And at bottom it was Marburg that had put its common stamp on all of us.
In the 1920s, the young Martin Heidegger embarked on the ambitious project of a radical rediscovery of ancient Greek philosophy. Initially focusing on Aristotle and Plato, he developed what he called a phenomenological Destruktion of several key texts and themes in their respective corpus. This Destruktion was not intended as a destroying (Zerstörung), but rather as a dis-mantling (Ab-bau) that was supposed to liberate the original intentions animating ancient Greek thoughts and concepts from the bonds of a rigidifying tradition that had allegedly distorted these original meanings in passing them down.Footnote 1 Up to the publication of Sein und Zeit, many of Heidegger’s courses were dedicated in whole or in part to phenomenological readings of Aristotle and Plato.Footnote 2 These readings brought Greek thinking back to life with such an intensity that Gadamer said Heidegger appeared to his students as an Aristoteles redivivus.Footnote 3 Thus Heidegger’s early teachings on Greek philosophy had a tremendous impact on a wide range of students, many of whom would become some of the most renowned thinkers of the twentieth century: Günther Anders, Hannah Arendt, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Hans Jonas, Karl Löwith, Herbert Marcuse, Leo Strauss, and others.Footnote 4
Heidegger’s promise of a radical renewal of philosophical thinking by returning to the Greeks is the promise about which Arendt famously said: “thinking has come to life again.”Footnote 5 But that promise in a sense failed, for Heidegger’s intense encounters with Plato and Aristotle led him slowly but surely to think that the problems that he expected to overcome by reappropriating ancient Greek philosophy were already there in embryonic forms.Footnote 6 More specifically, Heidegger eventually came to see in Plato the first decisive steps of the forgetting or oblivion of Being (Seinsvergessenheit) at work in the unfolding of the so-called Western metaphysical tradition. He would later straightforwardly identify Platonism with said metaphysics as well as with its alleged nihilistic consequences.Footnote 7 Most young thinkers among the first generation of Heidegger’s students found their own philosophical impulse by taking their distances from Heidegger while remaining faithful to the inspiration they found in his revolutionary thinking and teaching. Some among these more specifically attempted to emulate Heidegger’s initial turn to Greek philosophy while rejecting his ensuing critique of Plato. In response to Heidegger’s attack against Platonism, they articulated Platonic critiques of Heidegger.
This book examines the Platonic critiques of Heidegger developed by three philosophers among Heidegger’s first generation of students: Leo Strauss (1899–1973), Hans-Georg Gadamer (1901–2002), and Gerhard Krüger (1902–1972). Among those whom Wolin called “Heidegger’s children,”Footnote 8 Strauss, Gadamer, and Krüger stand out for several reasons. First, their common philosophical itinerary is somewhat emblematic of the impact of Heidegger’s emergence as the leading philosopher amid the collapsing Neo-Kantian School of Marburg. By conducting their doctoral studies under the guidance of Marburg Neo-Kantian philosophers (respectively with Ernst Cassirer,Footnote 9 Paul Natorp, and Nicolai Hartmann) and then turning to Heidegger’s thought, they lived, one may even say embodied the critical transition that this Heidegger moment represented in the Marburg constellation.Footnote 10 Clearly, these Marburg years played no small role in forging the bonds of friendship that they would cultivate in various ways throughout their whole lives.Footnote 11 Second, Strauss, Gadamer, and Krüger conceived of their own philosophical project not just as a new reactivation of Greek philosophy – a “repetition of antiquity at the peak of modernity,”Footnote 12 to borrow Karl Löwith’s phrase – but more specifically a new, better philosophical appropriation of Plato’s philosophy. This particularity distinguishes Strauss, Gadamer, and Krüger from other prominent philosophers among the first generation of Heidegger’s students, notably Hannah Arendt, Hans Jonas and Karl Löwith, whose works were inspired by both Heidegger and Greek philosophy, but who are most certainly not Platonists.Footnote 13 Third, their appropriations of Plato attempt to respond to Heidegger’s critique of Platonism.Footnote 14 Fourth, their Platonic critiques of Heidegger proceed through an articulation of an emphatically dialogical Platonism and, as I shall argue throughout this book, of a singular understanding of what that dialogical character of Platonic philosophizing entails.
Situating Strauss, Gadamer, and Krüger between their Neo-Kantian Doktorväter and Heidegger does not only provide helpful context for understanding their own Platonic trajectories but also allows us to understand Heidegger and his recovery of Plato and Aristotle in the Marburg constellation in which it emerged and which it in turn thoroughly transformed. As we shall see, when read against the background of the Platonism of the prominent Marburg Neo-Kantian philosophers (Hermann Cohen, Paul Natorp, and Ernst Cassirer), Heidegger’s critique of Plato appears particularly apropos. The contrast also helps to see just how revolutionary Heidegger’s approach to Greek philosophy was, and so how appealing it appeared to a whole generation of students who found themselves in this new configuration of the Marburg context. This new approach in fact had a tremendous impact on Strauss, Gadamer, and Krüger.Footnote 15 Strauss, for instance, recalls that Heidegger’s lectures on Aristotle were absolutely epochal:
I said to [Rosenzweig] that, in comparison with Heidegger, Weber appeared to me as an “orphan child” in regard to precision and probing and competence. I had never seen before such seriousness, profundity, and concentration in the interpretation of philosophic texts. I had heard Heidegger’s interpretation of certain sections in Aristotle, and some time later I heard Werner Jaeger in Berlin interpret the same texts. Charity compels me to limit my comparison to the remark that there was no comparison. … We saw with our own eyes that there had been no such phenomenon in the world since Hegel.
