This is the second installment of “Power and Pleasure at the Dinner Table.” Click here to find part 1, “An Invitation.”
Our first stop is a party table, in Athens around 400ish BCE, as described in Plato’s dialogue Symposium.[1] Socrates, perhaps the quintessential philosopher, and friends are celebrating the poet Agathon, who has won a contest as part of the Lenaian Festival. The friends are drunk. Although I refer to this scene as ‘a dinner party,’ the term “symposium” better translates to “drinking together.” Such parties would have food, but mostly drink. There would be musical and sexual forms of entertainment from women flute players. For Socrates and friends, being hungover from the previous night’s revelries, they forgo musical entertainment and, instead, take turns making speeches in praise of erotic love.
I love Symposium’s celebration of philosophy as something done with others in a private space, and that philosophy can be fun and boisterous. Though, I usually recommend some degree of sobriety to facilitate good philosophical reflection! By turning away from popular entertainment (i.e., alcohol, food, and music) Socrates and friends affirm that thinking can be just as pleasurable. Maybe, even, more pleasurable than sex!
Yet this affirmation is also a rejection of the body.
Philosophy’s towering early figure [that is, Socrates] thus bequeathed his successors a triple exclusion: banquets without food, men without women, and love without the body. (p. 11)
Socrates’ legacy is not only significant for the history of philosophy. It is also counter-cultural in his own time. Perhaps the exclusion of women is not counter-cultural, as same-sex relations were an accepted part of Greek society. Wealthy young men were often mentored by older men, and these relationships involved sexual activity. But many of the speeches in Symposium do praise same-sex attraction, something which our society could celebrate more. What is counter-cultural is the rejection of embodied pleasures. I want to reject this the aspect of Socrates’ legacy.
Erotic love is about desire, a longing for what one doesn’t possess. Through the various speeches, the depiction of eros that emerges becomes more abstract. In Socrates’ contribution, physical desire is only a stepping stone toward what real love is. Through the figure of the teacher Diotima (a woman), Socrates shows how desire for a particular beautiful physical body facilitates more virtuous forms of love and desire, that is, for knowledge, truth, and beauty (210A-B).
Diotima’s message that love of wisdom is the highest form of eros, from Socrates’ speech, is reinforced at the party when the handsome Alcibiades comes late. Alcibiades is hot for Socrates, who rejects his advances. According to Socrates, Alcibiades only brings physical beauty to the table. Worse, Socrates chastises him for being a poor philosopher because Alcibiades has not rid himself of physical desire.
But Socrates’ estimation of Alcibiades as a bad philosopher isn’t quite fair.
Following philosopher Donna-Dale Marcano (2012), I want to explore how Alcibiades’ lust enhances his philosophical abilities. Marcano describes Alcibiades’ quest for knowledge in this way:
In his desperation to become the best man he can be, Alcibiades offers his body, his mind, his belongings to Socrates in the hopes that this lover and teacher of wisdom would help him. (p. 228)
As Marcano emphasizes, Alcibiades yearns for Socrates not just as a lover but also as a teacher who can help him become wise (218D). Marcano’s use of the term “desperation” captures the intensity of the experience, which Alcibiades likens to a snake’s bite:
You know what people say about snakebite—that you’ll only talk about it with your fellow victims: only they will understand the pain and forgive you for all the things it made you do. Well, something much more painful than a snake has bitten me in my most sensitive part—I mean my heart, or my soul, or whatever else you call it, which has been struck and bitten by philosophy, whose grip on young and eager souls is more vicious than a viper’s and makes them do the most amazing things. (218A)
In Plato’s Symposium, Alcibiades describes his passion for philosophy as a snake bite. Art by Hank Graves.
As this quotation demonstrates, for Alcibiades, embodied and intellectual desire are inextricably connected. He loves Socrates, who is notoriously depicted as unattractive, because Socrates is a great philosopher.
According to Marcano, Alcibiades’ desire for relationality is unappreciated by Socrates.
Alcibiades desires a loving relationship, not just to be a lover. Socrates lives up to Alcibiades’ description of him as a man like no other. But this is not necessarily a compliment. In rejecting relationship, Socrates also rejects something fundamental about being human, that is, reciprocity and relationship. Socrates, the exceptional philosopher and exceptional man, is exceptional because he exhibits in-humanness.
Socrates’ rejection of Alcibiades can be extended to the marginalization of desire and embodied feeling as relevant for philosophical thinking. On Marcano’s account, philosophy fails Alcibiades because he thinks differently from the status quo. Part of what motivates Marcano’s rehabilitation of Alcibiades is that his marginalization seems to mirror ways in which Black women have been excluded from philosophy.
For Socrates, truth and wisdom are universal and abstracted from everyday particularities. However, abstraction can operate as a form of erasure. As Marcano states, Black women “are particularly situated in our desires, in our communities, in or race, in our genders, in our loves” (232). In a similar vein, Audre Lorde (2007/1984) situates eros as a form of knowledge expressed relationally. Further, eros can be expressed in both embodied action, such as dance, as well as in language. If philosophy maintains an emphasis on abstract reflection and universal generalities, then Black women’s experiences won’t be interpreted as yielding philosophical knowledge.
I want to follow Marcano in viewing, philosophy as embracing embodied desires, as part of being wise.
This reclamation of desire isn’t just about philosophy as a discipline, but about philosophical thinking as something we all do. Alcibiades describes being bitten in the heart or the soul. What might change about our reading of this passage if we replace Alcibiades’ mention of being bitten in the heart or the soul with hunger pains in our stomachs?
Starting with the gut rejects a separation of mind from body. According to Boisvert, “The stomach serves as a constant reminder of interaction rather than isolation” (60). It centers philosophy as something that unfolds in a dynamic, interconnected set of relations. Alcibiades hungers for philosophy, but needs help in meeting that need. This hunger, and the need of others to help meet it, brings us to our second scene, at the community table.
