creates the substance in soul and society?” Heidegger’s analysis of the remedy for das Gestell implies that the problem of will to power, the West’s penchant for treating the world as a gigantic gasoline station, will disappear when we understand Being differently. Like many of us, Plato would consider this wishful thinking.

192 23

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Cf. Brickhouse and Smith (1994: 139). Socrates makes this incompatibility very clear: “Because of this occupation, I do not have the leisure to engage in public affairs to any extent, nor indeed to look after my own, but I live in great poverty because of my service to the god” (Ap. 23b).

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Index

Alcibiades as Callicles 190n8 contrasted with Pericles 189n20 as embodiment of Periclean Athens 163, 165–70, 190n10, 190n13, 191n15 Heidegger as 155–6 as inverted image of Socrates 167, 170–2 and Plato’s choice to write dialogues 28, 40, 42–3, 48 and Plato’s politics 146–9, 158, 163, 165, 167, 172–4, 188n17, 191n16, 191n17, 191n20 and self-knowledge 188n19 in the Symposium 16, 162 alêtheia the ancient Greek experience of truth as 58 Being as 54, 58–60, 82, 99, 131, 135, 179n4, 184n24 and the essence of man 74, 182n14 nihilism and 58, 95, 115, 133, 152 Plato’s experience of 58–60, 62–4, 85, 89, 91–2, 95, 116, 181n5, 183n22 Plato’s transformation of 63, 95 and the purpose of philosophy 116, 123, 133, 158, 161, 181n5 Annas, J. 176n4, 177n17, 187n2, 188n2, 188n15, 188n19, 191n17 anxiety 51 Arcesilaus 6 Arendt, H. 170–2 Aristotle 16 and the dogmatic interpretation of Plato 21

and the esoteric interpretation of Plato 9, 176n6 Heidegger’s phenomenological appropriation of 120–7 and Heidegger’s philosophy 50, 52, 87 and Heidegger’s politics 97, 102, 120–5, 138 and the holistic interpretation of Plato 21 and Plato’s metaphysics 14 on Plato’s unwritten doctrine 5, 176n5 atheism 97–8, 109, 112 Augustine, St. 6, 20, 176n3 Ausland, H. 21, 177n14, 178n20 authenticity and Heidegger’s politics 123, 126, 136 and Plato’s experience of truth as alêtheia 86 Bakan, J. 190n5 Bambach, C. 115, 181n2, 184n4, 185n7, 185n9, 185n10, 185n12, 187n1, 189n26 Being belonging together with man 54, 78–80, 84, 90, 181n10 as concealed source of unconcealment 27, 49, 72, 83, 89, 92–4, 179n4, 183n22 as empowerment 78, 80, 82–4 forgetfulness of 49, 52–9, 60, 91, 99, 112–17, 120, 133 history of 52–9, 63–4, 70, 83, 86 and the metaphysics of presence 54, 55, 56, 58, 72, 84, 125, 133 as mystery 47, 76, 80–3, 94, 99, 159, 160, 179n4

208

Index

Being (Cont’d) philosophical questioning and 51, 56–7, 76–7, 80, 85, 91–3, 99, 101–6, 117–18, 126, 128, 134, 182n14, 182n16 pre-modeling projection of 73, 80 pre-ontological understanding of 66, 125, 132, 134 presencing 54–6, 58, 73, 82, 174 as process 54, 56, 58, 60, 65, 99, 115, 179n4 question of 66, 100, 126, 127, 129, 131, 135 as such 55, 57–8, 60, 63, 66, 72, 75–6, 78, 81–9, 101, 114–15, 152, 155, 157, 181n7, 181n9, 182n16, 187n4 Blochmann, Elizabeth, Heidegger’s correspondence with 62, 95, 181n2 Blondell, R. 16–18, 177n14, 178n20, 182n18 Bloom, A. 139, 140, 187n2, 188n4, 188n6, 188n7, 188n8, 188n10, 189n27 Bubner, R. 22, 24 Burnyeat, M. 188n2, 188n4, 188n9, 188n10 Carneades 6 closure, philosophy as the pursuit of 5, 20, 44, 55–7 Crowell, S. 185n4 Dasein, analytic of 51, 63, 130, 153, 187n4 death of God 97–8, 101, 107, 111–12, 115, 117, 189n4 Dennett, D. 4, 5, 20, 44 Descartes, R. 113–14 dialectic 132 and Platonic philosophical knowledge 30–3, 47, 59 and Plato’s philosophy 8, 17, 24, 27, 41 Dillon, J. 176n2, 176n4, 178n7 Diogenes Laertius 5 Dionysius II 28, 37, 39, 43, 91, 94, 137, 149, 151 Diotima 16, 24, 30, 36, 114, 120, 141, 161, 162, 172

