(Continuum Studies in Continental Philosophy) Mark A. Ralkowski-Heidegger's Platonism - Continuum (2009) PDF

Heideggers Platonism
Continuum Studies in Continental Philosophy

Series Editor: James Fieser, University of Tennessee at Martin, USA
Continuum Studies in Continental Philosophy is a major monograph series from
Continuum. The series features first-class scholarly research monographs across the
field of Continental philosophy. Each work makes a major contribution to the field
of philosophical research.
Adornos Concept of Life, Alastair Morgan
Badiou, Marion and St Paul, Adam Miller
Being and Number in Heideggers Thought, Michael Roubach
The Crisis in Continental Philosophy, Robert Piercey
Deleuze and Guattari, Fadi Abou-Rihan
Deleuze and the Genesis of Representation, Joe Hughes
Deleuze, Guattari and the Production of the New, edited by Simon OSullivan and
Stephen Zepke
Derrida, Simon Morgan Wortham
Derrida and Disinterest, Sean Gaston
The Domestication of Derrida, Lorenzo Fabbri
Encountering Derrida, edited by Simon Morgan Wortham and Allison Weiner
Foucaults Heidegger, Timothy Rayner
Gadamer and the Question of the Divine, Walter Lammi
Heidegger and a Metaphysics of Feeling, Sharin N. Elkholy
Heidegger and Aristotle, Michael Bowler
Heidegger and Happiness, Matthew King
Heidegger and Philosophical Atheology, Peter S. Dillard
Heidegger Beyond Deconstruction, Michael Lewis
Heidegger on Language and Death, Joachim L. Oberst
Heidegger, Politics and Climate Change, Ruth Irwin
Heidegger, Work, and Being, Todd S. Mei
Heideggers Contributions to Philosophy, Jason Powell
Heideggers Early Philosophy, James Luchte
Heideggers Platonism, Mark A. Ralkowski
The Irony of Heidegger, Andrew Haas
Merleau-Pontys Phenomenology, Kirk M. Besmer
Nietzsches Ethical Theory, Craig Dove
Nietzsches Thus Spoke Zarathustra, edited by James Luchte
The Philosophy of Exaggeration, Alexander Garcia Dttmann
Whos Afraid of Deleuze and Guattari? Gregg Lambert
iek and Heidegger, Thomas Brockelman
Mark A. Ralkowski
Continuum International Publishing Group

The Tower Building
80 Maiden Lane
11 York Road
Suite 704
London SE1 7NX
New York, NY 10038
www.continuumbooks.com
Mark A. Ralkowski 2009
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted
in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying,
recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission
in writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN: HB: 978-1-4411-8489-4
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Ralkowski, Mark.
Heideggers platonism / Mark A. Ralkowski.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN-13: 978-1-4411-8489-4 (HB)
ISBN-10: 1-4411-8489-9 (HB)
1. Plato. 2. Platonists. 3. Heidegger, Martin, 1889-1976. I. Title.
B395.R325 2009
193--dc22
2009008247
Typeset by Newgen Imaging Systems Pvt Ltd, Chennai, India

Printed and bound in Great Britain by the MPG Books Group
For Ratna and Iris
This page intentionally left blank
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
Platos system . . . is falsifying history and blocking the way to the inner
movement of this philosophizing and the understanding of its claim
to truth.
Heidegger, Schellings Treatise
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Introduction
xi
xiii
xvi
Chapter 1: What is Platonism?

Schleiermachers Pedagogical Interpretation of Plato
Whats Wrong with the Current Debate
The Romantic Rediscovery of Platos Ineffable Ontology
Conclusions: Ineffability and Dialogue Form
4
8
13
21
25
Chapter 2: Untying Schleiermachers Gordian Knot

Metaphysical Ineffability: The Argument from
Language and Human Finitude
Spiritual Ineffability: The Argument from
Self-Transformation
Existential Ineffability: The Argument from
Life Choice
Platonism Reconsidered
Conclusions
27
28
35
39
43
47
Chapter 3: The Context of Heideggers Interpretation of Plato:

Ontotheology and the Ontological Difference
The Context of Heideggers Interpretation of Plato
What It All Means and Why It Matters
49
50
59
Chapter 4: Heideggers Platonism

Stage One: The Realm of Shadows
Stage Two: The Fire
62
64
66
Contents
Stage Three: The Realm of Light
The Good: Heideggers Plato is the Later Heidegger
Stage Four: The Return to the Shadows
The Virtues of Heideggers Plato
70
75
85
89
Chapter 5: Nihilism: Heideggers Crisis and Opportunity

Setting the Stage
Heideggers Crisis
Understanding Heideggers Crisis: Nietzsche
Heidegger as Reformed Madman
95
96
97
107
112
Chapter 6: Heidegger and the Greeks: Revolutionary

Thinker or Utopian Social Engineer?
The Greeks and University Reform
Theoria and Fundamental Ontology
A Community of Similarly Striving Researchers
University Reform and Nihilism
117
119
120
127
133
Chapter 7: Back from Syracuse? Four Reasons to Rethink

Heideggers Politics
The Ontological Problem
The Epistemological Problem
The Moral Problem
The Political Problem
What was Plato Doing in Syracuse?
Back from Syracuse or Eros Tyrannos?
137
140
140
142
145
149
151
157
Chapter 8: How Heidegger Should Have Read Plato

Did Plato Anticipate Heideggers Critique
of Technology?
Platos Problems with Periclean Athens
Alcibiades as Embodiment of Periclean Athens
Alcibiades as Inverted Image of Socrates
Conclusions: What Heidegger Missed
158
164
167
170
172
Notes
Bibliography
Index
176
193
207
Preface
Calling Heidegger a Platonist is a bit like calling Plato an empiricist. Its the
sort of claim that earns you a failing grade in an introduction to philosophy
course. If you know anything about Heideggers philosophy, then, you
might be wondering, Whats 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 philosophyto 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 Platos philosophy.
If we reconstruct the meaning of Platonism, using Heidegger as our
unlikely guide, the apparent oxymoron in Heideggers Platonism disappears. In fact, I make the case that Heideggers interpretation of Plato in his
lecture course The Essence of Truth is both an interesting solution to the
problem of interpreting Platos 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 Heideggers thinking during
this critical time in his life.
Second, if we set aside the differences between Platos metaphysics,
traditionally understood, and Heideggers 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 Heideggers political aspirations
in 1933 and suggested that he was working and writing under the influence
of the political utopianism he discovered in Platos 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,
xii
Preface
something utopian and forgetful of mans finitudesomething like Platos

political ideology in the Republic. This is a common line of reasoning in the
literature on Heideggers politics, but I argue that it is fundamentally
mistaken, because it makes unwarranted assumptions about Platos 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 Heideggers 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 Platos 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 werent 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 Mexicos 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 Iains
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 Iains essay on Heidegger
and ontological education, my interpretation of Heideggers 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 Platos inimitable
philosophical vision, and enabled me to develop my own voice in the timeless activity of interpreting Platos dialogues. John and I disagree on several
points about Platos philosophy, but we agree that reading Plato is personal.
It isnt about mastering his system, because there isnt one. And it isnt
about crunching his arguments, because many of them are deliberately
xiv
Acknowledgments
poor. Its about what William James would call Platos temperament, that is,
his sense of what life ultimately means and why it matters. This isnt something one gets from trifling over Platos 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 Platos doctrine of the Good
and Heideggers concept of Being as such. And I am equally grateful to
Gonzalez for helping me rediscover Platos dialogues, and for helping me
understand what is most problematic, and least Platonic, about Heideggers
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
masters 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 Platos 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 Schlegels relation
to Schleiermacher typically isnt 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,
Acknowledgments
xv
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. OMeara. 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. 161240.
Alc. I
Alcibiades, by Plato, in Plato: Complete Works. Edited by

J. Cooper. Translated by D. S. Hutchinson. Indianapolis, IN:
Hackett, 1997, pp. 55795.
Anon. Prol. Anonymous Prolegomena to Platos 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. 1736.
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.
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
xvii
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. 164667.
ET
The Essence of Truth: On Platos 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

Schler. 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

Hhlengleichnis und Thetet. Edited by Hermann Mrchen.
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 (19201963), by

M. Heidegger and K. Jaspers. Edited by W. Biemel and
xviii
Abbreviations
H. Saner. Translated by G. E. Avlesworth. Amherst, NY:
Humanity Books, 2003.
Ideas, in Lucinde and the Fragments, by F. Schlegel. Translated

by P. Firchow. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press,
1971, pp. 24156.
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. 21366.
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.
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. 35997.
PDT
Platos Doctrine of Truth, by M. Heidegger, in Pathmarks.

Edited by W. McNeill. Translated by T. Sheehan. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1998, pp. 15582.
Phd.
Phaedo, by Plato, in Plato: Complete Works. Edited by J. Cooper.

Translated by G. M. A. Grube. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1997,
pp. 49100.
Phdr.
Phaedrus, by Plato, in Plato: Complete Works. Edited by J. Cooper.

Translated by A. Nehamas and P. Woodruff. Indianapolis, IN:
Hackett, 1997, 50656.
PLT
Poetry, Language, Thought, by M. Heidegger. Edited and

translated by A. Hofstadter. New York: Harper & Row, 1971.
Abbreviations
xix
Plut. Alc.
Alcibiades, by Plutarch, in Plutarchs 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. 9711223.
Platos 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. 4166.
Symp.
Symposium, by Plato, in Plato: Complete Works. Edited by

J. Cooper. Translated by A. Nehamas and P. Woodruff.
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. 41939.
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.
xx
Abbreviations
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. 122491.
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. 8296.
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. 27090.
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, Heideggers 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 Heideggers
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 Heideggers 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
Heideggers philosophy and its relation to Platonism. Unlike many other
treatments of Heideggers 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
Platos influence on Heidegger, show that Heideggers positive appropriation of Plato is as path-finding for us as interpreters of Platos dialogues as
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 Heideggers 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 Platos philosophy into his own, and what Heidegger missed in his
use and abuse of Platos 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 Heideggers Platonism I challenge Heideggers 1940 interpretation of
Plato as the philosopher who initiated the Wests ontological decline into
contemporary nihilism, and I argue that, in his earlier lecture course, The
Essence of Truth (193132), 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 Heideggers later period. The Good is Heideggers 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 Wests first truly post-Platonic philosopher. But it
is ultimately tragic. If Heidegger had made Platos political pessimism his
own, as he did with Platos discovery of the concealed source of unconcealment, he might have discovered an ancient analogue to his own critique of
technology in Platos 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 fools gold for which the tyrant settles.
Introduction
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 Sicilys 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. 21822). But in the
end it wasnt 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 Hitlers 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. Platos early interpreters saw an image of the future in this dream: try
as men would to grasp Platos 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, 2931). These dreams could
not have been more prescient. Nearly two thousand years later, the hunt for
Plato the swan rages on.
The elusiveness of Platos 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 Platos dialoguesin fact, for some, such
disagreements are a defining characteristic of philosophy.
If you would like to watch philosophers squirmand who wouldnt?
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 Platos early and middle dialogues with pleasure (Tigerstedt 1977: 1318). The interpretive challenge
with Plato seems to have two primary causes. First, he never told us what he
What is Platonism?
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 Platos 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, Platos 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 Platos philosophy and produced similar accounts of his doctrines (Merlan 1960: 24).
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 Platos oral teaching led them, as it does the contemporary esotericists, to conclusions about Platos 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.
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
Platos 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 Academynamely, St. Augustine,
Sextus, and Cicerosimply 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, anddespite acknowledging that he had no grounds for doing so, other than his own faith
in mans ability to know the truthhe 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 Platos. (AA III.43)
The New Academys skepticism, Augustine thought, was merely a faade
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 Platos
apparently constructive dialogues, the skeptics maintained control of the
What is Platonism?
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
Platos 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 Platos 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 Platos dialogues, the Neoplatonists sidestepped it. For example, they solve the problem of finding unity in Platos 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 Platos 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 Platos 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.
Schleiermachers interpretation of Plato turned out to be path-finding
for several reasons. While he accepted the assumption that Platos philosophy was systematic, he also argued for the philosophical significance of
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 Platos writings, he rejected the esotericists view that
Platos 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
Platos 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.
Schleiermachers Pedagogical Interpretation of Plato

In 1804, Schleiermacher finished his famous translation of Platos 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 Platos 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
What is Platonism?
two reasons. First, Platos writings are works of literary and philosophical
genius in whose language one can discover Platos philosophy and necessary traces of Platos 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 Aristotles 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: 913).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 Schleiermachers positive interpretive principles, the most important
were that (i) artistic form and philosophical content are inseparable in
Platos dialogues (Schleiermacher 1973: 14), (Hereafter the inseparability
principle.) (ii) Platos philosophy is scientific and systematic, complete from
the beginning and gradually presented (ibid., 14, 19, 43),7 and (iii) Platos
philosophy is entirely contained in his dialogues (ibid., 913). 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 Bruckers in the eighteenth, although he developed both ideas
in a highly original and influential way (Tigerstedt 1974: 3942; cf. 1977:
669). A great example of this is Schleiermachers 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 Platos corpus, and
then trace the real and essential relation of Platos works to one another
(Schleiermacher 1973: 24).
The standard twentieth-century developmentalist view is that the aporetic
dialogues contain Platos 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 Platos 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 Platos own development, but Platos
profound understanding of philosophical education: the stubbornness and
laziness of the mind, the relationships between the elementary principles
10
and the composite theory, and the pathway one must follow as one makes
ones 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 Platos composite theory, while others, for
example, Republic, Timaeus, and Critias, were properly expositive works
(Schleiermacher 1973: 407). 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 Platos system, (ii) indirect works, which indirectly expressed
Platos system, and (iii) expositive works, which directly presented Platos
fully developed composite theory. The preliminary and indirect works, in
themselves, are objectless and imperfect, but as steps in Platos pedagogical scheme, they point beyond themselves to the properly expositive works
in which Plato presents his system scientifically (ibid., 42). Schleiermachers
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 Platos own intellectual development is reflected in the dialogues.
Given Schleiermachers 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 Platos 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 Platos 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).
Schleiermachers 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 Platos 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.
What is Platonism?
11
But it seems most likely that it derives from the influence of Jena Romanticism in general and Friedrich Schlegel, Schleiermachers 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 Platos philosophy be both
inseparable from the artistic form of its presentation and systematic? Its
true that Plato may have had a variety of reasons for presenting a philosophical system in an artistic mediumfor 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 isnt clear why he insists that
Platos philosophy is nevertheless systematic. In fact, there are two significant problems with Schleiermachers view. In addition to the implausibility
of the hypothesis that Platos 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 Platos 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 Schleiermachers commitments
dont add up. On the one hand, he is committed to the view that Platos
philosophy culminates in a philosophical system to which one must be
12
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 minds 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 ones own voice for political or other reasons, it isnt clear that one
can be committed to a systematic philosophy whose principles are only accessible via dialogue.
Kramers explanation of this contradiction in Schleiermachers view
is that he didnt 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 Platos
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
What is Platonism?
13
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: 1516)
In other words, Schleiermachers view is that Platos method was Socratic
insofar as writing could be Socraticinsofar as writing could imitate living
instructionand 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 Schleiermachers 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 doesnt explain why Platos
doctrines require this kind of pedagogy. This is an especially problematic
explanatory hole in his account, since, if Platos 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 Schleiermachers principles is that
it expresses deep indecision in Schleiermachers own thought, which in
turn may have been caused by opposing theoretical assumptions in his
intellectual culturenamely, 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 peoples religion, a mythology of reason.
Whatever the influences on Schleiermacher may have been when he
wrote his introduction to Platos 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 Platos 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).
Whats Wrong with the Current Debate

