Speaking Truth to ‘Platonism’? Some Thoughts on Alcibiades and Erôs

Abstract

This article reads Alcibiades’ speech in Plato’s Symposium in terms of the later Foucault’s examination of ‘parrhēsia’, or ‘frank spokenness’. It contends that, in part, Alcibiades’ stress on the sheer particularity and individuality of erotic attraction—in his case, attraction to Socrates himself—acts as a kind of rejoinder to the ‘impersonal’ aspect of erôs highlighted in the famous speech of Socrates/Diotima.

1. Introduction

Michel Foucault’s later explorations of parrhēsia in Plato’s dialogues—‘speaking truth to power’, or even just ‘freespokenness’—are marked by a striking lacuna. For arguably, the most unexpected and uncanny example of parrhēsia that we find in Plato’s oeuvre presents a kind of immanent challenge to ‘Platonism’ itself and to the efficacy of its transcendent claims.

My main concern in what follows is not so much Foucault but Plato—and, more specifically, the significance of Alcibiades’ obtrusive presence in Plato’s Symposium [1]. The sheer strangeness of Alcibiades’ parrhēsiastic irruption within proceedings—strange enough to induce embarrassed laughter from the other participants—has hardly gone unnoticed: Lacan’s famous 1960–1961 seminar on ‘Transference’, to cite a particularly notable example, pivots on the kind of changed perspective that the drunken gatecrasher provides (and the end to the ‘eulogistic games’ that his arrival demands) [2]. Nonetheless, it seems worthwhile, at the least, recapitulating the singularity of Alcibiades’ provocation, for he can be taken to represent the singularity of erôs itself and perhaps even its resistance to the power of philosophical discourse.

To pursue all of this, I intend, in this paper, briefly to outline the first five speeches given in the Symposium and then to look in more detail at the ‘culminating’ speech given by Socrates/Diotima. I then switch attention to the ‘coda’ that Alcibiades offers, giving particular attention to the question of parrhēsia vis-à-vis ‘erotic discourse’. My tentative conclusion is that—for all the many difficulties and problems that surround the figure of Alcibiades—he still speaks truth to an idealised account of love and that Plato, via this depiction of a certain resistance to philosophy, is able to signal his own misgivings regarding any assumption about a full conceptual ‘grasp’ of erôs. This is not to suggest that Alcibiades somehow ‘destroys’ or ‘refutes’ the great vision of Socrates/Diotima; it is more that he serves as a reminder, offered by Plato himself, of the limits of logos.

2. Talking About Love

Before proceeding any further, we need to acknowledge the hermeneutically problematic ‘nature’ of our primary point of consideration: as Joseph O’Leary has put it, “[t]he word ‘love’ has no univocal sense but refers to a variety of heterogeneous ideals and practices” [3] (p. 189) We think of conceptual distinctions and oppositions like the Scholastics’ amor conscupiscentiae and amor amicitae seu benevolentiae, Malebranche’s amour d’instinct and amour de raison, or Kant’s ‘practical’ and ‘pathological’ loves; these all help to indicate something of the sprawling, uncontainable, character of the phenomenon (or phenomena) at hand. Platonic erôs, our main concern here, remains distinct from (and perhaps even antithetical to) New Testament agapê. Beyond these distinctions, we think of the further semantic and conceptual layers added by Augustinian caritas, medieval courtly conceptions and usages, Renaissance re-evaluations of Plato, the turbocharged notions of Love that emerge with Romanticism, Derrida’s aimance, and so on. Yet, even with this note of hermeneutical caution sounded, there are at least two good reasons for taking a look—another look—at Plato: first, his treatment of erôs has a kind of foundational status for so much Western discourse (regardless of how it may have developed and diverged from this source); secondly, this same treatment remains intrinsically (and not just historically) significant in terms of its description of ‘erotic phenomena’.

Plato’s attempted ‘incorporation’ of erôs into philosophy stretches back, before the Symposium, to the earlier Lysis; his consistent concern seems to have been to broaden our conception of both philosophy and erôs, folding one into the other. But it is with the Symposium that we are given a far fuller, even consummate, treatment; apparently, erôs is now taken to be identical with the figure of the philosopher himself (i.e., Socrates).

