figures, though they are not real y thinking about them, but
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about the originals which they resemble; it is not about the square or diagonal which they have drawn that they are arguing, but
about the square itself or diagonal itself, or whatever the figure
may be. The actual figures they draw or model, which themselves
cast their shadows and reflections in water – these they treat as
images only, the real objects of their investigation being invisible
except to the eye of reason...
...This type of thing I called intelligible, but said that the mind
was forced to use assumptions in investigating it, and did not
proceed to a first principle, being unable to depart from and rise
above its assumptions; but it used as il ustrations the very things
which in turn have their images and shadows on the lower level,
in comparison with which they are themselves respected and
valued for their clarity...
...Then when I speak of the other sub-section of the intelligible
part of the line you will understand that I mean that which
the very process of argument grasps by the power of dialectic;
it treats assumptions not as principles, but as assumptions in
the true sense, that is, as starting points and steps in the ascent
to something which involves no assumption and is the first
principle of everything...52
In this analogy to geometry, Plato equates physical y drawn triangles
or circles with the objects of the sensuous world, and the ideal
geometric ratios and axioms upon which they are based with the
ideal forms that together in-form sensuous objects. What is striking
is that he cal s even these unseen axioms and, by analogy, the ideal
forms “assumptions”. He criticizes geometers for not questioning
these assumptions and contrasts them with the guardians who will
use the forms to ascend to “the first principle of everything” – i.e.
the form of the Good – in light of which all of the other forms will be revealed as mere assumptions, as so many “steps” in a ladder which can be thrown away once one has ascended by means of it
52 Ibid.,
Republic: 510c–511c.
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– in a word: necessary constructs. Furthermore, knowledge of the
“form of the Good” is not attained by accumulation – i.e. it is not
a sum total of the knowledge of other forms. It is not the last step
in a causal progression. It “involves no assumption”, i.e. it is not
constituted by the forms and thus is not located within their ideal
realm. “Assumption” is intended negatively here, thus the forms are
also. Only through their negation is the ineffable vision of the Good attained.
Plato’s method of dialectic does not ‘produce’ the truth as a proof.
Rather, the clash of contrary reasons leads to an insight beyond them
all – just as rocks or dry sticks rubbed together produce a spark and
then a fire. Plato evokes this image in the Seventh Letter, where he writes:
It is only when all these things, names and definitions, visual and
other sensations are rubbed together and subjected to tests in
which questions and answers are exchanged in good faith and
without malice that final y, when human capacity is stretched to
its limit, a spark of understanding and intelligence flashes out
and il uminates the subject at issue...
...It [“the first principle of everything”] is not something that
can be put into words like other branches of learning; only after
long partnership in a common life [with others] devoted to this
very thing does truth flash upon the soul, like a flame kindled
by a leaping spark, and once it is born there it nourishes itself
thereafter.53
Dialectic is a means of stretching reason to its limits, of straining
and then breaking the mind open so that the truth can “flash upon
the soul” like sparks from the Heraclitean cosmic fire. The forms are
constructs employed to attain this peak experience. Yet it is not only the mind that requires attunement. The body and its “visual and
other sensations” must also be “rubbed together” and “subjected to
tests in which...in good faith and without malice...it is stretched to 53 Ibid.,
Seventh Letter: 344; 341.
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its limit” in “a common life [with others] devoted to this very [same]
thing.” This is why, from a young age men and women who are to
be Guardians must train together to become excellent artists,54 great
athletes, brave warriors, and above al , divine lovers.
4. Erosophia and the Birth of a New Art
For Plato, a philosopher must always be a lover, not only in the
abstract sense implied by the word philosophia, but in a thoroughly erotic sense. In the Phaedrus, we see why to be a lover must be an even more important prerequisite for philosophy than to be an
artist, athlete or warrior. Socrates explains to Phaedrus that because
“sight is the keenest of our physical senses” Beauty is the best form to seek in order to attain the entire realm of forms, since it is the most seductive. The reflection of Beauty in the sensuous realm leads to its ideal form more surely than that of any other form.55 Plato’s Socrates goes on to equate this erotic seduction to transcendence with a kind
of divine madness, without which complete understanding can
never be attained. Reproaching Phaedrus for having condemned the
lover for being mad, Socrates says:
If it were true without qualification that madness is an evil, that
would be all very wel , but in fact madness, provided it comes as
the gift of heaven, is the channel by which we receive the greatest
blessings...madness comes from God, whereas sober sense is
merely human.56
In the Greek society of Plato’s time, erotic madness was epitomized
by the cult of Dionysus. Opposed to this stood Apollo, the shining
god of reason and order, whose Delphic injunction Socrates evokes
on many occasions. In The Birth of Tragedy, Friedrich Nietzsche 54 A practitioner of musike or “the arts” – including, but not limited to, “music”.
