Eros and the Intoxications of Enlightenment: On Plato's Symposium

Introduction

INTRODUCTION We are the inheritors of the tradition of the enlightenment. Yet we are cut off from the sources of enlightenment. Curious doctrines and novel orthodoxies have overcast our mental horizon so completely that the peaks of human life have become almost invisible to us. In such a climate it is inevitable that the exceptional character of the city in which Socrates was born and died should be obscured. Socrates’ Athens was a city in which pre-Socratic philosophy and its popular dissemination had so infected the opinions of her citizens that her tragic and comic poets could ridicule the gods with virtual impunity in the midst of her most sacred religious festivals and her unofficial head of state could boast of his association with a man who declared the sun to be a burning stone and not a god. Science and enlightened poetry had so weakened traditional piety that the check upon man’s ambition that the terrible and beautiful gods of the poets had once posed was overturned. As a consequence, shame and fear were replaced by daring and hope, and men cast aside obedience to take up the imitation of the majesty of the waning gods: stripped of the enveloping horizon the immortals had once established for all things mortal, the Athenians sought an immortality of their own devising through the erection of “undying memorials of good and evil.”1 This audacious and ultimately ruinous ambition of the Athenians—for all of its rapacity and occasional brutality—was nonetheless transfigured by the mingling of its spirited transgression of once sacred boundaries with the longing of an eros for the beautiful. The suffusion of political ambition with erotic desire was a hallmark of Athenian democracy from its putative origins in the pederastic love of the tyrannicides, Harmondius and Aristogeiton; it nevertheless reached its apex in the love of the demos for that most beautiful of Athenian youths who promised to realize the most vaunting of their imperial hopes: as Thucydides reports, when the Athenians threw in their lot with Alcibiades and his plans for the conquest of Sicily “eros swooped down on all alike.”2 The Athenians’ erotic longing for the tyrant in their midst was transformed into a longing to contemplate new and distant spectacles, lay their hands upon eternal treasure, and encompass the entire world within their reach and scope.3 Athenian imperialism was not the grim and austere imperialism of Rome—it was an imperialism shot ix x INTRODUCTION through with the effects of enlightenment and animated by the frenzy of erotic desire. It was the city striving to transcend all the limits endemic to the city in the attempt to embrace the whole and integrate into its life the truth of man as man. For, as Plato instructs us, the core of what it is to be human is eros, the eros for the truth about the whole of things. Athens is not the only enlightened city to have existed on the face of the earth, but she is the only enlightened city to have made the implicit claim to be the proper home for man at his peak, naked in his nature, divested of the alien constraints of convention and law. In this she had no predecessor and has found no imitator. Athens was the enlightened city par excellence. If we wish to remind ourselves of the exceptional character of Athens, we must turn to the Symposium of Plato, for the Symposium is not only the dialogue in which Plato takes up the problem of the nature of eros, it is also the dialogue in which he offers his portrait of this enlightened and eroticized city. Through the arguments of the work, he uncovers simultaneously the true character of eros and the true character of Athens. The latter is displayed in the series of speeches offered by the symposiasts at Agathon’s banquet, all of whom are Athenian citizens and all of whom—with the notable exceptions of Aristophanes and Socrates—are avid students of the sophists. The former is displayed first and foremost in the speech of Socrates wherein the truth of eros is revealed to be identical with Socrates’ practice of erotics. Plato displays Socrates in his relation to Agathon and his guests and thereby his relation to Athens and the Athenian enlightenment. If the claims of enlightened Athens, as articulated above all in the speeches of Phaedrus, Pausanias, and Eryximachus, could have been sustained, then Socrates should have found his...