Bret W. Davis
In a letter written to his wife at the time, Heidegger characterized his 1944–45 Country Path Conversations (Feldweg-Gespräche, GA 77/CPC) as his “Plato book.”1 It is, indeed, the first and one of the only texts Heidegger composed in the Platonic form of dialogue.2 More significantly, Heidegger’s postmetaphysical confrontation with Platonic metaphysics is at issue throughout the three imaginary conversations that make up the book, even though Plato is rarely mentioned by name. This essay attempts to explicate the dialogical confrontation with Plato that takes place there and in many of Heidegger’s other writings—writings from which we must glean intimations of the content of another planned-yet-never-written “Plato book.”3 That unwritten book presumably would have been Heidegger’s final attempt to address the content of Plato’s dialogues directly, rather than (or perhaps in addition to) appropriating their form.
Much has been written about Heidegger’s readings of Plato, and references will be made to some of this important scholarship. The reading of both Heidegger’s written and unwritten “Plato books” undertaken in this essay will engage especially with John Sallis’s post-Heideggerian rereading of the Platonic dialogues, especially his reading of the “chorology” in the Timaeus, which shows how what Plato writes about the chōra (χώρα) preemptively deconstructs the dyadic structure of what became Platonist metaphysics. This engagement with Sallis’s Chorology4 and other of his works on Plato enables not only a more nuanced understanding of the Platonic dialogues themselves in relation to what became the traditional conception of Platonic metaphysics but also a reading of Country Path Conversations and other writings of the later Heidegger as attempts to begin again with another—postmetaphysical—chorology.
On January 9, 1945, Heidegger wrote to his wife Elfride of feeling “increasingly clearly the need for simple saying; but this is difficult; for our language only applies to what has been up until now.”5 A month earlier, soon ater having returned from a brief conscription into the Volkssturm to dig trenches in Alsace, Heidegger had let Freiburg on bicycle bound for his hometown Messkirch. Freiburg had been heavily bombed the night of November 27, 1944, with the old city almost completely destroyed. Once in Messkirch, Heidegger was preoccupied with safeguarding his manuscripts, which he eventually hid in a cave together with some manuscripts by Hölderlin, who a century before had lived out his remaining years—ater his decent into madness—in a tower in Tübingen. Heidegger reportedly “had the idea of having one of the towers of Messkirch Castle restored with a view to working there.”6 Work on restoring the Messkirch tower, however, was delayed and in the end never completed.7 In the early spring of 1945, Heidegger busied himself with attending to his manuscripts, teaching seminars to students who had retreated from besieged Freiburg to Wildenstein Castle in the vicinity of Messkirch, carrying on an affair with Princess Margot von Sachsen-Meiningen, and worrying about his two sons Jörg and Hermann, who were missing in action on the Russian front. It was no doubt difficult for him to ind the rest and repose needed for thinking beyond the pressing needs of the day, and it seems that he fell into a bout of depression.
Yet on March 11, 1945, a reinvigorated Heidegger wrote Elfride to say: “I’ve got over the depression; I feel that my strength isn’t at an end yet; perhaps the efforts of the last 7 years can resolve themselves into a quite simple saying.”8 One thinks of the often tortuous prose of the many solitary manuscripts—starting with Beiträge zur Philosophie (1936–38) and ending with Die Stege des Anfangs (1944)—on which Heidegger had been hard at work for what was in fact the previous eight or nine years, not to mention the many lecture courses, including his prolonged dialogical confrontation (Auseinandersetzung) with Nietzsche and his close readings of Hölderlin and the Presocratics. Then, on March 23, 1945, Heidegger wrote again to Elfride:
Even though my condition is still physically delicate, in the last few days I’ve gained such remarkable momentum that I’m almost completely oblivious to food & sleep. I suddenly found a form of saying I would never have dared use, if only because of the danger of outwardly imitating the Platonic dialogues. I’m working on a ‘conversation’; in fact I have the ‘inspiration’—I really have to call it this—for several at once. In this way, poetizing & thinking saying [das dichtende und denkende Sagen] have attained a primordial unity, & everything lows along easily & freely. Only from my own experience have I now understood Plato’s mode of presentation, & in some form or other the Plato book intended for you must one day become reality ater all.9
The “Plato book” book that Heidegger was writing at the time did become a reality. The manuscript was completed within a couple of months—the third dialogue dated May 8, 1945—and according to his wishes the three dialogues were posthumously published together in 1995 as Feldweg-Gespräche (GA 77), translated in 2010 as Country Path Conversations (CPC).
However, in a letter to Elfride in 1950, Heidegger wrote that “the work in which I deal specifically with Plato’s thought is to be yours . . . this work will one day be written.”10 Again in 1954 he makes a promise to her: “I shall eventually produce the Plato book ater all.”11 And so, Heidegger evidently planned to write not just a book in the Platonic style of dialogue but also one explicitly about Plato’s thought. It was never written. It seems that, despite all he did write about Plato, and in spite of his dialogical confrontation with Plato’s thought that must be read between the lines of his own attempt to write dialogues or—as he would prefer to call them—conversations (Gespräche), Heidegger was never done with Plato.
The present essay, of course, cannot pretend to complete Heidegger’s Auseinandersetzung with Plato for him, even if such completion were desirable. Rather, by examining the ambiguities and ambivalences in Plato’s dialogues themselves along with Heidegger’s increasingly critical and yet also at times ambiguous and ambivalent interpretations of those dialogues, I attempt (1) to delineate the major issues at stake in Heidegger’s dialogical confrontation with Plato and/or Platonism, and (2) to elucidate what can be called the “other chorology” that issues from this dialogical confrontation.
While my main textual focus will be Country Path Conversations, I will also take into consideration other texts in which Heidegger is explicitly or implicitly engaging with Plato and/or Platonism, especially texts written after what might be called his “Plato booklet,” Plato’s Doctrine of Truth. This relatively concise and critical interpretation of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave was written in 1940, based on a lecture course delivered in 1931–32.12 It was first published in 1942, and subsequently published independently as a booklet as well as included in Wegmarken/Pathmarks.13 Yet the summation of his Auseinandersetzung in that booklet was hardly Heidegger’s last word on Plato and Platonism. Insofar as he sees Plato as the inauguration of the history of metaphysics, and insofar as he sees his own thought as stepping back to the origins of metaphysics in order to think what comes both before the beginning and after the closure of that history, Heidegger is never done with reading Plato, and we have only begun to understand and respond to his readings. In this essay I will offer a reading of both Heidegger’s written and unwritten Plato books—that is, of both the book he wrote in the form of Platonic dialogues (in which he rarely mentions Plato) and the book he planned to write, based on his decades of engaging with Plato and with Platonism, but never did.
Country Path Conversations (Feldweg-Gespräche), a set of three imaginary dialogues composed in 1944–45 and preserved for posthumous publication (in 1995), stands out among Heidegger’s texts and not only because it is one of the very few texts he composed in this form. It was written at a pivotal moment in the development of Heidegger’s thought. It marks the dramatic completion of a crucial turn in the fundamental attunement (Grundstimmung) or comportment (Sichverhalten) of his thought, a turn from the will (Wille) to releasement (Gelassenheit).14 Moreover, it provides a kind of bridge between, on the one hand, Heidegger’s confrontation with the history of metaphysics and its technological present and, on the other, his own attempt to speak and think in a different manner by way of a “simple saying” or a saying of “the simple,” by which he means “the enigmatic” and by no means the easy; indeed, “the abyss of the simple”—along with other locutions such as “the open-region” and “the healing expanse”—is one of the names given to what Heidegger elsewhere, using the language of the tradition, calls “being.”15
The Guide in the first Conversation does not simply leap into a simple saying of the abyss of the enigmatic; he does not simply monologically walk of into the sunset of occidental (abendländische) metaphysics and thus toward the oriental (morgenländische) dawn of what the Tower Warden in the second Conversation calls a “non-metaphysical thinking” (das nichtmetaphysische Denken).16 Rather, the Guide himself endeavors to think toward this “other thinking” (das andere Denken) (187/122) by way of relating it to the (at first) staunchly modern-metaphysical manner of thinking of the Scientist and the more “loosened up metaphysical manner of thinking” (aufgelockerte metaphysische Denkweise) (175/114) of the Scholar.
The conversion of the Scientist over the course of the first Conversation is the most dramatic occurrence and in many ways the most helpful in showing us the pathway from the currently dominant “worldview” of scientism to this other thinking that would no longer, as Heidegger says elsewhere, represent the world as a picture.17 The claim that there is a sense in which natural science is applied technology, much discussed in the first Conversation,18 was already made in Heidegger’s lectures on Heraclitus in 1943 in a discussion of the primordial sense of nature as φύσις. And yet, there Heidegger says that “it would be foolish to want to persuade an agricultural chemist and a modern physicist of this [primordial pretechnological sense of φύσις],” since they only know how to approach matters in the technological manner of “doing something” with them.19 The Guide in Country Path Conversations ignores this advice, as it were, and attempts to lead a physicist to a thoughtful encounter with the modern metaphysical worldview that underlies his work. The Guide, with the assistance of the Scholar, shows that even though, in the Scientist’s experience, “Nature and nature alone, in the manner that it shows itself to us, has the last word in physics,”20 the first word is in fact had by “the mathematical projection of nature,”21 which representationally sets nature toward us in a particular manner; and it is precisely this prior objectification—which allows nature to show itself only as quantifiable material ready for calculative manipulation—that Heidegger means when he uses the term “technology.”22
The first Conversation is remarkable for the manner in which the Guide leads the Scientist down the path into Heidegger’s critique of the modern scientific and technological worldview. But many of us, insofar as we often go about our research on the history of Western philosophy, may most readily identify ourselves with the figure of the Scholar, whose careful steps often meditate the stretch between the Scientist, who tends to drag his feet, and the Guide, who tends to leap ahead. Or, as philosophers who often find ourselves cautiously following the lead of Heidegger’s thinking, perhaps we ind most illuminating the semantic space that opens up between the Guide and the Scholar in the first Conversation, between the Tower Warden and the Teacher in the second Conversation, and between the Younger Man and the Older Man in the third Conversation.
Yet, in what sense or senses can Country Path Conversations be understood as Heidegger’s “Plato book”? Did he call it that just because it is written in the Platonic form of dialogue? Or, is the content as well as the form conceived with Plato in mind? In fact, as the present essay seeks to demonstrate in detail, Heidegger’s dialogical confrontation with Plato’s thought is in the background of his appropriation of the form of Platonic dialogue—and this is the case despite the fact that Plato is mentioned by name only twice in Country Path Conversations.23 Plato’s thought is at issue throughout the three Conversations, not only on account of the form of these texts but also on account of their content—which, indeed, calls into question the very division of matters into form and content.
