Towards a

Polemical Ethics
 NEW HEIDEGGER RESEARCH

Series Editors:
Gregory Fried, Professor of Philosophy, Boston College, USA
Richard Polt, Professor of Philosophy, Xavier University, USA

The New Heidegger Research series promotes informed and critical dialogue
that breaks new philosophical ground by taking into account the full range of
Heidegger’s thought, as well as the enduring questions raised by his work.

Titles in the Series:

After Heidegger?
Edited by Gregory Fried and Richard Polt

Correspondence 1949–1975
Martin Heidegger, Ernst Jünger, translated by Timothy Quinn

Existential Medicine
Edited by Kevin Aho

Heidegger and Jewish Thought

Edited by Micha Brumlik and Elad Lapidot

Heidegger and the Environment

Casey Rentmeester

Heidegger and the Global Age

Edited by Antonio Cerella and Louiza Odysseos

Heidegger Becoming Phenomenological: Preferring Dilthey to Husserl,

1916–25
Robert C. Schaff

Heidegger in Russia and Eastern Europe

Edited by Jeff Love

Heidegger’s Gods: An Ecofeminist Perspective

Susanne Claxton

Making Sense of Heidegger

Thomas Sheehan
Proto-Phenomenology and the Nature of Language
Lawrence J. Hatab

Heidegger in the Islamicate World

Edited by Kata Moser, Urs Gösken and Josh Michael Hayes

Time and Trauma: Thinking Through Heidegger in the Thirties

Richard Polt

Contexts of Suffering: A Heideggerian Approach to Psychopathology

Kevin Aho

Heidegger’s Phenomenology of Perception: An Introduction, Volume I

David Kleinberg-Levin

Confronting Heidegger: A Critical Dialogue on Politics and Philosophy

Edited by Gregory Fried

Proto-Phenomenology, Language Acquisition, Orality and Literacy: Dwell-

ing in Speech II
Lawrence J. Hatab

Transcending Reason: Heidegger’s Transformation of Phenomenology

Edited by Matthew Burch and Irene McMullin

The Fate of Phenomenology: Heidegger’s Legacy

William McNeill

Agency, Freedom, and Responsibility in the Early Heidegger

Hans Pedersen

Heidegger’s Phenomenology of Perception: Learning to See and Hear Her-

meneutically, Volume II
David Kleinberg-Levin

Towards a Polemical Ethics: Between Heidegger and Plato

Gregory Fried
 Towards a
Polemical Ethics
Between Heidegger and Plato

Gregory Fried

ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD

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Copyright © 2021 by Gregory Fried

“The Cave” from Great Dialogues of Plato by Plato, translated by W. H. D. Rouse,

translation translation copyright © 1956, renewed © 1984 by J.C.G. Rouse. Used by
permission of New American Library, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a
division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

“Failing and Flying” from Collected Poems by Jack Gilbert, copyright © 2012 by Jack
Gilbert. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday
Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

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Names: Fried, Gregory, 1961– author.
Title: Towards a polemical ethics : between Heidegger and Plato / Gregory Fried.
Description: Lanham, Maryland : Rowman & Littlefield, [2021] | Series: New Heidegger
research | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020057009 (print) | LCCN 2020057010 (ebook) | ISBN
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 For Richard Polt

Question: Do you desire your sight more than anything else in the world?
Answer: No! No! I would rather walk with a friend in the dark than
walk alone in the light.
—Helen Keller, in Joseph P. Lash, Helen and Teacher, 498
Come said the Muse,
Sing me a song no poet yet has chanted,
Sing me the universal.

In this broad earth of ours,

Amid the measureless grossness and the slag,
Enclosed and safe within its central heart,
Nestles the seed perfection.

By every life a share or more or less,

None born but it is born, conceal’d or unconceal’d the seed is
  waiting.
—Walt Whitman, from “The Song of the Universal”
 Contents

List of Illustrations xiii

Acknowledgments xv
Abbreviations and Translations xvii
Preface xxi
Introduction 1
Towards a Polemical Ethics 2
Between Heidegger and Plato 4
The ‘and’ Between Heidegger and Plato: Hermeneutical
Considerations 8
Wonder, Question, and Response 9
At Issue: The Particular and the Universal in Being-Human 12
Heidegger and Polemos 19
Glossary of Key Terms 21
1  etween Earth and Sky:
B
The Polemics of Finitude and Transcendence 28
1.1 Philosophy as Absolute Freedom 31
1.2 The Strife between Earth and World 33
1.3 The Flight of Icarus 38
1.4 Sun and Soil 42
1.5 Construals of Meaning 48

ix
x Contents

2 Back to the Cave: From Heidegger to Plato 57

2.1 Heidegger’s Cave: Freedom under Fire 58
2.2 Truth and Freedom 69
2.3 The Charge of Nihilism 73
2.4 Socratic Zeteticism 75
2.5 Socratic Piety, Socratic Trust, Socratic Phenomenology 80
2.6 Zetetic Piety in the Republic: Pledging Troth to the Idea 87
2.7 The Polemic between Zetetic and Echonic Philosophy 90
2.8 Back to the Cave 97
3 Seeing Sun and Shadow: The Metaphorics of Vision in the Cave 104
3.1 Visionary Knowing 105
3.2 The Sun and the Divided Line as Images for Knowledge 106
3.3 The Idea of the Good 119
3.4 The Wraith of the Name on the Divided Ring 124
4 Breaking Down in the Cave 133
4.1 The Geography of the Cave 133
4.2 Breakdown and Traumatic Rupture 137
4.3 Healing from the Breakdown 144
4.4 Philosophers Misfired 149
5 Ideation and Reconstruction: Healing from the Bonds of the Cave 160
5.1 Lighting the Way on the Upward Path 160
5.2 Ideation and Socratic Phenomenology 167
5.3 Out of the Cave: The Echonic Vision 171
5.4 Transcendence Deferred: Preconstruction as Envisioning 173
6 The Compulsion of the Body 178
6.1 Our Bodies, Our Cave 179
6.2 The Return: Reconstruction as Reintegration of the Line 185
6.4 One’s Own and the Body Politic 192
6.5 The Confrontation of Ideation and Materiality 197
6.6 Ideal and Illusion 199
7 At the Crossroads of the Cave 206
7.1 The Lateral Path 207
7.2 Artifacts and Unintentional Poiēsis 210
7.3 Historicity and the Crossing of the Pathways 212
7.4 Sophistry and Philosophy at the Crossroads of the Cave 216
7.5 The Upward Path 231
 Contents xi

8 Retrieving Phronēsis: Antigone at the Heart of Ethics 237

8.1 Heidegger’s Polemics of Phronēsis 239
8.2 Essential Politics 242
8.3 Antigone and the Polis as Essential Tragedy 246
8.4 Antigone and the Polis as the Site of Polemical Phronēsis 253
8.5 Retrieving Phronēsis 256
8.6 Examples of Phronēsis in Ethical Life 261

Conclusion 268
Bibliography 279
Index 289
 Illustrations

Figure 1: The Cave. 156

Figure 2: The Divided Line. 157
Figure 3: The Cave with the Divided Line superimposed as
Divided Ring. 158
Figure 4: The Cave, modes of liberation and ascent. 159
Figure 7.1: The Cave, from Rouse, Great Dialogues of Plato. 209

xiii
 Acknowledgments

This book owes so much to so many that I will hardly be able to thank them
properly. I have been teaching Plato’s Republic for over twenty-five years, at
least once a year on average, sometimes more, and so my first thanks must
go to all the students with whom conversation about that book has taught me
so much. I cannot name you all, but you know who you are.
Richard Polt, to whom this book is dedicated, has been my friend and
companion in philosophy for over thirty years. He first led me to Heidegger,
and he brought me through and beyond Heidegger. He also read this work in
draft, and so it is not an exaggeration to say that dialogue with him has helped
light every step of my way, although any stumbles are my own.
I owe a great intellectual debt to two other scholars and friends: Drew Hy-
land, whose Finitude and Transcendence was an inspiration to me in bringing
Heidegger and Plato into conversation to recuperate Plato, and David Rooch-
nik, whose book Beautiful City taught me to see the Republic as a dialogue
between Plato and his readers in ways I had never considered, and whose
various works on retrieving the ancients show a way grounded in the present
to do phenomenology with those authors.
Others have read drafts and contributed to making the writing process a
dialogue. My father, Charles Fried, with his astute eye helped me to clarify
the arguments so that the nonspecialist in Heidegger studies might read
without losing patience. Marina McCoy was exceedingly generous with her
expertise in Plato in reading the book draft and providing suggestions. Re-
search assistants Maxwell Wade and David Abergel made many thoughtful
suggestions that would not have occurred to me otherwise. Research assis-
tants over the years helped with various stages of the project: Brian Smith,
Anton Janulis, Georgina Holmes, Mandeep Minhas, Molly Chandler, Jeremy
O’Brien, Weitao Liu, and Zachary Willcutt. Colleagues Matthew Caswell,
xv
xvi Acknowledgments

Dermot Moran, and George Heffernan, as well as Boston College librar-

ian Christopher Strauber, assisted with finding source materials when the
university library was closed due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Alan Letarte
kindly read my discussion of mathematics on the Divided Line. I thank an
anonymous reviewer of the book proposal who encouraged me to do more of
my own philosophical exploration. Faculty and students at St. Johns College,
Annapolis, heard a lecture on an earlier interpretation of the crossroads of the
cave and gave very valuable feedback.
I am extremely grateful to Lauren McGillicuddy, who served as an editor
at the final stage of this work. A skilled editor is a fine thing, but to have one
who has a keen eye, philosophical acumen, and patience for working though
ideas is a true blessing.
In devising the four illustrations for this volume, Marc Ngui was remark-
ably focused and creative in reading the Allegory of Cave and my analysis,
sketching detailed drafts, and patiently discussing multiple revisions with me.
Suffolk University, the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst, and
Boston College provided vital support for research and time to think.
My thanks also to Continental Philosophy Review, Springer Nature, and
Indiana University Press for permission to adapt three essays for this book, as
well as to Penguin Random House for permission to reproduce an illustration
from The Great Dialogues of Plato.
Frankie Mace and Scarlet Furness, my editors at Rowman & Littlefield,
were indefatigable in making sure this volume got to press, despite the con-
siderable challenges of the pandemic.
Finally, to my family of cyclopes, Christina, Jonah, and Eliza, I give thanks
for the gift that anyone attempting philosophy needs: to remember to laugh
at myself whenever I trip on the way. Completing this work during the 2020
pandemic was no easy task, and for their patience and good humor I am
deeply grateful.
 Abbreviations and Translations

This volume follows the conventions used in volumes of the New Heidegger
Research series by employing abbreviations for in-text citations for works by
frequently cited authors.
For the meaning of Greek words, I rely upon the Thesaurus Linguae Grae-
cae, also known as Liddell and Scott, the 2011 online edition. For etymolo-
gies, I rely upon Calvert Watkins, Dictionary of Indo-European Roots.
Wherever I amend a translator’s rendering of a passage, I will note this in
the cite as “tm” (translation modified).

WORKS BY PLATO

For Plato’s Republic, I follow closely the translation by Allan Bloom, cited
by Stephanus number. I have consulted other translations, especially the
one by C. D. C. Reeve in Plato, Complete Works. For Plato’s Apology and
Euthyphro, I rely on Four Texts on Socrates, translated by Thomas West
and Grace Starry West. Translations of other works of Plato are my own or
acknowledged in a note.

WORKS BY MARTIN HEIDEGGER

Works listed here are not included in the Bibliography to this volume.

Being and Time

SZ = Sein und Zeit. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1953. Later editions share the
same pagination, which is also provided in the English translations and in the
xvii
xviii Abbreviations and Translations

Gesamtausgabe edition (GA 2). The first edition was published in 1927. For
translation of Being and Time, I have consulted the ones by John Macquarrie
and Edward Robinson (Harper & Row, 1962) and Joan Stambaugh, revised
by Dennis J. Schmidt (State University of New York Press, 2010). Transla-
tions from SZ are my own, but I rely heavily on Macquarrie and Robinson.

GA = Gesamtausgabe
All volumes of Heidegger’s Gesamtausgabe, his collected works, are pub-
lished in Frankfurt am Main by Vittorio Klostermann (1975–). The date of
publication, or dates if there is more than one edition, are followed in the
listing below by the date of original composition in parentheses. All transla-
tions of Heidegger in this book are my own and all emphasis in quotations
is original, unless otherwise noted. Published translations of corresponding
volumes by Heidegger are listed below when available. Not all translations
listed include the entire contents of the corresponding GA volumes. Recent
translations generally include references to the pagination in the German col-
lected works, so readers interested in considering the context of quotes should
usually be able to find the relevant passages in these translations.
GA 1 = Frühe Schriften. Ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann, 1978
(1912–1916).
GA 4 = Erläuterungen zu Hölderlins Dichtung. Ed. Friedrich‑Wilhelm von
Herrmann, 1981, 2012 (1936–1968). / Elucidations of Hölderlin’s Poetry. Tr.
Keith Hoeller. Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 2000.
GA 5 = Holzwege. Ed. Friedrich‑Wilhelm von Hermann, 1977 (1935–
1946). / Off the Beaten Track. Tr. Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes. Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
GA 7 = Vorträge und Aufsätze (1936–1953). Ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von
Herrmann, 2000.
GA 8 = Was Heißt Denken? Ed. Paola-Ludovika Coriando, 2002 (1951–
1952). / What Is Called Thinking? Tr. J. Glenn Gray. New York: Harper &
Row, 1968.
GA 9 = Wegmarken. Ed. Friedrich‑Wilhelm von Herrmann, 1976, 1996,
2004 (1919–1961). / Pathmarks. Ed. William McNeill. Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1998.
GA 16 = Reden und andere Zeugnisse eines Lebensweges. Ed. Hermann
Heidegger, 2000 (1910–1976).
GA 18 = Grundbegriffe der aristotelischen Philosophie. Ed. Mark Mi-
chalski, 2002 (1924). / Basic Concepts of Aristotelian Philosophy. Tr. Robert
D. Metcalf and Mark Basil Tanzer. Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
2009.
 Abbreviations and Translations xix

GA 19 = Platon: Sophistes. Ed. Ingeborg Schüßler, 1992 (1924–1925). /

Plato’s “Sophist.” Tr. Richard Rojcewicz and André Schuwer. Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1997.
GA 22 = Die Grundbegriffe der antiken Philosophie. Ed. Franz-Karl Blust,
1993, 2004 (1926). / Basic Concepts of Ancient Philosophy. Tr. Richard Ro-
jcewicz. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997.
GA 24 = Die Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie. Ed. Friedrich‑Wilhelm
von Herrmann, 1975, 1997 (1927). / The Basic Problems of Phenomenology.
Translated by Albert Hofstadter. Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1982.
GA 25 = Phänomenologische Interpretation von Kants Kritik der reinen
Vernunft (1927–1928), Ed. Ingtraud Görland, 1977. / Phenomenological
Interpretation of Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason.” Tr. Parvis Emad and
Kenneth Maly. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997.
GA 29/30 = Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik. Welt—Endlichkeit—Ein-
samkeit. Ed. Friedrich‑Wilhelm von Herrmann, 1983, 2004 (1929–1930). /
The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude. Tr.
William McNeill and Nicholas Walker. Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1995.
GA 34 = Vom Wesen der Wahrheit. Zu Platons Höhlengleichnis und
Theätet. Ed. Hermann Mörchen, 1988, 1997 (1931–1932). / The Essence
of Truth: On Plato’s Cave Allegory and “Theaetetus.” Translated by Ted
Sadler. London: Continuum, 2002.
GA 36/37 = Sein und Wahrheit. Ed. Hartmut Tietjen, 2001 (1933–1934). /
Being and Truth. Translated by Gregory Fried and Richard Polt. Blooming-
ton: Indiana University Press, 2010.
GA 40 = Einführung in die Metaphysik. Ed. Petra Jaeger, 1983 (1935). /
Introduction to Metaphysics. Translated by Gregory Fried and Richard Polt.
Revised and expanded edition. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014.
GA 53 = Hölderlins Hymne “Der Ister.” Ed. Walter Biemel, 1984 (1942).
/ Hölderlin’s Hymn “The Ister.” Translated by William McNeill and Julia
Davis. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996.
GA 56/57 = Zur Bestimmung der Philosophie. Ed. Bernd Heimbüchel,
1987, 1999 (1919). / Towards the Definition of Philosophy. Tr. Ted Sadler.
New York: Continuum, 2000.
GA 59 = Phänomenologie der Anschauung und des Ausdrucks. Theo-
rie der philosophischen Begriffsbildung. Ed. Claudius Strube, 1993, 2007
(1920). / Phenomenology of Intuition and Expression. Tr. Tracy Colony.
London: Continuum, 2010.
GA 64 = Der Begriff der Zeit. Ed. Friedrich‑Wilhelm von Herrmann, 2004
(1924). / Partial translations: The Concept of Time: The First Draft of “Being
xx Abbreviations and Translations

and Time.” Tr. Ingo Farin. London: Continuum, 2011. The Concept of Time.
Bilingual edition. Tr. William McNeill. Oxford: Blackwell, 1992.
GA 65 = Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis). Ed. Friedrich‑Wilhelm
von Herrmann, 1989, 1994, 2003 (1936–1938). / Contributions to Philosophy
(Of the Event). Tr. Richard Rojcewicz and Daniela Vallega‑Neu. Blooming-
ton: Indiana University Press, 2012.
GA 94 = Überlegungen II–VI (Schwarze Hefte 1931–1938). Ed. Peter
Trawny, 2014. / Ponderings II–VI: Black Notebooks 1931–1938. Tr. Richard
Rojcewicz. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016.
GA 95 = Überlegungen VII–XI (Schwarze Hefte 1938–1939). Ed. Peter
Trawny, 2014. / Ponderings VII–XI: Black Notebooks 1938–1939. Tr. Rich-
ard Rojcewicz. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017.
GA 96 = Überlegungen XII–XV (Schwarze Hefte 1939–1941). Ed. Peter
Trawny, 2014. / Ponderings XII–XV: Black Notebooks 1939–1941. Tr. Rich-
ard Rojcewicz. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017.
GA 97 = Anmerkungen I–V (Schwarze Hefte 1942–1948). Ed. Peter
Trawny, 2015.

Other Works by Heidegger

NGS = Martin Heidegger, “Über Wesen und Begriff von Natur, Geschichte
und Staat,” in Heidegger‑Jahrbuch 4—Heidegger und der Nazionalsozialis-
mus I, Dokumente. Ed. Alfred Denker and Holger Zaborowski (Freiburg in
Bresigau: Verlag Karl Alber, 2009), 53–88 / “On the Essence and Concept
of Nature, History, and State,” in Nature, History, State: 1933–1934. Tr.
Gregory Fried and Richard Polt (London: Bloomsbury, 2013).
 Preface
Address to the Reader

Still when, to where thou wert, I came,

Some lovely glorious nothing I did see.
—John Donne, “Air and Angels”1

Dear Reader,
Forgive the anachronism of addressing you this way, but I am a Platonist,
or more exactly, a Socratic, and dialogue is essential to how I think and to
what I hope to accomplish with this book. While philosophy may begin in
private reflection, it fulfills itself and lives in conversation with others before
returning again to the internal forge of contemplation. In fact, before private
reflection can encounter the questions that impel it, conversation in the larger
sense must have brought reflection to where it no longer understands and
from there to wonder, reflect further, and then again respond. That larger
conversation is the ever-ongoing discourse of human community, across gen-
erations, that establishes a world of meaning for each of us. Meaning-making
conversation extends from those we have known most intimately—family,
friends, mentors—to those we hear from and hear about—the strangers and
acquaintances we encounter in everyday life, anonymous bureaucrats, politi-
cal leaders, entertainers, and storytellers of all kinds. It also includes those
we imagine: ancestors, historical figures, characters in myth and story. With-
out this prior world, there could be no breakdown of that world to engender
philosophical reflection.
In the Phaedrus, Plato has his Socrates argue that writing displaces and
thereby corrupts the immediacy of speech, because the written word can-
not speak, cannot answer the reader’s questions and enter into conversion
(274b–277a). In spoken dialogue, the conversation partner is directly present,

xxi
xxii Preface

engaging in the activity that makes the conversation a διάλογος: dia-logue, a

talking-through of an issue in conversation with another. The written word,
by contrast, is outside of time; it is locked down by its form and can no lon-
ger change and be changed by the reader. But Plato ironically undermines
this argument by having Socrates make his statement in a written dialogue
that imitates the form of spoken dialogue.2 Plato’s form of writing suggests
that writing may also beckon us into the kind of conversation necessary for
philosophical reflection.
If you are reading this book, I assume that you have read Plato and that
you also have imagined yourself in conversation with Socrates while reading
a work over two thousand years old. To refuse that invitation and nevertheless
continue to read would be to treat the dialogues as mere artifacts, dead letters
of intellectual history. My own first experience of accepting this invitation
was in high school, where a history teacher, Paul Jefferson, had us read the
Crito and then write our own dialogues between Socrates and ourselves—an
assignment I now give to my own students. From Plato to pupil, we all make
Socrates up, and each other as well, and even ourselves, through dialogue.
At stake in dialogue, and in polemical understanding more generally, is
what I will term ideation, a respectable if clunky English word. Dictionaries
define it as the formation of ideas or concepts as well as the ideas and con-
cepts so formed. For example, ideation is both the power to form a mental
image of a unicorn and the specific image itself. I will use the word to indi-
cate more than the formation of ideas, especially if taken in the sense of de-
liberately formulating theories and producing precise definitions and rigorous
arguments. That is an important aspect of the phenomenon, but I also want to
employ ‘ideation’ as both the latent capacity and the engaged activity of the
imagination to make present what is absent by giving it a form that makes
it intelligible and distinct, whether or not this is done consciously and then
deliberately thematized. In keeping with ordinary usage, in which ideation
is both process and product, I will speak of ideation in both its verbal and
its nominal sense, as both ‘thinking up’ something and the thing thought up.
Ideation suggests a resonance between idea, which Plato places at the
pinnacle of knowledge, and imagination, which he seems to place at the bot-
tom, but which is better understood as the foundation for understanding. For
example, ideation is happening, right here, right now, as I write and as you
read, each of us giving life to inanimate print on a page or pixels on a screen.
While I may have written long ago and be long gone, ideation makes me pres-
ent to you, just as it makes you present to me, whether you were my former
teacher or student, or are a friend or colleague, or will be someone entirely
unknown or unknowable to me, if I am lucky enough to have you as a reader
far distant in place and time.
 Preface xxiii

Of course, an ideation may be pure fantasy. Fantasy is certainly both a

strength and a peril of imagination, depending on its use: a strength, because
improbable but conceivable imaginings can free us from the given for the
sake of the possible; a peril, because absurd but engrossing imaginings can
unmoor us from what is possible and drive us into illusion and delusion.
Nevertheless, even if it goes astray, my ideation of you as reader and yours
of me as writer is a prime example of what I believe Plato recognized in the
Phaedrus: that structurally, ideation is an a priori foundation to all commu-
nication, whether spoken or written.3 We may well make each other up all
the time. Even in direct conversation, where the other person is putatively en-
tirely present, in fact their personhood is not directly accessible to us at all by
the senses. I can see and touch and smell the body. I can hear the voice. But
not the person. I can only impute personhood to the other, because it is insen-
sible, invisible. But impute is probably too weak a word for how we attribute
personhood to others, as if it were a merely intellectual exercise. Before the
intellectual attribution of personhood is a deeper, a priori empathy, uncon-
scious yet constant, for otherwise we would interact like sociopaths with
animated manikins as our companions. Yes, I can logically deduce that other
beings that look, sound, feel, smell, and act like me are probably persons, too,
but I can have no direct experience of their personhood, only of the physical
manifestation, the external, empirical shell. I can have direct access only to
my own personhood—not in a comprehensive way, but in the simple sense
that I can have access only to my own consciousness. Even if that self of mine
can be fractured, uncertain, and fleeting, it is nonetheless individuated and my
own—jemeinig, as Heidegger would say. I cannot experience the internality
of any other person, although I can imagine it by analogy with my own.
And yet all dialogue and communication requires my ideation of your
personhood. Even the most dogged empiricist pays indirect tribute to the
invisible whenever entering into conversation. To make up the other is not
to plaster over a merely brute physical presence with the cosmetic veneer of
personhood as a metaphysical fantasy. Making up is how we reconcile the
other to the invisibility of personhood. This ideation of the other as person
is not delusional, it is an idea that we cannot do without if dialogue is to be
possible at all. It is constitutive of discourse. All imagination is make-believe,
but it is also true that the world makes-us-believe, for otherwise we would
be petrified by incomprehension. There is no way around this belief, which
Plato calls pistis, the constitutive trust endowing the world with provisional
intelligibility. Dialogue is co-constitutive of the world, because without the
imputation of the other as person, I would be thrown back upon a solipsism
that the world itself belies, because the world constantly refutes my preten-
sions to treat myself as the origin of its meaning.
xxiv Preface

I am not the source of the intelligibility of the world. I am not alone in

meaning-making. Dialogue has already made sense of the world for me, and
I can only make better sense of the world in and through dialogue, because,
as the Greek dia-logos suggests, dialogue is the through-way to meaning.
The world as significant opens up only in communication with the things and
persons that impinge upon us and to which we respond. Dialogue involves the
ideation of the other-as-person in this ongoing meaning-construal. What Plato
understood is that writing can also address us, and by addressing us, involve
us in dialogue, and by so involving us, evoke the presence of the other as
person. It is not just that writing should ‘also’ be granted the stature afforded
to speech but that writing provides an exemplar of how the ideation of per-
sonhood underlies all discourse, something that speech can obscure because
of the seeming immediacy of the other person.
In Being and Time, Heidegger says that “hearing constitutes the primary
and authentic openness” of each of us “for our ownmost potentiality for
being, as hearing the voice of the friend” that we each “carry along with
ourselves” (SZ, 163). While I may disagree with Heidegger about many
things, I agree emphatically about this. This “hearing” is not auditory in the
physical sense of hearing sounds; it is the capacity for listening to the other,
as another person, that transcends any particular sensory medium of com-
munication. Who is this “friend” whose “voice” we each “carry along” with
us in our “ownmost” existence? Is it the voice of a specific person, a best
friend? Or different friends on different occasions? Or an anonymous voice
of conscience? I would say any and all of these, for the definite article of
“the friend” indicates a structural feature of our existence as human beings, a
placeholder that can be and must at times be occupied by the voice of a friend
known or unknown, specified or unspecified. Hearing this voice “constitutes”
(konstituiert) our individual openness to a meaningful world, not in the bland
sense of ‘constitute’ as being-the-equivalent-of, but rather as what con-sti-
tutes our world: brings together its intelligible elements and establishes them
as a meaningful whole that we can inhabit. More specifically, it is a world
that I can inhabit, what I and I alone can experience as my possibilities. Why
the friend? Because of the trust, the pistis, that necessarily underlies language,
from womb to grave. The friend is whomever we trust enough to listen to in
making sense of the world as a whole in the co-constituting work of hearing
and dialogue.4 That whole is always provisional. It can transform, fray, decay,
or fall apart entirely at any time, and so the voice of the friend returns ever
again, in forms as specific or as anonymous as the occasion demands.
If you are reading this in the spirit of my invitation, then you are enacting
exactly this point through the ideation of me as your imagined conversation
partner. In other contexts, ‘I’ might be the imagined voice of a long-passed
 Preface xxv

grandparent, a childhood friend, a lover, a teacher, a colleague, an adversary.

The friend might even be yourself; for some, it might be a divine presence,
such as Socrates’s daimonion. I trust that you know what I mean from personal
experience. It is not simply that we make up or imagine this friend. The ide-
ation of the friend is what makes us up, through a “voice” that arrives unbid-
den to help us make sense of the world and thereby to help us remain open to
our possibilities. The voice of the friend both builds our world and returns to
us in reconstituting a world whose meaning has frayed enough to break down.
Friendship therefore precedes any possibility of enmity, as truth precedes
any possibility of lying. Levinas was right and Hobbes was wrong. Ethics
is first philosophy because the trust entailed in dialogue is essential to the
formation of a meaningful world.5 Our natural condition is not a state of war
but of friendship, because without the preliminary trust in some other as a
person-like-us, we could not even begin to absorb the sense-making practices
of language that articulate the world.6 Like a wild-child raised by wolves,
we might have some kind of world, but it would not be a human world. We
all begin, quite literally in utero, taking in the meaning of the world through
the philia, the friendship in this most broad sense, provided by the mother;
research has shown that already in the third trimester, a fetus is taking in
and responding to the particular linguistic rhythms of the mother’s voice and
social environment.7
I have noted that dialogue, from the Greek dialegesthein, means to talk
(-legesthein) something through (dia-), to speak in alternation with someone,
to converse with others. The dia-, the alternating and reciprocal talking-
through of something with another or other persons, intimates the temporal
nature of discursive understanding, language, and being human. A world of
meaning cannot be constituted in one immediate and non-discursive cogni-
tion, and, because of our finitude, whatever provisional whole we do as-
semble will erode with time and must be reconstituted, in time, in dialogue.
To deny the enduring necessity of dialogue is to deny our human finitude, to
deny our need for the friend, and it implies a dictatorial will to impose a final
answer on the meaning of the world. Only a tyrannical and cowardly violence
can sustain such a dogmatic answer, because meaning does fray. We are not
alone, as if each one of us were the creator-God of all meaning. The ideation
of the other as a person, in the necessity of dialogue, is phenomenologically
essential to our humanity.
I seek to enact this philosophical point by dialoguing with you, as reader,
to make you the voice of the friend whom I will carry throughout. The ide-
ation of personhood in dialogue is itself a prime example of what I want to
defend in this book: the role of idea, image, and imagination as necessarily
constitutive of our ethical life, united in ideation. I hope that you, too, will
xxvi Preface

carry-through this dialogue, which certainly does not mean agreeing with
me. I trust that you have experienced the phenomenon of ideation, that you
experience it even now, in this moment, as you turn the inanimate letters
into animate language, and that you will think-through all this with me in
dialogue. Ideation of the other as a person in dialogue is emblematic, indeed
constitutive, of other forms of ideation that are essential to ethical life.

Gregory Fried
Auburndale, Massachusetts
July 13, 2020

NOTES

1. Donne, The Complete Poetry, 19.

2. For Plato’s irony as distinct from Socrates’ irony, operating through the “dra-
matic irony” of the action of the dialogues themselves, which includes the speeches
as well as the settings, characters, and events depicted, see Griswold, “Irony in the
Platonic Dialogues.” Griswold provides a concise yet compelling analysis of the
essential hermeneutical principles for reading Plato; see also the essays collected
in Griswold, Platonic Writings/Platonic Readings, especially Griswold’s own on
“Plato’s Metaphilosophy: Why Plato Wrote Dialogues.”
3. On the basis of Socrates’s argument in the Phaedrus, Jacques Derrida accused
Plato of “logocentrism,” the notion that speech conveys pure presence and stands as
the metaphysical paradigm for an absolute fullness of meaning requiring no further
interpretation and serving as the basis of unquestionable authority. But the complex
irony of the Phaedrus, where Plato writes about Socrates saying that writing is a de-
generate form of communication, shows that Plato was well aware that both speaking
and writing have the power, when done properly, to draw us into an ethical ideation
of the other. See Jacques Derrida, “Plato’s Pharmacy” in Dissemination.
4. Unlike Gadamer, who says that authority is based on “an act of acknowledg-
ment . . . that the other is superior to oneself in judgment and insight and that for this
reason his judgment takes precedence,” albeit an authority that is not beyond question
(Truth and Method, 291), I would amend Gadamer to say that authority, as a trust
that structures access to meaning, is something we necessarily impute to the other
as a precondition to dialogue. The trust bestowed upon the partner in dialogue as a
person and author of meaning is an a priori constitutive existentiale of any meaning-
ful exchange whatsoever and precedes the granting of authority in Gadamer’s sense.
5. For Levinas on the relation of ethics as first philosophy to the meaningful con-
strual of the world epistemologically, see Crowell, “Why Is Ethics First Philosophy?”
6. See Tomasello, A Natural History of Human Morality.
7. See Hatab, Proto-Phenomenology, Language Acquisition, Orality, and Lit-
eracy, 93–94.
 Introduction
Towards a Polemical Ethics

Think not that I am come to send peace on earth. I came not to send peace,
but a sword.
—Matthew, 10:34 (KJV)

But love cannot sleep, can never be peaceful or permanent.

—Emmanuel Levinas, “Ethics of the Infinite”1

The question of Being, as a question about how the world can be intelligible
and meaningful to us, and so how things can be what they are to us, is an
ancient one, not Heidegger’s private preserve. An analysis of the existential-
hermeneutical structures of our being-human, as Heidegger undertook in Be-
ing and Time as a way to unfold the question of Being, is both brilliant and
not obviously political, even if Heidegger ultimately made it so. Heidegger’s
understanding of the historicity and temporality of being-human led him to
a radically anti-universalist politics of human community. But the road to
atavistic ethno-nationalism has and will continue to take forms well beyond
Heidegger’s own thought or National Socialism’s specific history. We see
this in our times because it is human to fall prey to an exclusivist belonging.
In facing such questions, ‘Heidegger’ is not the historical person or even his
particular texts. His thinking stands for both a danger and an opportunity we
must face up to in responding to what it means to be as human-beings.2
A premise of this book is that in doing justice to Heidegger’s thought, we
must insist on the absolute freedom of philosophy, which means taking up a
thinker’s questions and the responses given to that question in our own way,
so long as this does justice to what is at issue. At his best, Heidegger would
have wanted this. He chose as motto for his collected works “Wege, nicht

1
2 Introduction

Werke,” loosely “Pathways, not treatises” (GA 1: 437). As Jürgen Habermas

wrote in 1953, “It appears to be time to think with Heidegger against Hei-
degger.”3 We must stay open to a constructive confrontation with Heidegger,
so that we may discern where we part company in responding to essential
questions lying at the heart of ethics about what it means to be human. In this
endeavor, I have made Plato my partner, in part because Heidegger makes
him his principal adversary, in part because after teaching his Republic for
twenty-five years, Plato’s Socrates is the philosophical friend I carry ringing
in my ear.

TOWARDS A POLEMICAL ETHICS

A joke explained is a joke ruined, but a title explained may assist in following
the trajectory of this book’s project and entering into dialogue with it. That
title is Towards a Polemical Ethics: Between Heidegger and Plato.
Towards: This book will not provide a systemic or programmatic theory of
ethics. It is a propaedeutic metaethics, a work that seeks to furnish the foun-
dations for fuller treatment. As a movement towards a goal, the book invites
you to participate in telling a philosophical story. It is a dialogue.
Polemical: The Greek word πóλεμος (polemos), is a central concept for
Heidegger.4 Polemos in Greek means war, but already in Fragment 53 of
Heraclitus the word takes on a metaphorical, philosophical, or even cosmo-
logical meaning deeper and wider than war in the usual sense. Heidegger
follows Heraclitus in making polemos a name for Being itself. The fragment
reads as follows:

Πόλεμος πάντων μὲν πατήρ ἐστι πάντων δὲ βασιλεύς, καὶ τοὺς μὲν θεοὺς ἔδειξε
τοὺς δὲ ἀνθρώπους, τοὺς μὲν δούλους ἐποίησε τοὺς δὲ ἐλευθέρους.

Polemos is father of all and king of all, and it reveals some as gods, others as
human beings; it makes some slaves, others free.5

My use of ‘polemical’ and related words departs from ordinary usage, and
in this I agree with Heidegger. It will not mean a relentlessly aggressive and
disputatious attitude, intent on wounding or destroying, incapable of self-
criticism and self-correction, although that certainly can be an effect of the
polemos as I interpret it. Polemos is a constitutive feature of being a person,
what Heidegger calls Dasein, but I will diverge from him significantly in
what this entails. Heidegger says that “polemos and logos are the same” (GA
40: 66; cf. GA 97: 39), by which he does not mean that they are identical but
 Introduction 3

rather facets of the same phenomenon. For Heidegger, drawing upon Hera-
clitus, logos does not simply mean word, account, speech, rational argument,
or language. It means the gathering and collectedness of phenomena such
that they are intelligible as distinctly meaningful things in an interrelated
whole, as only then can we name them in language or debate them in speech
or argue them in logic. This gathering allows things to be what they are, and
it therefore also delineates what they are not. It separates, distinguishes, and
demarcates things so that they may be distinct and not fall into a meaningless
jumble. This is the polemos, what Heidegger sometimes translates as Aus-
einandersetzung, a setting-out-and-apart-from-one-another, a con-frontation
in which things can fit together as what they are because they delimit them-
selves in their respective identity and difference.
To indicate my departure from Heidegger in my treatment of dialogue, I
would say that polemos and dialogos are the same. We make sense of the
world in dialogue with others and also through our experience of the world
of things. As an anonymous commentator on Plato wrote in the sixth century
CE, “the dialogue is a cosmos and the cosmos a dialogue.”6 Sense-making is
at issue because we are temporal and finite: we cannot lock the cosmos into a
fixed, absolute meaning without falsifying experience, which often does not
make sense, if we pay attention. We are brought up short in confrontation
with things that do not fit with the meaning established by prior dialogue in
the larger, world-forming sense. We either enter this polemos by reengaging
in dialogue or repress it to remain undisturbed in the unexamined life. This
being-brought-up-short-by-the-world will be a recurring theme of this book.
We must not hear this polemical aspect of the human condition as necessar-
ily negative, violent, or adversarial, although it can degenerate into these. To
be human is to be dialogically polemical as ever-ready to confront the world
anew and reform it interpretively.
In reviewing a draft of this book, Plato scholar Marina McCoy asked,
“Are all forms of dialogue polemical? Can some forms of dialogue be purely
cooperative and not polemical? If dialogue and polemics are two sides of the
same coin, what does each offer as a term that is lacking in the other term?”
My answer is yes. All dialogue is polemical, because in the most cooperative,
friendly, and even loving dialogue, one is still working out what the other
means as well as the meaning of what is at issue in the dialogue.7 That re-
quires confronting this double-acting meaning, testing it, exploring it, and
reconciling to it. This is why the polemos is always there in the dia-logos,
the working-through of conversation, and I think this is why Levinas, for ex-
ample, argues that ethics is first philosophy: because recognition of the Other
by confronting the Other, face to face, is what jolts us from our solipsistic
construal of the world, to make sense of its discontinuities and contradictions
4 Introduction

that is the heart of dialogues with others and the world itself. Otherwise, we
would already be of one mind, with nothing more to say, the dialogue done.
The opposite of polemos is not logos but silence: either the silence of indif-
ference or the silence of a complete meeting of the minds. The latter is a non-
discursive logos. Fully realized, it would have to be something like a lingua
mentis shared with divinity as unspoken, because as discursive, dia-logos is
the temporal formation of mutual understanding, but the fullness of a real-
ized logos is eternal in its unspoken silence—but a silence that nevertheless
‘speaks’ volumes. Such fully realized logos is beyond our finite embodiment
in this existence, as it would have to resolve all questions of meaning. What
polemos offers discursive logos is the engagements with what is at-issue that
keeps the logos going, unfolding as dia-logos; what logos offers polemos are
the intimations of mutual understanding that give purpose and hope to dia-
logue. Otherwise, there would only be polemics in its ordinary sense.
Ethics: This is not primarily a work in normative ethics, although it touches
on normative themes. I will use ethics in its Aristotelian sense of ēthos: a way
of life, a mode of being, that informs our normative decisions and everyday
morality. Such an ethics involves a conception of what it means to be human
as confronted with the choices that living with others necessarily raises, and
so it also entails politics. The project is metaethical, which includes the meta-
political: establishing the grounds for the possibility of an ethical life, norms,
and morality, as well as the customs, laws, and institutions needed to sustain
such a life. For a brief period at the onset of the Third Reich, Heidegger also
spoke of a metapolitics, for example: “The end of ‘philosophy:’”—by which
he means the supposedly dogmatic idea-ism of all Western thought since
Plato—“We must bring it to an end and thereby prepare what is entirely
Other: metapolitics” (GA 94: 115). It means, for him, a revolution in thinking
as profound as the one in politics, one that would up-end the entire historical
Being of a people (GA 94: 124), and thereby of the West, if not the globe,
in a radically other inception to history.8 This is why the polemos between
Heidegger and Plato is so vital.

BETWEEN HEIDEGGER AND PLATO

This project moves between Heidegger and Plato in multiple senses. First,
it brings Plato and Heidegger into confrontation with each other over the
question of ethics. Second, while I aim to defend Plato against Heidegger,
this defense is not a polemic that simply dismisses the latter without taking
his critique seriously. I will respond to the question of ethics in a way that
navigates between Plato and Heidegger by showing how the former provides
 Introduction 5

resources to take up the substance of the latter’s critique. Finally, Plato and
Heidegger serve as points of punctuation to the history of Western thought
so far. Sometimes I will delve into that history in order to draw forth what is
at stake between them.
Plato: That Plato towers over the origin of Western philosophy is as
self-evident as Whitehead’s much-cited observation that “the safest general
characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of
a series of footnotes to Plato.”9 Heidegger holds that Western thought had
its genuine but concealed and misunderstood inception with the so-called
pre-Socratics, chiefly Anaximander, Heraclitus, and Parmenides, but that this
inception failed to maintain its potential. For Heidegger, Western philoso-
phy does indeed begin with Plato due to that initial failing. In particular, it
is Plato’s “doctrine” of the ideas that Heidegger identifies as the explicit or
implicit driving force of all the subsequent history, even in those who think,
like Nietzsche or Marx, that they are upending Plato or the tradition based
upon him. Heidegger throws down a gauntlet before Plato, or what he takes
as Platonism.10 I will take up that gauntlet, in part because I agree that Plato
undergirds the Western tradition in philosophy and that Plato’s idea of the
ideas is decisive for the political question facing us now. At stake is ideation
itself as a defining feature of being human, and this, for me, makes Plato un-
avoidable for metaethics and metapolitics. Finally, Plato experts will note that
I follow the so-called literary school of reading Plato, which holds that inter-
preting Plato’s philosophical meaning requires taking into account characters
in the dialogues, setting, dramatic action as well as the surface structure of
the arguments presented by Socrates and other characters. This method also
does not assume that Socrates is simply Plato’s mouthpiece, as beloved as he
may have been by Plato.11
Heidegger: Much of my previous work has focused on the connection
between Heidegger’s thought and his active participation in the Nazi move-
ment. There is a huge literature on this topic, and I will not reproduce here
in detail my participation in these discussions. In my “Letter to Emmanuel
Faye,” I explained that I began working on Heidegger more than thirty years
ago because I wanted to find a thinker who could make the most trenchant
critique of what I took to be the best aspects of the liberal-democratic tradi-
tion and the Enlightenment.12
By liberalism I mean neither contemporary neo-liberalism, as a political
and economic program of global capitalism, nor contemporary liberalism as
what happens to be considered left-of-center in American politics and cultural
life—although aspects of both may be entailed by the liberalism I mean. A
larger sense of liberalism holds that liberty, or freedom, is essential to what
makes us human; that the individual person is worthy of a presumptive
6 Introduction

respect grounded in that freedom and for that reason is a bearer of rights; that
these rights extend universally and equally to all persons, without regard to
time, place, or other contingencies; that political power and social policy are
legitimate only to the extent that they accord with these rights; and that we,
as both individuals and societies, have the obligation to develop the personal
relations and sociopolitical institutions that engender, sustain, and defend
freedom. Vital to this conception of freedom is an understanding of equality
before the law and as an economic principle: that all members of the body
politic have the material opportunity to realize their freedom as well as the
obligation to employ it responsibly to contribute to the common good. This
is an affective equality of citizens’ dispositions as members of the integral
body politic, cultivated through education and participation in civic life as
necessary to devotion to the commonweal and its legitimacy, and sustained
by whatever political economy grants citizens this foundation. I will call
freedom so conceived an eleutheric freedom, for reasons I will sketch in this
volume and defend more fully in subsequent work.
All this may sound like a liberalism centered on the Kantian conception
of the person or on the Lockean conception of legitimate government as
grounded in consent. While such issues are important, my concerns here are
metaethical, which as I understand it includes the metapolitical. I am inter-
ested in defending the justificatory grounds for believing in such a liberalism
at all, not in spelling out a systematic normative ethical theory or a political
philosophy of institutions. Furthermore, I believe this is important now, in
our times, because liberalism in this larger sense is going through a period
of profound stress, even crisis, as evidenced by the rise of Donald Trump
in the United States and of a similar authoritarian ethno-nationalism in Eu-
rope and across the globe. The specter of fascism looms again. It cannot be
countered effectively by a merely ideological polemic but only by a polemos
that exposes, examines, critiques, and reassesses the justificatory grounds of
liberalism, because historical liberalism certainly has its share of faults and
failings. At stake is a reconstruction of liberalism through a polemical ethics
in response to some of its most serious vulnerabilities. The goal is to provide
the metaethical foundation for a reconstructive liberalism, what I hope to
defend in subsequent volumes as an eleutheric liberalism that will engage
polemically with the history of liberalism in this broader sense.
I take Heidegger seriously as a critic of liberalism’s metaethical founda-
tions, and so, I have not treated him merely as an ideological adversary to
be refuted. To read an author philosophically does not require that you agree
with his or her concepts, methodologies, arguments, or conclusions. It does,
however, require that you believe there is something of philosophical merit, at
least in questions opened up by that thinker and the way that thinker responds
 Introduction 7

to them. Otherwise, the encounter, no matter how learned and scholarly, be-
comes merely an exercise in intellectual history or ideological polemic with
no relevance to our lives together. I trust that you will read me in this spirit.
So, I seek a proper polemos with Heidegger, not a polemic against him. I
consider that confrontation worthwhile, because while I may oppose his cri-
tique of the liberal Enlightenment and loathe his decision to join the Nazis, I
do think he is right that at the heart of the matter lies the question of liberal-
ism’s universalism, and that this universalism has its deepest source in Plato’s
idea-ism as the most powerful current in Western philosophy. While this con-
frontation with Heidegger, in particular through an interpretation of Plato’s
Allegory of the Cave, will be supported through scholarship and analysis, the
project itself is not a conventionally academic one but rather an occasion for
a philosophical meditation on the polemical ethics of being human. As such,
I have attempted to make it as accessible as possible to readers not expert in
Heidegger or Plato.
Furthermore, as I have argued elsewhere, I disagree with critics such as
Emmanuel Faye and Sidonie Kellerer, who believe that there is nothing of
philosophical value in Heidegger.13 They do not think this simply because
they find his conceptual vocabulary and reasoning to be so nonsensical and
specious as to fail to rise to the level of philosophical concepts or arguments,
as have critics like Rudolf Carnap.14 More to the point, they see Heidegger’s
work as so entirely devoted to promoting a worldview dedicated to Nazism
that it does not deserve the designation of philosophy, because such a world-
view, in its advocacy of anti-rationalism, violence, domination, extermina-
tion, and racism, prima facie cannot be reasonable or philosophical. For
these critics, Heidegger merely lends a philosophical veneer to an incantatory
jargon that seeks to disseminate Nazism.
I simply disagree. As terrible as this may be, a thinker may argue and even
do evil but still be a philosopher. I think there is merit to many of Heidegger’s
concepts, methodologies, and analyses, even if I disagree emphatically with
some of his conclusions, especially the political ones. Moreover, I think that
conventional polemics against Heidegger miss a vital opportunity. The true
threat we face is not Heidegger but the reemergence of fascism in new forms.
There is something about the crisis of our late modernity that keeps churning
fascism to the surface of history as a symptom of our era’s form of nihilism,
which I contend has to do with the collision of universalism and embedded,
historical belonging. By confronting the weakness in liberalism that Hei-
degger exposes, we may reconstruct a politics that rises to this challenge. A
concise way of saying this is that what is at issue in Heidegger’s thinking
does not lead inevitably to fascism, but it also did not lead him there simply
by accident in his response to what human-being means. In the space opened
8 Introduction

up by this neither-nor is an opportunity to appropriate what is at stake philo-

sophically on our own terms.

THE ‘AND’ BETWEEN HEIDEGGER AND PLATO:

HERMENEUTICAL CONSIDERATIONS

The immediate scholarly dialogue I take up in this book is between Hei-

degger and Plato. The more fundamental dialogue that I seek is between you,
as reader, and me, as writer, as well as with an audience open to reflecting
upon the political crisis of our age, a crisis which makes more vivid what is
at stake in being human and a life well lived. Heidegger and Plato serve as an
occasion for this larger ethical inquiry. The ‘and’ is the site of the polemos
at issue. Heidegger and Plato are conjoined here by more than a merely aca-
demic interest in a comparison of their positions on ontology, metaphysics,
ethics, or politics, or even just because Heidegger takes aim at Plato as the
motive force for the decline into nihilism. Taken together, Heidegger and
Plato can provide the impetus into the questions that are most decisive for
this inquiry.
Engaging in this polemos requires being explicit about its methodological
principles. First is the role of scholarship. We presume that the more adequate
one’s interpretation of a great author, the closer we come to their philosophi-
cal insights. When done well, such interpretation can lead to greater clarity
about a thinker’s work, and it can advance an argument of its own. But the
danger is that our sense of modesty before a great thinker’s authority may
make us lean so heavily into exposition that we never quite get to asking, or
answering, the question at issue for ourselves. This is especially a risk with
Heidegger, whose conceptual vocabulary, phenomenological analyses, and
studies of authors and texts in the Western tradition are so rich (some would
say obtuse) that interpretive struggle with them can devolve into endless
exegesis, never quite getting to one’s own point. To try and counteract this
danger, I attempt to develop an English-language terminology as much as
possible rather than relying too much on Heidegger’s.
My goal is also not to provide a systematic or entirely ‘correct’ interpreta-
tion of Heidegger or Plato, but that certainly does not mean that I am simply
indifferent to the task of ‘getting right’ what an author argues. I bring Hei-
degger and Plato into dialogue to bring myself into dialogue with them and
with you, and most of all, with what is philosophically at issue. While careful
attention to an author’s concepts and arguments is vital out of respect and as
a way to sharpen what is at stake philosophically, an obsession with getting
an author right can derail reflection on die Sache selbst, the matter for thought
 Introduction 9

within the inquiry that may transcend the interlocutor’s initial understanding,
as well as one’s own. Dialogue must leave room for discovery and surprise,
because we are bounded by our finitude and should not presume to have
mastered an interpretation of the whole.

WONDER, QUESTION, AND RESPONSE

A second methodological consideration at issue in the ‘and’ between Hei-

degger and Plato has to do with the nature of philosophy itself as dialogue.
It is a view at least as ancient as Socrates that philosophy is not confined to
specific texts or arguments but is a way of life and that “a life unexamined
is not worth living” (Apology, 38a). Philosophy is more a verb than a noun,
a doing rather than a doctrine, a way of engaging with the world and with
people more than a system of concepts, arguments, and positions, but not
excluding these either.
What, then, occasions the activity of examination? What sets the heart of
philosophy beating? This brings us directly into Plato’s famous cave, where
a prisoner “is released and suddenly compelled to stand up” and to turn to the
light (515c). The passive construction in the Greek leaves unspoken who or
what does the releasing and the compelling. The allegory is so powerful as
a story that we may forget that the prisoners are “like us” (515a) as an alle-
gory for the activity of philosophy. Again, who or what provokes the sudden
compulsion into the examination that is philosophy? Is it an event that hap-
pens once, so that the scales fall from our eyes and we are ready to examine
everything, or is it an ongoing, episodic occurrence that, once occasioned, can
be sustained to punctuate life ever on?
While examination is not synonymous with skepticism, a comprehensive
skepticism that doubts everything is self-refuting, not just logically but
existentially. We cannot examine everything all at once. Even Descartes’s
radically comprehensive attempt to doubt everything cannot doubt its own
understanding of what it is doubting. Wittgenstein and Heidegger share an
insight that every act of doubting necessarily entails a prior understanding
that makes the doubt intelligible. Wittgenstein called this the language game,
Heidegger called it the unconcealment of a world of meaning.15 The same
is true of the examined life. Examination requires, as its scaffold, certain
assumptions that may go unexamined for a time in order to make sense of a
specific question. Thus philosophy is punctuated, piecemeal, and precarious.
It is always embedded in an already-operative understanding, situated in a
context that makes sense to examine, even when that examination ‘compels’
a departure from that rough-and-ready, everyday understanding. Chapter 4
10 Introduction

will examine what shocks philosophy’s heart into beating, but to address
the ‘and’ between Heidegger and Plato, I will focus here on philosophy’s
cyclical motion.
The life of philosophy has three moments: it begins in wonder, proceeds
into a question, and develops a response.16 Both Plato (Theaetetus, 155d) and
Aristotle (Metaphysics, 982b) attest to the first moment: that philosophy be-
gins in wonder, thaumazein.17 Something about the world brings us up short.
We will address this something more thoroughly later as the breakdown of
understanding, but whatever it is, it breaks in on us and compels our atten-
tion. It can be something as simple as a physical phenomenon that defies our
expectations, such as a straight straw that appears broken in a glass of water.
Or it can be something that throws our entire ethical life into unmeaning, such
as the realization, for an American living in, say, 1852, that the fact of slavery
completely negates the founding idea of the republic, as Frederick Douglass
proclaimed in his great Fourth of July oration of that year: “America is false
to the past, false to the present, and solemnly binds herself to be false to the
future.”18 The polemical heart animating that declaration is not despair but an
idea and ideal that allows Douglass to discern the contradiction between what
is and what ought to be, thereby venturing a reconstruction of the world. The
role of the idea in confronting the unmeaning of the world and then reconsti-
tuting it, as a defining feature of being-human, is what this project seeks to
illuminate and defend.
Wonder expresses itself in moods ranging from joyful, quiet awe to awful,
wrenching horror. As such, wonder is a response to what the Greeks called
to deinon, the wondrously awe-full as a marvel or a terror or both. Heidegger
was well aware of the inceptive role of wonder, both among the Greeks and
in philosophy as such. It animates the question he asks in Introduction to
Metaphysics: “Why are there beings at all rather than nothing?” (GA 40:
3). About alētheia (truth) in Heraclitus, he says, “Astonishment [Erstaunen]
first begins with the question, what does this all mean and how could it have
happened? . . . Thoughtful astonishment speaks in questioning” (GA 7: 267).
This connects with his well-known declaration in “The Question Concerning
Technology” that “questioning is the piety of thinking” (GA 7: 36).19 The
question of philosophical piety as questioning will both link Heidegger and
Plato and illuminate where they part ways.
Some might claim, like Descartes in the opening and closing passages
of his Meteorology, that the purpose of natural philosophy is to abolish the
causes of a wonder that leads only to superstitious myth and illusion.20 But
while we can ignore the call of wonder or treat it as something to overcome,
this repression always hobbles us, betraying what it means to live in polemi-
cal dialogue with our situated existence. The moment of wonder calls us to
 Introduction 11

confront our finitude, the reality that our understanding and our knowledge
are never absolute. Wonder is a defining feature of our discursive under-
standing: that our comprehension unfolds dialogically with the world; that
this comprehension is never comprehensive and often needs revision; that
it winds through time, rather than manifesting as the all-at-once of a non-
discursive, eternal understanding. In wonder, a prior meaning breaks down
into an unmeaning nevertheless ripe with the potential for meaning restored.
Wonder is sublime because it exposes us to what overawes us and provokes
us to pursue a deeper understanding. Pure wonder is at first inarticulate in
these moments of awe, but that does not mean it does not share in the logos,
that it is illogical; rather, it opens us to a dialogue with the world. Wonder is
also more than idle curiosity, because it breaks down what our prior under-
standing can articulate, if we do not avoid it by repressing it. Nevertheless, to
avoid breaking down entirely, we must permit our prior understanding to be
challenged by what is wondrous, using our existing comprehension as best
we can, if only to articulate the risks of breakdown in face of the wondrous.
This is how wonder passes over into the second moment of philosophy:
formulating a question. Wonder defies understanding but nevertheless de-
mands that we address what is at issue to drive the discursive dialogue be-
yond mute wonder into an attentive reconfiguration of an understanding of a
phenomenon. This is part of why Heidegger sees questioning as the expres-
sion of the piety of thinking: it invokes a trust that questioning, as a response
to wonder, is meaningful as such, even if thinking does not dispel the cause
for wonder in some final answer but rather intensifies the wonder itself. A
good philosophical question illuminates very precisely what is at stake, using
what it does comprehend to clarify what defies comprehension, pointing the
way to how understanding might reconstitute itself.
And that is how a question passes over to a response. Philosophical
responses to well-articulated questions attempt to reconstruct what is not
understood in terms of a new, but never entirely new, understanding. I say
response rather than answer because philosophy is a necessarily ongoing
dialogue with the world, encompassed by an understanding that is finite. This
dialogue is provoked by wonder, articulated in questioning, and addressed in
a response rather than by a final answer. Good philosophy seeks to remain
open to wonder out of respect for its own finitude and for the ways the world
can unexpectedly unsettle us. At its best, philosophy strives to unite all three
moments as part of the same, simultaneous activity. That ideal is very hard to
instantiate, but one we can attempt to approach.
Of the three moments, the third, response, is what many consider to be
philosophy. “What’s your philosophy of —?” Of politics. Of art. Of truth.
Of business. Of sport. There’s a problem, or set of problems, and a field of
12 Introduction

inquiry, and one expects anyone claiming to do philosophy to have a rigor-

ous, comprehensive, systematic answer in the form of clear concepts, cogent
arguments, and compelling conclusions. We expect a book on the shelf or
an article in a journal, making its case in an integrated constellation of argu-
ments, varying in form from the somewhat haphazard (Epictetus, Kierkeg-
aard, Nietzsche) to the methodically systematic (Aristotle, Kant, Hegel).
Rarer are the thinkers who make the questions, the second moment, their fo-
cus, but they do exist, such as the later Wittgenstein especially—“How small
a thought it takes to fill a whole life!”21 Rarer still are those who dwell on the
first moment, wonder. Examples include Heraclitus, Lao Tzu, and Meister
Eckhart. Academic philosophers tend to deny the name of philosophy to such
thinkers’ work, because it seems too close to mysticism and too far from
rigorous argument. That is a mistake, because attentiveness to what awakens
our wonder, and a body of work that seeks to emulate and incite that sense of
wonder, is a vital facet of philosophy.
No thinker fits neatly into one single mode of philosophizing. Some fit one
more than others, of course, and some straddle the distinctions—Wittgenstein,
for example, from the systematicity of the Tractatus to the exploration of
the Investigations, the third and second modes, respectively. Rarest of all are
thinkers who endeavor to work in all three modes at once. I believe Plato falls
into this category, and also Heidegger. To address what is at issue for us now,
what should evoke our wonder and what we need to articulate as a question,
is something that we can elicit in the polemos between Plato and Heidegger.
To enter into the triad of wonder-question-response, especially in reading an
author with whom one seriously disagrees, means to return to the wonder that
animates a question to be able better to formulate that question, to sharpen
what is at stake, so that one may respond yet more fully.

AT ISSUE: THE PARTICULAR AND

THE UNIVERSAL IN BEING-HUMAN

In Heidegger’s Polemos, I claimed that what is at issue in Heidegger is the

Being of our politics.22 By that I meant not only a specific set of historical
crises facing us, a planetary humanity at the close of modernity, but also the
broader question of what it means to be political. I presented this in terms of
a conflict between universalism and particularism, with Heidegger support-
ing the latter by joining with National Socialism. Since writing that book,
some of the most important texts exposing more fully Heidegger’s political
thinking have been published. These include his lectures of 1933–1934, at the
height of his involvement in the Nazi revolution, in the volume Being and
 Introduction 13

Truth. In those lectures is a passage that provides the most distilled version of
the connection between Heidegger’s ontology and his politics:

If one interprets [Plato’s] ideas as representations and thoughts that contain a

value, a norm, a law, a rule, such that ideas then become conceived of as norms,
then the one subject to these norms is the human being–not the historical hu-
man being, but rather the human being in general, the human being in itself, or
humanity. Here [that is, in Platonism in all its forms—which includes almost
everything from Christianity to Hegel to Marx, for Heidegger], the conception
of the human being is one of a rational being in general. In the Enlightenment
and in liberalism, this conception achieves a definite form. Here all of the pow-
ers against which we [that is, Germany under the National Socialist regime]
must struggle today have their root. Opposed to this conception are the finitude,
temporality, and historicity of human beings. (GA 36/37: 166)

In Introduction to Metaphysics, Heidegger writes, “the word idea, eidos,

‘idea,’ comes to the fore as the definitive and prevailing word for Being
(phusis). Since then, the interpretation of Being as idea rules over all Western
thinking, throughout the history of its changes up to today” (GA 40: 189).
The Platonic ideas are supposed to offer us the truth by transcending the par-
ticular givens of the world, by climbing up and out from the transient realm
of the cave and into the light of eternal realities. Again, Introduction to Meta-
physics: “[Plato’s] idea constitutes the Being of beings. But here, idea and
eidos are used in an extended sense, meaning not only what we can see with
our physical eyes, but everything that can be apprehended” (GA 40: 190).
The ideas supposedly give us access to meaning, what it means for any
particular thing to be, by comprehending that thing “in general,” in terms of
its abstract, universal features that constitute its form, its idea, as an eternal
reality “apprehended” with the mind’s eye. In the human domain, “not the
historical human being, but rather the human being in general” becomes the
object of inquiry. This is the human being as subject to timeless, universal
laws, such as those familiar to us in the liberal notion of human rights, which
supposedly apply to all humanity, irrespective of time and place—that is, how
we are situated and embodied as finite, temporal Dasein.
“Here,” says Heidegger, “all of the powers against which we must struggle
today have their root.” In Plato’s idea-ism, his moral and epistemological
idealism, Heidegger finds the universalizing roots of the liberal Enlighten-
ment. Against “the powers,” both ideological and political, which represent
that liberalism writ large, “we must struggle today.” The “we” here is his
audience of young German students, in the fall of 1933, in an introductory
lecture course at Freiburg University, at the dawn of the National Socialist
revolution. Heidegger says that “Opposed to this conception” of the human
14 Introduction

in Platonic-Enlightenment liberalism “are the finitude, temporality, and his-

toricity of human beings.” Why?
For Heidegger, Plato’s ideas offer up a notion of truth that is not finite but
rather infinite, transcending all flux and limitation; not temporal but rather
eternal; not historical but rather universal and trans-temporal. If philosophy
means escaping the cave to emerge into a realm of timeless, eternal ideas that
fix the meaning of reality forever, then Heidegger wants to upend philosophy
altogether. For Heidegger, there is no “rough, steep upward” pathway out of
the cave (Republic, 515e). The cave is all there is, even if we can be yanked
out of the shackles of everydayness and faced with some liberating power that
turns out to be a recognition of the power of history itself, and not an escape
beyond the cave.
This does not mean that the world we inhabit is meaningless. Far from it,
for Heidegger, who seeks an alternative to nihilism. That there is meaning
is a phenomenological given. The shadows manifestly do mean something
to us. But it is a historical us for whom they have meaning, a bounded us, a
community of shared traditions and understandings that are largely unspoken,
serving as the background to our everyday lives, and which therefore cannot
be universalized because such understanding is unaccountable. These back-
ground practices and understandings are unaccountable because to give them
a logos, in the sense of a rational account, would be precisely to dissolve
them as that background to our existence, as if one were to shine a light on
a shadow to see it better. At its most pernicious, for Heidegger, Platonism
devolves into nihilistic moralism by opposing Being as what actually is to
what ought to be: “As Being itself becomes fixed in its character as idea, it
also tends to make up for the ensuing degradation of Being. But by now, this
can occur only by setting something above Being that Being never yet is, but
always ought to be” (GA 40: 206).23
To be properly human, for Heidegger, means to be Da-Sein: Being-here,
situated in a historical reality that always-already is, bounded by a constel-
lation of meaning that we did not make up and which we have been given
as a kind of fate that we share with a community and a tradition. There is no
absolute transcendence for Heidegger, no way out of the cave, in the sense
of arriving at a timeless realm of ultimate truth; the truth is always given as
a time-bound, particular openness to a world of meaning that has a necessary
limit, a definite finitude. Historical meaning will shift, drift, and ultimately
pass away into the nothing that time brings to all finite things. All the more
reason to embrace the cave, for it is all we will ever have. For Heidegger,
nihilism consists precisely in denying the finite given in the name of a reality
that supposedly transcends it, but really only negates it.
 Introduction 15

As Alexander Duff has properly seen, the rejection of universalism con-

stitutes Heidegger’s “particularist revolution.”24 It does not merely reject the
progressive’s ameliorating idealism that repudiates the putatively confining
bonds of tradition to sacrifice the was and the is on the altar of the ought; his
ontological metapolitics also opposes, with a steely hardness, the conserva-
tive’s resentful obsession to make the present and future replicate the past.
This is Heidegger’s radical historicism as a radical situatedness that takes
on the polemos with its own historicity but without relying upon pre-given
standards, whether aspirational or traditional. Heidegger presents his po-
litical stance through a conception of human-being arising directly from key
concepts in his phenomenological analysis of human existence: “finitude,
temporality, and historicity.”
Against these, Heidegger opposes Platonism in its millennia-long domina-
tion of the West: the ideas, and the corresponding understanding that what
is most essential to human beings is not their finite belonging to a specific
world, not their dynamic unfolding in time, not their embeddedness in a his-
tory that provides their world with meaning, but rather “the human being in
general.” For Heidegger, this involves what can be abstracted from all such
specificity in order to provide timeless ethical and political principles, acces-
sible to a timeless rationality—what we today might call ‘human rights’—
that apply infinitely, as it were, to all persons and peoples, in whatever time
and however placed in historical context. Heidegger gives this opponent,
against which Germany must “struggle” in polemos, a name: Liberalism.
While Heidegger also does mean what we would conventionally call the
liberalism of the modern era in this concept, with its emphasis on personal
rights and liberties, limited government, equality of persons, and so on, it is
crucial for this project to underline that what he has in mind with Liberalism
(capitalized to distinguish it) has a much broader scope, reaching back to the
dawn of the West with Plato. What defines that scope is the universalism of
the Platonic ideas, how they apply to particulars, regardless of time or place.
Such a Liberalism encompasses conservatism, not just progressivism, as
grounded in standards that transcend human historicity. Particularism is what
he opposes to this Platonic, universalist Liberalism. It is a politics grounded
in a metapolitics, itself grounded in an ontology.
These ontological issues might seem distant from concrete ethical and po-
litical concerns. They are not as distant as they might seem, though, because
the nature of what is and how it is relates inescapably to what and who we are,
both you and I, reading and writing in our dialogical individuality, and us, as
communities of lesser and greater and overlapping scopes. For the Socrates
of Plato’s Republic, knowledge of the transcendent, everlasting ideas, and of
16 Introduction

the idea of the good that exceeds all other ideas, is what would make effective
rule possible at all, assuming such knowledge is attainable. The presumptive
philosopher-kings and queens of his imagined polity would have to know
the forms of justice, courage, and all the other virtues, as well as the nature
of the good itself, in order to make out how these apply to the shadows and
contingencies of the changeable world: “Once they see the good itself, they
must be compelled, each in his turn, to use it as a pattern for ordering city,
private men, and themselves for the rest of their lives” (540b). Only then can
they educate and lead their fellow citizens.
So began the reign of “idealism” through many avatars in Western thought,
the notion that life must be guided by ideas, which are more than concepts
because they establish the ideals by which to measure our shared world as
ethical and political beings, and hence to improve or repair it when it does not
measure up (progressivism) or to protect and preserve it when it threatens to
decay (conservatism), according to these standards. I will put aside for now
the vexed question of what distinguishes between ideas and concepts, and
between first- and second-order concepts, and rely at first on our ordinary
sense of the word idea, especially in its connotation of an illumination that
beckons and guides us. By calling generalizations from particulars ‘ideas,’
Plato makes the problem of abstraction from experience as difficult as possi-
ble, and properly so, because the ontological status of such purely intelligible
constructs should remain in question, not harden into dogmatic theory.25 So,
just as you must have the idea of the triangle ‘in mind’ when drawing some
particular triangle when teaching a class on geometry, so too must the educa-
tors and leaders of a community have an idea as ideal for what makes good
citizens and good institutions when raising them up in actuality. This only
makes sense if the projection of these ideals, and our ability to enact them,
even if incompletely, is not a priori delusional. It means that what is most
real and enduring about who we are is something universal, transcending our
radically singular particularity as persons of this or that ethnicity or national-
ity, male or female, rich or poor, and so on, just as the idea of the triangle
abstracts from any particular type of triangle, be it a scalene, isosceles, right,
or obtuse.
If that priority is reversed in favor of finitude and situated particularity,
other ways of understanding what and who we are come into view. One
does not have to go to the extreme of believing that there is no such thing
as natural kinds, independent of human cognition (such as trees or atoms or
even numbers and physical laws), to think that human cultural constructs,
such as understanding something to sit on as a throne rather than as a chair,
and evaluative concepts, such as justice, are in fact subject to the trajectory
of history by coming into being, lingering for a while, then falling into decay
 Introduction 17

and finally into the nothing of unmeaning. Such human constructs of mean-
ing would be like living creatures, or even entire species and ecosystems,
which emerge in geological time and then fade away. Finitude would trump
transcendence, at least in the domain of what actual, historical human beings
consider their meaningful anchors to life. That there be no permanence to the
things that matter to us on the human scale need not lead to nihilism. Rather,
it might open us up to an insight that connects us more meaningfully and
more intimately to what life truly is, while we have it in our embodiment here
and now, enmeshed in the meaning we manifestly do inhabit. Between origin
and demise, between birth and death, time whiles away at us, but in that tem-
poral whiling-away we do have our while. Like a revolving kaleidoscope, in
which patterns emerge, remain a while, and then collapse, the flux of human
existence is not sheer chaos.
The ethics and politics of human-being as a temporal being-here-and-now,
where the now is constituted by an interpretive, existential spanning of past
to future, is not obvious. It does seem to suggest, though, that a meaning-
ful life cannot be guided by eternal ideas and universal abstractions, for
these uproot life in favor of an inhuman other-world. It might then mean, as
Nietzsche writes, that “Whatever is done for love always occurs beyond good
and evil.”26 Ethics, as an embedded, situated way of life that has been owned
up to, could not be predetermined by some abstract ethical calculus such as
we find in the familiar works of moral philosophy, as in Kant or Mill, or as
the result of figuring out the Trolley Problem thought experiment.27 Political
life would not take its bearings from universal principles of the natural law or
human rights, but rather from the attachments that give meaning to the his-
torical community, in its particular shared purposes, conflicts, and struggles,
that we simply always already are.
While this might not obviously or necessarily lead to chauvinism or ethnic
nationalism, we can certainly see how it could. There is a parallel though not
identical danger in ethical and political universalism, cited on the Right by
figures such as Carl Schmitt and on the Left by decolonial thinkers such as
Enrique Dussel, that the logic of universalism leads to an imperial imposition
of norms on peoples and nations who do not live up to a Eurocentric liberal-
ism’s interpretation of those ideals.28
At issue is whether we should be guided by ideals that transcend us or by
attachments that embed us. The polemos between Plato and Heidegger is
timely because these poles of universalism and particularism are now collid-
ing on a global scale. At the end of modernity, we have reached a decisive
and unprecedented moment. This crisis is not what a Heideggerian might call
a merely ontic issue, a merely ‘factical’ circumstance of our contingency.
It pierces the heart of who we are as human beings and whether that ‘we’
18 Introduction

encompasses us all in an understanding of the political stakes of the dawning

future, or whether the ‘we’ has an operative scope that can properly reach
only as far as distinct and incommensurably bounded human communities.
This is a crisis in the Greek sense: a turning point, inescapable not only
because of modernity’s interlacing of planetary humanity through commerce
and communication technologies. There is also the blunt fact of a planetary
ecological crisis that threatens humanity on a global scale, which only a
humanity cooperating globally can address, not to mention the Covid-19
pandemic surging across the world at the time of this writing. The global
aspect of such crises forces the question of universalism, not just for action
on the climate crisis, but also in the concomitant political crisis of our age:
whether who we most properly are as human beings is members of distinct
and ultimately incompatible, but not necessarily hostile communities, or
whether our particularity has its dignity only because we can rise above our
historical contingency to what universally unites us. History itself seems to
have brought us to the outermost edge of this polemos between Being and
Becoming, universalism and particularism, cosmopolitanism and rootedness,
the One and the Many, affirmation and negation.
The thesis I explore in this book is that the metaethics of universal and
particular, of transcendent and situated, is not an either/or but rather a both/
and. It is not ‘Plato’ or ‘Heidegger,’ universal or particular, transcendent or
situated, affirmation or negation, unity or diversity, but rather a reconciliation
of these poles. If this is a reconciliation in favor of Plato, of universalism and
transcendence, it does not set aside the other pole of finitude and contingency
but subsumes it and accounts for it, just as the idea does with the particular,
by acknowledging that we can only start within the concrete.
Great philosophers, such as Aquinas and Hegel, have attempted such a
reconciliation with far great systematicity and fullness than I can hope to
emulate. My goal is far humbler: to demonstrate that Plato’s work contains
resources to anticipate Heidegger’s critique by showing how the life exam-
ined requires an ongoing polemical integration of the temporal situatedness of
human existence with what transcends that embedded understanding. Rather
than Da-sein as a fundamentally finite being-here, I will argue that being-
human is a situated transcendence. At the heart of this reconciliation is the
insight that our temporal existence is most meaningful in a life worth living
if challenged by ideas that we project beyond the limits of that existence.
Reciprocally, this means that such ideas, as ethical and political ideals, can
only be properly understood and enacted if brought into a discerning dialogue
with the radical contingencies of temporal life through practical wisdom,
phronēsis. That reconciliation, in short, is a polemos between the poles of our
paradoxical nature as situated-transcendence.
 Introduction 19

HEIDEGGER AND POLEMOS

The synopsis that follows is adapted from my book, Heidegger’s Polemos,

which the reader may consult for fuller exposition of these themes. For
Heidegger, to be is to be in confrontation, to be in polemos. This struggle to
interpret our Being is the most basic meaning of polemos. Polemos is a name
for Being itself, because it is how a field of meaning deploys for historical
understanding. The following points orient the subsequent chapters, and we
will return to some of these themes in greater depth:

1. Polemos is a keyword in Heidegger’s confrontation with Platonism. In

his masterwork, Being and Time, Heidegger says that the “question of the
meaning of Being” (SZ, 1) has receded and must now be asked again. This
means going to war against the over two-millennia reign of Platonism,
which locates Being in a static, timeless, otherworldly realm of ideas
and forms. For Heidegger, polemos, as a temporal unfolding of meaning
displaces idea, as eternal and static, in accounting for the intelligibility of
things and the world.
2. Polemos describes the way that Being happens and how it concerns us. It
also describes our relation to Being as what Heidegger calls Dasein, the
site, the There, in which Being manifests itself as a domain of meaning
that forms a navigable world. Being-human is itself polemical.
3. Truth is both a part of and a possible outcome of polemos. For Heidegger,
truth is the opening up of a world, the making-manifest of beings for Das-
ein’s understanding of Being. But along with this revealing of truth is the
struggle to bring forth from concealedness. The struggle to reveal is met
by the struggle to conceal. Truth stands up to and depends upon polemos.
4. Time also is a feature of polemos, because, Heidegger tells us, beings and
Being are always rooted in a specific time. We can only interpret what it
means to be, for things and ourselves, as enmeshed in time as our time. We
move both with and away from the past into a future as we engage in the
polemos of interpretation in order to make sense of the present.
5. Polemos with the past also may be understood as a method, or even an
ethic, for the interpretation of texts, authors, and works of art. To so en-
gage with a work is to cast it in its most powerful light, so that both it and
one’s own position are most radically exposed to examination.
6. History is polemical as both the full sweep of history and the history of
individuals, but it is never simply ours. We do not create history or con-
trol its direction. Heidegger speaks of a “confrontation between the first
and an other inception to history” (not simply another inception) that will
overturn the reign of Platonism.
20 Introduction

7. In this polemos of construction and destruction with history, Dasein en-

gages with its authentic task as a community, because the past it inherits
is never simply a solipsistic individual’s own.
8. Heidegger understands the proper relation of historical peoples as dis-
tinct communities as a polemos. True respect among peoples, as among
individuals, demands that each be allowed to come into its own while
insisting on a conversation that puts everything into question, in the face
of history’s challenges.
9. The polemos with Being must take place within the compass of a finite
world of a historical community, a Volk, a collection of people with their
shared inherited past, place, and language. By confronting the trajectory
of the givenness of its own history, a people simultaneously preserves its
particularity and renews its history, while making possible a transforma-
tive conversation, a polemos, with other peoples.
10. It was with this idea of creative polemos among the nations of the world
that Heidegger supported Hitler’s National Socialism. Each national
community would remain free for the self-assertion of its historical
uniqueness, its identity and its difference. At the extreme, polemos may
entail the impossibility of sharing a common community with some
peoples or nations, because no dialogue with them could result in the
shared understanding necessary for a unitary body politic.
11. Heidegger counters the perpetual peace envisioned by Kant with per-
petual polemos. In confrontation with themselves and with each other, in
setting themselves out and apart from one another, peoples might retain
the singularity of their own historical destinies.
12. Heidegger was a Nazi for philosophical reasons that are still in polemos
with other ideas, most particularly what I want to defend: a reconstruc-
tive liberalism, with ‘liberalism’ understood in the broadest scope of the
eleutheria of liberation in Plato’s Allegory of the Cave.

To understand the link between Heidegger’s thinking and his politics, we

must come to grips with the matter for thought announced by fascism as a
challenge to freedom that makes its own claim on what true freedom is. We
cannot think of Heidegger’s fascism as an error of an otherwise great thinker,
a merely personal fact to be ignored when considering his work. Likewise, we
cannot understand and respond to new manifestations of such politics if we
think of fascism as a past mistake that has been corrected and can be forgotten
or suppressed. Beyond Heidegger’s personal history or his thinking we must
think through what is at stake in fascism then, now, and in the future. This is
what can make Heidegger an occasion for thought, not just a controversial
figure in the history of thought. Such an encounter must itself be a polemos.
 Introduction 21

GLOSSARY OF KEY TERMS

Philosophy sometimes demands that we push language to its limits to express

explicitly what strikes us as meaningful in some previously unarticulated
way, given the ordinary bounds of language. If ordinary language were
enough to resolve our genuine wonder and perplexity, we would not need
the poetical-conceptual departures of philosophy in the first place. Such mo-
ments call for meta-translation, often even within a language. The difference
between translation in the ordinary sense and meta-translation is that the latter
runs the risk of expressing something in a way that seeks to convey what is at-
issue but that cannot be communicated simply through a rendering familiar to
ordinary language or by conventional, literal translation. An example on the
grand scale would be Alain Badiou’s “hypertranslation” of Plato’s Republic.29
The following terms express concepts discussed in this book that depart
from ordinary usage. Terms borrowed from Heidegger are noted as such.

at-issue This adverbial term designates what animates a par-

ticular line of philosophical inquiry. It is what we
stumble up against in wonder, what we try to articu-
late in formulating a question, and what we attempt
to address in composing a philosophical response.
Identifying what is at-issue is a matter of discern-
ment closely related to phronēsis, practical wisdom.
Discerning what is at-issue is always embedded in
a particular hermeneutical situation that is not up
to us and that cannot be scripted. I will sometimes
hyphenate this term to emphasize its adverbial sense.
always-already This Heideggerian term describes the way that we exist
in a world that is given to us in a web of connec-
tions in which beings are interpreted as meaningful
to us in advance. This meaning may be provisional
or incomplete, but it necessarily precedes us as the
background to all inquiry and understanding. As
individuals and as communities, we are thrown into
this always-already world.
Being Translators of Heidegger render the German Sein as
either ‘being’ or ‘Being,’ but I will generally use
the latter to prevent confusion with beings, specific
things as we understand them to be. Sein is the in-
finitive of the verb ‘to be’ made into a verbal noun,
which German and other languages can do (as l’être,
22 Introduction

in French). It is important not to read this big-B Be-

ing as a substantive, some sort of super-thing that
serves as the metaphysical foundation for all other
things.30 For Heidegger, Sein is not a Seiendes, a
particular being or entity that is, or even the whole
of what is. The to-be, Being, is not a being, a thing
among other things. The question of the meaning of
Being is the question of what it means for anything,
ourselves included, to be, to show up phenomeno-
logically as meaning this, not that, and as having
distinct possibilities grounded in its finite, contin-
gent historicity.
being-human and These are my meta-translations for the word that
human-being Heidegger uses for the kind of being that we are:
Dasein. In Heidegger, ‘Dasein’ is already a special
term, because in ordinary German it means simply
existence. Heidegger adopts it for the kind of being
that is a ‘who,’ not a ‘what,’ and for whom its own
being, what it is to be, is always (potentially) open to
question. For Heidegger, the combination, Da-Sein,
as a name for who we are, points to the necessarily
situated aspect of human-being. To be, for us, means
always-already to understand a particular world of
meaning. I will often render Dasein as either the hy-
phenated being-human or human-being, depending
on the context.
breakdown A term inspired by lusis tōn desmōn, the breaking of
the prisoner’s bonds in Plato’s Allegory of the Cave.
A breakdown is a moment of both crisis and oppor-
tunity, terror and wonder, that overwhelms the way
we have previously understood something about
the world or the world as such. Breakdown has two
aspects. One is the passive and negative confusion
or even despair in face of a rupture in meaning and
collapse into unmeaning; the other is the active and
positive breakdown, or analysis, of what has taken
place in the rupture, with the implicit or explicit
prospect of a reconstruction of meaning.
echonicism From the Greek echein, to have, hold, possess: a con-
ception of philosophy that expects or claims to find
 Introduction 23

the final, ultimate answers to its questions. The phi-

losopher queens and kings who rule the ideal city in
Plato’s Republic supposedly achieve this possession
of the truth (q.v. zeteticism).
ideation The process through which imagination and idea-
formation interact; more specifically, the process
through which we imagine things that exist in the
mind’s eye, such as when we form a ‘mental image’
of a person, place, or thing; but also entities that may
have no perceptible physical existence, such as con-
cepts or the insights of mathematics. Although usu-
ally based in metaphors of sight, it need not be con-
fined to these. Ideation is essential to our existence
as beings who interpret the world for ourselves and
for each other, for if we could not form and share
ideas about things that are not directly perceptible
to us, we could not communicate at all across the
gaps of our individuated embodiment, nor reflect for
ourselves on an existence that might be other than it
is. In ideation, idea (the most exalted level of under-
standing) and imagination (the most uncertain level,
yet also the most creative) meet up. Ideation is what
allows us to pluck meaning from unmeaning.
intimation In standard English, an intimation is a hint, a sugges-
tion, an inkling, of something hovering on the edge
of perception and meaning. It is glimpsed, as it were,
from the corner of the eye because peripheral to our
direct and directed vision, our ordinary, everyday
understanding. Here, I use it to mean the sense that
occasionally steals upon us of some meaning beyond
or behind what we ordinarily perceive or understand.
Sometimes, these are abstract virtues, such as jus-
tice, without which we could not recognize anything
as fair or unfair in general because we would be
unable to see beyond or behind our always-already
historical, situated context. In another sense, these
abstractions are always-already here, woven into
the world as it is, and intimations of them inform
our daily lives, but in an unexamined, unreflective
manner. Intimations are intimate in the sense that
24 Introduction

they are closely tied to our personal situatedness and

how we make sense of it to ourselves and to oth-
ers. Intimations are fleeting and fragile, setting our
being-human on edge, because they suggest that our
ordinary way of seeing, of understanding, may be
inadequate, that it frays, that there are liminal things
whispering or clamoring to be understood that do
not yet fit into our current construals of meaning.
Ideation (q.v.) is closely connected to intimation,
because it is how we endeavor to understand and
integrate the intimations that break into, disrupt, and
even break down our field of vision. Intimations
are both a threat and an invitation. An intimation
may turn out to be nothing at all, but that is because
this ‘nothing’ is the background to all meaning,
not as a collection of no-things, but as the domain
of unmeaning (q.v.) from which the not-yet-fully-
meaningful (as intimated) arises and into which
the no-longer-meaningful (as when a language or a
practice dies) returns.
meaning The phenomenological given that things (entities of all
kinds) and practices are always already provisionally
intelligible to us, that they are intelligible as part of a
larger whole, not just as isolated units, and that they
are significant to us, that they matter to us as being-
human. Meaning is not first and foremost a grand
purpose or design, although it is the ontological pre-
condition for such projects. As used here, meaning
shares aspects of both Bedeutung (how individual
entities and practices are understood and interpreted;
‘meaning’ in the narrow sense) and Sinn (structure
of an entire domain of intelligibility; sense, as the
overarching orientation to meanings as a whole) in
Heidegger.31
ontic and Heidegger famously articulated “the ontological differ-
ontological ence” between beings (Seiendes) and Being (Sein). I
follow his usage in using ontic to refer to what has to
do with beings or entities as we understand them and
ontological to refer to how we understand what it
means to be as such. Ontic questions assume a mean-
ing that we already ascribe to beings; ontological
 Introduction 25

questions address the ascription of meaning itself

and is therefore tied to hermeneutics.
polemos, polemics, The Greek word polemos means ‘war,’ but ever since
and the Heraclitus it has taken on a very wide range of mean-
polemical ings. In this book, ‘polemical’ usually does not have
its everyday meaning of bitterly or intransigently bel-
ligerent. Instead, it describes a fundamental feature of
what it means to be human as the beings who must
ever confront the meaning of their world in interpre-
tation and reinterpretation. That confrontation arises
from the specificity of our particular, embedded
embodiment in a historical context as what is signifi-
cantly at-issue in that given hermeneutical situation.
preconstruction When meaning ruptures, as it may during a personal,
physical, or political cataclysm, we must reassemble
a meaningful world in order to function. Generally,
this is described as a two-phase process of de- and
reconstruction, but I posit an intermediate phase,
preconstruction, to describe the process by which we
imagine a better possible world between that which
has broken down and that which emerges as the new
reality. As such, preconstruction is the moment of
ideation where the imagination first en-visions an
as-yet unrealized possibility and endeavors to work
it out conceptually.
situated A description of what it means to be human, embed-
transcendence ded in a finite, historical understanding and also
projected into what exceeds that understanding. As
another way of defining human-being, or Dasein,
situated transcendence is an adverbial, existential
characterization of how we are who we are onto-
logically, rather than what we are ontically as mere
things (e.g., as homo sapiens; complex organic com-
pounds; neural networks; atoms in space; etc.).
unmeaning The counterpart, not the opposite, of meaning (q.v.).
This term is a meta-translation of what Heidegger
calls das Nichts, the Nothing, which is not an onti-
cally impossible domain of no-things but rather the
ontological precondition for the polemos of mean-
ing. All perplexity, all wonder, all breakdown, all
26 Introduction

questioning begins in a confrontation with unmean-

ing, the way that some thing, some practice, some
context either fails to be meaningful or threatens
to cease to be meaningful to us, and yet still com-
mands our attention. What is—as intelligible, as
meaningful—both emerges from unmeaning and
recedes into it, much in the sense that Heidegger
identifies truth as a-lētheia, un-concealment.
zeteticism From the Greek zetein, to seek, search, inquire: a
skeptical but not cynical conception of philosophy
as using dialogue and questioning to make better
sense of the world and being-human in light of both
our finite historicity and our intimations of transcen-
dence. Zeteticism may be called a skeptical idealism
because it finds meaning in the search for truth but
insists upon its own refutability (q.v. echonicism).

