article

The Platonic Roots of Heideggers

Political Thought
Jacques Taminiaux
Universit Catholique, Louvain-la-Neuve and Boston College

EJPT
European Journal
of Political Theory

SAGE Publications Ltd,

London, Thousand Oaks
and New Delhi
issn 1474-8851, 6(1) 1129
[DOI: 10.1177/1474885107070827]

a b s t r a c t : Heideggers most notorious political text is the Rectoral Address on

The Self-Assertion of the German University, delivered in Freiburg in May 1933.
This work is puzzling in that it manifests not ideology, but what Dominique Janicaud
called an exacerbated Platonism. Accordingly, this article is an attempt to search for
the roots of Heideggers political views in his early work, and above all in the lecture
courses on Plato and Aristotle delivered before the publication of Being and Time
(1927), a book that still underpins the Rectoral Address. The investigation is in three
stages: 1) an analysis of the political elements in Heideggers thought before 1933; 2)
a survey of the development of his political thought after 1933; 3) an examination of
the prejudices involved in the Platonist approach to politics, with reference to the
work of Hannah Arendt, who was a former student of Heidegger in Marburg.
k e y w o r d s : Arendt, Aristotle, Heidegger, Plato, politics, praxis, Rectoral Address

One of the most notorious of Heideggers political writings is the famous Rectoral
Address on The Self-Assertion of the German University that he delivered on 27
May 1933 after his election as head of Freiburg University, a discourse that is
usually considered to be an obvious sign of compromise with the NationalSocialist revolution.1 There is no doubt that Heidegger became a member of the
Nazi party right after his election and that he was at that time full of admiration
for Hitler and full of hope in the political regime which was coming to power
under the Fhrers leadership in 1933. However, if readers compare Heideggers
speech with the main documents of Nazi propaganda, for example Hitlers Mein
Kampf, Rosenbergs mythology or the proclamations of Goebbels, they must
acknowledge their amazement. There is no trace in the Rectoral Address of an
endorsement by the speaker of what lay at the very foundation of the totalitarian
regime then taking shape in Germany: its ideology.
In her first major book, The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt analyses

Contact address: Jacques Taminiaux, Facult des sciences philosophiques, Collge

Mercier, Universit Catholique, Louvain-la-Neuve, Place du Cardinal Mercier 14,
B 1348 Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium.
Department of Philosophy, Carney Hall, Boston College, Chestnut Hill, MA 02167, USA.

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the most striking features of the totalitarian forms of government and insists on
the central function of ideology, in addition to the transformation of classes into
masses, the transformation of the party system into a mass movement mobilized by
a single leader, the domination of the army by the police and an open orientation
towards world domination.2 Arendt shows that the central role of totalitarian ideology is to abolish once and for all a difference that has been taken for granted in
the entire history of political thought since Plato, a difference between two levels
in the meaning of the word law: legality and legitimacy. In other words, ideology
pretends to bridge the gap between, on the one hand, positive laws and their legality, and, on the other hand, the validating authority from which they spring
without ever having been coincident with it; for example, the transcendent idea of
justice, fits naturally the commandments of God, the general will of a nation, or
the idea of practical reason.
This persistent differentiation between two levels in traditional thought entails
several other differences such as the discrepancy between the abstract and general
character of the standards of right and wrong and the concrete variety of unpredictable human events; between universal obligation and the freedom of
individual action and will; between duty and right; between the stabilizing impact
of positive laws and the ever-changing movement of human affairs. All these
distinctions vanish in totalitarianism thanks to ideology. Arendt demonstrates
quite clearly that the totalitarian ideology gets rid of them by claiming to be the
complete fulfilment of an ultimate law which itself is no longer referred to as an
ideal realm to be searched for, again and again, but is simply the expression of the
movement of a supra-human force, Nature or History, a force which has its own
beginning and end, its own consistency or logicality. Ideology thus is simply the
logical deduction of a premise taken to be self-evident, such as the perfect race
in the case of Nazism.3 Ideology therefore leads inevitably to the repression of all
the human forms of active life as well as to the destruction of the life of the mind. As far
as active life is concerned, the only activity preserved by ideology is the activity of
labour, since it is necessary for the survival of the race. But ideology represses the
activity of work, the condition of which in Arendts view is a common world built
by humans beyond the cycle of nature. This condition is eliminated as soon as the
only work taken into consideration is the fabrication of a perfect race. And ideology
also represses the activity that Arendt calls action properly speaking, whose condition, she says, is human plurality, the fact that human beings are all alike but all
different. Action thus understood as a sharing of words and deeds, as interaction
and interlocution, is eliminated by totalitarian ideology because ideology destroys
plurality by considering human beings as mere exemplars or tokens of a racial
type. As far as the life of the mind is concerned, ideology is no less destructive. It
destroys the activity of knowing as a renewed intellectual experience of phenomena because the only knowledge it retains is rigid deduction from an apodictic
premise. For the same reason, it destroys the activity of thinking considered as a
continually renewed search for meaning. Similarly, it destroys the activity of will-

