The First Boston College Lecture on the Symposium, 1993

Professor Emil J. Piscitelli

In Praise of Love: A Conversation With Plato's Symposium

Politics was always in season in Athens. In the spring of 415 B.C. an Egestaean delegation from Sicily arrived in Athens with sixty talents of silver, funds enough for a month's pay for a fleet of sixty ships. They came to plea for help against the imperialist Syracusan take over of all of Sicily. The Athenian assembly voted in haste to provide a fleet under the command of Nicias with Alcibiades and Lamachus as his lieutenants. Though Nicias opposed the war as politically dangerous, with great hesitation he accepted the command. On the day of the assembly Nicias gave a speech against the war even though most of the Athenians came forward in favor of war. A few took Nicias' side.

The most enthusiastic supporter of the expedition was Alcibiades, the son of Cleinias; he was determined to oppose Nicias, who was always his political opponent and had just now spoken of him in disparaging terms. But an even stronger motive with him was his desire to command and the hope that he might be the instrument for conquering Sicily and Carthage and that success would enhance his personal wealth and glory. He had a great position among the citizens and was devoted to horse racing and other expenses which outran his means. And later nothing contributed more to the ruin of the Athenian state. For some people feared the extremes to which he carried the lawlessness of his personal habits, and the far-reaching purposes which invariably animated him in all his actions. They thought that he was aiming at a tyranny and set themselves against him. And therefore, though in public affairs none could conduct the war better, they entrusted the administration of the war to others because as individuals they objected to his private habits; and so they speedily shipwrecked the state.

When the assembly met again to discuss the preparations for the expedition and to approve the expenditure of public funds to equip the fleet. Nicias, who spoke first, again tried to dissuade the assembly from entering the war and blamed Alcibiades for the enthusiastic support among its members. Then amidst a great uproar Alcibiades rose and spoke somewhat as follows:

"Citizens of Athens, I have a better right to command this expedition than the fainthearted Nicias here who has attacked me personally. By reason of self-defense I am forced to praise myself. You all know I am worthy of this command. The actions for which I am so much maligned redound as an honor to myself and my ancestors and have been a real advantage to my country. Because of the distinguished way I represented our interests at Olympia, the other Greek cities were given an idea of our power that far exceeded the reality. Before this they had hoped we were exhausted from the war and were about to take advantage of our weakness. I sent into the lists seven chariots no other private citizen ever did anything like it before. I won the first, second, and fourth prize and ordered everything in a style worthy of my great victory. My success brought me personal honor but it also brought my country the image of power and prestige.

A man should treat others as equals if he claims similar treatment for himself. I know that great men are hated when they are alive. They are hated especially by their equals and those who are close to them. Yet great men leave behind them a reputation for the ages that leads others who are not related to them to claim them as their ancestors and the pride of their country. Future generations will regard great men of the past, not as aliens or criminals, but as their own children who have acted nobly. I aspire to be such a great man. And I have been criticized for the private activities that have brought honor and glory, not only upon myself, but upon my city.

So my fellow citizens consider very carefully whether in the management of public affairs any man today has surpassed me! ... Do not fret over my youth but while I am still young and in my prime and Nicias still has a reputation for good fortune use both of us to the fullest. After determining to set sail, don't waver and change your minds under the impression Sicily has great power. For although the cities of Sicily are populous their inhabitants are a mixed rabble who gain and loose citizenship at the drop of a hat. Thus no one there feels he has a city of his own. There is no deep sense of patriotism. The people are poorly armed and the walls of the cities poorly fortified. . . . It is unlikely that such a motley crew can agree in counsel or act in a concerted way against us. There it's every man for himself and anyone of them would defect to the man who makes the highest offer.

Never before were the Spartans less confident of defeating us than now, but let them regain their confidence and they will invade our country and march into our city. Remember they can invade our land whether we go to Sicily or not! But we rule the seas and are superior to them there and we will be able to leave behind us a navy easily equal to theirs.

What reason can we give ourselves for hesitating? What excuse can we give our allies for denying them aid? We have given them our word under oath to protect them and now we are saying they never helped us? Our treaty with them was not for them to come to Athens and help us but to harass our enemies in Sicily and prevent them from attacking us. This they did. Like all great imperial powers we have acquired our dominion by our readiness to stand by anyone, barbarian or Greek, who asked for our help. If we sit by and do nothing or make distinctions on the basis of nationality when people ask our help, we will not only add little to our empire but we will probably run the risk of losing it altogether. Wise men are not content to repel the attack of a superior power, they anticipate it. We cannot regulate at our pleasure the extent of our empire. Given our position, we must neither relax our hold on our subjects nor give up our plans to attack and rule over others. For if we do not rule over them, we will be ruled over by them! We cannot afford the luxury of inaction like those who are our subjects unless we wish to exchange places with them and become subjected to them.

Let us calculate that we are most likely to increase our power at home if we sail at once and attack Sicily. Thus we will humiliate the Spartans when they see how we have scorned the restful peace we now enjoy. By adding Sicily to our empire, we shall likely become masters of all of Hellas. But no matter what happens, we will injure the Syracusans and thereby benefit ourselves and our allies. After we win the war, whether we stay or leave, our navy will ensure our safety. At sea we are more than a match for all the Sicilians put together.

Don't let Nicias put you off by his mealy mouthed talk of the virtues of peacefulness and by setting young and old at each other's throats. Follow the customs of our fathers who in their youth made plans together with their elders and brought our city to its present state of greatness.. . . If the state remains at rest, it wears itself out by internal friction like anything else and all its knowledge will grow stale and fade into nothing. But by constant struggle the city gains new experience and the skills necessary to defend itself not with talk but with action where it really counts! In my judgment a warlike state will hastily come to ruin if it changes over too quickly into a peaceful one. The people who enjoy the greatest security are those who pursue policies most consistent with their historical character and traditional customs even though these might not always seem to be the best. (Thucydides)

Alcibiades and Socrates

At the very beginning of the Symposium Plato connects politics with philosophy. He alludes to a rumor that the notorious Alcibiades had secretly returned to Athens. Before leaving the city as one of the commanding officers in the expedition against Syracuse, Alcibiades had been accused of profaning the Elysian Mysteries and castrating the statues of the Hermes. After honoring him by making him one of the commanders of the expedition, the fickle demos, persuaded by his enemies, recalled him to Athens to face a trial on the charge of blasphemy. While returning home under arrest, Alcibiades escaped and defected to Sparta. He betrayed Athens and allied himself with the Spartans, the ancestral enemy of Athens.

