Eros, Otherness, Tyranny: The Indictment and Defence of the Philosophical Life in Plato, Nietzsche, and Lévinas 3959482957, 9783959482950

Table of contents :
Cover
Titelei
Impressum
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1. Structure of the work
2. The Argument
2.1. Philosophical Eros and Will-to-Power: Tyranny and Tragedy
2.2. Philosophical Eros and the Other: The Will to Knowledge and the Instrumentalization of the Other
2.3. A Defence of Plato: Philosophical Eros and the Vindication of Philosophy
Wholeness, Tragedy and the Hubris of Philosophy: The Speech of Aristophanes and the first Indictment of Philosophy
1. Introducing Aristophanes
3.1. Background and Political Affiliations
3.2. Aristophanes and Plato: The Clouds of Aristophanes
4. The Speech of Aristophanes
4.1. Aristophanes Tragic Myth
4.2. Rebellion, Punishment, Re-orientation
4.3. Philosophy and Poetry
4.4. Naming Eros: The Threat of Nihilism
4.5. Eros Turranos and Eros Ouranos: Two Erotes or One?
5. Eros, Politics and Philosophy
Defending Philosophy I: Nietzsche’s Will-to-Power and Philosophy as Creative Excess
1. The Problem of Nietzsche and Socrates
1.1. Introducing Nietzsche
1.2. The Problem of Nietzsche
1.3. Nietzsche, Socrates, Plato
2. Philosophy as Spiritual Sovereignty
2.1. Philosophy in the Birth of Tragedy
2.2. Revolutions in Nietzsche’s Thought: Re-evaluating the Need for Justification
2.3. The ‘Yes’ and the ‘No’ to Life: Vitalism, Eros and Will-To-Power
2.4. Cultural Critique and the Transvaluation of Values
3. The Place of Socrates in the Later Thought of Nietzsche
3.1. Socrates as Cultural Critic
3.2. Philosophical Eros: Philosophy as Refined Will-To-Power
3.3. The Turn to Philosophy: Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks
3.4. The Later Works and Affirmation as Self-affirmation
3.5. Platonic Eros and Will-To-Power
3.6. Overthrowing the Gods and Dionysian Chaos
3.7. Tension in Affirmation: Ambition and the Hidden Goal of Eros
4. Defending and Overcoming Socrates: Nietzsche as the Fulfilment of an Aristophanic Prophesy
The Inhumanity of Philosophical Eros: The Speech of Alcibiades and the Second Indictment of Philosophy
1. Alcibiades: By Way of Introduction
1.1. Alcibiades the Man
1.2. Alcibiades and Socrates
1.3. Alcibiades and the Symposium
2. A Reading of the Speech of Alcibiades
2.1. The Beginning: Alcibiades Arrives
2.2. Introducing the Speech: Rival Visions of Eros and Language
2.3. Portrait of a Strange Man: Socrates in Images
2.4. Socratic Dualism and an Initial Accusation of Ethical Indifference
2.5. Sex and Philosophy: Ascent of the Soul and Descent of the Body
2.6. Socrates and the Cardinal Virtues
3. Canonical Readings of the Text
3.1. Gregory Vlastos: Plato’s Ethical Blindspot
3.2. Martha Nussbaum: Plato’s Recognition of the Inhumanity of Socrates
4. In Conclusion: Philosophical Eros, Dualism and Otherness
Defending Philosophy 2: Desire and Dualism as the Prerequisites of Ethics in the Early Thought of Emmanuel Lévinas
1. Lévinas: By Way of Introduction
1.1. Lévinas and the Indictment of the Western Tradition
1.2. Lévinas, Alcibiades and Plato
2. Ethics as First Philosophy
2.1. The Same (Le Même) and the Other (l’Autrui): Lévinas and Phenomenology
2.2. The Fundamental Structures of Ethics
3. Lévinasian Being: The Elemental, Sensibility and Il y a
3.1. Enjoyment and the Same (Le Même): Need and Living From the Elements
4. Eros and Ethics in the Early Lévinas
4.1. Re-interpreting Plato’s Erotic Lack: Eros and the Early Works
4.2. Ambiguity, Dualism and the Relegation of Eros: Eros in Totality and Infinity
5. Conclusions Based on the Early Work
Ethics and Erotic Paradigms in the Later Lévinas: Towards a Redemption of Philosophy
1. A Critique of Lévinas: Ontology, Chronology, Methodology
1.1. Derrida’s Critique
1.2. A Phenomenological Paradox: Fundamental Ethics and the Pre-Ethical
2. Otherwise than Being: Ethics and the Sensual
3. Focal Points: Delineations of Subjectivity and Erotic Paradigms in Otherwise than Being
3.1. Subjectivity and Alterity: An-archy and Gift
3.2. The Erotic Paradigm Deepens: Proximity and Distance
3.3. Substitution: The One for the Other and the De-centring of the Subject
3.4. The Saying and the Said: Philosophy and Justice
4. Concluding Remarks and Problems: Leaving Lévinas
4.1. Eros, Philosophy and Ethics
4.2. The il y a and the Meaning of Being: Dualism
4.3. Self-Abnegation and Violence in the Unfolding of the Good
The Speech of Socrates: Ultimate Good, Relative Goodsand the Hermeneutics of Eros
1. Initial Manoeuvres: Lack and Divine Origins
1.1. A Dialogic Interlude: The Deficiency and Lack of Eros
1.2. Diotima’s First Lesson: Eros as Metaxu
1.3. Diotima’s Second Lesson. The Origin of Eros: Metaxu and Doubleness
2. Transforming Eros: Empowerment and Creativity
2.1. Transitional Language and the Ambiguity of Erotic Desire for the Good
2.2. Forms of Erotic Transcending: Power and the Excess of Self
3. Hermeneutic Eros and the Final Ascent: Vindicating Philosophy
3.1. Hermeneutic and Heuristic Identifications of Ultimacy
3.2. Birth in Beauty Revisited: Eros as Spontaneous, Generous, Joyful
4. The Indictment One Last Time
4.1. Aristophanes
4.2. Nietzsche
4.3. Alcibiades
4.4. Lévinas
Appendix: The doctrine of eros in the Phaedrus
1. Eros in the Phaedrus
2. Dating and themes of the Phaedrus
3. The action of the dialogue
3.1. Prologue
3.2. The speech of Lysias and the first speech of Socrates
3.3. Interlude
4. The second speech of Socrates
4.1. Madness, inspiration, and reason
4.2. Affectivity and aesthetics
4.3. Eros and intersubjectivity
Bibliography
1. Plato: Primary Works
2. Other Primary Works
2.1. Lévinas
2.2. Nietzsche
3. Plato: Secondary Works
4. Other Secondary Works
4.1. Lévinas
4.2. Nietzsche
5. General bibliography

Citation preview

Philosophy is called upon to conceive ambivalence, to conceive it in several times. Even if it is called to thought by justice, it still synchronizes in the said the diachrony of the difference between the one and the other, and remains the servant of the saying that signifies the difference between the one and the other as one for the other, as non-indifference to the other. Philosophy is the wisdom of love at the service of love. Emmanuel Lévinas

ISBN 978-3-95948-295-0

61

Eros, Otherness, Tyranny

libri nigri 61

McGuirk - Eros, Otherness, Tyranny

James McGuirk

Verlag Traugott Bautz GmbH

James McGuirk Eros, Otherness, Tyranny

LIBRI NIGRI

61

Edited by

Hans Rainer Sepp

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The libri nigri series is edited at the Central-European Institute of Philosophy, Prague. www.sif-praha.cz

James McGuirk

Eros, Otherness, Tyranny The Indictment and Defence of the Philosophical Life in Plato, Nietzsche, and Lévinas

Verlag Traugott Bautz GmbH

Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek Die deutsche Bibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen Nationalbibliografie. Detaillierte bibliografische Daten sind im Internet abrufbar über http://dnb.ddb.de

Verlag Traugott Bautz GmbH D-99734 Nordhausen 2017 Gedruckt auf säurefreiem, alterungsbeständigem Papier Alle Rechte vorbehalten Printed in Germany

ISBN 978-3-95948-295-0

For Mam and Dad

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

12

Introduction

13

1. 2. 2.1. 2.2.

17 19 19

Structure of the work The Argument Philosophical Eros and Will-to-Power: Tyranny and Tragedy Philosophical Eros and the Other: The Will to Knowledge and the Instrumentalization of the Other 2.3. A Defence of Plato: Philosophical Eros and the Vindication of Philosophy

25 32

Wholeness, Tragedy and the Hubris of Philosophy: The Speech of Aristophanes and the first Indictment of Philosophy

36

1. 1.1. 1.2. 2. 2.1. 2.2. 2.3. 2.4. 2.5. 3.

37 37 38 41 45 47 53 57 61 65

Introducing Aristophanes Background and Political Affiliations Aristophanes and Plato: The Clouds of Aristophanes The Speech of Aristophanes Aristophanes Tragic Myth Rebellion, Punishment, Re-orientation Philosophy and Poetry Naming Eros: The Threat of Nihilism Eros Turranos and Eros Ouranos: Two Erotes or One? Eros, Politics and Philosophy

Defending Philosophy I: Nietzsche’s Will-to-Power and Philosophy as Creative Excess

71

1. 1.1. 1.2. 1.3.

73 73 76 80

The Problem of Nietzsche and Socrates Introducing Nietzsche The Problem of Nietzsche Nietzsche, Socrates, Plato

7

2. Philosophy as Spiritual Sovereignty 2.1. Philosophy in the Birth of Tragedy 2.2. Revolutions in Nietzsche’s Thought: Re-evaluating the Need for Justification 2.3. The ‘Yes’ and the ‘No’ to Life: Vitalism, Eros and Will-To-Power 2.4. Cultural Critique and the Transvaluation of Values 3. The Place of Socrates in the Later Thought of Nietzsche 3.1. Socrates as Cultural Critic 3.2. Philosophical Eros: Philosophy as Refined Will-To-Power 3.3. The Turn to Philosophy: Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks 3.4. The Later Works and Affirmation as Self-affirmation 3.5. Platonic Eros and Will-To-Power 3.6. Overthrowing the Gods and Dionysian Chaos 3.7. Tension in Affirmation: Ambition and the Hidden Goal of Eros 4. Defending and Overcoming Socrates: Nietzsche as the Fulfilment of an Aristophanic Prophesy The Inhumanity of Philosophical Eros: The Speech of Alcibiades and the Second Indictment of Philosophy 1. 1.1. 1.2. 1.3. 2. 2.1. 2.2. 2.3. 2.4. 2.5. 2.6. 3. 3.1. 3.2. 4.

8

Alcibiades: By Way of Introduction Alcibiades the Man Alcibiades and Socrates Alcibiades and the Symposium A Reading of the Speech of Alcibiades The Beginning: Alcibiades Arrives Introducing the Speech: Rival Visions of Eros and Language Portrait of a Strange Man: Socrates in Images Socratic Dualism and an Initial Accusation of Ethical Indifference Sex and Philosophy: Ascent of the Soul and Descent of the Body Socrates and the Cardinal Virtues Canonical Readings of the Text Gregory Vlastos: Plato’s Ethical Blindspot Martha Nussbaum: Plato’s Recognition of the Inhumanity of Socrates In Conclusion: Philosophical Eros, Dualism and Otherness

85 85 89 92 96 104 104 107 108 111 112 114 116 119 124 127 127 129 130 133 133 135 137 140 144 148 150 150 153 156

Defending Philosophy 2: Desire and Dualism as the Prerequisites of Ethics in the Early Thought of Emmanuel Lévinas 1. Lévinas: By Way of Introduction 1.1. Lévinas and the Indictment of the Western Tradition 1.2. Lévinas, Alcibiades and Plato 2. Ethics as First Philosophy 2.1. The Same (Le Même) and the Other (l’Autrui): Lévinas and Phenomenology 2.2. The Fundamental Structures of Ethics 3. Lévinasian Being: The Elemental, Sensibility and Il y a 3.1. Enjoyment and the Same (Le Même): Need and Living From the Elements 4. Eros and Ethics in the Early Lévinas 4.1. Re-interpreting Plato’s Erotic Lack: Eros and the Early Works 4.2. Ambiguity, Dualism and the Relegation of Eros: Eros in Totality and Infinity 5. Conclusions Based on the Early Work Ethics and Erotic Paradigms in the Later Lévinas: Towards a Redemption of Philosophy 1. A Critique of Lévinas: Ontology, Chronology, Methodology 1.1. Derrida’s Critique 1.2. A Phenomenological Paradox: Fundamental Ethics and the Pre-Ethical 2. Otherwise than Being: Ethics and the Sensual 3. Focal Points: Delineations of Subjectivity and Erotic Paradigms in Otherwise than Being 3.1. Subjectivity and Alterity: An-archy and Gift 3.2. The Erotic Paradigm Deepens: Proximity and Distance 3.3. Substitution: The One for the Other and the De-centring of the Subject 3.4. The Saying and the Said: Philosophy and Justice 4. Concluding Remarks and Problems: Leaving Lévinas 4.1. Eros, Philosophy and Ethics 4.2. The il y a and the Meaning of Being: Dualism 4.3. Self-Abnegation and Violence in the Unfolding of the Good

159 162 162 168 170 171 173 181 182 190 191 195 199 205 206 206 208 209 212 212 218 223 227 233 233 236 238

9

The Speech of Socrates: Ultimate Good, Relative Goods and the Hermeneutics of Eros 1. 1.1. 1.2. 1.3. 2. 2.1. 2.2. 3. 3.1. 3.2. 4. 4.1. 4.2. 4.3. 4.4.

Initial Manoeuvres: Lack and Divine Origins A Dialogic Interlude: The Deficiency and Lack of Eros Diotima’s First Lesson: Eros as Metaxu Diotima’s Second Lesson: The Origin of Eros: Metaxu and Doubleness Transforming Eros: Empowerment and Creativity Transitional Language and the Ambiguity of Erotic Desire for the Good Forms of Erotic Transcending: Power and the Excess of Self Hermeneutic Eros and the Final Ascent: Vindicating Philosophy Hermeneutic and Heuristic Identifications of Ultimacy Birth in Beauty Revisited: Eros as Spontaneous, Generous, Joyful The Indictment One Last Time Aristophanes Nietzsche Alcibiades Lévinas

242 245 245 251 254 257 258 260 266 268 275 278 278 280 281 283

Appendix: The doctrine of eros in the Phaedrus

287

1. 2. 3. 3.1. 3.2. 3.3. 4. 4.1. 4.2. 4.3.

288 289 291 291 293 295 296 296 298 301

10

Eros in the Phaedrus Dating and themes of the Phaedrus The action of the dialogue Prologue The speech of Lysias and the first speech of Socrates Interlude The second speech of Socrates Madness, inspiration, and reason Affectivity and aesthetics Eros and intersubjectivity

Bibliography

305

1. 2. 2.1. 2.2. 3. 4. 4.1. 4.2. 5.

305 306 306 308 309 313 313 317 320

Plato: Primary Works Other Primary Works Lévinas Nietzsche Plato: Secondary Works Other Secondary Works Lévinas Nietzsche General bibliography

11

Acknowledgements

A version of the present book first came to light in the form of a PhD thesis, defended at the KU Leuven, Belgium in 2004. In the intervening years, the themes of the work became somewhat dormant in my research, but never disappeared completely. It took the suggestion of my former colleague Mette Lebech, however, for me to return to the text and rework it for publication. For this suggestion, I am very grateful. This is, then, a revisited, rewritten, and updated version of the original thesis, which, I hope is also an improvement. The concern of the book is the indictment and defence of the philosophical life as this charge is played out in Plato’s Symposium, as well as in the philosophical oeuvre of Friedrich Nietzsche and Emmanuel Lévinas. At the same time, it is hoped that the themes of the work, including the role of philosophy in public life, love and the life of the mind, and the role of hierarchies in the ethical life can contribute to debates outside of any specific concern with the work of Plato, Nietzsche, or Lévinas. I would like to thank the many colleagues, former students, and friends who generously read all or part of the book and whose invaluable contributions have helped make the book as good as it could be. Chief among these is William Desmond, who was not only a patient adviser, but also a significant philosophical influence on the development of the present work. I would also like to thank Mette Lebech, Richard Kearney, the late Thomas Kelly, and the late James McEvoy for their input at various stages of the development of the manuscript. I thank Ian Leask, Ignace Verhack, and Bart Pattyn for their many useful suggestions for improving the text. I would also like to thank the many former students at Maynooth University whose participation in seminars and courses in which the material was originally presented proved most valuable. I would also like to thank my friends and colleagues at my current institution, Nord University. Last but not least, I would like to thank my wife Ellen, and our three beautiful children, Christoffer, Ella and Hannah for their love and support. The book is dedicated to my mother, Nuala and the memory of my late father, Sean.

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Introduction

In the year 399 BC, Socrates, the most emblematic figure in the history of western philosophy, was sentenced to death by a jury of his peers on charges of impiety and corrupting the youth of Athens. Socrates was the self-styled ‘philosopher’ whose mission was to obey the command of the Pythian god1 to ‘know thyself.’ Thus, in the Phaedrus, in a discussion concerning the conflict between science and myth, Plato has him proclaim, I can’t as yet ‘know myself’, as the inscription at Delphi enjoins; and so long as that ignorance remains it seems to me ridiculous to inquire into extraneous matters. Consequently I don’t bother about such things, but accept the current beliefs about them, and direct my inquiries, as I have just said, rather to myself, to discover whether I really am a more complex creature and more puffed up with pride than Typhon, or a simpler, gentler being, whom heaven has blessed with a quiet, un-Typhonic nature.2

This is clearly a defence of Socratic activity by Plato against the accusation of Meletus and company.3 He (Socrates) accepts the traditional beliefs on religious matters and his quest for self-knowledge seems a reasonably private and modest pursuit. Yet, his concern about the type of being he is indicates Plato’s awareness of a certain force in the charges against Socrates. Whether these charges are founded or not remains to be seen but we know, at least, that Plato is willing to address them. And, of course, his interest in this matter involves more than just his loyalty to his teacher. The trial of Socrates is, in a certain sense, the trial of philosophy. Socrates is the philosopher par excellence and yet he is accused of impiety and corruption, and so the implication is that it is not only Socrates but also philosophy that is

1

i.e. the oracle at Delphi. Phaedrus 230a. Roger Hackforth suggests that the name Typhon may be connected with the word tuphos, meaning vanity. Hackforth, R. (1952). Plato’s Phaedrus. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. All future reference is to this edition unless otherwise stated. 3 Apology, 19a-b. 2

13

impious and corrupt. As apologist, Plato must defend not only Socrates but also Socratic activity; i.e. philosophy.4 In what follows, I will attempt to explore this indictment of philosophy. I will be asking whether the movement of philosophy is intrinsically hostile towards peaceful co-existence and ethical pluralism or whether it is their ground. I will explore this from a certain, very definite perspective. I will examine the problem from the point of view of Plato’s famous erotic dialogue, the Symposium, as well as reading selected contemporary philosophers. The reason for this latter is that the questions of the relation of philosophy with otherness and the erotic quest for the Good are of specific concern for these thinkers. I am interested in the indictment of philosophy for the following reason: it is usual in accounts of the life of Socrates to dismiss the charges against him as trumped up by those whose wrong-doing was brought to light by the ethical inquiries of the philosopher.5 Socrates was a gadfly, who undermined the great men of Athens through his elenchic method of questioning, exposing their belief in their own righteousness to be groundless. In the early dialogues of Plato, we see Socrates encountering some very high profile Athenians, convinced of their various expertise in matters such as virtue (Meno), justice (Republic I), courage (Laches) and piety (Euthyphro). In most cases, the ‘experts’ leave the scene humiliated. This is generally thought to be an important reason for the resentment felt towards Socrates by his peers.6 While there is, no doubt, a great deal of truth to this, but I am equally convinced that there is more to the matter. If the reason for the execution of Socrates was petty jealousy alone, it is unlikely that Plato would devote so much time and effort to his various defences of the practice of philosophy. 4

A great deal of Plato’s writings are concerned with this question in one way or another, whether through the straightforward defence of the Apology, or the defence of philosophy as distinct from sophistry in the Gorgias and Protagoras. 5 The actual charges against Socrates are brought by a young man named Meletus, who is mentioned at Euthyphro 3a and again at Apology 19b. Socrates is aware, however, that Meletus is a shield for those who did not wish to make their animosity towards Socrates public. 6 This is not the only reason, of course. Another reason that we will return to was Socrates’s association with Alcibiades, who delivered Athens into the hands of the Spartans in the Peloponnesian war.

14

Why, then, the Symposium? If the indictment of philosophy is to be the theme, why not the Apology, or even the Republic? The reason is that the Symposium is about eros and eros is the key to understanding Plato’s conception of philosophy and therefore to its assessment and possible defence against the charges of corruption. It is a well-known feature of the Platonic Socrates that he professes ignorance on all matters. All matters but one. He will claim expertise only in matters of love.7 He is ignorant about most things but he is an expert on the eros of the philosopher and it is precisely the eros of philosophy that is most closely associated with the indictment of philosophy. Plato himself recognises that while eros is of the essence of the philosophical soul, it is also essential to the soul of the tyrant.8 We might naturally wonder, then, if the quest of the philosopher is no more than a disguised quest for tyranny. In other words, does the philosopher’s eros make him more puffed up with pride than Typhon or does he have a quiet, unTyphonic nature? The Greeks often made a distinction between two types of eros. These were Eros Ouranos, or heavenly eros and Eros Turranos, or tyrannical eros.9 In a sense, the question is: to which of these does the philosophical soul belong? Is philosophical eros a response to beauty and value, or the source of their valuation? Does it approach the divine with respect or seek, rather, to usurp the place of the divine and in doing so, arrogate to itself the position of sovereignty over the whole? This is a complex question and we shall see as we proceed that the eros of philosophy is ambiguous to the extent that it may realise either one of these possibilities. But the complexity of this question entails at least that we must take the indictment of philosophy seriously. This is also intimately related to the command of the Delphic oracle. In coming truly to know ourselves, we come to see the centrality of eros for the human soul in gen7

Lysis 204c and Symposium 177d. Unless otherwise stated, all references to the Symposium are taken from Plato (1999). Symposium. Christopher Gill (translator). London: Penguin Books. 8 See Republic IX and also Phaedrus 248e. In fact, eros is of the essence of all souls. Philosophy and tyranny are simply manifestations of excessive forms of eros. 9 Throughout the body of the book, I will capitalise the word eros only when it explicitly refers to the god himself.

15

eral and also to understand the intense ambiguity of this eros and its tendencies towards the excessive, as either good or evil. The (Platonic) philosopher claims to be marked most essentially by an erotic pursuit of truth and of the Good. But inasmuch as eros also involves assertion of self, is it not possible that this philosophic orientation might degenerate into an overblown pride, in which the philosopher comes to see him/herself as adequate, through conceptual mastery, to the whole of reality? If so, does not philosophy run the risk of embodying an insidious kind of violence in which all that is other is reduced to what can be known? In this case, the philosopher might end up taking the position that worth and value can only appear through the categories of thought that are, finally, his/her own. In other words, philosophy runs the risk of reducing value to its own meaning-giving activity. For Plato and Socrates, the injunction to ‘know thyself’ entails discovering whether the soul of philosophy entails an eros for wisdom or for tyranny. Or more specifically, the eros of the philosophical soul may entail a tendency towards both on account of its ineradicable ambiguity, so the task involves the cultivation of the best part of the self. On this understanding, philosophy may very well become a therapy for the soul. In short, the Symposium is the central text for the issue of the indictment of philosophy specifically because it puts the meaning of philosophical eros in the dock. In The Erotic Phenomenon, Jean-Luc Marion laments the lack of attention to love in philosophy, and by this he means not just the exploration of love as phenomenon, but of the meaning of love for and within philosophy. To do philosophy is not only about knowing, but about the enjoyment of knowledge and the act of knowing.10 If philosophy is a loving enterprise, then, it is important to reflect upon what this love signifies, what it communicates, and what can be communicated through it. In the Symposium, we find precisely this is at stake.

10

Marion, Jean-Luc (2007). The Erotic Phenomenon. Translated from French by Stephen E. Lewis. Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, p. 11.

16

1. Structure of the work In the light of these themes, the present work will divide into three parts, the first two of which will involve reading Plato alongside a more contemporary figure from the western tradition, respectively Friedrich Nietzsche and Emmanuel Lévinas. The point of these comparative readings is to explore some of the main themes brought out in the Platonic texts in a way that throws light on both his own thought and the thought of Nietzsche and Lévinas. There is no assertion of any simple equivalence between, for example, the speech of Alcibiades and the work of Lévinas, but only an attempt to elaborate themes across these texts. The hermeneutical approach I employ, in this respect, is rooted in the attempt to articulate and reflect upon themes that are addressed and development at different times and places, but which are perennial in their interest for philosophy and for human life in general. This will not be a work of Platonic exegesis. Instead, I am interested in the themes that Plato explores and the readings which his texts afford. This is a concern with what Paul Ricoeur calls “the world in front of the text”11, in the sense that I am concerned with the ways in which the text can continue to speak to us today by raising issues that continue to be of concern to us. But texts are not infinitely malleable. While bringing Plato in contemporary debates, we must also recognize the integrity of the original text itself. One must, in other words, avoid the Scylla of simple exegesis and the Charybdis of doing a violence to the text by finding in it only what one has oneself put there. As to how successful this approach has been, I leave to the reader to judge. Parts I and II will develop arguments in support of the indictment of the eros of Platonic philosophy alongside contemporary efforts to defend or re-work Platonic ideas against this indictment. Part III, on the other hand, will comprise a defence of Plato based on Plato’s own words. The readings of Plato will be taken mostly from the dialogue Symposium since it is in this dialogue that the canonical treatment philosophical eros is found. Part II will end with a brief discussion of Plato’s other central work treating

11

Ricoeur, P. (2008). The Hermeneutical Function of Distanciation. In: From Text to Action: Essays in Hermeneutics II. Translated from French by John B. Thompson. London: Continuum, p. 82.

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eros, the Phaedrus, in order to whether the two accounts are as incompatible as is sometimes claimed.12 The Symposium is a complex dialogue that comprises seven speeches in which seven, more or less distinct understandings of eros are proffered. Six of the speeches can be read as partly prefiguring the speech of Socrates, but their various emphases can also be read as offering critiques of Socratic eros to which Socrates will need to respond.13 I will not offer a reading of all seven but only three. These are the speeches of Aristophanes, Alcibiades and Socrates. The reason is that I am interested in the indictment of philosophy and I believe that this indictment can be explored sufficiently through these three speeches. I have chosen to do this for reasons of space and also structural cohesion. Inasmuch as the speeches of Aristophanes and Alcibiades put forward fairly definite accounts of eros, they also entail a critique of Socratic or philosophical eros from different perspectives and it is precisely these critiques that I wish to explore. The contemporary presences in the argument are Friedrich Nietzsche and Emmanuel Lévinas. Nietzsche and Lévinas are tied to Plato not just by their general interest in his philosophy14, but by their concern with the ethico-political implications of love for the spiritual activity that is philosophy. If they cannot straightforwardly be considered Platonists, it is undoubtedly true that Plato is a major spur for their thinking. Plato is either the greatest ally to their thinking or its greatest adversary. Sometimes both. Furthermore, all three put reflections on the meaning of desire at the heart of their philosophical enterprises. Though they will not always use the language of eros in this respect, it will become clear that their works can

12

Martha Nussbaum makes this point. Cf. Nussbaum, M. (2001b). ‘This story isn’t true’: madness, reason, and recantation in the Phaedrus. In: The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 200-34. 13 All of the speakers identify moments that are important for any full-blown understanding of love. Aristophanes speaks to the centrality of wholeness, Eryximachus emphasizes balance, while Phaedrus and Alcibiades emphasize sacrifice and particularity respectively. There is a sense in Socrates’s response that in claiming to be wholly true, these partial truths of eros become wholly untrue. 14 If Whitehead is right that the history of philosophy is “a series of footnotes to Plato”, then a general interest in Plato would surely be insufficient. Whitehead, A.N. (1978). Process and Reality. New York: The Free Press, p. 39.

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certainly be treated in the context of a discussion of eros.15 All three are interested in the movement of philosophical eros and the implications this may have for philosophy and its relation to the questions of otherness and goodness. The emphases in each reading will vary, however, and my intention will differ slightly from one part to the next, so it would be best to say a few words about the purpose of each section in advance in order to throw some light on the project as a whole. 2. The Argument 2.1. Philosophical Eros and Will-to-Power: Tyranny and Tragedy Part I comprises a reading of the speech of Aristophanes16 alongside consideration of the work of Friedrich Nietzsche. Broadly speaking, this part deals the indictment of philosophy as hubristic in the sense that the eros of philosophy entails desire for a spiritual sovereignty that is, at root, tyrannical. Essentially, the critique is that the abstract object of the philosopher’s eros masks the truth about erotic striving. The speech of Aristophanes is perhaps one of the most famous passages in the Platonic corpus. It involves a tragic myth about the origin of the human race and the meaning of eros for the human soul. What is especially important here is (a) that Aristophanes offers a muthos, not a logos and (b) that it is a tragic muthos. The myth is tragic because it claims that the human being is generated out of an original, now sundered, erotic wholeness to which return is no longer possible. On this account, human existence is irrevocably tragic. Furthermore, the point is expressed by Aristophanes as a myth and not a philosophical logos. This suggests his sense 15

I will claim, for instance, that Nietzsche’s will-to-power is a manifestation of eros (chapter 2) while there is always a difficult tension in Lévinas between eros and metaphysical desire (chapters 4 & 5). 16 In the body of the text I will make reference to the difficulties in treating the speeches of both Aristophanes and Alcibiades. These are both fictional creations of Plato but the situation is complicated by the fact that they are genuine historical personages and rather prominent ones at that. The task of the reader, therefore, is to refrain from reading their speeches as accurate historical documents whilst keeping in mind what we know about them both.

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that poetry or art is a better vehicle for the expression of the truth of the human condition. This is partly an endorsement of his own craft but it also constitutes a warning against the dangers of philosophy. Eros is a gift from the gods that ministers to our illness, according to Aristophanes. As such, there is no human expertise in this area. But such expertise is precisely what the philosopher claims – remember that this is the only area of Socratic expertise. Socrates claims to know what love signifies and thereby claims a kind of mastery of love through his philosophy. Aristophanes consequently warns us against the hubris of philosophy and its quest to harness eros with a view to control through knowing. Acknowledged or not, philosophy seeks a return to the original erotic wholeness, in which, so the story goes, human beings were so full of their own power that they mounted a challenge to the gods. Yet it is because of this kind of challenge that the human condition is tragic in the first place. The irony throughout is that Aristophanes appears to fear that this desire for equality with the gods is really what is at stake in eros; that is, the attempt to close the circle by bringing the origin of love into the light of the known masks tyrannical ambition by wrestling what is the province of the gods into the hands of men. And so recognising the perils of this position he seeks to re-orient human eros through poetry on the one hand and sexuality on the other. The hidden goal of eros is independence from one another and from the gods but the fruits of this pursuit will be disastrous. 17 The impetus of philosophy to transcend the human condition is, in a sense, a desire for self-annihilation in the sense that it seeks to overcome the human condition as it exists now. Philosophical eros is, in other words, a desire to alter the human place in the cosmos. The intention of Aristophanes, by contrast, is to reconcile the human being with his situation through the re-orientation of erotic desire. This is carried out through the poeticisation of the human condition which, in contrast to philosophy, is able to suggest, in pictorial form, the dark, erotic power that underlies human selftranscending. Furthermore, the poet can redirect the orientation of erotic energy by making it a wholly bodily principle. In this way, the order of the city is safeguarded against what would otherwise be challenged by the excessive nature of this energy. The gods gave us the possibility of peace with the severing of the original wholes but it is a peace that can only be main17

I will mention Aristophanes’s Clouds in which the parody of Socrates contains a real warning against the destructive force of philosophy, as he understands it.

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tained so long as we remain in a position of mutual dependence. The impetus of philosophy for self-sufficiency is a threat to precisely this and so it threatens to undermine the very heart of the polis. The philosophising of Socrates, for example, is expressly a-political in the sense that he looks beyond the city towards the heavens.18 For Aristophanes, though, this can only be a divisive force in the polis in that Socrates, inadvertently or not, encourages his followers to challenge the laws and institutions of the city and obey only what they can understand rationally. The fragile balance of human community is disrupted thereby and the tolerable tyranny of the Olympians is replaced by an intolerable tyranny of men, each seeking sovereignty over the whole of reality. As against philosophy, poetry, here represented by the myth of Aristophanes, is able to teach us about ourselves and our relation to the whole. The poet is acutely aware of the tension between human eros and the type of ordered existence that sustains human community. Philosophy upsets this balance by giving reign to the spiritual ambition or hubris latent in the spiritualisation of eros. Aristophanes will say that there is no techne of eros but, in fact, he will argue for poetry and the poets as mediators. They do not mediate eros as such but mediate between eros and the city. They will do this, not by suppressing eros, but by re-directing it to the body while the spiritual needs of man will be ministered by the poetic myths of the Olympians. In this way, peace is made possible insofar as we are reconciled with the gods and with each other. Alongside the speech of Socrates, I will consider aspects of the thought of Friedrich Nietzsche. The point of this chapter is to read Nietzsche as a defender of Socrates and Plato in light of the indictment of philosophy as it is presented by Aristophanes. That is, for Aristophanes, philosophical eros manifests a desire to usurp the mystery of the cosmic order by reducing it to the work of the human soul. In other words, the eros of the philosopher, in its concern for wholeness, ends up by acknowledging nothing other than itself and becomes tyrannical and self-serving. And although undermining the human community is never the explicit intention of the philosopher, it is the fruit of his/her activity insofar as the 18

In the Phaedrus, for example, Socrates insists that he belongs within the city walls (230d), and yet while in the city, he is always looking beyond its walls in a way that destroys the borders of inside and outside. It would perhaps be better for all if Socrates would either accept the imposed limits of the city or just leave.

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transcending pursuit of wholeness is one that seeks to heal the wound of heteronomy in the soul and become sovereign unto itself. The connection with Nietzsche is obvious, which is not to say that Nietzsche’s work is straightforward in this context. His attitude to Plato, Socrates and even the practice of philosophy is always ambiguous. This is a function of Nietzsche’s thought and style of writing, of course. His work always defies univocal interpretation and cannot be reduced to a programmatic or systematic set of discernible doctrines. For Nietzsche, the point is to affect a series of sometimes-inconsistent positions in order to explore what he considers to be the important questions of philosophy, without allowing this exploration to be reduced to system or dogma. As such, it is possibly futile to seek strong consistency in Nietzsche’s reflections on any given topic. This is also the case regarding his references to Plato and Socrates. He tends to equivocate between hailing them as inspirations and giants of spirit and renouncing them as crude or insidious moralisers. In addition to this, his attitude to philosophy itself is rarely consistent. In his earliest major work, The Birth of Tragedy, he accuses philosophy of undermining the power of art or drama to justify human existence, not only by driving a wedge between the rational and irrational aspects of reality but by insisting that only the rational dimension is real.19 In his later works, however, Nietzsche begins to view philosophical activity as a creative outpouring of spirit that can be truly life-affirming without being simplistically rationalistic. Yet, I believe that for all the ambiguity of Nietzsche’s thought, there are certain consistent elements in his thinking that justify his inclusion here. What I am most concerned with is Nietzsche’s project of making philosophy the core of his attempt to be spiritually affirmative. In his mature writings, he continues to espouse an almost Schopenhauerian metaphysics while refusing to resign himself to the pessimistic response of Schopenhauer to the tragedy of existence. He accepts from Schopenhauer, that is, the thesis that existence is marked by purposeless willing or striving but refuses to acknowledge that pessimism is the only legitimate human response to this. Rather, he seeks to transvalue traditional notions of value, which he believes to be rooted in a spirit of negative ressentiment, so as to 19

In many respects, this position is quite close to the Aristophanic indictment as I have presented it, though I will be arguing that there is more to Nietzsche than this.

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seek to glorify and celebrate the way in which will, as will-to-power, affirms existence just in itself and in the absence of any higher purpose or meaning. He means that the will-to-power or life-force of the self is naturally and spontaneously affirmative of itself and so seeks to release himself from the belief, rooted in cultural degeneration, that anything more is required. For Nietzsche, the fact that existence is purposeless according to a certain standard, leads those of weak spirit to resent those whose strength allows them to be assertive and affirmative. As such, the weak generated standards of value and virtue that were nothing more than condemnations of the strength of the strong - that is to say, they were substantively negative. Thus, “the good” of the traditional dichotomy of good and evil, is nothing more than the negation of the creative, spontaneous activity of the strong. Nietzsche’s work is an attempt to reclaim this spontaneous selfaffirmation through what he calls a transvaluation of values, in which the root of value is a positive ‘yes’ to life rather than a negation. It is in this respect that his reading of Socrates and Plato and his attitude to philosophy become important. While his attitude to Socrates and Plato, as I mentioned, is not always positive, I will focus on his endorsement of their work and on his sense of philosophy as a spiritual manifestation of the will to be affirmative. The great thinkers, he maintains, rose above the multitude and affirmed existence through affirmation of themselves in their spiritual creations. Socrates and Plato offered their readers doctrines about reality that were quite often moral in tone, but Nietzsche comes increasingly to suspect that these doctrines were nothing more than masks, behind which lay the truly self-affirming souls of these Greeks. This means that Plato and Socrates sought to transform reality through the strength of their own wills. They may have been forced to present their spiritual creations in a way that the masses would understand but what is most important about them is their insistence on themselves through creative spiritual activity. In this sense, they served no purpose higher than their own vigour or will-topower and again, they are memorable not for the details of their doctrines but for their ability to celebrate themselves both in their own time and across historical time. Though Nietzsche only intermittently uses the terminology of eros, it is clear from the above that characterisation of Nietzsche as a thinker of eros is justified. Not only does he speak of the self-assertive dimension of will-to-power but also of its creative or generative dimension. These are both attributes normally associated with eros. But in rejecting anything

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higher, to which eros is beholden, it is as though Nietzsche wishes to celebrate the erotic as self-justifying. In other words, erotic vigour affirms existence through an affirmation or expenditure of itself. Its strength is justified as the strength to act, the strength to transform, the strength to say ‘yes’. Aristophanes had feared that eros uninhibited would assert itself to the point that even the gods would be threatened. Nietzsche acknowledges the truth of this warning but refuses to understand it negatively. By endorsing unbridled erotic will-to-power, Nietzsche seeks to uncover the sources of erotic striving and thereby to release human creative energies to the point that existence is justified for its own sake. In this way, he seeks to replace fear, negation and resentment with joy, creativity and affirmation as the goals of human existence. In terms of the Aristophanic indictment, Nietzsche acknowledges it as true but claims that the unrestrained eros of the will-to-power of the strong is legitimised because of its will to affirm existence and, what is more, to be expressive of reality as it truly is. This is Nietzsche’s defence of Socrates and Plato insofar as he understands their eros to be the eros of the strong as he has presented it. He understands philosophy to intend spiritual sovereignty thus, and the only value to be the self’s distillation of itself and its affirmation of existence through itself. Thus, he accepts the Aristophanic analysis but radically alters or transvalues its significance. What is important from the point of view of the present work is the question of whether this is actually true to Plato and Socrates. Is Nietzschean will-to-power what is really at stake in eros as discussed by Plato and Socrates? Furthermore, if it is, is this view sustainable? That is, is Nietzschean eros, in any way, able to regulate itself so as to avoid the possibly tyrannical or violent excesses of eros? Nietzsche intends erotic self-affirmation to take the form of spiritual creativity but is there any means through which degeneration of this affirmative instinct into violent destruction can be avoided? These are important questions that will go to determining whether or not Nietzsche’s attempted defence of philosophy and of Socrates and Plato is one with which we can live. I will argue, for reasons that will be made clear in the text itself, that this Nietzschean position is neither faithful to Plato nor can succeed on its own terms. As such, we will continue to explore the issue.

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2.2. Philosophical Eros and the Other: The Will to Knowledge and the Instrumentalization of the Other If part I deals with eros in its political sense, broadly understood, part II concerns the indictment of philosophy insofar as it relates to concrete human relations. Chapter three is a reading of the speech of Alcibiades in the Symposium., Like Aristophanes, Alcibiades is an Athenian with a high profile. He was at one time a champion of the people, at another, the greatest enemy of the Athenian state. He was also a one-time associate of Socrates and student of philosophy though, at the time of the dialogue, he has become a reckless and dissolute politician. The fact of his association with Socrates would certainly have been in the mind of Socrates’s accusers, especially regarding the charge of corrupting the youth of Athens. Of all the dialogue’s characters, the presence of Alcibiades most obviously brings to mind the indictment of philosophy. But has the character of Alcibiades developed as it has in spite of his association with Socrates or because of it? Is he the product of Socratic questioning or of the failure to integrate philosophy and public life? Alcibiades is the only of the symposiasts that has not been invited to the evening’s proceedings and his arrival is disruptive in every way imaginable. Compelled to give an encomium to eros, he chooses instead to tell the story of his own relationship and his unrequited love for Socrates. Throughout the speech, he paints himself the victim of the philosopher’s bloodless pursuit of wisdom. The speech of Alcibiades is not particularly coherent and lacks a theoretical context. This is part of the point, since it is precisely the calculation of the philosopher that Plato’s wishes to contrast with the immediacy of the type of lover represented here by Alcibiades. The main thrust of Alcibiades’s critique is that contrary to his protestations, Socrates, the philosopher, is not erotic at all in the normal sense of the word. He is impassive and unresponsive to the extent that while he may be a worthy object of love, he is incapable of returning love. In spite of Diotima’s reservations, he (Socrates) has completed the ascent of eros but in doing so, he appears to have transcended those aspects of the human condition that relate to our embodied or affective selves. Humans are no longer his fellows and thus the important juxtaposition in this speech between the love of a particular other (Alcibiades), as against the love of ideas (Socrates). There is no rec-

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onciliation between these two loves20 and Alcibiades wants to give the impression that, for Socrates, particulars are unworthy objects of love because they are merely impermanent images of the true reality. He will also want to claim that if this philosophic eros can even be called eros, it is a strange form of that love that has little or nothing in common with the everyday understanding of the term.21 The reason, of course, is the dualist separation of realms of existence in the thought of Socrates (Plato) to the extent that they become irreconcilably alien. In other words, Socrates is accused of draining all affectivity or spontaneity from love to the point that all that remains is cold calculation. One final point concerning Alcibiades’s indictment of philosophy is this: emergent from his dual critique - (a) that the object of philosophic eros is abstract and universal and (b) that the philosopher is unerotic (in the normal sense of the word) - is the idea that the eros of philosophy seeks return to itself in the form of self-sufficiency.22 It is ultimately self-serving so that what is other (this applies, at the least, to human others) is never valued except instrumentally. Regardless of what we may make of Alcibiades, the suspicion persists that in his love of the abstract ideas or forms, the philosopher has become disconnected from his own humanity and more centrally from others. Alcibiades offers us a picture of the philosopher as one who has not only transcended his own materiality but has come to view embodiment generally as repugnant. In what sense can he connect with his fellows, then? The philosopher claims to investigate the grounds of being and morality but, in aspiring to knowledge of what is ultimate, he looks with scorn on what is immanent. That is, having ascended to relation with the Good, can he retain any interest in particular others? Indeed, Socrates, as object of love, is depicted by Alcibiades as like the Good itself inasmuch as he is incapable of returning love. As such, the philosophical deployment of love is one that shuts down a fundamental aspect of human love, namely the need to be 20

Alcibiades, in fact, makes this explicit at Symposium 213d. In many respects, this speech is especially resonant to the modern sensibility which feels a certain revulsion for the notion of filtering love through theory. We often tend to feel, along with Alcibiades and Pausanias in the same dialogue (183a), that anything and everything is justified in the name of love and that love suspends the laws of reason. 22 In this respect, the indictment of Alcibiades is brought into line with that of Aristophanes. 21

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loved. Socrates’s love has helped him to gain insight but the result of this insight is that he no longer needs others and he no longer needs love. With regard to this point, I will pay close attention to some very influential and important articles written on the subject. While critics are not generally inclined to sympathise with Alcibiades (he is anything but an innocent), many do take the accusation of indifference towards, or instrumentalization of others on the part of the philosopher seriously. In this regard I will examine the sources that charge Platonic love with being instrumentalist, self-serving and dualist to the extent that embodied personhood is scorned.23 None of these critics accept the speech of Alcibiades at face value but all acknowledge the serious problems generated from the apparent dualist disconnection of the philosopher whose love of the universal has lead to a disconnection from the lived particular. In the second part of part II, chapters four and five, I will develop this aspect of the indictment in the light of the work of twentieth century French philosopher Emmanuel Lévinas. As with part I, this requires some preliminary justification. After all, Lévinas is predominantly concerned with ethics while the speech of Alcibiades had to do with an erotic relation with the other. Even if it is true that Socrates had no interest in sexual relations, this does not mean that he could not be ethically responsive to others. Yet the point of the previous chapter is to assess Socrates’s capacity to be responsive to others in general. Though sexual indifference does not imply ethical indifference, it may be part of a wider problem that includes indifference to others generally. That is to say, it may involve a tendency towards instru23

These include Gregory Vlastos’s critique that Platonic love theory is irremediably instrumentalist. Vlastos, G. (1973). The Individual as Object of Love. In: Platonic Studies. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, pp. 3-42. On this view, others are valued only insofar as they advance my own ascent to contemplation of the forms. A similar critique is made by Anders Nygren, for whom eros is essentially self-interested and can never be for the other in any way. Nygren, A. (1982). Agape and Eros. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. It is an acquisitive love that can never generate anything like generosity from out of itself. Finally, Martha Nussbaum has traced the disconnection of the erotic philosopher in relation to the embodied human condition. Nussbaum, M. (2001a). The Speech of Alcibiades: A Reading of the Symposium. In: The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 165-99.

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mentalising others by mediating such relations through the prism of the ideas, which are otherworldly, and the real objects of the philosopher’s desire. And, of course, this was the point that is made by Vlastos and Nussbaum. This is where Lévinas becomes important. If we are to understand the eros of philosophy as the quest towards knowledge of the whole, Lévinas’s critique is resonant with that of Alcibiades. In the works of Lévinas, the western tradition is most often characterised in terms of the pursuit of power and dominion over the whole and consequently, the subjection of what is other.24 Here, of course, the idea of tyranny recurs. The form that this has taken, he claims, is in the philosophical insistence that the relationship of the subject to the universal, matched by the concept, is the primordial human relation. In other words, philosophy has claimed that the knowing relation is prior to the ethical relation of the face-to-face. In this sense ethics is mediated by ontology. But if we make ontology antecedent to ethics, the result will be disregard for the otherness of the other to whom I am always equal in thought. Lévinas sees Socrates as one of the progenitors of this ethical violence, or at least forgetfulness, precisely through his insistence that knowledge is virtue and that knowing the good and doing the good are the same thing. According to Lévinas, Socrates and Plato are both guilty of prioritising the relation with being over the relation with the other and of understanding the latter through the former. But in spite of his suspicion of Platonism, Lévinas remains a kind of Platonist, employing Plato’s notion of the ‘Good beyond Being’ from Republic VI as one of the central motifs of his thought.25 There is also a strong dualist leaning in the thought of Lévinas that drives a wedge not between universal ideas and the particularity of matter, but between Being and radical alterity of the Good. The Good is not simply irreducible to ontology for Lévinas, it is other than it. And so he insists on a relation that is more primordial than what the western tradition has always thought of in terms of primordiality (i.e. the relation of knowing in which mind is claimed to be adequate to what is other). 24

Alcibiades never accuses Socrates of megalomania but his claim that the philosopher becomes self-sufficient and therefore impassive is critique along the same lines. 25 That the Good is ‘beyond being’ (epikeina tes ousias) appeared at Republic 509b. He is also quite taken with the notion of the primordiality of speech as it appears in the Phaedrus.

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In the earlier of Lévinas’s magnum opera, Totality and Infinity (1961) this dualism is strictly maintained and, through it, I will argue that Lévinas provides an initial defence of the relation with otherness whilst employing certain Platonic insights. For Lévinas, the problem had not been with Plato’s dualism but with his tendency to put the human other on the wrong side of this dualism. Thus, he retains the separation of worlds though it is now the other (that with which the ethical relation holds) that appears on the far side of the divide. In a sense, Lévinas maintains the dualism but reverses its terms in the sense that it is now the relation of the I with the particular that takes precedence. But if Plato and Socrates envisaged eros as the essence of the relation with the Good, does Lévinas? The answer here is complicated. In the early works, Existence and Existents (1947) and Time and the Other (1948), he seems to suggest that eros is the crucial term of the relation with alterity, specifically inasmuch as it opens a relation with a temporality which is not grounded in the Same. It initiates a relation with diachrony that allows the Same to care in a non-self-interested way. Lévinas attempts to move further and further from this position as his work develops but what is always clear is his insistence that the other can only be approached in desire, not in thought. It becomes increasingly important for the middle and later Lévinas to distinguish this (metaphysical) desire from eros. Unlike eros, this desire does not emerge from need in the way eros tends to.26 Yet, this metaphysical desire does, we shall see, retain many of the elements of eros at least insofar as its object (the Good) and form are concerned (infinitely restless and the cause of self-transcending). What will be crucial, as we proceed, is the separation of the acquisitive dimension of erotic desire from Lévinas’s metaphysical desire. Through this work, Lévinas actually supports the indictment of philosophy as allergic to otherness as it is levelled against Plato because of the fact that as underscored by eros27, it never gets beyond the service of self. 26

On the notion of the return of eros to itself, all have so far understood it in this way. Much of the point of the present work is to assess whether this is an accurate delineation of Plato’s notion of eros. 27 Lévinas actually rejects Platonic eros for its failure to properly delineate the importance of generativity. Levinas, E. (1969) Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Translated from French by Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, pp. 256-66. This is a strange critique as we will see in chapter 6.

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What is interesting is that he attempts to resolve the problem while retaining the essence of Platonism; namely, the desire for the transcendent Good. There are, however, certain problems generated by this solution. These include the problem of the third, or the problem of judgement. If I am infinitely responsible before the other, how can I consider other others? How can I respond to a third person if I am infinitely responsible before the first? The weighing of competing claims is obviously incompatible with the logic of infinite responsibility, but in its absence, how can community become possible? A second problem has again to do with incarnation. In retaining Platonic dualism, Lévinas has retained the notion that value is purely otherworldly.28 If value only comes from what is wholly other, in what way can it be transmitted? Can it be called Good?29 Is this a determination of otherness that compromises its status as absolutely other? Does Lévinas end up supporting the allegedly Socratic view from the Symposium that materiality is beneath value?30 In making the relation with otherness purely spiritual, does not the question of the transmission of value become problematic? Even if these questions can be answered successfully, our central problem remains: what becomes of philosophy? Is philosophy essentially allergic to alterity or only a certain kind of philosophy? If the latter, which Lévinas seems to intend, what would a more allocentric philosophy look like? In chapter 5, I will turn to his second major work, Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence (1974), in which many of the problems of the earlier work are addressed. One of the most important developments in the second major work of Lévinas is the methodological shift. He abandons the stratified structure of

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That value is otherworldly for the early Lévinas is a controversial claim since he insists that the Other is not in a ‘world’, strictly speaking. This will be discussed in the text. 29 In one sense, this is Jacques Derrida’s critique. We will return to this later. 30 Materiality is important in Lévinas’s very early works and also in Totality and Infinity but not as communicative of value. It is rather the site of the sovereignty of the individual existent.

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Totality and Infinity in favour of a more fluid style that gives better expression to his sense of the primordiality of the relation with otherness.31 What is most interesting for the purpose at hand, however, is the shift in emphasis regarding the exploration of the ethical relation. In Totality and Infinity, the infinite distance between same and other had been to the forefront while in Otherwise than Being, Lévinas speaks of the relation with the other primarily in terms of proximity and the subjection of the I before the other that is felt even in fleshed existence. None of this is intended to lessen the radical otherness of the other since it does in fact deepen the sense of the call to responsibility. It is, rather, that alterity is now explored from within the constitution of subjectivity. The notion of proximity that becomes so important in Otherwise than Being is in fact a key term in the description of erotic subjectivity in Totality and Infinity. This does not, of course, mean that ethics becomes sexual in the later work, but only that Lévinas attempt to think together the embodied and spiritual aspects of the encounter with alterity. There had always been a wedge between these two in the earlier work as there is, according to certain critics, in Platonic ontology. An important advance arising from this shift of emphasis is Lévinas’s resolution of the problem of the ‘the third’ or the problem of the second face. In the earlier work, only infinite desire for the face could do justice to the otherness of the other and in this sense, ethics and justice were equivalent terms for Lévinas. In the later work by contrast, ethics is the primordial relation while justice is now the measuring work of philosophy. Justice is not unrelated to ethics but is nourished by it in the sense that the calculations of philosophy are pursued for the sake of the responsibility of the subject before the other. In this way, a path is opened for the possible vindication of philosophy against the charges of hubris, tyranny, and corruption. The point is that in returning to an even more nuanced use of the categories of the erotic, Lévinas is able to defend philosophy while retaining a fundamental respect for what is other to thought. That is to say that attentive 31

In the preface to the German edition of Totality and Infinity (1987), Lévinas says that his later work abandons the “ontological – or more exactly eidetic – language which Totality and Infinity incessantly resorts to in order to keep its analyses.” Reprinted in Lévinas, E. (1998). Entre Nous: on thinking-of-the-other. Translated from French by Michael Smith and Barbara Harshav. London: The Athlone Press, pp. 197-201.

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reflection on the desire for the Good can nourish philosophy rather than seek to overcome it. In this regard, there are elements of Lévinas’s later work that seem to suggest a softening of his earlier dualism and even a sense of materiality as possibly communicative of transcendence. All of this goes to a renewed sense of the value of philosophy beyond anything that appeared in his earlier work. However, the second major work is not an unbounded success and, in this respect, we will look to the violence of the language of ethics as it is expressed by Lévinas. For Lévinas, subjectivity is a gift in the sense that it is given to itself as for the other by the subjection of the subject before the other. It enables a relation of goodness. Yet, it remains paradoxical that the initiation of goodness never escapes the notions of guilt, murder, claustrophobia, and intolerable responsibility. While the embodied world may now be connected to the realm of value, it also appears to be the site of the I’s great violence. It is as though my very being in the world is a crime so grave that I can never make amends while it is at the same time this very crime that gives me to be as ethical. The problem is that Lévinas will never quite escape the permanent juxtaposition of goodness and violence. As for the possible move away from dualism, we will see that this is a move that Lévinas will not make and if there is any communication of value in the matter of the world, it is a value that cannot really be affirmed since this value is always swamped with the communication of the subject’s inordinate, murderous guilt. 2.3. A Defence of Plato: Philosophical Eros and the Vindication of Philosophy In the third and final part of the book, I will offer a defence of Platonic eros on the basis of a reading of the speech of Socrates. While parts I and II see Nietzsche and Lévinas trying to rescue Plato from within, we will return to the text of Socrates’s speech to see if Plato requires such rescuing. That is, we will ask whether Platonic eros requires either transvaluation or reappropriation for the sake of ethics. I will argue that the relation between Platonic eros and otherness is far more complex than has been imagined. In the critiques dealt with, the eros of philosophy is thought in terms of a will-to-power or to absolute knowledge. In either case, the self struggles with and seeks to overcome what is other than it, either by incorporating or destroying it. And in a wider sense,

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it seemed as though, for Plato, the philosopher’s eros was somehow indifferent to or even hostile towards the incarnate or ethical other. In the myth of the dual parentage of eros in the Symposium (Poros and Penia), Plato emphasizes the doubleness of eros as well as its ambiguity. He suggests that the relation between eros and the Good is complex but insists upon a positive energy in eros to which philosophy must pay heed. In consequence of this, it is, in fact, the transcendent other that is the source of the transcending energy of eros. Thus Plato insists on a primordial relationality between eros and goodness beyond any and all determinations of Being by the philosopher. I will secondly examine the ascent passage of the Symposium. This was the source of the critique of Alcibiades, if not also that of Aristophanes. Here, I will suggest that what is really entailed there is not ethical indifference or instrumentalization of others but rather a hermeneutics of eros in which the objects of erotic love are understood as communicating a more fundamental source of being. That is to say that immanence might be suggestive of transcendence for Plato. One of the most important implications of this is its impact on dualism. I will contend that the speech invites a nondualist reading inasmuch as there is, on the one hand, a continuity (albeit a progressive one) in the attachment to the incarnate and immanent and to the transcendent. On the other hand, I will argue that immanence cannot be valued for Plato in isolation from its ground in the Good. This means that it is only through the Good that particular incarnate others can be valued at all. It is, indeed, only in the light of the Good that they can be seen in their individuality. The eros of philosophy, indebted to the Good, involves the power to discern being in its plurality and otherness. The Good manifests itself in the light in which particulars bathe, which is to say that neither the Good itself nor the particulars are accessible independently of each other. The philosopher’s insight is precisely this: that individuals and the Good are neither independent nor reducible to each other. There is no attempt to flee the material realm or to trivialize ethics or politics in opposition to pure spirit, because the philosopher’s relation with spirit can only be cultivated and maintained through the interpersonal contexts which are the site of the Good’s self-revelation. There is a two-way movement in Platonic eros – upward, towards the object of human desiring and downward, in the productive or generative activity of eros. Again, the intimacy of eros and the Good will be seen to be the ground of the work of philosophy or the soil that nourishes it. It will be

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suggested that for the Platonic philosopher, the Good is understood as the source of plurality, as that which gives it to be, so that otherness comes to be viewed in a non-instrumental way. Attention to this source, both in eros and in what is other, allows erotic attachment to become a celebration of what is other, rather than a will to appropriation. The eros of the philosopher becomes tyrannical only if it forgets the source of its capacity to discern truth. With this, I will return to the other speeches and reassess the critiques we have already examined. I will suggest that the humility of the philosophical soul before the Good counters the charge of hubris. After all, the Good as object of philosophical striving is never the philosopher’s possession but is rather a revelation granted the humble soul. The transcendence of the object of philosophical eros means that no simple return to self is possible so that eros remains dynamic and open throughout. It also means that no final determination of either the Good or the erotic soul is possible and this means that dynamism rather than dogmatism is given the final word by Plato. The two most important points here will be (a) that the transcendence of the Good and the hermeneutics of eros mean that no absolutist position is available even while (b) the quest for truth is vindicated through a dialectic method that is capable of distinguishing difference and otherness through eros as attentive to the source of its own transcending.32 That means that erotic affirmation of self and other can be reconciled in a way that remained always alien to the various critics and even defenders of Plato. In this way, I will attempt to defend Plato against charges of both hubris and tyranny. Part III will end with a brief discussion of the Phaedrus and the relation of the account of eros found here and the one just discussed. I will argue that while the Phaedrus places greater emphasis on the experience of love in the soul than was the case in the Symposium, it does not differ in any significant way as to the meaning of eros and what it denotes. 32

That is, for example, the Sun of the Republic which is not the highest being in an hierarchy of beings but that which allows beings to be. In the Sun analogy, Plato tells us that the Sun is the source of the Being of beings but note also that it is only through the Sun’s light that beings can exist or be discerned as other.

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The present work, in sum, constitutes an effort to tackle Plato’s notion of eros insofar as this is related to the charge of the corruption of philosophy. I will take this charge seriously, devoting two-thirds of my thesis to its exploration. I will argue, however, that Plato and philosophy are finally vindicated. This does not mean that his accusers are simply wrong since each will identify a possible deployment of eros and the dangers that lie therein. Plato and we must beware. Yet eros is also that very transcending force in the human soul without which relation with neither the Good nor goods at all, would be possible. The philosophical soul is erotic and the human soul is erotic. The challenge for the philosopher is to do his/her job well and ‘mind’ human eros so as to facilitate the manifestation of goodness not only as the end of human striving but also in the lived present. This will not require additional support since this communication of inherent goodness is written into eros itself.

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Wholeness, Tragedy and the Hubris of Philosophy: The Speech of Aristophanes and the first Indictment of Philosophy

The speech of Aristophanes in the Symposium is one of the richest and best known passages in the Platonic corpus as is evidenced by the attention paid to it in the history of Platonic scholarship.33 Beyond the world of strict Platonic scholarship, the speech is often credited as articulating insights about the nature of love that are central to our intuitions about interpersonal or romantic love. My intention in what follows, is a little more modest inasmuch as I intend to read it predominantly insofar as it offers comment on Socrates’s philosophical activity and on the practice of philosophy in general. I will not be insensitive to the particular understanding of the meaning of eros that is offered in this speech but my principal concern will to be to read it as an indictment of the practice of philosophy. At stake in the speech of Aristophanes, as I read it, is the question of interpreting the meaning of eros as it relates to the truth of the cosmos and the truth of the human condition. It is, in short, a reflection on the relationship between physis and nomos. The speech proceeds through the elaboration of a series of important tensions which include, but are not limited to, the tension between the tragic nature of human existence and the desire for redemption, the tension between order and chaos and between physical and spiritual manifestations of erotic desire. All of these will serve to unfold the views of the character Aristophanes as to the correct deployment of eros as well as comment on the position of philosophy in relation to this. As we will see, Aristophanes’ speech constitutes a warning against the impulse towards tyranny that is essential to the philosophical deployment of eros as he understands it. He is, thus, concerned with the problem of erotic excess and especially that type of erotic 33

I have particularly in mind the treatment of the speech by Stanley Rosen in, Rosen, S. (1987). Plato’s Symposium. New Haven, Ct: Yale University Press. See also Mitchell, R.L. (1993). The Hymn to Eros: A Reading of Plato’s Symposium. Boston: University Press of America; and Strauss, L. (2001). On Plato’s Symposium. Chicago: Chicago University Press.

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excess that is manifested by the transformation of bodily eros to a principle of the spirit. This connection between eros and tyranny is crucial to the present work as a whole and will be elaborated further in the next chapter in our treatment of Friedrich Nietzsche’s defence of philosophical activity, in the light of his relationship with Plato and Socrates. 1. Introducing Aristophanes Athenians who are not only characters in the dialogue but historical personages about whom a great deal is known.34 It is likely that Plato intends us to keep in mind what we know of these characters independently of their appearance in the dialogue and so we must, although it would certainly be a mistake to do this at the expense of attention to the details of their respective speeches. At the same time, coherent interpretation will sometimes demand that we be suspicious of the statement of a belief that the historical personage would be unlikely to have held.35 In sum, the challenge is to do justice to the text without (a) ignoring or (b) overstressing historical documentary evidence.36 3.1. Background and Political Affiliations The exact dates of Aristophanes’ life are not known though it is believed he was born c. 447 BC and died c. 380 BC. He is without doubt the most prominent comic playwright active during the Golden Age of the Athenian 34

In addition to Socrates, Aristophanes and Alcibiades, whose speech will be the subject of chapter three of the present work, are the best known. The fact that both of these played an important role in the actual trial and death of Socrates is, of course, crucially important and suggests that their appearance in this dialogue is not incidental. 35 One such example is the praise of the practice of pederasty that appears in the speech of Aristophanes (192a). Aristophanes famously opposes this practice in his written works as would have been well-known to any contemporary audience. This is not grounds for an outright rejection of the sincerity of this passage but it is grounds for suspicion. 36 An excellent discussion of the crossover between Aristophanes’s speech in the Symposium and themes of his plays can be found in Rosen (1987). Op. cit., pp. 1209.

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civilisation. He lived through some of the most tumultuous times in Athenian history including the height of Athenian power prior to the Peloponnesian war, the defeat of Athens at the hands of Sparta and the re-emergence of Athens under the auspices of the Athenian league of 395 BC. Through his comedies, he is known to have been a significant voice in Athenian politics in the sense that serious political commentary is often housed in the obscenity and buffoonery of his fictional creations.37 His sympathies appear to have been conservative in the main and many of his extant works are concerned with lampooning and attacking advocates of change whether social or political. He was opposed to any attempt to confer democratic voting rights on anyone but the landowning classes and was also opposed to any changes in the system of education.38 It is likely that Plato has incorporated much of this into the character of Aristophanes that appears in Symposium so that while Plato’s Aristophanes is a fictional creation, he may also be said to express the views not dissimilar to those the real Aristophanes may have held.39 3.2. Aristophanes and Plato: The Clouds of Aristophanes Regarding the relation between Plato and Aristophanes, the situation appears to be very complex. Aristophanes was an older contemporary of Plato and it is likely that they were personally acquainted. As a student and friend of Socrates, Plato would have had every right to feel nothing but resentment for Aristophanes whose play Clouds is cited by Socrates in Apology as a con-

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M. S. Silk, in his thorough study of Aristophanic comedy, assesses the political, moral and religious aspects of the comedian’s works. He describes the political sympathies of Aristophanes in terms of an “exaltation of the ‘good old days’” and notes his concern that the values of old Athens are “under threat from modernity in the form of the new Enlightenment.” Silk, M.S. (2000). Aristophanes and the Definition of Comedy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 302. 38 This is said to be the concern of his first work, The Banqueters, which has not survived. See Silk. (2000). Op. cit., p. 50. 39 Of course, from one point of view, the views of the real Aristophanes are not relevant to the account of eros that we are studying. However, they will often provide an invaluable touchstone for the proper interpretation of the speech of the character Aristophanes.

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tributing factor to the charge of impiety which he faces in the trial.40 In that work, Aristophanes depicts Socrates as a sophist of the worst possible kind whose meddling in political, ethical and religious matters has the combined effect of undermining Athenian religious and social practices. The reason, of course, is that all human affairs are filtered through Socrates’ cosmological speculations. In the play’s dramatic action, the character of Strepsiades sends his son Pheidippides to study with Socrates because the former has amassed great debts and Socrates promises to teach young men to successfully argue their case ‘whether you’re in the right or not.’41 Strepsiades believes therefore, that philosophy can help him to further his own advantage by allowing him to bypass the truth. The value of philosophy, as it is expressed by the character of Socrates in the play, is that it can teach men to argue clearly, distinctly, and rationally, without giving heed to truth or justice. This backfires spectacularly, though not unexpectedly, when, under the influence of Socrates, Pheidippides turns his back on the very ties of family. In addition to the comic situation generated by this series of events, a serious point is being made about the divisive potency of philosophy and its capacity to sunder even family relations. Of the other targets of Aristophanes’ plays, only war is comparable to philosophy in terms of destructive consequences. Like war, it seems, philosophy can turn sons against fathers and erode the bonds of social cohesion. 42

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Speaking of his secret accusers (i.e. other than Anytus and Meletus who bring the charge publicly), Socrates complains that “the most unreasonable thing of all is this, that it is not even possible to know and speak their names, except when one of them happens to be a writer of comedies” Apology 18d. 41 Aristophanes Clouds I.i.93ff. This turns out to be a disaster as Pheidippides is encouraged to turn against his own father and when Strepsiades himself goes to Socrates for advice, he is saved from committing acts of vice only through his inability to remember what he has been taught. In other words, he is saved from vice by his inability to be a philosopher. 42 Aristophanes’ Lysistrata is his famous anti-war play. It is conceivable that Aristophanes detects in philosophical eros an eris similar to that of the spirit of war. This is not unreasonable since eris, or strife, is the root of the eristic method used by both Socrates and the sophists. Interestingly, in Lysistrata, the eris of the warmongers is overcome and unravelled by the women of Athens’ ‘sex strike.’ Thus, a certain manifestation of the erotic brings the ambitions of tyrants crashing to earth. As

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Of course we know that there were in fact such practitioners of rhetoric in 5 century BC Athens who specialised in training young men to be successful in the law courts. The true extent of their cynicism regarding matters of truth and justice is a matter of debate, though it was certainly advantageous to Plato to depict them in this way in order better to develop the contrast between sophistry and the truly philosophical activity of Socrates.43 Aristophanes, in any case, was very wary of this practice and expresses his opposition to it here in no uncertain terms. It is equally clear that there is something to the type represented by Socrates in Clouds even if it is exaggerated. What is most important for the purposes of the speech, however, is the fact that there appears to be no distinction between philosophy and sophistry in the mind of Aristophanes. And, as we have mentioned, Socrates cites this critique as influencing the views of many as to the nature of his intellectual activity. So if the type represented by Socrates is accurate, the question becomes to what extent Socrates represents the type. And if he does not, to what extent any difference between philosophy and sophistry is relevant. We might say that Aristophanes views the furtherance of civic virtue as incompatible with or threatened by any form of rigorous rationality and so if sophistry constitutes a dangerous and divisive development in Athenian society, so too does philosophy. In spite of this, however, there is evidence of a fondness in Plato for Aristophanes and his works. Although Plato finally sides with Socrates against Aristophanes in the Symposium, it remains true that the presentation of the comic poet in the dialogue is, on the whole, sympathetic and charming. He is also assigned one of the dialogues central speeches44 to which Socrates in his own speech is keen to respond. Several anecdotes about the relation between Plato and Aristophanes have come down to us. For example, Nietzsche reports that a copy of the th

such, the body’s limitations and vulnerabilities undermine excessive ambitions of spirit. 43 This issue is one of the most commonly treated in Plato’s dialogues, cf. Gorgias, Republic, Protagoras, Phaedrus. 44 It has been noted by several critics, including Rosen and Strauss, that the speech of Aristophanes is central in more ways than one. It is literally the central speech of the seven with three speeches either side of it. It is also claimed to be the dialogues first ‘inspired’ speech. See Strauss (2001). Op. cit., p. 121 and Rosen (1987). Op cit., p. 136.

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works of Aristophanes was found on Plato’s deathbed.45 It is also claimed that when Dionysus of Syracuse expressed interest in knowing what type of people the Athenians were, he was given, by Plato, a copy of Aristophanes. 46 Of course, we cannot read too much into the second of these stories since, even if it is true, Plato may have presented Aristophanes’ works so as to lament the base nature of his fellow citizens. The story of the discovery of the works of Aristophanes on Plato’s deathbed is more intriguing however. It may be that Plato admired the comic poet in whose works, even the crudest of them, can be detected a festivity and affirmation of existence in the face of all that is laughable and contingent about human existence.47 However, any fondness Plato may have had for Aristophanes does not detract from the seriousness or importance of the latter’s speech and its central place in the critique of the hubris and tyranny of philosophy. These points will, I hope, become clearer as we proceed. 4. The Speech of Aristophanes Aristophanes’ speech is the middle of the seven speeches in the dialogue. It is the first of what are called the ‘inspired’ accounts of Eros given in the Symposium (the others being the speeches of Agathon and Socrates). These are to be distinguished from the ‘uninspired’ or sophistic speeches offered previously by Phaedrus, Pausanias and Eryximachus.48 This is convenient 45

Nietzsche, F. (2002). Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future. Translated from German by Rolf-Peter Horstmann and Judith Norman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 30. All future references are to this edition. 46 Cited in Rogers, B. B. (1974). The Works of Aristophanes. In: Encyclopædia Britannica: Great Books of the Western World vol. V. edited by R.M. Hutchins. Translated from Greek by Benjamin B. Rogers, p. 451. 47 According to Silk, the works of Aristophanes exhibit an “exuberance for its own sake, an amoral joy, ‘beyond good and evil’, in being alive.” See Silk (2000). Op. cit., p. 302. This characterisation, of course, brings Aristophanes more into line with Nietzsche than with Plato. In what follows we will argue that the Aristophanes of the Symposium does not at all finally endorse this kind of ‘amoral joy.’ 48 The first three speakers are students of the Sophists, as we know from their appearance in the dialogue Protagoras. Agathon is also a student of the sophists as is displayed by, what Socrates refers to as, the ‘Gorgias-like’ rhetoric of his speech (198c). Still, his speech retains an inspirational quality that the others lack. Aristo-

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from a stylistic point of view. Yet it is interesting that this convenience comes as the result of a break in the original order of the proceedings. It is a chance happening that allows Aristophanes to speak after Eryximachus and before Agathon. More precisely, it is a chance bodily happening, an attack of the hiccups that forces Eryximachus to take the place of the comedian. This is surely significant. After all, he could just as easily have had it that Aristophanes was seated on the right hand side of Eryximachus.49 It would seem that this attack of hiccups foreshadows the view of eros that Aristophanes will now offer for it is a view in which the human being is, in many respects, at the mercy of the fortuitous happenings of the physical (i.e. the bodily). In fact, he will not only present eros as a predominantly embodied phenomenon, but will also make it the site of the paradox of human power and frailty. As a result, he will claim that the body itself in its vulnerability constitutes a warning against the excesses of a spiritualised eros. As erotic beings, we are both strong enough to rebel against the gods, but too weak to live with the consequences. As for the results of this with regard to rationality and Socratic eros we shall see shortly. In the initial stages of his speech, Aristophanes makes two noteworthy manoeuvres. The first is his rejection of the technicism of Eryximachus. Eryximachus had spoken of a logos of eros which needed to be administered by skilled experts; i.e. physicians such as himself (186d ff.). Aristophanes rejects this notion by stating that there can be no such experts in matters of love. Eros can be neither harnessed, nor instrumentalized, and human beings cannot mediate between themselves and eros. Rather, eros is himself the physician. He (eros) is, “the greatest helper of mankind and the doctor of those sicknesses whose cure provides the greatest happiness for human beings.”50 He thus pulls the rug out from under Eryximachus and anyone else who asserts the possibility of expertise with regard to love.51 There is no mediation possible. The obvious conclusion is that human beings are at the phanes, we know from Clouds, is an opponent of Sophism. He is also the only guest in the Symposium who does not appear in the Protagoras and is also the only character that is not part of a couple of lovers. 49 See 177d for the rules for speaking at the Banquet. 50 189d, my translation. Henceforth all references will be included in the main text. 51 Most commentators rightly identify the connection between the speeches of Aristophanes and Eryximachus but insofar as Aristophanes ostensibly opposes claims to expertise in matters of love, Socrates is just as much the target of his speech.

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mercy of eros. It can neither be controlled nor rendered intelligible. Instead of trying to understand it, we must have faith in eros as an energy at man’s disposal for mankind’s own good. This being so, Aristophanes is already attacking Socrates by challenging the one area of expertise that he (Socrates) claims to have (Symposium 177d-e; Lysis 204c). As for Aristophanes and Eryximachus, we may already have guessed an important relation between their two speeches from the fact that Plato draws our attention to the reversal of the order in which they speak. But things are even more complex than this. Aristophanes wishes to deny the expertise asserted in the speech of Eryximachus but it is, ironically, only because of the doctor’s techne that he is able to speak at all. After all, his hiccups did not simply go away of their own accord. Rather, he was forced to seek advice from the doctor and was cured only after applying the prescribed remedy. At 185d-e, Eryximachus had suggested possible cures for the hiccups, which ranged from holding one’s breath through gargling with water to forcing oneself to sneeze. It is only after the application of the third of these that Aristophanes is able to stop. Thus, he jokes that; It makes me wonder whether it was the “well-ordered” part of my body that wants the kind of noises and tickles that make up a sneeze (189a).

He is making fun of Eryximachus’s profession of course but, in a strange way, the joke is on himself. In laughing at the fact that it is only through one funny noise that he is able to stop another he actually gives support to Eryximachus’s theory of the balance and harmony that can be brought about by experts. It is true that one silly sounding, violent bodily spasm is terminated by the induction of another but it is because of the doctor’s expertise that he knew which spasm to induct and in what measure. Were it not for this, Aristophanes would have been condemned to pass the night making funny noises. That he can even make jokes now, he owes to the doctor’s expertise. Thus, in a sense, Aristophanes opposition to Eryximachus is only possible through the logos of the latter.52 This importantly introduces the interplay between order and chaos, and between nomos and physis that will be a feature throughout his speech.

52

This is why, at the end of the speech, Eryximachus says that he enjoyed it; i.e. he was not offended as we might have suspected. On this see, Mitchell (1993). Op. cit., p. 87-8.

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This relates to the second important point. In keeping with the above, Aristophanes offers no logos of eros but a muthos. This is, of course, consistent with the poet’s profession. All of the speakers in the dialogue approach eros from the point of view of their own interests or profession. Eryximachus had insisted that the meaning of eros was clear only to experts such as himself, Agathon will later speak of an aetheticized eros, Socrates will anchor it in philosophy, while Alcibiades will relate it to politics. Aristophanes is a poet and so thinks about eros in poetic terms and in this way will seek to defend the priority of his own craft and the irreducibility of eros to techne. In a sense, there is nothing all that strange about this. On the other hand, it seems important that the account of eros, for the first time in the dialogue, takes the form of a myth. This is not only important with respect to the speeches that have been but also with regard to those that will come, specifically the speech of Socrates. We will return to this point later. If Aristophanes is a poet, he is also a poet of the body. At 177e, Socrates says that Aristophanes’ “whole occupation is centred on Dionysus and Aphrodite.” In other words, his works are all about wine and sex, or the pleasures of the flesh. Thus he will insist on drawing attention (as he already has done) to the pathos of the human condition. Through his hiccups he demonstrates the way in which the body’s unexpected and ridiculous upsurges can interrupt high-flown intellectual discourse. That is to say, they interrupt the order of the speeches and, equally importantly, they interrupt the attempt to bring eros under the auspices of the discursive. That they interrupt Aristophanes himself is, in fact, part of his account of eros. Those who claim to discourse in god-like ways, that is, are still subject to the eminently fragile materiality of the body. Of course, we have seen how this is turned on its head in the exchange with Eryximachus but it is worth keeping this in mind as we proceed through the speech. Since the body constitutes an interruption in the flow of speech, it follows that pure rational speech cannot do justice to the complexity of the human situation. Even speech must be more enigmatic if it is, in fact, true that the body is the condition of speech. And so, at the very outset Aristophanes claims that myth is most appropriate to the discussion of eros. Eros is not intelligible. It is not subject to understanding but to faith. And here Aristophanes is somewhat evangelical for his speech is not simply for the benefit of his co-symposiasts but for all. His account is told to the other speakers so that they might “teach this to others”(189d). His intention is to teach us the ‘correct’ way of understanding eros. There is, of course, a cer-

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tain ambivalence here for in rejecting the technicism embodied by Eryximachus (and in Aristophanes’ mind by Socrates too) Aristophanes does put forward a rival conception of eros. In this sense, his muthos is also a quasilogos even if only in the narrow sense that it is a logos stating that there is no (rational) logos. Otherwise put, the logos of Aristophanes is, paradoxically, a logos that challenges the sovereignty of logos. But it does so in a very specific way. Jan Patočka claims that the point of Greek myth is partly that it dispenses with philosophic wonder. It does not wonder, or feel amazement (thaumazein) because it knows everything in advance. It explains and by explaining dispenses with the need for philosophical curiosity.53 If Aristophanes is opposed to the rationalisms of Eryximachus and Socrates, then this opposition takes two different forms. He opposes the hubris of Eryximachus, who thinks he already knows, and can explain by means of logos, while he opposes Socrates because he desires to know. The point is brought out by the tragic myth that follows.54 4.1. Aristophanes Tragic Myth Aristophanes’ account of eros is a myth concerning the original condition of mankind. Its stated purpose is to explain the fact of eros by outlining what is most essential to human being. This approach marks an important break with the previous speeches in the following way: all of the other speeches had comprised a genealogical account of eros followed by a panegyric on the benefits of eros to human beings. In other words, all previous speakers had first of all traced the origin of eros in a cosmological view of the universe and only afterwards outlined the benefits of eros in the human context. By contrast, Aristophanes’ speech begins with the line: First of all, you must learn about human nature, and what has happened to it. Long ago, our nature was not the same as it is now but quite different (189d).

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Patočka, J. (2002). Plato and Europe. Translated from Czech by Peter Lom. Stanford: Stanford University Press, p. 59. 54 Note here that the myth of Aristophanes is tragic. It is not a comic myth in spite of the fact that Aristophanes is a comedian. This suggests that Aristophanes is making a serious metaphysical point in spite of, or perhaps through his ‘clowning around’.

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In this way, he unites the genealogical and anthropological aspects of his account of eros. What had been separated is now the same. More precisely, Aristophanes proffers a genealogical account of eros in terms of an anthropological account. The previous speakers had understood the divine, cosmological dimension of eros as prior to any impact on human beings. Aristophanes, though, foregrounds the human. His is an account in which humans appear before the gods55 to the extent that the gods are somewhat decentred. And it will turn out, as the speech proceeds, that eros is only relevant or meaningful for human beings. As for the speech, though, Aristophanes tells us that we were not once as we are now. Instead of two genders as we have now, there were three. The first two of these were the all male (born of the Sun) and the all female (born of Earth). The third was a combination of the first two. These were male-female or androgyne. Aristophanes points out that whilst once this term designated a distinct human gender, it is now used only as a term of abuse (189e).56 Initially, it is worth noting here that the disappearance of these androgynous creatures –children of the moon – seems to signify a sundering of the link between mankind and the gods. After all, the androgynes are a combination of the two genders and are, therefore, the link between Earth and Sun. In their absence, the two realms are alienated from one another. This sets up the problem and, of course, allows eros to step in as the solution. If these circle-men are meant to represent the original human condition, then it is a condition with which we can no longer fully identify. Quite apart from the missing third gender, these proto-humans are simply other than we are. These beings were entirely self-sufficient possessed as they were of great strength and the ability to reproduce themselves by themselves (191c). We

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We might here ask ‘which gods?’ since, as we will see, there is a tension set up in the speech between the cosmic and Olympian gods. Nevertheless, it is worth noting as a general point that Aristophanes is the first to foreground the human being in this way. In fact, the gods only appear in his speech in reaction to human agency. 56 Note that this notion of combining the two genders is frequently used by Socrates when he speaks of ‘male pregnancy’. Some instances include Theaetetus 149a, 151e, 157d, 161a and 210b. In the Symposium, this idea can be found at 206c-e and also in the Phaedrus, at 278a-b. It is quite possible that Socrates is being identified with this lost gender in Aristophanes’ mind. If this is so, it is unlikely to be intended as a compliment.

