The Second Boston College Lecture on the Symposium, 1993
Professor Emil J. Piscitelli
Before we can make sense out of Diotima's speech on Love we have to understand the basics of the preceding speeches because Diotima's speech grows out of what went before. First there was Phaedrus. Phaedrus' name means the sparkling one or the flashy one. Phaedrus has the Madison Avenue Touch. He proposes that love is most of all a useful thing in human life, and it is useful to know something of its true nature. He identifies Eros with the Lover, the teacher, the erwsthV. For Phaedrus 'love makes the world go round'
Phaedrus praises love's goodness insofar as it is useful to the beloved. He cannot imagine a greater good for a young man like himself than that he have a useful lover. He is thinking of the sexual relation between a student and his teacher, like himself and Eryximachus. The usefulness of the beloved to the lover is virtually an afterthought. Phaedrus covertly admits to using the older man, Eryximachus, for his own selfish purposes. Becoming suddenly aware of revealing his unconscious, base motivation, Phaedrus devotes the rest of his speech to praising the lover, over the beloved, specifically praising his teacher over himself. He devotes the remainder of his speech to covering up his unconscious self-disclosure.
For Phaedrus what counts in civil society is the visible. How things look is more important than how they are. In the city image (eidwla) is everything. Phaedrus presents the basis for the common practice of power politics in civil society. Phaedrus argues that vulgar (dishonorable) acts of vulgar men are heroic (honorable) so long as they look like the heroic acts of tribal heroes or look like the virtuous acts of civilized human beings. For Phaedrus good men are men with a good reputation. Men are good because people think they are good. For him there are no objective criteria for excellence; there are no real heroes, nor are there any really civilized men. There are only vulgar men who look like heroes or appear civilized. Beneath the mask of every public hero is a dishonorable private man and behind the façade of every civilized man is a selfish barbarian. For him all men are equally boorish and selfish. Civil society exists to hide boorish selfishness beneath a veneer of sophistication. The most effective form of selfishness is the form practiced by the civilized man who knows how to hide his own selfishness and make efficient use of the selfishness of others.
His thesis is: If love justifies life, then love must overcome the death of the beloved. That means his teacher must overcome death for Phaedrus. If love is to be justified in life, then the lover must give up his own life for the sake of his beloved. For Phaedrus the selflessness of the lover is consistent with the selfishness of the beloved.
The student needs the teacher for his education. If the teacher does not step aside and die some day, the student will have a hard time finding a place in the world. If humankind would follow Phaedrus' principle of efficient selfishness, the result would be the inevitable disappearance of the human race. His principle of efficient selfishness guarantees the failure of students since there is no reason within the horizon of pure selfishness for any teacher to communicate all of their hard won knowledge to their students for momentary sexual pleasures or for the payment of a paltry tuition.
The speech Plato constructs for Phaedrus is not meant to be internally coherent. Phaedrus' speech vulgarizes abstract reason turning it into selfish calculation, and results from separating eros from reason. Phaedrus reduced the human reality to the physical or natural order of things. For him love is a matter of natural forces. Anticipating utilitarian ethics, he reduces the ethical life to a calculus of pleasure and pain. The speech shows the speaker to be at odds with himself insofar as his principle of efficient selfishness is self-defeating. No doubt there is some truth in what Phaedrus says though it is mixed with considerable falsehood. All the themes of the dialogue are contained in his speech; but they are muddled, undifferentiated, and distorted. Appropriately the last word of Phaedrus' speech is death (teleutesasin). The last word for power politics is death without a final hope.
The pedantic Pausanias opens his speech by correcting Phaedrus, Eryximachus' student. He chastises him for not recognizing that not only are there two different persons involved in love, the erwsteV and the eromenoV, the lover and the beloved, but also there are two kinds of love, heavenly and earthly. Pausanias uses sophistic arguments to justify his pederastic practices. He knows he is going to have a difficult time holding on to Agathon now that his student has won the prize for tragedy in the Dionysian festival and established a public reputation for himself. Pausanias' speech is a covert plea to Agathon not to desert him.
Pausanias asserts the principle that the nature of an act is determined by its achieved objective. He understands the principle to mean that a person can justify any act by the end the agent proposes. The end justifies the means! As a sophist, Pausanias is more concerned with appearing correct than with being right. He is more concerned with correctness than truth. He is more interested in speaking about virtue than he is in being virtuous.
Pausanias lives his life in pursuit of self-gratification. He recognizes that a life of self-gratification depends upon the preservation of the poliV. Only the city makes possible the life of pursuing pleasure for its own sake. Unlike Phaedrus he makes a distinction between tribal and civil society. Pausanias claims that in themselves human acts are neither noble nor shameful, but become good or base according to how they are performed. With one bold stroke he reduces the question of morality to a question of life-style. His argument amounts to claiming that if a person follows a good sex manual, then even depraved sex acts become morally justifiable and acceptable in high society. With the sophistic art of verbal gymnastics Pausanias uses his intelligence to manipulate others for his own purposes.
His speech makes no significant, philosophical advance over Phaedrus' thinly disguised utilitarian selfishness. His opinion leads clearly in the direction of identifying efficiency with excellence and managerial manipulation with human virtue. Phaedrus was the selfish student as consumer. Pausanias is the selfish teacher as business manager.There is no such thing as a noble sexual perversion. There is no reasonable justification for a virtuous manipulation of people for allegedly higher purposes. On his own principles while he is able to justify Agathon's remaining his student, he is not able to justify himself as Agathon's pederastic teacher because Agathon is acting for the 'higher' purpose of learning and he is acting for the 'lower' one of sexual pleasure. Pausanias suggests that technically produced style rather than real human excellence is the basis for nobility. He craftily redefines morality in terms of his own self-interest: holding on to Agathon.
Revealing the moral bankruptcy of his position, Pausanias appeals to success as the sole criterion of the nobility of human actions. He is a moralizer. He talks about moral standards that either cannot stand as moral principles on intelligent scrutiny or are not true moral principles because they cannot be followed in real life. Pausanias affirms that acts are noble or shameful depending upon how and for what reason they are done rather than on the basis of what is done. He concludes too hastily that desires of the body are necessarily bad while desires of the mind are necessarily good. He concludes young men can justifiably seek intellectual achievements using any means that will yield results.
Pausanias argues that the slavery of Eros in the case of the student-beloved is justified since it is for the sake of arhth, excellence, or manliness. In his argument excellence is simply identical with sophistic rhetorical skills. Though he dares not speak explicitly of a noble slavery since that would have been a contradiction in terms for the Greeks, still he calls the exchange of carnal pleasure for knowledge a non-shameful slavery (ouk eponeidistoV). If it is not the teacher who is the tyrant but Eros, understood as intense sexual desire, then the teacher-erwsteV is even more a slave of the lower passions than the student. For the teacher uses the student for his sexual gratification and not vice versa.
The position of Pausanias on love is a version of the utilitarian views of Phaedrus brought to a level of reflective justification. Pausanias replaces intellectual culture for money as the wages of prostitution. Culture becomes a commodity to be traded for sexual pleasures. Pausanias never explains in any reasonable way why the teacher-lover, who is supposed to love excellence, puts the pleasures of the body above the pleasures of intelligence in the teacher-student relationship.
For Pausanias there is no difference between a con man and a philosopher. If Pausanias is right, then students should withhold their sexual favors until it is evident that the teacher is a man of excellence. The principle would adversely affect Pausanias' chances with Agathon. Pausanias is playing with words rather than trying to discover the truth about love.
Aristophanes' attack of hiccups in the Symposium is the most famous case of hiccups in Western literature. As a playful ruse Plato afflicted Aristophanes with the hiccups, but his ruse has a philosophical purpose. At the end of the speech of Pausanias the reader discovers that the convulsions of Aristophanes began during the sophist's speech and they continued throughout the speech, and they functioned as a running commentary on the nonsense of the crotchety, old schoolmaster. Plato uses Aristophanes' hiccups to punctuate Eryximachus' convoluted speech. The comic effect is exquisite. Plato is also making fun of the comedian, Aristophanes. By his belching Aristophanes is mocking the two who spoke before him and calling attention to his own lack of physical self-control. Undoubtedly Plato meant Eryximachus to speak in the third place, exactly in the order that he did.
