Daniel Peterson

Love’s Fool: Mind and Emotion in the Speech of Alcibiades

By Daniel Peterson, Swarthmore College

Plato concludes several dialogues with a story or myth that seems out of place given the context of both the dialogue and Plato’s philosophical views as a whole. For example, many middle dialogues like the Republic and the Phaedo puzzle readers by ending with myths despite Plato’s apparent disdain for myths as a medium, evident in dialogues like the Ion. The Symposium ends in an equally puzzling way when, after Socrates’ “Diotima speech” seems to fully explicate Plato’s views on love, Alcibiades arrives at the party to deliver his own speech, one which focuses on his unrequited love for Socrates. It seems strange that such a passionate, personal, and at times comical speech follows Socrates’ abstract account of love, and this final speech certainly disrupts the flow of speeches which have been growing progressively more refined and convincing since Agathon’s party began.

Why, then, would Plato choose to follow the rational speech of Diotima, often taken to represent Plato’s own theory of love, with a speech like Alcibiades’s? And, more generally, what does the speech of Alcibiades add to the dialogue? Martha Nussbaum addresses this question in her book The Fragility of Goodness: luck and ethics in Greek tragedy and philosophy1. In this work, Nussbaum attempts to tie together Greek tragedy and philosophy to make a general statement about Greek views on aesthetics, morality, and the human life. In doing so, she draws upon the Symposium, and she provides an interpretation of the dialogue as a whole, including the speech of Alcibiades, which provides several important insights into Plato’s thought.

I will argue, however, that her interpretation of Alcibiades’s speech is flawed; though Nussbaum presents an accurate description of Diotima’s process of ascent and its connection to the Platonic conception of love, she incorrectly concludes that Alcibiades’s speech is meant to present an alternative theory of love that cannot be reconciled with Diotima’s. In this paper, I will show why Nussbaum’s interpretation of Alcibiades’s speech is insufficient and propose an alternative interpretation that explains how Alcibiades’s and Diotima’s speeches can be reconciled. I will explain Nussbaum’s perspective and argue against it by appealing to passages from the Symposium, the Phaedrus, and Nussbaum’s own book. Then, I will examine these same passages, along with aspects of Nussbaum’s interpretation that I would like to maintain, to construct a new interpretation of Alcibiades’s speech and how it fits in with rest of the dialogue.

So, how does Nussbaum understand the speech of Alcibiades in the Symposium? She examines this section of the dialogue by first considering Diotima’s speech, which provides the context for Alcibiades’s speech, and then proceeding to investigate Alcibiades’s speech in light of her conclusions on Diotima’s speech. In this analysis, Nussbaum focuses more on the process of love than on the object of love, giving birth to beauty, and as such I will follow suit in my criticism of her.

So what is this process of love proposed by Diotima’s speech, and what are its consequences? Nussbaum characterizes Diotima’s process of love as follows: "First, he or she sees only one loved one’s beauty. Then he must notice a close family resemblance between that beauty and others. Then…he decides that it is prudent to consider these rated beauties to be ‘one and the same’, that is, qualitatively homogeneous." (178, original emphasis) Nussbaum interprets Plato’s process of love as a kind of generalization based on particular experiences. The process consists of three steps: first, the person falls in love with a particular person. In this, one person recognizes the beauty of another and appreciates it. Secondly, the person sees this same beauty in other beautiful things, thus falling in love with them as well. Finally, the person concludes that, having experienced the same kind of process regarding love for the particular beautiful object and love for other beautiful things, he must rationally view these two loves as the same since they both share in love’s true object, beauty in general. Nussbaum elaborates on this final step later on in her chapter: “…the aspiring lover, aided by his teacher, sees relationships between one beauty and another, acknowledges that these beauties are comparable and intersubstitutable, differing only in quantity.” (180) From here on, I shall call these three steps in this process Nussbaum calls “the ascent” falling in love, generalizing love, and equating loves, respectively.

