Saving the Last Word: Heidegger and the Concluding Myth of Plato’s Republic

Abstract

Why does Heidegger refuse to pursue another reading of Plato? Why does he refuse to search out that Plato who is not already on his way to Platonistic metaphysics? This refusal can hardly be attributed to a simple oversight. What is most astounding is that Heidegger not only never excludes this other reading but that he in fact rigorously and repeatedly insists upon it as necessary, privileging it even as he sets it aside. It is as if what is essential or indispensable to Heidegger's history is not simply the determination of Plato and Plato's work according to a certain metaphysical necessity, but rather also the very postponement that holds open another way of thinking and reading, which thus works against the apparent closure of Heidegger's own dominant reading. But what does this reveal then about Heidegger's own historical thinking? What happens to the history of being once Plato's text is allowed to speak for itself, which is to say, once it no longer simply marks the irrevocable inception of metaphysical thinking? It is obvious that an adequate response to this difficulty is out of the question here. A beginning can be made, however, by emphasizing how Heidegger approaches Plato's text through a strange interpretive assumption: it is as if Plato, in giving rise to Platonism, is also already caught in the grip of what he is supposed to beget. To follow Heidegger's reading of Plato to its limits, by affirming the most basic assumptions of that reading, demands that Plato be read not only as if he were productive of the subsequent philosophical tradition. The interpretive hypothesis which would take Platonism simply as the work of a (ProQuest Information and Learning: Foreign text omitted.), as a kind of artifact of Plato's thinking-a product of his intent and design-must be set aside, if Heidegger's historical thinking is to be anything more than a crude abstraction, a vulgar simplification. At issue, instead, is the way Heidegger's Plato is also already caught in the inexorable logic of the metaphysical tradition that follows and arises with him. The legacy of Plato is, in other words, a Platonism that precedes him, which will have always already claimed him. Because Plato is already claimed in this way, by what has anticipated and comprehended both the beginning and the end of metaphysics in the binds of its necessity-what Heidegger calls the Geschick of history-the daunting task of an original reading of Plato, after Heidegger, would demand, then, nothing less than being able to repeat the beginning or the inception of philosophy itself, to uncover the very birth or emergence of philosophy, but in such a way that this repetition would not already find itself wholly enclosed within the metaphysics it must still rely upon, would no longer find itself simply placed within the hermeneutic circle that it seeks to put into question. It would, in other words, be a matter of reading the Platonic text as if it had a future, as if, therefore, it still harbored within it its untimeliness and untruth. One might even wonder whether such a reading can still be ventured, although one can indeed point to the work of Gadamer, Sallis, Derrida, and others.1 In any case, my contention is that, at the limits of Heidegger's reading, the Platonic text is indeed able to break apart the more reductive historiological determinations imposed upon it, determinations that otherwise continue to relegate that text to being both cause and effect of Platonism. This deconstructive strategy is pursued here by focusing upon and puzzling over a remark made by Socrates at the very end of the Republic. This remark, as it turns out, not only can be heard to reverberate throughout this dialogue in its entirety, but also finds itself repeated and even amplified, with decisive modulations, in Heidegger's own thinking. I will develop my interpretation of this remark in the context of Heidegger's lectures on Parmenides (1942-43) in which he also takes up the concluding myth of Plato's Republic. …