As Strauss notes, the Destruktion of the Greeks, although it eventually led Heidegger to criticize Plato and Aristotle, paradoxically left open the possibility of a new and less critical approach:
Above all, his [Heidegger’s] intention was to uproot Aristotle: he thus was compelled to disinter the roots, to bring them to light, to look at them with wonder. Klein was the first to understand the possibility which Heidegger had opened without intending it: the possibility of a genuine return to classical philosophy, to the philosophy of Aristotle and of Plato, a return with open eyes and in full clarity about the infinite difficulties which it entails.
As early as 1934, Strauss would, in his correspondence with Jacob Klein, speak of his own intellectual path as moving in a “direction beyond Heidegger” (Richtung über Heidegger hinaus).Footnote 17 While developing throughout his whole career his own Platonic philosophizing, the first steps of which were woven into the argument of Philosophie und Gesetz (1935) and The Political Philosophy of Hobbes (1936),Footnote 18 Strauss continued to read and ponder Heidegger’s works very seriously.Footnote 19
Strauss’s idea that Heidegger’s Destruktion paradoxically opened up new, non-Heideggerian possibilities of inquiry into the Greeks echoes the way Gadamer retrospectively looked as his own Heideggerian awakening, the one that gripped him when, in 1922, he (mis)read the interpretation of Aristotle contained in the Natrop-Bericht.Footnote 20 Gadamer indeed thought that the program therein announced was a revival of practical philosophy and of its hermeneutic salience for the analysis of human existence:
This text was for me a real source of inspiration. … When I reread today the first part of the introduction to Heidegger’s Aristotle studies, the “Indications concerning the hermeneutic situation,” it is as if I rediscover the guiding thread of my own philosophical development and should repeat the elaboration that finally led me to philosophical hermeneutics. … Reading this rediscovered program, what now strikes me is that phronesis is not so much at the forefront as the virtue of the theoretical life, sophia. This means that the young Heidegger was not so much preoccupied with the relevance [Aktualität] of practical philosophy as with its signification for Aristotelian ontology, for the Metaphysics. The sixth book of the Nicomachean Ethics appears in this program really more as an introduction to Aristotle’s Physics.
As is well known, Gadamer was very close to Heidegger during his years at the University of Marburg and wrote his Habilitation on Plato under Heidegger’s supervision. This work became Plato’s Dialectical Ethics: Phenomenological Interpretations Relating to the Philebus (1931), Gadamer’s first published study of Plato, in which both his Heideggerian influence and his attempt to take his distances from his master are palpable.Footnote 21 When he later published The Idea of the Good in Platonic-Aristotelian Philosophy (1978), he described Heidegger’s Plato as his “continuous challenge” and referred especially to “his interpretation of Plato as the decisive step toward ‘metaphysical thought’s’ Seinsvergessenheit” as the core of that challenge (IG, 5; GW 7, 130).Footnote 22
We find something analogous in Krüger’s own development. Krüger was perhaps one of Heidegger’s most gifted students and for a time his favorite pupil.Footnote 23 While Heidegger had otherwise a profound influence on his thought, he pursued his own independent path and did not refrain from publicly expressing some of his criticism of Heidegger as early as 1929.Footnote 24 As Susan Shell rightly pointed out in her introduction to the English translation of the Strauss–Krüger correspondence, “for Krüger no less than Strauss, Heidegger’s ‘destruction’ of the philosophic tradition opened up the prospect of a genuine recovery of ancient thought.”Footnote 25 Thus, in Philosophie und Moral in der kantischen Kritik (1931), which was first produced as his Habilitation and which owes much to Sein und Zeit and to Heidegger’s own interpretations of Kant,Footnote 26 Krüger is in fact led from Kant back to Plato and Socrates. This movement is reflected in the ultimate sentence of the book: “That the decisive question remains true even if it finds no answer, the example of Socrates can teach it to one who so questions” (PMKK, 236).Footnote 27 As Strauss wrote to Krüger in a letter of 1931: “instead of understanding Plato by way of Kant – as the Neo-Kantians do – [you] conversely allow Plato to put Kant, and especially us, in question.”Footnote 28 Eight years later, Krüger published his groundbreaking study of Plato, Einsicht und Leidenschaft: Das Wesen des Platonischen Denkens (1939). In Krüger’s Plato, as we shall see, several Heideggerian insights are employed to turn Heidegger’s critique of Plato upside down.Footnote 29
The following inquiry examines the Platonic paths of Strauss, Gadamer, and Krüger in order to show not just that they aim to overcome the challenge raised by Heidegger but also and most importantly that they do so in a strikingly similar way, namely by articulating what I will refer throughout this study as a “dialogical Platonism.” Moreover, their dialogical Platonism is distinct in that it is meant as a reactivation of the Socratic reorientation of philosophy announced in the Phaedo as a “second sailing” (δεύτερος πλοῦς), which they singularly understand in the light of Socrates’ other autobiography, namely the account of his Delphic Mission found in the Apology of Socrates.
