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Plato's Phaedrus

sparkling in the sensuous realm, in a way that, as such brilliance, it lets Being scintillate at the same time. Being is that to which man from the outset remains essentially bound; it is in the direction of Being that man is liberated.

Since the beautiful allows Being to scintillate, and since the beautiful itself is what is most attractive, it draws man through and beyond itself to Being as such. We can scarcely coin an expression that would render what Plato says in such a lucid way about radiance through those two essential words, ἐκφανέστατον καὶ ἐρασμιώτατον.

Even the Latin translation from Renaissance times obscures everything here when it says, At vero pulchritudo sola habuit sortem, ut maxime omnium et perspicua sit et amabilis ["But true beauty alone has been destined to be the most transparent of things and the loveliest of all"]. Plato does not mean that the beautiful itself, as an object, is "perspicuous and lovely." It is rather what is most luminous and what thereby most draws us on and liberates us.

From what we have presented, the essence of the beautiful has become clear. It is what makes possible the recovery and preservation of the view upon Being, which devolves from the most immediate fleeting appearances and which can easily vanish in oblivion. Our capacity to understand, φρόνησις, although it remains related to what is essential, of itself has no corresponding εἴδωλον, no realm of appearances which brings what it has to grant us into immediate proximity and yet at the same time elevates us toward what is properly to be understood.

The third question, inquiring about the relationship between beauty and truth, now answers itself. To be sure, up to now truth has not been treated explicitly. Nevertheless, in order to achieve clarity concerning the relation of beauty and truth, it suffices if we think back to the major introductory statement and read it in the way Plato himself first Introduces it. The major statement says that the view upon Being is proper to the essence of man, that by force of it man can comport himself to beings and to what he encounters as merely apparent things. At the place where that thought is first introduced (249 b), Plato says,


Martin Heidegger (GA 6 I) The Will to Power as Art - Nietzsche 1