Plato, Symposium | Socrates the Lover (Alcibiades' Speech) | Philosophy Core Concepts

Hi, this is Dr. Gregory Sadler. I'm a professor of philosophy and the president and founder of an educational consulting company called Reason.io, where we put philosophy into practice. I've studied and taught philosophy for over 20 years, and I find that many people run into difficulties reading classic philosophical texts. Sometimes it's the way things are said or how the text is structured, but the concepts themselves are not always that complicated, and that's where I come in. To help students and lifelong learners, I've been producing longer lecture videos and posting them to YouTube. Many viewers say they find them useful. What you're currently watching is part of a new series of shorter videos, each of them focused on one core concept from an important philosophical text. I hope you find it useful as well. In the course of Alcibiades' own speech in the symposium, an impromptu speech that he gives, having arrived as a party crasher, he decides that he's going to praise Socrates rather than praising love, as all the other participants have done. He's going to recount a very interesting story, a seduction tale, that we'll get to in a minute. I want to situate that within a larger problematic that has to do with love and that centers around Socrates himself. Socrates, at least as Alcibiades portrays him, occupies a very strange, you might say unconventional position. We've talked quite a bit in many of the other videos that have to do with the symposium about the relationship between the lover and the beloved. In Greek, the erates and the romanon. These were distinctive roles. The one who pursues and the one who is pursued. The one who has beauty to offer, the one who desires the beauty of the beloved. In the case of Socrates, a strange reversal is going to take place. Plato is telling us about this, and he's placing it in the mouth of Alcibiades. Now, the very first thing that we see happening, after Alcibiades comes in, drunk, with all these garlands on him, trying to sit next to Agathon, who's the best looking guy there, the most attractive, the most successful, is he realizes that Socrates is there. And then Socrates says, Agathon, it's your place. You have to protect me against Alcibiades. And there's a little bit of joking going on there, but it's also a little bit serious as well. Socrates says that Alcibiades, here's the real upshot of this, is a jealous, not a jealous lover, but a jealous beloved. So Socrates is the older person within the dyad. Socrates is the one who presumably desires, who is infatuated with the other's beauty and charm. And it's Alcibiades who becomes jealous, though. Alcibiades wants Socrates' attention to be turned entirely towards him, not dispersed over other beautiful, in body and mind, other beautiful people. So there's a kind of resistance there to the Platonic notion that we saw in Diodemus' speech, that you should move from just the single infatuation with a beautiful body to looking at many beautiful bodies and seeing what's common to them, and loving that attribute, and then loving the beautiful soul. Alcibiades wants to have Socrates entirely to himself, and so he is a jealous beloved rather than a jealous lover. What this brings us to, though, is that with Socrates, there's a weird shift that takes place in the relationship. And Alcibiades says, it's not just me, it's also all these other people, like Harmones, and, you know, this person, and that person, and this person. And so we know that something like this is the case, that Socrates does, in fact, spend a lot of time hanging out with the good-looking, the intelligent youth. But the question is, well, what is he actually after with that? What is he trying to get? Is Socrates kind of a dirty old man type? Or is he attracted to the potential that he sees in them, and thinking about how he might offer them the chance to become better young men, and then better, you know, mature men in the process? And what happens in each of these cases? Socrates is not a good-looking guy. As we talked about in the other video about Socrates' ugliness and beauty, Socrates is pretty ugly, physically. And Socrates doesn't have a lot of money. He doesn't have a social position. He doesn't have all these other things that people say, oh, yeah, that's really great to have somebody desiring you like that. What does Socrates possess? He at least has a reputation, although he denies the fact of this, for possessing some kind of wisdom. And, you know, you can look at other dialogues in which they talk about whether he is wise, whether he isn't wise. Socrates himself has a whole lot of explanations about this. We don't need to go into all of that at this point. Suffice it to say, there is something enthralling about Socrates himself. There is something attractive, so attractive, that those who he is the lover in relationship of role, towards the beloved, end up becoming lovers themselves, totally upending things. In fact, they end up being the ones to pursue Socrates, not Socrates the one to pursue them. Socrates can sort of take it or leave it, and he'll be just fine and content no matter what. They're the ones who become enthralled with Socrates and chase after him. So it's an interesting kind of, like I said, a reversal that takes place. Alcibiades puts this in terms of a particular characteristic. He says that with Socrates something happens that doesn't happen with anybody else. Remember, Alcibiades is the golden boy of Athens at the time. He's good-looking, he's from a wealthy family that has great family connections, he is up to be a military commander, he's already been given some military charges, he's charming, he is the guy who has everything. Sort of the Bruce Wayne but with parrots of the ancient world. And Alcibiades doesn't feel a sense of shame or embarrassment or a sense of impropriety in the face of anybody else. If somebody else criticizes him, Alcibiades has something to say, he can push it off, he can find a way to ignore it. But if Socrates doesn't think well of him, it strikes at his very heart. And he worries because the things, and we're going to see this with the seduction story, the currency that Alcibiades has by which he can buy out or buy the favors of just about anybody else, that doesn't work