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1. Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, Vol. 39, No. 2, May 2008
ALETHEIA AND HEIDEGGER’S TRANSITIONAL
READINGS OF PLATO’S CAVE ALLEGORY1
JAMES N. McGUIRK
Introduction
The purpose of the present essay is to investigate Heidegger’s various
readings of Plato’s Cave allegory in the works from 1927-1940, in light of his
understanding of truth as unhiddenness. In section § 44 of Being and Time,
Heidegger puts forward his original interpretation of the ground of truth in
Dasein’s disclosure of its world. This position, rooted squarely in the
phenomenological tradition, informs his endorsement of the allegory in the
years around the publication of Being and Time. However, in a lecture series
from 1931-2, entitled The Essence of Truth, he claims that the allegory
constitutes a turning point in the history of philosophy, insofar as it is both an
important meditation on the fundamental experience of the truth/uncon-
cealment (aletheia) of being as well as a crucial loss of this experience
consequent to the emergence of an inappropriate understanding of the essence
of untruth. Finally, in his best known treatment of the allegory, the 1940 essay
Plato’s Doctrine of Truth, we see Heidegger effectively dismissing the
allegory as making hardly any significant contribution to the concept of truth,
insofar as he paints Plato as a mere moralist and educational theorist. We will
argue that these texts reflect the evolution in Heidegger’s thinking about truth,
from the consideration of Dasein as the origin of truth, through an
interpretation of the original experience of truth in Greek philosophy, and
finally to a general dissatisfaction with philosophy as a vehicle for the
unconcealment of Being. As such, Plato’s Cave provides the ideal locus for
tracking the so-called ‘turning’ in Heidegger’s thinking.
In the 1940 article entitled Plato’s Doctrine of Truth, which is perhaps
Heidegger’s best known treatment of the allegory of the Cave, we are told that
Plato’s thinking subjects itself to a transformation in the essence of truth that
becomes the hidden law governing what the thinker says.”2
According to
Heidegger, the allegory has the explication of Plato’s ‘doctrine’ of truth as its
principal goal. And within this doctrinal agenda, what is really crucial for the
history of the concept of truth is the fact that this doctrine of truth is essentially
an illustration of the essence of education (PDT 167). Insofar as this is so,
“Plato’s thinking follows a change in the essence of truth … that becomes the
history of metaphysics” (PDT 181).
This change in the essence of truth, constituting the history of metaphysics,
is the loss of the fundamental experience of truth as aletheia and its
replacement with truth as adequatio intellectus et rei. Truth has come to denote
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2. a relation of correspondence between things and our concepts of them. But as
Heidegger insists, this relational correspondence is ambiguous and derivative of
a more fundamental experience. Hence his attention to the Greek word aletheia
which, he tells us, is badly translated by words like ‘veritas’, ‘Wahrheit’ or
‘truth’, mainly because of its negative form. It is made up of a privative alpha
attached to the verb lanthanein, which means ‘to hide.’ As such, aletheia is
better translated as unhiddenness (Unverborgenheit) than as truth. Thus, for the
Greeks, the essence of truth is fundamentally an experience of unconcealment
from out of the hidden. At this stage in Heidegger’s authorship, he is concerned
with reclaiming this original Greek experience of truth as the basis of authentic
thinking. This is crucially important insofar as it suggests a ground for truth that
the concept of adequatio not only fails to penetrate but indeed covers over. In
what follows, I intend to argue that this critique of Plato is an evolving one,
whose evolution reflects the transition in Heidegger’s own thinking from
phenomenology to poetry as facilitating the emergence of truth. Thus, the
‘turning’ in Heidegger’s thinking, which is more of a development than a
radical break, is set in relief and allows us to track the different emphases of his
different periods of authorship alongside one of the canonical texts and themes
(i.e. truth) in the history of Western thought.3
In order to do so, however, we
must retrace the emergence of the concept of truth as unconcealment, as it first
appears substantively in section § 44 of Being and Time.4
Disclosure and Phenomenology in the Marburg Years
When, at the end of Division One of Being and Time, Heidegger challenges
the primacy of the traditional conception of truth, he does so on the basis of
the account of human essence emergent from his fundamental ontological
analytic of Dasein. He begins by pointing to a seemingly irresolvable aporia
generated in the traditional conception of truth as adequatio intellectus et rei,
which owes its origins to Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas. Heidegger asks how
and in what way the ideal can in fact agree or measure the real. “With regard
to what” he asks, “do intellectus and res agree? In their kind of being and their
essential content do they give us anything at all with regard to which they can
agree?” (BT 258f). In other words, the correspondence account of truth
comprises a dualism between the real and ideal which, furthermore, specifies
neither what is meant by the ideal nor how exactly the concept of
correspondence is supposed to bridge the gap. It is, in fact, the product of a
dogmatic metaphysics that obscures the target of genuine thinking. Heidegger
replaces this conception of truth with a more authentic one rooted in
uncoveredness (Erschlossenheit). In other words, it is rooted in Dasein’s
facticity or its immersion in the world. He says that truth is not to be
understood as the correspondence between the psychical and the physical (as
though this were even possible), but through the fact that Dasein orients itself
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3. towards an entity in such a way that it uncovers that entity as what it is in itself.
Heidegger acknowledges that this is basically a restatement of Husserl’s
phenomenological account of truth in which dualism (and of course
psychologism) is overcome through the concept of intentionality which allows
consciousness to uncover the given as it is in itself.5
In this respect, the notion
of ‘confirmation’ becomes important to truth, in the sense that through the
intentionality of consciousness, the entity shows itself in its selfsameness
through a perspectival manifold (BT 261). But what is really crucial for
Heidegger here is the fact that the Husserlian concept of truth allows him to
stress the fact that the truth of entities is emergent from their being uncovered.
Heidegger’s originality regarding the concept of truth grows out of a double
movement away from this Husserlian definition. Firstly, he drops the notion of
intentionality which, because of its intellectualist connotations, persistently
falls back into precisely the dualism it seeks to avoid.6
Secondly, he abandons
the truth condition that entities be uncovered as they are in themselves. With
respect to truth, what is really important is that fact of uncovering as such
rather than the content of the uncovering. As Heidegger says, “Being-true must
be understood as Being-uncovering” (BT 261).7
This is justified by the fact
that it is no longer a question of gaining access to the real through
consciousness, since Being-in-the-world is intended as a more fundamental
situation which opens the possibility of experiencing the real in the first place.
