From "July 2013 issue of Iyyun: The Jerusalem Philosophical Quarterly". Used with permission

Book Reviews
Holger Thesleff
Platonic Patterns: A Collection of Studies.
Las Vegas/Zurich/Athens: Parmenides Publishing
2009. Paperback, xviii+623 pp. ISBN 978-1-930972-29-2

This volume is a much-needed re-issue of three of Holger Thesleff’s books and four of his articles: Studies in the Styles of Plato (first published in 1967), Studies in Plato’s Chronology (1982), Studies in Plato’s Two-Level Model (1999), “Theaitetos and Theodorus” (1990), “The Earlier Version of Plato’s Republic” (1997), “Plato and His Public” (published in Swedish in 2000), and “A Symptomatic Test-Corruption: Plato, Gorgias 448a5” (2003).

Thesleff brings to the study of Plato a thorough acquaintance with secondary literature, ancient and modern, strict philological discipline, and a salutary scepticism about ingrained dogmas of platonic exegesis. Well familiarized with the ‘historicist’ and the ‘modernist’ schools of interpretation, he admits, nevertheless, to being more historicist than modernist. Although quite sensitive to philosophical issues, he acknowledges a philological bias, which he explains as “collecting a variety of evidence, especially textual, to understand what Plato ‘means’ ” (p. 391). In all his writings, Thesleff goes into a minute analysis of sample texts. This makes for very cautious conclusions, providing a welcome correction to over-hasty interpretations of all kinds. Thesleff stresses time and again the well-known but much-overlooked triviality, that Plato did not write philosophical tracts and Plato’s dialogues can never be reduced to systematic philosophical treatises. While recognizing the importance of the contribution of the British and American analytical tradition to our understanding of Plato, Thesleff constantly reminds us that Plato presents his philosophy in a literary, dramatic disguise. This is not to say that Thesleff ascribes to Plato a set of ‘doctrines’ veiled by the literary style. His Plato is much more ‘exploratory’ than dogmatic. In stressing the importance of Plato’s literary form, Thesleff is right, of course, but I think he does not go far enough.1 Dramatic form is, for Plato, not a disguise, not even a choice of style, but an essential aspect, perhaps more than any other, of his conception of philosophy.

In the introduction to his Studies in Plato’s Chronology, Thesleff raises what he considers the main issues in today’s platonic interpretation: (1) He stresses first the shortcomings of the developmental interpretation and particularly of the stylometrical approach. (2) Accordingly, he opposes the attempts to find in Plato’s dialogues an ‘early socratic stage’. (3) Thesleff stresses the apparent lack of dogmatism in the dialogues and finds in them no doctrinal system. (4) Hence, the problem arises of how to deal with Plato’s ontology or metaphysics. (5) Not unrelated to this problem is the question of Plato’s esotericism, i.e., of his supposed ungeschriebene Lehre. (6) Along another interpretive line, the limits of what he calls the ‘literal’, or analytic, method of interpretation, despite all its advantages, have become lately more and more apparent. (7) Concomitantly, the advantages came more to the fore of the ‘literary’ and philological methods, which take account of the context and of the artistic, dramatic, playful, and ironic elements in the dialogues. (8) The question, then, immediately arises of the extent to which the various characters in the dialogues speak for Plato. But do they at all? Can we always trust even Socrates himself? (9) Which forces us to reconsider the character of platonic dialectic. (10) And, again, the problems must be considered concerning the ‘function’ and ‘publication’ of the dialogues, and not in the least the question of authenticity and possible revisions by Plato himself or by others. (11) And, lastly, attention must be paid to the growth of Plato’s magnum opus, the Republic. In short, Thesleff thinks it helpful if the various ‘schools’ of interpretation would enter into a thorough reconsideration of their premises and practices. He himself has done much to drive such reconsideration.

Already in Studies in the Styles of Plato, and throughout his long scholarly career, Thesleff occupied himself with the crucial question, why Plato wrote as he did and for what audiences. Following a very detailed analysis, Thesleff submits that Plato wrote for different audiences, and these audiences influenced his style in the different dialogues. Stylistic changes occur from dialogue to dialogue and within the same dialogue. The dialogues are literary pieces, and their form and style depend on the characters involved, the public intended, and their protreptic and/or provocative intent. Plato was fond of playing with styles and his style changes within very brief units of text. Thus, stylistic groups should not be identified with chronological groups unless there is independent evidence for it. Considerable differences can be shown even between dialogues belonging, by wide consensus, close together.

