Being ignorant

“Symposium” by Plato was the “final moment of Athenian Splendor” and it was written twenty years after the death of Socrates. The dialogue begins where an unindentified friend asks Apollodorus to ask to give an account of the drinking party when Socrates was present.

This is wonderfully captured in “The Greek Search for Wisdom” by Michael K. Kellogg.

Agathon

“The parody suitable to a drinking party does not end with Agathon's speech. Even Socrates's usual irony is magnified as in a fun-house mirror. He first claims that he has been “struck dumb” by the “beauty of the words and phrases” invoked by Agathon. Since Socrates is never struck dumb, we are primed for what follows. He then acknowledges that he should not have agreed to give a speech in praise of Eros. “In my foolishness,” he says, “I thought you should tell the truth about whatever you praise.” But now it appears that to praise is simply to apply “the grandest and the most beautiful qualities” without any concern for whether they are true or false.”I'm not giving another eulogy using that method, not at all – I wouldn't be able to do it! – but, if you wish, I'd like to tell the truth my way.” Socrates's “way” of praising Eros, he explains, is to “select the most beautiful truths and arrange them most suitably.” In other words, we will not hear any ugly truths about Eros -he will leave those to Aristophanes – but only those that are most beautiful and most suitable to the discourse at hand. It is clear that Socrates plans to transcend the base world of comedy and focus on the spiritual aspects of Eros, but without sacrificing truth to fine phrases.

Yet Socrates begins not with a speech but with his usual method of interrogation, a method suitable perhaps for the marketplace, but out of place at a drinking party among friends. Through his questioning, he gets Agathon to admit that Eros is a desire for something, rather than nothing, and that when we desire something it is because we currently lack it. A sick man desires to be well, a poor man to be rich, a weak man to be strong. To

www.capitalideasonline.com Page - 1 Being ignorant

the extent we can be said to desire qualities we already have (such as health, wealth, strength), we desire to have these things in the future as well as now. The objects of a man's love and desire, therefore, are “what is not at hand and not present, what he does not have, and what he is not, and that of which he is in need.”

Socrates

With this premise established, Socrates forces Agathon to admit that, because Eros longs for beauty, Eros must not be beautiful nor possess any of the other desirable qualities Agathon attributed to him. “It turns out, Socrates,” Agathon finally and with surprising good nature admits, “I didn't know what I was talking about”. “It was a beautiful speech, anyway, Agathon,” responds Socrates.

This harsh treatment of the soft and gracious Agathon, in which Socrates's already heightened irony flows into sarcasm, is surprising. But Plato is making clear that the stakes are now high indeed and that he will use all the weapons he has at hand. Agathon is the beloved of the Athenian audience. He wears the victor's crown awarded by the same multitude that would later judge and condemn Socrates. Agathon represents not just the theater but also the democratic assembly and the jury system, the entire realm of uninformed public acclaim and public condemnation in which rhetoric and fine phrases, rather than truth, hold sway over a senseless crowd.

www.capitalideasonline.com Page - 2 Being ignorant

Diotima

Apollodorus

Yet Socrates immediately softens his criticism by noting that he too once shared Agathon's view that Eros “is a great god and that he belongs to beautiful things.” Socrates proceeds to describe his own instruction many years before in the art of love by Diotima, a wise woman from Mantinea. At this point, then, we are reading Plato's written record of Apollodorus's retelling of Aristodemus's report of Socrates's account of the teaching of Diotima. Why is her original teaching filtered through four separate, inevitably distorting lenses? Why, moreover, does Plato soon make clear that Diotima herself is an invention of Socrates, by having her respond directly to Aristophanes's account of Eros? In part, the indirection and misdirection is in keeping with the playful mood of Symposium. In part, it underscores the already-noted fact that Socrates himself left no written record of his thoughts and, hence, that such a record must be painstakingly reconstructed (or reinvented) by Plato. In part, it reflects the inaccessibility of the higher mysteries of Eros. And, in part, it is a device that allows Plato to go beyond Socrates in his exploration of these ultimate mysteries.

www.capitalideasonline.com Page - 3 Being ignorant

Aristophanes

Diotima begins, as did Aristophanes, with myth. She leads Socrates to understand, as Socrates led Agathon, that Eros is full of longing precisely because he lacks me good things for which he longs. The beautiful and the good are objects of desire, not attributes of desire. Eros is therefore a lover, not a beloved. More surprisingly, she stresses that Eros is not a god at all. For the gods are immortal and already possess beauty and all good things. They stand in need of nothing. Eros was the child of Penia (poverty) and Poros (resourcefulness), himself the son of Metis (cunning). Eros is poor, barefoot, and homeless, but tough and resilient. He is a “schemer after me beautiful and the good.” Although not a god, neither is Eros human, but rather a spirit, or daimon, linking gods with men and serving as an intermediary between the two. He is neither beautiful nor ugly, neither rich nor wholly destitute, neither mortal nor immortal (for although he dies he is constantly reborn), but always somewhere between the two. Most important, Eros stands between wisdom and ignorance. The gods are already wise and hence do not long for wisdom. The common run of men are ignorant, but they too do not long for wisdom because they do not even recognize its absence – “of course you won't want what you don't think you need.” They are content in their darkness and intellectual poverty.

