Scholars have long debated the interpersonal dynamics that characterize Platonic dialectic. Dialectic and its literary rendition—οἱ Σωκρατικοὶ λόγοι, propounded primarily by Plato and Xenophon—in turn have become metonymic with Socrates’s pedagogy. Pure didacticism, however, does not fully explain Socrates’s preference for dialogue, and the dichotomy between teacher and student does not sufficiently summarize the bond that forms between Socrates and his interlocutors. For many critics, eroticism pervades the Platonic dialectical partnership. Often the dialogue’s participants mirror the traditional pederastic relationship—continually consummated by the sexual gratification of the aged ἐραστής through the youthful έρώενος. Yet, the attitudes that Plato’s characters adopt in conversation do not conveniently map onto the dominant portrayal of pederasty. David M. Halperin theorized the way that Plato appropriated the conventional model to represent an ascetic philosophical relationship, first initialized by the erotic gaze but spiritually equalized through a common pursuit of wisdom.[1] Eschatological content, as well, litters the Platonic dialogues. Previously, critics prioritized rationalism to interpret Plato. Within the text, they subordinated the value of religious belief to Socrates’s own method of cross-examination. In contrast, some recent scholars, such as John Bussanich, have sought to forefront Socrates’s faith and his identity as a pseudo-diviner in analysis of the dialectic.[2] As can be seen, the social and metaphysical ideologies which motivate Platonic characters prevent an entirely rationalist view of Socrates’s instruction and the seemingly egalitarian exchange of question and answer.
This essay seeks to examine how the particular dramatis personae of Plato’s Alcibiades I epitomize the social and pedagogical conflict inherent in the dialectic. Immanent celebrity, represented by a select few, contends against transcendent divinity, channelled in all. The diegetic occasion of Plato’s Alcibiades represents the meeting of Classical Athens’s most infamous symbols: Socrates, who wished to restrain the “freedom ethos” of the imperial democracy, and Alcibiades, who perhaps embodied that ethos to the point of the city’s destruction.[3] Dramatic irony haunts the Alcibiades, in which two historically doomed characters—whose association the πόλις in some way disavowed—strive in earnest to better serve the city and take care of themselves. In its anticipation of failure, the Alcibiades shines a light on the success of Socrates’s teachings. Because Socrates approaches Alcibiades at such a formative period of life, Plato implies that Socrates maintains partial responsibility for the degeneration of Alcibiades’s character. He draws a thematic through-line between Socrates’s pedagogical method and the trajectory of Alcibiades’s political career. In a shocking move, Plato in the Alcibiades puts Socrates’s philosophical agenda in close proximity with the symbolic representation of the fall of Classical Athens.
Rather than attribute blame to one party or the other, however, this essay aims to uncover the external forces that disrupt the joint process of dialectic. I argue that Socrates isolates an ideal when he promotes διάλογος but that the soul struggles to conceive of certain divine entanglements and realities. I aim to reframe the premonition at the heart of the Alcibiades vis-à-vis the irrational notions that impede the greater metaphysical project surrounding Platonic dialectic. The mixture of divinity and humanity, mistaken on Earth for celebrity, clouds realization of dialectical, pedagogical, and philosophical agency in such a way that stunts both Socrates’s and Alcibiades’s participation in true dialectic.
Near the end of the dialogue, Socrates roots all knowledge in the attainment of self-knowledge, discovered primarily through dialectic. Similar to the way that an eye can look into another eye and perceive the best part of itself exercising sight, Socrates suggests that two souls can interact to recognize themselves and their capability for reason.[4] He claims:
ἆρ᾽ οὖν, ὅθ᾽ ὥσπερ κάτοπτρά ἐστι σαφέστερα τοῦ ἐν τῷ ὀφθαλμῷ ἐνόπτρου καὶ καθαρώτερα καὶ λαμπρότερα, οὕτω καὶ ὁ θεὸς τοῦ ἐν τῇ ἡμετέρᾳ ψυχῇ βελτίστου καθαρώτερόν τε καὶ λαμπρότερον τυγχάνει ὄν;[5]
Despite the fact that the figurative argument falls somewhat flat—the image of two eyes gazing into each other does not appear analogous to the self-identification of two souls—Plato has prepared readers to accept the core of his epistemology. Already Socrates and Alcibiades have agreed that their souls represent their relative persons.[6] Just as Socrates uses this fact to separate lovers of Alcibiades’s soul (and thus Alcibiades himself) from lovers of Alcibiades’s body alone, the equivalence between soul and self brings new meaning to the dialogue’s actual participants:
Σ. ἔχε οὖν πρὸς Διός. τῷ διαλέγῃ σὺ νῦν; ἄλλο τι ἢ ἐμοί;
