From the Beginning to Plato

PLATO: AESTHETICS AND PSYCHOLOGY 415
classified as ‘middle’, along with the Phaedrus and the Republic). If so, then we
might in principle try interpreting the Symposium in terms of the (‘Socratic’) Lysis,
which treats of erōs without bringing in irrational desires: there are only beliefs
about what is good, together with a generalized desire for what is in fact good. This
option is attractive, particularly in so far as the lover’s advance in the Symposium is
described in strikingly intellectual terms (there is at any rate little blind passion in
evidence in the context). However, since an alternative explanation of this feature
is available, namely in terms of the chosen metaphor of initiation, there is
ultimately no more justification for importing this model of the Platonic soul than
for importing the other one. What the Symposium offers, through the figure of
Socrates, is above all a picture of how an individual’s concerns may be redirected
from (in Platonic terms) a lower to a higher level—a picture which is short on
philosophy but long on persuasion.
38 ‘It is not easy…for what is put together out of many parts, and that not in the finest
way, to be eternal’: so Socrates says, having offered another attempt at proof of the
immortality of the soul. He then makes his suggestion that the tripartite analysis
applies to the soul as it appears in this life, encumbered with a body and its
accoutrements as the sea-god Glaucus is with barnacles and seaweed (611bff.).
39 As Crombie points out ([10.36] 1:354), it is a necessary consequence of the
argument of Republic IV that the parts are genuinely independent, since otherwise
the principle (that the same thing cannot act or be acted upon in opposite ways at
the same time) will be broken. But in that case there will be no such thing as a
person’s soul (in the singular), or even a person, or self. (In the next section, we
shall discover a further problem with Plato’s use of the principle in question.)
40 The clinching point is the low position of the poet in the grading of lives at
Phaedrus 248d–e (sixth, after e.g. the earthbound gymnastic trainer and doctor,
only just before the craftsman and farmer, then the sophist and the demagogue, and
finally the tyrant). Lyric poetry, singled out in 245a, also figured earlier in the
dialogue, at 235c, in the shape of the ‘beautiful’ Sappho and the ‘wise’ Anacreon,
love-poets whom Socrates identified as possible sources for his own (inspired,
poetic: 238c–d) praise of the non-lover. So much for his view of their ‘divine
inspiration’.
41 See e.g. Hesiod, Theogony 22–8.
42 The dialogue as a whole falls into three parts: (1) Socrates argues that Ion cannot
perform or lecture on Homer through skill or understanding; (2) he must therefore
be able to do it by divine gift (i.e. by being inspired or maddened); then (3) when
Ion protests that what he has to say about Homer is anything but crazy, Socrates
presses him to say what knowledge it is that he has about his subject, and when he
cannot identify this knowledge, he has to choose between either saying he is no
good at what he does, or that he does it in the way Socrates has suggested, i.e. by
virtue of a kind of madness.
43 Ion 535d–e. There is a considerable degree of sleight of hand in Socrates’ handling
of Ion at this point. He first asks whether ‘we should call sane a person who,
adorned in colourful dress and golden crowns, weeps at sacrifices and festivals,
when he hasn’t lost any of these [namely, valuable possessions], or who is afraid
when he’s standing among more than twenty thousand people who like him, and no
one has stripped him or done him wrong?’ I suppose you must have a point, replies
Ion. Socrates’ next move is then to suggest that performers like Ion ‘do the same’