At the beginning of the dialogue Apollodorus said that someone heard Alcibiades was back in town recently partying with Socrates. But it was only idle talk. The events of the dinner party in question had occurred at Agathon's house about ten years earlier. Popular hopes had given rise to the rumor that Alcibiades might return to liberate Athens from the tyrannical rule of the Thirty. Subsequent to the Syracusan debacle, the victorious Spartans installed a pro-Spartan, antidemocratic government in Athens. After betraying Athens, Alcibiades took up residence in Sparta. There he became more Spartan than the Spartans. The rumor was that he had a love affair with a Spartan queen and she bore his child whom she boldly named after him. Shortly afterwards he had to flee Sparta.

The reference to Alcibiades early in the dialogue recalls the recent political crisis and collapse of the Athenian democracy caused in part by the defeat of the Athenian fleet at Syracuse under Nicias. Alcibiades plays a central role in a dialogue that begins with a reference to him and ends with him giving the last speech in praise of love. Why would Plato end the dialogue with a speech by a consummate demagogue and politician? Why would he give the last word on love to the very man who persuaded the Athenian assembly to embark on the tragic Syracusan Expedition? Alcibiades was the main instigator of the prosecution of the war with Syracuse. The demos spitefully denied him the supreme leadership of the expedition and they gave it instead to the faint hearted Nicias. Nicias had second thoughts about the war from the beginning. The Syracusan Expedition turned out to be Alcibiades's suicidal gamble for glory. It was the beginning of the end of the Athenian Empire and Alcibiades. In the course of the presentation we shall seek an answer to the question about the relation between Plato and Alcibiades. We cannot understand the Symposium without understanding why Alcibiades plays such a prominent role in the dialogue.

At the beginning of the dialogue, the names of Socrates and Alcibiades are closely linked together. The reunion of the teacher with his student of happier days connects the themes of piety and education with the themes of love and death. Socrates found in Alcibiades one of his most attractive, powerful, promising, and talented students. As a student allegedly corrupted by Socrates and as a suspected desecrator of the sacred, Alcibiades symbolized both of the charges against Socrates: corruption of the youth and atheism. Socrates was blamed for the failures of his students even though their failures resulted from their deserting his way of life. In his speech Alcibiades testifies that he left the Socrates' inner circle and the philosophical life before he had committed himself to public life to pursue a career of power politics. Alcibiades implies that he left the Socrates' circle because he rejected Socrates' philosophical political program.Dialogue And Protrepsis

Every one of Plato's dialogues is a protreptic because its purpose is to aid the reader in affectively identifying with his own intelligence. The philosophical dialogue never addresses the reader solely as a solitary individual, but always as a member of a free, self-governing, political community. The irony of Socrates and the dialectic method of Plato are in the service of the protreptic. Alcibiades speaking last must be connected with Plato's concern for living the philosophical life.

In the dialogues Socrates generally encounters two different types of characters. His conversation partners are either traditionalists or sophists. The traditionalists think they already know what they are talking about without investigating the issues under consideration. They think they can have answers without first pursuing the questions. The sophists think they can reject any proposal no matter how reasonable it is, because they think that no investigation yields any objective knowledge as distinct from merely subjective opinion. Speaking against both traditionalist and sophist in the Crito, Socrates says he will avoid both "speaking at random" and "arguing for the sake of argument". He will also refrain from combining both in the way of the mediocre multitude.

The traditionalist has no basis in thought for the positions he takes. He is a naive believer who does not question his beliefs in order to understand what can be understood about them. He tends to be dogmatic asserting the positions he holds without taking seriously the need for evidence to support his conclusions. He tends to be optimistic about life believing everything will turn out well in the end no matter what anyone does. He does not take full responsibility for his actions. He tends to be a sacralist who holds that human life is justified ultimately as a right for those who worship the gods. Damnation is the lot of human beings who do not. The traditionalist is a character who tries to avoid thinking wherever possible.

The sophistic counter-position is based upon the attitudes of people who only partly think through their positions. The sophist is a skeptic who turns every question into a weapon of doubt to destroy the meaningfulness of the received tradition. He is a relativist who thinks every truth can be undermined by showing it to depend upon questionable experience or different perspectives. The relativism of the sophist is based upon his cowardly refusal to defend his judgments by giving sufficient evidence for them. The sophist is a pessimist who thinks the most a human being can hope for is a relatively comfortable life that will inevitably end in death. The sophist proposes the use of his rhetorical skills to manipulate others to achieve the pleasures of life for himself. Finally the sophist is a secularist who thinks human life should be justifiable but it unfortunately is not. He thinks human beings should be guaranteed a pleasurable existence, but because they cannot be, existence is not a gift but a burden. The sophist is a "pseudo-thinker" who uses his intelligence against itself to escape from the meaningful, the true, the real, and the really worthwhile.

For Plato the reader is not interpreting the dialogues, but the dialogues are interpreting the reader. If the reader fails to achieve the protrepsis, then the dialogues provide him with another opportunity for either sophistic, conceptual evasions or unthinking traditionalist, anti-philosophical propaganda. With his irony Plato protects himself and his readers from the sophistic and the traditionalist distortions of his work. Plato's writing is thoroughly ironic. Plato's work is not to be interpreted literally, undialectically, or unironically. "The unexamined life is not worth living" or more literally, "the uncorrected life is not a fully human life." In a dramatic form the dialogues present the first principles for the examination of life. Human beings could achieve the protrepsis without reading Plato's dialogues. After all Socrates had. But the Athenians could not easily find another like Socrates to insist that they must become morally excellent human beings if they were to become good citizens. Similarly educated people cannot easily find another set of texts to inspire, enlighten, and aid them in the affective appropriation of their own intelligence for the sake of governing themselves well in a free society.

