The gravity of eros in the contemporary

The Socratic Symposia

These articles were associated with the Fifth Socratic Symposium, organized by the journal International Political Anthropology and the Marsilio Ficino Association for Neo-Renaissance Studies (three were part of the six papers presented, while the fourth was written for the occasion). The ‘Socratic Symposia’ are organized by a group of social scientists – sociologists, political scientists, anthropologists – who became convinced, following up hints by among others Foucault, Voegelin, Jan Patocka and Gregory Bateson, about the vital contemporary relevance of Plato’s thinking. Plato was the first European thinker to produce a body of writings that survived in its entirety and is discussed up till now. Still, time and again his work became ignored and bypassed in two opposite and yet closely related ways: he is either canonized, dogmatically, as the founder of philosophical idealism, the source of rationalist philosophy; or is reviled as an eternal utopian. Thus, with a series of symposia organized each year since 2006 on Plato’s birthday (7 November) around a single Platonic dialogue, we attempt to think the present through the ideas of Plato.

The dialogues selected so far form a kind of symphonic structure, sharing a complementary focus. The First Symposium was devoted to the Ion, with the emphasis placed on mimetic art. For the second, we selected the Statesman, focusing on the problems created by the contagious proliferation of mimetic politics in democratic Athens, with politicians resembling, in Plato’s vision, satyrs and centaurs (Statesman 291A–B, 303C–D), and the possibility of the emergence of real statesmen. ² The Third Symposium discussed the Timaeus, focusing on the notion of Place or Space [khóra], which renders possible every genesis, but also the materialization of its falsifications. The fourth, devoted to the Sophist, discussed the Mask as a symptom of imitativeness. Plato there directly tackles the paradox of nothingness, or how and why to discuss something that does not exist. Ontological and existential nothingness belongs to the very nature of the Sophist, who possesses the remarkable ability of representing and thus conjuring up the non-existent as local and vice versa. Plato emphasizes that false statements may seem to be true, thus calling attention to the fact that our understanding of reality can be just as problematic as that of non-reality. We also explored the parallels between Plato and Weber, partly concerning charisma, and partly through the manifold resonances between the Statesman and the Sophist, on the one hand, two dialogues that closely belong together, and Weber’s two famous lectures on politics and science as vocations, on the other. The Fifth Symposium turned to the Symposium itself, in order to provide a new angle on the debate on love, focusing on the formative and transformative, thus also educative, aspects of eros. This was followed in the sixth through a close reading of some selected passages of the Laws, focusing on a related dimension in Plato’s thought: how the mind functions according to one’s emotions, through the example of mass sensations generated by theatrical performances, especially comedy, or the transformation of democracy into a theatrocracy. The Seventh Symposium, held in 2012, was on the Philebus, where the discussion concerning the primacy of reason or pleasure is conducted through Plato’s famous methodos, which is by no means ‘method’ in the neo-Kantian sense, concerning the one, the many, the limit [peras] and the unlimited [apeiron], the latter being a way to thematize becoming and nothingness, and resulting in the primacy accorded to measure, which can be translated as ratio in the sense of proportionality, in contrast to the preference accorded to an empty free space.

The Symposium

The Symposium is, and has always been, one of the most popular and influential dialogues of Plato. ³ This is certainly due to its theme, but also to the fact that – in contrast to dialogues considered as obscure, like the Philebus, or supposedly dry, not dialogical, like the Sophist or the Statesman – it is very engaging. However, the easy intelligibility of the dialogue is deceptive, and Plato goes out of his way, by a very elaborate introductory staging, to warn the reader that more is there than meets the eye.

