lamm, julia - schleiermacher as plato scholar

8/12/2019 Lamm, Julia - Schleiermacher as Plato Scholar

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Schleiermacher as Plato ScholarAuthor(s): Julia A. LammSource: The Journal of Religion, Vol. 80, No. 2 (Apr., 2000), pp. 206-239Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1206234.

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Schleiermacher as Plato Scholar*Julia A. Lamm / GeorgetownUniversity

"In fifty years someone else will probably do it better."' Schleiermacher'sprediction regarding his own translation of Plato, if sincere, could nothave been more wrong.2 Now, almost two hundred years later, his transla-tion not only dominates sales of paperback editions of Plato in Germanybut also remains an authoritative translation for scholars.3 As importantas Schleiermacher's translation was the interpretation of Plato he offeredin the accompanying introductions to the Dialogues.4 "Through it,"Wil-helm Dilthey claimed, "the knowledge of Greek philosophy first became

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* Research for this article was supported by a fellowship from the Alexander von Hum-boldt Stiftung (1996-97) and a Summer Faculty Research Grant from Georgetown Univer-sity (1996); in addition to these two institutions, I am also grateful to Humboldt-Universititzu Berlin and the Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften. Most especially,I thank Kurt-Victor Selge, Wolfgang Virmond, and Cilliers Breytenbach for their generousacademic hospitality. I would also like to thank Dawn DeVries, William C. McFadden, S.J.,Elizabeth McKeown, Alexander Sens, Brent Sockness, David Wolfsdorf, and the readers forthe Journal of Religion; their detailed comments on earlier drafts have proved invaluable.1 Schleiermacher to G. A. Reimer, June 1803, in Aus Schleiermacher'seben: In Briefen,4 vols. (Berlin, 1861), 3:349 (hereafter cited as ASL).2 Platons Werke onE Schleiermacher, vols. (Berlin, 1804-28).See Hermann Gauss, Philosophischer andkommentaru denDialogenPlatos, 6 vols. (Bern:Herbert Lang, 1952-61), 1:20-21; and J6rg Jantzen, "Schleiermachers Platon-Ubersetzungund seine Anmerkungen dazu," in Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher, UberdiePhiloso-phie Platons, ed. Peter M. Steiner (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1996), pp. xlv-lviii. Ulrich vonWilamowitz-Moellendorff's minority position that Schleiermacher's translation is "unbear-able" stems in part from his conviction that Plato is "untranslatable" and must be read inthe Greek (Platon:Sein Lebenund seine Werke,3d ed. [Berlin and Frankfurt am Main: Weid-mann, 1948], p. xii).4 Schleiermacher's introductions to the Platonic dialogues have recently been made avail-able in the Steiner edition of UberdiePhilosophiePlatons. The English translation of Schleier-macher's introductions is under the title Introductionso theDialoguesof Plato, trans. WilliamDobson (1836; reprint, New York: Arno Press, 1973). Unless noted otherwise, all transla-tions are my own, and page references for the introductions are to the Meiner edition. Whatin the main text I refer to as the "General Introduction" is cited in the notes as "Einleitung."? 2000 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.0022-4189/2000/8002-0002$02.00

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Schleiermacher as Plato Scholarpossible."5 It is all the more remarkable, therefore, that the English-speaking world remains in a relative state of ignorance concerning oneof Schleiermacher's greatest achievements.6 Forjust as Schleiermacher'sGlaubenslehrerepresented a watershed in the history of Christian thought,and just as his Hermeneutiksignaled a turning point in critical theory, soalso his introduction to Platons Werkemarked a "geological fault" in thephilological world.' Schleiermacher "created a Platonic question," and, indoing so, he changed our assumptions about Plato.8The very idea of undertaking so massive a project as a new translationof the entire corpus of Plato emerged in the context of a philologicalrenaissance in late eighteenth-century Germany. Like the humanism ofthe fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, this new humanism occupied itselfwith careful translations of classic texts. Unlike that earlier Renaissance,however, the new renaissance was not international in character but was

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5 Wilhelm Dilthey, LebenSchleiermachers1870), in GesammelteSchriften,vol. 13, pts. 1 and 2,(hereafter cited as GS, 13/1 or GS, 13/2), ed. Martin Redeker (Gdttingen: Vandenhoeck &Ruprecht, 1970), 13/2, p. 37.6 Gustav-Adolf Krapf's dissertation ("Platonic Dialectics and Schleiermacher's Thought:An Essay towards the Reinterpretation of Schleiermacher" [Ph.D. diss., Yale University,1953]) remains the most in-depth study of Schleiermacher's interpretation of Plato in En-glish, even though it is almost a half century old. Richard B. Brandt (The PhilosophyofSchleiermacher: heDevelopment f His Theoryof Scientificand ReligiousKnowledge[New York:Greenwood, 1968]) only mentions Plato on occasion. Robert R. Williams (SchleiermacherheTheologian:TheConstructionof theDoctrineof God [Philadelphia: Fortress, 1978]) reminds usthat Schleiermacher had been the translator of Plato (p. 14) and compares features ofSchleiermacher's theology with the Parmenides pp. 60-64), but he ignores what Schleier-macher actually wrote about that dialogue; his primary concern is to compare Schleier-macher and Cusanus, who represents a type of Platonism. In contrast, Albert L. Blackwell(Schleiermacher'sarly Philosophyof Life: Determinism,Freedom,and Phantasy [Chico, Calif.:Scholars Press, 1982]) devotes a chapter to "Schleiermacher's Debt to Spinoza and Plato"(pp. 123-36), in which he rehearses the translation project and draws a preliminary sketchof how Schleiermacher had been influenced by Plato. Hans Joachim Krfmer's study ofSchleiermacher's introductions has been translated from the Italian into English (Platoand theFoundationsof Metaphysics:A Work n the Theoryof thePrinciplesand UnwrittenDoctrinesof Plato with a Collectionof the FundamentalDocuments,ed. and trans. John R. Catan [Al-bany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 1990]), but his concern has more to do with the debates concern-ing the direct and indirect Platonic traditions than with understanding Schleiermacher(see Sec. III below). It was my own reference to, but lack of development of, Schleiermacher's"Platonized Spinozism" that led me to investigate the matter further (Julia Lamm, TheLiving God:Schleiermacher'sheologicalAppropriation f Spinoza[University Park: PennsylvaniaState University Press, 1996], pp. 91-94).

7 Heinrich von Stein, SiebenBiicherzur Geschichte es Platonismus:UntersuchungeniberdasSystemdes Plato und sein Verhaltniss ur spaterenTheologieund Philosophie,3 vols. (Gottingen,1862, 1865, 1875; reprint, Frankfurt am Main, 1965), 3:409.8 Ibid., p. 375. According to Holger Thesleff, "Outside the German sphere of influencethere was no 'Platonic Question.' Plato and Platonism were as a rule interpreted along in-herited lines, and little attention was paid to questions of dating or authenticity" (Studiesin Platonic Chronology,Commentationes Humanarum Litterarum no. 70 [Helsinki: SocietasScientiarum Fennica, 1982], p. 3).



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The Journal of Religionspecifically German. Homer, Plato, and Shakespeare were translated intoa self-conscioius and romantic style of German. Such philological activitywas permeated by the sense that only a German, and only the Germanlanguage, could uncover the soul of the classics. This new German renais-sance, moreover, was fueled by the emergence of a new historical con-sciousness. After the revolutionary work on the nature of language byJ. G. Hamann and J. G. Herder in the 1770s, not just texts, but languageitself came to be viewed as fundamentally historical in nature.Inspired by the new movement and destined to bring it further,Friedrich Schlegel deemed the time ripe in terms of the development ofthe German language for a new "artistic" translation of Plato. To helphim in this project, he solicited the aid of none other than his housemateat the time, the young preacher at Charit6 Hospital in Berlin, FriedrichDaniel Ernst Schleiermacher. In the end, the Plato project would outlivethe friendship and would become Schleiermacher's enterprise alone. Itwould also significantly alter the course of Plato research. In retrospect,Schleiermacher's Plato project occupied a unique decade in the historyof German philology. In 1799 the field was open for so daring and monu-mental an enterprise as the one conceived by Schlegel and Schleier-macher; after 1809, the year in which Schleiermacher published thepenultimate volume of Platons Werke,philology became increasingly pro-fessionalized as an independent discipline, and the older generation oftranslators--E A. Wolf, A. W Schlegel, and L. Tieck-came under attackby a new generation. The result, according to R. Steven Turner, was an"alienation of a professional and esoteric philology from broader chan-nels of cultural humanism."9Given the significance of Schleiermacher's contribution, and given thefacts that Schleiermacher had been fully immersed in Plato for arguablythe most formative decade of his career and, as a member of the RoyalAcademy of Sciences in Berlin, continued to be occupied with Platothroughout his career, it is surprising that so little has been written onthe topic of Schleiermacher and Plato.'- The topic indeed appears a rich

