Review: [untitled]

Author(s): Donald C. Lindenmuth

Reviewed work(s):
Heidegger and Plato: Toward Dialogue by Catalin Partenie ; Tom Rockmore
Source: The Review of Metaphysics, Vol. 60, No. 2 (Dec., 2006), pp. 416-418
Published by: Philosophy Education Society Inc.
Stable URL: [Link]
Accessed: 26/05/2010 07:37
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416 THERESE SCARPELLI AND STAFF
Accusing
Strauss for
developing
current American
foreign policy
seems to have become an academic
parlor game.
The cause of our
prob
lems lies not in the
objective
circumstances of an actual war and a tele
vised attack
by
known and self-defined enemies who have made their
own world view
quite
evident. This war
justification
is
nothing
like the
romantic
Bagdad
of Norton's
Farabi,
or Strauss if he
really
would have
preferred Bagdad
to
Jerusalem,
which I doubt. A school of "Strauss
ians" led
by Harry
Jaffa considers
statesmanship (hence
war and
peace)
to be
part
of the essence of
Strauss,
who is often accused of
being
so
contemplative that,
like
Tha?es,
he did not know how to tie his shoe
strings.
Norton tells us that
today
our fears are less than what
they
were when
Roosevelt maintained that the
only thing
we had to fear was "fear itself
(158).
For
Norton,
we are "on the
ground"
in
Bagdad,
not to
protect
our
selves and
others, including Muslims,
but we are on a "Sicilian
Expedi
tion" that is
equally
as senseless as that described
by Thucydides
and
promoted by
Alcibiades.
Norton thinks Strauss would have
ignored
what
happen
on 9/11 and
the movement behind it. She has herself
evidently ignored
it in
seeking
to
explain
how we can understand our
country's actions, not,
as it
is,
in
terms of a
prudential
answer to an
objective
situation from a known
source,
but as a
"plot"
of certain
arrogant
students who once studied
Strauss with her at the
University
of
Chicago.
The last word of her
book, explaining
war and Straussian
philosophy,
should have been nei
ther
Athens, Jerusalem, Rome, Berlin, Washington,
or
Bagdad, but,
of all
places, Chicago!?James
V.
Schall,
S.
J., Georgetown University.
PARTENIE,
Catalin and
ROCKMORE, Tom,
editors.
Heidegger
and Plato:
Toward
Dialogue. Evanston,
Illinois: Northwestern
University Press,
2005. xxviii + 234
pp. Cloth, $59.95; paper, $23.95?This
volume is a wel
come addition to
contemporary scholarship
on
Heidegger.
It contains
several excellent
essays,
which
provide
a remarkable
presentation
of
Heidegger's evolving relationship
with and
interpretation
of Plato's
works. It also contains a
fairly
extensive list of Platonic
passages
and
themes,
which
Heidegger
discussed from 1918 to
1973,
with
page
refer
ences to the
"Gesamtausgabe."
The
bibliography
is a substantial addi
tion to that found in Boutot's
"Heidegger
et
Platon,"
which
only
listed
works
up
to 1987.
The introduction
by
the editors
initially provides
a short sketch of
Heidegger's interpretation
of Plato as an
appropriation
followed
by
an
estrangement.
But when this characterization is linked to the famous
pre-Kehre
and
post-Kehre periods,
as well as
Heidegger's rethinking
of
the Platonic "Idea" as
arising
from Dasein
or?along
with
Heidegger's
evolving
reflections on Nietzsche?as
leading
to
nihilism,
and with the
additional
possibility
that there
might
have been a third
stage,
it be
comes
very
clear that
Heidegger's
relation to Plato is not
ultimately
as
certainable as
initially proposed.
SUMMARIES AND COMMENTS 417
The ten
essays
that follow fall into three
easily
discernable
groups.
The first three
essays by
Theodore
Kisiel, Jacques
Taminiaux and Cata
lin Partenie look at
specific texts; respectively,
the Rectorial
Address,
Sophocles' Antigone
and the
Sophist
lectures of 1924-25. Kisiel's
essay
begins
with the
paradigm
of the Platonic
paideia
and
polis
as
presented
especially
in the
Republic
as
holding sway
over
Heidegger's
threefold
"service areas" of work
service,
defense
service,
and
knowledge service,
but
questions
Lacoue-Labarthe's
reading
of the Rectoral Address as a
displacement
of
phronesis by
techne. As Kisiel
points out,
techne in the
Republic
is
actually phronesis,
understood as
performance, know-how,
a
position Heidegger argued
for in his Nietzsche I. Taminiaux's
essay
traces
Heidegger's
two different
readings
of the
Antigone
in 1935 and
especially
in 1942 to the influence of Platonic
themes, including
the use
of Hestia and the
huperouranios topos
in the Phaedrus to account for
his
reading. Finally
Partenie's
essay
deals with the
similarity
and
great
difference in
Heidegger
and Plato on the
cleavage
between authentic
and inauthentic existence.
The middle
group
of four
essays
are on
Heidegger's position
on truth.
These
essays
are
by
Michael
Inwood,
Enrico
Berti,
Maria del Carmen
Paredes and
Joseph Margolis.
Inwood's
essay
brings
to
light Heideg
ger's disagreement
with Plato as a matter of
seeing
the Idea as either de
pendent upon
our
looking
or as
independent
of our
looking.
