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Galiet & Galiet
knowledge only in the measure the soul approximates purity and the body resists urges, that is, actions must be moderate.
Thus, for Plato, the body is an obstacle, an impediment to the soul. The soul is destined to live in a realm of purity, free from any blemish or taint; realm comparable to the highly insinuated 3⁄4 in case it is not the same 3⁄4 realm of Ideas. Plato substantiates his argument that the objects of knowledge come from reason by associating the soul to the invisible and not the visible, to the immortal and not the mortal, to the mind and not the body, to reason and not desire, to the same and not to difference, to the permanent and not the changing, to ruler and not the ruled, to being and not becoming, to truth and not error.77 From these premises, he concludes that the soul is uniform, always the same as itself, and divine, deathless, intelligible whereas the body is “the human, mortal, multiform, unintelligible, soluble and never consistently the same.”78 Platonism tends to conceive of the soul by analogy to the Idea and vice-versa. In this sense, Heidegger’s interpretation is correct. Aletheia, once ‘yoked’ to the soul in its progressive ascension towards noesis, cannot be differentiated from it. As one, they become ‘adaequatio,’ then ‘agreement,’ or ‘truth as correspondence.’ Hence, truth ceases to be in the openness of the open or the clearing, it ceases to be unconcealment; it becomes, instead correctness and correspondence, a misdemeanour to Heidegger whose truth, unlike Plato’s truth, belongs fundamentally to reality 3⁄4 beings and being and the world 3⁄4 not to thoughts and utterances.79
Indeed, Friedlander rejects Heidegger’s argument on four accounts:80
1. According to Friedlander, it is uncertain that alethes originates from a- and lanthanein and that it means ‘to escape notice, be unseen, unnoticed, without being observed, unknown.’81
2. Even if alethes were to originate from a-lanthanein, it hardly means ‘unhidden’ in Homer, Hesiod and later authors, but has three main senses:
77 Plato. Phaedo. 79e. Plato. Complete Works. Phaedo. Ed. John M. Cooper. Indianapolis, Hackett Publishing, 1997.
78 Plato. Phaedo. 80b. Plato. Complete Works. Phaedo. Ed. John M. Cooper. Indianapolis, Hackett Publishing, 1997.
79 This can be severely criticized. Dwelling in the world implies language and thought as imperfect language may be. Language and thought belong to both realities: the mind can perceive things of this world, imagine things of this and of parallel worlds, and conceive ideas pertaining to this world and other worlds including the divine. Indeed, some argue that language cannot signify [ Gorgias of Leontini (gaps in communication), Socrates (infinite regression of meaning), Derrida, (deconstruction)].
80 Inwood, Michael. A Heidegger Dictionary. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1999. 221-29. The four accounts are outlined in Inwood’s dictionary (single spaced); the observations and criticisms, however, are my observations (1.5 spaced).
81 In the sense of I am unseen by others while fighting (Iliad), lest he come on unseen by me (Sophocles), without accusative, lest he perish without himself knowing it, (Id), you are a slave without knowing it (Aristotle). In compound verbs it takes a causal sense, to make one forget a thing. In Passive sense, to let a thing escape one, to forget, to forget purposely, to pass over, or as either he chose to forget it or perceived it not. (Iliad). Liddell & Scott. An Intermediate Greek- English Lexicon. Oxford: Clarendon Press, Oxford University Press, 1889. 465
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