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The End of Love? Questioning Technocracy in Plato's Symposium

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The End of Love? Questioning Technocracy in Plato's Symposium AS ORIGENS DO PENSAMENTO OCIDENTAL THE ORIGINS OF WESTERN THOUGHT ARTIGO I ARTICLE The End of Love? Questioning technocracy in Plato’s Symposium Philip Krinks i https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5428-6516 [email protected] i The Centre for Theology & Community – London – UK KRINKS, P. (2020). The End of Love? Questioning technocracy in Plato’s Symposium. Archai 29, e02906. Abstract: Plato’s Symposium contains two accounts of eros which explicitly aim to reach a telos. The first is the technocratic account of the doctor Eryximachus, who seeks an exhaustive account of eros, common to all things with a physical nature. For him medical techne can create an orderly erotic harmony; while religion is defined as the curing of disorderly eros. Against this Socrates recounts the priestess Diotima finding a telos, not in technical exhaustiveness, but in a https://doi.org/10.14195/1984-249X_29_6 [1] 2 Rev. Archai (ISSN: 1984-249X), n. 29, Brasília, 2020, e02906. dialectical definition of eros in the light of the good. What is common to all human beings is the desire to be in eternal relation to the good. All technai are forms of poiesis, by which things pass from being to not being. The erotic harmony recommended by Eryximachus, no less than the Aristophanes” recommendation of eros as “of a half, or of a whole’, is subject to the question whether “it happens to be good’. A self-harmonisation produced by techne can no more evade the sovereignty of good, than can projects of self-completion with a beloved in our likeness. Keywords: techne, telos, eros, Plato, Diotima. Introduction Plato’s Symposium is attended by at least one professed technocrat: Eryximachus, the doctor, whose central observation about eros is drawn from “our techne, medicine” (186a8). He takes that as his starting-point, “so as to give honour to techne” (186b3; Edelstein, 1945, p. 90 & n. 10). For Eryximachus, one benefit of applying a technical, and indeed technocratic, perspective, is to shed light on the defined limits of eros. Eros is, first of all, contrary to the assumption of Pausanias, the previous speaker, to be found “in the souls of human beings towards those are beautiful (kalous)” (186a5). This is a more realistic approach to the role of beauty than Pausanias took, even if Eryximachus will not discuss beauty in any sustained way. More significantly Eryximachus sees eros as of enormous breadth: for it is found not only in human souls, “but so to speak in everything which exists” (186a7). A approach based on techne, he suggests, will allow him to develop an account of the necessary breadth during the rest of his speech (185e6-188e5). Thus he will overcome the problem he found to afflict the approach of Pausanias, who, he says, “although he set out well in his discourse, did not THE END OF LOVE? 3 sufficiently bring it to a telos – so it is necessary for me to try and put a telos on the discourse” (186a1-2). Later in the dialogue the primacy of techne is put in question by the priestess Diotima in a passage of the speech of Socrates (204d3- 206a13). Although parts of this passage have been widely discussed, its relation to the speech of Eryximachus has been largely missed. Yet multiple points of contact are signalled in the text. Firstly Diotima agrees that there is a need for discourse about eros to reach a telos; even if for her this telos is a matter of dialectical coherence, rather than an exhaustive survey. Questions about eros will require an answer which relates it to the good: only such an answer can be complete, and “have a telos” (205a3). Secondly Diotima disagrees also as to the relevant breadth of eros. For her, eros, like poiesis, is of enormous but different breadth, as “the whole desire for good things and flourishing found in everyone” – the usual narrower usage of the word eros for those desires relating to “procreation and giving birth” (206e5) notwithstanding. Thirdly, while Eryximachus” speech articulates the 4th century perspective which had increasingly sought to “use the techniques of the newly developing sciences to make progress” (Nussbaum 2001.84), for Diotima techne is a category unexcitingly contained within poiesis (205b8-c1). Diotima then concludes this section of her discussion with Socrates by asserting the primacy of good over the technically- produced erotic harmony praised by Eryximachus, along with the desired reunification with a lost “other half” considered by Aristophanes. The good is therefore both that to which all eros is oriented, in its desire for eternal relation to it, and the criterion against which desire and its objects should be judged. Only in this understanding will an adequate telos be reached. 