Symposium scholarship has flourished in recent years, with many high-quality publications being produced. The pressing issue for any new work in the field is to distinguish itself in this already bustling marketplace, in which a number of impressive wares are already on show.
The stated purpose of the Cambridge Critical Guides series is to offer cutting-edge research on key texts to scholars and students. In their introduction to this volume, D. and G. provide a simple justification for its existence: the Symposium is an indissolubly interesting work that continually rewards the concerned attention of sensitive scholars. The editors aim to provide a single resource in which readers can encounter the original insights of some of the keenest minds of Plato scholarship into all the major episodes of the Symposium.
In seeking to offer a cutting-edge resource, the volume is, on the whole, a resounding success. There are a number of high-quality contributions that serve to develop and often to transform our thinking about the Symposium. And although it is the case that some contributions rather represent refinements of scholars’ recent work on the dialogue (such as those of F.C.C. Sheffield and A.W. Price) or perhaps serve more to offer further justification for established readings (including those of S. Obdrzalek and F.J. Gonzalez), these contributions also lend credibility to the volume. While they do not offer research as groundbreaking as other chapters, they too contribute to the project of representing in a single resource the forefront of Symposium scholarship.
The one weakness of the volume is that there is relatively little communication between the contributors. Despite the fact that various papers examine the same passages, themes and concepts, while often offering dramatically different interpretations, there is little acknowledgement of these relationships and differences. This is particularly evident in the various treatments of the theme of immortality in Socrates’ speech. Several contributions deal prominently with this issue, and each attempts to establish connections with presentations of immortality in other dialogues to ‘fill out’ Diotima's obscure claims. But the external evidence to which scholars appeal varies, and so, consequently, do their readings of immortality in the Symposium. While D. Sedley and Price look to the Timaeus, A. Nightingale appeals to the Phaedrus, C. Shields to the Theaetetus and D. to the Republic. Of course, the differences between these approaches, and the conclusions reached, are evident to any reader. However, the volume would have been enriched if these related, but importantly different treatments were flagged by the contributors, so that the volume presented these readings in dialogue with each other. More worrying is that the dissonance of these readings demonstrates the problems inherent with reading between dialogues on this issue. However, no contributor acknowledges this.
One prominent exception to this is Shields, who draws on R. Kraut's rejection of rational eudaimonism later in the volume and shows to great effect how the new avenues of research Kraut's contribution opens can be applied to various interpretative issues, with Shield's focus being on determining why the form of Beauty is the telos of our erotic striving.
In what follows I provide a more detailed review of particular contributions. G. explores the frame and opening drama of the Symposium through the rubric of temporality to contrast the regressive, backward-looking Apollodorus and Aristodemus with the progressive, forward-thinking Socrates. G. does a fine job of demonstrating the felicity of this approach, although the results of the examination (at least concerning the frame) are somewhat limited, in so far as she provides further grounds for the standard reading of Apollodorus and Aristodemus as failed philosophers. Her discussion of Socrates’ use of rhêmata in the opening drama is more interesting, but she perhaps treats Socrates’ engagement with this practice as more serious than it is. Needed here is a closer comparison of Socrates’ use of rhêmata with that of the other speakers.
F.V. Trivigno's contribution forcefully demonstrates how clarity in the application of concepts is essential for a proper reading of the Symposium. Trivigno engages in the debate concerning the value of Eryximachus’ speech, and although he claims to advocate the traditional view that the speech is parodic rather than admiring of medical thought, Trivigno plots an intelligent middle course between the two interpretative extremes. He identifies the problem with the debate as a looseness of thinking concerning what it means for something to be serious or comic. Drawing on the distinction between ‘satire’ (aimed at individuals) and ‘parody’ (aimed at modes of thought), Trivigno argues convincingly that we should interpret Eryximachus’ speech, not as satire, but as parody of medical discourse, which overreaches in its claim to grasp human nature.
Sedley offers a fascinating discussion of sphericity as an image of divinity and posits a connection between the Symposium and the Timaeus on this issue. Comparing Aristophanes’ story of the circlemen and the various discussions of divine spheres in the Timaeus, Sedley convincingly establishes similarities between the two accounts, particularly concerning the ideas of sphericity as our original state, the fall from this and the need to regain our spherical nature. From this Sedley then reads Diotima's quizzical comments concerning the philosophical lover becoming ‘dear to the gods’ and ‘immortal’ in terms of the account of achieved immortality in the Timaeus, and argues that it constitutes a correction of Aristophanes’ own account of human completion. Much of Sedley's arguments hinge on the idea that the lover's activity in the presence of Beauty itself is purely intellectual, and although he provides strong arguments for this view, it is striking that he makes no explicit reference to Nightingale's or D.’s own arguments against this reading in the volume. In addition, one issue for Sedley's argument is the absence of any reference to sphericity in the relevant passage of Diotima's account. This is particularly problematic given that Socrates’ speech is otherwise replete with pointed references to earlier speeches concerning a variety of issues.
