The notion that Plato had unwritten doctrines (agrapha dogmata, i.e. doctrines not explicitly recorded in the dialogues, but which were taught orally in the Academy) is not one which has historically been popular in much of the English-speaking world; the majority of the important scholarship on the topic has been published in German and Italian.[1] The significance of this interpretative tradition must be firmly stated since it was dismissed out of hand by Harold Cherniss and Gregory Vlastos in a manner which has had repercussions for Anglophone research to this very day. Rafael Ferber’s monograph in English is to be welcomed, then, since it provides a detailed examination of a significant facet of Platonic scholarship and renders it accessible to the Anglophone reader.[2]
Although scholarship on the unwritten doctrines is usually associated with the Tübingen-Milan School (Hans Joachim Krämer, Konrad Gaiser, Thomas Alexander Szlezák, Jens Halfwassen, Vittorio Hösle, Giovanni Reale; Lloyd Gerson is an important scholar in North America who sympathizes with this approach), Ferber is explicitly not a member of this group (p. 107), differing with prominent Tübingen School members on some important points (e.g. methodologically, or on the possibility of divine wisdom for the philosopher). Essentially, the Tübingen-Milan School postulates that evidence for Plato’s unwritten doctrines can be found in the testimonia, that their existence can be demonstrated from certain passages in the dialogues and that these doctrines largely concern the Good/the theory of principles.
Ferber’s approach in this new English edition of the German versions (1991; 2007) is not to reconstruct the content of the unwritten doctrines, which is a popular thrust of much Tübingen School work, or to primarily evaluate its significance for the history of Platonic philosophy (as in the scholarship of Jens Halfwassen, for example). Rather he investigates what reasons Plato had for not writing the unwritten doctrines. After establishing the “lowest common denominator”—the consensus view accepted by most factions—he explores this question in three sections: A: The Answers from the Republic; B: The Answers from the Phaedrus and the Timaeus and C: The Answers from the Seventh Letter. A “Retraction” (in the sense of “revisiting”) contextualizes the controversy over the unwritten doctrines and examines its position within current Platonic scholarship, while considering responses to the thesis of why Plato did not write the unwritten doctrines advanced by the original German publications. An appendix evaluates the evidence for dating Plato’s lecture on the Good; the monograph is rounded out with a well-ordered bibliography presenting key works on the unwritten doctrines and the testimonia concerning them, before listing cited works. Reviews of Ferber’s original German text are listed, which along with the Retraction, provides a good overview of recent developments.
This organization is sensible, not least because many scholars (particularly in the English-speaking world) have reservations about the Seventh Letter’s authenticity; arguments relying on other texts, the authenticity of which are not subject to dispute, are more likely to be persuasive. The layout of the volume and bibliography ensures that Ferber’s volume advances an original contribution to the topic of the unwritten doctrines while orienting the novice within the literature and debates of the competing factions.
The “most obvious” response to Ferber’s question is that Plato did not write these doctrines due to secrecy (p. 17). However, as Ferber demonstrates, the conflation of “unwritten” and “secret” hampered acceptance of the Tübingen School’s views. While many analyses of deliberate gaps (passages which indicate that Plato’s Socrates has more to say, but is unwilling to say it on the present occasion) consider what it is that is left unsaid, Ferber assesses the motivation behind Socrates’ reticence. Socrates never says that he is unwilling to speak in order to keep his views secret (p. 18). Other possible reasons for Plato’s reticence (“arid schematisation”, “sheer technical difficulty”) are considered and rejected (pp. 18-19). A more promising line of inquiry is that Plato’s Socrates may only have “opinion”, rather than “science” or knowledge (p. 22), although this encounters the difficulty of separating the knowledge of the Republic’s author, Plato, from that possessed by his character, Socrates (p. 23).
Based on his reading of the Republic, Ferber suggests that Plato did not write down his doctrine concerning the Good since he did not possess it as a “science in the dialectical sense” and that writing it down would have “conferred on it an immutability that would not have been appropriate to doxastic mutability” (p. 24). This is certainly more attractive and more complimentary to Plato than the view that he was so disappointed with his ill-fated lecture on the Good that he abandoned the public presentation (i.e. external to the Academy) of these doctrines. It also differs from the view of Krämer, who regards the theory of principles as possessing “the highest possible degree of certainty”.[3] For Ferber, dialectic represents an ideal, but this ideal is not realized within the written text (p. 27). This view seems to be confirmed by the lack of evidence that Plato passed the elenchic text he proposes at Republic 543b3-6 (grasping the explanation of Being and essence of each thing and being able to give an account of it).
The Phaedrus’ “critique of writing” is a particularly problematic text. As in his treatment of the Republic, Ferber concentrates on a less well-known aspect of a famous passage: that philosophers possess “something more valuable than what they have composed or written after much turning back and forth, adding and deleting” (Phaedrus 278d8-e1; pp. 31-32). The question of the unwritten doctrines has often been presented—particularly since Vlastos—as a marginal topic in Plato studies and Ferber does a good job of underlining its centrality to the core philosophical enterprise when he notes that this passage is the first answer to the question “Who is a philosopher and who is not?”