NOTES

1. Levinas, “Ethics of the Infinite,” 81.

2. Here I agree with Reiner Schürmann, who writes that in thinking with Hei-
degger, one must not take “the name ‘Heidegger’” as referring to the man, but to the
questions at issue in the work, and that ‘Heidegger’ “will not be the proper name,
which refers to the man from Messkirch, deceased in 1976”; Heidegger on Being
and Acting, 3.
3. Jürgen Habermas, “On the Publication of the Lectures of 1935,” 197.
4. Excepting long passages, Greek words will usually be transliterated.
5. See Kirk, Raven, and Schofield, The Presocratic Philosophers, 189; the trans-
lation is my own, but close to theirs.
6. See Proclus, Proclus’ Commentary on Plato’s Parmenides, 3.
7. For an instructive discussion of a more expansive conception of dialogue and
dialectic in Plato, see Roochnik, Beautiful City, 140–49.
8. For further discussion, see Love and Meng, “Heidegger’s Metapolitics.”
9. Whitehead, Process and Reality, 39. Less often cited are his next two sen-
tences: “I do not mean the systematic scheme of thought which scholars have doubt-
fully extracted from his writings. I allude to the wealth of general ideas scattered
through them.”
10. Jussi Backman has convincingly argued in “All of a Sudden: Heidegger and
Plato’s Parmenides” that Heidegger’s 1930–1931 seminar on that dialogue, in addi-
tion to his 1924–1925 Sophist lecture course, shows that he was aware of the radical
potential in Plato’s later work for countering what later became entrenched as meta-
physical Platonism and the ideal of a perfect, atemporal beingness. My claim is that,
 Introduction 27

even if so, Heidegger never lingered on this potential, instead eliding the ambiguity
between Plato and Platonism, and he certainly failed to discern the complex dialectic
between historicity and transcendence in the Republic.
11. For a manifesto for this approach, see the essays by various authors collected
and edited by Charles Griswold in Platonic Writings/Platonic Readings, especially
Griswold’s Preface for a succinct presentation of the issues involved. For an example
of taking Plato as speaking through Socrates by a preeminent scholar, see Julia Annas,
An Introduction to Plato’s Republic, 9.
12. See Fried, “A Letter to Emmanuel Faye,” in Confronting Heidegger, 4–9.
13. See the contributions by Faye and Kellerer in Fried, Confronting Heidegger.
14. See Carnap, “The Elimination of Metaphysics through the Logical Analysis
of Language”; for the surprising complexity of the relationship between Heidegger’s
and Carnap’s thought, see Friedman, A Parting of the Ways.
15. For an exhaustive comparison of these two thinkers, see Lee Braver, Ground-
less Grounds, especially chapter 5.
16. For the triad, see Fried, “A Letter to Emmanuel Faye,” 33–36.
17. For a contrast between Plato as conserving wonder and Aristotle as seeking to
end it, see Andrea Nightingale, Spectacles of Truth in Classical Greek Philosophy,
253–68.
18. Douglass, “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” Portable Frederick Dou-
glass, 205.
19. For a helpful treatment of wonder in Heidegger, see Braver, Groundless
Grounds, 46–52; for a provocative study of wonder from Plato to Heidegger and
beyond, see Mary-Jane Rubenstein, Strange Wonder.
20. Cf. Renée Descartes, “Meteorology,” in Discourse on Method, 263 and 361.
21. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, 57e.
22. Fried, Heidegger’s Polemos, 3.
23. On moralism, see Fried, “Whitewashed,” in Heidegger and Jewish Thought,
55–74.
24. See Alexander Duff, Heidegger and Politics, 186–91.
25. For example, Kant, drawing from Plato, holds that “Just as the understanding
unifies the manifold [of sensory experience] in the object by means of concepts, so
reason unifies the manifold of concepts by means of ideas, positing a certain collec-
tive unity as the goal of the activities of the understanding”; Critique of Pure Reason,
B672.
26. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 90 (§153).
27. For the Trolley Problem, see Section I of Frances M. Kamm, Intricate Ethics.
28. For example, Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, 54, and Enrique Dus-
sel, Ethics of Liberation, 51–52.
29. See Badiou, Plato’s ‘Republic,’ xxiv. See also Polt, “Plato’s Republic, by
Alain Badiou,” in Teaching Philosophy 37, no. 1 (2014): 122–26.
30. On big-B Being, see Thomas Sheehan, “A Paradigm Shift in Heidegger Re-
search,” in Continental Philosophy Review.
31. On this point, I follow Thomas Sheehan in Making Sense of Heidegger, xvii–
xix.
 Chapter One

Between Earth and Sky

The Polemics of Finitude and Transcendence

I believe Icarus was not failing as he fell,

but just coming to the end of his triumph.
—Jack Gilbert, from “Failing and Flying”1

In the Theogony, Hesiod tells us that, “Surely first Chaos was born, but then
/ Broad-bosomed Earth, firm seat forever for all / Immortals” (119–21), and
then that “Earth gave birth to star-studded Sky / As equal to herself so that he
would cover her over all around / So that she would be a firm seat forever for
the blessed gods” (125–27).2
If you step outside or look up from your reading through a window, espe-
cially on a starry night, you can experience what Hesiod meant. Enveloped
by the sheer wonder of “Why this?” we stand upon the earth, the goddess
Gaia, and we stand beneath the sky or heavens, the god Ouranos. Modern
science, abstracting from where we stand as mere mortal humans, tells us that
the earth is round, that there is no absolute up and down or over and under to
its spherical gravity, that the sky does not cover the earth like a barrier dome
but rather extends so far in spacetime that to the feeble human imagination
it might as well be infinite. Yet scientism taken to an extreme belies what
it means to live, embodied, on the human scale. In The Human Condition,
Hannah Arendt, drawing upon the sensibility evoked by the invention of the
microscope and telescope, says that “we look and live in this society as if we
were as far from our human existence as we are from the infinitely small and
immensely large, which, even if they could be perceived by the finest instru-
ments, are too far away from us to be experienced.”3 David Roochnik quotes
from Donne’s “An Anatomy of the World”4 that this

28
 Between Earth and Sky 29

new philosophy calls all in doubt,

The element of fire is quite put out;
The sun is lost, and th’ earth, and no man’s wit
Can well direct him where to look for it.
And freely men confess that this world’s spent,
When in the Planets, and the Firmament
They seek so many new; then see that this
Is crumbled out again to his Atomies.
’Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone,
All just supply, and all relation

Roochnik puts it this way: “Whether we care to admit it or not, at the end
of the day, when we leave our laboratories and turn off the computers and
then finally go home we are anthropoi”—human, earth-bound beings, who
live amidst the concerns and relations that give life a meaning that we must
inhabit, or else dissolve into the despair and unmeaning of Donne’s “all in
pieces, all coherence gone.”5
One might object that this is just naïve anthropocentrism, but the audacious
claim must be that any being, even if quite alien to homo sapiens, but like
ourselves in being able to wonder at and reflect upon the world and itself, is
also human in the sense of being earthly: grounded and rooted in a particular
existence that is mortal and finite, suffused with the gravitational force of in-
volvements that bring it into the meaningful orbit of its affective cares. In The
Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Philosophy, written in 1935,
soon after the rise to power of the National Socialists, Edmund Husserl writes
that “Galileo abstracts from the subjects as a person leading a personal life;
he abstracts from all that is in any way spiritual, from all cultural properties
which are attached to things in human praxis.” In his Vienna lecture of the
same year, Husserl proclaims that “I am certain that the European crisis has
its roots in a misguided rationalism” that had its beginnings in the telescope
of Galileo, luring humankind from the earth to the heavens and to a thinking
that led to modern mathematical physics as the understanding of nature:
Einstein’s revolutionary innovations concern the formulae through which
the idealized and naively objective phusis is dealt with. But how formulae in
general, how mathematical objectification in general, receive meaning on the
foundation of life and the intuitively given surrounding world—of this we learn
nothing; and thus Einstein does not reform the space and time in which our vital
life runs its course.6

What Husserl here calls “our vital life” is what I am calling existence on the
human scale. To be human, as the root of the word implies, is to be earthly;
phenomenologically, human life as lived is necessarily geocentric. To inhabit
30 Chapter One

the world is to stand upon the earth as a given, encompassed on all sides by
the finite horizon rimming the border between earth and the sky-dome of the
heavens. We inhabit the Between between earth and sky, the out-in-the-open
within which a meaningful world spreads out and greets us as provisionally
coherent and navigable as a delimited, bounded cosmos. In one of his earlier
readings of the Cave Analogy, Heidegger puts it this way: “Human Dasein,
living upon the earth as upon a disk domed over by the heavens, is like living
in the cave” (GA 24: 403). Ontologically, we seem imprisoned by a cosmos
that confines us to a world of established meaning that we cannot escape.
Yet humans have always desired to break the bonds of earth and to pierce
the bounds of sky and leave behind all the stifling contingency of our situated
earthliness. As Arendt says about the invention of the airplane, “It is in the
nature of the human surveying capacity that it can function only if man dis-
entangles himself from all involvement in and concern with the close at hand
and withdraws himself to a distance from everything near him. The greater the
distance between himself and his surroundings, world or earth, the more he
will be able to survey and to measure and the less will worldly, earth-bound
space be left to him.”7 The flight of the bird is an image for freedom. That
longing for flight has been fulfilled in the last centuries, first with balloons,
then with aircraft that provide genuine aerial mobility. More recently still,
rare human beings, astronauts, have indeed broken past the bonds of earthly
gravity in space flight. They have seen the earth not as a ground bounded by
the horizon of sky but as a sphere suspended in a void, an experience we can
share vicariously in photographs taken from outer space. For several genera-
tions now, the lure of this final frontier has seized the imagination of many
ambitious and gifted writers, scientists, and astronauts, as well as funding
from governments eager for prestige. But this aspiration has its disquieting
side. In his 1966 Spiegel interview, Heidegger brings up the image of Earth
taken by an orbiting spacecraft, probably NASA’s Lunar Orbiter 1, a month
before: “I do not know whether you were terrified, but I certainly was terri-
fied when recently I saw the pictures of the earth taken from the moon. We
do not need atomic bombs: the uprooting of human beings is already here”
(GA 16: 670; cf. GA 16: 559). We will return to the question of “uprooting”
(Entwurtzelung) later.8
The longing for flight into and even beyond the sky, away from the con-
tingencies and limitations that ground us, embodies what is most ambitious
about human-being, what Sophocles called our tolma, the daring that wagers
all risks, pushing at all boundaries, limited only by death.9 That longing
for the literal abstraction of flight can also lead us into what is most inhu-
man, into a hubris of dislocation and disregard that is out-of-bounds. As the
philosopher-soldier J. Glenn Gray reminds us, the most cruel, indifferent, and
 Between Earth and Sky 31

relentless destruction of the wars of the last century arrived long-distance,

carried by air, in the form of artillery, carpet bombing, and atomic weapons.
Gray calls such weaponry an aspect of the godlessness of modernity, “that
remoteness from reality in warfare that I called abstraction,” a “forgetfulness
of the encompassing world to which we are so totally bound.”10 Each one
of these weapons, as well as other technologies of mass extermination, was
first animated by advances in mathematics, chemistry, and the grandest, most
cosmically soaring abstractions of theoretical particle physics.11 At the same
time, the longing for flight, to disconnect and see the world ‘in theory’ from
far above, is an existential feature of what it means to be human. By a strange
ambiguity of the word bound, which means both attached or constrained and
underway or destined, we are at once positively and negatively earth-bound,
tied to but also grounded by our situated particularity and horizons. We are
also sky-bound in the calling to transcendence and to freeing ourselves from
our earthly roots. If we forget that we inhabit the Between, nihilism beckons
at the extremes of earth and sky: in the narcissistic atavism of the particular or
the uprooting abstraction of the universal, the former forgetting our finitude
by burrowing into it without reflection, the latter by a heedless negation of
our contingency.

1.1 PHILOSOPHY AS ABSOLUTE FREEDOM

Philosophy is absolute freedom.12 Philosophy necessarily begins in freedom,

because the movement from wonder to question to response and back again
requires that we give heed to what calls us in our astonishment, departing from
the received opinions, expectations, and certainties in which we find ourselves
embedded. The freedom of philosophy, as a yearning of flight from our earth-
bound contingency, is therefore potentially ridiculous or dangerous or both.
Ridiculous, because, like the Socrates of Aristophanes’s Clouds, who
swings around hoisted in a basket to better observe the heavens at a remove
from the earth, philosophy risks such a precipitous rupture from the common
sense of everyday understanding that it may stumble into absurdities. Like the
tale told by Socrates about Thales falling into a well while on a walk to con-
template the stars (Theaetetus, 174a–b), philosophy’s starry-eyed ramblings
lead to pitfalls and pratfalls.13 Aristophanes depicts the filthy, impoverished
students in Socrates’s “Thinkery” (his putative school of instruction) as
prostrate, with their faces jammed into the ground, observing the goings-on
beneath the Earth, their buttocks raised simultaneously to scan the Heavens,
all in the pursuit of a natural science that discards all the received wisdom of
myth and tradition.
32 Chapter One

Dangerous, because the rupture with and departure from received wisdom
is not always merely laughable. It may well entail a direct threat to the articles
of faith, religious or secular, that bind a community together in a common
understanding of the norms by which its members may live a good, or at least
a decent, life together.
Aristophanes’s parody of the philosophic life astutely portrays the ex-
tremes of this project. Socrates’s students seek to explain Heaven and Earth,
the cosmic whole, with methods that lampoon the incipient natural sciences
of the period. Conventional Greeks both mocked and feared these natural
philosophers, whose scientific accounts demythologized and desacralized
the traditional religious narratives of nature in favor of impersonal, scientific
ones. By investigating the sacred beings of Sky and Earth, Ouranos and Gaia,
the natural philosophers assume that human reason can make rational sense
of the entire universe. In The Clouds, the comic arrogance of the students’
absurd posture, noses to the ground, bums to the air, masks a tragic threat.
Such hubristic probing might unhinge a people entirely from the inherited
narratives that make human communities coherent, as we live together in the
present and gaze backward and forward to our ancestors and descendants.
The myths and stories deserve respect, because the Earth is the inexhaustible
repository of hidden wealth on whose mere surface we plant ourselves and
cultivate our historical world. Heaven as sky is what rises far above us, yet
beckons us to transcendence, a transcendence that both frees us from narrow
everydayness and sanctifies it. For Aristophanes, a tragi-comic conservative
himself, philosophy’s extremism threatens the only coherence in life we can
hope for, the living traditions of the stories we tell about ourselves.
The Athenians may well have laughed at the Socrates of Aristophanes’s
play or at the buffoonish self-importance of Euthyphro, a citizen who claimed
such profound insight into things divine that he could prophesize the future
(Euthyphro, 3b–c). Nevertheless, the Socrates of The Clouds ends up burned
out of his Thinkery and ejected from the city. Athens put the historical
Socrates to death after his conviction on charges of impiety and corrupting
the youth. Philosophy, viewed as the freedom to break away from our finite
understanding in an attempt to reconstrue it, is a tragi-comedy.
At the end of the Symposium (223c–d), Plato has Socrates argue that
the greatest poet must be able to compose both tragedies and comedies in
order fully to capture the human condition, but the dialogue only tells us
that Socrates made this argument, not what he argued and how he argued it.
Perhaps that is because to be human means having the freedom to take the
risk of this rupture with our finite understanding, but that there is no formula,
no argument, to show us the way forward, to navigate between absurdity and
hubris, once we have broken with the familiar. But the burden of philosophy
 Between Earth and Sky 33

is that such a risky freedom is inevitable in the examined life, the life worth
living. The task of this book is to argue that such a difficult freedom is equally
inescapable whenever we take seriously the polemos of our ethical and politi-
cal lives.

1.2 THE STRIFE BETWEEN EARTH AND WORLD

Heidegger addresses human beings as residing between earth and sky, but
much more famous is his discussion of earth and world, especially as a fea-
ture of the work of art. For Heidegger, earth and world are in strife (Streit)
with one another, which Heidegger explicitly, if subtly, connects with the
polemos of Heraclitus. I do not here provide a comprehensive treatment of
these concepts in Heidegger, but rather set forth how they allow us to say
what is at stake in the question of situatedness and transcendence. That will
lead us to what is at issue in the polemical ethics of being-human.
In his elucidation of Hölderlin’s poem “As When on a Holiday,” in which
the poet speaks of a holy Chaos, Heidegger refers back to Hesiod’s divine
Chaos, first of the gods.14 Heidegger insists that this Chaos is not a meaning-
less jumbling together of things as we think it in modernity. Instead, we must
understand Chaos according to its Greek root, which means to yawn open, to
gape, to form a chasm. So, writes Heidegger:

This χάος means above all the yawning, the gaping cleft, the primally self-
opening Open, wherein all is swallowed. The cleft denies every support for
the distinct and the grounded. And therefore, for all experience that knows
only what is derivative, chaos seems to be the undifferentiated, and thus mere
disturbance. Nevertheless, the ‘chaotic’ in this sense is only the degraded and
contrary essence of what ‘chaos’ means. Thinking it in accord with ‘nature’
(φύσις), chaos remains that gaping apart out of which the Open opens itself
and by which this Open grants truth [gewähre] to each differentiated thing in a
bounded presencing. (GA 4: 62–64)

For Heidegger, chaos is therefore akin to chora, space in the sense of

this Open.15 It is also etymologically related to chasma, a chasm or gulf. It
might seem strange and contradictory that chaos would be both an abyss that
“denies every support for the distinct and the grounded” and the source for
the Open of a meaningful world in which “each differentiated thing” whiles
away for a time as a “bounded” presence to our historical understanding. Also
problematic is imagery of the metaphor: When a chasm opens up, or a mouth
or abyss yawns open, does this not depend first on there being sides to the
space opened up, just as the Between of the world depends first on there being
34 Chapter One

Earth and Sky? How can the space come before the contours that define its
bounds, like the edge of a precipice or the rim of a horizon? How, in short,
can chaos, in the sense of this ungrounded space, come first?
We must understand this chaos ontologically. It is like Lao Tzu’s emptiness
(無, wu), that makes a jug a jug, the emptiness of a wheel’s hub that makes
it a wheel. Ontically, of course, the potter must form the bounding sides of
the pot, the wheelwright must craft the rim, spokes and hub of the wheel, and
then the emptiness within each takes shape. Ontologically, however, the jug
can only be a jug, the wheel a wheel, because the emptiness at their center
gives them the meaning of what they are to be. The bounding walls that con-
tain this emptiness—the ceramic sides of the jug, the wooden or metal hub
of the wheel—each only take shape as guided in advance by the emptiness,
the potential, that they will contain. In Aristotelean terms, their emptiness is
the formal cause that precedes their material production. Just as unmeaning
is the latent ground of meaning, emptiness is filled with potential. Chaos is
first-born because all meaning deploys from a ground that is ungrounded,
a formless form, that is simply a given: we are always already thrown into
a world of meaning as given. That is why, borrowing from Heidegger, we
might say that Earth is next-born: there is always already a world of meaning
into which we are thrown and on which we must take our situated stand. This
is the ontological meaning of the temporal ekstasis of the past. Only on its
basis, as a basis, can the space beneath the heavens open up to us and provide
a horizon to our meaningful, future-oriented action in a determinate world.
Starting in the mid-1930s, most famously in “The Origin of the Work of
Art” lecture and continuing in his lectures and then-unpublished manuscripts,
Heidegger discusses earth and world, Erde and Welt. Less often, but still
importantly, Heidegger addresses earth and sky, Erde and Himmel—and
in what follows we must understand the German Himmel, like the Greek
ouranos, means at once sky, the heavens, and the heavenly.16 For example,
in a 1955 talk, Heidegger discusses a phrase of the poet Johann Peter Hebel,
who wrote that “We are plants, who—we may admit it or not—must arise
with their roots from the earth in order to bloom in the aether and to be able
to bear fruit.” For Heidegger, this means that “Wherever a truly joyful and
healthful human work should flourish, there must the human being be able
to arise from the depth of the homeland’s soil into the heights of the aether.
Here, ‘aether’ means the free air of the high heavens, the open expanse of the
spirit” (GA 16: 530).
Let us set aside for a moment the worrying echoes of Heimat (homeland)
and Blut und Boden (“blood and soil”) from the Nazi era. Heidegger reads
Hebel as speaking “neither just about the earth, nor just about the heavens.
He seeks to intimate something else, namely, the region between earth and
 Between Earth and Sky 35

heavens that human beings creatively and patiently inhabit”—and, Heidegger

insists, “This Between is the dimension of the human sojourn upon the earth.
This open expanse between earth and heaven, in which human beings stand
and move, is nevertheless not an empty space” but rather a domain of human
dwelling (GA 16: 530). Understood ontologically, the Between is not simply
a physical space ‘under’ the sky and ‘on’ the earth but rather the abode of
meaning within which historical human beings inhabit their world. An abode,
a dwelling place, is one that finds Hesiod’s “firm seat” upon the earth where
life can take a stand, inhabiting an intelligible and bounded horizon.
So why does Heidegger speak of earth and world as well as earth and sky?
In these concepts, Heidegger provides us with a compelling foil for a polemi-
cal ethics. Heidegger addresses earth and sky through his engagement with
Hölderlin, starting in 1934. Through Hölderlin, at the onset of the National
Socialist regime, Heidegger seeks to forge a new philosophical language to
address and propel what he began then to call “the other inception” to history,
an inception in thought to match the revolutionary departure in politics that
he at one time believed would serve as a countermovement to the nihilism
of the West.17 “World” is a term Heidegger had deployed since the 1920s as
an ontological category of Dasein’s existentiality, and he never abandoned it.
World is not a totality of things; it is the domain of intelligibility that we can
inhabit as historical beings and in which things find their place as meaningful
to us. To be at all, for us, is to have a world, to be-in-a-world.
“Earth” as a term of art does not originate in Heidegger’s earlier fundamen-
tal ontology of Dasein. It derives instead from his efforts at “poetizing-think-
ing” in conversation with Hölderlin to craft a post-metaphysical language
that might take philosophy beyond the supposed limitations of its previous
nihilistic metaphysics. At issue in Heidegger’s fundamental ontology with
the world is how Dasein always operates ‘in’ an understanding of things and
involvement, and in being-human, we do not have to ask why this world of
understanding that we inhabit is so for it to be so. If we do ask, we run up
against the sheer thrownness, the brute givenness, of the world we occupy. In
Being and Time, Heidegger calls this the nullity of our thrown existence (SZ,
§58). The question is not who or what created the ontic world of things, but
rather why ontologically this world has the meaning it does, and has it for me
rather than someone else or even no one else. To push behind this ontological
question is to stare nullity in the face, to glimpse the hint of the chaos that
opens the world in the first place as its groundless ground.18
In “The Origin of the Work of Art,” Heidegger introduces earth as a
counter-concept to world. He speaks there of the “strife of world and earth”
(Streit von Welt und Erde). As Michel Henry says, things in opposition are
not absolute contraries, or simply indifferent to one another (“A whale is
36 Chapter One

not opposed to an equation”), because “opposition in general presupposes a

bond.”19 Earth and world belong to each other in their strife, a strife that Hei-
degger explicitly links to Heraclitus’s polemos fragment (GA 4: 29). He uses
a Greek temple as his example of a work that gives a world its comprehensive
meaning to a historical people: “The temple, in its standing there, first gives
things their look and to human beings their outlook on themselves” (GA 4:
29). It is not that distinct, brute stuff is not ‘there’ already, but to be a world,
things must have a “look” that unites them in a meaningful way to human
understanding and activity in their “outlook” upon themselves. Referencing
again the polemos fragment, Heidegger says that the historical world of a
people depends on the struggle (Kampf) that distinguishes “what is holy and
what unholy, what is great and what petty, what is brave and what cowardly,
what is noble and what fickle, what is master and what slave” (GA 4: 29).
None of these is a ‘natural kind,’ if such kinds exist at all, but takes on its
meaning as a result of a historical, situated interpretive struggle in language,
art, and deed that defines a world of human habitation.
So, world is not simply the same as sky, although more than twenty years
later, Heidegger brings the polemos fragment to bear on his analysis of
“Hölderlins Erde und Himmel,” where, he says, “The earth is only earth as
the earth of heaven, heaven only the heaven insofar as it works its way down
and across the earth” (GA 4: 160–61). World, like the heavens, does define
the scope of the horizons of meaning that we inhabit, in the sense of living
in a world of habituation to practices and understandings that encompass our
possibilities. We are existentially and temporally a thrown-projection: given
over, as thrown, into a world of meaning we did not produce, as having-a-
past, but also cast forward by the trajectory of this throw into having-a-future
within a horizon of possibilities that are finite but also determinate and intel-
ligible because thus delimited.
But how does earth enter into this temporal dynamic, and—contentiously,
polemically—into a struggle with world? Heidegger says that earth is not
physical mass or the dirt under our feet or the planet Earth in the solar sys-
tem (GA 4: 28). He connects earth with phusis, what emerges unbidden into
meaningful presence to the understanding. Furthermore, Heidegger relates
both earth and world to a polemical truth as he understands it ontologically, as
a-lētheia, Unverborgenheit, un-concealment, which is to say, to what makes
it possible for us to be who we are, and things what they are, and accessible
to understanding in a meaningful world: “The essence of truth is in itself the
primal strife [Urstreit] in which that open center [offene Mitte] is struggled
forth [erstritten] and into which beings stand forth and from which they set
themselves back” (GA 5: 42). This “center” (Mitte), which in later texts
he calls the Between, the Zwischen, Heidegger describes here as the open
 Between Earth and Sky 37

region, the clearing or illumined realm, Lichtung, in which intelligibility as

such becomes manifest and a world of beings can come to presence for us.
As this Between, it is akin to the chaos that first allows earth and sky to take
shape, support, and encompass us, but just as readily threatens to swallow
us whole—about which more in a moment. Crucial is what Heidegger says
next: “To this open region belongs a world and the earth. But the world is not
simply the open region [das Offene], which corresponds to the clearing, and
the earth is not the closed region [das Verschlossene], which corresponds to
concealment” (GA 5: 42).
This is, admittedly, rather obscure to anyone not well versed in Hei-
degger’s idiolect, but it helps to bear in mind what is at-issue, namely, what
makes possible that we understand meaning at all, that a world be open to us,
not as a pile of inert if distinct things but as beings that matter to us integrally
as the situated, historical beings we are. Concealment and refusal are bound
up with this openness because a world of meaning is not the world in the
sense of a final, absolute world about which everything has been revealed
and in which there are no further possibilities of meaning. Concealed in each
world and from each world are other possible worlds, not in the sense of the
multiverse of theoretical physics, but in the sense of worlds of meaning that
might involve all the same ‘stuff’ we now have an outlook upon, but assem-
bling its meaning in a profoundly other interpretation, as if in the turn of the
kaleidoscope. We cannot be in all such worlds at once, given our finitude.
So, Heidegger says that “World and earth are constantly, inherently, and
according to their essence in strife, by nature strife-torn. Only as such do they
step forth into the strife of clearing and concealing” (GA 5: 42). Why? One
way to think of this is to remember what the Greeks certainly knew from long
experience: that the temple Heidegger describes is vulnerable to earthquake,
the prerogative of Poseidon, the earth-shaker (Poseidōn ennosigaios or
enosikhthōn). The ground can shift beneath our feet, the world of a given his-
torical understanding can suddenly (exaiphnēs) shudder, shake, and collapse,
the horizon can shift, and the sky can, figuratively, fall by bringing our world
crashing down around us. The clearing that once opened up the world for us
may swallow that world whole, and us with it in the sense of being deprived
off a nexus of meaning that makes sense and that matters to us. This is why
Heidegger, in a later note to the passage quoted above, wrote that the Urstreit,
the primal strife, the polemos, is the Ereignis, the event that inaugurates and
appropriates a new world of truth for historical understanding (GA 5: 42fnA).
Furthermore, to explain this bond in strife between earth and world, Hei-
degger says, “Earth can do no else but jut up through the world, and world
grounds itself only upon the earth, so long as truth happens as the primal
strife between clearing and concealing” (GA 5: 42)—the a- against -lēthē,
38 Chapter One

the Un- against verbogenheit, and the un- against concealment. No world of
meaning is ever simply static; the horizon is always pro-visional, the sense
that things make is never totally complete, and what we do not yet understand
may reveal itself more fully—or it may undo us with unmeaning. Our world
of meaning is grounded on the earth in the sense that our having-a-past, our
thrownness into a prevailing world of meaning, is given in a way we can
never get behind to make, as it were, our birth our own decision, creating
ex nihilo the entire world of meaning for ourselves. The earth juts up into
the world wherever we can be compelled into confrontation with whatever
we do not fully understand. This is the heart of our polemical situatedness
as historical beings: that the world as it makes sense to us also drives us to
confront interpretively what does not, yet, make sense—and the resolution of
this ‘yet’ is forever postponed in the primal strife. As worldly, we seek ever
to broaden the scope of the clearing; as earthly, we must be at once grateful
to and at the mercy of the sheer question-worthiness and obscurity of what is
and of what we are, an interrogation that threatens ever and suddenly to throw
our world off balance. The primal strife, the polemos, of being-human is the
ever-again of interpretation and reinterpretation, facing down and facing up
to the destruction of earthquakes in meaning and the reconstruction that must
follow if we are still to have an abode in a historical world, lest the earth open
up and swallow us whole, as it did Oedipus.

1.3 THE FLIGHT OF ICARUS

In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, just before embarking on their escape from the

prison of King Minos, the legendary inventor and artist Daedalus warns his
son Icarus to fly a middle path between sea and sky, inter utrumque vola,
to avoid the damp of the waves and the heat of the sun on the wings he had
devised from wood and wax and feathers. But in their flight, Icarus becomes
enraptured and leaves his father’s side:

Cum puer audaci coepit gaudere volatu

Deseruitque ducem caelique cupidine tractus
Altius egit iter.

When the boy began to rejoice in his daring flight

And deserted his leader, drawn by a longing for the sky,
He beat a higher path.20

The myth of Icarus is an ancient one, from at least the sixth century
BCE.21 King Minos of Crete had employed Daedalus, the legendary inventor,
 Between Earth and Sky 39

technician, sculptor, and engineer, to design and oversee the building of the
Labyrinth, where the king hid the Minotaur. In most versions of the myth,
Minos later imprisoned Daedalus and his son Icarus for assisting Theseus
of Athens to kill the Minotaur and escape the Labyrinth, because Minos’s
daughter Ariadne had fallen in love with Theseus. That phrase of Ovid’s,
caelique cupidine tractus—drawn by a longing for the sky, points to what
has always been so arresting about the myth: that longing for an ever-upward
flight as an escape into a kind of absolute freedom, to soar with all the grace
of a bird above the earth, almost as if unbound by natural laws. Of course,
for Icarus, the unchecked longing for a freedom that transcends all earthly
attachments and worries leads to disaster, for the sun melts his wings and he
falls to his death in the sea.
The flight of Icarus is potent as myth because it captures the miraculous
‘between’ of the human condition, the inter of Ovid’s inter utrumque vola,
the flight between earth and sky. Being-human is a miraculous flight, because
being-here has no verifiable explanation, no way for any of us to account
empirically for why I am someone rather than no one or for why there is
something rather than nothing. That the world be a meaningful one to us,
and not just what William James called a “blooming, buzzing confusion” or
Nietzsche “the chaos of sensations,” may seem a given in the ordinariness of
our everyday doings, but we cannot confirm what or who gives the given.22
We simply leap off into the trust that our given understanding of things as
what they are will hold us aloft after we jump into our daily routines. Like
Icarus, we may well fall by suffering some breakdown, and few, if any, may
notice. Haunting our being-human is the possibility of what the poets W. H.
Auden and William Carlos Williams called, respectively, the “forsaken cry”
and the “splash quite unnoticed” of Icarus’s fall and the lonely meaningless-
ness of it beyond one’s own suffering.23 In Heidegger, it is the angst in the
face of the groundless ground of our own unaccountable thrownness into the
happenstance of a particular historical world of meaning.
The “longing for the sky” that draws, or drags, Icarus upwards towards
the sun, the caelique cupidine tractus, is the human lure of transcendence.
In Latin, cupido is a desire, an eagerness, a passion, a longing for some-
thing; it is inspired by the god Cupid, the counterpart to the Greek Eros. The
overwhelming longing of love is the one thing that Socrates says he does
know (Symposium, 177d), because love is a lack, and he knows what he
lacks and what it means to lack, to yearn, and to seek—zetein. We make our
compromises and settle into an understanding of the world, as Daedalus did
at Knossos after building the Labyrinth for King Minos. But even so, some
intimation of freedom, like Theseus arriving in secret to slay the monster
Minotaur, may break in upon us. We can ignore that break-in of something
40 Chapter One

unaccountable that threatens a breakdown of our dependable understanding

of the world; or, like Daedalus, we can heed it and dare an escape from a
world that has become a Labyrinth, a maze that amazes us with its sudden
confusion and the stifling sense that there is no way out, an aporia. To-
be-human, an earthling, is to have some inkling that there might be some
Other, some new and as-yet inconceivable understanding of a meaning still
beyond us, if we break away to transcend the bonds of received opinion and
routine. We can fail to notice, turn away, ignore, or repress this inkling, but
that is to belie the human condition by living a life unexamined, fearful of
the irruption of the ontologically miraculous that breaks us down and bodes
something Other.
In confrontation with Heidegger, we must use the word transcendence cau-
tiously. Heidegger insists in many places that the problem of transcendence is
about how it is possible that we be open to and out in a world of meaning. For
example: “Being-in-the-world belongs to the fundamental constitution of that
being that is in each instance my own, that in each instance I my-self am. Self
and world belong together, they belong to the unity of the constitution of Da-
sein and define equiprimordially the ‘subject.’ In other words, the being that
we in each instance ourselves are, Dasein, is the transcendent” (GA 24: 423).
Heidegger seeks to dissolve the Cartesian conundrum of how we, as subjects,
can have knowledge of a world ‘out there’ by stepping across, transcending,
from the internality of the self to be ‘in’ an external world. Inspired by Kant’s
transcendental philosophy (GA 24: 423), which seeks the conditions for any
possible experience, Heidegger says that we, Dasein, are the transcendent as
such, because as Dasein, as being (-sein) here (Da-), we are always already
‘out’ and ‘in’ the world, stepping (-scending) beyond (trans-) ourselves in a
historical context of meaning that we have been thrown into and that already
makes a provisional sense. The burden of Heidegger’s existential analytic
of Dasein is to show how what he calls the existentiales, as features of the
hermeneutical understanding, serve to embed us in the always-already of a
world of meaning. Transcendence for Heidegger is therefore not what he
comes to oppose as metaphysics: an account of a reality that subsists beyond
(meta-) worldly beings (ta phusika). This metaphysics he dismisses: “The
transcendent, according to the popular philosophical meaning of the word, is
otherworldly beings” (GA 24: 424). Such an account of a transcendent real-
ity would be a form of Platonism, where the truth of things resides not in our
immediate experience of an ever-changing world, but rather rises beyond it,
trans-ascends it, in some heavenly realm of supra-sensory forms and ideas
and the good that exists eternally, outside of time, and which we can only
apprehend with the mind’s eye.
 Between Earth and Sky 41

At-issue in the confrontation between Plato and Heidegger is transcen-

dence and whether the notion of a meaning that transcends our finite, histori-
cal situatedness makes any sense at all, or if it is a nihilistic delusion that
slanders the only world we will ever have, as messy and inconstant as it may
be. In this confrontation, my conception of situated transcendence, as a theme
immersed in the Platonic dialogues, is deeply indebted to Drew Hyland’s
reading of a “finite transcendence” in Plato as a strategy,

that does not pretend that our finitude can be comprehensively overcome, yet
does not on the other hand possibly capitulate to it. This is to acknowledge and
understand the finitude as what it is, to recognize it in its depth and complexity,
but to respond to that limiting condition by transforming it into possibility, to
engage in what we may call ‘finite transcendence.’24

It is not that Heidegger denies an otherness to Being. Quite the contrary,

he commits much attention to the Greek deinon, the awesomely terrible and
astonishing, to the overpowering sway of phusis, nature, and to our Unheim-
lichkeit, our uncanniness, our homelessness even in the midst of our being-
situated in a given world of familiar meaning, our habitation. Heidegger
traces these disorienting features of Dasein’s hermeneutical existentiality
back to the nullity, the Nichtigkeit, of our existence, the usually only dim
awareness that our very being-here, and all the meaning and attachments to
the ground we stand on, is grounded on nothing, that we cannot get behind
the throw of our being thrown into this place, this time, this body, this his-
torical concatenation of language, tradition, and relationships. For Heidegger,
our finitude necessarily means the fraying at the edges of our understanding,
the impossibility of keeping meaning together as a whole. We may bump up
against this uncanniness of an angst in the face of the Nothing in either the
most trivial or most momentous of events.
What such an experience emphatically does not do is grant us access to a
Beyond, something that transcends us as an otherworld. All is immanence for
Heidegger, not as an inward subjectivity that we must overcome to ‘be’ in
the world (GA 24: 424–26), because there is no eternal, stable, otherworldly
realm that we can ascend into that explains the meaningfulness of a world
that we always already are in. Nevertheless, Heidegger says that “Being is
the transendens pure and simple. The transcendence of the Being of Dasein
is distinct in that this transcendence involves the possibility and necessity of
the most radical individuation” (SZ, 38). Without transcendence in this sense
of already being out into a world of meaning that makes a world of sense to
us, there would be no world for us to be ‘in’ at all. But this is the specific
world of an individuated historical meaning for specific human-being. The
42 Chapter One

finitude that characterizes our being-human defines us as worldly beings, as

both having and being in a world immanently. This is not transcendence to
an absolute or radically other plane. We always-already transcend to a finite
situated Here of meaningful existence that can be challenged, broken down,
enlarged, and so on in hermeneutical confrontation, but never becomes infi-
nite so long as we are human-being. Therefore, authenticity in the examined
life can only result in a deeper sense of our own historicity through a polemos
with the given, and through that, an insight into possibilities handed down
but overlooked by our given past and that we can appropriate in projecting
a meaningful future as our own, rather than as something by which we are
merely swept along.
At stake in the relationship between finitude and transcendence is freedom
and its role in ethics and politics, as well as in philosophy itself. What I want to
argue as the distinctive feature of ethical life, and to show phenomenologically
through a reading of the Republic, is that we can and do have intimations of
other possible meanings that transcend the constellation of opinions and prac-
tices that for the most part so absorb us, and that we can and do have access
to such meaning beyond the given that we might bring back to transform the
world as we have known it. At issue is not an ontic otherworld of things truer
than those of this world, but rather an ontological other-world of transformed
meaning. We can affirm in faith, deny, or remain agnostic about whether
there is an ‘otherworld’ somehow ‘beyond’ this one. I will not take a position
on that question, only that we are driven by a longing to transcend the given.
Heidegger might say the same, given his analysis of uncanniness that we will
examine in chapter 8, but at-issue is the ethical status of the idea. If not Plato’s
idea then something like it is essential to the phenomenological encounter with
a transformative otherness and to the ethical beings that we are. Philosophy
entails the possibility that we can break free of the bonds of opinion and attain
truth. We understand our freedom phenomenologically in terms of this pos-
sibility to rise, like Icarus, beyond the bonds that hold us down. The question
to address is how we can avoid the fate of Icarus in flying too close to the sun
and, instead, fly like Daedalus between earth and sky.

1.4 SUN AND SOIL

As earth and sky serve as concrete images for the phenomenon of the inter-
related polemics of situatedness and transcendence in being-human, there
are two subsidiary images that have their place in each domain: sun and soil.
These two elements play key roles in the confrontation between the two pro-
tagonists of this study: soil for Heidegger and sun for Plato.
 Between Earth and Sky 43

As an image for situatedness, soil is particularly fitting. Soil is the face

of the earth, that part of the earth with which human beings have the most
contact under the dome of sky and as what most immediately supports life.
As an image for the thrownness of our historical existence, earth corresponds
to what Heidegger calls the nullity of this thrownness. The sheer fact that
the givenness of your situatedness, in this body, at this place and time, is
ultimately inexplicable as yours and not someone else’s, even if we could
trace the physical chain of causes from parents to Big Bang. This is like the
earth: No matter how deeply I dig the ground or how minutely I split a stone,
I cannot expose everything concealed within the earth to light, because it
would then be annihilated as earth. Earth is inherently self-concealing, where
we bury our secrets and our dead, expecting them never to be revealed. As
earth’s outer face, though, soil beckons and flatters us with the illusion of tak-
ing possession of the earth, even if such possession is ultimately impossible.
Soil is how the withdrawn and boundless earth presents a fertile, life-giving
face to ordinary human existence.
Because we live so enmeshed with the soil, we take it for granted, just
as we generally take the inexplicable contingency of existence for granted,
sometimes to the extreme of forgetting our dependency upon it by ravaging
and polluting the earth. Soil sustains us in life, quite literally as the earth be-
neath our feet, and also as the ground in which we grow crops, plant our gar-
dens, build foundations for our homes, and bury our dead. If earth is a basis
in the sense of the inexplicable thrownness of historical meaning that we can
never fully expose, that may break open our meaningful world in earthquakes
we cannot control, then soil is the surface of things that makes everyday life
accessible. To be human also means to stand here, upon some particular, situ-
ated soil in a specific place and time that has its own concrete and personal
meaning for us as the landscape of our involvements and memories. When we
speak of settling down somewhere, truly inhabiting it and making it a home,
we say we are putting down roots. Whether for good or ill, soil defines the
embeddedness of situated human-being, the sheer givenness of what is one’s
own, even if we resist exploring beneath this surface.
Unlike the soil, which is the earth under my feet, the sun shines down
universally upon us all, a role acknowledged at least as early as the Sun-
god Aten in the monotheistic religion of the pharaoh Akhenaten (reigned c.
1353–1336 BCE): “Whenever you are risen upon the eastern horizon / you
fill every land with your perfection. . . . Although you are far away, your rays
are upon the land.”25 When risen, the sun’s light and warmth coax life from
the soil everywhere. Both distant in form and close in effect, the sun belongs
to everyone and to no one. We feel it but cannot touch it. We see it but cannot
look at it, at least not safely or for long. So, despite its detachment from us,
44 Chapter One

we nevertheless apprehend it and recognize we could not live without it. This
is the sun that Socrates describes in the Allegory of the Cave, which the es-
caped prisoner comes to realize “is in a certain way the cause of those things
he and his companions had been seeing” (516c) back in the cave, as well as of
all that exists in the outside world; its light makes the world comprehensible
in both the distinction among things and the interrelation of things. The sun,
then, is an image for the transcendence of being-human that we feel but do
not fully know in our longing for something that simultaneously illuminates
and lifts us out of our contingency and attachments, while uniting us in what
is universal to human-being and even with the cosmos as a whole, as when
an astronomer contemplates the vastness of the heavens and gratefully, or
at least without regret, forgets her own miniscule rootedness in an earthly
contingency. This is the liberating, sky-bound rapture of a contemplation that
even in otherwise miserable circumstances can lift us out of ourselves in the
study of a microbe or a distant galaxy or a poem or a mathematical theorem
or a philosophical question or text.
We will discuss the Plato’s sun later, so now a word about soil and Hei-
degger. In a critical dialogue with Emmanuel Faye, I argued that the confron-
tation with Heidegger points us to something important about being-human
that we must take seriously, even if he distorted it and even if we must rethink
it for ourselves: rootedness. Faye took exception to this claim, because the
whole language of uprootedness (Entwurzelung) and soil (Boden) played a
key role in what Werner Klemperer has called the Lingua Tertii Imperii, the
language of the Third Reich in Germany under National Socialism, especially
in the slogan Blut und Boden (Blood and Soil).26 The organic metaphor of that
slogan served to combine the notions of a people, a Volk, united by blood and
racial identity, and of a homeland (Heimat), as rooted to a particular soil, a
fertile territory bonded to the blood of the people by its history and traditions.
For the Nazis, both blood and soil were threatened with contamination and
uprooting by the cosmopolitanism, the commercialism, and the superficiality
of modern life, represented in persons by the Jews and in places by the cities,
with their soil paved over by concrete.
Faye is certainly right that when Heidegger waxed most enthusiastic
about the National Socialist revolution, he also spoke the language of blood
and soil. In one seminar, for example, he talked of “Semitic nomads”—a
thinly veiled reference to Jews—who would never have a connection to “the
nature of our German space” (NGS, 82).27 In the Black Notebooks of the
early 1930s, around the start of the Third Reich, Heidegger explores how
enrootedness might be restored to the people, how Germany might achieve
its Boden-ständigkeit, its standing firmly rooted in the soil (GA 94: 38–40). In
another entry, Heidegger writes: “The projection of Being as time overcomes
 Between Earth and Sky 45

everything prior in Being and in thinking; not idea, but rather task; not re-
lease, but rather binding. The projection does not dissolve itself into pure
Spirit, but rather first opens and binds blood and soil to readiness for action
and to the capacity for effectiveness and work” (GA 94: 127; but cf. 181).
This is revealing, because unlike in Plato, where the ideas draws us to tran-
scendence as a liberating “release” from the cave’s bonds, Heidegger focuses
on “task” as what constitutes a “binding” (Bindung) to the intense blood and
soil particularity of a people’s historical cave. For Heidegger, freedom is
release for the authentic realization of one’s boundedness.
Such evidence is important for understanding Heidegger’s support for
National Socialism as a countermovement to a putatively nihilistic liberal
universalism overrunning the planet. But what is important for this inquiry
is not Heidegger the man and how his thought is entangled with his politics;
rather, it is to expose, through a confrontation with that thought, what is at-
issue for our own thinking. As I wrote in my response to Faye, the metaphor
of rootedness in the earth is not the private property of Heidegger or the
National Socialists, nor does it lead inexorably to fascism. I cited a passage
in The Need for Roots, written in 1943 by Simone Weil, the philosopher and
anti-fascist, when she was working for the Free French cause and envisioning
the reconstruction of her country after victory:

To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the hu-
man soul. It is one of the hardest to define. A human being has roots by virtue
of his real, active, and natural participation in the life of a community which pre-
serves in living shape certain particular treasures of the past and certain particu-
lar expectations for the future. This participation is a natural one, in the sense
that it is automatically brought about by the place, conditions of birth, profes-
sions and social surroundings. Every human being needs to have multiple roots.
It is necessary for him to draw well-nigh the whole of his moral, intellectual
and spiritual life by way of the environment of which he forms a natural part.28

The metaphor of soil and roots is “a natural one” because the temporality
of being-human involves phusis in the sense of a spontaneous upsurge and
growth, as a plant emerges from the soil. To be human at all means having
a past that in-forms us, that serves as the nourishing soil in which a properly
constructive understanding of the world may be embedded and rooted. This
is not craven submission to the past and to tradition, because the future de-
mands drawing upon this past as a “treasure” in the sense of a resource both
cherished and expended in living—that is, in confronting new circumstances
and thereby adapting those traditions interpretively to preserve and transform
them, even in modest everyday practices. Roots are how we draw upon the
soil of the past to emerge into the open, into the light of day—but it is the
46 Chapter One

sunlight that draws us forth. This is why Weil says that participation in the
community is “wellnigh” (presque, nearly) all we draw upon for our “moral,
intellectual, and spiritual life,” because we must also transcend the intimate
particularity of our roots to engage in the polemical and reconstructive reap-
propriation of the past for the sake of the future.
The contemporary feminist thinker, bell hooks, puts it this way in a chapter
on “Touching the Earth” in her book Belonging: A Culture of Place:

When we love the earth, we are able to love ourselves fully. I believe this.
The ancestors taught it was so. As a child I loved playing in dirt, in that rich
Kentucky soil, that was a source of life. Before I understood anything about the
pain and exploitation of the southern system of sharecropping, I understood that
grown-up black folks loved the land. I could stand with my grandfather Daddy
Jerry and look out at fields of growing vegetables, tomatoes, corn, collards, and
know that this was his handiwork. I could see the look of pride on his face as I
expressed wonder and awe at the magic of growing things.29

For hooks, a passion for justice is rooted in the life-giving love of place and
belonging in a “soil” that both nourishes community and provides a context
for understanding what exploits and degrades it. Her own struggles for ra-
cial justice emerge from these roots in a profoundly embedded situatedness.
Having what Weil calls “multiple roots” is also why we are always polemi-
cally disposed, never simply rooted. We are always exposed to entanglement
and conflicts among these roots of our identities, having to engage in on-
going interpretive disentanglement, healing, and repair. Weil envisions a
freedom that knits together both the obligations of interdependency rooted
in circumstance and the rights pertaining to us as persons who transcend the
accidents of our particular situatedness. The sun, as an image for the call of
transcendence, is what energizes the resources we draw upon from the soil of
the past. Just as a plant cannot exist without its soil, being-human cannot ex-
ist without an organic past that meaningfully informs a situated understand-
ing. But to grow and adapt to circumstances, we must reach for the light that
allows us to gain perspective and then reflect upon and transform meaning
through confrontation. This is our human photosynthesis.
The danger, as with Icarus, lies in a nihilism at the extremes. The cry of
“Blood and soil!” reemerged in the United States at the “Unite the Right”
rally in Charlottesville in 2017, where Nazis, neo-Confederates, and alt-right
allies marched with flaming torches. When soil and blood are united in a
conception of community as an atavistic belonging to an exclusive, embodied
race, entrenched in a closed tradition, then fascism is at the door. This form of
chthonic nihilism denies the light of the sun as a call to transcendence that can
illuminate all human-being as sharing in a universal, yet properly polemical,
 Between Earth and Sky 47

dialogue about meaning, life, and justice, rather than an exclusive bond to
an equally exclusive slice of soil as a homeland. The sun that shines on all
intimates that in transcendence, human communities need not be utterly in-
commensurate, that there is hope for constructive dialogue across the borders
of rootedness in tradition, because each tradition also must confront itself as
temporal and finite, and therefore ever in need of reconstruction.
At the other extreme, a fixation on the sun, a yearning for a detached
and distant perspective that rises above the messy contingency of historical
existence, presents another form of nihilism. In recoiling from embedded
contingency out of impatience, embarrassment, or revulsion, this solar nihil-
ism denies the earth-bound aspect of being-human by finding solace only in
abstraction from a rooted existence. It imagines it can be entirely liberated
from the organic human need for roots, from the particularity of historical
belonging and tradition that informs our everyday, embodied existence. At its
most extreme, this nihilism denies any meaning whatsoever to being-human:
radical trans-humanists refuse to be bound to the accidents of embodiment as
homo sapiens, envisioning instead a post-human future where sentient entities
would be entirely free to design their own incarnation, tearing humanity up by
the roots. What such hubris ignores is that no inner-worldly being can be the
Creator-God of the totality of its own existence, a master over contingency,
immune to the fatal accidents and fateful attachments of finitude.30 Any liv-
ing being, of whatever species, that would be like us (Republic, 515a)—in
a capacity to respond to wonder, to reflect interpretively upon itself and its
world, and to articulate its reflections with others in dialogue—would be
‘human’ in this larger sense of rising to its reflection only out of an organic,
earthly contingency of embodiment that it could never get fully behind and
control. Transcendence, to arise at all, is dependent upon a situatedness that
it dynamically and dialogically confronts.
While it may seem strange to say, the human-being, like Heidegger’s
Dasein, is not limited to homo sapiens as a biological species. This is not a
concession to trans-humanism as a frontal assault on our contingency as such,
only an admission that there may be others like us, in forms we have not yet
met or recognized, because all life must be both bound and enlivened by the
specificity of its finite material embodiment. The nihilism of solar abstraction
converts Weil’s “treasure” into a fool’s good, either to be dissolved as an ob-
struction to the distance required for a detached perspective or, at its worst, to
be used as a mere resource, stripped of all affective significance and concern,
of all love and loyalty, to be disposed in the manipulation of all resources,
humans included. The polemical challenge of being-human, as a situated
transcendence, is to navigate a course between sun and soil, recognizing both
as essential to but neither as exhaustive of what we and the world are, and
48 Chapter One

using practical wisdom to strike the right balance in each interpretive, recon-
structive encounter with the situation one inhabits. How this may properly be
accomplished is the theme of subsequent volumes in this project.

1.5 CONSTRUALS OF MEANING

Before proceeding to a confrontation between Plato and Heidegger on the

meaning of the Allegory of the Cave, it is worth elaborating on why being-
human is constitutively confrontational in how we interpret and navigate our
historical world of meaning. The Allegory is about how interpretation itself is
inherently confrontational, or polemical, and how this relates to ethics, poli-
tics, truth, and Being. A pivotal text is a section in Heidegger’s 1927 lecture
course, The Fundamental Problems of Phenomenology: “The Methodological
Character of Ontology: The Three Fundamental Elements of the Phenomeno-
logical Method.” Here he explains his famous starting point: that the study of
Being must begin with the analysis of the being who has an understanding of
Being—namely, ourselves, Dasein. Heidegger names the three components of
the analysis of Dasein, as the path to addressing the question of Being, reduc-
tion, construction, and destruction. While his discussion ostensibly deals with
the methodology of phenomenology as a properly scientific discipline of the
study of Being, this method is not simply an academic one for application in
a subfield of philosophy. It is also a description of our way of being-human.
Reduction is a term that Heidegger takes from Husserl. He deliberately ap-
propriates this term, rather than simply borrowing it, because in this lecture
course of 1927, the same year as the publication of Being and Time, Hei-
degger wants to demonstrate both his continuity with the phenomenology of
his erstwhile mentor and to clarify his own decisive departure: “With this [i.e.,
phenomenological reduction], we are adopting the wording of a central term
in Husserl’s phenomenology, but not its content” (GA 24: 29).31 For Husserl,
as Heidegger says in the lecture course, phenomenological reduction is “the
method of taking phenomenological vision and leading it from the natural at-
titude of human beings, living amidst the world of things and persons, back to
the transcendental life of consciousness and its noetic-noematic experiences
[that is, the confirmation in experience of a conception of an object as pro-
jected by consciousness] in which objects constitute themselves as correlates
of consciousness” (GA 24: 29). Emphasizing the Latin root of re-duction as a
leading-back, Heidegger distinguishes his phenomenological reduction from
Husserl’s. He is endeavoring to make sense of the meaning of Being, but “Be-
ing is in each case the Being of beings, and therefore it becomes accessible at
first only by way of starting with some being” (GA 24: 29).
 Between Earth and Sky 49

The analytic of Dasein, the kind of being that we are, therefore, is not done
simply for its own sake but as a way to lead to an understanding of Being
as such. “For us,” says Heidegger, contrasting his approach to Husserl’s,
“phenomenological reduction means leading the phenomenological vision
from the comprehension of a being, in whatever form it takes, back to the un-
derstanding of Being (as projected upon the manner of its unconcealment) of
this being” (GA 24: 29). Husserl wanted to derive knowledge of pure eidetic
forms of entities through his reduction, a knowledge that would transcend
the vagaries of the natural consciousness in its absorption with everyday
things. Heidegger seeks to understand Being precisely as it is manifested in
the understanding that interprets its everyday world, the understanding that
is ours as being-human. This manifestation of meaning connects Heidegger’s
reduction to his conception of truth as unconcealment, the opening up of a
historical domain of sense and meaning, that is itself in turn a manifestation
of the way we are in the everyday world that we always already provisionally
understand. Heidegger does not want to leave the “natural attitude” behind
but dig deeper into it in order to see what is presupposed and unspoken in
it. For example, a particular object might register to us as an armchair rather
than as a throne, but what is it about the historicity of the understanding that
makes it meaningfully revealed to us this way? There is nothing to the brute
object that necessitates this interpretation.
This leads Heidegger to phenomenological construction. Re-duction,
leading-back from beings to Being, as the domain of meaning formation, is
not yet a positive accomplishment, because “Being does not become acces-
sible in the way a being does; we do not simply discover it lying at hand, but
rather it must, as will be shown, be brought into view in a free projection. We
designate this projection of a being, which is already given, upon its Being
and the structures of its Being as phenomenological construction” (GA 24:
29–30). In this rather dense passage, Heidegger indicates what he will go on
to accomplish in his existential analytic of Dasein in this lecture course and
then more fully in Being and Time: the elaboration of the existential catego-
ries of a being such as ourselves in order to illuminate how Being informs
our being-human. We understand what it means to be as Being-in-the-world
in terms of care, temporality, historicity, which Heidegger holds are among
the existential structure by which Being construes a meaningful world for us.
The positive construction as an exposition of these existential structures
will not be possible without a destruction, however, because the whole his-
tory of philosophy inhibits a clear phenomenological insight into the question
of Being: “The reservoir of fundamental philosophical concepts from the
philosophical tradition is still today so influential that the repercussions of
this tradition can hardly be exaggerated” (GA 24: 31). Words that now have
50 Chapter One

become commonplace to us once had a beginning as jarring concepts in their

day, ripped from everyday usage and given a distinct philosophical meaning.
For example, one of the most important is the word idea, which Socrates
and Plato took from everyday language—something that has been seen—and
elevated to a metaphysical, epistemological, and ethical keyword; there is
also ousia in Plato and in Aristotle, which in ordinary Greek means one’s
resources, both in character and wealth, in the sense that we might describe
someone as “a person of substance,” but which became a philosophical term
meaning substance in the sense of a thing’s essence as what defines its be-
ing, usually in terms of an eternal essence, such as the Platonic idea. But the
everydayness of such words obscures how profoundly the historical force of
the tradition may inhibit a new departure in responding to the question of
what it means to be: “This is why there necessarily belongs to the conceptual
interpretation of Being and its structures, that is, to a reductive construction
[zur reduktiven Konstruktion] of Being, a destruction [Destruktion], that is,
a critical dismantling [Abbau] of the inherited concepts—which at first must
be employed—down to the sources from which they have been drawn” (GA
24: 31).
Although such inherited concepts can inhibit us, there is no escaping his-
tory: they “at first must be employed” because they are the way we have ha-
bitually addressed the questions that hit us. There is no alternative to employ-
ing them provisionally until we have analyzed those concepts by breaking
them down in the Greek sense of ana-lusis, dis-assembling something into
its component parts in order better to understand how they work together to
make it what it is. Only after this dismantling might we be free to reassemble
the components and forge a new meaning for a philosophical vocabulary.
This reformation of conceptual apparatus is precisely what Heidegger at-
tempts throughout his career in order to open up new avenues for philosophy.
We see this in the terminology of the Being and Time period that is initially so
jarring, with terms like Being-in-the-world as an alternative to consciousness
or unconcealment for truth or Wesung (essencing) as an ontological alterna-
tive to metaphysical essence (ousia, Wesen)—and then even more radically
in his middle and later periods, where he uses terms like Ereignis (event) or
the Ge-stell (the en-framing) to describe aspects of Being’s self-presentation
in history that he thinks have never been adequately addressed in philosophy.
Heidegger insists that there is not only a unity to the “reductive construc-
tion” of the question, but that:

These three fundamental elements of the phenomenological method—reduction,

construction, destruction—belong together inherently and must be grounded in
their inherent relation. Construction in philosophy is necessarily destruction,
 Between Earth and Sky 51

that is, a dismantling of what has been handed down, carried out through a
historical return back [Rückgang] to the tradition; this means neither a nega-
tion of the tradition nor a condemnation of it as rubbish [Verurteiling . . . zur
Nichtigkeit: damning it to oblivion], but to the contrary a positive appropriation
of it. (GA 24: 31)

While Heidegger addresses this triad in the context of his specific ontologi-
cal task of addressing the question of Being, he also asserts that it applies to
all “philosophical insight” as intertwined with historical insight (GA 24: 31).
The “history of philosophy” is not merely a matter of information about the
concepts, arguments, and treatises of the tradition as “some expedient and
easy subject to prepare for exams” (GA 24: 31–32), because that history is not
a sideshow of idle curiosity to philosophy, as the history of alchemy might
be to the modern science of chemistry. The history determines the horizon of
how the fundamental questions matter to us at all: how they strike us through
wonder in the first place; how we then pose them and compose ourselves
to respond to them; and finally how we do answer them and then seek to
reintegrate those answers into a larger comprehension of the world, which in
turn may lead to more questions, pathways of inquiry, results or dead ends—
because only a moribund conception of philosophy endeavors to conclude the
helicoidal cycle of its questioning once and for all.
While he does not make this so apparent in the Fundamental Questions
lecture course, which aspires to a more detached and scientific cast of do-
ing phenomenology, we must recall that for the Heidegger of the 1920s, the
question of the meaning of Being is intimately bound up with the question of
“my ‘I am.’”32 This is not solely about Heidegger’s initial, intense rejection
of the prevailing academic philosophy of the time, which he deemed to have
lost contact with the meaningfulness of life as it is lived. Also at stake in the
question of the meaning of Being is the question of what it means to be for
the being that asks that question, the being he calls Dasein—or simply us: I
writing this, you reading it, as somehow present to each other, through but be-
yond ink on page or pixels on screen. It is not just the academic-philosophical
question of Being that ‘is’ historical, it is we, too, who are. Being-human, as
Dasein, is defined by the triad of reduction, construction, and destruction.
These three words rhyme, both in English and in German, which empha-
sizes their interrelation as moments of the intertwining interpretative response
to anything facing us. While these ‘structure’-words all derive from the Latin
compounds struere and prefixes, what unites these meanings may usefully be
referred back to the older Indo-European root: ster-, meaning to spread. That
root has cognates in English words such as strew and street, and in related
words in other languages such as Streusel in German, perestroika in Russian,
52 Chapter One

and stratos (multitude, army, expedition) in Greek, from which English has
strategy. The thread connecting these words is the connotation of distribution
in space in some greater or lesser order, which clearly underlies words such as
structure, construction, and, as their negation, destruction. This spatial meta-
phoric also informs how this word-family describes cognition, just as a spatial
metaphoric informs under-stand; for example, consciousness has a structure
that explains the relations and hierarchies of self-aware cognition: a con-struct
is a representation that brings together related features of a phenomenon into
an orderly whole that allow us to make better sense of diverse instances of a
thing and experiences with it. When we construe, we always construe some-
thing as something in an interpretation that articulates its meaning within a
larger structural whole that makes sense to us. Construal is the meaning-mak-
ing process by which we fit things and actions into the larger architectonic of
our historical inhabitation of a world that has significance for us.
All understanding, and not just the specialized understanding of the ques-
tion of the meaning of Being, is structural in this extended sense. To engage
the world, we con-strue meaning. From the diverse aspects of some experi-
ence or phenomenon, which would otherwise be an unintelligible jumble of
impressions, we bring together (con-) these elements by interpreting them as
some unitary, distinct thing; we build up these distinct entities as parts of an
articulate whole, a structure, that allows us to navigate our world, not in a
literally spatial way (although that also may be true), but as a realm of under-
standing that allows us to make sense of our situation.
Construal and construction, as modes of understanding and interpreting the
world, fit with ontological making-room, the opening of a hermeneutically
habitable world. that Heidegger calls Auseinandersetzung, his preferred word
for translating polemos. It means discussion or confrontation in German,
but Heidegger sometimes breaks the word apart into its component roots as
Aus-einander-setzung, the setting-out-and-apart-from-one-another, the dis-
tinguishing and gathering, that establishes the intelligibility of a meaningful
world. We can get this sense in the English ‘con-frontation’: a world, mean-
ingfully articulated in all its inner relations, is only possible if all things can
uphold their ‘fronts’ in identity with themselves and in distinction from oth-
ers. Without this, there is only Durcheinandersetzung, a confused intersper-
sion of things in a muddled heap, a sarma (Heraclitus, fragment 124), James’s
“blooming, buzzing confusion,” rather than a structured whole. As such, a
construction is also an aspect of the logos, the gathering that assembles a
world of meaning that can be articulated in language. This brings us back to
the earlier point, that polemos and logos are the same, although not identical
(GA 40: 66; GA 97: 39): meaningful structure and an engaged construal of
things within it depend for their intelligibility on a simultaneous unity and
 Between Earth and Sky 53

separation, identity and difference, of distinct elements articulated together

within a world of meaning. Without fronts, there are no borders, no shape to
things, and so no structure to a world that can be inhabited in everyday life.
But this account risks a misunderstanding if construal is taken as simply up
to us, subjectively, as either individuals or collectives. Our finitude and our
historicity mean that the structure of an intelligible world is always-already
there for us, in some provisional way. At the same time, the meaning of the
world and things within it is not fixed. To use Heidegger’s concepts from
Being and Time, the understanding grasps the world in a fore-structure of
meaning that has-been articulated for us in advance, and interpretation as-
signs things and actions their place in an as-structure within the fore-structure
(SZ, §32). I can interpret a chair as an armchair and not as a throne because
a range of possible meanings is already there be-fore me, as it were. A pro-
visional structure of meaning for what things can be is already accessible,
in the fore of lived existence, given by a particular historicity that in-forms
my world: it forms the intelligible structure of the world so that I may exist
in understanding in it. For Heidegger, the metaphorics of structure serves
also to overcome the dualism of thinking subject as separated from world as
thought-about. The structures of Dasein’s Being, as understandingly in-the-
world, mean that we exist as the world so structured. Ontologically, we are
this Being-in-the-world.
This is where the triad of reduction, construction, and destruction come
into view in a larger context. In section 5 of the Fundamental Problems
course, Heidegger pivots from the Latinate Destruktion to the German word
Abbau. Above, I rendered this word as “dismantling,” which is certainly cor-
rect linguistically, but not the only way. Albert Hofstadter, in his translation
of the lecture course, renders it as “de-constructing” (GA 24: 31), which
more literally conveys the German: Ab-bau, a negation (Ab-) of building
or constructing (-bau), which itself fits with the metaphorics structure as an
abode of meaningful inhabitation. Heidegger makes this shift from Latin to
German in part to make as clear as possible that the moment of interpretive
de-struction is not mindless destructiveness and that he is using the Latinate
word in a very specific way as a philosophical term of art. Within this clari-
fying move, though, is hidden the need to give a name to a critical feature of
our interpretive existence; although we ourselves do not create the always-
already of a world that provides our provisionally meaningful context, we are
not simply its passive recipients. Wonder allows us to catch glimpses of that
very contingency of the given world-structure. To be alive to the experience
of wonder is to be open to those moments in personal and communal history
when the need for reinterpretation becomes, or at least can become, both
overwhelmingly urgent and enticingly possible.
54 Chapter One

Deconstruction, then, is not a nihilistic, ontological vandalism against

the structural meaning of a world; it is a responsiveness to the possibility
of new, regenerative interpretations, grounded in the meaningful structures
already given, but also departing from them in new constellations of the ele-
ments of those structures. Deconstruction is intimately connected to freedom,
therefore, both in the negative sense of throwing off the absolute hold of the
past, and in the positive sense of opening up new horizons of meaning for in-
habiting a meaningful world. Deconstruction is the call of the future, in con-
frontation with the past. This is why Derrida would say that “Deconstruction
is justice,” because if being-human means that we inhabit a world as finite
beings, then to do justice to ourselves and to meaning itself we must remain
ever-alive to how meaning frays and reconstitutes itself ever-anew, as well
as being ever-vigilant against totalizing, absolutist, and tyrannizing claims to
have brought the necessity of reinterpretation to an end.33
Heidegger does not say all this in that passage in the 1927 lecture course.
The triad of reduction, construction, and destruction there seem mainly (but
not only) directed to the question of Being as specific to ontology as a dis-
cipline in philosophy. Reduction is supposed to lead us from the analysis of
being-human, Dasein, to Being as such; construction is supposed to enable
us to provide a coherent, positive account of the structures of Being; de-
struction, or deconstruction, is supposed to free us from the stifling hold of
long-unexamined philosophical concepts so that we can accomplish both the
reduction and the construction in as unencumbered a manner as possible. De-
construction grants us new insight into what has been overlooked but remains
at-issue in those concepts, and to appropriate them, once deconstructed, for
new purposes.
Thus, construction is futural: it is what we are always already doing as the
world-interpreting beings that we are, both as being given over in advance
(fore-) to the structures of intelligibility and as forging new domains of mean-
ing with the elements we have; that destruction is how we genuinely are our
past: not simply being borne along passively by it, nor obliterating it, but
confronting it and reconstruing it. Reduction is how we exist as present: not
as a fixed now-point, but as making sense of our situatedness, here and now,
by leading back an understanding of what it means to be human from a futural
horizon of possibility newly illumined by a deconstructed past.
These moments are not sequential, because our temporality is not ticks
on a timeline. Instead, they intersect each other at all times, informing each
other’s activity, as what Heidegger called the ek-stases, the standing-outside-
of-oneself of temporality, acknowledging that we exist not at now-points in
time but as stretched back and forth as the thrown-projection of a meaning-
ful world. In that world, the future is the most defining ekstasis, because the
 Between Earth and Sky 55

horizon of our Being, what it means for us to be, is worked out, polemically,
in terms of futural possibilities, in-formed by the past, and instantiated in the
situatedness of the present. The future is where freedom articulates itself, in
dialogue with the past, for the sake of the present.
My claim is that this temporality, as elastically stretched through past-pres-
ent-future, is itself motivated and defined by the polemos, the confrontational
dialogue of meaning between past and future that illuminates the present. In
my reading of the Allegory of the Cave, I will develop these three elements
of our interpretive being-human, using an expanded language to describe
the de-, pre-, and reconstruction of our historically interpreted world. I make
these terminological distinctions because I hope to show how each plays a
distinct but interlacing role in the polemical cycle of thought. This triad of
meaning-formation, deterioration, and reformation, as a constitutive feature
of human-being as polemical hermeneutics, is guided by the triad of wonder,
question, and response. I will endeavor to show that Plato, far from neglecting
what is at stake for being-human in this confrontation with meaning, displays
it in greater depth than Heidegger, and that by doing so, provides a fuller ac-
count of our ethical freedom, personal and political.

NOTES

1. In Gilbert, Collected Poems, 228.

2. Works and Days; Theogony; Testimonia, trans. Glenn Most (Cambridge, MA:
Loeb Classical Library, 2018).
3. Arendt, The Human Condition, 323; see also 248.
4. Donne, “The Anatomy of the World,” The Complete Poetry, 198–99, lines
203–14.
5. Roochnik, Retrieving Aristotle in an Age of Crisis, 3, 13.
6. Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Philosophy, 60,
290, 295.
7. Arendt, The Human Condition, 251.
8. For a sympathetic critique of Heidegger, Husserl, and Arendt on human “earth-
liness,” see Kelly Oliver, “Phenomenology and an Ethico-Politics of Earthbound
Limits,” in Pfeifer and Gurley, Phenomenology and the Political.
9. On tolma, daring, see Fried, “How Dare We Read Heidegger?”
10. See Gray, The Warriors: Reflections on Men in Battle, xvii–xviii and 238.
11. See Fried, “Odysseus on the Beach.”
12. See Fried, “A Letter to Emmanuel Faye,” 32, and Fried, “Peter Trawny: Free-
dom to Fail.”
13. For a treatment of the tale of Thales and woman by the well, the nature of
theory, absentmindedness, and the role of ridicule, as well as its significance for
Heidegger and philosophy, see Blumenberg’s The Laughter of the Thracian Woman.
56 Chapter One

14. See Fried, Heidegger’s Polemos, 148–50, where I discuss this text in detail.
15. For the most fruitful examinations of the chora in the phenomenology of
space, especially in Plato and Heidegger, see Sallis, The Verge of Philosophy and
Chorology.
16. Although, consider a passage such as this one from “Gelassenheit,” whose
language, in 1955, is disturbingly close to the Blutt und Boden rhetoric of the previous
decades: “Is there anymore such quiet dwelling of human beings between earth and
sky? Does the contemplative spirit still hold sway over the land? Is there yet a home-
land strong in its roots, in whose soil the human being can take a standing stance, that
is, standing constant in the soil?” (GA 16: 521).
17. For a fuller discussion, see Fried, Heidegger’s Polemos, chapter 4.
18. For an excellent discussion of this theme, see Braver, Groundless Ground,
chapter 5.
19. Michel Henry, The Essence of Manifestation, 444 (III.51).
20. Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. A. D. Melville (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1986), 8.223–25.
21. See Hornblower and Sparforth, Oxford Classical Dictionary, 409.
22. James, The Principles of Psychology, vol. 1, 488; Nietzsche, The Will to
Power, §569.
23. See Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts,” Collected Poems, 179, and Williams,
“Landscape with the Fall of Icarus,” Selected Poems, 238; both are responses to the
painting by Peter Bruegel at the museum in Brussels.
24. Hyland, Finitude and Transcendence, 29; cf. 32; also Questioning Platonism,
4, 9.
25. The Great Hymn to Aten in Simpson, The Literature of Ancient Egypt, 279.
See also Hoffmeier, Akhenaten and the Origins of Monotheism, chapters 7 and 8.
26. In Fried, Confronting Heidegger, see Fried, 39–42, 230–31; Faye, 66, 252–53;
and Kellerer, 182–86. Also Klemperer, The Language of the Third Reich, 197,
246–48, 263.
27. For a critical discussion of Jews and nomadology, see Gordon, “Heidegger in
Purgatory,” in Heidegger, Nature, History, State. On related themes, see the essays
collected in Lapidot and Brumlik, Heidegger and Jewish Thought.
28. Weil, The Need for Roots, 41.
29. hooks, Belonging, 34.
30. For my critique of trans-humanism, see Fried, “Odysseus on the Beach.”
31. For an overview of Heidegger’s departure from Husserl, see Dermot Moran,
Introduction to Phenomenology, 226–33.
32. Heidegger, “Drei Briefe Martin Heideggers an Karl Löwith,” 29; also GA 61:
172–74.
33. Derrida, “Force of Law,” 7; see also Fried, Heidegger’s Polemos, chapter 5.
 Chapter Two

Back to the Cave

From Heidegger to Plato

Even such a Shell the Universe itself

Is to the ear of Faith; and there are times,
I doubt not, when to You it doth impart
Authentic tidings of invisible things
—Wordsworth, from “The Excursion”1

If you are like most students of Western philosophy, Plato’s Allegory of

the Cave may have been one of your first encounters with philosophy’s
claim upon us.2 Plato’s Cave is perhaps the single most important depiction
in Western philosophy of human freedom in all its dimensions, from the
metaphysical, through the ontological and epistemological, to the ethical
and political. The Allegory also provides the best opportunity to conduct the
polemos between Plato and Heidegger, because Heidegger seizes upon the
Cave to identify where Platonism decisively signals the onset of nihilism in
the West, a nihilism that now, in the modern era, encompasses the globe. Fur-
thermore, Socrates characterizes the story he tells as one of prisoners being
released and making their escape from the bonds of their subterranean prison
into the open light of the world. It is a story of freedom, and of philosophy as
the engine of that freedom.
The basic details of the parable are well known: A society of prisoners
resides in a cavern, chained up so that they cannot look around or see each
other; above them burns a fire that projects shadows upon the cave wall that
they face, shadows they take to be reality. Somehow, some of the prisoners
get free of their chains, turn around, see the fire, and then make a long, ardu-
ous journey up and out of the cave into the light of day; having seen what the
real world is, they are compelled to return to the cave, risking disorientation

57
58 Chapter Two

and persecution, to provide a leadership informed by the truth and undeceived

by the shadows. (See Figure 1, The Cave.)
As a description of the human condition, Socrates declares outright that
the prisoners of the cave are “like us” (homoious hēmin, 515a), all of us.
The Greek homoious makes this sound as if he were declaring an analogy.
Homoios not only means “like” in the sense of resembling, but also akin to,
equal to, or even same as, in the sense of the expression “like for like.” So, it
is not just that we resemble the prisoners, we are just like them in a decisive
way concerning our freedom.
As I have suggested, freedom is the point of inflection to distinguish a
polemical ethics inspired by Plato in contrast to Heidegger’s polemos, while
also accounting for Heidegger’s critique of Plato. The confrontation between
these two conceptions of freedom turns on how we are free as finite beings
inhabiting our world through an interpretive confrontation with that world
as defined by our temporality and historicity. While I agree with Heidegger
that confrontation, as polemos, is a constitutive feature of our existential-
hermeneutical structure, my claim is that Plato also shows how and why this
must be so, and in a way that leads to very different ethical-political implica-
tions. The guiding thought is that our finitude means we can never have an
absolute and final interpretation of the meaning of things. This is not simply a
lack of ability on our part, it is a matter of time: how meaning frays and needs
reconstituting. The incompleteness of our understanding entails that the given
meanings of the historical world will repeatedly present us with unexpected
puzzles, contradictions, and outright crises. Confrontation, polemos, is how
the world, as interpreted, faces us, and how we must face up to it if we take
the examined life seriously as our ethical burden. The Allegory of the Cave
presents a powerful portrait for why this must be so.

