Plato's Phaedrus and Symposium
I attempt to demonstrate how Plato’s middle dialogues, Phaedrus and Symposium, provide a new pedagogical model for lovers of wisdom. I argue that Plato’s aim in the dialogues is, amongst others, to reassess the pederastic dynamic between erastes and eromenos and, in so doing, communicate a new method for conducting philosophical enquiry. My overall argument is that love does not lead to knowledge and knowledge does not lead to love. Instead, both states operate in a mutually dynamic and symbiotic relationship with one another. The apt knower is a lover and the apt lover is a knower. Love and knowledge are, if properly understood, inseparable. The highest pursuit is the love of knowledge (philos-sophia) and the greatest exemplar of the lover of knowledge is he who only knows erotics (Socrates). I propose that Plato wishes to convey to his reader an understanding that the connection between episteme and eros is that of an energetic pursuit which must begin, not in a static dynamic of exchange and favour seen in the traditional Greek pederasty, but in the passionate intellectual sparring between equal rational souls committed to a joint philosophical endeavour.
Introduction
In this essay, I will be attempting to demonstrate how Plato’s middle dialogues, Phaedrus and Symposium, provide a new pedagogical model for lovers of wisdom. I will be arguing that Plato’s aim in the dialogues is, amongst others, to reassess the pederastic dynamic between erastes and eromenos and, in so doing, communicate a new method for conducting philosophical enquiry. The overall thesis of the paper will be that love does not lead to knowledge and knowledge does not lead to love. Instead, both states operate in a mutually dynamic and symbiotic relationship with one another. The apt knower is a lover and the apt lover is a knower. Love and knowledge are, if properly understood, inseparable. The highest pursuit is the love of knowledge (philos-sophia) and the greatest exemplar of the lover of knowledge is he who only knows erotics (Socrates). I propose that Plato wishes to convey to his reader an understanding that the connection between episteme and eros is that of an energetic pursuit which must begin, not in a static dynamic of exchange and favour seen in the traditional Greek pederasty, but in the passionate intellectual sparring between equal rational souls committed to a joint philosophical endeavour.
I will begin by focussing on the pederastic tradition against which Plato is writing and will argue that Plato sees this as inadequate. I will then go on to suggest a new pedagogical model which I believe Plato is attempting to outline in the Phaedrus. Finally, I will discuss how Plato’s new conception of love provides a basis for interpreting his critique of the arts, in particular rhetoric and oratory. I will finish by providing a brief defence against the charge that Plato has constructed an understanding of love which is too abstract and devoid of particularity. I will rely on a close reading of Plato’s Phaedrus as well as, to a lesser extent, the Symposium. My conclusion will be that Plato wishes for us, his readers, to embark on our own passionate pedagogical relationships and continue the work he has begun in his dialogues. It will be argued that the dialogue form is designed to be the reader’s training in love. Plato is engendering in his reader an approach to romantic relationships and the recognition of knowledge which values the mutually beneficial intellectual interplay of an equal relationship with another. The dynamic tensions between intellectual sparring partners leads to the birth of beautiful ideas.
There are (at least) two loving and learning relationships on offer in the dialogues. Firstly, the Socratic model which is symbiotic, dynamic, and mutually fulfilling. Secondly, the traditional didactics of a teacher/student lover/beloved relationship which has its fullest realisation in the tradition of ancient Greek pederasty and in the teaching of rhetoric. This pederastic tradition is transactional, a passive exchange of received wisdom, oratorical, rhetorical and poetic, from the erastes to the eromenos often, though not exclusively, in exchange for sexual gratification or favour. Plato is suggesting a new way to love and a new way to learn. We should not passively accept the instruction and love of another, but, in madly embracing another in a dramatic and mutually beneficial fashion, draw the wisdom out of the beloved and have it drawn out of ourselves. In this manner, individuals learn to love and love to learn not merely another, but the shared beauty that resides within and without them.