Nightingale gives a brilliant examination of immortality in the Symposium, departing from the contemporary consensus (advocated most notably by Sedley in this volume) that the immortality Diotima attributes to the lover at the top of the Ladder is won via contemplation and providing the strongest argument yet for the view that people become immortal through giving birth to discourses which are themselves immortal. Nightingale's most original claim here comes from the relationship she establishes between the Symposium and the Phaedrus. She argues that the Phaedrus develops Diotima's account by contrasting the perpetuation of poetic discourse, which she claims is one of static preservation, with that of philosophical discourse, which she argues occurs through the development of a logos. But while I agree that this issue is articulated by Socrates explicitly first in the Phaedrus, I do note that the idea is already present in the Symposium, being dramatised in Apollodorus’ and Aristodemus’ mere (and therefore non-philosophical) repetition of Socratic logoi.
R.G. Edmonds engages with an exciting stream of Symposium studies, which concerns the significance of the imagery of Mysteries in the dialogue. He offers a different perspective on this issue by considering Alcibiades’ use of Mystery language, interpreting this in light of both his later profanation of the Eleusinian Mysteries and Socrates’ own use of Mystery language. Not only does this contribute to debates concerning the value of Alcibiades’ speech (he argues that it confirms that Alcibiades’ philosophical failure stems from his own faults), but perhaps most interesting is how it helps us to understand the relationship between the ‘lower’ and the ‘higher mysteries of erôs’ in Diotima's account. While the tendency in the literature has been to see these two parts of the speech as offering different views of virtuous behaviour (contrasting the lover of fame with philosophical lovers), Edmonds argues for continuity between the two. The implications of this reading are important and varied, and although Edmonds does not have time to pursue these, his contribution opens new avenues of research concerning the activity of the top of the Ladder, and the nature of this immortality (among other issues).
D. sets as his task to determine what ‘producing true virtue in contemplation of Beauty’ consists in, and argues against Sheffield's and Sedley's (Aristotelian) idea that it is purely a noëtic activity. D. pursues a novel approach in establishing the links between Alcibiades’ description of his reaction to Socratic logoi and Socrates’ biography of his own philosophical development in the Apology. From this basis D. argues forcefully that we must understand the lover's activity at the top of the Ladder as involving, not just noêsis, but also (theoretically-informed) moral and political activity. Through this rubric D. also offers interesting insights into the role of Alcibiades’ speech, its relationship to Socrates’ own and Diotima's comments concerning the philosophical lover becoming dear to the gods and immortal. His assertion that to become dear to the gods concerns nurturing ethical behaviour in others, taking his mark from Socrates’ comments about ‘theophiles’ in the Republic, is the strongest element of the contribution. Not as strong is his discussion of immortality, in which he appeals to the presentation of immortality in Republic 10 to fill out this account. While he acknowledges important differences between the eschatologies of both dialogues, he does not fully appreciate the problematic nature of this move – problems that the diversity of readings of immortality in this volume make clear.
Kraut offers a stunning rejection of the application of rational eudaimonism to Plato. Although he acknowledges the continued presence of ‘one's own good’ as an important standard for the evaluation of action throughout the dialogues, Kraut argues that such a perspective is evidently subordinated to higher standards of goodness, external to oneself, which include the family, polis and particularly the forms of the Good and the Beautiful. He argues that a central tenet of Plato's philosophical project is to establish a reconciliation between the two perspectives and so to demonstrate that one's own good and that of others are not in conflict. Kraut suggests that Diotima's speech is one such attempt at this reconciliation. His arguments here are strong, and his work opens many new exciting avenues of research, particularly a re-evaluation of the role of the other in the Symposium.
The remaining contributions also offer engaging and lucid discussions, however, due to space I cannot review them in detail here. I will merely conclude by saying that the editors have indeed succeeded in demonstrating that the Symposium is indissolubly interesting, and this volume is successful in its aim of being the most important single resource for scholars and students alike who seek to familiarise themselves with leading Symposium scholarship and stimulating future avenues of research.