2.1 HEIDEGGER’S CAVE: FREEDOM UNDER FIRE

As explained in the introduction, I do not intend to provide a comprehensive

interpretation of Heidegger’s readings of Plato. Other scholars have done
this well already, most notably Francisco Gonzalez.3 Instead, my goal is an
interpretation that exposes what is at issue for us in the confrontation between
Plato and Heidegger, for which an overview of Heidegger’s interpretation
of the Allegory of the Cave will suffice. Heidegger’s reading of the Alle-
gory goes to the heart of his critique of Plato, and that critique grounds his
understanding of the full sweep of the history of philosophy in the West as
“metaphysics.” That conception of the onset of metaphysics with Plato in turn
 Back to the Cave 59

informs Heidegger’s conception of the history of the West as a long slide into
an increasingly virulent nihilism.
A caveat: Heidegger at times insists, even in his readings of specific Plato
texts, that he is confronting not Plato but Platonism: “We say ‘Platonism’ and
not ‘Plato,’ because here we do not examine the conception of knowledge
that pertains to that title [i.e., Platonism] through an original and exhaustive
treatment of Plato’s works, but rather only through drawing out in rough out-
line here one particular strand” (GA 43: 184).4 I ask the reader for a similar
latitude to address Heideggerianism if not Heidegger.
Heidegger offers three major treatments of the Allegory of the Cave and
multiple shorter discussions.5 I will not address all of these systematically,
but it is worth noting the history of the major ones. The first is in his lecture
course of Winter Semester (WS) 1931–1932, On the Essence of Truth (in
GA 34). The second is his lecture course of WS 1933–1934, of the same
title (GA 36/37). This course follows the structure of the previous one, and
often repeats it, but is not identical. It includes Heidegger’s most developed
interpretation of polemos in Heraclitus’s Fragment 53 as a prologue to the
Cave interpretation, as well as political discussions and asides relevant to the
historical events of the time.6 The third is the essay “Plato’s Doctrine of the
Truth,” which is based on the first lecture course, although also not identi-
cal to it, and the only one he published in his lifetime, first in 1942 and then
1947.7
Scholars have debated the significance of the differences among Hei-
degger’s major treatments of the Allegory of the Cave. Gonzalez cogently
argues that Heidegger’s published essay is much more dogmatic about the
transformation through Plato of truth as unconcealment in favor of truth as
correctness, whereas the earlier lecture courses leave room in the Cave Anal-
ogy for correctness as “derivative of truth as unconcealment,” even if Plato
himself failed to understand this relationship originally enough because he
did not grasp the significance of concealment in truth as unconcealment.8
Even so, on Gonzalez’s nuanced reading of Heidegger’s interpretation of
the Cave Analogy, Heidegger’s essential thesis is still that through Plato a
decisive turn in Western thought occurs that obscures the question of Being
and the meaning of truth in a way that has decisive consequences, not just for
philosophy but for the history of the West, which, for Heidegger, becomes the
history of the planet in global modernity.
Each of Heidegger’s major readings of the Allegory does three key things.
First, each treats the Allegory as revealing Plato’s doctrine of truth (and the
ideas), a doctrine that affects the whole subsequent history of philosophy as
metaphysics, that is, as forgetting the question of Being as a question about
60 Chapter Two

how meaning as such is possible and focusing instead on what constitutes the
ultimate beingness of beings, whether that is the idea (which is the progenitor
of all the others, for Heidegger), God, substance, mathematical physics, or
the will to power, to name only some contenders.9 While only the 1942 essay
speaks explicitly of Plato’s “doctrine of truth,” the earlier ones are just as
emphatic about the doctrine of the ideas as the foundation for the conceptions
of what most properly ‘is’ throughout Western history. For example, in one
passage Heidegger attributes to Plato’s Ideenlehre a progeny that includes the
Christian concept of God and all created beings, the modern notion of reason
in the Enlightenment and the elevation of rationalism to a cult, the Marxist
concept of ideology, and finally Nietzsche’s misfired but still prophetic coun-
termovement to Platonism’s degraded forms in humanism, Christianity, and
the Enlightenment (GA 34: 324–25).
Second, each major reading locates in the Allegory a fundamental transi-
tion in the meaning of truth, from what Heidegger holds to be the primordial
meaning of truth as alētheia, Unverborgenheit, unconcealment, to truth as
homoiosis, correctness.
Third, each considers the Allegory an account of liberation as moving
through four stages (Stufen) in relation to truth, itself an uncontroversial read-
ing, but which, when combined with the other two, has important implica-
tions for an understanding of freedom in thinking, ethics, and politics.
I will focus here on Heidegger’s best-known treatment of the Cave Al-
legory, “Plato’s Doctrine of Truth” (1942), in part because it is the version
he chose to publish in his lifetime. Also, “Plato’s Doctrine of Truth” is the
version that most effectively establishes the domain of confrontation between
them as a locus for addressing our own historical situation and the meaning
of a polemical ethics. The German word translated as “doctrine” is Lehre.
Because Lehre can mean “teaching,” rendering it as “doctrine” might seem
prejudicial, as if Heidegger were unfairly assigning a dogmatism to Plato.
Heidegger writes that “The ‘Lehre’ of a thinker is what is unsaid in what
he says and is that to which human beings are exposed so that they might
devote themselves to it” (GA 9: 203). What I have rendered as “devote
themselves” is sich verschwende, which has a range of meanings from “lav-
ish” to “expend” to “waste” oneself upon something. That range captures the
ambiguity of Lehre as the “unsaid” of a thinker’s thought. The unsaid can be
a treasure for subsequent readers to unearth, or it might conceal what needs
to be thought and lead readers to squander their energies upon something su-
perficial. In neither case would Lehre be an explicit and dogmatic doctrine.
Nevertheless, Heidegger writes that “What remains unsaid [in Plato] is a shift
[Wendung] in the determination of the essence of truth” (GA 9: 203). That
“shift” comes to define subsequent thought in a manner concealed from that
 Back to the Cave 61

thought, and so while it is not an explicit dogma, it serves as a doctrine all

the more effectively precisely because unsaid and therefore not confronted.
So, the doctrinal nature of Plato’s teaching connects directly with the sec-
ond theme: truth. The said and the unsaid correspond to Heidegger’s concep-
tion of truth as alētheia, unconcealment, because in everything said openly
something essential remains concealed. The unsaid can therefore be under-
stood as the positive content of unmeaning: a meaning as yet unarticulated
but nevertheless intimated and, as such, what impels philosophical searching
and questioning. I claim, against Heidegger, that the process of Platonic
ideation is necessary to engage and elicit the unsaid in the triads of wonder,
question, response and of de-, pre-, reconstruction.
Thought and speech can never exhaust meaning. Heidegger acknowledges
that on the surface the text of the Allegory is about the education and thus
the liberation of the philosopher-rulers, but its implicit and unsaid content is
this shift in truth (GA 9, 218). Truth, on the surface of the argument, is what
entitles the philosopher-rulers to rule, and so their education corresponds to
“stages” (Stufen) in their ascent within, out of, and back to the cave. Hei-
degger discerns four such stages to the prisoner’s progress, each a different
“dwelling-place” (Aufenthalt) in the truth (GA 9: 219).
The first is the lowest cave floor, where the prisoners are enchained and
“caught up in what most proximately engages them” such that the prisoners
(in my translation of Heidegger’s translation of the Greek) “‘would consider as
unhidden’”—alethes, what Heidegger renders as unverborgen, conventional
translations as “true”—“‘nothing other than the shadows of those artifacts’”
(GA 9: 219) being carried along the lateral path above the cave floor (Repub-
lic, 514b–c). The second stage is the initial release from bondage, but it is
hardly an improvement, because the prisoners, unaccustomed to the light of
the fire, cannot discern the things that cast the shadows, even if those things
are now “alēthestera, ‘more unhidden [conventionally: truer]’” (GA 9: 220).
As Heidegger rightly says about the cave floor, “Removing the chains does
indeed bring a release. But liberation is not yet real freedom” (GA 9: 220–21).
Real freedom comes only at the third stage, when the unchained prisoner
emerges “outside the cave and is transposed into das Freie”—the free, the
open (GA 9: 221). Here, “The look of what the things themselves are, the eidē
(ideas), constitutes the essence in whose light each individual being shows
itself as this or that, and in this self-showing what shines forth in appearance
first becomes unconcealed and accessible” (GA 9: 221). Heidegger says that
according to Plato’s Allegory things are now not just alēthestera, more un-
concealed, but alēthestaton, most unconcealed—conventionally, most true.
The fourth stage is the “descent back down into the cave and the struggle
[Kampf] inside the cave between the liberator and the imprisoned who resist
62 Chapter Two

all liberation” (GA 9: 223). This stage might at first seem contradictory.
Glaucon initially calls it “an injustice” (519d) that the philosophers be made
to return. If the third stage is the most truly unconcealed, then no further
progress in liberation seems needed. A return down back into the cave seems
to be a regression, not a further stage in the progress of freedom and truth.
In the Allegory’s narrative, going back to the cave, both to rule it and to free
others capable of liberation, is precisely what the philosopher-rulers must do
as their duty to the city that first put them on the path of genuine education
(Republic, 520a–d). But why is this particular narrative not simply arbitrary?
Heidegger accounts for this explicit fourth-stage role of education in the
Allegory by relating the surface narrative to what he claims is the unsaid yet
most enduring content: the fate of truth as alētheia in Western thought. He
focuses on “the alpha-privative (a-lētheia)” by insisting that “Truth incep-
tively means what has been wrested from a concealment” (GA 9: 223). Here,
Heidegger calls truth a “wresting forth” as the “revealing” (Entbergung) of
unconcealment from its many forms of concealment—“closing-off, safekeep-
ing, veiling, masking, disguising, feigning” (GA 9: 223)—just as elsewhere
he calls it a Raub, a robbery:

In the truth, beings are torn from concealment. Truth is understood by the
Greeks as a robbery, a deprivation that must be torn from concealment in an
Auseinandersetzung in which phusis [nature in the sense of what surges or
grows into meaningful appearance without our agency] strives to conceal itself.
Truth is the innermost confrontation [Auseinandersetzung, i.e., polemos] of the
essence of the human with beings as a whole. (GA 29/30: 43–44)

The fourth stage, the return to the cave, is an existential necessity of being-
human because ‘The Truth’ is never fully and finally revealed.
According to Heidegger, Western thought since Plato has understood truth
as somehow located in statements, such as “The sky is blue this afternoon.”
Such statements are true if they correctly correspond to the way the world is
or if they cohere together in a way that makes pragmatic sense of the world.
Heidegger does not reject this conventional conception of truth, but he does
consider it derivative. The sheer givenness of a meaningful world is what
makes individual things intelligible to us in such a way that we can make
statements about them at all. This givenness of a meaningful access to things
and a world as intelligible, for Heidegger, is a deeper dimension of truth.
Here I draw inspiration from Thomas Sheehan’s typology of three layers
of truth in Heidegger, which Sheehan designates as alētheia-3, alētheia-2,
and alētheia-1 (or alētheia-prime): the propositional truth of statements as
corresponding to a state of affairs; the pre-propositional disclosedness of a
thing or state of affairs as meaningful and therefore about which one can
 Back to the Cave 63

make statements; finally, truth as the clearing, the space, the world in which
meaningfulness as such is possible and so also the possibility of making cor-
rect and incorrect statements.10
Our being open to the possibility of the truth of statements, truth in its
most conventional sense, is the most derivative layer, what Sheehan calls
alētheia-3. We might also call this ontic truth, as it has to do with making
correct statements about beings as already meaningful, whereas the other
layers involve ontological truth, how meaning as such is possible. For it to
be possible to make statements in the first place, the things of the world, in-
cluding general states of affairs and actions, must already be meaningful to
us. This openness to meaning, alētheia-2, precedes us in such a way that it
is more accurate to say that we are opened to the meanings of things rather
than open to them as if it were our choice. For Sheehan, the world itself, as an
integrated whole of meaning as at least provisionally opened up to us (not by
us), is alētheia-prime: the world opened up as an interlacing web of meanings
and thereby things within it disclosed as meaningful. This disclosure of things
as having-meaning (alētheia-2), grants the ontological possibility of making
statements about them (alētheia-3). This unconcealment is not discovery in
the sense of uncovering new truths about the physical or cultural world, as ex-
plorers or scientists or historians might accomplish; such discoveries remain
at the level of ontic, propositional truth. Heidegger takes his inspiration for
this layer of truth from the Greek word alētheia, whose etymological roots,
a- and lēthē, mean the negation of concealment or forgetting. Every such
world of meaning as unconcealed to us is a historical world, where meaning
is subject to emergences, shifts, and dissolutions.
Sheehan’s alētheia-prime describes the ontological given that the meaning
of things is opened to us in an a priori way. Here I depart from Sheehan. We
may grant that a historical world opens us up to meaning, but what performs
the opening? Why this world of meaning rather than another? This layer is the
most difficult to describe because so far removed from the ordinary language
used to express the conventional understanding of truth as the claim-making
of propositions. Let’s call it alētheia-0, because it describes the way that the
meaning and unmeaning of worlds transpires as an ontological something
rather than nothing. Over his career, Heidegger experiments with a variety
of words to express this irruptive truth, such as the Es gibt, the “it gives”
of the phenomenological given that “there is” always-already a meaningful
world for us (GA 14: 9ff); Ereignis, the event of appropriation that assigns a
particular world of meaning to a historical community (GA 65); and polemos
as Auseinandersetzung, the confrontation that divides a world up into mean-
ingful distinctions and identities among things, including us. He even equates
polemos and Ereignis (GA 94: 217).
64 Chapter Two

Polemos best describes the involvement of human-being at all four lay-

ers of truth. At the level of alētheia-3, propositional truth, polemos involves
our disputes about what is and is not the case; at alētheia-2, the givenness
of meaning, polemos involves our hermeneutical confrontation about what
words and things mean; at alētheia-1, the clearing or openness of a world as
such, polemos in turn opens us to wonder and so to questioning; at alētheia-0,
the event of opening itself as disruptive or irruptive truth, polemos implicates
us in the dissolution and emergence of worlds of meaning. The unsaid that
hovers between meaning and unmeaning may bring down or raise up a world
in disruptive-irruptive truth. Emmanuel Levinas, who confronts Heidegger’s
failure to address the ethical, expresses succinctly what is at stake here in the
unsaid:

Now, what I am interested in is precisely this ability of philosophy to think, to

question itself, and ultimately to unsay itself. And I wonder if this capacity for
interrogation and for unsaying (dédire) is not itself derived from the preonto-
logical inter-human relationship with the other. The fact that philosophy cannot
fully totalize the alterity of meaning in some final presence or simultaneity is
not for me a deficiency or fault. Or to put it in another way, the best thing about
philosophy is that it fails. It is better that philosophy fail to totalize meaning—
even though as ontology [for Levinas, the endeavor to systematize meaning], it
has attempted just this—for it thereby remains open to the irreducible otherness
of transcendence.11

As Levinas says, unsaying is what happens, especially in ethical life, if

we allow what transcends established systematization of meaning to irrupt
as an unmeaning that must be confronted because it interrupts our settled
understanding of the truth. We can take on or shirk the responsibility of par-
ticipation in the polemos at each layer of truth. Primordial truth as a-lētheia,
unconcealment, is defined by human-being’s finitude. Truth is not the sum
total of ontic facts waiting out there to be unconcealed in the sense of the
discovery of new natural laws, or gold mines, or planets, and then making
factually correct assertions about them. We live in truth only by engaging
and re-engaging in the polemos that itself is truth, because truth is what first
makes possible a context of meaning in which discoveries of specific beings
(laws, objects, concepts, and so on) can make sense in the first place.
Heidegger says that we live in untruth as well as in truth (SZ, §44), be-
cause our idle chatter, even or especially about things we pretend are most
profound, tends to turn revealing moments into ‘correct’ assertions that are
merely repeated without insight. It is not that living in untruth means we are
constantly making empirically false statements, but that a resistance to en-
gaging in the polemos with meaning is endemic to being-human. Because we
 Back to the Cave 65

always-already depend upon a given meaningfulness of the world as a whole,

we cannot question everything, all the time, for the sake of constantly fresh
insight. But an openness to a kind of hermeneutical phronēsis, a practical
wisdom about where and how meaning has broken down or should be broken
down, is possible if ethical life is properly mindful of what matters in our
situated being-human.
In making sense of the world, we must endure the anxiety that things have
failed or will fail to make sense. The world may break down into non-sense.
Anxiety about unmeaning is Janus-faced. We either face up to this unmean-
ing as an opportunity to re-imagine, reconstruct, and make sense of the world
anew, or we face away from this polemos and repress unmeaning with dogma.
The sense-making aspect of ontological rather than ontic truth always takes
place as a struggle because the whole of possible meaning is never available
to us in a total enlightenment. Heidegger’s analyses and style might give the
impression that only a constant state of morbidly vigilant angst is authentic
and that there is no place for everyday experiences of joy and serenity. To
respond generously, the point is that no experience of being utterly absorbed
in joy is constant, let alone eternal, for human finitude, but that same tran-
sience is potentially true for experiences of crushing despair and alienation,
too. Meaning is temporally dynamic, which means that we must be ready for
and open to ontological tectonic shifts in our meaningful world. Such change
happens, ready or not. A familiar meaning may break apart, at least in part,
as it develops and reconstitutes dynamically. This is the play of unmeaning in
meaning. Our situated rootedness will always be subject, eventually, to dis-
ruptive uprootings of meaning that displace us into unmeaning—sometimes
for the better, because in contexts of great injustice, the prevailing world of
meaning may well need deconstructing, even if a new meaning cannot yet be
envisioned, let alone enacted in a reconstructed world.
To be mindful of our being-human is to be ready, when it properly mat-
ters, for a polemical ethics that negotiates the dissolution and reconstruction
of meaning. Refusing this readiness for the cycle of thoughtful reconstruction
is to insist upon a constancy that human finitude cannot bear and to repress
any challenge to familiar meanings. Such constancy, however, will not stand,
and insisting upon it leads to a violent intransigence that can only end in
tragedy or farce in the return of the repressed. This is why the third stage
of the Allegory, emergence into the abode outside the cave, is not the final
one. Historical human-being must always confront an understanding that is
partial, that must learn to see anew, and that may and probably will resist
this reinterpretation of its world, just as the cave-dwellers may well resist,
perhaps violently, a returning former prisoner who tries to liberate others
as their mentor. Truth as a-lētheia is an existential aspect of who we are as
66 Chapter Two

human-being, as thrown into a confrontation with the meaning of the world

as always-already-interpreted but also as polemically open to reinterpretation.
Heidegger discerns this ontological polemos of truth as a feature of the un-
said in Plato’s narrative of the Allegory. It is important to distinguish among:
(1) what Heidegger thinks the historical Plato meant by the Allegory, which
does not especially interest him; (2) what happens as the unsaid in thought
through Plato, without Plato’s thinking it explicitly; and (3) what happens to
the history of thought as Platonism, the “doctrine” of truth that hardens after
Plato, making the unsaid all the less accessible. A thinker’s biography mat-
ters little to Heidegger: “Concerning the personal history of a philosopher,
only this is of interest: he was born in this or that place, he worked, and he
died” (GA 18: 5). This is an odd view to profess for someone who lends so
much importance to our situated existence and “my ‘I am,’” but Heidegger
is not yet a thinker of embodiment such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty or, in a
more political orientation, Iris Marion Young.12 What matters is what can be
thought as unsaid through these thinkers and how this unsaid then influences
subsequent historical horizons of thought. This is why Heidegger can discern
an echo of primordial a-lētheia in the Cave Allegory without ascribing it to
Plato’s own intention. But that echo remains unsaid by Plato, according to
Heidegger, and so the Allegory buries this ontological truth as unconcealment
in favor of a new form of truth compatible with the task of the philosopher-
ruler: truth as homoiōsis, correctness of representation.
This new form of truth is a direct result, according to Heidegger, of the phi-
losopher-rulers’ mandate for rule, legitimated by their education through the
stages of the cave. It is further explained by the Divided Line in Book 6 where
the ideas or forms (ideai and eidē) correspond to the liberated prisoner’s vi-
sion outside the cave of what most properly is in being. (See Figure 2, The
Divided Line.) The Allegory does not ostensibly address the meaning of truth
as such, Heidegger concedes. “And nevertheless the point stands: This ‘al-
legory’ contains Plato’s ‘doctrine’ of truth, for that allegory is grounded upon
the unsaid process of the idea becoming master over alētheia” (GA 9: 230).
Not a-lētheia, as ontological unconcealment, but the idea, as metaphysical
principle, comes to determine what truth is, and indeed what Being itself is,
because the ideas are what all beings themselves most truly are.
This shift, this turn-about (Wendung) in the meaning of truth occurs be-
cause, “If everywhere in every case our comportment to beings depends upon
the idein [act of seeing] of the idea, upon catching sight of ‘the look,’ then all
effort must first arrange itself according to the enabling of such a seeing” (GA
9: 230). Instead of truth as the ongoing hermeneutical-polemical encounter
between finite understanding and an inexhaustible domain of concealed
meaning, “Everything depends upon the orthotēs, the correctness of sight”
 Back to the Cave 67

(GA 9: 230). That correctness of sight after an arduous education legitimizing

the rule of the philosophers, is clear enough from the surface of Plato’s text.
Unsaid, for Heidegger, is the shift to the ideas as the marker of truth and of
Being and the forgetting of ontological unconcealment (GA 9: 230–31). This
is the doctrine that becomes the Platonism of Western thought for Heidegger,
whatever Plato himself intended: “And for a long time in Western thought,
‘truth’ has meant the agreement of representation in thought with the fact
of the matter [Sache]: adaequatio intellectus et rei [correspondence of the
intellect and the thing]” (GA 9: 218). We should remember that Heidegger
does not mean simply to dismiss truth as correctness of representation. His
point is that the correctness and coherence of statements (“The sky is blue”)
depends on a prior Auseinandersetzung, a truth as unconcealment that grants
a meaning to the terms of a statement (“the sky”; “blue”; even the “is” itself)
as individually intelligible (set out and apart from one another as identifiably
distinct), as intelligible as a unitary statement, and as part of an intelligible
world about which statements can be made. This is the difference between
alētheia-3, ontic truth, and the layers of ontological truth, alētheia-2, 1, and
0, that ground it.
This brings us to the third theme of Heidegger’s reading of the Allegory,
freedom, although it has shadowed the discussion all along. The Allegory,
on its surface, is about paideia, education, as the path of liberation from the
chains of the cave. It consists in a “turning around” (periagōgē, 518d) of vi-
sion from the shadows into the light and upon “things themselves” (516a),
that progresses through the stages Heidegger has described. So, he writes:

Liberation is not achieved right away by the release from the chains and does
not consist in lack of restraint, but rather first begins as the constant becoming-
accustomed to fastening vision upon the firm boundaries of things as standing
fast in their look. Authentic liberation is the constancy of the turning-around
towards that which shines forth in its apparent look and, in this shining-forth,
is most unconcealed. Freedom consists only in a turning-around constituted in
this way. (GA 9: 222)

For Heidegger, there would be no distortion of truth as unconcealment if the

idea or the eidos, as the visible or intelligible form that gives each thing its
discernable, clearly bordered self-identity (logos) and differentiation from
other things (polemos), were simply to announce the unconcealment of
things as part of a meaningful world given to us. Then idea would support
unconcealment by “serving the unconcealed by bringing it forth, shining, into
appearance” (GA 9: 234). The seer would not become the staging-ground
or worse, the source of truth, but rather a witness to truth as an event that
gives forth a world of beings in their historical meaning. But the opposite is
68 Chapter Two

the case. In Plato, “The idea is not a foreground that announces alētheia but
rather the ground that makes alētheia possible” (GA 9: 234).
Vision as the metaphor for truth tends to locate truth in the subjectivity
of the one seeing, in a correct turning-around-to-see and perspectival stand-
point: “In this change in the essence of truth there transpires an exchange
in the site of truth. As unconcealment, truth is still a fundamental feature of
beings as such. But as correctness of ‘vision,’ truth becomes a distinction of
the human relation to beings” (GA 9: 231). Once the site of truth shifts its
location from the givenness of the phenomenal world in its unconcealed ap-
pearing to the way we see things out there in the world, it becomes increas-
ingly incumbent upon us, as the seeing subject, to secure the meaning of the
world by correctly representing it. Freedom becomes a matter of the correct
education for this unfailing seeing, and what confirms such freedom becomes
the power of the seeing-knowing subject to hold sway over all objects in its
range of vision, a range extended, in principle, to complete enlightenment,
extinguishing all concealment. “Ever since [this shift in the meaning of truth]
there has been a striving for the ‘truth’ in the sense of correctness of seeing
and of the point of view. Ever since, securing the correct view of the ideas
has been decisive for all fundamental orientations to beings” (GA 9: 234).
While this may seem an innocuous feature of philosophical epistemol-
ogy, it is why, for Heidegger, Platonism’s doctrine of truth signals the onset
of metaphysics in the West, where the idea, parsed as correctness of vision
and of statement as features of a human knowing, determines all that is:
“Through Plato, this word [philosophia] is first taken for use as the name
for that knowing-one’s-way-around [sich Auskennen] beings that at the same
time determines the Being of beings as idea” (GA 9: 235). Nihilism, as the
consequence of this metaphysics, consists in forgetting the truth of Being as
alētheia, as the reciprocal relationship, in the polemos, of the bestowal of
meaning upon us in a way we cannot give to ourselves, and of our ongoing
confrontation with and reconstruction of that meaning in history. Nihilism,
as the forgetting of a polemical truth that we are given over to and must take
responsibility for, is the ground for what Heidegger came to call the essence
of technology that seeks to bring all beings under the sway of a machinational
will to power. This will to power reduces all beings, human and natural, to
resources in a lust for mastery over all we survey.13 In Heidegger’s account,
freedom, as this power of vision, turns on us in our pretension to mastery. It
makes us the servants of an increasingly synoptic pursuit of control in which
the only things that count as being are those that can be assessed and deployed
as resources and quanta of power.
Heidegger’s core charge against Platonism is that the doctrine of the ideas
falsifies Being by obscuring truth as a temporal and polemical unveiling. By
 Back to the Cave 69

locating Being in an eternal, other-worldly domain of supra-sensuous forms,

and by making truth the conformity of our assertions with these forms, Plato
has succeeded in transforming Being, from the unfolding of the field of mean-
ing as it is given historically, into a trans-temporal domain of eternally static
absolutes (GA 40: 235–37). Truth as alētheia is no longer the free opening of
a world of meaning to us; truth is now the marker of our correct apprehension
of a permanent, transcendent reality. Philosophy begins its confusion of Be-
ing and beings and therefore its nihilistic decline into a forgetting of Being as
the unfolding bestowal of meaning. Philosophy degenerates into a search for
the key for the humanistic mastery of Being itself: “The onset of metaphysics
in Plato’s thinking is at the same time the onset of ‘humanism’” (GA 9: 236).
Truth, as the criterion of philosophical and, later, scientific rigor, becomes
located in statements, or assertions, that correspond to a fixed reality. It is
only a matter of time before the connection is made between assertions about
reality and assertions that both reflect reality and permit us to assert ourselves
upon reality as our dominion and so as the fullest expression of our freedom,
as Descartes puts it in The Discourse on Method, to “render ourselves, as it
were, masters and possessors of nature.”14

2.2 TRUTH AND FREEDOM

Because the Allegory of the Cave intrinsically connects truth with freedom
by depicting an apprehension of reality with a liberation through education,
we need a sense of Heidegger’s broader treatment of truth and freedom so
that we can understand how these emerge in his critique of Plato. As many
critics of classical liberalism have done, Heidegger decries liberal freedom
as a fundamentally empty negative freedom, a freedom-from rather than a
robust freedom-for. The clearest statement of Heidegger’s condemnation of
a merely negative freedom can be found in his Rectoral Address, a speech
given to his assembled university as its head on May 17, 1933, as a com-
mitted party member in the National Socialist regime. In that speech he
proclaims what constitutes the “highest freedom,” in contrast to what it was
under the Weimar Republic: “The much-vaunted ‘academic freedom’”—
that is, freedom from interference in one’s research—“will be expelled from
the German university, because this freedom was ungenuine because merely
negative. It meant heedlessness, arbitrariness of intentions and inclinations,
and lack of constraint in its conduct” (GA 16: 113). The force of this tra-
ditional critique focuses on the liberty-as-license conception of liberalism.
Such a liberalism understands freedom only as the liberation of unattached
individuals from coercive restraint to do as they please, to survive and to
70 Chapter Two

enjoy “the pursuit of happiness” as they see fit, so long as no one else is
harmed.15
On such a view, the natural rights that the liberal state is supposed to pre-
serve, though tricked out as something ennobling, are in fact nothing more
than the demands of small-minded, self-involved, and timorous individuals
when they gather as a populace, not a people, to form the social contract,
fearful for their personal safety and greedy for their private satisfactions. The
contract itself can produce only an association, not a genuine community
where individuals may become properly free from their pinched and self-
serving pettiness and thereby free for the ennobling purposes that can only
be fulfilled by recognizing one’s belonging to a historical community and
by participating in the burden of its historical tasks. In his Rectoral Address,
Heidegger calls on his students freely to take up their duties to the university
as members of the German nation: “The first bond is the one to the Volksge-
meinschaft.” Volksgemeinschaft, “community of the people,” is a Nazi term
meaning the German people as nation, rather than a mere society composed
of indifferent individuals lumped together by the social contract. “This bond
commits [student-citizens] to involving themselves in the concerns, endeav-
ors, and expertise of all classes and components of the Volk” (GA 16: 113).
For Heidegger, the “highest freedom” demands the utmost attentiveness to
the struggles and challenges that history has bestowed upon the community
that is truly one’s own. The meaning of this freedom-for is not to dissolve
individuals in a collective but rather to fulfill them in what is most ennobling
in life, an active commitment to the community to which they belong. This
cannot happen if they treat society as an arena for the pursuit of narrow self-
interest, jealously protected by a merely negative freedom.
To be fair to the conception of positive freedom and the critique of clas-
sical liberalism, the dedication to the German Volk that Heidegger calls for
is an extreme expression of positive freedom and should not blind us to its
appeal in less pernicious forms. We will return to this in what follows, but we
also should not ignore the danger that more moderate forms of dedication to
one’s own people may degenerate into virulent nationalism. This attraction of
an exclusive and absorbing belonging is part of the challenge a reconstructed
liberalism must address in the next stage of this project, enacting a polemical
ethics.
Furthermore, Heidegger’s conception of freedom has a much deeper di-
mension than its adherence to the traditional critique of a negative freedom
that leaves individuals free only for their private interests. Freedom conven-
tionally understood involves the ability to choose among available options,
to act in the physical world, and to consent to social arrangements, all with-
out constraint—at least without illegitimate, human-imposed constraint by
 Back to the Cave 71

accounting for the natural constraints that restrict our choices through physi-
cal limits to our actions. Heidegger certainly does not exclude the existential
fact that human beings must make decisions. After all, his analysis of our
temporality demonstrates that Dasein’s having-a-future, as a feature of our
temporal Being, involves a horizon of possibilities and that we are in part the
decisions we make on that horizon.
But this is freedom in what Heidegger would call its ontic or “existentiell”
sense, that is, the ability to choose among specific possibilities available to
a specific person or community in a specific historical situation. Having a
choice available requires that one already inhabit a world where those choices
and their context are meaningful, and we never choose this always-already
of being thrown into a world of meaning. The best metaphor for this situated
freedom is language: without language we could not begin to think, let alone
endeavor to think beyond the bounds of our present conceptual vocabulary.
Without a meaningful world, ontic freedom would not be possible, and so the
question of the meaning of ontological freedom is bound up with the question
of the meaning of Being as what it means for anything to be meaningful and
so to matter to us. Ontic freedom depends upon and derives from ontological
freedom.
We can understand this problem in light of Heidegger’s conception of
truth, as discussed previously.16 Briefly, Heidegger offers an assessment of
truth that takes us from statements of fact (“The sky is blue today”) to the web
of a priori meanings that make factual statements meaningful to us (How do
we know what ‘blue’ means?), to how a nexus of such meanings can form a
world as a whole for us to inhabit hermeneutically, to how it is that, for us,
anything has this meaning at all, instead of some other meaning. In tandem
with this fourfold conception of truth, we can understand what freedom is for
Heidegger. At the most derivative, but nonetheless existentially vital level,
call it eleutheria-3, freedom is the capacity for choice and decision without
which we could not navigate among the possibilities that define our future-
oriented Being-in-the-world; Heidegger calls this existentiell choice (SZ,
12–13). The next level describes how this ontic freedom is available in the
first place. Because the meaning of those choices is already open to us, we
are freed for them in a particular historical world. Call this the first of the on-
tological layers of freedom, eleutheria-2. The next layer, eleutheria-1, what
Heidegger calls das Freie (e.g., GA 9: 229), the free-and-open, is what grants
us an interwoven con-text of meaningful action in world that preliminarily
has made sense to us. Here, we can see how ontological truth and ontological
freedom merge: the unconcealment of a world of meaning frees us up to en-
gage in all our activity within that world, including our decisions. Finally, at
the most primordial level, eleutheria-0, freedom describes the unaccountable
72 Chapter Two

spontaneity of a world opening up at all (GA 65: 5–9). By engaging in our

polemical interpretation of a given world, we also engage with this dimension
of freedom. We may even become the occasion for the Ereignis, the event of
disruptive-irruptive truth in which a new historical world opens up from the
old one, but we cannot make this event happen or control it when it does. The
event is unaccountably free in its eventuation. At most, we can prepare for its
arrival through interpretive polemos with the given.
Now we must understand how this multilayered conception of freedom
connects to Heidegger’s critique of a big-L Liberalism reaching all the way
back to the purported onset of nihilism with Plato. As with truth, Heidegger
does not want to deny freedom in its most derivative sense as the capacity
for choice and decision; however, his treatment of the ontological dimension
of freedom, as our opened-up-ness to a meaningful world, emphasizes the
historicity and finitude of ontic freedom. We are free to choose in ways that
are free from constraints only because we have already been made free for a
world to which we belong in a meaningful way. Although Heidegger does not
put it this way, conventional liberalism’s obsession with individual freedom
for choice and freedom from all illegitimate constraints necessarily plays
into the hands of what he calls metaphysical nihilism. It does so because, by
fixating on this ontic level of freedom, it promotes the individual subject as
the arbiter, and even the author, of the meaning of its world. My meaning,
my choice—and no interference from you, unless my choices illegitimately
impinge upon your autonomy and rights.
The burden of Heidegger’s critique of liberal modernity is that this hu-
bristic subjectivism and its related nihilistic will to power reaches all the
way back to the Platonic elevation of the idea as the key to Being because it
establishes a tradition that locates the human subject as the arbiter of mean-
ing and so of what simply is. Even if Platonism itself does not itself make
this case, it launches the trajectory of this history that culminates in the crisis
of modernity. Obsessive self-regard as the expression of freedom ignores
that we are not the makers of our own worlds, and it cannot appreciate that
our being-freed-for involvement in a meaningful world necessarily precedes
our individual freedom of choice. It is a refusal to give thanks for the gift of
givenness. Givenness is a gift because we ourselves are not the source of a
meaningful world, and being thankful is a way of acknowledging this fini-
tude and the simple wonder of having a world at all. Failing to appreciate our
debt for our being-freed-to-a-world obscures the historicity of our world as a
shared world of traditions, practices, language, and sociality that makes our
freedom meaningful to us in the first place.
Embracing our freedom-for, therefore, brings us more fully into connec-
tion with our finite, situated historical existence. It would involve a thinking-
 Back to the Cave 73

as-thanking for and about the finitude that frees us for a world that matters
and means to us (cf. GA 9: 310–12; GA 8: 149ff). Thankful thinking con-
templates the primordial wonder that a world is given at all. It recognizes that
there is no way to get behind the giving as such, but also that receiving this
gift appreciatively makes us free to enter into the ontological polemics of the
truth by ever-again reinterpreting the world as the work of zetetic philosophy.
Appreciating this paradoxical freedom in finitude can make us more alive
to our belonging in community that does not curtail our freedom but rather
enhances and fulfills it. That embrace of a situated belonging allows us more
fully to engage in a confrontation with the historical meaning of our world,
which in turn frees up possibilities for our Being that would otherwise remain
obscure. At the most primordial level, the level of the freedom of the eventua-
tion of a historical world to us in the first place (eleutheria-0), Heidegger’s
critique of Liberalism suggests that the obsession with the free and autono-
mous self as author of meaning renders us ungrateful for the gift of meaning
itself, a thanklessness that is the epitome of a thoughtless and hubristic nihil-
ism. It deprives us of the opportunity for properly free participation in the
confrontation with that givenness and so in participating in the epoch-making
events that may engender new currents in history.

2.3 THE CHARGE OF NIHILISM

But why should big-L Liberalism lead to the denial of our place and our task
in a historical community? The most significant accusation that Heidegger
brings against Platonism is that the insistence on absolute ideas, unmoored
from historical, situated existence, leads to a nihilism that ultimately, in the
crisis of modernity, sets the human subject up as the master-surveyor of
Being, rather than grounding being-human as entering into a reciprocal, in-
terpretive polemos with Being as the temporally unfolding field of meaning
given to us. We have now come to the heart of Heidegger’s accusation and
turn to nihilism itself in order to understand how it afflicts human-being as
presented in the Allegory of the Cave.
Heidegger took up the problem of nihilism from Nietzsche, who pro-
claimed: “What does nihilism mean? That the highest values devaluate
themselves. The aim is lacking; ‘why?’ finds no answer” (The Will to Power,
§2).17 For Nietzsche, this nihilism as meaninglessness and purposelessness
sets in with the death of God, which is not merely a theological claim. It is an
attack on Plato, because for Nietzsche, Christianity is merely Platonism for
the masses. At stake is what Nietzsche calls “the true world,” the world of
eternal, undying truth, the genuinely real world that is our proper home, but
74 Chapter Two

temporarily separate from us and therefore other-worldly. That other-world

had supplied the Platonic ideas and ideals that once guided us and supplied
the answer to the “Why?” of life and action. Meaning, in the sense of the
intelligibility and significance of all the things and customs once dear to us,
begins to decay when meaning in the sense of an all-encompassing, other-
worldly purpose dies.
When that transcendent otherworld dies, nihilism, “the uncanniest of
guests” (The Will to Power, §1), arrives at the door. For Nietzsche, the
healthiest response to this guest is to recognize that existence is not defined
by Being as a permanent, otherworldly reality, but rather by the ever-churn-
ing Becoming of this world, here and now, as the life to be lived. His advice:
“To stamp Becoming with the character of Being—that is the supreme will
to power” (The Will to Power, §617). To stamp chaos with order is the act of
the supreme artist and the supreme expression of life, for it creates temporary
meaning amidst the flux; but in the eye of the will to power, this Being is only
a semblance, a fleeting pause in the current of Becoming.
With Nietzsche in his sights, Heidegger asks in Introduction to Metaphysics:

But where is the real nihilism at work? Where one clings to current beings and
believes it is enough to take beings, as before, just as the beings that they are.
But with this, one rejects the question of Being and treats Being as a nothing (ni-
hil), which in a certain way it even ‘is,’ insofar as it essentially unfolds. Merely
to chase after beings in the midst of the oblivion of Being—that is nihilism.
Nihilism thus understood is the ground for the nihilism that Nietzsche exposed
in the first book of The Will to Power. (GA 40: 212)

Heidegger’s response to Nietzsche is that Nietzsche has also misunderstood

the question of Being, merely standing Plato on his head by replacing Being
with Becoming. Therefore Nietzsche only (albeit with great insight) grasped
the epiphenomena of the ground of nihilism. The question of Being is “the
question of the meaning of Being” (SZ, 1; italics modified). To ask this ques-
tion is to ask how anything ‘is’ for us, as meaningful; whether it be a unicorn,
a table, a number, or a concept, it is first and foremost meaningfully intel-
ligible—its reality bracketed as a secondary matter. The question of Being
is a question about how meaning, how intelligibility per se, is possible and
happens phenomenologically for us.18
To put this in a way that Heidegger does not, the question of meaning “of”
Being is not simply about how to define the word “Being”; rather, the “of”
suggests that meaning belongs to Being, that the question is about how Being
‘is’ the unfolding of meaning in an intelligible world to us, for we manifestly
cannot and do not live in a world of unmeaning, as if the things, sensations,
language, and all that makes up our lived existence were just a muddled chaos
 Back to the Cave 75

of insignificance. As a phenomenon on the human scale, the world does mean

to us, and Being’s meaning confronts us as more than a world of brute sensa-
tion. The answer to the question, “Why is there Being rather than Nothing?”
would be that meaning simply is, as a given, always already separated from
unmeaning in the form of a world, beings, and practices that make sense to
us—provisionally, because such meaning can degrade and slip into unmean-
ing. For Heidegger, the meaning of Being is always only accessible to us,
as temporal beings, on the horizon of time; hence the book Being and Time.
Also, because Being is what makes intelligibility and meaning possible, it
itself cannot ‘be’ a ‘being,’ a thing, an entity among others, not even as a
Supreme Being. It is much more like no-thing, because it is a non-entity. But
this claim is not itself nihilistic for Heidegger, who holds that “real nihilism”
is refusing to engage in such talk about “the Nothing,” as he notoriously does,
but rather to fail to distinguish between Being and beings, to chase as slaves
to the will to power after dominion over beings, and to allow the question of
Being to fall into oblivion. The impetus for that oblivion Heidegger lays at the
feet of Plato, who supposedly taught that real Being, the fulness and origin
of meaning, lies in a supra-sensory other-world of eternal ideas and forms.

2.4 SOCRATIC ZETETICISM

With this accusation in place, we turn to Plato and Plato’s Socrates for a re-
joinder. Socrates identifies himself in Book One of the Republic as one who
does not know. After his long struggle against Thrasymachus’s teaching that
a life of injustice is best and that the life of the tyrant is the fullest expression
of injustice, Socrates admits that “as a result of the discussion I know nothing
[mēden eidenai]” (354b–c). He had begun the discussion in the same way,
protesting that he is one who “does not know and does not profess to know”
(337e). This looks like a version of the proverbial expression of Socratic
ignorance in the Apology: that human wisdom consists in grasping that one
“is worth nothing with respect to wisdom” (23b). Of course, Socratic irony
is as famous as this quip about wisdom, and Thrasymachus is astute enough
to call Socrates out for his “habitual irony” (337a). We must give Thrasyma-
chus his due. If ironizing is a kind of lying, then Socrates does indeed seem
to know more than he says. This is unmistakable to even the casual reader
of the dialogues, and even more so in a dialogue as long and complex as the
Republic: Socrates has thought through the issues and arguments before,
and he often sets up his opponents many moves ahead. But this is not due to
some crafty strategy to win prestige in the arena of elenchus—and thereby
fees for teaching—in the style of the sophists, as Thrasymachus maliciously
76 Chapter Two

insinuates. If Socrates hesitates to speak entirely forthrightly about the nature

of his wisdom in a particular conversation with a specific audience, this might
be because that wisdom is complex and potentially disconcerting to precisely
those about whom he is most concerned in his conversation with Thrasyma-
chus: the young men gathered at the home of Cephalus who are on the cusp
of making life-defining decisions about the nature of justice. Socrates, and by
extension Plato, recognizes that the argument about justice and tyranny is not
merely academic. It implicates the future aspirations of the most promising
of the rising generation, and therefore it threatens the freedom of the polity.19
Thrasymachus does have a point: Socrates really does seem to understand
more than he admits and his professed naiveté is partly an act. In Book 6,
Socrates says, while discussing “what the good itself is,” that “it looks to me
as though it’s out of the range of our present thrust to attain the opinions I
now hold about it” (506e). Socrates clearly has an agenda, although it is not
the vulgar one that Thrasymachus imputes, but the nobler one of turning a
group of promising young men away from the allures of a life of injustice. In
the context of an Athens that faced actual tyranny through the course of the
Peloponnesian War, such a life is not merely hypothetical for these youths,
and Thrasymachus has made a compelling case to them for the natural good-
ness of a life of tyranny. In fact, some of the youth present for this long,
late-night conversation end up directly involved in resistance to the reign
of the Thirty Tyrants who briefly ruled Athens after the war: Polemarchus,
the son of the host to the gathering, was summarily executed by the Thirty
for opposing them; his brother Lysias became an orator who sought justice
against the Thirty in the courts. Glaucon and Adeimantus, Plato’s brothers
and Socrates’s main interlocutors for most of the dialogue, begin by making
forceful arguments for injustice and tyranny.20 With their wealth and connec-
tions as aristocrats from an ancient Athenian family, they could have acted
on these views. But Socrates wins them over to justice, and history does not
record them living otherwise. So, although Socrates knows “nothing,” he
clearly does know enough to say that it would be “impious” (mē . . . hosion,
368b–c) to cede the field to injustice. How can this be, if he means what he
says about his “human wisdom”? Even in Book 6, when Glaucon presses him
in the name of justice to give his views of the good, the highest aim of know-
ing and action, Socrates demurs by asking if “it’s just to speak about what one
doesn’t know as though one knew?” (506c).
Socratic denials of wisdom do not amount to a nihilistic skepticism. The
nihilistically skeptical Socrates is the portrait one often gets from enthusiastic
but hasty first readers of the dialogues, usually when they are just entering
into philosophy. This is the wise-guy Socrates who wants to deflate anyone
and everyone, who is so brilliant in the game of elenchus that he can beat
 Back to the Cave 77

anyone out of any opinion—which, of course, he sometimes fails to do, per-

haps most famously with Parmenides in the eponymous dialogue. Glaucon
and Adeimantus represent a developmental moment in the philosophical
life, one especially attractive to the young, when the eristic techniques of
philosophical interrogation first come to hand in a blaze of destructive glory.
Aristophanes’s Clouds supplies a satiric version of this youthful nihilism in
the person of Pheidipides, who returns from his lessons in eristic at Socrates’
Thinkery able to convince his own father that he should be able to beat him,
as his father had done with him as a child.
Socrates himself hints at this moment in the Apology, when he suggests
that one reason the Athenians might be angry with him is because young
Athenians, who watch him use his method to break down the pompous and
self-important, then use the same methods on their families. The nihilist skep-
tic embodies the purely deconstructive moment of philosophical analysis,
gleefully annihilating any and all otherwise respectable claims to knowledge
in order to build a reputation for a kind of negative wisdom and to promote an
anarchic freedom from authority.21 But Socrates does not beat just anyone and
everyone out of any and every opinion. As Socrates responds to Callicles’s
accusations against him in the Gorgias, when he is destructive in discussion,
this is not merely from spite or chagrin because he is at a loss for construc-
tive arguments. Rather, says Socrates, it is because “I believe that I am one
of a few Athenians . . . to take up the true political craft and practice the true
politics. This is because the speeches I make on each occasion do not aim at
gratification but at what’s best” (521d). As Richard McKim puts it, Socrates’s
“professions are never merely ironical, they never preclude positive moral
convictions.”22 The young Glaucon and Adeimantus say they want to believe
in justice yet confess that they are almost won over by Thrasymachus. They
want their wavering faith in justice restored by Socrates (358c–d). Does he
give that faith its final push? He does the opposite. Why?
Because Socrates is a zetetic skeptic.23 The term derives from the Greek
zētein, meaning to search, to seek.24 Philosophy for Socrates is a searching, a
seeking, a yearning—an eros—for wisdom that entails that the search itself
be meaningful (Symposium, 203b–204c). In his debate with Kojève about
whether philosophy must always be sectarian because of its putative “subjec-
tive certainty” that divides thinking into antagonistic dogmas, Leo Strauss
also has characterized Socrates as a zetetic. Strauss discerns an alternative
to sectarian philosophy, if we recall that “philosophy in the original meaning
of the term is nothing but knowledge of one’s ignorance,” that “philosophy
is not wisdom but quest for wisdom” and “as such is neither dogmatic nor
skeptic, and still less ‘decisionist,’ but zetetic (or skeptic in the in original
sense of the term).”25 Strauss recognizes that zetetic skepticism differs from
78 Chapter Two

nihilistic skepticism, because the zetetic search presumes a meaning, or a

goal, or what I call an intimation, the provisional intuition of a truth not yet
articulated and conceptualized. Nihilistic skepticism attacks both dogmatism
and the meaningfulness of the search for truth. At issue is the status of the
intimation underlying the search, but Strauss is oddly silent on this topic.
Perhaps, for him, the politically relevant point is that the meaningfulness of
the search be posited, not that it be detailed in any way, nor defended for its
own sake. But an unspoken and undefended posit is hardly adequate to fend
off a sophisticated and aggressive nihilistic skepticism, and so we need a
more robust, positive defense of what I will call a Socratic skeptical idealism.
The famous term that Socrates employs in this context is anamnēsis
(Meno, 81c–82a), usually translated as recollection.26 I use the word intima-
tion, provisionally, to describe an awareness that comes to us before we reach
anamnēsis, before we recollect. In the Meno, Socrates explicitly presents
the notion of anamnēsis as a matter of religious piety, a kind of myth, that
he must “trust” as true in his zetetic pursuit of truth (81e: hōi egō pisteuōn
alēthei einai ethelō meta sou zētein aretē hoti estin); he does not claim to
know it, and certainly not as a doctrine. Rather, it is a heuristic device, a
hypothesis, that he offers to make sense of a phenomenological datum: that
we must have some pre-theoretical understanding of what it is we are seek-
ing in any inquiry, or the search could not even begin. That we already have
some access to what we do not yet know is a genuinely and profoundly puz-
zling matter, but without his version of philosophical piety, Socrates warns,
we would fall prey to a sophist’s trick, and “it would make us idle, and
fainthearted men like to hear [this trick], whereas my argument makes them
energetic and keen on the search [ergatikous te kai zētētikous]” (81d–e). Of
course, there is a distinction between seeking as such and the intimation of
what is sought. The example of the Meno, where Socrates elicits mathemati-
cal understanding from a slave boy, could suggest a fundamental gap between
the two, because until you really do find the answer, you might not trust that
you will ever be on track to solve the problem. But the lesson of the Meno is
that without some intimation of what an answer might look like, you could
not even get started on a path to it, much less recognize that you have arrived
at an answer if you do.
This is the zetetic philosopher’s manifesto against nihilistic skepticism. It
foreshadows Heidegger’s assertion in Being and Time that “Every question-
ing is a seeking. Every seeking takes its direction in advance from what is
sought” (SZ, 5). In the prior phenomenological given, we simply do have
such a pre-reflective understanding of what we seek, for without it, the seek-
ing would not only be pointless, it would be senseless—as in not having any
meaning at all. But that is manifestly not the case, because the intimation
 Back to the Cave 79

guides us and brings the questioning into a meaningful trajectory. It is the

status and the meaning of these intimations that is philosophically problem-
atic, and it is only as a heuristic and stopgap solution that Socrates offers up
anamnēsis as a resolution in order to proceed in his conversation with Meno.
The problem of intimation is phenomenologically prior to the Socratic myth
(not the dogmatic theory!) of recollection, and Socrates himself understands
this. To put it another way, intimation describes the phenomenon as a prob-
lem, and recollection offers a provisional explanation of how intimation is
possible so that all subsequent philosophical inquiry does not become point-
less. Otherwise, Meno would lose faith in learning about virtue and become
“idle,” or, in the terms of this project, he would give up on the polemical ef-
fort of philosophical dialectic. In this sense, the “doctrine” of recollection is
a pedagogical and ethical second-best, made necessary by an ethical urgency
in the absence of absolute knowledge.
Every hunt, as Socrates suggests in the Meno (80d–e), must begin with the
scent of the quarry. We must have some intimation of what we are seeking, or
the search quickly becomes pointless and philosophy gives way to nihilistic
destruction of any and all belief. Surely this is why Socrates says that fail-
ing to defend justice would be impious. Socrates is not lying about the kind
of wisdom he possesses, but he is dissembling, in the sense that he does not
immediately explain what he is attempting to achieve in a given conversa-
tion. This is because an intimation of the good—or of anything decisive to
the way we should live—is naturally elusive and hard to communicate, and
hence vulnerable to the acid of a nihilistic skepticism. Socrates is willing to
state his pious conviction that justice, virtue, wisdom, and the like all exist.
He hesitates to state his opinion—or even that he has an opinion—as to what
these are, because to describe and defend an intimation concerning the most
decisive guides in life is to risk dispersing it altogether and thereby losing
those listeners whose own convictions are at their most delicate. He says this
explicitly: “[T]o present arguments [logous poiesthai] at a time when one is
in doubt and seeking [apsistounta de kai zētounta]—which is just what I am
doing—is a thing both frightening and slippery. . . . I’m afraid that in slip-
ping from the truth where one least ought to slip, I’ll not only fall myself but
also drag my friends down with me” (450d–451a). Socrates is no absolute
seer. Logos and dialogue do not lead invariably to insight, and he fears that
conversation now may unhinge vital ethical beliefs.
Nevertheless, Socrates understands that there are times when one must run
this risk. One cannot leave the young, who are the future of the polity, at the
mercy of a mentor like Thrasymachus. This is why zetetic philosophy is not
mysticism. While it adheres to a certain kind of faith in the meaningfulness of
phenomena, it remains open to questioning and to reappraising all articulated
80 Chapter Two

intuitions about that meaning and the theoretical elaborations of these intima-
tions. Eventually, Socrates does offer an argument, a logos, rather than insist-
ing on some privileged, gnostic insight. Mystical claims to gnostic insight
will not win over a Glaucon or an Adeimantus. Socrates is prepared to defend
and criticize his own intimations rationally, as need be, which distinguishes
his reliance on them from rank intuitionism.27

2.5 SOCRATIC PIETY, SOCRATIC TRUST,

SOCRATIC PHENOMENOLOGY

The nature of the piety claimed by Socrates demands further investigation.

The passage of the Republic where he falls back on this piety comes in re-
sponse to the vigorous arguments made by Glaucon and Adeimantus in favor
of injustice and tyranny as the best way to live, although they have left open
the possibility of being persuaded otherwise. Socrates replies to them by re-
membering their courage in the battle at Megara, and then says this:

For something quite divine must certainly have happened to you, if you are
remaining unpersuaded that injustice is better than justice when you are able
to speak that way on its behalf. Now you truly don’t seem to me to be being
persuaded [by the argument for injustice]. I infer this from the rest of your
character, since, on the basis of the arguments themselves, I would distrust
[ēpistoun] you. And the more I trust [pisteuō] you, the more I’m at a loss as to
what I should do. On the one hand, I can’t help out. For in my opinion I’m not
capable of it; my proof is that when I thought I showed in what I said to Thra-
symachus that justice is better than injustice, you didn’t accept it from me. On
the other hand, I can’t not help. For I’m afraid it might be impious to be here
when justice is being spoken badly of and give up and not bring help while I
am still breathing and able to make a sound. So the best thing is to succor her
as I am able. (368a–c)

It is worth noting that Socrates refers to his duty to piety in the context of
the brothers’ courage in battle in the service of Athens. Socrates adopts a lan-
guage of courage, too, in his obligation to come to the aid of justice: “while I
am still breathing.” Resisting impiety requires moral courage commensurate
to the physical courage displayed in battle for the sake of one’s community.28
What connects them is trust, pistis: the morale of soldiers will break if they
cannot trust their companions to stand with them in face of death, and the
bonds of community will break if citizens cannot trust each other to be just.
Trust in the physical and moral courage of its members is necessary for the
polity to survive, and its members support each other reciprocally. Not giv-
ing up in battle implies a deep trust in shared convictions and the character
 Back to the Cave 81

of one’s friends, and trust in character and conviction lend spirit to physical
courage when it is needed most.
In the image of the Divided Line described by Socrates in Book 6 of the
Republic, trust belongs to the second of four divisions of the faculties of
cognition, above imagination (eikasia), but below thought (dianoia) and in-
tellection (noēsis). Trust and imagination apply to the changeable, sensible,
visible realm of things, whereas thought and intellection, which cognize
mathematical truths and the ideas respectively, belong to the eternal, supra-
sensible, purely intelligible realm. Even if trust involves opinion rather than
knowledge, a provisional trust in things and in people is indispensable for
life. Trust is the mode of understanding that allows us to function in our
everyday world of people and things, because life would be impossible if
we had to confirm with apodictic certainty everything and everyone before
engaging with them. It is the background of all our practices, weaving the
fabric of sense and meaning and establishing the givens of what Heidegger
would call our Being-in-the-world. Trust has a dignity for Socrates. It is not
simply a debased version of comprehension, beneath the thought that grants
understanding of mathematics or the intellection that grants insight into the
ideas. Trust is a necessarily constitutive feature of our existence as knowers
in the broad sense. That does not mean that trust is indefeasible, only that it
is mostly inescapable for being-human and therefore must be respected in its
proper place.
While Socrates does not mention his famous daimonion, the divine voice
that would sometimes come to him, in his declaration of piety, it is worth
noticing that his decision to argue in defense of justice fits his description in
the Apology of his experience with his daimonion: “This is something which
began for me in childhood: a sort of voice comes, and whenever it comes, it
always turns me away from whatever I am about to do, but never turns me
forward [protrepei de oupote]” (31d). Socrates was tried and executed on the
twin charges of impiety and corrupting the youth. They go together because,
as someone whom his accusers perceive as a sophist or some sort of teacher,
Socrates’s purported impiety threatens to spread to the young, undermining
the shared convictions that sustain civic trust. Miletus had cited Socrates’s
daimonion, which must have been well-known to Athenians, as a mark of his
impiety as not believing in the gods of the city. Socrates cites his daimonion
precisely to prove his piety to the divine and to his city. For an example of
the latter, he reminds the jury of an episode during one of the few times he
had served in public office, as one of the prytaneis, an executive officer of
the Athenian council:

And it happened that our tribe, Antiochis, held the prytany when you [that is,
the Athenian democracy] wished to judge the ten generals (the ones who did not
82 Chapter Two

pick up the men from the naval battle) as a group—unlawfully, as it seemed to

all of you in the time afterwards. I alone of the prytaneis opposed your doing
anything against the laws then, and I voted against it. And although the orators
were ready to indict me and arrest me, and you were ordering and shouting, I
supposed that I should run the risk with the law and the just rather than side
with you because of fear of prison or death when you were counseling unjust
things. (32b–c)29

This illustrates what Socrates means by the moral courage necessary for
political piety to face actual persecution rather than merely fractious insults.
It also clarifies what Socrates means by saying that his daimonion “always
turns me away [apotrepei] from whatever I am about to do, but never turns
me forward [protrepei de oupote].” In the case of the generals, Socrates obvi-
ously did more than just turn away from an action, because he deliberately
voted against charging the generals. That the voice “never turns me forward”
is puzzling, because it seems that commanding an action is exactly what it
did in this case. But while the voice did command him to act against (apo-)
the motion for trial, it did not indicate what should be done with the generals
going forward (pro-).
This form of deflective action to prevent an injustice explains how, in the
Republic, Socrates feels an obligation to defend justice while also hesitating
to come “forward” with some positive claim to knowledge. Glaucon, Ade-
imantus, and the other young men apply intense pressure on him to provide
a positive teaching about the life of justice, rather than just a refutation of
Thrasymachus. Furthermore, the dramatic context of the dialogue indicates
that Socrates understands this might be a decisive moment for whether they
actually become corrupted by the lure of injustice. Other young associates
of Socrates, such as Critias, Alcibiades, and Charmides, were seduced by
tyrannical ambitions later in life, and Athens surely had them in mind when
bringing the charge of corrupting the youth against Socrates. In the Republic,
which others have properly seen as constituting a second apology for Socrates
against the city’s charges, Socrates’s piety wins out over his humility because
the trust essential for the city as a unified body politic, not to mention for the
well-being of the souls of the young men individually, is at stake.30 Socrates
cannot let that pass. While he does not say so, the daemonic voice seems to
have commanded him to act. His offer to provide the young men his opin-
ion about justice and the good is then a second best to a claim to unfailing
knowledge, compelled by his piety to the trust necessary to sustain human
community.
Socrates’ autobiographical account in the Phaedo of his “second sailing”
(99d) in philosophy sheds further light on the epistemic-ethical responsibil-
ity of the zetetic philosopher, which I am calling Socratic piety. Socrates
 Back to the Cave 83

describes his first foray into philosophy as follows: “When I was a young
man I was wonderfully keen on that wisdom which they call natural science,
for I thought it splendid to know the causes of everything, why it comes to
be, why it perishes and why it exists” (96a–b).31 Here, Socrates seeks a final
knowledge of the cause of the Being of all things: why and how each and all
come to be (gignetai), pass from being (apollutai), and simply are (esti). This
was his first way of asking the question of the meaning of Being, which he
recognizes as this temporal emergence, existing, and passing-away of things
as meaningfully what they are. He begins by considering answers that we
now would recognize as ones offered by natural science, though primitive
by modern standards. These attempt to explain all phenomena, as well as our
cognitive apparatus for knowing them, purely in terms of physical causes and
processes, arising from some fundamental element or other (water or air or
fire) and some process (combination or putrefaction).
After many false starts, the young Socrates came to realize that chasing
these scientific explanations had “made me quite blind even to those things
which I and others [emautō kai tois allois] thought that I clearly knew before,
so that I unlearned what I thought I knew before, about many other things”
(96c). What was it that he “knew” (ēpistamēn) before, and in what sense of
knowing? Because clearly he neither knew it then nor knows it now, in the
strict sense of an apodictic, fully justified certainty, because he was neither
satisfied then nor now with the status of his knowing. He mentions both his
own prior confidence and that of “others”: the navigable meaning of the
world was and is a shared meaning, dependent upon a provisionally convinc-
ing understanding among a historically situated community. At stake is a
phenomenological knowing, one that allows discourse and action to make
sense in a shared hermeneutical context. This is the context for what we will
call a Socratic phenomenology, and his pursuit of the forms is a way of il-
luminating the sense-making meanings that fellow human beings bring to the
logos of even everyday life.
As a prosaic example, he describes how while once he thought, as it
seemed “obvious to anyone” (96c, pro tou panti dēloun), that people grow
by eating and drinking, his scientific inquiries convinced him that no such
commonsensical answer would be adequate, because our natural, everyday
understanding of phenomena is superficial and naive. In modern terms, ex-
plaining the causes for why and how we grow requires knowing everything
about ingestion and digestion, the genetics of how DNA instructs proteins
for cell development and decay, the biology of how this transpires for a
specific organism, the chemistry of how this happens at the molecular level,
and probably also the particle physics that underlies the chemical reactions.
Socrates’s point is that chasing after such explanations detached him from
84 Chapter Two

the everyday understanding of something as straightforward as eating and

growth that was already accessible to him and other human beings in life as it
is lived on the human scale. This is the mode of life that ordinarily matters to
us, that involves the human beings that we are, embedded in communities and
located in place and time with all the cares, concerns, struggles, and attach-
ments this entails. There is always-already an implicit ontological knowing
of the meaning of things and how they matter within such a context, which
is not the same as an ontic knowledge of the facts of the matter. Life on this
human scale constitutes what is at-issue ethically for each of us in the life
examined. Its meaning is accessible through a phenomenological attention
to what people say about what and how things in fact do mean something to
them, even if only provisionally and subject to revision through the polemos
of dialogos. The ideas, as a heuristic, allow Socrates to focus on this phenom-
enological seeing.
Socrates has insisted that “I do not speak disrespectfully of such knowl-
edge” (Apology, 19c) in natural science, only that he had “no aptitude at
all for that kind of investigation” (Phaedo, 96c). More worrisome to him,
though, is that such investigations made him “quite blind” to how it was that
such simple things were somehow already meaningful, taken at that purely
human scale of everyday life. His second sailing therefore begins with the
realization that this human-scale understanding also deserves his attention,
because establishing what enables that more directly accessible understand-
ing would not only prevent the blindness that natural science threatened but
also make such human-scale meaningfulness more secure. So, rather than
look directly at the sun as careless people do during an eclipse, which risks
blindness (99d)—that is, rather than seek causes so far removed from the
lived human experience that this very endeavor risks eclipsing—he will seek
an indirect way to do what Aristotle would later call “preserving the phe-
nomena” (Nicomachean Ethics, 1145b2–7), much as the philosopher in his
Cave Allegory does by returning back down after escaping. He will do this
simply by dialoguing with people, asking their opinions at the human scale
of understanding.
The more personal and political example that Socrates mentions next
involves how one should explain the cause or reason (aitia) for why he was
sitting there in the Athenian prison, waiting for the hemlock to be adminis-
tered for his execution, and which he himself will later freely choose to drink
without complaint or hesitation (117c). A reductive scientism would say
“that the reason that I am sitting here is because my body consists of bones
and sinews” and that the respective relaxation and tension of flesh, bone, and
sinew is “the cause of my sitting here with my limbs bent” (98c–d). Such an
account fails to save the phenomena, because it leaves out precisely what is
 Back to the Cave 85

most humanly relevant as the “true causes” (alēthōs aitias) for why he hap-
pens to be sitting there in that prison: “that, after the Athenians decided it was
better to condemn me, for this reason it seems best to me to sit here and more
right to remain and endure whatever penalty they ordered” (98e–99a). Of
the merely physical aspects of why he is there, Socrates says, “To call those
things causes is too absurd [lian atopon]. If someone said that without bones
and sinews and all such things, I should not be able to do what I decided, he
would be right, but surely to say that they are the cause of what I do, and that
I have chosen the best course [tou beltistou hairesei], even though I act with
my mind [nōi prattōn], is to speak very lazily and carelessly” (99a–b). In
the context of what is humanly important, explaining Socrates’s free choice
(hairesis) to do what to his mind (nous) seemed best in purely physicalist
terms—to stay and endure rather than to flee the city’s punishment—would
utterly lose touch with what is at-issue on the human scale. Physiology could
not explain the relation of his freedom to his responsibility to the city, to his
friends there with him, and to philosophy itself as the life worth living. Nor
could it explain his specific free decisions in private and political life.
It is in the context of his blindness and perplexity about finding meaning
on the human scale of existence that Socrates offers to explain “his second
sailing [deuteron ploun] into the search [zētēsin] for the cause” of things
(99d, tm). Deuteros ploos is a Greek expression meaning a second best, a
backup plan, a new departure after the failure of a first attempt. The younger
Socrates concluded that he “must take refuge in logous [words, discussions,
arguments] and, through them, examine the truth of what is [tōn ontōn]”
(99e). By this, Socrates says he means “nothing new” (100d), but rather
what his companions would recognize as what he has been doing for many
years now: dialoguing with them and others to make the best sense he can of
things as what they appear to be, in terms of the forms, eidē (102b). There
is a fundamental ethical component to this phenomenology of the logos and
dialogos: that access to the meaning of things, the world, and even meaning
as such comes from taking seriously what others say as a manifestation of
what they mean, what matters to them, and what guides their lives. Even if
what they themselves can identify as their intended meaning falls short of full
consistency upon examination, the respect granted to their meaning-intending
is a recognition of their personhood that cannot be reified.
This reversion to what people say is what I call a Socratic phenomenology.
What Socrates has come to realize is that however naïve these might seem,
people’s words and talk, especially in the kind of conversations he conducts,
do in fact contain a meaning. This meaning lies both on the surface—after
all, language serves for everyday communication—and in a shared pathway
through dialogue to a deeper understanding of the context for meaningful
86 Chapter Two

communication not yet understood by either the speaker or the philosophi-

cal inquirer. The simple, brute fact that some provisional meaning exists
to sustain a background intelligibility for the world is given by everyday
experience on the human scale. For Socrates, the best way available to tease
out the cause of that meaning is through eliciting a deeper understanding of
the forms, or ideas. This, he says, “is the safest answer I can give myself
or anyone else” (100d–e). The most telling testimony for this Socratic phe-
nomenology comes from Socrates himself, in his depiction of the Cave Al-
legory, after he has described its relation to the Divided Line and the released
prisoner-philosopher’s ascent from and return to the prison-house of the cave:
“A god doubtless knows if it happens to be true. At all events, this is the way
the phenomena look to me [emoi phainomena houtō phainetai]” (517b; my
emphasis).32 (See Figures 1 and 2.)
Socrates also says that “I by no means concede that whoever investigates
what is [ta onta] by way of words and discourses [tois logois] is dealing in
images [eikosi] any more than someone investigating it by way of the work-
ings of things [tois ergois]” (100a). The Greek here is parsimonious, but
Socrates is distinguishing words, language, and dialogue (logoi) from deeds,
the workings of the world (ergoi), or perhaps what we would call facts or
data, and claiming that both words and the facts are in a certain sense images,
because neither is itself directly the cause of the meaning of what is. Other-
wise we would not need to seek an explanation beyond direct experience,
either through a scientific examination of beings or through dialogue with
what people say about them. Beings, both people and things, always already
have some provisional meaning to us that we understand; otherwise, we could
neither function in the world nor share language. But we can talk with people
in a way we cannot with things. What they say reflects, if only in part, the
meaning already inherent to our shared experience of the world.
This is the heart of phenomenology as Socrates practices it: that what peo-
ple say reflects the meaning that is in some way already there for them, even
if that “look” of things as they appear, phainetai, to each person individu-
ally, is a finite, situated perspective. The reflection of the logos, then, is an
image of a meaning we might be able to grasp more fully through dialogue,
the communication (logos) and conflict (polemos) of perspectives. Here in
the Phaedo and then in the Republic, Socrates calls the forms and ideas his
hypothesis, a Greek word for something set down in advance that can underlie
and hold up whatever is subsequently built upon it. The Latinate correlate
would be supposition, the placing of a substrate to hold up a construction
build upon it, as axioms or postulates do in geometry and mathematics. The
forms and ideas are not a theory or doctrine; they are a hypothesis employed
to explore the sense-making of our understanding. The world as it matters
 Back to the Cave 87

to us already has its rough-and-ready intelligibility. Its meaning is simply a

given, but never without puzzles and contradictions through which meaning
can be investigated, clarified, and revised. More emphatically, meaning can
escape us into unmeaning in ways we cannot predict or prevent. We will see
this in more detail as we proceed.
Socrates says that his second sailing is a search, a zētēsis, for the cause of
the world’s intelligibility. As such, it is an ongoing confrontation, a polemos,
with the given meaning of things, one that Socrates conducts through his
characteristic dialogues. But what keeps this ongoing dialogue going?
This returns us to the topic of Socratic piety. One might expect Socrates to
have a dim view of piety, given how completely he demolishes the definitions
of it offered by Euthyphro, the ludicrously self-important, self-appointed seer
of the will of the gods. The Euthyphro dialogue ends in aporia, a failure to
arrive at a definition of piety. Nevertheless, the narrative structure of the
dialogue and Socrates’s intense demolitions of Euthyphro’s definitions sug-
gest that genuine piety requires a sense of shame and modesty, which the
dogmatic Euthyphro lacks. In the Republic, by contrast, Socrates is unusu-
ally forthright in advancing his own idea of justice, which he defines as each
minding her or his own proper role in the community. Both dialogues lie in
the shadow of Socrates’ trial and execution for impiety.
The Euthyphro takes place on the steps of the courthouse where Socrates is
about to be tried (2a). When Euthyphro tells Socrates that he is so wise that
he “knows precisely” (akribōs eideiēn, 5a) the things divine, Socrates leaps at
the opportunity to have him define piety. Socrates does so ostensibly to gain
insight from Euthyphro for the upcoming trial, which pleases Euthyphro’s
vanity, but Socrates’s numerous ironic, even bitingly sarcastic references to
Euthyphro’s pretensions suggest otherwise (4a–b, 6a–b). Socrates is shocked
by Euthyphro’s arrogance in violating filial piety by presuming to prosecute
his own father, years after the fact, for what seems the father’s justifiable
or at least excusable homicide to defend others (9a–b). The narrative of the
dialogue suggests that Socrates sought to undermine Euthyphro’s confidence
in pursuing the prosecution. In a sense, Socrates’ daimonion was serving as a
proxy in an attempt to prevent Euthyphro from perpetrating a gravely impious
act. A negative aporia for Euthyphro would be an appropriate conclusion.

2.6 ZETETIC PIETY IN THE REPUBLIC:

PLEDGING TROTH TO THE IDEA

The situation in the Republic is very different. In that gathering, Socrates

cannot escape the positive task of defining justice and convincing some of
88 Chapter Two

the most promising youth of Athens that the life of injustice is not worth at-
tempting. This is no merely academic question. When Socrates says it would
be impious if he did not make the effort to defend justice, a Greek audience
for Plato’s dialogue would understand the context: that Socrates’s piety re-
inforced the virtues of the men who would later resist a tyranny for the sake
of Athenian democracy. Again, Plato offers an indirect defense of Socrates
against the charges of impiety and corrupting the youth. Even more to the
purpose here is the question of the phenomenological meaning of his Socratic
piety and what gives it force. How does an “examined” life occasion this ethi-
cal piety, and what guides it?
My claim is that an engaged ethical confrontation with the circumstances
of one’s life, philosophy as a polemical ethics, demands piety in the fol-
lowing sense. One must assume and sustain the hypothesis that an ethical
life does have a meaning, even if that meaning has not yet been worked out
thematically and justified fully, as we would find in a treatise by an Aris-
totle, a Mill, or a Kant. The zeteticism of the life examined as the mode of
philosophy requires that the search not be nonsensical or it will collapse into
nihilism. The heart of Socrates’s second sailing in the Phaedo is not merely
an epistemological or metaphysical claim (although it is these as well), but
rather an ethical one that allows him to sustain a meaningful life with others.
Furthermore, if not the forms or ideas, then something like them is necessary
as a hypothesis for any specific ethical engagement, in deed or discussion,
with both persons and problems about justice, courage, piety, or any other
ethical virtue or political principle. Without expansive concepts like ‘justice’
or ‘fairness,’ ethical engagement devolves into conventional polemics or
outright violence over ever-changing rules with no real ethical substance. We
would not be able to listen to one another, which requires harkening gener-
ously to both the meaning as intended in what others say and to what also
exceeds their intended meaning as unsaid but as potentially the ground for
discovery and reconciliation in confrontation.33 There might be another, per-
haps better, metaphor for what can guide a meaningful inquiry than the visual
one of what-has-been-sighted-in-advance, the ordinary-language meaning of
the Greek idea and eidos. Nevertheless, without something like the idea, pro-
jected in any discussion of what is at-issue ethically as the form of the matter
in question, ethical life would not be possible.
That is the phenomenological claim. It is corroborated by an extraordinary
passage in the Republic, in Book 7, after the Allegory of the Cave and dur-
ing the discussion of the education of the philosopher-rulers in dialectic—
extraordinary, because it is one of the rare places where Socrates seems to
be speaking unironically and forthrightly about his most important beliefs.
Instead of drawing opinions from his partners in dialogue, Socrates here
 Back to the Cave 89

declares a belief as his own. Glaucon asks Socrates to show him all the forms
and stages of dialectic, “For these, as it seems, would lead at last toward that
place which for the one who reaches it a rest from the road, as it were, and
an end of his journey” (532e; tm). Glaucon refers to that upward path from
the cave that finally ends the journey in the light of day; instead of aporia, no
way out, he wants a telos tēs poreias, an end to the journey, a putting-aside
of philosophy once it reaches its goal. This is an echonic conception of phi-
losophy as completed in absolute knowing. But Socrates demurs:

You would no longer be able to follow, my dear Glaucon, although there

wouldn’t be any lack of eagerness on my part. But you would no longer be
seeing an image of what we are saying but rather the truth itself, at least as it
appears to me. Whether it really is so or not can no longer be properly insisted
on. But that there is some such something to see must be insisted on. Isn’t it so?
(533a, tm; my emphasis)

By an image (eikōn) in this context, Socrates means both the Divided Line
and, as an image of that image, the Allegory of the Cave. These are only
icons of the truth, not the truth itself, which may be seen directly (as Plato
says in the Seventh Letter), but cannot be shared directly and discursively by
image or argument, only prepared by these. The truth is alogon, what Mark
Ralkowski has called ontologically ineffable, not because it is irrational but
because there is no way to compel someone to apprehend it by argument or
indication.34 This is why Socrates famously describes philosophical education
as a turning around (periagōgē, 518c–d) of the whole soul, because while
one can move someone to look, one cannot force them to see. Socrates can-
not insist, even if he can argue, that what truth is as it appears to him (moi
phainetai) is what the truth really is (ontōs—“beingly is”), or not. Against
Glaucon’s absolutist expectation, Socrates reasserts his zetetic modesty. At
the same time, he does not give up on his skeptical idealism, because he does
say that, phenomenologically, there must be some such something to see that
“must be insisted on.” Otherwise, there simply could be no navigable, mean-
ingful world, even in its ruptures and finitude, that could be engaged in the
work of a polemically reconstructive life of philosophy.
The Greek here for “must be insisted on” is ischuristeon, from ischur-
izomai, to maintain something stoutly, to stand firm on something, to trust in
something. That last meaning, to trust, is attested by the Indo-European root
of ischurizomai, which is deru- or dreu-, which is the root for the English
tree, trust, and truth, as well as more archaic words such as troth: when I
pledge my troth, I pledge to stand firm, to stand true, like a tree deeply rooted,
standing against adversity—as Socrates does when he affirms that it would
be impious of him not to fight for justice when it is attacked.35 So, while the
90 Chapter Two

Greek for ‘trust’ is pistis, and for ‘truth’ is alētheia, the English word family
of tree-trust-truth-troth, even more properly than the Greek, unites Socrates’s
meaning here: that whatever the truth is, we cannot not trust in some such
something (toiouton ti) as what gives meaning to an intelligible world in
which we can, provisionally, function. Socratic piety is pledging this troth
to truth so that there be some ground to stand on as rooted in the world. But
because human understanding is finite, the skeptical idealist’s trust in truth is
not a dogmatic insistence on any existing interpretations of the world. Rather,
it is a trust that the polemical confrontation with meaning, through dialectical
philosophy, is capable of ever-reconstructing meaning when it breaks down
in deconstruction. Glaucon understands this when he says to Socrates, in this
same passage, “it’s not only now that these things must be heard [that is,
concerning the Divided Line, the Cave, dialectic, and so on], but they must
all be returned to many times in the future” (532d). Skeptical idealism, as
polemical, as zetetic, is necessarily reiterative in its turning and returning.

2.7 THE POLEMIC BETWEEN ZETETIC AND

ECHONIC PHILOSOPHY

This portrait of a piously zetetic Socrates is utterly at odds with the portrait
that Socrates himself draws of the philosopher-kings—and queens, we must
not forget—of Kallipolis, the supposedly ideal city, built through speech
and imagination in the Republic.36 Socrates and his interlocutors give these
philosophers the right and the duty to rule because they are knowers: “Since
philosophers are those who are able to grasp [echontos dunamenoi ephaptes-
thai] what is always the same in all respects, while those who are not able to
do so but wander among what is many and varies in all ways are not philoso-
phers, which should be the leaders of a city?” (484b). We know the answer:
the philosophers should rule! These are echonic philosophers, from the Greek
echein, to have, to hold. They possess the truth; they grasp what is “always
the same” and, presumably, can wield it ruling the polity: in establishing in-
stitutions, laying down laws, educating the young in civic and personal virtue,
and cultivating the next generation of philosopher-rulers. Theirs are not mere
intimations at the outset of a search into what the truth might be. They “come
to the end” of their study (504c–d). They arrive at what Drew Hyland calls
“absolute transcendence.”37 They know the forms of justice and virtue. They
have seen the good in its full glory and can understand and apply it without
mediating metaphors such as Socrates’s sun or the Divided Line.
To know such things is to understand fully what is best for human beings,
just as to know how the body works is to understand what diet is most healthy
 Back to the Cave 91

or when to perform an operation. Just as we want doctors who are knowers to

tend the body, we need philosophers who are knowers to tend the city. They
have what it takes. This version of the philosopher as absolute knower who
has arrived at complete understanding at the end of the path of questioning
approximates the humanistic model that Heidegger rejects. The path of the
philosopher-rulers seems to result in a Platonic metaphysics, founded on an
epistemology that locates the truth in a transcendent, eternal realm. This cul-
minates in a nihilistic modernity making this truth the foundation for a machi-
national will to power, reducing the human and natural worlds to resources
mastered by the application of ready-made formulae.
Remarkably, Socrates does not present himself as an echonic philosopher.
This is pivotal in the confrontation between Plato and Heidegger, because
Plato does not represent Socrates as the type of philosopher that the internal
argument of the Republic establishes as paradigmatic of philosophy and of
the right to rule in the supposedly ideal polity. This is no small irony. In
the most famous philosophical work that makes the most famously exalted
claims about philosophers, the famous philosopher making such claims does
not pretend to be such a philosopher himself!
Is this just Plato’s little joke? Hardly. Plato may be ironizing about the pre-
tentions of philosophy, but the point is deadly serious. If Socrates is not a phi-
losopher, who can hope to be? Or is Socrates in fact an echonic philosopher
whose own dissembling irony is so profound that we cannot see that he has
just stepped into the cave after a long sojourn in the light of the Good that is
even beyond Being (509b: epekeina tēs ousias)? No. Plato is not playing the
buffoon with Socrates, who may know more than he usually lets on, if there is
a zetetic way of knowing that doesn’t indulge in the absolutes of echonicism,
but he has no pretensions of being a philosopher-king.
The implicit but unmistakable distinction between zetetic and echonic
philosophy in the Republic affects the whole metaphysical-ontological-
political-ethical-pedagogical teaching of Books 6 and 7, comprising the sun
as an image of the good, the Divided Line as an image for the articulation of
Being in the meaning of the world, and the allegory of the cave. That teaching
takes on a very different aspect depending on which account of philosophy
you think is the right one. Heidegger and his descendants have accepted the
traditional view that Socrates and Plato cleave to the dogmatically echonic
model of philosophy: Platonism is a theory, a doctrine, decisive for the West,
about how philosophy may possess the truth. After all, ‘everyone’ from St.
Augustine to Nietzsche says this is what Plato is about; so it must be so.38
For example, perhaps the most conventional and paradigmatic modern ex-
position of Plato as echonic philosopher adhering to a doctrine of the forms
can be found in Russell’s essay, “Plato’s Theory of Ideas.” It never crosses
92 Chapter Two

Russell’s mind that Plato might not identify totally with Socrates, much less
that Socrates himself is at all tentative about his hypothesis concerning the
ideas. At the other pole, in a postmodernist reflection of the echonic Plato,
Reiner Schürmann asks, “Quite as happiness for Plato is the possession of
the subsisting Good, [so does not nihilism] consist in the full possession of
presencing, in a total presence that stills all desire and all absence?”39 On
such readings, Plato’s Divided Line shows how reality, or Being, is divided
into separate realms, one earthly and illusory, one heavenly and pure. This
bifurcation of existence into the corruption of this world and the exaltation
of another one must mean, as Henry Mendell has put it in a commentary on
the Phaedo, that “The only good philosopher is a dead philosopher.”40 The
cave allegory describes how one may ascend the Divided Line by correct
representations of reality. This is Plato’s conception of truth on such readings.
The echonic philosopher’s vision of the good, the sun that sheds light on
all reality and serves as the foundation of Being, renders all knowledge cohe-
sive and secure. According to Heidegger, the good in Plato is the idea of the
enabling, what allows things to fit in, to serve their teleological purpose (das
Tauglichmachende, GA 9: 133–34). It is what makes possible the essence of
everything in terms of each thing’s specific idea, and thereby enables “all
forms of foresighted insight into practical action” (GA 9: 135). Through the
idea of the good, “alētheia comes under the yoke of the idea” (GA 9:136).
To know the good, to possess the ideas, is to understand how to make use
of everything that is, which is what Heidegger feared from an instrumental,
machinational reason in service to the will to power. As discussed in the
introduction, Heidegger locates in Plato the onset of nihilism: the will to
subject Being to a representational system of ontic truth that can be placed at
the service of the subjugation of nature, a project that forgets that ontological
truth as unconcealment is not subject to the human will.
But the story of the cave reads differently depending on whether one ac-
cepts the echonic or the zetetic model of philosophy. The immediate narrative
context of the dialogue in the Republic itself, of course, would suggest apply-
ing the echonic model of philosophy. The Allegory arises in discussing how
to educate those worthy of rule, the philosopher kings and queens. Whatever
we might say about their education, its culmination, on the narrative’s surface,
must be a vision of the final and absolute source, the cause and reason (aitia)
for all that is. Even more than this, that vision of the ultimate source provides
the now-qualified ruler with an understanding of how reality is articulated
through all the ins and outs of a particular historical world. This articulation
of the truth through all aspects of knowing that Socrates addresses in his im-
age of the Divided Line, addressed in chapter 3, means that when the former
seeker finds completion as a possessor of an inerrant truth, grounded in a
 Back to the Cave 93

transcendent reality, it becomes applicable, by those properly enlightened, to

the shifting shadows of the temporal present. The philosopher-ruler can see
the reality latent in all phenomena, even in the shadows of the cave, which
correspond to the specific opinions and traditions of a particular historical
community. This ability to grasp the real in all its refracted articulations is
what both enables and entitles the echonic philosopher to rule, just as the
proper understanding of chemistry, biology, and anatomy does for a doctor
to practice medicine.
How would the zetetic model map onto the Allegory? The beginning of
the story might be the same. The person enchained by the dominant opinions
of historical circumstances might, under the influence of some accidental
experience or the deliberate questioning of the right kind of teacher, break
the bonds of the given. The unbound prisoner, no longer a prisoner but not
yet enlightened, might then ascend a difficult path of education. But towards
what? According to the Allegory, perhaps towards the light at the end of the
tunnel along the “rough, steep, upward way” (515e) out of the cave into the
light of day. But if philosophy as zetetic means a seeking rather than a coming
to the end of inquiry in final possession of the truth, this process of striving
can last only as long as ascending the tunnel out from the underground realm.
To emerge into the light means to search no longer, to reach the absolute
truth, to possess it, and so to be able to return into the cave with that truth as
the power and the authority to rule.
Someone like Socrates seems condemned always to ascend through the
upward path but never to emerge into the light. And yet Socrates clearly does
see light at the end of the tunnel in two senses. First, he has his intimations
of the truth. While these are not full possession of the truth, they are hopeful
glimmerings that lead him onward and give the search meaning. Furthermore,
he can imagine what the echonic experience of emerging into the full light of
the sun might be like. This is precisely what Socrates is doing in recounting
the parable of the cave, for he himself does not claim to have made it out.
To merge Heideggerian and Platonic idioms: the world is the realm of the
cave—its historical setting, its beliefs, its customs, its social and political ar-
rangements. To stand up, to throw off the chains, is to deconstruct: to take
notice of hitherto unnoticed structures that bind our thinking and to break
their hold. Many postmodernists remain fixated at this level: they become
intoxicated with the initial thrill of liberation from the bonds of traditional
structures, convinced that any new imposition of structure is simply a new
style of ideological enchainment. Yet they secretly long for the would-be ty-
rant to make his attempt at subjugation because they are addicted to fighting
all positing of structure, without realizing that there can be no intelligibility
without some structure. To the postmodern anarchist, this is freedom—a
94 Chapter Two

purely negative dialectic that ever and again requires that unjust authorities
arise so that freedom can manifest itself again through the deconstruction
of their doctrines and regimes. Liberation becomes a perpetual adolescence.
Heidegger, of course, was not the anarchist that some of his postmodern-
ist readers, such as Reiner Schürmann, have become. He did believe, at least
in his middle period, that great creators could serve as a conduit for a new
dispensation of Being, a new arrangement of the intelligible world, as result
of the deconstruction of the past. Construction might follow deconstruction,
but because Heidegger did not believe in a final vision of Being, there could
be no standard for what new construction would be best. I suspect that this
faith in unhinged creativity is one reason for Heidegger’s complete lack of
practical wisdom in siding with the National Socialists.41 We will return to
the question of what guides practical wisdom in chapter 7.
The Socratic or zetetic model of philosophy does allow for guidance to ac-
tion. The intimation of a transcendent truth gives us something to go on, but it
demands precisely the modesty that would counter the hubris that Heidegger
at his best detects in the modern project. An intimation is not yet possession
of the absolute. It is not yet a doctrine, if by doctrine we mean a theory that
an author defends in the form of an orthodox system. Plato nowhere presents
a theory of forms or ideas, only various hypotheses offered by Socrates that
serve as tentative responses to an array of inescapable problems.42 To use
the term from chapter 1, in zetetic philosophy deconstruction is followed by
preconstruction, the provisional construction of the outlines of an integrated
account of something in the light of a truth only partially glimpsed. Such pre-
construction must leave itself open to revision or even to complete rejection,
but in the realm of praxis it can provide principled standards of action that are
precisely not doctrinaire but rather address the specificity of our situatedness
and remain open to correction as context changes.
Zetetic philosophy, as skeptical idealism, is bold enough to depart from
the given but modest enough to return to it without laying claim to the final
story. It straddles hubris and humility, tragedy and comedy. That is why it can
also be reconstructive as well as preconstructive. It does not remain fixated
on casting off the chains of the given past. It understands that attempts at an
integrated understanding of the world, whether philosophical or traditional,
logos or mythos, must fail to attain the absolute. In preconstructing a better
arrangement in the light of the best account we can give so far, we neces-
sarily draw upon the intimations of truth latent in the tradition to which we
belong, because we always-already exist in the shadows of that understand-
ing. Socrates clearly attends to this reconstructive ethos in the new departure
he describes in the Phaedo, namely, to listen to what people say about what
matters (Phaedo, 99d–100a). Surely this is what is going on in Socrates’s
 Back to the Cave 95

enthusiasm for Cephalus’s belief that justice exists, even as Socrates demol-
ishes Cephalus’s specific account of justice. Surely reconstruction is also at
work in Socrates’s pious defense of the young against Thrasymachus’s incite-
ment to tyranny. So, we have three moments to the zetetic journey: the libera-
tion from the bonds (deconstruction), the ascent upwards (preconstruction),
and the return to the cave (reconstruction). All three moments are necessary
for the full expression of human freedom.
But then why does Plato give us this double model of Socrates as a zetetic
philosopher and of the echonic philosopher as the ideal Socrates proposes?
Because of the need for preconstruction, the hypothesis (cf. 533b–d). Without
setting up (-thesis) something beneath (hypo-) the given as its support, how-
ever temporary a scaffold this may be, the search will lapse into despondency,
hopelessness, and nihilism. If the given is unsatisfactory and we seek to make
it better, then we need some intimation of the good to indicate that our striv-
ing is not meaningless. The intimation need not be, indeed should not be, final
and absolute, but it can call us to construing (preconstructing, envisioning)
alternatives to what presently is and to defend those alternatives with what
we ordinarily recognize as philosophical arguments, all as part of the process
of responding to the questions evoked by wonder about the breakdowns in
ethical life that bring us up short. This cycle of philosophy as de-, pre-, and
reconstruction is what distinguishes zeteticism from either intuitionism or
doctrinaire absolutism.
Through the portrait of Socrates as a midwife of ideas (Theaetetus, 148e),
Plato deliberately establishes a tension between the echonic and zetetic mod-
els of philosophy, because philosophy, especially for the young, might never
get beyond the vague promise of an answer and abandon its search, but it
may also misstep as philosophy if it believes that it has already arrived at its
destination. Plato presents this tension and does not resolve it for us, because
mature philosophizing requires that we resolve it for ourselves in a resolution
that is precisely not completed but always under way. This always-under-
way of philosophy is the polemos between the echonic and zetetic modes of
philosophizing.43
So, Plato has even Kallipolis, the best city, decompose in Book 8 of the
Republic, because the philosopher-rulers cannot maintain absolute command
of the “nuptial number,” a comically complex mathematical formula for the
eugenics of procreation needed in the city to maintain the right proportions
of the various kinds of citizens suited to the various necessary occupations.
While the echonic wisdom of the rulers provides them with timeless truths,
the finitude of the temporal world, which requires the constant biological
reproduction of the social structures of the polity over the generations, pre-
vents the formula from inerrant application. The equilibrium of the society
96 Chapter Two

eventually falters and the polity decays, because it fails to ensure that the right
kinds of people serve in their proper roles, and so faction breaks up the body
politic. The absurdity of the nuptial number is a deliberate joke on Plato’s
part, but a serious one that suggests the limits of hubris in pretending to a
technocratic mastery of the world through echonic truth. Absolute possession
of the truth cannot be maintained absolutely, if at all.
In the cosmic parable of the Myth of Er (614b–621b) at the close of the
Republic, Socrates leaves the young men with a vision of the whole that is
a mythos, not a full and thorough rational account, a logos. As a myth, it is
a substitute for the complete, echonic logos of the truth that Socrates cannot
provide. As mythos, Er’s tale serves positively the goals of logos: as a modest
confidence in reason. It reinforces the intimation that the world does make
sense as a cosmos, and therefore that rational inquiry also makes sense—not
by making sense of the whole as such, completely and absolutely, but as
guided by the glimmering light at the end of the tunnel.
Plato presents the two models of philosophy, the echonic and the zetetic,
simultaneously in the Republic, in the figure of the philosopher-ruler on the
one hand and Socrates on the other. He does so because the zetetic journey
(poreia, 621d) needs, as its fuel, the echonic preconstructions of the truth
about the whole. Without thinking up in imagination alternative visions of
the world and thinking through in argument why they might or might not
be true, we could not make even the preliminary claims to knowledge that
subsequent inquiry would analyze, criticize, debate, or defend in the living
work of zetetic philosophy. The zetetic analysis of echonic claims is like di-
gestion: by deconstructing them into their more elemental components, it can
then reconstruct them in new configurations that serve the ongoing inquiry.
Plato invites us to enter the polemos of the dialectic between these two mod-
els by enabling us to question the written but still living dialogue that is the
Republic, through its apparent lapses and problematic arguments, deliberately
providing us with a jump-start to philosophical dialogue. The Republic itself,
after all, is a narrative, a myth, a conversation that can remain in motion. Plato
presents such preconstructions as myths (the Er story) or as unrealized ideals
(Kallipolis and the philosopher-rulers). And what is an unrealized ideal but a
myth? But if, in our finitude, we can only make sense of our world through
ideation and a narrative construal of the meaning of our situatedness, then
myth is a positive feature of our sense-making, rather than a failure or just a
second-best. So long as we do not reify the myth as ontic truth, myth provides
the narrative context for the de-, pre-, and reconstructions of the historical
world we inhabit. Such tales are only intimations, and as such, they must
be constructively deconstructed to serve as the fuel for spurring on zetetic
philosophy’s search.
 Back to the Cave 97

Philosophy, then, is a journey of reconstructions that ends only with death,

as Plato and Socrates tell us in so many ways. Of the three moments of con-
struing the world, deconstruction, preconstruction, and reconstruction, the
last takes precedence, Although preconstruction envisions and formulates an
alternative to a world that has broken down, reconstruction most properly en-
gages with our future in the world by negotiating the situated transcendence
of our existence. Far from setting up the goal of an absolute knowledge to
which we may aspire as the tool of domination over the whole, Plato’s re-
constructive vision of philosophy establishes grounds for modesty even as
we dare to re-collect the pieces of the whole, ever again. Platonic freedom is
found neither in anarchistic deconstruction nor in the systematic imposition
of a final theory, but rather in the outrageously everyday dance between myth
and reason.