Of these three steps, Nussbaum focuses primarily on the final step of equating loves. She says of this step, “It is a startling and powerful vision. Just try to think it seriously: this body of this wonderful beloved person is exactly the same in quality as that person’s mind and inner life.” (180) All beauties, for Nussbaum’s Plato, are equal, so the true lover loves the body of his lover as much as his lover’s soul, for both of these entities participate in the same form of beauty. What’s more, the true lover will come to love all things that participate in the form of beauty, including mathematical theorems and heavenly bodies. What follows from this process, according to Nussbaum, is a collapse of the particular in the face of the general. Because Plato’s ratiocination makes all beauties the same, the lover is best suited for a life of contemplation in which he can be free to love beauty in general instead of loving merely instances of this beauty. As Nussbaum says, “The lover, seeing a flat uniform landscape of value, with no jagged promontories or deep valleys, will have few motivations for moving here rather than there on the landscape. A contemplative life is a natural choice.” (181) It is by equating beauties, then, that the lover becomes a philosopher, and equalizing loves, the goal of the three-step process of ascent, provides this transition.

Alcibiades is no such philosophical lover. Unlike Diotima’s speech, Alcibiades’s speech is full of angst, pain, loss, and the love of the particular that opposes the conception of the general, philosophical love presented in Diotima’s speech. Nussbaum writes, “Asked to speak about Love, Alcibiades has chosen to speak of a particular love; no definitions or explanations of the nature of anything, but just a story of a particular passion for a particular life: the understanding of eros he has achieved through his own experience.” (185) In this way, Alcibiades takes an entirely different tack from Diotima, focusing solely on the love for a single person, Socrates, instead of a more general love of beauty. Nussbaum interprets Alcibiades as saying, “There are some truths about love that can be learned only through the experience of a particular passion of one’s own.” (185) Because this kind of personal love lacks the rational generalization and equalization of loves that Diotima’s speech contains, Nussbaum concludes that the Alcibiades’s speech proposes an entirely different theory of love. As Nussbaum says:

He [Alcibiades] wants to claim that through a lover’s intimacy he can produce accounts that are more deeply and precisely true—that capture more of what is characteristic and practically relevant about Socrates, that explain more about what Socrates does and why—than any account that could be produced by a form-lover who denied himself the cognitive resources of the senses and emotion. (191)

Thus, Alcibiades proposes a theory of love that opposes Socrates’ theory, one which Alcibiades, according to Nussbaum, clearly believes holds more truth than the logical kind of love proposed by Diotima. Alcibiades is not concerned with the process of ascent here; he is content to sit on the lowest rung of the ladder of ascent because, according to Nussbaum, he believes that it is only from this perspective that he can “produce accounts” that are the most true and thus give birth (through production of accounts) to what is really true in human life.

So what is Plato’s purpose in establishing these two mutually exclusive theories of love, according to Nussbaum? She answers this question directly by stating:

What they [the other commentators on the Symposium] omit is now movingly displayed to us in the person and the story of Alcibiades. We realize, through him, the deep importance unique passion has for ordinary human beings; we see its irreplaceable contribution to understanding. But the story brings a further problem: it shows us clearly that we cannot simply add the love of Alcibiades to the ascent of Diotima; indeed that we cannot have this love and the kind of stable rationality that she revealed to us. Socrates was serious when he spoke of two mutually exclusive varieties of vision. (197-8)

For Nussbaum, then, the Alcibiades speech is meant to be taken seriously, and its purpose is to propose a unique (though, in Plato’s eyes, insufficient) alternative to Diotima’s theory of love. These two theories must be distinct because, in Nussbaum’s words, “We see two kinds of value, two kinds of knowledge; and we see that we must choose. One sort of understanding blocks the other.” (198) That is to say, if one were to take Alcibiades’s perspective, further ascent would seem dehumanizing since it would lead to a more removed perspective on humanity, while from Diotima’s perspective one would only remain at the first step of the ascent process out of ignorance since the more general love is always greater than the particular love. The speech of Alcibiades, then, is paired with its opposite, the speech of Diotima. The purpose of Diotima’s speech is to explain what theory of love must be accepted for one to live the good life, according to Nussbaum’s view, and the purpose of Alcibiades’s speech is Plato’s example of a theory of love that must be explicitly rejected for one to live the good life. This is Nussbaum’s solution to the problem of Alcibiades’s speech.

