Philosophy and Narrative Technique
The Symposium is a brilliant poetic demonstration of Platoâs philosophy, showing that narratives are nothing but faint shadows of the events they depict (or are about), just as the objects in this worldâlike for example the chairs and the tables in our homes and classrooms, according to Platoâs theory of Ideasâare nothing but faded copies of the eternal Ideas of these objects. The narrative techniques of the Symposium mirror this philosophical argument, showing in effect that not even Platoâs own philosophical dialogue can fully represent the truth. The narrative presented in the dialogue is a report given by Apollodorus to an unknown interlocutor about the celebration in honor of Agathon. Apollodorusâs report is based on what Aristodemus, who was present at the party, has previously reported to Apollodorus. And since Apollodorus had just given an account of this celebration to another interlocutor called Glaucon a few days earlier, he says that âyour question does not find me unpreparedâ (458, 172a)2 to tell what happened at the âgathering at Agathonâs when Socrates, Alcibiades, and their friends had dinner together [and tell] about the speeches they made on Loveâ (458, 172 b).
In the opening section of the Symposium, Apollodorus carefully informs his interlocutor (and us) that he had heard about these events from Aristodemus, one of Socratesâ ardent admirers, who had accompanied Socrates to the celebration (in Apollodorusâs careful formulation) âbecause, I think, he was obsessed with Socratesâone of the worst cases at that timeâ (459, 173b). Through its narrative techniqueâhaving one narrator present a report he has heard from another narratorâthe dialogue is actually twice removed from the banquet that took place in Agathonâs house during the second night after his victory, which is the actual event, the âsourceâ depicted in the dialogue. This corresponds to how Plato relates to works of art as being twice removed (just like the second night) from the truth, being copies of copies. This, he arguesâfor example, in book 10 of the Republicâis their essential flaw.
If Plato, on the other hand, had chosen to portray the events of the banquet in a purely dramatic form, which he did in many of his other dialogues, the narrative would of course not have reflected the Platonic theory of Ideas in this particular way. In its present form, the dialogue presents Apollodorusâs knowledge about the events of the banquet after Agathonâs victory as an epistemological investigation in literary form based on a complex chain of testimonies, transmitting knowledge about some âprimalâ truth. Such knowledge has to rely on earlier sources, which in some cases and for different reasons cannot be fully trusted. The narrators in Platoâs text (and indirectly Plato himself) openly admit that their memory is not always completely reliable. Before the first speech eulogizing Eros, presented by Phaedrus, Apollodorus even says: âOf course Aristodemus couldnât remember exactly what everyone said, and I myself donât remember everything he told me. But Iâll tell you what he remembered best, and what I consider the most important pointsâ (463, 178a). After presenting what Phaedrus had said in his speech, Apollodorus adds: âThere followed several other speeches which he couldnât remember very well. So he skipped them and went directly to the speech of Pausaniasâ (465, 180c). Plato thus openly admits that there were participants and speakers at the banquet that the dialogue, as he himself has composed it, does not account for at all.
Plato has thus composed a dialogue wherein Apollodorus, the narrator, can give only a partial account of what happened at the banquet, based on the already partial report given by Aristodemus. Furthermore, as many critics have already pointed out, Socrates repeats this basic narrative gesture of relying on an earlier source by quoting Diotimaâs explanations about Eros and thus transmitting her knowledge about Eros to the men assembled around the table. This creates an important gender shift in the dialogue, because after the women had been sent away in the beginning of the evening to enable the men to talk about Eros, Socrates reintroduces Diotima, a woman, as his own ultimate authority with regard to Eros. But since this report is contained within Apollodorusâs report, it potentially suffers from the same incompleteness that the report as a whole (namely, the dialogue as Plato composed it) intentionally is subjected to by Plato himself, as the ultimate author(ity) of this text. And as I will show later, there is an additional detail in Socratesâ report, from his conversations with Diotima, that even undermines his reliability and the philosophical core of the whole dialogue.
In both these casesâin Apollodorusâs as well as in Socratesâ account of what they have heard from othersâPlato, by drawing detailed attention to the technicalities of the transmission of knowledge, radically problematized the ways in which oral reports and oral wisdom serve as a source of knowledge. The issue of Platoâs written representation of Socratic philosophy is far too extensive to be examined in detail, but it is noteworthy that when Eryximachus proposes that the participants at the celebration should each praise Eros, he significantly adds, âIf you agree, we can spend the whole evening in discussion, because I propose that each of us give as good a speech in praise of Love as he is capable of givingâ (462, 177câd). Thus what Plato has penned is not only the oral philosophy of Socrates, but an event focusing on the spoken wordâthe âdiscussionââthat is transmitted through an intricate narrative chain.
