In this masterful and fascinating study, Francisco Gonzalez tracks the ups and downs of Heidegger’s lifelong engagement with Plato and gives an illuminating explanation of the ambivalences and contradictions that dogged it. Gonzalez argues that Heidegger could have had a more fruitful dialogue with Plato, whose phenomenological insight often anticipates his own. But in Plato the phenomenological strand cannot be clearly differentiated from the prevailing context of logical, metaphysical, and ethical reasoning, with which Heidegger was out of sympathy; hence his oscillations in reading Plato, whom he sometimes denounces as an abstract metaphysician, sometimes embraces as a fellow in the phenomenological quest. Since Plato saw dialectic as the primary means by which the mind is led to truth, whereas Heidegger sees it as a distraction from phenomenological apprehension of truth as unhiddenness, there is bound to be much unease and instability in his phenomenological appropriation of any Platonic text. Heidegger sees Plato as caught in an intellectualist posture that keeps him from pursuing his phenomenological intuitions to the end. Gonzalez believes that Heidegger’s fixation on the impossible ideal of a pure phenomenology bypassing logical dialectic is the ultimate source of his misreadings of Plato.
In the 1924-25 course on the Sophist, logos in general is viewed as Gerede, superficial talk. Heidegger thinks that ‘because the Greeks lived in speech they were also imprisoned by it’ (8). Dialectic is seen as playing an important role in the effort of the Greeks to free themselves from this imprisonment: ‘philosophy, in its attempt to disclose the things themselves, must both begin with logos and break through it by means of a “speaking for and against”… that destroys the autonomy and self-sufficiency that logos has in Gerede’ (9). But this dialegesthai is phenomenologically feeble; it cannot reach the pure noein (GA 19:197), the intuitive givenness of the phenomena.
Gonzalez objects to Heidegger’s phenomenological reductions of such key concepts as eidos and the Good. Eidos as an instrument of rational penetration, defined in the inventive give and take of dialectical argument, does not interest Heidegger. Rather he sees eidos as the authentic ‘look’ of a thing, in the sense of its appearance as that which it is, or as the power (dunamis) whereby a thing is enabled to step forth as it is and to be known as it is. Gonzalez finds contradictions between the discussion of the forms in terms of light and in terms of dunamis. But perhaps these can be softened if one keeps in view the phenomenon of the being of what-is to which both metaphors point.
In his 1931-32 lectures on ‘the essence of truth,’ Heidegger gives a rich, sensitive reading of the cave allegory (Rep., 514A-517A), which is presented as telling of successive acts of noein, with very little role for legein or logos. The series of events in the allegory reveal the nature of truth as ‘unconcealment’ (Unverborgenheit), as something that is always enacted as a wresting from concealment. The captives are likened to the average philosopher, who deals with metaphysical truths but cannot discern the process of emerging into unhiddenness. The ‘hermeneutical violence’ of this reading stems from its exclusively phenomenological thrust. Heidegger in the 1930s was working his way to a more integral phenomenology of the togetherness of being and thinking, which he summed up in the idea of the Ereignis. The interrogation of beings in view of their being is continued in the interrogation of being itself in view of what one can call the phenomenological conditions of its possibility. Heidegger is drawing on Plato as a resource for this latter interrogation when he reads the Good phenomenologically as that which ‘renders fitting’ (tauglich) the relationship of beings and the mind that perceives them, a relationship of un-concealment, which is the ‘yoke’ (zugon) between the openness of beings and the understanding of being. Thus if the eidê represent the breakthrough in Plato of a vision of being in its difference from beings, the Good, the idea of ideas, points to a more radical difference, that between being and the Ereignis, as that which ‘grants’ being: ‘Es gibt sein.’ For a while Heidegger seems to have caught a glimmer of the Ereignis in the Good, conceived as naming the innermost essentiality of being.
