Leo Strauss On Plato's Symposium

261 Pages·2001·9.468 MB·English

by  Leo Strauss, Seth Benardete (editor)

Leo Strauss (1899-1973) was the Robert Maynard Hutchins Distinguished Service
Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of Chicago. His many contributions
to political philosophy include The Political Philosophy of Hobbes, Persecution and the Art of
Writing, and On Tyranny, all published by the University of Chicago Press.
Seth Benardete is professor of classics at New York University' and the author, most recently,
of Plato Y “Laws9: The Discovery of Rein#.
The University’ of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637
The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London
© 2001 by The University of Chicago
All rights reserved. Published 2001
Printed on the United States of America
10 09 08 07 06 05 04 03 02 5 4 3 2
ISBN (cloth): 0-226-77685-9
We would like to express our gratitude to the John M. Olin Center for Inquiry into the
Theory and Practice of Democracy, which, with the support of the John M. Olin Foundation
and the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, provided invaluable assistance in preparing
the manuscript of this book for publication.
Library of (/ingress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Strauss, Leo.
Leo Strauss on Plato’s Symposium / edited and with a foreword by Seth
Benardete.
p. cm.
Includes index.
ISBN 0-226-77685-9 (alk. paper)
1. Plato. Symposium. 2. Political science—Philosophy—History.
I. Benardete,Seth. II. Title.
B385 .S77 2001
184—dc21 00-012819
©The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American
National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library
Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
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CONTENTS
Foreword vii
1. Introductory Remarks 1 7. Aristophanes 119
2. The Setting 17 8. Agathon 143
3, Phaedrus 38 9. Socrates (1) 174
4. Pausanias (1) 57 10. Socrates (2) 198
5. Pausanias (2) 73 11. Socrates (3) 216
6. Eryximachus 92 12, Alcibiades 252
Index 289
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FOREWORD
In the middle sixties of the last century Professor Hilail Gildin of
Queens College suggested that the lectures Leo Strauss had given on the
Symposium in 1959 be published in a readable form. Professor Strauss
agreed to this proposal, with the proviso that the translation of the passages
he had read in class be revised so as to conform more strictly with the orig­
inal, and in the summer of 1966 I set to work making the changes he had
requested. On first reading, Professor Strauss found the resulting manu­
script unsatisfactory, but after a second reading he agreed to its publication.
For several reasons this version never saw the light of day and was subse­
quently lost. In the summer of 1999 the project was resumed and done
again from scratch. A very few changes were required to make the lectures
flow smoothly on the printed page; heavier revisions are more frequent
early in the series than at its end, since Professor Strauss often repeated
points at the start of the early classes in order to confirm what he had estab­
lished. On occasion these repetitions involved new formulations or in­
sights, and these have been carefully preserved. The transcript from which
this edition was made was not complete; the changing of the tape resulted
in gaps of various length. When a gap could be filled in a fairly certain way,
this has been done; where more has been lost than could safely be conjec­
tured, an indication is given of the break in continuity, but it has not been
possible to determine the length of the missing portions.
Professor Strauss gave this course on the Symposium partly in honor of
his friend, Peter Heinrich von Blanckenhagcn, who had accepted a posi­
tion at the Institute of Fine Arts in New York and would leave Chicago by
the fall of 1959. fudging from the transcript, they had often discussed the
dialogue in the past, and they continued to talk about it during the course.
It is, I believe, the furthest that Professor Strauss ever strayed in his courses
on Plato from the strictly political dialogues: he taught the Statesman but
neither the Theaetetus nor the Sophist. In his interpretation, however, this
distinction proves to be somewhat illusory; without detracting from the
nature and experience of Eros, Professor Strauss was able to show how po­
litical philosophy could still be a guide to its full understanding. The polit­
ical in a narrow sense frames the dialogue, for Alcibiades is singled out at
the beginning, along with Socrates and Agathon, as of interest to Apollo-
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FORE W O R D
dorus’s acquaintance, and at the end it is he who disrupts the party, forces
it to become a symposium, and completes the scries of erotic speeches
with a praise of Socrates. The year of the party also politicizes the unpolit­
ical setting and theme, for it immediately precedes the Sicilian expedition
that Alcibiades promoted. His subsequent withdrawal, which virtually
guaranteed the failure of the venture, was due to the hysteria that swept
Athens after the mutilation of the Hermae and the profanation of the
mysteries, in which Alcibiades was thought to be involved. Strauss inter­
prets the Symposium as Plato’s version of that profanation: Socrates proves
through his mouthpiece Diotima that Eros is not a god. The political and
the theological thus come together and offer a way into Strauss’s abiding
concern.