Aristophanes himself is presented as someone who cannot control his bodily functions. Aristophanes is not fully potty trained and fit for civil society. He is the victim of nature's eruptions. Plato ridicules Aristophanes because he unjustly caricatured Socrates in The Clouds by presenting him as the worst kind of sophist. Aristophanes gives way to Eryximachus since the physician has "power over all those who belch."
Eryximachus distinguishes the orderly eros from the disorderly one and extends the application of love to every form of desire and attraction. Eryximachus makes eros a cosmic principle. He agrees with Pausanias that love has a double nature but he extends the principle of eros to all things: persons, animals, plants, and every natural body. Medicine is defined as a knowledge of bodily desires, ta erwtika, in terms of emptying and filling. The physician knows how to make opposites friendly with each other so that they are attuned to each other. Medicine achieves harmony between the opposing desires of the body.
Eryximachus identifies the noble and virtuous with the healthy and the base and vicious with the diseased. He bases the distinction between the healthy and the sick on how people feel. Medical tecnh is supposed to make people feel good. Like the purpose of sophistic rhetoric, purpose of medical humanism is to give human beings what they desire. Eryximachus does two things early in his speech that define the substance of what he will say about eros. First he reduces the psyche to the reality of the body. Secondly he exploits the ambiguity of the meaning of the double-eros by purposely conflating the distinction between good and bad with the distinction between healthy and sick. Ironically if the principle of the harmony of opposites were applied to a homosexual pederast, he would be forced to conclude that heterosexual love, or the love of opposites male-female, is the superior and the more orderly natural form human love while homosexual love is either a derivative or deviant form of eros. He can justify pederasty or homosexual love only by advocating the cultivation of a disorder.
Eryximachus deliberately confuses health with pleasure and sickness with pain. The confusion permits him to propose that medical science exists to promote pleasure over pain. For Eryximachus medical skill makes a physician god-like, but like a god who acts counter to the principles of the cosmic eros. For pleasure is not an end in nature, but a means to an end. Only human beings can make pleasure an end of life.
The speech of the sophistic physician extends the common sense viewpoint of Phaedrus into the realm of technical knowledge and theory. Eryximachus' proposal differs from his student Phaedrus' only insofar as his grasp of the technical issues is more sophisticated. His purpose remains the same goal of common sense: securing the longest life with a maximum pleasure and minimum pain. In Eryximachus' position, sophistic medicine simply substitutes medical skills for verbal ones. The psyche of the patient determines the success of the medical skill and the meaning of the end achieved: health means giving the patient what he or she desires. The physician simply decides which bodily inclinations he will honor based upon the demands of his patient.
For Eryximachus man is primarily an animal with technical skill, a tool using animal. Eryximachus' evaluation of the excellences of human life is governed by how much pleasure they afford and how much pain they avert. He is a technician of pleasure and pain. The sophistic physician accepts heterosexual license providing it is attuned to the healthy orderly eros. Eryximachus does not exclude heterosexual excesses because the physician can cure the disorders as long as the patients pay their doctor's bills. His medical skill consists in his ability efficiently, economically, and with few short term negative results to produce as much pleasure with as little pain as possible.
Medical knowledge as mere technological know-how is not much different from a form of cooking that attempts to make things appear edible whether they are healthy or not. The theory produces the equivalent of a justification for junk food. Like a form of cosmetics it attempts to make people look good whether they are beautiful or not. In the same genre as sophistry that makes speeches appear true whether they are or not, sophistic medicine makes its patients feel good whether they are well or not.
The argument of the first three speakers in the Symposium can be summarized in terms of three forms of selfishness. As human types, the first three champions of pederasty have defined their views within the horizon of selfishness. Each speaker degraded their own intelligence by subordinating it to immediate pleasure and self-interest. Phaedrus degraded human intelligence by reducing its procedures to a utilitarian calculus. He tried unsuccessfully to hide his intention to use his teacher for his own purposes. Pausanias promoted the somewhat crude calculus of Phaedrus to the magisterial level of rhetorical cleverness. His civilized discourse failed to conceal his intention to preserve his pederastic relationship with Agathon. His self-proclaimed concern with the psyche amounted to no more than an internalization of his selfish sexual desires. Eryximachus represents both progress and decline in relation to the positions of Phaedrus and Pausanias. He diminishes human nobility by identifying the psyche with the body, but his medical art gives him a quasi-objective criteria for distinguishing noble or right actions from ignoble or wrong ones. His criteria drawn from nature amount to the distinction between the healthy and the sick. The distinction between health and sickness is a minimal, but objective, standard. Though his notion of science takes the argument of the Symposium beyond a merely subjectivist rhetoric, he cannot establish a sound objective basis for the different types of eros. The immediate practical appeal of his speech is not accompanied by the theoretical adequacy that he promised and that will be found later in philosophy.
Eryximachus ends his speech appropriately with the Greek word that means to stop, pauw. Plato's ending hints that Eryximachus did not bring his speech to an end or to completion, but just stopped talking. A materialist cannot bring his discourse to completion; the best he can do is stop.
Aristophanes' speech completes the cycle of genesis that conceives eros as the fulfillment of the corporeal nature of human beings.
When Dionysus the tyrant king of Syracuse asked Plato for an explanation of Athenian politics he sent him the plays of Aristophanes without comment. Plato thought Aristophanes was the best introduction to the basic issues in Athenian political life. The Republic takes the comic poet's criticism of civil justice seriously and offers Aristophanes a philosophical answer.
Aristophanes rejects all theory as unfounded self-justification. The comic poet assumes that theory is just another name for ideology. He rejects the political application of the sophistic theory that laws are no more than social customs in the name of tribal justice. He assumes technical knowledge is necessary for life in the city. He claims that the practice of justice is essentially opposed to theories of justice. Aristophanes' speech proposes the legitimacy of the claims of tribal justice in a civil society. He thinks tribal values are superior to civilized life, and theory is alien to the nature of the human-animal. From the tribal viewpoint justice in civil society is the triumph of the unjust account (logoV) over tried and true traditional, tribal wisdom. Aristophanes rightly thinks that justice in civilized life depends upon argument and theory, but he wrongly rejects theory as necessarily corruptive of virtue. In the Symposium Aristophanes presents, not a critique of civil justice in civil society, but the claims of tribal justice in civil society. To overlook Aristophanes' identification of justice with tribal justice is to misunderstand the underlying argument of his speech. His speech ends with a prayer that the gods return men to the "arcaion fusin," the ancient, tribal life rooted in the nature (fusiV) of things.
For Aristophanes the fundamental political problem is how to contain the hubris of the body with justice. In his plays he suggests that one way to curb the uncontrolled sexual eros is to turn desire towards other bodily functions. He advocates the sublimation of sexual eros in eating, drinking, and other bodily pleasures. Where possible, Aristophanes thinks eros should be sublimated in mutual friendship and fellow feeling. But he frowns upon the sublimation of eros in thinking activities.
For Aristophanes the city is not a natural place for human beings to live. For him man is not naturally a political animal. He holds that all reflective justifications of civilized political life are destructive. Since for Aristophanes human life in the polis is necessarily at odds with itself, he teaches that the arrogant wisdom of sophistry is substantially no better than the misguided wisdom of philosophy.
Aristophanes displaces the Eryximachus' theory of the double eros with his story of the double people or circle people. Nearly the entire speech of Aristophanes is a story or myth. Aristophanes' myth of the circle-people in the Symposium is the first expression of a genuinely human experience of eros, that is, it is the first time eros is presented in strictly human terms.