Inwood
finds
Heidegger
closer to
Protagoras
than to Plato. Berti's
essay argues
that
Heidegger
understood the Platonic notion of truth as
largely
a func
tion of his
understanding
of Aristotle's
interpretation
of truth. Paredes
admits that
Heidegger
did at first understand Plato
through
Aristotle but
eventually
as he moves more and more towards a
nonrepresentational
model of
truth,
he
reshaped
his
understanding
of Plato to serve as the
antithesis to that model.
Finally, Joseph Margolis's analysis
of
Heideg
ger
on truth
frequently
remarks on
Heidegger's
devilish cleverness but
finds his account
unconvincing. Heidegger's reading
of Plato on this
topic
is an
extrapolation
from his
understanding
of his own time. One
must read "Plato's Doctrine of Truth"
along
with "The
Age
of the World
Picture".
The last three
essays
are rather
comprehensive
in their
approach
to
their themes. The
first, by
Johannes
Fritsche,
deals with
Heidegger's ap
proach
to Plato in the 1920s and 1930s in relation to his
understanding
of
"historicality"
in
Being
and Time. The
second, by Stanley Rosen,
is a
trenchant
critique
of
Heidegger's presenting
Plato's Ideas as an
ontology
of
production
The third and final
essay, by
Tom
Rockmore,
focuses on
Heidegger's approach
to the
history
of
philosophy
with
special empha
sis on
Plato,
which Rockmore
critiques
as an
attempt
to
get
behind the
history
of
thought
to
Being itself,
which is understood as a
single,
con
tinuing problem,
even
though
its formulation
by Heidegger
reveals it as
a
specific contingent,
historical event.
Each of these
essays approach Heidegger through
a certain under
standing
of Plato and Platonism.
Heidegger,
who could on occasion
distinguish
between Plato and
Platonism,
was also
guilty
on other occa
sions of
conflating
these
two,
not least because he was
capable
of re
thinking
the whole of Western
philosophy
in
light
of his own remarkable
418 THERESE SCARPELLI AND STAFF
insights.
As
Stanley
Rosen writes in his contribution to this
volume,
"We thus arrive at the odd situation that
Heidegger,
who rebukes all of
Western
philosophy
as
Platonism,
is himself in some
ways
closer to the
original
Plato than the so-called Platonists"
(p. 182).
It is one of the
many
merits of this volume that the reader is forced to consider this
need to move towards a
dialogue
with
Plato,
to consider the need to
evaluate and determine the
thought
of
Plato,
which
guided Heidegger,
perhaps
even when he least
suspected
it.?Donald C.
Lindenmuth,
The
Pennsylvania
State
University.
RAUSCHER, Anton,
editor. Nationale und kulturelle Identit?t im Zeitalter
der
Globalisierung.
Soziale
Orientierung. Ver?ffentlichungen
der Wis
senschaftlichen Kommission bei der Katholischen Sozialwissen-schaftli
chen Zentralstelle.
M?nchengladbach,
Band
18,
Duncker und
Humblot,
Berlin. 374
pp. $98.00?This
collection of
papers
read at the German
American
Colloquium
of
August
2004 in Detroit
deal,
as Jude
Dougherty
points
out in his
leading presentation,
with a most
important
issue?that
is,
the different
aspects
and effects of
globalization,
on the one
hand,
and the
importance
of national
identity,
of active
participation
of the cit
izens in the social and
political life,
on the other. In a short
preface,
An
ton Rauscher sketches the
purpose
and results of the biennial
colloquia
on
sociopolitical
and cultural
issues,
held
alternatively
in the United
States and
Germany.
Twelve of the
papers
were read and
printed
in En
glish,
eleven in German. In a
searching essay,
Kenneth Whitehead ex
amines what is
proper
to the national
identity
of Americans and notices
that the so-called
Anglo-Protestant
culture
Huntington praises
so
highly,
is in
steep
decline.
Gladys Sweeney
deals with the
psychological
effects
of
globalization (stifling conformity, stress,
sense of
alienation,
soulless
vision of the
world).
Kenneth Schmitz
proposes
what he calls a meta
physical analysis
of the
growing
unification: the
technological
culture
affects
deep-seated
local cultural values. Local
governments,
as noted
by
Thomas
Rourke,
are hard
put
to control outside influences: the
long
term
goal
of international
capital
is to have access to all the world's re
sources and
markets,
and it is in a
position
to threaten
governments
that
stand in the
way
(Thomas Rourke).
Richard Schenk advocates the mid
dle
way
between universalization and
specific identity,
while Michael
Novak shows the
shortsightedness
of those who
identify European
cul
ture with the
Enlightenment.
Some of the
essays
deal with historical
questions,
such as the
theory
of a
just
war. Manfried
Spieker gives
one of the most balanced and fair
evaluations of the second
Iraq
war from the
viewpoint
of international
law. Nicholas Pinchuk considers
globalization
from the
point
of view of
multinational
corporations.
Pinchuk does not think that the essentials
of national identities will be eroded
by
it. Globalization is
primarily
an
economic
phenomenon, although
it also
depends
on
political
factors.
John
Hittinger
stresses the
duty
to
participate actively
in
political
life
and
rejects
John Finnis's criticism of Aristotle's
theory
of the state as