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9 R. Steven Turner, "Historicism, Kritik,and the Prussian Professoriate, 1790 to 1840," inPhilologieund Hermeneutikm 19. Jahrhundert I, ed. Mayotte Bollack and Heinz Wismann(Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1983), p. 468.10See, in addition to the works cited above in note 6, Werner Schultz, "Das griechischeEthos in Schleiermachers Reden und Monologen," Neue Zeitschriftfiir ystematische heologieund Religionsphilosophie 0 (1968): 268-88; H. G. Gadamer, "Schleiermacher Platonicien,"Archivesde Philosophe32 (1969): 28-39; Franz Christ, "Schleiermacher zum VerhailtnisvonMythos und Logos bei Platon" (pp. 837-48), and Gunter Scholtz, "Schleiermacher und diePlatonische Ideenlehre" (pp. 849-74), both in InternationalerSchleiermacher-Kongress984,ed. Kurt-Victor Selge (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1985); Eilert Herms, "Platonismus undAristotelismus in Schleiermachers Ethik," in Schleiermacher'shilosophyand the PhilosophicalTradition, d. Sergio Sorrentino (Lewiston, Maine: Edwin Mellen, 1992), pp. 3-26.



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Schleiermacher as Plato Scholarone to pursue. Schleiermacher had on more than one occasion utteredsuch declarations as, "There is no author who has affected me as muchand who has initiated me into the holiest of holies-not only of philoso-phy, but of all humanity-as this divine man.""IAnd Dilthey argued thatPlato, along with Spinoza and Shaftesbury, was a determining philosophi-cal force in Schleiermacher's thought.12 Nevertheless, the fact remainsthat the topic is an elusive one made even more so by a basic confusionover the questions involved.Two different approaches to the topic of Schleiermacher and Plato mustbe distinguished. One approach focuses on Schleiermacher in his capacityas theologian or philosopher and asks, In what ways was Schleiermacherinfluenced by Plato or Platonism? The problem is that there are no defin-itive texts to which we may appeal in any systematic fashion, and as a re-sult most who have addressed this question have done so by focusing ona particular topic, whether that be dialectics, ethics, or education.'3 A sec-ond approach focuses on Schleiermacher in his capacity as philologistand asks, How did Schleiermacher understand Plato? For the most part,the latter approach has been taken by philologists or philosophers.'4However, unless and until this second question is addressed, the first ques-tion cannot be responsibly answered. In other words, the logically priorquestion is, Which Plato influenced Schleiermacher? Forthere were manyconstructions of Plato, and many Platonisms, which Schleiermacher re-jected.In the present essay, the first part of a larger study entitled Schleiermach-er'sPlato, I shall take the second approach and focus on Schleiermacheras a scholar of Plato, thereby hoping to fill a lacuna in Schleier-macher research, especially in the English-speaking world. That Schleier-macher changed the course of Plato interpretation is incontrovertible andhardly makes for a new thesis-except it is a neglected and forgotten one,especially by those of us who are not philologists. My aim, therefore, is toargue-by means of an analysis of Schleiermacher's "General Introduc-

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" Schleiermacher to C. G. von Brinckmann, June 9, 1800, in E D. E. Schleiermacher,KritischeGesamtausgabehereafter cited as KGA), pt. 5, Briefwechsel, d. Andreas Arndt andWolfgang Virmond (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1985-), 4:82.12 See GS, 13/1, pp. 166-79; 13/2, p. 43.13 See (respectively) Krapf (n. 6 above); Paul Kroker, "Die Tugendlehre Schleiermachersmit spezieller Berticksichtigung der Tugendlehre Platos" (Ph.D. diss., Universitdit zu Er-

langen, 1889); Norbert Vorsmann, Die BedeutungdesPlatonismusfiir denAufbauderErziehung-stheoriebeiSchleiermachernd Herbart(Dtisseldorf: A. Henn, 1968).14 See the three introductory essays to Uber die PhilosophiePlatons (n. 3 above): AndreasArndt, "Schleiermacher und Platon" (pp. vii-xxii), Peter M. Steiner, "Zur Kontroverse umSchleiermachers Platon" (pp. xxiii-xliv), and Jantzen (n. 3 above); see also Thomas Alexan-der Szlezaik,"Schleiermachers 'Einleitung' zur Platon-OJbersetzungvon 1804: Ein Vergleichmit Tiedemann und Tennemann," Antikeund Abendland43 (1997): 46-62. Of these fourscholars only Arndt is a Schleiermacher specialist.



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Schleiermacher as Plato ScholarSchlegel had clearly been the leader of the project.19 His name gaveweight to the project. It was he who had invited Schleiermacher to help

in the project, he who had evidently dictated the original plan, and hewho had undertaken negotiations with the publisher Karl Frommann.According to the agreement reached by Schlegel and Frommann in latewinter 1800, the Plato translation was to be a two-volume work, with thefirst volume appearing around Easter 1801. Schlegel communicated thedetails of the agreement in a letter to Schleiermacher and inquiredwhether he would like to be named both in the announcement and onthe title page.20 That Schlegel even had to ask such a question is curious;that, rather than waiting for a reply, he unilaterally decided that only hisname would appear in the announcement is startling. His explanationafter the fact was that "in the current Announcement I prefer to benamed alone; two names-that is too much for people and unnervesthem."21Schlegel's reaction to Schleiermacher's protest, which had ar-rived too late to effect any change, was one of "astonishment." He saw noneed to apologize and remained convinced that he had done nothingwrong, but he did express regret that the beginning of the project hadbeen tainted by Schleiermacher's displeasure and offered reassurancethat his friend would be named on the title page and in a special fore-word. He tried tojustify his decision with a rhetorical question that antici-pated the eventual fate of the project: "How can two translate Plato to-gether?"22In a letter to his friend Carl Gustav von Brinckmann, Schleiermachermentioned the episode over the announcement without any apparent bit-terness.23 Nevertheless, the episode remained a sensitive issue betweenSchlegel and Schleiermacher, and in retrospect it proved to be a tellingsign of tensions that had already crept into the friendship during thesummer of 1799, as well as an omen of the profound disagreements thatwould define their collaboration on the Plato project. Schlegel's insatiableneed for money led to his taking on more projects than could be com-

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19There is some evidence to suggest that the two had conceived the project togetherduring the first year of rooming together. However, Ernst Behler, the editor of KritischeFriedrich-Schlegel-AusgabeMfinchen, Paderborn, Wien, 1958-), argues that Schlegel hadbeen occupied with a translation of Plato as early as 1796, long before he met Schleier-macher (see 19:536).20 See E Schlegel to Schleiermacher, March 10, 1800, KGA,pt. 5, 3:412.21 E Schlegel to Schleiermacher, March 21, 1800, KGA,pt. 5, 3:431-32.22 E Schlegel to Schleiermacher, ca. April 4, 1800, KGA,pt. 5, 3:455.23 He went on to say that the work on Plato "fills me with enthusiasm, for I am deeply,inexpressibly imbued with veneration of Plato ever since I have known him-but at thesame time I stand in holy awe before him, and I fear having gone beyond the limits ofmy powers. May heaven help us" (Schleiermacher to Brinckmann, April 22, 1800, KGA,pt. 5, 3:486).



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The Journal of Religioncalled Schlegel to task: "I must frankly confess to you, that, given the wayin which you treat the Plato project and my part therein, you do every-thing possible to spoil any desire for the whole thing.... You showno consideration for my activity: no replies to my criticisms of you, noshadow of ajudgment about anything from me, ... so that I do not evenknow whether you have read it or not. This lies beyond all excuse.""7Inshort, Schleiermacher had come to the conclusion that Schlegel had notonly lost control of the material but had lost credibility as the chief con-tributor as well.The rest of 1801 brought further disagreements but also some conces-sions and new promises. The two were reunited in Berlin for a few weeksover the new year and were able then to reaffirm their friendship. Ac-cording to Schleiermacher, however, no progress was made on the Platoproject during that visit. In 1802 more deadlines were missed, Schlegelmoved to Paris with Dorothea Mendelssohn Veit, Schleiermacher took aposition in Stolpe, and Frommann gave more than one ultimatum. InMarch 1803, Schleiermacher broached the subject of the inevitable andgently urged Schlegel to hand the project over, which Schlegel finally didin a letter dated May 5, 1803: "Friend, I lay [the Plato project] in yourhand. ... I entrust now to you the decision of the whole affair, accordingto the particular items which here follow."38 n what followed, Schlegelassumed responsibility for the money owed to Frommann, retained hisright to write the introduction should Schleiermacher choose to adopthis ordering, and tried to persuade Schleiermacher to resist the tempta-tion to find "completeness" in the dialogues. That summer, Frommann,too, pulled out of the project. Schleiermacher was therefore free to ar-range a new contract with his friend and publisher, Georg Andreas Rei-mer. "At east," Schleiermacher wrote to Reimer, "there will be more unityin the whole because Friedrich has pulled out."39The new deadline wasset for Easter 1804, three years after the original publication date.In his November 1803 "Report" for the forthcoming translation ofPlato, Schleiermacher emphasized the continuity of his translation withthe project announced three and a half years earlier; in large part hedid so because he had to gain the respect of the literary and philologi-cal world that had eagerly been anticipating Schlegel's translation and"Study of Plato."40Schleiermacher explained that, although Schlegel had