It was inevitable that at some point Heidegger would realize that he was thinking as much against Plato as with him. Gradually he comes to see the Good as ‘the step to “value,” to “meaning,” to “the ideal”’ (GA 65:210), to a metaphysics divorced from the authentic thinking of being. It misnames the truth of being, and lays the foundation of metaphysics as an ontotheology that grounds beings in a supreme being. The 1940 essay, Plato’s Doctrine of Truth, no longer embraces the promising resonances of Plato’s language, but ‘grossly simplifies and sometimes even contradicts the much richer and conflicted reading in the courses: a reading that suggests certain affinities between Heidegger and Plato that are suppressed in the essay’ (Gonzalez, 3). The pages on the Good as what appropriates thought to the truth of beings in 1940 are no more than a relic of what is said on this in 1931-32, and they are quickly followed by reproaches in which Plato is put in his fateful place in the history of metaphysics. Many Heideggerians have subscribed to this impoverished doxographical stance: ‘Once we have identified Plato’s central doctrine, a doctrine that is moreover “unsaid” in Plato, what further need is there to study his texts?’ (162). Gonzalez liquidates this attitude, allowing Heideggerians to study Plato again with a good conscience. I hope that his book will also encourage Plato scholars to change their dreary diet of analytical philosophy and draw on the hermeneutical resources offered by Heidegger.
Heidegger’s loss of the real Plato, increasingly replaced by a caricatural Platonism, is offset by two discussions that point to ‘the dialogue that could have been,’ but that were not followed up. The dogmatic presupposition that in Plato the essence of truth changed from ‘unconcealment’ to ‘correctness’ leads Heidegger to lose the benefit of his subtle reading of the Theaetetus in the 1931-32 lectures, which implicitly overturns the presupposition, something he prevents from becoming clear only at the cost of arbitrary assertions (224). The discussion of the myth of Er in the 1942 course on Parmenides surprisingly finds in Plato a mythic vision of the concealment at the heart of a-lêtheia. Heidegger treats it ‘as some ghostly remnant of an earlier understanding of saying, one that Plato himself is leaving behind in the turn toward metaphysics’ (234). Again there is a clash between his reading of the text and his governing dogma: ‘while Plato’s text on Heidegger’s own reading shows the belonging-together of alêtheia and lêthê in being itself and characterizes our relation to being as anamnêsis in response to this understanding of being, we must believe that the transformation of alêtheia and lêthê into mere “subjective states” begins with Plato’ (240). Gonzalez concludes that Heidegger’s basic view of Plato is disproven by his own most perceptive readings of Plato’s texts (254). How could such a paradoxical situation arise? Homing in on the phenomenologically most promising aspects of Plato, Heidegger was impatient with the dialectic in which they are embedded, and saw it as spelling the triumph of metaphysical correctness over phenomenological unconcealment. (Gonzalez does not problematize the notions of unconcealment and correctness themselves.) For Gonzalez, dialectic is essential to philosophical thought and Heidegger’s rejection of it is intellectual suicide. Nor did his belief in dialectic prevent Plato from thinking in the direction of the ‘matter itself’ just as steadily as Heidegger.
I wonder if Gonzalez has done justice to the early Heidegger’s conception of phenomenology. The phenomenological data contain a priori intelligible patterns, such as the structures of temporality in Husserl or the web of the existentials in Sein und Zeit. The orderly clarification of these is not just a matter of ‘some sort of unmediated seeing’ (69), but implies a travail of thought moving to more integral levels of analysis. Heidegger considers this superior to dialectic, because it is not tied to and guided by quarrels about the definition of words. The later Heidegger also constructs a path of thought that moves through successively deeper layers, despite some declarations that might make it seem a pure intuitive contemplation. In denying any dialectical or dialogal character to Heidegger’s thought, Gonzalez also underestimates the significance of his dialogue with his favoured philosophers and poets (in the dialogal setting of his seminars). Conversely, is it true that for Plato ‘philosophy was nothing more nor less than dialectic’ (309)? The dialectic in the Symposium, the Phaedrus and the Phaedo turns around central phenomena that it seeks to clarify, and the phenomena prompt Plato at climactic moments to leave dialectic behind for mythic utterance, which is not particularly dialogal either.