2.8 BACK TO THE CAVE

In his 1931–32 lecture course, On the Essence of Truth, in a discussion of

the escape and subsequent return to the cave, Heidegger writes that “truth
is no static possession by dint of whose enjoyment we can set ourselves up
comfortably in some standpoint or other so that from there we can lecture
everyone else; rather, unconcealment happens only in the history of ongo-
ing liberation” (GA 34: 91). Heidegger’s claim here may seem compatible
with the zetetic interpretation, but we should note several things. One is that
Heidegger’s writings are equivocal about whether nihilism begins with Plato
or with Platonism. Another is that, even assuming the latter, Heidegger fails
adequately to rescue Plato, in the kind of sustained recuperation he bestows
upon a Heraclitus, from the nihilism he ascribes to Platonism. Finally, to
make sense of what we don’t possess of the truth, much depends here on what
Heidegger means by the historicity of the liberator’s return to the cave and
the truth achieved there.
Heidegger describes the escaped prisoner who returns to the cave as con-
fronting a history that “is always a unique task, fate in a determinate situation
for practical action, not some free-floating discussion in itself. The one who
has become free should be there in the cave and assert his opinion about what,
for those there, beings and the unconcealed are” (GA 34: 91). He says that
“The climb down into the cave is no fun-filled afterthought,” taken up in idle
curiosity, “but rather is the properly authentic fulfillment of becoming free”
(GA 34: 91). We know from Being and Time that fate as Schicksal is not
crude, mystic predetermination of events but rather the ontological given that
one’s own possibilities of meaning are bound up in the structures of meaning
98 Chapter Two

carried forward by one’s community in its history. Here we can agree with
Heidegger. We cannot do otherwise but address our concerns in terms that
make sense to the finite world in which we find ourselves. But Heidegger
goes on to argue that the truth to be won here, in going back to the cave, is
the truth of alētheia as the alpha-privative, as Auseinander-setzung, that is, as
confrontation, as a setting-apart.
This is Heidegger’s ontology of the polemos, according to which unhid-
denness is torn from concealment by a “primordial struggle (not mere polem-
ics), which means the struggle that first creates for itself its enemy and op-
ponent and helps that one up to the highest opposition” (GA 34: 92). Because
for Heidegger this polemos at the heart of truth is always historical and only
historical, “we come to suspect that in Plato it is not yet, or no longer, grasped
primordially,” and that “in Plato the fundamental experience from which
the word a-lētheia emerged is already disappearing” (GA 34: 93). For Hei-
degger, then, Plato’s truth as genuine transcendence, an exit from the cave, is
a falling-away from the conflictual heart of truth as unconcealment. We can-
not possess the latter truth because we do not own or master history or fate,
although we confront them continually. And yet, without the touchstone of
truth in Plato’s sense, as an ideal to strive for, can there properly be an escape,
a return, and a redemption (however partial) for the prisoner or the cave?
Heidegger’s polemical truth binds us just as firmly to the cave wall as the
shadows do, for historicity has no exit. Plato’s zetetic truth has a trajectory
and a destination, even as it strives and struggles polemically with the given.
Another objection (connected to the first) is that the zetetic model of
philosophy, while not absolutist in its own particular claims, still makes the
absolute, or the transcendent, its ideal, even if never attained. As such, it is
only a debased version of the same old otherworldly Platonism that Nietzsche
derided and Heidegger deconstructed. There is some truth to this charge,
though much of its weight depends on how much of a threat one takes tran-
scendent ideals to be and whether they are in fact otherworldly in a pejorative
sense that prevents them from having significance for a this-worldly endeavor
to perfect the understanding and community as fully as possible.44 Without
any intimation of such ideals, ethical and political standards, together with
all criteria for action, become indefensible as matters of rational discourse.
Surely this also is a serious threat. Heidegger and postmodernists may be
right to emphasize our finitude and our temporality, but the result of their
deconstruction of the Western tradition is a lapse into an extreme relativism
and historicism from which no appeal to transcendent principles is possible
without hypocrisy. As I will argue in chapters 5 and 6, by contrast, Socratic
zetetic philosophy begins in and returns to our finitude, just as the prisoner
begins in and returns to the cave, bringing finitude and transcendence into a
 Back to the Cave 99

dialectic. Plato’s lesson is that this dialectic can be taken up responsibly but
never resolved, and that any attempt to resolve it will result in philosophical
and political disaster. Plato’s bold modesty, a dynamic between tolma and
sōphrosunē, is what saves him from the worst excesses of scientistic modern-
ism or its mirror image, dogmatic fundamentalism.
This leads to a third objection.45 The passage up from the fire in the cave
to the sun outside it, Plato says, is a “rough, steep, upward way” (516e).
Would not many give it up in despair if it never reaches an end? If we postu-
late a transcendent truth but never reach it, won’t those who follow this path
finally become disillusioned and turn to either nihilism or dogmatism for
comfort? This is indeed a danger, but it is one that freedom must risk. Surely
it is the existential, epistemological justice that democracy must embrace,
at some level, or else the deliberative electoral process becomes a sham, to
be replaced by a leadership that claims total knowledge and prohibits the
search for wisdom altogether in favor of dogmatic traditionalism. Here I
agree with Stanley Rosen that nihilism is endemic to the human condition, so
any attempt to eradicate it will only aggravate the problem.46 Freedom must
always include the freedom to deny meaning and standards, and the defense
of these against nihilism must remain alive to there being no final solution
to the predicament. Again, this means that in every generation we must do
what Socrates does in the Republic: defend the rational faith in justice. And
recall that zetetic philosophy is not nihilistic skepticism, debunking just any
claim to wisdom. Robust liberal education and strong civic institutions must
prepare and preserve a prudent freedom. There is no formula for this. It is a
matter of a society’s cultivation of the appropriate civic virtues and practical
wisdom as a feature of an eleutheric liberalism.
Everything hinges, then, on the intimations of transcendence, for these
are what provide hope on the upward path as well as on that same path
downward, when the reformer descends to reconstruct the world in the light
of an intimated ideal. Good education and institutions nurture and sustain
the citizen’s personal and civic dialogue with these intimations, just as they
sustain us, each in our individuated situatedness and as members of a histori-
cal community. An intimation arises when, through reflection, discussion, or
attentive observation, we recognize the limitation of an accepted opinion,
grasp a new, potential truth, and return to our old opinion to find it and all
its filiations more fully illuminated in their historical context. An intimation
gathers to it all three moments of the zetetic journey: the wonder or shock
at an irruption of unmeaning; the attempt to formulate a question to address
that breakdown; and the response to the question as an attempt at reconstruc-
tion. Anyone who has thought critically about a matter of practical urgency
that grips them personally—not just theoretically—in ethical or political life
100 Chapter Two

has had such an experience. Heidegger himself argues that intelligibility is

not possible without some fore-structures of meaning that we posit, or, more
properly, within which we find ourselves always already positioned, or in the
terminology I am using, situated. These intimations of meaning allow us to
make a fuller sense of our circumstances whenever we engage in an act of
interpretation—which is always, because we are hermeneutical beings. It is
our calling to enter into a polemical encounter with the structures of meaning
within which we find ourselves.
To be sure, for Heidegger, the fore-structure is always the finite product of
specific historical Dasein, not an intimation of the transcendent, but I would
argue that without intimations in Plato’s sense, the experience of engaging
in philosophy, of entering into a discussion of a topic across the boundaries
of culture and history, would be impossible. Our intimations of justice or
virtue or wisdom may all begin within the finite bounds of our own histori-
cal situations, but they point to a realm that transcends them without utterly
obliterating our finite habitations. We are contingently, not absolutely, free,
but this contingency intimates the absolute. Hence the necessity of recon-
struction after the liberation of deconstruction. Because total transcendence is
beyond us, we should not despise, forget or annihilate the cave within which
all meaningful inquiry begins and to which it must go back, if we follow the
allegory—which we must, for human existence begins and ends enclosed by
finitude, although it is punctuated by transcendence. To accept the burden
of philosophy as zetetic and polemical in the larger sense is to recognize it
as a lifelong, ongoing task, one that, properly understood, far from causing
despair, opens up the richness of the human condition—suspended, as we are,
between finitude and transcendence, between earth and sky.

NOTES

1. Wordsworth, “The Excursion,” in The Collected Poems, 971, lines 1141–44.

2. In what follows, I will capitalize “Cave” and “Allegory” when referring to
these as names for a feature of Plato’s philosophy, and I will refer to the “cave” in
lowercase when discussing its details as a narrative element in Socrates’s argument.
3. Gonzalez’s analysis in Plato and Heidegger is thorough and trenchant, although
in my view it does not draw out the political meaning of Heidegger’s interpretations
sufficiently, especially in Being and Truth (GA 36/37). In addition, see his articles
“Dialectic as ‘Philosophical Embarrassment’” and “Confronting Heidegger on Logos
and Being in Plato’s Sophist.”
4. Also, GA 43: 254: “In Plato’s work there is as yet no Platonism. The ‘true
world’ [a supersensible world as ultimate reality] is not yet the object of a doctrine.”
 Back to the Cave 101

5. Less comprehensive treatments include a short passage in Heidegger’s 1926

lecture course on the history of ancient philosophy (GA 22: 102–107); another in the
1927 lecture course, Basic Problems of Phenomenology (GA 24: 403–405); a very
short discussion in the 1927–1928 Phenomenological Interpretation of Kant’s Cri-
tique of Pure Reason (GA 25: 398), where he gives a neo-Kantian reading of Plato’s
ideas as a precursor to Kant’s transcendental analytic of the understanding. These do
not develop the elaborate interpretation of the four stages of liberation found in the
later readings.
6. E.g., GA 36/37: 119, 147–48, 178, 210–13, 225.
7. For the text history, see the editor’s afterword by Hermann Mörchen to the
1931–32 course, GA 34: 333.
8. Gonzalez, Plato and Heidegger, 112–13. For other interpretations of Plato and
Heidegger on truth and on the Cave Allegory, see the chapters by Michael Inwood,
Enrico Berti, Maria del Carmen Paredes, Joseph Margolis, Stanley Rosen, Johannes
Fritsche, and Tom Rockmore in Heidegger and Plato: Toward Dialogue, edited by
Catalin Partenie and Tom Rockmore. Another helpful overview is James McGuirk,
“Alētheia and Heidegger’s Transitional Readings of Plato’s Cave Allegories.” For a
reading that carefully situates Heidegger’s interpretation of Plato in the context of
neo-Kantianism dominant in Heidegger’s early career, see Robert Dostal, “Beyond
Being: Heidegger’s Plato.”
9. Cf. GA 36/37: 146–50, and especially 165–66 and following, where Heidegger
describes Plato’s “doctrine of the ideas” as linked to the failure to understand truth as
alētheia adequately, which ultimately results in modern liberal universalism as a late
degenerate form of Platonism.
10. See Sheehan, Making Sense of Heidegger, 71–78.
11. Levinas, “Ethics of the Infinite,” 73–74.
12. See Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception, Part 1, “The Body,”
and Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference, chapter 5, “The Scaling of Bodies
and the Politics of Difference.”
13. The most comprehensive treatment of this theme in Heidegger is his “Question
Concerning Technology” in GA 9.
14. René Descartes, Discourse on Method, 50.
15. Consider J. S. Mill’s famous “harm principle” in On Liberty, in The Basic
Writings, 86.
16. The best discussion of both the strengths and the critiques of Heidegger on
truth is Daniel Dahlstrom’s Heidegger’s Concept of Truth. Especially helpful are
Dahlstrom’s explication of existential truth in chapter 4 and, in chapter 5.1–5.2, his
careful exposition of and response to Ernst Tugendhat’s important attack on Hei-
degger’s ontological conception of truth as disclosedness as effectively rendering the
operative meaning of truth void.
17. Here and following, I refer by section to Kaufmann and Hollingdales’s transla-
tion.
18. Thomas Sheehan makes this point with admirable clarity in Making Sense of
Heidegger: A Paradigm Shift.
102 Chapter Two

19. For a discussion of the young men present and their future significance, see
Bloom, The Republic of Plato, 440fn3.
20. For details about the lives of the historical figures in Plato’s dialogues, see
Debra Nails, The People of Plato.
21. For example, see the “Praise of Helen,” a defense speech written by Gorgias
for a woman more traditionally deemed guilty for plunging the Greeks and Trojans
into war, or his deliberately outrageous proof that “nothing exists,” in Curd, A Preso-
cratics Reader, 148–53.
22. McKim, “Shame and Truth in Plato’s Gorgias,” in Griswold, Platonic Writing/
Platonic Readings, 36.
23. For an account of philosophical knowing and practice compatible with the
recognition of finitude in zeteticism, see Jean-Luc Marion, Negative Certainties.
24. The Pyrrhonist skeptics were the first to describe themselves explicitly as
“zetetic,” but Socrates was not a skeptic in their sense. Socrates expresses to Meno
his wish skepsasthai kai suzētēsai (“to examine and to seek together”) what virtue is
(80d). See the rest of this passage for further uses of zētein. For zetetic Pyrrhonism,
see Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of Pyrrhonism, Book 1, 2–3, 156–88, 162–63 (I.1.2,
I.2.11, I.2.19). At issue between Pyrrhonist and Socratic zeteticism is whether the
search alone has merit or if it requires, in order to avoid nihilism, what I call below
a preconstruction of the aim of the search. Zeteticism calls for the latter; Pyrrhonism
abstains from such suppositions.
25. See Strauss, On Tyranny, 208–10.
26. I rely here on Grube’s translation of the Meno in Plato, Complete Works. Cf.
Jacob Klein, A Commentary on Plato’s Meno 94–99 and chapter 5.
27. Compare the discussion of “reflective equilibrium” in John Rawls, A Theory
of Justice, 20–22, 48–51.
28. For Socrates’ use of military language for the courage of philosophy, see Ma-
rina McCoy, Plato on the Rhetoric of Sophists and Philosophers, 30–31.
29. All quotations of the Apology are from the translation by T. G. West and G. S.
West, Four Texts on Socrates.
30. Cf. Bloom, who calls the Republic “the true apology” for Socrates in his “In-
terpretive Essay” in The Republic of Plato, 307–10.
31. For the Phaedo, I rely on the Grube translation in Plato, Collected Works.
32. For a perceptive account of Socratic phenomenology for politics in the absence
of decisive knowledge of the good, see Trott, “Saving the Appearances of Plato’s
Cave.” I agree with Trott about the centrality of dialogue for healthy, anti-tyrannical
politics on the Platonic account, but I would emphasize more than she the role of the
ideas as the motivating intimations for the ameliorative work of a polemical ethics
in political life.
33. This is the domain of respect for others in meaning-intending as a phenom-
enological-hermeneutical correlate to the Kantian respect for persons that I hope to
address in subsequent work on enacting polemical ethics.
34. See Mark Ralkowski, Heidegger’s Platonism, chapters 1 and 2.
35. See Julius Pokorny, Indogermanisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch, 215–16,
and Calvert Watkins, Dictionary of Indo-European Roots, 17.
 Back to the Cave 103

36. Here I follow David Roochnik in employing the name Socrates himself gives
to the city constructed in speech: Kallipolis, “the beautiful city” (572c). See David
Roochnik, Beautiful City, 8.
37. Hyland, Finitude and Transcendence, 57.
38. For a brief and compelling history of Platonism that supports my reading, see
Ralkowski, Heidegger’s Platonism, chapter 1.
39. Russell, “Plato’s Theory of Ideas” in A History of Philosophy; Schürmann,
Heidegger on Being and Acting, 215.
40. Henry Mendell, in an unpublished paper of this name, provided privately.
41. See Fried, Heidegger’s Polemos, 251–25.
42. I am indebted here to the work of Drew Hyland and Stanley Rosen and to
conversations with David Roochnik. See Hyland, Finitude and Transcendence, espe-
cially chapter 7, and Rosen, Nihilism, and Roochnik, Beautiful City.
43. As Francisco Gonzalez points out, it is puzzling that Heidegger, who insists
that Dasein is unterwegs, cannot see this unterwegs at the heart of Plato’s dialectic,
a dialectic essentially different from the Hegelian one. See Gonzalez, “Dialectic as
‘Philosophical Embarrassment,’” 374. My sense is that Heidegger cannot imagine a
thinking that is both under way and not also utterly bounded by historical finitude.
Apart from rare moments, Heidegger seems unable to read Plato as anything but the
writer of treatises. The Platonic dialogue, as such, as an instantiation of the dialectic
between finitude and transcendence, is quite simply invisible to him. Cf. Hyland,
Questioning Platonism, 35.
44. On this issue, consider the powerful point made by Charles Griswold in
“Longing for the Best: Plato on Reconciliation with Imperfection,” 121: “A very
different possibility is conspicuous by its absence from these seminal passages [in
the Symposium and Phaedrus], namely that the uniqueness, passingness, and mixed-
ness of an individual are the necessary conditions of his or her being lovable, indeed,
lovable just as this imperfect, complex, particular being. This is a failure common to
the Republic and the dialogues on love. That thought cannot be coherently pursued, I
think, within a Platonic framework.” This passage encapsulates what I am treating as
Heidegger’s claims about the failure of Platonist idealism to account for the belonging
and meaningfulness of finite human existence. What I argue for is a reading of the
Cave that allows us to reconcile the beloved imperfections of our specific and embed-
ded historicity with a zetetic perfectionism, as always incomplete, that emerges from,
returns to, reconstitutes, and defends a reconstruction of that finitude. For Griswold,
“the Platonic view is an invitation to a dangerous reification of persons, and thus a
negation of their moral status qua individuals” (129). My claim is that the work of
situated transcendence we may glean from Plato both constitutes and reconstitutes the
moral status of persons by taking their imperfection as an invitation to a dialogical
and reiterative cycle of engaged polemical amelioration rather than passive accep-
tance or indifference.
45. I am grateful to Alan Rosenberg for suggesting this objection.
46. See Rosen, Nihilism, especially chapter 6.
 Chapter Three

Seeing Sun and Shadow

The Metaphorics of Vision in the Cave

The name ‘human’ [anthrōpos] signifies that the other beasts neither
scrutinize nor reflect upon what they see, nor do they look into it closely,
whereas the human, once having seen—that is, ‘opōpe’—both looks
closely into it and reasons upon what has been seen. Thus, the human,
alone among the beasts, is correctly called ‘anthrōpos,’ because the human
looks closely into [anathrōn] what has been seen [opōpe].
—Socrates, in Plato, Cratylus, 399c

In chapter 2, I argued that we must go back to the cave in order to respond

to Heidegger’s charge that Platonism, especially Plato’s idea-ism, represents
the descent into the nihilistic degradation of ontological truth as alētheia. At
stake in the return to the cave is not simply what we are but who we are as
human beings, and how freedom and truth are integral to human-being. This
lies at the heart of the metaethics of the human condition. My claim, against
Heidegger, is that a certain kind of Socratic piety, or trust in the ideas, rather
than being a foundation for a dogmatic metaphysics, is a constitutive feature
of being-human, one that Socrates makes the core of his own phenomenol-
ogy of ethical life. Now I must begin to defend the cave as the operative
metaphor for the metaethics of knowing, understanding, and interpreting.
The first step is to address the metaphorics of vision, light, and shadow as
the epistemological and ontological context for the idea, the what-has-been-
seen. For that, we need to understand why this metaphorics of vision is not
merely arbitrary.

104
 Seeing Sun and Shadow 105

3.1 VISIONARY KNOWING

Plato’s core metaphysical or epistemological concepts, eidos and idea, are

grounded in vision. They mean what has a visible form (eidos) and what has
been seen (idea), both having an etymological connection to modern English
words such as vision and video. In Republic Book 6, Socrates’s exalted expla-
nation of the knowledge required by the philosopher-rulers of the ideal city
takes the sun and vision as the way to make sense of truth and understanding.
The sun, in his telling, is akin to the most exalted idea of all, the idea of the
good (idea tou agathou), which bestows intelligibility upon all other ideas,
and indeed upon all reality across what has been called the Divided Line. This
line divides the world into things perceived by the mind and by the senses,
most especially the sense of sight, and therefore into genuine knowledge and
insecure opinion.
Sense-perception as metaphor for purely mental cognition is so natural
because it shares with the problem of knowledge and meaning the experience
of taking something in and appropriating it into a larger context of response to
the world. Vision has been the dominant metaphor for knowledge in Western
philosophy. As a metaphor for knowledge, vision has its strengths. Vision, like
the understanding, can take in a wide nexus of things all at once, discerning
their differences and relative positions to one another, as well as how they
integrate as a whole. It also has its weaknesses, such as how vision can erect
a distance between seer and seen, knower and known, which can become a
pathology of disinterested theoria, of contemplation without engagement or
concern, purely for one’s own edification, risking an Icarean detachment from
the involvements of human life that can culminate in nihilism.1 It has other
limitations, as critics of ocularcentrism have pointed out, as in the feminist cri-
tique of the male gaze as the aggressive assumption of ownership or the deco-
lonial critique of theory as the way the West imposes its worldview on others.2
Nevertheless, all metaphor slips and fails to express adequately the
phenomenal experience of the world because language is always at work
renegotiating meaning. That is why at both the grand scale and in everyday
speech language must remain poetic to go on living. The sheer pervasiveness
of vision as metaphor for understanding makes it inevitable as a linguistic
touchstone in discussions of epistemology and metaphysics. Even Heidegger
is a Platonist in that his most prevalent metaphors for the understanding and
for what makes understanding possible are also grounded in vision and light.
There is the Vorsicht of Dasein’s understanding that grants a provisional in-
telligibility to the world; there is the Umsicht, the circumspection of Dasein’s
engaged situatedness that ‘sees around’ in a context and allows Dasein to
106 Chapter Three

make sense of all the filiations of meanings among things; there is the Lich-
tung that allows a world of meaning to light up as intelligible and to open up
for the understanding to inhabit. What Heidegger wants to deny is that phe-
nomenological seeing and illumination have anything to do with conventional
ethics or with a capacity for transcendence beyond world as historical. Vision
is where the polemos with Heidegger takes the field.

3.2 THE SUN AND THE DIVIDED LINE

AS IMAGES FOR KNOWLEDGE

Interpretations of the sun and the Divided line in Book 6 of the Republic are
legion for good reason. This is where Socrates gives one of the most detailed
and metaphorically gripping presentations of his understanding of the ideas,
knowledge and understanding, truth, and Being. In what follows, I do not
survey in detail the many competing interpretations of the role of the sun, the
idea of the good, and the Divided Line in Platonic metaphysics, epistemol-
ogy, and political philosophy, as that would be a major study of its own. My
goal is to provide a plausible reading of these elements, both to carry out the
polemos between Plato and Heidegger and to set the foundation for my own
interpretation of the Cave Allegory.
Socrates presents his position in Book 6 as his actual view. In so many
other circumstances he pleads ignorance, perhaps because Socrates believes
it is philosophically, pedagogically, and even politically more prudent to
ironize about his own degree of understanding about a ti esti, a particular
“What is it?” question that he has asked, such as the one about justice. This
is precisely what Thrasymachus both misunderstands and berates him for in
Book 1, calling him a “sycophant in arguments” (340d) and calling him out
on his “habitual irony” (eiōthuia eirōneia), predicting that “you [Socrates]
wouldn’t be willing to answer [the question about what justice is], that you
would be ironic and do anything rather than answer if someone asked you
something” (337a). The word eiōthuia, habitual, is related the verb ethein
and the noun ēthos, ethics in the sense of the way of life that one routinely
in-habits. While we have had over two thousand years of admiration for and
discussion of Socrates’s famous irony, eirōneia was not obviously a compli-
ment in Greek, as it meant a dissimulation, a phoniness, a self-disguising.3
All language, all conceptuality as such, is ironic, because language simul-
taneously illumines and obscures. Like Heraclitus’s polemos, it allows things
to ‘show up’ as what they are, but it also obscures their resistant earthiness,
the ‘fact’ that no words and no metaphors can entirely capture the onton sau-
thon, that there will always be slippage in meaning, as (to use Heidegger’s
 Seeing Sun and Shadow 107

language about it) the earthiness of language consistently thrusts up into the
world, destabilizing it. This polemos of earth and world is embodied in his-
torical language, and it is an aspect of why logos and polemos are “the same”
(GA 40: 66). Plato is ironic because Socrates is ironic because language is
ironic.4 As Plato says in the Seventh Letter, “because of the weakness of
words” (dia to tōn logōn asthenes), no human language can totally and finally
fulfill the logos. Because human reason and speech are discursive and finite,
they cannot account all at once and eternally for the whole of all possible
meaning. And yet for dialogos to be possible at all, we must make the at-
tempt, absent this full presence of meaning, by confronting the given meaning
of things and zetetically seeking to reconstitute the whole. We see this in both
our grand and petty struggles and play with language, from the lowly pun that
twists our expectations of words without transforming them, to poetry that
coaxes new meaning from words, to the coining of philosophical terminology
that endeavors to anchor insights in conceptual form.
The inevitable irony of genuine philosophizing fits with Thrasymachus
castigating Socrates as a sycophant in arguments. Thrasymachus interprets
Socrates’s zetetic modesty as weakness and the inability to make echonic
claims to wisdom. In Greek, the meaning of sukophantēs is not primarily an
obsequious person who tries to garner favor with those of higher status, but a
kind of a con-man, someone who earns a living through blackmail, slander,
and denouncing fellow citizens to the courts. As Allan Bloom explains in his
note on the text, sycophants “distorted the meaning of men’s acts and state-
ments, and Socrates, accused of making the worse argument appear the better,
could be compared. He was trying to make trouble and make his interlocutors
look bad before the public.” 5 In this case, the “public” are the wealthy and
high-status young men at Cephalus’s house. Thrasymachus probably per-
ceives himself in competition with Socrates to make them his paying pupils,
at least at first, before his defeat by Socrates. He sees Socrates’s ironizing as
a feeble gimmick for deflating competitors, and certainly not as a mark of
his bold yet modest ambition for what constitutes a philosophical life. Thra-
symachus therefore assumes that for philosophy to be possible at all, it must
achieve echonic wisdom, and that means Socrates is a failure and a fraud. But
this echonic conception of the role of the ideas robs them of their positively
aporetic role in opening our eyes to the contradictions in things, not for the
sake of eristic refutation and victory in argument, as a sophist would have it,
but for driving zetetic wisdom onward towards truth.
Socrates must have looked like a sophistical con-man to many Athenians,
given the depiction of him in Aristophanes’s Clouds and the fact of his indict-
ment for impiety and corrupting the youth. This makes it especially signifi-
cant that in Book 6 he does assert, seemingly unequivocally, that he has an
108 Chapter Three

opinion about what the good (to agathon) is. The young men have practically
begged Socrates to tell them what that is, because they have just determined
in the dialogue that the philosopher-rulers must know the good as the final
seal of their knowledge and the legitimacy of their rule (505a), and they may
also justifiably think that knowledge of the good would be indispensable for
living a good life. In keeping with his refusal to identify with the echonic
philosophers of Kallipolis, who have “come to the end” (504d) of their stud-
ies and possess the entire and absolute truth, Socrates, the zetetic philosopher,
denies any such knowledge. He tells them, “Let’s leave aside for the time be-
ing what the good itself is—for it looks to me as though it’s out of the range
of our present thrust to attain the opinions I now hold about it. But I’m willing
to tell what looks like a child of the good and most similar to it” (506e).
Socrates’s zeteticism is on full view here. While echonic philosophy must
be static, having attained an eternal knowledge that will not alter, zeteticism
means that Socrates must speak in terms of “the time being” (to nun), “our
present thrust” (parousan hormēn), and “the opinions I now hold” (dokountos
emoi ta nun) of the good (506e). Because of human finitude, zetetic philoso-
phy is temporal, and so Socrates’s opinions are always potentially temporary
and, according to the metaphor he will now use, subject to re-vision. The
“child of the good” is the sun, the first image he employs. The second is the
Divided Line. These serve to illuminate on a topic apparently so difficult and
abstract that Socrates himself does not claim to understand it fully and that is
virtually impossible to describe directly: the good and the idea of the good.
So, the first thing to note is that Socrates acknowledges, quite explicitly, that
what he will be presenting is not, to borrow from Kant, the thing in itself, but
rather an image of it: the sun as image (eikōn, 509a) of the good.
On the Divided Line (as illustrated in Figure 2), images are the lowest
level of being, the furthest removed (apart from what simply is not) from
what truly is. Crucially, Socrates will use an image, what is lowest, and call
upon the imaginations of his companions in dialogue, as Plato calls on ours,
to address what is the highest, the idea of the good. Although described as a
line (grammē, 509d), the Divided Line bends back upon itself, as a kind of
ontological moebius strip. The highest meets up with the lowest, idea with
imagination, as evidenced that we can and must actively enact in understand-
ing what Socrates is explaining. This is inherent to the dialectic between
imagination and idea in ideation.
An important clue to how this works is that unlike the other faculties of
mind, which only apprehend their objects, imagination is capable of produc-
ing its object as well (poiēsis). Imagination is therefore like or akin to the idea
of the good. Socrates must produce an image of the good and invite his in-
terlocutors to participate in this act of imagination, to discuss what is beyond
 Seeing Sun and Shadow 109

(epekeina) image. The idea of the good is therefore like Heidegger’s Ereignis
in being beyond being in the usual sense. Both are what make meaning as
such possible in the first place. The key difference is that the idea of the good
has an ethical teleology to it. Consider also that the whole Republic, though
portraying a dialogue, is in fact entirely narrated to a silent companion who,
like us (homoious hemin!), must imagine it to understand it.
Socrates begins his analogy by reminding his companions that “for all the
things that we then set down as many”—for example, I can draw “many”
different particular triangles and different kinds of triangle on a blackboard—
“we refer them to one idea of each as though the idea were one, and we ad-
dress it as that which really is [ho estin]” (507b)—in my example, the idea of
the triangle. He adds that “the former [that is, the many instances of a thing,
such as triangles] are seen but not intellected, while the ideas are intellected
but not seen” (507b). This makes sense if we consider that while someone
might see the figures of triangles on a blackboard, they might not ‘get’ that
these are all triangles, and that someone might see what ‘triangle’ is with the
mind’s eye without seeing a visible one.
Next, Socrates employs the sun as an offspring (508b) and image (509a)
of the good as analogon, analogously proportionate to good (508b): “as the
good is in the intelligible region with respect to intelligence and what is intel-
lected [noun te kai nooumena], so the sun is in the visible region with respect
to sight and what is seen” (508b–c). In this analogy, just as the sun provides
the light that illumines things and allows our eyes to see them—that is, to
discern them in their individual distinctiveness and their collective relations
to one another so that we might navigate an environment—so, when the soul
“fixes itself on that which is illumined by truth and that which is, it intellects,
knows, and appears to possess intelligence” (508d). Bloom translates nous
as “intelligence” in this passage, which is helpful in relating it to the cognate
forms noētos, intelligible region, and nooumena, the things intellected. But
it is important not to hear ‘intelligence’ in our ordinary sense of brainpower
but rather as intellection, the capacity for taking things in through insight or
rational intuition. For this reason, Socrates says that “what provides the truth
to the things known and gives the power to the one who knows, is the idea
of the good” (508e).
We can make some brief points about this famous assertion. One is that the
truth here, alētheia, can be understood as close to Heidegger’s sense of truth
as a-lētheia, unconcealment. It is not the truth of propositions but rather the
truth of an opening-up, an access to understanding, to intellection or insight.
This is mysterious because one might think that the idea alone, such as the
idea of the triangle, would be enough to explain that a variety of shapes,
which have some but not all features in common, are all instances of the
110 Chapter Three

single abstraction ‘triangle.’ Why is the idea of the good, which seems to be
an idea above and apart from the rest of the class of ideas, needed in addition
to serve as the “sun” of the mind’s eye? Only an integrative interpretation of
the images of the sun and Divided Line can resolve this.
Socrates makes the idea of the good even more problematic when he tells
Glaucon that not only is there this separate idea of the good, and not only
that this idea is more beautiful than knowledge and truth, but that “not only
being known is present in the things known as a consequence of the good,
but also existence and being are in them besides as a result of it, although the
good isn’t being but is still beyond being, exceeding it in dignity and power”
(509b). At these exalted heights of metaphysics, Socrates says that “Glaucon,
quite ridiculously, said, ‘Apollo, what a daimonic excess’” (509c). The Greek
here rendered as “daimonic excess” is daimonias huperbolēs, and one might
think that Glaucon is referring to what in English we call hyperbole: that the
assertion about the good as beyond truth, existence, and being itself is an
absurdly overwrought and portentous claim. In Greek, huperbolē is literally
a throwing-beyond, but more figuratively any kind of superiority, excess, or
preeminence. This can include hyperbole in our sense, but not as its primary
meaning. By saying that Socrates has spoken daimonias huperbolēs, Glaucon
is both punning on and echoing what Socrates has just said: that compared to
being, the good is dunamei huperechontos. It exceeds being in power, as well
as in dignity. So, while Glaucon might be poking playful fun at Socrates’s
lofty notion of the good, it is not obvious that he is contemptuously saying
that Socrates is speaking pretentiously and hyperbolically. Rather, he is af-
firming that the superiority of the good, in exceeding and comprising truth,
knowledge, beauty, and being, is a daimonias huperbolēs, a divinely over-
arching supremacy, above and beyond and yet still responsible for all other
things.
Some have argued that when Socrates says that Glaucon made this out-
burst “ridiculously”—gelaiōn: laughably, absurdly—this is Plato’s hint to the
careful reader that what Socrates is saying here truly is laughably ridiculous,
that this whole headlong flight of an Icarean metaphysics is seriously comic:
comic, because an absurd extravagance of high-flying, cloud-cuckoo-land
philosophy; seriously, because some people, like Glaucon, seem to need
this kind of thing to keep them on the straight-and-narrow belief that truth,
beauty, and the good all form a whole that supports the edifice of justice and
virtue.6 That is certainly the Nietzschean reading of Platonic metaphysics as
the supremely creative but ultimately farcical and slanderous lie that strives
to hold the chaos and the horror of the world at bay.7
But Socrates responds by soberly saying, “You are responsible for com-
pelling me to tell my opinions about it” (509c), that is, about the good,
 Seeing Sun and Shadow 111

and Glaucon bids him, “Don’t under any conditions stop” and “don’t leave
even the slightest thing out” (509c). Plato has introduced an ambiguity here
befitting the audacity of philosophy: that its aspirations for transcendent
knowledge may be at once as laughable as Thales falling into the well and as
divinely magnificent as the heavens he was contemplating as he journeyed.
Skeptical idealism endeavors to achieve and maintain a balance within this
ambiguity, within the compass of human finitude. That Glaucon is “compel-
ling” (anangkazon) Socrates to give what he, Socrates, emphatically calls his
opinions (ta emoi dokounta) on several occasions suggests that Socrates fully
grasps as tragi-comedy the ambiguous situation of philosophy as the con-
scious and self-reflective activity of the situated transcendence of the human
condition.8 It also reverberates with two themes in the Republic. One is the
necessity or compulsion imposed on the philosophers. The other is the opin-
ions, rather than the knowledge, that the zetetic Socrates claims to hold about
these most difficult conceptions of the nature of all being. Socrates underlines
the temporality, and so the potential temporariness, of his understanding of
these things by using the nominalized participle dokounta instead of the noun
doxa: his opinings rather than more static opinions. This calls for an integra-
tive interpretation that makes plausible Socrates’s account of the sun, the
good, and the Divided Line that is comically serious, rather than seriously
comic: It is comical, because, like Thales falling down the well—a “going-
down” underground that could well serve as a lampoon of the philosopher-
rulers who must go down, katabateon (520c, homoious hemin), back into the
cave—zetetic philosophy must remain open to the possibility of a pratfall (or
worse), and therefore to re-vision. It is serious, because an integrated account
of the good is needed to make a life of justice plausible, at least to intelligent
and promising young people like those assembled at the home of Cephalus.
Next, Socrates introduces his second analogon, the image of Divided Line,
followed by a third, the Allegory of the Cave. That in the development of the
narrative, Socrates introduces images, which are at the lowest level of under-
standing and reality according to the Divided Line, to make sense of intelligibil-
ity as such should alert us to the integrated nature of the Line itself, despite its
traditional name as the Divided Line—a name Socrates does not use. Rather,
after reminding Glaucon of the distinction between the visible and the intel-
ligible realms, Socrates introduces this image by saying, “Then, take a line cut
in two segments, one for the class that is seen, the other for the class that is
intellected—and go on and cut each segment in the same ratio” (509d).
An analogy, like all words and language, can never exactly match its sub-
ject. There is always slippage, things that don’t match up. But this is not a bug.
It is a positive feature of language as such, which must always return to the
interpretive polemos with the given and thereby think anew. This is evident in
112 Chapter Three

the lack of explanation for some of the Line’s details. It has been cut into four
segments, where the two segments each in the visible and in the intelligible
regions are of unequal length, but the ratio between their lengths is the same
from region to region. If the ratio of segment a to b is proportional to the ratio
of segments c to d, then mathematically, a:b::c:d means that segments b and
c are equal in size. But that does not tell us what the other proportions are.9
Socrates populates the four segments as follows (see Figure 2) in the visible
regions, corresponding to opinion (510a), are images, including shadows,
reflections, and the like (509e–510a), then things as we encounter them in the
world (510a); then, in the intelligible region, corresponding to knowledge, are
first the mathematical representation of things (510b–511b), then the ideas,
or forms (511b–d). He completes the description by saying that intellection
pertains to the intelligible realm, thought (dianoia, thinking-through) to the
mathematicals, trust (pistis, which could also be rendered belief) to things,
and imagination to the images (511d–e). What Socrates does not say is how
the proportional segments of the line should be ordered, whether the smallest
proportionately is at the top, for the forms or ideas, or at the bottom, for the
images.10 Such slippages should provoke grappling with what is at-issue in
the image, such as the relation between the various domains of beings and
understanding.
Another thing that Socrates does not tell us about the orientation of the line
is whether it should be horizontal or vertical, and if the latter, with the ideas
at the top and images at the bottom or vice versa. In this case, the sun, the
Allegory of the Cave, and other textual evidence suggest a vertical orientation
with the ideas at the top. The sun, first of all, appears above us in the sky as
“one of the gods in heaven” (508a). Even if modern science tells us that the
sun is neither up nor down from us in the solar system, phenomenologically,
the sun is always experienced as ‘up there.’ Only astronauts actually experi-
ence it otherwise, and that experience is a radical departure from our human
way of being, both literally and figuratively broken away from the gravita-
tional pull of the earth. In the cave, which is itself an image of the image of
the Divided Line, the released prisoner always progresses upward in under-
standing: the initial release requires the prisoner to “stand up” and to “look
up” (515c), and then ascend an “upward way” (515e) on “the soul’s journey
up to the intelligible place” (517b)—and that the fully realized philosophers
“must go back down” (520c) into the cave to rule. For these reasons, I repre-
sent the Line vertically, the smallest section for the ideas on top, because they
are models of multiple instances, and images are in the largest section at the
bottom, because images can present multiple representations of things (see
Figure 2). The upward path of the philosophical journey mirrors the flight
from the bondedness of finitude and situatedness among transitory things
 Seeing Sun and Shadow 113

to the putative liberation of transcendence among the forms. We as readers

must gather, imagine, and interpret all this by participating in dialogue with
the imagery and argument of the text, which therefore implicates us in the
integrative nature of the Line.
The productive slippage in the image of the Divided Line is particularly ev-
ident in Socrates’s explanation of thought as the thinking-through (dia-noia)
of the understanding of mathematicals. Thought is lower than intellection
(noēsis), because it is discursive; it unfolds over time rather than in an atem-
poral insight. He says that geometers “use visible forms besides [hypotheses]
and make their arguments about them, not thinking about them but about
those that they are like” (510d). In thinking through a theorem in geometry
discursively, I might draw an image of a triangle on a blackboard or craft a
triangle from wood. I am not thinking about the drawings or objects as such,
but rather what ‘is’ behind them, or above them, and that “are like” (eoike)
them—such as the triangle I see with the mind’s eye. So: “They [the geom-
eters] make the arguments for the sake of the square itself and the diagonal
itself”—that is, for the intelligible, mathematical conception of these—“not
for the sake of the diagonal they draw” (510d–e). Even more pointed is what
he says next: “These things that they mold and draw”—presumably, physical
models as well as drawings, as represented in Figure 2 by the triangle on a
sheet of paper and the pyramid—“of which there are shadows and images in
water”—presumably, shadows of the physical models and reflected images
in water of drawings—“they now use as images, seeking to see those things
themselves [auta eikeina] that one can see in no other way than in thought”
(510e–511a).
There is a strange slippage here, too, because Socrates treats reflections
as images of images, but this is consistent with something he says earlier:
“I mean by images first shadows, then appearances produced in all close-
grained, smooth, bright things [like mirrors], and everything of the sort”
(509e–510a). This suggests that even within the realm of images, there are
some ‘images’ at a further remove from things than others. Shadows, reflec-
tions, and drawings have differing implications, as images, for the under-
standing. The crucial point is that I can use a drawing of a triangle to think
about a physical triangle I have constructed. Furthermore, I can use both the
drawn and the constructed triangle as images for thinking-through the square,
diagonal, triangle as mathematical objects. In this way, the image straddles
and transcends from the sensible, visible realm to the intelligible, serving as
a ladder’s rung to make the ascent in thought. In thinking the mathematical
object, Socrates says, “this is the form I said was intelligible” (511a). Here,
he means by intelligible form (eidos) the triangle, square, or diagonal as
the “things themselves” (auta eikeina, 510d–511a) of pure mathematics, as
114 Chapter Three

illustrated in Figure 2 by the Pythagorean right triangle as understood by the

mind’s eye, not the drawings or physical modellings of them.
Nevertheless, these ‘forms’ are still only mathematical forms, not forms or
ideas in the strict sense of the uppermost division of the line. On this point, I
differ from readers, such as Gerasimos Santas, who equate mathematical defi-
nitions with the forms: “the form cube . . . is completely or perfectly a cube
in that it has all the essential features captured by the definition of a cube.”11
This obscures the question of the difference between the mathematicals and
the ideas, thought and intellection, what defines a cube and what allows us to
‘see’ that the definition makes sense. The mathematical ‘form’ is itself only
an image, within the two-part intelligible realm, for the true idea or form of
the triangle. What that would be is hard to grasp, but let’s try.12
Socrates says that, unlike mathematical forms that depend upon hypotheses—
presumably the axioms and the like that must be “set down” (hypotithenai)
in mathematics to construct proofs—intellection, noēsis, of the actual forms
requires dispensing with assumed premises such as axioms and the like. Intellec-
tion instead uses the “power of dialectic, making hypotheses not beginnings”—
that is, unexamined premises and suppositions—“but really hypotheses—that is,
steppingstones and springboards—in order to reach what is free from hypothesis
at the beginning of the whole” (511b).13 Such dialectical argumentation in intel-
lection makes “no use of anything sensed in any way, but using forms them-
selves, going through forms to forms, it ends in forms too” (511c).
Unsurprisingly, Glaucon responds, “I understand, although not ad-
equately—for in my opinion it’s an enormous task you speak of” (511c). We
readers are in the same position, and that is the point: to enter the dialectic
ourselves. If we read the Divided Line as not rigidly but only heuristically
divided, and therefore integrated in its divisions so that different sectors can
each play a role in the understanding of others, then Socrates’s very obscure
claim that dialectical intellection makes use only of forms can start to make
sense. The clue lies in what he has just said about mathematical objects, such
as the triangle we can only ‘see’ with the mind, as being forms in a figurative
sense but not forms in the fullest sense of the level of intellection of forms
that lies above both thought and the mathematical objects. Form, eidos, is
itself, after all, a metaphor, an image based on imagery itself. It is the distinc-
tive shape of a thing seen, as contained within a delineation of itself, such that
one can take it in as identical to itself and not confused with some other thing
in the field of vision. Image therefore permeates the entire Line. Mathemati-
cal objects are forms in the allegorical sense of being things that can only be
intellected, seen in their defining delineations by the mind’s eye. Dialectic
uses such ‘forms’ as mathematics uses images and models to think-through
to the pure forms at the highest level.
 Seeing Sun and Shadow 115

Still, Glaucon is right. This is very hard to understand “adequately”

(hikanōs). But that difficulty is entirely fitting to philosophy’s zetetic journey.
What Socrates says about the intellection (noēsis) of forms as higher than
the thinking (dianoia) of mathematical objects—that noēsis would use forms
alone, not unproven hypotheses, to perceive other forms—is something that
seems available only to the fully realized echonic philosophers who have
complete access to the ideas and to the good itself. Alternatively, it would
be available only to gods who, akin to the perfected echonic philosophers,
would have no need of the mediation of the body to possess cognition and
knowledge. On our interpretation, echonic philosophers are themselves only
hypotheses of the imagination, a heuristic devise for the sake of the argument
about the nature of justice and of philosophy itself. In our embodiment, we
rely on the metaphors of sense-perception to make sense of non-sensory ways
of knowing and can only imagine what it would be like to think solely with
a lingua mentis, a language of pure mind unmediated by the earthly meta-
phorics of human language. Zetetic philosophy, by contrast, would always
need to do precisely what Socrates is doing in conversation with the young
men, what Plato is doing with us in the dialogue, and I with you reading this:
using the integrated elements of the Divided Line, especially imagination
twinned in ideation with intellection, to enable philosophical vision in the
dialectic between situatedness and transcendence.
Consider the triangle. Say I am teaching a class in geometry. At the level
of images, I can draw all sorts of triangles of many different types on the
board—big and small ones, scalene and equilateral, and so on. They might
be very badly drawn, with curvy lines that don’t connect at the points, but
still do their job illustrating triangles by somehow conveying the idea that
is at issue—and note that this understanding, this grasping of triangle-ness,
precedes a geometrical definition of triangles, even for the beginning student.
It is a priori. At the level of things, I can fold or cut a piece of paper into
a triangle, or bring a triangular piece of wood to class, very much trusting
that these will serve as triangles for the purpose of instruction, even if none
of these triangles perceived with the senses has absolutely straight lines or
perfectly correct angles. At the level of thought, it gets more difficult. What
is “the mathematical” of a triangle? In geometry, one might venture to say
something like: a three-sided polygon that Euclidean geometry can prove to
have angles adding to 180 degrees.
But then what is the idea or form of a triangle that differs from such a
mathematical (in the broad sense) definition? Somehow, it involves our in-
sight into what a triangle is that goes beyond its mathematical definition. This
is true for all the ideas: they are not equivalent to definition; an idea exceeds
the definition and animates it. An idea or form guides us in understanding
116 Chapter Three

(‘intellecting’) what even very poor drawings of triangles mean in terms of

the mathematical properties of triangles that we can only think rather than
the ones we can draw or touch, which are always imprecise qua triangles. To
push this example further, one could say that the geometrical definition I just
gave for a triangle at the level of thought and “the mathematicals” is true, but
only in Euclidean geometry. If I draw a triangle on the surface of a ball, its
lines will be straight in one sense, curved in another, and its angles will not
add up to 180 degrees. This spherical triangle will violate several of Euclid’s
postulates (the “hypotheses” that Socrates says are the limitation of math-
ematical thought)—and yet, it will still be a triangle, because I have the idea
of a triangle whose “form” can guide me in making sense of what triangles
are in non-Euclidean geometry—a geometry that can get very complex, with
insights that depart very far from our ordinary conception of “triangleness”!14
This illustrates that the Divided Line is necessarily integrative, which is
to say that the divisions are conceptual, heuristic, and porous, rather than
defined by hard borders that exclude one another. At each level, other levels
obtrude: possibly as helpful, such as using images of triangles to get students
to ‘see’ the geometric principles; possibly as misleading, as when the shadow
cast by a physical triangle might distort my sensory perception of it at the
level of trust. This obtrusive integration of the Line’s divisions serves as the
basis for what I have been calling ideation, the way the Line loops back upon
itself in the construal of meaning, especially from imagination to idea. The
most dramatic example of this integration internal to Plato’s Republic, and
therefore something we might plausibly impute to Plato’s intent, is a triple
one that invites dialogue between reader and author. Just as I have just used
the example of the triangle as an image for the meaning of the Divided Line,
so has Socrates used the Divided Line as an image for the meaning of intel-
ligibility, and so has Plato used the whole of the dialogue named Republic,
in all its narrative and dialectical drama, as an image for what constitutes
philosophy.
This underlines a striking feature of the Line’s integrative structure. Unlike
the other three faculties of the mind or understanding (trust, thought, intellec-
tion), which only apprehend or become affected by their objects (pathēmata
en tēi psuchēi, 511d), imagination is also capable of producing its objects.
Events or narrations may spur my imagination of things, just as the sting of
a bee spurs my sensation of pain, but I can also choose to imagine things on
my own, just as you and I may choose to imagine the dialogue in the home of
Cephalus, or I with you or you with me. I cannot do the same with a sense-
perception. I cannot feel a pain and thereby have a bee sting me. In this way,
imagination resembles the idea of the good itself, which Socrates says is
responsible for all that is because it exceeds even being. This is compelling
 Seeing Sun and Shadow 117

evidence that the Divided Line doubles back on itself in its integration. What
it doubles back through, we leave to later.
To reinforce this point about the Line’s integration, and using the same
example: at the level of images, I can draw a triangle. The reflection of that
triangle in water or in a mirror might be more confusing than the drawing, but
these still exist on the level of images on the Line. I can also build a triangu-
lar object from wood or paper or stone; this is at the level of things, which I
can trust to be what they are (although I may be deceived). Such things cast
triangular shadows, and so they cross the border, as it were, into the division
of the Line for images. Next, I can use either the drawing or the crafted tri-
angle as an image to assist in understanding what a triangle is in geometry,
at the level of a mathematical object in the realm of intellection rather than
sense-perception. And at all three levels, the idea of the triangle is present as
the usually unacknowledged polestar of my orientation to the meaning of all
these other modes of understanding triangles.
For another example of the integration of the Divided Line, let’s consider
a different kind of thing: social or political justice. We can have images of
justice in a variety of ways, such as a statuary version of Lady Justice, who
stands blindfolded to represent impartiality, holding a sword to represent the
force of law, and lifting up scales to represent the deliberative process of
weighing facts and arguments for guilt or innocence. At the level of things,
we can find examples of just acts, just institutions, or just social arrange-
ments. As an everyday example of the latter, consider a living space where
roommates share payment, maintenance, and cleaning in a fair way. The level
of the mathematicals might seem more difficult to conceive, but philosophers
have done so, from Aristotle, in his mathematical distinction between restor-
ative and distributive justice, to Rawls, whose “difference principle” estab-
lishes the fairest outcome as the one where the least well off are still better
off than they would be in any other conceivable scenario.15 When we speak
of equality, inequality, distribution, proportionality, and the like for justice,
we are already using the language of mathematics, and it is not obvious when
we are doing so literally or imagistically.
Finally, the idea of justice will be hardest of all, but presumably it is al-
ways-already there, even if we have not grasped it thematically and explicitly,
just as the idea of the triangle is there, in advance, when we draw or build
triangles, both to teach and to learn about what triangles are. The idea, how-
ever imprecisely grasped, guides the hand of the painter, the agreement of the
roommates, or the mathematizations of the political theorist. Note that this
does not make them correct in how they have depicted justice, or performed
just acts, or come up with a mathematical schema for justice. The idea only
makes it minimally intelligible that they are seeking to understand and to do
118 Chapter Three

justice. It is the province of the fully realized, echonic philosopher-rulers to

have completely integrated all portions of the divided line with a total and
self-aware knowledge of the ideas and the idea of the good.
Finally, consider the example of ideation with which I began this book: the
person. I can depict persons in artworks such as drawing, poetry, film, and
story, and I can certainly imagine persons, such as you as reader, and you can
do the same with me as writer. I can encounter persons as things, as objects
of sense perception. You and I might meet ‘in person.’ At the level of math-
ematization, we can understand and quantify persons in the various aspects
of homo sapiens: the chemical formulae of DNA; the electrical impulses of
the nervous system; the neural networks of the brain that are the correlate to
consciousness, and so on. Each of these modes of understanding may illumi-
nate aspects of being-human, in terms of the specificity of our thrownness
into the brute facticity of given physical and historical embodiment, by tell-
ing us about what we are and how we appear and in what ways these affect
our being-human. Nevertheless, none of these modes of understanding gives
us access to who other people are, unless we define the Who in terms of the
materiality of the What. But this reductionism—the reducing of personhood
to some lower level of being—would violate the very phenomenon at is-
sue. For Heidegger, as for Kant, to be a person is to be a Who, not merely a
What, a thing. To be a person entails what Heidegger calls Jemeinigkeit, the
always-my-ownness of individuated embodiment as person. That ownness
of your personhood is nothing I could ever experience directly, even if we
were to meet in person: I can only impute it to you circumstantially, and you
to me, because to experience that personhood directly, you would have to be
me, or I you. Nevertheless, unless one suffers from a profound psychological
disability, we must and do impute personhood as an idea to other persons as
Other, simply as a way of being-human.
Ideation gathers all these elements together. Because persons matter to me
qua persons, I may depict them in art or imagination. I may long for them or
avoid them as things in the world. I may study them in genetics, or biochem-
istry, or neurology. Ideation serves to bring these partial aspects of person-
hood together in the light of the idea of the person. That idea of the person, in
our finite understanding as human-beings, never gets finally and thoroughly
grasped in an echonic vision so that no further inquiry is ever needed. It is
an intimation of a truth phenomenologically confirmed as meaningful rather
than illusory because it is hermeneutically indispensable to our everyday
living-with-Others, at the levels of imagination, trust, and thought, and so as
the metaethical grounding for an ethics. It also is essential to our reconstruc-
tion of what it means to be a person whenever that everyday understanding
breaks down, as it must for finite beings such as ourselves, especially in the
 Seeing Sun and Shadow 119

domain of ethical and political life. Ideation, as the active integration of the
Line in the understanding of our finite existence, is how polemical, zetetic
philosophy reconstructs, repairs, and heals its understanding of being-human
when faced with contradictions in the phenomena that throw the meaningful
world out of joint. This is where the idea of the good enters the picture.

3.3 THE IDEA OF THE GOOD

Now we return to the idea of the good, the idea tou agathou, to understand
why it would be the final thing the almost-completed echonic philosopher
would have to see in the realm of the intelligible to integrate fully all four
regions of the Divided Line. The idea of the good is one of the most con-
tentious features of the Platonic corpus, and I will not attempt to provide a
comprehensive scholarly interpretation here. My goal is to offer a plausible
alternative to Heidegger’s rejection of Platonism and to show how the idea
of the good might fit within what I am calling Plato’s skeptical and zetetic
idealism as a metaethical grounding for ethical life.
If the Line is integrated, and if, as Socrates says, the idea of the good is
responsible for all that is, then the understanding of even those people who
are furthest from being philosophers, who are firmly or even willingly bound
in the bonds of the lower cave, is in some way made possible by the idea
of the good, even if they are unaware of this grounding. The good filters
through ideas to mathematical representations to physical objects to the even
most tenuous shadows. A clue to the nature of the good lies in its ethical
and political role as something the philosopher-rulers must know in order to
rule with wisdom and authority. This is so even if the good applies to more
than matters of justice and ethics, because the conversation in the Republic
is rooted implicitly in what a good life would be (344e) and explicitly, as
Glaucon requests, in whether justice is a virtue that is good for the soul and
that makes a good life (357a–358d).
Knowledge of the idea of the good, says Socrates, is necessary for the “just
thing and the rest”—that is, for all the virtues, as well as institutions for a
just society—to “become useful and beneficial” (505a). This is why echonic
philosophers must come to possess this idea in order to enact justice “and the
rest.” While Socrates never lays claim to the echonic vision himself, that does
not mean that the idea of the good plays no role in the zetetic philosophical
life or in ethics. The ubiquity of the good, its presence in even the most mun-
dane ways in everyday life, is captured by ordinary expressions in English.
We might say that a hammer is no good for setting a screw into place, but that
a screwdriver is. My ticket on the subway is good for a few hours. Someone I
120 Chapter Three

work with might be a good-for-nothing. This good-for indicates a purposeful-

ness, a teleology, of a thing within a much larger context of making sense of
purposes, practices, and actions that defines an understanding of a world and
how we interpret beings within it, what we take them as and what we take
them for in being what they are in that context of meaning. To understand this
conceptually is to “save the phenomena” (sōzein ta phainomena) in the most
ancient sense of phenomenology. Any proper account of something must be
able to explain how it appears and makes sense at the human scale.16 The Be-
ing of anything, its “is-ness,” is already there for us, accessible in what it is
as itself, as what it means for it to be in that context.17
This is not the Kantian “thing in itself” that lies behind phenomenal ap-
pearances, to which our sensory and conceptual filters never have direct
access. However, and this is pivotal to the polemical nature of understand-
ing and interpretation, apprehension of what a being ‘is’ is not static: the
earthiness of meaning resists the absolute view from know-where of the sky-
bound understanding that tries to make final and total sense of the world as
opened up within the horizons of an historical situatedness. What things are,
as always-already interpreted, is ever-again open to breakdown, reinterpreta-
tion, reconstruction, and reintegration in a re-envisioned world of sense. The
thing-in-itself does not like a gremlin constantly overturn the tables of the
understanding until we get ‘things’ right, except in the sense that what beings
are “in themselves”—the hōsautōs onta, as Socrates puts it (479e)—is always
subject to the polemical cycle of breakdown and reconstruction of meaning
because of the finite, mortal, and temporal nature of human-being’s under-
standing. If there ‘is’ a thing-in-itself for Socrates and Plato, what anything
‘really’ is apart from what it appears to be to us, it is an idea of reason. We
posit it as a heuristic, like the echonic philosopher as an idea of reason, to
guide and motivate the self-moving polemical existence of being-human as
ever-again interpreting its world.
The decisive question is what makes the knowledge of the echonic phi-
losophers viable as the legitimate basis for their rule. The comic example
of Thales falling into a well while contemplating the heavens is shorthand
for conveying the distinction between sophia, theoretical wisdom, and
phronēsis, practical wisdom. We can certainly imagine that a thinker might
have astonishing insights into physical nature or the human condition but be
incapable of conveying these insights intelligibly to others, and even more
importantly in this context, incapable of engaging the world in any effective
way to implement these insights in a way that would do any good. That last
point is why the idea of the good would be so vital to the philosopher-ruler.
One might have all sorts of knowledge and insight without knowing what
these are good for. A geometer might know all about planar triangles and
 Seeing Sun and Shadow 121

spherical triangles as mathematical objects but still not know that, as a thing,
a triangle is good for building strong structures, such as load-bearing girders
on a bridge, or that, as an image, triangles are good for lessons in geometry,
or as illustrations for epistemological arguments in philosophy. If these seem
like trivial examples, consider scientific breakthroughs that have led to ep-
ochal transformations in technology. Revolutionary discoveries in genetic
engineering, such as gene-editing technology, promise previously unavail-
able therapies and cures for terrible diseases, but they could also produce
population-obliterating diseases. Their beneficial application—their use for
the good—depends both on knowing what the good would be as a goal, a
telos, of action in a particular context, and on phronēsis, wisdom enacted in
practice, to see one’s way to attaining that good in the contingent, historically
situated circumstances.
In ethical and political life, consider the virtue of courage. An artist or
writer might do very well at depicting courage in a painting or a story, and
we might recognize courageous deeds, and even understand why the neuro-
physiology of the brain can render someone so anxious that it derails the
confidence needed for a normal life. But without knowing what courage
is good for, an educator and leader would be working in the dark with this
virtue, both for inculcating courage in a new generation and for making a
place for courage in personal, civic, and institutional life. Above, we used
the example of justice in art, in action, and in its mathematical consid-
erations, but without knowing what justice is good for, one can imagine
someone understanding justice conceptually, but not how to implement it in
society or in her own conduct. This is not simply a question of ‘applying’ a
philosophical idea. As Glaucon’s initial demand of Socrates makes clear, the
question at issue is what justice is good for, whether justice is vital for living
well. Socrates insists that justice is intrinsically good, as well as instrumen-
tally good (358a), and so the good is not merely a matter of consequences.
An understanding of the good is constitutive of a good life, not just in its
achievements but in itself.
One might argue that knowing what a virtue is good for is implicit to
knowing what the virtue is, a position close to the Socratic claim that virtue is
knowledge. But this assumes an echonic version of philosophical knowledge
that possesses a complete and apodictically certain understanding of things, a
version that is at best an idea of reason and that would not apply to what the
zetetic Socrates emphatically describes as his opinions about such things. As
Aristotle argues in the Nicomachean Ethics, equating knowing what virtue is
with doing what is virtuous clearly contradicts the phenomena (tois phainom-
enois enargōs, 1145b27) of ethical life as we experience it. Peoples’ actions
may well fall short of what their convictions dictate about what is ethical.
122 Chapter Three

In Heidegger’s lectures courses of the 1920s, when he has not yet identi-
fied Platonism as the source of metaphysical nihilism,18 he naturally gives due
respect to the idea tou agathou as what Socrates in Book 6 of the Republic
famously calls epekeina tēs ousias, beyond being (509b). In 1926, Heidegger
defines it as follows: “Idea of the good: that from which everything becomes
understandable, that towards which the various activities strive, for the sake
of something, that to which something is suited and designated” (GA 22:
113). Heidegger assimilates the idea of the good to Seinsverstandnis, the
understanding of Being that makes sense of a world and inner-worldly be-
ings ontologically. To use his example from Being and Time, we understand
the hammer as suited to the task of pounding nails for the sake of hanging
a picture or building a house as governed by a fuller nexus of activities of
making a home.
This nexus of ontological-hermeneutical understanding is inherently pur-
posive for Heidegger, but not in the teleological sense that Plato or Aristotle
would ascribe to the good of action. In this same passage Heidegger sug-
gests “uncoupling the problem of Being from the idea of the good” and the
“uncoupling of Plato’s philosophy from Socrates and from his grounding
in a specifically ethical orientation” (GA 22: 114). This is why, in his more
elaborate analyses of the Cave Analogy starting in the 1930s, when develop-
ing the more radical critique of the Platonic roots of metaphysical nihilism as
the source of modern “Liberalism,” Heidegger defines the idea of the good as
the Ermächtigung. This is what enables or empowers any and all beings and
activities to be meaningfully what they are and thus empowers the opening up
of truth as unconcealment, what Heidegger will soon be calling the Ereignis,
the ontological event that establishes a meaningful world and allows human-
being to own up to and inhabit it.19 With this move, Heidegger effectively
accomplishes the disjunction of ontology and ethics in his reading of Plato in
which the idea of the good signifies Plato’s failure to make that move himself.
Heidegger still credits Plato with being responsive to the question of Being,
but only partially and unthematically. The idea of the good points to the prob-
lem of how meaningfulness is possible for the understanding, which allows
Heidegger to discern echoes of the question of being and truth as alētheia
in Plato while also charging Plato with obscuring the question of Being and
truth behind an ethical conception that links correctness and beingness. This
obscuring of the Being question that allows Platonism over millennia to elide
ontological universalism with ethical universalism is the root of Liberalism
for Heidegger. By severing the link of the ontological and the ethical in the
idea of the good as well as from its status as “beyond Being,” Heidegger
seeks to overcome what he deems the nihilism of a transcendent (epekeina)
Good as the touchstone for both philosophical and ethical life.
 Seeing Sun and Shadow 123

As Robert Dostal points out in an insight he develops from Gadamer, even

in granting the idea of the good the power of empowering the Being of all
beings, Heidegger glosses over the special status of the idea of the good as
distinct from all other ideas:

The ideas are presented by Plato as true Being (ousia), but the Good is beyond
Being. It is the very cause (aitia) of Being. As the source of light the sun is
more difficult to see than any thing. Rather it lets things be seen for what they
are, while it itself remains, for the most part, unseen. Though Plato does call the
Good an idea, unlike the other ideas it is never in the Republic called eidos as
the others are. Heidegger translated eidos as Aussehen or “appearance.” In ac-
cord with this, the Good should not be understood as an appearance. Rather the
Good presents no appearance. It is beyond the forms. It is their very ground.20

Note that the “beyond Being” of the idea of the good, unlike the other ideas,
has no form.21 This corresponds to what I will argue later is the Beyond of
the idea of the good as what slips over the arc of the Divided Line. The Line
in fact reveals itself as a Divided Ring where the idea of the good, as the
formless source of form, allows image and idea to meet up in dialectic to
draw meaning from unmeaning (see Figure 3). This, I will argue in chapter
8, is what happens when ethics as a set of established norms breaks down
into a crisis of unmeaning, such as the one Thebes faced in the Antigone. A
polemical ethics must draw upon the unformed but unshakable heart of what
is ethical to re-form and reconstruct the meaning of ethics conceptually, in the
given situation, with phronēsis.
This makes sense if the idea of the good, or the good itself, stands above
not only all other ideas but if, in its “divine superiority” (509c) it also exceeds
even truth and being itself. While Heidegger must have some sympathy for
this, because he too seeks what it is that makes intelligibility and meaning
possible, he must ultimately reject the idea of the good for the following rea-
sons. The first is that what grants meaning cannot be some idea subsisting in
some eternal, otherworldly domain, because Being is intimately bound to time
and to the finite historicity of being-human. Second, while Heidegger might
accept an implicit teleology of the Woraufhin, the projective upon-which of
all meaningful activity as directed to some purpose which some thing or ac-
tion might be good for, such purposes are always enclosed in a finite world
of involvements, not in a teleology of the good that transcends historical situ-
atedness.22 Finally, because Heidegger rejects the transcendental universalism
of the good in human existence, he must also reject moralistic claims about
universalist ethics and political right.23 I will argue against this that ethical life
is the phenomenologically unavoidable conduct of fully being-human, and that
to dismiss it as mere moralism is to belie our existential nature.
124 Chapter Three

3.4 THE WRAITH OF THE NAME

ON THE DIVIDED RING

The following passage by Stanley Rosen on this subject comes close to my

position but brings it into sharper relief, because we disagree on the idea of
the good as epekeina tēs ousias, beyond Being:

If ousia refers to the nature of being altogether, then “beyond” must mean here
either that the Good is not, that is, not only is it not a particular being (on), it
does not exist in any sense of that difficult word [i.e., “exist”]; or else the Good
does exist, that is, “be,” but it also goes beyond ousia into some higher domain.
The former case is unthinkable, since for Socrates we cannot think of what is
not; the latter case seems to conjure up a hybrid entity like a centaur or hippo­
griff, one which both is and is not. In this case, it seems to be a member of the
domain of genesis, the members of which wander between being and nonbeing.
We are here facing one of those points in Plato that are too cryptic to be ame-
nable to an entirely satisfactory explanation. My own preferred view is that the
Good is “beyond” being in the metaphorical sense that it is neither this nor that
of a separate and definable kind but is rather a property or set of properties of
Platonic Ideas, namely, intelligibility, stability, and eternity.24

Rosen is certainly right it would be “unthinkable” (nonsensical) that the good

be “beyond” Being in the sense that the good simply does not exist. Rosen
resists the alternative, though, that the good be some sort of contradictory
hybrid between what “is and is not.” In Rosen’s solution, the “beyond” of the
idea of the good describes the property or properties of the ideas as such. The
good is what gives each idea its specific intelligibility (how it grants mean-
ing to something in everyday life), its stability (how everyday life’s meaning
is reliably grounded, not chaotic), and its eternity (how meaning persists as
universally normative across time and culture).
But what if the Divided Line were not simply a line but a Divided Ring?
For echonic philosophy, the Line must be just that: linear (Figure 2). It rises
from what is least in Being, the shadows, reflections, and images, to what is
most in Being, the ideas and forms; what lies beneath the images simply is
not (mē onti; 477a–478d). So there is nothing beyond the idea of the good,
which is itself beyond Being. The echonic philosopher would rise through
the levels of the Line to arrive ultimately at certain knowledge of the ideas
and the good, at which point the journey would “come to the end” (504d).
For zetetic philosophy, by contrast, the journey does not end, at least not in
this embodied existence. The triadic structures of wonder-question-response
and de-, pre-, and reconstruction are cyclical, like a ring. For the zetetic
philosopher, knowing is not a possession but a way of being that opens up
in wonder, breaks down what is at-issue through formulating a question,
 Seeing Sun and Shadow 125

and proceeds, if it can, to reconstitute a meaningful world through argument

while leaving open the possibility of responding ever-again to new break-
downs of meaning.
Admittedly, to think of the Divided Line as simply the front of a Divided
Ring seen straight on, along one half-edge of its circumference, is a depar-
ture from the text of the Republic. My contention is that such a departure
in imagination is exactly what Plato’s dialectical method encourages us
to enact in ideational dialogue with him. As Julia Annas and others have
pointed out, there are many “annoying” puzzles and problems in explain-
ing the Line’s details.25 My claim is that such slippages and difficulties are
not a flaw but feature of the Allegory (as of all allegories), because neither
Plato nor Socrates is providing some utterly final and authoritative account
of knowledge and reality. Rather, they offer through the Allegory a precon-
struction of the articulation of our understanding of the world, a philosophi-
cal account that has been so fertile because intended for deconstruction and
reconstruction. If a complete and final understanding of the linked natures
of Being and knowing is not something we can possess totally in echonic
vision, at the end of the line—but if, at the same time, the world always-al-
ready makes a provisional sense that we can analyze, interpret, and enlarge
upon—then we are both condemned and liberated to use our imagination
to put into image and word what is our best understanding in light of the
intimation of an idea.
This is what it means to articulate an idea and why ideation and imagi-
nation are fundamentally two sides of the same endeavor. They are linked
through the dark side of the Divided Ring, the half-arc of the circumference
we cannot see when looking at it head-on, the part illumined by neither
natural nor artificial light. Figure 3, superimposing the Divided Line on the
Cave, illustrates this dark side of the Ring as the domain of unmeaning, or
nothingness, as passing through the earth, that which is hidden and unex-
posed. As Richard Kearney puts it in a discussion of the Czech philosopher
Jan Patočka’s conception of “negative Platonism,”
[I]magination is the tracing of transcendence. The Idea of the Good could not
make itself manifest within our finite experience without the testimony of such
imaginary traces. Consequently, if imagination appears to refer to a realm of
non-being, considered from the standpoint of empirical experience, it succeeds
in breaking through the closed horizon of objective entities and pointing to the
Idea of the Good. Without this transcending power of imagination there would
be no such thing as moral freedom. Freedom presupposes the everyday activity
of imagination.”26

The breakthrough occasioned by the meeting up of imagination and idea

in ideation requires these traces, what I have called intimations, of the idea
126 Chapter Three

of the good to animate and guide the zetetic endeavor of reintegrative re-
creation after a breakdown.
The cyclical nature of the Divided Line as Divided Ring is all the more
appropriate if we consider the sun as image for the idea of the good. Socrates
himself alludes to the cyclical rather than the stationary nature of meaning
when he says that even after emerging from the cave (like the sun from the
underworld), the escaped prisoner would make sense of the heavenly realm
“more easily at night” and only after that “the sun itself by itself” (516a–b).
The standard image, with the sun at the summit of the visible realm, can re-
inforce the impression that the progress of the understanding is linear, finally
reaching its echonic apogee in contemplation of the sun as allegory for the
good, where the sun remains locked in place at high noon, just as “The sun
stopped in the middle of the sky” for Joshua in his victory over the Amorites
(Joshua 10:13). But even for Joshua, the sun finally did set. In Greek mythol-
ogy, the sun-god Helios makes a cyclical journey, passing every day into the
chthonic underworld of Hades and emerging again each dawn. As Mircea
Eliade explains, “the entry into Hades is called ‘the gates of the sun,’ and
‘Hades’ as pronounced during the Homeric age—‘A-ides’—also brings to
mind the notion of what is ‘invisible’ and what ‘renders invisible.’ The swing
between light and darkness, solar and earthly, can therefore be taken as two
alternating phases of one and the same reality.”27 The dark side of the Divided
Ring, as the hidden, under-earthly realm of Hades, is a-eidetic, the domain of
unmeaning as the absence or undoing of ideas (a-ides), like the wraiths that
gather and then dissolve at the visit of Odysseus to the underworld. It is where
the intelligibility that grants meaning lapses into unmeaning.
That there is nothing beyond the idea of the good, and that what is not
lies beneath images and shadow, indicates that the dark side of the Ring is
Nothing itself, the counterpart to Being. But as Heidegger would remind us,
this Nothing is not no-thing, the sheer absence of entities in “a realm of non-
being,” about which it would be non-sense to speak. Rather, if the question of
Being is about how the world can make sense at all, how a meaning to things
and actions is somehow always-already there for us, then we exist as much in
a world that makes sense and has meaning as in a world that makes non-sense
and frays into unmeaning. We will address this in more detail when we dis-
cuss the breakdown that happens in the cave in chapter 4, but the fundamental
point is this: If we do not possess final, echonic knowledge, then the possibil-
ity of meaning breaking down is always impending whether it manifests in
terror or in wonder, which the Greeks indicated with a single expression, to
deinon. Plato understood just as well as Heidegger that being-human, in our
finite historicity, involves the polemical negotiation of meaning and unmean-
ing in taking up the dialectical cycle of the Divided Ring. After all, in Greek
 Seeing Sun and Shadow 127

myth, the sun does pass through the underworld; the chthonic realm of dark-
ness is not a total absence of light. Just as the sun may leave its trace behind
in glowing embers, when a world collapses into unmeaning in a breakdown,
inklings and intimations of meaning to-come may still beckon towards the
world’s reconstruction, just as the stars and moon illuminate the night, even
in the absence of the sun.
We do not usually see the dark side of the Divided Ring because we usually
do not want to see it. Unmeaning is ontologically unsettling, what Heidegger
called unheimlich, uncanny or, more literally, unhomely. The Nothing of
unmeaning casts our regular habits into doubt and sends tremors through
our habitation of a world that, for better or worse, at least makes sense to
us. To borrow from Roberto Esposito, the dark, under-earthly, semicircular
arc of the Divided Ring is an image for the perennial problem of negation in
Western thought and its irruption into ethics and politics. In the face of an
anxiety about the finitude of the human condition and the ever-present threat
of identity succumbing to unmeaning, the totalitarianism of the twentieth
century arose
as the attempt to eliminate negation by characterizing as universal a political,
social, or racial type of particularity. The category of totality, from which totali-
tarianism takes its name, was nothing but the device used by those who aimed
to eliminate anything that did not fit into their own self-affirmation.28

The metapolitical question then becomes not how to negate negation as a way
to fend off all threats of unmeaning in some echonic, unshakable self-identity
and self-certainty, which so easily degenerates into a pathology of annihila-
tion of all potential threat and otherness, but rather how to recognize and
accept negation and unmeaning as a potentially positive feature of the cycle
of human historicity. To rely again on Esposito, we can understand the dark
side of the Divided Ring as a potentially affirmative negative: “Conceived
of in an affirmative form, the negative is the limit that cuts across our life,
revealing what it could be and has never been. . . . For this reason, it can at
the same time be actual and inactual—the inactual that continues to disrupt
our actuality.” 29 Openness to this cutting-across of negation in finitude is the
starting point of a polemical ethics guided by a skeptical idealism.
To be human, as the Between, means always to be exposed to the earth-
quakes of unmeaning that threaten to upset a settled world. As we will discuss
in the next chapter, we can respond with despair or outright nihilism to such
breakdowns of unmeaning in our habitation. We can also respond, in zetetic
philosophy, to the breakdown as a break-in of wonder, an opportunity for
reflective knowing that might enlarge the sense of the world. If the finitude
of human-being entails that we may never, in this embodied life, achieve a
128 Chapter Three

fully realized knowledge, then the cyclical irruptions of unmeaning must be

an existentially constitutive feature of our dynamic polemos with the world
and to which we are called to respond. This would be a Platonic version of
Heidegger’s call of conscience, with the difference that the struggle with un-
meaning must be guided by the meeting of idea and imagination in the work
of ideation as it strives to make reconstructive sense of the world. The mo-
tion of this polemos between meaning and unmeaning in zetetic philosophy
is helicoidal (which admittedly strains the metaphor of the ring to its limit),
because, when successful, it returns to where it was before, but with a larger
sense of the meaning of the world, much like the progress of Dante through
all three domains of the Divine Comedy.
Finally, it is important not to leave the impression that unmeaning, the
dark side of the Divided Ring, is simply obscure, or worse, an obscurantist
mystical notion. In his Preface to Eugene Gendlin’s A Process Model, Robert
Parker quotes a wonderful passage from William James:30

Suppose we try to recall a forgotten name. The state of our consciousness is

peculiar. There is a gap therein; but no mere gap. It is a gap that is intensely
active. A sort of wraith of the name is in it, beckoning us in a given direction.
. . . If wrong names are proposed to us, this singularly definite gap acts imme-
diately so as to negate them. . . . And the gap of one word does not feel like the
gap of another, all empty of context as both might seem necessarily to be when
described as gaps.31

What James here describes as the “gap” is what I am calling the dark side of
the Divided Ring, the realm of unmeaning that negates a given understanding
or seemingly withholds a new one. Forgetting a name is an everyday occur-
rence, unsettling or unnerving, perhaps, but rarely traumatic; nevertheless, it
illustrates the negational irruption of unmeaning into existence, what I will
call the breakdown. As James says, the gap is “no mere gap,” nothingness
as sheer void; it “is intensely active” in prodding us to mind the gap and fill
it; it is an experience of the inactual that can either dismember the actual or,
if grasped positively, that can evoke the hidden potential of the actual that is
only as-yet inactual.
James brilliantly calls this a “wraith of the name” in the gap, a ghost both
present, because I feel its lack, and absent, because I cannot fulfill it, at least
not immediately and at will. This “name” can stand not just for the name of a
person but for a word or concept for anything at all. Anyone who has tried to
speak a new language surely has had this experience: struggling and fumbling
to bring forth a word for what you know you mean but cannot express. Gend­
lin calls this experience the “dot-dot-dot” (“[. . .]”), the powerful embodied
sense that there is a meaning to convey, but it lies just beyond articulation
 Seeing Sun and Shadow 129

in that “gap” of unmeaning—until one finds the word, or the image, or the
brushstroke, or the musical note to express it, in the appropriate context.32
The wraith of the name hovers in unmeaning, “beckoning us in a given direc-
tion”; this is what I have been calling the intimation of an idea. The wraith
is whatever is at-issue in a question opened by wonder, from the everyday
to the earth-shattering. It is a pre-conceptual, as-yet-unarticulated sense of a
meaning, or what Parker calls a “more-than-conceptual knowing” that guides
the work of imaginative articulation.33 We can close the gap on the dark side
of the Divided Ring between the beckoning of the wraith and the fulfillment
of meaning through the dialectic between imagination and idea.34
Taken as a whole, this is the process of ideation. It is akin to what has long
been called the hermeneutical circle, the problem of how, in interpretation,
to relate part to whole, for each element must be related to an overarching
context, but each such whole must encompass each of its constitutive parts.
The problem of part and whole is not merely an issue for an obscure field of
interpretive studies. Factically, as a feature of our existential-hermeneutical
nature, the circle obtrudes upon us as finite beings because the coherence of
part and whole inevitably frays. The understanding collides with breakdowns
and propels us into the gap of unmeaning that demands our attention in re-
interpretation on the dark side of the Divided Ring, what Gadamer describes
as being “pulled up short” in any interpretive context, be it scholarly, ethical,
or everyday. The figures of both circle and ring are somewhat misleading,
though, because, as Gadamer also says, the existential-hermeneutical “task is
to expand the unity of the understood meaning centrifugally,” which is why
the work of reinterpretation “is never finished; it is in fact [for finite human-
being] an infinite process.”35 The circle or ring operates “centrifugally” when
properly engaged because, as when we learn a new language, the process of
ever-again reintegrating part and whole is expansive. It enlarges the under-
standing even if never complete. Its motion is helicoidal, not a vicious circle
that merely ends up where it began.
To bring this full circle to the idea of the good, it is the good that
prompts the imagination to conjure possibilities of meaning, which either
come or do not. But without the idea of the good, no name, no concept, no
word could be found to fit the purpose in any particular context hovering
between meaning and unmeaning. This is why I disagree with Rosen that
the “beyond Being” of the idea of the good is only “a property or set of
properties of Platonic Ideas, namely, intelligibility, stability, and eternity.”
Because it straddles the preconceptual and the conceptual, the idea of the
good is the “beyond” that elides the border between the realm of the intelli-
gible (meaning) and unintelligible (unmeaning) in ideation. The idea of the
good is indeed “unthinkable,” as Rosen puts it, in purely conceptual terms,
130 Chapter Three

because it animates the ideational process between the conceptual and pre-
conceptual (or more-than-conceptual) life of the mind. It is what makes the
“beckoning” of the wraith of the ideas, which have not yet fully taken on
form (eidos), meaningfully promising to the imagination. It is the idea of
the good that engenders the trust of Socratic piety in a skeptical idealism
that seeks the light at the end of the upward path from the cave, guided by
the glimmering intimations that may be discerned in an earthen darkness
nevertheless rich in possibility.

NOTES

1. For a critical assessment of theoria, see Andrea Nightingale, Spectacles of Truth

in Classical Greek Philosophy, especially chapters 2 and 3 on its role in Plato and the
Republic. Nightingale’s analysis is explicitly sociological, at least in part, in tracing
the transition from ordinary Greek language usage to philosophical knowing in Plato
and Aristotle as theoria (beholding, contemplation). She rightly observes the poten-
tial distortion this may occasion, especially if visual “spectacle” is conceived as the
only way of knowing, but this does not conflict with my claim that some metaphor
for knowing is necessary and that any such metaphor, by the nature of language, is
distorting. The Socratic journey of zetetic ascent to seek the best vantage for seeing
fully is compatible with critical reflection on the vision-metaphor itself, too, as a lad-
der to be kicked away at the end of the climb.
2. On the latent nihilism of theory and of scientism as indifferent to the human
scale of existence, see Reid, Heidegger’s Moral Ontology, 29–49. For critiques of
ocularcentrism, see David Kleinberg-Levin Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision
and Sites of Vision, as well as essays by others in his edited volume, Modernity and
the Hegemony of Vision, for a wide-ranging critique of vision in Western thought;
see also Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century
French Thought. For a feminist critique targeted on Plato’s Cave, see Luce Irigaray,
“Plato’s Hystera” in Speculum of the Other Woman. For a decolonial and antiracist
critique of ocularcentrism, see Franz Fanon’s appropriation of Sartre on the gaze to
explore the fixation of identity upon the colonized and racialized, chapter 5 of Black
Skins, White Masks, Helen Ngo’s lucid overview of the topic of the racialized gaze
in “The White Gaze, Being-Object, and Intercorporeity,” in Pfeifer and Gurley, Phe-
nomenology and the Political, as well as Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics
of Difference, 125ff. For a defense of the vision metaphor, see Hans Jonas, “The
Nobility of Sight.”
3. See Drew Hyland on Plato’s “complex irony” in Finitude and Transcendence,
chapter 3, especially 101–3; also, Roochnik, “Socratic Ignorance as Complex Irony.”
4. On the difference between Plato’s and Socrates’s irony, See Griswold, “Plato’s
Metaphilosophy,” in Platonic Writings/Platonic Readings, 161. On the irony of
language as such, see Kenneth Sayre’s “Plato’s Dialogues in Light of the Seventh
Letter,” also in Platonic Writings/Platonic Readings.
 Seeing Sun and Shadow 131

5. See Bloom, The Republic of Plato, 445fn34.

6. Consider Strauss, The City and Man, 119: “The doctrine of ideas which
Socrates expounds to his interlocutors is very hard to understand; to begin with, it
is utterly incredible, not to say that it appears to be fantastic. . . . No one has ever
succeeded in giving a satisfactory or clear account of this doctrine of ideas.” Rosen
attacks Strauss for what he takes to be his esoteric anti-Platonism: “I suspect that
Strauss did not take seriously the doctrine of the noetic perception of pure form [be-
cause] for Strauss, philosophy is discourse. Or in slightly different terms, I suggest
that Strauss regarded philosophy as finally impossible because of the impossibility
of furnishing the discursive validation of the foundations”; Rosen, “Leo Strauss and
the Quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns,” in Leo Strauss’s Thought, 141.
7. Consider Nietzsche, “How the ‘True World’ Finally Became a Fable” in Twi-
light of the Idols, 23–24, as well as 14 and 21; also The Will to Power, §1067.
8. For a trenchant discussion of this theme, see Hyland, Finitude and Transcen-
dence, chapter 5, “The Whole Tragedy and Comedy of Philosophy.”
9. See Klein, A Commentary on Plato’s Meno, 119fn27, and Annas, An Introduc-
tion to Plato’s Republic, 247.
10. Compare the differing illustrations in the text notes of C. D. C. Reeve’s trans-
lation, which places ideas in the largest realm (Plato, Collected Works, 1130), and in
Bloom’s translation in The Republic of Plato, 445fn34, which finesses the ambiguity
by not distinguishing the proportions of uppermost and lowermost zones.
11. Santas, Understanding Plato’s Republic, 133, also 143.
12. In what follows, I differ from Annas, who claims that the scheme of the Line
“breaks down” because the analogy of proportion between imagination to trust and
thought to intellection does not hold. This issue is too complex to address here, but
my position turns on how just as thought uses objects “as images” (510e) to arrive
at the mathematicals, intellection uses the mathematicals, which are ‘forms’ only in
the allegorical sense of seen by the mind’s eye, to intuit the forms. See Annas, An
Introduction to Plato’s Republic, 251–52.
13. For hypothesis as “supposition” and its relation to thought (dianoia) on the
Line and in the cave, see Klein, A Commentary on Plato’s Meno, 120–25.
14. This is illustrated in Figure 2 by the depictions of non-Euclidean triangles at
the level of intellection; it is not the illustrations we understand at this level but rather
the idea that allows making sense of ‘things’ that indeed are also triangles, even if
unexpectedly so according to our prior perceptions and conceptions.
15. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 5.2–4; Rawls, Justice as Fairness, §§13–14.
16. See Pierre Duhem, who traces the expression back to Plato’s methodology on
the testimony of Simplicitus, To Save the Phenomena, 5–6.
17. On ousia as is-ness, see Sheehan, Making Sense of Heidegger, 33–34.
18. Which is not to say that there are not hints of what will develop into this
critique. In his 1920 lectures, Heidegger identifies Platonism’s fixation on a priori
knowledge as responsible for the neglect of the situated historicity of life as lived;
see GA 59: 23, 71.
19. See GA 34: 99; GA 36/37: 200–204; cf. GA 9: 228 and 232, where he calls it
the Ermöglichung, “the making-possible of the correctness of knowing and the un-
132 Chapter Three

concealment of what is known.” Heidegger had employed the term Ereignis as early
as in his 1919 Kriegsnotsemester lecture course, but there the “event” refers to lived
experience as integral to the life-world of historical being-human, not to the breaking
open of truth as unconcealment that confers the life-world as such upon us; see GA
56/57: 75.
20. Dostal, “Heidegger’s Plato,” 82; I have amended the passage so that “Be-
ing” conforms with my capitalization. Dostal cites Gadamer’s Die Idee des Guten
zwischen Platon und Aristoteles (20-21) as his inspiration here.
21. For this reason, it is striking that some scholars call it the form of the good, for
example, Annas, An Introduction to Plato’s Republic, 251; Santas, Understanding
Plato’s Republic, 137ff.
22. For Heidegger’s implicit but limited teleological normativity, see Reid, Hei-
degger’s Moral Ontology, chapter 3.
23. See Fried, “Whitewashed with Moralism.”
24. Rosen, Plato’s Republic, 262.
25. E.g., Annas, An Introduction to Plato’s Republic, 251; cf. 256.
26. Kearney, The Poetics of Modernity, 122.
27. Eliade, Patterns in Comparative Religion, 143–44.
28. Esposito, Politics and Negation, 4.
29. Esposito, Politics and Negation, 207.
30. Robert Parker, preface to Eugene Gendlin, A Process Model, xiii.
31. James, Principles of Psychology, 251.
32. For a discussion of the “[. . .]” device, see Greg Madison, Theory and Practice
of Focusing-Oriented Psychotherapy, 37.
33. Parker, Preface to Gendlin, A Process Model, xiii.
34. For a phenomenological interpretation of “paying attention” that treats what
is at issue here but proposes a rather different path from mine, because he effectively
denies that that genuine attention can be guided by phronēsis and ideation as I inter-
pret them, see S. West Gurley, “Attention Is Political: How Phenomenology Gives
Access to the Inconspicuously Political Act of Attending,” in Pfeifer and Gurley,
Phenomenology and the Political.
35. See Gadamer, Truth and Method, 280, 302, 309; on the history of the herme-
neutical circle, 302–4.
 Chapter Four

Breaking Down in the Cave

If you do not expect the unexpected, you will not find it, for it is hard to
find and out-of-the-way.
—Heraclitus, Fragment 181

There is a pathway through Plato’s Cave. In fact, there are two, and what is
most important about them at this point in the argument is their intersection.
This chapter will provide a roadmap for navigating the geography of the Cave
in order to make sense of how its features accord with the hermeneutical,
existential, and ethical dimensions of our situated transcendence. In previ-
ous chapters, I have argued that the ideas are a phenomenological given of
ethical engagement with the world and that they animate the piety of zetetic
philosophy. The ideas, in the process of ideation that mediates between our
intimation of the truth and imagination of alternatives to a world that has
broken down, draw us out of the cave to transcend its finitude, requiring and
enabling us to return to reconstruct the historical world with a greater perspi-
cacity, or what the Greeks called phronēsis, to be addressed in chapter 7. The
intersection of the two pathways is the point at which the finitude of human
historicity and the transcendence of a skeptical idealism confront one another
and may reconcile in a polemical dialogue. At the crossroads of the cave Plato
provides us with the resources to respond to Heidegger’s critique that Plato
fails to account for the finite temporality of being-human.

