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pp. 48
Brill’s Companion to German Platonism explores how
Plato was interpreted and appropriated by some of the leading thinkers of the history of
German philosophy, from Nicholas of Cusa to Hans Georg Gadamer. The book includes fifteen
chapters, each of them devoted to one author or school, written by outstanding scholars.
While most of the contributions deal with the reception of Plato’s epistemology and
ontology, some others also—or only—address the long-disputed issue of how to interpret
Plato’s philosophy. Since it is not possible to discuss all the topics in this almost
four-hundred page volume, the review is limited to discussing how Plato’s most famous and
controversial doctrine, the so-called theory of forms, was interpreted by German
philosophers. More specifically, I will pay special attention to what we might call—to use
the terminology suggested by the editor—the ‘transcendental interpretation’ of Plato’s
theory of ideas. In the following lines, I focus on how this reading emerged and was
developed by German philosophers in their various ways of endorsing, modifying, or
rejecting Plato’s thought.
Alan Kim’s Introduction (chapter 1) provides an overview of
the topics discussed by each of the contributors and identifies the two conflicting
interpretative models already mentioned: the ‘transcendental’ or ‘functional’ reading of
the ideas, on the one hand, and the ‘transcendent’ or ‘substantial’, on the other (2).
According to the latter, which is the most common interpretation of Plato, ideas are
separated substances that exist in a transcendent sphere of reality. Under this
view, the forms are conceived as the true objects of knowledge and the soul is said to
gain access to them through intellectual intuition. On the other hand, the former reading
does not understand the forms as objects, but rather as ‘transcendental conditions of
possible experience’ (3). The transcendental reading thus rejects the realism and dualism
associated with the transcendent one and does not consider ideas as objects of intuition,
but rather as functions of understanding. Among the figures examined in this volume that
ascribe to Plato the substantialist view are Kant, Schleiermacher, Schopenhauer,
Nietzsche, and Heidegger. On the other side, the functional interpretation was anticipated
to some degree by Nicholas of Cusa, Leibniz, Mendelssohn and Hegel, and explicitly
supported and developed by Cohen, Natorp and Husserl.
In the first chapter after the introduction (2), Claudia D’Amico presents a detailed study of the manifold connections between Nicholas of Cusa and Platonism. She also provides a valuable survey of German authors that in one way or another were influenced by Cusanus’ thought. As for the understanding of Platonic forms, Nicholas of Cusa criticizes Plato for conceiving ideas as separated forms, suggesting instead that while forms are real, they do not exist separated from things. Cusanus thinks that real forms are inaccessible to human reason, only capable of forming conjectures.
In chapter 3, Jack Davidson examines how Leibniz incorporates
Plato and Platonism into his own philosophical system. Among the most remarkable points of
agreement between both philosophers, Davidson points out Leibniz’s rejection of
materialism and his conviction that reality ultimately consists of immaterial,
intelligible substances, of which sensible things are appearances (53). After indicating
other points in which both philosophers converge, the author devotes epigraph 5 to show
how Leibniz’s epistemology reshapes some Platonic themes. More precisely, this section
focuses on the agreements and disagreements regarding the role and nature of innate ideas.
As it is well-known, Leibniz holds that some of the most fundamental concepts are known
innately. At the same time, however, he rejects two positions he ascribes to Plato: the
pre-existence of the soul and the presupposition that every truth one knows has been
explicitly known by the soul before (63). Despite the emphasis that Leibniz puts on his
differences with Plato at this point, both philosophers agree on a fundamental level, as
Davidson suggests, that sensible experience does not suffice to account for our knowledge
of necessary truths. Thus, the human soul must be equipped with a special potential to
know them (ibidem).
The next chapter, written by Bruce Rosenstock, studies Moses
Mendelssohn’s appropriation and reworking of Plato’s Phaedo within the framework
of his ‘Leibnizian Platonism’ (79) in his own Phädon. Rosenstock focuses on the
‘infinitesimal calculus of the soul’ as Mendelssohn applies it in his own version of the
dialogue. The application of Leibniz’s infinitesimal calculus leads Mendelssohn to endorse
a functionalist view, since he believes that the soul’s process of knowledge works—like
that type of calculus—by progressively ‘integrating’ the initially indistinct mass of
representations’ (83). Thus, following Leibniz, Mendelssohn understands the soul as an
active Platonic idea that brings unity into multiplicity (84). However, as Rosenstock
indicates, this is only one side of the story. Under Mendelssohn’s view, the Platonic
ideas do not only account for the integrative nature of human knowledge; they are not
merely abstract objects of understanding, but also and at the same time ‘the object[s] of
the soul’s authentic (philosophic) desire for happiness’ (92). In this sense, the soul’s
capacity to unify the multiplicity of appearances through conceptual unities is the
‘expression’ of the soul’s desire for happiness (93). Hence, according to Mendelssohn, the
search for knowledge is necessarily entangled with the quest for the good (92).
