Symposium - AIC

Eros and Life-Values in Plato's Symposium
Stephen Halliwell
Olympiodorus’s commentary on the first Alcibiades, and likewise the anonymous Prolegomena to
Platonic Philosophy, recounts that shortly before his death Plato dreamt that he had turned into a swan
which frustrated a group of pursuing bird-catchers by moving rapidly from tree to tree. (Real swans,
you will appreciate, are not to be found in trees – but we are in a forest of symbols here.) Simmias the
Socratic, the story continues, decoded the dream as showing that the significance of Plato’s thought
would always elude its interpreters: no matter how hard they try, they will never capture its meaning.
Plato’s works, like those of Homer, we are told, are open to an irreducible plurality of interpretations.
Whatever the exact origins of this anecdote (which draws, of course, on motifs and tropes
from Plato’s own writings), it undoubtedly reflects a long history of ancient debates – both inside and
outside the Academy – about how to read Plato’s dialogues. Such debates have their modern
counterparts, and that is as it should be: we are still hermeneutic bird-catchers and the beautiful swan
continues to escape our grasp. This is as true of individual dialogues as of the whole oeuvre whose
parts they constitute. In the case of the Symposium, everyone agrees on the work’s multi-layered
texture of registers, voices and dramatic psychology: it was surely in the forefront of Nietzsche’s
mind when he characterised Plato’s writing in general as ‘polygeneric’ and quasi-(or proto-)novelistic.
Yet even the Symposium is regularly exposed to readings which enlist it in the cause of a doctrinally
systematic Platonism – the system usually being posited ‘behind’ the work but visible through it,
provided one has the right kind of discernment. Such readings treat the speech of Diotima (whom I
take as a fictionalised projection of Socrates’ ‘mantic’ persona) not just as a climactic moment in the
dialogue, but also as a definitive key to everything else around it. But to treat the Symposium as
though we can effectively transcribe its message in that way is arguably to collapse its complexity
into a reductive simplicity.
On the alternative hermeneutic adopted in this paper, Plato’s (written) philosophy in each of
his dialogues resides not in a single message which requires interpreters to extract and codify it, but in
the whole web of relations between its parts. What this means, among other things, for the
Symposium is that the speech of Diotima-Socrates, despite (or even because of) its unique features,
does not nullify everything that has preceded it nor even tell us exactly what we should think about all
the earlier speeches. The work itself, in its totality, sets up a configuration of perspectives – all of
them coloured by the elusive element of role-playing undertaken by the symposiasts (not least
Socrates himself) – which makes it impossible for Diotima’s account of mystical transcendence to
resolve all the questions so intricately posed by the dialogue’s succession of ideas.
I intend to concentrate here (with some drastically selective and abbreviated remarks) on the
Symposium’s treatment of erōs as a focus for its participants’ idealised reflections on life-values –
values putatively capable of shaping and informing an entire life. That this is one profitable way of
following some of the work’s various thematic threads may seem paradoxical in the light of the fact
that in archaic and classical Greek culture erōs/Eros – whether conceived of as divine, personified, or
purely naturalistic/ psychological, and whether or not conjoined with Aphrodite – is predominantly
associated with psychosomatic upheaval and loss of control: with types of experience, in other words,
that violently destabilise the course of a life, threatening it with madness and even, in extreme cases,
with destruction. Such traditional ideas are much more in evidence (both echoed and philosophically
recast) in Phaedrus than in the Symposium. In the latter, erōs’s psychosomatic dangers are largely
suppressed. Instead, the concept is treated by almost everyone (with the obtrusive if complex
exception of Alcibiades) as a source of life-unifying meaning and motivation.
It is important, however, to remember that Plato could expect his first readers to be familiar
with a much wider range of earlier Greek patterns of thought about erōs than we can now fully
reconstruct (though we can detect some of their traces). It is not, I suggest, a sheer coincidence that in
one fragment of Euripides (897 TrGF) Eros is described as ‘an education in wisdom’ (παίδευµα
σοφίας), called a daimōn with whom humans ‘consort’ (προσοµιλεῖν, cf. Symp. 203a3), and regarded
as something into which it is possible to be ‘(un)initiated’ (ἀτέλεστος) and which the young are urged
not to flee from but ‘to use correctly’ (χρῆσθαι...ὀρθῶς)? Other fragments of Euripides too (esp. 388,
661), as well as some passages in the surviving plays, contain clear indications of a conception of erōs
that splits into a polarity of negative and positive, the latter capable of being harmonised with such