John Sallis
Beginning is what is most formidable.
Think of the beginning of a sentence or of an essay or of an entire book. The beginning, the very first word, must anticipate, before anything has been said, all that will be said. With the first word, the whole of what one would say must already be in play, even if one’s intention never simply precedes its realization in speech, even if one genuinely knows what one wants to say only when one has succeeded in saying it. Or think of the beginning of an intricate geometrical proof, of how the first equation or construction must anticipate, before it has been traversed, the entire course of the proof. In order to begin, one must somehow know what, on the other hand, one cannot, as one begins, yet know. Or imagine a painter at the moment when he first puts brush to canvas. At that moment when he begins to paint, the entire picture must somehow be in view, even though as such it cannot be in view, not even, as we say, in the mind’s eye. Imagine—or, though the prospect is daunting, at least try to imagine—a composer as he sets down the very first note or chord, hearing somehow at that moment the entire, still unsounded composition, the composition that even when sounded will necessarily be sounded and heard, not in a moment, but across an expanse of time. Could one ever hope to imagine how Beethoven, almost totally deaf, could have sensed where to begin so as to arrive, with artistic necessity, at the choral setting of An die Freude?
And yet—if bordering on the unimaginable—beginnings are made. Sometimes their character as beginnings is emphasized, as when one begins with a discourse about beginning. Or as in the final movement of the Ninth Symphony, which begins by quoting, in order, the themes of the preceding movements, interrupting each, in turn, before then letting the final theme begin to sound very softly in the double basses, as if emerging from silent depths.
Even as a beginning is made—and one hardly knows how—it remains formidable. For one cannot but be keenly aware from the beginning, in the very moment when one begins, that the stakes are very high indeed. If the beginning is faulty or limited, everything will be compromised. Eventually one will be compelled to return to the beginning, to make another beginning that compensates for what was lacking in the first beginning. Or rather, to make another beginning that attempts insofar as possible to compensate: for one cannot always simply undo having already begun.
In the Platonic dialogues, too, beginning is nothing less than formidable. As interrogated and as enacted, beginnings are pervasive in the dialogues. For instance, the ascent represented and enacted at the center of the Republic is described as an ascent to the beginning of the whole (τὴν τοῦ παντὸς ἀρχὴν).1 It is also, at once, an ascent from the cave-like condition in which humans find themselves in the beginning, hence an ascent from one beginning to another, from—as Aristotle will put it—what is first for us to what is first in itself. Furthermore, one could think of the question of the polis, the question that overarches the entire dialogue, as a question of beginning, as a question of how to begin anew with a polis as secure as possible from the corruption to which political life is otherwise exposed. This aspect of the political question reaches its comedic climax when it turns out that the founding of such a city will require the expulsion of all who are more than ten years old. In order to begin anew, it must become a city of children (see Rep. 541a).
The Timaeus is even more permeated with the enactment and interrogation of beginnings. Indeed an injunction as to how to begin is set forth in the dialogue: “With regard to everything it is most important to begin at the natural beginning” (Tim. 29b). And yet—most remarkably—the Timaeus itself violates the very injunction it sets forth. Not only does it defer the beginning of Timaeus’s speech, inserting prior to it speeches by Socrates and Critias that are quite different in character; but also, even once Timaeus begins to speak, it turns out that he has not begun at the natural beginning and so is eventually compelled by the very drift of the discourse to interrupt his discourse and set out on another, to make another beginning.
Even if this other beginning in the Timaeus has a certain distinctiveness, even if its sense is incomparable, it is not as such unique. Indeed the dialogues abound with various kinds of fresh starts and new beginnings. One of the most decisive occurs in the dialogue in which all the discursive and dramatic elements are brought to utmost concentration on the end, on death; precisely here, in the Phaedo, as the centralmost discourse of this dialogue, there is an account of Socrates’ beginning, of his venturing another beginning. As he prepares to die, Socrates turns to the past, to his own beginning; he tells his friends the story of how he first began with a kind of direct investigation of nature and of how, after such investigations failed, he came to set out on a second sailing by turning from things to λόγοι, making thus another beginning. But among all the polyphonic discourses of the Platonic dialogues, there are none in which this turn to λόγοι has not already been taken. It is always the second sailing that bears Platonic thought along. It is as though Platonic thought makes its first beginning only in launching another beginning, as if, in first beginning, it already sets out on another beginning.
