McGuirk; Phenomenological Reduction, Epoche, and the Speech of Socrates in the Symposium(1).pdf

Phenomenological Reduction, Epoche , and the Speech of Socrates

The Southern Journal of Philosophy (2008) Vol. XLVI

Phenomenological Reduction, Epoche,

and the Speech of Socrates in the

Symposium

James McGuirk

Bodø University College, Norway

Abstract

The point of the present article is to investigate whether the key

conceptions of epoche and reduction as found in Husserl’s phenomenology

can be brought to bear in a fruitful rereading of the speech of Socrates

in Plato’s Symposium . 1 In pursuit of this goal, I will begin by revisiting

the traditional reading of this speech in terms of a scala amoris in

which the erotic subject is guided from attachment to a series of

inferior objects to the Beautiful and Good itself such that the value of

all preceding attachments is suspended. The critique that this approach

to love instrumentalizes all but the transcendent Good is one that is

found both within and without the text. In opposition to this reading,

however, I will suggest that Husserl’s notions of epoche and reduction

enable us to read the speech not as an instrumentalizing scala but in

terms of a reflective distance in which our immersion in and with the

erotic object is suspended so that we might reappropriate the real

meaning of erotic engagement. According to this reading, Plato does not

negate the particular or lower forms of eros but reinscribes them with

a value derived from their position in relation to the ultimate. The

suspension of the lower forms, then, is not final but is merely employed

in order to let what occurs in erotic engagement show itself.

In perhaps one of the best known commentaries on Plato’s

theory of love, Gregory Vlastos maintains that “the individual,

in the uniqueness and integrity of his or her individuality, will

never be the object of love.” 2 Thus, while Vlastos is often critical

of the rather extreme position of Anders Nygren that reads

Platonic love as purely self-serving egotism, 3 he does insist that,

James McGuirk received his PhD from the K. U. Leuven with a dis-

sertation entitled Eros and the Indictment of Philosophy (2004) which

dealt with the relationship between philosophical eros, ethics, and poli-

tics in Plato’s Symposium . He has recently published articles on the

philosophy of Nietzsche and on Heidegger’s reading of Plato. He is cur-

rently Associate Professor at the School of Professional Studies at Bodø

University College, Norway.

James McGuirk

at root, Plato’s love theory is deficient as a result of its

incapacity to recognize the value of the human other. Vlastos’s

critique has proved highly influential upon scholarship in this

area of Plato studies leading to a dominant reading in which,

for Plato, interpersonal love must be suppressed in order to

enable the relation between the soul and its true object, the

idea of the Beautiful and the Good itself. My aim in what

follows is not to entirely reject Vlastos’s reading of Plato’s love

theory in general or of the Symposium in particular. I believe

that his point about the problematic nature of interpersonal

love in Plato is not unfounded. Having said that, one of the

central planks of this critique involves a reading of the summit

of the erotic mysteries, as they are revealed to Socrates in his

reported conversation with Diotima, as a scala amoris or “ladder

of love” in which lower objects of love are replaced by higher

ones until the soul finally receives a vision of the Beautiful and

Good in itself such as reduces all previous erotic attachments to

insignificance. 4 It is my contention that this reading is overly

hasty such that it misreads the subtlety of the relation between

the Good ( to agathon ) and Beautiful in itself ( auto to kalon ) and

the lower erotic objects as they appear in Plato’s text. For Plato,

I maintain, the lower objects of erotic attachment are not so

much rejected as they are relativized in terms of the ultimate

object of love that is their ontological and epistemological

ground. In pursuit o f this point, I will employ the notions of

reduction and epoche as they are used in the phenomenology of

Edmund Husserl as tools that allow some of the nuance of

Plato’s text to emerge. As such, I will argue that what appears

at first sight to be a turning away from the lower objects of love

is in fact a reflective consideration of them as “bracketed”

phenomena.

In his critique of Platonic love theory, Vlastos draws as much

upon the Lysis and the Republic as on the Symposium itself.