In chapter 5, Manfred Baum examines Kant’s appropriation of
the theory of ideas in both the pre-Critical and the Critical period. It is worth noting,
first, that Kant never attributes the two-world doctrine to Plato, even though his primary
source, Brucker, does it. The Kantian pre-critical reading of the Platonic idea
assimilates it with a ‘common standard of perfection’ for measuring all other less perfect
realities (115). In the critical period, Kant’s well-known differentiation between
understanding and reason leads him to reshape his reading. Under this new light, Plato’s
ideas are interpreted as anticipating to some extent Kant’s concepts of reason, the
regulative ideas, in contrast with the concepts of understanding, the categories
(123-124). According to Baum, both Kant and Plato agree that ideas do not originate in the
senses and that their object is not found in the empirical world (ibidem).
However, Kant rejects the alleged hypostatized nature of Platonic forms, that he
presumably takes from Bruker’s Neo-Platonic interpretation of Plato (126-127). The result
of Kant’s appropriation of Plato’s theory of ideas, then, is twofold (as Kim also puts it
in the introduction [5]): Kant attributes to Plato a substantial or transcendent view of
ideas, while at the same time he sees Platonic ideas as the first attempt towards a
transcendental consideration of human knowledge.
Hegel’s reading of Plato can be seen, as Jere Surber
persuasively presents it in chapter 6, as the first modern philosophical interpretation of
the Platonic corpus (133). The most distinctive features of the Hegelian approach to Plato
are, first, Hegel’s direct and detailed engagement with the dialogues and, second, his
distinctive appropriation of the Platonic ideas. According to Hegel, Plato’s ideas
anticipate in a still unsystematic way his own systematic account of genuine Begriffe
(concepts) as “concrete universals” (141). Relying on his interpretation of
Parmenides, Timaeus, and Republic, Hegel rejects the
dualistic, transcendent interpretations of the forms. He suggests instead that the
Platonic idea should be understood as an ‘identity-in-difference’, and therefore as a
genuine concept in Hegelian terms, that is, one that unifies in itself the formal and
material aspect of reality (136). On the other hand, Hegel also dismisses the
psychological transcendentalism according to which the ideas are mere constructs (or
mere concepts, as opposed to genuine concepts) of the human mind since
this view fails to account for the essential connection between the ideas and the sensible
things (p.136). Therefore, as Surber points out, Hegel thought of his own philosophy as
the articulation of Plato’s ‘in a modern systematic form’ (142).
The following two chapters (7 and 8) are devoted to
Schleiermacher’s influential approach both to Plato’s philosophy and its interpretation.
In chapter 7, André Laks provides an insightful discussion of Schleiermacher’s both
philological and philosophical reading of the Platonic dialogues. Regarding the
interpretation of Plato’s ideas, Schleiermacher rejects Aristotle’s criticisms and defends
that the forms are real concepts that actually possess causal force and can directly
affect both the physical and the moral world, given that they derive from God’s power
(155). Chapter 8 is at odds with the rest of the contributions since it does not offer a
reconstruction of Schleiermacher’s reading of Plato, but rather presents the author’s
(Thomas Szlezák) main reasons for disagreeing with it. While the philological arguments
provided by Szlezák are highly illuminating, and many of his objections to Schleiermacher
are indeed very persuasive—see, for instance, his detailed analysis of Plato’s critique of
writing in the Phaedrus (172-179)—, one cannot but wonder why Schleiermacher’s
interpretation is the only one subject to such critical scrutiny. Besides, the main
objections of the Tübingen School–to which Szlezák belongs– to Schleiermacher are again
developed and argued for in chapter 14 by Vittorio Hösle. In his contribution, Hösle also
provides a valuable survey of some of the most representative advocates of the
abovementioned school and provides a summary of the main points of Krämer’s pioneering
dissertation Arete bei Platon und Aristoteles, still only available in German
(337-339).