Strauss’s capacity to discern the ultimate import of seemingly minor
things is nowhere more conspicuous than in his interpretation of the Sym-
posium. He shows that Socrates’ hubris, to which both Agathon and Alci­
biades call attention, is equally involved in his teaching on Eros and his
contest with Agathon, in which Alcibiades, in the guise of Dionysus, proves
to be the judge. The contest with Agathon for supremacy in wisdom is in
turn shown to be a contest between poetry and philosophy: Socrates had al­
ready observed to Aristodemus the hubris Homer committed against the
good. The truly profound speech of Aristophanes and the seemingly silly
speech of Agathon divide between them all that comedy and tragedy re­
spectively can muster against philosophy. Only Aristophanes, Agathon, and
Socrates, Strauss shows, give speeches that do not subordinate Eros to any­
thing. Their speeches are the only inspired speeches, for Phaedrus looks at
Eros through selfishness, Pausanias through morality, and Eryximachus
through science. In each case Eros disappears into something else and does
not emerge into its own until Aristophanes, recovered from the hiccups,
speaks. His hiccups disturb the order of speeches and put the two poets on
the same side as Socrates. Strauss’s recognition of this division of the
speeches into two triads does not affect his careful exposition of the first
three speeches. Phaedrus’s selfishness has a connection with Socrates’ shift­
ing of Eros from a concern with the beautiful—the ordinary understand­
ing—to a concern with the good; Pausanias’s unstable advocacy of freedom,
philosophy, and morality at various stages of his argument encapsulates the
political problem that the Republic sets out to solve; and Eryximachus’s co­
ordination of Eros with science already adumbrates the modern project
that Plato uncannily foresaw and opposed.
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FOREWORD
In accordance with Socrates’ own remarks on writing, Strauss sometimes
compared the Platonic dialogues to animals in a zoo, in which the visitor is
encouraged to classify the unique specimens on display into groups. Some
of the more obvious taxonomic criteria were whether the dialogues were
reported or not and, if reported, whether by Socrates or by others; whether
their settings or times were given; and whether the characters were known.
The Symposium is a reported dialogue at several removes from the occasion;
it shares this peculiarity with the Parmenides, where Plato’s relative reports
on Socrates’ second venture into philosophy. Phaedo reports Socrates’ own
account of his first venture in the Phaedo, and Apollodorus, who weeps
continuously throughout the Phaedo, records Socrates’ last in the Sympo­
sium. Strauss observed that Diotima’s account of Eros as a daimonion, mid­
way between gods and mortals, is plainly meant to overcome the difficulty
Parmenides found in Socrates’ ideas, which allowed there to be nothing ex­
cept ideas and their participants. Strauss proposed that Eros, or the essence
of soul, was meant to be an intermediary that could not be reduced to ei­
ther a paradigmatic idea or its copies. Psychology therefore became paired
with ontology or cosmology and offered a way to get around the Par-
menidean paradox. Strauss went on to observe that the Protagoras included
all the characters in the Symposium, with the exception of Aristophanes. He
inferred that Aristophanes replaces Protagoras: the comic poet offers a
myth about man’s origin and nature that surpasses the sophist’s, for it puts
together man’s impiety and man’s civility, or the double nature of man, in a
way that Protagoras utterly does not understand. The Symposium's link
with the Protagoras necessarily brings in its train the Gorgias, which handles
the relation justice has with rhetoric, or the issue of rationality and punish­
ment. Not only does the Symposium gain natural ties with the Republic
through its association with these dialogues, but it also links up with the
Phaedrus, wrhosc theme is persuasion, dialectic, and writing in the element
of Eros. Here is where Strauss’s wholly unprejudiced viewpoint comes to
the fore; it is not everyone who would sec the kinship of the Phaedrus with
the DjFJor of the Symposium with the Epinomis, for writing connects the
first pair and the notion of occasion the second. Strauss did not always de­
velop these connections fully, but he suggested how' one should proceed in
trying to put together the necessarily imperfect cosmos of Platonic dia­
logues as an imitation of the true cosmos.