Without a doubt, the most common assumption among todays Plato scholars is that Plato was a metaphysical dogmatist, whose aim in the dialogues
14
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 Platos 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
Platos 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 arethat is, have the
properties they havein 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 Platos 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 Platos farewell to the theory of Forms (Ryle 1965:
97147),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 Ryles farewell
What is Platonism?
15
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 havent
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 Platos ideas developed as he matured (Tigerstedt
1977: 67). Hermann didnt give up the assumption that Platos 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 Schleiermachers less plausible assumption that Plato-the-master slowly
presented his system in order to initiate the reader into his otherwise inaccessible ideas. Since Hermanns 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 cant determine the chronology of composition, theres no basis for claims about development that
arent inherently question begging: we know that Platos 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 Platos 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 Platos
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
16
can analyze what Blondell calls the play of character in Platos 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 Symposiums 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 wouldnt have grounds for this thesis if he focused exclusively on
the dialogues arguments, treating Diotima as Platos mouthpiece and
Diotimas speech as the sole source of Platos 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 Platos 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
dont know what Plato thought because he never speaks in the first person.
Platos 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 Platos 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 Platos characters with the voice of the author, or to
What is Platonism?
17
infer it from the dialogues themselves (Blondell 2002: 1819). Platos

authorial silence, in other words, is impenetrable. Our search for Platos
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 dont 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
theyve uncovered Platos beliefs or intentions. But they might also insist
that this is irrelevant. The point of interpreting Platos dialogues is not to
find a magic bullet approach that gives us direct access to Platos 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 Platos authorial silence to assert that Plato was a
skeptic, or that the dialogues drama or characterization gives us privileged
access to Platos 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 somethingand surely we must assert at least
that much in order to make sense of the dialogue form having a philosophical contentit follows that the holists have no grounds for treating the dramas as providing privileged access to Platos 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 Platos 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
18
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 dont need to go outside of Platos 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 Platos 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 Phaedruswhich is no easy conclusion to come
by, as any reader of the Phaedrus knowsby applying the holism principle,
as it is contained in the Phaedrus, to the Phaedrus itself. But he didnt stop
here. He thought the same principle could be applied to Platos 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: 56). It isnt obvious, however, that one cannot find a similar organic or thematic unity in Platos dialogues as a whole (Griswold 1986:
11; cf. 1990: 243). Schleiermacher clearly thought we could.
What is Platonism?
19
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 Platos 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
Whats 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 Platos
dialogues, because the available alternatives are each deficient in some
way.
20
The skeptical interpretation can account for the form of Platos 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 dont 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 Platos dialogues to conflicting interpretations
(which is an inevitable consequence of deemphasizing and recontextualizing the arguments), they cannot be expected to provide one conception of
Platos 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
shouldnt follow Augustine in assuming a priori that Plato couldnt have preferred open-ended inquiry to dogmatic certainty. In fact, as I shall argue,
Augustines 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 Platos dialogues.
They reject the dogmatists most basic assumptions about the nature of
Platonism, and they reject Dennetts assumption that closure is the only
respectable goal for philosophy. Instead of assuming, as the dogmatists do,
that Platos aim was to construct an exhaustive theory of reality, the holists
often assume that Platos aim was to represent the nature of philosophy as
suchhow 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 mans finite nature. What we find lurking in the gulf
What is Platonism?
21
separating the dogmatists from the holists, in other words, is the same
tension at the heart of Schleiermachers interpretation of the dialogues.
Following in the footsteps of Aristotle, the dogmatists assume that Platos
philosophy contains or attempts to build a philosophical system. The holists
deny this basic understanding of Plato. They reject Aristotles dogmatic
approach and argue for a new appreciation of the artistic form of Platos
dialogues (Gadamer 1991: 7).18 In defense of their alternative, there are
two things the holists usually say against the principle that Platos 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 weve 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 Platos 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 Im not sure why it isnt more important, especially for a holist interested in challenging the systematization of Platos
philosophy, to ask why Plato stressed, and in some cases embraced, nonrational phenomenafor example, myth, madness, religious experience,
prophecy, charms, incantations, divine dispensation, mystery religions, and
so onin 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 Platos philosophy,
point much more directly than literary form to an unsystematic philosophy.
The Romantic Rediscovery of Platos 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 Platos dialogues, the texts that created the knot in the first place. As I explain above, Schleiermacher argued
22
both that Platos philosophy is systematic and that it is inseparable from its
artistic form. And as weve 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
havent yet explained why the nature of Platos philosophy necessarily rules
out the possibility that it was systematic and requires the use of dialogues
or their equivalent for its presentation. Schleiermachers own explanation
of this point provides us with a pedagogical explanation, rather than the
philosophical one were 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 Platos philosophy. For him, the dialogue form itself is an expression of Platos ontology, which cannot be grasped by any system. If developmental pedagogy is the lynchpin in Schleiermachers interpretation of
Plato, Schlegels is twofold: he assumed that (i) Platos 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 Platos 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: 21018).
Schlegel addresses precisely this tension in a letter to Schleiermacher in
1803, one year before the publication of Schleiermachers 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 weve seen, Schleiermacher assumed that Platos philosophy was complete from the beginning and gradually revealed in the dialogues according to a protreptic pedagogical imperative. Schlegel rejected this assumption,
What is Platonism?
23
and argued that, for Plato, philosophy was not just incomplete but, due to
the nature of reality and mans finite relation to it, entirely incapable of
completion. Straight away, then, we can see a fundamental conflict between
Schlegels understanding of Plato and the dogmatic view (as well as
Schleiermachers), according to which a systematic understanding of nature
is possible because nature is systematically ordered. Schlegels 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? Schlegels Plato, like Kant, says we cannot know.
Undoubtedly, Schlegels 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 Fichtes 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 (179697) 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 beautythe 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:
51011)
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
24
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 Platos dialogues as instances of his ideal of philosophical
art in other places as well. In his more developed lectures on Plato, he
argues that Platos 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 mans
chameleon like relationship to it, must be represented negativelythat 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 Platos 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 neednt
restrict ourselves to the so-called early dialogues. On Lears interpretation,
What is Platonism?
25
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 poets 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 itin virtue of its
formsymbolizes an absent reality, a reality that must be absent from any of
its representations. Irony, in particular the irony of his fragmented writing, was Platos way of suggesting that truth is too elusive to be fully and
finally grasped by man. We might even say that, on Schlegels view, Platos
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 mans 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
26
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 didnt understand or didnt accept
Schlegels ontological interpretation of Plato. If he didnt accept it, its
a mystery why he nevertheless argued for the inseparability of form and
content in Platos dialogues. His pedagogical explanation cannot establish
inseparability, because it reduces the dialogue form to an unnecessary
pedagogical tool. By contrast, as weve seen, Schlegels view can straightforwardly establish inseparability because on his view the representation of
Platos 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 Platos
philosophy was systematic, and because the dogmatists have done an excellent job of extracting a philosophical system from Platos 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 principlenamely, the conceptual inexhaustibility of Platos ontologywhich should have harmonized Schleiermachers
opposed principles, and thus prevented the divide between the holists and
dogmatists.
If I am right about this, were left with two very important questions. First,
do we have good reasons, such as evidence that is somehow grounded in
Platos texts, to accept Schlegels 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 Platos system? Differently put,
what do we mean by Platos ontology if we reject the notion that Platos
philosophy is systematic? I will answer these questions in the next chapter
by reviewing the argument from Platos Seventh Letter and showing its consistency with key passages in Platos 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 Platos ontology, and it provides us with three
good reasons to believe that Platos choice to write dialogues was motivated
by his general conception of philosophy and its objectives.
Chapter 2
Untying Schleiermachers Gordian Knot
The purpose of this chapter is to determine whether Platos 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 Platos 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
truethe Good is doubly withdrawn from knowledgefor 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 Goodif it is ever of the Goodit is radically unlike any other kind of cognition, that is, if we can call it a cognition
at all. Plato doesnt 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 isnt 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 isnt possible to
28
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 ones 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
belowand 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. 210a212b), and harmonizes the revolutions in his
soul by coming to learn the harmonies and revolutions of the universe
(Tim. 90d). Borrowing from Pierre Hadots 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 characteristicsits experiential benefits, its strangeness, its conflicts with tradition and
politics and religion, and so onalongside 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 Platos letter is that philosophical knowledge cannot be committed to writing, because these matters
29
cannot be expressed verbally as other subjects can. This claim alone, without any of the supporting arguments, should give pause to anyone who
treats Platos 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 341ce).
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, imagesall 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 Platos
metaphor can be pushed this far, knowledge is all consuming. Doctrines
arent 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
30
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.
203b204a), 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).
Platos 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
31
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 doesnt 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 wont 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 were describing, but
32
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 minds 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
othersit 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 didnt merely believe that the Good was inexpressible,
and he didnt 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
33
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
predicatesit is neither at rest nor in motion, neither the same nor different, neither equal nor unequal, and so onand 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 letters epistemology? Here is one
possibility. On Platos 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 Formsthis 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 engenderor (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 isnt 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
34
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 couldnt 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. Platos qualificationswe 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 nothingmake 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 Platos
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.
35
These points are significant for understanding the Seventh Letter because
they explain Platos 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
philosophys 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 344b47)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 343e12). On Platos view, if one has not undergone what Socrates elsewhere calls purification, one cannot see the truth.
If . . . a persons 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 343e2344ab)
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 ones own soul (Gonzalez 1998a: 26971).
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
36
colorful ornamentation, these passages help us make sense of Platos

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 ones 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 (243e257b) and Republic (514a518b): the soul is fundamentally
transformed in its ascent toward the Beautiful and the Good. We find the
same stagesawakening, 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 342a56), but they are
incapable of conveying the non-propositional content of philosophical
understanding. And even if they could convey such contents, non-philosophers,
37
not being pure, wouldnt be capable of grasping them. Dionysius book on

Platos 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 342e344d). It showed conclusively that he didnt
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 ones self, not merely an intellectual grasp of discursively transmittable doctrines (Ep. VII 338e). Dionysius didnt understand any of this. He was most likely a participant in the Sicily Plato distrusted
and despised, which was characterized by the happy lifea 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 wouldnt
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 326b4c4).
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
optionspsychic, moral, ethical, intellectual, of thought, of the
soulis 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 individuals 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: 812)
38
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 subjects
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 oneselfones passions and desires, ones thought processes and thought habitsbefore 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 whod fallen in battle (Thuc. 2.43).
Because philosophical knowledge requires this degree of selftransformation, and because such changes in ones 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.
39
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 Dionysiusthe demands on ones daily life, the amount of learning
that is entailed, and so onand 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 Platos prescribed life-changes as thoroughly undesirable, and thereby confirm Platos fears that he was insincere, interested only
in waving the banner of philosophy and associating his name with Platos.
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 philosophys value to non-philosophers,
existential ineffability.
40
Plato knew he couldnt 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 itif he couldnt 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? Doesnt 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 souls
deepest and strongest desire for the Good (Phdr. 250d252c), 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.
41
On this point I am indebted to Bill Prior, who has argued that we ought to
view Platos dialogues, both early and middle, as Platos 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: 1212). 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 Platos 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 Priors 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., 11516). How can we answer that question fairly? Priors
hypothesis, which I accept, is that one of Platos primary purposes in these
dialogues was to present Socrates as an exemplar of the philosophical life
(Cf. Friedlander 1964: 1256).
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? Priors 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 Platos 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: 11516).
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
42
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 (77e78a). 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 Priors 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 dont 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 Platos 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 lifeSocratic 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 onand the jury
responds with about as much understanding as Cassandras 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).
43
Platos 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 wouldnt have if
he hadnt betrayed philosophythis, I take it, is one of the various inferences Plato wants his audience to makesince 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
Schleiermachers claim that the form of Platos 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).
Platos 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 didnt 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 Platos 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 Platos philosophy, and they are also correct to be suspicious
about attributing positive metaphysical views to Plato, they are nevertheless
44
wrong to argue that Platos philosophy and method are not grounded in his
ontology. Their mistake is to think that Platos ambiguous method entails or
implies a purely non-doctrinal philosophy. Plato had doctrines, and the dialogues represent Socrates in pursuit of philosophical insight. But Platos
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 Platos 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 Platos 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 realitythe principles that would constitute the foundations of ones theory
of everythingcannot 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
Platos 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
45
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 subjects 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 Platos doctrines,
like his dialogues more generally, were intended to be transformative rather
than informative. They were not advertisements to empty philosophizinga mere playing around with notions and arguments, as Findlay worriesbut 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 subjects
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:
1819)
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
46
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 consciousnessmoderate fears
and introduce hopeby changing ones 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 onperhaps 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 ones 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 Platos 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
47
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 Platos 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: mans 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? Platos 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.
Platos philosophy was a spiritual practice, and his doctrines, it seems,
were like Wittgensteins 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 Platos 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 Schlegels view that Platos conceptually
inexhaustible ontology was his motivation for writing dialogues. Along the
way we have also discovered spiritual and existential reasons underpinning
Platos commitment to ineffability. These reasons, however, are subordinate
48
to the ontological reason. Without the ineffable ontology, the other senses
of ineffability make very little sense: spiritual ineffability is clearly a function
of Platos 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 Platos 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
mans 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 insightjust 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 Schlegels version of the inseparability principle, it does give us plenty
of reason to think Platos motivation for writing dialogues was ontological.
And that may be all we will ever have.
Chapter 3
The Context of Heideggers 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 Platos 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
Heideggers lecture course The Essence of Truth and the positive part of his
famous essay, Platos Doctrine of Truthperhaps the most unlikely of
sources, in view of the fact that Heideggers work on Plato is most famous
for its interpretation of Plato as the beginning of the Wests forgetfulness of
Being and consequent ontological decline. What makes Heideggers 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 Heideggers interpretation of Plato have
either uncritically repeated Heideggers argument for the view that in place
50
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 Heideggers
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 Hlderlin (Hahn 1997:
458). I will discuss the problems with Heideggers later interpretation of
Plato in Chapter 8. But we should not let Heideggers later mistakes obscure
his earlier discoveries.
Before I discuss the details of Platos 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 Heideggers 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 Heideggers 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 Heideggers
later thought with his interpretation of Platos cave allegory. Moreover,
I will suggest that, given (i) the early date of Heideggers 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 Heideggers Interpretation of Plato

Heideggers thought, throughout his career, is devoted in one way or
another to discovering the foundations of metaphysics. In Being and Time,
Heideggers Interpretation of Plato
51
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 Daseins way of
being was, in part, an analysis of what Kant called mans propensity to ask
metaphysical questions.
Being held out into the nothingas Dasein ison 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
Daseins ek-sistence (Daseins 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]
52
overcoming metaphysics (WMI 279). But why must metaphysics be overcome? On Heideggers 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. 1545).
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 195657 to make precisely
this point:
53
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 Daseins 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 Daseins 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, ones world is specific to ones
historical epoch.5
One might grant some or all of the above and wonder, Whats 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? Wouldnt 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
54
forgets Being, and the forgetfulness of Being could ultimately cause the
West to collapse under the weight of nihilism (IM 40). Before I discuss
Heideggers diagnosis of Western nihilism and his prescriptions for overcoming it, however, lets 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
altheia.
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 processthe process of phusis-altheiain 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-altheia and therefore acts as an obstacle to Beings recovery.6
Heidegger identifies Being with altheia, 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
55
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 Daseins 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.
56
Heideggers name for this paradox of revealing-concealing is a-ltheia, 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 metaphysicians 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 couldnt such
knowledge be liberating by helping us acquire the resources we need to
engage in Mills experiments in living?
Heideggers 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). Heideggers 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 sciences 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
57
back that lets thinking enter into a questioning that experiencesand

lets the habitual opining of philosophy fall away. (LH 246)
Our answer to the question, Whats 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 267). 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 Nietzsches 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 Nietzsches 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).
Heideggers 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
58
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-Socraticsin particular Parmenides and Heraclituswhose 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 (altheia 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 723) an untrod path that leads
beyond das Gestell to a new beginning.
Although Heideggers opinions about the significance of Platos philosophy change between 1931 and 1940, in the early 1930s he argued that Platos
cave allegory contained a similarly path-finding, tradition-rehabilitating
expression of the Greek experience of truth as altheia.9 In his lectures on
Platos Republic, he explains unambiguously that he was interested in Plato
because, despite the fact that the original experience of unhiddenness
begins to wane in Platos thought, the cave allegory nevertheless illustrates
that truth is the ground of [mans] existence (ET 86), not a property
of his judgments. Heidegger was convinced that the allegory as a whole
predominantly treats of altheia (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 altheia (PDT 1812), by (i) returning to
Plato as a philosopher in whom altheia is still manifest and (ii) recovering
that experience for ourselves so that we can arrive in the same domain
(ET 85).
Heideggers interest in Plato, therefore, was not a matter of historical
curiosity, and it was not strictly critical. He believed that a return into
historyin this case, through Platos doctrine of truthcould determine
our existence by determining our questioning (ET 86): through Plato,
not just the Preocratics, altheia 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
59
resolved to exist out of this understanding, altheia 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 thats 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 were 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 Platos 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 Platos 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 Platos 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 havent yet seen the details of Heideggers 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
60
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 altheia. Since we know that Heidegger looks to Platos cave allegory as a clue to understanding the essence of unhiddenness (altheia)
(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 Platos cave allegory.
As we will see next, Heidegger appropriates and transforms Platos 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 Heideggers critique of metaphysics, and (iii) how does
Heideggers 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 Heideggers Plato
helps us navigate a middle path between the false dichotomy offered by the
holists and dogmatists until weve actually looked closely at the details of
Heideggers view.
As we will see, for Heidegger, Platos philosophy is highly paradoxical. On
the one hand, he heralds Plato as a philosopher in whom altheia 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, Platos thought
contains an account of altheia 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 Heideggers positive view).
But on the other hand, he claims that Platos 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
Heideggers narrative of decline).11 In Chapter 8, I explain Heideggers
narrative of decline and challenge both the claim that Plato transforms the
essence of truth and the application of Heideggers ontotheology formula
to Platos philosophy, that is, the grand claim that Platos thinking remains
decisive in changing forms . . . throughout the whole history of philosophy
61
such that metaphysics is Platonism (TB 57). In the next chapter, however,
I will focus on Heideggers 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
There is no question that Platos thought had a significant impact on