Ferber next examines whether the Phaedrus’ critique of writing supports his analysis of the Republic. He suggests that the so-called critique of writing (as outlined in the Phaedrus’ Egyptian myth) is actually a critique of written publication (i.e. making the text available to a wider audience in the author’s absence, pp. 33-34, as opposed to using writing as a memory aid, for example). This reference to memory aids (hypomnēmata) suggests another reason for Plato’s not writing the doctrines down since it could only “remind those who already know what it is written about” (Phaedrus 275d1-2). Ferber uses this statement to consider that knowledge of the unwritten doctrines cannot simply be imposed or known like the content of mathematics—his comparison with Wittgenstein’s Tractatus helps to underscore the continued relevance of this approach to knowledge, rather than presenting it as a subject of merely antiquarian interest. Even those who do not subscribe to the notion of unwritten doctrines will surely find the next sections useful, examining the claims to knowledge which the dialectician can advance (pp. 36-42), highlighting the limits to human knowledge.
The Timaeus is significant since Socrates is not the primary interlocutor here and Timaeus exhibits the same sort of philosophical reticence (Timaeus 48c2-7), which suggests that the unwillingness to write down these doctrines is due to “the essence of the matter”, rather than exclusively attributable to “the character of Socrates” (p. 42). The Timaeus is significant since it mentions even higher principles (principles above fire etc.) which are “known only to God” (Timaeus 53d)—raising the issue of what these principles are and whether Plato knew them (p. 43). Ferber elegantly concludes this section with a consideration of the limits of human—and therefore philosophical—wisdom.
Section C searches for answers in the text which has possibly provoked the bitterest debates in Platonic scholarship: the Seventh Letter. Ferber notes (p. 45 n. 80) that “the issue does not seem to be objectively decidable”). Since he keeps evidence drawn from the Seventh Letter separate from the evidence drawn from the dialogues, any conclusive proof that it is spurious would not undermine his case. The Seventh Letter is employed to flesh out information derived from the dialogues, while, if it is accepted as authentic, it rejects all written reports about the unwritten doctrines, not just Plato’s own dialogues (p. 47). So how does the Seventh Letter enrich our understanding of why Plato might not have desired to commit his unwritten doctrines to written publication?
One possibility is lack of sufficient knowledge, as suggested by Republic 505a5-6 and illustrated by Dionysius’ claim of knowledge based on what he “heard”, when he is actually ignorant. By contrast, the Seventh Letter’s author makes no claim to knowledge (p. 47); this neatly picks up Ferber’s previous analysis of the dialectician’s claim to knowledge. While it is possible to have reservations about the Seventh Letter’s authenticity, 341c-d has serious repercussions for our understanding of Plato when the author claims that “there is no writing of mine about this [the Good] nor will there ever be”. If the author is Plato, this suggests that even the dialogues are not “writings about the nature of the idea of the Good” (p. 48); it is therefore valuable (beyond simply understanding the Seventh Letter) that Ferber treats this matter at length with consideration of why “what is greatest” could not be transmitted by written communication.
The unwritten doctrines are also significant for our understanding of Neoplatonism which it allows us to see more in continuity with, rather than as a rupture from, the preceding Platonic tradition. Ferber addresses this when examining Plotinus’ interpretation of the “light in the soul” (Seventh Letter 341c-d) as “ecstatic rapture” (Enneads V.3.17.25-29; p. 52), and presents a persuasive argument against Plotinus’ “mystical interpretation”. The conclusion raises the issue of how (or whether) the principles could be known, rather than what arises from the interaction of the two principles (p. 87), which raises questions for Plato’s epistemology and the ultimate aim of dialectic.
The Retraction is both a useful and unusual feature of the monograph. It is not often that the reactions to a book and the author’s reflections upon objections raised to his theses are all found between the covers of a single volume, particularly coupled with observations on the changing landscape of Platonic scholarship since these theses were first advanced (pp. 91-96). This provides a welcome dialogical aspect to Ferber’s book and a pleasant view of philosophy as a shared enterprise. The theses outlined here bring the notion of Plato involved in an “ongoing attempt” to develop the content of these doctrines into sharp focus (pp. 96-99). One difficulty with the theory of knowledge presented by Ferber, identified by Hermann Steinthal and ultimately caused by Plato’s lofty aspirations for dialectic, is that its goal is set so high that it can say little definitely about the object on which it fixes itself. The Retraction allows Ferber to respond to this difficulty by pointing out that we can have opinion concerning, or hope for, knowledge about something that is (not yet) securely known (as Socrates does, p. 102).
Ferber’s monograph contributes significantly to an important strand of Platonic scholarship, the consequences of which have not been fully resolved. The major relevant passages (including the Philebus) are analyzed in detail and Ferber makes a cogent and persuasive argument for why—irrespective of our stance on the issue of the unwritten doctrines—we should care about why Plato never wrote these down, since it concerns the nature of philosophy, the difficulties of written communication and, ultimately, the possible limits of knowledge itself.
Notes
[1] E.g. H. J. Krämer, Arete bei Platon und Aristoteles (Heidelberg, 1959); K. Gaiser, Platons Ungeschriebene Lehre: Studien zur systematischen und geschichtlichen Begründung der Wissenschaften in der Platonischen Schule, 2nd edn. (Stuttgart, 1968); G. Reale, Per una nuova interpretazione di Platone: Rilettura della metafisica dei grandi dialoghi alla luce della ‘Dottrine non scritte’ (Milan, 1984).
[2] Apart from Ferber, see, e.g., C. S. O’Brien, Plato’s Unwritten Doctrines (Cambridge, 2025); T. A. Szlezák, Reading Plato (London / New York, 1999); V. Hösle, “The Tübingen School” in A. Kim. (ed.), Brill’s Companion to German Platonism (Leiden / Boston, 2019), 328-348.
[3] See his review of the German original of Ferber’s book in Philophisches Jahrbuch im Auftrag der Görres-Gesellschaft 94 (1987), 196-201 at 200-201.