Aristophanes tells a story about the origin of human nature. He speaks of a time when humans were not the same as they are now.In the beginning humankind was tri-sexual: male, female, and male-female. According to the story, in the beginning people were shaped like circles; they were perfectly symmetrical on all sides. They had twice the parts humans presently have: they had two faces, Janus-like, pointing frontwards and backwards; four hands, feet, eyes, and ears and two sets of sexual parts. There was no sexual generation as we presently know it, and, therefore, present sexual relations are a result of the lack of a genuine harmony between human beings. According to Aristophanes in the beginning there was no eros and no alienation, no love and no disorder. The predominant characteristic of the circle people was their ability to move around with great speed, freely, and gracefully in any direction. They had terrific power and energy. They arrogantly challenged the gods themselves. They even went so far as to defy the gods and attack them.
After deliberating on the alternatives of destroying them or debilitating them, Zeus decided that he did not want to give up the sacrifices and honors the circle people offered to the gods. Instead of destroying them Zeus decided to debilitate the circle people by cutting them in half. Zeus orders Apollo to cut them in half. But that leads them to spend all their time wandering around looking for their other half and if they fail to find it, they ultimately die forlorn and forsaken. Zeus performs a second operation because the first one had negative results. This time Zeus himself does the cutting. He splices sex organs in the front conferring eros upon the half circles. According to Aristophanes the story explains why Eros is naturally ingrained in human beings. Eros restores a primordial human nature, making it whole, one out of two. It heals the alienation caused by the loneliness of the isolated, individual human being.
All lovers are such that they never want to be separated from the beloved other half, but to live their whole lives together. The meaning of love goes beyond sexual union. The soul of each lover desires something beyond what they can clearly put in words: to be melded together into a single being again. Aristophanes concludes by counseling men to befriend, obey, and worship the gods otherwise Zeus will spit them in two again.
Aristophanes holds that the human is both natural and artificial. Though the civil, political domain is a human outgrowth, it is not strictly a natural phenomenon. Because it is artificial, the city is a result of human disorderliness. The polis is a fundamentally unstable, harmony of erotic opposites. Its defects and excellences are best symbolized by pederastic love. Eros is a result of Divine selfishness. Aristophanes has extended the hypothesis of selfishness developed in the first three speeches into the divine realm itself. Zeus is a greedy god, greedy for the worship and sacrifices of humans. According to Aristophanes' myth the Olympians need the circle people as much as the circle people and their human descendants in civil society need the Olympians.
For Aristophanes philosophy is a self-delusion of naive intellectuals because it deceives them into thinking that the philosopher wants something other than tyrannical power over others. The philosophical quest for power is more insidious than the common power politics since the philosopher's intentions are hidden from others and often from himself by a rhetoric that proclaims itself founded on intellectual truth moral virtue, and a divine vision.
Aristophanes' image of the circle-men is a metaphor for the natural side of human nature, the symbol of the divine circle of life and death. In the light of the circle-people image Aristophanes' position becomes "all at once" intelligible. Primitive men conjure the gods into existence by worshipping natural forces. At first the tribal gods become a means by which human beings humanize themselves. Tragically when the process of humanization evolves beyond tribal society in the polis, human beings tend to rebel against and replace or transform their tribal gods into civil gods. The wish is self-destructive since, without the regulative influence of the tribal gods of nature, men deprive themselves of the only form of justice that is genuine, tribal justice.
According to Aristophanes a nomos, human laws, can be ascribed of the polis, but a logos cannot be predicated of the cosmos, the polis or the psyche. For the comic poet cosmopolis is a myth with no objective foundation. The myths, including androgyne, are, finally, false stories human beings tell themselves to console themselves and to project meaning in life and make it bearable. According to the myth of the circle people, original human nature is in the barbarous condition of the circularity of birth and death. As they become civilized, the circle people naturally rebel against their superiors. If eros were really to succeed in making one from two, it would not heal human nature, but destroy it.
The poet's criticism of philosophy is that it creates the illusion of an articulate speech adequate to the truth of life and substitutes the illusion of a Divine Life for the reality of natural, Animal Death. Aristophanes is caught in a vicious circle of his own making. Nature gives birth to man and man returns to nature. The circle of the circle people is exposed in the vicious cycles of nature: death-birth-life-death. If nature is all there is, there is no way out. The last word of Phaedrus' speech was death; the last unspoken word of Aristophanes' speech is death.
The desire of love is the desire for death disclosed in the loss of self-conscious identity in the orgasm that is achieved in sexual union. Erotic union is a fusion of consciousnesses through the copulation of bodies that mirrors the final loss of self-consciousness in the corpse. The corpse is the human body achieving its ultimate erotic destiny by reuniting itself with earth in the grave. Aristophanes supposes that human beings want to be like the gods, but they do not understand what that means. Unlike the gods who have imaginative bodies and are really nothing, humans with real bodies are mortal. Like the gods, humans are destined to become nothing. For after death humans become the figments in the imaginations of future men.
The last words of Aristophanes' speech are that eros will "restore and heal us by a natural principle making us blessed and happy." The last word is poihsai, "to make." The theme of Agathon, the next speaker, will be the theme of poetic "making," poihsiV.
The effeminate Agathon, the beloved student of the wily Pausanias, is the soft, good looking, young, intellectual aristocrat who hosts the drinking party. Agathon is bent on emancipating human life from the necessities of nature by novel and creative speech. He thinks novelty and creativity are interchangeable. Agathon argues for individual rights or privileges as the basis for personal freedom. For Agathon Eros is synonymous with poetry and poetry with creativity and creativity with complete innovation. Agathon wants to turn rhetorical skill into art by magic.
Agathon is the first speaker to propose a vision of life as something that partakes of the Divine, as something beyond the realm of natural necessity. He is the poet of freedom. He does not distinguish freedom from spontaneity nor aesthetic innovation from creativity. Agathon exalts human freedom beyond its limits by identifying it with divine freedom. He gives the poet the freedom to innovate reality, to create the real itself in its totality. Agathon identifies himself with Eros and Eros with the Beautiful.
For Agathon the preeminent, visible good is beauty since it is self-evident and requires no defense beyond its recognition. He is interested exclusively in the genesis of beauty, specifically in the genesis of beautiful speeches as the adornments of life. For him the wisdom of the divine eros consists in generating the poetic arts in men. Eros makes mortals into poets and poetry makes men divine. Once the gods are identified with poetic activity, then the poem becomes the divinity. "Of all the happy gods Eros is the happiest and the best." Agathon's teaching identifies excellence with pleasure and assures us that happiness is pleasure rather than knowledge. For him the just man is the seductive poet. The seductive poet is the skilled innovator because what civilized human beings want is the constant distraction produced by the pleasures available only in civil society.
Eros is the happiest of gods because he is the most beautiful and therefore, the best. Since Eros is the youngest divinity, he abandons the old. Since he is happiest because the youngest god, Eros's happiness might be transient, lasting only until some new god is poetically generated. When Agathon advocates poetic theogenesis, he implies that poetry cannot be replaced by another doctrine since any new teaching would itself have to be a poem and, like the gods, poetically generated. Agathon's speech celebrates the new erotic man of civil society. By his principle of innovation he wants to abolish the old tribal aesthetic values.
Agathon is the first speaker to recognize the two cycles of genesis: the cycle of nature (necessity) and the cycle of man or freedom/eros. Agathon is the first speaker to subordinate the body to the psyche. According to Agathon poetry is governed by the aesthetic demand for elegance. As someone sensitized to the aesthetic forms of things, Agathon is the first speaker to mention the eidoV (form/idea) of eros. Agathon claims to take an apolitical position. Eros neither does nor suffers injustice in relation to god or man. There is no such thing as an apolitical position. Justice is an inescapable issue in human life. Agathon, in effect, proposes to aestheticize the political domain. His unspoken implication is that Eros has no need for justice as an excellence or virtue. the desire for erotic pleasure completely controls human behavior. Agathon wants to replace force with persuasion and rape with seduction.
