The Review of Metaphysics

The contention of this book is that Schleiermacher "changed how we understand Plato."

Schleiermacher translated the entire corpus of Plato during a "philological renaissance" in late eighteenth-century Germany that concerned itself with careful translations of classics texts and a historical-critical method. The book shows how that act of translation informed the interpretive principles laid out in his "General Introduction," which proved revolutionary for Platonic studies and informed Schleiermacher's own philosophical and theological work.

The book lays out the method clearly, exploring its novelty against the backdrop of Schleiermacher's contemporaries. Four themes emerge. First, there is the "internal method," a philological task informed by historical understanding of the linguistic, literary, and conceptual background. Its significance is set against the backdrop of late eighteenth-century applications of the historical-critical method, which had begun to reject dogmatic commitments, theological agendas, and philosophical systems, in favor of internal evidence and textual interpretation. [End Page 821]

Second, where the internal method rejected systematizing dogma, be this in the form of Neoplatonism or "unwritten doctrines," the second emphasized Plato's artistry, which rejected a "piecemeal approach" focused on isolated dialectical arguments. This artistry was the "interpretive key" that exposed the unity of Plato's thought. Following the Phaedrus, a work must be understood as an organic whole; what is scattered must be collected and divided into its natural parts to expose the "natural sequence and necessary relation" in the works. This is applied not just to individual works but to the entire corpus: The dialogues are essentially connected and lead naturally and necessarily from one to the other. So, this came with the commitment that Plato had in mind the full body of material that was to be communicated.

Third, Schleiermacher attended to the philosophical significance of Plato's literary brilliance by drawing attention to the relationship between form and content. This rehabilitation of the dialogue form, his most enduring legacy, captured the essentially dialogical, social, and communicative nature of Plato's philosophy.

Finally, these principles are deployed to determine the order of the dialogues—by tracing the "pedagogical progression of ideas," which is structured by two series: ethics and physics, of which the Republic and the Timaeus are the culmination. This gave rise to one of the most controversial of Schleiermacher's views: the early dating of the Phaedrus, which contained the seeds of all Platonic doctrines. Though the consensus today largely rejects the early dating, struggling with the difficulties of the Phaedrus was instrumental to Schleiermacher's entire approach and provided clues to the interpretation of the canon. How to read a dialogue was suggested by the image of a logos as a living body, the impulse to philosophy was specified as eros, the method by dialectic, and the ultimate purpose is the kind of communication that brings the student to knowledge, namely, the form of dialogue (whether written or spoken). The suspicion of writing was taken to support Schleiermacher's claim that dialogical form was the essential medium for written texts, offering a model of "truly living instruction."

After arguing that these principles shaped a new form of Platonism, the second part of the book turns to how Plato informed Schleiermacher's own work. Lamm takes the Christmas Dialogue first, showing how it manifests the "impulse and method" of philosophy, with "joy" replacing eros as impulse and living, reciprocal, conversation as the method to be celebrated. The Platonic influences are found in formal features, most notably in the overall structure of the Dialogue, which mirrors Schleiermacher's interpretation of the structure of Plato's corpus.

Analysis of the second edition of Speeches on Religion (1806) shows how central topics, such as being and existence, opinions versus knowledge, and the association of knowing and acting, were informed by Schleiermacher's decade of engagement with Plato, which motivated fundamental changes to his main argument about "the essence of religion." The Sophist is central: Both the notion of being as generative [End Page 822] and the understanding of...