Heidegger and Plato: Toward Dialogue

Imprint: Heidegger’s Interpretation of Platonic Dialectic in the Sophist Lectures ( 1924– 25)

In a letter to Karl Jaspers dated December 20, 1931, Heidegger describes himself as a simple “attendant” (Aufseher) in the great museum of philosophy . As such an attendant, he goes on, his sole duty is to make sure “that the blinds over the windows are raised and lowered correctly, so that the few great works of tradition receive a more or less adequate illumination for the chance observer.”1 Heidegger, however, knew very well that he was being misleading when he described himself in that letter to Jaspers as a simple attendant in the great museum of philosophy. Just one year before he wrote that letter , in a lecture he gave at the University of Freiburg, he described himself in completely different terms: as a murderer with a noble alibi. The interpretation of a philosophical work, he said there, should be a Destruktion, a “destruction” of that work (GA 31, 292). In such a “destruction,” during which one should attempt to bring the questions raised in that work to their ultimate transparency, one will metaphorically murder that work’s author. Thus, he claims, “it is—in the history of everything essential—the privilege and also the responsibility of all descendants to become the murderers of their forebears” (GA 31, 37).2 Heidegger’s interpretation of Plato (all along its significant transformations ) is a complex Destruktion of Plato. Can we call this interpretation murder? Perhaps not. Perhaps he was just being melodramatic, as he often was, when he claimed that Destruktion amounts to murder. But in his interpretation of Plato he is definitely not just a simple attendant who merely takes care of the blinds so that the right light will be cast on Plato’s masterpieces. Most of the time he actually modifies these masterpieces, and he does so intentionally. And while he modifies them and leaves his mark on them, they too trespass on his thinking and leave their mark on it. My essay will follow one episode of this Platonico-Heideggerian interImprint : Heidegger’s Interpretation of Platonic Dialectic in the Sophist Lectures (1924–25) Catalin Partenie 42 play. The episode has at its core four theses centered upon the Platonic dialectic that Heidegger advances in his lectures on Plato’s Sophist. I shall argue that these theses, although they reveal a biased reading of Plato, manage to draw our attention to a genuine and important Platonic distinction , usually overlooked, between authentic and inauthentic human existence, and that this distinction also lies at the core of the fundamental ontology expounded in Being and Time. At the close of the essay I shall address, but only in a preliminary way, the question of why Heidegger did not acknowledge this Platonic imprint on his Being and Time. The lectures on Plato’s Sophist were delivered at the University of Marburg during the winter semester 1924–25. They contain a running commentary of the Sophist completed by extensive analyses of book Z of the Nicomachean Ethics, book A (chapters 1 and 2) of the Metaphysics, and the Phaedrus . Of the many theses Heidegger advances in these lectures (whose published text counts 653 pages), I shall focus here on four, centered upon the Platonic dialectic. The first thesis (T1) states that for Plato man always exists miteinander , with other men (GA 19, 135–36).3 This view, Heidegger argues, according to which communality is a fundamental feature of human existence , was also envisaged by Aristotle when he determined man as a zôon politikon (GA 19, 135, 140), and by the Greeks in general, for whom “existence ” (Existenz) was “existence in the polis” (GA 19, 231/159), that is, communal existence. This thesis, however, is not further developed. For the Greeks in general, and also for Plato, Heidegger claims, man is not only a zôon politikon; for them man is also, to use another famous Aristotelian phrase, a zôon logon echon (cf. GA 19, 17; cf. also 340, 585), an “animal that speaks” (“[ein] Lebewesen, das reden kann”; GA 22, 310). The second thesis (T2) comes in two parts: one about speaking in general, the other about speaking as Miteinandersprechen, as speaking with others. Speaking is mostly a mere speaking about things “carried out in isolation” (emphasis in original) from them (GA 19, 339/235). As such, speaking is “free-floating” (freischwebend); thus, “in itself, insofar as it is free-floating, logos has precisely the property of disseminating presumed knowledge in a repetition that has no relation to the things spoken...