Eros and the Intoxications of Enlightenment

Steven Berg

Description

An original analysis of one of Plato's most well-known and pivotal dialogues, this study is based upon the effort to think together the most manifest themes of the Symposium (the nature of eros and the relation between poetry and philosophy) with its less obvious but no less essential themes (the character of the city and the nature and limitations of sophistic enlightenment). Author Steven Berg offers an interpretation of this dialogue wherein all the speakers at the banquet—with the exception of Socrates—not only offer their views on the nature of love, but represent Athens and the Athenian enlightenment. Accordingly, Socrates' speech, taken in relation to the speeches that precede it, is shown to articulate the relation between Socrates and the Athenian enlightenment, to expose the limitations of that enlightenment, and therefore finally to bring to light the irresolvable tension between Socrates and his philosophy and the city of Athens even at her most enlightened.
Acknowledgments
Introduction

Part I: Athens and Enlightenment

1. Socrates Made Beautiful

2. Phaedrus: Phaedrus’ Best City in Speech

3. Pausanias: Noble Lies and the Fulfillment of Greekness

4. Eryximachus: Sovereign Science and the Sacred Law

Part II: Athens and the Poets

5. Aristophanes: Eros, Soul and Law

6. Agathon: Eros, Soul and Rhetoric

Part III: Socrates and Athens

7. Socrates: Daimonic Eros

8. Alcibiades: Divine Socrates

Conclusion: Socrates and Plato

Notes
Index

Sujets

• Philosophie
• Philosophie antique
• Ancient philosophy

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 23 février 2010
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438430195
• Langue: English

