The problem starts with Plato. But never having been recognized as a problem, it continues to plague philosophy, that is, before Heidegger came onto the scene to expose how Western metaphysics had gone awry. The problem is summarized in his essay Plato’s Doctrine Of Truth. It is the problem of metaphysics bequeathed by Plato. Through his reading of the “allegory of the cave,” Heidegger argues that Plato inaugurates a remarkable shift in the essence of truth that simultaneously founds both the essence of Being as “presence,” and the orientation of the human being toward this essence. Prior to the shift, Heidegger’s Greeks understood truth — aletheia — as an “unhiddenness” in relation to a “hiddenness” that remained beyond the grasp of subjective self-assertion. “Truth originally means what has been wrested from hiddenness.”1 However after Plato, “being present is no longer what it was in the beginning of Western thinking: the emergence of the hidden into unhiddenness.”2 After Plato, what originally appeared ceased to show itself in relation to the mystery of the hidden; but instead came to be yoked to the outward appearance of what is made visible by the “idea.” “A ληθεαι comes under the yoke of the ιδεα.”3
Heidegger goes on to explain, by positing the idea as that which brings forth the unhidden as well as that by which the unhidden is recognized, Plato comes to construct truth as correctness in the sense of catching sight of the idea as it is manifest in the world. The idea, particularly the Idea of all ideas, the Good, replaces the hidden as the source of beings that are no longer understood in an “attunement” to the hidden but in terms of perception. “Ever since, what matters in all our fundamental orientations toward beings is the achieving of a correct view of the ideas.”2 According to Heidegger, this shift inherited from Plato founds both the notion of Being as “objective presence” and the notion of truth as correctness that continue to plague Western metaphysics.
Inseparable from this change in the essence of truth is a parallel change in the essence of education that “has to do with one’s being and thus takes [2] place in the very ground of one’s essence.”4 Plato’s allegory is the documentation of such an education depicted in the four stages of “dwelling” that Heidegger points out in the prisoner’s ascent from the cave.5 Because truth is now oriented toward what can be perceived “as something” through the lens of the idea, education occurs fundamentally with respect to sight. Human nature must subsequently be educated to orient itself toward the outward appearance of things as they may be grasped by the idea lighted by the Idea of the Good. “If our comportment with beings is always and everywhere a matter of the ιδεαν of the ιδεα, the seeing of the ‘visible form,’ then all our efforts must be concentrated above all on making such seeing possible. And that requires the correct vision.”3 With the shift from concealment, or hiddenness, to what can be made present through the lens of the idea, the essence of truth henceforth lies in the correct relation between the outward appearance of a thing and the perception of that thing established by the Idea. This is the message, Heidegger believes, that the “allegory of the cave” is meant to disclose. “Truth is no longer, as it was qua unhiddenness, the fundamental trait of being itself. Instead, as a consequence of getting yoked under the Idea, truth has become correctness, and henceforth it will be characteristic of the knowing of beings.”2
- Martin Heidegger, “Plato’s Doctrine of Truth,” tr. Thomas Sheehan, in William McNeill, ed., Pathmarks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 177.[↩]
- Heidegger, “Plato’s Doctrine of Truth” in Pathmarks, 179.[↩][↩][↩]
- Heidegger, “Plato’s Doctrine of Truth” in Pathmarks, 176.[↩][↩]
- Heidegger, “Plato’s Doctrine of Truth” in Pathmarks, 166.[↩]
- Heidegger, “Plato’s Doctrine of Truth” in Pathmarks, 168-172.[↩]