“At the Crossroads of the Cave: Plato and Heidegger on History and Nihilism”

Abstract

Martin Heidegger accuses Plato, or at least Platonism, of promulgating a doctrine of the truth that interprets the truth in terms of trans-temporal ideas. Human beings themselves get interpreted in terms of their relation to these eternal, universal ideas, rather than their proper “finitude, temporality, and historicity,” which leads to nihilism, according to Heidegger. This paper argues that Heidegger misses an important feature of Plato’s parable of the cave: the fact that there are two pathways within it that meet at a crossroads. One, the well-known upward path, leads to the realm of transcendent truth; the other, often overlooked, is the lateral path that transects the cave and from which the shadows are projected. At this intersection, Plato show how what it means to be human requires both temporality and what transcends the historically situated.