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Zeus Enthroned |
The Third Boston College Lecture on the Symposium, 1993
Professor Emil J. Piscitelli
But, then 'all at once' (exaiphnes). there was a loud noise like a party of drunken revelers and a banging at the courtyard door. A moment later they all heard the voice of Alcibiades in the hallway -- shouting loudly -- a boisterous and extremely drunk voice -- demanding to know the whereabouts of Agathon and insisting they should take him in to Agathon. So the attendants supporting him between them brought him into the house, with the flute-girl and several others helping him stand up and walk. There he stood, propped up in the doorway, garlanded with ivy and violets wound round a thick wreath and with a great array of ribbons of flowers encircling his head.
. . . Who else is at the table with us? At that he turned around and saw Socrates. He jumped to his feet and exclaimed, "By Hercules! What have we here? Is that you again, Socrates! Are you once again lying in wait for me? So you followed and ambushed me here. You're up to your old tricks again, as always suddenly [exaifneV] appearing where I least expect you!
Alcibiades was a talented and charismatic man. He was a nephew and ward of Pericles and an inheritor of great wealth. He was handsome and intelligent, passionate and ambitious. The gods had been kind to him. Alcibiades loved notoriety. Everything about Alcibiades was controversial.
Aristophanes and Alcibiades present two opposing forms of the common rejection of philosophy. Aristophanes rejects philosophy as theory. Alcibiades rejects philosophy as practice. Aristophanes thinks philosophy is impossible because no objectively true theory of the human condition is possible. For Aristophanes philosophical theory is indefensible in principle and, therefore, ordinary humans have to rely on their own, sometimes contradictory, gut-level reactions. Alcibiades claims that philosophy is impossible for human beings, not because it is not true, nor because it is intellectually indefensible, but because the philosophical life cannot be practiced by ordinary human beings. Alcibiades implies that the philosophical life, while impossible to practice for ordinary human beings, is the only intellectually defensible life. Alcibiades has glimpsed the divine source of human intelligence in the life of Socrates. He will speak of glimpsing the agalmata or the divine images within Socrates. Alcibiades complains that his old mentor challenged the students in his circle to be more than human. His ironic praise of Socrates in place of Eros will amount to an attack on the noetic form of eros that Diotima taught Socrates to cultivate. Alcibiades is an enemy of the noetic eros. Alcibiades says he intends to praise Socrates and mildly criticize him. Instead he mildly praises Socrates and seriously criticizes him. His speech is a left handed compliment.
Alcibiades is about to betray Athens to Sparta. He will defect from Athens during the Syracusan expedition when he is recalled to face charges of blasphemy against the Eleusian mysteries and the alleged castration of the statues of Hermes protecting the city. Lysander and Critias will conspire to have Alcibiades murdered because they fear his demagogic skills even while he is hiding in exile in Persia.
Alcibiades' entrance into the party is symbolic. Led by a flute girl, Alcibiades stumbles into the doorway of Agathon's house drunk. The flute girl foreshadows Alcibiades's presentation of Socrates as Marsyas who arrogantly competed with Apollo in a flute playing contest. The flute has the power to hypnotize or mesmerize the hearer. By referring to the power of the speech of Socrates, Plato continues the drug (farmacon) metaphor introduced in the conversation of Socrates with Agathon. The power of rational discourse is greater than the power of ordinary drugs. Speech can be toxic or therapeudic.
Alcibiades symbolizes the inefficacy of theory without practice, speech without action, and plans without execution. Alcibiades is the man of action, but with an important difference. He had been a favorite student and apprentice of Socrates. As a clever student of philosophy, he learned that the ambition to achieve success as an end in itself and the concomitant neglect of human excellence and virtue is a form of self-destructive behavior unworthy of human beings. He knew the pursuit of success without excellence is vain. Yet he chose to follow his ambition for fame, power, and glory instead of living the philosophical life. He drowns himself in drink to forget that he is at odds with himself. Drug induced drunkenness is the lowest form of madness. Alcibiades rejected philosophical practice even though he knew Socrates' way of life was the right one. He gets drunk to escape from himself.
Alcibiades announces to the company that he has come to tell the truth about Agathon. He tells the truth about the good life by witnessing to the goodness of Socrates' life over his own. Alcibiades claims the old philosopher is a great carnal lover. He suggests that Socrates is not oversexed but sexually defective. For the power politician perception is more important than reality. Socrates, who has identified himself with the noetic eros, is unlikely to be dominated by his libido. Diotima suggested that, the young Socrates, if not the mature one, was not fully initiated into the mysteries of eros. She was referring to his somatic eros. The defect is not unusual for a young man of fine character and good upbringing.
Socrates playfully suggests that he is in love with Alcibiades. He claims the love affair proved to be a painful one since Alcibiades was so jealous and possessive a lover that he would fly into a rage every time Socrates so much as spoke to another handsome young student. He claims Alcibiades could hardly keep his hands to himself, that he was all over him, and that he feared he might even use force against him in a jealous frenzy.
Socrates defines the arrogance of Alcibiades as pleonexia, a desire for more and more. The unquenchable desire is neither for pleasure nor for wealth nor for understanding, but for power over men and the glory that comes with it. According to Socrates, Alcibiades is by nature either a tyrant or a philosopher since they are two sides of the same coin. His passion for power makes him a social chameleon. To achieve the object of his passion for glory, Alcibiades is willing to become any thing to anyone, a populist leader to the Athenians, a lean warrior to the Spartans, or a wild savage to the barbarians. For all its apparent splendor Alcibiades' passion is truncated because it is cut off from the divine Goodness which is conceived as something totally alien.
Alcibiades hunts popularity and simulates the behavior of the multitude in order to manipulate and dominate them. He is a child of the Athenian democracy and he attempts to master it by flattery. He was tutored in justice by the many as a boy. His contemporaries make contradictory judgments about him which is a sign of his volatility. Thucydides holds volatility to be the common vice of the Athenian democracy since public opinion in a democracy is so fickle. His hybristic insolence accounts for what happened to Alcibiades. His conceit and daring combined fatefully to bring about his destruction. His life serves as evidence for Thucydides' judgment concerning the defects of a democracy dominated by power politics. Alcibiades is a demagogue, but as a former student of Socrates he has learned enough from him that he can no longer convince himself of the truth of his own self-serving propaganda.
Madness distinguishes both Socrates and Alcibiades from the run of the mill crowd. The madness of Socrates and Alcibiades were similar insofar as both are based upon a longing for identification with the divine. Alcibiades' madness was based on an envy of the gods that led him to try to substitute himself for the gods as ruler of the cosmos. Socrates' madness is a divine madness that results from his assimilation to the Divine Nous. His identification with the divine was achieved by living a life in accordance with his intelligence.
In a drunken confession Alcibiades attests to the presence of divinity in Socrates. The presence of the divine in Socrates accounts for his erotic attraction to him. The divine presence in Socrates is a result of the life he chose to lead. Alcibiades says that only Socrates can make him feel ashamed of himself. Socrates makes him realize that he cannot ignore good arguments for living the life of moral excellence. The vision of the good cannot be expressed in words alone; it requires deeds. The good life is realized in the lives of morally excellent human beings. The power politician tries to live and rule well without philosophy, and because he does, he makes unreasonable choices that lead to destructive consequences for himself and his community.
Alcibiades praises Socrates as an act of self-defense because he thinks he has to justify his attraction to a man who was neither physically attractive nor aristocratic like himself. In his stories about him, he portrays Socrates principally for imitating the manly virtues he himself emulates: physical endurance, self-control, and courage. With the exception of Socrates' commitment to the noetic good that makes him unique, an odd ball, Alcibiades presents Socrates as a diminished version of himself. The speech presents Socrates as a diminished version of Alcibiades himself and amounts to no more than a set of subjective impressions offered as a justification for his strange attraction to the uncomely philosopher. He swears to tell the whole truth about Socrates. But his speech hardly represents the whole truth about a man whose way of life Alcibiades rejected. His speech is a cheap exposé that tells more about himself than it does about Socrates. His confession is hardly an honest portrait of his great teacher. Alcibiades is a complex personality. Notwithstanding the profligacy of his life and variability of his character, he had a genuinely manly affection for and attraction to Socrates as an exemplar of political excellence.
Alcibiades changes the discussion from the theme of Eros, the god-daimon, to Socrates, the daimonic philosopher. The speech of Alcibiades is an ironic account of the political excellence of Socrates by a consummate power politician. Alcibiades had quit the company of Socrates a long time before his encounter with him at Agathon's. He has a love-hate relationship with his one time teacher. As long as he is in his presence, Alcibiades feels a strange, erotic attraction to the older man. He left Socrates' inner circle to pursue the politics of personal self-advancement.
In his speech Alcibiades uses a form of irony he learned from his former master to mock the philosopher's life. Alcibiades attempts to disclose the inner mysteries of the philosophy of Socrates to the uninitiated guests at the drinking party. His purpose is ostensibly to get even with Socrates for rejecting his sexual advances when was a young man. What Alcibiades really wants is to castrate Socrates verbally because he disapproves of the life of political politics that he himself has embraced. Socrates rejected the young man's erotic advances because he offered to trade sexual favors for philosophical knowledge. He wanted to use philosophy dishonorably as a tool of power politics. Alcibiades interpreted Socrates' rejection of his erotic advances as the castration of his political ambition. He wants to get even with Socrates by verbally castrating him. He exposes the philosopher's allegedly deficient, carnal passion and claims that it amounts to a blasphemy against the god, Eros.