4.1 THE GEOGRAPHY OF THE CAVE

Of the two pathways in the cave, one is more familiar to readers of the Re-
public, as it bears the burden of the philosopher’s ascent from opinion, error,
133
134 Chapter Four

and delusion to insight, truth, and wisdom. Many, if not most readers, take
the journey up this path as the main meaning of the Allegory. Socrates calls it
“the rough, steep upward way” (515e) that leads from the lower cave out into
the light of day. It is the road less taken in the allegory, though it plays the
most obvious role in the narrative. Very few manage to navigate this upward
way, and in the Republic, Socrates treats them as the true philosophers, the
echonic ones who eventually come to possess truth in its fullness. We have
also seen why this portrait of what constitutes real philosophy is more com-
plex, involving a dialectic between the zetetic and echonic modes.
But there is another road in the cave, one that has received little attention
but which carries far more traffic and is critical for the meaning of the Al-
legory. It is a pathway that transects the cave rather than leading up and out. I
will call this the lateral path. Socrates refers to this lateral path when he first
presents his parable:

Make an image [apeikason] of our nature in its education and want of education,
likening it to a condition of the following kind. See human beings as though they
were in an underground cave-like dwelling with its entrance, a long one, open
to the light across the whole width of the cave. They are in it from childhood
with their legs and necks in bonds so that they are fixed, seeing only in front of
them, unable because of the bond to turn their heads all the way around. Their
light is from a fire burning far above and behind them. Between the fire and
the prisoners there is a road above [epanō hodon], along which we see a wall
[teichion], built like [hōsper] the partitions puppet-handlers [thaumatopoios] set
in front of the human beings and over which they show the puppets [thaumata].
(514a–b, tm; my italics)

This “road above” cuts across the cave, we can presume, laterally from side
to side while remaining underground. The cave-dwellers do not ordinarily
see the lateral path. Their bonds force them to look the other way, to the
cave wall opposite them. Also, the pathway is not just behind but “above”
them, screened by the constructed wall (teichon), making it all the more
inaccessible and invisible to them. The lateral pathway’s position in the
cave, above the prisoners, also points to the overarching metaphor of the
directionality of philosophy as transcending from one’s embedded origins
in the particularity of a historical world, with its own traditions, beliefs,
opinions, and norms.
Glaucon says that “I see” (horō) the image Socrates has conjured up, and
so Socrates continues:

Then also see along this wall human beings carrying all sorts of artifacts [skeuē],
which project above the wall, and statues of men and other animals wrought
 Breaking Down in the Cave 135

from stone, wood, and every kind of material; as is to be expected, some of the
carriers utter sound while others are silent. (514b–515a)

First, we should note that the language of image-making and seeing with the
mind’s eye evokes the language of imagination, which is technically that
segment of the Divided Line furthest from the truth. Yet Socrates conjures
an image to craft this powerful account of the nature of philosophizing and
expects his companions to exercise their imagination to envision it, too.
Within this parable intended as an allegorical image of the human condition,
Socrates says the dividing wall between the prisoners and the lateral pathway
is “like [hōsper] the partitions puppet-handlers set” up for their performances.
More on this later, but it is important to underline that this puppet-wall is an
analogy within an analogy. It is not the case that the travelers carrying things
along the road actually (or, even more emphatically, necessarily) are pup-
peteers, which is a common misunderstanding of the allegory.2 In fact, these
passers-by (pariontōn, 515b) seem largely or wholly unaware that the objects
they carry project shadows onto the wall of the cave, images that the prison-
ers see and interpret. Socrates does not say if the passers-by even realize the
impact they are having. As he says nothing about their behavior other than
that they pass on the road, carrying objects and making noise, they may well
be either indifferent to or entirely unaware of the cave-dwellers.
So now we have the familiar picture, or image (eikōn), as Socrates ex-
plicitly calls it (517a). (See Figure 1.) But what does it mean? As we have
noted before, Glaucon calls Socrates’s depiction of the cave “A strange image
[atopos eikona] and strange prisoners [desmōtas atopous] you are telling of”
(515a). The connotations of the Greek atopos (strange) suggest more about
how this image is strange. The adjective is formed from the alpha-privative
and the word topos, which means “place,” not in the sense of merely indif-
ferent coordinates on a topological grid, but rather place as an abode, a locale
one might inhabit and feel at home, as when we say, “Come over to my place
for dinner.” To be a-topos, then, means to be strange in the sense of out-of-
place, unfamiliar, or displaced. In Greek, topoi can mean the way of doing
things specific to a place, time, and culture, so to be atopos is to be estranged
from the local traditions, practices, and understanding of one’s community.
Of persons, being atopos can mean eccentric, weird, or even disturbing.
Socrates’s contemporaries saw him as atopos, and Alcibiades, in the Sym-
posium, treats his atopia, his bizarreness, as a defining feature of Socrates’s
singularly wondrous nature (221d).
We have seen that in response, Socrates says the prisoners in the cave
are “like us” (515a5). Despite the everyday appearance of normalcy, we are
all somehow atopos, out of place, even when we fail to own up to this. As
136 Chapter Four

something latent to the human condition, and represented paradigmatically

by Socrates, atopia resembles what Heidegger in Being and Time calls our
Unheimlichkeit, our uncanniness (SZ, §§40, 57–58), or in his interpretation
of the Ode to Man in Sophocles’s Antigone, the hupsipolis-apolis character
of human-being, at once rising high in the city, deprived of the city (GA
40: 161ff). We will return to this theme in chapter 8, but Heidegger’s point
here is that while our understanding usually finds its home in the world (to
be heimisch is to be at home, familiar, homey), lurking always at the edges
of this familiarity is the possibility of a breakdown of meaning, because our
understanding cannot maintain a final and total interpretation of all things and
all possibilities.
In our finitude, time always frays the understanding. When Socrates asks
(524e) what “compels” the intellect to “turn around” from its prior under-
standing and make its zetetic inquiry, he answers that “some opposition”
(ti enantiōma) and “strange interpretations” (atopoi hermēneiai, 524b) in
things are “apt to summon or awaken the activity of the intellect” (523e).
Contradictions in things inevitably arise to disturb our interpretations of the
world. Even if we try to repress these oppositions back beneath our homely
everydayness, they break forth occasionally in the mood of angst, that sense
of dislocation and homelessness in the face of all our usual possibilities and
understandings, or they break in on us in sudden disruptions of life. At-issue
for us is what philosophy can or cannot accomplish in the oscillation between
familiarity and uncanniness.
Back to the cave, then. The prisoners are “like us” because theirs is a world
of shadows that grant a certain intelligible familiarity, but which can also in-
timate a much fuller and richer world of understanding beyond. I agree with
the standard view that the prisoners’ perception of these shadows corresponds
to the opinions people hold about both the moral and the natural world they
share as members of a given community. We share a community of opinions
and norms, in the Greek sense of nomoi, which includes both custom and
positive law, all the familiar topoi that encompass, enable, and restrict the
social, political, and cognitive contours of our historical world like the walls
of the cave. The budding philosopher is someone whose bonds to the reigning
opinion about these are broken, by luck or accident, by nature, or by delib-
erate intervention, human or divine, in noticing the contradictions in some
phenomenon and feeling compelled to resolve them.
She or he next painfully stands up, flexing long-cramped limbs, then turns
around and, again with great effort, ascends past the barrier-wall, makes it to
the road, and after recovering from the blinding light of the fire, makes sense
of the fire’s relation to the shadows projected by the various artifacts being
carried along the lateral pathway. You can understand why this would be
 Breaking Down in the Cave 137

painful: think of turning around in a dark theater and looking straight into the
light of the projector. Beyond this stage, the former prisoner must make yet
another painful journey “along the rough, steep upward way” (dia tracheias
tēs anabaseōs kai anantous, 515e), the other pathway in the cave that rises up
beyond the fire, out into the open world and the light of day. Even that ulti-
mate escape for the prisoner causes pain, as the former prisoner is “dragged”
out along the upward path “into the light of the sun,” all the while “distressed
and annoyed,” and when finally emerged, to have “eyes overpowered by [the
sun’s] beam and be unable to see even one of the things now said to be true”
(515e–516a, tm). It is like attending a daytime screening of a film, then being
herded at its end to exit immediately from the theater, emerging into a day-
light quite blinding and disorienting as you gain your bearings to make your
way home. All this echoes the epistemic and hermeneutic distress entailed by
reconfiguring an interpretation of one’s world.

4.2 BREAKDOWN AND TRAUMATIC RUPTURE

As any reader of Plato knows, the Cave Allegory is supposedly a story about
the arduous process of exchanging opinion for knowledge—shadowy, fleet-
ing images for shining, eternal ideas. But the meaning of the details can be
elusive, because the allegory, as an image we envision in our own internal
theater of the imagination, is so compelling as narrative. The details of the
story make sense in terms of the parameters of the allegory and follow a logic
internal to its narrative. People long chained would naturally find it painful
to rise and move, to climb an unpleasant and difficult ascent, and to look into
various blinding sources of light. Of course, once they get used to the outside,
they would be loath to return back down to the cave, as Socrates says is the
responsibility of the philosophers trained by Kallipolis. And no doubt they
would look ridiculous, in their fumbling, bumbling comings and goings out
into the light and then back into the dark.
But what is the meaning of all this pain and difficulty? Why would the
ascent and descent be hard, even dangerous? Isn’t knowledge a sweet and a
good thing, desired by us all, as Aristotle says in the Metaphysics (980a21)?
A clue lies in how the whole process of liberation gets started, which is
an image for how philosophy gets started. Having set up his picture of the
prison-cave, Socrates says, “Look now. . .what their release and healing
from the bonds and folly would be like if something of this sort [i.e., the
narrative to follow] were by nature to happen to them” (515c, tm). Again,
we are instructed to examine the meaning of the image with the mind’s eye
and the imagination, and at-issue here is how this liberating “release” (lusis)
138 Chapter Four

from the bonds were to happen by nature (phusei). What is natural about the
liberation? Socrates immediately shifts from “them” (autois), the prisoners in
the cave taken as a whole, to an individual: “Take someone who is released
and suddenly compelled to stand up, to turn their neck around, to walk and
look up toward the light; and who, moreover, in doing all this is in pain and,
because of the flashing [of the fire], unable to see distinctly those things [i.e.,
the artifacts being carried along the road] whose shadows he previously saw”
(515c–d, tm).
First to note, the release and healing (lusin te kai iasin) from the bonds
is a two-step process. The release alone from the bonds is not sufficient for
genuine liberation. In fact, the release or break is only the first step in an
arduous process of healing and recovery. The bonds, as it were, cast their
own lingering shadow. It is also striking that Socrates uses the passive voice
to indicate how the prisoner “is released [lutheiē] . . . and compelled [anan-
keizoito] to stand up”; he does not say who or what does the releasing and
compelling. One might assume that it must be some person who does the
releasing, because soon Socrates will ask: “And what if someone dragged
him away from there [the stage of the lateral road and fire] by force along
the rough, steep, upward way [the pathway up into the open light of day] and
didn’t let him go before dragging him out into the light of the sun?” (515e,
tm). Later Glaucon objects to Socrates’s proposal that their “job as founders
is to compel the best natures to the study which we were saying before is
the greatest, to see the good and go up that ascent” (519c–d) of the Divided
Line, and then compel them again (520a) to “go down” back into the cave to
govern it. Glaucon says it would “do them an injustice” to force such refu-
gees back into the cave and “make them live a worse life when a better one
is possible for them” (519d).
Socrates has a telling response. He says, “We won’t be doing injustice to
the philosophers who come to be among us” (520a), that is, the educators
of the next generation of philosopher-kings and queens, because they owe
their liberation precisely to the founders and therefore owe a debt of service
in return. But: “We’ll say that when such men come to be in the other cities
it is fitting for them not to participate in the labors of those cities. For they
grow up spontaneously [autophues: by their own nature, sui generis] against
the will of the regime in each; and a nature that grows by itself and doesn’t
owe its rearing to anyone has justice on its side when it is not eager to pay
the price of rearing to anyone” (520b). This indicates two possible modes
through which the liberation may occur “by nature”: spontaneously or by
deliberate education. This is illustrated by the two lower panels in Figure 4.
The educational system for the rulers of Kallipolis proposed by Socrates
is remarkably detailed, but someone must have started it and so at least
 Breaking Down in the Cave 139

someone must get free spontaneously without it. Socrates says that the onset
of philosophy happens “suddenly” (exaiphnēs, 515c). That word, exaiphnēs,
is an important one for Plato. In the Seventh Letter, he says that the heart
of philosophical insight is not something he can write up in a treatise: “For
in no way can it be put in words as in other fields of learning; rather, from
long communion with the matter itself and by living with it, it comes to be
suddenly, like a light is kindled from a leaping flame, it emerges in the soul
and then nourishes itself by itself” (341c–d). There is also the passage in
the Symposium, where Diotima tells Socrates that at the end of the ascent
of the ladder of love, proceeding from loving the many beautiful things at
its start, “suddenly” (210e) the seeker is granted the wondrous vision of the
“singular, ever-in-being form” (monoeides aei on, 211b) of Beauty itself that
encompasses and gives being to all transient, beautiful things. What happens
exaiphnēs happens by surprise, like the thief in the night. We might possibly
prepare for it, but it comes unbidden, of its own accord and all of a sudden.
We cannot make it happen, and we cannot predict when or what it will be.3
The sudden onset of philosophy begins as this unbidden, unexpected
release of the prisoner from the bonds (515c), whether by someone else or
spontaneously. In Greek, release from bonds, or manumission, is lusis tōn
desmōn. A lusis is a release, a loosening, a dissolution, and an ana-lusis is
a dissolution of something into its component parts, a breaking down of the
bonds that hold it together. But what are the bonds that get broken down at
the onset of philosophy?
The Greek word desmos, bond, is a ligature or connection that holds things
together in ways that can be positive, negative, or both. It can be a simple
strap or chains or an imprisonment. A desmōtēs is a prisoner, someone in
bonds. In English, we speak of the bonds of marriage, of being duty-bound,
of the ties that bind, and of bondage. These English usages correspond
closely to the sense of desmos. We are bonded to a world in ways that free
and fulfill us as well as constrain and diminish us. To use Heidegger’s terms,
we always find ourselves already immersed in a world about which we care,
either positively or negatively; its meaning, and what we can do and ac-
complish within that meaningful world, concerns us. As we go about our
business, we are bonded to and bounded by the meanings we inhabit in our
historical location, our heritage, our community: our cave. These bonds and
bounds grant connection, structure, and intelligibility to things, and they usu-
ally allow us to understand our involvements and to function without having
to reflect upon that understanding in some detached, theoretical pondering.
Our finitude means that we are bound to be bound, but freely to confront or
to accept those bounds, as situated wisdom requires, also can free us for the
choices available to us within those boundaries.
140 Chapter Four

As Heidegger points out, sometimes the self-evidence of all these filiations

breaks down. His famously prosaic example is the hammer. The hammer is a
hammer for me because I interpret it as such for the sake of a purpose (ham-
mering a nail to a wall for the sake of hanging a picture), and it comes ready-
to-hand as hammer in the filiated web of purposes, procedures, and all the
other things (nails, walls, pictures, and so on) interpreted in the as-structure
of a particular, bounded world of meaning (SZ, 93–94). But if my hammer
breaks, suddenly—exaiphnēs—there is a breakdown in the fabric of the sys-
tem of references that makes meaningful action possible (SZ, 98). In English,
a breakdown can be several quite different things: a collapse of a system or
organization (“The government’s system of monitoring environmental pollut-
ants has suffered a breakdown”); a personal psychological or physiological
collapse (“He had a nervous breakdown last week”); an intentional analysis
of something into its most significant elements, usually for examination and
then action (“The coach wants a breakdown of the opponent team’s defen-
sive strategy”). What unites them is the sense of a reduction of something to
its elementary components. The first two are negative events that impede or
prevent functioning in a given world-context; the third is usually positive.
Breakdown is in fact a quite direct English correlate to the Greek ana-lusis,
the dissolving of something previously cohering into component parts, the
root of our word analysis.
The hammer is a commonplace example, but breakdown can happen in
contexts from the mundane to the cataclysmic. In Radical Hope, Jonathan
Lear analyzes the ontological bereavement of the Crow Nation of Native
Americans in the nineteenth century, facing cultural and physical genocide.
The disruptions of their way of life became so devastating that an entire
world of meaning for things and practices faced complete breakdown. Lear
quotes the last great chief of the independent Crow Nation, Alaxchiiaahush,
Man-of-Many-Acts-of-Valor, speaking of the disappearance of the buffalo:
“After this nothing happened.” This is not a declaration of a Hegelian end
of history but of ontological catastrophe where the good no longer orients
action and meaning no longer inhabits things: “when the buffalo went away,
the hearts of my people fell to the ground, and they could not lift them up
again.”4 The buffalo did not just represent, they were the way of life for the
Crow, so after their disappearance, cultural practices, ritual objects, every-
day implements, norms, and traditional virtues lost their meaning and col-
lapsed into indifference and unmeaning. As Heidegger puts it, “Where strug-
gle ceases, beings indeed do not disappear, but world turns away. Beings
are no longer asserted [that is, preserved as such]. Beings now become just
something one comes across; they are findings” (GA 40: 67; Heidegger’s
interpolation)—inert “findings” in the sense of pots or arrowheads one
 Breaking Down in the Cave 141

might dig up, or see in a museum, or buy in an antiques shop, but no longer
inhabiting a living world. Struggle, polemos, is what drives the hopefulness
of the reinterpretive reappropriation of meaning, but when that “struggle
ceases”—and now I draw instead on Plato—the good no longer inhabits a
historical world. As Alaxchiiaahush puts it, that world falls “to the ground,”
the earth of a tradition that had sustained its significance but now swallows
it up, as it did Oedipus.
In every context of breakdown, a domain of signification either temporar-
ily or irrevocably dissolves. The breakdown announces what Karl Jaspers
called the “limit situation” (Grenzsituation), a moment that both threatens
and promises an existential transformation that we can either evade in bad
faith or engage in hermeneutic struggle.5 When a breakdown occurs, a web
of signification ruptures, leaving one momentarily flustered or profoundly
traumatized or potently awestruck. Some one thing, or perhaps a whole
constellation of objects and social practices, seems to flop about, obtruding
upon awareness but no longer fitting in. The world goes out of joint. Whether
trivial or devastating or awe-inspiring, a breakdown presents an irruptive op-
portunity to notice the web of intersecting meanings that define the contours
of things and the significance of the world. In prosaic cases, this window of
opportunity may close as quickly as reaching for a different hammer or allow-
ing a moment of idle curiosity to pass by. Nevertheless, the opportunity for
the examined life beckons, even in everyday breakdowns, to see how things
have been interpreted and to consider that they might be interpreted otherwise
and then to consider how.
A desmos, a bond or tie, gets loosened, cut, or broken, lutheiē, as strands
in the web of interconnected meanings that form the complex structures of a
historical world. In Heidegger’s language, the breakdown points to an event
in the fore- and as-structures of the understanding and interpretation of a
world that brings these up short. What breaks are the bonds of signification
and reference that allow us to place things in the nexus of meaningful objects
and practices that define a hermeneutically habitable world, the world as
we live it on the historical, human scale. There are two levels to seeing the
bonds: one grasps the fact that something has been interpreted in such and
such a way, leaving a space for a new interpretation; another seizes upon the
interpreted-ness of things as such, breaking open the possibility of the ques-
tion of the meaning of Being itself that asks how it is possible that we can
understand anything as what we take it to be.
The breakdown happens to us, but we can also take it up, following its drift
in interpretive analysis. Ana-lusis, breaking down, therefore has both passive
and active aspects. Even the devastation of a world of meaning can become
an opportunity for transformation. Indeed, how a community responds in
142 Chapter Four

such a moment of crisis can mean the difference between cultural oblivion
and cultural resilience and adaptation. As passive, a breakdown can happen
to us, of a sudden and against expectation, interrupting the ordinary course of
things. As active, a breakdown is something we do and produce by analyzing
something confronting us as a problem or a challenge, although the impetus
to do so first happens to us. In either case, passive or active, the breakdown
occurs because something calls for interpretation and reintegration into mean-
ingful context, but we heed this call, we do not make it. The process of analy-
sis and reconfiguration can succeed or fail, or never even get started, but it is
always occasioned by something out of joint, something that the previously
operative understanding cannot fully make sense of, either any longer or not
yet. These are the “strange interpretations” (524b) and oppositions in things
that Socrates says summon the intellect to reconstructive dialogue. We can
shunt that call aside and repress it, going about our business as best we can—
if the moment of meaning-displacement is relatively trivial, we can usually do
so—or we can endeavor to be as open as possible to noticing and then taking
up the call. But in neither case do we make it happen that something about
the world calls for reinterpretation.
The possibility and inevitability of breakdown is grounded in the finitude
and temporality of human understanding. We are not capable of complete
vision, entire comprehension. Furthermore, the understanding we do have is
discursive: it unfolds, develops, or decomposes, through the dia-logos with
our contextual environments, with both persons and things. The dialogue
itself is motivated at its most energetic by the various breakdowns, from the
petty to the all-encompassing, that impinge upon us and call upon us to revise
our understanding through new interpretations. The breakdown of the bonds
of understanding is therefore another way of describing what we addressed
as deconstruction in the previous chapter, what Heidegger called Destruktion
and Abbau, destruction and dismantling. Indeed, deconstruction is simply
another way of saying breakdown. Both operate on the metaphorics of taking
apart an existing assemblage, and the assemblage, the logos as a gathering,
is the nexus of significations and referents among things that constitutes a
meaningful world. This is why Jacques Derrida would say, in discussion with
Gianni Vattimo, that:

“I ought to have specified that what happens deconstructs itself in the process.
It is not I who deconstruct; rather something I called ‘deconstruction’ happens
to the experience of a world, a culture, a philosophic tradition: ‘it’ deconstructs,
ça ne va pas, there is something that budges, that is in the process of being dis-
located, disjointed, disadjoined, and of which I begin to be aware. Something is
‘deconstructing’ and it has to be answered for.”6
 Breaking Down in the Cave 143

Heidegger’s Destruktion might seem more intentional and deliberate than

this; however, I think he would not claim the deconstruction as his but as
something happening within thought and meaning in a historical world and
that he simply notices and articulates.
While I have disagreed emphatically with aspects of Derrida’s postmod-
ernist political understanding of deconstruction, largely because it downplays
or ignores the Platonic ideation necessary for reconstruction of a world in
favor of a too one-sidedly anarchistic conception of liberation, his succinct
description of deconstruction is a splendid explanation of the point I want
to make about the breakdown, the lusis desmōn, that occurs as the starting
point to the internal action of the narrative of the Cave.7 Ana-lusis is first and
foremost something that happens, not something that we make happen, to
the warp and woof of the meaning-structures of being-human in a historical
world, which necessarily frays as a function of our finite temporality, but
which we may reweave reconstructively. When Derrida says that “‘it’ decon-
structs,” the “it” is the hermeneutical nexus of the fore- and as-structures of
our understanding and interpretation within which things, practices, and ac-
tions ordinarily find their meaningful place, or topos. Certainly “I” can follow
the lead of this happening of deconstruction by taking up the ana-lusis as my
own, but the “it happens” of the breakdown in meaning is a priori. Derrida
says that the fraying of meaning-structures “has to be answered for,” and this
is another way of expressing the dia-logos that human beings are or can be in
the life examined, our polemical confrontation with our finite understanding
of the world.
The “has to be” of answering in this polemical dialogue has both an ethical
and an existential aspect. We have a calling to answer the atopoi disjunctions
that arise in the world, and we risk an increasingly incoherent cognitive exis-
tence if we evade responding to them. Nevertheless, Derrida’s claim that the
breakdown of meaning “has to be answered for” puts it too categorically: we
are always free, at liberty, to ignore the call to respond; we can live the unex-
amined life, both ethically and cognitively, by sweeping the fraying threads
of the textile of understanding under the rug of our consciousness, unless
and until the incoherence of our historical world becomes so extreme that
the everyday reliability of this world we inhabit becomes unsustainable. As
Polemarchus responds in Book One of the Republic, when Socrates attempts
to persuade him and his friends that he and Glaucon should be left alone to re-
turn to Athens rather than go with Polemarchus to his father’s home, “Could
you really persuade if we don’t listen [mē akousantas]?” (327c). In the refusal
to listen, we are borne along passively by the currents of the breakdown of the
world rather than having an active role in its reconstruction. In other words,
the breakdown, the deconstructive moment of ana-lusis, does not necessarily
144 Chapter Four

result in a full-blown rupture, at least not immediately, if it is repressed and

ignored. The rupture is the breakdown fulfilled in the call that demands a
dialogical response and is addressed through a reconstructive interpretation.

4.3 HEALING FROM THE BREAKDOWN

We will return to the active features of this reintegration. For the moment,
recall that Socrates distinguishes between the breakdown of bonds, the lusis,
and the healing from them, the iasis (515c). The healing is the much lengthier
process. While the breakdown occurs exaiphnēs, of a sudden, the healing re-
quires the arduous process of ascent—and, I will argue, return. To be healed,
one must move up from the lowest cave floor where the bonds bind the pris-
oners, to the lateral path and the fire, and then up the steep, upward pathway
into the open light of day—and after that, perhaps, back down into the cave.
The Greek noun iasis derives from the verb iaomai, a middle-voice verb
that means to heal in both the passive and active senses: to heal from some-
thing and to heal someone of something. It also has a secondary meaning
of repair, which corresponds to the reweaving, or perhaps ad hoc patching,
of the fraying textile of the meaning-structures of an intelligible world. In
contrast to the breakdown as ana-lusis that happens of a sudden, breaking
in unbidden upon the understanding, the healing repair as the active analysis
through reconstruction takes time, as well as courage and perseverance, in the
life examined. Furthermore, its success is not guaranteed.
If the prisoners are “like us” and we are therefore in bonds as well, what is
the symbolic meaning of the pain associated with the process of the healing
from the bonds, as well as the risks Socrates ascribes to the recovery? The
prisoner going through the healing process of liberation “is in pain” (algoi,
515c) at each station of the ascent: at the very first removal of the bonds and
the flexing of the long-constrained limbs; during the ascent to the lateral path
and when confronting the fire; during the ascent up the steep, upward path
from the fire to the outside world; upon emerging into the blinding light of
day once finally outside; and then, for some, in going back down into the
cave, readjusting alternately to the darkness and the firelight. Socrates is
candid about the risks for those returning from the light of day back to the
cave. While their eyes are adjusting to the darkness, they will suffer disori-
entation and a new kind of blindness, the obverse of suddenly emerging from
dark into light. In this condition they may stumble, and the inhabitants of the
cave might ridicule them or even try to kill them or their former mentors as
potential corruptors of the eyesight of others (516e–517a).
 Breaking Down in the Cave 145

To make sense of this dual pain and risk, we can turn to Socrates’s more
formal discussion of the education of the philosophers in Book 7. There, he
describes dialectic as the last and most dangerous study (537d–539d). It must
come after the other studies, such as mathematics and geometry, which are
preparatory for dialectic in method more than in content. In those prior stud-
ies, the rising philosopher learns to make and discard explanatory hypotheses,
but the stakes are abstract, a matter of pure knowing or not knowing about
things magnificent and beautiful but remote from human affairs, such as the
Pythagorean theorem. But in dialectic, the hypotheses presented—and dis-
cussed, refuted, and reconstructed—are opinions not only about mathematics
and the grand abstractions about truth or Being, but also about life on the hu-
man scale. Such questions involve piety and impiety, right and wrong, justice
and injustice, courage and cowardice, and all the vices and virtues that orient
and pinion us to our lives and attachments.
As we will see below in the discussion of the seduction by rhetoric, power,
and pleasure, these normative convictions (dogmata) are the hypotheses that
dialectic about ethical life threatens to destroy in its acts of deconstruction.
The young, not yet matured to philosophy but who learn dialectic, “misuse
[arguments] as though it were play, always using them to contradict . . . like
puppies pulling and tearing with argument at those who happen to be near”
(539b). More seriously, someone may deploy dialectic to refute the laws, tra-
ditions, and convictions “about the just and good and the things he held most
in honor” (538d–e), all that restrains willful and predatory behavior. Such a
person may then turn to lawless self-indulgence or manipulative sophistry.
Dialectic is safe only in the hands of someone “who’s willing to discuss and
consider the truth rather than the one who plays and contradicts for the sake
of the game” (539c). Of course, for us as for Athens, once the Pandora’s box
of dialectic is opened, its power disperses indiscriminately, and it is hard to
imagine even Socrates’s ideal city managing to keep it in bounds, however
carefully guarded. Even the most just and judicious dialectician would face
tremendous obstacles convincing ordinary citizens by argument alone.
Within the narrative of the Allegory, Socrates suggests this when he asks
about the prisoner just released:

What do you suppose he’d say if someone were to tell him that before he saw
silly nothings, while, now, because he is somewhat nearer to what is and more
turned toward beings, he sees more correctly; and, in particular, showing him
each of the things that pass by, were to compel the man to answer his questions
about what they are? Don’t you suppose he’d be at a loss and believe that what
was seen before is truer than what is now being shown? (515d)
146 Chapter Four

The parallel is unmistakable between asking the ascending prisoner about

what the shadows really “are” shadows of and Socrates’ own questioning
people about “what is” love, or justice, or piety, or any of the usual, human-
scale topics of his inquiries. Equally unmistakable is Socrates’s self-portrait
of the liberated prisoner returning back to the cave to address its inhabitants:

And if he once more had to compete with those perpetual prisoners in forming
judgments about those shadows while his vision was still dim, before his eyes
had recovered, and if the time needed from getting accustomed were not at all
short, wouldn’t he be the source of laughter, and wouldn’t it be said of him that
he went up and came back with his eyes corrupted, and that it’s not even worth
trying to go back up? And if they [that is, the perpetual prisoners] were some-
how able to get their hands on and kill the man who attempts to release and lead
up, wouldn’t they kill him? (516e–517a)

As other commentators have suggested, this portrait of the returning libera-

tor’s travails obviously maps onto the fate of Socrates: first being ridiculed
by the likes of Aristophanes as an absurd and corrosive wise-guy, and then
his actual prosecution, conviction, and execution for impiety and corrupting
the youth.8 While Athenians might have laughed at Euthyphro for his overly
pious and pompous claims to prophetic insight into the will of the gods—be-
cause he was so manifestly ludicrous in his extremity—at least Euthyphro
accepted the prevailing myths about the nature of the gods, and so was prob-
ably no serious threat. But Socrates laid claim to a piety that would inspire
not laughter but fear and pain. He did not question that the gods existed but
whether the stories told about them were accurate—that they committed the
rapes and castrations and violence attributed to Zeus, Chronos, and Ouranos,
as well as all the other disputes among the gods (Euthyphro, 6a–c).
What does it mean to have “vision still dim, before his eyes had recov-
ered”? It is the obverse of how dialectic guides the healing process. Dialectic
“compels” the prisoner, as the method of recovery from the bonds of opinion,
to confront the dogmas inherited from the happenstance of their particular
location in a specific historical context. This is the meaning of the “rough,
steep, upward way” (515e) from the stage of the lateral path to the outside
world. It is “rough” (tracheias) because dialectic is the deconstructive path
by which the bonds of received opinions are broken up into shards through
the polemos of identifying contradictions among them, leaving the ordinary
vision of the world in lesser or greater states of demolition. It is “steep”
(anabaseōs) because dialectic is inherently precipitous, disorienting, and
vertiginous; it risks a fall by deconstructing how our ordinary views grant
us a coherent vision of our context, so that we can no longer navigate our
historical world effectively. It is “upward” (anantous), most obviously in the
 Breaking Down in the Cave 147

context of the Allegory, because progress from imprisonment is up and out

of the cave; but analogously because dialectic compels us to emerge, up and
away, from the views that had previously grounded us in our happenstance.
Now again, we run up against the inherently metaphoric nature of language.
Why should this deconstructive process of breakdown, analysis, and dialectic
be an upward motion, and why should that be painful?
As several readers of the Republic have noted, the imagery of upward and
downward motion plays a central role in the narrative and the arguments of
the dialogue.9 The first word of the dialogue, narrated by Socrates, is katebēn,
“I went down”—down from Athens to the port of Piraeus. When Socrates
tells the story of the cave, he says the newly minted philosophers, after
emerging into the light and growing accustomed to it, must each “go back
down” (katabateon) into the cave to lead the people there. And as we have
seen, the process of breaking free of dogmatic opinion involves an ascent up
through several stages of increasingly greater understanding.
Why should greater understanding be associated with upward movement?
Hikers are told that if they get lost in the wilderness, an important step for
getting reoriented is to find a higher vantage point, especially if lines of sight
are obscured, because from a height the prominent features of the landscape
come into view as landmarks, and the more proximate details of one’s loca-
tion can be related meaningfully to them so that one can make progress.
Similarly, when a breakdown of meaning occurs, it is important to step back
from the details, away from the nitty-gritty of one’s ordinary involvements,
because these are the things that either overwhelm us with their multiplic-
ity so that we cannot reorient our understanding or lull us into complacency
with their everydayness so that what had once stood out in the breakdown
as demanding attention recedes and gets covered over. Abstracting oneself,
figuratively pulling oneself back from immersion in the details, grants the
opportunity to discern new patterns and to reintegrate a broken-down sense
of meaning into a provisionally navigable whole.
But why this should be painful is not yet clear. One obvious clue is the
response that the Socratic method generates among some of his fellow Athe-
nians—and which students and teachers alike can observe when using the
method in the classroom. As Socrates reports in the Apology, many of the
artisans, poets, and politicians, whose claims to knowledge he examined and
usually demolished, reacted in anger (Apology, 21d–24a). Anger is a natural
response to pain. One aspect of this is vanity. Few who profess a claim to
knowledge, especially if that claim supports their social, professional, or po-
litical prestige, enjoy a public refutation. We see this in the Republic itself,
where Thrasymachus reacts first in disdainful rage (343a–344d) and then
in humiliation (350d) to Socrates’s demolition of his definition of justice,
148 Chapter Four

because he wanted to “win a good reputation” (338a)—and presumably

the fees he might have earned from Cephalus if his sons, Polemarchus and
Lysias, had chosen him for their teacher after witnessing him defeat Socrates
in elenchus. Indeed, one reason Polemarchus might have been so eager to get
Socrates to come back to his home is because he knew Thrasymachus was
already there and that he could pit him against Socrates as an impromptu
audition or job interview (327c–328b).
Vanity and humiliation are important because they might inhibit the dis-
solution of the bonds of opinion, but they are not the only source of pain in
the breakdown and subsequent healing process by which one ascends through
the various stations up and out of the cave. Much more painful is that sense of
aporia, of no-exit, that crawls over you when a belief that anchors some vital
aspect of your life in place crumbles. This aspect is not about interpersonal
status but rather your own sense of orientation within a world that had made
sense up to that moment of breakdown. Opinions are binding because they are
so often bound to our most intimate attachments, as to friends, family, faith,
and country, and to our most defining activities, such as profession, work, and
play. Heidegger’s name for this attachment to the involvements of the histori-
cal world we always find ourselves in as pre‑given is care (Sorge). This is
not necessarily care in the sense of affectionate or dutiful solicitude for things
or people; it is care in the larger, existential sense that being‑human means
having a meaningful world oriented for us by what matters to us, including
things that burden or frighten us, as well as those that bring comfort, joy,
or satisfaction. When Heidegger says that Dasein is care in Being and Time
(§§41–42), he means that to have a world involves having an understanding
of things, persons, and activities that make sense because they matter to us in
some way as what we take them to be. Breaking the bonds of opinion threat-
ens to disrupt whatever illumination of the world we thought was sufficient
to function within it.
Emotional pain can be as phenomenologically real as a blow to the face.
Human beings generally desire to operate within the norms of the social
group that is dispositive for them. That group may not be one that the indi-
vidual loves, likes, or even tolerates—it may even be hated—but its norms
have defined the contours of acceptable behavior for the individual that she
relies upon to get through the day with minimum anxiety and distress. This
corresponds with the experience of breakdown in the cave. The pain elicited
by the threat or fact of breakdown of the bonds could result in a variety of
responses: fending off the perceived attack on the bonds of belief by ignor-
ing or repressing the potentially liberating person or event (in the case of
persons, repression can extend to oppression and even elimination, as it did
with the execution of Socrates by Athens); repairing the bonds in a slapdash
 Breaking Down in the Cave 149

manner that does not really address how badly they have been damaged, but
does enough to restore an illusion of restraint for a while; pretending that the
bonds have not been broken and continuing to function ‘as if’ they were still
there; and, finally, engaging in the process of what Socrates calls the healing
(iasis) from the bonds, which is separate from the release and which the other
responses avoid. The healing process takes time to work through the pain of
the dissolution of formerly orienting beliefs and then to reintegrate the con-
tours of a meaningful life. The healing is education in the sense that Socrates
gives it: a “turning around” (metastrophē, 518c, 532c) from the shadows as
the ascent up through the stages of the cave, and then the subsequent return
(to which we will return). This healing is necessarily polemical, because it
must confront the prior convictions that occasioned the painful breakdown in
the first place, deconstruct them, construe a new meaning, and reintegrate it.
The Republic addresses the two-phased pain of release and then healing
from the bonds of opinion, most notably in the discussion of dialectic as
the final stage in the education of the philosopher-rulers in Book 7, which
Socrates explicitly calls the “journey” (532b)—the Greek is poreia, as op-
posed aporia, a pathway with a destination rather than one with no exit. This
is the journey of healing from the bonds after the initial release, a journey that
takes time and changes place, going through differing scenes and perspec-
tives. While dialectic has the power to test (537d) the character of prospec-
tive philosopher-kings and queens as to the virtue of their initial opinions and
to lead their souls upward in the cave and on the Divided Line (532a–c), in
this passage on education Socrates also warns about “how great is the harm
coming from the practice of dialectic these days” (537e). Dialectic can have
this negative effect because of its power to unsettle and break the bonds of
received opinion. Dialectic works its power “these days” (to nun) in cities that
have no proper principles or superintendents for the education of its young in
dialectic, “a job requiring a great deal of guarding” (pollēs phulakēs ergon,
537d), which otherwise produces adults “filled full with lawlessness” (para-
nomias empimplantai, 537e).

4.4 PHILOSOPHERS MISFIRED

This misfiring of dialectic recalls Book 6, where Socrates describes the

two types of failed philosophers, the useless and the vicious. Both may be
understood as resulting from a failure to grasp the importance of the idea of
the good. If a person has all the raw talent needed for a philosopher-ruler—a
quick learner; intrepid in spirit; having a good memory, brilliant insight, and
sharp analytical skills—that person is also very attractive to those who would
150 Chapter Four

put those talents to use for purposes far less noble than philosophy or just
rule. Such purposes involve all the arts of persuasion, the tricks of argumenta-
tion and rhetoric, that can sway people in the city’s assembly, the law courts,
or in the market place. We today would call this the work of public relations
and marketing, including all the subtle arts of modern advertising, branding,
consumer data analysis, political consulting, and so on. These seducers of the
potential philosopher-ruler have no actual regard for the common good of the
community. They seek to recruit the talents of the potential philosophers for
factional purposes. This potential philosopher-ruler turns vicious by being
seduced away from two things: healthy philosophy and the youthful virtues
instilled in them by a traditional upbringing that directed them to the common
good. The seducers win potential philosophers over by flattering them with
the prospect of status and power for the vicious pseudo-philosophers (494c)
and pleasures (538d) for the hedonist, each of which will flow from wielding
their talents for refutation and persuasion without concern for the good apart
from a distorted view of their own good. Such use of refutation and persua-
sion resembles philosophical dialectic in its method but not in its purpose. It
seeks a partisan or private good rather than justice.10
When the once-naive but increasingly worldly youth discovers that the
decent but perhaps boring, restrictive, and unsophisticated family that raised
him is not really as reliably authoritative as he once thought, then accord-
ing to Socrates, “unless he is by nature particularly decent” (panu phusei
epieikēs, 538c), he will be sorely tempted to cease honoring them and begin
listening to the flatterers and “to live according to their ways” (538b–c).
Socrates says, “Surely we have from childhood convictions about what’s just
and fair by which we are brought up as by parents, obeying them as rulers and
honoring them” (538c). These convictions—he uses the word dogmata here,
which has a more binding normative force than doxa, opinion—seem to make
us generally but unreflectively decent by fending off the passions, desires,
and actions that would otherwise seduce us into injustice. But because these
norms are unreflective, unexamined, and unsupported by argument, they are
vulnerable to dialectic or eristic. Socrates asks:

When a question is posed and comes to the man who is so disposed [that is, to
honor and obey “the ancestral things,” 538d], “What is the fair [kalon, also the
noble]?”—and after answer that he heard from the lawgiver [i.e., the ancestral
norms], the argument refutes him, and refuting him many times and in many
ways, reduces him to the opinion that what the law says is no more fair than
ugly, and similarly about the just and the good and the things he held most in
honor—after that, what do you suppose he’ll do about honoring and obeying as
rulers the things he heard from the lawgiver? (538d–e)
 Breaking Down in the Cave 151

The answer is obvious to both Glaucon and Socrates. To be refuted over

and over again by arguments that deprive the ancestral convictions of their
affective and binding force leaves a person feeling foolish for once having
honored them and opens him up to all kinds of “outlaw” (paranomos, 539a)
opinions and ways of life. This is particularly likely if, having lost his un-
reflective but once-instinctive convictions, he “doesn’t find the true ones”
(538e). Without using the word, Socrates describes this state of mind, which
views “what the law says as no more fair than ugly,” as a form of nihilism:
“Then when they themselves refute many men and are refuted by many, they
fall quickly into a profound disbelief of what they formally believed”—which
is a great cause for why “they themselves and the whole activity of philoso-
phy become the objects of slander among the rest of men” (539b–c).
Nihilism may arise at the lowest level of the cave when the bonds of
conventional convictions break down and the now released prisoner is left
abandoned in that state, without hope of finding truth. Stumbling around in
the darkness, no longer oriented by the naive but uncomplicated bonds of
ancestral conviction, startled occasionally by the flare of the fire that now
merely distorts their apprehension of the shadows on the wall, the released
prisoner is disoriented and displaced, atopos with no way out, no exit—
brought to aporia through argument.11 As for members of the Crow Nation
after its devastation, this condition of release unaccompanied by healing from
the bonds, especially if extended into hopelessness, can be ontologically
traumatic.12 It leaves the prisoner deprived of a sense for living a meaningful
life. Although the shadows remain, just as feelings and objects and people
and norms remain in the world after our convictions break down, they have
lost their prior significance for us. This deprives us of an understanding of
our possibilities for engaging with them—just as one might continue to vote
in elections even if convinced that voting makes no difference; as one might
continue regular religious observations to please one’s parents, even if one no
longer believes. The released but lost, semi-blind, and abandoned prisoners
cannot even ascend to the lateral road above the lowest floor of the cave and
the fire burning there. The ascent and the bright firelight seem only to cause
more pain and disorientation, and there is no one to guide and reassure them.
This trauma, caused by an unfulfilled tutelage and healing in dialectic that
must be developmental and not merely sudden and episodic—exaiphnēs like
the breaking of the bonds—leaves the released but not-yet-healing prisoner
extremely vulnerable to the “flatterers”: the allures of power and pleasure,
fame and status, to supply meaning in life. For the shaky and only potential
philosopher, such flatterers promise fulfillment through sophistry, in its an-
cient and modern forms, as a way to manipulate others with argument and
information. Power, pleasure, fame, and status have a very natural appeal.
152 Chapter Four

Especially if one has been lost long enough without hope of an exit, a person
becomes cynical about the possibility of any argument providing the orient-
ing principles for a meaningful life. This nihilism is what Socrates means by
the danger of misology, the hatred of argument. A person gripped by misol-
ogy “no longer makes any use of persuasion by means of speech but goes
about everything with force and savageness, like a wild beast” guided by the
instinct for power and pleasure (411d–e). He also brings it up in the Phaedo,
where he likens misology to misanthropy: “For misanthropy insinuates itself
from trusting someone too much but naively [aneu technēs]” and then having
that experience repeated over and over so that he ends up “hating everyone
and believing there is nothing sound in anyone at all” (89d–e). So, too, the
misologists, “by dissipating themselves in disputatious arguments, end up
believing that they have become most wise and that they alone have had the
insight that there is nothing sound or firm to anything or any argument, but
all being [panta to onta] blithely fluctuates up and down, like in the [violent
currents of the tidal straits of] Euripus, and nothing remains anywhere for any
time” (90b–c; tm).
Socrates suggests that hating people and hating argument both issue from a
nihilism that arises from a sense of trust betrayed, born of a naive confidence
in one’s own powers of judgment. We might modify this misological form of
nihilism to a more sophisticated version. The corrupted nascent-philosopher,
the one abandoned at the lowest floor of the cave, might still use argument for
the sake of power and pleasure but forsake the promise that argument once
seemed to make at the moment of initial release: that a noble and inspiring
understanding of the world might be found, confirmed as true by dialectic
rather than as arbitrarily binding by mute tradition. Despite having forsaken
this noble aspiration for philosophical inquiry, the misologist might still make
nihilistic use of argument (in eristic rather than genuine dialectic) to decon-
struct any other argument that claims to have discovered what truth, virtue,
justice, and the like really are, because to be absolutely free of normative
fetters is preferable for the misologistic anarchist to being taken in again by
illusions of righteousness that interfere with the naturally obvious attractions
of power, pleasure, and prestige. This is not even the worst that can hap-
pen. The breaking down of the bonds can result in an ontological trauma so
profound that it can cause a complete breakdown, unable to cope with real-
ity.13 Socrates acknowledges this danger at every station of progress out of
the cave, where the former prisoner is exposed to various forms of pain and
disorientation (515c–516a). While the bonds of opinion bind us, they do still
give us the semblance of a stable, intelligible world, and to lose that sense
of grounding can be devastating, because even if that present world is full of
injustice and suffering, it is at least predictable.
 Breaking Down in the Cave 153

All this suggests that the transitional moment between the release from the
bonds, or the breakdown, and the healing from the bonds, or the ascent that
completes the rupture from them by providing a genuine alternative, is an
extremely sensitive one in education as the “turning around” of the soul. If the
prisoner is abandoned here, or if the supposed liberator is in fact a sophistical
manipulator or propagandist rather than a trustworthy mentor, the results may
be disastrous, and from the perspective of the newly released, it may well
be impossible to discern a philosophical mentor from a sophistical preda-
tor. Unlike a passive stuffing of the mind with information or the training of
the body with physical skills, the required turning (periacteon, 518c) of the
soul towards the light requires a careful and respectful deployment of what
Socrates calls the journey of dialectic (532d) as an active polemical engage-
ment with the beliefs of the person ascending the pathway up and out of the
cave. But first, the true mentor must earn the trust of the one dislocated and
traumatized by the release, perhaps by showing how even the broken shards
of the bonds of previous opinion may intimate unexpected meanings and a
reintegration of the understanding.
This dialectic has a distinctly polemical character, in our larger sense of the
polemical. Because it is not a formulaic insertion of information into the soul,
but rather a learning and a teaching how to live the examined life of ques-
tioning seeking, Socrates calls dialectical education an “art of this turning
around” (technē tēs periagōgēs, 518d). On the one hand, the pedagogical art
of polemical dialectic must bring the pilgrim-philosopher into confrontation
with mere opinions, to analyze, refute, or confirm them. On the other, it must
avoid allowing this confrontation to lapse into despondency and hopeless-
ness about ever making progress. The seeker must learn how to internalize
and integrate this dialectic actively as a feature of the life worth living, as a
polemical ethic. Otherwise, whatever insights it produces will be short lived.
They will fade with what Socrates describes as the misological effects of
refutation after refutation of received opinion (537d–539c).
Socrates says emphatically that “this power [of sight] is in the soul of
each” (518c) and that “this art takes as a given that sight is there, but not
rightly turned nor looking at what it ought to look at, and accomplished this
object” (518d). He directly links turning this power for “sight” (opsis, 518c)
in the allegorical situation of the cave, from the shadows up into the light, to
the image of the Divided Line, as the sight of the mind’s eye turning around
“from what is coming into being” (ek tou gignomenou) by learning “to endure
looking at that which is [eis to on] and the brightest part of that which is—and
we affirm that this brightest part is the good” (518c–d, tm). In principle, if
not realized in practice, this power of polemical turning and ascent is latent in
each of us, as vision is in the eye. Although its actualization may be risky and
154 Chapter Four

delicate, Socrates’s maieutic drawing-forth (anamnēsis) of mathematical in-

sight from an enslaved boy in the Meno suggests that a responsible, phronetic
pedagogy may elicit the polemical turning to zetetic philosophy as a cast of
mind as democratically as a population can embrace it. Short of a full em-
brace of zetetic philosophy by an entire people, responsible pedagogy, at the
level of the fire, projects narratives, legends, and norms that lend salutary im-
ages of justice to some and leave the door to philosophy open to any who can
take the upward way. Responsible guidance, responsive to the understanding
of historically situated human beings, that leads up to the lateral pathway and
the fire, and then up the steep, rough, upward way and out into the light of
day, is vital if the released prisoner is not to suffer trauma and fall victim to
despair, manipulation, nihilism, or a complete breakdown.
To put all this another way, the proper use of dialectic, for oneself and with
others, expands upon Socrates’s claim in the Phaedo that “those who engage
in philosophy correctly study nothing other than dying and being dead” (64a).
Dying and the prospect of death cause the greatest fears and the greatest pain
for most. As the end of life, death seems to be the ultimate separation from
all that we are and could be, all that we know, and all that matters to us. But
breaking the bonds and bounds of the cave, the release from opinions about
what we have held dear or what we have simply relied upon to navigate an
uncertain world, can be a kind of death as well. To cease to believe what
friends or family or mentors or other one-time paragons believe can be like
dying to a whole world of commitments, concerns, affections, and expecta-
tions. To learn how to live with this possibility of dying to one’s familiar
world is a key feature of the pedagogy of dialectic, and so to a polemical
ethic. It requires learning how to let go of opinions without falling into the
despair of utter disorientation or nihilism. It means learning again to trust in
trust, even after an initial, naive trust in the transparency of the world has
been shattered. This means engaging in the zetetic life of philosophy, a life
that embraces the helicoidal, triadic unity of wonder-question-response by
trusting one’s intimations but being willing to discard them if they fail in the
polemos of interpreting the world with both honesty and charity. To see how
this is possible requires understanding what happens after the initial release
as the escapee ascends, past the fire and up the steep, rough, upward path to
the light and back down again into the cave.

NOTES

1. This is my translation; see Kirk, Raven, and Schofield, The Presocratic Phi-
losophers, 193.
2. For example, see Annas, An Introduction to Plato’s Republic, 255.
 Breaking Down in the Cave 155

3. For a thorough treatment of this theme, see Joseph Cimakasky, The Role of
Exaiphnēs in Early Greek Literature, chapters 3–5.
4. See Jonathan Lear, Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation, 2.
5. See Karl Jaspers, Basic Philosophical Writings, 96–104.
6. Jacques Derrida, in conversation with Gianni Vattimo, in J. Derrida and
M. Ferraris, A Taste for the Secret, 80.
7. For my critique of Derrida, see Heidegger’s Polemos, chapter 5, and “Inhalt
unzulässig.”
8. Consider Bloom, “Interpretive Essay,” 307–10, 390, 399–400; Strauss, The
City and Man, 62.
9. See Strauss, City and Man, Bloom, “Interpretive Essay,” 310; for a sustained
analysis of the “upward way” and its place in the motif of the Socratic “I went down”
(katebēn) in the Republic, see John Sallis, Being and Logos, chapter 5.
10. For an incisive analysis of this theme, see Marina McCoy, Plato on the Rheto-
ric of Philosophers and Sophists, especially chapter 5.
11. For a valuable discussion of how aporia and atopia, lack of a way out through
argument and finding oneself out of place in understanding, arise together in the
liberation from the cave, see Andrea Nightingale, Spectacles of Truth in Classical
Greek Philosophy, 96–107.
12. For a phenomenology of ontological trauma, see Polt, Time and Trauma, es-
pecially chapter 4.
13. For a perceptive phenomenological analysis and narrative of breakdown and
healing in mental health, see Kevin Aho, Contexts of Suffering, especially the after-
word.
Figure 1. The Cave. Illustration by Marc Ngui.
Figure 2. The Divided Line. Illustration by Marc Ngui.
Figure 3. The Cave with the Divided Line superimposed as Divided Ring. Illustration
by Marc Ngui.
Figure 4. The Cave, modes of liberation and ascent. Illustration by Marc Ngui.
 Chapter Five

Ideation and Reconstruction

Healing from the Bonds of the Cave

The road up and down is one and the same.

—Heraclitus, Fragment 601

In the previous chapter, I argued that phenomenologically the breakdown of

the bonds of opinion is not yet a breaking-free, because the healing from the
bonds must also happen as a feature of genuine liberation. Deconstruction of
some authoritative, authoritarian, or simply erroneous construal of meaning,
however oppressive or limiting it might have been, is only the beginning.
This beginning may easily falter and lead to despair, or fall into a new form
of ideological manipulation, or into outright nihilism. The breakdown is not
liberation itself, only its inception that can easily go astray. Socrates distin-
guishes the release that takes place in breaking the bonds from the healing
from the bonds. Freedom is fully achieved by taking the path of recovery,
which is the polemical, philosophical life.

5.1 LIGHTING THE WAY ON THE UPWARD PATH

In Socrates’s allegory, the upward pathway in the cave represents the process
of healing that is critical for philosophy and a life well lived. That upward
pathway has several stages: first, to the level of the lateral pathway and the
fire; second, up the steep, rough, upward pathway from the lateral pathway
and the fire and out into the light of day; third, outside of the cave; fourth,
back down into the cave (see Figure 2).
First, the lateral pathway and the fire. I will address this stage only briefly
here because I will treat it separately in chapter 7 as the pivot between Plato

160
 Ideation and Reconstruction 161

and Heidegger. What the escaped prisoner learns at this level is that the
shadows cast upon the wall of the lowest level are projections, very much
like the ones we see cast by a projector in a slide show or movie theater.
They are not the things themselves. The shadows, the fleeting shapes that the
prisoners’ former opinions were about, now become newly comprehensible
as produced by a cause beyond themselves. This accounts for them in a fuller
sense than what is accessible from the lowest floor of the cave. Socrates says
that, from the perspective of the lowest cave-dwellers, the shadows are not
simply meaningless and arbitrarily chaotic. There are patterns to the shadows
and when they appear, allowing the prisoners to hold contests for who can
predict what will come next (516c). What the escaped prisoner may come to
understand at the fire is that opinions and their objects are not merely arbi-
trary; there is something that gives them sense. Nevertheless, if the prisoner
does not ascend further, then the realization that the shadows themselves are
not arbitrary risks being replaced by the view that their cause is arbitrary, and
this has its own dangerous consequences.
In the second stage, dialectic marks out “the rough, steep, upward way”
(515e). Socrates says nothing more about the upward way than that it is rough
and steep and leads out “into the light of the sun” (515e). Still, if this way
is an image for dialectic, as he indicates, it is difficult and painful because
it involves more than the deconstruction of individual opinions about some
particular shadows, which can bring on the first release. It is a systematic and
comprehensive deconstruction of opinions as well as accounts for the basis
of opinion (call these accounts theories or ideologies, as we will discuss in
chapter 7). This is all in the service of preparing the upward-bound prisoners
for the true and fully integrated account of all that is, which will finally come
to light out beyond the cave after they emerge, and that will also account
for how this knowledge relates back to all the opinions and accounts of the
shadows seen in the cave.
What lights the way on this upward path? Is it light from the fire, reflect-
ing upward, or light from outside, seeping downward? Socrates does not
say. Perhaps this is fitting for the practice of this comprehensive dialectic as
the training of the philosophers, because it is potentially so disorienting and
unpleasant that few will even attempt it. Few can withstand the wholesale
deconstruction of their understanding of the world with only the promise of
its reconstruction. As Socrates says to Glaucon, it is really only safe for those
who have proven themselves mature enough to maintain the salutary opinions
that make them suitable for citizenship in the city, even while putting those
opinions to the most rigorous tests of dialectic (539c–540a; cf. 413c–414a).
Still, even for those resilient few who maintain that Socratic piety, that
trust in the meaning of the world may ever-again be reconstructed, what
162 Chapter Five

keeps them going? What prevents them from remaining in or plunging back
into the despair or nihilism that first appears at the original release from the
bonds, when the prisoners cast off the certainties of naive opinion but have
not yet found anything in its stead? At this point of decision for continuing on
the upward path, the misology and nihilism could be all the more furious and
acidic, armed with the systematic techniques of dialectic, now degenerated
to mere eristic after giving up on the truth as dialectic’s goal. Even though
Socrates does not say what lights the way up, we are entitled to fill in the de-
tails from what he says elsewhere, because the logic of the Platonic dialogue
itself, by implicit intention, calls upon us to enter the dialectic and use our
own imagination in ideation.
For one thing, there are the intimations of the truth that dialectic can pro-
duce. As discussed in section 2.4, ‘intimation’ is my rendering of Plato’s
anamnēsis in the Meno, where it serves as the Socratic version of the herme-
neutic circle. No inquiry can even begin without prior understanding of an
intelligible world that undergirds any question as a question worth pursuing.
There are two sides to these intimations. One comes from the act of question-
ing as such, the other from its direction or goal. Without the prior contextual
understanding that makes a question arising from that context intelligible,
there would not be the incendiary wonder and then the question that guides
the inquiry. We can say this illumination of the dialectical upward way is
provided in part by the light the fire casts upward, rather than the light it casts
downward on the cave wall that produces the shadows the prisoners see. The
upward firelight would not cast shadows of the artifacts upon the upward
way, because the passers-by carrying them walk between the fire and the wall
that separates them from the prisoners. Instead, what this upward firelight
provides is simply illumination upon the upward path, which, while still very
difficult, becomes potentially navigable.
But surmising this from the Allegory is still figurative, and does not explain
what it means in terms of the practice of dialectic as productive discernment.
Here, Heidegger’s term Lichtung is particularly well suited to making sense
of this because it has both a visual (Licht: light) and a spatial meaning: it is
an area, a clearing, that is lit up and thus open to our understanding, involve-
ments, and purposes. It is the Da of our Da-sein, the here of our being-human,
the situated emplacement that defines our historical world. Our understanding
has the potential to make sense of a world and all the things in it, but without
that world already having been opened up for us, lighted up in advance, as it
were, we would be blind—whatever our capabilities. The way we experience
this opened-up-ness of a world is by having been always-already thrown, in
Heidegger’s idiom, into a particular historical world, whose overall sense
grants meaning to most, if not all things, that we encounter within it. This is
 Ideation and Reconstruction 163

what the light of the fire provides for those living in thrall to the shadows on
the cave wall. But the firelight provides something different for those setting
out on the journey upon the upward way out of the cave. Due to the orien-
tation of the fire, it no longer provides the shadowy shapes of the artifacts
within a particular historical understanding. What it does provide is enlight-
enment about the casting (the thrown projecting) of historical understanding
as such, which is how it conditions, or causes (as aitia), the opinions that
human beings hold about the nature of the things they perceive.
This is the light that opens up and illumines the entrance to the upward
way. While apprehending the role of the firelight in projecting historical
opinion does not simply obliterate these opinions for a prisoner healing from
the bonds and the trauma of release, it does hint at the possibility of some-
thing beyond received opinion other than despair, sophistry, or nihilism. The
firelight, cast upward rather than downward, provides the inkling of hope. It
grants a discernment for opinion as such, as the wellspring of the potential
contradictions and questions that inevitably arise in our polemical confronta-
tions with the world. Even the simple recognition of opinion as such provides
the opportunity and impetus to seek something beyond opinion. The fire casts
light upon and through the opening to the upward way.
Socrates in the Meno says that no inquiry, no hunt, would be possible with-
out some prior scent of the quarry to be found.2 This is the intimation granted
by the downward-filtering light from outside, the second form of illumina-
tion on the upward way. It may be utterly inchoate at first, but it sheds just
enough light to make the act of questioning and inquiry possible, so that the
upward ascent can begin through an intimation of what transcends opinion.
We receive confirmations of these intimations in dialectic when the dialectic
produces insight, as in the Meno where Socrates shows that the slave boy
can elicit a knowledge he had no notion he possessed. Even if such insights
are only temporary as confirmations of intimation, as each may come under
further dialectical inquiry (“they must all be returned to many times in the
future,” Glaucon says [532d]), such insights provide encouragement that the
way up is not in vain. We will say more about the role of this upward firelight
in the discussion of the crossroads of the cave in chapter 7, but the responsi-
ble use of a polemical dialectic derives from Socratic phenomenology. What
people say when giving their opinions can guide the inquiry upward, because
what they say already contains meaning even if they do not directly grasp
its fuller significance. Otherwise, communication would not be intelligible
at all. Opinion should be respected for that reason, not simply cast aside, as
the newly released but unhealed prisoner might be inclined to do in an initial
burst of resentment. Opinions are not nothing. They contain the first impulses
of understanding that can lead to productive questions. As we shall see, this
164 Chapter Five

has to do with the integrated character of the Divided Line and with the fact
of our finite embodiment.
Although Socrates does not describe this, the only shadow cast by the
firelight that the ascending seeker now must contend with as a shadow is
their own, cast up ahead along the upward path. By contrast, it is fair to as-
sume that in the state of bondage, with the fire blocked by the wall running
alongside the lateral path, the prisoners see not their own shadows, but only
those projected by the artifacts passing in front of the firelight. The prison-
ers have little or no reflective sense of themselves. Unable to see even their
own shadows, unable to move because of their bonds as do the shadows they
see cast on the cave wall, they have no notion that they are implicated in the
world of shadows, artifacts, and passers-by. Taking the shadows as the only
things that are, they have no sense of their own perspective but rather inhabit
their received opinions like a second skin. But at the level of the fire and the
lateral road, the healing prisoner must become familiar with her own shadow
while she comes to understand the relationship of the projecting firelight and
the shadows of artifacts cast on the wall.
The former prisoner’s realization that she herself also casts a shadow is
a moment of self-discovery to which we will return in the discussion of the
lateral path. The former prisoner now does have the ability for self-reflection
and can realize that her embodiment and her situatedness are implicated in
how opinion is projected upon things, including herself. This realization
about the nature of opinion as cast or projected by a situated context in which
one is oneself implicated opens up the question of whether one can rise above
the situatedness of opinion, if there is a knowledge beyond the happenstance
of opinion. This is the moment that the former prisoner may notice the open-
ing to the upward way, lit up by the firelight, and consider taking it, despite
how unpleasantly rough and steep it might appear. As she enters upon it, her
own shadow, cast by the fire, would loom large, making the initial climb all
the harder. What does this mean? If, as we have argued, understanding the
relation of firelight, artifacts, and shadows corresponds to insight into how
the bonds of historical opinion are forged from a forced perspective upon
what is, then a recognition of one’s own perspectival opinion, even as one
seeks to climb beyond it, can be the greatest impediment to that progress. So-
cratic phenomenology begins with opinion because, even when faulty, there
is something inherently meaningful to opinion. The shadow cast by the fire
along the upward path is how one’s own embodiment and the perspective it
brings with it can distort and obscure a proper understanding of the nature of
opinion, making it harder to grasp what is really at issue in a confrontation
with the meaning inhering to a particular opinion. We are likely to overcom-
pensate for our own perspectival happenstance, discounting the intimations of
 Ideation and Reconstruction 165

meaning, or we are liable to insist upon our own convictions and resist dying
to them. Even if that is in principle what we want, the shadow of our selves
gets in the way. This is why climbing the upward path within sight of a friend
or mentor might help to alert us of our limited ways of seeing.
But if the seeker does not give up at the start of the upward way, frightened
off, as it were, by her own shadow, we can surmise that intimations also must
come from above on the upward journey. After all, the tunnel must eventu-
ally open to the light of day, and this daylight will filter downward along the
upward way, just as the firelight seeps upward. As the seeker climbs higher,
the firelight ebbs away and the diffused daylight penetrating the upward way
increases.
If the light of the fire cast upward represents the dialectical understanding
of how opinion forms our historical world as something we are contingently
thrown into, and for that reason not utterly meaningless, the daylight filter-
ing down must represent something else. In the context of both the Divided
Line and the Cave Allegory, the daylight represents the absolute enlighten-
ment of knowledge, which the seeker does not yet have, but which beckons
along the upward path. Intimations of such knowledge might come from the
study of mathematics, for example, which are positioned at the third level of
the Divided Line, though still below ideas and the idea of the good. While
not yet the fullness of a comprehensive knowledge that would shed light on
things both human and otherwise, mathematics, when studied properly, has
the power to ignite the mind with the beauty of an understanding abstracted
from contingent particulars and historical opinion.
If the firelight intimates our situatedness, our rootedness in a historical em-
placement that entails all the already-having-been-interpreted of a world we
did not choose, the filtered daylight intimates our potential for transcendence,
the possibility of rising above the contingent to the universal and perhaps
to the eternal. Though the diffusion of upward firelight and of downward
daylight may overlap, in inverse proportion, all along the upward way, the
seeker climbs from the initial guidance of the firelight, which teaches about
the hold that opinion as such can have over us, to guidance from the daylight,
which promises a universal knowledge that will put all particular opinion in
its correct place, rather than simply obliterate it. Indeed, as she climbs further
upwards, the seeker’s shadow will gradually be displaced as the diffused
daylight from above slowly overpowers the firelight, casting the shadow
back, rather than forward. The shadow of the self ceases to obscure the way
up and forward and instead marks what the seeker is leaving behind, if she
looks back on her progress.
But on the upward path we now run into a serious difficulty that derives
from the distinction between the zetetic and the echonic philosopher. Within
166 Chapter Five

the narrative of the Allegory as Socrates tells it, the aspiring philosopher does
indeed emerge from the cave’s dark passageways into the light of day. Once
outside, the former prisoner completes her liberation as the fulfillment of the
hope and trust that guided the way along the upward path through the upward
and downward intimations of knowledge. The outside world, illumined by the
light of the Sun rather than by a feeble fire, constitutes the next stage of the
journey, after the upward path, and before that, the lateral path and the fire,
and before that, the initial release from the bonds. In the narrative, the knowl-
edge gained outside, by the light of the Sun, reveals things as they really are,
not merely as the artifacts of contingent, historical human representation as
seen at the level of the lateral path in the objects carried by the passers-by.
This corresponds to an apprehension of the ideas, with the Sun as the idea of
the good that is the source of the meaning for all the ideas and so of every-
thing else, down the Line. It is this knowledge that entitles the philosopher-
rulers to govern, and to do it effectively once they return and adjust to the
darker illumination of the cave. This is the echonic vision of philosophy, the
one that lays definitive claim to the truth, that has it, holds it, and wields it to
govern in the city “in a state of waking, not in dream as the many cities nowa-
days are governed by men who fight over shadows with one another and form
factions for the sake of ruling, as though it were some great good” (520c).
Socrates does not make this claim for himself. It is one of the most famous
things about Socrates that he claims that the extent of his wisdom is knowing
that he does not know. As we have seen, he is a zetetic philosopher, one still
seeking that complete illumination, still ascending the upward way. But this
throws the whole narrative of the Allegory into confusion. It is deeply puz-
zling that Socrates would propose a conclusion to the philosophical journey
that not even he has attained. That he has not reached the end brings into
question whether the destination is as he describes it and whether a final,
absolute knowledge is even achievable. That in turn calls into question the
notion that philosopher-rulers could even come into being, let alone return
back to the cave to lead the city in a state of waking. The threat of misology
and nihilism, which first arose at the moment of release and confusion for the
prisoner at the lowest level of the cave, returns now with a vengeance.
The promise implied by embarking upon the journey of the difficult up-
ward pathway was that the intimations of truth would lead, in the end, to an
apprehension of the truth, a way really out from opinion, deception, illusion,
confusion. That hope seems dashed if even Socrates cannot fulfill this prom-
ise. If so, what justifies bothering to attempt the painful and exhausting up-
ward pathway? It seems to be a fraud, one even more crushing than the initial
confusion at the first release, because it is a betrayal, a promise broken. If not
a fraud, then perhaps it is a delusion bordering on psychosis to believe that an
 Ideation and Reconstruction 167

imaginary set of ideas and ideals, beyond sensory verification and subsisting
in some timeless zone accessible only to the mind, is the ontōs on, what is
really real, most truly in being. This fraud, delusion, or psychosis threatens a
breakdown as a decisive end of philosophy.
Here we reach a stage tangential to the Allegory and unspoken within it,
but nevertheless essential to its meaning. We can be confident that this stage
is there because Plato himself must certainly have been aware of the contrast
between Socrates as zetetic philosopher and the echonic philosopher-rulers
of the Republic that Plato depicts Socrates asking his companions to imag-
ine. Plato thus calls us to consider this apparent paradox in connection with
the narrative of the Cave, and with the argument more broadly, that on the
surface seems to seek to establish the legitimacy of philosopher-rulers. This
confrontation between the Socratic context, that Socrates is not a knower, and
the argument’s narrative within the text is Plato’s masterstroke as the meta-
teller of the tale: of the Cave, the Divided Line, and the Republic as a whole.
It is how he can speak with us, without speaking directly to us, by drawing us
into the polemos of philosophizing and about philosophy itself as way of life,
through both the said and the unsaid. It is precisely the contradiction between
echonic and zetetic philosophy that sets the polemos of interpretation on edge
with his text. It is here, reader, that you are invited back into the picture, the
eikōn that both Socrates and Plato have drawn.

5.2 IDEATION AND SOCRATIC PHENOMENOLOGY

The key is Socrates’s phenomenology, his commitment to an interpersonal

dynamic of asking people for and then conversing with them about their
opinions. Of course, you can always refuse that call or refuse the conversation
after giving an answer, but if you take it up, then Socrates has also committed
himself to his piety in the dialectic: that what you have to say, your opinion,
is already rooted in meaning, even if deeply obscured and requiring exten-
sive deconstruction to make it more visible and intelligible. Socrates’s piety,
as a trust in trust, remains resilient even if a particular conversation results
in aporia. This phenomenological piety about the meaningfulness of what
people have to say was discussed just above as the intimations produced by
the light shed by the fire upon the upward path. It entails the assumption that
whenever you honestly give an opinion, it is somehow rooted in a meaningful
historical context that illumines it. But what about the downward intimations,
the ones from the daylight filtering in from above? If the zetetic journey has
no end, are these not just will-of-the-wisps, luring us into miasmic bogs of ill-
founded and imaginary ideas that will separate us from the only firm ground
168 Chapter Five

we can trust for our everyday existence, the settled convictions of the histori-
cal communities to which we belong?
We have already seen that Socrates orients his phenomenology of con-
versation on what he readily calls a hypothesis, not a doctrine or a settled
theory: the ideas or forms. He has said that something like the ideas, “some
such something” (toiouton ti, 533a), must be if meaningful dialogue is to be
possible at all, because something must have already lent intelligibility to the
world we share in speech as meaningful, because it is simply manifestly so
that there is meaning. Plato makes this point when he has Parmenides, in the
dialogue of the same name, say the following about ideas and the very pos-
sibility of speech:
If someone were not to grant that forms of beings exist, nor to demarcate [horie-
itai] a form for each one, he would have nowhere to turn his thought, for he does
not grant that there is an idea that is always the same for each of the various
beings, and in this way he would completely destroy the power of talking things
through [dialegesthai: dialectic, discussion]. (135b–c)

Our logos, our giving of accounts in speech and in dialogue, the power of
words as such, is grounded in a larger logos that has always-already gath-
ered together a world of meaning, making any given conversation at least
provisionally intelligible. Even to doubt meaning is to assume it in the act of
doubting. The ‘idea’ is itself an image, a metaphor, based on the operation of
human vision. It is not the thing itself, even if “some such something” like it
must be. The Socratic metaphorics of vision, by focusing on the Greek word
idea as what-has-been-caught-sight-of, tries to address what is at-issue in the
problem of how meaning, truth, and knowledge can be possible. Just as we
do see things as distinct and separate from one another (and to go beyond
ocularcentrism, also the blind, using Braille maps, for example, discern the
meaningful differences among things), so also we do understand things, in
advance, even if often blurred and mistaken, without the account that phi-
losophy latterly seeks to give them. Otherwise, we would have no world at
all, only William James’s “blooming, buzzing confusion,” a mere manifold
of sensations, to use Kant’s terminology, which we could not even begin to
articulate in understanding, let alone in language.3 Even mistakes presume, as
the background to identifying them as mistakes, a context of an understand-
ing of meaning that allows us to discern truth from untruth, and so go about
our business.
For Socrates, the ideas are a heuristic for engaging in the dialectical
polemos of conversation, because they allow him to draw the conversation
partner from opinion to analysis by relying on the inchoate sense of meaning
that we already inhabit by using words. The key to the Divided Line is that it
 Ideation and Reconstruction 169

is an image: literally—if we assume that Socrates could have been drawing

it in wax or sand for the young men in Cephalus’s house—and figuratively,
as something we must imagine as we read or hear about it. The same is true
of the Allegory of the Cave. It is an image. We must imagine it to understand
it as Socrates narrates it. We employ precisely that power of imagination
which Socrates places at the lowest level of the Divided Line, in order to
make sense of the idea of the ideas, which reside at the highest level, sup-
posedly the furthest removed from images, reflections, and representations,
as well as the shadows on the cave wall. Image and idea both partake in the
same metaphorics of vision. We must not forget that the Divided Line is not
divided by actual barriers, any more than are the modes of understanding the
world, from imagination, to trust, to the thought that can perform mathemat-
ics, to the insight that grants the ideas. The cave itself is a continuum, from
lowest depths to the outside, and even if it contains obstacles to the ascent
(and return), no stage is completely walled off from the others. To say that
the ideas are on a continuum with images and imagination is not to denigrate
the ideas but to fulfill their meaning.
Thus, the term ideation is apt for what is at-issue in countering the nihilism
that threatens the upward path on the zetetic model of philosophy. Ideation
captures the sense of imagination and idea as deeply connected, as well as
the sense of a verbal process and not just a thing, an engaging in the activity
of philosophizing as an ongoing confrontation with meaning. The Socratic
insight is that meaningful existence requires ideation, whether as something
we do implicitly or something elicited by philosophy. What Heidegger cri-
tiques as metaphysics, as the oblivion of what it means to be, is in fact a
phenomenological necessity for our understanding of a meaningful world and
for ethics more particularly.
To illustrate why ideation is a necessary feature of our hermeneutical ex-
istence, I will now appeal directly to you again, reader. Without you, these
words and pages are just ink on cellulose or pixels on a screen, or soundwaves
played by a book-on-tape, or digital data stored in a server. Indeed, without
you and the rest of us, who have the kind of hermeneutical understanding that
you share, words and ink and pixels and screens have no meaning at all. They
are just stuff, uninterpreted and meaningless. And yet, I only imagine you as
reader, whether a friend or colleague whom I know, or a stranger far off in
place or time. As discussed in my address to you, even if you were here, right
in front of me, I would still have to imagine you, because personhood is noth-
ing I can touch or see or hear, even if I had you in an MRI machine to see your
brain in action as we speak. Being-a-person is nothing empirically verifiable;
it is something that only the person that I am can experience as my own, in a
cave of selfhood. Unless there is a form of consciousness I have never known,
170 Chapter Five

I cannot experience being-you nor you being-me. Yet without the idea of you,
the activity of conversation, or of writing, would be unintelligible.
The presence to me or to you of the other person as person is not ordi-
narily a concept, although we can certainly make it a matter of theoretical
concern, as we are doing right now; rather, it functions phenomenologically
as an a priori feature of our interpersonal dealings. It is more fitting to call
our apperception of the personhood of the other an ideation than a concept,
because if we do reflect on our everyday assumption that it is persons,
rather than, say, robots or mirages, that we interact with, then we see that
this being-with-others-as-persons is simply a constitutive way of our being
in the world. Through ideation, we see the person there, despite the fact that
there can never be any sensory or empirical evidence of personhood. The
idea of the other-as-person is a transcendental condition of the possibility for
discourse of any kind. It is a phenomenological given of the activity itself,
because discourse of any kind entails that other nodes of thought, feeling,
and self-awareness are ‘there’ to us, in various ways. Otherwise, what we
take to be dialogue would only be the projections of a solipsistic monologue,
and this runs up against the reality of discovery through conversation: that
there are understandings of the world that I myself did not create.
I bring up the idea, or the ideation, of you—and of others—as persons
because it is phenomenal evidence that the ideas are indeed connected with
imagination. Far from making the ideas delusional, this connection is what
makes them a constitutive feature of our understanding of a meaningful
world. The ideas are a metaphor, and as such imagined, but so too are all con-
cepts. The question is whether they, or “some such something” by whatever
name we call them and whatever metaphor captures their role, are necessarily
constitutive of a meaningful world and, more specifically, to a philosophi-
cal life. The ideas are the heuristic that Socrates turns to, because he refuses
misology and nihilism; he trusts that even when the world breaks at one of
its joints, asking “What is X?” (ti to on) and employing the idea of X as a
prompt to investigation and discussion will possibly illuminate the meaning
already inherent to our understanding. In asking the “What is X?” question,
the definition of X (justice, piety, love, etc.) would not itself be the idea of
the thing. That is because only in the light of the idea could the definition
make sense and be correct, just as it is only because of the idea, if still only
dimly sighted and intimated, that Socrates or we discern hermeneutically that
a given definition is incorrect and that the polemical work of interpretation
and dialogue must continue. The idea informs linguistic articulation and
definition, but the idea itself straddles conceptuality between the domains of
meaning and unmeaning.
 Ideation and Reconstruction 171

5.3 OUT OF THE CAVE: THE ECHONIC VISION

In the Allegory of the Cave, the culmination of the ascent from the cave is to
emerge from the upward pathway into the broad light of day. I will not tarry
here, for reasons to be made clear in what follows. Emerging from the cave,
as usually interpreted, represents the realization of the complete liberation of
the mind in light of ultimate truth. The sight acquired once out of the cave is
the echonic vision of the truth: once beheld, this vision is absolute, without
need for re-vision. As we have noted before, understanding the ideas, which
grant intelligibility to each instance of the particulars, and grasping the idea
of the good itself, which clarifies what ideas such as justice, wisdom, mod-
eration, and courage are good for as human virtues for a life well lived, is
what justifies the rule of the echonic philosophers as legitimate. There is an
absolute self-sufficiency to the vision of the echonic philosopher, akin to the
wisdom of the divine.
A key detail requires attention at this point. Even upon emerging from the
upward pathway into the open, the escaped prisoner’s vision is not immedi-
ately healed and made whole. At first, asks Socrates, would not the disori-
ented prisoner coming into the light “have his eyes suffused by the sunbeam
and be unable to see even one of the things now said to be true?” (516a, tm).
What follows is a period of habituation, where the prisoner completes the
process of healing from the bonds:

At first he’d most easily make out the shadows; and after that the phantoms
[eidōla] of the human beings and the other things in water; and, later, the things
themselves. And from there he could turn to beholding the things in heaven
and heaven itself, more easily at night—looking at the light of the stars and
the moon—than by day—looking at the sun and sunlight. […] Then finally I
suppose he would be able to make out the sun—not its appearances in water or
some alien place, but the sun itself by itself in its own region—and see what
it’s like. (516a–b)

The final mark of healing and liberation is that the former prisoner would
conclude that the sun “is in a certain way the cause of all those things he and
his companions [back down in the cave] had been seeing” (516b–c). The
seeker would arrive at the end of seeking “by making out the sun itself.” We
should keep in mind that this is a healing in the echonic account, where phi-
losophy comes to an end by being able to behold the sun, the image for the
idea of the good. As all know, we can only make out the sun itself directly for
a brief moment, or risk temporary or permanent blindness where the distinct
intelligibility of things gets overwhelmed and erased. The danger in gazing
directly upon the idea of the good is that contemplating the source of all
172 Chapter Five

meaning might overwhelm one’s sense of the specific meanings that things
happen to have in one’s particular circumstances and why these should even
matter to us.
On my account, any actual healing must transpire through the life of zetetic
philosophy as skeptical idealism, a life that mediates between the longing for
transcendence and knowledge and the rootedness of finite human understand-
ing. What is remarkable about the account Socrates gives is that even outside
of the cave, the features of the cave remain present. There are shadows of
things themselves, such as of trees; there are eidōla, phantoms, or less dra-
matically, reflections of things and people in water. An eidōlon, from which
we have our word “idol,” is like a shadow of an eidos, a form, as when you
look in a mirror. By itself, it is not the thing (the you, for example, which is
only reflected as a “phantom” in the mirror), but very close to the thing in its
delineations (a reflection bears an eerie resemblance to what it reflects, with-
out actually being it). As part of the Allegory, the sun is itself an eidōlon of
the idea of the good, just as the image of the Divided Line is an eidōlon of the
structures of intelligibility as such. The Divided Line bends back upon itself
again, so that images, the lowest level, are part of the ideas, the highest, and
vice versa. If this involution were not the case, if the divisions of the Divided
Line were not integrated with one another—making it in fact an Integrated
Line, or a Divided Ring—then knowledge of the apex would be useless at
the base, and the base would find no resolution at the apex. Indeed, even
after emerging into the open, even after getting accustomed to the daylight
and coming to look upon the sun itself as a source of all that is, the prisoner
is still in a cave, one enclosed by the cosmic vault of the sky like the natural
earthen walls of the cave, a point that Heidegger also makes (GA 24: 403).
Transcending the cave, in the Latin sense of trans-scandere, to climb across
or above or to surpass, is a compromised undertaking.
Even so, the Cave image is not compromised in the purely negative sense of
irrevocably flawed, because, as with all great images and metaphors, its fail-
ings point beyond itself so that it can transcend itself. No word, no metaphor,
no image is the same as the thing itself. That would be idolatry. Instead, each
word, metaphor, and image is an eidōlon in that larger sense of something
that points beyond itself, that is not simply equivalent to what it is about, and
therefore cannot represent it in its fullness. Full meaning always escapes us.
The eidōlon’s flaws, as with any breakdown in understanding, are the clues
to what can only be apprehended by entering into the polemos of confront-
ing the image through interpretation and reinterpretation as provoked by the
flaws, inconsistencies, and inadequacies of what has been said or depicted. As
such, the Allegory, as any word or metaphor or image, is a compromise in the
 Ideation and Reconstruction 173

Latin sense of a com-pro-mittere, a sending-forward-together that impels the

intimations of ideational thinking with the deferred promise of fulfillment.
The eidē and ideai, forms and ideas, that Socrates promotes as a way to
make sense of our sense-making as such, are themselves images and eikones,
but so is everything we say. All language is cave-like, being just such a com-
promise between the meanings we have inherited, the breakdowns in those
meanings we inevitably run up against, and the reintegrations we achieve if
we can navigate the ongoing ascent to heal the breaks. To compromise after
a confrontation is to project forward a meaning into the future that we can
trust and share in together for a while, until the next breakdown of meaning
requires another breakthrough from unmeaning. Compromise is futural; it
retains the grounds of confrontation as a trust that when breakdown in mean-
ing breaks out again, the ongoing process of dialogical polemos will strive to
reknit the frayed and always fraying fabric of understanding, a fabric whose
evolving patterns intimate its mending.