Eros is the source of all wisdom since she is a divine poet. Agathon hints that sexual generation in man is more connected with fantasy and imagination than with physical conditions. Even the physical aspect of the sexual performance is a movement from the external to the internal. Nature imitates the psyche. The poet's wisdom consists in his ability to make love through his art and to reveal that the greatest pleasures are the pleasures of the psyche. The touch of the poetic Eros does not result in understanding. The music of love-sick poets does not come from an understanding of what is happening to them when eros touches them. The poetic art is not wisdom but the ability of the poet to imitate erotic inspiration by touching the feelings of others aesthetically. The poetic art is the skill of touching the hearts and souls of others with the right words.
For the tragic poet moral goodness is achieved in making, admiring, and loving beautiful things. For the poet the invisible is realized only in the visible realm. Agathon believes the gods themselves are the product of Eros, the Divine Poet. The poetic eros displaces the natural eros. The hidden thesis of Agathon's speech is that the poetic art is the real maker of the gods. Agathon is a covert atheist since he does not believe that the gods transcend the literary arts. The gods are the product of the poetically inspired, but thoroughly human, imagination.
Agathon's position implies that the source of the poet's immortality lies not in the poem itself, but in the opinion of the audience. For the poet, as for the rhetorician, whether it is true or false, public opinion is all that matters. The leaders of the political community imitate the artists by promoting propaganda; but when they do, they cannot avoid falling victim to the lure of art and its danger of confusing illusion with reality. When that occurs, government itself becomes a staged spectacle orchestrated by the producers of the public show. The art of governing based upon the practice of the virtues comes to be replaced by the techniques of personnel management. When the skills of management replace the art of good government, then everything in the government becomes a show. The position of Agathon does not hold up. Agathon's mixture of play and seriousness is a bad imitation of philosophical dialectic. Philosophical irony also mixes play and seriousness but without confusing the two.
Agathon concludes his speech with the Greek word for mixing, metecon. The word symbolizes the promise and the failure Agathon's speech. The speech's failure consists in its lack of differentiation. Agathon's promise is the promise of artist. The promise of the artist is that he will disclose the metaxiV in human experience. Art promises to show, through its myriad forms of expression, that being human is to be in the metaxiV, human life is life in-between the beasts and the gods, that to be human is to be in the middle.
The philosophic way of life is based on recognizing a reality beyond the body or the psyche. The philosopher recognizes the autonomous realm of understanding, the world constituted by meaning, the realm of intelligence, the realm of nouV. Each speaker so far failed to go beyond either the immediate evidence of the visible world or the spontaneous feelings of the psyche. Socrates says the correct method of praising eros is to speak the truth about it. The philosopher complains that his predecessors attributed qualities to eros that pleased the audience whether what was said was true or not. Socrates must know about eros otherwise he cannot be a philosopher. As a power in human life Eros is a daimon that mediates between the divine and the human. When Socrates claims to know the truth about the psyche, he claims to know how the whole is ordered toward the human. When Socrates claims to know the truth about the nous, he claims to know how the human is ordered toward the divine. His claim does not imply that he knows everything about everything.
Socrates distinguishes two ways of praising love, one that praises it without regard for truth or falsity, the other picks out loves best features, but it remains concerned for truth in the process. Socrates in his own account of Eros will take something from each of the five speeches, but will reject their disregard for the truth. Rhetoric, conceived as a species of flattery, consists not in saying what is utterly false, but in saying what is only half true. Philosophical rhetoric consists in discerning the true from the false, eliminating the false to preserve the true for the sake of the good.
Socrates approves of Agathon's distinction between the nature of Eros and his works and suggests that questions about the nature of Eros, of what sort he is, are prior to questions about his works, what he does: we need to know who, or what, Eros is first. Socrates asks Agathon whether Eros is such as to be of something or of nothing. The "OF" is a genitive of relation: Eros is the desire for what is loved. So Eros is desire for what it is OF. The genitive is a defining genitive, identifying the form of love or desire involved; it is also an objective genitive for Eros is love of some object; to specify that object is to define the kind of Eros it is.
Socrates tells Agathon the prior speakers assumed that eros is desire. Eros aims at what it lacks or does not yet in some way possess. Since Eros as lover strives for or desires beautiful things, as lover Eros cannot be unequivocally beautiful. Therefore, Socrates suggests that eros must in some sense not be beautiful itself. Agathon grudgingly agrees. If Eros is a desire for something it does not yet possess, then the object of erotic desire must be unerotic, at least insofar as the beloved object is desirable and not desiring. For it makes no sense to say someone desires the emptiness of the other, but rather that someone desires something the other possesses, the other's fullness. Someone (the lover) desires the satisfaction, completeness, or fulfillment that the other is or has. Love is a relation; it implies a privation or lack in the lover. The lover who lacks something and is imperfect cannot be divine. Eros is the lover qua lover and the lover qua lover is not kaloV. If the lover is kaloV, it is qua beloved. It is the lover just insofar as he loves who lacks what he loves and desires to possess it.
A desire, or a wish must be defined in terms of its objects, that is, in terms the various kinds of thing of which it is a desire. Human desire is an intrinsically restless passion that spontaneously intends a non-limiting objective. For human beings the beautiful is the manifestation of the Good expressed concretely in the body. The Beautiful is the Good manifesting itself in the visible things of nature. The erotic desire for the beautiful body is not a desire for the body as such, but a desire for the beauty manifested in the body. When the lover's desire for the possession of a body is transformed into the recognition that the beautiful body is an instance of beauty and a manifestation of the good in the individual, the lover's carnal desire is sublimated into a love of friendship or genuine admiration for the individual beloved. The love of friendship based upon what is truly good is the fulfillment of eros.
Desire for the Good is a desire to possess good things that are lacking and a desire to continue possessing what is already possessed into the indefinite future. Human beings desire to possess the good things that they now possess indefinitely into the future. Socrates concludes that love is in some sense ugly or, at least, it is not completely beautiful and not completely divine. Love is not simply Beauty Itself. Nevertheless love must share in some way in the beautiful or it could not exist. Truth is the missing term that relates the Beautiful to the Good. Truth is the mediation of the Beautiful in the Good. The final truth of the Beautiful is the Good. Socrates learned from Diotima that the Beautiful is the visible manifestation of the Good. Without knowing it, Eros in nature strives for the Good under the aspect of the Beautiful.
Eros cannot be understood without the ugly any more than the true can be recognized without the recognition of the false. Similarly the good cannot be done without the avoidance of evil. Living a good life is often a matter of knowing how to eliminate the ugly, to refute the false, and to avoid evil. The physician is more concerned with disease than with health, the judge with crime and punishment than with law-abidingness, and the philosopher in the polis with falsehood, and the things that are not, than with truth and the things that are.
Diotima is a noble fiction in the Symposium. Socrates creates her for the purpose of his argument. The truths of life sometimes can be told only in fiction. Noble fictions do not deceive in an unqualified sense since they communicate truths to their hearers who can have access to them in no other way. According to Diotima the whole visible realm strives for the beautiful and by striving for it living things stretch towards truth and excellence. Beauty, truth, and excellence coincide in the Good. Diotima will differentiate the objects of eros. Her speech progresses from the beautiful outwardly symbolizing the inner truth to the truth inwardly objectifying the invisible good. Eros is a double mediation or the double In-Between.
Diotima will claim that eros proceeds from perception to thinking, from manifesting beauty in the appearances through evidencing beauty in the truth. For truth is the making evident the invisible or meaning/intelligibility. Thoughtful choice has its fulfillment in the thoughtful choice of the virtuous man who lives in the Being of the Luminous Good. The final evidence for the good life is in the living of it. The good life as self-evidencing or luminous to itself is the foundation for the beauty and the truth of things and persons. The truth of the beautiful is that it is the good made visible. The Good accounts even for the appearances. If the beauty of the world witnesses to the Good beyond it, then the philosopher, not the sophist, is the true master of the appearances and of beautiful speeches.
