On Plato's Cave Allegory and Theaetetus, trans. Ted Sadler (London, Continuum, 2009), 1-5. THE POLITICAL IMPLICATIONS OF HEIDEGGER'S READING OF THE ALLEGORY OF THE CAVE 11 Heidegger does not go on to work out in full detail what the demands of the day are. He does, however, indicate that the allegory of the cave is a story about the awakening of the historical essence of human existence, which is at the present suffocated.14 As it is well known, Heidegger has a peculiar understanding of the words "essence" and "existence." Already in Being and Time, he suggests that "the 'essence' of Dasein lies in existence."15 One has to be attentive to the fact that Heidegger puts the word "essence" in inverted commas, thus expressing his discomfort with this philosophicallygive a more elaborate justification of the need to go back to the Greeks. He does so by drawing an analogy between the current state of humanity and a wanderer in an arid land who is about to die from thirst due to her distance from the source that she last drew water from.16 To better understand the implications of Heidegger's story of the wanderer, one must first examine what he means by the threat of dying from thirst. As we have indicated, the wanderer symbolizes humanity.17 14 Ibid., 45, 59. 15 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2009), 68. 16 Martin Heidegger, The Beginning of Western Philosophy, trans. Richard Rojcewicz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015), 31 f. 17 Heidegger's