The Ideenlehre as Methodology in Marburg Neo-Kantian Platonism

Chapter 1 surveys the Platonism of Marburg neo-Kantian philosophers to set out the context out of and against which Heidegger’s Destruktion of Plato emerged. I do not argue that Heidegger’s Plato is a direct response to the Plato of Cohen, Natorp, and Cassirer. I contend instead that what Heidegger identifies as unprecedented and extremely influential mistakes in Plato’s philosophy are sometimes found in slightly different and sometimes strikingly similar forms in their laudatory interpretations of Plato. The clearest and most evident case in this regard is their interpretation of Forms as laws governing thinking, particularly logical and propositional thinking. I argue that if Strauss, Gadamer, and Krüger propose new reactivations of Platonism to respond to Heidegger, these reactivations cannot follow the Platonism of Marburg Neo-Kantianism to their ultimate conclusions. At the same time, it is also clear that there are important traces of a neo-Kantian heritage in the ways Strauss, Gadamer, and Krüger understood Plato, most notably the Marburg Neo-Kantian refusal to understand Platonic Forms as beings, things, or substances.