Alcibiades accuses Socrates of being excessively loved by his students, but he claims that he does not love them commensurably in return. He compares Socrates to a satyr. Socrates refers to his speech as a satyr play. The satire in Socrates is the fact that he pretends to be highly sexed. Silenus, who exemplifies eros in the form of lust, is a satyr entrusted with the education of Dionysus. Alcibiades alludes to himself as the god, Dionysus, and the satyr, Socrates, as his Silenus. Ironically though Socrates looks like an ugly old satyr, he does not act like a satyr since he is not dominated by his bodily desires. His beauty is entirely an inner beauty making him as teacher more beloved than the student and less the lover and more the beloved.
Alcibiades rejection of philosophy as a way of life underlines the fact that for Plato philosophy is not only a way of thinking, but also a way of living. Qeoria is not only a celebration of the logos, but it is also a divine practice, an image of the divine life. Socrates attributes a divine madness to Alcibiades who, except for himself, is the most erotic man at the party. Alcibiades is the only man at the party who is at odds with himself and knows he is at odds with himself. His awareness of the non-coincidence of his actual self with his true self is central to the meaning of his speech in praise of Socrates.
His speech is blasphemous. He praises a man in place of a god so that he can praise a man as though he were a god. If Socrates can replace a god, then other men can replace the gods as well, other more worthy men like Alcibiades himself. Alcibiades is taking his revenge on Socrates. He refutes Socrates by professing his love for him inspite of the fact that he does not appropriate his way of life. The power politician overtly denies philosophy is a genuine possibility for ordinary human beings.
Alcibiades substitutes Socrates for the beauty, truth, and goodness that Socrates makes present. Socrates was right to think Alcibiades was capable of philosophy when he pursued him as his student. Teaching philosophy to the young who are capable of it involves a terrible risk. The failed philosopher can become a tyrant because he has experienced what is divine in life and knows what constitutes the excellent life.
Alcibiades symbolizes the duplicity of eros. He claims to honor Socrates as his teacher, but dishonors him as his ex-student. He elevates Socrates over the rest of the company, only to proclaim his own superiority to everyone at the party. He reminds them that Socrates is from a lower social class than himself. He says he yearns to get even with Socrates for the alleged injustices that he committed against eros and himself when he was a young man. Yet what he really resents is Socrates' disapproval of his own choice of power politics over philosophy. He is determined to take his revenge on Socrates even at the price of exposing his own vulnerability.
Claiming to be the only one at the party who really knows Socrates, Alcibiades begins his speech by charging Socrates with hubris. He says that Socrates is the most arrogant of mortals. The allegation comes from a man who was celebrated for outrageous behavior and reveled in his own arrogance. Socrates takes his unjust accusation seriously and warns Alcibiades not to blaspheme. The blasphemy is against the god Eros whom Alcibiades places on an equal level with himself. When his teacher, Diotima, warned him of his ignorance the young Socrates held his tongue. When his teacher, Socrates, warned him of his ignorance, the ex-student Alcibiades refused to hold his tongue. "I can praise no one else [but Socrates]." His speech will be more about his own honor than the honor of Socrates. Alcibiades frowns on the philosophical life of qeoria as not being a genuinely human life. He knows he cannot refute Socrates when he argues that a life of power politics opposed to philosophy is not intellectually defensible.
Without having heard Socrates' speech, since he arrived after it was given, Alcibiades boldly alleges that his speech was false and misleading. He calls Socrates a deceiver implying that he is someone who misleads people on purpose. More surprisingly Socrates does not venture to refute him or even to complain that he has been done him an injustice. Why not? The answer is easy. To what purpose would Socrates say anything? He knows Alcibiades knows better. There would be no reason for him to correct him, to deny the charges, or to show the contradictions in his false insinuations. He knows the other people at the party are aware of the exaggerations of a drunken, self-serving politician. The only reason for Socrates to launch a full scale attack against Alcibiades would be to justify himself where no self-justification is necessary. To react against charges that are patently false and even preposterous would be to endow them with a seriousness they do not deserve. Alcibiades will betray Socrates and philosophy before he betrays Athens.
The purpose of Alcibiades' power politics is to rule autocratically over others and glorify himself. How much the praise of Socrates outweighs the blame in the duplicitous speech of the power politician is difficult to assess. Even if only defectively Alcibiades still loves Socrates and imitates him. Inspite of his self-destructive choices, Socrates still cares for Alcibiades even though his friendship fails to turn him towards the practice of the virtues and philosophical politics. Alcibiades dares Socrates to stop him if he says anything false. Playing both a prosecuting attorney and a witness in a court, he puts himself under oath. He promises he will not lie willingly. Alcibiades implies that Socrates is his conscience just as Plato implied he was the conscience of Athens.
Alcibiades protects himself from criticism in advance by claiming his haphazard presentation will be a result of his drunkenness and the idiosyncrasies of Socrates. The mention of Socrates' idiosyncrasies is an allusion to the Apology and the charge Socrates himself imagines people bringing against him. "Socrates must have done something out of the ordinary and, therefore, wrong otherwise why do so many people think so badly of him?" Ironically the Athenians thought well of Alcibiades no matter how badly he acted, even when he betrayed his own city to its enemies. While they thought badly of Socrates no matter how well he acted, even when he tried to live his life in accordance with virtue.
The Structure of the Speech
The speech of Alcibiades falls into five parts of unequal length:
Alcibiades claims that Socrates is a dissembler, so arrogant as to be indifferent to the human condition, especially to the beautiful boys for whom he liked to feign erotic attraction. Alcibiades pretends at first that the hubristic indifference Socrates shows toward bodily beauty is justified since his inner beauty makes him more beautiful and superior to all other men. According to Alcibiades Socrates' philosophical arrogance is both unjustified and flawed since it impairs his effectiveness in persuading the majority of the people of the importance of philosophy. By contrast Alcibiades implies that his political arrogance is effective in achieving his purpose of manipulating the multitude. Alcibiades rightly implies that the hubris of Socrates is not in tune with a human life that is totally immersed either in corporeal desires or in the desire for power and honor among men. For Socrates the destiny of the human body is the inner life of the psyche. The destiny of the inner life of the psyche is the divine life of the noetic contemplation of the Good.
Images and Propaganda
"I shall try to praise Socrates by way of images (d'ekonion). He will perhaps suppose that this is to make fun of him, but the image will be for the sake of truth, not for laughter." Alcibiades is a lying politician. Contrary to what he says, he is trying to make Socrates into a laughingstock. The politician and the philosopher know how powerful the images and symbols of a changing, visible reality are for human beings who, for the most part, remain immersed in the realm of bodies. The whole truth about Socrates cannot be told in images. The whole truth requires an understanding of the goodness of Socrates. The clash between Socrates and Alcibiades expresses the tension between the universality of truth and the concreteness of the good. Reconciling the love of ones own and the love of the good is not easy. The love individuals have for individual persons, like the friendship of Socrates and Alcibiades, is incommensurable with abstract discourse about the Transcendent Good. But the defect is not in the Good but in the abstract talk. The Good is not abstract only our talk about it is.
Alcibiades is not mistaken about the importance of images and symbols. No one can give a rational account of an individual's life. Although psychological explanations can be given, explanations of individuals or of things that change cannot be given because what allows things to change and makes them individuals is not directly intelligible. An explanation of the Idea of the Good cannot be given, not because it changes or because it is an individual and to that extent unintelligible, but because it exceeds the intelligibility of any explanation and the Good is the ground of all explanations.
In the Sophist the Eleatic Stranger divides image-making (eidolourgikh) into two species: eikastic and phantastic. The Sophist is a maker of phantastic images. The eikastic is left undivided. We can divide eikastic image-making into two sorts: philosophical and commonsensical. The former is for the sake of an appropriation of the good life and the life of qeoria in civil society. The latter is for the sake of power politics and its end of manipulating the multitude. The images projected on the walls in the story of the cave show that the rhetorical form of eikastic image-making is for the purpose of controlling the minds of men and their behavior. Propaganda is the rhetorical use of images and stories by those who want power for its own sake. Alcibiades will chose his images of Socrates to prove that Socrates' life of philosophy is an impossible life for human beings.
The speech of Alcibiades is an excuse for not taking philosophy and the life of qeoria seriously. According to Alcibiades the Divine life of qeoria is opposed to a life of effective political action. While politics is necessary for human beings, philosophy is not. In fact for him philosophy is an impediment to the intelligent practice of politics. Alcibiades is defending his practice of power politics. He cannot give a rational defense of power politics nor can he give a convincing argument for his disordered way of life. He uses images to lead men away from the truth that they are responsible for the life they choose for themselves.
Alcibiades proposes Socrates as a antihuman image, a distortion of the heroic role he plays in Plato's dialogues. The sophistic argument that philosophical politics is unrealistic has been echoed by political "realists" down through history. After awhile people come to believe the anti-philosophical propaganda given by the false friends of philosophy. The common view of the political impracticality of philosophy is not based on an intellectually compelling argument or on human experience; but, like many forms of propaganda, it is a result of thoughtless repetition.
Alcibiades proposes the satyr as the appropriate image of Socrates. Satyrs are known for their lust. According to Alcibiades, Socrates is defective in ordinary human passion. Alcibiades alleges Socrates presents himself as a satyr deliberately to deceive him. The choice of the satyr as an image of Socrates serves his purpose directly. Alcibiades wants to absolve himself of the mistaken judgment he made about what kind of teacher Socrates really was. Alcibiades never says anything about the substance of Socrates' teaching. Yet the substance of his teaching led him to recognize that Socrates was different from the common sophist. Alcibiades implies that the difference between Socrates and the sophists was what attracted him to the philosopher.