Such warnings, however, were hardly heeded, and the reception history of the dialogue is mostly a history of misunderstanding – much of which is not even benevolent. ⁴ Over the long centuries, two opposite readings became dominant, indicating a ‘schismogenic’ process (Bateson). On the one hand, the Symposium was interpreted, by opponents of Platonic thinking, primarily Sophists, as the eulogy of a characteristic drunken philosophical orgy – strangely recalling the manner in which the Christian agape was treated in the early centuries AD. On the other, defenders of Plato, like Ficino, were as if forced to argue that Plato rather promoted a purely spiritual kind of love, alien to any bodily contact; the life-hostile ‘Platonic love’, which similarly misreads the text. Such distortions of Plato’s thinking were transmitted to Europe during the Quattrocento, around the 1453 sack of Constantinople, by the Byzantine dotti [learned men], received as the wise sages of the East, but who sold as the deep truth both esoteric and exoteric speculations cultivated in the Byzantine court society by long generations of court intellectuals and sophists. ⁵

The reason why such misreading has not been cleared up until today is partly due to the force of tradition, especially as the enormous influence of the Byzantine world on European thought has never been properly understood; and partly through the character of contemporary philosophy. Philosophers bred on centuries of Cartesian logic and Kantian analytics, arguably themselves versions of sophistic thinking, being very distant from Plato’s thinking, focus on the discursive argumentation of the text, and in this regard find the Symposium wanting. This is because they consider the elaborate, mediated, theatrical and mythological setting of the dialogue as purely negative, a diversion from the central argument of the text. However, as all the articles of this special section agree, the set-up of the dialogue is very much part of its substance. Without attention to this, and understanding the reasons for Plato’s way of proceeding, the text becomes a series of decontextualized pieces of argumentation, whose meaning can easily be turned to its opposite.

Our aim is to draw out its contemporary relevance, in the tradition of Dilthey’s and Weber’s Verstehen, starting with its exact theme. In plain English, the dialogue is about ‘love’. However, staying there would mean to read it through two millennia of Christian interpretation of love, immediately distorting the original meaning – and we need this original meaning in order to render Plato’s ideas relevant as both a diagnostic tool and an orienting concept today, including its genuine, vital importance towards the very development of the Christian idea concerning the converting power of love. The dialogue is rather about eros as a force generating devotion or subservience, and in order to understand the difference and persistent freshness of Plato’s ideas, we need to reconstruct the context in which they were set.

However, before embarking on such an exercise, we must realize that the dialogue is not simply about the truth concerning eros. It also claims to offer a full, true picture of Socrates. The central part of the new, true image is presented, in a highly theatrical manner, through a speech by Alcibiades; but other and similarly theatrical aspects of the dialogue also contribute much to this picture. This immediately opens up an entire series of questions concerning the need for such a new image. And here one must immediately realize that the two, seemingly so separate themes are tightly connected, as the image presented of Socrates is stunningly close to the way the dialogue depicts eros. The most important similarity concerns the in-between character of both, warning about the difficulty of coming to terms with them, as the in-between is always hazy, indefinite, uncertain, and can be captured truthfully only in a roundabout manner. The ‘object’ and ‘subject’ of the dialogue, eros and Socrates, just as its form and its substance, the message and the reasons for the message, are all tightly interrelated, forming a whole that must be approached most carefully, where understanding assumes the use of careful hermeneutical and genealogical methods, otherwise one risks the imposing of an arbitrary, dogmatic meaning, failing to make use of the strikingly fresh intellectual power packed inside this deceptively casual work of philosophy and art.

All four articles in the special section approach the dialogue in this spirit, trying to unearth some vital insights that Plato can offer, through his understanding of the crisis of Athens, and its significance for human life on this planet, for our contemporary times, the ‘gravity of eros’ in our present.

Plato’s eros in context

Eros is one of the most elusive divine figures of Greek mythology. The name has no etymology; it does not appear as a divinity in Homer, only in Hesiod; has few places of cult; and its features are imprecise. However, where it appears, it is considered as one of the oldest deities, assigned the role of a founder of culture, specifically linked to the foundation of cities, even to the foundation of Athens, through Athena, and its main cults are also considered as archaic (Fasce, 1977).

The features of eros in Greek mythology and thought are fuzzy due to its fundamental ambivalence, being an elementary, irresistible force (in this capacity already appearing in Homer), which produces both incomparable pleasures and sufferings. The discrepancy between Homer and Hesiod signals that it took a considerable work of mythic thought to generate a personalized deity who could represent this primordial but highly ambivalent force. Poets of the classical period, like Alcman and Sappho, brought about a further personalization through the poetic formulation of the experience of being assailed by the pleasures and terrors of love, leading Sappho to invent the word ‘bittersweet’. The ambivalence of eros is particularly clear through its representations in the visual arts: Eros is male, but full of effeminate features, and so also often represented as a hermaphrodite; he is winged, but also shows chthonic features, through his robe and Phrygian cap.

