Martin Heidegger accuses Plato, or at least Platonism, of promulgating a doctrine of the truth that interprets the truth in terms of trans-temporal ideas. Human beings themselves get interpreted in terms of their relation to these eternal, universal ideas, rather than their proper “finitude, temporality, and historicity,” which leads to nihilism, according to Heidegger. This paper argues that Heidegger misses an important feature of Plato’s parable of the cave: the fact that there are two pathways within it that meet at a crossroads. One, the well-known upward path, leads to the realm of transcendent truth; the other, often overlooked, is the lateral path that transects the cave and from which the shadows are projected. At this intersection, Plato show how what it means to be human requires both temporality and what transcends the historically situated.

Heidegger’s ontology consists of three general categories of beings: present-at-hand, ready-to-hand, and Dasein. Beings in the latter category, namely human beings, are said to exist in either one of two modes; either authentically or inauthentically. In recent years, however, it has been suggested we distinguish a third mode. This third mode, ‘indifference’ as it has come to be known, is motivated by the need to mitigate the tendentious relationship between the two functions of inauthenticity. Inauthenticity serves in a positive capacity as the source of a shared context of significance, while also functioning in the more negative role as the fundamental barrier to authenticity. Introducing this third mode of indifference allows us to split the difference, as it were, between these two seemingly incompatible functions of inauthenticity. This paper argues for a different approach. I want to suggest these two roles of inauthenticity can be made sense of using Heidegger’s distinction between genuine and non-genuine ways of disclosure. This would allow Heidegger to maintain the integrity of inauthenticity without giving up on the formal value-neutral status of this ontological distinction.