Satyrs conceal a divine beauty beneath an ugly, bestial exterior and they can vanquish mortals by hypnotizing them through speech; but he mistakenly inferred that his ability to overcome his opponents with arguments meant that he could conquer the multitude in the same way and become a great political force in Athens.
There were two things that Alcibiades failed to mention. First he does not mention that Socrates appealed to his intelligence, not to his lower passions. Second he refuses to admit that Socrates had no interest in power as a form of control over others. Both things made Socrates seem far more powerful to Alcibiades than most people who had political power since Socrates had control over himself and they did not. Socrates could not be bought and he could not be intimidated. Alcibiades concluded Socrates was the most powerful man in Athens because everyone else could either be bought or intimidated.
The flaw in Alcibiades' character, his quest for political power and glory, mislead him in his assessment of Socrates. He thought Socratic rhetoric was just a more powerful way to dominate the multitude than sophistic rhetoric. He could not distinguish between the noble and the base passions of his own heart. Alcibiades made himself the master of mediocrity. His chameleon ability to assume a variety of forms is more akin to poetry than philosophy. He became an uncontrolled and unstable character. Alcibiades became the political symbol of the Athens he strove to dominate. Both Alcibiades and Athens condemned Socrates for similar reasons.
Alcibiades idolized the demos, and he refused to recognize that philosophy required a protrepsis. For the philosopher, democracy cannot be justified as a self-evident principle. For the rule of the majority is not self-evidently just. The ancients thought of democracy, not as a vocation or a principle, but as a regime: the rule of the many as opposed to the rule of the few (aristocracy/oligarchy) or the rule of one (monarchy / tyranny). The modern notion is that political rule is democratic in the sense that all men are called to govern themselves according to the requirements of their own intelligence and reasonableness. If human beings have a democratic vocation, it is because they have a vocation to live well. A democratic regime stands or falls on its ability to educate its citizens to rule themselves by their intelligence and then to take responsibility for the way of life they choose. In that sense democracy is the most philosophical of regimes because in civil society it depends upon a philosophical appropriation of the moral virtues.
Alcibiades likens Socrates to the Silenus figures that contain "images of the gods within." The Greek word is agalmata. The word is very suggestive. It comes from the verb, agallw, which means to glorify, to honor the gods. There is an allusion to the meaning of Diotima's name, divine honor. In the passive voice, agallomai, means to delight, to glory in. The substantive, agalma, is a statue honoring a god, an image of the god, but also a pleasing gift from the gods. The Trojan horse could be described as an agalma. In the Apology Socrates calls himself ambiguously both a gadfly and a gift of the gods. The seminal meanings of the Greek word, agalma, can be missed if the translation gives no explanation.
he is most like the Silenus-figures that sit in our statuary shops; you know the ones I mean, the ones our craftsman make with pipes and flutes in their hands; when the two halves are opened up, they are found to possess images of the gods within.
Alcibiades evokes the metaphor of cutting, dissection, or analysis. The sword is a central erotic metaphor for Alcibiades, the warrior. Alcibiades threatens to bisect Socrates. The "cutting" metaphor connects his speech with the speech of Aristophanes that tells how Apollo bisected the circle people. The Silenoi, the companions of Dionysus, and Marsyas, the competitor of Apollo, associate Dionysus with Apollo. Alcibiades suggests that he like Dionysus will break the Apollonian Socrates open, not to inflict the wound of eros in human nature, but to de-daimonize Socrates by disclosing the man-made gods within him. Since the two halves of the Silenus figures are hinged and do not come apart when they are opened, Alcibiades' metaphor of 'cutting' symbolizes disclosure or cutting away the veil, not separation as in the story of Aristophanes. The purpose of Alcibiades is to expose the interiority of Socrates by turning him inside out. Alcibiades thinks that to expose Socrates as dreamer or visionary is to destroy his power over men.
Alcibiades associates Socrates with Marsyas to display his hubris. Marsyas, a satyr known for his divine flute playing, foolishly challenged Apollo to a flute-playing contest. As a prize he suggested that the winner could do what he liked with the loser. Marsyas was soundly defeated by the god. In accordance with Marsyas' terms, that the winner could do as he liked with the loser, Apollo demanded his skin as the prize. The divine surgeon flayed him alive as punishment for his arrogant challenge of the gods. Identifying himself with Apollo, Alcibiades insinuates that he will strip the new Marsyas, Socrates, of his protective skin of irony and expose him to the world for the arrogant challenger of the gods that he really is. Alcibiades contemptuously implies he, like Apollo, will defeat Socrates at his own game. Mocking the rhetoric of the courtroom, Alcibiades swears on his honor as a gentleman that he will tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
Alcibiades is not dominated primarily by carnal desires. He is concerned with the body solely as the basis for political power. Alcibiades is a man of power (timetic eros) and not just an unrestrained voluptuary. He knows that the body does make its contribution; but if that were all that impressed him, he would not have been a student of Socrates. Alcibiades' approach is fundamentally ambiguous. Whereas he recognizes that the power of Socrates' rhetoric goes beyond the body, still he thinks such rhetoric could be employed to rule tyrannically over democratic institutions. Honesty and truthfulness for Alcibiades are the most important things to know how to fake in politics.
The music of Marsyas produces "a divine trance in his hearers to demonstrate by the divinity in those so inspired who the people are who yearn for the divine and the initiation into the divine mysteries." Socrates' discourse is meant to enchant those who possess similar interior divinities in order to distinguish those who are capable of philosophy from those who are not and to initiate those who are into the life of philosophy. Tragically Alcibiades had such a divine capability otherwise Socrates could not have moved him by his speech nor attracted him to his circle.
Alcibiades recognized the importance of philosophy as a dialectical skill. He believed philosophical arguments were superior to sophistic arguments because their truth made them more tricky than the sophistic ones. Alcibiades had no qualms about emulating Socrates for his own purpose of controlling the multitude. He often appeals to the truth in the introduction to his speech. Alcibiades turns philosophical rhetoric into demagoguery. He exempts himself from the demands of self-appropriation and uses philosophy for the domination of others.
The variability of Alcibiades' character is not the cause of his rejection of philosophy. Rather his bad faith rejection of philosophy is the cause of the extreme variability of his character. It is a symptom of his attempt to lose himself, to run away from himself, to escape from the self he had chosen over the self he was inspired by Socrates to be. His accusation against Socrates is an accusation against himself. Alcibiades does not reject the philosophical way of life for lack of knowledge of what it is. Quite the contrary, he abandons philosophy after having heard the best arguments for it. While the other speakers in the dialogue are at odds with themselves and do not know it, Alcibiades is at odds with himself and knows it.
Alcibiades' description of Socrates as Silenus and Marsyas is a caricature of Socrates' irony. It is an imitation of irony rather than its true reality.
I would take an oath and testify to all the strange effects I personally felt from his words and even now by which I am still affected. For when I hear him, I become worse than a wild maniac. I find my heart throbbing and leaping into my throat and tears gushing out from my eyes at the sound of his voice. I see great numbers of others undergoing the same experience. . . . With them my spirit was not left in turmoil and I did not have to complain about being in the condition of a common slave. Whereas under the influence of our Marsyas here, I have often been thrown into such a state of confusion that I thought my life not worth living anymore on my own. terms.
In his initial relationship with him Alcibiades may have had an impression of Socrates that fits the picture he gives. But he no longer believes it, and so it is a gross exaggeration. His testimony presents a half truth. For though the philosophical discourses of Socrates led him to think his life devoted to power politics was not worthy because it was intellectually indefensible, the conclusion was not the result of blind or wild passion. Instead it followed from the thoughtful, philosophical arguments of Socrates. Socrates' irony disclosed the truth about how to live well. Alcibiades' anti-philosophical irony allowed him to hide the truth from himself at the same time that he pretended to be telling it.
For he makes me admit that even though I myself am in great need, I neglect my own concerns and instead conduct the public affairs of Athens. So I block my ears forcibly as though I were trying to avoid his Siren Song, and I run away lest I grow altogether old sitting at his feet.
Alcibiades, fancying himself another Odysseus, listens to the Siren Song of Socrates. After hearing it like Odysseus he is tortured by it and wants to block his ears against philosophy lest he become an incurable disciple of Socrates. He suggests that other students like Agathon block their ears.
For Alcibiades to suggest that it is slavish to remain a disciple of Socrates is a half-truth. Philosophical discipleship exists so that human beings can become self-governing, liberated, and virtuous persons. True discipleship prepares the student to become the responsible master of himself. Alcibiades complains that Socrates is so rhetorically seductive that he loses his liberty as his student. He is lying. The power of Socrates resides in the truth of his teaching. Socrates is a man who, like Alcibiades, is drunk, not with drugs, power, or ambition but with the truth. The consummate power politician learned how to use the truth to mislead himself and others.
When Socrates is around, Alcibiades knows what he should do. He can do what he knows is right because Socrates shames him into doing what is right. Alcibiades is still an adolescent. His sense of shame proves he has a sense of honor. Alcibiades feels shame in the presence of none but Socrates. For only Socrates is superior to himself and the multitude that he wishes to dominate because the philosopher is a man of genuine virtue. His awe of and respect for Socrates makes Alcibiades feel ashamed of himself. He knows he has abandoned his true honor.
Alcibiades shifts responsibility for doing what is right from himself to Socrates. Socrates reminds him of what he is destined to be. Alcibiades pretends that Socrates is more than human. The pretense places an impossible burden upon the philosopher. According to Alcibiades he can act well in the presence of a paradigm of a more than human virtue, but he cannot in his absence. Human excellence is not accessible to him without the example, encouragement, and the presence of Socrates. The need for a moral paradigm is a half truth coming from the duplicitous Alcibiades. For him the moral example of Socrates is his excuse for immoral behavior in the absence of Socrates.
