Rosen Quarrel

The Quarrel Between
Philosophy and Poetry

Studies in Ancient Thought
Stanley Rosen
Routledge
New York London
First published in 1988 by
Routledge
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1988 Routledge, Chapman & Hall, Inc.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Rosen, Stanley, 1924-
The quarrel between philosophy and poetry.
Includes index.
1. Philosophy. 2. Philosophy, Ancient.
3. Poetics. I. Title.
B73.R67 1988 101 87-28628
ISBN 0-415-00184-6
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Rosen, Stanley
The quarrel between philosophy and poetry:
studies in ancient thought.
1. Poetics 2. Imagination 3. Creation
(Literary, artistic, etc.).
I. Title
808.1 PN1041
ISBN 0-415-00184-6
Contents
Preface vii
1 The Quarrel between Philosophy and Poetry 1
2 Philosophy and Revolution 27
3 Plato's Myth of the Reversed Cosmos 56
4 The Nonlover in Plato's Phaedrus 78
5 Socrates as Concealed Lover 91
6 The Role of Eros in Plato's Republic 102
7 Thought and Touch: A Note on Aristotle's De Anima 119
8 Heidegger's Interpretation of Plato 127
9 Much Ado About Nothing: Aristotle contra Eleaticism 148
10 Remarks on Nietzsche's 183
Notes 204
Index of Names 222
Preface
The studies collected in this volume have been written at various
times during the past thirty years. They were produced as expressions
of a continuous effort to understand whether philosophy is possible.
Their author came to the academic practice of philosophy from po-
etry. He had been convinced as an adolescent of the truth of T. S.
Eliot's observation that philosophy and poetry are two different lan-
guages about the same world. Leo Strauss helped him to understand
that there is an irreconcilable tension between these two languages
as they are commonly conceived. Unfortunately, Strauss's own con-
ception of philosophy was incapable of defending itself against the
poetry of Nietzsche and Heidegger.
This is not the place to describe the itinerary to which the present
author was led by dissatisfaction with Strauss's Farabian conceal-
ment of the dilemma of decadence. The extraordinary achievements
of Leo Strauss must not be minimized. But on Strauss's own account,
they exhibit an impasse between reason and revelation, which by the
nature of the claims of each, gives the edge to revelation. Stated with
the brevity appropriate to a preface, this awards the victory to poetry.
With all honor to the welfare of the multitude, a poetic con-
cealment of the triumph of poetry over philosophy is a deeply dis-
appointing fulfillment of a teaching that exalted philosophy above
all other human activities. But so too is the public repudiation of
poetry, in the name of the thesis that philosophy is the technical
resolution of"puzzles." Analytical philosophy, for all its charms, pro-
vided no alternative to Strauss on the one hand or to Nietzsche and
Heidegger on the other. On the contrary, it suffered from a fatal lack
of self-understanding: it did not see that techne is a species of poetry.
When this self-knowledge arrived at last, it was in the form of dec-
adence, the prelude to postmodernism.
If we attempt to refresh ourselves from the weariness induced
by the inferior poetry of the second half of the twentieth century, and
return to the Greeks, we find the origin of the quarrel between phi-
losophy and poetry in the ambiguous senses of mythos and logos.
viii
Preface
There is no doubt that philosophy has something to do with logos.
Let us go so far as to assert that a logos is a reasoned account. But
what does this mean? Are there no circumstances in which mythoi
are reasonable, to say nothing of the fact that the distinction between
the two words is relatively late?
An account is reasonable if it is appropriate. Thus the best math-
ematicians understand when it is inappropriate to offer an equation
as an account of phenomena. At least initial light is shed upon the
quarrel between philosophy and poetry when we take our bearings
by Plato's distinction between the two kinds of measure: the arith-
metical and the appropriate or fitting. This distinction is essentially
the same as Pascal's distinction between the esprit geometrique and
the esprit de finesse.
Is it not, however, the esprit de finesse that distinguishes between
itself and the esprit geometrique? In other words, does not the return
to the presumably superior poetry of the ancients simply confirm the
triumph of poetry over philosophy? We can take at least one more
step by raising the following question. How can the esprit de finesse
be the root of itself and of the esprit geometrique? Is there not a deeper
root of which these two attunements of the soul are branches?
The point can be illustrated by an introductory contrast between
Plato and Aristotle. In Plato, the whole (to halon) is exhibited within
the dialogues by myth, and more comprehensively by the dramatic
or poetic form of the dialogues themselves. Aristotle advocates the
replacement of myth by logos, and he gives up the dialogue form for
what may most simply be called monologue. The result seems to be
that there is no account of the whole as whole, but only separate
accounts of distinct families of phenomena. Not even the science of
first principles provides us with an account, or for that matter with
a phenomenological description, of the unity articulated as the tri-
partition of theory, practice, and production.
This tripartition is anticipated in Plato's Republic by the Socratic
tripartition of citizens in the
11
city laid up in speeches" (IX, 592all:
a good example of the use of logos as blended together with mythos).
The principle of political unity, one could almost say, is for Socrates
the division of labor. It is assumed that each person has one char-
acteristic
11
Work" that he or she does best, and that justice, or the
unity of the city, requires each person to mind his or her own business
or to do his or her own work.
From our present standpoint, the most interesting feature of the
city laid up in speeches is in the order of the stages of education. The
citizens are first habituated to virtue by music, or the cultivation of
the esprit de finesse. Mathematics, or the cultivation of the esprit geo-
Preface ix
metrique, comes later, and in serious form, it is restricted to a small
class of citizens: to the guardians or potential philosophers. The So-
cratic vision of the order of human life suggests that poetry, which
is ostensibly to be banished from the city, must in fact rule over
philosophy. This suggestion seems to be confirmed by the noble lie:
the root of the division of labor is the myth of the earthborn gold,
silver, and bronze souls.
One could object to this that the prudential or tactical employ-
ment of music and myth is a secondary consequence of Socrates'
"geometrical" analysis of human existence. But the term "geometri-
cal" functions here in a metaphorical or poetic sense. In other words,
one must first see the differences in nature before one can divide them
with precision. It is true that seeing, or more generally, perceiving,
is already a dividing. This follows from the principle that to perceive
is to perceive something Gust as to be is to be something). But division
is itself divided into the ordered set of finesse and geometry.
Put bluntly, it cannot be the case that philosophy originates in
geometry. Yet each attempt to identify the root of geometry and fi-
nesse seems to result in the assertion of finesse. To identify is here
not simply to name but to explain, hence to analyze, and therefore
to divide. Our attempt to explain the whole has produced an im-
mediate bifurcation, which cannot be reunified by asserting the
name, or for that matter offering a description, of one of its parts.
On the other hand, if the attempt to explain the root leads us nec-
essarily to assert the priority of the branch of finesse (or of the "on-
tological" domain that corresponds to finesse), then "fundamental
ontology" is impossible, or rather, it is possible only by a descent
from philosophy to poetry. Does this not mean that philosophy is
impossible?
If to describe or to explain is to analyze, then every attempt to
describe or to explain unity (in the sense of the ground), or the whole
as whole rather than as articulated sum of parts, is necessarily a
concealment or dissolution of the whole. This is the plain sense of
Heidegger's doctrine of the concealment of Being. It is also the tacit
basis for the empiricist or "analytical" denial of the whole, a denial,
incidentally, that is shared by the postmodernists.
What follows from the impossibility of an analytical or concep-
tual explanation of the unity of the whole? Either there is no whole,
which is to say that the wholeness or unity of our experience is a
perspective, that is, a poem. Or, at a somewhat deeper level of this
response, it is we who must supply a cosmological myth of the whole
with an accordingly rhetorical justification. Or, finally, philosophy
is grounded by a conceptually empty intellectual intuition of the Ide-
X Preface
alist sort, which can itself be described only metaphorically. In all
three cases, poetry again triumphs.
It should be emphasized that the attempt to engage in philosophy
without foundations is an entirely spurious enterprise that substi-
tutes technical production, and hence poetry once more, for genuine
thinking about the possibility of philosophy. The generation of Amer-
ican academic philosophers now drawing to its close has been dom-
inated by puzzle solvers. These demiurges did not see, or did not wish
to see, that their puzzles were technical artifacts, produced in obe-
dience to the rhetoric of the early modern, and decisively French,
Enlightenment.
This blindness led first to the loss of the comprehensive vision
of the Enlightenment, still evident, if through a glass darkly, in the
great personalities of logical positivism. The result was nihilism,
lightly camouflaged by technical arrogance. But techne is infinite in
its variety. Hence the next step in the decay of Enlightenment, the
triumph of the rhetoric of infinite variety, or the sequel to the re-
placement of unity by identity: the dissolution of identity by differ-
ence. By the cunning of history, if not of reason, the postphilosophical
kings of difference are also French: d' Alembert deconstructed is
Derrida.
The preceding reflections would seem to terminate in a compre-
hensive alternative. If there is a whole, that is to say, a unity to human
experience, it is accessible only via poetry, whereas if there is no
whole, then we are forced to invent it, again via poetry. In either case,
philosophy is devoted to the role of servant, perhaps as prime min-
ister or counselor of state to the poet-kings. The history of philosophy
is accordingly revealed as the chronicle of the progressive defeat of
rebellious counselors, or of their steady transformation into poets on
the one hand and technicians on the other. The noble vision of phi-
losophy as the perfection of the human soul is replaced by the ignoble
vision of philosophy as the art of rhetoric.
Palin eks arches: let us begin again, as Socrates says. The initial
distinction between the arithmetical and the fitting, or between ge-
ometry and finesse, suggests that the vision of the whole originates
as a division. Can it be that there is no quarrel at all between phi-
losophy and poetry, but that the two are inseparable? To put this in
another way, were we not too hasty in assigning finesse to the domain
of poetry? Or was our error the assumption that the apparent un-
speakableness of the vision of unity between finesse and geometry
leads necessarily to a poetical surrogate for speech appropriate to the
vision of unity?
Preface xi
The unity of an internally articulated element is exactly the same
in all cases; what differs is the pattern of articulation. The ability to
distinguish one pattern from another suggests that the whole is vis-
ible in the coherence of the diversity of its parts. The whole is not
some further pattern superimposed onto an open sequence of di-
versely patterned elements. Conversely, openness, or the apparently
unending nature of the sequence, does not preclude unity or whole-
ness. Interestingly enough, this inference is merely a discursive ex-
tension of the implicit hypothesis of mathematics.
In the present case, the possibility of philosophy depends upon
whether the coherence of diversity, or the ability to distinguish be-
tween better and worse as well as between true and false in any
internally articulated element of an open sequence, provides us with
the means to a poetic production of the whole, without itself being
a poem. In other words, the issue does not turn upon the division
between finesse and geometry, but upon the unity necessary to di-
vision. The fact that there is a multiplicity of perspectives, or that
our worldview is a poem, does not entail that the world is a poem.
The preceding formulation could be regarded as nothing more
than a quasi-Platonic articulation of the Aristotelian assertion that
art completes nature. Nature requires to be completed by art: man
is the artist-animal who must produce the human world. Plato's
Ideas, Aristotle's categories, and Kant's transcendental ego, are all
poetic versions of this natural necessity. That is to say, they are the
formulation of a problem, not a technical resolution of a puzzle. Phi-
losophy is then not the mere stating of the fundamental problems,
nor of their solutions: the seigneur" approach to
philosophy, in which Heiterkeit replaces infinite labor of nega-
tivity," leads to aesthetic skepticism, or another version of poetry.
To the ancient celebration of play, one must add the modern respect
for work.
Philosophy is, and has always been, the comprehensive articu-
lation of problematicity. It is therefore both true and false to say that
there is no root unifying the two branches of geometry and finesse:
true, if one is searching for a third a ttunemen t of the soul, but false,
when one realizes that philosophy, and nothing but philosophy, is
the root.
The quarrel between philosophy and poetry is thus a secondary
consequence of the primary unity between philosophy and poetry.
The quarrel arises when we attempt to identify and describe the prin-
ciple of unity itself; and this attempt leads invariably to the triumph
of poetry. The triumph occurs at a secondary level that is perceived
as primary. In slightly different terms, the quarrel between philos-
xii
Preface
ophy and poetry is technical or methodological: it arises when techne
assumes the dominant role in philosophy, and so when philosophy
has already transformed itself into poetry. The quarrel is therefore
specious, not merely secondary, because it is already evidence that
there is no genuine quarrel. The quarrel is itself the triumph of poetry.
This must suffice as a general statement of the approach under-
lying the essays in the present volume. It must be emphasized that
the essays are not themselves directed to a further development of
that approach. They are intended as investigations of specific inter-
nally articulated elements of an open sequence. The function of a
preface is not to resolve the problem of unity, but to suggest what
that problem is.
Perhaps a historical example of the problem may be useful by
way of rounding off these prefatory remarks. According to Aristotle,
man is by nature a political animal. Nowhere in the Platonic dia-
logues does such a statement occur. To the contrary, the metaphor of
weaving, which is regularly employed to designate the art of politics,
exhibits the Platonic thesis that the polis is a work of art. Political
health is natural only as a consequence of philosophical art. But na-
ture raises so many obstacles to the exercise of this art as to render
its success extremely unlikely, if not impossible.
Aristotle's position is intrinsic to his tripartition of theory, prac-
tice, and production. The city is for him not a work of art but the
natural growth of human activity. Its completion is therefore inde-
pendent of philosophy, but for that reason it is also essentially in-
dependent of poetry. The expulsion of the poets from Socrates' city
is a secondary act that owes its justification to the actual dependence
of the city upon poetry in the primary sense. The Aristotelian states-
man does not need to camouflage the Platonic mastery of nature be-
neath the poetical mask of rhetoric and religion.
One may take two quite different attitudes toward Aristotle's
political writings. On the one hand, he may be commended for in-
sulating politics from philosophical madness. On the other hand, he
may be criticized for overestimating the power of sobriety and prac-
tical intelligence. In general, there is a marked tendency throughout
Aristotle's writings to overstate the case for moderation and, ulti-
mately, the reasonableness of nature.
It would be an interesting enterprise to attempt to determine the
degree to which this overstatement is responsible for what at first
sight seems entirely un-Aristotelian: the temptation to master nature
by technical devices. This is of course not to overlook the role played
in the emergence of modernity by conceptions of nature as hostile
and (a separate point) as radically contingent.
Preface xiii
Such an enterprise would take us altogether beyond the scope of
the present volume. Let one point suffice as a paradigm for subse-
quent investigations. Plato is closer to the Greek tragedians than is
Aristotle. We do not find in the Platonic dialogues an excessive respect
for the friendliness of nature to man. It is in the disjunction between
nature as telos and nature as both trans- and sub-human that poetry
gains its purchase, or rather, discovers its necessity. This is the Pla-
tonic counterpart to the stimulation of technical mastery by the rea-
sonableness of nature. One could do worse than to see here the dif-
ference between Platonic madness and Aristotelian sobriety.
During the past two decades, it has become increasingly fash-
ionable to insist that philosophy is no longer possible. If, however,
the current view of the history of metaphysics as Platonism, and so
as a concealed version of the productions of the will to power, is to
be accepted, then philosophy was never possible, or at least it has
never existed. The possibility of philosophy stands or falls upon the
possibility of a philosophical madness that is more sober than so-
briety. This is no doubt a deeply problematical formulation. But it
is not a puzzle.
Stanley Rosen
1988
1
The Quarrel between
Philosophy and Poetry
I
In Book Ten of the Republic, Socrates refers to a long-standing
quarrel between philosophy and poetry. The ensuing discussion of
this quarrel raises two fundamental questions for the reader. First:
what precisely is the nature of the quarrel? Second: if we assume
that Socrates takes the side of philosophy, how are we to reconcile
this with the fact that Plato, the creator of the dramatic Socrates, is,
as the author of philosophical dialogues, himself a poet? This problem
is obviously related to the question of why Plato presents Socrates
in the Phaedrus as a sharp critic of writing. If we take the term "po-
etry" (poiesis) in its extended sense of "production," the question of
writing is clearly a specific instance of the more general issue.
These problems lead to the more fundamental question whether
there is a difference in nature between philosophy and poetry, as
opposed to conventional differences in the use of meter, rhyme, and
diction. It is not difficult to see that in the Republic, despite some
confusion in the order of discussion, two charges are leveled against
poetry. First, it produces images instead of a direct apprehension of
originals, or in other words, falsehoods masquerading as the truth.
Second, poetry is morally or politically defective because it encour-
ages the license of desire, and in particular, of Eros.
As we reflect upon the Republic, however, as well as upon the
balance of the Platonic corpus, these charges become ambiguous. I
have already mentioned the fact that the Republic, like all Platonic
dialogues (not to say all writings) is itself a poem. The thoughtful
reader will wonder whether Plato himself can validate his distinction
between originals and images by means of a writing, that is to say,
a poem, and so, presumably, an image. Second, in the Republic Soc-
2 The Quarrel between Philosophy and Poetry
rates justifies or lies on the part of the philo-
sophical guardians, for the benefit of the city. Third, whereas Eros
is restricted in the Republic by mathematics, which is intimately con-
nected to philosophy, and in a sense is identified as its essence, it is
also true that, even in the Republic, but more extensively elsewhere,
Socrates is explicit about the erotic nature of philosophy.
