It's difficult living away from a home that is not yet one's home, at least not for a few more months, and yet it is still something that I miss, this still unfamiliar home, somewhere I would rather be. A and I are driving up from Lancaster on 2nd November for the Gills Bay ferry, crossing over to St Margaret's Hope and flying over to the island the next morning and shall stay there for a week. The drive is already becoming something of a mythic journey for me, perhaps because I am so neurotic about long distances. Meanwhile, I find myself teaching some first years about St Anselm's Proslogion and trying to use it as a point of departure for a paper I have agreed to write on teaching philosophy, which is a bit of a problem because the main body of the article is about Plato's Symposium: how to join them up. Here is the current draft, the stuff on Anselm is just a set of rough notes:
On Wisdom and Virtue: What do philosophers teach?
In a basement seminar room in the Department, smell of stale damp air, the fuse gone in the extractor fan, the text for the day a passage from Anselm’s Proslogion, the students in their first year, second week, we are starting to teach them philosophy, and they have been presented with these short and rebarbative chapters, the locus classicus for the Ontological Argument. Is this where I should wish to start, and does it matter? No, I should not myself have wanted to start from here, but this is a team effort and this is where we are for two hours. The students have read the text, are bright, bubbly, wary of each other, of me, but amused and excited by the atmosphere that their chemistry has unexpectedly brought about. For a few months in the eleventh century Anselm himself was hardly more than twenty miles from here sorting out difficulties in the new Abbey being built in Chester. He had already composed the Proslogion.
Someone has been assigned to introduce the opening chapters. They hardly refer to the first chapter, complaining impatiently that there is something wrong with the famous inversion:
For I do not seek to understand in order to believe, but I believe in order to understand.
Something wrong, they think, it seems to be cheating when he should be trying to ‘prove’ that there is a God in the first place, how can you start by affirming your belief ... as though it were that simple. On the other hand, one also sees, doesn't one, a nervous and placatory moment here? Maybe that is what is picked up, subliminally, but interpreted as a problem with an idea rather than an emotion. And why is writing this at all?
I imagine we shall settle on the question whether ‘existence is a predicate’, see whether Anselm is confused when he claims that it is ‘greater’ to exist in reality than to exist only in the understanding. In one sense I should have thought he is obviously not confused. Or at least, to counter Kant, I'd rather have a hundred quid in my pocket than in my mind ... That would be 'better', but not greater, surely. But isn't a living God greater than an imaginary one? Wouldn't it be terrific to discover that there really were unicorns? Of course, but they would not be more perfect as unicorns for being real than merely imaginary. But isn't the real point that Anselm, in his pursuit of greater understanding, is in fact developing a grammar of God?
Anselm thinks that if God is a being of utter greatness … such that no greater can be conceived, then he exists, because this utter greatness could surely be surpassed if he existed only in the understanding, since it is greater to exist also in reality. One would be thinking of something greater, he claims, if one thought of such a being as existing in reality than as existing only in the understanding. Except, one wants to say, there is no possible comparison of two modes of existence here, surely, since you either exist or you don't and 'existing in the mind' is not really a form of existence ...
... How can this not really be quite tedious, there are these proofs for the existence of God, but of course they are flawed … yes, I remember my own first reaction was just like that of this self-conscious student, it can’t be right, no, but it is not enough for you to announce that the argument is flawed, you need to show how it is. So, point out the flaw … Silence. So is this doing philosophy, then, exposing a medieval sleight of hand? Well what is the sleight of hand: write the crucial passage on the board:
So even the Fool is convinced that something than which nothing greater can be thought is at least in his understanding; for when he hears of this [being], he understands [what he hears], and whatever is understood is in the understanding. But surely that than which a greater cannot be thought cannot be only in the understanding. For if it were only in the understanding, it could be thought to exist also in reality—something which is greater [than existing only in the understanding]. Therefore, if that than which a greater cannot be thought were only in the understanding, then that than which a greater cannot be thought would be that than which a greater can be thought! But surely this [conclusion] is impossible. Hence, without doubt, something than which a greater cannot be thought exists both in the understanding and in reality.