I want to give particular attention to the speech of Socrates/Diotima in the Symposium—ostensibly, the ultimate statement of Platonic love and a massive cultural and intellectual influence throughout Western history. The Great Speech comes as the apparent conclusion to the work as a whole—although, as we shall see, the question of ‘conclusion’ is perhaps the salient and unsettled issue here—and it seems to offer itself as a kind of Aufhebung, or sublation, by absorbing and ‘transcending’ the five previous speeches given, of varying quality and substance, all on the subject of erôs. The fuller details of these five speeches are beyond our scope, but we can still note some basic shapes and outlines.

Phaedrus, a young man wooed by the Sophists and hugely interested in rhetoric, begins the business with a speech in praise of erôs in general—that is, without differentiating ‘better’ and ‘worse’ formations or expressions. Next, Pausanias, a middle-aged Sophist, introduces a distinction between ‘noble’ and ‘base’ erôs—and, importantly, his speech is interrupted by Aristophanes’ hiccoughs! (Lacan tells us that Kojève told him: “you will never be able to interpret the Symposium if you do not know why Aristophanes had the hiccoughs” [2]) (p. 61). Eryximachus, a pedantic physician, then presents a supposedly ‘scientific’ account—quite possibly pure parody on Plato’s part—but he broadens the consideration by positing erôs as a kind of principle found throughout the cosmos as a whole. Next, Aristophanes, the comedy writer, cured of his hiccoughs, provides his famous depiction of humans desperately—even pathetically—searching for their missing halves. (Despite the ‘comedy’, his is ultimately a tragic depiction: our bodies are shown to be a source of constant shame and disappointment; sexual desire is shown as profoundly absurd.) Finally, Agathon, the tragic poet in whose honour the entire drinking session is being held, gives a fairly vacuous speech that at least (a) continues to develop the idea of erôs as playing on the soul, as well as body, and (b) suggests that erôs aims at the beautiful.

These speeches are all presupposed by Socrates/Diotima, and, to a greater or lesser extent, aspects of each are lifted up into a ‘concluding’ dialectical composite. (Kierkegaard comments on the speeches being “like a sliding telescope; the one presentation ingeniously merges into the other…” [4] (p. 42)). As regards the Socrates/Diotima conjunction, one of the so many fascinating aspects of this speech is that the specific identity of the speaker is unclear: the older Socrates recalls how, as a callow, much younger man, aged about 18, an older woman, Diotima, acted as his teacher and guide: he reports what she said and taught. (This is the only ‘direct’—although still reported—appearance of a woman in the Platonic corpus, other than Aspasia in the Menexenus.) Underlining the extent of Diotima’s formative influence, some of the only (‘properly’) dialogical, eristic parts of the Symposium emerge when Diotima treats the younger Socrates in the same kind of way that the older Socrates, whom we know from the other Platonic dialogues, tends to treat his interlocutors. The young Socrates describes erôs as a great god, wholly distinct from mortals—just like Phaedrus suggests at the start, and then Agathon repeats, just before Socrates speaks. Diotima sets out to disrupt his ‘either/or’ approach: she laughs at this strict binary thinking (202b). Something that is not beautiful does not necessarily have to be ugly; similarly, there can be a state between ignorance and wisdom.

This ‘in-betweenness’ is extremely important: it is the state of the philo-sophos. Erôs is neither beautiful nor ugly, neither a god nor a mortal, good nor bad, but a mean between these states. Erôs is a ‘daimon’, an intermediary between our finite, mortal existence and the realm of the eternal and immortal. (This ‘betweenness’ is also reflected in the supposed origins of erôs—the son of Poros and Penia, plenty and poverty, who inherits characteristics from both.) The gods have no direct contact with humans; instead, contact takes place through an intermediary, an ‘in-between’ (203a).

Over the course of the description of erôs, and almost without us noticing, the application is broadened significantly: crucially, it is stretched to include (or even just become) the love of wisdom. Erôs engages in a search for wisdom throughout his life (203d); the gods, by contrast, do not desire wisdom because they have it; the ignorant, meanwhile, fail to realise what they lack (204a-b). Love is about desiring wisdom, which also means us realising what we lack.