The traditional understanding of pederasty and knowledge transfer
The pederastic model by no means provides an exhaustive account of educative models on offer in either the Greek world or Plato’s dialogues. However, its structure is, to some extent, the zenith of the Greek aristocratic educative system and is certainly of pressing concern to Plato in both the Phaedrus and the Symposium. It will therefore be a useful place to begin an analysis as a normative backdrop against which Plato begins his educative project. Kenneth Dover, in his work, Greek Homosexuality provides a description of the pederastic roles of the erastes and eromenos in the Ancient Greek world (Dover, 1980). The erastes is an older man in his twenties, a free citizen of aristocratic background. His role is to pursue, attempt to dominate and be the active participant in the pederastic relationship. This is despite the passive or imploring role he may at first assume to win over the eromenos. The eromenos, as the younger target of his affection, is the passive participant. While he too is a free Greek citizen of aristocratic background and perhaps also a future eromenos, the dynamic is one of pursuit and flight, with the traffic of sexual affection running in one direction from active to passive participant. The relationship is, as Dover states, ‘the product not of the reciprocated sentiment of equals’ (Dover, p. 84). The eromenos is self sufficient, without pressing needs of his own and self-absorbed with the perception and desires he elicits in his erastes. The healthy manifestation of the dynamic was seen as beneficial for both partners but not in a parallel manner. While the erastes ideally enjoys the gratification of erotic urges, the eromenos is supposed to receive love, admiration as well as mentorship and education. The interaction is one of pursuit and capture. In the Symposium, Pausanias’ speech illustrates that if the erastes wins his eromenos it is seen as ‘honourable’ even though he is willing to endure ‘a slavery which no slave would ever endure’ (Symposium, 183c). The dynamic, at all points, seems to be imbalanced. Dover speaks of hunting as a metaphor for the erastes’ pursuit of the eromenos. The disapproval of fathers against erastes is mitigated, Dover claims, by the significant social advantage that can be gained for the eromenos in his relenting to the desire of the erastes, especially if the erastes is an ‘excellent model for the boy to imitate’ (Dover, p. 89). While custom forbids a too easily gained consummation, the sublimation of the eromenos’ body and beauty to the erastes’ desire may become one of crude exchange. As Dover describes, ‘acceptance of the teachers’ thrusting penis between his thighs...is the fee which the pupil pays for good teaching, or alternatively, a gift for a younger person to an older person whom he has come to love and admire’ (Dover, p. 91). The erastes’ role as active initiator is discussed further by David Halperin in One Hundred Years of Homosexuality (Halperin, 1990). Halperin cites E. Bethe’s article on ‘Dorian Pederasty’. Bethe suggests that the tradition of pederasty enters the Greek world through the initiation rituals of Dorian invaders. The rites were believed to allow older elite males to pass on powers contained within their semen to the next generation of soldiers and statesman (Bethe in Halperin, p. 56). The important aspect of the traditional pederastic model for the purposes of this essay is that the relationship is one of possession and exchange. All objects of exchange: love, sexual gratification, education, imitation, though not always simply one way, are actively given from one and passively received by another.
