Die Unwissenheit des Philosophen, oder, warum hat Plato die "ungeschriebene Lehre" nicht geschrieben? (review)

Book Reviews Rafael Ferber. Die Unwissenheit des Philosophen oder warum hat Plato die "ungeschriebene Lehre" nicht geschrieben? Sankt Augustin: Academia Verlag, 1991. Pp. 93- Paper, DM 29.5o. This important book is not simply another contribution to the endless debate concerning the existence of "teachings" which Plato communicated orally but not in the dialogues . Ferber devotes only three pages to defending the existence of such teachings so that he can focus on the more important question of why Plato left them unwritten. The answer Ferber defends is that they were only opinions and not knowledge. 1As Ferber's discussion of the Phaedrus shows (24), the written word has the characteristic of fixing once and for all what is said. What Plato sought to avoid, then, is fixing in an unalterable form of expression alterable opinions about the unalterable principles of reality (16). Therefore, Plato kept out of his writings anything more than an indirect metaphorical expression of these opinions. But what is Ferber's evidence for the thesis that Plato's unwritten teachings were only opinons? Socrates admits in the Republic that he has only opinions about the good (5o6c; cf. 533a). Ferber's inference that this is also true of Plato is supported by passages from the dialogues (including Phaedrus [27] and Timaeus [3o-32]) which emphasize the limitations of human knowledge, in particular Socrates' claim at Republic 5o5e that every soul is aporousa with regard to determining the nature of the good: "every soul" must include Plato's, so that even here Plato remains an "Aporetiker" (17). Ferber of course cannot deny that in the Republic the dialectician is described as someone with knowledge in the strongest sense of the word, but he maintains that this description is an ideal which, like the ideal republic itself, was never realized by Plato (2o-2 l). Ferber appears on much firmer ground here than his opposition. While he can defend his "aporetic" interpretation of Plato's philosophy with textual evidence from the dialogues, there is no evidence for H.J. Kr/imer's View that the unwritten teachings comprised an axiomatic, deductive system providing the greatest possible certainty. 2 Kr~imer and other "esoterics" have assumed that any evidence for unwritten teachings is also evidence for the systematic and apodictic character of Plato's thought. Ferber's book has exploded this assumption. ' This thesis had already been briefly defended in Ferber's earlier book, PlatosIdee des Guten (Sankt Augustin: Verlag Hans Richarz, 1984), 154-59. "See Plato and the Foundations of Metaphysics, ed. and trans. John R. Catan (Albany: State University of New York Press, 199o), x53; and Review of R. Ferber, Platos ldee des Guten, in PhilosophischesJahrbuch iraAuftrag derG6rres-Gesellschaft94 (1987): 2oo-2ol. [483] 484 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 32:3 JULY I99 4 Though Ferber's discussion of the dialogues leaves unclear whether the "Unwissenheit des Philosophen" is simply a contingent fact or an inescapable fate, his excellent analysis of the Seventh Letter (more than half the book!) clearly supports the latter option.S Our four means of knowing something (words, images, logoi, and even "knowledge ") express how a thing is qualified (poion tO rather than simply what it is (ti esti). Since these means, then, cannot provide the philosopher with knowledge of a thing's true being, such knowledge can never be attained (43ff.). Ferber recognizes two important implications of this argument: 1) it makes a "theory of Forms" strictly speaking an impossibility (5o) and ~) it shows that Socrates' "What is X?" question is in principle unanswerable (47)Ferber is much more faithful to this text than are the "esoterics" who consider Plato's unwillingness to write about what he "takes most seriously" to be caused by a fear of being misunderstood by the philosophically unprepared and completely ignore the above argument, which P/ato sees as the decisive one (342a, 343a).4 In fact, Ferber's thorough (not selective) interpretation of the text on which the "esoterics" themselves rely so heavily/s suffic/ent by/tse~ to refute their attribution to Plato of an axiomatic system of principles. But is not Ferber's conclusion too pessimistic? What in fact necessitates it is his view...