Heidegger’s Reading of Plato: On Truth and Ideas

ABSTRACT

I wish to show that Heidegger’s contradictory accounts of Plato are not the result of a confusion on Heidegger’s part, but a showcase of his complex relation to Plato. I attempt to prove my point by focusing on Heidegger’s interpretation of Plato’s allegory of the cave in his 1942 essay “Plato’s Doctrine of Truth”, and his lecture courses during the 30’s. I argue that whereas the former work emphasizes the way in which Plato prefigures a forgetfulness of an original relation between truth and Being, the latter show signs of a positive appropriation of Plato’s work. By the end of this paper I hope to have shown that Heidegger’s reading of Plato cannot be reduced to a critique or condemnation. I argue, rather, that Plato is for Heidegger a transitional thinker who is situated at the centre of a struggle between an originary and a derivative conception of truth.

KEYWORDS:

• Heidegger
• Plato
• truth
• ideas
• unhiddennes

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to the anonymous reviewers for their constructive feedback on earlier versions of this paper.

Notes

1 Heidegger, Bremen and Freiburg Lectures, 125.

2 This dual aspect of Heidegger’s reading of Plato is also discerned by Peter Warnek. Nevertheless, according to Warnek, Heidegger refuses or fails to carry on a reading of Plato before Platonism, notwithstanding the fact that he often insists on such a need. In a rather Derridean fashion Warnek argues that a detailed reading of Plato before Platonism (metaphysics) is never performed by Heidegger. This is to say, that another, non-metaphysical reading of Plato is presented only as a promise for the future (See Warnek, “Reading Plato before Platonism [after Heidegger]” and “Saving the Last Word: Heidegger and the Concluding Myth of Plato’s Republic”). Whereas I agree with Warnek’s observation that Heidegger does not engage in a full-scale analysis of a pre-metaphysical Plato, and I also agree that what we find in Heidegger’s interpretation is mostly the promise of a different Plato, I disagree with Warnek’s claim that Heidegger never attempts a reading that opens up a different Plato. I suggest that his interpretation of the cave allegory during the 30’s provides a reach analysis of the ways in which Plato preserves a way of thinking that is different from Platonism and the metaphysical tradition.

3 This paper focuses on the different aspects of Heidegger’s reading of Plato, with the aim of showing that Heidegger’s interpretation of the Athenian philosopher is not reduced to a mere critique. A rigorous examination of the extent in which Heidegger’s interpretation of Plato does justice or interprets violently the text exceeds the scope of the paper. Numerous scholars have challenged Heidegger’s interpretation of Ancient Greek texts. One of the earliest critiques comes from Paul Friedländer who challenged Heidegger’s translation of the Greek word aletheia as unconcealment (See Friedländer, Plato. An Introduction).

4 See Heidegger, Being and Truth, 79, 101 (hereafter, abbreviated as BAT).

5 See Wrathall, Heidegger and Unconcealment, 12ff.

6 The reason that I start my analysis with a text from 1942 and then move backwards in time is because “Plato’s Doctrine of Truth” is the published text where Heidegger develops the most critical aspects of his reading of Plato. This text is generally conceived as a landmark for understanding Heidegger’s relation of Plato and, on many occasions, it has been read as a text that repeats or completes Heidegger’s interpretation of Plato during the 30’s (See footnote 55 below). What I want to show is that the 1942 text is inconclusive and makes some undeveloped claims. These undeveloped claims, I suggest, can make sense to us only if we focus on texts that provide a more detailed, and to a big extent more positive, reading of Plato. Heidegger’s lecture courses from the 30’s, I argue, are such texts.

7 Although Heidegger explicitly denies that Aristotle situated truth solely in assertions. See Heidegger, Being and Time, 269 (hereafter, abbreviated as BT).

8 Heidegger, History of the Concept of Time, 55.

9 Heidegger, Plato’s Sophist, 125 (hereafter, abbreviated as PS).

10 Heidegger, History of the Concept of Time, 55.

11 PS 124.

12 Wrathall, Heidegger and Unconcealment, 13.

13 Heidegger, Pathmarks, 104 (hereafter, abbreviated as PM).

14 See Heidegger, Introduction to Phenomenological Research, 201; Four Seminars, 76.

15 See Heidegger, The Beginning of Western Philosophy, 1 (hereafter, abbreviated as BWP).

16 See Heidegger Introduction to Metaphysics, 5 (hereafter, abbreviated as IM).

17 Heidegger, Four Seminars, 79–80.

18 According to Drew Hyland the use of the word “doctrine” is an indication that Heidegger reads Plato’s dialogues as treatises which seek to present a set of doctrines “as clearly and as persuasively as possible” (Hyland, Questioning Platonism, 55). Even though he pays attention to Heidegger’s interpretation of “doctrine” as the “unsaid”, Hyland insists that an unsaid doctrine is nonetheless a doctrine. He therefore concludes that Plato is read by Heidegger as having a fixed account of truth. According to my reading, Heidegger’s translation of “doctrine” as the unsaid, indicates that he does not intend to ascribe to Plato a consolidated account of truth.