Without rehearsing the whole of his argument, it suffices to

note that he finds in all of these texts a thorough subordination

of the particular to the universal in Plato’s ontology. Thus, it is

the ideas as the immutable and universal realities that act as

the ground through which particular things come to be or be

known, inasmuch as they can be known. This relation between

the universal and the particular is as much an evaluative

criterion as an ontological or epistemological one in the sense

that what is particular is only valued, if at all, through its

participation ( methexis ) in the universal. This impacts upon

interpersonal and ethical relations to the extent that, unlike

Aristotle, who recognized that when one loves another human

being truly, one wishes that other’s good for his/her own sake, 5

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Phenomenological Reduction, Epoche , and the Speech of Socrates

Plato sees the other human being as, at best, only an instrument

that leads the soul to relation with the more lasting Ideas.

Thus, while Aristotle moves, albeit only partially, toward an

appreciation of the other as person 6 or, to use Kantian terms,

an end in herself, Plato views others as mere “place-holders for

the predicates ‘useful’ and ‘beautiful’” 7 and so utterly fails to

even raise the question of the intrinsic worth of other human

beings. Nowhere is this clearer than in the apex of the speech

of Socrates in the Symposium in which he recounts the

mysteries of love that were revealed to him by a Mantinean

priestess called Diotima. Before initiating Socrates into these

mysteries, Diotima leads the young Socrates, according to the

report, to a series of insights into the meaning of eros 8 which

include (i) that Eros is not a god but an intermediary daimon

that interprets divine messages for mortals and vice versa

(202e), (ii) that he is not beautiful and wise himself (as Agathon

had claimed [197c]) but a lover of beauty and wisdom (204b)

and (iii) that erotic activity is predominantly to be thought of as

reproduction and birth in beauty (206b), which is to say that

erotic energies are activated by something other than the lover

himself, through which he (the lover) creates and so transcends

himself by immortalizing himself. As far as the objects that

activate erotic energies are concerned, these range from the

beauty of particular bodies, through the love of particular souls

to the love of institutions, laws, literature and finally to the

Beautiful itself.

In order to explain the “correct way” (210a) of engaging

these various objects of erotic attachment, Diotima leads

Socrates though the so-called ladder of love, by means of which

she explains the importance of being introduced to the ways of

love, first through attachment to the beauty of one particular

body before being lead to the realization that what is actually

prized here is the beauty of form (210b). This being the case, it

makes no sense to value one body over all others such that the

initiate will be lead to love the beauty that can be found in all

beautiful bodies. After this, the student will realize the

superiority of the beauty to be found in the goodness of minds

(210b), which outweighs bodily beauty. This turn toward the

spiritual is, at the same time, a turning away from the physical

whose value is negated. This turn to the spiritual results in a

corresponding realization of the beauty common to all beautiful

souls such that the attachment to any single beautiful soul is

loosened. Following on from this is an attachment to a more

lasting beauty such as is found in wise laws, beautiful artworks,

and so on which leads to the spontaneous, creative production of

virtuous and wise discourses. This now constitutes a second

turning toward what we may call the spiritual infinite and

away from the spiritual finite (i.e., human souls). Finally,

having proceeded through these various stages, the lover will

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James McGuirk

receive a vision of the Beautiful and Good in itself which was

“the ultimate objective of all the previous efforts” (210e).

As each stage in the “ladder of love” is reached, the previous

is apparently dismissed as worthless in the sense that erotic

focus is turned toward one object and away from what preceded

it. This includes the love that is felt for individual others such

that, as Vlastos notes, Plato fails to “make the thought of others

as subjects central to what is felt for them in love.” 9 While other

human beings are indeed loved in this ladder they are only

loved inasmuch as they possess qualities that point toward the

ideal instantiation of beauty and goodness. As such, institutions,

laws and mathematical theorems are “not only as good as

persons, but distinctly better,” 10 because these latter participate

in a purer way in ideal beauty than do humans, as either bodies

or souls. All of this seems indeed to result in an instrumentali-

zation of others in Platonic love theory in the sense that what we

tend to value about persons in our intuitions about interpersonal

love (i.e., their uniqueness) is precisely the reason they are

valued so weakly by Plato. That is to say that the particularity of

individual human beings is synonymous with the extent to

which they fail to participate in the Beautiful as such to the

point that attachment to the individual is understood as a

distraction from the soul’s true terminus.

