Abstract
This paper focuses how Heidegger, owing to his project of truly apprehending the Being of beings, reinterprets the Platonic narrative of the cave (το σπήλαιον). It does not attempt to completely reinterpret the Heideggerian reinterpretation of the cave-narrative, but rather it expounds certain metaphors construed in the narrative for the elaboration of Heidegger’s concept of the lifeworld (Lebenswelt) in relation to Gadamer’s notion of tradition. That is to say, both Heidegger’s world and Gadamer’s tradition are reinterpreted in the nexus of the Platonic metaphor of the cave as portrayed in the allegory of the cave. The task here is to find a semiotic mutuality of the cave both with the lifeworld and the tradition in the nexus of the transcendence-immanence contrast which is to be expounded with reference to Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology and Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics. Submitting its principal thesis to the hermeneutical critique, I shall take Heidegger’s work, Vom Wesen der Wahrheit: zu Platons Höhlengleichnis und Theätet (The Essence of Truth: On Plato’s Cave Allegory and Theaetetus) as a reference and a guide for construing my argument. The other major references for this construing are Plato’s Πολιτεία (The Republic) especially Book VII, Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit (Being and Time) especially Einleitung and Gadamer’s Warheit und Method (Truth and Method) especially Part II.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Jeffrey A. Bell’s identification of the problem of difference as a philosophical framework used throughout the history of western philosophy is a particularly valuable technique of analysis and mutual and comparative study of various theories. He notes: “In the history of philosophy, one finds many examples of a fundamental distinction forming the cornerstone of a philosophical theory. There is Plato’s distinction between knowledge (reality) and opinion (appearance); Aristotle’s form/matter distinction; Descartes’s mind/body distinction; and Kant’s a priori/a posteriori distinction. But the challenge of these theories, the problem that calls for the creativity and intellectual inventiveness of these thinkers, is to show how the two sides of the distinction are nevertheless related to and dependent upon each other. This is what I call the ‘problem of difference,’ and it is this problem which accounts for the most interesting and important aspects of the above mentioned theories. See Jeffrey A. Bell, The Problem of Difference: Phenomenology and Poststructuralism (Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1998), p. 3.
- 2.
Edmund Husserl, Cartesianische Meditationen (Cartesian Meditations) (The Hague, Martin Nijhoff Publishers, 1960), pp. 83–84.
- 3.
Roman Ingarden Comments on Husserl’s phenomenology: “The existence of what is perceived (the perceived as such) is nothing ‘in itself but only something ’for somebody/for the experiencing ego. ‘Streichen wir das reine Bewusstsein, so streichen wir die Welt’ (‘If we exclude pure consciousness then we exclude the world’) is the famous thesis of Husserlian transcendental idealism which he was already constantly repeating in lectures during his Göttingen period.” Roman Ingarden, On the Motives which led Husserl to Transcendental Idealism, trans. Arnor Hannibalsson (The Hague, Nijhoff, 1975), p. 21.
- 4.
Op. Cit., Husserl, pp. 1–6.
- 5.
In the nexus of the Lebenswelt Husserl says that ‘Wir wollen auf die “Sachen selbst” zurückgehen (we must go back to the things themselves).’ Edmund Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen (Logical Investigations), vol. 2, Trans. J.N. Findlay (New York, Humanities Press, 1970), p. 252.
- 6.
I have stolen the phrase, ‘distorting mirror’ from Gadamer’s statement: “The focus of subjectivity is a distorting mirror.” He makes that statement while justifying the plausibility of ‘prejudices’ as the constitutive elements of man’s being as an ‘historical reality.’ Hans-Georg Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode (Truth and Method) trans. G. Barden and W.G. Doerpel (New York, Crossroad, 1975), p. 278.
- 7.
Ibid., pp. 268–269.
- 8.
Ibid., p. 272.
- 9.
Ibid., p. 273.
- 10.
Op. Cit., Husserl, pp. 36–37.
- 11.
Discussing the universality of transcendental experience and description being absolutely unprejudiced, Husserl writes: “This description is then called on to be the foundation for a radical and universal criticism. Naturally everything depends on strictly preserving the absolute “unprejudicedness” of the description and thereby satisfying the principle of pure evidence, which we laid down in advance. That signifies restriction to the pure data of transcendental reflection, which therefore must be taken precisely as they are given in simple evidence, purely “intuitively”, and always kept free from all interpretations that read into them more than is genuinely seen.” Op. Cit., Husserl, pp. 35–36.