The question is whether Nussbaum’s views are well-supported in Plato. Since the characterization of ascent is so crucial to Nussbaum, it is appropriate to begin my analysis with it. Nussbaum’s three-step process of ascent comes from the following passage from the Symposium, in which Socrates quotes Diotima:

A lover who goes about this matter correctly must begin in his youth to devote himself to beautiful bodies…then he should realize that the beauty of any one body is brother to the beauty of any other and that if he is to pursue beauty of form he would be very foolish not to think that the beauty of all bodies is one and the same. When he grasps this, he must become a lover of all beautiful bodies. (210a-b)2

This passage clearly supports Nussbaum’s characterization of ascent. First, it begins with the devotion of a lover to “beautiful bodies”, so the lover is first expected to find beauty in particulars. As Socrates establishes before this passage, the recognition and appreciation of beauty in another is what constitutes love, and it is therefore reasonable for Nussbaum to make this first step “falling in love”. One reaches the second step, generalizing love, when he recognizes the fact that “the beauty of any one body is brother to the beauty of another,” and is able to find beauty in places other than his beloved. This is a generalization because, having found beauty in one thing, the lover is able to generalize this love to all beautiful things. The final step of this process, the equalization of loves, occurs once the lover realizes that “the beauty of all bodies is one and the same,” which is exactly how Nussbaum characterizes this final step.

In the following passage, Diotima’s speech also conveys the idea that the process of ascent is the only true account of how one loves: "You see, the man who has been thus far guided in matters of Love, who has beheld beautiful things in the right order and correctly, is coming now to the goal of Loving: all of a sudden he will catch sight of something wonderfully beautiful in its nature; that, Socrates, is the reason for all his earlier labors." (210e) By emphasizing the “right order” in which the lover is supposed to conduct this process so that he can achieve his goal, Plato is lending credence to Nussbaum’s claim that the process of ascent alone leads one to a correct conception of love. Through the right order of ascent only can the lover can see something “wonderfully beautiful” in its nature. Therefore, Nussbaum is well-supported in the importance she ascribes to and her characterization of the three-step process of ascent in the Symposium.

However, this agreement does not vindicate all of Nussbaum’s views—indeed, it may refute some of them. Nussbaum claims that Alcibiades’s vision of a mad, personal love cannot be reconciled with Diotima’s more general, universal conception of love; yet she characterizes the ascent process in such a way that it begins with such a love of particulars, though it does proceed to transcend them. Alcibiades, of course, is not able to ascend, and as such he is trapped in the first stage of ascent; but does this deny the possibility that Diotima’s and Alcibiades’s speeches can be reconciled by the fact that Alcibiades explains the first step of ascent which Diotima’s speech all but ignores?³ Clearly, if this were the case, the difference between the Diotima speech and the Alcibiades speech would not be a difference between two irreconcilable theories of love but rather a difference in emphasis between the rationality and emotionality of the process of ascent. Also, Alcibiades’s entrenchment in the first step of this process explains why Plato would pair this speech with Diotima’s, which first describes ascent.

The theories of love found in Diotima’s and Alcibiades’s speeches can be reconciled more easily if one draws evidence from the Phaedrus and the theory of love presented in it as well as the Symposium. These two dialogues both include persuasive speeches on love. In the Symposium, it seems as if Plato is selling himself short; the only philosophical view of love presented in this dialogue that modern interpreters generally attribute to Plato, namely the one proposed by Socrates, seems rather brief when compared to the Meno’s account of recollection or the Phaedo’s proofs of the immortality of the soul. In contrast, the Phaedrus focuses more prominently on Socrates’ conception of love than does the Symposium with its many, varied speeches on the subject. As such it seems reasonable to invoke the Phaedrus to help clarify Plato’s view on love.