Heideggers 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 Platos 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)
Heideggers encounter with Platos 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 Platos cave allegory at this
time, its clear that he means what he says in his letters. Between 1931 and
1934, for example, Heidegger argued that Platos cave allegory could help
us more clearly to grasp the essence of altheia as unhiddenness (ET 85)
because it gives expression to a fundamental experience, an experience which
63
tells us something about the fundamental stance of man in his philosophical comportment to beingsnamely, Daseins comportment toward gradations of simultaneously revealing and concealing disclosure (ET 26).
During this time Heideggers 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 thoughtnamely, the distinction between Being as such and the Being of entitiesin his positive
appropriation of Platos cave allegory. In his lecture course on Plato and the
essence of truth in 193132, for example, one finds the following conceptual transformations:
Table 1
Heideggers appropriation of Platos cave allegory
Elements of the allegory

zRealm of shadows
zThe fire
zRealm of light
zThe light itself
Platos interpretation
Sensibles
Doxa
Forms
The Good
Heideggers interpretation
Entities
Dasein/World
Being of beings
Being as such
At some point during the 1930s, however, for reasons he never fully
explained, Heideggers understanding of Platos place and role in the history of Western philosophy changed significantly. By the time Heidegger
published Platos Doctrine of Truth in 1940, Plato was no longer the philosopher in whose thought we might recover the history of mans essence
(ET 84), who witnessed but did not cause the waning of the ancient Greek
experience of truth as altheia. Thanks to his subordination of altheia to
ida (PDT 179), Plato had become the cause, the source of subjectivism and
ontotheology, the fraternal twin evils of Heideggers 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 hadnt always been so bad.
In his 193132 lecture course on Platos 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
64
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 Platos presentation (ET 17)
and to gain access to that indescribable and improvable something, the
experience of altheia in Platos philosophy, which is what the whole effort
of philosophizing is about (ET 13). If we do this correctly, Heidegger
promises the cave allegorys testimony to altheia 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 Napoleons defeat of the
Prussian monarchy at the Battle of Jena, Heidegger thought the essence
of truth and a peoples destiny were at stake in Germanys political crisis
(GA 36/37 989). 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 altheia. 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 altheia 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 Nietzsches madman
warns us of in 125 of The Gay Science. Dasein was in decline, Heidegger
thought, but Plato could save us. His testimony to altheia, 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
65
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 mans experience of himself and his world is fundamentally transformed (PDT 1678).
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 aleths, 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
212). 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.
66
[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
sufficesso 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 Platos response to the Being questionthey are his name for
the Being of beingsand the Good is Platos 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
67
expect, it seems most plausible that Heidegger understands the fire (or the
light of the fire, to be more exact) as World, which is Heideggers 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 Daseins tradition-determined
understanding of Being, it is analogous, though not quite functionally
equivalent, to metaphysics. We should recall our discussion of the relationship between Daseins 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 Daseins
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 ones 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 Heideggers 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
68
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 ones 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?
Heideggers answer to this question is partly an allusion to Being and Times
discussion of Daseins 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 Times discussion of Daseins 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 ones own thing and doing what
69
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 ones 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 mans existence in the cave (ET 27).
The reason the lights 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 278)
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 Times 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 sciencesconcepts as fundamental as
life, consciousness, personhood, materiality, and so onwe 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 Times analysis of anxiety, the cave allegorys 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 2334).
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.
70
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 mans 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 mans
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
71
(i) frees one from the dictates of the they-self and the reifying categories of
ones 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
ones exposure to the primordial light (ET 31) to take control of ones
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
regionalso 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
72
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 Heideggers
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 presencethe frame no longer
concerns us as something that is presenttherefore 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 Heideggers interpretation of the Forms.
73
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 389), 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 didnt
engage in far flung speculation when he constructed his theory of
Forms, on Heideggers 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 Heideggers 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, mans 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
74
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 Heideggers 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 Heideggers view,
reality does not correspond to man; man is no more than the place where
altheia 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 dont 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 Heideggers own view, metaphysics shapes
intelligibility, and thereby determines the direction of mans 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 Platos 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 389)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.
75
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: Heideggers Plato is the Later Heidegger

Heideggers 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 Platos 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
Platos sun analogy.
In Heideggers 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
76
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, Platos idea of the Good is Heideggers
Being as such. Plato gave him the idea. This becomes clear as we look at the
details of Heideggers lecture and compare them with several passages from
his later thought.
Heidegger begins by calling Platos 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 Platos 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 experiencea 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).
77
This is what I called spiritual ineffability in Chapter 2. Heidegger deserves

credit for recognizing and appreciating this feature of Platos 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 Platos 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 Platos 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 Goods ineffability, Heideggers 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
78
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 Heideggers 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 Heideggers 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 Platos 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
perceivingit lights up the eye itself [and] makes it free to receive
objectsand to the perceivable. It opens the world for Dasein, and Dasein
for the world (ET 745), 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 Heideggers later essay, Platos 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
79
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)
Heideggers 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 Heideggers lecture on the Good, we can
see that he is extracting these ideas, albeit in an undeveloped form, from
Platos sun analogy.
Heidegger proceeds by asking questions about the Forms. If the Being of
beings, Forms, in Platos 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 Heideggers 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 Heideggers later thoughtmore 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 Platos
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
80
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 745). 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 756), 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
81
only as something decisive in the enablement of being and truth . . . Enablement is the limit of philosophy (ET 767). 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 beings . . . 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, Platos Good is Heideggers
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
Heideggers 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 possiblebut does not ontotheologically ground
metaphysics various epochal postulates of the being of entities. (Thomson
2005: 19)
82
This is the view Heidegger discovers in Platos distinction between the Good
and the rest of the Forms. Consider Heideggers 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
altheia 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 1213, 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
Platos 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 789)
83
Heidegger says that, with Platos 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 Heideggers Being as such, is
what gives the Being of beings (Forms); [the] Being [of beings]that
which It [Being as such] givesis 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 Heideggers 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 Rilkes 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 mans 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
Platos symbolism respects the intractability of the concealed source of
unconcealment, Heidegger found the same quality in Platos thought.
Platos 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 Platos 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
84
the innermost power of the essence of man (ET 82). Plato said nous
descended from a divine origin (Tim. 90bd). Heidegger is phenomenologizing Platos mythological language, not to reduce it to something less
transformative but to renew the transformative power and wisdom (ET 40)
in Platos symbolism. Indeed, this is Heideggers strategy throughout his
exposition of Platos 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 Heideggers 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 [Mgen] 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
ones 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)
85
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 altheia, 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
86
and, therefore, the highest form of practice. These claims were not meant
merely to be provocative and paradoxical: on Heideggers 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 ones striving by transforming ones 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 dont 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.
87
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 ones 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 philosophers 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
88
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 liberators 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 612)
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 liberators
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 623). 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).
89
The Virtues of Heideggers 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
Heideggers Plato help us solve the problem of Plato interpretation? Weve
already provided detailed answers to the first two questions. Our close reading of Heideggers 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 Heideggers
own philosophical commitments. Because he finds an expression of the
difference and a preeminent expression of the experience and concept
of truth as altheia in Platos Republic, there is a sense in which Plato is a
pre-ontotheological thinker, despite Heideggers later failures to recall or
recognize this.18
With all of this analysis behind us, our final task is to determine how (or
whether) Heideggers Plato can help us untie Schleiermachers 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. Weve already discussed why there is a tension
between these rival interpretations of Plato (each is the negation of the
other), and weve also determined why each of them is flawed when considered individually: both failed adequately to characterize the nature of
Platos 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 Heideggers 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 Foucaults view
that Plato made self-transformation a necessary precondition for gaining
access to truth. As he says, one must become other than oneself, because
90
one is incapable of truth as one is. Heidegger undoubtedly would accept this
claim, but he deepens it by phenomenologizing Platos prescription that we
recognize our reflection in the mirror of the divine and become as godlike
as possible. In place of Platos 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 Heideggers 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 ones being,
such that one is turned around in the very ground of ones essence (PDT
166) and attuned to the world in a new way. Heideggers 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) mans 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 Heideggers claim that paideia requires a reorientation in the
fundamental direction of ones striving (PDT 166).
The prisoners 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 philosophers being, Heidegger is able to give a precise account
of what happens in the philosophers 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.
91
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 1678)
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 altheia 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 Heideggers 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 Foucaults concepts of (i) self-transformation and (ii) the rebound
effect. As Heidegger says, the interrogation of that which empowers being
92
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 Heideggers 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. Lets review. Like
the holists, Heidegger is critical of the analytic approach that attempts to
reconstruct Platos 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
Platos mind, as Kahn says, than he is in understanding what the texts
imply about Platos experience of altheia, regardless of whether Plato was
fully aware of this. Heideggers 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 importantin fact, Heidegger makes global claims
about Platonic philosophy on the basis of the cave allegory, a very short
passage in one of Platos longest dialogues. If he shares any positive principle with the holists it is that the literary form of Platos dialogues is philosophically significant. As he argues in The Essence of Truth, the most important
matters in Platos 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 mans finite wisdom. This comes very
close to Schlegels position, according to which the artistic form of the dialogues was itself an expression of Platos ontology and epistemology.
While Heideggers 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 Platos interest in ontology, even if he would give an entirely
93
different sense to Platos ontology than most or all contemporary

dogmatists. If we recall the epigraph to this book, Heidegger thought Platos
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, mans relation to Beings
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 Platos philosophy and ignorant of the inner
jointure and order of Platos 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 Heideggers lecture courses on Platos
cave allegory in the early 1930s is that they help us recognize the problems
with his 1940 essay, Platos Doctrine of Truth. For example, we can now
explain very precisely what is wrong with Heideggers thesis that Platos
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 Platos 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 Heideggers 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
94
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
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 Platos 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. Platos 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
mans 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: Heideggers Crisis and Opportunity
When Heidegger published Platos 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 altheia could save the West from the crisis of European nihilism.
However, instead of continuing to play the role of savior in Heideggers
narrative, Plato became the villain. As we saw in the previous chapter,
Heideggers earlier view had been that Platos testimony to altheia 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 Platos fundamental experience (ET 85).
But by 1940 Heidegger began to attribute our ontological decline to Platos
transformation of truth from altheia to orthotes because he thought it paved
the way to Nietzsches ontotheology of eternally recurring will to power
(PDT 1812). 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 modernitys deepest crises grow?
We can only speculate about the content of Heideggers 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 Platos 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.
96
It is also possible that Heidegger was motivated by a basic desire for

retribution. As we will see in the next three chapters, Platos 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
Heideggers 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 Heideggers
Rectoral Address contains unmistakable allusions to the Republics tripartite
division of the state, Heideggers politics are best explained by Platos
thought, not his own (Young 1997: 19).2 This appears to be a reasonable
position. Heideggers lectures on Platos 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 Platos thought and transformed it to suit his own circumstances, but the basic idea underpinning
Heideggers 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 Heideggers politics and Platos. If Plato
inspired Heideggers delusions about leading the leader, he shouldnt have,
and he wouldnt have if Heidegger had read Plato more sympathetically.3
As I will show in Chapter 7, Platos 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 Platos 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 didnt 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
97
deeply influenced by his misunderstanding of Plato. What we must try to

explain, therefore, is twofold. We must unpack the political philosophy
contained in Heideggers 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 Gadamers
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
Heideggers Address to his lectures on Plato and Aristotle in 1924, and read
these lectures in connection with Heideggers project of fundamental
ontology in Being and Time, it is clear that the particulars of Heideggers
positive vision for university reform derive from his appropriation of
Aristotles Nichomachean Ethics, not Platos 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 Heideggers 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.
Heideggers Crisis
It is well known that Heidegger immersed himself in Nietzsches 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 Nietzsches 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 Nietzsches 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 Nietzsches. In 1925, Heidegger
focuses on the upside of Gods 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
98
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
Europes 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 deadand 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 Daseins
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
Heideggers 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
99
display of breathtaking hubris and naivet, 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-altheia, 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 Wests previous worldviews allowed, if only the
West could recover its oldest understanding of Being (BT 423). 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 Beingit discouraged Dasein from using the originary
power of questioning to achieve its world-disclosing potential (IM 78)
while modernitys 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 Wests self-understanding were deep and pervasive,
causing Daseins 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
100
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 intellectuallywhen 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 modernitys piercing theoretical
gaze. The gods had fled. God was dead. Man was no longer at home in his
world.
101
This, in short, is Heideggers 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 modernitys 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 [Europes]
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 Wests 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? Heideggers 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 Heideggers
102
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 Platos 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 isnt something we will discover by studying the present
state of the university nor [through] acquaintance with its previous history
(RA 6). And it isnt 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 Aristotles 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 wont 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.
103
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 mans 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 Heideggers 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 67). He
intends to reform the university, therefore, by reorganizing it in light of
a special mode of questioning.
From Heideggers 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).
104
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 sciences ignorance
of its roots in philosophy have world-historical significance?
Heideggers 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 mans 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 8990)
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 Heideggers Archimedean
lever, and herein lies the world-historical significance of sciences forgetfulness of its roots. Because the question of Being is the fundamental
105
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 didnt share Marxs view that economic activity
was the most basic foundation for the epiphenomenon (or superstructure) of culture. He thought cultures foundation was something still more
fundamental. A Marxist cant 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 peoples 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 worldviewevery 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 Heideggers: 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
106
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 Heideggers 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 altheia (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 altheia, 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 thingsit 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 89).
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 philosophyit is our ontic distinctionand 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
107
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 Heideggers Crisis: Nietzsche

We might think of Heidegger as the second coming of Nietzsches 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 [Gods] shadow is displayed (GS 108),
but at the most basic level the world isnt what it used to be. The Wests 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? Arent we falling constantly? Backwards,
sideways, forwards, in every direction? Is there still an above and a below?
Arent we wandering as if through an endless nothing? Isnt empty space
breathing upon us? Hasnt it gotten colder? Isnt night and more night
continuously coming upon us? Dont lanterns have to be lit in the morning?
(GS 125)
The madmans message falls on deaf ears. His audience laughs at him
because they arent ready to accept his message or its implications, namely,
the dark, continuous night of nihilism and the weight of existential responsibility it entails. They dont want to admit to themselves that they invented
their metaphysical comforts in order to give meaning to their suffering.
Mans 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
madmans message, therefore, couldnt 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 madmans audience listened to him, they
108
would have to face the fearful void alone. But that would produce a kind
of suicidal nihilism (GM III 28), so they dont. They prefer to be victims
and passive recipients of a meaning that is put up and demanded from
outsideby 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 starseven 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 Wests 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 Wests 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 Gods 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 individualbut 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
109
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 madmans message. He isnt 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 philosophys greatest critics of dogmatic metaphysics,
was unwilling to question the existence of the Moral Law, hence Nietzsches
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 persons expectations, desires, values, and behavior.
Nietzsches 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
110
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 animaldoctrines which I consider true but deadlyare 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 Heideggers 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 Nietzsches fixation
on value, but he shares Nietzsches 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
111
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 iswill to power (BGE 211).
Nietzsches 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 mans
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? Nietzsches 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 nothingnesshe must
come one day. (GM II 24)
Here Nietzsche anticipates the arrival of the bermensch, 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 Nietzsches perspective, God was worse than irrelevant. He had
112
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 Nietzsches diagnosis of the rise of nihilism in the West,
and he shares Nietzsches concerns that it could precipitate a cultural
catastrophe.17 But he challenges Nietzsches solution to this problem, suggesting that Nietzsches doctrine of the will to power merely increased the
strength of nihilisms stranglehold on the West, and he tells a different story
about nihilisms 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, Christianitywhat he famously calls Platonism
for the people in the preface to Beyond Good and Evilsewed the seeds of
its own undoing in two ways. First, it encouraged an attitude of skepticism
about pagan superstitions that eventually undermined peoples 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 ones
rewards and advancing to ones 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 dont
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
113
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 modernitys 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 bermensch. 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 Nietzsches conception of a Will to Power that posits
new values does nothing fundamentally to alter the worldview of modern
sciencein fact, because it makes man the measure of everything, it is
Cartesian subject-object dualism in the extremeand 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
Nietzsches metaphysics differ from Descartes, he remains within the Cartesian framework in a way that no other modern thinker does (N4 103).
Nietzsches 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, 12930)
Nietzsche unchains us from Platos 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 bermensch cannot hope for more than a
limited and temporary fix for the problem of nihilism, the lawlessness that
114
accompanies humanitys 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 3202). Nietzsches 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 traditions transcendent metaphysics and endorsing a life-affirming, sensuous philosophy of aesthetic illusion as an alternative, Nietzsche simply inverted the old metaphysical hierarchy, upending
Diotimas 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 Nietzsches 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 wont be able to accept Heideggers 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 Nietzsches
doctrines of Will to Power and Eternal Recurrence do, Nietzsches thought
is metaphysical and thus forgetful of Being as such.
115
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 Heideggers 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
Nietzsches 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 hasnt 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
altheia to the nihilism of the technological age on the coattails of metaphysical thinking. He has also begun to connect Nietzsches 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 altheia, 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] altheia (ET 85),
the true soil underpinning the later Aristotelian and medieval views with
which it was confused and forgotten. Heideggers positive recommendation
116
is that we analyze the experience of how the world shows up for us in pretheoretical, everyday, lived activitiesthe contexts of meaning and understanding that are prior to, and the ultimate basis of, all theoryso that we
can awaken and focus our awareness of phusis-altheia. 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

