Symposium - AIC

ABSTRACT
Socrates’ Thea:
The Description of Beauty in Symposium 211a
and the Parmenidean Predicates of Being
Manfred Kraus
Some 40 years ago, Friedrich Solmsen and Rosamond Kent Sprague have simultaneously and
independently pointed to the striking similarity of the terms in which Diotima describes the Form of
Beauty in Symposium 211a and the predicates of Parmenidean Being revealed by the goddess in
fragment B 8. Yet in subsequent scholarly literature this groundbreaking discovery has left
astonishingly few traces other than short remarks or footnotes. Scholars have mostly confined
themselves to pointing out the negative or privative character of the employed predicates or to
emphasize parallels with other Platonic descriptions of the Ideal such as Phaedo 78b-79b, Cratylus
439d-440b, Timaeus 52a-c, Philebus 15b, and several others.
Yet in effect, while Platonic descriptions of ideas are often reminiscent of Eleatic concepts
and vocabulary, in the Symposium passage this correlation appears to be even more close-knit than in
any other. It provides not only a description of the Beautiful itself, but also of the nature of knowledge
and wisdom, and the imagery of ascent, descent, revelation, sudden vision and light is particularly
prominent and concentrated.
For this reason this true centrepiece of the whole dialogue would seem to deserve a more
detailed comparative appraisal than it has hitherto been granted. Such an endeavour is both strongly
suggested and facilitated also by the fact that scholarship on the Parmenidean predicates of Being has
made substantial progress in recent years, and the role of space, time, eternity, homogeneity,
indivisibility, changelessness, perfection etc. in Parmenides has been reassessed in many ways, not to
speak of erotic undertones that have recently been perceived.
The paper will attempt to analyse the Symposium passage by comparing it in a first step with
other similar Platonic passages relevant to the description of ideas, in order to highlight its particular
differences and peculiarities. It will then meticulously examine the relationship of the individual
predicates and combinations of predicates to their respective parallels in Parmenides’ fragment B 8.
Ideally, the result will be not only a more profound understanding of the Platonic passage and its
Eleatic background, but also some new insights about the sometimes contested wordings and
meanings of the difficult Parmenidean sequence. As a result it will emerge that the Platonic passage is
in various respects more closely modelled on its Parmenidean archetype than mostly assumed, and
how Socrates takes on the role of a new kouros to listen to the revelations of his personal guiding
goddess, the mysterious Mantinean woman Diotima, eventually to become an eidōs phōs in all things
erōs, beauty, and wisdom.