Heidegger and Sophistry

Abstract

In an essay entitled ‘Hegel and the Greeks’, Heidegger articulates the following claim: ‘It is Hegel’, he says, ‘who, for the first time, thinks the philosophy of the Greeks as a whole and thinks this whole philosophically’ (HG, 324). Hegel is able to do this, Heidegger argues, because he thought history in such a way that it is determined as philosophical in its very essence. Not only is it that Hegel recognises in the philosophical tradition a unity, a cumulative effort of enquiry directed towards one goal, the determination of truth, as had Aristotle before him, but also that history, for Hegel, is the history of thought finding itself, of its coming to realise itself in its full and absolute truth. Heidegger’s aim is this essay is to make apparent how Hegel experienced Greek philosophy. He provides a simple, succinct answer: Hegel experiences Greek philosophy as ‘unsatisfying’; it is ‘unsatisfying’ in that it is determined by Hegel as merely a ‘beginning’. In other words, philosophy, begun by the Greeks, is, being a beginning, limited. This limitation becomes apparent when it is grasped from the perspective of the richer, fuller, truth it has made possible. Viewed on that basis Greek philosophy is a ‘not yet’, a ‘not yet’ what it will finally become.