It cannot but appear remarkable, then, that Heidegger writes of the first beginning in terms that, though generalized, more or less identify this beginning with Plato. At the very least it will be necessary to say, in response, that if indeed Plato’s thought constitutes a first beginning, it will prove to be a far more complex beginning than the expression first beginning might at first suggest. For within this alleged first beginning there are, as the examples just cited show, multiple instances of another beginning. Yet a great deal more specificity is required in order, first of all, to determine the precise sense in which Heidegger takes Platonic thought to be the first beginning and then, secondly, to hear the resonance evoked in the Platonic texts themselves by this characterization. In listening to this resonance, it will be a matter of determining whether these texts accord with and confirm the characterization of Plato’s thought as first beginning or whether within these texts there are retreats that go unsounded and that can effectively recoil on that characterization.
What, then, does Heidegger mean by first beginning? In Contributions to Philosophy this expression designates the beginning of philosophy, of what later comes to be called metaphysics. The first beginning occurs in and through the Platonic determination of being as ἰδέα. This determination establishes the distinction between intelligible ἰδέα and sensible thing as the fundamental—that is, the founding—distinction of philosophy or metaphysics. This distinction provides then the fundamental framework for all subsequent philosophy or metaphysics. The sequence of determinations of and within this framework constitutes the history of metaphysics, which reaches its end when, in Nietzsche’s thought, the distinction between intelligible and sensible is completely inverted and thus its possibilities finally exhausted.
In designating this beginning as the first beginning, Heidegger does not intend to suggest that it is a simple beginning. It is not a matter of a beginning made for the first time, preceded by nothing else of its kind. Indeed it turns out that what Heidegger takes to occur in Plato’s thought is a beginning in the form of a transformation, a redetermination, a change. As founding metaphysics, this beginning is first only in distinction from the other beginning that would be ventured beyond the end of metaphysics. This other beginning is what Contributions to Philosophy would prepare—that is, this text is engaged in crossing over to the other beginning.
How are the two beginnings related? There are expressions in other texts, if not in Contributions itself, that suggest a certain mutual externality, such expressions as Überwindung—or even Verwindung—der Metaphysik. The relation would, then, be such that what was begun in the first beginning would have run its course, have come to its end, so that now this first beginning could be left behind—as something overcome, gotten over—as one ventures another beginning. And yet, there is no such externality: in venturing another beginning, one does not simply leave the first beginning behind; one does not simply abandon the metaphysics to which the first beginning gave rise. In Contributions to Philosophy Heidegger writes: “The other beginning is the more originary taking-over of the concealed essence of philosophy.”2 Thus, in the other beginning something essential to philosophy that, on the other hand, remained concealed from philosophy is to be taken over in a way that is more originary than was the case in philosophy. It is to be taken over in such a way that it does not remain, as in philosophy, simply concealed.
Thus the other beginning, beginning beyond the end of metaphysics, is at the same time a return to the first beginning, a return that enters into the first beginning so as to grasp it more originarily than in the first beginning, so as to grasp somehow that which, though essential to the first beginning, remained—in the first beginning—concealed. The double character of this move, that it is a move beyond metaphysics that, at once, goes back into the beginning, is perhaps most succinctly expressed in the following passage from Contributions to Philosophy:
The leap into the other beginning is a return into the first beginning, and vice versa. ... The return into the first beginning is ... precisely a distancing from it, a taking up of that distance-positioning [Fernstellung] that is necessary in order to experience what began in and as that beginning. For without this distance-positioning—and only a positioning in the other beginning is a sufficient one—we remain always, in an entangling way, too close to the beginning, insofar as we are roofed over and covered [überdacht und zugedeckt] by what issues from the beginning.3
One could say: what is decisive is to move through the first beginning, to move disclosively from the first beginning back to that which, though essential to it, remained, in the first beginning, concealed. What is decisive is the move from the intelligible-sensible framework that governed metaphysics back to what within that framework remained concealed. What is decisive is the move from the Platonic determination of being as ἰδέα back to that which, precisely through this determination, came to be concealed.