In “The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking,” Heidegger claims that “throughout the history of philosophy, Plato’s thinking remains decisive in its sundry forms. Metaphysics is Platonism.”24 Heidegger’s dialogical confrontation (Auseinandersetzung) with Plato thus cannot but be in the background of Country Path Conversations insofar as all three Conversations attempt to think back before and out beyond metaphysics, that is, insofar as they attempt to articulate and engage in a “non-metaphysical thinking.”25 It is as if confronting and recovering from the metaphysics of Forms first set forth in the Platonic dialogues requires thinking once more in the form of dialogue. Indeed, Heidegger’s refusal to use the Greek-derived term Dialog, preferring instead the German Gespräch (57/37), is perhaps indicative of his marking a certain distance and diference from Plato precisely as he is apparently appropriating his literary form; the proximity and distance between Dialog and Gespräch would, as it were, echo the proximity and distance between what in Contributions to Philosophy26 is called the “first inception” of Western philosophy, which devolved into Platonic metaphysics, and the “other inception” of non-metaphysical thinking. It is as if Heidegger wants to intimate that he does not want to be misunderstood as simply mimicking the form of Plato’s thought; as if the content of his Country Path Conversations is meant to appropriate in a manner that at the same time breaks the mold of Plato’s paradigm.
Yet, let us proceed carefully. To begin with, there is a momentous question to which, it is fair to say, Heidegger does not always sufficiently attend: the question of what gets lost when the Platonic dialogues get reduced to statements of Platonic metaphysics. What gets lost when Plato gets translated into Platonism? John Sallis has led the way in raising and pursuing this momentous question.27 He has influenced a new generation of re-readers of Plato who have unearthed in the Platonic dialogues core motifs and moments of recoil from the very metaphysics that, when unleashed from these reins of recoil, set sail as Platonism in the Western tradition—or even as the Western tradition, if we include under its determinations the manners in which Platonism essentially informed various philosophies and theologies, and how it remains determinant even in its eventual overturning and thus, according to Heidegger, consummation in positivism and in what Nietzsche calls his “inverted Platonism.”28
Rereading Plato under the tutelage of Sallis’s careful and compelling hermeneutics, one discovers in the Platonic dialogues time and again, on the one hand, a conspicuous thrust toward metaphysics, a separation of “the sensible” (τὸ αἰσθητόν) from “the intelligible” (τὸ νοητόν)—a separation of the realm of changing particulars from the realm of eternal Ideas (ἰδέες) or Forms (εἶδη) and an ontological, epistemological, and axiological subordination of the former to the latter; on the other hand, one discovers time and again a recessive recoiling from this thrust, an undercutting or at least endless complication of this metaphysical division. We can perhaps best hear Plato’s own essentially ambivalent voice, not in an unwritten doctrine concealed behind the scenes, but rather precisely in the tension and interplay between this thrust and this recoil.
In an essay on the chōra (χώρα), and with his at times remarkable combination of clarity and nuance, Derrida explains the distinction, and the connection, between the Platonic dialogues and Platonism thus:
Should one henceforth forbid oneself to speak of the philosophy of Plato, of the ontology of Plato, or even of Platonism? Not at all, and there would undoubtedly be no error of principle in so speaking, merely an inevitable abstraction. Platonism would mean, in these conditions, the thesis or the theme which one has extracted by artifice, misprision, and abstraction from the text, torn out of the written fiction of “Plato.” … This will be called Platonism or the philosophy of Plato, which is neither arbitrary nor illegitimate, since a certain force of thetic abstraction at work in the heterogeneous text of Plato can recommend one to do so.29
Given the distinction as well as connection between Plato and Platonism, it will be important to bear in mind that Heidegger’s critique of Plato is, for the most part, a critique of Platonism. Heidegger himself is—at least at times—quite explicit about this. At the beginning of one of his clearest and most extensive treatments of Platonism, namely the last third of his first lecture course on Nietzsche (1936–37), he writes: “We say “Platonism,” and not Plato, because here we are dealing with the conception of knowledge that corresponds to that term, not by way of an original and detailed examination of Plato’s works, but only by setting in rough relief one particular aspect of his work.”30
Moreover, it is also crucial to bear in mind that, even on his own terms, Heidegger’s thought is not an anti-Platonism. In Country Path Conversations as elsewhere, Heidegger accuses Nietzsche of remaining stuck in the horizon of Platonism precisely by having merely overturned Platonism. While in his interpretation of art Nietzsche began to twist free of the paradigmatic metaphysical opposition of the sensible and the intelligible, “the idea of value led his thinking—at least in its form of expression—to fall back into metaphysics.”31 Heidegger finds especially problematic the positing of values by the “will to power,” for “the realm of a pure will to power . . . would have to remain only the counter-world to the Platonically thought world” (209/135). For Heidegger, “Any countermovement against metaphysics, and any mere turn away from it, always remains still caught in metaphysical representation” (188/122). This theme—namely that “by positing the opposite we just entangle ourselves yet further in a dependence on that from which we want to free ourselves” (154/100), that “everything revolutionary remains caught up in opposition. Opposition, however, is servitude” (51/33)—is repeated throughout Country Path Conversations.
The problem with willing to overcome metaphysics or nihilism is not just that it repeats the problem it is trying to solve—namely the “willing” that deines the subjectivity implicated in modern metaphysics and nihilism—but also that what Heidegger is searching for is not simply the binary opposite of the terms privileged in the hierarchies of metaphysics. Thus, he does not want the sensible over the intelligible; or immanence over transcendence; or even the historical over the transhistorical. Heidegger’s thought is just as critical of one-world empiricism and positivism and historicism as it is of two-world Platonism. And the “non-willing,” “Gelassenheit,” and “waiting” called for in Country Path Conversations is not a passivity as opposed to activity; it is beyond the domain of this opposition, which Heidegger calls “the domain of the will.”32 Heidegger does not think in terms of “anti-” but rather in terms of “non-”; his “non-metaphysical thinking” (187/122) is not antimetaphysics but rather a thinking otherwise.
And so, the nonmetaphysical thinking Heidegger is presaging would not simply be an anti-Platonism, much less an anti-Platonic thinking. Rather, this nonmetaphysical thinking would be a rethinking of what was thought as well as what was at issue yet remained unthought by Plato, what was said as well as what was at issue yet remained unsaid in the Platonic dialogues. We could even say that it would be a matter of rethinking and resaying what was said and thought about that which cannot be properly said or thought, about that which cannot be fully appropriated by our speaking and thinking because our speaking and thinking have always already been both appropriated and expropriated by it. In this sense—in the sense, that is, of that which allows us to make limited sense of everything precisely by disallowing us to make unlimited sense of anything, and especially of it—we could say that Heidegger is intimating another chorology.
Even though Plato is mentioned by name only twice in Country Path Conversations, he is perhaps the referent, or at least one of the referents, of a significant, if enigmatic (or perhaps in this case merely cryptic) allusion. In the second Conversation, the Tower Warden attributes the thought that “thinking is a feast or festival” (das Denken sei ein Fest) to “‘he who is far greater’ than both of us combined.”33 The other likely referent—and the ambiguity may well be intentional—is Hölderlin, whose poetic word is often, or perhaps always, concerned with the festival. Perhaps Heidegger is intimating that, like John the Baptist in conversation with the author of the Gospel of John, the Tower Warden in conversation with the Teacher is looking toward what is coming by alluding to the most futural (zu-küntige) of poets; and at the same time he is looking back at what has been and continues to essentially determine our historical being (das Gewesene) by way of alluding to Plato.
It is beyond the scope of this essay to discuss Heidegger’s relation to Hölderlin and his poetic word regarding “the wedding festival of humans and gods.”34 Although Hölderlin is mentioned by name only once in Country Path Conversations, after 1934 he remains Heidegger’s most intimate conversation partner, especially when he endeavors to think by way of “simple saying” rather than by dialogical confrontation with the metaphysical tradition. Nevertheless, here I wish to follow the implications of taking the reference to he who thought that “thinking is a festival” to be a reference to Plato.
Allusions to feasts and festivals abound in the Platonic dialogues, as does the idea that philosophical discourses and dialogues are in their own manner feasts and festivals. For example, near the beginning of the Republic, as Socrates begins his ascent back to the city, he engages in a feast of logos (see 352b, 354a) in which he dismantles Thrasymachus’s aggressively proclaimed thesis that justice is whatever is advantageous for the stronger; in other words, might makes right. Socrates does not attempt to convert by external force—by might—but rather to educate through the power of logos, a power he trusts inheres in his partner in dialogue. And so he tells Thrasymachus that this was a “feast furnished by you . . . now that you have become gentle with me and are no longer angry” (354a).35 A similar attempt to provide the occasion for such a conversion is foreshadowed at the beginning of the Gorgias, when Socrates arrives just ater the rhetorician had displayed his powers of persuasion. The dialogue opens with Callicles’s remark: “his is how they say you should take part in warfare and battle, Socrates.” Socrates responds by subtly shifting the metaphor for what should be taking place by means of logos: “What,” he asks, “have we arrived at the latter end of a feast, as the saying goes” (447a). The feast of logos suggested here would be a dialogue in which participants would not be willfully coerced into believing something but rather would be guided toward the light of reason that compels them not from without but from within. The noncoercive nature of dialogue is echoed in Heidegger’s suggestions that a conversation is not a conversation at all “if it wills something,”36 and that it is the course of the conversation, or the country path itself, that moves us (118/76, 202/131).
The images of a feast of logos to be found in the Platonic dialogues also include, of course, the entire setting of the Symposium, in which participants engage in a sober discussion about the most maddening and ecstatic of topics, namely love (ἔρως). In the first of the Country Path Conversations, it is suggested that thinking is “the festival of sobriety [Das Fest der Nüchternheit],”37 and Heidegger may be intimating his preference for Plato’s dialogical thinking over Hegel’s dialectic, which Hegel describes as “the Bacchanalian revel [der bacchantische Taumel] in which no member is not drunk.”38 In a true conversation, presumably, one is not to be coerced either by irrational intoxication or by the “cunning of reason” operated by a teleologically driven world-spirit.39
Two of the most remarkable references to the idea of a feast of logos to be found in the Platonic dialogues appear in the Timaeus (20c) and the Phaedrus (227b, 247a–b). And the fact that this expression occurs in these two dialogues in particular is worth pondering. Despite all the rigor and sobriety involved in the festival of thinking that is the Timaeus, or rather precisely on their account, it cannot evade a descent into “bastard reasoning [λογισμῷ τινι νόθῳ]” (Timaeus 52b) and dreamlike discourse when it comes time to speak of the chōra (χώρα). Whereas in the middle of the Republic we ind an ascent out of the cave all the way up toward that which is “beyond being,” in the middle of the Timaeus we find a descent down toward what is, as it were, beneath being: beneath even the privative form of being that characterizes the changing particulars.
