This is Gary’s first letter to the plato-parmenides list Sent: Tuesday, April 04,

FIRST: Have any of you read John M. Berry's paper "The Reliability of Heidegger's Reading of Plato's Gigantomachia" found at the Ereignis - Heidegger, Martin web site and the Paideia web site? It seems to me very good in making the point that in his lecture course, Heidegger deliberately left out or mistranslated the meaning of being as "presence" instead of "power. The Stranger says, according to Berry's translation, "For I am establishing that there is a border that confines the beings in such a way that they are nothing else but power" (247de). Berry also says, "(Heidegger) blatantly misreads the text, changing the untranslated aswmaton -- 'bodiless' -- into aoraton -- 'invisible' . . . He has shifted the [meaning.ed.] from its proper basis on the distinction between bodies and bodiless things to base it on a totally different distinction which plays an entirely different role in the text . . .

He then reformulates the Being = power ontology, keystone of the whole dialogue, so that it can be understood as arising out of his misreading of the text. Being = power becomes Being = possibility-of-presence -- an obviously watered-down reading of the Greek with no justification at all in the text!" Heidegger strangely enough, in the first volume of his Nietzsche equates will- to-power with being and in a number of places emphasizes physis as the fundamental opening out of being into disclosedness. Any comments on this would be appreciated. SECOND: Has anybody studied the influence of Plato on Heidegger? A literal understanding of Plato's writings seems to have led Heidegger to some of his basic concepts, i.e., "idea" as both literal sight and a remembrance through sight which eventually becomes an abstraction, and Heidegger's concept of "falleness" which seems to be derived from Plato's myth of a pre-existent soul, a memory of which is found in the yearning-back concept of anamnesis, but with which Heidegger drops any belief in a pre-existent soul and keeps anamnesis as a sense of "throwness" into a place where one does not belong and is not at home (uncanny, unheimlich) which is falleness without a place to fall from.