A new interpretation of Platonism has been proposed over the last thirty years by what one can call the Tübingen School, since its main protagonists and several of its proponents, in fact, teach in that city. Three key works mark in some way the foundation of this school: the book by Hans Joachim Krämer on Arête in Plato and Aristotle, which appeared in 1959, that of Konrad Gaiser on the forms of Platonic dialogue, entitled Protreptic and Paranêsis in Plato,a also published in 1959, and, finally, that of Gaiser on the unwritten teaching of Plato, dating from 1963.b
For a long time, it is true, one has used the ancient testimonies on the unwritten doctrines of Plato, notably Aristotle’s, in order to reconstitute their structure.2 But one generally considered that these unwritten doctrines had appeared late in the evolution of Plato’s thought. The dialogues were thus, in the eyes of historians, the unique expression of Plato’s thought during most of his life. The novelty introduced by the Tübingen School consisted in refusing to consider the unwritten doctrines as a late phenomenon. On the contrary, it recognizes in them the essential [part] of Platonic thought, because they were the very content of the oral teaching. This oral teaching was for Plato the only valid [form of] instruction. The Tübingen School thus takes seriously the condemnation of writing, that is to say, of his own dialogues announced by Plato in the Phaedrus and in the Seventh Letter. The dialogues express Plato’s thought only in an allusive and imperfect way, because they have, above all, a protreptic and paraenetic value, and it is the oral teaching that allows one to understand and to complete them.
The publications of the three books which we have mentioned very soon provoked a gigantic controversy in the scholarly world, a veritable War of the Giants which is yet to be resolved, and which has engendered a very abundant literature, of which one will find the principal titles in the bibliography [of Marie-Dominique Richard’s L’enseignement oral de Platon]. Indeed, one can affirm that, regardless of the final judgement that one makes of the theories of the Tübingen School, it is impossible to deny that the School has from the start represented an extraordinary renewal in Platonic studies. It has opened new perspectives for the understanding of the dialogues, it has revealed the immense effects which the discussions which took place in Plato’s Academy had on the philosophical schools until the end of Antiquity, and it has inspired fruitful researches regarding the history of ancient philosophy as a whole, notably on Hellenistic philosophy and Plotinus.
Around the time of the publication of the works I have just mentioned, several highly remarkable reviews or studies appeared in France between 1960 and 1970, authored by Jean Pépin, Pierre Aubenque, Aimé Solignac and Jacques Brunschwig. The fact remains that the importance and significance of the theses of the Tübingen School are not presently known in our country except by a small number of initiates. Until now, there did not exist in the French language any means of access to the theories relating to Plato’s oral teachings and to the controversies which have developed around them, whereas in the Italian language, for example, there exist many extremely important works on this theme.
Marie-Dominique Richard’s book, therefore, responds to an urgent need, and fills a significant lacuna in French research. Richard has even made the special effort of writing her work in Tübingen, in the course of a four-year sojourn, during which she was able to follow the ‘oral teaching’ of Hans Joachim Krämer and Konrad Gaiser, and to converse with them. Her work was thus drawn from the most direct sources. Moreover, because of her remarkable mastery of the German language, she has been able to make accessible to her readers the mass of documents on this question which have been published in the last few years.
It is thus an extremely precious working instrument that [Richard] offers to her readers. They will be able to judge for themselves based on the evidence, since they will find at the end of the book, together with the Greek original text and the French translation, the complete dossier of the main ancient texts relating to the oral teaching of Plato. The book traces the main lines of the history of the controversy which took place around the problem of the oral teaching of Plato, presenting the history and critique of ancient testimonies regarding the unwritten doctrines, carefully distinguishing the translations coming from Aristotle, Theophrastus or the Ancient Academy. Finally, the synthesis that one can extract from these testimonies and thus the structure of the theory of principles elaborated by Plato is presented with great acuity.c
***
Richard’s book will certainly inspire in its readers the desire to pursue further research, for example on the relationship between Pythagoreanism and Platonism, or on the exact nature of Platonic dialectic, or on the implications of the dualism professed in the oral teaching.