The Timaeus is the only dialogue in which Plato discusses the chōra in the sense of the “third kind” (τρίτον γένος), which is meant to enable the interrelation between sensible particulars and intelligible Ideas (48e–52). To be sure, as a common word meaning, among other things, place, land, and country, the term chōra frequently occurs in other Platonic dialogues, such as throughout the Laws. It is noteworthy that chōra shares the ambiguity of our English word “country”—as well as the English and German words “land” and “Land”—in that it can mean both the countryside that lies outside the city walls and the entire political unit that surrounds and includes the city. In the Timaeus, the word chōra is often translated as “space,” and it is used, along with “receptacle” (ὑποδοχή), “nurse” (τιθήνη), “mother” (μητέρα), and “matrix” (ἐκμαγεῖον), in Plato’s attempts to speak of the “third kind” that enables the production or genesis of the sensible particulars as imperfect and changing images of the intelligible Ideas as perfect and eternal originals.
The thought of the chōra—or rather the necessity yet inability to think the chōra, to bestow meaning and form on that which receives meaning and form precisely because it has no meaning and form of its own—this unavoidable thought of the unthinkable, this name for the unnamable, problematizes the very opposition that establishes and maintains the metaphysics of Platonism. As Timaeus speaks and Socrates silently listens, Plato preemptively undermines Platonism by introducing, out of necessity, the thought of a non-intelligible matrix of reality that is neither sensible nor intelligible but is needed if sensible things are to be or become in some sense images of intelligible Ideas.
In a key passage in his remarkable book on this topic, Chorology, Sallis writes:
Thus, it is the χώρα that makes possible the doubling of being in an image, the duplicity of being. … But then, the very move that displaces or limits the twofold, namely, the introduction of the third kind, is at the same time what establishes the very possibility of the twofold, of the doubling of being in an image. … If one were to take metaphysics to be constituted precisely by the governance of that twofold, then the chorology could be said to bring both the founding of metaphysics and its displacement, both at once. Originating metaphysics would have been exposing it to the abyss, to the abysmal χώρα, which is both origin and abyss, both at the same time. Then one could say—with the requisite reservations—that the beginning of metaphysics will have been already the end of metaphysics.40
The aim of the present essay is to demonstrate how Heidegger’s later thought can be understood as a radical postmetaphysical rethinking of Plato’s pre- or proto-metaphysical chōra. Although Sallis has in many respects cleared the way for such an interpretation, he has not himself pursued it, at least not in such terms. In fact, he writes: “In Heidegger’s own brief discussions of χώρα, which conflate χώρα with τόπος and link Platonism to the transformation of the essence of place into space defined as extension, there is little to suggest any originary engagement with the Platonic discourse on the χώρα.”41 However, I think we can clearly trace Heidegger’s thinking of being in terms of “the open-region” (die Gegnet) in Country Path Conversations back to the Greek, if not specifically Platonic, notion of chōra.
Although chōra is not mentioned in Country Path Conversations, it is in the background—indeed, one is tempted to say that it is the background that is at issue. The chōra is rethought as the “region of all regions”42 or “open-region” that is spoken of as the “open and yet veiled expanse” (206/132). Reading Country Path Conversations as developing a postmetaphysical chorology is supported by Heidegger’s references to chōra in at least two previous texts. The first occurs in a parenthetical remark in Introduction to Metaphysics (a remark not read but purportedly written in 1935 and first published in 1953). Before the parenthetical remark, Heidegger says that the “Greeks have no word for ‘space.’ This is no accident, for they do not experience the spatial according to extensio but instead according to place (τόπος) as χώρα, which means neither place nor space but what is taken up and occupied by what stands there. The place belongs to the thing itself.”43 In other words, the modern and specifically Newtonian idea of space as a homogeneous container is foreign to the Greek understanding of a mutual belonging of place and thing. Heidegger says that the transition from thing-specific places to neutral space is portended, however, in Plato’s doctrine of the chōra—at least, we should interject, in the way in which this doctrine gets taken up by Aristotle and the ensuing tradition. Heidegger paraphrases and then quotes in Greek a key passage from the Timaeus, according to which the chōra must be “bare of all manners of outward appearance [Aussehen, Heidegger’s translation of Plato’s εἶδος or ἰδέα]” so that it may receive the imprint of any of these forms without interference or imposition of an outward look of its own. In the parenthetical remark, Heidegger then suggests that “Platonic philosophy—that is, the interpretation of being as ἰδέα—prepared the transfiguration of place (τόπος) and of χώρα, the essence of which we have barely grasped, into ‘space’ defined by extension.”44 Insofar as Plato’s chōra lends itself to being interpreted as spatially extended matter, into which the Demiurge as Craftsman would stamp the unities of eternal and perfect Ideas into the pluralities of changing and imperfect particulars, it plays an inceptual role in the development of the metaphysics of production. It has been the modern destiny of the history of this metaphysics to understand space as extension in terms of a mathematical grid through which things are reduced to calculable points of mass-energy.
Yet, in the parenthetical remark, Heidegger also says that we have scarcely begun to grasp the essence of chōra, and he offers a brief yet significant indication of how we may begin to do this: “Could not χώρα mean: that which removes itself from every particular [das Sichabsonderde von jedem Besonderen], that which gets out of the way [das Ausweichende], that which in this manner admits [zuläßt] and ‘makes place’ [Platz macht] precisely for another?”45 Heidegger develops this brief remark—this hint of another chorology—in his lectures on “Heraclitus’ Doctrine of Logos” in the summer semester of 1944.46 here he writes: “The χώρα is the self-opening expanse which comes to encounter [Die χώρα ist die sich öffnende, entgegenkommende Weite].”47 He translates chōra as “the region” (die Gegend) and even makes reference to the Tirolian dialect form of this word, Gegnet, which features prominently in the first of the Country Path Conversations written soon thereafter.
The context in which Heidegger begins to develop what I am calling his “other chorology” in the 1944 lectures is his translation and interpretation of Heraclitus’s fragment 108: ὁκόσων λόγους ἤκουσα οὐδεὶς ἀφικνεῖται ἐς τοῦτο ὥστε γινώσκειν ὅ τι σοφόν ἐστι, πάντων κεχωρισμένον. Richard McKirahan translates this fragment as follows: “Of all those whose accounts [λόγοι] I have heard, no one reaches the point of recognizing that that which is wise is set apart from all.”48 Heidegger takes issue with similar German translations and gives the following rendering: “Of the many λόγοι I have (already) heard, none reaches the point of familiarity with this: that what is properly to be known in relation to all beings essentially unfolds from out of its (own) region [Sovieler λόγοι ich (schon) vernommen habe, keiner gelangt dorthin, von wo aus er vertraut is damit, daß das eigentlich Zuwissende im Bezug auf alles Seiende aus seiner (eigenen) Gegend west].”49 Crucial here is Heidegger’s rendering of πάντων κεχωρισμένον as “im Bezug auf alles Seiende aus seiner (eigenen) Gegend west” rather than as “von alles abgesondert, abgetrennt, ab-gelöst, ab-solutum.”50 Such metaphysical and theological misunderstandings of what Heraclitus means by logos (λόγος)—misunderstandings Heidegger says can be found in attempts to link Heraclitus’s logos to Christ as logos in the opening lines of the Gospel of John—founder precisely insofar as they fail to see the sense of chōra implied in kechōrismenon. It is true that “κεχωρισμένον etymologically belongs to χωρίζω, χωρίζειν, which one translates as to divide, remove, set aside” (334). But in our exclusive attention to the setting apart of one thing from another, we forget what lies at the basis of such setting apart (was dem zugrunde liegt). What gets lost in the translations of kechōrismenon as abgesondert, abgetrennt, and so forth is precisely the chōra that underlies any chōrizein, any separation or articulation of the diferences between phenomena. hat this chōra gets forgotten, overlooked, is presumably because it does not present itself as an object, as a Gegenstand; it is, says Heidegger, “Das Gegenstandlose der Gegend,” “the objectlessness of the region” (336). This is why, as Heraclitus says, no one recognizes it. In our exclusive attention to beings, we overlook being as the chōra that lets them be.
Heidegger interprets the chōra in this context as “the surrounding region, the given environs, which gives place to a sojourn [die Umgebung, die umgebende Umgegend, die einen Aufenthalt einräumt und gewährt].”51 He relates it back to the verb χάω (whence also χάος), which means to yawn, to gape, to open oneself up. Heidegger then says: “ἡ χώρα as the given surroundings is thus ‘the region’ [ἡ χώρα als die umgebende Umgegend ist dann »die Gegend«]” (335).
In his 1944 lectures on Heraclitus’s doctrine of logos (λόγος), which we have been examining, Heidegger understands chōra as being and as logos. He understands logos here in the same manner he does in the third text of Country Path Conversations, namely as the all-gathering or “the gathering toward the originally all-unifying One,”52 the One that can let things be in their diferences precisely as it holds them together; for “διαίρεσις, the Greeks well knew, is still and is already σύνθεσις.”53 Heidegger takes logos to be the referent of “that which is to be known” in Heraclitus’s fragment 108, and his interpretation of the fragment bears the following fruit. “he Λόγος is as λόγος πάντων κεχωρισμένον: the all-surrounding region which, in relation to the whole of beings, opens itself for everything and comes to encounter everything [die alles umgebende, für alles sich öffnende und allem sich entgegnende Gegend]: the present [Gegenwart] into which each and every thing is gathered and sheltered; from out of it—out of the region as such—each thing emerges and receives its arising and its perishing, its appearing and its disappearing.”54
The following year, Heidegger develops this thought in Country Path Conversations, where of the open-region (die Gegnet) it is said: “he open-region is the abiding expanse which, gathering all, opens itself so that in it the open is held and halted, letting each thing arise in its resting.”55 And: “his open seems to me to be something like a region, by means of whose enchantment everything which belongs to it returns to that in which it rests” (112/73). Heidegger also adds that, precisely on account of its radical openness, “the open-region [as such] draws itself back, goes away from us [uns entgeht], rather than coming to encounter us [uns entgegenkommt]” (114/74). The “horizon” is said to be the side of the open-region that comes to encounter us, “the side turned toward us of [this] surrounding open” (112/72). The horizon is a delimitation of the open-region, a delimited openness. The delimitation of a horizon within the open-region of being is an event of truth as ἀλήθεια, as Lichtung.
