The Tübingenschule and the (Anti-)Esotericist Debate

The name ‘Tübingen School’ mainly refers to a scholarly approach to Plato, rather than to later Platonists, but it is in some senses a revival of Late Platonist hermeneutics of Plato in a thoroughly modern guise, and significant for this reason to the study of Platonist philosophic silence more generally. The Tübingen reading of Plato is further significant in the context of ancient philosophic silence because it is an esotericist reading of Plato – that is to say, these scholars read Plato as though he did indeed write more Platonico, hiding at least some of his true doctines – and is thus embroiled in the problematics of the self-hiding secret, one of the major interpretative difficulties when dealing with Platonist philosophic silence.

As mentioned above, the idea that Plato wrote in this way, hiding his true doctrine in some fashion, has been an assumption of many, or even most readers since late antiquity until the eighteenth century, and it has only been with the advent of the modern analytical approach that this reading has been widely called into question. Harold Cherniss took an influential reductionist stance on which sources of evidence are admissible in attempting to discern what Plato meant to say: Cherniss maintains, essentially, that only the dialogues themselves should be considered as evidence of Plato's views. The ‘Esoterics’, on the other hand, argue that the strong testimony of Aristotle and others that the lecture ‘On the Good’ presented an oral component of Plato's teaching cannot be ignored. Insofar as regards the history of Platonist interpretation, this is certainly true; as Chapter 2 of the present work emphasises, the Platonic ‘oral teaching’ had a long interpretative life in later Platonist metaphysics, and served as a thematic locus for Platonist silence.

It is impossible to say with precision when the reputation of Plato as an author with a secret teaching arose. Tigerstedt has correctly pointed out that there is no direct evidence for the idea of a secret Platonic doctrine before the imperial period, a fact which he adduces to a thoroughgoing argument against a secret Platonic doctrine.

The present study is an enquiry into ‘philosophic silence’ in Plotinus. The line of enquiry pursued arose from wonder at a seeming paradox: Plotinus posits a radical truth available to the philosophic seeker, a truth that is an ontological transformation as much as it is an epistemological attainment, but refuses to speak this truth, and denies that it may be spoken. Why, then, write about it? The ineffable nature of the One or Good for Plotinus, coupled with what may be termed its transcendence and immanence at all levels of being and knowing, naturally gives rise to this tension between utterance and silence.

Plotinus also positions himself as an exegete of an esoteric philosophic tradition, with a concern for keeping certain philosophic matters out of the hands of the vulgar crowd. He claimed a great reluctance to write and publish his philosophy. Yet publish he did, as well as teaching a philosophic seminar open to all, and to questions from every quarter. How should we account for these apparent contradictions?

The most common account of Plotinus’ use of the intensive negative language known as apophasis, of the rhetorics of silence and secrecy and of the paradoxes of transcendence and immanence, is that all these techniques are legitimate philosophical responses to the ineffable first principle of later Platonism. Viewed from the perspective of the philosophic history of ideas, Plotinian paradox and indeed what is widely termed Plotinian ‘mysticism’ arise from Middle and Late Platonist hermeneutics of Platonic premises, and are simply logical. Since the publication in 1928 of Dodds’ seminal ‘The Parmenides of Plato and the Origin of the Neoplatonist One’, the dominant tendency in Classical scholarship has been to regard the rise of the transcendent first principle in Platonism, and particularly in Plotinus, as an outcome of exegesis primarily of the Platonic dialogues and secondarily of other Greek philosophical materials, particularly of Aristotle and the commentary tradition. The intellectual history which has emerged, painted in broad strokes, describes a more or less linear progression toward an idea of a first principle which, whether it is an intellect, a monad, or something else, surpasses being and essence.

I have argued that there were certain typical themes which characterised a Platonist perennialism discernible across a wide spectrum of second-century Platonist thought. The significance of this line of argument for understanding Plotinus is the subject of the present chapter. Plotinus, like Plutarch, Numenius and Celsus, believed in the wisdom of the ancients, and the Enneads show a thoroughgoing deference and culture of respect toward the canonic sages of the past. But most importantly for this discussion, Plotinus applies a hermeneutic of enigma and esoteric meaning to this tradition in a way which seems to have been unprecedented and innovative: like the Middle Platonists he finds wisdom hidden in myths and rituals, but unlike them, he also unearths it, with the same methodology, in Plato.

The tradition to which Plotinus allies himself has an ‘open’ side – the realm of philosophical dialectic, the disputes and liberties proper to a culture of parrhêsia and the ‘republic of letters’ of Græco–Roman Hellenism – but there is no corner of Plotinian philosophy which is not also informed by an esoteric privileging of knowledge. This chapter will help to nuance and complete our picture of the ‘open’ aspects of Plotinus’ project with a contextualised understanding of the ways in which the practice of esoteric reading and writing define his relationship to – or construction of – a perennial tradition.

The Plotinian Idea of Tradition

In light of the well-known remark of Plotinus, cited at the beginning of the previous chapter, that he is not an innovator but an exegete of the ancients, and of the evidence presented subsequently for a widespread Platonist tradition of perennialism, it will come as no surprise that Plotinus may profitably be described as a Platonist perennialist. While the formulation of Platonist perennialism formulated in the present work is in some respects new, the fact that Plotinus saw himself as indebted to an immemorial tradition is well known.

The thesis of Odo Casel was that the cultural trope of silentium philosophorum in antiquity was in large part a transference over time of religious arcana – actual doctrinal secrets, and the culture of secrecy surrounding them – to the idea of an ineffable reality which could not, by its own nature, be revealed. The evidence traced in the present volume supports this analysis in many respects. There is however an important proviso: for Casel, and most scholars after him, the late antique philosophic use of the themes of mystic silence and other rhetorics of concealment and secrecy was entirely metaphorical. The mystic arcanum stood for the ineffable first god.

I would argue that this is too simple, and ignores what written secrecy and written silence have in common: they both advertise a truth to which the author is privy and the reader is not. Throughout the history of philosophic secrecy, concealment was rarely the main aim, but rather revealing the existence of privileged knowledge on the part of the philosopher. The act of written hiding and revealing applies equally well to the hidden arcanum which must be kept from the uninitiated and the openly announced, but ineffable, reality.

Discussing the interference between secrecy and ineffability found in Plotinus, Jean Pépin poses the question, without answering it, of why and how one would guard against communicating the incommunicable, and whether it makes sense to forbid the impossible. It is hoped that this book has posed some answers to the ‘how’ part of the question: forbidding communication of the ineffable should be understood as an exercise of rhetorical hiding and revealing, part of a long Platonist tradition of treating the highest matters of philosophy as ‘secret knowledge’. Even in the earliest sources cited in this book, such as the mysteries and the Presocratic poets, the concerns of secrecy are at least as much to do with identity and exclusion and with the identification of the ‘mystery’ as a mystery as with the concealment of genuine secrets. Keeping this in mind, the seeming paradox of the Plotinian move to conceal the ineffable should become less inexplicable. Platonist philosophic silence has its own internal logic, but this logic only makes sense if we cease to imagine that the exercise of secrecy either implies secrets or even necessarily requires the presumption that there are secrets.