Seminari Internacional - Socratic erotics: before, after, and in the Symposium

Zdravko Planinc is associate professor of Religious Studies at McMaster University (Canada). He studied political science in York University and did his PhD in Harvard University. He works in the field of history of political philosophy, and his primary areas of interest are the ancient Greeks and twentieth century critics of modernity. He is author of different books, among which Plato’s Political Philosophy: Prudence in the Republic and the Laws, (University of Missouri Press, 1991), and also Plato Through Homer: Poetry and Philosophy in the Cosmological Dialogues (University of Missouri Press, 2003). 

Talk: Socratic erotics: before, after, and in the Symposium

Socrates does not only know that he knows nothing. He says that he knows nothing except erotics; and he practices it in the midwifery that he learned both from his mother, a midwife, and from Diotima, an Eleusinian priestess. The fullest explanation that Socrates gives of the nature of erotics is in Plato’s Symposium. His eulogy to Eros is a recollection of some of the things he learned from Diotima as a young man. Similarly, Plato presents Socrates’ eulogy as a reply to several other preceding eulogies to Eros, each of which gives an account quite different than all the others. All of the symposiasts’ speeches are highly personal and differently incomplete accounts of the nature of love. Understanding Plato’s intent in composing the Symposium as he did – how the eulogies form parts of a more complete understanding of eros – has always baffled scholars. Most prefer to ignore it; others attempt to reduce it to familiar doctrines in other dialogues with which they are more comfortable. This approach takes up the hermeneutic challenges presented by the Symposium by reading it as a work of literature. More specifically, it compares Plato’s presentation of Socrates’ eulogy to Eros with the poetry of Sappho and with the poetry of Kae Tempest.