Thus, Heidegger’s development of the thought of the chōra as Gegend or Gegnet is a development of his understanding of the truth of being as an event of un-concealment, as the clearing (die Lichtung), or as Da-sein, as long as we no longer understand the latter primarily in terms of the projection of the meaning of being on the part of the human. In his comments in the 1969 Seminar in Le Thor, Heidegger says that in order to counter the Sartrean misconception of “project” (Entwurf) as a performance of human subjectivity, “the thinking after Being and Time replaced the expression “meaning of being” with “truth of being.” And, in order to avoid any falsification of the sense of truth, in order to exclude its being understood as correctness, “truth of being” was explained by “locality of being [Ortschat des Seins]”—truth as place-hood [Örtlichkeit] of being. his already presupposes, however, an understanding of the place-being [Ortseins] of place. Hence the expression topology of beyng [Topologie des Seyns] …”56 In and after Contributions to Philosophy,57 Heidegger often, though not always, uses the archaic spelling of Sein (being), Seyn (beyng), to indicate the appropriating event (Ereignis) that is more originary than the metaphysical distinction between being as beingness (Seiendheit, whatness, quidditas, ἰδέα) and beings (Seiende). Heidegger’s “topology of beyng” is thus his attempt to think beyond the ontological diference that founds metaphysics by thinking back before it, by stepping back to that region—or chōra—that undergirds and undercuts it, enabling its construction, deconstruction, and, perhaps, transmutation.58
Yet, we might ask, is the open-region—the chōra—of beyng a topos, an Ort? In his 1944 lectures on Heraclitus, Heidegger in fact marks a clear and important distinction between chōra and topos, Gegend and Ort, region and place or location.
The place or location [Ort] is always in a region [Gegend] and has a given environs [Umgebung] around it which comes out of the surrounding-region [Umgegend]. . . . This open expanse, however, is not the emptiness of a container, but rather an open that holds back, holds much in reserve, and, in its peculiar manner, of itself delimits itself. These limits, moreover, are themselves region-like and that means expansive and revealing. Because the region that can be understood in this way in each case surrounds and grants locations [Orte], and so first allows the arrangement and allocation of location, it is in a certain regard that which is essential [das Wesenhate] to a location, its locality [Ortschat].59
In this sense, we can understand Heidegger’s “topology of beyng” as an attempt to develop an understanding of the place-being of place, where place is not simply a spatial location but is the qualitative space of intelligibility and perceivability that opens up with an event of unconcealment. The topology of beyng is none other than Heidegger’s understanding of alētheia as clearing.
Yet, insofar as the clearing is an opening in a forest, and if we were to name the cleared space the Da (there) in the sense of the delimited openness of a horizon, we need a name for the surrounding forest itself, that is, for the mystery of the open-region as the “concealed essence of truth” that withdraws in any event of unconcealment; we need a name for the lēthē that remains held back in the event of alētheia. If topos names a delimited place, we need a name for the open-region in which the openings of such places take place. We need a name for the open-region that surrounds all delimited and therefore disclosive topoi and withdraws from them precisely in the radicality of its unlimited openness. hat name could be, in Greek, chōra. And so, Heidegger could have spoken not of a “topology of beyng,” but rather, in a more expansive sense—in the sense of an expanse that both holds within itself and withholds itself from the topoi of sense in which we reside60—he could have spoken of a chorology of beyng.
Having gotten a sense of the other chorology entailed in Heidegger’s conception of the other inception of postmetaphysical thinking, it remains for us to examine more closely how it relates to the Platonic pre- or proto-metaphysical chorology. The Platonic chorology haunts the ontology of Platonism as a necessary and yet necessarily “bastard reasoning” that its dualistic metaphysical structure requires and yet cannot accommodate; in addition to being (Ideas) and becoming (particulars), there must be a “third kind” of thing, namely the chōra: the material-spatial receptical of the Ideas that makes the individuation and generation of particulars possible (Timaeus 47e–53c). In the middle of Plato’s Timaeus, the explication of the genesis and structure of the world thus finds it necessary to delve into a chorology in its attempt to return to the beginning and retell this cosmogenic tale from the ground up. Yet this ground turns out to be quicksand on which Platonism either founders or builds upon only by covering it up—for example, with the translation of the χώρα into the technical concept of ὕλη.61 Moreover, even if Aristotle’s hylomorphism subordinated matter to form, potentiality (δύναμις) to actuality (ενέργεια), it was only through medieval theology and modern metaphysics that matter gets stripped of its inherent dynamic potentiality and is treated as a merely passive recipient of forms imposed upon it by a transcendent or transcendental subject.
Although the Timaeus first introduces the chōra in passive terms as a “receptacle,” as though it were a shapeless malleable material that is given form by being stamped with the mold of the Ideas, it immediately adds to this the more ambiguous metaphor of “nurse” and connects the chōra to the primal movement of the morphological exchange among the elements (Timaeus 49a–d). It later speaks of the chōra as a dynamic, if still disordered, “winnowing basket” whose shaking movement separates the elements into different regions of space in advance of their arrangement into an ordered cosmos by God (Timaeus 52d–53b). Sallis writes that “the χώρα is a receptacle filled in the beginning with indeterminate powers in flux; it is the mother from whom, then, the elements come to be born.”62 Yet the subsequent reduction of the chōra to merely passive matter lays the productionist metaphysical ground for the technological reduction of beings to “standing-reserve” (Bestand) for the extraction of material resources and limitlessly transferable energy.63
Heidegger’s postmetaphysical and posttechnological chorology attempts to “step back” behind this “history of being”—as the history of the devolution of Platonist metaphysics into the technological worldview—to the always self-concealing at the same time as self-revealing event of unconcealment. In effect, Heidegger rethinks the chōra as the open-region (Gegnet) of beyng (Seyn), and the orientation of his thinking is an avowedly enigmatic “going into nearness to farness,” that is to say, an ek-static opening to the mystery of the forest of concealment that surrounds the horizonally delimited clearings of the sensible and intelligible worlds in which we in-statically dwell.64
It is as if, as it were, Plato’s Divided Line, the linearity of which sustains the metaphysical oppositions of Platonism, is bent back around such that the “beyond being” (ἐπέκεινα τῆς οὐσίας) (Republic 509b) of the Good can no longer be clearly distinguished from the “before being” of the chōra, thus closing the space of metaphysics and clearing the way for a nonmetaphysical thinking grounded, or rather ungrounded, in another chorology.65
Heidegger’s nonmetaphysical thinking does not attempt to get beyond the chōra but rather to thoughtfully dwell within it. Country Path Conversations thematizes and enacts a thinking that understanding itself as a “going into nearness”66 to “the unprethinkable” (das Unvordenkliche) (146/95, 231/150), to “the enigmatic” (30–32/19–20, 81/51, 138/89, 213/138, 218/141) that cannot be captured in the horizons of thought because it is the open-region in which those horizons are themselves formed. As the Guide says in the first Conversation: “Insofar as we are those who think, we come into the nearness of the world [later emended to “the open-region”], yet, due to such nearness, we at the same time remain far from it; although this remaining is also a return in the sense of a turning to enter into releasement.”67
Heidegger’s chorology develops out of his turn from a transcendental-horizonal projection of world toward an indwelling releasement to the open-region.68 This turn involves a return to nature, in the sense that human horizons are formed in response to the wider expanse of nature—as long as we understand “nature” not in the sense of one region of beings (i.e., as the collection of natural versus artificial or supernatural beings), but, to begin with, in the sense of what for Heidegger was the original Greek word for being, φύσις. As we have seen, one of the meanings of the Greek word chōra is country or countryside, as in what lies beyond the city walls and as what surrounds and thus includes the city. This sense presumably informs Heidegger’s retrieval of the term and his translation of it as Gegend and Gegnet in the context of his retrieval of Heraclitus’s sense of the originary belonging together of physis and logos.
The chōra in both Platonism—which, following Aristotle, reduces the chōra to hyle (matter)—and in Heidegger is connected to “nature” (φύσις, Natur). Yet everything depends on how we understand “nature.” To make a long story short: whereas the productionist metaphysics of Platonism rooted φύσις in τέχνη, Heidegger seeks to return technē to its original rootedness in physis.69 This originary understanding of physis would precede the subordination of physis to the model of technē, beginning with the image of a divine craftsman who imprints the Forms on the chōra, analogous to the manner in which a human craftsman shapes amorphous matter according to his design or a design he receives through inspiration from a transcendent source—in any case, a design foreign to the matter being shaped. This productionist model ultimately leads to the technological reduction of nature to natural resources, to standing-reserves for human projects by way of passing through the modern metaphysics of transcendental subjectivity, according to which such subjectivity constitutes objects by imposing its forms of intuition and categories of understanding on things. Physis becomes the nature of natural science by way of being subjected to objectification; scientific objects are formed when phenomena are constrained to show themselves according to the grid of “mathematical projection.” By going back to the Presocratics, Heidegger endeavors to recover an originary sense of physis, an experience of nature not as one region of beings, much less a region that is all but deprived of being, but rather as beyng itself.
The development of Heidegger’s attempt to recover a more originary sense of physis goes hand in hand with the development of his critique of technology—developments that begin precisely around the time of his failed rectorship and his turn from a voluntaristic embrace of Hitler’s politics to a thoughtful dialogue with the poetry of Hölderlin, for whom nature was “the holy”—is certainly relevant. Since the publication of Contributions to Philosophy (GA 65), with its critique of Machenschaft, and of GA 90, which collects Heidegger’s previously unpublished notes on Ernst Jünger from 1934 to 1954, the development of Heidegger’s critique of technology has become more transparent. Particularly striking in this context is the second note in GA 90, which reads: “he interpretation of beings as a whole from and according to the Old Testament’s creation-plan [Schöpfungsplan] and the planetary domination of the unconditional work-plan [Arbeitsplan] of the worker are metaphysically the same—both are carried and supported by the correspondingly reinterpreted homogenizing of ancient Platonic-Aristotelian metaphysics and its modern transmutation [Abwandlung].”70
Hence, Heidegger’s Auseinandersetzung with modern technology is a confrontation with the theological as well as metaphysical legacy of Platonism. Insofar as Plato’s chōra gets translated into hyle, and hyle comes to be understood as a merely passive material receptacle for the imprint of the Ideas, the Timaeus’ demiurge (δημιουργός) becomes the craftsman who stands at the inception of the metaphysics of production. Analogously, in the beginning of Genesis the Creator God of the biblical tradition fashions an ordered cosmos out of a primeval watery chaos. More than a millennium later, Christian theologians reinterpret this creationist cosmogony in terms of the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo, a doctrine that dispenses with the chōra or reduces it to a nihil negativum. In the modern metaphysics of “transcendental-horizonal representation,” it is human subjectivity that projects the a priori categories of understanding through which things can show themselves only by way of being turned into objects of representation. This transcendental “thinking as willing” then devolves into the technological “human attack on nature”71 that is problematized in Heidegger’s Country Path Conversations.
For Heidegger, the chōra, rethought as the Gegnet or open-region, is not a chaotic material or passive receptacle of eternal Ideas but rather the “concealed essence of truth” that “requires the human” in order to reveal itself in always finite ways.72 It is the “abiding expanse” in which humans and things belong, in which they are allowed to rest in themselves. It is the open-region in which finite horizons are formed, horizons through which things can come to be known by humans, and potentially known as they show themselves from themselves rather than as they are reduced to representational objects or technological standing-reserve.