5.4 TRANSCENDENCE DEFERRED:

PRECONSTRUCTION AS ENVISIONING

What I have called the implied or tangential contradiction between the

echonic and the zetetic conceptions of philosophy in the Republic raises a
decisive question about the upward pathway. On the narrative surface of the
Allegory, echonic philosophers do indeed manage to emerge into the light
of day and come to grasp the truth about reality as their absolute possession.
They achieve an absolute transcendence from mere opinion into complete
knowledge, gazing upon the sun. The same cannot be true of the zetetic
philosophers, whose mode of philosophizing is an ongoing seeking for truth,
knowledge, and wisdom.
At the lowest level of the cave, we interpreted the breakdown of under-
standing that initially cuts the prisoner loose from the bonds of received
opinion as a deconstruction, both of specific opinions and of the modes of
interpreting what the opinions are about, namely, the shadows, what it is we
believe we have understood as this or that thing. At the level of the lateral
pathway and the fire, escaped prisoners may come to understand that what
had conditioned their way of seeing and interpreting these things is the pro-
jection of opinion by our historical situatedness. So, what happens on the
upward pathway, between the recognition of the contingency of opinion and
the realization of absolute knowledge? What is the healing prisoner doing and
learning there by climbing upward?
174 Chapter Five

I have suggested that on the upward path, diffused firelight from below
at first guides the seeker, which gives way to the diffused daylight from
above, and that the former decreases and the latter increases in proportion to
how far the seeker has climbed (see Figure 4, upper panels). The illumina-
tion provided by the firelight represents an understanding of how historical
contingency mediates the influence of opinion, while still preserving the
phenomenal content of opinion. For Socrates, this is the meaning inherent but
often unsaid in what people say, but which needs fuller elucidation to guide
the upward way, an elucidation provided by dialectic and dialogue. This is an
understanding that might transcend but does not obliterate mere opinion. That
greater understanding, though not yet realized, still beckons upward. We will
illustrate how this happens in the next chapter with various examples.
In chapter 1, we discussed the triad of construal of a meaningful world in
Heidegger’s 1927 lecture course: a moment of deconstruction, which frees up
historically ossified concepts for new use; a moment of construction, which
starts construing a new way of potentially understanding and employing the
historical concepts now unlocked and made available by the deconstruction;
and a moment of reconstruction that brings the new understanding to bear
on how we understand and live in the world. After the historical meaning of
contingent opinions, norms, concepts, and the arguments for these has been
deconstructed, new possibilities of meaning may be imagined. This is the
moment of construction, or what I have called preconstruction, but because
the latter is an unwieldy term, and the former probably too vague, I also call
this the moment of envisioning.
This envisioning involves the intimations of another possible world, a
future meaning that could be integrated into life, combining imagination
and ideas in polemical dialogue with the received but now deconstructed
opinions inherited historically. It is a version of ideation that can range from
daydreaming to complex and systematic philosophical arguments in the light
of the ideas that beckon. To en-vision, as with many words with the prefix
en-, means to place oneself into the context of a vision, a seeing of a future
possible world of meaning and imaging oneself living within it. While envi-
sioning may be delusional (and we will address this later), it is also something
we are doing all the time, in the little everyday struggles where we have to
plan ahead due to circumstances we had not predicted. Hence, envisioning is
something futural that we are always already doing as a feature of our finitude
and existential temporality, but we can elevate it to a self-aware activity.
With respect to the triad of wonder, question, and response, envisioning
takes place at the level of response, when we address a question occasioned by
the breakdown of understanding marked by the moment of wonder that gives
us pause and disrupts our usual ways of seeing, in situations ranging from
 Ideation and Reconstruction 175

the trivial to the momentous, from the rapturous to the traumatic. At its most
elaborate, preconstruction as envisioning involves what we would usually
recognize as a philosophical argument, most obviously in political philoso-
phy, but not only in that context. As one response provoked by the breakdown
and the wonder and questioning it involves, philosophical argument engages
in the dialectical, reinterpretative polemos with deconstructed concepts and
arguments in order to justify and legitimize an alternative understanding as
fully and as comprehensively as possible. An example would be the cynical
realist Thrasymachus, who nevertheless cannot avoid getting embroiled in
a debate about the nature of an ideal ruler “in the strict sense” (341b). Such
polemical work of reinterpretation is how imagination locks horns rigorously
with the past for the sake of a future. This envisioning, in all its forms, is what
transpires through the intimations of the diffused daylight of the ideas, filtering
down from above, in recuperative confrontation with the relevant patterns of
received opinions illumined by the firelight of historical insight.
But now we must ask why it matters if one understands progress up along
the upward path on the zetetic rather than the echonic model of philosophy.
Presumably, the seeker destined to emerge as a thoroughly complete echonic
philosopher would arrive in a position where she could confirm that the inti-
mations of her envisioning of alternatives to the contingent opinion she had
been born into—intimations that led her upward on the pathway—were in-
deed correct, or at least could be adjusted to fit with the absolute truth, given
the final vision that she would come to apprehend in looking upon the sun of
the idea of the good. For such a philosopher, a philosophical argument, once
made and understood, would be final and decisive, no longer subject to revi-
sion. So, for the echonic philosopher, the truth realized in argument would
provide the irrefutable legitimation for rule. It would not be dogma, it would
not be opinion (even if it might seem so to the uninformed), but rather the
exact representation of what is that provides the template for all appropriate
action in the world, a technology for rule and for education and for engineer-
ing both the human and the natural environments.
While the zetetic philosopher engages in exactly the same dialectical activ-
ity as the prospective echonic philosopher, who after all is still seeking while
on the upward path, the difference is that the zetetic does not emerge into the
light of day to behold that final, all-encompassing vision of the truth. But why
would the zetetic philosopher not fall into the trap of despair, produced by a
realization that insight into the historicity of opinion is not enough to lead one
out into the light of a transcendent truth, a truth whose beckoning intimations
on the upward path turn out to be nothing more than delusional phantoms
projecting upward by some phosphorescence within the cave but never lead-
ing out of it? This is the second occasion for nihilistic despair. The first is the
176 Chapter Five

initial and potentially traumatic breakdown of the bonds of received opinion.

The second is the belief that there may be no escape from the contingency
and divisiveness of historical viewpoints.
Notice that this same danger threatens the prospective echonic philosopher,
whose journey upward through dialectic may also be very long, and whose
literal out-come is no more or less assured while still on the journey. The
journey of philosophy provides no prospective guarantee of success. That is
the risk of embarking in philosophy, that combination of hubris and humility
in facing to deinon, the awe-inducing terror of the limits of our understand-
ing. Nihilism always lurks at the edges of the recognition that opinion is in
some sense historically conditioned and contingent, but that there may be no
alternative, and so no certain knowledge.
So, why would Plato set up the Cave Allegory in such a way that brings
that tangential divide into play between the zetetic and the echonic philoso-
pher: the philosopher that Socrates claims to be, a seeker who does not know
the truth, and the philosopher-rulers that Socrates posits in his narrative of the
city in speech, whose completely realized knowledge entitles them to rule? It
might seem that Plato risks undermining the whole philosophical enterprise
by obliquely suggesting that the philosopher-rulers are purely a figment of
Socrates’s philosophical imagination, exposing the attentive reader to the
corrosive risk of nihilism.
Several responses might save Plato, and by extension Socrates, from this
charge of promoting nihilism, a version of the charge against Socrates for
corrupting the youth by unsettling their convictions as provided by the gods
and traditions of the city. One is that Socrates himself was no such nihilist and
seemed content to live a life entirely upon the upward path, never laying claim
to that final, comprehensive wisdom about all that is. Presenting the example
of Socrates would be a mere appeal to the authority of Socrates as philosophi-
cal paragon, were it not for the Socratic defense of his activity as a kind of
philosophical piety. As we have seen, that defense is more than bald assertion
of the merits of the philosophical life. It involves both an argument immanent
in texts, such as the Phaedo and Republic, and an extrinsic argument that, I
would claim, Plato encourages us to develop for ourselves in confrontation
with the meaning of both the texts and the example of Socrates’s philosophi-
cal life as such. This is the brilliance of Plato’s dialogue form, which raises
these questions for the attentive reader and provides resources to address them,
thereby coaxing us into the dialectic that constitutes the polemical life of phi-
losophy by kindling the meeting of imagination and idea in ideation.
Another response has to do with the role of envisioning as the form phi-
losophy takes as a mode of construction, or the preconstruction of a new way
of understanding constructed from the elements analyzed, broken down, by
 Ideation and Reconstruction 177

deconstruction. I have argued that it is a phenomenological given that we

simply do this preconstructive envisioning as a feature of our existential
structure as beings who interpret themselves and the world, in both everyday
life and in those extraordinary circumstances that mark the breakdown of
understanding. To use Heidegger’s terminology from Being and Time, envi-
sioning is an existentiale, a mode of our polemical human-being that makes
the world intelligible to us as we confront the breakdowns of our understand-
ing and endeavor to reinterpret the world. Our finitude requires this, because
no understanding will be final and complete, as imagined in the vision of the
echonic philosopher who comes to the end of philosophical seeking in a full
and exhaustive illumination of the understanding.
So why project the echonic vision to our imaginations at all? The young
men in the Republic long to know if the imagined city is possible. Philosophi-
cal eros longs to know if an imagined ideal can ever be made real (471c). Why
should Plato have Socrates invite us to imagine the philosopher-rulers, who, as
the response to the third wave threatening to engulf the city in speech, take up
a major portion of the Republic, from the latter part of Book 7 (473c) through
the end of Book 7 as the ideal rulers of the ideal city? Surely the simplest an-
swer is that imagining what it would be like to know is one of the most natural
acts of philosophical reflection. The breakdown in opinion gives rise to this
desire. Even if that desire cannot be fully realized, a responsible defense of
the philosophical life must address the desire to know without either killing it
off or inspiring unrealistic hopes of complete satisfaction. That is a feature of
the zetetic healing from the bonds: a reconciliation of hubris and humility, a
reconciliation that is an ongoing activity of reconstructive interpretation of the
world, not an eradication of the tension between them. The ambition inspired
by the desire to know provides the fuel to philosophical ideation, especially in
its initial stages, after the first dislocations of deconstructive breakdown. The
more mature zetetic philosopher has learned to temper this hubris with a hu-
mility that accepts our finitude and fallibility, but without falling into nihilistic
despair. That combination is what I have been calling skeptical idealism as the
healing from the bonds. Next I will address what compels this balancing of
hubris and humility in the life of zetetic philosophy.

NOTES

1. In Curd, A Presocratics Reader, 48.

2. For the role of the hunt as metaphor for philosophy in Plato, see Mary
Townsend, The Woman Question in Plato’s Republic, 60–61 and passim.
3. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, B218–19.
 Chapter Six

The Compulsion of the Body

Why after all this one and not the rest?

Why this specific self, not in a nest,
but a house? Sewn up not in scales, but skin?
Not topped off by a leaf, but by a face?
Why on earth now, on Tuesday of all days,
and why on earth, pinned down by this star’s pin?
—Wisława Szymborska, from “Astonishment”1

The nature of skeptical idealism becomes clearer if we consider the distinc-

tion between how echonic and zetetic philosophy would function at the next
stage of the Allegory: the return of the philosopher back down into the cave.
The context is the founding of legitimate, wise, and just rule for the presump-
tively ideal city that Socrates and his companions are building through dis-
cussion. In describing the aspiring seekers who have arrived at the conclusion
of their ascent from the cave and their education in philosophy to become
possessors of truth, Socrates says that he and his interlocutor friends, as the
founders of the imagined Kallipolis, must not “permit them what is now
permitted,” namely for the realized philosophers “to remain there” outside,
beyond the cave in the open light of day, as if they had “emigrated to a colony
on the Isles of the Blessed while they are still alive.” Instead, Socrates says,
“Our job as founders is to compel the best natures to go to the study which we
were saying before is the greatest, to see the good and to go up that ascent”
(519c–d) and then again “by persuasion and compulsion” (519e) to “be will-
ing to go down again [palin katabainein] among those prisoners” and “share
their labors and honors, whether they be slighter or more serious” (519d). Ac-
cording to the surface narrative of the Allegory, these “best natures” must be

178
 The Compulsion of the Body 179

the prospective and then fully realized philosophers, the echonic philosophers
who know the full truth of the forms and the idea of the good after their ascent
from the cave. Only full possession of truth grants their legitimacy and ability
for completely just and wise rule.
We must contend again with the metaphorics of the Allegory, and in two
ways. First, what is the meaning of this compulsion (anankē) to go back to
the cave, apart from the logic of the narrative? In that narrative philosophers
would owe their enlightenment to the education provided by the city and
therefore owe that community a debt in a way that philosophers arising
spontaneously (again, exaiphnēs) in other societies unfriendly to philosophy
would not (520b). After all, the circumstances of philosophers returning to
Socrates’s Kallipolis are so extravagantly unlikely, as he himself acknowl-
edges (502c–540d), that we are left wondering what this compulsion would
mean outside of the allegory.
Second, there is an even greater difficulty posed by what I have called
the tangential but nevertheless essential narrative: the conflict in principle
between the philosophers of the Allegory, who are echonic possessors of
wisdom, and Socrates himself, who is a zetetic seeker. What would it mean
to go back to the cave if you have never properly made it out at all? The an-
swer to both questions involves one thing: the body.2 It is the compulsion of
the body, as a feature of the finitude of being-human, that necessitates zetetic
philosophy as the actual practice of a philosophical life, rather than echonic
philosophy as the end of philosophical life.

6.1 OUR BODIES, OUR CAVE3

The echonic philosophers of Kallipolis and of the Allegory of the Cave are
imagined as a mode of the Socratic ideation of the idea of justice. They are
ultimately figures or figments of Plato’s storytelling that we also must imag-
ine to get the idea, as it were, of the allegory. As imagined figures, these phi-
losophers have bodies that we also can imagine. We can imagine the escaped
and healing prisoners ascending from the cave to the open. They obviously
would bring their bodies with them, which is why it is at least possible that
once they have fully escaped into the light of day, they could feasibly go on
living up there, contemplating in both relief and horror the dark hole from
which they had emerged through a disorienting, painful, and sometimes
traumatic process. But because we the readers, as well as Socrates and his
friends, exist only metaphorically in a cave, what would it mean to emerge
from this metaphorical cave of the world we inhabit with our actual bodies,
not just imagined ones?
180 Chapter Six

Socrates gives some indication when he says that the fully realized phi-
losophers of the Allegory would not normally want to engage in politics for
the sake of the city because they would regard themselves as emigres to the
Isles of the Blessed, with far better things to do. Greek mythology treated
the Isles sometimes as a place in this world reserved for the most virtuous
and sometimes as a kind of heaven in the afterlife. Socrates speaks of the
philosophers as believing themselves there “while they are still alive,” rather
than dead but rewarded in the next world, which implies that their ordinary
expectation would be that this paradise is only accessible in an afterlife.
This echoes the sense from the Phaedo that the only good philosopher is
a dead philosopher, because only then would she avoid the distractions of
living that led Thales to fall into the well. It is because the body is mortally
vulnerable that we must look out for its needs, even if we wish to lead the
life of the mind.
As Socrates points out in Book 2 of the Republic, such needs of the body
and our incapacity to tend to them adequately as lone individuals is what
gives rise to human community in the first place: “a city, as I believe, comes
into being because each of us isn’t self-sufficient [ouk autarkēs] but is in need
of much” (369b). The needs of the body are a decisive constraint on human
freedom. We are mortal and finite rather than immortal and infinite beings,
which means we cannot be entirely self-sufficient, as immortal divinity can
be. Our need for one another extends to things beyond the body, too, such
as the need for friendship and love, as well as for the dialogue necessary
to enlarge our understanding in everything ranging from training and basic
education to philosophy. But these features of a good life depend on first
fulfilling the needs of the body, and the contingent facticity of the body and
its needs binds us in our factical situatedness, in this body, in that context of
its requirements.
To care for the body therefore requires caring about the community. This
may be in some minimal or passive way, such as wanting the community’s
continued support. But to take for granted the contributions of the community
to one’s own well-being is to rely on luck or privilege, and neither is particu-
larly stable. For this reason, we all owe a debt to the community that sustains
us, even if it is a rather bad community, as Socrates, arguing in the Crito, dip-
lomatically describes Athens (51c–d). This debt is analogous but not identical
to the way that the philosophers owe a debt to Kallipolis for educating them out
of the cave of received opinion. Even in a quite unjust community, to which we
may owe very little indeed, we cannot afford to be indifferent to how that so-
ciety impacts our embodiment, because we cannot reliably live in our heads if
a dictatorship confiscates our subsistence, enslaves us, or outright kills us. The
good life for human beings, as Aristotle argues in the Politics (1252b27–32), is
 The Compulsion of the Body 181

not the same as sustaining mere life, even if it requires the latter, and sustaining
the good life of philosophy requires doing what one can to make one’s com-
munity the best it can be as well, even if it starts out quite badly.
This is the “compulsion” we all endure to go back to the cave, not only to
make life better and more just, but to stay engaged in a constructive polemi-
cal way with those who, like Thrasymachus, either passively or actively seek
to make it worse. To ignore that compulsion is to risk falling down the well,
like Thales, or flying too close to the sun, like Icarus. Even for those who live
the lucky life of leisure, to ignore this compulsion is to live in bad faith and
to do injustice both to all those people who fulfill the needs of their bodies
and to the institutions of society as a whole that make such a life possible. In
our finite embodiment, such neglect is just reckless, like stargazing at night
without looking where you are going.
The body also provides a response for the second problem: the meta-
textual clash between zetetic and echonic philosophy. Our embodiment is the
concrete fact of our finitude. We are not gods. We cannot simply transcend
the body to emerge into an immortal existence of pure life of the mind, Aris-
totle’s thought thinking itself (noēsis noēseōs noēsis, Metaphysics, 1074b36).
More emphatically, the body pins each of us down, as Szymborska’s poem at
the head of this chapter says, to our individual historical site. This includes
the habits, affects, affections, inclinations, aversions, loves, and hatreds,
as well as the features of face and limb and health and voice and gait and
brain and on and on that simultaneously enable and delimit our possibilities,
whether social or occupational or simply physical. This being-pinned-down
involves everything physiological that defines us in our unique specificity
and everything that happens to us as physical beings whose existence is never
fully at our own command. The body is the cave made flesh.
The Allegory of the Cave hints at this hypogean embodiment when Socrates
begins telling it. He instructs Glaucon and the others to “See human beings as
though they were in an underground cave-like dwelling” (514a). “See” here
is the Greek ide, which is the imperative form of eidon, an irregular verb that
means “to behold,” “to look,” but also “to have the look of” something, and,
as early as in Homer, “to see with the mind’s eye” (e.g., Iliad 21.61) and “to
know.” This verb eidon is complex, having as its infinitive idesthai, “to see,”
and in these various forms we ourselves can see how both eidos (form, shape,
look of a thing) and idea (that which has been seen) are united closely in the
Greek, bringing together seeing, looking like, knowing, and imagining. So,
Socrates is asking his companions to see with the mind’s eye, to imagine, to
envision. What they are to envision is anthropous, for which the best transla-
tion is “human beings,” because this Greek word refers to us all, irrespective
of gender or other distinctions. We must see these human beings living hoion,
182 Chapter Six

“as if,” in an oikēsis, a noun formed from oikos, a house or home, but mean-
ing more broadly the act of inhabiting, which is captured well by the English
gerund, “dwelling,” a habitation. This dwelling Socrates wants us to see is
both spēlaiōdēs and katageios, cave-like and underground. The former com-
bines two words: spēlaion, cave, and the suffix -eidēs, meaning “-like” but
more specifically, “having the form of—,” because it derives from the same
root as eidos, “form.” Once again, the Divided Line is involuted, folding back
upon itself from idea to imagination, with the highest level, that of knowledge
of the forms, meeting up with the domain of image at the lowest level in a
reflection of reflection.
The latter word, katageios, also combines two words, the preposition kata,
“down” or “under”—as in Socrates’s first word of the Republic, the katebēn
of “I went down” to the Piraeus—and gaia, the word for both “earth” and the
primal goddess, Earth, Gaia. So, Socrates invites us to envision a dwelling
that is cave-like in form and beneath the earth. In the parable, the true echonic
philosophers emerge from Earth into a domain under the bright dome of
Sky, the heavenly realm far removed from all the messy specificity of earthy
particularity, but they always begin as earthly—and must return to earth.
The English “human being” reminds us of the fundamental bondedness and
boundedness that defines the human condition. “Human” is from the Latin
humus, earth, which in term derives from the Indo-European root dhghem-,
Earth, which is also the root for the Greek chthon, earth in the sense of land,
the country, the place on the surface of the earth where one is from or abides
as home. Calvert Watkins explains this filiation as follows:

We normally think of earthling as a word useful for distinguishing humans from

invading Martians or other extraterrestrials. Words meaning “earthling” have
been around for millennia, however, and in Indo-European distinguish humans
from gods—celestial beings of a different sort [than science fiction extrater-
restrials]. The root dhghem- “earth” furnished the base for a number of words
meaning “human being” in the daughter languages.4

Something very similar happens in Hebrew, where “Adam” derives from

the word ‫אדמה‬, adamah, the earth, the soil or dirt or dust, from which God
first formed us, and to which Adam and we all return. The body itself is
spēlaiōdēs, akin to a cave, because we, as earthlings, as human, are pinned to
a specific time, place, and homeland of meaning into which we are born and
then borne along as historical beings. We can never fully emerge from this
earthly habitation, unlike the echonic philosophers that Socrates invites us to
imagine who escape the cave. But the earthly bondage of the body should not
 The Compulsion of the Body 183

be mistaken for something simply negative. It is, after all, what enables life
for mortals, who must naturally be somewhere, grounded in a physicality and
materiality and historical situatedness that we do not choose.
For all these reasons, there is no possibility except in imagination for em-
bodied beings such as ourselves to do what Socrates describes as an option
for some who escape from the cave: to live entirely outside the cave in the
life of the mind. The body, as the inescapable situatedness of an existence we
cannot choose or fully master, prevents the total fulfillment of philosophy in
the echonic sense. It is not simply that we must occupy ourselves with the
private and the civic labors of maintaining the body. The body itself com-
pels us to have a view from somewhere, to paraphrase Thomas Nagel.5 We
cannot simply eliminate the distortions of perspective and inclinations that
the shadows of the bodily cave lock us into as the medium of our historical
situatedness. We cannot reach a perspective of absolute objectivity, the view
from nowhere, because we are embodied.
Again, this is not simply a negative condition. Just as the cave-dwellers
necessarily begin somewhere, in the radical specificity of the cave they find
themselves born into, so too does each of us start from our own unchosen
embodiment. All the involvements and moods and projects and needs and
aptitudes that our individual bodies grant us, refracted by how that individual
specificity means something different in different historical contexts, is what
grants us opportunities for coming up against the contradictions of the world,
without which the triadic cycle of wonder, questioning, and response could
not get under way. It is only because we naturally care about the owned speci-
ficity of our embodied, situated existence that a breakdown of that existence
can matter to us, be it in an everyday challenge or a catastrophic event, and
so provide the impetus for the polemos of making sense of the breakdown and
reintegrating the world through a response to it. Caring about the body, in its
largest sense as our situated embodiment as earthly, historical beings, with
all the worldly involvements this implies, is what can potentially open us to
the inception of philosophy. The actual polemical work of this philosophiz-
ing must always take place in the zetetic, reconstructive striving of that same
cave-like embodiment.
In narrating the Allegory, Socrates says that “we,” that is, he and his com-
panions as founders of the city in speech, must “compel” the completed phi-
losophers to go back down into the cave to rule it. But it is our embodiment
that compels us to do this outside of the Allegory. We cannot exist without
the body and all the extended relations with other embodied human beings
who form the communities that fulfill the body’s material needs. We are in-
dividuals, but nevertheless interdependent as political-social-ethical beings.
184 Chapter Six

These human relations also provide the context for a life beyond mere neces-
sity, the larger fulfillment of a good life, including philosophy, as well as the
nobility of an ethical life and political activity. Even more fundamentally, the
body compels us back into consideration of the materiality, the finitude, and
the specificity of the opinions and habits that have always-already formed the
provisional meaning of things and the world as whole.
To ignore this cave-like embodiment as the way we always-already under-
stand ourselves and the world is like what Socrates says about staring into
the fire after first breaking free of the bonds (515c), or into the Sun when
first emerging from the cave (516a), or again at the fire when descending
back down into the cave (516e–5717), or at the idea of the good itself when
ascending the Divided Line (506e). To gaze this way risks blindness, either
temporary or permanent, because staring directly into the source of illumina-
tion overwhelms vision. Looking at the light source overpowers the capacity
to differentiate among the things made clear and distinct by the light, just
as contemplating what makes intelligibility possible at all can obscure the
meaning of the things and practices that are historically given to us in our
everyday existence.
Again, this is why Socrates begins with what people say. His phenomenol-
ogy assumes a meaning to the understanding, if only because the world is
always-already given to us in some provisionally intelligible way. It helps
to take seriously this word: pro-visionally. We already see forward, ahead
of ourselves, prospectively and circumspectively, as Heidegger would say
(e.g., SZ, 150 and 69, 80–81), or else the world would not be navigable. At
the same time, our seeing is provisional in the sense of temporary and open
to revision. We are vulnerable to the exaiphnēs interruptions, the sudden and
unexpected breakdowns that threaten to undo the structures of familiar mean-
ing. Those structures are provisional because they are temporary, and they are
temporary because our mode of understanding is temporal and finite. What
is provisional in our seeing is therefore also potentially revisionary, not as a
vindictive or timorous evasion of reality, but more literally as a seeing-anew
that reintegrates a world of meaning after a breakdown. Our embodiment is
cave-like because we always begin where we are situated in a given world
of meaning, even if we seek to transcend and reconstitute our understanding
of it. But we can never entirely transcend our finite, historical human-being,
because we cannot leap over our own shadows, the sheer facticity of our
always-already emerging in a world of meaning as historically given to us.
Self-sufficiency is necessarily incomplete for finite beings like ourselves. It
requires the polemics of reintegration in the encounter with what upsets our
provisional expectations. This is why being-human requires the social fric-
tion, as well as the cooperation, of ethical life.
 The Compulsion of the Body 185

6.2 THE RETURN: RECONSTRUCTION AS

REINTEGRATION OF THE LINE

So far, we have discussed two aspects of the construal of meaning that can
be mapped to two phases in the ascent from the cave. Deconstruction occurs
when some contradiction provokes a breaking of the bonds of opinion that
tie the prisoner to seeing the world in a certain way. Preconstruction occurs
when the ascending prisoner envisions an alternative way of seeing, com-
posed in part from the deconstructed conceptual elements of the prior belief,
through the dialectical process of the upward pathway, which corresponds to
the refining of the alternative through the rigorous examination of arguments,
hypotheses, definitions, and so on. We also have discussed how the complete
fulfillment of the echonic philosopher is impossible due to our historical and
physical embodiment, our being pinioned in time and place. Now we turn to
the journey back down into the cave that the compulsion of the body forces
upon the supposedly liberated prisoner, and I will argue that this corresponds
to the reconstruction of meaning.
In describing the moments of transition for both the prisoner and the philos-
opher, Socrates suggests that someone possessing insight (noun ge echoi tis)

would remember that there are two kinds of disturbances of the eyes, stemming
from two sources—when they have been transferred from light to darkness and
when they have been transferred from darkness to light. And if he held that these
same things happen to a soul too, whenever he saw one that is confused and un-
able to make anything out, he wouldn’t laugh without reasoning but would go
on to consider whether, come from a brighter life, it [that is, the disoriented soul]
is in darkness for want of being accustomed, or whether, going from greater lack
of learning to greater brightness, it is dazzled by the greater brilliance. (518a)

We have discussed the pain involved in such disoriented or disturbed seeing

in the pivotal moments of transition during the prisoner’s ascent: the moment
of initial release in the breakdown of the bonds; the moment of confrontation
with the fire on the lateral pathway; and the moment of emergence in the light
of day. The first represents the dislocation of meaning to things and world
when received opinion falls into contradiction and no longer provides guid-
ance; the second, how historical contingency projects received opinion; the
third, how the ideas provide the foundation for a knowledge that both tran-
scends and explains contingent opinion. These each involve progress from
darkness into light, from the most naive opinion to the fullest understanding,
and each transition involves painful reorientation.
You have probably experienced what it is like to go suddenly into a dark
place from a brightly lit one or vice versa: the meaning of things turns hazy,
186 Chapter Six

and you have to grope your way around while your eyes adjust. The descent
back to the cave is a transition “from light to darkness,” and Socrates’s account
suggests that even for the wisest, the echonic philosophers fully enlightened
by the absolute knowledge of the ideas and the idea of the good beyond the
cave, there can still be a kind of ignorance. This is not ignorance about what
the truth is but rather about how truth may be integrated with the contingency
of opinion that orients most of us, most of the time, to the meaning of the lives
we inhabit. This dynamic of reintegration is something that Heidegger misses
in his lectures on Plato’s Cave. Socrates’s warning that anyone with insight
would not laugh at a person stumbling in such a moment of transition recalls
the distinction that Socrates draws in the Euthyphro between the laughter of
his fellow Athenians at the eccentric pretentions of Euthyphro—claiming to
be a prophet and knower of the will of the gods—and their anger at himself,
Socrates, whom they were now prosecuting for the capital crimes of impiety
and corrupting the youth (3c–d). It is one thing to appear laughably buffoon-
ish due to outlandish notions, which is inherently possible or even probable
for philosophy; it is quite another to seem a mortal threat to a society’s most
cherished norms and to lead astray the people’s children, their most cherished
hope for continuity in the affections, connections, traditions, and memories of
what makes life most meaningful to them.
As we have seen (4.3), Plato hints at Socrates’s fate in Athens when he
has Socrates ask Glaucon about the former prisoner, now enlightened, who
returns to his seat at the bottom level of the cave. To review, the liberated
prisoner, now returning to the lower cave, would undergo intense disori-
entation because of the effects of the darkness on eyes now accustomed to
sunlight; the prisoners would ridicule him, saying that “he went up and came
back with his eyes corrupted” (517a) and they might get angry enough to
try to kill whoever has been releasing their fellow cave-dwellers to this fate.
The Greek for having one’s eyes “corrupted” (diephthapmenos) is a form
of the same word used in the city’s charge against Socrates for corrupting
the youth (Euthyprho, 2c); it means to utterly (dia-) destroy (-phtherein)
something, to kill, and, in moral matters, to corrupt someone, whether by
seduction or bribery or some other nefarious means. Laughter against the
outlandish philosopher can quickly shift to persecution or outright violence
if shaming the corrupting influence with ridicule fails to end the threat, as
Aristophanes’s Clouds and Socrates’s actual fate illustrate. Both failures,
imagined in the Clouds and actual in historical Athens, were confirmed for
the public by Socrates’s hold on some of the city’s most promising youth,
most famously Alcibiades.
In the context of the Allegory, the disturbances (epitaraxeis) of the eyes are
not an irrevocable corruption, as the cave-dwellers assume it to be from their
 The Compulsion of the Body 187

perspective, having never made the ascent themselves. The disturbances are a
temporary but still dangerous condition. The prisoner, in the extreme disori-
entation which comes when the bonds are first broken at the lowest level of
the cave, would then be most susceptible to the despair of believing that the
illness in seeing might be permanent. With each iteration of disorientation in
the stages of ascent, however, the healing prisoner can (but does not neces-
sarily) gain more confidence that such episodes are transitory.
As ever, we have to interpret these details of the allegory, which is power-
ful enough that it can make us forget the narrative is an allegory. The distur-
bances are dislocations of the meaning-structure that all human beings find
themselves always-already inhabiting. The understanding of what things and
practices most properly are gets knocked out of joint. A person finds it dif-
ficult or even impossible to function in the usual way. At each stage of the
ascent, the healing prisoner must wait for their eyes to adjust. Similarly, after
some aspect of our understanding of meaning has been thrown into confusion
by a rupture in our opinions, we must find a way to reassemble the broken-
down elements of our world in a manner that can once again make sense, but,
in the helicoidal structure of polemical philosophy, on a higher level that can
still account for what we had seen and believed before. According to the Di-
vided Line, those higher levels include making sense of opinion, manifested
by what we imagine and what we trust in our everyday worlds: from the
perspective of knowledge, manifested by thought, which reveals the universal
principles of mathematics operative in things; and by intellection, or insight,
which grants access, even if only partial or provisional, to the ideas.
There is an important distinction to draw between the disturbance of the
eyes in the ascent from the cave and the disturbance in the descent back down
into the cave. The former is largely a private matter, experienced by a single
individual who has or has been broken loose from the bonds of received opin-
ion. There may or may not be a mentor to guide the prisoner upward through
a form of teaching in dialectic that assists in the prisoner’s own “turning
around,” as Socrates calls it, rather than simply imposing some new vision.
(See the various panels of Figure 4, which illustrates possible modalities of
release and ascent in the cave.) But still the released prisoner seems to experi-
ence this privately, or at least only with a mentor, without involving the other
prisoners who remain in their bonds.
By contrast, there is a very public aspect to the descent back to the cave.
The returning philosopher, in Socrates’s descriptions, necessarily comes to
the attention of the cave-dwellers, either because his initial, clumsy fumbling
around in the dark before his eyes have adjusted causes a commotion, or be-
cause his job, if he has been educated as a philosopher-ruler, is precisely to
interact with the cave-dwellers. This is why Socrates asks,
188 Chapter Six

Do you suppose it is anything surprising if a man, come from acts of divine con-
templation to the human evils, is graceless and looks quite ridiculous when—
with his sight still dim and before he has gotten sufficiently accustomed to the
surrounding darkness—he is compelled in courts or elsewhere to contest about
the shadows of the just or the representations of which they are the shadows, and
to dispute about the way these things are understood by men who have never
seen justice itself? (517d–e)

The parallel here to Socrates’s own fate in Athens, forced to defend him-
self at his trial, is unmistakable.6 As we have seen, Socrates describes the
cave-dwellers as potentially wanting to kill the awkward and graceless zetetic
philosopher who threatens the community’s order and its children with his
outlandish but somehow alluring ideas. That fate only sharpens the question
about the distinction between the zetetic and the echonic philosopher in return-
ing to the former habitation at the bottom of the cave. Socrates does not claim
to be an echonic philosopher who possesses the truth, and so his awkward-
ness among the Athenians would make sense. But the philosopher-rulers are
supposed to lead in the cave, and being ridiculed and scorned hardly seems a
promising start. Socrates imagines the pep-talk the city’s founder would give
to the newly minted echonic philosopher about to return to the cave:

So you must go down, each in his turn, into the common dwelling of the others
and get habituated along with them to seeing the dark things. And, in getting
habituated to it, you will see ten thousand times better than the men there, and
you’ll know what each of the phantoms is, and of what it is a phantom, because
you have seen the truth about fair, just, and good things. And thus, the city
will be governed by us and by you in a state of waking, not in a dream as the
many cities nowadays are governed by men who fight over shadows with one
another and form factions for the sake of ruling, as though it were some great
good. (520c)

The key phrase here is “in getting habituated” (sunethizomenoi). The

Greek adjective synēthēs, habituated, is composed from sun-, together, and
ēthos, habit or custom, the basis for our word ‘ethics’ and most famously
discussed in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics as the foundation of a virtuous
character. It is significant that ēthos also means ‘a usual place,’ as in the haunt
of animal or person, an abode one is accustomed to in-habit. ‘Habituated’ is
therefore a particularly good rendering for synēthēs and its related forms, and
we might go further to say what Socrates is describing here is a habituation
as syn-ēthēs in the sense of a co-habitation, a getting-used to living with oth-
ers and seeing things in the way they are accustomed to understanding them.
Someone who is a synēthēs is a friend, an intimate, someone whose character
and habits are congenial enough to make a shared life feasible. As habituated
 The Compulsion of the Body 189

cohabitation, synēthēs is akin to Mitsein in Heidegger: being-with others in

being-in-the-world, in-habiting it as the space of meaning that we can share
with others in a life that makes a kind of provisional sense, although Mitsein
has no necessary ethical meaning, only the ontological-hermeneutical one.
Even the echonic philosopher does not possess this synēthēs directly as
a result of the presumptively complete enlightenment provided out in the
light of day. This is perhaps a reflection of the Greek sense, exemplified by
the story of Thales and the well and addressed directly by Aristotle in the
Nicomachean Ethics (1140a33–1140b3), that there is a difference between
theoretical and practical wisdom. The knowledge of abstract, universal truths
does not itself give direct insight into the unpredictable contingencies of the
historical situatedness of human existence. The ability to integrate the two
requires phronēsis, practical wisdom, and this form of wisdom requires inti-
mate, embodied co-habitation with the particulars of a specific historical way
of life—the essence of habituation. This cannot be taught in the abstract. It
must be lived affectively, and because it is not calculable in advance, it must
be risked as a matter of tolma, daring, and of courage (see chapter 8).
A difference between the zetetic philosopher who happens to return to the
habitation of the cave-dwellers and the echonic philosopher who returns pur-
posefully to rule it is that the latter, as an aspect of the training for rule, could
have been instructed to expect this particular “disturbance” of the eyes, the
turbulence of adjusting from the dark to the firelight. Even so, no amount of
study of the theory of leadership or case studies in ‘applying’ philosophical
insight or role-playing such scenarios can prepare the one who is returning
for the contingencies of the actual, affective, embodiment of the process of
habituation. In this regard, echonic philosophers might be no better prepared
than zetetic ones in making themselves at home among those who have not
made the philosophic journey. Indeed, it might be harder for the echonics,
who have supposedly achieved such an absolute epistemological transforma-
tion that it would fundamentally estrange them from the cast of mind of the
cave-dwellers’ life-world. By contrast, the zetetics remain closer to the cave-
dwellers in living with shadows and uncertainty. Still steeped in the polemi-
cal dialogue with the given historical world as they make their philosophical
journey, the zetetics are potentially more alive to the practical wisdom needed
to interact reconstructively with that world.
We must ask what is the disturbance of the eyes during the return to the
lower levels of the cave and how it differs from the disturbances of vision
during the ascent. What is at-issue is that even for the echonic philosopher,
emerging into the light of day and learning all there is to know about the ideas
and the idea of the good itself is not yet complete wisdom and therefore not
yet a complete healing from the bonds of the cave. If the Cave Allegory is a
190 Chapter Six

story about liberation, then that liberation is not complete without going back
to the cave. As we have seen, Heidegger recognizes this too. We must ever-
again refresh the logos by returning to dialogos. That necessity is confirmed
by the argument that our actual embodiment means that we always have our
cave with us, that there is no absolute emergence from the cave of historically
habituated opinion, at least not in this life, and that care of the body and at-
tentiveness to the finitude of our own understanding demands that we inhabit
a world with others, also embodied, sharing an ēthos as our common ground
for an understanding potentially open to mutual revision in a polemical, ethical
dialogue. Our unshakable embodiment, our inevitable situatedness, makes us
return to the fuller task of liberation in ethical and political life.
In this messy work of embodied reconstruction of the world, the actual
zetetic philosophers might be more adept than the imagined echonic ones.
The zetetic philosopher is a skeptical idealist: idealist, because still faith-
ful to the piety that the transcendent ideas provide crucial guidance in the
search for a better understanding, even if this understanding cannot result
in the absolute possession of a final truth that ends philosophy as a seeking;
skeptical, because with the recognition of human finitude and the nature of
our discursive, temporal, dialogical understanding, the zetetic recognizes that
such philosophy must ever-again engage in re-vision of what we had thought
true, submitting our understanding and interpretation to skepsis, to investiga-
tion, inquiry, and critique, but not for the sake of a sheer nihilistic destruction
of meaning. This is the Socratic version of the Judaic tikkun olam, the duty
to repair the world.
If the zetetic does not seek to destroy meaning, then what deserves this
skepsis? Potentially anything and everything, but not simply anything and
everything, because that is just willful destructiveness and nihilism. Here,
we must let our embodiment, in its fullest sense, be our guide in practical
wisdom. We must attend to how the meaning of the world shows up, phe-
nomenologically, as breaking down in what matters to our situated existence.
This involves a phronetic discernment for what we care about in what we
say—not just random nitpicking, but what announces itself in the contradic-
tions in things that impinge upon us in wonder. By following Socrates’s lead
in roving among and talking with all kinds of people in his homeland, zetetic
philosophers may make what people say, about what truly matters to them
and how they understand and justify it, a guide to the inquiry after a meaning
that is always-already operative, but usually hidden, in our everyday lives.
Because the zetetic philosopher is always on-the-way, attentively on the
lookout for the polemos of contradictions in meaning, he or she lives closer
to the habituation of the cave, in all its murkiness, than does the imagined
echonic philosopher.
 The Compulsion of the Body 191

I have argued that the echonic philosopher is an ideation, an idea we

can imagine as we wonder about what it would mean to know, but that the
echonic philosopher is only an idea, an idea of reason, as Kant might say.7
This idea, this eidos, of the echonic philosopher becomes an eidolon, an idol,
if we treat it as an ideal to be realized as the only legitimate qualification for
ethical authority and political rule. As an idea, though, the echonic philoso-
pher serves a dual purpose: positively, for inspiring the ascent on the upward
way, because even if absolute knowledge eludes us, greater understanding
can come to us as a form of provisional wisdom; negatively, for reflecting
upon what it means that we cannot attain this ideal absolutely. As embodied,
situated beings, we cannot overcome our finitude and enter unconditionally
upon the view from nowhere, to borrow again from Nagel. But this does not
render the zetetic philosopher’s activity pointless, because that activity is
necessary to the ever-ongoing confrontation with the temporal world, whose
unpredictable contingencies and contradictions impinge suddenly, unexpect-
edly, and unavoidably upon the finitude of complete understanding.
Concretely, this means that any deconstruction of a given understanding or
received opinion, followed by the preconstruction or envisioning of an alter-
native as a philosophical response to a question at-issue, must still return, as
it were, to the actual lived historical context from which what is at-issue first
arose. Deconstruction alone, treating the breaking of bonds of received opin-
ion as the final form of liberation, leaves the freed person uprooted, unable to
fit into and inhabit a world. This deconstructive nihilism as a corrupted form
of freedom has a counterpart in a preconstructive nihilism, a free-floating,
visionary imagining of alternatives. A very elaborate, philosophically sophis-
ticated, and meticulously argued treatise on justice, for example, may fly off
into a Cloud-Cuckoo-Land of speculation untethered from historical reality or
any reasonably imaginable context for implementation. But note, this too is a
form of nihilism, an Icarean escape into hyper-abstraction that leaves behind
the situated historical existence of being-human, of being-here.
If there is no actual possibility of attaining the complete knowledge of the
echonic philosopher, then a complete healing from the bonds of received
opinion also is not possible. We are never entirely free of the past and its
conventions and convictions. What is possible is a life of zetetic philosophy,
a skeptical idealism that serves as a necessary therapy for—and perhaps even
a reconciliation to—the bondage that is our embodiment in the cave of our-
selves, without which we would not be at all. In a real sense, then, zetetic phi-
losophy is the healing from the bonds of the cave. This entails a freedom that
includes not just a deconstructive liberation from the bonds of the given, and
not just a preconstructive envisioning of an alternative, but also a reconstruc-
tive reintegration of what could be with what has been, and with what is. This
192 Chapter Six

is precisely what transpires in the synēthēs of philosophy. It is the becoming

at-home with the ever-ongoing polemos with the given as both a deep famil-
iarization with the historical specifics of how a particular world construes its
meaning and as a well-developed practical wisdom for how to integrate new
understandings with the ones already at work in a historical community. To
be able to navigate with this situated, habituated, practical wisdom is key to
the healing from the bonds and to recovering from the disturbances of the
eyes, namely, an inability to pivot between abstract ideals and the practical
interpretation and realization of those ideals in a specific context.

6.4 ONE’S OWN AND THE BODY POLITIC

Socrates’s arguments for features of the ideal city, Kallipolis, provide evi-
dence internal to the Republic for the dynamic of the triad of construal. For
example, Socrates asks, “Is, then, that city in which most say ‘my own’ and
‘not my own’ [to emon te kai ouk emon] about the same thing, and in the
same way, the best governed city?” (462c). This point harkens back to what is
at-issue in the origins of any human community: the fact that we are not self-
sufficient organisms and therefore have a need for one another (369b–c). But
the motivating discussions of the Republic suggest something more. Thrasy-
machus claims that injustice and tyranny are the greatest good for a human
being, and Glaucon’s thought experiment of the Ring of Gyges purports to
show the weakness of any social contract. Therefore arises the question of
what prevents individuals from exploiting the cooperation of the community
to fulfill their private desires, with as little sacrifice as possible of their own
needs, as far as they can get away with it—if they have the strength of body
and mind to do so. This possibility, the source of exploitative criminality, lies
hidden in every community.
When Socrates takes up this problem, he asks, “Have we any greater evil
for a city than what splits it and makes it many instead of one? Or a greater
good than what binds it together and makes it one?” (462a–b). For a com-
munity to provide for the needs of all of its members—the reason they would
be part of it in the first place—each member must trust that their contribu-
tions and sacrifices will be reciprocated rather than exploited. The motto of
the United States, approved in 1782, echoes this point: E pluribus unum, Out
of many, one. Socrates asks further, “Doesn’t the community [koinonia, the
sharing] of pleasure and pain bind it [the political community] together when
to the greatest extent possible all the citizens alike rejoice and are pained at
the same comings into being and perishings?” (462b). These “comings into
being and perishings” involve all the changes of a contingent world that
 The Compulsion of the Body 193

might convulse our affective lives: births and deaths; victories and defeats;
harvests and droughts; and so on. As Socrates then says, “the privacy of
such things dissolves” the community (462c); here, “privacy” is idiōsis, from
which we have words like “idiot” and “idiosyncrasy,” and it means “making
private” in the sense of a peculiar or eccentric way of doing things particular
to oneself in isolation, without regard to others.
The individualization of desire, pleasure, and pain is a carrier for spread-
ing the disease of injustice in a community, which is why Socrates goes on
to suggest that “that city is best governed which is most like a single human
being,” illustrating as follows:
For example, when one of us wounds a finger, presumably the entire commu-
nity—that community tying the body together with the soul in a single arrange-
ment under the ruler within it—is aware of the fact and all of it is in pain as a
whole along with the afflicted part; and it is in this sense we say that this human
being has a pain in his finger. (462c–d)

Glaucon and Socrates agree that the “city with the best regime is most like
such a human being” (462d), because its citizens would rejoice and lament,
feel pleasure and pain, for the same things, “to the greatest extent possible”
(462b). This qualification points to what is at-issue, what does not go with-
out saying: that the political community is not by nature a single body. This
is the core of the political problem, because we do not necessarily feel the
same joys and disappointments as others at the same things. What is most
immediately “my own” is my body and all my needs and desires and all of
the relationships—to friends and family—that are mine in an exclusive sense,
rather than in an inclusive one that embraces the community as a whole. The
loves and attachments that we naturally feel are generally private and exclu-
sive, and yet this is what makes injustice not just possible but likely in the
body politic.
The conception of a single ‘body politic’ is itself an ideation, an ideal that
we can imagine, just as the ideal city Kallipolis is an ideation that unites
private and collective identity in a single whole. This ideation has drastic im-
plications in the Republic, because to overcome the gulf between “my own”
as a private and a common good, Socrates makes some very radical propos-
als, the “three waves” that threaten the plausibility of the ideal city. The first
is providing equal opportunity of profession and education to women and
men, so that women may do any job that men do, and vice versa, if they
prove their merit, including serving as soldiers and rulers. This is necessary
because the city must overcome all merely contingent differences of the body
so that each individual’s talents most fully serve the needs of the city. The
second wave is the abolition of the private family, of private erotic love, and
194 Chapter Six

of monogamous marriage; this includes the eugenic breeding of children ac-

cording to a scientific plan, separating them from their mothers at birth, and
raising them in common, apart from their biological parents—who will not
even know them as their own, other than knowing all the city’s children as
“their own.” This is necessary because, more than anything else, “my own”
body individuates my needs to what my erotic longings are, to the progeny of
that longing in the form of children, and the division of “my own” interests in
raising those children from what might be in the best interest of all children in
the community. Finally, the “third wave” requires that philosophers rule the
city, so that knowledge of the good can provide unity to the city, rather than
self-interested, unreflective opinion dividing it into factions.
Once again, the Republic acknowledges the profound political and existen-
tial importance of the body. It is the body that pinions each of us to a private,
idiosyncratic, nexus of needs, desires, attachments and therefore prevents us
from simply existing outside of the cave altogether. The body is the inevita-
bility of our thrown situatedness, a perspective that binds us tightly to what
we think we want and know. This embodiment gives meaning to all that mat-
ters to us in a world that makes sense on the human scale. The body is the
home of the Jemeinigkeit, the always-my-ownness of individuated existence.
We bear the cave with us so long as we are embodied, and to be embodied is
what and how we are as finite beings.
But does this mean that Socrates’s ideation of Kallipolis as the community
that overcomes the division between “my own” and “ours” is simply an il-
lusion, a phantom of an overactive philosophical imagination? Does it mean
that his philosophical arguments and his policy proposals for gender equal-
ity, family equality, and enlightened rule based on this ideation are entirely
implausible or ridiculous?
Some readers, such as Allan Bloom, have gone so far as to argue that the
three waves serve as a tragi-comic reductio ad absurdum to warn against the
overweening and naive ideological ambition for a political community that
would finally and utterly overcome the injustices and inequalities fostered by
the division between private and public good.8 Bloom is certainly right that
the measures needed to fully overcome the private interests fostered by the
body would be so extreme as to defy any reasonable expectation of what hu-
man nature is capable of accomplishing. The erotic longings of the body are
not simply up to us to govern as individuals. They descend upon us unbidden
as a decisive feature of our personal, situated thrownness. To expect that a
government of enlightened technocrat-philosophers could tame these erotic
necessities, so that we could not love those we feel impelled to love, would
be asking a great deal of human nature, just as it would be asking rather too
much to take newborn children from their birth mothers and separate them
 The Compulsion of the Body 195

forever as a family unit. For Bloom, the lesson of the Republic is a negative
one of moderating such imprudent ambitions by showing just what would be
necessary to achieve them, and how unlikely and undesirable that would be.
But if we understand the policy proposals that Socrates envisions through
philosophical argument in the sense of the preconstruction that follows upon
a deconstruction of what is problematic about current institutions, we can in-
terpret them as part of a larger dialectic with what is at-issue within the text,
as well as a larger dialogue that Plato invites us to join.9 The ideation of a
community that completely reconciles public and private interest, just like the
ideation of echonic philosophers who come to grasp the entirety of the truth,
serves an important role in rousing the interpretive polemics of philosophy. If
complete justice in a community entails the noble idea that all citizens should
care for the whole as much as for themselves in order to prevent faction and to
cultivate a dauntless public spirit, then we must consider what price we would
have to pay to achieve that complete unity of “mine” and “ours.” One does not
have to go so far as to interpret Kallipolis as the antithesis of what a sensible
society would look like to reflect dialectically upon how far it makes sense to
go with Socrates’s proposals. The fact that we are each individuated in our own
bodies sets a natural, if somewhat historically flexible, limit to the complete
identification of my own embodiment with the body politic. A dialectical read-
ing of Plato suggests that not only does Plato expect us to notice the difficulties
immanent to the arguments as the dialogue unfolds, but he also expects us to
take up the polemical work of philosophy in confronting how these proposals
might relate to our own ethical, social, and political lives. That is because jus-
tice depends on this ongoing, situated reconstruction of what is at-issue, rather
than on applying some definitive, trans-temporal blueprint of the ideal.
For example, Socrates argues that for the sake of the unity of the city and
for finding an appropriate path in life for each child, justice requires that all
children in Kallipolis receive equal opportunity in education. This applies to
more than absolute equality of educational and professional opportunities for
girls as well as for boys (457b–c). It also means that the children of the gold
ruling class should get no special consideration over children born of silver or
bronze parents. In this absolute meritocracy, no matter your birth, you should
be able to attain whatever position, high or low, your talents and virtues al-
low, both for your own sake and for the sake of the city (415b–c). This seems
entirely just, a matter of fairness for children who had no choice in being born
male or female, rich or poor, high status or low.
If such fairness and equality truly matter, then there are many flaws in
the American educational system, for example, that would demand atten-
tion. Should expenditures for primary education be based on local property
taxes, which disproportionately disadvantage children born into poorer
196 Chapter Six

neighborhoods through no fault of their own, often ones redlined for gen-
erations by race? Should parents be free to send their children to private
schools which charge hefty tuition, or should education, as Socrates in the
Republic and Aristotle in the Politics (1337a21–27) argued, be universal
and public only, so that all citizens have the same stake in ensuring both that
it be excellent and that it unify rather than divide the people by class? To
push the argument for fairness and equality even further: Even if there were
public education equally funded for all children, would not the children of
the wealthy and successful still have major unfair advantages provided by
the high socioeconomic status of their parents, which gives their children an
unearned advantage in obtaining tutoring, finding internships and jobs, feel-
ing at ease with the manners of the important and the powerful, and so on?
Why not do something like what Socrates suggests by making citizens all live
together in dormitories and eat together in common dining halls so that all
socialize with all, thus diminishing the effects of differences in status? And,
in fact, we do something that resembles this policy suggestion in college
dorms and dining halls.
The limit to such measures, once again, is the body, as well as all the ma-
terial reality that it represents. The love that parents generally feel for their
own children can be an overwhelming impetus to ensure that “one’s own”
do well, even when this is not fair to other children. The extremity of the
measures that Socrates suggests—abolishing private property and private
homes, abolishing private families and private love among couples in favor
of temporary, arranged marriages for eugenic breeding purposes, separating
babies permanently from their mothers at birth—points to how far a society
would have to go suppress these claims of the body. Such measures promote
the kind of absolute unity that Socrates’s envisioned just city would require in
order to erase all distinctions of personal preference and private good in favor
of a total identification of all citizens with the good of all. But the skeptical
idealist approach is an inherently recursive, reiterative process in which the
imagined ideal is brought into polemical dialectic with the situated givens of
a particular historical context.
Here I am close to Hermann Cohen, who argued that Plato’s ideas are akin
to Kant’s regulative ideas, that the ideas are not intended to extricate us from
the life of empirical existence but rather to provide us with a necessary and
therefore unavoidable a priori heuristic to assess and refine our understand-
ing of that existence: “that reason and embodied sensory experience should
ever remain blood-relations, so that the distinction between them should not
mislead us into a total separation between them, by which only rhetoric and
not the longing for truth would triumph.”10 This involves interpreting the
lived context and then reinterpreting it again and again through the process
 The Compulsion of the Body 197

of integrating actual changes in the meaning of things, institutions, practices,

and even language, all in the light of the ideated ideal. We need the ideal of
unity as a regulative idea to illuminate and counteract the meaning of dis-
unity when it threatens to pull us apart entirely, even if the ideal is unrealiz-
able in absolute terms. This dialectical negotiation of ideal and real requires
phronēsis, which will be discussed further in chapter 8.
This polemical process may also force a reinterpretation of what the ideal
is. For example, the difficulties inherent to the implementation of social
equality as an ideal might provoke a reconsideration of the ideal or even of
the idea of justice animating it. This is consistent with the conception of a
skeptical idealism, one that posits the idea as necessary to the ethical, politi-
cal, and thoughtful life, but does not lay claim to an absolute knowledge of
the idea or of how to implement it as an ideal. For educational equality, what
might be possible in the context of an Israeli kibbutz is probably quite differ-
ent from what would be in the United States or in the Japanese educational
system. The historical situatedness of American traditions and character
places constraints on what is possible in light of the ideal—not rigid con-
straints, but elastic ones, whose resistance is proportional to the distance it
pulls institutions and beliefs from their historical embeddedness. American
individualism, which resists governmental involvement in family matters; the
separation of church and state, which has permitted the private development
of both secular and religious schools; the federalism that differentiates tax
policy both among states and within states: these and other factors constrain
what is possible in promoting educational equality. That does not mean these
constraints cannot be managed or even broken, but doing so requires perspi-
cacious discernment in practical wisdom.11

6.5 THE CONFRONTATION OF

IDEATION AND MATERIALITY

Socrates is explicit about the regulative function of the idea or ideal as a fea-
ture in the full process of ideation, which involves imagining an alternative
and considering how to apply it, and then actually doing so. In his general
description of selecting and appointing guardians from among the silver class
in the city through a process of testing to see if under pressure from pleasure,
fear, or pain they maintain “their conviction that they must do what on each
occasion seems best for the city” (413c), Socrates says the process must be
“something like this, not described precisely, but by way of a model [hōs en
tupōi]” (414a). He makes this point even more vividly when discussing the
purpose of justice itself with Glaucon:
198 Chapter Six

Socrates: But if we find out what justice is like, will we also insist that the just
man must not differ at all from justice itself but in every way be such as it is? Or
will we be content if he is nearest to and participates in it more than the others?
Glaucon: We’ll be content with that.
Socrates: It was, therefore, for the sake of a pattern that we were seeking both
for what justice by itself is like, and for the perfectly just man, if he should come
into being and what he would be like once come into being. Thus, looking off
at what their relationships to happiness and its opposite appear to us to be, we
would also be compelled to agree in our own cases that the man who is most like
them will have the portion most like theirs. We were not seeking them for the
sake of proving that it’s possible for these things to come into being. (472b–d)

Granted, in this case Socrates is not interested in actually implementing

some version of Kallipolis. The whole purpose of imagining Kallipolis as a
city in speech was as a metaphor for the psyche of a human being and whether
being just is indeed a virtue that conduces to the human good. But even so,
the context of the Republic demonstrates that there is a political and practical
aspect to what Socrates is doing in producing “a pattern” (paradeigma) of a
just person: He seeks to steer these promising young men away from argu-
ments that favor a tyrannical injustice whose principles they certainly could
have implemented in public life as a very different paradigm. The historical
Polemarchus and Lysias were leaders of the democratic revolt against the
oligarchic tyranny imposed by Sparta at the end of the Peloponnesian War.12
Whether they did so as a result of a conversation with Socrates we cannot
know, but even if not, through the dramatic features of the dialogue Plato
shows us Socrates precisely as modeling reconstructive intervention with his
own historical situation by defending justice as an idea and ideal, through the
construal of Kallipolis as an ideation that can address the lived concerns of
these companions, there, at that time and place.
Socrates asks later, when the young men, with all the enthusiasm of youth
about an ideal, insist on knowing if Kallipolis is possible: “Can anything be
done as it is said? Or is it in the nature of acting to attain less truth than speak-
ing, even if someone doesn’t think so?” When they agree that the ideal can be
truer than the real, he says: “Then don’t compel me necessarily to present it
as coming into being in every way in deed as we described it in speech. But
if we are able to find that a city could be governed in a way most closely ap-
proximating what has been said, say that we’ve found the possibility of these
things coming into being on which you insist” (473a–b). Here, the decisive
term is engutata, “most closely approximating”—closest to, nearest to. In the
process of ideation, which includes action to change the world—including
changing the minds of influential future leaders of society—the ideal must
 The Compulsion of the Body 199

be approximated due to the situated contingencies of historical existence. As

regulative, the idea guides the polemical dialectic with historical actuality,
compelling the actor to account for the contingencies that inhibit or assist the
approximative realization of the ideal. Under favorable conditions, with politi-
cal action guided by a discerning practical wisdom, the real might then make
asymptotic progress towards the ideal. This is the responsible answer to Glau-
con’s question, “Is it ever possible for this regime to come into being, and how
is it ever possible?” (471c). As Socrates asks, “[W]ill we be content if [the
just man, or the just regime] is nearest to it [namely, the imagined ideal—the
preconstruction] and participates in it more than the others?” (472c).
Another way of saying this is that the obverse of a skeptical idealism is a
reconstructive realism. In the cycle of ideation, reconstruction is the encoun-
ter between material reality and projected ideal. Material here means not
only physical objects as governed by natural laws and the natural resources
at hand to implement policy, but also means the opinions, institutions, tradi-
tions, and all the unspoken practices that habituate us to the meaning of a
specific historical world. Material reality, understood ontologically as well
as ontically, is anything about the always-already givenness of the world that
offers resistance to what we can envision and hope to implement or produce.
It is akin to what Heidegger calls facticity. I can envision flying like a bird,
but if I don’t take into account all the physical laws and material constraints,
I will never come close to approximating flight. We can, like Socrates, envi-
sion a world in which women have the same opportunities as men, including
serving in the military and in ruling. That Socrates took this seriously, I do
not doubt, given his own acquaintance with Aspasia, often credited with the
success of Pericles, and Plato’s portrayal in the Symposium (201d–212c) of
a younger Socrates gaining insight from Diotima into the one thing he did
claim to know about: love (177d).13 Assuming that this specific ideal is in
fact in accord with the idea of justice, achieving the ideal of gender equality
requires an exquisitely fine-tuned understanding of the historical constraints
and opportunities for action and change.

6.6 IDEAL AND ILLUSION

This discussion has broached specific questions about enacting a polemical

ethics, which will be the subject of future volumes in this project. Our main
task here is to flesh out a metaethics of polemical, skeptical idealism as a way
of being-human and of doing philosophy, but it is impossible to do that with-
out providing some initial sense of how metaethics filters into an engaged
life, where the confrontation between the ideal and the real takes place. This
200 Chapter Six

is crucial to understanding any genuinely iterative process of ideation because

it explains the difference between ideals that are fantasies that we can only
imagine—at least if we don’t want to cause terrible damage—and ideals that
can serve as regulative ideas or paradigms for an asymptotic approximation
in the praxis of ethical and political life.
Without developing a detailed metaphysics of the real, we can say that in
a polemical ethics, the real is how the world brings us back to earth, to what
is given factically as unavoidable, to what constrains us both interpretively
and practically in the always-already of a historical world. The difference
between a delusional fantasy and an envisioned ideal is that the latter is able
to engage in dialogue with the resistance offered by the world, whether it be
in trying to find a way to fly, for example, or in achieving gender equality
in society. It can be hard to distinguish delusional fantasy from brilliance
of imagination because true visionaries can seem utterly unhinged from the
earthy realities of their situated existence. The dream of flight may have
seemed fanciful before the Wright brothers, but we have indeed brought the
fantasy of flight into reality, even if not in the form imagined by the myth
of Icarus, but only because human ingenuity slowly came to grips with the
material reality constraining the possibility of flight. But, even if we cannot
(yet!) fly quite like a bird, or like Icarus, understanding the ontic materiality
of flight (gravity, aerodynamics, engineering, etc.) allows us to reinterpret
what ‘flying’ might mean, to reimagine it, and then to realize it. The goal of
gender equality certainly seemed as improbable when proposed by Socrates
more than two millennia ago, or when advocated by suffragettes one hundred
years ago, or as tested when women serve in combat or run for president to-
day. We can tell the difference between illusion and ideal only by entering in
good faith the polemical activity of attempting to realize or prove unfeasible
the vision proposed by confronting the prevailing material reality.
This has implications for how we should understand truth in a polemical
ethics. Are the ideals we envision in the light of an idea true? Or, as Nietzsche
might say, are they just lies we concoct to make life bearable, to fend off for
a while the chaos of a cosmos in flux? For Heidegger, truth happens in the
polemos between earth and world. This is truth in his ontological sense of
a-lētheia, Unverborgenheit, unconcealment, the truth that makes meaning pos-
sible. It is easy to misunderstand this unconcealment as some act of discovery
by some intrepid explorer or researcher, uncovering some new fact about the
world. But as discussed earlier, unconcealment for Heidegger has to do not
with a given ontic array of facts (alētheia-3), known or unknown, but rather
with our ontological openness to a meaningfulness of world and things in which
discovery in the mundane sense is possible in the first place. In a polemical
ethics comprising the full and reiterative cycle of construal—deconstruction,
 The Compulsion of the Body 201

preconstruction (or envisioning), and reconstruction—human beings, as inter-

pretive beings, confront truth dynamically in both senses: ontological truth as
unconcealment and ontic truth as matters of fact about what is.
In the moment of the breakdown, the irruption of unmeaning that is ei-
ther positive in opening us to new possibilities of meaning or negative in
collapsing the sense of a world in despair, we come into conflict with the
unconcealment of the world as it has been opened up to us in the happen-
stance of our historical situatedness. This confrontation with unconcealment
is rarely thematized as such when it happens, but it is happening nevertheless
whenever we pause in wonder, formulate a question, and forge a response
to some phenomenon that brings us up short. It begins as the deconstructive
loosening and release of ways of seeing, interpreting, and understanding, and
can proceed either into nihilism or into the attempt at reconstruction. This
may happen in contexts from the humble to the overarching: When a tool
breaks and a person seeks a way to make up for its loss in getting on with a
task. When someone’s patience breaks with a job and he reconsiders his path
in life; when someone’s forbearance with injustice breaks and she starts to
envision a different kind of world. Or even when one looks to the night sky
and wonders why there is a world as such rather than nothing, and wonders
why, in that world, they are someone rather than no one—and “Why on earth
now, on Tuesday of all days”? In each such case, we run up against how we
understand and interpret the way the world opens up to us, what the things
within it are, and what we can do while we are here. Granted, such moments
can rise up suddenly and just as quickly fall silent, without so much as an
echo in our lives. But each such moment is a call, an appeal to confrontation
with unconcealment. Even the tiniest incident or observation can precipitate
a polemos that transforms one’s world.
From the moment of breakdown, even in otherwise everyday routines, to
avoid falling into complete despair and aporia, one must envision an alterna-
tive and then implement that alternative in one’s lived existence, even if that
implementation is incomplete. It is never enough to envision some alterna-
tive in theory (preconstruction); one must implement it by reintegrating the
invention into the practice at-issue. This is the moment of reconstruction. It is
where, as the expression goes, the rubber meets the road. The new dispensa-
tion must gain traction in a way that its meaning can make sense and take hold
in the world as it is given, because we cannot create all meaning ex nihilo.
This is how the polemos with the meaning of the world, in order to open a
new pathway in it, comes into confrontation with the construal of the world as
it is. Each creative act, even the most soaring revolutionary change, depends
on its reconstruction, its reintegration, into the always-already subsisting con-
text of a world of meaning, opened up to us in its unconcealment.
202 Chapter Six

The new tool I have invented may fail to meet its purpose. Perhaps it is
too heavy, or not heavy enough, or the materials I have chosen cannot bear
the stress of the task. A new move in a sport—a new pitch in baseball, for
example—must be tested in the field, and it may fail to challenge the batter.
A new way of playing the guitar might fail to provide the flexibility needed
to play many compositions, or it may fail to please the audience. A new rule
for a game may fail to make it any more fun or fair. At the grander level, a
revolution may fail to achieve even its most modest policy goals, let alone al-
ter the whole habitus of human beings in society. Even if envisioned changes
do work largely as hoped, the historicity of human-being, the ever-fraying
nature of our inhabiting a meaningful world, will mean that another break-
down, another irruption of unmeaning, will arise and that we must renter the
polemical circle again.
Here a respect for truth has its place in the more mundane, ontic sense
(again, alētheia-3). For empirical truth to play a role in the polemical cycle,
we do not have to settle the grand metaphysical question of whether facts
are real as such or if they are always mediated in their meaning for us as
conceptual constructs. What matters is that in any given way of meaningfully
construing the world, the vast preponderance of elements is simply not up
to us. Human innovation cannot be creation ex nihilo because the world of
meaning—the historical world within which we enter the cycle of construal
by breaking with the past, envisioning some alternative, and then implement-
ing it through reconstruction—is what provides the context for innovation.
At most, our confrontation with a given world of meaning can prepare us
and even spark the emergence of a transformed world of meaning. But as in-
worldly beings, this is never something we can control.
The polemical process of reconstruction can allow us to discern the differ-
ence between a delusional ideation and one that can approximatively realize
a newly envisioned meaning that is genuinely visionary rather than merely
fanciful. Facts and truth in the conventional sense matter. This should not
surprise us, but philosophers sometimes forget. To draw from Heidegger,
there is an earthiness to the world of meaning: “World grounds itself upon
earth, and earth protrudes into world” (GA 5: 35). Any world of meaning
depends upon a given sense of the things that we did not make and cannot
completely remake; at the same time, the giving keeps happening, jutting up
unexpectedly into our experience and understanding, unsettling the world
of meaning as it is, either bringing it down or opening it up to new constel-
lations of meaning. In the polemos with any given meaning of things, the
earthiness of the world offers a resistance to our attempts at reinterpreting it,
not just conceptually but also actually, in implementation. A hammer made
of papier-mâché will not function well as a hammer—unless it is a prop in a
 The Compulsion of the Body 203

play. To throw a pitch using just thumb and index finger is unlikely to work
in a baseball game—unless it is a burlesque. To play an electric guitar at a
folk concert in 1965 is unlikely to go over well with the audience—even if
you happen to be Bob Dylan. To make it a rule in bridge that you may play
your hand only after setting your cards on fire is unlikely to make the game
more fun or fair—unless you are at a party with surrealist artists. A revolu-
tion with aspirations that stretch human nature past its limits is unlikely to
succeed—unless the goal of revolution is Götterdämmerung.
There is a dialectic, a dialogue, to the process of reintegrative reconstruc-
tion that keeps the helicoidal cycle of the polemos in motion. To take another
familiar example, consider the history of the introduction of the three-point
shot in basketball. For much of its early history, scoring a basket in game-
play, rather than by a penalty shot, awarded the team two points. Slowly, it
dawned on many in the sport that awarding three points to successful baskets
shot from a designated arc of distance from the net would improve the game,
because it would allow players of differing skills and attributes to score in
different ways with different techniques, and it would improve the pacing of
the game by allowing quicker turn-arounds and scoring attempts. Some col-
leges made experiments with the rule in the 1940s and 1950s. The American
Basketball Association adopted the rule in the 1960s, and the rest of the world
followed by the 1980s. But the calibration of the rule continues even now,
with different diameters of distance for different leagues, skill levels, and
genders. The argument for the rule change was based on the insight of some
that there was something at-issue in the game, something in breakdown, that
was preventing the game from being its best. Advocates envisioned a rule
change that would address what was at-issue, and then had to convince oth-
ers to apprehend the problem and to accept their solution. Then, officials and
coaches had to implement that rule change. In the process of reconstructing
the meaning of the game while integrating that change, they have had to cali-
brate the rule-change to different contexts, because these contexts confronted
them with successes and failures for what is at-issue for different constitu-
encies of players, audiences, coaches, team owners, sporting events, and so
on. The material dialogue is not just with the human beings involved in the
game about what the game is about, it is also a dialogue with the physical
facts of the game—what the court design is, the physics of making a shot, the
physiognomy of players (by age, gender, and skill level) in different leagues
of play, and so on again.14
Much the same happens in the dialectical process of philosophy. The mo-
ment of wonder exposes something at-issue in the world that seems worthy
of thought. The thinker then construes what is at-issue in the form of a
question that can be addressed intelligibly, based on existing understanding,
204 Chapter Six

but that may also potentially transform that understanding. The thinker then
responds to the question with an answer that is as rigorous and systematic as
the subject requires. Even then, no serious philosopher would consider the
work done, because now come the critiques and responses and revisions and
retractions. The polemical circle reiterates the moment of wonder in which
what is at-issue arises exaiphnēs in unexpected ways and presses ever again
for response.
Any philosophical argument that envisions an alternative way of making
sense of things, as preconstruction before the enactment of reconstruction, is
a standing challenge to reenter the polemos of thinking, dialogue, and refor-
mulation of argument. The argument itself provides the material invitation
for further deconstruction, revisioning, and reconstruction of itself, all guided
by what is at-issue. In fact, much the same happens in any human endeavor
of interpretation and reinterpretation, because no extant understanding stands
forever against the fraying of meaning by unmeaning and the subsequent call
to respond. It happens in all domains of design, for example, from mechanical
to architectural to sartorial, as the fashions and the facts demand an adaptive
response. It happens in lawmaking, when the public and legislators come to
realize that there is something at-issue in existing statutes or the constitution
itself that needs amending in light of changing circumstances (such as traffic
laws to account for cell phone use while driving) or an ideal not yet realized
in the fundamental principles of the polity (such as a constitutional amend-
ment to end slavery or to grant women the vote). Reconstruction is how the
polemical cycle keeps itself honest by bringing the ideal into confrontation
with the real. The rigors and discoveries of an ongoing zetetic struggle is the
only healing available to us. If engaged properly, with Socratic piety, it opens
us up to the wonders and discoveries of life rather than to the anxieties and
traumas that the inevitable dislocations of meaning would otherwise bring.

NOTES

1. Wisława Szymborska, Poems New and Collected, 128.

2. Bloom is particularly good on the meaning of the body, although my account
here of the body as cave would moderate the conclusions he draws; see especially The
Republic of Plato, 362–64.
3. With respect for Our Bodies, Ourselves, originally published in 1970 by the
Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, which had such an important impact on the
understanding and the politics of embodiment and gender.
4. Watkins, Dictionary of Indo-European Roots, 20.
5. See Thomas Nagel, The View from Nowhere, especially chapter 11, section 2.
6. Cf. Bloom, “Interpretive Essay,” 307–10.
 The Compulsion of the Body 205

7. See Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, B383–84. Kant also takes Plato’s Republic
as itself an example of an idea of reason, in this case, of freedom (B372–73); other
examples include virtue (B371–72), plants, animals, humanity, and even the cosmos
(B374).
8. “Book V is preposterous, and Socrates expects it to be ridiculed”; Bloom,
“Interpretive Essay,” 380. Cf. Strauss, The City and Man, 61–62.
9. For a subtle reading of the intentionally dialectical structure of the Republic
taken as a whole, see Roochnik, Beautiful City.
10. Cohen, Kants Theorie der Erfahrung, 12. I am also indebted to Lucas Fain’s as
yet unpublished paper, “Plato after Marburg: Rethinking Forms and Ideas through the
Inspiration of Hermann Cohen,” which takes up Cohen’s salutary distinction between
eidos and idea but argues that “idea asks a question to which eidos gives a response.”
11. For a rich, meticulous treatment of this theme, see Patrick Byrne, The Ethics of
Discernment, especially chapter 1, Discernment and Self-Appropriation.
12. See Bloom, The Republic of Plato, 440–41n3.
13. For a plausible account of the connection between the historical Socrates
and Aspasia and the speech of the Platonic Socrates about Diotima’s teaching about
love in the Symposium, see Armand D’Angour, Socrates in Love: The Making of a
Philosopher.
14. For the early development of basketball’s rules, see the book by the inventor
of the game: James Naismith, Basketball: Its Origin and Development; for the mod-
ern history, see W. G. Mokray, L. W. Donald, et al., “Basketball,” Encyclopaedia
Britannica.
 Chapter Seven

At the Crossroads of the Cave

You must see the infinite, i.e. the universal in your particular or it is only
gossip. Did I ever remark to you that philosophy after its flights ends in a
return to gossip? It goes ahead and formulates as far as it can the laws of
the cosmos, but it ends in the purely empirical fact that the cosmos is this
and not otherwise—an unrelated, unexplained datum, which is gossip and
nothing else.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes to Harold Laski, 19261

Heidegger’s critique of Plato implies that Plato has no sense of the historicity
of human-being and that time plays no role for Plato in the way meaning is
constituted for human beings—at least, not time in Heidegger’s ontological
sense as the horizon of Being. Ontological temporality entails the embedded,
projective historicity of being-human that establishes a meaningful world.
To employ a contrast that Heidegger would not himself use, this would
make Plato an inheritor of Parmenides, who, in the prevailing interpretation,
argued that being is one, eternal, and unchanging; rather than Heraclitus,
who argued that all being is plural, impermanent, and in flux. But is this
characterization of Plato’s neglect of the temporal historicity of human be-
ings true? Because if not, then Plato might well offer a way to understand
how to mediate our historical situatedness and the call to transcendence. The
intersection of the two pathways, the lateral and the upward, is the place to
inquire further. The logic of situated transcendence works its way out at the
crossroads of these paths.

206
 At the Crossroads of the Cave 207

7.1 THE LATERAL PATH

As we have seen, Socrates describes the travelers on the lateral pathway,

the ones who carry objects that end up getting projected on the cave wall, as
“passers-by” (pariontōn, 515b). Passing-by is a temporal activity, and a path-
way implies temporal transition and trajectory. Unlike the prisoners in the
cave, the passers-by are not locked in place. They have a degree of freedom of
movement, constrained by the bounds of the pathway’s contours. Presumably
they could leave the lateral pathway, either by descending into the lower cave
or by ascending the upward pathway, but it does not seem to occur to them
to do so. Also, unlike actual puppeteers, the passers-by do not seem aware
that they are projecting images to the cave-dwellers, whom they also seem
not to notice. Socrates says that every now and then, “one of the passers-by
happens to utter a sound” (515b, tm), which the prisoners interpret as coming
from the shadows they see on the wall. What do these features of the allegory
mean beyond the tale itself?
One clue is that while the comings and goings of the shadows may be
somewhat haphazard, they are not simply random. Socrates suggests this
when he says that among the cave-dwellers, there might be “honors, praises,
and prizes for the man who is sharpest at making out the things that go by,
and most remembers which of them are accustomed to pass before, which
after, and which at the same time as others, and who is thereby most able to
divine what is going to come” (516c–d). There seem to be temporal patterns
in movements of the objects carried and then projected on the cave wall, al-
most as if there were regular transports of statues, furniture, and other goods
along the lateral pathway. But what does this mean about our lived reality, if
the cave-dwellers are, as Socrates says, “like us”?
The shadows correspond to how we interpret beings as we do, given our
bonds to prevailing, given opinion about both things and norms. The objects
carried by the passers-by would then correspond, in the Allegory, to actual
things themselves. The shadows of the artifacts being carried are projected,
thrown forward, to the prisoners, as if the cave were a primitive movie the-
ater, with Plato as the first cinematographer of our imagination as readers.
The prisoners interpret these projections according to the understanding they
have as formed by their particular cave of received opinion. At issue here is
the qualified arbitrariness of this received opinion. Each cave has its cultural
norms for making sense of sociality, as well as its traditions for making sense
of the physical reality of the nonhuman world. While not simply random,
these understandings are historically contingent. They are largely the result
of historical accidents that often do follow patterns but are not governed by
208 Chapter Seven

some overarching intention or providential history, in the more literal sense of

a Providence that sees ahead and plans accordingly and intentionally. Again,
Socrates gives no indication that the passers-by are aware of how the fire
casts shadows of what they carry or, more significantly, of the effect their
passing-by and the projected shadows has on the cave-dwelling prisoners.
Two things in this depiction deserve immediate attention. What do things
that the passers-by carry signify, and what does it mean that the passers-by
have no awareness of their impact upon the prisoners? Socrates says the
passers-by carry “artifacts . . . and statues of men and other animals wrought
from stone, wood, and every kind of material” (524c–515a). The Greek word
used here for the things carried is skeuē, which Bloom properly renders
as “artifacts,” but which has a broad range of meanings, including: vessel,
implement, accoutrements, equipment, baggage. Most broadly, then, what
they carry is stuff, but this stuff is all human artifacts such as “statues of men
and other animals.” What is common to all of this stuff is that it is the prod-
uct of human making—in Greek, poiēsis. The artifacts are not all statues and
other representational objects, although Socrates does single out statues as a
prime example of skeuē, perhaps because they are so obviously the workings
of human artifice. So, the passers-by do not carry things themselves, the auta
eikeina as the products of nature, phusis. The decisive question is why they
do not carry natural objects, such as animals or plants or stones, but only
artifactual constructs of them (see Figure 7.1).
Concerning “the things that are carried by” (parapheromenōn), Socrates
asks, “If [the prisoners] were able to discuss things with one another, don’t
you believe they would hold that they are naming these things going by before
them that they see?” (515b).2 The prisoners name (onomazein) the shadows
that they see passing by, and the verb here for “they would hold” is nomizein,
which is related to nomos: norm, custom, convention, or law. It therefore can
also mean to adopt as a custom, to enact as a rule, and, as we would say, to
coin, both in the literal and figurative sense that a ‘coinage’ can mean estab-
lishing something—a kind of metal, a type of shell, a specially printed piece of
paper—as the customary currency for commerce. It can also mean fashioning
a new word as valid currency for the exchange that takes place in language.
This is why Hermes was the god of travelers, merchants, and messengers as
well as translators and interpreters, and from whom we have our word, herme-
neutics, the study of the making and communicating of meaning. Hermes was
also the god of thieves, who conduct their own form of commerce both within
and against a system of rules. Similarly, coining a new word both works within
a language and appropriates elements of it against customary usage, but also
reintegrates the new word with that usage, if the ‘theft’ is successfully laun-
dered in the commerce of language.
Figure 7.1. The Cave, from Rouse, Great Dialogues of Plato. Illustration by J. Legakes, courtesy of Penguin Random House.
210 Chapter Seven

The prisoners forge a meaningful world by naming the shadows, which

allows them to delineate them, identify them, remember them, and com-
municate about them. Naming, then, is a form of poiēsis, poetry in its most
elemental sense as a making that makes up a meaningful world by making
it intelligible and communicable in language. This is as ancient an insight as
Adam naming the animals that God parades before him after creating him last
(Genesis 2:19). Although such naming is organic and necessary to the life of
the cave as community, it is nevertheless a skeuē itself, an artificial imposi-
tion of nomos, custom or convention, upon phusis, nature, that may very well
distort and misapprehend what is. The artifice of naming is never simply de-
lusional, though, because in the integration of the Divided Line and the Cave,
the apprehension and comprehension of shadows and images is not divorced
from things or beings, ta onta. The shadow is still a shadow of something,
even if the prisoners “would hold [nomizoien] that the truth is nothing other
than the shadows of artificial things [skeuastōn skias]” (515c).