Plato does not separate irony from dialectical thinking. He does not separate myth or story from logos or theory (explanation). In the dialogues stories suggest theories while explanations are applied to life through the stories. Plato's dialogues embrace both story and theory because human meaning in life is both intersubjective and interobjective. A life that does not include both kinds of meaning is an impoverished human life. For Plato the choice is never between theory or story, but always a choice of both. The dialogue genre is unique because it embraces both story and theory, symbol and concept, irony and dialectic.

The purpose of Plato's irony and dialectical arguments is not just to communicate some information or some meaning to the reader, but to aid the reader in achieving a protrepsis. By the protrepsis the reader begins to identify affectively with his own intelligence. He begins to live his life on the basis of a commitment to being reasonable. He begins to make choices for which he takes responsibility and for which he can give an account.

The most important thing for a person to learn is how to be an excellent human being. Genuine human learning requires the internalization of an ideal. Plato makes Socrates his dramatic protagonist to serve as a model for the internalization of the ideal of the good life based upon philosophy. By making Socrates the paradigm philosopher, Plato acknowledged that human beings do not learn to live excellently without imitating and affectively identifying with a model. The flesh and blood human being makes present the concrete possibilities of human excellence. In the dialogues Socrates is the paradigm of the intellectual and moral excellences. He is the reflective man who is recognized by other reflective men as the just citizen. Plato presents him in the dialogues as a practitioner of philosophical politics.

Genuine moral knowledge is impossible without moral training and practice. While character training makes it more probable that a person will become virtuous, it does not guarantee that the person of good character will always rise to the challenge of living a virtuous life. The uncontrollable element of fate or luck cannot be completely eliminated from the moral realm. Plato's irony serves the moral truth that ethical reflection is no substitute for good character training, but even good character training requires some good fortune.

In the Seventh Letter Plato identifies philosophical insight with an instantaneous illumination (exaifneV). The instantaneous illumination is not an obscurantist, Gnostic, or exclusivist doctrine. Plato is not a mystic in the obscurantist sense. In speaking of illumination he means that philosophical wisdom is a gift of nature to human beings. Human wisdom comes at the end of a lifelong process of development and learning. When philosophical illumination comes, the subject experiences it as something immediate. The sage acknowledges understanding as a divine gift. For Plato the virtuous life lies beyond what can be accounted for as a result of human effort alone. The philosopher experiences the insight that leads to wisdom as the fulfillment of human nature and as a gift of the gods. Nature itself has a divine origin and so it is an appropriate symbol of a divine gift. Nature and the divine gift of insight are in accord. Nature is the gift insofar as it is given to human experience. The philosopher experiences insight as an intensification of human experience, a heightening of it. Philosophical illumination experienced as a gift is a power beyond nature drawing nature beyond itself, a divine zhthsiV. The divine is the ultimate objective of all "going beyond."

Plato uses the word, exaifneV, in the Seventh Letter, in the Parmenides, and in the allegory of the cave in the Republic. All the references to exaifneV are crucial passages in Plato's argument. The word, exaifneV, refers to immediate dimension of the experience of understanding that results from the periagwgh, the turn toward the Good that takes control of the life of the human being who undergoes it. Plato cannot give an adequate account of the experience of exaifneV because the experience of understanding itself is the ground of philosophical accounts. The philosopher cannot directly intuit the Transcendent Ideas. Yet Plato tells the story of human beings recollecting the ideas from a different world and a different time. Diotima prophesies the movement from philosophy to religion, a trajectory that Plato believes is both inevitable and continuous since the intention of intelligence is the intention of the divine.

The dialogues playfully express Plato's idea of the philosophical life in the city. The dialogue plays dramatize his own interior philosophical protrepsis. Socrates disclosed the nature of the protrepsis that informed his life, not by writing on tablets, but by writing on the hearts and minds of the young Athenians in his inner circle. Socrates changed their lives. Plato dramatized the protrepsis that informed his life through the character of Socrates in his dialogues. Plato memorialized Socrates to liberate himself and his readers. His provocative memorial to Socrates continues to make the philosophical life possible for anyone who learns how to read his dialogues. Plato inscribes his philosophy, not primarily in the texts of dialogues, but in the minds and hearts of those who learn how to read them.

Plato's irony requires the reader to dialogue with the dialogue. He intends the reader to reenact in his own mind the dialectical arguments that make it possible for the philosopher to achieve the protrepsis. The reader cannot always be certain of Plato's conclusions. He cannot always determine what position Plato held. When he can, he will not always agree with Plato. But to the extent that the reader undergoes the protrepsis, he will begin to live the philosophical life, and that is what Plato meant for his readers to achieve by reading his dialogues.

The emergence of literate cultures from oral cultures results from the shift from tribal society to civil society. Socrates recognized that civil society could not preserve the human achievements of the ancestral (tribal) society without philosophy. Plato recognized that a literate culture, even more than an oral culture, requires the practice of philosophy to make a good life possible in the political community. For Socrates public discussion is an essential part of philosophical politics. The philosopher is the conscience of the city. Plato made writing into a philosophical mission. On the basis of a program of political reform achieved by educating the citizenry to self-rule, Plato made the academy the locus of the city's conscience. Oral philosophy was necessary to preserve the self-governing city. Written philosophy became necessary to preserve and promote the city's mindful self-governance from one generation to the next. Plato's dialogues were so effective that the essence of the Athenian enlightenment lives in them.Horizon Analysis in the Symposium

The Symposium opens in an unusual way. Apollodorus says, "I believe I am not unrehearsed in what you are asking." The narrative begins in the middle of a conversation between Apollodorus and some unnamed companion. The Symposium is not narrated by Socrates but by Apollodorus who tells us he heard the story from Aristodemus and later checked it with Socrates. He in turn told Glaucon the story recently and now he is telling some unnamed companion (and us). It is a triple narration. The triple narration indicates the distance between the account of the speeches and their historic occurrence. Apollodorus says Aristodemus did not remember everything everyone said. Nor did he remember everything Aristodemus told him.

