WRFH/Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM - Heimliche Hemlock: Plato’s Symposium-Diotima’s Speech?

Episode Date: April 3, 2025

Alexandra discuss Diotima’s Speech form Plato’s Symposium with David Cathel

You're listening to Heimlike Hemlock on Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7. Hello, my name is Alexandra Comas, and you're listening to Heimlike Hamlock, a podcast where I talk about romanticism. Today I'm here with David Cathell, a real-life classicist, even though he's of the wrong variety. Don't worry, we won't hold it against you. We won't hold it against you too much. Anyway, so today we're going to be reading the symposium. And we should start out by saying that we're going to be focusing on the speech of Diotima today because there's way too much in this dialogue and hopefully we'll come back to it sometime.

But definitely read it yourself if you haven't. So when he starts out, to set the stage a little bit, there have been many other speeches before this. and a bunch of guys from Athens are gathered with Socrates and with Agathon who has just had the rhetorical and poetic experience of his life. He just won this competition for composing tragedy. And so they all went out drinking the night before and they have terrible hangovers and they don't want to drink again

for the time being at least. I think that's reasonable. Yeah. And so they're still having a good time and they decide, okay, let's have a feast of speeches rather than of more wine because we're not sure our bodies will catch up with this. We're sloshed. Yeah, exactly. Technical Greek term there. Yeah.

Coming from a Latinist, that would make sense. I'm kidding. So anyway, yeah, Socrates brings in a woman, which is very, well, a woman's speech. She's not actually there, which is very surprising already because it only happens in one other potonic dialogue, I think, where we hear a speech from a woman, which is Menexonis, I think. I haven't read that one. Yeah, me neither. So anyway, yeah, this is very rare.

and we should ask ourselves what this means that he's bringing in a woman. And this is much more interesting because Socrates says, she has taught me the ways of love, which kind of opens up the question, who is Deotima? Why is she being invoked here? Is she some sort of cortis in, because the way she speaks in this dialogue, or the way in which we are told about her speech, beach, which is heavily mediated, by the way.

This is one of the dialogues where we have some of the most mediation, one of the others being the Fado, another one of my favorites. And so, why do you think we have this level of mediation? Oh, man, this is a big question, always, in reading the Platonic Dialogues. And I think especially with the symposium, On the one hand, I think you're kind of supposed to see this mediation as the ongoing practice of philosophy in the city, I think. I guess to give a little more background, the way that the mediation works is that the symposium itself is narrated by Aristademus, or is it Polonius? It's Aristotemus.

It's Aristidesimus who heard it from someone else who heard it from a guy who was with Socrates who was there at this dinner party that's supposedly being talked about and Socrates is himself narrating Deotemus speech that he heard like 10 years before

so when you get to DOTMA's speech it's like you're like four levels removed from the actual original speaker So, to clarify, we have an ancient Greek slashed game of telephone. Yeah. About what some woman said about love.

Yeah. Of whom we don't know much. Yeah. I mean, Socrates just says that she was very wise and that, like, she told the city the right sacrifices to make. So they didn't have to worry about plague for 10 years. But I think the structure, this very mediated structure, is supposed to make us attend more closely to the actual details of the speech. It's telling us to step away from who we think the interlocutors are

to focus on whether what they're saying is actually true and in what sense it's true. And that's just my opinion, but that's what I think. A Latinist opinion. A Latinist opinion. Anyway, I'm sorry. But yeah, we should also consider that the speeches, the dialogues with more mediation seem to be ones that deal with more potentially esoteric things. For instance, ones that could be more related to the mystery cults. Yeah, and that's also, that's another big thing in the symposium is,

Socrates uses this language of initiation when he talks about deatima. it's not just that Deaetima is teaching him, she's initiating him into these kind of mysteries. And that is cultic language. That's the language of when you become part of like a religious rite in ancient Greece, you would be initiated into the mysteries. Because only the initiated can see it. If you're profraying and not initiated, you can't be a part of the ritual. So there's the sense in which Deaetima has initiated.

