Heidegger’s Reading of Plato: On Truth and Ideas

ABSTRACT I wish to show that Heidegger’s contradictory accounts of Plato are not the result of a confusion on Heidegger’s part, but a showcase of his complex relation to Plato. I attempt to prove my point by focusing on Heidegger’s interpretation of Plato’s allegory of the cave in his 1942 essay “Plato’s Doctrine of Truth”, and his lecture courses during the 30’s. I argue that whereas the former work emphasizes the way in which Plato prefigures a forgetfulness of an original relation between truth and Being, the latter show signs of a positive appropriation of Plato’s work. By the end of this paper I hope to have shown that Heidegger’s reading of Plato cannot be reduced to a critique or condemnation. I argue, rather, that Plato is for Heidegger a transitional thinker who is situated at the centre of a struggle between an originary and a derivative conception of truth.