Dodds, E. R. 34, 42, 158, 163, 188n16, 190n9 Dostal, R. J. 183n22 Dreyfus, H. 178n19 education Heidegger on 86, 90, 101, 104, 120, 174, 180n1 enframing see Gestell Ereignis 182n11 see event of Appropriation event of appropriation 76–7, 80, 81, 84–5, 181n8 Farias, V. 184n1 Fichte 23, 101, 178n22, 185n9 Findlay, J. N. 19, 45, 49 Forde, S. 189n1, 189n20, 190n6, 191n15, 191n19, 191n20 on Alcibiades as embodiment of Periclean Athens 166–7, 190n13 on the Sicilian Expedition 169, 190n7, 190n10, 191n16 Forms, Plato’s theory of 28, 35, 42, 47, 142, 151, 177n12 and Alcibiades’ philosophical development 40 and the developmental interpretation of Plato’s philosophy 14, 44, 177n12 and dialectic 27 Heidegger’s interpretation of 63, 66–7, 71–87, 90, 93, 180n12, 181n7 and Heidegger’s interpretation of ancient Greek philosophy 121 and the holistic interpretation of Plato’s philosophy 19 and Platonism 47 and Plato’s politics 138–43 and the Seventh Letter 29–30, 32–3 Foucault, M. 38, 45, 59, 89, 90, 91, 122, 180n11 freedom Heidegger on 90–1, 100–2, 126, 133, 136, 160, 173, 181n6, 182n15, 189n3 in Plato’s cave allegory 66–71, 76–8, 85, 87

Index Friedlander, P. 41, 177n14, 182n18, 183n22, 191n17 Friedman, T. 185n12, 186n12 fundamental ontology 120, 125, 127, 130–3, 136, 180n7, 187n4 Funeral Oration 164–5 Gadamer, H. G. 21, 32, 47, 97, 137, 177n14, 178n4, 179n9, 179n10, 184n1 German idealism 23, 100 Gerson, L. 140, 176n4, 188n13 Gestell 57, 58, 70, 159, 160, 169, 179n2, 192n22 Gonzalez, F. 176n4, 177n14, 177n17, 177n18, 178n20, 178n2, 178n3, 183n22 on the gap between philosophy and politics in Plato’s Republic 142 on Heidegger’s politics 152–3, 189n24 on the holistic interpretation of Plato 19–20 on Platonic philosophical knowledge 30, 178n1, 178n2 on Plato’s doctrine of recollection 35 Gordon, J. 177n14, 177n18, 178n20 Gribble, G. 16, 165, 188n19, 189n20, 189n22, 190n6, 190n13, 190n14, 191n15, 191n16, 191n20 Griswold, C. 18, 21, 177n9, 177n14 Guignon, C. 186n15, 186n19, 187n4 Guthrie, W. K. C. 176n2, 187n2 Hadot, P. 28, 37, 38, 182n18, 184n22, 185n11, 191n19 and spiritual exercises 37–8 Halperin, D. M. 179n11 Hankey 183n22, 184n22 Harris, H. S. 23 Harris, S. 186n13 Hegel, G. W. F. 64, 177n14 Heidegger, M. critique of Nietzsche 113–17, 135 critique of Plato 63–5, 93–6, 157, 183n22, 184n23 and the critique of technology 57, 117, 158, 173 see Gestell