As I explain in Sections I.2 and I.3, and as it should unfold throughout the present inquiry, the Platonism of Strauss, Gadamer, and Krüger displays a dialogical form, and this in two senses. First, it understands dialogical inquiry as the only possible philosophical method or orientation. Second, it understands this dialogical path as structured around prominent types of interlocutors, and, consequently, prominent philosophical questions, whose preeminence is grounded in their authoritative claim on the question of the good human life. These prominent interlocutors are poets and politicians, and these questions or themes are those posed by the confrontation of philosophy with poetry and politics. According to such understanding, the arch of the second sailing in the Phaedo, namely the attempt to know the truth of beings – ultimately, Forms – by turning to speeches is mediated by the dialogical encounter prompted by the poetic and political challenges to the philosophical endeavor. This twofold dialogical Platonism is a response to the doctrinal Plato of Martin Heidegger as well as to his dogmatic views on the role of Platonic thought in the history of Western philosophy.
This kind of confrontation or Auseinandersetzung with Heidegger through and about Plato is not a merely historical dispute, and this for three reasons. The first general reason is that it is hardly possible to distinguish Heidegger’s thinking from his interpretation of the history of philosophy. In other words, Heidegger is not just the thinker of historicity but his own philosophy is deeply tied to its relation to the history of philosophy; it is thoroughly historical. Hence, it is impossible to problematize Heidegger’s reading of the history of philosophy without problematizing Heidegger’s thought itself. Second, Heidegger, as mentioned earlier, proclaimed the identity of metaphysics – provisionally understood as a series of allegedly misguided “background assumptions” concerning the meaning of Being – and Platonism, so what is at stake when he criticizes Plato is nothing less than the fate of metaphysics.Footnote 30 Third, the critique of metaphysics as Platonism or of Platonism as metaphysics is not one among many aspects of Heidegger’s thinking; the thesis that metaphysics is responsible for the distortion of the Seinsfrage and the oblivion of Being rather lies at the heart of his work. Therefore, responding to Heidegger on the question of the meaning of Platonism, if done effectively, means providing a substantial critique of Heidegger.
By showing that the Platonism of Strauss, Gadamer, and Krüger represents a significant Auseinandersetzung with Heidegger, the current book inscribes their philosophical works not just in rupture with a tradition but also in continuity with it. Broadly speaking, this tradition is the tradition of German philosophy, and especially of post-Kantian German philosophy.Footnote 31 But more specifically, it also is the long tradition of German Platonism, that is, of the recurrent and intense reception of and philosophical encounter with Plato that is arguably a characteristic “syndrome” of German philosophy.Footnote 32 In this sense, this book deals with one of the last episodes in the life or lives of German Platonism.
Yet the nature of the following inquiry is not merely historical. As much as Strauss, Gadamer, and Krüger took the challenge posed by Heidegger with the utmost seriousness, I think we, too, should take their critique of Heidegger and their own Platonism seriously. By this I mean not only that they deserve serious scholarly attention (which of course they do) but also, and more importantly, that we should ourselves be disposed to hear – to speak like Gadamer – their Wahrheitsanspruch, that is, the truth-claim that their works are making. I intend this truth-claim in a threefold sense. The first sense: We should take seriously their critiques of Heidegger’s critique of Platonism. The second sense: We should take seriously their interpretations of Plato and be genuinely open to the possibility that they might be saying something true, powerful, and important about Platonic philosophy. The third sense: Their attempt to philosophize as contemporary Platonists deserves our keenest attention, and is perhaps worthy of some kind of creative imitations of our own. As such, this book can hardly do more than prepare ourselves for such an invitation to articulate new forms of contemporary Platonism. It so prepares us by providing a fresh and clear access to Strauss’s, Gadamer’s, and Krüger’s Platonic response to Heidegger such as to allow us to hear their Wahrheitsanspruch in the first two senses. It should finally be said that disposing ourselves to hear such a truth-claim does not require that we forsake criticism. It is instead an invitation to enter into a genuine dialogue with Gadamer, Strauss, and Krüger, and a genuine dialogue requires both attentive listening of the other’s voice and earnest and thoughtful answering. Without serious listening, it is a dialogue of the deaf. Without answering, it is a monologue.
I.1 Recovering the Second Sailing
I.1.1 The Unity of the Methodological and the Thematic
Gadamer’s recovery of Plato has been interpreted as a “re-Socratizing” (Resokratisierung) of Plato as well as a post-metaphysical Platonism.Footnote 33 These are apt characterizations insofar as they emphasize the importance of dialogue and Socratic ignorance as central to his understanding of Platonic philosophy. However, we can hardly make sense of the specific directions that Gadamer’s Platonic writings take and of the questions he prioritizes on these Socratic grounds if we do not further interpret these grounds. Likewise, this basis alone is insufficient to fully account for the similar pressing concerns that animate Strauss’s and Krüger’s writings on Plato.
Scrutinizing the interpretations of Plato by Strauss, Gadamer, and Krüger, one indeed notices that they display resemblances that go beyond their agreement about the Socratic dialogical method. Indeed, there are also evident thematic similarities that stand out: All three give substantial attention to the same issues in Platonic thought, namely the questions of the meaning of dialogical thinking and writing, the relation between philosophy and poetry and between philosophy and politics. Taken separately, each of these themes is an obvious candidate for Platonic investigations, for each is, as a matter of fact, an important question in Plato’s works. Yet, attributing the thematic similarities of their appropriations of Plato to a coincidence is an unlikely solution in light of two facts. First, these themes were barely given attention by the most important philosophical interpretations in the German context in general, as well as in the Marburg context in particular during the 1920s and 1930s. In fact, neither Neo-Kantian nor Heidegger’s readings were interested in these questions and focused instead on issues in Platonic epistemology and ontology. Second, most interpreters of Plato who consider some of these themes do not treat all of them together. This suggests that they don’t see an inner connection between these sets of questions, whereas Strauss, Gadamer, and Krüger do. In this respect, these three post-Heideggerian Platonists once more stand out.