A. ναί.
…
Σ. οὐκοῦν λόγῳ διαλέγεται ὁ Σωκράτης;
Σ. τὸ δὲ διαλέγεσθαι καὶ τὸ λόγῳ χρῆσθαι ταὐτόν που καλεῖς.[7]
In retrospect, we understand the dialectic as a conversation between Socrates’s and Alcibiades’s souls, which encompass reason and the body, including the eyes. To engage in dialectic, their souls manipulate reason just as, to produce a shoe, a cobbler manipulates a knife.[8]
Interestingly, these admissions all follow Socrates’s brief mention of αὐτὸ τὸ αὐτό, Plato’s common phraseology for the Forms.[9] Immediately after Socrates gestures to the divine Forms, he directs the dialogue downwards, towards piecemeal reasoning based around the soul. Although Plato fails to convince his audience with the metaphor of the seeing eye, the movement of the text itself exemplifies the intellectual discovery that occurs between two souls. Whether Alcibiades fully internalizes the analogy between eye and soul, he does not say, but he does clearly externalize the argument. His soul recognizes that of Socrates so as to constitute change. After Socrates has followed him for years, at times to Alcibiades’s chagrin, Alcibiades finally accepts Socrates’s love and begs him not to leave.[10] Seemingly, reasoning has brought out an epiphany in Alcibiades—or at least a change of heart. Throughout the dialogue, Socrates’s and Alcibiades’s souls have wielded logic to “see” each other. The act of admission and concession typifies the realization of one’s reasoning—oneself—upon another.
Despite the fact that Socrates and Alcibiades make significant progress according to dialectic, their relation to divinity remains a logical quandary upon which they are unable to reconcile. From the onset of the dialogue, Socrates presents divinity in an enigmatic manner. He attributes an “inhuman” cause to his evasion of Alcibiades throughout the years, namely a “δαιμόνιον” obstacle.[11] Later, the “δαιμόνιον” comes to refer to a god, a θεός, that prevented Socrates from approaching Alcibiades before the appropriate time.[12] Much of Socrates’s soteriological contribution relies on this god, so much so that he makes sure to correct Alcibiades again in the final section of dialogue: Alcibiades will be able to flee his current situation not if Socrates desires it, but if the god wills it.[13] Through this godly figure, a third self intrudes the narrative and derails the dialectical plot. Socrates arrives before Alcibiades not as another human struggling to understand the world but as an ambassador of the divine. To this tertiary figure, Socrates credits the true source of epiphany.[14] Because Alcibiades—that is, Alcibiades’s soul—cannot comprehend a fully divine presence, he writes Socrates’s claim off as a joke:
Σ. θεός, ὦ Ἀλκιβιάδη, ὅσπερ σοί με οὐκ εἴα πρὸ τῆσδε τῆς ἡμέρας διαλεχθῆναι: ᾧ καὶ πιστεύων λέγω ὅτι ἡ ἐπιφάνεια δι᾽ οὐδενὸς ἄλλου σοι ἔσται ἢ δι᾽ ἐμοῦ.
