University of Tabriz-Iran

Journal of Philosophical Investigations

ISSN (print): 2251-7960/ ISSN (online): 2423-4419
Vol. 13/ Issue. 28/ fall 2019
Journal Homepage: www.philosophy.Tabrizu.ac.ir

Heidegger’s Socrates:
“Pure Thinking” on Method, Truth, and Learning

James M. Magrini
Adjunct Professor, Philosophy and Ethics-College of Dupage, USA, Email:
magrini@cod.edu

Abstract
This speculative essay develops a unique understanding of Socrates by reading
Heidegger in relation to contemporary Platonic scholarship arising from the
Continental tradition, which embraces Plato’s Socrates as a non-doctrinal
philosopher. The portrait of Heidegger’s Socrates that emerges is related to
contemporary education and its drive toward emphasizing an academic focus on
Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) at the exclusion of the
Liberal Arts, with the goal of showing that other forms of “knowledge,” such as
the philosophical “truth” emerging from the relationship between the human
and the unfolding of Being, while stifled or neglected in STEM curricula, are
also crucial to our continued development as human beings. Ultimately, the
essay seeks to draw out an authentic vision of paideia by turning to the valuable,
albeit limited, writings of Heidegger focused specifically on the historical
philosopher Socrates, as opposed to Plato.
Key words: Heidegger Studies; Non-Doctrinal Socrates;
Phenomenology and Platonic Studies; Paideia and education;
Contemporary Educational Practices.

 Recived Date: 07/29/2019 Accepted Date: 08/26/2019

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Introduction
This essay elucidates a view of “Heidegger’s Socrates” with the understanding
that Socrates is a highly enigmatic figure in the Heideggerian corpus. We are
also interested in the way Heidegger classified Plato as a “doctrinal” thinker, for
it is the case that Heidegger had far more to say about Plato than he did about
Socrates. In what follows, we attempt to sketch a portrait of Socrates - as a
decidedly “non-doctrinal” philosopher or thinker - from an understanding of
Heidegger’s philosophy in a way that might be related to a unique vision of
education (paideia) as a philosophical way-of-Being, or perhaps and more
appropriately, given Heidegger’s explicit and unwavering task during the
“Turn,” reveal a mode of “pure thinking” in the relationship with the truth-of-
Being, which is at once an originary educative event. Ultimately, turning to a view
of Heidegger’s Socrates, we offer a counter view to such common educational
issues as the employment of methods, the means of knowledge acquisition, and the
understanding of the learning process as they comprise the educational experience
in the age of standardization and the rise and dominance of STEM curricula.1
The chapter unfolds in three sections: (1) We explore Heidegger’s “doctrinal”
view of Plato and discuss how this view influences education; (2) We offer a
detailed analysis of pure thinking, truth, and dialectic method in relation to
“Heidegger’s Socrates,” which includes insights on how this view might be
clarified and enhanced by turning to “non-doctrinal” interpretation of Plato’s
Socrates emerging from recent scholarship focused on re-readings of the
Platonic corpus; and (3) We synthesizing the foregoing analyses with a view of
education (paideia), attempting to elucidate a unique vision of a Socratic education
in the spirit of Heidegger’s reading, which lives beyond the understanding of
philosophy as akin to a science and education as understood as a standardized,
controllable, and predictable technological achievement. In relation to (2), we
adopt this unique approach, which includes works that are not explicitly
Heideggerian in theme or content, because of the lack of detailed material
written by Heidegger about Socrates. The incorporation of Continental Platonic
scholarship contributes to demonstrating how the key ideas emerging from
Heidegger’s reading of Socrates might be understood when further elucidated by
incorporating similar scholarship embracing Socrates, as does Heidegger, as a
radically “non-doctrinal” thinker.
Heidegger’s “Doctrinal” Plato
Truth as “Correctness” in Relation to Education
Heidegger is criticized in Continental “phenomenological” scholarship and
“hermeneutic” readings of Plato for developing and espousing a “doctrinal”
view of Plato’s philosophy (Hyland 1995, 2004; Zuckert 1998). We also
encounter this critique in “Third Way” Platonic scholarship, e.g., Gonzalez
states emphatically that the “figure who normally bears the name ‘Plato’ in
Heidegger’s text is a dogmatic metaphysician,” and we add, the first systematic
metaphysician and, as related directly to our concern, “the complete antithesis
to the figure Heidegger himself names ‘Socrates.’” (Gonzalez 2009: 431).2
Against Heidegger, Hyland offers a decidedly “non-doctrinal” reading of Plato,
stating, “Heidegger’s reading of the cave analogy in Plato’s Doctrine of Truth is
 Heidegger’s Socrates /129

