

































6

Dianoia: The Undergraduate Philosophy Journal of Boston College

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AN INTERVIEW WITH GREGORY FRIED, 
PH.D., PROFESSOR OF PHILOSOPHY AT 
BOSTON COLLEGE

Towards a Polemical Ethics: Between Heidegger 
and Plato

"I think for Plato and for Socrates, the philosophical life is a constant striving 
to seek that enlightenment: to try our utmost to transcend our historical 

circumstances, even knowing that we will ultimately fail."

Patrick Kelly, Managing Editor  !ank you, Professor Fried, for agreeing to 
have this interview with us. 

Professor Gregory Fried  !ank you so much. I look forward to our chat.

PK So can you give us a brief introduction on the relevance of your book Toward a 
Polemical Ethic, why you chose to write it, how you think it might prove useful for 
today’s philosophy students as well as for non-philosophers, and why you chose to 
focus on this area?

GF !ank you for that question. It’s always a di"cult question to ask a philosopher, 
but I think it’s the responsibility of a philosopher to try to answer the question, who 
is their audience, and what are they trying to achieve? Many academic philosophy 
books—in fact, I would imagine the vast majority of them—are written for a 
specialized academic audience. While I think philosophers are very happy when 
people outside academic life—or outside of philosophy as a speci#c discipline—read 
them, it’s not common and it is not the audience most professional philosophers 



7Issue X ◆ Spring 2023

An Interview With Gregory Fried, Ph.D., Professor of Philosophy at Boston College

write for. However, I tried to write this book for a more general audience than just 
Heidegger specialists or philosophy specialists. !at is very di"cult to do when 
working on a #gure like Heidegger. But I believe there is something relevant to a 
wider audience here. 

I think the fundamental issue that is at stake is Heidegger’s claim that the challenges 
facing European civilization, which has e$ectively become a global civilization after 
colonialism, and the integration of the world into a single world economy—that 
those challenges are addressed by Heidegger as going all the way back to a tradition 
rooted in Greek thought and in Plato.

Heidegger is challenging Plato and challenging that tradition. Very unfortunately, 
Heidegger’s own personal response to those challenges was to say that this tradition 
needs to come to an end; that it has exhausted itself; that what we think of as 
contemporary, enlightened liberal societies—those are manifestations, not of the 
strength of our civilization, but of its decline and its weakness. 

Heidegger traces that weakness back to Greek thinking, starting with Plato, which 
sees the world as divided between historical reality—the shadows of the cave that 
we live in—and the realm of philosophical truth, the realm of the Ideas, which 
philosophy can bring us to as the true world beyond our historical experience in 
which there are everlasting truths that transcend us.

Heidegger thought that way of thinking about what it means to be human in the 
world was responsible for uprooting humanity from its connection to the reality of 
its historical world. I disagree with him about that. I think there’s a way of reading 
Plato, which shows that Plato takes into account the concerns that Heidegger has and 
that he has an answer for Heidegger. 

Obviously, Plato comes more than 2000 years before Heidegger, so he’s not answering 
him personally. But I see it as my task in the book to think with Plato against 
Heidegger, but also to think with Heidegger, to take seriously what his challenges 
to us are. !at brings me to the present because I do believe that, especially in the 
United States, we are facing a political, social, and cultural crisis over the meaning 
of our own national political identity, and that this has something to do not with 
Plato and Heidegger directly, but the issues these two philosophers bring up for us—
issues that can be traced to the kinds of thinking that do exist in our own historical 
tradition and that are familiar to Americans. 

My book’s last chapter is about Frederick Douglass as an American thinker and 
political actor who embodies for me the response that I actually think is a platonic or 
Socratic one to the challenges of contemporary American democracy. I do hope that 
I have a wider audience that can understand the broad relevance of philosophy in the 



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Dianoia: The Undergraduate Philosophy Journal of Boston College

Western tradition for the crises that we face in the United States and elsewhere in the 
world that revolve around the human beings that we want to be in the 21st century.

PK What is your own approach to writing?  Socrates, as you mention in your book’s 
address to the reader, never published a single word. So, what is your method in 
approaching writing and stepping into, as you just said, the space where conversation 
with Heidegger and Plato is possible? 

