The Reliability of Heidegger’s Reading of Plato’s Gigantomachia :: Philosophy Philosophical Papers

The Reliability of Heidegger’s Reading of Plato’s Gigantomachia ABSTRACT: At issue is the reliability of Heidegger’s contention that Greek thinking, especially Plato’s, was constricted by an unthought "pre-ontology." "The meaning of being" supposedly guiding and controlling Greek ontology is "Being = presence." This made "the question of the meaning of ousia itself" inaccessible to the Greeks. Heidegger’s Plato’s Sophist is his most extensive treatment of a single dialogue. To test his own reliability, he proposes "to demonstrate, by the success of an actual interpretation of [the Gigantomachia], that this sense of Being [as presence] in fact guided [Plato’s] ontological questioning . . .". I will show Heidegger’s strategy in connecting what he takes to be Plato’s naive pre-ontology — Being = Presence — to the ontology of the Gigantomachia — Being = Power. I will show that Heidegger blatantly misreads the text to make the connection: he completely misses the distinction between bodies and bodiless things. The text makes sense, I will show, if and only if its explicit ontology — Being = Power — is its implicit pre-ontology. Plato wrote his text not to discuss, but to exemplify, Heidegger’s ontology-preontology distinction. He wrote the Gigantomachia for Heidegger, but Heidegger missed it. Heidegger proposed "to demonstrate, by the success of an actual interpretation of [Plato’s gigantomachia] that this sense of Being [as presence] in fact guided the ontological questioning of the Greeks...." I will show Heidegger failed this self-imposed test. Then with Heidegger’s interpretation as a starting point, I will show the basic structure of the text. The organizers of this conference have arbitrarily established a fifteen minute long border artificially confining my thought: Anything that cannot be thought within that boundary cannot be thought or said at this conference. In Plato’s gigantomachia peri tes ousias (Soph. 246-48), the Stranger establishes a border that constricts, not thought, but beings within a sharply defined boundary: "For I am establishing that there is a border that confines the beings in such a way that they are nothing else but power" (247de). (My translation). Heidegger, however, claims Plato’s Stranger establishes this boundary confining beings because a conceptual boundary, analogous to the fifteen minute long boundary established for this conference, constricts Plato’s own thinking: Plato cannot think outside the boundary, the "unthought" implicit "pre-ontology," that controlled all Greek thought; Plato’s gigantomachia peri tes ousias, his "ontology," his explicit "theoretical inquiry explicitly devoted to the meaning of entities," occurs within the confines of this constricting pre-ontology.