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can only think at this point that he is describing for us a pre-lapsarian human condition before the advent of need or want.57 4.2. Rebellion, Punishment, Re-orientation Their great strength, it turns out, was the reason for their downfall since they had “great ambitions and made an attack upon the gods” (190b). The proto-human circle men contested the superior position of the gods, and would yield to no authority other than their own. Their attack was a statement of desired autonomy to the effect that they needed no beings set over them to govern their affairs. This attempted coup is, however, a resounding failure and incurs the wrath of Zeus. Interestingly, though, Zeus chooses not to destroy human beings as he had the Giants whose crime was identical (190b).58 In fact, Aristophanes claims that the story told by Homer about the Giants Ephialtes and Otus actually refers to our ancestors (190b). This strengthens the link between human beings and the cosmic gods, the Giants and Titans, and reenforces the suggested natural conflict with the gods of the city at Olympus.59 Zeus and the other gods need human beings for without them there are no sacrifices or honours for them. This would seem to suggest that the dependence is two-way. It is apparently not in the gods’ power to simply destroy the race and create a new one from scratch. The gods need sacrifices from human beings to the extent that they are dependent on them for sur57

At 191c, Aristophanes describes the reproduction of the circle-man. Instead of mating, they simply laid eggs. It seems they did not care for them, not out of neglect but because no care was needed. As such, this myth recounts a time that is prior to any form of human community (i.e. State, family etc.). it speaks rather of a time when our ancestors were radically autonomous and self-legislating. 58 In one version of the story, Ephialtes and Otus lead the Giants as they piled Mount Pelion on Mount Ossa in an attempt to reach the heavens. We notice the similarity in theme of this story with, for example, Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound, which describes the punishment of the Titans for their act of rebellion. Just like the circle-men of Aristophanes’ myth, their crime was to reject the authority of the Olympian gods. Of course, the Giants were not the same as the Titans (Kronos, Hyperion, Prometheus etc.) but in terms of the clash of divine authorities, the difference is not crucial. 59 We remember that Socrates allegiance in Clouds is with the cosmic gods whose virtue is their strength and whose behaviour is marked by wilfulness.

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vival. As such, the destruction of the race is not an option. According to Leo Strauss, it is at this point that the specifically political aspects of the speech begin to come to the fore. The situation of the Olympian gods, in this myth, is similar to the situation of governments generally.60 A government cannot destroy its citizens but it cannot either allow them to act in a way that is indifferent to law. So, it must find a way to control its subjects in a way that limits their power, but not to the extent that they cease to exist as the beings they are. This notion of the dependence of the gods on human beings is an explicit feature of Aristophanes’ account (190c) so what is its significance? Stanley Rosen offers the interesting interpretation that it’s purpose is to highlight the meaning of hubris whilst retaining the possibility that the myth is only a myth. That is, the gods do not have an independent existence. They are the creation of human kind at a certain point in evolution. At a later time, man evolves to the point where he claims no longer to need gods set over him. He recognises them for what they are, an invention designed to preserve order. As such, he rebels; he will no longer subject himself to the authority of non-existent deities. Through his rebellion, he will be unshackled and free to soar to the level of the gods.61 If we return to Strauss’s example, we note that in a democracy (and Aristophanes was a democrat), government must rule but must also be aware that it owes its very existence to the populace it rules. There are not citizens because there is government, that is, but a government because there are citizens.62 Unfortunately, the result of this rebellion is the very opposite of what was intended.63 Instead of soaring to god-like excellence, man descends to a 60

Strauss (2001). Op. cit., p. 125. After all, if the gods do not themselves exist, they must be human projections; that is to say, human possibilities. This kind of idea is found in the works of Ludwig Feuerbach and Friedrich Nietzsche in the 19th century. 62 Both Leo Strauss and his student Stanley Rosen interpret the speech of Aristophanes in political terms and suggest that if there is a conservatism in the speech, it is more likely to be seen in terms of the political rather than the theological. That is, it may well be the case that Aristophanes does not believe in the gods. He is, however, concerned about the consequences for human community of discovering their non-existence. 63 This discussion is echoed by Jean-François Lyotard when he says, ‘if one has overcome the gods…then that is the moment of greatest peril, because the relations one has to the gods is one of weak and strong, and one can expect some form of 61

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state more miserable than he could have imagined. He reverts to barbarism rather than ascending to divinity. But why is this? The reason would seem to be this; if we take the circle men to be a symbol of the enduring nature of humanity, it would seem that the act of inventing the gods is also a tool by which man civilises himself. The act of rebellion, then, is characterised by the abnegation of the regulative influence of the gods over us. In losing this, however, we lose justice. Just as the gods need us, so do we need them as a way of preserving peace. Thus, the only way of preserving peace is by means of a ‘self-restrictive act of piety.’64 If we return to Strauss’s analogy with the notion of government we can see what is at stake here. Because we voluntarily set government over us, we might come to think that we need nothing extrinsic to ourselves to regulate our affairs and so rebel. That is, if the legitimacy of government is derived from humans, why cannot each human legislate or herself? Why do we need government set over us? The answer of course, is that while we may be capable of sovereignty over our own affairs, we do not live as solitary beings. We are communal beings, and we must find a way of living with each other. As such, a principle that can mediate between potentially conflicting sovereignties is required, and what better for this purpose than the Olympian gods, who demand sacrifices and regulate the behaviour of humans. Whether they actually exist or not may well be irrelevant to their performance of this political function. Without this regulating function, rebellion will likely issue in disaster and a total dissimulation of order. This reveals an important paradox in the views of Aristophanes. While humans may be responsible for the authority of the gods in the sense that they restrict themselves and subject themselves to the gods, this is not an historical accident but a human necessity since only through such selfrestriction is order possible.65 This brings us back to the question of whether the circle men should be read as the enduring symbol of the human condition. If so, their purpose reprisal. At the moment of victory, one has been imprudent. It is imprudent to win.’ See Lyotard, J.-F. and Thébaud, J.-L. (1985). Just Gaming. Translated from French by Wlad Godzich. Manchester; Manchester University Press, p. 40. 64 For an expanded version of this argument, see Rosen (1987). Op. cit., p. 143. 65 If this is correct, it is strikingly similar to Thomas Hobbes’s account of the ‘state of nature’ and the origin of government in Hobbes, T. (1981) Leviathan. London: Penguin, esp. Part I.

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becomes more intelligible. The circle men are not representatives of a human nature now abolished. In fact, if they were, it would be difficult for us to identify with them and we would be left wondering as to their function here (dramatically or anthropologically). Rather, they represent human nature as it is now. Or rather, they represent one mode of being and one possible deployment of eros. This deployment, though, is both the pinnacle of human strength and the manifestation of the monstrous at the same time. The ambiguity is, then, that the beings, which seem to represent a perfection of the species, also represent its greatest threat. By attacking the gods, they run the risk of destroying the whole race by plunging it into darkness. What we have here, then, is a warning. If it is the eros of the circle men (i.e. their desire for mastery) that motivated their attack on the gods, then eros is revealed as both our greatest ally and the greatest threat to our survival. But since we are by nature erotic, it is not possible to nullify this threat by simply excising the erotic. Aristophanes’ point, therefore, is to encourage us to honour eros in the right way. But what is the right way and to whom is Aristophanes’ warning directed? This we shall see shortly. This myth is now developed through Aristophanes’ account of the punishment meted out to humans for their act of rebellion. As already noted, Zeus could not simply destroy humans so he comes up with an ingenious plan. He cuts them in half, which has the double effect of reducing their strength so that they are less likely to be troublesome, and doubling their number thereby increasing the honours and sacrifices received by the gods. This operation also carries with it the threat that human beings will be cut in half again if they refuse to “settle down and be silent” (190d).66 This operation has a profound effect on the severed humans. Here, we are offered an initial sense of the comic poets vision of the truly tragic nature of human existence. If we said that the circle-men represented the human condition under its fullest or most ambitious aspect, then these ‘half-men’ would seem to represent human being in its self-restrictive mode. This initial act of self-restriction (Zeus’ first operation) has disastrous results. The sev66

As a piece of anthropological archaeology, this story has much in common with the Biblical account of the Tower of Babel (Genesis 11) in which Yahweh weakens those who would ascend to heaven by confusing their language so that they are no longer able to understand one another. Yahweh justifies this by saying that with the strength of a common language, there will soon be nothing humans will be incapable of.

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ered halves are completely lost in the world. They pine for their other half to the extent that they disregard everything else in their lives, even their own well-being. In this condition, they die out in great numbers for even if they are united, they do no more than lie together (in a non-sexual way) mourning the loss of their self-sufficient unity. As a result of this, Zeus takes pity on these pathetic creatures and performs a second operation.67 He moves the faces of the severed halves to the front and does likewise with the genitals. This way, those halves that unite with one another will at least have the consolation of bodily pleasure from their union. In the case of a heterosexual union this also has the added advantage of continuing the species. The skin that remains loose is gathered to the front at the point that is now known as the navel (190e). The point of this, we are told, is to act as a constant reminder to the human race of their crime and a warning against future incursions. Through this second operation, Zeus has ‘invented’ sex in the way we now know it – remember that before the initial operation, humans laid eggs on the ground – and has, thereby, made humans dependent upon each other in a way they never were before. Physically, humans now resemble the Olympian gods rather than their cosmic counterparts. We are no longer circles but halves or ‘symbols’ of a lost unity. The circle-men were purely present to themselves whereas now, our very physicality indicates absence and lack. Aristophanes is suggesting a mutual dependence here between men and (Olympian) gods in which alone symbolic wholeness can be regained. But this is an asymmetrical mutuality, which is attested to by our fragility and dependence upon other human beings. This is important if we remember that the myth of the circlemen is only a myth; that is, we never were circles, and perhaps the gods do not even really exist, so what we see here is an examination of the problem of self-recognition. Aristophanes is telling us in effect what it is that should concern us, and what we have no right to be concerned with. Overall, the success of this operation, according to Aristophanes is that it has radically altered not only man’s appearance but also his focus. The circle-men were ambitious and dangerous. They needed pay little heed to their own bodily welfare, to the gods or to each other, and on account of their great strength, they seem not to have lived in anything like a community or Polis. In other words, they were outward looking. They aspired to 67

In fact, it was Apollo who performed the first operation at the behest of Zeus (190e).

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the stars and had god-like ambitions. In one sense, we might say that these original beings are pre-erotic in that eros only becomes truly relevant in Aristophanes’s speech after the operation of Zeus. On the other hand, the circle men can be understood as self-sufficient erotic wholes that become intoxicated by their own power.68 Their great strength or ‘erotic wholeness’ made them resistant to the imposition of any kind of extrinsic order so that this outward looking eros is the antithesis of law and order. Thus, they rebelled against the Olympians. This was their act of hubris and it was for this that they were punished. After the operation (the second operation), the situation is radically different. These new creatures now look inward. Instead of raising their eyes to the stars, they look inward and downward towards their navels and genitals and are thereby reminded of their lack. The work of Zeus has irrevocably altered both man’s exterior and his interior. In this way, Zeus has re-established control. In this condition, humans are far more likely to be peaceful since they now find themselves dependent upon each other. It is interesting that whilst these severed halves concern themselves with their own other half, the side effects of their unions include the creation of a polis and the initiation of peaceful society. This is interesting because it is not the focus of the newly created entities. It goes on in spite of them, so to speak, and is in no way to the forefront of their consciousness. The split humans know themselves to be looking for their other halves, nothing more. In this way, Aristophanes presents us with a myth in which the focus of eros is one thing while its real advantage and benefit is something else and we begin to get a sense of the complex nature of the truth about eros. Perhaps this is why he was so opposed to Eryximachus’s suggestion of a human technicist who mediates between human beings and eros. Eros is the only physician for the poet but his (Eros’s) work is always somewhat hidden from us. Eros is of the essence of man yet now, not only is the immediate goal of eros other than before but so is its more deep-seated goal. As circle-man, our erotic wholeness had been characterised by a lofty ambition that sought equality with the gods (in a way, it was a desire for unrestricted autonomy). Now, the goal of eros is one’s own other half and the fruits of this pursuit are the establishment of a peaceful, harmonious society. But if this is the case, how 68

Jacques Lacan makes the point that for the Greeks, the circle was not only a symbol of self-sufficiency but also of that which is unlimited. Lacan, J. (2002). The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VIII: Transference. Translated from French by Cormac Gallagher. London: Karnac Books, sect. 6. 11-12.

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can the circle-men’s role be claimed as a symbol of humanity? We noted earlier that the circle-men are not intended as representative of man simpliciter but merely of a human possibility, of how we might be. Yet even this seems unlikely now. How, if what is so essential to our being is so different can they (the circle-men) be said to be in any way like us? 4.3. Philosophy and Poetry In fact, this is an important difficulty in Aristophanes’ account and it centres on the tension, already noted, between philosophy and poetry or intelligibility and myth. Aristophanes claims to be offering a description of the value and purpose of eros. Instead, he offers a revisionary account. In other words, he is offering us an alternate logos. This is probably why is so keen to convince his listeners so that they might teach it to others (189d). Aristophanes does believe in the circle-men as representing a human possibility; that is, they represent one possible deployment of eros. However, this eros that is characterised by the upward glance is dangerous and must be suppressed at all costs without suppressing eros entirely. For the poet, this deployment of eros will have disastrous results for human beings though, as yet, it is unclear why. This is why his speech is a myth. It is a poeticisation of the human condition and of human eros since the real aims and real work of eros is always obscured. As erotic beings, we remain something of a mystery to ourselves. We do not know what it is we really want. Of course, there is some ambivalence here in the sense that Aristophanes, in his speech, is ‘bringing to light’69 the truth about what is most essential to eros. He reveals what has been heretofore hidden. And yet this is not quite the case either, since the use of myth entails that the most Aristophanes can do is to reveal the fact that the real goal of eros is always in some way hidden; that is, it is forever other than we think it to be.70 As erotic beings, we are forever in conflict with ourselves. He describes eros as a kind of blind grasping for a we-know-not-what (192c ff.) whilst Eros, the physician, carries out a plan behind our backs. This goes part of the way to explaining the tragedy of the

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Aristophanes’ name means ‘best bringer to light.’ This position, as we will see, turns out to be rather paradoxical in the sense that Aristophanes struggles to maintain the position of mythologiser. He will have to tell us what is behind the myth in order to convince us that the myth is necessary. 70

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human condition. The culmination of the tragedy, we shall see, is that what we most truly desire is forever unattainable. The purported superiority of poetry over philosophy is brought into its clearest relief here in precisely the sense that Aristophanes’ account of eros is revisionary. For in making such a revision, the poet continues the work of Zeus. We know already that Aristophanes is concerned with ‘Dionysus and Aphrodite’ or wine and sex and through the hiccup incident earlier, he drew attention to the absurd thereness of the body. Thus, just as Zeus does in the myth, Aristophanes, the poet, attempts to steer our focus away from the stars and downwards towards the body. This is important at least insofar as it generates an ambiguity regarding the simple relationality between the gods and men and regarding the apparent humility of Aristophanes himself. We are encouraged to fear the Olympian gods who have alienated us from ourselves against our will and who threaten further punishment if we do not ‘settle down’ but it is, in fact, the poet who cultivates the alteration against our nature. The reason is, of course, that our nature, left unchecked, stands in direct opposition to what the poet perceives as our good; namely, the capacity to co-exist and to be orderly. Corresponding to the clash of divine authorities, there is a violent and possibly irreconcilable opposition between nomos and physis. Aristophanes is identifying our good with nomos, the Olympians and the laws of the polis while he suspects that eros is perhaps more closely linked with physis and the disordered arrogance of the Giants and Titans. Ironically, the riotousness of Aristophanes’ comedies mask a deeper conservatism that steers us towards the body precisely in order to avoid the spiritualization of eros that philosophical reflection realizes. If Stanley Rosen is right and there are atheistic undercurrents to the thought of Aristophanes, it is difficult to understand what he is up to here. He suggests that it is good that the real goal of human eros should remain hidden from us and yet puts forward the notion that its real aim is the establishment of peaceful, societal harmony. But why should this be hidden from us? It seems to be a perfectly desirable state of affairs. The only conclusion can be that this is not the real goal of eros. The real goal of eros should be hidden from us because it is probably connected with the ambitions of the circle-men and these, we said, are dangerous. But these ambitions are still very much a part of who we are, as is demonstrated by Socrates and his followers. What is more, if the idea that we should limit ourselves were to be made public, it would most likely be rejected as unworthy. This is why the ‘real’ truth about eros must remain hidden. By revising, or attempting to

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revise, the focus of eros towards the bodily (i.e. through our fixation on the navel and the genitals), Aristophanes wishes to alter the focus and also the products and outcomes of erotic energies.71 He has entrusted knowledge of the real aim of eros to the gods. As we noted, though, it may be that he does not believe in the gods. And even if he does, it seems strange that he too is in possession of this knowledge. It seems more likely that Aristophanes is endorsing the poeticisation of reality for the good of man. He endorses piety before gods who are the invention of the poets and, thus, endorses the value of religious belief regardless of whether the gods literally exist. In this way, he bestows upon his own art form the task of education and the cultivation of the human good.72 In the tension between philosophy and poetry, Aristophanes has opted for the latter. He is attempting to preach a doctrine that encourages the focus of eros downwards towards the body as a way of avoiding the aspirations of the hubristic circle-men. Thus, he is opposed to any kind or rationalism or technicism, but this anti-intellectualism is not blind. He opposes the technicism of the doctor Eryximachus but, more importantly, he is opposed to the rationalism of Socrates, which is, for Aristophanes, the very embodiment of hubris. Through his philosophy, Socrates elevates himself above the rest of society, he displays great ambitions, he questions the nature of piety and justice etc. and even questions the nature of the gods themselves. In other words, he interferes where he has no business.73 What would become of a society in the grip (as some young people already are)74 of such a man? 71

At 191c, he makes the enlightening remark that sexual satisfaction would enable us “to relax, turn to our work and the other things in our life.” Thus, the expulsion of our erotic energy through sex is a harmless way of venting an energy which might otherwise be harnessed for other, unsavoury purposes. 72 This intention is odd considering the irreverent nature of comedy. Nevertheless, the dialectic between comedy and the nomos of the polis will turn out to be far more mutually beneficial than it sometimes appears. 73 The notion of minding one’s own business is of course an important aspect of Plato’s ideal society in the Republic. The difficulty for Plato seems to be that philosophers, notoriously, do not mind their own business. The question then is whether philosophy should be given a special dispensation. If so, must this be regulated as to who can be a philosopher or how many there can be? 74 See for example, Aristodemus, a slavish follower of the philosopher and nonspeaking member of the assembled company. He appears to be completely under the spell of Socrates (e.g. 174b). In the debate between ‘Right’ and ‘Wrong’ in the

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The tension in the speech between physis and nomos is apparent again here. As erotic, we are naturally drawn upwards towards equality with the gods just as our ancient parents, the Giants, had been. This natural impulse is inherently destructive of order though. If we cast our minds back again to Aristophanes’s Clouds, we will remember that in choosing cosmic forces above the Olympians the character of Socrates destroys not only the relations between man and the gods but also between men and each other.75 In fact, as the fate of the character Socrates in the Clouds shows us, the Socratic choice ultimately leads to his own downfall, such that Aristophanes has here uncovered a potentially self-destructive impulse in erotic desire. In warning his fellow symposiasts and us away from Socrates, Aristophanes again expresses his fear of what the philosopher represents. If the poeticisation of reality is for the good of man (since it is unlikely he is merely trying to protect his own artistic turf) must it not be the case that our real nature is something from which we must be protected? Is Socratic philosophy likely to reveal a terrible secret? Is it the revelation of a dark secret? Aristophanes seems to be telling us that whilst he offers a vision of the real that is not, strictly speaking, true it is at least one with which we can live. It is a ‘noble lie’76 because the ‘real’ truth, that physis cannot be reconciled with nomos, demands the promulgation of an untruth. The alternative is to follow Socrates and Socratic rationalism. As with the circle-men, this may result in death.

Clouds, Right laments the condition of Athenian youth that has fallen under the spell of the philosophers and remarks that ‘one day Athens will wake up to what you’ve been doing to our youth’. I.iii.920. 75 As we mentioned, Pheidippides, under the influence of Socrates, argues that it is just to beat one’s own father. See Aristophanes (1973). Clouds Translated from Greek by Alan H. Sommerstein. London: Penguin, p. 160. This is very significant because of the degree to which justice was understood by the Greeks primarily in terms of kinship. Anyone who dismantles these ties is a warmonger in the worst sense. 76 The notion of the noble lie is, of course, taken from Plato’s Republic (414c), where the lie (ho pseudos) is used as a remedy or medicine (to pharmakon) that makes the ideal society possible.

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4.4. Naming Eros: The Threat of Nihilism The next section of Aristophanes’ exposition of eros involves the fanciful offer of Hephaestus. At 192d, he asks his listeners to imagine Hephaestus standing over two lovers and asking them what it is they want. What is crucial here is that they are unable to tell him. They do not know what it is they want. It is clear, he says, “that each of them has some wish in his mind that he can’t articulate; instead, like an oracle, he half-grasps what he wants and obscurely hints at it” (192d).77 So, the object of love, and its inner meaning, which is essential to the human soul, is hidden from the soul. We do not know what it is we really want. Hephaestus then suggests that what the lovers want is to be united as they are forever. This seems to be based on a passage in the Odyssey in which the god of craftsmanship binds the lovers Ares and Aphrodite together.78 In this passage, the act of welding is a punishment for the treachery of these lovers. In Aristophanes’ version, however, it is ostensibly presented as a favour to humans. This way they will lead a shared life and will also share death as one being instead of two. Aristophanes says that anyone who heard this offer would be certain to accept because “this is our original natural state and we used to be whole creatures; ‘love’ is the name for the desire and pursuit of wholeness” (192e-193a). Hereby is the central section of Aristophanes’ account of eros concluded. After a rather lengthy mythic exploration, eros is finally named. The goal of eros is the desire to recapture our original wholeness. We desire to return to the time prior to erotic longing in which we were mighty circle-men. This was a time when erotic wholeness was characterised by a great strength that issued in barbaric hubris. This is what the un-nameable longing longs for; the erasure of longing through erotic wholeness. This passage deserves attention since it seems, at one level, to undermine the admonition against pursuit of original wholeness that we have seen up to now. There are one or two points that must be kept in mind. For one 77

The reference to an oracle here is interesting since oracular proclamations are notable, in Greek histories, for their ambiguity. Thus, whilst eros affects us powerfully, its ultimate orientation requires interpretation. Aristophanes is framing the tension between philosophy and poetry as to which is better suited to offer such an interpretation. 78 See Homer (1986). Odyssey. Translated from Greek by Robert Fitzgerald. London: Harvill Press, 8.266-366.

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thing, we note that this is an impossible offer in the sense that the return to bodily wholeness is impossible. In that case, it is likely that we are supposed to imagine other, substitute forms of wholeness. These are most likely to be the physical wholeness of erotic love – which will as a matter of course give rise to communal wholeness of the city – and the individualistic wholeness that is sought by philosophy as Aristophanes understands this. Secondly, we should, I think, be suspicious of the source of this offer of a return to the ‘natural state.’ The offer is made by Hephaestus, the god of craft and metalwork. In light of Aristophanes’ avowed opposition to techne, how could it be that he now makes the god of techne to be the saviour of the human race? Remember, at the start of his speech he was very clear that there is no techne of eros. Only Eros himself can be the physician since he knows what is in mankind’s best interest. This was the kernel of his opposition to Eryximachus and Socrates. Now along comes Hephaestus and does exactly what Aristophanes warned against. He mediates between eros and man; that is, he mediates what must be immediate. In a sense, then, he interferes where he has no business. This interference can be further demonstrated by the fact that he asks leading questions.79 The lovers, remember, cannot answer his original question- ‘what is it that you most desire?’ - so he rephrases it as a statement –‘is it not the desire to live a shared life?’ - and seeks an affirmation. But surely this is sophistry. Hephaestus has ambushed the lovers with his question. The intimate and immediate nature of the relation between man and eros makes it such that we cannot articulate what it is we are seeking in eros. In this state, however, we are likely to fall prey to meddlers who come along and attempt to put words in our mouths offering an easy way out of the suffering attendant upon the human condition. And though this attempted mediation may appear desirable, it is by no means clear that it is so. Hephaestus has uncovered the truth of our longing, and while the solution that he offers is appealing, it is not necessarily in our best interests.

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This may be intended to remind of Socrates himself. In many of Plato’s earlier dialogues, Socrates wins assent from his interlocutors by asking questions of the form ‘Isn’t it so that x is y?’ etc. An example is the Meno, in which the slave boy is asked to confirm or deny the propositions put to him by Socrates. This approach has been criticised as leading the interlocutor. See, e.g., Melling, D. (1987). Understanding Plato Oxford: Oxford University Press, ch. 6 passim.

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We might also make the mistake of confusing the consolation of eros for its real object. On Aristophanes physical account, sexuality is this consolation of eros. It is the object of our focus whilst what remains out of focus (the generation of the polis) is what it makes possible. Sexuality is, therefore, a distraction80, which enables us to get on with our real task, i.e. work. Yet, this focus on the body and away from the soul has left a certain uneasiness. We feel that there is somehow more going on in eros and erotic longing. When Hephaestus makes his offer, we are likely to be tricked (as Ares and Aphrodite were) and to misidentify the true source of happiness. Aristophanes most likely views the offer of Hephaestus as treachery in that it cultivates an erotic techne, which will undo the operation of Zeus. Hephaestus thus arrogates to himself a position of sovereign authority regarding the affairs of man. Accepting that erotic desire is for completeness and self-sufficiency, his offer will shift the focus of eros away from the navel (i.e. the downward glance) and once more towards the stars (the upward glance). But to do this can only be detrimental to the common good and the affairs of State since it removes the interdependence that was initiated by the self-restrictive act of truncating eros (the operations of Apollo and Zeus) and relocating the object of erotic love. The desire for wholeness is the real aim of eros. Here, Aristophanes is serious but whether giving in to this is in our best interest is another matter entirely. Hephaestus is, in effect, doing the work of Socrates through his offer of welding the lovers together and thereby moving the glance up rather than down but in the mind of the poet, the results of this will spell disaster. If it is correct that Aristophanes intends the circle-men as the ‘enduring symbol’ of the human condition, then we must qualify this by saying that they represent the enduring symbol of man as philosophical. But man as philosophical is our greatest fear since philosophical man has a kind of ‘death-drive’.81 Through his ‘meddling’ and aspirations, he unconsciously 80

This notion of sexuality as consolation, or distraction, if it is correct, makes the view of Aristophanes more distinct from psychoanalysis than is generally acknowledged. He does not make sexuality the ultimate goal of action but a distraction which possibilises action. 81 The terminology is Freud’s but the point is given powerful expression in Derrida’s Margins of Philosophy, when he claims that the eros of philosophy is the desire for pure presence in which difference is absolutely overcome (p. 52). As such, philosophy as theory is described as “the death of desire, death in desire, if not the desire of death.” (p. 92). In highlighting the desire of philosophical eros for pure presence

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wills his own destruction. This is the greatest irony in Aristophanes’ account of eros. His revisionary story tells us that the effects of eros remain hidden to us. By altering the focus of eros, though, we ensure that these effects are positive ones. If, on the other hand, we acknowledge the real focus of eros, the fruits are very bitter indeed. Thus, philosophical man in spite of his great intellectual strength and tremendous arrogance is as much in the dark, with regard to eros, as non-philosophical man. He thinks he wills his elevation to divinity and divine understanding but in fact wills only death and not only for himself but for the entire race. The fundamental trait of human being, on this account, is blind wandering. We wander into the domain of the gods, who alone have knowledge, but this wandering remains blind and, as such, becomes the cause of immeasurable suffering and destruction if it is not checked by humility. This, according to Patočka is the point not only of Sophocles’ Oedipus, but of Greek tragedy in general,82 and it is a point that is seemingly close to Aristophanes heart also. The tragedy for man lies precisely in this dilemma. He hovers precariously between two positions, neither of which is ideal – between the limited vulnerability of the body and the unlimited desire of the soul. On the one hand, we can be true to our rational nature by giving vent to the erotic desire for wholeness and self-sufficiency, which will result in our destruction or we can create a fiction (i.e. lie) that will not only console but preserve us, even if it be at the cost of truncating the aspirational dimension of eros. The poeticization of eros is not, then, a luxury or an aesthetic decoration. It is vital to our well-being, something which the disclosvie tendencies of philosophy threatens most deeply. Socratic eros, in its pursuit of eternal truths, intends the stars in exactly the way the poet warns against. It is interesting to note that the body is always a central motif in Aristophanes’s attempt to reorient eros. The upward movement of eros seeks to overcome the limitations of the body – in the way the circle-men were more or less indifferent to their own bodies – but this is to seek the destruction of what it means to be human in overcoming these limitations. And it is a crucial plank of Aristophanes’ account that it is Derrida is referring specifically to the thought of Hegel and yet the similarity with the Aristophanes critique is germane. It is also worth noting here that Derrida makes much of the image of the circle in relation to the death drive of philosophical eros (p. 52-3). Derrida, J. (1982). Margins of Philosophy. Translated from French by Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 82 Patocka (2002). Op cit., p. 56.

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only as limited (tragically) that we become civilized. The laws that make us orderly are set in opposition to our nature, it is true, but this must be so because what is closest to our hearts is a desire for a radical autonomy that turns out to be not liberating but savage and tyrannical. If this is what is intended by Socratic eros, Aristophanes draws our attention again and again to the body to remind us that we are not gods. The goal of Socratic eros is not explicitly or consciously destructive, but it will be the outcome of his will-to-truth, in the same way that civilized society will be the outcome of bodily oriented eros. Socrates is indeed ignorant, though not in the way he often claims to be. He is not ignorant because he is not in possession of eternal truths, but because he lacks self-knowledge about what this pursuit entails. Only Aristophanes’ anti-intellectual buffoonery can, in the end, save us from this more dangerous form of ignorance. 4.5. Eros Turranos and Eros Ouranos: Two Erotes or One? It may seem from what has proceeded that there are two different kinds of eros in the speech of Aristophanes. This would be in keeping with the distinction between heavenly and pandemic eros that was made by Pausanias and Eryximachus. Yet, at the beginning of the present speech, Aristophanes said that his speech would be of a different sort than what had preceded it (189c). And indeed it has been, and with regard to the question of a double eros, I think that what Aristophanes has offered has in fact been a detailed psychological account of a single eros. I mean this; in Pausanias’s account there were two kinds of eros each of which had its proper object. Pandemic eros intended simply pleasure while virtue was the ostensible concern of heavenly eros. Following Pausanias, the doctor Eryximachus put forward the claim that the division between the erotes should better be understood as identifying a higher eros that intends order (whether bodily, psychic or cosmic) and a lower eros that intends disorder. This is not the case for Aristophanes. In the present speech, there is only one eros and it is always connected with chaos as opposed to order. Eros is the philanthropic god that ministers to man’s ills and from what we have seen, he (Eros) is the only philanthropic god. It is interesting that Aristophanes connects philanthropy with the ministering to the chaotic dimension of human existence and it also reveals a deep truth about eros in his speech. As single, it becomes apparent that there is no heavenly eros. All eros is tyrannical and since eros is common to all, the greater is the need to

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revise its deployment. If there is a doubleness in eros, it is only in the ways in which it is deployed. The aspirational eros of the philosopher is, at bottom, no different than the eros of the adulterer. But if this is so and eros always intends chaos, on what basis can a re-orientation of eros proceed? The answer to this question reveals, I think, the deepest paradox in the speech of Aristophanes. We know that Aristophanes’ work is concerned with Dionysus and Aphrodite. As the gods of wine and sex, these are more closely connected with the cosmic gods of physis and chaos and yet in his speech, superiority is assigned to Zeus and Apollo, the pre-eminent gods of nomos and order. So, if there is a tension between order and chaos, Aristophanes gives priority to the gods of order in spite of his profession. But, this cannot be done at the expense of the eradication of the gods of disorder since chaotic eros is so much a part of what we are. It requires a release of some sort. This is why Aristophanes opts for sexuality as a fundamental motif of his speech and it is why he is so keen to bring our attention back again and again to the chaotic absurdity of the body. It is not, of course, that we need to be told about sex in order to be aware of it, but we do require the poet to constantly keep it in the forefront of our minds. Ostensibly, his work is at odds with the affairs of state and law and order since it proceeds by making fun of these and celebrating the irrational yet, at bottom, it is through this kind of opposition that Aristophanes finally endorses the order of the city. Philosophical or Socratic eros concerns itself with knowing what the gods know and so, in the mind of Aristophanes, it represents the aspiration to be a god. In so doing, however, it constitutes a challenge to the order of the city since it claims that it needs no extrinsic order imposed upon it. The fruits of this will not be the perfection of the human race but its descent into barbarism. As such, the eros of philosophy manifests an impulse towards tyranny that is ultimately destructive of both the city and itself because of the fact that the mind or spirit is not selflimiting in the way the body is. By contrast, the eros present in Aristophanes’ poetry is like a release valve for the city. We remember from the beginning of his speech that he intends to challenge the polis-based order of Eryximachus and Pausanias, yet he ends in subservience to exactly that. In orienting the gaze downwards, he allows the focus of eros to be distracted so that the business of the city can proceed unmolested. We saw at the beginning that Aristophanes pokes fun at precisely the type of authority (represented here by Eryximachus, the doctor) that en-

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ables him to speak in the first place. His works provide a kind of lower pleasure which when tasted allows citizens to ‘relax, turn to their work, and think about the other things in their life’ (191c). Thus, he takes a role not dissimilar to that of the medieval jester who gives voice to a higher wisdom that constantly hearkens back to our limitations as humans and warns against spiritual excess. In this role, he can vent against the authorities while remaining ultimately subservient in relation to them. What is more, the balance – albeit asymmetrical – between the order of the city and the chaos of comic poetry and the body allows a certain type of attenuated wholeness to be achieved. And it is clear that such a balance is intended by Aristophanes’ account of eros as when he notes that eros is meaningful beyond the bounds of physical pleasure. Regarding the separated halves, he claims that “no one can think that it’s just sexual intercourse they want” (192c). In other words, not sex but wholeness is the goal of their love.83 Human existence is tragic because we cannot return to the selfsufficient wholeness that we so desire and the point has been that any attempt to do so results in tyranny and disaster. But we can achieve a limited wholeness in the successful duration of the city in which the two aforementioned parts are held together in tension. This may explain Eryximachus’s surprising praise of the speech. If Aristophanes intends to attack the order put forward in the doctor’s speech, we should expect the latter to try to defend himself. Instead, he says, Actually I much enjoyed your speech. If I didn’t know that Socrates and Agathon were experts on the ways of love, I’d be very worried that they might run out of things to say, since we’ve already had such a wide variety of speeches (193e).

Robert Mitchell argues, successfully in my opinion, that this comment demonstrates that Eryximachus has understood the challenge to the order of the city in the speech not as a real challenge at all but as a completion of his own account.84 What it does do, however, is warn against the spiritualization of philosophic eros that seeks to overcome the limitations of the human condition and legislate to itself for itself. This brings human beings into direct 83

Irving Singer makes the same point when he claims that sex “in itself does not explain the nature of love. Far from being sexual, love is the search for that state of wholeness in which sex did not exist.” Singer, I. (2009). The Nature of Love, vol. I. Cambridge, Ma.: Cambridge University Press, p. 52. 84 Mitchell (1993). Op. cit., p. 88

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confrontation with the law of Apollo and Zeus and therefore, into conflict with what happens to be in our best interest. The irony of philosophical activity from the point of view of Aristophanes is that its challenge to order is indirect. Socrates claims to be seeking foundations for notions such as justice, virtue etc. in a context that is wider than the political. The result is the production of aporiai and a relativism that undermines the possibility of these notions. To put the matter another way, we might say that at stake in the speech of Aristophanes is the question of the interpretation of eros. He has throughout juxtaposed his own physicalistic interpretation of eros with the spiritual interpretation of the philosopher. We saw that this does not mean that there are two Erotes but that the same single eros can be understood in different and conflicting ways. What was particularly noticeable about these conflicting interpretations was that they entailed both a visible and a hidden aspect. The physicalistic interpretation intends bodily pleasure ostensibly but through this, facilitates polis and community. By contrast, the spiritualistic interpretation intends enlightenment but, as an unforeseen consequence, unravels the social bonds and threatens the dissimulation of the human community. What is curious here is that if Aristophanes identifies these conflicting interpretations with poetry on the one hand and philosophy on the other, his own speech would seem to take a third position which does not fully coincide with either. Undoubtedly, he accords superiority to the poet but he needs to stand outside his role as poet in order to do this. Eros does not know what it wants so we must interpret the real object of its desire. It seems that there is no right or wrong to this but we can judge these interpretations according to what they give rise to. By its nature, eros is a chaotic desire or a desire for chaos. Because of the type of beings we are, it is shown by Aristophanes to be both ineradicable and dangerous. So if the destructive excess of eros must have an outlet, it is better that this outlet should be physical rather than spiritual because while the body limits itself –as shown by the hiccup – the spirit does not. Therefore, the philosopher’s interpretation of the goal of eros threatens to engulf the whole by making chaos – consciously or not – the funding principle of its activity. This is because it recognises no higher order or ordering principle outside of itself. How can it since the problem is not that the philosopher wages war on order in the name of chaos but that he thinks that he pursues a higher order than the order of the polis when, in fact, there is no such higher order. Consequently,

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he becomes an unwitting advocate of chaos. By contrast, the wild eros of Aristophanes’ plays does, for all its buffoonery, recognise and order outside itself since he acquiesces to an order beyond the disorder of the body. As such, the challenge to order that Aristophanes’ represents turns out finally not to be a challenge but an assent to traditional authority. Understood in this way, the speech of Aristophanes has sought to mediate in the debate between philosophy and poetry by ‘bringing to light’ the truth about eros. He interprets eros for us and removes it from its hiddenness. But the position he takes is not one that can be sustained because in ‘unconcealing’ eros he shows why it is that eros must remain concealed. As such, Aristophanes offers us a thoughtful unfolding of eros that uncovers what is at stake in different ways in what might be called poetry’s and philosophy’s hermeneutics of eros in action. By hermeneutics in action, I mean the way the respective disciplines interpret or harness erotic desire. The overarching hermeneutic of course reveals the driving force of both to be the same even while one is less damaging than the other. And because the driving force of both is the same, Aristophanes must conceal the true meaning of eros even as he reveals it. This is why his account of eros is offered as a myth. This need for concealment goes for the poet as much as the philosopher since in eros, neither knows what he is doing and ends up doing the opposite of what he intends. Thus, the comic poet, the enemy of order, sustains the order of the city while the philosopher will obliterate the human community in his attempt to ground it. Again, this is because the poet’s enmity to the ordered polis is in fact parasitic upon this very order while the philosopher’s dialectic intends a substitute order that is independent of the polis. The effects of the poet’s employment of eros are at best positive and at worst, tolerable while the eros of the philosopher is incompatible with political life at all. 5. Eros, Politics and Philosophy So what conclusions can we draw from the Aristophanic conception of eros based on what we have seen so far? In placing the speech in the context of the indictment of philosophy, we have been able to draw out a complex theory of the perils and possible salvation of existence based on the root sources of erotic energy. Aristophanes is anti-philosophical and, therefore, anti-Socratic. In the Clouds, he presented Socrates as a Sophist and a med-

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dler in affairs that did not concern him. In the Symposium, Plato’s Aristophanes is endorsing the same sort of view. We know that in many of the dialogues Plato is keen to draw a real distinction between the philosophical activity of Socrates and that of the Sophists. It would be fair to say that any distinction is lost on Aristophanes. As far as he is concerned, there is no difference. The activity of both (Socrates and the Sophists) is characterised by hubris and, if anything, the work of Socrates is an even more dangerous employment of erotic energy – at least the Sophists were generally concerned with political matters and had limited ambitions regarding the metaphysical underpinnings of truth and justice per se. Aristophanes, then, is of the view that philosophy and philosophical matters should not concern us. We would be better off without them. This, we said, is not necessarily motivated by a fear of literal reprisals from the gods but a fear of the dismantling of the social fabric. Aristophanes may be acting as a representative of the view that it is people like Socrates who are responsible for Athens’ current woes.85 Socratic philosophy is the great corruptor of youth since it encourages a critical questioning of the status of the gods and is generally apolitical.86 It dismantles the structures of the polis but without putting anything in their place. We cannot help but feel however that there is more to the critique of Aristophanes than a conflation of Socrates and sophism. Even were this the case, the conflation is not necessarily unreasonable. It is often almost impossible to maintain any such distinction between Socrates and the sophists.87 85

At the time of the setting of the Symposium, Athens is a city in impending crisis. They have just been defeated by the Spartans and the power of the old, democratic regime smashed. This is to be replaced by the thirty tyrants of whom Plato and Socrates were initially supportive. All in all it is a dark chapter in Athenian history. Aristophanes, in fact, refers to this at 193a: “Before this, we were unified but now, as a result of our crimes we have been split just as the Lacadaemonians have split up the Arcadians.” 86 It is worth noting that this aspect of Socratism is featured in the dialogues prologue in the exchange between Apollodorus (the dialogues narrator and slavish follower of Socrates) and his companion (172a-174a). Apollodorus attacks the concerns of everyday life not only because they are unimportant but because many (such as his companion) labour under the misapprehension that only they are important. 87 According to Gadamer, Plato himself is aware that ‘…there is no adequate criterion by which to distinguish between truly philosophical discourse and sophistic

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We are sometimes given the impression that the only basis for distinction is their respective intentions. But how can we ascertain these in any certain way? And if we could, would this obviate the problem of the potentially antisocial consequences of philosophical critique? The point here is that the hubris and potential tyranny of philosophical eros, as understood by Aristophanes, need not be understood as a simple desire to dominate but might instead entail a destructive irresponsibility. Socrates need not have the soul of a tyrant. His critique of the traditional values and foundations of Athenian society may be performed in the best of faith, but it generates aporiai from which perhaps there is no way back. Is Socrates, then, a model citizen? If we follow Socrates, do we not risk deconstructing the foundations of our cultural communities to the point that there is no longer a way through? This is an important question for the contemporary reader in an era in which a culture of critique and a hermeneutics of suspicion more often fragments than re-grounds community. In the Symposium and elsewhere, Plato makes much of the atopia of Socrates.88 He is out of place in the city. This does not mean that he bears ill will to his fellow citizens but that because citizenship is not enough for him, he de-centres the individual in the community. But a single Socrates is one thing. What if we had a community full of Socrates’? This is what Aristophanes fears and with good reason. In contemporary western society, we are all a-topos and decentred by our refusal to subject ourselves to any authority other than ourselves. As such, each one becomes his own emperor and community is based on nothing more than physical proximity and the negative injunction not to interfere with one another. In a society that assigns absolute value to the concept of autonomy, how can it be otherwise? I do not mean this as a plea for some kind of simple political conservatism but only to show that the critique of Aristophanes must be taken seriously. There is a dogma in western societies that if we each challenge stagnant forms of traditional authority we will push through to a brighter tomorrow populated by intelligent, condiscourse.” Gadamer, H.-G. (2004). Truth and Method. Translated from German by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall. London and New York: Continuum Press, p. 340. 88 In addition to the speech of Alcibiades, which we will come to shortly, the Symposium itself begins with the account of Socrates standing rapt in thought on the neighbour’s porch when the party at Agathon’s house has already begun (175a). This and many other incidents serve to demonstrate the strangeness of Socrates. He is always out of place.

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tented and peaceful individuals. Like the circle-men of Aristophanes, we will have the facsimile of a community because in our self-sufficient enlightenment, we will have no need of either contact or conflict with one another (witness any internet café to observe a version of this vision).89 Yet to what extent this has been realised or, more importantly, to what extent it is realisable are legitimate concerns. And beyond this unconscious dissimulation of human community, there is also the issue of the malicious facsimile of philosophical eros in the hands of those who intend no way through. Aristophanes Clouds is an exploration of these issues and I believe that Plato too is not insensitive. We know from both the Phaedrus and the Seventh letter that Plato was all too aware of the dangers inherent in philosophy, and especially in the disengagement of discourse from presence, or the saying from the said. In the latter, Dionysus II’s publication of the teachings of Plato alerts the philosopher to the painful fact that through malice, or more likely arrogance, the fragile spirit of philosophy is betrayed and becomes a vehicle of potentially very serious political strife. As Gadamer notes, there is a distinction made by Plato between authentic and inauthentic questioning so that for critique to be productive, one must genuinely want to know and one must acknowledge one’s own ignorance in a way that is humble and respectful.90 Since such a spirit is rare, Plato became increasingly guarded about revealing his insights to others.91 So even if we accept that Socrates does not have the soul of a tyrant and that he truly understands the enquiring mind as beholden to divinity and not self-possessed, the problem is not overcome.92 The point is that the spirit of philosophy is so fragile and that it is not easily discernible from sophism. As such, Plato wishes to defend Socrates but he also ex89

The phenomenon of the internet is perhaps a good example here. Being ‘online’ not only provides facsimile communities but also communities in which there is no limit placed on desire. This is not only the result of scant restrictions online but because the limits of the body do not come into play. One can shop for groceries without brushing against the unwashed neighbour or visit several museums in a day without getting tired feet. Every impulse is catered for in cyberspace and with every experience we are able to edit out all that is unpleasant, inconvenient or tiresome. 90 Gadamer (2004). Op. cit., p. 356-7. 91 See Plato, 7th letter, 341c. 92 Gadamer notes that for Plato, “true opinion is a divine favour and gift, so the search for and recognition of the true logos is not the free self-possession of the human mind.” Gadamer (2004). Op. cit., p. 340.

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presses through Aristophanes a reservation about the openness of his friend and former master. Yet for all this, we must keep in mind, in the context of his Symposium speech that, this is all philosophy can offer for Aristophanes. Socrates’ intellectual pride is destructive and nothing more since it has nothing positive to say. This is crucial because it reveals a certain metaphysical standpoint underlying the views of the poet. He is opposed to metaphysics and the cultivation of metaphysical viewpoints yet his rejection of them is a metaphysical point of view. In believing that philosophical activity is purely destructive, he betrays the attendant belief that there is no fundamental rationality to existence that can be discovered by reason. Philosophy produces chaos because when it penetrates the core of things it finds only chaos. Or at least, it produces chaos because its ‘ordering’ (for want of a better word) principle is chaos. This is precisely why philosophy is not to be encouraged for if it is, we will turn barbarous. Thus, Aristophanes uproots the meaning of philosophy from the gratitude to divinity that, for Plato, was such an important part of the activity of Socrates. This may be because he is agnostic or because he considers philosophy to be at odds with gratitude to the divine or because he mistrusts the faith of Socrates. He may be contesting the genuineness of the conjunction of reverence and critique in the soul of Socrates or he may be highlighting the ease with which reverence can be excised without any change in the form of philosophical discourse being noticeable. If the latter is the case we must take heed to what extent this critique hits home in an age in which critique and reverence sit uneasily if at all with one another. It is far better to ‘poeticise’ existence even if this means restricting or re-channelling, our natural impulses. To do this, we know, involves changing the focus of eros away from the spirit and towards the body. In this way, sexuality becomes a harmless outlet for erotic energy and one that produces the added desirable side-effect of preserving the species. Once this is achieved, it is more likely that we will get on with our day-to-day work and mind our own business. We will, as Zeus in the myth hoped, ‘be still and cease to cause trouble’. The poeticisation of existence itself is the work of the poets. It is their job to tell stories about the gods and their regulative effect in our lives. Does this mean that Aristophanes is an atheist? I do not think that this question can be answered in any definite way given his unequivocal endorsement of religious practice. In one sense, the Question may be beside the point, as Aristophanes may well adhere to a theology in which rationality is inimical

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to human well-being.93 At the end of his speech, Aristophanes tells us that we should show all due reverence to the gods or we will be plunged into chaos. To get on the wrong side of the gods, he says, is to love in the wrong way (193b). Note, he does not say that lack of reverence is not eros but that it is a destructive (i.e. Socratic) deployment of eros. Eudaimonia and the salvation of the race is not a task that can be discharged by philosophers because philosophy is hubris. Rather, eudaimonia is the business of the poets and is achieved by cultivating our interest in sex (think of Aristophanes’ own plays) and piety. The ostensible challenge to political order that Aristophanic comedy represents, in fact, supports precisely this political order while the apparent indifference of philosophy is the source of its threat to this order. I mean to say that Aristophanes pokes fun at authorities whose ultimate authority he finally accepts while philosophy’s indifference betrays a pernicious desire to be free of any such authority. The desire for wholeness that was named as the meaning of eros is as inevitable as it is inescapable but the tragedy of the human condition lies precisely in the fact not that this is presently unattained but that the consummation of this desire would be ultimately counter productive. It is a desire for a self-sufficiency that would unravel the bonds that tie men to the gods and to each other.94

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The idea that Greek thinking was generally inimical to science is interestingly developed by historian Rodney Stark. See Stark, R. (2003). For the Glory of God: How Monotheism led to Reformations, Science, Witch-hunts, and the end of Slavery. Princeton & Oxford: Princeton University Press, p. 151f. 94 One final point is worth keeping in mind since it will be important later and it is this; we said in concluding that Aristophanes finally subordinates the work of ‘his’ gods (Dionysus and Aphrodite) to the work of Zeus and Apollo. That is to say, he subordinates chaos to order and while this is true it is worth keeping in mind the slight disingenuity of this stance. We noted earlier that in his muthos of eros he himself does the work of Zeus insofar as he turns the human stare away from the stars and towards the body. Thus, while his work depends on the prior provision of order, it is true at another level that this order is sustained by the work of the comedian who endorses the redirection of erotic energies. In the end, the wholeness of the city and the balance between comic poetry and politics is more even it may have once appeared.

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Defending Philosophy I: Nietzsche’s Will-to-Power and Philosophy as Creative Excess

The fact that he was condemned, not just to banishment but to death, is something that Socrates himself, with complete clarity and without the natural dread of death, seems to have accomplished; he went to his death with the same calm he had shown as when...he left the symposium as the last thinker in the grey dawn to begin a new day, while his sleeping companions remained behind, on the benches and on the ground to dream of Socrates, the true eroticist. Nietzsche, Birth of Tragedy, 13

If there were gods, how could I endure not to be a god. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, II “On the Blissful Islands.”

In the previous chapter, we examined the indictment of Socrates and of philosophy through a reading of the speech of Aristophanes in Plato’s Symposium. That speech focused on the tension between civilisation and human erotic energy. Aristophanes focused on the unlimited character of eros and the danger that, if spiritualised, it tends towards tyranny and the desire for radical but self-destructive autonomy. This he considered to be the work of philosophy and so his speech constituted a warning against (i) the hubris and tyranny of philosophy and (ii) its lack of self-knowledge. That is, in addition to the tyrannical bent of intellectualised eros, eros unchecked tends to terminate not in a final apotheosis of the self but the self’s own destruction. In the present chapter, we will examine a possible defence against this critique through a reading of the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. The point here is not to refute the critique simply but rather to defend Socratic activity – as it is understood by Aristophanes – through Nietzsche’s revaluations. Nietzsche is a perfect candidate for comparison here inasmuch as many of the most central themes raised in the last chapter are fundamentally important to Nietzsche’s oeuvre. For example, the clash between physis and nomos – at least nomos understood as tradition – is a persistent feature of

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Nietzsche's work.95 Nietzsche is one of what Paul Ricoeur called ‘the masters of suspicion’, who, along with Freud and Marx, thinks largely in opposition to the Enlightenment project and the notion of the transparency of reason to itself.96 This entails the claim that there is no simple correspondence between reason or even experiences, on the one hand, and things on the other. As such, ‘Truth’ is not self-evidently accessible to reason because reason is the slave of hidden interests (in Nietzsche’s case, this will be reducible to will-to-power). Scientific, ethical, and religious rationalities, then, turn out to be nothing more than masks, sublimations, or ideologies that cover what is really at stake in existence. The ‘natural light of reason’ is anything but a natural or impartial light but is, rather, a sophisticated tool of domination. Because this is the case, Nietzsche accepts the Aristophanic hermeneutic of eros in which it is will rather than reason that defines human being, but he turns the critique back on itself by embracing the hidden sources of human motivation and refusing to subjugate them to any noble lie or artificial superstructure, be it moral religious or scientific. He wants to both acknowledge and embrace the hidden secret of eros that Aristophanes so feared. The reasons for this are, firstly, that the hidden (erotic) drive precedes all of these superstructures and secondly, that this drive is the source of human creativity which is, for Nietzsche, the essence of the good life.97 This chapter will break down into four sections. The first part will introduce Nietzsche and comment on certain problems associated with reading him. In the second part, I will discuss Nietzsche’s understanding of phi95

As we shall see, Nietzsche is constantly attempting not to overthrow nomos in any form but only a certain kind of nomos, which is the nomos of the weak. Against this, he wants to transvalue the notion of nomos and reground it otherwise. 96 Ricoeur, P. (1965). Freud and Philosophy: An essay on Interpretation. New Haven & London: Yale University Press, p. 32. As Ricoeur puts it, “[i]t is easier to show their common opposition to a phenomenology of the sacred, understood as a propadeutic to the ‘revelation’ of meaning, than their interrelationship within a single method of demystification” (ibid.). In other words, their respective focus on hidden drives, power relations, and class interests are not reducible to a single critique of the Enlightenment. Instead, their work comprises a series of ways of critiquing the Enlightenment project. All three are, furthermore, thinkers of great influence on 20th century thought. 97 Whereas Nietzsche tends to be very far from the Greeks, medieval or moderns in his conception of what the ‘good life’ entails, he is by no means opposed to the notion of the good life. In fact, the good life is a central problem for his philosophy.

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losophy and philosophical activity as the cultivation of spiritual sovereignty insofar as this is relevant to the critique of Socrates that we have seen. I will argue that Nietzsche is a thinker who accords pre-eminence to the unlimited transcending power of eros. Thirdly, I will return to the relation of Nietzsche and Socrates. In this part, I will examine both Nietzsche’s admiration for and also his resentment of Socrates. In the final part, I will look at the work of Nietzsche as fulfilling the dangerous promise mooted in the speech of Aristophanes. Here, I will look to Nietzsche’s final rejection of Socrates which is not about distancing himself from Socrates simpliciter but as continuing the work of Socratic eros in overcoming his predecessors.98 1. The Problem of Nietzsche and Socrates 1.1. Introducing Nietzsche Friedrich Nietzsche was born in 1844 in Röcken, a small town in the eastern part of present day Germany.99 He was the first of three children born to pastor Karl Ludwig Nietzsche and his wife Franziska. His father died in 1849 of a softening of the brain100 and was survived by the five year old Nietzsche, his sister Elisabeth and his mother.101 In 1858, he was sent to the exclusive Pforta boarding school before moving to the University of Bonn in 1864. His studies comprised Greek and Latin philology for the most part and he distinguished himself to the extent 98

One of Nietzsche’s last works, Twilight of the Idols (Götzendämmerung), contains the most sustained discussion of Socrates in any of his works other than The Birth of Tragedy. Nietzsche’s ambivalence regarding Socrates here demonstrates his attempt to both acknowledge the greatness of the past and to overcome it entirely in his own person. We will return to this later. 99 My intention in this section is simply to sketch the major dates and events in the life of Nietzsche. There exist many fine biographies of Nietzsche in which greater detail can be found. I list among these Hollingdale, R.J. (2001). Nietzsche: The Man and his Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Salomé, L. (1998). Nietzsche Translated from German by Siegfried Mandel. Chicago: University of Illinois Press; and Safranski, R. (2002). Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography. New York: W.W. Norton and co. 100 Most likely encephalomalacia, which is a form of dementia. 101 The couple’s third son, Ludwig Joseph, died in infancy in 1850.

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that he was offered the post of Professor of philology at Basel in 1869 in advance of the completion of his studies at the tender age of 24. Whilst professor at Basel, he published the Birth of Tragedy in 1872, a work inspired by and dedicated to the two great influences in Nietzsche’s life at the time, Arthur Schopenhauer and Richard Wagner. However, the work received a cool reception in academic circles and was harshly reviewed in 1873 by the influential classical philologist Ulrich WilliamowitzMöllendorf who felt that the book’s scholarship did not justify the claims made therein.102 In spite of publishing one other book, Untimely Meditations in 1876, the opposition of Williamowitz-Möllendorf more or less finished Nietzsche’s academic career from which he retired permanently in 1879. Though Nietzsche suffered from ill health throughout his life, the termination of his teaching duties heralded the most productive period of his life. His first work of original reflections appeared in 1878 with the title Human, All Too Human, which bore the subtitle, “A Book for Free Spirits” and was followed in 1880 by The Wanderer and His Shadow.103 In 1881, he published Daybreak and The Gay Science followed the year after. In 1883, he published the first two parts of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, “a book for all and none”. The subsequent two parts were published in 1884 and 1885. Although this is by far the best known of Nietzsche’s works and the finest example of his attempt to integrate philosophy and poetry, its prominence in academic circles has waned somewhat in recent years. In 1886 began what might be termed the final epoch of Nietzsche’s authorship with the publication of Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future. Nietzsche was primarily concerned at this point with critique of moralities and his attempt to re-valuate or trans-valuate all values. This project was continued in 1887 with On the Genealogy of Morality. This project was never brought to fruition in spite of the publication of four short books in 1888. These were, Nietzsche contra Wagner, Twilight of the Idols, The Antichrist and Ecce Homo. The last of these was an autobiographical reflection on his philosophical career while The Antichrist was intended to be the first part of a major work entitled the Will-To-Power. As with the re102

Williamowitz-Möllendorf’s review ended with the words, “Let Mr. Nietzsche keep his word, let him take up the thrysus and move from India to Greece, but he should step down from the podium from which he is supposed to be teaching scholarship.” Cited in Safranski (2002). Op cit., p. 83. 103 This work is generally included in editions of Human, All Too Human.

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valuation project, this never saw the light of day and the project was abandoned and not to be confused with the Will-To-Power published by Nietzsche’s sister Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche after his death. These works signalled the termination of Nietzsche’s intellectual career and in January 1889 he collapsed into insanity, a state from which he never recovered. He died in Weimar on August 25th, 1900. So Nietzsche’s career as a philologist was short, while he was rarely, if ever, taken seriously as a philosopher during his lifetime. He claimed at the time that his work was addressed to the future which was where he would find his true audience104 and in a sense has been proved correct by the great attention directed to his work in the 20th century.105 He has also been the subject of intense controversy, principally through the association of his thought and its appropriation by Nazi intellectuals during WWII, even though there are very few today who would seriously argue for any genuine sympathy between Nietzsche’s thought and Nazism.106 We will return to this issue briefly later in the present chapter. In either case, and even in spite of the Nazi controversy, Nietzsche has continued to fascinate his readers and exert a tremendous influence on the philosophical milieu in both the 20th and early 21st centuries. As to his more direct relevance to the issue at hand, we will see presently.

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In Ecce Homo, Nietzsche says “I know my fate. One day my name will be associated with the memory of something tremendous – a crisis without equal on earth.” See Nietzsche, F. (2005). “Why I am a Destiny.” In: The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols and Other Writings. Translated from German by Aaron Ridley and Judith Norman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 143. All future references are to this edition. Hence EH. 105 Many of the giants of 20th century, such as Foucault, Heidegger, and Derrida are clearly and explicitly inspired by Nietzsche, while others such as Gilles Deleuze, Karl Jaspers, and Pierre Klossowksi (as well as Heidegger and Derrida) have devoted full length studies to his work. 106 On this issue, see Kaufmann, W. (1968). Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist. 3rd edition New York: Vintage Books, Ch. 10 passim. Kaufmann claims, convincingly, that any coincidence between the work of Nietzsche and Nazi ideology can be traced to his sister’s, herself a committed anti-Semite, (mis)use of her brother’s thought

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1.2. The Problem of Nietzsche Before we do this, however, there is one other issue that needs mentioning. This is the problem related to reading Nietzsche at all. In the Twilight of the Idols Nietzsche refers to the “problem” of Socrates by which he means that it is difficult if not impossible to determine exactly who Socrates was and what his motivations were.107 Socrates never committed any of his thoughts to paper so that we must rely on competing and incompatible sources to generate a picture of the real historical person and what he really thought. It is an interesting irony that we face a similar problem in our attempts to read and understand Nietzsche. Unlike Socrates, Nietzsche did write books and letters and is separated from us historically by a much shorter period. The documentary evidence drawn from the writings of his acquaintances, moreover, reveals certain indisputable character traits such as melancholy, loneliness, politeness etc. Yet, we still cannot be sure exactly what Nietzsche thought or even how he understood his intellectual life. Part of the reason for this is, of course, the fact that Nietzsche was not a systematic thinker. He preferred to philosophize through the use of aphorism and polemic rather than constructing argumentative narratives in the style of, say, Kant or Hegel. He also wrote poetry and music and not incidentally since he considered these to be essentially bound up with the expression of his philosophical views. Like his onetime Danish contemporary Søren Kierkegaard, he expresses himself through different voices, different characters, and different styles, so that it is not always easy to identify who the “real” Nietzsche is. This problem becomes even more acute as the result of Nietzsche’s tendency to contradict and argue with himself. He observes, at one point, the popular error of “having the courage of one’s convictions; rather,” he says, “it is a matter of having the courage for an attack on one’s convictions!!!”108 Some of these inconsistencies are the result of a change of opinion – here we might think of his shifting evaluations of figures such as Schopenhauer and Wagner – but there is also a deliberate will to inconsistency or at 107

Nietzsche discusses this issue in a section of Twilight of the Idols entitled, “The Problem of Socrates”. See Nietzsche (2005). Op. cit., p. 164. Henceforth TI. 108 Nietzsche, F. (1925). Gesammelte Werke, vol. XVI. Munich: Musarion Verlag, p. 318. Cited in Kaufmann (1968). Op. cit., p. 19.

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least polyphony in his thought and writings. Nietzsche equated development of any kind, personal or communal, with agonistic struggle. Thus, personal development was bought through forging one’s will in opposition not only to what lay without oneself but also in opposition to what lay within. So Nietzsche’s lack of system is not an accident but a deliberate choice. System builders must think from the basis of unchallenged assumptions whereas Nietzsche wanted always to be free to challenge his own assumptions repeatedly. As one of his biographers, Lou Salomé, writes, But even when he was exhausted, his problems never left him. The found solution, therefore, was for Nietzsche a signal, each time, for a conversion; only in this way could a problem be gripped and a solution be attempted anew…he did not wish the problems under inquiry ever to cease to concern him; he continually wanted them to cause him inner turmoil.109 It is as though he becomes his own interlocutor in the attempt, not so much to ‘settle’ issues through this conflict, but to define himself through endless conflict. The struggle for self-overcoming, which takes the place of system, is in fact the most persistent motif of Nietzsche’s thought. I mean to say that he fundamentally opposes any system that can be understood as descriptive of any kind of objective reality or objectively stable personhood. In place of this, he asserts an unending dynamism that makes becoming prior to being. It is not surprising, then, that he so highly esteems Heraclitus’s emphasis of the primordiality of flux over stability. The conscious dissimulation that is so present in Nietzsche’s thought has made him a kind of icon for postmodernity insofar as his ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ heralds the downfall of the modernist rationalist project and also emphasizes the need for cultural and historically astute critique. As with many postmoderns, there is an irony here, though, inasmuch as the will to constantly re-evaluate assumptions is underwritten by the basic assumption of a disjunction between reason and reality and between man’s desire for meaning and the world. Nietzsche notes, for example, that it is a natural failing of man to assume ‘that that which is essential to (our) heart is the heart and essence of all things.’110 This assumption is never really challenged 109

Salomé (1988). Op. cit., p. 34-5. Nietzsche, F. (1996). Human, All Too Human. Translated from German by R.J. Hollingdale. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 14. Henceforth HATH. All future references are to this edition. In fact, Nietzsche makes this nomos/physis 110

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in the way the assumptions of modernity are. In some respects, this might seem ultimately to be the overthrow of one kind of metaphysics for another one, as opposed to the overcoming of metaphysics per se.111 In any case, the challenge the runs through Nietzsche’s entire oeuvre is the challenge to reason itself. He understood many of his predecessors as assuming a concord between reason and reality in a way that he seeks to question. He says, Why is it that from Plato onwards, every philosophical architect in Europe has built in vain?…because they had all neglected the presupposition for such an undertaking, the testing of the foundations, a critique of reason as a whole…the correct answer would really have been that all philosophers…were apparently aiming at certainty, at “truth”, but in reality at ‘majestic moral structures’.112

So Nietzsche seeks to uncover the source of reasoning in general which he finds to be irrational. This fundamental irony suggests a deep tension within the human soul and a certain incompatibility with the world. In essence, reason has historically attempted to create structures by which we might live but which turn out to be grounded in the instincts and in will rather than in any objective reality. In relation to this critique, Nietzsche’s writings manifest the attempt to discover one important truth; the truth of the human psyche, and the complex nature of human psychological motivation. In this way, Nietzsche is pursuing a psychological archaeology of human history. From the point of view of a reader, however, it is difficult to know how exactly one is supposed to read Nietzsche. As one writer has quipped, “[t]ell me what you need, and I’ll supply you with the right Nietzsche quotation.”113 This joke tells an important truth, not only about Nietzsche’s works themselves but how they tension an internal as well as an external principle insofar as he identifies a struggle between human rationality and the irrational instincts that underlie it. That is, the struggle is not just between human being and world. 111 This was, in fact, Heidegger’s critique. According to Heidegger, Nietzsche’s thought does not overcome western metaphysics, but is its final elucidation. See Heidegger, M. (1991). Nietzsche, vols 1&2. Translated from German by David Farrell Krell. San Fransisco: Harper Collins, p. 4. 112 Nietzsche, F. (1997). Daybreak. Translated from German by R.J. Hollingdale. Cambridge; Cambridge University Press, p. 3. Henceforth D. All future references are to this edition. 113 Tucholsky, K. (1960). Fräulein Nietzsche. In: Gesammelte Werke, vol. 10. Hamburg: Rowohlt. Cited in Safranski (2002). Op. cit., p. 11.

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have been employed in the last hundred years. He has been vilified as antiSemitic, racist and elitist as often as he has been celebrated as an advocate of democracy, equality and freedom. As Tucholsky suggests, it is always possible to support one’s views through the use of Nietzsche. Commentators will often read as ironic or overlook what others read literally according to the point they are trying to make through Nietzsche. Some have sought to find support for their own philosophical interests through Nietzsche114, while other use his insistence on intellectual freedom as a way of thinking in the spirit of Nietzsche rather than simply following him.115 Since Nietzsche was keen not to have disciples, it is unlikely that he would be opposed to these approaches to his work. He intended his work, I think, to be amorphous, dynamic and unstable to the extent that it constantly provided a challenge to the casual interpreter and especially to the university professor who seeks a system that can either be accepted or rejected. Nietzsche is a thinker with many masks and one who subverts any attempt to make his thought either systematic or transparent. However, in spite of the many faces of Nietzsche, there are some recurrent and persistent motifs in his thought which, while not amounting to a system, do amount to an approach to the question of human existence and to philosophy in general. The already mentioned fascination with the notion of agon in the thought of Nietzsche is rooted in his sense of the basic nature of existence as will-to-power and the Dionysian frenzy. Will-to-power and the Dionysian are features that are either present or suggested in all of Nietzsche’s works. The desire to endorse creativity as value and to overthrow existing values or, more properly, value systems, the connection between philosophy and poetry and the will to affirm existence are all ever-present in Nietzsche’s corpus. As such, I will use these aspects of the thought of Nietzsche predominantly in my analysis of his work in relation to my theme. This will, of 114

In his four-volume study of Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger understands Nietzsche’s work as both close to, and propadeutic for his own project. See Heidegger (1991). Op. cit. 115 For examples of this kind of approach, see Derrida, J. (1979). Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles. Translated from French by Barbara Harlow. Chicago: Chicago University Press; Deleuze, G. (1983). Nietzsche and Philosophy. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson. New York: The Athlone Press; Klossowski, P. (2005). Nietzche and the Vicious Circle. Translated from French by Daniel W. Smith. London: Continuum Press.

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course, make it difficult to traverse his works and to make sense of the various contradictory opinions expressed therein but it will also, hopefully, provide the means to discovering a deeper unity in the thought of Nietzsche and especially his understanding of the work of philosophy and of Socrates and Plato. 1.3. Nietzsche, Socrates, Plato From the time of his earliest studies, Nietzsche was fascinated by antiquity and the pre-Hellenistic Greek world in particular. As his studies progressed through philology to philosophy, he developed a strong interest in Greek philosophy and the culture that allowed the flourishing of this new attempt to confront the human situation.116 In relation to this, he discovered, early on in his philosophical career, the central place of Plato and Socrates, not only for Greek culture but also for European culture as a whole.117 These were men who determined the philosophical milieu that exists today and have left an indelible mark on western civilisation. Yet Nietzsche’s attitude to Plato and Socrates as a whole is deeply ambiguous and ambivalent. We should not be surprised by this given what we have already said about the nature of Nietzsche’s thought and his penchant for ambiguity generally. Yet, this is a problem if our intention in the present context, is to think of Nietzsche as a defender of Socrates. None of Nietzsche’s texts are free of reference to Socrates even though the extent to which he is addressed varies from one work to the next.118 But he is always present and, what is more, one can find just as many scathing or derogatory references to Socrates as positive or affirmative ones. So what exactly did Nietzsche think of Socrates? Much scholarly work has been done on this topic in recent years in opposition to the view that Nietzsche simply opposes himself absolutely to Plato and also, therefore, to Socrates. In an excellent study entitled, Nietzsche and Greek Thought, Vic116

This interest may first have developed during the preparation of what Lou Salomé describes as his only truly philological work, Contributions Toward a Source Study and Criticism of Diogenes Laertius (1870). Salomé (1988). Op. cit., p. 36. 117 See Nietzsche, F. (2014). Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks. Translated from German by Marianne Cowan. Washington. Regnery Publishing, 1962. Henceforth PTAG. All future references are to this edition. 118 Socrates is discussed at some length in, for example, The Birth of Tragedy and Twilight of the Idols, but much less so in On the Genealogy of Morality.

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torino Tejera traces Nietzsche’s understanding of Greek philosophy in general and Socrates in particular. One problem with this book, however, is that Tejera tends to overstate the common ground between Nietzsche and Socrates.119 This kind of overstatement is also a feature of Walter Kaufmann’s treatment of the issue. Kaufmann too is to be applauded for bringing to our attention Nietzsche’s great admiration for Socrates though he does this at times at the expense of balance in the sense that he downplays all of Nietzsche’s less positive estimations of Socrates. The fact of the matter is that Nietzsche does not have a transparent or consistent view of Socrates, or of Plato for that matter. In Twilight of the Idols, he speaks of his boredom with Plato and his “inability to join in the admiration for the artist Plato”, whose dialogues he considers to represent “a horribly self-satisfied and childish kind of dialectic.”120 On the other hand, he will say that, Some ancient writings one reads to understand antiquity: others, however, are such that one studies antiquity in order to be able to read them. To these belong the Apology.121

Nietzsche was intimately acquainted with both the Apology and the Symposium of Plato and, it is reported, that he designated the Symposium his Lieblingsdichtung when he graduated from school.122 These do not sound like the actions of a man who has never been able to appreciate Plato’s artistry or to stomach his philosophy. What are we to make of this? One approach that has been forwarded with some success is the view that while Nietzsche admires Plato and Socrates, he is bitterly opposed to the schools of thought to which they gave rise; namely, Platonism and 119

Tejera, V. (1987). Nietzsche and Greek Thought. Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff. Tejera plays up the controversial dimension of Socrates’s personality and views his philosophizing in terms of cultural critique. In doing this, he tends to gloss over Socrates passionate pursuit of the Good and so makes him more of a ‘Nietzschean’ than was really the case. In one chapter, “What Nietzsche loved about Socrates”, he pursues this line but tends to speak more about what Nietzsche should have loved than what he did. Having said this, there are many things to recommend this book including Tejera’s attention to the sources of Nietzsche’s understanding of Socrates. 120 “What I Owe to the Ancients”, §2 in TI, p. 225. 121 Nietzsche, F. (1925). Gesammelte Werke XVI. Op. cit., p. 6. Cited in Kaufmann (1968). Op. cit., pp. 405-6. 122 Kaufmann (1968). Ibid., p. 393.

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Socratism.123 The argument goes that the disciples of these two great thinkers have tended to dogmatise and stagnate the dynamic philosophic work of their masters. Thus, for example, Socrates the critic of traditional beliefs becomes a symbol of Christian morality at a later period. In other words, perhaps Socrates, like Nietzsche was a seeker and agonist, whose work amounted to the setting and re-setting of questions only. He intended to be subversive because subversion is essentially the work of philosophy. In this regard, Nietzsche says that Plato …received the decisive thought as to how a philosopher ought to behave toward men from the apology of Socrates: as their physician, as a gadfly on the neck of men.124

Remember that Nietzsche thinks of himself as a physician or at least a diagnostician addressing himself to his sick patient, contemporary Europe. One cannot, therefore, rest content with the beliefs of the many since man’s true transcending powers are only truly released in the life of the mind and its persistent search for truth.125 Socrates knew this as did Plato but it is a view lost on their followers. So is Nietzsche simply responding to a certain kind of stagnant 19th century academic Platonism? Many of his contemporaries were more interested in the ‘doctrines’ of Plato and Socrates than in the more nuanced and poetic elements in their thought. And, which is worse, many read Plato only insofar as his thought could be brought into harmony with Christian theology. So, in this regard Nietzsche is right to identify something beyond the doctrines, something deeper to which he feels a greater kinship. One problem with this view, however, is that Nietzsche does not seem always to be aware of the difference between Plato and Socrates and contemporary interpretations of their thought. If he has the distinction in mind, it is never made explicit. In the Birth of Tragedy, for example, the dry and soulless intellectualism of Socrates is the rock upon which tragic drama founders. Now, of course, we can read Nietzsche as deliberately courting controversy and using the names Plato and Socrates to stand as symbols for the type of thinking they have come to represent. Yet, the Birth of Tragedy is 123

This view is put forward by Walter Kaufmann. Ibid., pp. 391-412. And although he warns against overstating this view, he is keen on the distinction. 124 Nietzsche, F. (1921). Gesammelte Werke IV. Munich: Musarion Verlag, p. 404. Cited in Kaufmann. Ibid., p. 391. 125 i.e. rather than in specific doctrines.

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intended to be an historical account so the real Socrates must be the target of these attacks. Another possibility is that the Socrates that Nietzsche opposes is not Plato’s but Xenophon’s Socrates. It is, of course, impossible to piece together an entirely accurate or reliable picture of the real, historical Socrates, as we have noted already. Plato’s Socrates is different from Xenophon’s and the Socrates of Aristophanes’ Clouds is different from both. But according to some commentators, the Socrates pilloried by Nietzsche is most like to the one that appears in the Memorabilia and Symposium of Xenophon. This Socrates is a kind of ‘gentleman philosopher’ who expounds doctrines of an ethical or political kind and seeks to convince others of their veracity. There is not much of the Platonic ‘gadfly’ about him. Plato’s Socrates is ‘antidogmatic and anti-systematic’ and also a quoter of poets and a maker of myths.126 Thus he is much more than the moralist of Xenophon or the Pythagorean doctrinarian of the tradition. This brings us back, of course, to the view that it is Socratism and the traditional understanding of Socrates that Nietzsche is opposing. This view may be tempting, but it is hardly convincing. As a philologist, it is certain that Nietzsche was aware of Xenophon’s writings, but it stretches credibility too far to suggest that he would base his estimation of Socrates entirely upon these writings. What possible reason could there possibly be for eschewing the Platonic presentation? A third approach, to which I am more sympathetic, revolves around the importance of the pre-classical Greeks for Nietzsche. While it is difficult if not impossible to understand Nietzsche's work if his love of antiquity in general is bracketed, a more nuanced attention reveals a closer affinity in many of his writings with the warrior age of Homeric antiquity than with the Golden age of the philosophers. As such, he is inclined to read Socrates and Plato through the lens of the values of the this earlier age. Thus, while they re-interpreted Homeric values through the lens of reason, Nietzsche reverses the movement. In so doing, Nietzsche glorifies an age whose values are strength, courage, spontaneous creativity, and nobility, and mourns its sundering upon the rock of Christian guilt. Of course Plato and Socrates are not Christians but in his earliest work, as we shall see, Nietzsche understands them as precursors of Christian ressentiment. He understands Plato and Socrates as the sanitised or Christianised philosophers of the western tradition. And insofar as he comes to hold a more positive view of their ac126

Tejera, V. (1987). Op. cit., p. 90-1.

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tivity in later works, this is to be explained not by any amendment in his view of the warrior age of eris and agon but in a re-evaluation of what was really at stake for Plato and Socrates. That is to say, he will gradually come to see the philosophic activity of the Golden age of Athens in terms of a more subtle or refined will-to-power. The Homeric values, then, are not rejected but voiced in a more nuanced way. This will be elaborated as we proceed and, if correct, it in fact re-enforces once again the notion that the principal target of Nietzsche's polemics is Socratism and Platonism rather than Socrates and Plato. However, we will also see that while this insight is fundamentally correct but it does not go far enough. As we proceed, it will become clear that Nietzsche’s ambiguous understanding of Socrates includes a deeper resentment than cannot be explained merely by his cultural critiques. Nietzsche does admire Socrates and Plato and will defend their work based on his own understanding of philosophical activity as the creations of higher types, unconstrained by the laws of the many. Therefore, I will read Nietzsche not only as a defender of Socrates but of the understanding of philosophy that has been presented by Aristophanes. He accepts the critique of hubris but re-evaluate it in terms of his revaluation of values. Consistent with this approach, we will see that Nietzsche finally rejects Socrates because the erotic will-to-power of philosophy, as he understands it, necessarily aspires to the level at which it will tolerate no equals. Thus, he sets himself the task of following the Greeks to the point of finally surpassing them.127

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It is interesting to note, as an aside, that this is also the trajectory of Heidegger’s appreciation of the Greeks. For Heidegger too, the Greeks are originally extolled as paragons of philosophical activity, before finally being rejected as initiators of the tradition of thinking that has inhibited the possibility of a genuine thought of Being. See McGuirk, J. (2008a). Heidegger’s Transitional Readings of Plato’s Cave Allegory. Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, 38 (2), pp. 167-85.

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2. Philosophy as Spiritual Sovereignty 2.1. Philosophy in the Birth of Tragedy I want to turn now to the issue of Nietzsche’s understanding of what philosophy in itself is. As usual, this cannot be quickly determined and requires careful attention to the nuances of Nietzsche’s thought. In the earliest published work, the Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche appears to take a more or less negative view of philosophy. There, philosophy, through the figure of Socrates, is the source of the destruction of tragic drama. This is a problem because tragedy in classical Greece represents not only a supreme high point of human civilisation, for Nietzsche but is also the most pristine expression of the truth of human existence. Tragedy reconciles, as never before, the human being with existence in general. According to the central thesis of that work, the deep truth about human existence is expressed in the wisdom of Silenus, who tells king Midas, Wretched, ephemeral race, children of chance and tribulation, why do you force me to tell you the very thing which it would be most profitable for you not to hear? The very best thing is utterly beyond your reach: not to be born, not to be, to be nothing. But the second best for you is: to die soon.128

Existence in itself is horror and suffering and is fundamentally inhospitable to the human desire for meaning. The world is justified neither metaphysically nor morally. However, it is justified as a work of art or as aesthetic phenomenon (BT 24). The reason for this is a contradiction at the very heart of existence; namely, that all beings suffer from their existence because they exist as particular. Yet, in seeking to overcome this limitation, each being destroys itself in destroying its limitations and thus its own particular form

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Nietzsche. F. (1999). The Birth of Tragedy. Translated from German by Ronald Speirs. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 23. Speirs cites Aristotle’s dialogue Eudemos as the origin of this story though a version can also be found in Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations, I.48. §114. All future references to the Birth of Tragedy are taken from this edition, which includes the “Attempt at a SelfCriticism”, unless otherwise stated and will appear henceforth in the text as BT.

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of existence.129 This contradiction cannot find a voice in the registers of metaphysics or ethics, but it can be articulated aesthetically inasmuch as the aesthetic can gestalt the contradiction without needing to resolve it. The eros of the soul seeks to overcome its own particularity but this desire is, paradoxically, a desire for its own annihilation. This is already reminiscent of the Aristophanic conception of eros. But it is interesting that at this point, Nietzsche understands philosophy otherwise than Aristophanes had. For Nietzsche, the emergence of philosophy is problematic because while it claims to be a search for truth, it can only succeed as a fundamental denial of truth. The ‘truth’ is that all existence is becoming and destructive frenzy (as exemplified by the god Dionysus). Philosophy proceeds, however, through the notion that there is a stable, unchanging reality that justifies the impermanence of the world of appearance, and that the particularity of the individual is a perfection. It postulates a metaphysical edifice of permanence that underwrites the dynamic and the mutable. What is more, this ‘unseen’ world is claimed to be the real truth of existence. Thus philosophy denies truth for the sake of truth.130 If becoming is ultimate, the human situation is justified only as aesthetic phenomenon. This is because in tragedy, for example, the fundament of existence is married with the vision of stability and permanence (as represented by the ‘dream-world’ of Apollo). In this way, art is a therapy for the soul in the sense that it both preserves and beautifies the truth of existence. It is a vision that is both true and one with which we can live. Throughout his entire oeuvre, Nietzsche is concerned with reconciling human psychology with the imperative to live in the truth. He cannot accept the wishful thinking manifested by metaphysical systems, but he is at the same time, acutely aware of the human need for meaning. While he will reject the salvific power of tragedy in later writings, he never loses sight of the need to make the human response to existence the centrifugal point of his thinking. 129

For further discussion of this point see Zuchert, C.H. (1996). Postmodern Platos: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Gadamer, Strauss, Derrida. Chicago; Chicago University Press, p. 12. 130 We remember that Aristophanes had identified a dangerous lack of selfknowledge in the philosophical impulse, which was ultimately destructive. What Nietzsche means here is something else. The problem is not that the philosopher does not know what the outcome of philosophical inquiry will be, but rather that philosophical inquiry is made possible by an assumption that is false.

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In this work, justification is a function of the synthesis of Dionysian and Apollonian instincts. The Apollonian dream world in itself is an empty dream while the frenzy of Dionysus represents a truth with which we cannot live because its disintegrative impulse is directly inimical to the type of beings we are (namely particular).131 We are beings that live in and with phenomena but the truth of the whole is beyond all phenomena, it is the truth of the primordiality of endless, purposeless will (BT, p. 7). At this point, however, Art approaches as a saving sorceress with the power to heal. Art alone can re-direct those repulsive thoughts about the terrible or absurd nature of existence into representations with which man can live (BT, p. 7).