55 Ibid.,
Phaedrus: 250.
56 Ibid., 244.
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sees the Apollonian as a lucid dream-like rational simplicity
of crystalline forms that abides by logic and is the sustainer of
individuation.57 Nietzsche takes the Olympian pantheon as a whole
to be a manifestation of this essence of the god Apollo, while the
god excluded from membership to this pantheon, Dionysus, is the
symbol through which the Greeks comprehended the true nature
of the world. Nietzsche sees the Apollonian as a veil of il usion
that guards the ego against the chaos of reality as it is glimpsed in
Dionysian intoxication.
Nietzsche argues that great art and culture are dependent upon
the continual strife and subtle interdependence of the Apollonian
and Dionysian. He sees Homeric epic and the classical sculpture
that embodied its scenes as Apollonian art, and lyric poetry and the
music that inspired it as Dionysian art. The strife between these two
w
as reconciled into a tense and sublime harmony in the tragedies
of Aeschylus and Sophocles, as well as the early Pre-Platonic
philosophers such as Heraclitus who sought to evoke a life-affirming
Dionysian vision through Apollonian forms and imagery. Yet
Nietzsche sees philosophy from Parmenides onwards, and drama
in the wake of the tragic playwright Euripides, as a progressive
suppression of Dionysian vitality in favor of purely Apollonian
rationalism. Most importantly, Nietzsche identifies ‘Socrates’ as the culmination of the decay of the Greek spirit due to a withering of the Dionysian. The interpretation of Plato being forwarded here challenges this Nietzschean interpretation of Plato as valuing
Apollonian rationalism over Dionysian erotic madness.
At first glance, it seems that in the dialogue Alcibiades we find a confirmation of Nietzsche’s interpretation. It is in this dialogue that Socrates refers explicitly to the Delphic injunction of the god Apollo:
“Know Thyself”, the injunction of the divinity whose oracle Socrates
devotes his life to proving true and the god associated with the
demonic voice that keeps him on the straight and narrow path. On
the surface, it also seems that we are presented with a fine example
57 Nietzsche, Friedrich, The Birth of Tragedy (New York: Dover Publications, 1995).
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of Plato’s quintessential y Apollonian method of dialectic (questions
and answers which seek to expose contradictions and arrive at logical
definitions of the terms involved in a given question). However, the
same Alcibiades who is mercilessly subjected to this rational method
in the dialogue by his name goes on to ecstatical y describe Socrates
and his philosophy in the most vividly Dionysian terms throughout
his eulogy in the dialogue Symposium.
Alcibiades tel s us how Socrates is like certain statues of sileni
with pipes and such, with doors that open at the stomach and have
miniature statuettes of the Olympian gods inside.58 Socrates not only
literal y bears a physical resemblance to these figures but, according to Alcibiades, he also has the same spirit as them. Just as all who
learn the satyr Marsyas’ flute tunes and repeat them have a magical
effect on their listeners, so also not only do those who listen directly to Socrates experience a Dionysian madness but even those who
listen to second-hand accounts of his discourses. These discourses
have a profound ability to move listeners to tears, and they even
make the toughest skinned or thickest skulled people, like Alcibiades
himself, feel ashamed. Thus Alcibiades spends his life running away
from Socrates, so that he can carry on with the politics of pandering
to the mob, only to feel heart-rending shame when he once again
happens to come face to face with the master. This makes Alcibiades
wish Socrates dead and yet at the same time he realizes that if his
wish came true, he would real y be devastated. In the course of his
eulogy, Alcibiades utters these extraordinary words, in which he
compares being passionately seized by Socrates’ philosophy to being
bitten by a poisonous snake and suffering from a kind of Dionysian
madness:
...when a man’s been bitten by a snake he won’t tell anybody what it feels like except a fellow sufferer, because no one else would
sympathize with him if the pain drove him into making a fool of himself...I’ve been bitten by something much more poisonous...
bitten in the heart, or the mind, or whatever you like to call it,
58 Hamilton,
Collected Dialogues of Plato, Symposium: 215b.
