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Until recently, assessments of Heidegger's interpretation of Plato have been confined to his analysis of the Republic's Cave Analogy in Platons Lehre von der Wahrheit, the discussion of the same analogy and of a section of the Theaetetus in the lecture course Vom Wesen der Wahrheit (1931/32), and scattered, brief discussions of isolated passages from other dialogues. The great lacuna in the Heideggerian Gesamtausgabe has been a detailed interpretation of an entire Platonic dialogue. This situation has changed with the publication of the lecture course on Plato's Sophist (1924/25). 1 This text does not disappoint for lack of thoroughness or scope: Heidegger takes the task of interpreting this major Platonic dialogue so seriously that he devotes over two hundred pages to preparing his interpretation and almost four hundred pages to detailed, almost line by line exegesis of the text, from the dramatic prologue to the explanation of the possibility of falsehood. With this course, therefore, we are finally in a position to assess the extent to which Heidegger succeeded in coming to terms with Plato's thought. In this paper I argue that, despite some important insights, this attempted "philosophical appropriation of Plato"2 fails. I also suggest that this failure exposes certain limitations of Heidegger's thought, specifically with regard to the relation between ethics and ontology. * (foreign words are omitted)
One feature of Heidegger's interpretation of the Sophist is immediately striking: even though the lecture course began on November 4, 1924, Heidegger did not turn to the actual text of the dialogue until after Christmas break (or until p. 236 of the Gesamtausgabe text). Interpretations of Plato's dialogues are indeed normally preceded by an introduction of some sort, but two months of lectures and over two hundred pages of text may seem at first a little excessive! Even more striking is that this introduction hardly mentions Plato, but is devoted to Aristotle. The explanation for this unusual procedure is Heidegger's view that Plato must be interpreted through Aristotle. This view is itself justified by an appeal to the hermeneutical principle that we should always proceed from what is clear back to what is obscure (GA 19: 11). The assumption is clear: Aristotle understood Plato better than Plato understood himself (11-12); this means both 1)...