The Platonic Heidegger: Being and Time and the Cave Allegory Lectures of the 1930s

This essay examines surprising parallels between Heidegger’s lectures on Plato’s cave allegory in the early 1930s, on the one hand, and his earlier work in Being and Time (1927), on the other. Whereas previous scholarship has mainly focused on the perceived incompatibility between Heidegger’s thought and Plato’s or on the connection between the cave lectures and Heidegger’s later work, this study explores instead the similarities between these lectures and Being and Time. I show that, despite Heidegger’s well-known critique of Plato, his interpretation reveals a Plato who had already arrived at many of the key existential insights Heidegger proposed in Being and Time. This argument is developed by first highlighting what is distinctive in Heidegger’s reading of the allegory, then comparing related discussions in Being and Time, and finally, considering Heidegger's interpretation in view of the broader context of Plato’s corpus, particularly Books 6 and 7 of the Republic.