This is not my territory but I hope I am not going to mislead them too much. ‘Whatever is understood is in the understanding’. Well what is understood here and what is therefore in the understanding? Is it God that is thus understood, and is therefore in the understanding? Or is it the idea of God that is understood and is therefore in the understanding? And how can the latter be a way in which God exists? What is understood is an idea and yes, it ‘exists in the understanding’, and of course whatever is understood is in the understanding, but that is no more than to say that it is understood. But doesn’t it look as though Anselm thinks that it is the being than which nothing greater can be thought that exists in the understanding rather than the idea of that being, and the conception of a being is surely not a mode of its existence, as I have said … except that I rather think from comments by my more scholarly and better informed friends that Anselm would believe it was … that to have the idea of God in the understanding is already to be touched by God. But if that is true, then we are not really dealing with an ontological argument. God's existence in the understanding would just be one mode of his existence after all, it would be an effect upon us of his divine power, a lesser form of his existence by comparison with how he is in himself. It makes the second chapter merely preparatory for the third … Anselm would think that there are degrees of reality ... there is the supreme form of being, necessary being, then the lesser contingent being and then being in the mind ...
‘For if it were only in the understanding, it could be thought to exist also in reality—something which is greater [than existing only in the understanding].’
This is not the time, yet, for talking about first and second order predicates, there is plenty of time for that later. But what about the next chapter? they have only read it in a cursory manner and it turns out that they think that it simply repeats the content of the previous chapter. We look more closely, and one realises how difficult it is to read this material for the first time, and see that it doesn’t say that it is greater to exist in reality than to exist merely in the understanding but rather that it is greater to exist in such a way that one cannot be conceived as not existing than to exist in such a way that one can be conceived as not existing. So we arrive at the distinction between contingent and necessary being and, for Anselm, come to a developed understanding of God, hence the point of the grammatical investigation.
…………..
… As he settles himself down next to his host at the dinner party Socrates remarks that
It would be very nice, Agathon, if wisdom were like water, and flowed by contact out of a person who has more into one who has less, just as water can be made through a thread of wool out of the fuller of two cups into the emptier. (175d)
On hearing this quotation a friend of mine once wryly remarked that nowadays we call this kind of exchange ‘knowledge transfer’—and the joke has a point: we are more inclined now, at least in British institutions of higher education, to talk in terms of knowledge and skills than in terms of wisdom. Indeed a certain embarrassment surrounds the use of such a word in an environment in which the motto of one university is ‘Investing in Knowledge’. The idea that there can be knowledge without wisdom is not acknowledged, partly perhaps because there is so much more agreement about what passes for knowledge and 'wisdom' sounds terminally 'value-laden'.
But philosophy is not about knowledge and skills, even though those who are taught philosophy certainly acquire both. The question arises, then, what is it to do philosophy at all? and what is the nature of the wisdom that philosophers once allegedly aspired to (they hardly do so now)? Unfortunately even philosophers are all too ready to answer this question precipitately, and they answer, naturally enough, in the light of knowledge that derives from their philosophical education. What I want to suggest in what follows is that professional philosophers have through an unfortunate division of labour come to think that what was once only a part of philosophy is the thing itself. But if we are to think of the larger whole we shall have to consider the place and status of poetry and literature.