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Taminiaux: Platonic Roots

ing because human beings are no longer allowed to take initiatives. The will is no
longer their will: it is the monopoly of the perfect race.
If we concede that the analysis outlined here provides a fair picture of Nazi
ideology, then we must also concede that Heideggers Rectoral Address does not
fit with it at all. On closer scrutiny, with the exception of a celebration of the
Fhrerprinzip and a vague allusion to the slogan Blut und Boden, in its language and
its principal themes the speech can be seen as a kind of repetition of the first major
text in the tradition of political philosophy, the very tradition Nazi ideology
intended to get rid of once and for all, namely, Platos Republic.
Indeed, Heideggers discourse is a celebration of the normative position of what
Plato called theoria, contemplation, defined by Heidegger in ontological terms as
the passion to remain close to and hard pressed by what is as such.4 In his attempt
to characterize this passion which overcomes the ontic towards the ontological,
and which is therefore the privilege of metaphysics as the queen of sciences,
Heidegger insists that the theoria at stake is not a detached form of contemplation
but an extreme possibility of Dasein. Theoria is thus conceived in existential terms
as a comportment, a way of life. Hence the normative position celebrated is the
normative position of what Plato called bios theortikos. As retrieved by Heidegger,
this bios is both an ontological issue it is focused on the Being of beings and an
existential accomplishment of Dasein as being-in-the-world. Obviously inspired
by Platos teaching, Heidegger defines this accomplishment with the help of
Greek words. It is, he says, the highest modality of energeia, of mans being-atwork, as well as the highest realisation of genuine praxis.5 In this context
Heidegger does not hesitate to quote and to take as a kind of motto a verse of
Aeschylus Prometheus which in Greek runs Techn danangks asthenestera makr,
and which is translated by Heidegger as knowledge, however, is far weaker than
necessity.6
The reference to the tragic verse is meant to point out that the ontological and
existential theoria is at once the highest praxis or highest action and the highest
techn, i.e. the highest know how in the sense of a mode of disclosing adjusted to a
specific poisis, or production, defined as a putting-into-work of truth understood
as altheia, disclosedness. A similar encroachment of the tragic text upon the text
of Plato had already occurred in Heideggers writings two years earlier in the long
lecture course of 19312, The Essence of Truth, in which he undertook a detailed
ontological interpretation of the parable of the cave, the central motif of Platos
Republic.7 In order to show that what is at stake in the process of elevation
described by the parable is the transcendence and ecstatic disclosure that defines
the human Dasein in its intrinsic tension between everydayness and authenticity,
Heidegger illustrates the uncanniness of the ownmost condition of Dasein by
quoting his own translation of the beginning of the chorus polla ta deina in
Sophocles Antigone. His translation runs: There are many uncanny things, but
nothing is more so than man himself.8
The Rectoral Address is consistent with the theme of elevation to the highest

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European Journal of Political Theory 6(1)

ontological unconcealment. In the context of the Address, the verse of Aeschylus
Prometheus cited by Heidegger is supposed to mean:
. . . all knowing about things has always already been delivered up to overpowering fate
and fails before it. Just because of this, knowing must develop its highest defiance; called
forth by such defiance, all the power of the hiddenness of what is must first arise for
knowing really to fail. Just in this way, what is opens itself in its unfathomable inalterability
and lends knowing its truth.9

14

The challenging knowledge at stake is of course philosophy itself. Consequently

the words of Prometheus are supposed to characterize the very condition of the
philosopher; Prometheus turns out to be the one who dedicates his life to the bios
theortikos. And since there is an amalgamation between the highest theoria, the
supreme modality of poisis, and the highest accomplishment of praxis, Heidegger,
in agreement with Plato, describes the body politic as a huge workshop in which
everyone has a specific function under the guidance of the philosopher. There is
an obvious echo of Platos Republic in Heideggers picture of a corporatist state
wherein each of the estates (Stnde, a favourite word in Hegels political philosophy, which was itself inspired by Plato) provides a distinct service to a particular
people, the German Volk: a service of work, a service of defence and, at the top, a
service of knowledge, above all a service of metaphysics, in order to prevent the
dispersion of sciences into specialized disciplines. There is no allusion whatsoever
to the transformation of classes into masses. Rather, the movement to which
Heidegger alludes in the Rectoral Address is a conscious movement towards
Being, not a mass mobilization. Likewise the world alluded to is not a universal
Lebensraum for the race of the Lords but the ontological site of Dasein.
This long introduction is sufficient to suggest that Heideggers political
thought at the time of his most notorious compromise with Nazism was not the
thought of an ordinary Nazi. To be sure, there is in it an emphasis put on the
importance of guidance, Fhrung, a key concept in Nazi ideology, but since in
Heideggers use of the notion the guide is the one who is able to raise fundamental
questions whereas the body of followers has its own strength and bears resistance within itself, we are a very long way from the blind submission to a
suprahuman force which, according to Arendt, characterizes ideology.10 As
Dominique Janicaud observed, this self-affirmation of the German university is a
call to self-affirmation for the self and the people (for oneself in the people).11
This appeal explains why, on the one hand, a representative of official Nazi
ideology such as the Minister for Education in Baden, Otto Wacker, could criticize the discourse as a document of private national-socialism and why, on the
other hand, Karl Jaspers, who never compromised with the regime, on receiving
a copy of the speech, intended to send a letter of congratulation to the author.
If we acknowledge that the Rectoral Address, read as an expression of
Heideggers political thought in 1933, exhibits not ideology, but what Janicaud
called an exacerbated Platonism, this introduction puts us in a position to search
for the roots of his political thought in the long debate with the Greeks, particu-

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Taminiaux: Platonic Roots

larly Plato, that he conducted before the publication of the book that still determines the horizon of the Rectoral Address, that is, Being and Time.12
My investigation into these roots is divided into three stages:
1) An outline of the political elements in Heideggers thought before 1933.
2) An examination of the development of the political thought outlined in the
Rectoral Address during the following years.
3) A reflection on the prejudices involved in Heideggers Platonic view of political matters. Here, I shall call on the help of Hannah Arendt, one of the major
political thinkers of the 20th century, a former student of Heidegger and one
who never hesitated, after a short period of rejection, to acknowledge her
intellectual debt to Heideggers teaching.

I
Are there political elements in Heideggers thought before 1933, in the lecture
courses that paved the way to Being and Time, in the book itself (published in 1927)
and in the writings and lecture courses that followed directly afterwards? And if
so, do these elements amount to an endorsement of Platos view of politics? The
answer to both questions is: yes indeed.
As I have suggested, the Rectoral Address gravitates, so to speak, around a few
basic concepts: poisis enlightened by techn (or production, putting into a work the
truth disclosed by a knowhow), praxis (or action) and theoria (or contemplation).
It is now quite clear that these basic concepts of Greek philosophy, by which I
mean the dialogues of Plato as well as the treatises of Aristotle, designated central
topics in Heideggers teaching in the Marburg years that saw the genesis of Being
and Time. Let me offer a brief reminder of Heideggers way of dealing with these
topics during those Marburg years, when his lecture courses consisted almost
exclusively of interpretations of works of Plato and Aristotle.
We might begin by noting that the framework of these interpretations is
provided by the famous Natorpbericht of 1922, a text in which Heidegger was
attempting to describe how he conceived his investigations in Greek philosophy,
particularly in the philosophy of Aristotle, in order to justify his application for a
teaching position of the University of Marburg.13 What is immediately striking in
Heideggers presentation of his task as an interpreter of philosophical texts of the
past is the emphasis he puts on an ontological vision, on an insight into the Being of
beings. In terms of method, insight, vision, Anschauung, in Greek theoria, was of
course a leitmotiv in Husserls phenomenology, which was familiar to Heidegger
as a former assistant of Husserl. In this respect, the title he gave to the
Natorpbericht is significant: Phenomenological Interpretations with Respect to
Aristotle, with the subtitle Indication of the Hermeneutical Situation.
Phenomenology is a matter of seeing. And I remember Heidegger, in the last
seminar he gave in Zhringen in 1974, which I attended, repeating forcefully: If