- 12.
“Consciousness of being affected by history (wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewuβtsein) is primarily consciousness of the hermeneutical situation. To acquire an awareness of a situation is, however, always a task of peculiar difficulty. The very idea of a situation means that we are not standing outside it and hence are unable to have any objective knowledge of it. We always find ourselves within a situation, and throwing light on it is a task that is never entirely finished. This is also true of the hermeneutic situation -i.e. the situation in which we find ourselves with regard to the tradition that we are trying to understand…All self-knowledge arises from what is historically pregiven,…because it underlies all subjective intentions and actions.” Op. Cit., Gadamer, p. 301.
- 13.
The way Gadamer conceives of the life world suggests that he is not alone in this line of speculation rather he finds himself aligned with a group of scholars like Ludwig Landgrebe, A. Schütz, G. Brand, U. Claesgens, K. Düsing, P. janssen, and others. See n. 151 of Part II of Op. Cit., Gadamer.
- 14.
For Gadamer’s articulation concerning the concept of life as a critique of Husserl with the help of York see Op. Cit., Gadamer, pp. 235–245.
- 15.
Op. Cit., Gadamer, p. 453.
- 16.
Op. Cit., Gadamer, p. 438.
- 17.
Gadamer’s concept of language as tradition may be compared to that of the later Wittgenstein’s notion of language. The latter conceives of language as an activity or game with certain rules which are set and can be learned in the context of conventional and cultural life form. In this regard Haberms attempts to relate Gadamer to the later Wittgenstein. He appreciates Wittgenstein’s deviation from positivism by bringing to awareness the fact that one cannot master the grammatical rules on the symbolic plane of language itself. Instead, one can learn the rules in the cultural life form. At the same time he criticizes Wittgenstein for his positivistic shortcomings of neglecting the hermeneutical aspect of mastering the rules of grammar. Wittgenstein’s language game is, for Habermas, a sealed and ‘opaque’ bundle of rules which allows nothing to pass through and so the practice of the game is an ahistorical mechanism. Habermas, opting the hermeneutical dimension of language from Gadamer, transforms language from a ‘monadically sealed’ oneness into a ‘porous’ unit which is developed hermeneutically and historically in the making of tradition. See Jürgen Habermas, Zur Logik der Sozialwissenschaften (On the Logic of the Social Sciences), trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen & Jerry A. Stark (Cambridge, Polity Press, 1988), pp. 148–150 and also see Abdul Rahim Afaki, “Habermas’ Hermeneutical Project of Intersubjectivity: The Pragmatic-Analytic-Hermeneutic Approach to the Empirical-Analytic Sciences of Action,” Phenomenological Inquiry 36 (October 2012); pp. 101–124.
- 18.
While pursuing this study of Heidegger’s I shall take the Einleitung to Sein und Zeit as a major reference and guide and other minor sources will also be referred accordingly.
- 19.
According to Heidegger, Aristotle perceived time in the way Einstein would later conceive of it. Heidegger cites from Aristotle’s Physics IV, ch. 11, 219a, in which time is described as something “within which events take place.” See Martin Heidegger, Der Begriff der Zeit (The Concept of Time), trans. William McNeill (Oxford, Blackwell, 1992), p. 3E, also see translator’s n. 5.
- 20.
Ibid., pp. 3E–5E.
- 21.
Ibid., pp. 6E–19E.
- 22.
Ibid., p. 20E.
- 23.
I call it reinterpretation because Plato himself interpreted the allegory where he places it in Πολιτεία (The Republic), Book VII and Heidegger’s phenomenological approach towards its ‘unsaid’ meanings is rather a second-order endeavour. In this regard my interpretation of Heidegger’s reinterpretation of Plato’s primary interpretation of the narrative is a third-order or tertiary discussion.
- 24.
First I thought that what I meant by ‘unsaid’ seemed to be more close to what Ricoeur rather than Heidegger said about the ‘unsaid’ but later I realized that the most useful idea in this regard would be what they mutually said about the ‘unsaid.’ According to Heidegger, ‘what a thinker left unsaid, whatever it might be, we have to consider what he said’ in general or in particular. In this case an interpreter feels a little free about whether a concept is to be incorporated into or abstracted from the thinker’s concerned scheme of thought. See Martin Heidegger, Wegmarken (Pathmarks), ed. William McNeill (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 155. Ricoeur while comparing the relationship between metaphor and narrative states that ‘[in] both cases, the new thing—the as yet unsaid, the unwritten—springs up in language.’ Both metaphor and narrative show the phenomenon of ‘semantic innovation.’ In case of the former this ‘innovation lies in the producing of a new semantic pertinence by means of an impertinent attribution’ whereas in case of the latter the ‘innovation lies in the inventing of another work of synthesis—a plot,…that is, a new congruence in the organization of the events.’ Here the interpreter is a little unfree while interpreting the unsaid in the context of what has already been symbolically said in a metaphor or a narrative. See Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, Vol. 1, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1984), p. ix.
