This article offers a close reading of the passages leading up to the myth of the cave and contends that the Republic frames this famous passage less as the illustration of a transcendental truth than as a problematic and self-referential meditation on the simultaneous necessity and impossibility of distinguishing between being and seeming. It contends that the myth when read in context not only asks us to distinguish between shadows on the wall and things themselves, it also forces us to

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... ogate this distinction. How does the world beyond appearance appear? What is it like? How does the truth seem? DREAMS AND OTHER FICTIONS Truth, in this world, is a property of the thoughts of the subject, not of the world that enfolds both consciousness and its other (Heidegger 1998, 177, 182). This shift in the nature and concept of truth, Heidegger claims, is the beginning of metaphysics (1998, 181). What Heidegger means by "metaphysics" is representational thinking: in the post-Platonic tradition, the world exists for us as a series of "pictures," which are judged and evaluated through the concepts possessed by the subject (1982). Philosophy is the critique, refinement, and manipulation of those concepts. "Metaphysics," then, is a form of thought that absolutizes the subject of thought and its perceptions in such a way that it fails to think its relation to time and death (