In the Preface to his translation of Plato’s Symposium[1] Robin Waterfield refers to what he calls ‘the balance between philosophy and literary art’ in that text. This is hardly an unexpected or surprising remark since the Symposium is an unusual dialogue in which as well as the familiar Socratic dialectic and argumentation, there is also a series of speeches about the nature of Love or Eros—speeches that are ponderous, portentous, comic, sentimental or deluded, though all of them manage somehow to say something true about Love—even as, ironically, they reveal in the speakers at least as much ignorance as self-knowledge or wisdom, the nature and pursuit of which is the theme of the book. The Symposium also contains the playwright Aristophanes’ humorous instructions about how to cure hiccups and his playful account of how lovers are literally in search of their ‘other half’—and Plato turns his hand to comic but crucial theatre when a drunken Alcibiades lurches in, supported by a flute girl, and reminisces ruefully about his failure to seduce Socrates when once he crept expectantly under his blanket.
This little drama has its own power to compel and reveal, and reinforces rather than merely illustrates the priestess Diotima’s claim that wisdom is not a quantity or commodity than can be exchanged, and that in a certain state of Eros the offer of sexual favours in exchange for wisdom is as untempting as the offer of dross for gold. And then there is the allegorical tale of how Eros was born of Poverty and Contrivance, and the unforgettable image there which is at once a picture of Socrates, of the lover and of the philosopher, weather-beaten, shoeless and homeless. We also hear how Socrates, wearing shoes on this occasion, finally drinks everyone else under the table and heads off at daybreak to the gym.
But to talk as Waterfield does of a balance in the dialogue between philosophy and literary art rather assumes that we know perfectly well the nature of the quantities that rest upon the scales, that we know what the philosophy is and how it is to be distinguished from the ‘literary art’. But though some of us are more confident than others about how the lines are to be drawn, it is not perhaps such a straightforward issue. The nature of philosophy and the range of its methods are profoundly contested and we tend anyway as we all know to our cost or amusement to make unconscious choices that favour our own aptitudes by reference to which we then define the discipline.
Certainly the Symposium is a piece of literature—it is a representation and an enactment of the nature of the pursuit of wisdom, of what it is to do philosophy at all—but it seems to me to contain not so much a ‘balance’ between ‘philosophy’ and ‘literary art’ as an inventive convergence of methods by which the philosophical aim of self-understanding and insight can be achieved. Instead of talking of a balance in the dialogue between philosophy and literary art, I should prefer to talk rather of a convergence of tropes, a range of forms of reflection—story-telling, allegory, theatre, metaphor, dialectic, analysis, in combination and mutual dependence. This is not a matter of balance between philosophy and something else—‘literary art’. The philosophy lies in the totality. Thus, the elenchus is a particular procedure within the context of the whole which undermines attachment to such beliefs and attitudes as make us blind to what can be shown in the same dialogue only by other means. The elenchus is not the philosophy in the dialogue, but only a part of it. All the aspects in combination have the function of investigating and revealing realities that were previously hidden or unavailable. At the beginning such realities may be only dimly discerned, and we proceed feelingly by means of images and metaphors that we do not fully understand but they lead us by means of an imaginative form of reflection which belongs precisely to the nature of image and metaphor, the sense of an isomorphism in which attention to one of the terms leads us towards knowledge of another.
But, at the same time I am not entirely persuaded by my own intuition about where and how the lines should be drawn, and this is partly because our attitudes about what philosophy is are so entrenched. What I want to do in what follows is to look more closely at the question—what is it to do philosophy? It seems to me that the essentially Socratic attempt to free us from the bewitchment of our intelligence by language is only a part of philosophy and I am concerned that at least some of its other aspects are placed too firmly on the side of ‘literature’—but that doesn’t quite do it, either, since these other aspects could also quite naturally be thought of as belonging to ‘literature’ (but not ‘literature’ as opposed to ‘philosophy’) in just the way that the little scene with Alcibiades could, even though it has an obviously philosophical function (and is not merely ‘at the service’ of philosophy). Better, perhaps, the distinction to be made is not straightforwardly between one general kind of writing and another, ‘philosophy’ and ‘literature’, but rather between different forms of literature. One kind of writing of a discursive and analytic kind is quite obviously ‘philosophy’ as we currently understand the discipline but other kinds are no less ‘philosophical’ for the absence of these methods. Perhaps more than I realise turns on the fact that I use the noun ‘philosophy’ to characterise one kind of literature and the adjective ‘philosophical’ to characterise another. On the other hand, it is too question-begging and defeatist to leave things like that. The writing that we recognise as ‘philosophy’ (and the ‘we’ is overwhelmingly significant here as one thinks of the reception of continental philosophy in the Anglophone world) is so recognised because of a questionable division of labour, and what we see in the Platonic dialogues represent the status quo ante. It is an enactment of a particular aspect of philosophy and other forms enact and represent its other aspects.