19 PM 155.

20 See Dostal, “Beyond Being: Heidegger’s Plato,” 61ff. See also Paredes, “Amicus Plato magis amica veritas,” 116ff.

21 PM 176.

22 PM 167.

23 PM 170.

24 PM 170.

25 PM 164.

26 BT 189.

27 BT 189.

28 PM 170.

29 PM 171.

30 PM 172.

31 PM 169.

32 PM 179.

33 PM 170.

34 Heidegger, Nietzsche: The Will to Power as Art, 151 (hereafter, abbreviated as NW).

35 NW 173.

36 BT 88–89; BAT 68.

37 PM 173.

38 PM 176.

39 PM 176–77.

40 PM 179.

41 PM 167.

42 PM 170.

43 PM 167.

44 PM 166.

45 Heidegger, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, 286. For a discussion of this topic see Dostal, “Beyond Being: Heidegger’s Plato,” 71–72. Heidegger will also mention the epekeina in his 1928 lecture course on The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic. There, he focuses on the notion of an original transcendence – a primordial understanding of Being – which “makes possible every intentional relation to beings” (135). Plato, Heidegger says, exhibits the tendency of conceptualizing the “problem of transcendence along the lines of looking” (183). Because of this, he claims that Plato’s theory of ideas, prefigures “the epistemological relationship of subject to object” (183). Nevertheless, Heidegger moves on to say that the epekeina that characterizes the Good points to a primordial transcendence that goes beyond beings and beyond ideas. This transcendence, he says, is better explained by Aristotle’s account of the hou eneka as “that on account of which something is or is not, is in this way or that” (184). In these two lecture courses, Heidegger admits that the epekeina opens up the possibility of a different Plato. He nevertheless refuses to follow this path and what we are left with is the claim that Plato paves the way for a metaphysics of subjectivity.

46 PM 173.

47 PM 173ff, 178.

48 PM 175.

49 PM 181.

50 This happens only through the long process through which Western thinking comes to reject the idea of a God (e.g. Nietzsche’s declaration of the death of God) and postulates the human subject as the inventor of truth (PM 179).

51 PM 181.

52 PM 178.

53 PM 171.

54 NW 151.

55 This is an assumption that underlies Robert Dostal’s paper on the relation between Heidegger and Plato (See Dostal, “Beyond Being: Heidegger’s Plato”). Drew Hyland notices that Heidegger’s interpretation of Plato during the 30’s has its charitable moments, but he concludes that the 1942 essay constitutes the crystallization of the results of his lecture courses during the 30’s. (Hyland, Questioning Platonism, 55). Francisco Gonzalez highlights the dissimilarities between the 1942 essay and Heidegger’s lecture courses. He does not, nevertheless, pay attention to the way that Heidegger presents certain features of his own conception of truth by engaging in a phenomenological reading of Plato. (See Gonzalez, Plato and Heidegger: A Question of Dialogue, 113ff). For Gonzalez, the dissimilarities between the two interpretations are only a proof that Heidegger supresses certain elements of Plato’s thought for the sake of naming him the father of metaphysics (Plato and Heidegger: A Question of Dialogu, 147). Finally, Mark Wrathall’s reading of Heidegger’s lecture courses in the 30’s, takes on board a lot of the criticism found in Heidegger’s 1942 essay (See Wrathall, “Heidegger on Plato, Truth, and Unconcealment”). For a work that elaborates on the positiveelements of Heidegger’s interpretation during the early 30’s, see Ralkowski, Heidegger’s Platonism, 62ff.

56 Heidegger, The Essence of Truth, 26 (hereafter, abbreviated as TET); BAT 109.

57 TET 35–36.

58 TET 38.

59 TET 38.

60 BT 98.

61 BT 98

62 TET 38.

63 TET 38.

64 TET 36ff.

65 I am not suggesting that Heidegger ascribes to Plato a developed account of hermeneutic understanding or that he engages in a fully-fledged identification of Platonic ideas with circumspective understanding. What I am suggesting is that Heidegger engages in a rather creative – albeit ambivalent – interpretation of ideas that allows him to bring forth the priority of circumspective understanding over theoretical assertion. According to this reading, ideas need not be identified with the conceptual grasp of things. They can rather be interpreted as pointing to an understanding that precedes theoretical conceptualization.