Alcibiades distorts Socrates' teaching by claiming that moral excellence is unique to the philosopher. According to Alcibiades there is something divine in Socrates, but the divine element is unconnected with the human condition. His wish that Socrates disappear amounts to a wish that the manifestation of the invisible good in his life become hidden again. Socrates made the invisible good visible to him. But the absence of Socrates would distress him even more since he knew the philosophical life of Socrates bestows a true nobility on human beings and helps make a good life possible. Alcibiades still loves Socrates in spite of his bad choices because he cannot help but love the possibility of the good in himself. Socrates invites him to actualize moral excellence in his own life.
Alcibiades claims Socrates secretly scorns physical beauty and carnal desire. Socrates' debasement of physical beauty constitutes his philosophical arrogance. As proof of his thesis, he offers what he claims is Socrates' cold and calculating rejection of his own beautiful body. The speech of Alcibiades culminates in the story of his failed attempt to seduce his teacher. Power politics stands or falls on the assumption that the body is the final reality. Philosophical politics assumes the existence of nouV as a reality beyond the body that orders all things including the body. Alcibiades is ready to give his evidence against Socrates to prove the philosopher is an atheist because he does not believe in the god of Love.
Alcibiades' Unsuccessful Seduction of Socrates
Alcibiades claims to show Socrates for what he is, but instead he exposes more about himself than about Socrates.
I shall expose him now that I have started down this road. Notice how Socrates is amorously inclined towards good looking men and how he is always busy with, involved with, and captivated by them. He affects an utterly stupid and ignorant countenance. Is this not just like a Silenus? Exactly. It is an outward molding, a mask he wears just like the sculptured Silenus. But if you opened up his insides, you would not imagine, my fellow drinking partners, how full he is of self-control. I warn you that all the beauty a man might possess is as nothing to him. He despises it more than you can believe. Nor does wealth attract him; nor any honor which is the envied prize of the masses. All these possessions he counts as worth nothing and all people like us as worthless. He spends his whole life in rebuffing and making sport of his fellow man. Whether anyone else ever caught him in a reflective moment and opened him up and caught sight of the images inside (agalmata) of him, I cannot say. But I myself saw them one day, and thought them so divine and glorious, so perfectly fair and wonderful, that I simply had to do as Socrates bade me.
Alcibiades wants to possess the mysterious divine objects (agalmata) within the psyche of Socrates. He tries to make the goodness inside Socrates into something other than his practice of the virtues. For Alcibiades the agalmata, the symbols of divinity within Socrates, are transformed into objects to be possessed like things that can be bought, sold, and manipulated. For the politician images are equivalent to reality. Because Alcibiades substitutes the image of the gods for the gods, he is an idolater. His speech discloses the political consequences of idolatry. He wants to know all that Socrates knows without the effort and the patience necessary for him to find out for himself. Alcibiades wants wisdom without discipline and enlightenment without changing himself. Alcibiades wants his audience to believe Socrates is both a godlike man and a manlike demon. He presents Socrates as different from the rest of mankind by portraying him as strange but attractive, frightening but seductive.
Alcibiades recounts how he came "all of a sudden" to see the inner beauty of Socrates one day. Alcibiades had an insight into what Socrates was all about. "All at once" (exaifneV) he saw the beautiful things inside of him, the agalmata. It was so wonderful, so beautiful, so divine that he felt compelled to please Socrates and do as he wished. Alcibiades fell in love with Socrates that day, not because of his good looks, since he was not physically attractive, but on account of the inner beauty of the agalmata. The agalmata inside Socrates were the reflections of Diotima's idea of the transcendent divine Beauty. For Alcibiades the agalmata, the images of the divine, are irresistible. Socrates is the paradigm, the eikon of inward beauty. The young Alcibiades envisions the truth of beauty by understanding its reflection in Socrates' life. Instead of dedicating himself to the transcendent, divine realities, Alcibiades makes the divine into a finite power-object. Yielding to political idolatry, he declines to enter the life of qeoria. He refused to appropriate for himself the beauty of the life of excellence. Alcibiades thought he could seduce the philosopher and gain possession of the agalmata.
Being in love with Socrates, sadly Alcibiades knew of no other way of showing his affection for him than by trying to seduce and gratify him physically. Alcibiades assumes that Socrates' wisdom, symbolized in the agalmata, is a form of mind-power and he wanted to barter power over the body for power over the mind. Like arrangements other young men had with their teachers, he thought Socrates would exchange his knowledge for sexual favors from himself as an up and coming politician.
Alcibiades hides his resentment towards Socrates behind his account of the embarrassing incident of Socrates' rejection of his seduction. An erotic incident from his youth and Socrates' fatherly rebuff is unlikely to be an embarrassment for him in his mid-thirties. If it were, why would he be telling the story so shamelessly?
I went and met him so that the two of us could be alone. I thought he would seize the opportunity and talk to me as a lover does to his beloved in private, and I was glad. But nothing at all happened: he would merely converse with me in his accustomed manner. . . . I resolved to throw myself at the man and go for broke, refusing to give up the contest once I set my mind on it. I wanted to know what was up and to clear the air. So I invited him to dine with me, you know, the way any lover schemes using a pleasant dinner alone to get his beloved into bed with him. Even dinner he was slow to accept, but eventually he was persuaded. The first time he came, he wanted to leave right after dinner. On that occasion I was too embarrassed to stop him and let him go. The second time I had a plan: after we had dined, I continued talking with him far into the night and when he wanted to leave, I pretended it was way too late and made him stay the night. So he fell asleep on the couch where we had eaten together. No one but the two of us were in the room.
For a second time a speaker tells the story of a party within a party. The first time was Aphrodite's birthday party at which Eros was conceived. The story of the heavenly party parallels the story of Alcibiades' seduction of Socrates. In Alcibiades' story the lover is drunk and the beloved is sober. Socrates is a sober Poros (beloved). Alcibiades is the drunken Penia (lover). The parallels are easy to recognize. In the seduction of Socrates Alcibiades identifies himself with the feminine, the eromenos. The seduction at Alcibiades's private party is not successful. Nothing is conceived or born. Socrates fails, through no fault of his own, to divert Alcibiades from power politics to the philosophical life. The majority of the fault rests with Alcibiades.
it seems unjust to me, having undertaken to praise him, I should now hide his haughtily, arrogant behavior. Besides, I share the plight of men who are snake-bitten: you know it is said of one in such a condition that he refuses to describe his pain to any but those who have been bitten themselves, since they alone would understand him and sympathize with him if he should lose his composure in his agony and speak and act out of control. Now I have been bitten by a more lethal creature, in the most painful way that one can be bitten: in my heart and my soul, or whatever you might call it, I am stricken and stung by the venom of his philosophical discourses, which adhere more fiercely than any viper once they get hold of a young and talented soul and force it to do or say whatever they will.
Alcibiades uses the metaphor of the farmakon. It is an ambiguous metaphor. The venom of a snake can be therapeutic or poisonous. He uses the metaphor in a misleading way by mentioning only the poisonous quality of the venom and suppressing its potential for therapy. In his case Socrates' teaching resulted in being poisonous because there is no philosophical therapy when the subject refuses to undergo a protreyiV or conversion.
If Socrates made it possible for Alcibiades to recognize what an excellent life was, then he also made it possible for him knowingly to reject the virtuous life. But that would hardly make Socrates a corrupt teacher. The danger of Socrates' teaching is that if his student repudiates the philosophical life, he is more responsible for his self-destructive behavior than if he had never heard of it. Socrates stung the conscience of Alcibiades. For that Alcibiades would never forgive him since he had no intention of living the philosophical life even though he knew it was superior to the life of power politics.
Alcibiades wants to change places with Socrates. He wants Socrates to become his erwmenoV, his beloved; he wants to act as the philosopher's lover, the erwsteV. In other words Alcibiades wants to make Socrates his student. It is no simple change of places since he wants to trade carnal for a noetic eros. Alcibiades deliberately misidentifies himself as lover. He deliberately confuses his masculine body with the feminine. He deliberately confuses the realities of his body with the realities of his psyche. He deliberately confounds his passion for honor and power with his passion for the knowledge and truth. He deliberately confuses his love for himself with his love for Socrates. Finally he confuses the results with the cause: the image with the reality, the images of the gods within Socrates, the agalmata, with the reality of divinity.
Alcibiades both loved and hated Socrates, not because he had scorned him sexually as a young man, but because Socrates disclosed to him the truth of the genuine nobility of the mind and spirit. Socrates showed him that, though he was capable of it, he lacked a genuine nobility of the mind and spirit. Alcibiades could not tolerate anyone being more excellent than himself. The hidden purpose of his speech was to demean the excellence of Socrates and exalt his own position based on his superior social class. He still agrees with Socrates. When he says he cannot rid himself of Socrates what he means is that he cannot rid himself of what is best in himself. The agalmata he sees in Socrates represent what is best in himself.
Alcibiades claims he lost his freedom in the presence of Socrates because the philosopher had power over him as his beloved. The only 'freedom' Alcibiades lost in the presence of Socrates was the license to act unreasonably against what was right. The only 'freedom' Alcibiades lost in the presence of Socrates was the freedom to deceive himself. The only choice of which he was deprived in Socrates' presence was the choice of self-imposed slavery, the choice of spiritual suicide.