The truth is not something with which we can live but we can be reconciled to existence in spite of this. At bottom, the truth is chaos (becoming) while we maintain our existence by marrying this chaos with the ephemeral beauty of appearance (Being). Philosophy, by contrast, insists on a diametrically opposite thesis; namely, that appearance, as chaotic, stands in a lower order to the truly beautiful and intelligible truth beyond phenomena. We can see Nietzsche’s lifelong ambition to invert Platonism already operative already in this early work. On the one hand, we might say that according to this thesis, philosophy simply replaces art by providing a new phenomenon by which we might live; the phenomenon of metaphysical/moral justification. But for Nietzsche, in the Birth of Tragedy, the Socratic impulse is directed against the Dionysian element in existence (BT, p. 12) and seeks to subordinate it entirely to the Apollonian dream of self-control and moderation (BT, p. 9). According to the philosophical impulse, the Dionysian is purely a matter of lack, of the absence of order, rather than an energy that gives existence to be. In this way, philosophy does not transfigure the horror of existence as tragic drama had done, but simply denies it. For Nietzsche, philosophy – at this point at least – represents not a development but a degeneration of the human spirit. The challenge, for Nietzsche, is to live in the truth, but since truth is horror, we must do more than simply assent to it. We must find a way to transform 131

We might be tempted to say that ‘Apollo without Dionysus is empty, while Dionysus without Apollo is blind’. It is unlikely, however, that Nietzsche would have approved of this formulation.

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it into something human. Philosophy entails a negation of the truth, and so it can tell us nothing about how to live. As a result of this Schopenhauerian insight, Nietzsche’s attitude to Socrates, in the Birth of Tragedy, is almost exclusively negative. He calls him the ‘Cyclops’ in whom ‘the fine frenzy of artistic enthusiasm had never glowed’ (BT, p. 14). Where the instincts had always been the source of creativity, Socrates now makes consciousness creator and turns it against the instincts (BT, p. 13). Thus, the previous harmony of reason and will, embodied in tragedy, is destroyed by Socratic philosophy. Again, the problem is not that philosophy is rational. Rationality is important. The problem is rather that the rationality of philosophy seeks to subjugate the will, and thereby denies what is communicated therein. It is worth noting that this harmony of reason and the will is similar to the peace sought in the speech of Aristophanes with the important difference that while Aristophanes seemed finally to domesticate the Dionysian element in the union while the opposite is true for Nietzsche. The Dionysian element of existence was ostensibly primary for Aristophanes in the sense that his works celebrated the excess and vulnerability of the absurd. As we saw, however, the ultimate hermeneutic of his account was directed otherwise. What is also worth noting is that while the indictment of Socrates is extended to Plato, the latter is generally presented as a victim of the former. Nietzsche claims that the Platonic dialogue represents an attempt to salvage poetry even while making it ancillary to philosophy in accordance with the Socratic spirit (BT, p. 14).132 Thus, Plato’s ‘natural tendencies’ towards poetry channelled art in new directions. In this way, his aristocratic spirit was not entirely eclipsed by the maxims of Socrates (BT, p. 14). But even allowing for this, the influence of Socrates had the effect of almost permanently undermining the sovereignty of art.133 If Nietzsche does not quite understand this distinction in terms of master and slave morality yet, he does understand it in terms of aristocratic and peasant spirits. And yet, for all this, there are the faintest glimpses of a re132

Nietzsche says here that Plato’s dialogues gave to posterity the blueprint of the novel. 133 The damage is ‘almost’ permanent inasmuch as with Wagner, to whom the Birth of Tragedy was dedicated, Nietzsche sees the possibility of a return to an artistic nobility that had not been glimpsed since the time of the Greeks.

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prieve for Socrates such as, for example, when Nietzsche wonders whether the daemon voice offers [T]he only hint of any scruples in him (Socrates) about the limits of logical nature; perhaps, he must have told himself, things which I do not understand are not automatically unreasonable. Perhaps there is a kingdom of wisdom from which the logician is banished? Perhaps art may even be a necessary correlative and supplement of science? (BT, p. 14)134

This ambiguity notwithstanding, the overall portrayal of Socrates in the Birth of Tragedy is negative. He is for Nietzsche at this point, a soulless villain whose logical turn against the instincts results in the dissembling of both the art and ethics of his time so that, all in all, his influence on Greek culture is lamentable. And of course there is more than just a local historical critique at stake here in the sense that the immense influence of Socrates on the western tradition generally means that something essential has been lost for our culture. The tragic work of art crucially offered as much reconciliation between human existence and itself and existence in general as was possible. With Socrates, it is replaced by a sterile rationality that isolates itself from the deeper truths of human existence and initiates in cultural history a struggle with the instincts that would last for centuries.135 2.2. Revolutions in Nietzsche’s Thought: Re-evaluating the Need for Justification Although the Birth of Tragedy is a key work in the Nietzschean corpus and one that is never repudiated, Nietzsche does forcefully criticise this work later on.136 This is partly explained through his attempt to distance himself from the two great influences under which the work was originally written in 1872; namely Wagner and Schopenhauer. In Ecce Homo, he says that ‘the cadaverous perfume of Schopenhauer still clings to a few formulas’ in the 134

This kind of comment seems to support Tejera’s view that the Socrates reviled by Nietzsche is the Socrates of Xenophon, since Plato’s Socrates is far less insistent on the hegemony of logic than Nietzsche makes out. See Tejera (1987). Op. cit., 91. 135 At this time, Nietzsche anticipated a return to the pure art of Greek tragedy through the work of Richard Wagner. After his break with Wagner, Nietzsche was forced to locate the redemptive challenge to decadence elsewhere. 136 The first of these is in the “Attempt at a Self-Criticism” which first appeared in the 1886 edition of The Birth of Tragedy. The second is in Ecce Homo (1909).

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work.137 He also notes that the Birth of Tragedy ‘smells offensively Hegelian’ which seems to be its most serious fault. In saying this, Nietzsche is referring to the understanding of art as a synthesis (aufhebung) of Apollonian and Dionysian impulses and, more importantly, to the notion that existence requires justification. Though the pursuit of justification is something that Nietzsche never gave up138, it is a concern that is pursued in later works without the Schopenhauerian pessimism that permeates his first work. That is to say that while justification remains a central idea, there is a very conscious attempt to liberate it from the idea of redemption. The later works abandon the Artistenmetaphysik of the Birth of Tragedy and the notion of art as therapy in an attempt to overcome the pessimism that tarnished his first work.139 And yet, this attempt is carried out without rejecting any of the ontological premises of that work. The primordiality of the Dionysian element of existence is not lessened but even amplified in the later works. What does change, however, is Nietzsche’s later understanding of how we should confront this ‘truth’. And with this transformation comes a transformed sense of the role of philosophy. On the whole, philosophy was depicted in the Birth of Tragedy as a degeneration of the Greek spirit that reached its acme with tragic drama. As early as 1873, however, Nietzsche began to moderate his views on this point.140 He begins to identify the value of philosophy both as (i) a tool of cultural critique and (ii) an expression of the nobility of spirit. This characterization of philosophy anticipates the ideas of genealogy and transvaluation, to which we will return in section 2.4 of this chapter. Nietzsche does not thereby reverse the priority of art from the Birth of Tragedy, or subordinate art to philosophy in the way he accused Plato and Socrates of doing. Rather, he begins to view philosophical activity as a higher form of artistic expression. Thus the juxtaposition between the two is eroded somewhat and a nuance is introduced into how philosophy is understood. He will continue to reject certain forms of philosophy so that the notion of philosophy as an expression of a higher soul does not mean that all 137

“The Birth of Tragedy” §1 in EH, p. 108. According to Gilles Deleuze, the entirety of Nietzsche’s philosophical project is concerned with the question, ‘what is justice?’ See Deleuze (1983). Op. cit., p. 18. 139 “Attempt at a Self-Criticism” §2 in BT, p. 5. 140 I am referring specifically here to the unfinished Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks (1873). We will return to this text later. 138

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philosophers are higher souls. In fact very few are and that they are not is a function of both a lack of self-knowledge and an excess of rationalism and consequent lack of the finesse that marks Nietzsche’s own philosophical writings.141 What is most important to Nietzsche’s conception of philosophy, as it had been to his view of art, is that it be rooted in the experience of life. The philosopher need not be one who subordinates the dynamism of life to the immutable concept, as was the case in the Birth of Tragedy, but may think in sympathy with life, or in its service. And while the Dionysian fundament of existence was, in a sense, mourned in the Birth of Tragedy, it is celebrated in and for itself as his thought develops. Or rather, it is celebrated in thought, and not just as spectacle. In later writings, Nietzsche comes to detect a weakness in the Birth of Tragedy, in terms of its inability to consciously and explicitly appropriate the Dionysian, preferring instead consolation through art. Philosophy as artistic, in the later writings, comes to stand for precisely this attempt to affirm and celebrate existence as it is, rather than to seek consolation. His objection to his earliest work is an attenuated version of his critique of his philosophical predecessors; namely that it embodies a Christian (and for that matter, Schopenhauerian) weariness and rejection of life. All life rests on semblance, art, deception, prismatic effects, the necessity of perspectivism and error. From the very outset, Christianity was essentially and pervasively the feeling of disgust and weariness which life felt for life, a feeling which merely disguised, hid and decked itself out in its belief in ‘another’ or ‘better’ life.142 Since the majority of philosophical systems in the west are rooted in Christianity (which is, after all, Platonism for the people143) it follows that they too are embodiments of this cowardice and flight from reality and from truth. But this no longer means that philosophy in itself constitutes cowardice.144 The challenge is to philosophise out of a sense of strength and a will to affirm existence in all its plurality and instability. While many have sought an 141

In Ecce Homo, Nietzsche says that his own genius is ‘in his nostrils’, in the sense that he is able to smell decay. This is why he has detected the cadaverous ‘perfume’ of Schopenhauer and the offensive ‘smell’ of Hegel in the earlier work. 142 “Attempt at a Self-Criticism” §5 in BT, p. 9. 143 Nietzsche. F. (2002). Beyond Good and Evil: A Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future. Translated from German by Judith Norman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 4. All future references ate to this edition. Henceforth BGE. 144 “Attempt at a Self-Criticism” §1 in BT, p. 4.

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escape to ‘elsewhere’ from the suffering that is inherent in existence, Nietzsche wishes to affirm existence as suffering and thus trans-value the tragic into the joyful. In this way, he takes the atheist Schopenhauer’s deepest insight and turns it into the source of the greatest joy. This was something Schopenhauer himself had never done. Already in the Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche had attempted to overcome the pessimism of Schopenhauer but this was executed on the basis of acceptance of Schopenhauer’s understanding of the horror of existence. Rather than resign under the weight of this tragedy, Nietzsche had sought an attenuated redemption not in religion but in a return to the tragic art of a lost ‘golden age’. As his thought evolves, however, Nietzsche comes to see this approach as doomed to failure because it is still operating within the terms set by Platonism, Christianity and the rejection of life. What Schopenhauer had done – and Nietzsche himself to an extent – was to accept the terms of Christianity for what a meaningful life could be and then reject its possibility on foot of a conviction of atheism. But this is merely a negation of Christianity so that even Nietzsche’s artistic justification of existence in the Birth of Tragedy is ultimately anchored in Christian sensibilities. The task now is to offer a positive response to life that is spiritually prior to Christian or Platonist negations rather than a negation of their negations. This, in fact, is what transvaluation means – to ground values in spontaneous affirmation of life rather than in weariness or even the rejection of weariness. 2.3. The ‘Yes’ and the ‘No’ to Life: Vitalism, Eros and Will-To-Power At the beginning of this chapter, we stressed the deliberate lack of system in Nietzsche’s thought. All philosophical systems work only because they make certain basic assumptions that remain unchallenged. Thus, it is on the basis of these assumptions and not on reality that system is built. What is necessarily neglected is both the ‘true’ nature of reality and the psychology of the human being responsible for the system. If existence per se is not hostile to rationality for Nietzsche, it is at least other than it. Existence is not, in itself, rational but is rather characterised as plural, ambiguous, and amorphous. Nietzsche, thus, prioritises change and dynamism over stability and identity, these latter being only invented tools that are tailored to certain human needs (or agendas). As such, becoming is more primordial than being.

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What is more, the plural nature of existence is defined as agonistic. Plurality means a totality of forces that are constantly in tension or at war with one another.145 This agonistic tension is as much a principle of human psychology as it is of reality generally and it is this principle that becomes a fundament of Nietzsche’s own thinking. He attempts, not only to do justice to the plurality of being but also to celebrate it and to think in a way that is reflective of it. This is the reason for his constant reformulation of problems and his attack on his own assumptions. A matter that has been clarified, no longer concerns us (BGE, p. 60), he says, and it is his contention that certain basic matters cannot be clarified, at least in a way that could be considered ‘objectively’ true. Not the least of these is human action itself.146 Inasmuch as Nietzsche wishes to reflect and affirm this dimension of existence as basic, we can see that he understands his own philosophy as both living in the truth and also saying ‘yes’ to life. This is an important point. On the one hand this ‘yes’ to life distinguishes Nietzsche, in his own mind, from both the Christian-Platonic tradition that preceded him and also from the philosophy of Schopenhauer whose response to the truth about existence that there is no God and, therefore, no otherworldly consolation, was one of pessimism. For Schopenhauer, The world and life can offer us no true satisfaction, and are therefore not worth our attachment to them. In this the tragic spirit consists; it leads accordingly to resignation. 147

So while the Christian thinkers had said no to life in order to say yes to an afterlife, Schopenhauer says no to the whole. Nietzsche seeks a position that is reducible to neither of these. He wants to live in the truth in a way that Schopenhauer’s pessimism had finally not allowed him to do and yet be affirmative in the way the Christians had been. Unlike the Christians, of course, he will make life rather than an afterlife the site of this affirmation,

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In Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, §§4-5 Nietzsche seems especially enamoured by both Anaximander and Heraklitus, both of whom make the principle of eris or strife basic to reality. He ultimately favours Heraklitus since for him, strife is as much an internal as an external principle. Nietzsche (2014). Op. cit., pp. 45-56. 146 For a discussion of this point see Daybreak: §§ 22 and 116. D, pp. 23-4; 116. 147 Schopenhauer, A. (1966). The World as Will and Representation, vol II. Translated from German by E.F.J. Payne. New York: Dover Press, p. 433-4. Cited in “Attempt at a Self-Criticism” § 6 in BT, p. 10.

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and so his affirmation will be truthful in a way that it never could be for the Christian. As such, the second important aspect of Nietzsche’s yes to life is his sense of life as irreducible. I mean to say that, for Nietzsche, the majority of his philosophical predecessors, out of weariness with life itself, had sought refuge in ideas. They thus created ‘majestic structures’ (D, p. 3), which would mediate between themselves and life. Part of this was the instinct to ‘moralize’ being and thereby to impose a structure on it through which it could answer for and to human desires. In doing this, however, philosophers since and including Plato, made life subordinate to ideas. In a sense, this was what philosophy meant for them. In the spirit of Nietzsche’s famous ‘inversion’ of Platonism, he seeks to make ideas and philosophy subordinate to life. Thus, the unending plurality that is given expression in his work is done out of service to life. It lacks weariness and demonstrates again the strength of the will to affirm and to ceaselessly create and destroy, à la Dionysus. Here we see the vitalist dimension of Nietzsche’s thought and the important progression from the Birth of Tragedy. He does not any more reject the practice of philosophy but he will not either subordinate life to philosophy. Philosophy must be judged through the prism of life rather than life through the prism of philosophy. The latter instinct is the very definition of the spirit of decadence that shields itself from life and judges and condemns because of its inherent weakness. It speaks of an other world or truer realm of being and, of course, in relation to this the world of appearance is inferior, corrupt and even evil. It is worth pointing out here that in rejecting the notion of life at the service of thought, Nietzsche is not really rejecting the idea of objective truth. In fact, he is putting forward a rival version of the objective truth of existence. In this sense, he remains a metaphysician. What he is doing, however, is denying the idea that objective truth is an end in itself. The truth of ‘how life is’ is to be decentred and replaced by the deeper truth of the response and transformation of life in oneself. Life itself is neither good nor evil but innocent. The challenge is to bless life in its innocence by calling it good, as the only possible valorisation of existence.148 Life is not good because it is ordained so by God, but by us. The categories of good and

148

For an extended version of this argument, see Babich, B. E. (2000). Nietzsche and Eros between the devil and God’s deep blue sea: The problem of the artist as actor-Jew-woman. Continental Philosophy Review, 33, pp. 159-188.

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evil and even good and bad are metaphysical fictions, which only emerge as the human response to life.149 In opposition to the weak, the strong, ‘we truthful ones’, determine being, create values and do not need approval from anyone else (BGE, p. 154). Speaking of the relation of the strong man with life, Nietzsche says, Everything that he knows of himself he reveres: this kind of moral code is self-glorifying. In the foreground is a feeling of fullness, of overflowing power, of happiness in great tension, an awareness of a wealth that would like to bestow and share…from the urgency created by an excess of power (BGE, p. 154).

So the ultimate ‘life in truth’ is an acknowledgement of the wildly plural nature of existence and also the strength to say ‘yes’ to this. This is a fairly accurate delineation of that famous Nietzschean notion, the will-to-power. For, according to Nietzsche, all of existence is will-to-power, This world: a monster of energy, without beginning, without end...this world is the will-to-power- and nothing else besides and you yourselves are will-to-power- and nothing else besides.150

If life is fundamental, then life is fundamentally will-to-power. Life wills itself and human beings will themselves as a function of their own strength. This does not mean that all human beings are possessed of equal strength. In fact it is only the few, the noble and strong of spirit that are capable of affirming existence as it is. Most require the kind of lie with which they can live. But for the few possessed of this strength, joy resides precisely in the affirmation of life as it is. In relation to the previous chapter’s analysis, we might say that Nietzsche embraces life as physis that is limited only to the degree that it is vital. This, then, becomes the transvalued nomos of the strong as an active and spontaneous interpretation of existence. The weak, because they lack the strength for this kind of affirmation, crave limits to be 149

This is a complex point inasmuch as, while both are fictions, they are unavoidable and cannot, therefore, be excised in being unmasked as fictions. Furthermore, Nietzsche will describe the distinction between ‘good and bad’ as rooted in a positive valorisation of existence in the Genealogy of Morality. It is thereby also distinguished for the concept pair ‘good and evil’, which are reactive and negative. 150 Nietzsche, F. (1968). The Will to Power. Translated from German by R.J. Hollingdale and Walter Kaufmann. Random House: New York, p. 550. All future references are to this edition. Henceforth WP.

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set for them. Thus, they crave a nomos that can subjugate the truth of a physis they fear. And the thoughtful interpretations of philosophers of ressentiment go even further in claiming that the nomos of logos is actually the perfection of physis. But this is merely turning the instincts against themselves. By contrast, Nietzsche’s insight that the meaning of existence is will-topower re-externalises the principle of strife151 and, at the same time, makes possible reconciliation between reason and instinct insofar as thought proceeds in the service of life. 2.4. Cultural Critique and the Transvaluation of Values As we mentioned earlier, philosophy comes to be understood as both cultural critique, and as expression of nobility in the mature work of Nietzsche. These twin aspects are important and include the capacity of the philosopher to diagnose the psychological sources of thinking and acting (genealogy), as well as the capacity to think affirmatively. In his canonical study of Nietzsche, Gilles Deleuze elaborates this point by underling the importance of the distinction between active and reactive force in Nietzsche’s thinking.152 This distinction is important both in terms of diagnosing ways of responding to life and for re-orienting these responses. It is important to remember that the distinction between active and reactive force is not intended to designate kinds of people. Rather, they are deployments of will. There is no simple division of people into active and reactive, or weak and strong. Rather they are instincts to act which reside – both at the same time – in all of us. Part of the point of Nietzsche’s emphasis on the notion of the agon, is the idea that self-overcoming is the work of overcoming the gravitational pull of reactive thought and action. Nietzsche’s late work, The Genealogy of Morality, which was considered preparatory to a full-scale transvaluation of values, is specifically concerned with the origin of thought and action in instinctual responses to life, and the transformation of these instincts into culture. There is no doubt a positivist streak in Nietzsche inasmuch as he thinks of human beings are thoroughly biological entities who are as driven by instinct as any other creature. At the

151

That is, he wants to renew the agon as the principle of relation between things against the stultifying morality of perpetual peace. 152 Deleuze (1983). Op. cit., p. 39f.

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same time, we are possessed of a reason that can relate to this form of being and thereby transform, accentuate, or twist it. It is Nietzsche’s mission to reground contemporary culture on the will to self-affirming spontaneity, and to wrestle it from the self-lacerating ressentiment of the instincts turned in on themselves. A perfect example of the spirit of ressentiment is embodied in Hegel’s master/slave dialectic.153 Hegel’s dialectic is the acme of the Enlightenment project of reason (as the knowing consciousness of the whole) but it is also reactive from the very beginning insofar as assertion is possible only through the negation of difference. In the dialectic, it is the slave, according to Nietzsche, who “dialecticizes” the relation by insisting that the master can be a master only if he is recognized as such.154 In this way, the slave inverts the positive difference of the master into an apparent lack. This is the work of pure reason for Nietzsche. It neither says nor does anything positive itself. Its only achievement is interference with and interruption of the exercise of power through condemnation. Pure reason is concerned with the universal, and thereby with interests of the masses. It pursues a principle of equality or equilibrium. As a result, this kind of reason opposes singular and positive difference as dangerous and introduces “the bacillus of revenge into things” (WP, p. 401). This is the emergence of a decadent morality which does express a will to power, but it is a reactive will to power. In this way, Nietzsche understands the idea of equality, along with all of the other moral notions originating in Christian sensibilities, as negative. They negate the different for the sake of the same or mediocre. What is worse, the economy of the same is, in essence, an economy of the nihil since it enshrines and protects that which lacks the strength to be positively singular and different. For Hegel, the master/slave relation is one in which the struggle for recognition enables the formation of an integrated self-consciousness. Thus, master and slave comprise two sides of the same coin that are resolved in a higher unity. The problem for Nietzsche is precisely that the relation is rooted in recognition or representation and that the integrated selfconsciousness prized by Hegel is possible only as the fusion of the two through the negating activity of the slave. For Nietzsche, by contrast, the master and the slave constitute two distinct types whose ways of valorizing 153

Hegel, G.W.F. (1977). Phenomenology of Spirit. Translated from German by A.V. Miller. Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 111-19. 154 See Deleuze (1983). Op. cit., p. 10.

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are characterized by affirmation and negation respectively. The slave can and historically has overcome the master but this cannot be considered a resolution or reconciliation, for it is dialectic—the invention of the slave—that is the harbinger of reconciliation and thus the death of the affirmative values of the master.155 Deleuze’s notion of the “differential element” intends to highlight precisely this problem by drawing attention to the irreconcilable fundamental drives that characterize master-and-slave thinking. The differential elements are irreconcilable because they are simply of a different order.156 Rather than acting, the slave interprets action in reactive and negative terms because he lacks the strength to act out of his own resources. But what the slave does possess is cunning, by means of which he inverts his own inveterate weakness into the appearance of strength. Or rather, it is not the slave who performs this inversion but the genius of nihilism: the priest.157 The priest does not invent suffering or weakness but it is he who organizes communities under the banner of weakness.158 He is the great “directionchanger of ressentiment”(GM, p. 99). For those who lack the strength for “life,” the priest transforms the meaning of life from the joyous suffering of existence into something evil and corrupt. This transformation can take the form of the subordination of life as it is to another, better life, or the invention of a morality of ressentiment in which the strong are condemned as wicked and evil.159 The priest (or socialist) creates reactive values based on negation of strength and then accuses the master of choosing to violate these norms. Hence, the sovereign activity of the master is transformed into moral 155

See Klossowski (2005). Op. cit., p. 103. This means too that consciousness is problematized differently for Nietzsche (and Deleuze) inasmuch as it moves out of itself in the spirit of an innocence that is prior to any and all negation. 157 See Nietzsche, F. (1995). On the Genealogy of Morality. Translated from German by Carol Diethe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 18. Nietzsche claims that “nobody else’s intelligence stands a chance against the intelligence (Geist) of priestly revenge.” All future reference is to this edition. Henceforth GM. 158 In terms of our earlier point about active and reactive force, it is important to recall that the ‘master’, the ‘slave’, the ‘priest’ etc. are idealizations in this discussion. They stand for kinds of instinct and not for kinds of individuals. See McGuirk, J. (2008b). The Sustainability of Nietzsche’s Will to Affirmation. American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, 82 (2), pp. 237-63. 159 For Nietzsche, the priestly type includes also the socialist revolutionary, who replaces the kingdom of heaven with the social utopia of the future. 156

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evil. For Nietzsche, the point is not to defend the master from this accusation from the moral point of view but to re-evaluate the problem from a position that is otherwise than the moral. It is for this reason that he calls himself the great immoralist and defender of the positive value of irresponsibility.160 To think within the moral point of view is already to surrender to the reactive force of the slave, which surrender is the site of the turning inward of the instincts. Against this, Nietzsche seeks a re-externalization of the instincts through attention to the differential element that most truly characterizes master morality. The master thinks otherwise than the slave in that he acts from a sense of difference. This means that he values his difference as a value in itself rather than as related to what he is different from. His thinking and his activity are spontaneously affirmative in a way that pays no heed to what is other. In drawing our attention to this point, Deleuze demonstrates the extent to which interpretations of will to power and master morality as domineering and violent misread Nietzsche. In fact, such readings interpret Nietzsche through the lens of Hegel, representing him as advocating a cruel and violent dialectic.161 But the Nietzschean master is no dialectician and does not need the slave in order to affirm himself.162 His affirmation is originary, which is what Deleuze means in characterizing the differential element of master morality as active. This is not to say that the master knows nothing of negation. He does negate the activity of the slave as bad but this negation is always secondary to his own affirmation of himself as good. That is, it is a consequence of his valorizing rather than its enactment. In stressing the important difference between Nietzsche and Hegel regarding the master/slave analysis, Deleuze accurately explicates the reconciliation of the two central moments of Nietzsche’s work as a whole. Genealogy and critique are inseparable from the meaning of the Nietzschean project, but we misunderstand Nietzsche if we understand genealogy as the sole import of his thought. Rather, the genealogical project is motivated by the 160

Deleuze calls irresponsibility “Nietzsche’s most noble and beautiful secret.” Deleuze (1983). Op. cit., p. 21. 161 For Nietzsche, violence is most pre-eminently a by-product of the moral interpretation of existence. The point is that Nietzsche’s ethic is violent and domineering only if it is viewed as an option within the Hegelian schema. But it is intended to offer a totally different way of evaluation. 162 I am deliberately using the masculine pronoun throughout for the sake of faithfulness to Nietzsche’s own masculine bias.

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desire to affirm and by the will to health. His proposed transvaluation of all values intends the renewal of the value of genuine affirmation. He rejects traditional morality only because such morality constitutes a rejection of life, whereas the central thrust of Nietzschean philosophy is the affirmation of life as it is. This constitutes the difference between the ratio cognoscendi and the ratio essendi of the will to power.163 According to Nietzsche, life is essentially Dionysian affirmation of itself in all its suffering and becoming. Yet, the suffering of life becomes blameworthy only with the advent of moral man or, more precisely, with the moral interpretation of life. Thus, physis is condemned and labeled evil by the nomos of those who lack the strength for life as it is. Nietzsche’s great insight is that existence contains no moral order that awaits discovery but rather that reactive will to power interprets existence morally as a function of its reactive element. Nietzsche’s transvaluation, as such, seeks to rescue a sense of the innocence of existence as becoming. In this way, the tragic nature of existence is inseparable from the joy of existence, which is the meaning of the Dionysian world-view. Dionysus is the god of creativity, destruction, death, and rebirth, whose eternal becoming and return is, for Nietzsche, the meaning of life’s affirmation of itself. With the moral point of view, life as it is, as the eternal play of forces, is condemned and active force is separated from what it can do. Insofar as the moral way of valorizing existence is tied to the Christian religion (which historically it has become for Nietzsche), it is nourished by a sense of existence as corrupt and standing in need of redemption. It is precisely this notion that Nietzsche challenges. His own contemporaries held views that are not only untrue but more seriously, express a deep weariness with life. Their own weakness and inability to create is expressed in the form of metaphysical and moral hypotheses that are essentially negations. Existence is condemned as inhospitable to man’s desires. Whether this is on account of the nature of existence itself (Schopenhauer) or through man’s own fault (Christianity) the result is the same; namely, that life is a kind of prison from which we wish to escape.164 163

That is, will to power is known by us as suffering but it is innocent affirmation. See Deleuze (1983). Op. cit., p. 174. 164 Of course, there is nothing new in these approaches, which are at least as old as Socrates’ characterization of philosophy as preparation for death in the Phaedo 67d. Nietzsche also points to Socrates final comment in the dialogue, “O, Crito, I owe Asclepius a cock.” Since Asclepius was the god of medicine and healing Nietzsche

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Nietzsche identifies this kind of thought as sick and contrasts it with the health of his own thinking, which is carried out in the service of life. In fact, because of Nietzsche’s sense of the innocence of becoming and life’s resistance to providing a meaning for the human soul, health becomes a more important notion in his work even than truth. This should not surprise us given his commitment, from the very beginning, not to truth per se, but to responding to truth. And just as John the Baptist proclaims the coming of the redeemer Christ, Nietzsche’s Zarathustra proclaims and awaits the coming of the one who can finally leave the question of redemption behind. Zarathustra, through whom Nietzsche expresses the positive in his thought in poetic form, is not quite the overman , nor is he exactly identifiable with Dionysus. Nietzsche tells us that he (the historical Zarathustra) was the first to propound a moral interpretation of existence and so must also be the first to repudiate it. Just as Nietzsche had to overcome the Hegelian/Schopenhauerian stain of his own earliest work,165 Zarathustra must make amends for his crime—giving birth to the moral interpretation. He does this by indicating the positive valorization of existence as being beyond the need for justification and in so doing, he leaves behind the higher men who surround him toward the end of the work.166 The will to power in itself does not constitute the positive dimension of Zarathustra’s thinking, but its connection with amor fati and the doctrine of the eternal return of the same.167 It is through these latter notions that Zarathustra interprets the will reads this as meaning that Socrates rejoices in his own death as healing his soul. For discussion of the death of Socrates in Nietzsche, see Nietzsche, F. (2001). The Gay Science. Translated from German by Josefine Nauckhoff. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 54-5; 193-4. Unsurprisingly, Nietzsche both praises and accuses Socrates for his behaviour in the face of death. All future references to The Gay Science are to this edition. Henceforth GS. 165 In “Attempt at a Self-Criticism” (1886) and Ecce Homo, Nietzsche repudiates the Birth of Tragedy insofar as that work still operated within Hegelian terms in seeking for a resolution of the problem of existence. In his later works, he denies the idea that there is such a thing as a problem of existence. 166 Zarathustra says, “they (the higher men) are not my companions. It is not for them that I am waiting in my mountains”. Nietzsche, F. (2006). Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Translated from German by Adrian Del Caro. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 264. All future references are to this edition. Henceforth TSZ. 167 In Deleuze’s study of Nietzsche, the first of these concepts is explicated masterfully, although it is interesting that amor fati is mentioned only once. It could be

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to power of the whole in a way that affirms it as it is. Thus, he says that “all things are baptized at the fount of eternity and beyond good and evil,” and that in acknowledging the eternal becoming and chance of all things, he has “redeemed (all things) from servitude under purpose” (TSZ, p. 132). This is Nietzsche’s ultimate amen to existence, that he says “yes” to life in all of its sufferings as well as its joys, and that this amen is bestowed upon existence as it is returning eternally. Now, although seems as though Nietzsche did in fact believe his doctrine of eternal recurrence to be factually true,168 its greatest importance lies in its capacity to ground the revaluation of values. In the Will to Power, he claims that this doctrine allows us to replace the concepts of traditional metaphysics in a way that is positive rather than antithetical. We no longer locate “joy in certainty but in uncertainty; no longer ‘cause and effect’ but the continually creative; no longer will to preservation but will to power” (WP, p. 545). This is the revaluation that Zarathustra proclaims, thereby renouncing the search for an ordered universe for the sake of the celebration of chance and necessity.169 This revaluation is characterized by the virtues of dance and song (TSZ, p. 186), a festive valorization that is totally other than the negative values of the dialectic. Put otherwise, the doctrine of the eternal return does not add anything substantive to the meaning of will to power but denotes Nietzsche’s celebration of the fact that the will to power and nothing besides is the fundament and meaning of existence. Yet this changes everything insofar as the fact of will to power (which is the basis of the genealogy) is now infused with value through the amen of the doctrine of eternal return. This festive affirmation of the will to power as eternal return is linked, then, by the notion of amor fati, which, as Nietzsche notes, entails that “one wants nothing to be differargued, however, that the two concepts are so intimately linked that Deleuze’s treatment of eternal recurrence obviates the problem of omission to some extent. Pierre Klossowski does not discuss amor fati either in his otherwise excellent study of the doctrine of eternal return. 168 See, for example, Will to Power, § 1064, where Nietzsche claims that if a state of equilibrium were possible, it would already have been achieved. WP, p. 547. See also Klossowski (2005). Op. cit., p. 72ff. Heidegger also discusses the literal truth of eternal recurrence in Heidegger (1991). Op. cit., p. 21. 169 On the marriage of chance and necessity in the doctrine of eternal return, see Deleuze (1983). Op. cit., p. 27 and Klossowski (2005). Op. cit., p. 89. The point is that while the return itself is necessary, it is internally characterized by chance or the “dice-throw.”

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ent, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely to bear what is necessary, still less to conceal it … but love it.”170 This is the revelation of Zarathustra which does not quite realize the vision of the overman but makes space for the new value that will be realized in the child-player Dionysus.171 Zarathustra, the lion, makes way for the child as the third of the three metamorphoses discussed at the very beginning of Thus Spoke Zarathustra (TSZ, p. 16-7). And, of course, this metamorphosis is not a dialectical resolution. Rather, Zarathustra must perform an act of destruction by means of which the old law is broken to make way for the radically new that does not build on or fulfil the old but makes space for what has been suffocated by the old (TSZ, pp. 156-72). This is the originary positive core of Nietzsche’s thought, and his attempt to invert Platonism. The genealogical or critical element in Nietzsche’s thinking is always subordinate to the affirmative sense of value as positive and different. For Nietzsche, western civilization is sick in accordance with the extent to which Platonism has dominated it and presented a counterfeit of affirmation for the Dionysian affirmation that is genuine, spontaneous, and creative. The notion of the counterfeit is useful here in that it suggests once again that there is no dialectical resolution of the different typological elements for Nietzsche but only the struggle between the original affirmation and the derivative affirmation (which is really a negation) that presents itself fraudulently as original. So this is Nietzsche’s project as a philosopher: he wishes to be the first to excavate the true depth nature of human psychology and motivation for action and set philosophical thinking aright. There is almost a medical aspect to the revaluation in the sense that Nietzsche has diagnosed the sickness and prescribed the cure that will heal Europe’s long sickness. Revaluation is Nietzsche’s mission or the terminus of his creative work. It is the goal towards which his philosophical eros or will-to-power is directed. On the one hand, this would seem to negate the notion of a celebration of the plural and the constant challenging of one’s own convictions insofar as Nietzsche appears to be instituting a new gospel. On the other hand, his noble or masterly morality and thinking generally consists in acting in accordance with one’s own strength so it has that spontaneous quality that requires neither system nor consistency. Nietzsche’s higher man is not 170 171

“Why I am so Clever,” in EH, p. 99. See Deleuze (1983). Op. cit., p. 189ff.

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especially concerned with consequences. He acts not ‘in order that…’ but rather affirms existence in himself in his strength of acting here and now. 3. The Place of Socrates in the Later Thought of Nietzsche I want to return to the question of the place of Socrates and Plato in Nietzsche’s works, in light of his transformed appraisal of philosophical activity. So far, we have chiefly been discussing Nietzsche’s rejection of the tradition whose origins lie in the otherworldliness of Socrates and Plato, but what exactly does he say about the philosophers themselves in the later works? We have seen that philosophical activity breaks down into two distinct yet interconnected moments in the thought of Nietzsche. On the one hand, the philosopher is a critic of contemporary culture. On the other, he is a noble spirit who affirms himself in thought and action. These are connected, we have seen, precisely because while the second is an affirmation of life in action, the first is a critique based on this principle of vitality and the extent to which contemporary culture embodies this. What I want to do now is look at Nietzsche’s attitude to Socrates and Plato under these twin auspices in his later works. As we will see, there is a transformation in his attitude to Socrates and Plato that corresponds with his transformed appraisal of philosophy. 3.1. Socrates as Cultural Critic In terms of the moment of cultural criticism, not only does Nietzsche acknowledge Socrates as a spiritual giant but actually models himself on the great gadfly of Athens. Socrates, to confess it frankly, is so close to me that I always fight a fight against him.172

In true Nietzschean style, Socrates is both exemplar of how the philosopher should act and sparring partner, in the struggle against whom he desires to define himself. That he is both, is the mark of Socrates’ greatness, and of the 172

Nietzsche, F. (2010). Sämtliche Werke: Kritische Studienausgabe. Band 8. Hrsg. von Colli, G. & Montinari, M. Berlin: De Gruyter, p. 97.

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greatness to which Nietzsche himself aspires. Nietzsche is not the first reader of Plato to be struck by this critical moment in Socrates’ philosophical activity, but he reads a greater significance into it than many interpreters had done in the past. We are used to thinking of Socratic questioning as a dimension of his maieutic, subordinate to the project of grounding ethical values. According to this understanding, he does not disturb and decentre for its own sake, but in order that his fellow citizens might truly begin to question the foundational assumptions upon which their political, social, and ethical lives are built. Nietzsche, however, is inclined to understand Socratic critique as an end in itself. In Human, All Too Human he says that Socrates is, Athens’ greatest backstreet dialectician, who finally had to compare himself to a pesky horsefly, set by a god on the neck of the beautiful horse Athens to keep it from coming to rest (HATH, p. 159).

Thus, Socrates spurs Athens on through the ‘fencing-art’173 of his dialectic so that in the tension between traditional Athenian authority and the subversive influence of Socrates, the city might continue to grow and flourish. Rather than seeking to ground the life of Athens in eternal truths, flourishing is only possible so long as the city remains ungrounded and dynamic. More importantly, he believes that this emphasis on conflict captures the essence of Socratic activity to a much greater extent than the later Christian appropriation with its emphasis on eternal truth. Even if Socrates was pursuing the eternal, what is far more interesting is the way he was doing this. According to Nietzsche, Socrates still takes egoism to be a fundamental principle of human development. In the Gay Science, he tells us that Christianity has cultivated ‘herd instincts’ because of its condemnation of egoism while for Socrates, egoism is still endorsed. While the Christians harmed the egoist impulse, Socrates sought to harm stupidity in that From Socrates onwards these thinkers never tired of preaching ‘Your thoughtlessness and stupidity, your way of living according to the rule, your subordination to the opinion of your neighbour is the reason why you so seldom achieve happiness – we thinkers are, as thinkers, the happiest’ (GS, p. 183).

173

At Daybreak § 195, Nietzsche celebrates the value of dialectics as a new form of agon. D, p. 115-6.

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In this way, Nietzsche has Socrates endorsing the life of thought as opposed to the products of the life of thought. In other words, he celebrates his own lifestyle. It is hardly surprising then that – and this is interesting in relation to the speech of Aristophanes in the Symposium – Socrates’ mission results in his own isolation and alienation from others. Those moralists…who, following in the footsteps of Socrates, offer the individual a morality of self-control and temperance as a means to his own advantage…take a new path under the highest disapprobation of all advocates of morality of custom – they cut themselves off from the community, as immoral men, and are in the profoundest sense evil. (D, p. 11)

Now while Nietzsche is not an unequivocal supporter of the notions of selfcontrol and temperance endorsed by Socrates he does endorse his countercultural impulse and subversion. Walter Kaufmann claims that Nietzsche even begins to interpret his own first work along these lines. Socrates brought about the wreck of tragic drama, yes, but he did so by introducing a new tension or agon that allowed Athens to survive. He says that only the absurd rationality of Socrates …could curb the instincts in an age of disintegration and degeneration; Socratism alone could prevent the premature end of western man.174

So Nietzsche does not reject the thesis of the Birth of Tragedy that Socrates brought about the end of tragic drama, but he rejects his erstwhile interpretation of the significance of this act of destruction. If Socrates heralds the end of the tragic era of Greece, he does so in a way that is both responsive and palliative. The way of life of tragic Greece was no longer really available to people in Socrates’s time, it was in decline and so he notes that At the time of Socrates, everyone’s instinct was weary, and conservative old Athenians let themselves go, still pronouncing the same splendid words that their lives had long failed to justify. At that time, irony may have been necessary for greatness of soul (BGE, p. 106-7). This is a very different appraisal of Socrates than the one in the first work. Socrates kept the dying Athens alive through his philosophical activity, which acted as a constant stimulus and challenge to a city and a culture in decline. Nietzsche, we know, understands his own work to consist partially in this kind of societal subversion and accepts, as Socrates did, the alienation that comes with this. This instinct in Socrates so lauded by 174

Kaufmann (1968). Op. cit., p. 406-7

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Nietzsche was, in part, what was condemned by Aristophanes. The latter was, of course, a political conservative who did not see Socratic subversion as a stimulus to health in the city but the opposite – as heralding the disintegration of order and justice. We have already seen that Nietzsche understood his own work partially in this way. Critique is important, but it is never more than propadeutic (EH 313; KSA 6, 353), and it is certainly a mistake to read Nietzsche merely as a philosopher of critique or genealogy, who attempts to unmask prejudices and unsettle cosy bourgeois certainties. In the postmodern era this is, even a way of domesticating Nietzsche by seeing him as the unmasker of social and political ‘grand narratives’ and delusions in which we no longer believe. But while this kind of activity makes Socrates and Nietzsche interesting and appealing, it does not make them interesting in any way that is philosophically challenging, so we must turn now to the second moment in philosophical activity as Nietzsche understands it and as it relates to Socrates. 3.2. Philosophical Eros: Philosophy as Refined Will-To-Power If my discussion of cultural critique is accurate, there is clearly a resonance between the speech of Aristophanes and Nietzsche’s treatment of this issue except that while one praises, the other blames. So we are half way to our defence of Socrates through the philosophy of Nietzsche. But from this alone, it would be possible to dismiss the critique of Aristophanes as the objections of a political reactionary. One of the reasons we esteem philosophy is precisely that it instils in us the capacity to critically examine our own and others assumptions. We are, furthermore, well aware that this will often be inimical to the interests of power. If this was all that was meant by the warning of Aristophanes, then it is not worth wasting much time on. But there was more to the critique than this. For Aristophanes, the impulse of philosophy led not to critique but to tyranny. Our task now is to see whether this is also resonant with Nietzsche. We have suggested already that the second moment in Nietzsche’s understanding of philosophy concerns self-expression as the outpouring of an excess of strength or life. We said that Nietzsche’s will-to-power was a principle of vitalism that celebrated life in itself, quite often as pure spontaneity. Is it possible that vitalism houses a will to tyranny?

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3.3. The Turn to Philosophy: Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks Having discussed some of Nietzsche’s later works, I want to backtrack a little now and look to a very revealing text; the unfinished 1873 manuscript entitled Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks. As in The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche tends to separate Socrates from Plato in this work, except that while there he held a more positive view of Plato, here things are otherwise. In opposition to the traditional approach to dividing Greek philosophy into pre- and post-Socratic eras, Nietzsche makes the divide after and not with Socrates. With Plato, something entirely new has its beginning. Or it might be said with equal justice, from Plato on there is something essentially amiss with philosophers when one compares them to that “republic of creative minds” from Thales to Socrates. (PTAG, p. 34)

Already here, and in contrast to The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche sees philosophy in a far more positive light. This is, in part, the result of a greater attention to the pre-Platonic tradition, with which he now also identifies Socrates. This, and the consequent realisation that Thales, Anaximander and Heraclitus either pre-date or are contemporaries of the tragedians celebrated in the earlier work, lead him to see philosophical activity representing not so much a break with tragedy as a contemporary spiritual activity175 that, in fact, outlasts it. Regardless, the notion of philosophy as will-to-power is very clearly foreshadowed in this text. Nietzsche understands the Greek model to be an example to all as to the spirit in which one should philosophise. The Greek knew precisely how to begin (philosophizing) at the proper time. Not to wait until a period of affliction (as those who derive philosophy from personal moroseness imagine) but to begin in the midst of good fortune, at the peak of mature manhood, as a pursuit springing from the ardent joyousness of courageous and victorious maturity. (PTAG, p. 28)

In this way, Nietzsche contends that the Greeks, and Socrates too since he is most definitely included in the Republic of Geniuses, began to philosophise out of an affirmation of life itself, out of ‘an ideal need for…the values of

175

“What verse is for the poet, dialectical thinking is for the philosopher” (PTAG, p. 44)

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life. Whatever they learned, they wanted to live through, immediately.’ (PTAG, p. 31) What is more, the Greeks not only affirmed life in general but particularly in themselves and pursued greatness for and in themselves. Thus, in contesting the view that Greek science was nothing more than derivations of Babylonian or Egyptian wisdom, Nietzsche cites their originality to lie in the desire to Pick up the spear and throw it onward from the point where others had left it. Their skill in the art of fruitful learning was admirable. We ought to be learning from our neighbours precisely as the Greeks learned from theirs, not for the sake of learned pedantry but rather using everything we learn as a foothold which will take us up as high, and higher than our neighbour. (PTAG, p. 30)

Philosophy is both an expression of virility and is understood as responding to life rather than judging it. And while this understanding extols the virtue of philosophy, it also acts as a rather scathing criticism of the type of philosophy practiced in contemporary Europe where philosophy acts not only as arbiter of life but is also withdrawn from life and practiced, probably, by those who have not the strength for living. Nietzsche applauds the Athenian culture that facilitated the emergence of geniuses such as Thales, Heraclitus, and Socrates in contrast to our weak contemporary cultures in which the philosopher is “is a chance wanderer, lonely in a totally hostile environment which he either creeps past or attacks with clenched fist.” (PTAG, p. 33)176 In our culture, the notion of greatness is the province of the few. The philosopher is described as terror-inspiring comet (PTAG, p. 34) inasmuch as he realizes a human possibility that both glorifies man and yet also sets the philosopher above his fellows as their superior.177 In the pursuit of philosophy, the key discovery is that of greatness and with this the philosopher imposes himself on existence in a truly meaningful way. Nietzsche says that Philosophy starts by legislating greatness. Part of this is a sort of namegiving. “This is a great thing,” says philosophy, thereby elevating man over 176

It is likely that Nietzsche is thinking of Germany and himself here. This kind of language anticipates the claim made in “Why I Am a Destiny” in Ecce Homo, § 1. Here, Nietzsche says, “I am no man, I am dynamite.” EH, p. 143-4. 177

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the blind unrestrained greed of his drive for knowledge. By its concept of greatness philosophy tames this drive. (PTAG, p. 43)

Such an interpretation radically alters the traditional understanding of the goal of philosophy. The notion that philosophy seeks to collect and catalogue eternal truth is transformed here into a desire for greatness, and the spirit or eros of philosophy, we are told, is assuaged only by this greatness. Thus, philosophical activity celebrates life in itself and is satisfied only by a sense of its own greatness, which is revealed as the basis of the quest for knowledge in the first place. Philosophers are spiritual heroes who have the courage to acknowledge the tragic nature of existence and affirm it, Nietzsche says.178 This constitutes a departure from the view of The Birth of Tragedy and brings this text fully in line with the later works of Nietzsche. In celebrating the agon in and for itself, Nietzsche already anticipates the work of transvaluation that will become increasingly important for him. He seizes upon the notion of justice and justification as the essence of the encounter between Being and becoming as it is expressed first by Anaximander, and more perfectly by Heraclitus. But he is now no longer talking about justifying existence as a work of art, but of engaging the chaos of existence and seeking justification in the transformation of oneself. This is an insight which is not only to be true but which profoundly alters the engagement with reality of the one who thinks it.179 At the same time, the transcending affirmation of the philosopher and his pursuit of greatness sets him outside of the human community. His insight is the realization of the highest human possibility, the possibility to live with a truth we cannot live in.180 This is not something which many can achieve. The heroic affirmation of the truth is available only to “him, who 178

Ibid. p. 46. This notion of the subjective transformation of thinking is of course crucial to Nietzsche’s thought throughout his career At Beyond Good and Evil: § 73, Nietzsche refers to philosophical work as the activity of self-transcending and says that “Whoever has reached his ideal, transcends it at precisely that point.” BGE, p. 59. According to Lou Salomé, this was crucial to Nietzsche’s understanding of his own development. See Salomé (1988). Op. cit., p. 34-5. 180 What I mean by this is that the point is to transform through a sense of one’s own power (living with) as opposed to passively accepting a place in an ordered cosmos (living in). 179

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like Heraclitus, is related to the contemplative god”, who sees this world as ‘perpetual innocence’ and engages it in play as “only artists and children engage it”(PTAG, p. 62). In this way, the philosopher has access to a justification and a justice beyond what the common man can understand or tolerate. It is the realization of a good that is beyond good and evil. This text expresses for the first time an ideas that Nietzsche fought to come to terms with until his death; namely the idea that, contra The Birth of Tragedy, existence in its supreme innocence is not unjustified because it is tragic, but rather receives its justification from us in the form of blessing. 3.4. The Later Works and Affirmation as Self-affirmation I say that this is an idea Nietzsche fought to come to terms with for the very reason that it contains within in it the most acute of paradoxes. In blessing the innocence of an indifferent world, Nietzsche attempts to combine a principle of anti-Humanism – that the universe is utterly indifferent to human being – with the most profound of humanisms – that our response is the only thing in life that truly matters. As a result, Nietzsche often struggles to maintain the lightness and effervescence that is clearly evident in this text. The ideas generally remain the same but one gets the sense that Nietzsche finds himself harder and harder to convince. Or perhaps it is the necessary development of this kind of thinking. In either case, the later works generally emphasise to a greater and greater extent the self-glorifying and self-affirmative dimension of thought in the affirmation of life. While the possibility of a philosophy at peace with existence is suggested in Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, Nietzsche’s later comments on philosophical activity stress the pursuit of greatness and the desire of will-to-power for mastery with ever greater fervour. He never abandons the notion of affirmation of life as crucial, but this seems to be enacted increasingly as the individual’s affirmation of herself. This had, of course, always been the case, but it seems as though the tension between the affirmation of self and affirmation of the whole grows more acute as Nietzsche’s thought develops. In other words, affirmation tends to rebound with greater vigour onto the self, whose capacity to sustain this affirmation becomes ever more unsteady. In terms of will-to-power and the instincts that drive philosophy, Nietzsche increasingly understands philosophical activity as the drive to impose oneself upon the world. In Beyond Good and Evil, he says

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Little by little I came to understand what every great philosophy to date has been: the personal confession of its author, a kind of unintended and unwitting memoir; and similarly, that the moral (or immoral) aims in every philosophy constituted the actual seed from which the whole plant grew. (BGE, p. 8)

Thus, the ‘instinct for knowledge’ is not really an instinct for knowledge at all but rather a different instinct that made use of knowledge as its tool (BGE, p. 7). This is, of course, a restatement of the notion that the terminus of philosophy is the idea of greatness in oneself. The only difference, if there is one, is that it is slightly more at odds with the pursuit of knowledge itself and more directly and nakedly an erotic drive for assertion of self. Later in the same work, Nietzsche will confirm this in asserting that True philosophers are commanders and lawgivers. They say, ‘This is the way it should be!’ only they decide about mankind’s where to? and what for? and to do so they employ the preparatory work of all philosophical workers, all subduers of the past. With creative hands they reach towards the future, and everything that is or has existed becomes their means, their tool, their hammer. Their ‘knowing’ is creating, their creating is law-giving, their will to truth is – will to power. (BGE, p. 106)

3.5. Platonic Eros and Will-To-Power Though neither Plato nor Socrates is mentioned here, there is good evidence to suggest that Nietzsche did understand their thought to fit this paradigm. That is, they too thought out of a desire to command and legislate. According to one commentator, Nietzsche gradually came to believe that Platonic doctrines like the Good and the immortal soul constituted public teachings that Plato himself did not believe and that differed markedly from Plato’s understanding of his own activity or philosophy properly understood. To the extent to which later philosopher built on the Platonic theory of ideas, they built on a falsification, a “noble lie” or mythos that Plato intentionally fabricated not merely to protect philosophy from persecution but to give philosophy political influence.181

Whether Nietzsche is right in this suspicion is not something we can deal with at this stage. What is important is that Nietzsche not only suspects this 181

Zuchert (2010). Op. cit., 10.

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to be the case but actually endorses it. Philosophy is the manifestation of a desire for greatness of a noble spirit; it is will-to-power as the celebration of life felt subjectively. Taken in themselves, then, all philosophical systems represent one man’s vision or experience of his own existence and the will to impose this vision on reality itself. This is not to be understood as simple egotism, but as the desire to legislate on the basis of one’s own strength of will. The philosopher is engaged in demiurgic work except that the demiurge in this case is a pure original, ‘entire and self-contained’182 and beholden to none.183 Whether Nietzsche is right or not about the political motivation of this subterfuge, he is certainly clear about the essentially self-assertive nature of philosophical activity.184 If we cast our minds back to the critique of philosophy in the speech of Aristophanes, we find we are getting closer to the core of that warning. The accusation there was not so much that philosophy was too political but that it was not political enough. For Aristophanes, Socratic eros as a pursuit of wholeness and greatness was prepared to risk the order and stability of the city for the sake of personal elevation. It set itself above the many and that was what characterised it as hubris. Philosophical places itself in the city and in the midst of the political, but it is decidedly apolitical, or perhaps anti-political, because both its terminus a quo and its terminus ad quem, are the self-aggrandizing will-to-power of its practitioner. Nietzsche is, essentially, making the same point here except that he identifies in this impulse the true greatness and nobility of philosophy. Another example of this point in Nietzsche is found in Twilight of the Idols, in a section entitled, “How the ‘True World’ Finally Became a Fable”. Nietzsche says The true world – attainable for the sage, the pious, the virtuous man; he lives in it, he is it. (The oldest form of the idea, relatively sensible, simple,

182

This phrase, referring to Socrates, appears at Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks §1. It echoes the notion of eros pursuing wholeness that we saw in the speech of Aristophanes. 183 In Plato’s Timaeus, the demiurge creates after the pattern of the forms so he is not a pure or original creator in this sense. 184 In an essay entitled “The Greek State” from 1872, Nietzsche says that Plato’s political thought is at bottom a celebration of his own genius. Reprinted in Genealogy of Morality. GM, p. 185-6.

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and persuasive. A circumlocution for the sentence, “I, Plato, am the truth.” (TI, p. 171)

Again we see the fundamental equivalence between Plato’s eros and Nietzsche’s will-to-power. According to Nietzsche at least. The terminus of thought is not the Good as other, but rather the assertion of oneself as absolute sovereign. The will-to-power wills itself and, what is more, it wills itself as subjective. Thus, in On the Genealogy of Morality, Nietzsche claims that the philosopher Affirms his own existence and only his existence, and possibly does this to the point where he is not far from making the wish: pereat mundus, fiat philosophia, fiat philosophus, fiam… (GM, p. 82)185

3.6. Overthrowing the Gods and Dionysian Chaos If this kind of self-assertion really is the core of the philosophical life, then the question of impiety raised at the trial of Socrates and in the speech of Aristophanes begins to seem less far-fetched than we are used to thinking. Can this kind of will to sovereignty tolerate anything set above it as superior? In the Book of Exodus, God commands, “I am the Lord thy God, thou wilt not have strange gods before me”.186 But how can the philosopher tolerate strange or other gods above himself. Zarathustra complains “[i]f there were gods, how could I endure not to be a god” (TSZ, p. 65). When we realise that God and gods are inventions of the human spirit, we not only reject them as non-existent, we come to see them as human possibilities. The Pious One speaks: God loves us because he created us! ‘Man created God!’ – responded the jaded. And yet should not love what he created? Should even deny it because he made it? (GS, p. 18)

In this way, we come not to despise the idea of God but simply to reject the idea that God is in any way other than ourselves. As Nietzsche puts it, “[a]re we not compelled to become gods ourselves, if only to seem worthy of the act?” (GS, p. 120). Our erotic transcending is then understood as intending ourselves at an ever higher level. This fulfils the double exigence of persistent striving, will185 Nietzsche, GM III §7. The last line reads, ‘Let the world perish but let philosophy exist, let the philosopher exist, let me exist.’ 186 Exodus 20: 3.

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ing in the context of persistent becoming and also the exigence towards selfassertion. But for Aristophanes, the overthrow of the gods caused man not to ascend to a higher type but to descend to barbarism. This is not so for Nietzsche or for Zarathustra who tells us that, “One must have chaos in one, to give birth to a dancing star.” (TSZ, p. 9). Thus, the fact that human will-to-power or eros is chaotic, as it had been for Aristophanes, does not preclude the achievement of greatness but is its condition. So again, the warning and danger of philosophy envisaged by Aristophanes is celebrated by Nietzsche as the glorious and excessive Dionysian transcending work of philosophy, something with Socrates was only too familiar. He thus transvalues the common moral expressed by Aristophanes and asserts a higher possibility for man, beyond good and evil. If this entails a will to tyranny it is not something that Nietzsche rejects or condemns. In Human, All Too Human, he says that all philosophy masks a will to tyranny (HATH, p. 123) and says that Plato, the ‘monster of pride’ (GS, p. 210) may himself have been aware of this. The lust for tyranny always lurks; every oligarchy constantly quakes at the tension which every individual has to exert in order to remain in control of this lust. (For example, it was like that with the Greeks: Plato testifies to it in a hundred places, Plato, who knew his peers – and himself… (GM, p. 107)

Every philosophy is a tyranny, whether over others or oneself and the reason is that its eros is will-to-power. Philosophers have interpreted the inspiration of this frenzy variously (HATH, p. 68)187 but this is simply part of the creative bent of the human spirit. That it is power asserting itself as power is, for Nietzsche, indisputable. Plato, by contrast, was ambivalent. He was aware of the chaos in his own soul but carried out a life or death struggle to convince himself that this madness was ‘other-induced.’ Thus he convinced himself that both reason and instinct intended the Good. In this respect, Nietzsche indicates the superiority of Socrates who he claims was aware that this was simply a self-deception (BGE, p. 81).

187

Nietzsche discusses the concept of madness and inspiration here and states that inspiration has always been interpreted in accordance with and for the sake of particular or perpectival interests.

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3.7. Tension in Affirmation: Ambition and the Hidden Goal of Eros The idea of a tension between the conscious and unconscious dimensions of philosophical eros was something we have already encountered in the speech of Aristophanes. For him, eros was a force that we finally could not control in spite of our pretensions, so that while the desire for greatness was real, it masked a kind of unconscious will to destruction. This was the problem of philosophy and self-knowledge. Nietzsche too is sensitive to this and in fact his constant equivocations regarding Socrates and Plato seem to stem, as we have suggested, from a doubt about whether they knew exactly what it was they were doing. Plato may have been asserting himself as the truth, but was he conscious of this? In the Will To Power, Nietzsche comes down on the negative side when he says that Plato like all great thinkers to date Blindfolded themselves simply so as not to have to behold the narrow ledge that separates them from a plunge into the abyss. (WP, p. 510)

In the speech of Aristophanes too the human subject in eros occupied such a precarious position, hovering between two forms of annihilation.188 The philosopher blinded himself to this, however, and so it was that Aristophanes set himself the task of curtailing and re-directing the irrational energy of eros. Salvation was possible only through poetry, something which is enjoined by the early, but not the late Nietzsche. Yet, if Plato is not aware of the movement of his own soul in this respect, Nietzsche certainly is and he is aware, furthermore, of the implications of this kind of excess of spirit.189 But even this is a tension that Nietzsche seeks to acknowledge and affirm. He is conscious of the desire for infinity in the human soul and also the tendency of this to end in annihilation. Thus he says Saying Yes to life even in its strangest and hardest problems, the will to life rejoicing over its own inexhaustibility even in the very sacrifice of the 188

The attack on the gods was ultimately an act of self-destruction in the speech of Aristophanes and at Symposium 190d, we are warned that further incursions will result in Zeus slicing humans in half again (i.e. we would be a quarter of the original whole). 189 This may be explained by the fact that in Nietzsche’s own mind, there was never a psychologist of his rank before.

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highest types – that is what I called Dionysian, that is what I guessed to be the bridge to the psychology of the tragic poet…in order to be oneself the eternal joy of becoming – that joy which included even joy in destroying. (TI, p. 228)

There is a tension of which Nietzsche, to his credit, is aware, but in spite of his several attempts to do so, it is not clear that he ever makes peace with this tension. He wants the double affirmation but it is not clear how this can work. From as early as the Birth of Tragedy, he had sensed an incompatibility between the desire to affirm and the essence of the Dionysian as selfdestruction. These two conflicting impulses make it difficult to see from where the eternally self-affirming affirmation of existence can take place. In the Birth of Tragedy, he spoke of the breakdown of the principium individuationis …the blissful ecstasy which rises from the innermost depths of man…at (the) collapse of the principium individuationis, we shall gain an insight into the nature of the Dionysian. (BT, p. 17)

And even in The Gay Science, he says that “I love at length to lose self and identity in a blessed wilderness” (GS, p. 53). Perhaps in this sense, The Birth of Tragedy is Nietzsche’s most honest work. If it is at all possible to affirm the whole in its joyful destruction, and the self’s affirmation of itself, if we can simultaneously affirm creation and destruction, or creation as destruction, then the transvaluation of values will need to be the key. And yet, the question of to what extent the transvaluation is achieved or achievable remains a point of deep ambivalence in Nietzsche. It seems, in fact, as though the proposed transvaluation of values that was slated was never completed and was replaced by an increasingly vociferous critique of traditional values.190 His diagnostic work is carried out to a great extent in Beyond Good and Evil (1886) and The Genealogy of Morality (1887) while the revisionist project was intended to begin in a later major work. But only The Antichrist (1888) was ever completed, and even there, the success of the project is debatable in a work that consists more of exhortation and rhetoric than argument. For example, he will say that 190

The Antichrist was intended as the first part of this revaluation, which would appear under the title of The Will to Power. The revaluation was never completed and was followed by works such as Twilight of the Idols and Nietzsche contra Wagner, which are polemics against the spirit of decadence and ressentiment.

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[W]e ourselves, we free spirits, are nothing less than a “revaluation of all values”, an incarnate declaration of war and triumph over all the ancient conceptions of “true” and “untrue.”191

This is an attempt of sorts to rethink values in terms of Nietzsche’s own basic, vitalist understanding of existence. His intention is to empty current notions of value of their prejudices so as to bring them in line with the cultivation of vitality and health. But the problem persists that to make sense of Nietzsche, we are forced to dwell more and more on the critical dimension of his thinking. At one point, Nietzsche denies that this is a problem. In the review of his books in Ecce Homo, he asserts that the “yes-saying” or affirmative part of his philosophy had basically been consummated with Zarathustra, so that what remained was the “no-saying, no-doing part” (EH, p. 135) that would stand everything before him on its head (EH, p. 137). Fine, but what then is the revaluation? After all, Nietzsche calls his Genealogy of Morality a series of “preliminary sketches by a psychologist for the revaluation of values” (EH, p. 136). In these later works (from Beyond Good and Evil onward), though, Nietzsche outlines the spirit of affirmation mostly through contrast with the ressentiment of the sick. What is more, he tells us that saying “yes” is possible only through “negating and destroying” (EH, p. 146). So in spite of claims to the contrary—by Nietzsche himself and Deleuze and others on his behalf—the critical or genealogical moment comes more and more to the fore in the later Nietzsche’s thought. It seems as though Nietzsche himself equivocates in his understanding of his own mission. At times he sees himself as Zarathustra, the prophet, making space for the overman to come, while at other times, he appears to see himself as Dionysus incarnate in the sense of having accomplished the transvaluation in his own person. Perhaps this is the fate of the self-enclosed eros of philosophy and that Aristophanes was right in suggesting that this masks a will to tyranny finally which finally unravels itself.

191

The Antichrist § 13. Nietzsche (2005). Op. cit., p. 11. Henceforth AC.

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4. Defending and Overcoming Socrates: Nietzsche as the Fulfilment of an Aristophanic Prophesy This tension between self-affirmation and self-unravelling is a problem for Nietzsche, and it is one that is never entirely or satisfactorily resolved. Is the desire for mastery or the will to tyranny nothing more than an illusion? If it ends in self-destruction, why should Aristophanes worry so about the dangers of philosophy? Let the philosophers destroy themselves. The answer seems to be that while, yes, the ultimate vision of this kind of philosophical spirit is an illusion, its will to tyranny is nevertheless real and this means that it does pose a great threat to others. After all, in Aristophanes’ Clouds, his concern is not for Socrates the philosopher himself but for those who fall under his spell.192 The point of this chapter has not been to excavate Platonic philosophy in itself but rather Nietzsche’s interpretation of Plato and Socrates, and of philosophy in general. In terms of his final view of the Greeks, the evidence is too ambivalent to draw an unequivocal conclusion. At one time, the Greeks are bourgeois Apollonians, too weak to live with the truth of existence. At other times, they are heroes of the spirit whose control of their passions is a novel form of self-overcoming. At times, it is sometimes Socrates who has corrupted Plato (BT), while at other times it is Plato who has sanitized his teacher (PTAG). In the main, Nietzsche admires Plato and Socrates as legislators for mankind in the highest sense of this term. Yet for all Nietzsche’s ‘closeness’ to these two and his many admiring comments, it remains true that in his later writings he tends to oppose and condemn them every bit as virulently as he had in The Birth of Tragedy. Almost every entry in the notebooks published as The Will To Power concerning Socrates and Plato condemns them as decadents and in the Twilight of the Idols treatment of Socrates, Nietzsche’s final stance is one of rejection. Socrates was a physician for his time, yes, but he was a decadent for all that. His turn against the instincts could not be otherwise since this is the very formula of decadence. His turn against the instincts was ‘a mere disease, another disease and by no means a return to “virtue” to “health” (TI, p. 166). The modern era lacks great men like these (Socrates and Plato) to be sure (BGE, p. 95), but in the end they fall short of the ideal of the Übermensch. 192

He may be thinking here of Alcibiades, the subject of our next chapter.

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Does this mean we must abandon the notion of Nietzsche as a defender of Socrates or Plato? I do not think so, and the reason is that it is his admiration of these men as genuine philosophers that has lead him to the point of his repudiation of Socrates in the final works. The Twilight of the Idols is after all, a book that sets out to destroy or overcome all previous authorities or superiors. This means not only the gods, but Nietzsche’s own heroes as well. He has understood Socrates as a smasher of idols but in order to properly follow in his footsteps he must finally smash the idol that is Socrates himself. Only thus can he be what he wishes himself to be A crisis without equal on earth, the most profound collision of conscience, a decision that was conjured up against everything that had been believed, demanded, hallowed so far. (EH, p. 143)

In overcoming Socrates he thus continues the work he understood Socrates to be doing. He continues in the vein of Socrates, as he understands him and is a true disciple in this sense.193 In order to complete the project, as Catherine Zuchert notes, ‘Zarathustra must supplant Socrates as the image of the living philosopher.’194 Nietzsche, who celebrated the ‘pure originals’ that included Socrates in Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks has himself become the purest of originals. He is thus without peers. This may explain why Nietzsche literally elevates himself to the status of a god after his descent into madness.195 And while it may be unfair to judge Nietzsche’s thought on the basis of this period of his life, it has been suggested by some that madness was not an accidental happening but the inevitable result of his thought.196 193

That is, the true disciple overcomes the master. This may why neither Zarathustra nor Socrates wanted disciples. See GS, p. 53. 194 Zuchert (2010). Op. cit., p. 23 195 See, for example, the letter to Jacob Burckhardt (Jan. 6th, 1889), reprinted in Nietzsche, F. (1977). The Portable Nietzsche. Edited by Walter Kaufmann. London: Penguin books, p. 685. 196 Martin Heidegger claims that madness was the inevitable final step in Nietzsche’s inversion of Platonism (cf. Heidegger’s Nietzsche vol. I. 24, 202) while Lou Salomé, a personal friend of Nietzsche also claims that his philosophy could not but end in madness. Heidegger (1991). Op. cit. p. 24, 202; Salomé (1988). Op. cit. Interestingly, Salomé’s translator Siegfried Mandel claims that the common view that Nietzsche suffered from syphilis was, in fact, untrue. See “translators Introduction” in Salomé ibid., p. xli.

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Regardless, we might feel more inclined to sympathise with Aristophanes’ warning concerning the dangers of the ambition to greatness that he detects housed in philosophy. And as for the danger of this to mankind generally? I do not wish to discuss the highly controversial subject of the relation between the thought of Nietzsche and the Nazi ideologues but one cannot help but wonder. Certainly the form of Nazi assertion would have appalled Nietzsche but does he retain the right to condemn its spirit?197 After all, we have seen that the final flowering of this thinking is the overturning of even one’s own mentors. This was why, at the end of the Clouds, it is Strepsiades, the former student of Socrates and not an outsider that turns on him with fire. It seems in the end that whether Nietzsche captures the essence of Platonic philosophy or not, he certainly captures one deployment of philosophical activity and the eros of thought. Insofar as he does, he is a kind of fulfilment of the prophesy of Aristophanes. I think that in all likelihood Plato too is aware of this tendency in the human soul and perhaps, as Nietzsche suggests, even in his own and that of his master. Yet, there is also more in Plato and Socrates, as we will see in the subsequent chapters. Just as Aristophanes had done, Nietzsche highlights the centrality of eros but like Aristophanes, he makes no distinction between a higher and a lower eros. If all is will to power and nothing else besides, distinction is impossible and the sheer infinite force of eros can be nothing other than destructive because as infinite, it is in fact greater than we who possess it. The core of the difference is that Plato never gives up his reflective pursuit of the source of erotic power while, for Nietzsche, power is simply strength. For Plato, as we will see, eros reaches its limit and is opened to its other as the transcendent other or the Good. It is in relation with this transcendent other that the meaning of eros can be reflectively, or hermeneutically, unfolded. By contrast for Nietzsche, the other of will to power is will to power. He never really manages to offer anything other than a metaphysic of power. We have already quoted Nietzsche’s observation that, 197

This issue is discussed by Walter Kaufmann in Kaufmann (1968). Op. cit., pp. 284-306. While this is an interesting and scholarly discussion, Kaufmann tends, as usual, to exonerate Nietzsche of any responsibility laying all the blame at the door of his sister Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche for her misappropriation of her brother’s work. That she did this is not in dispute but whether this resolves the question is another matter.

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The world is this will-to-power and nothing else besides, and you yourselves are will-to-power and nothing else besides. (WP, p. 550)

What is required is not a hermeneutic seeking origins but a hermeneutic seeking destiny. The only hermeneutic for Nietzsche is the unfolding of the power of the erotic self. To do justice, is to do justice to what it can be. I mean that if there truly is nothing besides will to power, the unfolding of power and the release of strength is faithful to the truth of the whole and insofar as this is manifested in the philosopher, it is self-justifying. Of course, the limitations placed on will to power are not necessarily understood as negative since it is through conflict and self-overcoming that new possibilities are realized, and that value emerges. Furthermore, Nietzsche is desperate to offer a form of evaluation that the ontology of will to power can generate. In this respect, Gilles Deleuze is right to draw our attention to the non-oppositional distinction between active and reactive force, which Nietzsche intends to form the basis of his transvaluation of values.198 Active force is not the opposite of reactive force awaiting dialectical mediation, but refers to the spontaneous self-affirming expression of power. As Nietzsche puts it, The judgment “good” does not emanate from those to whom goodness is shown! Instead it has been “the good” themselves, meaning the noble, the mighty, the high-placed and the high-minded, who saw and judged themselves and their actions as good, I mean first-rate, in contrast to everything lowly, low-minded, common and plebeian. (GM, p. 12)

So the ontology of will to power is by no means indifferent to the idea of the Good, even though it understands the term in a way that is radically different from the Platonic/Christian tradition. The Good is anchored in a primordial joy in living and in the feeling of one’s own power to be.199 Not the power to survive, but to flourish. This is an idea that is expressed again and again in Nietzsche’s later writings, and which expresses his desire not only to destroy metaphysics, but to create something out of the ashes of these destroyed systems. This is what the eros of the philosopher intends. It is a problem however, that it never really rises above the level of the rhetorical or exhortative, and is ultimately torn apart in the internal tension between the self’s affirmation of itself, resulting in tyranny, and its affirmation of exis198 199

Klossowski (2005). Op. cit., p. 103; Deleuze (1983). Op. cit., pp. 64-70. Deleuze (1983). Op. cit., p. 79

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tence, resulting in dissolution. In the end, the other of will to power at its limit is not really other at all, and so too much weight is placed on the individual as creator of values. Nietzsche wants to unfold the eternal truth of the will to power so that his name will be “associated with the memory of something tremendous – a crisis without equal on earth...” (EH, p. 144) The fact is that will to power is neither confronted nor limited by a value, but rather engenders value in the conflict with power.200 So his desire for mastery knows no patience at the limit of the finite because it recognises nothing beyond this limit other than itself. As such, the limitless desire of the erotic soul becomes its own absolute, the touchstone for all eternity and the desire inherent in human eros for an other worthy of its desire, rebounds, in Nietzsche’s case, back onto himself. If there is something other than eros, as there is for Plato, the meaning of the self-insistence of eros or its conatus essendi is transformed. The reason is that its concern for its own power of being is understood in the context of an affirmation of being generally. This puts the self into a relational position vis-à-vis the absolute rather than making itself the absolute in relation to which everything else is relative. This does not entail repression of the conatus for Plato since it is precisely the other of eros that is the source of its power. It is the Good that gives eros its wings and nourishes it.201 The conatus essendi or self-insistence of eros is not and need not be rejected because it is understood as given to be and oriented towards what is more ultimate than self. In acknowledging this other, that is, the self’s concern with and insistence of itself need not be thought of as pure egoism precisely because this self-concern is not raised to the level of an absolute. The self’s interest in self can, furthermore, be termed good because of the relation with the ultimate that allows the whole of being to be affirmed as good. As we will see later, the divinely creative activity of eros is understood as gift and acts as one of the bases of human worth for Plato. As such, the conatus essendi cannot be simply for itself since any move towards the isolation of the self paradoxically curtails its ability to be self-affirming.

200

In The Gay Science §169, Nietzsche notes that “enemies are indispensable for some people if they are to rise to their own kind of virtue, manliness, and cheerfulness.” GS, p. 135. (Nietzsche’s italics). 201 Plato, Phaedrus 250e-252c.

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The Inhumanity of Philosophical Eros: The Speech of Alcibiades and the Second Indictment of Philosophy

In the previous chapters of the present work, we explored a first indictment of philosophy through a reading of the speech of Aristophanes in Plato’s Symposium alongside a defence of philosophical activity as offered by Friedrich Nietzsche. The basic tenet of the argument was that for Aristophanes, the sublimation202 of erotic desire and its re-orientation towards spiritual goals (the work of philosophy) constitutes a great danger for human community. The reason is that spiritualised eros represents a monstrous desire for spiritual hegemony over the whole. Thus eros becomes a will to dominate insofar as it seeks self-sufficiency and attempts to overthrow all and any subjection to higher authority. This was explored through both Aristophanes’ speech in the Symposium and reference to his treatment of Socrates in his play Clouds. Against this, I offered a reading of Nietzsche’s complex attitude to Socrates, Plato and philosophy in general. Here we saw a defence of philosophy based on the idea of philosophical activity as creative, erotic excess and an expression of the higher will to power of spirit. At times, Nietzsche suggests that neither Plato nor Socrates really believed what they taught and that even if they did, what is significant about them is that they left the indelible mark of their own higher subjectivity on the western consciousness. According to this reading, Nietzsche both accepts and defends the Aristophanic understanding of the meaning of philosophical activity. In other words, he defends philosophy not by claiming it to be something other than Aristophanes had maintained, but precisely as will to power, or the will to dominate. Ultimately, I suggested that this defence was not all

202

The word sublimation is, of course, anachronistic in this context as it is not a Greek idea. However, it is perfectly appropriate here in the sense that to sublimate or ‘make sublime’ involves transforming a lower impulse into a higher one. What is assumed is that it is the lower impulse that is more primordial and in that sense, truer.

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that successful and so there remains something of a cloud over philosophy as envisaged by Plato and Socrates.203 Before offering a defence of Platonic/Socratic philosophy, however, I want first to continue to pursue the indictment along a new route. As I mentioned in the previous part, I am reading the Symposium as a dialogue that explores the indictment of philosophy thoroughly. Thus, we cannot terminate our inquiry with one speech but must continue to explore other facets of the indictment.204 Before Socrates can be defended, we must examine the charges against him as thoroughly as possible. The present chapter will involve a reading and treatment of the speech of Alcibiades in the Symposium. In many respects, this speech offers as important a challenge to Socratic/Platonic philosophising as did the speech of Aristophanes. One of the central differences will be that while Aristophanes put forward a more abstract, theoretical critique of Socratism, Alcibiades will offer a personal story about his relationship with the person of Socrates. In this speech he will lay Socrates bare for us, in order to show us the fruits of a life devoted to thought and obedience to the philosophical eros to know. Against this, he will offer a different and even incompatible understanding of the meaning of eros which will challenge that of Socrates. We will see that the identification of this or that object as the ultimate object of desire has implications for a life and has profoundly shaped the lives of both Socrates and Alcibiades. Regarding what we know of the lives of these two, we should naturally be wary of the choices made by Alcibiades, but what Alcibiades wishes to tell us is that we should be equally wary of the choices made by Socrates. Has Socrates’s philosophical eros made him inhuman? Is he impassive? And if to be an erotic being means to be vulnerable, is Socrates even erotic? Does he, after all, know anything of love? Regarding this last, I mean to say that there are times when Alcibiades suggests that Socrates is like the circle men of Aristophanes’ speech in that he is purely self-sufficient and self concerned. The suspicion, as we will see, is that Socrates does not fully understand eros and therefore misses something crucial about the meaning of being human. The dualistic separation between mind and body in the person 203

On the assumption that Nietzsche is right in understanding Plato and Socrates as kindred spirits, that is. 204 I also noted that while a reading of the entire dialogue might be useful it is not necessary. Thus, I have chosen to highlight what I consider to be the two most important rival accounts of eros put forward in the dialogue.

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of Socrates has made him immune or invulnerable to the type of contingent happenings that affect the rest of us. As such, he is accused of an indifference, if not an hostility, to otherness as a direct result of his ascent through the stages of love recommended by his guide Diotima. This critique will partly overlap with the critique of Aristophanes, but it also supplements. Aristophanes, we saw, was acutely attuned to the praxis of philosophy in his critique and the inherent dangers in this praxis. Alcibiades is, in may respects, far less subtle in his critique and more or less understands the philosophical praxis in the way Socrates himself does. His critique, on the other hand, is more focused on the human cost of the life of philosophy with regard to individual lives. He will not accuse philosophy of harbouring a monstrous will to tyrant, but will rather accuse Socrates of an inhuman indifference to the affective pull of his fellow human being. As with the previous part, this part will also comprise a defence of Socrates. In Part I, Nietzsche accepted the reading of Aristophanes and sought to defend Socrates and Plato through a transformation or revaluation of the meaning of philosophical activity. Here, I will attend to the work of 20 th century French thinker Emmanuel Lévinas. As with Nietzsche and Aristophanes, I will argue that Lévinas both accepts a version of the critique of Alcibiades (namely that philosophy is allergic to otherness) while attempting a solution through a reworking of some of the basic dimensions of Platonic thought. Lévinas has never hidden his debt to Plato and especially to the notion of the Good as ‘beyond being’ which forms the central insight around which his own work is developed.205 On the other hand, he is frequently critical of the status accorded to otherness in the works of Plato and in the reported activity of Socrates. There is a tendency, according to Lévinas, to think of the Good as the good of knowledge of the whole, into whose categories the other is subsumed and subordinated. As such, Lévinas tries to locate the communication of the radically transcendent Good in the direct encounter with the face of the Other. We will see more of this in chapters four and five. The structure of the present chapter will more or less mirror that of Chapter 1. Following from these introductory remarks, I will say a few words about Alcibiades. This will involve some comment about the historical personage and the sources on his life and also some preliminary comment concerning his relationship with Socrates and Plato. In respect to this, I will 205

Republic 509b.

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discuss the importance of Alcibiades’ appearance in the Symposium both dramatically and thematically. I will then proceed to give a reading of the speech itself and attempt to bring its most important features to light as they relate to the critique of Socrates and the eros of philosophy. Questions will be posed here as to whether philosophy is guilty of hubris, whether Alcibiades’s vice is the fault of Socrates and whether, more generally, philosophy’s concern with universals (i.e. knowledge and concepts) leaves it unresponsive to otherness in the form of concrete, incarnate particularity. In relation to this, I will treat of some of the more important readings of this speech that have appeared in recent years. 1. Alcibiades: By Way of Introduction 1.1. Alcibiades the Man According to Plutarch, Alcibiades was born in or around the year 450BC 206 and was to become one of the most (in)famous of Athenian citizens during the so-called golden age of Greek civilisation. He did not have humble beginnings. His father Clinias had earned great repute fighting for Athens at Artemisium though he died subsequently fighting the Boeotians at the battle of Coronea, leaving Alcibiades fatherless at the age of three. On his mother’s side, Alcibiades was related to the Alcmaeonidae, a family that was descended from Megacles I and included the great statesman Pericles, to whom Alcibiades would become ward after the death of his mother. As such, he can be described as a high-profile personage even from the time of his birth. Alongside Aristophanes, Socrates, and perhaps Agathon, he is the character in the Symposium about whom we know most. His life is chronicled by Plutarch and he also appears frequently in Thucydides’s history of the Peloponnesian War in which he featured prominently.207 He is a fascinating character 206

Plutarch (1951). Selected Lives and Essays. Translated from Greek by Louise Ropes Loomis. New York: Walter J. Black Inc. Press, pp. 195-234. 207 Thucydides (1996). Peloponnesian War. Edited by Robert B. Strassler. New York: Simon & Schuster Inc. All references to Alcibiades are to be found in Books 5-8 and deal with his political machinations during the Peloponnesian War. Thucydides is less concerned with Alcibiades the man than is, say, Plutarch.