The question of the relation between writing and orality in philosophy, posed by Plato himself in the Phaedrus and in the Seventh Letter, is a key problem, which one finds very often evoked throughout the pages of this work. The question which is posed to historians is in effect the following: in order to understand Plato’s thought, should we trust in fragmentary testimonies of students reporting an oral teaching, rather than in dialogues written by the master and composed by him with an extreme care? Should we not consider that only the writing authenticated by the author has, precisely, an authentic value?
In order to understand what is at stake here, namely the methodology of the history of ancient philosophy as a whole and the very definition of philosophy, I will evoke, first of all, the remarks that Victor Goldschmidt has made, a few years ago, in a work advocating in favour of the structural method in the history of philosophy.3 Underlining the fact that ‘the structural method […] incontestably stresses the written work, as the unique testimony wherein a philosophical thought is manifested’, he goes on to affirm: ‘The Greco-Roman civilization early on became a civilisation of writing […] Philosophy, from its origin, is formulated though writing.’
It is necessary to say this clearly. One cannot maintain that Greco-Roman civilization became early on a civilization of writing. On the contrary, as Eric A. Havelock underlined: ‘one could say of Pindar and Plato that they are still part of a world without writing’ and that one cannot understand ‘their clever compositionsd […] without at base examining the oral processes of composition and recording’.4 Generally speaking, certainly in the epoch of Plato and probably in all of Antiquity, the written work is extremely closely tied to orality. According to the felicitous formula of Arnold J. Toynbee:5
Like the typed text of the speaker on the radio presently, the Greco-Roman ‘book’ was really a mnemonic system aiming to dispel the evasive power of words and not a book in the sense that we understand today, as a thing made so that one could read it to oneself.
The ancient book was, nearly always, the echo of a speech intended to become speech once again. An echo of speech, as we will see later concerning Plato,e the book was destined to once again become spoken word. This is because (during all of Antiquity until the time of Augustine, who was struck, as we know, to see Ambrose of Milan reading with his eyes), the book is read aloud, whether by a slave who did the reading to his master, or by the author in a public reading,6 or by the reader himself. The constraints that oral literature imposed on literary composition, on the form of the phrase, the rhythm and the sonority which are addressed to the ear and not to the eyes, will thus be rediscovered in [ancient] written works, and these constraints have their consequences in the expression of ideas. In these conditions, indeed, ideas could not be presented timelessly,f as in the modern book that one can read in an undetermined order and in which all the parts coexist. They are rather submitted to the time of speech.g It is not striking that Plato exposes his ideas under the form of a conversation, of a dialogue which is an event which unfolds itself in time. We will see up to what point he exposes them.
Generally speaking, as speech is tied to real time, insofar as it is an act produced by human beings in relation to others, the ancient book, echo of speech, does not find its meaning exclusively in itself, but in the living praxis from which it emanated and towards which it is aimed. No more than the inscriptions that epigraphy studies can it be separated from its spiritual and material site. Thus, as we will have occasion to repeat, the dialogues of Plato cannot be understood in themselves without taking account of all the information which we have on the school of Plato and the discussions and teachings which were practiced there.
The written work, therefore, does not suffice to make the ‘philosophy’ of an author known, and it does not suffice to say, with Victor Goldschmidt ‘philosophy, in its origin, is formulated in writing’ in order to prove the contrary. One could perhaps think with Havelock7 that the development of writing enabled the rise of Greek thought by making abstraction possible, by making it possible for a word to correspond no longer to an image but to a concept. But that is not certain. One must not overlook the extraordinary capacities for meditation and memory of the thinkers of Antiquity. We could remark, for example, that Socrates indeed laid claim to search for definitions and concepts solely with the aid of spoken dialogue, and Plato in the Symposium depicts Socrates’ long, solitary meditation being undertaken without writing. Another testimony of this extraordinary power, at least in certain men, [survives]: we know that Plotinus, before writing his treatises, ‘had organised them entirely in his soul’,8 which presupposes that he did not have need of the support of writing to develop his thought.
To speak precisely, it is probably an error to consider abstraction as the main characteristic of ancient philosophy (if not of philosophy in general). For the ancient philosopher, at least beginning with the sophists and Socrates, proposes to form men and transform souls. This is why philosophical teaching is delivered, in antiquity, primarily in an oral form, because only living speech in dialogues, in conversations pursued over a long period of time, can accomplish any such work. The written work, however remarkable it may be, is, therefore, most of the time only an echo or a complement of this spoken teaching.