Plato’s epistemology follows: when one soul engages with another soul or something like it, the soul contemplates something divine to grasp a sense of its wisdom.[16] What may serve as “similar” to the soul or the best of the soul—as indicated by the phrase “ᾧ τοῦτο τυγχάνει ὅμοιον ὄν”—remains fairly ambiguous.[17] However, Socrates and Alcibiades come to the agreement that the soul makes up what a “man” is. Accordingly, only two humans or humanoids who engage together in dialectic can achieve self-knowledge. Plato does not address whether it is the divine’s presence as a third interlocutor that causes the dialectical imbalance or whether the issue stems from the presence of divinity in-and-of-itself. Surely, unless the divinity of this godly subject resonates with the divinity inherent in the human soul, self-knowledge cannot occur. Whereas Plato outlines a path toward knowledge that culminates in the understanding of transcendent, otherworldly being, the temporary devolution of the Alcibiades into humor and Alcibiades’s own error in reasoning at the dialogue’s conclusion point towards an interruption in the dialectical process around the topic of the divine. The topic of the divine halts intellectual exchange.
Additionally to the dialectic’s disadvantage, divinity does not simply hover over earthly affairs but mixes its substance among human agents. Godliness potentially rests within every human soul; meanwhile, some humans can directly channel the gods.[18] In the case of Socrates, he exhibits both qualities: he acknowledges his own innate godliness and acts on the voice of his δαιμόνιον. John Bussanich in “Socrates and Religious Experience” addresses this latter power. In consideration of the future charge against Socrates of impiety, Bussanich plants the δαιμόνιον’s influence at the center of Socrates’s philosophical activity in order to portray his occasionally belligerent rationalism as an act of practical piety.[19] Among the various faithful attitudes Socrates demonstrates towards the divine, he routinely serves as a μάντις or prophet figure. Day to day, Socrates lives according to and proclaims his δαιμόνιον, “itself a sign of Apollo.”[20] Clearly, this mundane display of divinity must have been rare, due to the accusations Socrates later amassed. The particularity notwithstanding, Socrates displays an individual’s ability both to possess aspects of divinity intrinsically and to incorporate other outside sources of divinity into one’s behavior.
Within the Alcibiades, Plato takes to task Socrates’s propensity for “prophecy.” In a very bizarre statement, Socrates forwards his particular divine connection. He embeds several preconditions to his and Alcibiades’s betterment: “ἀποκρίνεσθαι τὰ ἐρωτώμενα, ὦ Ἀλκιβιάδη: καὶ ἐὰν τοῦτο ποιῇς, ἂν θεὸς ἐθέλῃ, εἴ τι δεῖ καὶ τῇ ἐμῇ μαντείᾳ πιστεύειν, σύ τε κἀγὼ βέλτιον σχήσομεν.”[21] Α future-more-vivid conditional presages some success for the task before Socrates and Alcibiades; nevertheless, the reality of “becoming better” is stipulated by three simultaneous protases. Again, the tertiary character of Socrates’s god appears, just before Socrates suggests that Alcibiades trust in his “μαντείᾳ.”[22] Without a serial connective καί or other indicators of syntax, the sentence does not effectively communicate whether trust in Socrates’s prophecy acts primarily as a third premise that will ensure his and Alcibiades’s ability to grow or whether Socrates inserts this trust as an aside, subordinate to the will of his god. Regardless, a paradox arises: Socrates constructs a prophecy for the two of them, which requires as a central component that Alcibiades believe in his prophecy. On the one hand, divine will denies Alcibiades or Socrates agency in their own destinies; on the other, Socrates’s relation to prophecy further divides them as intellectual partners. Given the three protases that maintain the conditional and the nearly inscrutable statement about an investment in prophecy, Plato depicts Alcibiades as unlikely to become better. Here, divinity does not obtrude the course of dialectic per se; but rather, the mention of divinity leads one to view the dialectical project in a fatalist light. At least, in the case of Alcibiades, he perhaps stumbles upon the right philosophical method, but he does so in conversation with someone whose relationship to the divine presents additional challenges to the realization of soul-to-soul connection. If Alcibiades discovers the right pedagogical tools at the right time, he perhaps settles upon the wrong person with whom to engage in dialectic.