209

andThe Essence of Truth 49, 50, 58, 60, 62–88, 91–3, 95, 101, 103, 105–7, 115, 122–3, 131, 154–5, 158, 161, 181n5, 181n6, 182n14, 182n15, 182n16, 183n22 and the human essence 62–6, 70, 78, 82, 84, 86–91, 95, 99–107, 110, 115, 119, 122, 123, 133, 152, 179n2, 179n4, 180n10, 181n5, 182n14 later thought of 49–51, 63, 74, 76, 79, 85–6, 182n14, 186n20 on man’s relation to Being 93, 98–104, 119, 152, 158, 173 missed opportunity with Plato 157, 175 on Plato’s Forms 63, 66, 67, 71–83, 85, 87 Plato’s influence on 50, 62, 76, 83, 95, 136, 137–8, 151–7 positive appropriation of Plato 50, 60, 63–94, 120–7, 157, 161, 183n21 on science 56, 69, 98–9, 101–4, 108, 112, 113, 115, 118–22, 126–32, 134–6, 180n7, 185n12, 187n4 as tyrant 155–6 and world-disclosure 63, 70, 82, 87, 183n22 Heidegger’s interpretation of Plato’s cave allegory Being as such in 63, 66, 72, 75, 76, 78, 92, 93, 95–7, 99 Being of beings in 63, 66, 72–84, 86–7, 89, 91 Plato’s doctrine of the Good in 63, 66, 74–85, 91–3 Heidegger’s politics 49, 96–138, 151–61 compared with Plato’s politics 151–6 nihilism and 54, 57, 58, 63, 95, 101, 103, 106, 112, 115, 117, 120, 127–8, 133–6, 158, 174, 184n4 Rectoral Address 96, 97, 98–104, 106, 115, 118, 121, 122, 126, 128, 129, 134, 137, 138, 160, 184n4, 185n10 university reform and 107, 108, 101, 104, 119, 120, 122, 127, 128, 133, 134, 174, 181n5, 185n8, 186n4 Heracleides 5

210

Index

Hermann Mörchen 152 Hermodorus 5 historicity 53, 181n5 Hölderlin 50 Howland, J. 177n13, 182n18 human wisdom 27, 32, 34, 35, 47, 92 Hyland, D. 177n14, 178n8, 183n22, 187n2, 188n6, 188n7, 188n10 Jaspers, K. 189n28 correspondence with Heidegger 62 Jena Romanticism 11, 13, 23, 25 Junger, E. 155 Kahn, C. 17, 41, 92, 177n9, 182n18 Kant, I. 126, 178n22, 179n2, 186n18, 187n4 ethics of 109 on the limits of knowledge 23 on man’s natural propensity to ask metaphysical questions 51, 119 Kennedy, President 186n12 Kisiel, T. 186n2 Kramer, H. J. 12, 24, 25 Kraut, R. 15, 177n10 Kuhn, T. 180n5, 186n3 Lacou-Labarthe and Nancy 178n22 Lamm, J. 10, 13, 22 Lear, J. 16, 24, 48 Lilla, M. 152, 155, 184n3, 188n14, 189n23, 189n28 Long, A. A. 176n3, 176n4 Löwith, K. 185n10 Marx, K. 105 metaphysics Dasein as 51, 106, 119, 126, 134 metaphysics, Heidegger on overcoming 52–60, 74, 82, 91, 113–15, 133, 135, 138, 158–61, 169, 179n2, 182n20, 183n20, 186n14 metaphysics, Heidegger on the limits of 52 National Socialism 103, 137, 153–5, 186n15

