1. LW: 187. I have marked “tm” in cases where I have modified translations. A draft of this essay was first presented as part of a lecture course given at the Collegium Phaenomenologicum in July of 2013. I thank Drew Highland for inviting me to teach that course. And I thank the attendees, John Sallis foremost among them, for an intense and fruitful discussion afterward.
2. Other than the three texts gathered in Country Path Conversations, the only other two texts Heidegger composed in the form of dialogues were “Das abendländische Gespräch: 1946/1948” (GA 75: 57–196), a long, less polished, and unfinished dialogue written in the wake of Country Path Conversations; and “From a Conversation on Language (1953–54): Between a Japanese and an Inquirer” (GA 12, 79–146/OWL 1–54, translation of the title modified). Although the three dialogues in Country Path Conversations appear polished and complete, the editor of GA 77 informs us that in Heidegger’s Nachlaß can be found sketches for continuations of all three (GA 77: 246/CPC 161). Heidegger published a revised excerpt of the first Conversation was in 1959 (GA 13: 37—74/DT 59–90). For some insightful reflections on the dramatic elements of Heidegger’s dialogues, together with some comparisons with Plato’s dialogues, see Drew A. Hyland, “Heidegger’s (Dramatic?) Dialogues,” Research in Phenomenology 45 (2015): 341–57; and three articles by Katherine Davies: “The Resistant Interlocutor: Plato, Heidegger, and the End of Dialogue,” Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy 23/1 (2018): 165–90; “Heidegger’s Reading(s) of the Phaedrus,” Studia Phaenomenologica 20 (2020): 191–221; and “Heidegger’s Conversational Pedagogy,” Research in Phenomenology 53, no. 3 (2022): 399–424.
3. LW: 212, 241.
4. John Sallis, Chorology: On Beginning in Plato’s Timaeus (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999).
5. LW: 182
6. LW: 179
7. See LW: 181, 186.
8. LW: 187.
9. LW: 187.
10. LW: 212.
11. LW: 241.
12. GA 34/ETP
13. GA 9: 203–38/PM 155–82.
14. For a treatment of the development of Heidegger’s path of thought that focuses on his turn from the will to nonwilling, see Bret W. Davis, Heidegger and the Will: On the Way to Gelassenheit (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2007). For a sketch of the content of Country Path Conversations, see my Translator’s Foreword to CPC.
15. GA 77: 95/61; see also 92/59, 138/89, 199/129, 205/132, 230/149.
16. GA 77: 187/CPC 122.
17. GA 5: 75—113/QCT 115–54.
18. GA 77: 5–12/3–11.
19. GA 55: 89.
21. GA 77: 41–42, 141/CPC 26–27, 92.
22. On the fate of “nature” in the turn of Heidegger’s thought that can be witnessed most clearly in Country Path Conversations, see Bret W. Davis, “Returning the World to Nature: Heidegger’s Turn from a Transcendental-Horizonal Projection of World to an Indwelling Releasement to the Open-Region,” Continental Philosophy Review 47/3 (2014): 373–97.
23. GA 77: 91, 209/CPC 58, 135.
24. ZSD 63/BW 433.
25. GA 77: 187/CPC 122.
26. GA 65/CP.
27. In addition to his Chorology (1999), see especially the following works by John Sallis: Being and Logos: Reading the Platonic Dialogues, 3rd ed. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996 [first edition 1975]); Platonic Legacies (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004); and The Figure of Nature: On Greek Origins (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016).
28. According to Heidegger, Nietzsche’s reversal of Platonic oppositions is an overturning that consummates the history of metaphysics; Nietzsche is said to sometimes anticipate but never quite manage to “twist free” into a nonmetaphysical thinking. See Ni 180, 231–42/N1 154, 200–10; Ni 473–81/N3 3–9; Nii 199–202/ N4 147–49. See also Davis, Heidegger and the Will, 151–57.
29. Jacques Derrida, “Khōra,” translated by Ian Mcleod, in Jacques Derrida, On the Name, edited by Thomas Dutoit (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 119–120.