But since this original opening is the event of Dasein’s attempted resolution of
the question of its own being, Heidegger does not merely abandon the idea that
entities are uncovered as they are in themselves, but replaces it with the
hermeneutic as which is, of course, directly sourced from Dasein’s
worldhood. Thus, he says:
Being-true as Being-uncovering, is in turn ontologically possible only on the basis of Being-
in-the-world. The latter phenomenon, which we have known as a basic state of Dasein, is the
foundation for the primordial phenomenon of truth (BT 261).
That is to say that the phenomenon of truth is first and foremost rooted in
Dasein’s disclosure of its world (facticity) which is also, of course, the way in
which it discloses itself to itself. As such, truth is understood through those
aspects of Dasein that have already emerged from the fundamental ontological
analytic such as projection, thrownness and falling. This latter, of course,
entails the fundamental ambiguity that Dasein is primordially and essentially
in the truth and in untruth in the sense that its mode of uncovering can be either
authentic or inauthentic. The important point is that truth is only possible “so
long as Dasein is” (BT 269), because disclosure is exclusive to Dasein. In
addition, the phenomenon of truth can only be explored through Heidegger’s
phenomenological ontology which penetrates the existential sources of truth
which are otherwise neglected by the correspondence theory. Heidegger
anticipates Division Two here when he claims that eternal truth is impossible
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4. since all truth is relative to Dasein’s being (BT 270). That is to say that since
Dasein’s being is essentially temporal-historical (as will be argued in Division
Two), truth too is meaningful only as historically given in the context of
Dasein’s finitude.8
This understanding of truth is reflected in Heidegger’s reading of Plato’s
cave allegory in the later Marburg years, in a group of texts including The
Basic Problems of Phenomenology9
and The Metaphysical Foundations of
Logic10
, from 1927/8 and 1928 respectively. It should be pointed out that
neither of these texts treats the issue of truth in the allegory as absolutely
central.11
This is not surprising given the fact that truth is not accented in quite
the same way as it will come to be later. At this stage, truth is understood
relative to Dasein and as such, it is subordinate to the question of the meaning
of Being. In these texts, the principal focus of attention is on the notion of the
idea of the Good as ‘beyond being’ (epekeina tes ousias). This phrase, which
is not even quoted in the later treatments of the allegory, constitutes, at this
point for Heidegger, the text’s principal contribution to the history of
philosophy. In the Basic Problems of Phenomenology, he reads the idea of the
Good in the allegory as a way of explicating the meaning of the transcendence
of Dasein. He claims that the epekeina, which is the way the Good is
delineated for Plato, belongs to Dasein (BPP 299) in the sense that it is Dasein
in its temporal structure that allows being to come to presence at all and, in this
regard, makes possible the disclosure of being. This is, of course, perfectly
consistent with the discussion of truth that can be found in § 44 of Being and
Time, in which it is Dasein’s projective interpretation of its own being that
gives truth (and untruth) their very being (cf. BT 256-73). The major
modification that Heidegger makes is that while Plato presents the Good as the
transcendent condition of the truth of entities, Heidegger employs it as an
image of Dasein as the transcendental condition of the possibility of truth.
The second text, quite compatible with the first, focuses on Plato’s sense of
the idea of the Good as ou heneka or ‘for the sake of which’. Plato says in the
Republic, 505e, that the Good is “that which every soul pursues and for its
sake does all that it does”. Heidegger locates the ‘for the sake of which’
(Umwillen) as world in its transcendence. Since it is towards world that Dasein
transcends, world is the ultimate target and is that which “excels the ideas but
in excelling them … determines and gives them the form of wholeness,
koinonia and communality” (MFL 185). So the Good as epekeina captures
Dasein’s condition as essentially disclosing itself through its disclosure of
world. Dasein does this as a freedom (which is identical to transcendence)
through which the phenomenon of being can manifest itself by way of the
possibilities to be that are opened by Dasein. In turn, this means that truth
itself is made possible by the freedom of Dasein such that there is no
unconcealment outside of Dasein’s transcendence.
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5. In these texts we see Heidegger operating very much within the province of
transcendental phenomenology, albeit his own specific version thereof. He is,
thus, still concerned with the phenomenological task of describing the
phenomenon par excellence (i.e. being) through its manifestation in the
existential analytic of Dasein. What is more, he reads Plato’s idea of the Good
as perfectly encapsulating the transcendence of Dasein so long as we
understand the ‘beyond’ (epekeina) as enacted as finite time and do not read
the Good as a value (MFL 184). The idea of the Good is what transcends the
ideas and yet organises them as a whole (MFL 185) in the same way that the
relation of Dasein and its world allows (at least at this point) what appears to
appear.12
In other words, the Good is presented here as the very ground through
which all that is disclosed is disclosed. Heidegger replaces Plato’s
transcendence with a phenomenological transcendentalism (albeit not Kantian
or Husserlian) which ensures firstly that truth is only possible on account of
the questioning entity that we are and, secondly, that truth must be understood
as inalienably historical and bound up with the destiny of Dasein. This allows
us to make sense of the proximity and distance to Husserl’s phenomenological
account of truth or of the move from the disclosure of beings as they are in
themselves to the priority of disclosure itself, since what is crucial is Dasein’s
disclosive capacity through which it interprets its world in relation to the task
of answering the question for the meaning of its own being. In other words,
truth’s importance is ultimately delineated relative to Dasein’s own existential
concerns. However, while many of these projects are retained in the later
works, the allegory itself is interpreted along radically different lines until in
1940 the idea tou agathou is read as the acme of the loss of the sense of the
fundamentality of truth as disclosure. As we will see, this is crucially related
to Heidegger’s evolving understanding of the ground of truth.
