Preface

of the old culture must be placed at the center; the same applies to Plato, where one must first and foremost master the subject matter that his name signifies. His literary, or to put it bluntly, his poetic nature can only be understood from that starting point, and never without it.

This book intends to offer a guide to the central, factual understanding of Plato’s works. It is only a guide; the best part of the work remains with the reader. This book should be regarded as a tool for study. It assumes that for every chapter, one reads the works of Plato discussed therein, and primarily seeks to reach an understanding of them through one’s own labor. However, the book aims to help overcome the deepest, truly philosophical difficulties, so that the innermost content of these works does not remain unmastered or perhaps even unheeded.

Only at the eleventh hour—that is to say, a year ago, while the material for the book had been largely ready for fifteen years—did I decide upon this limitation. Since then, I have been increasingly confirmed in the conviction that it was necessary and beneficial; not merely in the interest of the unity of the presentation, which would have been jeopardized by any attempt to combine the philological with the philosophical task, but particularly for this reason: with the philological work, in which I have also participated to the best of my ability throughout these fifteen years, I would not have reached a conclusion that satisfied me within a foreseeable time. On the other hand, what had to be the peculiar work of the philosopher in Plato could be brought to a certain conclusion. I do not say that it satisfied me (let alone others) entirely, but perhaps it could be ventured at the current stage of Platonic research, and it had to be ventured in the very sense that has been done here.

It is the understanding of idealism that has, it must be said, all but been lost to our age, and which, as I believe with a few others, is an absolute necessity for us to regain. One would think it should have been regained long ago through the astonishing work that has been devoted for a generation to understanding Kant.