Truth: Studies of a Robust Presence

9. Art and Truth: From Plato through Nietzsche to Heidegger

232 Robert E. Wood 9 S Art and Truth From Plato through Nietzsche to Heidegger Plato and Heidegger stand at two ends of the philosophic tradition. Plato launched metaphysics as the search for the truth of the Whole; Heidegger attempted to get back to the ground of metaphysics after it reached its supposed end, in one sense in Hegel and in another sense in Nietzsche. Crucial to Plato is the struggle of philosophy with art over the basis of human existence. The infamous line in the tenth book of the Republic places art “three degrees removed from truth (alētheia).”1 It provides images of images of things that are themselves images of the “beingly beings ,” the Forms. Artists decorate the cave, they provide the basic doxa of a community regarding what is high and low in human existence. They filter and distort the intelligible realm, which alone can provide the true measure of human existence. Contrasted to Plato, Heidegger claims that metaphysics is not the fundamental mode of thinking of Being. He finds a further ground for metaphysics itself: it lies precisely in the Cave, that is, in our prephilosophic mode of being-in-the-world, our inhabiting a common way of understanding and acting formed out of a tradition determined essentially by the poets.2 Crucial for our purposes is Plato’s view that the relation between phi1 . Plato Republic X, 597e (henceforth Rep.). 2. Martin Heidegger, “The Way Back into the Ground of Metaphysics,” in Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre, translated by Walter Kaufmann (Cleveland: World Publishing, 1956), 206–221. Plato through Nietzsche to Heidegger   233 losophy and poetry is one of subordination of the latter to the former: philosophy is the censor of poetry because it grasps Being whereas poetry creates and is subject to appearance. For Heidegger, on the contrary, the relation between philosophy and poetry is one of coordination evoked in the image of the occupants of twin peaks equidistant from the valley of everydayness. Poets and philosophers are both deinoi, unheimlich, uncanny , distant from being-at-home and thus able to create for the first time a new or renewed mode of being-at-home. Both struggle with appearance for the sake of being. The philosopher thinks being while the poets proclaim the holy.3 In between Plato and Heidegger is Nietzsche, who lashed out against what he saw as the disparagement of temporal and bodily existence in Platonism and Christianity, who attempted to get behind the tradition to its motivational sources, and who substituted perspectivism for absolute truth.4 Nietzsche called for the study of knowing from the viewpoint of art and both from the viewpoint of life.5 For Nietzsche, we have art lest we perish of truth, the supposed object of religion and traditional philosophy ; indeed, art is higher than truth. In this paper we will examine the position of each thinker in turn on the nature of and relation between truth and art. We will attempt to point out the way in which each subsequent thinker is both critical of and crucially assimilates what preceded him. But we do so, not in order to perform some antiquarian scholarly exercise, but to come into an essential relation to the matters considered. We will do that explicitly in the conclusion. We begin with Plato. Plato Plato’s major treatment of art is in his Republic, and his major explicit treatment of art and truth is in Book X of that dialogue. There poetry appears not, as it did earlier, in terms of its civic exemplarity, but in terms of its truth-content. It is measured against the hierarchy displayed in the 3. Prologue to “The Way Back.” 4. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, translated by Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1966), 3 (henceforth BGE). 5. Nietzsche, “Attempt at a Self-Criticism,” 1886 preface to 1872 The Birth of Tragedy (henceforth BTR), translated by Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1967), 2/19. 234   Robert E. Wood Cave and in the line of knowledge: images and things in the Cave surmounted by mathematicals, the Forms, and the Good outside the cave. It is here that the question of truth emerges, the truth that would allow us to assess the civic. In his Book X assessment Socrates uses a very odd device, a double metaphor. His immediate target is poetry, but he relates poetry to claims about painting, indicating something of...