The Philosophically Hidden: On the Essence of Truth (1931-2)
However, before turning our attention to Plato’s Doctrine of Truth (1940),
we must first consider a text which sees Heidegger taking what amounts to a
middle or transition period between the early and later texts. In the winter
semester of 1931-2, Heidegger gave a lecture series at the University of
Freiburg which has been published under the title The Essence of Truth.13
Heidegger has, at this point, already begun to distance himself from the Being
and Time project of developing a complete ontology from the analytic of
Dasein. This fact makes its presence felt in two important ways. Firstly, he is
demonstrably and explicitly more interested in truth itself than was the case in
the Being and Time period. Truth is no longer understood as simply a
delineation of Dasein’s Being-in-the-world but is approached under the
auspices of Being’s concealment and unconcealment of itself. Secondly, the
fact that Heidegger is so much more attentive to the details of the text is itself
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6. telling. Instead of merely choosing a passage from the allegory as an image to
describe Dasein’s transcendence, he is now more interested in the text itself
insofar as it makes a contribution to the history of the concept of truth. That is,
while he continues to understand truth through the temporal historical, he no
longer understands the temporal historical through Dasein alone. So rather
than a fundamental ontology pursued via Dasein, what we have here is an
attempt to recover the original experience of truth as it emerged in the history
of philosophy, because now Being’s historicity has replaced Dasein’s. Insofar
as truth means the concealment and unconcealment of Being, Heidegger sets
himself the task of discovering to what extent this insight was meaningfully
understood in the tradition of western thought. Since the Latinization of
philosophy lost sight of the essence of truth through translation,14
we must, of
course, begin with the Greeks, whose “fundamental experience of hiddenness
is obviously the ground from which the seeking after unhiddenness arises”
(TET 9). He does not, thus, consider the origins of philosophy in Greek
thought to be “primitive, half-baked, groping and unclear” (TET 10) or, to the
extent that they are, this unclarity constitutes Greek philosophy’s positive
essence in placing it in an authentic relation to the fundamental experience of
being. Half of this lecture series comprises a meditation on the allegory of the
cave. He reads the text as both genuinely penetrating the question of the
essence of truth as well as containing the seeds of the waning (Schwinden) of
the centrality of aletheia for philosophy (TET 12).
Insofar as Heidegger has now replaced the idea that truth and untruth owe
their being to Dasein’s disclosive Being-in-the-world with the claim that
hiddenness and unhiddenness belong to Being itself, the question is to what, if
any, extent Plato dwells with this insight in his thinking about truth. The
answer is affirmative in the main. According to Heidegger, in The Essence of
Truth, the allegory is predominantly concerned, at least in the first three stages,
with the essence of truth as unhiddenness. Plato does refer to the orthotes, or
the correct way of seeing things, but this correctness “is grounded in truth as
unhiddenness” (TET 26). And again, he claims that “the allegory as a whole
treats of aletheia” (TET 31). Insofar as aletheia is to the fore, then, the
allegory can be considered an authentic attempt to understand the original
experiences that ground human essence and historical existence. This means,
as Heidegger notes, that unhiddenness belongs to the essence of man, in that
man is the being who always comports himself towards beings or what is given
(TET 20-22). He is concerned, therefore, with Dasein’s stance in the opening
towards unhiddenness as such. What is happening in this text is a simple
mapping of the similarly titled 1930 essay “On the Essence of Truth” – which
does not deal with Plato – onto the allegory. In that essay, not to be confused
with the lecture course of the same title which we are discussing, Heidegger
thinks of truth and untruth, contra Being and Time, as belonging to “the inner
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7. constitution of the Da-sein to which historical man is admitted”15
. Thus, truth
and untruth are re-thought because the ‘thrownness’ (Geworfenheit) of Dasein
is re-thought in terms of the clearing (Lichtung) of Being to which historical
man is given over (i.e. rather than thinking the question of being as entirely
disclosed through the Dasein which is mine).
Heidegger continues to think of truth, as he did in Being and Time, in terms
of human essence, yet now the question is thought in terms of the orientation
of historical man to unhiddenness, rather than as that which is identical to his
being. In other words, the contemplation of aletheia as unhiddenness is
essential to philosophy and therefore also to human essence since it is in being
given over to this thought that we take a stance and confront ourselves as what
we really are. In respect to this, we notice a subtle change in Heidegger’s
terminology from Erschlossenheit to Unverborgenheit. In Being and Time, we
remember, Heidegger had claimed that truth must be understood as
uncovering16
where ‘uncovering’ was understood as more correctly translating
aletheia. In 1931-2, though, Heidegger prefers to translate aletheia as
Unverborgenheit or unhiddenness. This is crucial to understanding the shift in
Heidegger’s thinking. In 1927, Dasein actively ‘uncovers’ being and beings,
through its existential engagements, while in 1931-2 it is being and beings
which emerge out of hiddenness. This emergence can only be encountered by
Dasein but the latter’s pure activity has been suspended in the sense that
Dasein does not ‘unhide’ being. As far as the implications of this transformed
sense of truth for Plato’s allegory are concerned we will need to look to the
allegory’s three central expository features as Heidegger reads it. These are (1)
the use of the notion of idea; (2) the importance of education (paideia); and
(3) the idea of the Good (idea tou agathou).
In The Essence of Truth, Heidegger interprets the ‘idea’ positively as that
which ‘lets through’the being and truth of beings (TET 42f). Through the idea,
being is interpreted according to a pre-understanding of being that it discloses.
Thus, for Heidegger, Plato is concerned with truth as an understanding of the
being of beings beyond the immediacy of what concerns the prisoners within
the cave (TET 39). It is true, of course, that what is revealed by the idea is
essence, but inasmuch as Plato understands this as the revelation of the being
of beings, he appears to be on the right track. From the point of view of the
allegory, the idea as what ‘lights up’ or ‘lets through’, is concerned with the
liberation of the prisoner, which allows him to comport himself towards the
being of beings in an authentic fashion (TET 43f). In this sense, the ideas
liberate the prisoner and allow him to open himself onto the questions of being
and truth (realised through the projection of possibilities) in a way that can
authentically ground his existence (TET 44-7). What is noteworthy here is that
aletheia as the unity (not identity) of disclosing and the being of what is given
(TET 51-3) is flagged as the fundamentally human event (TET 53-7).
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8. Heidegger understands liberation to be central to the allegory and, what is
more, this liberation speaks to the history of man as the being who can
comport himself towards being. In his search for truth, therefore, being is
disclosed at the same time that the questioner brings himself into question in
a way that was never possible within the cave. Heidegger interprets the notion
of aletheia as denoting this twin occurrence. Thus he speaks here of the idea
as fundamental to the unfolding of aletheia and to its mode of uncovering.
What is more, aletheia is presented as relational and not as originating wholly
in Dasein’s questioning. That is, while truth is only meaningful amongst
humans, it is understood here as the way in which historical man orients
himself to the being of the given. In this sense, aletheia or truth is what
grounds Being-in-the-world rather than the other way round.