Nietzsche, F. compared with Heidegger 64, 99, 101, 107, 117, 189n4 compared with Jena Romantics 23 on the death of God 98, 189n1 Heidegger’s interpretation of 57, 95, 97, 160–1, 186n16, 186n21 and Heidegger’s politics 97, 184n4 philosophy of 107–15, 135, 186n18, 186n20 nihilism 180n8, 184n4, 186n21, 190n5 and alêtheia 95, 106, 115 and the forgetfulness of Being 57–8, 63 Heidegger and 54, 103, 120, 127, 128, 134, 135–6, 138, 157, 174 metaphysics as the cause of 159–60 Nietzsche and 98, 101, 107, 108, 110–13, 115, 117, 135 ontological decline 49, 57, 58, 60, 63, 95, 98 humility 47, 151, 155 ontotheology 51–60, 63, 81, 93, 95, 97, 114, 122, 157, 186n14 Heidegger’s critique of 53–60, 82, 84 and metaphysical paradigms 53, 57, 66, 67–74, 83, 91, 125, 127–9, 157–60 paideia 70, 90, 91, 101, 158 Parmenides 58, 163 Peloponnesian War 43, 161, 163, 164, 189n20 Peperzak, A. 94 Periclean Athens 150, 158, 161, 164, 167, 169, 173, 190n6 Pericles 38, 148, 164, 165, 167, 168, 189n20, 190n12, 191n18 philosophical life 28, 35, 38–43, 47–8, 162–3, 167, 170–2 phusis 54, 58, 99, 116, 189n22 Plato Alcibiades’ influence on 162, 163 Heidegger’s phenomenological transformation of 50, 60, 74, 84, 90, 120–7, 157, 161, 183n21

Index on the philosophic nature 28, 39, 87, 146, 147, 149, 172 political pessimism of 96, 139–40, 149–51, 154, 158, 174–5 politics of 96–7, 136, 138–51, 157–75 on the problems with Periclean Athens 158, 164–72 on the withdrawal of the philosopher from society 175 Plato’s doctrine of truth, Heidegger’s essay entitled 50, 58, 60, 63, 65, 70, 90–1, 95, 117, 180n1, 184n23 Plato’s philosophy conflicting interpretations of 4–5 developmental interpretation of 9, 10, 14, 15, 16 dogmatic interpretation of Plato’s philosophy, problems with 5, 6, 7, 13, 14, 15, 17, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 26, 27, 29, 43–5, 49, 59–61, 89–94, 179n11 esoteric interpretation of 5, 12, 13, 176n6 and the Good 27, 28, 29, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 38, 40, 63, 66, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 91, 92, 93, 94, 138, 142, 143, 144, 157, 161, 172, 173, 180n12, 181n7, 182n13, 182n16, 183n21, 183n22 Heidegger’s interpretation of 49–50, 60–1 holistic interpretation of Plato’s philosophy 13, 15–22, 26–7, 43–4, 59–61, 89–94, 177n14, 177n16, 177n18 ineffability, existential 28, 39–43, 47, 48 ineffability, metaphysical 27, 28–35, 47–8, 77 ineffability, spiritual 28, 35–9, 47–8, 77 inseparability of form and content in 21, 24–8, 34, 35, 37–41, 43, 46–9, 59, 77, 89, 183n21 and irony 25, 47, 139, 141, 142 Neoplatonic interpretation of 7