If there is such a connection, it is appropriate to look into it for insights on a proper characterization of the appropriations of Plato in Strauss, Gadamer, and Krüger. My proposal, as I already mentioned, is that we find an articulation of the intimate relation between philosophy, dialogue, poetry, and politics if we read the two Socratic autobiographies of Plato’s corpus, namely the second sailing of the Phaedo and the Delphic mission of the Apology, through one another. Doing so reveals the unity of the methodological and thematic aspects of their Platonism.
I.1.2 The Second Sailing as Dialogue
In the autobiographical passage of the Phaedo (96a–102a), Socrates explains how he became the philosopher that he was. According to this story, Socrates became the Socrates we know by coming to terms with his dissatisfaction vis-à-vis physicists. Socrates targets one thinker in particular: Anaxagoras. He was at first astonished by the promise contained in the Anaxagorean doctrine of νοῦς (the intellect). Anaxagoras promised to explain how things are in terms of the good (97d–e), that is, to provide teleological explanations of the world. But Anaxagoras did not fulfill this promise and rather provided material or physical explanations for everything. These explanations merely provide sine qua non causes, and not sufficient causes: Socrates is not sitting in his prison cell because of his flesh, sinews, and bones (98c–d). It is true that he could not do so without these, but that could count as an equally good explanation of Socrates’ escape from prison, and Socrates did not escape. Socrates then explains that since he was “deprived [of the cause] and could neither find it by himself [αὐτὸς εὑρεῖν] or learn it from others [παρ’ ἄλλου μαθεῖν],” he resolved to embark on a “second sailing for the search for the cause” (τὸν δεύτερον πλοῦν ἐπὶ τὴν τῆς αἰτίας ζήτησιν) (99c8–d1).
There are many controversies concerning the meaning of this second sailing. In Greek, the idiom refers to a trip where sailors recur to oars when the wind is lacking or too weak.Footnote 34 It is a “second-best” in the sense that it replaces another means of sailing that would be better were it available. Scholars disagree about what both the second sailing itself and what it is meant to replace, namely the “first” sailing or πρῶτος πλοῦς, refer to. The usual candidates for what the δεύτερος πλοῦς refers to are: (1) the method of hypothesis; (2) the turn to Forms as causes; (3) a method that cannot guarantee certainty in the search for causes.Footnote 35 The candidates for what the πρῶτος πλοῦς refers to are: (1) teleology; (2) material causation; (3) a method that guarantees certainty.Footnote 36 But the passage in which Socrates explains what he means by his second sailing is open to a much more modest reading that has the advantage to be closer to the text. I think that this is the approach that can properly illuminate the Platonism of Gadamer, Strauss, and Krüger. Let us quote the passage first (99d4–100a7):
After this, he said, when I had wearied of investigating beings [τὰ ὄντα], I thought that I must be careful to avoid the experience of those who watch an eclipse of the sun, for some of them ruin their eyes unless they watch its image [τὴν εἰκόνα αὐτοῦ] in water or some such material. A similar thought crossed my mind, and I feared that my soul would be altogether blinded if I looked at things [τὰ πράγματα] with my eyes and tried to grasp them with each of my senses [ἑκάστῃ τῶν αἰσθήσεων ἐπιχειρῶν ἅπτεσθαι αὐτῶν]. So I thought I must take refuge in speeches and investigate in them the truth of beings [εἰς τοὺς λόγους καταφυγόντα ἐν ἐκείνοις σκοπεῖν τῶν ὄντων τὴν ἀλήθειαν]. However, perhaps the way I picture it is inadequate, for I certainly do not admit that one who investigates beings by means of speeches is dealing with images any more than one who looks at facts [τὸν ἐν τοῖς λόγοις σκοπούμενον τὰ ὄντα ἐν εἰκόσι μᾶλλον σκοπεῖν ἢ τὸν ἐν τοῖς ἔργοις]. However, I started in this manner: taking as my hypothesis in each case the speech that seemed to me the most compelling [ἐρρωμενέστατον], I would consider as true, about cause and everything else, whatever agreed [συμφωνεῖν] with this, and as untrue whatever did not so agree.
The notion of hypothesis does not come up until 100a3, although this is usually where commentators rush to so as to argue that the second sailing is the “method of hypothesis.” The idea of positing Forms, in the immediate context of the second sailing, does not emerge before 100b5. This is not to say that hypotheses and Forms are not relevant to Socrates’ second sailing, but that they are extensions of a broader reorientation announced by Socrates under the name of δεύτερος πλοῦς (second sailing), and this reorientation is explained through lines 99d4–100a3. These lines usually do not get the attention they deserve. What they tell us is that Socrates refrained from trying to grasp beings directly by perceiving them in facts (ἐν τοῖς ἔργοις) and started instead to investigate the truth of beings through speeches (ἐν τοῖς λόγοις). This is to say that the second sailing is the indirect orientation through λόγοι, and it is meant to replace the direct orientation through ἔργα. Following the meaning of the δεύτερος πλοῦς metaphor, the way ἐν τοῖς λόγοις is privileged because the way ἐν τοῖς ἔργοις is unavailable. Why is it unavailable? Because this empirical-perceptual kind of inquiry blinds the soul. What kind of blindness is Socrates talking about? It is reasonable to think that he is referring to the aveuglement of physicists in the vein of Anaxagoras, that is, of those with whom he was dissatisfied.