These questions are sufficient to warrant another look at the
quarrel between philosophy and poetry. We take our bearings, prop-
erly enough, by the explicit mention of the quarrel in the Republic,
X, 607b5. Socrates goes on to justify the exclusion from his and Glau-
con's city of
11
the hedonic poetic and mimesis" (607c4-5). "For if you
admit to citizenship the pleasure-seasoned Muse in lyric or epic, plea-
sure and pain will rule for you in the city instead of nomos and that
which is commonly held to be the best logos" (607a5-8).
It is worth noting that nomos should be translated here as "cus-
tom" rather than "law." Whereas specific laws are certainly men-
tioned in the Republic, positive law does not carry the same weight
here as in the Laws. In the present passage, this general point takes
on specific form by the use of the somewhat vague expression "that
which is commonly held to be the best logos." The philosopher-kings
rule by philosophical doxa, and hence by phronesis or sound judgment
as well as by political myths, rather than by an elaborate legal code
like the one developed in the Laws. This will be of some importance
later in our study.
Meanwhile, we observe that the logos which has constrained us
to expel poetry from our city (607b3) is not merely (if at all) the quasi-
mathematical logos of philosophical dialectic. The logos in question
is political. Therefore, the expulsion will be revoked when the ad-
vocates of poetry, who are not themselves poets but friendly to her,
will speak in prose in her behalf. What they must show is that poetry
is "not only pleasant but beneficial to political regimes and human
life" (607d6-9).
Such a line of defense would be clearly inadequate, and even
irrelevant, if the major charge against poetry were "ontological" or
"epistemological" (to use non-Platonic terms). Socrates says that we
ourselves feel the charm of poetry (607c6-7); it will therefore be to
our advantage if she shows herself to be not only pleasant but ben-
eficial. The fact that this demonstration must be conducted in prose
neither obliterates the possible benefits of poetry nor does it establish
anything more than a conventional distinction between poetry and
prose. The deeper question remains that of originals and images, as
well as the political significance of images.
It is evidently the case that poetry will be granted citizenship if
The Quarrel between Philosophy and Poetry 3
she can show herself capable of telling nothing but medicinal or noble
lies. The question of mimesis would therefore seem to be irrelevant.
The most one could say is that, since poets do not, as poets, grasp
the truth (600e4-6), they must be regulated in their art by those who
do grasp it. On the other hand, if, despite the rhetorical praise for a
pure dialectic of forms (which we shall consider below), no human
being can grasp the difference between originals and images in logos,
then what is commonly taken to be the best logos is actually doxa,
namely, the "rational opinions" of the wise (in Aristotle's expression).
The question will then present itself with special force: what is the
difference between philosophy and poetry? Or alternatively: why
does rna the rna tics claim to provide us with a paradigm for philo-
sophical rule?
However, let us move more slowly. Let us say for the moment
only that the discussion of the imitation of the unique or" god-made"
bed is singularly unilluminating with respect to the political defi-
ciency of poetry. This deficiency was already plain in Books Two and
Three, and it was emphasized in Book Eight with respect to the tragic
poets, and especially Euripides. We learn there that the tragedians
are to be denied entrance into our city because they speak to the
crowd and "drag the political regimes into tyrannies and democra-
cies" (568c2-5).
According to Socrates, democracy regards freedom as the good
(562b12); this leads it to permit each citizen to do whatever he wishes
(557b4-6) or in other words to arrange his life as he pleases (557b9-
10). Such a government is a "pleasant, anarchic, and variegated re-
gime" (558c3-5). Because of its diversity, it would be judged by many
to be most beautiful, namely, by those whose judgment is like that
of ~ ~ b o y s and women when they see intricate things" (557c7-9; cf.
Statesman 303bl).
A democracy is thus characterized by license (eksousia: 557b5,
8) and pleasure (558al-2) rather than by excellence or virtue, or in
other words not merely by pleasure but by unnecessary desire
(558d4-9). Socrates' precise meaning follows frmn his contention that
democracy is converted into tyranny through its insatiable desire for
freedom (562b9-d5). At the beginning of Book Nine, Socrates says
that the previous discussion of the desires was insufficient. There
follows a treatment of uncontrolled, mad, shameful desire which cul-
minates in the identification of Eros and tyranny (573b6, 574d8ft).
Socrates goes on to say of the tyrannical man: "the Eros in him
will live tyrannically in complete anarchy and lawlessness" (575al-
2). We cannot avoid thinking of philosophical madness and Eros, and
of the fact that the mad philosopher, very much like his prudent
4
The Quarrel between Philosophy and Poetry
counterpart in the Statesman (see below), is bound by logos and phro-
nesis, or even by dialectic, the science of the free man (Sophist 253c6-
10), and certainly not by nomos.
In sum, the tyrant is maddened by desire and Eros (578a10-12).
What is the difference between the philosopher and the tyrant? The
answer to this question turns upon the difference between the phi-
losopher and the poet, for which we are now searching. To put the
point as simply as possible, poetry is associated with the tyranny of
Eros, whereas the philosopher presumably differs from the poet by
his apprehension of originals, or the so-called Platonic forms. It is
still unclear whether such an apprehension is possible, or if it is pos-
sible, why it should serve to moderate Eros in such a way as to leave
the philosopher sufficiently mad to philosophize, yet not mad enough
to become a tyrant.
Do not the philosophers of the Republic return from the appre-
hension of pure forms into the cave, in order to impose their doxa
upon the nonphilosophers? They can hardly be said to impose the
apprehension of pure forms, or their elaborate mathematical edu-
cation, upon their fellow citizens. Why is their political activity not
tyranny? Socrates' implied answer is that the guardians are not ty-
rants because they restrain their sexual Eros. But those of us who
have read Freud may wonder whether this answer is sufficient. And
to say that the philosophers are virtuous because they do good to the
city is to commit a petitio. If justice is ta heautou prattein, we require
a demonstration that the "business" or "things" of the nonphiloso-
pher are either the same as, or determined by, the "things" of the
philosopher. But the first alternative is excluded by the natural dif-
ference between philosopher and non philosopher, and the second is
the main thesis of a philosophical tyranny.
In any case, since poetry caters to pleasure or incites human
beings to licentious liberty, and thus to the rule of desire, specifically,
of sexual desire, the quarrel between philosophy and poetry seems
to be essentially a quarrel between sexual restraint and sexual li-
cense. This makes sense in view of the obvious connection between
sexuality and genesis or production (although that link is not made
in the Phaedrus, in distinction to the Symposium). But it does not
explain why sexual license is inferior to sexual restraint.
In other words, appeal to the political explanation is circular,
because the merits of the sexually restrained city are derived either
from a conventional, and hence nonphilosophical, view of virtue, or
else from the ostensible superiority of philosophy to poetry. But we
still do not know the difference between philosophy and poetry. Con-
5
trary to Socrates' stated and implied arguments, sexual license is
entirely compatible with eugenics, even with a mathematically reg-
ulated eugenics (VIII, 546alff; see esp. b3-4).
With this in mind, we return to the discussion of mimesis at the
beginning of Book Ten. This passage follows directly upon the con-
clusion of Socrates' praise for the rule of pleasure by philosophy (IX,
586e4ff). That which is furthest from law and order is furthest from
philosophy and logos, namely, "the erotic and tyrannical desires" (IX,
587a7-bl). The city in which philosophy rules is not to be found on
the earth. Perhaps, says Socrates, "there is a paradigm of it laid up
in heaven for whoever wishes to see it and, having seen it, to establish
it within himself. It makes no difference whether it exists anywhere
or ever will exist." Whoever wishes to do so, will practice the con-
stitution of this city, and of none other (592b2-5).
The city in speech (592all: teen logois keimene) is therefore, as
we may infer, a copy of the heavenly paradigm. The philosopher who,
like Socrates, constructs the city in his discourse, engages in prosodic
mimesis of the political "Idea." Whether one calls this mimesis poetry
or not is irrelevant to its productive or demiurgic, as well as to its
mimetic, character. Furthermore, Socrates is now himself the par-
adigm, thanks to Plato's dramatic mimesis of his speech, for subse-
quent political demiurges. Finally, the guardians within the city are
"made" by the nomos (VII, 519el-520a4) and, their souls having been
trained by musical images of the original forms of the free man's
virtues (III, 401a7-c9), themselves become "demiurges of the freedom
of the city" (III, 394b9-cl).
However seriously we take Socrates' metaphor of the heavenly
paradigm of the philosophical city, it is thus apparent that the pro-
duction of the city on earth, in both speech and (if possible) in deed,
is saturated with mimesis. There is no question here of a noetic ap-
prehension or recollection of an original pure form. The mimesis of
the "heavenly" paradigm is a practico-productive act. Furthermore,
although Socrates speaks for the most part in prose, he not only makes
use of myths or falsehoods but is himself a character within a phil-
osophical drama, and therefore the sense of his speeches must be
interpreted, like that of any other fictional character, within the con-
text of the dramatic structure of the dialogue.
To repeat an earlier point, poetry cannot be simply a matter of
meter, rhyme, and diction. As Socrates himself insists, the crucial
issue is the political utility of mimesis. But Socrates' (and Plato's) own
practice makes it obvious that mimesis is, or can be, of considerable
political utility, and indeed, that it is politically indispensable. The
association of poetry with tyranny and sexual license seems to be
exaggerated if not in fact arbitrary. So far as the distinction between
poetry and prose is concerned, there is obviously no reason why prose
cannot be employed to encourage sexual license. Conversely, poetry
in the traditional sense can be and has been used with an effectiveness
at least as great as that of prose to indoctrinate its listeners or readers
in sexual abstinence or moderation in general.
This preliminary survey of the problem has failed to answer the
question of why Socrates turns to the criticism of mimetic poetry at
the beginning of Book Ten. This book seems to be a peroration or
appendix to the proper task of the Republic, namely, the defense of
justice, or the refutation of the claim that injustice is advantageous
to the man who is completely unjust, but who is believed to be just
(IX, 588bl-4). If we grant the contention that poetry encourages li-
cense, and therefore erotic tyranny, and further that erotic license is
the principal enemy of the just or philosophically governed city, what
is the connection between this license and the imitation in poetry or
painting of physical artifacts like beds or tables?
This puzzle may be stated in another way. Socrates' criticism of
mimesis turns upon the ostensible fact that whereas artisans like the
carpenter imitate the unique form corresponding to a multiplicity of
artifacts, such as the unique bed, the poet (or painter) imitates the
artifact, and is thus "three steps from the king," namely from the
form (eidos) or "the bed itself" (X, 597a2, e6ff), and so from the truth.
Apart from the obvious rejoinder that the poet (and even the painter)
may well be imitating the same "form" that is the original of car-
pentry, there are two objections to Socrates' argument that follow
from the larger discussion of the Republic.
First, the political deficiency of poetry is regularly identified as
its service to and unlicensed encouragement of pleasure rather than
political utility. But as we have just noticed, there is no reason to
assume, on Socratic grounds, that falsehood, and more specifically,
false images, cannot be politically useful. We have only to recall Soc-
rates' earlier endorsement of medicinal lies, and in particular of the
noble lie upon which the tripartite structure of the just city is founded
(II, 382c6ff; III, 389b2ff; III, 414b8ff; V, 459c2-dl). Second, the po-
litical function of poetry, for better or worse, has nothing to do with
the copying of physical artifacts, or more generally, with the pro-
duction, veridical or otherwise, of images of things.
In order to see the peculiarity of Socrates' procedure, one has
only to ask how the production of a false image of a bed could lead
to sexual license on the part of its beholders. If beds are regarded as
peculiarly inflammatory artifacts, it must be granted that the car-
penter's copy is far more dangerous to sexual continence than the
poet's. Poetry enters into the political and moral arena when it tells
a tale of the use to which beds are put. In other words, if poetry
imitates anything of political significance, it is the states of the
human soul or the actions of everyday life. Strictly speaking, however,
poems are inventions of possible states or actions, and not imitations.
Poems imitate in the secondary sense that they represent types of
persons through their inventions (cf. X, 603c4-5; and Ion 531cl-d7).
But the same may be said of Socrates' descriptions in prose of the
types of human beings to which there correspond types of regime.
The ambiguity of the quarrel between philosophy and poetry is
thus intensified by the apparently inaccurate, even obtuse, descrip-
tion of the "mimetic" nature of poetry. To this the following consid-
eration may be appended. At least since Proclus, readers have sus-
pected that the reference to a form or nature (in the special sense of
a Platonic Idea) of the bed is a sign of the ironical intention of Plato.
It is at least dubious whether there are Platonic Ideas of artifacts.
This is implied by Socrates' contention that the unique form or nature
of the bed is produced by god (theon ergasasthai: X, 597b5-7). The
question whether there is one divine bed or many does not affect the
fact that "god" is himself on Socrates' account a poet or demiurge.
We are entitled to assert that this poet-god must have imitated
his own "Idea" of a bed in producing the ontological form. It is en-
tirely unclear what it means to speak of god as the "natural producer"
(phytourgon: 597d5) of the form of the bed, since this form, as pro-
duced, is the copy of an invention, rather than of something which
exists by nature. Of course, Socrates is using the bed as an example
of a one over many that "we are accustomed to posit in each such
case" (596a5-8). But by choosing such an example, he implies that
the difference between "natural" beings and artifacts is irrelevant to
the understanding of the one over many. And this tends to support
the view that all such "ones" are inventions or productions of a divine
demiurge or poet (597dl-2).
One might wish to cite the comparison of hypergenerated es-
sences (ousiai) to mathematical entities in Book Seven (527b5-6; c4-
6). But this is inconclusive, since such ousiai, even though "beyond"
the domain of genesis, might still have been produced by a demiurgic
deity. And in fact, the good, or the Idea of the good, which imparts
to perceptible things "being and essence," is thereby the principle of
the generation of pure forms, as is well brought out by the metaphor
of the sun, principle of generated things on the earth (VII, 509b6ff).
On balance, one must conclude that the Republic, despite the central
role assigned to rna them a tics in connection with the exposition of
the nature of philosophy, regularly speaks of "Platonic Ideas" with
8
metaphors or similes, i.e., in poetic language, which refers to these
Ideas as produced. There is no evidence that Socrates regards this as
politically dangerous.
I noted above that the poet imitates (if he imitates at all) human
actions or states of the soul. The art of poetry (whatever may be said
about painting) does not consist in the imitation of beds or other
artifacts, with the purpose of persuading us that these imitations are
physical artifacts. This point can be stated more generally. Plato as
well as his immediate students assign three distinguishable prop-
erties to the Ideas or pure forms.
The first property is the mathematical or
11
0ntological" structure
of the Idea, for example as constituted by the joint action of the One
and the unlimited dyad, or as possessing an internal structure of
monadic elements in some sense analogous to numbers. The second
property is namely, the of a cow or a
horse, by which each natural individual is identified as an instance
of a determinate form. The third property is namely,
the degree of excellence attributed to the form, or its position within
the eidetic hierarchy of the structural elements of the intelligible
cosmos. None of these is the proper original of poetic mimesis.
Or rather, none of these is the object of poetry in the traditional
senses of epic, dramatic, and lyric mimesis. The criticism of poetic
mimesis in Book Three, 394elff, which distinguishes it from narra-
tive, condemns the imitation of more than one occupation or manner
of life (and not only of a bad manner). The poet, as mimic, pretends
to be a person whom he is not; he does not pretend to be a thing or
an Idea. Naturally, he pretends to know (according to Socrates) that
which he does not know. But there is no question here of ontology.
The contemporary defense of poetry, for example by Heidegger,
attributes to the poetic art the manifestation or unveiling of that
which Plato would call an
11
Idea" or ausia. But the Socratic critique
does not say that the poet
11
Veils" the Ideas. The accusation is polit-
ical. One must connect the critique of Book Three with that of Book
Ten. The latter is an illustration of the more general thesis that all
types of mimesis (taus allaus hapantas taus mimetikaus) are an outrage
or destruction of the discursive intellect of those who listen to them
(tes ton akauanton dianaias), if they do not possess the remedy (phar-
makan): namely, knowledge of what mimetic art actually is (595b3-
7).
There are three points to be made about this passage. First, as I
have already noted, a Platonic dialogue qualifies as a type of poetic
mimesis. Plato speaks on behalf of, or as if he were, all of his dramatic
characters, exactly as do Homer and the tragedians (III, 393a2ff).
Second, in the immediate context, Socrates says explicitly that poetry
is to be excluded from the city if it is of the mimetic type (X, 59Sa5:
hose mimetike). This leaves open the gates of the city to poetry in
which the poet speaks in his own voice "and does not try to turn our
discursive intelligence aside" or to deceive us into supposing that
someone else than he is speaking (III, 393a6-7).
