with Socrates’ conclusion and exclaims in exasperation and
bewilderment:
I swear by the gods, Socrates, I have no idea what I mean – I
must be in some absolutely bizarre condition! When you ask
me questions, first I think one thing and then I think something
else.61
This is just the kind ‘acting like a fool’ that Alcibiades retrospectively describes as the first symptom of being poisonously intoxicated by
Socrates’ philosophy.
61 Ibid., 116e.
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The point is that the flaws of logic in Socrates’ ‘argument’ in
Alcibiades are so serious and so numerous that when we consider them in light of Alcibiades’ eulogy in Symposium it is grounds for the suspicion that Plato did actual y intend Socrates to be some
sort of satyr who intoxicates with his flute tunes rather than soberly convincing people with benignly rational arguments. In this case,
the flaws in the dialogue Alcibiades, as well as its dramatic linkage to the latter’s eulogy of Socrates in Symposium, would be intentional devices employed by Plato as a means of providing a key to unlock
the innermost chamber of his philosophy.
The Dionysian is an erotic energy or vision and in Symposium
Socrates claims that “eros is the one thing in the world I understand”62
and “eros will help our mortal nature more than all the world...this is why I cultivate and worship...[it]...and bid others do the same.”63
Alcibiades says that only drunkards tell the truth.64 We could take
this as a hint from Plato that only in the Dionysian intoxication of
the dialogue Symposium, particularly Alcibiades’ eulogy, will the whole truth about his philosophy be revealed. In light of this hint,
and Socrates’ own admission that eros is all he understands and teaches, we might reasonably assume that the wisdom unveiled by
the enchanting lady Diotima is the closest we come to a revelation of
Plato’s own esoteric understanding.
She teaches Socrates that one must fall in love with the beauty
of one body, then compare it to others and see that as the love is for the bodily form one should love all people with beautiful bodies and account any given one of little importance. This should ultimately
lead to one being drawn to the beauty of a soul, even if in an ugly body
– perhaps because the fascination with physical beauty is satiated
through one’s abandonment to all its abundance. This love will foster
nobility in one’s thoughts and words, provoking contemplation of
the beauty of abstractions like laws and institutions. From here one
will go on to love the beauty of knowledge and the sciences that lead
62 Ibid., 177e.
63 Ibid., 212 b-c.
64 Ibid., 217e.
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to it and from this perspective, one will see the narrowness of all
other beauties, especial y bodily love of one person. Then one stands
on the threshold of ultimate Beauty in-itself:
...an everlasting loveliness which neither comes nor goes, which
neither flowers nor fades, for such beauty is the same on every
hand, the same then as now, here as there, this way as that way,
the same to every worshipper as it is to every other. Nor will
his vision of the beautiful take the form of a face, or of hands,
or of anything that is of the flesh. It will be neither words, nor
knowledge, nor something that exists in something else, such as
a living creature, or the earth, or the heavens, or anything that is
– but subsisting of itself and by itself in an eternal oneness, while
every lovely thing partakes of it in such sort that, however much
the parts may wax and wane, it will be neither more nor less, but
still the same inviolable whole.65
I believe that Plato intends Alcibiades’ description of Socrates as a
garishly erotic silenus that opens up to reveal images of the gods
inside as a symbol for the relation between the Apollonian and
Dionysian in his doctrine. It is strongly implied that before one
realizes the beauty of the soul one must have sexual relations with
many beautiful people at the same time. In other words, one must
thoroughly indulge in physical love in order to see that it does not
ultimately suffice to satiate the deepest (erotic) desires of one’s soul.
This orgiastic imagery of lady Diotima’s “final mystery” is Dionysian
not only on the surface, but also in that the orgy is supposed to
result in some kind of ecstatic transcendence to an appreciation
of divine oneness. While the pre-Platonic Dionysian vision only
comes about occasional y, when one is driven into ecstasy by
intoxication, music and erotic revelry, once attained, Plato’s vision
of oneness is permanent and ever-present. According to Plato’s
Diotima, the love of Wisdom – i.e. philosophia – is this deeper and more rapturous eroticism. Perhaps this is why Socrates, who is its
65 Ibid., 210a – 211b.
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perfect embodiment, drives Alcibiades ‘mad’ like a ‘fool’ to strip and embrace Socrates.