Alcibiades' proposition addressed to Socrates sounds like Pausanias' argument except it is not in the mouth of the teacher but of the student.
after the lights went out and the servants had withdrawn, I determined not to beat around the bush, but to say openly what I wanted to do. So I shook him and said, "Socrates are you asleep?" "Why no," he replied. "Let me tell you what I have decided." "What is the matter," he asked. "I consider you to be the only man worthy of being my lover, but it looks to me as though you are too shy to mention love to me. Allow me to state my position straight away: I think it is foolish not to gratify you in this way -- as well in any other way -- if you had any need of my property or of my friends. To me nothing is more important than the attainment of the highest possible excellence, and to achieve this end I believe I can find no abler ally than yourself. So I should feel far more shame before enlightened and worthy people for not giving sexual pleasure to such a friend, than I would feel before the unthinking riffraff for satisfying him."
The androgynous Alcibiades no more desired to have a sexual relationship with the older man, Socrates, than Phaedrus desired sexual intimacy with the old physician, Eryximachus. Alcibiades is a cold, calculating political opportunist. He thinks the difference between the excellent few and the mediocre masses is not that the excellent few are virtuous, but that they can manipulate the minds of the many to dominate the multitude and glorify themselves. He will never be a philosopher because he has no intention of exchanging his practice of power politics for the practice of the virtues.
Socrates knew Alcibiades was more in love with the image of being a philosopher than with being a philosopher. A career in philosophy can and often does begin with a love of its image. Plato uses the image of Socrates in the dialogues to attract his readers to philosophy. The student of philosophy must move beyond images to the reality of a commitment to a life in pursuit of self-knowledge and moral excellence. Concretely that means giving up the life of self-indulgence or the quest for personal power and glory.
When he heard this, he put on that outrageous, ironic air that was so characteristic of him and responded,"My dear Alcibiades, I dare say you are not really a stupid person, so if what you say of me is true, and there is a certain power in me that could help you to be a better human being; then what you must recognize in me is a stupendous beauty that would be vastly superior to your own good looks. And if upon envisioning this, you are attempting a mutual exchange of bodily beauty for noetic beauty, you are trying to get quite an advantage, aren't you? -you are trying to barter real for apparent beauty -and in fact, you would be pulling off the age-old con game of exchanging bronze for gold. But you should be much more wary, my excellent friend: you could be deceived and I might be a nobody [no one] (me se lanthano ouden on). Remember intellectual vision begins to sharpen when the body's vision is in decline; and you are a long way from the more penetrating vision of old age.
Why does Socrates say that Alcibiades might not be stupid? Does he imply by the comment that someone might suppose he was? Alcibiades had the highest regard for his own intelligence, social position, and good looks. Alcibiades recognized an excellence beyond his own good looks and position in society. He was misguided in his attempt to exchange places with Socrates and to barter his sexual favors for excellence. His behavior showed that his understanding of philosophy was defective. Socrates cannot function as his erwmenoV for two reasons. First Socrates cannot offer Alcibiades the good looks of an erwmenoV. Second he cannot let him turn philosophical wisdom into a weapon for the use of power politics.
Socrates plays on a Homeric pun in his response by referring to the story of Odysseus and Polyphemus. After he is blinded by Odysseus, Polyphemus demands to know his name. Odysseus tells the Cyclops his name is "No one" (ouden on). By referring to the story, Socrates lays the groundwork for a comparison between himself as the clever Odysseus and Alcibiades as the blinded, drunken Cyclops, Polyphemus, who, like Alcibiades, was strong, self-congratulatory, but also stupid.
In his warning Socrates extends the meaning of the pun on Odysseus' trick. He refers to Odysseus, who by a ruse gets Polyphemus intoxicated, blinds him, and escapes from his prison cave by hiding with his men under the Cyclops' sheep. When the Cyclops asked Odysseus his name, he made the perfect fool of Polyphemus by saying he was called "No One." When Polyphemus requested assistance from his parents who were gods and they asked who blinded him and tricked him, he answered that "No One" did it. The gods did not revenge him because they thought he was crazy. Do the present company think Alcibiades is crazy for claiming Socrates has blinded him with a love for philosophy? The reference to Alcibiades as both stronger than Socrates and drunk (Polyphemus) and the further references to his poor intellectual vision (the blinded giant) and to Socrates as "No One" (the new Odysseus) makes the interpretation quite plausible.
Blindness in the young results from the flattery paid by older man who have made their place in the world to younger men to whom they give a great deal of attention. Blinding political ambition drives Alcibiades. He was successful in capturing the imagination of the Athenian populace. He knows he is more gifted than the run of the mill Athenian politician. He is more intelligent, better looking, wealthier, better connected, and a more clever political orator than most. But Alcibiades knows he cannot refute Socrates' argument to the effect that he is inferior to anyone who practices the virtues of self-control, courage, practical wisdom, and justice. Socrates forces him to admit that his nobility is a sham without the practice and the achievement of the virtues. His argument suggests that any virtuous citizen is superior to Alcibiades. The upper class politician finds his argument preposterous and intolerable. It galls him because he cannot refute it. The contrast between the talents of the proud Alcibiades and the philosopher's inner beauty that he says he glimpses in the agalmata, turns the discussion back to the central theme of Diotima's speech, the erotic ascent to the transcendent beauty of the divine Good.
Socrates certainly does not flatter Alcibiades. In fact he does the opposite. He warns him that his motives, though honestly stated, need reflective and critical scrutiny. The notion that honesty by itself somehow justifies his position is a fallacy of the inexperienced thinker. Socrates is being prophetic when he says in the days to come each of them will decide what they are to make of themselves. The theme that "time will tell" pervades all the undercurrents of the dialogue. Alcibiades ignores Socrates' suggestion to consider his purposes and straight away he gets into bed with him.
Alcibiades claims that Socrates showed contempt for him. Did Socrates really show contempt for him? Or Is Alcibiades distorting what happened? Didn't Socrates simply fall asleep in his arms? Doesn't that suggest Socrates trusted him as his friend? The mock trial of Socrates before the sophists and his intellectual enemies for his alleged deficiency in eros is a betrayal of that trust. Is the refusal of Socrates to take sexual advantage of Alcibiades proof of his haughty disdain for him or evidence of his genuine care for him? Is the refusal to use someone for one's own pleasure the betrayal of a friend? Does Alcibiades resent Socrates' paternal role? Does he resent all authority?
Alcibiades, the power politician, depends completely upon his city for the honor, glory, and excellence. Socrates, the philosopher, is not completely dependent upon civil society for the excellence of the divine contemplative life. Does Socrates' independence anger the power politician as well as the multitude?
Alcibiades wants his audience to think that by scorning his sexual advances, Socrates failed to worship Eros properly. He presents his case as a crime of blasphemy against Eros. The magnitude of the crime is supposed to overshadow the shame Alcibiades should feel in disclosing it. The indictment against Socrates and the evidence of the seduction given in the story adumbrates the future trial of Socrates. Alcibiades represents both his judges and his accusers in the Athenian demos. Athens, like Alcibiades, attempted to seduce Socrates away from philosophy. As a just man, Socrates practices self-control with respect to both his own body and the body politic. Self-control is Socrates' conspicuous virtue. His virtue became his crime. Alcibiades can assert his superiority over the multitude only as long as Athens continues to embrace power politics and intellectual mediocrity. Socrates committed treason against power politics and the intellectual mediocrity of the multitude.
Virtues of Socrates According To Alcibiades
The warrior in Alcibiades loved victory more than anything else. Socrates' indifference to pleasure and pain in war Alcibiades wrongly identified with courage. Endurance, he thought, made Socrates indomitable. Socrates was indomitable in the way a good man is indomitable.
Alcibiades anticipates and symbolizes Athens whose darling he was. Like Athens Alcibiades does not ascribe justice to Socrates. Socrates was trying to do justice to Alcibiades and Athens, but they do not return the compliment. In a just society a just men would be acquitted of a trumped up charge. Socrates hurt the pride of Alcibiades and later of Athens, but he did not insult their intelligence. Both felt injured at the same time that both knew they were not. Alcibiades could find no reason for quitting the company of Socrates. He knew Socrates had no hold over him. The only relationship Socrates had with Alcibiades was that of a genuine, teacher-student friendship that could free both men to be themselves in their pursuit of excellence.
Alcibiades pretended to be surprised that Socrates was immune to the lure of sexual pleasure and money; two of the three things he put at the disposal of Socrates in the declaration of his love for him. The third thing was friends. Friends are a good Socrates cannot wish to live without. The power politician cannot be a genuine friend to Socrates as long as he subordinates the philosophical life to power politics. Alcibiades pretends to agree with Socrates. Socrates knew the life of the psyche and the quest for honor was superior to the life of the body, but he also knew the noetic love of the truth was superior to the political love of honor. The psyche includes but transcends the life of the body. Similarly the noetic philosophical love of the truth includes but transcends the political desire for honor.
When he served as his comrade in arms, Alcibiades describes Socrates on the field of battle. In war the warrior presents himself more favorably in comparison with the philosopher. Alcibiades and Socrates were messmates at Potidaea. He tells how Socrates surpassed the whole army in his ability to tolerate the lack or overabundance of food or drink. He excels in self-control whether because of an excess or because of a lack of food or drink. Alcibiades passes over his sexual appetite in silence. Alcibiades portrays Socrates as being indifferent to the discomfort caused by the extremes of the weather. The weather represents all those external conditions that surround and envelop human beings insofar as it is a symbol of nature and stands beyond the complete control of human beings.
