Status Updates From Heidegger's Platonism (Cont...

Plato: we are governed by an erotic longing for the Good, and that we love or long for what we lack,

Heidegger: we are drawn toward Being as it withdraws: “we are drawing into what withdraws, into the enigmatic and therefore mutable nearness of its appeal”. The deepest philosophical insight recognizes that the mystery must “remain . . . veiled”, that man’s search for wisdom is incomplete and incomplet-able.

The Good, then, is what Heidegger will later call the “mystery,” the unfathomable and concealed source of unconcealment that “in giving holds itself back and withdraws” ( TB 8), the dark side of Rilke’s “globe of Being”, the “side” of intelligibility facing away from us ( DT 64) that Heidegger describes interchangeably as “mystical,” “awesome,” “the unknown god,” and “the holy.”

Heidegger says that, with Plato’s “doctrine” of the Good, we are inquiring into what grants and empowers being and truth, not the Being of beings and not unhiddenness themselves. The Good, like Heidegger’s Being as such, is what “gives” the Being of beings (Forms); “[the] Being [of beings]—that which It [Being as such] gives—is what is sent” ( TB 8). What