GF I think I say at the very beginning of the book that I’m a Platonist and a Socratic. 
And for me, thinking is dialogical. I think in conversations. I think in conversations 
with philosophical thinkers, but also with colleagues and with friends. It’s very hard 
for me to write from a standing start, as it were. So sometimes I feel that conversation 
very directly, and it allows me to write quickly and well. Sometimes I have to really 
examine myself to see what the conversation is that I want to take up in order to get 
my dialogical energies %owing. So, in fact, when I started this book, I began writing it 
as a letter to one of my close colleagues and friends, because that was the way for me 
to imagine my way into a philosophical dialogue about what matters in this project. 
I try to engage in that dialogue with Heidegger, against Heidegger, with Plato, and 
even against certain aspects of Plato. I think that’s the best general explanation of 
how I go about writing. I do have an outline. I have a plan for what I want to do, 
but I don’t write according to a #xed outline of what’s de#nitely going to happen in 
my book. It’s more of an outline around broad issues, even questions that I want to 
address, because my thinking happens in my writing. !e writing is a dialogue for 
me, so I’m not entirely sure what’s going to happen or where it will go. I’m telling a 
story about thinking when I’m writing.

PK On that note: in your #rst chapter, you describe philosophy as a form of absolute 
freedom. Do you feel that way yourself when you’re entering into these dialogues, 
when you’re writing? Or put it this way: Would you care to elaborate on what it 
means for you, in the con#nes of the discussion between Heidegger and Plato, to 
experience philosophy as a form of absolute freedom?

GF First, abstractly, I think philosophy is absolute freedom because philosophy asks 
us to take seriously the challenge of separating ourselves from our most immediate 
convictions and attachments and prejudices in order to think through a question or 
a problem with fresh eyes. It’s very hard to do that. I don’t think human beings can 
ever fully do that. But I do think there is an ethical obligation on us if we’re going to 
think of ourselves as engaging in philosophy to take seriously the challenge of being 
that free. I do think that the experience of that freedom can be terrifying sometimes 
because, as human beings, we are attached to our convictions, our opinions. !ey 
attach us not only to our sense of ourselves, but to other people as well. And so 
seriously questioning one’s own deepest convictions can be very disorienting; it can 
even give a sense of danger that one may be risking relationships with people one 



9Issue X ◆ Spring 2023

An Interview With Gregory Fried, Ph.D., Professor of Philosophy at Boston College

cares about if one ends up with a di$erent view than one had before one started 
philosophizing, especially about ethical and political issues. But I also think that 
this sense of liberation from one’s own context can be exhilarating. I don’t think 
we can ever completely leave our own context, 
and that’s part of my argument in the book. 
We’re always returning to where we began 
and trying to see it with fresh eyes. I 
think there is a way to reconcile our 
embeddedness in a context and in a 
world which matters to us, in which 
we have opinions and convictions that 
matter to us a great deal.

It’s possible to look at those with the 
ideal of freedom and consider 
them and then return to them in 
ways that can rejuvenate them. 
If there are aspects that we really 
discern, we need to reject about our prior 
convictions and prejudices, that should be 
liberating and not depressing.

PK Regarding freedom: In your chapter titled “Freedom Under Fire,” you discuss 
Heidegger in terms of the cave-analogy. Leo Strauss has famously said that modernity 
is the second cave under the cave. In what way does Heidegger see our freedom as 
being under #re, is it similar to Strauss’s point? How would Plato respond to this 
argument?

GF Strauss’ point about modernity having dug a cave, even beneath the cave-%oor 
of Plato’s allegory is really very interesting. I do think that Strauss has in mind the 
predicament that Heidegger presents us with. I’ll come back to that. But I think 
what Strauss meant by that was that for the Greeks, for Plato and Plato’s allegory of 
the cave, they, could really recognize the shadows of everyday experience as a normal 
aspect of political life, and that that was immediately tangible to them. Modernity, on 
the other hand, conceptualizes and theorizes and historicizes political life so radically 
that we’ve in fact lost touch with the phenomena of everyday political experience—
what it means to be a social animal. For Strauss, we have to claw our way back just 
to the experience of what it means to be situated naively in one’s own historical, 
political, cultural context because we have mediated that so much with theories that 
no longer allow us to experience it directly.  

To come back to Heidegger: I titled that chapter “Freedom Under Fire” for two 
reasons. One is because in the allegory of the cave, we, the prisoners in the cave, 



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Dianoia: The Undergraduate Philosophy Journal of Boston College

are literally by the topography of the cave that Socratic depicts, under a #re behind 
and above us, a #re we can’t see as projecting the shadows on the wall of the cave. 
How can we be free under the #re of the cave, which is what gives us the minimal 
illumination that we have to see even the shadows by? Can there be freedom there? 
!at’s part of Heidegger’s question. What is the freedom of the cave? Is there freedom 
in the cave? How do we become free in the cave? !at’s a question for Socrates and 
Plato as well. 