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37 Schleiermacher to E Schlegel, April 27, 1801, ASL, 3:271-72.38 E Schlegel to Schleiermacher, May 5, 1803, ASL, 3:340.39 Schleiermacher to Reimer, November 11, 1803, ASL, 3:370.40 Schleiermacher, "Anzeige die Ubersetzung des Platon betreffend," in Intelligenzblatt erAllgemeinenLiteratur-Zeitung,November 12, 1803 (in G. Meckenstock, "Historische Einftih-rung,"KGA,pt. 1,SchriftenundEntwiirfe,3:civ-cv; also inArndt [n. 14above], pp. xviii-xix, n.).



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Schleiermacher as Plato Scholarfailed to mention it, he had been involved in the project since its incep-tion and had gained the respect of two established philologists, Heindorfand G. L. Spalding. Whereas Schlegel had felt it necessary to end thecontract, Schleiermacher found himself "incapable of leaving the work;to the contrary, I find myself compelled in all ways to attempt it alone."He was confident that this "feeling of necessity" would carry him throughwhatever difficulties, including his own limitations, he would encounter.Such modest disclaimers, however, belied the fact that Schleiermacherhad in the previous three years gained tremendous confidence as a trans-lator and interpreter of Plato. He concluded his report saying that thefriends of philosophy would be able to see for themselves where Schlegeland he were agreed, and where they deviated from one another.How precisely did they deviate? As Schleiermacher understood it, ithad less to do with their different opinions regarding the ordering andauthenticity of the dialogues than with different views of the method andtask of philology itself. Schleiermacher reproached Schlegel and Schle-gel's student, Friedrich Ast, for neglecting the painstaking, detailedhistorical-critical work of philology.41 In 1802, in his first publication onPlato-a very critical, anonymously written review of Ast's book on thePhaedrus-Schleiermacher articulated the task, method, and identity ofthe philologist, contrasting it with that of the idealist philosopher. Thereare, of course, the predictable criticisms that are grist for the mill in mostbook reviews: Ast claims for himself a discovery made by someone else,he does not always substantiate his claims, he is immodest and immature,and so on. In Schleiermacher's harsher criticisms of Ast, however, we findcareful formulations of various complaints already voiced in his corre-spondence with Schlegel. Echoing his earlier admonition to Schlegel that"philosophy and the higher grammar should therein revise each other,"Schleiermacher in his review of Ast drew a fundamental distinction be-tween philosophy, which assigns its own meaning, and philology, whichtries to recover original meaning. Schleiermacher charged that "the chiefstriving of [Ast] is to comment on the thought of Plato from the idealistic

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41 Friedrich Ast was a student of E Schlegel and E W.J. Schelling. According to Dilthey, itwas only through his personal influence on Ast that Schlegel left his mark on Plato scholar-ship (see GS, 13/2, pp. 44-45). Ast went on to make a name for himself as a Plato researcher,but Schleiermacher remained as critical of his later work as of his early work. In the secondedition of his Platons Werke 1817), Schleiermacher added numerous criticisms of Ast. Inhis Academy Addresses of 1829, "On the Concept of Hermeneutics, with Reference toE A. Wolf's Instructions and Ast'sTextbook," Schleiermacher was still contending with Ast'sviews (see Schleiermacher:Hermeneutikund Kritik, ed. Manfred Frank [Frankfurt am Main:Suhrkamp, 1977], pp. 309-46, trans. James Duke and Jack Forstman, in Hermeneutics:The HandwrittenManuscripts,ed. Heinz Kimmerle [Missoula, Mont.: Scholars Press, 1977],pp. 175-214).



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The Journal of Religionphilosophy," and this only leads him "to misunderstand and completelymisinterpret Plato."42

If the task of the philologist is to understand and interpret (in this case)Plato, then the method employed by the philologist must be critical andhistorical. That is to say, first, the philologist can bring no content, noprior doctrinal commitments, to the text. Ast's goal, however, was to find"his own ideas in Plato,"43and he took "as his starting point the principleof idealist philosophy and gladly ascribes this to Plato."44Second, thephilological method for Schleiermacher involves close grammatical andcomparative work within the text. Each part must be isolated and workedthrough with "exactitude and completeness" because "the field of philol-ogy is so infinite, and its entire thriving rests on each part," so much sothat if the careful work of attending to the details is not done, the wholecannot be understood.45 Ast, however, "lays aside the difficulties of inter-pretation and the historical tasks that present themselves."46 Third, as thislast criticism suggests, the philological method is inescapably historical inthat it requires a deep and thorough investigation of the linguistic, liter-ary, and conceptual backgrounds of the texts in question, as well as anacquaintance "with everything that has already been said about thetopic."47 n Ast's work, however, there is "a complete lack of historical in-vestigations."4sIn sum, Ast's De Platonis Phddrowas an interesting expres-sion of the newest philosophy but had little to do with "what Plato says."49Ast practiced "Conjecturalkritik,"50ut the true philologist is one who en-gages in true Kritik.That task Schleiermacher took upon himself in hisPlatons Werke.The first volume of the long-awaited Plato translation appeared in1804 and included the Phaedrus,Lysis,Protagoras,and Laches,along withSchleiermacher's "General Introduction" and the introductions to the in-dividual dialogues. The second volume to the first part appeared in thefollowing year and included the Charmides,Euthyphro,Parmenides,and anappendix, which included dialogues that Schleiermacher either took tobe secondary to the core canon (the Apology,Crito,Ion, and LesserHippias)or ruled to be inauthentic (GreaterHippias,Minos, and Alcibiades I) It was

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42 Schleiermacher, "Rezension von Friedrich Ast: De Platonis Phddro (Jena, 1801),"Litteratur-Zeitung,ol. 7, no. 30 (April 12, 1802); KGA,pt. 1, 3:474.43 KGA,pt. 1, 3:477.44 Ibid.,p. 471.45 Ibid., p. 470.46 Ibid., p. 469.47 Ibid., p. 470.48 Ibid.,p. 473.49 Ibid., p. 478.50 Ibid., p. 469.



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The Journal of Religioncritics, are revisiting Schleiermacher's Plato.57 In what ways, therefore,did Schleiermacher's introductions mark something fundamentally new?II. CENTRAL THEMES IN THE "GENERAL INTRODUCTION"According to Schleiermacher, the goal of his exposition is not to offer ananalysis of Plato's philosophy itself so much as it is "to make it possiblefor each reader, by means of an immediate and more exact knowledgeof Plato's works, to come to his own view of Plato's Geist and teachings,whether that view be entirely new or just more complete."58This is pos-sible only if the "natural sequence" and "a necessary relation of thesedialogues to one another" is discovered.59Schleiermacher, therefore, tookupon himself the task of restoring the original order of and relationsamong the dialogues-a task that he considered to be his unique contri-bution to the field. As it turned out, it was his method, more than hisordering, that came to be recognized as his lasting contribution to Platostudies. That method was characterized by four interconnected themes:a development and special application of the internal method; an inter-pretation of Plato as artist; an insistence on the necessary relation be-tween form and content; and, last, a determination of authenticity andorder in light of the first three themes. In developing each of thesethemes, Schleiermacher departed decisively from his predecessors-even, and perhaps most consciously, from his immediate predecessor,Wilhelm Gottlieb Tennemann, whose study of Plato nevertheless in-formed his own.60InternalMethodThe first methodological moment in the "General Introduction" involvesa philological task, which could no longer be understood as a strictlygrammatical exercise insofar as it demanded historical tools of investiga-tion. The modern philologist had to have so intimate a knowledge of the

51 See, e.g., David Wolfsdorf, "Aporia n Plato'sCharmides, Laches, and Lysis"(Ph.D. diss.,University of Chicago, 1997), pp. 1-39. To a significant extent it has been Schleiermacher'scritics who have brought him back into the conversation: Thomas Alexander Szlezaikac-knowledges that the General Introduction remains an "intellectually demanding and high-quality reading of the modern dialogue theory" (Platon und die SchriftlichkeiterPhilosophie[Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1985], p. 339); see also Kramer's critique of"Modern Schleiermacherianism," in Plato and theFoundations n. 6 above), pp. 3-74.58 Schleiermacher, "Einleitung" (n. 4 above), p. 28.59 Ibid., p. 42.60 This assessment differs from that of Szlezaik, who has challenged the "masterpiece"status of Schleiermacher's "General Introduction" by listing twelve ways in which Schleier-macher's insights are dependent on Tennemann's (see "Schleiermachers 'Einleitung"' [n. 14above], pp. 51-53).