Roughly, the earlier part of the speech amounts to this: why do we love what we take to be good things?—because we want to have these good things. What would this having or possessing mean?—happiness. ‘Thus’ everyone is a lover, inasmuch as we all desire what we take to be good things; no-one loves anything unless they take it to be good. (Diotima tells us that “this desire, this love, is common to all of us” 205a.) And so a further broadening takes place: erôs can have wide application—beyond the sexual, or what we might term ‘amorous lived experience’.

Diotima outlines how we use generic terms and apply these to specific situations—e.g., ‘creativity’ applied to a wide variety of creative people. So too with erôs: usually, we apply ‘lover’ and ‘beloved’ in a narrow fashion, but the love of business, sport, philosophy, and so on also falls within the domain of erôs (205d). Hence, Diotima: “Basically, it’s always the case that the desire for good and for happiness is everyone’s ‘dominant, deceitful love’” (205d).

Furthermore, we desire to possess the good ‘forever’: the question of ‘eternity’ comes into play. This immortality can only be achieved through procreation of some kind: giving birth, continuation via generation. Accordingly, when Diotima addresses the question of ‘function’, first adumbrated in the earlier speeches, she tells us that love is ‘about’ different kinds of procreation (206b-e).

In one sense, there is a straightforward material point being made here: Diotima acknowledges the “delight of procreation”, and at 207a-c, especially, erôs is spoken about specifically in physical terms as a basic impulse in the animal kingdom. Erôs affects wild animals ‘powerfully’, and Diotima tells Socrates that he cannot expect to understand erôs as a whole if he fails to address all this. Diotima seems to be saying that all desire is, at base, erotic, or sexual—like a prototype statement of Freudian ‘sublimation’, with the libido as source of our energy, impulses, and so on. But, of course, a hugely important movement or expansion takes place here—from physical desire to ‘the eternal’. (Even animals have sex, reproduce, and then care for their young for the sake of immortality: “mortal nature does all it can to achieve immortality and live for ever” (207d)). And—in this respect—so much human activity can be understood as mortal, finite, people ‘producing offspring’ in order to ensure a kind of immortality despite the flux of physical existence. Different human desires—for fame, glory, honour, etc.—are different manifestations of our longing for eternity. Furthermore, developing the notion of a higher and lower erôs (which we encountered in earlier speeches), Diotima seems to class literal procreation as being part of the domain of the body, while metaphorical procreation (that of the poet, the inventor, the statesman, the philosopher…) is part of the domain of the ‘soul’ (209a-b). The second type must involve an ‘intellectual’ intercourse: it is through dialogue and interpersonal encounters that we might come to wisdom. Just as physical beings cannot be reproduced without sexual intercourse, so too the ‘immortal truths’ and the insights of philosophy are a dialogical, not monological, ‘product’. Overall, then, generation is an expression of mortals’ desire for immortality. Leaving a successor means securing some kind of perpetuity. Erôs is the impulse towards immortality, the impulse that leads to ‘offspring’ (of all sorts): not just people but also laws, inventions, great deeds, and great words.

The cumulative effect of all this is to display higher and higher formations of desire or gradations within erôs. Finally, we are given the famous conclusion to the Great Speech, the depiction of ascent from the physical to the ‘spiritual’ and eternal. The younger we are, the more we are attracted to the physical beauty of one individual. Then, with maturity, we come to reflect, not so much on the particular, but on the nature of the universal, Beauty per se. With this move made, it becomes easier to appreciate not just physical beauty but beauty in all sorts of shapes and guises: the beauty of a soul, of laws, of traditions, etc. Ultimately, we come to see that all beauty is related and that the ‘higher’ the beauty, metaphysically speaking, the better. We come to see that the Form itself—‘the great sea’—is not subject to physical change and decay but remains constant, unchanging, uniform:

… the right kind of love for a boy can help you ascend from the things of this world until you begin to catch sight of that beauty, and then you’re almost within striking distance of the goal. The proper way to go about or be guided through the ways of love is to start with beautiful things in this world and always make the beauty I’ve been talking about the reason for your ascent. You should use the things of this world as rungs in a ladder. You start by loving one attractive body and step up to two; from there you move on to physical beauty in general, from there to the beauty of people’s activities, from there to the beauty of intellectual endeavours, and from there you ascend to that final intellectual endeavour, which is no more and no less than the study of that beauty, so that you finally recognise true beauty.

