January 5, 2006
I pretty much agree with this statement made by Jasmin Chen in a review of Martin Heidegger's Plato's Sophist:
Yet it is this early section of the lecture course which has most immediately guaranteed the Plato's Sophist's relevance for Heideggarian scholarship. Indeed, it is generally accepted that Heidegger's theory resonates much more clearly with Aristotelian philosophy than with Platonic ideas....which is reinforced by the striking resemblance his preparatory reading of the Nichomachean Ethics bears to the fundamental structure of Being and Time, revealing the particularity of Heidegger's indebtedness to Aristotle. In this respect, Plato's Sophist has been taken up in support of the growing consensus that Heidegger is ultimately most influenced by Aristotle's "practical philosophy", to the extent that commentators such as Franco Volpi and Jacques Taminiaux argue that within Heidegge''s interpretation of Book Six, "what he takes to be Aristotle's ontology of Dasein .... indicate[s] the very structure of Heidegger's own analytic .... which is the first stage of his fundamental ontology."
Plato's Sophist is a reconstructed transcript of a course on Plato's Sophist offered in the Winter Semester of 1924-25 by Heidegger just prior to the publication of Being and Time. The text is in two parts; the first treats Book VI of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, whilst the second Plato's Sophist where Plato is cioncerned with the whole--- the notion of being.--as the whole of things, what the world, the cosmos is, including non-being’as a form of Being.
Heidegger's concern is to discover a pre-philosophic way to understand the character and nature of Being through an hermeneutical examination of the western philosophic tradition on the question of Being. That involves a questioning of what the tradition of philosophic scholarship holds Aristotle and Plato to have taught. It indicates how philosophy for Heidegger was in its doing, that for him, philosophy belonged to those who questioned and who didn't write historiological tracts but engaged the material as matter to be thought. Hence the significance of this quote:
'For manifestly you have long been aware of what you mean when you use this expression "being." We, however, who used to think we understood it, have now become perplexed.' Plato, Sophist
Heidegger's way of reading the Western philosophical tradition is not in a spirit of reverence, nor does it have the aim of repetition; instead, it is an attempt to dismantle philosophical concepts, to loosen them from their sedimented and hypostatized strata so as to free them up for a radical kind of retrieval that rethinks their meaning within an ontological perspective that dispense with the whole notion of any subject-centered "perspective" and recovers a certain way of being-in-the-world. It is reading in a highly agonistic manner; a twisting, displacing, and reinterpreting the thought of Aristotle and Plato in ways designed to illuminate a range of exceedingly Heideggerian issues.
And so Heidegger approaches Plato through Aristotle. Though the pathway to Being is truth ---as a disclosing, a-forgetting, something that is revealed to the seeker---we approach this through phronesis, which deals with human choice and human action in relation to how one best lives one's life. It is in the question of living well that is the way into the hermeneutical circle of the various ways of understanding Being. Chen says:
Within the course of Heidegger's analysis, it has become quite clear that phronesis, or practical wisdom, rather than [Aristotles'] sophia, speculative wisdom, is the mode of uncovering proper to human Dasein, a point which has been taken up by many commentators seeking to reinvigorate Heidegger as ascribing to Aristotle's "practical philosophy."
That is how I approach Heidegger. He transforms Aristotelian phronesis from a branch of philosophy into an entire project of existence.
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Hello Gary, my first comment here (enjoy your blog very much, especially the occasional artistic exhibits ;) Stanley Rosen's _The Question of Being: A Reversal of Heidegger_ is an extended commentary on Heidegger's Plato's Sophist lectures. I read it some time ago but it was too much for me (as an amateur Deleuzian ;)