The time perspectives are expressed symbolically by the three narrative times of the dialogue. The narrative times are structured in three nested narratives. Aristodemus told Apollodorus, Apollodorus tells Glaucon recently and his present companion while they walk to town, and finally Plato is telling us. Aristodemus narrates the time of the happening. Apollodorus narrates the time of the telling. Plato narrates the time of understanding. The time of understanding is a time in and beyond time. The narrative-times recall what had happened to the characters after the party was over. The characters are connected to the readers and they anticipate what happens to them because desire and love are essential to human destiny. The time of the telling lasts as long as the dialogue presents its readers with the meaning and truth of eros across time. The time of understanding is not time in the ordinary sense since it is a time beyond time.

We can identify three distinct readings of the Symposium: an exegetical, a systematic, and an horizon-analytical. The exegetical discloses the meaning and implications of what each character says about love. The systematic discloses the relation between the horizons of the speakers, the meanings of their speeches, and their personal fates. The systematic reading reveals the structure of the dialogue as a meaningful whole and its underlying unity. The horizon-analytical reading discloses the dialectical tensions and conflicts between the meanings, truths, and values disclosed in the speeches on eros and the reader's horizon and aspirations in life. Like the author the reader is a silent participant in the dialogue. The dialogue spreads out as the speech in-between the silence of the author and the silence of the reader.

Plato's dialogues are not systematic treatises, but intellectual dramas embodied in the flesh and blood and the emotions and passions of human beings. Like the plays at the time the dialogues take their characters from historical persons. They are existential dramas displaying human existence in its totality through interpersonal and intellectual interaction. Philosophical irony is the expression of dialectical thought in the form of symbolic-interpersonal communication. The conceptual or theoretical form of philosophical irony is the dialectical method. The dialogue remains a intersubjective form of communication. Ingeniously Plato incorporated into his dialogues both symbolic interpersonal and conceptual theoretical forms of dialectical thinking. He perfected the dialogue as the consummate pedagogical form of philosophical communication and through the written word he equaled, if not surpassed, what Socrates had achieved in oral communication.

Just as Socrates accommodates his speech to his hearers, Plato accommodates his writing to his readers. Every statement in a dialogue is more or less ironic. The irony begins with the dramatic setting and ends with the reader's life in his own community. Irony is the appropriate form of communication for Plato because he wants people to think for themselves, to inquire systematically into the divine mysteries of existence without publicly renouncing what is held to be the divine law, and to act justly. Philosophical irony makes it possible for Plato to probe the destructive tendencies within the psyche, to purge it of its disordered desires, and to protect philosophy from the rage of anti-philosophers. Art, Poetry, and Politics in the Symposium

The dialogues are works of art and works of philosophy. Plato does not separate the aesthetic from the practical or the political from the theoretical dimensions of life. The intersubjective and dramatic character of the dialogues partially explains their abiding attractiveness for every generation. The Symposium does not separate thought from desire or the beautiful from the good. It explores the relation of political discourse to inspired poetry and ecstatic religious speech.

In the Republic Socrates banned the poets from the city. In the Symposium he embraces poetry as a the result of a divine creative eros. It is a mistake to interpret literally Socrates' proposal to exile the poets from the just city in the Republic. The Symposium presents philosophy in the guise of poetry and rhetoric. Diotima's speech is more poetic and rhetorical than it is philosophical. It is more inspiration and exhortation than argument. The Symposium discloses the connection between the aesthetic value of speech and its political uses. Art expresses political aspirations and becomes an instrument for the achievement of political ends. Eros is the ligature (sundesmoV) that binds living things and human societies together. Human desire, aspiration, and the longing for immortality is the connection between art, politics, and religion.

Dramatis Personae: Teachers, Students, and Gods

The Symposium presents a typology of psyches, a typology of educational practice, and a typology of ways of life in relation to the divine. The major characters in the dialogue are teachers and students. They represent a chain of students and teachers spanning three generations. Pairing off the teachers and students, we have the following schema:Characters Presented -- Prior Generation Teachers

At first Aristophanes appears to be neither a teacher nor a student. He presents himself as the teacher of the political community, but he hides the fact that someone was his teacher. To recognize someone as your teacher is to admit your own limitations. His unacknowledged teacher was Homer. Aristophanes aspired to replace Homer, who was the poet of the tribe, with himself as the poet of the tribe in the city. Aristophanes knew that only the gods were not students. A man who pretends to have no teachers pretends to be divine.

In the Protagoras the cast of characters is almost the same as in the Symposium. Its theme is the question: whether virtue can be taught. Socrates and Hippocrates go to the house of Callias to see Protagoras. They find Eryximachus the physician and his young student Phaedrus listening to Hippias of Elis speaking on astronomy. Pausanias with a younger Agathon are together with Prodicus of Ceos, a sophist known for his use of the method of distinguishing the meaning of words to determine the proper use of names in moral discourse. Hippias, who professed himself an expert in all fields of learning, was willing to answer any question, and was never at a loss for words. He taught geometry, astronomy, and the musical arts. Eryximachus' speech betrays Hippias' influence.

Aristophanes is the only speaker in the Symposium not present in the Protagoras. Socrates anticipates the rules given by Eryximachus governing drinking parties and after dinner speeches. Alcibiades arrives after Socrates as he does in the Symposium. Alcibiades is just showing the beginnings of a beard. This puts the dramatic date of the Protagoras some 15 to 20 years earlier than the Symposium. In both dialogues Plato pairs Socrates with Alcibiades. The Protagoras presents the story of the beginning of the relationship. Socrates is pursuing Alcibiades as a young student. The Symposium presents the story of the end of the relationship. After leaving the inner circle of Socrates, Alcibiades tells his own version of what happened between himself and Socrates.