I am acutely aware that many of us subscribe to the view that philosophy is an activity, a conversation which can also be carried out and also represented in writing, and that is partly the reason I have been talking about both representation and enactment, since the Symposium so obviously offers a representation and a carrying on of its subject matter, the investigation of the nature of desire. But the problem is to say just what kind of activity it is. There is plenty of scope in the history of philosophy for elenchus and the critique of our pretensions to knowledge, but explorations of the possibilities of knowledge, the forms in which human life can be ‘examined’, take much more diffuse forms and are no less philosophical for that. In other words the term ‘philosophical’ names a function or telos rather than a subset of the methods by which this telos or function might be achieved. What I have in mind in referring to this function or telos is a particular kind of moral endeavour that defines a philosophical community, at once revelatory and emancipatory, critical and constructive. The Socratic dialectic and elenchus by means of which ignorance and delusion may sometimes be dismantled is a part of this philosophical endeavour but not the whole: indeed there is a particular kind of intellectual and moral cruelty which simply dismantles and then leaves.
There is, then, unfortunately, an historical division of labour that is now reinforced and institutionalised in academic departments of philosophy, an institutional drag on the possibility of change within the discipline that reinforces more personal forms of resistance. The division of labour involves a fragmentation of the conception of philosophy that emerges in Plato’s Symposium and, to use a formula that has some significance in that dialogue, what I should want to call a part of philosophy has appropriated the name of the whole.
In her account of Eros Diotima claims that one thing that gods and ignorant mortals have in common is that neither of them desires wisdom, the one because they are already wise and you can only desire what you do not have, the other because they are unaware of any lack and you cannot desire what you do not know yourself to lack. I suppose one should qualify both of these statements, one in the ironic spirit of the Symposium itself. It is misleading to conflate ‘being wise’ and ‘having wisdom’, or at least the latter is a misleading expression which assimilates wisdom to a possible possession like health or wealth which could then be treated as a commodity with an exchange value. Socrates is lured by Diotima into offering an analysis of the desire for beauty in terms of ‘possession of the beautiful’, but is abruptly corrected, as we shall see, and the point is that the readiness to offer just that conflating analysis is the indication of a certain kind of moral blindness on his part that is seen rather more poignantly in the case of Alcibiades. Diotima’s alternative suggestion, that what we desire is ‘procreation in the beautiful’, is enormously suggestive as an account of what is involved in the love specifically of wisdom, because it tells us something about what it is to be or to become wise, and what it is to desire to be wise, that has a bearing on the nature of a creativity that reveals an inner unity between philosophy and literature or, as I shall now say, poetry.
The gods are wise and therefore do not desire to be wise. As for the ignorant, they are not always so deeply engulfed in their condition—we should want to tread more warily around a phrase like ‘you cannot desire what you do not know you lack’ since people sometimes protest too much, and the point about mauvaise foi is that it is evanescent. Nevertheless Diotima then offers a comment on a character we perhaps all know too well:
The tiresome thing about ignorance is precisely this, that a man who possesses neither beauty nor goodness nor intelligence is perfectly well satisfied with himself, and no one who does not believe that he lacks a thing desires what he does not believe he lacks.
