Okay, with some pretty heavy preliminaries out of the way, we can now see how Heidegger characterizes the various stages of the allegory, and he does so in terms of what is revealed to the person in each stage. In stage one, people live chained inside the cave, engrossed in what they immediately encounter, as we've said. Now, in the Greek statement, the description of the dwelling place, it includes the word, and here's where Heidegger focuses in, in relationship to aletheia, it includes the word aletheia. Okay, so he puts it that the distinctions between the dwelling places and stages within the movement of passage are grounded in the different kinds of aletheia, normative at each level, that is the different kinds of truth, quote unquote, that are dominant at each stage. So on stage one, in stage one, those who are chained consider nothing else to be unhidden, aletheia, unhidden, true, except the shadows cast by the artifacts. In stage two, you have the removal of the chains, they're still confined to the cave, but those imprisoned are now free in a certain sense, now they can turn around in every direction,

the chains have been removed, it becomes possible to see the very things that were previously carried along behind them. Those who before looked only at shadows now come, and here he's quoting Plato 5.15d2, a little nearer to what is. To what is. Okay? Nearer to what is. A degree of proximity to being. You see that? Okay? A degree of proximity. More being is revealed. You're closer to what truly is. So this idea of stages of the, stages of being's revelation. Does that make sense? Aletheia is unhidden. More and more of what is. Is unhidden.

In the course of these stages. In the course of education. In the course of ascent. Out of Plato's cave. When one's gaze is freed from its captivity to the shadows, it becomes possible for the person who has been freed to enter into the sphere of what is. Aletheia is more unhidden. So it's a comparative. Okay? The Greek there is a comparative. More true. But again, because true here has the formation of unhiddenness. More unhidden. Okay? He will consider that the shadows that were previously seen without any help are more unhidden than what is now expressly being shown to him by others. In other words, remember, the prisoner has been freed from his chains. He's turned around. So he's closer to what truly is. But he will think that the shadows were more unhidden. More true than what he sees now. He runs back to the shadows. Okay? He runs back to the world he knew. Why? Heidegger asks. The glow of the fire to which their eyes are not accustomed

blinds those who have been liberated. This blinding hinders them from seeing the fire itself and from apprehending how its glow illuminates the things and thus lets things appear for the first time. That is why those who have been blinded cannot comprehend that what they previously saw were merely shadows of those things cast by the light from this very fire. All right? So they're blinded by the light of the fire. They run back down to the world they know. But nevertheless, it's crucially important for Heidegger here as we attend to the words, the words that Plato's using, Plato's doctrine of truth, when we see that he's used the word alethes in a comparative. More unhidden. Less unhidden. More and less. Greater or lesser. Degrees of unconcealment. Degrees of unhiddenness. Degrees of truth. We're going to see why all this matters as we continue to go through it. Real freedom is attained only in stage three. Here's someone who has been unshackled, is at the same time conveyed out of the cave into the open.

You remember that. Into the open. Remember that. Open. There above the ground, all things are manifest. The looks. Ideas. Eidos. Visible form. The looks that show what things are now no longer appear merely in the man-made and confusing glow of the fire in the cave. The things themselves, the most meaningful beings, stand there in the binding force and validity of their own visible form. You don't see shadows cast on the wall. You see the things themselves out of the realm of the man-made. Natural beings. If you reread those passages, you see that. The open, into which the freed prisoner has now been placed, does not mean the unboundedness of some wide open space, like a vast, hugely vast field with nothing in it. Rather, this is a Heideggerian formulation, but think about it. The open, out of the cave, and remember, this is the goal of our education, the goal of the Paideia. The open sets boundaries to things. It lets them be what they are,

and it is the binding power characteristic of the brightness radiating from the sunlight, which we also see. So it's not an empty openness. It's an openness that bestows form, visibility, shape, definition, essence, brightness, radiance, okay? And you can bring yourself into that world in the cave allegory. That, then, is what is unhidden to you. The ideas that constitute the essence in whose light each individual being shows itself as this or that. We can only see something as something because there's an idea that lets us take it that way. Okay, you got to remember here, this is not, this is not easy, but because it concerns the human condition, because it concerns your being in the world, because it concerns the possibility of understanding, it's not abstract or theoretical. You can get it. You just have to click into it. Remember, as I mentioned before, idea is not an idea in your head. It's not like, a phantasm, like something you imagined. Okay, the ideas here have,