This interpretation of the Platonic idea is complimented by Heidegger’s
meditation on the notion of paideia, which he associates more closely with
human freedom than with correctness of perception. He insists that while it is
common to translate paideia with the German Bildung or English ‘education’,
this in fact misses the point entirely and trivialises the insights of Plato’s
thought:
And we today! ‘Plato’s doctrine of ideas’ has its essence ripped out and made accessible for
the superficiality of today’s Dasein: ideas as values and paideia as culture and education, i.e.
what is most pernicious from the nineteenth century, but nothing from antiquity! (TET 84)17
For Plato, the cave allegory is about “the liberation and awakening of the
innermost power of the essence of man”, which has nothing to do with “certain
propositions or formulas learned or repeated, and which ultimately correspond
with things” (TET 82). As such, Heidegger translates paideia not as education
but as ‘positionedness’ (TET 83).18
It is noteworthy that the term
‘positionedness’ here is connected with the notion of orientation which is
normally characteristic, as ‘correct orientation’, of correspondence theories of
truth. Yet here the connotation is far from negative. Here, ‘positionedness’
entails a becoming free to understand “being as such, which understanding
first of all lets beings as beings be” (TET 44). He goes on to say that:
Whether beings become more beingful or less beingful is therefore up to the freedom of man.
Freedom is measured according to the primordiality, breadth, and decisiveness of the binding,
i.e. this individual grasping himself as being-there [Da-sein], set back into the isolation and
thrownness of his historical past and future. (TET 44f)
Paideia in this sense hearkens back to the notion of resoluteness discussed
in Being and Time. The difference, of course, is that while there resoluteness
entailed Dasein’s taking itself in hand in light of its ownmost possibility
(ausgezeichnete Möglichkeit), here paideia means Dasein’s being-freed into
the open (Lichtung) so that the question of the unconcealment of being itself
can be encountered. Regardless, the point is that paideia is understood
positively as entailing Dasein’s resolute stance in relation to the happening of
aletheia which amounts to a direct confrontation with the question of the
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9. history of human essence. In its facilitation of questioning, paideia is
concerned with the essence of man in a way that precedes “all pedagogy,
psychology, anthropology, as well as every humanism” (TET 83).19
That is, the
philosophical is not an aspect of the human scientific domain of enquiry but
its ground.
From Heidegger’s point of view, perhaps the greatest clue to the
authenticity of Plato’s engagement with aletheia is the idea of the Good. But
Heidegger is keen, as he had also been in the period of Being and Time, to
separate the Platonic Good and the question of truth from the question of
value. In fact, he maintains that the interpretation of the Good as value not
only goes against the grain of Greek thought in general but also against the
grain of Platonic thought (TET 72). For Plato, as for the Greeks generally,
‘good’ means what is ‘sound and durable’ (TET 77). In terms of the allegory,
the idea tou agathou refers to nothing more than an enabling power in the
sense that when our questioning goes out beyond the questions of being and
unhiddenness, it “encounters something with the character of empowerment
and nothing else” (TET 77). This is what is meant by the Good. Of course, the
agathon is described as idea, yet for Heidegger this is misleading even with
respect to Plato’s intentions. He draws attention to the fact that the agathon is
seen only with difficulty if at all (mogis horasthai) and constitutes the very
dunamis of being itself (TET 70). As mogis horasthai, the Good is not an a
priori form of rational validity from which all knowledge is derived. Indeed it
is difficult even to say anything about the agathon. Plato himself says very
little and as such appears to recognise the extent to which the encounter with
the agathon is corrupted by ethics and questions of value (TET 77). As
Heidegger notes, it is normal that “one wants to know what the good is, just
like one wants to know the shortest way to the market place”. But, he goes on,
“the idea of the good cannot be interrogated in this uncomprehending way”
(TET 70). In fact, to do so is to proceed in a most unplatonic way (TET 70):
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. In the meantime it has
almost become a triviality that the omne ens is a bonum. For whoever asks in a philosophical
manner, Plato says more than enough. For someone who wants only to establish what the good
is in its common usage he says far too little, even nothing at all (TET 80).
That Plato says more than enough is explained by the fact that he (Plato)
understands the Good only as this “dunamis, the enablement of being and
unhiddenness in their essence” (TET 80). In other words, the Platonic Good is
neither a being nor that which unconceals beings, but that which enables
unconcealing as such. That is, the idea as light, ‘lets through’ the being of
beings while the Good enables unhiddenness and being as “what they are”
(TET 72). So the idea enables an ontological orientation towards being while
the Good is the space (clearing) which grants the ontological question in the
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10. first place (TET 79). As such, Heidegger finds in the text a ‘yoking’ of the
question of the essence of truth to the question of the essence of being (TET
83). As he notes:
In so far 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 aletheia is deconcealment, in which occurs the history of
man’s essence (TET 83).
The question of the essence of truth is a fundamentally human question so
that the authenticity of Plato’s problematic is ensured by his pursuit of the
ground of the human soul’s opening towards the question of being as such. In
The Essence of Truth Heidegger is concerned with the way that questioning
fundamentally changes Dasein or man (TET 84). The Good is understood as
that which enables the stance (Haltung) or standing-forth of man in which he
empowers himself in his essence and gives himself over to himself. We can
clearly see, therefore, that the Good is no longer reducible to Dasein in the
way that it was in Heidegger’s texts from the late 1920s. Rather, the Good as
the ground of the empowerment of the unconcealing of Being belongs to
Being itself while man’s confrontation with this ground is the propriative event
around which human essence and history revolves. Such a confrontation with
unhiddenness and its ground in this sense is for Heidegger, “nothing else but
philosophising” (TET 83) which is the essential way man takes stewardship of
Being.
Yet as much as Plato’s allegory constitutes an authentic confrontation with
truth as aletheia, it also marks a development in the history of philosophy in
which the fundamental experience of truth begins to wane (TET 87). The site
of this waning is the issue of untruth. We remember that in Being and Time,
truth and untruth were equiprimordial with regard to Dasein in the sense that
Dasein could disclose being authentically in terms of its own ownmost
possibility or inauthentically through the idle talk of the ‘they’. This inherent
ambiguity is also a feature of Heidegger’s account of truth here, in the sense
that he insists that the essence of truth is inextricably linked to the essence of
untruth, because Being hides itself in showing itself.20
Truth and untruth
remain tightly interwoven here, while there is a shift in Heidegger’s thinking
towards thinking untruth as truth’s condition of possibility. As such, the
equiprimordiality of truth and untruth from Being and Time is beginning to
unravel. Heidegger laments the fact that this connection is not properly
thematised by Plato, with the result that the question of untruth is over-hastily
determined as falsity (pseudos), such that falsity later on becomes the prism
through which truth itself is understood in oppositional manner (TET 97). In
addition, he claims that unhiddenness is both a theme and not a theme for Plato
(TET 91) in the sense that although he is concerned with the unhidden, he
begins to think of it in terms of beings rather than Being so that “the question
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11. of unhiddenness as such ceases to come to life” (TET 90). This means that
Plato loses sight of the fact that the human being can meaningfully orient itself
towards Being at all, as he becomes preoccupied with what specifically is
shown. That is, if aletheia as unhiddenness denotes a fundamental experience
of truth then untruth should properly be thought of in terms of hiddenness
(letheia).