Nussbaum would disagree with this approach since she concludes that the Phaedrus marks a new turn to Plato’s thought on love. When making the statement of purpose for her chapter on the Phaedrus, she writes: “I shall argue that the Phaedrus displays a new view of the role of feeling, emotion, and particular love in the good life, and that this change of view is explored inside the dialogue itself….” (202) Nussbaum supports this statement about the novelty of the Phaedrus by arguing that the Phaedrus shows that, for example, “Some kinds of madness can be responsible for ‘the greatest of goods for us’” (213), a statement that she would never attribute to the Symposium and its treatment of Alcibiades’s “madness”. Nussbaum draws several other conclusions concerning the Phaedrus, such as: “He is clearly claiming that certain sorts of essential and high insights come to us only through the guidance of the passions.” (214) Thus, in the Phaedrus, Nussbaum finds a Plato who accepts the passions as valuable and worthwhile pursuits instead of hindrances to true understanding, and thus she states that it diverges from the thought of the Symposium.

Yet the Phaedrus does not have to be so radically different. In this dialogue, love is characterized as a kind of madness, but a kind with two parts: a good part and an evil part. Socrates asks, “And…there are two kinds of madness, one produced by human illness, the other by a divinely inspired release from normally accepted behavior?”4 (265a) This rhetorical passage shows that madness for Plato can be positive if it is divinely inspired. If Nussbaum’s interpretation of Alcibiades’s speech is to hold up to the Phaedrus as well, the positive form of madness cannot be what possesses Alcibiades since Plato approves of this kind of mania. So what kind of madness does possess Alcibiades? The former madness is associated with illness and “left-handedness,” (266a) while of the latter it can be said, “…in fact the best things we have come from madness when it is given as a gift of the god.” (244a)

The above quotes concerning the “positive” form of madness suggest that is can be distinguished from its opposite by a focus on the divinity of the loved. As Socrates says, “Everyone chooses his love after his own fashion from among those who are beautiful, and then treats the boy like his very own god, building him up and adorning him as an image to honor and worship.” (252d-e) Note that this passage also draws a parallel between the Symposium and the Phaedrus since it is only with one who is “beautiful” that another falls in love. It seems that, in one respect at least, Plato has not changed his theory as Nussbaum suggests since beauty and beautiful things are still the objects of love, and therefore this passage supports my use of the Phaedrus to support points in the Symposium. If this parallel between the two dialogues is valid, it is the positive madness alone that Plato would associate with the first step of the ascension process since Plato would never suggest that positive benefits like the understanding of a form could come from the negative madness. Although Plato does not draw such a distinction between types of madness in the Symposium, the positive kind of madness seems reconcilable with the first step in the ascension process, especially since the Diotima speech does not describe this step thoroughly and since Plato supports this conception of love in the Phaedrus. Another important thing to note about the above passage is that the positive kind of madness deifies the loved one. It is only in cases like the one described in the above passage, according to Plato, that madness helps one get in touch with the true god5 and obtain knowledge of the good.

If Alcibiades, then, can be shown to revere Socrates as a deity in a manner consistent with positive madness, it would seem that Alcibiades is, in fact, on the first step of the ascension process. The fact that Alcibiades’s love for Socrates is a positive form of madness can be seen from several examples. First of all, and most importantly, the first paragraph of Alcibiades’s speech compares Socrates to statues the deity Silenus: “Look at him! Isn’t he just like a statue of Silenus? You know the kind of statue I mean…It’s split right down the middle , and inside it’s full of tiny statues of the gods.” (215b) By suggesting that, like the statues of Silenus, Socrates himself is full of holy relics and using the imagery of statues to which one prays or which one worships, Alcibiades is clearly revealing his divine wonder and awe for Socrates. This are definite symptoms of the divinely-inspired love rather than base love. Alcibiades provides further examples when he compares Socrates to the satyr Marsyas later in the same passage: “Now look at him [Socrates] again! Isn’t he also just like the satyr Marsyas?” (215b)