Socrates then asks what kind of person can be said to love or desire wisdom and is told that it is ‘those who fall between wisdom and ignorance’. This class includes, however, the personified Eros, that weather-beaten, shoeless, homeless person who exemplifies the felt lack at the heart of desire, and it includes Eros because
wisdom is one of the most beautiful things, and Love is love of beauty, so it follows that Love must be a lover of wisdom and consequently in a state half-way between wisdom and ignorance.
I suppose we have to acknowledge that the conclusion is rather dubious. A lover of (any kind of) beauty could only ‘love wisdom’ if they were in a position to perceive it as ‘one of the most beautiful things’ and even then we can admire something beautiful without desiring it. There is a general comment to be made here on Plato’s account of eros and beauty. Beauty is something that we admire and we can admire a person or a beautiful object without conceiving a desire for them or suffering that sense of lack which belongs to desire. Indeed the whole Kantian aesthetic rather depends on this point. In any event, Diotima crucially represents the philosopher as a lover, an erastes. One might say that it is difficult to see how this image can be sustained: ‘wisdom’ is not an obvious candidate for the role of eromenos or ‘beloved’. And there is a further problem, which can be expressed as follows: surely one needs to know what wisdom is if one is to desire it. I’m not sure that this latter claim is true, since one can be oppressed by ignorance and futility and have a sense of something that transcends it without having much idea of what that would be, let alone how to attain it. Much more mundanely, and to talk perhaps more specifically of phronesis or ‘practical wisdom’, our ordinary human follies and stupidities are precisely failures to learn from experience, defined by our inability to act in the light of knowledge of the particular causal chains that characterise the human condition, and the wisdom consists not just in knowing but also in the power to act in the light of that knowledge.
But the dialogue almost centres on these two issues. The point about the figures of Alcibiades and Socrates is the admiration of the former and the attractiveness or moral beauty of the latter. The natural eromenos of the philosopher erastes is precisely someone wise or capable of wisdom. What we are shown is the failure of Alcibiades to comprehend what he admires and is attracted to. His conception of the wisdom of Socrates is limited and distorted by his spiritual condition: he does not understand the true nature of what attracts him, but is still passionately attracted to the distinctive demeanour and presence of Socrates. He thinks that Socrates has something that he can have through an exchange of goods, etc. This misunderstood attractiveness of Socrates is an important image of what it is to be in an intermediate state between ignorance and wisdom, a state which determines that one does not yet understand the nature of what one finds attractive. But this image is an essential part of a philosophical argument. In that sense Alcibiades is just as much a philosopher as the young Socrates: his being in ‘an intermediate state between ignorance and wisdom’ is shown in his failure to understand the nature of what for all that he still desires.
I turn now to a set of reflections by Diotima which have a more obvious bearing on the question of the relationship between ‘literature’ and ‘philosophy’.
“Why is it then, Socrates, if all men are always in love with the same thing, that we do not speak of all men as being in love, but say that some men are in love and others not?” …”the truth is that we isolate a particular kind of love and appropriate for it the name of love, which really belongs to a wider whole, while we employ a different name for the other kinds of love.”
Let us leave on one side the question of how we are supposed to substantiate the claim that all men are always in love with or desire the same thing—in fact it is claimed to be immortality or the eudaimonia or fulfilment that comes from possession of what is desired, and that is not as straightforward as it sounds. The obvious example of what Diotima has in mind here is philosophia itself. She claims in effect that the prefix masks that alleged unity among phenomena which makes the figure of Eros born of Poverty and Contrivance also the figure of the philosopher.
The initial implausibility of that alleged unity is lessened, I think, if we reduce talk of the beauty or attractiveness of wisdom to talk of the beauty or attractiveness of those deemed to be wise, and Alcibiades is certainly given lines which show him to be in a state of desire in relation to Socrates. But it is at this point in the conversation with Diotima that the young Socrates is made to ask an artless question whose answer brings us to the heart of the matter:
“Can you give me another example of such a usage?” … “Yes, here it is. By its original meaning poetry means simply creation, and creation, as you know, can take very various forms. Any action which is the cause of a thing emerging from non-existence to existence might be called poetry, and all the processes in all the crafts are kinds of poetry, and all those who engage in them poets … but yet they are not called poets, but have other names, and out of the whole field of poetry or creation one part, which deals with music and metre, is isolated and called by the name of the whole. This part alone is called poetry, and those whose province is this part of poetry are called poets”.