Diotima's name means: "the honor of God." The discourse of Diotima is rhetorical; but the elevated diction of her speech is required by the occasion and does not detract from its philosophical seriousness, which must be judged by its content. If rhetoric is directed at truth and the virtue of soul of the hearers rather than flattery and pleasure indifferent to truth, then philosophy is a form of rhetoric. Rhetoric is art of persuasion, and persuasion can be controlled by rational thought.
The dialectical development of Diotima's speech exhibits three stages. In the first stage, Diotima undertakes to define Eros, reaching the conclusion that Eros is of the good being one's own forever. In the second stage, she turns to the works of Eros: Eros aims at immortality, of the body through nutrition and reproduction, of the soul through fame, to be obtained through poetry, law giving, and moral-political education. Since the immortality achieved is vicarious, it is not personal immortality in the full sense, and Eros has not yet reached its divine objective. In the third stage Diotima reveals the Greater Mysteries of Eros, in which the lover ascends by a kind of scaffold from bodily beauties to physical beauty, from physical beauty through spiritual and intellectual beauties, to the contemplation of Beauty itself, and there befriended by the divine, is taken up into immortality.
Diotima implies that, contrary to its usual associations in Greek, Eros is not simply sexual desire, but desire in all its forms. It follows from this and from its relational character that Eros is to be defined in terms of its objects, that is, in terms of the various kinds of beautiful things it seeks. Eros as "in-between" is also a daimon. Eros is like right opinion, intermediate between knowledge and ignorance, and so Eros will prove to be a philosopher, a lover of wisdom.
"[Do you think] those who are not wise are [simply] ignorant? Have you not noticed that there is something midway between knowledge and ignorance?"
What is that?
"Don't you know it is what's 'In-Between'," (meqaxu) she said. It's having right opinions [or beliefs] without being able to give the reasons for them. This would be neither knowledge (maqia) -- for how can you have knowledge without having the evidence for your proposals? -- nor is it [simply] ignorance, for what attains the truth is not [simply] ignorance (amaqia). Thus correct opinion (orqh doxa) holds just that very place 'In-Between' (meqaxu) knowledge and ignorance."
"Very neat!" I said.
"Then please, don't insist on a thing that is not [simply] beautiful being ugly or a thing that is not [simply] good being evil. Similarly concerning EroV: when you recognize that he is not [simply] good or beautiful, don't suppose, therefore, that he is [simply] ugly and evil, but rather something 'In-Between' (meqaxu) the two."
What is "in-between" knowledge and ignorance that manifests the In-Between nature of Eros? Diotima says true opinion or true belief is the kind of thing she has in mind. But how is true opinion "in-between" knowledge and ignorance? And what does the "in-between" have to do with philosophy? Diotima states that eros is intrinsically connected with the love of wisdom. On what does philosophy reflect? Clearly it begins with questions. Socrates has more questions than any of his conversation partners. The method of Socrates is based upon asking strategic questions. The elenchus is really a heuristic method, a method based upon the structure of the questions themselves.
The question is In-Between knowing and not knowing. When we understand or know something, then our questions are answered. The fact that we are able to raise intelligent questions means we can recognize what would count as an appropriate answer. So questions indicate both our ignorance and some pre-understanding of the things involved. When we ask intelligent questions, we already have some pre-understanding of the issues or we would not even be able to ask the questions. Contrary to common assumptions the less, we understand and know, the fewer questions arise. The more we understand and know, the more questions arise. Socrates' ability to ask questions and to ask them in a strategic order shows that he thought profoundly about the issues about which he inquires. According to Diotima true belief constitutes the In-Between character of eros. How is the in-between nature of the act of questioning connected with Diotima's claim that true belief constitutes the in-between nature of eros? True belief or right opinion in the form of a received tradition is that about which questions are asked. The purpose of philosophical inquiry is to confirm the true and to correct the false beliefs of received traditions and wherever possible to turn true belief (doxa) into knowledge (episthmh).
Eros is not simply divine nor merely human. Eros belongs to the intermediary realm of the daimonic: the half human, half divine In-Between reality. In Socrates' speech in the Symposium, Eros symbolizes man becoming truly himself, the human becoming divine. Just as body becomes psyche in the natural cycle of eros, psyche becomes nous in the human cycle of eros. Because it is derived directly from the Good itself, nous is divine.
Man is intermediate between two species of being, the natural genesis of the human body and the coming to be of human intelligence. Human beings are intermediate, daimonic living beings stretched between the being of the natural world that is intelligible, but not intelligent, and the Divine Being of Intelligent Goodness itself. Human beings are more than just instances of the intelligible since they can understand. But human beings are less than pure intelligence since they begin by understanding nothing, not even themselves, and strive to understand by wondering and asking questions. To be human is to be an "in-between being" that has its being in questioning and seeking to live the good life.
|
Order |
Mortal |
Metaxis |
Divine-Immortal |
|
Ethical/Religious |
Evil |
Daimon-Conscience/Law |
Goodness |
|
Cognitional |
Ignorance |
Question-Doxa |
Truth |
|
Physical Visible Appearances |
Ugly |
Eros-Soma (Body) |
Beauty |
The human heart is vulnerable and restless, but Diotima does not conclude that human beings find no rest except in death. She does not yield to the temptation is to collapse the two poles of the double eros. The two poles of Eros present the three fundamental relationships in human life, the relations of nature to man (somatic eros), man to man (timetic eros), and man to the divine (noetic eros). Eros as desire strives for the beauty manifested in the realm of the natural world as nature becomes more intelligent and more humanized. In the human realm of human persons becoming humanized, eros is the quest for the honor and dignity of a life liberated beyond unthinking, animal existence. The noetic eros is the passion behind the inquiry into the excellent life. The noetic eros is the basis for the man or woman of conscience seeking the truth and what is truly worthwhile and thereby becoming Divine-like.
To embody the meaning of eros in images (eidola), Socrates retells Diotima's myth of the birth of Eros. Following the story, he offers her theory of eros. The story and theory are complementary.
"On the day Aphrodite was born, the gods gave a great banquet and Poros [Resource], son of Metis [Invention] was at the party. While they were banqueting, Penia [Poverty] came to beg. A party is an opportune place to beg, so Penia [Poverty] hung around the doorways. Having gotten quite drunk with nectar, (for wine had not yet been invented), Poros [Resource] went outside and into Zeus's garden and in his drunken condition fell fast asleep. Lacking resources herself, Penia [Poverty] schemed to have a child by Poros [Resource]. So she lay down with him and there conceived Eros [Love]. Thus it has been from the beginning that Eros is always an attendant and minister to Aphrodite since he was begotten on her birthday. He is by nature a lover bent upon beauty since Aphrodite is so beautiful."
Eros displays its intermediate nature by standing midway between wisdom and ignorance. No one who is wise desires to be wise, for he is already. Nor do the doubly ignorant desire wisdom; double ignorance is self-satisfied, since one does not desire what one does not suppose one lacks. Those who love wisdom are intermediate between knowledge and ignorance. The nature of Eros is to be in between knowledge and ignorance: Eros is like the philosopher who knows that he does not know.
Eros implies the desire for happiness. In human life wisdom is always implicated in the desire for happiness. Diotima substitutes the good for the beautiful (204d-e) because the beautiful is the good insofar as it is the manifestation of it. Diotima is moving in the direction of the distinction between an immediate desire (epiqumia) and a reflective wish (boulhsiV). When eros is conceived as the desire The Eros of the mind is the motivation for the elenchus of Socrates and his practice of dialectics as philosophical politics.
Since the philosophy of Socrates originates in the highest form of eros: the passion for truth expressed in inquiry; Plato's version of Socrates' philosophy cannot be explained in purely rationalist terms. To reject passionate inquiry in the name of passion is to demean the nature of human passion. Plato's Socrates rejects the notion of the philosopher who lacks passion. He argues that passion includes bodily desires, compassionate feeling for one's fellows, and the culminating intellectual passion for the transcendent Good.
Diotima tells the story about the beginning and the origin of human life in the divine realm. The effects of eros are read off the human condition itself.