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not only because of his role in the fate of Athens in that landmark war, but also because of his social activity. He appears to have been a man who loved the limelight and was possessed of an extraordinary ability to manipulate popular opinion. He was noted for his extravagance and unpredictability and was not averse to spreading stories of himself and others that were untrue in order to cultivate an image or curry public favour. Some of his reported exploits are bizarre to say the least.208 His political and military career was colourful to say the least. As much as he was capable of winning public approval, he was just as quick to lose it and, during the war years, he offered himself in service to the Athenians, the Spartans and eventually the Persians. We know that he was recalled from the disastrous Athenian expedition to Sicily in or around 411BC to stand trial. He was accused of parodying the sacred mysteries of Eleusis and was also suspected of desecrating the stone faces and genitals of the Herms. The second charge could not be proved and did not even appear on the official indictment,209 while it was widely believed that Alcibiades was either behind the desecration or at least involved in it. Alcibiades never returned to Athens to stand trial for his crimes and was sentenced to death in his absence. Disaffected, he offered his services to the Spartans in exchange for sanctuary. They agreed and availed of the expertise of Alcibiades for some years until he grew distrustful of them and was recalled to Athens in 407BC.210 At this time a restored democracy was in power and Alcibiades was seen as one of its greatest protectors. However, he quickly lost favour again following the defeat of troops under his command at Notium, which resulted in his good advice being ig208

For example, Plutarch recounts a tail in which Alcibiades is said to have cut the tail off his dog with the remark, “I want the Athenians to chatter about this, so that they may say nothing worse about me”. See “Alcibiades” in Plutrach’s Lives. Op. cit., p. 202. Alcibiades was without doubt a person who would have felt at home in our contemporary celebrity culture. 209 Accounts of this incident can be found at Plutarch’s Lives Op. cit., chs. 19-22, and Thucydides Peloponnesian War Op. cit., Book 6. 210 One of Alcibiades’s greatest talents was his ability to ingratiate himself with people. Thus, he is said to have enjoyed all the extravagance of Athens while living there and to have endured the basic way of life of the Spartans. Plutarch says: “Alcibiades could go among good and bad alike and never find any custom he could not imitate and make his own. Thus in Sparta he loved exercise, simplicity, and seriousness; in Ionia, luxury, gaiety and frivolity.” Plutarch’s Lives. Op. cit., p. 216.

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nored by commanders during the battle of Aegospotami in 405BC. Alcibiades became embittered and left Greece for Persia to serve king Artaxerxes. In 404BC, he was assassinated by a Persian agent in the small town of Phyrgia. The reason for the assassination is not known for certain, though many theories were current at the time. Plutarch mentions the theory that Alcibiades had seduced a local woman whose brothers became enraged and burned down the house in which he was staying. They then shot him down as he sought to flee. Knowing Alcibiades’s fondness for sexual excess, this is not at all impossible. But he notes that the more likely motive was political. In 404BC, the democracy at Athens was once again dismantled and replaced by the rule of thirty tyrants favourable to Sparta. Plato’s uncle Critias was amongst these and it is thought that he conspired with Spartan commander Lysander to have Alcibiades murdered. The reason was that so long as Alcibiades lived, so did the dream of Athenian democracy.211 If this is correct, we get some insight into just how important Alcibiades was. He was more than a flamboyant playboy or clown but was, for many, the living symbol of Athenian democracy. 1.2. Alcibiades and Socrates Of the many lovers taken by Alcibiades during the course of his life, none is more famous than Socrates. Their association is mentioned in several places in the dialogues of Plato, most famously in the Symposium.212 Socrates was roughly twenty-five years older than Alcibiades, though this kind of age gap in male relationships was perfectly consistent with then contemporary Athenian practice.213 From what we can tell, they appear to have been genuinely fond of one another. That their relationship involved sexual attraction 211

This story is recounted by Plutarch. Op. cit., pp. 231-33. Their love affair is also mentioned, though in less detail, in the Protagoras. Plutarch discusses their relationship but his account appears to have been drawn from Plato’s Symposium. His account of Alcibiades’s feelings for Socrates is taken almost verbatim from the speech of Alcibiades in that dialogue. See Plutarch. Op. cit., p. 199. He also notes, however, that Socrates’s love for Alcibiades is “proof of the boy’s natural soundness and good disposition.” Ibid., p. 197. 213 The two best studies of Greek pederastic relationships that I am aware of are Dover, K. (1978). Greek Homosexuality. London: Duckworth Press, passim and Marrou, H.I. (1956). A History of Education in Antiquity. Translated from French by George Lamb. London and New York: Sheed and Ward, Ch. 3. 212

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on both sides is never disputed, though it seems that this was never physically consummated – at least this is what Plato has Alcibiades tell us (219d). Alcibiades is said to have been extraordinarily good looking and this is also said to have attracted Socrates to him. However, the latter was more interested in cultivating the mind and soul of Alcibiades than indulging in a sexual relationship. That the relationship soured is a matter of record and it has generally been maintained that Alcibiades’s excessive and inconstant temperament were the reason. In this chapter, we will be exploring a possible alternative explanation, which involves the possibility that Socrates is as guilty as the younger man for the breakdown of their relationship. In part 3 of this chapter, we will also discuss Gregory Vlastos’ and Martha Nussbaum’s readings of the dialogue, which offer similar treatments of the problem of philosophy, affectivity and otherness. 1.3. Alcibiades and the Symposium For reasons that are understandable enough, Alcibiades’ presence and his speech have, in the past, been overlooked or treated summarily.214 Why? For one thing, Alcibiades is not one of the invited guests, but rather gatecrashes the party after all the main protagonists have spoken. Since he speaks after Socrates, there is a tendency to treat his speech as either an amusing appendix to the proceedings215 or a fulfilment of the Socratic notion that a life not integrated by philosophy is doomed to tragedy. Certainly this is part of the point, but it is not the whole point. Furthermore, Alcibiades’s speech is the least theoretical of all, owing to his inebriated condition, and it is perhaps for this reason that it has been treated as making no contribution to our understanding of eros, let alone to a critique of philosophy and the philosophical life.

214

A.E. Taylor, a well-respected critic of Plato, tells us that the importance of Alcibiades in the dialogue is “for understanding the characters of Socrates and of Alcibiades, not for any contribution it makes to our comprehension of Socratic or Platonic philosophy.” from Taylor, A.E. (1960). Plato: The Man and his Works. London: Methuen, p. 233. 215 Werner Jaeger claims that Socrates is the last speaker in the Symposium, which is to suggest that Alcibiades’s contribution is not to be considered part of the exploration of eros at all. See Jaeger, W. (1986). Paideia, vol II. Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 179.

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Yet there are several clues in the dialogue which suggest that Plato does in fact intend us to take the speech seriously. Firstly, Alcibiades makes the dialogue’s longest speech, after that of Socrates. While this in itself proves nothing, he is the only of the speakers who has the chance to confront the Socratic account of eros – and this he does in spite of the fact that he was not present during its delivery. Most important of all, however, is the dialogue’s prologue. The dialogue begins when a man by the name of Glaucon, who may or may not be Plato’s brother, accosts Apollodorus to ask him about a dinner party at which both Socrates and Alcibiades were present (172b). This sets the scene and indicates the party’s most prominent guests. Glaucon, we are told, is a man of affairs and is very keen to hear what was said at this dinner party. At first, he thinks it to have been a recent event (172c).216 If this had turned out to be true, it would be newsworthy indeed since it would entail a meeting between the banished black sheep of Athens as well as the city’s most renowned thinker involving the possible return of the former. It is possible therefore, that Glaucon is on a scouting mission and that his interest in the gathering is political. Even when it turns out to have happened many years before, when Glaucon himself was a child (173a), he stays to hear what transpired. Even if it happened years ago, it might still furnish him with an insight into the nature of the relationship between these most troublesome of Athenians. The issues raised in the prologue go to the very heart of the question of this study. If the action of the prologue is set around 400 BC, then it is about a year from the time of the trial and death of Socrates. Furthermore, the fact that Alcibiades and Socrates are the objects of Glaucon’s interest highlights the fact that these were not merely two high profile citizens. They were men who, according to Walter Ellis, were “feared by their contemporaries as profound threats to the status quo.”217 Further, they were associated

216

The question of the dating of the action of the Symposium is a difficult one though the best guess seems to be that it occurred around 416 BC. Thus it is set before the Sicilian expedition and before the first trial of Alcibiades. The prologue is thought to take place around 400 BC or 401 BC. Further discussion of this point can be found in Dover, K.J. (1965). The Date of Plato’s Symposium. Phronesis, 10, pp. 2-21, and Mattingly, H.B. (1958). The Date of Plato’s Symposium. Phronesis, 3, pp. 31-39. 217 Ellis, W. M. (1989). Alcibiades. London: Routledge, p. 23. This is a detailed and comprehensive study of the life of Alcibiades as well as a close look at the sources.

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with one another and it seems that many of the later followers of Socrates held Alcibiades partly responsible for the condemnation of their master.218 The relationship between Alcibiades and Socrates was no secret in Athens, and nor were the extravagances and crimes of the former. Alcibiades promised much but, in the end, was partly responsible for the downfall of Athens and though a supporter of democracy, he did much to contribute to its temporary suspension. He was a darling of the people but also a reputed blasphemer. If we cast our minds back to the Clouds of Aristophanes, we remember that Socrates was there depicted as a teacher who encouraged rebellion against the gods. What is more, he taught students who were ill equipped to handle this kind of knowledge. Thus, as a former student of Socrates, the suspicion remained that the downfall of Alcibiades and therefore of Athens, was somehow the fault of Socrates. In this way, the followers of Socrates were probably correct, in that it is likely that it was Alcibiades that Socrates’s accusers had in mind in drafting his indictment and including therein the charge of corrupting youth. And, of course, the speech itself is a recrimination against Socrates in which Alcibiades refers to his co-symposiasts as jurors – a role they would later play in earnest. Insofar as the prologue is set after the death of Alcibiades, he has nothing to fear from Glaucon’s investigation. The same cannot be said for Socrates. It is thus clear, I hope, that through Alcibiades and the Symposium as a whole, Plato is putting Socrates, and by implication philosophy, on trial to see if there is any foundation to the accusation that it is a dangerous and corrupting practice. Before he has opened his mouth, the very presence of Alcibiades is a statement of this accusation. One of the most important questions to emerge from this is the precise relation between the character and actions of Alcibiades and the teaching of Socrates. Is Alcibiades the product of Socratic education or, conversely, is the tragedy of his life the fruit of his rejection at the hands of the philosopher? Either way, the question is put again as to how innocent Socrates really is with respect to the fate of Alcibiades and Athens. And beyond the context of the dialogue itself, this raises the question of the nature of philosophy’s contribution to public and social spheres of life.

218

Ibid. p. 19

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2. A Reading of the Speech of Alcibiades 2.1. The Beginning: Alcibiades Arrives I have referred to the Symposium before as a set of seven speeches but, of course, critics who see the speech as an appendix and not part of the action proper and not entirely without justification. Alcibiades is quite out of step with the other symposiasts in several important respects. For one thing, he does not seem to have been invited but rather shows up on a drunken whim. He arrives long after dinner and after each of the other six key symposiasts has given his encomium to eros. On the subject of drunkenness, the others had agreed, on the advice of Eryximachus (176c-e), to limit the intake of alcohol at the party. In fact, the evening’s proceedings up to this point, had been conducted in an atmosphere of sobriety.219 That is, until the arrival of Alcibiades. His appearance is so sudden that he prevents Aristophanes from challenging the speech of Socrates (212c).220 Alcibiades bursts on the scene, shouting, wearing a garland of flowers and accompanied by revellers. In this way, he fulfils Agathon’s prophecy at 175e that Dionysus will judge their (his and Socrates’s) respective claims to wisdom. Right on cue, Alcibiades appears as the human manifestation of the god of wine and intoxication after Socrates has presented his account of eros out of the ashes of Agathon’s. Immediately the tone is altered and the banquet becomes more orgiastic than academic. Alcibiades suggests that they all get very drunk very fast. Eryximachus, however, tries to maintain some semblance of order by insisting that Alcibiades make a contribution to the evenings proceedings. They had all given a speech in praise of eros before he arrived so, as the newcomer, it falls to him to follow suit. Alcibiades says he is too drunk to do this but he will make a speech in praise of Socrates. Thus, rather than praise eros in the abstract, he will illu219

As well as abstaining from alcohol, Eryximachus also dismisses the flute-girls and suggests speech-making rather than discussion for the evenings activity (176e). It is interesting to note as an aside the tremendous influence exerted on the nights proceedings by the pair of lovers Phaedrus and Eryximachus. Phaedrus has chosen the topic and form of conversation (i.e. speeches) while Eryximachus has insisted upon order and sobriety. Of course, all of this goes out the window with the arrival of Alcibiades. 220 At 205e, Socrates had referred explicitly to the speech of Aristophanes but only in order to contradict it.

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minate the topic by recounting the story of an individual erotic attachment. This autobiographical style is crude to be sure and has the result of eliciting embarrassed amusement amongst the assembled company because of its frankness (222c). None of the others had spoken in this way. And yet, the six previous speeches had been as autobiographical in their own way. Phaedrus had extolled the virtues of courage and loyalty that accrue from the fact that a lover will do anything for his beloved. As Phaedrus himself is young and the beloved of Eryximachus, this is quite convenient and highlights a deep selfishness in his character. Pausanias justifies his own pederasty in the name of education. Eryximachus makes techne the truest means of expressing and mediating with eros and then arrogates to himself expertise in all technical disciplines by making medicine the prototypical techne. Aristophanes and Agathon make poetry the vehicle for genuine insight and Socrates equates philosophy with the life most worth living. So, in a way, autobiography is hardly introduced by Alcibiades. This is, I think, crucially related to the topic under discussion. If Socrates is right, at 205a, that love is common to all souls, it makes sense that a theory of love would have more intensely personal implications than, for example, a discussion of statesmanship. Yet, the speech of Alcibiades lacks both the disingenuousness of some of the other speeches as well as a reflective context. It seems that he lacks the ability to frame his experience with Socrates in a context and this is the reason for the frankness of his speech. Alcibiades, however, does not apologise for this shortcoming but appears to make a virtue of it. He is in no way apologetic and claims that in his speech he will ‘tell the truth’ (214e). Since his speech is so unsystematic it, will be up to us as readers not only to assess his truth claim, but to place it in its proper context. Martha Nussbaum tells us that he is the only character who makes such a claim.221 In fact, this is incorrect. Socrates had also claimed to ‘tell the truth’ (198e) and bemoaned the other speakers for treating truth so casually. It seemed to him (i.e. Socrates) that truth was hostile, irrelevant or, at the very least, inconsequential to the business of eulogising a subject.222 This is a crucial point since it establishes one of the most significant tensions in the 221

Nussbaum, M. (2001a). Op. cit., p. 167. Socrates is uncomfortable with speech making generally as is evidenced, not only by this dialogue, but also in Phaedrus where he tolerates the speech of Lysias because of the uncommon environment and in Gorgias where he threatens to leave unless dialogue replaces rhetoric. 222

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dialogue. Here we have Socrates and Alcibiades, both of whom are claiming to tell the truth.223 Yet the style and substance of their speeches are so radically different that we, as readers, are being asked to make a very difficult choice. We must choose between the philosophers love of the Good as an abstract property and feature of reality and Alcibiades’s love of a concrete person. This choice is difficult because, for one thing, Alcibiades insists that there can be no reconciliation between the two (213d). Furthermore, it seems as though Socrates’ understanding of the meaning of Love is very much ingredient to the reason that Alcibiades’s love for the person (of Socrates) is unrequited. As such, it represents a further challenge to philosophy and philosophical eros. If my reading of the speech of Aristophanes was correct, it might be said to be predominantly an attack on philosophy and only secondarily on Socrates. The speech of Alcibiades, by contrast, is first and foremost an attack on Socrates and only secondarily an attack on philosophy. The speech of Aristophanes, whilst condemning philosophy, surreptitiously makes a philosophical point. The speech of Alcibiades does not, yet it is just as much a challenge to philosophy for all that. 2.2. Introducing the Speech: Rival Visions of Eros and Language The confrontation between Alcibiades and Socrates appears to throw them both into a state of shock. Just as Alcibiades himself had appeared suddenly so he accuses Socrates of appearing out of the blue where he is least expected and usurping the attentions of the best-looking people (213c). Socrates, by contrast, complains of the menacingly violent way in which Alcibiades has come to treat him and of his fear of Alcibiades’s “mad attachment to his lovers” (213d). He thus asks Agathon to mediate between them, a suggestion that is immediately repudiated by Alcibiades (213e). This tells us right from the start, that there is an irreconcilable chasm between the visions of eros of both men and one that cannot be integrated. Specifically, the rival 223

The significance of this is brought out through a comparison with the speech of Agathon, who says he will be the first to speak about eros ‘in the right way’ (195a). Speaking in the right way about something does not necessarily entail telling the truth. This demonstrates that, for Agathon, style is more important than substance. He is thus distinguished from Alcibiades and Socrates. He acknowledges this during his cross-examination by Socrates when he admits that he did not know what he was talking about (201b). The reverse is true for both Socrates and Alcibiades.

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accounts of eros cannot be mediated by the poet. Alcibiades is clear that what he will say will be true, but also that it will be incompatible with the account that Socrates must have given.224 Unlike the other characters in the drama, it is as important for him that Socrates’ account of eros be held as fraudulent (214d), as that his own be seen as authoritative. The evening, it seems, has reached an impasse, which is only overcome when Alcibiades promises to give a eulogy of Socrates that tells the truth about him. Socrates, owing to his avowed passion for truth, says that he will not only allow this but commands it (214e). Having secured permission to give his speech that ‘tells the truth’, he begins with the admission that his speech may lack fluency and coherence. The reason is his condition – he is drunk. Yet, we cannot avoid the feeling here that there is more to this than alcohol. It is part of the truth that Alcibiades is about to recount. His love is a love for an individual existent and as such it struggles for expression. Erotic passion is often marked by an obscurity of feeling. This is not to say that it involves weak or insipid feelings. Quite the contrary, erotic feelings are amongst the deepest and most passionate of human experience. However, the briefest of acquaintance with Romantic poetry and/or literature reveals a significant truth about the relation between erotic feeling and language. That is to say, lovers often struggle to express the inexpressible. Their feelings cannot be put into words because while words name universals, erotic love is about attachment to particulars, the value of which it is difficult to say.225 They may list several aspects of a beloved’s personality, yet, even in the listing, what is really felt is not made transparent. There is a powerfully felt yet inchoate sense of the wonder of the other person. In the grip of this kind of erotic attachment we could not, if asked, explain why this individual person has evoked such strong feelings in us. Why him or her rather than someone else? To list their attributes would seem to make them interchangeable with another and still we know that they are not. Alcibiades will make this point later in his speech. When 224

He is confident in this claim despite not having been present to hear Socrates’ encomium. 225 In a way, this was the point made by Aristophanes (192e) but it was also the danger of eros, since it allowed Hephaestus to come along and put words into the mouths of the lovers. The recalcitrance of erotic feeling to expression was something that Aristophanes wanted to cultivate. He feared Socrates, therefore, as a meddler. Under his instruction, lovers will become violent and hubristic. In a way, Alcibiades is proving him right.

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describing his love for Socrates, he says that he is like no one else living or dead (221c-d). He is simply Socrates. He is beloved, but what it is about that is loved is ineffable. Alcibiades will tell the story of his love for Socrates the whole person. This is the truth he will tell. He can and will tell particular stories and draw attention to aspects of Socrates’ personality but the reason he loves him is all of these and none of these. They do not actually explain why he loves Socrates. This is, as I say, a common feature of love, erotic or otherwise, for persons.226 It is not subject to analysis or dialectic. It is an upsurge of feeling that is more intimately ours than any other and yet it remains mysterious. In a sense, we might say that it is eminently clear without ever being transparent. It involves the reasons of the heart that reason struggles to say. 2.3. Portrait of a Strange Man: Socrates in Images So what does Alcibiades say about Socrates? What can he say? And what have these to do with philosophy and Socrates on trial? If the speech of Aristophanes gave a warning of the possible fruits of Socratic philosophising, Alcibiades offers us a portrait of the embodied result of this. He says that he will speak about Socrates through the use of images (215a) and that only in so doing can he describe what Socrates is really like. This is a significant point. On the one hand, Alcibiades is claiming to know the real Socrates better than anyone else on account of his erotic attachment to him. In this way the connection between eros and knowledge is asserted in a way that is both related and opposed to the connection between Socratic eros and wisdom. On the other hand, Alcibiades proceeds through the use of images because his sense of the uniqueness of the person of Socrates is such that it can be expressed in no other way. I mean that while Socrates had proceeded from the particular to the universal, Alcibiades has no real sense of a universal object of erotic desire, any more than he has a metaphysical view of the person, and so cannot frame his knowledge of Socrates in a conceptually transparent way. He must use images that are suggestive rather than directly correspondent. 226

According to Gregory Vlastos, this is a feature of love for persons generally; i.e. not just erotic love. The inadequacy of Plato’s love theory can, he says, be aptly expressed by his (Plato’s) failure to give sufficient account of this feature of human experience. Vlastos (1973). Op. cit., p. 5. We will return to this later.

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The use of images in this speech brings out the tension between Alcibiades and Socrates in another way too. According to many traditional readings of Plato, rooted especially in the discussion of art in the Republic, Plato and Socrates are hostile to the image broadly construed. This understanding has generally centred around the banishment of the poets in book II of the Republic, who are condemned for pandering to the lowest of human instincts by wallowing in images of what are themselves images of the true reality.227 Strong attachment to images, for Socrates, can only result in confusion, a fact that is well borne out by Alcibiades. Socratic eros seeks to dispel the image whilst Alcibiades’ eros wallows and rejoices in it. In his speech, Socrates was interested in the universally valid object of love. In this vein, the ascent of the soul had, as its intention, the gradual uncovering of what is most truly the object of desire (for all). This ‘way up’ was described as somewhat difficult because of the fact that the pre-eminent object of love is initially hidden from us. Thus we must be prepared to face hardship and sacrifice for the sake of the reward of happy enlightenment and understanding. By contrast, Alcibiades is concerned with a particular, subjective experience of the love for another person. In this way, his speech contrasts with that of Socrates as a movement downwards, towards the contingent unintelligibility of the material rather than upwards towards the supra-intelligibility of the non-corporeal. Alcibiades’s knowledge of Socrates is, for this reason, not only partial but also confused because it is other than the type of propositional knowledge extolled by Socrates. It might be that, far from giving grounds for rejecting Alcibiades, this is the very statement of his contribution to the discussion and indictment of Socrates. It is through our sense of the uniqueness of particular others that a great deal of our sense of their worth is communicated. That Socrates is ignorant of this suggests that he may not be capable of actually seeing this value in the other. The images that Alcibiades uses in order to reveal the true essence of Socrates are not only used to give attenuated access to the core of the man. They are used to bring the charge of hubris against him. At one point in the speech he even refers to his co-symposiasts as ‘gentlemen of the jury’ (219c), 227

This is based on the notion that Plato holds a two-world ontology. According to this, poetic images are simulacra of objects in the world of sense which are themselves only simulacra of the Forms. Thus, the poets draw the human focus even farther away from the truth that the philosopher pursues.

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foreshadowing the role they would all soon play in relation to Socrates. He compares the philosopher to the toy silenoi that can be found in craftsmen’s shops (215b). When these toys are opened up they have statues of the gods inside them. This is the first reference in the speech to the divine inner nature of Socrates but it is not at all clear that this is meant as a compliment. The reason is that Socrates is being compared to silenoi or satyrs and in particular to the satyr Marsyas. While the satyrs were divine, or at least semidivine mythical creatures, they were also mischievous troublemakers, associated with the crime of hubris and reputed as rapists and profaners. Socrates the philosopher is, then, a troublemaking profaner. This, of course, foreshadows the charges brought by Meletus in the real trial of Socrates.228 Like the speech of Aristophanes, the speech of Alcibiades is a dress rehearsal for the real trial. Alcibiades compares Socrates to Marsyas because, like that satyr, he possesses the ability to bewitch his audience. While Marsyas beguiles with the flute, Socrates bewitches through speech, which has the effect of paralyzing and confusing its audience (215b-d). In his own case, he has been beguiled by Socrates’ speech and arguments in a way that is unparalleled. Only Socrates has traumatised him through his words and has “disturbed his whole personality” (215e). This is because the words of Socrates display for him the “slavish quality of his life” (215e) and the worthlessness of his ordinary pursuits. In this way, the effect of Socrates is a deeply unsettling one precisely because Alcibiades is cut to the quick by his words. He sees in them a divine core and a truth that is indisputable. Yet this praise is couched in terms of an analogy with a mythical creature noted for his hubris. Marsyas is semi-divine but to the point where he poses a challenge to the gods. Marsyas is said to have found the discarded flute of Athena (who threw it away when she realised how undignified she looked when playing)229 and learned to play beautifully. So much so, however, that he challenged Apollo to a contest in which the Muses would judge. In the end, and not unexpectedly, Apollo triumphed and rewarded himself by tying Marsyas to a tree and flaying him alive. It is perhaps for this reason that Alcibiades flees the words of Socrates as he would the Siren’s song (216a). Alcibiades implies at this point that while Socrates possesses super 228

As mentioned in the Euthyphro (2c-d) and Apology (19b). Plutarch, interestingly, tells the story of Alcibiades’s refusal to play the flute on exactly these grounds. See Plutarch. Lives. Op. cit., p. 197. 229

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human wisdom, it is also a dangerous wisdom which will potentially lead to the ruin of those who cannot escape its captivation. There are two ways in which Alcibiades’ flight from Socrates can be understood. On the one hand, it may be intended politically. In this respect, it is worth noting that when Alcibiades flees Socrates, he flees to the safety of the city. This is important because it suggests that the ruin that Alcibiades fears through his attachment to Socrates is a kind of social or political ruin. By his own admission, Alcibiades is inordinately attached to the life of the city and the honours attendant upon this (216a-c). What he fears, as such, is that the life of philosophy that Socrates represents will force him to abandon the life of public honour to which he is so drawn. Now this may only mean that the ruin heralded by philosophy is the loss of the life of superficial celebrity, in which case it is not easy to feel too much sympathy with Alcibiades at this point. But there may be a deeper issue at stake. Namely that the life of philosophy is incompatible with public life as such. Alcibiades tells us that he feels the draw of philosophy and of the truths which Socrates possesses, but simultaneously notes that philosophy demands too much of us, and will radically alienate us from our fellows. On the other hand, the internal conflict experienced by Alcibiades may stem from an implicit dissatisfaction with the words of Socrates. This relates to the previously mentioned question of language. Socratic language is convincing and even indisputable as far as rationality goes. Alcibiades cannot argue with him and feels that Socrates is always right. But he seems also to feel a certain dissatisfaction with Socratic language vis-à-vis the emotional dimension of human existence. Alcibiades suggests to us that while Socratic words and arguments are intellectually convincing, they take no account of the affective dimension of our being, or of the incarnate vulnerability that is so intrinsic to what it means to be human. 2.4. Socratic Dualism and an Initial Accusation of Ethical Indifference But beyond this, there is even a question of whether Socrates is truthful at all, or if he dissimulates At 216d-e, Alcibiades makes an important comment about Socrates to the effect that there is something deeply deceptive about the philosopher. He refers to the two most common features of Socrates’s public persona; his nescience and his eros.

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You see that Socrates is erotically attracted to beautiful boys, and is always hanging around them in a state of excitement. Also, he’s completely ignorant and knows nothing… this behaviour is just his outer covering, like that of the statues of Silenus. (216d)

Socrates is famous for his professions of ignorance. He denies expertise on almost every topic that we see him discussing in the works of Plato. The only exception to this is love or eros. In both the Symposium (177d) and the Lysis (204c), he tells us that this is the only matter in which he has expertise. But Alcibiades suggests that he may be playing false on both counts. Like the statues of Silenus, this is only an outer appearance while underneath the truth is completely different. Alcibiades claims that the erotic and nescient Socrates is no more than an image cultivated by the philosopher so that he can spend his life “pretending and playing with people.” (216e) In other words, he is not only false, but his dialogue is a form of subtle mockery, in which he engages others in discourse for no other purpose than to amuse himself at their expense. Alcibiades suggests that Socrates has, perhaps, completed the ascent described by Diotima earlier. In that part of Diotima’s teaching, she tells Socrates of the stages of eros through which an initiate lover is lead by his or her guide. Though this passage will be discussed in greater detail in a later chapter, it would do to give some indication of what we are talking about here. There are roughly four stages in this ascent. In the first, the student will experience eros through the love of a particular body, before being instructed to see the beauty of all bodies as akin with the result that attachment to this or that particular body is loosened. Next, the student will see the superiority of beauty of spirit to that of body and will become attracted to beautiful souls. The issue of this will be beautiful discourse or spiritual friendship. As with the first stage there is a movement from particular to general at this stage. The next stage involves the appreciation of the beauty of laws institutions and areas of study. At a certain point comes the fourth stage, which is described passively as a revelation received by the lover of beauty itself, “pure, unmixed, not cluttered up with human flesh and colours and a great mass of mortal rubbish” (211d). The important point here is that the final revelation of beauty as it is in itself allows the lover to see the trivial nature of his previous attachments. It is also worth noting that what we might consider genuine human or ethical relations are relegated to a fairly low place even before this happens and are considered of lesser worth than one’s attachments to laws or areas of study.

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The result of this, interestingly, is a kind of erotic mastery, which involves overcoming an important part of what it means to be human. At this point, Socrates is certainly far from ignorant but is, by contrast, the wisest of all Athenians. Furthermore, there is nothing of eros about him anymore. His profession of ignorance is untrue because he is, in fact, eminently wise while his claim to know about love is also false since his self-sufficiency precludes the need for anything outside himself. But if you could open him up and look inside, you can’t imagine, my fellow-drinkers, how full of moderation (sophrosûne) he is! You should know that he doesn’t care at all if someone is beautiful – he regards this with unbelievable contempt – or is rich or has any other advantages prized by ordinary people. He regards all these possessions as worthless and regards us as worth nothing too. (216d-e)

This is perfectly consistent with the ascent. At the later stages, Diotima told Socrates that he would come to look on the beauty of individuals as a trivial matter since his focus would now be set upon transcendent beauty. We could accuse Alcibiades at this point of setting far too great a value on physical beauty. We would hardly wish to condemn Socrates purely on the basis of his questionable concern for the physical. But if he has indeed come so far in the ascent, it is suggested that he is also unmoved by beauty of soul since this was also a stage to be realised and passed through. It is in no way certain, and probably unlikely, that beauty of soul is what is intended by Alcibiades here but if it were, would the comment on Socrates be any different? His point is that philosophical activity gives rise to an attachment which results in the undermining of all other attachments. Perhaps there is a greater truth revealed in the ascent that we cannot yet see, perhaps the ascent towards commerce with the transcendent forms of goodness and beauty allows for a deeper service and a deeper sense of the truth of interpersonal relations. But if this is so, why does Socrates play with others? Why does he pretend to be something he is not? For Alcibiades, Socrates has completed the ascent and is now eminently wise. He is selfsufficient in his wisdom (sophia) and moderation (sophrosûne). The result of this, thinks Alcibiades, should be a willingness to be of service to his fellows but it is not. Rather, Socrates is indifferent and even contemptuous of those who do not share his wisdom. When wisdom has been achieved, there is no longer any reason to concern oneself with others. They have served their

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purpose in terms of the pursuit of one’s own enlightenment and so now can be neglected. This may be a little hard on Socrates though. What Alcibiades says, and this will be substantiated later, is that Socrates is not moved by what moves others. What is of especial importance to Alcibiades is physicality. Socrates does not respond to physical stimuli in the way Alcibiades does which is enough in itself, he thinks, to question whether there is any eros left in Socrates. It may be, however, that Socrates is simply grown indifferent to corporeality. We need not then ascribe any malicious motivation to his behaviour. Yet, in completing the ascent, we still get the feeling that Socrates has ‘crossed over’. His indifference to materiality is unusual to say the least. He appears to be invulnerable in a way that none of the rest of us can claim to be. We are all, in some ways, at the mercy of ourselves as material entities (a point brought out again and again by Alcibiades and by Aristophanes too) and this makes us vulnerable. But it also makes us human. Socrates’s apparent invulnerability suggests something more than human about him but is it something with which we can relate? If not, we perhaps gain a little more sympathy for Alcibiades and his desire to flee Socrates. The life of philosophy is the life of the more than human and while this is certainly not less than human, it may be somewhat less human. The point can also be put this way. Here and in the passages that will follow – both the story of the seduction (217b-219e) and the account of Socrates’ exploits during wartime (219e-221c) – Alcibiades offers a portrait of a man that is impassive to external, physical stimuli. It is not that he is ascetic. Asceticism is a choice, and often one that involves sacrifice and hardship. Not Socrates is simply indifferent to his own embodiment. Cold or warm, Socrates dresses the same way. If rations are cut off he gets by just fine, though when food and drink is available, he eats and drinks as much if not more than others. The point Alcibiades wants to make is that to be human means to be incarnate so that our bodies are a crucial part of our identity as human. But this means also to be vulnerable and capable of suffering as an embodied being. We suffer both from the elements and also from one another. That we can be so deeply affected by what is other to us entails that we are not sovereign regarding otherness. But Socrates seems no longer capable of such suffering and this throws doubt over his vulnerability and therefore over his humanity. After all, if he is immune to physicality in the way Alcibiades suggests, is it not also possible that he is equally invulnerable regarding the emotional or spiritual? His self-control seems from one point

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of view admirable but might it not also be read as representing an almost monstrous sovereignty to the effect that otherness is no longer properly significant for him. While it is still possible to argue that the view of personhood is too physicalistic for Alcibiades, we cannot but feel that there is something to his argument. I will argue in a later chapter that there is more to eros than physical or even spiritual need according to the Platonic or Socratic account. But even if need or lack are not equivalents of eros, they are very much ingredient to the meaning of that notion. Alcibiades’s critique is heavily dependent on the notion of need: both in terms of his own need for Socrates and Socrates’s own apparent overcoming of any and all needs. He depicts Socrates as one so full of wisdom and moderation that he requires nothing from anybody. In one way, he is a kind of fulfilment of his own notion that ‘the good man cannot be harmed.’230 As Alcibiades understands it, nothing from outside can affect him for good or bad, and while his wisdom is undisputed his humanity, from this point of view, is. 2.5. Sex and Philosophy: Ascent of the Soul and Descent of the Body The incident at the centre of Alcibiades’s critique and indictment of Socrates is his attempted and failed seduction of the philosopher. This story is retold at 217a-219e. This is the most coherent passage in the speech, which has so far consisted of snippets of information and a jumble of images. It is also the passage that is most revealing about the respective characters of Alcibiades and Socrates. Alcibiades’s intention is to once again put Socrates and philosophy on trial by juxtaposing his own erotic experience with the apparent lack of human eros in Socrates. Plato masterfully executes this juxtaposition by having the passage echo the ascent passage in Socrates’s own speech. In the earlier speech, Diotima had revealed to Socrates the ‘rites of love’ (210a), a mystery only the few would understand. In like fashion, Alcibiades speaks of revealing something at this dinner party, which only those who have known Socrates well could possibly understand. This revelation, of course, is the story of Alcibiades’s attempted seduction. It is the story of what eros drove him to and would be so shocking for ‘crude uninitiates’ that they are told not to listen. The others, such as Aristodemus, Agathon, 230

Apology 41c-d

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Phaedrus etc., know something of the “madness and bacchic frenzy” (manías te kai Bacheías) of philosophy and so might excuse things done under this influence that would otherwise be inexcusable.231 So while Diotima’s final ascent comprises the movement of the soul into spiritual communion with the absolutely non-corporeal, Alcibiades speaks of a final movement, albeit a frustrated one in this case, towards physical unity with another body. Socrates speaks of the ascent of the soul out of the body in the search for happiness while Alcibiades intends the same goal through the descent of the soul into the body. Just as importantly, though, Alcibiades thinks that his own experience of eros is more genuine than that of Socrates if, in fact, Socrates can be termed erotic at all. He describes for a second time the unsettling effect that the words of Socrates have had on him, ...my experience is that of someone bitten by a snake. They say that someone who’s had this experience is only prepared to discuss it with those who’ve been bitten themselves, because they’re the only ones who’ll understand and make allowances if the pain drives you to do and say shocking things. I’ve been bitten by something more painful still, and in the place where a bite is most painful – the heart or mind or whatever you should call it. I’ve been struck and bitten by the words of philosophy, which cling on more fiercely than a snake when they take hold of a young and talented mind, and make someone do and say all sorts of things. (217e-218a)

So he is to be excused for what follows as it was done under the influence of philosophic madness. We see also that Alcibiades refers all experience to the body. The unsettling effect of philosophy is described in terms of ‘stings’ and ‘bites’ directed at the “heart or mind or whatever you should call it.” Alcibiades has no sophisticated philosophical understanding of the soul so is left confused by his experience. Yet, he feels the effect of the older man on his soul. He is disturbed by Socrates but does not know what about him actually feels the disturbance. Once again, the emotional particularity and vulnerability of Alcibiades is juxtaposed with the cold rationality of Socrates. But the point is that even in his confusion, or perhaps through it, he has been traumatised by Socrates. More specifically, his erotic attraction to the 231

In the speech of Pausanias, it was argued that eros justifies what would otherwise be shameful. The claim, not unlike the one made by Alcibiades here, was that the power of eros decentres social norms and even our sense of the virtuous.

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older man has made him vulnerable and he has suffered at the hands of the other in a way that cannot be quantified. It is also unlikely that this kind of trauma of otherness could be felt by Socrates. The paradox here is that it is Socrates’ philosophical soul – not his body – which incites in Alcibiades the desire for an intimate human connection with the person of Socrates. This is spurned by the older man, not because he does not happen to find Alcibiades attractive, but because he is no longer capable of responding to particularized beauty at all. In this sense, a fundamental aspect of human intimacy and love ahs been lost to Socrates because he is a philosopher. From Alcibiades’s own point of view, the most shocking thing he has done, under the influence of his love for Socrates, is that he has allowed a reversal in the usual roles associated with these kinds of love affairs. Normally it is the older man (erastes), who pursues a sexual relationship with the younger (eromenos), while the younger man is less interested in sex and allows any sexual contact there is for the sake of the help that may be forthcoming from his pursuer.232 Alcibiades claims he is interested in becoming the lover of Socrates because he recognises the latter’s wisdom and thinks it a wonderful thing. For the chance to learn from Socrates, it is worth allowing their relation to become sexual. But things do not develop as Alcibiades expected. When left alone, Socrates continues to converse with him as though there were others present. Increasingly, Alcibiades becomes agitated and contrives situations that will increase the temptation for Socrates to proposition him sexually. But the expected proposition never comes so Alcibiades makes the offer to Socrates with these words; Nothing is more important to me than becoming as good a person as possible, and I don’t think anyone can help me more effectively that you can in reaching this aim. I’d be far more ashamed of what sensible people would think if I failed to gratify someone like you than of what ordinary, foolish people would think if I did. (218d)

His offer of sex is couched as an appeal for help and for education. He wishes to become a good person and if the price of this is gratifying Socrates sexually, so be it. But still Socrates does nothing. Instead he says:

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The norms for such relations in 5th century Athens are set out in Dover’s Greek Homosexuality. The inequality of interest is also explained and justified in the speech of Pausanias (180c-183d). The older man might help the younger in the pursuit of a career by introducing him to his wealthy and powerful friends.

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My dear Alcibiades, it looks as though you’re really no fool, if what you say about me is true and I somehow have the capacity to make you a better person. You must be seeing in me a beauty beyond comparison and one that’s far superior to your own good looks. If you’ve seen this and are trying to strike a deal with me in which we exchange one type of beauty for another, you’re planning to make a good profit from me. You’re trying to get true beauty in return for its appearance, and so to make an exchange that is really gold for bronze. But look more closely, my good friend, and make sure you’re not making a mistake in thinking I’m of value to you. The mind’s sight begins to see sharply when eyesight declines, and you’re a long way from that point. (218e-219a)

This was about as cutting a rejection as Alcibiades could have imagined. Socrates treats him as though he were a thief. He acts as though the appeal for education is some cunning attempt to steal something from him. He will not exchange the appearance of beauty (physicality) for the real thing (wisdom). This gradation of beauties is, of course, perfectly consistent with the ordering of beauty as found in the ascent passage of his own speech and Socrates is no initiate so he is well beyond the stage of pursuing ephemeral physical beauty. All the same, why would he think that he will loose something in this exchange. If true beauty is as he says, undivided and absolute (211a-b), then surely what Alcibiades seeks is the opportunity to share Socrates’s vision of it, not to take it away from him. What is more, at 207c, Socrates tells Diotima that he has come to her because he requires instruction in the proper use of love. She is unsure as to whether he will be able to understand the nuances of the right use of love but she tells him anyway. In other words, she is generous with her wisdom and educates him. Socrates, when it is his turn to pass on his wisdom, is markedly different. He refuses and turns his back on Alcibiades. That he can do this so easily also reiterates the point about Socrates’s immunity to the appeal of the other, not just physically, but emotionally, spiritually, and morally. In the speech of Alcibiades, the mystery of the pursuit of a particular other is revealed just as Socrates had revealed the mystery of the pursuit of beauty itself. For Socrates, the summit is the revelation of a form that is itself in itself. It is the object of love but it does not return the love directed towards it. Likewise, Alcibiades reveals what he himself learned from his pursuit of this individual Socrates; a self-sufficient philosopher who is as like a form as a human being can be. Socrates, he claims is the preeminent object of love but he is incapable of returning love.

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Through the offer of sex, Alcibiades had expressed both the desire to give of himself (an important aspect of erotic desire according to Diotima’s account) and also the desire to be valued or needed by Socrates. He is frustrated, however, on both counts. In some respects, the humiliation of Alcibiades mirrors the humiliation suffered by Socrates’ interlocutors in many of the other dialogues. Socrates mocks and denudes his dialogue partners, not just by puncturing their arguments, but by showing them that they have nothing he needs in order to pursue his path. Yet while Euthyphro or Callicles or Thrasymachus are humiliated in debates over impersonal topics, the humiliation of Alcibiades is more personal and reaches to the core of his being. That he makes this private humiliation public himself is one of the great ironies of the speech but it is not for nothing since through it, he seeks to outline and clarify the accusation of hubris against Socrates. 2.6. Socrates and the Cardinal Virtues In the closing stages of Alcibiades’s speech he returns to offering the same type of piecemeal information he began with. He recounts the strangeness of Socrates through stories of their time together in the army. These are repetitive so there is no need to go into any great detail. Suffice it to say that they deal with Socrates’s ability to survive without food and his immunity to the elements. They also mention his unparalleled bravery and loyalty to his fellow soldiers. Yet, in spite of this, Alcibiades tells us that Socrates was far from popular with the other soldiers. His behaviour was not admired but resented because they felt that Socrates looked down on them (220c). Disorderly as this part of the speech is, though, it allows Alcibiades to attribute to Socrates the third of the four cardinal virtues. For the Greeks there were four cardinal virtues. These were wisdom (sophia), courage (andreia), moderation or temperance (sophrosune) and justice (dike). In this speech, Socrates is held up as the object of love par excellence. But is he an exemplar to follow? Alcibiades insists that he is wise and that he is full of moderation. The battle stories testify to the courage of Socrates. The only of the virtues that is not mentioned is justice, which is the most interpersonal of the virtues. Far from being just, Socrates is accused of hubris. He is arrogant in his dealings with others and treats them with contempt because he considers their existence worthless in comparison to the objects of contemplation whose company he keeps. These ideal objects include the forms of goodness and beauty and justice but the great irony is that they have not

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taught Socrates to act in a way that is just. The reason is that he does not seem to think that he owes justice to others. In book I of the Republic, a standard Athenian definition of justice is put forward. We should treat everyone according to their due.233 But in the scala amoris of the Symposium, the due of individual others is not that much. They are, after all, worth less than a mathematical theorem or a successful law. Socrates’ wisdom is such that he does not concern himself with relations with others. They no longer have anything to teach him since he understands all he needs to of them through his philosophical ascent through the stages in the rites of love. Particulars participate in beauty to be sure but they do so only dimly. If one can understand the source of this beauty, there is no more mystery about the particular other. It is as challenge to precisely this that the speech of Alcibiades is set. His eros is wild and it is a cause of great suffering for him but the eros of Socrates, if it exists, is one that does not risk loss or frustration and this being the case, he misses a crucial dimension of human experience. In coming to know ourselves as weak, vulnerable and limited, we come to know what is other than ourselves, insofar as this touches us from outside. Socratic self-sufficiency is the very antithesis of this because, in risking nothing, it remains closed to what is genuinely outside or other. I would like to conclude this chapter by referring here to two canonical treatments of the Symposium which offer compatible interpretations of the dialogue’s dramatic action. These support and deepen the critique that I have presented the speech of Alcibiades as representing. They are, firstly, “The Individual as Object of Love” by Gregory Vlastos234 and “The Speech of Alcibiades: A Reading of the Symposium” by Martha Nussbaum.235 Because these are so important to the argument of the present work, I will now summarise the arguments of both.

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Republic I, 331e. Vlastos (1973). Op. cit., pp. 3-42. 235 Nussbaum (2001a). Op. cit., pp. 165-199. 234

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3. Canonical Readings of the Text 3.1. Gregory Vlastos: Plato’s Ethical Blindspot It is no overstatement to say that Gregory Vlastos’s article is canonical in the area of Platonic ethics and love theory. The basic tenet of this article is the suggestion that Plato’s theory of love is seriously deficient regarding its sense of individual others. Though his reading of Plato here covers the Lysis, Republic, and Symposium, I will restrict my own comment on the article to his treatment of the Symposium. He focuses here on the scala amoris that is presented to Socrates by Diotima in the Symposium (210a-212a). Vlastos compares this unfavourably with Aristotle’s sense of the love that is felt for an other. He quotes a passage in the Rhetoric where Aristotle says: Let philein be defined as wishing for someone what you believe to be good things – wishing this not for your own sake but for his – and acting so far as you can to bring them about.236

For Vlastos, even Aristotle’s perfect friendship is not quite perfect but it does, he says, capture two important intuitions we have about interpersonal love; namely that others should be loved as unique individuals and that they should be loved for their own sake. We are referring here, of course, to love generally and not just eros but since Plato’s love theory apparently fills out what he had said about friendship237, the problem must be addressed. In the scala amoris of the Symposium, Plato comes up short on both counts. On the one hand, the guide encourages the lover to see all instances of physical or spiritual beauty as instances that are the same in kind, the intention being to loosen attachments to individuals. On the other hand, the purpose of cultivating eros for others when it is cultivated, is the final vision of the beauty revealed to the soul and not the other person’s own good. Vlastos says that for Plato, 236

Aristotle, Rhetoric 1380b35-1381a1. Cited in Vlastos (1973). Op. cit., p. 3. Friendship (philia) is the theme of the dialogue Lysis, which ends in aporia both because the attempt to discover the ultimate object of love fails, and because, regardless the result of this search, the value of friendship has been instrumentalized to the point of being dissolved. It is interesting to note that Aristotle’s treatment of friendship in books 8 & 9 of Nichomachean Ethics draw heavily on the Lysis discussion, and yet is more successful, because of Aristotle’s refusal to collapse the discussions into a discussion of ultimate objects of love.

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…the individual, in the uniqueness and integrity of his or her own individuality, will never be the object of our love. This seems to me the cardinal flaw in Plato’s theory. It does not provide for love of whole persons, but only for love of that abstract version of persons which consists of the complex of their best qualities.238

We might even go further and say that not only do individuals not happen to be the objects of love for Plato but that when such an attachment is formed, we must do all that we can to undo it. The reason is that the individual always fall short of the ideal perfection that is the true object of erotic love. Thus, while an individual might indicate or point to this true object, he or she must never be mistaken for it. We must love individuals only insofar as they are beautiful and good. The basis of the problem here is Plato’s insistence that what attracts us in persons is beauty and further, that it is an instance of a beauty that is, at root, uniform. Thus the beauty of a person is simply a quantity of the same type of beauty that might, for example, obtain in a mathematical theorem. In the case of the scala amoris, the problem is deepened by the suggestion that the quantity of beauty in a person is even less than that in the theorem and, of course, the quantity in both is less than in beauty itself. Vlastos’ critique centring on the issue of particularity is entirely understandable vis-à-vis our intuitions about the love of persons. He does not say that persons are not loved in Plato since they clearly are. The problem, rather, is the reason they are loved. We must not love others because of their uniqueness but because of qualities they possess that are universal. I might love A more than B but only because A possesses a greater quantity of beauty or goodness than B. According to Vlastos, one of the most important roots of this view is the fact of Plato’s own homosexuality.239 I do not wish to enter into a discussion here of the precise nature of Plato’s sexuality but it seems that if he was homosexual by orientation, he was not by practice.240 For Vlastos, Plato’s own revulsion of the physical urges aroused by his own sexuality caused him to sublimate the love of other humans into a spiritual love. This would ex238

Vlastos (1973). Op. cit., p. 19. Vlastos cites as evidence the fact that in almost all instances in which sexual arousal is mentioned in Plato, the context is homosexual. Ibid., p. 25-6. 240 At Laws 836b-c, sexual intercourse between men is referred to as ‘contrary to nature.’ 239

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plain why others occupy such a lowly place on the scala amoris and why physical love contributes nothing to insight into the highest love.241 Individual others are, says Vlastos, only “place-holders of the predicates ‘useful’ and ‘beautiful”’.242 Any attachment we feel to them must be quickly overcome since scientific theories and philosophical systems are “not only as good as persons, but distinctly better.”243 Thus, Vlastos essentially makes the claim that Plato’s sexuality does bleed into his ethics as represented here by Socrates. I mean that we might well be reserved about accepting Alcibiades’ claim that Socrates’s sexual impassion necessarily implies ethical indifference. Vlastos, however, gives us reason to think that while the implication of ethical indifference is not necessary, it is actual. According to this view, Plato’s theory of interpersonal love is not only instrumentalist (in the sense that others, even when they are loved, are loved not for their own sake but for mine) but also pathological. Whether we accept this view of a pathology in Plato’s love theory or not, the criticism here is important. The ultimate fulfilment of erotic love is “the farthest removed from affection for concrete human beings.”244 In fact, the whole of Plato’s love theory comprises the attempt to overcome affection for particular others and replace it with love for an impersonal object.245 Though Vlastos never refers to the speech of Alcibiades in his article, it is clear that there is an application given the juxtaposition in the Symposium of the philosophical eros for the impersonal Good and the love of a particular individual. This conflict, in which both claim to be telling the truth, is one of which there can be no reconciliation. What we must decide is whether one or the other is really telling the truth or if they are both telling truths that are incompatible. If this latter is the case, it may be that Socrates’s scala amoris remains true but is not the whole truth. Does it miss something fundamental about the connection between love and the truth of the human condition that Alcibiades brings to our attention?

241

See also Singer (2009) Op. cit., p. 75-6. Vlastos (1973). Op. cit., p. 26. 243 Ibid. 244 Ibid., p. 32. 245 Vlastos is aware of a counter-argument based on Socrates’s profession of love for his fellow citizens who are neither wise nor good (Apology 29d) but says that this only proves that a man can be better than his theory. Ibid., p. 9. 242

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3.2. Martha Nussbaum: Plato’s Recognition of the Inhumanity of Socrates In fact, this is close enough to what Martha Nussbaum claims to be going on in the Symposium. For the most part she accepts the criticism levelled by Vlastos but insists that Plato is himself aware of the defective and partial nature of the scala amoris, as cited by Socrates in the dialogue. In this way, she argues that the critique of Socratic eros is both recognised and explored by Plato here. Unlike Vlastos, she is explicitly attentive to the speech of Alcibiades which she claims is crucial to understanding the dialogue at all. For Nussbaum, the speech of Alcibiades is not simply the story of one man’s tragedy but the tragedy of philosophy. Or rather, it tells the tragic story of what philosophy, after the model of Socrates, risks losing. In Socrates’s speech about eros, he recounted the story of philosophy’s pursuit of the vision of a beauty that is untrammelled by human limitations and contingencies. In this sense, it is supra human or transcendent. What is more, it promises fulfilment or happiness beyond what any finite object can offer. This seems more than enough to win us over to the life of philosophy. What happens with the appearance and speech of Alcibiades, however, is a warning about the sacrifices entailed by this way of life. As much as the speech of Alcibiades is the story of his own mistreatment at the hands of Socrates, it is also the story of the inhumanity of philosophy. Nussbaum appears to have a deep sympathy with the character of Alcibiades in the dialogue and with his indictment of philosophy. “If the ascent appears remote from human nature”, she says “that is because…it is a device for progressing beyond the merely human.”246 And by ‘beyond the merely human’ here she means other than human. It is what Denis De Rougemont calls man’s “infinite transcendence…without return.”247 Socrates is indifferent to the concerns of ordinary human beings because he has realised a higher human possibility through the ascent that takes him away from bodies and matter and separates him from the rest of human nature.248 This is problematic for Socrates’s very humanity because he no longer finds in his fellows any interesting communication of the Good, the true object of love,

246

Nussbaum (2001a). Op. cit., p. 181. De Rougemont, D. (1983). Love in the Western World. Translated from French by Montgomery Belgion. Princeton. Princeton University Press, p. 62. 248 De Rougemont. Ibid., p. 61; Singer (2009). Op. cit., p. 81.

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which gives itself only to philosophical intuition.249 He has made the ascent in spite of Diotima’s doubts250 but the result is that in his self-sufficient contemplation he has become dismissive of the world around him. Nussbaum says that: Socrates has so dissociated himself from his body that he genuinely does not feel its pain, or regard its sufferings as things genuinely happening to him.251

For those who know him, then, he has become like the forms he spends his time contemplating; hard, unresponsive, impassive and stone-like. This Socrates is more Cartesian than the later Descartes could ever hope to be. He is pure mind contemplating eternal truths, with all the impassive imperturbability this entails. None of this means that the truth of the ascent of Socrates and Diotima is untrue but only that its truth is other than the truth of the lived experience of the particular. As Nussbaum puts it: Socratic philosophy cannot allow the truths of Alcibiades to count as contributions to philosophical understanding.252

They are an intrusion into the world of philosophy in a way that is, according to Nussbaum, even more traumatic than the revelation of beauty at the end of the ascent. Even the very entrance of Alcibiades testifies to this. From the rarefied contemplative world of the self-sufficient philosopher we are suddenly, with an abrupt jolt, returned to the world we inhabit and invited to see this vision, too, as a dawning and a revelation.253

Alcibiades’ story of his passion for an individual is incompatible with the erotic ascent of Socrates because it fails to make the intuitive connection between the various instances of beauty and so becomes, what Socrates de249

Singer puts the point as follows: “In being the desire for the perpetual possession of the Good, love strives for union with a metaphysical principle that does not exist (in nature or anywhere else) and shows itself only to philosophic intuition.” Op. cit., p. 82. 250 At 210a Diotima wonders whether Socrates ‘could manage’ initiation into the erotic mysteries. 251 Nussbaum (2001a). Op. cit., p. 183. 252 Ibid., p. 186. It is, of course, important to note that precisely fragility and vulnerability are the themes of Nussbaum’s study. She is concerned with the way in which particularity can find a place or a voice in philosophical systems. 253 ibid., p. 184.

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scribed, as a ‘mad attachment’ to a particular. For Socrates on this reading, Alcibiades’ attachment is both mad in the sense of frenzied and also in the sense of disproportionate and unreasonable. Their respective truths are incommensurable and here, for Nussbaum, is the key to the Symposium as a whole. She says: There dawns on us the full light of Plato’s design, his comic tragedy of choice and practical wisdom. We see two kinds of value, two kinds of knowledge; and we see that we must choose. One sort of understanding blocks out the other.254

Nussbaum does not, of course, make a saint out of Alcibiades and notes that his speech tells his own story of the ‘contemptuous overweening of the body’, but it is also the story of Socrates’s ‘contemptuous overweening of reason’.255 In other words, there is an excess to both characters which it is perhaps Plato’s intention to uncover and explore. But we are less concerned with the character flaws of Alcibiades here than of Socrates. These readings proffer a damming and important charge against philosophy. They claim that the eros of Socratic philosophy is either incompatible with or hostile to genuine relations with others. Thus, Socrates for all his wisdom knows nothing of the wonder of an other person as a unique whole. In fact, his knowledge precludes this. The great irony is that while Socrates concerns himself with notions such as justice, virtue and goodness, he perhaps knows little of these in lived situations since his response to concrete others is one of disdain. He appears also to be impassive regarding incarnate beauty. He looks through and beyond to the higher beauty in relation to which others are no more than signifiers at best and ‘mortal rubbish’ at worst. From one point of view, this objection revolves around the perceived dualism of Socratic or Platonic philosophy. The Good or beauty in itself are not merely transcendent on this view but utterly other than the world of sense. Thus, Socrates is no longer capable of responding in a way that might be considered remotely human because his attention is now focused on the hyperouranian forms, which do not suffer from the maladies of vulnerability, permeability or finitude. The problem is that we begin to suspect that the two realms of Plato’s ontology are so unlike one another as to require the 254 255

Ibid., p. 198. Ibid., p. 198.

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total refusal of the one for the sake of the other. Alcibiades has made his choice but so has Socrates. 4. In Conclusion: Philosophical Eros, Dualism and Otherness The speech of Alcibiades offers an important critique of Socrates and also of Platonic philosophy. If we go along with Gregory Vlastos, we can interpret it as highlighting exactly what is wrong with Platonic love theory. Yet, we must remember that this speech is written by Plato.256 It was for this reason that Martha Nussbaum read the speech as both Plato critiquing his own philosophy and highlighting the irreducibility of choice in matters of love. For her, we are offered two importantly different understandings of eros: one in which the other is the object of love and one in which the other is only suggestive of the Good as the real object of love. The basis of the critique of Alcibiades is that Socrates is impassive regarding others. The reason is either (i) that he is no longer erotic but selfsufficient having completed the ascent towards the Good or truly beautiful, or (ii) that his eros is operative at a different level and intends the transcendent objects of thought. I think that both of these are at stake in one way or another. Implied in both is that, otherness, as represented by individuals, does not concern him. This last claim above all is of crucial importance, and is one to which we will return. Regarding the second reason above, we can raise certain questions about the relation between Socratic or philosophical love and ethics. Alcibiades does not mean to criticise Socrates as unethical but if he is as impassive regarding others as is suggested and considers them worthless in relation to the real object of love, we can ask whether this kind of love can be ethically fruitful at all. Essentially, the problem is that the ontological picture at stake is a dualistic one. In spite of what Alcibiades thinks, Socrates is still a lover, but what he loves is something other than and inimical to, the human. His love theory as presented here involves overcoming attachments to others for the sake of the soul’s commerce with the Good itself. The eros of the soul transcends the bounds of the human but there is no suggestion of a return or 256

Precisely this fact makes it likely that, if anything, Nussbaum’s reading is more accurate. If my reading of the speech is correct, it may be that Vlastos overlooked this point.

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a way down through which we might love others for their own sake. The coupling of eros with ontological dualism here means that others are on the wrong side of the divide and so can never be objects of love. As such, it is not clear ethics can hold a very high place in Socratic/Platonic philosophy. Of course, Plato often suggests in the dialogues that Socrates is genuinely concerned with the welfare of others but this may be, as Vlastos suggested, an indication that Socrates is better than his theory.257 For there is nothing in the scala amoris itself to suggest that he should be so concerned. There is nothing in the theory to suggest that he should be hostile to individual others but it is suggested that they are not of much account. Socrates is concerned with what is transcendent, impermanent and unchanging while individuals are impermanent, finite and vulnerable. In the case of Alcibiades, they are also changeable to the point of being erratic. But in spite of the many faults of Alcibiades, there remains a certain uneasiness about the understanding of particulars that is operative in the speech of Socrates. In one sense, he is an exemplar to follow insofar as he realises a possibility at the limits of the human but on the other hand, one of the fruits of this is the apparent loss of even his sense of his own embodied finitude. This is a loss that goes right to the heart of what it means to be human and impacts on one’s capacity to be responsive both as human and in relation to human others. Once again, the great irony is that this risk issues from Socrates’s pursuit of philosophical truth. He is supposed to be concerned with the good life, both in relation to himself and to others. But because his (or Plato’s) ontology is dualist, the re-orientation of desire towards the Good as ultimate means that he risks losing a sense of the value of the individual, human other. In fact, the problem may be even more serious. As we saw, it may even be the case that Socrates has achieved an intellectual self-sufficiency to the point that his eros is, as Alcibiades claimed, sham. If so, the question of the legitimacy of the transcendence of the Good in the Socratic account of eros can be raised. I mean to say that Socrates is allegedly concerned with the Good as transcendent and yet if the account of his character offered by Alcibiades is correct, there are surely grounds for questioning whether the Good as object of philosophic eros is properly transcendent.

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And of course the Socrates of the Symposium is probably more Platonic than Socratic so we cannot be sure of even this.

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If Socrates is impassive regarding what is other and is content to live a life of self-sufficient contemplation, one wonders whether the object of his eros is transcendent in itself or if it is simply transcendent with respect to corporeality. The point is that a relation of self-sufficiency is not possible with transcendence. In fact, it is a contradiction in terms. Transcendence by definition entails more than limited finitude can do justice to. Any relation with a transcendent object demands transcendence as a necessary term. It must be dynamic and therefore vulnerable. If dynamism and vulnerability are qualities that Socrates lacks, it becomes permissible to ask whether the Good about which he speaks is transcendent in the more genuine sense or whether it is simply the Good of a type of theoretical knowledge of the whole that is essentially reductive. In asking this question we also bring the two speeches so far examined into line with each other. For both Aristophanes and Alcibiades, the accusation is made against the tendency of philosophy to be reductive. In one case it reduces divinity in the other case incarnate particularity to a specific kind of rationality. In the end, both of Socrates’s critics are making an appeal on behalf of what cannot be reduced, to an indeterminable at the heart of the human existence that is drastically overlooked or subjugated by philosophy. For Socrates, they think, the good life cannot be realised unless all indeterminables become determinable. Against this, they seek to identify and generate some kind of finessed sense of aspects of the real that are irreducible. Furthermore, they claim that it is eros, that most essential of human characteristics that reveals this irreducibility to us. The dangerous hubris of philosophy entails closing itself to those aspects of the human condition (embodiment, finitude, interpersonal affectivity, politics) that make it possible for us to exist at all as human beings. In thus closing itself, philosophy loses its ability to be just. This will be the topic of our next chapters.

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Defending Philosophy 2: Desire and Dualism as the Prerequisites of Ethics in the Early Thought of Emmanuel Lévinas

The speech of Alcibiades in the Symposium is the story of one individual’s passionate love for another. But it may also be an indictment of the totalizing tendency of philosophical eros. It is an appeal for recognition as particular insofar as Alcibiades wants to be valued by Socrates in isolation from his subsumption into a system of thought that relativizes, and ultimately erases, all particularity. We interpreted his speech as putting forward the idea that there is a value in the irreducible concrete thereness of particular individuals that system belies. For Socrates, in the ascent passage of his speech, beauty as manifested in either the body or soul of another is of a piece with beauty per se and it is only insofar as the individual manifests this uniform beauty that he or she is valuable at all.258 In terms of the philosopher’s pursuit of truth and goodness, the irreducibly singular dimension of the existent is not valued. What is valuable is the universal of which the particular is no more than an exemplar. The universal can be an object of contemplation while the particular cannot be. As such, particularity qua particularity is part of the dross of materiality. Not only does the philosopher not concern herself with it but claims that it is not worthy of concern at all. Since the philosopher is the one concerned with truth and the Good of the whole, this constitutes a serious undermining of the value of particular others and of the notion of irreducibility in general. Alongside the speech of Aristophanes, which identified philosophical eros as a monstrous transcending energy that sought spiritual hegemony, the speech of Alcibiades identifies the tendency of this transcending energy to reduce otherness to system in a way that fails to accommodate the desire for recognition as particular, which is so fundamental to the human soul. In the 258

This is a broad stroke summary of the arguments of Vlastos and Nussbaum. They both take this indictment seriously to the extent that Vlastos ultimately condemns Plato while Nussbaum defends him but only at the expense of Socrates and Socratic eros.

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first speech we are presented with philosophical eros ascending towards its goal of superiority. In the second, we are presented with the fruits of this pursuit and the consequent denial and rejection of difference for the sake of a rationally transparent totality.259 In both cases, there is the suggestion that while philosophical eros is indeed a transcending energy, it finally recognises nothing transcendent or properly other to its own categories. Both of the speeches discussed treated eros alongside a profound sense of both the vulnerable and irreducible aspects of human existence to which philosophy, construed as system, could not do justice.260 Socrates, on the other hand, is presented as the great reducer of difference. He identifies fundamental samenesses to the extent that existence is reduced to a singular principle to which he, as philosopher, has unique access. He may or may not be jealously protective of his knowledge of the whole but this is not the point. Even if he is not, the fact remains that we are presented with a picture of a Socrates who insists that the whole of existence can be uncovered and made comprehensible by the activity of philosophy. As such, the fate of the individual is to be stripped of his or her particularity and made a manifestation of an impersonal and primordial whole. In chapter 6 of this work, we will return to both of these critiques. At that time we will take a closer look at the indictment presented by Alcibiades both in terms of its content and in terms of the one who brings it. Even so far, I have been sceptical about the tendency to sanitise the motivations of Alcibiades.261 He is a deceitful and untrustworthy opportunist. But even so, he throws doubt on the genuineness of transcendence as Socrates presents it. He suggests that the philosopher is more concerned with transcending the everyday and the particular in a way that is self-sufficiently contented than in searching for a transcendence that would be more likely to be chastening. At this point, we turn to the second of our contemporary thinkers. Insofar as Nietzsche defended the perpetually transcending movement of spirit suggested as the basis of philosophy by Aristophanes, he sought to defend Plato and Socrates by identifying transvaluation as the inner core of their activity. The contemporary philosopher we will be discussing in the subse259

In a later chapter, I will challenge these claims as they relate to the philosophical eros of Plato and Socrates. What I am doing here is restating the indictment. 260 And of course, they both construe Socratic philosophy as essentially system. 261 I find this tendency in Martha Nussbaum’s otherwise thought-provoking treatment of the speech.

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quent chapters is Emmanuel Lévinas. Emmanuel Lévinas is also, in many important ways, a defender of Plato/Socrates in the sense that he takes from Plato one of the most enduring insights of his own work. But he also takes seriously the critique as presented by Alcibiades.262 In other words, the accusation that philosophy intends self-sufficiency and the reduction or relativisation of otherness is one close to his heart, even if his reasons for making this claim are not those of Alcibiades. Even so, there is enough similarity regarding the indictment in its general aspect to make discussion of Lévinas a suitable counterpart to the speech of Alcibiades. Lévinas has never disavowed or sought to conceal his debt to Plato. Plato’s statement that the Good is ‘beyond being’ from Republic 509b acts as a leitmotif in the entirety of the Lévinasian corpus. And yet, Lévinas’ debt to Plato is not so strong that his work could be considered along the lines of antiquitism. While deeply concerned with this Platonic phrase, it is never quite clear whether Plato himself, in Lévinas’ eyes, is fully faithful to this insight. On the surface, the greatest point in common between Lévinas and Plato is their insistence on the radical alterity of the Good and on the primordiality of desire as a path to the Good. In the present chapter, I will attempt to explore this idea as it manifests itself in the early thought of Lévinas. I will examine the evolution of his philosophy of desire as it relates to a sense of both Goodness and alterity. I will argue that the flowering of Lévinas’ early thought in Totality and Infinity demonstrates both a proximity and distance from the thought of Plato. On the one hand, he makes central the Platonic notion of the ‘Good beyond Being’ while, on the other hand, he is suspicious of the culmination of Plato’s project and insistence of the interpenetration of Being and the Good. He also reverses Plato’s notion of metaphysics as prerequisite to ethics in the name of a more genuine ethics of alterity. In this way, his relevance alongside the Alcibiades critique will become clear. In the course of this exposition, I will examine the importance and meaning of the notion of erotic desire for Lévinas and its relation to both (a) 262

I have phrased this point thus because I find no evidence to suggest that Lévinas ever read the speech of Alcibiades in the way I have presented it. But while Lévinas’ critique is not be reducible to Alcibiades’, we will argue that the two are importantly related to each other inasmuch as they focus on the relationship between the philosophical life and openness to alterity.

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the Platonic notion and (b) ethical desire. In this and the next chapter, we will see the development of the thought of one of the 20th century’s most important thinkers. As important as he is, however, he is prone to inconsistencies that can be problematic insofar as they are often left unjustified. This last is a claim I will attempt to support as I proceed. 1. Lévinas: By Way of Introduction In my reading of the work of Nietzsche, I followed the by now traditional reading of him as a Platonist who seeks to invert Plato.263 This kind of ascription would rarely if ever be applied to the work of Lévinas but it would not be altogether inaccurate. While the thought of Plato, at least in the Symposium, tends to begin with concrete particularity and end in the company of Being itself, the thought of Lévinas begins with his rather negative sense of Being qua Being and ends with his sense of the transcendent particularity of the Good. 1.1. Lévinas and the Indictment of the Western Tradition Insofar as this thesis intends to explore the indictment of philosophy, Lévinas is an excellent subject since the indictment of philosophy – at least western tradition of philosophy – is one of the most defining features of his thought. As one of the undisputed fathers of this tradition, Plato must be immediately suspect notwithstanding Lévinas’ partial Platonism. Of course, my interest here is more local and concerns only the indictment of philosophy inasmuch as it relates to the centrality of Platonic eros. It is first necessary, however, to try and get a sense of the meaning of Lévinas’s critique as a whole. From the time of his earliest original work, Lévinas expresses a certain dissatisfaction with the contemporary philosophical climate.264 He makes it clear that the central target of his work will be 263

At the least, Nietzsche seeks to invert the spirit of Platonism traditionally understood. 264 I include neither Lévinas, E. (1995). The Theory of Intuition in Husserl’s Phenomenology. Translated from French by Andre Orianne . Evanston: Northwestern University Press, nor Lévinas, E. (1974). En Découvrant l’Existence avec Husserl et Heidegger. Paris: Librairie Philosophique, in this category because they are early

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the thought of Heidegger but his indictment of the tradition of a whole stems from the view that the work of Heidegger is in fact the culmination of one of the deepest exigencies in western thought in general. He says that his own thought is marked by “a profound need to leave the climate of[Heideggerian] philosophy and by the conviction that we cannot leave it for a philosophy that would be pre-Heideggerian.”265 Of course as a student of Husserl, he may intend the founder of phenomenology with this remark.266 Yet in light of his repeated condemnations of the ‘tradition of western philosophy’ it is likely that his critique of the ‘pre-Heideggerian’ runs deeper. In fact, he is clear that western thought has most often been a philosophy of power, an ontology or a reduction of the other to the same by interposition of a middle and neutral term that ensures the comprehension of being.267

This is a critique of the tradition’s prioritization of the unfolding of an ultimate horizon of comprehension (Being) as the primary task of philosophy and of life. For Lévinas, this reductive tendency in philosophy is originally Greek. The primacy of the same was Socrates’s teaching: to receive nothing of the Other but what is in me, as though from all eternity I was in possession of what comes to me from the outside – to receive nothing or to be free. (TI 43; TeI 34)

And again:

exegetical works, which are of limited import in understanding the originality of the mature Lévinas. 265 Lévinas, E. (1963). De L’Existence à L’Existant. Paris: Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, 2nd ed., p. 19. Translated by Alphonso Lingis asLévinas, E. (2001). Existence and Existents. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, p. 4. Henceforth EE and DEE. 266 Lévinas’s first book was devoted to the thought of Husserl. Entitled The Theory of Intuition in Husserl’s phenomenology (1930), it is a landmark book that introduced phenomenology to France. It was, in fact, it was mostly through Lévinas that French philosophers, including Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, first became acquainted with phenomenology. 267 Lévinas, E. (1961). Totalité et Infini. Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff Press, p. 33-4. Translated by Alphonso Lingis as Lévinas, E. (1969). Totality and Infinity. Pittsburgh: Dusquesne University Press, p. 43. Henceforth TI and TeI.

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According to the Greek model, intelligibility is what can be rendered present…exposed and disclosed in pure light. To thus equate truth with presence is to presume that however different the two terms of a relation might appear…they can ultimately be rendered commensurate and simultaneous, the same…The Greek notion of Being is essentially this presence.268

Since before the time of Aristotle’s first philosophy and the science of Being qua Being, the western tradition has privileged the notion of Being as pristine and ultimate.269 Part and parcel of this view is the notion of the sanctity of freedom and the importance of the relation of knowing as the primordial relation of the living subject in relation to Being. The subject is the I as free and the highest task that can be undertaken by a human being is that of disclosing or making sense of Being in its otherness. Indeed if knowing is the ultimate task of rational existence, then freedom becomes a necessity, or the highest value of existence. All else is subordinated to this undertaking including the relation between one human being and another. And here is exactly the problem as Lévinas sees it. For Lévinas’s is a philosophy that seeks to be ineluctably dialogical in asserting the irreducibility of the other to the same. The notions of ‘other’ and ‘same’ in the thought of Lévinas are somewhat idiosyncratic and will be clarified as we proceed but, for now, it is enough to note that his project consists in establishing the priority of ethics and a responsiveness to the other that he believes goes against the grain of western thought. This is a rather surprising claim initially insofar as the ethical appears to have been a crucial and central interest of western thinking since at least the time of Socrates.270 The immensity of Lévinas’s indictment becomes clear however when we realise that he is asserting that, though this may be the case, the fact of the matter is that philosophy’s ethical interest has always been subordinated to the ontological interest in making sense of 268

Kearney, R. ed. (1984). Emmanuel Lévinas. In Dialogues with Contemporary Continental Thinkers. Manchester: Manchester University Press, p. 55. This interview took place in 1981 and demonstrates the extent to which Lévinas has now become influenced by Heidegger and Derrida’s notion of the tradition as a metaphysics of presence. 269 Lévinas often traces this back ultimately to Parmenides and Eleatism. 270 The pre-Socratics, of whom Heidegger is so fond, have a tendency to focus on cosmological speculation at the expense of the ethical. This is not to say that they subordinated ethics to cosmology necessarily but it is not until the time of Socrates that ethics moves into the forefront of philosophical speculation.

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Being as a whole. In other words, ethics has always been a part of western philosophical thinking, but it has always been contextualized in terms of metaphysical systems, to the extent that ethics requires justification form without the immediacy of the relation between I and other. Thus, again, the relation with the other only appears in the context of the relation with Being, so that ethics has been deduced as an aspect of ontology. At one point, Lévinas says that his own thought manifests the attempt to [d]ecline at the same time the ontology of isolated subjectivity and the ontology of impersonal reason realizing itself through history. (TI 305; TeI 341)

This comment is quite revealing insofar as it suggests that Lévinas’ critique is narrower than even he himself thinks.271 I mean that he insists that his critique relates to the tradition as a whole while the above statement seems to reduce it to more local targets. On the one hand, the reference to ‘isolated subjectivity’ may be read as identifying existentialism and the philosophy of, say, Kierkegaard while the notion of ‘impersonal reason realizing itself through history’ is quite clearly aimed at Hegel and Hegelianism. In other words, it appears as though when speaking of the tradition of western philosophy, Lévinas identifies a trend towards a type of reduction of otherness that is specifically a feature of modernism. The situation is further complicated by the fact that Lévinas often identifies Plato, Plotinus and Descartes amongst others as philosophical heroes. These are, of course, not only representatives of the western tradition but philosophers whose thought profoundly shaped that tradition. Insofar as Lévinas cites the ‘good beyond being’, Plotinus’s radically transcendent one or the idea of infinity in Descartes, his indictment appears strained. One interpretation might be that he is trying to reclaim a sense of otherness that was prevalent in pre-modern thought but has been eclipsed in the post271

The issue of Lévinas’s indictment and what and who exactly are implicated is a fascinating one. Unfortunately, the restrictions of the present work make it necessary for me to take the indictment at face value for the most part. An interesting discussion of this topic can be found in Desmond, W. (1994). Lévinas, Marcel, Jaspers. In Richard Kearney (Editor). Twentieth Century Continental Philosophy. London: Routledge, pp. 131-74 and also in Farley, W. (1996). Eros for the Other: Retaining Truth in a Pluralistic World. Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania University Press, pp. 39-67.

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Hegelian era. But if this were so, why does he consistently refer to the western tradition rather than speaking of the western tradition since Hegel? To be fair to Lévinas, he does, in fact, discuss what he calls the ‘tradition of heteronomy’ in a 1957 article entitled “Philosophy and the Idea of Infinity.”272 Here he mentions a tradition that includes Plato and Descartes, that “does not read right in might and does not reduce every other to the same.”273 That is, he claims that philosophy has not always been, nor is necessarily, allergic to otherness. But, as far as I am aware, this article is as close as Lévinas ever comes to thinking of his own work in the context of a tradition. And even here, the heroes of this tradition are ambiguous in that it is suggested that Lévinas will do more with their heteronymous insights than they themselves would have wished. My own view is that there is some confusion regarding Lévinas’s critique, which is caused by his own proclivity towards overstatement. I mean that he justifies the radical nature of his own work by contrasting it with “the choice of Western philosophy that has most often been on the side of freedom and the same.”274 Yes, he mentions a tradition of heteronomy but, if such a tradition exists and includes such notable figures, why do we need such a radical philosophy of the other? Lévinas’s indictment, in fact, becomes more inclusive as the years go by and I can only think that this is strategic; i.e. his heteronymous thought of the other is radical precisely because it has been marginalized by the tradition. The fact of the matter is that he does intend more than post-Hegelian thought in his critique. He celebrates the above-mentioned unique contributions of Plato, Descartes, Plotinus etc., but his point is that as a whole the western tradition has not been faithful to them. He says, for example, that Plato’s ‘Good beyond being’, …should have served as a foundation for a pluralist philosophy in which the plurality of being would not disappear into the unity of number nor be integrated into a totality. (TI 80; TeI 79) 272

Lévinas, E. (1957).La Philosophie et l’idée de l’infini. In Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale, 62, pp. 241-53; Lévinas, E. (1987). Philosophy and the Idea of Infinity. Collected Philosophical Papers. Translated from French by Alphonso Lingis. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Press, pp. 47-59. All future reference is to the English translation. 273 Ibid., p. 53. 274 Ibid., p. 48.

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As we shall see, it is not even clear that Plato himself is true to this insight in the eyes of Lévinas.275 Plato’s insight “should have served as a foundation for a pluralist philosophy” (TI 80; TeI 79). The implication, of course, is that it has not. It would seem that for Lévinas, these insights are almost aberrations in the tradition, which became increasingly marginalised in modern and contemporary thought. It is his intention to renew them and to make them the cornerstones of his own indictment of the tradition from which they sprung. If Lévinas is right and western philosophy has privileged notions such as that of concept, Being, knowledge, it has done so at the expense of notions such as alterity and goodness. This does not mean that these latter do not play any role in the tradition but that they are understood in the light of the former. The relation with the other is played out against the background of a philosophical comprehension of Being and it is for this reason that Lévinas describes western thought structures as philosophies of power. He does not necessarily mean this in any dramatic Nietzschean sense of will to power, though this is by no means excluded, since he is more likely to identify Heidegger as the western philosopher par excellence.276 A philosophy of power is simply one in which the alterity of the other is secondary to ‘my own’ understanding of Being, enacted as freedom. Since my comprehension of Being entails my grasping of Being out of its otherness and since the other is that which appears on this horizon, it follows that the other is subordinated to my freedom as knower. The point rather is to challenge this and make the relation with the other of primary importance.

275

In the aforementioned “Philosophy and the Idea of Infinity”, Plato is cited more often as representative of the tradition of autonomy (13 references) than of the tradition of heteronomy (6 references). 276 Although at one point Lévinas says that his own work poses a challenge to a philosophical milieu (i.e. 19th and 20th century) that considers infidelity to Nietzsche as blasphemy. Lévinas, E. (1974). Autrement qu’être ou au-delà de l’essence. Den Haag: Martinus Nihjhoff, p. 272; Lévinas, E. (1981). Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence. Translated from French by Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, p. 177. All future references are to these editions. Henceforth OB/AE.