The Protagoras asks the question about the value of the new learning. The question of the Symposium raises the question about the connection between religious poetry, education, and love. Protagoras claims to teach the virtues, but the dialogue discloses that he really does not know whether what he teaches is good or harmful. The Symposium pursues the question: what happens to people who carry the new learning in their souls. But unlike the Clouds of Aristophanes the Symposium denies that philosophy is the equivalent of the new sophistic learning. The Symposium contrasts the teachings of the sophists and the traditionalists with the teachings of the philosopher in terms of their foundations in eros. As desire Eros moves all men, and the forms and deformations of eros determine the kind of education that results. In the speech of the drunken Alcibiades who deserted the philosophical life for a life of power politics, the reader discovers the final outcome of the sophistic paideia.Eros

At the suggestion of Eryximachus, the physician, the group decides to forgo the customary after dinner drinkfest in favor of a contest or agon in which each of the participants will give a speech in praise of the god, Eros. Initially the proposal implies giving an encomium to Dionysus. But it is ambiguous since eros may or may not be Dionysian. The Dionysian eros is the first form of eros to be honored in the speeches. The Greek word, Eros, includes all the meanings of love in the sense of desire from sexual passion to romantic love and even to the love of friendship insofar as it includes desire. Eros is sometimes contrasted with filia, friendship or affection. This is the same Eros of which Sophocles wrote so eloquently in the Antigone:Love unconquered in battle,Love that wreaks havoc with wealth,That keeps a vigil on the soft cheek of a maiden,That roams over the seas Seeking prey in pastoral haunts,No Immortal God can escape You,Yet alone a Man whose life lasts but a Day !The one whom you possess becomes mad.By You to their ruin even the Just Are warped and do wrong:You are the one who stirred upThe present strife of kinsfolk.The Love-Kindling Light From the eyes of the fair BrideConquer the loverPitting son against father.Love is an Eternal PowerEnthroned beside Eternal Laws.There Aphrodite works her Indomitable Will.

Euripides describes eros as a violent tyrant the ruin of those whose hearts he bewitches. In the Republic Plato calls eros, "by nature a self-controlled and cultivated love of order and beauty." Plato's eros is the philosophical eros. But eros can be the passion of the tyrant to dominate others or the sting of a lover's unsatisfied longing. When Alcibiades placed Eros on his shield in his coat of arms, he had in mind the indomitable Aphrodite of Sophocles' Antigone.

Eryximachus speaks of honoring or adorning the god. The word he uses is kosmhsai which means to put in order and to dress up. The contrast is with what is disordered or in disarray or the naked truth. The assumption is that it is difficult for civilized men to take the naked truth about Dionysian eros. The rhetoricians know how to dress up the naked truth or to order a Dionysian eros that is by nature disordered.

Eryximachus proposes the contest because he claims his student Phaedrus often complained that no poet or song writer ever praised love for its true worth though common table salt has been justly praised for its utility. Phaedrus implies that, like common table salt, love's value comes from its usefulness. For Phaedrus what redeems Dionysian eros is its practical utility. As part of fusiV natural desires serve the higher purpose of preserving the living species from extinction. But Phaedrus does not have natural species preservation in mind. He is thinking of using the lover to pursue his private interests. A close analysis of his speech discloses his hidden agenda. Everyone agrees that it is a good idea to have a speech contest in praise of love. Each is to take their turn giving a speech in praise of Eros beginning with Phaedrus who is dubbed the "Father of the Discussion."

The speakers celebrate Eros on a feast of Dionysus, the god of lusty love, a fertility nature god, a phallic god. The worship of Dionysus has two forms: a newer civil form in which he is worshipped as the god of wine and civil pleasure that connects human beings with the gods of Olympian civility and an older tribal form in which he is a chthonian god of drug induced frenzy and wild sexual ecstasy that connects human beings with the gods of the animal world. The worship of Dionysus is, therefore, unstable. Euripides shows in his play, the Bacchae, what can happen when the god is worshipped in the older form. In the version presented in the Bacchae, on alternate years women societies at Delphi engaged in wild orgiastic dancing in midwinter at night. The god himself possessed them in the dance that led them up to the summit of mount Parnassus carrying the thyrsus, the phallic rod. With it they tore apart their victims: small animals they nursed at the breast as well as animals as large as mountain lions and then they ate them raw. In the Bacchae Agave, the mother of Pentheus, thinking it is a young lion she has just killed, carries her son's head on the thrysus. Cadmus, her husband, finally brings her to an awareness of what she has done and what she holds on the thrysus. The emotional reaction to the play is pity for the souls possessed by the god and revulsion at the god's savage cruelty. Euripides forced his fellow Athenians to confront the fact that they regressed from time to time to the savage parts of their nature.

There is a civilized side to Dionysus, the god of wine and exquisite civilized pleasures. He is the god of the theater which objectifies and presents the instinctual side of human desire and thereby cleanses it of its brutality and makes it human. While the civilized Dionysus does not tame human desires completely, he transforms them cathartically into a creative humanized reality. The plays of Euripides are as much inspired by Dionysus civilis as the orgies of old were inspired by Dionysus ferus.