30. N1 151.
31. GA 77: 187/CPC 122.
32. GA 77: 109/CPC 70.
33. GA 77: 198/CPC 128.
34. EHD 103/EHP 126 tm.
35. Translations of passages from Plato’s dialogues are generally taken from The Collected Dialogues of Plato, edited by Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1961). I have sometimes modified these translations and, when commenting on Sallis’s interpretations, often used his translations.
36. GA 77: 56/CPC 36.
37. GA 77: 137/CPC 89.
38. G. W. F. Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp,1986), 46; Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, translated by A. V. Miller (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 27.
39. Heidegger’s only explicit reference to Hegel in Country Path Conversations serves to distance his attempt to think the sense in which “physics is applied technology” from the “tricky tactics of reversal” one finds in the assertions of philosophers such as Hegel, who claims that “in order to be able to follow the thinking of metaphysics, one must attempt to stand on one’s head and walk like that” (GA 77: 7/CPC 4).
40. Sallis, Chorology, 123. It is beyond the scope of this essay to do justice to the manner in which Sallis’s own phenomenological thinking has—in the wake of and, at times, in critique of Heidegger—developed in part out of his careful engagement with Plato’s chorology. Sallis has coupled a pursuit of the topic of imagination, which Heidegger dramatically brought to the fore in his Kant book and then abandoned, with a pursuit of the question of the “sensible,” which cannot be reduced to the question of the “meaning” of being. With this coupling of imagination and the sensible, and drawing on early Greek discourses of the elements including their centrality to Plato’s chorology, Sallis develops a thinking of “the elementals” that adds a concrete sensibility to the Heideggerian chorology discussed in the present essay. In addition to Chorology and his other works on Plato, some key works of Sallis in this regard are Echoes: Ater Heidegger (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990); Force of Imagination: The Sense of the Elemental (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000); and Logic of Imagination: The Expanse of the Elemental (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012).
41. Sallis, Chorology, 111.
42. GA 77: 113/73.
43. EM 50/IM 72 tm.
44. EM 51/IM 73, emphasis added.
45. EM 51/IM 73 tm.
46. Note that, given that there are indications that at least some of the parenthetical remarks in Introduction to Metaphysics were in fact added after 1935, it may be that the passage quoted earlier was written ater the Heraclitus lecture course of 1944 and ater Country Path Conversations (1944–45). One can also hear an echo of the chōra in Heidegger’s 1959 “Hölderlin’s Earth and Heaven” when he speaks of “the Greek χορός” as the festive “round dance” in which the fourfold are gathered (EHD 174/EHP 198). Ater the original drat of the present essay was written and presented at the Collegium Phaenomenologicum in July of 2013, a fine English translation of Heidegger’s 1943 and 1944 lectures on Heraclitus was published (HC). Although I have kept my own translations and references to GA 55, the English translation includes the German pagination and so the context of the passages I cite from GA 55 can easily be found in that volume.
47. GA 55: 337.
48. Richard D. McKirahan, Philosophy Before Socrates: An Introduction with Texts and Commentary (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994), 117.
49. GA 55: 330.
50. GA 55: 333.
51. GA 55: 335.
52. GA 77: 223/CPC 145. These terms are gleaned from Heidegger’s translation and interpretation of Heraclitus’s Fragment 50. See GA 55: 243–47; and VA 218/EGT 75.
53. GA 55: 337.
54. GA 55: 338.
55. GA 77: 114/CPC 74.
56. GA 15: 335/FS 41 tm.
57. GA 65/CP, written 1936–38.
58. See Sallis, Platonic Legacies, 86–90.
59. GA 55: 335.
60. see GA 77: 182/CPC 118.
61. In critique of Aristotle’s misinterpretation of Plato’s chōra as topos and as hyle (see Physics 192a, 209b), Sallis avers that these equations have no basis in the Timaeus. See Sallis, Chorology, 152; and Platonic Legacies, 31–32.
