A Comparison between Heidegger and Gadamer on Plato’s Dialectic

Heidegger and Gadamer return to Plato to find a way out of the meaningless crisis of Western civilization. Heidegger believes that Plato by proposing the doctrine of ideas is the initiator of the forgetting of Being and responsible for the crisis of the West. He returns to Plato's allegory of the cave to clarify the nature of this forgetting. In this allegory, dialectic means passing from the sensible world to the reasonable world. In his interpretation of Plato, Heidegger pays attention to this meaning and ignores other meanings of dialectic such as the method of conversation, the method of collection and division, etc. Of course, in Plato's Sophist, he connects dialectic with logos and criticizes it. In general, Heidegger considers dialectic as a problem for philosophy. Unlike Heidegger, Gadamer pays attention to the different meanings of dialectic in Plato's philosophy and considers its development. Gadamer's emphasis on conversation in Socratic dialogues, as well as the method of collection and division in later dialogues, makes him consider Plato's philosophy as a dynamic and living philosophy. According to Gadamer, dialogue and dialectic in Plato's dialogues can save us from the current crisis of the West. This article tries to investigate and explain with descriptive-analytical methods how dealing with different meanings of dialectic causes Heidegger and Gadamer to present two different interpretations of Plato.