At the inception of Platonic metaphysics, there occurred, according to Heidegger, a transformation in the essence of truth. In “Plato’s Doctrine of Truth” (1931–32, 1940), Heidegger claims that “what remains unsaid in Plato’s thinking is “a change in the determination of the essence of truth,” namely a change from an understanding of truth as ἀλήθεια, as the unconcealment or unhiddenness of beings, to truth as the correctness (ὀρθότης) of human apprehension and assertion about beings.73 With the determination of the being of beings as the Ideas, the locus of truth changes; truth is no longer the self-showing of things in unconcealment, it is the correspondence or agreement (ὁμοίωσις) of human representations and linguistic propositions to the Idea, the “outward look” (εἶδος), which in turn determines the being of a being from above, as it were. Natural things are given form by resembling something supernatural. They cannot show themselves in an intelligible manner from themselves; to make sense they must receive the imprint of a look—an eidos—from something supersensible that transcends them.
This change in the transformation of the essence and locus of truth accompanies a transformation of the essence and locus of nature, of φύσις. In this case, the older conception of physis is not replaced but rather a new, metaphysical sense of physis comes to be used alongside it. Physis derives from the verb φύειν, “to grow, to appear.” Heidegger deines the original meaning of physis as “what emerges from itself (for example, the emergence, the blossoming, of a rose), the unfolding that opens itself up, the coming-into-appearance in such unfolding, and holding itself and persisting in appearance—in short, the emerging-abiding-sway [das aufgehend-verweilende Walten].”74 For Plato, however, for a thing to appear as this or that, it must participate in an eternal and immaterial Idea that transcends its temporal and material becoming, a metaphysical essence that shapes its physical existence.
The term “metaphysics,” to be sure, is a later invention; it was first used to designate the untitled book that Aristotle wrote ater his Physics on “first philosophy,” and only later became used to refer to what lies “beyond physical things” (μετὰ τὰ φυσικά). Rather than inventing the word “metaphysics” to speak of the Ideas, Plato gave the word physis a second meaning. This ambiguity is still evident today in the fact that we use the word “nature” to refer either to the essences of things or to things that are untouched by human artifice. The English word “nature” derives from the Latin nasci, “to be born,” which in turn stems from the Proto-Indo-European root gene-, from which also come “genesis” and “generation.” Sometimes the two senses of “nature” are understood to be related insofar as the qualities something is born with are thought to be those that are essential to it. Yet, for example, when someone asks about the nature of language or the nature of God, they are generally not asking about their genesis, and may in fact be asking about their timeless essences.
We owe this second, metaphysical sense of “nature” as “essence” to the new sense of physis formulated in what Socrates calls—in his autobiographical account in the Phaedo of how he became, as it were, a Platonic rather than a natural philosopher—his “second sailing” (Phaedo 99c–d). A “second sailing” (δεύτερος πλοῦς) “is what sailors do when in the absence of wind they take to the oars.”75 In this case, when Socrates’s youthful attempts to look for natural causes of things ended up raising aporetic questions—such as about the peculiar nonphysical nature of numbers—that called for a different kind of inquiry, he redirected his search toward another, supernatural kind of cause of what makes things the things that they are. In Book 10 of Plato’s Laws, the Athenian criticizes naturalistic explanations of things, saying: “Why, by nature [φύσιν] they mean what was there to begin with, but if we can say that soul [ψυχή] came first … it will be perfectly true to say that it is the existence of soul which is most eminently natural [διαφερόντως φύσει]” (Laws 892c). What the Athenian calls psychē here is akin to Anaxagoras’s idea of nous, the idea that set the course for Socrates’s second sailing. Socrates says that he was inspired when he heard someone reading a book by Anaxagoras “which said that is it νοῦς that sets all in order and causes all things” (Phaedo 97b–c). Although he was disappointed to ind that Anaxagoras did not actually employ nous to explain the causes of things but rather, like others, gave naturalistic explanations based on the elements, Socrates himself set about to employ the rational soul or intellect rather than the senses to understand why things are as they are.
In other words, or rather in the now ambiguous use of the same word, we could say that Socrates turned away from “nature” in order to understand the “nature” of things. In effect, his second sailing launches what might be called the project of Platonism. Sallis deftly explains this as
a tendency (not foreign to Platonic texts [in a footnote Sallis sketches the polysemous uses of the term φύσις in the Timaeus]) to let the word nature undergo a decisive semantic shit: from designating the domain of natural things (as presented through the senses), it comes to signify what something or someone is. If one were simply to follow this tendency, then it could be said that by looking into nature (in the first sense) Socrates came to a certain insight into his own nature (in the second sense). Then the discourse could expand into an account of the nature of things and even of the nature of nature. And yet, with this shit, one would have posited a nature beyond nature, dividing nature against itself.76
It would not be an exaggeration to say that this ontological as well as semantic split of “nature” into two distinct and even opposing domains and meanings—a split which inscribed, in a single yet ambiguous word, the two-world metaphysics of Platonism—henceforth determined the history of Western philosophy as a history of metaphysics.
In commenting on Charles Scott’s critique of the notion of “nature” as a metaphysical essence that would grant us knowledge of a thing’s generic qualities at the expense of blinding us to its singularity, Sallis writes of the “doubling of nature” that gave rise to Platonism and the entire Western tradition of metaphysics as follows:
The fact that the word “nature” commonly has this double sense in the modern European languages, that it can signify both the manifold of natural things and the essence of something, even of something not natural—as when one speaks of the nature of art, for instance—attests to the force and consistency with which philosophy has determined nature precisely by projecting it beyond itself, by positing a nature beyond nature. In interrupting and dismantling this project, philosophy thus turns critically, deconstructively, against itself.77
It was Plato who inaugurated the tradition of metaphysics, with its turn away from natural things (existents) and toward their natures (essences). And yet, we need to remind ourselves again that there is much more going on in the Platonic dialogues than the inauguration of Platonist metaphysics. To begin with, even before the beginning, Plato writes of the chōra as “the nature [φύσις] that receives all bodies” (Timaeus 50b).78 In Plato’s chorology, one could say, a third kind of nature is from the beginning shown to be a necessary supplement to the doubling of nature into particulars and Ideas. Plato’s chorology deconstructs, at the same time as it inaugurates, metaphysics.
In his postmetaphysical rereading of the pre- as well as protometaphysical ambivalences in the Platonic dialogues, Sallis points out that Socrates’s second sailing does not simply set a course toward the metaphysical Ideas but rather is a turn to logoi, to human speech as the mediator between the two sense of nature.79 Language is the psychophysical medium through which the things we perceive with our bodily senses are allowed to make meaningful sense to our minds. And, at least as long as we remain embodied beings bound to the earth, language is the medium though which we (always imperfectly) attain some idea of the Ideas that determine the nature of natural as well as artificial things. Sallis reminds us of the irreducibly dialogical nature of Plato’s texts, and the questions whether Plato’s understanding of dialogue is not in fact much closer to Heidegger’s understanding of the “gathering of language” that takes place in a genuine Gespräch (conversation)—in which language is allowed to speak (die Sprache spricht) and humans speak only insofar as they respond (entspricht) to this speaking of language—than Heidegger was willing or able to acknowledge.80
There is much more to be said about language. For example, one could examine the resonances, as well as the dissonances, between, on the one hand, the manner in which logos mediates the intelligible and sensible realms in Plato’s dialogues and, on the other hand, Heidegger’s placement of language as the “dimension” (Dimension) of “dif-ference” (Unter-schied) and intimacy (Innigkeit) that holds together while holding apart the “twofold” (Zwiefalt) of world and things.81 One could further attend to the way in which Sallis explores the similarities and relation between language and imagination in attending to the images of art alongside, or sometimes interweaving with, the spoken and sung (as well as written) word—and both in relation to the presentations of the phenomena of nature, beginning with what Sallis calls “the elementals.”82 One might also attend to Julia Kristeva’s explicit use of the term chōra to indicate the field of prelinguistic semiotic rhythms produced by the psychosomatic drives, which both generate and disrupt the symbolic systems of meaning in which we dwell as conscious subjects.83
But here let us keep our focus on Plato. In order to lay the groundwork, as it were, for logos as the mediator between the sensible particulars and intelligible Ideas, the chorology in the Timaeus is, as it were, Plato’s original attempt both to distinguish between and to mediate the two senses of physis. The chōra is a “third kind,” different in kind than either the physical generation (γένεσις) of the things of “nature” or the metaphysical Ideas that impart an essential “nature” to those things.
We have seen how Plato’s chorology is more of an abyssal quicksand than a solid ground for the construction of Platonist metaphysics, a quicksand that was covered over and dissimulated in the translation of chōra into matter and into space. Still, even if we restore the enigmatic chorology to its rightful place in the Platonic text, and even if we let this expose the tension between a thrust toward, and a recoil from, metaphysics in our rereading of the Platonic text, where does this leave physis in the “first sailing” sense of “nature”—physis in the physical sense of the realm of things we can perceive with our bodily senses? Even if we attend to the recoiling moments in the Platonic dialogues that remind us that the mortal coil of human life and thought is bound to nature, does this alter their axiomatic orientation toward the supernatural? To pursue this question, let us turn to the Phaedrus, a prominent Platonic dialogue that speaks of two senses of a feast of logos.84
The centerpiece of this dialogue, Socrates’s second speech, famously inscribes the doctrines of Platonist metaphysics with its mythical account of the tripartite soul consisting of two horses and a driver. This soul occasionally manages to grow wings and ascend to where the driver can glimpse the realm of the intelligible Ideas in the “place beyond the heavens” (ὑπερουράνιος τόπος) (Phaedrus 247c). For the most part, however, the driver, as the “best part of the soul” is alienated from this true home since, on account of the bad horse, it falls back into embodiment in the physical world.
The dialogue takes place between Socrates and Phaedrus. The latter recites a speech on love (ἔρως) by Lysias, who is said to have been in Athens the day before. Socrates comments, ironically, “No doubt Lysias was giving the company a feast of logos” (Phaedrus 227b). In order to convert Phaedrus away from understanding love as oriented toward physical pleasure to Socrates’s own understanding of love as the philosophical ascent toward the metaphysical Ideas, that is, toward the true “feast” (δαίτη) or “banquet” (θοίνη) of the procession of the gods outside the rim of the celestial sphere (247a–b), he follows Phaedrus on a “walk outside the city walls” into the countryside. They wade barefoot across a stream and then sit and talk at a beautiful shady spot under a plane tree.
The Phaedrus stands out among the Platonic dialogues in that it takes place on an excursion outside of the city walls. However, having been lured out into the country by Phaedrus, it is Socrates’s aim to lead Phaedrus back across the stream and thus return him to the city. Sallis reminds us that “the Republic concludes with the task of making a ‘good crossing of the river [Λήθη]’ (621c),” signifying “the ascent by which the soul returns from Hades to another life on earth.”85 Of course, the underworld of Hades—into which a lover not of wisdom but of the body (φιλοσώματος, Phaedo 68c) would fall—must be distinguished from the “place beyond the heavens” toward which earthling philosophers aspire on their upward journey. The Republic begins with a downward excursion out of the city, or rather to the outer limits of the city, namely to Piraeus, the harbor of Athens, where the city meets the open sea and where citizens mingle with foreigners. Ater attending the festival of Bendis, a goddess of the underworld, Socrates begins his ascent back to the city by engaging in a different kind of festival, the feast of logos with Thrasymachus referred to earlier (Republic 352b, 354a). In both cases, leaving the city is analogous to descending toward a realm of nature that is less than being, whereas returning to the city is viewed as an ascent on the upward journey toward the true being of the Ideas and ultimately toward the divine Good beyond being.