It is undoubtable that the Socratic turn to λόγοι involves hypotheses and Forms, but there is a danger to hastily interpret the second sailing as either a hypothetical method or an ontology. The danger is to overlook what comes before these, that is, to underestimate the role of this primary flight into the λόγοι. For surely the method of hypothesis and the Forms presuppose that one orients oneself according to speeches, and not vice versa. This means that the flight into the λόγοι has not only temporal but also a logical priority. Now the initial description of the “method of hypothesis” (100a3–7) tells us that we need to select the most compelling or healthy (ἐρρωμενέστατον) λόγος and take as true what agrees (συμφωνεῖν) with it. This selection and comparison (indicated by the superlative and agreement components of the sentence expressing the “method”) require that we examine a plurality of λόγοι. Later on, we are told that the process by which we should do that is to give an account or speech (διδόναι λόγον, 101d6), a phrase that is paradigmatic of Socratic elenchus. The best way to be offered a multiplicity of competing λόγοι is to engage in dialogue with others. It might be possible to formulate to oneself (or to give to oneself) a variety of λόγοι, but even solitary and silent thinking is understood as a dialogue of the soul with itself in the Theaetetus (189e4–190a1) and Sophist (263e3–264a3). The conclusion to be drawn from these remarks is that before being a turn to Forms or to a hypothetical method, the second sailing is a turn to speeches in the form of a dialogical inquiry.
While I think the above reading is sound on Platonic grounds alone, it is worth pausing here to note that this this approach is explicitly endorsed by both Gadamer and Strauss in the 1930s. Consider Gadamer’s remarks on the δεύτερος πλοῦς passage in his 1931 Habilitationschrift, Plato’s Dialectical Ethics:
What one is looking for is, after all a reason or cause that stays the same: for each entity, that which it at bottom always is. Now this claim is fulfilled, in a certain way, in language [Sprache]. … Language makes the identical universality of a nature stand out from the manifold of what is given in changing perception and designates each entity by means of what it always is. […] Thus language is by no means a mere image of entities. And if this second voyage seeks the reason or cause of entities in the logoi rather than in looking directly at the world, this does not mean merely contenting oneself with an image. One misunderstands this Socratic turn to the logoi, with its absolute bindingness for classical Greek philosophy, if one misses the irony with which it is introduced as a second voyage. So that we should not miss it, but understand that this way is superior to immediate sense experience, in particular, Plato has Socrates say this explicitly, albeit with the irony of a “perhaps.”
Gadamer thus understands the turn to λόγοι as the turn to language (Sprache), and not a turn to arguments, hypotheses, or Forms. He also thinks that the second sailing is in fact superior to what it is meant to replace. Similarly, in Strauss’s 1936 book on Hobbes, we find the following comments:
Plato “takes refuge” from things in human speech about things as the only entrance into the true reasons of things which is open to man. Anaxagoras and others had tried to understand the things and processes in the world by their causes, by tracing them back to other things and processes in the world. However, this procedure affords no possibility of true understanding.
… to give up the orientation by speech means giving up the only possible orientation, which is originally at the disposal of men, and therewith giving up the discovery of the standard which is presupposed in any orientation, and even giving up the search for the standard.
So, for both Gadamer and Strauss, the turn to λόγοι is the turn to human speech and language, and it is not just a second-best but the only available, and thus the actual best orientation.
As already indicated, it is sensible to contrast the second and first sailings as the way through λόγοι and the way through ἔργα. If this is the case, it hardly makes sense to say that the second sailing replaces teleology. This misreading is somewhat natural insofar as it is clear that when Socrates says at 99c8 that he was “deprived of it” (ταύτης ἐστερήθεν),” “it” (ταύτης) refers back to “such cause” (τῆς τοιαύτης αἰτίας, c6–7), which in turn refers to “the good and fitting” (τὸ ἀγάθὸν καὶ δέον, c5). But the fact that Socrates was deprived of the teleological cause does not mean that he abandoned it or, in other words, that the second sailing is an alternative to τὸ ἀγάθὸν καὶ δέον.Footnote 37 The grammatical argument is thus inconclusive and allows for other interpretations.
Rather, Socrates says that he could not find the final cause by himself (αὐτὸς εὑρεῖν) or learn it from others (παρ’ ἄλλου μαθεῖν), and this most likely means that he could not learn it from physicists who promised it like Anaxagoras. But this leaves open the possibility that he could find it by embarking on a second sailing.Footnote 38 The crucial point, it seems to me, is the following: the detour through λόγοι, insofar as it leads to Forms, allows the Good to come back as a cause (cf. 100b6).Footnote 39 The second sailing does not replace, but at best revises teleology. What it does replace is a direct perceptual or physical apprehension of beings. It replaces it because this method, the first sailing, does not allow the truth of beings to become manifest.
