Symposium
Place on List:
I. Literary Theory and
Criticism
1. History of Literary Theory and
Criticism until 1930
Plato. *Symposium.
Trans. Christopher Gill.
Supporting References:
- “Plato.” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2001. 33-7. Print.
“1. Dialogue by
Plato,
written perhaps c.384 bc. The events described are supposed to
have taken place at a party held in Athens at the house of the tragic
poet Agathon
who is celebrating his first victory in the competitions for tragedy
at the Lenaea
of 416 bc. The dialogue is narrated by a friend of Socrates,
Apollodorus of Phalerum, who was not present (being too young) but
had the story from an eyewitness and admirer of Socrates,
Aristodemus. For entertainment each of the guests delivers a short
speech in honour of love, Phaedrus from a mythical standpoint,
Pausanias from that of a sophist, Agathon from that of a poet, and so
on; Aristophanes
turns the dialogue towards comedy. Each speech is a clever parody by
Plato of the style of the purported speaker. Socrates takes the
discussion on to a higher plane. He has learnt from Diotima, the
priestess of Mantinea, that love may have a nobler aspect. The need
in a human being which is manifested on a lower plane by sexual love
can also take an intellectual form, the desire of the soul to create
conceptions of wisdom and beauty such as poets and legislators
produce. One should proceed by stages, as when climbing a ladder,
from the love of a beautiful body to the perception and love of
universal divine beauty, which has no physical aspect. Alcibiades
now joins the party, professedly drunk. He confesses the fascination
which Socrates exercises on him and his hope of receiving lessons in
wisdom from him. He tells of various incidents in the life of
Socrates, including his own failure to seduce him. Socrates, he says,
is like the statuettes of Silenus
that conceal images of gods inside them, and like Marsyas
the satyr who with his pipe could charm the souls of men. The party
is broken up by the arrival of revellers.
“The term
‘Platonic love’ refers to the argument for the superiority of
non-sexual love.
“2. A narrative
by Xenophon
of an imaginary symposium supposed to have taken place on the
occasion of the Great Panathenaea
of 421 bc at the house of Callias,
Socrates being among the guests. Those present are all well-known
historical characters except for a comedian called Philippus and a
Syracusan in charge of the dancers. The narrative gives a vivid
picture of the conversation and amusements at an Athenian symposium.
The conversation is a mixture of humour and seriousness, and Socrates
is presented in a relaxed mood. There are a good many jokes about his
personal appearance; he is the central figure, and, amid all the
jokes, delivers a serious speech on the superiority of spiritual to
carnal love.”
- Birch, Dinah. "Plato." The Oxford Companion to English Literature. : Oxford University Press, 2009. Oxford Reference. 2009. Date Accessed 3 Sep. 2013
“Plato (c.424/3–c.348/7 bc) With *Socrates,
who taught him, and Aristotle,
whom he taught, a dominant philosophical figure of classical
antiquity, author of numerous dialogues and founder of the Athenian
Academy, a school formally closed by Justinian in ad 529 (but without
significant effect on the teaching of pagan Platonism). The
dialogues—‘Socrates’ mostly leads; Plato himself is permanently
absent—fall stylistically into three chronological groups: (I)
Defence of Socrates (‘Apology’: actually not a
dialogue), Charmides, Cratylus, Crito,
Euthydemus, Euthyphro, Gorgias, Hippias
Minor, Ion, Laches, Lysis, Menexenus,
Meno, Phaedo, Protagoras, Symposium;
(II) Parmenides, Phaedrus, Republic,
Theaetetus; (III) Sophist, Statesman,
Philebus, Timaeus, Critias, Laws.
Until the modern period, and the German Romanticists at the beginning
of the 19th century, the cosmological Timaeus was considered
the master‐work; for moderns it is the political Republic.
Central to all periods of Plato's writing is the importance of
dialectic, that is, philosophy in the form of conversation; in
some works, especially those in Group I, the emphasis seems to be on
the demolition by Socrates of others' ideas, and their pretence to
knowledge, but certain positive ideas are more or less constant. (1)
Plato and his Socrates oppose relativism of all kinds, especially
value‐relativism: things like justice, beauty, and above all the
good can be investigated, and in principle their natures
discovered (where what is investigated becomes the ‘Form’
in each case, in contrast to its instantiations, i.e. the
‘particulars’ that ‘share’ in the Form). (2) Plato appears
permanently committed to the idea that his fellow human beings
radically misunderstand the way things are, which is why they need
philosophy (if necessary, the philosophy will be done by others:
hence the idea of the ‘philosopher–rulers’ in the Republic);
for (3) they will, above all, misunderstand what is truly good—which
is what they (we) all, always, desire. ‘No one willingly goes
wrong’, say the dialogues from beginning to end—suggesting a
thoroughly optimistic view of human nature, though this appears to
sit alongside (4) a more pessimistic view, according to which parts
of our souls resemble brute beasts. (‘Platonic love’ develops the
properly Platonic figure of the philosopher–pupil relationship as a
passionate but asexual joint search for the truth.) Plato's influence
on European philosophy and literature is largely indirect: through
Augustine,
through the Florentine Platonists, but above all through the
Neoplatonists,
especially Plotinus,
who for many was indistinguishable from Plato. Central, for English
literature, was the neo‐Platonizing Thomas Taylor, who completed
the first English translation of the whole corpus (1804): S.
T. *Coleridge and P.
B. *Shelley could read Plato for themselves,
but Coleridge also read Taylor's translations (complete with his
interpretations), as did John
*Keats, William
*Wordsworth, and W.
B. *Yeats; across the Atlantic the
‘transcendentalists’ around Bronson Alcott (1799–1888) and
Ralph
Waldo *Emerson were also inspired by Taylor.
Modern, direct study of Platonic texts begins seriously with figures
like Friedrich
von *Schlegel and Schleiermacher (1768–1834)
in Germany; but literature is barely touched by this Plato—for
which, in a recent treatment, see Christopher Rowe, Plato and the
Art of Philosophical Writing (2007).”
- Kraut, Richard. "Plato." The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Ed. Edward N. Zalta. Fall Edition. 2013. Web. 15 Aug 2013.
The article with
URL( http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/plato/
) offers an overview of Plato and less a discussion on the
above-cited text.
“Plato (429–347
B.C.E.) is, by any reckoning, one of the most dazzling writers in the
Western literary tradition and one of the most penetrating,
wide-ranging, and influential authors in the history of philosophy.
An Athenian citizen of high status, he displays in his works his
absorption in the political events and intellectual movements of his
time, but the questions he raises are so profound and the strategies
he uses for tackling them so richly suggestive and provocative that
educated readers of nearly every period have in some way been
influenced by him, and in practically every age there have been
philosophers who count themselves Platonists in some important
respects. He was not the first thinker or writer to whom the word
“philosopher” should be applied. But he was so self-conscious
about how philosophy should be conceived, and what its scope and
ambitions properly are, and he so transformed the intellectual
currents with which he grappled, that the subject of philosophy, as
it is often conceived—a rigorous and systematic examination of
ethical, political, metaphysical, and epistemological issues, armed
with a distinctive method—can be called his invention. Few other
authors in the history of Western philosophy approximate him in depth
and range: perhaps only Aristotle (who studied with him), Aquinas,
and Kant would be generally agreed to be of the same rank.”
Comments