Derrida vs Plato in a Socratic Smack-down: The Symposium

or Why you should never discuss critical theory at a dinner party

The Symposium is one of Plato's spiciest Dialogues. It is set in the form of a drinking party to celebrate the recent success of Agathon, a tragic poet (Plato, 385 B.C.).

Present at the party are seven figures, some of them real, some of them fictional. After dinner, one of them proposes that they take turns singing the praises of Eros in as eloquent a manner as they can manage. Here, for your pleasure, is the cast of characters.

• Phaedrus - a friend of Socrates
• Pausanius - a legal expert
• Eryximachus - a physician
• Aristophanes - a comic poet & dramatist
• Agathon - a tragic poet & dramatist
• Socrates - Philosopher, teacher of Plato
• Alcibiades - A military general, and all-round "rock-star and bad boy of Athens" (Hobbs, 2007).

Phaedrus begins: he praises Eros by recounting the influence that Eros wields over lovers. Egging them on to acts of heroism and self-sacrifice. No one, he says, wants to act shamefully in the eyes of his lover and, therefore, Eros' influence makes men behave virtuously.

Pausanius speaks next. He reminds the party that there are two kinds of love: the vulgar kind and the heavenly kind. The goodness and beauty of love is not in love itself but in how it is pursued.

Eryximachus, the doctor relates the origin myth of lovers. The Olympians created men, women, and hermaphrodites who were something like Siamese twins: four arms, four legs, two heads, two sets of genitals, etc. These hermaphrodites were so strong and independent that the Gods themselves feared them. So Zeus cut them in half. Lovers, says Eryximachus, are torn souls yearning to rejoin their other halves. Once they find each other, they become whole.

Aristophanes pleads hiccups, so Agathon takes the floor. He speaks of the perfection of love:

"He brings peace among men, calm upon the sea, repose and sleep in sadness. He frees us from ill-will, and fills us with kindliness, brings all gentleness and expels all ungentleness, whom every man should follow with sweet hymns in his praise, taking his part in that song of beauty which Love sings, healing the troubles of all minds of gods and men."

When Agathon finishes, Socrates takes the floor, chiding them all for singing the praises of Eros without doing him the honour of being truthful.

It is here, in Socrates' account of love that we find the seeds of Derridean theory. He questions Agathon, and in doing so shows us the paradox of the concept of Erotic love:

"And the admission has been already made that Love is of something which a man wants and has not?

True, he said.

Then Love wants and has not beauty?

Certainly, he replied.

And would you call that beautiful which wants and does not possess beauty?

Certainly not.

Then would you still say that love is beautiful?"

Here, in the space between love and what love wants, we find a wonderful illustration of the Derridean concept of differánce. The gaping hole between the shifting, impermanent language we must use and the meaning that lies beneath it (Derrida, 1982).

Socrates goes on to tell the story of his lessons in love from Diotima, the oracle. He admits to having felt the same way as Agathon about love until Diotima confronts him with the logic that, at the very core of the nature of love, is lack. Vulgar or heavenly, love is desire for something.

Diotima challenges Socrates to admit that if love involves lack, then Eros is not perfect - not a god - neither good nor beautiful. Socrates accepts this, venturing that, perhaps, Eros is bad and ugly.

Note the binary oppositions flying around: here get to watch Diotima as the first woman in history to perform a Derridean deconstruction of the text of erotic love.

She tells Socrates that Eros is neither good and beautiful, nor bad and ugly. She chides him for the way he privileges the binaries of "good" and "beautiful" (Hedges, 1998).

Eros, she tells him, is not a god, but rather, a spirit - a conduit between humans and the gods. She says of Eros, rather semiotically, that "Plenty was his father, and Poverty his mother". So he shows traits of both parents.

Diotima goes on to get Socrates to admit that love longs for beauty - perhaps the body of a beautiful boy - but that, as love grows up, it begins to see that beauty's not in one body alone, but in all bodies. It evolves, beyond wanting to contemplate beauty, to create it so as to ensure that it is ever-present.

Here, says, Diotima is when love grows up; in the pursuit of immortality. At it's most basic level, is the urge to reproduce - achieving immortality through the physical organism. Art and science and all creative endeavours are by-products of the maturation of love; a leap towards immortality through great works that live beyond the creators' lifespan.

But the purest and most immortal of all loves, says Diotima, is the love of beauty itself, not the shadows of it that populate this mortal world.

Here again is the echo of Derrida's differance. For Beauty, says Diotima, is perfect and cannot lack and, therefore, cannot return the lover's love (Derrida, 1982).

Ultimate love is forever unrequited.

After this wonderful investigation of the essence of erotic love, Plato, in startlingly post-modern style, pulls us down to earth with the introduction of the drunken, surly, Alcibiades.

The handsomest man in Athens has a crush. And the object of his love is Socrates. This is where the drinking party turns into a hybrid soap opera - reality TV show full of flirting, couch-hopping, melodramatic fun as Alcibiades (the young, the butch, the forlorn) tells the whole party how Socrates has spurned him over and over again, refusing him affection and decimating his own sense of self-worth.

My question is: was Plato channeling Derrida? Or was Derrida channeling Plato?