The Sophists further ‘humanized’ this deity, though in a very particular and highly problematic manner, as they broke the unity of the figure into two opposite extremes, in line with Plato’s claim that the Sophists cannot think the in-between, thus are forced to think in dualisms, jumping too quickly from the one to the many and back (Philebus 17A). On the one hand, they exalted, out of context and beyond limits, the pleasures associated with erotic experiences, giving rise to an entire literature of ‘erotic stories’ [logoi erotikoi], which would eventually give rise to the erotic novels of the Hellenistic period that would be revived, in two waves, in Byzantium. On the other hand, however, the Sophists presented erotic desire as an external force that shows no mercy to human beings, irresistibly overpowering them, as in the Encomium of Helen by Gorgias, who absolves her from all guilt, blaming rather the divine. With this, the Sophists not only ignored the in-betweenness of eros, destroying the unity of human experience, preaching self-abandon and undermining the care of the self, but also alienated their audience from the divine, represented as a blind or even explicitly hostile external force that requires only unconditional devotion. One can immediately perceive the parallels with modernity, like the thinking of Freud, who similarly externalized eros as the libido, an irresistible force completely outside human beings, whose ‘repression’ generates intolerable psychic pressures, resulting in various pathological symptoms, thus exonerating those who used this theory to justify giving up their integrity.

This is the context in which Plato partially returns to the archaic and classic characterization of eros [passionate devotion] as an in-between force, characterizing it not as a deity, but a daimon (Fasce, 1977: 183–8; Osborne, 1994: 108–10), thus going beyond not just the Sophist dualism, but the assertion of an irredeemable ambivalence as well, proposing Eros as a converting force. Conversion is a term usually associated with Christianity. However, while the idea is not present in the Old Testament, it draws on an old European tradition, particularly present in Minoan Crete (Szakolczai, 2007), while the full theoretization of conversion was connected to the thinking of Plato (Foucault, Hadot), in particular the ‘turning around’ [periagoge] of the Republic (Voegelin). It is exactly here that the Symposium breaks new ground.

In the famous cave scene at the beginning of book VII of the Republic the turning around, or leaving the cave and ascending to light, is due to an external compulsion that literally forces one to leave the cave (Barney, 2008). It is this negative external force that in the Symposium is replaced by the positive force of eros. However, as the articles try to show, Plato is extremely careful in specifying what kind of eros can produce a positive converting force. This assumes a connection with beauty, to be sure, as beauty is fundamental to move the human soul; but such beauty is not to be searched for in the object of one’s love, as that would remain a mere desire for possession, but incorporates an overall concern and care for beauty at the level of the entire surrounding environment, which can be conducive to the elevation of the soul towards the contemplation or beholding of the essence of beauty, and thus, beyond possessing an object, to perpetuate beauty by engendering beings that are beautiful – children as well as objects or works of art. Plato makes here no distinction whatsoever between the body and the soul or mind, ideas or physical objects, human, animate or inanimate beings, rather connects a phenomenology of the world as full of beauty (a cosmos not a chaos) to the conversion of the human soul to the proliferation of beauty; two concerns so well captured by the term ‘epiphany’. The meaning is that only by becoming thoroughly permeated with the beauty of the world can one develop a kind of love that escapes one’s own limited self, with its wishes and desires for exclusive possession, and rather start living a spiral of giving through engendering in beauty.

The converting power of love, however, as the articles by Horvath and Szakolczai emphasize, can work both ways. It can elevate, but can also bring down; just as a spiral can move upward or downward, once the Pandora’s box of the unlimited is opened up. Love implies an opening-up and emptying of the self, rendering one vulnerable; it sets up a relationship of influencing and thus power that can be used and thus abused consciously. Capturing the problem of an irresistible external force from the opposite side, eros might become a means for manipulation, turning an in-between into a tool. Whoever manages not simply to seduce another person, but also to inculcate a loving devotion, gains almost unlimited control over that other person, thus starting a spiral in the opposite direction: instead of elevating, through beauty, to giving and creating, provoking a descent into the hell of dependency, subjugation, destruction and sacrifice.