cursory and orthodox [doctrinal] to the point of tedious” (Hyland 1995: 140).3
We pause here briefly to examine the term “doctrinal” in relation to Platonic
scholarship in order to highlight characteristics consistent with “doctrinal”
readings emerging from the analytic tradition, e.g., Sahakian and Sahakian
(1976), who read Plato as a systematic metaphysical idealist: (1) Knowledge
“produced” by the dialectic is propositional in nature; (2) The dialectic, as
method sine qua non of the philosopher-rulers, culminates in noesis by
transcending the hypothetical method in the production of certain truth; (3)
Knowledge accruing via the dialectic is of the essential “Forms” and the “Idea”
of the Good; and (4) The “positive” experience of the dialectic, which is
equated with “Socratic” education, is substantive, definitive, and reproducible.
Thus, already, in relation to our concern with method, truth, and learning we
encounter views that are opposed to a “non-doctrinal” or “non-systematic”
interpretation Plato and Plato’s Socrates. Contrarily, Heidegger’s decidedly
“non-doctrinal” view of Socrates Heidegger embraces the following positions:
(1) Knowledge or truth of virtue is non-propositional in nature; (2) Knowledge
of the virtues cannot be taught via transmission, and is rather lived and
instantiated within the unfolding context of the elenchus-dialectic; (3) The
dialectic, unlike the “scientific method,” is neither transposable nor does it
terminate in the production of definite results; and (4) The relation to “truth”
the dialectic establishes is always limited because of the ontological distance
separating the human off from the full revelation of the essence of virtue, this
because of the existential limits imposed by finitude.
In one of Heidegger’s most notable readings of Plato, the Allegory of the Cave
serves to elucidate and establish Plato’s understanding of the essence of truth
(alethiea) with the concomitant understanding of how the essence of truth
ultimately determines an authentic view of education as paideia. Authentic
education (paideia), for Heidegger, in his reading of Plato and the Allegory is
represented in a series of “movements” as the turning around (periagoge) of the
entire soul back to itself enlightened, i.e., an authentic education - the very form
of education the “doctrinal” Plato fails to realize because of his initial
misunderstanding of the essence of truth - according to Heidegger, “lays hold
of the soul itself and transforms it in its entirety by first leading us to the place
of essential Being accustoming us to it” (Heidegger 1998, 165). The theme of
“light” permeates the reading of the Allegory and it is within that which “shines”
forth, is “seen,” that the “whatness” of things manifests, and so it is in quidditas,
and not existentia, that esse as essentia is located. The “whatness” of a thing is
traced directly to a “view of what is present” (Heidegger 1998: 173), and for
Plato this represents the essence of all things, the “whatness” of a thing
indicates that it can be seen and hence known (idea/idein) in its unhiddenness, in
its ability to shine forth. According to Heidegger, in Plato, “Unhiddenness” now
means: the unhidden always as what is accessible thanks to the idea’s ability to
shine,” and this is what “brings about presencing, specifically the coming to
presence of what a being is in any given instance,” and so, as Heidegger
critically concludes, seeing - as unhiddenness itself - “is yoked into a ‘relation’
with seeing, it becomes ‘relative’ to seeing (Heidegger 1998: 173).
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Plato thus fails to trace the essence of truth to primordial hiddenness and
finitude, and rather to the “secondary” and “dependent” occurrence of
unhiddenness itself, to what is present, to the thing that is shown and stands before us
and remains “in its constancy” (Heidegger 1998, 175), in its naked givenness, i.e.,
the very thing given through “unhiddenness” in the event of Being. Heidegger’s
concern is far more originary, as Sheehan articulates, for it is the ontological
concern with the underlying phenomenon that makes “givenness” possible in
the first instance, i.e., what is it that facilitates or “produces (poiei sein)
givenness” and “provisionally and heuristically we may designate this focal issue
as ‘the enabling power’ that makes possible the correlation of givenness/being
as its dative” (Sheehan 2001: 7), and as stated above, this is Heidegger’s concern
with primordial “hiddenness” (in Being’s recession) as the essence of truth.
Importantly, this has implications for Plato’s conception of aletheia, which is
erroneously “taken as the opposite of  (i.e., of the false sense of the
incorrect)” (Heidegger 1998: 178), and is reduced to and embraced as
“correctness” (), and this indicates that truth informs and grounds our
comportment to (present-at-hand) beings and not to Being. The essence of truth,
which becomes an epistemological and not an ontological issue, is taken as the
“agreement” or relation between idea and thing as expressed through a locution
or proposition, where the locus of truth is encountered, e.g., as in the history of
Western philosophy and the understanding of adaequatio intellectus et rei
(“agreement between intellect (idea) and thing”), expressed through the
Correspondence Model of Truth, and herein lies the initial ground for a Platonic
reading that might be labeled “doctrinal.” Due to this misinterpretation of
aletheia, Plato’s vision of knowing and learning, or “education,” is represented
by gignoschein - and not authentically as paideia - the process of “knowing by way
of seeing,” and this is linked by Heidegger with the Greek idein in relation to
idea in terms of homoiosis as the overall “agreement of the act of knowing with
the thing itself” as seen (Heidegger 1998: 177).4
As stated, Heidegger claims that the idea of truth is inseparable from
education, and if we follow this logic, we understand that since the “first
beginning” education moves away from an original notion of paideia as it is
instantiated within the soul’s relation to the truth of Being, shifts from an open
manner of questioning grounded in finitude, mystery, and primordial
hiddenness, and is instead systematically “harnessed in a relation to looking,
apprehending, thinking, and asserting” (Heidegger 1998: 182). This leads to a
view of education that is directed toward the accumulation and possession of
knowledge, indeed, as Heidegger points out, if receiving a so-called “good
education,” we would then “know everything possible to know in all realms of
science, art, and the like,” and we would continue to “acquire each day what is
newest and most valuable” (Heidegger, 1993: 258). This is a view of education
that we equate with contemporary education, resulting from the fallout of
Platonism, a form of education that Scott, in his reading of Socrates’ “non-
doctrinal” practice of education, claims is akin to an additive model of education,
which is the very type of education - the filling up of empty vessels, the piling
and building up of knowledge - that Plato’s Socrates continually decries in the
 Heidegger’s Socrates /131

dialogues,5 as opposed to an integrative model of education, which he associates with

an original form of paideia. In relation to these thoughts, Heidegger observes
that when “thinking” in education is conceived as a “technique for explaining
highest causes,” it comes to an “end by slipping out of its element,” it then
procures its “validity as techne, as an instrument of education and therefore as a
classroom matter,” in terms of standardization, and as such this presupposes it is
already a “cultural concern” (Heidegger 1993: 221).
Indeed, according to Heidegger, language itself moves in the direction of the
“service of expediting communication along routes where objectification - the
uniform accessibility of everything to everyone - branches out and disregards all
limits” (Heidegger 1993: 221), and when this occurs, beings (and Being) shows
up as “actualities in a calculative” schema, i.e., “scientifically and by way of
philosophy, with explanations and proofs,” and so we believe that we wipe
away or outstrip the inherent mystery in things, and have already “decided the
truth of Being” as established by means of “causes and explanatory grounds.”
(Heidegger 1993: 223). This “cultural concern” or phenomenon that Heidegger
references in is traceable to the oppressive “en-framing” effect of das Ge-stell
(Heidegger 1977). Here we note that it is because of Plato’s “doctrine of truth”
that the essence of technology manifests in the modern epoch, for according to
Heidegger, “Plato’s doctrine of ‘truth’ is not something past, it is historically
‘present,’ not just in the sense of his teaching have a ‘later effect’,” but rather in
the sense that the change to the essence of truth leaves us with “an all-
dominating fundamental reality, long established and thus still in place”
(Heidegger 1998: 181-182). Drawing on Heidegger’s interpretation, we note
that we today in education encounter a technological-and-quantitative view of the
three educational issues of our concern: (1) Method is understood as a top-down,
transposable schema for “problem-solving” (scientific method) or “teaching”;
(2) Truth is conceived (and experienced) as the destination to which method
inevitably leads, i.e., knowledge as something that is acquired, possessed, and
validated by one or another epistemological model (e.g., Correspondence
Model of Truth); and (3) Learning is a controllable, predictable, and terminal
activity that occurs through the successful “application” of a given method,
indicating that “truth” has been procured, which is then assessed to indicate the
student’s or learner’s educational “achievement.”6
Heidegger’s “Non-Doctrinal” Socrates
“Pure” Thinking in the “Sway” of the Unfolding of Essential Truth
Heidegger identifies Socrates as the “purest thinker of the West” (Heidegger
1968: 17), and it is this classification as a “pure thinker” that we are committed
to unpacking as it relates to Socrates’ understanding and practice of his dialectic
method, his view of “truth,” and his understanding of philosophy (or thinking)
as a process of original learning (paideia). Socrates, in his ever-renewed quest for
truth, observes Heidegger, is courageously “drawn to what withdraws,” and
when this happens to a thinker in the process of authentically thinking, he is
drawn into “the enigmatic and therefore mutable nearness of its appeal,”
despite being “far away from what withdraws” and even though “the
withdrawal may remain as veiled as ever” (Heidegger 1968, 17). This, as we
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explain constitutes or instantiates for Heidegger the “living context” of