Thus far we have reviewed Heideggers diagnosis of modernitys 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 Nietzsches solution to
the problem of meaninglessness because it reinforces the Cartesian subjectivism that is nihilisms innermost cause. Despite his differences with
Nietzsche, however, Heideggers concerns about modernity clearly derive
from Nietzsches. 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 universeindeed,
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 Heideggers critique of technology, the world appears just as
118
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 actone changes the world, therefore, by changing the
way it is perceived.
If this is the general story of Heideggers 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
Heideggers 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)
Heidegger and the Greeks
119
The full meaning of this passage will become clearer as we go. For now it is
important to point out that, because Heideggers plans for university reform
hang on this conception of Greek philosophy, this short passage is arguably
the most important moment in Heideggers Address. And yet it hasnt been
sufficiently explained. Most scholars either ignore it or give it such a superficial gloss that it ends up saying something trivially true about Heideggers
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 Heideggers 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, Heideggers 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 Heideggers 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 mans 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
120
grasp (WM 93). If we put these ideas together, Heideggers 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 Diotimas
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 dont 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 nihilisms 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 Heideggers choice
of the Greeks as his clue to the essence of science.
This explains the general connection between Heideggers 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 ones 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.
121
In the Phaedo, Socrates describes the philosophers 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. Aristotles 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 philosophers activity as
more than merely human (NE 1177b314), 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 1177a212). When Aristotle catalogs his six reasons for selecting the
theoretical life over the practical life, he says explicitly that one of theorias
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 doesnt 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 Platos 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)
Heideggers 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
122
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 specialiststhat is the philosophy enjoyed by the philosophy professors he criticizes, that is, the ones who are failing to address
the Wests severe distress (RA 6).
It might be helpful to interpret Heideggers claims about theoria in light
of Foucaults notion of the rebound effect, according to which philosophical knowledge passes through, permeates, and transfigures the being
of the one who knows (Foucault 2001: 1819). 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 ones 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 ones self and
work upon the world. This conception of science seems to be the goal of
Heideggers 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 Heideggers 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 isnt 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 Heideggers thought. Fair enough. Is this possible?
It is if we turn to Heideggers lecture course on the Sophist. In these
lectures Heidegger argues that Aristotles 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 Daseins Being and reveals the concealed significance of
123
the ordinary. Such contemplation is not a distortion of Daseins 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
Daseins 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 Daseins 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 mans essence that aims at understanding
what empowers being and unhiddenness (ET 81). This is Heideggers
phenomenologization of Aristotles perfectionism. One does not contemplate the means to becoming happy in theoria (NE 1143b1920), as Aristotle
points out. Theoria literally is ones happiness because it is the activity that
fulfills the human function.
Heideggers 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 Platos distinction between the philosopher
and the sophist. Unlike the philosopher, whose life is oriented around truth
(understood as altheia) 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 Platos unstated understanding of
truth, our everyday relationship to truth through doxa, and our heightened
relationship to truth through philosophy (S 11).
124
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 Daseins 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, philosophys 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 Daseins
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 Platos 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 Daseins 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 1516). 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
125
Plato when he changes the object of sophia from the metaphysical structure
of reality to the Being of Dasein, and therefore redirects philosophys attention from the being of nature to mans own being, whose temporality and
tendency to fall are the ultimate sources of substance ontology and the
metaphysics of presence.
The link between Heideggers 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, Heideggers name for this
inner tendency to see and to understand is Daseins 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 itselfthe pre-ontological understanding of Being. (BT 35)
Theoria, therefore, is the radicalization of Daseins 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 mans natural concern with his existence and inborn capacity to be in the truth.
In Heideggers 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
126
in principle. Heideggerian theoria makes us aware of thisauthentic 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. Heideggers 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 doesnt 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 historywhich,
in their numerous filiations and distortions, determine the conceptual
character of philosophy even todayprove that when Dasein understands
itself or Being in general, it does so in terms of the world, and that the
127
ontology which has thus arisen has deteriorated to a tradition in which it

gets reduced to something self-evidentmerely 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 423, emphasis added).
This, I take it, is the metaphysics Heidegger hopes to inscribe into the
structure of the university. If we want to understand Heideggers 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 weve answered these questions we will be in a better position to ask whether there is, in fact, anything Platonic in Heideggers
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 mans 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.
128
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 isnt the only reason, and it certainly isnt the primary one, for
reuniting the university in common philosophical questioning. If it were,
one could argue that Heideggers 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 Heideggers 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
129
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 well be able to trace the various branches of science
back to a common root and soil, namely, Daseins 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.
Heideggers stunning conclusion is that this common root of the sciences
is not a concept at all but rather Daseins 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
130
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 unrecognizedthe tradition was
essentially correct that Being was the hypokeimenon; it just failed to identify
its real properties. This cannot be Heideggers 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 Daseins understanding of Being.
131
This raises new questions. If we cannot fully and finally define the meaning of Being because of Daseins embedded position in a historical tradition that conditions its understanding of everything, what can we say about
Being that isnt 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 Daseins understanding
of Being? Heideggers 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 allan 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 altheia (ET 85).
Consider Heideggers 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
132
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 Daseins 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 Heideggers
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 mans nature and the Being of beings.
Butas soon as I thoughtfully say mans nature, I have already said
relatedness to Being. Likewise, as soon as I say thoughtfully: Being of
beings, the relatedness to mans nature has been named. Each of the two
members of the relation between mans 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 mans 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 hadnt 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) Daseins 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
133
the nature of Beingthe 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 Daseins
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 Heideggers 193132 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 altheia. 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
altheia. 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 ourselvesor, better, we should look at our
134
reflection in the mirror of ancient Greek philosophy. Heidegger thinks

well 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 natureand 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,
couldnt 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 dont, the spiritual strength of the
West will fail and its joints will crack. Theoria is the lynchpin, the model for
Heideggers 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 Daseins 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 weve 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
135
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 Platos 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 Nietzsches 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, Nietzsches 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 nihilisms innermost
cause.
Heideggers 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. Heideggers reforms were meant to bring all of
this to light, eliminate Cartesian metaphysics, and recover a more primordial understanding of mans 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 altheia. 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 doesnt explain
why Heidegger thought he could institutionalize his reforms and, in a sense,
136
legislate nationwide authenticity. The curious leap in Heideggers reasoning is his inference from his diagnosis of Europes 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 Heideggers 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 Daseins temporality. How could the
universitys administration iron out these details if Heidegger could not?
The other problem is Heideggers 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: 778).
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 finallysometime, when it has long since been forgotten as originary philosophyit sinks away in the form of one of Daseins
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 Heideggers 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, Heideggers own
emphasis on powerlessness, receptivity, and a kind of fatalism in his later
period conflict with his Promethean dream of becoming historys master
puppeteer in the early 1930s.
How do we explain this strange aberration in Heideggers thought?
Some have suggested that Heideggers work on Plato can help us answer
this question. But, as we will see in the next two chapters, it isnt clear there
is any truth in this claim.
Chapter 7
Back from Syracuse? Four Reasons to Rethink

Heideggers 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 Platos 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
Platos 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 Heideggers involvement in the Nazi Party with Platos involvement in Sicilian politics. There is
another, however, and it encourages us to draw very different conclusions
about the relationship between Platos thought and Heideggers 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
138
of the Forms and the philosophers 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
Heideggers astonishing political navet than the case of Plato . . . It is
a kinship found both in the circumstantial parallels to Platos 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 thinkings relation to truth, including the truths of the political realm, is through the idea, which is a relationship of detachment from
practical life. It isnt 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 Platos theoretical optimism
in politics, the Rectoral Address is the most Platonic of Heideggers 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: 1625).1 It is an
instance of the nihilism that Heidegger supposedly opposed.
Schmidts 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
Back from Syracuse?
139
admits that the guardian class may be unhappy with the abolition of private
property and the nuclear family, not to mention the states 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. 420b421c).
The defining characteristic of the standard view, then, is that it interprets
all of the Republics 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 Republics politics, therefore, it was only because he did not understand Platos 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 proposalsespecially the discussion of gender equality and coed communal life among the guardians in
Book Vwere 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 philosophers 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 philosophers 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 Republics
political argument is riddled with ironies, including one that is decisive
for determining the texts 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.
140
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 navet.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 Platos political pessimism, I shall return to the
questions about Heideggers 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. 472e473a, 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. 204b45). It is not an activity of the immortal gods
Back from Syracuse?
141
(Symp. 204a12) who enjoy pure, unmediated knowledge of the Forms.

According to the Symposiums 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. 248a46). This poses a
fundamental problem for Platos 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, doesnt 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 couldnt be clearer about
the philosophers 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 thats 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
142
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 lines list of cognitive states is a name for the kind of cognition that corresponds to the philosopher who has returned to the cave. He doesnt 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. 47680). 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 philosophers knowledge. If we were
to place the enlightened cave dwellers 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 philosophers 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. 472e473a, 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 philosophers 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.
Back from Syracuse?
143
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 werent 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 (463e464d). These limitations on
the guardians freedom, however, pose a fundamental problem for Platos
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 (417a37), 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 citys interests, on Platos 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 isnt consistent with the standard view,
and it isnt consistent with Platos own suggestion that the philosophers
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 Platos 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: Platos imagery makes them fugitive, flat, unsubstantialshadows 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)
144
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 Platos 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 couldnt 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 arent 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 citys 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).
Back from Syracuse?
145
We must ask whether anything could be more contrary to nature than

these particular proposals. Mothers arent 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
years lottery! Could Plato have believed this, using nature as his guiding
light? Wouldnt he have had to be wildly confused about the nature of
human inclinations?
The Political Problem

Lets 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 mans 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 captains guiding star: it doesnt 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
Platos ethics. But in the political context, it raises a crucially important
question: should there be an approximation of the kallipolis in society?
Platos 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 individuals 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
146
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 Platos ideal is monstrous. Since all
approximations of the kallipolis fall short of Platos 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. 487b503b). At the conclusion
of this long response, Socrates has indeed shown that philosophys 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 Im afraidnot
because I distrust your nature, but because I know how powerful the city
isIm 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 Athenians judgment, but that we are not free
is something he says he knows for certain (Laws 644e, 803c804b).16 Platos
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
Back from Syracuse?
147
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. 491b68).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 persons 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 dont have sufficient influence on the
young, and they merely serve the citys 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 persons 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 hell
say that the same things are beautiful and ugly as the crowd does, follow
148
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 reactscalling 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. 358359b).21 It is best
to seem, not to be, just. These opinions haunted Platos idealism. He had
seen others like them destroy Socrates (Ep. VII 3245), 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. 549c550b). 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 isnt now, hasnt 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 mobI 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 savedyou
might rightly sayby 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
Back from Syracuse?
149
these people were predetermined, in a way that was tragic, either to be

rejected by society or corrupted by it. Socrates and Theages are Platos 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. 496bc).
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 Platos 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 Platos intentions in Sicily, namely, that he was there to
create the kallipolis or something roughly similar.
A brief look at the relevant details of Platos letter will confirm that Plato
went to Syracuse to moderate a despot and establish the rule of lawsthis 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 Dions
ambitions were no different from Platos. 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 wasnt part of their plans.
150
The more general point of Platos 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 citys
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 325c326a)
Platos 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 wiseso miraculous a temper is against
natureor 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,
Back from Syracuse?
151
oligarchies, or democracies, and their rulers reject the demands of true justice (Ep. VII 326d). In the end, Dionysius deeply frustrated Plato. Contrary
to Dions hopes, and exactly as Plato suspected, Dionysius turned out to be
like a sick man who refuses to obey his doctors orders, that is, precisely
the sort of person who is unworthy of earnest philosophical counseling
(Ep. VII 330d). The problem with Schmidts 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 obstacleswhat I have called the ontological, epistemological, moral, and political problemsblocking 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. Platos 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-kings 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
Schmidts view that Platos 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 ruleforms
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 Platos
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
152
between the twin evils of communism and capitalism. Instead of following

in Platos 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 altheia by recovering
and perfecting their own essence (GA 36/37 867). It wouldnt be easy. The
struggle for truth is a battle, a war, against Beings self-concealment and
mans 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 Hitlers motivations for withdrawing from the League
of Nations, to ontological realities, such as the German peoples choice of
its essence and future, Heideggers interpretation of Germanys withdrawal
from the League of Nations (GA 36/37 867).
Some of Heideggers friends can help us confirm this. During the semester
break following Heideggers lectures on the allegory of the cave, Hermann
Mrchen visited Heidegger at his cabin in Todtnauberg and recorded the
following impression in his diary.
He doesnt 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 doesnt 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 Mrchen makes the crucial point in a few sentences. Heidegger
didnt understand much about politics because his yardsticks were
Being as such and mans relation to Being. The German Volk were choosing
their essence when Hitler broke with the League of Nations (GA 36/37 989).25
Back from Syracuse?
153
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 2102).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 Heideggers inexcusably myopic perspective on
the monstrous events and rhetoric of his time?
Gonzalez argues that Heideggers 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 didnt see people suffering or countries fighting, and he didnt hear any
racist rhetoric; he saw the drama of Beings history unfolding before him,
and he wanted to play the part of Beings shepherd. No doubt there is
something to this account of Heideggers 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 Husserls, 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.
Heideggers 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 Schmidts question. What inspired Heidegger to
forget his own better judgment about the obscurity of human knowledge?
154
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 Platos philosopher-king ideal. If we
look closely at Heideggers 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 623)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 Platos thought, which isnt
surprising, given his low opinion of das Man. What is surprising is that he
didnt 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 623) suggests that Heidegger understood and
shared Platos suspicions about the plausibility of sweeping political reform.
And yet, as we know all too well, this wasnt 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 Heideggers politics. We can
only speculate. Maybe it was due to his philosophical confusion, caused by
Back from Syracuse?
155
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 Heideggers
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,
poetswhat 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 tyrants servile flatterers, composing hymns to tyranny once
he is in power. (Lilla 2001: 21011)
Even a cursory glance at Heideggers 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 Germanys philosopher-king, Heidegger
forgot Platos ontological humility, which he had previously recognized and
emphasized in his lectures. Like Alcibiades, Heideggers wanting to get to
the bottom of beings and of Being as such (ET 60)his longing for the
light outside the cavewas tragically transformed into a tyrannical desire to
master the cave, the false whole and fools gold for which the tyrant settles.
Back from Syracuse? was no doubt the correct question to ask Heidegger
156
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 Sicilys 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. 21822). But in the end it
wasnt 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 Hitlers 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 Platos philosophy

from Platonism and explained several objections to Platos 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 Platos ineffable, incomplete-able philosophy fits
neither mold. And he is wrong to downplay the similarities between his
thought and Platos because he discovered his own distinction between
the Being of beings and Being as such in his phenomenological return to
Platos cave.
These criticisms sum up one set of problems with Heideggers interpretation of Plato. There is another, and it may be even more important because
it concerns Platos influence on Heideggers politics in 1933, not just subtle
mistakes in his understanding of Platos metaphysics. Instead of forcing
Platos thought into the framework of ontotheology and the overarching
narrative of historical decline, and instead of interpreting the cave allegory
as an image of Germanys struggle to decide the essence of truth, Heidegger
should have recognized a kindred spirit lying behind Platos 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 Heideggers concerns about the fate of the West in the
age of technology as a new species of Platos 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,
158
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), Platos 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 mans relation to Being, that is, paideia.2
When we recognize this shared sensibility between Heidegger critique of
technology and Platos 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 altheia, and in a sense reidentifies virtue with knowledgeMan is
the being that understands being and exists on the basis of this understanding (ET 57)Platos 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. 521d68).3 Plato thought lawless
desire and ignorance were at the root of Greeces 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 Platos ultimate solution to the political problem.
The polis could be changed, although not once and for all, and only from
the bottom up, one individuals 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 Platos Republic, for
example, he might have better appreciated Platos political pessimism and
avoided his own political catastrophe.
Did Plato Anticipate Heideggers Critique of Technology?

