designation of this thinking: it is "pre-Platonic" philosophy, its fragments the "fragments of the pre-Socratics." Not only does Greek philosophy appear in a Christian theological interpretation, but even within philosophy it is presented as the first stage of Christian-occidental thinking. For the first metaphysical-historical meditations on the whole of the thinking of the West, namely Hegel's lectures on the history of philosophy, understand Greek philosophy as the stage of immediate thinking, not yet mediated and not yet come to itself. Only this latter, certain of itself, in the modern sense the first "true" thinking, is actual thinking. Christianity functions here as the stage of mediation. In the wake of Hegel, the historiographical research of the nineteenth century adheres to all his basic concepts but at the same time, in a remarkable self-deception, rejects his "metaphysics" and flies to "Schopenhauer" and "Goethe"; yet even there Greek philosophy in general and the philosophy of Plato in particular are represented within the horizon of a Christian Platonism. The same holds for Nietzsche as well, whose much-celebrated interpretation of the "pre-Platonic" philosophers is actually Platonic, i.e., Schopenhauerian, and utterly un-Greek. But what could be more self-evident than the conviction that the most appropriate interpretations of the philosophy of Plato are those approaching it with the aid of Platonism? Yet this procedure is comparable to the one that would "explain" the fresh leaf of the tree on the basis of the foliage fallen to the ground. A Greek interpretation of the thinking of Plato is the most difficult, not because this thinking contains in itself special obscurities and abysses, but because the following ages, and still we today, are inclined to rediscover immediately our own, later thinking in this philosophy. In the context of our lectures we must forego even naming the basic presuppositions of a Greek interpretation of Platonic thinking. The following remarks on Plato's μῦθος of λήθη are therefore in this regard provisional.
Recapitulation
1) Politeia: the τόπος of the essence of the πόλις. The essentially unpolitical character of the politeia of the polis. The pole of πέλειν. The impossibility of interpreting the polis on the basis of the "state," Δίκη and iustitia. Death: transition from "here" to "there." Platonism.
We are meditating on the counter-essence to ἀλήθεια, truth in the sense of unconcealedness. The primordial counter-essence to ἀ-λήθεια is