thinking, a context facilitating the “draft” of the dynamic counter-striving of
lighting and concealing, and Socrates, according to Heidegger, did “nothing else
than place himself into this draft, this current, and maintain himself in it,” and
this is why, according to Heidegger he was the purest thinker of the West
(Heidegger 1968: 17). To bring clarity to this notion of thinking in terms of an
immersion in the “draft,” we turn to Heidegger’s understanding and
interpretation of what he terms Da-sein’s Being-historical thinking (inceptual/mindful
thinking), which is an original way of doing philosophy, or thinking, “according
to a more originary basic stance” within the context sheltering the unfolding of
“the question of the truth of be-ing,” which is no longer a “thinking about
something and representing something objective” (Heidegger 1999: 3), but
rather a thinking of matters in the poietic manner of bringing forth what is thought
in its incompleteness while at once retaining and sheltering traces and
intimations of its supreme and primordial power, which inspires the respect for
the ineffability of that which is thought and its refusal to be brought to full
disclosure or rendered wholly intelligible in language.
For Heidegger, as we know, it is Being qua Being or the essential truth of
Being that is thought, while for Socrates it is ultimately the Being or ineffable
and mysterious essence of the virtues, which he continually questions within the
context of his thought and “examination” (exetazein). Heidegger claims that
inceptive-mindful thinking is attuned to the matter at hand, original questioning,
and thinking itself, in order to authentically hold the thinker in the essential
“sway” of the relationship between thinking and the essential truth of Being.
This type of thinking does not come to an end, for it is never a means to the
end of “truth” that might terminate the thinking and is always actively underway
as it is grounded in recession or primordial hiddenness and so it experiences
and thinks the coming-to-be and passing-away of Being, it breaks open and holds open
what is most question-worthy and so abides amid Being’s essential unfolding.
There is an exigent, distressing need, Heidegger claims, of “holding oneself within the
essential sway of truth (Heidegger 1999: 258). This form of thinking shelters the
mystery, or Being’s recession into hiddenness (Entruckung) that initially facilitates
unhiddenness (Berucking), illuminating beings in such a way that self-hiddenness
and the event and truth of Being unfolds in its most primordial way. This is one
way to interpret Heidegger’s comments regarding Socrates’ pure mode of thinking,
and in the phenomenological “non-doctrinal” readings of Plato’s Socrates, this
is also how we might understand the questioning-context sheltering and
instantiating the unfolding of Socrates’ mode or practice of questioning, his
mode of elenchus-dialectic examination.
Heidegger claims that Socrates thinks a single thought, for he repeatedly
thinks “on no other topic than what things are” and continues to say “the same
thing about the same thing” (Heidegger 1956: 74) and, as stated, this for
Socrates is the Being of the virtues. He thinks the same thing because the matter
demands the unwavering dedication to continually return to it, responding to its
enigmatic withdrawal and appeal, because its very essence resists being
exhausted by the questioning, and this is because what Socrates inquires into
 Heidegger’s Socrates /133

remains question-worthy. To think such thoughts we must first, states Heidegger,

“incline toward what addresses itself to thought – and that is that which of
itself gives food for thought,” this he identifies as a gift, and the “gift of what
must be properly be thought about, is what we call most thought-provoking”
(Heidegger 1968: 17) – which is most question-worthy. This we relate directly to
the “the question” Socrates asks, which finds its origin (arche) in an attunement
or pathos Heidegger calls “astonishment” (das Erstaunen) that is related to
“wonder” (to thaumazein), and as Socrates explains in the Theaetetus, this
attunement grounds philosophy. When talking of the “beginning,” Heidegger
references arche, which “names that from which something proceeds,” however,
this “‘from where’ is not left behind in the process of going out, but the
beginning rather becomes that which the verb achein expresses, that which
governs” (Heidegger 1959: 81), i.e., astonishment and wonder give birth to and
continue to nourish, invigorate, and direct Socrates’ ever-renewed philosophical
inquiry. In and through “wonder” we are set within a relationship to what is
inquired into, and here recall our initial comments regarding Socrates and the
“draft” of thinking, wherein that which is questioned, that which is essential,
“retreats” from our advances, as we are held in a state of “wonder,” and are
simultaneously “forcibly drawn to and, as it were, held fast by from which it
retreats” (Heidegger 1959: 85). From out of this phenomenon what Heidegger
terms “original questions” spring forth. Original questions never terminate in
definitive answers, they can never be closed-off, and the most original question
for Socrates, as Heidegger informs us, is the “Greek ti estin,” or “what is the
essence of x?” Since we have said philosophy has its beginning (arche) in
thaumazein, and original questions also have their origin in the pathos of wonder,
this beginning, according to Heidegger, gives rise to a questioning that “pushes
[Socrates] into the open,” and as an original questioning, it “transforms itself (as
does every genuine questioning), and casts a new space over and through
everything” (Heidegger 2001: 32/23).
The type of truth consistent with “doctrinal” readings of Plato’s Socrates is
the form of knowledge that can be grounded, as we saw in Heidegger’s reading
of Plato, in “correctness,” but contrarily, Heidegger’s Socrates, might be said to,
as Kirkland ontends, devote himself to the pursuit of “truth,” which
presupposes an “attitude toward his subject matter in which he does not
impose his will upon it,” but rather, “aims to allow it to come to light in his
discourse” (Kirkland 2010: 51, my emphasis). This is precisely the manner in
which Plato in Letter Seven describes philosophical understanding as an original form
of aletheia, which manifests in dialogue, but “cannot at all be expressed in words
as other studies can, but instead, from living with the subject itself in frequent
dialogue a light is kindled from a leaping flame comes to be in the soul where is
presently nourishes itself” (Plato 1997: 341b-d my emphasis). Let us explore
this notion of Socratic truth as it might relate to Heidegger’s philosophy in a bit
more detail by looking to the early Greek experience of aletheia, which is by now
quite familiar to readers of Heidegger, as an encounter with unhiddenness (un-
concealment) linked intimately with hiddenness (concealment) as the ground
for its possibility, the possibility as entities presencing or showing up for our
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appropriation - in their givenness - in the first instance. As stated, Plato

