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Knowledge of Beauty in Plato's Symposium Author(S): Ludwig CH Chen Source Knowledge of Beauty in Plato's Symposium Author(s): Ludwig C. H. Chen Source: The Classical Quarterly, New Series, Vol. 33, No. 1 (1983), pp. 66-74 Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of The Classical Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/638647 Accessed: 12/09/2008 18:51 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=cup. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit organization founded in 1995 to build trusted digital archives for scholarship. We work with the scholarly community to preserve their work and the materials they rely upon, and to build a common research platform that promotes the discovery and use of these resources. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. The Classical Association and Cambridge University Press are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Classical Quarterly. http://www.jstor.org Classical Quarterly 33 (i) 66-74 (1983) Printed in Great Britain 66 KNOWLEDGE OF BEAUTY IN PLATO'S SYMPOSIUM I Plato's Symposium consists of six speeches on Eros with the addition of Alcibiades' praise of Socrates. Of these speeches Socrates' speech is philosophically most important. It is true that the speech is given as a report of Diotima's view on Eros, but 'she is a double of the Platonic Socrates',' and we take her view as the theory of Socrates in this dialogue.2 Early in his speech it is asserted that Eros is intermediate between wise and ignorant, beautiful and ugly (good and evil), and mortal and immortal.3 Stripped of the mythological disguise, the lover (now a human, not the demon) is intermediate in these three cases, and strives for the knowledge of beauty, beauty itself and immortality, respectively.4 Here are three aims in our dialogue. Let the first of them be called a cognitive aim and the last two ontic aims. The three aims are not of equal importance, and their relative priority is as follows. The final goal, from the beginning to the end of Socrates' speech, is beauty. In order to possess it everlastingly, there is the need to strive for immortality.5 It turns out that of the three forms of immortality6 the highest one, if it is possible for the lover, results from his creation of real virtue and not from the creation of its shadows.7 The latter is due to the divine gift,8 and the former to knowledge.9 Hence there is the striving for the knowledge of beauty or good. To sum up, immortality is the condition of everlasting possession of beauty or good, and the knowledge of the latter is a means to the immortality possible in the highest form. The series begins with striving for the knowledge of beauty. From the interrelationship among the three aims it is seen that the cognitive aim can be treated alone with occasional reference to the two ontic aims. This is what we are going to do in the following. II 1.a. a. The steps in striving for the third form of immortality are mingled with the steps of cognitive striving until the last step. The first step in both cases has beautiful bodies for its objects. The pursuer of beauty should know that beauty in all beautiful W. C. K. Guthrie, A History of Greek Philosophy iv (Cambridge, 1975), p. 385. 2 Throughoutthis paper by 'Socrates' is meant the speakerSocrates in Plato's dialogues withoutany implicationof an answerto the problemof the historicalSocrates. 3 202a2-9; b1-5; d 10-e 1. Cf. W. Kranz, 'Diotima von Mantineia', Hermes 61 (1926), 440; he gives more cases which do not concern us here. 4 The lover being intermediate in these cases does not have wisdom (knowledge of the good and, therefore, also of the beautiful) and beauty and is not immortal. Hence he strives for them (cf. the general account of erO7t0vLEv 200a 5 if.), and makes an effort to possess them (cf. 204e 2-4). 5 i.e., the possessor himself must be deathless; hence there is the striving for immortality. 6 The three forms are immortality in the form of prolongation of the life of the race, 207 a 6-208 b 6; in the form of leaving behind oneself everlasting fame, 208c l-209e4; in the highest form resulting from creating real virtue based upon the knowledge of beauty or good 210al-212a7. 7 212a3-5. 