This Site is Under Construction: Situating Hegel's Plato

Abstract

In this paper, I examine broad features of Hegel's interpretation of Plato from his Lectures on the History of Phihsophy, noting how these features resonate with current views of Platonic philosophy. Hegel formed his interpretation of Plato under very different circumstances than those of today. Serious study of the Platonic dialogues had come to the forefront in German Idealist philosophy. As Rüdiger Bubner notes: ‘It was this tradition of thought that discovered, in an original way of its own, the authentic Plato in place of the various mediated substitutes of before, and indeed saw him as a thinker who was to provide continuing inspiration to the needs of post-Kantian philosophy’. We find Hegel holds Plato in high esteem, most famously as a ‘teacher of the human race’ alongside Aristotle. His Plato is one who is fundamentally significant in the development of philosophy, raising it to the status of science, although not in a fully systematic manner. At the same time, Hegel distinguishes his Plato from the projects of his contemporaries, Tennemann's esoteric Plato and Schleiermacher's aesthetic Plato. Hegel also forms his view of Plato at a time just prior to the development of stylometric studies of the dialogues, begun in its earliest form by K. F. Hermann (1839) and pushed forward by Lewis Campbell and Friedrich Blass in the later half of the 19th century. (This is not to claim that questions regarding the ordering of the dialogues did not arise earlier than 1839, but that they became scientific and central in Platonic interpretation with Hermann.) The pressures Hegel negotiates in his interpretation are quite distinct, especially in this last respect, yet not altogether alien. There are, I think, interesting reasons for this. (One might think that given Hegel's strong opposition to Schleiermacher (and Hegel's disposition towards development), he might have been inclined towards a developmental reading of Plato. One also might think that given his opposition to Tennemann's esotericism, he might have had more doubts about discerning a system within Plato's unsystematic dialogues. But one would be wrong on both counts.)