misinterpreted this primordial understanding of truth as aletheia. Heidegger
finds the original understanding of aletheia in Heraclitus’ Fragment 123:
… , which might be translated in a straightforward
manner as, “Nature has an affinity for hiding or remaining hidden.” However,
Heidegger renders it as, to return to the language of the “sway” within which
Socrates thinks, “the holding sway of beings, i.e., beings in their being, loves to
conceal itself” (Heidegger 2002: 9). We get this understanding of aletheia in
Kirkland’s “non-idealist” reading of Plato’s Socrates in pursuit of the phenomenal
Being of the virtues. In the course of questioning and interrogating the initial
appearance of the virtue present to the doxai, as opposed to definitions or ideas
filling the content of consciousness, “what emerges into truth through the
questioning of the doxa with Socrates is ‘what virtue is’,” but it is not brought to
stand in propositional language, but rather remains “unspoken,” and indeed this
living and instantiating the nourishment of indelible truth, like a flashing light into
the soul marks the true “success” of the dialectic, for “it marks the limit of
virtue’s appearing to us, disturbing our doxai and pointing thereby beyond them
to what is present in doxa only in exceeding it” (Kirkland 2010: 115).
Kirkland argues, in his analysis of the pathein-of-truth (“suffering under”
truth), the experience of aletheia is not only “excessive” it can also be
“dangerous” in the sense of it representing an encounter with ta deinon, or the
awe-inspiring presence of truth as an excessive force or phenomenon, which
“resists being delimited and made intelligible, not merely frustrating our specific
expectations, but radically calling into question what we presumed to be the
limits of ‘what is,” even of the possible” (Kirkland 2010: 49), and here we
understand Heidegger’s claim regarding Socrates demonstrating the “courage”
to hold himself in the dialectic’s unfolding and reisting the temptation, to which
others fall victim, of fleeing-in-the-face of truth. Aletheia, as philosophical
understanding, appears as the flashing flame within a momentary revelation, as an
intimation of truth, where there is the concomitant movement or recession of
what appears into mystery, and certain aspects of the virtue - and its very essence
- remain concealed (Magrini 2017; 2018). Thus, as opposed to the type of
propositional or axiomatic certainty that many analytic interpreters of Plato link
with the (potential) philosopher-rulers’ practice of the dialectic in the Republic,
e.g., Sahakian and Sahakian (1977), it is possible to grasp Socrates’ notion of
philosophical understanding in the following terms: (1) It is a form of insight that
although emerging from a discursive process of dialogue, it itself non-
discursive; (2) it is non-propositional, but it is not reducible to rote or basic
“know-how,” this because it is a “normative” form of insight; (3) It is manifest
and comes-to-presence only in the midst of dialogue or the practice of the philosophical
method; (4) It is neither wholly subjective nor object and rather it mediates both
realms, and is also reflexive in nature as a potential form of “self-knowledge”
(Gonzalez 1998; Kirkland 2010; Hyland 1995; Magrini 2017; 2018). Turning to
Notomi’s “non-doctrinal” analysis of Platonic truth in dialogue-and-dialectic, it is
possible to understand this characterization of alethiea as related to Socrates in
the “draft” and “sway” of his inquiry as “primarily the soul’s ability (dunamis)
 Heidegger’s Socrates /135

and process of engaging properly in a dialogue” (Notomi 2004: 2), and it is now
to the issue of the dialectic and the practice thereof in Heidegger’s Socrates that
we turn.
When working to separate the sophist off from Socrates - or Socratic
philosophy - the real philosopher, the ontos philosophos, is describes as embodying
the vocation, task, or “occupation” that looks upon the bios, as this term and
concept is set off from zōe. This indicates for Heidegger that the philosopher is
not concerned with the life of things and entities set within the “nexus of
animals and plants, of everything that crawls and flies,” but rather the “sense of
existence, the leading of a life, which is characterized by a determinate telos, a
telos functioning for the bios, itself as an object of praxis” (Heidegger 1998: 168),
and for this reason, we refer to philosophy as a way-of-Being in the world. The
philosopher is concerned with existence, the living out of various kinds of life,
and beyond, makes a determination regarding which life or types of lives (bioi) it
is best to live. For Socrates, as we have already seen, this is a life in pursuit of
excellence and the “good” and it is a life that is inseparable from the practice of
the dialectic or dialektikē - the practice and way-of-Being that is at once a living with
the logoi. We note that unlike typical “doctrinal” readings of Plato that view the
dialectic as a tool or trusted method for arriving at certain truth, truth grasped
in and through noein - where the hypothetical method is jettisoned, as described in
the Republic - Heidegger points out the dialectic’s flaws, problems that Plato
does not overcome. Gonzalez, in his reading of the Sophist, informs us that the
“logos pervading all forms of disclosing…has a tendency to conceal,” as such,
what the dialectic aims at is what amounts to the transcendence of language or
the logos, by way of “proceeding through (dia) logos,” and “its ultimate aim, that
towards which it is inherently directed must be a pure seeing or noein beyond
logos” (Gonzalez 2004: 18). However, the dialectic can never accomplish this
end and so has an “inherent tendency toward a ‘pure seeing’ that it can never
attain” (Gonzalez 2004: 19). This appears to render the dialectic a failed project,
however, there are positive elements associated with the dialectic as practiced
by Socrates, despite it failing to rise to the level of trustworthiness granted in
doctrinal readings of Plato. It is successful within limits, and there are positive
aspects of the Socratic dialectic that relate to truth, education, and the potential
development of the character (hexis).
So, if the dialectic is limited, according to Heidegger, what can it accomplish
as it relates directly to a “Socratic” philosophy? In a response requiring some
explanation, we attempt to show that the dialectic is beneficial to a
philosophical life, as described above, in that it instantiates a way-of-Being that is
educational or heuristically educative in its essence. The dialectic is a process that is
disclosive, according to Gonzalez, but it discloses things “indirectly, negatively,
and ‘reflexively’ (i.e., through the process of philosophy itself)” (Gonzalez 2004:
38). “Negatively,” in this case, as Heidegger brings to our attention, refers to
“denial” by means of legein, and the “saying ‘no,’ is a letting be seen,” and is not,
a reference in words to that which amounts to the bringing “of what is said to
nothing,” which is a naming that allows things to fade away or disappear into
“nothingness” (Heidegger 1999: 388). Rather, when “negation” possesses a
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“disclosive character,” it possesses, “within the concrete uncovering of beings,

