Men in Love: Aspects of Plato's Symposium

Abstract

Plato's so-called ‘middle period’ saw the composition of what are generally agreed to be his finest philosophical dramas, and of these the Symposium is usually singled out for special praise. Yet it is only recently that serious attempts have been made to approach the Symposium as a work of literature rather than a philosophical treatise. Those who employ the work as a source-book for Platonist doctrines rarely venture beyond Socrates' dialectical refutation of Agathon and his report of what Diotima told him (199c-212b); and if they do, it is to point out the logical or perceptual fallacies — i.e. the philosophical deficiencies — of the other five encomia and to find in Alcibiades' contribution a glowing tribute by Plato to that most remarkable of human personalities, the philosopher Socrates. This, however, is not the way to arrive at a real understanding of the Symposium. The author clearly intends the reader to respond to this work not as a philosophical treatise on the subject of Eros but as a work of literature which portrays a group of thinking human beings engaged in appraisal of an issue which is of fundamental importance in their lives. His primary purpose in dramatising this intellectual event is thus not to expound the philosopher's conception of Eros or to expose our minds to auto to kalon (‘the beautiful itself’). Rather the true subject of the work is man the intellectual animal, whose logoi (‘speeches’) demonstrate his capacity for analysing, evaluating and idealising his feelings and aspirations. It depicts ‘philosophy brought down from the sky and located in the cities and homes of men’; we are shown how, and how successfully, philosophy can function as a vital constituent of human life, rather than a barren and essentially irrelevant dispute about the mechanics of the universe.