Beyond Being: Heidegger's Plato

Beyond Being: Heidegger's Plato ROBERT J. DOSTAL FoR MARTIN HEIDEGGER METAPHYSICSis Platonism? Heidegger's attack on metaphysics is equivalently an attack on Platonism. Brief comments about Plato are not uncommon in Heidegger's published works, but there is only one published essay devoted exclusively to a text of Platcr--Plato's Doctrine of Truth. ~ This essay's principal thesis is that Plato transformed the notion of truth from unconcealment (Unverborgenheit) to correctness. Though this was written at a time (193o/31) when Heidegger's thought was making the famed and controverted turn (Kehre), the critique of Plato remains essentially the same thoughout Heidegger's work. There is, of course, the late concession in "The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking" that "the assertion about the essential transformation of truth [in Plato] ... from unconcealment to correctness is... untenable. ''3 But, as we will see below, this does not alter Heidegger's unrelenting critique of Plato. Unlike other aspects of Heidegger's work, his Plato critique has not elicited widespread discussion, presumably because he himself wrote so little on Plato. The best responses to Heidegger's essay on Plato have come from those close to and sympathetic with Heidegger's work yet unsympathetic with his Plato interpretation. It was perhaps the sharp criticism of ' In the lecture "Das Ende der Philosophie und die Aufgabe des Denkens" Heidegger claims: "Durch die ganze Geschichte der Philosophie hindurch bleibt Platons Denken in abgewandelten Gestalten massgebend. Die Metaphysik ist Platonismus." This lecture is published in Zur Sache des Denkens (Ttibingen: Niemeyer, 1969), 63; in English translation by Joan Stambaugh , On Time and Being (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), 57. Heidegger makes the same claim in Nietzsche (Pfullingen: Neske, 1961), ~:2~. '~ This essay was first published in 1942. In 1947 it was published in book form with the Letter on Humanism. It is cited here from Wegmarken (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1967). Though the essay has been translated, all translations used here are my own. Hereafter it is referred to as PL. 3 Zur Sache des Denkens, 78; On Time and Being, 7o. [71] 7 9 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 23:1 JANUARY 1985 Paul Friedlander more than any other that motivated Heidegger's late concession ? Friedlander had been a colleague of Heidegger at Marburg and a member of the Graecum in which Heidegger participated at a time when Heidegger's Plato critique was taking shape. 5 Another notable critic was Gerhard Kriiger, a student of Heidegger at Marburg. 6 He criticized Heidegger , just as Friedl~inder had done before and as Stanley Rosen (a student of Leo Strauss, another student of Heidegger at Marburg) has done more recently, for Heidegger's neglect of the ontological on behalf of the epistemological in Plato. 7 The most compelling response to Heidegger's reading of Plato, however, has been that of Hans-Georg Gadamer--another Marburg student of Heidegger . Though Gadamer almost entirely foregoes taking direct issue with Heidegger, his own life-long work on Plato constitutes a challenge to Heidegger 's view of Plato. Gadamer attests to this when he writes of his own Plato interpretation: "Behind it all, however, stood the constant provocation which Heidegger's own pathway of thought means for me--in particular his interpretation of Plato as the decisive step in the direction of the forgetfulness of Being of 'metaphysical thinking.'"s A large thesis of Gadamer's 4 Friedl~inder objects to Heidegger's minimalization of the ontological aspect of the Good. He criticizes as well Heidegger's etymology of aletheia as a-lethe. He points out that Plato himself discusses its etymology in the Cratylus and renders it ale-theia, 'divine whirlwind.' He argues further that nowhere in the Pre-Socratics or in Homer is aletheia used in Heidegger's sense of Unverborgenheit. See Chapter ai in vol. 1 of Platon (Berlin: DeGruyter, 1954). Heidegger, who seldom responds to criticism, responded very briefly to Friedl~inder's criticism by way of a question in the lecture "Hegel und die Griechen," (1958) published in Wegmarken , 271 . He is not yet ready here to make the concession he makes six years later in the lecture "Das Ende der Philosophie und die Aufgabe...