The intertwining of being and non-being
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Description
The purpose of this study is doubly double: its philosophical motivation is to explore the questions of both being and non-being, its hermeneutic goal to offer a commentary on Plato’s Sophist while considering the most important moments from Heidegger’s lecture course on that dialogue. Heidegger’s interpretation offers a Sophist that argues: being is presence within logos, non-being is otherness and therefore a kind of presence, there is no genuine absence. I take this to be an extraordinarily helpful misreading of the dialogue and adopt it as my guide even while I subject it to critique. Heidegger describes the trajectory of the Eleatic Stranger’s arguments with rare acuity and argues convincingly for the central importance of logos. But the Eleatic Stranger is not Plato. Because Heidegger does not read Plato in the manner that I try to demonstrate Plato must be read –as a species of drama– he appears not to see the numerous textual indications that Plato’s view cannot be the same as the explicit view of the Eleatic Stranger. Plato’s own understanding of being and non-being, I will argue, is closer to Heidegger’s than Heidegger admits. The Sophist demonstrates why being cannot be reduced to what is present in logos, why it must comprehend both presence and that overwhelming absence Heidegger calls “the Nothing” and Plato terms “non-being” – an absence that is not, I think, successfully reduced to otherness. It is in the turn to imagery that Plato initially makes the intertwining of being and non-being clear, since the image somehow is what it is not, a present reminder of an absent original – which needn’t be some “other” available to logos. Being itself is encountered only through those images of being we call appearances. It is therefore both present (because imaged) and absent (because only imaged). The philosophical and hermeneutic goals of this study are themselves intertwined. Heidegger reads the dialogue as if its meaning were reducible to what is immediately present within the Stranger’s logoi. He therefore fails to appreciate the ontological significance of Plato’s choice to present philosophy as dialogue – that is, as a form of image.