Any particular philosophical system, and the practice of philosophy itself (whatever exactly that may be), both have their limits. There is always something that they cannot handle or conceptualize, something ‘beyond’, ‘known’ precisely as what cannot be known. This, so Sallis tells us, is what Heidegger and Derrida aim to uncover, not by drawing it into the ordinary net of words with which we comfort ourselves, but by gesturing towards what we can, at best, only lightly touch and never grasp. This, they all assure us, was also Plato's focus: neither the Good Itself (aka the One), nor Chora (the space within which concrete entities have their being, later equated with Matter), can be directly known, any more than we can gaze directly at the Sun without being blinded; neither have any conceptualizable character; both are posited or guessed at or somehow experienced as, variously, the power with which all things exist or the potential to express such things.

In gesturing towards these notions, Sallis does something like the late antique philosopher Plotinus. Just as Plotinus assumes that everything that Plato said is somehow true and to the point (even when we may reasonably think that he is disagreeing with his master), so Sallis cannot bear to suppose that either Heidegger or Derrida is ever, simply, mistaken. He is startled to discover that Heidegger himself acknowledged, for example, that his pseudo-etymological analysis of Aletheia (as being a-lethes, unconcealed) and especially his complaint against Plato that he replaced ‘the Unconcealed’ with mere correspondence of speech to fact, were both in error. Every vague connotation of the terms they use must somehow or other be significant (‘verge’, he tells us, was once used to mean the male reproductive organ of some varieties of crustacean: I cannot myself conceive the relevance of this claim). At the same time, their terms can't really be translated or even – it seems – given any clear explanation, so that Sallis's text is sprinkled with German, French and Greek terms, as well as neologisms like “Beyng”, that we are told we can't expect to understand. How Sallis himself is persuaded that he understands them, or what would count as understanding them, remains unclear. And if, as he sometimes seems to suppose, no words or sentences have any stable meaning, nor touch the truth, it remains, to me, unclear how this or any other volume of his writings is meant to be more, at best, than verbal (not very euphonious) music.

Some chapters or sections of the book may possibly be of service to readers of Plato's Republic and Timaeus. One chapter – probably the clearest – deals, though rather too superficially, with Plato's account of differing musical modes and their emotional effects. He expounds various myths, of the Cave, and of Er, and of Orpheus, in ways that may kindle some awareness or enthusiasm in his readers. Of Orpheus, for example, and following Blanchot, he suggests that what Orpheus really desired was not Eurydice ‘alive’ and visible in the usual light of day, but the hidden Eurydice, the Other, never to be fully caught and understood. Bringing her back into the light, which might have seemed the very point of Orpheus' expedition into Hades (the Unseen), would have been a betrayal of the real desire, to ‘know’ what isn't visible, even to the eyes of intellect.

That there are truths being gestured at in Sallis's writings seems likely enough: my own taste is to think them better expressed, even with conscious paradox and playful misdirection, in the writings of Plotinus, and other open followers of the Platonic tradition. Aletheia, more likely (though this too is a false etymology), is the Unforgotten, not the Unconcealed: it is recalled to memory, as Plotinus has it, when some god tugs us around by the hair to waken us to a sense of our own involvement in a larger world (Ennead VI.5 [23].7, 9f). This is to lay claim, of course, to the real possibility of Presence, to that sense of something that we don't fully grasp but which instead lays hold of us. Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida and Sallis may be applauded for their bravery in trying to imagine life without such a presence, without any sense of a cognizable or recognizable reality. Personally, I prefer Plotinus, both as being clearer and as likelier to be correct.