Heidegger claims that it is the fourth stage of the allegory – the return to the
cave (Republic 516e ff.) – where this ‘turn’ in Plato’s thinking occurs. This
return signifies a ‘fall’ in the history of philosophy, a fall into a forgetfulness
of the essence of truth, because of the question of the essence of untruth. The
allegory reaches its zenith, not in the vision of the Good, but in the
confrontation between the philosopher’s understanding of truth and that of
those who remain shackled to the cave wall. The philosopher descends into the
cave from which he has been released as a would-be liberator – albeit an
unsuccessful one – with the goal of bringing about a ‘turning around’21
of the
souls of these others. Of course the philosopher, whose eyes are now
accustomed to the light outside the cave is no longer able to orient himself
within the cave, with the result that he is scorned and threatened by the other
prisoners. They think that it is they who have access to the unhidden and that
the philosopher is delusional. The point for Heidegger is that, at this stage in
the allegory, the essence of truth is understood through the essence of untruth
(which is not a problem), while this latter is understood as the ‘pseudos’ or
false. At stake now is the clash between the philosopher and prisoners vis-à-
vis their beliefs about beings. That is to say that there is an inevitable and
necessary loss of the fundamental experience of truth as the uncovering of
Being, in that reflection on the ground of unconcealment must recede into the
background as more local or ontic questions begin to concern us. This is all the
more unfortunate since the fundamental uncovering is the ground of all other
forms of inquiry such that it should – as the primordial – be that which most
concerns the philosopher. But in Plato’s allegory, as we have noted, the hidden
is too quickly brought under the yoke of the idea of the false as opposed to
being thought of as crucially tied to the showing of the unhidden. This
opposition between letheia and pseudos is important insofar as it denotes two
different types of experience – the one that has to do with the essence of beings
(Seienden) and the other that is concerned with hiddenness as such. Otherwise
put, what is at stake is a clash between a reflection on truth, as Heidegger
understands the term, and what we might call ‘true things’. Heidegger is not
in principle opposed to the notion of the pseudos with regards to truth, but he
considers it to be derivative. When Plato begins to think of aletheia as
“something pertaining to beings” (TET 89), he initiates a theory of truth based
on correspondence and so cultivates a loss of the original showing and hiding
of Being that makes such correspondence possible in the first place. The
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12. notion of ‘pseudo’ is appropriate to beings, but the problem is that the
dominance of this notion leads to a situation in which truth is understood as
the opposite of the pseudos or false, such that the true ground of truth gets
covered over. The ‘pseudos’, then is not an alternative understanding of the
untrue, but an orientation to beings that is first made possible by the primordial
showing of Being.
So the allegory, according to Heidegger, terminates in a forgetfulness of the
essence of truth on the basis of Plato’s loss of the sense of the primordiality of
untruth as the hiddenness of Being. Plato’s ‘fall’ is the result of his inability to
dwell in the ambiguity generated by his unfolding of the connection of the
questions of essence and unhiddenness. Plato misses the positive sense of
untruth also in that he fails to understand untruth as what enables truth (the
hidden which allows the unhidden to come forward) and understands it instead
as falsity, which can only be negative. At the same time, the allegory constitutes
one of the great achievements of the western philosophical tradition in the sense
that it brings reflection on the ground of truth to the point that forgetfulness
becomes inevitable and even necessary. It is inevitable insofar as the
philosopher must live with other Dasein’s and necessary if scientific
understanding is to become possible since science operates in a cleared realm
of Being.22
But it is philosophy’s task of thinking this clearing in the first place.
Plato both achieves this grounding in his meditation on aletheia in the allegory
before allowing that which aletheia makes possible to replace it.
The Philosophical Inevitability of Correspondence: Plato’s Doctrine of Truth
(1940)
All of which leads us back to Heidegger’s 1940 text, in which Plato’s
allegory of the cave is rejected as understanding nothing of what is essential
to the notion of aletheia. At this point, Heidegger claims that it is almost
entirely the derivative understanding of the essence of truth
(adequatio/homoiosis) that pushes to the fore (PDT 172), in spite of the fact
that the word aletheia continues to be used. In other words, Plato has
completely lost the original or pre-Socratic understanding of aletheia. In order
to explain what Heidegger means here, we must return to the three central
expository features of the text; namely the idea, the notion of paideia and the
idea of ‘the Good’.
With regard to the first of these, Heidegger tells as that although
unhiddenness is mentioned at several points in the text, “it is considered
simply in terms of how it makes whatever appears be accessible in its visible
form” (PDT 172). This is because Plato considers the ‘idea’ (idea) to be the
soul’s most crucial mode of access to truth. The ‘idea’, to be sure, is not a mere
concept, but is rather that which shows itself in its visible form. As such,
Plato’s doctrine of ideas – inasmuch as he can be said to have one – refers to
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13. the shining of beings, in which shining they show themselves and only
themselves. When the human mind can perceive or apprehend these ideas, it
gains access to truth in that it apprehends beings as they are in themselves.
Thus, for Plato, the life of the released prisoner outside the cave is superior to
the life in the cave, because while those in the cave see only shadows of what
appears, the released prisoner dwells in a realm in which the shining forth of
beings reveals them as entirely from themselves.23
But this means that what
appears as ‘idea’ appears as this or that. As Heidegger tells us, the becoming-
unhidden of what appears is less important in this account than the ‘whatness’
or essentia of beings (PDT 173). This is strikingly different from what
Heidegger has maintained in the text from 1931-2. Beings only become
present as what they are insofar as the ideas reveal themselves in their shining.
That is, they show their essence rather than their being. Thus, for Plato, the
superiority of the life of philosophy consists in the philosopher’s capacity to
see the essences of the multitude of beings through the ideas. In this way,
philosophy comes to stand for a kind of uncritical eidetic intuition. Since the
grasp of this essence represents for Plato the terminus of philosophy, it is
suggested that the experience of unhiddenness as such is already lost to him
and that he has begun to think of truth solely in terms of the correspondence
of idea and thing.