The clear-sighted Apollo is the god of the civil arts and crafts, of medicine, and of prophecy. If Dionysus symbolizes the passionate side, Apollo symbolizes the intellectual side of love. The drinking party was celebrated on the third day of the Dionysian festival. The wine god, Dionysus, was a god of desire, of lust, of nature, and genesis. The civilized icons of Dionysus are the grape and the phallus in the shape of a thyrsus, that becomes the magic wand producing all the civilized pleasures which include the pleasures of fellowship as well as sexual pleasures. Divine intelligence governs the natural order. Apollonian love, the love of divine intelligence, sublimates Dionysian desire and lust that sublimation results in the ordering of nature. The Symposium presents two cycles of the genesis of eros: the genesis of the human (body) from Dionysian desire and the genesis of the daimonic (human noetic psyche) from Apollonian love. Eros And Intelligence

According to the Symposium eros can mean either living on the basis of blind desire and fear or living on the basis of passionate intelligence. Socrates appears arrogant because he achieved a vision of NouV as the divine principle of life. His arrogance is the same as his humility. If human beings do not cultivate the divine gift of their own intelligence as the basis of self-governance, they make it impossible to live a virtuous, civilized life. The conflict between the life of passionate intelligence and the chaotic life of disordered desires and fears separates Socrates' philosophical politics from Alcibiades' power politics.

Is the Symposium both a criticism of, and a tribute to, Socrates? The speech of Alcibiades is a thinly disguised criticism of Socrates. His speech is a gross form of self-promotion. Plato is neither simply agreeing nor disagreeing with Alcibiades. He is using the speech of a power politician in conjunction with the other speeches to disclose the truth about philosophy and Socrates. Plato is criticizing the potential misuse of Socrates and philosophy by spurious disciples. A faithful student of Socrates must go beyond being his student and appropriate the philosophical life for himself. Alcibiades rejected the life of philosophy for a life of power politics. While the speech of Alcibiades contains some truth, so do all the other speeches. The interpreter must distinguish what is true from what is false in each speech. Everyday life mixes both the true and the false together. Alcibiades complained that Socrates was lacking in ordinary, human passion. Plato is not simply criticizing Socrates and agreeing with Alcibiades. Perhaps Plato was criticizing Alcibiades for lacking self-control and Socrates for not doing sufficient justice to the role of affectivity in political life.

In the Symposium Socrates recounts the speech of Diotima. She presents three distinct but interrelated forms of desire: desire as epithumia, raw animal desire, thumos, fellow-feeling or the desire for honor, and eros, the desire to know the truly divine good. Eros is the desire of human intelligence for Beauty (To Kalon), Truth, and the Good.

The Symposium presents seven speeches given in praise of love. The speeches reveal as much about the assumptions of the speakers as they do about the nature of eros. For the nature of the speaker's eros determines how he understands and praises it. The horizons of the speakers range from the utilitarian rhetoric of Phaedrus' common sense values to the prosecutorial rhetoric of a drunken Alcibiades with his intemperate political ambitions. The Phaedrus presents three speeches on the best kind of friendship: one written by Lysias recounted by Phaedrus and two others given by Socrates. The first two praise a friend who is not a genuine lover; the third praises a friend who is a genuine lover. Socrates writes his first speech as a sophistic exercise to show that he can write a better speech on a chosen topic than Lysias, the popular legal advocate. After the speech, Socrates realizing what he has done, confesses to having committed a sin against the god, (h ti qeon) Eros, covers his head, and promises to do penance by giving a second speech. Socrates says his daimon kept him from proceeding until he recanted his defamation of the god. The reference to his daimon is similar to the mention of it in the Apology where he says his daimon would stop him when he was saying something he knew to be wrong, even in the middle of a speech.The Metaxis and the Psyche

Eros as desire collects the natural into the human. Eros as passion first consciously then self-consciously recollects the human into the divine. Eros is the basis for recollection. In the dialogues the theme of recollection is a learning motif. The two cycles of the speeches present the types of erotic genesis: anthropogenesis and theogenesis. The dialogue is a recollecting of psyches on the basis of erotic types. It presents a form of psychogenesis. The psyche is intermediary between nature and mind. Psychogenesis recapitulates anthropogenesis or the transformation of nature into man. Noogenesis, the genesis of mind from psyche, recollects itself in theogenesis or the process of assimilating the human being to the Divine Being of the Good.

In the Symposium psychogenesis presents both a process of natural development (first cycle) and a dialectically self-conscious activity (second cycle) in which each speaker presents a viewpoint in conflict with the others. The conflict arises because each speaker implies that his view is the truth about human existence. As the dialogue unfolds in the successive speeches, it presents the speakers as becoming more self-conscious of the conflicts first with one another and then with themselves. Psychogenesis becomes noogenesis when the tensions and conflicts within the consciousness of the speaker become reflectively self-conscious.

Plato arranged the speeches in the Symposium from the less to the more differentiated or from the less thought out to the more thought out positions. He ordered the horizons of the speakers genetically and dialectically. The psyche is the realm of the inner life of human beings. It expresses human interiority primarily in terms of thymic feelings. Human feelings are ambiguous, for they exist in-between the animal world and the divine-noetic world of Theoria and the Good. In the Symposium the world of the psyche presents the most immediate and experiential form of the metaxis. It presents the human reality as constituted in-between nature and mind.

Psyche represents the human as distinct from either the natural subhuman or the sublime superhuman divine world. The psyche is the human world as constituted by the inwardness of both nature as desire and human nature as the intention of the divine Good, the ground of the excellent life. The Transcendent Good is the ultimate objective of a life of contemplation.

While the Timaeus speaks of a World-Psyche as the inwardness of the whole cosmos, psyche is not identical with the cosmos nor with the public, political world. The dialogues present the totality of reality under the aspects of Cosmos, Psyche, and Polis as having the same structure. Natural development proceeds from cosmos to psyche to polis. In the natural process of collection the totalities become more explicitly conscious and inwardly concentrated. Self-conscious recollection proceeds from the polis to the psyche to the cosmos. In the self-conscious process of recollection the totalities become more explicitly inclusive. A reflective culture thematizes the psyche first in the arts and the theater and then in philosophy. The experience of the psyche is the first experience of the metaxis. The psychic metaxis symbolizes the totality of the experience of reality as reflected in the inner life of human beings. Eros is the inner, intentional activity of the psychic metaxis, that is of the psyche as in-between nature and mind. The Symposium begins as a reflection on eros as natural desire, continues as a reflection on eros as a force that draws all living things together, and ends as a reflection on love of the Good as the Beautiful, To Kalon. In the Symposium the Good experienced as the Beautiful, To Kalon, is the undifferentiated objective of natural desire, human aspiration, and divine love.