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1.2. Lévinas, Alcibiades and Plato Before moving onto our elucidation of the details of Lévinas’s work, I would first like to say a brief word re-iterating the relevance of Lévinas to the present discussion. There is, without doubt, a clear connection between Lévinas’s indictment of the western tradition and the critique of Alcibiades which centred on the idea that Socrates’ pursuit or love of wisdom (philosophia) made him unresponsive to particular others. We will see that Lévinas’s critique is far subtler and, I would add, more genuinely rooted in an ethical sensibility. Nevertheless, on the face of it, the critique is the same in the sense that Lévinas indicts the tradition as privileging universal conceptual knowledge over responsiveness to the particularity of the Other. Ethics is destroyed as soon as the Other whom I encounter is reduced to an exemplar or a manifestation of an impersonal system in the hands of a knowing subject. It is interesting to add to this a word about Lévinas’s place in the history of philosophy. The fact that Alcibiades’s critique (of philosophy) was not really philosophical while that of Lévinas is, must be understood in the following light. The Alcibiades speech is Plato’s fictional creation of the story of a rejected lover who accuses his erstwhile lover of neglect and an inability to experience the other in an intimate way.277 As I mentioned earlier, this was a critique of Socrates and only accidentally – albeit importantly – a critique of philosophy. By contrast, Lévinas’s historical situation makes him far more wary of the dangers of philosophy. His thought develops in the midst of the postmodern era, and though Lévinas is not really a postmodern thinker, he shares with many of the thinkers of that tradition a thoroughgoing scepticism to the Enlightenment project. Skepticism to the Enlightenment dream was nourished by a century ravaged by two world wars. Many became sceptical about the possibility of absolute truths around which human society could organise or be organised.278 The notion that reason could herald an era 277

By intimate here, I mean more than just sexual. For Lévinas there is an intimacy in ethics which is other than the sexual. 278 It is interesting to note, as an aside, that the devastation of a century of wars was also contributory to Descartes’ motivation for grounding universally valid truths. One of the tenets of the Enlightenment, growing out of this, was the notion that peace should be rooted in universally accessible truths of reason. So while war was

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of unprecedented liberty was discredited as philosophy’s relationship with ideology was revealed as often uncomfortably close.279 Loss of faith in reason lead to philosophers turning away from any attempt to generate system in favour of concentration upon notions such as difference, otherness and the fragmentation of both community and even the ego. On the one hand, Lévinas is very close to these thinkers insofar as difference and otherness are given primary importance in his work. On the other hand, his thought is unique inasmuch as his sense of the other is richly interwoven with notions of transcendence and goodness often lacking from other postmodern thinkers. In many respects his thought lacks the underlying despair that is so close to much of 20th century philosophy. This may have something to do, paradoxically, with the fact that the thought of Lévinas was forged, to a great extent, in the concentration camps of Auschwitz and Birkenau. As a French citizen and soldier during the Second World War, Lévinas was never interred. Many of his Lithuanian family were, however, murdered during Nazi pogroms in the 1940s. In a brief autobiographical essay Lévinas says that his whole life was dominated by the memory of the Nazi horror.280 This trauma was both personal and philosophical for Lévinas in the sense that he expresses a deep sense of dismay that a philosopher as great as Heidegger, could endorse – even tacitly – the horrors of National Socialism.281 But while the trauma of the Nazi torment undoubtedly weighed heavily on him, it also gave him an unshakeable sense of the urgent need to renew the question of ethics and with it the questions of transcendence and goodness. It is also because of this that I believe the work of Lévinas to be deeply personal and it allows him to leave the climate of what might be termed postmodern counter-ideology. This is not to say that his work should be understood only in terms of his experience of the Nazi holocaust crucial to the birth of the Enlightenment in the modern era, it became a major source of anti-Enlightenment in the later 20th century. 279 We can think here of Hegel’s endorsement of the reign of Napoleon, or the French Existentialists support of Stalin, or Heidegger’s relationship with National Socialism. The list could go on but the point is that here, we see the greatest minds of their generations supporting, to put it charitably, dubious political movements. 280 Lévinas, E. (1990). Signature. In Difficult Freedom. Translated from French by Sean Hand. London: The Athlone Press, p. 291. 281 Lévinas, E. (1985). Ethics & Infinity: Conversations with Philippe Nemo. Translated from French by Richard A. Cohen. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, p. 41

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but the interpenetration of his personal, historical and philosophical experience is such as to give his work a resonance that is matched by few of his contemporaries. The point here is simply that as well as being critical, Lévinas also attempts to be positive and if he indicts philosophy it is with the view to draw attention to the ethical significance of the face of the other that the tradition, as he sees it, always risks forgetting. His indictment, as such, is an appeal in the name of the sanctity and inviolability of the person, the Other. This is all by way of establishing the terms of the problematic at hand. I would like now to turn to a detailed look at the features of Lévinas’s early work by which I mean the work that culminated in the 1961 publication Totality and Infinity. 2. Ethics as First Philosophy Most commentators rightly identify the originality of Lévinas’s work with his insistence on the primacy of ethics. According to Simon Critchley, the entirety of his corpus is dominated by a single thought.282 This is not intended as a slight but an indication of the importance of that thought for both Lévinas himself and the generation of philosophers that have read and been influenced by him. For Aristotle, metaphysics or the science of Being qua Being is first philosophy. It is first simply because it is the science of first things and relates to those ultimate principles or the ultimate principle that is the ground of everything that exists. The study of this science, then, entails an ascent of the mind towards an understanding of the principles that will open the whole to the spectators gaze and make it transparent. For Lévinas too metaphysics is first philosophy yet he radically alters the meaning of this claim. For him, metaphysics is not the science of Being qua Being – this is rather his description of the work of ontology – but ethics.283 He says that metaphysics is first philosophy and precedes ontology 282

Critchley, S. (2002). Introduction. In The Cambridge Companion to Lévinas. Edited by Simon Critchley and Robert Bernasconi . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 6. 283 This point is discussed in Lévinas, E. (1989). Ethics as First Philosophy. In The Lévinas Reader. Edited by Sean Hand. Oxford: Blackwell Press, pp. 75-88.

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(TI 42-8; TeI 32-9) because only as first can justice, goodness and value be meaningful. Ontology before metaphysics means freedom before justice. Lévinas preserves the word metaphysics because of its power to indicate what is primordial. What is primordial is the other and the essential movement of metaphysics is not in reason towards comprehension but in desire towards dialogue. The result, as such will not be the I’s knowledge of the whole but the two in conversation, face-to-face. 2.1. The Same (Le Même) and the Other (l’Autrui): Lévinas and Phenomenology Two of the most important terms used in the earlier work and especially in Totality and Infinity are the Other and the Same. It would be appropriate now to explain what precisely Lévinas means by these. The Same for Lévinas, is crucially related to subjectivity, but this is not to say that the two terms are synonymous. The Same includes the self, as conceived by modernity284 but it is also more than this. If Lévinas is critical of the unchallenged hegemony of philosophies of subjectivity, it is because they are intertwined with the idea of Being as the ultimate horizon for thought, action, meaning. According to this understanding, subjectivity (transcendental or otherwise) is the site of the manifestation of this horizon. The notion of the Same is in many respects intended to both identify and critique the complex idea of subjectivity that is found in the philosophies of his two teachers, Husserl and Heidegger. It is not that Lévinas will want to efface the phenomenological idea of subjectivity – in fact it turns out to be one of the most important issues in his work, especially in Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence. In this sense, Lévinas thinks both in sympathy with, and in opposition to, the tradition of Phenomenology. However, he will consistently attempt to articulate the ground of subjectivity in the Other, as opposed to thinking subjectivity itself as the ground of meaning. He will attempt, in other words, to decentre the idea of subjective, or even intersubjective constitution, as delineating the entire space of meaning. He acknowledges that, for Husserl, constitution is not reducible to meaninggiving acts, but is also intimately tied to givenness. Lévinas’s critique of the phenomenological project is a sophisticated in this sense inasmuch as the 284

As we will see, the Same includes the ego discovered by Descartes in Meditation II but it is more comprehensive.

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Same does not only refer to noeses or intentional acts of consciousness, but to the totality that is made up of noeses and noemata, or the objects intended by consciousness. But if Husserl is a target here, then so also is Heidegger. The latter tended to steer clear of the ghost of dualism that he detected in the terminology intentional acts and intended objects, favouring instead the idea of Dasein or Being-in-the-world, as a subjectivity that is neither first and foremost concerned with objectifying consciousness, nor can, even schematically, be distinguished from world. But this difference is not enough to distance Heidegger from what Lévinas considers the prioritization of the Same. Both articulate the ground of meaning in terms of the lived relation of the self with its world.285 It is in Being as elemental that the self finds itself at home with itself (chez soi – TI 33; TeI 21), in which nothing is irreducibly other. Now, we will see that Lévinas articulates a phenomenology of the Same, which is neither purely Husserlian, nor Heideggerian. In his emphasis on the notions of materiality, jouissance and enjoyment, he is in fact closer to Sartre and Merleau-Ponty. But it is not his account of the Same that he identifies the core of his thinking, since his principal point is that phenomenologies which do not think the outside of subjectivity can only ever think otherness relative to the position of the I. That is to say that otherness is understood negatively as related to but other than the I and disclosed in relation to the interests or movements of the I. This is the economy of the Same. The Same, then, is the totality of relationships enacted within this ‘athomeness’ with oneself in the world. The Other, by contrast, is other. By this, Lévinas refers to a radical otherness that breaks through this selfenclosed and self-sufficient world of the Same and that cannot be understood relative to the meaning-giving activity of the I. In a sense, the other is otherworldly insofar as it is not of this world. Again, by world we mean here the phenomenological notion of world as the totality of all possible relations, starting from the point of view of the I.286 The world is always world285

This holds whether the fundamental task of phenomenology is understood as epistemological (Husserl) or ontological (Heidegger). On this see Crowell, S. (2001). Heidegger’s Phenomenology and the Question of Being. In Husserl, Heidegger, and the Space of Meaning. Evanston, Ill: Northwestern University Press, pp. 203-221. 286 Sokolowski, R. (2008). Two Ways of Saying “I”. in Phenomenology of the Human Person. Cambrdge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 7-21. See also Zahavi, D.

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hood and is always mine287 or the emprise of the Same. The appearance of the other constitutes a ‘breach’ (TI 35; TeI 24) of totality for Lévinas precisely insofar as the Other is beyond the scope of the totality of relations enacted in the Same. The thoughtless complacency of the I at home with itself is put into question by the appearance of this radical alterity that cannot be reduced or made relative to itself. As such, it constitutes an utterly original relation. The other, of course, is the ethical other and this is why Lévinas tells us that the other is the Other (l’autre c’est l’Autrui).288 This phrase, confusing in English, reveals the coincidence of the ethical and the metaphysical for Lévinas. What is primary, in the sense of other, is the other person and so the primary focus of the I is radically altered as it must now turn to this original other and respond to it. Thus metaphysics, as ethics, becomes plural and dialogical. 2.2. The Fundamental Structures of Ethics As we might expect, the relation of the I with the Other is not a relationship of knowledge or one based on disclosure. Insofar as it is radically or absolutely other, it cannot be. At the same time, Lévinas is attempting to make radical alterity a question of phenomenological research by articulating the way it gives itself in the experience of the subject. He wants to remain within the tradition of phenomenology, while simultaneously subverting it by making it primarily responsive rather than constitutive. But how is the relationship enacted and what are its terms? How are we to make sense of the radically non-intentional nature of the relation with the Other, this non-adequation par excellence? If one is not provided, Lévinas leaves himself open to the unavoidable objection that what is absolutely (1999). “I”. In Self-Awareness and Alterity. Evanston Ill: Northwestern University Press, pp. 3-13. 287 When Lévinas speaks of the world as ‘mine’ he may and probably does have Heidegger’s jemeinigkeit (mineness) in mind. 288 Regarding the notions of the Same and the Other, Lévinas is rather inconsistent regarding the use of capitalisation. In the French of Totality and Infinity he usually tends to capitalise Autrui or the other person though not always autre, or other. He also capitalises le Même, the Same. However, by the time of Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, all these terms appear in lower case. For this reason, I will tend to capitalise the word Other, when it refers to Autrui when dealing with the early work.

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other cannot be encountered at all. It is pure ineffability. This was the critique of both Dominique Janicaud and Jacques Derrida, who for different reasons, reject the legitimacy of Lévinas’s phenomenology of the face.289 Janicaud is especially trenchant in his critique in which he accuses Lévinas’s of claiming to do phenomenology while too easily dismissing the methodological constraints of phenomenology (as understood by Husserl) and of introducing through the idea of the infinite, a phenomenology of the Other that is simply not warranted.290 Janicaud is critical of the so-called theological turn in French phenomenology generally, which he traces to the work of Lévinas, in which the horizon of absence that opens the possibility of subjective disclosure is invested with positive and/or theological significance. This amounts to a phenomenology of the invisible that goes far beyond what is warranted in Husserl’s principle of all principles from Ideas I.291 This is a very rich issue that goes to 289

In an article entitled “Violence and Metaphysics”, Derrida objects that there can be no experience of alterity. He asks, “…can one speak of an experience of the other or of difference? Has not the concept of experience always been determined by the metaphysics of presence? Is not experience always an encountering of an irreducible presence, the perception of a phenomenality?” See Derrida, J. (1967). Violence et Métaphysique. In L’Écriture et la Différence. Paris: Éditions du seuil; Derrida, J. (1978). Violence and Metaphysics. In Writing and Difference. Translated from French by Alan Bass. Chicago: Chicago University Press, pp. 97-192 (190). Henceforth VM. Of course, Derrida’s reading of Lévinas becomes much more positive in his later writings, but it is clear that this critique was one which proved a significant challenge for Lévinas, and which motivated to a large degree the direction his later work would take. We will return to this issue in the next chapter. 290 See Janicaud, D. (2000). The Theological Turn of French Phenomenology. In Phenomenology and the Theological Turn: The French debate. Edited by Dominique Janicaud. New York: Fordham University Press, p. 38-9. This extended essay is a critique of all of the French phenomenologists associated with the so-called theological turn – Michel Henry, Jean-Louis Chrétien, Jean-Francois Courtine, Jean-Luc Marion and Paul Ricoeur, but the principal target is Lévinas. According to Janicaud, the idea of the infinite simply reveals the transcendence of subjectivity and the possibilities that phenomenology brings to light, so that there is no need to posit the Other as the radically other of subjectivity on its basis. 291 Husserl, E. (1983). Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, first book. Translated from German by Fred Kersten. Dordrecht: Kluwer, p. 44. The principle of all principle reads: “that every originary presentive intuition is a legitimizing source of cognition, that everything originarily

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the heart of what the limits of phenomenology are, and of what phenomenology can legitimately be said to articulate. Unfortunately, it is a question that goes beyond the scope of our present investigation. However, we will hopefully be able to shed some light on the issue by exploring the account of the encounter with alterity that Lévinas provides. He provides such an account through the tightly related notions of desire, infinity, face and discourse, so let us see what he has to say. Desire We have already seen that the I approaches the Other, not in the attitude of disclosure, but in desire. Yet, even desire can be an aspect of the Same, so in order properly distinguish ethics from the work of ontology, Lévinas insists that it is a unique metaphysical desire that is unrelated to the normal understanding of the word. It is not a nostalgia for a lost unity but a [d]esire for a land not of our birth, for a land foreign to every nature, which has not been our fatherland and to which we will never betake ourselves. (TI 34; TeI 22)

It is only through this kind of desire that we can break the circle of selfinterest that is produced by ontological hegemony. Already, and this will be increasingly important as we proceed, Lévinas wants to drain metaphysical desire of all traces of need. The reason is that need is always reflexive. To be in need is to highlight a deficiency in the I and thus to perpetuate the primordiality and primacy of the I. If I need x, it is because I need it. Desire for the Other however is a desire that is deepened rather than sated by contact with its desired (TI 34; TeI 22). It is what Lévinas calls dis-inter-ested292 desire because it goes out of the I and towards the Other rather than hovering in constant relativity to the I.293 Lévinas often makes his point through a offered to us in ‘intuition’ is to be accepted simply as what it is presented as being, but also only within the limits of what is presented there.” It is specifically the last part of the formulation that Janicaud is concerned with insisting that Lévinas and others connected with the turn attempt to go far beyond the limits of what is given and so cannot really be considered to be doing phenomenology at all. 292 See for example, Lévinas, E. (1998). Dialogue on thinking-of-the-other. In Entre Nous. Op. cit., p. 202. 293 It seems that Lévinas understands a degraded form of desire, or perhaps eros, to be at the root of the will to totality.

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comparison between the stories of Abraham and Odysseus. In the Odyssey, Odysseus has a series of adventures that lead him all around the known and unknown world but the intention all along is return to Ithaca. The foreign and the strange are encountered and endured, but the trajectory is always homeward. By contrast, under the command of God, Abraham leaves his home in the knowledge that he will never return. It is this willingness to leave the home without the possibility of return that is characteristic of the selfless movement of Lévinasian ethics. It represents a possibility for the self to be for-the-other which is both a burden and a release from the reef of solipsism.294 Like Sartre and unlike Heidegger, Lévinas thinks of being-forothers as a kind of trauma that constantly interrupts the relation of the self with itself.295 The Idea of Infinity In order to clarify the deep meaning of metaphysical desire, Lévinas reverts to the tradition of philosophy and refers us to the idea of infinity as it appears in Descartes’ Third Meditation. Lévinas makes a different use of this idea but it indicates nevertheless a deeply Cartesian strand in his thought. For Descartes, the idea of infinity is the idea of God in the thinking substance. Descartes finds that there is more in this idea than can be accounted for by the cogito itself and concludes that it is an idea that is more than an idea and that leads me towards God. Importantly, the idea of the infinite is also a way of escaping the reef of solipsism which threatens to engulf Descartes as a result of the stringent conditions laid down for clear and distinct knowing from the first meditations.296 The idea of the infinite as the idea of 294

A similar reading of the story of Abraham can, incidentally, be found in Søren Kierkegaard’s “Eulogy on Abraham.” Kierkegaard, S. (1983). Fear and Trembling. Translated from Danish by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press, pp. 15-23. 295 See Sartre, J.-P. (1984). Being and Nothingness. Translated from French by Hazel Barnes. New York: Washington Square Press, part 3 passim. We will see, of course, that Lévinas’s appraisal of the presence of the other is quite different form Sartre’s. As for Heidegger, mitsein or being-with-others is a crucial aspect of Dasein, but it rarely had the disruptive aspect that the presence of the other has for Sartre and Lévinas. 296 Descartes, R. (1997). Discourse on Method and the Meditations. London: Wordsworth, pp. 134-9.

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the divine is not only a clear and distinct idea in itself, but also one that vouchsafes the validity of other ideas, which are not originally given with the same apodicticity. Lévinas is explicit in his insistence that he intends to put the idea to a different use297 even whilst acknowledging it as one of those non-totalising aberrations of the western tradition. For Lévinas, the idea of infinity is a supreme idea because it is not an idea at all. It seems that when Lévinas speaks of idea, he is still working in the shadow of Descartes. For Descartes, an idea is that which corresponds to any reality in thought. Thought, as the capacity to understand is the possibility to have the measure of reality and to suspend its otherness or difference. This is because in thought, objective and formal reality do, or at least can, coincide. The idea of infinity is utterly unlike any other idea however. It is unique insofar as its ideatum far surpasses its idea (TI 49; TeI 41) such that that no coincidence of thinker and object thought is possible. The idea of the infinite is “non-adeqaution par excellence” in the sense that its essence, from the point of view of the subject, is its absolute resistance to reduction. The ideatum of this idea transcends the capacity of the I to suspend its alterity. In fact, as Lévinas notes, the idea of infinity falls infinitely short of its ideatum and it is this that initiates the desire to relate to that which cannot be thought or to that which transcends the limits of thought. As Lévinas puts it: The distance that separates ideatum and idea here constitutes the content of the ideatum itself…to think the infinite, the transcendent…is not to think an object. But to think what does not to have the lineaments of an object is to do more or better than to think. (TI 49; TeI 41)

The idea of infinity is a rupture or breach in the economy of the Same, an idea that cannot be thought, but which also cannot be ignored. The idea, taking the form of Desire, is again depicted as a wholly original relation since it is a relation with transcendence. On the face of it, it is an idea like any other but on closer inspection it reveals itself as infinitely other than the thought that thinks it. As Lévinas says, then, its very content is alterity. To move towards the other as such can only be enacted as Desire, the other of thought. And again, this desire must be without need since the point is that 297

Lévinas, E. (1986). Dieu et philosophie. In De Dieu qui Vient à l’idée. Paris: Libraire Philosophique Vrin; Lévinas, E. (1998). God and Philosophy. In Of God Who Comes to Mind. Translated from French by Bettina Bergo. California: Stanford University Press, p. 62. All reference is to the English translation.

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the infinity that engenders metaphysical desire is superfluous in the sense that it appears as other than the circuit of my self-related needs. Face Yet if this most fundamental of relations is other than the relation of thought, with what is it encountered. For Lévinas, the idea of infinity does not orient us towards a supreme spiritual object ungraspable in thought (since even to use the word object returns us to the realm of thought). More importantly, it does not signify sheer equivocal difference but is met rather as face. This is again an important factor differentiating Lévinas’s use of the idea from Descartes’. For Descartes, the idea was an ideative signification, while for Lévinas it is an experience or an encounter. Here the formation of Lévinas’s ethical thought as metaphysical is outlined. Metaphysical desire and the idea of infinity coincide in the face of the Other (l’Autrui). In the I’s encounter with this face, we have the fundamental relation of the face-toface. Its is, in fact, ‘fundamental’ in a way that brings into focus the fundamental difference between Heidegger and Lévinas. For Heidegger, ontology as the hermeneutics of facticity was fundamental. The question of the meaning of Being was the question that grounded all of our engagements with the world, it was the question that was implicated in everything, including our relations with others. For Lévinas, who does not wish to eschew ontology, the call to respond to the face of the Other is what is fundamental. It is in the encounter with the face that the I’s heedless and totalising egoism is shattered and called into question. The hermeneutics of facticity is thereby not excised but relativized. The face breaks through insofar as the relation of possessing or grasping or understanding is inappropriate to it. It is met as the absolutely Other or the pre-eminent phenomenon. By this Lévinas means not that the face is a horizon against which all other phenomena appear, since to say this would merely be to re-name the Heideggerian project. He is precisely challenging the idea of horizon, in any form, as fundamental. The face is pre-eminent in the sense that it challenges the very project of positing myself in relation to the horizon of phenomena as relative to myself. But he also concedes that the language of phenomenon is not quite accurate here either. Phenomena are disclosed but the face constitutes a revelation or epiphany (TI 66; TeI 61). It communicates on its own ground in such wise that it is always more than any thought I might have of it. The I

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is arrested by the revelation of the face because it comes from beyond the realm of what I might consider mine. Discourse, Language, Goodness The face as revelation signifies in its own right. This already distinguishes it from the phenomena which become significant relative to the disclosing work of the ontological project of the I.298 The relation with the other is enacted through the epiphany of the face as a discourse with what expresses. The face speaks and in so doing is irreducible to the meaning giving activity of the I.299 It is not disclosed but reveals itself. It disrupts the egoism of the I and calls for a response. Lévinas designates the face as speech predominantly because insofar as the face challenges the I’s hegemony it can be considered an address. The face is a living presence; it is expression. The life of expression consists in undoing the form in which the existent, exposed as a theme, is thereby dissimulated. (TI 66; TeI 61)

This entails also the notion that the essential dimension of language is “the coinciding of the revealer and the revealed in the face” (TI 67; 62). That is, the revelation of the face is nothing short of the revelation of its own otherness. It does not reveal an alternate perception of the world in the sense that I and Other could be considered two meaning-giving subjects. The point is that its revelation as language reveals that it is simply other. Otherness is the content of the revelation and I have nothing in common with the Other. It comes from outside of the world, which is always mine, so that the revelation of its alterity is an appeal. Lévinas tells us that the Other challenges the

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Lévinas says that Rosenzweig’s Stern der Erlösnung is too present in Totality and Infinity to be cited (TI 28; TeI 14) but the same could be said, for different reasons, of Heidegger. Though he is mentioned several times during the course of the book, he seems present even when he is not discussed. The idea that phenomena are made significant by the disclosing power of the subject is exactly what Lévinas understands Heidegger to be doing especially regarding the latter’s notion of the ontological muteness of objects in relation to the signifyingness of Dasein. 299 Lévinas persistently refers to this meaning-giving activity using the German term Sinngebung.

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dogmatic egoism of the I but not in the sense of violent struggle.300 The Other appears in poverty and the face is an appeal to goodness. Thus, he persistently uses the image of ‘widow and orphan’ (EE 98; DEE 162) for the Other who, approaching in the dimension of height, is always poor and destitute. For this reason Lévinas considers language and discourse, or the going towards the Other, as desire for the transcendent as Good. The Other as other is absolutely other and so the relation of the Face-to-Face must be irreducible to any category of thought or concept of Being. It is a relation, enacted as conversation, the one to the other, with what is beyond the mediating scope of Being. This is where Lévinas alludes to the Platonic notion of the ‘good beyond being’ as crucial to ethics. The other in his otherness is always in a position of weakness in relation to the I at home with itself in Being. Thus, ethics again cannot be considered a reciprocal relation, contra Buber (TI 68; TeI 64). In order for the Good to be meaningful, it must involve a disinterested desire beyond egoism to go, in dialogue, towards that which is alien and other than me (TI 50; TeI 42). The face is an appeal, from beyond the world I inhabit, to leave that home for the sake of the radically transcendent, the Other. This is further established as Good insofar as there is no promise of return or reward. One gives of oneself endlessly for the sake of the Good. We might also note that this is ‘beyond being’ in the sense that is hyperbolic in relation to the normal calculus of means and end or efficiency of the Same. Instead, it is an unreasonable request. It requires us to embark on a relation of giving that is asymmetrical and in which I will never be able to say that what I owe to the Other has been discharged. Only thus is ethics and goodness possible for Lévinas. Lévinas’s way of articulating the ethical relation can, at times, strike as given to hyperbole and excess. It was precisely this that motivated the aforementioned critique of Janicaud, in which Lévinas was accused of going beyond the bounds of the given. Indeed, Lévinas does draw heavily on the tradition of Biblical exegesis in unfolding the nature of the relation, as we have seen, and we might be forgiven for wondering if careful phenomenological description of the relation with the other has been sacrificed to fealty to the Biblical sources. However, I would argue that his work never leaves the orbit of the phenomenological tradition, and this critique is ultimately 300

That is, it is other than the ‘Master/Slave’ dialectic of Hegel. Hegel, G.W.F. (1977). Op. cit., pp. 111-19.

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unfair. Phenomenology is the concern with the way in which experience is constituted, or what it is that gives experience the meaning it has. From Husserl, through Heidegger, to Merleau-Ponty, phenomenologists have always pointed to the difficulty in doing this, because of the fact that the essence of experience is elusive.301 What is given is both present to us, and yet difficult to attend to, and it for this reason that phenomenology requires an attitudinal adjustment in order that we might again ‘see’ what we see. The point, in other words, is ‘to look at what we normally look through’.302 So, through the phenomenology of the face, Lévinas is not suggesting that each and every encounter with the other is traumatizing, but only that the expression of the face in its infinite difference, is what constitutes the ethical. This is true even if it is forgotten or ignored within the Same.

3. Lévinasian Being: The Elemental, Sensibility and Il y a For Lévinas, the face-to-face relation of ethics is not a way, amongst others, of being good but the original relation that makes the term goodness meaningful at all. Without the approach of radical alterity, goodness is in no way possible. While in one sense the appearance of the Other is a challenge to my freedom, it also frees me to be good. The point of all of this is that ethics and goodness are not features on the horizon of Being but constitute the other of Being. The face-to-face is a relation with an alterity ‘beyond being’. In the early works, and in Totality and Infinity, Lévinas’ thought is unquestionably dualist. This is not the dualism of mind and body or of idea and

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On the difficulty of phenomenological seeing, see Husserl, E. (1983). Op. cit., p. 41. Husserl says that “because of prejudices, one becomes incapable of bringing what one has in one’s field of intuition into one’s field of judgement.” See also Heidegger. M. (1962). Being and Time. Translated from German by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. Oxford: Blackwell, p. 37. Heidegger says that “the idea of grasping and explicating phenomena in a way which is ‘original’ and ‘intuitive’ is directly opposed to the naïveté of a haphazard, ‘immediate’, and unreflective ‘beholding.’ 302 Sokolowski, R. Introduction to Phenomenology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 50.

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materiality303, but his thought is dualist nonetheless. He is so keen to avoid the western tradition’s reduction of ethics to ontology that he drives a wedge between Being and the Good. Any relation enacted within Being is reducible to a synoptic gaze or mediation by a third term through which difference is collapsed. This is why ethics must be other than Being since I must remain ever vigilant to the radical otherness of the other. If I make the disclosure of Being my sole focus, the expression of the face is denied and transformed into what is manipulable. But for the face to appear as shocking or traumatic, for it to disrupt the I so deeply, there must be a condition of Being that precedes this appearance. That is to say that there must be a realm in which the ontological relation with Being is appropriate. For the Other to be other, it must be ‘other than…’ In this section, I will outline what is meant by terms such as sensibility, enjoyment and ontology in the thought of Lévinas. This will not only fill out the picture of Lévinas’s dualism but also give us a crucial insight into his understanding of the meaning of Being. Furthermore, this discussion will crucially adumbrate Lévinas’s later treatment of ethics. 3.1. Enjoyment and the Same (Le Même): Need and Living From the Elements The fullest exposition of these ideas is to be found in section II of Totality and Infinity, entitled “Interiority and Economy”. Though this is the most elaborate account of the relation given by Lévinas, it is crucially adumbrated in Time and the Other and more especially, Existence and Existents. In some respects, the relation of the I with Being in Lévinas can be understood as his thoughts on the hegemony of the I in its ontological relation with Being. Yet, the relation of the I with Being designates more than just conscious intentionality or conceptual analysis. It is also to be distinguished from praxis or involvement with things in the world. That is, it is neither Husserlian nor Heideggerian. The earliest of Lévinas’s original philosophical works, Existence and Existents, deals only infrequently with the ethical relation. Instead, its concern is describing the relation of the self with Being in a nonHeideggerian way. As we have noted, Lévinas is particularly keen to distance 303

The first of these designations captures the traditional reading of Descartes, the second, the traditional reading of Plato. Both are probably unfair.

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himself from Heidegger in this work, something which comes to light even prior to the emergence of the fully-fledged ethical moment in his thinking.304 The essential aspect of this relation is described by Lévinas as neither intentional consciousness nor Care (Sorge) but enjoyment (jouissance). The French, jouissance captures Lévinas’ meaning in that he intends by it a kind of naive, and somewhat thoughtless, play in Being as elemental.305 The thought and determination of Being (ontology) is important here to be sure but essentially what is at stake is the dwelling of the I in the materiality of Being. In the early works, he delineates the notion of enjoyment as an hypostasis306 of singular being. In contradistinction to Heideggerian ek-stasis, the self is not care for its always-already-being-in-the-world, but a standing out of Being (hypo-stare) by which subjectivity is accomplished. In Time and the Other, he insists that subjectivity is existence as solitude (TO 62; TA 44), which, far from being a fall, is the overcoming of the anonymity of Being as such.307 We note here that the anonymity intended by Lévinas is not comparable to the anonymity of das Man as described by Heidegger. The anonymity of das Man refers to an anonymous and inauthentic lived interpretation of the meaning of Being, which reneges on the singularity of the particular Dasein.308 For Lévinas, it is Being itself that is anonymous, such that the achievement of the I in standing forth from Being is an even more radical achievement than the authentic grasping of Dasein’s ownmost possibility for Being. The point seems to be to avoid the kind of totality that Heidegger’s project suggests and to open the way for genuine transcendence ‘beyond 304

We will see that the ideas of Being as il y a, and of the self’s maintenance of itself though enjoyment and jouissance bring Lévinas closer to Sartre and Merleau-Ponty respectively than to Heidedgger. 305 Though the comparison is not one that can be followed up here, it would be worth comparing Lévinas’ description of the jouissance with the notion of the chiasm in the later Merleau-Ponty. See Merleau-Ponty, M. (1968). The Intertwining – the Chiasm. In The Visible and the Invisible. Translated from French by Alphonso Lingis. Evanston, Ill. Northwestern University Press, pp. 130-57. 306 See EE/DEE, pt. 4. See also Lévinas, E. (1979). Le Temps et l’Autre. St. Clement: Fata Morgana; Lévinas, E. (1987). Time and the Other. Translated from French by Richard A. Cohen. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, pts. I and II. Henceforth TO and TA. 307 Being as such is described by Lévinas as il y a (there is). We will return to it presently. 308 Heidegger (1962). Op. cit., pp. 163f.

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Being’; that is, subjectivity ‘positions’ itself as initially other than Being pure and simple so that, again, its solitude is not a cause of despair or angst but the possibility of experiencing the world as a subject, as I.309 This accomplishment of subjectivity as solitude enables Lévinas to conceive of the world as an ‘ensemble of nourishments’ (TO 63; TA 45) in which the I dwells and maintains itself.310 The obvious differences with Husserl and Heidegger need not be mentioned again here but what is worth remembering is that Lévinas is keen to make space for an outside of consciousness without which sense, for example, is not really possible. The hypostasis that is subjectivity is for Lévinas a kind of gathering311 of the I into itself as grounded in itself or autochthonous.312 It dwells and maintains itself in the elemental nourishments provided by the world. It is thus that it achieves its status as existent, which is a mastery over Being. Furthermore, this accomplishment of existing is prior to either thought or action (TO 67; TA 51). It is simply dwelling in Being. In this regard, the I transcends in a limited way into the world. Limited because its motion is always limited by objects in the world that are enjoyed for their own sake. There is something deeply sensuous about Lévinas’s language here. In Totality and Infinity, he speaks often of ‘biting into...’, ‘living from...’ and ‘bathing in the element’ as the meaning of the enjoyment of the elemental.313 There is a happy egoism about all this in the sense that the I enjoys the elemental for its own sake (and not, therefore, for the sake of something else), it is heedless.314 As Lévinas points out, it may not be true to say that we live to eat but it is equally untrue to say that we eat to live (TO 63; TA 45). We walk in the

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The notion of subjectivity as positioning is a highly illuminating image for Lévinas’ sense of the relation with Being. See especially EE/DEE, pt. IV, § 2. 310 Throughout this section, we see Lévinas forever distancing himself from Husserl and Heidegger. On the elemental as ‘nourishing’ he is rejecting both Husserl’s view of the world as objects for consciousness and Heidegger’s notion of the world as tools. 311 Lévinas here makes use of the etymological sense of legein as gathering. 312 The word autochthonous, meaning literally, ‘grounded in itself’ is used frequently in Totality and Infinity though not in the earlier works. 313 See TI/TeI, § II passim. 314 One might also think here of Camus’s Mersault in L’Etranger, “in love with a sun that leaves no shadows.” Camus, A. (1983). The Stranger. Middlesex: Penguin, p. 119.

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fresh air not for the sake of our health primarily but for the sake of the air. 315 There is a love of life (TI 144ff.; TeI 154ff) experienced in the sensuous dwelling of the I.316 We get a clearer picture here of why Lévinas is so keen to keep the notion of need outside of the ethical relation. Need is intrinsically related to solitude and enjoyment in the sense that enjoyment is characterised partly as living from one’s needs. The hegemony over Being achieved by the hypostasis of subjectivity is to be understood as the ability to satisfy one’s needs. This is what dominance means. If I am hungry I can eat, if I am tired I can sleep etc. I need air to live but the separation of the I from Being pure and simple is the possibility of living from the elements. The primary relation is neither objectification (Husserl) or Care (Heidegger), but enjoyment out of need. Thus need is the meaning of sovereignty for Lévinas and not an impediment to it. The point is that without need, sovereignty would be meaningless. It gets its meaning from the ability to consume, to take and to sate oneself. As much as I find myself in need, I am also capable of living from my own labour and transforming the world into this ensemble that is for me. This is what he means by ‘genial solitude’ (TO 55; TA 35). What is at stake here is not identical with conscious objectification of the world but is its necessary precedent. This is because enjoyment is rooted in the self. This is not exactly the same as to say that the I is always what is at stake in enjoyment. As we have seen, nourishments are enjoyed for their own sake but the fact that they can even be experienced in this way is the achievement of the I. Of course, the conclusion of this line is the relation of reason with Being, through which the I accomplishes its destiny “to be the sole and unique point of reference for everything.” (TO 65; TA 48). Reason throws light on Being and thus absorbs it into its own universality. This is the circular or solipsistic motion that is the essence of reason (TO 65; TA 48). Of course, 315

Here Lévinas is challenging the kind of Platonic/Aristotelian analysis according to which goods are valued for the sake of other goods in a hierarchy that terminates in the ultimate Good that refers to nothing outside itself. Throughout his early work, Lévinas is determined to disrupt the continuity between particular ‘goods’ and the Good. The latter is absolutely other. 316 This idea of a primordial joy in living and the articulation of this in terms of embodied affectivity, also establishes a connection between Lévinas and Michel Henry. See, for example, Henry, M. (2008). Material Phenomenology. Translated from French by Scott Davidson. New York. Fordham, p. 81.

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Lévinas is aware here that consciousness and intentionality allow the ego to distinguish itself from things in the world but in doing this, its work is the work of bringing things into the light of reason and thereby grounding them (TO 66; TA 49). This constitutes Lévinas understanding of the tradition of western philosophy. The work of the mind is a labour equivalent to the sensuous labour of sensual jouissance. In both cases, what is worked upon is, so to say, worked out of its alterity. We would be amiss if we failed to point out a tension in the early thought of Lévinas which relates to Totality and Infinity as well as the analyses of Existence and Existents and Time and the Other which has to do with sense, value, and ethics. His analysis of subjectivity in terms of hypostasis and the heedless ‘living from’ the elements makes perfect sense. That is, he wishes to establish a view of subjectivity that is different from the phenomenological analyses of Heidegger. For Heidegger, meaning, sense and value all emerge within the lived identity of Dasein and its world and all within the orbit of the question of the meaning of Being. But Lévinas, as we know, wants to make a space for a relation with alterity in which alone meaning and value can make sense since it is only with this relation that language is forged as the going unto the Other. Thus, he insists on the elemental rapture of subjectivity and its thoughtless being for itself. Yet, as soon as subjectivity becomes disclosive, either in terms of the spontaneity of enjoyment, or though the reflective rationality of the labour of the Same, he seems to open a realm of sense, and indeed of value, that is prior to the ethical. Through the notion of the Same as sensuous and calculating, Lévinas seems increasingly to suggest (perhaps unwittingly) that, although the ethical relation is primordial, it is chronologically secondary. The meaning and value that develop in the face-to-face, that is, do not constitute the origin of meaning but a new – albeit challenging – type of meaning. I mean that we get the sense that, through the hypostatic positioning of subjectivity, a determination of the world is already in place that only afterwards is disrupted by the call of the Other. This tension is one that remains unresolved until the later work Otherwise than Being, which will be the subject of our next chapter.

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Il y a Lévinas’ notions of subjectivity as accomplishment and the geniality of solitude are crucially related to his sense of Being as il y a. The il y a is a difficult idea but an important one that is never abandoned by Lévinas.317 In some respects, it is through the notion of the il y a that the difference between Lévinas and Heidegger is brought into its clearest relief as far as the early works go. The phrase il y a is concerned with pure existence prior to the emergence of the existent. For Heidegger, Being in general is made manifest through ‘my’ being or Dasein. For Lévinas, the two are not equivalent. My being is hypostasis, through which I gather myself as existent. This accomplishment is the overcoming of Being by a being. But why is this overcoming necessary? For Lévinas, the reason is that Being pure and simple, corresponds to a feeling of horror as primordial. Being, as such, is anonymous rustling or il y a (there is).318 This sense of horror or nausea319 inspired by Being is, it should be noted, not analogous to Heideggerian angst since angst, for Heidegger, was related to the notion that Being was bounded by nothingness. It was exactly nothing that gave rise to angst. For Lévinas, by contrast, horror is inspired by Being as impersonal (EE 58; DEE 102). As he notes, “horror is nowise an anxiety about death” (EE 56; DEE 99). Thus it is not inspired by the fact that we will one day cease to exist but by the fact that Being as impersonal weighs on us in a way that cannot be escaped. Being has ‘no exits’ (EE 56; DEE 100). In every negation of Being, there continues to lurk Being. In other words, while individual beings can be negated by consciousness, Being itself cannot. The il y a is Being as pure presence, a featureless stirring that resists the meaning giving activity of consciousness (EE 59; DEE 103-4). This idea is difficult to make sense of though it is help317

See Lévinas (1985). Ethics and Infinity. Op. cit., p. 52 The most extensive discussions of this phenomenon are to be found in EE/DEE, pp. 51-61 and TO/TA, pp. 44-51. It is that from which the existent separates itself though even the word ‘that’ is incorrect since il y a is neither a this nor a that. Its role becomes more confusing in the later works. 319 In an early article entitled “De l’évasion”, Lévinas uses the language of Nausea to describe the experience of pure, impersonal Being. Lévinas, E. (1935/6). De l’évasion. Rescherches Philosophiques, 5, pp. 373-92; Lévinas, E. (2003). On Escape. Translated from French by Bettina Bergo. California: Stanford University Press. Note, this is about three years before the publication of Sartre’s Nausea. 318

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ful to note Lévinas’ insistence that il y a as an “atmosphere of presence” (EE 59; DEE 104) is not the antithesis of Being since it, in fact, is the context in which even this opposition can be spoken (EE 60; DEE 105). As we suggested earlier, the il y a as horror is not to be characterised as the existent’s sense of itself as solitary. On the contrary, the sense of solitude is part of the accomplishment of the hypostasis. Solitude is the product of the existent’s gathering of itself to itself. My status as existent is won precisely when I feel myself to be solitary, I am a subject who possesses the attribute of Being. Thus, anonymous Being is mastered insofar as I name it in myself. In Totality and Infinity, Lévinas discusses this phenomenon under the title of separation. The il y a is never mentioned so explicitly as in Existence and Existents or Time and the Other but it is always present in Lévinas’s works. Separation and atheism in Totality and Infinity (TI 53-60 & 109ff.) designate the existent’s capacity to ground itself as master of Being. Its autochthony is its victory over the anonymous. Because of his sense of what Being in itself means and what it means for the existent to be, we begin to understand the radically otherworldly nature of the Other in Totality and Infinity and the early works generally. Being itself is dark, foreboding, inhospitable and anonymous rustling. It does not signify, it simply threatens. The victory of the existent is, in a certain sense, an overcoming by turning away from Being so understood. The I posits itself as free by positing itself as I. As an I, a single existent, it can determine Being in a way that turns the anonymity into a system of nourishments or conceptually pliable realities. Being becomes the domain of the I. It is not surprising that the Other cannot be part of this and so Lévinas insists on its radical transcendence. The Other is ‘widow, orphan’ and destitute (EE 98; DEE 162) because the world is my world. Everything in the world is constituted as for me, whether this be as an object of thought or an object of sense. Discourse and ethics is turning towards the Other in desire in which I offer him my world. In order for this to make sense though, the other must be from elsewhere. We have seen how far dualism reaches already in the early thought of Lévinas. This point brings out both the proximity and distance of Lévinas from Plato. On the one hand, his thought is dualist and identifies desire as the path to the Good. On the other hand, he has firmly ruled out any interpenetration between Goodness and Being. We know that the Good is beyond Being for Plato, but Plato also insists that it is the source of beings. Thus

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while there may not be a logically transparent connection between Being and the Good, they are intimately related. Lévinas, by contrast, has shattered all intimacy between the two. Being is pure impersonal presence while the Good is located in the face and in transcendence. This is important regarding our critique. For Lévinas, Being is separated radically from goodness and communicates itself as threatening presence. This operates as a parallel to the point that the philosophical attempt to make the concept of Being ultimate represents the attempt to eradicate all difference. Furthermore, this eradication is one from which it is difficult to generate any genuine sense of value. We have already noted the tension in the early Lévinas with regard to the notions of sense and value. At the very least, he would maintain that a philosophy which does not move out of the orbit of Being will, at the very least, be impoverished with respect to value. For Hegel, Being is, as it is for Lévinas, the most empty of concepts initially. And yet, for Hegel it is ultimately the fullest in which all differences are resolved. Lévinas both rejects this as a philosophical project in itself as well as its prospect of success.320 For Lévinas, salvation lies elsewhere, in a thought that is other than the thought of ontologizing philosophy (i.e. the thought of infinity). Already we have a sense of the tension between the Platonic and Lévinasian ways. For Lévinas, the Good is not only transcendent but radically and absolutely Other. It is not so clear that this is the case for Plato, as we shall see. The important point here is that for Lévinas, it appears as though he considers transcendence and radical alterity as synonymous. This is why he is fascinated by the Platonic description of the Good at Republic 509b. Insofar as this is the case, he may already be said to be a follower of Plato whilst reserving a certain suspicion. As we read the critique of Alcibiades, philosophy on the Platonic/Socratic model suggested, if not equivalence, then a continuity between Being and the Good such that eros and reason were subtly linked. In fact, the suspicion at this time was that eros was finally subordinated to philosophical knowledge. For Lévinas the crucial mistake here is in locating Being and goodness on the same side of the dualistic divide. Goodness for him is other than Being in the most radical of ways. 320

That is, Lévinas objection to Hegel for example is beyond ideology. He is asserting that even were it not undesirable, the Hegelian project could not work since denying an outside to Being makes primordial that which is most anonymous and destructive.

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Any attempt to connect them amounts for Lévinas to the attempt to subordinate the Good to knowledge. This being the case, we might not be surprised if Lévinas is suspicious of Plato’s understanding of desire, rationality and the Good.321 As we will now see, this does turn out to be the case. 4. Eros and Ethics in the Early Lévinas If we were to leave the matter here the relation between Lévinas and Plato would already appear deeply complex. Lévinas is a Platonist of sorts insofar as he insists on the transcendence of the Good and the centrality of desire as opening a relation with the Good. By identifying goodness with ethics and the face-to-face relation, however, he challenges the abstraction of the Platonic understanding of the Good. He wishes to sever all and any connection between the Good and knowledge. This is resonant with Alcibiades’ critique in the sense that it challenges the idea that the I’s relation with the Good as intellectual is superior to its relation with the Other as Autrui, or the other person. To leave matters here would see Lévinas not transvaluing but reorienting the locus of desire and the site of Goodness. But we cannot leave matters here because we have not yet dealt with Lévinas’ specific handling of the notion of eros. The complexity is deepened precisely in that eros, for Lévinas, is reducible to neither ethics so presented nor to the realm of the Same in Totality and Infinity. As a unique relation in itself, it throws light on both the development of the notion of alterity in Lévinas’ own thought and on his relation with Plato. The problem essentially is that by the time of Totality and Infinity, Lévinas identifies eros with neither the movement in philosophy towards totality, as Alcibiades had done, nor with the face-to-face of ethics. So what does eros mean for Lévinas and how is it related to our overall project? For the most part, critics of Lévinas who discuss his writings on eros are concerned with the understanding of sexual difference that lies therein. Thus, it is a topic that is dealt with mainly by feminist thinkers. This originates in Simone de Beauvoir’s claim that Lévinas’s understanding of eros was explicitly and culpably sexist. This has then been discussed back and forth by

321

In fact, in Lévinas’ early work as a whole, he is suspicious of any relation between philosophy and goodness.

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thinkers such as Luce Irigaray, Catherine Chalier and Tina Chanter.322 My interest here is somewhat different though I by no means intend to reject or undermine the legitimate concerns of these thinkers and critics.323 The present analysis will continue into the next chapter but for now it will suffice to explore Lévinas’s sense of eros in the early works up to and including Totality and Infinity. 4.1. Re-interpreting Plato’s Erotic Lack: Eros and the Early Works It is interesting to note that all three of Lévinas’s earlier works terminate with an exploration of the notion of eros. Through these three, though, we can trace an important evolution of (i) the importance of eros regarding alterity and (ii) the relationship between his own sense of eros and that of Plato. According to Robert Bernasconi, Lévinas’s analysis of eros is “a reflection on Plato’s Symposium and Rosenzweig’s Star of Redemption.”324 In other words, Plato's dialogue is crucial to the evolution of his thought on the subject. But if Lévinas is influenced by Plato’s discussion of eros, he does not always endorse it. In fact, in both Existence and Existents and Time and the Other, he is highly critical of Platonic eros while in Totality and Infinity, he softens towards Plato but this is partially because he has drawn a deeper distinction between eros and ethics. Surprisingly, eros is essential to Lévinas’ discussion of alterity in both Existence and Existents and Time and the Other. In these works he has not yet fully developed the ethical thinking that is so important in his later writings. I do not mean that he is unconcerned with alterity but the notion of 322 De Beauvoir’s critique initially appeared in De Beauvoir, S. (1989). The Second Sex. Translated from French by H.M. Parshly. New York: Vintage, p. xxii. Luce Irigaray has written extensively on the subject of eros in the thought of Lévinas. See for example, Irigaray, L. (1991). Questions to Emmanuel Lévinas: On the Divinity of Love. In Re-Reading Lévinas. Edited by Robert Bernasconi and Simon Critchley London: The Athlone Press, pp. 109-119. 323 The ‘feminist issue’ arising from Lévinas’ work is not my main concern and it would take me too far a field to treat it here. I do believe, however, that the increasing tendency in the thought of Lévinas to understand eros only sexually is the root of the problem. 324 Bernasconi, R. (1991). Am I Obsessed by Bobby? In Re-Reading Lévinas. Op. cit., p. 239

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the face-to-face as primordial has not yet been developed. In the earlier of these works, Lévinas is primarily concerned with phenomenological analyses of the fundamental modes or moods of Being. However, he does turn his attention to the relation with alterity towards the end of the work. It is at this point that he identifies the feminine as the crucial site of the encounter with alterity. This is an encounter that takes place within the economy of the Same, but it is also an encounter that is resistant and irreducible, and which signals the otherwise. The introduction of the notion of alterity through the phenomena of eros and the feminine is also crucial to the analyses of Time and the Other and it is because of this that he has come under such heavy fire from feminist commentators. The critique centres here around the idea that Lévinas is identifying masculinity as fundamental while the feminine is secondary or other. This is a rather simplistic analysis but it does correctly identify the extent to which Lévinas reads eros sexually. Of course, sexuality was important in Plato’s account of eros too as it must be to any worthwhile discussion of the subject but there was certainly more to eros than the sexual for Plato. In suggesting that it is in the feminine that alterity is encountered, Lévinas appears to deny an eros that is outside of or beyond the purely sexual.325 This does not mean that he equates animality with the depth significance of sexuality but he is resistant to the spiritualization of eros. In fact, he is deeply suspicious of the spiritualization of eros in the Platonic dialogues and so seeks not so much to augment as to transform the notion of eros. According to Lévinas, the Platonic notion of eros still operates within the domain of the Same and so continues to treat the relation of the subject with Being as fundamental. The reason is that Plato, says Lévinas, understands the lack or the failure of transparency in eros negatively and, as I mentioned earlier, lack or need is construed by Lévinas as an essential dimension of the I’s sovereignty. Now, Plato does not necessarily understand lack in this way, but he does according to Lévinas. The latter is, furthermore, critical of the attempt in the Symposium to overcome the lack experienced in eros. He says:

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I do not mean to reduce sexuality to biology here. It is simply my intention to indicate the fact that Lévinas is wary of a spiritual manifestation of eros. The reason for this will soon become apparent.

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In Plato, Love, a child of need, retains the features of destitution. Its negativity is the simple “less” of need, and not the very movement unto alterity. (EE 86; DEE 145)

Plato, that is, understands the lack in eros as a deficiency in my own being that I seek to overcome through the sovereign relation with the world enacted as knowing. In other words, the lack directs me towards what is other for the sake of my self.326 By contrast, Lévinas seeks to understand the lack in eros positively. It suggests a relation with what is mysterious and resists the disclosing gaze of the sovereign I. He says: Eros…will furnish us with an analysis of this relationship with mystery – provided it is set forth in terms entirely different from those of the Platonism that is a world of light. (TO 76; TA 64)

The implication is that Platonic eros dispels or seeks to dispel mystery for the sake of maintaining itself in Being and therefore, at least at this point in Lévinas’s writings, becomes interchangeable with the spirit of totalising thought. For Lévinas in opposition to this, eros, far from setting the self assail in its odyssey towards self-sufficiency, grounds intersubjectivity as irreducible. It[intersubjectivity] is brought about by eros, where in the proximity of another the distance is wholly maintained, a distance whose pathos is made up of this proximity and this duality of beings. What is presented as the failure of communication in love in fact constitutes the positive character of the relationship; this absence of the other is precisely his presence as other. (EE 98; DEE 163)327

Lévinas thus accepts the Platonic description of eros but interprets its significance otherwise. The deficit in eros is actually its positive dimension. The lack or deficit in eros is not a lack to be overcome but a positive absence through which the other becomes present. This is not, of course, a transparent presence. In fact, Lévinas insists that eros is marked by a failure of communication (TO 88; TA 81). But this failure is only failure if one adopts the 326

The suggestion is that even while Platonic eros intends the Good, it intends it for the sake of the immortality or happiness of the self. Thus Lévinas understands it as initially other-centred but ultimately self-centred. 327 This statement from the early 1940s is ironically close to being an accurate version of the thought of Otherwise the Being, the magnum opus of 1974. We will return to this in chapter 5.

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terminology of ‘grasping’, ‘possessing’ or ‘knowing’, which are the “synonyms of power” (TO 90; TA 83). The problem, and here again Lévinas seems to be implicating Plato, is that the relation with alterity that is generally sought in eros is understood as a relationship of fusion. It is precisely against this notion of fusion that Lévinas is struggling. What is understood as the failure of communication in eros is actually the very mark of the success of genuine communication with alterity or transcendence. Regarding eros, he says: One must recognise its exceptional place among relationships. It is a relationship with alterity, with mystery…with what is never there, with what cannot be there when everything is there – not with a being that is not there but with the very dimension of alterity. (TO 88; TA 81)

In these early works, then, eros is in fact the site of the relation with alterity and the breach of totality. Though he may be influenced by Plato in identifying eros as central, Lévinas rejects what he sees as the movement towards fusion in the latter’s thought. What we have here, then, is a corrective of Plato. Plato failed in his inability to identify the centrality of the feminine in eros as the approach of genuine alterity and therefore failed to appreciate the depth significance of his own ascription of Goodness (i.e. as beyond Being). In Lévinas’ phenomenology of voluptuousness, the “exceptional place of the feminine and the absence of any fusion in the erotic” is confirmed (TO 89; TA ). I find this interesting first because of the primordial place accorded to eros in the early ethical thought of Lévinas, and secondly because it confirms the critique made by Alcibiades for whom Socrates’ transcendence of the physical made him self-seeking and unresponsive to alterity. At this point in Lévinas’ writings, the relation of the I with alterity is rooted in materiality and the problem with Platonic/Socratic eros is precisely its attempt to overcome physicality. Once again, this does not mean that alterity is a purely physical phenomenon for Lévinas, but it does mean that what is felt in the flesh constitutes a communication of otherness. According to Lévinas, Plato is right to identify eros as crucial regarding the Good but wrong to dualise the meaning of this desire because in distinguishing erotes, he suggests the possibility of an eros that is purely discarnate and with it the possibility of a spiritual fusion that might overcome the limitations of finitude and incarnation. For Lévinas, by contrast, “man’s relationship with the other is better as

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difference than as unity: sociality is better than fusion.”328 It is worth noting the lack of any developed dualism in Lévinas’ thought at this point which only really develops as his probings into the question of alterity blossom. 4.2. Ambiguity, Dualism and the Relegation of Eros: Eros in Totality and Infinity But if eros is the crucial term of the relation with alterity in Existence and Existents and Time and the Other, this is no longer the case in Totality and Infinity. Lévinas devotes part IV of that work to the discussion of eros but he is clear that it is to be distinguished from ethics, both as a form of desire and concerning its relation with alterity. It is also worth noting that Lévinas’ reading of Platonic eros has been altered. In the earlier works, he seemed to want to argue for a new interpretation of erotic desire based on the lack in eros as positive presence. This was supposed to oppose Plato’s apparent understanding of eros as a desire for fusion. In Totality and Infinity, by contrast, he understands eros as other than ethics and also begins to look more positively on Plato’s discussion of eros in the Symposium. I do not mean that he has softened regarding the sense of eros as a desire for fusion, since he has not. Yet, when rejecting this notion he now refers only to the speech of Aristophanes rather than rejecting ‘Plato’. The myth Aristophanes tells in Plato’s Symposium, in which love reunites the two halves of one sole being, interprets the adventure as a return to self. (TI 254; TeI 285)329

In fact, he now credits Plato too with seeing through the deficiencies of this position (TI 63; TeI 58) in the name of a desire that does not seek closure. But for all that, Lévinas grows increasingly distrustful of eros – a position that will be officially maintained if not deepened, in the later works – at least insofar as it relates to alterity.330

328 Kearney, R. (1984). Emmanuel Lévinas. In Richard Kearney ed. Dialogues with Contemporary Thinkers. Op. cit., p. 58. 329 The “adventure” referred to here is the adventure of love. In this same passage, Lévinas also refers to this understanding of eros as incestuous. 330 By “officially maintained” I mean that Lévinas insists with ever greater urgency that ethics involves a desire that is not erotic. I will show in the next chapter, however, that this position can be confusing in light of the account of ethics offered.

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In Totality and Infinity, Lévinas tells us that eros is a unique relation, which he wishes to distinguish from both ethics and from the will to totality. It is a relation with alterity and therefore is other than the circle of the Same, but it is also deeply ambiguous and hovers between immanence and transcendence (TI254; TeI 285). Since ethics is the relation of the Same with transcendence, eros cannot be considered ethical. A crucial point here is the meaning of ambiguity for Lévinas. The face-to-face is not ambiguous since the command of the Other met in the face is clear, not in the sense of being rational or reasonable but in the sense that the meaning of its command to respond is unequivocal. The call to ethics must be so and this is an important reason why Lévinas drives a wedge between eros and ethics. That eros is ambiguous is not in itself negative but it is enough to outline the distinction with Goodness. According to Stella Sanford, the principal virtue of Plato’s account of eros for Lévinas is its ambiguity.331 As ambiguous, it is related to both the notion of alterity as well as remaining partially within the realm of the Same. Because of this, it is reducible to neither. Thus, we see Lévinas taking a more positive view of the Socratic/Diotiman account than he previously had done, although this is not yet an endorsement of Plato since he believes that Plato himself did not realise the centrality of this notion. Lévinas seems to think that eros is only initially ambiguous for Plato. It is hinted, by Lévinas, that the aim of Platonism is to overcome this ambiguity through a knowing relationship with the intelligible Good. For Lévinas, by contrast, the ambiguity of eros is irreducible and this is its main virtue even though it is also that which separates eros from ethics. For Lévinas, the erotic relation is characterised as a relation contracted ‘beyond’ or ‘beneath’ the face. This is important specifically because eros presupposes a face. In this way, there is at least an initial relation with ethics. One can have an erotic relation with a face only, Lévinas is clear on this point (TI 271; TeI 304) and yet the relation takes place beneath or beyond the face so that the primordial relation is subverted somehow. There appear to be two important reasons why this is so. The first is that erotic desire is not disinterested in the way ethical desire is. The second reason is that the erotic relation is beneath or beyond language. In fact, the first of these is presupposed by the second in the sense that language, for Lévinas, is consti331

Sandford, S. (2000). The Metaphysics of Love: Gender and Transcendence in Lévinas. London: The Athlone Press, p. 98.

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tuted by the metaphysical desire for the other as disinterested. The fundamental meaning of language is ethical communication. In eros, the face is presupposed but in such a way that its expression is subverted to the extent that it becomes ambiguous and, because it is ambiguous, it cannot be termed Good. In Totality and Infinity, Lévinas says that eros involves an intentionality of searching rather than disclosure: “It expresses love but suffers from an inability to tell it” (TI 258; TeI 288). This captures its essential difference from both of the other relations described (i.e. ontology and ethics). Eros is not disclosive and is therefore other than the relation with Being. Instead, it expresses but it is never clear what it expresses and so it differs from ethics. In this sense, the idea of the failure of communication in eros is revisited but with a different emphasis.332 It is still understood positively but no longer, and this is important, as the presence of the other as ethical other. Eros is articulated through a “phenomenology of voluptuousness”, in which the key terms are touch, caress, proximity and sensibility. But now, the fact that proximity and sensibility are connected to eros is enough to distinguish it from ethics. The ethical relation is one based on distance and the idea of infinity and is other than sensibility. At this point in his writings, Lévinas appears to have drawn a clear distinction between sensibility and ethics as the dualistic strand in his thought is given full expression.333 This is why eros is characterised as ambiguous. It is both a relation with a face and also a sensible relation. It hovers, therefore, between immanence and transcendence. Its immanence is, of course, connected to the fact that it is sensible, while it relates to transcendence insofar as the future as other is offered to the Same through erotic fecundity. There is a diachronicity in erotic fecundity through the child engendered, who is both me and not me. In an article entitled “Feminism and the Other”, Tina Chanter claims that the features of Lévinas’s eros are deeply indebted to Plato and in a sense

332

Lévinas stresses this failure in Time and the Other 90 (TA 83). It is also worth noting that the inability of erotic desire to express itself is a feature of the (by Lévinas) oft-cited speech of Aristophanes in the Symposium. See my chapter on Aristophanes. 333 In terms of this dualism, eros occupies a middle position that is neither sameness not alterity. Ultimately its role at this point in Lévinas’ authorship is not entirely clear.

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this is correct.334 For one thing, Plato defines erotic desire as reproduction and birth in beauty.335 That is to say, erotic desire is generative beyond itself. This is paralleled in Lévinas’s notion of eros as fecundity. And again, Lévinas is impressed by the sense of eros as semi-divine as it hovers between mortality and immortality, immanence and transcendence, finitude and infinitude. But the fact of the matter is that eros is not, as with Plato, desire for the Good. In Totality and Infinity, that role is taken by the metaphysical desire, already discussed, that is other than eros. Eros is a relation with transcendence but it is not the relation that enshrines Goodness; it is not ethics. The transcendent aspect of eros relates most clearly to the notion of fecundity in Lévinas’s discussion. That fecundity is so crucial to eros for Lévinas implies that the real other of eros is the son who is related to me and yet other than me. Furthermore, he is always in the future or, to put it better, the son is my future as other. So the relation with time is stressed and we begin to get a greater insight into why the erotic relation is described as ‘beyond the face’. One further point needs to be made about Lévinas’s treatment of eros here. It becomes clear that when Lévinas equivocates between the characterisation of eros as both beneath and beyond that he is referring to different aspects of eros. Eros is beyond the face in the sense that it intends the son who is ‘my’ future. It is beneath the face because the relation itself is not one of discourse. Throughout his treatment Lévinas seems uneasy about the question of sexuality. He speaks of it in terms of profanation. Erotic nudity is the profanation of the face because the face remains forever within the context of materiality. The Other as third (or second if the son is third) is met physically in the caress.336 This is the seeking of eros that Lévinas describes as voluptuousity. Voluptuousity is the encounter with the other as dissimulating and non-signifying because it is met as “exorbitant ultramateriality” (TI 256; TeI 286). It is interesting that in spite of Lévinas’s uneasi334

Chanter, T. (1988). Feminism and the Other. In The Provocation of Lévinas: Rethinking the Other. Edited by Robert Bernasconi and David Wood. London: Routledge, p. 49. Chanter claims that the similarities are so great that Lévinas’s “Phenomenology of Eros” in Totality and Infinity can be read as a footnote to Plato’s dialogue. 335 Symposium 206b. 336 The fact that fecundity and the son, or child, are so central here may go some way to explaining the basis of feminist objections to Lévinas.

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ness about eros, he is insistent that it remain within the domain of the sexual. We remember that, through Socrates and Diotima, Plato attempts to transform eros from a physical to a spiritual principle. Because it hovers and dwells in materiality, it is never transformed qua object for Lévinas in the way it is for Plato. It remains ambiguous because it is between mortal and divine. It is not of the order of the relation with the material described as enjoyment because it is a genuine relation with alterity. Yet it is not an unmediated relation with a face either. It looks beneath the face of the feminine other and towards the face of the son in fecundity, which is always too future. In principle, this is extremely faithful to Plato, whose Symposium Socrates had been keen to dispel the notion that eros was a god. Eros was, instead, a spirit that acted as link between the two worlds. For Lévinas too, eros is between mortal and divine as the ambiguous double of materiality and non-materiality or immanence and transcendence. Unlike Plato, the scope of this relation is never widened. This is a crucial point to which we will return when we come to Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence. 5. Conclusions Based on the Early Work One possible explanation of Lévinas’s shifting understanding of eros might be his persistent suspicion of mysticism. He is also critical, therefore, of the tendency in Plato to identify the relation with the Good as other than ethical. In a 1981 interview with Richard Kearney, he complains because, Plato defined love – eros – as only half-divine in so far as it lacks the full coincidence or unification of differences which he defined as divinity…I am trying to work against this identification of the Divine with unification or totality.337

So in spite of the more affirmative treatment of Platonic eros in Totality and Infinity, Lévinas actually distances himself from Plato because he no longer holds eros to be central to the relation with alterity as Goodness. Again, even while saluting Plato’s rejection of the idea of fusion in the myth of Aristophanes, he warns that:

337

Kearney, R. (1984). Op. cit., p. 58.

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Love as analysed by Plato does not coincide with what we have called Desire. Immortality is not the objective of the first movement of Desire, but the Other, the Stranger. It is absolutely non-egoist. (TI 63; TeI 58)

He reads Platonic eros as ultimately concerned with self rather than alterity. The fact of the matter is that Lévinas’ comment on Plato is inconsistent but the general thread seems to be a suspicion of a tendency to privilege a relation of the Same with the Good at the expense of the Other. Lévinas’ own suspicion of mysticism results in his notion that only as ethics can a relation with the Good be enacted. That is, the Good is not to be thought as abstract. Rather, the irreducible transcendence of the Good can only be encountered in the ethical relation. This may explain the shifting approach to the question of eros in Lévinas’ thought. Initially he makes it the site of the relation with alterity but only by refiguring the Platonic account. Later, he becomes wary of the ambiguity of eros and its connection with sensibility and so makes it distinct and secondary to ethics. I must add one or two remarks here in order to recapitulate. Our interest in Lévinas is in (a) his indictment of philosophy in the name of ethics, (b) his attitude to Plato, and (c) the centrality of desire in his thought. As we have seen, not one of these issues can be dealt with straightforwardly as they are each deeply, and at times frustratingly, complex. We began by treating Lévinas’ indictment of philosophy. We saw here that he tended to overstate his own case and that the relationship with the tradition was, at times, ambiguous – that is, the tradition endorses totality while, at the same time, some of its greatest representatives provide the means towards a philosophy of alterity. Yet, even if Lévinas’ target is not as great as he imagines, there is an important point being made here about the tendency in some schools of philosophical thought to be reductive of otherness. Any such reduction is all the more perfidious since it usually proceeds in the name of truth and goodness. Lévinas’ point, then, that goodness can only be meaningful as a relation with what is other is well taken. But in relation to this, what is Lévinas’ attitude towards Plato and, more specifically, how does he read Platonic eros? This relates to (b) and (c) above. It is here that things become increasingly complex, both in themselves and because it is almost impossible to separate these two questions. As we have seen, Lévinas’ attitude to Plato in general is ambiguous and not easy to discern. On the one hand, he finds in Plato some of the most profound insights in the western tradition as a whole. Plato’s Good as epekeina tes

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ousias allows for the possibility for a radical hospitality towards alterity and it is, in many ways, around this insight that Lévinas’ thought is built. So Plato is a kind of hero for Lévinas to the extent that the latter’s thought can fairly be described as Platonist in spirit. On the other hand, Plato appears to understand knowledge as intimately related with Goodness. This may be the legacy of certain Socratic theses such as ‘virtue is knowledge’ or knowledge as recollection, both of which Lévinas deeply distrusts. These theses are very much in line with Lévinas’ presentation of the capital failing of the western tradition – namely the equivalence of the thought of being and Goodness. Plato appears at times to hold the view that understanding is the path to Goodness. But the matter is even more complex than this, as we have seen. If Plato sometimes suggests that knowledge is related to Goodness, he also suggests that eros, or desire is the fundamental term of the subject’s relation with the Good. Here again, Lévinas is indebted to Plato. So he takes from Plato the ascription of the Good as well as the means of relation. But it is not enough to say this since Lévinas is suspicious of whether Plato himself is always faithful to the epekeina and he is never quite comfortable with Plato’s insistence that desire for the Good is essentially erotic. In the present chapter, I have tried to examine the principle notions of Lévinas’ thought specifically as they relate to these issues. A brief review might be helpful here. In the earliest of Lévinas’ works, Existence and Existents and Time and the Other, he develops a view of subjectivity that is nonHeideggerian.338 We do not have concern (Sorge) with our own being and therefore with Being in general since Being is described as featureless and threatening (il y a). Subjectivity is an hypostasis in which the I gathers itself to itself and therefore overcomes the anonymity of Being. In these works, Lévinas offers close phenomenological analyses which revolve around the deeply sensuous and playful (jouissance) relation between the I and its world. Interestingly, when he discusses the communication of alterity, eros is the key term. There is a continuity here insofar as eros is both connected to the sensible while also containing the more of a communication of significance

338

I think that the presence of Heidegger is always detectable in the works of Lévinas but this is especially true of these two works. The dismantling of Heideggerian ontology is almost the raison d’être of these works.

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as other.339 Unfortunately, however, these analyses are not terribly well developed. On the face of it, the similarity to Plato here is profound. However, at this point in his writings, Lévinas is keen to stress that he understands eros differently than Plato had done. He never challenges the Platonic description of eros as offered by Diotima in the Symposium, but he wishes to interpret the lack or deficit in eros positively. That Plato, according to Lévinas’ analysis, did not do this, he takes to be a serious flaw and it justifies his sense that, for Plato, eros never escapes the Same and ultimately pursues the fusion of the soul with its other. Plato is accused of misidentifying the essence of eros and of lacking sufficient sensitivity to what is communicated therein. Even so, the fact that Lévinas identifies eros as the key term in the relation with the Good is striking. In Totality and Infinity, by contrast, Lévinas’ thought becomes more dualistic and so he is inclined to endorse the Platonic account of eros more fully. But what is most significant now is that eros is no longer privileged as a relation with alterity. In Totality and Infinity, the desire for the Good is other than eros precisely because eros still hovers within the sensuous and is ambiguous. Now Lévinas wants to expunge all trace of ambiguity from ethics and so insists that the desire for the Good is unique and un-erotic. While some connection between the dwelling of the I and the communication of alterity lingered in the very early works, Lévinas is inclined more now to isolate the provinces of Being and Goodness. The notion of the proximity of the other in ethics is now entirely sidelined to the insistence on intraversible distance. Thus, Lévinas starts out very close to Plato while later moving into a position in which eros is replaced by a desire that retains no connection with the incarnate. It is for this reason that I have described his thought as dualistic. When eros was a key term, he could not really be considered a dualist. This is significant because, as I will argue later, Plato’s sense of eros allows him also to avoid dualism. But it seems that for Lévinas, circa Totality and Infinity, dualism is the only way to avoid the reduction of otherness to sameness. He is indebted to Plato’s sense of the importance of desire for a relation with the Good but he is equally suspicious that for Plato, desire is always and ultimately concerned with a return to self. That is, Plato is still 339 These early analyses, especially in Time and the Other, also crucially develop Lévinas’ thoughts on the meaning of time. I have not been able to deal with them in any great detail here.

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bound to the tradition of the hero and Odysseus while Lévinas is attempting to think in the spirit of Abraham. Treated alongside the critique of philosophy in the speech of Alcibiades, the work of Lévinas may appear to sit uncomfortably, especially since we are approaching Lévinas as a defender of Plato. What we have seen involves as much if not more distance from Plato as common ground. Yet at root Lévinas can still be termed a Platonist and it is around two Platonic insights – the Good beyond Being and desire as the path to Goodness – that his own work is developed. He has sought to furnish us with an understanding of desire that, in the very early works is transformative of eros while it later becomes something other than eros. But the point has always been to re-orient these basic Platonic insights towards a more open and receptive position regarding the Other (l’Autrui). He follows Plato to the point where Plato makes the Good other than the Other (l’Autrui). For Lévinas, the pursuit of the Good must be enacted as ethics. He is not re-stating the critique of Alcibiades except in the loosest way. He is not arguing for a relation between the Same and the Other based on sexuality nor does he critique philosophy for its resistance to seduction. But as we saw when we read the speech of Alcibiades, and when we treated the canonical interpretations of this speech by Vlastos and Nussbaum, it (the speech of Alcibiades) suggests a certain closure of the philosopher against concrete and irreducible otherness. Using Platonic terms, Lévinas acknowledges the strength of this claim, especially as a reading of Platonic eros, but essays to salvage ethics by employing the nugatory truth at the heart of Platonism. As a defender of Plato, Lévinas does not seem to know whether Plato followed through on the essential insights of his writings but what we find when we read Lévinas is still a Platonist defence of Platonism. In part I, we saw Nietzsche re-orienting Platonic eros and reading it as ultimately affirmative of self. Here, we see that eros never sits easily with Lévinas. He rethinks it before rejecting it as a path to genuine alterity and Goodness. But he finds in it initially the seed of a movement towards the Other even if it is a seed that is never fully realised by Plato himself. That his interest is so diametrically opposed to Nietzsche’s in spite of their loyalty to the same source is interesting in itself and tells us much about the depth and difficulty attached to reading Plato. But we are not yet finished with Lévinas. In the following chapter we will attend to developments in his last major philosophical work, Otherwise

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than Being. In that work, as we will see, many of the formal structures of Totality and Infinity are collapsed as Lévinas finds it increasingly difficult to maintain the dualist structures that appeared in the earlier of the works. In Otherwise than Being, Lévinas’ opposition to any purported assimilation of eros and ethics qua desire reaches its highest pitch. In spite of this, however, the collapse of the formal structures of Totality and Infinity makes it increasingly difficult for him to do this. I would not go so far as to claim that ethics becomes erotic in the later work, but I do think that the crucial ingredients of eros that appeared in the earlier works are later incorporated into the ethical relation. Lévinas may thus unwittingly continue his defence of Plato by salvaging once more a sense of eros as open to what is other in a nonreductive way.

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Ethics and Erotic Paradigms in the Later Lévinas: Towards a Redemption of Philosophy

In the previous chapter, we examined the indictment of philosophy as it is played out in the early thought of Emmanuel Lévinas. We did this with particular emphasis on his attitude to Plato and the centrality of notions of desire and eros in his thought. We saw that while endorsing, for example, the epekeina tes ousias of Plato, he criticises Plato for failing to recognise that the expression of this infinity is the face. The epekeina first introduces the idea of the infinite into Western thinking340, but fails by refusing to anchor the relation with infinity in the Other (l’Autrui) as ethics. Plato’s erotic dialogues are guilty of, at best, searching for transcendence in the wrong place or, at worst, reneging on the relation with transcendence by understanding itself as pure lack that seeks only to overcome itself as lacking.341 Lévinas is no Alcibiades but he does share with him a sense of the inhumanity of philosophical eros insofar as that eros intends self-sufficiency or the immortality of the subject. Lévinas is deeply critical of the tradition of western thought and while he never outright rejects the possibility of philosophy, he does seem to think that metaphysical ethics as liturgy retains the only possible fostering of otherness and Goodness. We can read the early thought of Lévinas, as such, as responding to the critique of Alcibiades from within a certain type of Platonism. This is achieved, however, only at the expense of deposing philosophy’s pursuit of knowledge for the sake of ethics.342 What I wish to do in this chapter is to consider the developments in Lévinas’s thought as they emerge in the 1974 publication Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence. This work is importantly different from Totality 340

Lévinas, E. (1998). Philosophy and the Idea of Infinity. In Collected Philosophical Papers. Op. cit., pp. 47-60. 341 On this point, see also Max Scheler’s critique of Plato’s theory of love. Scheler, M. (1992). Love and Knowledge. In Feeling, Valuing, and Knowing. Chicago: Chicago University Press, pp. 147-65. 342 For the notion of the ‘deposition’ of philosophy in Lévinas’s thought, see Badiou, A. (2001). Ethics: An Essay on Understanding Evil. Translated from French by Peter Hallward. London: Verso Books, p. 18.

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and Infinity in many key respects. I wish here to examine these divergences as well as suggest possible reasons for them. Ostensibly, the central difference between the two works is their subject matter. While Totality and Infinity was an ‘essay on exteriority’343, Otherwise than Being is concerned with the questions of language and ethical subjectivity. On the face of it, this makes the latter work more directly phenomenological inasmuch as it addresses the question of the constitution of the subject and thereby deals with the manifestation of the other from within that constitutive framework. While this unpacking of the constitution of subjectivity will prove to be wrought with paradox – it is, in fact, Lévinas’s intention to show that starting with subjectivity methodologically demonstrates the non-priority of subjectivity regarding meaning and the Good – it is an approach that allows him to respond to critics of the earlier work from within phenomenology. 1. A Critique of Lévinas: Ontology, Chronology, Methodology 1.1. Derrida’s Critique In the previous chapter, we mentioned two critiques of Lévinas’s early work, which attempted to highlight its incoherence as phenomenology. The first of these was Derrida’s 1967 article entitled “Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Lévinas”, critiques Totality and Infinity’s project of overcoming ontology. In this essay, Derrida is critical of Lévinas’s project because he thinks that the latter’s attempt at overcoming ontology is still rooted in ontology. Lévinas is opposed to the totalising effects of the thought of Being as it is found in the tradition. Inasmuch as this is so, the critique is directed with force against both Husserl and Heidegger, as we have seen. For Derrida, however, it is the ontological thought of Being as found in Heidegger’s work, for example, which prevents such closure. For Heidegger, according to Derrida: It is metaphysics (or metaphysical ontology) which remains a closure of the totality, and transcends the existent only toward the (superior) existent, or toward the (finite or infinite) totality of the existent. (VM 178)

343

This is the subtitle of Totality and Infinity.

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Lévinas, says Derrida, presupposes the “precomprehension of Being in his discourse, even when he directs it against ‘ontology”’ (VM 177). The hierarchy of Same and Other in Totality and Infinity is that which introduces and formalises the closed totality and for Derrida it is one in which, paradoxically, the Other is presented not as other than Being but as the supreme existent. In this way, the thought of Lévinas is accused of being hypertraditional in spite of its pretensions to radical originality. Derrida seems to say that Lévinas follows the logic of Greek and Medieval thought in placing the highest Good (the Good or God) at the summit of Being and, as such, fails in his attempt to think the Good as discontinuous with Being. For Derrida, Lévinas’ depiction of the tradition is a kind of caricature used to facilitate his depiction of transcendence as goodness. Against this, he claims that the thought of Being in Heideggerian ontology is the site of resistance to totality since it is, pre-eminently, the thought of difference (VM 183). The thought of Being can be a ‘letting be’ (Gellasenheit) that respects difference while the over-hasty determination of the epekeina tes ousias as the Good (to agathon) is, in fact, totalising. Heidegger’s philosophy of Being represents, for Derrida, a patience before what manifests itself. The phenomenological tradition, form its very inception, is also one that has emphasized absence, withdrawal, and deferral as ruptures in manifestation that speak expressly against totalizing closure.344 Derrida’s critique is, at times, convincing even if it should be read as much as an introduction to Derrida’s own thought as a piece of Lévinasian exegesis. Essential to his critique is the idea that any determination of the beyond Being as the Good is by definition hasty and not in keeping with a philosophy of the other as Other. According to Derrida any such determina344

These notions are indicative of emphases in the thought of Husserl, Heidegger, and Derrida respectively. While Derrida’s deconstruction is perhaps most closely associated with non-totalizing forms of thinking, he traces this impulse in his own thought to his inheritance from both Husserl and Heidegger whose respective emphasis of the notions of absence and withdrawal betoken an openness to what gives itself to be seen operative at the heart of the constitution of meaning. Husserl speaks, for example, of the interplay between the present and the absent in intentional horizons, while Heidegger’s understanding of phenomenology from the beginning emphasized the tendency of the given to withdraw from sight. See Husserl, E. (1959). Erste Philosophie II (Hua 8). Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, p. 45, and Heidegger (1962) Op. cit., pp. 58-63. See also Sokolowski (2000). Op. cit., pp. 3341.

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tion undermines notions such as genuine alterity and difference. While this may be a little unfair on Lévinas, especially since the delineation of the Goodness of the Other was rooted so clearly in the idea of infinity (i.e. as that which makes determination or totality impossible), it does pinpoint a weakness in Lévinas’s early work and it is this weakness that the later work seeks to address. The problem, it turns out, is not that alterity has been hastily determined, but that the subjectivity to which and in which is manifested has been insufficiently articulated. 1.2. A Phenomenological Paradox: Fundamental Ethics and the Pre-Ethical Chief amongst the problems of Totality and Infinity, was the relationship between ontology and ethico-metaphysics. As I suggested earlier, there appears to be a kind of paradox in the early work of Lévinas. On the one hand, he wants to insist on the ethical relation as fundamental and as grounding ontology. On the other hand, his depiction of the Same and realm of enjoyment suggested a pre-ethical relation with Being. It was as though the I must first gather itself to itself for itself (the hypostasis) before it could respond to the other. Furthermore, the appearance of the other was always shocking and traumatic because of the absolute nature of its alterity and the demand for response. But if the relation with the other is as primordial as Lévinas claims, how can there be a pre-ethical subjectivity that is so dramatically shocked by the encounter with the face? An example of this confusion can be witnessed in the chapter on eros in Totality and Infinity. In “The Subjectivity in Eros”, he says that: There is in the erotic relationship a characteristic reversal of the subjectivity issued from position, a reversion of the virile and heroic I which in positing itself put an end to the anonymity of the there is, and determined a mode of existence that opens forth the light (TI 270; TeI 303).

However, in “The Phenomenology of Eros” he says that: [S]ociety with the Other, which marks the end of the absurd rumbling of the there is, is not the work of the I giving meaning. (TI 261; TeI 292)

Surely these two claims are inconsistent. In the first, the cessation of the rumbling of the il y a is the work of the virile and sovereign I while in the second, it is the Other that releases the I from said rumbling anonymity. The source of this problem can be traced to the somewhat dualistic orientation of

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Lévinas’s thought in Totality and Infinity. He is so keen to protect ethics from the clutches of subjectivity’s Sinnegebung that he drives a wedge between Being and the Good or between ontology and metaphysics. That is, he does not rethink the thought of Being in terms of alterity but makes it radically other. Because of this, he is constantly struggling with the question of which came first – the epiphany of the face or the positioning of the subject as egoist? In the end, he seems bound to the latter since only when one accepts his descriptions of the hypostatic formation of subjectivity as selfcentred can the call of the face be absolutely other or traumatic at all. I mean that the trauma of the Other can only be a trauma if we accept the preethical account of subjectivity as for itself. So, the trauma of the other and the radical dualism between ethics and philosophy is only convincing if we accept Lévinas’ account of Being and traditional philosophy in the first place. There is, in short, a problem of coherence. This is also Derrida’s point. It is as though Totality and Infinity has furnished a sketch of a phenomenology of subjectivity and a sketch of a phenomenology of alterity but without showing how these fit together. If the primoridiality of ethics is to be established phenomenologically, which is Lévinas’s intention, then it must be more firmly anchored within an account of subjectivity. This is a methodological point as much as a substantive one and it is one that, if answered, will allow Lévinas to deal with the objections of Derrida and Janicaud. Janicaud, we remember, rejected Lévinas’s phenomenology of alterity because it transgressed the principle of all principles and engaged in speculation beyond the limit of the given. If Lévinas can give a better account of the manifestation of alterity from within givenness, he will be able to go some way to meeting this objection. 2. Otherwise than Being: Ethics and the Sensual These problems are, in fact, dealt with more satisfactorily in the later work of Lévinas, in which he fruitfully develops notions of proximity, sensibility and lived indebtedness from the later sections of Totality and Infinity. The first two of these have already been met in his accounts of eros, but they are now invested with a more decidedly ethical import.345 Does this mean that 345

In spite of this, it is worth noting that, unlike the earlier works, Lévinas does not discuss eros at all in Otherwise than Being.