(211c)

This is the pre-eminent statement of Platonic ascent from the earthly realm of change and appearance to the eternal and unchanging realm of Truth, i.e., “beauty itself, in its perfect, immaculate purity—not beauty tainted by human flesh and colouring and all that mortal rubbish, but absolute beauty, divine and constant” (211e). This ascent (it seems) is what philosophy should aim for. There can be no progress without desire, without that initial charge: the final, highest steps presuppose an erotic impulse. Nonetheless, the ‘telos’ is purely intellectual: to cite Kierkegaard’s commentary, again:

The final presentation of the essence of erôs by no means inhales what the previous development had exhaled, but reflection, in a continual ascent, mounts higher and higher above the atmospheric air until breathing almost stops in the pure ether of the abstract. Accordingly, the earlier discourses are regarded not as components in the final conception but rather as a terrestrial gravity from which thought must more and more be freed. While the different presentations do not stand in any necessary relation to the final one, they do, however, have a mutual relation to one another in that they are discourses about love springing from the heterogeneous viewpoints found in life with which the speakers, like allied powers, surround the whole territory constituting the real nature of love, which in the Socratic view proves to be as invisible as the mathematical point, inasmuch as it is abstract, and from which point the various relative and warped views cannot be deduced [4] (pp. 41–42).

Conceptually, the description of this ‘great ladder’ would seem to conclude the entire discussion: the loose ends and partial insights of the earlier speeches are gathered up and ‘perfected’ in this great dialectical synthesis. Erôs allows us to ‘ascend’ from the earthly to the divine: maturity and ‘fullness’ arrive as we leave the particular and contingent behind and head towards the universal. But, of course, what seems so important—and yet often overlooked—is that this is not the end of the story. The work does not conclude with this magnificent statement of ascent from terrestrial to transcendent. Instead, a drunk suddenly crashes the party—literally and, one could say, conceptually. (The suddenness is highly significant—like the suddenness of erotic force itself. Or the suddenness of hiccoughs). This party-crasher, of course, is Alcibiades, one of the most famous and infamous figures in classical Athens. He will give the final speech.

Alcibiades is about 34 at the time of the dialogue: wealthy, ambitious, brilliant, charismatic, beautiful, apparently destined for ‘greatness’, a “seductive young libertine”, in Anne Carson’s description [5] (p. 5), who was hoping to become “a new and greater Achilles”, as Leo Strauss puts it [6] (p. 259). But he is also already known for debauchery and drunkenness: it is as if Dionysus has suddenly entered the building. (He even has a garland squint on his head as he joins the drinking party, and he is accompanied by a pipe-girl and a coterie of followers.) He demands to be involved in the discussion—but, crucially, he has no interest in the original theme, i.e., erôs ‘in general’. Instead, he wants to talk about the particular: specifically, he wants to talk about Socrates himself and his love for Socrates himself.

Thus, we have a striking counterpoint here: Socrates/Diotima went from the individual or particular to the essence, Beauty itself; but now, Alcibiades spurns any ‘general’ description and speaks about the pure particular—i.e., Socrates’ effect on him. His speech is an attempt at communicating Socrates’ uniqueness. Previously, there was a ‘telescoping’ at work, with a culmination in the ‘clear lens’ of Socrates/Diotima. Now, we have a drunk’s ramblings. Crucially, though, these ramblings also present the strange, uncanny example of parrhēsia that, as noted at the start of this paper, seems to stand at such a strange angle to Foucault’s analysis.

3. Plato and Parrhēsia

Foucault’s discussions of parrhēsia are found mainly in the 1982–1983 Collège de France lecture course The Government of Self and Others, the 1983–1984 Collège de France course, The Courage of Truth, and also in the 1983 Berkeley lectures, published as Fearless Speech. His main interest is in the genesis of Christian confessional; the treatment of parrhēsia in Plato’s dialogues is supposed to show an important shift that occurs in ancient culture, whereby a private and ‘moral’ domain comes to replace or take over from public and ‘political’ discourse, and philosophy emerges as an alternative to rhetoric. Thus, for Foucault, the earliest mentions of parrhēsia in Euripides are wholly positive and demonstrate an important aspect of what we might term ‘Periclean’ political culture—the ability of a citizen to speak frankly in public, even to those far more socially and politically powerful. But with Athens’ defeat in the Peloponnesian War and with a growing hostility towards facile public loquacity, the significance of parrhēsia moves from public assembly to private debate (and so ‘philosophical’ self-formation); in this respect, Plato’s work, so Foucault contends, is paradigmatic.