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Schleiermacher as Plato Scholarlanguage as to recognize the particular ways in which an author had usedand modified it. This entailed a historical knowledge of the language andthe culture that produced it. The goal, Schleiermacher explained, is "toadduce something about the scientific state of the Hellenes at the timewhen Plato began his career, about the progress of the language in rela-tion to philosophical ideas, about texts of the same genre that were avail-able at the time and the probable extent of their circulation.""' WhatSchleiermacher called for was a rigorous application of the new Kritik,not unlike that being done in Biblical scholarship, to Plato studies.62 Hewanted to get behind the tradition in order to discover the authenticPlato. Such a Kritikin turn required an examination of the philosophicalgrounds of interpretation, something Plato scholars had not yet under-taken. In answer to his own call, Schleiermacher developed an "internal"approach to the Platonic texts.Schleiermacher's development of an internal method is best under-stood against the backdrop of eighteenth-century Plato research andwhat E. N. Tigerstedt has termed the "new situation" in Germany: "Inthe second half of the eighteenth century, the rejection of the Neoplatonicinterpretation of Plato thus became more and more accepted by scholarsand the general public.... It was now taken for granted that any inter-pretation of Plato had to be based above all upon his own works-exclu-sively even some would have added."'6 According to Tigerstedt, the "newsituation" reached back to Gottfried W. E von Leibniz but began really,at least on the popular level, with Jacob Brucker, whose program wascarried out in a more philosophically responsible manner by DieterichTiedemann and by his successor at Marburg, Wilhelm Gottlieb Tenne-mann. It was Tennemann's major work, SystemderplatonischenPhilosophie(1792), that proved to be most influential on Schleiermacher's own ap-proach to the dialogues.Tennemann had acknowledged the important contributions of Bruckerand Tiedemann, but he claimed that his own study of Plato was entirelynew because he was the first who, eschewing all dogmatic interests andrelying on Plato alone to be his guide, sought "the system and the historyof the philosophy of Plato."64Tennemann was right in claiming something

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61 Schleiermacher, "Einleitung," p. 27.62 See Harald Schnur, Schleiermachers ermeneutikund ihre Vorgeschichtem 18. Jahrhundert:StudienzurBibelauslegung, uHamann,HerderundE Schlegel Stuttgart and Weimar:J. B. Metz-ler, 1994); and William Baird, Historyof New Testament esearch,vol. 1, FromDeism o Tibingen(Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1992).63 E. N. Tigerstedt, The Decline and Fall of the NeoplatonicInterpretation f Plato: An Out-line and Some Observations,Commentationes Humanarum Litterarum no. 52 (Helsinki-Helsingfors: Societas Scientiarum Fennica, 1974), p. 63.64 W. G. Tennemann, SystemderplatonischenPhilosophie,2 vols. (Leipzig, 1792), 1:x.



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The Journalof Religionnew for himself, but the real difference between his work and that of hispredecessors had less to do with setting aside neo-Platonism (since theyhad attempted that, too) than with his conviction that Kant's critical phi-losophy had inalterably changed our understanding of history and,hence, our understanding of philosophy. So convinced was he of the newphilosophy that he stated in his foreword, "One can therefore accept thatthe more truth a system contains, the more it must approach the criticalphilosophy, and conversely, the more it approaches critical philosophy, thetruer it must be. And this relation is found in the Platonic philosophy."''65Schleiermacher expresses appreciation for the new research of the pre-ceding century (the "spitere Kritik")66 insofar as it had removed the worstmisunderstandings of Plato, had made some progress toward a historicalunderstanding of the dialogues, and had removed the most obviouslyinauthentic dialogues from the list of Plato'sworks. Nevertheless, the newresearch had not gone far enough and thus lacked "full understand-ing."67The problem was that in their reluctance to question the old canonand in their failure to give reasons for accepting some dialogues as au-thentic, modern critics remained uncritical. Only Tennemann's workstood apart because it broke with the conventional categories and siftedthrough the vast body of biographical material on Plato. This, coupledwith the fact that his was "the first somewhat thorough attempt to dis-cover the chronological sequence of the Platonic dialogues from varioushistorical traces left in them,'"68ffered a real chance for finding a naturalorder in the dialogues.Indeed, Schleiermacher so respected Tennemann's historical methodthat he opened his "General Introduction" by referring the reader to Ten-nemann's "Leben des Platon," which constituted the first part of System.Because he saw no way to improve on Tennemann's biography of Plato,Schleiermacher decided against undertaking his own and described hisstudy as a "counterpart" (Gegenstiick)o Tennemann's.69Such a descrip-tion, however, is not unambiguous. His two direct references to Tenne-mann in the "General Introduction" certainly suggest that by Gegenstiickhe means a "companion piece"-a work that corresponds with and com-plements Tennemann's work. This interpretation is supported by another,indirect reference: Schleiermacher, in calling his investigation a "supple-ment" (Ergdnzungsstiick),learly means that it is a supplement to Tenne-mann's work.70The chief difference between them, as Schleiermacher saw

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65 Ibid.,p. v.66 Schleiermacher, "Einleitung" (n. 4 above), p. 50.67 Ibid.,p. 29.68 Ibid., p. 47.69 Ibid., p. 48; cf. pp. 25-26.70 Ibid., p. 38. See editor's note.



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Schleiermacher as Plato Scholarit, was that Tennemann's intention was "not so much to discover, bymeans of this method [of a critical and historical researcher], the real andessential relation of the works of Plato to one another, as it was to discernin general their dates, so that an earlier, incomplete work will not be mis-takenly used in a presentation of the philosophy of the mature and com-plete Plato.""7But in fact the difference between them would prove to bemore profound than this passage indicates-so profound that, muchmore than supplementing Tennemann's work, Schleiermacher's study su-perseded it. To the degree that Schleiermacher intended this, his workon Plato is a "counterpart" in another sense of the term-it stands inopposition to, or at least in tension with, Tennemann's work.Whereas Tennemann had relied on external evidence or historicaltraces, Schleiermacher planned to rely primarily on internal evidence,using external evidence as a "natural test.""72Although necessary, externaltraces are not in themselves sufficient because they do not address thenatural relation between dialogues, they are more subject to accidentalconditions, and, strictly speaking, they may not "extend past the life ofSocrates."'7 More to the point, Schleiermacher was skeptical about whatwe can learn from historical traces. So little is known of Plato's life "thatlittle can be gained for the dating and ordering of his writings, and atthe very most, we can conjecture where the former series interrupts thelatter."74Not only is the internal method less subject to what is accidentalor circumstantial, but it also allows the entire corpus to be viewed to-gether. Nevertheless, Schleiermacher was aware that the internal methodby itself is also insufficient. He cited the example of James Geddes who,although he came upon the promising idea "that certain dialogues ofPlato reciprocally explain each other," made no attempt to offer a chro-nology, thereby rendering his conclusions useless.75The internal investi-gation needs the counterweight of whatever external evidence exists.Ideally, when viewed together and compared with precision, the exter-nal and the internal series should corroborate each other.76 In reality,however, because there are so few external historical markers, the inter-nal indicators-the authentic words and texts of Plato-become the pri-mary source for understanding Plato. For Schleiermacher, the externaland internal methods are held together in the philological task. Althoughclearly indebted to the new historical method of the Enlightenment,

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"7Ibid., pp. 47-48.72 Ibid.,p. 48.73 Ibid.74 Ibid., pp. 26-27.75 Ibid., p. 46. See James Geddes, An Essayon the Composition nd Manner of Writingof theAntients,ParticularlyPlato (Glasgow, 1748), pp. 104, 114-43.76 See Schleiermacher, "Einleitung" (n. 4 above), p. 48.