I.1.3 The Ethical-Political Crux of the Dialogical Inquiry
There are two reasons to turn to the Apology to clarify the question of the second sailing. First, the parallel is invited by the fact that the Apology contains another autobiographical passage that illuminates the nature and intent of Socrates’ philosophical activity. Second, if the second sailing is the turn to exchanged λόγοι in dialogue, the question of what kind of interlocutors the philosopher should look for arises. This is not a random question, for the “hypothetical method” enabled by the turn to human speeches demands that we select the most compelling λόγοι, and this might not be an easy task with any interlocutor. In the Apology, Socrates precisely addresses the question of his intended interlocutors. On the surface, it looks like he conversed with anyone in Athens. This impression is usually strengthened when he tells us that he engages in dialogue with craftsmen: If Socrates is humble enough to enter into dialogue with artisans, he must be open to philosophize with everyone.
But we ought to be careful when reading Socrates’ autobiographical discourse: While he claims to discuss with craftsmen, it is striking that Plato, unlike Xenophon (Mem. III. 10), never displays even one single conversation between Socrates and a craftsman. I am not suggesting that the historical Socrates never did talk to craftsmen, but rather that Plato’s Socrates had preferred types of interlocutors. In the Apology, he mentions two other groups of people: poets and politicians (22a). Compared to the case of craftsmen, it is also striking that Plato displays Socrates exchanging λόγοι directly with poets (Agathon and Aristophanes) and political men (Alcibiades, Critias, Charmides, Nicias, Laches, etc.) and indirectly with poets (Homer, Hesiod, Simonides, Theognis, etc.) and political men (Pericles, Solon, Themistocles, Aristides, etc.). Instead of rehearsing the reasons for Socrates’ disappointments with his interlocutors in the autobiographical account of his Delphic mission, I would like to ask bluntly the question: Why such a precedence of poets and politicians over craftsmen (and other random people)? While craftsmen are knowledgeable people, they are ignorant about the “most important things [τὰ μέγιστα]” (22d6). To be sure, Plato’s Socrates indicates that poets and politicians, too, are ignorant about τὰ μέγιστα. So, what is the difference? I propose the following explanation: Craftsmen are not just ignorant about the most important things; they are, qua craftsmen, not concerned with the most important things, that is, they are not concerned with them in virtue of their τέχνη (craft). By contrast, politicians and poets claim to know, teach, and promote the most important things, namely virtues. They do not simply happen to be concerned with virtue; it is precisely in their capacity of politicians and poets that they have an authoritative claim over the good. This is why they are the privileged interlocutors of Plato’s Socrates.Footnote 40
We can put the point differently. The problem Socrates encounters through his Delphic mission is not primarily epistemological but ethical-political, or “agathological.” The issue with the ignorance of his interlocutors is not just that they are unaware of their ignorance; the real issue is that they are unaware of their ignorance about the good while thinking they know the good and claiming to be real authorities about it. Craftsmen may be doubly ignorant about virtue, but they are not authorities in matters of moral and political excellence; they are only authorities about what they produce. This is why Plato’s Socrates is not really bothered with craftsmen – as distinguished from the issue of τέχνη itself – but constantly talks to the other two types. Poets and politicians are important interlocutors because they have authoritative λόγοι about virtue and the good. These speeches, and not just any kind of speech, are the kind of speeches that must be examined when one turns to the λόγοι with the purpose of finding the most compelling ones and taking them as true. This confirms one of the points argued previously, namely that teleology or explanations in terms of the good is not abandoned by the second sailing. On the contrary, the Apology confirms the absolute centrality of the question of the good, that is, of the ethical-political crux of Socrates’s reorientation.
Together, the second sailing and the Delphic mission thus reveal the shape, method, and themes of the Socratic reorientation. They allow us to see the connection between the form and content of Plato’s philosophy. As I shall show, this unity of the dialogical form and of the ethical crux of philosophy is precisely how Gadamer, Strauss, and Krüger approached Plato. This gives them a decisive advantage over both Neo-Kantian interpretations and Heidegger’s reading, for the latter two in fact jump directly to Plato’s Ideenlehre (theory of Forms) without consideration for the Socratic path toward the Forms. This has the effect of transforming Plato’s philosophy into rigidified, lifeless doctrines, and of causing the oblivion of the privileged Platonic mode of inquiry. By reviving this dialogical mode, Gadamer, Strauss, and Krüger bring Platonism back to life.
I.2 Plato and Platonism: Interpretation and Appropriation
So far and in what follows, I did and will use the word “Platonism” in a non-pejorative sense. Since this terminology comes with risks of misunderstanding, it is appropriate to clarify this choice and briefly defend it. Three important contemporary critics of Heidegger’s Plato,Footnote 41 as well as defenders of Gadamer’s Plato,Footnote 42 have preferred to ascribe the label “Platonism” to dogmatic interpretations of Plato, that is, to readings of Plato that transform the dialogues he wrote into a set of fixed theories and doctrines, like “Plato’s theory of the state,” “Plato’s theory of virtue,” “Plato’s theory of truth,” “Plato’s theory of Forms,” and so on.Footnote 43 According to them, “Platonism” designates an enemy of the genuine spirit of Plato’s philosophy. In German, the word for “theory” and “doctrine,” Lehre, also means “teaching.” Yet it is just as impossible to determine with any precision and certainty what Plato’s teachings were as to determine what his doctrines or theories are, and this for a very simple reason: Plato (almost) never spoke in his own name.Footnote 44 The problem of Plato’s anonymity raises tremendous difficulties for the interpretation of his work,Footnote 45 but I contend that the risk of transforming a philosophical work into a dogmatic falsification of it is a broader and much more pervasive problem, and in fact a tendency that we can see at work virtually whenever interpretations of philosophical texts occur. Philosophically, we can call this the problem of reductionism. Reductionism is the act of reducing a complex phenomenon or thing to one or some of its aspects or parts. We need not explore here the different causes of reductionist tendencies among philosophical interpreters. Suffice it to say that reductionism is a problem insofar as it fails to capture the complexity of what should be brought to understanding through the act of interpretation and thereby produces misunderstanding instead of understanding. Granting the danger and problematic nature of reductionism, we must ask: Is it the case that any kind of Platonism is a reductive interpretation of Plato? I do not think so.