The question for Plato thus has less to do with the happening of
unhiddenness as such but revolves more around correct identification of what
is unhidden (true). Nowhere is this clearer for Heidegger than in Plato’s
yoking of the question of truth to the question of education (paideia). Paideia,
Heidegger says, denotes a turning around of the soul (periagoge holes tes
psuches) towards the region of the most hidden. The philosopher desires to
turn away from the shadows of the cave wall and dwell in this region where
beings show themselves and become accessible in their own light (PDT 173).
But as we have already noted, the cave allegory does not terminate with the
prisoner leaving the cave but with his return to his erstwhile companions. This
makes sense in light of the fact that the allegory begins with Socrates’ request
for Glaucon to consider the problem of overcoming the lack of education
(PDT 170).24
And since the question of education and its lack was raised at the
very beginning of the allegory, it must be that this understanding of truth and
untruth has been operable all along. Inasmuch as truth is understood as the
becoming visible of the essence of beings through ideas, untruth is thought
through the misrecognition of what is essential. Thus, the prisoners have false
beliefs about beings while the philosopher holds true beliefs. In this important
way, philosophy has been set under an inauthentic and derivative concept of
truth as correspondence and the work of philosophy is consequently
understood as the correction of false beliefs. As Heidegger points out, this line
reaches fruition in Aristotle’s claim that truth does not belong to beings but
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14. exists only in thought.25
Thus, while in the 1931-2 lectures Heidegger
suggested that Plato fell into an inauthentic understanding of untruth as
pseudos as the result of an authentic meditation on the true meaning of
aletheia, he now claims that the inauthentic or derivative concept of untruth
has been operable from the very beginning of the allegory. Consequently, he
now insists contra the earlier lecture course that while, for Plato, ‘education’
or Bildung, do not quite capture the meaning of paideia, they come as close as
can be expected (PDT 166). Perhaps the reason for this altered interpretation
is that a close reading of the allegory shows that it not only ends but also
begins with a return to the cave in that the original prisoner is guided in his
ascent – presumably by a philosophos who has already made the ascent.
As far as the derailing of the question of the essence of truth and untruth is
concerned, this ultimately seems to be connected with the question of value for
Heidegger. In the allegory, the truest or the most unhidden thing is the idea of
the Good (idea tou agathou). In discussing this idea, we see that Heidegger
broadly follows Nietzsche in insisting on the absolute separation between the
Greek concept of agathon and any Christianisation of this term as the ‘moral
Good’ (PDT 174). “In Greek thought”, he says “to agathon means that which
is capable of something and enables another to be capable of something” (PDT
174). This means that for the Greeks, what is good is what makes something
possible or enables its being as this or that. To think of the Good in moral
terms is to go beyond Greek thought and once again disables the capacity to
think the experience of the Good as a fundamental experience of being itself.
This is fully in line with the earlier text. However, Heidegger now suggests
that in two important ways Plato has left behind Greek, in the sense of pre-
Socratic thought with regard to this question of the Good. On the one hand, he
notes that: “As idea, the good is something that shines, thus something that
provides vision, thus in turn something visible and hence knowable” (PDT
174). In this way, the Good is somewhat reified as an object of contemplation
and ceases to be simply the empowering ground of unhiddenness, as it is
transformed into the most unhidden being, or the being-est being (PDT 181).
Thus, though the agathon is enabling, it is first and foremost an idea and the
highest idea at that. Therefore, it is the idea that shines brightest and is
consequently most pre-eminently visible (PDT 175). If this is so, Plato’s
thought has moved into the realm of ontic description and away from an
exploration of the liminal hiding and showing of Being. The description of the
Good as mogis horasthai, which was so important for Heidegger in 1931-2, is
now dismissed as meaning nothing more than that correct orientation with the
idea of the Good is more challenging than it is with other ideas.
Secondly, while the agathon is for the Greeks generally not a moral term,
Heidegger now claims that “Plato’s interpretation of the agathon as idea offers
the occasion for thinking of ‘the good’ ‘morally’ and ultimately reckoning it to
180

15. be a ‘value’” (PDT 174). The reason for this is that once aletheia is subjected to
the idea, so that it is understood as the opposite of the false (pseudos), its essence
becomes orthotes (adequatio). From here it is a short step to a dominant
humanism in which what is of greatest concern is the position of human beings
and their correct orientation towards beings. Hence the crucial role of paideia,
which Heidegger now identifies, rather than aletheia, as the allegory’s core
(PDT 166). In relation to this, the ‘most correct’orientation the human being can
have is with the highest idea, the Good. Inasmuch as the pursuit of relation with
this idea becomes the goal of philosophy, the suprasensuous idea itself is
identified by both Plato and Aristotle as to theion, or the divine (PDT 180f).
Under the hegemony of the idea, then, philosophy becomes metaphysics and
metaphysics becomes theology (PDT 181) or onto-theology in the sense that the
question of being is now interpreted as fidelity to the most unhidden being which
is responsible for the being of all beings. The question of unhiddenness, as such,
drops into the background and is replaced by the scientific pursuit of the essence
of the given or beings in their ontic dimension. In addition, since the question of
being is in a sense decided through the idea of the Good as the most visible that
is accessible to contemplation, truth or aletheia as unconcealment is no longer
sustainable and must be replaced by truth as ‘correct alignment’to the showing
of what is unhidden (PDT 177). One of the most important consequences of
this, of course, is the obscuring of the question of the ontological difference
between being and beings since the issue of the being of beings is decided in
advance by the interpretation of the divine as the cause of all beings as well as
the highest value.
In this highly critical treatment of the cave allegory, Heidegger essentially
maintains that Plato has left behind the question of aletheia as the hiddenness
and unhiddenness of being for a kind of theological service of the highest
being.
From Phenomenology to Poetry
Here we have texts from three different periods which appear to offer
significantly different interpretations of the major features of the allegory. As
such, the Cave allegory, better than any other motif in Heidegger’s writings,
allows us to track the evolution (if not ‘turning’) in his thought and its
changing emphases on the questions of truth and Being. Furthermore, I would
suggest that the evolution in question amply reflects Heidegger’s abandoning
of the phenomenological enterprise in the early 1930s before, in the mid 30s
and 1940s, giving evidence of an anti-philosophical turn in his thinking. At the
very least, he appears to have lost faith in philosophy as it has been practised
in the Western tradition.
