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This Site is Under Construction: Situating Hegel's Plato

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 June 2015

Maureen Eckert
Maureen Eckert*
Affiliation:
University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth
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Abstract

In this paper, I examine broad features of Hegel's interpretation of Plato from his Lectures on the History of Phihsophy, noting how these features resonate with current views of Platonic philosophy. Hegel formed his interpretation of Plato under very different circumstances than those of today. Serious study of the Platonic dialogues had come to the forefront in German Idealist philosophy. As Rüdiger Bubner notes: ‘It was this tradition of thought that discovered, in an original way of its own, the authentic Plato in place of the various mediated substitutes of before, and indeed saw him as a thinker who was to provide continuing inspiration to the needs of post-Kantian philosophy’. We find Hegel holds Plato in high esteem, most famously as a ‘teacher of the human race’ alongside Aristotle. His Plato is one who is fundamentally significant in the development of philosophy, raising it to the status of science, although not in a fully systematic manner. At the same time, Hegel distinguishes his Plato from the projects of his contemporaries, Tennemann's esoteric Plato and Schleiermacher's aesthetic Plato. Hegel also forms his view of Plato at a time just prior to the development of stylometric studies of the dialogues, begun in its earliest form by K. F. Hermann (1839) and pushed forward by Lewis Campbell and Friedrich Blass in the later half of the 19th century. (This is not to claim that questions regarding the ordering of the dialogues did not arise earlier than 1839, but that they became scientific and central in Platonic interpretation with Hermann.) The pressures Hegel negotiates in his interpretation are quite distinct, especially in this last respect, yet not altogether alien. There are, I think, interesting reasons for this. (One might think that given Hegel's strong opposition to Schleiermacher (and Hegel's disposition towards development), he might have been inclined towards a developmental reading of Plato. One also might think that given his opposition to Tennemann's esotericism, he might have had more doubts about discerning a system within Plato's unsystematic dialogues. But one would be wrong on both counts.)

Type
Hegel and the Greeks
Information
Bulletin of the Hegel Society of Great Britain , Volume 27 , Issue 1-2: number 53/54 , 2006 , pp. 1 - 23
Copyright
Copyright © The Hegel Society of Great Britain 2006

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References

Notes

1 All citations of Hegel's Lectures on the History of Philosophy in the body of the paper are from Hegel, , Lectures on the History of Philosophy in Three Volumes, trans. Haldane, E. S. and Simson, F. H. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995)Google Scholar, from the 1840 translation (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner and Co.). This paper is written with gratitude to Frank M. Kirkland and Gerald Press, my earliest teachers of Hegel and Plato.

2 Bubner, Rüdiger, The Innovations of Idealism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 4 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 Stace, W. T., The Philosophy of Hegel (New York: Dover, 1955), p. 7 Google Scholar.

4 Zuckert, Catherine, Postmodern Plats*: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Gadamer, Strauss, Derrida (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996)Google Scholar.

5 Cooper, John, ‘Introduction’ from Plato: Complete Works, ed. Cooper, J. (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 1997), pp. 12–18 Google Scholar.

6 Nails, Debra, Agora, Academy, and the Conduct of Philosophy (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1995), p. 68 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 Tigerstedt, E. N. assess the historical progression of Platonic Interpretation in his work, Interpreting Plato (Uppsala: Almquist and Wiksell International, 1977)Google Scholar and includes a critical review of the stylometric dating of the dialogues (p. 19).

8 Schleiermacher is credited with originating the Unitarian view by most contemporary scholars although this has been challenged by E. N. Tigerstedt, who sees that Neo-Platonist (systematic) interpretations of Plato had fallen into decline prior to Schleiermacher's work. Cf. Tigerstedt, E.N., Decline and Fall of the Neoplatonic Interpretation of Plato (Commentary on the Hum. Litt., 52, Helsinki 1974)Google Scholar. Unitarian approaches to Plato have been held throughout the twentieth century by von Arnim, Randall, Shorey, Jaeger, Friedlander and H. Kramer of the Tübingen School

9 Vlastos, Gregory, Socrates: Ironist and Moral Philosopher (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), pp. 45–80 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Vlastos presents his ‘Ten Theses’ for the views of the historical Socrates found in Plato's dialogues — as distinct from Plato's views. Santas, Gerasimos, Socrates (London: Routledge and Keegan-Paul, 1979)Google Scholar, presents a Platonic Socrates. Brickhouse and Smith, following Vlastos, further defend the distinguishing of the historical Socrates' views in Plato's works, especially the Apology, which they argue is the most accurate record of the events of Socrates’ trial.