a purifying [cathartic] function, so that negation itself acquires a productive
character” (Heidegger 1999: 388). Negation is understood by Heidegger as an
integral component of the Socratic dialectic, which is thought of as a process of
“ of the  by ,” which works by “setting the 
against each other through the   ‘” (Heidegger 1999: 260) - the
purification of ignorance through the questioning and synthesizing through the gathering of
beliefs and opinions held by those who are engaged in the dialogue. In this process,
what is “positive”- and here we recall Plato’s claim in Letter Seven about the
leaping flame of truth that settles in the soul, which transforms it through
periagoge, or the soul’s turning back or around to itself enlightened, which is an
“educative” (paideutic) occurrence - is the partial and limited revelation of the
matter under discussion, i.e., the partial appearance of elusive phenomenal Being of
the virtues. What Heidegger indicates about what is “positive” in the dialectic,
he links intimately with a “Socratic attitude,” which achieves the “positive only
in actually carrying it out,” by living within the draft and sway of the inquiry and
not in terms of the dialectic producing “positive” results in terms of “truth” that
somehow stands at the end, and hence beyond, the inquiry itself (Heidegger
1999: 368), i.e., we are transformed within the dialectic, only within the process
itself, and not by some result it might produce.7 How this “enlightenment”
occurs, however, is not clearly explicated by Heidegger, however, in relation to
his reading, we explore this issue by turning to “non-doctrinal” readings of
Plato’s Socrates’s practice of elenchus-dialectic in the attempt to show that,
although never culminating in noetic insight of the so-called “truth” of the essence
of virtue, the logoi, in rigorous, well-meaning discourse, does demonstrate a
revelatory capacity in the process of questioning, refuting (negating), and
winnowing out the doxai that are shown to be problematic and questionable.
Heidegger describes the practice of the dialectic as a vigorous questioning
() with the purpose of shaking one out of familiar and complacent
modes of knowing where many doxai are brought together and set in tension in
relation to that which is questioned or “one and the same thing” (Heidegger
1999: 260). Beyond simply assuming oppositional roles, the doxai, as Heidegger
stresses, within the discourse, the “‘opinions’ as it were, slap each other in the
face” (Heidegger 1999: 261), and there is the “casting out [] of
ungenuine ,” and a “clearing away,” or a “removal of what stands in the
way of the , the proper positive learning” (Heidegger 1999: 262),
which demonstrates the function of “,” the act of casting out
ignorance and transcending  (Heidegger 1999: 258) in a way that
“clarifies” or “purifies” () the soul. Indeed, when Heidegger
describes the context of the Socratic dialectic and dialogue, and here we should
recall Heidegger’s description of the philosopher’s life as introduced above, “it
is not a dwelling with the material content of knowledge,” i.e., not a concern
for content-over-method, or propositional knowledge over a more vague and limited
form of understanding, rather “it is a matter simply of the Being of Dasein
itself: to what extent does it dwell in  [understanding/truth of the
 Heidegger’s Socrates /137

virtues and the “good” life] or in  [ignorance of the virtues and the
“good” life]” (Heidegger 1999: 262). But how, returning to Heidegger’s critique
of the dialectic, as a practice that is locked in language, and hence cannot
transcend language in its pursuit to arrive at the place of noein, a pure form of
seeing that is beyond the logos, is it possible to imagine “truth” emerging from a
practice driven by and at once limited by language? Gonzalez observes that
what philosophy requires is a form of speech, or manner of approaching
discourse, that “breaks through speech in a process of ‘speaking for and against,’”
in a way that might direct our “attention beyond what is said, thereby leading us
more and more to the matter under discussion and letting it be seen” (Gonzalez
2004: 18). If we take into consideration what Heidegger has said regarding the
Being of Dasein as representing the true philosopher’s concern in relation to
what he claims about “dialogue” in What is Called Thinking? perhaps it is
possible to suggest a response to this issue as it relates to Socratic dialectic.
Heidegger informs us that if “dialogue” focuses exclusively on “what is directly
said” and what might be directly known through this saying, dialogue “becomes
haulting and fruitless” (Heidegger 1968: 178). However, if inquirers in the
dialogue “involve each other in that realm and adobe about which they are
speaking,” and as we have seen, for Heidegger, this realm of original
questioning gives rise to “speaking,” they inhabit the site of thought in its
relation to the essential truth of Being,” and “lead each other to it” to dwell in
the “soul of the dialogue,” and so the speakers are “led into the unspoken,” i.e.,
what emerges from logos but is irreducible to it (Heidegger 1968: 178).
To approach an understanding of how this movement into the unspoken through
the logos might occur in the unfolding of the Socratic dialectic, we consider
Gonzalez’s (1998) and Gadamer’s (1988) insightful analyses of Plato’s Letter
Seven, focusing on the manner in which the four ways of knowing contend in
order to open a vista for the presencing of the “fifth way,” or brief insight, a truth
barely seen, in the midst of the dialectic as this phenomenon might occur through
the winnowing process of clearing away the negative and making space for the
positive in dialectic as Heidegger describes above. In Letter Seven, Plato discusses
four ways of knowing: (1) names/words, (2) images/figures, (3) propositions,
and (4) resulting insight (knowing). Plato also discusses a “fifth way” that
occurs from out of these, and it is a form of philosophical insight (philosophical
understanding) that he stresses is ineffable; it cannot be spoken of like other
things philosophers discuss, and it certainly does not possess the degree of
certainty required to ground any systematic doctrine (Plato 1997: EP VII 341c).
Whereas Heidegger elicits the imagery of the doxai in and through dialogic
exchange, “slapping against each other,” in both Gonzalez (1998) and Gadamer
(1988), we encounter a similar metaphor, that of the dialectic unfolding as
process wherein the doxai or “ways of knowing” are rubbed against each other,
and this relates to the notion of language’s potential transparency in relation to
the Greek term that Plato employs, tribein, “to rub down.”8 Ideally, in the
dialectic, we might imagine words fading into the background so that the
meaning shines forth in a clear and pristine manner. However, as Gadamer
informs us, in the “rubbing” of the four ways together in dialectic, they “assert
138/ Philosophical Investigations, Vol. 13/ Issue. 28/ fall 2019