Extrait

EROS AND THE INTOXICATIONS OF ENLIGHTENMENT

SUNY series in Ancient Greek Philosophy
Anthony Preus, editor

EROS AND THE INTOXICATIONS OF ENLIGHTENMENT
On Plato's Symposium
STEVEN BERG
S TATE U NIVERSITY OF N EW Y ORK P RESS

Published by S TATE U NIVERSITY OF N EW Y ORK P RESS , A LBANY
© 2010 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY www.sunypress.edu
Production, Laurie Searl Marketing Anne M. Valentine
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Berg, Steven, 1959–
    Eros and the intoxications of enlightenment: on Plato's Symposium / Steven Berg.
            p. cm. — (SUNY series in ancient Greek philosophy)
    Includes bibliographical references and index.
    ISBN 978-1-4384-3017-1 (hardcover: alk. paper)
    1. Plato. Symposium. 2. Love. 3. Socrates. I. Title.
    B385.B47 2010
    184—dc22                                                                                           2009021079
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to thank Ronna Burger, David Neidorf, and Peter Vedder for reading the manuscript and offering their encouragement and criticism. I would also like to thank David Neidorf, Patrick Downey, and St. Mary's College of California for permitting me to present chapters of this manuscript in the form of papers delivered to faculty and students there.
INTRODUCTION
We are the inheritors of the tradition of the enlightenment. Yet we are cut off from the sources of enlightenment. Curious doctrines and novel orthodoxies have overcast our mental horizon so completely that the peaks of human life have become almost invisible to us. In such a climate it is inevitable that the exceptional character of the city in which Socrates was born and died should be obscured. Socrates' Athens was a city in which pre-Socratic philosophy and its popular dissemination had so infected the opinions of her citizens that her tragic and comic poets could ridicule the gods with virtual impunity in the midst of her most sacred religious festivals and her unofficial head of state could boast of his association with a man who declared the sun to be a burning stone and not a god. Science and enlightened poetry had so weakened traditional piety that the check upon man's ambition that the terrible and beautiful gods of the poets had once posed was overturned. As a consequence, shame and fear were replaced by daring and hope, and men cast aside obedience to take up the imitation of the majesty of the waning gods: stripped of the enveloping horizon the immortals had once established for all things mortal, the Athenians sought an immortality of their own devising through the erection of “undying memorials of good and evil.” 1
This audacious and ultimately ruinous ambition of the Athenians—for all of its rapacity and occasional brutality—was nonetheless transfigured by the mingling of its spirited transgression of once sacred boundaries with the longing of an eros for the beautiful. The suffusion of political ambition with erotic desire was a hallmark of Athenian democracy from its putative origins in the pederastic love of the tyrannicides, Harmondius and Aristogeiton; it nevertheless reached its apex in the love of the demos for that most beautiful of Athenian youths who promised to realize the most vaunting of their imperial hopes: as Thucydides reports, when the Athenians threw in their lot with Alcibiades and his plans for the conquest of Sicily “eros swooped down on all alike.” 2 The Athenians' erotic longing for the tyrant in their midst was transformed into a longing to contemplate new and distant spectacles, lay their hands upon eternal treasure, and encompass the entire world within their reach and scope. 3 Athenian imperialism was not the grim and austere imperialism of Rome—it was an imperialism shot through with the effects of enlightenment and animated by the frenzy of erotic desire. It was the city striving to transcend all the limits endemic to the city in the attempt to embrace the whole and integrate into its life the truth of man as man. For, as Plato instructs us, the core of what it is to be human is eros, the eros for the truth about the whole of things. Athens is not the only enlightened city to have existed on the face of the earth, but she is the only enlightened city to have made the implicit claim to be the proper home for man at his peak, naked in his nature, divested of the alien constraints of convention and law. In this she had no predecessor and has found no imitator. Athens was the enlightened city par excellence.
If we wish to remind ourselves of the exceptional character of Athens, we must turn to the Symposium of Plato, for the Symposium is not only the dialogue in which Plato takes up the problem of the nature of eros, it is also the dialogue in which he offers his portrait of this enlightened and eroticized city. Through the arguments of the work, he uncovers simultaneously the true character of eros and the true character of Athens. The latter is displayed in the series of speeches offered by the symposiasts at Agathon's banquet, all of whom are Athenian citizens and all of whom—with the notable exceptions of Aristophanes and Socrates—are avid students of the sophists. The former is displayed first and foremost in the speech of Socrates wherein the truth of eros is revealed to be identical with Socrates' practice of erotics. Plato displays Socrates in his relation to Agathon and his guests and thereby his relation to Athens and the Athenian enlightenment.
If the claims of enlightened Athens, as articulated above all in the speeches of Phaedrus, Pausanias, and Eryximachus, could have been sustained, then Socrates should have found his proper home in the city of his birth. Socrates' trial and execution confute these claims. Though one might believe that Socrates' trial was simply the unfortunate consequence of the accidental decline of enlightened Athens and the disappointment of the Athenians' eroticized imperial ambitions, Plato, through the speeches of his characters, demonstrates the necessity and inevitability of this decline and disappointment. The brutal return to a crude piety rooted in a renewed reverence for the just and punitive gods exhibited in the reaction to the desecration of the Hermae was, according to Plato, the necessary result of the fact that the erotic frenzy ingredient in Athens' imperialism was in principle incompatible with her democratic regime and the piety that supported it. Even more essentially, Athens' attempt to integrate eros into the life of the city necessarily stood at odds with the fact that eros, the most private of human passions, resists all efforts to make it public. Socrates' Athens was a city living under a constant strain—it was essentially unstable and always verging on flying apart at the seams. On another higher level, Plato shows that while the preeminence of the poets within Athens and the incorporation of the beautiful gods into her civic piety were a precondition for Socrates' practice of erotics, that same practice worked to eliminate the last vestiges of these beautiful gods and ultimately brought the preeminence of the poets within Athens to an end. Nietzsche was simply following Plato's lead when he declared Socrates to be the destroyer of the Homeric gods in general and Dionysus, the patron gods of the dramatic poets, in particular. 4
Socrates declares in the Republic that the city as such is the greatest sophist. In the Symposium he makes clear that Athens was the greatest of cities. The Symposium , therefore, is not only a compliment to the Republic and its teaching concerning the essential limits of the city, it also takes its place among that series of Platonic dialogues devoted to the examination of the pretensions of the sophists. It is no accident, therefore, that all of the chief speakers within the dialogue, with the exception of Aristophanes, make their first appearance in the Protagoras, that dialogue in which Socrates sets out to refute the most prominent of the men who styled themselves practitioners of the sophistic “art.” As Hippias attests near the center of the Protagoras (337c–d), the sophists ply their trade in the light of the recognition of the primary distinction between convention or law ( nomos ) and nature. Practically speaking, they attempt to live a life according to nature, while, nevertheless, going public and receiving conventional distinction in terms of wealth and honor. They wish to permit nature to become visible as a standard within the city—the realm dominated by convention or law—by replacing the politically beautiful or the noble with what is beautiful by nature: wisdom. Protagoras indeed boasts that he has taken this public display of nature further than any of his predecessors, who, though they were in fact sophists or wise men, obscured this fact by disguising their art and masquerading as poets, prophets, gymnastic trainers, or teachers of music. Protagoras, however, has dispensed with such concealments and openly declares himself to be precisely what he is, while, at the same time and on this very basis, receiving the broadest sort of conventional acclaim (316d–317c; Hippias Major 281a–282e). He has, more than any other, effectively reconciled nature and convention or allowed nature to become the basis for conventional appraisals of worth.
Just as the hollowness of Protagoras' claims are displayed in the dialogue that bears his name, so Plato shows in the Symposium th