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you dont see, you are not a phenomenologist. In other words, throughout his
entire career, from the Natorpbericht until the last seminar, he continued to proclaim the normative position of theoria as he did in the Rectoral Address.
What is the link between the two words which make up the subtitle of the
Natorpbericht: phenomenology and interpretation? In each of them it is a matter of
seeing. Indeed, the task of the interpreter is to see what Heidegger calls a
Sachgehalt, the content of a state of affairs. It is a task that depends on a hermeneutical situation that Heidegger also describes in optical terms as determined by a
Blickstand (an initial position of looking), a Blickrichtung (a direction of looking)
and a Sichtweite (a scope of looking).14 And since Heidegger claims to be neither a
scholar nor a historian of ideas, but to be interested exclusively in the deepest questions of philosophy, which are ontological questions of course, his aim is not to provide a neutral contribution to an objective knowledge of the past for its own sake.
His aim is to achieve a philosophical reappropriation of the Greeks here and now
with respect to the originary object of philosophical research in the present. He
writes: The object of philosophical research is human Dasein insofar as it is interrogated with respect to the character of its being [Seinscharakter].15 Philosophical
research started in Greece and the Greeks coined the basic categories for philosophical research, but under the influence of Christianity these categories slowly
lost their genuine ontological impact. The purpose of Heideggers interpretation
of Greek texts is to restore that ontological impact, reappropriating what the
Greeks discovered in relation to the factical life of the human Dasein, and, through
this reappropriation, to make visible, even transparent durchsichtig the human
Dasein itself in its ontological character.
Clearly echoing Nietzsches second Untimely Meditation, Heidegger writes:
The past opens itself up only in accord with the degree of resoluteness
[Entschlossenheit] and power of the capacity to disclose it [Aufschliessenknnen] that
the present has available to it.16 Here, we can see one of the earliest expressions
of the strict correlation between the historical character of Dasein and the excellence of the bios theortikos, i.e. the philosophical way of life, that will later be given
such emphasis in the Rectoral Address. Indeed, Heidegger claims that philosophy,
in its effort to see, is a commitment that adheres closely to the inner movement of
factical life and brings it to its highest level. Philosophical research, he writes, is
the explicit actualizing of a basic movement of factical life and constantly maintains itself within it.17 It is by being intimately concerned with the Being of
factical life that philosophy becomes what in Being and Time he will simply call
fundamental ontology.18 The main part of this fundamental ontology, the analytic
of Dasein, is already anticipated in its basic themes here in 1922. The intentionality that pervades the movement of factical life is care (Sorge), a cura that is oriented
towards a surrounding world, a common world (Mit-Welt) and a self-world, and
diversified into various concerns according to which the world is encountered by
factical life as having such and such a meaning, and interpreted through a logos, in
such and such a discursive modality. A detached knowledge of objects results

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Taminiaux: Platonic Roots

from an inhibition of the tendency to pursue goals or produce effects that initially
characterizes care in its specific movement. Along with, and within, this basic
intentionality of care, factical life is inclined to lose itself in its world, to fall
into it, thereby falling away from itself, alienating itself. As a result of this falling,
factical life, which is in each case properly the factical life of an individual, is for
the most part not lived as such.19 Instead, it is lived in a specific averageness, the
average character of what is at each time public for everyone, for das Man, for the
They.
In addition to care and falling, a third major topic of fundamental ontology is
also anticipated in the Natorpbericht: being-towards-death. Once again, this is a
matter of seeing. Heidegger writes:
When one has death before one as certain and lays hold of it as such, ones life becomes
visible in itself. When death is in this manner, it gives to life a certain way of seeing itself
and constantly leads it before its ownmost present and past.20

Death, in other words, is the key phenomenon in which the specific kind of
temporality belonging to human Dasein is to be brought into relief and explicated.21
The excellence of the bios theortikos celebrated by the Rectoral Address obviously has deep roots in Heideggers intellectual journey, beginning with the
Natorpbericht. To be sure, that celebration ultimately goes back to Plato. However, there is no allusion either to Plato or to politics in the indications of the
hermeneutical situation in the Natorpbericht. These indications introduce an interpretation of Aristotle, not of Plato. Moreover their purpose is strictly ontological,
and the ontology at stake in them is not the ontology of a people, but the ontology
of an individual Dasein. Nevertheless, it is perhaps not exaggerated to claim that,
behind the overall tension between the inauthenticity of the They falling away
from the ownmost movement of factical life and the philosophical insight into
Daseins authentic way of being, there lies a major topic of Platos political
thought: the tension between the life of the sage and the life of the polloi.
This tension comes to the fore, often with explicit reference to Platos notion
of politics, in the lecture courses delivered by Heidegger in Marburg in the
following years, to which the Natorpbericht was a prelude. Let me comment briefly
on the reference to Platos notion of politics in the lecture course on Grundbegriffe
der aristotelischen Philosophie that Heidegger delivered in the summer semester of
1924, and also in the lecture course on Platos The Sophist delivered a few months
later in the winter semester 19245.22
At the beginning of his lecture course on the basic concepts of Aristotelian
philosophy, Heidegger in the wake of his Natorpbericht reminds his listeners that
he conceives of his task as belonging to the scientific purpose of philosophy, a task
in which the possibility of human existence is at stake; by which he means that
human life has the possibility to refer only to itself without faith or religion.23
The only faith required is the faith in history [Geschichte], for it is presupposed