themselves as whatever particular thing they are instead of fading out of view,”
and this indicates that language, a critique we are familiar with in reading
Heidegger, fails to achieve the proper level of transparency in order to let the
“thing itself” (Being of virtue) move to the fore unimpeded and be seen in the
fullness of its self-showing (Gadamer 1988: 105). Now, if we consider what
Gonzalez contends about the Greek term tribein, as a “process of a vigorous
rubbing that wears things down” (Gonzalez 1998: 265), or wears them away, it
is possible to understand the process of truth-happening in Plato’s Letter Seven:
As we move through the four ways, rubbing each against the other, there
occurs a “wearing down” of the language, so to speak. The more intensely we
seek to clarify the names, images, and propositions we employ to ground our
knowledge, the more the words/images begin to wear down and away; they
recede, as it were, and a partial and momentary transparency of language occurs,
and the fleeting light of truth shines forth, like a leaping flame (Magrini 2014). In
more direct terms, according to Gonzalez, through the “process of question
and answer in which we expose the weakness of the words, propositions, and
images we use,” we are afforded a momentary and partial vista into truth, and
“just barely glimpse through their cracks the true being which they all attempt
but fail to express” (Gonzalez 1998: 268). It is possible to link the “fifth way”
of “barely” knowing the “thing itself” with the moment when language reaches
its limited, but disclosive potential as a transparent medium for aletheia.
This is not, however, to indicate that this form of insight transcends
language usage entirely, or that it is a moment when truth is fully disclosed with
no dissembling or hiddenness, because this moment of truth-happening occurs
only in and through the vigorous use of language, which is always grounded in
human limitation and radical finitude. As Gonzalez stresses, in a way we relate
to our reading of Heidegger’s Socrates, this unique, fleeing, and fragile instance
of philosophical insight as described is not and can never be “the kind of
knowledge that will put an end to all inquiry or that can be ‘grasped’ once and
for all” (Gonzalez 1998: 267), and it requires ever-renewed attempts to bring it
to light, which requires the participants in the dialectic, as Heidegger has
stressed in relation to Socrates, to hold themselves in the draft of the inquiry, for as
Plato stresses, whatever we learn must be learned together, “through long and
earnest labor” (Plato 1997: EP VII 344b). To further contribute to this line of
thought as related to a theme we have already discussed, Kirkland stresses that
this process of “truth-happening” highlights the ontological distance that the
human being is situated from full disclosure of truth, which is always given in
an obscure, oblique, and partially veiled manner. However, the dedicated
participants agree to inhabit this “site of distance from but nonetheless toward the
being of virtue” (Kirkland 2010: xxii), and this indicates that we “abide with
doxa while pointing beyond it and to its limits” (Kirkland 2010: 114). In relation
to what Kirkland has identified as the deinos associated with philosophical
insight, this is a distressing distance from Being, but one that is at once protreptic,
i.e., in an important way, alluring and inspirational, which establishes our
relationship to issues that remain “as concealed, hidden, and thus
questionworthy” (Kirkland 2010: 55), we are drawn, as Heidegger indicates
 Heidegger’s Socrates /139

regarding Socrates, in the pursuit of that which withdraws from our grasp, and
in its withdrawal it beckons us to continue our pursuit, because it is truly
worthy of our continued questioning and represents the very essence of an
education directed toward those things that are most beneficial for our souls.
The site of the dialectic - the ever-developing, ever-expanding context of
originary learning - which is the locus of distance and the excess of truth, “belongs
essentially to the site opened by melete,” which is related directly to Plato’s
Socrates avowed practice of philosophy as care for the soul (as a paideutic practice),
“by our being originally concerned by the being of virtue, compelled to be toward
it in its withdrawal” (Kirkland 2010: 114).
Paideia as Philosophical Task and Way-of-Being
A Socratic Notion of Truth-and-Method in Learning
In what we have described in these foregoing sections, might be said to
represent an originary understanding of method and truth in Socratic philosophy,
as a practical way-of-Being or living out of one’s existence attuned to the
understanding that this also instantiates a life-of-learning, in terms of what
Heidegger describes, in relation to the undeniable Socratic influence on Plato’s
philosophy, as a way of life, a way-of-Being that is “on the way” (unterwegs) to
learning, which can never be equated with, to return to our earlier description of
contemporary standardized education, the “application” of methods in the
pursuit of “acquiring” sure and certain knowledge in education. Learning in a
manner associated with Heidegger’s Socrates is never reducible to the rote
accumulation of the day’s lessons, to be rehearsed on exams that calculate and
assess the “proficiency” level of the student in memorizing and regurgitating
the lesson; this is not Socratic learning, which we argue can never be
authentically reproduced in the classroom, e.g., Socratic Seminar. Heidegger
assures us of this when observing that  is not education as described
above, rather it is “, a task, and hence not a self-evident
possession,” and further, it is not merely a “task any person can take up
according to whim but is one which precisely encounters in each person its
own proper resistances” (Heidegger 1999: 258). Heidegger recognizes that
learning, just as is the case with thinking, is something we must first begin to
“learn,” for learning in an essential way “means to make everything we do
answer to whatever essentials address themselves to us at a given time”
(Heidegger 1968: 14). Education calls for, as opposed to the speaking of
monologues or the delivering of lectures, an attuned mode of “listening” in
advance for the call of education itself, and here, we return to the arche of
authentic philosophy - from out of which we are attuned and continually
guided and directed by original issues and questions - and the “unspoken”
essence in dialogue - which reveal “truth” that partially and momentarily
nourishes the soul in such a way that we are at once challenged by it and
enticed to continue on in the pursuit to better understand it, to bring to light
further aspects of it that are hidden.
Education, or authentic learning, as understood and practiced by
Heidegger’s Socrates, is an ongoing and ever-renewed “task” - recall
Heidegger’s understanding of education as “,” as exercise or labor
140/ Philosophical Investigations, Vol. 13/ Issue. 28/ fall 2019