Robert Wicks’ chapter on Schopenhauer (9) stresses the role
of Plato’s account of time in the former’s metaphysical account of human consciousness and
reality. More specifically, according to Wick, the Platonic conception of time as ‘the
moving image of eternity’ in the Timaeus inspired Schopenhauer’s consideration of
the spatio-temporal world as a prison of human consciousness (192 and 215). In his mature
philosophy, Schopenhauer regards Plato’s ideas as essentially dependent on the Will, which
constitutes the core of reality, the thing-in-itself, which lays beyond any form of
representation and time (209). Under this view, ideas are said to play an intermediary
role between the thing-in-itself as Will, on the one hand, and the objects of the
spatio-temporal world, on the other (210). Therefore, as Wick suggests, Schopenhauer’s
reading of ideas within this framework attributes them a twofold nature: as long as they
are objects, they ultimately belong to the world of representation and, to this extent,
they are high-ranking illusions; however, considered in their relationship to the
thing-in-itself, ideas are ‘timeless acts of Will’ (213-214). In this last sense, Plato’s
forms are placed behind the veil of the ordinary experience of the world, and thus they
are only apprehended by a certain timeless intuition that Schopenhauer identifies with an
intense awareness of the present moment (200-201). Philosophy is thus conceived as a form
of asceticism whose aim is to reach such timeless, transcendent, and even mystical
awareness (215). As Richard Bennett stresses at the beginning of chapter 11, Nietzsche
regards this ascetic approach to reality—that he attributes to Plato—as anti-natural,
coward, and decadent (249-252). In the second section of his contribution, Bennet proves
that Nietzsche’s consideration of Plato goes far beyond this one-sided evaluation and is
more multi-faceted and less consistent than usually acknowledged.
The transcendental reading of Plato’s ideas was explicitly
defended for the first time by the two leading figures of the Marburg School of
Neo-Kantianism: Herman Cohen and Paul Natorp. In chapter 10, Karl-Heinz Lembeck examines
both authors’ attempts to mediate between Kant and Plato in their ambitious
philosophical-historical interpretations (217). Cohen’s early reading of the forms as
psychological categories radically evolved in the mid-1870s into a purely
logical-transcendental interpretation of them. Under this new approach, and drawing on
Kant’s Critique of Judgement, ideas are now viewed as ‘regulative concepts’
guiding knowledge. Within this picture, the form of the Good is not seen as a real entity,
but rather as ‘the function of a unifying synthesis of appearances’ (223-224). Cohen
extracts this interpretation from Plato’s alleged identification of ideas as hypothesis,
that is, as ‘pre-sub-positions’ which thinking anticipates in order to be able to
apprehend reality (228). In other words, ideas are said to be a priori conditions
of knowledge.
Unlike Cohen’s, Natorp’s appropriation of Plato is grounded
on a deep engagement with the texts. In Platons Ideenlehre (Plato’s Theory of
Ideas), Natorp develops his reading of Plato’s theory of ideas as a theory of the
constitution of experience (231-232). From this standpoint, Natorp downplays the
ontological significance of the ideas, stressing their epistemological relevance as ‘laws’
that govern the dynamisms of knowledge (233). In his late systematic philosophy, Natorp
modifies his reading of Plato’s ideas, as he seems to come under the influence of
Neo-Platonism. Now, forms are understood as categories and, as such, as secondary
functions unable to grasp the ultimate level of reality. Such level corresponds to Plato’s
form of Good, which is radically transcendent and, therefore, inaccessible by means of
articulated knowledge (237).
In the next chapter (12), Alan Kim explores Husserl’s
‘productive appropriation of Plato into phenomenology’ (273), relying on the fact that
Husserl considered himself a phenomenological Platonist. By doing this, Kim provides an
original, perceptive reading of the theory of ideas from a phenomenological perspective
and, at the same time, a compelling presentation of the Husserlian account of eidetic
intuition. In a way akin to Cohen and Natorp, Husserl endorses a transcendental
interpretation of Platonic ideas, rejecting the ‘static’ Platonism of separated
substantial forms along with its subsequent metaphysical dualism and mystical intuitionism
(274). According to Kim, Husserl’s ideas or eidê refer to the object of the
apprehension of the what-ness of a given thing. Such eidê, however,
differ from the empirical universal concepts derived by abstraction from contingent facts.