The common soldiers cannot negotiate the cold weather without covering their feet. Socrates usually goes barefoot. His feet are in direct contact with the earth and his soul in 'direct contact' with reality though his intelligence (nouV). The harshness of winter does not change the custom.
`Next the valiant deed our strong-souled hero dared' once during that campaign is well worth hearing. At dawn he was immersed in deep contemplation and he stood still in the same spot meditating upon some problem. When the problem would not yield to him, he refused to abandon it but stood still wrapped in thought. Time passed to midday, and the men began to notice him and talked together about him and said to one another in amazement, "Socrates has been standing there in a trance ever since dawn." The end of the incident occurred thus: in the evening -this time it was summer -after dinner some of the Ionians brought out their mattresses and rugs and bedded down in the shade and so waited to see if he would stand there all night. He stood still until dawn came and the sun rose again; then he strolled away after offering a prayer to the Sun.
Alcibiades' stories of the two incidents in battle exposes the perversity of Socrates and his practice of philosophy. In the winter Socrates moves about outside in the cold while everyone else is trying to keep still and warm inside. In the summer Socrates keeps perfectly still for hours on end standing in the sun while everybody else is busy moving around performing the tasks of the day and staying in the shade to keep cool. He portrays Socrates as a fool to the sophisticated and as an eccentric to the common folk. Alcibiades presents Socrates as common to the aristocrat and as snobbish to the common man. With the rank and file Alcibiades refers to Socrates as aner, a gentleman, and he uses the more common noun, anqropoV, to refer to the soldiers. Alcibiades calls Socrates a gentleman in the presence of the common foot soldier, but not in the presence of other gentlemen.
The philosopher comports himself differently towards the gentlemen than towards the common man, and the reason is that philosophy is dialectical. On the one hand Socrates challenges aristocratic men to appropriate the ideals of human excellence so often proclaimed as their own. On the other hand he invites democratic men to discover the ideals of excellence that make more of life than the lives of luxury lived by the wealthy few. What the upper classes call the good life is the luxurious life of the rich and famous. For the privileged few the good life amounts to no more than a life of self-indulgence, conspicuous consumption, and the oppression of the common people by the elite who hold power. Talk of public virtue by the upper classes is often no more than a mask to hide the self-congratulatory attitude of those who were lucky to be born into a life of privilege.
Socrates is democratic in the sense that he believes the challenge to live a life of moral excellence is addressed to all citizens of the polis. He is aristocratic in the sense that he believes the good life is determined, not primarily by extrinsic goods, but by the appropriation of the traditional virtues of self-control, courage, practical wisdom, and justice philosophically mediated in civil society. Since Socrates' argument is dialectical, the interpreter might fall into the trap of turning Socrates into either a covert aristocratic reactionary or a closet democratic sophist. Perhaps for Plato a responsible democracy and a democratic aristocracy are two sides of the same political coin.
Socratic Courage?
In the two incidents Alcibiades relates Socrates is supposed to be the one who is being praised, but Alcibiades indulges himself again in thinly disguised self-adulation. He mentions his own noble rank in contrast to Socrates' lower class status. He portrays himself as so aggressive in battle that he is severely wounded while Socrates is unharmed. If Socrates fought bravely, why was he not hurt while Alcibiades, the noble warrior, was wounded? Surely he hung back in the battle and failed to fight as valiantly as our hero, Alcibiades. Alcibiades presents himself as the first to name Socrates for the medal of honor for bravery. Socrates takes second place to Alcibiades in the practice of the aristocratic virtue of magnanimity.
The picture Alcibiades gives of Socrates standing beside himself as the commander is like the portrait of a loyal valet next to his master rather than the image of a courageous warrior. In the same breath that Alcibiades mentions saving his life he cleverly adds "and my armor" making Socrates into no more than his manservant doing his duty to his master. The generals will not award the medal for bravery to a manservant who was just doing his job over a noble warrior, like Alcibiades, who was wounded in battle for his country.
In the final incident Alcibiades recounts in his portrait of Socrates, he presents the spectacle of the Greek army in full retreat from Delium after being defeated by the Thebans in 424 BC. Again his barely hidden agenda is to promote himself over Socrates.
let me tell you what a distinguished figure he cut when the army was retreating in flight from Delium. I happened to be present on horseback while he was marching under arms. The troops were in complete disarray and he was withdrawing with Laches when I chanced to catch up with them. As soon as I saw them I told them not to be afraid and gave my word I would not abandon them. Here I had a better chance to observe Socrates than at Potidaea, for I had less reason to be afraid since I was on horseback. First I noticed how much he far surpassed Laches in self-composure. Next Aristophanes, to use a phrase of yours, I noticed that he strutted along just as he does in town "swaggering, proudly rolling his eyes from side to side" looking calmly aside at friends and enemies alike, making it clear to everyone even from a distance that if anyone so much as touched this man (androV), he would defend himself vigorously. As a result he and his comrades got away unscathed. For scarcely anyone who behaves this way will be touched, the enemy pursues only those who flee in headlong rout.
Alcibiades presents Socrates and the army in full retreat. As a knight on horseback, he says he "had a better chance to observe Socrates" (kallion eqeasamen). His superiority to Socrates is obvious. He is a knight. Socrates is a mere foot soldier. He rides. Socrates walks. He towers over Socrates. He offers him protection. Socrates is vulnerable. Alcibiades looks down upon him. In his account of the retreat from Delium, Alcibiades says he had less to fear than Socrates. Does he mean less to fear than Socrates because he was on horseback? This section of his speech is thick with irony. He announces that he is going to praise the courage of Socrates in battle and then he portrays Socrates in full retreat. He says that after being beaten by the enemy, Socrates cut a distinguished figure in the retreat. Men distinguished for their courage are not customarily portrayed as running away from the enemy. Socrates is presented as being at his best in a retreat with a defeated army.
Alcibiades alludes to Aristophanes' satiric play by using a phrase from The Clouds to refer to Socrates' strange behavior. The play of Aristophanes denounces Socrates as a common Sophist and lampoons philosophy as elitist nonsense. Imitating Aristophanes, Alcibiades offers the image of a clownish man who avoids attack from the pursuing enemy because of his bizarre behavior and not because of his genuine courage. In contrast Alcibiades portrays himself as courageous and loyal since he voluntarily gives his word to stay with Socrates and protect him when he could just as easily ride off to safety.
Socrates, The Odd-Ball
When Alcibiades says Socrates is unique among mortals, he criticizes him under the guise of praise. In Alcibiades' speech Plato associates the double meaning of his uniqueness with the double movement of eros. At this juncture in the speech, Alcibiades drops the term, aner to designate Socrates and begins using the term anqropoV. The word shift subtly denigrates Socrates before the company.
There are many other quite amazing things that we could find to praise in Socrates: though there would probably be as much to say about any one of his habits, I choose his unlikeness to anyone else, whether in the ancient or modern world, as the trait that should elicit our greatest astonishment. .... However with the strange qualities of this man (anqropoV) both in his person and in his utterances, no inquirer could come even close to finding a parallel, whether among our contemporaries or the ancients. Unless perhaps, as I put it, you match him, his person and his discourses, not with a mere mortal man (anqropoV), but with the Silenoi and the satyrs.
He turns attention away from himself and focuses on the uniqueness of Socrates and the extraordinary nature of his speech
This reminds me of an important point I missed in my opening remarks. I am referring to his speeches, which, when you open them up, they are themselves like [those little statues of] the Silenoi. When you listen to the speeches of Socrates, your first reaction is that they are quite preposterous. For on the surface they are clothed in ridiculous turns of speech befitting, of course, the [outer skin or] hide of the mocking Satyr he is! His speeches are all about pack asses, smiths, cobblers, and tanners. He seems always to be saying the same thing over and over again, so that someone untutored [in what he is doing] and unprepared would laugh his speeches to scorn. But, when they are opened up and you look into them and see them from a different perspective by understanding them from the inside, first you discover they are the only speeches that make any sense. After you understand their deeper meaning, you find that no other speeches are quite so divine, quite so rich in the images of excellence. His discourses so abundantly and so completely encompass everything it befits a man to contemplate who seeks to attain a life of the finest beauty and highest excellence."
Socrates' discourse is ungainly and ugly on the outside, graceful and seductively beautiful on the inside. Alcibiades is the power politician, and he knows the power of a good speaker. What amazes him is that, without using it, Socrates has the power to capture by his deceptively simple speech, not only the multitude but also thoughtful people. Alcibiades thinks Socrates could become for the intellectual elite what he had become for the demos. He thinks Socrates could use his intelligence to manipulate the manipulators. Alcibiades measures Socratic speech by his criteria of propaganda expressed in images. For the power politician, images are everything since through them the hordes of humanity are dominated.
Alcibiades became obsessed with the quest for the honor, power, and prestige of political rule. He was Plato's paradigm of a timetic eros severed from its noetic roots and derailed from its divine destiny. Alcibiades was Plato's image of the philosopher turned power politician.
For Plato philosophy depends upon the practice of dialectics whose end is the moral and philosophical protreyiV. Philosophy is the only adequate preparation for an authentic political life. To the extent that the practice of philosophy is the pursuit of the excellent life, it is required in a self-governing, civil society for the political leaders and the citizens. In a democratic regime philosophy is even more necessary because in a democracy the citizens are directly responsible for their own governance. In democratic regimes the citizens must hold the political leadership of their city accountable for their rule. Contrary to a common misconception, Plato's dialogues might be among the most radically democratic, philosophical literature ever produced insofar as they offer the best justification for democratic rule.