Seth Benardetc
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1 INTRODUCTORY
REMARKS
I his course will be on Plato’s political philosophy and it will be
conducted in the form of an explanation and an interpretation of the Sym­
posium. By way of introduction I have to answer these two questions: (1)
Why do we study Plato’s political philosophy? and (2) Why did I select the
Symposium? As for the first question, one could say that to give courses on
Plato’s political philosophy is the decent thing to do. It is admitted in the
profession that political science students are supposed to have some knowl­
edge of the history of political thought, the history of political philosophy.
If this is so one surely must study it thoroughly, at least in graduate school,
and the thorough treatment of the history of political philosophy requires
specialized courses in the great political philosophers, hence also on Plato.
This reasoning is rather poor for two reasons. In the first place, it would
lead to the consequence that one should give such courses also, say, on
Locke or Machiavelli, and I for one give such a course only on Plato. In the
second place, though in all practical matters it is indispensable, either al­
ways or mostly, to follow custom, to do what is generally done, in theoreti­
cal matters it is simply untrue. In practical matters there is a right of the first
occupant: what is established must be respected. In theoretical matters this
cannot be. Differently stated: The rule of practice is “let sleeping dogs lie,”
do not disturb the established. In theoretical matters the rule is “do not let
sleeping dogs lie.” Therefore, we cannot defer to precedent and must raise
the question, Why do we study Plato in particular?
When we look at the present situation in the world, this side of the Iron
Curtain, we see that there are two powers determining present-day thought.
I call them positivism and historicism. The defect of these powers today
compels us to look out for an alternative. That alternative seems to be sup­
plied by Plato rather than anyone else.
First positivism. Positivism makes the assertion that the only form of
genuine knowledge is scientific knowledge. Physics is the model of all sci­
ences and therefore of political science in particular. But this is more a
promise than an achievement. This scientific political science does not exist.
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CHAI’ T ER ON E
In spite of this fact, we must take this position very seriously. Its motive can
be crudely stated as follows: The same science—scientific method—which
produced the H-bomb must also be able to prevent the use of the H-bomb.
The science which produced the H-bomb, physics; the science dealing with
the use of the H-bomb, political science. Now, you see immediately that
this reasoning, that the same method which produced the H-bomb must
also be able to prevent the use of the H-bomb, is very poor: the distinction
between the use and misuse of anything—H-bomb included—means a
distinction between good and bad, and this kind of distinction is now called
a value judgment. According to the positivistic view value judgments are
outside the scope of science. Therefore this positivistic political science
promises something which it is, strictly speaking, unable and unwilling to
supply. The characteristic thesis of positivism can be said to be that all val­
ues are equal. Positivistic science claims to be able to distinguish between
attainable and unattainable ends. This is all. It cannot and does not claim
more. It cannot even say that the quest for unattainable ends is foolish and
therefore bad. This would be a value judgment. It can say only that they are
unattainable. But it cannot say that the quest for unattainable ends is infe­
rior to the quest for attainable ends. Positivists sometimes reject the impu­
tation that according to their views all values are equal. But I can only say
that this is merely an attempt to befog the issue. What they say in fact is that
as far as human knowledge or reason is concerned, or as far as we know, all
values are equal. This they certainly say, and there is no practical difference
between the assertion ‘as far as we know and shall ever be able to know’ and
the assertion that all values are equal.
The positivistic position can be characterized as follows: There is no po­
sition between the objectivity of science and the subjectivity of evaluations.
The principles of thought, of thinking, of understanding, arc objective.
The principles of preference or action are necessarily subjective. I leave it at
these brief remarks in order to characterize in a few words an alternative to
positivism which I call historicism. There are all kinds of overlapping be­
tween these two areas of thinking, but it is unnecessary for us to go into
them.
