Symposium - AIC

ABSTRACT
The Comic and the Tragic:
a Reading of Aristophanes’ Speech in Plato’s Symposium
Suzanne Obdrzalek
At the close of the Symposium, we are left with a striking image: Aristophanes, Agathon and Socrates
drink wine from a common cup, as Socrates argues that the skillful tragedian should also be a comic
and vice versa. Readers of the Symposium might wonder whether this stricture can be applied to
Aristophanes’ speech. With its grotesque depiction of the cutting of human bodies and the contortions
of sex, Aristophanes’ speech appears pure comedy. In this paper, I argue that it is in fact
fundamentally tragic: it presents humans as both incomplete and incapable of completion.
Though Plato deliberately draws attention to the significance of Aristophanes’ speech in
relation to Diotima’s—she twice makes seemingly anachronistic objections to it (205d-e, 211d)—it
has received relatively little philosophical attention. Critics who discuss it typically treat it as a comic
fable, of little philosophical significance (e.g. Dover 1966, Rowe 1998), or uncover in it an account of
love which recognizes the value of human individuals as love-objects (e.g. Dover 1966, Nussbaum
1986). Against the first set of interpreters, I maintain that Aristophanes’ speech is of the utmost
philosophical significance; in it, Plato sets forth a view of eros as the desire for completion, which is
the starting-point for Diotima’s analysis. I argue against the second set that Aristophanes’ speech
contains a profoundly pessimistic account of eros. Far from being a response to the individuality of
the beloved, eros, for Aristophanes, is an irrational urge.
In the first part of my paper, I offer an analysis of human nature as presented in Aristophanes’
speech. According to Aristophanes, humans are created both incomplete and aware of this
incompleteness. In the second part of my paper, I offer a close reading of the physical transformations
undergone by Aristophanes’ humans. I argue that Plato subtly indicates that while we may attempt to
overcome our incompleteness through finding our other halves, this project is doomed to failure. It is
not obvious how we might recognize our other halves; indeed, there is reason to doubt that they even
exist. Furthermore, Aristophanes’ humans do not appear to seek their other halves, but rather to forget
their state of primordial incompleteness by embracing any available partner. In the final part of my
paper, I ask what goes wrong with Aristophanes’ lovers. Diotima, too, sees man as incomplete, but is
hopeful that we can achieve completion through our relationship to the forms. I argue against Dover
that what Plato rejects is not Aristophanes’ focus on love of particular individuals. Instead, the
difficulty with Aristophanes’ lovers is their irrationality. Aristophanes’ lovers are not depicted as
attracted to any qualities in their other halves beyond their ability to complete them. It is only when
Aristophanes’ analysis of eros as originating in lack is wedded to Agathon’s emphasis on beauty that
eros becomes rational and capable of resolution: in the ascent it is the initiate’s responsiveness to the
beauty of a particular beloved that enables him to eventually love beauty itself (see, e.g., my 2010).