- 25.
In my paraphrased summary of the narrative I have deliberately replaced ‘the screen above which showmen exhibit their puppets’ with the cinema screen. This alteration in the material does not affect the meanings of the tale rather it makes the meanings more neatly graspable for the contemporary reader. Cornford also suggested the same as he notes that in this regard ‘Plato could have found a neater analogue in the cinema.’ See W. K. C. Guthrie, Plato: the Man and his Dialogues: Earlier period: A History of Greek Philosophy, Vol. IV (Cambridge, Cambridge university press, 1975), n. 3, p.515.
- 26.
This paraphrasing is drawn mutually from the translations of the tale by Paul Shorey and Martin Heidegger. See Πολιτεία (The Republic), Book VII, 514a–517a, in Plato, The Collected Dialogues of Plato Including the Letters, eds. Edith Hamilton & Huntington Cairns (New York, Bollingen Foundation, 1961), pp. 747–749 and Op. Cit., Wegmarken, pp. 156–163.
- 27.
Op. Cit., Πολιτεία, Book VII, 517a–519b.
- 28.
Ibid., 517a.
- 29.
While concluding his argument Heidegger’s remarks encompass not only Greek thought but even the whole ‘history of Western humanity’ and not only its past and what is happening at present but what will happen in the future as well. See Op. Cit., Wegmarken, p. 182.
- 30.
Martin Heidegger, Vom Wesen der Wahrheit: zu Platons Höhlengleichnis und Theätet (The Essence of Truth: On Plato’s Cave Allegory and Theaetetus), trans. Ted Sadler (London, Continuum, 2002), p. 7.
- 31.
On the issue of the four stages see Ibid., pp. 17–68.
- 32.
Op. Cit., Wegmarken, p. 165.
- 33.
The bipartisan structure of the cave-world has various interpretations. ‘The chained prisoners represent ordinary uneducated humanity’ while the bipartite cave stands ‘for the whole world of nature’ so that the shadows ‘represent particulars and the artefacts that cast them the general notions abstracted from them by the uneducated.’ Keeping the purpose of depiction of the tale in Book VII of Πολιτεία in his mind, Plato might have referred to ‘the whole field of mimesis’ while conceiving of the bipartisan structure of the cave. The shadows are ordinary appearances and the artefacts are their artistic imitations; and since ‘the artists do not understand what they are imitating’ the level of reality of their imitations remains low. On this general discussion see Op. Cit., Guthrie, pp. 512–517 and specifically on poetry as an art of producing ‘only deceptive appearances of things’ see Hans-Georg Gadamer, Dialogue and Dialectic: Eight Hermeneutical Studies on Plato, trans. P. Christopher Smith (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1980), pp. 39–72.
- 34.
Sigmund Freud, An Outline of Psychoanalysis, trans. James Strachey (New York, Norton, 1949), p. 24.
- 35.
The meaning of transcendence in the context of relationship between the cave-world and the world of illuminations is altogether different from what Husserl means by this term. In case of the latter, when one transcends the lifeworld one arrives at the empty abode of the transcendental subjectivity, and whatever thereafter one cognitively experiences it takes its place immanently within the same abode. Such an act of cognition is possible in the structure of intentionality. In the nexus of intentionality consciousness is always a consciousness of something, i.e., there are two poles of cognition namely the knowing subject (noetic pole) and its known objective correlate (noematic pole). Such a correlation is not possible in Plato’s philosophy as depicted in the cave-narrative. When one transcends the cave-world, one observes the objectively existing illuminations which are absolutely independent of one’s subjective cognition of them. This is to say, the Platonic Iδέα is an objectively existing reality rather than simply a noematic correlate of the transcendental subjectivity.
- 36.