References:

Plato, (384 B.C.) Symposium, trans. B. Jowett, The Gutenberg Project,
http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext99/sympo10.txt (Accessed: April 2, 2008)

Hobbs, A. (2007) Angie Hobbs on Plato on Erotic Love, Philosophy Bites Podcast,
http://nigelwarburton.typepad.com/philosophy_bites/2007/11/angie-hobbs-on-.html
(Accessed: April 8, 2008)

Derrida, J. (1982) Margins of Philosophy: Differance, The Hydra Website, http://www.hydra.umn.edu/derrida/diff.html (Accessed: April 16, 2008)

Hedges, W. (1998) Derrida & Deconstruction: Some Key Points, South Oregon University Website, http://www.sou.edu/English/Hedges/Sodashop/Rcenter/Theory/People/derdakey.htm (Accessed: April 16, 2008)

1000 words (4,080 and counting)

Meeting Derrida

I remember the very first time I ever heard about Plato's cave. I think I was about 16. (My father had given me Bertrand Russell's "A History of Western Philosophy"). At first I had a hard time grasping the metaphor of it and then, once I did, I got very angry. Who the hell was this dead Greek guy to tell me that everything I had experienced all my life was illusion? And that I had been too stupid to notice it.

A little later, in my early twenties, I had to read Descartes's "Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting the Reason". I didn't take well to the idea of having to leave common sense behind and questioning things I felt were obvious.

At the age of twenty-eight, I was diagnosed with manic-depression and, after a lengthy talk, my wonderful Czech psychiatrist handed me his personal copy of "Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason" by Michel Foucault. He proscribed me medication, asked me to read it, and then decide whether, in light of what I'd read, I wanted to keep on taking the medication or not.

I went on to read a number of other books by Foucault. The idea that all the structures of power around me where not what I imagined them to be, what I was taught they were, scared me. Well, first it annoyed me that, again, I was being asked to question what I felt was a given reality. Then it scared me. Then I calmed down about it.

Many years later and somewhat saner and now writing, I read Barthes' "Image-Music-Text". I took to the idea of everything having "text" quite well. However, my first reaction to "The Death of the Author" wasn't a particularly accepting one. It took me a while to see the possibilities in reading available to a "writerly reader".

When I started this masters, I read a little of Daniel Chandler's "Semiotics for Beginners" online and balked a little. As good a writer as Chandler is, it's dense going at first and it takes a couple of re-readings to get some of the ideas. In the end, I bought the book when I was in London because I wanted to make sure he got some money.

Similarly, my initial run-in in with the structuralists wasn't a happy one. Who likes being told they aren't really a creative being, that the language "uses" us, and that that language is a construction of what society dictates?

Now along comes Derrida, who claims we can't even have any confidence that what we think we mean IS what we mean. And certainly we can't make any claim at all to being assured that anyone else will make any sense at all of what we say, or write.

We are, it seems, a bunch of walking automatons. Out of our mouths and our pens we leak not what we mean to say at all, but the detritus of our cultural biases, the viral load of our overlords and, sometimes - by sheer fluke - nonsense.

And here, all the time we were writing, we thought we were makers and communicators of meaning, masters of the universe.

If I were to take all the critical theory of the last 50 years to heart, I'd never write another word. What, after all, would be the point?

It's always worth, I think, keeping in mind that theories are tested at their extremes and that theorists write of their ideas at the extremes to, in essence, see if they have legs.

Rather, I think, we are somewhere inbetween a state of being totally autonomous beings who mean exactly what we say, and the enslaved brainless mouthpieces of the state. We're both, and none of those too.

Reading Derrida, I feel rather sorry for him. He took on an impossible task of examining the fragility of meaning in language, with language as the tool. His writing is annoying in the extreme: repetitive, circuitous, full of words he's given new meanings to, unstructured and sometimes wildly metaphor-ridden. He's bloody hard to read. But having struggled through chapter 2 of "Of Grammatology", I can't in all honesty say that some of his ideas are without merit, nor that the questions he asked and the assumptions he challenged weren't worth asking or challenging. I've read equally dense academic papers that presented far, far smaller ideas than his. At least with Derrida, I didn't regret the time I spent trying to understand his ideas.

So I've been surprised at some of the reactions of my fellow students. One of them, reference to Derrida, boasted that he "didn't have to taste shit to know it was shit."

Similarly, I was surprised to run across " Jacques Derrida, Abstruse Theorist, Dies at 74," the obituary for Derrida, published in the New York Times, by Jonathan Kandell, who not only misrepresents a lot of his ideas, but also subtly attempts to suggest he was soft on Nazis by bringing up Heidegger's past affiliations and articles Paul de Man wrote during WWII; guilt by association, one assumes.

These aren't negative reactions to theories one decides are groundless, or disagreements over approach or methodology. They aren't even legitimate questions over the ethics of a certain line of inquiry.

These are fear-based reactions reminiscent of McCarthyism. Like the fabled responses to the proposition that the earth wasn't flat, or that we might have evolved from monkeys, or my own reaction to the allegory of Plato's Cave.

Do ideas that are wholly without merit elicit this reaction? Usually we laugh at them, dispute their logic, and push them aside. So, given the reaction I've witnessed, I think I need to read more Derrida.

(960 words/ 3,080 and counting)