Symposium - AIC

Carolina Araujo
changing objects due to the acknowledgement of their limits in comparison to the reality that strikes
us (κατανοῆσαι - 210a8; b2; b4; b7; c3), meanwhile obstinately devoted to producing logos about this
obscure paradigmatic object (210a7-8; c1-2; d5). Time and again the lover fails to give an account of
reality, however, through the memory of the logos he produces and the effect of this memory, he
becomes humanly immortal. All the stages consist in love’s action inasmuch as they all intend the
sudden sight of beauty (210e4-6) 17 and they are all right if constantly trying to rescue from oblivion
this fleeting moment through logos, (σχεδὸν ἄν τι ἅπτοιο τοῦ τέλους - 211b6-7 in opposition to ἱνα
γνῷ αὐτὸ τελευτῶν ὅ ἐστι καλόν – 211c8-d1): the unity of the ladder is given both by the unity of
beauty and by action of the lover. 18 This permanent exercise of love is real excellence (212a5-7) and
its immortality takes place in others by means of all the erotic speeches produced along the journey. 19
Alcibiades presents the effect of these speeches in his eulogy for Socrates as the daimonic
agent (214d3; 221c4-6). 20 According to his imagery, gods are inside Socrates (215b3) 21 , causing him
to be hubristic for being simultaneously excellent and disdainful (215b7, see also 175e7; 216d6-7; e2-
5; 219d4-7; 222a3). This internal divine nature, said to be also νοῦς (222a2-3) makes Socrates a
unique human being (221d2), capable of producing speeches that produce possession (κατεχόµεθα –
215d6). In a reappraisal of the enthusiastic model, the daimonic possession or philosophical madness
(218b3) is presented as an effect of speech on human beings, felt as an Aristophanic suffering
(ἐκπεπληγµένοι– 215d5-6; ἔπασχον - 216e5), which arouses the divine in others through the distress
(ἐτεθορύβητό - 215e6) about the way one ought to live (216a1-2). The speech is hence not only a
product of love that can immortalize actions, as poets and legislators do; it is a producer of love,
immortalizing the production of speeches by producing daimonic lovers. 22 The daimonic way of
living qua possession is irresistible – and here Pausanias’ voluntary servitude comes back to the fore
(ποιητέον εἶναι ἔµβραχυ ὅτι κελεύοι Σωκράτης 217a1-2; 218a3-5) in again a merging of
Aristophanes’ and Agathon’s meanings of love (216d2-3; 221d1-6; see also 177d7-8; 198d1-3) –, but
Alcibiades is simply incapable of living it (216b3-5). Both Alcibiades’ mistake about Socrates 23 and
states that “the philosophic initiate begins, then, at a level lower than that attained by the honor lover in the Lesser Mysteries
(whom he will overtake in the due course)” (256). What the higher mysteries seem to reveal is how the constant exercise of
lack and reasoning, described in the lesser mysteries, can result in excellence.
17 Being an educational process between at least two people, the ladder is the action of a lover to turn someone else also into
a lover, and it is as the common way of living of lovers that love takes place among individuals. If this daimonic way of life
is marked by the constant experience of falling short of giving an account of the reality that strikes us, beauty is the constant
object of love in persons, bodies, souls, laws, activities, etc. This constancy implies that even the vocabulary of “exclusive”
or “inclusive” interpretations, proposed by Moravcsik (293), is misleading, not to mention the whole debate about love for a
person as a person. For this topic, see my To orthos paiderastein: righteousness and eroticism in Plato’s Symposium,
forthcoming.
18 Halperin (186) seems to neglect this daimonic model of action in claiming that the link between the stages is made only in
objective and not in subjective terms, although he recognizes that Plato considers the lover’s sexual desire identical to the
philosopher’s desire (188).
19 “What is generated at the summit is, for the first time, not described as a kind of discourse, but rather as ‘true virtue’”
(Ferrari: 259). The form of beauty will cause the experience of failure in the attempt to give an account of it, because i) it is
sudden; ii) because it is loved, it is never possessed. Hence it determines the rectitude of all the process without a logos of
itself, the same kind of rectitude that must be implied in a right opinion, an internal state ratified by practical effectiveness.
All the speeches in the ladder are about beauty (in diverse instances) and they fall short because of their object. “If Socrates
has indeed been gazing on the Form of Beauty, the offspring he produces will be not logoi, but interior virtues. Such virtues
may, however, be manifested in action”. (Blondell: 158). The evidence of excellence in actions is what explains Alcibiades’
mistaken claim about Socrates’ inner states.
20 Robin: 109, 161-164; however, we cannot accept Robin’s theses that Eros is the nous or the soul, (125, 137) nor is the
feeling of love cut off from philosophy (159), a theory that would destroy the principle of lack and desire for immortality.
Robin’s intellectualism even considers Platonic love as an inferior principle of action (164-165), a conclusion based in its
synthetic function that would, again, hold against his identification of Eros and nous. Interestingly enough some of Robin’s
claims can also be found in Nussbaum: “It is, we see, the old familiar eros, that longing for an end to longing, that motivates
us here to ascend to a world in which erotic activity, as we know it, will not exist”. (183). Closer to our approach here is
Belfiore’s definition of Socratic eros as: “a passionate desire for the wisdom, beauty and other good things that one
recognizes that one lacks”(3).
21 Reeve’s understanding of agalmata as “an image for what is itself necessarily beyond image”(138) seems to imply a too
radical philosophical experience in what Alcibiades sees in Socrates. What Alcibiades sees is the success in speeches and the
excellence in actions, i.e., Socrates’ efficiency in performing tasks that Alcibiades would like to perform equally well.
22 Lear insightfully suggests the connection between beauty and immortality through memory, which “makes one wonder
whether his quasi-immortality is not something altogether different from enduring for a very long time in the minds of
others” (111); a point of view shared by Price: “so long as the boy lives, and does not deteriorate, the man’s virtues will be
alive in him” (28). However these approaches do not consider Socratic love as a producer of lovers in which it is one’s own
excellence instead of the memory of someone else’s deeds that immortalizes the love.
23 So Alcibiades’ unreliableness lies in his ignorance and misunderstanding of reasons, not in his description of past facts or
phenomena, his parresia, which is assured by the silence of Socrates himself. “Plato’s text encourages his readers to adopt a
hermeneutic of suspicion towards Alcibiades’ interpretation of Socrates, but not towards the veracity of incidents that he
recounts” (Lane: 47). “In Alcibiades' speech, Socrates is sophos, and therefore godlike and lacking in desire, rather than the
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