Heidegger insists on the distance required in order to carry out this move. He insists that sufficient distance is provided only by being positioned in the other beginning, that is, only from a stance beyond metaphysics, only from the position that results from twisting free of the Platonic-metaphysical distinction between intelligible and sensible. Only if one gets out from under the roof of metaphysics can one—according to Heidegger—find one’s way back from the determination of being as idea, back to that which came to be concealed precisely through this determination. Heidegger is insistent: only from the distance of the other beginning can one carry out this regress within—this regress back through—the first beginning.
It is this insistence that I want to put in question. My intent, however, is not to show that such a regress is broached at certain critical junctures in the history of metaphysics, though there are indeed crucial indications of this in, for instance, Plotinus, Schelling, and Nietzsche. Leaving open in the present context the question whether such a regress remains closed to those who remain under the roof of metaphysics, the question I want to raise concerns Plato himself. Can one mark in the Platonic texts themselves a regress from the determination of being as ἰδέα to that which subsequently in the history of metaphysics remains essentially concealed? Does Plato in founding metaphysics also destabilize it through a regression to that which escapes metaphysics? Does there belong to the first beginning a countermovement toward another beginning, Plato’s other beginning?
In order to develop this question, it is necessary to focus on the interpretation of Plato that is at work in Heidegger’s determination of Platonic thought as constituting the first beginning. This interpretation is primarily that expressed in Plato’s Doctrine of Truth, the redaction of which belongs to the very years in which Heidegger composed Contributions to Philosophy and the other manuscripts closely linked to it. If one takes Contributions to Philosophy as carrying out primarily the leap into another beginning, one can regard Plato’s Doctrine of Truth as carrying out the complementary return into the first beginning.
Since Plato’s Doctrine of Truth seems to go furthest in this complementary direction, I shall limit my discussion to it.4 Although this text is well known—perhaps all too well known—I will need to crystallize the parameters and the determining schema of the interpretation developed in this text. In this way it will be possible to mark with some precision the limit of Heidegger’s interpretation of Plato’s thought as first beginning and also to draw from Heidegger’s texts certain resources for rethinking what Heidegger puts in question, for rethinking this questionable moment beyond the debate with this text. Yet even as we retrace the configuration of Heidegger’s text, some features may begin to strike us as strange, if not as outright provocative.
Radicalizing and ironizing an ancient distinction, Heidegger casts his interpretation as one directed to Plato’s teaching (Lehre) regarding truth, as aiming to say what remains unsaid in the Platonic text. At the very outset— most remarkably—he says this unsaid, exposes in writing the unwritten teaching, thus already in the beginning circling back from the interpretation, still to come, that will uncover the hidden teaching. It is as if the text—this text on beginnings—began by transposing the end, the outcome of the interpretation, to the beginning. Even before the text to be interpreted is cited, Heidegger says what only the interpretation of that text can reveal, says the unsaid, writes the unwritten: “What remains unsaid there [that is, in the text still to be cited, translated, and interpreted] is a change [eine Wendung] in the determination of the essence of truth.”5 From this beginning one can read off, in advance, most of the parameters as well as the determining schema of the ensuing interpretation. Two determinations of truth will be exhibited: first, the pre-Platonic determination and, then, the determination that is effected in the Platonic text and that comes to prevail in the history of metaphysics. It is to be shown that in the Platonic text—specifically in the passage with which Book 7 of the Republic begins—a change is effected from the earlier determination to what will become the metaphysical determination. It will turn out that what effects this change, what drives the transition from one determination of truth to the other, is the Platonic determination of being as ἰδέα.
The schema can also be construed from the perspective of Contributions to Philosophy. Then, over against the exhibiting of the constitution of the first beginning, there would take shape a double gesture with respect to the older determination of truth: on the one hand, the regression that recovers it by moving through the first beginning; on the other hand, a demonstration of how in Plato’s text a repression of this other determination is already operative.