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Lévinas moving more in the direction of an erotic account of ethics in the later works? One in which the metaxu desire of eros is at least employed to heal the dualistic rift and solve the phenomenological paradox of Totality and Infinity? This remains to be seen. If he is, it will be worth noting what becomes of the notion of the Being and the il y a. Even in Otherwise than Being, it is never abandoned but it is hard to see how this position can be maintained if things are as we suspect. The subject matter of Otherwise than Being is ethical subjectivity and language. Thus, there is a shift away from the type of discussions of alterity that were found in Totality and Infinity. There, alterity, sensibility and eros were discussed in separate sections giving rise to the problems of cohesion we have already mentioned. In Otherwise than Being, by contrast, sensibility or the sensuous are represented as being almost inseparable from the meaning of ethical subjectivity. And while there is no discussion of eros per se, we find that the language of eros from the last part of Totality and Infinity comes more and more to the fore. Indeed, in his 1978 introduction to Otherwise than Being, translator Alphonso Lingis notes that: the highly original concepts that were elaborated to formulate the erotic relationship... are now the basic concepts with which the ethical relationship of responsibility with the other is formulated.346

Among these ‘original concepts’ are the notions of proximity, of closeness, and of skin caressed. These concepts, so foreign to the description of the ethical relation in Totality and Infinity, are now crucial to it.347 While Lévinas spoke at length about the traumatizing affect of the appearance of the Other in Totality and Infinity his description of this encounter from the point of view of subjectivity was relatively thin. In Otherwise than Being, this defect is not only addressed, but is so in a way that draws explicit attention to the encounter with alterity as material. In other words, the ‘ideality’ of Totality

346 Lingis, A. (1981). Translator’s Introduction. In Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence. Op. cit., p. xxi. 347 The sensuous was, of course, important to the relation with alterity as outlined in Existence and Existents and Time and the Other. It would be wrong, however, to suggest that OB involves a simple return to the earliest works given that the ethical is central to OB in a way that was never the case in Existence and Existents or even Time and the Other.

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and Infinity is replaced by materiality.348 This is an important evolution in Lévinas’s thought, which relates ethics to the elemental in a way that was not the case earlier. Again, Lingis claims insightfully that the “ethical relationship...acquires, if not an erotic, a sensuous character” (OB xxii) insofar as sensuous contact is seen as both preceding and supporting the ethical relationship. Lingis is right to distinguish between the sensuous and the erotic given that the erotic descriptions of Totality and Infinity dealt to a large extent with the sexual relation. To claim that ethics becomes erotic, in this sense, would be tantamount to claiming that the ethical relation is reduced to sexuality and this is certainly not what Lévinas intends.349 Yet, insofar as eros was situated between the divine and the mortal, it entailed relation with the Other through the elemental and sensual. Alterity was encountered in the matter of Being and communicated in a way that was never transparent. But these are, strangely, some of the most defining features of ethics and ethical subjectivity in Otherwise than Being. Thus, if ethics does take on a more erotic character, it is the result of a extension of the scope of the terms of eros from the earlier work. It is certainly more than the eros conceived of in Totality and Infinity. If this assertion bears fruit, it may be that Lévinas becomes more open to a hermeneutic of the communication of Goodness through the sensible. What I am keen to do here is draw out some of the implications of the incorporation of the features of eros into ethical subjectivity. The fact that alterity is felt ‘under the skin’ has, I will argue, two important consequences. The first is that the dualism of Totality and Infinity comes under threat or, at least, that Lévinas will give himself the resources to think other than dualistically. Secondly, it will result in Lévinas referring to responsibility more in terms of the an-archical than the absolute. This means that alterity is no 348

I use the word ideality in inverted commas because it appears a strange way of describing Lévinas’s thought. He is consciously and vehemently opposed to idealism because idealism, he thinks, involves the attempt to reduce all of reality to concepts or to the constitutive activity of subjectivity as it is classically understood by phenomenologists. By ideality, rather, I am referring to the tendency to entirely separate matter and thought in the early works whilst privileging the latter with regard to ethics. Lévinas does not, of course say that thought can do justice to the otherness of the Other, but it is in thought (the idea of infinity) that the Other approaches. 349 It was not what Alcibiades intended either, at least on the basis of Nussbaum’s reading.

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longer the terminus of a pre-established subjectivity but is prior to subjectivity and gives the subject to itself as gift. Subjectivity will no longer be seen as responding from a position of sovereignty chez soi, but as gathering itself as response. The other is, then, encountered in the diachrony of the immemorial past to which subjectivity responds in the accusative. From the point of view of temporality, this amounts to a significant departure from both the timeless absolute of alterity in Totality and Infinity, and the futurity of eros in Existence and Existents and Time and the Other. It also has implications for the way we understand philosophy, which perhaps need no longer be considered as allergic to ethics. If guided by a sense of the subject’s ab-original indebtedness, it may even become the site of the response. Lévinas had, of course, spoken of the idea of infinity in Plato and in Descartes, but his early treatment of this idea is one that tended to see this idea as an aberration in the history of philosophy, which the tradition had always attempted to marginalize or domesticate. This is, of course, important because we are continuing to explore the theme of the indictment of philosophy in the thought of Lévinas as well as the role played by eros in this. I believe that the shift in methodology and language and Otherwise than Being allows him, not to struggle incessantly with philosophy, but to seek to ground it otherwise. In what follows, I will outline the major notions of Otherwise than Being in order to explore the way Lévinas pursues the aims of his project (i.e. the insistence on the primordiality of ethics and alterity) and the ways in which these mark a progression from his earlier thought. This will be carried out in the context of highlighting the use of erotic paradigms in Otherwise than Being and the consequences for philosophy. I will finally tie up my reflections on Lévinas by an assessment of his success in terms of his own attempt to renew a sense of transcendence and Goodness. 3. Focal Points: Delineations of Subjectivity and Erotic Paradigms in Otherwise than Being 3.1. Subjectivity and Alterity: An-archy and Gift As we have already noted, Otherwise than Being is an extended treatment of subjectivity which supplements and transforms Lévinas’s earlier thinking. Part of the change is methodological. Otherwise than Being is a very different

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kind of work than Totality and Infinity, where the former was a more programmatic study divided into strata so as to deal with its themes relatively independently of each other. In this way, it was methodologically similar to many of the great works of phenomenology from this period. Now whereas this made it an easier book to read, it did create certain difficulties. Lévinas’s notion of the radical alterity of the other was intended to pose a fundamental challenge to the way western philosophy, and especially phenomenology,350 operates. Yet, in treating the themes of the book discretely and independently, the thrust of Levinas’s central point became blunted. The overall impression of Totality and Infinity is of a pre-established subjectivity which is then shaken to its foundation by the rupture of the idea of the infinite as face. The result was an overly programmatic and seemingly disjointed account of the Same and the Other that was finally unconvincing.351 In Otherwise than Being, by contrast, Lévinas appears to have chosen a style that is more in keeping with his theme. Though the sustained focus on subjectivity brings Otherwise than Being into closer dialogue with many of the other classics in the phenomenological canon352, the continued haunting presence of the other-in-the-same precludes any kind of programaticity in the work. This makes it a more difficult read, to be sure, but it is also made clearer, to the patient reader, that there is a consistency here that his earlier thinking perhaps lacked. But while it is more phenomenologically consistent, Otherwise than Being is by no means a systematic book. Totality and Infinity had also railed against system but it did so while retaining the trappings of

350

I do not think that phenomenology was especially guilty in Lévinas’s eyes, only that, owing to his acquaintance with the phenomenological tradition, he is keenly aware of its shortcomings. It is not radically at fault in terms of western philosophy generally but is also less distinguishable from the tradition than it thinks. Lévinas struggles with the thought of Husserl, Sartre, and especially Heidegger, at least two of whom (Husserl and Heidegger) claimed to be thinking in a revolutionary way. 351 It was also, in my view, difficult to resist Derrida’s claim that the Good seems a determination due to its nature as ‘absolutely’ other. 352 Whether in the form of Husserl’s transcendental subjectivity, Heidegger’s Dasein, or the auto-affection Michel Henry’s subjective immanence, to name but a few, phenomenology has tended to offer sustained articulations of subjectivity as the site of the manifestation of the world.

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system.353 These are abandoned entirely in Otherwise than Being with the result that the book flows better and also seems a better vehicle for Lévinas’ challenging thinking.354 The early works, concerned the relation between subjectivity and alterity; after all, it was only as subject that I could respond in goodness to the Other. Yet those early works seemed also to retain an awkward pre-ethical sense of subjectivity, at least insofar as ethics and subjectivity were unfolded somewhat independently of each other. At root, subjectivity was described in terms of the hypostasis by means of which the existent drew itself together out of anonymous Being so as to achieve the status of existent. One needed first to establish oneself as solitary and sovereign over Being before one could respond ethically. In Otherwise than Being, by contrast, subjectivity is described from the beginning as forged in exposure and proximity.355 Subjectivity is thought of in terms of a passivity that is even prior to the traditional passivity/activity dichotomy. The double of passive/active is traditionally a category that itself is derived from the being of subjectivity, while Lévinas wishes to think a more radical form of passivity that is the condition of possibility for the very being of the subject. Finally, sensibility now contains the communication of alterity in a way that it never did in the various analyses of Totality and Infinity. The result of all of this is a more nuanced idea of subjectivity and ethics. At one point Lévinas calls it “a malady of identity that it is both accusative and self” (OB 69; AE 111). Subjectivity is no longer built upon hegemony over the alterity of Being, and nor is responsibility simple investiture. Rather, the subject is indebted to it from the very beginning.356 Thus Lévinas speaks of ‘the other in me’, as the identity of the I. Furthermore, this is only possible, he says, as incarnation, 353

It is worth noting as an aside that while Totality and Infinity ends with the traditional “Conclusions”, Otherwise than Being ends with a section entitled simply “In other words”. 354 I say this to avoid the claim that there is a Kehre in the later thought of Lévinas. It is simply the case that the earlier thought was less successful, especially Totality and Infinity, owing to methodological confusions. The style of Otherwise than Being appears to allow Lévinas to say what he could not say earlier. In other words, the methodology of the later work is more successful in the execution of its theme. 355 We will say more about this presently. 356 The notion of indebtedness is crucial in Otherwise than Being, we will return to it throughout the discussion.

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[t]he animation, the very pneuma of the psyche, alterity in identity, is the identity of a body exposed to the other, becoming ‘for the other’, the possibility of giving. (OB 69; AE 111)

This is important both because it presents not only ethics but also subjectivity as inconceivable in the absence of alterity, and because it establishes a connection between ethics and embodiment that was hinted at but never resolved in the earlier works. In Otherwise than Being, the other is, in a sense, under my skin. I am exposed to the other even in my body before I can gather myself into a sovereign subject.357 But this inner otherness makes it doubtful whether sovereignty is now possible at all. Lévinas claims that identity as simple is not possible. There is no I in the straightforward sense of that which is separable from everything else and which must encounter the radically other as pure exteriority. There is no possibility of reducing the relationality that is fundamental in this structure. Again, we are struck by the shift of emphasis from the earlier works. Gone is the happy egoism or solipsism in which the I set itself up as autochthonous only to be disturbed by the call of the other. Lévinas has not abandoned his insistence on the primacy of the other but he no longer dwells exclusively on exteriority since for this to work required a certain ‘ontological’ view of subjectivity. His emphasis is more on alterity as ‘the other in the Same’ and less on exteriority as ‘the other of the Same’, so that he now seeks to explode ontology altogether by re-grounding the subject in responsibility to the other (i.e. rather than in something like Spinoza’s conatus essendi). Here, Lévinas speaks of an irreducible obstacle to solipsism (which, paradoxically, threatened in Totality and Infinity) in the sense that the unity of apperception is impossible. He says that: Apperceiving itself as universal, it (the I) has already slipped away from the responsibilities to which I – always contrasting with the ego – am bound, and for which I cannot ask replacements. (OB 92; AE 147)358

357

As Lingis noted, the language of Otherwise than Being is distinctly sensuous if not erotic. 358 Perhaps this is only a difference of emphasis in the sense that the ego (confusingly contrasted here with the I) can renege on its responsibilities. Still, the earlier works had suggested that an initial closure was possible and even necessary. In this work, no such closure seems possible.

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There can be no final closure of I with I so the circle of self-identity is irrecuperably shattered. The circle of self-identity, we may remember, was the very happy egoism accomplished in enjoyment as described in part II of Totality and Infinity. Now, that possibility appears to be closed off. And this is no accident. It is not a contingency of subjectivity but its very essence because, now, to be a subject is to be ‘subject to’.359 Subjectivity is in the accusative, I am ‘accused of a fault I have not committed freely’ (OB 92; AE 147).360 In my very being as bodily, incarnate being, I am responsible for the other. I am ‘hostage’. To be subject is to be hostage to the other. The images he employs are striking. For example: The subject is in the accusative...not at rest under a form, but tight in its skin, encumbered and as it were stuffed with itself, suffocating under itself, insufficiently open, forced to detach itself from itself, to breathe more deeply...forced to dispossess itself to the point of losing itself. (OB 110; AE 175)

Even the air we breathe speaks of the responsibility to the other. I am “accused beneath the level of prime matter” (OB 110; AE 174). The passage just cited, and in fact the whole of Otherwise than Being, ooze with an atmosphere of claustrophobia. There is no escape from the responsibility that is felt in living, that is touched by the fingers in every experience. In some respects, this is not all that dissimilar from the various accounts of the il y a as ‘atmosphere of presence’ in the very early works. The early descriptions of the il y a also involved a threatening sensuous materiality by which the I felt oppressed. This does not mean that the other has become the il y a, or that the ‘otherwise’ than Being has become pure Being, but it is nevertheless striking that it is now the other that threatens the unity and self-identity of 359

Unfortunately, it is difficult to find an alternative to the word essence here. Lévinas’ point is that subjectivity has no essence in the traditional sense or it is beyond essence. He is writing at the edges of language and sense deliberately since he understands language (in the sense of philosophical terminology) to be expressive of a totalising prejudice. This accounts for the often frustrating ‘neither…nor’ style of his writing as identified by Derrida (VM, p. 112). This point will be revisited with regard to his reflections on ‘the Saying and the Said.’ 360 There are clear parallels between Lévinas’s accusative subjectivity and Heidegger’s notion of guilt and the call of conscience from Division II of Being and Time. There was, of course, never any suggestion of interpreting the meaning of these phenomena in ethical terms for Heidegger. See Heidegger (1962). Op. cit., pp. 317f.

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the subject at the very level of material being. In Otherwise than Being, this presence is described as the immemorial at the heart of Being that haunts because no thought of Being can recuperate it or integrate it into a totality. In Freudian terms, it is a trauma. We note here, though, that none of this is intended to soften the alterity of the Other. The fact that I am for-the-other from the start certainly appears to challenge the dualism that we detected earlier but even if this is the case, it does not do so at the expense of monism for I neither comprehend the Other in my obsession with him nor am I swallowed up by him. Not only do I survive the trauma caused by alterity but am maintained therein. That is to say, I am given as subject by this trauma. It is precisely thus that Lévinas can conceive of subjectivity as ‘gift’. In my obsessive responsibility, I am given to be as subject, subject to. And, of course, far from lessening my responsibility, the gift increases it. Since the other is ‘beyond Being’, subjectivity as instituted by the other is itself partially unanchored from Being – this is the meaning of the gift.361 Again, I am indebted in advance in such wise that I can never repay what I owe, I will never be ‘quits’ or on equal footing with the other. The language of Otherwise than Being is strained, as we noted, but this is part of the point. Language struggles not to repay, but even to say what it owes. It is worth noting here that language, along with sensibility and subjectivity, also gains a depth in this later work that it lacked in the earlier work. In Totality and Infinity, Lévinas spoke of language as discourse, in which I offer my world to the other. Here language is described principally in terms of expression, in a way that makes explicit the verbal or dynamic dimension that was perhaps under-communicated in the earlier work. Expression is the attempt to respond to alterity, but it is also the attempt to say what is owed and to make that articulation material. Lévinas hereby draws a distinction between the content of speech and the effort to repay what cannot be repaid (ethics) to the other. It is in this context that the notions of ‘the saying’ (le dire) and ‘the said’ (le dit) will become crucially important, as we shall later see.

361

It is for this reason that Lévinas’ language is so difficult and imagistic in this work. Of course, by beyond Being, he appears to mean beyond a certain type of ontology or thought of Being.

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3.2. The Erotic Paradigm Deepens: Proximity and Distance If the meaning of subjectivity is altered in Otherwise than Being, it is because proximity is now of its essence. Of course, the notion of infinite responsibility is not new in Otherwise than Being, but the language used to convey it most certainly is. The atmosphere of claustrophobia, the exposure to the other in incarnation and the inescapable weight of subjectivity all testify to the closeness of alterity, and to the inextricable presence of transcendence in immanence. The other is, as Lévinas says, under my skin. This differs from Totality and Infinity in which the ethical relation was described using the language of distance and height.362 The notion of proximity, that comes to the ethical fore here, is not new to Lévinas’s later work either, as it had been employed as far back as On Escape and Existence and Existents. In these earlier works, as also in Time and the Other and Totality and Infinity, it was deployed as the meaning of erotic subjectivity. In opposition to the ethical relation of the face-to-face – produced as the idea of infinity as the presence that maintained distance – erotic subjectivity was described precisely in terms of closeness and proximity. To be sure, this closeness was in no way to be read as fusion,363 since it too maintained an irreducible distance between I and other, but it was a relation of tangency nonetheless. In some respects the proximity of eros was responsible for its fundamental ambiguity. In terms of the distinction between the Same and the Other in Totality and Infinity, eros held an uncomfortable position because it was reducible to neither – too sensuous to be ethical and too transcendent to be a relation within ontology. That is, the erotic subject oscillated between the divinity of ethics and the mortality of enjoyment.364 Not to mention that this paradox was deepened by the radical diachrony between the erotic subjectivity and the child, which appeared often to be the primordial other of eros.

362

The Other came to me in the idea of infinity and maintained him/herself in a dimension of height. 363 I have mentioned before that Lévinas is always critical of the account of eros given by Aristophanes in the Symposium, in which the separated halves seek fusion. 364 In some respects, it appears as though the uniqueness of the erotic relation is such that, from Totality and Infinity onwards, Lévinas does not know where to put it. This might explain his increasingly obscure sense of eros.

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For this reason alone, it is worth examining the new role of proximity and why it has become a properly ethical notion. We remember the early works that spoke of the accomplishment of subjectivity as hypostasis. Here we find something important. Lévinas says that subjectivity consists in “...the hypostasis of the relationship into a subjectivity obsessed” (OB 85; AE 136). And again; Subjectivity is not antecedent to proximity, in which it would later commit itself. On the contrary, it is in proximity, which is a relationship and a term, that every commitment is made. (OB 86; AE 136)

Furthermore, “[i]t is probably starting with proximity that the difficult problem of incarnate subjectivity has to be broached” (OB 86; AE 136). But this is surely a radical departure from the earlier works. There, subjectivity was initially established as free and ‘atheist’365 whereas here the relationship with alterity not only precedes the hypostasis of subjectivity but gives it to be in the first place. The proximity of the other, then, is felt even in the matter of the world. He is everywhere. I do not accomplish myself first before turning to the other but am given to myself as my-self by the other. What has become of the solitary subject living from the world and off its own needs? In proximity, even my needs seem to speak of the other. He is the absent presence that is there before I am366 and from whom I cannot escape. Lévinas says that: [o]nly a subject that eats can be for-the-other, can signify. Signification, the one-for-the-other, has meaning only among beings of flesh and blood. (OB 74; AE 119)

So signification and signifyingness are now too related to sensibility and this is so because incarnation is the felt proximity of the other in the same. The very materiality of the world is ethically communicative. This is no small development in Lévinas’ thought. The notion of proximity seemed a very apt and descriptive one in the discussions of eros precisely because it captured the flavour of the sensuousness of eros but it was never discussed in ethical 365

Lévinas used this term in Totality and Infinity (TI, p. 53 ff.) not to designate nonbelief in God but the subject’s sense of itself as self-justifying. 366 I use this formulation deliberately since it reminds of the passage from John 8:58, “Before Abraham was, I am.” This is, of course, somewhat incongruous in the sense that it is a New Testament quotation. However, it is related to the name of Yahweh in Exodus, “I am who am.”

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terms. Now it is and, what is more, it has become pressing to the point at which even the notion of identity is under strain.367 The language of claustrophobia, we said, permeates the book. “In responsibility...the subject is accused in its skin, too tight for its skin” (OB 106; AE 168) such that even “materiality...sensibility...vulnerability...describe responsibility for other” (OB 106; AE 168-9). The proximity of the other is such that there is no escape. He is felt and experienced even in the elements because the subject that enjoys is ‘subject to’. So there is no outside of the ethical relation. Of course, it was never Lévinas’ intention to suggest that there was, and yet Totality and Infinity did often give the impression of a subjectivity that could live in heedless indifference to the Other.368 Infinite responsibility was always infinite responsibility but this was only experienced by a subject that set itself up as sovereign in advance. In Otherwise than Being, there is no antecedence to responsibility and this is the result of the altered view of the meaning of sensibility. We had noted, in the previous chapter, the strong dualist leaning in the early thought of Lévinas, at least insofar as materiality and sensibility were considered relatively independently of ethics and goodness. But this is now under strain thanks in large part to the increasing importance of proximity, sensibility and the language of eros in the later work. A point of clarification is required here. I have said that the use of the term proximity in relation to ethics is new in Otherwise than Being. This claim is certainly true with respect to Totality and Infinity. It is true regarding Existence and Existents and Time and the Other too but in a somewhat less clear cut way. Proximity was in fact an important term in the relation with alterity in the earliest two works, and Lévinas even speaks at one point of proximity and distance as the tension in which the other was maintained (EE 98; DEE 163). Oddly enough, this passage (written in the early 1940s) comes strangely close to an expression of Lévinas’s later thought in that the irreducibly other is felt proximately in the subject. This sat somewhat awk367

This undermining of identity is crucial to the Otherwise than Being project. I will say more about this shortly. 368 Both Alphonso Lingis and Robert Bernasconi argue that it was the “ontological language” of Totality and Infinity that was at fault for the misunderstanding. This may very well be the case but it does raise serious problems with some of the earlier analyses. See Lingis (1981). Op. cit., and Bernasconi, R. (1995). Only the Persecuted...Language of the Oppressor, Language of the Oppressed. In Ethics as First Philosophy: The Significance of Emmanuel Lévinas for Philosophy, Literature and Religion. Edited by Adriaan Peperzak. London: Routledge, pp. 77-87.

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wardly at the time but it is perfectly compatible with the later thought. This passage appeared nevertheless in a discussion of eros which, at the time, constituted the major encounter with alterity. Lévinas had not yet developed his powerful sense of the primacy of an ethics of the face, which had the effect in Totality and Infinity of relegating the importance of the erotic. Otherwise than Being, to re-iterate, does not revert to this position (i.e. the primacy of eros) but it does seem to absorb crucial features of eros into the account of ethics. The fact that this occurs may help us make sense of Lévinas’s constantly evolving attitude towards eros. In the very early works it is primary, in Totality and Infinity it is secondary, while the later Lévinas mentions eros only negatively. He says that the relation with alterity is a love ‘without concupiscence’ and it is clear that, by concupiscence, he means eros. Thus, he starts to think of eros again in terms of self-interest and the desire for fusion. In an interview carried out eight years after the publication of Otherwise than Being, he says: We say that love is a fusion, that it triumphs in fusion. Diotima, in Plato’s Symposium, says that love as such is a demigod, precisely because he is only separation and desire for the other.369

And in an article entitled “God and Philosophy”, he describes eros as… aspiration that can be satisfied in pleasure or which, if unsatisfied, remains a pure lack that causes suffering.370

It would seem that Lévinas is taking the same position regarding Platonic eros that he had done in his earliest works. Then, he wished to offer a corrective interpretation of eros in the service of his phenomenological project, while now he wishes to abandon it altogether. At the same time that eros is excised, however, it re-emerges powerfully through the sensuous terms in which the ethical is articulated. Lévinas is, perhaps, aware of his appropriation of erotic language to support ethical responsibility but since he does not want to give the impression that ethics is somehow erotic, he tends to avoid the issue of eros entirely in Otherwise than Being.

369

Lévinas, E. (1982). Philosophy, Justice, and Love. In Entre Nous: on thinking-ofthe-other. Op. cit., p. 113. 370 Lévinas, E. (1982). God and Philosophy. In Entre Nous: on thinking-of-the-other. Ibid., p. 61.

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One of the most frequently used words in the later work is ‘obsession’. Subjectivity is obsessed by the other and desire becomes a kind of mania (un désir sans fin). In this way, subjectivity seems to be underscored with an obsessive desire for transcendence, which because it is now anchored in material sensuality, is uncannily like eros. But Lévinas continues to resist any such identification. Part of the reason for this, as we will discuss later, is the impossibility of purging eros entirely of notions such as pleasure, festivity or joy. For Lévinas, these notions are incompatible with obsessive concern for alterity and always threaten, once again, to prioritise egoism.371 A further aspect of this discussion relates to the question of incarnation and need and the status of these ideas in Otherwise than Being. In the earlier works, Lévinas insisted upon the distinction between metaphysical desire and need – this was his reason for rejecting the Socratic definition of desire. The reason was clear enough in relation to his accounts of sensibility and autochthony. The subject lived from its own needs and its ability to sate them. This was the inner meaning of sovereignty and happy solitude. If in the later works sensibility is transformed however, is not also need? The notion of happy solitude is disrupted in Otherwise than Being to the extent that even the bread I eat bears the weight of my responsibility to the other and his proximity as ‘under my skin’. But this surely means that need is no longer suggestive of simple egoism only. The closure of the I on itself is no longer possible so that transcendence haunts me even in my need. This houses an important ambiguity. On the one hand, need remains an aspect of the I’s relation with itself. On the other hand, though, the simple unity of the I with itself is no longer possible, even in the satisfaction of need. Lévinas, by contrast claims that because the other is so present in proximity, even need is disturbed. I am persecuted by the other even in my need. But this is not the same as to say that need is now ‘for the other’. And yet this is unsatisfactory. At one point, Lévinas says that the ultimate secret of incarnation is that it is “...prior to all reflection, prior to every positing, an indebtedness before any loan, not assumed, anarchical, subjectivity of a bottomless passivity...” (OB 111; AE 175). And again;

371

Lévinas says that “God commands only through the men for whom one must act.” This confirms his sense that the divine is communicated only through that which is burdensome and accusatory. See Lévinas (1998). Philosophy and the Idea of Infinity. In Collected Philosophical Papers. Op. cit., p. 59.

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Persecution is not something added to the subjectivity of the subject and its vulnerability...the subjectivity of the subject is responsibility of beingin-question in the form of total exposure...’ (OB 111; AE 176)

And finally: To undergo from the other is an absolute patience only if by this fromthe-other is already for-the-other. This transfer, ‘otherwise than essence’, is subjectivity itself. (OB 111; AE 176)

3.3. Substitution: The One for the Other and the De-centring of the Subject While the whole of Otherwise than Being is concerned with ethical subjectivity, the core of the argument is perhaps to be found in the chapter entitled ‘Substitution’, which represents the kernel of the work. It was first published as an article six years before Otherwise than Being and then became the cornerstone upon which the rest of the work was built.372 As such, it comprises most of the themes we have already discussed. In addition to these there are, however, three further important themes that are elucidated in this section to which we must take heed. These are (3.3.1) passivity and persecution, (3.3.2) identity and (3.3.3) investiture. Passivity and persecution The phrase conatus essendi is frequently discussed by Lévinas in Otherwise than Being. Its origins lie in Spinoza373 and it designates the endeavour of beings to be or, in other words, the perseverance of beings in Being. For Lévinas, it is the very motto of western philosophy’s tendency to subordinate everything to Being or the being of the subject. It is not simply a principle of intellect since it encompasses not only the attempt to understand Being but a striving to be simpliciter. It is therefore ontological, epistemological, and existential. It is the deep centre of philosophy, the truth around which all other truths rotate. Lévinas’s philosophy as a whole can be de372

The article was first published as Lévinas, E. (1968). La Substitution. Revue Philosophique de Louvain, 66, pp. 487-508, and then slightly modified and expanded for the publication of the second major work. 373 Spinoza, B. (1992). Ethics. Translated from Latin by Samuel Shirley. Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett Press, pp. 18-25.

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scribed as the attempt to literally de-centre this ‘truth’. At the same time, he is aware that de-centring cannot be mere opposition since any reversal that takes place within the logic of Being will confirm what it seeks to displace. He will not, therefore, challenge the hegemony of the conatus with anything like a Gelassenheit374 since this would remain a relation within Being which confirms Being as the ultimate horizon of meaning.375 So he maintains that there is a passivity in subjectivity that is “more passive still than the passivity of matter” (OB 114; AE 180). It is “beyond the normal play of action and passion in which the identity of a being is maintained, in which it is” (OB 114; AE 181). We have already seen that subjectivity does not simply undergo but is actually forged as undergoing. It is for this reason that the passivity is beyond the active/passive dichotomy since even the latter of these would imply a pre-existent substantiality which he is not now willing to grant to subjectivity. It is not clear whether Lévinas intends to reject the notion of conatus essendi entirely (though at times it is hard to see how he will avoid this) but he does intend to reject its primordiality. It is not originary in the sense of being an arche. Responsibility is, he says, an-archical meaning that it is not chosen by the I’s own initiative. The claim of the conatus to be an arche is the very crime of western thought’s tradition of autonomy, its perversion of the original situation.376 Why does the other concern me?[...] This question has meaning only if one has already supposed that the ego is concerned only with itself, is only a concern for itself. (OB 117; AE 186)

374

Lévinas always rejects any assimilation of the other to Being, “even if that assimilation ends in releasing him as a being – in letting him be.” See Lévinas, E. (1998). Is Ontology Fundamental? In Entre Nous: on thinking-of-the-other. Op. cit., p. 8. It is not unreasonable to think he has Heidegger’s Gelassenheit in mind here. 375 Once again, it is clear that Lévinas has Heidegger in mind. Lévinas remained to the end impressed by Heidegger’s achievement in Sein und Zeit, which has “remained the very model of ontology”, and “which clearly defined philosophy in relation to other forms of knowledge as fundamental ontology”. See Lévinas, E. (1985). Ethics and Infinity. Op. cit., p. 41, p. 38. 376 Note that for Lévinas, the subject’s self-referential freedom is the only possible arche. That the other is antecedent does not justify speaking of a different arche but leads to the rejection of the language of arche at all.

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Identity The result of this is the explosion of traditional ontological concepts, most especially that of identity. The self is no longer simply itself in the way the tradition has always maintained. Lévinas says that “A does not, as in identity, return to A” (OB 114; AE 180). There is no unity of apperception of the transcendental ego, as is the case with Kant and Husserl, nor an irreducible jemeinigkeit at the heart of all manifestation , as for Heidegger. He had made a similar claim in Totality and Infinity when, in discussing enjoyment, he asserted that the identity of the Same was not reducible to the ‘A is A’ formalism, but the intention there was only to assert that the self-sufficiency of the Same was a complex rather than simple identity. This was, we might say, a Heideggerian point, notwithstanding the subsequent exposure of this sovereign I to the face that summons me out of myself. In Otherwise than Being, though, the point is to deny that sovereign identity is sustainable at all. The movement of the I goes not to itself but to “the hither side of identity” (OB 114; AE 181) because “I exist through the other and for the other” (OB 114; AE 181).377 The traditional notion of identity is the notion of the closure of the I against what is other than it, even if this closure entails a relative openness through which otherness is incorporated or transformed. But Lévinas insists that the relational is original, or ab-original, abandoning the language of arche. “The meaning of I is here I am” he says (OB 114; AE 180).378 And, of course, this inner otherness does not threaten difference. The subject is not swallowed by the other but maintained in its responsibility. The infinite nature of this responsibility is such that it is characterised as persecution. This establishes the uniqueness of the I. I am elected by the other and since I cannot renege on my responsibility, I am irreplaceable.379

377

Lévinas heads the chapter “Substitution” with the following quote from Paul Célan: ‘Ich bin du wenn ich ich bin’ or, ‘I am you when I am myself’ (OB 99; AE 156). 378 This is, of course, Samuel’s response to Yahweh whose call cuts through the night, though the source cannot be ascertained. 1 Sam: 3. 379 The idea of election suggests the strong connection between the philosophy and theology of Lévinas. The same very Jewish idea is discussed, for example, by Martin Buber. See Buber, M. (2002). The Election of Israel: A Biblical Enquiry. In The Martin Buber Reader. Edited by Asher D. Biemann. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 23-33. Though the context is theological for Buber also, I do not mean by

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Lévinas says “Grace à Dieu, je suis autrui pour les autres” (OB 158; AE 247), which is to say that the very appearance of the subject is an event within the logic of the Good. This is even prior to the investiture of freedom that was discussed in Totality and Infinity, because it speaks not of an event in the life of the subject, but of the event of subjectivity. The very value of the I is understood in light of its persecution by the other, which is the trace of God. Investiture The subject is hostage because the other permeates everything, in a way that understands investiture beyond anything that was seen earlier. When Lévinas spoke of the investiture of freedom in Totality and Infinity (TI 302-4; TeI 337-40), the point had been that freedom became meaningful in dialogue with the Other. Here, he claims that subjectivity in and of itself is invested from the beginning because there is no pre-relational dimension. The subject is not simply responsible for the Other but for all the others, for everyone and, importantly, everything (OB 116; AE 183). [I]t is under the weight of the universe. The unity of the universe is not what my gaze embraces in the unity of apperception, but what is incumbent on me from all sides, regards me in the two senses of the term, accuses me. (OB 116; AE 183)

This investiture is crucial since through it, the world itself, even in its materiality, is my affair consequent to responsibility. This represents another important difference of emphasis from Totality and Infinity. While never lessening the depth of responsibility or the alterity of the other (in fact, they are almost deepened in the later work), the two worlds of Totality and Infinity have now come under increasing strain, while this very strain could make space for affirmation of the goodness of the world in itself. What I mean is this: Lévinas rejects the notion of the possible closure of subjectivity as selfsufficiency. He does not, thereby, destroy subjectivity but grounds it otherwise. This means that I am beholden as subject, even in my sensibility and that everything I touch bespeaks the other before whom I am infinitely guilty. It would seem from this that the trace of the other is now to be found this comparison to suggest, along with Alain Badiou, that this means that Lévinas has no philosophy. See Badiou (2001). Op. cit., pp. 18-23.

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even in Being. In the two worlds of Totality and Infinity, it seemed that closure of the self, at home with itself (chez soi), was possible; that is, before the face of the other broke through as trauma. Now, this initial movement of subject is ruled out to the extent that there seems a far greater permeability between the Good and Being. Thus, the ‘otherwise than being’ could be thought of as decentring dualism along with the transcendental notion of subjectivity. This suggestion is subversive with regard to Lévinas’s own intentions, of course. The very title of the later work confirms his absolute resistance to thinking Being and ethics otherwise than had been the case in Totality and Infinity. The point of Otherwise than Being was to clarify the implications of the manifestation of the face from the point of view of subjectivity, not to re-imagine the core of the earlier work. What I am suggesting, in spite of this, is that the trajectory of Lévinas’s thought in Otherwise than Being offers the resources to appraise Being otherwise in the light of alterity, even if this possibility is never one that is seized explicitly. The point, then, is not that Lévinas overcomes dualism in Otherwise than Being, but that he provides himself with the resources for such an overcoming. It is in this author’s opinion unfortunate that he does not avail of them. 3.4. The Saying and the Said: Philosophy and Justice In articulating the essence of ethical subjectivity in Otherwise than Being, Lévinas simultaneously re-interprets language on the basis of ethical responsibility. We mentioned earlier that he introduces the famous distinction between the Saying (Le dire) and the Said (Le dit) in this regard. In Totality and Infinity there was an implied disjunction between the language of ontology and the language of discourse, or a radical split between expression and the institutionalization of language that was the work of the Same.380 The latter became ethical insofar as it offered its world to the other (l’Autrui). Of course, this distinction, as far as it went, was always somewhat confusing. I mean that on the one hand, it seemed as though language was co-original with ethics insofar as ethics was contrasted with heedless sensuous enjoyment. On the other hand, the indictment of philosophy suggested that there 380

In this respect, Lévinas echoed Plato’s critique of the written word in Phaedrus 274e-275b, where it is claimed that the written word does not assist memory, but distorts our relation to living presence.

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was a possibility for language to be totalising and allergic to otherness. This problem was never properly resolved. In Otherwise than Being, Lévinas distinguishes between language as theoretic content (the Said) and as the event of signifyingness (the Saying). As with the work in general, the point is to ground language as beholden to the other an-archically, which is to say that language has no independence from the response logic that is ethics. Lévinas’ use of the word ‘an-archy’ rather than ‘absolute’ is important here, as it was with the discussion of subjectivity, for it continues to overturn the suspicion of an outside of the ethical relation. His notion of the saying as “a foreword preceding languages” (OB 5; AE 17) suggests that speech and language derive from neither the initiative of the subject or the intersubjective but are given by the other. That is, just as subjectivity was understood as accusative (‘I’ means me voici, or, ‘here I am’), so the Saying is the pre-original expression of this an-archical indebtedness. He insists that: …this pre-original saying does not move into a language, in which saying (le dire) and said (le dit) are correlative of one another, and the saying is subordinated to its theme. (OB 6; AE 17)

This would be to subordinate ethical speech to ontology (OB 7; AE 18). Rather, the origin of language is irrecuperable so that the original saying cannot be reclaimed in the said in such wise that the debt to the other could be grasped or discharged. Nor should we understand the pre-original to refer here to a discrete moment in history. It is, he says, the “signifyingness of signification” (OB 5; AE 17), which means that it grounds signification without ever becoming a theme of signification. It is the persistent attempt to articulate the debt to the other that is never, nor can ever be, discharged. It is the saying that can never become said since this would imply that it could be housed entirely within the finite boundaries of language. As alterity is the infinitude in the finitude of subjectivity so the saying is the infinite in the finitude of language. In both cases, the finite is given to be and almost sustained by the infinite and the other. By their very nature, these are not two terms that could be synthesised in a new unity and so the multiple or plural is guaranteed here, at least so long as the I is conscious of its debt and does not understand the derivative as the primary. Therefore, the distinction between ethical and non-ethical language is not as clear cut as it seemed to be in Totality and Infinity. The two are not equivalent but the latter is sustained or given to be by the former.

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Our theme in this study is the indictment of philosophy, and so I would like now to explore the implications of what has preceded for philosophy and, indeed, the status of philosophy generally in Otherwise than Being. We detected, in Totality and Infinity, a somewhat anti-philosophical tendency, which seemed to be connected to the dualistic structure of that work: that is, philosophy was associated with the sovereign enjoyment that relativized the otherness of Being. The Good was only conceivable therefore as radically other, so much so that ethics, justice and goodness called for a suspension and subversion of the philosophical impulse. Only metaphysical desire beyond ontology could do justice to the otherness of the other; only this could be ethical. All of this made it appear as though ethics required the suspension of philosophy, or at least of philosophy understood as ontology. The title of the later work would immediately suggest that not much has changed. We are still dealing with the ‘otherwise than being’ which designates responsibility and, so long as philosophy is still concerned with Being and only Being, the two are at odds. However, we have seen that through the notion of an-archic responsibility, the sovereign autochthony and autonomy of the I has been challenged and the language of ontology and identity disrupted, so perhaps this calls for a re-evaluation of what it means to do philosophy beyond the quasi-Nietzschean vision of Totality and Infinity.381 This is perhaps the most difficult aspect of Lévinas’s thought to deal with due to some serious ambiguities on his part. At times, it seems as though there is hope of philosophising beyond the positing of conatus essendi as primordial so that philosophy might be respectful of alterity. Yet, Lévinas never abandons exposition of language and subjectivity in terms of violence, persecution and the uprooting of the subject, in Otherwise than Being. It appears that any genuine relation with alterity, ethical or philosophical, must be traumatic and harrowing.382 The best and most important exposition of the role of philosophy, in the later Lévinas, is found in the section of Otherwise than Being, entitled, 381

I mean to say only that the possibility for philosophy to be anything other than ontology or philosophy of power was rarely a feature of Totality and Infinity. 382 This is perhaps the Kantian strain in Lévinas’ thought. The latter does not, of course, think in terms of the opposition of duty and pleasure since duty is a much too determinable concept and one that implies the kind of reciprocity that Lévinas has always rejected. Still, they share a common spirit.

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“From the Saying to the Said, or the Wisdom of Desire” (OB 153-62; AE 239-52), in which Lévinas wrestles with the question of why we should engage in philosophy at all (OB 157; AE 244). The reflections on philosophy found in this section seem to signal yet another departure from the language and analyses of Totality and Infinity. The questions of philosophy, consciousness and determination are dealt with in relation to the question of justice. Philosophy is the vehicle of justice because the language of philosophy (the Said) can now be understood as infused with an-archical responsibility. Lévinas tellingly claims that, Responsibility for the others or communication is the adventure that bears all the discourse of science and philosophy, thus this responsibility would be the very rationality of reason or its universality, a rationality of peace (OB 160; AE 249).

At the end of this section, Lévinas says that “philosophy is the wisdom of love, at the service of love” (OB 162; AE 253). He thus plays with the etymology of the word meaning ‘love of wisdom’ and transposes its terms. Philosophy is still not the measure of ethics but it is no longer antithetical either. Inasmuch as “the extraordinary commitment of the other…calls for control, a search for justice, society an d the state, comparison and possession…philosophy is the measure brought to the infinity of the being-forthe-other” (OB 161; AE 251). In this way, philosophy and reason generally become repositories of the Good, which chronicle our being-for-the-other and bear witness to the fundamental nature of the ethical. In a 1986 interview, Lévinas claims the renewed possibility for a connection between philosophy and justice to have been one of the most fundamental differences between Totality and Infinity and Otherwise than Being. He says: In Totality and Infinity, I used the word ‘justice’ for ‘ethics’, for the relationship between two people. I spoke of ‘justice’, although now for me ‘justice’ is a calculation...It is something I distinguish from ethics which is primary.383

So, in Totality and Infinity, justice designated the metaphysical desire that sought to ‘do justice to’ the alterity of the other. Beyond the determinations of philosophy as ontology, the idea of the infinite was met in the epiphany 383

In interview with Tamra Wright, Peter Hughes and Alison Ainley, published under the title Lévinas, E. (1988). The Paradox of Morality. In The Provocation of Lévinas: Rethinking the Other. Op. cit., p. 171.

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of the face of the other to which only the infinite desire of the I was adequate. Only this desire, manifested as discourse could do justice, could be just. So justice was ethics and since ethics was beyond the scope of traditional western philosophy, so too was justice. By contrast, he says that in the later work, justice is viewed as a calculation. Does this mean that all connection between justice and ethics has been broken and that the former has returned to the ontological sphere of calculation and determination? Is justice unethical or indifferent to ethics? Quite the opposite. Essentially, Lévinas’s modification of the term justice is borne out of criticisms of his early works that revolved around the so-called problem of the third: that is, justice as the going-towards-the-other, before whom one is infinitely responsible, in dialogue, seemed to rely on the exclusivity of the two. But what of the second face? If I am infinitely responsible to the other, what then becomes of the third party? I cannot be infinitely responsible for both. When the second, or third face enters and calls on me, to whom do I respond? How can I decide this? Is deliberation possible? In other words, what of the Aristotelian question of practical judgement? In the same interview he says: But with the appearance of the third - the third must also have a face. If the third is also a face, one must know whom to speak to first. Who is the first face? And in this sense, I am led to compare the faces, to compare the two people, which is a terrible task. It is entirely different from speaking to the face. To compare them is to place them in the same genre.384

It is precisely in relation to these concerns that Lévinas modifies his view of justice. Justice cannot be indifferent to ethics and yet it cannot be its equivalent. It is here that philosophy becomes important as the attempt to be faithful, insofar as this is possible, to the pre-original (ethical) saying that underpins it. Justice calls for measure and calculation in a way that was never permissible in ethics. “The third party” says Lévinas, “introduces a contradiction in the saying whose signification before the other until then, went in one direction” (OB 157; AE 245). Because of this, Justice is necessary, that is comparison, co-existence, contemporaneousness, assembling, order, thematization, the visibility of faces, and thus intentionality and the intellect, the intelligibility of a system, and thence also

384

Ibid., p. 174.

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a co-presence on an equal footing as before a court of justice. (OB 157; AE 245)

Intentionality and intellect are the tools of philosophy. The relation with the other in ethics was always considered outside of these. But the question is now not one of doing justice to the other but to the others. If, in proximity, I am responsible even for the responsibility of the other, then all the others are my affair. Insofar as it calls for measure, the third party is, the very fact of consciousness. It is the thematization of the same on the basis of the relationship with the other...whereas the identification of knowing by itself absorbs every other. (OB 158; AE 246)

So consciousness, as rooted in language, originates in responsibility. As Lévinas says, thematization is done on the basis of the relationship of the same with the other and not vice versa. Justice is possible only because of ethics and infinite responsibility. Thus he can claim that the measure involved in justice is not a “diminution or limitation of anarchic responsibility” (OB 159; AE 248) since any measure involved is for the sake of this responsibility. In other words, it is the pressing proximity of the other and its signification of the others that calls for justice in the first place and it is philosophy’s task to respond to this call. Furthermore, philosophy as judge, is not outside of the proximate relation between faces but in the midst of it (OB 159; AE 248). Though it cannot discharge responsibility, it is no longer indicted as such. In Totality and Infinity, Lévinas sought to replace the Greek (philosophy) with the non-Greek (ethics) whereas now he holds out the possibility of grounding the Greek in the non-Greek rather than insisting on their radical opposition. Every thematization and every determination involves the search for truth – this is the classical definition of philosophy. But now, even this search for truth is understood as the desire for justice which, in its turn, is underscored by responsibility and the desire for transcendence. The weight of alterity is and must be felt in the heart of philosophy so that philosophy is for-the-other. It is no longer value-free analyses of the “neutral notion of being” (OB 158; AE 247). We have re-iterated again and again, though, that this quasi-Hegelian sense of what philosophy is was to the heart of Lévinas’ critique in Totality and Infinity. Philosophy was the hegemony of the subject over Being, it was dominion and domination. Now, in Otherwise than Being, even the representation and logos of philosophy can be for-the-other because philosophy is

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the work of a subject obsessed by the other before its own initiative. The subject is hostage, ‘subject to’ from the start so that even its ‘will-to-truth’, so to speak, is a concern borne out of relationality as irreducible.385 I must be concerned with the other in my thematizations and this suggests that the other is present when I think and in what I think about. My representations are now the means by which I attempt to do justice. This is philosophy as the ‘wisdom of desire’. Ethics is not justice but the ethical as primordial (albeit an-archical) underscores justice and it is here that consciousness is borne. I take heed of or mind the others thoughtfully. 4. Concluding Remarks and Problems: Leaving Lévinas It remains now only to conclude this discussion of the work of Lévinas with some critical remarks based on what we have seen to date. I would like to summarise what we have seen under three headings. These will be: the evolution in Lévinas’ thought qua eros and philosophy; the status of the notion of Being; and the question of violence in relation to transcendence and goodness. 4.1. Eros, Philosophy and Ethics At the beginning of this chapter I said that I did not consider the later thought of Lévinas to constitute a Kehre. I re-iterate this in spite of the fact that we have seen divergences with the earlier works right the way through. I believe that Lévinas’ corpus manifests an unbroken continuity from the earliest to the latest works. To be more precise, I do not believe that his project has altered in any significant way qua fundamental intentions from Totality and Infinity to Otherwise than Being. What he has done in the later 385

In light of this change, I am concerned with the question of the status of the other as ‘widow and orphan’. In the earlier works this formulation made sense because the other was considered entirely outside of the network of relations contracted by the subject. The latter was self-sufficient and happy in possession of the world as always ‘my world’. The face of the other was an epiphany that came from elsewhere. As an intrusion into my world, it could not be other than poor and destitute. But in light of the transformations we have seen of the sensible and the work of philosophy in Otherwise than Being, is it still sustainable to talk of the other in this way?

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work is adapt his methodology to his theme. Totality and Infinity consisted of several different sections and analyses which had the unfortunate effect of seemingly compartmentalising the relation to the other and thereby introducing an ambiguity concerning the primordial nature of alterity. The very idea of an encounter with alterity suggests a being who can have this encounter. While this encounter was described as radically different from any of the other encounters enacted within the economy of the Same, the set up of the discussion introduced an ambiguity that undermined idea of the infinity from within. Many of these problems are addressed in Otherwise than Being. The schematic methodology is abandoned for a more fluid style with the result that it hangs together more successfully on its own terms. All this means, however, is that in Otherwise than Being Lévinas has found a style and way of writing that is more suitable to what he was trying to say from the beginning. He is not saying something different. From his first to his last works, Lévinas is obsessed, to use his own word, with the question of ethics and otherness. What I have tried to do in the last two chapters is to follow this concern alongside discussion of the notions of eros and the indictment of philosophy, which are my own concerns here. The backdrop was, of course, the indictment of philosophy and philosophical eros in the speech of Alcibiades in the Symposium. This proved exceedingly difficult on account of the various evolutions in the thought of Lévinas especially regarding the relationship between erotic desire and ethics. In the very early works, eros is the site of the relation with alterity, in Totality and Infinity it is secondary and ambiguous, while in Otherwise than Being it is rejected altogether. And as complicated as this might be, the situation was exacerbated by the fact that ethical subjectivity in particular is articulated in Otherwise than Being using erotic terminology (sensibility, touching, obsession, proximity). As for the results of this stylistic evolution with respect to eros, we noted that Lévinas does not discuss eros at all in Otherwise than Being. But perhaps the omission is telling even while being understandable. He says that he is wary of the language of eros for fear that it will give the impression of simple concupiscence.386 In his later writings in general, he tends to speak of the erotic in terms of concupiscence so as to distinguish it as radically as possible from ethics and the relation with transcendence. The irony of this is that while Lévinas describes the relation with transcendence increasingly in 386

See Lévinas (1988). The Paradox of Morality. Op. cit., p. 174.

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the language of eros, he also thinks more and more negatively of eros. Eros was not given a central place in Totality and Infinity but still constituted a relation with transcendence. In his later writings, Lévinas seems to want to deny even this. It is possible, I think, that in order to clarify the distinction between eros and ethics, Lévinas resorts to overstatement. Otherwise than Being was also the work in which a possible reevaluation of philosophy was mooted. In Totality and Infinity, philosophy was predominantly ontology and ontology was understood in terms of the power that made neutral Being the primordial term of existence relative to which all other conceptions revolved. Much of this was explained by Lévinas’ struggle with Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit. Ethics represented a challenge to philosophy as the absolute other of philosophy. Since the face-to-face could not be unfolded in philosophical (i.e., ontological or totalizing) terms, it seemed that there could be no reconciliation between philosophy and ethics or justice. This represented a kind of either/or in Lévinas’s thinking. In Otherwise than Being, on the other hand, philosophy plays a crucial role with regard to justice, now distinguished from ethics. The presence of the third party calls for justice and with this, consciousness is borne. Philosophy’s work of justice is described in terms of calculation, measuring and interpretation for the sake of my responsibility.387 The very language of philosophy is now, along with consciousness, haunted by responsibility. As such, it need no longer be oblivious or allergic to alterity. The point is that law and system generally are forever underscored by the asymmetry and indebtedness to which no system can do justice. Yet, philosophy is the striving through this. It fails to be sure, but this failure is, in another sense, its success: that is, philosophy’s humility before that which gives it to be, the irreducibly other. As such, the work of philosophy is no longer understood as necessarily reductive and totalising since, as vigilant, its work can be for the other. 387

Heidegger makes frequent use of the ‘for the sake of’ structure in order to make sense of making sense. For Heidegger, however, it is always Dasein itself that is the ‘for-the-sake-of’ (ou heneka) or the horizon of all comportment. See Heidegger, M. (2003). Plato’s Sophist. Translated from German by Richard Rojcewicz and André Schuwer. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, p. 35. See also McGuirk, J. (2015). Heidegger’s Reading of Aristotle’s Ethics: re-appropriations, transformations and the spectre of Kierkegaard. In Martin Heidegger’s Philosophy and Present Day Sociocultural Trends. Edited by V.M. Voronov. Murmansk: University of Murmansk Press, pp. 78-96.

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4.2. The il y a and the Meaning of Being: Dualism With these adaptations in mind, it is worth asking once more about the meaning of Being in the later thought of Lévinas. I mean this: In Totality and Infinity and earlier, the experience of Being was described in terms of an atmosphere of presence or a dark anonymous rustling (il y a). Subjectivity was the hypostatic positing of the self as for-itself and this constituted the victory of the I over Being which rescued it from anonymity and allowed it to determine or relativize the world. The appearance of the other was of a different order and shattered the complacency of the subject and its ‘place in the sun’. This we described as the non-Cartesian dualism of Totality and Infinity, which comes under increasing strain in Otherwise than Being for reasons we have examined. One of the most important consequences of this I said was the re-grounding of subjectivity and the move away from what appeared to be a pre-ethical realm. In Otherwise than Being I am accused in my skin and I am accused an-archically. For Lévinas, not only I am indebted to the other prior to the positioning of my subjectivity but, in fact, my subjectivity is given as responsibility by and to the other. If this is so then there can be no outside of the responsibility and relativity of the subject to the other. Before I am myself I am responsible because the very subjectivity of the subject is responsibility. To be subject is to be subjected. With this and the other developments of Otherwise than Being in mind, it is hard to see how Lévinas can sustain a notion of Being as il y a, or what it could mean if he does. How can there be an experience that is not communicative of otherness? The il y a was dark and menacing because it was felt as the dissolution of all categories even, interestingly, that of subjectivity. So, it was an experience described as beneath subjectivity. In Otherwise than Being, the other is the presence beneath subjectivity. This being the case, it is hard to see how the notion of il y a is sustainable. In fact, the strained dualism of Otherwise than Being also raises questions about the status of the meaning of Being generally for Lévinas. If the other communicates an-archically, would this not support a view of Being itself as the site of this communication? Alterity may yet be beyond Being but it could be in such wise as to make Being infused with traces of the Good. In Otherwise than Being, materiality is no longer the sphere of the simple enjoyment of the solitary subject and nor does the need of the I to gather itself rescue it from anonymous rumbling. Rather, the other is felt even in the sensible world and the I gathers itself to itself, even as incarnate, as response to immemorial responsibility.

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His proximity means that there is no escape. The other is everywhere so that even the bread I eat communicates the presence of an other to whom I am infinitely indebted. There is no outside to the relation because there is no discrete subject who can enter into such a relation. The other is with me from (before) the very beginning. The idea of indebtedness is also, of course, important and is elaborated further by Lévinas when he speaks of the hostage subject, subject to the other, obsessed and always instituted in the accusative. Only as responsible does the notion of subjectivity make sense so that I owe my very existence to the other. Before I am free to choose I am accused so my freedom is not so much challenged, as in Totality and Infinity, as given by the other. This means that I am persecuted from the beginning but it also means that the primordial relationality at work that is other than Being is also operable within Being, even if it is so in a way that is not reducible to Being. There is no return of the ego to itself via otherness as a single identity. Responsibility is forever asymmetrical, as is evidenced by Lévinas’s frequent use of the Dostoyevsky motif “we are all responsible for everything but I more so than the others.”388 But since “thanks to God, I am an other for the others” (OB 158; AE 247), I too am considered. In the very depths of my subjectivity, I am beholden. But this means that there is no simple effacement of an I whose non-replaceability as responsive invests it with an inherent value that was never quite the case in Totality and Infinity. Thus Lévinas’s thought temporarily hints at the possibility of a non-totalising view of the whole. There is also the implication that sensibility, once the sphere of heedless freedom subsequently challenged by the face of the other, is now part of the furniture of ethics. In the early works, there was ethics and then everything else. Now, even the matter of existence bears the imprint of my responsibility, which might suggest, crucially, that matter is returned to the sphere of value. Once again, a new understanding of wholeness is mooted. Unfortunately, Lévinas will never allow this. In spite of the developments of Otherwise than Being, he continues to speak about il y a and the neutral notion of Being. In the end, it appears that there is no real move away from dualism in Otherwise than Being. On the one hand, the dualism between I and other seems lessened but he still insists that the Good, as

388

Dostoyevsky, F. (1992). The Brothers Karamazov. Translated from Russian by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. London: Vintage Books, p. 289.

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wholly other than Being can never penetrate into Being.389 He wants to provide a non-Eleatic ground for notions such as subjectivity and philosophy and yet he continues to struggle with rather than rethink what he considers to be the primordiality of the Greek sense of Being. As was the case with eros, Lévinas seems to fear any concession to the notion of the penetration of the Good in Being in case it might be a short step to a new totalising thought of the whole. Of course, Lévinas has never suggested that Otherwise than Being does or should overcome dualism so, in one sense, there is no problem and no critique. Yet, by marrying the Good beyond Being with accusative subjectivity and anarchic responsibility in Otherwise than Being, Lévinas provides a way out of dualism that would not reduce transcendence to presence. What is more, the fact that the call of the other is felt even in the matter of the world might allow him to relax his sense of Being and value as antipodes. But this is a step Lévinas will not make, which is unfortunate. Refusal to take this step, I suggest, lessens the success of Otherwise than Being and raises the question of the work’s internal coherence. The reason is that, while Lévinas wants to quarantine the communication of the Good within subjectivity to the province of the human other only, the claustrophobic presence of that other makes it difficult to see how this is possible. If the other affects me even in my sensible contact with the world, it would seem that Being itself carries some trace of this alterity and of the communication of the beyond Being. As such, his insistence on Being as neutral and valueless becomes difficult to sustain.390 But Lévinas resists any notion of a transformation of Being from beyond absolutely even though, as I have suggested, the notions employed in Otherwise than Being would seem to make this possible without reducing transcendence to ontological immanence. 4.3. Self-Abnegation and Violence in the Unfolding of the Good This brings me to the final point, which has to do with the unfortunately negative implications of the priority of transcendence in the thought of Lévinas. In my view, it is to Lévinas’s great credit that he raises anew the 389

In the next chapter, we will explore the idea that the Good is both beyond Being and communicated in Being for Plato. 390 If for no other reason than that this seems to suggest, once again, an outside to the relation (I and other) to which Lévinas says there is no outside.

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questions of transcendence and Goodness in a philosophical milieu that was often hostile to such questions. However, I believe it is equally unfortunate that the language of violence and even torture is always so close to the surface in his works. This was true of Totality and Infinity but it is even more prevalent in Otherwise than Being. Through his notion of responsibility as an-archical, Lévinas introduces the idea of subjectivity as gift, but it is a strange gift, a gift that accuses and recriminates. If I am guilty before my own initiative, as he says, then the gift is the gift of guilt. In a way that is strangely reminiscent of Heidegger, Lévinas speaks of guilt as the ground of subjectivity to which response is demanded.391 The subject is indebted and the debt is one that cannot be discharged but must be enacted as living. But this makes responsibility violent and tortuous. He speaks of the subject as hostage, persecuted and obsessed, as torn up from its beginnings, with no place to hide (OB 144; AE 220). The ‘I’ must tear the bread from its mouth to give to the other. In fact, the whole work oozes with an atmosphere of claustrophobia and asphyxiation. The subject is traumatised and victimised by its responsibility for the other. So the passion that Lévinas speaks of is the terrorised passion of the victim that is persecuted by alterity. This changes the nature of the gift somewhat insofar as the gratuity of the gift is a gratuity or an excess of guilt, persecution and violence. This may go some way to explaining the abovementioned problem of the dualistic separation of Goodness and Being. That is, rather than say that the communication of the other within the sensible could allow for the incorporation of the material into the sphere of value (grounded by the other) Lévinas prefers to see sensible subjectivity as the very site of my crime and violence against the other. Thus, the goodness of the other exceeds without saturating Being with the trace of goodness. Rather it saturates Being with guilt to the point that my very existence is a crime against the other. Being remains finally unjustified vis-à-vis the Good. But as well as transmitting a negative view of transcendence – and not in the sense of apophasis – this language also, paradoxically, can suggest a certain self-obsession. What I mean is this. Lévinas is obsessed with the responsibility of the I to the other but this obsession results in an obsessive vigilance that is always watchful and suspicious of itself. In one sense, this vigilance seems a kind of asceticism but it is also a fixation with self for the sake 391

Heidegger (1962). Op. cit., p. 326.

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of the other than self. In a highly illuminating discussion of the work of Lévinas, Wendy Farley highlights his obsession with the violent tendencies of the conatus essendi and the self-abnegation that is intended to mark ethics. It is as though Lévinas thinks that the human subject yearns to be domineering and to do violence unto otherness so that only this obsessive and violent vigilance can hope to accommodate plurality and ethics. But this is violence against violence. For Lévinas, she says: My hunger always illustrates the dynamic of need, of assimilation, of possession: violence. Its illegitimacy is reinforced by its equation with the demand for the sacrifice of the very self to the other by giving the other the very bread from my mouth.392

In connection with this, we might remember that Lévinas’ increasing suspicion of the notion of eros stemmed from precisely its connection with need and pleasure. It is as though the fact that self-affirmation or self-interest can be violent in relation to otherness is enough for Lévinas to conclude that it is always and necessarily violent. Thus, he combats violence towards the other with violence done unto the self. Farley suggests – a point to which we will return – that eros can be understood as a delight in concrete otherness which allows respect for alterity and self-affirmation to co-mingle. The alternative, that is the Lévinasian alternative, which is obsessed with detecting the taint of self-interest, runs the risk of becoming so suspicious of self that we even lose sight of the other. Farley likens the risk run by Lévinas to the warning given to a character equally obsessed with the ‘disease of self-interest’ in a novel entitled The Yeshiva by Chaim Grade. The character of Reb Tsemakh is told that: You always look for the taint of ulterior motive, the sin of selfishness. But the Omniscient and the Torah trust man more than a Navaredker Musarnik. The Rabbi can decide for his rebbetsin whether her Sabbath chick is kosher or not, and the Torah does not suspect conflict of interest…but if we see Satan in everything and everyone, and if we live with the assumption that man must not trust himself or his friends, then we nullify every judgement and every court of law…By so doing we destroy the order of the world. It’s as if we’re living in a fog. You don’t see your

392

Farley, W. (1996). Eros for the Other: Retaining Truth in a Pluralistic World. Op. cit., pp. 96-7.

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neighbour; you don’t see your own threshold; you don’t even see yourself.393

Does not Lévinas’s obsessive self-abnegation run precisely this risk in suspecting violence to be at the root of any and all affirmations that are other than the tortuous? Again, this is a theme to which I will return, but I would like to close by simply posing the question whether the violence against violence in the thought of Lévinas does not ultimately run the risk of obscuring and making impossible a true affirmation of Goodness, transcendence or even alterity. We have examined the work of Lévinas in the attempt to defend philosophy from the charge of indifference to lived otherness. In the later works, Lévinas moves as close to this as he can but we are finally left wondering whether the picture we are presented with is one that works or with which we can live. We noted that Lévinas suggests re-grounding philosophy as interpretative calculation for the sake of justice but, with all of the above in mind, it seems as though philosophy can only be a relentless instrumentalization of Being, on the one hand, and violent expenditure of self, on the other hand, for the sake of an other before whom I am eternally guilty.394 In general Otherwise than Being is a far more successful work than Totality and Infinity though the various uncomfortable tensions discussed here represent some deep and unfortunate inconsistencies that continue to plague Lévinas.

393 Grade, C. (1976). The Yeshiva. Translated from German by Curt Leviant. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Co. Cited by Farley. Op. cit., p. 94. 394 I do not wish hereby to dismiss the work of Lévinas whose appeal on behalf of alterity I believe to be one of the most important moments of twentieth century philosophy. However, I would suggest that, from a certain point of view, this kind of expenditure of self and instrumentalization of Being leaves Lévinas closer to Nietzsche than he would like.

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The Speech of Socrates: Ultimate Good, Relative Goods and the Hermeneutics of Eros

Through our readings of the speeches of Aristophanes and Alcibiades in the Symposium, we have explored the indictment of philosophy, with especial regard to the centrality of eros to philosophy. The argument ran that since the eros of the philosopher is directed towards the acquisition of wisdom and understanding, the desire for wisdom subordinates or instrumentalizes all affectivity in eros by subordinating Being to the power of calculative thought. Furthermore, on the basis of the prioritization of reason, the philosopher risks understanding his eros as the measure of the whole of Being. Respectively, these were the critiques of Alcibiades and Aristophanes. For Aristophanes, philosophical eros does a disservice to the truth by reducing everything to its own determinative powers. It seeks to dominate the whole of Being in a quest for sovereignty that is generated in the intellectualisation or spiritualisation of erotic desire. His speech constituted a warning against the dangers of the complete appropriation of eros by philosophy. This warning seemed to anticipate certain impulses in the work of Nietzsche whose notion of will-to-power locates the source of all value and meaning in human desire and its harnassing of power. Indeed, it is this impulse that is the source of Nietzsche’s ambivalent attitude to Plato and Socrates (and the Greeks in general). These thinkers are often scorned and rejected for their contribution to the heinous project of ‘moralising’ Being, but they are also revered as spiritual giants who stamped their mark on the flux of Being. It is in the context of the latter of these approaches that Nietzsche can be considered a defender of Plato and Socrates insofar as he transvalues the meaning of their activity and its import. They are not primarily moralizers preaching about the transcendent Good but thinkers of will-to-power who express their greatest through the philosophical work. In this sense, Nietzsche does not repudiate the Aristophanic interpretation of philosophy but accepts and celebrates it. Though certainly related to this, the critique of Alcibiades was subtly different, for his is an appeal on behalf of particularity and the irreducible

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passivity of the one before the other. According to him, the philosopher’s quest for relation with an intellectually transparent object of contemplation results in a hardening of the soul of the philosopher. He (the philosopher) seeks to erase all passivity in himself in the quest for self-sufficiency. He thus considers individuals to be insignificant in comparison with the eternal and unchanging object of contemplation to which he seeks to conform himself. While we might well have reason to question the authenticity of Alcibiades’s motives, his critique is not entirely without salience and anticipates later attempts to see in singular otherness ruptures in the philosopher’s dream of self-enclosed understanding. It was in this regard that we turned to Emmanuel Lévinas, whose work is an examination of the appeal of the ethical other to which the categories of thought are neither adequate nor appropriate. But the paradox deepens yet again here inasmuch as Lévinas, like Nietzsche – though for entirely different reasons, finds in Plato an important anticipation of his own thinking. The Platonic notion of the ‘Good beyond Being’ from Republic 509b is a crucial motif for the whole of Lévinas’s project, even if he is never convinced of Plato’s own commitment to this insight. In essence, what we have been doing is exploring the reputed connection between philosophical eros and tyranny – albeit from different perspectives. That this is an explicit Platonic theme is evidenced not only by the speeches of the Symposium but also by the strong connection drawn between eros and the soul of the tyrant elsewhere in the Platonic corpus (Republic IX 571aff).395 Plato is aware of the tendency towards tyranny in eros and since eros is so essential to the soul of the philosopher, the question of the relation of philosophy and tyranny is pertinent. Eros is a crucial source of the impulse to philosophy, but it is also a violent and wild energy that stands in need of being tamed by reason. Or at least, so goes the interpretation we have seen thus far (chapters 1 and 3). Now, of course, while eros is essential to philosophy, it is not exclusive to it. Nevertheless, the philosopher is distinguished by his/her reflection on the meaning of this eros. If he understands his eros as self-originating, then he will understand his grasp as 395

This is, of course, a concern that is not exclusive to Plato and is, in fact, a trope in many ancient writings which deal with the madness of eros or love in general and its threat to individual and communal sovereignty and well-being. See, for example Ovid (2004). Metamorphoses. London. Penguin, especially book 10. This theme will also appear in the first two speeches about eros in Plato’s Phaedrus.

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adequate to the infinite reach of eros, which is another way of describing the quest for absolute sovereignty. The speech of Aristophanes takes up this point by stressing the ascending vector of philosophic eros, while Alcibiades describes the type of person that the quest for self-sufficiency produces. The dangers inherent in this identification of the true terminus of eros are (i) that the philosopher will consider himself superior by virtue of the immensity of his erotic ambition, and (ii) that he will consider contingent particularity in both himself and others to be insignificant. This description of the pursuit and the achievement of self-sufficiency, issuing in tyranny, is broadly the two sides of the indictment brought by Aristophanes and Alcibiades. In the present chapter, I want to return to the text of the Symposium – this time to the speech of Socrates – in order to re-assess the indictment as outlined above. I want to read this speech in its own right and in light of the speeches of Alcibiades and Aristophanes. I will argue that for Socrates and for Plato, human eros in general and philosophical eros in particular both originates in and is sustained by a Good that is understood as both other and transcendent. This can be traced through Diotima’s accounts of the origin, function and ultimate object of eros. The question of ultimacy will be most important for Plato/Socrates in the Symposium and it is in relation to this question that the tension with Alcibiades and Aristophanes comes most sharply into focus. But since ultimacy or transcendence is never entirely divorced from immanence in the Symposium, the choice of the philosophical life need not be the strict either/or it has sometimes been presented as being.396 Ultimacy is communicated in immanence which allows us to read the speech of Socrates both hermeneutically – regarding the ultimate Good – and archaeologically – regarding the inspiration of the Good in the soul from the beginning. This kind of reading can provide an antidote to the charge of tyranny because it counterbalances the ascending power of eros with a sense of both the indebtedness of the transcending subjectivity as well as the presence of the Good as other in immanence. This presence, though never transparent, is nevertheless detectable. If philosophical eros is pre-eminent in the detection of this communication of the Good, there is always a risk of selfaggrandisement or hubris but even this is tempered by the sense of the irreducibly transcendent nature of the Good, which is never erased by Plato. 396 Martha Nussbaum suggests that the Symposium demands that we choose between philosophical and non-philosophical modes of life. See Nussbaum (2001a). Op. cit., p. 198.

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The line between self-affirmation and affirmation of the other is, of course, a fine one and always risks sliding into excesses of one sort or the other.397 However, I believe that Plato himself navigates this difficulty more successfully than either his detractors or his defenders by cultivating an understanding of eros that remains affirmative of self while never destroying a sense of the fundamental relativity of self to what is other. 1. Initial Manoeuvres: Lack and Divine Origins The speech of Socrates in the Symposium constitutes both a nuanced and a complicated account of eros. Its many facets represent the attempt to integrate the truths of the previous speeches, as well as to put forward an original reflection on eros as it relates to life and, in particular, the life of philosophy. In this respect, it can be read as an apology for philosophy in advance of the more formal defence of philosophy found in the Apology. In terms of chronology it is, of course, set while Socrates is still living and therefore before his trial but it is most likely a work of Plato’s middle period, which means that it was written after the Apology.398 As such, it is a work in which a more mature Plato explores the significance of philosophical activity and the desire to know. It is, moreover, the place where Plato explores the way in which eros makes the philosopher like and unlike the tyrant. This last point is, of course, the core around which the speeches of Alcibiades and Aristophanes revolve. 1.1. A Dialogic Interlude: The Deficiency and Lack of Eros When the time comes for Socrates to make his contribution to the evening’s proceedings he expresses hesitation. He fears any contribution he makes will fall short of the expectations of the others present. This can most immediately be connected to the Socratic profession of ignorance we have seen many times before (Lysis 204b, Apology 21b), but it also makes a point. He will disappoint his listeners because he will not and cannot speak in the way the others have done. He says: 397

See for example, the excessive affirmation of self in Nietzsche or the excessive self-abnegation of Lévinas in chapters 2 and 5 respectively. 398 Vlastos (1973). Op. cit.; Mattingly (1958). Op. cit.; Dover (1965). Op. cit.

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I took pride in thinking I would give a good speech because I knew the truth about how to give a eulogy of a subject. But in fact, it seems, that isn’t the right way of praising something. Instead you should claim that your subject has the greatest and finest possible qualities, whether it really does or not; and if you say what isn’t true, it doesn’t matter very much. (198d-e)

So the others are indicted by Socrates on account of their casual treatment of truth and the ease with which they ignore it for the sake of the pleasant. Their contributions are condemned, in short, as not being philosophical owing to their casual attitude to the truth of the matter.399 This is, of course, contentious. All of the other speakers were explicitly attempting to communicate fundamental truths about eros, about the life of the mind, and about the human condition. They communicated these ideas through media that were most appropriate to their own art, hence the use of the speech. But for Socrates, speech-making is, by its nature, inadequate to the pursuit of truth and so by its standard, he will offer a disappointing contribution. For Socrates, the dialectic method of philosophy is far more conducive to exploration of a topic for the sake of cultivating wisdom and discovering truth. As a result, he will proceed through the use of dialectic. This may lack the elegance of the other speeches, especially that of Agathon, but it will have the advantage of coming closer to the truth about love, the only subject about which Socrates claims expertise (177d). In eschewing rhetoric for philosophy, Socrates foreshadows the view of eros that will follow as one in which the discussion of beauty is understood in terms of truth and Goodness rather than the other way round, as had been the case for many of the others. This does not entail a war on aesthetics or absolute subordination of art to philosophy, however, since it will emerge later that in making this initial move, Socrates gains access to a beauty greater than could be imagined by those who make beauty or aesthetics the standard by which the Good is 399

This would seem to suggest that Plato holds more or less the same position he held in the Gorgias, in which rhetoric and the art of pleasing is not only irrelevant but possibly even inimical to the truth and to philosophical activity. In the latter dialogue, Socrates insists that rhetoric holds the same relation to politics or ethics as cooking does to medicine – its concern, that is, is not for the perfection of its subject but for what appears pleasing. See Gorgias 463d. This position is significantly modified in the Phaedrus, in which rhetoric is validated as long as it is infused with a philosophical love of wisdom. See, for example, Ferrari, G.R.F. (1987). Listening to the Cicadas: A Study of Plato’s Phaedrus. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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measured.400 Thus, Socrates does not wish to dispel the discussion of beauty nor to escape its allure but he does warn against an unreflective pursuit of beauty and consequent subordination of the Good which can lead, he thinks, to the degradation of both. Methodology and message were crucially connected for the other speakers, according to Socrates, and so they will also be for him. After all, he acknowledges that the other eulogies were ‘beautiful and impressive’ (199a) but laments the fact that they lacked a concern for truth. In his own speech, he will be concerned primarily with truth, though he must not entirely sideline the issue of beauty – at least if his account of eros is to have anything to do with common understandings of eros.401 He begins with a cross-examination of Agathon, which I have described above as a dialogic interlude, since it is only through such discussion that he can effectively make the point he wants to make. Of course, this interlude is only an interlude in the context of the proceedings of the Symposium itself. Socrates’s entire speech is, in fact, a dialogue split into two parts. The first, and shorter part is the dialogue with Agathon while the second part is Socrates’s reported dialogue with the priestess Diotima. Two points are worth making here. The first is that as well as driving home the point of the intimate relation between dialectic and wisdom, this also reminds us once again of the great distance between the reader and the visions of Diotima. I mean that the final part of the speech, the ascent, has often been criticised for its haste and apparently dismissive attitude towards others. But as readers, even philosophical readers, we are very far removed from Diotima’s vision. We are reading Apollodorus’s account of the account of Aristodemus of a banquet that happened several years earlier in which Socrates gave an account of the account of eros offered by a mysterious Mantinean priestess. These degrees 400

For example, Phaedrus understood the appearance of virtue to be virtue. For Pausanias, erotic attraction to boys suspended usual ethical norms while Agathon made beauty the source of goodness. Socrates turns all these positions on their head to an extent. 401 Aristotle is more commonly associated with the attempt to salvage the doxai but it is also important for Plato, as is clear here. It is not clear whether Plato is as convinced as Aristotle of the notion of folk wisdom as the transmitted wisdom of the ages but he does seem aware of the need to preserve as many traditional beliefs as possible even while transforming them. On the issue of folk wisdom, see McEvoy, J. (1996). Aristotelian Friendship in the Light of Greek Proverbial Wisdom. Aristotelica Secunda. Liège pp. 167-79.

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of separation suggest a profound distance between the inquiring and transcending human soul and any vision of the Good. As Catherine Osborne notes, the dialogue is one in which guides and educators are in great supply and in fact, must be in order to lead us to what, rather than hasty, is the most difficult of things.402 This also prefigures the definition of eros as in-between the mortal and the divine or the finite and the infinite. Eros is the messenger between the two realms and therefore also their means of connection. But the meaning of the communication of eros is not transparently clear and so reflective attention is called for. The second point of note is the extent to which Plato makes not only dialectic, but dialogue central to the unfolding of insight into eros. We have heretofore seen accusations of the isolation of the philosopher, but it is, in fact, only Socrates’s contribution which makes others central to the flowering of insight. Given that the dialogues themselves tend as usual to be somewhat asymmetrical (Agathon in the first part and Socrates himself in the second) we should perhaps be cautious about reading too much into the dialogic form, but it offers at least a prima facie reason to withhold judgement on the indictment. As far as the argument itself goes, Socrates interrogation focuses primarily on the identification of eros and beauty (and consequently goodness) in the speech of Agathon. For the tragedian, Eros, the youngest of the gods is pre-eminently beautiful and the source of peace, happiness, wisdom and justice.403 It is not necessary to dwell on the details of Agathon’s speech. Suffice it to say that it is a piece of ‘Gorgias-like rhetoric’, as Socrates says (198c), in which eros is credited with all good things on the one hand, and identified with the soul of the artist on the other. Thus the poet and the eros of the poet are not only elevated to the status of the divine, but are celebrated as that which can bring peace even to the warring gods. In his aestheticization of human being, the poet both figures the truth of the human condition as well as enabling a cathartic resolution of the eris that characterizes the relationship of mortals to mortals, mortals to gods, and amongst the gods themselves.

402

Osborne, C. (1994). Eros Unveiled: Plato and the God of Love. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 90-3. 403 That is, Agathon attributes the four cardinal virtues of Justice (Dikē), Temperance (Sophrosunē), Wisdom (Sophia) and Courage (Andreia) to Eros.

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According to Socrates, he too once held this position and identified Eros as a god at least, if not the most powerful of gods (201e). That is, until he received instruction from Diotima. This instruction, which we will discuss in a moment, throws retrospective light on the dialogue between Socrates and Agathon from 199d-201d. In essence, what Socrates does is challenge the central thesis of Agathon’s speech by contesting the notion that Eros is a god. His claim is that divinity implies possession of goodness, happiness and beauty. As such, none of the gods desire beauty because one does not desire what one already has. But eros, he says, is fundamentally relational; that is, it is always directed towards some object (199e). It is ‘love of….’ The point is that if eros desires beauty and goodness, it cannot possess these since one only desires what one needs but does not have (200e). From this, it follows that eros is deficient and therefore cannot be considered divine much less synonymous with the terms beauty and goodness. The gods possess beauty, Eros does not, so while he is concerned with divinity, he is not himself divine strictly speaking. The upshot of this exchange is that Agathon admits that he didn’t know what he was talking about (201b).404 This passage seems to have a double function. On the one hand, it furnishes us with an initial insight about eros itself. On the other hand, it reveals something about the relation between human eros and divinity. Socrates dwells on the deficiency and lack in eros and so drives a wedge between eros and divinity in order to counter the claims of Agathon. Socrates’s argument is sound for the most part although it does contain one glaring logical flaw that is not picked up on by Agathon. At 200b, Socrates modifies his claim that desire is for what one lacks by citing the example of a strong man who claims to desire strength or a fast man who desires speed etc. He notes the essential futural dimension of eros to avoid this aporia by insisting that such desire is a desire for continued possession. Encountering a man with such desire, we might ask:

404

This reinforces the point about the disjunction between rhetoric and truth. Agathon’s speech was so beautiful that it moved his listeners to rapturous applause, as reported by Aristodemus (198a). It turns out however, that the speech was nonsense. The danger of this from the Socratic/Platonic point of view is that it is not obvious nonsense but masquerades as true beauty and virtue. Agathon’s aesthetic fascination is not only indifferent to truth at base but actually dissembles the very notion of truth by passing nonsense as sound reason.

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‘When you say that you desire what you’ve already got, ask yourself whether you mean that you want what you’ve got now to go on being there in the future.’ He’d have to agree to that wouldn’t he? (200d)

So it is possible to desire the continued presence of what one already possesses. However, at 201b, he returns to the question of the divinity of eros and asks Agathon, “Would you say that something that needs beauty and is wholly without beauty is beautiful?” This is asked on the grounds of the already established principle that eros and beauty cannot be co-eval if eros is the desire for beauty. Yet, in light of the previous passage, there are no longer grounds for asserting that eros is ‘wholly without beauty.’ If the wealthy man can legitimately desire the continued presence of wealth, is it not also possible that beautiful eros could desire the continued presence of beauty? Surely it is. In fact, that this is so becomes an aspect of the later argument of Socrates. Perhaps Plato does not want to complicate matters in this passage whose central intention is to distinguish eros and divinity. Or perhaps the point is to draw attention to Eros’s unstable possession of beauty. He can attain the beautiful but is also always at risk of losing it in a way that is never possible for the pure divinities. Either way, this is a useful dialectical starting point from which an account of the intimacy of eros and divinity is elaborated. Regarding the issue of philosophical eros’s relation with tyranny, one could argue that Socrates’s insistence on an initial distinction between eros and the divine constitutes an eschewal of the hubris of which he stands accused. In fact, it is the poets (here represented by Agathon) who are hubristic in their alignment of themselves with the gods. This is unsatisfactory for a number of reasons though. Most importantly, the notion that there is lack in eros was not contested by any of the other speakers and critics of Socrates. For both Aristophanes and Alcibiades, philosophical eros was driven to excess by a sense of its own lack. In other words, the lack in eros was critical to their understanding of the tyrannical impulse in the philosophical soul. That Socrates identifies and dwells on this lack only supports their accusation at this point.405 In addition to this, Socrates’s acknowledgement of the futural dimension in eros leaves the way open for an excessive and selfish 405

Nietzsche and Lévinas were also aware of the lack in erotic desire and its role in the ascent of the philosophical soul. In Nietzsche’s transvaluation, this was a statement of the possible greatness of the philosopher while for Lévinas it was crucial to his warning against the dangers of philosophical excess.