But this is where Heidegger and Plato diverge. And because they diverge, that’s the 
other meaning of freedom under #re. Being under #re means you’re under attack. 
Attack by an enemy. I do think that there is an attack that Heidegger is making against 
freedom as it has been understood, at least in the last several hundred years of the 
liberal Enlightenment. !at’s a very broad statement. !e Enlightenment was many 
things, and liberalism was and is many things. But I think that’s still the issue on the 
table: the nature of freedom and modernity. So, for Socrates in telling the story of the 
cave, freedom only happens when we’re released from the chains. But it’s not just the 
release from the chains that really makes us free because we’re enormously disoriented 
once we lose those chains. We can’t make out the shadows in the dark anymore. 
We’re blinded by the light of the #re. We need a new orientation, and we need to 
climb out of the cave to see what the ultimate reality truly is. I think for Heidegger, 
there is no ultimate climbing out of the cave. Why? Because Heidegger rejects the 
platonic distinction between the eternal world of the ideas that are accessible to us 
through philosophy and the historical world of our opinions, our embeddedness in 
a particular culture and society that for the most part dominates us, but a world that 
we can transcend philosophically. Heidegger rejects that. He does not believe that 
there is a realm beyond history that we can achieve. His interpretation of the cave is 
not to free ourselves from our historical boundedness to a particular time and place, 
but instead to free ourselves from the average everyday lazy interpretation that we 
have of our historical situatedness, where we don’t confront it, where we don’t assess it 
for ourselves, where we don’t make it our own. His understanding of liberation from 
the cave is as a way of being more authentically situated in the cave itself.

I think for somebody like Strauss—and I would agree with him on this—Heidegger 
e$ectively walls o$ the exit to the cave and leaves us there in our historical time, our 
historical place, without the possibility of true transcendence to something, some 
objective standard, that’s beyond time and beyond history that we can use to evaluate 
our historical situation. So for Heidegger, the freedom within the cave is just to 
know and to authentically live within it and situate oneself inside it without using an 
external standard—whether eternal or natural—to justify it with.

For Heidegger, nature means something very speci#c. So, he would agree that there 
can be a natural standard, but not in the sense that nature has been used in the liberal 
Enlightenment by natural rights theories, where nature becomes something universal 



11Issue X ◆ Spring 2023

An Interview With Gregory Fried, Ph.D., Professor of Philosophy at Boston College

that we can philosophize about and can apply to all human beings, where we all have 
natural rights or what in contemporary times we call human rights that transcend 
history and time and place. For Enlightenment, liberal thinking, again, speaking 
with a broad brush, if we have a natural right, then that right applies irrespective 
of culture, time, and place, even if people don’t recognize it as such. Heidegger is 
rejecting that. 

What does that mean? It means, yes, that the freedom we have is freedom to own 
up to the #nite speci#city of our worldly existence. What’s natural about that is not 
something that unites all of humanity across time. Nature, for Heidegger, is about 
genuinely experiencing what history means for you in your time and your place and 
the tasks that your history presents you with in your time and place, and voluntarily 
taking those upon your shoulders rather than just being borne along by the current 
of what everyone else is doing; but there’s no eternal external standard by which to 
judge the choices you make in that freedom.

Now, I think that’s a very powerful argument.

PK Yes, I’m simultaneously compelled and repulsed by it.

GF Yeah, people do #nd it very attractive, and yet there is some profound danger 
to it.

PK Well, I’m just thinking of Heidegger’s own history. On the one hand, there seems 
to be a certain impossibility about what Plato is calling for. But on the other, without 
it, you can situate yourself in such a way that Naziism becomes not only appealing 
but acceptable.

GF !at is, in my view, the danger of this position, because it makes one’s own 
historical situatedness an ultimate barrier to identi#cation with all of humanity. !at 
ends up leading into nationalism—if not worse.

Because one’s most important commitments are historically bound, and there’s no 
way for a very di$erent culture with a very di$erent history to share that, one can 
respect that other cultures, other nations, other peoples have their own histories and 
their own historical tasks to take up authentically. And what you don’t want to do for 
Heidegger is fuse them all together into some mishmash where everyone then loses 
the singularity of their own historical traditions. But Heidegger is not merely some 
traditionalist. He’s not calling for a return to the past. He’s calling for taking one’s 
own past really seriously, though, in terms of what it means for dealing with one’s 
own present and the future, and to make the past questionable. But it’s questionable 
in your way as a member of that tradition. And that’s your obligation—to think that 
through.