Therefore, as the son of Poros (Resource) and Penia (Poverty) Eros finds himself in the following condition: First he is always impoverished, and far from being tender and beautiful as most people think, he is weather-beaten and rugged, barefoot and homeless, always sleeping unsheltered and on the ground, sleeping on doorsteps and on the open road. Having his mother's nature he is always penniless. But then on the contrary from his father he turns out to be a schemer for beautiful and good things. He is brave and swaggering, an eager and clever hunter always plotting some trick (mecanas), a resourceful and inventive seeker of self-control (phroneseos), philosophizing throughout his life, wizard-sorcerer, healer-poisoner, and philosopher-sophist. Born neither mortal nor immortal, on the same day he will bloom, live, prosper, and then die. Still he will be brought back to life by the nature of his divine father. Eros always spends all he has acquired, so that he is at no time rich or poor, but In-Between wisdom and ignorance.
The nature of Eros is ambiguous. Like the Erostes, the lover, he wants the beautiful and the good. But like the Eromenos, the beloved, he is not controlled by his desires for them. Rather he contrives to possess or appropriate them. The person who is enslaved by his passions is not generally capable of exercising cunning. Those whose desires drive them to a clever employment of artifice (duplicity) to get what they want show that Eros can also become the contrary of himself.
Diotima portrays Eros as the trickster: his tricks are as ambiguous as himself; they can lead to the virtuous or the dissolute life. Eros is both playful and serious: Comic and Tragic.
Diotima presents an intellectualist interpretation of Eros that begins with an account of Eros as sensual desire and progresses to a view of Eros as the intellectualist love of Divine Beauty. She helps Socrates envision his ascent up the Mountain of Being. The actual ascent is carried out by the practice of the virtues. Diotima traces the natural cycle of human genesis from the cosmic principle of "procreation in the beautiful" to the human cycle of the progress of moral life toward the divine. If the moving viewpoint of the Symposium is ignored, the significance of both cycles tends to be overlooked. The moving viewpoint requires the interpreter to identify the erotic horizon of each of the speakers. The dialectical method of the Symposium requires that the reader identify his own erotic horizon.
Plato makes a distinction between desire (epiqumia) and wish (boulhsiV). Wish, Boulh or BoulhsiV, is desire plus reflective thought, taking counsel. The distinction implies that we might desire what we do not wish for, that is, desire to possess what does not lead our own well-being. Socrates thought no one does evil voluntarily or no one does what is bad for themselves knowingly (boulhsiV).
If human beings desire the beautiful because it is good and if human beings desire the good because it makes them happy and if human beings desire to be happy because happiness or well being is self-evidently desirable because it is the end of life itself; then why do we not say that all human beings are lovers? Why do we restrict the term lover to the realm of sexuality? Diotima's claim implies that if everyone desires happiness, then everyone is a lover.
By seeking the beautiful, Eros desires the visible whole, but the whole as visible is only a part of the totality of being. Even though seeking the visible whole reduces being to the realm of the body, still the desire for the beautiful implies that the desire of eros is a desire for the whole, a desire for integrity. Since the visible is not the whole of reality but only a part, and since eros desires the whole Diotima argues that implicit in the desire for the visible whole is the desire for the Good; for the Idea of the Good contains the whole of reality as visible and invisible. Reversing the relation of eros to end (teloV), Diotima claims that beauty is the Good (teloV) made visible (eros).
In Diotima's story Eros tries to accumulate for himself all the beautiful and good things, but then he squanders them by giving to others what he has acquired for himself. In his vision of beauty, the philosopher shamelessly gathers to himself all the truth and goodness he can, but then he just as prodigally dissipates his treasures by giving them freely to those who wish to understand, know, act in accordance with excellence, and identify with the immortal ground of being in the Good. Even selfishness is redeemed in Diotima's vision of love.
Eros is the integral desire for good things and the well-being they confer.Socrates and Diotima agree on the following: Happiness, in the sense of well-being, is the end of desire. Genesis is a form of poiesis. Poet is the name usually given to those who work in music and meter, but Diotima wants to extend the meaning of the term to include all lovers. Diotima is trying to expand Socrates' understanding of the higher objectives of eros. What is loved is loved because it is good. If we can see no good at all in what is our own, then we will reject it. The good that we possess can be opposed to a greater good as in the case when the good of the whole is threatened by the good of the part. If that happens, all things being equal, we will opt for the greater good. The good is the objective of eros, but goods are polyvalent.
According to Diotima's teaching whatever is, is good. She has not yet made the distinction between moral good and evil. She needs to introduce the distinction between right and wrong to give an adequate account of the human good. The objects of immediate desires are the goods of the body. The psychic-social goods of friendship and fellow-feeling and the noetic goods experienced in the desires to understand, to know, and to be involved in what is really worthwhile are the mediated desires of an Eros understood in terms of a psyche oriented toward Nous. Psychic desires intend the good of order. The good of order results from things fitting together and forming a whole. The good as value is the ground of reasonable choice. The work of Diotima's speech is to help Socrates differentiate the different meanings of the good so that he can appropriate the differences bodily, psychologically, intellectually, and morally into his life. Diotima prepared Socrates for her teaching on the mystical ascent to the Divine Good by claiming that human beings, not only desire the good, but desire to possess the good always.
1. Eros is the desire for the good.
2. Eros is the desire for the possession of the good.
3. Eros is the desire for the perpetual possession of the good.
According to Diotima's teaching on the effects of Eros, the higher the ascent of the student of Eros towards the beauty of the divine Good, the greater his immortality because the Good assimilates him into itself.vercomes Death
Nature cannot beget and bring forth life from the ugly, but only from the beautiful. Begetting, bearing, and bringing to birth are divine acts which impart immortality to mortal, living beings. . . . Therefore, when a person is fertile and teeming with life, they tremble uncontrollably before the beautiful which alone can release them from the great pangs of having to bring forth life. But eros is not a desire for the beautiful in itself, as you tend to think, Socrates," she warned.
Whether or not the beloved is really beautiful does not determine the outcome, but somatic genesis cannot occur unless the lover believes the beloved to be beautiful. Carnal desire depends upon the opinion (doxa) of the lover that the beloved is beautiful. What is not beautiful cannot become pregnant.
Diotima claims that Eros is the driving force behind genesis, not only in the body, but in the psyche as well. that is, in nature as a whole. Human beings change their habits, their characters, beliefs, and desires. So humans are always becoming new persons in their inner as well as their outer lives. Human beings change in respect to their knowing. Old knowledge recedes and new knowledge takes its place. Everything mortal is preserved, not by remaining the same like the Divine Being, but by continuous procreation, renovation, and innovation.
The genesis of human life as both physical and psychic is a link between physical genesis and the Being of the Noetic Good. The analogy between somatic Eros and noetic Eros is imperfect. The human psyche as human is driven by strictly human desires. The properly human as distinct from animal or divine desires is called timetic eros. The timetic eros includes the desires for honor, glory, and fellowship. In Diotima's revelation the timetic eros is the pivot point for human desires. She shifts the discussion from bodily desire to the desire for honor (timh). The connection between somatic eros and the desire for fame or honor is to be found in the desire for immortality that both desires have in common. Diotima pivots her argument from the desire for life (somatic eros) to the human desire for honor and recognition (timetic eros). By subsuming bodily desires into the desire for honor, she moves the praise of eros in the direction of a final vision of the noetic Eros that explicitly pursues a life in search of Divine Honor and Immortality.
Before Socrates met Diotima, he had a noetic temperament. He had a natural eros towards the Divine. If he lacked something as a youth, it was a fully developed passion for the earthly and the human. The defect kept him from understanding the full cosmic sweep of Eros and concrete connection between nature and human nature. All the speakers in the Symposium are presented as being at odds with themselves in one way or another. The self-duplicity of human nature is disclosed in each speech in different ways. Even Socrates is in some way at odds with himself. None of the other speakers so far have known or admitted that they were at odds with themselves. Socrates is different because he knows it, he admits it, and he tries to overcome it.