According to Socrates, tragedy and comedy are entirely mimetic,
epic poetry is a mixture of mimesis and narration (as are other types);
whereas the dithyramb is purely narrative (III, 394b8-c5). There fol-
lows a lengthy discussion of mimesis that turns upon the inability of
the same man to imitate many things as well as he can one thing
(394e2-7). The general principle is throughout moral. An imperfect
imitation misleads or does not provide the same utility as does a
perfect imitation. This is plain from Socrates' statement about the
guardians. If they are permitted to imitate anything, it should from
childhood on be what is fitting to them: "men who are brave, tem-
perate, pious, free, and all other things of this sort" (395b8-e4).
This brings us to the third point. Poetry is destructive of the
dianoia if we lack the appropriate remedy or medicine (pharmakon).
This destructiveness does not touch our knowledge of pure forms but
rather of the political use of things by the technites. Just as falsehoods
may be used for medicinal purposes, so too with knowledge. If we
put to one side the private interest of the philosopher in the truth for
its own sake, knowledge plays the same role in the Republic as does
falsehood: it must be useful to the city. The philosopher, exactly like
all other citizens, is produced by the nomos, "not that it may allow
each man to take whatever direction he wishes, but in order to use
each one for the binding-together of the city" (VII, 520al-S). The
medicinal lie (III, 389b2-9) is from a political standpoint on the same
level as the medicinal truth. The possession of the pharmakon thus
negates the principle "one person, one occupation." It is permitted
to imitate more than one occupation for the benefit of the city. And
in the decisive case, the guardians do not imitate, but actually prac-
tice, two occupations: the military and the philosophical. It follows
that philosophy is from a political standpoint, namely, as an internal
instrument of the city, on a par with, but not superior to, poetry.
On the basis of all these passages, we may draw together the
following inferences. First: whereas nonmimetic poetry may be de-
fective for political or moral reasons, it does not corrupt the dianoia
and so is immune from the criticism of mimetic art presented by
Socrates in Book Ten of the Republic. Second: the defect of mimetic
art is political or moral, not ontological or phenomenological. Its
danger lies, not in an abstract misrepresentation of the eidetic hi-
erarchy, but in the concrete misrepresentation of the moral character
of the gods, in a favorable representation of immoral human beings,
and in general, in the misuse of mimesis by which the same man is
led to imitate many things, rather than the one good thing he imitates
best.
There is something more that needs to be said on this point. We
have seen that Socrates, and a fortiori Plato, that is to say the phi-
losopher as founder of the city, imitates all of the citizens. Socrates
presents himself in various dialogues as "connoisseur" of the various
sciences and arts, and not only as erotician or "specialist" concerning
the soul. But what in fact is a specialist concerning the soul? What
is the difference between the philosopher and the poet on this point?
Is not the poet plainly superior? At a less profound level, how does
Homer's description of the military art suffer in comparison with the
description given by Socrates? If at all, only with respect to the moral
or political employment of that art. In sum, Socrates, like the guard-
ians, may or may not be
11
poets" in the narrow sense. But they are
without doubt mythologists "for the sake of utility" (III, 398a8: ophe-
lias heneka). This also follows from the fact that narrative poetry
seems to be permitted to remain in the city. From an "ontological"
standpoint, narration is as "mimetic" as mimesis. That is to say, the
forbidden imitation is of the soul, not .of Ideas. And if one possesses
the pharmakon, which can hardly be vision, let alone knowledge, of
the Ideas, the censorship is suspended.
The third inference is the most important one. The guardians
may employ mimesis, and hence mimetic poetry, for the benefit of
the city, because they possess the remedy (pharmakon), i.e., they know
what they are doing. But this means that Socrates, and of course, in
the first instance, Plato, that is, the philosopher who founds the city,
may lie, whether in prose or in verse, for the benefit of the city. One
could argue that since philosophy acquires knowledge, it is a higher
activity than poetry. But this in itself does not constitute a quarrel
between the two, and furthermore, the argument is compromised by
the mimetic nature of philosophy itself.
Our last inference has far-reaching consequences for the inter-
preter of the Platonic dialogue. Whereas the importance of the dra-
matic and rhetorical dimensions of the dialogues has been acknowl-
edged more frequently in the past decade, there is still a marked
unwillingness to draw the obvious conclusion. No doubt philosophy
is distinguished from poetry and sophistry within the dialogues by
its dedication to truth and hatred of the lie in the soul. But this por-
trait presents philosophy in its private identity, whereas the Platonic
dialogues, like any published writing, are political documents.
The least one can say is that the dialogues have both purely theo-
retical and political functions. But the comprehensive portrait is po-
litical, and therefore we must assume, in keeping with Socrates' own
procedures, that the portrait of pure theory is itself accommodated
to Plato's political or moral intentions. Plato gives us a poetic portrait
of philosophy, not a theoretical one. He gives us rhetorical or (to use
an appropriate anachronism) ideological testimonials to the life of
pure theory, as for example the art of dialectic. But these testimonials
are not supplemented by straightforward and extensive theoretical
examples. It is not by chance that there is no agreement among stu-
dents of Plato as to the nature of dialectic or of the so-called
11
theory
of Ideas.''
In sum: it is entirely clear that Plato practices llesotericism," and
that those who extract what they take to be Plato's theoretical views
or from their dialogical and poetic presentation are
studying images of their own theoretical presuppositions, but not
Plato. I mean by this, not that arguments have no place in Plato, or
in philosophy, but rather that one must be a poet as well as a phi-
losopher in order to determine what are the Platonic arguments. Just
as Homer is and is not Achilles, Odysseus, Helen, and Andromache,
so too Plato is and is not Socrates, Alcibiades, Protagoras, and
Diotima.
That this conclusion, which is beyond dispute, should continue
to draw opprobrium onto those who assert it, is a sign of the wide-
spread failure to understand Socrates' account of the quarrel between
philosophy and poetry. It is an echo of the eighteenth-century En-
lightenment, or in other words, is itself an unconscious exhibition of
the rhetoric of openness. As unconscious, it leads to the absurd con-
sequence that technical incompetence regards itself as technical com-
petence. The answer to the question of how to read a Platonic dialogue
is, however, not technical at all. There is no techne for correct reading,
and hence none for determining which are the genuine Platonic II ar-
guments," whereas there is of course a techne for determining the
validity of a Illogical" argument. In the largest and most compre-
hensive sense of the term, the problem of Platonic interpretation is
erotic, arid hence, to borrow an expression from Socrates, it is a rna t-
ter for the idiotes, not for the technician.
II
According to Socrates, all poets since Homer have been
tators of images of virtue and of the other things which they make,
but they do not lay hold of the truth" (X, 600e4-6). As we have now
seen, the fact (if it is a fact) that poets do not grasp the truth about
Platonic forms is irrelevant to the main investigation of the Republic,
which is justice, or as Socrates says in Book Nine (578c6-7), "with
the greatest of all things, the good and the bad life." Whereas knowl-
edge is needed for that investigation, there is nothing in the Republic
to support the view that, if "good" means "politically good," namely,
"a life livable in the just or philosophical city," this life requires the
possession of the science of dialectic, or precise knowledge of forms.
To the contrary, the discussion of philosophy in the middle books
of the Republic is explicitly characterized by Socrates as a digression
to the investigation of justice and the just life (VIII, 543c4). In that
digression, the account given by Socrates of Ideas, the good, and di-
alectic, is sketchy, poetical, and incomplete (VI, 506el; 509c7-10; VII,
517b6-cf. VI, 505el-506a5; VII, 523a8; and the very important
536cl, where his speech about philosophy is called a game).
In other words, all that is needed for the inquiry into the good
life is an image of philosophy in the narrower, private, or "mathe-
matical" sense. One might object that whereas Socrates' account is
incomplete, it might have been more precise. But this is to assume
that Socrates is wise rather than a philosopher, or to go against Soc-
rates' own testimony. It is to assume that a science of dialectic, and
hence a precise knowledge of pure forms, is possible. But this con-
tradicts all the evidence of the dialogues.
One might argue that, if we accept the thesis of esotericism, Soc-
rates (or Plato) may well be lying, or concealing knowledge of di-
alectic and the forms. In other words, on this account, the poetic
portrait of even the mathematical nature of philosophy is entirely
exoteric. All that remains for proponents of this view is to supply us
with the science of dialectic and knowledge of forms, together with
a convincing explanation of why Plato concealed this science from
his readers. To this I add that such a view reinforces the inference
that full knowledge of the nature of philosophy is politically unnec-
essary and (since it is suppressed) undesirable.
Let me emphasize that in my view, the principles of Socrates',
and of Plato's, conceptions of philosophy are indeed to be found
within the dialogues. My point is that a science of dialectic and
"mathematical" knowledge of the pure forms is rendered impossible
by these principles. Plato practices esotericism (to state the matter
very generally) in the sense that he seeks to persuade us that philos-
ophy has won, or can win, its quarrel with poetry. Were he to have
lied about his principles as well, he would have published treatises
rather than dialogues. Differently stated, within the dialogues, there
are two portraits of philosophy as mathematical and poetic. But the
portraits themselves are poetic. These are facts. The task of the in-
terpreter is to explain them.
The quarrel between philosophy and poetry is in the first instance
political or moral. Stated in terms less exaggerated than those of the
Republic, the quarrel amounts to this: poetry encourages desire, and
hence the will. It encourages production for the sake of satisfying the
desires, or in other words defines completeness as satisfaction. Phi-
losophy, on the other hand, advocates the restriction of the desires
or the transformation of desire in accord with the definition of com-
pleteness as wisdom. Philosophy has the advantage over poetry of
being able to explain what it understands by wisdom. But poetry has
the advantage over philosophy in that part of wisdom, and indeed,
the regulative part, is poetic.
The identification of poetry and tyranny is thus explained; it is
the tyranny of desire as unhindered by teleology or a hierarchy of
ends. In the extreme case, man desires to become, not merely the
master and possessor of nature, but the producer of nature. He wishes
to transform nature into an artifact or poem. Coordinately, the con-
nection between the tyranny of desire and Eros is rooted in the pri-
macy of production. In order to satisfy his desires completely, man
must recreate the world in his own image. Eros is accordingly un-
masked as narcissism.
In order to triumph over poetry, the philosophical Eros must be
restrained from narcissism, if I may employ an appropriate meta-
phor, by the replacement of mirrors with Ideas. Whereas one sees an
image of oneself upon looking into a mirror, Ideas do not reflect. There
are no images of Ideas. If I may summarize a long argument which
I have presented elsewhere in full (in my book, Plato's Sophist [New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1983]) there are either correct or in-
correct images of Ideas. But correct images are, as correct, indistin-
guishable from the originals, whereas incorrect images are images
of something else.
Ideas (if there are any) therefore terminate the reflexivity or per-
spectival nature of vision; as one could also express this, they give
rise to full, complete, or pure vision, with no room left over for speech.
Whatever one says about Ideas is therefore an image of something
else. Plato employs the metaphor of recollection in this context; dis-
course about Ideas is in fact discourse about our recollections of Ideas.
In other words, it is discourse about images, and hence of discursively
modified artifacts which the dianoia produces in the absence of direct
contact with the Ideas themselves. At a still more vulgar level of
production, these images are called predicates (not, of course, by
Plato).
Almost inadvertantly, by the process of our reflection upon the
Republic, the quarrel between philosophy and poetry has evolved
from one that is political in the conventional or usual sense into a
more fundamental quarrel between two ways of responding to human
desire, or, to give desire its official Platonic name, to Eros. To return
to the conventional level, Socrates does not actually, despite his ex-
plicit statement to that effect, expel poetry from his city but rather
subordinates it to philosophy. As we have seen, the philosopher must
imitate the poet
11
for the benefit of the city."
This can be understood as an imitation for the sake of justice to
all citizens. As such, it is a self-sacrifice on the part of the philoso-
phers, or a restriction of philosophical desire by obligation to the
nomoi which have produced philosophy. Philosophers who dwell in
other, that is, actual cities, are not bound by this obligation (VII,
520a6ft). This is because, in actual cities, philosophy is a spontaneous
growth and not a production of the city. In other words, in actual
cities, philosophers are natural, whereas in Socrates' city, they are
artifacts or poems.
The artifactual status of philosophers in Socrates' city corre-
sponds very well to the poetic account of the philosophical culmi-
nation of the mathematical education, as well as to the status of the
Ideas as divine artifacts. Whatever status we assign to Socrates'
founding discourse, in the city itself, poetry triumphs and rules com-
pletely. We must now gradually descend from the heights of the pre-
vious several paragraphs to a continuation of our circumstantial in-
vestigation. We start with a question. Given the political triumph of
poetry, what has happened to the pharmakon or remedy of knowledge
that was supposed to preserve the guardians from the debilitating
effects of falsehoods, i.e., of poetry?
If we assume that poets lack knowledge because they produce
false images, or pretend to produce true ones, then someone must be
in possession of the distinction between true and false images. This
in turn requires that someone possess direct apprehension of the orig-
inals. We shall now verify that no one in the city founded by Socrates
is in possession of such an apprehension. The case need not be made
in exhaustive detail; I will give only the essential points.
In the section of the Republic that has come to be known famil-
iarly as
11
the divided line," Socrates uses that image to distinguish
between the visible and intelligible places (topoi) or ~ ~ f o r m s " (eide:
VI, 509dlft). The visible place is subdivided into two parts, one of
images and the other of perceivable beings, both natural and arti-
factual, to which the images correspond.
The intelligible place is divided into two parts as well, the first
of which corresponds to dianoia. The soul investigates this domain
by using the perceivable things (part two of the visible place) as im-
ages (510b4-5). In so doing, it proceeds like the geometers "who make
use of visible forms and construct speeches about them, although they
are not thinking about these, but rather about those things of which
they are images" (510d5-7).
In other words, the dianoia thinks, or as we must say, attempts
to think about the geometrical originals, to which it has access only
via their perceptible images. Whereas in the visible domain percep-
tible things are originals, in the intelligible domain they are images.
The intellect or soul is required to employ hypotheses in dianoetic
thinking, namely, hypothetical formal properties which are based on
the use of perceptible things as images of presumed originals (511 a3-
8). These hypotheses sustain the "formal" results of dianoetic think-
ing, which is consequently dependent upon "images" in establishing
its conclusions. Accordingly, these conclusions are themselves hy-
pothetical. The hypotheses as well as the conclusions rest upon im-
ages. Hence there is no independent access to originals, no way to
determine that the results of geometry are not dianoetic construc-
tions or poems. Such a determination can be made, if at all, by noesis,
or thinking exclusively via pure forms (511c1-2).
The distinction between the original and the image corresponds
to the distinction between noesis and dianoia. Noesis is a pure intel-
lectual perception of pure form, whereas dianoia is the construction
of discursive images, on the basis of nondiscursive or ontic images,
of those originals. This leads directly to an aporia. Given the inse-
parability between dianoia and images, that is to say, between dis-
course and images, there can be no direct discourse about forms
themselves.
In Socrates' very cryptic account of noetic dialectic, we are told
only that it too makes hypotheses, but treats these as mere beginnings
which raise it up to the level of the nonhypothetical, at which point
it proceeds exclusively via forms to forms, and so concludes with
forms (511 b3-8). It would be foolish for anyone to pretend to under-
stand exactly what Socrates means here, but I believe that one point
is clear. Logos or discourse is mentioned as grasping the noetic by
way of the dialectical "making" of temporary hypotheses (tas hy-
potheseis poioumenos auk archas: 511 b4-5).
Once the leap from hypotheses to forms has been accomplished,
there is no reference to discourse. Glaucon thus restates his under-
standing of Socrates' contention as follows: "you wish to distinguish
that which is contemplated by the dialectical science of Being and
the intelligible as clearer than the [result] of what are called the arts,
whose principles are hypotheses, and are forced to use the discursive
intellect (dianoia) ... " (Sllc4-7). Dianoetic viewing (Sllc8) is thus
distinct from noetic theorizing (SllcS-6).
Pure eidetic theory is silent, exactly as in the myth of the soul
told by Socrates in the Phaedrus. As I have argued elsewhere at length,
the same situation obtains throughout the Platonic dialogues. How-
ever, in order to buttress our present results, I will now show that
the same conclusions follow from a crucial passage in the Philebus.
This dialogue is widely regarded as belonging to Plato's last period,
and so to contain doctrines that go beyond those presented in the
Republic. More usefully, the discussion in the Philebus links the quasi-
mathematical treatment of forms with an investigation into the good
life and the roles played therein by pleasure and intelligence. We can
therefore use the later dialogue as a control on our interpretation of
the earlier one.
The passage that interests us begins at 55c4. In it, Socrates pro-
vides a diaeresis of knowledge (episteme). In previous sections, plea-
sure has been subjected to a rigorous examination, one which shows
that it cannot be a good, or more properly, that it cannot be the good,
i.e., the principle of the good life. We must now conduct a similar
examination of intellect and knowledge (nous and episteme), in order
to determine what is purest in them by nature (56c4ff). The purest
parts will provide us with the truest parts of intellect and knowledge,
which may then be compared with the truest parts of pleasure.
