The Other Plato: The Tübingen Interpretation of Plato's Inner-Academic Teachings

ONE Plato: Testimonia et fragmenta

ONE PLATO: TESTIMONIA ET FRAGMENTA Dmitri Nikulin Plato is a unique character among the dramatis personae in the history of philosophy. No other thinker arouses so much emotion and dissent among readers and interpreters. Passions are inevitably stirred when one tries to answer a simple question: What does Plato want to say, and what does he actually say? Plato wrote dialogues, which are fine pieces of literature and reasoning but which may always be read and interpreted differently, especially since the speakers often do not commit themselves to any particular philosophical position and the question discussed frequently remains unanswered and sometimes not even explicitly asked. Moreover, it is neither easy to discern Plato’s own position at any given moment in the discussion, nor who is speaking behind his characters. When Socrates is engaged in a dialectical debate of a subject (such as wisdom, courage, love, friendship, temperance, etc.) does he really mean what he says, if one takes into account his undeniably ironic stance? And is it Plato who speaks through Socrates, Socrates himself, or an anonymous voice ascribed to Socrates, made to say what he has to within the logic of the conversation? Plato appears to always escape and defy any final and finalized conclusion, being an Apollo’s bird, the swan that, as Socrates predicted, still remains not captured by generations of later readers and interpreters. Because of the seeming uncertainty of what has actually been said, reading Plato is a fascinating yet risky enterprise, for we might need to reconsider not only our understanding of a text but also the very principles of philosophical reading and interpretation. It is perhaps not by chance that modern hermeneutics arises with Schleiermacher and flourishes in Gadamer 1 2 THE OTHER PLATO as primarily an attempt to make sense of the Platonic dialogues, of their intention and proper sense. Yet, since the dialogues appear to be open to a variety of consistent but mutually conflicting interpretations, reading them leads to so much disagreement, misunderstanding, and even mutual mistrust in the guild of fellow Plato scholars. THE TÜBINGEN SCHOOL Among recent notable attempts to provide a different reading of Plato is the so-called Tübingen interpretation, both an original attempt at reading and understanding Plato, and at the same time one rooted in a philological and philosophical tradition that goes back to the end of the eighteenth century while echoing Platonic (Neoplatonic) interpretations of Plato. This interpretation of Plato originated in the works of two students of Wolfgang Schadewaldt, Hans Joachim Krämer and Konrad Gaiser, who were also joined by Heinz Happ, Thomas A. Szlezák, Jürgen Wippern, and later by Vittorio Hösle and Jens Halfwassen. In Italy, Giovanni Reale became the main proponent of the Tübingen interpretation, and in France, Marie-Dominique Richard. The two path-breaking works were Krämer’s 1959 Arete bei Platon und Aristoteles and Gaiser’s 1963 Platons ungeschriebene Lehre, which were followed by a number of other relevant publications. The Tübingen reconstruction attempts to provide a systematic understanding of Plato based on the evidence preserved in the tradition of the transmission and interpretation of his texts. Dietrich Tiedemann and especially Wilhelm Gottlieb Tennemann, both of whom predate the Romantic reading of Plato and still continue the line of Neoplatonic interpretation, had already argued in favor of the existence of a systematic oral teaching in Plato. It is because of this tradition, which pays attention to the evidence preserved in earlier philosophical works and stresses the necessity of meticulous philological research oriented toward a philosophical understanding of the text, that we now have Diels and Kranz’s Fragmente der Vorsokratiker. It is this tradition that made such a profound impact on ancient scholarship of the nineteenth century, including Jacob Burckhardt and Nietzsche, and the whole of twentieth-century Continental philosophy, including the Neo-Kantians, Heidegger, Hannah Arendt, and Hans Jonas. In the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, the existence of a systematic teaching developed by Plato within the Academy was accepted and argued for by Eduard Zeller, Heinrich Gomperz, Léon Robin, and Julius Stenzel. Thus, in his book of 1908, La théorie platonicienne des idées et des nombres d’après Aristote, Robin attempts to show that, if one reads Aristotle carefully and takes seriously what he says about Plato, especially in Meta- 3 PLATO: TESTIMONIA ET FRAGMENTA physics M and N...