62. Sallis, Platonic Legacies, 42.
63. See Heidegger’s essays collected in QCT and Davis, Heidegger and the Will, 173–78.
64. See GA 9: 197—98/PM 151; GA 77: 151–57, 205–6/CPC 99–103, 132–33; GA 13: 24/DT 55.
65. On the curious similarities between the before-being of the chōra and the beyond-being of the Good, see Sallis, Platonic Legacies, 54, 78. Sallis goes so far as to suggest: “Is it not in the chorology that one finds, then, a Platonic counterpart to the movement back through the first beginning ventured in [Heidegger’s] Contributions to Philosophy?” “To be sure,” he adds, “the chorology did not become part of the Platonic legacy; its reduction and effective exclusion is already at work as early as Aristotle. The Platonic chorology is rather something held back from the legacy, something not passed along, except for the traces remaining in the text of the Timaeus. Yet those traces endure beyond that Platonism that chorology already exceeds” (Platonic Legacies, 93). Sallis has pioneered the recovery of those traces. The question remains, however, in what sense or senses Plato’s pre- or proto-metaphysical chorology, which both undercuts and underlies the “first inception” of metaphysics, is the counterpart to the other chorology involved in Heidegger’s “other inception” of postmetaphysical thinking It is beyond the scope of the present essay to pursue the manner in which later Platonists and Neoplatonists took up the legacy of Plato’s dialogues and of his so-called unwritten doctrines. The latter include the idea that, for there to be intelligible and sensible beings, the first principle of the One must, from the beginning, be complicated by the second principle of The Ininite Dyad (see Aristotle’s Physics 209b13–15, and Metaphysics 987b25–988a15, 1081a22, 1081b22, 32–33). The Indefinite Dyad (αὁρίστος δυάς) is akin to, and perhaps even synonymous with, the chōra. The One is the principle of unity and determinateness, whereas the Infinite Dyad is the principle of multiplicity and indeterminacy. Both these primordial principles are coprimordially necessary for the generation of sensible and intelligible beings, and yet they are both before or beyond being and thus insensible and unknowable in themselves. For rethinking the relation between Heidegger’s postmetaphysical thought and Plotinus in particular, the work of Reiner Schürmann is especially noteworthy. See his “Neoplatonic Henology as an Overcoming of Metaphysics,” Research in Phenomenology 13 (1983): 25–41; and his Broken Hegemonies, translated by Reginald Lilly (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), 137–88. See also Sallis’s engagement with Schürmann’s work in “Platonism at the Limit of Metaphysics,” in Platonic Legacies, 61–78. For a nuanced critique of Heidegger’s metaphysical interpretation of Plato’s Idea of the Good as failing to attend to the strategies and ironies at play in Plato’s text and to the similarities to his own postmetaphysical thought, see Adraiaan T. Peperzak, “ Heidegger and Plato’s Idea of the Good,” in Reading Heidegger: Commemorations, edited by John Sallis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 258–85. For a compelling argument that Socrates’s method of elenctic discussion in Plato’s early dialogues presents us with one model of the nonmetaphysical thinking “in the between” that Heidegger calls for in texts such as Contributions to Philosophy (GA65/CP), see Sean D. Kirkland, “Thinking in the Between with Heidegger and Plato,” Research in Phenomenology 37 (2007): 95–111. Kirkland argues that not only are these early dialogues of Plato compatible with Heidegger’s nonmetaphysical thinking, but that, in so far as Socrates is primarily concerned with human virtue, they “open up the possibility of engaging political and ethical problems, without betraying Heidegger’s insight as to the limits of the metaphysical concepts that traditionally ground those discussions” (111). However, Gregory Fried argues that, in order to revive ethical and political thought ater their foundering in “Heideggerian postmodernism,” we need to return to a nondogmatic Plato who does not deny our finitude and yet who inspires us to repeatedly aspire toward the transcendent Good. See Gregory Fried, “Back to the Cave: A Platonic Rejoinder to Heideggerian Postmodernism,” in Heidegger and the Greeks, edited by Drew A. Hyland and John Panteleimon Manoussakis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 156–76; on Plato in this regard, see also Drew Hyland, Finitude and Transcendence in the Platonic Dialogues (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), esp. 108–9, 176–78, 191–95. It is true that Heidegger failed to do more than suggest in passing that his thinking implied