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The Journal of ReligionSchleiermacher was also critical of its undue confidence in being able toknow the past. So he developed a method that, while historical and criti-cal, respected the scarcity of empirical evidence without falling into skep-ticism. In applying his internal method, Schleiermacher promised toframe new questions, to suspect any assumptions, and to let the authenticPlatonic texts be his guide. Indeed, he rejected many accepted schemasand authorities; although he relied heavily on Aristotle, he gave philo-sophical and historical reasons for doing so. Most important, he suppliedthe hermeneutical theory that previous attempts lacked. A key elementto that theory, which would have a profound effect on subsequent schol-arship, was the view of Plato as artist.Plato as ArtistSchleiermacher was convinced that his new method would not only leadthe lay reader into a more profound encounter with the dialogues, butwould also alter the experts' understanding, since it took as its funda-mental orientation the view of Plato as "philosophical artist."" Their in-sights, he promised, even if not completely altered, will be "better con-nected and gain more range and unity."'"78his understanding of Platoas artist was the interpretive key that would unlock the mysteries of thedialogues because with it, and only with it, could Plato's work be viewedas a whole, and not just as any whole but as an artistic whole. That is tosay, there is an "essential unity"79 to all the dialogues to which previousinterpreters had been blind because their approach to Plato's thoughtwas either too fragmentary or too systematic.At one extreme, there were those who had presented the dialogues ina piecemeal fashion and who thus characterized Plato as a mere dialec-tician, "more eager to refute others than capable of, or inclined toward,producing a well-grounded edifice of his own.""8Schleiermacher quicklydismissed such an approach because it betrayed a "total lack of under-standing."8 At the other extreme, there were those who appealed to somehidden, unwritten (esoteric) tradition of Plato in order to fill the gapsand inconsistencies left in the written (exoteric) tradition. Schleiermacherdistinguished ancient varieties of esotericism, judging the "so-called neo-Platonists"82to be the most praiseworthy, but he was much more con-

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77 Ibid., p. 28.78 Ibid.79 Ibid., p. 31.80 Ibid., p. 32.81 Ibid.82 Ibid.,p. 35.



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Schleiermacher as Plato Scholarcerned with the modern version, the main proponent of which was noneother than Tennemann." The reasons for Schleiermacher's suspicions ofthe esoteric tradition follow logically from his methodological commit-ments. In a word, whether in its traditional or modern form, the appealto an esoteric Platonic tradition was (in fact or in effect) precritical. Privi-leging the oral over the written tradition did not lend itself to textual orhistorical criticism.84Modern interpreters of Plato faced a serious dilemma. In rejecting neo-Platonism, did they also have to relinquish the notion that there was aunity to Plato'sthought? Most scholars at the time did not think so. Sometried to ground that unity in what Schleiermacher considered to be toosubordinate a principle;85others, convinced that there was some unifyingsystem but unable to find it, imposed their own. Schleiermacher deemedboth such attempts to be as untenable as conceding that Plato's philoso-phy was fragmentary. The essential unity of Plato's thought was, rather,to be found not in a particular doctrine, but in Plato himself-in hisartistic genius. Hence, his works should be interpreted not as a system,but as an artistic whole. Whereas in a system the various parts are oftenrandomly arranged,86 in a work of art the parts are arranged accordingto "natural sequence" and "necessary relation."87What is more, an artisticwhole, unlike a system, requires an aesthetic response on the part of thebeholder in order to be understood. Readers, Schleiermacher warned,must investigate with their own inner activity,otherwise the dialogues willremain foreign objects, unrelated to each other and inconsequential tothe reader.To illustrate further what he meant by this, Schleiermacher employedone of his favorite metaphors, that of an organic body. When we viewsomething as a living body, we realize that the passive knowledge pro-duced by "dissection" is not adequate, and we are driven to discover thenatural and essential relations and thus to acknowledge the vital role of

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83 Tennemann maintained that Plato "had a double philosophy, an external one and aninternal or secret one" (System n. 64 above], 1:137). Tigerstedt also identifies Tennemannas the main subject of Schleiermacher's criticisms on this point (see Decline and Fall [n. 63above], p. 6).84 At the same time, it is probably also true that Schleiermacher's move in rejecting oraltradition was not due solely to historical-critical interests but was an authentically Protestant

move. As Martin Luther had before him, Schleiermacher insisted that what is necessary isalready given in the text and that the oral tradition brings nothing new.85 He cited the example of Johann August Eberhard, his former professor at the Univer-sity of Halle, who appealed to the didactic function of the dialogues-namely, the formationof youths into virtuous citizens (see Schleiermacher, "Einleitung," p. 46).86 See Schleiermacher, "Einleitung," pp. 29-30.87 Ibid.,p. 42.



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The Journal of Religionthe seemingly most insignificant parts.88When we apply this method tothe Platonic dialogues, we can finally re-member or restore the "limbs"(or particular dialogues) "to their natural connection." Then the dia-logues will finally be seen as constituting "increasingly more completepresentations which gradually developed Plato's ideas, so that while everydialogue is seen not only as a whole in itself, but also in its connectionwith the rest, Plato may at last be understood as a philosopher and aperfect artist."89 The somatic metaphor also allowed Schleiermacher toaccount for occasional or accidental pieces, which do not really expressthe "free activity"90of the author, and to address other notorious difficul-ties in Plato interpretation, such as the relation between the two parts ofthe Phaedrus. Plato, Schleiermacher argued, "leaves nothing to chanceor blind fate, but with him everything is proportioned to, and active inaccordance with, the full range" of his thought.91 Even in the most trivialof passages, Plato's art may be discerned.This view of Plato as artist includes one further and very importantdimension that distinguished Schleiermacher's interpretation from botheighteenth- and nineteenth-century interpretations. When Schleier-macher argued that the dialogues are essentially connected, he meantthat they lead naturally and necessarily from one to the other. There isin the dialogues a pedagogical progression of ideas proceeding "from thefirst excitement of the original and guiding ideas, up to an all but per-fected presentation of particular sciences."92 This is necessarily the case,Schleiermacher explained,For [Plato]cannot advance furtherin another dialogue unless he supposes theeffectproposedin an earlier one to have been produced,so that the samesubjectwhichis completed n the terminationof the one, must be supposedas thebegin-ning and foundationof another.Now if Plato ended withseparateexpositionsofthe severalphilosophicalsciences, it might then be supposed that he had alsoadvancedeach for itself in gradualprogression,and we should be compelledtolook for two separateclassesof dialogues,an ethicaland a physicalseries. But ashe representsthem as a connected whole, . . . so also are the preparations orthem united in like manner,and made by consideringtheir commonprinciplesand laws,and there are thereforenot severalunconnectedand collaterallypro-

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88 Schleiermacher takes his cue here from Socrates: "Every speech must be put togetherlike a living creature, with a body of its own; it must be neither without head nor withoutlegs; and it must have a middle and extremities that are fitting both to one another andto the whole work" (Plato, Phaedrus 264c, trans. Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff[Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett, 1995], p. 62).

89 Schleiermacher, "Einleitung" (n. 4 above), pp. 38-39.90 Ibid., p. 57.91 Schleiermacher, "Einleitung zum Phaidros"(1804), in Uberdie PhilosophiePlatons (n. 3above), p. 77.92 Schleiermacher, "Einleitung," p. 42.



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Schleiermacheras PlatoScholargressing series of PlatonicDialogues,but only one single one, comprehendingevery thing in it.93According to Schleiermacher, this pedagogical progression of ideas deter-mined the natural order of the dialogues. To view Plato as an artist is to viewhim as a great teacher who already had in mind the full body of materialto be communicated to the student, as well as the course best suited tocarry the student along, before he sat down to write the dialogues.This didactic theory of the sequence of the dialogues stands in contrastto a developmental interpretation, according to which Plato's doctrineswere presumed to have changed and matured throughout the course ofhis life and writing. Those who held such a developmental view, such asTennemann and, later, Karl Friedrich Hermann, sought the original or-der of the dialogues in part so that they could isolate the mature worksof the "real"Plato.94As a result, the significance of the earlier dialogueswas diminished. Schleiermacher allowed no such diminishment. For him,the first dialogue, the Phaedrus,contained the "seeds"from which all phil-osophical doctrines unfolded.95 If an idea was not fully formed in an earlydialogue, that is because the student was not yet prepared to receive it,not because anything was lacking in Plato's philosophy.

From this follows yet another principle for discovering the original or-dering of the dialogues-namely, the progressive relation between mythand dialectics. Inasmuch as myth stands in tension with history, it was ahermeneutical conundrum for those engaged in historical-critical re-search. Schleiermacher's notion of the pedagogical progression of ideashelped him solve the problem of myth in Plato rather tidily. Plato, fullyunderstanding the power of myth to excite ideas, introduced a philosoph-ical principle at first mythically and then, having aroused the student'simagination, developed the myth into scientific, or "dialectic,"form. And

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93 Ibid., pp. 42-43; Dobson (n. 4 above), p. 19.94 In a lengthy discussion of the relation of his work to Schleiermacher's, Hermann ex-plained that, whereas he is firmly convinced of Schleiermacher's "picture of a living organicdevelopment" and of the need for a scientific approach beginning from this assumption, he(unlike Schleiermacher) took that to mean the notion of development had to be applied toPlato himself. Plato, Hermann argued, could not have had the full scope of his philosophicaldoctrines in mind before he began writing. A truly historical (in contrast to Schleiermacher's"pseudo-historical") perspective forces us to admit that he must have come under the in-fluences of his time, which is to say,his own understanding must have undergone develop-ment (see Karl Friedrich Hermann, Geschichte nd System erPlatonischenPhilosophie Heidel-berg, 1839], p. 351). Schleiermacher was not unambiguous on this point. He certainlyrealized that a historical-critical approach necessarily had to view its object as any otherpiece of literature, and he claimed to reject any position that "deprived [Plato] of a rightenjoyed by every one else, that of correcting or reversing his ideas even after he has publiclyvoiced them" ("Einleitung," p. 57). At the same time, his view of Plato as artist seems not toallow for any essential change.95Schleiermacher, "Einleitung zum Phaidros,"p. 87.



