Platon: Sophistes.

Miller, J. Philip

This volume contains the text of a lecture course Heidegger presented in Marburg in the winter semester of 1924/25, just a year before completing his work on the manuscript for Being and Time. A lengthy introductory section examines the concept of truth in Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics and Metaphysics. The "Main Section" presents a detailed commentary on the Greek text of Plato's Sophist. Part I deals with the various attempts made at the beginning of the dialogue (219a-236c) to define "the factical existence of the sophist." Part 2 is devoted to the ontological discussion which arises out of these attempts (236e-264b).

Heidegger refers frequently to the Aristotelian definition of the human being as zoon logon echon. The term logos he takes to mean "discourse," course," especially discourse that is made public and shared with others; thus Aristotle's definition is understood to identify speech as a central human phenomenon. According to Heidegger, however, Aristotle also recognizes another human possibility, closely related to discourse yet distinct. More basic than speech is the human capacity for "seeing" the things themselves, for making present what our speech is about. Everyday human existence is dominated by obscurity and by "empty talk" (Gerede), in which the capacity for seeing is not fully activated. There is always a possibility, however, of moving from obscurity and emptiness to authentic presence. As the lecture makes clear, it is this basic phenomenological contrast that underlies Heidegger's interpretation of the Greek concept of truth as a-letheia, as an "un-coveredness" of the things themselves (p. 16).

Heidegger calls attention to Aristotle's use of the verb aletheuein. He takes Aristotle to be saying that human beings are essentially "in the truth," that truth is "an essential characteristic of human existence itself (p. 23). One manifestation of the tendency toward truth is phronesis, a capacity for disclosing the human situations in which action takes place and one's own being is at issue. Although he does not fully develop the idea, Heidegger does identify some ways in which the truth of phronesis is contrasted with corresponding forms of concealment. The allegedly higher truth of sophia, "authentic understanding," also represents a contrast with concealment. As Heidegger points out, Aristotle clarifies sophia by showing how ft emerges from the relative obscurity of experience, art, and science. Each of these reflects a kind of partial exercise of the capacity for truth: something is "seen" in each, even though the archai or "starting points" remain obscure.

This introductory discussion of Aristotle is relevant because the Sophist turns out, on Heidegger's reading, to revolve around an understanding of discourse and truth. The dialogue's various attempts to characterize the sophist have a common thread: all imply that logos is what somehow defines the sophist's mode of existence. This is most obviously true of the last two definitions, in which the sophist appears as a disputer who repeatedly opposes one opinion to another and as an imitator who uses words to paint false and misleading pictures of things. But it also applies to the earlier attempts. In each, "the basic phenomenon of legein becomes decisive" (p. 303).

To shed light on Plato's concept of discourse, Heidegger examines the Phaedrus, the dialogue which in his view "forms the center, so to speak, for all questions of Platonic philosophy" (p. 321). Here he shows that Plato also works with a distinction between a speaker who has only hearsay acquaintance with the subject of his discourse and a speaker who has actually "seen" what he speaks about "in its unconcealment" (p. 323). Plato's skepticism about the written word is to be understood in this context: far from making people wiser, trust in written discourse (or in any discourse that has been taken over from another) actually fosters lethe, "forgetting" or "covering up," in that it leaves the reader or hearer unconcerned about the presence of the things themselves. The philosopher's dialectical art, on the other hand, is meant to lead to a genuine seeing; it is not a matter of making sterile divisions, but rather the Me" by Which speakers can go back "through" (dia) what is ordinarily said to an authentic uncovering, an original appropriation, of that which is spoken about.

Heidegger believes that this phenomenological understanding of discourse and truth plays an important role in the Sophist. Implicit in the is the thesis that the sophist's medium is "uprooted," "free-floating" floating" speech, empty discourse not anchored in genuine disclosure. The sophist creates an image or appearance instead of allowing the thing itself to be seen and appropriated. Where the philosopher's dialectical art seeks to uncover the things themselves, the sophist aims only at speaking well.

On Heidegger's interpretation, even the ontological section of the dialogue makes use of this phenomonological understanding of discourse and truth. Here Plato's Eleatic stranger proposes to modify the received Parmedenidian ontology, since its absolute repudiation of non-being makes impossible any understanding of false discourse, and hence of sophist's mode of existence. Heidegger finds the root of the problem in Parmenides' interpretation of being as sheer, undifferentiated "presence." Since this ontological Position leads inevitably to a denial of non-being, Plato's stranger must somehow move beyond Parmenides. No Greek was able to transcend the ontology of presences, which arises naturally from ordinary ways of thinking about the world. But the stranger does introduce an important modification.

Heidegger suggests that Plato's ontology differs from that Parmenides ides in that it is based on a careful study of the structure of discourse. Plato saw that logos is more than mere naming, that is always involves saying something "of" something else. By the same token, what the authentic speaker apprehends is not just the thing spoken about, but something that is present "as" something else. The presence that underlies authentic discourse is always the articulated presence of something-as-something, not the sheer, undifferentiated presence envisioned by Parmenides. It always involves a certain koinonia or "togetherness." What is decisive for Platonic ontology is thus an understanding of being as the "possibility of togetherness," dunamis koinonias (p. 479), the potential for being present together with something else for an authentic speaker.

This ontological advance underlies the stranger's solution to the problem of the being of non-being. Once he has defined being in terms of koinonia, the stranger goes on to show that "otherness" comes together with everything that is. And since otherness is a kind of non-being, the being of non-being is established, and the definition of the sophist in terms of false discourse is secured.

The lecture provides striking evidence of the degree to which Heidegger was absorbed in both phenomenology and Greek philosophy at the time he composed Being and Time. Phenomenological distinctions like that between authentic and inauthentic discourse pointed him toward a dramatically new way of understanding the Greek philosophers; understood in this way, the Greeks in turn suggested new approaches to a wide range of philosophical issues. The two perspectives are so fused in Heidegger's lecture that it is often difficult to distinguish his own voice from the voices of those whose works he comments on. Some will find this fusion of perspectives unsettling and disturbing, but phenomenologically oriented philosophers can look to the work for a wealth of provocative insights and suggestive interpretations.