Plato’s subversion of the pederastic model
At the outset of the Symposium Plato seems to be subverting the role of interchange between passive and active partner when, at separate points, both Agathon and Alcibiades aim to passively gain Socrates’ powers simply by osmosis. Socrates states ‘My dear Agathon...I only wish that wisdom were the kind of thing one could share by sitting next to someone...from the one that was full to the one that was empty’ (Symposium, 175d). Eryximachus also speaks of this dynamic in his speech. Medicine is described as ‘knowledge of the form of bodily love as regards filling and emptying’ (Symposium, 186-7). Across the dialogues Plato continually rejects the idea that knowledge is an object that can be gained passively from another, even if that other is Socrates. The Oracle at Delphi insists that Socrates is the wisest man alive only because he knows that he is an empty vessel and knows that he knows nothing. Socrates insists upon this in the Theaetetus, pronouncing his barrenness and that his only art is ‘midwifery’ (Theaetetus, 150b). The ideal for Plato is, therefore, to educate and to love, not through insertion, but through drawing out. Knowledge is not an object someone possesses and gives, but rather what can be recollected and extracted. Thus Plato states in the Phaedrus that, contrary to Lysias’ speech, an eromenos should give his affections not to the erastes whom they are indifferent to so as to gain the advantage (as per the ideal pederastic model), but to those who are mad about them. True madness is passion gained in recollection of the beauty instantiated within the eromenos. Thus the true philosopher is the one who becomes divinely inspired in their recollection of the form of beauty contained (if only partially) in the beauty of the other. The divinely inspired lover is inspired, not to actively take knowledge or passively give it, but in their own recollection of the form of beauty to ‘melt’ and ‘give birth’ in the beautiful (Symposium, 206c). True love, therefore, should inspire madness not for another, but for that which is already contained and therefore recollected within. This is what Alcibiades so spectacularly fails to understand at the end of the Symposium. Rather than seeing Socrates as the catalyst for his own recollection of beauty, he becomes possessive and angry at the sight of Socrates next to another and his unwillingness to be seduced by him. As the example of Alcibiades in the Symposium illustrates, the objects of our affections, the individual instances of beauty, are not to be desired in and of themselves but are (as Diotima explains) the catalyst for further development up the ‘ladder of love’. Plato wishes to illustrate this in his account of rhetoric and communication which forms the latter half of the Phaedrus.
Plato’s critique of rhetoric and empty oratory in the Phaedrus
The new pedagogical relationship between lovers has now been established as one not of passive receiving but as divine inspiration to recognise what is within. I now wish to draw attention to parallels between Plato’s understanding of pederasty and his critique of the arts. The parallel is significant because an understanding of Plato’s account of the objects of knowledge, appropriate or inappropriate, should shed light on the manner in which a lover of knowledge must come to know and be a lover of them. This is not insignificant when it is taken into consideration that a large part of the Phaedrus is devoted to a discussion of rhetoric. Knowledge and the communication of ideas, for Plato, should be an active ‘living’ process. The dynamism at the heart of learning and loving sits in stark contrast to the ‘dead’, static rhetoric against which Socrates is reacting in the Phaedrus. From the outset of the dialogue, the static transmission of ideas is assaulted. Plato mocks Phaedrus’ attempt at the beginning of the dialogue to act as though he were speaking Lysias’ speech from memory when in reality it was hidden under his cloak (Phaedrus, 228). Parallels can be drawn to Alcibiades’ attempt to gain Socrates’ power by lying under his cloak in his abortive seductions recalled at the end of the Symposium. Plato is emphatic. This is not the dynamic that should exist between two lovers on a mutual, democratic pursuit for knowledge. Instead ‘discourse ought to be constructed like a living creature’, Socrates tells Phaedrus (Phaedrus, 264b).
The idea of static possession of ideas as the object of transfer between lovers, from ‘one that was full to one that was empty’ (Symposium, 175d), is further attacked in Plato’s critique of the art of writing. Empty words, seen as having no living nature, are ridiculed as a perversion throughout the dialogue.‘It will plant forgetfulness on their soul’s, (Phaedrus, 275d) Plato says of writing. ‘Using pen to sow words that can’t speak in the own defence’ is ‘dead discourse’ (Phaedrus, 276a-e). Therefore possession of knowledge as a passive, fixed object is not true knowledge. Instead, knowledge transmission must be fluid and developmental in process with another. Plato uses an agrarian metaphor of sowing and nurturing: ‘The dialectician... plants and sows his words founded on knowledge, words that can...defend themselves...’ (Phaedrus, 266e – 278b). The seeds of knowledge are therefore to be sown in another as potentiality to be actualised, not as a finished static object. The dialectician draws knowledge out of an individual because they are fertile ground for the birth of beautiful ideas.