Three important themes that have yet to be clarified:
1. the distinction between the beautiful and the ugly,
2. the question of the relation between human excellence as a universal demand and human happiness as individual need, and
3. the distinction between moral good and evil.
Diotima speaks about somatic eros as the quest for immortality and not the quest for happiness, well-being, or eudaimonia. Everything in nature is always becoming, that is, coming to be and passing away, the individual psyche is becoming, but more importantly even human knowledge is becoming: non-epistemic knowledge is forever slipping away from the changeable minds of human beings.
Diotima substitutes the beautiful body as the object of Eros for the beautiful (good) name. The Greek term, kaloV, has many shades of meaning from beautiful to fine or from the refined to the excellent. At this point in her speech the famous, good name displaces the attractive beautiful body. The name lasts longer than the body. LogoV gathers things up into itself. The meaning of the name in a political community is originally value-ladened. In the human world the name stands for the person. The new objective of Eros is to achieve a good name in society in perpetuity. As human eros becomes the desire for the recognition and honor of one's fellows.
Nature preserves the species at the cost of the individual. The undying memory of virtue preserves the name of a unique person and their position in society, their words and/or deeds. At this point in Diotima's speech the meaning of immortality becomes more closely identified with the individual. The political life driven by the quest for honor among men mediates between the natural and the divine world, between the merely sensible world of immediate objects and the purely intelligible world of theory and ideas. Moving into a discussion of the political world, Diotima departs from an explanation of eros in purely physical terms. Diotima's vision of eros includes the notion of a community dedicated to the life of human excellence based upon intelligence.
The immortal memory of virtue is the political equivalent of the vision of the immortal ideas in the Good. Memory in the human world is the bond that unites psyche with psyche in the political domain. The corporate memory of the members of the polis preserves the way of life of the people who made the community's life possible. Thus fame discloses a new possibility for immortality and transcendence significantly different from the natural level of species generation. Human memory provides the basis for mathematical operations like counting, and it makes discursive thinking (dianoia) possible. It is not yet mathematical collecting nor intellectual recollecting, but it is presupposed by both those operations. The intellectual operations are functions of intelligence and constitute the higher genus of nouV.
Fame is a mixture of the corporeal and the incorporeal. As corporeal, fame depends upon the temporal memories of living mortal men. As incorporeal, fame can be preserved continuously or reconstructed after a hiatus. The principle of Diotima's erotic ascent to the divine is that the more excellent the man, the more he is able to transcend temporality and achieve immortality.
Carnal eros needs to acquire self-control and justice since they are missing from its natural repertoire of excellences. The somatic eros is directed towards the beauty of the human bodies and expresses itself in the desire to mate. Because bodily eros expresses itself in sexual reproduction, it is neither moderated by self-control nor regulated by justice since it seeks indiscriminately to unite with beautiful bodies. At first the psychic eros, functioning as the basis of political life, is directed indiscriminately towards the generation of beautiful thoughts and speeches. In its timetic form eros directs itself towards an excessive love of recognition, honor, and fame. An uncontrolled timetic eros is the basis for power politics. The noetic eros, the transpolitical love of the ideas in the Good, is the authentic basis of the political life. Intelligence, the principle of benign rule, orders all things in accordance with their true natures. Noetic eros includes all the other forms of eros and bears within itself the promise of the fullest order of human excellences.
The love of honor is intermediate between the love of one's own (phusis) and the love of the best (nous). The love of one's own is rooted in bodily genesis. The love of the best is grounded in human activity in accordance with intelligence (nous) and virtue. The love of honor is more praiseworthy than the love of bodies. For although it is a desire to procreate in beauty, somatic eros is a desire rooted in the intention of the survival of the species. The love of honor includes a elevating component in human desire to the extent that it is not just a desire to procreate in the body but a desire to live an honorable life together with others. The desire for honor reflects more of the love of transcendent beauty than carnal desire.
Political communities in civil societies are intermediate between the tribal political community based on animal genesis and the psyche as the realm of human affectivity and divine community of the cosmos based on nouV as the realm of the divine Good, the realm of universal divine governance. The love of honor among human beings in the family and tribal society gives them an affinity for the political life in civil society. In tribal society the love of honor is a vocation to real achievement and genuine excellence. In the tribal society the preservation of honor is the task of the warrior. In tribal society honor is a principle of inequality, the inequality of birth and family position. The warriors present the possibility of timetic eros. The principle of equality first emerges among the warriors all of whom must equally face death to preserve the way of life of the community. In tribal society death is the principle that equalizes all human beings. Diotima is the first to distinguish the timetic from the somatic and the noetic eros. The timetic eros raises the question of death and immortality.
The divinely oriented psyche seeks out beautiful bodies, but the individual soul, most attuned to the divine, discovers the greater beauty of the inner life of the psyche. Teachers give birth to divine thoughts in the minds of their best students. Teaching and learning together create a kind of friendship of intimacy quite different from, but not necessarily opposed to, carnal relationships based on bodily desire. The friendship of teachers and students founded on mutual understanding mirrors the vision of the Divine Good. Her argument turns from the lessons of the teacher who forms the character of a student to the works of the poets who construct and shape a civilization. The works of Homer, Hesiod, and other great poets render them immortal in the memory of society as long as the civilization that they engendered endures.
Noetic immortality must be transcultural in the sense that each thinker incarnates a concrete, historical paradigm that discloses the nature of reality in such a way that the prototypes of reality remain permanent and universal possibilities for any intelligent life.
The speeches of the lawgivers like Lycurgus and Solon confer more divine immortality on these men than the discourses of the poets. Just laws extend friendship to all citizens and constitute the community of gods and men in cosmopolis. The barbarians can be the equals of the Greeks provided they establish just laws that aim at human excellence. In her introduction to the final revelation, Diotima proceeds to track the course of eros from the quest for honor among men in civil society to the intellectual love of the Divine Good revealed under the aspect of beauty that is both experienced and known in the affective life. She recounts the career of eros from the teacher and his doctrines that are preserved in the memories and minds of his students to the poet and his works in the literature that forms the basis of a civilization. She reminds Socrates that the lawgivers and the laws that make a self-governing civil society possible also make a way of life possible that endures through epochs of time.
The traditions of teachers and the schools they found, the civilizations constructed on the works of poets and artists, the ways of life made possible in cities by the laws of the lawgivers, and finally the excellences the laws encourage constitute an epochal progression towards more and more concrete forms of immortality. More of the teacher lives in the student who follows his thought than of the parents who sired him and imparted their genes. More of the poet-writer lives in those who read and understand him than of the parents whose genes are dissolved in the ever expanding genetic pool of an animal species. More of the poet-writer's words live in those who read them and are inspired by them than the lessons of the teacher whose thoughts are necessarily mixed with the thoughts of others in the history of the broader culture.
Still more of the lawgiver is preserved in the laws of the city as a form of a political community embodying the forms of excellence down through the ages than the parent in their children, the teachers in their students, or the poet in his words and works. For the poet remains one among many voices in the polyphony of a civilization. The highest and most comprehensive form of immortality is reserved for noetic eros in which the act of noesis is assimilated to the sublime Beauty that manifests the Good itself in a religious vision of Being. When the theoretician gives himself completely to the noetic quest for Transcendent Beauty, the immortal gods themselves befriend him.
Diotima concludes with a differentiated ascent towards the Beautiful as the manifestation of True Good. Diotima's vision of transcendent beauty sets the precedent for the notion of the beatific vision in western intellectual, religious history. If human beings have access to divine immortality, it is those whom, after having lived a good life, transcendent beauty assimilates to itself. The man befriended by the gods has been assimilated to the beautiful good by seeking the truth of beauty and begetting the truth of beauty in others. The achievement of the apex of excellence is contingent upon two things: the pursuit of the beautiful in the good life and the contemplative vision of the Good itself. Both are required for Diotima's sublime vision of immortality. The contemplative vision and the pursuit of the good life form a circle: without the vision of the Good, a human being cannot do the good; but without trying to live a good life by finding out what an excellent life is, the human being cannot envision what is really good. Diotima presents the vision to Socrates in images. She reveals the endpoint in the ascent. With Diotima's help Socrates resolves to live his life in pursuit of the Transcendent Beauty of the Good Itself.