In parenthesis I should like to suggest, and this brings us back to the opening discussion about the nature of philosophy, that something similar has happened to the term ‘philosophy’. Just as Eros and poiesis have been appropriated for the part within the larger whole, ‘philosophy’ has been appropriated as a term that covers analysis and argument, that is to say, to a subset of the techniques, activities and attitudes that converge in the illuminative and emancipatory project of philosophy.
I think that the picture that emerges from this passage and what follows it is of philosophy as a form of poiesis, of creation or making, and of the philosopher as engaged in a form of creativity. But it is a very particular form of ‘causing a thing to emerge from non-existence to existence’, one that is expressed in terms of the metaphorics of bringing-forth, a bringing-forth of wisdom and virtue. But it seems to me that what Plato also envisages, and this comes out clearly in the graduated series of objects of desire in the Ascent to Absolute Beauty described by Diotima, is the making or creating of an Academy, a philosophical community of teachers and pupils which centres on this form of creativity.
But what support is there for the claim that philosophy is a form of poiesis? Let us start with the idea that there is a unity between the various forms of desire, that what they have in common is that experience of lack exemplified in the figure of Eros, who is more a spirit than a god and more a tramp than a spirit:
“The object of love, Socrates, is not, as you think, beauty.” “What is it then?” “Its object is to procreate and bring forth in beauty.” (207b)[2]
Whatever one may want to say about this general characterisation, the implication is that the object of the love of that form of beauty which is wisdom—what is here desired—is to procreate and bring forth in the beautiful. But what does this mean in this particular case? Well, it is here that the famous distinction is made in the Symposium between corporeal and spiritual progeny or offspring:
Those whose creative instinct is physical have recourse to women, and show their love in this way … but there are some whose creative instinct is of the soul, and who long to beget spiritually, not physically, the progeny which it is the nature of the soul to create and bring to birth. If you ask what that progeny is, it is wisdom and virtue in general; of this all poets and such craftsmen as have found out some new thing may be said to be begetters. (209a)
Thus Walter Hamilton’s translation. Waterfield offers a rather different and in some ways more interesting one:
Now, when men are physically pregnant, … they’re more likely to be attracted to women …Those who are mentally pregnant, however … I mean there are people whose minds are far more pregnant than their bodies; they’re filled with the offspring you might expect a mind to bear and produce. What offspring? Virtue, and especially wisdom. For instance, there are the creations brought into the world by the poets and any craftsmen who count as having done any original work …
The differences between the Hamilton and Waterfield translation presumably hints at some difficult metaphorical compression in the original about which I am in no position to comment. In any event, we have both male and female roles, begetting, conceiving, being pregnant, giving birth and rearing offspring in a slightly overwrought and promiscuous atmosphere of mutual attraction which surely merits Nietzsche’s cheerful comment:
Plato … says with an innocence for which one must be Greek and not ‘Christian’, that there would be no Platonic philosophy at all if Athens had not possessed such beautiful youths; it was the sight of them which first plunged the philosopher’s soul into an erotic whirl and allowed it no rest until it had implanted the seed of all high things into so beautiful a soil. Another singular saint!—one doesn’t believe one’s ears, even supposing one believes Plato. One sees at least that philosophising was different in Athens, above all public …Philosophy in the manner of Plato should rather be defined as an erotic contest …What finally emerged from this philosophical eroticism of Plato? A new artistic form of the Greek agon, dialectics. §23 p 80-81 Twilight of the Idols)
As far as poiesis is concerned, Diotima makes explicit reference to the poets when she talks about this spiritual offspring as virtue and wisdom. It is important to notice what Diotima goes on to say here, since it indicates a relatively low position in a larger hierarchy for the vocation of what we think of as philosophy
but far the greatest and fairest branch of wisdom is that which is concerned with the ordering of states and families, whose name is moderation and justice. (ibid)
But my particular interest at this point is that Diotima has told us that the philosopher is someone who desires wisdom because it is one of the highest forms of beauty, that to desire something beautiful is not so much a matter of seeking to possess and keep it but to bring to birth and procreate in it, and that in the case of the desire for wisdom the desire is manifested therefore in the desire to procreate and bring it forth. The main images are of begetting, being pregnant and giving birth. Begetting is a male activity and makes most sense in relation to the idea of ‘procreating in the beautiful’. The image which is slightly neglected but which seems the most important to me, is that of conceiving. Being pregnant and giving birth follow conception. In any case the picture is of planting seed as it were in another, bringing to birth in oneself and also, of course, acting as midwife to others as others have so acted to oneself in a community defined by these metaphors of creative relationship.