10 The thematic grouping of the dialogues is beginning to appear in textbooks on ancient Greek philosophy. Cf. Peterman, John, On Ancient Greek Philosophy (Irvine: Wadsworth Publishing, forthcoming 2005)Google Scholar.

11 Penner, Terry, ‘Socrates and the Early Dialogues’, in The Cambridge Companion to Plato, ed. Kraut, R. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 121–169 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. He furthers Vlastos' ten theses defending the presence of the historical Socrates' views in the early dialogues, presenting ‘twelve theses’ that individuate the historical Socrates' views from those of Plato.

12 See Bubner, Rüdiger, The Innovations of Idealism, pp. 43–44 Google Scholar for a brief but intriguing discussion situating contemporary Tübingen Platonic interpretation (unwritten doctrines) in light of Schleiermacher's interpretation of Plato.

13 Michael Frede, for example, maintains a developmental framework for interpreting Plato's dialogues, yet addresses the question of Plato's use of the dialogue form and its relation to argument. The first line of his paper reads, ‘Plato's dialogues are works of art’. ‘Plato's Arguments and Dialogue Form’ in Methods of Interpreting Plato and His Dialogues, ed. Klagge, J. and Smith, N., Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy, suppl. vol. 1992, pp. 201–19Google Scholar.

14 Press, Gerald, ‘The State of the Question in the Study of Plato’, in Plato: Critical Assessments, Vol. I, ed. Smith, N. (London: Roudedge, 1998), p. 317 Google Scholar.

15 Scholars tend to hold that the Apology is not merely a philosophical document, but also a historical document. Charles Kahn even shares this viewpoint, although he opposes the developmentalist view of Vlastsos and holds a ‘minimal view’ of the influence of Socrates found in a few Group I dialogues. Scholars who see the Apology in this way include, Taylor, A. E., Plato: The Man and His Work (London: Methuen, 1960), pp. 156–67Google Scholar; Guthrie, W. K. C., The History of Greek Philosophy, Vol. IV (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962), pp. 67–93 Google Scholar; Allen, R. E.. Socrates and Legal Obligation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1980), pp. 3–36 Google Scholar; Reeve, C. D. C., Socrates in the Apology (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1989)Google Scholar; Brickhouse, Thomas C. and Smith, Nicholas D., Socrates on Trial (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989)Google Scholar; Kahn, Charles, Plato and the Socratic Dialogue (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 88–95 Google Scholar.

16 Hegel cites Plato's Apology along with Xenophon's Memoribilia and Apology on points such as the Delphic Dictum: ‘Know Thyself’ (435), and the accusation of the corruption of youth (437). The quotation from the Protagoras, the definition of courage as the right estimation of what is and what is not to be feared (411–12), is very interestingly divorced from our debates concerning Platonic Hedonism, a debate that is compounded by disputes regarding the chronology of Plato's dialogues. See Rowe, Christopher, ‘Just How Socratic Are Plato's “Socratic” Dialogues?: A response to Charles Kahn, Plato and the Socratic Dialogue: The Philosophical Use of Literary Form (Cambridge University Press, 1996)’, Journal of the International Plato Society 2 (2002)Google Scholar. Hegel mentions Plato's Phaedo once in his discussion of Socratic thought, but only with respect to its depiction of Socrates' death (443), a dialogue he describes as expressing popular philosophy.

17 At the conclusion of the Lectures Hegel reminds us: ‘The latest philosophy contains therefore those which went before; it embraces in itself all the different stages thereof; it is the product and result of those that preceded it’ (Vol. 3).

18 Grote, George, Plato and Other Companions of Socrates (London: John Murray, 1875), Vol. 1, 246 Google Scholar; Vol. 2, 278.

19 Plato transposes Socratic philosophy's clash with natural morality into a philosophical position, radically revising the subjective principle (self-determining individual conscience in the Republic, and eliminating this altogether in favour of the organic unity of the individual with the state: ‘Because these two elements were not homogenous, traditional and conventional morality were overthrown. Plato recognised and caught up the true spirit of his times, and brought it forward in a more definite way, in that he desired to make this new principle an impossibility in his Republic’ (Vol. 2, 99). This is another example of the way in which Hegel perceives Platonic philosophy as distinct from Socratic philosophy, building upon it, yet distinct in terms of the progression of ideas.

