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Heidegger's Aristotelian Reading of Plato: the Discovery of the Philosopher Martin Heidegger

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Heidegger's Aristotelian Reading of Plato: the Discovery of the Philosopher Martin Heidegger Heidegger's Aristotelian Reading of Plato: The Discovery of the Philosopher Martin Heidegger. Platon: Sophistes. Vol. 19 of Gesamtausgabe, II Abteilung: Vorlesungen 1919-1944. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann Verlag, 1992. 668 pp. Translated by Richard Rojcewicz and André Schuwer under the title Plato's "Sophist. " Bloomington: Indiana University Press, forthcoming. In his 1924/25 lecture course on Plato's Sophist (GA 19), Heidegger makes a remarkable claim that in fact governs his entire discussion of Plato's dia- logue : "There is no scientific understanding, that is, no going back histori- cally, to Plato without passing through Aristotle" (189). Aristotle is said to be the philosopher who comprehends in a radical fashion the problem with which Plato and his predecessors were grappling (190). No Plato interpreta- tion can be legitimate that does not measure up to Aristotle. Aristotle is supposed to have sorted out and distinguished the various ways of see- ing and questioning that run together in Plato's philosophy, sorted them out on the basis of an understanding of the guiding orientation of Greek philosophy, namely, the question of the sense of being and the concomitant question of truth. Plato's primary aim in the Sophist, according to Heidegger, is not to unmask the sophist but to discover the philosopher, who can only be indirectly traced through the h6yog of dialectic. Heidegger claims that the Platonic, dialectical arguments employed in this dialogue are on the way towards the discovery of "a higher level of philosophizing" (165). But dialectic can only disclose this stage negatively, by pointing to what is not available through the sophist. Aristotle's greatness, Heidegger says, is that he is able to take up in a positive manner the implicit direction of Plato's thought, towards a h6yog that is not 8ta?,oyoS, and make this authentic disclosure of being thematically explicit. Pla- to's thought remains, in the end, according to Heidegger, confined to and dependent upon the less primordial saying at work-in dialectic. In the Sophist dialogue, the primary distinction is between dialectical thinking and sophistry. Aristotle, in contrast, unfolds a further distinc- tion that distinguishes philosophical thinking from both sophistry and dialectic, equating dialectic with the Àóyoç of affirming and denying- Ka'tá<j>acrtç and c:X1tó<j>acrtç. 275 More is at issue here than a mere making explicit of what is already contained in Plato. The Aristotelian level is attained only when philo- sophical thinking about being and truth is made thematic, since the truth of being cannot appear through an investigation of beings. Pla- to's thinking remains caught in the limitations of its approach. Prima- rily this limitation has to do with the failure to distinguish properly between being and beings. Plato tended to search for being by going through beings and defining being as beyond beings, and in the end, thinking of being as itself a kind of being. Aristotle penetrates more deeply into the question of being as such. Thus Heidegger says: Plato did obtain a certain sense of being, although not as radically as did Aristotle later on, but then it "happens" to him that he addresses this being as das Seiende so that what genuinely are beings must be set down as nonbeings. Aristotle saw through this failure completely. (85) Heidegger views the Sophist dialogue as Plato's most radical attempt to confront in a scientific way, that is, to bring to conceptual clarity, the question of being inherited from Parmenides. In this dialogue, the pfi 6v, nonbeing, is shown to be. Being and not being, sameness and otherness, tautological identity and multiplicity, are shown to be in- trinsically woven together. Plato introduces the notion of 6Ovapig K0iv(ovia<;–the power of community, of coming together and separat- ing, as belonging to the character of being. But for that which is to affect and be affected in this way, it is required that what is other than being also be. The intermingling of being and nonbeing- (falsity) is made manifest and occurs in 7?oyoS, that is, in the movement of the soul that addresses something as something. The sophist, the one who discloses falsely and shown things as they are not, exists because the power to be covered up and thus shown as false belongs to being and because human beings dwell in truth and falsity. The philosopher, in Plato's view, is distinguished from the sophist as the one who moves away from not being and appearance towards the truth. However, Plato still thinks of being as a being, and therefore, he implicitly conceives of both being and nonbeing as e(5q that are present together, that are mixed or woven together in an ontic fashion. Thus Heidegger claims that with Plato's limited conception of icoivmux "the difference between the essentially still ontic treatment of motion and rest in Plato in con- trast to the ontological treatment in Aristotle becomes clear" (115). The Sophist dialogue is viewed as the place where Plato comes to the edge of a breakthrough to ontology but falls short because he has not discovered the ontological difference. Heidegger seems to me to attribute this breakthrough to Aristotle, at least to the extent that Aristotle's .
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