This past, to which our lectures are seeking access, is nothing detached from us, lying far away. On the contrary, we are this past itself. And we are it not insofar as we explicitly cultivate the tradition and become friends of classical antiquity, but, instead, our philosophy and science live on these foundations, i.e., those of Greek philosophy, and do so to such an extent that we are no longer conscious of it: the foundations have become obvious Precisely in what we no longer see, in what has become an everyday matter, something is at work that was once the object of the greatest spiritual exertions ever undertaken in Western history. The goal of our interpretation of the Platonic dialogues is to take what has become obvious and make it transparent in these foundations. To understand history cannot mean anything else than to understand ourselves—not in the sense that we might establish various things about ourselves, but that we experience what we ought to be. To appropriate a past means to come to know oneself as indebted to that past The authentic possibility to be history itself resides in this, that philosophy discover it is guilty of an omission, a neglect, if it believes it can begin anew, make things easy for itself, and let itself be stirred by just any random philosopher. But if this is true, i.e., if history means something such as this for spiritual existence, the difficulty of the task of understanding the past is increased. If we wish to penetrate into the actual philosophical work of Plato w'e must be guaranteed that right from the start we are taking the correct path of access. But that would mean coming across something ] (p. 7-8)