To be sure, just as there are gods and goddesses of the underworld, divinities can be found in the countryside as well. In the Phaedrus, when they reach the spot in the countryside, Socrates enthusiastically praises the natural scenery, and surmises that the stream is “consecrated to Achelous and some of the nymphs.” Achelous is the chief river god, signaling the importance of the stream and, presumably, of making a good crossing of it back to the city. At the end of the dialogue, Socrates suggests that, before making their way back to the city, they first “offer a prayer to the divinities here.” He then gives this prayer: “Dear Pan, and all ye other gods that dwell in this place, grant that I may become fair within, and that such outward things as I have may not war against the spirit within me” (Phaedrus 279b). Pan is a musician and also, as Socrates says elsewhere, “either logos or the brother of logos,”86 suggesting perhaps that he represents the capacity for a certain kind of divine inspiration to unfold into logos. Pan is a god of music who is part man and part animal, and so perhaps he can also help humans achieve the virtue of moderation needed so that the desires of the body do not impede the desires of the spirit: in particular, the spiritual love for beauty and hence for truth that will bring humans from the countryside back to the city and, ultimately, back to their true home in the realm above the heavens.
It should be pointed out that, here as elsewhere, Plato is rewriting traditional accounts of the gods so as to put these myths at the service of philosophy.87 Pan is traditionally portrayed as driving humans into an irrational frenzy with his music, and the nymphs or local nature deities are associated with musical and sexual seduction and abduction. Plato’s Phaedrus is taming and reorienting, as it were, these divine powers of madness and ecstasy, reinterpreting them as inspiring forces of that beneficial “divine madness” that leads humans toward that realm above the heavens where they may feast on the real nourishment of the soul: the vision of the Ideas.
When first reaching the spot in the countryside, Socrates also mentions “the shrill summery music of the cicada choir” (Phaedrus 230c), and he later retells the myth of the cicadas. In its original pre-Platonic version, this myth can be understood as a warning against seduction by the Muses. When the Muses came into existence there was a race of humans who were “so thrilled by pleasure that they went on singing, and quite forgot to eat and drink until they actually died without noticing it” (259c). The first element of the Platonic reinterpretation of the myth is that, if we orient our love only toward pleasure, we will fail to take any part in that divine banquet of logos that is the true aim and sustenance of a properly human life.
Yet Socrates, in his second speech, is not simply calling on us to choose the saneness of reason over the madness of love but rather to engage in a kind of divine madness, a philosophical love that leads through earthly beauty upward toward the intelligible realm above the heavens. The cicadas, who are said to report back to the Muses, are accordingly interpreted as divine messengers who inspire us (Phaedrus 262d), and whose incessant singing reminds us to stay on this philo-sophical—or erotico-sophical—path to meta-physical wisdom and not get sidetracked by pursuing only physical pleasure. Speciically, “to the eldest, Calliope, and to her next sister, Urania, they tell of those who live a life of philosophy and so do honor to the music of these two Muses whose theme is the heavens and all the story of gods and men, and whose song is the noblest of them all” (259d tm). In other words, the cicadas are reinterpreted as divine messengers sent to the countryside to remind us that our true home is not in the countryside. The key point of Socrates’ speech is that beauty is the shining of the supersensible in the sensible; it thus bridges the gap and leads us on our erotic path upwards from the country to the city and ultimately back to the true home of the highest part of our souls in that “place beyond the heavens.”
Of course, in this Platonic dialogue it is hardly the case either that Phaedrus himself is truly trying to return to the country, or that Socrates thinks humans should stay walled up in the city. Phaedrus, ater all, wants to use the countryside for an invigorating walk to refresh himself and in order to practice reciting the speech that he is concealing under his cloak. As Sallis writes in Being and Logos, one meaning of Socrates’s question that opens the dialogue (“Phaedrus, my friend, where do you come from and where are you going?”) and Phaedrus’s answer (that he has come from listening to a speech by Lysias and going for a walk in the country) is that “men are formed in the city—this is where they come from—and they are formed especially by the speeches they hear in the city.” Even when we go out into the countryside, it remains questionable: “Do men really go outside the city? Do they really succeed in getting beyond the walls?”88 Or do they always see and experience the countryside through city speeches? Do they always only see φύσις through the framework of τέχνη—for example, as the work of a divine craftsman, as creatures great and small, or as a scenic landscape enframed as a vacation destination?
Socrates, for his part, “is beyond the city precisely by virtue of his way of being in the city.”89 As recounted in the Apology, Socrates understands himself as a git to the city from God, called Apollo or Zeus (Apology 23b, 28e, 29d, 33c, 35d). “Socrates’ way of being in the city (as gadfly), his specific mode of comportment to the men in the city (questioning), is not determined by the city nor by Socrates’ ‘genetic’ bond to the city; it is determined, rather, by something which transcends the walls of Athens and of every particular city.”90 Nevertheless, what transcends the city is, for Socrates, not the countryside; it is not something natural. It is not nature but rather something divinely supernatural. The city lies between the countryside and the “place beyond the heavens” (ὑπερουράνιος τόπος) (Phaedrus 247c), just as humans, as combinations of body and soul, dwell between the visible world and the “intelligible realm” (νοητόν τόπον) (Republic 6.508b), and between the beasts of nature and the gods.
In the Phaedrus, Socrates shows his lack of interest in nature—in physis understood as the physical in opposition to the metaphysical, as the realm of the body rather than the realm of the soul. In regard to the scientific accounts of those so-called wise people (οἱ σοφοί) who debunk mythical beliefs—including those Presocratic philosophers whom Aristotle called φυσιολόγοι or “those who discuss nature”—he says: “I myself certainly have no time for the business, and I’ll tell you why, my friend. I can’t as yet ‘know myself,’ as the inscription at Delphi enjoins and so long as that ignorance remains it seems to me ridiculous to inquire into extraneous matters. Consequently I don’t bother about such things, but accept the current beliefs about them, and direct my inquiries … rather to myself ” (Phaedrus 229e–230a). Especially in the Phaedo, Socrates distances himself from the inquirers into the workings of the physical world and explains that the philosophical quest to “know thyself ” involves a “liberation of the soul from the body” (ψυχῆς ἀπὸ τοῦ σώματος ἀπαλλαγήν). The practice of freeing the rational soul from distractions and desires of the body is an approximation and a preparation for that unfettered vision of the intelligible realm that can only happen in a disembodied aterlife. Socrates thus strikingly explains the practice of philosophy to be a “practicing dying and preparing for death” (αὐτοί ἐπιτηδεύουσιν ἢ ἀποθνῄσκειν τε καὶ τεθνάναι) (Phaedo 64a–c). Not surprisingly, the Phaedo in particular became the locus classicus for what Nietzsche and others decry as the body-despising and life-denying spirit of Platonism.
And yet, Sallis persistently reminds us that, in the Platonic dialogues, “the upward way belongs inextricably together with a downward way, which is the way of corruption, the way of death, the way of concealment,” and the way of earthly embodiment.91 In his commentary on the Phaedo, Sallis reminds us that Socrates is here gearing his speech to two Pythagoreans, Simmias and Cebes. The term “philosopher” was probably first used among the Pythagorians, who took over a great deal from the mystery religion of Orphism. It is from this Orphic-Pythagorean tradition that Plato gleans the doctrines of reincarnation and—through the process of purification—the desideratum of liberating the soul from the body. Sallis writes:
In the Phaedo there is much that derives from Pythagoreanism. … Yet, there is nothing taken over that is not, in one way or another, brought under interrogation. This is preeminently the case with the theme of purification, especially insofar as it is conceived as a means by which the soul would free itself of embodiment and of the attachment to nature and the earth that embodiment entails. In this interrogation what is fundamentally put in question is the bond of the human to φύσις and to the earth and the receptacle of φύσις.92
According to Sallis’s provocative—indeed revolutionary—rereading of the Phaedo, Plato is not advocating for an understanding of philosophy as a liberation of the soul from the body but rather demonstrating—with dramatic hints and ironic ventriloquy of “obtrusively Orphic-Pythagorean diction and gestures”93—the hubris of thinking that this is possible.94 The “second sailing” that Socrates ventures ater turning away from a direct sensory investigation of natural things, Sallis points out, does not lead to a simple and straightforward intellectual vision of intelligible Ideas as the metaphysical causes of physical things.
Rather, it is a turn to λόγοι as they call forth the beings themselves, the looks, the original causes. Yet, through this turn there is accomplished a return to the things of nature, a return in which these things become manifest in their look, in the look that shines through them and determines them in their being. In the second sailing the soul does indeed draw itself away from nature, but only in order that there might be a return of nature in the manifestness of its being.95
The Phaedo ends with Socrates’s last words, namely “We owe a cock to Asclepius” (Phaedo 188), the god of healing. This has traditionally been understood—and derided especially by Nietzsche—to imply that life is one long illness from which the philosopher is freed by death.96 Yet Sallis offers a competing—and rather compelling—counter-interpretation:
What, then, is the illness from which there has been a recovery? It could hardly be a recovery from human emplacement in a body within nature upon the earth. Rather, the recovery—for Socrates but also for his friends—will have been from the presumption of an ascent into the company of the gods themselves, and from the danger that in venturing direct access to being itself one risks blinding one’s very soul. It is a recovery that would free humans for a celebration of all that belongs to nature, that would enable them to embrace the return of nature.97
The recovery spoken of would thus be from the hubris of thinking that one could separate the rational soul from its earthbound embodiment. Ironically, the entire tradition of Platonists would have then missed the irony and pursued the hubris Socrates was warning against. Sallis’s reading is thus as radically overturning as it is hermeneutically patient and persuasive.