The article by Agnes Horvath offers an interpretive understanding of communism, derived from Plato’s analysis of eros. The central idea is that the capacity of eros to fluidify or liquidate borderlines can be instrumentalized by purposefully inciting devotion and thus fixating it towards an ideology. The striking lifespan of communist parties, with the enormous and sudden success of mobilization after world wars and the similarly comet-like disappearance due to exhaustion, leaving only a void and a general sense of lethargy, can be explained by arguing that they experimented with such techniques of seduction for political purposes on a mass scale. This implies first the evocation of an oceanic, blissful feeling of happiness, luring large segments of the population into emptying of oneself, abandoning integrity, helped by the situation of devastation and suffering. Apart from generating blind devotion, the inciting of such expectations also helped to perpetuate the liminal conditions, while after a time the failure to meet expectations was ruefully turned against those who were caught by the enchanting tricks, generating feelings of guilt for the foolish desire of unlimited pleasure. This then became channelled into a passion for suffering, entrapping not only those who were seduced, but the entire population into a gigantic sacrificial mechanism, violently forging into a unity those whose integrity became dissolved, with the elimination of suffering as the supposed justification for political rule transmogrified into the idea that only those who suffer can rule, engendering an auto-poietic system of self-victimization. While communism as a political system today belongs to the past, Horvath argues that this model has eerie relevance for contemporary politics, where it is increasingly taken for granted that social cohesion can only be based on common suffering, thus substituting the noble ideas of common good with base symbols and feelings, transforming the political body into a community of sufferers, destroying personality and community; an idea that derives strength from generalized feelings of guilt about giving up one’s integrity to the system of ‘passionate interests’ (Tarde and Latour), masked by the schismogenic pairs of cold ‘rational choice’ and irresistible libido, on which the logic of consumer capitalism is based.

The Socrates of the Symposium in the context of Plato’s works

The converting power of eros, through beauty, inaugurates a shift between the Republic and the Symposium; two dialogues considered as ‘transitional’, finished around the same time. Given that the Republic is rightfully considered as the culmination of ‘Socratic dialogues’, this clearly indicates a problem Plato started to perceive with his master, or at least the image he previously constructed in the dialogues. This partly reflects changes in his understanding of the Sophists, visible in the need felt to offer a conclusive new image of the Sophist as well, contained in the eponymous dialogue, widely considered as opening Plato’s last period. But it also hints that, as several articles argue, the need felt for a new image of Socrates was due to the fact that certain things increasingly bothered Plato about his master, and that these had to do with eros. This could only mean that for Plato Socrates failed to find a proper balance between pedagogy and the erotic.

Bonner’s article argues that the theatrical set-up of the Symposium intimates a failure of Socrates as pedagogue. Socrates was a strong teacher who managed to focalize the attention of students in such a decisive way that they, instead of learning how to take care of themselves, became fanatical followers of their master. This can be complemented through the seemingly opposite case of Alcibiades, on whom Socrates failed to exert a sufficiently strong impact – effective in the presence of Socrates, but not lasting. This failure was particularly serious, as the entire career of Socrates was motivated by his efforts, after the death of Pericles, to secure a proper education for the designated heir; and particularly emphasized by the setting of the dialogue, in 416 BC, so just before Alcibiades started the disastrous expedition of 415–413, motivated by his own hubris rather the genuine good of Athens. The reason for this failure, Bonner suggests, is double. On the one hand, the method of Socrates is to dislocate the interlocutors from their taken-for-granted ways, for them to feel ashamed of the life they were leading, forcing them to turn around. Such a negative stimulation, however, produces two opposite excesses, schismogenic pairs: either, as in the case of Alcibiades, it remains ineffective, once the direct impact of the shaming is forgotten; or it produces brainwashed devotees. On the other hand, the particular technique used by Socrates on Alcibiades is also singularly mistaken. On the one side, Socrates was attracted by the beauty of Alcibiades; on the other, he managed to control himself and refuse gratification. Alcibiades tells the story in order to praise the resilience of Socrates; however, it is not difficult to see how this attitude is deeply flawed. As it is only self-evident, a teacher can hardly do something worse than to fall in love with his student; thus, the eventual ability to resist the consumption of such a relationship is hardly sufficient to produce a proper education; it rather nurtures hubris in the student. The outcome, the disasters produced by the hubris of Alcibiades, thus can be directly attributed to Socrates.