Certainly, the notion of Socrates’s “wrongness” as a dialectical partner does not stem from any intrinsic quality or from his regular communication with his δαιμόνιον. Instead, Socrates’s particular communion with the divine results in a misinterpretation of personality. Such misattribution, figured as celebrity, drives the dialectic towards an impasse. No longer does the soul view itself in something like; celebrity perhaps represents an imitation of the soul, an unlike proportion of the lowly to the divine. To shape this argument, this essay turns to Plato’s Symposium and C.D.C. Reeve’s “A Study in Violets.” Reeve contemplates Alcibiades’s speech in the Symposium in the greater context of Plato’s metaphysical philosophy. He gives special attention to the word agalmata, used in Alcibiades’s speech to give some idea of Socrates’s exceptionalism.[23] Unlike any other man Alcibiades has met before, Socrates teems within with “statues” of virtue.[24] Reeve links agalmata to the unique mission of the philosopher to contemplate as well as imitate the Forms:
For an agalma originally had no “relation whatsoever to the idea of resemblance or imitation, of figural representation in the strict sense.” Instead, it was something the aim of which was “to construct a bridge, as it were,” that would reach “toward the divine.” Yet “at the same time and in the same figure,” it had to “mark its distance from that domain in relation to the human world.” It had to make the divine power present, yet it had also to emphasize “what is inaccessible and mysterious in divinity, its alien quality, its otherness” (Vernant 1991:152–153). Like what is in a Platonic philosopher for another, agalmata are a bridge to something else—an image for what is itself necessarily beyond images (Symposium 212a4–5).[25]
Evidently, Socrates’s possession of agalmata—loosely from Reeve, a bridge to the divine—does not characterize Socrates as a distinct individual but all Platonic philosophers. Reeve reiterates: “It isn’t Socrates we should be interested in, but philosophy and the forms [sic].”[26] Because Socrates seldom discusses αὐτὸ τὸ αὐτό, his interlocutors learn to correlate allusions to divinity with Socrates’s own person. This development of celebrity irrevocably alters the dialectic, apparent in the Alcibiades. When Socrates asks Alcibiades to clarify if what is just and what is profitable are the same or different, Alcibiades admits that he does not know if he can go through his argument before or “πρός” Socrates.[27] Alcibiades may adopt an abashed tone for a number of reasons. According to the rules of the erotic chase, he may be “playing coy”; Socrates’s pedagogical methods may intimidate him on an intellectual level; or Socrates’s pedagogical methods may intimidate him because of who he thinks Socrates is. The text maintains some ambiguity, although “πρός” conveys a sense of Socrates’s gaze upon Alcibiades as he chooses his next words. For another example, we might turn once more to Alcibiades’s misnomer near the end of the dialogue:
Σ. οἶσθ᾽ οὖν πῶς ἀποφεύξῃ τοῦτο τὸ περὶ σὲ νῦν; ἵνα μὴ ὀνομάζωμεν αὐτὸ ἐπὶ καλῷ ἀνδρί,
A. ἔγωγε.
Σ. οὐ καλῶς λέγεις, ὦ Ἀλκιβιάδη.
Alcibiades mistakenly supplies Socrates and his individual desire in the place of a god and the will of that god. He encapsulates all promise of salvation upon Socrates. In an apparent Freudian slip, Alcibiades exposes that he has not digested what the dialectic has sought to uncover. While he exhibits an improved ability to converse in the style of dialectic, some obstacle, likely his lionization of Socrates and Socrates’s intellect, has prevented his metaphysical development. Insofaras Socrates introduces Alcibiades to a new intellectual model, Alcibiades remains fairly receptive. By the time that that intellectual model assumes metaphysical significance, however, Alcibiades, to no great individual fault, struggles to process the notion of divinity.
Plato’s Alcibiades I presents itself as a metafiction, an interrogation of the Platonic dialectic itself. Two cultural giants animate the dialogue and infect its progression with symbolism. With such resonant literary figures, Plato exaggerates the interpersonal and metaphysical struggles that emerge within the dialectic. At the crux of the Alcibiades, the higher teleology of the Forms and the multiple access to the divine plane plague the human partnership. Plato constructs a tragic construction, in which humankind forever aspires to reunite their rational parts with the irrational divine. Beyond their historical persons, Socrates and Alcibiades embody an eternal struggle to covet past what reality offers.