Heideggers 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
159
toward things and openness to the mystery through meditative thinking (DT 545). Modernity, Heidegger says, is the age of the worlds 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 Heideggers list of symptoms.
Many other philosophers and novelists from the modern period provided
similar diagnoses of the Wests cultural maladies and existential disorder.
But Heideggers causal analysis of the Wests symptoms is unlike anything
else in modern thought. He accounts for modernitys destitution in terms
of mans 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 Daseins 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).
160
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 Nietzsches 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).
161
His prescription for restoring the Wests 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 modernitys various predicaments, in other words, is to see and understand the world anew, to be
touched by [the] altheia 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 mans 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 citys 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 (243e257b) and Republic
(514a518b). 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 ones fallen, benumbed slumber in the
ordinary. Then, just as suddenly, as if one has been transfixed or possessed
162
by a superior reality, one remembers ones 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. 251a252c). 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
stagesawakening, purification, and life-transforming illuminationin
the cave allegory. The cave dweller isnt 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
thoughtsocial affliction and philosophical therapytogether 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. 222a35), 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 isnt 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
163
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 Platos
autobiography, Plato faced intense social pressures not to turn his back on
the privileges and opportunities afforded by his familys wealth and status
(Dodds 1959: 31). These pressures are best articulated by Callicles, who
characterizes Platos choice of lifeducked 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. 215e216b). 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 Platos 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 Platos social and political philosophy.9 There
may be no greater or more personal influence on the content of Platos
postwar thought. Alcibiades experience of Socrates was similar to Platos,
and his moral weakness was likely the impetus for Platos 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 Platos 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 Platos own identity.
164
Platos 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 strikeswe attack other lands
by ourselveswhereas 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 qualitiesindeed,
the citys 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 citys 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 ones life (Thuc. 2.44).
165
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 Platos 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 Platos 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, hes 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, hes carried in that direction, if money-makers, in that one. Theres 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 youd 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
166
who is by nature free . . . [But] doesnt 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 hell
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 Platos 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 cant have one, you
cant 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.
167
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 Fordes
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 citys 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 didnt 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. 6.166.24).
168
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 doesnt 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 citys 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
169
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 Platos criticism of Periclean Athens and Alcibiades, her most illustrious
and disordered son.
170
Alcibiades as Inverted Image of Socrates

We dont 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 Platos
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 Platos 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
171
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 individuals 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
citys reputation for power; Socrates argued that a life like Alcibiades is
no better than the most miserable slaves (Symp. 216a) because it enslaves
the best part of himself to the most vicious (Rep. 589d), and therefore
renders one incapable of actualizing ones 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 citys greatness in terms of the militarys
strength and the treasurys size (Gorg. 519a).18
Alcibiades aroused Athenian eros with the prospect of transcendence
via militarism; Socrates awakened his audiences 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 Platos Socrates. From the perspective of Platos philosophical life,
Alcibiades desires and ambitions, his way of life and his values, are utterly
foolish. The objects of all his longing are the fools gold that prevents one
from realizing ones highest possibilities of being (Tim. 90d) and instead
produces ineluctable psychological, social, and political disorder.
172
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 Diotimas 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 isnt 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 wouldnt 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 Platos 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
Platos 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 Platos 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
173
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. Platos
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 Heideggers critique of technology, then, Platos critique of Periclean
Athens has causal and prescriptive components. On Platos view, as with
Heideggers, the cause of mans 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
worlds 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 didnt 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
174
has freed herself from the leaden weights that pull her souls 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). Platos
hardnosed psychological realism suggests that eros is always corruptible.
Heideggers 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 Platos 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 Heideggers thought, and in particular his thought
about politics and education. In the 1966 Spiegel interview, for example,
Heideggers 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 Heideggers optimism dangerously nave. 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 didnt share Platos 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 resourcescorrect
the reductive revelation of Being, and the worlds other problems, whether
they be the abuse of the environment or wars of conquest, simply go away.
Plato wouldnt have understood this feature of Heideggers 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,
175
an important collection of passages leaves no doubt about the philosophers 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 Im saying, and
thats the man Im having a discussion with. The majority I disregard.
And I do know how to call for a vote from one man, but I dont 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 Platos
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 Platos 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
3
4
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: 44692) and
Reale (1985: 6783). For a detailed account of the philosophical views of Platos
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 Platos 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.
Schleiermachers controversial claim that Aristotles comments on Platos 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 Platos Late Ontology that the contents of Platos oral lecture can
in fact be found in several of Platos 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: 16784). The other criticism of the esotericists position is that it ignores the passages in Aristotles Metaphysics where Aristotle attributes
views to Plato that are consistent with the metaphysics of Platos middle and late
dialogues (e.g., 1078b, 990b, 991a).
These are fair criticisms of the esotericists, provided one trusts Aristotles 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 Aristotles
writings about it. It doesnt matter that Aristotles 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 Platos
oral teaching without capturing it sufficiently for reconstruction. Indeed, if the
esotericists were correct, Platos philosophy would have perished when he did.
Notes
7
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
177
In 1812, Schleiermacher explicitly claims that Plato was the first systematic
philosopher (1839: 98).
In Schleiermachers 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 Platos dialogues. For a critique of Kahns 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 Ryles 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 Platos arguments,
while skeptic and non-doctrinal imply that holists think Platos philosophy
entirely lacks positive content. I dont know of any holists who ignore Platos
arguments or deny that Platos 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 (14.115.50). 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 Platos entire project, which in turn led him to place the Phaedrus
at the head of Platos 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: 122, esp. 1213); cf. Tigerstedt (1977: 103) and Annas
(1992: 60).
See Gonzalez (1998a: 116). For an excellent example of a holist who supplies
her reader with a clear alternative to the traditional understanding of Platonism,
see Gordon (1999).
178
18
19
20
21
Notes
Scholars often make the mistake of assuming that because Aristotle was brilliant,
and because he was Platos student and colleague, he couldnt possibly have misunderstood him. But this is a horrible inference, as is clear if we consider any
number of contemporary examples. Heres one: John Searle is brilliant, and he
is Hubert Dreyfus colleague; therefore, he must understand Dreyfus, perhaps
even better than Dreyfus understands himselfjust admire the analytic clarity in
his writing!
See Ausland (1997: 380), Gordon (1999: 7), Gonzalez (1995: 11; 1998a: 116),
Rutherford (1995: 710), and Blondell (2002: 1819).
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: 3958).
Chapter 2: Untying Schleiermachers Gordian Knot

1
3
4
5
6
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: 2534) and Gonzalez (1998a: 255).
Cf. Gonzalez (1998a: 263)
For a detailed account of these distinctions in negative theology, see Gersh
(1986: 26672). White (1988: 249) makes a similar distinction in his portrayal of
Gadamers interpretation of Plato.
See Miller (1985: 175) and Sallis (2007: 256, 502).
For classic examples of this view, see Burnet (1911 and 1914), Taylor (19171918,
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 dont 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.
Notes
9
10
11
179
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: 2489). 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 Heideggers

Interpretation of Plato
1
2
3
4
See PDT 155; cf. ET 512.

Heideggers 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 Daseins very essence.
See Thomson (2001: 247); cf. Thomson (2005: 743, esp. 1719).
Heideggers emphasis on the historically fluctuating experience of truth might
seem spooky or mystical to some philosophers, but it is crucial to Heideggers
philosophical presuppositions, and it is rooted in a phenomenological analysis
of everyday, ordinary experience. Being and Time was supposed to show that it is
Daseins 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 hasnt 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 altheia, 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.
180
5
10
11
12
Notes
As radical as this may sound, it is not altogether different from Kuhns thesis in
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. See Kuhn (1996: 1618): 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 groundleaves 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, Heideggers 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: 10414). In his later period,
Heideggers 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 Heideggers 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 Heideggers 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 Platos Republic and
discovered these lines in Platos distinction between the Forms and the Good
beyond Being. If I am correct about this, it would make sense that Heideggers
transformation of the Platonic categories into his own philosophical vocabulary
occurred just one year later.
Chapter 4: Heideggers Platonism

1
While, in 1940, Heidegger still thinks the cave allegory illustrates the essence of
real education, his emphasis in Platos 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 1801).
Notes
2
3
4
5
10
11
12
181
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 212
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 Heideggers view that we approach Plato, just as we
approach the pre-Socratics, from a defective understanding of Being (ET 1011),
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 mans 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 altheia 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 Heideggers lecture on
the Good, where he distinguishes the Good from the other Forms.
I discuss the connection between Heideggers Appropriation and Platos 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 23840), where Being is described as the
giver, and Time and Being, where Being itself is said to be given with time (TB
810).
Heideggers name for this co-opening of man and world in his Beitrge (193638)
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;
182
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
Notes
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
Heideggers 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 mans 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 altheia is de-concealment, in which occurs the
history of mans essence . . . the question of the essence of truth is the question
of the history of mans 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 Platos 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 Platos 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: 423), Howland (1998: 468), Barabas (1986),
Blondell (2002: 734), and Kahn (1996: 69).
Anyone familiar with Heideggers work on Plato should be well aware of
Heideggers claim that Plato was the first ontotheological thinker: Throughout
the whole history of philosophy, Platos thinking remains decisive in changing
forms. Metaphysics is Platonism (TB 57). Given our reading of Heideggers
lectures on the cave allegory, however, this well-known claim should seem a lot
less obvious, and even puzzling.
Heidegger hasnt 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 Platos metaphor of light throughout his interpretation of the allegory.
We should also note Heideggers 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 Heideggers argument in Platos Doctrine of Truth are too
well known to warrant repeating here. The same might be said about the many
Notes
22
183
problems with Heideggers reasoning in this peculiar essay. However, because the
shift in Heideggers 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: 801), Hyland (1995: 139; 2004: 5364), Zuckert
(1996: 51), Peperzak (1997: 103), and Gonzalez (2002: 376n41; 2008). Dostal
(1985: 72) observes that Friedlander, Heideggers colleague at Marburg, was the
first to raise this objection to Heideggers interpretation of Plato.
As Dostal explains this criticism, the problem with Heideggers interpretation
is not the suggestion that both epistemological and ontological tendencies exist
in Platos 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): [Heideggers] 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 Platos Doctrine of Truth is that, on this
extremely important point, it contradicts Heideggers earlier view in his lecture
courses. In 193132, 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
altheia: 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, 989, 104), Sallis (2007: 17), and
Hankey (2004: 435): Largely, but not exclusively, the most effective criticism of
Heideggers 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 Heideggers thought is une sorte de neo-platonisme, may have been
the first to see this. See Hadot (1959: 5402), 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 Platos philosophy, not Platos intention. But there are
at least two problems with such an argument. First, this is not Heideggers view
in his 1940 essay, in the opening paragraph of which he says explicitly that he is
interested in Platos 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 Platos thinking is
a change in what determines the essence of truth (PDT 155, emphasis added).
184
23
Notes
Second, this is not Heideggers 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 thoughtthe tradition has misunderstood and distorted their testimony to a fundamental experience of Being as altheia, 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
Platos 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: Heideggers Crisis

and Opportunity
1
2
3
4
Predictably this debate has divided into warring camps. Some argue that the relationship between Heideggers philosophy and politics is direct, and that we
should therefore condemn Heideggers 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:
314), Schrmann (1990), Olafson (1998: 13), and Gadamer (1989: 428).
Others agree. See Taminiaux (1997: 45, 49) and Schmidt (2002: 1623).
Cf. Lilla (2001: 44).
Several commentators have picked up on the theme of world-historical crisis in
Heideggers Rectoral Address. For excellent examples, see Young (1997: 1151),
Sluga (1993: 238), Zimmerman (1990: 3445), and Safranski (1998: 22547). For
a view closer to mine, where Heideggers Address is directly linked to Nietzsches
analysis of nihilism and Heideggers earlier view that the origins of nihilism must
be traced back to Plato, see Bambach (2003: 8990) and Zimmerman (1990: 21).
For additional examples of philosophical discussions of Heideggers Address, see
Scott (1991), Fehr (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 Berghahns thesis by observing that, from 1880 to 1913,
Notes
7
8
10
11
12
13
14
185
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, Heideggers descriptions of everydayness in Being and Time were critical evaluations of everyday life in industrial
urban society.
See Bambach (2003: 77); cf. Thomson (2005: 10414).
Heidegger was not unique in believing the nation could be restructured via
radical university reform. See Sluga (1993: 201).
For an excellent discussion of Fichtes influence on Heideggers thinking about
German exceptionalism, see Sluga (1993: esp. 2952); cf. Bambach (2003: 72, 74,
856, 99).
I tend to agree with Bambachs assessment of Heideggers 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 (Lwith 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 Friedmans
The World is Flat, especially chapter seven, The Quiet Crisis (2005: 25075).
Heidegger would share Friedmans frustration with a society that primarily values
wealth, and he would endorse Friedmans 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
Friedmans 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. Friedmans
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 Heideggers 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
186
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
Notes
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 Heideggers indebtedness to
Nietzsches second Untimely Meditation in Being and Time, see Taminiaux (1991:
17589).
For an insightful discussion of these issues in Heideggers thought, see
Zimmerman (1990: 393).
On Nietzsches view, Platos otherworldly metaphysics and eschatology, the
centrality of the derivative doctrine of salvation in Christianity, and even Kants
location of the moral subject in the noumenal realmthese dominant metaphysical views, despite their doctrinal differences, are equally life-denying because
each has a story to tell about this worlds 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 Heideggers 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

1
2
3
Quoted in Young (2002: 56).

Quoted in Kisiel (1993: 233).
Cf. Kuhn (1996) on The Priority of Paradigms (4351), Crisis and the Emergence
of Scientific Theories (6676), and The Response to Crisis (7791).
Thomson (2005: 116, 117). I generally agree with Thomsons account of
Heideggers 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., 11618).
Both meanings are correct insofar as Heidegger used the term in both senses.
But the former is used more often (see BT 335, 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
Notes
187
analytic of Dasein . . . the ontological analytic of Dasein in general is what makes

up fundamental ontology (BT 345). 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 ontologythe 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 Daseins Being remains only one way which we may
take (BT 487).
For a helpful discussion of Heideggers confusion on this point see Guignon
(1992: 66). There is no need for us to be confused on this point, however. The
reason for Daseins 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 Daseins 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