Thus, in 1927 he understands the allegory and the question of the Good as
unfolding the transcendence of Dasein. That is, the reading of the allegory in
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16. the Basic Problems of Phenomenology and in the Metaphysical Foundations
of Logic echoes the concerns of Being and Time regarding how the question of
being is to be approached through the existential structures of Dasein and by
means of the phenomenological method. At this point, truth and untruth are
described as equiprimordial inasmuch as they are further grounded in the
‘uncovering’ activity of Dasein.
By 1931-2, Dasein’s unconcealing of Being is replaced by Being’s own
hiddenness and unhiddenness as Heidegger starts to think of truth as a
bestowal rather than as reducible to Dasein. That is to say that Heidegger has
become more interested in the genesis and fate of the experience of truth as
that which grants historical man access to and guardianship of Being. As we
noted when we looked at Heidegger’s treatment of Plato’s allegory in this
lecture series, he locates the philosophical tradition as the proper home of the
fundamental experience of truth even if that same tradition has entailed a
covering over of that experience. Here, truth is foregrounded in a way it never
was in the period of Being and Time and begins to be understood as grounded
in the unthought hiddenness of Being, which is approached if never properly
engaged by Plato.
In 1940, however, when Heidegger becomes fascinated by the pre-Socratic
problematic of the obscure hiding of Being as such, the allegory is read as a
canonical text in the history of onto-theology and the forgetfulness not only of
the essence of truth but of thinking as such. But the problem, it seems, runs even
deeper in that, here, Heidegger appears to indict philosophy itself with regard to
the question of truth. I mean that art has now replaced philosophy as the proper
home of the unhiddenness of Being, as Heidegger suggests that it is the
emergence of the philosophical mind that is essentially responsible for the loss
of the sense of aletheia as unhiddenness and its replacement with adequatio. The
reason is that philosophy, with Plato, becomes essentially paideia (negatively
understood) in that it fixes what is unhidden rather than meditating on the liminal
interplay of hiddenness and unhiddenness. At this point in time, Heidegger’s
thought is revolving around the poetry of Hölderlin and the writings of
Parmenides and especially Heraclitus, whose claim that ‘nature loves to hide’
(physis kryptesthai philei) has become emblematic for Heidegger.26
One might think in this connection, of contemporaneous texts such as the
1936 essay “The Origin of the Work of Art” in which he claims that it is the
artwork that is the predominant vehicle for the emergence from unhiddenness
of being.27
And even his interest in Parmenides and Heraclitus centres on the
almost pre-philosophical dimension of their thinking. What remains of these
thinkers are poems (Parmenides) and obscure, de-contextualised fragments
(Heraclitus) such that they are at a distant remove from any ‘theory’ or
‘doctrine’. Heidegger calls them ‘primordial thinkers’ who think Being
because they ‘think the beginning.’28
In addition, he notes that:
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17. Plato and Aristotle and subsequent thinkers have thought far ‘more’ (than Heraclitus or
Parmenides), have traversed more regions and strata of thinking. And yet all these thinkers
think ‘less’ than the primordial thinkers (P 8).
As soon as philosophy becomes ‘doctrinal’ as, according to Heidegger, it does
in Plato’s allegory, its very language becomes inadequate to the
unconcealment of Being since philosophical language, under the sway of
metaphysical concepts, has succumbed to the scientific-technological
understanding of Being as usable, beginning as soon as the Good is identified
as a value. Being, in other words, becomes ‘enframed’ by a rationality of use
and dominance.29
But the point now is that there is life and language beyond
and before Western philosophy. Unhiddenness remains fully rooted in
Heidegger’s thinking about human essence in that “man is founded in the fact
that he is the being to whom Being itself reveals itself” (P 55) and in that there
is no unhiddenness without language (OWA 198). But he has moved away
from philosophy and phenomenology as the site of this happening.30
Instead,
poetry and art bequeath the possibility of a thinking after the end of
philosophy.
What is more, Heidegger feels that traditional philosophy is not
accidentally but essentially allergic to the priority of the historical with regard
to the essence of truth. This is why he was so opposed to Plato’s use of the idea
of the Good in the cave allegory, as he considers the rise of the issue of value
as directly related to a loss in the authenticity of thinking. Since this is
essential to philosophical thinking per se, Heidegger has begun to view
philosophical rationality as corrupt and infected with Gestell thinking such
that the only resort is a flight into poetry. Poetry thinks truth as man’s finite
situatedness, while philosophy, in its search for the true as the certain,
abandons the historical for the eternal. Thus, philosophy must cover over the
historical as the ground of truth (aletheia) in order to sustain itself.
Conclusion
These varied readings can as such be understood in the context of
Heidegger’s move away from the more strictly phenomenological interest in
the question of truth in 1927 to a focus on the unhiddenness of Being as such
that was later to be of central concern to him.31
And just as Heidegger
reduces the question of truth to a characterisation of Dasein’s being in 1927,
so from 1930 onwards he seeks an archaeology of the fundamental
experience of unhiddenness. By 1940, Heidegger indicts Plato, because the
latter’s thought of the Good as idea has reduced the possible to the actual in
the guise of a highest ontic reality and because he has contaminated the
philosophical thought of the original with the notion of value. Here, thus, the
allegory is rejected not for being too unphilosophical but for being too
philosophical. Philosophy’s inability to dwell at the limit leads Heidegger’s
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18. thinking towards a ‘flight into poetry’ through which alone man can truly
‘listen’ to Being.32
Bodø University College, Norway
References
1. I would like to express my gratitude to Niall Keane and Ian Leask who both read earlier
drafts of this paper and made several helpful suggestions.
2. M. Heidegger, Platons Lehre von der Wahrheit, Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann
1997, tr. T. Sheehan as “Plato’s Doctrine of Truth” in Pathmarks, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press 1998, ed. W. McNeill, p. 167; henceforth PDT.
3. The question of whether there is a ‘turning’ at all in Heidegger’s philosophy remains
controversial. Yet it is probably correct to say that while Heidegger’s entire oeuvre is
concerned with a single problem (namely the fundamental experience of Being), he pursues
its explication in different ways. Thus we could say that questioning, truth and the event are
always present in Heidegger’s thinking but with different intensities. The question of truth is
the ideal locus for the exploration of this development.
4. M. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, Tübingen: Max Niemeyer 2001, p. 18. Tr. J. Macquarrie and E.
Robinson as Being and Time Oxford: Blackwell Press 1962; henceforth BT.