Focussing on the Charmides, Laches and Alcibiades 1, Foucault depicts Socrates as a ‘new’ kind of parrhēsiastēs, standing up—in private domains—to different kinds of cultural power. The Symposium may not feature much in Foucault’s analysis, but the figure of Alcibiades is crucial (for Foucault) in demonstrating Socrates’ parrhēsiastic bravery: the older man is determined to ‘convert’ the young, hot-headed aristocrat to philosophy, regardless of the latter’s wealth and status. Alcibiades 1 shows Socrates to be typically fearless in his arguments that we should aim to have control over ourselves before we ever begin to contemplate exercising power over others.

Foucault’s depiction of parrhēsia has been subject to all kinds of critical objections—for example, that it is anachronistic, that it fails to account for Platonic irony, that it misses the equal significance of isēgoria (the issue of access to the demos), or that, in the case of Alcibiades 1, it gives too much weight to a dialogue that is quite possibly not Plato’s. Significant as all these issues might be, they are not my main concern here—mainly because the ‘effective history’ of Foucault’s labours seems to outweigh the totality of objections raised. Instead, I want to focus on Plato’s depiction of Alcibiades and put Foucault to work, so to speak, in exploring at least something of the significance of Alcibiades’ ‘truth-telling’ speech. For in the Symposium, Plato shows Alcibiades as a parrhēsiastēs, ‘speaking truth’ to Socrates, and, by doing so, challenging the version of erôs that had emerged from the previous speeches and their great culmination.

For sure, Alcibiades’ speech is a jumble, a sprawl, with no clear argument, no real ‘logic’ as such; even the syntax reflects this ‘dissolution’. Nonetheless, it is exceptionally powerful: it is almost as if Alcibiades’ own intoxication conveys—in a way that sober accounts could never manage—the intoxicating power of erôs itself. There is a striking physicality in Alcibiades’ descriptions:

I’ve been bitten by something with a far more excruciating bite than a snake, and it couldn’t have attacked a more vulnerable part of me. My heart or mind—I don’t know what the proper term is—has been struck and bitten… (218a)

He is vulnerable, liable to be pierced, hit, struck; he remains defenceless against Socratic ‘lightning bolts’; when he hears Socrates, his heart beats more violently than the Corybantes; etc. He tells us, in great detail, about his attempts to seduce Socrates—the frustration, pain, and humiliation involved. He is gripped by another power, out of his senses, slavish, in turmoil; “there I was: no slave has ever been more utterly in the power of an master than I was” (219e), etc.

And yet, even though he repeatedly emphasises his suffering, the speech is not all drunken self-indulgence. Alcibiades refuses to accept Socratic ‘ignorance’ as anything other than a sham (216d), and he will accuse Socrates, three times (215b, 219c, 222a), of hubris, inasmuch as he seems impervious to erotic ‘demands’: in Stanley Rosen’s summary, “Socrates is a dissembler, so full of hybris as to be indifferent to human beings, even to the beautiful bodies by which he pretends to be attracted” [7] (p. 294). Alcibiades is shocking in the sheer frankness he displays about the power Socrates commands over him: the others laugh at his parrhēsia, we are told (222c). Alcibiades, then, is an unusual kind of parrhēsiastēs. We could even suggest that, for all his aristocratic privilege, he speaks truth—a partial truth, at least—to the power of philosophy (and its idealised abstractions). He highlights an erotic energy which cannot be mediated or ‘sublated’; he reminds us of a physicality that cannot be dismissed—and that cannot be cured. After the high point of ‘Platonic’ love, we are reminded of this obtrusive presence—by an obtrusive presence. For all the magnificence of the great vision presented by Socrates/Diotima, theirs is not the philosophical conclusion to the Symposium: perhaps we could say that Plato himself throws a spanner into the ‘Platonic’ works, reminding us that erôs cannot be ‘contained’ conceptually.

