Between Plato's Republic and Symposium: Searching for the Middle Path

Emil A. Kramer (Augustana College)

My presentation demonstrates that there are significant structural and thematic parallels between Plato's Republic and Symposium. These parallels, I posit, suggest that Plato intended the two works to be read and understood together, and that neither work was intended by itself to provide a programmatic vision of the ideal life. As this is a very large topic, my purpose in this presentation is to show only that there are indeed parallels between the two works, and that these parallels merit further study of the two dialogues along the same lines. Therefore, my presentation will be limited to demonstrating the general similarity in the overall structure of the two dialogues, and one indisputable inter-textual allusion to the Symposium in the Republic.

The overall structure of the two dialogues provides the most obvious clues regarding their relationship. Both works begin "on the road". Once the topic is laid forth in each dialogue, the nature of justice/reason in the Republic and love/desire in the Symposium, five speakers are allowed their take on the respective issues (Cephalus, Polemarchus, Thrasymachus, Glaucon, and Adeimantus in the Republic, Phaedrus, Pausanias, Eryximachus, Aristophanes, and Agathon in the Symposium). At this point in both dialogues, Socrates redirects the conversation to the topic of proper education. Both dialogues then conclude with what we might term -- and here I apologize for the oversimplification -- a consideration of the issues at hand in the "real world".

Plato was kind in that, in addition to giving us the fairly obvious structural parallels between the two dialogues, he provided at least one, it seems, indisputable inter-textual reference that links the Republic and Symposium at a crucial point in both dialogues. In book 6 of the Republic Adeimantus compels Socrates to address the disparity between the ideal sort of philosophers he has described and the sort apparent in the real world (and here, memories of Alcibiades certainly lurk just below the surface). Concluding their discussion of how the sort of false philosophers Adeimantus has criticized come to be, Socrates and Adeimantus agree (500b) that "the people responsible for most people's hostility to philosophy are the uninvited outsiders who have gate-crashed the party" (translation by T. Griffith, Cambridge, 2000). This is clearly an allusion to Alcibiades' rowdy "crashing" of the Symposium (212c), and thus provides us a secure locus from which we may explore other parallels between the two dialogues.

The Republic and the Symposium have both been oft misunderstood -- in the case of the former especially, with tragic consequences. Most familiar with Plato's thought will understand that the Republic and Symposium deal with similar issues: namely, desire and reason and man's relation to The Good/Beautiful. As Kenneth Dover remarks in the introduction to his text of the Symposium (Cambridge, 1980: 7), "desire and reason continuously reinforce each other, and if the good is the ultimate explanation of everything, desire and reason actually converge upon it and will fuse at the point where 'vision' of the good is attained." What most do not seem to be familiar with, however, are the more intimate structural and thematic parallels between the two works. This presentation seeks to make those known, and to begin to explore their significance for our understanding of the two dialogues.