Why does Alcibiades speak last in the dialogue? Why must he speak last? Obviously it is not simply because Plato thinks Alcibiades is right and Socrates is wrong. That would be as simplistic a solution as claiming Socrates is always right. Alcibiades represents the horizon of politics, the dimension of the life of intelligence in action. Alcibiades also symbolizes the failure of power politics. As a power politician he presents the paradigm case of a timetic eros pulled toward the immediate desires and fears of the body. Alcibiades rejects the life of philosophical politics based upon the divine noetic life of Qeoria.
Alcibiades recognizes the presence of the Beautiful Good in Socrates and its absence in himself. He is at odds with himself and he knows it. The issue between Plato and Alcibiades is the meaning of the life of Socrates: Is the philosophical politics of Socrates really possible? Alcibiades says no. He denies it is something human beings can do. He claims it is only possible for odd balls like Socrates. Plato answers yes, the philosophical life is possible for those who commit themselves to it. For the divine life in Socrates (agalmata) is a reflection of the divine Beautiful Good that Diotima eulogizes. Socrates could not himself speak about his philosophical inspiration in her way. Diotima is an image of Plato's understanding of Socrates. The religious inspiration of philosophy makes it akin to poetry. The mission of Apollo, "the command of the god," from the Apology became Plato's speech of Diotima in the Symposium.
Is Socrates' uniqueness, as Alcibiades claims, the result of the ironist aspiring to be more than human? Is Socrates trying to live a life beyond what is humanly possible? If so, then the rest of humanity is absolved of taking full responsibility for their lives. We are excused from identifying with the divine in ourselves the way Socrates did. Or is the uniqueness of Socrates, as Plato claims, the result of living a genuinely good life? For Plato human beings are responsible for the self-appropriation of intelligence. Socrates' uniqueness is not, as Alcibiades suggests, the uniqueness of the eccentric or a screwball, but the uniqueness of a good man.
By giving Alcibiades the last word, Plato makes the choice of philosophical politics the central issue of civilized life. He compels the reader to choose, not between Socrates and the rest of the company, but between Alcibiades and philosophy, between accepting and refusing to appropriate one's own intelligence, between philosophical politics and power politics. Plato presents the excellence of Socrates as a moving image of an eternal transcendent Good. Diotima reminded Socrates that whoever sees beauty itself becomes immortal and generates the images of excellence in other souls.
In Book Two of the Republic Glaucon asks Socrates how to distinguish just men from unjust. Socrates replies that it is difficult to do so because it is like trying to read very fine print. By generating a city in speech, they could read the nature of justice, that is so difficult to read in the small letters in the psyche, more easily in the large letters in the polis. Plato suggests a threefold isomorphism between the psyche, the polis, and the cosmos that corresponds to the three controlling themes of the dialogue: nature, man, and the divine. The three totalities mirror one another. The Symposium puts everything in terms of psyche.
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Is it possible to practice politics justly in civil society without philosophy? Is it possible to love Socrates and not love wisdom? Is it possible to love wisdom and not embrace the life of human excellence? Plato answers these questions with an unequivocal no. Alcibiades practices politics without philosophy and claims he loves Socrates without committing himself to a life of excellence.
Not out of care for the welfare of prospective students, but out of spite and revenge, Alcibiades warns Agathon and other handsome, young men not to be deceived by Socrates' apparent eroticism in the presence of his potential students. He neglects to say that though the eros of Socrates is a passion for truth (noetic) rather than a passion for bodily pleasure (somatic) or social honor and political glory (timetic), the noetic eros is more attractive and compelling than either carnal lust or his own unbridled ambition for political glory. Ironically Alcibiades is still in love with Socrates since he cannot get him out of his mind and he cannot get his mind out of himself.
The company responds to Alcibiades with nervous laughter rather than with applause because the picture he paints of himself as a handsome young man pursuing an old, and ugly Socrates seems ridiculous and the story about Socrates' rebuff of his sexual advances makes him look absurd. His shameless public confession is outrageous. Some of the nervous laughter from the company results from Alcibiades's belligerent accusation that none of the others in the company are able to discern the inner beauty and seductiveness of Socrates. The apparent candor of Alcibiades' confession of an earlier, erotic misfortune as Socrates' student stands in stark contrast to the devious presentations of the other speakers.
Socrates suggests Alcibiades is not being frank at all. Unrelenting he exposes his hidden agenda. For the hidden purpose of Alcibiades is to separate Socrates from Agathon, poetry from philosophy. Alcibiades wants Agathon (poetry), not Socrates (philosophy), as his erotic-objective.
Socrates suggests Alcibiades is not being frank at all. Unrelenting he exposes his hidden agenda. For the hidden purpose of Alcibiades is to separate Socrates from Agathon, poetry from philosophy. Alcibiades wants Agathon (poetry), not Socrates (philosophy), as his erotic-objective. Once he wrapped Socrates in his arms to seduce him; now he wraps in a circle of duplicitous words his deceptive erotic designs on the young Agathon. First he wanted to exchange carnal union for philosophical knowledge. Since that failed, Socrates claims that now, by wrapping around Agathon the naked words of carnal seduction, he wants to prevent the union of teacher and student in friendship, a friendship Socrates seeks with Agathon. Alcibiades is jealous of Socrates' students because Socrates offers them the opportunity he rejected. The jealousy of Alcibiades is a result of his domineering nature. He wants to be the exclusive lover and beloved. Alcibiades is more the Silenus-Satyr than Socrates, but the images hidden in his heart (agalmata) are not the paradigms of moral excellence or the images of the gods, but the icons of ambition, the political idols, the will to power, and the desire to dominate.
The timetic eros, the political passion for honor, controls Alcibiades' life, but without the noetic eros, political passion becomes a desire for naked power and the domination of ones fellows. Alcibiades' desire for power is uncontrolled and, therefore, it has neither the physical limits of somatic eros nor the self-imposed limits of noetic eros. The uncontrolled desire for naked power makes Alcibiades more dangerous than a voluptuary. The philosopher desires to rule men the way the divine intelligence orders the cosmos and, therefore, to govern he submits himself to NouV, the divine principle of rule. Alcibiades wants to lord it over everyone by the sheer force of his personality, his talents, and his position. The power politician seeks power for its own sake. He seeks the glory of the multitude's recognition of his power over them.
Alcibiades is torn between love and hate for Socrates just as he is torn between hate and love for himself. When he is not drunk, he loves himself for his beauty, his wealth, and his position, but he hates Socrates for his ugliness, his lack of means, and his lowly station in society. When he is honest with himself, he loves Socrates for his dedication to truth and excellence, but he hates himself for failing to seek the truth and live the excellent life. Alcibiades, the last speaker in praise of eros, asserts his independence of Socrates by betraying him and his way of life, the life dedicated to the theory and practice of moral excellence. In so doing he betrays himself. Plato, who has the final word of the dialogue, achieves his autonomy and independence from Socrates, not by betraying Socrates, but by moving beyond discipleship in his pursuit of philosophy. Although Plato has the last word of the dialogue, he does not have the last word in the dialogue. He challenges the reader to decide between two forms of autonomy: to choose between the way of Alcibiades and the way of the philosopher, to choose between power politics and philosophical politics, to choose between a life headed for the death of the spirit and a life in communion with the immortal life of NouV.
"All at once" order becomes chaos, the party dissolves. ExaifneV is the experience of understanding. Insight can bring with it the highest kind of pleasure. ExaifneV symbolizes in time an eternal aspect of understanding. Insight is akin to carnal pleasure because, like bodily pleasure, it is experienced "all at once." Insight is an acquired pleasure. It participates in the eternal. It is neither motion nor rest, but pure activity. The pure activity of insight constitutes its in-between reality. Insight is neither the emptiness of questions nor the fullness of answers. ExaifneV is understanding as the presence and absence of the transcendent, Divine Beauty, Truth, or Goodness to the lover, the philosopher. Because it is divine, exaifneV founds and shatters worlds. Socrates devoted his life to insight, understanding, knowing, and moral excellence. He was the image of philosophy for Plato. In his dialogues Plato made him the paradigm.
Plato: Disciple of Socrates, Lover of Wisdom
Plato was sick the day Socrates drank the hemlock and so he did not attend him on his last day. Was Plato physically incapable of being present or was he so emotionally distraught that he was incapable of seeing his beloved teacher die? Was he afraid that he would be sent from the room as the women were? Was he afraid that if he saw Socrates die, he would find it hard to believe in the self-sufficient, immortal, divine reality of the noetic soul so dramatically exemplified in his master's thoughtful life? Are the demonstrations of the immortality of the human psyche in the Phaedo as much for his own benefit as for his reader's? Did Plato commit himself to the life of philosophy because of the way Socrates died? I do not know the answers to all these questions. I do know from his portrayal of Socrates that Plato was his passionate and devoted disciple. Plato was a genuine disciple because he followed his master's example and committed himself to philosophical politics. Unlike Alcibiades, Plato was Socrates' true lover and his real friend.
In the Symposium Alcibiades represents the antithesis of Plato. The characters of the dialogue represent horizon possibilities within Plato and his readers insofar as each character presents a type of human eros and the way of life determined by it. Plato identifies to some extent with each speaker because each presents some aspect of human eros. Plato is related to Alcibiades in a special way. Both were students and friends of Socrates. Plato is also at odds to some extent with each speaker in the dialogue since each speaker, including Socrates himself presents a possible shortcoming of a particular form of eros in human life. Plato is more concerned with Alcibiades than with the other speakers because as a favorite student of Socrates, he had the best opportunity to learn what philosophy was from him. Plato knew that in spite of the Alcibiades' closeness to Socrates, he rejected the Socratic way of life for the pursuit of his own glory in power politics.
