The Sinn requires the Sinn-Bild, without which it is merely a story, something to entertain, a tool for passing the time. ” The passage towards meaning, towards understanding that which is indicated, that to which one is directed by it requires-Heidegger is adamant- the story itself: one passes to understanding not from the story, but in and through it. Like the parables of Jesus (at least in this way) the Sinn- Bild of Plato performs the work of “indication”: it tells us “ that something is to be understood,” specifically by “providing a clue as to what this is.” This activity of “hinting,” of offering a “clue,” Heidegger explicates further: “The image provides a hint-it leads into the intelligible, into the region of intelligibility. According to Heidegger what is crucial about this story in Book VII of Plato’s Politeia is the specific function it enacts, namely, “to provide a hint or clue.” This means, on the one hand, that the “image” is not meant simply to stand for itself, as if there is nothing to be understood through it. In his opening lecture of Vom Wesen der Wahrheit, the first half of which is a patient philosophical exegesis of this didactic story of the cave, Heidegger uses two terms to name this story under our examination, “allegory” and “sense-image” ( Sinn-Bild), and he uses them interchangeably to express what Plato means (according to him at least this is implied for it is not explicitly stated) by calling this story an image. The enterprise of philosophy, at least for Plato, in fact depends on this possibility. Perhaps it is a matter of truth, as far as Plato is an authority on the truth, on philosophical truth (on the question of what matters most to my humanity), and it therefore is a matter of an event of some truth or other, and through it, the truth itself. Further, the parable itself is an event of the inbreaking of that very kingdom precisely in the very peculiar, “hidden” manner in which it is “breaking in.” It is worth hoping that the “allegory of the cave,” if not on par with the parables of Jesus, is at least more than a mere allegory. Jesus’s parables refer to aspects of a higher truth by reference to the things of ordinary experience: by higher truth I do not mean a mere spiritual lesson in garb that helps uneducated people grasp it (in this case the parable would be a mere allegory), but, rather as truths, words about realities that are impinging on this world itself in and through the person of Jesus: the “kingdom of God” is here, now, pressing into the world of human experience (ruled by political, economic, and social powers set explicitly against Jesus and his mission) and the parable itself provides the hermeneutic for understanding how the kingdom is here, what it means, and how to enter it. Once the message of Jesus is understood, once the disciple comes to an understanding of what Jesus is telling him in a veiled way, the disciple cannot disregard the narrative itself, as if it were a useless husk. But the stories Jesus told about the kingdom, the last judgment, about himself, about Rome, about the Temple, about the future…, these stories are not merely allegories in the common sense. From this perspective the parables of Jesus of Nazareth are allegories. This common understanding of allegory refers indeed back to the Greek term- allēgoria, speaking otherwise, from állos (“other”) and agoria (“speaking”). Plato says the same thing about the “image” of the “dividing line” at the end of Book VI, with which the present “image” of the cave is explicitly correlated.īy “allegory” is commonly meant a story that expresses something else, a properly conceptual truth, by other-lesser-means, which, once grasped, exhaust the meaning of the story, which was, all along, merely a shell. In the first place I must ask: what is this story? Is it indeed an “allegory”? And what do I mean by that term? Plato, of course, calls it an “image,” which appears to be something like a thought experiment, a necessary means toward the grasping of something that cannot be grasped except precisely through this image. “Philosophically” means: what does the allegory teach? “As philosophy” means: what does it mean to philosophize this way? And hence a subsequent question: what does it mean for philosophy that philosophy, at one of its major early moments, is, or was, practiced in this way? Image and Allegory What is commonly called “Plato’s allegory of the cave,” I intend to come to understand, or rather, come to an understanding not only “about” it, but, more importantly “through” it: I intend to come to understand something of what the “allegory of the cave” means for me, a living human being-that is, what it means philosophically and what it means as philosophy. Empedocles Introduction to an Exegetical Fragment “Happy is he who has gained the wealth of divine thoughts, wretched is he whose belief about the gods is dark.”
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