an “originary ethics” (GA 9: 356/PM: 271), and even commentators who are sympathetic with his aversion to metaphysical moralizing have bemoaned what Drew Hyland calls “ Heidegger’s longstanding antipathy toward ‘the political,’ toward ‘ethics,’ towards that whole set of issues that could be said to be associated with ‘the polis’ ” (Hyland, “ Heidegger’s [Dramatic?] Dialogues,” 349). While it is beyond the scope of the present essay to address this important issue, it is no doubt a momentous question for a postmetaphysical chorology whether it can provide the grounds—or groundless source—for ethical and political critique. Whether it is thought with or against (the letter or the spirit of) Plato’s texts, might not this other chorology imply a kind of transcendence—or, rather, “trans-descendance”—toward the source of ethical and political thought and action? (The term “trans-descendance” was apparently first used by Jean Wahl, yet I borrow it from Kyoto School philosopher of Zen, Nishitani Keiji; see Bret W. Davis, “The Step Back Through Nihilism: The Radical Orientation of Nishitani Keiji’s Philosophy of Zen,” Synthesis Philosophica 37 [2004]: 139–59.) Does not this other chorology and, indeed, Heidegger’s entire path of thought indicate a third way beyond both metaphysical transcendence and positivistic immanence? The question could be put thus: Do ethical and political thought and action require transcendence toward the supernatural, or might they receive their impetus and orientation from a trans-descendance toward a deeper sense of the natural?
66. GA 77: 155/102.
67. GA 77: 149/ CPC 97; see G 65–66/DT 86.
68. See Davis, “Returning the World to Nature.”
69. See GA 65: §97.
70. GA 90: 5.
72. GA 77: 146–47/CPC 95–96.
73. GA 9: 201, 231/PM 155, 177; see also GA 34: 17–18/ETP 12.
74. EM 11/IM 15–16.
75. Sallis, Figure of Nature, 235.
75. Sallis, Figure of Nature, 232-33.
77. Sallis, Platonic Legacies, 132–33.
78. See Sallis, Platonic Legacies, 137.
79. See Sallis, Figure of Nature, 238.
80. See John Sallis, “Gathering Language,” in John Sallis, Elemental Discourses (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2018), 34.
81. GA 12: 9–30/PLT 187–208.
82. Among his many works on art, see John Sallis, Transfigurements: On the True Sense of Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008); and John Sallis, Songs of Nature: On Paintings by Cao Jun (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2020).
83. See Julia Kristeva, “The Semiotic Chora Ordering the Drives,” in Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, translated by Margaret Waller (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 25–30.
84. My treatment of the Phaedrus in relation to Heidegger’s thought will not pursue a textual analysis of Heidegger’s own various treatments of this dialogue over the course of his career. In her “Heidegger’s Reading(s) of the Phaedrus,” Katherine Davies examines Heidegger’s three explicit readings of the Phaedrus—in the 1924/25 Plato’s Sophist lectures (GA 19: 308–52/PS 214—44); in a seminar on the Phaedrus in 1932 (GA 83: 85–150); and in the first lecture course on Nietzsche in 1936 (Ni 218–31/N1 188–99)—as well as in what she interprets as an implicit engagement in “Das abendländische Gespräch: 1946/1948” (GA 75: 57–196). In 1936 Heidegger says of Plato’s Phaedrus that is “this dialogue must be accounted the most accomplished one in all essential respects” (Ni 222/N1 191), and Davies argues that Heidegger “remains steadfast in praising this Platonic dialogue above all others,” and that “these readings provide fertile ground for reconsidering Heidegger’s engagement with Plato over and above Platonism” (195). With regard to Heidegger’s evolving interpretation of Nietzsche gathered in his two Nietzsche volumes (N1 and N2), Hannah Arendt remarks that there is an important sense in which in the first volume Heidegger still largely “goes along with” Nietzsche, while the second is written in an “unmistakable polemical tone” (Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind [San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1978], part 2, 173). This pattern can also be detected in Heidegger’s evolving interpretations of Plato, which become more critical—indeed polemical—the further along he progresses in developing his interpretative schema of the history of Western metaphysics, a historical narrative in which the figures of Plato and Nietzsche mark the beginning and end. In the 1936 Nietzsche lecture course, Heidegger in fact announces this critical turn in his interpretive approach when he writes: “We say ‘Platonism’ and not Plato, because here we are dealing with the conception of knowledge that corresponds to that term, not by way of an