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The Journal of Religionso, what "is anticipated mythically more often than not appears later inits scientific form."96 Interpreting Plato therefore requires close attentionto form.Formand ContentBefore Schleiermacher, it had been a common assumption that the dia-logical form proved a hindrance to understanding Plato'sessential philo-sophical doctrines. Even Tennemann had not been able to break fromthis older model of interpretation. His overriding interest had been todiscover the system in Plato's thought, and he considered the dialogicalform to be the chief difficulty in achieving his goal.97To his credit, heacknowledged the advantages of the dialogical form: it allowed "for thepresentation of truths, for the development of concepts and propositions,for the refutation of objections, and generally for the production of per-suasion";98 moreover, it allowed Plato to utter dangerous truths. Yet forTennemann it remained the case that this form "becomes somewhat wide-running and boring;... Why did Plato choose precisely this form?"99The only answer he could come up with was simply that Plato "could notdo everything" and therefore had left much of his task to Aristotle '00Tennemann, having made a distinction between a philosophical and anaesthetic point of view, clearly opted for the former, using content, order,and doctrine, rather than form, as his chief criteria for judging what be-longs to the Platonic system.'0' The dialogical form, he said, is only the"clothing" (Einkleidung)of pure doctrine.'02Although he did not mention Tennemann, Schleiermacher vehementlyrejected such a "disparaging view" of the dialogue form as a completefailure to understand Plato'swork.'03 If, as modern research claimed, wemust rely entirely on the authentic writings of Plato, it would not do tobe so dismissive of them. Rather than presuming the dialogical form tobe some easily discarded embellishment, Schleiermacher proposed thatthe connection of the dialogues and the meaning of their content besought precisely through an appreciation of their form. Such a bold ap-proach was really a natural consequence of the view of Plato as artist: itsimply made no sense to judge a work of art apart from its form. Here

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96 Schleiermacher, "Einleitung," p. 65. He goes on to argue that individual myths aredeveloped and formed out of one, Platonic Grundmythosp. 66).97 See Tennemann, System n. 64 above), pp. xv-xvi, xxiv.98 Ibid., p. 126.99Ibid.100Ibid., p. 147.101See ibid., pp. 125, 144.102 Ibid., pp. 86, 89, 117, 125, and 127.103 Schleiermacher, "Einleitung" (n. 4 above), p. 32.



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Schleiermacher as Plato Scholaragain the somatic metaphor came into play. Just as the parts of a livingbody can be understood only in vital connection with one another, soPlato's philosophy "is inseparable in regard to its form and content, andeach sentence is rightly understood only in its own place, and within theconnections and restrictions, that Plato established for it."'104 Hence, instark contrast to Tennemann, Schleiermacher insisted that language andcontent were not sufficient forjudging authenticity or order.Another crite-rion, form ("theform and composition in the whole"),105 was also required.Such an appreciation of form followed from the historical task, asSchleiermacher understood it. The interpreter must have so comprehen-sive a grasp of the language during a given era as to be able to recognizean author's innovative use of the language: "Whoever does not have suchknowledge of the poor state of the language for philosophical purposesso as to feel where and how Plato is confined by it and where he himselfstruggles to expand it further will necessarily misunderstand Plato."'106The feeling to which Schleiermacher here refers should not be mistakenfor something arbitrary or purely subjective. By it he meant a "philologi-cal feeling" that only the most expert and talented philologists enjoy.'07Schleiermacher's novel understanding of the dialogue form also func-tioned in his critique of the esoteric (unwritten) tradition. By form hemeant the written form. This preference of written over oral commu-nication, however, seems to contradict the passage in the Phaedrus(274b-278e) where Socrates expresses preference for the oral form.Aware of this discrepancy, Schleiermacher turned to the subtleties of Soc-rates' argument, finding in them a support of his own claim regardingthe necessity of the dialogical form. The purpose of the Socratic methodof oral instruction, Schleiermacher explained, was pedagogical, and itsimportance rests in this, "that the teacher-standing in the presence of,and in lively interaction with the student-can know in each momentwhat the student grasps and so can assist the movement of the under-standing whenever it falters"; this advantage of oral instruction, however,"is really based on ... the formof thedialogue,which a truly living instruc-tion by nature should have."'108In other words, it is not oral instructionper se, but oral instruction as an exercise of the dialogue form that de-fines the Socratic method. What is more, even though Plato's methodwas Socratic, Plato surpassed his teacher in "educational dialectics."'09

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104Ibid., p. 38.105 Ibid., p. 58. Hermann was convinced by Schleiermacher on this point but used formas a tool to strengthen his own position regarding the development of Plato's thought.106 Schleiermacher, "Einleitung," p. 28.107Ibid., p. 53.108 Ibid., pp. 38-39, emphasis added.109bid., p. 40.



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Schleiermacher as Plato ScholarIn determining the core canon, Schleiermacher made a distinction be-tween dialogues of the "first rank" (those dialogues of indisputable origin

and importance) and those of the "second rank." Once the first rank isdetermined, we have a sure reference point for "determining the authen-ticity of the rest and figuring out the place which belongs to each.""6Since the greatest difficulties had to do with the determination of thesecond rank, Schleiermacher relied all the more on his three criteria:language, content, and form. No one criterion is in itself sufficient, andit takes a certain artistic sense to be able to recognize the proportionalrelations of the three, but form is especially important. "Asthe clarity ofform diminishes," he noted, "so also does the conviction of authenticityin every regard.""l7Having thus identified the authentic dialogues and classified them ac-cording to rank, Schleiermacher turned to the chief task of ordering thedialogues, which required that "the essential features of their connectionand the arrangement resting thereon [be] presented in the manner of aprovisionaloverviewof the whole in general.""8 Indeed, it is precisely inhis notion of beginning with a provisional or preliminary whole, and ofdiscerning within that whole clusters of smaller wholes, that we can ap-preciate how the various methodological moments function together.Schleiermacher explained that we have a body of material before us-dialogues determined to be authentic and of the first rank-and thatthese constitute a certain kind of whole. Almost immediately, we recog-nize three among them (the Republic,Timaeus,and Critias) hat distinguishthemselves by their "objective, scientific presentation."' 9 Although tradi-tion had long held these three to be later dialogues, Schleiermacher of-fered new philosophical reasons for considering them so: their internalsimilarities suggest that they belong together, the fact that they presumeinvestigations already made indicates that they are not among the earli-est, and their scientific-constructive form confirms that they are amongthe latest of the dialogues. He then sought to order this particular wholeand concluded that the Republicmust have been the first because it con-tains within it, and gives structure to, all the dialogues not belonging tothis cluster of three; at the same time, it contains elements that are fur-ther developed in the Critiasand Timaeus.120If we were to force the Repub-

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116 Ibid.117Ibid., p. 61.118Ibid., p. 63; emphasis added."9 Ibid.120 In his introduction to the Republic(1828), Schleiermacher referred to the Republicasthe "keystone" of all that had gone before, but he emphasized that it was not Plato'scrown-ing achievement (p. 383). He ended his introduction to the Republic:"It can hardly be



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The Journal of Religionlic into another place, our own "feelings" (Empfindungen)121ould resistsuch an inversion. It can have only one place in the artistic whole.

