Heidegger and Plato: Toward Dialogue

Introduction

This is a volume of original essays on issues raised in Heidegger’s treatment of Plato. Important philosophers often have interesting things to say about their predecessors and/or their contemporaries. Martin Heidegger possessed an unusually detailed grasp of the history of Western philosophy . Throughout his philosophical development he was extremely interested in the interpretation of key figures in the history of philosophy, with special attention to ancient Greek thinkers. Heidegger’s views of Plato are extremely complex. His writings on Plato provide no more than a fragmentary indication of the importance of the latter for his philosophical theories. During his life Heidegger published only one relatively short essay on Plato, “Plato’s Doctrine of Truth” (“PDT”), which appeared in 1942. Yet he was deeply interested in Plato. Three of the courses given at the Universities of Marburg and Freiburg im Breisgau were exclusively devoted to his writings. They include one on the Sophist in 1924–25 (GA 19), another on the Republic in 1931–32 (GA 34) and a final one on the Theaetetus (GA 36/37, part 2). At the beginning of the course on the Sophist, Heidegger also announced a course on the Philebus (GA 19, 7). The latter, which was supposed to occur in the same semester, was never given. In summer semester 1929, Heidegger gave a one-hour course entitled “Introduction in Academic Studies,”1 based on an interpretation of Plato’s cave allegory that was later developed in the 1931–32 course. Also in winter semester 1930–31 and in summer semester 1931, he gave a seminar whose full title, according to Herbert Marcuse’s transcript, was “Plato’s Parmenides (On the problem of time).” No transcripts or lecture notes of this seminar have so far appeared, and it is not known if their publication is planned. A simple way to describe Heidegger’s reading of Plato might be to say that what began as an attempt to appropriate Plato (and through Plato a large portion of Western philosophy) finally ended in an estrangement from both Plato and Western philosophy. What follows is a brief sketch of this attempt to appropriate, and this estrangement from, Plato. Introduction Catalin Partenie and Tom Rockmore xix Heidegger’s attempt to appropriate Plato for his own purposes began in the early 1920s and ended in the late 1920s. Throughout his remarks on Plato, Heidegger consistently maintains that Plato understood being as idea.2 According to Heidegger, “the fundamental question of Greek philosophical research is the question of Being, the question of the meaning of Being, and characteristically, the question of truth” (GA 19, 190/132). The fundamental question of Heidegger’s philosophy is the question of being. His deep interest in Greek philosophy arises out of his consistent claim that philosophy is nothing but a battle concerning this question. Heidegger considers Aristotle to be the “scientific high point of ancient philosophy” (GA 22, 22),3 and he straightforwardly claims that “what Aristotle said is what Plato placed at his disposal, only it is said more radically and developed more scientifically” (GA 19, 11–12/8). He further claims, however, that “philosophy has not made any further progress with its cardinal question [the question about being] than it had already in Plato” (GA 24, 399–400). Heidegger’s first major work, Being and Time (1927), opens with a quotation from Plato’s Sophist (244a). The quotation precedes a section of the Sophist usually called “the battle of the Gods and Giants,” which describes a debate about what being is (see Sph. 245–49). The fact that Heidegger’s first major work opens with a quotation from Plato indicates that at the time he composed this book Plato appeared to him to be the main hero of the philosophical battle about the meaning of being, the so-called gigantomachia peri tês ousias, which Being and Time was supposed to take up again in a way not seen since the early Greeks, and to resolve. From the early 1920s to the late 1920s Heidegger attempted to show that the question of being takes its clues from Dasein. And his claim throughout that period that Plato understood being as idea was an attempt to show that Plato’s philosophy also takes its clues from Dasein (see for instance his interpretation of the idea of the good in “EG,” 160–62, and the recollection of ideas in GA 26, 184–87). The estrangement from Plato’s thought that began in the late...