But Diotima goes on to identify the poets as among those who bring forth wisdom and virtue. The point is emphasised a little later when she mentions Homer and Hesiod:
Take Homer, for example, and Hesiod, and the other good poets; who would not envy them the children that they left behind them, children whose qualities have won immortal fame and glory for their parents? (209c)
What is desired by those who desire wisdom is expressed by means of the metaphorics of procreation and birth, including begetting, conceiving, gestation, bringing forth and raising: the relevant offspring are forms of wisdom and virtue.
Now whether this reference to wisdom and virtue is interesting and profound or merely pious depends absolutely on the ways in which these terms are applied. It is obvious enough that the metaphors are well-established as a language for talking about creativity or poiesis, about composition and realisation, as a way of talking about the formation of our ideas about how things are, about how we come to see that something we had taken for granted was an error or an illusion, about how we come to what Wittgenstein called a perspicuous representation, an understanding which consists in ‘seeing connections’. The kind of bringing forth of wisdom and virtue that Diotima attributes to the good poets seems to me an essentially philosophical poiesis, an activity of enlightenment and self-understanding which suggests a Platonic criterion of literary value. But again everything depends upon what content we give to this talk of wisdom and virtue. The dialogue itself of course offers representations of the progression from ignorance to self-understanding in its account of the real nature of Eros as essentially suffering lack, as weather-beaten, shoeless and homeless, and certainly not a lovely god. Or in its acute portrayal of Alcibiades’ failure to understand the nature of the embodied wisdom that he is also attracted to. It is Diotima who makes this connection between poetry—here in the form of music and metre—and the love of wisdom, a form of creativity that is to that extent philosophical, suggesting an inner unity between two forms of poiesis that is essentially philosophical. The Symposium itself creatively enacts and represents these processes. Of course the Socratic dialectic is an essential part of what we have come to understand philosophy to be, but, as I am seeking to show, this is only one activity among others in the attempt to communicate wisdom, essentially a process by which scales are removed from someone’s eyes, their errors and delusions are dismantled, so that they are brought into a state of tension which is ripe for something further, the development of wisdom. The connection between wisdom and virtue is also germane to the Platonic enterprise and has obvious resonances in the Indian traditions. Thus the image of the Cave in the Republic exercises a power of attraction upon the imagination, and its power of attraction is also a sign that it is showing us something which we have not yet fully realised. I think of the moment when the released prisoner sees for the first time the mechanisms which had determined the form of his whole previous experience. And then we find that it provides a kind of template by which we can start to gain an understanding of our own experience, that the form of our inner condition (the presence or absence of virtue) determines what we see and what we fail to see.
[1] I have mostly used the old Penguin translation by Walter Hamilton but have also referred to the Waterfield translation published by Oxford World Classics.
[2] Waterfield has the clearer but less elegant ‘birth and procreation in a beautiful medium’ (p 49)
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