This is what Plato himself says in the Phaedrus.9 This primacy of the oral over the written is for Plato at the same time an historical necessity and a spiritual requirement. It is, first, an historical necessity because, in a civilization which has political discourse at its centre, it is necessary to form men who possess, above all, mastery of speech. This is the case, even if like Plato, in contrast to the sophists, one wants to found political discourse on a Science which will be mathematical, but above all dialectical, and which will enable philosophers to act and to speak conformably to the Idea of the Good, measure of all things,10 and to exact definitions which follow from it. Yet, precisely in Plato’s school, this dialectic is always practiced in a living discussion, in an oral dialogue. It is also a spiritual requirement. Because, for Plato, the written work only engenders in its reader a false knowledge, a ready-made truth. Only living dialogue is formative: it brings to the disciple the possibility of discovering by himself the Truth because of long discussions, because of a long ‘agriculture’ which is pursued during his whole life, very different from the ephemeral gardens of Adonis which grow in books.11 For it is in souls, not in books, that it is necessary to sow [the seeds of philosophy] with the aid of speech.
Living dialogue could only be pursued in a group, not in a school or a university in the modern sense of the term, but in a community of people, united by spiritual love and placing everything in common, above all their ideas: such is very much the spirit of the Platonic Academy. A certain esotericism inevitably results from this: the esotericism inherent in all closed groups which end up having their own tradition, ritual, special language, documents and, in a word, their mysteries. If it is not at all certain, as John Patrick Lynch has shown,12 that the philosophical schools of Antiquity were not religious thiases, it nevertheless remains [true] that the representation of philosophy as a mystery (at Symposium, 210a, for example) could lead [us] to conceive of philosophy as a secret reserved for initiates. As Clement of Alexandria will say much later: ‘The mysteries, like God, can only be confided in speech, and not in writing.’13
Let us add, to put writing in its rightful, entirely relative place, that true philosophy is neither an oral discourse, nor a written discourse, but a way of being: to philosophise does not consist in speaking or writing, but in being; it is necessary to transform the entirety of one’s soul to be able to contemplate the Idea of the Good. Here, one reaches the limits of language.
But then, one will say, why write, why not content oneself with speaking? It is because writing has an advantage over speech, it allows [us] to extend the action of speaking in time and space. For future times, it allows us to conserve the memory of events or ideas which [would otherwise] risk being forgotten.14 This is also, nevertheless, its danger, for it risks provoking an atrophy of the capacities for memorization (this is what happens to modern man). In any case, writing allows us to amass a ‘treasure of memories for old age’, as Plato says. One can accept that certain dialogues, for example the Philebus, are the echo of certain discussions which had taken place within the Academy. They are thus only the echo of the oral activities of the school. The dialogues thus express the ideas of Plato, but in the perspective of a precise question. One sees there the principles applied to a particular case.
Writing can thus act at a distance, it can be addressed to people who are absent and those who are unknown. The ‘discourse will circulate everywhere’h and it can reach souls foreign to the school,15 non-philosophers who, by reading of the dialogues and putting into question their system of values, can perhaps be converted to philosophy. From this point of view, the Platonic dialogues are literary works of an exoteric character, in the same way as the dialogues of Aristotle. They are only a distant echo of the oral teaching, which aim to make [the latter] known. It is a curious thing, since we still possess the esoteric (acroamatic) works of Aristotle which, like the treatises gathered in the Metaphysics, are often a direct and immediate echo of his oral teaching and entail a high degree of technicality, that we do not experience any reticence in considering his dialogues, which are totally lost, as exoteric works intended for the general public, expressing his philosophy under a more accessible form. However, it is necessary to imagine that the same situation is found in Plato: the dialogues, for the most part, are exoteric, addressed to the cultivated public. As for the oral teaching, it [as it were] cannot not have existed. Most likely, the dialectical exercises must have had an important place. But it is impossible that Plato did not then express his own opinions or his methodological reflections. In any case, Plato himself does not seem to have made the effort to ensure that [the oral teaching] was written down. This oral teaching is known to us only through the testimony of his disciples.