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that history, and the historical past in so far as the way to it is liberated, can give
a thrust, a push [Sto ] to the present and to a better future.24 Heidegger immediately insists on the ontological perspective of the retrieval involved in his
investigation, where ontology is taken in the strict sense of a logos, a discourse,
adjusted to the Being of beings. Once again, the privilege of theoria becomes clear.
Indeed, Heidegger claims that in Aristotles famous definition of the human
being as the zoon logon echon, the speaking animal, the point is to reach an accomplishment that takes place in the delimitation (horismos) of ousia, a word he
translates as being in its Being. Heidegger then adds:
The ultimate possibility in which Dasein is authentically, we call Existenz. Existence, in
the radical sense, is for the Greeks precisely that way of being in the world, to dwell in it,
from which is motivated the horismos as speaking with the world. Existence, the radical
possibility of Dasein, it is for the Greeks, the bios theortikos: life persisting in pure
contemplation.25

18

For the Greeks! The phrase is significant if we consider that the only Greeks
Heidegger addressed in his Marburg lecture courses were Plato and Aristotle.
The phrase the Greeks means that he didnt distinguish between Plato and
Aristotle, and this is confirmed in the interpretation he gives of the second
Aristotelian characterization of the human being: zon politikon. Heidegger
acknowledges that for Aristotle the zon politikon is a speaking animal, but he is
quick to project the teaching of Plato onto the speech of the zon politikon. The
speaking citizen does not overcome the inauthentic preoccupation that pervades
the rule of the They in everydayness, and his deliberative speech in the public
space of the polis is, Heidegger claims, trapped in habits, fashion, immediate
vogue, idle talk.26 He doesnt speak as a responsible individual, he is a mere
sample of das Man. Without any consideration for Aristotles objections to Plato
in matters of politics, Heidegger contends that, like Plato, Aristotle was in the
most extreme opposition to what was alive around him in the concrete world.27
In other words Aristotles real concern was to celebrate, like Plato, the excellence
of the bios theortikos, in full opposition to the inauthenticity of the bios politikos. In
the first bios it is an ontological disclosure that prevails; in the second, it is the rule
of opinions, which adheres to the way things commonly appear to das Man. At
stake in the first bios is altheia (truth), whereas the second bios does not move
beyond persuasion.
In line with these considerations, the lecture course Platos Sophist delivered by
Heidegger a few months later claims in a commentary on the Nicomachean Ethics
that for Aristotle politik epistm is genuine sophia and the politikos is the true
philosophos; that is the conception of Plato.28 This lecture course is particularly
interesting with regard to the alleged continuity between Plato and Aristotle. It is
in order to provide an existential introduction to Plato that Heidegger offers his
students a detailed interpretation of Book 6 of the Nicomachean Ethics. And his
existential interpretation of Aristotles treatise is focused, once again, on the
excellence of the bios theortikos. In fact, on close inspection, it is through a very

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Taminiaux: Platonic Roots

particular retrieval of the teaching of the Nicomachean Ethics that Heidegger discovered, with respect to the finite and mortal existence of Dasein, his own way
towards a reappropriation of the absolute precedence that Plato bestowed upon
the bios theortikos as capable of achieving an ultimate ontological insight.
In Nicomachean Ethics 6, Aristotle establishes a hierarchy among the intellectual
virtues or excellences and splits them up into two groups: the deliberative virtues
on a lower level, the epistemic virtues on a higher one. Techn (art or know how),
the virtue of poisis (production), is lower than phronsis (prudence or practical
judgement), which is the virtue of praxis (action or conduct of life). Similarly, on
the upper level epistm, the virtue of contemplation directed towards particular
objects (for example, the contemplation of geometrical shapes), is lower than
sophia, the virtue of higher contemplation directed towards the ultimate principles
of the movement of nature as a whole.
Heidegger claims that Aristotles description of these two levels is focused on
the possibilities of disclosure that characterize Dasein. The fabric of the lecture
course is thus a comparative assessment of the active life and the contemplative
life governed by the pre-eminence of the bios theortikos. Heideggers handling of
the Aristotelian text is a complex intermingling of sophisticated scholarship and a
structural reappropriation for his own ontological purpose, which is to discover
the meaning of Being by way of an ontological analysis of human existence
defined in terms of a finite and mortal temporality. Against this backdrop, his
analysis of the active life pays much attention to the Aristotelian distinction
between poisis and praxis, work and action. Work, insists Heidegger, is illuminated by a specific mode of althia, unconcealing, which is techn or knowhow.
But this mode of disclosing has three flaws. First, it relates to entities that
surround human beings and which do not have Daseins mode of Being. Moreover, while the principle of that disclosive activity (e.g. the blueprint of the
product to be shaped), is in the working Dasein, the telos, the goal, is a thing out
there in the world that is independent of the producer. Finally, the product
becomes instrumental for the aims and needs of many other individuals who are
all trapped within an endless cycle of means and ends. By contrast, the Aristotelian
notion of praxis is interpreted by Heidegger as an activity in which there is no
longer any lack of balance between arch and telos, and with respect to which
means and ends are no longer relevant. According to Aristotle, praxis is hou
heneka, for its own sake. As interpreted by Heidegger, this statement translates as:
Dasein exists for the sake of itself (umwillen seiner).29 Thus Heidegger does
not hesitate to translate the specific form of disclosure belonging to praxis, i.e.
phronsis, into conscience (Gewissen), understood in strictly ontological terms with
no ethical connotation, as the intimate vision by an individual Dasein of its ownmost possibility of Being. In other words it is easy to see that this interpretation
of poisis and techn anticipates the description of everydayness in Being and Time,
and the interpretation of praxisphronsis anticipates the future description of care
and of authenticity as a way of facing existence.