Book 7 of the Republic begins with Socrates enjoining Glaucon to “make an image of our nature in its education and lack of education.” Heidegger’s interpretation of the passage that ensues is discreetly guided by the most telling words in Plato’s text. One such word is παιδεία, rendered as Bildung or, even less adequately, as education. The image that Socrates makes for Glaucon, that he describes and asks Glaucon to envision, has to do with education. By casting what he says in relation to the image of a cave, Socrates makes an image of our nature in its education and lack of education. Thus the image that Socrates actually makes and Glaucon envisions is not just that of a cave, but rather of the movement through which the soul undergoes education. The expression by which Socrates describes this movement is περιαγωγὴ όλης τῆς ψυχῆς, a revolution or turning-around of the entire soul. Heidegger emphasizes this turning-around; and in order to designate that to which this turning-around is oriented, he brings into play another of the telling words used by Socrates in the passage. It is for Heidegger the most telling word: to alethes, which Heidegger translates not as the true (das Wahre), but as the unconcealed (das Unverborgene). In this translation, in the shift that it effects, Heidegger’s entire interpretation is broached.
The image of our nature that Socrates makes is thus an image of the way of education as a way on which the soul turns around toward the unconcealed. What the image actually lays out, according to Heidegger, are the four stages belonging to this way. Turning away from the captivating images within the cave, the soul comes to see more unconcealedly the things of which it had previously seen only images. Proceeding still further, emerging from the cave into the open space above, the soul comes to behold the very look of things, that is, the εἴδη that shine through things and make them look as they do. It comes to behold the εἴδη themselves and no longer merely the εἴδη shining from afar through things. Here there is genuine liberation as the soul comes before the most unconcealed (τὸ ἀληθέστατον). And yet, the progression through these three stages, this progression toward the ever more unconcealed, requires still another, a fourth, stage. Only if the image is extended to include finally a return to the cave does it genuinely image our nature in its education and lack of education. It is the privation that prescribes the final stage: because lack of education (ἀπαιδευσία), that is, ignorance, is never simply left behind, education requires continual engagement with and overcoming of this condition. For Heidegger this stage, too, is determined by orientation to unconcealment. The unconcealed must, he says, always be wrested from concealment, and so to unconcealment as such there belongs a continual overcoming of concealment. Παιδεία reaches its fulfillment only in a modality of unconcealment in which this essential connection to concealment is appropriated. In returning to the cave, the escaped prisoner enacts such an appropriation.
These brief indications suffice to show how Heidegger’s interpretation begins. His first move is to show how the originary Greek determination of truth as unconcealment remains operative in this Socratic discourse on education. Not only are the stages of education determined by orientation to unconcealment, but also in the very image of a cave there is imaged the character of unconcealment: a cave is an open space in which things can appear in a certain light, an open space that is yet enclosed, just as unconcealment—which in other contexts Heidegger calls the open space of a clearing—is, as it were, enclosed by the concealment from which it must be wrested. Thus, Heidegger’s first move is to recover the older determination of truth as it is still operative in the Platonic text. Even before laying out the first beginning, Heidegger has already carried out the regression through it to the originary determination of truth as unconcealment.
Heidegger’s second move goes against the first. What he proceeds to show is that in the passage on education there is also another determination of truth at work and that this determination, which will become the metaphysical determination, is already dominant. It seems—remarkably—that what most testifies to this dominance is the shape of the story, the way the story is shaped around the various sites and moments that belong to it. In a decisive passage he writes: “The illustrative power [Veranschaulichung] of the ‘allegory of the cave’ does not come from the image of the closedness of the subterranean vault and the imprisonment of people within its confines, nor does it come from the sight of the open space outside the cave. For Plato, rather, the expository power behind the images of the ‘allegory’ is concentrated on the role played by the fire, the fire’s glow and the shadows it casts, the brightness of day, the sunlight and the sun. Everything depends on the shining forth of whatever appears and on making its visibility possible. Certainly unhiddenness is mentioned in its various stages, but it is considered simply in terms of how it makes whatever appears be accessible in its look (εἶδος)” (GA9, 225). Everything seems to depend on the story’s being drawn more toward one side than the other, more to the side of appearances and of what makes them possible, the glow of the fire inside the cave and the sunlight that brightens the day outside. To be sure, truth as unconcealment is also portrayed, especially in the image of the enclosed openness of the cave. But in the way the story is told—or at least as Heidegger takes it to be told—this side is dominated by the emphasis accorded to the look (εἶδος, ἰδέα) and to the lighting that enables the look to shine forth.