- that is instantiated within the educational practice of the elenchus-dialectic,

which according to Heidegger, “provides the positive only in actually carrying it
out and not by making it the direct theme of reflection” (Heidegger 1999: 368)
and then producing objective instances of knowledge that terminate the method
or process.9 Based on our speculative reading of Heidegger’s Socrates, what we
term the originary context of education, which shelters the draft of authentic thinking
and learning, unfolds in the following manner, grounded in the understanding
that in learning there occurs a two-fold movement, captured by Heidegger’s use
of the Greek term, “”: (1) Our soul moves away from ignorance or
amathia and (2) because of the excessive and elusive nature of that which we
seek to reveal, it moves away from us, from the scope and parameters of our
inquires, and we are set at a distance from the full disclosure of the essence of
what we are inquiring into.10 Admittedly, if this two-fold movement fully
captured the process we identify as paidiea, the situation of learning would
indeed appear frustratingly pessimistic in the extreme, however, there is a third
component that is inseparable from the movement that Heidegger importantly
stresses, namely, (3) that we are attuned within this process and at once
transformed, drawn toward and to the very thing that withdraws from our
inquiry. In relation to this concern, we argue that authentic learning occurs
within the dynamic “draft” created by the counter-striving movement between
thought and what is thought set within the ontological context that instantiates
our relationship to the essential truth of Being, and this movement is
highlighted, as is the case with Socrates, by the back-and-forth of the question-
rejoinder-refutation of the dialectic in praxis - all the while, as Heidegger
reminds us, there is an attendance to what remains “unspoken” in the dialogue
(Heidegger 1968: 178), i.e., our encounter with alethiea. When learning, as stated,
we are inspired - attuned and held fast in wonder (thaumazein) - to continually
inquire into that which withdraws from full disclosure, “drawn to what
withdraws” (Heidegger 1968: 17), and in this process, we are located at a
distance from the essential nature of what remains question-worthy, and hence
worthy of our educational pursuits, and here we experience a way-of-Being within
a context of thinking highlighted the “mutual nearness of its appeal” (Heidegger
1968: 17). So, within this questioning in the midst of this distance from truth, a
proximity we can never close off, although distressing, we find inspiration to
continue on, for this thinking at a distance is attuned to continue on in the pursuit
of what withdraws from our inquiry. In learning, the partial and oblique
revelation of truth, or the intimation of truth, has nourished the soul, inspires us
to hold ourselves in the ever-evolving draft of thinking, for like Socrates, if we
are attuned to the “call” of education itself, we do “nothing else then place
[ourselves] into this draft, this current, and maintain [ourselves] in it”
(Heidegger 1968: 17), for it is only in this draft that enlightenment and
authentic education can occur.
Heidegger informs us that because Socrates is drawn into what withdraws,
“he points into what withdraws,” and in this way we might think of him as
serving as a “sign, a pointer,” but what he is pointing at is “something which
has not, not yet, been transposed into the language of our speech” (Heidegger
 Heidegger’s Socrates /141

1968: 18), indeed, still to this day, what Socrates philosophized - which he could
not properly or systematically bring to language - has not yet been understood
by a majority of educators, who are “like those people who run to seek refuge
from any draft too strong for them” (Heidegger 1968: 17). In the presence of
Heidegger’s Socrates, we find ourselves faced with the practice of education
that is not only foreign but radically at odds with the way we as contemporary
educators view education. For education as described relating to and emerging
from Heidegger’s Socrates cannot be reduced to the type of method that can be
successfully reproduced or imitated in the classroom with the aim of producing
the result of learning that can be gauged through quantification. To even
attempt to “thematize” or “systematize” it would serve only to bastardize its
unique and original essence, indeed to write it down in the service of a
systematized curriculum with the requisite “lesson-plans” already betrays
Heidegger’s point about one of the things that makes Socrates the purest thinker
of the West, namely, “he wrote nothing,” and if he would have attempted to do
so, he would have turned away from authentic thought, or “pure thought,” to
become a “fugitive” of thought (Heidegger 1968: 17-18). Thus, a Socratic
education drawn from Heidegger’s reading is a form of learning and education,
to continue our theme drawn from contemporary Platonic scholarship, by its
very essence, must remain non-systematic; it cannot become a doctrine in the
sense that we in education understand it today. However, it is our hope that this
essay might work in service of offering Socratic intimations of and gestures
toward - despite how veiled these elucidations must remain - inspiring new and
potentially fecund thinking on the ways we currently go about educating our
students, offering philosophical insights into the potential re-conceptualization
of what we currently understand about the standards for methods, truth, and
learning. For the education we have described, as related to Heidegger’s
Socrates, depends on a genuine form of questioning that lies at the heart of the
educational experience, where deep transformation and attunement to the soul
(psyche) or disposition (hexis) occurs - here, we understand the pathos-of-education
in Heideggerian terms as a “tuning” or “turning” of the “dis-position and
determination” (Heidegger 1959: 83) - i.e., the soul in periagoge turned back to
itself enlightened, and it is enlightened in and through a unique and non-
doctrinal, non-systematic understanding of the experience of truth as aletheia, in
the occurrence of aletheuein as it is inseparable from the originary context of
education, which shelters the draft of authentic thinking and learning: authentic paideia.
Notes
1. As related to Fn. vi. below, readers are encouraged to reference George
Lazaroiu’s (2018) article, “The Socratic Process of Learning: Being-Educated as
a Philosophical Way of the Ethical Life,” which works to bring together
contemporary empirical (theoretically-based) research to bear on the questions
and issues emerging from a “non-doctrinal” reading of the dialogues. This essay
also makes an important contribution to re-thinking and re-envisioning the
Socratic Method as it has been traditionally embraced and practiced for years by
educators in classrooms. Lazaroiu shares the view that in relation to a so-called
“Socratic Method,” the notions of truth, method, and the process of learning
142/ Philosophical Investigations, Vol. 13/ Issue. 28/ fall 2019