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Dianoia: The Undergraduate Philosophy Journal of Boston College

PK I have one more question.  In your concluding chapter, you discuss how a 
reconstructive view of history can help us to embody “polemical” ethics and lead to 
a new understanding of freedom. So, in the context of the present-day United States, 
how can a reconstructive view of our history elucidate polemical ethics and help us 
move forward as a people? What might that look like?

GF By “polemical ethics,” I do not mean a combative attitude that’s looking for 
#ghts, that’s trying to win at all costs. Here, I’m trying to think with Heidegger 
and Plato against the historically limited way that Heidegger thinks about political 
belonging. I think that Heidegger is right in saying that what it means to be human 
is to be polemical in his larger sense, which means to be confronted with one’s own 
history and to confront one’s own history and have to interpret it. We are necessarily 
embedded in the world that we’re born into, and that has to have an impact on us. 
!ere’s no getting around that. And all of us are confronted by that task in little ways 
and in big ways in our everyday life and in momentous decisions that we have. We’re 
informed by the past, we’re carried forward by the past. But if we don’t take seriously 
for ourselves what that past really means for us going forward into the future, we’re 
not taking ourselves seriously, and we’re not taking other people seriously. !e 
polemical ethic is to take oneself, one’s history, and other people in the world around 
you—what they have to say, what they have to do—with utmost seriousness, and to 
be challenged by it and to challenge it.

My di$erence with Heidegger is that I think he’s fundamentally wrong about denying 
need for transcendence beyond our own historical situatedness. I don’t think—and 
this is getting very complex, so I can only say a little bit about it, and the readers of 
this interview will have to read the book—I don’t think that Plato or Socrates believe 
that absolute transcendence from our #nite situatedness is truly possible for human 
beings. I believe they both think we can get glimmers of what that might mean and 
have experiences of transcending our limited #nite understanding of things and of 
coming to a new understanding of them. But I think for Plato and for Socrates, the 
philosophical life is a constant striving to seek that enlightenment: to try our utmost 
to transcend our historical circumstances, even knowing that we will ultimately fail. 
And that’s an ongoing struggle that makes life interesting but is also an ethical and 
political requirement on us. In our context, I think that we see this animated by the 
American experiment in liberal democracy, where the American experiment begins 
with these very high-%ying words: We hold these truths to be self-evident that all 
men are created equal.

!at’s an ideal standard for what you think of as human life—and also what society 
you think would be a good and decent one, and what government you think 
would be a legitimate one. Did America in 1776, at the time of the Declaration 
of Independence, or in 1789, when the constitution was adopted, embody those 



13Issue X ◆ Spring 2023

An Interview With Gregory Fried, Ph.D., Professor of Philosophy at Boston College

ideals? Was reality in conformity with those ideals? Absolutely not. !ere was slavery, 
there was the subjugation of women. Even white men didn’t have the vote because 
there were property requirements for having the vote. So, in what sense are all 
persons created equal if that’s the world that we are inhabiting? An example of the 
“polemical” ethic is to confront the historical reality in which one lives and say: We 
have this ideal, we claim we’re living by this ideal. What does that ideal truly mean? 
Have we misunderstood it? When it says all men, does it mean only all white men, or 
all white men who own enough property? Does it include the people of color who have 
been enslaved? We had a Civil War to try to resolve that question. Does all men mean 
all males, or does it include women?

!e confrontation with our history tells us that women should have the vote and 
have equal rights under the constitution—that working itself out of what the ideal 
means requires that we transcend our time in order to understand the ideal more 
fully. If people couldn’t do that, slavery would never have been challenged in the 
way it was by #gures that I take as heroic and emblematic of this. And the one that 
I’ve chosen here to speak of is Frederick Douglass and others. But Douglas, in my 
view, is a paramount version of a modern American Platonist who confronts his lived 
situation and is faithful enough to the ideals of what that situation ought to be, what 
it should be, to try to rectify and change the lived world so it’s a little bit closer to what 
that ideal, as best he understands it, requires. I think we’re still #ghting that #ght. 
!at’s a summation in very broad strokes of what’s going on in my book and why I 
think these issues are important.

PK !ank you for your time, Prof. Fried.  It’s been a pleasure. 

Gregory Fried, Towards a Polemical Ethics: 
Between Heidegger and Plato (Lanham: 

Rowman & Little#eld, 2022).

Professor Fried’s book can be purchased on 
Amazon or from the publisher at  

http://www.rowman.com.