To interest readers and eventually convert them, it will be necessary to have recourse to all of those refinements of the art of nascent literature which already appear in Pindar, the tragedians, or Thucydides.16 One will ask a great deal of the reader, one will pique his curiosity by allusions, subtleties of composition and desired correspondences. There will also be, up to a certain point, an esoteric sense in these exoteric dialogues which will only be discovered by the perspicacious reader.
The protreptic and paraenetic character of the Platonic dialogues has been shown in a remarkable way by Konrad Gaiser in 1959, as we have said. His demonstration is confirmed in a striking and, one could say, sensational fashion by the ancient testimony, nevertheless very close to Plato’s times, which is cited by Richard in the Appendix of her book. This text is a ‘Life of Plato’ written by Dicaearchus, disciple of Aristotle, and it is cited by the Epicurean Philodemus in a writing which forms part of the collection of papyri found at Herculaneum and whose deciphering has recently been considerably improved. Dicaearchus notably writes: ‘in composing his dialogues, Plato exhorted (proetrepsato) a mass of people to philosophise […] Due to the influence of his literary activity, Plato encouraged by his books many outsiders [that is to say, strangers to the school, PH] to not personally take account of the opinions of chatterboxesi [probably the sophists, PH]’. Protreptic and paraenesis, exhortation and encouragement, such is therefore the main goal of the Platonic dialogues. We have at least an historical example of this role of the dialogues. We know, indeed, from Themistius17 that it was after she had read the Republic that a woman of Philonthus, Axiothea, came to Athens to become a disciple of Plato, disguised as a man.
The Platonic dialogue thus acts at a distance, but never with the efficacity of living speech. It strives at least to imitate this living speech, to give to the reader the illusion of participating in the dialogue. In this sense, it refers, yet again, to the discussions of the Academy; it is a seductive image of life inside the Academy, an image in which Plato loves to present himself under the traits of Socrates, insinuating that the discussions of the Academy are continuations of the Socratic discussions. As I have said elsewhere, certain dialogues are writings which attempt to make themselves forgotten as writings, which give the illusion of being spoken.18 Certain others more clearly have the characteristics of written texts, on the contrary, like the Timaeus, in which Plato almost completely renounces dialogue. That is, he sees these texts as games, even more so than his other dialogues.
For the literary composition is for Plato a game in honour of the gods: it is, he writes, ‘to amuse oneself in a decent and pious manner’19 that he writes philosophical works. The Timaeus, for example, has an affinity with the sacrifice offered in honour of Athena.20 Like the religious festivals, the literary work is a human game which imitates in some way the divine game of the creation of the world.21 In the case of the Timaeus, it is a likely story which mimics the event of the birth of the God-World. Furthermore, Plato underlines in several places the fact that it is not necessary to take this game too seriously: as Pascal says: ‘when they [Plato and Aristotle] entertained themselves by writing their Laws and Politics, they made them by playing; it was the least philosophical and the least serious part of their lives’.
Plato, therefore, considers with irony his own dialogues as a game that imitates the amusement which the creation of the world was for the gods. A late Neoplatonist has expanded the comparison to the whole of Plato’s work.22 In the same way that the creator God has made certain parts of his creation invisible, like souls for example, Plato delivered a part of his teaching in writing and the other part [was] spoken, namely ‘that which he said in his classes (sunousiai)’. One sees that, for this Neoplatonist, the unwritten classes of Plato are superior to the written works, as souls are to bodies.
Finally, the Platonic dialogue is to some extent analogous to tragedy, because, on the one hand, it makes characters speak in such a way that Plato never clearly speaks in his own name. On the other hand, the dialogue is not originally intended to be read by a solitary reader but to be recited in a public reading,23 I would not say in a performance but, in any case, in a spoken form. It is perhaps written consciously in this perspective and the auditor experiences it like a drama, as a momentary event which takes place in time and which is probably only heard once.
All this collection of facts, distinct to Plato or general to his time, obliges us to consider the works that Plato has written as testimonies which, without doubt, have incomparable value in making his thought known to us. But these testimonies do not suffice by themselves. Not only do they refer back to a hidden sense. Above all, they are only a part, only one aspect of Plato’s philosophical activity, and they demand to be clarified by all that we know of Plato’s activity as the head of [the] school.