Alcibiades’s direct comparison between his loved one and a divinity suggests that Alcibiades is possessed by the kind of positive madness described previously. What’s more, Alcibiades later says that Socrates is greater than such a god: “The only difference between you and Marsyas is that you need no instruments; you do exactly what he does, but with words alone.” (215c-d) Since Socrates is capable of such divine magic even without the tools that Marsyas needs to do his work, Socrates is clearly superior to such a divine figure in Alcibiades’s eyes. All of these quotes, then, show that Alcibiades loves Socrates not just as an object of his appetites but rather as a deity or sacred object worthy of worship. For this reason, it seems that Alcibiades’s love is an example of the positive kind of madness described so thoroughly in the Phaedrus, and, as such, this kind of madness suggests that Plato views Alcibiades’s first step on the path of ascent in a more positive light than Nussbaum is willing to admit.

Nussbaum recognizes several similarities between the madness of love described in the Phaedrus and the mad character of Alcibiades in the Symposium. She says, for instance, “An example of the erotic mad person would be Alcibiades, whose account of his actions is a story concerned with particulars, packed with expressions of and appeals to feeling and emotion.” (204) Thus, Nussbaum believes that the Phaedrus departs from the Symposium in that the kind of madness Plato despised in Alcibiades in the Symposium is argued for in the Phaedrus as a uniquely valuable experience. For this reason she views the Phaedrus as a kind of counterpoint to the Symposium, one in which “The ethical thinker cannot, it seems, afford to make sharp and simplistic divisions between bad madness and good sophrosune [usually translated as “moderation”] as the first two speeches did, as the Republic and the Symposium did.” (213)

However, Nussbaum’s conclusion about the simplicity of the ethical thinker in the Symposium does not recognize the distinction between the positive and negative forms of madness presented in the Phaedrus. And, if such positive mania is the starting point for Plato’s process of ascent, why should the Phaedrus mark a radical change in Plato’s thought? Nussbaum draws conclusions about the Phaedrus which are, in themselves, correct; Plato certainly favors the kind of positive madness that descends upon the lover as a way to truth, especially when Socrates makes statements such as “These are the rewards you will have from a lover’s friendship, my boy, and they are as great as divine gifts should be. A non-lover’s companionship, on the other hand, is diluted by human self-control;....” (256e) However, Nussbaum does not support her claim that such a view cannot be reconciled with the view presented in the Symposium. Rather, it seems, the Phaedrus is simply a more in-depth treatment of one step of the process of ascent presented in the Symposium.

If the positive kind of madness is the first step on the path towards true love, then why is a speech in favor of it made by such a character as outlandish as Alcibiades? Why would Plato not show more respect for such a speaker? Alcibiades even says of himself:

Socrates is the only man in the world who has made me feel shame—ah, you didn’t think I had it in me, did you? Yes he, makes me feel ashamed: I know perfectly well that I can’t prove he’s wrong when he tells me what I should do; yet, the moment I leave his side, I go back to my old ways: I cave in to my desire to please the crowd. (216b)

Alcibiades is able to hear the words of Socrates, yet he cannot internalize them permanently. He can understand what Socrates says immediately after he says it, and, more than that, Alcibiades feels a deep and abiding love for Socrates. However, he is not able to act on the words of truth that Socrates gives him, and for this reason he is unable to take the second step in the process of ascent: he cannot generalize his love. Instead of seeking the form of beauty in everything and generalizing the things he learns from Socrates to his own political life, he ends up reverting to his old ways, and as such he returns to pursuing Socrates on a lower level.

This is Alcibiades’s flaw, and it helps explain the inclusion of his speech in the Symposium. Because Alcibiades is able to take the first step in the process of ascent but unable to take the second, he is tragically doomed to pine away for a truth (and a Socrates) that he can never attain. Plato presents this flawed character to discourage those who, like Alcibiades, are or would be stuck on the first step of the process of ascent, lured away from generalizing their love by obsessing over the specific. Nussbaum provides support for this kind of rationale by writing, “…Socrates’ pupils, inspired by personal love, tend not to follow his advice.” (168) Thus, it seems that the tale of Alcibiades is a cautionary one, meant to keep Plato’s readers on the path towards true understanding.

