Preface

But there must be quite specific difficulties that are to blame for the fact that, despite such fervent efforts, one has evidently not arrived at any agreement regarding him. It may ultimately be the highly complicated historical conditioning of Kant that makes a pure and complete understanding of his philosophical achievement such a difficult matter. In Plato, idealism is indigenous, one might say autochthonous native or originating from the place where it is found. It grows out of the simple Socratic discovery of the concept with an inner necessity from which no philosophically directed thought can easily escape. And at no stage does it harden into a scholastic formula; until the end, it remains in the most vivid state of flux. Therein lies the indelible charm, and therein the eternal didactic value, of the study of Plato. The introduction to Plato is an education in philosophy; for it is in him that its entire concept first arises. Philosophy, however, according to its strictest historical concept, is nothing other than idealism. Therefore, it is not an imposition of a foreign, unhistorical viewpoint upon an account intended to be historical when the unfolding explanation of Plato’s theory of ideas develops into an introduction to idealism. Plato’s theory of ideas is the birth of idealism in the history of humanity. What more correct entrance to idealism could there be than through re-experiencing this birth within the development of Plato’s philosophy?

The necessity of a presentation progressing genetically from work to work resulted precisely from this. Although the sequence of the Platonic writings is still much disputed, the completion of this book was delayed not a little by the worry of whether the sequence of writings I adopted was sufficiently well-founded to serve as a basis for a presentation of Plato’s central teaching. This sequence suggested itself to me, also fifteen years ago, from a precise, continuous comparison of the entire factual content of the Platonic works, whereby all other criteria were only used as auxiliary tools for subsequent control. Some of my assumptions have since been confirmed by the research of others; some are contested to this day, and will perhaps remain so for a long time.