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There is a clear Platonic bias in the way Heidegger erases what in Aristotles
notion of praxis is essentially linked to the right exercise of citizenship among a
plurality of equals and in interaction with them. He also overlooks the fact that for
Aristotle phronsis is a doxastic virtue that is in no way intended to stand apart
from what appears to other agents. All in all, Heidegger completely overlooks
what in Aristotles analysis of praxis and phronsis indicates a link with the real bios
politikos of the democratic regime of Athens for example when Aristotle says that
Pericles is a good example of phronimos.
What of theoria? Here, too, there is evidence of a Platonic bias in Heideggers
analysis, since he argues as though Aristotle recognized in the bios theortikos the
only possibility of attaining eudaimonia. It is revealing of his own ontological perspective focused on Dasein that he translates eudaimonia into Eigentlichkeit,
authenticity. Because of this focus, his analysis is a mixture of agreement and
reservation: agreement in so far as the Aristotelian features of the highest theoria
solitude, silence, ultimate vision are the very features that will define conscience in Being and Time; reservation because the Aristotelian theoria is focused
on the perpetual present of nature, rather than the ecstatic temporality of the
human Dasein.
In relation to Being and Time, I will just highlight the Platonic bias in the
following passage from the Introduction:
With regard to the awkwardness and inelegance of expression in the analyses to come,
we may remark that it is one thing to give a report in which we tell about entities, but another
to grasp entities in their Being. For the latter task we lack not only the words, but, above all,
the grammar. If we may allude to some earlier researches on the analysis of Being,
incomparable on their own level, we may compare the ontological sections of Platos
Parmenides or the fourth chapter of the seventh book of Aristotles Metaphysics with a
narrative section from Thucydides; we can then see the altogether unprecedented character
of those formulations which were imposed upon the Greeks by their philosophers.30

20

To illustrate the contrast between ontological discourse and ontic discourse by

choosing as an example of ontic discourse the work of Thucydides, which is one
of the rare documents in which the traces of the political discourse of real agents
of the Athenian bios politikos are preserved, is indicative once again of the point I
am making. If we recall that one of the most telling of those traces is the description of the democratic regime of Athens in the famous funeral oration by Pericles,
we might say that Heideggers choice displays a disdain for the real bios politikos of
the real polis a disdain which, of course, sits well with Platos negative views
about democracy.
But it is in the lecture course, The Essence of Truth, delivered by Heidegger
after the publication of Being and Time that his agreement with Platos notion of
the best political regime becomes fully explicit. Indeed in this lecture course,
Heidegger deals extensively with Platos Republic and presents a detailed reappropriation of the parable of the cave in terms of his fundamental ontology. Here,
we find the following statement: In regard to the state (as we somewhat inappro-

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Taminiaux: Platonic Roots

priately translate polis) and its inner possibility Plato maintains as his first principle that the authentic guardians of human association in the unity of the polis must
be those who philosophise.31 Any student of Greek philosophy might easily agree
with this statement. But we already know that Heidegger is not interested in a
neutral knowledge of past ideas for their own sake. On the contrary his purpose is
a reappropriation of the past here and now. This is why he continues with a clear
reference to Germany:
He does not mean that philosophy professors are to become chancellors of the Reich, but
that philosophers are to become phulakes, guardians. Control and organization of the state
is to be undertaken by philosophers, who set standards and rules in accordance with their
widest and deepest freely inquiring knowledge, thus determining the general course which
society should follow. As philosophers they must be in a position to know clearly and
rigorously, what man is, and how things stand with respect to his ability-to-be.32

This is already the language of the Rectoral Address.

II
What of the development of Heideggers political thought directly after the
Rectoral Address? Does it exhibit the continuation of Platos legacy? Dominique
Janicaud was right to claim that the philosophical horizon of Being and Time is
for the most part maintained in the Rectoral Address.33 Since this philosophical
horizon is fundamental ontology, the question we face is this: what becomes of
fundamental ontology in the wake of the Rectoral Address? We could say that the
contrast between falling everydayness and resolute authenticity remains at the
core of the lecture courses in which Heideggers celebration of the NationalSocialist revolution is most starkly evident, starting with his first course on
Hlderlin in 19345.34 What is new, however, if we admit a continuity, is the
expansion of fundamental ontology to the Dasein of a people. The question
Who? is no longer exclusively concerned with an individual Dasein that is in each
case mine, but with the Dasein of the German people. In connection with this
enlargement another modification is also introduced. In the restricted fundamental ontology focused on the individual Dasein, each Dasein is capable of
matching up to its ownmost ontological truth. This is not so in the enlarged
fundamental ontology. Very rare, Heidegger says, are these human beings equal
to the truth of the Dasein of a people. They are: the poet who founds (Stiftung)
that truth; the thinker who articulates conceptually and makes understandable
what the poet discloses when founding the Dasein of a people; and last but not
least the political founder of a state adjusted to the essence of that people. These
three creators and only these three are qualified to be in charge of the Promethean
techn that was celebrated in the Rectoral Address.
In this context, the encroachment of the Greek past upon the present that had
been a constant leitmotiv since the Natorpbericht is maintained but it acquires a
new physiognomy. Indeed, the role attributed to Hlderlin is supposed to corre-