Heidegger notes: “What emerged as the essence of light and brightness namely letting-through for seeing, is precisely the basic accomplishment of the idea. The essence of light is letting-through for sight. If light, as in the allegory, is meant in a transferred sense…seeing must correspondingly be meant in a transferred sense: the seeing of beings…What is seen in and as the idea is, outside the allegory, the being of beings. Iδέα is what is sighted in advance, what gets perceived in advance and lets beings through as the interpretation of ‘being’. The idea allows us to see a being as what it is, lets the being come to us so to speak. We see first of all from being, through the understanding of what a particular thing is. Through its what-being the being shows itself as this and this…Being, the idea, is what lets through: the light. What the idea accomplishes is given in the fundamental nature of light. See Op. Cit., der Wahrheit, pp. 42.
- 37.
Ibid., pp. 43–44.
- 38.
Heidegger inevitably refuses in principle to incorporate such a concept of man-with-a-soul or man-with-a-personhood into his phenomenological hermeneutics. He Writes: “In our indicative definition of the theme of hermeneutics, facticity = in each case our own Dasein in its being-there for a while at the particular time, we avoided on principle the expression “human” Dasein or the “being of man.” He further explains why this inevitability is there in his system of thought by referring to the originality of this concept of man with personhood. He notes that this concept of man ‘arose in the Christian explication of the original endowments of man as a creature of God, as explication which was guided by Revelation in the Old Testament.’ See Martin Heidegger, Ontology – The Hermeneutics of Facticity, trans. John van Buren (Indianapolis, Indiana University Press, 1999), p. 17.
- 39.
See note 27.
- 40.
Paul Ricoeur is also of the view that human temporality is more intensely justified and deepened with its reference to eternity. He notes: “This intensification does not just consist of the fact that time is thought of as abolished by the limiting idea of an eternity that strikes time with nothingness. Nor is this intensification reduced to transferring into the sphere of lamentation and wailing what had until then been only a speculative argument. It aims more fundamentally at extracting from the very experience of time the resources of an internal hierarchization, one whose advantage lies not in abolishing time but in deepening it.” He further notes: “Indeed it was necessary to confess what is other than time in order to be in a position to give full justice to human temporality and to propose not to abolish it but to probe deeper into it, to hierarchize it, and to unfold it following levels of temporalization that are less and less “distended” and more and more “held firmly,” non secundum distentionem sed secundum intentionem (29: 39). See Op. Cit., Ricoeur, p. 30.
- 41.
In a conversation with Riccardo Dottori, Gadamer, responding to a question concerning man’s ‘finite spirit’ in relation to the possibility of absolute knowledge, explicitly said: “…what we must keep in mind here is that transcendence is not attainable anywhere. Transcendence is not simply believing in God. It is something incomprehensible, and this is true for Hegel as well. This is all we can say today. It’s all true for Jaspers, who incorporated this form of transcendence into his thinking, but even for Heidegger. This is why we ourselves (Heidegger as well) have, for some time, been able to come to an extensive understanding with Jaspers…So I would basically agree with Jaspers that the ignoramus is the fundament of transcendence.” And this ignoramus is ‘the finitude beyond which we are not allowed to go.’ See Hans-Georg Gadamer, A Century of Philosophy: A Conversation with Riccardo Dottori, trans. Rod Coltman with Sigrid Koepke (New York, Continuum, 2003), pp. 78–79. Gadamer forces his refusal to transcendence by his emphasis on immanence. Discussing the relationship between Greek philosophy and modern thought, he finds the theme of an ‘enduring relevance’ dealing with ‘the integration of the magnificent results and the faculties/achievements of the modern empirical sciences into social consciousness, into the life experience of the individual and the group.’ This integration, he further says, “accomplishes itself in the praxis of social life itself. It must always take back into its own purview that which has been placed in the power of human beings, and it has to vindicate the limits that human reason has placed upon its own power and recklessness. We require no proof to see that, for the contemporary human being as well (even as much as modern industry and technology are spreading across the entire globe), in this sense, the understandable world, the world in which we are at home, remains the final authority.” See Hans-Georg Gadamer, The Beginning of Knowledge, trans. Rod Coltman (New York, Continuum, 2001), pp. 125–126.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Afaki, A.R. (2014). The Cave, the Lifeworld and the Tradition: The Transcendence-Immanence Contrast Perspective. In: Tymieniecka, AT. (eds) Phenomenology of Space and Time. Analecta Husserliana, vol 117. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-02039-6_10
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-02039-6_10
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-02038-9
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-02039-6
eBook Packages: Humanities, Social Sciences and LawPhilosophy and Religion (R0)