Eros is in love with what is beautiful, and wisdom is the most beautiful of all good things. We use the word Eros too narrowly, Diotima tells us, if it is limited to sexual passion. “Every desire for good things or for happiness is 'the supreme and treacherous love' in everyone.” Some pursue it in sports, others in making money, or through war or politics or art. Eros drives them all. Diotima broadens the context in which love holds sway to the whole spectrum of human life, within which sexual passion is but one shading. Most of us are stuck in the realm of earthly comedy: ugly, base, and ignorant. But Eros also calls us to something higher. “Everything spiritual, you see,” Diotima explains, “is in between god and mortal.”

Socrates, however, poses the fundamental Aristophanean question: “What use is Love to human beings?” For Aristophanes, love is simply an irrational compulsion, which is inescapable because it is fundamental to our

www.capitalideasonline.com Page - 4 Being ignorant

natures. Diotima, as Socrates playfully recounts, anticipates Aristophanes's speech (many years before it is given); “there is a certain story,” she explains, “according to which lovers are those people who seek their other halves.” But we do not seek simply “what belongs to us,” for we would shun what belongs to us if we found it harmful, even cutting off a limb if it was diseased. “What everyone loves is really nothing other than the good.” We seek good things because we think they will bring us eudaimonia, a word usually translated as happiness, but more broadly indicating human flourishing or living and faring well. “There's no need to ask further, 'What's the point of wanting happiness?”' Diotima explains, because eudaimonia is an end in itself. Eudaimonia is by definition what all men seek, and our task is to determine the proper components of human flourishing, of living a full and complete life.

Virginia Woolf

Diotima addresses that question by noting that “mortal nature seeks so far as possible to live forever and be immortal.” The “real purpose of love,” she explains, is “giving birth in beauty, whether in body or in soul.” Some seek such immortality in offspring, which is why parents, both human and animal, so fiercely defend their young. Others are pregnant in their souls and bring forth the arts and the crafts or focus upon “the proper ordering of cities and households.” They channel their creative urges, their desire to make beauty permanent, into works of art and craftsmanship, into laws and institutions that outlive them. We “look up to Homer, Hesiod, and the other good poets with envy and admiration for the offspring they have left behind – offspring, which, because they are immortal themselves, provide their parents with immortal glory and remembrance.” “This is our triumph; this is our consolation,” as Virginia Woolf would later write. Yet highest of all, Diotima explains, is the use of logos (reason) to strive for knowledge and understanding, and thereby to participate in what is immortal and unchanging. Logos is our greatest gift, and we must respect and nature this gift above all others. The most important component of eudaimonia is the search for wisdom, the mastery of logos.

We see, then, yet another reason why Diotima rather than Socrates is the main speaker at this point. Diotima is

www.capitalideasonline.com Page - 5 Being ignorant

necessary to allow Socrates to praise himself in praising Eros, just as Agathon indirectly praised himself in his own speech. Man's essential nature – which Socrates more than any other has realized – is Eros, poised between the ugly and the beautiful, the base and the noble, the mortal and the immortal, between ignorance and wisdom. Socrates, like Eros, is barefoot and poor, yet tough and resilient. He is effectively homeless, rejected and condemned by his own polis. He is notoriously homely yet full of spiritual beauty. Most important of all, Socrates has enough self-knowledge to recognize his own ignorance. As such, he is a lover of wisdom (i.e., a philosopher). That is why he can claim, consistent with his professions of ignorance, that he understands Eros better than anything else. His knowledge of Eros is self-knowledge, which is in turn knowledge of his own state of longing for the wisdom he does not possess. For each of the speakers, and Socrates most of all, Eros has been a mirror held up to show their deepest concerns.

But Socrates, by his own admission, falls short of “the final and highest mystery.” The extent of Socratic wisdom is his realization of ignorance. He needs Diotima (and Plato) to lead him any further. “I don't know if you are capable of it,” she warns, but “you must try to follow if you can.”

www.capitalideasonline.com Page - 6