must be reconceived in a way that stands opposed to typical standardized

epistemological models.
2. Heidegger’s reading of Plato’s philosophy (metaphysics) as “doctrinal” in nature
is not limited to Platonic scholars, e.g., Poggler (1987), commentating on
Heidegger’s path of thinking, recognizes that Heidegger embraces a “doctrinal”
and systematic Plato: “Plato,” writes Poggler, “turns his attention not to the
counteraction between unconcealment and concealment, but rather to
unconcealment as mere ‘unconcealment,’ as mere revealing” (80/102), thus
giving rise to a systematic metaphysics, education, and later, secular humanism.
3. Contrary to Hyland, Fried (2006) points out – although he does not refer to
Heidegger’s readings as “doctrinal” in nature - that, for Heidegger, it is not that
Plato is consciously teaching a systematic doctrinal philosophy; rather, it is the
manner in which what is “unsaid” in Plato’s philosophy is formalized or “said”
by and within the tradition, and the main concern is with “the translation of
truth as aletheia from unconcealment (Unvernogenheit) to the correctness of
representation [orhtotes],” of what is present before us in terms of an entity or a
being (157). Fried adds the following caveat to his reading: “Heidegger at times,
insists even in specific readings of Plato’s texts, that he is confronting not Plato
but Platonism” (157). Despite Heidegger’s reductive readings of Plato, Fried
stresses that we must not underplay the importance of Heidegger’s readings,
“for whatever critiques postmodern philosophers have of Heidegger, many
postmodernists owe a debt of thinking to Heidegger,” this is because they have
“accepted [his] reading of Plato as a decisive turn in the Western march toward
nihilism” (157).
4. Heidegger’s (1999) claim is that the “essence of ” is understood in the
“  ,” which Heidegger identifies as the educative
movement characterized by the “turning around the whole human being” from
an encounter with beings or things to the encounter with Being that first
facilitates the revelation of those beings and things for their potential
appropriation (167).
5. For example, in the Symposium, Socrates assures Agathon that authentic
education can neither be pursued nor carried out as a process through which
those who have little in the way of knowledge are made more knowledgeable by
those possessing greater knowledge, as “if ideas were the kind of things which
could be imparted simply by contact, and those of us who had few could absorb
them from those who have a lot,” much like the “way that liquid can flow from
a full container to an empty one if you put a piece of string between them”
(175d).
6. Overlooking the plausible conclusion offered by many Platonic scholars
regarding the lack of a codified method in Plato’s Socrates, Socratic Circles,
Socratic Method, and Socratic Seminar (Wilberding 2014; Strong 1997) are all
formalized Socratic Methods for application in the classroom. Educators
implementing Socratic Seminars argue that Socrates employs a reproducible
systematic method that can be explicated, packaged, marketed, taught, and
applied in the classroom to produce definitive “academic” results that meet the
criteria for the objectives in Common Core State Standards Curriculum and the
concomitant high-stakes testing consistent with the contemporary standardized
view of education. These educators claim that Socrates’ way of practicing his
dialectic examination can be systematized and imitated. In relation to this claim,
we bring the reader’s attention to a crucial issue Plato highlights in the Apology,
to which practitioners of the Socratic method in education have apparently paid
 Heidegger’s Socrates /143

no heed or have summarily dismissed, namely, the utterly and unmistakably

disastrous results that ensued when the youths of Athens attempted to “imitate”
the enigmatic and inimitable Socrates. Those who imitated Socrates contributed
to the formulation of the charges against him, as they systematized, copied, and
employed his supposed “method,” performing elenchus refutations of prominent
Athenian citizens. Let us listen to Socrates, who proclaims, “The sons of the
richest men accompany of their own accord, find pleasure in hearing people being
examined, and often imitate me themselves, and then they undertake to examine
others; and then, I fancy, they find a great plenty of people who think they know
something, but know little or nothing. As a result, therefore, those who are
examined by them are angry with me (Plato 1997, Apol. 23c-e). It is interesting
to note, in relation to “Socratic teaching,” that as opposed to training or
teaching (didasko) these youths to be upstart “gadflies,” it is by chance (tuche) and
neither by Socratic design nor the implementation of any formal or even
informal “Socratic curriculum,” that these youths are drawn to Socrates, listen
intently to him, and then take it upon themselves to imitate him (Magrini 2017;
2018).
7. Heidegger (1988) defines phenomenology in precisely the same manner, as a
“method” within which truth manifests that cannot be jettisoned once we have
arrived at it, e.g., when talking of interpreting facticity, Heidegger is clear that this
interpretation can be nothing other than “living” it, for only in interpretive
activity is Dasein’s possibility for “becoming and being for itself” made known
and pursued; ‘ (the interpreting of facticity), is a method for living
and acquiring “an understanding of itself” (11). This observation is made by
Gonzalez (2009) when stating in his reading of Socrates, “the truth of
philosophy is its method,” for “Socrates himself, at least as depicted in Plato,
places much more emphasis on method than on results, not only because his
discussions are often aporetic, but also, and more importantly, because he
appears to value more the process of dialectic and dialogue than any outcome of
this process” (427).
8. Original passages from Plato’s (1997) Letter Seven will assist the reader in
understanding the analysis we have provided, and they run as follows: “Only
when all of these things - names, definitions, and visual and other perceptions –
have been rubbed against one another and tested, pupil and teacher asking, and
answering questions in good will and without enmity – only then, when reason
and knowledge are at the very extremity of human effort , can they illuminate
the nature of any object (344b)…[but] this knowledge is not something that can
be into words like other sciences; but only after long-continued discourse
between teacher and pupil, in joint pursuit of the subject, suddenly, like a light
flashing forth when a fire is kindled, it is born of the soul and straightaway
nourishes itself” (341c).
9. In Gonzalez’s (2004) reading of Socratic philosophy and the dialectic, he
stresses that philosophy is an endeavor where truth and method are inseparable,
and “the truth of the matter shows itself, not in some definition or teaching that
would conclude philosophical questioning, but rather in the very carrying out of
this questioning” (427). If we relate the issue of “pure thinking” to an education
that would be consistent with because it is instantiated by Heidegger’s Socrates,
the ever-renewed practice of the dialectic requires, as Gonzalez elucidates, a
form of pure thinking that is “always underway and yet so in touch with the being
of the matter in question as to be continually changed by it,” i.e., a thinking in
relation to truth that can never be brought to full unhiddenness and yet still
144/ Philosophical Investigations, Vol. 13/ Issue. 28/ fall 2019

holds the supreme power to transform the soul (epagoge), and this thinking “pays
more attention to the way,” or practice and movement of the dialectic, “than to
the content without becoming contentless,” or devolving into a transposable,
applicable, formable, and hence, empty method, and this is the type of pure
thinking “transforms without instructing” (431)
10. We undoubtedly get the sense of  (apallage) referring to the “casting
out” of ignorance through dialectic. But this term can also indicate, as we have
suggested, in addition to “deliverance, release, riddance of a thing,” the “going away”
or taking a “departure” from a thing, hence our reference to truth’s movement away
from our understanding as well as the movement away that we experience from our
previous state of ignorance in the midst of the dialectic (Lexicon, 76).

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