Heideggers Politics
1
2
See also Taminiaux (1997: 49), Young (1997: 19), and Bambach (2003: 105).
See Bloom (1968: 309, 380432) and Strauss (1964: 65); cf. Guthrie (1969: 469),
Annas (1981: 1859), Hyland (1995: 5986), and Rosen (1965: 460). For a strong
statement of the view that Platos 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 Heideggers other apologists who wish to defend
Heideggers philosophy by insulating it from the charges that it led to his own
catastrophic political decisions.
188
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
Notes
See Strauss (1964: 61, 116); cf. Bloom (1968: 3801) and Burnyeat (1992: 3028).
Cf. Randall (1973: 116).
Bloom (1968: 409); cf. Hyland (1995: 73n70) and Rosen (1965: 468).
See Strauss (1964: 11617) and Bloom (1968: 382); cf. Hyland (1995: 73, 74).
Bloom (1968: 403); cf. Strauss (1964: 124) and Voegelin (2000: 88, 11617).
The most famous of such responses to Strauss is Burnyeats 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: 356). For an excellent discussion of the problems with Burnyeats criticisms, see Smith (2000).
See Strauss (1964: 11617) 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 wont 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). Its a vicious circle. The
opposition between city and state, therefore, seems irreconcilable. Burnyeats
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:
3665). I do not intend to enter this debate here.
Cf. Voegelin (2000: 88).
Its 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: 16689).
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: 21516) links this passage to Platos 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 (113d68).
See Voegelin (2000: 801).
See Gribble (1999: 241). For a discussion of the theme of self-knowledge in the
so-called early Platonic dialogues, see Annas (1985: 11138); cf. Johnson (1999:
119). 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 129b130d), then with the divine part of the soul, and finally
with the divine intellect, which is God (Alc. I 132c133c).
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. 2435). Cf. Ep. VII 330e331a. If a society is corrupt to the
Notes
23
24
25
26
27
28
189
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 Heideggers 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 ones existence from the grip of the commonplace and assuming responsibility for it. Then he saw a new tyrant enter his friends 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
If Heidegger had considered the historical context of Platos writing, he might

have seen various parallels with his own time. Just as Heideggers political thought
was, in part, a response to Nietzsches 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
humanitys 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 Wests 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 Bakans 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).
190
6
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
Notes
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: 15375) argues persuasively that Callicles, who is not heard of
in Athenian politics outside of the Gorgias, is a mask for Alcibiades.
Cf. Dodds (1951: 21516): I think we have to recognize two strains or tendencies
in Platos 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 suchambition
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 Fordes account of the relationship between Thucydides presentation of
Alcibiades and the character of Athenian imperialism (Forde 1989: 68, 17, 479,
6870, 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 dont 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 Platos 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 Platos Alcibiades and Thucydides, see Gribble
(1999: 246). It is tempting to believe that Plato did read Thucydides work, and
Notes
17
18
19
20
21
22
191
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 wars
deepest causes, and he would also appreciate Thucydides reflections on the
compatibility or incompatibility between politics and individuals with great
abilities. In [Platos] 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 ones 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?
Heideggers analysis of the remedy for das Gestell implies that the problem of will
to power, the Wests 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
Notes
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).
Bibliography
Adam, J. (1902), The Republic of Plato, with critical notes, commentary, and appendices. 2 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Ahbel-Rappe, S. L. and R. Kamtekar, eds, (2006), A Companion to Socrates. Malden,
MA: Blackwell Publishing.
Algra, K., Barnes, J., Mansfeld J., and M. Schofield, eds, (1999), The Cambridge
History of Hellenistic Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Allen, R. E. (1965), Studies in Platos Metaphysics. London: Routledge and Kegan
Paul.
Annas, J. (1981), An Introduction to Platos Republic. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
. (1985), Self-knowledge in early Plato, in OMeara, D. J. (ed.), Platonic
Investigations. Washington, DC: Catholic University Press, pp. 11138.
. (1992), Plato the skeptic, in Klagge, J. and N. D. Smith (eds), Methods
of Interpreting Plato and His Dialogues, Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy, supp.
vol. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 4372.
Arendt, H. (1990), Philosophy and politics, Social Research, 57, (1), 73103.
Ausland, H. W. (1997), On reading Plato mimetically, American Journal of Philology,
118, 371416.
Bacon, H. (1959), Socrates crowned, Virginia Quarterly Review, 35, 41530.
Bakan, J. (2004), The Corporation. New York: Free Press.
Bambach, C. R. (2003), Heideggers Roots: Nietzsche, National Socialism, and the Greeks.
Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Barabas, M. (1986), The strangeness of Socrates, Philosophical Investigations,
9, 89110.
Barrow, R. (1975), Plato, Utilitarianism and Education. London: Routledge and Kegan
Paul.
Beistegui, D. (1997), Heidegger and the Political. New York: Routledge.
Berghahn, V. R. (1982), Modern Germany: Society, Economy, and Politics in the Twentieth
Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Berti, E. (2005), Heidegger and the Platonic concept of truth, in Partenie, C.
and T. Rockmore (eds), Heidegger and Plato: Towards Dialogue. Evanston, IL:
Northwestern University Press, pp. 96107.
Blondell, R. (2002), The Play of Character in Platos Dialogues. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Bloom, A. (1991 [1968]), The Republic of Plato. New York: Basic Books.
Bourdieu, P. (1991), The Political Ontology of Martin Heidegger. Translated by
P. Collier. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Brickhouse, T. C. and N. D. Smith (1989), Socrates on Trial. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press.
194
Bibliography
. (1994), Platos Socrates. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Brogan, W. A. (1995), Heideggers Aristotelian reading of Plato: The discovery of
the philosopher, Research in Phenomenology, 25, 27482.
. (1997), Platos dialectical soul: Heidegger on Platos ambiguous relationship to rhetoric, Research in Phenomenology, 27, 315.
Bubner, R. (2003), Innovations of Idealism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Burnet, J. (1911), Platos Phaedo. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
. (1914), Greek Philosophy: Part 1, Thales to Plato. London: Macmillan.
Burnyeat, M. (1985), Sphinx without a secret, New York Review of Books, 32, (9),
306.
. (1992), Utopia and fantasy: The practicability of Platos ideally just city,
in Fine, G. (ed.), Plato 2: Ethics, Politics, Religion, and the Soul. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, pp. 297308.
Bussanich, J. (1996), Plotinus metaphysics of the One, in Gerson, L. P. (ed.),
The Cambridge Companion to Plotinus. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
pp. 3865.
. (2006), Socrates and religious experience, in Ahbel-Rappe, S. L. and
R. Kamtekar (eds), A Companion to Socrates. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing,
pp. 20013.
Cherniss, H. F. (1957), The relation of the Timaeus to Platos later dialogues,
American Journal of Philology, 75, 11330.
Cochrane, C. N. (1965), Thucydides and the Science of History. New York: Russell &
Russell.
Cooper, J. (1977), The psychology of justice in Plato, American Journal of Philosophy,
14, 1518.
., ed., (1997), Plato: Complete Works. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett.
Corrigan, E. and K. Corrigan (2004), Platos Dialectic at Play: Argument, Structure, and
Myth in the Symposium. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.
Crowell, S. (1997), Philosophy as a vocation: Heidegger and university reform in
the early interwar years, History of Philosophy Quarterly, 14, 25576.
. (2001), Heidegger, Husserl, and the Space of Meaning: Paths Toward Transcendental Phenomenology. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
Dennett, D. (1999), Ludwig Wittgenstein, Time, March 29, 153, (12), 8890.
Denyer, N. (2001), Plato: Alcibiades. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Dillon, J. (2003), The Heirs of Plato: A Study of the Old Academy. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Dodds, E. R. (1928), The Parmenides of Plato and the origin of the Neoplatonic
One, Classical Quarterly, 22, 12942.
. (1951), The Greeks and the Irrational. Berkeley: University of California Press.
. (1959), Plato: Gorgias, a revised text with introduction and commentary.
New York: Oxford University Press.
Dostal, R. J. (1985), Beyond Being: Heideggers Plato, Journal of the History of
Philosophy, 1, 7198.
Edmundson, M. (2004), Why Read? New York and London: Bloomsbury Publishing.
Ellis, W. M. (1989), Alcibiades. London: Routledge.
Farias, V. (1989), Heidegger and Nazism. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.
Bibliography
195
Fehr, I. (1992), Fundamental ontology and political interlude: Heidegger as rector

of the University of Freiburg, in Macann, C. (ed.), Martin Heidegger: Critical
Assessments. New York: Routledge, pp. 15997.
Ferrari, G. R. F. (1997), Strauss Plato, Arion, 5, (2), 3665.
. (2005), City and Soul in Platos Republic. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Figal, G. (2000), Refraining from dialectic: Heideggers interpretation of Plato in
the Sophist, in Scott, C. E. and J. Sallis (eds), Interrogating the Tradition: Hermeneutics
and the History of Philosophy. New York: S.U.N.Y., pp. 95109.
Findlay, J. N. (1974), Plato: The Written and Unwritten Doctrines. London: Humanities
Press.
Finley, J. H. (1942), Thucydides. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Forde, S. (1989), The Ambition to Rule: Alcibiades and the Politics of Imperialism in
Thucydides. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
. (1992), Political ambition in Thucydides and Plato, in Rubin L. G. (ed.),
Politikos II: Educating the Ambitious. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press,
pp. 930.
Foucault, M. (2001), The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the College de France
198182. Translated by A. Davidson. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Friedlander, P. (1964), Plato. Translated by H. Meyerhoff. Vol. 1, 2nd edn. Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press.
Friedman, T. (2005), The World is Flat: A Brief History of the 21st Century. New York:
Farrar, Strauss and Giroux.
Fritsche, J. (2005), With Plato into the Kairos before the Kehre: On Heideggers different interpretations of Plato, in Partenie, C. and T. Rockmore (eds), Heidegger
and Plato: Towards Dialogue. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, pp. 14077.
Fynsk, C. (1993), Heidegger: Thought and Historicity. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press.
Gadamer, H. G. (1980), Dialogue and Dialectic: Eight Hermeneutical Studies on Plato.
New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
. (1986), The Idea of the Good in Platonic-Aristotelian Philosophy. Translated by
P. C. Smith. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
. (1989), Back from Syracuse? Translated by J. McCumber. Critical Inquiry,
15, 42730.
. (1991), Platos Dialectical Ethics: Phenomenological Interpretations Relating to the
Philebus. Translated by R. M. Wallace. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
. (1994), Heideggers Ways. Translated by J. W. Stanley. New York: S.U.N.Y.
Gagarin, M. (1977), Socrates hubris and Alcibiades failure, Phoenix, 31, 237.
Galston, W. A. (1982), Heideggers Plato: A critique of Platos doctrine of truth,
Philosophical. Forum-(Boston), 1, 37184.
Gersh, S. (1986), Middle Platonism and Neoplatonism: The Latin Tradition, 2 vols. Notre
Dame: University of Notre Dame Press.
Gerson, L. P. (1996), The Cambridge Companion to Plotinus. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
. (2000), Plato absconditus, in Press, G. A. (ed.), Who Speaks for Plato?:
Studies in Platonic Anonymity. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers,
pp. 20110.
196
Bibliography
. (2003), Knowing Persons: A Study in Plato. New York: Oxford University Press.
. (2005), What is Platonism? Journal of the History of Philosophy, 43, 25376.
Gocer, A. (1999), Hesuchia: A metaphysical principle in Platos moral psychology,
Apeiron, 32, (4), 1736.
Gonzalez, F., ed., (1995), The Third Way. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield
Publishers.
. (1998a), Dialectic and Dialogue: Platos Practice of Philosophical Inquiry.
Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
. (1998b), Nonpropositional knowledge in Plato, Apeiron, 31, 23584.
. (2001), On the way to sophia, Research in Phenomenology, 27, 1660.
. (2002), Dialectic as philosophical embarrassment: Heideggers critique
of Platos method, Journal of the History of Philosophy, 40, (3), 36189.
. (2003), Heideggers 1933 misappropriation of Platos Republic, Problemata:
Quaderni di filosophia, 3, 3980.
. (2008), Platos question of truth (versus Heideggers doctrines), Proceedings of the Boston Area Colloquium in Ancient Philosophy, 23, 83119.
Gordon, J. (1999), Turning toward Philosophy: Literary Device and Dramatic Structure in
Platos Dialogues. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.
Gribble, G. (1999), Alcibiades in Athens. New York: Oxford University Press.
Griswold, C. L. (1981), Gadamer and the interpretation of Plato, Ancient Philosophy,
2, 1718.
. (1986), Self-Knowledge in Platos Phaedrus. New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press.
., ed., (1988), Platonic Writings/Platonic Readings. New York: Routledge.
. (1990), Unifying Plato: Charles Kahn on Platonic prolepsis, Ancient Philosophy, 10, (2), 24362.
Guignon, C. (1992), Heidegger and the Problem of Knowledge. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett.
. (1993), The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
. (2004), On Being Authentic. New York: Routledge.
Guthrie, W. K. C. (1969), A History of Greek Philosophy: Volume 4, Plato: The Man and
His Dialogues: Earlier Period. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
. (1978), A History of Greek Philosophy, vol. 5. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hadot, P. (1959), Heidegger et Plotin, Critique, 15, 53956.
. (1995), Philosophy as a Way of Life. Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishers.
Hahn, L. E., ed., (1997), The Philosophy of Hans-Georg Gadamer. Chicago, IL: Open
Court.
Halliwell, S. (1988), Republic: Book 10. Warminster, Wiltshire, England: Aris & Phillips.
Halperin, D. M. (1992), Plato and the erotics of narrativity, in Klagge, J. and
N. D. Smith (eds), Methods of Interpreting Plato and His Dialogues, Oxford Studies in
Ancient Philosophy, supp. vol. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 93130.
Hankey, W. J. (2004), Why Heideggers history of metaphysics is dead, American
Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, 78, (3), 42543.
Harris, H. S. (1972), Hegels Development: Toward the Sunlight. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Bibliography
197
Harris, S. (2004), The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason. New York:
W. W. Norton & Co.
Hatab, L. J. (1991), Heidegger and myth: A loop in the history of Being, Journal
of the British Society for Phenomenology, 22, (2), 4564.
Heidegger, M. (1962a), Being and Time. Translated by J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson.
New York: Harper & Row.
. (1962b), Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics. Translated by J. Churchill.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
. (1967), Preface (Letter to Fr. Richardson). Translated by W. J. Richardson. Heidegger: Through Phenomenology to Thought. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff,
pp. viiixxiii.
. (1968), What is Called Thinking? Translated by J. G. Gray and F. Wieck.
. (1969), Identity and Difference. Translated by J. Stambaugh. New York: Harper
& Row.
. (1972), On Time and Being. Translated by J. Stambaugh. New York: Harper &
Row.
. (1973), The End of Philosophy. Translated by J. Stambaugh. New York: Harper
& Row.
. (1975), Early Greek Thinking. Translated D. F. Krell and F. A. Capuzzi.
. (1977a), Letter on humanism, in Krell, D. F. (ed.), Basic Writings. Translated by F. A. Capuzzi. New York: Harper & Row, pp. 21366.
. (1977b), The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. Edited and
translated by W. Lovitt. New York: Harper & Row.
. (1979), Heraclitus Seminar 1966/67. Translated by C. Seibert. Alabama: University of Alabama Press.
. (1982a), The Basic Problems of Phenomenology. Translated by A. Hofstadter.
. (1982b), Nietzsche: Nihilism. Edited by D. F. Krell. Translated by
J. Stambaugh, D. F. Krell, and F. A. Capuzzi. New York: Harper & Row.
. (1985a), History of the Concept of Time: Prolegomena. Translated by T. Kisiel.
. (1985b), Schellings Treatise on the Essence of Human Freedom. Translated by
J. Stambaugh. Athens: Ohio University Press.
. (1990), Spiegel interview, in Neske, G. and E. Kettering (eds), Martin
Heidegger and National Socialism. New York: Paragon House.
. (1992a), Parmenides. Translated by A. Schuwer and R. Rojcewicz. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
. (1992b), The self-assertion of the German university, in The Heidegger
Controversy. Edited and translated by R. Wolin. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
. (1997), Platos Sophist. Translated by R. Rojcewicz and A. Schuwer. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
. (1998a), Introduction to what is metaphysics? in McNeill, W. (ed.),
Pathmarks. Translated by W. Kaufman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
pp. 270290.
198
Bibliography
. (1998b), Platos doctrine of truth, in McNeill, W. (ed.), Pathmarks. Translated by T. Sheehan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 15582.
. (1998c), What is metaphysics?, in McNeill, W. (ed.), Pathmarks. Translated
by D. F. Krell. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 8296.
. (2000), An Introduction to Metaphysics. Translated by G. Fried and R. Polt.
. (2003), The Heidegger-Jaspers Correspondence (19201963). Edited by W. Biemel
and H. Saner. Translated by G. E. Avlesworth. Amherst, NY: Humanity Books.
. (2005), The Essence of Truth: On Platos Cave Allegory and Theaetetus. Translated
by T. Sadler. London and New York: Continuum.
Henry, M. M. (1995), Prisoner of History: Aspasia of Miletus and Her Biographical
Tradition. New York: Oxford University Press.
Hornblower, S. (1987), Thucydides. London: Duckworth Publishing.
Howland, J. (1991), Re-Reading Plato: The problem of Platonic chronology
reconsidered, Phoenix, 45, 189214.
. (1993), The Republic: The Odyssey of Philosophy. Toronto, ON: Twayne Publishers.
. (1998), The Paradox of Political Philosophy: Socrates Philosophic Trial. Lanham,
MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers.
Hyland, D. A. (1968), Why Plato wrote dialogues, Philosophy and Rhetoric, 1, 3850.
. (1995), Finitude and Transcendence in the Platonic Dialogues. New York: S.U.N.Y.
. (2001), Caring for myth: Heidegger, Plato, and the myth of Cura, Research
in Phenomenology, 27, 90102.
. (2004), Questioning Platonism: Continental Interpretations of Plato. New York:
S.U.N.Y.
Irwin, T. (1977), Platos Moral Theory: The Early and Middle Dialogues. Oxford: Clarendon
Press.
Johnson, D. M. (1999), God as the true self: Platos Alcibiades I, Ancient Philosophy,
19, 119.
Kahn, C. H. (1981), Did Plato write Socratic dialogues? Classical Quarterly, 31,
30520.
. (1986), Platos methodology in the Laches, Revue Internationale de Philosophie, 40, 721.
. (1988a), On the relative date of the Gorgias and the Protagoras, Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy, 6, 69102.
. (1988b), Plato and Socrates in the Protagoras, Methexis, 1, 3352.
. (1988c), Platos Charmides and the proleptic reading of Socratic dialogues,
Journal of Philosophy, 85, 54149.
. (1996), Plato and the Socratic Dialogue: The Philosophical Use of Literary Form.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kant, I. (1965), The Critique of Pure Reason. Translated by N. K. Smith. New York:
Macmillan.
Kaufman, W., ed., (1975), Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre. New York:
New American Library.
Kisiel, T. (1993), The Genesis of Heideggers Being and Time. Berkeley: University of
California Press.
. (2005), On the purported Platonism of Heideggers rectoral address, in
Partenie, C. and T. Rockmore (eds), Heidegger and Plato: Towards Dialogue.
Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, pp. 321.
Bibliography
199
Klagge, J. and N. D. Smith, eds, (1992), Methods of Interpreting Plato and His Dialogues,
Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy, supp. vol. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Klein, J. (1965), Platos Meno. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Kramer, H. J. (1990), Plato and the Foundations of Metaphysics: A Work on the Theory
of the Principles and Unwritten Doctrines of Plato with a Collection of the Fundament.
Translated by J. Catan. New York: S.U.N.Y.
. (1999), Fichte, Schlegel, and the infinite interpretation of Plato, Graduate
Faculty Journal, 22, (2), 69112.
Kraut, R. (1984), Socrates and the State. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
. (1991), Return to the cave: Republic 519521, Proceedings from the Boston
Area Colloquium in Ancient Philosophy Volume 7, 4362.
., ed., (1992), The Cambridge Companion to Plato. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Krell, D. F., ed., (1977), Basic Writings. New York: Harper & Row.
Kuhn, T. (1996), The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.
Lachterman, D. (198990), What is the Good of Platos Republic, St. Johns Review,
39, (12), 13971.
Lacoue-Labarthe, P. and J. L. Nancy ([1978] 1988), The Literary Absolute: The Theory
of Literature in German Romanticism. Translated by P. Barnard and C. Lester. Albany:
S.U.N.Y.
Lamm, J. (2000), Schleiermacher as Plato scholar, The Journal of Religion, 80, (2),
20639.
. (2005), The art of interpreting Plato, in Maria, J. (ed.), The Cambridge
Companion to Schleiermacher. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 91108.
Lear, J. (1998), Open Minded: Working Out the Logic of the Soul. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Lee, D., trans., (1974), Plato. The Republic. London: Harmondsworth.
Lilla, M. (2001), The Reckless Mind: Intellectuals in Politics. New York: New York Review
of Books.
Littman, R. (1970), The loves of Alcibiades, TAPA, 101, 26376.
Long, A. A. (1974), Hellenistic Philosophy. London: Western Printing Services.
Long, A. A. and D. N. Sedley (1987), The Hellenistic Philosophers. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Lwith, K. (1988), The political implications of Heideggers existentialism. Edited
by R. Wolin. Translated by M. Cox. New Critique 45.
Macann, C. (1992), Martin Heidegger: Critical Assessments. New York: Routledge.
Maria, J., ed., (2005), The Cambridge Companion to Schleiermacher. Cambridge:
McGinn, B. (1991), The Foundations of Mysticism. New York: Herder and Herder.
McGregor, M. F. (1965), The genius of Alcibiades, Phoenix, 19, 2746.
McNeill, W., ed., (1998), Pathmarks. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
pp. 27090.
McPherran, M. (1997), Wisdom, Ignorance, and Virtue: New Essays in Socratic Studies.
Edmonton: Academic Printing and Publishing.
Merlan, F. (1960), From Platonism to Neoplatonism. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.
Milchman, A. and A. Rosenberg (1997), Martin Heidegger and the university as a
site for the transformation of human existence, The Review of Politics, 59, 7596.
200
Bibliography
Miller, M. (1985), Platonic provocations: Reflections on the soul and the Good
in the Republic, in OMeara, D. J. (ed.), Platonic Investigations. Washington, DC:
Catholic University Press, pp. 16393.
Morgan, M. L. (1990), Platonic Piety: Philosophy and Ritual in Fourth Century Athens.
Munn, M. (2001), The School of History: Athens in the Age of Socrates. London: University of California Press.
Murdoch, I. (1971), The Sovereignty of Good. New York: Routledge.
Nagel, T. (1986), The View from Nowhere. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
. (2005), What is it like to be a bat, in Rachels, J. (ed.), The Truth about the
World: Basic Readings in Philosophy. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Nails, D. (1992), Platonic chronology reconsidered, Bryn Mawr Classical Review, 3,
31427.
. (1993), Problems with Vlastos Platonic developmentalism, Ancient Philosophy, 13, 27391.
. (1994), Platos middle cluster, Phoenix, 48, 627.
. (2000), Mouthpiece schmouthpiece, in Press, G. A. (ed.), Who Speaks
for Plato? Studies in Platonic Anonymity Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield
Publishers, pp. 1526.
. (2002), The People of Plato: A Prosography of Plato and Other Socratics.
Indianapolis, IN: Hackett.
Nehamas, A. (1998), The Art of Living. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Neske, G. and E. Kettering, eds, (1990), Martin Heidegger and National Socialism.
New York: Paragon House.
Nietzsche, F. (1966a), Beyond Good and Evil. Translated by W. Kaufman. New York:
Vintage.
. (1966b), Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Translated by W. Kaufmann. New York:
Viking.
. (1967), The Birth of Tragedy. Translated by W. Kaufman. New York: Vintage.
. (1968), The Will to Power. Translated by W. Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale.
New York: Vintage.
. (1969), On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo. Translated by W. Kaufman.
New York: Vintage.
. (1974), The Gay Science. Translated by W. Kaufmann. New York: Vintage.
. (1977), Twilight of the Idols and the Anti-Christ. Translated by R. J. Hollingdale.
Harmondsworth: Penguin.
. (1982), Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality. Translated by
R. J. Hollingdale. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
. (1997), Untimely Meditations. Translated by R. J. Hollingdale. Cambridge:
Nightingale, A. W. (1995), Genres in Dialogue: Plato and the Construct of Philosophy.
Norman, J. (2002), Nietzsche and early romanticism, Journal of the History of Ideas,
30, (1), 50119.
Nussbaum, M. (1979), The speech of Alcibiades: A reading of Platos Symposium,
Philosophy and Literature, 3, 13172.
. (1986), The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy.
Bibliography
201
. (2001), The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and
Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Olafson, F. (1998), Heidegger and the Ground of Ethics: A Study of Mitsein. Cambridge:
OMeara, D. J. (1978), St. Augustine: Against the Academicians, by St. Augustine. Edited
by D. J. OMeara. New York: Paulist Press.
., ed. (1985), Platonic Investigations. Washington, DC: Catholic University Press.
Owen, G. E. L. ([1953] 1965), The place of the Timaeus in Platos dialogues, in
Allen, R. E. (ed.), Studies in Platos Metaphysics. London: Routledge and Kegan
Paul, pp. 31338.
Partenie, C. and T. Rockmore, eds, (2005), Heidegger and Plato: Towards Dialogue.
Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
Penner, T. (1992), Socrates and the early dialogues, in Kraut, R. (ed.), The Cambridge
Companion to Plato. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 12169.
Peperzak, A. (1993), Heidegger and Platos idea of the Good, in Sallis, J. (ed.), Reading Heidegger: Commemorations. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. 25885.
Plutarch (2001), Plutarchs Lives. Edited by A. H. Clough. Translated by J. Dryden.
New York: Random House.
Popper, K. R. (1962), The Open Society and Its Enemies. London: Routledge.
Press, G. A. (1993), Platos Dialogues: New Studies and Interpretations. Lanham, MD:
Rowman and Littlefield Publishers.
. (1996), The state of the question in the study of Plato, The Southern Journal
of Philosophy, 34, 50732.
., ed., (2000), Who Speaks for Plato? Studies in Platonic Anonymity. Lanham, MD:
Rowman and Littlefield Publishers.
Prior, W. J. (1997), Why did Plato write Socratic dialogues? in McPherran,
M. (ed.), Wisdom, Ignorance, and Virtue: New Essays in Socratic Studies. Edmonton:
Academic Printing and Publishing, pp. 10923.
Rachels, J., ed., (2005), The Truth about the World: Basic Readings in Philosophy.
New York: McGraw-Hill.
Raffoul, F. and D. Pettigrew (2002), Heidegger and Practical Philosophy. New York:
S.U.N.Y.
Randall, J. (1973), Plato: Dramatist of the Life of Reason. New York: Columbia University Press.
Rappe, S. L. (1995), Socrates and self-knowledge, Apeiron, 28, (1), 125.
Reale, G. (1985), The Systems of the Hellenistic Age: History of an Ancient Philosophy.
New York: S.U.N.Y.
. (1990), A History of Ancient Philosophy. Translated by J. R. Catan. New York:
S.U.N.Y.
Reeve, C. D. C. (1990), Socrates in the Apology. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett.
. (1992a), Philosopher Kings: The Argument of Platos Republic. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press.
. (1992b), Telling the truth about love: Platos Symposium, Proceedings of the
Boston Area Colloquium in Ancient Philosophy, 8, 89114.
Richardson, W. J. (1963), Heidegger: Through Phenomenology to Thought. Preface by
Martin Heidegger. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.
. (1977), Heideggers way through phenomenology to the thinking of
Being, Listening, 12, 2137.
202
Bibliography
Rockmore, T. (2005), Heideggers uses of Plato and the history of philosophy,