In the clear case, historicism admits that a value-free social science is im­
possible. But it asserts that both principles of thought and principles of ac­
tion are essentially variable, or historical, and therefore in a radical sense
subjective. In the vulgar form of this position we cannot arrive at any higher
principles of understanding and of preferring than those of Western civi­
lization. There are no principles of understanding and principles of prefer­
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I N T R O D U C T O R Y REMARKS
ring which belong to man as man, who can never go beyond a historically
qualified humanity such as Western civilization. Historicism stems from
Germany and is, therefore, far more developed there than, for example, in
this country. But even in this country you find it in various forms. Carl
Becker, I believe, was the most famous representative of historicism who
denied the impossibility of any objective history. All historiography is based
on the climate of the country and the age and can never transcend it. The
difficulty with historicism, simply stated, is this: it cannot help transcending
history by its very assertion. If we say every sort of man is radically histori­
cal, this assertion is no longer meant to be historical and therefore refutes
the position. I cannot go into any further detail. I can only assert here that
both positivism and historicism are not viable. But this is not the subject of
this course. Assuming that they are viable, they are admittedly late posi­
tions. They are based on the experience of the failure of an earlier approach.
This earlier approach is called in the loose language of this kind of literature
the absolutist approach.
The absolutist approach asserts that there are invariable, unchangeable,
universally valid principles of thought and action. This, it is said, has been
destroyed by man’s deeper reflection or by man’s longer experience. From
this it follows that if we as positivists or historicists want to understand our­
selves we must understand our own ground, i.e., the absolutism of the past
and the experience of the failure of that absolutism. Therefore a historicist
or relativist, if he reflects on his position and wants to understand what he
says, is compelled to understand the older position, the absolutist position,
which he replaces. In other words, reflection, of which I have given here
barely a specimen, on the defects of the views prevalent today, leads us to
take a serious interest in the opposite view, in an evaluating social science
that refers to invariable and universal principles. Such a social science was in
existence at least until the end of the eighteenth century. The notion of a
value-free social science emerged only in the last decade of the nineteenth
century. The most talked about form of this older form of social science is
the natural law teaching. This natural law teaching has its roots in the teach­
ing of Plato and Aristotle, but it was not developed by them. It began to be
developed by a certain Greek school, the so-called Stoics, which emerged
after Aristotle, but we have barely sufficient evidence to speak about the
Stoic natural law school. For all practical purposes, the classic of the natural
law social science is Thomas Aquinas. As that part of the movement of
thought which I have discussed up until now, Thomas Aquinas would be of
the utmost interest to us.
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CHAPTER ON E
But why concentrate on Plato as distinguished from Thomas Aquinas?
In order to understand that, we have to consider a second meaning of rela­
tivism which has nothing to do with a value-free social science. If we look at
what is going on in the sciences proper, in the natural sciences, and what is
their peculiar character compared with earlier natural science, say up to the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, we notice this: These sciences live in
an open horizon. No results are regarded as definitive. All results, all theo­
ries, are regarded as open to future revision in the light of new evidence.
This is a new phenomenon, that the highest authority for human society—
and the highest authority for Western society is science—has this peculiarly
open character. As someone who was very competent to speak about these
matters, Nietzsche, put it, “We are the first men who do not possess the
truth, but only seek it.” Nietzsche had in mind all dogmas, all systems
which predominated in the past and also sometime later. The novel thing
was a society which apparently does not possess the truth. Now, there is an
apparent modesty, an apparent commonsensical reasonableness in this
open-mindedness, this refusal to say, “I possess the truth,” which has surely
some attraction for most of us. When we look back from this seeming pe­
culiarity of the late nineteenth century and twentieth century to the past,
we sec that there is only one great philosopher who somehow seems to have
stood for this principle, that the questions are clearer than the answers to
the important questions. That was Plato.
Everyone knows, or has heard, that according to Plato man is incapable
of acquiring full wisdom; that the very name of philosophy—a quest for
wisdom, love of wisdom—indicates that wisdom proper is not accessible to
men. Or to use the other formula, philosophy is knowledge of ignorance
rather than the complete system. One can also indicate this historically as
follows: Plato founded a school called the Academy. This school became, a
few generations after Plato, the New Academy, a skeptical school. Whereas
traditional Platonism was one of the most dogmatic schools, Plato gave rise
to a most skeptical school as well, and this can be explained by the fact that
while Plato himself was neither a dogmatist nor a skeptic, his successors
were unable to remain on this level. There is a remarkable sentence of Pas­
cal according to which we know too little to be dogmatists and too much to
be skeptics, which expresses beautifully what Plato conveys through his di­
alogues. This peculiar openness of Plato seems to make him particularly at­
tractive to our age, which has gone through so many moral and other
disappointments. I will not now develop this notion of Plato as a thinker
who cannot be properly characterized as either dogmatic or skeptic. I will
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