Post #20 of my commentary on Heidegger’s anaylsis of Plato’s Theaetetus, written in the lead up to my exhibition: The Aviary
The failure of each of the three perspectives to explain the false view leads to their abandonment. In their stead the phenomenon of the pseudes doxa itself leads the way in what is now the main investigation, which seeks to clarify the nature of the “combined comportment” which the phenomenon of the false view demands.
The pseudes doxa is still approached in terms of knowledge, but rather than being thought as something we either know or do not know, what is looked for is what is in the middle of both, which Heidegger calls the “intermediate phenomena” of “coming-to-know.” This coming-to-know is explained through the process of learning; “in the learning process there is always something that one knows and as yet does not know.” (206) Thus, what lies in between knowing and not knowing, coming-to-know, combines the two. This allows a new perspective, the metasu, “what lies in between,” to be opened up, from which the phenomenon of the distorted view is now approached.
Through this new combined perspective, of coming-to-know, the complex duality of doxa is now better understood as requiring a comportment from ourselves “of knowing and at the same time not-knowing.” This in turn leads to the possibility of securing the essence of doxa, pseudes doxa and pseudos.
Rather than a philosophical impossibility, the false view is now understood as having an “intermediate character,” one which reflects the “condition and comportment of man wherein he is somehow related to beings, albeit distortedly.” (208) The phenomenon of the false view is thus intrinsic to our relationship to being, which was shown to belong to the soul. The soul is now revisited, in light of doxa’s combined duality, in a “new double characterisation,” given in the form of two similes.
These similes place us before two sensory images, the first a wax mass and the second an aviary, through which the soul’s capacity to make present what is not before us and its role in allowing us to see what is false are discussed. I shall describe each in turn.
Next post: The Wax Mass Previous post: The Three Perspectives Retracted
Contents
All Theaetetus Posts
Derek Hampson 