The outcome that Heidegger takes the story to have is well known and requires only the briefest reminder. Heidegger indicates that what has come into force in the Platonic text is a shift, which, displacing ἀλήθεια as unconcealment, sets the ἰδέα, as it were, at the center. Thus, unconcealment comes to be assimilated to the ἰδέα, comes to be regarded as made possible by the ἰδέα. Coming thus under the yoke of the ἰδέα, truth comes to be redetermined in reference to the ἰδέα, as the correctness (ὀρθότης) of vision of the ἰδέα, as agreement (ὁμοίωσις) with it. And whereas truth as unconcealment counted as a trait of beings themselves, truth as correctness belongs to human comportment toward beings.
This, then, according to Heidegger, is the unsaid of the Platonic texts, Plato’s unwritten teaching: the change from the determination of truth as unconcealment of beings to truth as the correctness of human knowledge. This is what, though happening in the text, goes unremarked, remains unsaid. If one agreed that this is indeed Plato’s teaching regarding truth, then there would be little hope of discerning in the first beginning a countermovement that might constitute another beginning. For Heidegger’s conclusions do not allow even a genuine ambiguity to remain, much less a countermovement. Rather, there remains only a trace of the originary determination of truth, a trace that, because of the dominance of the idea, is already destined to disappear entirely.
This is how things would stand if one agreed that what Heidegger identifies as Plato’s teaching is in fact such. And yet, not all have agreed. One who did not agree is Paul Friedländer. His criticism of Plato’s Doctrine of Truth and his extended exchange with Heidegger is well known and need not be retraced here through its various phases.6 Suffice it to say that even when Friedländer withdrew one of his principal criticisms and granted that the sense of ἀλήθεια as unconcealment was in play very early among the Greeks, he still continued to insist on his other principal criticism, his rejection of what he calls Heidegger’s “historical construction,” namely, the thesis that in Plato there occurred a change from truth as unconcealment to truth as correctness.
Another who, after the debate with Friedländer, no longer agreed with this thesis was Heidegger himself. When I spoke with him about Plato in 1975, I was surprised at the candidness with which he voiced his dissatisfaction with his book Plato’s Doctrine of Truth. The book was, he said, no longer tenable (nicht mehr haltbar). Yet this only reiterated what Heidegger had written in a text composed in 1964. In the text “The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking” he writes: “But then the assertion about an essential transformation of truth, that is, from unconcealment to correctness, is also untenable [nicht haltbar].”7
What are the consequences of this very remarkable retraction? Can the determination of Platonic thought as the first beginning remain intact, that is, somehow be reconstituted? Can the historical framework of Contributions to Philosophy, the opposition between the first beginning and another beginning, remain in force, or is it, on the contrary, thoroughly destabilized? More specifically, how is the relation between the two determinations of truth to be reconfigured in the Platonic text once Heidegger’s thesis of a change from one to the other has been set aside? Can it be simply a matter of now granting that the Platonic text is ambiguous or two-sided, that both senses of truth are operative there? Even then, it would still be imperative to determine just how these two senses belong together in the Platonic text.
How might one today venture such a reconfiguration—beyond the debate over Heidegger’s interpretation and even in a certain countermovement to that interpretation? One possibility can be opened perhaps by something that can be gleaned from Heidegger’s specific statement regarding the alleged outcome of the change in the determination of truth. In this statement Heidegger says that after the change “The ἰδέα is not a presenting foreground [ein darstellender Vordergrund] of ἀλήθεια but rather the ground that makes it possible” (GA9, 234). The formulation suggests—or in any case can be taken to suggest—that prior to the change the ἰδέα is a presenting foreground of ἀλήθεια. But then if there is no change, if the alleged change did not occur, one might well suppose, without limitation or qualification, that the ἰδέα simply—or not so simply—is a presenting foreground of ἀλήθεια.
