Symposium - AIC

Claudia Luchetti
that, with this last allusion, Plato decided to write the word end to one of his masterpieces, omitting
those details that would have been indispensable to comprehend the ultimate meaning of a
διαλέγεσθαι (c6) carried out through the greater part of the night (223b1 ff.).
Aristophanes and Plato. On the “Primordial Nature”, and on the Good as One.
If this pattern of internal cross-references in the Symposion, is already an evident sign that Plato
exhorts us to take the content of Aristophanes’ speech seriously, there should be no doubts as regards
its theoretical consistency, if one focuses on the predominance of the notion of ἀρχαία φύσις (191d1-
2, 192e9, 193c5, 193d4), around which the whole argument is constructed. The insistence on this
notion reveals the platonic intention, wearing the mask of Aristophanes, to draw the attention on the
topic of the pristine nature of the Soul, as well as on the relationship of the ψυχή with the Good, the
highest object that guides the psychical desire to return to her ancient condition. Within certain limits,
it is not necessary to establish distinctions among the more or less accentuated philosophical
inclinations of the Souls involved in this myth, from the point of view of their aspiration (see Resp. VI
505d5-e3 and Symp. 191c2-d2.
To establish the undeniable affinities between this primigenial nature and Plato’s conception
of the Soul regarded in her pure form, a brief reconstruction might be useful.
Apart from the two passages, quoted in the previous page, from the Timaeus 90c6-d7, and the
Republic X 611d1-e5, we can refer to a couple of lines of the Sun’s Simile in Republic VI (508d4-
509a5): when the Soul is definitively oriented to the vision of the realities enlightened by Truth and
Being (ἀλήθειά τε καὶ τὸ ὄν, 508d5), she discloses her agathoid features (ἀγαθοειδής, 509a3), that is
to say, she shows herself as Intelligence and Science (νοῦς, 508d6 ed ἐπιστήµη, 508e6).
The passus of Republic X (611d1-e5), proves that the Soul’s Being does not exhaust itself in a
static condition, consisting instead in a constant aspiration and propensity: in order to contemplate her
primeval nature, one has to gaze at her philosophy. In this formulation are flowing into each other on
the one hand, the conception of the philosophical activity as µελέτη θανάτου (61b7-84b8) and the
theory of the συγγένεια of the Soul with the divine reality of εἴδη deriving from the Phaedo, and on
the other hand, the predominantly erotic character of the psychical élan towards the Intelligible
deriving from the speech of Socrates and Diotima in Symposion, signalled from the use of the
metaphor of physical and spiritual contact (Resp. X 611e1, Symp. 192b5, and in Diotima 208e5,
209c7, 211b5-7, 212a2-5). Philosophy therefore, the Eros aiming at εἰδέναι and φρόνησις (see Phaed.,
62c9 ff.), doesn’t only represent the wish, certainly possible to fulfill, though with some ‘temporal’
limitations (Phaed. 66b1-67a2) of a still embodied subject, but constitutes the authentic Essence of the
Soul, when one observes her in what she is “beyond” the bodily constraints (see the perfect
coincidence in the use of ἐκεῖσε in Resp. X 611b10-d8 and Symp. 211e4-212a2), and by virtue of the
only instrument which makes this contemplation possible: her own Intelligence.
In the platonic concept of ἀρχαία φύσις converges the almost omnipresent symmetry in the
dialogues between knowledge of the Soul and knowledge of the Ideas (see the ἴση ἀνάγκη of Phaed.
76e5), which culminates in Self-knowledge (see Phaed. 79d1-7).
We encounter the highest expression of this beautiful synthesis of platonic ontology, gnoseology, and
psychology, precisely in the passus of the Timaeus (90c6-d7), describing the dynamic of the ὁµοίωσις
θεῷ: the ἀρχαία φύσις reveals herself here, most evidently, neither in the consideration of the subject
of knowledge, also in its uncontaminated form, nor in the object of knowledge, taken as such,
disconnected, but rather in the fusion of this polarity within the Unity of the noetic act. The Identity,
that Plato exhorts us to meditate in Republic X between ἀρχαία φύσις and φιλοσοφία, understood with
Diotima as the attainment of the Good mediated by the intellectual Union with Beauty (see 201d1 ff.),
urges us not to lose sight of the core of this ‘eternal process’ and this ‘eternal aspiration’: in the Sun’s
Simile the Good is not ‘only’ the cause both of Being and Existence of the Intelligible (τὸ εἶναί τε καὶ
τὴν οὐσίαν, 509b7-8); it is the cause of the ‘passage’ from their knowability to their being known as
well (τὸ γιγνώσκεσθαι, 509b6). The Good infuses, simultaneously, ψυχή and εἴδη with itself, ‘by
mean of’ that mighty bond called Light, defined as a “third” (τρίτον, 507d1, e1), determining, ‘during’
the act of irradiation itself, both their ontological consistence and their reciprocal connection.
To synthesize: ἀρχαία φύσις is for Plato the Unity of knowing subject and object of
knowledge, in erotic-philosophic words, of Lover and Beloved, caused by the ἀγαθόν.
Without further deepening, one should ask oneself whether Aristophanes’ speech hides all this
gnoseological, ontological and metaphysical or protological density, or not. Once all the necessary
clarifications will be made, with the support of a comparison with Diotima’s speech, I will answer yes
to this question.
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