original and detailed examination of Plato’s works, but only by setting in rough relief one particular aspect of his work” (Ni 177/N1 151). Yet Heidegger subsequently blurs this crucial distinction between “Platonism” and “Plato,” for example in his programmatic “Plato’s Doctrine of Truth,” written in 1940 (GA 9: 203–38/PM 155–82), which interprets the Allegory of the Cave in Plato’s Republic as the locus classicus for the transformation of the concept of truth from unconcealment to correctness. Yet, as Francisco Gonzalez points out, Heidegger’s reading of the Allegory of the Cave in his 1931 lecture course (GA 34/ETP) was far more nuanced. See Francisco Gonzalez, Plato and Heidegger: A Question of Dialogue (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2009), 107–36. Noting that Heidegger mentions in a 1954 letter that “I’ve now made a decisive discovery” about “the transformation of λόγος in Plato,” Katherine Davies suggests a recovery of his first extensive engagement with Plato’s dialogues in the 1924–25 lecture course published as Plato’s Sophist, in which Heidegger claims that the central theme of the Phaedrus is λόγος (GA19: 315–16/PS 219; Davies, “ Heidegger’s Reading[s] of the Phaedrus,” 210). Yet in his close reading of Heidegger’s 1932 seminar on the Phaedrus (“‘I have to Live in Eros’: Heidegger’s 1932 Seminar on Plato’s Phaedrus,” Epoché 19/2: 217–40), Francisco Gonzalez explains how, whereas Heidegger’s 1924–25 treatment of the Phaedrus had focused just on logos, his 1932 treatment focuses especially on the intimate relation of logos and eros, concluding that “the essence of every λόγος is the ‘λόγος ερωτικός’” (GA 83: 313). Yet Gonzalez also indicates: “his intensive engagement with the notion of eros in Plato is, however, short lived. When Heidegger delivers again in 1933–34 his course On the Essence of Truth, … the notion of Seinserstrebnis that plays such a central role in the course as delivered in 1931–32 drops out completely. … Eros is clearly associated here with the transformation of being into ιδέα and truth into ὁμοίωσις and thus with the beginning of metaphysics. If Heidegger speaks of the beginning of ‘philosophy’ here, he clearly means the beginning of ‘the eros for wisdom.’ Many years later in the lecture, “Was ist das—die Philosophy?” Heidegger will speak of this transformation as one from φιλεῖν τὸ σοφόν understood as being in harmony or concord with the wise (Einklang, ἅρμονία), the kind of ‘philosophy’ that characterized the Presocratics, into a striving after [Streben nach] the σοφόν and thus philosophy understood as ὄρεξις and eros” (Gonzalez, 230; WP 50–51). Gonzalez wonders: while in 1932 “Heidegger suggests that the catastrophe for philosophy is when it ceases to be erotic, when it loses … its ground in the striving for being. How could eros have come to be seen by Heidegger as itself the catastrophe?” (Gonzalez, 230). However, if we take into consideration Heidegger’s turn through an embrace of the will (Wille) in the 1930s toward a fundamental attunement of Gelassenheit (see my Heidegger and the Will), a turn away from projecting toward waiting, away from transcendence toward indwelling (see my “Returning the World to Nature”), this turn away from eros—especially given that Heidegger links eros with orexis and thus with the ancient germ of the modern metaphysics of will—makes more sense. Of course, Plato’s philosophy as “eros for wisdom” is a far cry from what Heidegger criticizes as the “technological will to will.” Moreover, Gonzalez draws our attention to later letters to his wife in which Heidegger personally continued to both identify and struggle with eros, philosophically as well as romantically—and indeed in the context of talking about the “Plato book” he still hoped to one day be able to write (LW 213, 246). Perhaps that Plato book would have clarified the relation between eros, will, and Gelassenheit; or perhaps it was Heidegger’s inability to clarify that relation that prevented him from writing the book. In any case, when thinking about Heidegger’s desire and inability to write that book, when reading Heidegger’s various interpretations of the Platonic dialogues, and when developing our own interpretations, we should bear in mind a perceptive—and presumably retrospective—remark Heidegger made in 1951: “A dialogue of Plato—the Phaedrus, for example, the conversation on Beauty—can be interpreted in totally different spheres and respects, according to totally different implications and problematics. This multiplicity of possible interpretations does not discredit the strictness of the thought content. For all true thought remains open to more than one interpretation—and this by reason of its nature” (ZSD 68/WCT 71).
