In Jonas’ “Phenomenon of Life” I believe he writes about the connection between study and living, the inextricable link between what is learned and what is lived, which Heidegger could not grasp. Thus the disaster of H’s political commitments, and his inability to really see the inextricable metaxu, as S. Weil wrote, between thought and life, between thinking and life in the polis. Strauss also knew this of Heidegger — and I’m paraphrasing — when he wrote of him, that it is rather naive, is it not, to simply think that life is all about pondering Being (and being without telos, to be sure).

Heidegger later told a group of students in France in the 1960s that “you can see my limits; I cannot,” which to me, seems a remarkable description of a lack of philosophic integration from someone who felt himself to be a kindred spirit with the pre-Socratics. I don’t think he really understood them at all. But that might just be my own limitations at work, which — alas — I see rather clearly.

When Jonas met Heidegger in Rome in 1936, and Heidegger still sported the regalia of the German state on his arm (long after he had given up the rectorship at Freiburg and recognized what he had done) it is sad to think that Heidegger had already been subjected to the withering rebuke of a colleague: “Back from Syracuse?” Yet he still wore the armband.

Plato’s mistakes in engaging with Dionysius resulted in the teachings contained in the 7th Letter and The Laws (and of course Plato’s earlier musings on writing and the Garden of Adonis in the Phaedrus); Heidegger turned to poetry and mysticism and the faint hope that “nur noch ein Gott kann uns retten.”