The erotic dynamic between male and female Guardians in
the Republic reiterates the alchemical y transformative potential of sexual energy that Diotima teaches in Symposium – especial y in its insistence on the fact that as lovers, men and women philosophers
will never possess each other, just as they will not possess any other forms of private property: “...all the women should be common
to all the men...” This frees eros from the chains of jealousy, envy, emulation, greed and violence and allows it to become a powerful
means of transcendental seduction to wisdom. Here is the key
passage, which we should read in light of the one from The Seventh Letter quoted above – about wisdom flashing forth only amidst the intimacy of a communal life of intense seekers:
Then the women guardians must strip, since they’ll clothe
themselves in virtue instead of robes, and they must take
common part in war and the rest of the city’s guarding, and must
not do other things...And the man who laughs at naked women
practicing gymnastic for the sake of the best, ‘plucks from his
wisdom an unripe fruit for ridicule’ and doesn’t know – as
it seems – at what he laughs or what he does... all the women
should be common to all the men... They will live and feed
together, and have no private home or property. They will mix
freely in their physical exercises [for which the Greeks always
stripped naked] and the rest of their training, and [so] they’ll
be led by an inner natural necessity to sexual mixing with one
another...possessing nothing private but the body...they will then
be free from faction.66
Through the pure eros inherently involved in “the pursuit of wisdom”
lovers become to each other symbols of Beauty-in-itself. Instead of
dissipating in the flesh of the other, erotic desire is directed towards this form by its attraction to the beloved, and transcends to this
66 Ibid.,
Republic: 457a–458d; 464e.
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form through the (earthly) beloved. Yet the form of Beauty is itself a mere construct used to attain the discipline and attunement that
allows one to have a vision
of the “first principle”. Plato says the latter is beyond “reality”, thus it is not only beyond Becoming but also
beyond Being. It is the why or the Good for-the-sake-of-which there is a mixture of Being and Non-Being in the receptacle to produce
the Becoming of the world.
What defines a caress – as opposed to touching, grasping,
holding and taking – is an absorbed languor that almost forgets
itself. It abandons the intellect’s intentional deliberation and delivers itself over to the presence of the other’s body as experienced through one’s own. The seat of consciousness moves from the mind to
stomach, and one feels compromised and vulnerable amidst the
world. The “shiver of pleasure” brings forth embodiment but if one
becomes reflexively conscious of it and begins to seek it as a goal
one loses sight of the Being of the other, who instead becomes an
object of one’s subjectivity. If this occurs eros is defeated for one can never possess the transcendent Beauty of the other as ‘object’. All of one’s grasping and penetrating, and ultimately even one’s climax of
pleasure, become pervaded by the torturous refusal of surfaces.
The analogy is that the body, like the world itself, is a phenomenon
in which Being shines forth and is sheltered as a Becoming – where form limits a Being which would otherwise be so blinding that it would escape us all together, and thereby allows it to scintil ate in its coming to presence. Heraclitus recounts how while we go about lost
in our worldly business every day, the world itself escapes us. Like a fish that does not see the water it is swimming in we fail to recognize that we are, and marvel that we are. He says so poetical y: Men forget where the way leads...And they are at odds with that with which they most constantly associate. And what they meet
with every day seems strange to them... We should not act and
speak like men asleep.67
67 Kahn,
The Art and Thought of Heraclitus, 31.
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The forms are Plato’s answer to Heraclitus’ exasperated and paradoxical question: “How can one hide from that [Sun] which
never sets?!” Only through rigorous abstraction can we gain enough
distance from the world which we “meet with every day” that we can
then look back at the world in wonder, look at the phenomenon of existence in which Being and becoming are necessarily reciprocal
manifestations of each other. This looking back is the Platonic
reversal, which takes place once the philosopher has attained to the
form of forms. In the Phaedo, Plato writes:
I thought that... in the contemplation of true existence, I ought
to be careful that I did not lose the eye of my soul; as people
may injure their bodily eye by observing and gazing on the
sun during an eclipse, unless they take the precaution of only
looking at the image reflected in the water, or in some analogous
medium... I was afraid that my soul might be blinded altogether
if I looked at things with my eyes... and I thought that I had
better have recourse to the world of idea and seek there the truth of things...68
Nietzsche argued that Greek tragedy originated in the chorus (not
the dramatic action) and it was in its most ancient form nothing
but the chorus. People of Dionysian spirit desire the truth of nature
in its most unforgiving reality and when they achieve this through
intoxication they are transformed into satyr-like beings that speak
with an oracular wisdom, which flows from comprehending the
heart of existence through union with it. This is the chorus in its
most ancient form. In tragedy, it becomes a realized projection of
the desire of the civilized mass of spectators to regain this primordial state. The action is, in turn, a ‘vision’ of the chorus. Original y the only subject of drama was the suffering and redemption of Dionysus.
Moreover, this drama was not actual y present but was imagined, literal y as a vision of the chorus who in their intoxication were the servants of Dionysus. In music, dance, and words they conveyed
this invisible epiphany of their god. The introduction of actors and
68 Hamilton,
Collected Dialogues of Plato, Phaedo: 99d–100a.