4 Rev. Archai (ISSN: 1984-249X), n. 29, Brasília, 2020, e02906. Eryximachus” Critique Of Pausanias The previous speaker, Pausanias, had come, as the text punningly emphasises, to a pause: “Pausaniou pausamenou” (185c5). Eryximachus offers a cure which will “pause” (pausetai 185e3, c.f. 185d2) the hiccups affecting the next speaker, Aristophanes. This more than by-play: the distinction between a pause and aiming for the more complete end constituted by a telos will be at the heart of Eryximachus” speech, as he suggested in his criticism of Pausanias” lack of a telos (186a1-2). But what does Eryximachus think a completion, or telos, involves? For Phaedrus, the first speaker in the dialogue, the completion which mattered was the ideal end of a hero’s life and what followed. For Pausanias the relevant completion was the intellectual and physical maturity of the adolescent through the education achieved in Athenian homosexual relationships. For Erxyimachus, however, the central notion is exhaustiveness: he holds that eros exists, not only in the souls of human beings towards beautiful people, but also towards many other things and in other things, in the bodies of all living creatures and in things which grow in the earth and, so to speak, in everything which exists (pasi tois ousi)… (186a4-7) Eryximachus’ intention is to drastically broaden the field of discussion: from the presence of eros (whether single or double) in human beings, as Phaedrus and Pausanias had suggested, to all of nature. Certainly the exhaustiveness extends to sexual orientation. Pausanias’ defence left most eros (including all heterosexual eros) standing explicitly unpraised. He broadened his discussion beyond Phaedrus’ focus, but it was still true that on his account only a homosexual lover with a beloved of just the right age, of which Pausanias’ own relationship with the younger Agathon is of course an example (Dover 1980.3, 96), could love well. Pausanias’ defence THE END OF LOVE? 5 failed to come to a completion by being too narrow: too narrowly homosexual (Corrigan and Glazov-Corrigan 2004.66), as well as too city-specific. Yet, even as Eryximachus aims to bring his own account to completion, he finds its limit when he reaches it not wholly satisfactory. His words “so to speak, in everything which exists” are consistent with two different ontologies. Are physical objects, including souled human beings, the entirety of all which exists? All bodies and living things is not necessarily the same as everything. To assume so would restrict ontology to exclude gods, as well as the daimones which will play a role in Diotima’s account. Eryimachus speaks of “giving the first place (presbeuomen) to techne”. These are words full of ambiguity. The transitive use of presbeuomen means, literally, to put first in rank, but it has theological overtones of sacralised honour, and even worship. In Athenian tragedy the word had been used for honour paid to a mother’s name (Sophocles Trachiniae 1065), paid to a tomb (Aeschylus Choephoroi 488) and even to the goddess, Gaia, as put first in prayer (Aeschylus Eumenides 1). Whether it is medical techne or all techne which is exalted is left ambiguous. Neither of these ambiguities will prove irrelevant to Eryximachus’ intent. Eros As Empedoclean Cosmic Force For Eryximachus to re-commit to a “double” (186a3) account, focused on physis (nature), exhaustive in extent, of an eros taken to be pervasive, cannot help but recall Empedocles’ poem Peri Physeos (On Nature, Diels-Kranz B17). The textual echoes between the opening lines of Erxyimachus’ speech and the longest surviving fragment of the poem are distinct: a diploun (double) account (186a3, cf. dipl’ B17.1, 2); a contrast between that which is one and monon (alone: 186a4, cf. B17.1); that which is true of polla (many, 186a5) or pleonon (B17.2); and that again which is true of all things (pasi 186a6, panton B17.4) which are naturally growing (phumenois 186a7, diaphuomenon B17.5). 6 Rev. Archai (ISSN: 1984-249X), n. 29, Brasília, 2020, e02906. Thus Eryximachus’ remark places his speech in the context of Empedocles’ efforts to solve Parmenidean problems about how change in the universe is possible (Barnes, 1979, p. 6-9). Empedocles sought to do this, not with eros as such, but with philotes (love). Like eros as conceived by Eryximachus, philotes was for Empedocles a pervasive, basic, general and eternal associative force, responsible along with disassociative neikos for apparent changes in the physical universe (Robin, 1929, p. lxi; Guthrie, 1965, p. 205; Ludwig, 2002, p. 71). Eryximachus wishes to assimilate the role of eros to the role of Empedoclean philotes (Ludwig, 2002, p. 136-139, Edelstein, 1945, p. 91, 94). Eryximachus is throwing in his lot with a thinker who was committed to find what was the cause of what, in a mode much closer than the contributions of Phaedrus and Pausanias to the contemporary scientific understanding of causes and explanations.
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