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22

spond in Germany to the role played by Sophocles in Greece. Among Heideggers

numerous references to the Greeks in his first lecture course on Hlderlin, the
following statement is decisive in this respect: The poem of Sophocles called
Antigone is, as a poem [Dichtung], a foundation of the Greek Dasein as a whole.35
A careful analysis of the Heideggerian interpretation of that poetic foundation
reveals that it is conducted against the backdrop of the legacy of Plato. The
lecture course delivered by Heidegger in the summer semester of 1935 on the
Introduction to Metaphysics is significant here. It is in the context of an ontological
polemos (conflict) between Being and Appearance that for the first time Heidegger
deals extensively with a Greek tragedy. On the face of it, Heidegger interprets this
polemos in the light of Heraclitus and Parmenides. But on close inspection his
handling of the topic is governed by a Platonic schema. Heidegger insists that the
polemos between Being and Appearance (Schein) belongs to the inner conflict in the
disclosive process of aletheia, not only between concealment and unconcealment,
but also in unconcealment itself between a genuine appearing and a mere appearance or semblance. The Greek word translated into Schein by Heidegger is doxa.
Schein, he says, has basically three meanings: radiance, appearing and semblance.36
These three meanings designate interplaying possibilities in the ontological
process of aletheia, in which there is a tension between the pure radiance of presence and its concealment by semblance. Heideggers favourite example of this
radiance is the sun, which suggests once again that he is arguing against the backdrop of the simile of the cave. This is confirmed by the language he uses in
defining doxa, which is said to be the regard <Ansehen, looking-at, esteem> which
every essent conceals and discloses in its appearance <Aussehen> (eidos, idea), as
well as by the hierarchy in which he ranks the meanings of doxa: glory at the top,
followed by the vision that offers something, and finally, at the bottom of the
ladder, a view that a man forms, opinion.37
If we accept the sense of doxa as opinion (the dokei moi was the very fabric of the
democratic regime of the Athenian polis), Heideggers disdain for the bios politikos
is obvious. And once again this disdain is motivated by the pre-eminence of the
bios theortikos. This is very clearly demonstrated by Heideggers interpretation of
Sophocles Oedipus in the same lecture course. Mindful that Greek tragedy concerns the ontological polemos of unconcealment, Heidegger writes of Oedipus
that, beyond the downfall of a powerful individual, we must see him as the
embodiment of Greek being-there (Dasein), who most radically and wildly asserts
its fundamental passion, the passion for the disclosure of being.38 It is doubtful
that in the century of Pericles the Greeks of the democratic regime were invited
to the Dionysian theatre in order to celebrate the bios theortikos. It is far more
likely, given the coincidence between democracy in Athens and the blossoming
of tragedy, that Athenians attended the tragic theatre in order to become better
citizens by realizing that in human interaction those who claim to be confidants
of the gods are blinded by hybris, and that the best attitude towards human affairs
is measure and prudence. In this regard, it is symptomatic of Heideggers con-

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tempt for interactive praxis and plurality that he doesnt even pay attention to the
original title of Sophocles tragedy, Oedipus Tyranos, Oedipus the Tyrant. It is
significant, too, that Heidegger doesnt mention that Hlderlin was the first to
translate the title of Sophocles masterpiece correctly. Similarly, he doesnt pay
attention to Hlderlins Remarks on the drama, which clearly deplore that
Oedipus, motivated by a Promethean hybris, instead of acting as a prudent statesman, falsely claims to be a half-god.39 By contrast, Heidegger, who was highly
selective in his retrieval of Hlderlin for the purposes of his expanded fundamental ontology, celebrates the Promethean character of Oedipus.40
In the same lecture course Heideggers interpretation of Antigones chorus polla
ta deina merits a similar observation. The context of the interpretation is once
again significant: at stake is the conflictual relationship between Being and Thinking, clearly not a key topic for the citizens practically interested in the bios politikos,
but a central concern for the few, like Plato, who since Parmenides had dedicated
their lives to the bios theortikos.41
Heideggers emphasis on the word deinon, and his specific translation of it, are
indicative of his narrowly ontological perspective. Indeed, he deliberately overlooks the use of the word in the drama itself: for example, in describing the burial
of her brother by Antigone or the stubbornness of Creon. When used in the
dialogues of the drama the word deinon always designates some frightening excess;
it can be seen in Antigones antilegalism as well as in Creons obsession with the
law. This is something Hlderlin perceived quite clearly in his translation of the
drama as well as in his Remarks.42 But Heidegger neglects the drama and pays
little attention to Hlderlins comments, precisely because they are focused on
human interaction. By translating deinon as unheimlich the word which in Being
and Time designated the ontological condition of Dasein Heidegger implies that
what is at stake in the chorus is exclusively the ontological tension between
Daseins authentic view of Being and an inauthentic falling away from Being into
the mere appearances that make everydayness familiar and secure. Yet fundamental ontology is no longer limited to the Dasein of an individual, and is now
concerned with the Dasein of a people, so what is actually at stake is not just the
historicity of an individual but the ownmost destiny of a people. In this context,
Platos concept of the polis as a huge workshop ruled by those few who are dedicated to an authentic unconcealment reappears in a typically modern variation;
namely, in the German tradition of philosophy of history, and above all in Hegel.
Hegel claimed that great men were the agents of the historical process. Similarly,
Heidegger claims that the truly efficacious agents of the setting-into-work of the
altheia of a people are creative men of action.43 Again, the contrast with
Hlderlins praxeological approach of the Greek text is striking. In Hlderlins
interpretation of the chorus it is no less deinon to be above the polis than it is to be
without polis cityless. Not so in Heideggers interpretation. Instead of expressing a warning against hybris, the word deinon supposedly expresses a celebration of
the creative statesmen. They must be high above the polis and even without polis:

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European Journal of Political Theory 6(1)

without statute and limit, without structure and order, because they themselves
as creators must first create all this.44
A careful reading of Heideggers interpretation of the key words in the chorus
polla ta deina reveals many traces of Platos legacy, in spite of the modern emphasis on the philosophy of history. For example, the word logos is given a strictly
ontological meaning in terms of the recollection of entities upon their Being.
Techn denotes the cognitive ability to look beyond what is present-at-hand.
Dike is given a similar treatment and Platos influence is unmistakable when
Heidegger claims that dike loses its fundamental metaphysical meaning when it
is translated as justice.45 Like Plato in The Republic, Heidegger understands dike as
another name for an ontological realm, a name of Being; more precisely a name
for an injunction addressed by Being, an injunction to which techn has to correspond. Consequently, rather than warning against various acts that endanger
praxis and political interaction, as Hlderlin believed, the chorus polla ta deina
simply expresses a demand that there be an adjustment to ontological necessity,
that human will-to-power corresponds to the overpower of Being. To be sure,
Heidegger notices that the final verses of the chorus apparently suggest a reservation:
May such a man never frequent my hearth;
May my mind never share the presumption
Of him who does this.46

But it is significant that he does not detect in those words any call for moderation
or prudence. He writes: Insofar as the chorus turns against the strangest of all, it
says that this manner of being is not that of every day.47 Translated into ontological terms, the final verses merely express the unavoidable blindness of everydayness to the ontological spectacle that the bios theortikos is able to see.

