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)