66 BT 186.

67 TET 51; BAT 129–30.

68 TET 42. This positive interpretation of Platonic ideas is also discerned by James McGuirck in “Aletheia and Heidegger’s Transitional Readings of Plato's Cave Allegory,” 173.

69 Heidegger mentions the possibility of a phenomenological-ontological reading of Platonic ideas in his lecture course on Plato’s Sophist. There, he says that the Platonic hypothesis (ὑπόθεσις) names that which underlies our ontic comportment to beings; that which decides “the possible Being or non-being of everything else” (Heidegger, Plato’s Sophist, 312). See also, Gonzalez, Plato and Heidegger: A Question of Dialogue, 86.

70 TET 47.

71 TET 43–44.

72 The seeing of the idea, he says, “first allows beings to be recognized as the beings they are” (TET 38–39).

73 TET 57.

74 TET 52.

75 TET; BAT 133. In the 1968 and 1969 seminars in Le Thor, Heidegger repeats that the Platonic idea/eidos is not a being. Although he states that the Platonic notion of idea points to a presence that never absences, he also claims that Being for Plato must be understood in the verbal sense (Heidegger, Four Seminars, 24, 40)

76 BAT 133.

77 TET 38.

78 Francisco Gonzalez suggests that Heidegger’s interpretation of ideas in the 30’s is contradictory because in certain parts of his interpretation Heidegger treats ideas as “being present”, but in other parts he says that ideas are not something present (vorhanden) (Gonzalez, Plato and Heidegger: A Question of Dialogue, 113–15). I contend the contradiction that Gonzalez detects can be overcome if one differentiates between presence (Anwesenheit) and presence-at-hand (Vorhandenheit). Gonzalez translates Anwesenheit as presence-at-hand (Plato and Heidegger: A Question of Dialogue, 114) without paying attention to an ontological account of Anwesenheit that Heidegger develops during the 30’s.

79 See Heidegger, “Time and Being,” 5.

80 For a discussion of the ontic and ontological significance of the word presence see Young, Heidegger’s Later Philosophy, 10. See also Malpas, Heidegger’s Topology: Being, Place, World, 11.

81 PM 145.

82 Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy, 194–96.

83 TET 9.

84 TET 103–04.

85 BWP 137.

86 BWP 138.

87 TET 125.

88 IM 194.

89 IM 193.

90 IM 193.

91 NW 147.

92 IM 194.

93 IM 193ff.

94 TET 38.

95 IM 63.

96 BWP 20.

97 BWP 21.

98 BWP 24.

99 TET 72.

100 Heidegger, Parmenides, 104.

101 Heidegger, Parmenides, 103.

102 Heidegger, Parmenides, 104.

103 Heidegger, Parmenides, 107. “This looking, which first makes presence possible, is therefore more original than the presence of things, because the self-disclosing look, according to the full essence of disclosure, at the same time shelters and hides something undisclosed” (Heidegger, Parmenides, 107).

104 Heidegger, Parmenides, 73.

105 Heidegger, Parmenides, 75.

106 Heidegger, Parmenides, 75.

107 Heidegger, Parmenides, 72.

108 Heidegger, Parmenides, 77.

109 BAT 152–53.

110 TET 80.

111 TET 80.

112 TET 71.

113 In the analysis of Book X of the Republic in his 1942–43 lecture course on Parmenides, Heidegger will make this point even more explicit. There, he interprets the myth of Err in a way that brings forth the field of concealment (τὸ τῆς Λήθης πεδίον) as the counter-essence of physis (118). But as I have tried to show, already in the early 30’s Heidegger hints at a way of reading Plato that avoids what Heidegger considers the reductive tendencies of Platonism.

114 TET 66.

115 See Zarader, “The Mirror with the Triple Reflection,” 22. Zarader argues that in his late works Heidegger renounces this privileged position ascribed to pre-Socratic philosophers (Zarader, “The Mirror with the Triple Reflection,” 27). It exceeds the scope of this essay to discuss the extent to which Heidegger eventually withdraws the privilege that he ascribes to the early Greek thinkers. As Zarader submits, Heidegger utilized this privileged reading of the pre-Socratics for a long period and in numerous texts. What I hope to have shown is that in certain texts, Heidegger ascribes to Plato the same privileged access to an original withdrawing, that he ascribes to pre-Socratic thinkers.