7.2 ARTIFACTS AND UNINTENTIONAL POIĒSIS

This brings us back to why Socrates says the passers-by on the lateral road
carry artificial and not natural things, because this is clearly not an oversight
or accident on his part, nor on Plato’s. All human hermeneuein, all of our
understanding, interpretation, communication, and translation of things and
experience and action is necessarily mediated by the poiēsis of historical
language. We do not have immediate access, as historical beings, to the
things themselves, and when we endeavor to communicate our understand-
ing as individuals, we also cannot provide immediate access to others of the
my-ownness-ness of that experience and understanding of things. No word is
simply a substitute for the thing itself, even if we must rely on words to medi-
ate, always pro-visionally, the meaning of things. Instead, both our individual
understandings and our discourse with others is mediated, primarily and for
the most part, by how things are named and presented to us by contingent
human artifice. Our predecessors handed down such meaning-making arti-
facts (which include practices as well as things) often unintentionally as they
engaged in the most fundamental form of poiēsis, the poetry of language that
named and secured such innovations in the nexus of historical meaning. They
endeavored, as now we in turn take up that endeavor, to ‘make sense’ of a
historical world. All language and representation as sense-making is broadly
poetic, and words themselves are skeuē, artifacts borne and projected to us
in the passing-by of a particular linguistic community’s history that provide
form and conceptual intelligibility to the manifold and shared experiences
 At the Crossroads of the Cave 211

within that community. To the extent that we are born and borne into a world
of meaning, thrown into it as a given matrix of received opinions and under-
standings, language is the inherited artifice that mediates that world.
This is the meaning of the projection of the artifacts, casting shadows
thrown by the fire against the lowest cave wall. Historical poiēsis in language
as the logos, as the construal of meaning in the broadest sense of making a
world intelligible, is cast forward in the traditional practices and received
opinions of a linguistic community. The passers-by on the lateral path carry
artifacts because human tradition does not convey and project historically the
things themselves but rather how those things have been mediated intergen-
erationally in the formations and mutations of language, technological prac-
tices, and social customs, seen in this broad sense as poetic sense-making.
After all, in the Cave parable, the supposedly actual things reside not on the
lateral pathway but outside, in the light of day. As is frequently the case in
the inherited traditions of a community, actors who establish lasting conven-
tions and practices and then secure them in language often do not realize at
the time that they are doing so, just as the passers-by on the lateral path do
not realize the effect they are having on the prisoners. Actors whose acts be-
come historical in this sense are usually responding to the exigencies of the
moment, without any particular intent to pass along a new custom. The ser-
endipitous poetry of their success, call it unintentional or spontaneous poiēsis,
that establishes the meaning of new words, works, practices, and institutions.
For an everyday example of such sedimentation of meaning and practice in
language, consider the residue of both Norman French (Latinate) and Saxon
terminology in legal documents, such as when we “devise and bequeath” an
estate in a will, where “devise” derives from the Norman, meaning to bestow
real property, and “bequeath,” from the Old English, to grant personal prop-
erty. We understand this expression’s oddness in this specific sedimented
usage, even though we rarely use these words in this archaic way in any other
context in ordinary language.3
This point draws inspiration from the concept of sedimentation in Hus-
serl’s later work. There, sedimentation is a name for the process of how in-
novations of any kind—in language, social practices, concepts, tool-making,
and so on—accrue in layers over time and become part of the background
understanding for how both individuals and entire cultures operate in a
meaningful historical world. Each new layer of sedimentation enables more
complex structures to emerge. As Dermot Moran and Joseph Cohen have
explained, the development of sedimented techniques for playing the guitar,
for example, form the basis for playing ever more naturally and fluently.
Similarly, in learning a language, the original acquisition of habits falls
into the background of the activity and becomes largely unconscious as one
212 Chapter Seven

incrementally improves. Otherwise, the activity itself would be impossible,

like trying to skate or run by intently remembering how to flex each muscle
and make each movement. One would simply fall. At the societal level, prac-
tices, concepts, language, and, most importantly, society-organizing goals,
says Husserl,

live on in sedimented forms yet can be reawakened again and again and, in their
new vitality, [can] be criticized; this manner of inquiring back into the ways in
which surviving goals repeatedly bring with them ever new attempts to reach
new goals, whose unsatisfactory character again and again necessitates their
clarification, their improvement, their more or less radical reshaping.4

This is another way of describing the de-, pre-, and reconstructive construal
of meaning, which depends on the prior sedimentation of meaning. ‘Sedimen-
tation’ fits well with the metaphor of earth as the ground for the openness of
world. ‘Sediment’ is itself earthy, accumulating in layers of practices and
language upon which a meaningful world is grounded. But we can delve into
this layered earth, even if we cannot unearth it entirely, for otherwise it would
be the strip-mining of a tradition that leaves no lived practice behind. Delving
may unearth strange things caught in sediments of a shared history, the fos-
sils of linguistic and cultural practices that shaped the conceptual schemes of
our modern selves. The deeper we delve, the more challenging it is to bring
this background—or underground—to light. We can endeavor to do this by
making ourselves aware of personal or societal assumptions and habits, then
critically engaging and reformulating them, all in terms of the goals we set for
living and thinking well. Those goals necessarily follow from an implicit or
explicit conception of the good, for self or society. This is why Husserl says
that “all prejudices are obscurities arising out of a sedimentation of tradition”
that we can never unearth totally, because situated life always depends on a
ground of habituated practices and opinions that recede into the background
of awareness.5 Nevertheless, it remains the duty of every thinker and every
ethical actor ever-again “to carry out a responsible critique, a peculiar sort
of critique which has its ground in these historical, personal projects, partial
fulfillments, and exchanges of criticism rather than in what is privately taken
for granted by the present philosopher.”6

7.3 HISTORICITY AND THE CROSSING

OF THE PATHWAYS

In his interpretation of the Republic, Allan Bloom depicts the founders of cit-
ies as deliberately and comprehensively responsible for the details of ethical,
 At the Crossroads of the Cave 213

institutional, cultural, and material life: “Legislators and poets are the makers
of these horizons; or, to use the symbols of the cave image, they are the men
who carry the statues and the other things the reflections of which the prison-
ers see. These objects are not natural; they are themselves images of natural
objects produced with cunning art so as to look like their originals, but are
adapted to serve the special interests of the artists.”7 This is the portrait we get
from Plutarch of figures like Lycurgus, who, as lore would have it, deliber-
ately and with careful intentionality reconstituted the customs and institutions
of Sparta in a comprehensive way, including property division, marriage and
sexual relations, education and military training, music, clothing, political
institutions, dining and food, and even rules for how to craft the woodwork
on homes so that it would be as functional and unpretentious as possible. The
deliberately intentional and comprehensive (even totalitarian) influence of a
founder like Lycurgus does occasionally intervene in human history, but this
is quite rare and not how the texture of meaning usually arises and endures in
human communities, due to human finitude and the accompanying slippage
of meaning. Even Lycurgus, according to legend, did not create his customs
from scratch, but first traveled Greece seeking models and grafted these onto
existing traditions in Sparta.8 Bloom’s depiction of the passersby as always
the deliberate manipulators of the projected shadows gives the lawgivers and
the poets of custom, language, and belief too much credit for an ability to
create and manage opinion both comprehensively and from scratch. It also
neglects the fact that much of the development of concepts, language, and
tradition is unintentional and haphazard. Most importantly, it obscures the
ontological point that the Divided Line is a continuum and that the shadows
are still shadows of things themselves, not simply illusions. The shadows can
grant access to what transcends them, and natural things exercise constraints
on how the artifacts, as representations, can be fashioned, and so how the
shadows can be projected.
The conception of the absolute creator-founder is partly justified, though,
by Socrates’s insistence that the founders of Kallipolis would exercise an
absolute censorship over music, which Socrates explicitly understands in its
largest sense to include not just what we think of as music, but every artifact
and artifice of human poiēsis. Socrates indicates that not just the songs we
hear and sing, not just the stories that inspire us the most, but also the musikē
of everyday artifacts can have a profound effect on how we are attuned to the
meanings of a shared existence. He asks:

Must we, then, supervise only the poets and compel them to impress the im-
age of the good disposition [tēn tou agathou eikona ethous] on their poems or
not to make them among us? Or must we also supervise the other craftsmen
214 Chapter Seven

[dēmiourgois] and prevent them from impressing this bad disposition, a licen-
tious, illiberal, and graceless one, either on images of animals or on buildings or
on anything else that their craft produces? Mustn’t we . . . look for those crafts-
men whose good natural endowments make them able to track down the nature
of what is fine and graceful, so that the young, dwelling as it were in a healthy
place, will be benefited by everything; and from that place something of the fine
works will strike their vision or their hearing, like a breeze bringing health from
good places; and beginning in childhood, it will, unawares, with fair speech lead
them to likeness and friendship as well as accord? (401b; tm)

The music of everyday artifacts, from clothing to public buildings to the

implements we eat with, attunes us “unawares” to the norms and meanings
of an ēthos, an interwoven text of significations that binds the understanding
to a way of life and expectations of behavior. Hence, Socrates’s famous pro-
nouncement that “a change to a new kind of musical training is something to
beware of as wholly dangerous. For one can never change the ways of train-
ing people in music without affecting the greatest political laws” (424c). In
American history, perhaps there is no better illustration of this than the 1960s,
when profound shifts in musical tastes accompanied equally profound shifts
in dress, sexuality, gender roles, politics, and many other aspects of social
and cultural life.
This is how history is present in the cave: as the contingent but not purely
random source of the particular constellation of meaning of a human society,
its being-a-world. As human-beings, we always already find ourselves situ-
ated in a particular nexus of historical meaning whose totality can never be
fully planned in advance. We can also call this happenstance: we always hap-
pen to find ourselves standing in situ, situated in a site of presumptive mean-
ing that grounds the involvements of our everyday going-about-our-business.
Our location, our standing, in a particular concatenation of the nexus of
history provides us with the horizon and landmarks of meaning by which we
orient our individual lives. The history of our individual and collective hap-
penstance is contingent, but it nevertheless projects, as it were, over the wall
that separates us from an intimate familiarity with how the sedimentation of
generations of historical practices supplies us with the patterns of meaning by
which we cobble together a meaningful world. That dividing wall (teichion,
514b) over which meaning projects is the barrier between the present and
the past, which is a natural barrier in one sense, because ontically we cannot
time-travel. It is also an ontological-hermeneutical barrier that being-human
artificially erects to conceal the nature of what transpires behind it along the
lateral pathway. The construct of the barrier-wall prevents us from being
overwhelmed all the time by the past and by the realization of the continency
of our historicity; but ontologically, it is not an impermeable barrier, as time’s
 At the Crossroads of the Cave 215

arrow is for us ontically in the physical universe: some can escape to climb
over it to confront what happens in the background to history.
Hubert Dreyfus, one of Heidegger’s most influential readers, described
this attunement to the music of meaning as the background practices of our
being-in-the-world.9 The practices that inform the meaning of our existence,
in the practical sense of granting access to the significance of things, activi-
ties, and even concepts, lie in the background because we can never fully
get behind them; they quite literally in-form the intelligibility that makes
any inquiry possible in the first place. To be human is to be subject to and
product of a formation of the understanding that happens “unawares,” as the
cumulative effect of generations of meaning-making shared practices. We
all are musical; we are attuned to and entranced by the rhythms of meaning
and action that define the sedimented reception and interaction of personal
and cultural practice. Even a founder as profoundly innovative as Lycurgus
must rely upon a vast, pre-existing weave-work of intelligibility—linguistic,
institutional, technological—to implement changes that, while transforma-
tive, are small compared to this always-already comprehensive attunement to
practices. This sedimentation informs our understanding unawares through
the cumulative influence of a history of unintended, spontaneous, innovative
acts that project over the wall of time separating us from the past. This is a
wall we ordinarily do not see behind and often are unaware of in our everyday
activity, like the techion separating the prisoners from the lateral path, with
our attention glued to the images of meaning projected before us in the world
we habitually inhabit.
Remarkably, in the geography of the cave the lateral and the upward path-
ways intersect. While Socrates does not explicitly say this, the logic of the
cave’s geography implies it. If they did not cross, then the seeker for truth
who emerges from the cave would not have a full understanding of how each
‘station’ of the cave integrates within the whole of the truth revealed by the
journey. That is why an illustration of the cave such as the one found in the
edition of the Platonic dialogues by W. H. D. Rouse cannot be right (Figure
7.1: The Cave, from Great Dialogues of Plato).10
In this illustration, the lateral “roadway” before the fire and the “rough as-
cent” do not meet up at all. The latter passes under the former. This does not
conform narratively with the Allegory, because Socrates describes the escap-
ing prisoner as encountering the fire. On my interpretation, that encounter is
symbolically important because if philosophical understanding must become
familiar with and integrate all levels of the Divided Line and the cave as the
world of human habitation, as illustrated in Figure 4, it cannot simply bypass
the fire and the lateral pathway. It is a feature of the proper pedagogy of the
cave, as well as of that pedagogy’s potential failure, that the liberated can
216 Chapter Seven

only rise to the light of day by first confronting and making provisional sense
of the fire and lateral pathway, only then returning to inhabit and rule the cave
by encountering them again in the light of the greater understanding won by
ascending the upward path.
The two paths must therefore intersect precisely at the point where the lat-
eral road passes between the fire in the cave and the wall blocking the lateral
pathway and the fire from the view of the prisoners. Although Socrates does
not describe how this happens, if the cave-dweller who escapes the bonds is
to make any progress to a fuller liberation, she or he must first get past the
wall, arrive at the lateral pathway, and encounter and make sense of the fire.
Socrates says that while the newly released prisoner would now be “somewhat
nearer to what is,” to Being (nun de mallon ti egguterō tou ontos, 515d2–3),
this liberated cave-dweller would still be in pain and dazzled by the fire until
his or her eyes adjusted to its light. Only then would the freed prisoner begin
to understand the relation of fire and light, objects and projection.
I suggest that this initial adjusting of the eyes to the fire is the dawning of
historical consciousness: the realization that ways of understanding, both of
ethical norms and of the world itself, are historical; that our opinions, our ide-
ology (in the sense of an integrated whole of opinions), are to some significant
extent historically contingent. For Heidegger, they must be entirely historical
if there are no transcendent ideas that apply universally. The escaped prisoner
may grasp this at the level of the fire burning above and beyond the lateral
pathway. This is what authenticity (Eigentlichkeit) means for Heidegger; it
is a moment when one recognizes the entirely groundless contingency of
the everyday meaning of the world one inhabits. Confronting the existential
anxiety provoked by this realization of historical contingency, authenticity
entails being able to return to and embrace that world through revitalized
interpretations, realizing meanings implicit but previously unrealized in one’s
given existence. The fundamental difference between Heidegger’s view and
my own is this: I believe Plato’s teaching that without the intimation and ide-
ation of the ideas, the polemical cycle of de-, pre-, reconstruction would be
unhinged from the genuine phenomena of human ethical life and the practical
wisdom needed to guide it.

7.4 SOPHISTRY AND PHILOSOPHY AT

THE CROSSROADS OF THE CAVE

What Socrates does not directly say here, but what may plausibly be ex-
trapolated from other passages in the Republic, is that this crossroads is
the place where a sophist may set up shop. In Book 6, Socrates responds
 At the Crossroads of the Cave 217

to Adeimantus’s challenge that philosophers are either useless or vicious:

achrēstous, without profit, or pamponerous, utterly depraved (486d). Ade-
imantus seems to have in mind either pasty intellectuals, such as the hapless
denizens of the Thinkery in Aristophanes’s Clouds, or malignant subversives,
such as Thrasymachus or perhaps Unjust Speech in the Clouds, who would
undermine wholesome traditional beliefs and practices in order to make a
profit, justify their vices, or seek power. This is consistent with our previ-
ous discussions of the two poles of the more jaded Athenian perception of
philosophers: the laughably eccentric, such as Euthyphro, and the genuinely
dangerous, such as Socrates himself, accused of impiety and corrupting the
youth. In reply, Socrates lays the blame not on genuine philosophy as such,
but on the community that does not know either how to recognize it or how to
cultivate it. True philosophers appear useless only to those who do not under-
stand things well enough themselves to discern what proper knowledge looks
like or how to wield it. Communities of this sort are like ignorant sailors on a
ship who cannot grasp the knowledge of astronomy necessary for navigation,
and who would ignore the recommendations of a true pilot as unintelligible
(488a–489c).
But it is the vicious who are most significant for our purposes, because
Socrates associates them with the sophists as the ones with the most per-
nicious effect on the young and on society as a whole. As we have seen,
Socrates describes the sophist as a failed or corrupted almost-philosopher,
someone who has all or most of the qualities of mind and character that would
make for a genuine philosopher. Such a person, says Socrates, is exceedingly
rare (491a–b), because the qualities required are so unusual: they must be
erotic in the sense of utterly longing for learning, for the truth, and for what
is (485b–c); they must be self-controlled, forsaking pleasures of the body and
other distractions for the sake of learning (485d) and not overly concerned
with money (485e); they must be courageous, not petty but instead mag-
nanimous in their aspirations, able to endure adversity, not even fearing death
(486a–b); they must also be fast learners with good memory, given the rigors
of their search (486c–d); finally, they must be graceful and charming, able to
attend to the music of inspiration and thereby led “easily to the idea of each
thing that itself is” (485d), but also so that they can communicate effectively
with the inhabitants of the cave when returning to lead them.
Socrates then says, “What is most surprising of all to hear is that each one
of the elements we praised in that nature has a part in destroying the soul
that has them and tearing it away from philosophy”—and here he means not
only the features just enumerated but also all the virtues—“And what’s more
besides these, all the things said to be good corrupt it”—that is, the soul of the
potential philosopher—“and tear it away—beauty, wealth, strength of body,
218 Chapter Seven

relatives who are powerful in the city, and everything akin to these” (491b).
Here, Socrates is speaking directly to and about the most promising youth of
Athens, such as Glaucon and Adeimantus, and perhaps even more so Alcibia-
des, who had generous endowments of mind combined with all the privileges
of birth, wealth, beauty, health, vigor, education, and connections to power.
The danger is that “the best nature comes off worse than an ordinary one from
an inappropriate rearing” and that “the best natures become exceptionally bad
when they get bad instruction” (491d–e). Everything, therefore, depends on
the careful and proper cultivation of this exceptional potential, because such
rearing does not happen by accident, “unless one of the gods chances to as-
sist” (492a). Socrates asks whether it is even worth mentioning, because so
obvious, that “certain young men are corrupted by sophists”—as the youths
gathered there in Cephalus’s home might have been by Thrasymachus before
Socrates’s intervention (492a–b).
But at this point, Socrates says something even more perplexing to Ade-
imantus: that it is not the professional sophists who are the greatest threat,
but rather the public, when it gathers “in assemblies, courts, theaters, army
camps, or any other common meeting of a multitude” (492b). The multitude
deflects attention from its own pernicious influence on the promising young
by condemning the individual sophists. Nevertheless, argues Socrates, it is
the crowd, with its “great deal of uproar” of praise and blame, its “shouting
and clapping” that rock the very stones of a gathering place, that can exert
the greatest effect of sophistry on the young (492b–c). What, asks Socrates
is “the state of the young man’s heart” in such venues and events? “Or what
kind of private education will hold out for him and not be swept away by such
blame and praise and go, borne by the flood, wherever it tends so that he’ll
say the same things are noble and base as they do, practice what they practice,
and be such as they are?” (492c). The allusion to the career of someone like
Alcibiades is unmistakable.
Lest we imagine that this dynamic is an anachronism specific only to the
direct democracy and relatively small population of ancient Athens, consider
the effects today on the young, and not just the young, of attending a concert,
megachurch, or sport event, political rally, with massive screens and sound
systems projecting images and saturating the body with music, crowds roar-
ing and swaying together. Or consider the mania for self-curation on Twitter,
Facebook, or YouTube, with the craving for ‘likes’ and for the possibility of
becoming ‘an influencer’ or the next internet sensation, perhaps garnering an
invitation to the White House as the newest alt-news media star in a post-truth
world.11
The greater sophist, then, is public opinion, which exerts a powerful
gravitational pull, especially on the ambition and imagination of the young
 At the Crossroads of the Cave 219

as they begin to find their way in the world. Socrates says that “each of these
private wage earners whom these men”—that is, the public in its multitude—
“call sophists and believe to be their rivals in art, educates in nothing other
than these convictions [dogmata] of the many, which they opine when they
are gathered together, and he [that is, the professional sophist as a private
teacher] calls this wisdom” (493a). The skill of the private sophist is to under-
stand and teach with great precision the disposition, opinions, and passions
of the particular public that is dominant, as well as those of relevant sub-
populations that play important roles in a particular community at a specific
moment in its history. Then, says Socrates, it is like:
[A] man who learns by heart the angers and desires of a great, strong beast he
is rearing, how it should be approached and how taken hold of, when—and as a
result of what—it becomes most difficult or most gentle, and, particularly, under
what conditions it is accustomed to utter its several sounds, and, in turn, what
sort of sounds uttered by another make it tame and angry (493a–b).

The community has its particular, historically contingent passions and con-
victions, and it will applaud or reject, perhaps violently, proposals, represen-
tations, and actions that confirm or conflict with these. By understanding such
proclivities in detail, perhaps by using all the tools of modern social science,
the sophist “calls it wisdom and, organizing it as an art, turns to teaching”
(493b).
Nevertheless, the disposition of the multitude is not infinitely malleable.
In fact, Socrates recognizes that sophistry depends on grasping what a phe-
nomenologist would call the background practices of a people’s ethos, its
convictions and habits, just as the beast has its natural proclivities. What the
sophist’s expertise can teach is how to manipulate these proclivities. We see
this all the time in our era: how Google and Facebook manage the personal
data their users provide, usually inadvertently, to target advertising to those
very users on both an aggregate and an individual level, or how firms such
as Cambridge Analytica or the secret services of hostile nations can use such
data to micro-target voter populations to attempt electoral manipulation or
to compromise political figures.12 These are just the recent egregious ex-
amples. Advertising and marketing firms have for decades used sophisticated
methodologies, including neuropsychology, to understand and then corral
consumers’ purchasing behavior, just as social science can assist in learning,
predicting, and interfering in the voting behavior of populations.13 But such
information tells marketers, public relations experts, political consultants,
and advertisers nothing about what is good for people or for a community:
“Knowing nothing in truth about which of these convictions and desires is
noble, or base, or good, or evil, or just, or unjust, [the sophist] applies all these
220 Chapter Seven

names following the great animal’s opinions—calling what delights it good

and what vexes it bad” (493b–c), all as part of the project of manipulation.
This is how to win votes, ratings, ‘likes,’ and purchases. So, while unable to
create the disposition of the public ex nihilo, the skilled sophist can present
things in a way most likely to enthrall and thereby gently nudge public taste
and public opinion in the desired direction. In extraordinary moments where
the opportunity occurs for a new founder to reconfigure a radical departure
in society—a “new prince,” as Machiavelli would say—the sophist might be
able to do more than just nudge. Even so, there is a kind of hermeneutical
circle of desire, opinion, and action that begins with a historical people’s most
entrenched proclivities and convictions. The sophist must find the right way
to engage these in order to nudge, to budge, or perhaps even to transform
them in some revolutionary way.
The young potential-philosopher is therefore in a precarious position if
deprived of the proper education, mentors, or companions. All of the mag-
nificent aptitudes and virtues—being intelligent, charming, quick to learn,
and so on—make such a person a promising target for “kinsmen and fellow
citizens” who “will surely want to make use of him, when he is older, for their
own affairs” (494b). As the promising youth enters adulthood—say, embark-
ing on college and then graduate education in law or business—those who
want to use his talents will “lie at his feet, begging and honoring him, taking
possession of and flattering beforehand the power that is going to be his”;
they will offer him, or her, loans, scholarships, internships, fellowships, then
well-paying jobs with attractive bonuses, all to develop their skills in man-
aging the beast, not for what is just or right or noble, but for what enhances
power, prestige, and wealth. What will such a young man do, asks Socrates,
“especially if he chances to be from a big city, is rich and noble in it, and
is, further, good-looking and tall? Won’t he be overflowing with unbounded
hope, believing he will be competent to mind the business of both Greeks and
barbarians”—like Alcibiades, again—“and won’t he, as a result, exalt himself
to the heights, mindlessly full of pretension and empty conceit?” (494c–d).
Now we must map this account of the descent into the viciousness of soph-
istry back onto the narrative of the cave. Where on the upward journey does
this corruption transpire, and how?
We have seen in chapter 6 that the released prisoner first stumbles around
in a daze, unable immediately to reconcile the shadows that she had previ-
ously always seen with the blinding light emanating from the fire. If she does
not fall victim to nihilism or despair at this point, she might make her way
up to the level of the lateral pathway, with the passers-by carrying artifacts,
and to the fire itself. This, too, will be a traumatic dislocation, but the former
prisoner may come to understand the relation between the fire, the artifacts,
 At the Crossroads of the Cave 221

and the projection of the shadows, as well as how the bonds of the prisoners
force them to see nothing but those shadows.
It is at this point, upon arrival at the lateral pathway and the fire, that the
incipient philosopher faces the greatest temptation and most defining deci-
sion. At this delicate crossroads in life, Socrates says, the released wanderer
might encounter a mentor who would “gently approach the young man in
this condition and tell him the truth—that he has no intelligence in him [that
is, no nous, no genuine insight and comprehension] although he needs it, and
that it’s not to be acquired except by slaving for its acquisition”; Socrates
then asks, “do you think it will be easy for him to hear through a wall of so
many evils?” (494d). The “evils” Socrates means are all the inducements of
power, prestige, pleasure, and wealth the youth will be promised by society
if he will only bend his prodigious talents and labors to the interests of those
who already enjoy such things. The truth told by the gentle mentor is not easy
to hear, in part because the mentor says that genuine insight will only be won
by “slaving” for it. Translating this to the imagery of the Cave Allegory, this
gentle admonition by the mentor would be a way of pointing out the open-
ing to the “rough, steep, upward way” (515e) that leads away from the fire
and the lateral path up to the light of day, where genuine insight is possible.
The Greek here for “slaving” is douleusanti, a word directly related to the
bonds, the douloi, that bind the prisoners in place at the lowest level of the
cave (514a–b, 515c). For the newly escaped prisoner, embarking upon that
upward path might sound like trading one form of bondage for another. The
youth will have only just emerged from the original trauma of dislocation
from habitation on the floor of the cave, which, as miserable as it might have
been in retrospect was apparently stable—until it was not. Now, at the level
of the fire and lateral path, the talented youth is offered a new stability and
a new hold on power, both visible in the light of the fire. The opening to the
upward path, by contrast, promises only more toil and instability. The youth
will not actually see the light of day from this vantage point, the supposed
insight promised by the gentle mentor, only the harshness of the ascent, lit
up in its first stages by the fire through the opening to the upward path. The
inducement to choose that path rather than to stay in place, in the comfort of
the fire, might be weak indeed.
The mentor thus carries a great deal of the burden if the youth is to make
the right decision. The mentor must convince the youth to trust that there is
indeed light at the end of the upward tunnel. This involves successfully kin-
dling that Socratic trust or faith in a transcendent truth. Socrates asks:

But if, thanks to his good nature and his kinship to such speeches [namely, to
the suggestions of a benevolent mentor that he lacks genuine insight “although
222 Chapter Seven

he needs it” (detai de, 494d)], one young man were to apprehend something and
be turned and drawn toward philosophy, what do you suppose those will do who
believe they are losing his use and comradeship? Is there any deed they won’t
do or any word they won’t say, concerning him, so that he won’t be persuaded,
and concerning the man who’s doing the persuading, so that he won’t be able
to persuade; and won’t they organize private plots and public trials? (494d–e).

Plato’s allusion here to the persecution and trial of Socrates himself is unmis-
takable.14 If the mentor fails to teach the incipient philosopher diplomatically,
so that the powers-that-be in the cave do not suspect or fear that they might
be losing a talented future ally, the mentor and student will likely fall victim
to persecution. The mentor must be a zetetic, like Socrates, whose skeptical
idealism can persuade the incipient philosopher to embark up on the upward
path, whose gentleness offers a supple, phronetic balance between a daring
that verges on hubris (because willing to depart radically from received opin-
ion) and a modesty that remains prudently aware of the limitations of human
finitude and the indebtedness of understanding to received opinion. The men-
tor’s persuasion must therefore consist in three things: convincing the youth
that “he needs” to embark upwards; that there is some reason to hope that this
need can be fulfilled, even if only in part; and that the departure from received
opinion and norms must be handled with tact.
The need, the detai, is grounded in the verb deō, to need, to lack, to want,
and is related to a cluster of words for what is required, what is fitting or
proper (dei), from which we have deontology, an account of what we ought
to do as a matter of duty. The young philosopher must be made phenomeno-
logically aware that there is something lacking at the level of the fire, despite
its apparent allures, and that an ethical and good life requires embarking
on the upward path, despite its apparent toils. At the same time, the young
philosopher must have some reason to believe that the search upward is not
pointless, or else the endeavor will tumble back down into a deeper despair
or nihilism from a still greater height than in the initial dislocation of the
lower cave. The failed philosopher might then retreat to the inadequate but
comfortably tangible inducements of the sophistic life at the level of the fire,
which will seem to outweigh the empty promise of a supposedly transcen-
dent alternative.
Here again we must avoid getting mired in the details of the Allegory,
as if the logic of that narrative alone were enough to establish its truth. An
allegory’s power lies in how well it can goad us into examining and reexam-
ining the phenomenon it is about. No allegory, just as nothing in language,
can map the thing itself perfectly, but the most powerful uses of allegory and
language push us to think all the more deeply about what does not fit. We
 At the Crossroads of the Cave 223

must consider, then, how the prisoners are still “like us” if they ascend to the
level of the fire, and why that situation is so precarious.
On the lateral path, the anonymous passers-by carrying artifacts are like
the succession of generation upon generation of historical human beings.
The smaller and greater innovations, usually quite unintentional and sponta-
neous, generated by these ancestors in language, technologies, institutions,
norms, and cultural practices get projected—anonymously for the most part,
in sedimented layer upon layer—onto the life‑world of a particular historical
community. This community is a specific ‘cave’ of bounded cultural mean-
ings in which we are, at least at first, entirely immersed and bound up. The
tact of the aspiring philosopher involves a recognition of how the historicity
of meaning forms the bonds and bounds of a world that, however flawed, is
home for those with whom she shares a community. Tactful empathy grasps
that breakdowns of this meaning can be deeply traumatic, and so both the
departure and return must be negotiated with care and compassion.
The fire itself as allegory is harder to understand. Socrates says it repre-
sents the sun (517b), but that hardly sheds light on what the fire represents in
the production of historical understanding. It helps to think in terms of seeing
in the light of fire: the projection of the artifacts against the cave wall would
not happen without the light cast by the fire, an artificial light, compared to
the sun, because it does not present the things themselves but rather how they
are mediated by historical understanding. Each historical community, in order
to function, must share in the construal of a meaningful world, for community
requires communication. Those who dwell together must see together to be
able to speak together, and their mutual needs form the basis of what matters
to them as meaningful. The fire is the source and condition of the possibility
of a shared intelligibility that can be projected communally and intergenera-
tionally. The fire is the eventuation of shared meaning in a particular histori-
cal world, in the light of which the spontaneity of invention can adjust and
pass down an evolving, temporal understanding.
As we have discussed above in our exploration of a broad definition of
sophism, whoever comes to understand the mechanism of the production of
historical meaning is in a position to wield considerable social and political
power. Those who reach the level of the lateral path may gain this histori-
cal awareness. Instead of change and the projection of change in historical
understanding within a community occurring by happenstance, as it gener-
ally does in the naive, pre-historical consciousness, they come to realize that
what people see as real, as well as their opinions about that reality, while not
infinitely malleable, is susceptible to manipulation. Existing concepts and
constructs can be deconstructed and reconstructed with intention, and with a
224 Chapter Seven

greater or lesser degree of formal methodology, in order to rearrange peoples’

desiring, understanding, and interpreting.
As ancient religions have long recognized, human beings are profoundly
vulnerable to the charms of the graven image. This is amply illustrated in
our times by the pervasiveness of advertising of all kinds, commercial and
political, the moving images of modern narratives in film and television, and
the ubiquitous and profoundly addictive presence of handheld screens. The
image is powerful because it can serve as a substitute for the thing itself, and
also because it excites the power of the imagination in the individual. When
presented with skill, images projected by the sophist can convince people that
what they imagine is in fact a world they inhabit, and that because they have
imagined it, it is their own creation, something they have freely chosen, rather
than being a mere projection imposed on them by someone else. The most
convincing tricks are the ones the tricked believe they have accomplished
themselves. The sophist therefore incites the illusions of ideology, rather than
the ideations of philosophy.
The sophist, in contrast to the philosopher, abandons himself to the power
of the image. The sophist traffics back and forth over the wall and between
the fire and the prisoners chained to the floor, rather than along the upward
path. What the sophist traffics in are shadows and their projection. Although
their ancestors mostly had no awareness of what they were projecting to their
communities and descendants, like the passers-by on the lateral path, the
sophist intentionally becomes a puppeteer, casting shadows and projecting
images deliberately as a way of crafting historical understanding. The sophist
understands the relation of fire, object, light, and the projection of shadows
on the wall.
In short, the sophist understands the distinction between phusis and no-
mos, nature and convention. Just as Thrasymachus, for example, understands
justice to be nothing more than the advantage of the stronger—defined as
whatever ideology serves the interests of the ruling body that happens to hold
power—so does the sophist more generally understand that opinions are con-
tingent, historical constructs. The sophist is the puppeteer, the thaumatopoios,
the wonder-worker who knows intimately the moods and opinions of the au-
dience of cave dwellers, as well as what it is they think they see, and who can
thereby manipulate them by doing deliberately and consciously what before
had happened unawares: projecting images against the cave wall.
It is remarkable that the sophist shares to some degree in the wonder that
also gives rise to philosophy. This is a further indication of the unitary phe-
nomenon of questioning as liberation. Both the sophist and the philosopher
originate from a breakdown in the received way of understanding the world,
but the sophist gives up on ascending the upward path or sending others
 At the Crossroads of the Cave 225

up along it, from wonder to wisdom, in favor of manipulating wonder for

personal and political gain. As we have discussed, the sophist degrades won-
der into a tool for domination in the spectacle of propaganda. At the most
accomplished level of sophistication, the skilled sophist can do more than
manipulate isolated elements within the confines of a population’s existing
desires and convictions. The arch-sophist becomes so adept at broadcasting
shadows that she or he can reconfigure an entire ideology.
Propaganda as technē, as skillful mastery over images and shadows, is
what fascinates the sophist, who falls in love with the power of ideas (in the
conventional sense) to weave a world of meaning for a population, a meaning
to be manipulated almost at will. Ideas and their historically situated efficacy
can never be more than ideological tools for the sophist, who remains fix-
ated at the level of the fire, obsessed with casting shadows over the wall and
observing how the crowd of prisoners will react in order to refine the skills
of projection. The sophist finds joy in the power of propaganda, not in truth
as such. While the sophist takes up position on the lateral pathway where it
passes by the fire and intersects with the upward pathway, she either does
not notice that the upward path is there or scorns it as a “rough, steep upward
way,” hardly worth the bother. Or worse: he realizes that ascending the up-
ward path might empower some to expose him, and so he might be tempted to
wall it off altogether, to prevent escape from the cave.15 Translating from the
allegory, this walling-off would involve arguments, propaganda, threats, and
inducements to convince anyone who might be tempted by the idea of tran-
scendent ideas that such things are futile delusions and that the only thing that
matters is what people can be made to believe is true. As Socrates says, the
sophist cares nothing and knows nothing about which of the cave-dwellers’
“convictions and desires is noble, or base, or good, or evil, or just, or unjust.”
These are all just labels of convenience to the sophist, for he does not believe
in a noble, or a good, or a just in itself as independent ideas; he only believes
in these things as constructs to be manipulated.
Marina McCoy, in her insightful study Plato on the Rhetoric of Philosophers
and Sophists, makes a compelling case that, from the perspective of the cave-
dwellers, there is no obvious difference between sophistry and philosophy.
At-issue is whether a putative teacher is a mentor or manipulator. Plato does
not distinguish between philosophers and sophists as using different technical
methods. Eristic, arguing for the sake of winning the argument, can look much
the same as dialectic, arguing for the sake of reaching the truth. The distinction
lies in “differences in character and moral intention,” as McCoy puts it, which
is also what makes it so difficult to distinguish between the sophist and the
philosopher in practice, because doing so requires acute skill and judgment in
observing that intention in the speech and deed of the person in question, and
226 Chapter Seven

presumably one would already have to be wise to do so. McCoy’s argument

about the sophist in the Republic “as an incomplete philosopher, skeptical of
opinion (doxa), freed from the chains within the cave, but not yet oriented
toward the forms” and therefore “the most dangerous sort of character in the
city,” supports the analysis here. Both sophist and philosopher, when engaged
in civic life, employ rhetoric and argumentation at the crossroads in the cave,
deliberately managing how the fire casts its shadows.16
The philosopher’s recognition of the necessity of rhetoric is a recognition
of the inevitability of human communal understanding as inflected by history
and the fact that all rational accounts must also contend with the affective
truth of human situatedness and embodiment. McCoy rightly argues that
Thrasymachus is an ambiguous figure, for while he clearly seeks status, and
probably employment, by promoting his immoralist view of justice, he does
also seem to have what looks like a philosophical commitment to his position.
He believes it to be true—and important because true.17 On the interpretation
of the crossroads of the cave, this would be Thrasymachus not having previ-
ously realized that there is the upward path leading out, which would explain
why he would stay and listen after his humiliation by Socrates. His eros for
knowledge wins out over love of honor and gain, allowing him to take that
other path seriously, at least for the rest of that nightlong discussion. This
suggests that even a quite cynical sophist may be redeemed by a highly effec-
tive and genuine mentor who can reignite both the liberation and the sense of
wonder necessary for the hard work of ascending the upward path.
At the same time, this account suggests that the philosopher, who loves the
truth for its own sake but who must return to the cave, must also find ways to
present the truth in a form perhaps quite far removed from philosophy, such
as myth and story, that can reach the cave’s inhabitants. While this might
seem to collapse philosophy into the deceptions and manipulations of soph-
istry, it is important to consider here what Richard Kearney, drawing on the
work of Paul Ricoeur, discusses as the positive potential of the social imagi-
nary. Against thinkers like Marx and Feuerbach who argue for a science of
a social truth against the mystifications of legend, lore, and ideology as false
consciousness, Kearney argues for a hermeneutics of a social imaginary, de-
fined as comprising “the interplay of ideals, images, mythologies, and utopias
informing our cultural and political unconscious. Here we are concerned with
ways in which a poetics of imagination operates in our everyday lives, often
anonymously, to produce collective narratives—stories we tell ourselves in
order to explain ourselves to ourselves and to others.” Those stories are open
to the polemos of retelling, We see this now, in the debates over national
founders, monuments, symbols, and even the names of sports teams in the
United States. As we have discussed, no community can exist without this
 At the Crossroads of the Cave 227

sedimented background of shared and largely unconscious meanings and

practices. A social imaginary is a repository of a community’s “myths, ideals,
and rhetorics” that allow it to share a formative past and ideals of the future.
But more than a repository, it is a treasury from which a community may
draw, in politics most especially, for the founding stories that members must
revisit and renew to maintain their unity and resilience as a community.18
The philosopher at the level of the fire also draws from this positive store-
house of the social imaginary to reinterpret and reconstruct a community’s
way of seeing its history, itself, and its possible futures, all assuming some vi-
able understanding of the good. The echonic philosopher would lay claim to
total possession of the good as well as to the social truth of historical human
beings, such as those who have claim to practice a genuine science of history
that holds the hermeneutical key to unlock with finality the whole of mean-
ing and to tell a story that would never need revision. The zetetic philosopher
would have only intimations of truth and the good and so would depend, as do
the rest of us, on the social imaginary for the historical narratives, symbols,
and images that mediate the meaning of a shared world. At the fire, the zetetic
would draw on this treasury to reconstruct the social imagination in ways that
direct the people more towards the good, justice, and virtue, using practical
wisdom to reimagine and revise stories and images as the situation requires.
The sophist, by contrast, draws on false credit in order to manipulate the pub-
lic for private or sectarian ends, depleting the treasury until the community’s
funds of imagination are exhausted by cynicism.
The question is how a genuinely philosophical mentor can induce someone
to leave the light of the fire and attempt the difficult upward journey through,
away from, and back to this social imaginary to engage constructively with
it. This cannot be understood in terms of what Socrates says is the false view
of education: that some echonic philosopher, in total possession of the truth,
would simply pour learning into the mind of the student, like pouring water
from a full jar into an empty cup, or, as Socrates says like “putting sight into
blind eyes” (518b–c).19 Rather, the zetetic philosopher, as mentor, must be
able to model her own manner of truth-seeking and draw the student into
the search. The crucial phrase in the passage cited above, where the student
arrives at the crossroads of life between the lateral path and the upward
path—between sophistry and philosophy and between cynical manipulation
of images and trusting engagement with ideation—is that Socrates says that
this departure upward can happen if a youth (or someone still young in mind)
“were to apprehend something and be turned and drawn toward philosophy”
(494e). The Greek here is instructive. What Bloom renders as “apprehend”
is eisaisthanētai, to perceive, to understand, to ‘get’ something conceptually;
“turned” is kamptētai, which can have an even stronger sense of bending
228 Chapter Seven

dramatically, as when a charioteer pivots a horse team around a turning post

in a race; “drawn” is helkētai, which also can have a more vivid sense of be-
ing dragged or pulled with force.
That last word is the same one that Socrates uses to describe the last stage
of the prisoner’s emerging from the cave, starting from the level of the lateral
path and fire: “And if someone dragged [helkoi] him away from there by
force along the rough steep upward way and didn’t let him go before he had
dragged him out into the light of the sun, wouldn’t he be distressed and an-
noyed at being so dragged?” (515e–516a). As we have discussed, the difficulty
and distress come from having one’s opinions challenged through dialectic,
which is not simply a threat to personal vanity but potentially to one’s whole
orientation to the world in what it has meant and how it has mattered. Presum-
ably, anyone who has managed to get as far as the fire would have already
come to terms with having their initial and naive opinions as a cave-dweller
disrupted, perhaps traumatically, by the original release from the bonds. If they
have accustomed themselves at the level of the fire to these disruptions of the
social imaginary, they will have understood the relationship of history to the
way opinion is projected over generations to establish norms. The task for the
genuine mentor is to lead the potential philosopher away from the twin lures
of historicist relativism and manipulative sophistry. Thrasymachus revealed
himself to be a kind of cultural relativist about the nature of justice and power.
As his case demonstrates, the opinions formed at this level of sophistication
can arouse just as much passion, possessiveness, and defensiveness as those
naive opinions of the prisoners still bound to the cave floor.
Socrates causes Thrasymachus considerable discomfort and humiliation
in refuting his positions. Before giving up to Socrates, Thrasymachus sweats
and blushes while being “dragged [helkomenos] with considerable effort”
(350c–d; my translation) through the argument’s dialectic. This introduces
the same language of compulsion and resistance as in the Allegory for this
stage of philosophical progress. But Thrasymachus becomes tame. He does
not leave in a fit of wounded vanity but stays to listen, because Socrates has
indeed rekindled his wonder for something more than the power of rhetoric
and the wages or prestige it might provide.20 This means that the potential
philosopher, in order to embark upon the upward path, must do so voluntarily
by internalizing the compulsion of the dialectic, by coming to feel at home
with it as a zetetic seeker. The being turned here must be an expression of
the existential freedom to choose a way of life. Otherwise, as Polemarchus
suggests in a playful seriousness (327c), one could simply refuse to listen to
the logos of dialectic. The polemos of dialectic with one’s situated, received
opinions or with one’s more sophisticated ‘theoretical’ ones, must be free. It
must sublate the compulsion and make its energy one’s own.
 At the Crossroads of the Cave 229

What the skilled mentor does with dialectic is first to point out the entrance
to the upward path, the opening to the possibility of something more than
historical consciousness. Through dialectic with the mentor, this involves
the incipient seeker’s apprehending something, somehow (eisaisthanētai
pēi, 494e), about his inadequacy and ignorance that opens him up to the pos-
sibility of this something more in philosophy. We see this happen through
the debate with Thrasymachus, where, whatever we might think of the argu-
ments Socrates uses to achieve his victory, he at least succeeds in showing
the young people present that Thrasymachus’s relativism about justice is not
adequate to making sense of what it means to live a good life. It certainly
happens with Glaucon and Adeimantus. Not only does the mentor indicate
the possibility of this alternative. The mentor must also guide the student far
enough along the upward path that she or he begins to discern another source
of illumination, the daylight filtering down from above, rather than the light
from the fire, which now burns below and behind as the student ascends.
Absolutely crucial here for understanding the upward pathway is that, as
Heraclitus has said, “The way up and the way down are one and the same”
(Fragment 60). The philosopher, recall, must go back down into the cave, and
the pathway for escape out is one and the same as the one for return. The Cave,
just as the Divided Line, is an integrated continuity. We have interpreted this
to mean that embodiment, in its fullest sense, is not something a human being
can simply leave behind and transcend entirely. This embodiment includes
not simply the individuation of the body, with its physical limitations and its
sensations and its needs, but also the embeddedness of human understanding
in a specific cultural-linguistic historical context. Transcendence is situated.
It begins in the shadows of received opinions, makes its progress by confron-
tation with them, and must return to them. Zetetic philosophy must reconcile
itself to this embodiment, to the understanding that mortal transcendence is
necessarily encumbered with the embodied and the historical and that it must
speak in their language.
This is another reason that McCoy is correct to say that the sophist and the
philosopher can appear identical from the perspective of the cave-dweller.
Both employ the tools of rhetoric. Both must be able to speak fluently the
language of their specific embodiment, as situated in a particular place and
time, among a people with their characteristic passions and propensities,
their mindsets and opinions formed by a deeply sedimented history. Just as
Socrates makes use of images, such as the Noble Lie of the three metals of
the soul, the Divided Line, and the Allegory of the Cave, and just as Plato
uses the images of narrative setting and characters in the dialogue form as
such, so too must the returned philosopher master the projection of shadows
for the prisoners, from the fire, over the wall bordering the lateral path, and
230 Chapter Seven

onto the cave wall. Because the Cave and the Line are each integrated wholes,
even the dimmest image is still an emanation of the truth. We can only make
sense of our world, as a world that matters to us, through narrative, where the
interlacing textuality of meaning captures our imagination and connects us
more vividly to the world.
But the use to which the philosopher puts image, rhetoric, language, and
narrative differs in kind from the manipulations of the sophist. The philoso-
pher’s mastery must entail a phronēsis, a practical wisdom, about which im-
ages and narratives and arguments will best reach a specifically situated indi-
vidual or audience for their own good. It means which stories and arguments
are most likely to liberate with the least amount of trauma and, even if they do
not liberate, will be the best imagistic renderings of a more abstract truth, and
therefore least likely to harm individuals and the community. The sophist’s
rhetoric seeks only manipulation for the sake of power, prestige, pleasure, or
wealth. It uses word, image, and argument to direct desire and mold ideology,
but without any sense that there might be more to wisdom than a method of
manipulation. This is true whether or not the sophist is aware of and inten-
tionally manipulating historical consciousness as such, just as a skilled archer
can hit a target using physics without knowing about physics thematically.
The sophist does not care for the well-being of the target audience, except
perhaps in the transactional sense that Thrasymachus suggests: as a shepherd
tends the flock for eventual shearing and slaughter (343a–344c). The sophist,
as sophist, has no concern for anything but situated embodiment in flesh and
ideology, has no awareness of the opening to the upward way that beckons
beyond—or else is aware of it, but walls it off as a threat to their own power
or in spiteful regret for this path not taken.
Now, Heidegger may not be a sophist, but he does share with the sophist
a distinct hostility to the ideas in their Platonic sense. Heidegger also shares
with Thrasymachus the rejection of a justice that transcends historicity and
contingency, and both end up endorsing tyranny, but Thrasymachus only
in theory, Heidegger in actual practice. Thrasymachus turns out to be po-
tentially redeemable in the Republic (498c–d), but Heidegger never retreats
from his embrace of the “inner truth and greatness” of National Socialism as
he envisioned it (GA 40: 208). For Heidegger, the notion of eternal ideas as
the touchstone for meaning, for what we take things to be, is an anathema,
because all meaning is historical, finite, transient and rooted, not fixed and
eternal as the basis for an ethics and a politics that he rejects as a Liberalism
stretching from Plato through Christianity to the Enlightenment. But might
Plato in his allegory also account positively for the historicity of meaning and
the situatedness of human understanding? The analysis of the lateral pathway
and its relation to the fire and the projection of the shadows shows that Plato
 At the Crossroads of the Cave 231

does provide room to think about the interweaving of rooted historical par-
ticularity with a universalism that transcends contingency. We always begin
within a constellation of meaning that is historically given: the cave and the
opinions projected into it by the activity along the lateral pathway.

7.5 THE UPWARD PATH

But why is this not enough? Why do we also need the upward path? It could
be enough to say that some of the opinions in the cave are simply false (say,
that the world is flat or that three million illegal votes were cast in Califor-
nia in the 2016 presidential election), and that the upward path intimates a
truth we can attain that transcends historical accidents and ignorance. This
will hardly satisfy Heidegger, though, who holds that truth is interpretive all
the way down, that there is no emergence into a total, complete, and final
enlightenment, not even as a regulative postulate, that requires no further
reinterpretation.
The test of the upward path is whether the ideas are needed to make sense
of moral phenomena. Socrates claims that the sophist does not care whether
a conviction is actually noble, good, or just. Can we really live as if this were
true? Well, yes, we can, but the price we pay is that we can no longer say that
anything is just or unjust in itself. Moral judgments become a gambit in the
ideological game-play in a discourse of power. This is why Jan Patočka says
that a negative Platonism, one that leaves us open to the idea of the good but
without metaphysical dogma pretending to ultimate knowledge,

preserves for humans the possibility of trusting in a truth that is not relative and
mundane, even though it cannot be formulated positively, in terms of contents.
It shows how much truth there is in man’s perennial metaphysical struggle for
something elevated above the natural and the traditional, the struggle for the
eternal and supratemporal, in the struggle, taken up ever again, against a relativ-
ism of values and norms—even while agreeing with the idea of a basic historic-
ity of man and of the relativity of his orientation in his context, of his science
and practice, his images of life and the world.21

Radical historicism denies what is essential to the phenomenon of ethical

judgment: that rightness and wrongness are meaningful to us absolutely and
not just contingently and that justice transcends the arbitrary givens of a
particular historical context. For Heidegger, Platonism is nihilistic because it
sacrifices the only existence we have, the one of historically given finitude,
on the altar of transcendent, eternal ideas; idealism negates the given, the only
world of meaning we can actually inhabit. By contrast, Patočka reminds us
232 Chapter Seven

that the meaningfulness of human freedom and ethical life depends precisely
on this struggle, which he explicitly calls a polemos in other writings, to
negate without annihilating, to step back and away from the embeddedness
of our historicity precisely as the way to embrace it again.22 I differ from
Patočka when he says that truth “cannot be formulated positively, in terms
of contents”; on my account, the zetetic trust in truth, pledging troth to truth,
requires making the preconstructive attempt to envision an alternative to the
meaning of a world we find drifting into unmeaning. This is a facet of the
reintegrative healing of polemical philosophy.
Recall that the upward path of the ideas and the lateral path of history inter-
sect, and they do so at the point of the fire, which must be close by the lateral
path and not far from where the upward, outward path begins. This suggests
that historical consciousness, which the liberated prisoner may achieve at the
level of the fire, is itself a preliminary form of transcendence, a necessary
way station along the upward path to the exit. A good history teacher may
have intimations of the upward path and point the way without going up it
herself.23 To see by the light of the fire is to recognize the contingency of the
shadows in the cave. This realization of the cave’s historical contingency is
what constitutes authenticity, the only form of liberation possible for Hei-
degger. It means forever losing the comfortable, naive (heimlich) understand-
ing of meaning, handed down by tradition as simply and incontrovertibly
true. For both the sophist and the historicist, this awakening from innocence
is the end of the story. It means giving up on truth altogether, as truth is con-
ventionally understood. Heidegger calls this the Unheimlichkeit of human
existence: the uncanny realization that all meaning is contingent, grounded
on nothing (SZ, 188–89).
At stake here is the role of wonder. Socrates, remember, says that “Between
the fire and the prisoners there is a road above, along which we see a wall,
built like the partitions puppet-handlers set in front of the human beings and
over which they show the puppets.” In Greek, the word here for puppeteer is
thaumatopoios, literally a wonder-worker, and the puppets are ta thaumata,
the wonders. These wonders are tricks and illusions, a semblance that takes
on the air of reality, made possible by the wall that separates and hides the
technical trickery of the wonder-worker from the audience. Yet, both Plato
(Theaetetus, 155d) and Aristotle (Metaphysics, 982b) say that wonder is the
beginning of philosophy—not wonder in the sense of idle curiosity or listless
pondering, but rather wonder in the Greek sense of thaumazein: a wonder that
knocks you back and brings you up short in the encounter with something un-
expected. Such wonder sets your world on fire because of a contradiction and
a puzzle that demands your attention and thought in order to restore meaning
and integrity to the phenomena.
 At the Crossroads of the Cave 233

What do these two wonders share, puppetry and the birth of philosophy?
We may think of a puppet show as mere amusement, but seen with the eyes of
a child, it is an astonishing transformation of the nonliving into the living. It
provokes the tantalizing awareness that this transformation is at once mysteri-
ous and potentially explicable as a performance, which explains the enduring
appeal of the tale of Pinocchio. The puppet show is more than amusement,
then, for it kindles both delight and the intimation that there might be more
to the world than one had once thought. Just so, philosophical wonder sets
the world on edge with an admixture of dismay and joy and hunger, a driving
desire to see behind the wall that separates transient opinion from echonic
knowledge. The danger is that this longing can give way to frustration and
so to the temptation of dogma as a way of claiming an echonic knowledge
to which one is not entitled. This is a form of nihilism, because it denies
aspects of the given phenomena to arrive at an illegitimate certainty, such as
when some philosophers of mind argue that consciousness can be reduced to
purely physical events, because they have a doctrinal commitment to a form
of naturalism that refuses to admit the existence of phenomena that cannot be
explained without resorting to what transcends material processes.24
The challenge to zetetic philosophy as the iasis, the healing after the
break (lusis) from the bonds of the cave, is to reconcile the seeker of truth
to a journey that may not end with echonic possession, at least not in this
life, because a reconciliation to longing is also reconciliation to our inherent
finitude. Socrates does this in the Symposium (203b–c) by suggesting that as
an erōs, an overwhelming, longing love for wisdom, philosophy is born of
two parents: Penia and Poros, Need (or Poverty) and Resource. Zeteticism as
healing means a reconciliation to erōs, to longing as never entirely fulfilled
and yet nevertheless and as such fulfilling as this ongoing journey. The pov-
erty of philosophy is the recognition of its separation from absolute knowing;
its resource is the givenness of intimations of the truth, which light the way
with the distant daylight, refracted down from beyond the upward way. It
is worth remembering that in ordinary usage, poros in Greek means a way
to pass over or through, such as a ferry or ford, and our English word pore,
which provides a passage from body to world. In the language of Sophocles’s
Ode to Man, we are pantaporos-aporos (Antigone, 359), everywhere with a
way through, yet without a way through. Once again, the phenomenological
given that some meaning is given to us, in the sheer fact that the world makes
provisional sense, provides Socrates with his phenomenal resource for the
ongoing journey, despite his poverty: exploring what people say as the avatar
of the givenness of a meaning beyond us. Even in our poverty, the word is
the richest source of meaning available to us, because in language and in
speaking with others we touch upon meaning and upon the personhood of
234 Chapter Seven

the Other—as I now do with you and you with me—despite never possessing
either definitively and echonically.25
The upward path in the cave points to another layer of transcendence: one
that goes beyond the realization of historical contingency and apprehends the
ideas that are imperfectly refracted in the shadows of the cave, the historical
opinions of a given community. The fire of history on the lateral path is a
prefiguration of the sun of the ideas at the end of the upward path. Both on the
Divided Line and in the Allegory of the Cave, the shadows and images, the
cultural givens of opinion, are not simply nothing. They are not merely contin-
gent. They are reflections of the chain of meaning up through the ideas in the
light of the idea of the good, and their significance depends upon that chain.
If that is right, then nihilism would consist not in rejecting and thereby utterly
negating the shadow-world of the cave but in denying that it is ultimately con-
nected to what transcends the cave. Once again, Patočka puts this well:

The problem of ethics, the problem of essential meaning of human beings is to

be sought in the ultimate kernel of human life. This kernel concerns the dona-
tion of intentional meaning which unfolds into the world without actually being
reducible to it. It implies a transcendence beyond all reality. [What I have called
intimation.] We understand this transcendence through the experience of sepa-
ration, of distancing ourselves, taking our distance. The ethical life is our first
practical contact with the negativity inherent in our very essence.26

Patočka uses Husserlian language of “intentional meaning” to indicate that

the world and things in the world have significance to us, even if that mean-
ing as a “donation” given to us, cannot be reduced to an explanation based
on anything we encounter empirically within the world. There is therefore a
positivity to the negativity of the essential freedom of being-human: by enter-
ing into the interpretive polemos with both the given and the giving as such,
such freedom has the potential to induce new meaning in a world breaking
down into unmeaning. This positive-negative freedom emerges through and
as ideation, which integrates a world as we envision it might be with the
meaning of the world as it is.
Such reconstruction is a difficult freedom, requiring practical wisdom.
This is why Socrates says that a person with insight (nous), “would remem-
ber that there are two kinds of disturbances of the eyes, stemming from two
sources—when they have been transferred from light to darkness and when
they have been transferred from darkness to light” (518a). Failure to recog-
nize the danger of these disturbances, being “dazzled” (518a–b) by either
sudden darkness or sudden light, can result in a disorientation amid opinions
and norms that no longer make sense, leading to ridicule, persecution, or even
execution. Those returning must learn to operate at the level of the fire, too,
 At the Crossroads of the Cave 235

in order to translate their insights into the historically situated language of

shadows that nevertheless are not nothing. According to the Divided Line’s
continuum, contingent historical opinion necessarily has some relation to a
wisdom that transcends it, or it would be less meaningful than garbled echoes
and dim reflections of truth.
Everyday, cave-bound opinion would otherwise be simply unintelligible,
and that is manifestly not the case phenomenologically, for we self-evidently
do function within a margin of meaning. If nihilism means losing a sense for
how the world may be meaningful, then far from constituting nihilism as the
forgetting of contingency as the source of meaning for human beings, Plato’s
intersecting pathways suggest that nihilism only sets in when we give up on
the struggle with contradictions between the contingently given and the ideas
that can draw us out from the contingent. The ideas can then lead us both out
from and back to our situated belonging in the world in order to reconstitute
that world’s meaning responsibly, as best we can, in the refracted light of
what transcends it. What we need to investigate next is how to conduct that
responsive reconstruction responsibly, and that brings us to phronēsis, wis-
dom in action.

NOTES

1. Howe, Holmes-Laski Letters, vol. 2, 835.

2. An alternative manuscript does not include the onomazein in the sentence, and
so, as Bloom notes, another rendering for this would be “they would hold that these
things that they see are the beings” (The Republic of Plato, 465n1). I follow Bloom
and Reeve here in including onomazein, but even without it, the sense of the claim
is that the prisoners would take, and so mistake, the shadows as the beings (ta onta)
themselves.
3. For a brief overview, see Paul Brand, “The Language of the English Legal
Profession.”
4. Husserl, The Crisis, 71; on sedimentation, see Moran and Cohen, The Husserl
Dictionary, 289–91.
5. For a discussion of how such practices necessarily recede into the background
of awareness so that awareness of meaning as such is possible, see Mark Wrathal’s
introduction and the essays by Hubert Dreyfus collected in Dreyfus, Background
Practices: Essays on the Understanding of Being, especially chapters 3–6.
6. Husserl, The Crisis, 71–72.
7. Bloom, The Republic of Plato, 404.
8. See Plutarch’s “Lycurgus,” in Lives.
9. See Dreyfus, Background Practices.
10. Plato, The Great Dialogues of Plato, trans. W. H. D. Rouse, 314.
236 Chapter Seven

11. For example, see Katie Rogers, “White House Hosts Conservative Internet Ac-
tivists at a ‘Social Media Summit.’” To be clear, this is not a matter of ‘left’ or ‘right,’
even if supposed conservatives are currently the most adept at such projections.
12. See Confessore, “Cambridge Analytica and Facebook,” and Helderman and
Zapotosky, The Mueller Report, 587–618.
13. For example, see Shaw and Bagozzi, “The Neuropsychology of Consumer Be-
havior and Marketing,” and the chapters collected in Suhay, Grofman, and Trechsel,
The Oxford Handbook of Electoral Persuasion, especially Gilles Serra, “A Menu of
Clientist Methods to Buy and Coerce Voters: The Dark Side of Electoral Persuasion.”
14. Cf. Bloom, “Interpretive Essay,” 399–400.
15. This is akin to what Leo Strauss says about “pseudo-philosophies” that frighten
the cave-dwellers so badly about the upward path that they induce the prisoners to
“dig a deep pit beneath the [natural] cave in which they were born, and withdraw into
that pit.” See Leo Strauss, “How to Study Spinoza’s ‘Theological-Political Treatise,’”
in Persecution and the Art of Writing, 155.
16. See Marina McCoy, Plato on the Rhetoric of Philosophers and Sophists, 1
and 22.
17. McCoy, Plato on Rhetoric, 117.
18. Kearny, The Poetics of Modernity, 66, 67, and 70ff.
19. Even if an echonic philosopher were serving as mentor, as in the ostensible
narrative of the cave, where echonic philosopher-rulers would be educating the next
generation of rulers, they would also have to re-inhabit, as it were, the mindset of
the zetetic seeker, because that is the present situation of the student being taught.
This would not be impossible to imagine, as it would also be the situation that the
now-complete philosopher-rulers had themselves experienced during their period of
tutelage.
20. Cf. Bloom, who has a different reading of the meaning of the friendship estab-
lished between Socrates and Thrasymachus: The Republic of Plato, 400–401. Bloom
interprets Thrasymachus as a defender of the interests of the received opinions of
the city for whom philosophy is a threat, but this is hard to reconcile with his initial
teaching that the life of the tyrant is the best, for that is just as much a threat to the
norms of Athens, if not more so.
21. Patočka, “Negative Platonism,” 205–6.
22. For Patočka on polemos, see Heretical Essays, 42–43.
23. My thanks to Lauren McGillicuddy for this example.
24. For examples, see Paul Churchland, Matter and Consciousness or Daniel
Dennett, Consciousness Explained; for a counterargument to reductive theories of
consciousness, see Hubert Dreyfus and Charles Taylor, Retrieving Realism, 11–16,
51, 93, and for a critique of scientism, see Reid, Heidegger’s Moral Ontology, 37–49.
25. On poverty, consider Meister Eckhart’s sermon 52, in Meister Eckhart, The
Essential Sermons, Commentaries, Treatises and Defense, 201–3, and Ian Moore,
Eckhart, Heidegger, and the Imperative of Releasement, 24–28.
26. From an entry of 1947 in Patočka’s journals, quoted in Kearney, The Poetics
of Modernity, 121.
 Chapter Eight

Retrieving Phronēsis
Antigone at the Heart of Ethics

See—there is a limit to looking,

and the world gazed upon
wants to blossom in love.

The work of vision is done,

now do heart-work
on the images in you, the ones imprisoned; for you
overpowered them: yet you do not know them.
—Rainer Maria Rilke, from “Turning-Point”1

Previously, I have argued that Plato provides a response to Heidegger’s cri-

tique that idea-ism and idealism set the stage for a nihilistic human hubris
that forgets our finitude and the embedded situatedness of our existence as
what most matters to life. In this chapter, I will argue that in addition to
misunderstanding the ethical meaning of ideation, as I have argued previ-
ously, Heidegger misunderstands a form of thinking vital to ethical-political
life, phronēsis, generally translated as practical wisdom or prudence. Hei-
degger’s radical historicism prevents him from seeing the intersection of
principled norms with life as we find it and as we live it, at the crossroads
of the cave. At-issue here is how ethical life proceeds from and reconstitutes
itself according to insights and judgments that are preconceptual, that pre-
cede any specific conceptual formulation and argument. We have already
encountered the preconceptual in various ways: as the earth that undergirds
and sustains a meaningful world; as the background practices that make the
world and action within it intelligible and navigable; as the sedimentation
of personal habits and cultural routines that recede into the unconscious

237
238 Chapter Eight

habituation of more complex and interwoven concepts, language, traditions,

norms, and praxis.
What we will now address is what impels and informs the dynamic of
delving into the preconceptual background of our mores, institutions, and
behaviors when the world faces breakdown in unmeaning. Phronēsis is the
heart that animates the polemical ethics of bringing the ideas into confronta-
tion with the contingent, situated lives we inhabit. Understanding phronēsis
as the pivot between transcendent idea and situated finitude brings us from
Plato to Aristotle and, as we will see, to Sophocles’s Antigone as champions
of a nuanced conception of the situated transcendence of being-human. This
initiates a turn to the next stage of the project: the question of enacting a
polemical ethics in reading texts, in personal ethical life with others, and in
political life with communities. That will be the substantive work of subse-
quent volumes, but in this and the final chapter, we will establish the transi-
tion. First, as a counterpoint, we will explicate Heidegger’s understanding of
the role of phronēsis as a feature of the preconceptual ethical life of politics,
and then we will deconstruct his reading of the Antigone in order explicate
phenomenologically the necessarily ideational aspect of phronēsis in ethical-
political life.
The word phronēsis is related to a family of words in ancient Greek that
illuminate its meaning. The phrēn is the midriff, the seat of an embodied
knowing that is tied to the intuitive, intimate, and familiar, the furthest
thing from the conceptual knowing of metaphysical philosophy. Hence, the
verb phronein means to know in your gut, to have an instinctive feel for
what fits with the familiar, as well for what breaks with it. It is a thinking
that discerns the way to effective action amid the contingencies of life, and
therefore it must be rational in the sense of being responsive and responsi-
ble to both the particulars and the principles of action. The noun phronēsis,
in turn, refers to the capacity to make judgments that fit well with what a
particular situation demands but is not merely instinctual or nonrational. As
a form of reason embodied in practical judgments, it acts with an insight
that, while in the moment of action may well be intuitive, can also be de-
fended rationally in private reflection and in public dialogue with others as
part of an ethical-political community. Convention translates phronēsis as
‘practical wisdom’ or ‘prudence,’ but these renderings lose the sense of the
Greek connection to affective, embodied knowing that is not immediately
conceptual. It is neither a form of abstract wisdom formulaically applied to
practice, nor a prudence that calculates options according to principles of
cautious moderation. I will leave phronēsis in the Greek, because its mean-
ing is at issue for understanding ethical life as mediating the preconceptual
with the rationally defensible.
 Retrieving Phronēsis 239

8.1 HEIDEGGER’S POLEMICS OF PHRONĒSIS

From the ancient Greeks onward, the role of phronēsis has generally been
understood as the virtue of mind required for sound judgment and action in
ethics and politics. In phronēsis, judging and acting are not separate, as if one
were first to make a cognitive assessment and then apply it in deed; rather,
the two are united in the praxis of human embodiment amid the contingencies
of temporal existence. In Aristotle, the divine would not need phronēsis. The
divine has no need to match discursive rationality with finite embodiment,
because the divine’s intelligence is nondiscursive, self-sufficient, and non-
embodied. By contrast, because we are embodied and not self-sufficient, and
our intelligence is discursive, requiring time for learning and deliberation,
the human good requires practical wisdom to manage the body, both through
the moral virtues and through the everyday activity and political cooperation
needed to secure the body’s needs.2 This does not mean that persons possess-
ing phronēsis act instinctively in an irrational sense. The rationality of right
action has been thoroughly habituated into their thinking and acting, and in a
way that they could, in principle, explain, defend, and revise through rational
discourse and deliberate re-habituation.
Phronēsis is therefore a distinct and defining feature of being-human as
embodied and embedded in the sociality and rooted specificity of affective
ethical life. We see this in Heidegger’s lectures of the early 1920s where
he endeavors to appropriate Aristotle’s phronēsis phenomenologically. In
a 1924 lecture course, he says, “The aisthēsis of phronēsis, as phronēsis, is
related to the prakta” (GA 19: 163). Here, aisthēsis is perception as a taking-
in, a making-sense of a domain of beings. In phronēsis, what one takes in are
the prakta, the contingent contexts and ends of practical action, in contrast
to the first principles of theoretical wisdom (as when one ‘gets’ the axioms
of geometry). Phronēsis therefore depends on a rational insight (nous) into
the radical specificity of a context: “Phronēsis is insight into here-and-now
[Diesmaligen], the concrete here-and-now-ness of the momentary situation.
As aisthēsis, it is eye-sight, the seeing that in the blink of an eye takes in what
is ever-always concrete and, as such, can always be otherwise” (GA 19: 163–
64). Heidegger takes up the metaphorics of sight, as did Plato. The ‘looking’
here is not physical eyesight but the ontological seeing of being able to make
sense of a contingent context, all in the blink of an eye (Augenblick) so that
practical action might be possible at all as befitting the situation.
Heidegger’s ontological-existential appropriation of Aristotle is most ap-
parent when he says that phronēsis is the mode of Dasein’s Being that dis-
closes our “Being-oriented to beings that are in each case themselves Dasein”
(GA 19: 164; cf. 48). In Aristotle, that is because praxis as such is necessarily
240 Chapter Eight

ethical. It has to do with the discernment that enables us to act ethically. This
is a discernment that grants us the situated insight to live well as human be-
ings, both with oneself and with others, not just instrumentally (which would
be mere cunning), but as beings who flourish only by respecting ourselves
and others as finite, embodied beings capable of shared rational discourse in
the conduct of life. Heidegger recognizes that phronēsis has to do with eu
zên, living well as being-human or Dasein (GA 19: 49), and that eu prattein,
acting well for the sake of living well, depends on a perception of the good,
to agathon (GA 19: 48), but he ontologizes the meaning of the good, as we
have also seen in chapter 3 concerning his reading of Plato’s idea of the good.
Heidegger takes a crucial passage in the Nicomachean Ethics defining
phronēsis as hexin alēthē meta logou praktikēn peri anthrōpō agatha kai
kaka (1148b4–5)—“a truthful habituated characteristic of acting rationally
concerning practical matters of good and bad for human beings”—and he
glosses it as hexis alēthēs meta logou practikē peri ta anthrōpō agatha.
He then loosely renders this gloss to define the telos, the end or goal, of
phronēsis as “ein solches Gestelltsein des menschlichen Daseins, daß es über
die Durchsichtigkeit seiner selbst verfügt,” which may be translated as “a
certain disposition of human Dasein that presides over its own transparency”
(GA 19: 50). Heidegger’s aggressive ontologization of this definition of
phronēsis not only obscures the ethical good of the goal of practical action, it
entirely eliminates the bad that virtuous praxis must also aim to avoid, all in
favor of an existential-hermeneutical self-awareness that has no ethical telos.
Mark Blitz succinctly addresses the stakes of this decapitation of the ethical
good as the purpose of praxis:

For all the ways in which we can speak intelligibly of guidance, direction, and
authority, such that these are not ultimately relative, apparently depend on the
kind of universality in possibility that Heidegger denies for man. This is even
true of the non-absolute Aristotelian prudence [i.e., phronēsis] or the Platonic
measure of the fitting, for in the last analysis these rely on an understanding of
what is natural in the humanly noble, the humanly just, and the humanly good. . .
[I]f “goodness” is grounded in what is not permanently possible, is it not finally
reduced to the arbitrariness of one’s own?3

What Blitz calls “one’s own” are the finite concerns and involvements of
historical facticity, which may both open up and obscure the possibility that
Heidegger does posit as a measure for being-human: authenticity. Heidegger
says, “A mood can close a person off from himself; certain things of periph-
eral importance can overwhelm him; he can get so caught up in himself so
that he does not authentically see himself”; this means that phronēsis “needs
ever again to be rescued,” because “the insight into oneself must ever-again be
 Retrieving Phronēsis 241

wrested away from the danger” of this self-obscuring (GA 19: 51). Heidegger
then says, “It is by no means obvious that Dasein be disclosed for itself in
the authenticity of its Being” (GA 19: 51), and goes on to say, “Therefore, as
soon as it is achieved, phronēsis is bound up in an ongoing struggle against
the tendency to cover over that lies in Dasein itself” (GA 19: 52). “Struggle”
(Kampf) is a word that within a decade will be one of Heidegger’s translations
for the polemos that lies at the heart of being-human, and here, the struggle
of phronēsis defines Dasein’s authenticity against what in Being and Time
Heidegger will call those modalities of existence—such as idle chatter, am-
biguity, idle curiosity—that the They‑self throws up against Dasein’s owning
itself by owning up to itself in authenticity. Now, my own argument in this
study includes the view that central to being-human is a polemical ethics that
struggles to makes sense of its obligations in its own situated context.
The issue here, though, and where I claim that Heidegger and Plato part
company, lies in how Heidegger interprets the truth-telling, the alēthuein, of
phronēsis—the making clear of human-being to itself—as conscience:

Phronēsis is nothing other than conscience set into motion that makes an action
transparent. One cannot forget conscience, but one can certainly allow what the
conscience discloses to be obscured and rendered ineffective by hēdonē [plea-
sure] and lupē [pain], by passion. Conscience [nevertheless] announces itself
ever-again. (GA 19: 56)

In Being and Time, the call of conscience can be ignored, but it is what sum-
mons the human-being to seize upon its possibilities as its own, authentically,
in a polemical interpretation of the meaning of its world, rather than allowing
itself to be defined passively by the meaning it is caught up in by the trajec-
tory of history.4 Consistent with what Heidegger says here about phronēsis
as ever-again returning to the struggle with its own existential features that
obscure insight into a positive appropriation of its situated being, authentic-
ity in Being and Time is necessarily a polemical “modification” of the way
the world has always-already been interpreted (SZ, 130, 170), because we
cannot recreate meaning as a whole ex nihilo. Being-human, for Heidegger,
means resolving upon what the call of conscience, as phronēsis, discloses in
the irreplicable situation of finite historicity as the space of one’s interpretive
decision in action. But famously, this call of conscience gives no content to
the resolution, only the perspicacity for the situation that allows one to make
it one’s own.
This is the result of Heidegger’s ontologizing conscience and phronēsis.
Because there is no transcendence to the good, no idea of the good as either
ethical or ontological, the meaning of action is always entirely immanent
to the ēthos of the cave of a given historical world, even if merely as a
242 Chapter Eight

deconstructive reinterpretation of it. The good to which conscience calls and

phronēsis orients the human agent is always grounded in a historicity of a
given community to which one belongs and whose ēthos is incommensu-
rable with other communities, because the good cannot transcend historicity.
Hence, at the level of political action, as an extension of ethical life as histor-
ical-communal ēthos, what phronēsis must discern is the context of decision
that applies only to that people, rather than to human beings as such. This is
at the heart of Heidegger’s rejection of “Liberalism” as a modern extension
of Plato’s universalism. At-issue, then, for the meaning of political judgment
in Heidegger, is discerning what is at stake in the particular historical fate in
the essence of one’s own community.

8.2 ESSENTIAL POLITICS

One of the most important texts for Heidegger’s understanding of how

political judgment and decision should take place is a seminar he held in
1933–1934, at the height of his involvement with National Socialism. Its title
is On the Essence and Concept of Nature, History, and State. The seminar
begins with an explicit attempt to distinguish essence and concept (Session
1): grasping the essence of a thing or domain in existential understanding, as
situated historically, necessarily comes before grasping it conceptually. This
follows the analysis set forth in Being and Time, where Heidegger argues that
Dasein always already inhabits a world of understanding that makes sense
pre-theoretically, that theory and explicit concepts always follow as a modi-
fication of or abstraction from Dasein’s preconceptual understanding (SZ,
138). In this seminar, he calls this “the simple, prescientific beginning of the
question of the essence of the domains at hand, which consists in the plain,
uncomplicated, quite naive expression of how nature, history, and state are
given to us” (NGS, 53–54). Theory and the definition of concepts are always
derivatives of an understanding of meaning that must precede all formal ar-
ticulation in conceptual terminology or theoretical detachment.
Here it must be understood that “essence” for Heidegger is not the eidos,
ousia, or substantia of the metaphysical tradition, which would be essence in
the sense of a permanent, metaphysical substrate to reality, more recently cri-
tiqued as essentialism, especially in feminism.5 Instead, Heidegger famously
says that “The ‘essence’ of Dasein lies in its existence” (SZ, 42). This means
that who we ‘are’ does not reside in properties pertaining to a substance-
essence as some what-thing. Rather, who we are depends on structures of our
Being as existing, as hermeneutical beings who make sense of the world by
 Retrieving Phronēsis 243

polemically confronting and reinterpreting it, a position potentially consistent

with contemporary anti-essentialism. Phenomenological analysis means get-
ting at the essence of things as they appear in preconceptual understanding.
In Heidegger, such understanding is always historical for beings such as
ourselves, whose existence precedes their essence. In the seminar, the turn
to what he calls the “naive” givenness of a meaningful world very quickly
becomes a historical analysis of phusis, natura, and other key philosophical
terms. That is because nature, as a phusis that brings meaning into manifes-
tation and significance for us apart from our choosing or control, provides
insight into essence understood ontologically rather than metaphysically.
Essence in this reconstructed sense, for Heidegger, precedes a conceptual
understanding detached from the embedded understanding that grants our
primary grasp of the essence of things in the world as what matters to us in
our situated existence. An excessive focus on conceptualization and theory
risks flattening this more direct encounter with the essence of things.
“We begin,” Heidegger says, “by clarifying the political as a way of Being
of human beings and what makes the state possible” (NGS, 74). He explains
as follows:

The manner of our Being marks the Being of our state. In this way, every people
takes a position with regard to the state, and no people lacks the urge for the
state. The people that turns down a state, that is stateless, has just not found the
gathering of its essence yet; it still lacks the composure and force to be commit-
ted to its fate as a people. (NGS, 74)

Heidegger connects politics with Being, which in turn connects with the
radical historicity of a particular people. Politics cannot be understood in the
ways familiar to the metaphysical tradition—say, in liberalism—as the arena
for the protection of fundamental human rights, because human beings are not
a what-thing with ahistorical, essential properties. Politics does not describe
legitimate or illegitimate interaction based on some feature of human nature
understood as a metaphysical essence. Instead, politics is “a way of Being
of human beings.” That seems hopelessly abstract until we realize that this
“way of Being” is always a matter “of our Being”; it is always about how a
particular historical people shares in an understanding of the world as a world
that matters to them in its specificity and as intimately, even exclusively and
incommensurably, their own. Politics must therefore be finely attuned to the
historical meaning of a given community. Of course, the community Hei-
degger speaks of here as sharing “our Being” is the German Volk. To under-
stand its radically historical, specific way of Being is to understand its shared
“fate” (Schicksal), not a fate in the metaphysical sense of a predetermined
244 Chapter Eight

future, but rather as an understanding of how the momentum and trajectory

of its history presents that people with its particular challenges and tasks as
what it must confront in the cycle of polemical reinterpretation (cf. SZ, §74).6
Heidegger says that a people that has not found its essence cannot form a
state. To find its essence must mean to understand the singularity of its own
historical mode of Being, including a mission, a “fate” as a guiding possibil-
ity, that defines it as this particular people, rather than finding its essence as
some universal feature of a metaphysical humanity. The state, then, embodies
the way of Being of a particular people that has found the strength to express
itself in a state. Heidegger even goes so far as to identify the state “as the Be-
ing of the people” (NGS, 79), because even if the people is prior in having its
own unifying historical task, only in having a state can it face that task, em-
body it, and protect and project its own identity in the community of peoples.
If the essence of politics is the formation of radically historical and in-
commensurable essence of a people in a state, there can be no universal
conceptual standards for politics, no trans-temporal measure of legitimacy in
a political theory. Heidegger intends this as a revolutionary departure from
the metaphysical tradition of the essence of politics and state formation, a
departure in keeping with the transformation of the thinking of Being that
Heidegger has announced in Being and Time and that we have discussed
throughout this volume as a departure from Platonism. To think politics
without concepts, or at least prior to concepts, without metaphysical essences,
means doing away with normative standards for legitimacy and justice. To
think politics this way means no longer appealing to timeless principles,
such as the social contract, human rights, or the rule of law in liberalism, and
then applying them to particular cases, which is what Heidegger means by a
conceptual approach to political thought. Post-metaphysical political thought
would mean staying attuned to the unique historical circumstances and taking
up the challenges so presented. This may all sound very abstract, but without
universal principles, even as undogmatic postulates of a skeptical idealism to
guide phronēsis in political life, one can hardly be surprised that the rejection
of Enlightenment liberalism’s discourse of rights, limits to power, rule of law,
and so on, would lead to the barbarities of an atavistic ethno-nationalism, a
prospect we still face today.
Being exquisitely attuned to historical contingencies might sound like Ar-
istotelian phronēsis. But if politics, as essential in Heidegger’s sense (linked
to the singular challenges facing a distinct community’s historical trajectory)
has no ground in any transcendent ideal or principle, and if the good can only
shed light on the particular cave-like historicity that is one’s own, and not
universally for being-human, what then is the measure for political action?
This question will ultimately separate Heidegger from Aristotle on phronēsis,
 Retrieving Phronēsis 245

and it is one that drives Heidegger towards decisionism during this period.
In Nature, History, State, Heidegger argues that this decision is one facing
individuals as members of the people: “Every individual must now reflect in
order to arrive at knowledge of the people and state and his own responsibil-
ity. The state depends on our alertness, our readiness, and our life” (NGS,
74). In Being and Truth, a lecture course later in 1933, he links this decision
with essence: “not only is the question about essence not insidious, but it is
the very questioning that unrelentingly holds us in actuality and impels us to a
decision there” (GA 36/37: 88). Throughout the early Black Notebooks of the
1930s, Heidegger says that the epochal decision, the one that will define the
fate of the National Socialist revolution and the fate of the West and indeed of
the globe, is a “decision between beings and Being,” by which he means de-
ciding either to embrace the people’s historical finitude as a bulwark against
the oblivion of Being, as a “transformation of human being,” or to join in
with the nihilistic, global chase of the will to power to subdue all beings in a
system of machination (GA 95: 117–20l; GA 96: 16–22).
The preparation of individuals for this decision through openness to ques-
tioning is linked to the necessity of the leader (Führer) who takes the state in
hand and directs its collective action:

The Being of the state is anchored in the political Being of the human beings
who, as a people, support this state—who decide for it. This political, that is,
historically fateful decision requires us to clarify the original, essential connec-
tion between people and state. An understanding and knowledge of the essence
of the state and people is needful for every human being. This knowledge, the
concepts and cognition, belong to political education, that is, what leads us into
our own political Being; but this does not mean that everyone who gains this
knowledge can or may now act politically as a statesman or leader. For the ori-
gin of all state action and leadership does not lie in knowledge; it lies in Being.
Every leader is a leader; he must be a leader in accordance with the marked form
of his Being; and he understands, considers, and brings about what people and
state are, in the living development of his own essence. (NGS, 73)

Once again, we see that post-metaphysical understanding of the Being of the

people precedes conventional concepts about the state, its institutions, and so
on. While such conceptual knowledge may be necessary for political educa-
tion of citizens (so, on a par with alētheia-3 in Sheehan’s typology), political
action in its deepest origins “does not lie in knowledge [understood conceptu-
ally]; it lies in Being.” So, a leader simply “is a leader”—or he is not. In this
leader’s “essence” existentially understood, he either succeeds in being that
leader, and thereby is properly attuned to the decisions called for by the his-
toricity of his people’s Being in Heidegger’s sense of phronēsis, or he fails to
246 Chapter Eight

be a leader. No formula, no standard, determines this; only the is or is not of

engaged action. Heideggerian phronēsis would guide the singularity of such
ontological decision in the singularity of historical circumstance.
Heidegger clearly has a Führer such as Hitler in mind here. Note the first
sentence of the following passage, but also the role that he assigns to himself:

A leader does not need to be educated politically—but a band of guardians in the

people [eine Hüterschar im Volk] does, a band that helps to bear responsibility
for the state. For every state and all knowledge about the state grows within a
political tradition. Where this nourishing, securing soil is lacking, even the best
idea for a state cannot take root, grow from the sustaining womb of the people,
and develop. (NGS, 73/45)

The resonance with Plato’s guardians in the Republic is unmistakable. Hei-

degger advocates the formation of these guardians as a “political nobility”
(NGS, 74) in the tradition of Bismarck’s political class, but one more firmly
rooted in the people; Bismarck’s nobility collapsed with his death, thus prov-
ing its superficiality. While Heidegger’s vision here is vague (though it sug-
gests why he took the university so seriously during his political engagement),
he clearly intends the political education of the guardians as not merely form-
ing an understanding of the historical tradition as a series of dates and facts,
or of the state as a collection of institutions and functionaries. Genuine politi-
cal education must prepare these guardians for a post-metaphysical thinking
about the essence of the people and the state so that they are prepared for the
genuinely historical decisions that will face the nation and its leaders. If, as he
says in Being and Truth, “essence cannot be brought together in thought and
represented in empty concepts and displayed in a conceptual system” (GA
36/37: 86), then Heidegger’s guardians are a radical departure from Plato’s.
Rather than apprehending the idea of the good as a trans-temporal source
for justice as an ideal and standard, they would be attuned to thinking of the
historical destiny of the people in its state as an ongoing ontological question,
always open to further reflection while at the same time ready for decision but
unencumbered by a universal teleology of the good or of justice.

8.3 ANTIGONE AND THE POLIS

AS ESSENTIAL TRAGEDY

Heidegger’s understanding of the essence of politics as preconceptual is

connected to his interpretation of the grand sweep of the history of the West
now become a planetary force in modernity both in modes of thinking and in
historical forces more conventionally understood. This attempt to rethink the
 Retrieving Phronēsis 247

essence of politics is vivid in two lecture courses where Heidegger considers

what it means to be human and to be a polis through a detailed analysis of the
choral passage known as the Ode to Man in the Antigone of Sophocles (lines
332–75). These two are Introduction to Metaphysics (1935) and the course on
The Ister (1942). Having written elsewhere on the former, I will confine my
analysis to outlining its central elements.7 It is in the latter that Heidegger ex-
plores more fully the person of Antigone and the kind of thinking she embod-
ies, and that is what I most want to examine in terms of retrieving phronēsis.
In Introduction to Metaphysics, Heidegger sets the terms of what it means
to be human and to be political in relation to the Ode (GA 40: 153–72). As
befitting Sophocles’s drama, Heidegger presents these as tragic modes of
Being, and because of that, an illustration of what is most noble. It is crucial
to underline that Heidegger interprets the Ode as a way to make sense of Par-
menides’s saying that “thinking and Being are the same” (GA 40:153–55),
because it is precisely phronēsis as a mode of thinking that is at issue for us.
Several Greek words and word pairings lie at the heart of Heidegger’s read-
ing of the Ode, especially deinon, tolma, and hupsipolis-apolis. In the two
strophes and first antistrophe of the Ode, the chorus describes human beings
as deinotaton, “most wondrous” (in many translations), because they venture
out on land and sea, subduing the earth, capturing animals on land, sea, and
air, stopping only at death as something they cannot master. For Heidegger,
this deinotaton means that human beings are most terrible (deinon) because
they are the “most uncanny” the “most unhomely”; they are restless among
beings, always testing their limits, but they also necessarily run up against
death as a limit that cannot be surpassed. Human beings are violent in their
uncanny venturing amid beings: both ontically violent, in dominating animate
and inanimate nature, and ontologically, in challenging the meaning and in-
terpretation of what things are. But it is Being, as “the overwhelming sway”
that governs all beings, that they run up against and risk shattering against,
because Being establishes the meaning, and so the limit, of all beings as what
historical humanity encounters. It is this polemos between Being and human
beings that is most terrible, but also most productively tragic, because only by
Dasein’s daring to run up against the limits do history and the world remain
meaningful through the polemos of reinterpretation (cf. GA 40: 170, 176–77).
In the fifth and final antistrophe (365–75), the chorus praises this restless
human daring (tolma) and cleverness (sophon), but also fears these. For the
chorus, the wondrous daring of human beings may also mean that those who
dare might ignore the limits set by the laws of the land (nomous chthonōn)
and the gods’ sworn justice (theōn t’ enorkon dikēn). Honoring (geraiōn) the
laws and justice would elevate someone in the city (hupsipolis), but exiled
from the city (apolis) is anyone who dares what is not right (mē kalon).
248 Chapter Eight

Heidegger, by contrast, reads the appositional use of hupsipolis and apolis

as a properly paradoxical description of our uncanny essence. Only the con-
ventional morality of a cowardly They-self dismisses the daring necessary
to confront Being in the polemos of deconstructive reinterpretation and all
the ontic disruptions that might follow, thereby risking disaster. This pacific
ontological cowardice clings instead to morality as a “table of values that is
attached to it externally,” obsessed with “the cultivation of undisturbed com-
fort” that such imposed certainty brings (GA 40: 173). This is the conceptual
approach to ethical life that Heidegger deplores as moralistic: a theory that
one can apply to cases, thereby relieving oneself of the ontological respon-
sibility of a genuine polemos with the rooted singularity of the situation one
faces. A “table of values” may literally be written on tablets of stone to em-
phasize that there is no rewriting them, no rethinking them.
Heidegger explicitly proclaims that the creative few, who stand outside the
city (apolis), employ a violence that is primarily ontological in confronting
the established truth of Being, but also ontic in disrupting the conceptually
settled norms and lives of the people, potentially with actual violence (GA
40: 159). In rising beyond (hupsi-) the existing norms of the city (polis), they
are the only ones capable of founding and renewing the community (GA
40: 161–62). The essence of politics revolves around the polis as the site of
both confronting the limits and reconstituting the meaning of a collective,
historical way of Being. Such a “violence-doer knows no kindness and con-
ciliation. . . . For such a one, disaster is the deepest and broadest Yes to the
overwhelming” (GA 40: 172), because disaster reveals Dasein’s finitude in
Being, our incapacity to get behind all meaning and master it completely in
a comforting forever-so.
Other commentators have argued that when Heidegger lectures on the Ode
in 1942, he has softened his position.8 There is some truth to this. Largely
gone, though not entirely absent, is the valorization of creative violence. But
our focus here will be on the last lines of the Ode, where the chorus seems
to reject the one who violates the laws of god and city. In Greek, those lines
read:

Mēt’ emoi parestios

genoito mēt’ ison phronōn hos tad’ erdoi.