And yet, I wonder whether Sallis goes a little too far in suggesting that Plato is unequivocally calling for a “celebration of all that belongs to nature” and an “embrace of the return of nature.” It does seem persuasive to say that Plato is warning against the hubris of thinking we can, as embodied as well as rational beings, ever free ourselves completely from all things earthly—at least so long as we are embodied, and perhaps that means as long as we are alive in any sense. Nevertheless, the primary orientation of Plato’s thought does generally seem to be away from nature, and his acknowledgment of an inevitable return of nature—and of the bodily in particular—hardly always seem celebratory. As Sallis himself notes, and quotes, in the final mythical tale at the end of the Phaedo, Socrates says that, while those who have committed bad deeds will be cast down into the various subterranean regions, “all who seem to have distinguished themselves in leading a holy life—it is they who are liberated and set free from these regions here within the earth, as though from prisons, and who, arriving at their pure dwelling up top, dwell on the surface of the earth. And of these people, the ones who have been sufficiently purified by philosophy live without bodies for all time to come” (Phaedo 114b–c). Nevertheless, Sallis reads this final myth of the Phaedo—which he calls “Socrates’ swan song”—as a celebration of “a return of nature with the earth as its receptacle.”98 He writes:
Hardly anything could be more remarkable than that Socrates’ final discourse is a song of the earth, considering how often in the previous discourses, especially in the third, the body, the senses, nature, and the earth as the very receptacle of nature were denigrated as the locus that the true—or true-born—philosopher would strive to die away from. As Socrates’ death draws near, he speaks only about the earth, and even what he says about the destiny of the various sorts of souls is in every case described in terms of the region of the earth to which they are finally transported. … Yet what seems most remarkable of all is the depiction of the purest and holiest souls: even they—even if they become so purified that they can live (even though they are dead) without bodies—even they go to dwell up on the surface of the earth. Not even they, though purified by philosophy, would take light of the earth.99
And yet, I wonder whether this is a too literal reading of what Plato intended as allegory, in the manner in which the physical Sun is an earthly “offspring” and analogy for the metaphysical Good (Republic 6.508b). In the final myth of the Phaedo, as in the Allegory of the Cave in the Republic (Republic 7.515c–516c), is not the surface of the earth—which lies outside the cave or the cavernous underworld—a metaphor for the “intelligible realm” (νοητόν τόπον) (Republic 7.517b), that is, for the super-terrestrial (and indeed super-atmospheric) realm that Plato speaks of in the Phaedrus as the “place beyond the heavens” (ὑπερουράνιος τόπος) (Phaedrus 247c), the metaphysical realm to which the purified rational soul can ascend only ater it leaves the binds of the body and the earth behind (see Phaedo 64–68)? Ater all, it is not only in the Phaedo that we ind Socrates affirmatively discussing the Orphic doctrine expressed in the wordplay sōma-sēma: the teaching that the body (σῶμα) is like a tomb (σῆμα) from which the purified soul would be liberated into a super-corporeal afterlife (see Phaedo 80a–84b, Gorgias 493a, Cratylus 400b–c, and Phaedrus 250c).
Despite the repeated reminders of the mortal recoil that binds us to earthly embodiment in this life, the predominant orientation of Socrates’s discourses in the Platonic dialogues thus seems to remain, ater all, the upward journey that ultimately is said to lead to a supernatural and incorporeal afterlife. In order to track this complicated yet persistent supernatural orientation—which became the all-too unequivocal metaphysical doctrine of Platonism—let us return to where we let of in the Phaedrus.
Although Socrates says that he does not have time for reductionistic scientific explanations of customary mythical stories, and so he just accepts those stories and gets on with his business of seeking to know himself (Phaedrus 229e–230a), he does not in fact simply accept those mythical stories as they have traditionally been told. Rather, he reinterprets and reorients them in a way that puts them in service to philosophy. Having reached the shady spot Phaedrus had in mind, Socrates enthusiastically praises the enchanting natural environment; yet, ironically, as we have seen, he interprets the divine sights and sounds he perceives in the countryside as reminders that he does not belong in the countryside: it is by talking to people in the city, not by communing with nature in the countryside, that he can stay on course in his journey back to the supernatural home of the highest part of his soul. Thus, after reaching the beautiful spot in the countryside, Socrates says that Phaedrus has been “the stranger’s perfect guide.” To which Phaedrus responds:
“Whereas you [Socrates], my excellent friend, strike me as the oddest of men. You really do seem like a stranger [ἀτοπώτατος, literally someone out of place] being guided about, rather than like a native [ἐπιχωρίῳ, literally a person of the country]. You never leave the city to cross the border nor even, I believe, so much as set foot outside the city walls.” Socrates replies: “You must forgive me, dear friend; I’m a lover of learning, and country regions [χωρία] and the trees won’t teach me anything, whereas the people in the city do. (Phaedrus 230c–d tm)
By sharp contrast, it would seem,100 Heidegger does think we can learn from country regions and from trees. In his 1949 essay, “Der Feldweg” (“he Country Path”), Heidegger reminisces about growing up among oak trees and learning from them about the slowness and steadiness of growth. He writes: “he oak tree itself spoke, saying that what lasts and bears fruit is grounded solely in such growth; and that growth means: to open oneself to the expanse of the heavens and at the same time to be rooted in the dark earth, and that everything sturdy flourishes only if humans are equally both prepared for the claim of the highest heaven and taken into the protection of the supportive earth.”101 The oak tree teaches us, in other words, that we belong in the between; we are beings whose life and growth are nurtured by dwelling always between the earth and the heavens. We do not exist in this between as beings who erotically strive—through increasingly disembodied levels of ἔρως—to return to an intelligible home above the heavens; our desire is not ultimately directed to a disembodied beholding of “the beautiful” (τὸ καλὸν) as such, “pure, undefiled, unmixed, unadulterated by human flesh and skin complexion, or any other such mortal nonsense” (Symposium 211e). Rather, our true home is in the between, and beautiful and meaningful things can be experienced only there, in the fourfold gathering (Geviert) of earth and sky, mortals and divinities.102
For Heidegger, even the divine does not subsist in a realm above the heavens; the divinities are not supernatural beings. Even God, or the Godhood (Gottheit) of which the divinities are said to be “the hinting messengers,”103 is not a supernatural being.104 In “Der Feldweg,” Heidegger writes: “The expanse of all grown things, which abide about the country path, bestows world. As Eckhart, the old master of reading and living, said, in the unspoken of the language of this expanse, God is first God” (GA 13: 89). Trees can teach us to listen to the divine, not as a supernatural voice breaking into nature from a realm above the heavens, but rather as the silence and wordless sounds of the natural expanse in which we dwell among all living things. And this expanse bestows world, not as a stationary site cut of from nature behind city walls, but first of all as a country path on which we walk between cultivated fields and dark forests.
And yet, trees can teach us such things only if we let them show themselves from themselves rather than through rhetorical lenses crated behind city walls; only if, that is, we “for once let the tree stand where it stands,” namely, in the “country region” that abides in the “open-region.” his “healing expanse,” which “provides us with freedom,” is intimated to the Younger Man in the third of the Country Path Conversations by “the rustling of the expansive forest” on his walk outside the walls of the barracks, walls that he identifies with “what is objective” (das Gegendständliche).105 The problem, Heidegger later writes in Was heisst Denken?, is that “to this day, thought has never let the tree stand where it stands.”106 The problem is that we make it stand over against us as an object (Gegenstand) of our representation; the problem is that we allow the tree to show itself only through the idea of treeness (das Baumhate) that we have projected upon it having preemptively climbed up above the tree itself.107
Understanding ourselves as animal rationale—a medieval version of the Aristotlean determination of human being as ζῷον λόγον ἔχον—we have come to think that: “Thinking is really nothing other than the representational setting-before [Vor-stellen] and setting-toward [Zu-stellen] of the horizon, that is, of the circle-of-vision, in which the outward look and the essence of objects—Plato named it the Idea of things—becomes visible to us.”108 In this statement, the Scholar in the first Conversation draws a line connecting modern “transcendental-horizonal representation” back to Plato’s thought of the Ideas. Of course, this line is a long one and we need to examine it carefully—even more carefully than did Heidegger.
We have seen how, in “Plato’s Doctrine of Truth” (1931–32, 1940), Heidegger claimed that “what remains unsaid in Plato’s thinking is a change in the determination of the essence of truth,” namely a change from an understanding of truth as ἀλήθεια, as the unconcealment or unhiddenness of beings, to truth as the correctness (ὀρθότης) of human apprehension and assertion about beings.109 In Plato, truth is said to have been displaced from the display of things themselves to the correspondence of our thoughts and words about things with the Ideas that form the essences of things. In 1975, however, Heidegger reportedly said in a conversation with John Sallis that his essay “Plato’s Doctrine of Truth” was no longer tenable, meaning, presumably, that the Platonic dialogues were not ater all the site of a transformation of truth from unconcealment to correctness.
Where, then, does this leave matters? As Sallis puts the question, “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?” Sallis himself provocatively offers one possibility by way of unfolding the implications of a key statement found in “Plato’s Doctrine of Truth.” Ater the purportedly fateful change in the determination of truth, according to that essay: “he ἰδέα is not a presenting foreground [ein darstellender Vordergrund] of ἀλήθεια but rather the ground that makes ἀλήθεια possible.”110 This implies, however, “that prior to the change the ἰδέα is a presenting foreground of ἀλήθεια.” Sallis develops this implication as follows:
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. … 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.111
Remarkably, Sallis reveals that this doubling of truth—this interplay between truth as unconcealment and truth as the relation of correctness that unconcealment enables in its withdrawal into the background—is at play in the Platonic dialogues themselves. Moreover, those dialogues, in their moments of recoil, are found to intimate a “turn back into concealment,” that is, a returning of our attention to the nonsublatable interplay between concealment (λήθη) and unconcealment (ἀλήθεια). What is remarkable about this reading is not just that it finds Heidegger’s central thought of alētheia anticipated in Plato. Ater all, Heidegger found his way to this thought by way of returning to the Presocratics, and so we might simply conclude that Plato, as a watershed figure, had more in common with the Presocratics than Heidegger acknowledged. Yet what is also remarkable is that, while Sallis moves the line forward into the Platonic dialogues, so to speak, Heidegger, in his late writings, pushes it back further into the Presocratic Greeks.
In “The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking” (1966, 1969), where Heidegger famously, in response to Paul Friedländer’s critique,112 retracts the central claim of “Plato’s Doctrine of Truth,” namely “the assertion about the essential transformation of truth, that is, from unconcealment to correctness,” the reason he gives for this retraction is not that Plato in fact did, ater all, maintain an understanding of truth as unconcealment but rather that, even in the Presocratic Greeks,
‘Αλήθεια, unconcealment in the sense of the clearing of presence, was originally experienced only as ὀρθότης, as correctness of representations and statements. But then the assertion about the essential transformation of truth, that is, from unconcealment to correctness, is also untenable. Instead we must say: ἀλήθεια, as the clearing of presence and presentation in thinking and saying, immediately comes under the perspective of ὁμοίωσις and adaequatio, that is, the perspective of adequation in the sense of the correspondence of representing with what is present.113
“‘Αλήθεια is indeed named at the beginning of philosophy” by Presocratics such as Parmenides; but, Heidegger says, “It is not explicitly thought by philosophy,” not even in the very beginning, for it immediately came under the sway of truth as correctness (ZSD 76/BW 446). The early Greeks did indeed “experience” alētheia as unconcealment; but, in order to “think it as the clearing of self-concealing,” we must go “above and beyond the Greek [über das Griechische hinaus]” (79/448).114
The metaphysical understanding of truth as correctness, as the adequation of representations to reality, is said to have first taken root in the Platonic doctrine of Forms or Ideas, according to which a mental idea was true insofar as it corresponds to a metaphysical Idea. So let us briefly turn our attention now to Heidegger’s Auseinandersetzung with the discourse on the Ideas initiated by the Platonic dialogues and developed by the tradition of Platonism.