5. BT 261; Heidegger mentions in a note that this account of truth is drawn from §§36-9 of
Logical Investigation VI. See E. Husserl, Logical Investigations, vol. II, tr. J. N. Findlay, ed.
D. Moran, London: Routledge Press, 2001, pp. 259-67.
6. One could of course argue that rather than drop intentionality, Heidegger reworks it as care
but, if anything, care is more like a condition of the possibility of intentionality rather than
its simple rethinking.
7. An excellent commentary on this manoeuvre in Heidegger’s argument can be found in E.
Tugendhat’s “Heidegger’s Idea of Truth” in B. P. Wachterhauser ed. Hermeneutics and Truth,
Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press 1994, pp. 83-98.
8. This claim of the essentially historical nature of truth will not change after the Kehre but its
meaning relative to Dasein, as we shall see, most definitely will.
9. M. Heidegger, Die Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie, Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio
Klostermann 1975, tr. A. Hofstadter as The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, Indiana:
Bloomington 1982, pp. 283ff; henceforth BPP.
10. M. Heidegger, Metaphysiche Anfangsgründe der Logik im Ausgang von Leibniz, Frankfurt
am Main: Vittorio Klostermann 1978, tr. M. Heim as The Metaphysical Foundations of
Logic, Bloomington: Indiana University Press 1984; henceforth MFL.
11. Both texts pursue the ‘Good’ or the idea tou agathou as a way of explaining transcendence.
12. For further discussion of this point see E. Berti’s excellent treatment of the issue in
“Heidegger and the Platonic Concept of Truth” in C. Partenie and T. Rockmore eds.
Heidegger and Plato: Toward Dialogue, Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press
2005, pp. 96-108.
13. M. Heidegger, Vom Wesen der Wahrheit, Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann 1988; tr. T.
Sadler as The Essence of Truth, NewYork & London: Continuum Press 2002, henceforth TET.
14. That is, in the translation of aletheia as veritas, the privative core of the notion of truth as
well as its relation with the hidden was lost. This issue is discussed in too many of
Heidegger’s writings to cite but it is already intimated in Being and Time § 44 before
returning in, for example, TET 6-17.
15. M. Heidegger, “On the Essence of Truth” (1930) in D. Farrell Krell ed. Basic Writings, New
York & San Francisco: Harper Collins 1993, pp. 11-38.
16. He says: “Wahrsein der Aussage muss verstanden werden als entdeckend-sein” which is
literally, “the being-true of the assertion must be understood as being-uncovering” (BT 261)
17. This issue of value theory and 19th century philosophy is an enduring theme in Heidegger’s
thought. See for example his critique of Neo-Kantian value theory as early as the 1919
184

19. lecture course “Phenomenology and Transcendental Theory of Value” in Towards the
Definition of Philosophy, tr. T. Sadler, London & New York: The Athlone Press 2000. See
also T. Nenon’s excellent survey of the issue, “Values, Reasons for Action and Reflexivity”
in J. G. Hart and L. Embree eds., Phenomenology of Values and Valuing,
Dordrecht/Boston/London: Kluwer Academic Press 1997, pp. 117-37.
18. It is worth noting that while in PDT Heidegger emphasises the periagoge of the soul as the
essence of education, in TET he stresses the meaning of the term as he hemetera phusis (PDT
83).
19. In the later text, PDT, Heidegger will claim that it is partly through Platonic paideia that
humanism gains a foothold in the history of thought (PDT 81).
20. It is likely that the problematic of the hidden/unhidden in Heidegger is a refigured version of
the interplay of presence and absence that is found in Husserl’s work (cf. for example,
Logical Investigations vol. II, Investigation VI, ch. 3, especially §§ 24ff. The difference, of
course, is that whereas Husserl frames this issue within a treatment of the intentionality of
consciousness, Heidegger has made it the essence of the story of the history of Being.
21. The idea of ‘turning around’ will be especially important in the later text, “Plato’s Doctrine
of Truth”, in which Heidegger will locate the meaning of paideia as a periagoge holes tes
psuches or a complete reorientation of the soul.
22. On this point, see also “The Origin of the Work of Art” (1936) in D. Farrell Krell ed. Basic
Writings, p. 187; henceforth OWA.
23. The fact that Heidegger is so little concerned with the things themselves but with their mode
of uncovering demonstrates the extent to which he has left behind the phenomenological
concerns of Being and Time (see especially sect. 7).
24. The word apaideusia which Heidegger translates as lack of education is often translated as
ignorance. See D. Lee’s translation, Republic 2nd ed., Middlesex: Penguin 1987, although
the Loeb edition translation is similar to Heidegger’s. See Republic, Bks &-10, translated by
P. Shorey, Cambridge, Ma. & London: Harvard University Press 1935.
25. Aristotle Metaphysics E, 4, 1027 b25ff, cited in PDT, p. 178.
26. In fact this turn to Parmenides and Heraclitus has already occurred by the mid-thirties as is
evidenced by the 1935 text Einführung in die Metaphysik, Tübingen: Max Niemeyer 1953,
tr. G. Fried and R. Polt as Introduction to Metaphysics, New Haven: Yale University Press
2000.
27. See OWA 161. In discussing Vincent Van Gogh’s painting of a pair of peasant shoes,
Heidegger insists that it is “the artwork that lets us know what shoes in truth are.” We also
notice the emergence of the primordiality of the setting to work of truth in the poetry of
Hölderlin in this essay; see p. 163.
28. Martin Heidegger, Parmenides, tr. A. Schuwer and R. Rojcewicz, Bloomington: Indiana
University Press 1992, p. 7; henceforth P.
29. The notion of ‘enframing’ or Gestell is mooted already by Heidegger in OWA, p. 189, before
being properly developed in the 1949 essay “The Question Concerning Technology”, in The
Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, tr. W. Lovitt, New York: Haper & Row
1977, pp. 3-36. In OWA, Heidegger includes in this critique his own Being and Time notion
of world as equipmental totality.
30. The proximity and distance of theses citations from Being and Time is striking.
31. On Heidegger’s move away from phenomenology in this sense, see D. Janicaud’s “The
Theological Turn of French Phenomenology” in Phenomenology and the Theological Turn:
The French Debate, tr. B. Prusak, T. A. Carlson and J. L. Kosky, New York: Fordham
University Press 2000, p. 61.
32. On the importance of the auditory motif in Heidegger’s writings see P.
185