in Partenie, C. and T. Rockmore (eds), Heidegger and Plato: Towards Dialogue.
Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, pp. 192212.
Rojcewicz, R. (1997), Platonic love: Daseins urge toward Being, Research in
Phenomenology, 27, 10320.
Romilly, Jacqueline de (1988), Thucydides et limperialisme athenien. Salem: Ayer Co.
Publishers.
Roochnik, D. L. (1988), The tragic philosopher: A critique of Martha Nussbaum,
Ancient Philosophy, 8, (2), 28595.
Rorty, R. (1988), Taking philosophy seriously, The New Republic, 198, 314.
. (1999), Analytic philosophy and transformative philosophy. Retrieved
March 10, 2006 from http://www.stanford.edu/~rrorty/analytictrans.htm.
Rosen, S. (1965), The role of eros in Platos Republic, Review of Metaphysics, 18, (2),
45275.
. (1967), Heideggers interpretation of Plato, Journal of Existentialism, 7, (2),
477504.
. (1968), Platos Symposium. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
. (1983), Platos Sophist: The Drama of the Original and Image. New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press.
. (1991), Is metaphysics possible? Review of Metaphysics, 45, (2), 23557.
. (1993), The Question of Being. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
. (2005), Remarks on Heideggers Plato, in Partenie, C. and T. Rockmore
(eds), Heidegger and Plato: Towards Dialogue. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 17891.
Rubin, L. G., ed., (1992), Politikos II: Educating the Ambitious. Pittsburgh, PA:
Duquesne University Press.
Rutherford, R. (1995), The Art of Plato. London: Harvard University Press.
Ryle, G. (1965), Platos Parmenides, in Allen, R. E. (ed.), Studies in Platos Metaphysics. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Safranski, R. (1998), Between Good and Evil. Translated by E. Oslers. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
Sallis, J. (1975), Being and Logos: The Way of Platonic Dialogue. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press.
., ed., (1993), Reading Heidegger: Commemorations. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
. (2007), The Verge of Philosophy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Sayre, K. M. (1983), Platos Late Ontology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
. (1988), Platos dialogues in light of the Seventh Letter, in Griswold, C. L.
(ed.), Platonic Writings/Platonic Readings. New York: Routledge, pp. 93110.
. (1990), Review of Kramers Plato and the foundations of metaphysics,
Ancient Philosophy, 13, 16784.
. (1993), Why Plato never had a theory of forms, Proceedings from the Boston
Area Colloquium in Ancient Philosophy, 9, 16793.
. (1995), Platos Literary Garden: How to Read Platonic Dialogue. Notre Dame
and London: University of Notre Dame Press.
Schein, S. L. (1974), Alcibiades and the politics of misguided love, Theta-Pi, 3,
15867.
Bibliography
203
Schiller, J. (1968), Just man and just acts in Platos Republic, Journal of the History of
Philosophy, 6, 114.
Schlegel, F. (1971), Lucinde and the Fragments. Translated by P. Firchow. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press.
. (1997), Friedrich Schlegel: On philosophy. To Dorthea, in Schulte-Sasse, J.,
H. Horne, E. Mittman, and L. C. Roetzel (eds), Theory as Practice. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, pp. 41939.
. (2001), On the Study of Greek Poetry. Translated by S. Barnett. New York:
S.U.N.Y.
Schleiermacher, F. (1839), Geschicte der Philosophie: Aus Schleiermachers handschriftlichen
Nachlasse, in Smmtliche Werke III, 4, 1. Edited by H. Ritter. Berlin: G. Reimer.
. (1973), Introductions to the Dialogues of Plato. Translated by W. Dobson, 1836,
Cambridge: Pitt Press; repr. New York: Arno Press, 1973. Originally published
as Platons Werke, 6 vols., Berlin, 1804.
Schmidt, D. (2002), The baby and the bath water: On Heidegger and political life,
in Raffoul, F. and D. Pettigrew (eds), Heidegger and Practical Philosophy. New York:
S.U.N.Y., pp. 15972.
Schofield, M., M. Burnyeat, and J. Barnes, eds, (1980), Doubt and Dogmatism: Studies
in Hellenistic Epistemology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Schopenhauer, A. (1969), The World as Will and Representation, vol. II. Translated by
E. F. J. Payne. New York: Dover.
Schulte-Sasse, J., H. Horne, E. Mittman, and L. C. Roetzel, eds, (1997), Theory as
Practice. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Schrmann, R. (1990), Heidegger on Being and Acting: From Principles to Anarchy.
Translated by C. M. Gros and R. Schrmann. Bloomington: Indiana University
Press.
Scott, C. E. (1991), Heideggers rectors address: A loss of the question of ethics,
Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal, (1415), 23764.
Scott, C. E. and J. Sallis, eds, (2000), Interrogating the Tradition: Hermeneutics and
the History of Philosophy. New York: S.U.N.Y.
Sheehan, T. J., ed., (1981), Heidegger: The Man and the Thinker. Chicago, IL:
Precedent Publishers.
Shorey, P. (1960), The Unity of Platos Thought. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Sluga, H. (1993), Heideggers Crisis. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Smith, N. (2000), Images, education, and paradox in Platos Republic, Recognition,
Remembrance, and Reality: New Essays on Platos Epistemology and Metaphysics, suppl.
Apeiron, 33, 12541.
. (2004), Did Plato write the Alcibiades I, Apeiron, 37, (2), 93108.
Smith, S. (2000), Leo Strausss Platonic liberalism, Political Theory, 28, (6),
787809.
Sorabji, R. (1983), Time, Creation, and the Continuum. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press.
Stadter, P. A. (1989), A Commentary on Plutarchs Pericles. Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press.
Stewart, J. A. (1905), The Myths of Plato. London: Macmillan.
Stone, I. F. (1989), The Trial of Socrates. New York: Anchor Books.
Stough, C. (1969), Greek Skepticism. Berkeley: University of California Press.
204
Bibliography
Strauss, L. (1946), On a new interpretation of Platos political philosophy, Social

Research, 13, 32667.
. (1964), The City and Man. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
. (2000), On Tyranny. Edited by V. Gourevitch and M. S. Roth. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Taminiaux, J. (1991), Heidegger and the Project of Fundamental Ontology. Translated
by M. Gendre. Albany: S.U.N.Y.
. (1997), The Thracian Maid and the Professional Thinker: Arendt and Heidegger.
Translated by M. Gendre. Albany: S.U.N.Y.
Tarrant, H. (1983), Middle Platonism and the Seventh Letter, Phronesis, 28, 75103.
. (1993), Thrasyllan Platonism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
. (2000), Platos First Interpreters. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Taylor, A. E. (191718), Platos biography of Socrates, Proceedings of the British
Academy.
. (1933), Socrates. New York: D. Appleton.
Thomson, I. (2000), Ontotheology? Understanding Heideggers Destruktion of
metaphysics, International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 8, (3), 297327.
. (2001), Heidegger on ontological education, or: How we become what we
are, Inquiry, 44, (3), 24368.
. (2005), On Ontotheology: Technology and the Politics of Education. Cambridge:
Thorson, T. L., ed., (1963), Plato: Totalitarian or Democrat? Englewood Cliffs, NJ:
Prentice Hall.
Thucydides (1998), The Pelopponesian War. Translated by S. Lattimore. New York:
Random House.
Tigerstedt, E. N. (1969), Platos Idea of Poetical Inspiration. Helsinki: Societas Scientariarum Fennica.
. (1974), The Decline and Fall of the Neoplatonic Interpretation of Plato. Helsinki:
Societas Scientariarum Fennica.
. (1977), Interpreting Plato. Stockholm: Almquist & Wiksell.
Vickers, M. (2008), Sophocles and Alcibiades: Athenian Politics in Ancient Greek Literature.
Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Vlastos, G. (1970a), Plato, A Collection of Critical Essays I: Metaphysics and Epistemology.
Garden City, New York: Anchor Books, Doubleday.
., ed., (1970b), Plato, A Collection of Critical Essays II: Ethics, Politics, Art and
Religion. Garden City, New York: Anchor Books, Doubleday.
., ed., (1971), Plato II: Ethics, Politics, and Philosophy of Art and Religion. Notre
Dame: Notre Dame University Press.
. (1981), The individual as object of love in Platos dialogues, Platonic
Studies. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
.,ed., (1991), Socrates: Ironist and Moral Philosopher Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
. (1995), Studies in Ancient Greek Philosophy: Socrates, Plato, and Their Tradition.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Voegelin, E. (2000), Plato. Columbia: University of Missouri Press.
Westerink, L. G., ed., (1962), Anonymous Prolegomena to Platos Philosophy. Amsterdam:
North-Holland Publishing, 1962.
Bibliography
205
White, C. (2004), Time and Death: Heideggers Analysis of Finitude. Edited by