Any engagement with eros, argues Bonner, is a risky business, and doubly so when the pursuit of eros becomes explicitly conflated with education. Devotion can inspire, but also distort. Eros, as Socrates states at the end of his speech, requires respect and care; one must yield to it, but also preserve oneself; dealing with eros can be compared to tightrope-walking. As Socrates failed with Aristodemos, Apollodorus and Alcibiades, a central concern of the dialogue is Plato’s attempt to come to terms with his own handling of the legacy of his master.

Szakolczai similarly argues that the dialogue represents a problematization, by Plato, of Socrates, even a definite distancing from his master, without implying a complete repudiation; and that this is connected to the attitude of Socrates concerning eros. Such distancing is indicated by an entire series of reversals, from the outlook of Socrates through the directionality of the journeys, culminating in Socrates subscribing to the teaching he learned from Diotima, thus being reduced to the status of a student. Central in this process are the emphatic parallels between eros and Socrates, particularly strong in-between the two characterizations offered in this dialogue (Osborne, 1994: 94–5), by which Socrates is neither divinized, nor reduced to the status of an external object, but is identified as an in-between being who cannot serve as a proper guide, as itself it needs the right channelling and guidance.

Just as important as the parallels with eros are the links tied between Socrates, Aristophanes and the Sophists. According to the Apology the Clouds of Aristophanes, where Socrates was ridiculed as an alazon [intruder] and arch-Sophist, contributed much to the condemnation of Socrates; and Plato’s search for the causes of the collapse of Athenian democracy increasingly put the blame on the imitative arts, in particular comedy, culminating in the diagnosis of theatrocracy in the Laws. Szakolczai interprets the series of elaborated theatrical devices as indications of Plato acknowledging that a number of features in the conduct of Socrates indeed establish perplexing parallels between himself and the Sophists, most particularly the conscious conflation of education and the erotic.

The special section ends with an article that is neither about the Symposium, nor about the eros, yet brings in a fundamental complementary perspective. It discusses Lysis, a dialogue on friendship [philia], which is notoriously difficult to date, focusing on the figure of Hermes. Friendship as a word is an even less satisfactory rendering of philia than love was for eros, as the Greek word taps much of what we mean by love: it implies a strong positive emotional tie, though – just as friendship – it has no sexual connotation.

The two dialogues also share a number of similar modalities. Just as the Symposium, Lysis is also full of dramatic devices and uses of mythological elements, both serving to emphasize the participatory and not discursive aspect of the dialogue. In particular, the dialogue starts by a journey, recalling not only the Symposium and the Phaedrus, the dialogues devoted to eros, but also the Republic, thus opening up an entire field of interpretive possibilities concerning the meaning of this – highly liminal – device, and its relation to changes in the way Plato understood the contrast between Socrates and the Sophists, all the more so as the argumentative style of Socrates in the dialogue, as von Heyking argues, would be characterized as Sophistic in the Euthydemus, often considered as a follow-up dialogue. It also takes place during a festivity, or a ritual event close to theatre, opening up another loop for interpretative understanding.

Even more important are the similarities between philia in Lysis and eros in the Symposium. Both imply a taming of violent, primary impulses, and an opening-up of the individual soul towards an ascent to the divine. According to von Heyking, the central achievement of Plato in Lysis is to express this opening-up experience, which can be traced back to shamanism, and is most present in Greek religion and mythology in the figure of Hermes. The parallels between Hermes and Eros in Greek mythology and religion are also intriguing, all the more so due to the evident affinity between Hermes, god of speed, commerce, language and communication, but also a thief, liar and snatcher of souls, and the modern world, and also because both evoke the more general anthropological figure of the trickster. ⁶

The parallels with the famous passage in the Symposium, concerning the ascent towards the essence of beauty, are also most evident, opening up the question of how from this perspective the relative chronology of the dialogues concerned can be revisited, beyond purely stylistic concerns. This, however, cannot be attempted here.