Rather, what I think the notions of “Platonism” and “Platonist” evoke is an act of appropriation wherein one who calls oneself a Platonist or a philosophical proponent of Platonism is calling to attention the intellectual affinity between oneself and what one thinks represents the genuine spirit of Plato’s philosophy. To be simply an interpreter of Plato allows one to reject what one finds in Plato; to be a Platonist means to gives one’s philosophical assent to what one finds in Plato. This appropriative dimension is the main reason why I resolve to talk of Platonism in a non-pejorative way. However, it is important to see that this appropriation does not work as a two-step process. On a two-step process model, one first understands Plato’s philosophy and only thereafter decides whether one agrees with it and makes it one’s own. This model is flawed, for it fails to consider the interpretive character of understanding, or at least fails to appreciate the appropriative dimension of such interpretive understanding. Both Heidegger and Gadamer have provided helpful frameworks to understand the intricacies of understanding, interpretation, and appropriation. In Heidegger’s terms, we do not primarily and for the most part understand things as if they were simply “present-at-hand” (vorhanden), statically available for a distant theoretical gaze, but as “affordances” (das Zuhandene), things that matter to us and with which we are “pragmatically” engaged.Footnote 46 For Gadamer, interpretive understanding is the dialectic between the alterity of the interpretandum and the appropriation of that interpretandum by the interpreter.Footnote 47 It is not possible to properly understand something if we do not make it our own, that is, if we do not apply it to our own situation, put it in our own words and into relation with our own thoughts, experiences, concerns, aspirations, and so on. Accordingly, any attempt to understand Plato is an interpretation of Plato on the basis of the “situational finitude” of the interpreter.Footnote 48
It could be argued that, if this is true, every interpretation, being situated, is intrinsically oriented toward certain aspects of the interpretandum at the expense of others, and is thus naturally led to reductionism. Indeed, perspectival or aspectual understanding can hardly claim to do justice to all aspects or all perspectives. An impartial or non-perspectival sight would require, as Nietzsche puts it, a “non-concept of eye.”Footnote 49 Yet there is a difference between the perspectival character of hermeneutics and reductionist interpretations. The difference stems from hermeneutics’ acknowledgment of its finite situation and perspectival nature. We can put the point in the following way: Perspectivism is a necessary yet insufficient cause of reductionism. Gadamer speaks of interpretation as highlighting (Überhellung).Footnote 50 Highlighting something is a way of emphasizing it, and something is always emphasized at the expense of something else that is not emphasized, or perhaps even downplayed. But there is still a crucial difference between the two: Emphasizing A at the expense of B is not the same as reducing B to A. To acknowledge the finitude of perspectival understanding means to acknowledge that A has been emphasized over B without trying to cancel out B. Reducing B to A does not allow one to see any remaining glimpse of B.
Following these remarks, we can make a distinction between Platonism as an interpretive appropriation of Plato according to which one can call oneself a Platonist, and dogmatic or doctrinal Platonism, which consists in any kind of interpretation of Plato’s work that reduces it to this or that specific “theory.” Gadamer, Strauss, and Krüger should all be understood as Platonists in the former sense. This is to say that not only do they praise Plato while interpreting his work but they also articulate their own philosophical thinking as a kind of Platonic philosophy. In that sense, they articulate various yet similar kinds of Platonism. I have qualified their kind of Platonism as dialogical. As I have explained, I take this in a rather specific sense, for their understanding of the dialogical path in Plato is quite singular. But the phrase “dialogical Platonism” should also be heard more generally as an opponent to dogmatic or doctrinal, that is, reductive Platonism. Dialogical Platonism does emphasize Socrates’ second sailing and its ethical crux, and perhaps it does so at the expense of other concerns one finds in the Platonic corpus – say, logical or epistemological questions – but it is not guilty of reductionism because it does not pretend to offer a definitive and exhaustive interpretation of Plato’s views. In particular, its dialogical character prevents one from the otherwise natural tendency of interpreters to try to “have the last word.”Footnote 51 As we shall see, they think that for Plato, and this means for them too, questions do not just have a temporal but also a substantial or ontological priority over answers. In light of this, the various kind of positive propositions and interpretive conclusions I will discuss in what follows will be understood properly if they allow to reveal the interrogative impulse, the “force of the questions” that prompt them.Footnote 52 In this respect, we can let ourselves be guided, somewhat paradoxically, by Heidegger’s beautiful words quoted as the epigraph to this book: “Any answer remains powerful as an answer only insofar as it is rooted in the questioning.”Footnote 53
I.3 Structuring the Inquiry
This book is divided into two parts and composed of seven chapters. Part I (Chapters 1–3) reconstructs the philosophical context in which Heidegger, Strauss, Gadamer, and Krüger all found themselves in the 1920s in Marburg and establishes the challenge to which the second sailing of the latter three is a response. Chapter 1 first provides an account of the Marburg Neo-Kantian interpretations (Cohen, Natorp, Cassirer) of Plato’s “theory of Ideas,” which claim that Plato anticipated the modern scientific hypothetical method. This proves important not just contextually, for a crucial contention of this interpretations is that Plato’s Forms are not substances or beings, and that very idea will play a significant role in the new readings of Platonic metaphysics proposed by Strauss, Gadamer, and Krüger. In Chapter 2, I engage critically with Heidegger’s treatment of Plato and discuss problems and shortcomings that pertain to the notions that structure the Platonic paths of these three thinkers: dialogue, poetry, politics, and Forms. This chapter sets out Heidegger’s critique of Platonism as the genuine challenge that the dialogical Platonism of Gadamer, Strauss, and Krüger tries to address. Chapter 3 provides a brief discussion of the philological innovation of Paul Friedländer, who prepares the way for a reading of Plato that considers indispensable the dramatic structure of the dialogues. There, I argue that Friedländer anticipates the anti-dogmatism and the attention to irony characteristic of the interpretations of Plato by Strauss, Gadamer, and Krüger but does not allow the deeper philosophical meanings of these features to emerge.
