Symposium - AIC

Samuel Scolnicov
the temporal expression of a metaphysical perfection he cannot fathom. In this, he goes wrong twice:
he thinks in terms of physical completeness and of temporal everlastingness.
But Plato’s soul cannot be immortal in this sense. For Plato, the incarnate soul is the principle
of ordered movement, and, as such, it has a supra-sensible dimension. This dimension is expressed as
immortality only mythically understood as everlastingness. The incarnate soul, as ordered movement,
introduces in the world a duplicity of sensible (insofar as it is movement) and of non-sensible reality
(insofar as it is order). 15 But if Plato’s soul is the principle of ordered movement, it is necessarily
prior to time as the number of that movement (Timaeus). Thus, the soul cannot be immortal in the
sense of indefinite continuation in time. Indefinite continuation in time is the sensible, mythical
expression of a non-temporal, non-empirical dimension of the incarnate soul. The soul in its pure
form as nous (Republic x) is not temporal.
Plato is not concerned in the Symposium with immortality after death. Diotima does not speak
of an after-life, 16 as Aristophanes does not do either. (His Hefaistos’ proposal is merely hypothetical.)
She is not concerned with reward after death. 17 Soul comes to its own perfection by attaining its true,
non-empirical nature, not by securing its own everlastingness.
Man is not in need of completion; he needs perfectioning. He lacks Vervollkomnung, not
Ergänzung, as Pohlenz put it in a slightly different context. 18 What he lacks is not more of the same
ontological order. Praxiteles’ Doruphoros lacks his spear and is, therefore, in need of completion. A
Roman copy of it may have all its parts and still fall short of the original. Any first-year conservatory
student can play Bach’s first Two-Part Invention without missing a single note, but not as Glen Gould
or Wanda Landowska played it.
Compare, in the Republic, the passage from the ‘city of pigs’ to the ‘swollen city’. In the first,
man has all he needs for his survival and even enjoys a modicum of happiness. But what Glaucon
misses of is not of the order of physical survival. What he needs is something of a different order:
luxury, poetry, art, eventually philosophy. Glaucon can begin to name what Aristophanes’ half-men
could not.
Diotima is indeed concerned with the highest amount of perfection achievable in this life, 19
but not just with some kind of self-perfection by creative work. As Dover justly notes, ‘Aristophanes’
notion that in sexual eros we are groping in ignorance after something beyond temporary union
(192c4-d3) might itself be regarded as an uninformed but not totally misdirected groping after the
metaphysical world perceived and expounded by Diotima (210a-212a)’. 20 Although he is prepared to
say that, in his view, there is here a faint apprehension of recollection, yet he further claims explicitly
that ‘recollection and the existence of the soul before union with the body are nowhere mentioned by
Diotima, and we cannot be sure what view Plato took of the recollection theory when he wrote
Smp.’. 21 Aristophanes’ myth stresses man’s half-conscience of what he lacks and his drive towards
completion and procreation, and presents man as fundamentally pregnant. This is as far as
Aristophanes can go: not only conscience of the lack but also a vague memory of it (cf. mnemeion
191a4). But this memory is too vague, it has no inkling of a positive content.
The myth does not quite amount to an ‘intimation of the “hyperouranian” place’. 22 It only
posits a drive for physical completion, knowingly marking man’s painful shortcoming, without being
able to see, not even through a glass darkly, what this shortcoming implies or where to look for its
remedy. Socrates/Diotima will clarify this as a most powerful drive towards man’s non-immanent
perfection, to which he can approximate by careful recollection of his mythical pre-natal state.
Works cited
Bury, R.G. 1969. The Symposium of Plato. Cambridge: W. Heffer. Second edition.
Dover, Kenneth J. 1980. Symposium. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Frede, Dorothea 1993. ‘Out of the cave: What Socrates leaned from Diotima’. Nomodeiktes: Greek
studies in honor of Martin Ostwald. Ann Arbor: Michigan University Press, 397-422.
15 I cannot go here into a discussion of this vexed question. In a forthcoming article, I argue that Plato’s teleology, the
principle of order, is not temporal and is, in this sense, external to the pure, absolutely non-directional motility of the khora.
Cf. Scolnicov (forthcoming).
16 Frede 1993, O’Brien 1984.
17 Contra O’Brien 1984.
18 Pohlenz 1916.
19 Frede 1993.
20 Dover 1990.
21 Dover 1990.
22 Salman 1990.
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