Giuseppe Menditto

José Saramago’s novel The Cave recruits the well-known Platonic image in order to describe the totalitarian power of our capitalistic society and the human efforts to fight back. This chapter compares Saramago’s novel with some of the most significant twentieth-century interpretations of the Platonic allegory of the cave, namely, those by Martin Heidegger, Eugen Fink, Jan Patočka, Hannah Arendt and Adriana Cavarero. The broader phenomenological framework within which Saramago’s novel can be examined includes many issues, from the space for tactile and bodily knowledge, man’s freedom and responsibility and the relationship between reality and the virtuality of experience. In The Cave, Saramago somehow reverses Plato’s original myth, develops some of its implicit strands and creates a new model for collective imagination.

Hans Blumenberg’s reflection is grounded on the phenomenology of history that can be considered as one of the most heretical Husserl’s developments. Blumenberg sees these developments as a way of thinking, a “source” of inspiration, a “legacy” and a sort of “legitimacy.” The purpose of this paper is to stress two different but connected ques-tions on this heresy: on the one hand, the path of Blumenberg’s phenomenology not as continuum of historical substances, but as “reoccupation” of problems that a thinker bequeaths to another; on the other hand, the metaphor, as Blumenberg’s “semantic anomaly” and Husserl’s Lebenswelt images (e.g. “ground,” “horizon,” “leap”) as “infi-nite” heresy of their premises.