Eidê also relates to facts, but not because they derive from them, but rather
because they constitute the rule of any possible apprehension of them. In order to
illustrate the process by means of which consciousness moves from facts to eidê,
Kim draws on Plato’s Divided Line and Allegory of the Cave. The first is meant to
represent the different psychic states, while the second focuses on the soul’s progression
from one to another. Here, eidê are presented as logical structures or essential
meanings ‘that had always been co-intended in my aesthetic grasp of the phenomenon as
actual thing, but which had been, as it were, eclipsed by the glare of ‘reality’’ (278).
The ascension of the soul towards the realm of ideas is thus understood as a progressive
detachment and liberation from the blinding glare of sensible appearances of things, so as
to be able to perceive the essential features of them. This interpretation explains both
the fact that the highest form of knowledge according to Plato, namely, dialectics, is
said to deal only with ideas, and also that the knowledge of ideas allows the ex-prisoner
in his return to the cave to recognize images as what they really are (280). In the
following pages, Kim equates both Husserl’s and Plato’s account of the vision of eidê
with the ‘understanding of the F-ness of many f’s’ (281). As the
author points out in a footnote, the state of consciousness in which we grasp an eidê
is not adequately described as a learning process, that is, as certain acquisition of
knowledge, but instead as some sort of perceiving or, even more accurately, re-cognizing
(erkennen) (281, n. 70). In this sense, the phenomenological method of
purifying the mind from its factual intentions and redirecting it towards the essential
turns out to be very similar to Plato’s account of dialectic as a process of remembering
(anamnesis) what one already knows in his or her soul (281). Within this
framework, Kim forcefully argues that Husserl’s basic idea of a ‘noematic form implicitly
governing the coherence of sense experience’ can be paralleled with Plato’s account of the
relationship between noêsis and aisthêsis in the passage on the
summoners in Republic VII, as well as with the role attributed to sensibility in
the recollection argument offered in the Phaedo. Finally, the author points out
that the Husserlian reading was deeply influenced by Lotze’s thesis that ideas do not
possess existence (Sein), but rather validity (Geltung) (294).
The two remaining chapters are devoted to Heidegger’s
confrontation with Plato (chapter 13) and Gadamer’s productive reshaping of the
Heideggerian reading (chapter 15). Francisco J. Gonalez begins his chapter on Heidegger’
reading of Plato by focusing on the 1924/25 course on Plato’s Sophist. In these
lectures, it becomes apparent a tension that characterizes how Heidegger will read Plato
the rest of his life. On the one hand, the Heideggerian approach reveals several points
where Plato’s understanding of being comes very close to Heidegger’s fundamental ontology.
On the other, the German philosopher insists that Plato interpreted being as presence,
that is, as the object of logos, and therefore that Plato’s philosophy is to be
seen as the first of a long series of reductions of truth to correspondence (306). As
Gonzalez clearly shows in his contribution, this tension will persist until the late
Heidegger, although the latter approach will become the ‘official’ reading. The author
suggests that one of the most remarkable exceptions to the official reading can be found
in the Parmenides seminar of 1930/31. Drawing on both Heidegger’s class notes and
Herbert Marcuse’s transcript of this seminar, Gonzalez clearly shows that Heidegger saw
Plato’s discussion of exaiphnês (instant) in the Parmenides as a
genuinely ontological comprehension of the problem of ‘being and time’ (314-315). We find
a similar exception in Heidegger’s interpretation of erôs in the Phaedrus
seminar of 1932 (319 ff.). Gadamer’s appropriation of Platonic philosophy, discussed
by François Renaud in the final chapter (15), reacts against Heidegger’s official reading.
Gadamer claims that ‘Plato is not a Platonist’ and argues that the theory of forms and the
method of dialectic are meant to make explicit the conditions of Socrates’ practice of
dialogue in the early dialogues (356). According to Renaud, Gadamer seems to think that
the forms are objects independent from representation, though he also speaks of them as if
they only were transcendental principles (374).
This volume is worth reading for both historical and philosophical reasons. Each of the fifteen chapters provides the reader with valuable insights into the history of German philosophy in line with the most updated research and effectively supports the general thesis of the book that Plato exerted a decisive influence over the most relevant German philosophers (1). On the other hand, anyone interested in the interpretation of Plato’s works will surely find this book an exciting source of inspiration. In particular, as I hope to have shown, it will prove especially helpful for those intrigued by the possibilities of a transcendental reading of Plato’s theory of ideas. Last but not least, this collective work reminds us of both the risks and benefits of a philosophical reading of Plato, that is, one that attempts to identify and rethink the core issues of Platonic philosophy anew.
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