III

24

In this final stage of the article, I will present a critical reflection by Arendt on
Heideggers Platonic view of politics. We are fortunate that there is an essay by
Arendt that sets out the main points of her criticism quite clearly. In a letter
written on 8 May 1954 in reply to a question about her work from Heidegger, she
states that she had for some time been working on Heideggers interpretation of
the relation between philosophy and politics.
Philosophy and Politics was in fact the title of the final part of a series of
lectures Arendt gave at Notre Dame University in 1954. This part of the lecture
series subsequently underwent significant revision and its final version was published in 1990 in Social Research.48 Although Heidegger is not even mentioned in
the text, Arendt herself claims in her letter that her work on Philosophy and
Politics had a great deal to do with his interpretation, which invites the historian
of ideas to decipher Arendts lecture as an implicit debate with Heidegger.49 The

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Taminiaux: Platonic Roots

lecture deals with what she calls the gulf between philosophy and politics, a gulf
which marks, she says, the entire tradition of political thought, a tradition which
began when the death of Socrates made Plato despair of polis life, and, at the same
time, doubt certain fundamentals of Socrates teaching.50 Regarding Heideggers
early teaching when he was her teacher at Marburg, Arendt herself wrote, in her
tribute to Heideggers 80th birthday:
It was technically decisive that, for instance, Plato was not talked about and his theory of
Ideas expounded; rather for an entire semester a single dialogue was pursued and subjected
to question step by step, until the time-honored doctrine had disappeared to make room
for a set of problems of immediate and urgent relevance.51

Arendt is referring here to the lecture course on The Sophist that Heidegger
offered in the winter semester 19245.52 The question is whether or not there is
a link between Arendts treatment of Plato in her lecture of 1954 and Heideggers
interpretation of Plato in 19245.
There is indeed a link. From the very start, Arendts lecture focuses on the conclusion that Plato drew from Socrates trial; i.e. that there is an opposition
between truth and opinion (doxa). Heideggers lecture course also focuses on the
same opposition from the start. But whereas Arendt insists that the opposition was
the most anti-Socratic conclusion that Plato ever drew, Heidegger takes for
granted that, by insisting on the opposition, Plato was in full agreement with
Socrates.53 Accordingly, Heidegger takes it for granted that Socrates, Plato and
Aristotle share in the struggle against rhetoric and sophistry.54 He himself claims
to make this struggle his own philosophical endeavour, his way of life. Thus, he
translates the opposition between truth and opinion into the opposition between
authenticity and everydayness, between a disclosing logos and an idle talk,
between a genuine Self and the They. In the course of this retrieval of Platos
struggle, Heidegger will argue in the lecture course of 19245 that only the
philosopher can be an authentic politician, a position that he will repeat again and
again, for instance, as I have already said, in his lecture course of 19312, Of the
Essence of Truth.55 We have seen that a similar reappropriation of Plato is at the
core of the Rectoral Address of 1933, which is in the end a pale remake of Platos
Republic.
This is what Arendt dismantles in her lecture of 1954. Instead of claiming, as
Heidegger does, that Plato continued Socrates struggle, she insists on a decisive
difference between Plato and Socrates. Far from being opposed to doxa, she
argues, Socrates took it as the basic assumption of political life: the world is
common to all by opening up differently to everyone. In other words, Socrates
recognized that doxa is coupled with plurality. His celebrated maieutic was aimed
at helping everyone, Arendt says, to express his own opening to the world.56 For
him, the role of the philosopher, then, is not to rule the city, but to be its
gadfly, not to tell philosophical truths but to make citizens more truthful.57 Not
to overcome their doxai but to improve them. Accordingly whereas Heidegger

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claimed that Socrates was already committed to fighting rhetoric, Arendt claims
that Socrates Apology is one of the greatest examples of rhetoric, the art of
persuasion, the highest, the truly political art.58 Similarly, whereas Heidegger
claimed that Socrates was determined to oppose the sophists, Arendt writes:
If the quintessence of the sophists teaching consisted in the dyo logoi, in the insistence that
each matter can be talked about in two different ways, then Socrates was the greatest
sophist of them all. For he thought that there are or should be as many different logoi as
there are men.59

26

Moreover instead of insisting on the points of agreement between Aristotle and

Plato, as Heidegger does for ontological reasons, Arendt turns to Aristotle on
several occasions in order to find a non-Platonic echo of Socrates, if only a weakened one; for example, in friendship as higher than justice, or measure (metron) as
the possible virtue of everyone.
Finally, instead of claiming with Heidegger that Platos doctrine of truth, as it
is framed in the simile of the cave, justifies the political rule of philosophers,
Arendt deconstructs the simile in order to comprehend the enormity of Platos
demand that the philosopher should become the ruler of the City.60 Although, in
tacit agreement with Heidegger, she regards the simile as a condensed biography
of the philosopher, in her view such a biography demonstrates that the philosopher, in Platos sense, is the least qualified for dealing with human affairs. She
underlines that the simile begins with the suspension of the two most politically
significant aspects of human life: talk and action. Indeed the only business of the
inhabitants of the cave consists in a silent vision. Each turning point in the story,
Arendt says, is meant to describe levels of seeing which define the stages in the
formation of the philosopher. Each of these stages is accompanied by a loss of
sense and orientation, therefore a loss of the ability to reach a doxa.61 In Arendts
view the whole story presupposes, in its emphasis on levels of seeing, that philosophy begins in wonder, a wonder that she defines without mentioning
Heidegger, but in his language: it bears on everything that is as it is, and it is somehow the experience of nothingness, an experience which, by definition, escapes
the sharing of words and deeds essential to the bios politikos.62 But the story also
presupposes that the end of philosophy similarly overcomes interaction and interlocution, since, as Plato suggests in his Seventh Letter, it is a condition of
speechlessness before a light which is like a flying spark.63 Hence the beginning,
the stages and the end of the story all demonstrate that the philosophical way of
life, the bios theortikos, is lived entirely in the singular by a person who is alone in
the world. If such a person decides to endure the pathos of a speechless wonder, he
is inclined to tyranny when he returns to the cave for the simple reason that, by
basing his whole existence on that pathos, he destroys the plurality of the human
condition within himself.64
I consider this analysis to be the most significant testimony of Arendts intellectual relation to Heidegger. In contrast to the angry rejection expressed by