20 Charles Griswold, for example, speaks of collection and division as a method in which both ‘interpenetrate’ each other: ‘[wholes] are articulated unities, whether division is used in the service of producing speech or for understanding an already given whole, whether natural or artificial), division is implicitly coeval with collection. In choosing out a whole, we must distinguish it from other wholes; every collection seems to presuppose prior division. If collection is a collection of parts or elements, then what is collected has already been divided’. Self Knowledge in Plato's Phaedrus (University Park: Pennsylvania University Press, 1986), p. 175 Google Scholar. Griswold locates a more primal level presupposed by this formal method — that of language. In this respect his interpretation has much in common with Gadamer's, particularly his critique of Hegel's Logic in Hegel's Dialectic: Five Hermeneutical Studies, trans. Smith, P. C. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976)Google Scholar. Hegel's interpretation of Plato's forms as species (‘We translate edios first of all as species or kind; and the Idea is no doubt the species, but rather as it is apprehended by and exists for thought’ (Vol. 2, 29) is a view that has been challenged by Sayre, K M., Plato's Analytic Method (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), p. 162 Google Scholar, and Moravcsik, J. E. M. ‘The Anatomy of Plato's Divisions’, Phronesis, Suppl. Vol. 1 (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1973), pp. 324—48Google Scholar. In this case, Hegel may very well be imposing Aristotelian categories onto Plato.

21 It remains an open question for me at this point as to why Hegel, who is familiar with Plato's Seventh Letter, and demonstrates a careful reading of the Phaedrus (Vol. 2, 36–40)Google Scholar, remains silent on Plato's view of writing. His opposition to Tennemann would, on the one hand, be weakened by acknowledging the problem of writing raised in these texts. On the other hand, Hegel uses the letter as a biographical source (Vol. 2, 4–8) and is perhaps unwilling to claim that a non-philosophical text expresses philosophical ideas. This may be quite a charitable stretch, especially since Hegel is also silent on the Phaedrus' post-palinode discussion of rhetoric as well as its method of collection and division. My suspicion is that Hegel found himself between a rock and a hard place on this count, as integrating the Phaedrus as supporting the Parmenides on speculative dialectic would open the door to esotericism about Platonic texts themselves, or require a much stronger account of why Platonic texts should be read immanently. This, in turn would bring him too close to Schleiermacher for comfort.

22 Hegel does, however, determine that there is a feature of the conversations, Urbanity, which reflects an openness in conversation: ‘Urbanity is true courtesy, and forms its real basis, but Urbanity makes a point of granting complete liberty to all with whom we converse, as regards both the character and the matter of their opinions, and thus the right of giving them the same’ (Vol. 2,15). This characteristic ‘gives such gracefulness to Plato's Dialogues’, he says.

23 Griswold, Charles, ‘Plato's Metaphilosophy: Why Plato Wrote Dialogues’, in Plato: Critical Assessments, Vol. 1, ed. Smith, N. (London: Roudedge, 1998)Google Scholar, see especially pp. 227–232.

24 Bubner states: ‘as far as the search for the ‘true’ Plato is concerned, this means we must refuse the distinction between interpretation and historicalfact. The historical Plato is also the Plato that is most intelligible with regard to further efforts of interpretation. Interpretation and historical research are not alternatives. At most, it is merely a question of differendy articulated and plausible approaches that are more or less convincing in relation to the relevant material as a whole. There is no unsurpassable or incontestable reality in itself existing over and beyond our interpretations. And if there were some such reality in itself beyond all interpretations, we should still have to describe it as intrinsically intelligible, and thus as falling potentially within the framework of what we can interpret’ ( Bubner, Rüdger, The Innovations of Idealism, p. 45 Google Scholar). While on the whole agreeing with Buhner's view on interpreting Plato — that there is no ‘true Plato’ standing above and beyond our interpretations, I am uncertain that the fragmentary nature of research on Plato can be considered ‘the Plato’. Competing interpretations, as I see it, read the historical facts very differently. Interpretations, based on different readings of historical facts do not become resolved, as on the model of competing theories in the sciences. Any ‘resolution’ pertains, instead, to philosophical orientation, which can become more reflective, especially in terms of the presentation, of research and justification of methodology. Yet if our situation is such that there is no one over-arching philosophy, there will still be competing Platos.

25 Tigerstedt, E.N., Interpreting Plato (Uppsala: Almquist and Wiksell International, 1977), p. 16 Google Scholar.