According to Gyburg Radke, contemporary Platonic scholarship is in a fix, and in this voluminous book she turns to the Neoplatonic commentators on Plato, and to Proclus in particular, for help. In chapter one ("Die postmoderne Wende in der Platonphilologie"), she traces the root of the present problems back to F. Schleiermacher. The latter initiated modern Platonic philology by putting the issue of the particular form of Plato's writings firmly on the map: what are we to make from the fact that Plato did not express himself in treatises, but instead wrote dialogues from which he himself is notoriously absent? According to Schleiermacher himself, Plato's intention was to make his readers re-enact the philosophical activity represented in the dialogues, and thus to engage them in a (never-ending) search for philosophical knowledge and truth. Post-modern Platonic scholarship readily accepts Schleiermacher's insistence on the importance of the dialogue form for the proper understanding of Plato's works, but finds fault with his idea that the dialogues are intended to initiate a search for knowledge. It denies that the ultimate end of the dialogues consists in knowledge, since the appropriate form of expression for (propositional) knowledge would be the treatise, not the dialogue. On the assumption that any doctrinal core is absent from the dialogues, it regards any given element in its own right, i.e. as not being in any way subordinated to a central philosophical theme.

In chapter two ("Die neuplatonischen Interpretationen zur Platonischen Dialogform: ihre Prinzipien und Methoden"), Radke focuses on the way in which the Neoplatonists dealt with the dialogue form. In the first section of this chapter, she argues that the neglect of Neoplatonic commentaries by post-modern Platonic scholarship stems from a fundamental theoretical disagreement. Whereas post-modern scholarship rejects any attempt to extract a systematic account of Plato's philosophy from the dialogues, this is exactly what the Neoplatonists did. She next focuses on the guiding principle of Neoplatonic exegesis that Platonic dialogues have a central doctrinal message, its skopos or goal. Thus, contrary to post-modern Platonic scholarship, the Neoplatonists apparently completely neglected the issues that Plato himself raises about the possibility of teaching philosophy by means of written texts, especially in the Phaedrus and the 7th Letter, rather than through personal contact with the student. Also contrary to the post-modern fashion, they did not consider literary elements as the setting of the dialogue and the presentation of the personae involved in the dialogue in isolation, but they supposed that these elements too somehow contributed towards the central goal of the dialogue by illustrating, in an analogous fashion, that central message.

The fact that Plato's Schriftkritik is not an independent theme in Neoplatonic commentaries is brought out in greater detail in chapter three ("Die Platonische Schriftkritik im Phaidros-Kommentar des Hermeias und bei Proklos"). Hermeias in his commentary on the Phaedrus, for example, spends little time on the famous passage on the (ab)use of philosophical writing that has so excited modern scholars. To him, the passage is an illustration of Plato's low opinion of physical entities in comparison to spiritual entities such as soul, not a rejection of philosophical writing in favour of oral discussion. Likewise, Proclus' problem with philosophical writings is not so much that they are written texts, as opposed to life philosophical discussions, but that the thoughts of, e.g. divine souls, are of such a nature that the cannot be adequately expressed in discursive language.

In the, very long, chapter four ("Proklos und die Platonische Dialogform - der Dialograhmen und der Skopos des Platonischen Parmenides"), Radke gives a detailed and careful analysis of Proclus' interpretation of the various elements of the proem of the Parmenides, as it can be found in book one of his commentary on that dialogue. Like his post-modern colleagues, Proclus pays much attention to the literary aspects of the text, such as the role of the various characters and what is said about them, e.g. the fact that Parmenides smiles ("das Lächeln des Parmenides") when he listens to Socrates, and that he has grey hair. However, unlike post-modern readers, he interprets these elements in accordance with what he takes to be the doctrinal core of the Parmenides. Thus, in this case attention for the literary aspects is intimately linked with attention for the philosophical message of the dialogue.

The Neoplatonist way of reading a Platonic dialogue is obviously an attractive one, yet it raises the question how we may identify one of the many, often contradictory, positions put forward by the various characters in a dialogue with the one held by Plato himself. As recent discussions have brought out, there are considerable problems with the assumption that in a dialogue one character functions as a mouthpiece for Plato. Radke once again turns to Proclus for guidance. Take for example the immoral Thrasymachus in the Republic. According to Proclus, it is evident that Thrasymachus does not represent Plato's own views. The assumption that underlies the entire dialogue is that Thrasymachus is utterly wrong and that the thesis opposite to his is the correct one. Thus, the question should not be who speaks for Plato, but rather what the central thesis is that the dialogue seeks to promote.

I wholeheartedly agree with Radke and the Neoplatonists that the dialogues contain Platonic philosophy and that any interpretation should take into account both formal and philosophical aspects. I am less sure, however, whether it was really necessary to go back all the way to Proclus to make this point. Contrary to the impression that Radke gives, the post-modern approach to Platonic dialogue is, fortunately, not universal. In fact, the method of reading Plato that she advocates is already practised. [1] It may be that something of the sort can be found in Proclus, but it seems unnecessary to discuss book one of his Commentary on the Parmenides in such detail, interesting though as Radke's analysis of it may be in its own right. All the more so, because Proclus' interpretation of the Parmenides as a systematic Platonic theology is highly implausible, as are therefore his interpretations of the more literary aspects of the text that depend on it. For, in spite of Radke's passionate pleas to the contrary, she has not convinced me that John Dillon was wrong in calling Proclus' interpretations of Plato "higher non-sense".

Note:

[1] See, e.g., Rachel Barney, Names and Nature in Plato's Cratylus Routledge (New York & London) 2001, who also discusses the case of Thrasymachus (18-21) to make a similar point.

Robbert M. van den Berg