She concludes with a summary of the universal scope of eros from bodily desires, through timetic eros of the quest for honor and glory, to the noetic eros and its culmination in the beatific vision of the Beautiful Good. The image of the final vision is her gift of the revelation of Being. Diotima presents human beings as standing in community with Being by presenting the human reality as an In-Between reality. Being fully human is being daimonic. Her speech presents a natural, a human, and a divine communion of beings with Being.
The poets are omitted in the final version of the ascent to the contemplation of the beautiful. Only the lawgivers are mentioned. Perhaps the poets are left out because Diotima wants to point to an objective of eros that goes beyond the present world. The poets subordinate the universal to the particular, the unchanging to the ephemeral, the divine to the human. Poetry measures the divine by human experience and Diotima wants to measure the human by the divine scope of theory. Diotima purposely passes over the poets because poetry does not commit the poet to a life of integrity. Nevertheless the speech of Diotima presents us with a sublime, philosophic, poetry. Plato himself was the philosophical poet who celebrated divine intelligence. The intimate and intricate relation between poetry and philosophy is one of the deepest ironies of Plato's dialogues.
Unlike timetic, political eros the theoretic eros takes the student of politics beyond the unique beauty of any particular city's way of life including his own. The Symposium does not raise the question of justice, but sings the praises of eros. The philosopher who commits himself to excellence cannot ignore the importance of the practice of the virtues in his own city. In the Republic justice is the right ordering of the passions of the soul by the noetic eros. Nous is the self-ordering divine principle. The noetic eros is the foundation for justice because it is a self-ordering eros.
Diotima grounds the unity of thought in noesis based on the revelation of the sublime truth that Beauty is the Divine Good. The highest form of Noesis is expressed in epistemic knowledge, that is, the systematic articulation of the moral excellences. The science of Being (ousia) is based upon the knowledge of the excellences of life and through the practice of the virtues a knowledge of the Divine Good itself. Philosophy is the architectonic science in the sense that it integrates a life dedicated to knowledge and moral excellence.
Diotima's speech celebrates the life of theoria. The differentiation of eros is the work of Diotima's discourse. Her revelation of the Beautiful Good is more like a gift than an achievement. It is a gift that comes along with the achievement of the passionate quest of the intelligent, moral life. The ascent takes the student from outer speech to inner speech; from the eloquence of beautiful bodies and physically expressed works of art to the eloquence of beautiful speeches; from beautiful speeches to the eloquence of the inner voice of the good conscience, the Daimon of the just man. Every attempt to express beauty itself generates another instance of the beautiful. Every attempt to demonstrate the good in action generates another act of human excellence or virtue. The ascent initiates the student of eros into its mysteries.
Every human passion is not necessarily governed by the noetic self-ordering eros. The chorismos of the Good does not exclude the Presence of Transcendence among beings, but rather implies that the forms are present through the Good in the excellences of things. Though flawed like every metaphor, the visual metaphor for understanding and revelation is an appropriate way to express the transcendent nature of True Being. The metaphor of sight implies both illumination and distance at the same time. Theoria is likened to a glimpse of the Beautiful Good. Diotima says the philosopher sees the beautiful ALL AT ONCE (exaifneV). 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 requires a moral and intellectual conversion before the philosopher can give an adequate account of the virtues in the polis and the ideas in the cosmos.
Beauty is the clarity, proportion, and luminosity of the being of beings. Beauty is the evidence of a thing's truth and goodness. Intelligence recognizes the beautiful primordially in the eudaimona fantasmata or the divine apparitions of the soul's preexistent contact with the holy. The Symposium does not tell the whole story of the truth of the Beautiful Good. It raises the question of the aesthetic conversion of the student of philosophy who comes to recognize the autonomous realm of Transcendent Being as the ultimate source and ground of aesthetic meanings, truths, and values. Beauty is not any of its instances. It cannot be separated from the appearance of beauty in things without destroying the reality of what appears.
Beauty discloses the Good. It is the self-evidence of the Good. The beautiful is the shining forth of the Good in persons and things. The "shining forth" can be the manifestation of an outer or an inner reality. Only a person with a properly disposed soul can apprehend the psychic or noetic beauty that outshines corporeal beauty. Bodily beauty symbolizes virtuous beauty.
In her later description Diotima shifts her attention to the side of the subject and stresses the desire for the beautiful, the visibility or evidence of the Good. Driven by the love of beauty, the subject ascends to the transcendent being of Beauty itself. Her shift to the subjectivity, desire, and evidence prepares the reader for the speech of Alcibiades. Alcibiades will not praise the objective good but the subjective achievements of the men whose lives are worthy of the highest admiration. The consummate power politician will ostensibly praise the unique achievements of Socrates but covertly propose himself as the man worthy of the highest admiration. In a mock trial of Socrates he will argue that as philosopher Socrates betrayed human passion for a passion for the divine that led him to a life beyond the human.
If a man contemplates the highest noetic beauty, then KALOS as Excellence Itself will empower him to give birth, not only to the images of human excellence, but also to excellence itself. If the philosopher gives birth to and cultivates real excellence in himself and others for a lifetime, he will become qeofiloV "beloved of the gods," and he will become as immortal as a human being can become. humans begin to share in divine immortality by envisioning it. All at once (exaifneV) enlightened by a vision of the truth of the Good, the philosopher generates true instances of the good in himself and others. The immortal is partly within and partly beyond human understanding. Human beings come closest to the immortal in the contemplative vision of the Good. The philosopher can preserve and pass on the memory of the vision by making speeches in praise of excellence. The speeches give an account of what he has seen "only through a glass darkly." By giving an account of the beauty of beautiful bodies, fine speeches, and excellent deeds, the wisdom-lover evokes images of the good in the minds of his fellow men.
Beauty shines through the virtue-generating speeches of the teacher who envisions the good by living it himself. Philosophy becomes art. The artist philosopher's discourse has the power to beget the acts of political virtue in men who live in civil society. As human beings come closer to the truth of Being in the Good, bodily eros is taken up, transformed, and sublated in the love of friendship (filia). Human beings who live such a life become befriended by the gods and partake in divine immortality in a mysterious way.
The foundational metaphor of the tranquil vision at the center of the restless life of human passion or Eros is the symbol of Plato's understanding of understanding, the 'all at once' (exaiphnes) metaphor for insight into insight. Diotima speaks poetically of the foundation for the truth in human speech and the good in the virtuous life. She does not speak of virtuous speeches without the virtuous life. Speech alone is not an adequate expression of the vision of transcendent beauty. She says, ("tekonto de areten alhqh"), after giving birth to true virtue and cultivating it in his own life, he is destined to attain the friendship of the gods. She is not just talking about discussing virtue. She is talking about the discussions of virtue that lead to the living of the good life and the good life that leads to the further discussions of virtue. Diotima is talking about human speech as a necessary component in the deliberation that is required for good choices, responsible decisions, and virtuous actions.
Noesis is the equivalent of a divine revelation. A divine mystery lies at the heart of what Diotima is making manifest. Socrates uses the verb peiqein, 'to persuade', four times just after he completes Diotima's speech. Socrates is persuaded by Diotima and tries to persuade others of the reality of the transcendent Beauty. The truth of the philosophic way of life is not a matter of certainty. The mystery of life cannot be logically deduced from self-evident propositions. For Plato intellectual faith (periagoge) is an essential part of the life of theoria.
At the end of his speech Socrates praises the intelligent eros as the basis for political life and a friendship between men and the gods. The speech of Alcibiades will turn to the question of the friendship of men with men in the polis. Alcibiades will raise the question of the conflict between power politics and philosophical politics.
copyright © Emil J. Piscitelli