Socrates turns directly to a diaeresis of knowledge. This was not
his procedure in the case of pleasure. Instead, Socrates analyzed plea-
sure from various, ambiguously related standpoints, such as the het-
erogeneous and homogeneous or impure and pure; the bad, the harm-
less, and the good; the true and the false, and so on. Whereas no one
would deny that the types of knowledge present us with various dif-
ficulties, they are nevertheless easier to articulate into their elements
than is pleasure.
Episteme is a technical construction, whereas pleasure is a per-
vasive natural phenomenon. Knowledge is separable from other
human possessions or activities, and it may be divided into its several
kinds from a variety of standpoints. Pleasure is difficult if not im-
possible to separate from other aspects of human life; furthermore,
it is not a genus so much as a pure quality which does not separate
into species except through the mediation of external objects that
please.
A rapid survey of the Platonic dialogues shows us that, whereas
there is some variation in the principle by which the sciences are
divided, the range of that variation is rather narrow. In the Gorgias
(449d8ff), the arts are divided initially into those of the handworkers
and such practices, and those which function via logos. Examples of
each are painting on the one hand and arithmetic on the other. In
the Charmides (16Sc4ff), the major division of the arts is into those
with separate products, like housebuilding and clothesmaking, and
those whose objects are not separate, like medicine and arithmetic
or geometry.
It is worth pausing for a moment over this association between
medicine and arithmetic. As is well known, the Aristotelian distinc-
tion of the arts into theoretical, practical, and productive is virtually
absent in Plato (for an indication of its presence, see Charmides
163a10-12). We normally find a distinction between what Aristotle
might call "theoretical" or what are called in the dialogues non-
productive arts on the one hand, and the "practico-productive" arts
on the other. Medicine is theoretical in the sense that it studies na-
ture; it is nonproductive in the sense that it does not bring into being
a separate entity. This is of interest in considering the relation be-
tween "medicinal" lies and philosophy in the Republic.
It would lead us too far afield to explore the role of medicine in
the Platonic dialogues in this essay. Suffice it to say that there is an
obvious connection between medicine and philosophical rhetoric, or
the art of adjusting one's speech to the ipdividual soul (see Phaedrus
268a8ff and 270blff, where medicine and the true art of rhetoric are
extensively compared). Persuasive language is as much a pharmakon
as the drug administered at the right time and in the proper amount
to the appropriate patient. In both cases, a knowledge of nature is
required (Phaedrus 270cl-2).
The object of rhetoric is the human soul, whereas the object of
medicine is the human body. In both cases, the aim of the art is to
produce health. We may grant that no separate entity results from
this mode of "production." But the arts are man-centered, as arith-
metic is not. It is evident that rhetoric is "political," but not so evident
that medicine is. One could claim that medicine is the theoretical
paradigm for the practico-productive problem of how to determine
political health, and so to produce virtuous citizens. Nevertheless, as
an art that modifies human life, medicine cannot be altogether free
of a political dimension.
The connection between medicine and rhetoric raises the deep
question of the sense in which politics is a productive art. This ques-
tion is concealed by the association of medicine with arithmetic. It
makes more immediate sense to associate medicine with music and
gymnastic, or in other words with those arts having a formative, and
consequently productive function in politics. If it is objected that
medicine has also a theoretical dimension, the reply must be that so
do music and gymnastic. Put in one last way, the theoretical part of
the formative arts is either arithmetic or something akin to
arithmetic.
Thus in the Republic (VII, 521d8ff), the distinction is made be-
tween the nonphilosophical arts like music and gymnastic, and the
study needed by all other activities, a study which does lead to phi-
losophy: number and calculation. However, number and calculation
have nothing directly to do with politics; they are ~ ~ p u r e l y theoreti-
cal." In other words, arithmetic becomes political "measurement"
only when mediated by "medicine" (in the sense of the man-centered
study of nature), and hence as present within music and gymnastic.
Two other dialogues may be briefly cited. The fundamental di-
vision in the Sophist (219a8ff) is between the poetic arts like farming
and mimesis, and the acquiring arts like learning and fighting. The
Sophist is not explicitly concerned with politics, and indeed, it gives
a peculiarly apolitical portrait of the nature of sophistry. But this is
only on the surface, as is already evident from the initial association
of learning with fighting. The Eleatic Stranger regularly employs the
metaphors of hunting and wrestling for philosophy: one must force
nature to reveal her secrets in a way that is not entirely different from
the procedure recommended by the founders of modernity (for a de-
tailed discussion of the relevant Platonic texts, see my Plato's Sym-
posium, revised edition [Yale University Press, New Haven, 1987],
pp. 339ff). Finally, in the Statesman (258b6ff), the primary distinction
of the arts is into those like arithmetic which are "bare of practice"
(i.e., of the production and management of what did not previously
exist), and those which do engage in production and management.
It is obvious that the Platonic dialogues favor the division of the
arts or types of knowledge into those which produce something and
those which do not. If we disregard ambiguous cases like fighting,
this amounts to a distinction between poetry and mathematics. It
would be tempting to conclude that mathematics is virtually iden-
tical to, or paradigmatic of philosophy, thereby providing ourselves
with a technical parallel to the quarrel between poetry and philos-
ophy. However, we have already seen that such a conclusion is in-
validated by the Republic. Not only is mathematics inferior to di-
alectic, but the philosophical investigation of the good life is much
more like poetry than it is like mathematics. Furthermore, mathe-
matics itself seems to be productive. Similar results will follow from
our study of the diaeresis of knowledge in the Philebus, with one
apparent qualification.
Two other points should at least be registered here. Whereas the
arts are relatively easy to articulate (although the results vary with
the principle of division employed) and pleasure is quite difficult,
intellect (nous) is impossible to analyze. We may distinguish the func-
tions of the soul, of which nous is one. But we cannot distinguish the
properties of nous because it is monoeidetic or homogeneous. Nous,
taken as synonymous with noesis, rather than as the general term for
the cluster of properties like dianoia, noesis, phronesis, and so on, has
no internal structure. It is the capacity to grasp or view pure forms,
just as it is for Aristotle, and nothing more analytically precise can
be said of it because of its lack of internal structure.
Nous, taken as noesis, is surprisingly like
11
the altogether not" (to
medamos on). This lack of internal structure is not a deficiency but
a necessity, if a vision of forms is to be possible in which cognitive
structure does not interfere with the purity of that vision. I note in
passing that any reference to the properties or II predicates" of forms
is always grounded in a prepredicative perception of those forms, in
Aristotle as well as in Plato. The unity of predication cannot be
grounded in an statement which itself consists of the
division of an essence into (or from) its predicates. This is why dianoia
must be unified by noesis.
We can, of course, produce poetic descriptions of nous, but these
employ metaphors as well as predicates. Predicative discourse, or
dianoia, as analytical, is thus necessarily "productive" in the sense
that
11
Concepts" or images are produced as surrogates for pure forms
as well as for the unity of the pure form. Thus the classificatory prin-
ciples of the arts are derived from human intention or activity, and
not from some arbitrary hierarchy. For example, the dis-
tinction between arithmetic or the nonproductive arts and the pro-
ductive arts is already artificial or productive, and underlies the se-
rious question whether arithmetic itself is altogether distinct from
production. Suffice it to say here that poetry is already present within
diaeresis, the ancestor of modern lltheory construction" or
''concepts.''
To come back directly to the Philebus, Socrates begins the dia-
eresis of science (episteme) as follows:
11
Well then, for us, I suppose,
part of the science with respect to knowledge is demiurgic, and part
concerns education and nurture" (SSdl-3). Socrates' slightly cum-
bersome terminology brings out the point that both parts of episteme
are in the comprehensive sense of encompassing
"the things that are understood." Making is also a kind of knowing.
This is why Socrates regularly begins his investigation of knowledge
with a humble techne like shoemaking or carpentry.
It is initially surprising that, in a dialogue devoted to the question
of the principle of the good life, Socrates does not proceed to divide
the educational and the nurturing arts. A moment's reflection makes
clear that we are not primarily concerned with abstract knowledge
or philosophy in the narrow, "theoretical" sense, but rather with the
production of a mixture: the life that is best because it is a proper
mixture of intelligence and pleasure (59d10-e3). Socrates says ex-
plicitly: it is a proper discursive image to compare us to demiurges,
since we are producing something, namely, the good life (cf. 22c5ff).
In other words, our inquiry here is no more purely theoretical
than it was in the Republic. Whereas it is true that counting and
measuring occur in all the arts, it is not true that philosophy is equiv-
alent to counting and measuring. If arithmetic is the paradigm of
nonproductive knowledge, then philosophy, although it includes
arithmetic, falls under the complementary cut of productive knowl-
edge. This shows us that the division of the sciences into productive
and nonproductive is not exhaustive; it cannot lead to a coherent
concept, or to two compatible concepts of distinct types of science.
To anticipate a later development, we can divide arithmetic into pure
and impure. To do so, however, renders the nature of philosophy
inaccessible instead of leading to its clarification.
This result is reflected in the attempt to divide the elements of
the good life. Whereas intellect may be the element in the mixed life
most akin to whatever makes that life desirable and good, it is not
itself the cause of the mixture (22cl-23b4, esp. 22d5). The cause of
the mixture of intellect and pleasure is a fourth kind or form (eidos)
differing from the mixture and its two elements (23c12ff). This
amounts to the contention that the human intellect cannot be the
cause of the mixture by which it participates within, and rules, the
best human life. To employ a modern expression, man cannot make
himself. Similarly, arithmetic cannot itself be the cause of the mix-
ture within which it is the ''ruling" element. More precisely, there
are two different senses of "ruling," or (as we shall see) two different
senses of ''measure,'' and it is the nonarithmetical measure that rules
by producing a mixture within which arithmetic is a pervasive
element.
This consideration helps us to understand what appears as an
inconsistency in Socrates' presentation. He identifies intellect and
sound judgment (phronesis) as together constituting a component of
the good or mixed life, and the cause of the mixture as a fourth form
in addition to the three forms of intellect, pleasure, and mixture ( =
the mixed). But he also subsequently insists that this fourth cause is
itself intellect (28clff).
This identification is associated with piety by Protarchus, Soc-
rates' interlocutor, an association to which Socrates has no objection
(28d5ff, esp. el-2). Thus Socrates distinguishes between his own in-
tellect and that of god. At 30clff, Socrates concludes that the causal
intellect is resident in the soul of Zeus, and it is on this basis that he
draws his conclusion: intellect belongs to the fourth (causal) form
(30dl, d10-e3).
To summarize: the divine or causative intellect is not the same
as the human intellect which, however, of the various elements in
the good life for humans, most closely resembles it. Divine intellect
stands to human intellect as pure arithmetic stands to impure arith-
metic. By itself, pure arithmetic can make nothing: it is the non-
productive science par excellence. God, on the other hand, is a de-
miurge. We may infer, by parity of reasoning, that the divine intellect
is an instrument in the making of which the divine soul ( = Zeus) is
the agent. It is analytically or cognitively possible to distinguish the
divine intellect from the soul of the divine demiurge, just as it is
analytically possible to distinguish pure from impure arithmetic. But
the result is not philosophy in the latter case, just as no human life
can result from the former distinction.
It therefore makes perfect sense that we should continue our di-
vision of the sciences falling under the demiurgic part. Only in this
way can we enact the educational episteme concerning the good life.
And this means that, with respect to the good life, there is no division
between the educational and demiurgic sciences. A nondemiurgic,
epistemic paideia is entirely irrelevant to the concerns of the Philebus.
Similarly, the discussions of forms, eidetic numbering, dialectic, and
cosmic properties like the limited and the unlimited play a role in
the Philebus analogous to the one played in the Republic by the digres-
sion on philosophy. This is to say that they play a demiurgic or poetic
role.
The attempt to extract from these discussions a quasi-mathe-
matical methodology is, if not entirely misguided, certainly an ob-
stacle to the proper understanding of the Philebus as a unified pro-
duction. This attempt arises from the same misunderstanding of the
quarrel between philosophy and poetry that we noticed previously.
The quarrel is not resolved by equating philosophy with mathemat-
ics. In such an equation, philosophy disappears, thereby giving the
palm to poetry, or to what we may call the art of interpreting formal
calculi by the construction of hermeneutical models. In sum, it is not
mimesis alone that leads poetry to corrupt the dianoia, but rather
mimesis that is ruled by desire instead of by intellect (nous) and
judgment (phronesis). The discursive intelligence cannot rule itself
because it is finally indiscriminate: it says everything, poetry as well
as mathematics.
Step two of the division of science begins as follows: us first
consider whether in the manual arts (cheirotechnikais) one part is
closer to episteme and the other part less so, and so that the first part
must be regarded as the purest (kai dei ta men has katharotata nom-
izein) and the second as less pure" (SSdS-8). In this statement, the
two verbs "consider" and "regard" refer to two distinct intellectual
operations.
The discursive intellect or dianoia, which in Plato is intimately
related to "calculation" (logismos), makes formal distinctions be-
tween kinds of art. Judgment then decides (nomizein) which part is
purest. It must, in other words, apply a criterion of purity, and thus
evaluate the significance of structural properties in terms of the in-
tentions of the diaeretician. The criterion is a "law" (nomos) that
expresses a human intention, and not merely a formal expression of
complexity or a (I formula." The law designates "the ruling elements"
(tas toinun hegemonikas: SSdlO); this is already an interpretation of
formal structure. Contrary to the instructions of the Eleatic Stranger
in the Sophist (227a7-c6), diaeresis not only classifies like with like;
it also distinguishes between better and worse. Diaeresis is from the
outset a mixture of theory and practice; but this is to say that it is
productive or demiurgic.
This last point is brought out by Socrates as follows. He leads
Protarchus to agree that, without arithmetic, measuring, and weigh-
ing, the remainder of the arts would be paltry or inferior (SSel-4).
We should have to fall back upon conjecture, literally, upon the use
of images (eikazein), and so to exercise the sensations by experience
and routine as well as by guesswork (5Se5-56al). It is therefore ev-
ident that arithmetic, or counting, measuring, and weighing, rules
in the arts. This decision in turn follows from the assumption that
episteme, in its official or philosophical sense, means knowl-
edge" rather than "practical know-how."
The criterion, in other words, has little or nothing to do with the
utility of the arts; instead, it honors a formal property of art in gen-
eral. The arts classified as ''less precise" (56c5), namely, music, med-
icine, agriculture, piloting, and generalship (56a3-b3), are extremely
useful, even indispensable. Their lack of precision corresponds to the
nature of things, not to a deficient mathematical element. The value
of precision is thus relative to nature and to human intention.
Equally important in the passage just cited is the classification
of medicine with the less precise arts. In the Charmides, we recall,
medicine was classified with arithmetic. This is a clear indication
that the classifications in the dialogues are always "rhetorical" in
the sense of being relativized to the immediate discussion. Medicine
is an "ambiguous" art; it is both theoretical and practico-productive,
exactly, as I have argued.
If we attempt to render each of the arts precise (as for example
by an exhaustive or quasi-mathematical diaeresis that functions as
a universal method), then, with the possible exception of arithmetic
and its cognate arts, we destroy rather than perfect the remainder.
Similarly, we might establish the purity of arithmetic by such a meth-
odology, but this would require us to separate it from all of the other
arts, thereby depriving them of their "ruler." Establishment of the
paradigm of precision is of great theoretical importance, but in a
practico-productive investigation, such as that of the good life, the
function of the ruling element is always relative to its subjects, i.e.,
to a mixture.
This point is illustrated by Socrates' treatment of pure and im-
pure arithmetic in the remainder of the diaeresis. We note to begin
with that the examples given by Socrates of the more precise arts
are shipbuilding and housebuilding or, more generally, woodworking
or building (56b4-c3). One should observe that without medicine and
agriculture, housebuilding would be a useless activity; similarly, the
art of the pilot is what gives value to the art of shipbuilding. The less
precise arts therefore rule the more precise arts when our criterion
is human life.
It is also important to observe that the obvious presence of count-
ing, measuring, and weighing in the less precise arts does not enforce
the Socratic inference that these constitute the ruling element. They
are of course indispensable, but so too are other intellectual, spiritual,
and physical qualities. What sense does it make to claim that arith-
metic is the ruling element in the art of the pilot or the farmer? This
observation is an important prelude to the distinction between two
kinds of measure, which I shall introduce below.
To continue with the immediate context, there follows a discus-
sion of mathematics, pure and applied, which is of considerable in-
terest in its own right, but which for our purposes need not be studied
in detail. The main point is this. The "vulgar" mathematician counts
with "unequal units," i.e., kinds or forms of things (such as armies
or oxen, hence as in "two armies," "two oxen"). The philosophical
mathematician, on the other hand, counts with homogeneous monads
or pure numbers (56dl-57a4).