According to Schleiermacher, once we have discerned and outlined thethree "constructive" dialogues, our gaze passes back naturally to thewhole body of first-ranked dialogues, and we immediately recognize bymeans of contrast another grouping of three (the Phaedrus,Protagoras,and Parmenides).The contrast is marked by their character (they have a"distinctive character of youthfulness"),122 their circumstance (the con-structive dialogues both presuppose and mention them), and their con-tent ("in them the first breaths of the basis of everything that follows areemitted")."23All of this leads necessarily to the conclusion that this groupor "whole" of three (along with some dialogues of the second order)forms "the first, as it were, elementary part of the Platonic works."124Withthese two smaller wholes set in place, Schleiermacher was convinced wehad a more defined picture of the larger whole. Because the outer sup-port systems that give meaning and coherence to all the rest have beenestablished, the order of the dialogues falling between them can be dis-cerned through their "progressive connection."'25 Schleiermacher, freelyconceding that there can be less certainty about the inner ordering of thissecond group than about the first and third, offered yet another guidingprinciple. In addition to the primary principle of discerning the "naturalprogression of the development of ideas,"there is a secondary, supportingprinciple-namely, that of attending to "a variety of particular sugges-tions and references."'26

Upon review of the central themes of the "General Introduction,"therefore, it becomes apparent that Schleiermacher's study was muchmore than a "companion piece" to Tennemann's. Although to some de-gree Schleiermacher's internal method can indeed be said to complementTennemann's external method, Schleiermacher's other interpretive prin-ciples-his view of Plato as artist, his sole reliance on the written works,and his emphasis on the dialogical form-all stand in opposition to Ten-nemann's principles. Moreover, despite the fact that Tennemann's Systemis generally recognized as "the first modern monograph on Plato,"'27 t

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doubted that when Plato wrote these books [of the Republic], e had alreadyresolvedtoattach the Timaeus nd the Critias o them"("EinleitungumStaat," . 387). Since he nevergot around to writing ntroductions o those finaltwodialogues,the Letters,or the Laws,this sentence woundup being the final one of his introductions.121 Schleiermacher, Einleitung," . 65.122Ibid.,p. 66.123Ibid.,p. 67.124Ibid.

125 Ibid.126Ibid.,p. 68.127 Tigerstedt,Decline ndFall(n. 63 above),p. 65.



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Schleiermacher as Plato Scholarhad not achieved the same level of Kritikthat Schleiermacher's had for atleast three reasons. First, although Tennemann had promised to look toPlato's writings as the only legitimate source, he wound up claiming that"overall in [Plato's]writings we do not come across his complete philoso-phy."'28 Incredulous at the thought that Plato had no system, he con-cluded that Plato must have had a "double philosophy"; unable to rejectthe idea of an esoteric tradition but unwilling to assign to it a neo-Platoniccontent, moreover, he assigned to it instead a Kantian one. Second, al-though he had promised to examine as never before the authenticity ofthe dialogues, he wound up accepting most of what the tradition hadalready accepted as genuinely Platonic. Third, although he had set outto give a strictly historical ordering of the dialogues, his discussion of thechronology was brief and uninspiring.129 In the end, Tennemann's chiefcontribution was his biography of Plato.Schleiermacher, who had set out to accomplish many of the same goalslisted by Tennemann, was much more successful in achieving those goals.Not only had he fulfilled his promises to question the conventional as-sumptions and to raise entirely new questions, but he also developed ahermeneutical theory on which to ground his revolutionary interpreta-tion of Plato's dialogues.'30 Consequently, he was able to proceed withouthesitation in rejecting the esoteric tradition, eliminating several dialoguesfrom the corpus and assigning others to questionable status. Moreover,through the description of his methodology in the "General Introduc-tion" and the detailed explanations in each introduction, he carefullymade his argument for a new ordering of the dialogues and, in fact, wascritical of the reasons Tennemann had offered for his dating of the Phae-drus.'1' Even though that ordering would be called into question by thenext generation of Plato scholars, his thoughtful reflections on each dia-logue and on their interrelations would remain relevant and illuminatingto later generations. In the end, Tennemann stood in the backgroundwith the other eighteenth-century Plato scholars, and Schleiermacher seta new course in Plato research.It is much more difficult to determine the degree to which Schleier-macher had been influenced by, or had departed from, Schlegel in hisinterpretation of Plato. Schlegel clearly thought that Schleiermacher had

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128 Tennemann, System n. 64 above), 1:264.129 See ibid.,pp. 115-25.130 See Wolfgang Virmond, "Der fiktive Autor: Schleiermachers technische Interpretationder platonischen Dialoge (1804) als Vorstufe seiner Hallenser Hermeneutik (1805),"Archivodi Filosofia52 (1984): 225-32; and Julia A. Lamm, "Practicing on Plato: The PhilologicalRoots of Schleiermacher's Hermeneutics" (paper presented at the annual meeting of theAmerican Academy of Religion, San Francisco, November 22, 1997).131 See Schleiermacher, "Einleitung zum Phaidros" n. 91 above), pp. 85-87.



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The Journal of Religionstolen his chief ideas. Unfortunately, Schlegel left no finished or extensivestudy of Plato that would provide a means of comparison. More compli-cated yet is the fact that the question of Schlegel's and Schleiermacher'sinterpretations of the Platonic dialogues is intricately bound up with thedevelopment of their hermeneutical theories.'32 Nevertheless, there wasone particular theme that had proved an ongoing issue of disagreementbetween them and that therefore might provide some measure by whichwe may judge the degree to which Schleiermacher's interpretation ofPlato's dialogue was new-namely, the placement and significance of thePhaedrus.Their disagreements over the Phaedrusare all the more interest-ing since Schleiermacher's treatment of it became one of the most contro-versial issues in the debates of the mid-nineteenth century.III. CONTROVERSIAL ISSUES IN THE INTRODUCTIONSPlacementof the "Phaedrus"Indignant that Schleiermacher had called his work on Plato into ques-tion, Schlegel retorted, "On the Phaedrus do you really wish [to claim]more expertise than I?'33Thereafter the Phaedrus was a focal point oftheir growing disagreements. In a provisional ordering of the dialoguesand again in his "Complexus of Hypotheses," Schlegel identified thePhaedrusas the earliest.134 Schleiermacher, more preoccupied at the timewith producing a careful translation of the Phaedrus than with frettingabout its placement, cited two reasons for doubting its early dating: Platowould not have reproached Lysis for being youthful were he himself stillyoung, and the discourse on writing could not be the work of a novice.Nor was he convinced by Tennemann's much later dating for the Phae-drus, the reasons for which he considered "dumb."'35 In the winter of1801, therefore, Schleiermacher was open to the possibility that the Phae-drus was the first dialogue, but he was also careful to stress that a later

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132 The literature on the relation between their respective hermeneutics is extensive. SeeJosef Kbrner, "Friedrich Schlegels Philosophie der Philologie," Logos 17 (1928): 1-72; Her-mann Patsch, "Friedrich Schlegels 'Philosophie der Philologie' und Schleiermachers friiheEntwiirfe zur Hermeneutik," ZeitschriftfiirTheologieund Kirche63 (1966): 434-72; H. Jack-son Forstman, "The Understanding of Language by Friedrich Schlegel and Schleier-macher,"Soundings51 (Summer 1968): 146-65; Hendrik Birus, "Hermeneutische Wende?Anmerkungen zur Schleiermacher-Interpretation," Euphorion 74, no. 2 (1980): 213-22;Reinhold Rieger, Interpretation nd Wissen:Zurphilosophischen egriindungderHermeneutik eiFriedrichSchleiermachernd ihremgeschichtlichenHintergrund(Berlin and New York:Walter deGruyter, 1988); and Schnur (n. 62 above), pp. 139-59.

133 E Schlegel to Schleiermacher, early August 1800, KGA, pt. 5, 4:181.134See E Schlegel to Schleiermacher, letters dated early September and December 8,1800, KGA,pt. 5, 4:244, 353, respectively.135 Schleiermacher to E Schlegel, January 10, 1801, ASL, 3:252-53.



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Schleiermacher as Plato Scholardating would not undermine his support of Schlegel's system, since hewas in full agreement with Schlegel's principles. 36A year later, when hereviewed Ast's De Platonis Phadro, Schleiermacher continued to resistthe placement of the Phaedrus as the first dialogue, at least on the basisof its "dramatic form."''37Nevertheless, within the next two years Schleier-macher, too, had arrived at the conclusion that the Phaedrusmust havebeen Plato's first dialogue, but he was careful to distinguish his reasonsfrom those of "that ancient tradition" of Diogenes and Olympiodorus.'38He made passing reference to Ast but made no mention of Schlegel.Shortly after the publication of the first volume of Schleiermacher'sPlatons Werke,Schlegel sent a letter to Reimer complaining that Schleier-macher had stolen his ideas. Schleiermacher denied any such depen-dence on the grounds that he could not have taken his ideas from Schle-gel since he had "never heard from [him] any real reasons for the priorityof the Phaedrus."'39 chlegel's accusations, however, did not go away,andSchleiermacher had to defend himself again four years later in a letter toBoeckh. He wrote that Schlegel and he had been in agreement that thePhaedrus and Protagoraswere both early dialogues, but he also concededthat Schlegel had pronounced it first, since at the time he had himselfbeen occupied with the task of translating. Still, Schleiermacher con-tended, Schlegel had never given any reasons other than style and tradi-tion for the Phaedrusbeing first. What is more, he himself never had anyinterest in taking up the "quite un-Kantian thoughts about the Phaedrus"that Schlegel had propounded. 40 In short, although a quick glance athis ordering might lead one to think it was very similar to Schlegel's,Schleiermacher insisted that, when examined in its particulars, it clearlyowed no debt to Schlegel.As it turned out, each was claiming credit for a theory that would verysoon be proven false. Already in 1820 with Joseph Socher's UberPlatonsSchriftenand more definitively in the 1830s with the works of GottfriedStallbaum and Hermann, the Phaedruscame to be seen as a later work.'41