as he puts it, they constitute the essence in whose light each individual being shows itself as this or that. Simply stated, just again to try to make this intuitively graspable, I'm holding my cup, it's this particular cup, I can lift it, drop it, fill it, empty it, shatter it, tap on it, but the cupness of the cup, the idea of the cup, that in whose light the cup shows itself as a cup, that's not something I can tap on, that's not something I can pick up or put down. It's somehow there in principle. It can be there for me that, yeah, this is a cup, not just this particular one, but it is cup, you know, it shares in or is what it is by virtue of cupness, so to speak. I know it's weird, maybe it is, maybe it isn't, but that notion, that's not just in my head for Plato, it's not just in my head for Heidegger. So we have it in us,

in who we are as the human being, to unconceal, or to be in a realm where what's unhidden for us, what's true for us, what's there for us, is the realm of the ideas, okay, and that's what it means to be out of the cave. Therefore, right at the beginning of his description of stage three, Plato speaks of, and he gives the Greek, and then I'm going to give you the English, of what is now addressed as the unhidden. So again, in the Greek, you have again this word, aliphaz, in one of its forms, and again in a comparative.

In fact, the unhidden that has now been reached, is the most unhidden of all. So using the comparative here, like this is beautiful, that's more beautiful, this is the most beautiful. So this is true, this is more true, this is the most true. This is unhidden, this is more unhidden, this is the most unhidden. So Heidegger now hits upon this formulation, the most unhidden. He says, that word actually does not come out in the cave allegory, but it does come out in the image of the divided line in book six. And there you have the word for the most unhidden, and I'll just read you what it says. The most, I'll read you what Heidegger says, the most unhidden shows itself in each case in the whatness of a being. What makes it what it is. The what it is, okay. The most unhidden is so-called, remember, translate for yourselves. The most unhidden means what you would normally call the most true, the truest. But because He's interpreting truth in terms of the Greek aletheia,

He's calling it unhidden. The most true, the most unhidden. The most unhidden is so-called because it is what appears antecedently in everything that appears, and it makes whatever appears be accessible. You couldn't have the experience of holding a cup, if somehow cupness, the idea that makes the cup what it is, weren't already there. In that sense, the ideas are the truest. In that sense, the ideas are the most unhidden, is what Heidegger is saying here. The most unhidden is so-called because it is what appears antecedently in everything that appears, and makes whatever appears be accessible. So we have these three stages. First, you're in the cave, taking the shadows, as all there is, then to turn around to the fire, and quickly back down to the world you know, and then out of the cave altogether, into the open realm of the ideas.

Liberation, what can we say about liberation from this account? It does not come about by the simple removal of the chains. You don't have it in phase two, where just because you're unchained, you're free. Not at all. It's like a dog who's been fenced in by an electrical fence. The electrical fence maybe is turned off, but the dog is still not going outside of what it's used to. It's not quite liberated. It does not consist in unbridled license. Freedom doesn't just mean do whatever you want to do. Liberation, in the context of education, doesn't just mean do whatever you want to do. Rather, it first begins as the continuous effort, continuous effort, okay, every word matters here, at accustoming one's gaze to be fixed on the firm limits of things that stand fast in their visible form. What is it really? What is it truly? What is it essentially?

Continuous effort, accustoming your gaze to be fixed on the limits of things that stand fast in their visible form, in their idea, in their edos. Authentic liberation is the steadiness of being oriented toward that which appears in its visible form and which is the most unhidden in this appearing. You're free, truly free, when you're oriented towards what truly is.

Steadiness of being oriented towards what's truly true, what truly is, what's most true, most unhidden. Freedom exists only as the orientation that is structured in this way. But what is more, this orientation as a turning around and a turning toward alone fulfills the essence of paideia as a turning around. Read it again because I made a mistake. What is more, this orientation as a turning around alone fulfills the essence, I said it again, turning toward alone fulfills the essence of a turning around. Okay, what is the conversion of the soul? What is the turning around of the human being? It is a turning toward what truly is.

Thus, the fulfillment of the essence of education can be achieved only in the region of and on the basis of the most unhidden, the alethestaton, the most unhidden, the truest, i.e. truth in the proper sense. The essence of education is grounded in the essence of truth. Let me pause. We know the allegory of the cave has to do with education. Socrates says, so it has to do with apaidea and paidea. Heidegger said, I'm going to interpret this in terms of the truth. Why were we able to make that link? Because Plato's Socrates says, using the Greek word, alethes, in its comparison, more, most, okay, unhidden, more unhidden, most unhidden, in the stages of the cave allegory. So that the paidea represented by that allegory correlates with the levels and degrees of unhiddenness with the levels and degrees of truth. Okay? Hopefully that's squaring for you to a certain extent. So that shows us that the essence of education is grounded in the essence of truth. The more unrevealed

something is, the more paidea there is. The possibility of going from apaidea to paidea, lack of education to education, is grounded in the fact that being can reveal itself more or less. Excuse me. beings can reveal themselves more or less.