At this stage of the diaeresis, the arts have disappeared; demiurgy
or poetry has been replaced by mathematics. Socrates could have
arrived at the same result by dividing the educational and nurturing
part of episteme. If his purpose is to show Protarchus that the purest
element in the productive arts is mathematics (57a5-b2), he has not
yet shown that this is the case in the nonproductive arts. Differently
stated, he has not yet shown that precision is the ruling element in
knowledge altogether, but at most (and paradoxically in some if not
all cases) that it rules the productive part of knowledge.
In other words, this division of the arts fails to establish that the
mathematical measurement (metretike) is the same as the measure
that has been designated by "the eternal" as the highest or ruling
element in the good life (66a6). In fact, it is obvious, as we have al-
ready established, that they are not the same. "Measure, moderation,
and fitness" (metron kai to metrion kai kairion) are not arithmetical
or precise but rather political or prudential, as the Eleatic Stranger
shows in the Statesman (284alff, 305d6-e8). In the Stranger's for-
mulation, phronesis is the natural ruler of the laws, whether political
or technical (294a6ff). By phronesis, the Stranger means the sound
judgment that allows the philosopher to decide in each case what is
to be done. What else could Socrates mean by phronesis in the Phi-
Zebus, where he regularly employs that term, either by itself or in
conjunction with nous, to name the element in the mixed life most
resembling the good?
III
The closing pages of the Philebus are too complex to summarize
here, and the constant shifting of terms, as well as the outright dis-
agreement between the final descriptions of the good life and its ele-
ments on the one hand, and the main sections of the dialogue on the
other, threaten to make a shambles of any coherent interpretation.
The dramatic effect is that of the intrusion of life's irregularity upon
any effort at systematic analysis, or in other words, the triumph of
impure over pure arithmetic.
Our intentions, however, are much more modest than that of a
comprehensive interpretation. It is almost enough to say that the
demotion of intellect and judgment to third place on the list of ele-
ments within the mixed life that claim to resemble the good (66b5),
and the assignment of first and second places to various kinds of
measure and beauty (66a4-b3), serve to confirm the results of our
analysis of the quarrel between philosophy and poetry in the
Republic.
In the Philebus, philosophical arithmetic is said to study "what
remains always the same without mixture" (ta aei kata ta auta ho-
sautos amiktotata echonta), and so to provide "steadfast, pure, true,
and what we call unmixed" knowledge (59c2-6). But human life
plainly belongs to those things that have come to be, are coming to
be, and will come to be, that is, to the continuously changing or
perishing, about which precise knowledge is impossible (58e4-59b3).
It does not follow that there is no knowledge of what remains
always the same. Furthermore, this knowledge provides a kind of
skeleton to the living and hence imprecise knowledge of human being.
But the skeleton is not alive. In other words, human life is like the
demiurgic part of knowledge taken in its entirety, and not at all like
philosophical arithmetic. The latter may well be marvelously supe-
rior "in precision and truth" to the nonphilosophical arts (57c9-d2);
but for this very reason it is not the "fitting" paradigm of the element
in knowledge that rules with respect to the criterion of the principle
of the good life.
Neither can we resolve the issue merely by substituting "sound
judgment" (phronesis), the art of the statesman, for the arithmetical
art of the philosopher, or (let us say) for the mathematical intellect,
which is dianoia, not nous understood as noesis. The promotion of
phronesis must be accompanied by the recognition that the good
human life is not, so to speak, an "ontological" but a demiurgic or
poetic mixture. Sound judgment cannot rule except by producing or
constructing a good life from the endless and endlessly varying par-
ticularities of human existence.
The extraordinary variation of terminology, and the extreme con-
fusion of the "arithmetical" articulation of steps in the argument, as
well as of the positions in the hierarchy, are dramatic illustrations
of the inappropriateness of purity and precision as paradigmatic for
the attempt to understand human life. They are accordingly inap-
propriate as the paradigm for wisdom. The fact is that there is no
single or pure and precise paradigm for wisdom, which is a divine
mixture, not an atomic element. We cannot arrive at a precise or
steadfast enumeration of the attributes of the good life. To understand
human life is to live it, and hence to produce or construct the details
of the mixture, whose components may vary from one standpoint to
another. Anything less than this is either platitude or sclerosis.
So long as we take them in their conventional senses, there is an
essential discontinuity between poetry and mathematics. As a direct
consequence, if philosophy is represented by the paradigm of math-
ematics, then it can never win its quarrel with poetry. The victory
goes to poetry, which directs mathematics and gives it human sig-
nificance. This is the easiest stratum of Plato's esoteric teaching; it
is so to speak silently but directly conveyed by the fact of the dialogue.
Nor is the triumph of poetry a guarantee of political license and on-
tological relativism. Whether we take it as mimesis or direct vision,
poetry is as capable as mathematics of perceiving the eternal.
I want to close this study with a suggestion. There is a deeper
level to Platonic esotericism, although it too begins with the surface
of the dialogues. Poets and philosophers in their conventional ident-
ities are quarreling about the best human life, and so, not about eter-
nity, but rather about the artifacts which render eternity accessible.
Poetry, like philosophy, when each is taken apart from the other, runs
the risk of replacing the whole by a part, or in other words of replacing
the original with an image. The dialogues suggest that this quarrel
is not, and cannot be, resolved. Instead, to employ a Hegelian term,
it is sublated into a demiurgic discourse that is neither poetry nor
philosophy but philosophical poetry.
Philosophy without poetry, exactly like poetry without philoso-
phy, is immoderate or unmeasured. In the last analysis, there is no
quarrel between philosophy and poetry. But the last analysis is not
the first. Even within the limits of the Tenth Book of the Republic, it
cannot be too strongly emphasized that Socrates begins with the
quarrel but ends with the myth of Er. The pedagogical function of
the Republic is that of a pharmakon or noble lie, which is designed
to inoculate us against the vitiating consequences of the recognition
that justice is impossible.
As a corollary of Platonic medicine, the Republic shows that the
statement of the rule of mathematics is a poem, or that Homer was
wrong when he said that "the rule of many is not good; let there be
one king." To conclude, it turns out that the poets (in the traditional
sense of the term) are more fanatical than the philosophers (in the
Platonic sense of the term). The significance of the so-called two Pla-
tonic principles of the One and the unlimited dyad is that there are
two kings, or if you prefer, that dualism is the king of all men. Triadic
synthesis is just a garrulous form of the silence of unity.
8
Heidegger' s
Interpretation of
Plato
Since this paper deals with some fundamental aspects in the
thought of both Heidegger and Plato, it is essential that I state from
the beginning the limits of my intentions. From the viewpoint of both,
no study of Heidegger's interpretation of Plato could pretend to be
adequate that had not mastered their work as a whole. As both would
agree, the
41
WOrk" of the philosopher is to think the whole; one there-
fore the work of a philosopher by himself thinking the
whole in itself, and not merely as it appears in the work of others. A
peculiarity of philosophical thought, as both would perhaps again
agree, is that, although in one sense a part of the whole, it is that
part which mirrors or reveals the whole as a whole.
1
By virtue of the
synoptic character of philosophical thought, one may see an image
of the whole through a consideration of some of its parts. The most
I dare to hope for is that this paper is such an image; I shall be quite
content if the reader regards it as a mythos rather than a logos. It is
an inquiry (historia) that for" (zetein) as it at" (theorein).
In these obscure regions, I am guided by the words of Heraclitus:
one does not hope, he will not find the unhoped-for, as not to be
found and inaccessible."
2
I take to stand for the pathos or
Stimmung which opens the soul to the otherwise unseen light of
Being. The mood of hope is frequently called
41
Wonder" (thauma) by
the Greeks; both Plato and Aristotle tell us that it is the origin of
This paper was delivered in a lecture to the graduate philosophy club at Yale University
on January 13, 1966 and was also read to the philosophy department at C. W. Post
College on May 11, 1966.
128 Heidegger's Interpretation of Plato
philosophy. In my own interpretation of Plato's image of the cave,
Socrates silently alludes to wonder when he asks Glaucon to suppose
that one of the cave dwellers, "having been released (from his chains),
is forced instantly (eksaiphnes) to stand up, to turn his head, to walk
toward and look at the light (of the fire)."
3
The periagoge or "con-
version" is not originally paideia or "education," but the instanta-
neous illumination of wonder which permits paideia to occur.
4
It is
this instant of conversion which drags the released man up into the
light of the sun. Wonder opens man's eyes to the light of the good
through the divine spark, the theia moira, the mania, or gift of the
gods, as Plato variously calls the horizon of instantaneous vision.
5
The image of the cave is central to Heidegger's interpretation of
Plato. I refer to it at the beginning of this paper, and will return to
it at the end, in order to suggest that Heidegger's interpretation, for
all its help in reading Plato, is a very serious misinterpretation. But
I shall try to do this in a way which does justice to Heidegger's in-
tentions as well as those of Plato. My procedure is therefore somewhat
different from the one which has often been taken by classicists and
historians of philosophy. In my view, this procedure is at bottom
inadequate, not merely because it rests upon the circular acceptance
of conventional hermeneutics, but more specifically because the tra-
ditional picture of Plato as painted by modern scientific and geistes-
geschichtliche scholarship prevents us from seeing important resem-
blances between Plato and Heidegger. Apparently Heidegger himself
has been influenced by that traditional picture, even in the "oddity"
of his approach to Plato. At least he shows no awareness that the
differences between himself and Plato may be viewed from within
the horizon of a common endeavor. Let me give an introductory
sketch of the balance of this paper with a few more words about the
image of the cave.
The "releasement" of the cave dweller by the instantaneous
agency of wonder is reminiscent of what Heidegger calls Gelassenheit.
Wonder leaves man free to let beings be, as they are, independently
of his subjective Vorstellungen of them in the world of doksa. The
difference between the sunlight and the firelight is the Platonic an-
alogue to the "ontological difference" drawn by Heidegger between
Sein and Seienden. Heidegger's "lighting-process of Being" (Lichtung
des Seins) is in Plato the light of the good, and the things in the sun-
light are the Ideas, accessible to noesis or instantaneous vision. The
cave represents doksa ("seeming" in the sense of "opinion"), and vi-
sion by flickering firelight, that is, of the images cast by the fire, and
is the moving, i.e., temporal, or discursive thought of dianoia. These
images, we must remember, are the shadows of puppets, presumably
Heidegger's Interpretation of Plato 129
made as well as manipulated by men, an aspect of his own image
which Socrates strangely ignores in the balance of his exposition. I
suggest that the puppets and puppet-masters stand for what Hei-
degger would call the Vorstellungen of Subjektitiit, and so the unre-
cognized graund of dianoetic thinking, in which must be included
what Socrates calls pistis and eikasia when he discusses the divided
line prior to in traducing the image of the cave. It is thus man or man's
thought which moves, and neither the Ideas nor the Good. The real
problem in understanding the image of the cave is the unstated re-
lationship between sunlight and firelight, or between noesis and
dianoia.
In other words, the openness which characterizes man in the
of the world is not the same as the openness of the Good in
the domain of the Ideas. Man shares in the openness of the Good
thanks to his share of the divine nous, or noetic intuition. In order
for man to become aware of this divine gift, he must understand the
direction of his striving or intentionality, which Plato calls Eros, or
more fundamentally, the daimonic.
6
And yet he cannot see that di-
rection without the gift itself: hence the circularity of existence
7
which is the ground of the so-called "hermeneutic circle." Eros is the
Platonic version of Sorge, or the directed openness of Time. But within
the interstices of the moments of Eros, another transcendent or ec-
static or "clearing" is opened up: to eksaiphnes, within which
man sees the Ideas, and to the degree that he can see it reflected in
their visibility, the Good. Being or the Good conceals itself as revealed
in the forms of the Ideas, in the formlessness of mind, and in the
flickering quasi forms of spatia-temporal individuals. Mind, one may
say in this connection, is that aspect of Being which stands for the
whole by standing to its thoughts as Being stands to beings. But the
minding, caring, or Eros of mind, and so the light in and by which
it speaks, although it derives the luminosity of its light from Being,
constitutes a difference within Being, as is clear from the fact that
Ideas do not speak.
Socrates calls Being "the Good," and still more erotically ''the
sun,"
8
not because he has Being, but because of what
may be explained as a fundamental disagreement with Heidegger
about Being itself. At first glance, the "sun" is at least in some crucial
respects surprisingly like Heidegger's Sein. It is the giver of life as
well as light, and so of man and speech. Its light can blind as well
as illuminate, and hence as "presence" or "unconcealment"
is inseparable from" absence" or a hiddenness by virtue of light itself.
Its rising and setting may be understood as defining time and so, too,
historically: the sun's motion thus opens up the horizon within which,
and only within which, we see it. In these and similar terms, Hei-
degger's Sein is even more like the sun than that of Plato, or so I
would suggest. For Heidegger, thanks to the temporal nature of the
horizon of man's vision, Being is a process or Bewegung that "occurs"
(ereignet) as a show in and through man or Dasein. Whatever may lie
"behind" the horizon of temporality as an unseen source or unity,
Being as presence or emanation from that unity is confined by time
in the very act by which time opens the showplace within which
Being presents itself to man. In the most fundamental sense, the time
within which the show occurs and man's viewing of it are one and
the same; that is, the openness of Sein and the openness of Da-sein
are one and the same. Given his special etymologies of the consti-
tutive terms, Heidegger accepts the Parmenidean utterance that to
gar auto noein estin te kai einai.
9
To auto is the Zwiefalt within Being
between itself and thought; but at the root of this duality is a unity
which one might call their need for each other.
10
For Plato, on the
contrary, einai has no need of noein. There is a difference between
"sunlight" and "firelight" corresponding to the double duality be-
tween Being and beings on the one hand, and noesis and dianoia on
the other. Thought needs Being, but this need can be gratified only
by way of beings. In sum: Being is the Good, and beings (ta ontos
onta) are the Ideas. Being is visible/concealed only as or in the form
of Ideas or beings, which in turn present themselves to man as ap-
pearances (ta phainomena).
Since Being and thought are not united in Plato by a reciprocal
need, it is less fruitful to speak of a "duality" here than of a "harmony
of opposites." The unity between the One and the many has reference
in Plato to the structure of beings, and so to mind only as a being,
but not between Being simply and thought or mind simply. Mind is
opposed to Being as the living or thinking to the nonliving or non-
thinking. Of course, if we consider such passages as Timaeus 35alff,
we may say that, for Plato, Ideas, mind, and spatia-temporal partic-
ulars are related (syngeneis) by the common elements of the unchang-
ing, indivisible, or eternal ousia, sameness, and otherness. But this
is merely to render somewhat more precise the structural relation of
beings as beings. The recipe in question fails to explain why one kind
of being is alive and thinking, whereas the others are not. The problem
is reemphasized rather than resolved if we take seriously the figure
of the demiurge as an ultimate principle of unification, since again,
there is an opposition between the demiurge and the Ideas on the
one hand, and the demiurge and the receptacle on the other. This is
scarcely a problem which is peculiar to Plato; in the history of phi-
losophy, one finds a variety of proposed solutions which cannot be
examined here. Perhaps I may simply mention the situation in Kant
because of its relevance as an intermediate situation between Plato
and Heidegger. In Kant we have the three ''dimensions" of tran-
scendental ego, phenomena, and things-in-themselves or the nou-
menal. The distinction between phenomenal and noumenal is main-
tained by the schematism, or generally time as the product of the
pure productive transcendental imagination.
11
As the form of inner
sense, time is the form of the phenomenal world, which is conse-
quently temporal, as the noumenal world is not. Furthermore, since
time is the product of the transcendental imagination, it defines a
"horizontal" dualism between the transcendental ego and the phe-
nomenal-noumenal, which we may call the "vertical" dualism. In
other words, as a function of the transcendental ego, the transcen-
dental imagination is obviously not itself in time.
Restricting our attention to these three Kantian dimensions, may
we not say that the openness of the phenomenal is different from the
openness of the transcendental, and that both in turn differ from the
closure of the noumenal, which reveals itself, so to speak, only in the
domain of practice? And as in the case with Plato's demiurge, if we
look to God for the ultimate principle of unification of the three di-
mensions, a problem arises. God cannot properly be said to have
"created" the transcendental ego, which Kant thought of as a logical
condition binding even God in the creation of an intelligence con-
forming to sensible extension. So far as such an intelligence is con-
cerned, its own activity is the ground for every instance of combi-
nation or unity in its objects.
12
I can only suggest here that unity in
the world of human thought seems finally to emerge from the pro-
duction of time by the transcendental ego; and this of course is Hei-
degger's own conclusion in his first Kant book.
13
Since the same can-
not be said of the transcendental ego or of God, the result is as follows:
the openness of the eternal is not the same as the openness of the
temporal.