85. Sallis, Being and Logos, 113.
86. Sallis, Being and Logos, 175, citing Cratylus 408d.
87. See Bruce Gottfried, “Pan, The Cicadas, and Plato’s Use of Myth in the Phaedrus,” in Plato’s Dialogues: New Studies and Interpretations, ed. Gerald A. Press (Lanham, MA: Roman and Littlefield, 1993), 179–94.
88. Sallis, Being and Logos, 107.
89. Sallis, Being and Logos, 107.
90. Sallis, Being and Logos, 58.
91. Sallis, Being and Logos, 534.
92. Sallis, Figure of Nature, 177.
93. Sallis, Figure of Nature, 192.
94. See Sallis, Figure of Nature, 247.
95. Sallis, Figure of Nature, 240–41.
96. See Friedrich Nietzsche, “The Dying Socrates” in The Gay Science, §340; and “The Problem of Socrates” in Twilight of the Idols, especially §§1 and 12.
97. Sallis, Figure of Nature, 247.
98. Sallis, Figure of Nature, 245–46.
99. Sallis, Figure of Nature, 245.
100. The contrast is complicated, and even softened, yet not eliminated by the following: near the end of the Phaedrus, ater telling a myth about an Egyptian god who invented writing and a king who pointed out the dangers of relying on it, Socrates defends his telling of such tales by saying that “the authorities of the temple of Zeus at Dodana, my friend, said that the first prophetic utterances came from an oak tree. In fact, the people of those days, lacking the wisdom of you young people, were content in their simplicity to listen to trees or rocks, provided these told the truth” (Phaedrus 274c–275c). Socrates had prefaced his recounting of the tale from Egypt by saying: “I can tell you the tradition that has come down from our forefathers, but they alone know the truth of it. However, if we could discover that for ourselves, should we still be concerned with the fancies of mankind?” (274c). He goes on to contrast the dead speech of the written word with living speech that relies on the true knowledge that is “written in the soul of the learner” (276a). Myths and written texts must be employed merely as means to reawaken the inner logos inscribed in the human soul. The implication is that, on the “long detour” (274a) that is necessary to do this—a journey that includes the journey outside the walls of the city to the countryside where myths originated from listening to trees and other natural phenomena, such as cicadas—at the end of the day one is to return from mythos to logos, from nature to the city, on the upward journey toward true knowledge and being.
101. GA 13: 88.
102. See “The Thing” in the 1949 Bremen Lectures (GA 79: 5–21/BFL 5–20), where Heidegger develops a number of thoughts first articulated in Country Path Conversations.
104. On the Gottesfrage that accompanies Heidegger’s lifelong path of thinking the Seinsfrage, see Bret W. Davis, “God or Gods (Gott, Götter),” in The Cambridge Heidegger Lexicon, ed. Mark Wrathall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 357–61.
105. GA 77: 206/CPC 132.
106. WHD 18/WCT 44.
109. GA 9: 201, 231/PM 155, 177.
111. John Sallis, “Plato’s Other Beginning,” in Heidegger and the Greeks, 186–87; see also John Sallis, The Verge of Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 24.