The Order of the Speeches in the Symposium

The Symposium is a well wrought work of art. If it is a work of art, then a major feature of it cannot be the result of chance. The ordering of the speeches is the major structural feature of the dialogue. Therefore the order of the speeches cannot be a result of chance.

Plato placed the speeches in their present order by design. But the reason for the order is not obvious. The order of the speeches form a conspicuous pattern. The characters speak in the following order: Phaedrus, Pausanias, Eryximachus, Aristophanes, Agathon, Socrates, Diotima, and Alcibiades. Why do they speak in just that order? Are the participants speaking in the order in which they happened to be reclining at table? Such an explanation would push the question back one remove to why Plato put the company in that order in the first place. If Plato meant the speakers to speak in their order at the table, he must have had some reason to make Eryximachus and Aristophanes exchange places and speak out of order. It is unlikely the drinking party was an historical event. Plato could not have been present since he puts the dramatic date of the dialogue at the time of his childhood.

The dialogue does not portray the historical details of an actual dinner party. Rather Plato is suggesting a typical encounter between Socrates and his contemporaries. The dramatic, aesthetic, and philosophical purposes determine the details and the symbolic meanings in the dialogue. The dialogue is historic without being historical. The order of the speeches clearly has an important role to play in the meaning of the dialogue as a whole.

Another way of asking the question about the significance of the order of the speeches is to ask why Alcibiades rather than Socrates speaks last? Most attempts at answering the question of the order of the speeches give an explanation that leads the reader to expect Socrates to speak last. Some interpreters treat Socrates as having the last word even though Alcibiades gave the last speech because, they claim, Alcibiades praised Socrates in place of Eros. The solution is unsatisfactory. Alcibiades has the last word in the dialogue because he, not Socrates, gave the last speech on the nature of eros. Moreover a close reading reveals that Alcibiades does not unequivocally praise Socrates in his speech. He reproaches him for rebuffing his erotic advances towards his teacher and he indicts his one time mentor for betraying Eros in its human form. Plato has the last word of the dialogue as the philosopher artist who made the whole thing up.

The basis for the order of the speeches is the dialogue's deep structure and its meaning. A satisfactory answer to the question about the significance of the order of the speeches will result in a better understanding of Plato's philosophy of eros and the psyche. A better understanding of Plato's philosophy of eros and psyche will shed a light on the meaning of his teachings in the Republic and other related dialogues like the Phaedrus, the Philebus, the Sophist, and the Timaeus. The significance of the order of the speeches is central to the meaning of the dialogue as a philosophical work. Some dialogues are more important than others. I believe the Symposium is one of the most important dialogues for understanding Plato's philosophy. Political Speech In The Symposium

In one reading of the Symposium each speaker offers a different version of political discourse commensurate with his own erotic horizon. On this reading Phaedrus reduces political discourse to a form of commercial jingle by placing it in the category of a useful tool. In his pedantic oration, Pausanias turns political discourse into a form of sexual seduction. The sophist makes political speech a psychological tool to achieve his erotic purposes. The physician, Eryximachus, turns political discourse into the technical skill for developing a sound body. By extending his body metaphor for the psyche into society, he reduces political practice to managing the public health. He understands political speech to reflect the natural order that is a form of physical harmony. The speech of Eryximachus completes the first cycle of eros which presents the process of nature becoming human. In the first cycle eros means animal desire. The physician makes animal desire the ground of political speech. In the physician's view political speech is a form of the expression of the natural forces in human life. Since human beings are a result of natural forces, politics is the highest form of natural science. The most sublime form of natural science is the science of medicine.

The speech of the comic poet, Aristophanes, brings to a close the first cycle and initiates the second cycle of eros which presents human beings becoming divine. It presents eros within consciousness specifically as human desire and aspiration. The speech of Aristophanes is both more concrete and more attuned to human experience. In the arts Eros has a life of its own within human consciousness. For Aristophanes even though it is substantially no more than the result of natural forces, human desire has an inner life of its own. The comic poet grounds political discourse in a myth that tells of a self-deceptive human longing for wholeness. He proposes that political discourse is a form of lying to one's self in order to hide from the tragic truth of human finitude, self-destructiveness, and death.

Agathon, the young tragic poet and host of the party, proposes political discourse to be the sublime art of divine self-creation. He transforms political rhetoric into the propaganda of self-promotion. Agathon's speech heralds the triumph of art as pure elegance over the plain truth, the triumph of style over substance. The Mantinean prophetess, Diotima, proclaims political discourse to be founded on religious ecstasy, an experience that takes human beings beyond themselves. She proposes the transformation of political speech into the poetry of divine revelation. The philosopher, Socrates, following her lead, makes philosophy the highest form of political poetry, rhetoric, and practice. He argues that the self-knowledge resulting from the practice of the virtues is the basis for genuine political discourse. Socrates makes practical wisdom the foundation for freedom and the fulfillment of life.