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transcending eros that is oriented ultimately towards possession of all beautiful and good things for oneself. So even in his discussion of lack, a sense of the power of eros to satisfy or at least seek to satisfy this lack through acquisition of otherness has been slipped in. If we are to successfully defend Socrates and philosophy from the charge of tyranny we will have to look further than this passage. 1.2. Diotima’s First Lesson: Eros as Metaxu Having established the deficiency of eros qua divinity, Socrates terminates his discussion with Agathon and begins the second dialogic part of his speech. He reports the conversations he once had with a mysterious Mantinean priestess named Diotima whose wisdom included, though was not limited to, expertise in the ways of love (201d). According to Socrates, he too held the views expressed in the speech of Agathon – that Eros is a sovereign divinity - until he received instruction from Diotima (201e). Diotima’s first lesson for Socrates is built on and qualifies the point made in the discussion with Agathon. Since the gods are perfectly happy, beautiful and good, it follows that eros is not a god since eros lacks these things, else he would not desire them (202c). But while denying to Eros the status of god, Diotima is keen to insist on the connection between eros and the realm of the divine.406 As with the examples of wisdom/ignorance or beauty/ugliness, she insists that what is not divine is not necessarily mortal. Eros is something ‘in between’, metaxu. He is not a god but neither is he a mortal. He is a daimon or spirit that is in-between mortality and divinity and contains a share of both. As Catherine Osborne notes, the introduction of the class of daimones at this point in the speech does not represent an unnecessary multiplication of levels in Platonic ontology since the point is not to compound the separation of gods and men but to elaborate their connection.407 That is, having already insisted that gods and men are separate, the 406

In another dialogue, the Phaedrus, Socrates explicitly rejects the idea that Eros is not divine at 242d. This is asserted against speeches (by Lysias and Socrates himself) that dealt with the deleterious nature of eros regarding human life. In the Symposium, by contrast, Eros is being praised by all. In both dialogues, Socrates attempts to put forward a nuanced picture of the relation between eros and divinity. As such, I think the two dialogues are entirely compatible. 407 Catherine Osborne argues that “whereas the insertion of extra links in a continuous chain would elongate the chain and increase the distance between what had been

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introduction of the category of daimones might seem to exacerbate this problem – the question of the relation between mortality and divinity is now multiplied as the questions of the relation of men and daimones and daimones and gods. However, the purpose of the daimonic is precisely “to carry messages from humans to gods and from gods to humans” (202e). Since eros is essential to the human soul, the metaxu nature of eros is precisely what reestablishes the relation with divinity that was broken in the earlier part of Socrates’s speech. In short, the metaxu does something which none of the other speeches had done, namely to account for how the erotic constitutes the site of the communication between gods and mortals. It is as erotic that the human being participates in the divine. As a result of this, the quasi-definition of eros as lack from that earlier passage comes under strain. The identification of eros with lack runs much deeper than Plato’s dialogue of course. Thinkers as diverse as Max Scheler and C.S. Lewis have insisted that this is the core of Plato’s doctrine of eros408. But in so insisting, they neglect the subtleties of the discussion here in which divinity is not only the terminus of erotic longing but also a presence in eros that wakens it to the divine in the first place. As for the dialogue itself, neither Diotima nor Socrates are abandoning the idea of lack in eros but there is already an important supplementation according to which the lack is not pure lack. Spirits and daimones are the mediators of communication between mortality and divinity. Since eros is a daimon, it follows that it contains within it some trace of divinity even if it cannot be considered divine simpliciter. This passage, in fact, lays the ground for an interpretative or hermeneutic understanding of the relation between the mortal and the divine in Plato. Divinity is not transparent but is yet communicated to humans through the mediation of spirits of which Eros is the most important. Already this seriadjacent links, Diotima’s intermediaries are used to fill a gap.” Osborne (1994). Op. cit., p. 109. Again, “Diotima’s universe would be in danger of falling into two parts if intermediaries were denied” (Ibid., p. 110). 408 Scheler says that for Plato, “eros is a transition from a lesser to a greater knowledge. Eros is the drive and longing of not-being for being, of the bad for the good.” Scheler (1992). Op. cit., p. 149. Lewis, for his part, claims that “Human love, as Plato teaches us, is the child of poverty – of a want or lack; it is caused by a real or supposed good in its beloved which the lover needs and desires.” Lewis, C.S. (2009). The Problem of Pain. New York. Harper Collins, p. 44. Both readings emphasize lack exclusively. It is this misplaced emphasis that we are seeking to challenge here.

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ously modifies the caricatured picture of Platonic ontology that is based on certain passages in the Phaedo. As Seth Benardette points out, the Symposium account of eros seeks to bring together the opposed realms of Being from the Phaedo.409 In the Phaedo, Socrates is about to die and so focuses greatly on those aspects in which the soul is independent of the matter of the body. He calls philosophy a preparation for death (64a) and is keen to conceptually separate two distinct ontological realms. In the Symposium, by contrast, he is more concerned with the ways in which the two realms are connected and interpenetrate and how communication between the divine and human realms is possible. So much so that the ontological picture of the Symposium is arguably no longer properly dualistic. Or rather, while dualism may still be Plato’s position vis-à-vis ontology, it is more complicated at the level of anthropology, since it is in the human soul, as erotic, that the two realms of being co-exist and are minded. The metaxu nature of eros constitutes deficiency but also communication of something more than the lack. What exactly this communication signifies is not immediately clear and hence the importance of philosophy as a reflective activity seeking to understand. For Plato and for Socrates, eros contains within it something of the more than human. This is important in itself and also for the indictment. If we understand this more than human energy in eros as wholly original – that is, unsourced – we come to see ourselves as absolutely sovereign with regard to Being because it is through ourselves alone that we are oriented desiringly towards Being. And it can consequently be nothing other than a higher version of ourselves that is the terminus ad quem of erotic desire. We become the mediators of the whole such that nothing of the real is beyond the scope of human control. This was, in many respects the critique of Aristophanes and it was the soil out of which Nietzsche’s defence grew. Even if Aristophanes pledged allegiance to the Olympian gods, he still feared human erotic energy to be a refusal of obedience and a rival claim to sovereignty that sought to overthrow the gods and take their place. On the other hand, we might understand philosophical work as acknowledging divinity as superior and other though this does not, in itself, nullify the indictment either. It is, after all, still possible that the philosopher might understand himself as supe409 Benardette, S. (2000). On Plato’s Symposium. In The Argument and the Action: Essays on Greek Poetry and Philosophy. Edited by Seth Benardette. Chicago: Chicago University Press, p. 167.

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rior and as having a privileged access to the truly real in the way that was suggested by Alcibiades. Unlike Aristophanes, he gives no indication that Socrates’s belief in a higher realm is sham,410 yet still he accuses Socrates of placing such importance on this higher realm that he loses sight of his duty to his fellows. Lévinas too vacillated on this point but sought to transform the energy of Platonic desire towards a sense of the subject’s debt to the ethical other or face. It is still not clear where Socrates and Plato fit in this picture or if they fit at all. If eros involves a trace of divinity, as seems to be the case from the notion of the metaxu, they may be holding either of the above positions. Or they may hold neither. Yet in emphasising a possible empowering communication in eros, Socrates and Plato have opened the way for another understanding of eros. Perhaps eros is to be understood as a gift that anticipates the Good as much as it motivates its further pursuit. If so, the practice of philosophy would involve neither self-aggrandizement or radical selfabnegation, but would instead involve a patient hermeneutic unfolding of what communicates in and through eros. It is, as yet, too early in the speech to tell, so we must press on. 1.3. Diotima’s Second Lesson. The Origin of Eros: Metaxu and Doubleness In the following passage, Diotima relates to Socrates the story of the origin of eros. Amongst other purposes, this story further elaborates the Platonic view about the relation between eros and divinity and so importantly refers to many of the other speeches of the evening.411 According to Phaedrus, Eros is the oldest of the gods and so he makes Eros sovereign, usurping the place of the tyrant Zeus (178b). For Agathon, by contrast, he is the youngest of the gods (195a) and brings a soothing, anaesthetizing peace to the gods whose relations would otherwise be characterised by constant Eris or strife (197b).412 Aristophanes comes closest to placing eros between gods 410

That is, even if his eros is. Reference to the origin of the subject under discussion is actually one of the central features of any encomium although this rule is not always followed in the Symposium. See Gill, C. (1999). Introduction. In Symposium. London: Penguin, p. xx. 412 According to Agathon, the activities of the gods “only became organised when Love was born among them” (197b). He makes even Zeus and Apollo to be pupils 411

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and mortals, but he does so in a way that notably differs from what Socrates is doing. Far from the locus of their communication, Eros is a by-product of the punishment of the gods and a sometimes-painful reminder of lost wholeness. Eros was a comfort but also entailed the temptation to mount another attack on the heavens. What is interesting here is that all three accounts set eros at odds with divinity (understood in terms of classical Greek theology) in one way or another. For Phaedrus, Eros overpowers the other gods, for Agathon, he paralyses them while for Aristophanes, he threatens to destroy them. Furthermore, in so characterising the god Eros, these also represent possible human positions with regard to divinity. We may suspend consideration of the divine through force (Phaedrus), art (Agathon) or both (Aristophanes). In opposition to this, we will see that Socrates/Diotima tells a story of the origin of eros that is rooted in divine festivity. Eros is conceived at a time of celebration which is characterised by an outpouring of joyful divine energy. Again this suggests no direct equality between Eros and the gods but it does suggest eros is connected to divine affirmation.413 Eros is less at odds with the gods than he was for the others so that perhaps, as erotic beings and in spite of the fears of Aristophanes, we are too. Complimenting this aspect of the narrative, the story of the origin of eros (203b-204a) continues to modify the question of eros and lack. This point had already been modified by the characterisation of Eros as metaxu or in-between the mortal and the divine. This is now filled out through the story of his conception and birth. According to Diotima, Eros was conceived at a feast celebrating the birth of Aphrodite, goddess of Love. In addition to the connection between Eros and divine affirmation here, Diotima is also the first of the evening’s speakers to attribute divine parentage to Eros and to associate him explicitly with Aphrodite.414 There is at least a relation between daimonic love and heavenly, divine love. and followers of Eros. Socrates may not wish to deny this outright but he would certainly want to qualify it. 413 This aspect of the account of the origins of Eros would, no doubt, have pleased Nietzsche. 414 Pausanias had also referred to Aphrodite in his speech at 180d but his point was only to assert that just as there is a heavenly and a pandemic Aphrodite so too are there two Erotes. He was not trying to establish any genealogical link between the two, in other words. On the subject of the divine parentage of Eros, it should be

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The story goes that at this party, Resource (Poros), who was one of the guests, became drunk and fell asleep in the garden of Zeus. Poverty (Penia) was begging at the gates and on seeing the enfeebled condition of Poros, forms the plan of relieving her lack by conceiving a child by the sleeping god. The issue of this union is Eros, who is possessed of attributes from both parents. He is poor, homeless (standing in doorways), shoeless and dishevelled after his mother but is also resourceful, cunning and a lover of wisdom and beauty after his father. One of the most noteworthy aspects of this description is its proximity to the traditional picture of Socrates himself. The wisest and greatest of Athenians he is, at the same time, usually shoeless, homeless (a-topos) and is noted for his rough and ugly appearance.415 It may not be that Socrates is exceptionally ugly or dishevelled but simply that the apparent divinity of his soul makes the contrast with his physical outside all the more striking.416 This is the first explicit assimilation of eros and philosophy in the speech and highlights its double nature as both weak and vulnerable as well as its aspiration towards things divine. The point seems to be that such aspiration would not be possible were it not that eros is empowered by divinity. This is suggested, of course, by the paternal lineage of Eros but also in the fact that even the character of Penia as lack cannot cohere as pure lack. I mean that even the plan to conceive by Poros shows a certain resourcefulness on the part of Eros’s mother. At this point, the notion of erotic lack is strained almost to breaking point. It is not set aside but it is simply not convincing that eros be defined entirely in its terms. The fact that it is felt as lack at all is because of the more fundamental affirmative and divine energy that marks it. Diotima tells Socrates that Eros is neither immortal nor mortal by nature (203e). This is not new and is connoted that for several of the others, Eros was himself a great god so that such supplementation was not necessary. 415 The homelessness of Socrates is not to be understood negatively. Instead, it refers to the fact that his investigations are not peculiar to any one place. His interests are related to the city and politics but are not limited by them. Of course, this was exactly the cause of Aristophanes’s view of the dangers of philosophy. 416 It should also be noted here that Socrates is unusually well dressed and washed on the evening in question. Aristodemus notes that Socrates had “just had a bath and put on sandals – things he hardly ever did” (174a). This shows us that though Socrates rarely beautifies himself, he is not opposed to it in principle. The contrast between the inner and outer nature of Socrates is also a feature of the speech of Alcibiades.

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sistent with the description of Eros as daimon and of his nature as metaxu. In relation to his parentage though it helps us to understand the nature of Eros as both a descending divinity and a transcending mortality. Human beings are mortal and finite but insofar as they are erotic, they are marked by an infinity that orients them in Being and gives birth to their striving. Furthermore, since divinity is said to be at the root of eros, it follows that the divine is both the origin and the end of eros. In other words, the picture of erotic desire as simply lacking what is beautiful and Good and seeking to acquire it, is problematic because it tells only half the story. The affectivity of lack in eros is, in fact, tempered by a more fundamental sense of pre-original relation and indebtedness. As does Eros, the human being finds him/herself in between mortality or finitude and divinity or infinitude and so retains a myriad of possibilities as to how to understand this lack and how to employ this transcending power. Several of these possibilities have been discussed already in our treatment of the dialogue’s other speeches. What the speeches of Aristophanes and Alcibiades had in common was a kind of dualistic separation in which the lack was understood purely negatively while the transcending power of eros was understood acquisitively. In so doing, they elaborated erotic possibilities that were greedy and possessive and therefore compatible with an impulse towards tyranny. This does not mean that they were themselves tyrannical souls but tyranny is precisely what they attribute to the philosophical soul of Socrates. Socrates eschews this kind of understanding of eros from the beginning but it is also true that much of this eschewal has been only implicit so far. It is, then, too early to acquit Socrates or philosophy yet. We must, therefore, move onto the next section of the reported dialogue in which the function of eros is discussed. As we shall see, this both deepens what has gone before as well as making explicit much of what was implicit so far. 2. Transforming Eros: Empowerment and Creativity Up to now, Diotima has discussed eros under the auspices of his origin and the objects of his desire generally understood. She moves now to a discussion of the function of eros in beings,417 and it is here that things become 417

I say beings rather than human beings since, as we will see, Diotima extends the scope of Eros to all living things. This universalisation of eros had also been a fea-

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complicated as well as increasingly interesting. The first part of Diotima’s instruction had not differed in form from the other speeches since most had made reference to the origin (or lack of origin) of Eros as well as its proper object. This next section, however, explores the way in which that desire is made manifest and it is here that the speech departs from what we have already seen. 2.1. Transitional Language and the Ambiguity of Erotic Desire for the Good This passage dealing with the function of eros is prologued by a brief recap of the discussion so far, which brings to the fore three important aspects of the discussion as a whole. These are (i) extension of the scope of eros, (ii) its relation with transcendence as other and (iii) the desire for immortality. Extending the Scope of Eros (204d-205d) This first move does not require extended treatment since it seems to function as a simple dialectical method of deconstructing the subject under discussion with a view to understanding it in a more profound fashion. Diotima tells Socrates that eros is common to all beings and is not limited to either a single species or a single form of life. This is not a statement of relativism since higher and lower expressions of eros will soon be distinguished. Essentially, this move serves as a basis for rejecting the absolute sovereignty of eros that was put forward by some of the others. Eros is present in lower and higher animals and in noble and base deeds. Thus, eros itself by itself is not self-justifying and nor is there simply a higher and a lower eros as such. Erotic energy can find higher and lower expressions but this is not the same thing. By its nature, eros is a desire for beautiful and good things but this does not mean that it simply is beautiful and good or even that it understands precisely what beauty and goodness are. This much we know.

ture of the speech of Eryximachus (186a-188d), of course, though it was still performed under the auspices of the two distinct Erotes introduced by Pausanias.

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Eros and Transcendent Otherness: A Shot at Aristophanes (205d-206a) Diotima goes on to rebut the account of eros given by Aristophanes. Aside from the initial cross-examination of Agathon, this is the only time that Socrates explicitly refers to one of the other speeches. Diotima says: The idea has been put forward that lovers are people who are looking for their own other halves. But my view is that love is directed neither at the half nor the whole unless, my friend, that turns out to be good. (205e)

Aristophanes’s sense of the tragedy of human existence had revolved around precisely this point. On the one hand, existence was deemed tragic because of this lost wholeness while philosophy was suspect for its blindness to or rebellion against this intractable tragedy. Philosophical eros was depicted as a desire to overcome the tragedy of the human condition by desiring god-like self-sufficiency and an independence that is fundamentally hubristic. In this sense, Aristophanes understood eros not as desire for what is other but for what is the same. The relative otherness intended by eros was desired for the sake of a return to self at a higher level, a desire that manifests itself most fully when eros is spiritualized as it is with the philosophers. While this higher self is entirely self-referential and therefore dangerous, its threat is mitigated by directing erotic energy towards the physical whose attempt to heal the wound is condemned to failure. Erotic desire, in this sense, offers momentary consolation but also, and more importantly, acts as a constant reminder of the crime of human being and a warning against future incursions. That Socrates denies this is extremely significant. He has Diotima say that eros is neither for the half nor the whole ‘unless that turns out to be good’. In this way, the idea of erotic desire as purely self-reflexive is rejected in favour of the view that what is intended by eros is the Good as other. We do not desire a higher self simply (this is not entirely ruled out) but the movement of self towards what is other and Good. And note that the Good is then not the instrument of self-realization but that to which the desiring soul is drawn. Self-realization – if such a term is justified here at all – is a consequence perhaps of the movement of the soul towards the Good but not an end in itself. The full extent of this point does not become clear until later but it is worth noting its appearance at this stage of the dialogue.

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Desire for Immortality (206a-b) The third prong of Diotima’s present preamble is insistence that eros is not simply the desire for the Good but the desire to possess the Good forever. Thus it entails a desire for immortality. The language of possession here is interesting in terms of the previous point about the non-reflexive nature of erotic desire. In speaking about possession, is not Socrates intimating the apotheosis of the individual soul? This is often how the text has been interpreted. Irving Singer, for example, finds in the soul’s possession of the Good, the core idea in which “all Platonic wisdom resides.”418 We will see why this is not the case when we turn to the latter stages of the speech. What I wish to do here is simply highlight the emphasis on erotic transcending and its aspiration towards the more than human. We have said that many of these issues are resolved in the latter stages of the speech but one more point can be made at this juncture. The passage under discussion, from 204d-206b, is marked most essentially by the transition in language dealing with the object of eros. From the beginning of her speech, Diotima had spoken of the desire of eros for good and beautiful things (tagatha kai ta kala). Here, though, she tends to replace the language of beautiful with the language of the Good (to agathon) only. As she tells Socrates, “the point is that the only object of love is the Good” (206a). The Good is desired by all and it is desired for the sake of happiness. We might say that the Good is what grounds the intentionality of eros to itself. We will see later on that this does not mean suppressing beauty or rejecting the aesthetic in favour of the moral or religious but simply stresses the relation between beauty and the Good as ultimate. For Socrates and for Plato, only in this context can beauty be properly appreciated as beauty. 2.2. Forms of Erotic Transcending: Power and the Excess of Self In the rather lengthy section that follows on the function of eros, Diotima takes the conversation in a startlingly new direction. Given that the overall object of love is to have the Good forever, she says, we must ask “in what way and in what type of action people pursue this goal, if the enthusiasm and intensity they show is to be called love” (206b). Since Socrates cannot answer, she tells him that “Love’s function is giving birth in beauty both in 418

Singer, I. (2009). The Nature of Love, vol. I. Op. cit.:, p. 53.

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body and in mind (206b).” This is one of the most important formulations of the dialogue as a whole because of the fact that it shifts the emphasis away from erotic lack in the most decisive way yet. It has already been suggested that there is more to eros than lack and this suggestion comes to full fruition here. In her discussion of the way eros becomes manifest, Diotima concentrates on erotic power rather than lack. She says that all beings are pregnant either in body or in mind or both and that their eros is the desire to give birth in the presence of beauty (206c). The ostensible point here is to establish the entailment of a desire for immortality from the idea that eros is the desire to have the Good forever. Thus, at 206e, she rather bizarrely states that “the object of love is not beauty as you suppose…but reproduction and birth in beauty.” Since we desire to have the Good forever, we must also desire to exist forever and the best way that humans can do this is to reproduce and leave something of themselves behind when they die. It seems at this juncture that this is the only type of immortality available to humans and that the self’s persistence as self across time is ruled out.419 Diotima extends this from human being to all beings. She notes that lower animals also display the presence of eros insofar as they “become sick with the excitement of love” (207b), a desire that involves the initial move towards coupling, as well as the subsequent desire to rear and nurture what has been brought into being. In this way, animals and humans preserve themselves by bringing into being what is other but also a part of themselves. We place great value on our offspring and are willing to die for their sake because they are a testament to our presence after we are gone. This passage appears to radically alter both the focus and meaning of the previous parts of the speech. In understanding eros thus, Diotima alerts Socrates to the transcending power in eros that is made manifest through the desire to give out of its own excess. In this way, eros comes to be understood fundamentally as the desire to give rather than to receive. Eros, as one commentator puts it, “becomes a kind of generosity rather than a kind of

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As such, this seems to conflict with the Platonic view of soul in Phaedo, Phaedrus, and Republic. The issue of immortality of the soul in the Symposium is well treated by O’Brien, M.J. (1984). ‘Becoming Immortal’ in Plato’s Symposium. In Greek Poetry and Philosophy. Edited by D.E. Gerber. California: Scholars Press, pp. 185-205.

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need.”420 In the speech’s earlier formulations, the notion of a desire to possess the Good forever seemed to suggest that eros was purely acquisitive and intended an ultimate union with its object. This seemed to be the implication of the claim that eros intended possession of the Good forever. Diotima has now come closer to abandoning than modifying this impression.421 She has supplemented the unitative aspect of eros with a creative aspect in such wise that it’s meaning has been irrevocably altered through the paradoxical step of making possession of the Good possible only when eros gives of its own abundance. This counts decisively against the tradition following Nietzsche that would read Plato as a self-loathing ascetic. The goal of eros is not simply release from the prison of the body in which the transcending self merges with the transcendent. The point here is that transcending is also to be understood as fecundity in the presence of the beautiful. In light of the fact that the present emphasis has shifted from the lack in eros to its power, it is worth highlighting the fact that in Diotima’s account, this power is not self-activating, but must be drawn out of itself. It is only in the presence of beauty that it can be properly released (suggesting, of course, that there may be inappropriate modes of erotic release), which makes erotic transcending an essentially co-operative exercise. This is already a challenge to the notion of eros as a selfish, egoist pursuit of selfsufficiency since on this view, erotic transcending seems open-ended and other-oriented. If eros is creative as well as lacking, then it is so in a way that is not reducible to self. It exceeds itself only under specific conditions – in fact, Diotima speaks of the pain involved in the frustration of erotic release (206a). As erotic, we are creative and productive but only insofar as this creative upsurge is cultivated by the presence of a beauty that is outside our-

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Markus, R.A. (1971). The Dialectic of Eros in Plato’s Symposium. In Plato: A Collection of Critical Essays vol. II. Edited by Gregory Vlastos. New York: Anchor Press, p. 138. Another commentator defines Platonic eros as the “desire for absolute good and beauty which is somehow inevitably also a desire to increase good and beauty.” See Armstrong, A.H. (1960). Platonic Eros and Christian Agape. Downside Review, 79, pp. 105-21. 421 As the speech proceeds, the language of desire is altered. Osborne astutely notes the change in terminology from  , or the ‘acquisition of goods’ at 205a, to   , meaning ‘that the good should be there for him forever’ at 206a. Osborne (1994). Op. cit. 102.

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selves.422 This creative upsurge is, of course, not limited to human beings since we share with lower animals the business of creation through sexual reproduction (206c). But in humans, erotic transcending also encompasses the realm of the spirit. Sexuality is part of our eros but only part. According to Diotima, human production also includes spiritual objects such as the discourses on virtue that are brought to birth between friends.423 Just as parents love their children, so others love the honour or virtue they have given birth to in the presence of spiritual beauty. This passage is crucial, I think, to Plato’s theology and to his anthropology. As such, it is also an important aspect of the defence of philosophy so crucial to the dialogue as a whole. Diotima says that: There is something divine in this process; this is how mortal creatures achieve immortality, in pregnancy and giving birth. (206c)

We are beginning to see why this is. In the definition of eros as metaxu, it was implied that there is a divine aspect to the human soul. Of course, in the present passage, this trace of divinity is extended to all creatures that manifest eros. What has been crucially elaborated here is the notion that the divine aspect in the human soul involves more than just a communication with the gods. It also involves participation in divine activity through genesis.424 This point is missed by many of Plato’s critics425 and it is one that puts strain on the idea that Plato is simply a thinker of two worlds whose eros is the means of escape from the lower to the higher. The human soul aspires towards what is transcendent to be sure but it can also be creative in an original way in the presence of this transcendence.426 In a sense, we might say that 422

This idea comes back in even more explicit form in the Phaedrus account of eros. See Appendix. 423 Incidentally, this is another way in which the erotic metaxu can be understood; i.e. as operative between people or as residing in the interstices of human community and fellowship. 424 As Cornford puts it, “Procreation is the divine attribute in the mortal animal.” See Cornford, F.M. (1971). The Doctrine of Eros in Plato’s Symposium. In Plato: A Collection of Critical Essays vol. II. Op. cit., p. 124. 425 Vlastos (1973). Op. cit.; Nussbaum (2001a). Op. cit.; Scheler (1992).Op. cit.; Lewis (2009). Op. cit. 426 This idea is elaborated further in the Phaedrus discussion of the inspiration of eros. That the erotic self is inspired is, I believe, implied here but not as explicitly as in the other dialogue.

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there is both a vertical and a horizontal aspect to human erotic transcending. It desires a beauty or goodness that it lacks but also desires to reproduce something new alongside this beauty out of its own resources – here the myth of Poros and Penia is made clearer. In other words, our finitude is limiting but not absolutely. As erotic, we possess the imprint of an infinitude not just in a desire for the infinite, but also in our capacity to cooperate in the divine through creation. This relates to the defence of philosophy and specifically the dialectic method so esteemed by Plato and Socrates. To speak rhetorically, as the sophists did, is barren since it amounts to the attempt to reproduce out of oneself alone. In spirit as in nature this cannot be done. Instead, Socrates and Plato favour dialogue or dialectic which risks more but also stands to gain more.427 Philosophy is essentially a communal exercise and insofar as the participants of a dialogue proceed in the spirit of an eros for wisdom and truth, they stand the chance of producing true wisdom in this presence. That is, philosophy is not simply mimetic or a weak imitation of transcendence but a novel production in its presence.428 In begetting a child, we do not merely produce a copy of ourselves but a genuine original and so it is also with spiritual activity. Furthermore, we participate with the divine in the very act of creating as well as in its issue. This is most likely what Diotima means when she states that human beings become divine through reproduction – that we share in the work of the gods when our erotic transcending is generative. Understood in this way, the idea of eros as link between the two worlds comes into clearer relief. I mean that erotic transcending is not only upward towards the transcendent Good but also outward into the world through generative activity. As such, the mortal realm participates actively as well as

427

Socrates frequently uses the motif of pregnancy along with the image of himself as midwife. In the Theaetetus, he notes that it is possible that the discourse will produce nothing more than a ‘wind egg’ (i.e. a false idea) but it may also produce a true idea (151e). What is important is that this idea will be the product of both Socrates and Theaetetus and not either by themselves. 428 This point is discussed by William Desmond, Desmond, W. (2003). Art, Origin, Otherness: Between Philosophy and Art. New York: SUNY Press p. 19-53. Amongst other things, Desmond contends interestingly that the purported tension between mimetic and creative theories of art has been overstated.

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passively in the divine world.429 This allows Plato to broaden the scope of ontological affirmation. He does not simply affirm the transcendent as Good and the corporeal or mortal as corrupted and inferior since the creative exigence of eros is now understood as transformative. He will still insist, of course, that any affirmation of the lower must be made in the context of affirmation of the higher but the double movement of eros (upward and downward) now opens for a possible reappraisal of material Being terms of the Good. This point has serious consequences for the indictment of philosophy, especially as Alcibiades brings it. The critique of Alcibiades involved the idea that philosophical eros entailed an upward transcendence only. As such, the picture of Socrates in his speech, was of a man who had deliberately isolated himself from others and from corporeality generally. He presented Socrates as one in a state of self-involved and contented spiritual stasis. This was also crucial to Lévinas’s critique of western philosophy in Totality and Infinity. Yet, the emphasis on co-creation in eros makes these charges more difficult to sustain. For one thing, philosophical eros and eros generally is far more dynamic than was imagined, at least by Alcibiades. What is more, this dynamism achieves proper release only through communal activity. The final goal of eros, therefore, is not unity of the soul with the Good but a fostering and deepened sense of community with the Good. The issue of philosophical or any eros is not, by its nature, the property of any one individual but is something emergent and given. In this way, the idea of divinity in eros as gift is doubled in the human being’s own capacity to be a giver in erotic creation. I repeat that this does not mean that Socrates abandons the notion that there is lack in eros but it is clear that lack is not its most important feature. The reason that Lévinas, for example, was so wary of eros was precisely because he understood eros as defined by lack and therefore irrevocably egoist.

429

The idea of participation is notoriously difficult in Plato (see, for example, Parmenides in which the meaning of the participation (methexis) of the physical with the forms is critiqued). However, it was generally understood to mean that changing physical reality was a poor copy of what is original and unchanging. On this understanding, even human reality could only be understood negatively; i.e. that it could be understood at all entailed being understood in terms of what it was not. If the present analysis is correct, though, eros allows participation to be understood positively also.

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3. Hermeneutic Eros and the Final Ascent: Vindicating Philosophy We move now to a consideration of the final part of the speech of Socrates. This is generally referred to as the ascent passage in the dialogue and is that part of the speech that has received most attention. In many ways, the indictment of philosophy refers almost exclusively to this passage. In it, the priestess Diotima initiates Socrates into the rites of love. She is not sure he will be able to follow but she tells him anyway. In the speech of Alcibiades, it was implied that Socrates had indeed completed the ascent but with the result that he had become disengaged from his fellows. The point of the passage is to teach the initiate Socrates how to love ‘in the right way’ (210a) and amounts to an ascent of the mind from the lowest to the highest object of love. This parallels the allegory of the cave from the Republic (514a-521b) except that here love replaces cognition. Diotima tells Socrates that the right way to love is first to love a single particular body before realising that the beauty of all bodies is of a kind. We then make souls the object of our love, then forms of knowledge before finally receiving a revelation of an eternally subsistent beauty that lacks the partiality of any of the previous forms. This passage has been critiqued from several points of view. For Gregory Vlastos and for several other critics, we remember, the passage was the very statement of Platonic instrumentalism insofar as it made human others mere stepping stones on the way to the philosopher’s own advancement of herself; that is, human others were the food of her self-absorbed transcending.430 Lévinas too might be suspicious since the progressive tone of the passage seems to entail what, for him, is the defining feature of western thought generally; namely, the reduction of the other for the sake of an allencompassing conceptual totality. Martha Nussbaum insists that the cardinal flaw in this passage is the mistaken belief that all beauty is of a kind.431 It is precisely the idea that all beauty can be encompassed in a single form or concept that allows the reduction of unique particulars as she understands it. Aristophanes, for his part, was wary of the impetus in eros towards tyrannical megalomania. The erotic soul, aware of its immense transcending power, lacks humility and comes to see itself as the equal of the whole and its divine origin as a projection of a human possibility to be. In delineating this as hubris and tyranny, Aristophanes made an appeal on behalf of human 430 431

Vlastos (1973). Op. cit.; De Rougemont (1983). Op. cit.; Singer (2009). Op. cit. Nussbaum (2001a). Op. cit., p. 179.

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fragility and warned of philosophy’s tendency to disrupt the delicate balance of human affairs.432 As convincing as these arguments are from a certain point of view, they all suffer from an important oversight. They effectively ignore the transformed intentionality of eros in the speech, which moves from unity with the Good to reproduction in the presence of the Good. The critics read the ascent passage in light of the speech’s early insistence on the lack in eros (199d-201c) rather than on the later section’s focus on erotic plenitude. They ignore the discussion of erotic transcending as fecund or generous and, as a result, interpret the ascent passage as the ultimate movement of philosophical acquisitiveness. This is understandable in some respects. On a first reading, it seems as though Plato himself has reverted in the ascent passage to the speech’s earlier themes and is viewing the ascent as an upward transcendence of mind for the sake of its lack, in which objects are apprehended before being passed through on the way to the single soul’s salvation through contemplation of beauty and the Good itself. It also appears as though we are being told that the otherness of the particular is suspended in the universal form that is available to thought. Thus, the passage appears to involve suppression of irreducible otherness as well as the arrogation to the self of sovereign ownership of the Good. On closer inspection, however, we see that the passage dealing with the function of eros is crucial to the ascent passage and so calls for a more nuanced reading of the latter. Since this passage is also the key to Diotima’s defence of philosophy, it is crucial to our attempt to vindicate the practice of philosophy against the various critiques we have explored. What I would like to do now is offer a way of doing precisely that. I will first suggest a way of reading this passage that is not instrumentalist before supplementing this with further discussion of the notion of the essential generosity of eros. This will hopefully allow us to see, in the eros of Platonic philosophy, greater humility and less exclusivity than has been imagined.433

432

Because it is impossible to recapture lost wholeness, philosophical eros manifests an ambition that cannot be realised and is disastrous in the pursuit. 433 The indictment brought by Aristophanes was that philosophy lacked humility while Alcibiades objected to the philosopher’s absolute dismissal of forms of life that were not entirely rationalistic.

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3.1. Hermeneutic and Heuristic Identifications of Ultimacy My contention is that the question that that the ascent passage deals most essentially with is the question of eros and ultimacy. Furthermore, it must be read hermeneutically rather than heuristically as many commentators have done.434 I need to be clear about what I mean here since the claim that the passage must be understood in the light of ultimacy is, in one sense, uncontroversial. The critiques we have explored earlier in our discussion have all tended to recognise the gravitational pull of the ultimate object of love in Socrates’s discussion.435 In fact, the notion of ultimacy is, for many, precisely the problem inasmuch as it invites a reading of this passage as a one-way progression in which the soul moves from the lowest to the highest object of love. When the erotic lover (or philosopher) attains a vision of beauty itself, he finds there a beauty that both encompasses all other beauties and allows him to disengage himself from all attachment to lower instantiations. This is not prima facie unreasonable. The ascent passage can support the interpretation of an erotic quest for ultimacy that allows all relativity to be viewed as deficient, petty and ugly. In this regard, Diotima’s reference to “flesh and colours and a great mass of mortal rubbish” (211e) has been made much of and assumed that the link that eros provides between the two worlds of Platonic ontology is purely instrumental in nature. Eros acts as a ladder by means of which the philosopher drags himself out of the mire and releases himself from the world of the finite and into the world of the infinite. Understood thus, eros offers only a way out of the world of appearance rather than indicating its transformed status qua the Good. This interpretation of the passage is roughly what I have termed heuristic.

434

Vlastos, Nussbaum, Scheler, Lewis etc. tend to read the various stages in the ascent as steps on the way to the ultimate which, as aspects of human life, are then dismissed as trivial and/or worthless. This entails viewing human others as worthless and so poses a significant challenge to the possibility of a Platonic ethics that is genuinely respectful of otherness. 435 The prioritization of the first love harkens back, in fact, to the aporia in the discussion of friendship in the Lysis, which was caused by the uncertain relationship between friendship for individuals and the prw=ton fi/lon or first love for the sake of which (ou= e9neka) everything else is loved. See Lysis (219c-d).

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There is, however, another way of reading this passage in light of the erotic pursuit of ultimacy. This I will call the hermeneutic interpretation. 436 There is undoubtedly a distinction being drawn in the passage between higher and lower objects of desire, but this does not mean that the lower are entirely rejected as has been suggested. Instead, they are understood and understandable in the light of the ultimate. This requires further explanation. On the progressive, heuristic model, the lower objects of desire are simply surpassed and absorbed by the higher. But what if the passage’s intent is simply to reject the lower for the higher insofar as ultimacy is concerned? This means that the ascent can be viewed as constituting a reflective investigation into objects of desire qua the ground of their desirability. That the passage is progressive is the result of the lover’s deepening sense that neither bodies nor souls nor sciences are themselves the ultimate object of desire. Instead, the lover seeks the ground of their desirability and this is why the mind is drawn upwards. The lover of wisdom is characterised by exactly this search for grounds and what he comes to understand through reflection on his erotic attachments is that none of the proper objects in the initial stages are self-grounding. And, to borrow a principle from the earlier argument about the notion of the metaxu, the fact that they are not ultimate does not necessarily make them ugly or petty. On the contrary, their dependence on the higher Good is the very source of their value and worthwhileness. In the Diotiman ascent, as related by Socrates, the lover is initially drawn to one single body, which he regards as the only and ultimate object of desire. But the aesthetic shock of this stirring in the soul is not, on reflection, an aesthetic response only. It is also a moral response to an embodied soul.437 On the basis of this, he is lead to appreciation of a subtler and less immediate beauty – the beauty of souls. But neither is the beauty of the soul self-grounding, an insight that leads the lover to look deeper for the ground of this beauty, and so on until the final revelation. The issue of depth and grounding means that all of these beauties have a common source, but it does not mean that all beauty is the same.438 436

On this reading see also McGuirk, J. (2008c). Phenomenological Reduction, Epochē, and the Speech of Socrates in the Symposium. In Southern Journal of Philosophy, 46 (1), pp. 99-121 437 Note, this effect is one of astonishment. In the Phaedrus, Plato uses the word frikh/ (251a), which indicates a shuddering of the soul in the face of beauty. 438 i.e. contra Nussbaum (2001a). p. 179.

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We notice that this is quite different from the more standard interpretation of the passage because it does not entail a simple absorption of the lower objects of desire. Even when Diotima tells Socrates that the lover will come to see his previous attachment to a single body etc. as petty (210b), this can be understood as suggesting that the single body loved is not the ultimate. This may be why she speaks of relaxing the ‘intense’ passion (210b) for this or that body rather than relaxing that passion altogether.439 So what the ascent does is allow the lover to understand that none of the objects of love mentioned is the ground of human desire. This, of course, has a double aspect since what is suggested is that there is something more fundamental that grounds both desire and the desirability of what is desirable. And eros communicates this something more insofar as we are attracted to even the lowest objects of desire at all. All desire and all things desirable are Good but their goodness is not self-grounding. They are the indirect revelation of the ultimate as well as clues that draws us toward it. The philosopher is no more drawn to this ultimacy than anyone else, but he is explicitly concerned with the mining this ground and making sense of the ultimate that is both revealed and concealed in the objects of desire that we confront in our everyday lives.440 This entails the view that individual objects of desire are desirable or valuable through and because of their relation to the ultimate. On the one hand, this entails the view that the many objects of desire are related to the ultimate which makes the idea that they are simply rejected absolutely in the name of ultimacy difficult to sustain. It is likely that Plato would suggest that only that which bears no relation to the ultimate should not concern us but it is clear that this is not the case with any of the objects of desire he discusses. On the other hand, the so-called lower objects of desire are not valued up to the point that the soul receives an epiphany of the Good and then rejected but are valued more truly at this point. I mean that Plato understands them as grounded by the Good but it is only in one’s realisation of 439

Diotima says:

Tou=to d‘ennoh/santa katasth=nai pantwn tw=n kalow=n swma&twn e0rasth/n, e9n o_s de_ to_ sfo/dra tou=to xala&sai katafronh/santa kai_ smikro_n h9ghsa&menon. The Greek sphodra

refers to excess or violence normally and so the point is to loosen unreasonable attachment rather than attachment per se. 440 According to G.R.F. Ferrari, the beauty of particulars points the spectator “towards what is not immediately appreciable. Yet its function and value is not therefore purely instrumental.” Ferrari (1987). Op. cit., p. 149.

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this fact that the true value of the relative is illuminated. There is, of course, a parallel here with the Sun analogy of the Republic (507a-509d). In that story, the Sun was described as the source of the generated world so that a hierarchy was suggested. But it was also through the light of the Sun that the particularity of the particular was visible at all. That is to say, that the Sun of the Republic or the Good of the Symposium do not obscure what is relative but, on the contrary, allow it to be seen as singular.441 At the same time, the Good itself remains invisible except through the revelation of particulars. Without the grounding source of the Good, neither discernment nor desire would be possible since the objects of the finite world would be neither visible nor beautiful. So it is with a sense of the grounding activity of the Good that what is particular and other can truly be valued as such rather than as relative to one’s own desire. I mean that the Good does not undermine the uniqueness of particulars in relation to itself because it is not the highest in a series. It is not an object but the ground of objects. Thus, it does not suppress difference and particularity but illuminates them.442 The hermeneutical approach to the passage does not entail a rejection of individual objects of desire but a warning against mis-identifying any of them as ultimate. Such misidentification results in the transformation of desire into violent obsession, which both misplaces ultimacy and also fails to acknowledge the true nature and splendour of the object loved.443 What Diotima does here is not to dispel all images but to seek to interpret them in the name of the more fundamental ground of Being that is communicated 441

This point is made by Catherine Pickstock when she notes: “As the source of all light, the sun is more difficult to see than anything else, but it is a beneficent mystery which lets things be seen in their true nature, while itself remaining but obliquely visible. As well as letting things be seen, the sun gives things to be seen, for although it is beyond being, it is the ground of all being(s).” Pickstock, C. (1998). After Writing: On the Liturgical Consummation of Philosophy. Oxford: Blackwell, p. 11. 442 According to Pickstock: “…the good is revealed in the beauty of physical particulars. The philosopher who…has regained knowledge of the good, is wont to glimpse its transcendence in the mundane order, and is thus given to revere all physicality according to its participation in this spiritual sun.” Ibid., p. 12. 443 Once again, Pickstock is insightful: “And so if the philosopher can be accused of neglecting ‘things below’ …it is not that he turns away from physicality itself (for this would deny him access to the good) but that he neglects a mundane apprehension of physicality as merely immanent or crudely separated from the whole…” Ibid., p. 15.

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through them. As we have noted, this results in a double affirmation. Unsurprisingly, the source of Being is affirmed by Plato as the Good. What is more surprising, though, is that he can also affirm beings, which are allowed to shine forth in their otherness because of this source. This appears to provide a way in which things can be respected in their particular otherness as well as communicating a ground beyond themselves with which they are related rather than determined. Once again, the fundamental community of things with the Good does not deny difference but is the condition of its possibility. And what is more, the philosopher’s pursuit of the Good is inseparable from particularity and difference since it is here that the Good actually manifests itself.444 As such, it is the various misidentifications of ultimacy as body, soul or knowledge that truly curtail difference and this precisely because they constitute reifications of ultimacy. But might it not be argued that there is still evidence of spiritual pride or hubris in this defence of philosophy if the philosopher is accorded special access to reality which, in a sense, elevates him above his fellows? One might think that this may lead the philosophical soul to identify in itself a superior form or manifestation of eros. I believe that this claim is unsustainable for several reasons. The first and most important concerns the end of Diotima’s ascent passage. What she says is that anyone who has followed the ascent’s early stages… will now reach the goal of love’s ways. He will suddenly catch sight of something amazingly beautiful in its nature; this, Socrates, is the ultimate objective of all the previous efforts. (210e)

The most noteworthy aspect of this is the fact that the ascent culminates in a revelation to the lover rather than a discovery by him. This means that neither he, by himself, nor his guide can bring about the culmination of the soul’s ascent. What happens, in fact, amounts to a reversal of roles. In the early part of the ascent, the lover appears in the active mood as the pursuer of wisdom. Yet, in the end, the revelation of beauty itself throws him back

444

Pickstock says that “…the philosophic ascent does not result in a ‘loss’ of love for particular beautiful things, since the particular participates in beauty itself.” Ibid. p. 14.

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into a position of passivity.445 It would be going too far in the direction of a Christianisation of Plato to say that this reversal makes the lover the beloved of beauty or the Good since there is no sense that the Good, as conceived by Plato, loves the person in the way the Christian God does. Plato would most likely have considered the Christian understanding of the divine to be an anthropomorphic idea of transcendence. Nevertheless, there is a sense in which the Christian is prefigured by the reversal that suspends the power of the soul as it is gripped by a transcendence which it cannot measure. In any case, the point is that the illumination of the philosopher requires a certain patience and cannot be brought about through his own work alone. He must await the revelation of beauty in its otherness and transcendence and cannot simply will it. In this regard, the ascent is finally a chastening experience for the philosopher insofar as it brings him to the limits of his own powers before bequeathing to him a revelation of that which lies beyond him. The epiphany is described by Plato as surprising because what is revealed is of a different order to the rest of the ascent on foot of its non-objective status. The transcendent is both revealed and concealed in things because it is not itself a thing.446 Of course, the ascent passage as a whole brings to the fore once again the fluid interplay between activity and passivity or power and vulnerability in Platonic eros. The ascent is characterised initially by erotic striving and power before culminating in a certain suspension of this power. This point is paralleled in the discussion of tyranny in the Republic in which the great irony is that the tyrant’s unrestrained use of power has the final effect of limiting his own power. He exercises power capriciously to the point where he becomes paralysed by this very caprice. So Plato seems to be making a point about the release of the soul beyond the limits of the human and the initiation of a higher freedom. The paradox is that this cannot be achieved through the exercise of power but requires a patience in the face of something other. As such, the tendency towards a sense of superiority is at least 445

This interchange between beloved and lover is also a feature of the speech of Alcibiades whose transformation into the position of lover of Socrates takes even he by surprise. 446 As Pickstock puts it: “Both recognition as self-knowledge and recognition as knowledge of everything else are a matter of seeing together and separating out. Thus, we only glimpse the difference of the finite in their orientation towards, and yet separation from, the transcendent realm.” Ibid. p. 17-18.

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tempered by the philosopher’s sense of himself not as completely autonomous but as beholden. He must, that is, envisage something higher than human power in a way the tyrant does not. Another check against any possible collapse of eros into tyranny is this. Understood hermeneutically, the ascent allows the philosopher to affirm what is particular and relative in its particularity and relativity because he sees, in its uniqueness, the communication of something more. This does not mean, however, that it is only the philosopher that can be affirmative. In fact, the affirmation of the philosopher is a retrospectively mindful affirmation of what is affirmed naturally in advance. I mean that Plato has been keen to make the concept of eros as comprehensive as possible and has included even animal sexuality in consideration of its divinity. This was not present in any of the other speeches with the possible exception of Eryximachus’s where the point was in fact to reduce all erotic energy to a principle of nature (186a-b). But sexuality, for example, is something that is affirmed spontaneously by both animals and humans – we do not wait for the philosopher’s approval since we feel its goodness, for want of a better word, in our incarnate being. This goes for both the act of sex and the instinct to preserve what one has brought into being. What the philosopher does is simply to reflect on these and other phenomena in search of a wisdom concerning their grounding. The issue of this reflection is the aforementioned epiphany of the Good or beauty in itself which gives the philosopher an insight into how these various manifestations of eros are related to one another and to the transcendent. Thus, the philosopher does have a privileged position as one might expect. But this privilege is anchored in her ability to articulate in words and concepts what was already affirmed by nature. Understood in this way, the point of philosophy is not to prescribe but to mind the ways in which the Good is already revealed and generated within Being. Philosophy thus understood might well be construed not as the love of wisdom but as the wisdom of love, as Lévinas suggested.447 The point is not that we love according to the degree that we understand, but that we understand with ever greater insight that which we love and why. Knowledge follows where love leads, in other words.448 This perhaps makes Plato something of a phenomenologist in committing him to a “validation of the truth of prephi447

See chap. 5 of the present work. This reading reverses the trajectory that both Scheler (1992). Op. cit. p. 149 and Singer (2009). Op. cit. p. 58-9; 84 trace in the ascent passage. 448

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losophical life, experience, and thinking.”449 The Good is both manifested and indicated in the world and in the erotic desire that draws this to our attention. The job of the philosopher is simply to bring this to our attention. If anything, the fact that the light of the Good allows the shining particularity of things to be seen from the point of view of the rational observer, makes the philosopher even more humble in relation to the multiplicity of things of which he knows he is not master. 3.2. Birth in Beauty Revisited: Eros as Spontaneous, Generous, Joyful I would like, in the light of these insights, to return briefly to the definition of eros as reproduction and birth in beauty (206e). We said that this passage suggested a fundamental generosity in eros that made the notion of eros as acquisitive egoism difficult, if not impossible, to sustain. Eros was characterised as generative activity which, in contact with beauty, produced beyond itself in a way that was wholly reducible to neither the erotic self nor the other. In terms of the most obvious example of childbirth, this meant that the issue of eros was both between and beyond the two whilst being intimately related to both. I think that this is interesting in relation to the hermeneutic reading of the ascent passage because it re-enforces the non-nihilistic nature of eros. Eros is not a desire for unity with the Good simpliciter. If this were so, erotic energy might be described as entailing the kind of nihilism initimated in Nietzsche’s espousal of the dissolution of the principium individuationis in Dionysian frenzy. In other words, the capture of the pre-eminent object of desire would result in a total loss of self to the point that self-effacement would emerge as the hidden goal of striving. Rather eros ultimately desires to preserve itself in relationship with the Good and in so doing is able to affirm itself as well as what is other to it. It does this through a reflective sense of itself, its other and that which is emergent between them. In the ascent passage, Diotima makes frequent reference to what was emergent when the erotic energy of the soul was activated by something external. In the case of a beautiful body, it was a child, with a beautiful soul, 449

Sokolowski (2000). Op. cit., p. 63. Similarly, Husserl says that “phenomenological explication does nothing but explicate the sense this world has for us all, prior to any philosophizing…a sense which philosophy can uncover but never alter.” Husserl, E. (1973). Cartesian Meditations. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, p. 151.

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private discourse, sciences lead to theory and other advances in public wisdom while the beautiful and Good itself enabled the generation of true wisdom and virtue. Thus, the search for grounds was carried out alongside affirmation through spontaneously generative activity. This could not be understood as instrumentalist because the issue of relation with the external was never subsumable by the self. It was always other to the extent that eros was unavoidably generous. The great irony of this position was that eros gives of itself, even when this is not the explicit intention. For example, Diotima appears to confirm the tendency towards egoism in eros when she re-evaluates the story of Achilles and Patroclus as told by Phaedrus (208d). In Phaedrus’s version, Achilles died for the sake of his love for Patroclus (180b) while Diotima claims that the real reason was to preserve for himself immortal fame. This suggests that his love for Patroclus was ultimately selfcentred and in a sense it is, but it shows that even when this motivation is present, the lover bequeaths to future generation an example of virtue from which he cannot himself benefit. Again, Solon may have been concerned with his own immortal fame in fashioning his laws, but the pursuit of this was actually inseparable from a gift of himself to the Athenian community. Thus, erotic energy is ineradicably generous and cannot be reabsorbed by the soul that gives it even when this is the intention. It is the paradoxical nature of erotic intentionality that it thwarts any simple return of the self to itself through the kenotic element that makes the dialectic of giving and receiving intractable. Neither is there any ultimate loss of self since it is through this kenosis that the soul realizes itself. The necessary orientation of eros is beyond finitude in the sense that eros desires to give in a way that transcends the finite even when the question of the infinite is not of direct concern to the agent. For the philosopher too, his reflective ascent towards the Good as source is inseparable from a type of generation beyond himself that is at the service of the other. In the presence of the other, he produces beautiful discourses which, though not entirely his own, are for the benefit and betterment of himself and his interlocutor. In the sense that the Platonic philosopher is concerned with the more than finite, he has a somewhat deeper understanding of the nature of eros and comes to understand its ultimate orientation. That is, he is concerned with the more than finite and finds this concern written in eros prior to any reflection on the matter. With his revelation of the transcendent beauty or the Good, he comes into contact with a source that illuminates beings in their otherness and

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difference. He also finds that his own eros and eros generally is attuned to this as affirmative orientation to the beauty of things. He finds that erotic power is an inspiration of the Good even to the point that it is unconsciously generous in a way that seeks to establish itself on the plane of infinity.450 This is demonstrated again by Diotima’s insistence that erotic frustration is not caused by lack of its object but by the inability to give of itself and so transcend (though not absolutely) the limitations of its own immanence (206e). So eros in no way intends self-sufficiency or the closure of itself from otherness since its nature is essentially marked by generosity. Furthermore, this desire to give demonstrates both an affirmation of self and of otherness – the two are not mutually exclusive. The point of this double affirmation is exactly the place where the two aspects of the ascent coalesce. Particularity and relative otherness are affirmed spontaneously in the various expressions of love – bodily or spiritual - and then mindfully by philosophy after the fact. It turns out, then, that the issue of erotic relations with others is the very manifestation of this affirmation or the way the affirmation becomes concrete. Thus, the affirmation of self and other is manifested through children, private discourse, public discourse and enlightenment insofar as these are ways of fostering and developing community on the grounds of a sense (thoughtful or not) of an already established or irreducible relationality between things. This can be made clearer by means of an example and I will take the first stage of the ascent to do this. In the case of sexual attraction understood on this Platonic model, the eros of the self becomes activated by what is other than it; i.e. the other. Eros desires, then, not to possess – though it can become this – but to give of itself to the other and to receive from the other. The issue of this is the third, as child, through which the intimacy of the two re-emerges into the world. Thus community is engendered anew on the basis of a pre-existing community and human erotic activity is marked by retreat and reemergence. The same pattern is found in all examples of erotic activity as described by Diotima with the result that the model of eros as lack seeking possession becomes ever more difficult to sustain. Several commentators have pointed out the importance of the motif of self-love in the Symposium

450

See also Phaedrus (251b) on the inspiration of eros.

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and in Greek thought in general.451 To intend the Good is always, in a sense, to intend one’s own Good. But while this may be suspect by Lévinas’s lights, the hermeneutics of eros in the Symposium suggests that self-love is in no way reducible to simple egoism. Even when there is an impulse towards possession, the very nature of erotic intentionality is such that it cannot return to itself but always externalizes itself through acts of self-transcendence from which there is no simple return to self. Eros is thus generative of various forms of community such that it cannot be understood through the logic of self-enclosure or the simple return of the soul to itself. The philosopher does not make this so, but simply understands it in these terms. Philosophy understands, though it does not generate, the irreducible nature of community and relationality. The enlightenment that marks the eros of the philosopher’s relation with the Good is distinguished by being spontaneous and mindful at the same time. This does not mean, however, that only the philosopher communes with the Good but that only he is mindful of this fact. And again, if this does imply superiority through greater wisdom, it is on foot of a wisdom that gives him a sense of the depth of his indebtedness and of the value of plurality of otherness. The philosopher affirms himself in his acquisition of wisdom just as the politician affirms himself in the laws he writes or the parent in the child, but the philosopher is also profoundly aware of the transcendent other that provides the gift or resources through which the affirmation is possible at all. 4. The Indictment One Last Time The various versions of the indictment explored in the course of this work have been met in my reading of the speech of Socrates but I would like to return to each of them one last time in order to clear the matter up. 4.1. Aristophanes For Aristophanes, philosophy involved both a dualistic rejection of the body as well as a spiritual quest for dominance of the whole. This is as clear from 451 According to Werner Jaeger the notion of self-love (filauti/a) is not only important for Plato in the Sympsoium. It is also a core motif in Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics (9.8.). See Jaeger (1986). Paideia, vol II. Op. cit., p. 190-1.

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his speech in the Symposium as from his Clouds presentation of a Socrates who will set himself as the judge of right and wrong. I believe that neither of these aspects of Aristophanes’s indictment is sustainable. As we have seen, Plato does distinguish body and mind but not to the point that anything like the strong dualism imagined by the comedian obtains. For Plato, the eros of the body and that of the mind are related insofar as they are both grounded in the Good as source of Being. Furthermore, the eros of the body is never rejected in the discussion of the way in which eros enables humans to participate in divine activity through reproduction and birth in beauty. If anything, this fact allows Plato to extend the trace of divinity in nature beyond humans to include even the lower animals. For Aristophanes, humility can only be preserved by averting the human glance away from the heavens and towards its own genitals. But this is to avert the glance away from what is other and the inevitable result is a passion that is for oneself alone. Moved by a sense of vulnerability, Aristophanic eros desires its own other half but finally produces nothing more than a desire for a re-enforcement that will lessen our vulnerability in the face of what is other. Diotima rejected this idea saying that eros was for neither the half nor the whole but only the Good. In this way, she made eros more open, even as bodily, than was ever imagined by Aristophanes. As for the claim that the spiritualisation of eros as philosophy is tyrannical, two points need to be made. The first is that for Plato, eros is spiritual as much as it is physical and so does not require ‘spiritualisation’ in the sense of transforming a physical drive into something it naturally is not. The second point is that, as we have seen, the enlightenment of philosophical eros provides the most profound sense possible of the relationality and indebtedness of the human being in the face of what is other. Thus, it does not result in the dominance of the single soul over the whole but in a deepened sense of the soul’s own ascending power as gift. Philosophical eros, as Plato understands it, is a desire for wisdom and understanding, not for control. To be sure, he is eminently aware of the immense power in eros but he never loses sight of the divine origins of this power and the self-destructive results of its capricious or self-indulgent employment. In this respect, he tends to understand erotic power as the empowerment of the transcending soul and to this extent, its exigence is most truly realised in respectful relation with what is other to it.

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4.2. Nietzsche Like Aristophanes, Nietzsche had a strong sense of philosophical erotic transcending as self-affirming will-to-power. He vacillates on the issue of whether this will-to-power is to be understood as the self-affirmation of the whole or of the self’s affirmation of itself in opposition to the whole but he is always clear in his sense of the irreducibility of this power to anything more fundamental. At the deepest ontological level, power, for Nietzsche is undifferentiated and is co-equivalent with his metaphysics of endless becoming. There is no wider context and power affirms itself simply in its exercise. Power is, to be sure, refined and nuanced in its exercise, but this is not a feature of the ontology of will-to-power. It is, by contrast, an anthropological point in the sense that the harnessing of will-to-power in the soul is the manifestation of the uniquely human way of encountering the senselessness of Being.452 Nietzsche’s relationship to Plato is deeply ambiguous but, as we have seen, he tends to read the eros of Platonic philosophy as fundamentally Plato’s will to glorify himself through himself. This was resonant with the Aristophanic critique except that Nietzsche salutes where Aristophanes condemns. Because of the ambiguity of Nietzsche’s work, it would not be right to say that my reading of the Symposium refutes him since this aspect of his thought is just that, an aspect and not a theory. Yet, insofar as this aspect could be taken seriously, it appears to dramatically misunderstand Platonic eros.453 To interpret Platonic eros as self-affirming is correct to an extent, but this cannot be isolated from Plato’s sense of a transcendence as other that enables self-affirmation and allows the self to traverse the limits of its finitude in the way that Nietzsche wished to but could never quite manage.454 So if Plato affirms himself, which he does through creative activity, it is not in 452

On this point see Deleuze (1983). Nietzsche & Philosophy. Op. cit.; Klossowksi (2005). Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle. Op. cit. 453 At root, of course, Nietzsche is impossible to refute since even his interpretation of Plato’s intention as the insistence ‘I, Plato, am the truth’ from Twilight of the Idols was, by his own admission, only an interpretation. Nietzsche (2005). Twilight of the Idols Op. cit., p. 171. 454 McGuirk (2008b). The Sustainability of Nietzsche’s Will to Affirmation. Op. cit.

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opposition to the whole but through a sense of meaningful relation with the whole in a way that is neither subjugated nor subjugating. In terms of the essential generosity of eros, Nietzsche is close to Plato in his analysis of Zarathustra’s gift-giving virtue, for example, but he (Zarathustra) never looks beyond himself for any resonance of this spirit of generosity in Being generally and so finally and paradoxically, cannot elevate himself beyond the limitations of the finite in the way Plato can.455 Unlike Plato, for whom the Good as other is the source of the kenotic movement in eros, Zarathustra recognizes no source of meaning outside of himself. He gives as a way of saying yes, but the affirmation is less a response than an initiative from out of himself that affirms that which otherwise bespeaks nothing. 4.3. Alcibiades Alcibiades’s critique was based on the supposed inability of Socratic/Platonic philosophy to accommodate the love of one person for another. For him, philosophical eros was a one-way movement of the soul, through particulars, towards unity with an abstract object of contemplation. It was this critique that gave greatest voice to the accusation of instrumentalism against Plato. Socrates contemplates the beauty of human others but only with a view to furthering his own pursuit of abstract beauty. When he completes his ascent, he looks down with disgust on what is finite and incarnate (220b-c) so that, in spite of its pretensions, philosophy can only be ethically sterile insofar as it judges the finite by the infinite and thereby rejects utterly human vulnerability and vicissitude. But perhaps it is in fact Alcibiades who is guilty of that with which he has charged Socrates. From the words of his own story, we can see Socrates acting in accordance with the insights found in his own speech. His affection for Alcibiades is genuine and he makes every effort possible to ground their relationship in a sense of the Good. He desires a relationship with Alcibiades 455

Zarathustra tells his disciples that the highest virtue is the ‘bestowing virtue’ but this is finally related to affirmation of himself only. He does not recognize anything superior and, as is typical in Nietzsche, is focused predominantly on what is inferior. He explicitly understands ‘good and evil’ in immanentist terms and so sees in them only tools to be incorporated into affirmation of self. See Nietzsche (2006). Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Op. cit., p. 55f.

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that is based on a love of wisdom that will both bind them together as well as making their relationship spiritually generative.456 Thus, in addition to his devotion to Alcibiades in battle (220d-e), he is devoted to the project of making Alcibiades a better man and educating him through their congress and their discussions. He identifies in Alcibiades a beauty of divine origin that he attempts to cultivate as much as possible.457 But this is resisted every step of the way by Alcibiades in spite of the protestations in his speech. He reports asking Socrates to make him better but his every action belies this. It is he who seeks to transform their relation from one based on the love of wisdom to one based on sex. Thus he speaks of seeking to trap and to seduce Socrates (217b-c) and of enduring his conversation for this end (217d). He wants us to think that Socrates’s refusal to trade ‘gold for bronze’ (218e219a) is a rejection of Alcibiades himself as singular and that Socrates will not devote any time to the other person since he would rather contemplate the forms. In reality, though, Socrates refusal is the refusal to make sex rather than philosophy the basis of their association and, therefore, his refusal demonstrates at least as much concern with the welfare of Alcibiades as with his own.458 In this passage he tells Alcibiades that it is better for him (Alcibiades) and that he will be a better person (which he ostensibly wants) if Socrates acts as spiritual guide to him rather than physical lover. Alcibiades wilfully equates sex with love however and so uses this as the basis for a critique of Socrates in which he is incapable of feeling for other persons. I say wilfully because, again by his own admission, Alcibiades tells us he has been convinced by Socrates but turns his back on him repeatedly neverthe456

Leaving aside the question of Plato’s own sexuality for now, his critique and rejection of homosexual activity appears always to be based on the fact that it cannot be generative in a physical way. 457 This point is also very much a feature of the account of love and education in the Phaedrus in which the lover is devoted to his beloved for the sake of the latter’s reflection of divinity (255d). Again, this does not mean that he looks through the beloved but sees in him what would otherwise not be visible. He attempts to assist the beloved in becoming as good as it is possible for him to become and so his love is, in an important way, at the service of the other. 458 Of course, the idea that there should be a basis to human relations at all is criticised by Vlastos in the name of love for persons in their individuality. However, as G.R.F. Ferrari points out, “to love an individual unconditionally, just as the individual that he or she is, is to love him for what he happens to be, and so to make it accidental that he is the person loved.” Ferrari (1987). Op. cit., p. 182.

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less (216b-c). Thus he has an inkling that Socrates is right about the benefits of the philosophical life but consciously rejects this life for the lure of public acclaim and instant gratification. As a result, it gradually emerges that it is his and not Socrates’s eros that is violent, repressive and possessive.459 In spite of what he wishes to argue, Socrates is generous with his wisdom. Alcibiades, though, will not accept this generosity since he wants, instead, not to share with Socrates but to own him. He wants to break Socrates apart so as to get his hands on the images of the gods within. But from what we have seen, the aim of genuine eros is not the greedy possession of divinity but the establishment of community with it. This will never be enough for Alcibiades since he has the soul of a tyrant and is infuriated with Socrates, not because he could never affect him, but because he could never control or manipulate him. Alcibiades is finally a tragic figure who is, in a sense, destroyed by his own eros. He was undoubtedly beautiful and had a great soul but he steadfastly refused to be reflective on the meaning of his eros in spite of Socrates’s best efforts (perhaps here we see the limits of philosophy in Socrates’s failure). His is an eros that will not yield to anything superior to it and as with the tyrant of the Republic, the great irony is that he becomes ultimately a victim of himself. The point is made again that in the divinity or at least semi-divinity of human eros, an infinite power is at our disposal. Yet, if we persist in understanding ourselves as absolutely sovereign, we find ourselves wielding a power in eros that we, as finite, cannot possibly control. 4.4. Lévinas In many respects, Lévinas appeared to confirm the critique of Alcibiades or, at least, the spirit of that critique as I presented it in the chapter on Alcibiades. Lévinas indicts western philosophy for its alleged allergy to otherness. He understood philosophical eros as issuing in the desire to lay the whole of Being open to the gaze of the spectator. As such, he is often critical of Plato and Socrates insofar as he understands their work as making ethics subordinate to metaphysical ontology. No conceptual schema or ontology,

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Remember Catherine Osborne’s reference to the change in terminology in the speech of Socrates.

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he thinks, can do justice to the otherness of the other person and can only impose upon them with violence. On the other hand, Plato is probably the single greatest hero in the works of Lévinas since it is from Plato that we have the idea of the good beyond Being. That is, an idea of the Good that is not an idea and that is not finally determinable. For Lévinas, though, it seems that the only way to fully rescue the insights of Plato is to re-orient Platonic desire away from the Good in the abstract and towards the face of the other so that this fundamental metaphysical impulse issues not in thought but in ethical action and responsibility. In this regard, philosophy as we have it from the tradition must be suspended since otherwise it will suspend the alterity of the other with the result that ethics will become a degraded self-referential totality. The point is to pursue a relation with infinity in desire such that all movements towards the closure of a totality of the whole are disrupted. Insofar as Lévinas defers to Plato in this attempt, he seems to understand him well since Plato too, as we have seen, understands the Good or transcendence to be finally beyond the scope of philosophical determination and as the ground of determining in the first place. However, Plato’s exploration of eros seems finally to avoid the kind of dualism to which Lévinas is persistently given. Plato makes transcendence other than thought in terms of conceptual transparency but unlike Lévinas, he does not drive a wedge between the two. Rather, he understands transcendence as other, to be the very empowering source that funds the determinations and spiritual creations of the human soul. The Good is not reducible to ontology in Lévinas’s sense but it is not absolutely other than it either. Lévinas’s mistake seems to be thinking too much in terms of an either/or – either the Good is absolutely other than Being or it is entirely determinable within Being. The result for Lévinas is that respectful nonviolence in response to the face must be played out as infinite ethical responsibility and self-abnegation. The great advantage of Plato’s sense of eros is that it is understood as a joyful appreciation of otherness that does not rule out self-affirmation. For Plato, the transcendent is the source of both the desire of the self and the desirability of what is other. When this eros is married to reflection, we gain insight into this complex relationality. Because of the shimmering nature of beauty as the visible manifestation of the Good, eros is spontaneously af-

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firmative.460 Coupled with philosophical reflection, it appreciates, mindfully, the relation of self-being and other-being to transcendence. This relationality, as Catherine Pickstock notes, does not reduce the value of what is other but actually saturates particular others with value.461 Particulars are not merely aspects of the Good but are given to be as unique and particular by the Good. Thus, the affirmation of particulars as either self or other is valued because of the transcendent for Plato but this does not make them in any way inferior. It is simply that only through the infusion of value from outside can they genuinely be unique and valuable. Armed with this sense, the self can be truly affirmative of itself without reducing what is other. This, of course, can never be the case for Lévinas. The subject, for Plato, can affirm itself as good as much as it can affirm the other, on the basis of its sense of the community both share with the Good itself. Understood in this way, the orientation of Platonic philosophy is far more respectful than is imagined by Lévinas when he speaks about the ‘tradition’. Even if it is accurate to talk about Plato’s subordination of ethics to metaphysics, this subordination is not a subjection. Rather Plato’s metaphysical insights furnish him with a sense of the value of the ethical other as other. This means that the value of the other is not reduced to my interest 462 in it, though this is not excluded, but is indexed to itself and to its relation to the Good as infinite other.463 For ethics, this is important because it obviates the need, as Lévinas sees it, for infinite responsibility to the other, which is both impossible and tortuous. As I pointed out in an earlier chapter, Lévina460

According to Wendy Farley: “Beings, simply in their existence, are lovely and valuable. Beauty integrates an ethical dimension with an aesthetic one. The throb of beauty running through life carries with it a judgment against wanton destruction or exploitation. Being enacted as beauty imposes obligations that cannot be recognised if the intrinsic, ineffaceable value of reality cannot enter into consciousness.” Farley (1996). Op. cit., pp. 79-80. Lévinas will never allow for any interpenetration of the aesthetic and the ethical realms and insists that respect for alterity must take the form of profound suffering also. The Platonic alternative is a suffering of alterity too but it is suffering in the sense of a passio that is fundamentally joyful. 461 Pickstock (1998). Op. cit., p. 12. 462 Lévinas, we know, often claims that genuine ethical sensibility must be wholly disinterested. 463 For Plato, the Good is the infinite other even though it is not infinitely other. The distinction is important and suggests that even though the Good is infinite, it is also intimately related to immanence.

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sian infinite responsibility can tend to smack of an obsession with self insofar as I take the responsibility for the whole upon myself and take to myself guilt for the whole of existence. In Plato’s erotic discussion, the whole is more justified from the start and can be termed Good because of the intimacy of its relation with the Good. For Lévinas, I am guilty in my being because Being itself is unjustified. For Plato, Being is justified though not in a way that would allow me to abdicate my responsibility.464 I am still responsible and indebted but, through my erotic orientation to the world, this indebtedness can be understood now more in terms of joyful affirmation than in terms of guilt and negation. In essence, Platonic eros is not purely acquisitive as Lévinas increasingly suggests in his later works but grounded in a sense of what is transcendent and other. As such, it can be positive and affirmative about itself and its other, which frees it from the obsession with self that so characterises Lévinas sense of guilt before the other.

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As G.R.F. Ferrari puts it: “we are not to feel guilt over our embodiment, since after all, Plato’s point is that we should view it as a contingency, an accident; yet we are not therefore simply to exonerate ourselves from all sense of responsibility as human agents.” Ferrari (1987). Op. cit., p. 135.

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Appendix: The doctrine of eros in the Phaedrus

I have argued in the preceding chapter that the readings of Socrates speech on eros in the Symposium as instrumentalist, dualist, and hubristic are all wrongheaded. While the accusation of hubris was drawn principally from our reading of the speech of Aristophanes, accusations of dualism, rejection of the flesh and the instrumentalism of others have, as we have seen, been common among some of the dialogue’s most prominent commentators. What all of these commentators miss, I argue, is a sensitivity to the notion that the highest Good, as intended by eros, is revealed through the subordinate goods as their ground. In this sense, the lower goods both point to the Highest Good as well as manifesting themselves as values in relation to it. They are not tokens to be surpassed and moved through in a heuristic pursuit of the Good in relation to which the rest is worthless, but manifestations of the Good, which only shows itself in the hermeneutic process of manifestation as such. The subordinate goods are invested by the highest Good and it is because of this investiture that we respond to them as values in eros. There is, to be sure, a hierarchy and a relativization of goods in the Symposium but this is to be seen as a warning against the tendency to misidentify the invested goods as the ultimate itself. Vlastos, Nussbaum, and others accuse Socrates of being incapable of loving concrete others as a result of his pursuit of the highest Good with which he seeks rational communion. We have defended against this accusation in two ways; firstly, by highlighting the fact that erotic love is fundamentally generative rather than acquisitive or possessive and secondly, by arguing that others are valued precisely because they bear a relation to the highest Good. Regarding this latter, it is possible to push back even further against the critique. On the one hand, the criticism of Socrates (and Plato) is perfectly comprehensible inasmuch as it is based in opposition to instrumentalism. But might we not, on the other hand, ask what precisely is meant by valuing others in and for themselves? In Lévinas’s terms the point is obvious. For him, Being is unredeemed and valueless and is only invested as valuable with the advent of the face. This makes the Other (l’Autrui) the very site of the rupture in Being into which the Good can enter. But neither Vlastos or

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Nussbaum are thinking in Lévinasian terms. The question is then what do they mean by accusing Socrates of instrumentalizing others? If they mean that the value of the other is never sui generis, but stands always in relation to a higher Good, then the accusation hits its target. But is this enough to conclude that others are instrumentalized by Socrates (and Plato)? We know well what we mean when we extoll the value of others as unique, irreplaceable, non-interchangeable individuals, but does this mean that their value is completely unrelated to wider contexts of significance in which this value is borne? In fact, is there any good reason to accept the tacit implication in this line of argument that the value of others as unique excludes relationality or heterochthony? It is precisely this point that we have argued in our reading of the speech inasmuch as we noted that Socrates’s self-defence against Alcibiades, for example, is based on his rejection of the latter’s attempt to decontextualize their relationship from wider contexts of significance. It is Alcibiades who makes of Socrates an instrument by attempting to subjugate him to the logic of his (Alcibiades’s) own self-relation. Socrates’s philosophical articulation of eros, by contrast, involves the attempt to ‘see’ the meaning of others in the context of the ground from which their value is drawn. And to be clear, the valuation of others and of other subordinate groups does not issue from philosophical insight. Rather, philosophical insight is about grasping after the fact, the valuations that are already given in experience but which can become confused and overweening if their place in the value hierarchy is disoriented. 1. Eros in the Phaedrus Whereas I feel that the argument is made on this point, I want to conclude by engaging briefly with the other Platonic dialogue that deals with eros, namely the Phaedrus. Apart for the obvious reason for doing so – that the dialogue commits a substantial portion of the text to an exploration of eros465 – there is also the fact that the Phaedrus is often contrasted with the Symposium as offering a more ‘human’ understanding of erotic love than the bloodless one found in the earlier dialogue. Martha Nussbaum, for one, finds a radically different understanding of not only eros, but human relations in 465

The first part of the dialogue consists of three speeches about eros, two of which are delivered by Socrates and where certainly the second is the more important.

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general in the later dialogue. As she puts is, “what happened to Plato[in the Phaedrus] was that he discovered that merely human life was more complicated, but also richer or better, than he had imagined. [in the Symposium]”466 I believe that Nussbaum goes much too far with this claim. That being said, the two dialogues do undoubtedly contain interesting contrasts in the way eros is discussed. The most notable of these is the emphasis on erotic love as turbulent in the later dialogue, in a way that contrasts with the seeming serenity of the ascent from the Symposium. Along with this, the Phaedrus gives greater room to affectivity, including the affectivity of the body, in its account of the experience of erotic love. While critics are right to point to these contrasts, I think they are wrong to impute to them a change in Plato’s understanding of eros. My contention is, rather, that these contrasts should be understood in terms of a different thematic focus on the topic of eros. While the Symposium was concerned with understanding the meaning of erotic love, the Phaedrus places more weight on an extrapolation of the experience of erotic love. Put otherwise, the earlier dialogue was concerned with unfolding what the underlying intentionality of eros is, while the later dialogue is concerned with the way in which the inspiration of the soul in eros is felt. While the emphases of the two dialogues are undoubtedly different in ways that shape the unfolding of eros in the text, these do not bespeak conflicting moments in the way eros as such is understood by Plato. Or so I will argue. 2. Dating and themes of the Phaedrus The dating of the Phaedrus, as is the case with very many of Plato’s dialogues, is not uncontroversial, although it is generally agreed that the dialogue occupies a place in between the acme of the middle period (Symposium, Republic) and the obviously later dialogues (Statesman, Sophist etc.).467 466

Nussbaum (2001b). Op. cit. p. 230-1. Gregory Vlastos puts forth a schema of the most likely chronology of Plato’s works based on stylometric analysis as well as thematic development in Vlastos (1973). Op. cit. In this study he identifies two transitional periods in Plato’s authorship. The first is that between the early ‘Socratic’ dialogues and the middle period works. This first transitional period includes the Meno and the Gorgias. The second transitional period is after the Republic and Symposium but before the later dialogues such as Sophist, Statesman, Theaetetus and Laws. It is in this second transi467

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Support for this dating of the text is drawn from the dialogue’s subject matter – rhetoric – and the seeming change in Plato’s position on the topic from the earlier Gorgias. While the earlier dialogue condemned rhetoric as subordinate or even inimical to philosophy, the later dialogue views rhetoric in an entirely more positive light as not only compatible with, but part of the philosophical enterprise. That it appears to have been written sometime after the Symposium, also lends prima facie credence to the idea that the dialogue might be seen as offering a revised doctrine of eros, if only in the minimal sense that there are so many different emphases in the later dialogue. I do not wish to dwell on exegetical issues concerning the dialogues dating or even on the precise nature of the role of rhetoric in the text. As such, my remarks will largely be confined to those passages of the dialogue dealing with eros in the first part of the dialogue. That being said, it is not going too far to suggest that what holds the two parts of the dialogue together– the first part on eros and the second part on rhetoric – is a concern with the role of affectivity in human life and in the philosopher’s pursuit of truth and the Good life. Inasmuch as this is the case, the dialogue can also be viewed as offering a deep reflection on the relationship between insight and aesthetics.468 Both in terms of physical beauty and in terms of the power of words, perception (aesthesis) is what allows the human soul to be moved and inspired in hitherto unforeseen ways. Plato’s concern here is how this passivity or affectivity gives access to insight which transcends the kind of understanding of truth and goodness generated from within the paradigm of the Greek ideal of self-sufficiency (sophrosune). To be human is to be capable of being arrested in the flesh by what manifests itself in the perceptual environment. Whereas some experiences can be more intensely stirring than others, our embodiment as such entails a capacity to be moved, affected, and tional period that the Phædrus appears. See also Panagiotou, S. (1975). Lysias and the date of Plato’s Phaedrus. Mnemosyne, 28 (4), pp. 388-98; Usacheva, A. (2010). Concerning the date of Plato’s Phaedrus. Hermathena, 189, pp. 53-70. These and others argue for a date of ca. 372-368 BC. 468 I cannot therefore, agree with Werner Jaeger’s claim that the Phaedrus is properly to be considered as a work exclusively about rhetoric. According to Jaeger, only the second part of the dialogue is thematically interesting, while the first part is there simply to make the point that Socrates can compete with the Sophists at their own game. Jaeger, W. (1986). Paideia III: The Conflict of Cultural Ideals in the Age of Plato. Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 186.

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inspired in ways which are never fully in our control. Whereas different souls are captured by different aspects of the given – something Plato discusses under the auspices of the kinds of lovers that exist (252c-253c)469 – we are all fundamentally responsive beings who are set in motion in the first place by the attraction of what is both intimate and strange for us at the same time. This, it will turn out, is key to understanding the phenomenon of eros and erotic love and through it, for understanding the genesis of the soul’s concern for truth and goodness. The importance of eros, it turns out, is that it is the site of that fundamental passivity in the soul against which the truthseeking initiative is profiled. This idea was very much part of the Symposium account of eros, as we saw in the previous chapter, both in terms of the intimacy of the Good in embodied responses as well as the potential ambiguity of these responses and the danger of misidentifying the relative as the ultimate. The difference between the two dialogues lies rather in the increased focus on the embodied encounter with the given in the Phaedrus. Rather than simply mining the ground of erotic love, the Phaedrus is concerned with articulating the way in which this ground is made manifest in our embodied experience. As with the Symposium, the concern is still very much a proper grasp of what is being communicated in eros, but certainly the increased focus on affectivity and the decentring of the soul in eros allows for a clearer presentation of the presence of the Good in beings, in a way that blocks the cogency of instrumentalist readings of Platonic eros. 3. The action of the dialogue 3.1. Prologue The dialogue begins with a seemingly chance encounter between Socrates and Phaedrus outside the walls of the city. The prologue to the dialogue is hugely pregnant with anticipations of the themes of the dialogue, and specifically the encounter with strangeness and its meaning for thinking. Socrates draws our attention to the strangeness of the place and, specifically, its strangeness for him. He is quite literally out of place (a-topos) beyond the 469

I will refer in the main to Hackforth’s translation of the Phaedrus. Hackforth, R. (1989). Plato’s Phaedrus. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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city walls. It is not his scene, a fact he insists upon when he says that, “I’m a lover of learning, and trees and open country won’t teach me anything, whereas men in the town do” (230d). This claim is, however, if not belied then at least heavily attenuated by much of the rest of the dialogue’s action and drama with its positive emphasis on strangeness, inspiration and the affectivity of the soul. At 238d, Socrates wonders whether there is a divine presence in the place they are conversing, that leads his thinking in the direction of new insight. Even more tellingly, he recounts the myth of Boreas (the north wind), who allegedly carried off the slave girl Oreithuia while she was at play with Pharmacia (229cd). What is particularly interesting about this story is Socrates’s rejection of the tendency of ‘crude science’ (229e) to explain away the myth in order to replace it with naturalistic explanations. His rejection of crude scientific explanations (230a) can, of course, be understood as a re-iteration of the same eschewal of speculative philosophy found in the Apology (19c). His interests lie not in the area of cosmology, as was the case with the preSocratics, but on the welfare of the human soul. But the myth also serves the positive function of acknowledging the role of passivity in human experience and the limits of knowing. As human beings, we are moved and motivated by forces beyond ourselves and of which we are never truly master. Socrates does not thereby renege on his philosophical project, but he does locate it within a wider context that transcends the initiative of the soul. The prologoue is also noteworthy for Socrates’s framing of his philosophical questioning as seeking to “discover whether I really am a more complex creature and more puffed up with pride than Typhon, or a simpler, gentler being whom heaven has blessed with a quiet, un-Typhonic nature” (230a-b). This hearkens back to the theme of the indictment of philosophy and specifically to the idea of philosophical praxis as a form of hubris that is ultimately driven by a will to domination. Socrates wonders whether to be a philosopher is to have the soul of a tyrant seeking control over Being through thought or whether philosophy involves, on the contrary, a humility, which seeks to ‘mind’ the meaning of what manifests itself to the soul and, in this case, to the senses. The answer to this question is likely that it can be either. Philosophical activity can be the pursuit of absolute sovereignty, but is it always so? Is it so for Socrates? For our purposes, this contextualization of the inquiry neatly connects the dialogue to the Symposium and in particular, to the question of the relationship between eros, philosophy, and tyranny.