112. Paul Friedländer, Plato 1: An Introduction, translated by Hans Meyerhof (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1969), chapter 11. The second edition of the German text, which added this chapter, was published in 1954. In a preface to the third edition, published in 1964, Friedländer writes: “Only chapter XI, ‘Aletheia: A Discussion with Martin Heidegger,’ has undergone substantial revision. My opposition to Heidegger’s interpretation of the Platonic concept of truth remains unchanged. Yet, recent extensive analysis of the meaning of aletheia in the older literature has more clearly brought out the various early meanings of the concept. It has become clear that the aspect of unhiddenness most stressed by Heidegger was present very early, but so were the elements which later combined in Plato’s lofty concept of aletheia” (vii). In the concluding paragraph to his revised chapter on Heidegger, Friedländer writes: “In my discussion with Martin Heidegger, I have learned that my earlier opposition to the interpretation of aletheia as unhiddenness was unjustified. What stands unchanged is my criticism of Heidegger’s historical construction [of a transformation of truth from unhiddenness to correctness in Plato]. For the result has become ever more clear. It was not ‘first in Plato’ that truth became correctness of perception and assertion. his meaning was present much earlier, i.e., in the old epic. For Plato, there is in ἀληθής and ἀλήθεια an equilibrium between the revealing truth, the unhidden reality, and the truthfulness which measures the reality by this truth” (229). In the end, Heidegger and Friedländer come close to an agreement about the ambiguities of aletheia both before and in Plato. However, whereas Friedländer concludes that “Plato sharpened the concept, systematized it, and heightened it” by bringing “the three facets of the Greek aletheia”—“the ontological, the epistemological, and the existential”—together (229), Heidegger sees in this ambiguity an occlusion of the primordial sense of aletheia as unhiddennness or unconcealment (Unverborgenheit), as the forgetting of being (or beyng) as the “clearing of self-concealing presence, clearing of self-concealing sheltering” (ZSD 79/BW 448 tm) that inaugurates the tradition of metaphysics.
113. ZSD 78/BW 447.
114. For Sallis’s critical and insightful reading of Heidegger’s “Plato’s Doctrine of Truth” and his engagement with Friedländer, see “At the Threshold of Metaphysics,” in John Sallis, Delimitations: Phenomenology and the End of Metaphysics, collected writings edition (Indiana University Press, 1995), 170–85.
115. GA 65: 208–9/CP 163.
118. GA 77: 149/CPC 98.
119. See Davis, “Returning the World to Nature.”
120. GA 77: 205–6/CPC 132–133.
121. GA 54: 139–40, 144/PA 94, 97.
122. Indeed, the originality of Heidegger’s interpretation may incline one to replace “Kant” with “Plato” in a response Heidegger is said to have given to a critique of his interpretation of Kant: “It may not be good Kant, but it is awfully good Heidegger.” While this quote comes from a hearsay report by Bernd Magnus, in a later preface to his Kant book, Heidegger does, in print, offer this justification for the hermeneutical “violence” of his admittedly contentious interpretation of Kant: “In contrast to the methods of historical philology, which has its own agenda, a thoughtful dialogue is bound to other laws—laws which are more easily violated” (KPM xviii).
123. GA 54: 140/PA 95.
124. GA 53: 97–119/HHI 79–95.
125. GA 54: 132/PA 89.
126. GA 54: 180/PA 121.
127. GA 54: 141/PA 95.
128. GA 54: 174/PA 117 tm.
129. GA 54: 151/PA 102 tm.
130. GA 53: 113/HHI 91.
132. GA 53: 150/HHI 120.
133. GA 53: 147–48/HHI 118.
134. GA 54: 150–51/PA 101–102 tm.
135. The Kyoto School philosopher of Zen, Ueda Shizuteru, speaks in a related manner of “being-in-the-twofold-world” (nijū-sekai-nai-sonzai). See Ueda Shizuteru, Kokū / sekai [Empty Expanse / World], Ueda Shizuteru shū [The Collected Writings of Ueda Shizuteru], vol. 9 (Tokyo: Iwanami, 2002); Ueda Shizuteru, “Horizon and the Other Side of the Horizon,” in Contemporary Japanese Philosophy: A Reader, ed. John W. M. Krummel (New York: Roman & Littlefield), 93–106. An examination of the Kyoto School’s philosophies of “place” (basho), including what Ueda calls “nature as place” (basho toshite no shizen), in relation to Heidegger’s thought and especially the other chorology I have sought to articulate in this essay will have to wait for another occasion.
Bret W. Davis - Notes for Another Chorology: Reading Heidegger’s Plato Books
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