Symposium - AIC

Edward C. Halper
would be undermined by his climbing the ladder. 16 She would explain Alcibiades’ not climbing the
ladder as a heroic stand to preserve his love of Socrates as an individual. This is not the character
Plato presents to us in this dialogue. Instead, the Symposium shows Alcibiades evaluating Socrates
by the same criterion Socrates uses to evaluate him, moral virtue: he is stunned by the degree of
Socrates’ courage and self-control. He is in love with a moral virtue that exceeds anything he has
encountered. What makes Alcibiades so puzzling is not his commitment to unintelligible experience,
as Nussbaum imagines, but his appreciation of Socrates because Socrates has climbed the ladder.
Moreover, he knows that philosophy is at the core of Socrates’ virtue. He may believe Socrates’ mad
devotion to philosophy is an individual quirk (218b), but he knows that philosophy is not a hobby and
that it is responsible for the moral virtue that makes Socrates so attractive. Alicibiades’ dilemma is
that he cannot recognize the value of philosophy without himself pursuing it, but he cannot give up
his political aspirations. His soul is divided. It is, I propose, as if Plato had anticipated Vlastos and
Nussbaum and included a character designed to illustrate the disastrous consequences of taking an
individual as the object of love.
To be sure, Alcibiades and Socrates could simply agree that the pursuits of the other, though
legitimate, are not for them. But, then, they would not engage in activities together. It is this latter,
rather than wishing another well, that Plato (and Aristotle) take as central to a love relationship. For
the same reason, if each of them takes the other as his end, their activities will not share the same end.
Nor is the individual as an object of love any more attainable than the Good as an object of love.
What makes the Good the more suitable object of a sustainable relationship is its universality: both
lovers can pursue it as an end. The Symposium shows Socrates presenting a beautiful speech about
love, a speech that nicely incorporates the insights of the previous speeches, but there is little of the
direct engagement with interlocutors that is so prominent in other dialogues. The end of all the
symposiasts is a universal, Beauty or Good, but they pursue it as individuals. Alcibiades helps the
reader to see what is missing, for the reader recognizes that Alcibiades could engage Socrates in
philosophical discourse but mysteriously chooses not to do so. And Alcibiabes wants to have
Socrates’ knowledge for his own individual (political) ends, something that Socrates cannot pursue
and share with him. Whereas Socrates speaks of a lover’s necessary ascent up the ladder of loves and
sees its culmination is his individual communion with the Good, Alcibiades’ speech inadvertently
makes clear the essential correctives, namely, that this ascent is not an individual endeavor but one
best undertaken with another and that the other may, for no reason at all, be unable to undertake or
complete it. The Symposium does not discuss whether it is better to pursue the Good jointly as lovers
by creating discourses and speeches or to pursue one’s more private interests, but the contrast between
Socrates’ joyous begetting of speeches with others and Alcibiades’ drunken debauchery and, despite
the other revelers, his isolation is a dramatic endorsement of a suitably corrected version of Socrates’
account.
Bibliography
Belfiore, Elizabeth S. Socrates’ Daimonic Art: Love for Wisdom in Four Platonic Dialogues.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012.
Gagarin, Michael. “Socrates’ Hybris and Alcibiades’ Failure.” Phoenix 31 (1977): 22–37.
Halper, Edward C. “Humor, Dialectic, and Human Nature in Plato” Epoché: A Journal of the
History of Philosophy 15 (2011): 319–30.
------. “Plato and Aristotle on Friendship.” In Form and Reason: Essays in Metaphysics, 35–55.
Albany, New York: State University of New York Press, 1993.
Keyt, David. “The Mad Craftsman of the Timaeus.” The Philosophical Review 80 (1971): 230–
35.
Nussbaum, Martha Craven. The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and
Philosophy. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
Reeve, C. D. C. “A Study in Violets: Alcibiades in the Symposium.” In Plato’s Symposium:
Issues in Interpretation and Reception, edited by James Lesher, Debra Nails, and Frisbee
Sheffield, 124-46. Washington, D.C.: Center for Hellenic Studies, 2006.
16 Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness, 198, thinks Alcibiades and Socrates represent two irreconcilable ways of knowing.
She argues that Alicbiades’ seeing Socrates as an individual entails not only seeing his virtue but also seeing Socrates as a
whole (p. 190). Her argument relies on Alcibiades’ using an image to describe Socrates (signaling that Socrates is not a fully
intelligible universal) and declaring that he is going to speak the truth (214e-215b). My objection is that in the Apology
Socrates claims to speak the truth (17b-c) and also uses an image to describe himself (30e). Further, she says nothing about
the begetting in beauty that is the center of Socrates’ account of love.
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