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Arendt in 1946 in the Partisan Review, the 1954 lecture no longer attributes the
main topics of Heideggers fundamental ontology, such as its concern with what
is as it is, nothingness, singularity, the instant of vision (Augenblick), etc., to a form
of irresponsible and arrogant romanticism. It claims instead that these topics,
along with the compromise with tyranny, derive from the activity of thinking itself
when, instead of being a temporary withdrawal from the common world of
appearances in order to prepare a meaningful return to it, it becomes the exclusive pathos of a whole life (a point repeated by Arendt fifteen years later in her
homage for Heideggers 80th birthday).65
This deconstruction of Heideggers Platonism is of course carried out from the
viewpoint of praxis as conditioned by plurality, and from the perspective of the bios
politikos as a renewed sharing of words and deeds among equal partners compelled
to judge concrete situations. It is a perspective that enabled Arendt to adopt
towards Heidegger the professional thinker the ironical stance of the Thracian
maid. This stance found expression in a text written one year before the lecture
course of 1954 for her private use in which she offers a Kafkaesque picture
of Heidegger the fox, a fox, she says, who couldnt even tell the difference
between a trap and a non-trap but who in his shocking ignorance of the difference decided to build a trap as his burrow.66
Notes
1. Martin Heidegger (1933) The Self-Assertion of the German University, tr. K. Harries,
in (2003) Philosophical and Political Writings, ed. Manfred Stassen, pp. 211. London:
Continuum Press.
2. Hannah Arendt (1973) The Origins of Totalitarianism, ch. 13, Ideology and Terror: A
Novel Form of Government. New York: Harcourt.
3. Ibid. p. 465.
4. Heidegger (n. 1), p. 4.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.
7. Martin Heidegger (2002) The Essence of Truth, tr. Ted Sadler. London: Continuum.
8. Ibid. p. 143. Sophocles, Antigone, 3323.
9. Heidegger (n. 1), p. 4.
10. Ibid. p. 10.
11. Dominique Janicaud (1996) The Shadow of That Thought, tr. Michael Gendre, p. 46.
Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
12. Ibid. p. 47.
13. Martin Heidegger, Phenomenological Interpretations in Connection with Aristotle: An
Indication of the Hermeneutical Situation, tr. John van Buren, in Heidegger (2002)
Supplements: From the Earliest Essays to Being and Time and Beyond, ed. John van Buren,
pp. 11145. Albany: SUNY Press. This essay first appeared in translation as (1992)
Phenomenological Interpetations with Respect to Aristotle: Indication of the
Hemeneutical Situation, tr. Michael Baur, Man and World 25: 35593.
14. Heidegger (2002, in n. 13), p. 112.
15. Ibid. p. 113.

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16. Ibid. p. 112.

17. Ibid. p. 114.
18. The phrase Heidegger uses in 1922 is prinzipielle Ontologie, which is translated in
Supplements (p. 121) as a fundamental ontology that deals with principles.
19. Ibid. p. 118.
20. Ibid. p. 119.
21. Ibid.
22. Martin Heidegger (2002) Grundbegriffe der aristotelischen Philosophie, Gesamtausgabe, 18.
Frankfurt-am-Main: Vittorio Klostermann. The course title would translate as Basic
Concepts of Aristotelian Philosophy. Heidegger (1997) Platos Sophist, tr. Richard
Rojcewicz and Andr Schuwer. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.
23. Heidegger (2002, in n. 22), p. 6.
24. Ibid.
25. Ibid. p. 44.
26. Ibid. p. 109.
27. Ibid.
28. Heidegger (1997, in n. 22), p. 93. The Greek text in the published edn has been
transliterated.
29. This expression and the related for-the-sake-of-which (Worumwillen) are used
frequently by Heidegger: cf. Martin Heidegger (1980) Being and Time, tr. John
Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, p. 416. Oxford: Blackwell. Martin Heidegger (1984)
The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, tr. Michael Heim, p. 189. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press.
30. Heidegger (1980, in n. 29) p. 63.
31. Heidegger (n. 7), p. 73.
32. Ibid.
33. Janicaud (n. 11), p. 47.
34. Martin Heidegger (1989) Holderlins Hymnen Germanien und Der Rhein, ed. Susanna
Ziegler, Gesamtausgabe, 39. Frankfurt-am-Main: Vittorio Klostermann.
35. Ibid. p. 216.
36. Martin Heidegger (1961) Introduction to Metaphysics, tr. Ralph Mannheim, p. 85. New
York: Anchor Books.
37. Ibid. pp. 88, 89.
38. Ibid. p. 90.
39. Friedrich Hlderlin, Remarks on Oedipus, in Hlderlin (1988) Essays and Letters on
Theory, tr. and ed. Thomas Pfau, pp. 1018. Albany: SUNY Press.
40. Heidegger (n. 36), pp. 901.
41. Ibid. pp. 123ff.
42. Friedrich Hlderlin, Remarks on Antigone, in Hlderlin (n. 39), pp. 10916.
43. Heidegger (n. 36), p. 128.
44. Ibid.
45. Ibid. p. 135.
46. Ibid. p. 124.
47. Ibid. p. 138.
48. Hannah Arendt (1990) Philosophy and Politics, Social Research 57(1): 73103.
49. It has often been pointed out that beneath Arendts discussion of Plato there is in fact a
simultaneous discussion of Heidegger, notably by Margaret Canovan (1990) Socrates or
Heidegger? Hannah Arendts Reflections on Philosophy and Politics, Social Research
57(1): 13565.
50. Arendt (n. 48), p. 73.

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51. Hannah Arendt (1977) Martin Heidegger at Eighty, in Michael Murray (ed.) Heidegger
and Modern Philosophy, p. 295. New Haven: Yale University Press.
52. Heidegger (1997, in n. 22).
53. Arendt (n. 48), p. 75.
54. Heidegger (1997, in n. 22), p. 11.
55. Heidegger (n. 7), p. 73.
56. Arendt (n. 48), p. 81.
57. Ibid.
58. Ibid. p. 74.
59. Ibid. p. 85.
60. Ibid. p. 75.
61. Ibid. p. 95.
62. Ibid. p. 98.
63. Ibid. p. 101.
64. Ibid.
65. Arendt (n. 51), pp. 293303.
66. Hannah Arendt (1994) Essays in Understanding (19301954), ed. J. Kohn, pp. 3612. New
York: Harcourt Brace & Co.

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