Differently stated, the eternal is atemporally "present" as the
ground of temporal presence or of temporality altogether. But the
manner of "atemporal presence" is not the same in Kant as it is in
Plato. God is something more than the Platonic demiurge. Nor can
the transcendental ego be equated with the Ideas. If we restate the
three dimensions in Kant as God, transcendental ego, and the activity
of the human mind in its spatia-temporal form or bond, we may say
that in each case the principle of unity is a kind of mind or thinking,
whatever the difficulties which arise in attempting to unify, or even
harmonize, the three different kinds. Kant, despite his concern for
morality or practice, is on the way toward identifying Being and
mind: even morality is grounded in the autonomy of thinking mind.
And thanks to the root function of the transcendental imagination,
he is on the way toward making time the horizon within which Being,
even atemporal or eternal Being, "occurs."
To return to Plato and Heidegger, they differ radically in this
respect: for Plato, time is not the horizon of openness within which
Being lights up beings (and thereby reveals itself as concealed). In-
stead, Being is the horizon of openness within which time occurs as
the intermittently illuminated twilight of man's existence. Second,
openness in Plato is only partly mental: ta eide are not the same as
ta noemata. Whereas Heidegger' s formulation of the correlation be-
tween Being and man, or his "phenomenology," is unmistakably
Kantian in its development of thinking, and so of time, as the struc-
ture common to both, Heidegger differs from Kant in that, even in
his later works, he attempts to eliminate every trace of the transcend-
ent from his phenomenology or hermeneutic of the world. For Hei-
degger, to name "man" is to name residence in the fourfold unity of
heaven, earth, divine and mortal, a residence with things.
14
Thus the
heavenly or divine is immanent in man's worldly life, very much as
in Greek thought; it does not refer to the transcendental Christian
God, as He is in himself apart from his revelation to man. At the same
time, the complete immanence of human existence provides a link
between Heidegger and Christianity. Since the world is bounded by
temporality, and Being emanates from a hidden source, it is possible
for the Christian reader to find in Heidegger both the contingency of
human existence and the Deus absconditus of his own faith.
15
Let me recapitulate what has been said thus far. The most general
way to state the error of Heidegger's interpretation of Plato is by
observing that 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.
16
The openness of Being, as prior
to distinctions of beings, particular speeches, kinds of measuring, and
the subject-object relationship, is the unstated luminosity within
which the dialogues are themselves visible. The dialogues become
intelligible only when we perceive this unstated luminosity, which
is directly present as the silence of Plato. The spoken voice of the
dialogues occurs always within the cave (if not always in the language
of the cave). We may emerge from this cave at any instant that we
hear the silent accompanying voice of Plato. In my opinion, Heidegger
goes wrong because he is not sufficiently attentive to the silence of
Plato. Still more specifically, he never confronts the significance of
Socratic irony or the dramatic form of the dialogues.
Heidegger is resolved in the face of Angst, but never playful. I
suggest that this may account for the surprisingly conventional char-
acter of Heidegger's unorthodoxy in the interpretation of Plato. It is
true that Heidegger inverts the conventional or obvious interpreta-
tion of the Platonic Ideas by rendering them in a Kantian perspective.
But an inversion of orthodoxy, as Heidegger himself has reminded
us in the case of Sartre, is still grounded in convention. In Heidegger's
treatment, the Platonic Idea becomes more radically an epistemo-
logical concept than in the work of the most ordinary of analysts.
Like the most professorial of philologians, Heidegger normally ig-
nores the dialectical context of those sentences which he abstracts
for analysis, as though they were independent, technical propositions
instead of the speech of irony. His procedure in this vein is also rem-
iniscent of the way in which Rudolf Carnap casts positive scorn on
one of Heidegger's negative utterances. Even when Heidegger seems
to be aware of the dramatic context, as in Platons Lehre von der Wahr-
heit, he refers only to those aspects of it which seem to serve his
purpose. He ignores the details even when insisting upon an individ-
ual nuance. In proceeding abruptly to the voice of Being, Heidegger
does not do justice to the Platonic view that it can be recorded only
via the infinitely subtle echoes in becoming.
Heidegger's account of Plato turns upon his interpretation of the
Ideas as a distortion of beings by the rational or categorizing function
of mind, and so as the decisive step in the veiling over of Being. As
he states it, in the original and authentic Greek teaching, Being is
understood as the presence of visibility, in the dual sense of "sprout-
ing" or "opening forth" (physis) and "gathering together" or "col-
lecting" (logos).
17
The appearance or presentation of beings within
the openness (Lichtung) of Being, is a process, happening, or even-
tuation whereby Being both diversifies itself by spilling out from an
unknown and silent source, and also collects or gathers itself together
in the common bonds of sight and hearing.
18
But the happenings or
events of this process (beings) draw our attention away from the pro-
cess itself (Being); we are tempted into the description of beings in
their heterogeneity and specificity, into the technical activity of sort-
ing and measuring in accordance with kinds. Being is then conceived
as a general property of beings, instead of as their ground or source.
We consequently fail to observe the difference between Being and
beings. Being is not thought in its own terms but as an abstraction
or derivative from beings.
19
Plato renders Being invisible by sundering logos from physis and
thereby creating the two realms of the supersensible and the phe-
nomenal.20 Whereas previously "truth" or "uncoveredness" was the
same as "Being" or the process of sprouting forth and gathering to-
gether in the openness of presence, it is now conceived as a property
of statements about beings. "Truth" is now defined as "correctness"
in the sense of similarity or correspondence between propositional
speech and the separate Ideas.
21
Man is thus sundered from lived
intimacy and integrity with Being. Truth is no longer an activity of
manifestation or uncovering in which man participates, and by which
he is "in touch with" what presents itself.
22
Wisdom no longer retains
its authentic meaning of one's way about in that which is
present as the uncovered and which is the continuous as that which
appears."
23
Philosophy is no longer life, but a preparation for dying;
or more accurately, it is the death of physis through the instrumen-
tality of the sundered and so altered logos.
The Platonic murder of physis is perpetrated in the name of the
Ideas. In his concern with the visibility of beings, Plato mistook their
"look" or "face," how they seem to man, for what they genuinely
present themselves to be.2
4
According to Heidegger, the Ideas are
in the sense of subjective projections rather than the
presentation of presence as it is allowed to be by a thinking which
is not willful but marked by Gelassenheit.
25
This is the nub of Hei-
degger's conventional orthodoxy: he completes a line of argument
which goes back through Nietzsche, Marx, Hegel, even Kant, to the
beginnings of the modern era. What we may call the "historical in-
dividual" (an individual bud or sprout of physis) first points itself out
as a that (to hoti). This is the facticity, as well as the finitude and
temporality of beings, which emerge from the aperture of openness
in the bonds of time: mittence is intermittent. Plato covers over the
that by transforming it into a what (ti esti).
26
The facticity of Dasein
is replaced by the Idea of man, or the groundless play of Being is
replaced by the technical principle of the ground.
27
The idea or picture by which Plato designates the what is in fact
a photograph, a categorial re-presentation that hangs over, and so
renders invisible, the that.
28
I suggest that the Heideggerean "that"
has its own proximate historical origins in Kant's Ding-an-sich, and
so in the Empfindungen as prior to synthesis by the transcendental
imagination.2
9
The deepest concern of Heidegger's thought is to by-
pass the machinery of the transcendental ego, in order to stand before
the presynthetic Empfindung or individual moment of the tempor-
ality of Being.
30
There are two implications associated with this con-
cern. First, Heidegger accepts the Kantian conception of reason as
ordering, synthesizing, projective, or positing structure, even while
condemning these activities as the obscuration of Being.
31
From this
perspective, the Platonic Idea is a primitive version of the principle
of modern epistemology. The Idea is the first product of the will to
power, or the will to will, whereby man makes use of the buds of
Being while himself attempting to replace the plant. In addition to
this, the unique historical individual, the that of beings apart from
the subjective what, is analogous to a moment of time conceived as
existing independently of the formal properties by which a moment
is designated: as the "pure stuff" of time, something in itself, but not
deriving its self from categories which express mental unifications
imposed from outside the moment.
In the first part of this paper, I began with a general comparison
between Plato and Heidegger, formulated in terms of the image of
the cave and the sun, gave the example of Kant as an intermediate
position between them, and then summarized the particulars of Hei-
degger's treatment of Plato throughout his writings. In this part, I
shall try to combine generality and particularity by taking up certain
pervasive features of Heidegger's interpretation of Plato. As I have
a l ~ e a d y indicated, the issue which is common to these features is the
problem of openness: that is, the relation between Being and time,
as it emerges from a consideration of thinking, speaking, and doing.
Once again, my account is in no sense intended as complete; I hope
merely to sketch out the broad picture of what is involved in a genuine
comparison of Plato and Heidegger.
According to the Platonic dialogues as they have always been
understood, the presence of visibility or intelligibility is the timeless
presence of Ideas as ungenerated, unchanging, neither spatial nor
temporal, both general and particular, somehow accessible as both
that and what, or in the visibility of the instance (the temporal shadow
of the instant) as both same and other. In addition, the dialogues say
nothing of a noetic structure which constructs or projects formal
unity from or by operations upon a previously indeterminate man-
ifold. Instead, nous "sees" or "grasps" the manifold as formally de-
termined or differentiated. Noetic vision as described in the dialogues
is in fact the "letting be" of beings as they present themselves within
the light of the Good.
32
I am tempted to say that it is Plato rather
than Heidegger who genuinely counsels Gelassenheit in the presence
of Being. For Plato, the noetic "activity" is a pathos in the sense of
self-surrender to the presence of the visible, an absenting in this pres-
ence of the self-ish projections of dianoia or (in Heidegger's sense)
ratio. It is discursive reason (dianoia) which performs the temporal
activity of gathering or weaving together in logoi what has been re-
membered of the instantaneous (to eksaiphnes), transtemporal, and
in that sense ecstatic vision of the Ideas.
33
The logos of dianoia, or
human speech, is self-ish, or what man brings to the self-less vision
of noesis. Dianoia is the Bewegung which speaks or categorizes, and
so obscures as it represents, the stillness of noesis. One of the most
difficult problems in Plato is whether this "stillness" is also a "si-
lence," and in what sense one can say what one has seen in the ecstatic
instant.
34
Here Plato comes very close to Heidegger's view that "lan-
guage speaks as the ringing of silence."
35
Perhaps the difference is
this: for Heidegger, "thinking is a hearing that sees,"
36
whereas for
Plato, it is a seeing that hears.
If I may speculate further in this vein, vision seems more appro-
priate than hearing to instantaneous occurrence. Hearing "takes
time'' just as does dianoetic thinking. Whether we hear words or the
ringing of silence, there is a sequence constituting the message with
an internal structure that is temporal rather than spatial. Within this
metaphor, there can be an instantaneous look which we then trans-
late into speech by means of temporality. In hearing, there is a gath-
ering together of one word after another, or a movement of thought
that may be "measured" by the "before" and "after" of the words.
In seeing, the before and after of the spatial elements of the vision
may be simultaneous, as in the Gestalt of a single glance. As I un-
derstand Heidegger, noetic vision is for him a looking-around-at or
circumscribing of what has been gathered together in hearing. For
Plato, on the other hand, it is hearing which moves or follows after
the visible in the dimension of recollection. Speech then arises from
the erotic striving after the completeness of the Ideas. We remember
temporally, and so self-ishly, the vision of completeness in the ecstasy
of the instant. The transcendence of time is thus for Plato immanent
in the sense of interstitial: Instantaneous vision occurs in the inter-
stices between the moments of time, and serves to hold these mo-
ments together as the visible world.
37
The wholeness of what is held
together can be spoken only in myth, or with respect to the paradig-
matic function of vision, the attempt to speak in spatial, visual
terms.
38
Since it takes time to see as well as to speak in the spatia-
temporal world, there can be no complete vision or speech within
that world.
Human speech is for Plato a "moving image of eternity."
39
Con-
sequently, man is not needed "to guard or watch over (hiUen) the
unhiddenness and hiddenness of every essence (Wesen) on this earth,"
as Heidegger puts it.
40
Watching is not watching over; we must dis-
tinguish between the presence of Being and its appearance to man.
In other words, Plato is not a phenomenologist; the distinction be-
tween Ideas and ta phainomena corresponds to that between two
kinds of visibility. Man is peculiar in his ability to move between
these two domains, but his movement is not an integral component
of the mode of visibility of the Ideas.
41
For Heidegger, however, there
is no Being without man.
42
One might express the difference between
the two thinkers by saying that the movement of intermediacy or
doksa in Plato is not the Geschehnis or Geschick of Geschichte. It is
not the voice of Being but the voice of man. Although Heidegger fre-
quently emphasizes that Being occurs independently of man's acts,
choices, or will,
43
this occurrence is as such to and for man, and is
consequently described in formal or structural terms which derive
their meaning from the role of man as participant. As the teacher
says in a difficult to translate but important passage in Gelassenheit:
Human nature is released to that-which-regions and used by it
accordingly for this reason alone-because man has no power
over the truth, and this remains independent of him. The truth
can abide independently of man only because human nature as
releasement to that-which-regions is used by it in regioning-to-
man (Vergegnis) and for the preservation of the conditioning pro-
cess of things [Bedingnis: i.e., the process by which things become
visible in the region]. The independence of truth from man is ev-
idently a relation to human nature, which relation rests on the
regioning (Vergegnis) of human nature in that-which-regions.
44
To comment on this passage: openness occurs, or is open, as open
to or around man, and man himself is a region of that openness:
namely, the region within which openness shows itself. Man does not
make or will openness, nor the truth that shows itself in openness,
but he is needed in order that there be a show. Openness in Heidegger
is therefore equivalent to man's "visual" field, in the language of
sight. In Plato, on the contrary, the openness of man's visual field is
into an openness that transcends what man can see.
45
Since both
Plato and Heidegger are men rather than gods, they can only speak
the language of men, and say what men can see. But for Heidegger,
man's speech brings das Seiende into openness.
46
The structure of
openness can be appropriately described in terms of openness-to-
mao, however difficult the task of forging an adequate terminology.
What looks like the anthropomorphic dimension in Heidegger's lan-
guage is then not myth but the speech of Being. Differently stated:
both Plato and Heidegger might agree that openness to man is only
the visible "side" of the horizon of Being. For Heidegger, however,
nothing can be said about openness-away-from-man, beyond refer-
ring to it as the source or origin of the occurrence of the Being-process.
Being emanates unto man out of an invisible "opening." But it is Being
which so emanates; in speaking of the phenomenological unity be-
tween man and openness-ta-man, we are speaking of Being. Our
speech is the speech of Being: i.e., Being speaks.
In the language of Sein und Zeit, man is radically in-the-world:
that is, in this world, the Lebenswelt of doksa, and so of temporality,
which functions as boundary in the double sense of delimiting and
defining. For Plato, on the other hand, openness-ta-man as a being-
in-this-world is like the opening into a cave, an openness of flickering
shadows rather than of the lighting-up process of Being, but one in
which by a divine fate or madness we are enabled to discern the
visibility of Being as open away from man. The discernment of Being
in this world enables man to exist ek-statically in another "world."
47
The opening into the cave is the horizon of our vision, but as such it
is also visible as an opening out of the cave. This vision or recognition,
that there can be no cave except as enclosed by an external horizon,
is the first step in the upward motion away from human openness.
48
Even as a resident of the cave world of doksa, man may intermittently
leave or transcend that world for "another place." But the step up
is also a step down, namely, by the light from the external horizon
which illuminates, and so identifies, the opening of the cave.
To terminate this line of speculation, we see that when Heidegger
makes man the shepherd of Being, he suppresses the fact that shep-
herds are ultimately the agents of butchers and wool merchants. As
a recent interpreter, Father G. S. Seidel, puts it:
But since being gives itself ("es gibt") to Dasein, it is man that
comes to determine the course which being is to have in history.
It is Dasein that comes to determine the fate not only of mankind
in this regard, but even of being itself, since it is Dasein that first
brings being along a way that is in the open (Weg des Entbergens).
49
In other words, if "letting-be" is also a "grasping" or "taking in"
analogous to the gathering up of the harvest, man's activity, as dis-
tinct from the pathos of theoria, does not merely tend to or watch,
but imprints.
50
Man plays a part in forming both the shape and sig-
nificance of the crop, which is a crop only thanks to man. The am-
biguity to which I refer is clearly if unintentionally revealed in the
following passage from Father Richardson's highly sympathetic ac-
count of Heidegger. He says that the function of Dasein
is to gather into concentration the overwhelming power of Being
and thus contain (noein) its dynamic advance in such a way as
to force it into the disclosure through which the non-concealment
(truth) of beings comes-to-pass ... in forcing Being into disclo-
sure, There-being must let-be (manifest) the negativity as well
51
Perhaps it is true that Heidegger, as he and his disciples claim,
has escaped the relativism implicit in the subject-object relation.