The ἰδέα would be the look by which things come to be present, the look that, shining through them, presents them as the things they are, that is, in their unconcealment. Yet as such the ἰδέα would be only foreground, would be set against the background of concealment from which the look of things would have to be wrested and to which these looks, the things themselves, would always remain attached. Thus the ἰδέα would be nothing other than the moment of unconcealment belonging to ἀλήθεια. But then, there would be no more demanding imperative than that the ἰδέα always be thought in relation to concealment, that it always be thought as bound back to concealment.
Thus one would say: the look of things stands out from and remains bound to concealment, that is, is limited by concealment. Yet the difference thus installed in the first beginning is so enormous—not to say monstrous—that its consequences are virtually unlimited. Still, it can be expressed by the slightest modification: in place of saying, “Being is determined as ἰδέα,” one would now say “Being as determined is ἰδέα”—or perhaps a bit more clearly: “Being as determinate, but not Being as such, is ἰδέα.”
The reconfiguration of the two determinations of truth can now be very simply sketched. Truth as ἀλήθεια would make possible truth as correctness by setting forth a look, a presenting foreground, to which apprehension could correspond and so be correct. Yet the look would be bound to concealment, and consequently the apprehension would be bound always to take account of the bond to concealment. Taking account of concealment could not, however, consist in apprehending it as though it were just another look. Taking account of the bond to concealment would rather consist in setting all apprehension of looks within its limits. In Socratic terms, it would consist in installing all learning within the horizon of a certain awareness of ignorance. But then, the very sense of truth as correctness would—as often in the dialogues—be exposed to slippage, would begin to mutate into something that would look other than the concept of truth that can, all too easily, be traced in the history of metaphysics. And yet, this mutant truth is perhaps not entirely missing from this history, if it is thought otherwise than simply as the history of metaphysics.
But what about the beginning? Or the beginnings?
If the moment of unconcealment is thought as ἰδέα and if it is this determination that constitutes the first beginning and founds the history of metaphysics, then in thinking the bond of the ἰδέα to concealment Plato would have installed an irreducible countermovement toward another beginning. This other beginning, Plato’s other beginning, would occur as a turn back into concealment.
Let me mention, then, in conclusion and all too briefly, two passages from the Republic that broach this turn back into concealment.
The first passage has to do with the highest ἰδέα, τοῦ ἀγαθοῦ ἰδέα. What is meant in saying that this is the highest idea? This idea is such that its shining, its luminosity, provides the light in which all other ideas shine; it makes possible the shining of all other ideas. Thus, whenever any idea becomes manifest and is apprehended, this highest idea must have shown itself and, it seems, have been apprehended. And yet, in a passage (517b) immediately following the one employing the cave image, Socrates says of the idea of the good that it is μόγις ὁρᾶσθαι, scarcely to be seen. Indeed, in Plato’s Doctrine of Truth Heidegger cites and translates this passage, and then in a marginal note written in his own copy of this text he says: “Ἀγαθόν of course ἰδέα, but no longer coming to presence [nicht mehr anwesend], therefore scarcely visible” (GA9, 227). Yet how can there be an idea that does not come to be present—and hence visible—considering that the very sense of idea is to be a look presentable to a vision? How can it be that precisely the highest idea, the one whose luminosity all others presuppose, is itself less than fully luminous, scarcely to be seen? Is it not a matter here of installing, at what would be the very pinnacle of unconcealment, an integral bond to concealment—indeed concealment, not just as something to be appropriated after the highest vision (as in the return to the cave), but as something integral to the highest vision, a refusal that would haunt it as such?
The second passage occurs in the discussion of that figure of a line cut in two unequal segments, each of which is then also cut in two in the same proportion. In Book 6 Socrates draws a contrast between the penultimate segment, corresponding to διάνοια, and the highest segment, corresponding to ἐπιστήμη or dialectic. At the penultimate stage, the progression of vision is, as at the lower stages, by way of images, “using as images the things that were previously imitated” (Rep. 510b). In this dianoetic eikasia one takes as images those things previously taken as originals, and one’s vision proceeds through these images to their originals. It is precisely this dyadic image-original structure that, it seems, would finally be left behind at the highest level, that of dialectic. At this level all images would, it seems, be left behind for the sake of a vision of the ἀρχή, the beginning, which is not itself an image of something else.