with Socrates. The two things that work with Socrates are intelligence and virtue. And Alcibiades, as a person, thinks about whether he is living the proper kind of life. He only thinks this when he's with Socrates, by the way. So when he's with Socrates, he feels a sense of shame, he feels a sense of not being everything that he could be. And so long as he's in the presence of Socrates, he's aware of his own condition. Then he says, when I get out of Socrates' presence, of course, then I just look at the public and the mob, and they tell me what a swell guy I am, and I start to believe them, and all that gets forgotten. But this is why Alcibiades in his speech is saying there's something really special about this guy. So now we have what I really wanted to get to, the core of this, of Alcibiades' speech. He tells us something that is quite shameful. And so he's demonstrating the fact that he does not feel a sense of shame towards us, towards the public, only with respect to Socrates. And he's already felt that shame with Socrates in this occasion. So he's willing to tell a story about how he, the super successful man, was unsuccessful. He's willing to tell a story about how he did something embarrassing and failed in the process. So what does he tell us? He tells us how he tried to seduce Socrates. Why would he want to seduce Socrates? Isn't it the job of the lover to try to seduce the beloved? Yes, but Alcibiades wants to speed up the process, because he figures there's going to be a quid pro quo here. He's going to get some of Socrates' wisdom, which he values much more highly than anything else. And he figures, well, if I have to be charming with him, or perhaps even have sex with him, or hang on his arm and be what we call eye candy these days, that would all be great, because I'm going to get something better out of it. And I've got plenty of this stuff over here. I can dole it out, but Socrates can give me something way better. So if there's anybody I'm going to do this with, it's going to be Socrates. So he begins this process by going to the park with his attendant, and he engages Socrates in conversation. And so they're talking back and forth, and they're talking philosophy, as well as pleasantries and stuff like that. Alcibiades sends his attendant away and says, all right, now this is going to work. Socrates is going to put the moves on me. And it turns out Socrates doesn't. He just keeps on talking as normal. He doesn't pick up the hint, as we would say, right? Or perhaps Socrates did pick up the hint, and he's not in the game for that sort of purpose. So Alcibiades says, all right, that didn't work. I'm going to have to get serious about this. How can I get this guy to deliver the goods, to let me deliver the goods so I can get the goods that he wants? He invites him to dinner. Now this is something that the beloved doesn't do. This is something that Alcibiades comments on. He says, I treated him as if I was the lover, and he was the beloved. I invite him to dinner. I'm now putting things out for him. So he invites him to dinner, and they have a conversation again. And Alcibiades sends the servants away. And then Socrates, as soon as dinner's over, he says, all right. He takes off imagining he's got a bib or something. He says, all right, great meal. See you later. And he heads out. Alcibiades is left there saying, what happened? Then the next time Alcibiades says, all right, I'm going to get. It's almost like watching Wile E. Coyote trying to get the roadrunner with this sort of thing, isn't it? Alcibiades makes sure that this time the dinner's going to go on extra long. Socrates is not going to be able to go home. He's going to have to spend the night. This is how they're going to get together. So he has Socrates stay the night, and it's cold. So he creeps under Socrates' cloak, what we would nowadays call a blanket or a comforter. And he tries to seduce Socrates. He tells him this really great line. Socrates, you're the only truly worthy lover for me. If I was going to give it up to anybody, you're the one that I would do that for. Because you actually have so much more to offer me than all the other people who are after me, all the other people who would like to get with me, as we say. And Socrates does two things. Actually, he does three things that are worth talking about. One is he tells Alcibiades, we'll have to consider whether that's a good idea sometime. Not today, but some other time. So there's an infinite deferral, right? And there's this sort of premise to that, that unless it can be argued as a good thing for Socrates, he's not going to do it. So he's not just going to follow his passions the way any normal person would do, not because he doesn't have any emotions or desires or anything like that, but because he understands the proper relation of them. So this is the second point now. Socrates is temperate. He can have a beautiful person laying down next to him, naked, under the covers, saying, basically, I'll do anything you want. And Socrates can say, that's really not what I'm about, and that's not what I want our relationship to be structured by. And he can actually pull it off. He can not just say that sort of thing, but follow through on it the entire night. So that Alcibiades can say, when we got up the next morning, it was as if we were just companions, sleeping next to each other, and not lover and beloved. The third thing that's very important, Socrates, in his response, also says to Alcibiades, you know, you really want to be careful with this sort of thing. You know, if what you're trading is sexual favors in place of gaining wisdom, you really would be making out on the deal. If I can really give you wisdom that way, you are a smart guy. But how do you know, oh, you who are not yet wise, whether I do indeed possess what you're looking for? How do you know you're not going to cheat yourself and feel terrible about it in the morning and have regrets for having given up something good for something that is just valueless? How do you know that, Alcibiades? So this is the story that Alcibiades tells us about this quite marvelous guy, Socrates. Instead of giving a speech in praise of love, he gives a speech in praise of the object of love. And he talks about this guy who somehow transmutes or flips around the relationship between beloved and lover.