Socrates, and now Socrates is initiating Agathon and all the other men that are here at this symposium, and then that just makes it more strange because you're getting this passed on to yourself. So it's almost like we are also as readers being initiated into this kind of cultic practice. Yeah, and interestingly, we get this later with alcibiades, where he was right before he was about to go off to bash heads and ruin everything

he was accused of profaning the Elisinian mysteries by divulging them in some way and he also did that whole thing with all the Hermes statues yeah maybe we don't have to be very clear we don't have to go too much into that

you should definitely read it yourself if you want to know all the saucy details Yes, but... Read Plutarch's lives. Yeah. You're listening to Heimukahamok on Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7. Anyway, let's dive in, shall we? So, the speech of Diotima starts by her saying,

When Aphrodite was born, the gods held a celebration. Poros, the son of Medes, was there among them. When they had feasted, Pena came begging, as poverty does when there's a party, and stayed by the gates. Now Poros got drunk on nectar. There was no wine yet, you see. And, feeling drowsy, went into the garden of Zeus, where he fell asleep. Then Penae schemed up a plan to relieve her lack of resources. She would get a child from Poros. So she lay beside him and got pregnant with love. This is why love was born to follow Aphrodite and to serve her, because he was conceived on the day of her birth. And that's why he is also by nature a lover of beauty, because Aphrodite herself is especially beautiful. So, and she slash Socrates giving her speech goes on to say that he is by nature neither immortal nor mortal, but now he springs to life when he gets his way, now he dies, all in the very same day. Because he is his father's son, however, he keeps coming back to life, but then anything he finds his way to always slips away. And for this reason, love is never completely without reason. And for this reason, love is never completely without reason. nor is he ever rich. He is in between wisdom and ignorance as well. In fact, you see,

none of the gods loves wisdom or wants to become wise, for they are wise. And no one else who is wise already loves wisdom. On the other hand, no one who is ignorant will love wisdom either or want to become wise. For what's especially difficult about being ignorant is that you are content with yourself, even though you're neither beautiful and good nor intelligent. If you don't think you need anything, of course, you won't want what you don't think you need. So here's an issue that is set up here. There is a kind of gray area that love exists in. I should say who Poros is.

Poros means way or resource. And so he has a wealth. And Penae is the exact opposite, basically. She's poverty. Peña is poverty. So we have this kind of back and forth where love, it's not clear, like, is he a god? Is he something, he's not entirely immortal. And he also isn't entirely wise, but he's also not entirely lacking in wisdom or mortal.

Yeah, well, this is the brilliance. this is the brilliance of Plato, that this story about Peña and Poros and Love being the offspring of the two is going to wind up capitulating the whole account of beauty that comes, beauty and love that comes later. Because what we see here already is that love is this intermediate thing. It desires, but it doesn't have. That's really important in this passage. Love want something, but the wanting is conditioned on the not having the desired object. And that's why Deaetima is characterizing love as this intermediate place. Because the truth is that if you're ignorant, you're not going to know what you're missing

out on, and you can't desire it. But if you already have all the things you desire, there's no more desire. You're not properly loving anymore. So the question for Deaetima about love is, where are you in this middle, like, liminal space between knowing and not knowing, between having and not having? And so love is always desiring while not fully having. But it's important to note that here, the way that Deotima talks about love already begins to situate love as an external thing. Love is already turning out from perhaps what love, what he has in himself to look at what he can get, right? What he is searching for.

And we're going to see that as a theme that pops up in a really important passage later. So we're already focusing on love, but love as a turning from maybe what you have in yourself to an external beauty, external desire. Yeah, and just to follow this thread of why this kind of liminal space is so important, we should talk about how beauty or love relates to the good. Because we see the good often as a kind of completion, and we often have the tendency to say something about beauty being good. This also comes up in Hippius Major, but it's an earlier dialogue, and it doesn't

really, it's not all that satisfying and ending, of course, which isn't the point. But it also comes up here where you have this kind of lack. It may be something about the good in becoming, where it definitely strives after some sort of unity, some sort of thing that abides by natural standards and is good in itself and self-sufficient. But it's not exactly clear how this works because it can't be completion in itself. Yeah, this is a complicated question in platonic philosophy. Because you'll get later people who are following Plato like Plotinus. And Plotinus will just say that properly understood, like, beauty and goodness are just kind

of the same thing. I think he says beauty is the form of the good or something like that. but then when you get the iconic account of the good in Republic books six and seven you don't really see beauty at all which is really interesting so there's somewhat already connected

but they're somewhat distinct my own personal opinion is that when you talk about one of the big questions in the Pallanic Corpus is well, how do you ascend? How do you go from, to use the imagery of the Republic, how do you go from being in the cave to looking at the sun? Well, actually, I think it's beauty that draws you up out of that.