Heidegger renders the lines as follows:

Nicht werde dem Herde ein Trauter mir der,

nicht auch teile mit mir sein Wähnen mein Wissen,
der dieses führet ins Werk.
 Retrieving Phronēsis 249

Such a one shall not be entrusted to my hearth,

Nor share his delusion with my knowing,
Who puts such a thing to work. (GA 53: 115)9

Heidegger rightly indicates that parestios is a combination of para and

hestia: at the hearth. The Herde, the hearth, is the heart of the home, the
most intimate, most literally familiar place, for it is where the family gathers
for light, warmth, meals, and fellowship. At the hearth, the home is most
homely. But can a hupsipolis-apolis person ever be trusted to share this
hearth? Such a person, like Antigone, has broken away into the radically un-
familiar, un-homely, and uncanny. Heidegger links hestia with the phronōn
(GA 53: 133–34), which derives from phrēn, which in the introduction to
this chapter we saw is core to an embodied knowing that senses implicitly
what fits and does not fit with the reigning meaning of a given world. We
speak of knowing in the gut, but also with the heart, especially when this
preconceptual knowing touches on what is nearest and dearest to us, both
affectively and in our way of interpreting what is most important to our
world. Heidegger calls this knowing “a pondering and meditating . . . from
the ‘heart,’ from the innermost middle of the human essence itself” (GA 53:
134; cf GA 8: 149).
The problem is the un-homely, the uncanny, the hupsipolis-apolis figure
in the Ode. Being-at-home, having-a-home seems paradoxically to demand
a dis-location. The city and the hearth, the communal and the familial, the
political and the personal, are linked by this paradoxical feature of what
Heidegger calls “the essence of the polis” (GA 53: 99) and of being-human.
The home is secured only by the daring breakaway from established, familiar
meaning, risking the potentially tragic demise of the familiar, which is en-
tirely in keeping with what we have elucidated as the breakdown within the
cave. “The polis,” says Heidegger, “is the polos, that is, the pole, the whorl in
which and around which everything turns” (GA 53: 100). The human world
is historical; it “turns.” The meaning of not just individual things, but also all
things, beings as a whole, may shift and go out of alignment in this whirling
“whorl” of history. The word state derives from the Latin status, standing.
Heidegger insists that the essence of politics precedes the political in the de-
rivative sense of institutions, constitutions, parties, and intrigues. It is what
allows a historical community to take a stand, find a pole, around which the
meaning of the world can orbit. The polis is “the site [die Stätte] of the abode
of human history that belongs to humans in the midst of beings. . . . [W]hat is
essential in the historical Being of human beings resides in the pole-like re-
latedness of everything to this site of abode, that is, this site of Being homely
in the midst of beings as a whole” (GA 53: 101).
250 Chapter Eight

Heidegger says that the uncanny, the deinon in the sense of a terrible un-
homeliness is “the fundamental kind of essence belonging to human beings”
(GA 53: 72–73). In contrast to a mere adventurer, who abandons the home,
the truly unhomely person is hupsipolis-apolis: “Constantly on a path toward
the homely site, and at the same time placed at stake in the play that repudi-
ates the homely, human beings in the innermost essence are those who are
unhomely” (GA 53: 111). Why this paradoxical drive that must fail? Because
of the deinon: we are finite, we cannot get behind Being and bring beings as
whole into a final perspective beyond perspective and bring historical mean-
ing to a final stand. Human-being, as historical, is essentially paradoxical:
thrown into a world whose meaning is always-already formed, that meaning
is also on-the-move, unmasterable, impossible to grasp as a finished whole.
Hence, the only way to be at home is to accept the tragic necessity of the
paradox: “For this very reason the polis remains what is properly worthy of
question, that which, on account of such worthiness, prevails in permeating
all essential activity and every stance adopted by human beings” (GA 53:
101–2). Remaining open to what is most question-worthy grounds the para-
dox: it is the ontological essence of politics before politics “in the derivative
[ontic] sense” (GA 53: 102), because we thereby remain alive to what is most
worthy of thought in a particular place and time. This is why Heidegger re-
sists glib answers to the “Who are we?” question, such as biological racism.10
To keep the historical task vibrant is to keep it question-worthy.
But then how to make phronetic ethical and political judgments in the
“derivative” sense at all? For Heidegger, the answer lies in the Ode’s final
lines about hestia and phronein, hearth and knowing. To know the hearth as
knowing from the heart means to know it as the intimately familiar, the world
of meaning that constitutes the political as the preconceptual core of what
binds a community together in its understanding of the world. But because to
be human is to be historical, and because our historical existence is radically
finite, the hearth and its familiarity are always exposed to incompleteness,
challenge, and failure. Ontological earthquakes break down the most intimate
structures of meaning. So, “if the ‘hearth’ determines the homely, and if the
deinon is that which, in its supreme configuration, must remain excluded
from the hearth, then the deinon can be the uncanny only if it has the essential
nature of the unhomely” (GA 53: 133).
Human beings always-already reside in a meaningful world. Even if that
world is exposed to ruptures in meaning, the breakdowns we analyzed in the
cave, we still begin with what Heidegger calls knowing (Wissen) as intimat-
ing (Ahnen, GA 53: 132) how the world makes sense; otherwise, Being-in-
the-world at all would be impossible. Translating Heidegger’s Ahnen as ‘inti-
mating’ invites comparison with my use of ‘intimation’ in previous chapters.
 Retrieving Phronēsis 251

To this extent, I agree with Heidegger: There would be no sense, no meaning,

only a purely negative unmeaning, if we had no preconceptual intimation of
the background sense of things as the way Being opens up a world for us to
inhabit. Heidegger insists that this intimation is not some naive, unformulated
presentiment of what might become some fully developed theory; rather, inti-
mation is what grants us the pre-theoretical connection (Vernehmen as noēsis)
to the world as meaningful, without which no theory would be possible at all.
If it were not so, we could not experience the deinon as an uncanny break
with the given sense of the world (GA 53: 133–34). Here, though, I agree
with Plato. In Heidegger, the intimations of meaning enmesh us in a historical
world, a cave without transcendence to the universal, whereas in Plato, the
intimations of meaning do both by giving us an impetus to seek a fuller mean-
ing that transcends our situatedness while also making us more discerning
about how the universal is refracted in the contingencies of our rooted lives.
Once again, the dynamic between transcendence and situatedness illuminates
the proper role of phronēsis.
To make ethical-political judgments means to engage in a pre-theoretical
thinking that reflects on what belongs to the hearth and home as constitut-
ing the life of the given historical community. While one does not have to
disagree with Heidegger on this to embrace a Platonic polemical ethics that
enlarges upon it, we first have to make better sense of pre-theoretical (or
preconceptual) thinking, which sounds paradoxical, if not outright contradic-
tory. Does not rational thought involve precisely the formation of concepts,
the formulation of definitions, and the construction and analysis of theories
and arguments, all in a manner that is deliberate and self-aware, rather than
preconceptual? Those elements are certainly part of rational thought, the part
that takes place in the moment of response in the triad of wonder-question-
response. In ethical and political thought, it is most familiar to us in the work
of a Locke, a Mill, or a Rawls. But is there not more to this in the human
logos? Do we not also think when we wonder, or when we devise a question
from that wonder? Does not an artist think, even if not in terms of definitions,
concepts, and syllogisms, when using a brush, crafting a poem, molding clay,
composing a score, or playing a composition? Plato, by inviting us to pay
attention to the moments when erstwhile opinion breaks down in unmeaning
or when the mind lights on fire in the diffused light of an idea, also invites
us to contemplate this form of thought that is more properly non-conceptual
than conceptual. It is what allows us to engage in discernment while Being-
in-the-world, to notice when that world goes out of joint into unmeaning, to
understand when and why that matters, so that we can engage in the polemi-
cal work of ideation that links imagination and idea to reconstruct the world
of meaning.11 Rationality, in the more familiar form of redefining concepts,
252 Chapter Eight

reformulating arguments, and devising new theories, can only meaningfully

happen if first one has some intimation of what matters. For anything to
matter, we must be involved, rooted, in a world, and this too has its logic, its
logos, in our situated existence, at the heart and by the hearth of the life we
inhabit.
For Heidegger, our thinking from the heart-and-hearth cannot be subjected
to ethical formulae or laws, be they ‘natural’ or ‘positive’ law. The ontologi-
cally ethical and political precede these ontic aspects of how we order our
lives together. There is indeed a phronēsis in Heidegger: it is the work of
phronein, thinking from the phrēn, the heart of our connection to a particular
place, time, and community, even if that means breaking with all that, in un-
canniness, to bring it back into joint. It is an intensely sensitive attunement to
the radical finitude of historical situatedness in the polis as site, polos, around
which the world takes meaningful shape. Understood in this way, phronēsis
would be a form of care, Sorge, that reveals to Dasein the complexities of its
situated Being-with-others in the Da, the unique Here of historical location
(see GA 36/37: 87). Justice is then what Heidegger in Introduction to Meta-
physics calls Fug, that is, “fittingness,” or “fit” (GA 40: 168–69).
As Dennis Schmidt has described, this idea of justice as “fit” must mean
something like the thinking of an artist who ‘sees’ what stroke of the brush
will fit with a painting, or a composer who ‘hears’ what note is called for in
a composition.12 This cannot be derived from a set of rules, because in such
cases, thinking is meditative rather than calculative: it ventures into unmean-
ing in the positive sense: following an intimation of meaning where there is
nothing yet concrete. We may willingly enter into such thinking but cannot
control it with logic as an algorithm, which is why the Greeks assigned its
outcome to the divine intervention of the Muses. Only phronēsis in Hei-
degger’s sense of thinking from the phrēn, from the heart or gut, can arrive at
what justice demands, as what is fitting. But this ontological, radically histor-
ical notion of phronēsis seems to provide no guidance for ethical and political
life. This is the whole point for Heidegger: to get past the metaphysical no-
tion of ethics and politics as following some external (or indeed internalized)
idea that sets a command and takes away the responsibility of “taking heart”
oneself, of tuning in exquisitely to one’s historical situatedness, to assess the
historical fate of one’s community, to allow that to guide one’s sense of what
may remake, restore, or sustain what fits with what matters.
Yet, in Heidegger’s own case, this unmoored political thinking resulted in
a disastrous decision in favor of the National Socialists, in part because he
explicitly rejects, as a form of Platonic metaphysics, politics as guided by
norms “in a juridical-moral sense” (GA 40: 169). Furthermore, in rejecting
modern liberalism as a late form of Platonism, Heidegger also rejects all the
 Retrieving Phronēsis 253

protections attached to human rights, the rule of law, mixed government, and
so on. Heidegger’s anti-conceptual phronēsis leads to a radical relativism
and an intense form of decisionism. While we might still have convictions,
and while we might still make judgments, there is no longer any ground, any
principle, we could base these upon, except for our own intimations of what
“fits,” and these are incommensurable, beyond logos in the sense of a shared
political discourse that might settle our disputes.

8.4 ANTIGONE AND THE POLIS AS

THE SITE OF POLEMICAL PHRONĒSIS

Having examined Heidegger’s anti-conceptual thinking about the Antigone

and phronēsis, let us recall the context for the Ode in the Antigone. It is often
called the Ode to Man, but as Heidegger asks: To whom do those last lines
apply? Whom would the chorus exile from the polis? For Heidegger, it is
clear that Antigone herself is hupsipolis-apolis, the one who unsettles hearth
and home (GA 53: 129).
Remarkably, Heidegger does not discuss in detail the actual ethical-
political drama of the play, one that is rooted in questions of legitimate rule,
obedience to law, and loyalty divided between city and family. Creon accuses
Antigone of “daring to take the risk [etolmas] of transgressing [huperbeinein:
overstepping; transcending] the laws” (449), norms in the conventional sense
of juridical imperative. Creon has decreed that Polyneices must not be bur-
ied, for he had attacked his own city with an army that would have destroyed
hearth and home. To violate Creon’s law means death, but Antigone refuses
to obey the decree. At first glance, this looks like thinking ethical life from
the phrēn, from the heart—phronēsis in a Heideggerian sense. Antigone re-
fuses to be governed by a normative ethics merely imposed as external rules
and fiat. Instead, she insists on the freedom to consult her own sense of the
ethical as what is fitting and proper to the situation: that she bury her own
dead brother. Confronted by Creon with fact that Polyneices killed her other
brother, she says, “It is my nature to nurture not hate but love” (523). Anti-
gone makes her decision based on what heart-and-hearth call for, even if it
seems imprudent and impractical to conventional practical wisdom.
But even if that is true, Antigone also does not simply stand her ground
mutely, without the logos of argument. To Creon, she defends her decision,
but not as an incommensurable, personal intuition of what is “fitting,” as
Heidegger requires in his sense of intimation as Ahnen. Instead, she appeals
for justification to the “unwritten and unshakable laws of the gods” (agrapta
kasphalē theōn nomima, 454–55). Recall that the chorus appeals to “the laws
254 Chapter Eight

of the land” as a limit to human daring. Perhaps Heidegger does not men-
tion this dimension of the drama because Antigone’s position looks like an
expression of natural right or natural law that trumps positive law: that ethics
(in the ancient sense, comprising both morality and politics) cannot be fully
determined by human “laws of the land,” that there is a ground for ethics that
transcends what happens to be written on the statute books by human hand.
She says that the laws she obeys “live not for now or before, but for always,
/ and no one knows when they appeared” (456–57). She claims a ground
for ethics that is timeless (“for always,” aei pote), a direct contradiction of
Heidegger’s view that what governs human existence is radically temporal;
indeed, hers is a pre-theoretical version of the Platonic idea of justice that
Heidegger so vehemently rejects.
Antigone says these laws “live” (zē) in a form that is both “unwritten and
unshakable” (agrapta kasphalē); the “unwritten” is the heart that gives life
to the letter of the law, and to rewriting or even breaking that law when the
letter fails. Against a Heideggerian rebuke that this recourse to timeless law is
a way of avoiding one’s own radical responsibility, Antigone says these laws
live precisely because they are unwritten; their life resides in each person’s
having to make sense of them on their own, as she does, risking everything.
They are unshakable because the mere givens of positive law, written in the
codes of law or the common law of inherited norms, can never substitute
for this personal responsibility to discern the ethical. Her declaration fore-
shadows Levinas’s claim that “Universalism has a greater weight than the
particularist letter of the text; or, to be more precise, it bursts the letter apart,
for it lay, like an explosive, within the letter.”13 Antigone does shun judging
the ethical by what convention happens to demand, what ‘They’ say must be
done, just because ‘it is written.’ Crucially, Antigone’s unwritten, unshakable
laws are not simply the same as the modern idea of natural law or human
rights, which we attempt to codify in a philosophical system. The meaning of
any such system must be blown apart by the “explosive” of confrontation in
the face of an unmeaning that may lead either to tragedy or renewal, depend-
ing on whether the confrontation succeeds in drawing new meaning for norms
from the challenge of unmeaning. For Antigone, it is a matter of personal
responsibility to a law she must discern for herself, not bound by tradition,
yet still bound to answer to it. She makes her case to the community for what
she discerns as eternal and universal, thereby answering the call of conscience
both for herself and to the community.
What is asphalēs for Antigone, then, is her unshakable right to take a
stand on the ethical and its demands for herself, risking the explosion of
norms, even as she ascribes this appeal to the eternal laws of the gods. They
are unwritten laws, therefore manifestly open to re-interpretation; they are
 Retrieving Phronēsis 255

precisely not a codified “table of values” or dictatorial norms. This is the core
of ethics as what I am here calling the ethical, or simply ethical life, which is
distinct from normative ethics, either as traditional codes of conduct or highly
elaborated philosophical systems of ethics. What I mean by this distinction
is similar to the one Levinas draws “between the ethical and the moral”:
“By morality I mean a series of rules relating social behavior and civic duty.
But while morality thus operates in the socio-political order of organizing
and improving our human survival, it is ultimately founded on an ethical re-
sponsibility towards the other.”14 The ethical precedes ethics. It involves our
responsibility to make sense of an ethical challenge for ourselves while at the
same time making a case, by rational argument, to those others with whom
we share our world, both as a mark of respect for the fact of that interdepen-
dency and because intimations of the ethical must always start from given,
traditional norms, even when in confrontation with them. Where I depart
from Levinas is when he says that the ethical “is a form of vigilant passivity
to the call of the other”; Levinas insists on this “passivity” as a way to avoid
totalization and to remain open to what the call of the other might disrupt in
the settled norms of established morality. But while a polemical ethics must
be alive to this disruptive call, it must also actively engage in the dialectic
between established meaning and a potentially fertile unmeaning that irrupts
within it to spur the reconstruction of ethics in response to the call. Antigone
insists on her ethical agency, but still in a form that appeals to a common
understanding. She does not reject dialogue in favor of solipsistic, mystical
insight; she engages in a dialectic between what is “unwritten” in the ethical
and the norms that are written, in the extended sense of established morality
and rules, in order to reformulate these norms. Both she and the chorus, as
well as Creon, appeal to law. It is this double responsibility of the ethical that
is asphalēs, the unshakable ground of responsibility to both self and commu-
nity, bound together but distinct, in the polemical working-through of what is
at issue in ethical life whenever existing normative ethics fall short.
The intense political drama of the Antigone arises through a shattering
ethical conflict, the explosion that Levinas deems the heart of ethical life that
must at times burst the confines of written norms, in that extended sense of
“written” as meaning what has been established and set as normative, nomos,
and seems to brook no defiance. The drama of the play centers on the clash
of two domains of meaning that each lays uncompromising claim on the in-
dividual: family and community. This clash threatens the whole community
with breakdown into unmeaning. But just as to deinon has a double aspect as
the wondrous and the terrifying, so does the irruption of unmeaning: it is an
opening to new constellations of meaning as well as to the collapse of mean-
ing into despair. Antigone does not make her case in a philosophical form,
256 Chapter Eight

but it is worth remembering that if she is the apolis figure at the start of the
play, the one the chorus and Creon expel from the hearth as deinotaton, her
position carries the day by the end, persuading both the chorus and Creon.
Even if she herself dies, she dies a hero. By acting from the phrēn, the heart
of ethical life, she lacks the phronēsis to negotiate the crisis in a way that
would save herself, but she does show the way to saving the city. The awful
tragedy of her fate is also awe-inspiring, because it opens up new vistas of
meaning for both the legendary Thebes and the historical audience in Athens,
as well as for us. Even if it is too late for Creon and Antigone, Sophocles’s
tragic lesson might well be that it does not have to be too late for us if we can
enlarge upon the phronēsis needed to navigate ethical life.
We can have a politics that remains open to the polemical interplay be-
tween the ethical and ethics, or ethical life in conflict with customary norma-
tive ethics (nomoi). By ethics, again, I mean the established norms of personal
and political life: constitutions, laws, mores, and so on—all that Heidegger
scorns as calcified codification that allows us to evade our radical responsibil-
ity by simply obeying without thinking. By the ethical, I mean that heart of
life to which we turn in thinking whenever we, like Antigone, discover that
we cannot agree with what the statutes or norms dictate and find ourselves
plunged into the awfulness of awe-inspiring unmeaning, with only our con-
science as a guide to the intimations of a new or renewed meaning for recon-
structing a shared world. Ethics is ontic: it is about having established norms
for action. This is not to denigrate ethics, which is vital for being-human; but
the ethical, or ethical life, is ontological: it is how we face up to the polemical
task of reconstituting our ethics, because all established norms, all “letters of
the law,” fray in the face of our finitude and may fail to do justice to what is
ethical and just.

8.5 RETRIEVING PHRONĒSIS

This discussion returns us to phronēsis and the essence of politics, and now
we can no longer ignore Aristotle. Heidegger does discuss Aristotle briefly
in his second reading of the Antigone. This comes during his analysis of the
essence of the polis as the historically situated site around which the mean-
ing of the world revolves. Heidegger cites Aristotle’s description in Book
1 of the Politics of “the human being as zōon politikon,” which he says is
translated “in a superficial way” as “‘the human being is a political being’”
(GA 53:102). For Heidegger, to be a political being involves what Aristotle
means by calling us “a zōon logon echon—a living being that has the word,
 Retrieving Phronēsis 257

which means: that being that can address beings as such with respect to their
Being”:

Who or what the human being is precisely cannot be decided “politically”

according to that thinker who names the human being the “political being,”
because the very essence of the polis is determined in terms of its relation to the
essence of human beings (and the essence of human beings is determined from
out of the truth of Being). (GA 53: 102)

Heidegger understands the essence of human beings and of politics as

grounded in the “truth of Being”: the way that a world of meaning opens up
historically for us. As logos, this truth of Being collects the understanding
of the world in a particular way for a historically located community, and so
logos and polis are connected at the polos, the site around which meaning
forms, differentiating one community from others in the polemos.
But in his ontologized understanding of politics, Heidegger leaves out what
Aristotle says about the actual work of the logos in the polis. In Book 1 of
the Politics, Aristotle says that human beings have the logos because, un-
like any other living being we know of, we discuss and make determinations
about what is just and unjust. We debate and then act on our accounts of what
is right and wrong, and we give reasons for why we hold the positions we
do (1253a8–18). The logos encompasses these dimensions of rationality—
account, dialogue, giving reasons, argument—and more, because it also
includes the possibility of contemplating what as yet has no account, that
demands an account, but as yet only beckons by intimations through the explo-
sion of unmeaning that a breakdown in norms induces. The conflict between
Creon and Antigone epitomizes the political. Each articulates a position on
a matter of decisive importance to the city. For them, politics fails; disaster
overtakes the city. But it does not have to be so, and surely Sophocles sought
to offer his audience in democratic Athens that possibility through the warning
of the tragedy. We recognize that politics, as the domain of discourse about
the just and unjust, is polemical, but that this conflict may be mediated by
speech, not violence. Unlike social insects, we do not cooperate harmoniously
by instinct alone. Heidegger is right about the deinon and the apolis; it is es-
sential to being-human to disagree and to diverge from established justice. Our
understanding of the social world is vulnerable to breakdown, never entirely
set and secure. Rules, laws, and ethical codes are never final and adequate to
every circumstance. But what is asphalēs, a firm foundation, is that as long
as we remain human-beings, the call of conscience can summon us from the
contingencies if our situatedness to confront the breakdown in de-, pre-, and
reconstruction.
258 Chapter Eight

At stake here is what it means to be ethical. Heidegger is surely right that

it does not simply mean conforming to the norms of the society into which
we happen to be thrown by submitting to the dictates of whatever authority
claims to command. To be ethically responsible is to be alive to conflicts and
breakdowns in these laws and norms, to the need to think them through, and
to the necessity of becoming apolis if one deems them unjust. This is what we
learned about the breakdowns within the cave and what Antigone means by
saying that the unwritten laws are alive (zē). It is not that they command us
with yet another, somehow ultimate layer of authority, but rather that we are
called by ethical life to think through for ourselves what we believe is just,
and also to give an account of that determination. The break with Heidegger
happens here, because this life of ethical phronēsis is not mere decisionism
or intuitionism, even though the ethical is not a norm, and even if justice is
higher than statutory law.
Ethical life is what calls for reflection beyond established concepts and
norms, what we must think about polemically, whenever we discover that
existing norms are somehow inadequate or unjust, even if, in reconstructing
ethical life, we must translate the ethical into new norms, concepts, practices,
institutions, and indeed systems of ethics. That is the work of preconstruction
and reconstruction. But what does such thinking consist in? Heidegger rightly
says that it cannot be simply another form of ratio, calculating from indubi-
table first principles and applying them to a new situation, because that would
still be ethics in the metaphysical, conceptual sense (GA 53: 117–18). Later,
in the discussion of ethics as ēthos in his “Letter on Humanism,” Heidegger
says that “there is a thinking that is more rigorous than the conceptual”; it is
“a thinking that is neither theoretical nor practical. It eventuates prior to this
distinction” (GA 9: 357, 358). But if ethical-political thinking is not about
grasping conceptual norms from an authoritative dictate, tablet of command-
ments, law book, or philosophical theory and applying them, what is it?
One possibility is that ethical life, which includes the political in the an-
cient sense, involves reflecting on justice as what fits (the Fug) in the given
unique situation, and this cannot be given in advance by a formula that takes
away the responsibility for each such moment as decisively one’s own. But
this seems again to throw the measure for action back to thinking as a kind
of technē of the ēthos that intuits without any capacity for giving reasons.
This is ultimately why Heidegger links Parmenides’s noein and einai, think-
ing and Being, as “the same,” with both Heraclitus’s polemos and logos as
“the same” and with Sophocles’s thinking of human beings as deinotaton and
hupsipolis-apolis, because our ethical-political life is never fully at-home.
Conflicts ever arise over the meaning of the world, over its Being as a col-
lected logos, and the only way to break through is to accept the uncanniness
 Retrieving Phronēsis 259

of situated, historical life and take a stand. Heidegger thinks leaders do that:
they take a stand where there is no calculable measure and thereby paradoxi-
cally “ground the abyss” (GA 65: 7).
Heidegger errs, though, by rejecting existing laws and norms as contempt-
ible expressions of the They-self, as manifestations of metaphysical essential-
ism, or as derivative conceptual thinking. Just as “Being is always the Being
of beings” for Heidegger (SZ, 37), we might also say that the ethical is always
the ethical of an ethics, or the political is always the political of a politics,
where ‘the ethical’ and ‘the political’ stand for a domain of polemical reflec-
tion to which we must turn when the meaning, purpose, or practice of existing
nomoi have broken down. This is the heart of ethical life to which thinking
must return when these norms break down in order to breathe new life into
ethics, newly conceptualized and newly institutionalized. This liminal do-
main, where existing meaning threatens to collapse into unmeaning, is where
imagination and idea meet in the apprehension of new or renewed insight
into the ethical and political, insight that has the potential for the reconstruc-
tion of our social world. Unmeaning is never simply a naked nothingness,
an ontic nullity where no-thing makes any sense. Understood ontologically
and hermeneutically, unmeaning emits intimations of meaning, and thus is
the counterpart to meaning, which is always fraying, never complete, always
threatening a decay into unmeaning.
On the other hand, the fertile potential inherent to unmeaning, which is not
simply the annihilation or lack of meaning, is that unmeaning is itself on the
verge of mending, of becoming coherent at its edges, if only we take up the
threads of the intimations that beckon in the call of conscience by exercis-
ing the ideation that mediates between idea and imagination. Both meaning
and unmeaning are not attributes adhering to beings but modes of Being;
they describe the way things do or do not mean for us as we take them to
be, and we to each other as the beings for whom meaning and unmeaning is
what we do in dialogue and what makes the world either matter to us or fade
into insignificance. Just as we find ourselves always-already in a world of
established meaning where beings are interpreted as what they are, so do we
find ourselves always-already living in a world of established norms. But the
apolis, deinon moment of human existence is always a possibility. We “ap-
prehend” (noein) that in some particular case the norms do not “fit.” This is
that moment of breakdown for the prisoner in the cave. Just as we can chal-
lenge the interpretation of beings, so can we challenge the justice of norms.
This is polemical justice. But we can only make this challenge in terms of the
deconstruction, but not destruction, of the understanding we already have, as
Antigone does with the chorus’s understanding of law, even as we work our
way to a new understanding through ideation.
260 Chapter Eight

In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle singles out a moral virtue critical to

justice: epieikeia, which might be translated as reasonableness, equity, or fair-
mindedness (Book 5.10). At issue for Aristotle is that no rule can cover every
possible contingency. For that reason, to do justice in a unique circumstance it
may be necessary to ignore or break the standing rule. But the crucial question
here is, to what does the rule-breaker appeal in such a case? Where does think-
ing go when existing norms and concepts no longer suffice? What justifies the
decision made, both intellectually, as the ground for the rule-breaking, and
politically to the community, as the legitimacy of such a violation of settled
norm? As Aristotle suggests (Politics, 1287a19–32), such rule-breaking may
easily tilt into lawless tyranny. It is necessarily apolis in two senses: as a
departure from established norms and as a threat to the very life of the com-
munity. Nevertheless, Aristotle holds this apolis moment as essential to the
political, precisely because of the finitude of human understanding and the
necessary deficiency of all settled laws and norms, which cannot always fit
the given situation. There can be no rule for when the existing rules do not ap-
ply, for that leads to an infinite regress (Ethics, 1137b14–30), and so epieikeia
demands a mode of thinking other than merely interpreting or applying an
existing rule, be it a human posit or a purported natural or divine law.
Corresponding to the moral virtue of epieikeia as the disposition to be
mindfully flexible, rather than a narrow stickler about the rules, is the intel-
lectual virtue of phronēsis, the thinking that discerns properly when and how
to bend or even break the rules (and with whom, to what extent, in what way,
and so on). As such, Aristotle’s phronēsis seems very close to Heidegger’s
notion of the thinking, the noein, that intuits the just as the fitting and ap-
propriate. This does not mean it is irrational or, worse, barbaric, according to
Heidegger (GA 9: 346). But why is this not intuitionism and decisionism, a
thinking that can give no account, no logos, of itself?
The answer may lie in Aristotle’s concept of noēsis, an especially difficult
word to translate. In Book 6 of the Ethics, it is the faculty that allows us to
intuit the fundamentals of a science, such as the axioms of geometry, that are
true but cannot themselves be demonstrated; one either ‘gets it’ or does not
(1140b3–1141a9).15 That is in the domain of theoretical wisdom (sophia), of
eternal truths; but we could also say that noēsis plays a role in phronēsis, the
domain of contingency, which is precisely the domain of historically situated
communities. This noetic thinking must apprehend with exquisite finesse not
timeless, indemonstrable axioms, but rather a situation’s singular features to
judge what norms must be broken to what extent, and how they can be recti-
fied, reconstructed, and remedied.
Previously, we have called this openness to such finesse the intimations
that unite us in our situated transcendence.16 It is essentially paradoxical,
 Retrieving Phronēsis 261

like being hupsipolis-apolis, and yet essential to what it means to be human

as open to the ethical. Because ethical life is always encountered through the
ethical breakdowns of an ethics, that is, through the polemos that arises when
we discover that established norms fall short in a given situation, political and
ethical life can only rise high (hupsi-polis) when we have the insight (noein)
for situations that call into question our established norms; such thinking
transcends the community’s givens and is therefore a-polis. Heidegger might
be right in his “Letter on Humanism” to cite Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics
as saying that ethics is first and foremost about ēthos, a way of life shared by
a community whose norms are habitual, and therefore largely preconceptual
(GA 9:352–53). Aristotle therefore considers the lawmaking leader crucial,
because lawmaking in the broad sense constitutes the institutions and prac-
tices that inculcate this ēthos (Ethics, Book 10.9).
But because politics is polemical in the deeper sense, we cannot always
rely on ethics as simply the preconceptual “background practices,” as Hubert
Dreyfus would call them, of our life together.17 When conflicts arise, if we are
to resolve them through a shared human logos in the manner of human poli-
tics for Aristotle rather than through bestial violence, then in times of break-
down, we must make that ethics explicit. That is, we must make it conceptual
so that we may talk through the ethical in our ethics. This means we must
not rashly discard or scorn established ethics—as laws, rules, norms—when
thinking the ethical, because that ethics is the only ground for discourse with
our community about what the ethical calls for when the established norms
break down. The shadows on the cave wall are not about nothing. Heidegger
himself says that a community works out its collective fate through Mit-
teilung und Kampf, “communication and struggle” (logos and polemos), but
he neglects the role that existing norms must play in structuring but not dic-
tating how the reasoned discourse for resolving a confrontation must proceed
if community is to be reconstructed after a breakdown (cf. SZ, 384–85). We
cannot discard the existing discourse entirely, because all political-ethical
discourse depends in advance in our sharing some grounds of understanding,
the ethical life of any ethics, just as sharing a world depends on our having
some shared understanding of the Being of beings.

8.6 EXAMPLES OF PHRONĒSIS IN ETHICAL LIFE

Let me give examples that illustrate where Heidegger goes wrong in think-
ing the ethical at the limit. In a book I wrote with my father about ethical,
legal, and policy questions after 9/11, such as torture, invasions of privacy,
and presidential power, we argued for such a situated transcendence (without
262 Chapter Eight

calling it that) in facing limit situations in our norms through a form of Aris-
totelian phronēsis.18 We cited political leaders who bent, or even broke, the
law: Thomas Jefferson violated the Constitution when, as president, he autho-
rized military expenditures without congressional approval when he thought
war with Britain was immanent in 1807; Abraham Lincoln violated the
Constitution by suspending habeas corpus without constitutionally mandated
congressional approval when he deemed Washington under immanent threat
in 1861 at the outbreak of the Civil War. On the citizens’ side, oppressed
people in America have resisted in a variety of ways. Civil rights activists
deliberately violated long-established Jim Crow laws, especially in the 1950s
and 1960s, to protest and overturn those laws as unjust.19 More recently,
women have challenged both unwritten norms of abusive sexual behavior and
the written rules of precedent on assault and harassment through the #MeToo
movement. Also, the Black Lives Matter movement, especially after the kill-
ing of George Floyd, has mobilized protesters of all races to demand substan-
tive change to structural racism in policing, criminal justice, and the public
memorialization of our shared history. For the most part, these movements
have not bent or broken laws, but they have vigorously challenged norms in
ways that portend genuine societal change. This is the hermeneutical-political
polemics of ethical life confronting established norms to give new form to
ethics, law, and institutions. It is polemical ethics enacted.
Essential to these examples of both officers and subjects of the law is re-
spect for law even in bending or breaking the law. Ethical life cannot subsist
without producing norms to live by, even if those norms may have to be con-
fronted and reconstituted ever again, given our finitude. This underlines the
idea of justice that transcends the existing conceptualization and institution-
alization of justice, due to a crisis, a breakdown. Lincoln went to Congress to
acknowledge a violation of the law, asking Congress to rectify the rupture by
ratifying it ex post facto, risking impeachment if Congress would not. Civil
rights activists showed respect for the law, even as they broke it, by risking
prosecution. In each case, the actors took upon themselves the risk, the tolma,
of apolis action that transcended established norms.
My father and I observe that in discussing his law-breaking, Jefferson “rec-
ognized that in an emergency, public servants must hold to the principle that
the welfare of the people trumps the letter of the written law.” In Jefferson’s
words: “The officer who is called to act on this superior ground [the welfare
of the people; the common good], does indeed risk himself on the justice of
the controlling powers of the Constitution, and his station makes it his duty to
incur that risk.” Jefferson also writes, “A strict observance of the written law
is doubtless one of the high duties of a good citizen, but it is not the highest.
. . . To lose our country by a scrupulous adherence to written law, would be
 Retrieving Phronēsis 263

to lose the law itself, with life, liberty, property and all those who are enjoy-
ing them with us.”20
Like Antigone, Jefferson holds that the right to pass judgment on the ad-
equacy of standing law is critical to justice. But that right entails a willingness
to take upon one’s own head, and as a duty, the risk of appealing to what Anti-
gone called the unwritten ground of established, written law; this submission
to judgment distinguishes such norm-breaking acts from the acts of tyrants
who respect no established norms whatsoever. The political actors we cite
appealed to their fellow citizens’ sense of the ethical underlying the specific
ethics of the established norms. They employed phronēsis in violating ethics
as mere rules, but appealed to the intimation, defended in rational discourse,
of a common good that lives (zē) at the heart of this ethics and without which
it becomes mere fiat, incapable of discerning its own breakdowns. This con-
cern and respect for norms as given makes possible, although not certain, the
reconstruction of personal and political bonds after the disruptive rupture.
Acting beyond law for the common good must risk the ethical-juridical
judgment of the community or else risks drifting into tyranny or anarchy.
We may each appeal to an ethical life beyond established ethics and norms,
but we must submit to the community to validate this appeal, or else dissolve
communal life entirely into a sterile unmeaning. This dialogical responsibility
saves reconstructive idealism from the “Because I said so!” of authoritarian-
ism, decisionism, or crude intuitionism, none of which are able, or willing,
to give an account of their determinations because they depend either on
the arbitrary willfulness of the tyrant or on a refusal of responsive dialogue
in favor of insisting upon incommensurable atavism. Avoiding this silenc-
ing of dialogue is the source for the responsibility to give reasons for one’s
apolis insight and expose oneself to the judgment of the community. It is an
acknowledgment of one’s own finitude, one’s own fallibility, in passing judg-
ment on the norms of the community. It is what keeps both leader and citizen
from hubris in bending or breaking those norms through a polemical ethics.
Heidegger entirely misses the phronēsis needed for negotiating the break-
ing and reconstruction of norms by championing only the hupsipolis-apolis
creative few, which leaves him vulnerable to the despotic politics of National
Socialism and the Führerprinzip.
Crucial to the hupsipolis-apolis action of norm-breaking actors, then, is
this responsible appeal to the common good at the heart of ethical life beyond
the given norms as well as to the very norms they live by every day. Unless
the community is so unjust as to be irredeemable, requiring instead revolution
or separation, the political actors present their law-breaking as a responsive
loyalty to the spirit of the laws even if that spirit has not been realized, as with
Antigone in legend and civil rights activists in history. Jefferson and Lincoln
264 Chapter Eight

argued that the Constitution was established to preserve the community; their
actions were a redeemable break to accomplish just that preservation. In civil
disobedience against racist laws, activists argued that the founding principle
of “all men are created equal,” as well as the constitutional protections de-
veloped in the spirit of that principle, meant that the Jim Crow laws were
themselves unlawful, even as they accepted legal punishment to demonstrate
their allegiance to law as a fundamental principle of shared political life.
This is how ethics in the norm-al, situated sense inhabits ethical life in the
apolis sense as transcending norms. That life beyond established norms must
still must account for itself, for its noēsis, the rationally defensible intuition
of what ‘fits’ justice as newly formulated in terms the previously normal eth-
ics can understand. Thus polemos, as a conflict over what justice calls for,
and logos, as accountability, bring ethical life and ethics together in situated
transcendence. This is how metaethics, as a reinterpretive encounter with the
foundations of ethical life, even if not explicitly thematized as such, comes
into play with a given established ethics. There is no guarantee that this ap-
peal to the community will succeed, but that is the apolis risk rule-breakers
take upon themselves as the pledge of shared allegiance to a common good.
This is why, in his ontological interpretation of polemos in politics, Jan
Patočka says, following Heraclitus, “Polemos is what is common”—common
both in the sense of pervasive and of what we share: “Polemos binds together
the contending parties, not only because it stands over them but because in
it they are one.” Politics, rather than brute violence, is the contentious but
shared dialogue interpreting what constitutes the heart of the community,
what is right and wrong, lawful and unlawful. That is why Patočka properly
links polemos and phronēsis: “The power that arises from strife is a power
that knows and sees: only in this invigorating strife is there life that truly sees
into the nature of things—to phronein. Thus phronēsis, understanding, by the
very nature of things, cannot but be at once common and conflicted.”21 Com-
mon and conflicted, logos and polemos, are united by phronēsis because only
through discerning the historically situated particulars and how they matter
as meaningful, does what is at-issue in the conflict for a specific community
come to light in a way perspicacious enough for resolution through vigorous
struggle in debate, dialogue, discussion, and the consequent reconstruction of
norms, laws, and institutions. Otherwise, as Sophocles warns, disaster awaits.
In the analysis of the polemical cycle of exit and return in the cave, I have
described the moments of this process as a triad of de-, pre-, and reconstruc-
tion of norms. In deconstruction, we run up against the limits of given norms
and expose them; in preconstruction, we formulate a new understanding of
what the ethical calls for, but always in terms of what ‘normal’ ethics in-
volves as norms to live by; in reconstruction, we integrate those new norms
 Retrieving Phronēsis 265

in the life of the community. The danger of failure is alive in each moment,
because phronēsis cannot eliminate the contingencies of human finitude. In
deconstruction, the danger lies in going beyond identifying how a concep-
tual scheme we live by has broken down to promoting a nihilistic mistrust
in meaning altogether; in preconstruction, or envisioning something new, it
lies in imagining ideals and theorizing alternatives so remote from the given
norms that they have no hope of dialogue with the situated existence of the
historical community; in reconstruction, it lies in failing to integrate new
insights and ideals with the existing institutions and practices of the commu-
nity, from the most intimate habits to the most general principles, so that so-
ciety might be reconstituted enduringly. Nevertheless, risking these dangers
is necessary for ethical life to persist, precisely because that same finitude of
human institutions, habitual practices, and ethical-political concepts makes
breakdowns in meaning and the subsequent cycle of reconstrual inevitable.
To be un-ethical is to refuse the call of ethical life, the phronetic thinking
as noein, the attentive, discerning perception that discloses the limitations of
established norms. To refuse to be alive to the possibility that the given norms
may be inadequate, that new interpretation is going always to be needed in
the polemos of the historical situatedness of human political life, is a failure
of responsibility. To believe that ethical life is only about calculating accord-
ing to established rules and applying them, rather than thinking about what
gives those rules their validity metaethically, is a failure to heed the call of
conscience. Such rigidity in the face of finitude results only in tyranny and
repression, which will inevitably corrode the affective sharing of norms that
give life to the body politic. Still, the triad of de-, pre-, and reconstruction
always transpires as an appeal to ethical life through a discussion of ethics
and the principles as a community has understood them hitherto.
In this movement from noēsis to explanation, the conceptual is not alien
to genuine ethical thinking. It gives that thinking a foothold in the situated
life of the community. The articulation of principles, political and ethical
theories, and systems of law is integral to how we give voice to ethical life,
even if these conceptual schemes cannot exhaust it. I am arguing, then, for
a polemical reconciliation of idea and noēsis, of reason and non-conceptual
thinking, of concept and essence, of metaphysics and ontology, of Plato and
Heidegger, in a situated transcendence that must ever-again work through the
breakdowns and breakthroughs of our finite historical understanding.
Heidegger failed to respect ethics as the concrete experience of ethical
life, and this left him with an unhinged phronēsis. In his rush to overturn
metaphysical thinking, Heidegger uprooted everything he took as an expres-
sion of Platonic “Liberalism” and moralism. This led him to contribute in a
significant way to some of the most abhorrent impulses of one of the most
266 Chapter Eight

barbaric movements in human history, such as the valorization of transgres-

sive violence and leadership beyond law. No reader should forget that in a
lecture course as early as 1933, Heidegger told students that proper under-
standing of the polemos involves detecting or even fabricating an enemy that
has burrowed into the “innermost roots” of the Volk and that this enemy must
be attacked “with the goal of total annihilation” (GA 36/37: 91). A properly
attuned phronēsis is moderate even in its radical willingness to depart from
the norm; it respects the givens of ethics as the only living context for how
the historically situated community comes to terms with the ethical as the
ground for ethics—even if that be the supposedly metaphysical understanding
of norms in the Western tradition.
Heidegger welcomed tragedy as the human condition, as the experience of
our limitation in the face of Being, but he failed to notice that Greek tragedies
often ended with a satyr play and that the festival of Dionysus included com-
edy as well as tragedy. The comic is not merely the ridiculous or the funny,
but another way of seeing the finitude of human existence in another register
than tragedy.22 Joy and reconciliation are possible conclusions of our polemos
with our situatedness, not just the disaster faced by Antigone, Creon, and
Thebes. To be ethical, to live the ethical life, rather than living passively by
inherited or imposed codes of ethics, we must face possibilities of both disas-
ter and breakthrough as we work for the ever-reconstructing existence of the
community. We cannot do this without rethinking ethical life by confronting
ethics as we find it and live it in our given historical world. In turn, we must
be ready to reconstitute that ethics in the light of ideas we can articulate for
one another by reflecting on ethical life as what transcends the here and now.

NOTES

1. Rainer Maria Rilke, “Wendung,” 52; my translation.

2. On embodiment and the difference in Aristotle between divine and human
wisdom, see Nicomachean Ethics, 1141b4–13, 1143b17–23, 1177b27–32, 1178b17–
1179a2.
3. Mark Blitz, Heidegger’s Being and Time, 201.
4. For a detailed account of the Dasein as polemical in its existential structure, see
Fried, Heidegger’s Polemos, chapter 2, “Polemos as Da-Sein.”
5. For example, see Allison Stone, “Essentialism and Anti-Essentialism in Femi-
nist Philosophy.”
6. In Being and Time, Heidegger distinguishes between the fate (Schicksal) of the
individual and the destiny (Geschick) of a people (Volk) that encompasses individual
fates (SZ, 384–85), but in Nature, History, State, he speaks of the singular fate of an
individual people, embodied in its state, among other peoples.
 Retrieving Phronēsis 267

7. See Gregory Fried, “Introduction to Metaphysics,” in The Bloomsbury Com-

panion to Heidegger; also, Heidegger’s Polemos, chapter 4.
8. See Clare Pearson Geiman, “Heidegger’s Antigones,” in A Companion to
Heidegger’s Introduction to Metaphysics; Theodore Kisiel, “The Seminar of Winter
Semester 1933–34 within Heidegger’s Three Concepts of the Political,” in Nature,
History, State.
9. I employ the excellent translation by William McNeill and Julia Davis in what
follows, but I have amended it here. I will render Sein as “Being” rather than “being.”
10. Consider Heidegger’s attack on Erwin Kolbenheyer (GA 36/37: 209–15).
This does not mean that Heidegger cannot subscribe to an ontological racism. See
Heidegger’s Polemos, 227–28.
11. For an insightful treatment of discernment in the light of Aristotle’s euphuia
as deepened through iterative self-reflection and dialogue in community, see Byrne,
The Ethics of Discernment, 304–6.
12. Dennis Schmidt employed this analogy in his July 2013 lectures for the Col-
legium Phaenomenologicum, “Idioms of the Ethical in Heidegger: From the Rectoral
Address to ‘Letter on Humanism.’” Of his published work, Schmidt’s essay, “Hei-
degger and the Call for an Original Ethics,” most succinctly captures his critique of
ethics as “applied” theory in favor of a way of thinking about ethical life as attuned
to the singularities of existence.
13. Emmanuel Levinas, Nine Talmudic Readings, 39.
14. For this and the quote below, see Levinas, “Ethics of the Infinite,” 80.
15. On noēsis as thinking that ‘gets it,’ see Fried, “A Second Letter to Emmanuel
Faye,” in Confronting Heidegger, 218–25.
16. See also Fried, “Heidegger and Gandhi,” 60–61.
17. See Hubert Dreyfus, Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger’s Be-
ing and Time, 4–5.
18. Charles Fried and Gregory Fried, Because It Is Wrong.
19. Fried and Fried, Because It Is Wrong; see especially the chapters on “No Be-
ginning or No End” and “Learning Not to Be Good.”
20. Quoted in Fried and Fried, Because It Is Wrong, 155, 136.
21. Patočka, Heretical Essays, 41.
22. See Hyland, Finitude and Transcendence, 137.
 Conclusion
Towards Enacting a Polemical Ethics

Poets, prophets, and reformers are all picture-makers, and this ability is the
secret of their power and achievements: they see what ought to be by the
reflection of what is, and endeavor to remove the contradiction.
—Frederick Douglass, “Pictures and Progress”1

The task of this book has been to lay the metaethical foundations for a po-
lemical ethics upon the ground cleared by enacting a confrontation between
Plato and Heidegger. We can agree with Heidegger that being-human is es-
sentially hermeneutical in its understanding of the world and that we enter
into the polemos whenever we engage in a genuine, authentic interpretive
struggle, without following his rejection of Plato’s idealism. My reading
of the Cave Allegory argues that ethical life, which includes political life,
requires the projection of the idea as a constitutive feature of our polemi-
cal, hermeneutical, and historical existence. If this reading is sound, it can
build the metaethical foundations of a polemical ethics by accounting for the
historicity of being-human without discarding either our situated awareness
of meaning or the ideas that transcend it. The next steps involve enacting a
polemical ethics upon this foundation.
A reconstructive view of history can help us to embody this polemical eth-
ics and lead to a new understanding of freedom. For now, I want to underline
the presuppositions and arguments of my ongoing project. Heidegger is in
part correct to say that big-L Liberalism has its roots in Plato, but this Liberal-
ism is not a nihilistic dead end. Rather, this larger Liberalism, which includes
but exceeds the classical liberalism of modernity, offers the best hope for the
polemical freedom and situated transcendence of being-human. This more

268
 Conclusion 269

encompassing Liberalism posits freedom as the starting point of philosophy

as a way of life that all can potentially share in varying degrees.
Four types of freedom are described by the Greeks. The first three are:
autarcheia, or autarchy, meaning freedom as self-sufficiency (usually but not
necessarily in an economic sense); autonomia, or autonomy, which means
being free to govern oneself and to set one’s own rules; and exousia, license,
or the freedom to do as one pleases because one holds the authority or simply
the sheer power to do so—the power of tyrants.
The fourth freedom is eleutheria, freedom from being subject to the ar-
bitrary will of another. Eleutheria is the opposite of slavery, douleia.2 The
Greek eleutheria might seem to have no direct counterpart in English, but in
fact there is an etymological connection. The Latin liber and the Greek eleu-
theria both derive from the same Indo-European root, *(e)leudo and variants,
which is also related to the root *leuth, which means to grow, and is related
to words such as the German Leute, the people, and the Roman deity Liber,
god of plant growth and viniculture.3 This freedom, this liberty, can be de-
scribed as the freedom to flourish where one is planted, as opposed to being
forced to grow against one’s will in a strange land. In short, the English word
liberty is an etymological cousin to the Greek eleutheria. Ancient linguistic
usage echoes the claim of Heraclitus that there is an ontological distinction
between the freeborn, the eleutheroi, or the liberi, and the slaves and captives,
the douloi, or the servi. In such a conception, the human social world would
include both as a simple fact of the natural order of things. In the ancient slave
societies that were bound by this master-slave ontology, eleutheria required
the forced labor of the enslaved to free up time for the free to enjoy liberty,
both as private persons and as participating members in the civic life of a free
but exclusive society.
But we can manumit the vital core of liberty as eleutheria: we can recog-
nize that personal liberty is both secured by and fulfilled through civic liberty.
This eleutheria, unbound from the binary of free and slave, may encompass
a conception of liberty as a positive realization of human-being without a
concomitant repression and exploitation of others. That is the ideal proposed
by the proponents of modern liberalism, who hold liberty and equality to be
compatible, even if their balance must regularly be negotiated in practice.
Liberty as eleutheria means that our private liberty, our independence
from arbitrary impositions upon our freedoms, is protected, fulfilled, and
enlarged by our civic liberty. Civic liberty, the active, willing, and honorable
participation in the political life of an independent polity, is necessitated by
our finitude, because we are not wholly independent individuals. Eleutheric
freedom, as an interdependent independence, is a feature of the paradoxical
270 Conclusion

Between of human-being: between the earth-bound dependency of embodied

situatedness and the sky-bound longing for separation and individuation.
Such freedom completes us as individuals, to the extent possible in a shared
human finitude, by allowing us to contribute both individually and collec-
tively to sustaining the intertwined independence of self and community as an
expression of human freedom. The necessity of returning to the cave because
of our dependent embodiment bears witness to this intertwining of self and
society in eleutheric liberty.
And so a key feature of enacting a polemical ethics will be to delineate an
eleutheric liberty, or eleutherism, as the kind of reconstructive liberalism I
hope to develop and defend. At the same time, like all constructs limited by
human finitude, eleutheric liberty includes unresolvable tensions and prob-
lems. Thus, it must be a reconstructive liberalism paired with skeptical ideal-
ism that lays itself open to correction, reinvention, and renewal. No political
system and certainly no magical political concept will settle once and for all
the political problem while we remain human.
The tyrannical in spirit try to evade finitude by treating our interde-
pendence as an embarrassment, something to be overcome for oneself or
exploited in others. But this evasion is in bad faith, for it denies the most
evident fact of our finitude: our mortal limitations and dependencies. We are
not gods. We are finite beings, frayed by our contingencies and mortality.
We cannot be entirely self-sufficient, because we cannot survive, let alone
flourish, by supplying all of our needs by ourselves or from ourselves, as does
the divine. Living in bad faith is illiberal, because it poisons and precludes
the fuller freedom we can attain, in constructive dialogue with others and the
world, in ethical life, in political life, and in the life that acknowledges its
codependency with a natural world that no human ingenuity can fully master.
License craves an unachievable and tyrannical mastery over human finitude.
This will to mastery is futile, because it ruins the true liberty that only the
interdependent life can provide. If left unchecked, this will degenerates into
a hubristic will to power, as history teaches only too well.
If our historicity and embedded finitude as members of particular histori-
cal worlds is fundamental to being-human, then eleutherism must account for
how this situatedness may be compatible with the universalism of liberal ethi-
cal and political thought. It also means reconciling three dimensions of free-
dom: freedom from, freedom to, and freedom for. The first suggests liberation
from as many constraints as possible, including the bonds of belonging and
tradition in a particular historical community; the second, the autonomy to
pursue opportunities as one sees fit; the third, embracing the bonds of identity
in community as what frees us for a belonging that transcends the limitations
of a cramped and cyclopean individualism. These three dimensions may
 Conclusion 271

well conflict, but if polemical being-human is riven by such tensions, then

recognizing and balancing these tensions through phronēsis in a responsible
response to ever-changing contexts is what makes this difficult freedom (to
borrow from Levinas) an inevitable feature of ethical-political life.4 This
in turn requires that the safeguards of negative freedom in traditional lib-
eralism—especially rights, popular sovereignty, limited government, the
separation of powers, and the primacy of the rule of law—be reconciled to a
positive freedom that entails a more affective and reflective sense of belong-
ing, identity, and responsibility to one’s own historical community. Finally,
eleutheric liberty, as a feature of reconstructive liberalism, must account
for how an autonomous, self-sufficient, and independent individual can be
reconciled to the third dimension of freedom: the understanding that we are
ultimately dependent upon a world of meaning not of our making, even if we
may, at our most venturesome, envision and prepare the reconstitution of that
world. Such forms of reconciliation must be a recognition and embrace of the
ongoing struggle, through practical wisdom, to balance universal and situated
freedom, not a reconciliation that pretends to settle the problem forever.
As the polemical task of ideation and reconstruction necessarily unfolds
through a situated transcendence, a confrontation with something at-issue in
one’s own embedded existence, my future work will focus on a confrontation
that claims me: the meaning of the American experiment in liberal democ-
racy. As anyone who has taught the founding texts of the American experi-
ment can attest, the meaning of the Founding, especially as exemplified by
the Declaration of Independence, remains contentiously at-issue, especially
the egalitarian principles of the proclamation that “We hold these truths to
be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their
Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty
and the pursuit of Happiness.”
In a context of vast inequalities separating those in a position to proclaim
such principles and to frame institutions and those without a voice—the
enslaved, women, native peoples, unpropertied classes—can we believe that
“all” really means all, and all persons, and not just men? At-issue in this
polemos is the idea that animates these words—all, men, created, equal, and
even are—and how to interpret that idea in its ideation, both historically and
in our own construal of it. Do these words truly declare a universal human
equality? Or, do they bear witness to the specific civic equality of a very par-
ticular set of human beings, the ones who framed the founding documents:
wealthy white men? This interpretive confrontation with the text leads to a
deconstruction of the meaning of the Declaration, and that deconstruction can
bring about at least two outcomes: a complete breakdown of its meaning so
that it can no longer provide legitimation for a political community grounded
272 Conclusion

in its claims, resulting in the death of the body politic; or, an opening for
reinterpretation of its elements, such as “all,” “men,” and “equal”—perhaps
even “are” and “created” as well. What would serve as the basis for such a
deconstruction and reinterpretation?
In support of the latter restrictive view is the simple historical fact that
many of the Founders owned slaves and that slavery was perfectly legal
before, during, and after the American Revolution and in the Constitution of
1787. Furthermore, the Founders say “men” in the Declaration, so why not
believe that they meant only men? As a matter of historical fact, women had
vastly inferior civic, educational, professional, and property rights before,
during, and after the Revolution, so why not take the Founders at their word,
this word: “men”?
Charles Mills makes exactly this point in The Racial Contract: The idea of
the founding and of those words was to institute a body politic in which white
males, particularly propertied white males for whom other human beings
could be property, would share equal civil rights in a master-race polity that
would exclude all other people as persons rather than (potential) property.
Hence, in contrast to idealized conceptions of the meaning of the Founding,
writes Mills, “the notion of a Racial Contract might be more revealing of the
real character of the world we are living in, and the corresponding historical
deficiencies of its normative theories and practices than the raceless notions
currently dominant in political theory.”5 Historical reality tells us what the
idea truly is, and the words of the Declaration take on meaning as a tool of
partisan propaganda, not an ideal we can live by or live up to.
And yet, in the same passage, Mills writes, “Insofar as contractarianism is
thought of as a useful way to do political philosophy, to theorize about how
the polity was created and what values should guide our prescriptions for
making it more just, it is obviously crucial to understand what the original
and continuing ‘contract’ actually was and is, so that we can correct for it in
constructing the ideal ‘contract.’”6 This follows from the distinction Mills
draws between his descriptive account of the historical reality of the racial
contract and a prescriptive account of what a presumably just social con-
tract would legitimately endorse. At-issue in the confrontation between the
grim historical reality and a brighter alternative—a subjunctive reality, as it
were—is whether the idea is limited by its historical expression or if polemi-
cal ideation might reveal what remains productively and positively unsaid in
what was said. Mills implicitly concedes that the meaning of the founding
is not limited to its historical instantiation when he speaks of “constructing
an ideal ‘contract.’” These few words unite ideation, the preconstructive
envisioning and thinking-through of an alternative, with reconstruction, the
implementation of that alternative given the historical realities, all grounded
 Conclusion 273

in a deconstruction of the historical failure properly to understand and enact

in norms and institutions the idea once imperfectly expressed but nevertheless
sent on its way on the upward path.
To put this another way, on what basis can we object to the slavery, the rac-
ism, and the sexism inherent in the American founding? If I proclaim, “These
words say that ‘all men are created equal,’ but that is clearly hypocrisy, be-
cause these men held slaves and subjugated women,” then what is it about
those words that I can declare hypocritical as the obfuscation of an unjust
historical reality? To interpret that reality as unjust, I must have an idea of
why it is unjust and what would be more just, either implicitly as an unspo-
ken intimation or envisioned in a political theory. Only in the downward-cast
light of the idea does the upward-cast firelight of the historical context and its
attendant opinions about the nature of equality come into view as something
meaningful that matters to us. It is through the conflict, the contradiction,
the polemos, between the historically situated and the ideated transcendent
that the difference gets worked out. In fact, it is the very inadequacy of those
words in their historical context—all men; all men: really?—that provokes
the deconstructive breakdown, ignites the philosophical reflection into what
has been left unsaid, and motivates the polemical pursuit of a new under-
standing and implementation of equality in the light of the idea of justice.
Otherwise, the deconstructive breakdown results only in nihilist unmeaning.
This, then, is the Socratic phenomenology of seeking the meaning of an
opinion both through what people say and beyond to what is unsaid. To object
to the historically situated interpretation of “all men are created equal,” the
idea, as something intimated that we can still imagine and refer to as a guide
in an ongoing dialogue about justice, must break through and, as it were,
shine through these specific, historically determined words. Across genera-
tions, Americans have imagined how things could be in light of what the idea
seems to imply as the ideal. They fought and struggled according to that idea
and made progress towards the intimated ideal by ending slavery, granting
women the vote, winning civil rights, and continuing in struggle today—as
of this writing, most notably in the multiracial movement to end structural
white supremacy that erupted after the murder of George Floyd. Such living
history demonstrates both the power and the phenomenological necessity of
the idea in its confrontation with its always-imperfect historical expression
in language, institutions, law, and customs. If we believe human freedom can
have anything to do with history at all, then that confrontation, the ideation
that pivots between imagination and ideal in collision with the real, is what
serves as the motive force of historical change.
All this suggests that it is precisely the slippage and splintering of language
in polity-defining texts such as the Declaration that ignites the contradictions,
274 Conclusion

setting the polemos of history in motion about what those words could mean
and should mean, despite and even because of whatever they have meant
historically. In this case, the breakdown in language involves the ambigu-
ity of “all men” and whether it applies prescriptively to all human beings in
principle, even if not descriptively as historical fact. Also at-issue is whether
new wording, such as all persons, might be needed to bring the idea from in-
timation to actual expression and social, political, and legal implementation.
In this case, both the “all” and the “men” incite the polemos over the scope of
the meaning of these words that goes beyond these words themselves.
Socratic phenomenology tells us that what people say can have a mean-
ing that extends beyond what they have said, how they have said it, and
even beyond how they thought they had meant it. This unsaid, this excess
of meaning beyond its historical entrenchment, must be elicited through a
dialogue that may bring the participants up short in aporia. It may even pro-
voke a breakdown in the way we had been seeing that meaning as a prelude
to its reconstitution. Meaning can be elicited in dialogue and implemented
in political action through the activity of polemical confrontation about the
slippage of meaning. We find such reconstructive reinterpretation of history
in the battles over flags and monuments in America today, especially those
that valorize the Confederacy.
Throughout our shared, situated, and provisional understandings of and
confrontations over what “all men” means, we have harkened—and in some
cases, been justly forced to harken—to those who expanded our understand-
ing of the possible meaning of our founding texts. There is the example of
Frederick Douglass, former slave and fierce abolitionist, who adamantly op-
posed the Garrisonian interpretation of the nation’s founding as an irredeem-
able compact with slavery. In his 1852 address, “What to the Slave is the
Fourth of July?” Douglass insisted that “America is false to the past, false to
the present, and solemnly binds herself to be false to the future.”7 Still, Dou-
glass meant that this falseness is predicated on a betrayal of the underlying
truth of the 4th of July, a meaning both spoken and unspoken that exceeds
the intent of any individual founders or any of the Americans of his own day
who perpetuated that falseness. Douglass went even further than almost any
of his contemporaries, making common cause with the nascent women’s
rights movement to interpret the “all men” as meaning all human beings, not
just white males.8
Douglass serves as a paradigmatic exemplar of the polemical Platonist:
someone who enters into a deconstructive and, most importantly, a recon-
structive dialogue with his tradition. Douglass lays bare the deficiency and
ambiguity of the intended meaning of the “all men” of the Declaration as
well as the excess dormant within it, and he can do this because he is a
 Conclusion 275

Platonist about the ideas that animate meaning. He seeks a reconstituted pol-
ity grounded in a reinterpretation faithful to the meaning polemically latent
in the Founding. The Declaration’s “all men” phrase is deficient because it
fails to articulate adequately the universal ideal of equality; it is excessive, not
because it says too much too radically, but because its unspoken but ideated
meaning exceeds the inadequacy of its expression as “all men.” Moreover,
despite this inadequacy, that excessive, latent meaning remains available
through the “all men” and perhaps even because of it. For the phrase itself is
a stumbling block, not in the purely negative sense of the biblical command-
ment, “Thou shalt not . . . put a stumbling block before the blind” (Leviticus
19:14), but in the positive sense that stumbling across an obstruction lodged
in language brings us up short, compelling us to confront a challenge in the
meaning of a shared world—in this case, the historical contradiction of a
slaveholding nation dedicated to liberty and the proposition that all men are
created equal.
If this were not so, how would the idea occur to Douglass, or to any of us,
that “all men” fails to articulate the idea fully? It is through the constructive
polemos with that failure that we can rearticulate the meaning at–issue in the
Founding in a way that is not “false” to the past, present, and future. Such
falseness—a violation of the Socratic trust necessary for honest societal and
political dialogue—denies the facts of historical injustice and the ambiguity
of the founding principles, denies how that history thoroughly pervades the
challenges facing the contemporary body politic, and denies how a viable
future demands standing up to this confrontation with historical meaning
to reconstruct self-understanding for a resilient community. Without some
intimation of the idea of justice, in this case as including a form of human
equality, the polemical work of such a reinterpretation could not even begin.
That is the difference between the Platonic polemos and the Heideggerian. It
is the glimpse of the ‘ought’ that transcends our finite embodiment, a glimpse
engendered by confronting that historical situation reflectively to tease forth
its unfolding meaning in both its excess and its deficiency, but with faith in
the ongoing work of removing the contradictions.
That the efforts and successes of a Frederick Douglass, or more recently a
Martin Luther King Jr., were not complete does not diminish their example
or that of all those who worked with and after them. The polemical confron-
tation between ideal and actuality is a cyclical hermeneutic, helicoidal in
form if done properly. Each iteration of the cycle may bring the real closer
to the ideal, although nothing guarantees this will be so. Much depends on
the phronēsis, the practical wisdom, of reconstructive action in ethics and
politics to align an envisioned ideal with the radically situated historical ac-
tuality that must be engaged to accomplish anything lasting. The question, to
276 Conclusion

paraphrase Heidegger on the hermeneutical circle (SZ, 153), is how to break

into the polemical cycle in the right way so that reconstruction can prepare
the ground for the next inevitable confrontation to bear fruit, rather than to
collapse in nihilistic despair when progress falters or seems to fail altogether.
That reconstructive work is at-issue now in the United States, embodied in
questions of affirmative action, police-community relations, mass incarcera-
tion, educational and economic redlining, and many others. To be a found-
ing ontologically, our Founding, just as any founding, must remain a living
touchstone for the polemical reinterpretation of its meaning; otherwise, it will
ossify as a historical dead letter. A founding, to retain its inceptive force, must
be found again in the polemos. That is why figures like Douglass are as much
Founders, or more properly Refounders, as the so-called Founding Fathers.
Because being-human and language are finite and fragile, no human commu-
nity can survive intact as a body politic without such refounding.
Furthermore, because the cycle of de-, pre-, and reconstruction is an exis-
tential feature of being-human, it does not operate only on this grand scale of
major historical change, but also locally. Consider policy making and, as an
example, transportation policy. In my city of Boston, the traffic patterns and
commuting conditions have become so problematic as to verge on systemic
breakdown. To truly address this problem properly requires more than break-
ing down what is going wrong through a deconstructive analysis. It also re-
quires an ideation, a reimagining and reconceptualization of what movement
in a zone of human habitation can and should involve. But even more, a genu-
ine polemical confrontation with what is at-issue in the patterns of human
movement in one’s city requires the informed and engaged savvy, the practi-
cal reason, to implement what improvements can be accomplished, given the
situated potential of the historical contingencies of that specific community,
which in this case also means confronting patterns that both accidentally and
deliberately divide Boston’s citizens by class and race. An ethical polemics
requires attention to everything at issue in a city’s transportation: social and
political dynamics, geography, laws, the economic system, the available ma-
terial resources, the labor and skills necessary for the job, and so on.
Or consider how our laws—intended to protect citizens as they live in
freedom—have become weapons used against citizens to limit their private
opportunities, extract wealth from them in the form of fines and legal fees,
and expose them to unjust harassment and death. And yet, to be free we need
laws as the framework within which to flourish in eleutheric liberty. To repair
and reconstruct our laws—even such minor laws as those regarding jaywalk-
ing or bail posting—we must first be alive to what has broken down in current
law and confront it. Only if we can ideate what a better law would be can we
then propose a specific statutory change that fits with the legal regime as it
 Conclusion 277

now is to bring it closer to what it should be. If this were not possible, then
all positive law would be as immutable as the laws of nature. The life of the
law, as we saw with Antigone, transcends the written letter of the law, but
also cannot subsist without it.
This is how practical wisdom participates in the reconstructive realization
of the ideal, and it happens on the grand historical scale, the local, and the
purely personal, because it is a defining feature of polemical human-being.
Our relation to the truth and to language is zetetic rather than echonic. We
may mean more than we say, and we can always question our works, our
words, and ourselves about the truth of what we mean. The future requires
us to undertake such questioning if we are to refound our democracy by em-
bodying a polemical ethics.

NOTES

1. Douglass, “Pictures and Progress,” in The Portable Frederick Douglass, 357.

2. Recall that in Fragment 53, Heraclitus says that “War . . . makes some slaves,
others free [tous men doulos epoiēse tous de eleutherous].”
3. See the discussion of the link between eleutheria, plant growth, and freedom
as a member of one’s kinship group in Emile Benveniste, “The Free Man,” Indo-
European Language and Society.
4. Levinas, Difficult Freedom.
5. Charles Mills, The Racial Contract, 7.
6. Mills, The Racial Contract, 7; see 5–7 for the distinction between prescriptive
and descriptive.
7. Douglass, “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” in The Portable Frederick
Douglass, 205.
8. See David W. Blight, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom, 196–97.
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 Index

alētheia-3, -2, -1, and -0, 62–64, 200, Being and Time (1927), xxiv, 1, 19,
202. See also truth 35, 48–50, 53, 75, 78, 97–98, 122,
allegory of the cave, the (Plato), 9, 133– 135–36, 148, 176–77, 240–42, 244,
39, 144–54, 156, 158–67, 171–77, 266n6
178–92, 204, 206–35; Heidegger’s Black Lives Matter, 262
treatment of, 57–69 Blitz, Mark, 240
America, 10, 195–97, 203, 214, 261–64, Bloom, Allan, 107, 109, 131n10, 155n9,
271–77. See also United States 194–95, 204n2, 208, 212–13, 227–
Annas, Julia, 27n11, 125, 131n12, 28, 235n2, 236n20
132n21 bondage, 61, 139, 164, 182–83, 191–92,
Antigone, 246–59 221
aporia, 40, 87, 89, 148–49, 151, 155, breakdown, 10–11, 22, 127–29, 137–49,
167, 201, 274 172–77, 183–85, 201–3. See also
Arendt, Hannah, 28, 30 crisis
Aristotle, 12, 27n17, 50, 88, 117, 122,
130n1, 238–40, 244–45, 256–57, care (Sorge), 148, 252
267n11; Metaphysics, 10, 137, 181, chaos, 33–37
232; Nicomachean Ethics, 84, 121, chora, 33
188–89, 240, 260–61, 266; Politics, circle, hermeneutical, 129, 220, 276;
180–81, 196, 257, 250, 260 polemical, 202, 204
atopos, 135–36, 151 Clouds (Aristophanes), 31–32, 77, 107–
Auseinandersetzung, 3, 52, 62–63, 67, 8, 146, 186, 217
98 Cohen, Hermann, 196
authority, xxvin4 comedy, 32–33, 111, 266. See also
tragedy
background practices, 14, 215, 219, 237, community, 20, 45–47, 70–73, 180–81,
261 192–95
Badiou, Alain, 21 conscience, xxiv, 241, 256; call of, 128,
basketball, 203 241–42, 254, 257, 259, 265

289
290 Index

construal (of meaning), 52–53, 96, 75–236, 246; Symposium, 32–33,

116, 160, 174, 185, 192, 200–202, 39–40, 77–78, 103n44, 135, 139,
211–12, 223 199, 205n13, 233
contract, racial, 272; social, 70, 192, divided line (Plato), 81, 89–93, 105–19,
244, 272 123–30, 157–58, 163–69, 172, 213,
conversation, xxi–xxiv, 167–70 234–35
courage, 80–82, 121, 171, 189 Douglass, Frederick, 10, 268, 274–76
crisis, 8, 17–18, 22, 262; of modernity, Dreyfus, Hubert, 215, 261
72–73; of unmeaning, 123. See also Duff, Alexander, 15
breakdown
Crow Nation, 140, 151 earthquake. See meaning
echonicism, 22–23
Dahlstrom, Daniel, 101n16 echonic philosophy, 90–97, 108, 115,
Dasein (being-human and human- 124, 165–67, 171–73, 175–77, 227,
being), 22, 25, 40, 48–49, 148, 236n19
242–43 eleutheria, 71, 73, 269–70. See also
deconstruction, 54, 90, 93–100, 125, freedom
142–43, 145, 160–61, 167, 173–74, embodiment, 4, 17, 23, 25, 47, 115,
176–77, 185, 191, 195, 264–65, 118, 163–64, 180–81, 183–85, 189–
271–73 91, 194–95, 229–30, 239, 266n2,
de-, pre-, and reconstruction, 25, 55, 61, 275
95–96, 124, 212, 216, 257, 264–65, epieikeia, 260
276 equality, 6, 15, 117, 194–97, 199–200,
Declaration of Independence, 271–75 269–75
Derrida, Jacques, xxvin3, 54, 56n33, Ereignis (event), 37, 50, 63, 72, 109,
142–3 122, 131–32n19
Descartes, René, 9–10, 69 erōs, 39, 77, 177, 226, 233
destiny, 246, 266n6 ethical life, 119–22, 234, 237–38, 242,
dialectic, 145–54, 161–69, 195–99, 248, 253, 255–68
225–29 ethics and the ethical, 64, 122, 234,
dialogos (διάλογος), 3, 84–85, 106–7, 253–64
189–90 ethno-nationalism, 1, 6, 17, 244
dialogue, xxi–xxvi, xxvin4, 2–5, 8–11, event. See Ereignis
26n7, 85–90, 174, 176, 189–90, 200,
203–4, 263–65 Faye, Emmanuel, 5, 7, 44–45, 282
dialogues (Plato), Apology; xvii, 9, 75, fascism, 6–8, 20, 45–47. See also
77, 81–82, 84, 102, 147; Cratylus, National Socialism
104, 180; Crito, xxii; Euthyphro, finitude, 16–17, 72–73, 89, 97–98, 136,
xvii, 87, 146, 186; Meno, 78–79, 177, 181, 190–91, 262–66, 269–70
102n24, 131, 153–54, 162–63; founders, 138, 178, 183, 188, 212–15,
Parmenides, 26–27, 168; Phaedo, 220, 272–76
82–88, 92, 94–95, 152, 154, 176, founding, 178, 227, 264
180; Phaedrus, xxi–xxiii, xxvin3, Founding, the (American), 271–77
103n44; Republic, xv, xvii, 2, 10, freedom, 5–6, 20, 30–33, 39, 42, 45–46,
14–15, 21–23, 26–27, 42, 47, 61–62, 54–55, 57–62, 67–73, 76–77, 97, 99,
 Index 291

191, 228, 234, 268–71, 273. See also ideation, xxii–xxvi, 23–24, 132n34, 133,
liberty 143, 160–77, 197–99
friend and friendship, xxiv–xxv, 180 illusion, 200–204
imagination, xxii–xxiii, xxv, 23, 25, 28,
Gadamer, Hans-Georg, xxvin4, 123, 129 30, 81, 90, 96, 108–9, 112, 115–18,
Gendlin, Eugene, 128 125–30, 131n12, 135, 137–38, 169,
gene engineering, 121 176–77, 183, 259, 273
Gonzalez, Francisco, 58–59, 100n3, intellection, 81, 109, 112–17, 131n12
103n43 irony, xxvin2, 75–76, 91, 106–7, 130n3
Griswold, Charles, xxvin2, 27n11,
103n44, 130n4 James, William, 52, 128, 168
Gyges, Ring of, 192 Jefferson, Thomas, 261–64
Jim Crow, 262, 264
Hades, 126 justice, 75–82, 87–91, 106, 110–11, 117–
healing (iasis), 144–53, 171–73, 177, 21, 191–99, 226–32, 252–64, 273–75
187–92, 204, 233
Heidegger, Martin, 1–8, 12–20 Kallipolis (Socrates’s “city in speech”),
helicoidal, 51, 128–29, 154, 187, 203, 90, 95–96, 103, 108, 137–39, 178–
275 80, 192–95, 198, 213
Heraclitus, 2–3, 5, 10, 12, 25, 33, 36, Kant, Immanuel, 6, 12, 17, 20, 27n25,
52, 59, 97, 106, 133, 160, 206, 229, 40, 88, 101n5, 108, 118, 120, 168,
258, 264, 269, 277n2 191, 196, 205n7
hermeneutics, 25, 55, 208, 226. See also Kearney, Richard, 125–26, 226
meaning
Hesiod, 28, 33, 35 language, xxv–xxvi, 21,71, 85–86, 105–
historicity, 15, 26n10, 42, 49, 53, 72, 6, 115, 173, 208, 210–13, 273–77
98, 103n44, 123, 131n18, 206, 212– law, 150–51, 247–48, 252–64, 276–77;
16, 230–32, 241–46, 268, 270 natural, 17, 39, 199, 254; positive,
history, 4–8, 13–20, 49–53, 97–100, 136, 254, 277; rule of, 244, 253, 271;
207–15, 226–34, 273–75 unwritten, 254–55, 258
Hölderlin, Friedrich, 33, 35–36 Lear, Jonathan, 140
homeland, 34–35, 44, 46–47, 56n16, Levinas, Emmanuel, xxv, xxvin5, 1,
182 3–4, 64, 254–55, 270–71
hooks, bell, 46 Liberalism, 5–8, 13–15, 17, 20, 69–73,
Husserl, Edmund, 29, 48–49, 211–12, 99, 122, 230, 242–44, 252–53, 265–
234 66, 268–71
Hyland, Drew, xv, 41, 90, 103n42 liberty, 5–6, 69, 262–63, 269–71, 275–
76. See also freedom
Icarus, 28, 38–42, 46, 181, 200 light, 88–94, 133–39, 144, 153–54,
idea, xxii, 5, 10, 12–19, 49–50, 59–61, 160–76, 220–24, 232–35
66–9, 87–88, 91–92; of the good Locke, John, 6, 251
104–10, 119–30 logos, xxiv, 2–4, 11, 14, 52–53, 83–86,
idealism, skeptical, 26, 78, 89, 94, 111, 94–96, 106–7, 142–43, 168, 189–90,
130, 172, 177–78, 191, 199, 222, 211, 251–61
270. See also zetetic philosophy Lycurgus, 213, 215
292 Index

mathematics, 113–14, 117, 145, 165, the unsaid, 64; and violence, 248;
169, 187 and wonder, 11, 232; and world,
Marx, Karl, 5, 60, 226 xxiv–xxv, 9, 30, 35–38, 41–42, 52,
materiality, 118, 183–84, 200 63; and zeteticism, 77–79
McCoy, Marina, xv, 3, 225–26, 229 mental image, xxii, 23
meaning, 24; and background practices, metaethics, 2, 5, 18, 104, 199–200, 264
215; and Being, 48–49, 51, 59–60, metapolitics, 4–5, 15, 26
71, 74–75, 83, 257; breakdown of, Mills, Charles, 272
140, 143, 147, 173, 201, 223, 265; misology, 152, 162, 166, 170
and the cave of community, 223; music, 213–18
and chaos, 34; and community, myth, 10, 31–32, 38–39, 78–79, 94–97,
97–98; construal of, 52, 116, 127, 146, 180, 200, 226
211–12; and dialogue, 168, 274; and Myth of Er, 96
the Divided Ring, 126–29; and the
“dot-dot-dot” (Gendlin), 128–29; Nagel, Thomas, 183, 191, 204
double-acting, 3; earthiness of, 120, naming, 208, 210
202; earthquake in, 37–38, 43, 127, National Socialism, 1, 12–13, 20,
250; and embodiment, 183–84; ex 44–46, 230–31, 242, 263
nihilo, 38, 201–2, 241; and fore- Nietzsche, Friedrich, 5, 12, 17, 27n26,
structure, 100; fraying of, 54, 58, 39, 60, 73–74, 91, 98, 110, 131n7,
126, 144, 204, 259; and freedom, 200
72, 234; and hermeneutics, 208; and nihilism, 14, 46–47, 57–59, 68, 72–75,
the idea of the good, 124, 164, 234; 97, 99, 102n24, 105, 122, 127,
historicity of, 230–31; ideas and, 151–54, 160–63, 169, 176, 190–91,
13, 164, 230, 234; intending of, 85, 233–35
102n33, 234; intimations of, 100, nomos (custom, law, norm), 136, 208,
127, 251, 259; and life, 18, 29, 88, 210, 224, 255–56, 259. See also law
149, 151–52; making of, xxi, xxiv, norms. See nomos
52, 210, 215; and nihilism, 74, 190,
231, 235, 265; ontic and ontological, ocularcentrism, 105, 130n2, 168
24; and opinion, 163–65, 167, 185; opinion, 145–54, 160–69, 173–77, 185–
phenomenologically given, 14, 62, 91, 218–24, 228–35
190, 233; and philosophy, 169; Ovid, 38–39
and poiēsis, 211; and polemos, 19,
63–66, 100, 128, 141,190, 202, 257, Parmenides, 5, 76–77, 168, 206, 247,
274; and the polis, 249, 256; and 258
reconstruction, 65, 90, 185, 251, particularism, 12, 15–18
256; sedimentation of, 211–12; and passers–by, 135, 162, 207–11, 223–24
Socratic phenomenology, 83–88, Patočka, Jan, 125, 231–34, 264
163–64, 174, 184, 233, 273–74; and Phenomenology, Socratic, 83–86,
sophistry, 223–24; and statements, 102n32, 163–64, 167, 273–74
63, 71; and subjectivity, 72–73; and philosophy, Western, 5, 7, 57, 105
transcendence, 40–41, 251; and truth, phronēsis, 18, 21, 64–65, 120–23, 132–
62–64, 200; and uncanniness, 232; 33, 189, 196–97, 230, 235, 237–66,
and unmeaning, 65, 123, 259; and 260–61, 275. See also wisdom
 Index 293

piety, 10–11, 78, 80–90, 104, 130, 133, Sallis, John, 56n15, 155n9
161–62, 167, 176, 190, 204 Schmidt, Dennis, 252, 267n12
pistis, xxiii–xxiv, 80, 89–90, 112. See science, 28, 31, 51, 82–84, 112, 219,
also trust 226–27, 260
Plato, xxi–xxiv, 5, 41–42, 50, 58–62, 66, second sailing (Socrates’s), 82–88
91–97, 105, 122, 167, 176, 206, 251 sedimentation, 211–15, 235n4, 237–38
Platonism, 5, 13–15, 19, 26n10, 40, 57, shadows, 160–73, 207–13, 224–26,
59–60, 66–68, 72–73, 91, 97–98, 229–34
100n4, 101n9, 103n38, 104, 119, Sheehan, Thomas, 27n30, 62–63,
122, 125, 131n6, 131n18, 131, 244, 101n18
252–53 skepticism, 9; nihilistic 76–79, 99. See
poiēsis, 108, 208, 210–11, 213 also zetetic philosophy
polemical ethics, 58, 60, 65, 88, 123, social contract, 70, 192, 244, 272
127, 200, 238, 241, 251, 258, 262– social imaginary, the, 226–28
63, 268, 270 Socrates, 75–87
polemos, 2–4, 6–8, 15, 17–20, 25, sophistry, 75, 78, 81, 107, 145, 151,
33–38, 52, 55, 58–59, 62–68, 95–96, 153, 163, 216–32
98, 106–7, 172–73, 183, 190, 200– Sophocles, 30, 256–59, 264
204, 228, 231–32, 247–48, 264–66 Strauss, Leo, 77–78, 102n25, 131n6,
preconstruction, 25, 94–97, 125, 175– 155n8, 205n8, 236n15
76, 185, 191, 199, 201, 204, 258, sun, 42–48, 90–93, 104–32, 171–73
264–65
propaganda, 224–25, 272. See also technē, 152–53, 225, 258
sophistry Thales, 31, 55n13, 111, 120, 180–81, 189
property, 45, 195–96, 211, 213, 262–63, Thrasymachus, 75–82, 95, 106–7, 147–
272 48, 175, 181, 192, 217–18, 224–30,
puppets and puppetry, 135, 224, 232–33 236n20
Pyrrhonism, 102n24 tragedy, 65, 94, 246–57, 266
transcendence, 17–18, 39–48, 99–100,
race, 46, 262, 272, 276; racism, 7, 250, 173–77, 234; situated 25, 206, 229,
262, 267n10, 273 264–65
reconstruction, 25, 95, 97–100, 120, Trott, Adriel, 102n32
143–44, 161, 174–75, 185, 190, 195, Trump, Donald, 6
201–4, 234–35, 255, 263–65 trust, 39, 78, 80–87, 129–30, 131n12,
responsibility, 245–48, 252–58, 263, 152–54, 167–70. See also pistis
265, 271 truth, absolute, 93, 108, 175; as alētheia,
Ricoeur, Paul, 226 62–64, 69, 98, 104, 108, 118; as
rights, 6, 46, 72, 271; civil, 262–63, alogon, 89; as Auseinandersetzung,
272–73; human, 13–17, 243–44, 62, 67, 98; of Being, 257; and
253–54; natural, 70; women’s, 274 conscience, 241; as correctness,
Roochnik, David, xv, 28–29 59–60, 66–67; as derivative, 62; and
roots, 31, 24, 43–47, 56n16 dialectic, 162; and the Divided Line,
Rosen, Stanley, 99, 103n42, 124, 129, 92; empirical, 202; and Ereignis,
131n6 122; finite, 14; and echonicism,
Russell, Bertrand, 91–92 90–91, 108, 134, 166, 171–75,
294 Index

195; and freedom, 69–73; and the unmeaning, 10–11, 25–26, 61, 64–65,
idea of the good, 109–10, 123; 74–75, 123–29, 251–59
intimations of, 93–94, 99, 118, 133, unsaid, the, 60–67, 88, 167, 174,
162, 166, 233; and mentoring, 221, 272–74
227; and nihilism, 151, 162; ontic
and ontological, 92, 104, 201–2; violence, xxv, 7, 88, 186, 248, 257, 261,
and phronēsis, 189; and polemical 264, 265–66
ethics, 200; and polemos, 19, 36, vision, 66–68, 92, 104–6, 130nn1–2,
66, 98, 200; and post-truth world, 146, 168–69, 171, 174–77, 181–82,
218; and preconstruction, 94, 96; 189–90
and relativism, 231; and rhetoric, voice, xxiii–xxv; divine, 81–82
226; and rule, 61, 66, 91, 93, 179;
and sophistry, 225; and statements war, 2, 19, 25, 30–31
(or propositions), 62, 64, 108; as Weil, Simone, 45–47
temporal, 68–69; and technological wisdom, 75–79, 99, 107, 166, 171, 235;
mastery, 96; transcendent, 13–14, practical, 18, 21, 47–48, 94, 99,
40, 69, 90–91, 98–99, 175, 221, 231; 189–90, 192, 197, 199, 227, 234,
and troth, 89–90, 232; and trust, 239, 253, 277; theoretical, 120, 189,
89–90; as unconcealment, 49–50, 260. See also phronēsis
59, 62; and unmeaning, 61; and Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 9, 12, 27n21
untruth, 64–65; and vision, 68; and wonder, 9–12, 27n17, 27n19, 31, 51,
zeteticism, 77–78, 93, 97–98, 108, 53, 64, 72–73, 124–29, 162, 174–75,
173, 190, 232. See also alētheia 201, 203–4, 224–25, 232–33, 251
tyranny, 75–76, 78, 88, 102n32, 192, words, 49–52, 63–64, 85–86, 105–7,
198, 230, 236n20, 260, 263, 265, 168–69, 210–11
269–70 writing, xxi–xxiv, xxvin3

United States, 6, 46, 192, 197, 226–27, zetetic philosophy, 73, 79, 87–100,
276. See also America 102n24, 108, 115, 124, 127–28,
universalism, 7, 12, 15, 17–18, 45, 153–54, 172, 191–92, 229, 233. See
101n9, 122–23, 230–31, 242, 270 also skepticism