Nevertheless, Thesleff claims that reported dialogues do not belong to the beginning of Plato’s career but developed from the need to address a wider public. ‘Dramatic’ dialogues, for Thesleff, were meant to be read as such and the identity of the speakers (not marked in ancient manner of writing drama) was clear in the direct presentation. To Thesleff’s mind, dialogues meant to be read (aloud) for a wider public needed a different framework. However, Thesleff does not explicitly consider dialogues such as Timaeus, Sophist, and Politicus, which he admits to be ‘esoteric’ but are, contrary to his rule of thumb, reported. He is obviously right in reminding us that the reported dialogue further distances the reader/hearer from the situation reported. But Plato has also other means of achieving such distance, as, for example, inserting into the dialogue false ‘historical’ tracks and chronological inconsistencies. The section on mimesis and diegesis in Republic iii not only “reflects the conflict,” as Thesleff points out (p. 37). It explicitly prefers diegesis, with no conflict, and not for reasons to do with the intended public. Furthermore, it is not accurate to say, as he does, that the reported form has no philosophical relevance. (But from what Thesleff writes later it becomes apparent that he rather meant a different kind of philosophical relevance.) Of course, not for every single exchange the reported form is significant. But in many cases it is, as, for example, in Euthydemus and even in Phaedo. In all dialogues, as a rule, the interlocutor’s assent not only serves to mark a vivid interest or maintain a quick rhythm of question and answer. The subtle variations, not easily translatable, in the interlocutors’ responses alert the close reader to the equally subtle reactions Plato expects from him and to the different ironical accents Plato puts on the theses he proposes, not necessarily his own (even when formulated ostensibly as such by his Socrates).

In “Plato and His Public” Thesleff further develops the view that Plato did not, on the whole, intend his dialogues for general circulation. Without fully subscribing to the thesis of the ungeschriebene Lehre, he does accept that there was a continuous oral discussion in Plato’s circle (of which, naturally, we know next to nothing), only partially reflected in the dialogues.

On another, parallel line, Thesleff argues, in Plato’s Two-Level Model, that it seems impossible to distinguish clearly between authentic and inauthentic texts within the platonic corpus, One has to abandon the old hard and fast distinction and work, instead, with a sliding scale from reasonably acceptable authenticity, over degrees of what he calls ‘semi-authenticity’, i.e., works partly composed by Plato or inspired by him, or modified, revised or rewritten, much or little, in the Academy, down to works totally spurious, which entered the corpus for a variety of reasons. This is no doubt a possibility that must be taken into account, but the criteria for building such a sliding scale, apart from the intuition of the interpreter, remain unclear, especially in view of the near-insurmountable shortcomings, well documented by Thesleff, of platonic stylometry.

In Studies in Plato’s Chronology, Thesleff is more suspicious than ever of the alleged results of stylometry, even after the electronic advances of the eighties. He starts with a detailed and instructive critical conspectus of all the chronologies suggested, from Tennemann (1792) to Kahn (1981). On the basis of these results and of his own research, Thesleff is very sceptical as to the possibility of reconstructing anything to do with the details of the development and chronology of Plato’s dialogues. In particular, the possibility is excluded that the dialogues reflect a steady line of linguistic change. On such grounds, the theory of a distinct ‘socratic period’ becomes untenable. Rather, Thesleff puts forward the view that Plato developed early on a personal version of ‘true philosophy’. He opposes the application of a rigid chronology to Plato’s writings but attempts to sketch a new tentative chronology, more as a stimulus to further thought than a fixed time-table.

In Studies in Plato’s Two-Level Model, Thesleff attempts to break away from a rigid ‘theory of ideas’ and proposes instead a more flexible two-level model, of which the positing of ideas is only one aspect. Two levels appear everywhere in Plato’s thought: divine/human, soul/body, leading/being led, truth/appearance, knowledge/opinion, intellect/senses, defined/undefined, stability/change, one/many, same/different, and so on. The upper level is inherent (but not immanent) in the lower level. Sometimes Plato seems to see the lower level as a middle, as, e.g., the soul. As Thesleff remarks, too often over the centuries Plato’s thought experiments have been understood as his philosophical convictions. But for Plato the orientation was much more significant than the exact fixing of the ideal. Philosophy, for him, was not a set of arguments or doctrines. Human life is at best a constant ‘orientation’ from the human level towards order and the (metaphorically) divine. Evil is no active force; evil is imperfection and the chaotic state that results when the lower-level tendencies get the upper hand. Book Reviews 281

This is certainly true, considering the background of Plato’s profound distrust of human nature and its possibilities. But Plato cannot be satisfied with kantian postulates. Even if we cannot arrive at the higher level, or perhaps very few can (Socrates was the one example Plato could muster), in order for there to be a distinction between ‘upwards’ and ‘downwards’, for Plato there must be a fixed, absolutely real, point, on pain of falling into a structuralist hall-of-mirrors. As he puts it at the end of Parmenides, if the one (in itself) is not, nothing is. Thesleff admits that Plato’s main interest lies in ethical reform from a pointedly theoretical and metaphysical perspective. But, then, a fixed point becomes indispensable, viz., a conception of ideas (or of a whole of ideas) even if not a dogmatic theory. Orientation towards the truth is, indeed, more essential than reaching it in its entirety, but that holistic truth must be accepted as ‘the really real’ (to ontos on).

These are only some of the many basic issues discussed in this book. Thesleff’s collection is indispensable reading for all interpreters of Plato, of whatever school or tendency, as a timely antidote against deep-seated exegetical preconceptions, philological or philosophical.

Samuel Scolnicov
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
The Review of Metaphysics

 

1 See my Euthydemus: Language and Ethics, Lecturae Platonis 8 (St. Augustin: Academia Verlag, 2013).