And once again, that's another thing that will probably hit in the symposium because the symposium is also really important for that idea. Certainly. Now, should we also talk a bit more about the idea of self-sufficiency and immortality and beauty? it's complicated, but it seems like it's something that definitely has to be addressed. Yeah. Well, you know, there are different, so there are different opinions.

I guess just to how much do you want to landmark this kind of conversation that Socrates reports between himself and Diatima? What do you mean by that? How much, because I think there's a general structure that's important to talk about. because we have, so we begin with this story, but then what winds up happening is that Socrates and Deutima will have this back and forth about what love is, what the lover desires,

and the lover's desire, and its relation to the good, the good and the beautiful, or to good things and beautiful things, I think is a little more specific. And then there's another account, which is just Dea Tema's final speech about Ascent.

Because they kind of have this discussion, this argument, and it's somewhat intractable. Socrates winds up concluding that the, I think the lover's desire is to, you know, they use very weird language, but is to like give birth. Give birth and beauty. Give birth and beauty and then to like have beautiful things forever. And they just kind of reject that and then go on to another account of beauty, which is the one that that gets. picked up a lot on. That's Dea Tema's account of the Ascent. But there's, there's, there's some questions in scholarly literature about how the two are actually supposed to relate to each other, because some people say, well, actually Dea Tema is trying to turn us, is trying to get us

to recognize that the lover is supposed to stop caring for himself. It's supposed to kind of turn away from herself towards beauty. But then I have a little bit of a different interpretation. Freytel. So, yeah, I guess this is a little complicated to talk about, I think maybe we should just talk a little bit more about the status of the lover. Let's see if I can find the particular passage. Socrates says, reproduction, birth and beauty.

and they go, which is a super weird image, and they go on and then... Well, you just skipped the whole part about immortality. Fine, fine. Well, no, that right after that, De Ateema says it follows from our argument that love must desire immortality. So it's like, well, if you want good things, you've got to want them forever, because otherwise you're just not, you can't actually be sure in your possession of them. So it's kind of a problem.

And then Deutima asks, well, what causes love and desire? And they talk about animals. And there's this example of animals wanting to reproduce. And then when they have children, they will fight to the death to defend. They're young. And so it's like, so we see love. among wild animals and talk to, he's like, well, I don't know what to do with this. And then Dio Tima uses this to support her account that love is to seek as far as possible to live forever and be immortal.

And the conclusion is, well, how do you be immortal? You are immortal through the offspring that you give birth to in love. And it has to be something that's not easily killed, I suppose. because, for instance, when you have the lowest level, like just the animal giving birth to a real live offspring, this comes with decay. It will eventually get old and die. And when you think about it, like only, if you think about it in terms of passing on DNA or whatnot, something very practical and without any sort of transcendent reality about it. you do come to the issue where only 50% of the offspring's DNA will be yours, and then you just go down the line and it diminishes, obviously. Yeah, well, and this is the problem with... There are a variety of problems with this kind of argument about what love is,

because, okay, so you think that love necessarily must desire eternal things or immortal things, well, even if you are mortal, like, through your offspring, isn't really make a big difference to you because you'll still have died. So, like, well, it seems like that's something of a problem, like... It puts a damper on things, just a little bit. Yeah, it's like, oh, I want this because, you know, I'm supposed to be mortal, then, oh, well, it turns out, like, actually going to die anyway. So what's kind of...

What's going on here? And then they go on to talking about giving birth and beauty and how, like, the lover becomes pregnant in the presence of beauty. And deotema connects this to, like, it's not just, like, physical offspring. It becomes, like, poetry and laws and all these kind of wonderful arts and things that humans can wind up doing. Yes. Unfortunately, we're going to have to do a terrible thing to all the listeners, which is to end on a point of, you know, everything's going to die, but also maybe there are other options like teaching or poetry. And now we basically run out of time.

So we must do another episode on this because we've barely, We've barely scratched the surface Oh Well Goodbye Cliffhanger You'll have to come back next time Yeah

Well thank you for listening to Hamley Canlock On Radio Free Hillsdale 101.1.7 FM