8 7ravro[aaperw created by statesmen (209d4-e3) is OVrE fvtEL OVT?tE aLKTOV,aAAa OEL[a /Ioitpa 7rapayLyvotFevr1avEv vov.... (Men. 99 e 5-100 a2). 9 Philosophic virtue is based upon wisdom, as is known from earlier dialogues; see especially the last argument for the inaccurately formulated thesis that virtue is knowledge in Prot. 359a2-360e5. BEAUTY IN PLATO'S SYMPOSIUM 67 bodies is one and the same. But, at the beginning, the pursuer has not come as far as he will later; what he actually realizes at the present moment is only that the beauty in this body is akin (adelphon)to the beauty in that body.'0 The beauties in these bodies are not a single beauty and the beautiful bodies are also different bodies, as is seen in the case of twins.1 The lover concentrates on the fact that this body has the same quality as that body; the object of his knowledge is really this or that beautiful body as deindividualized, i.e., without regard for its possessor (e.g., Alcibiades, Charmides). Consequently, he loves all these bodies indifferently, not the beauty-in-all-bodies as such. 12 Next comes the beauty in souls. He regards it as higher in value than the beauty in bodies. Yet what he loves is the beautiful souls of young men and not the beauty-in-all-souls as such, because he creates beautiful discourses to improve these youths in virtue, i.e., to make their beautiful souls more beautiful, not the supposed identical beauty within the 'level' of beautiful souls.13 Hence what the lover has in mind is still beautiful instances. Next to beautiful souls are beautiful institutions and laws.14 The same thing happens 10 210b3. Ev TE Ka TrarVTV.. .TO ml Trarov Troi aoULaal KcaAAosis what the lover should know b2-3, but what he at present actually thinks is OT rT6KaAAos TrO 4rt orcTovv aCUOIaT Tr) rE7TLETEpp awUiaTL a8,EA0qv oCTL 210a8-b 1. I take TOVTO in 210b4 as referringto a8-b 1 not to b2-3, the latter being inserted as a parenthesis to explain what the pursuer of TOCrX' ElSEt KaAO,vshould know, not what he at present does. If it refers to b2-3, it is in conflict with avyyeves in c5 and rTvE& in 211b 5. 'Akin' is Jowett's translation of a3EA6ov; more exact is Schleiermacher's' verschwistert' in German; cf. also Robin's translation into French: 'soeur [de la beaute]' (Le Banquet (Assoc. Bude), Paris, 1926, p. 68). 11 J. M. E. Moravcsik, 'Reason and Eros in the "Ascent s-Passage of the Symposium', in Anton and Kustos, Essays in Ancient Greek Philosophy (Albany, N.Y., 1971), pp. 287-8, finds his pattern of R-steps in 'first, reasoning recognizing common features of a plurality of instances, and isolating the common element and grasping its unity'. After quoting R. G. Bury, The Symposium of Plato (Cambridge, 2nd ed. 1932), p. xlii, he continues: 'It is crucial to note, however, that... the relation between unities on any given plane and their instances is not the " only one and many" relation described in the passage. For in addition to seeing the unity within each level, the mind has to grasp that all the levels are "akin"; they are, one might say, species of beauty.' Though Moravcsik emphasizes the second relation (to which we shall return; see n. 23), for the moment we shall concentrate on the first point - which he takes for granted. He finds a 'unity within each level'. This supposed unity is questionable. In his Rl, 288, the lover recognizes only that the relation among the instances is daEA,ov. Even twin brothers are not a single person and their characteristics, though similar, are not a single characteristic; no matter how much they are like each other, their relation is not one of identity. There is no unity to replace a8?EA0ovElvaI. The lover realizes no more than this 'Verschwistertsein' among beautiful bodies; he does not realize the beauty as such in all beautiful bodies. Otherwise he would love one and the same KaAAoscmr nraatv roig acwucaacinstead of KaraaTrivai 7rTcvrwvTrcV KaA,v a a-rcowv Epaarrbv (210b4-5). One may compare the Laches: when the general has been made to understand the nature of the question, he gives a definition of courage as such, not of its instances distributively (192 b 5-c 1). To return to our dialogue, when the lover advances to love beautiful institutions and laws, he still grasps only their avyyeveLa (210c3-5) and not the yevos; being avyyeve is not the same as being one and the same genus.
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