Gadamer's Path to Plato

A Response to Heidegger and a Rejoinder by Stanley Rosen

Fuyarchuk

• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Year: 2010
• eBook ISBN: 9781498271790
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Gadamer's Path to Plato investigates the formative years of Hans-Georg Gadamer's Plato studies, while studying with Martin Heidegger at Marburg University. It outlines the evolution of Heidegger's understanding of Plato, explains why his hermeneutics and phenomenological method inspired Gadamer, and why Heidegger's argument, that Plato was responsible for Western civilization's forgetting the meaning of existence, provoked him. Heidegger's provocation was crucial to the development of Gadamer's understanding of Plato. This book thus puts forward an argument for Gadamer's having indirectly refuted Heidegger's Plato. This involves a dialogical relationship to the past and a re-examination of the relation of Plato to Aristotle in matters of ethics, physics, and truth. Above all, however, it is Gadamer's concept of Platonic dialectic that refutes Heidegger. This challenge to Heidegger's Plato was commensurate with the origination of Gadamer's positive hermeneutical philosophy. In order to test the alleged openness of that philosophy to the other as other Gadamer's reading of the Republic is scrutinized by using the brilliant scholarship of Stanley Rosen. An examination of their interpretations of the Republic includes an inquiry into their intellectual influences. For Gadamer these include Hegel, the Tubingen school and Jacob Klein; for Rosen, the poetic genius of Leo Strauss. Rosen's mathematical and poetic orientation is then compared to Gadamer's dialectical orientation to Plato. The mathematical approach dovetails with a theory of human nature and procedural rationalism in Gadamer's hermeneutical philosophy that explains why he, in contrast to Rosen, bypasses important dimensions of the Republic such as the significance of particular characters and settings to understanding the whole. In turn, this methodological shortcoming calls into question the truth of Gadamer's method and, with it, the foundations of a truly open and pluralist society.

Part I

Heidegger and Gadamer

Introduction

Gadamer’s path to Plato developed in reply to Heidegger’s claim in the late 1920s to early 1930s that Plato was responsible for the forgetting of the meaning of Being by the West.1 Gadamer explains to Leo Strauss in 1961 that his “point of departure is not the complete forgetfulness of Being, the ‘night of Being,’ rather, on the contrary—I say this against Heidegger and Buber—the unreality of such an assertion.”2 The belief that Being is forgotten is unrealistic for Gadamer because forgetting is a precondition for a mode of remembering (a-lethia). Since this is a position Gadamer had learned from Heidegger during the Marburg years (as well as from Hegel) there is a sense in which Gadamer’s challenge to Heidegger’s understanding of Plato reminds Heidegger of himself. It is thus not surprising to find that Heidegger’s relation to Plato is more complex and variable than we might otherwise gather from Gadamer’s emphasis upon the claim about Plato as a metaphysician. Some of Heidegger’s lectures during the 1920s prefigure and provide justification for Gadamer’s argument that Plato and Aristotle share common ground. Outlining the development and changing character of Heidegger’s Plato does not, however, vitiate the relevance of Gadamer’s criticisms. Despite having two dimensions, Heidegger’s view of Plato the metaphysician has remained constant for over forty years. Moreover, it is primarily as a metaphysician that Heidegger’s Plato has been granted to us, giving rise to antimetaphysical movements including phenomenology, existentialism, and postmodernism.3 In other words, Gadamer’s image of Heidegger’s Plato is relevant insofar as it continues to define the character of Western philosophy, a character about which Gadamer would have been understandably ambivalent insofar as it is based upon an unreflective relationship to the history of thought. Since Heidegger justified this orientation with an argument for the end of philosophy, yet during the Marburg years (1924–1928) provided Gadamer with the conceptual tools for resisting it, Gadamer was both provoked and inspired by him.

Outline

Part I is an introduction to the evolution of Heidegger’s understanding of Plato and how it was received by Gadamer when he studied under Heidegger in the 1920s at Marburg University. Chapter 1, “Heidegger’s Plato,” sketches three portraits of Plato based on different dimensions and stages of Heidegger’s philosophical development. The first, “Plato: Metaphysics 1909–1920,” argues that Heidegger was initially a metaphysical realist in the sense of striving to achieve a better grasp of things-in-themselves. Although relatively indifferent to Plato during this time, he was nevertheless averse to the notion of universal and first causes. This aversion becomes pronounced when he turns to Aristotle’s phenomenology for purposes of developing a philosophical justification for faith. The obstacle to that goal is, for Heidegger, the legacy of Neoplatonic concepts within a Christian understanding of existence. This is discussed in “Aristotle and Destruction.”