An identical process is required in love. The beloved should not be owned or possessed and above all should not be the true object of love. The individual is merely an intermediate object or catalyst for the true love affair which is not with any particular but with the intellectual ideas that are recognised in, and via, the beloved. In this manner, the metaphor of hunting is apt. However, this is not the pederastic hunting of another ‘As wolf to lamb so lover for his lad’ (Phaedrus, 241d), as per the traditional pederastic model. Instead, it is the hunting for beautiful ideas. Diotima claims in the Symposium that eros, the son of both resource and poverty, is an ‘intense clever hunter’ (Symposium, 203d). Love and the pursuit of knowledge must have as its object not the beloved or their knowledge, to be passively given and actively received. Instead its object should be beautiful ideas that are recognised (if only partially) in another and in oneself and pursued communally through the practice of discourse. Socrates says to Phaedrus, ‘you are the cause of my having to deliver myself’ (Phaedrus, 242b). Socrates wants nothing from Phaedrus other than the shared experience of the joint pursuit of beauty and truth through discourse. Phaedrus, on the other hand, at first wishes, visa vi the pre-Socratic pederastic model, to extract knowledge directly from Socrates. In contrast to Plato’s comic mocking of Phaedrus’ hiding of a supposedly memorised speech under his coat, Phaedrus demands that which is supposedly hidden by Socrates to be given directly to him: ‘deliver yourself of what you told me you had in your breast, please don’t make me use force to open your lips’ (Phaedrus, 236d). For Socrates, dynamic discourse is an antidote to static, memorised and dead oratory. Socrates states ‘I should like to wash the bitter taste out of my mouth with a draught of wholesome discourse’ (Phaedrus, 243e). This is why madness is so encouraged by Socrates in the beginning of the dialogue. Recollection of the forms and the ‘place beyond the heavens, none of our earthly poets has yet sung’ (Phaedrus, 247c), allows for divine inspiration. This is not something taught or given, but catalysed in a dynamic relationship with another. Thus Socrates states in the Symposium ‘This is the right method of approaching the ways of love, being led by someone else’. (Symposium, 211b).
Christopher Janaway sets out a case for Plato’s mistrust of the arts in ‘Images of Excellence: Plato’s Critique of the Arts’ (Janaway, 1998). Janaway describes Plato’s scepticism towards mimesis, the making of appearances or representations. Appearances and representations are anathema to Plato’s metaphysical project. They represent doxa or opinion for Plato and are dangerous in so far as they are several degrees removed from true knowledge. Janaway illustrates how, across the dialogues, Plato critiques mimesis in the arts: the rhetoric of Gorgias, the sophistry of Protagoras, the poetry of Ion, Agathon and Aristophanes. The divine inspiration of the poets such as Ion, are instead seen as merely mimicry and empty knowledge. Plato wishes to differentiate between art that is representative of truth and truth itself. As Janaway puts it, without this, ‘we become powerless to distinguish the pleasing from the good, plausibility from truth, and cleverness from genuine expertise and wisdom’ (Janaway, 1998). If memesis is to be discouraged in the arts and the pursuit of knowledge, so too is it to be discouraged in love for its potential to create chimeras or illusions of beauty in individual sensible objects rather than knowledge of the universal form of beauty itself. Consequently, the loving of an individual is to be encouraged only as a stepping stone to loving that which is atemporal and in-transient. Thus the true lover and the true knower will succeed in bringing to birth ‘not phantoms of virtue, because he is not grasping a phantom’ (Symposium, 212a). Understanding this goes a long way in helping us to understand Plato’s insistence on the dialogue form itself, with its opaqueness, inconsistencies and inconclusiveness. Like good lovers, we are implored not to take Plato himself as static authority, but to be divinely inspired to seek out truth and beauty ourselves with the dialogue form as our launching pad. We should not aim to statically possess Plato’s knowledge or another’s beauty in so far as Plato’s knowledge does not belong to Plato and another’s beauty does not belong to the beloved. They are catalysts only for our own erotic and epistemic journeys.
