Alkibiades’ Love is the third major work of philosophy by Jan Zwicky. The 11 essays collected here span nearly 20 years. At various points, they intersect with Zwicky’s Lyric Philosophy and Wisdom & Metaphor, and they do extend the project of those books; but this book’s armature is its engagement with ancient Greek thinking. In the passion and vitality of its dialogue with the dead, Zwicky’s work is similar to that of Pierre Hadot, Aryeh Kosman, and Martha Nussbaum. This book includes close and insightful readings of texts by Herakleitos, Parmenides, and Plato, among others. The closeness of these readings is motivated by one of Zwicky’s central thoughts: “meaning is a function of form” (3). Very briefly, I shall sketch the metaphilosophical context for Alkibiades’ Love, and then turn to reviewing a couple of selected themes.

If philosophy can be defined as “thinking in love with clarity” (6), then lyric philosophy might be roughly defined as thinking in which clarity assumes the form of resonance. A lyric structure is one whose many dimensions stand in integrated relations with each other, and are thus capable of communicating resonance. Alkibiades’ Love does not merely recapitulate the terrain already covered by Zwicky’s other books: in its detailed study of exemplars, it illustrates and fleshes out her concept of integrity. While retaining the concept’s ethical connotations, Zwicky’s use of it departs from its mainstream deployment in the hands of philosophers such as Bernard Williams and Cheshire Calhoun. For Zwicky, integrity is a virtue native to a specific kind of wholeness: one that emerges through the tension among its components. She offers, as a paradigmatic image, the “back-stretched harmony” of the Herakleitean lyre.

Such structural integrity is exhibited, Zwicky argues, by Plato’s Phaidros, Symposium, and Meno. According to her reading of Phaidros, its ‘form’ is a response to the argument articulated in its ‘content.’ The text concludes with a written critique of writing. The six objections distinguished by her might be summarized as follows: according to Sokrates, philosophy occurs exclusively through living conversation, thoughtful questioning and responding; by contrast, writing is inert: when questioned, it dogmatically repeats itself. Zwicky argues that Plato takes Sokrates’ critique seriously, and that Phaidros is his response: an attempt to enact, through its dramatic structure, the experience of doing Sokratic philosophy. “Content and form are themselves in dialogic relation, and their tension, instead of blowing the dialogue apart, is its torqued unity, the breathless updraft at its centre that pulls the questions from us” (78).

There are two essays concerning Plato’s Symposium. Zwicky’s answer to the question asked in the title of the first one—“Why Is Diotima a Woman?”—is that Plato is a Parmenidean. Her method of argumentation here (and elsewhere) is roughly Wittgensteinian: positioning “resonant particulars to facilitate perception of their attunement,” or presenting “other texts or works or things for comparison” (11). She places Plato’s characterization of τό καλόν (beauty) beside Parmenides’ characterization of τό ὄν (being), and notices that the nature of each is essentially the same. Furthermore, in both cases, the protagonist is initiated in a feminized context by an imperious teacher. (Zwicky’s other compelling analogies I set aside for reasons of space.) If she is right, then both Plato and Parmenides view philosophy “as a practice whose culminating visions spring from a fundamentally feminine province of [the] mythworld” (236).

So, too, in Plato’s Meno: the Eleusinian Mysteries (which concern the myth of Demeter and Persephone) are offered as one source for encouraging philosophy in its confrontation with skepticism. At the heart of the Mysteries is the experience of insight, which is reflected in Plato’s own epistemology: “since it feels like seeing, it is a kind of seeing, with the mind’s eye, of non-physical Forms” (173). This experience can be facilitated, but not transmitted. In addition to the dialogue’s explicit questions—Can virtue be taught? et cetera—there is an implicit question: What is teaching? “And as soon as we notice that teaching is undefined,” writes Zwicky, “we realize that there is a difference between imparting information (‘the Greek word for fish is spelled iota psili, khi, theta, upsilon oxeia, sigma’) and assisting someone towards understanding” (171). If we assume, as Meno does, that teaching is nothing more than transmitting information, then virtue cannot be taught. However, as Cornford argued, the true conclusion—that virtue is recollectable under Sokratic questioning—is masked.

Another cluster of essays concerns the epistemological and political implications of Freudian metapsychology. Zwicky focusses on Freud’s structural distinction between primary and secondary process (prototypical of her own distinction between lyric and analysis). Very roughly, the relations among the moments of primary process are resonant, while those of secondary process are sequential. (For example, contrast the connections among the motifs in a powerful lyric poem with the links between the premises and conclusion of a valid argument.) Pace Freud, Zwicky argues that we can be aware of primary process thinking, and such thinking allows us to know things that cannot be grasped by secondary process without distortion.

This thesis is political for the following reason: if the world has more than one aspect—if it is not only a gigantic aggregate of linguistically representable objects, but also a complex and flexing ecology (in Zwicky’s image, a geodesic sphere of internally related nodes)—then insofar as our thinking becomes more epistemically amphibious, it will be more adequate to the world. What Plato and the Presocratics offer us, what primary process offers us, is not a ‘primitive’ version of our own world-view, but an alternative way of perceiving the world: a way that is responsive to ecological structure. By contrast, the culturally specific modern Western idea that the world is “only a mechanically organized collection of objects ... has resulted in vast, almost incomprehensible, damage” (260). Insofar as we remain complacent and unilingual users of such a tradition of thought, we are complicit in the conflagration of the world.

The book concludes with an unexpected coalition between analysis and lyric. For Zwicky, Platonic philosophy fundamentally involves both διαλεκτική (the method of collection and division, practised in living dialogue) and ἔλεγχος (cross-questioning, sifting the true from the false). Thus conceived, philosophy is not dissimilar from analysis. It can be used “to sharpen our perception of aspects of resonant wholes, bringing those aspects into distinct focus” (257). If the soul is such a structure, then analysis can also serve to complexify and clarify it. “And so, late in the day,” Zwicky confesses, “I find myself returning to my early training, what seemed to me at the time to be an exercise in empty eristic. What has held my gaze, without my conscious understanding, is a sensed connection between the capacity for analytic conceptual discrimination and the possibility of leading the good life” (297). When such analysis is turned on one’s own soul, it can identify the false beliefs that distort our perception and so free us from them.