Part II (Chapters 4–7), the crux of the present investigation, turns to the Platonism of Strauss, Gadamer and Krüger. Its structure follows the thematic articulation set out in the preceding remarks, namely that of Socrates’ second sailing as the matrix of their Platonism.
Chapter 4 deals with the meaning of Plato’s dialogical form of philosophical inquiry. It argues that, for Strauss, Gadamer, and Krüger, dialogue is not just the way in which Plato presents his philosophical thought but the way in which Plato philosophizes and urges us to philosophize in turn. Through authorial anonymity, the dramatic interrelation of speeches and action, and irony, Plato constantly undermines the readers’ temptation to reduce the meaning of the philosophical conversations to fixed propositions. Their analysis all point toward a dialogical understanding of truth, as opposed to a propositional one, and it does so by anticipating some of Heidegger’s own philosophical insights, notably by emphasizing the ethical-political facticity of the philosophical inquiry and its rootedness in prereflexive attunements (Stimmungen). Given this emphasis, we are naturally led to inquire into how different kinds of interlocutors shape philosophical dialogues.
Chapter 5 deals with philosophy’s encounter with poetry and the poets. While the starting point of Gadamer, Strauss, and Krüger in their analysis of the dialogical form of Platonic philosophy is the paradox of Plato’s written critique of writing, the starting point of their analysis of the “old quarrel between philosophy and poetry” is Plato’s mimetic critique of mimesis. This paradox leads them to reconsider the critique of poets in a radical way, for they all contend that Platonic philosophy must be poetic to achieve what it purports to do. For them, the encounter with poets leads the Platonic philosopher to acknowledge the limits of philosophical discourse alone, that is, to a λόγος that is not supplemented by the disclosive resources of poetry. Here again, the Plato of Gadamer, Strauss, and Krüger anticipate Heidegger’s deep appreciation for poetic thinking but reconfigure this appreciation in two ways: first, by emphasizing its “agathological” crux, that is, the centrality of the good life; second, by refusing the dichotomy between philosophy and poetry that is implied in Heidegger’s rejection of philosophical discourse in favor of poetic saying and thinking: Philosophy can become poetic without ceasing to be philosophy.
Chapter 6 deals with philosophy’s encounter with politics and the city by turning to the interpretation of Plato’s Republic by Strauss, Gadamer, and Krüger. It focuses on the meaning of the utopia that philosophical rulership represents and argues that, for all three, the apparent harmony of philosophy and politics in the Republic is ironic. I distinguish two different kinds of ironic readings, represented on the one hand by Strauss, and on the other hand by Gadamer and Krüger. Both readings are ironic insofar as they contend that the apparent harmonization of philosophy and politics at once dissimulates and discloses the real tension between the two. In the case of Strauss, it is a hyper-irony, for the identity of philosophy and politics embodied by the philosopher-ruler is understood as an indication of the ineluctable antithesis between the two. In the case of Krüger and Gadamer, the tension obliquely indicates ways in which the philosopher can nonetheless contribute to political life through critique and education. Insofar as they all articulate a tension between the philosopher and the city, their ironic readings of Kallipolis are all antidotes to the kind of reckless political Platonism that Heidegger enthusiastically embraced in his rectoral address.
Chapter 7 deals with the interpretation of Forms. It argues that Gadamer, Strauss, and Krüger all understand Platonic ontology in ways that attempt to respond to Heidegger’s criticism of Platonism as metaphysics. This critique contends that, for Plato, Being fundamentally means intelligibility. Gadamer, Strauss, and Krüger, all try to show that this is at best partly true, or, better put, that the Forms indicate a very partial intelligibility of Being, and, conversely, that Plato anticipates Heidegger’s insight into the fundamental elusiveness of Being. However, I show that through their interpretation, Gadamer and Strauss get rid, each in their own way, of the transcendence or the “beyond” that is so characteristic of Platonic Forms and the Good, and argue that, hermeneutically, this is too high a price to pay for responding to Heidegger. In fact, I suggest that it might be possible to argue in favor of the elusiveness of Being in Platonic ontology while maintaining the “beyond,” and, in fact, precisely by preserving this transcendence. This way is one that Krüger’s reading prepares, especially by thinking through the spacing between discursive thought (διάνοια) and noetic insight (νόησις).