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by Socrates’ philosophy, which clings like an adder to any young
and gifted mind it can get hold of, and does exactly what it likes
with it...every one of you has had his taste of this philosophical frenzy, this sacred rage...59
The sileni and the satyr Marsyas were bearded, half human, half
goat-like beings with huge phal uses and tails, who on the one
hand acted like fools, and on the other like sages who pronounced
dark oracular sayings. They formed one of two groups of Dionysus’
companions. Members of the other group were the maenads,
women who held serpents and staffs entwined with poison ivy in their hands and wore wreath-crowns. Both maenads and sileni
played enchanting flute melodies. Nietzsche sees them as a symbol
of what is still animal in man, a primal and erotic nature masked
by reason and wrought through and through with contradiction. In
the mystery rites of the Dionysian cults, by means of intoxication
male and female initiates were to be transfigured into dancing
Maenads and sileni/satyrs, and thereby symbolical y enter into the
company of their god. This ‘companionship’ would mean a painful y
blissful vision of the chaotic oneness of reality beyond the il usory
individuation of beings. From the moment Plato has Alcibiades
enter the symposium, with flute girls and a train of revelers, the
dialogue abounds in Dionysian imagery. The latter is not contrasted
with Socrates, as one might expect. Rather, through Alcibiades’
eulogy, Plato turns Socrates into the Dionysian divinity which the
Maenad (flute girl), sileni (the revelers) and the satyr (Alcibiades)
praise.
Toward the end of his eulogy Alcibiades goes so far as to explain
how Socrates’ arguments also resemble the statues of sileni. On the
outside they seem gaudy and ridiculous, encased in the language
of horse trainers, blacksmiths and so on, and they all also seem the
same to careless observers. However, when one ‘opens them up’ one
sees brilliant divinities inside – which Alcibiades is probably using
59 Ibid., 218 a-b, my emphasis.
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as a metaphor for the Platonic ‘forms’ “that help the seeker on his
way to the goal of true nobility.” Bearing this in mind, let us look
back at Socrates’ argument about the “just” and “advantageous” in
Alcibiades.
At the beginning of the dialogue Socrates argues that if Alcibiades
intends to convince many people in the assembly of his position
then he should be just as able to persuade each of them individual y,
and Alcibiades agrees. Thus Socrates tel s him to think of the proof
of his claim that sometimes the “just” is not “advantageous” as an
exercise to prepare him for convincing assembly members. After
some reluctance, Alcibiades final y agrees to proceed by answering
Socrates’ questions. Beneath the surface of this seemingly benign
encouragement, Socrates is actual y mocking Alcibiades. Socrates
probably believes that dazzling and swaying a mob into supporting
one’s position involves, or should involve, very different means than
convincing an individual – unless the given individual has a mob-
mentality and cannot use a one-on-one encounter to rational y
question and examine the orator. Yet never in the course of the entire dialogue does Socrates point this error out to Alcibiades. It remains
an inside joke. In Symposium Alcibiades takes irony of this kind as a hint of So
crates’ insincerity – it is his way of condescendingly
laughing at the whole world like a satyr.60
We have a much more serious example of trickery when Socrates
asks whether Alcibiades would say that some just things are
“admirable” while others are not, and has Alcibiades agree to this
by defining the admirable as the opposite of what is “contemptible.”
It is only because Socrates demands that just things either be total y admirable or real y contemptible that Alcibiades goes along with him
on this point. This polar division is quite superficial and artificial, even on Plato’s terms. Socrates now asks whether all admirable
things are “good” and Alcibiades responds that some are “bad.” He
asks Alcibiades whether in making this assertion, he has in mind
a case where, for example, someone does the admirable deed of
trying to rescue friends or relatives in a battle but this has the bad 60 Ibid., 216 d-e.
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result that the rescuer is wounded or killed. Once Alcibiades accepts
that this is an appropriate example, Socrates has him agree that
cowardice is as bad or worse than death, while living a courageous
life is their opposite. These opposites cannot logical y ‘touch’ and so something admirable can only be good in so far as it is admirable
and bad in so far as it is contemptible. This point, as it stands, seems to be logical y flawed on Plato’s own terms. If opposites real y cannot come into contact with each other, then a just action cannot be
both admirable and good in one sense and contemptible and bad in
another completely distinct sense.
Socrates now finishes off Alcibiades by asking whether people
who do what is admirable do things ‘wel ’ and consequently live
successful lives in the sense that they receive good “things” for their proper behavior. Needless to say just because an action is admirable,
perhaps for its intention, it certainly does not always follow that it is executed ‘wel ’. Furthermore, even well-executed actions of this
kind are often (even usually) admired but not rewarded with ‘good things’. Nonetheless, Alcibiades agrees that good conduct is both
admirable and advantageous. Socrates then states that all “just things are advantageous” and it would be laughable to try and persuade an
assembly otherwise. This last conclusion rests on the assumption
that all just things are ‘good’, a point that is never explicitly proven or even discussed in the dialogue. Nonetheless, Alcibiades agrees