Alcibiades vs. Platonism

"Boring from Within: Reading the Speech of Alcibiades as Attack on the Agenda of Definition"

This is a summary of work in progress.
For more information, send a note to jwp2@axe.humboldt.edu

Martha Nussbaum's essay, "The Speech of Alcibiades" suggests that that speech in the Symposium can be used to raise issues about the status of Platonism, traditionally understood as embodied in Socrates' account of the ascent of love by stages from particular concrete loves to an ideal, abstract, unchanging, and moral love. Though I owe my interest in these questions to Nussbaum, I make claims quite unlike her.

The Symposium may be read as a dialogue in which Plato's ironic approach includes grave questions about his own goals in philosophy. Alcibiades' speech is thus a key. Assessments of this speech have varied from scholars thinking that the entrance of Alcibiades is basically the end of the dialogue to Nussbaum's taking it quite seriously as an illustration of problems of the ascent of love, in particular the dilemma one faces in the ascent apparently requiring us to turn out backs on particular loves. I claim instead that Alcibiades raises the possibility that the rest of the dialogue and indeed the agenda of definition have severe limitations at best and at worst are seriously confused. It does this by presenting an example which none of the definitional accounts can incorporate, an example whose wealth of detail and emotional richness washes away the definitional agenda, and implicitly presents a criterion argument: that definitions are to be judged based on their ability to fit examples, and so examples (like Alcibiades presenting himself as an example) are logically prior to defintional accounts. The result is that a traditional understanding of the Platonic agenda is being brought into question by Plato himself.

The Symposium does not follow the typical pattern of many other dialogues--beginning with a problem, the throwaway mention of a few examples, then the invocation of the need for a definition, the work toward which forms the body of the dialogue, and then the admission of failure and expression of humility at the end. My reading reveals the Symposium to have a structure similar to those others though less overt, and suggests the endings of those others might be taken in a new and more serious way.

Further, there is something right about the speech of Alcibiades if it is regarded as the last word. There are important characteristics of love which are not included in the earlier parts of the Symposium, and those characteristics are not ones which could be included in a Platonistic definitional account. When we think about love, and about trying to give an account of love, the events of a particular love and the feelings of vulnerability, despair, elation, of being held in thrall, of yearning, of compulsion to pursue the beloved, of embarrassment--all these are foreign to an account of love as a begatting on Beauty. The phenomenology of love overwhelms and washes away the intellectual account of love. Plato may mean to do this.

Given this approach to this dialogue, one may then ask about the agenda of definition, for which Platonic dialogues have served as a model for much of 2300 years of philosophical work. The Symposium develops an account of love we can articulate which is at one with the traditional account we get of Plato's metaphysics and epistemology. Diotima's speech is an Ur-Cave myth. Indeed, given that account we can read the speech of Alcibiades as an example or illustration of part of that account--Alcibiades is someone who is stuck at an intermediate level in the ascent of love, an ascent in which Socrates by contrast has achieved an almost impossibly higher level. But we can also read the speech differently, as one which calls into question the task of giving such a definition and which reminds us that our understanding in these matters is not so great, and perhaps is not even helped by the attempt to give a definitional account.

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