Works Cited
Bussanich, John. “Socrates and Religious Experience.” A Companion to Socrates, Edited by Sara Ahbel-Rappe and Rachana Kamtekar. Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2006.
Forde, Steven. “The Alcibidean Moment.” The Ambition to Rule. Cornell University Press, 2019.
Halperin, David M. “Plato and Erotic Reciprocity.” Classical Antiquity 5, no. 1, (April 1986), 60–80.
Kraut, Richard. “The defense of justice in Plato’s Republic.” The Cambridge Companion to Plato. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992, 311–37.
Plato. Alcibiades I. Platonis Opera. Edited by John Burne. Oxford University Press, 1903, https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Plat.+Alc.+1+133&fromdoc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0175.
C.D.C. Reeve. “A Study in Violets: Alcibiades in the Symposium.” Edited by Lesher et al. Plato’s Symposium : Issues in Interpretation and Reception. Washington, DC: Center for Hellenic Studies, Trustees for Harvard University, 2006.
[1] David M. Halperin, “Plato and Erotic Reciprocity,” Classical Antiquity 5, no. 1, (April 1986).
[2] John Bussanich, “Socrates and Religious Experience,” A Companion to Socrates, ed. Sara Ahbel-Rappe and Rachana Kamtekar, (Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2006), 200–13.
[3] A representation of the late Classical Athenians as “lovers of freedom” comes primarily from Steven Forde and Richard Kraut. (Steven Forde, “The Alcibidean Moment,” The Ambition to Rule, (Cornell University Press, 2019); Richard Kraut, “The defense of justice in Plato’s Republic, The Cambridge Companion to Plato, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 325–9.)
[4] Plato, Alcibiades I, 133b2–5, Platonis Opera, ed. John Burne, (Oxford University Press, 1903), https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Plat.+Alc.+1+133&fromdoc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0175.
[5] Plato, Alcibiades I, 133b7–10.
[6] Plato, Alcibiades I, 130c1–4.
[7] Plato, Alcibiades I, 129b5–c2.
[8] Plato, Alcibiades I, 129c7.
[9] Plato, Alcibiades I, 129b1–3.
[10] Plato, Alcibiades I, 104d3–5, 131d4–6.
[11] Plato, Alcibiades I, 103a5–6.
[12] Plato, Alcibiades I, 105d1–106a1.
[13] Plato, Alcibiades I, 135c10–d6.
[14] Indeed, the word “ἐπιφάνεια” may evolve a double meaning within a divine reading of the dialogue. Strictly speaking, Socrates promises Alcibiades “fame,” but, given his affinity for prophecy, he may portend some greater realization or manifestation.
[15] Plato, Alcibiades I, 124c9–d1.
[16] Plato, Alcibiades I, 133c4–6.
[17] Plato, Alcibiades I, 133b10.
[18] Plato, Alcibiades I, 133c5.
[19] John Bussanich, “Socrates and Religious Experience,” A Companion to Socrates, ed. Sara Ahbel-Rappe and Rachana Kamtekar, (Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2006), 200–1.
[20] John Bussanich, “Socrates and Religious Experience,” 203.
[21] Plato, Alcibiades I, 127e4–6.
[22] Plato, Alcibiades I, 127e5.
[23] C.D.C. Reeve, “A Study in Violets: Alcibiades in the Symposium,” ed. Lesher et al, Plato’s Symposium : Issues in Interpretation and Reception, (Washington, DC: Center for Hellenic Studies, Trustees for Harvard University, 2006).
[24] C.D.C. Reeve, “A Study in Violets: Alcibiades in the Symposium.”
[25] C.D.C. Reeve, “A Study in Violets: Alcibiades in the Symposium.”
[26] C.D.C. Reeve, “A Study in Violets: Alcibiades in the Symposium.”
[27] Plato, Alcibiades I, 114b4–5.
[28] Plato, Alcibiades I, 135c10–d6.