Alcibiades’ Symposium Speech: Plastered Party Crasher & Plato’s Mouthpiece

After finishing reading and listening to audio tapes (of a completely different translation) of both the Symposium and the Republic, my first response was to take a celebratory nap. Reading hundreds of pages doesn’t necessarily put me to sleep, but being trolled by the Socratic method for extensive lengths of time is enough to scramble anyone’s brain. Anyone who has taken an Introduction to Philosophy course has probably read these works, but as I was reading I had a hard time justifying the back-and-forth bickering and mixing of metaphors as literary genius. Judging by the extensive amount of highlighting, underlining, and circling already made in my copy of the book the previous students reading these dialogues were just as lost as I was.

 In spite of having scrambled eggs for brains by the end of my reading, my thoughts were more organized after going to Discussion on Friday for Ancient World. Talking about Alcibiades’ response to Diotima’s Ladder of Love made me consider some serious questions by the end of the 50 minutes. Why does Plato include the interjection of a love-drunk and plastered Alcibiades after Socrates masterful speech on love? What does this say about good ole trollin’ Socrates? What does it say about Plato, whose voice is literally found nowhere (you can quote me on this) in the Symposium?

For starters, I suppose we can excuse Socrates for his relentless trolling in the Symposium if Plato is cool with having Alcibiades barge in drunk and interrupt the sobering speeches, with Socrates’ speech on Diotima’s Ladder of Love being last. Socrates leaves us with the Love of Beauty which is the love of the “absolute, pure, unmixed, not polluted by human flesh or colors or any other great nonsense of mortality” in its true form. This love that Socrates describes is part of the heavenly, metaphysical love half of the Ladder.

After building up to the most dynamic speech in the essay and leaving us with the ideal kind of love, Plato contrasts this seriousness with the boisterous interruption made by Alcibiades and a group of his drunken friends. Alcibiades, come to crown Agathon for his latest achievement of winning a tragedy competition, is quickly surprised to find Socrates on the same couch as Agathon (the most beautiful man in the room). Upon seeing Socrates, Alcibiades goes off on a rant about the complete opposite of the heavenly love just discussed. Alcibiades says “here was a man whose strength and wisdom went beyond my wildest dreams! How could I bring myself to hate him? I couldn’t bear to lose his friendship. But how could I possibly win him over?” Here we see Alcibiades reversing the typical beloved/unloved relationship between an older man and younger man during this time period. This reversal exemplifies the exact opposite half of the ladder previously discussed. Alcibiades’ speech represents a coarser, physical love that has to do with the love of physical bodies and attaining achievements in the physical world.

But that’s not enough. On the surface Alcibiades does offer us a perfect example of coarse love, but what’s said in his speech does more than just contrast with Socrates words— it glorifies Socrates as an example of the highest form of love: the Love of Beauty. At the beginning we see that although Alcibiades comes with the intention to crown Agathon, Plato has Alcibiades crown Socrates with ribbons and garland instead. By contrasting Alcibiades’ coarse love for Socrates with Socrates’ higher love of wisdom and disinterest in love of the physical bodies of younger men, Plato is crowning Socrates as an exemplar for the Love of Beauty.

“If you are foolish, or simply unfamiliar with him, you’d find it impossible not to laugh at his arguments. But if you see them when they open up like the statues, if you go behind their surface, you’ll realize that no other arguments make any sense. They’re truly worthy of a god, bursting with figures of virtue inside. They’re great—no, of the greatest— importance for anyone who wants to become a truly good man.”

Alcibiades wraps up his speech with the quote above in spite of being heart sick for Socrates. Here, we see Alcibiades praising Socrates’ for his wisdom and thus seeking a love that is above the love of the physical world. While Plato does not outright say this is his belief as well, judging by the disconnect between Socrates’ and Alcibiades’ speeches, I consider Alcibiades to be a mouthpiece of sorts for Plato’s final message on Socrates even though the audience knows Socrates will be tried and executed for corrupting the youth of Athens, not paying proper respects to the gods, and for being a “threat” to democracy. I’m going out a bit further on the limb here, but the contrast between the Ladder of Love and Alcibiades’ outburst shows us that Plato condemns these offenses as false and Socrates’ execution as unjust. Without Alcibiades’ speech, we don’t see Diotima’s Ladder of Love in practice through Socrates who, as a lover of Beauty, clearly has no interest in any romantic affairs with the youth of Athens, worked to promote wisdom and philosophy to strengthen democracy, and believed that the highest form of love was a godly kind of love. 

So what next? We know that Socrates will be killed but Plato does not end the Symposium with words of praise for Socrates alone. In the final framing scene, Plato closes the discussion with Agathon the tragedian, Aristophanes the comedian, and Socrates the philosopher still awake discussing the idea “that authors should be able to write both comedy and tragedy: the skillful tragic dramatist should also be a comic poet.” Here we see Plato trump all three, as he has just successfully amused his audience with Alcibiades’ comedic speech about his love for Socrates in contrast to the already established sobering (if not tragic considering his fate) Ladder of Love amongst the other players in the Symposium’s speeches. Plato has Socrates exit the scene leaving the comedian and the tragedian in third and fourth place with Socrates as second if not tied for first with Plato in this discussion. Plato and Socrates as the philosophers have won this contest (if you will) because the Symposium allows Plato to argue that philosophy can successfully write both comedy and tragedy. Without Alcibiades’ speech that both redeems Socrates’ character by lifting him up as the example of the Love of Beauty and balances the tragic, serious speeches that came before with comedy, however, this would not have been possible.