One critic, Martha Nussbaum, has claimed that this problem is

not unknown to Plato and is raised more or less explicitly in the

speech that follows Socrates’ own. 11 In her attention to the

speech of Alcibiades, Nussbaum takes a strong position on the

hermeneutic question as to the extent to which the character of

Socrates can be taken as a spokesman for Plato’s own view. She

rejects this as an unequivocal thesis, at least in the case of the

Symposium , such that she reads the Socratic scala amoris , not

as Plato’s final word on the question of eros, but as a possible

choice in the context of the pursuit of the good life. 12 The speech

of Alcibiades offers an alternate choice to be sure, but, more

importantly, it offers a searching critique of the temptation

toward a flight from the embodied condition of humanity

represented by the Socratic understanding of human love.

Alcibiades is an eminently suitable mouthpiece for such a

critique of Socrates if Plato really intends the dialogue to be read

as Nussbaum suggests. As a figure of note in contemporary

Athens, his personal history would have been well known to

Plato’s readers. So too would his connection with Socrates. 13 In

his topsy-turvy relationship with his fellow citizens, Alcibiades

was a man who was hated as much as he was loved. 14 He proved

ultimately to be a destructive force in the Peloponnesian War

from the Athenian point of view and was implicated in several

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Phenomenological Reduction, Epoche , and the Speech of Socrates

sacrilegious acts that finally lead to his virtual banishment from

Athens in 411 BC . 15 The fact that he was a former lover 16 and

student of Socrates would not have gone unnoticed by those who

brought the charges of corruption and blasphemy that ultimately

lead to the death of Socrates. It was most likely suspected that

Alcibiades hubris was in some way the result of the teachings of

Socrates. According to Nussbaum, by contrast, Alcibiades’ conduct

is, at least partially, traceable to the fact that he could not follow

the teachings of Socrates in relation to the good life.

In the speech itself, Alcibiades movingly recounts his

passionate attachment to the unrepeatable individual that is

Socrates as well as the latter’s cruel rejection of him as lover

(218e–219a). He (Alcibiades) recalls that while Socrates inspired

him to be “as good a person as possible” (216a), he (Socrates)

also selfishly guarded his wisdom in refusing to trade its gold

for the bronze of Alcibiades’ beauty (219a). As much as Alcibiades

struggles to express the wonder of Socrates’ character (217e–

218a), he also indicts him for his dismissive attitude toward

others (216d–e). He tells of Socrates’ lack of fellow feeling or

sympathy for the incarnate fragility of others. He presents us

with the oddity of Socrates’ character and his apparent discon-

nection from his own body. This is displayed in Socrates’ various

feats of superhuman endurance during wartime (219e–221c).

Socrates dresses the same way, winter or summer and while he

eats and drinks when food and drink is available, he never gets

drunk and nor does the lack of food appear to bother him. In

highlighting these eccentricities, Alcibiades seems to want to

make the point that part of what it means to be human is to be

incarnate so that our bodies are a crucial part of our identity as

human. But this means also to be vulnerable and capable of

suffering as a bodied thing. We suffer both from the elements

and also from one another. That we can be so deeply affected in

our embodiment by what is other entails a fragility that

suggests that we are not sovereign regarding exteriority in any

of its guises. Yet Socrates seems no longer capable of such

suffering and this throws doubt over his vulnerability and

therefore over his very humanity.

For Alcibiades, the stance of Socrates as lover is no more

than a pose that enables him to toy with others for his own

amusement. He has become entirely self-sufficient and self-

enclosed in his pursuit of wisdom, which suggests that he has

perhaps completed the erotic ascent described by Diotima. More

importantly, this suggests that this kind of self-sufficiency was

the hidden meaning of eros from the Socratic/Diotiman point of

view. From his lofty position, Socrates does not need human

intimacy and in fact is contemptuous of those who do since it

entails an attachment to the flesh and the mortal that has been

utterly subordinated in his own pursuit of philosophic wisdom

and beauty.

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