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drama is an Apollonian objectivization – in dreamlike epic imagery
– of the Dionysian state of the chorus.
Nietzsche goes on to explain that all of the heroes of tragedy
are masks of what was original y none other than Dionysus. The
simplicity and clarity of their lines and characters are merely the
glimmers of an Apollonian surface of light behind which there looms
an infinite background of darkness from out of which they arise (as
consolations). In tragedy, the hero’s suffering or demise (original y
the dismemberment of Dionysus) is dramatized in order to show
that it is a mere phenomenon and the eternal life behind it remains
untouched and persists (original y, Dionysus’ rebirth). This suffering and redemption, dismemberment and rebirth, is an expression of
the truth of the Dionysian mysteries: that individuation is the source of all suffering and redemption is to be found in the intoxication that al ows one to plunge into the primordial unity of al (Dionysus returning to the womb for rebirth).
Plato ends the Symposium with the image of two dramatists,
Agathon the tragedian and Aristophanes the comedian, discussing
their art forms with Socrates. Plato tel s us that Socrates was arguing that the same person should be able to write both tragedy and
comedy. In The Birth of Tragedy Nietzsche argues that Apollonian-Dionysian tragedy suffered its demise at the hands of the purely
Apollonian ‘Socratism’ of Euripidean ‘comedy’. Could it be that Plato, who began his life as a tragic poet like Agathon, is actual y inventing a new artistic genre that seeks to rejuvenate the tense balance of both the Apollonian and Dionysian? This may be why the conversation
is metaphorical y set just before dawn as if to anticipate the birth of something new. Agathon and Aristophanes, Tragedy and Comedy,
both fall asleep and after respectful y covering them, Socrates gets
up and leaves the symposium to start a new day.
Perhaps the archetypal “forms” or “ideas” are to Plato’s new art of
Philosophy what (according to Nietzsche) the Apollonian imagery
of tragedy is to its dark, hidden and primal Dionysian background?
In this one and only dialogue of intoxicated honesty are we being
told to look at the forms like the little statuettes of gods against the 75
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background of the silenus that envelops them? We again come face
to face with the Platonic reversal. Let us look back at Socrates’ first discussion with Alcibiades in which he evokes the injunction of the
God Apollo. “...Trust in me and in the Delphic inscription and ‘know
thyself’” he says, and then continues:
...Now, how can we get the clearest knowledge of our soul?
If we knew that, we’d probably know ourselves as wel ...If the
inscription...advised... “See thyself,” how would we understand
such advice? ...I’m sure that you’ve noticed that when a man
looks into an eye his face appears in it, like in a mirror...So if
an eye is to see itself, it must look at an eye...Then if the soul,
Alcibiades, is to know itself, it must look at a soul... 69
In light of the development of Socrates
’ relationship with Alcibiades
in Symposium as one of erotic seduction, and in light of the passages in Phaedrus and Republic, we see how this Apollonian commandment is written in the blood of Dionysian rites. Philosophical knowledge
is only possible through dialogue because, as Plato says, the form of forms “is not knowledge” but lies beyond it. It is ultimately
unknowable by the intellect, and thus unknowable in isolation.
This is why Plato does not write his secret doctrine. It can only be
discovered through “...the skill in the science of love which thou
hast given me …philosophical discussion directed towards love in
singleness of heart.” The philosophical dialogue with the other on the same quest for wisdom, when at its peak of intensity, is inherently
erotic in its maddening Dionysian transcendence of subjectivity and
attainment of union. We can only find ourselves inside the other. The
Soul, Plato tel s Alcibiades, is in the eye of the other . The orgiastic erotic ascension towards the form of the Beautiful in Symposium, and the common marriage of the Guardians in pursuit of the form
of Justice in Republic, is like the flirtatious dance of Maenads around their vision of the god whose dismemberment is a symbol of the
il usion of individuation, and whose rebirth symbolizes the death of
the Self who finds itself inside the other. “Know Thyself!” whispers
69 Ibid.,
Alcibiades: 132c-d; 133a-b.
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Apollo, through the lips of Dionysus... “Make Music Socrates!”
whispers Dionysus, through the lips of Apollo.
5. The Pharmakon of Occidental Rationalism
If there is anything to the interpretation that I have been forwarding, and which now draws to its close, then Plato remains the most
deceptively complex thinker in the history of Philosophy. We should
expect as much from the philosopher who proposed to rebuild
society on the foundation of a ‘noble lie.’ In “Plato’s Pharmacy”
Derrida focuses his study on Plato’s use of the ambiguous Greek word
pharmakon, which can mean drug in the sense of “poison” or in the sense of “medicine”. He argues that when Plato condemns writing in
the Phaedrus, he attempts to deny the positive meaning of the word.
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