But what is the place of the oral teaching in this other part of Plato’s activity, that is in his activity as head of the school? What does this systematic schema represent that, in opposing the Dyad to the One, allows the emergence of the Ideas and Numbers? Here, I believe, is a question which also remains open to future research, and I approach it with great caution. Some [readers] will perhaps find this schema very thin or too systematic. But if this theoretical core is relatively thin, it is probably because the system is precisely not an end in itself, it is not intended to deliver all at once a total and exhaustive explanation of reality by the construction of an abstract theoretical edifice, but it has for its end, in each new circumstance, before each new problem which is posed about speech and action, to furnish to the dialectician the means to solve problems in a way that Plato considered to be scientific, recognizing in each case the exact measure according to which the One and the Dyad are mixed, and striving to exactly place each thing under the light of the Idea of the Good. As Konrad Gaiser has clearly shown,24 this method is an infinite enterprise and it is not at all a renunciation of Socratic aporetic, for it makes philosophy discover the perpetual inadequacy of human knowledge in the face of ultimate reality.
1This text was originally published as the French-language Preface to Marie-Dominique Richard, L’enseignement oral de Platon (Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1986), 7–15.
2Cf. the book by Léon Robin, La Théorie des Idées et des Nombres (Paris: F. Alcan, 1908).
3In Victor Goldschmidt, Métaphysique, histoire de la philosophie, Recueil d’études offert à F. Brunner (Neuchâtel: Éditions de la Baconnière, 1981), 230.
4Eric A. Havelock, Aux origines de la civilisation écrite en Occident (Paris: Maspero), 14.
5Arnold J. Toynbee, La Civilisation à l’epreuve (Paris: Gallimard, 1951), 53–54.
6Diogenes Laertius, III, 35–37.
7Eric A. Havelock, ‘Preface’, Plato (Cambridge [MA]: Harvard University Press, 1961).
8Porphyry, Life of Plotinus, 8, 10.
9Plato, Phaedrus, 276 a–e.
10Plato, Republic, 517c.
11Plato, Phaedrus, 276 a–e, with Seventh Letter, 344 b–c
12John P. Lynch, Aristotle’s School: A Study of a Greek Educational Institution, 106–114.
13Clement, Stromates, I, 1, 13, 2.
14Plato, Phaedrus, 276 b.
15Plato, Phaedrus 275 d–e.
16Cf. Jacqueline de Romilly, Histoire et raison chez Thucydides (Paris: Belles Lettres, 1956), 89–106.
17Themistius, Orat., XXIII, 295 c–d.
18Pierre Hadot, ‘Physique et poésie dans la Timée de Platon’, Revue de théologie et de philosophie 115, no. 2 (1983): 126.
19Plato, Phaedrus, 265 c, 276 b.
20Plato, Timaeus, 26 c.
21Plato, Laws, 644 d.
22Cf. Anonymous Prolegomena, edited by Leonard G. Westerink (Amsterdam: Prometheus Trust, 1962), 26–27.
23Diogenes Laertius, III, 35–37.
24Platons ungeschriebene Lehre, 10.
a [Translator’s note] Original: Konrad Gaiser, Protreptik Und Paränese Bei Platon Untersuchungen Zur Form des Platonischen Dialogs (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1959).
b [Translator’s note] Konrad Gaiser, Platons ungeschriebene Lehre: Studien zur systematischen und geschichtlichen Begründung der Wissenschaften in der Platonischen Schule (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1963).
c [Translator’s note] The preceding paragraph did not appear in the version of the ‘Preface’ to Richard’s work which appears in Discours et mode de vie philosophique (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2014) but is found in the 2010 Belles Lettres collection, Études de philosophie ancienne, which we follow here.
d [Translator’s note] More or less literally, “assemblages of words”: agencements de mots.
e [Translator’s note] See Chapter 3 above.
f [Translator’s note] Original: intemporelle.
g [Translator’s note] French: temps de la parole.
h [Translator’s note] Preserving Hadot’s translation of κυλινδεῖται μὲν πανταχοῦ from Phaedrus 275 d–e, the text would read ‘discourse will roll through all sides’, which is not felicitous; the translation, in this case, is our own.
i [Translator’s note] The French noun being bavards.