Yet there is one further point to be made in this interpretation, for Alcibiades is not the only flawed character in the Symposium to give a speech at the end. Socrates’ Diotima speech carries with it a curious passage in which Diotima seems to chastise Socrates and express her doubts about his understanding of love: “‘Even you, Socrates, could probably come to be initiated into these rites of love. But as for the purpose of these rites when they are done correctly—that is the final and highest mystery, and I don’t know if you are capable of it.’” (210a) Why is Diotima doubtful that Socrates will be able to fully understand love? This passage seems out of place if Nussbaum is right and Socrates is supposed to be presenting Plato’s idea of a perfect theory of love. After all, if Socrates, Plato’s hero, is unable to understand love, what hope have we? And, more importantly, if Socrates may not be able to understand the “rites of initiation” to love, what of Nussbaum’s statement that “Socrates is put before us as an example of a man in the process of making himself self-sufficient—put before us, in our still unregenerate state, as a troublesome question mark or challenge”? (184) Can such a man really be the paragon of Platonic virtue?

Plato’s passage hinges on the word “initiated”. Diotima says that Socrates could probably be “initiated” into the “rites of love”, but he would probably not be able to grasp the “highest mystery”. If one accepts Nussbaum’s theory of love as the process of ascent, it becomes clear what the “initiation” must be: the mania induced by falling in love, for without this, the rest of the revelation cannot follow. What’s more, this is the only step in the process of ascent that Socrates might lack since both generalizing love and equalizing loves derive from rationality, and since such rationality is characteristic of philosophers and Socrates is the paragon of philosophy, it would be specious to assume that irrationality is what keeps Socrates from true knowledge. If one then interprets “initiation” in this passage as the process of falling in love, it becomes clear why Socrates is not as wise as Diotima on the subject of love and why it is Diotima, not Socrates, who has the answers: Socrates does not have the depth of emotion to truly fall in love, a fact supported by Socrates’ lack of emotion when dealing with Alcibiades’s advances.6 As such, Socrates has not been “initiated” into the “rites of love” yet, and, though he understands the generalizing and equalizing processes would work, he still cannot fall in love as is first required to “ascend”.

Thus, the conflict between mind and emotion presents itself in the Symposium through the conflicting speeches of Socrates and Alcibiades. Socrates speaks of Diotima, who, like Plato, has perfect knowledge of the process of loving, which begins as an emotional response to particulars but rationally generalizes to an equal love for all things. However, Socrates possesses the rational capacities without the emotional capacities, so he omits a description of falling in love in Diotima’s speech. This omission of such detail is later remedied in the Phaedrus, wherein Socrates seems to finally understand love, but as of the Symposium he has not yet gained this revelation. Contrary to Nussbaum’s opinion, Socrates has not made the ascent in the Symposium since he has not grasped an understanding in love, and it is not until the Phaedrus that Plato allows him to make this first step in the process of ascent. Such an interpretation of Socrates has important consequences for his character in general; after all, if the process of ascent is what allows one to grasp the forms, then Socrates has not grasped the forms and does not have the knowledge most of his readers assume him to have. However, this problem is beyond the scope of this paper and will have to be addressed elsewhere.

Alcibiades, as opposed to Socrates, has the requisite emotion for the kind of love necessary for the good life but no true understanding of the rational component necessary for one to generalize love equally to all things. As such, Plato sets up the two characters of Socrates and Alcibiades in the Symposium, not to establish a good/bad distinction between two separate theories of love as Nussbaum would suggest, but rather as two separate failures to understand the necessary interplay between mind and emotion as it is manifest in love: one too rational to experience the joy and mania of love, the other too emotional to exercise his rationality.□