Genuine affection for someone is not possible without finding out what is really good for the person loved and helping them to find out for themselves what is really good for them. Neither Socrates nor Plato thought genuine love was possible without objective knowledge of the good.
A scene between Plato and Socrates similar to the one depicted in the speech of Alcibiades is difficult to imagine. Yet it is not difficult to imagine a young disciple like Plato finding himself a late comer to the entourage of Socrates feeling overlooked by the master. This scenario is plausible.
Undoubtedly Alcibiades was no back bencher in the Socratic circle, but a clear favorite of the master. Perhaps there is parabolic irony here: The favorite turns out to be Socrates' worst student and the less noticed student turns out to be Socrates' best. Plato never mentions himself in the dialogues except in the Apology where he refers to himself as present to certify his account of the trial as historically accurate. Could it be that he never refers to himself in an other dialogue, not only because of his self-control but also because of his lack of prominence in the Socratic circle during the master's lifetime? If true, the disciples of Socrates would have known that Plato was not in the inner circle. It would have been obvious to them, but not to us. Plato often uses the stylistic device of presenting the dialogues as indirect reports creating a certain distance between himself and the events. Perhaps this in part reflects his status as a latecomer to the Socratic circle, one who depended upon reports about Socrates' earlier teaching from students of longer standing? Plato idealizes Socrates soon after his death. The deference Plato shows his master in his presentation of him is, perhaps, another clue.
The philosopher wants to see beyond the world of change and appearances to the true principles of its being in the Good. To see beyond the immediate requires love. Philosophy is an act of love. Philosophical love is not simply an attraction to the good, but a creative force for the procreation of good things in the vision of the beautiful. The beautiful is the good as it manifests itself in the natural world. When directed toward the excellence of others, the philosophical eros is the power behind authentic education, the bringing to birth of understanding and virtue in the young through rhetorical irony, dialectical argument, and the exemplary practice of the virtues.
Teaching is connected with revelation. Revelation suggests the transmission of truth from teacher to student. While other teachers and students advance human doctrines, Socrates hands down a divine revelation. The Greek word, nohsiV, in Plato has the connotation not only of knowing in the sense of gaining information for ourselves about an object, but also of the being of the object "disclosing itself." In Plato NohsiV includes revelation.
Alcibiades is a case of a talented student who distorted his master's teachings. He discovered the divine Silenoi in the inner life of Socrates, but acted as though they were for sale like the statues in the marketplace. Plato transforms the daimon of Socrates into Diotima. Diotima is Plato's understanding of what Alcibiades called the agalmata, the images of the gods. He discerned Diotima in Socrates, the divine presence hidden within him. Alcibiades treated "Diotima" as a human reality rather than as a revelation of the divine Good within Socrates. He was a practical atheist. He does not believe in the reality of any gods beyond himself. Inasmuch as he profanes the divinity within Socrates, he profanes the divine within himself. He never identifies the agalmata or the Diotima within himself. Plato presents the character of Alcibiades as seriously flawed.
The Symposium celebrates the divine eros of students and teachers. Plato presents Alcibiades, the student as an anti-hero. He presents him as the personification of a political passion that by-passes intelligence, objectivity, and a commitment to moral excellence. He refuses to change his life by undergoing the protrepsiV necessary to differentiate his creative from his destructive passions. Plato suggests that the most important choice human beings make is the choice of the kind of passion by which they allow themselves to be governed. Choice and passion form a circle in human life: We both determine and are determined by the passions that rule us. The refusal of the protrepsiV is the movement downwards. Accepting the protrepsiV is the opening into the circle moving upwards towards the Good. The condition for the Socrates' ascent to the vision of the Beautiful Good is a periagogh, a conversion, a turning of his life toward the sunlight of the Divine Good.
The Symposium does not betray a romantic nostalgia for the self-destructive behavior of the naturally gifted Alcibiades. How could Plato feel sorry for a man who had everything he needed to live an excellent life and then refused to do so? Alcibiades had close relationship with Socrates. How could Alcibiades throw all away for the vainglory of a life of power politics? Socrates tells Alcibiades that he chose garbage when he could have chosen gold. Alcibiades thought Socrates was so stupid that the philosopher would barter his wisdom for momentary sexual pleasures.
Alcibiades teaches us that human beings cannot love rightly without first loving other human beings who love rightly. Socrates makes Alcibiades rightly feel ashamed of himself. Plato too might have felt ashamed of his ambition to be a tragic poet after encountering Socrates. According to a legend after a conversation with Socrates, Plato was so ashamed of his work that he burned his plays. Though he was Socrates' favorite student, Alcibiades kept his vain political ambitions. Plato, perhaps, later realized that the burning of his plays was the precondition for writing his dialogue plays. He became a student and learned to be a lover of Socrates in order to become a lover of wisdom. Alcibiades refused to remain a student of Socrates and to admit that he had to learn to be a lover of Socrates. Instead he chose to become a demagogue and a traitor to an Athens.
Diotima's speech makes it clear that all passion is not necessarily destructive. Eros is a daimon, an intermediary divine being. The ascent to the Good through beauty presupposes desire. The central task of the Symposium is to differentiate the horizons of the lover-beloved and the corresponding kinds of eros as desire: somatic, timetic, and noetic. The rational part of the psyche (logistikon) is identified with the passion for thought. The Symposium reconciles the conflict between passion and thought, in principle.
The goal of the Symposium is to beget the Vision of the Good in the mind of the reader. The Vision of the Good is still born if the reader believes that Socrates alone can achieve the vision of true Beauty (Alcibiades). For Plato Socrates is the eikon of the Good, an image of the good life who sometimes begets and sometimes fails to beget virtue in his students. How can an image beget virtue? Why did Socrates fail in the case of Alcibiades and succeed in the case of Plato? The enigma of the Symposium is the success and the failure of love in bringing about the good. The mystery of life remains the mystery of love.
The secret of the Symposium is that love cannot be understood by the merely learned. It can be understood only by those who seek the divine. The secret disclosed in the Symposium is that human sexuality is a symbol of the divine nouV, the divine intelligence. Sexual pleasure is a shadow, an image, or symbol of the ecstasy of love that finally is identical with the ecstasy of insight. The reconciliation of insight and passion marks a step in the direction of a hope that human beings will be reconciled with the divine. Through love the divine is working in and through nature and history to bring forth the community of the friendship of God with man. The mystery of love remains the mystery of life. The mystery of life is that it is somehow daimonic, somehow connected with the divine NouV.
Alcibiades wanted Socrates to pierce his body with his flesh, to be his lover so that he could break open the mind of Socrates and carry away the divine mysteries. He tried to castrate the Hermae within Socrates and refused to receive the words of Socrates into his heart and be moved to live the divine life of excellence. Alcibiades described himself as Odysseus stopping up his ears against the siren song of Socrates. Plutarch tells the story in which the night before his assassination, he dreamt that he dressed in woman's clothes. His wish to be physically feminine and spiritually masculine was his wish to be a whore who could sell her body for the true beauty of the mind. Dressing in drag is a symbol of Alcibiades' choice of power politics over philosophy. He wanted to barter mortality for immortality.
Alcibiades' blasphemy consisted in his trying to beget the spirit without god; he wanted power without goodness. He conspired to replace divinity with his own subjective passion, his arrogant self-love and self-promotion. In Plutarch's story of his violent end he was killed by an assassin's spear that pierced his heart. Ironically the next day his courtesan, Timandra wrapped him in her fancy clothes and buried him in the earth thus garishly clad. His dream had come true in death. The coat of arms on his shield was the god, Eros, holding a thunder-bolt. Presumably the god had stolen the bolt from Zeus. Even his armor blasphemed. Zeus recovered his spear but not without first piercing the real thief's heart with it.
Unlike Alcibiades Plato was willing to receive the image of Socrates into himself, to listen to the words of Socrates, and to find the truth of philosophy within his own intelligence. Through the dialogues, he became the lover of Socrates, and through Socrates the lover of wisdom, and through philosophy the lover of the divine. As Socrates' images and words about virtue penetrated Plato's soul, he heard the voice of Diotima and saw the vision of the Beauty of Goodness that Socrates heard and beheld. Plato speaks for himself in the dialogues. Behind the Socratic elenchus he understands the ideas for himself and experiences the divine light. With Socrates' image, Plato plants images of virtue in the minds of his students. He cultivates the image of Socrates in them so they can hear and behold the truth for themselves.
Unlike Alcibiades Plato tells the truth about Socrates in images, in the stories in the dialogues. Plato is the true disciple, lover, and friend of Socrates because he is the faithful lover of divine wisdom, a philosopher in his own right. The tears of Alcibiades' courtesan shed for him at his death are tears that mourn the unbearable mortality of men, not the tears of friends made in the common pursuit of virtue. On hearing of his death Socrates also wept for Alcibiades, but his tears were tears mourning the death of a talented student and friend who did not use his talents in living the good life. At the death of Socrates Plato wept for the loss of his teacher. He mourned the loss of a good man who was a great man because he was a good man. Similarly Plato's disciples mourn the loss of a good friend and a man who sought the life of genuine excellence. Like Socrates on the day he died, Plato could say of himself and his work, "Even if you try, you shall not be able to catch and hold on to me." A legend says that just before he died Plato dreamed that he was turned into a bird. Simmias interpreted the dream to mean that no one would understand the meaning of Plato's words though many would try. But Simmias was only partly right. Plato's dream meant that before anyone could rightly interpret his work, they had themselves to become a bird and learn to fly.
copyright © Emil J. Piscitelli