Plato has reconstructed a situation in which, besides basing the narrative on Aristodemusâs partial report, he emphasizes that Apollodorus has also checked the details with Socrates himself to see if he has gotten them right (and this raises an interesting issue that I return to later). Furthermore Apollodorus mentions that only a few days before he tells his anonymous interlocutor about the banquet, he had told Glaucon about it. As it happens, Glaucon had already heard about it from another person, who in his turn had heard about it from someone called Phoenix. And Phoenix had mistakenly conveyed to this unnamed person that Apollodorus was also present at the banquet celebrating Agathon. This Apollodorus quickly refutes because, as he says, he was very young when the banquet itself took place. Plato has repeatedly interspersed small details drawing attention to the fact that the reports are unreliable approximations. And this is just as he claims in several other contexts that the copies of Ideas are unreliable with regard to the true nature of the Ideas themselves. In this respect the Symposium is quite radical because it indirectly questions Socratesâ philosophical practices by drawing attention to the unreliability of oral reports as they are presented in the Symposium.
In the Symposium Plato presents a radical critique of mimetic representation by pointing at its limitations, not by providing a direct philosophical critique as was done in many other contexts, most notably in the Republic. Instead Plato has gone to great pains to point out that all of the narrators / reportersâincluding Socrates himselfâare only able to present a partial or slanted report of what really happened at the banquet, or in Socratesâ case during his meetings with Diotima. Thus this shows through the narrative technique itself that not only do narratives and dramatic representations fail to fully reveal or represent the truth, but philosophical ideas are subject to such limitations as well. Following Platoâs own philosophical ideas about art and mimesis, the narrative told by Apollodorus as it is presented in the dialogueâand to be exact, this report is actually what the dialogue consists ofâis a faded, twiceremoved copy of the real events of the banquet. Thus what Plato actually shows in the Symposium is how the acquisition, the reproduction, and the transmission of knowledge depend on a complex narrative genealogy, a chain reaching backward to a source or an origin, just as, according to Plato, the objects in the world as we know them have their source or origin in the eternal Ideas, but without these objects being able to fully represent this origin.
The notions of genealogy and origin as problematized by Plato in the Symposium have several important implications for this study. Nietzsche and Benjamin, as well as Brecht, have in different ways formulated how tragedy, performance, and even philosophy were to be established as discursive practices. In The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music, Friedrich Nietzscheâs tragedy was conceived as a biological birth (Geburt). Walter Benjamin mobilized Platoâs Symposium as his template for the epistemological foundations, on the basis of which he investigates the German Tragic Drama and reconstructs its origin (Ursprung) in The Origin of German Tragic Drama. Bertolt Brechtâs notion of the Epic theatre as presented, in 1938, in his essay âThe Street Scene: Towards a Basic Model for an Epic Theatreâ comes closest to the notion of a chain of transmission of reports or testimonies like that depicted in the Symposium. According to Brecht, the Epic theatre originates from a situation in which âan eyewitness [is] demonstrating to a collection of people how a traffic accident took place.â3 In Platoâs dialogue the events at the banquet have been passed from Aristodemus, the direct witness, to Apollodorus who, after having actively verified the events with Socrates, is seen as a secondary witness, just as the spectators, according to Brecht, learn from the eyewitness report and then pass it on to other listeners, adding their own comments and conclusions, so that, according to Brechtâs formulation, the âbystanders are able to form an opinion about the accident.â4
The carefully designed opening section of the Symposium, which explores and examines the genealogy of the report about the banquet, serves as a warning. Although the text is composed by Plato himself, not all of its details can be fully trusted. In this instance it is even possible to talk about a âPlatonic ironyâ through which Plato, at the same time as he presents Socrates as the source of true philosophical knowledge, undermines his own reliability through the use of this complex narrative technique of oral transmission. As I show in detail shortly, this radical ambiguity, indeterminacy in fact, between what actually happened at the party and the consciously limited possibilities of Platoâs philosophical dialogue to give a full report about it, comes to a head in the very last section of the dialogue.
After its investigatory beginning, the dialogue moves into a dramatic mode of presentation in which the speeches held at the banquet are presented as direct quotes. In this section, fully using the dialogue form in the generic sense, pr...