Section §110 of Contributions to Philosophy gives a sketch of the history of metaphysics beginning with “the concept of ἰδέα (εἶδος).” This concept is said to have originally meant “the look of something, what something gives itself out to be and makes of itself, that in which something is set back and thus is the being itself.” It means “the shining forth of the look itself, what offers up a view and does so for a gaze.” Originally, therefore, an idea as an eidos is not a metaphysical Idea determining the essence of things from above, much less an idea in our heads. Rather, it is the look given forth by the thing itself; it is the way a tree, for example, shows itself from itself.
However, Heidegger goes on to say, insofar as the emphasis is on “the presencing, the shining forth, of the view in the look and specifically as that which in coming to presence provides constancy at the same time,” there originates the bond of the ἰδέα to the notion of “constant presence.” Moreover, insofar as it is the look of treeness that remains constantly present, even though the particular tree may change, “Here originates the distinction between the τί ἔστιν [‘what it is’] (essentia, quidditas) and ὅτι [‘that it is’] (existentia) in the temporality of the ἰδέα.”115 In “Sketches for a History of Being as Metaphysics,” Heidegger writes of this fateful division between essence or “whatness” and existence or “thatness,” a division that ensues when ἀλήθεια “comes under the yoke of the ἰδέα.” “he precedence of the ἰδέα brings the τί ἔστιν along with the εἶδος to the position of authoritative measure-giving being [des maßgebenden Seins]. Being is primarily whatness. . . . As authoritative measure-giving being, whatness displaces being, namely being in the primordial determination lying before the distinction of what and that, the determination which preserves for being the fundamental characteristic of inceptuality and emergence and presencing.”116 In his 1943 lectures on φύσις in Heraclitus, Heidegger says that the Greek ὄν was originally ambiguous: it is a participle which, like our English gerund “being,” can be understood both nominally as das Seiende (a being) and verbally as Sein (το εἶναι, be-ing, to be).117 It was precisely the turning away from the verbal sense to the nominal sense and, moreover, the identification of this nominal sense with ἰδέα, that inaugurated metaphysics. Heidegger’s thought is an attempt to return to the verbal sense of being understood at once as physis and as alētheia. The return to the things themselves is a return to the way in which things naturally show themselves from themselves at the same time as they withdraw back into concealment and so preserve their inexhaustible richness.
Heidegger’s other chorology is thus an attempt not just to let things show themselves from themselves but also to let them return to that open-region of nature, the field of physis, in which they originarily belong. The world, he says, “insofar as it worlds, gathers everything, each to the other, and lets everything return to itself in its own resting in the selfsame.”118 Insofar as Heidegger’s chorology calls for a proper human participation in the logos that is “the gathering toward the originally all-unifying One” (223/145), it calls for letting things return to rest in themselves. This would be a matter of letting things be as they are—as they are, that is, neither merely locked up “in themselves” nor merely exposed “to us,” but rather, in the circulating course proper to their self-showing, “as things for themselves [als Dinge für sich selbst]” (139/90).
It is tempting to conclude this essay by summarizing the contrasts between Platonist metaphysics and Heidegger’s postmetaphysical thinking. In 1929–30 Heidegger quotes Novalis as saying, “Philosophy is really a homesickness, an urge to be at home everywhere” (GA 29/30: 7/FCM 5). Yet the “first inception” of philosophy articulated in the Platonic dialogues repeatedly suggests that the true home of the highest part of our souls is elsewhere, not of this earthly world. Heidegger, in 1929–30, speaks of becoming at home in the world. To be sure, at this point he still views the world as formed by Dasein’s transcendental-horizonal projection, which, in a sense, surpasses nature.119 By the time he writes Country Path Conversations, however, Heidegger thinks of the environing horizonal world as situated within a nonanthropocentric open-region, a “healing expanse” that is most nearly sensed when we venture out on country paths that take us through “the rustling of the expansive forest.”120
The Platonic dialogues take place within city walls, or, in the unique case of the Phaedrus, on an excursion out to the countryside that in the end leads back to the city. Heidegger’s Conversations, by contrast, take place on country paths, and they deepen as they wander forth into dark forests. The path of Platonic eros leads primarily upward toward a realm above the heavens, toward a transcendence of nature (even if, so long as we remain embodied, there is an inevitable return of nature). Heidegger’s Gelassenheit entails a being engaged (eingelassen sein) in the earth and an openness to the mystery of nature. To be more precise, Heidegger’s Gelassenheit involves a being at home in not being at home in nature; it is a matter of being at home in an intelligible clearing that is surrounded by an endlessly bountiful yet also eerily boundless forest. Heidegger’s path of thought does not aim to take us somewhere else but rather to let us, for once, be where we are. It does not aim at metaphysical transcendence to the supernatural, but rather at an indwelling that does not forget that our human being-in-the-world is, in turn, situated within the wider field of nature.
Thus may we summarize the diferences. And yet, while the contrast with Platonic metaphysics may be clear, the relation of Heidegger’s thought to the richness of the Platonic dialogues evades such clear-cut opposition. And so, let me close—or rather open back up—this essay by explicating Heidegger’s attempt to recover a more primordial sense of physis in another one of his readings of Plato. In his 1942 lecture course, Parmenides, Heidegger looks back to what he calls the “fresh leaves” of the tree of Plato’s texts rather than to the “foliage fallen on the ground” that became Platonism.121 “It is almost as if,” Heidegger says, “what was always already nearby and experienced is explicitly put into words only in the age of the completion of Greek humanity, a completion that is not a high peak but instead a high pass of transition to the end” (131/88).
Here Heidegger gives a highly original interpretation of the concluding myth of the Republic, the Πολιτείᾱ.122 He writes: “he last word of the Greeks that names λήθη in its essence is the μῦθος concluding Plato’s dialogue on the essence of the πόλις.”123 What is first of all remarkable—and no doubt controversial—is how Heidegger claims that the “essence of the πόλις, i.e., the πολιτείᾱ, is not itself determined or determinable ‘politically’” (142/96). Building on the interpretation of “the pre-political essence of the πόλις” he gave the previous semester in his course on Hölderlin’s Der Ister,124 Heidegger says that “Πόλις is the πόλος, the pole, the place around which everything appearing to the Greeks as a being turns in a peculiar way.”125 He also says that “πόλις is, in its root, identical with the ancient Greek word for ‘to be,’ πέλειν: ‘to emerge, to rise up into the unconcealed’” (133/90). “Hence the πόλις is not the notorious ‘city-state’ but is, rather, the settling of the place of the history of Greek humanity… . …The πόλις is the abode, gathered together into itself, of the unconcealedness of beings” (133/90). The polis is thus, in other words, the site of alētheia.
To the experience of alētheia, of life in the polis, belongs an experience of lēthē, an experience of what is named in Plato’s myth “τό τῆς Λήθης πεδίον—the field of withdrawing concealment [das Feld der entziehenden Verbergung].”126 If alētheia is the polis, the abode of unconcealment in which mortals dwell, this abode is situated within a field—perhaps we might say a chōra, a country region—an uncanny forest that surrounds, exceeds, and encompasses the clearing, the “city,” in which we are at home and go about our ordinary lives. We, however, no longer see beyond the city walls; we no longer take excursions in the countryside, even when (or precisely when) the vacation industry provides us with outdoor adventures. And we no longer notice that our homely cities, in which our ordinary lives are conducted, are situated in this surrounding uncanny (unheimliche), unhomely (unheimische), and even monstrously extraordinary (ungeheuerliche) region.
When Heidegger says that “being … is precisely the τόπος for all beings,”127 this is not simply a space of intelligibility but includes at its heart—or is included in, surrounded by—what Plato’s myth calls a “δαιμόνιος τόπος,” which Heidegger translates as an “ungeheure Ortschat,” a “monstrously extraordinary locality.”128 “For us,” he says, “it is difficult to attain the fundamental Greek experience, whereby the ordinary itself … is the monstrously extraordinary.”129 We no longer attend to the uncanny mystery of the “earth” that enables the emergence of—and may at any moment, and will certainly in due time, reclaim—our fortified cities and our embodied lives.
In his interpretation of the choral ode in Sophocles’s Antigone, Heidegger speaks of the uncanny as “das Un-heimische,” as “that unhomely that is the fundamental trait of human abode in the midst of beings.”130 We need to distinguish between what we might call an inauthentic and an authentic homelessness or being unhomely. The former is our “ fallenness” or lostness among predetermined beings, our everyday “running around amidst beings” (Umtrieben an das Seiende)131 and consequent forgetfulness of our true home in being. For “being is not some thing that is actual”;132 it does not provide a home in the sense of a constant presence that supports us, but rather withdraws its extraordinary excess in order to enable the delimitations of the horizons of an ordinary abode—an artistically and linguistically delimited “house of being.” Dwelling in such a domesticated world while at the same time maintaining a nearness to the earth—that is, to the extraordinary excess of the open-region of being that lies outside and encompasses our horizonal homes—would be an authentic homelessness. Heidegger’s thought calls for a being at home in not being at home, an ek-static standing out of our homeliness among beings as an indwelling (Inständigkeit) in the open-region of being in a manner that is “open to the mystery.” In his reading of the choral ode as the core of Antigone, Heidegger thus says: “The counterplay [of this tragedy] is played out between being unhomely in the sense of being driven about amid beings without any way out, and being unhomely as becoming homely from out of a belonging to being … such that what is poetized is a becoming homely in being unhomely.”133
In the following year, in his Parmenides lecture course, Heidegger elaborates on this unhomely abode as he looks back beyond the purported transformation of alētheia to correctness, back to the primordial unity of alētheia and physis intimated in Plato’s mythos.
We may call the δαιμόνιον the monstrously extraordinary [das Un-geheure], because it surrounds, and insofar as it everywhere surrounds, the present ordinary state of things and presents itself in everything ordinary, though without being the ordinary [das Geheure]. The monstrously extraordinary, understood in this way with regard to what is ordinary, is not the exception but rather the “most natural [das Natürlichste]” in the sense of “nature” as thought by the Greeks, i.e., in the sense of φύσις. The uncanny, the extraordinary, is that out of which all that is ordinary emerges, that within which all that is ordinary is suspended, usually without surmising it in the least, and that into which everything ordinary falls back.134
Heidegger’s postmetaphysical chorology invites us to ind our home, not up in the supernatural heavens but rather in the midst of the extraordinariness of the open-region of nature that surrounds—and ordinarily shows itself only as delimited by—the homely horizons of our everyday being-in-the-world.135
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Bret W. Davis - Another Chorology: Reading Heidegger’s Plato Books
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