M. Ralkowski. Aldershot: Ashgate.
White, N. (1976), Plato on Knowledge and Reality. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett.
. (1988), Observations and questions about Hans-Georg Gadamers interpretation of Plato, in Griswold, C. L. (ed.), Platonic Writings/Platonic Readings.
New York: Routledge, pp. 24757.
Wisser, R., ed., (1977), Martin Heidegger in Conversation. Translated by B. Murthy.
New Delhi: Heinemann.
Wolin, R. (1990), The Politics of Being: The Political Thought of Martin Heidegger.
New York: Columbia University Press.
., ed., (1992), The Heidegger Controversy. Translated by R. Wolin. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
Woodruff, P. and A. Nehamas (1995), Introduction, Phaedrus, in Plato: Complete
Works. Edited by J. Cooper. Translated by P. Woodruff and A. Nehamas.
Indianapolis, IN: Hackett.
Young, J. (1997), Heidegger, Philosophy, Nazism. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
. (2000), Heideggers Philosophy of Art. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
. (2002), Heideggers Later Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Zeller, E. (1876), Plato and the Older Academy. Translated by S. Frances & A. Goodwin.
London: Longmans, Green, and Co.
Zimmerman, M. E. (1981), Beyond humanism: Heideggers understanding of
technology, in Sheehan (ed.), Heidegger: The Man and the Thinker. Chicago,
IL: Precedent Publishers, pp. 21927.
. (1990), Heideggers Confrontation with Modernity. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.
Zuckert, C. (1996), Postmodern Platos. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Index
Alcibiades
as Callicles 190n8
contrasted with Pericles 189n20
as embodiment of Periclean
Athens 163, 16570, 190n10,
190n13, 191n15
Heidegger as 1556
as inverted image of Socrates 167,
1702
and Platos choice to write
dialogues 28, 40, 423, 48
and Platos politics 1469, 158, 163,
165, 167, 1724, 188n17, 191n16,
191n17, 191n20
and self-knowledge 188n19
in the Symposium 16, 162
altheia
the ancient Greek experience of
truth as 58
Being as 54, 5860, 82, 99, 131, 135,
179n4, 184n24
and the essence of man 74, 182n14
nihilism and 58, 95, 115, 133,
152
Platos experience of 5860, 624,
85, 89, 912, 95, 116, 181n5,
183n22
Platos 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. 1702
Aristotle 16
and the dogmatic interpretation of
Plato 21
and the esoteric interpretation of

Plato 9, 176n6
Heideggers phenomenological
appropriation of 1207
and Heideggers philosophy 50, 52, 87
and Heideggers politics 97, 102,
1205, 138
and the holistic interpretation of
Plato 21
and Platos metaphysics 14
on Platos unwritten doctrine 5,
176n5
atheism 978, 109, 112
Augustine, St. 6, 20, 176n3
Ausland, H. 21, 177n14, 178n20
authenticity
and Heideggers politics 123, 126, 136
and Platos experience of truth as
altheia 86
Bakan, J. 190n5
Bambach, C. 115, 181n2, 184n4,
185n7, 185n9, 185n10, 185n12,
187n1, 189n26
Being
belonging together with man 54,
7880, 84, 90, 181n10
as concealed source of
unconcealment 27, 49, 72, 83, 89,
924, 179n4, 183n22
as empowerment 78, 80, 824
forgetfulness of 49, 529, 60, 91, 99,
11217, 120, 133
history of 529, 634, 70, 83, 86
and the metaphysics of presence 54,
55, 56, 58, 72, 84, 125, 133
as mystery 47, 76, 803, 94, 99, 159,
160, 179n4
208
Index
Being (Contd)
philosophical questioning and 51,
567, 767, 80, 85, 913, 99, 1016,
11718, 126, 128, 134, 182n14,
182n16
pre-modeling projection of 73, 80
pre-ontological understanding of 66,
125, 132, 134
presencing 546, 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, 578, 60, 63, 66, 72, 756,
78, 819, 101, 11415, 152, 155,
157, 181n7, 181n9, 182n16, 187n4
Blochmann, Elizabeth, Heideggers
correspondence with 62, 95, 181n2
Blondell, R. 1618, 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, 557
Crowell, S. 185n4
Dasein, analytic of 51, 63, 130, 153, 187n4
death of God 978, 101, 107, 11112,
115, 117, 189n4
Dennett, D. 4, 5, 20, 44
Descartes, R. 11314
dialectic 132
and Platonic philosophical
knowledge 303, 47, 59
and Platos 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 767, 80, 81,
845, 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 1667, 190n13
on the Sicilian Expedition 169,
190n7, 190n10, 191n16
Forms, Platos theory of 28, 35, 42, 47,
142, 151, 177n12
and Alcibiades philosophical
development 40
and the developmental
interpretation of Platos
philosophy 14, 44, 177n12
and dialectic 27
Heideggers interpretation of 63,
667, 7187, 90, 93, 180n12, 181n7
and Heideggers interpretation of
ancient Greek philosophy 121
and the holistic interpretation of
Platos philosophy 19
and Platonism 47
and Platos politics 13843
and the Seventh Letter 2930, 323
Foucault, M. 38, 45, 59, 89, 90, 91, 122,
180n11
freedom
Heidegger on 901, 1002, 126, 133,
136, 160, 173, 181n6, 182n15,
189n3
in Platos cave allegory 6671, 768,
85, 87
Index
Friedlander, P. 41, 177n14, 182n18,
183n22, 191n17
Friedman, T. 185n12, 186n12
fundamental ontology 120, 125, 127,
1303, 136, 180n7, 187n4
Funeral Oration 1645
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 Platos Republic 142
on Heideggers politics 1523, 189n24
on the holistic interpretation of
Plato 1920
on Platonic philosophical
knowledge 30, 178n1, 178n2
on Platos 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 378
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 11317, 135
critique of Plato 635, 936, 157,
183n22, 184n23
and the critique of technology 57,
117, 158, 173 see Gestell
209
andThe Essence of Truth 49, 50, 58, 60,

6288, 913, 95, 101, 103, 1057,
115, 1223, 131, 1545, 158, 161,
181n5, 181n6, 182n14, 182n15,
182n16, 183n22
and the human essence 626, 70, 78,
82, 84, 8691, 95, 99107, 110, 115,
119, 122, 123, 133, 152, 179n2,
179n4, 180n10, 181n5, 182n14
later thought of 4951, 63, 74, 76,
79, 856, 182n14, 186n20
on mans relation to Being 93,
98104, 119, 152, 158, 173
missed opportunity with Plato 157,
175
on Platos Forms 63, 66, 67, 7183,
85, 87
Platos influence on 50, 62, 76, 83,
95, 136, 1378, 1517
positive appropriation of Plato 50,
60, 6394, 1207, 157, 161, 183n21
on science 56, 69, 989, 1014, 108,
112, 113, 115, 11822, 12632,
1346, 180n7, 185n12, 187n4
as tyrant 1556
and world-disclosure 63, 70, 82, 87,
183n22
Heideggers interpretation of Platos
cave allegory
Being as such in 63, 66, 72, 75, 76,
78, 92, 93, 957, 99
Being of beings in 63, 66, 7284,
867, 89, 91
Platos doctrine of the Good in 63,
66, 7485, 913
Heideggers politics 49, 96138, 15161
compared with Platos politics 1516
nihilism and 54, 57, 58, 63, 95, 101,
103, 106, 112, 115, 117, 120, 1278,
1336, 158, 174, 184n4
Rectoral Address 96, 97, 98104,
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 Mrchen 152

Hermodorus 5
historicity 53, 181n5
Hlderlin 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 mans 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
Lwith, K. 185n10
Marx, K. 105
metaphysics
Dasein as 51, 106, 119, 126, 134
metaphysics, Heidegger on
overcoming 5260, 74, 82, 91,
11315, 133, 135, 138, 15861, 169,
179n2, 182n20, 183n20, 186n14
metaphysics, Heidegger on the limits
of 52
National Socialism 103, 137, 1535,
186n15
Nietzsche, F.
compared with Heidegger 64, 99,
101, 107, 117, 189n4
compared with Jena Romantics 23
on the death of God 98, 189n1
Heideggers interpretation of 57, 95,
97, 1601, 186n16, 186n21
and Heideggers politics 97, 184n4
philosophy of 10715, 135, 186n18,
186n20
nihilism 180n8, 184n4, 186n21, 190n5
and altheia 95, 106, 115
and the forgetfulness of Being 578,
63
Heidegger and 54, 103, 120, 127,
128, 134, 1356, 138, 157, 174
metaphysics as the cause of 15960
Nietzsche and 98, 101, 107, 108,
11013, 115, 117, 135
ontological
decline 49, 57, 58, 60, 63, 95, 98
humility 47, 151, 155
ontotheology 5160, 63, 81, 93, 95, 97,
114, 122, 157, 186n14
Heideggers critique of 5360, 82, 84
and metaphysical paradigms 53, 57,
66, 6774, 83, 91, 125, 1279,
15760
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, 3843, 478,
1623, 167, 1702
phusis 54, 58, 99, 116, 189n22
Plato
Alcibiades influence on 162, 163
Heideggers phenomenological
transformation of 50, 60, 74, 84,
90, 1207, 157, 161, 183n21
Index
on the philosophic nature 28, 39, 87,
146, 147, 149, 172
political pessimism of 96, 13940,
14951, 154, 158, 1745
politics of 967, 136, 13851,
15775
on the problems with Periclean
Athens 158, 16472
on the withdrawal of the philosopher
from society 175
Platos doctrine of truth, Heideggers
essay entitled 50, 58, 60, 63, 65,
70, 901, 95, 117, 180n1, 184n23
Platos philosophy
conflicting interpretations of 45
developmental interpretation of 9,
10, 14, 15, 16
dogmatic interpretation of Platos
philosophy, problems with 5, 6, 7,
13, 14, 15, 17, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 26,
27, 29, 435, 49, 5961, 8994,
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
Heideggers interpretation of 4950,
601
holistic interpretation of Platos
philosophy 13, 1522, 267,
434, 5961, 8994, 177n14,
177n16, 177n18
ineffability, existential 28, 3943, 47,
48
ineffability, metaphysical 27, 2835,
478, 77
ineffability, spiritual 28, 359, 478,
77
inseparability of form and content
in 21, 248, 34, 35, 3741, 43,
469, 59, 77, 89, 183n21
and irony 25, 47, 139, 141, 142
Neoplatonic interpretation of 7
211
New Acadmeys interpretation of 6,

176n3, 176n4
non-rational phenomena in 21, 24, 34
Old Academys 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 2633, 34, 357,
3940, 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 altheia 102,
106, 128
and exposing oneself to the sublimity
of things 106
and the fulfillment of Daseins
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, 1056, 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 Platos developmental
pedagogy 9, 10, 22
on the problems with the esoteric
interpretation of Plato 176n5
on writing as imitation of living
instruction 1113
Schleiermachers interpretation of
Plato 79, 18, 22
intellectual context of 10
principles of 710
problems with 1113
Schmidt, D. 1378, 149, 151, 153, 154,
184n2, 188n3
Schopenhauer, A. 76, 117
Searle, J. 178n19
Serranus 7, 9
Shakespeare, W. 1617
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, 406,
65, 121, 161, 179n9
and Platos choice to write
dialogues 28, 32, 36, 38, 44
and politics 13850, 158, 1623,

1667, 1703, 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, 1203, 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. 1434, 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,
11114, 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

(Continuum Studies in Continental Philosophy) Mark A. Ralkowski-Heidegger's Platonism - Continuum (2009) PDF

Diunggah oleh

Informasi Dokumen

Judul Asli

Hak Cipta

Format Tersedia

Bagikan dokumen Ini

Bagikan atau Tanam Dokumen

Opsi Berbagi

Apakah menurut Anda dokumen ini bermanfaat?

Apakah konten ini tidak pantas?

Hak Cipta:

Format Tersedia

(Continuum Studies in Continental Philosophy) Mark A. Ralkowski-Heidegger's Platonism - Continuum (2009) PDF

Diunggah oleh

Hak Cipta:

Format Tersedia

Heideggers Platonism

Continuum Studies in Continental Philosophy

Continuum International Publishing Group

Typeset by Newgen Imaging Systems Pvt Ltd, Chennai, India

For Ratna and Iris

This page intentionally left blank

The beginning of Western philosophy was without a system, but yet, or

This page intentionally left blank

Chapter 1: What is Platonism?

Chapter 2: Untying Schleiermachers Gordian Knot

Chapter 3: The Context of Heideggers Interpretation of Plato:

Chapter 4: Heideggers Platonism

Chapter 5: Nihilism: Heideggers Crisis and Opportunity

Chapter 6: Heidegger and the Greeks: Revolutionary

Chapter 7: Back from Syracuse? Four Reasons to Rethink

Chapter 8: How Heidegger Should Have Read Plato

something utopian and forgetful of mans finitudesomething like Platos

who provided me with a view of Table Mountain while I wrote parts of

St. Augustine: Against the Academicians, by St. Augustine. Edited

Athenaeum Fragments, by F. Schlegel, in Lucinde and the

Alcibiades, by Plato, in Plato: Complete Works. Edited by

Anon. Prol. Anonymous Prolegomena to Platos Philosophy. Edited by

Apology, by Plato, in Plato: Complete Works. Edited by J. Cooper.

Beyond Good and Evil, by F. Nietzsche. Translated by

The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, by M. Heidegger. Translated

Being and Time, by M. Heidegger. Translated by J. Macquarrie

Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality, by F. Nietzsche.

Discourse on Thinking, by M. Heidegger. Translated by

The Enneads: Abridged Edition. Edited by J. Dillon. Translated by

The End of Philosophy, by M. Heidegger. Translated by

Seventh Letter, by Plato, in Plato: Complete Works. Edited by

The Essence of Truth: On Platos Cave Allegory and Theaetetus, by

Gesamtausgabe, Vol. 9: Wegmarken. Edited by Friedrich-Wilhelm

Gesamtausgabe, Vol. 19: Platon: Sophistes. Edited by Ingeborg

Gesamtausgabe, Vol. 27: Einleitung in die Philosophie. Edited by

Gesamtausgabe, Vol. 34. Vom Wesen der Wahrheit: Zu Platons

GA 36/37 Gesamtausgabe, Vol. 36/37: Sein und Wahreheit. Edited by

On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo, by F. Nietzsche.

Gorgias, by Plato, in Plato: Complete Works. Edited by J. Cooper.

The Gay Science, by F. Nietzsche. Translated by W. Kaufmann.

The Heidegger Controversy. Translated by R. Wolin. Cambridge,

History of the Concept of Time: Prolegomena, by M. Heidegger.

Martin Heidegger in Conversation. Edited by R. Wisser. Translated

The Heidegger-Jaspers Correspondence (19201963), by

Ideas, in Lucinde and the Fragments, by F. Schlegel. Translated

Identity and Difference, by M. Heidegger. Translated by

An Introduction to Metaphysics, by M. Heidegger. Translated by

Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, by M. Heidegger. Translated

Letter on Humanism, by M. Heidegger, in Basic Writings.

Nietzsche: Nihilism, by M. Heidegger. Edited by D. F. Krell.

Parmenides, by M. Heidegger. Translated by A. Schuwer and

Parmenides, by Plato, in Plato: Complete Works. Edited by

Platos Doctrine of Truth, by M. Heidegger, in Pathmarks.

Phaedo, by Plato, in Plato: Complete Works. Edited by J. Cooper.

Phaedrus, by Plato, in Plato: Complete Works. Edited by J. Cooper.

Poetry, Language, Thought, by M. Heidegger. Edited and

Alcibiades, by Plutarch, in Plutarchs Lives Volume 1. Edited by

The Question of Being, by M. Heidegger. Translated by

The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, by

The Self-Assertion of the German University, by

Republic, by Plato, in Plato: Complete Works. Edited by J. Cooper.

Platos Sophist, by M. Heidegger. Translated by R. Rojcewicz and

Spiegel Interview, in Martin Heidegger and National Socialism.