The power politician, Alcibiades, insists that real political discourse is the making of a political community in the image of a single great man's aspirations and ambitions. He turns political discourse into a form of tyranny. Plato, the tragedian who became a philosopher and political reformer, proposes genuine political discourse to be the making of the political self and the self-governing city in the image of the divinity reflected in daimonic men like Socrates. By providing the method for embodying the principles of philosophical and moral conversion in the institutions of society, Plato hoped to transform political discourse into a continuing public philosophical dialogue. The public conversation about the good to be pursued by a civil society is the substance of philosophical politics. Public dialogue makes it possible for human beings to live together creatively in political communities that liberate rather than oppress them.Drama Tragedy And Comedy And Philosophy

Men worship Dionysus, a god of natural instincts, in the theater, first in the tragedies and then in the comedies. Tragedy was originally a goat song, sung over a scapegoat, a sacrificial victim, torn apart alive and eaten raw, symbolizing Dionysus cut in pieces. Tragedy presents the suffering and death of the hero or heroine in the form of an appropriate lamentation, but it also presents suffering as appropriate to the hero's character flaw or hubris. Hubris is the arrogant refusal of the hero to keep within the bounds of his allotted place in the scheme of things coupled with his nemisiV, his allotted destruction. The theater has religious purposes: the blessings of the gods for fertility and the release from sin. Tragedy celebrates human life with all its vicissitudes displaying the highest divine aspirations of men and mourning the failure of even the greatest men to achieve them. Comedy or the komwV is a later development, a revel song. The revel by custom ends in a gamoV, a ritual sexual union of the participants. In the classical period the chorus and actors in the comedy wore artificial phalli and sang phallic songs. Comedy recognizes the origins and limits of human achievements in contrast to unlimited and conflicting human passions. Plato transformed the dramatic presentation in the theater of the life of feeling into the drama in his dialogues of the life of the mind. Reflection can never eliminate Dionysus, for he turns out to be the other side of Apollo. Nor can desire completely eliminate reflection, Dionysus overwhelm Apollo. Dionysus and Apollo are two different sides of the reality of Eros.

Plato is the dramatist, not of the yuch, but of the yuch becoming nouV, of soul becoming mind. In the theater of the mind divine intelligence sublates the psyche into itself. Intelligence is the only legitimate ruler of the polis. When the polis is well ruled by intelligence, the city mirrors the cosmopolis, the order of the universe, by reflecting the divine order in its laws and in its life. When psyche becomes mindful, the common soul of the tragic chorus no longer adequately represents the will of the gods in society. With the development of civil society the demos is not to be guided any longer by the inarticulate, law of the tribe. The divine law is still the ground of the laws in civil society, but it is expressed more fully in the civil law and requires the practice of philosophy. The social, institutional, and personal commitment to argument (logos) legitimates the laws of civil society and makes the practice of the virtues in civil society possible. Civil society must be measured by its own rational standards, not by an inarticulate, traditional, tribal wisdom, but by good arguments. Good arguments proceed from the individual minds of daimonic men. In Plato's dialogues Socrates is a model of the daimonic man.

The tragic chorus presented the divine law articulated in the comportment of good men in tribal society. The law of the tribe did not require that the virtuous man be capable of giving an account of his actions. The virtuous man in tribal society generally could not give an account of his actions. In a civil society men had to be able to give a public account (logoV) of their actions when required by courts of law, but also by society generally. In the arguments of Plato's Socrates the divine law remained the foundation for the civil laws. Plato thought that civil society and its just laws fulfilled the divine law. Philosophy showed how civil law reflected the divine laws by imitating the Divine Intelligence that rules the cosmos.

The Symposium shows how natural desire becomes human aspiration and how human aspiration intends the divine. Eros as human passion finds its fulfillment in human intelligence. Plato's ordering of the speeches presents the transformations of natural desire into human aspirations and human aspirations into a longing for the Divine Beauty. By revealing the tensions and conflicts between the speakers and their own speeches, between each speech and every other speech, and finally between the horizons of the speakers themselves and the horizon of the reader, the dialogue works through the erotic transformation of psyche into nous Each speaker is called upon to do justice to the nature of Eros. Each successive speaker does more justice to it. Yet the speakers, including Socrates, do only partial justice to it. If Eros is a god or even a demigod, then no human can do full justice to him.

The transformation of mortal flesh into a human animal with a psyche is a natural process driven by eros as it stretches toward the divine Good by seeking to procreate in the Beautiful, the To Kalon. The transformation of psyche into nous results from a periagogh, a conversion toward the Good, a self-conscious transformation based upon knowing and loving. The life of the mind does not eliminate the natural or the social order, but brings both to completion first in moral-political and then in the philosophical and religious life.

The Immortality of Daimonic Men

Diotima presents human beings neither as animals nor as gods. A human being is a being in-between or a daimonic being, a mortal who participates in immortality. In the Symposium Diotima derived the theme of immortality from an understanding of eros as it moves through the registers of life beginning with the animal desire that strives to procreate in the beautiful body. From brute desire eros becomes a more properly human desire that seeks to create meaning, to uncover truth, and to act virtuously in the souls of the young. From human desire, eros as thumos or fellow feeling, moves beyond itself to a self-transcending passion that seeks to achieve the good in the founding of political communities on the principles of moral excellence. Finally eros as divine-human aspiration transcends the limits of the human quest to complete life in the philosophical, religious contemplation of the Good as the Truth of Beauty. Socrates' Diotima identifies the Truth of Beauty, to Kalon, with the Good.

The portrait of Socrates in Plato's dialogues is true to life in the sense that he presents Socrates as a credible human being. The picture Plato gives of Socrates is largely coherent with what we know of him from other contemporary sources. Plato's purpose is to present Socrates as the model philosopher. The Symposium shows a side of Socrates not seen anywhere else. It shows Socrates as a philosopher who is a poet and a lover. Socrates ascends from Dionysian lust to the vision of transcendent Beauty. By virtue of pursuing the excellent life, Socrates is presented as passing beyond death and befriended by the Immortals. The dialogue makes the soul's immortality self-evident by articulating the intentional and dialectical structure of desire. In it the necessary condition for the ascent of the psyche towards the Beauty of Divine Goodness is a life lived in quest of excellence. In Diotima's speech each level of eros is a differentiation of a corresponding objective, the different forms of the beautiful. The differentiations of the beautiful good, to Kalon, present forms of participation in immortality that come closer to the Eternal Good. Participation means community with and communion in the divine. Each level of eros makes possible a more comprehensive and more intensive form of community with the divine. But this raises the question of the meaning of Diotima's speech which is the subject of our next talk.

copyright © Emil J. Piscitelli

Second Lecture