In ‘Grundsätze des Denkens’ (1957), Heidegger speaks rather enthusiastically about dialectic, noting how the laws of identity, non-contradiction, and excluded middle becomes dynamic and mobile in German idealism. Then ‘thought becomes knowingly dialectical’ (GA 11:128), and we enter ‘the highest dimension of thought in the historical course of metaphysics’ (11:131); the dialectic of Plato pointed forward to the destiny that is now accomplished. The prevalence of dialectic as a global reality today is linked with the triumph of science over nature in the atomic age (11:134). Again it becomes clear that authentic thinking has to step back behind this dialectic and overcome it. In reply to a question of Jean Beaufret in 1973, Heidegger declared: ‘Heraclitus represents the first step in the direction of dialectic. From this perspective Parmenides is more profound and more essential… Tautology is the only possible way of thinking what dialectic can only cover up’ (quoted, 291). Gonzalez finds here an extreme of monologism that cuts off dialogue, but one might recall that many Buddhist and Christian thinkers have used such language too, and that their sense of an ultimate simplicity did not abolish dialogue. [Heidegger's remark is possibly aimed at Hegel, who speaks condescendingly of Parmenides but acclaims Heraclitus and states that all of Heraclitus's saying found a place in his own Science of Logic.]
Faced with Heidegger’s hostility to dialectic over half a century, Gonzalez undertakes to show that Heidegger himself cannot avoid dialectic and falls into an ‘unelective affinity’ with Plato (292). Indeed, one could go further and claim that the entire movement of Heidegger’s thought is dialectical in a broad sense, and exhibits affinities especially with Hegel. When Heidegger reverses metaphysical priorities he summarizes his path of thought in chiastic utterances such as ‘the essence of language is the language of essence,’ which pass the initiative from the thinker who eagerly questions after explanations and grounds to the ‘matter itself,’ the Sache that calls forth thinking and guides it on its way. Is this not reminiscent of the dialectical reversals that recur throughout the Phenomenology of Spirit?
Gonzalez’s final chapter discovers dialectical patterns in the 1962 text Zeit und Sein. These cannot be the sort of reversal found in Heidegger’s overcomings of metaphysical ways of thinking, for now he wants to leave off from overcoming metaphysics and simply to bring the phenomenon of being itself as the Ereignis into view – truly a tall order! Heidegger comes close to silencing himself: ‘What remains to be said? Only this: das Ereignis ereignet. Thereby we say the same of the same with respect to the same’ (quoted, 297). The original German is more dynamic here: ‘vom Selben her auf das Selbe zu das Selbe’ – these prepositions, like those of Hegel, might harbour a considerable amount of implicit dialectical reflection. Gonzalez argues that a simple saying of being cannot escape becoming at least a negative dialectic, since it must use ordinary language while at the same time crossing it out, as in negative theology. ‘A form of thinking that can get at what it wishes to express only negatively by working against the forms of expression it is forced to employ’ (302) can be called dialectical. Gonzalez judges this ‘self-dismantling dialectic’ a failure (304); it makes sense only a clearing the ground for a direct seeing of Ereignis; and since Ereignis is also Enteignis, known only in its withdrawal, this entails a ‘phenomenology of the inapparent.’ ‘But how can a phenomenonology of what is never a phenomenon avoid self-deconstructing?’ (308). One might defend Heidegger here by seeing the ‘inapparent’ as a structural dimension of the phenomenon, another form of the concealment that is the condition of unconcealment, and that has been central to Heidegger’s phenomenology all along.
Curiously, this late Heidegger comes close to Plato: for Plato, ‘the good makes beings manifest as beings, thereby at the same time letting them be’; this resonates with Heidegger’s ‘characterization of being as letting beings come to presence, or bringing them into the open’ (312). If so, we are brought back to the warmth of Heidegger’s attitude to the Good in 1931-32, and an unnecessary alienation of thirty years is ended. A fundamental difference remains: ‘while neither Plato nor Heidegger looks for the truth of beings in beings themselves, Plato turns to logoi and how the truth of being manifests itself therein, whereas Heidegger insists on attempting to see and say being directly in a way that bypasses both beings and logoi’ (335). But it seems to me that this radical bypassing is confined to a small number of Heidegger’s texts, and that these presuppose the long interrogation, throughout his work, of beings and logoi in view of the truth of being. Thus the commonalities between Heidegger and Plato may go far beyond the one noted by Gonzalez the apophasis of Zeit und Sein and that of Plato’s Seventh Letter (342). The final message of this book is that, contrary to a long-standing deleterious cliché, propagated by Heidegger himself, the coast is clear for a mutually challenging and nourishing dialogue between the two thinkers. The task is immense, and the place to begin, henceforth, is with careful study of Gonzalez’s rich and stimulating book.
International Journal of Philosophical Studies 20 (2012):308-13.
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