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CONCLUSION SOCRATES AND PLATO According to Socrates, Alcibiades has offered his speech not in order to praise him, but with the hidden purpose of keeping Socrates and Agathon apart (222c–d). Alcibiades attempts to stand in the way of Socrates’ pairing with a beautiful youth who is also a tragic poet. The greatest of political men wishes to prevent Socrates from putting to use his erotics and from enlisting the poet to his cause. In this respect, Alcibiades appears once again as the city of Athens in its suspicion and envy of Socrates. Socrates calls Alcibiades’ speech, insofar as it is devoted to this end, a satyr-play (222d). For Alcibiades himself, the speech seems to have recounted what he took to be the tragedy of his encounter with Socrates. Alcibiades’ speech elicits laughter among the guests of the banquet (222c) and they, therefore, seem to second Socrates’ description and not Alcibiades’ experience. The encounter between philosophy and the city is, for the city, a tragedy. Athens is no good without Socrates, but ultimately cannot endure his presence within its walls. Plato’s Apology of Socrates is for the political man, therefore, a source of pity and fear; for the philosophic it is more apt to be a cause of laughter than sorrow and is finally a vehicle to insight into the nature of things that lies beyond laughter and tears.1 Still, by his own admission, Socrates is eager to form an alliance not with the comic, but the tragic poet (213d, 222e). Though Aristophanes may be immeasurably closer to Socrates than Agathon when it comes to insight into the nature of things, there is something in the nature of comedy as a genre that seems to make the comic poet worse than useless for Socrates as an ally: the comic poet ridicules the gods and deflates the noble. If he did not provide his spectators with an overwhelming pleasure and conceal himself beneath the appearance of madness, Aristophanes would have found himself on trial for impiety and corrupting the youth long before Socrates. Aristotle declares that comedy’s very name is said to be derivative of the 151 152 EROS AND THE INTOXICATIONS OF ENLIGHTENMENT fact that, when it first appeared, it was considered unfit for admittance within the walls of the city.2 According to Socrates, however, poetry as such really belongs outside the city. It is an ancilla not to political life, but to philosophy, and it is most of all the tragic poet “by art” who can realize the true purpose of poetry (223d). Alcibiades himself seems to have admitted that nothing can stand in the way of the realization of this purpose: before engaging in what would have proved to be the second of the evening’s contests in speeches—Alcibiades attempting through his praises of Socrates to separate Agathon and Socrates, and Socrates through his projected praise of Agathon to bind Agathon to himself (222c–223a)—Alcibiades declared Socrates’ speeches to be victorious on all occasions (213e). Moreover, Alcibiades’ speech, despite what Socrates declares to be its object, could not be better suited to render Socrates as attractive as possible to Agathon. On the one hand, whereas at the close of his speech, Socrates portrayed philosophy as the ascent to and identification with the self-sufficiently beautiful, Alcibiades has portrayed Socrates as having already completed that ascent and identification. Socrates is the repersonified beautiful itself. On the other hand, having assigned himself the just and Socrates the beautiful, Alcibiades could not help portraying Socrates’ beauty from the limiting perspective of his own position, that is, precisely in terms of the just: Socrates’ beauty was for him not primarily a source of erotic attraction, but of shame. Alcibiades, in translating Socratic perplexity into shame, legalizes the beautiful and makes it a source of something like punitive justice. Socrates deprives Alcibiades of all hope and afflicts him with the greatest of pains, both, according to Alcibiades’ own understanding, in the interest of humiliating him in order to relieve him of his hubris. Alcibiades, even while attempting to discriminate between the beautiful and the just, cannot help collapsing them once again in his portrait of Socrates. But since Socrates is for him the one true god, Alcibiades cannot help painting his new god in the colors of the old gods of the tragic poets—Socrates is both beautiful and terrifying.3 Alcibiades’ portrait of Socrates, then, must be infinitely charming to Agathon: what Agathon offered as...

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