52
So far as I can see, there is still a strong component of what must be
called ''anthropomorphism'' in his portrait of Being. And the reason
for this is the immanence or this-worldliness of openness as radically
inseparable from the openness of man to Being. To the immanence
of openness qua thinking there corresponds an immanence of open-
ness qua speaking. At the same time, Heidegger's lack of sympathy
for the Platonic mode of speech leads him to accuse it of what
amounts to subjectivism, in however preliminary a form. In so doing,
Heidegger replaces the playfulness of Platonic dialectic by the utter
seriousness of history. Thus for Heidegger, the nature of Being varies
at different times because of its dependence as visibility upon how
it looks to the great thinkers of a given epoch,
53
whereas for Plato
visibility endures in and as itself at all times, regardless of how it is
seen by anyone. The fundamental "timelessness" of the Platonic di-
alectic is a denial of the philosophical relevance of history in any but
its literal sense of "inquiry." I playfully suggest that Heidegger's doc-
trine of radical historicity is in part the consequence of an excessive
seriousness or "realism" which prevents him from appreciating the
playfulness of Plato's "idealistic" dialectic. The very few instances of
Heidegger's irony that I have observed are bitter rather than playful.
In general, Heidegger makes no jokes: his is a spiel-los Sprache von
der Spiel des Seins.
54
Heidegger' s seriousness was evident from the popular sections
of Sein und Zeit, in which he analyzes the "fallen" condition of human
existence in unmistakably Christian tones. 5
5
One has only to contrast
his Daseinsanalytik with the equivalent surface-stratum of the Pla-
tonic dialogues, with their "pagan" portrait of daily life, to see the
difference between a timely and timeless account of time. Just as
melodramatic essays on the philosophical significance of play are no
substitute for the dramas of a playful psyche, so one cannot under-
stand irony by translating it into the List der Vernunft or the speech
of Being. It is not Being but man who is ironical. According to Hei-
degger, Western philosophy since the time of Plato may be called
dialectic. 5
6
But Heidegger interprets "dialectic" as kategorein or "ad-
dressing something as something," which is in turn a "thinking
through and discussing of the gene tau ontos"; i.e., "dialectic" is for
Heidegger exclusively the techne of division and collection in ac-
cordance with kinds. "Dialectic" as Heidegger understands it is es-
sentially logic, as he indicates in reference to Hegel.
57
Heidegger ig-
nores the playful or ironical dialectic of man: specifically human
speech is almost at once replaced by specifically divine speech, by
or
11
0nto-theo-logy" (and then in turn by the utterance
of Being). Therefore he seems to be quite deaf to the possibility that
there is a note of irony in the dialogical speeches about the techniques
of division and collection. Despite his etymologizing, Hei-
degger's interpretation of Platonic dialectic is in its own way as in-
adequate as that of orthodox classicists. Heidegger
Plato.
Although Heidegger says next to nothing about he is
quite loquacious on the subject of logos.
58
By considering very briefly
his treatment of logos, we are able to see the Heideggerian replace-
ment for human dialectic: namely, what I am tempted to call with
very little irony silence of agriculture." The simplest translation
for the Greek word dialektike is We might also say
or means of speech," thereby indicating the sense of
an activity or directed motion. The verb leg6, as Heidegger has con-
tinually emphasized, means pick up," gather," or choose"
as well as
11
to say." Thus or might be defined
by as well as by Dialectic, in a Heideg-
gerian mode, would then be a turning-toward, and so an attending-
to, which is also a living-with what has been gathered together. In
an essay on logos, Heidegger gives as its original and authentic mean-
ing collecting laying-down and laying before of what collectively
presents itsel."
59
Thus speech is derived from the activities of se-
lecting and collecting, and still more fundamentally, from the sim-
plest acts of human life, such as gathering the harvest or selecting
the best grapes for winemaking. That which has been collected, lies
before us and so displays itself or appears, in a rest which is conse-
quently a derivative-and a temporary derivative-of the motion of
collection.
There are a number of observations to be made with respect to
this interpretation of logos. To begin with, it makes the silence of
doing into the ground or paradigm of the speech of thinking.
60
Instead
of human dialectic, we begin with prephilosophical silence. No men-
tion is made of the fact that this silence is already defined by speech.
But apart from this, the kind of silence which functions as paradig-
matic is especially instructive. So far as I am aware, the Greeks made
love at least as frequently as they made wine. And yet, if I am not
mistaken, Heidegger never mentions the sexual meanings of such
related words as synousia or dialeg6 when he etymologizes upon the
existential senses of Greek words for and Why
is agriculture ontologically superior to Eros? Is that superiority ont-
ically evident? Not to me.
61
I should also say here that the act of
gathering in the harvest relates man silently to the mute plants,
whereas Eros normally relates human to human in a situation in
which speech is a natural component. Performatory utterances are
proper between lovers ("with this ring I do thee wed") but not be-
tween man and the grape ("with this press I do thee crush"). It is
true that the power of the grape may move us to an ode to Bacchus,
but Heidegger is not concerned with this "humanization" of vini-
culture in his etymologizing. Man brings speech to the soil, whereas
speech emerges from within Eros.
By returning to the "founding" or geschichtliche senses of tech-
nical philosophical terms in archaic ordinary speech, Heidegger gives
the impression of moving back from the rationalizations of meta-
physics to authentic thinking, and so to the origins of thinking in its
initial harmony with Being, prior to the dis-junction between noein
and einai, or the sundering of logos from physis. But everything de-
pends upon the kind of motion by which we are returned to the origin,
and so to the relation between motion and rest within the origin.
Throughout his writings and in a variety of ways, Heidegger treats
rest as a "tarrying-in" or derivative of motion.
62
And motion in the
ontological sense, as for example in his analysis of the worldliness of
Dasein, is always understood to be primarily temporal rather than
spatial.
63
His interpretation of Anwesenheit, parousia, and the like as
"presence" in a sense derived from the verb tense or temporal present
is thus essentially related to his etymology of logos as a "gathering
together." The unity of thought (noein) and speech (legein) conceived
as the "taking up," "preserving," or "taking care of" what has been
"gathered" or "stored up" is grounded in the conception of physis as
growth, and so as birth and death: it is grounded in temporality, and
in temporality conceived in terms of human activity. This latter point
is perhaps more evident in Sein und Zeit than in the later works, since
in the former, Zeitlichkeit is grounded in the "Da" of Da-sein, or the
worldliness of the world as a referential structure of human signifi-
cances.64 But it remains true in the later works, even though Zeitli-
chkeit seems to be replaced by Geschichtlichkeit as the Geschick des
Seins. In each case, by conceiving of Being within the horizon of time,
Heidegger never takes seriously the possibility that the temporal
present is itself a derivative of the trans-temporal presence of
visibility .
65
The discussion of thinking and speaking has taken place in terms
of a contrast between dialectical and (radically) historical speech;
that is, with respect to the difference between Plato and Heidegger
concerning speech as uncovering or opening, and hence as regards
its temporality. The whole discussion serves as an anticipation of the
third term which, as I mentioned at the beginning of this part of my
paper, is relevant to an account of the problem of openness: doing.
The role or meaning of human doing is implicit throughout any ad-
equate analysis of Heidegger's conceptions of thinking and speaking.
The question of that role emerged explicitly in my discussion of the
difference for Heidegger between his Sorge and Platonic Eros. Being
needs man (even if only occasionally
66
), whereas for Plato, it is only
the case that man needs Being. Let me restate this question: to what
extent does man as agent share in the process by which Being occurs
or presents itself? The answer to this question also determines our
attitude toward history, that is, to the question whether there is such
a thing as historicity. In other words, the whole issue of historicity is
subordinate to the problem of whether or in what sense "opening"
is a human I shall sketch the difference between Plato and
Heidegger on these problems by returning to the question of the re-
lation between openness and time.
Even if physis in the sense of eidos should be historically posterior
to physis in the sense of growth, there is no reason to assume an
inverse identity between the order of history and that of authentic
thought or the uncovering of truth. If there were, then we should have
to agree with Pindar that is best" and become disciples of
Thales, the original instrument of the Seinsgeschick that has deter-
mined Western Geschichte.
67
Here as elsewhere we may note the cryp-
tic influence of Hegel on Heidegger's teaching.
68
Of course, like Hegel,
Heidegger does not mean to suggest that Being is temporal in the
way of beings.
69
For both, the structure of time is meant to escape
the transience of its moments. In Sein und Zeit, the nontransient na-
ture of the structure of time was evident in the form of the existentials
of Dasein (the immanent counterpart to the structures of the tran-
scendental ego of Kant). In one of the latest works of Heidegger with
which I am familiar, the same point is expressed in a more funda-
mental manner. In an unpublished lecture from 1962 entitled Zeit
und Sein, Heidegger speaks of Zeitraum, or the structure of time itself,
rather than of the structure of the temporality of Dasein. The situation
now seems to be as follows: in order for Being to be characterized
by (and so of course by or by ecstatic location, di-
rectedness or intentionally structured openness must be established.
Previously, this openness was grounded in Dasein.
70
But now Hei-
degger resituates this in the source or origin of the Being-
process:
11
Zeitraum names the openness that clears (lichtet) itself in
the joint self-sufficiency of future, past, and present."
71
Being as An-
wesenheit or presence occurs as a givenness within this clearing. It
now looks as though Heidegger distinguishes between Sein and Da-
sein, but as we shall see, the look is deceptive.
I have just used the phrase "occurs as a givenness"; Heidegger
says "Es gibt Sein" and "Es gibt Zeit." The Es is to be defined out
of geben (like the "that which" in Gegnet), or the sending of Being
within the clearing of time, and thereby as what defines Being and
time in their togetherness (zusammengehoren): as Ereignis, which nor-
mally means "event" or "occurrence." In this key term, there is al-
ready a suggestion of the ambiguous relation between Being and man
in the "late" Heidegger. As is often the case, Heidegger employs a
word which normally carries a temporal, historical, or even human
meaning, but in what he insists is a special or extra-ordinary sense.
Thus, although we are told that Ereignis is a unique term, which in
its special sense can no more be adequately translated than logos or
Tao, Heidegger explicates its significance by speaking of both Eigenen
and eignen: one's own or proper possession (somewhat reminiscent
of the definition of Dasein as "my own Being"
72
), together with the
notion of suitability or fitness.
73
Or again: "In the sending of the
G'eschick of Being, in the sufficiency of Time, a dedication, a trans-
ferring points itself out, namely of Being as presense and time as reach
(scope, range) in Ereignis. "
74
Geschick normally means "fate," but
Heidegger employs it in the sense of "order": namely, the order
whereby Being consoles man by clearing itself, or filling up the Zeit-
Spiel-Raum/5 i.e., as the "over against each other" of Being and
man.
76
If we try to combine these representative passages from the later
Heidegger, the result, as I understand it, is this. Openness is implicitly
intentionally structured in a way which reveals itself to man as
time.
77
Being presents itself within this openness, and its presence is
thus radically temporal. In speaking of"presenting," "giving," "send-
ing," "consoling," "appropriate," and indeed of "past, present, fu-
ture," we acknowledge the inseparability of the unity "openness-pres-
ence-within-openness" from man (or Dasein). As Heidegger says in
his preface to the Richardson volume:
If we replace 'Time' by: the lighting of the self-hiding of Anwesen
(presence as holding itself together and before), then Being defines
itself out of the projective scope of Time. But this results only in
so far as the lighting of self-hiding puts to its use a thinking that
corresponds to it. Anwesen (Being) belongs to the lighting of self-
hiding (Time). Lighting of self-hiding (Time) produces Anwesen
(Being).
78
That is: Being belongs to time as that which hides itself within it; as
so hiding, it appears (i.e., presents itself) as the structural process of
temporality.
This "appearance" is not an illusion, but how Being presents
itself to (human) thought. Man can never cease to think temporally,
any more than he could cease (while still a man) to see beings. Being
can only be "seen" as the masked self-presentation, masked by beings
in temporally directed order (Geschick). This temporally directed
order, the unity of Being and time with respect to openness, visibility,
and presence, i.e., with respect to thought, and so to man (who also
stands in the lighting of Being), is Ereignis: the logos or Tao of Hei-
degger's teaching?
9
It is the rest of the total assemblage of motion,
and thus reminiscent of the transcendental Bewegung of Hegel's Ab-
solute. Thus we read in Gelassenheit, apropos of the occasion for
releasement:
Scholar:
Teacher:
Scholar:
Teacher:
Scholar:
Teacher:
But that means, such an occasion brings us to the path which
seems to be nothing else than releasement itself ...
. . . which is something like rest.
From here on it is suddenly clearer to me the extent to which
movement (Bewegung) comes out of rest and stays within rest.
Releasement would then be not only the path, but the movement
(along it).
Where does this strange path go, and where does the movement
along it rest?
Where else but in that-which-regions, to which releasement is
what it is?
80
In other words, the "resting" or "abiding" of man, things, and re-
gions, or of openness altogether in its regionality, is also a "tarrying"
or motion which Heidegger again expresses in his later writings as
das Geviert: the fourfold assemblage of man and gods, heaven and
earth, whose reciprocal excitation defines the structure of "the
thing."
81
Thus I agree with the following remark by Father Richardson in
the conclusion to his long and useful study:
Heidegger's perspective from beginning to end remains phenom-
enological. By this we mean that he is concerned only with the
process by which beings are lit up and reveal themselves as what
they are for and to man.
82
Such a process necessarily requires as an integral element the doing
or acting of man. As I previously suggested, the inseparability of mind
or thought from Being or beings is evident in the attribution of "fu-
ture, past, present" to the play of Zeitraum. This directional structure,
whatever it may be "in itself," is described from the outset in terms
of thought which finds its way about in the clearing of temporality.
What I am urging is this: there is no such thing as past,
present," and certainly no significance to that order of the tenses,
except to Dasein or its equivalent. The structure of Being, time, Ges-
chick, Ereignis, or what you will, is from the outset expressed in terms
of the structure of human time. Ereignis (to use this word as a sum-
mary of the rest) is how Being looks to man: the face of Being, or
exactly what Heidegger says about the Platonic Idea. Nor is this con-
sequence altered by the fact that the is not conceived in terms
of the subject-object relation but in terms of the horizon of that
relation.
83
There is of course this radical difference between Ereignis and
the Platonic Idea. Ereignis within the horizon of time,
whereas the Idea does not
11
0Ccur" or is not itself an instance of tem-
poral structure, even though visible or present through time. Fur-
thermore, at least so far as the exclusively phenomenological domain
of Heidegger is concerned, openness in the triple sense of It clearing"
or "light" or "viewer," and
44
the viewed" is temporally, and so hu-
manly, understood: not perhaps in a subjectivistic or relativistic
sense, but certainly in a way deeply akin to that of Kant's transcen-
dental ego. For Plato, as I have already pointed out, this is not the
case. The three domains of man, light, and Ideas are distinct if re-
lated.84 Heidegger seems to present us with a more coherent or un-
ified portrait of Being than does Plato; on the other hand, this unity
is subject to continuous dissolution because its binding structures
are defined or articulated in terms of human time. That is, Heideg-
ger's doctrine of time is inadequate because immanent time serves
as the paradigm for transcendental time. In fact, as is especially clear
in Sein und Zeit, Heidegger uses "transcendence" and "ekstasis" in
a specifically immanent or intratemporal sense. There is literally
nothing to hold open the "clearing" which provides the theater for
the various activities of Being, activities inseparable from human
doing.
Heidegger' s "clearing" is defined or held open by the direction-
ality internal to the illumination of self-concealment. But this direc-
tionality can hold itself together only by structural referentiality
which directs temporal flow without itself consisting of that flow.
Differently put, the openness of a horizon is not the same as the trans-
formation or sequence of illuminations thanks to which we can see
in that openness. In quasi-Platonic language, the configuration of the
sequence defines a form or idea which is not equivalent to the flow
of the members of the sequence.
85
Whereas in the Heideggerian teach-
ing, the unity of Ereignis leads finally to the identity of light, viewer,
and viewed without being able to account for their differentiation,
in the Platonic teaching, the difference of the three is the starting
point. Whether or not Plato can account for the harmony of the three
in one cosmos, his teaching seems to me more accurate to the very
phenomenological situation which Heidegger is ostensibly explain-
ing. As I understand Heidegger, there is nothing anywhere in his ac-
count which allows for the phenomenological presentation of the
eternal or transtemporal; such a possibility is ruled out from the very
beginning, ostensibly in obedience to the "facticity" of human ex-
istence. But the whole question concerns the nature of that facticity.
Heidegger ultimately reduces all phenomena to a process of illumi-
nations, which is at least reminiscent of the reduction of the cosmos
to atoms moving in the void, but which he paradoxically describes
in anthropomorphic terms. Plato comes closer to saving the
phenomena.