This discussion is resumed in Book 7 following the passage on education. Once Socrates has gone through a detailed articulation of the penultimate stage, Glaucon is eager to proceed to dialectic and to go through it in the same way so as to arrive at “that place which is for one who reaches it a haven from the road, as it were, and an end of his journey” (Rep. 532e). To Glaucon’s request, Socrates answers: “You will no longer be able to follow, my dear Glaucon, although there wouldn’t be any lack of eagerness on my part. But you would no longer be seeing an image of what we are saying, but rather the truth itself, at least as it looks to me” (Rep. 533a). Here the truth itself (αὐτὸ τὸ ἀληθές) means the unconcealed; it has nothing to do with correctness. Here, at the end of the journey—figured on the line, imaged by the movement up out of the cave—one would see the original truth, the true (that is, unconcealed) original, which presumably in its pure luminosity would no longer be an image of some further original. Or rather, it would be a matter of seeing the truth—Socrates says—as it looks to me (μοι φαίνεται), that is, in the appearance that it offers to me, the image that it offers, casts, in my direction, and so, in distinction from the look itself. Indeed Socrates continues: “Whether it is really so or not can no longer be properly insisted on.” Thus, with subtlety and irony, Socrates is saying that even at the end of the road one will see only an image of the true, not the true in its undivided, full luminosity. Or, to speak more directly, there is no end of the road, no haven where one would finally have the highest idea present without reserve before one’s vision. Always there would remain images, difference—that is, the bond to concealment.
Once Plato’s other beginning is allowed to come into play, one might again—though differently—radicalize and ironize the ancient tradition about Plato’s unwritten teachings, about the unsaid of Plato’s text. Now one might well take λήθη, concealment, to be this unsaid. This would not be an unsaid that could just as easily—or at least without too much difficulty—have been said. It is not that Plato somehow just neglected to say it. Rather, it remains unsaid because it resists saying, because it borders on the unsayable, because it withdraws from λόγος, refuses to submit to the question: τί ἐστι?, “What is ...?” And yet, it is not simply unsayable but is somehow inscribed, is the unsaid of Plato’s text.
In what one might be tempted to take as Heidegger’s last word on Plato, he tells of one of the ways in which this unsaid, λήθη, came to be inscribed by the Greeks. In his lecture course Parmenides, Heidegger says: “The last word of the Greeks that names λήθη in its essence is the μῦθος concluding Plato’s dialogue on the essence of the polis.”8
And yet, we know that this μῦθος is not merely a story told at the end of the dialogue, that it does not merely conclude the Republic as something added on at the end. Rather, this μῦθος is in play throughout the dialogue, in virtually all that is said and done in the course of the dialogue. It will, then, have installed λήθη everywhere, not only in the central images and figures of the dialogue, but from the very moment Socrates, beginning his narration—beginning thus again—says: “I went down yesterday to Piraeus.”
1. Rep. 511b–c. Further references to Platonic dialogues are given in the text. Translations are my own.
2. Martin Heidegger, Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis), Gesamtausgabe 65 (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1989), 436. Translations are my own.
3. Ibid., 185–86.
4. There are two lecture-courses that cover much the same material as Plato’s Doctrine of Truth and that clearly provided the basis for Heidegger’s redaction of the essay. The first constitutes the initial half of the course Vom Wesen der Wahrheit presented in the Winter Semester 1931–32 (published Gesamtausgabe 34 [Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1988]). The second constitutes the initial half of the course of the same title presented in the Winter Semester 1933–34 (published in Sein und Wahrheit, Gesamtausgabe 36–37 [Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2001]). In both cases the second half of the course consisted in interpretation of selected passages from the Theaetetus.
5. Heidegger, Platons Lehre von der Wahrheit, in Wegmarken, Gesamtausgabe 9 (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1976), 203. Further references are given in the text as GA9 followed by page numbers.
6. See my discussion in Delimitations: Phenomenology and the End of Metaphysics, 2nd ed. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 176–80.
7. Heidegger, Zur Sache des Denkens (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1969), 78.
8. Heidegger, Parmenides, Gesamtausgabe 54 (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1982), 140.
John Sallis - Plato’s Other Beginning
From Heidegger and the Greeks. Original PDF.