4. Conclusions

Certainly, there are critical points being made here, via the person of Alcibiades, about a life of ‘erotic dissolution’. Alcibiades was a ‘problem’ for Plato: Socrates’ association with him was almost certainly a key factor in the prosecution brought against him and so surely constituted a ‘legacy issue’ for the student’s defence of the master. Accordingly, some historical context seems important:

(1)

Alcibiades and some friends carried out a drunken, mock ritual in an important temple; they also mutilated statues of the gods—by smashing off their genitals. This happened very soon after the date on which the Symposium was supposed to have taken place (416 BCE). Unsurprisingly, the profanation caused huge outrage in ancient Greece.

(2)

Shortly after this, Alcibiades (who was both politician and military leader) led a disastrous military expedition to Sicily as part of the Athenians’ war against the Spartans. The expedition is reckoned to have contributed massively to the Athenian’s overall defeat in the war; Alcibiades was blamed and even regarded as a traitor. The one-time high-flyer, who (at the time of the Symposium) had the world at his feet, crashed down to earth.

Alcibiades was indicted for impiety after the failure of the Sicilian expedition; he then fled to Sparta—the enemy camp—where he turned sides and agitated against Athens. However, his amorous ways got him into further trouble: he ended up having an affair with the wife of a Spartan king and then had to flee to Persia. There, he took up the Athenian cause again, trying to persuade the Persians to join the fight against the Spartans. He was recalled to Athens by a new regime and led a successful campaign against the Spartans; however, one of his juniors suffered a huge defeat. Alcibiades was blamed and forced to flee again, this time pursued by Athenians, Spartans, and Persians. He was eventually killed by a hired assassin.

These ‘facts’ are no doubt very significant in how we should regard Alcibiades: he is beyond reckless, and—as such—he serves as a warning about what we might term a ‘philosophically unregulated existence’. However, it is not at all clear that Plato is looking to make a ‘straightforward’ didactic point here via the disastrous figure of Alcibiades. He is not ‘simply’ saying something like: “ignore philosophy and this’ll be your fate”. Instead, I would suggest, he is acknowledging a certain lacuna (maybe a vanity?) within the ‘Platonic’ vision that is the central focus of the dialogue as a whole. Alcibiades is a reminder that erotic particularity, in all its strangeness and ambiguity, cannot (and perhaps should not) be ‘converted’ into conceptual generality; he is thereby also a reminder that Plato’s texts do not always coincide with whatever ‘Platonism’ might be assumed to stand for.

Arguably, the subsequent Platonic tradition consistently sought to suppress this strange particularity. We know from Porphyry just how uncomfortable and agitated Plotinus was rendered by the very mention of Alcibiades in the Symposium [8], (pp. 42–43) and for all the huge importance of Beauty in the Plotinian system, erotic ‘actuality’ seems to serve, not even as a ‘stage’, but as (merely) the nostalgic, negative, articulation of the spiritual and pure. (Once it has ascended the highest peak, the Plotinian soul reposes in a state of grace-filled luminosity, beyond Being and beyond any erotic discomfiture.) The Pseudo-Dionysius provides a Christian consolidation of this tendency, rendering physical beauty merely an image of a transcendental original, which itself becomes configured as an attribute of God, or ‘divine name’. And Marsilio Ficino’s great re-enactment of the Symposium, his De amore, effectively consummates this ‘tradition’ by ignoring altogether the provocation that Alcibiades presents. In short, we could say that the Platonism we have been bequeathed seems to have effaced the obtrusive, unwieldy power of erôs—and thereby to have confirmed its apparent status as ‘totalising’ metaphysical imposition.

For sure, such a characterisation of such a huge and diverse tradition may well be more like a caricature. Nonetheless, and assuming that at least some Nietzschean mud sticks, my central concern here has been to offer a reading of Plato that stresses just how resistant his text may be to ‘anti-Platonic’ condemnation. Whatever the tendency of post-Heideggerian European philosophy to read Plato as a proto-Hegelian, concerned with “the dissolution of the particular and thus… the production of the universal” [9] (p. 51), the ‘intrusion’ of Alcibiades shows us that, for Plato (regardless of the tradition which arises from his thinking), a total Aufhebung is impossible when it comes to the manic singularity of erôs.