211

New Acadmey’s interpretation of 6, 176n3, 176n4 non-rational phenomena in 21, 24, 34 Old Academy’s interpretation of 5, 176n4 oral teaching of 5, 7, 176n5, 176n6 rebound effect and 45, 49, 59, 85, 89, 90, 91, 122 self-conscious incompleteness of 5, 24, 25, 26, 48, 94 self-transformation and 35, 37, 38, 44, 47, 49, 59, 89, 91 Seventh Letter and 26–33, 34, 35–7, 39–40, 52, 44, 46, 47, 48, 94, 114, 137, 148, 149, 150, 151, 154, 166, 178n2, 189n22 skeptical interpretation of 5, 6, 7, 8, 17, 19, 20, 43 Plotinus 7, 31, 34, 38, 94 Popper, K. 187n2, 188n2 Prior, W. 41, 42 Pseudo Dionysus 94 questioning and the essence of science 104 and the experience of alêtheia 102, 106, 128 and exposing oneself to the sublimity of things 106 and the fulfillment of Dasein’s Being 106, 123, 125, 126, 134 as the highest form of knowing 101, 117, 134 and overcoming metaphysics 106, 126 and overcoming nihilism 106, 118, 135 and university reform 103 and world-disclosure 99, 105–6, 118, 134, 135 Reale, G. 7, 176n2 Richardson, W.J. 52, 70, 160, 180n12, 186n21 Rorty, R. 1, 44, 184n1 Rosen, S. 177n14, 183n22, 184n24, 185n4, 187n2, 188n6

212

Index

Rutherford, R. 178n20, 190n15, 191n15 Ryle, G. 14, 177n12 Safranski, R. 62, 64, 111, 115, 152, 181n2, 184n4, 186n20 Sallis, J. 178n5, 182n13, 183n22 Sayre, K. M. 176n5, 176n6 Schlegel, F. 11, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 47, 48, 92, 178n22 Schleiermacher, F. 7, 8, 15, 18, 23, 25, 27, 43, 89, 176n1, 177n8, 177n9, 177n14, 177n15 influence on contemporary Plato scholarship 13, 21, 26 on Plato’s developmental pedagogy 9, 10, 22 on the problems with the esoteric interpretation of Plato 176n5 on writing as imitation of living instruction 11–13 Schleiermacher’s interpretation of Plato 7–9, 18, 22 intellectual context of 10 principles of 7–10 problems with 11–13 Schmidt, D. 137–8, 149, 151, 153, 154, 184n2, 188n3 Schopenhauer, A. 76, 117 Searle, J. 178n19 Serranus 7, 9 Shakespeare, W. 16–17 Sluga, H. 119, 184n4, 185n8, 185n9 Smith, S. 94, 188n9 Smith, N. 192n23 Socrates 11, 14, 24, 33, 76, 182n18 and Alcibiades see Alcibiades Heidegger and 83, 87, 124, 156 and human wisdom 25, 154 method of 9, 92 in the Phaedrus 12, 18, 40 and the philosophical life 35, 40–6, 65, 121, 161, 179n9 and Plato’s choice to write dialogues 28, 32, 36, 38, 44

and politics 138–50, 158, 162–3, 166–7, 170–3, 175, 190n13, 191n20, 192n23 and Thucydides 190n15 Speusippus 5 Stephanus 7 Strauss, L. 16, 17, 139, 140, 177n14, 187n2, 188n4, 188n7, 188n8, 188n9, 188n10 Taminiaux 184n2, 186n16, 187n1 Taylor 178n6 Tennemann 7 theoria 102, 118, 120–3, 126, 134, 136 Thomson, I. 53, 56, 70, 81, 186n4 Thucydides 161, 170, 171, 190n7, 190n13, 190n15, 191n16, 191n18, 191n19 Tigerstedt, E. N. 4, 5, 7, 9, 18, 19, 20 utopianism 96, 117, 149, 151, 154, 157, 158 Vickers, M. 163, 190n8 Vlastos, G. 143–4, 174, 177n10, 178n6 Voegelin, E. 165, 172, 174, 175, 188n8, 188n11, 188n18, 190n11, 191n21 White, N. 177n10, 178n1, 178n2, 178n4, 179n10 will to power 57, 95, 98, 102, 106, 111–14, 135, 173, 189n3, 189n4 Wittgenstein, L. 47 Wolin, R. 184n1, 189n25 Wonder 115, 120, 134, 135, 175 Xenocrates 5 Young, J. 76, 96, 105, 136, 154, 180n8, 182n12, 184n4, 186n1, 187n1 Zimmerman 160, 173, 180n8, 184n4, 185n5, 185n6, 186n17, 189n3 Zuckert 178n8, 183n22