“Plato II: Platonism” argues that Heidegger enters a new phase in his philosophical development, a shift from identifying with the task of metaphysics (though not Plato) to overcoming metaphysics (Plato). In this famed “turn” Heidegger, on account of a renewed interest in Nietzsche, associates Plato with Platonism. This is also the portrait of which Gadamer is critical.

“Plato III: Appropriating Plato” investigates evidence throughout Heidegger’s philosophical development for a more charitable interpretation of Plato. This is a dimension of Heidegger’s philosophy that anticipates Gadamer’s project to correct him. “Plato III,” then, brings into question the accuracy of Gadamer’s view of Heidegger’s Plato, but as mentioned, neither its critical relevance to Heidegger nor trends in contemporary thought that remain in the grip of Plato the metaphysician who forgets the meaning of Being.

Chapter 2, “Provocation and Inspiration,” investigates both Gadamer’s admiration for and ambivalence about Heidegger’s teachings during the Marburg years: while Gadamer was inspired by Heidegger’s phenomenology and hermeneutics because of the way they revivified the past in an incisive criticism of Marburg’s neo-Kantian and scientific intellectual culture, he was also troubled by Heidegger’s antipathy toward Plato and by his juxtaposition of Plato with Aristotle.

1. IG, 5.

2. Quoted from Wachterhauser, Beyond Being, 14.

3. I have in mind Jean-Luc Marion, Michel Henry, Jean-Louis Chrétien, Jean-Yves Lacoste, Jean Paul Sartre and Jacques Derrida.

1

Heidegger’s Plato

1. Plato I: Metaphysics (1909–1920)

Among Heidegger’s earliest intellectual influences were the works of Husserl (Ideas, published 1913, and Logical Investigations, published 1900) and Aristotle. Before he became Husserl’s teaching assistant in 1916, Heidegger had been alerted by Franz Brentano in 1907 to the many ways in which beings become manifest, and by Carl Braig in 1909 to the question of their unity in Aristotle’s philosophy. From the outset of his philosophical development, Heidegger had an ambivalent relationship to Plato’s theory that Being transcends beings. Rather than resort to a ground of meaning independent of the cohesion of everyday life, Heidegger sought to uncover a sense of meaning intrinsic to a given state of affairs. In his 1915 lecture “The Concept of Time in the History of Philosophy,” he says that metaphysics posits hidden qualities as a cause in order to explain phenomena, cites Plato’s notion of hypothesis to illustrate what he means by metaphysics, and suggests an equivalence between metaphysics and Galileo’s quantitative science.4 He indicates that the causes Galileo identifies, while visible and measurable, are comparable to Plato’s in that scientific causes are, to the same extent as metaphysical ones, hypotheses; that is, they are a subject matter placed under discussion. Metaphysics, according to Heidegger at this time, concerns intelligible principles that are not independent of a linguistic context, but rather, like scientific hypotheses, are ways of making sense of the world. Metaphysics is another language about reality, with no greater corner on truth than the language spoken by scientists and epistemologists.

This assessment of the “Queen of the sciences” is an invitation for Heidegger to develop a general theory. The general theory for which he aims is metaphysical, as Dostal reports, but not in a conventional sense.5 “Being” for Heidegger is not a supersensible cause grasped by reason alone. On the contrary, after having been schooled in the transcendental phenomenology of Edmund Husserl, Heidegger partook of a movement that was challenging the legacy of Greek rationality in the modern age. Even before the devastation of World War I, when disillusion with scientific rationality and progress reached a new pitch in Europe and the phenomenological movement in Germany gained momentum (Max Scheler, Martin Buber), Heidegger was challenging scientism, although from a confessional standpoint. While science, i.e., Greek concepts, abstracted from and thereby obscured the authentic...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Acknowledgments
• Key to Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part One: Heidegger and Gadamer Introduction
• Chapter 1: Heidegger’s Plato
• Chapter 2: Provocation and Inspiration
• Part Two: Gadamer’s Correction of Heidegger Introduction
• Chapter 3: Counterarguments
• Chapter 4: Heidegger’s False Modernism
• Chapter 5: Heidegger’s Aristotelianism: The Production Thesis
• Chapter 6: Hermeneutical Situations
• Part Three: Gadamer’s Plato Introduction
• Chapter 7: Truth as Unconcealment
• Chapter 8: Physics
• Chapter 9: The Good
• Part Four: Stanley Rosen’s Rejoinder Introduction
• Chapter 10: Gadamer’s Dialectic: Hegel, Tübingen, and Klein
• Chapter 11: Incongruity of Speech and Deed
• Chapter 12: Plato’s Dialectic Reconsidered
• Part Five: The Politics of Exclusion Introduction
• Chapter 13: Gadamer’s Interpretation of the Republic
• Chapter 14: Rosen’s Interpretation of the Republic
• Chapter 15: Human Nature
• Chapter 16: The Politics of Inclusion
• Appendix
• Bibliography