The Space Between: Alcibiades and Eros in Plato's Symposium

Heather C. Kelly (University of Arizona)

Read uncharitably, Alcibiades' speech amounts to little more than an extended backhanded compliment from a would-be lover still stinging from the humiliation of rejection. Such a reading would be in keeping with the traditional understanding of the scala amoris as the philosophical climax of Plato's Symposium. However, since Nussbaum (1986) inspired new debate on how to interpret the Symposium as an organic whole by suggesting that Alcibiades' speech was not merely literary fancy but constituted a serious rebuttal to Diotima, any reading of the Symposium must be able to account for what that passage contributes to the overall philosophical tenor of the work. Unfortunately, these have largely reduced Plato's fictive Alcibiades to a philosophic cautionary tale, casting him as a sort of anti-Socrates. Gill convincingly argues from Alcibiades' own speech that he shunned a virtuous life even after Socrates successfully persuades him of its merits (1990: 81-82). Nussbaum, having effectively psychologized Alcibiades' through the lens of both some of his more notorious and celebrated career highlights, roughly concludes, "His story is, in the end, a story of waste and loss, of the failure of practical reason to shape a life" (1986: 166).

Even if we accept Kahn's (1996) position that Diotima's speech is as a series of precepts aimed towards achieving a "moral ideal," against which the moral success of men's lives may be judged, the text simply does not support the unqualified claim that Alcibiades "does not understand – and resists coming to understand the intellectual and moral basis of Socrates' 'oddity'" (Gill: 80-81). Rather, a close reading of Alcibiades' speech reveals acute self-awareness rather than ignorance. When brought to bear against the ascent passage and Plato's theories on the acquisition of knowledge, it becomes clear that Alcibiades—rather than lacking understanding—has incomplete understanding, and as such resides in the space of metajç with which so much of the Symposium is concerned.

__________________

Gill, C. (1990) "Platonic love and individuality" in Polis and Politics: Essays in Greek Moral and Political Philosophy; Kahn, C. (1996) "The presentation of the Forms" in Plato and the Socratic Dialogue: the philosophical use of a literary form; Nussbaum, M. (1986) "The speech of Alcibiades: a reading of the Symposium" in The Fragility of Happiness.