Symposium events/speeches - from Agathon's winning the prize for his first tragedy - re-told first by:
--> Aristodemus ("the best demos") , infatuated (erotically) with Socrates and present at the Symposium,retold in turn from him by
--> Apollodorus ("gift of Apollo" / god of light, reason, measure)
--> who retells it again to the unidentified friend - to some degree, a "stand-in" for the reader of the dialogue -
Beyond these layerings through time and two re-collections of the speeches - both Aristodemus and Apollodorus are hardly "objective" reporters: beyond Aristodemus' infatuation with Socrates at the time - Apollodorus is emphatically "the maniac," likewise infatuated with Socrates and contemptuous of especially businessmen (!)...
(These puns on names seem quite intentional: Socrates at 174B puns on Agathon's name as he recasts the proverb "Good men go uninvited to an inferior man's feast" to "Good men go uninvited to the Goodman's [Agathon] feast."
They extend to
Aristophanes: "best light"Diotima: "honor of the god."
Notice how religious and social conventions are intentionally overturned:
the slaves become the mastersthe one female in the presence of all these males - the flute-girl - is dismissed
(this makes the introduction of Diotima at the center of the dialogue all the more remarkable)
the religious obligation of drinking to excess in honor of Dionysius is moderated by reason - in the form of the physician's advice
(where physicians are often examples in the dialogues of a kind of knowledge held by a few, not the many, conducive to physical health, as an analogue to philosophy as concerned in part with the knowledge necessary for "psychic" health - where the pysche is understood along the lines suggested precisely in Diotima's speech.)
In some sense, this overturning of social and religious conventions resembles classic myth - the transition from the normal, usual way of doing things, into the liminal domain, where things are not quite as they usually are (Alice in Wonderland, Dorothy in Oz, Luke Skywalker with Yoda, as contemporary examples). In myth - precisely an oral telling, a mythos - importnat boons or insights are gained in the journey into the liminal domain: Diotima's speech - the oddest occurence in the dialogue, precisely as a female speaker now intrudes on the otherwise entirely male company - may be understood as conveying some of the most important insights in the dialogue as a classically-organized myth.
notice the transition in the speeches from
| Agathon Aristophanes [poets] | to: Socrates | Diotima |
| This transition in part involves a transition from the initial dualistic logic in the speeches - a dualism apparent still in Agathon's praise of eros - | |
| to a complementary logic in especially Diotima's account of eros as precisely the mediating daimon between Agathon's (and the young Socrates') dualistic hierarchy of: | |
|
Beauty Good Divine Wisdom |
|
|
eros // philosophia (pursuit of wisdom) |
|
|
Ugly Bad Human Ignorance |
This shift is apparent not only on a first level - i.e., in the content of the speeches - but also on a second level, in the form or style of the speeches:
| the poets are associated by Socrates with Sophism and persuasion | |
|
but instead of presenting an either/or between :
poetry/Sophism/persuasion, and -->
(as the either/or logic of Agathon's speech would require) |
philosophy |
| Socrates' speech embodies Diotima's account of eros/philosophia as including Sophistry, persuasion, and overt uses of poetry. |
Still more broadly: the Dialogue itself stands as a philosophical/poetic creation.
Cf. the closing lines of The Republic, which suggest that poetry is perhaps closest to the philosophical quest for the Good;
Nietzsche's notion of la gaya scienza;
and the affiliated uses of complementarity logic in The Republic -
the allegory of the cave: no either/or between cave and sunlit world, but a path conjoining them;the use of the analogical line depicting the four levels of knowledge/being (where, like the path joining the political world of the cave with the solitary world of the philosopher, the line conjoins both directly and through analogical proportions the four domains of Being/Knowledge)
- corresponding to the erotic/philosophical journey described by Diotima.
Provocative Question:
given this understanding of philosophy - in the Dialogues as what Belsey would call interrogative texts? -how far does this understanding of reason fit the postmodernist characterization of Western conceptions of reason in general, and Plato in particular, as dualistic, contemptuous of the material/bodily world - most certainly including eros - etc.?
[for somewhat more detailed discussion of these points, see the Class Discussion notes for July 18, 1997]