To conclude this section of my paper: for Heidegger, the inten-
tional, directed, and so directing or illuminating structure of time,
derived from the phenomenon of visibility-to-roan, provides the
"space" within which Being occurs as the fourfold or reciprocally
definingBewegungen of heaven and earth, men and gods. The simplest
way to contrast the Platonic teaching is by summarizing the defects
which it would ascribe to Heidegger's account of time: (1) the on-
tological account of time is actually an articulation of the "ontic"
facticity of Dasein's temporal existence as intentionally directed
within the tridimensional unity of past, present, and future. But to
on is in advance regarded as to phainomenon. Although Heidegger
interprets to phainomenon as "presence" of Being itself rather than
"appearance" or "illusion," "presence" is "presence-to-man" as the
abiding or tarrying of temporality. Heidegger's "phenomenology" is
no longer concerned with ~ ~ e s s e n c e s " but with "facts" in the sense of
"occurrences." (2) Even as an account of how time looks to man, this
phenomenology is defective, since it rules out the possibility of the
presence of the eternal or genuinely transtemporal within the very
structure of to phainomenon. One of the most important results of
this procedure is to blur if not to suppress altogether the difference
between man and Being. (3) More specifically, time cannot supply
from within itself the structure of its own Being. That is, Heidegger
fails to explain how time holds itself together within each of its mo-
ments, let alone as the opening or clearing within which Being occurs,
since that opening is itself an occurrence. (4) Heidegger singles out
time as more fundamental than space, but this assumption seems to
hold only if we accept as fundamental the temporality of man's ex-
istence. In fact, Heidegger cannot speak of time except through spa-
tial terms: the least one could say is that both dimensions seem to
be equally necessary in an account of human existence. And the ne-
cessity of space (i.e., of human space) is a clue to an inadequacy in
Heidegger's otherwise excellent discussion of openness as the horizon
of noetic vision. (5) Finally, it is hard to see how Heidegger, despite
his distinction between Geschichte and Historie, makes it possible for
man to take a responsible stand toward history. One must seriously
question the adequacy of the resolute acceptance of tradition-i.e.,
what happens-as a criterion for human conduct. An ontology which
cannot assist man in his struggle to preserve himself from his own
actions runs the risk of Nihilism, which I regard as the consequence
of the claustrophobia of complete immanentism masquerading as
freedom.
86
Notes to 124-129 213
has as his form the sum of becomings which constitutes the actualization of Geist.
See Phenomenology of Mind (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1952), p. 32.
27. De Anima, 431b26.
28. At Metaphysics 1032a32, Aristotle says: 'Apo technes de gignetai hoson to eidos en
tei psychei. If the form of a created thing is in the psyche, then (a) it is separate
from the thing made, in just the way which Aristotle blames Plato for maintaining;
(b) in knowing or thinking some created X, the psyche does not grasp the form of
X, but rather thinks itself as the other; i.e., it thinks an aspect of itself, but not
itself as a single form. Is there, finally, a radical difference between thinking
natural and artificial objects? Must we revise De Anima 431 b20 so that, in thinking
natural things, the psyche is somehow ta onta, whereas, with respect to artificial
things, ta onta are somehow the psyche?
29. De Anima 429a18: panta noei [sc. ho nous] ...
30. Aristotle avoids deriving the psyche from "nothing" in the Heideggerian sense, in
so far as potentiality must inhere in a prior actuality. The definition of the psyche
can only be derived, as we are now arguing, from a consideration of the actuality
within which the psyche emerges. Nevertheless, in so far as the psyche has no form
of its own, it remains even for Aristotle an ambiguous mixture of "something"
and "nothing." Cp. Plato, Sophist 240elff for a discussion of the copresence of
Being and non-Being, in the structure of the Whole. Aristotle's psyche "is" (po-
tentially) everything, i.e., the form of the Whole. The Hegelian conception of Geist
may be regarded as (by intention) the completion, or complete actualization of,
Aristotle's psyche, which is itself a version of the Socratic-Platonic conception.
Hegel reconciles the distinction between (living) finite psyche and world-soul or
nous by Aufhebung of the former into the latter. Compare Aristotle's doctrine of
immortality as the absorption of the individual into the world-soul.
31. See Xenophon, Memorabilia, X.3ff, where Socrates discusses with a painter how
the eidos of the psyche or the states of the psyche as mirrored in the body, may
be imitated. But this is one aspect of political existence, upon which both the
states of the psyche and the skills of the painter, depend. In other words, it would
be short sighted and misleading to think of art as the medium through which the
psyche is imitated, without thinking of the political context of art.
8. Heidegger's Interpretation of Plato
1. Republic 537c7; Was is das-die Philosophie? (Pfullingen: G. Neske Verlag, 1956),
pp. 21ff. Was is das will henceforth be represented as WPH.
2. Diels, Fr. 18.
3. Republic 515c6ff.
4. The elaborate program for educating philosophers in the just city depends for its
enactment upon the prior existence of philosophers. The way up is not quite the
same as the way down, which precedes it.
5. E.g. Phaedrus 244a5ff; cf. Epistles VII, 341cff.
6. Symposium 203a6: Eros is only one of the daimons.
7. In Plato, the wholeness of human existence is "circular," as prefigured in the myth
of the circle-men in Aristophanes' speech in the Symposium. I have discussed this
214 Notes to 129-134
elsewhere at some length. Cf. Sein und Zeit, 7th ed. (Tiibingen: Max Niemeyer
Verlag, 1953), pp. 152-53. Henceforth SZ.
8. Cf. "The Role of Eros in Plato's Republic."
9. Diels B3; Vortrage und Aufsatze (Pfullingen: G. Neske Verlag, 1954), pp. 249ff.
Henceforth VA.
10. Cf. Was heisst Denken? (Tiibingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1954), pp. 114-26; 146ff.
Henceforth WHD.
11. Kritik der reinen Vernunft B 179-180. This also resolves the dualism within Verstand
between intuition and the categories.
12. Ibid., B130: " ... we cannot represent to ourselves anything as combined in the
object which we have not ourselves previously combined .... "
13. Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik (Frankfurt-am-Main: Vittorio Klostermann,
1951), pp. 127ff. Henceforth KPM.
14. VA, p. 157.
15. Cf. W. J. Richardson, S. J., Heidegger(The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1963), p. 640. Hence-
forth Richardson; and Identitiit und Differenz (Pfullingen: G. Neske Verlag, 1957),
pp. 70-71. Henceforth /D.
16. In this connection, one should consider carefully Phaedrus 229c4ff.
17. Einfuhrung in die Metaphysik (Tiibingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1953), pp. 11,
131-34, 142. Henceforth EM; VA pp. 269ff. At p. 274 of VA, Heidegger says that
physis means the same as zoe: "life" is here defined as "stepping out" or emerging
into view. In EM, p. 11, however, he states that physis includes as instances the
course of the heavens, the waves of the sea, etc. We see here the beginning of his
interpretation of Being as the fourfold: heaven and earth, human and divine,
which are explicitly mentioned.
18. "Process," "happening," and "eventuation" translate Bewegung, Geshchehen, and
Ereignis. For the unknown and unthought character of the "source," cf. ID, p. 44;
Nietzsche (Pfullingen: G. Neske Verlag, 1961), Vol. 1., p. 471; Vol. II., p. 484; Un-
terwegs zurSprache (Pfullingen: G. Neske Verlag, 1959), p. 31. Henceforth US. For
the common root of sight and hearing, seeDer Satz vom Grund (Pfullingen: G.
Neske Verlag, 1957), pp. 86ff. Henceforth SG.
19. Nietzsche II, pp. 211, 486.
20. Ibid., pp. 430ff.
21. EM, p. 142; Platons Lehre von der Wahrheit (Bern: A. Francke A. G., 1954), pp. 41-
42, 49. Henceforth PLW. Also, from the same volume, Vber den "Humanismus",
p. 106. Henceforth UH.
22. EM,pp. 134, 146; WHD,pp. 73-74, 122-26; VA,pp.208ff.
23. PLW, p. 47.
24. Vom Wesen des Grundes (Frankfurt-am-Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1955), p. 41.
Henceforth WG; WPH, pp. 16, 24-27; PLW, pp. 34, 46; EM, p. 139.
25. Cf. PLW, p. 51, with Gelassenheit (Pfullingen: G. Neske Verlag, 1959), passim;
Nietzsche II, p. 452.
26. For the discussion of to hoti and ti esti, cf. especially Nietzsche II, pp. 400ff. (Here
and elsewhere, e.g., WG, p. 41, Heidegger erroneously makes the idea equivalent
to Moglichkeit).
Notes to 134-137 215
27. SG, pp. 59, 90, 18Sff.
28. Nietzsche II, pp. 72ff.
29. Cf. Gerhard Kruger's brilliant essay, "Uber Kants Lehre von der Zeit" in Anteile:
Martin Heidegger zum 60 Geburtstag (Frankfurt-am-Main: Vittorio Klostermann,
1950).
30. Such is my understanding of Gelassenheit.
31. ZurSeinsfrage (Frankfurt-am-Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1956), p. 9. Henceforth
ZS; SG, p. 125; Kants These uber das Sein (Frankfurt-am-Main: Vittorio Kloster-
mann, 1963), pp. 9, 12, 16; Die Frage Nach dem Ding (Tiibingen: Max Niemeyer
Verlag, 1962), pp. 114-15, 171-73, 178, 186. Throughout his writings, Heidegger
gives "histories" of thinking as ratio, percipere, Vorstellung, etc., as obscurations
or "objectifications" of Being; e.g., Nietzsche II, pp. 229ff.
32. A good example of this is Sophist 248d4ff, where the activity (poema) of knowing
is related to the psyche or mind: the changeless objects of knowledge cannot
undergo a pathos.
33. Cf. Sophist 248d10ff, 250cl, 259e5: it is life, nous or the dianoetic logos which
moves, not the megista gene, to on and the symploke eidon (kinesis is here treated
as an eidos or genos). For to eksaiphnes, cf. notes 5 and 37.
34. In this connection, one should consider the various remarks in the dialogues about
dreaming and divining; e.g., Republic 505e1-506a5, 523a8; Theaetetus 201d8ff, et
passim.
35. US, p. 30.
36. SG, p. 86.
37. The problem of the Instant and the relation between "Being and Time" is treated
by Plato in the Parmenides 156cff. In discussing the hypothesis that to hen esti,
i.e., that it is or exists, and so partakes of time, Parmenides derives the consequence
that to hen must both move and rest, and that the change from movement to rest,
as identical with neither, cannot occur in time, but must occur in to eksaiphnes
(the instant): alla he eksaiphnes haute physis atopos tis enkathetai metaksy tes ki-
neseos te kai staseos ... (cf., Aristotle's doctrine of actualization). If the Instant
occurs between any two moments of time (within which there may be either
motion or rest, but not a change from one to the other), then either (1) the Instant
both rests (between mk and mk +
1
) and moves (from between one pair of moments
to another), or else (2) time passes discontinuously through the Instant. That is,
the Instant makes time discontinuous; it makes the "rest" of mk and the "move-
ment'' from mk to mk+l As the context shows, the Instant is neither Being nor
non-Being (and so, neither is to hen when in it); Being and non-Being are coor-
dinate, and as such, subordinate to what we may call Actuality, for want of a
better name ( = the Instant). Cf. SZ, p. 338 (onder Augenblick).
38. Phaedrus 346c6: there is no logos of a deathless thing, and no noesis sufficient to
operate independently of imagination. Consider in this connection SZ, p. 6, where
Heidegger objects to myth that it speaks of Sein as a Seiendes.
39. Phaedrus 247d1: dianoia goes round with the moving world, and sees the hyper-
uranian beings dia chronou; cf. Theaetetus 206d1, Philebus 17b3: speech flows. See
also Sophist 263e3ff.
40. VA, p. 40.
41. Symposium 202e3ff.
216 Notes to 137-141
42. Cf. SZ, pp. 212ff; and Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1960), p.
100. Henceforth UK.
43. E.g., PLW, p. 50; UH, p. 75.
44. Gelassenheit, pp. 65-66. I have modified a translation by John Anderson and Haris
Freund (New York: Harper and Row, 1966).
45. Phaedrus 247b6ff: the surface of the hyperuranian visible is still, whereas dianoia
moves: this is Plato's "version" of Gegend.
46. UK, p. 84; cf. ZS, p. 28.
47. Phaedo 109b4ff.
48. Cf. Theaetetus 176bl.
49. G. S. Seidel, S. J., Martin Heidegger and the Pre-Socratics (Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 1964), p. 24.
50. Cf. WHD, pp. 124-25.
51. Richardson, p. 296; cf. EM, pp. 131ff.
52. E.g., in "Hegel und die Griechen" (Die Gegenwart der Griechen im neueren Denken
[Tiibingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1960], p. 55).
53. E.g., Nietzsche II, p. 257; cf. pp. 37, 43-44, 98, 332; and Nietzsche I, pp. 173-74;
SG, pp. 158, 176; ID, p. 65. These are only examples of a theme which appears
continually throughout Heidegger's work.
54. Consider here Theaetetus 145b10ff, where Socrates indicates that mathematicians
do not joke. There is something "mathematical" about Heidegger's approach to
and account of Being.
55. Cf. Otto Poggeler, Heidegger (Pfullingen: G. Neske Verlag, 1963), pp. 35ff, and US,
p. 96.
56. Nietzsche I, p. 529.
57. Ibid., p. 530.
58. Representative discussions may be found in VA, 208ff; WHD, pp. 122ff.
59. VA, p. 212.
60. Thus, e. g., in SZ, theory is regarded as an abstraction from the concrete use of
beings as "tools" in daily life. It is true that Heidegger makes Rede an existential
in SZ, but even there, speech is given a primordial interpretation similar to the
one in his later writings.
61. In Plato, farming is praised by Eryximachus, the spokesman in the Symposium
for technicism (186e4ff); in the Laws (889c5ff), the Athenian Stranger associates
farming with materialism. In the Symposium speech replaces drinking (agricul-
ture-viniculture); in the Laws, however, it is pointed out that drinking serves to
test men's psyches by making them talk freely (649a4ff). Heidegger seems tore-
commend viniculture, but not symposia or drinking.
62. For some representative passages, cf. Die Frage nach dem Ding, pp. 33ff; Nietzsche
II, pp. 13, 485, 489; SG, p. 144; "Vom Wesen und Begriff der Physis, Aristoteles
Physik B1," in Il Pensiero, Part I (May-August, 1958): 138. In US, p. 213, Heidegger
says: "Die Zeit selbst im Ganzen ihres Wesens bewegt sich nicht, ruht still." But
Ruhe is for Heidegger self-constraining motion.
63. SZ, pp. 367ff.
64. Ibid., pp. 350ff.
Notes to 141-147 217
65. Cf. Timaeus 37e4ff; and note 34 above.
66. Nietzsche II, p. 486.
67. Cf. my essay "Thales: the Beginning of Philosophy" in Essays in Philosophy (Uni-
versity Park, Penn.: Penn State Press, 1962).
68. Heidegger deals explicitly with the difference between himself and Hegel in ID,
e.g., p. -43. He is not so explicit about the similarities.
69. SZ, pp. 18-19; cf. Poggeler, Heidegger, p. 186.
70. SZ, pp. 133, 157ff.
71. The quotations are from a privately circulated copy of this unpublished lecture.
Here the reference is top. 8. For a very similar statement in the published writings,
cf. US, pp. 214-15: "Zeitigend-einraumend be-wegt das Selbige des Zeit-Spiel-
Raumes das Gegen-einander-iiber der vier Welt-Gegenden: Erde und Himmel,
Gott und Mensch-das Weltspiel." The soundless, calling gathering of this Be-
wegung is "die Sprache des Wesens."
72. sz, pp. 41-42.
73. ID, pp. 28ff (cf. the original sense of ousia as "private property").
74. Zeit und Sein, unpublished text, p. 10.
75. SG., pp. 109, 130.
76. Ibid., p. 158.
77. UK, p. 58.
78. Richardson, p. xxi.
79. Cf. Richardson, pp. 638ff on the ambiguity of Ereignis: it means (1) some third
thing other than einai and noein prior to and unifying both; (2) Being itself as
Geschick.
80. Gelassenheit, pp. 46-47; again I modify somewhat the translation by Anderson
and Freund.
81. VA ("Das Ding"), pp. 163ff. For Plato, contrast Phaedo 90c2ff.
82. Richardson, p. 627.
83. Cf. A. de Waelhens, "Reflections on Heidegger's Development," International Phil-
osophical Quarterly (Sept. 1965): 490. In speaking of SZ, he gives a consequence
of its teaching, not stated by Heidegger, and which he says would no longer cor-
respond with the latter's thought: "If the time that is anterior to the World and
the time that marks the course of things are but modes derived from the tem-
porality that springs from our Being itself, then we must go one step further and
maintain that the Being of beings, that which is time in them, is likewise a mode
that has issued from the Being of that being which comprehends Being." With
the appropriate shifts in terminology and emphasis, however, I suspect that this
consequence does correspond to the later Heidegger's thought.
84. Cf. Sophist 248e6ff, Timaeus 34a8ff, Philebus 30a1ff.
85. Cf. the distinction between Wesen and Sein made by Oscar Becker in "Platonische
Idee und ontologische Differenz," (Dasein und Dawesen [Pfullingen: G. Neske Ver-
lag, 1965], pp. 157ff).
86. See SZ, p. 310, for a statement of the resolute, sober, and angstvoll acceptance of
this world in its factic temporality. Entschlossenheit makes us illusions-frei but
therefore excessively sober, in my opinion.

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