More revelation, more education. Less revelation, less education. Okay? Very important. So, that means that paidea includes within itself an essential relation to lack of education because it constantly remains an overcoming of lack of education. Paidea is constantly a fight against being dragged back down into the shadows. Of remaining steadfast in your orientation towards what truly is.

Okay, and here importantly Heidegger reminds us of what you may already be thinking, that the story is not done yet. Now, never mind that Heidegger is not commenting on the rest of the Republic. He's only commenting on the cave allegory. Okay, but even within the context of the cave allegory, the story is not done yet because you still have the dissent of the freed person back into the cave. Back to those who are still in chains.

But, the would-be liberator no longer knows his or her way around the cave and risks the danger of succumbing to the overwhelming power of the kind of truth, the kind of unhiddenness, that is normative there. The danger of being overcome by the claim of common reality to be the only reality. The liberator is threatened with the possibility of being put to death, a possibility that became a reality in the fate of Socrates who was Plato's teacher. The return to the cave and the battle waged within the cave between the liberator and the prisoners who resist all liberation of itself makes up stage four of the allegory where the story comes to a conclusion. Admittedly, Heidegger here writes, the word allephese is no longer used in this part of the story. So we have a kind of a question. Talking about the doctrine of truth, we've seen the degrees of unhiddenness, we're mentioning the descent back into the cave and there the word allephese isn't used. So how do we make

sense of that? Two factors, he says, are essential to the unhidden. Not only does it in some way or other render accessible whatever appears and keep it revealed in its appearing, but it also constantly overcomes a hiddenness of the unhidden. The unhidden, the true, must be torn away or as I put it, rested from a hiddenness, a concealment. It must in a sense be stolen from hiddenness. Originally for the Greeks, hiddenness, concealment also I think is a nice way of saying it, as an act of self-hiding, permeated the essence of being and thus also determined beings in their presentness and accessibility. So I told you, the fundamental experience of truth for the Greeks included concealment. That's why it's called unconcealment because concealment is thought together with it is what Hadeger is saying. But later when truth was translated from Greek into Roman when it became veritas okay, like verify, veritable, verity, right, verily, veritas, it lost that sense at least in the word itself of a reference

to concealment. This is crucial because that's an example of what Hadeger means by an essential transformation of truth. It's not just that the word changed in a translation, it's that it was thought differently. It wasn't just written differently, it wasn't just spoken differently, it was thought and experienced differently. The Greek experience includes concealment, the Roman experience no longer does. So the hiddenness, the concealment, the letheia part of aletheia, the hiddenness, it can be of various kinds. Closing off, that's one way of concealing. Hiding away, that's another way of concealing. Disguising, covering over, like I can, so to speak, I can use this quickly, take my pen out of the frame, I can also cover my pen up in that way, right? I can also do other things to conceal. Since, according to Plato's allegory, the supremely unhidden must be wrested from a base and stubborn hiding, for this reason one's movement out of the cave, into the open, and into the light of day is a life and

death struggle. Stage four of the allegory gives us a special glimpse into how privation, attaining the unhidden by wresting it away, belongs to the essence of truth, therefore it also deals with Aletheia. So, when you go back down into concealment, the liberator tries to talk to the prisoners, the prisoners don't want to be moved from their common state, and, you know, they subject the liberator to death, and death is also a certain kind of privation, as is the cave dwelling, so there's a saturation in the image of a privation in a way that's essentially related to truth. It's not just dramatic flourish.

As Heidegger writes it here, only somebody who experiences truth as unconcealment, and therefore as fundamentally also related to concealment, could have a relationship to the image of the cave in a fundamental way. So, this allegory can have the structure of a cave image at all, he writes, only because it is antecedently co-determined by the fundamental experience of Aletheia, the unhiddenness of beings, which was something self-evident for the Greeks, for what else is the underground cave except something open in itself that remains at the same time covered by a vault, and despite the entrance walled off and enclosed by the surrounding earth. So the very image of a cave is an openness that is nevertheless shut off. Just like our ordinary lives are in openness, there's a world there for us, but it's a world that's shut off. It's inauthentic. It's lacking breakthrough insight into what things are. Only the essence of truth understood in the original Greek sense of Aletheia, the unhiddenness that is related to the

hidden, to something dissembled and disguised, has an essential relation to this image of an underground cave. So, as far as the stages in their relationship to truth and why that brings truth and education into an essential relation, we can leave it there. And then the next video will take up a little bit more of what Heidegger has to say about the image of the sun, the idea of the sun, and getting closer and closer to a fuller formulation of why he thinks Plato was such a fateful step and in some sense a fateful misstep in the history of Western humanity. But we'll take that up in the next video.