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136 See Schleiermacher to E Schlegel, February 7, 1801, ASL, 3:259-60.137 See Schleiermacher, "Rezension von Ast,"KGA,pt. 1, 3:472-73.138 Schleiermacher, "Einleitung" (n. 4 above), p. 87. In his introduction to the Phaedrushe expands on the reasons given in the General Introduction: "For it is of course undeni-able that the seeds of almost his entire philosophy are in the Phaedrus,but just as clear is itsundeveloped state, and the incompleteness particularly betrays itself in that indirectmethod of the dialogue" ("Einleitung zum Phaidros,"p. 87).139Schleiermacher to E Schlegel, October 10, 1804, ASL, 3:405.140 Schleiermacher to Boeckh, June 18, 1808, Dilthey, GS, 13/2, pp. 72-73.141 Werner Jaeger attributes the discovery of the later placement of the Phaedrus,hencethe first attack on Schleiermacher's ordering, to Hermann and his 1839 volume, Geschichteund System see "Der Wandel des Platobildes im 19. Jahrhundert," in HumanistischeRedenundVortrage1936; 2d ed., Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1960], p. 133). Virmond (n. 130 above)pushes the discovery back to Stallbaum and his 1832 work, Plato: Dialogi selecti (also pub-



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The Journal of ReligionHermann, citing Stallbaum and Socher, agreed with Schleiermacher's in-sight that the Phaedruscontained the seeds of the Platonic doctrines, buthe argued that, rather than being the first of the entire series of the dia-logues, it functioned as the beginning program for Plato'sAcademy andtherefore could not be the first, or even among the earliest.142 In Ger-many in the 1880s, Hermann's genetic methodology was itself supersededby stylometry (the statistical examination of words, grammar, and style),which nevertheless reached the same basic conclusion regarding the Phae-drus.'43Today the consensus is that, contrary to Schleiermacher's position,the Phaedrus is a middle or later dialogue.The question remains whether Schleiermacher's incorrect identifica-tion of the Phaedrus as the first dialogue completely undermines the restof his interpretation of Plato. Somewhat predictably, Schleiermacherscholars have argued that it does not. Gustav-Adolf Krapf and Karl Pohlhave both made the case that in Schleiermacher's treatment of the Phae-drus we find not only a profound grasp of Plato's dialectics but also thekey to understanding Schleiermacher's own theory of dialectics.'44 Giventhe fact that so often when Schleiermacher is mentioned in twentieth-century commentaries on Plato it is in passing reference to his outdatedview of the Phaedrus,it would seem that Plato scholarship has generallyassumed his interpretation of Plato is an antiquated one. Yet some Platoscholars have concurred in the judgment that Schleiermacher's Plato in-terpretation does not "stand or fall"with his placement of the Phaedrus.145For instance, the English translators of the Phaedrus are persuaded bySchleiermacher's view of the relation between the two parts of the dia-logue.'46 And Albin Lesky holds that, "For the task of determining therelative chronology of the Platonic writings, Schleiermacher's attempt is

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lished as PlatonisOperaomnia,vol. 4, sec. 1; reprint, New Yorkand London: Garland, 1980);he argues, however, that it was Hermann who, in his review of Stallbaum in 1833, recog-nized the significance of the new ordering and welcomed the end of Schleiermacher's tute-lage, and who developed this position more fully in 1839 (p. 232). Thesleff (n. 8 above)locates the break with Schleiermacher earlier still, in Socher's 1820 study of Plato's works;he contends that it was Socher who first employed the new genetic method that would bedeveloped by Hermann (pp. 2, 8).142 See Hermann (n. 94 above), pp. 513-14.143 For more on the genetic approach, see E. N. Tigerstedt, InterpretingPlato (Uppsala:Almquist & Wiksell, 1977), pp. 25-51. For more on the stylometric method, see LeonardBranwood, The Chronology f Plato'sDialogues (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge Uni-versity Press, 1990).144 See Krapf (n. 6 above), pp. 56, 61-62; and Karl Pohl, "Die Bedeutung der Sprachefiir den Erkenntnisakt in der 'Dialektik' Friedrich Schleiermachers," Kant-Studien46, no. 4(1954-55): 308-15.

145Von Stein (n. 7 above), 1:67; cf. p. 33 n.146 See Nehamas and Woodruff, introduction to the Phaedrus (n. 88 above), pp. xxvii-xxviii. Unfortunately, they cite Schleiermacher as having stated this view in 1836, two yearsafter his death.



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Schleiermacher as Plato Scholarstill of fundamental importance."'47 This leads to another, yet related,controversial issue in Schleiermacher's Plato-namely, whether it is pos-sible to give specific dates for the dialogues.TheOrderingand Chronology f theDialoguesLike the debates over the placement of the Phaedrus,the controversy overthe ordering of the dialogues goes back to the very beginning of the Platoproject. Schlegel had been chiefly interested in establishing a "historicalordering,"'48 which, he was convinced, would correspond with a moreartistic or literary ordering. In contrast, Schleiermacher apparently sug-gested what Schlegel referred to as "a construction of [Plato's] Geist."'49Schleiermacher clearly seems to have been skeptical early on about thepossibility of a strictly historical ordering and described himself as havingtaken as his point of departure "the view of nonordering [NichtOrd-nung]."150As already noted, he thought the task of translation necessarilyhad to precede that of ordering, and he was criticized by Schlegel forbeing so willing to drop the ordering just to meet a deadline.'5' Schleier-macher, of course, far from ignoring the task of ordering, was the first tooffer a chronological ordering of the dialogues, or at least a compellingone. "Chronological," however, is here used with qualification, since theinternal method alone yields "only a sequence and no point in time."'52The external method supplies certain definite chronological points of ref-erence, but those are limited. In other words, Schleiermacher's ordering(as suggested by his view of Plato as artist and of the dialogues as a livingbody) was primarily based on "natural," nternal relations within the dia-logues and only secondarily did it enjoy a probability of correspondencewith chronological sequences. Of course, logically speaking, his naturalordering implied a before-and-after relation ("both must be one andthe same"),153 but he did not emphasize that, and he certainly made nopretense at being able to date particular dialogues. The evidence, hethought, was simply not there.It was inevitable that the boundaries set by Schleiermacher would bechallenged, since, as Klaus Oehler explains, "The interest in the historical

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147Albin Lesky,A Historyof GreekLiterature,rans. James Willis and Cornelis de Heer (Lon-don: Methuen, 1966), p. 515.148 E Schlegel to Schleiermacher, March 10, 1800, KGA,pt. 5, 3:412, emphasis added.149 E Schlegel to Schleiermacher, March 28, 1800, KGA,pt. 5, 3:443.150 Schleiermacher to E Schlegel, September 13, 1800, KGA,pt. 5, 4:257.151 See E Schlegel to Schleiermacher, mid-November, 1800, KGA,pt. 5, 4:317-18.152 Schleiermacher, "Einleitung" (n. 4 above), p. 49.153 Schleiermacher to Boeckh, June 18, 1808, GS, 13/2, p. 71.



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Schleiermacher as Plato ScholarPlato on the whole belongs rather to the type of thinkers whose philoso-phy is fixed in early maturity (Schopenhauer, Herbert Spencer), ratherthan to the class of those who receive a new revelation every decade(Schelling)."'58To date, unlike the controversy over the placement of thePhaedrus,the controversy over whether we can ascertain a strictly histori-cal ordering of the dialogues, complete with dates, remains unresolved.

The Validity f the EsotericTraditionSchleiermacher's rejection of an esoteric tradition, unlike his placementof the Phaedrusand his ordering of the dialogues, did not become trulycontroversial until more than a century after his death. With a couple ofexceptions, his preference for the exoteric over the esoteric tradition be-came the dominant interpretation. Even G. W. E Hegel, who criticizedSchleiermacher's work on Plato for being superfluous and hypercriticaland who rejected the notion of Plato as an artist, nonetheless agreed withSchleiermacher that "Plato's philosophy was left to us in the writingswhich we have from him."'159he momentum began to shift in the periodbetween World Wars I and II, when classicists began to address the prob-lem of Plato's unwritten doctrines.160 For the most part, this new scholarlyattention to the agraphadid not challenge the authority of the dialogues,although it did lead some scholars to reconsider the validity of neo-Platonism as an authentic expression of Platonic doctrine.161The real controversy over the agraphabegan in 1959, when the publica-tion of Hans Joachim Krdimer'sAretdbei Platon u