Being Beyond Production: Two Challenges to Heidegger’s Critique of Plato

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Panel title: ‘Being Beyond Production: Two Challenges to Heidegger’s Critique of Plato’ 

Abstract: Heidegger criticizes Plato for naively attempting to understand being from within the horizon of production. In so doing, he accuses Plato of reducing being to that which is objectively present for a looking. Although Heidegger never provided a reading of either the Timaeus or the Philebus, both dialogues have recently been subjected to interpretations that reinforce Heidegger’s published view on Plato. By way of an analysis of nature in the Timaeus and human life in the Philebus, we argue that such readings fail to capture a deeper understanding of being that emerges in these two texts. 

Paper 1: ‘Challenging the “Being-as-Production” Thesis in Plato’s Timaeus’ (Michael Hudecki) 

Abstract: This paper will challenge interpretations of the Timaeus that over-privilege the role that technical production plays in the creation of the cosmos by arguing that nature (phusis) both limits and undergirds techne in Timaeus’ narrative. Read uncritically, the Timaeus appears to strongly support the interpretation that Plato understands being through the lens of production. This is especially true for the first portion of Timaeus’ narrative (27c-48e), wherein the intellect is depicted as a divine craftsman that artfully brings a disordered state into its best and most beautiful condition through deliberation. Furthermore, the forms are made thematic solely through the productive role they play in techne, namely, by providing the ideal paradigm that guides the process of making all that is beautiful. However, the priority of production is challenged by what is unveiled in Timaeus’ second beginning (48e). While we might expect the state of the world prior to the demiurge’s intervention to be marked by chaos, Timaeus proceeds to describe a natural order that is shot through with mathematical and geometrical laws, revealing a sense in which nous is internal to nature itself rather than merely imposed on it through external productive activity. 

Bio: Michael Hudecki is a Canadian PhD Student in philosophy at the University of Ottawa. His main areas of research are in Ancient Greek philosophy, existentialism, and phenomenology. His dissertation focuses on the meaning and role of nature (φύσις) in the philosophical relationship between Martin Heidegger and Plato. He completed an undergraduate degree at Western University and a master’s degree at KU Leuven. He wrote his MA thesis on the question of eternity in Martin Heidegger’s middle-period works. 

Paper 2: ‘Overcoming a Metaphysics of Craft Objects in Plato’s Philebus’ (Gary Beck) 

Abstract: The Philebus is frequently thought to posit the ethical life as something produced by a kind of craft or tēchnē. Inquiring into the cause of the best human life, Socrates puts forward what has recently been called “a metaphysics of craft objects,” in which the good life is envisaged as a well-ordered mixture, produced by an intelligence that stands apart from the life itself (23b-31a). Nous creates and observes life, but it does not live it. Accordingly, if assessed as an ontological analysis of what it means to live well, such a metaphysics must be considered a failure. In this talk, I suggest that Socrates encourages Protarchus to adopt such a perspective not because it pretends to be a sufficient ontological analysis, but because of its potential therapeutic effects. Once Protarchus has come to recognise the positive role played by peras (limit) in the creation and maintenance of well-ordered wholes, the way has been cleared to discover a principle of ordered motion within the soul. Such a principle is discovered first as desire (33c-45d), and then as the love of truth (57e-59d) that underlies and sustains the activity of philosophical dialogue. 

Bio: Gary Beck is a doctoral candidate in the philosophy department at the University of Ottawa, Canada. His PhD thesis, tentatively entitled, “Self-Ordering and Dialectical Openness in Plato’s Philebus”, argues that the hexis that Socrates takes to be responsible for the best human life is that of dialectical or hermeneutical openness. More broadly, his research focuses on Plato, Aristotle, contemporary ethics, and phenomenology.