Some scholars interpret Plato’s invitation to seek beauty and truth in its abstract form beyond individual instances as pernicious. Gregory Vlastos argues this in ‘The Individual as an Object of Love’(Vlastos, 1999). For Vlastos, Plato’s attempt to frame erotic relationships in the same way as he frames his epistemology, ontology and metaphysics as a journey upwards out of particulars and into universals, loses something of the concrete particularity of love. Vlastos describes this as the ‘cardinal flaw’ in Plato’s theory (Vlastos, p. 161). Plato’s schema, for Vlastos, does not lead to the loving of a person as a whole person. I however, strongly disagree. As I have tried to demonstrate throughout the course of this essay, Plato’s strength is that he is able to combine his epistemology with his study of erotics. The traditional pederastic model clearly illustrates how knowledge of a particular is inferior to knowledge of a universal and love of an individual is surely inferior to love of a universal. Plato speaks of the life-long loving relationships which can result from a mutual intellectual philosophical pursuit in comparison with the fleeting and transitory affections of a pederastic model where love often ends upon the appearance of a beard. Furthermore, Plato’s ‘scala amoris’ as Vlastos puts it (Vlastos, p.161), allows individuals to be returned to themselves to the extent that they, like Aristophanes’ myth in the Symposium, recognise what is lost in themselves, their souls’ knowledge of the eternal forms. Taking the first steps on ‘the celestial highway’, no longer burdened with transitory images, lovers will ‘walk together in a life of shining bliss...because of their love’. (Phaedrus, 256d).
Conclusion
In conclusion, I have attempted to demonstrate how Plato’s middle dialogues, Phaedrus and Symposium, provide a new epistemic and erotic model for the philosophical life. I have shown how Plato reassesses the pederastic dynamic of his time and invites us to engage in more mutually fulfilling and truly philosophical relationships with objects of both love and knowledge. I have endeavoured to show that, for Plato, love does not lead to knowledge and knowledge does not lead to love. But rather both are inseparable; to love is to know and to know is to love. The correct lover is one who has as his target that real object of love: the good and the beautiful as universals not seated in the particularity of a single beautiful individual. Similarly, the correct knower is one who has as his target that real object of knowledge: the good and the beautiful as universals not seated in the particularity of a single piece of doxa, rhetoric or oratory. Love therefore should be a ‘madness’ as it inspires us to partake of our ‘proper food’ and access an eternal realm where ‘true being dwells without colour or shape’ (Phaedrus, 247d).
In order to demonstrate how this is possible, I have illustrated Plato’s departure from the traditional pederastic dynamic and sought to show that its flaw for Plato is that it does not allow a soul to recollect true knowledge found within. Plato’s metaphysical schema necessitates that this can be the only true learning and therefore a dynamic of passive exchange of ideas, whether in a pederastic model or not, will never be satisfactory for him. While the traditional pederastic model is by no means the only model for love and education in Plato’s works, it has served as useful because it is the most contrary to Plato’s own conception of knowledge and therefore afforded us the greatest contrast against which to access Plato’s own ideas in the Phaedrus and the Symposium. Interestingly, pederasty itself isn’t ruled out in Diotima’s teaching to Socrates. It is, however, simply the first step in a process and therefore cannot afford knowledge by itself but act only as a catalyst for further pursuits.
Finally, contrary to Gregory Vlastos, I don’t believe that Diotima’s conception of the ‘ladder of love’ excludes the love of individuals. While Socrates is clearly physically chaste in the dialogues, he is not short of friends and loved ones. In fact they ignite in him the passion and madness required for philosophy. This is evidenced in the dialogue form itself: Plato never attempts to deliver dogma to us. The dialogues are a busy place and therefore love of knowledge must always have as a central component the love of others in order for it to get started in the first instance. However, Philosophy is not passive instruction, nor is it acceptance of received doxa. Love should therefore inspire us, not to passively aspire to possession of a fixed object, whether epistemic or erotic, but rather ready us for a life-long communal pursuit. Love requires plural participants, so too does knowledge. The search for knowledge is a communal, dynamic and democratic pursuit with it’s object as something neither lover nor knower yet possess - ‘a great sea of beauty ...which is vast, and no longer slavishly attached to the beauty belonging to a single thing’ (Symposium, 210d).
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