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3.2. The speech of Lysias and the first speech of Socrates Following the thematic anticipations of the prologue, the dialogue’s first main theme is introduced at 230e with the speech of Lysias as recited by his disciple and Socrates’s interlocutor, Phaedrus. The point of the speech is quite simply to favourably compare the non-lover with one who is in love from the point of view of the beloved. More specifically, the speech argues that the beloved (eromenos) is better served by submitting to one who is not in love with him than one who is (erastes). The argument is made by contrasting the disadvantageous (for the beloved) nature of love with the mutually beneficial relationship based on exchange and friendship. This speech is followed by Socrates first speech, which sets itself the goal of improving on the argument of Lysias while making the same point. Socrates’s first speech does not, then, challenge the content of Lysias’s speech, in the way that the second speech will do, but only its form. The speech itself comprises a mixture of accusations against erotic lovers that we have already seen in the Symposium, as well as novel accusations we have not yet seen. Chief among the first of these is idea that the lover is essentially self-serving. Guided by his passion, he seeks to own or to possess his beloved, but without any real concern for the beloved’s own good. Thus, the lover is jealous of others seeking the society of his beloved, regardless of whether these other suitors might be of benefit to the beloved in some way or other (232c). This makes the lover calculating and callous, concerned only with the gratification of his own desire. He is also inconstant inasmuch as his interest in his beloved will wane as soon as he is gratified (232e-233a). In short, the lover loves the beloved not for the sake of the beloved, but for the sake of himself. While the portrait of the lover as calculating, inconstant, and callous does not map exactly onto the portrait of Socrates from the Symposium, it does echo the critique of instrumentalizing eros that was so much a feature of the various critiques of the earlier dialogue. But the speech of Lysias also contains a second major element, which is not present in the Symposium, namely the warning against the madness and irrationality of love. The lover is self-serving, but he is also incautious and dangerously unpredictable. The lover’s judgement is impaired by the strength of his feeling, something that will result in extolling the unworthy thoughts and actions in his beloved and in his imbalanced sense of what is good and worthwhile for himself and his beloved (233b-c). In this sense, the lover is a victim of love (233c) and in turn also a victimizer of his beloved.

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Love upsets balance and perspective and literally distorts the ability of the lover to see or to discern the real from the illusory. Love is a dangerous madness that leads lovers and their beloved away from reason, prudence, and a concern for their mutual welfare, dashing these on the rocks of a reckless passion. Against these disadvantages, Lysias contrasts the virtues of a passionless relationship in which the lover is concerned with gratification but without the mad attachment of love. Such a relationship is, in fact, more compatible with true friendship (philia), precisely because the lover will be retain the perspective necessary to see the personality of his beloved unperturbed by mad passion. He says that, A lover more often than not wants to possess you before he has come to know your character or become familiar with your general personality; and that makes it uncertain whether he will still want to be your friend when his desire has waned; whereas in the other case, the fact that the pair were already friends before the affair took place makes it probable that instead of friendship diminishing as a result of favours received, these favours will abide as a memory (232e-233a)

The non-lover has a sense of perspective inasmuch as he will prioritize future advantage rather than immediate pleasure (233c) and in this way is a true friend to the beloved. A cynical interpretation of Lysias’s speech – which is not unreasonable incidentally – is that the relationship between lovers should be enacted on the model of the contractual in order to ensure the mutual benefit of both parties (234c). A more charitable reading might be that his point is not to oppose love with non-love, but rather passionate love (eros) with the more serene love of friendship (philia). The passion of eros literally blinds and dements the lover and makes him incapable of seeing the what is good for his beloved or for himself. Indeed, he cannot see the beloved at all. A love based on friendship and exchange, by contrast, will further the interest of all. To the lover goes the gratification of bodily desire, while the beloved is initiated into a network that will increase the chance of success in his ventures in the social world. This model is simply not possible when strong feelings are concerned, precisely because these tend to neutralize the ability of both parties to think strategically about their interests. In other words, passion initiates a self-centredness, but it is the wrong kind of self-centredness because it lacks the capacity to see beyond the immediate.

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In Socrates’s first speech, he follows the line of argument initiated by Lysias, especially as it concerns the contrast between judging what is good, on the one hand, and the effects of passion on the other. Like Lysias, he frames the contrast between lover and non-lover as a contrast between the one who is ‘less or more sane’ (236b) and thereby presents judgement and love as mutually exclusive. His speech does not, as Lysias’s had done, commend the behaviour of the non-lover, but only articulates the disadvantages of love. If there is a difference between the two speeches, it resides only in the greater level of abstraction in Socrates’s speech in which he crystallizes the trajectory of Lysias’s speech into a contrast between desire and reason. Thus, he says that when, Judgement guides us rationally towards the best, and has the mastery, that mastery is called temperance; but when desire drags us irrationally towards pleasure, and has come to rule within us, the name given to that rule is wantonness (237e-238a)

Desire is, then, the opposite of reason. It is unreason and thereby leads us away from what is good and noble and towards what is base. It is for this reason that the lover – and here Socrates goes even further than Lysias – will want to cultivate the baser qualities of his beloved (239a). This is not just because it will better serve his purpose but because the very trajectory of erotic desire is towards the lower, dehumanizing aspects of the soul. On this understanding eros is incompatible with the good life and certainly incompatible with philosophy’s approbation of the life of reason. 3.3. Interlude It is not obvious how we should interpret this speech in relation to the Symposium account of eros.470 As we have already noted, some aspects of the Lysias/Socrates critique bear a certain resemblance to aspects of the critique in the earlier dialogue, most notably in the reference to eros as self-serving and instrumentalizing. But for the most part, the critique of eros in these early speeches could not be considered to be anything more than a caricature of the Socratic/Diotiman account of eros from the Symposium. Even the 470

There is, of course, no reason to think that Plato’s intends for us to interpret them together at all, but for the purposes of the present argument, we must.

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critics who accuse Socrates of instrumentalizing others in the ascent towards the Good never question the intimate relationship between erotic love and the Good. It is eros that signals the Good to us and brings it to our attention. Even were we to accept the critiques of Nussbaum, Vlastos and others – which we do not – there is never any suggestion that eros as such is the problem.471 But it is exactly this suggestion that shapes these first two speeches in the Phaedrus. The claim is being made that eros itself leads us away from the life of reason and self-control and into an irrational, selfdestructive madness. It blinds and dements and makes the pursuit of the good life impossible. It is no surprise, then, that Socrates will not cross the river (242b) before he has made amends for “the terrible theory that Phaedrus introduced and compelled him to expound” (242d). He had, of course, anticipated this regret by covering his head in shame before reciting his speech (237a), but now he can go no further before recanting. In terms of the dialogue itself, the earlier speeches most likely function is providing a contrast with the emphasis on erotic affectivity that follows in the third speech. As we noted earlier, this emphasis is novel vis-à-vis the Symposium, but not in such a way that we are dealing with a different doctrine of eros. 4. The second speech of Socrates Socrates’s recantation of his earlier speech is essentially an inversion of its premises in which key phenomena such as madness, affectivity, and beauty are re-evaluated and transformed into positive moments in the erotic relationship with the Good. 4.1. Madness, inspiration, and reason The most important of these revaluations is undoubtedly the positive understanding of madness put forth by Socrates. Far from being an evil, he says that “the greatest blessings come by way of madness, indeed of madness that is heaven sent” (244a-b). While self-controlled rationality (sophrosunē) remains a virtue, he insists that many who do “little or nothing while sane” 471

Quite the contrary, the critique was usually that it was the passionless nature of Socratic eros that inhibited his ability to see the other as other.

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(244b), become capable of great feats in the grip of madness, whether they be oracles, healers, poets, or philosophers for that matter. Socrates does not hereby reject the dichotomy between the sane and the non-sane or the rational and the irrational, but introduces a nuance into how the irrational might be understood. He is not, in other words, simply re-claiming the madness decried by Lysias, but drawing our attention to another kind of madness that Lysias has not seen. Socrates is well aware of the dangers of the kind of madness that Lysias describes and has, in fact, pointed out the same thing in his warning against the mad jealousy of Alcibiades in the Symposium (213d). But he insists that madness can also denote the soul’s reception of a transcendence which overwhelms the soul’s mastery of itself by manifesting what the soul cannot measure. When the soul surrenders itself to this form of madness, it does not surrender itself to the purely irrational, but gives itself over rather to its own divine origin. This is not madness on the hither side of reason, but one which is higher than rationality and that reaches where the merely rational cannot. This higher madness is the divine origin making itself seen in forms of inspiration, which to the majority will seem like simple madness (249d). The point, of course, is not that the majority are wrong in their condemnation of madness, but that they have misidentified the kind of madness that is at stake. In the thrall of this mad inspiration, the lover is “rebuked by the multitude as being out of his wits, for they know not that he is possessed by a deity” (249d). Such inspiration, however, releases forces within us that are not in our control, and which alone can lead us to insight into the transcendent. This occurs not when we are selfgoverning, but when we allow inspiration to take hold. Plato is not, as Nussbaum suggests, positively interpreting the affectivity that he rejected in the Symposium, but is simply making affectivity the focus in a way that was not the case in the Symposium, But even here, there is a clear attempt to nuance what affectivity betokens and what the appropriate response to it is. When we discussed the speeches about eros in the Symposium, we noted a focus throughout on the issue of communication between gods and men, where eros was referred to as a point of connection between the two realms. There was throughout a double hermeneutic at work in the sense that eros communicated divinity at the same time as the philosopher interpreted the meaning of this, usually indirect, communication. But whereas the communicative nature of eros was thematised with regards to its possible positive or negative consequences, the nature of the communication itself was largely passed over. In the Phaedrus, by contrast, it is the principal thematic focus.

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In his approbation of madness, Socrates is interested not only in what communication with the divine means, but in how this manifests itself to us. Socrates is interested in the phenomenon of being moved or affected, we might say. Madness is enthusiasm or possession by divinity (enthousiasmos), and while this enthusiasm annuls the self-containment of sophrosunē, it is also the context in which reason operates. It is what is given to reason to think. Far from being the chaotic flux out of which reason must struggle to assert itself, divine inspiration felt in madness communicates something positive, but it is a communication that we cannot bring into view in its entirety. In this sense, it overwhelms reason and throws it off balance, not because it unravels the achievements of reason, but because it relativizes them. 4.2. Affectivity and aesthetics Socrates goes on to describe how this madness visits us and does so with reference to the affectivity of the body as the site in which the divine can most easily communicate with us. When we read the Symposium, we noted that the assimilation of the Good and the beautiful (tagatha kai te kala) tended to give way to a discussion of the Good alone. In the Phaedrus, by contrast, the language of beauty remains more to the fore and the reason appears to be that the focus here is on eros as an embodied phenomenon, where the indirect communication of the Good happens most pristinely through the phenomenon of beauty. In the soul’s disembodied state, we are told that it catches glimpses of the heavenly forms including, as one would expect, temperance, justice, wisdom, and beauty (250b-d). Of the first three of these, no lustre remains on earth (250b) but beauty is different. Beauty shines brightest amongst the heavenly visions and it is, furthermore, perceptible ‘here below’ through the faculty of vision, the highest of the senses (250d). Socrates says that “for beauty alone has this been ordained, to be most manifest to sense and most lovely of them all” (250d). So beauty is the only form that shines in the created realm (i.e. is clearly perceptible). Thus, while eros is the connecting energy between mortality and divinity, beauty is its corresponding form and it is these two together that form the nexus of the philosophical life. This is what reawakens the divine interest within us for commerce with the divine, for which we are meant.

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However, and this is crucial, the fact that eros is common to all and beauty is perceptible by all means that it cannot simply be eros or the perception of beauty that distinguish the philosopher from the nonphilosopher. Both of these (i.e. eros and beauty) are features of mortal human existence; that is, they touch us in our incarnate as well as our spiritual being. Indeed, they touch us primarily in our incarnate being. The awakening of eros is irreducibly embodied and so the body is not one among a multitude of ways that divinity can reach of us, but is rather, our privileged mode of access to the divine. What distinguishes the philosopher, it will turn out, is his reflection on the meaning of these phenomena. Thus, the created realm, insofar as it manifests beauty, is interpreted by the philosopher, but it must first be experienced by her and inasmuch as it is, she is no different than anyone else. The phenomenon of eros and the fact of beauty are taken to be significant or indicative of the nature of reality. Once again, this is suggestive of a more nuanced view of materiality than that with which Plato is often credited. His disdain for the incarnate is a disdain for a nonreflective relationship with incarnation. The incarnate as such is the site of the encounter of the soul with value. It is the place where the souls is touched by something other than itself that gives it to think. In this sense, the aesthetics of embodiment comprise the irreplaceable centre of human the life. That what is communicated in the aesthetic encounter with otherness can be ignored, misunderstood, or rejected is another matter, and Socrates will certainly suggest that the philosopher is he who ‘minds’ this communication most appropriately. However, the philosopher’s experience is not an experience of a different kind. It is simply that he responds to his experience differently. He does not let go of the initial feelings of shock and awe that the encounter with beauty gives rise to (251a), but reflects deeply on what these mean. What this experience signifies is, of course, something deeper than what appears on the surface. It is the totality of Being, truth, and goodness, but it is the aesthetic encounter that initiates this desire and that sustains it throughout. This becomes clear in the famous allegory of the soul that is introduced at 246aff. The allegory, which depicts the soul in the figure of a chariot driven by two horses – the one good and noble, the other base – and the charioteer who seeks to navigate these energies, is often interpreted along the lines of a battle in the human being between the soul’s attraction to the spiritual and the attraction of the flesh to the lower realm. But as Josef Pieper astutely points out, there is not a word in the text that supports such

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a reading. As Pieper notes, the allegory says nothing about the origin of human unhappiness in physicality, but is about the mind. Plato is saying that the possibility of degeneration and downfall lies within the structure of the human mind itself, which is finite. Man is inclined toward and capable of wickedness not just because of physicality and sensuality…The susceptibility is there before it encounters temptations from the sirens’ song of the world of sense.472

The allegory is not about the human being composed of spirit (good) and matter (bad), but about competing impulses within the soul of man. Much of this is brought out in the account of the approach of the lover to his beloved (253c-256e). The struggle within the soul of the lover amounts to the attempt to subjugate lustful impulses in order to release a more genuine form of eros. This distinction may again seem to invite an interpretation based on the dichotomy of spirit and flesh, but actually denotes the contrast between possessive and respectful responses to beauty within the soul as such. That the lustful is a real dimension of human experience is not the result of embodiment but of the tendency in the human soul towards possessive and self-serving egoism. Such unruly passion is a desire for possession and violence that seeks to consume the desirable object in its ardour. In this way, it treats its own eros as an end in itself before which everything is sacrificed and in relation to which all otherness is incorporated. Plato’s wish, though, is to contrast this with a genuine love that is respectful in the sense of being properly appreciative. Only in this way can the soul be released towards the higher realm signified in erotic emotion. Furthermore, this higher eros is not contingent upon a rejection of materiality but of a deeper understanding of its signification. In thought, the philosopher reflects upon the meaning of his own desire as well as its proper object. On reflection, it finds its own eros, which remains anchored in the sensual realm, to be indicative of an irreducible reality beyond itself and it is with this reality that the soul of the philosopher dialogues. Since thought without this respectful eros is barren on this picture, the possession that is eros constitutes a kind of formation of the soul. I mean that eros is the very essence of the soul as a desire for what is other. It is the 472

Pieper, J. (2000). Enthusiasm and Divine Madness: On the Platonic Dialogue Phaedrus. South Bend Indiana: St. Augustine Press, p. 78.

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essence of the soul as an affectivity that moves the soul prior to any initiative. We are given over to the realm of the material, which arrests our perception and manifests values that we recognize as originating elsewhere – that is, they are not the product of our own initiative. This is a feature of all human experience. What distinguishes the philosopher is not his perception of this value, but his reflective interpretation of its meaning. 4.3. Eros and intersubjectivity If the picture so far emergent is convincing, we have in the Phaedrus the sense of material, incarnate being as significant; that is, it is a network of signs of the ultimate and signs, furthermore, that stand in need of interpretation. Eros draws us into relation with these signs and also calls for respectful and appreciative interpretation of what they mean for the sake of relation with the ultimate. However, this seems to renew once again the problem of instrumentalism in Plato’s love theory. If the importance of the material realm (and this would include human others, in the case in question, the beloved) consists in its signification of the ultimate beyond itself, is it not legitimate to ask again about the status of human others here? After all, in the account of love that we have here, the beloved is loved not for himself it seems but because he bears the image of divinity. More worrying still, at one point we are told by Socrates that the love of the beloved for his lover is on account of the fact that the latter is ‘a mirror in which he (the beloved) beholds himself’ (255d). Even if we ignore the narcissistic implications of this for the time being, we remember that the philosopher is an alien because he cranes his neck upwards, he is oriented always towards what lies beyond the material. With all of this in mind, how can we be justified in calling eros in any way appreciative of the incarnate other? Such fears turn out to be unfounded, however. For one thing, Socrates makes clear that the tri-partite soul is one riven with internal ambiguities and conflicts such that ‘tracking’ the Good is inherently difficult for mortals. The soul regrows its wings only if it has ‘sought after wisdom unfeignedly, or has conjoined[its] passion for a loved one with that seeking’ (249a). Interpersonal love is no mere vehicle for the pursuit of a relation with the Good, but its very enactment and the site in which the Good is made manifest. The lovers’ mutual affection “arises through the madness inspired by love” (253c) such that in his dealings with his beloved, the lover’s “every act is aimed at bringing the beloved to every whit like unto himself and unto the

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god of their worship” (253c). This last passage is reminiscent of the earlier claim that the beloved sees in the lover a mirror-image of himself but we can see now that this is neither narcissism nor a desire for simple sameness. The reflection that the boy sees is not simply himself but the trace of divinity within himself and the desire to make the beloved ‘like unto himself’ represents the attempt to inculcate a desire for the ultimacy, which his very own particularity betokens. The lovers are at the service of each other because of this shared madness and what is more, the relation emergent from this constitutes the highest type of friendship and the greatest virtue available to mortals. As we saw in the Symposium, erotic desire has a triadic, rather than a dyadic structure. In the Symposium, the emphasis was on the generativity of erotic desire and its realization though self-transcending creation, which itself was understood in terms of the mutual participation of the lovers in the Good. Likewise in the Phaedrus, the soul’s loving attraction to the world or the other, is understood in the context of the third, the Good. The lover and the beloved are held together in an authentically loving relationship by the transcendent Good. Genuine eros is not a dyad. It is not the love of the lover for his beloved or of the lover for the Good, for in these dyadic relations lie the temptation towards selfish possession on the one hand, and callous disregard for individuals, on the other. Instead, individuals are only truly loved when they are loved in and through the Good, while the Good is only truly loved when this love is maintained and enacted in the interpersonal love between individuals. In other words, we come into contact with the Good only through the interpersonal. As we have already suggested, Plato’s doctrine of eros should be understood as a strong condemnation the instrumentalization that would covet the other for one’s own sake. The respectful response to beauty is one that recoils in the face of what is other. This is why the good horse recoils while the bad one seeks to possess (254bc). This is not about flesh and spirit but about the different energies and tendencies within the human soul itself – the one respectful of the divine in the mortal, the other self-centred and possessive. But there is a further point worth making here, which goes to the specific meaning of interpersonal love in the text and of how love for other souls differs from the desire initiated by the world otherwise. The soul is captured in its own incarnate being by aesthetic allure of what is other than it. This is true of eros in general. In the case of the other soul, however, this attraction exerts itself in terms of both desire for the other and the desire of

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the other. There is a reflexivity in desire, in the sense that the lovers desire is initiated as much by what the other desires as by the other herself. Desire for the Good is both the motive and the initiative for the lovers mutual affection. Here Plato is anticipating René Girard’s insistence of the intrinsically mimetic nature of desire, which is to say that we are largely initiated into love by loving what is loved by the other.473 We come to know the world (as valued) by tracing what the other sees and come to know love by witnessing the loved bestowed by the other. But this is fascinating, given that what the other sees is the co-mingling of the particularity of the beloved with the Good as such. In this sense, we come to ‘see’ ourselves as loved in the light of the Good through the loving gaze of the other. This insight, which is the insight of the philosophical soul, is not one that re-directs interpersonal love away from the particular and towards the universal, but is one that truly reveals the unique vale of the incarnate other. Coupled with the fraught nature of insight into the meaning of love, it seems absurd to suggest that interpersonal love be anything other than the fundamental site of the relationship between souls with the Good. As ensouled and incarnate, we are ambivalent and fragile, capable of betraying as of being faithful to the meaning of beauty as communicated in aesthesis. It is only in interpersonal love, however, that the fully reflexive nature of this communication allows for a grasping of the other and oneself as truly valued. In the love of the lovers for each other, each comes to see not only the value bestowed by the Good but their own value as unique, loved and lovable.474 What is finally communicated in eros is that, while the Good is transcendent and therefore irreducible to any being in the world, it is visible in and through all of these. The Good permeates the cosmos and is involved and implicated in everything that exists. The aesthetic impact of sensual realm is the communication of the transcendent, but within this lies the challenge of how this communication will be received. Only the one who allows herself to remember will experience the shock of emotion and the 473 On the notion of mimetic desire, see Girard, R. (1976). Deceit, Desire, and the Novel. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, pp. 1-52. 474 Jean-Luc Marion, with whom we began this work, says that human existence is framed not by any doubt about my existence, pace Descartes, but with the question, “Does anyone out there love me?”. In eros comes “the assurance of me, in my originary passivity; and this assurance [can] only be received from elsewhere than me.” Marion (2007). The Erotic Phenomenon. Op. cit., p. 40.

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shudder of awe in which the lover both sees the individual as individual and gains insight into the whole of Being at the same time. Material beauty is like a “rain pouring in through the eyes”, which causes the re-growing of the soul’s wings, which in turn allows the lovers to glimpse something more profound which their love betokens. What is thereby activated is a love that is not bounded by the finite realm. None of this is new vis-à-vis the Symposium. The Phaedrus simply shows greater concern for the role of subjectivity in eros and the affectivity of the soul in its encounter with beauty. The point is to describe how the attraction of the divine is felt in the human soul and what is most interesting here is that that just as he did in the Symposium, Socrates will distinguish between appropriate and inappropriate ways to respond to this access. Whenever eros does not maintain itself in the triad of lover, world, and transcendent Good, it becomes corrupt and self-serving. Erotic love can fetishize the material at the expense of the spiritual, but can also fetishize the spiritual at the expense of the physical. Both are deviations from the view that views embodiment as the pristine access to a Good that both saturates and transcends at the same time.475

475

Girard, ibid. p. 59.

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(2001). The Symposium. Translated from Greek by Seth Benardete. Chicago: Chicago University Press. (1977). Timaeus and Critias. Translated from Greek by Desmond Lee. London: Penguin Books.

2. Other Primary Works 2.1. Lévinas Lévinas, E. (1998). A New Rationality: On Gabriel Marcel. In Entre Nous: On Thinking-of-the Other. Translated from French by Michael B. Smith and Barbara Harshav. London: The Athlone Press, pp. 61-4. --- (1999). Alterity and Transcendence. Translated from French by Michael B. Smith. London: The Athlone Press. --- (1974). Autrement qu’être ou au-delà de l’essence. Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff. --- (1986). Collected Philosophical Papers. Translated from French by Alphonso Lingis. Dordrecht, Boston and Lancaster: Martinus Nijhoff. --- (1982). De L’évasion. Introduced and annotated by Jacques Rolland. Paris: Librairie Générale Francaise. --- (1998). De L’existence à L’existant. Paris: Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin. --- (1998). Diachrony and Representation. In Entre Nous: On Thinking-of-the Other. Translated from French by Michael B. Smith and Barbara Harshav. London: The Athlone Press, pp. 159-78. --- (1998). Dialogue on Thinking-of-the-Other. In Entre Nous: On Thinking-of-the Other. Translated from French by Michael B. Smith and Barbara Harshav. London: The Athlone Press, pp. 201-06. --- (1990). Difficult Freedom. Translated from French by Seán Hand. London. The Athlone Press. --- (2000). Discovering Existence with Husserl. Translated from French by Richard A. Cohen and Michael B. Smith. Evanston, Ill: Northwestern University Press. --- (1998). Entre Nous: On Thinking-of-the Other. Translated from French by Michael B. Smith and Barbara Harshav. London: The Athlone Press. --- (1985). Ethics and Infinity: Conversations with Philippe Nemo. Translated from French by Richard A. Cohen. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. --- (1989). Ethics and Politics. In The Lévinas Reader. Edited by Seán Hand. Oxford and Cambridge, Ma.: Blackwell Publishers, pp. 289-97. --- (1989). Ethics as First Philosophy. In The Lévinas Reader. Edited by Seán Hand. Oxford and Cambridge, Ma.: Blackwell Publishers, pp. 75-87. --- (2001). Existence & Existents. Translated from French by Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press.

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(1986). God and Philosophy. In Collected Philosophical Papers. Translated from French by Alphonso Lingis. Dordrecht, Boston and Lancaster: Martinus Nijhoff, pp. 153-74. (2002). God, Death, and Time. Translated from French by Bettina Bergo. Stanford: Stanford University Press. (1998). Hermeneutics and the Beyond. In Entre Nous: On Thinking-of-the Other. Michael B. Smith and Barbara Harshav (Translators from French). London: The Athlone Press, pp. 65-76. (1986). Humanism and Anarchy. In Collected Philosophical Papers. Translated from French by Alphonso Lingis. Dordrecht, Boston and Lancaster: Martinus Nijhoff, pp. 127-40. (1998). Is Ontology Fundamental? In Entre Nous: On Thinking-of-the Other. Translated from French by Michael B. Smith and Barbara Harshav. London: The Athlone Press, pp. 1-12. (1986). Language and Proximity. In Collected Philosophical Papers. Translated from French by Alphonso Lingis. Dordrecht, Boston and Lancaster: Martinus Nijhoff, pp. 109-26. (1989). The Lévinas Reader. Edited by Séan Hand. Oxford and Cambridge, Ma.: Blackwell Publishers. (1983). Le Temps et l’autre. Vendôme: Imprimerie des Presses Universitaires de France. (1986). No Identity. In Collected Philosophical Papers. Translated from French by Alphonso Lingis. Dordrecht, Boston and Lancaster: Martinus Nijhoff, pp. 141-52. (1998). Of God Who Comes to Mind. Translated from French by Bettina Bergo. Stanford: Stanford University Press. (2003). On Escape. Translated from French by Bettina Bergo. Stanford: Stanford University Press. (1998). Otherwise than Being: Or Beyond Essence. Translated from French by Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. (1986). Philosophy and the Idea of Infinity. In Collected Philosophical Papers. Translated from French by Alphonso Lingis. Dordrecht, Boston and Lancaster: Martinus Nijhoff, pp. 47-59. (1998). Philosophy, Justice, and Love. In Entre Nous: On Thinking-of-the Other. Translated from French by Michael B. Smith and Barbara Harshav. London: The Athlone Press, pp. 103-22. (1989). Reality and Its Shadow. In The Lévinas Reader. Edited by Séan Hand. Oxford and Cambridge, Ma.: Blackwell Publishers, pp. 129-43. (1987). Time and the Other. Translated from French by Richard A. Cohen. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. (1990). The Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism. Translated from French by Seán Hand. Baltimore: The Johns Hopksins University Press.

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(1998). The Idea of the Infinite in Us. In Entre Nous: On Thinking-of-the Other. Translated from French by Michael B. Smith and Barbara Harshav. London: The Athlone Press, pp. 219-22. (1998). The Other, Utopia, and Justice. In Entre Nous: On Thinking-of-the Other. Translated from French by Michael B. Smith and Barbara Harshav. London: The Athlone Press, pp. 223-34. (1998). The Theory of Intuition in Husserl’s Phenomenology. Translated from French by André Orianne. Evanston, Ill: Northwestern University Press. (1961). Totalité et Infini: Essai sur l’extériorité. Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff. (1969). Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Translated from French by Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. (1998). “Preface to the German Edition” of Totality and Infinity. In Entre Nous: On Thinking-of-the Other. Translated from French by Michael B. Smith and Barbara Harshav. London: The Athlone Press, pp. 197-200. (1986). Transcendence and Evil. In Collected Philosophical Papers. Translated from French by Alphonso Lingis. Dordrecht, Boston and Lancaster: Martinus Nijhoff, pp. 175-86. (1998). Useless Suffering. In Entre Nous: On Thinking-of-the Other. Translated from French by Michael B. Smith and Barbara Harshav. London: The Athlone Press, pp. 91-102.

2.2. Nietzsche Nietzsche, F. (2010). Sämtliche Werke, 15 Bde. Kritische Studienausgabe. Edited by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari Berlin: De Gruyter. --- (1921-25). Gesammelte Werke (23 Bde.). Munich: Musarion Verlag. --- (2002). Beyond Good and Evil: A Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future. Translated from German by Judith Norman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. --- (1997). Daybreak. Translated from German by R.J. Hollingdale. Cambridge; Cambridge University Press. --- (1996). Human, All Too Human. Translated from German by R.J. Hollingdale. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. --- (1995). On the Genealogy of Morality. Translated from German by Carol Diethe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. --- (2005). The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols and Other Writings. Translated from German by Aaron Ridley and Judith Norman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. --- (1968). The Portable Nietzsche. Edited by Walter Kaufmann. New York: Penguin Books. --- (1999). The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings. Translated from German by Ronald Speirs. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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(2001). The Gay Science. Translated from German by Josefine Nauckhoff and Adrian Del Caro. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (1968). The Will to Power. Translated from German by Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale. New York: Vintage Books / Random House. (2006). Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Translated from German by Adrian Del Caro. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (1990). Untimely Meditations. Translated from German by R.J. Hollingdale. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

3. Plato: Secondary Works Allen, R.E. (1966). A Note on the Elenchus of Agathon: Symposium 199c-201c. The Monist, 50, pp. 460-3. Armstrong, A.H. (1960). Platonic Eros and Christina Agape. The Downside Review, 70, pp. 105-21. Benson, H. H. ed. (1992). Essays on the Philosophy of Socrates. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Benardete, S. (2000). The Argument of the Action: Essays on Greek Poetry and Philosophy. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Boardman, J., Griffin, J. and Murray, O. eds. (2001). The Oxford History of Greece and the Hellenistic World. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bolotin, D. (1989). Plato’s Dialogue on Friendship: An Interpretation of the Lysis with a New Translation. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. Cornford, F.M. (1971). The Doctrine of Eros in Plato’s Symposium. In Plato: A Collection of Critical Essays, Volume II. Edited by Gregory Vlastos. New York: Anchor, pp. 119-31. De Rougemont, D. (1972). L’Amour et l’Occident. Paris: Plon. --- (1983). Love in the Western World. Translated from French by Montgomery Belgion. Princeton. Princeton University Press. Derrida, J. (1981). Dissemination. Translated from French by Barbara Johnsen. Chicago: University Chicago Press. Diogenes Laertius. (2000). Lives of Eminent Philosophers, Volume I. Translated from Greek by R. D. Hicks. Loeb Classical Library. London and Cambridge, Ma.: Harvard University Press. --- (2000). Lives of Eminent Philosophers, Volume II. Translated from Greek by R. D. Hicks. Loeb Classical Library. London and Cambridge, Ma.: Harvard University Press. Dostal, R. (1992). Beyond Being: Heidegger’s Plato. In Martin Heidegger: Critical Assessments. Edited by Christopher Macann. London: Routledge. Dover, K. J. (1966). Aristophanes’ Speech in Plato’s Symposium. Journal of Hellenic Studies, 86, pp. 41-50.

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--- (1965). The Date of Plato’s Symposium. Phronesis 10, pp. 2-21. --- (1978). Greek Homosexuality. London: Duckworth. Ferrari, G.R.F. (1987). Listening to the Cicadas: A Study of Plato’s Phaedrus. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Friedländer, P. (1958). Plato: Volume I: An Introduction. Translated from German by Hans Meyerhoff. Princeton: Bollingen Series LIX / Princeton University Press. --- Plato: Volume III: Platonic Writings from the Second and Third Period. Hans Meyerhoff (Translator). Princeton: Bollingen Series LIX / Princeton University Press, 1970. Gadamer, H.-G. (1987). The Relevance of the Beautiful. In The Relevance of the Beautiful and other essays. Translated from German by Nicholas Walker. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 3-53. --- (1986). The Idea of the Good in Platonic-Aristotelian Philosophy. Translated from German by P. Christopher Smith. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. --- (2000). Plato as Portraitist. Continental Philosophy Review, 33, pp. 245-74. Gelven, M. (1973). Eros and Projection: Plato and Heidegger. Southeastern Journal of Philosophy 4, pp. 125-36. Gooch, P. W. (1992). Has Plato Changed Socrates’s Heart in the Phaedrus. In Understanding the Phaedrus: Proceedings of the Second Symposium Platonicum. Edited by Livio Rossetti. Sankt Augustin: Academia Verlag, pp. 309-12. Gosling, J.C.B. (1983). Plato. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Gould, T.. (1963). Platonic Love. Connecticut: Greenwood. Griswold jr., C. L. (1988). Platonic Writings: Platonic Readings. New York and London: Routledge. Heidegger, M. (2003). Plato’s Sophist. Translated from German by Richard Rojcewicz and André Schuwer. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Haden, J. (1983). Friendship in Plato’s Lysis. Review of Metaphysics, 37, pp. 327-56. Hyland, D. A. (1968). Eros, Epithumia and Philia in Plato. Phronesis, 13, pp. 32-47. Irwin, T. (1995). Plato’s Ethics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jaeger, W. (1965). Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture, Volume I: Archaic Greece: The Mind of Athens. Translated from German by Gilbert Highet. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. --- (1986). Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture, Volume II: The Search of the Divine Centre. Translated from German by Gilbert Highet. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. --- (1986). Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture, Volume III: The Conflict of Cultural Ideals in the Age of Plato. Translated from German by Gilbert Highet. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kahn, C. (1996). Plato and the Socratic Dialogue: The Philosophical Use of Literary Form. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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(2002). Response to Christopher Rowe. The Internet Journal of the International Plato Society. August: 1-4. Kraut, R. (1992). The Cambridge Companion to Plato. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Leask, I. (2001). Statuary Presence: Phaedrus 235d-236b. Yearbook of the Irish Philosophical Society. 1, (1) pp. 96-103. Markus, R.A. (1971). The Dialectic of Eros in Plato’s Symposium. In Plato: A Collection of Critical Essays, Volume II. Edited by Gregory Vlastos. New York: Anchor, pp. 132-43. Mattingly, H.B. (1958). The Date of Plato’s Symposium. Phronesis, 3, pp. 31-9. McGuirk, J. N. (2002). A Reading of the Speech of Aristophanes in the Symposium. Maynooth Philosophical Papers. 1, (1), pp. 63-71. --- (2001). Eros in Platonic Friendship and the Lysis Failure. Yearbook of the Irish Philosophical Society. 1, (1), pp. 127-38. --- (2008a). Heidegger’s Transitional Readings of Plato’s Cave Allegory. Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, 38 (2), pp. 167-85. --- (2008c). Phenomenological Reduction, Epochē, and the Speech of Socrates in the Symposium. In Southern Journal of Philosophy, 46 (1), pp. 99-121. Melling, D. (1987). Understanding Plato. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Mitchell, R.L. (1983). The Hymn to Eros: A Reading of Plato’s Symposium. London and Maryland: University Press of America. Nussbaum, M. C. (1994). The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics. Princeton: Princeton University Press. --- (2001a). The Speech of Alcibiades: A Reading of the Symposium. In: The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 165-99. --- (2001b). ‘This story isn’t true’: madness, reason, and recantation in the Phaedrus. In: The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 200-34. Nygren, A. (1982). Agape and Eros. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. O’Brien, M. J. (1984). ‘Becoming Immortal’ in Plato’s Symposium. In Greek Poetry and Philosophy. Edited by D.E. Gerber. California: Scholars Press. Osborne, C. (1994). Eros Unveiled: Plato and the God of Love. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Ostenfeld, E.N. (1992). Self-Motion, Tripartition and Embodiment. In Understanding the Phaedrus: Proceedings of the Second Symposium Platonicum. Edited by Livio Rossetti. Sankt Augustin: Academia Verlag, pp. 324-28. Panagiotou, S. (1975). Lysias and the date of Plato’s Phaedrus. Mnemosyne, 28 (4), pp. 388-98.

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Peperzak, A.T. (1993). Heidegger and Plato’s Idea of the Good. In Reading Heidegger: Commemorations. Edited by John Sallis. Bloomington, In.: Indiana University Press. Piccone, E.H. (1992). Four Features of Dialectic in Plato’s Phaedrus. In Understanding the Phaedrus: Proceedings of the Second Symposium Platonicum. Edited by Livio Rossetti. Sankt Augustin: Academia Verlag, pp. 261-4. Pickstock, C. (2003). After Writing: On the Liturgical Consummation of Philosophy. Massachusetts and Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. Pieper, J. (2000). Enthusiasm & Divine Madness: On the Platonic Dialogue Phaedrus. Translated from German by Richard and Clara Winston. Indiana: St. Augustine’s Press. Price, A.W. (1997). Love and friendship in Plato and Aristotle. Oxford: Clarendon Press. --- (1992). Reasons New Role in the Phaedrus. In Understanding the Phaedrus: Proceedings of the Second Symposium Platonicum. Edited Livio Rossetti. Sankt Augustin: Academia Verlag, pp. 243-5. Reeve, C. D. C. (2004). Plato on Friendship and Eros. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Edited by Edward N. Zalta. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ plato-friendship/ Rojcewicz, R. (1997). Platonic Love: Dasein’s Urge toward Being. Research in Phenomenology, 27, pp. 103-20. Rosen, S. (1987). Plato’s Symposium. Indiana: St. Augustine’s Press. --- (1965). The Role of Eros in Plato’s Republic. Review of Metaphysics, 18, pp. 45275. Rowe, C. (2002). Just How Socratic are Plato’s ‘Socratic’ Dialogues? The Internet Journal of the International Plato Society. August, pp. 1-12. Santas, G. (1992). The Theory of Eros in Socrates’s Second Speech. In Understanding the Phaedrus: Proceedings of the Second Symposium Platonicum. Edited by Livio Rossetti. Sankt Augustin: Academia Verlag, pp. 305-8. Singer, I. (2009). The Nature of Love, vol. 1: Plato to Luther. Cambridge, Ma.: Cambridge University Press. --- (2009). The Nature of Love, vol. 3: The Modern World. Cambridge, Ma.: Cambridge University Press. Strauss, L. (2001). On Plato’s Symposium. Edited by Seth Benardete. Chicago and London: University of Indiana Press. Taylor, A.E. (1978). Plato: The Man and His Work. London: Methuen & Co Ltd.. Taylor, C.C.W. (2000). Socrates: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tejera, V. (1992). The Phaedrus, Part I: A Poetic Drama. In Understanding the Phaedrus: Proceedings of the Second Symposium Platonicum. Edited by Livio Rossetti (Editor). Sankt Augustin: Academia Verlag, pp. 290-5.

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Usacheva, A. (2010). Concerning the date of Plato’s Phaedrus. Hermathena, 189, pp. 53-70. Vlastos, G. (1973). Platonic Studies. Princeton: Princeton University Press. --- (1971). Ed. Plato: A Collection of Critical Essays, Volume II. New York: Anchor. Voegelin, E. (2000). The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, Volume 16: Order and History, Volume III, Plato and Aristotle. Edited by Dante Germino. Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press.

4. Other Secondary Works 4.1. Lévinas Bernasconi, R. (1985). ‘Only the Persecuted…’: Language of the Oppressor, Language of the Oppressed. In Ethics as First Philosophy: The Significance of Emmanuel Lévinas for Philosophy, Literature and Religion. Edited by Adriaan T. Peperzak. New York and London: Routledge, 1985: 77-86. --- (2002). What is the Question to Which ‘Substitution’ is the Answer? In The Cambridge Companion to Lévinas. Edited by Simon Critchley and Robert Bernasconi .Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 234-51. Bernasconi, R. and Critchley, S. eds. (1991). Re-Reading Lévinas. London: The Athlone Press. Bernasconi, R. and Wood, D. eds. (1988). The Provocation of Lévinas: Rethinking the Other. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Bernet, R. (2002). Lévinas’s Critique of Husserl. In The Cambridge Companion to Lévinas. Edited by Simon Critchley and Robert Bernasconi .Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 82-99. Bernstein, R. J. (2001). Evil and the Temptation of Theodicy. Guest lecture. Katholieke Universiteit, Leuven, Belgium. March 2001, (23 p.). --- (2002). Evil and the Temptation of Theodicy. In The Cambridge Companion to Lévinas. Edited by Simon Critchley and Robert Bernasconi. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 252-67. Cederberg, C. (2012). Accusing the Erotic Subject in Lévinas. In Phenomenology of Eros. Edited by Jonna Bornemark and Marcia Sá Cavalcante Schuback. Huddinge: Södertörn Philosophical Studies, pp. 209-24. Chalier, C. (1991). Ethics and the Feminine. In Re-Reading Lévinas. Edited by Robert Bernasconi and Simon Critchley. London: The Athlone Press, pp. 11929. Chanter, T. (1991). Antigone’s Dilemma. In Re-Reading Lévinas. Edited by Robert Bernasconi and Simon Critchley. London: The Athlone Press, pp.: 130-48.

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(1994). Ethics of Eros: Irigaray’s Rewriting of the Philosophers. New York and London: Routledge. Ciaramelli, F.(1985). The Riddle of the Pre-original. In Ethics as First Philosophy: The Significance of Emmanuel Lévinas for Philosophy, Literature and Religion. Edited by Adriaan T. Peperzak. New York and London: Routledge, pp. 87-94. Cohen, R. ed. (1986). Face to Face with Lévinas. Albany: State University of New York Press. Critchley, S. (1991). ‘Bois’ – Derrida’s Final Word on Lévinas, In Re-Reading Lévinas. Edited by Robert Bernasconi and Simon Critchley. London: The Athlone Press, pp. 162-189. --- (2002). Introduction. In The Cambridge Companion to Lévinas. Edited by Simon Critchley and Robert Bernasconi. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 1-32. Critchley, S. and Bernasconi, R. eds. (2002). The Cambridge Companion to Lévinas. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Davies, P. (1985). On Resorting to an Ethical Language. In Ethics as First Philosophy: The Significance of Emmanuel Lévinas for Philosophy, Literature and Religion. Edited by Adriaan T. Peperzak. New York and London: Routledge, pp. 95-106. De Boer, T. (1985). Theology and the Philosophy of Religion According to Lévinas. In Ethics as First Philosophy: The Significance of Emmanuel Lévinas for Philosophy, Literature and Religion. Edited by Adriaan T. Peperzak. New York and London: Routledge, pp. 161-72. --- (1997). The Rationality of Transcendence. Amsterdam: Brill Academic. Derrida, J. (1991). At This Very Moment in This Work Here I Am. In Re-Reading Lévinas. Edited by Robert Bernasconi and Simon Critchley. London: The Athlone Press, pp. 11-48. --- (2001). Violence and Metaphysics. In Writing and Difference. Translated from French by Alan Bass. London and New York: Routledge. Desmond, W. (1994). Philosophies of Religion: Marcel, Jaspers, Lévinas. In Routledge History of Philosophy, Volume VIII: Twentieth-Century Continental Philosophy. Edited by Richard Kearney. London and New York: Routledge, pp. 131-74. Farley, W. (1996). Eros for the Other: Retaining Truth in a Pluralistic World. Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press. Hand, S. (1997). The Other Voice: Ethics and Expression in Emmanuel Lévinas. History of the Human Sciences 10, 3 pp. 56-68. Irigaray, L. (1991). Questions to Emmanuel Lévinas: On the Divinity of Love. In ReReading Lévinas. Edited by Robert Bernasconi and Simon Critchley. London: The Athlone Press, pp. 109-18. Kearney, R. (1984). Dialogues with Contemporary Thinkers. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

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Kearney, R. and Dooley, M. eds. (2002). Questioning Ethics: Contemporary Debates in Philosophy. London and New York: Routledge. Kearney, R. and Semonovitch, K. eds. (2011). Phenomenologies of the Stranger: Between Hostility and Hospitality. New York: Fordham University Press. Kearney, R. and Treanor, B. eds. (2015). Carnal Hermeneutics. New York: Fordham University Press. Kearney, R. and Zimmermann, J. eds. (2016). Reimagining the Sacred. New York: Columbia University Press. Janicaud, D. (2000). The Theological Turn of French Phenomenology. In Phenomenology and the Theological Turn: The French debate. Edited by Dominique Janicaud. New York: Fordham University Press. Léonard, A. (1980). Pensées des Hommes et Foi en Jésus Christ. Paris: Edition Lethielleux. Lingis, A. (1981). Translator’s Introduction. In Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. Lingis, A. (2007).The First person singular. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press. --- (1998). The Imperative. Bloomington, In.: Indiana University Press. Llewelyn, J. (1991). Am I Obsessed by Bobby (Humanism of the Other Animal). In Re-Reading Lévinas. Edited by Robert Bernasconi and Simon Critchley. London: The Athlone Press, pp. 234-46. --- (1996). Emmanuel Lévinas: The Genealogy of Ethics. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. --- “Lévinas and Language” in The Cambridge Companion to Lévinas. Simon Critchley and Robert Bernasconi (Editors). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002: 119-38. McGuirk, J.N. (2011). Responsibility and Crisis: Lévinas and Husserl on what calls for thinking. In Analecta Husserliana 108. Dordrecht: Springer, pp. 193-211. Overgaard, S. (2003). On Lévinas’s Critique of Husserl. In Metaphysics, Facticity, Interpretation: Phenomenology in the Nordic Countries. Edited by Dan Zahavi, Hans Ruin, and Sara Heinämaa. Dordrecht: Springer, pp. 115-38. Peperzak, A. T. ed. (1985). Ethics as First Philosophy: The Significance of Emmanuel Lévinas for Philosophy, Literature and Religion. New York and London: Routledge. --- (1991). Presentation. In Re-Reading Lévinas. Edited by Robert Bernasconi and Simon Critchley. London: The Athlone Press, pp. 51-66. --- (1985). Transcendence. In Ethics as First Philosophy: The Significance of Emmanuel Lévinas for Philosophy, Literature and Religion. Edited by Adriaan T. Peperzak. New York and London: Routledge, pp. 185-92. Sandford, S. (2002). Lévinas, Feminism and the Feminine. In The Cambridge Companion to Lévinas. Edited by Simon Critchley and Robert Bernasconi. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 139-60.

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(2000). The Metaphysics of Love: Gender and Transcendence in Lévinas. London and New Brunswick: The Athlone Press. Spiegelberg, H. ed. (1982). The Phenomenological Movement. Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff. Staehler, T. (2010). Plato and Lévinas: The Ambiguous Out-Side of Ethics. London: Routledge. --- (2008). What is the Question to which Husserl’s fifth Cartesian Mediatation is the Answer? Husserl Studies, 24, pp. 99-118. Tallon, A. (1985). Non-intentional Affectivity, Affective Intentionality, and the Ethical in Lévinas’s Philosophy. In Ethics as First Philosophy: The Significance of Emmanuel Lévinas for Philosophy, Literature and Religion. Edited by Adriaan T. Peperzak. New York and London: Routledge, pp. 107-22. Valevičius, A. (1988). From the Other to the Totally Other: The Religious Philosophy of Emmanuel Lévinas. Bern & New York: Peter Lang. Vetlesen, A.-J. (1995). Relations with Others in Sartre and Lévinas: Assessing Some Implications for an Ethics of Proximity. Constellations: An International Journal of Critical Democratic Theory, 1, (3), pp. 358-82. Visker, R. (2004). Is Ethics Fundamental? Questioning Lévinas on Irresponsibility. In The Inhuman Condition: Looking for Difference after Lévinas and Heidegger. Dordrecht: Springer, pp. 142-86. Weber, E. (1985). The Notion of Persecution in Lévinas’s Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence. In Ethics as First Philosophy: The Significance of Emmanuel Lévinas for Philosophy, Literature and Religion. Edited by Adriaan T. Peperzak. New York and London: Routledge, pp. 69-76. Waldenfels, B. (2002). Lévinas and the Face of the Other. In The Cambridge Companion to Lévinas. Edited by Simon Critchley and Robert Bernasconi. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 63-81. --- (1985). Response and Responsibility in Lévinas. In Ethics as First Philosophy: The Significance of Emmanuel Lévinas for Philosophy, Literature and Religion. Edited by Adriaan T. Peperzak. New York and London: Routledge, pp. 39-52. --- (2011). Phenomenology of the Alien. Translated from German by Alexander Kozin and Tanja Staehler. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press. Wyschogod, E. (1985). The Art in Ethics: Aesthetics, Objectivity, and Alterity in the Philosophy of Emmanuel Lévinas. In Ethics as First Philosophy: The Significance of Emmanuel Lévinas for Philosophy, Literature and Religion. Edited by Adriaan T. Peperzak. New York and London: Routledge, pp. 137-50. --- (2002). Language and Alterity in the Thought of Lévinas. In The Cambridge Companion to Lévinas. Edited by Simon Critchley and Robert Bernasconi. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 188-205.

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4.2. Nietzsche Ansell-Pearson, Keith. “The Significance of Michel Foucault’s Reading of Nietzsche: Power, the Subject, and Political Theory”, in Nietzsche. A Critical Reader. Peter R. Sedgwick (Editor). Oxford and Cambridge (Massachusetts): Blackwell Publishers, 1995: 13-30. Babich, B. E. (2000). Nietzsche and Eros between the devil and God’s deep blue sea: The problem of the artist as actor-Jew-woman. Continental Philosophy Review, 33, pp. 159-188 Benson, B.E. (2007). Pious Nietzsche: Decadence and Dionysian Faith. Bloomington, In.: Indiana University press. --- (2002). Graven Ideologies: Nietzsche, Derrida, and Marion on Modern Idolatry. Downers Grove, Ill.: Intervarsity Press. Bergmann, F. (1990). Nietzsche’s Critique of Morality. In Reading Nietzsche. Edited by Robert C. Solomon and Kathleen M. Higgins. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 29-45. Brodsky, G.M. (1998). Nietzsche’s notion of amor fati. Continental Philosophy Review, 31, pp. 35-57. Conway, D. W. (1995). Returning to Nature: Nietzsche’s Götterdämmerung. In Nietzsche. A Critical Reader. Edited by Peter R. Sedgwick. Oxford and Cambridge, Ma.: Blackwell Publishers, pp. 31-52. Dannhauser, W. J. (1974). Nietzsche’s View of Socrates. New York: Cornell University Press. Danto, A. C. (1990). Some Remarks on The Genealogy of Morals. In Reading Nietzsche. Edited by Robert C. Solomon and Kathleen M. Higgins. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 13-28. Davey, N. (1994). Hermeneutic Passions: Gadamer Versus Nietzsche on the Subjectivity of Interpretation. International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 2 (1) pp. 45-61. Deleuze, G. (1983). Nietzsche & Philosophy. Translated from French by Hugh Tomlinson. New York: Columbia University Press. Derrida, J. (1979). Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles. Translated from French by Barbara Harlow. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. --- (1995). Interpreting Signatures (Nietzsche/Heidegger): Two Questions. In Nietzsche. A Critical Reader. Edited by Peter R. Sedgwick. Oxford and Cambridge, Ma.: Blackwell Publishers, pp. 53-68. Desmond, W. (1997). Rethinking the Origin: Nietzsche and Hegel. In Hegel, History, and Interpretation. Edited by Shaun Gallagher. Albany: State University of New York Press, pp. 71-94. Diprose, R. (1995). Nietzsche, Ethics and Sexual Difference. In Nietzsche. A Critical Reader. Edited by Peter R. Sedgwick. Oxford and Cambridge, Ma.: Blackwell Publishers, pp. 69-83.

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Gilman, S. and Parent, J. eds. (1987). Conversations with Nietzsche. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Heidegger, M. (1991). Nietzsche, Volume I: The Will to Power as Art, and Volume II: The Eternal Recurrence of the Same. Translated from German by David Farrell Krell. San Francisco: Harper San Francisco. Hicks, S. V. and Rosenberg, A. (2003). Nietzsche’s Untimeliness: The “Philosopher of the Future” as the Figure of Disruptive Wisdom. The Journal of Nietzsche Studies, 25, pp. 1-34. Higgins, K. (1990). Reading Zarathustra. In Reading Nietzsche. Edited by Robert C. Solomon and Kathleen M. Higgins. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 132-151. Hollingdale, R.J. (2001). Nietzsche: The Man and His Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. --- (1995). Theories and Innovations in Nietzsche: Logic, Theory of Knowledge and Metaphysics. In Nietzsche. A Critical Reader. Edited by Peter R. Sedgwick. Oxford and Cambridge, Ma.: Blackwell Publishers, pp. 111-22. Jaspers, K. (1997). Nietzsche: An Introduction to the Understanding of his Philosophical Activity. Translated by Charles F. Wallraff and Frederick J. Schmitz. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Kaufmann, W. (1968). Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist. Third edition, revised and enlarged. New York: Vintage Books / Random House. --- (1995). Nietzsche’s Attitude to Socrates”, In Nietzsche. A Critical Reader. Edited by Peter R. Sedgwick. Oxford and Cambridge, Ma.: Blackwell Publishers, pp. 123-43. Klossowski, P. (2005). Nietzche and the Vicious Circle. Translated from French by Daniel W. Smith. London: Continuum Press. Léonard, A. (1991). Le Fondement de la Morale. Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf. MacBride, J. (1984). Nietzsche’s Existential Ethic. Philosophical Studies, 30, pp. 7383. McGuirk, J.N. (2008b). The Sustainability of Nietzsche’s Will to Affirmation. American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, 82 (2), pp. 237-63. Magnus, B. (1990). The Deification of the Commonplace: Twilight of the Idols. In Reading Nietzsche. Edited by Robert C. Solomon and Kathleen M. Higgins. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 152-81. --- (1990). The Use and Abuse of The Will To Power. In Reading Nietzsche. Edited by Robert C. Solomon and Kathleen M. Higgins. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 218-36. Nehemas, A. (1990). Who Are “The Philosophers of the Future”?: A Reading of Beyond Good and Evil. In Reading Nietzsche. Edited by Robert C. Solomon and Kathleen M. Higgins. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 4667.

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Norman, J. (2000). Nietzsche contra contra: Difference and Opposition. Continental Philosophy Review, 33, pp. 189-206. Owen, D. (2003). The Contest of Enlightenment: An Essay on Critique and Genealogy. The Journal of Nietzsche Studies, 25, pp. 35-57. Reckermann, A. (2003). Nietzsche’s Philosophy as Dionysian Justification of Existence. Thursday lecture. National University of Ireland Maynooth, Ireland. April 2003 (11 p.). Safranski, R. (2003). Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography. Translated from French by Shelley Frisch. New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company. Salomé, L. (2001). Nietzsche. Translated from German by Siegfried Mandel. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Schacht, R. (1995). Zarathustra/Zarathustra as Educator. In Nietzsche. A Critical Reader. Edited by Peter R. Sedgwick. Oxford and Cambridge, Ma.: Blackwell Publishers, pp. 222-49. --- (1985). Nietzsche. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. --- (1990). Nietzsche’s Gay Science, Or, How to Naturalize Cheerfully. In Reading Nietzsche. Edited by Robert C. Solomon and Kathleen M. Higgins. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 68-86. Schrift, A. D. (1995). Putting Nietzsche to Work: The Case of Gilles Deleuze. In Nietzsche. A Critical Reader. Edited by Peter R. Sedgwick. Oxford and Cambridge, Ma.: Blackwell Publishers, pp. 250-75. Scott, J. (1998). Nietzsche and decadence: The revaluation of morality. Continental Philosophy Review, 31, pp. 59-78. Sedgwick, P. R. ed. (1995). Nietzsche. A Critical Reader. Oxford and Cambridge, Ma.: Blackwell Publishers. --- (1995). Nietzsche’s Institutions. In Nietzsche. A Critical Reader. Edited by Peter R. Sedgwick. Oxford and Cambridge, Ma.: Blackwell Publishers, pp. 1-12. Siemens, H.W. (2001). Nietzsche’s agon with ressentiment: towards a therapeutic reading of critical transvaluation. Continental Philosophy Review, 34, pp. 69-93. Soll, I. (1990). Pessimism and the Tragic View of Life: Reconsiderations of Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy. In Reading Nietzsche. Edited by Robert C. Solomon and Kathleen M. Higgins. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 104-131. Solomon, R. C. and Higgins, M. eds. (1990). Reading Nietzsche. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tejera, V. (1987). Nietzsche and Greek Thought. Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers. Winfree, J.K. (2003). Before the Subject: Rereading The Birth of Tragedy. In The Journal of Nietzsche Studies, 25, pp. 58-77. Young, J. (2006). Nietzsche’s Philosophy of Religion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Zupančič, A. (2003). The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche’s Philosophy of the Two. Cambridge, Ma. and London: The MIT Press.

5. General bibliography Adams, D. (1992). The Lysis Puzzles. History of Philosophy Quarterly, 9, (1), pp. 317. Aeschylus (1961). Prometheus Bound and Other Plays. Translated from Greek by Philip Vellacott. London: Penguin Books. Aquinas, St. Thomas (1993). Selected Philosophical Writings. Translated from Latin by Timothy McDermott. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Aristophanes (1973). Lysistrata / The Acharnians, The Clouds. New York: Penguin Books. Aristotle (1985). Nicomachean Ethics. Translated from Greek by Terence Irwin. Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company. --- (1998). The Metaphysics. Translated from Greek by Hugh Tancred-Lawson. New York: Penguin Books. Augustine (1998). Confessions. Translated from Latin by Henry Chadwick. Oxford: Oxford World Classics. Badhwar, A. (1993). Friendship: A Philosophical Reader. Cornell: Cornell University Press. Badiou, A. (2002). Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil. Translated from French by Peter Hallward. London and New York: Verso. Barnes, J. ed. (1987). Early Greek Philosophy. New York: Penguin Books. Bataille, G. (1986). Erotism: Death & Sensuality. Translated from French by Mary Dalewood. San Francisco: City Light Books. --- (1988). The Tears of Eros. Translated from French by Peter Connor. San Francisco: City Light Books. --- (1998). Essential Writings. Edited by M. Richardson. London: Sage. Biemann, A. D. ed. (2002). The Martin Buber Reader: Essential Writings. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Bornemark, J. and Sa Cavalcante Schuback eds. (2012). Phenomenology of Eros. Huddinge: Södertörn Philosophical Studies. Bornemark, J. and Wallenstein, S.-O. eds. (2015). Madness, Religion, and the Limits of Reason. Huddinge: Södertörn Philosophical Studies. Bowie, A.M. (1993). Aristophanes: Myth, Ritual and Comedy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Buber, M. (2002). Between Man and Man. Translated from German by Ronald Gregor-Smith. London and New York: Routledge. --- (2002). The Election of Israel: A Biblical Enquiry. In The Martin Buber Reader. Edited by Asher D. Biemann. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 23-33.

320

Camus, A. (1983). The Outsider. Translated from French by Joseph Lardo. New York: Penguin Books. Crowell, S. (2001). Heidegger’s Phenomenology and the Question of Being. In Husserl, Heidegger, and the Space of Meaning. Evanston, Ill: Northwestern University Press. Cunningham, C. (2002). The Genealogy of Nihilism: Philosophies of Nothing and the Difference of Theology. London: Routledge. De Beauvoir, S. (1989). The Second Sex. Translated from French by H.M. Parshly. New York: Vintage. Deleuze, G. (1999). Foucault. Translated from French by Seán Hand. London and New York: Continuum. Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1994). What is Philosophy? Translated from French by Graham Burchell and High Tomlinson. London and New York: Verso. Derrida, J. (1997). Deconstruction in a Nutshell: a Conversation with Jacques Derrida. Edited by John D. Caputo. New York: Fordham University Press. --- (1998). Of Grammatology. Translated from French by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins Press. --- (1981). Margins of Philosophy. Translated from French by Alan Bass. London, New York, Toronto, Sydney, Tokyo and Singapore: Prentice Hall. Descartes, R. (1997). Discourse on Method and the Meditations. London: Wordsworth. Desmond, W. (2003). Art, Origin, Otherness: Between Philosophy and Art. New York: SUNY Press. --- (1995). Being and the Between. New York: State University of New York Press. --- (2001). Ethics and the Between. New York: State University of New York Press. Dostoevsky, F. (1992). The Brothers Karamazov. Translated from Russian by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. London: Vintage Books. Ellis, W. (1984). Alcibiades. London: Routledge. Foucault, M. (1980). Power / Knowledge. Translated from French by Colin Gordon. Essex: Pearson Education, Ltd., 1980. Gadamer, H.-G. (1980). Dialogue and Dialectic: Eight Hermeneutical Studies on Plato. Translated from German by P. Christopher Smith. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. --- (1977). Philosophical Hermeneutics. Translated from German by David E. Linge. Berkeley, Los Angles and London: University of California Press. --- (2004). Truth and Method. Translated from German by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall. London and New York: Continuum Press. Gardiner, P. (1963). Schopenhauer. New York: Penguin Books. Girard, R. (1976). Deceit, Desire, and the Novel. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press. --- (2016). Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World. Translated from French by Stephen Bann and Michael Meteer. London: Bloomsbury.

321

---

(2016). Violence and the Sacred. Translated from French by Patrick Gregory. London: Bloomsbury. Habermas, J. (1998). The Inclusion of the Other: Studies in Political Theory. Edited by Ciaran Cronin and Pablo De Greiff. Boston: The MIT Press. Hegel, G.W.F., (1991). Elements of the Philosophy of Right. Translated from German by H.B. Nisbet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. --- (1975). Logic. Translated from German by William Wallace. Oxford: Clarendon Press. --- (1977). Phenomenology of Spirit. Translated from German by A.V. Miller. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Heidegger, M. (1962). Being and Time. Translated from German by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. --- (2000). Introduction to Metaphysics. Translated from German by Gregory Fried and Richard Polt. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Henry, M. (2008). Material Phenomenology. Translated from French by Scott Davidson. New York. Fordham. Hesiod and Theognis (1973). Hesiod: Theogony. Works and Days and Theognis: Elegies. New York: Penguin Books. Hobbes, T.(1985). Leviathan. Edited by C.B. MacPherson. New York: Penguin Books/Classics. Homer (1991). The Illiad. Translated from Greek by Robert Fagles. New York: Penguin Books/Classics. --- (1996). The Odessey. Translated from Greek by Robert Fritzgerald. London: Harvill Press. Hume, D. (1977). Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Indiana: Hackett. --- (2000). A Treatise on Human Nature. Edited by David Fate Norton and Mary J. Norton. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Husserl, E. (1983). Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, first book. Translated from German by Fred Kersten. Dordrecht: Kluwer. --- (1959). Erste Philosophie II (Hua 8). Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff. --- (1973). Cartesian Meditations. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Hutchins, R.M. ed. (1952). Encyclopædia Britannica: Great Books of the Western World Vol. V.: Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes. Translated from Greek by Benjamin B. Rogers. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Irigaray, L. (2002). The Way of Love. Translated from French by Heidi Bostic and Stephen Pluhácek. London and New York: Continuum. Kant, I. (1993). Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals. Translated from German by James W. Ellington. Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc. Kaufmann, W. (1976). Existentialism, Religion, and Death. New York and Scarborough, Ontario: Meridian Books.

322

Kelly, T. A.F. and Rosemann, W. (2004). Amor amicitiae: On the Love that is Friendship: Essays in Medieval Thought and Beyond in Honour of the Rev. Professor James McEvoy. Leuven, Paris and Dudley: Peeters. Kierkegaard, S. (1987). Either / Or: A Fragment of Life. Translated from Danish by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press. --- (1983). Fear and Trembling. Translated from Danish by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Lacan, J. (2001). Écrits: A Selections. Translated from French by Alan Sheridan. London and New York: Routledge. --- (2002). The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VIII: Transference. Translated from French by Cormac Gallagher. London: Karnac Books. Lewis, C.S. (1998). The Four Loves. London: Fount Paperbacks/Harper Collins Publishers. --- (2009). The Problem of Pain. New York. Harper Collins. Loughlin, G. (1999). Erotics: God’s Sex. In Radical Orthodoxy. Edited by John Milbank, Catherine Pickstock and Graeme Ward. London: Routledge. Lyotard, J.-F. (1984). The Postmodern Condition. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Lyotard, J.-F. and Thébaud, J.-L. (1985). Just Gaming. Translated from French by Wlad Godzich. Manchester; Manchester University Press. McEvoy, J. (1996). Aristotelian Friendship in the Light of Greek Proverbial Wisdom. Aristotelica Secunda. Liège pp. 167-79. McGuirk, J. (2015). Heidegger’s Reading of Aristotle’s Ethics: re-appropriations, transformations and the spectre of Kierkegaard. In Martin Heidegger’s Philosophy and Present Day Sociocultural Trends. Edited by V.M. Voronov. Murmansk: University of Murmansk Press, pp. 78-96. MacIntyre, A. (1985). After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (Second edition). London: Duckworth. Marion, J.-L. (2002). Being Given: Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness. Translated from French by Jeffrey L. Kosky. Stanford: Stanford University Press. --- (2007). The Erotic Phenomenon. Translated from French by Stephen E. Lewis. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Marrou, H.I. (1956). A History of Education in Antiquity. Translated from French by George Lamb. London: Sheed and Ward. Merleau-Ponty, M. (2012). Phenomenology of Perception. Translated from French by Donald Landes. London and New York: Routledge. --- (1968). The Intertwining – the Chiasm. In The Visible and the Invisible. Translated from French by Alphonso Lingis. Evanston, Ill. Northwestern University Press, pp. 130-57. Mooney, B. T. (1990). Plato’s Theory of Love in the Lysis: A Defence. Irish Philosophical Journal, 7 (1), pp. 131-59.

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Moran, D. (2001). Introduction to Phenomenology. London and New York: Routledge. Murdoch, I. (2003). Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals. London: Vintage/Random House. --- (2001). The Sovereignty of the Good. London and New York: Routledge Classics. Patočka, J. (2002). Plato and Europe. Translated from Czech by Peter Lom. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Peterson, J.B. (1999). Maps of Meaning. London: Routledge. Pieper, J. (1999). In Tune With the World: A Theory of Festivity. Translated from German by Clara and Richard Winston. Indiana: St. Augustine’s Press. Plutarch (1951). Selected Lives and Essays. Translated from Greek by Louise Ropes Loomis. New York: Walter J. Black Inc. --- (1973). The Age of Alexander. New York: Penguin Books. Ricoeur, P. (1994). Oneself as Another. Translated from French by Kathleen Blamey. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. --- (2008). The Hermeneutical Function of Distanciation. In: From Text to Action: Essays in Hermeneutics II. Translated from French by John B. Thompson. London: Continuum. --- (1977). Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation. Translated from French by Denis Savage. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Rosen, S. (2002). The Ancients and the Moderns: Rethinking Modernity. South Bend, Indiana: St. Augustine Press. --- (1993). The Question of Being: A Reversal of Heidegger. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Rosenzweig, F. (2002). The Star of Redemption. Translated from German by William W. Hallo. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. Sartre, J.-P. (1984). Being and Nothingness. Translated from French by Hazel Barnes. New York: Washington Square Press. Scheler, M. (1992). Love and Knowledge. In Feeling, Valuing, and Knowing. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Schopenhauer, A. (1969). The World as Will and Representation, Volume I. Translated from German by E.F.J. Payne. New York: Dover Publishers, Inc. --- (1958). The World as Will and Representation, Volume II. Translated from German by E.F.J. Payne. New York: Dover Publishers, Inc. Sedley, D. (1989). Is the Lysis a Dialogue of Definition? Phronesis, 34, (1), pp. 107-8. Shestov, L. (1968). Athens and Jerusalem. Translated from Russian by Bernard Martin. New York: Clarion Book/Simon and Schuster. Silk, M.S. (2000). Aristophanes and the Definition of Comedy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Soble, A. (1989). Eros, Agape, and Philia: Readings in the Philosophy of Love. St. Paul: Paragon House.

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Sokolowski, R. (2008). Two Ways of Saying “I”. in Phenomenology of the Human Person. Cambrdge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 7-21. --- (2000). Introduction to Phenomenology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Spinoza, B. (1992). Ethics: Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect and Selected Letters. Translated from Latin by Samuel Shirley. Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company. Stark, R. (2003). For the Glory of God: How Monotheism led to Reformations, Science, Witch-hunts, and the end of Slavery. Princeton & Oxford: Princeton University Press. Stern-Gillet, S. (1995). Aristotle’s Philosophy of Friendship. Albany: State University of New York Press. --- (1999). Epicurus and Friendship. Dialogue, 28, pp. 275-88. Whitehead, A.N. (1978). Process and Reality. New York: The Free Press. Wyschogrod, E. and Gerald P. McKenny, G. (2003). The Ethical. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. Zuchert, C.H. (1996). Postmodern Platos: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Gadamer, Strauss, Derrida. Chicago; Chicago University Press. Zahavi, D. (1999). “I”. In Self-Awareness and Alterity. Evanston Ill: Northwestern University Press, pp. 3-13.

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LIBRI NIGRI DENKEN ÜBER GRENZEN

Herausgegeben von Hans Rainer Sepp Die libri nigri treffen sich bevorzugt an Orten, an denen die Grenzen von Wirklichkeitsbereichen, Standpunkten, Fachrichtungen sowie Kultur- und Wissenstraditionen in den Blick geraten und ihre Voraussetzungen verhandelbar werden. Begründungsabsichten nachzuspüren, gilt hier mehr, als Begründungen zu suchen, das wagende Experiment mehr als die gültige Schablone, die störende Bewegung mehr als der Drang nach Absicherung. Da die Orte für entscheidende Bewegungen meist Ränder und nicht Zentren sind und da Grenzen nicht einfach nur begrenzen, sondern vor allem Potentiale des Anderen und Fremden bergen, wird sich die Reihe auch dem Terrain des Utopischen nicht verweigern.

1

Hans Rainer Sepp Über die Grenze Prolegomena zu einer Philosophie des Transkulturellen broschiert ISBN 978-3-88309-792-3 gebunden ISBN 978-3-88309-793-0

2

Yoshiko Oshima Zen – anders denken? Zugleich ein Versuch über Zen und Heidegger 2. Aufl. broschiert ISBN 978-3-88309-846-3 gebunden ISBN 978-3-88309-847-0

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Max Lorenzen Philosophie der Nachmoderne Die Transformation der Kultur – Virtualität und Globalisierung Herausgegeben von Cathrin Nielsen broschiert ISBN 978-3-88309-668-8 gebunden ISBN 978-3-88309-668-1

4

Hisaki Hashi und Friedrich G. Wallner (Hg.) Globalisierung des Denkens in Ost und West Resultate des Österreichisch-Japanischen Dialogs broschiert ISBN 978-3-88309-555-4 gebunden ISBN 978-3-88309-560-8

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Aleš Novák Heideggers Bestimmung des Bösen broschiert ISBN 978-3-88309-650-6 gebunden ISBN 978-3-88309-651-3

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Paul Janssen Vom zersprungenen Weltwerden broschiert ISBN 978-3-88309-685-8 gebunden ISBN 978-3-88309-686-5

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Constantin Noica De dignitate Europae Übersetzt von Georg Scherg Herausgegeben von Mădălina Diaconu broschiert ISBN 978-3-88309-708-4 gebunden ISBN 978-3-88309-709-1

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Dean Komel Den Nihilismus verwinden Ein slowenisches Postscript zum 20. Jahrhundert broschiert ISBN 978-3-88309-712-1 gebunden ISBN 978-3-88309-713-8

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Tatiana Shchyttsova (Hg.) In statu nascendi Geborensein und intergenerative Dimension des menschlichen Miteinanderseins broschiert ISBN 978-3-88309-716-9 gebunden ISBN 978-3-88309-688-9

14

Chung-Chi Yu and Kwok-ying Lau (eds.) Phenomenology and Human Experience broschiert ISBN 978-3-88309-722-0 gebunden ISBN 978-3-88309-723-7

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Hiroo Nakamura Für den Frieden broschiert ISBN 978-3-88309-731-2 gebunden ISBN 978-3-88309-732-9

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Günter Fröhlich Anthropologische Wege Ulmer Stadthausvorträge broschiert ISBN 978-3-88309-733-6 gebunden ISBN 978-3-88309-734-3

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Hans-Dieter Bahr Die Anwesenheit des Gastes Entwurf einer Xenosophie broschiert ISBN 978-3-88309-761-9 gebunden ISBN 978-3-88309-762-6

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Massimo Mezzanzanica Von Dilthey zu Levinas Wege im Zwischenbereich von Lebensphilosophie, Neukantianismus und Phänomenologie broschiert ISBN 978-3-88309-750-3 gebunden ISBN 978-3-88309-751-0

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Klaus Kanzog Mit Auge und Ohr Studien zur komplementären Wahrnehmung broschiert ISBN 978-3-88309-784-8 gebunden ISBN 978-3-88309-785-5

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Claus C. Schnorrenberger Chinesische Medizin – Placebo, Wissenschaft oder Wirklichkeit? broschiert ISBN 978-3-88309-776-3 gebunden ISBN 978-3-88309-777-0

23

Detlef Thiel Maßnahmen des Erscheinens Friedlaender/Mynona im Gespräch mit Schelling, Husserl, Benjamin und Derrida broschiert ISBN 978-3-88309-782-4 gebunden ISBN 978-3-88309-783-1

24

Leonidas Donskis Fifty Letters from the Troubled Modern World A Philosophical-Political Diary 2009–2012 broschiert ISBN 978-3-88309-799-2 gebunden ISBN 978-3-88309-800-5

25

Hartmut Buchner Heidegger und Japan – Japan und Heidegger Vorläufiges zum west-östlichen Gespräch broschiert ISBN 978-3-88309-836-4 gebunden ISBN 978-3-88309-837-1

26

Kateřina Šolcová Comenius im Blick Der Briefwechsel zwischen Milada Blekastad und Dmitrij Tschižewskij Deutsch-Tschechische Ausgabe broschiert ISBN 978-3-88309-843-2 gebunden ISBN 978-3-88309-844-9

27

Karin Knobel Poetik des Staubes bei Goethe und Hafis broschiert ISBN 978-3-88309-838-8 gebunden ISBN 978-3-88309-839-5

28

Ryôsuke Ohashi Schnittpunkte Essays zum ost-westlichen-Gespräch Erster Band: Dimensionen des Ästhetischen broschiert ISBN 978-3-88309-859-3 gebunden ISBN 978-3-88309-860-9

29

Ryôsuke Ohashi Schnittpunkte Essays zum ost-westlichen-Gespräch Zweiter Band: Deutsch-Japanische Denkwege broschiert ISBN 978-3-88309-885-2 gebunden ISBN 978-3-88309-886-9

30

Aleš Novák (Hg.) Grenzen der Transzendenz Aus dem Tschechischen übersetzt von Jana Krötzsch broschiert ISBN 978-3-88309-854-8 gebunden ISBN 978-3-88309-855-5

31

Boško Tomašević Hervorgang des Seins Das ontologische Geschehen des Dichtens broschiert ISBN 978-3-88309-952-1 gebunden ISBN 978-3-88309-953-8

32

Gerard Visser Nichts ist geschenkt Ein philosophischer Essay über die Seele Aus dem Niederländischen übersetzt von Anna Sikora broschiert ISBN 978-3-88309-871-5 gebunden ISBN 978-3-88309-872-2

33

Marcin Rebes Der Streit um die transzendentale Wahrheit Heidegger und Levinas broschiert ISBN 978-3-88309-942-2 gebunden ISBN 978-3-88309-943-9

34

Jürgen Trinks Überleben des Phänomens im Symbolischen Studien zur sprachphänomenologischen Kulturwissenschaft broschiert ISBN 978-3-88309-875-3 gebunden ISBN 978-3-88309-876-0

35

Martin Cajthaml Europe and the Care of the Soul Jan Patočka’s Conception of the Spiritual Foundations of Europe With a Preface by Peter McCormick broschiert ISBN 978-3-88309-887-6 gebunden ISBN 978-3-88309-888-3

36

Leonidas Donskis Das Ende von Ideologie und Utopie? Moralität und Kulturkritik im zwanzigsten Jahrhundert Aus dem Englischen übersetzt von Cathrin Nielsen broschiert ISBN 978-3-88309-883-8 gebunden ISBN 978-3-88309-884-5

37

Dean Komel Kontemplationen Entwürfe zur phänomenologischen Hermeneutik broschiert ISBN 978-3-88309-903-3 gebunden ISBN 978-3-88309-904-0

38

Armin Wildermuth Findlinge Gefundenes und Erfundenes broschiert ISBN 978-3-88309-944-6 gebunden ISBN 978-3-88309-945-3

39

Hisaki Hashi (Hg.) Denkdisziplinen von Ost und West Interdisziplinäre Philosophie in einer globalen Welt broschiert ISBN 978-3-95948-047-5 gebunden ISBN 978-3-95948-048-2

40

Markus Ophälders Konstruktion von Erfahrung Versuch über Walter Benjamin broschiert ISBN 978-3-95948-083-3 gebunden ISBN 978-3-95948-084-0

41

Ivan Chvatík and Lubica Ucník (eds.) Asubjective Phenomenology Jan Patočka’s Project in the Broader Context of his Work broschiert ISBN 978-3-88309-993-4 gebunden ISBN 978-3-88309-994-1

42

Terri Jane Hennings Writing Against Aesthetic Ideology Tom Sharpe’s The Great Pursuit and Paul Auster’s City of Glass broschiert ISBN 978-3-95948-180-9 gebunden ISBN 978-3-95948-181-6

43

Irina Hron (Hg.) Einheitsdenken Figuren von Ganzheit, Präsenz und Transzendenz nach der Postmoderne broschiert ISBN 978-3-88309-995-8 gebunden ISBN 978-3-88309-996-5

44

Nicole Thiemer Zwischen Hermes und Hestia Hermeneutische Lektüren zu Heidegger und Derrida broschiert ISBN 978-3-88309-946-0 gebunden ISBN 978-3-88309-947-7

45

Sumalee Mahanarongchai Health and Disease in Buddhist Minds broschiert ISBN 978-3-88309-950-4 gebunden ISBN 978-3-88309-951-4

46

Fengli Lan and Friedrich G. Wallner (eds.) The Concepts of Health and Disease From the Viewpoint of four Cultures broschiert ISBN 978-3-88309-948-4 gebunden ISBN 978-3-88309-949-1

47

Fengli Lan Metaphor The Weaver of Chinese Medicine With an Introduction by Friedrich Wallner broschiert ISBN 978-3-95948-020-8 gebunden ISBN 978-3-95948-039-0

48

Kurt Greiner und Martin J. Jandl (Hg.) Bizzarosophie Radikalkreatives Forschen im Dienste der akademischen Psychotherapie broschiert ISBN 978-3-95948-014-7 gebunden ISBN 978-3-95948-032-1

49

Martin Nitsche (ed.) Image in Space Contributions to a Topology of Images broschiert ISBN 978-3-88309-985-9 gebunden ISBN 978-3-88309-986-6

50

Friedrich G. Wallner and Gerhard Klünger (eds.) Buddhism – Science and Medicine Interpretations, Applications, and Misuse broschiert ISBN 978-3-95948-052-9 gebunden ISBN 978-3-95948-053-6

51

Severin Müller Verwandelte Ferne Phänomenologische Analysen zu realen und imaginären Mobilitäten broschiert ISBN 978-3-95948-089-5 gebunden ISBN 978-3-95948-090-1

52

Severin Müller Transformationen Studien zu Zeit, Bewegung und Imagination

53

Friedrich G. Wallner and Gerhard Klünger (eds.) Constructive Realism Philosophy, Science, and Medicine broschiert ISBN 978-3-95948-102-1 gebunden ISBN 978-3-88309-829-6

54

Anna Maria Martini Phänomenologie der Zweigeschlechtlichkeit Kenotische und transzendente Momente und ihre anthropologische Bedeutung broschiert ISBN 978-3-95948-125-0 gebunden ISBN 978-3-95948-126-7

55

Petr Kouba Margins of Phenomenology broschiert ISBN 978-3-95948-144-1 gebunden ISBN 978-3-95948-145-9

56

Klaus Kanzog Militärische Leitbilder in Spielfilmen der Bundesrepublik der 50er Jahre Faktizität, Kunstfreiheit, Rhetorik broschiert ISBN 978-3-95948-173-1 gebunden ISBN 978-3-95948-174-8

57

Dragan Jakovljević Erkenntnisgestalten und Handlungsanweisungen Abhandlungen zur Erkenntnislehre und praktischen Philosophie Mit einem Nachwort von Dariusz Aleksandrowicz broschiert ISBN 978-3-95948-202-8 gebunden ISBN 978-3-95948-203-5

58

Fengli Lan, Friedrich G. Wallner, Gerhard Klünger (eds.) Lifestyle and Health broschiert ISBN 978-3-95948-235-6 gebunden ISBN 978-3-95948-236-3

59

Hans-Christian Günther Nachgehakt (Un)zeitgemäße Betrachtungen zu Religion, Ethik und Politik broschiert ISBN 978-3-95948-287-5 gebunden ISBN 978-3-95948-288-2

60

Ľubica Učník and Anita Williams (eds.) Phenomenology and the Problem of Meaning in Human Life and History

61

James McGuirk Eros, Otherness, Tyranny The Indictment and Defence of the Philosophical Life in Plato, Nietzsche, and Lévinas broschiert ISBN 978-3-95948-295-0 gebunden ISBN 978-3-95948-296-7