Prolegomena (Dec 2003)
Image and Truth: On Plato’s Symposium
Abstract
The article explores the relation of Plato’s criticism of poetry in Politeia to a seemingly unusual fact that one of his most important dialogues the Symposium is essentially a poetic work, and not a philosophical one. The analysis and the interpretation of the dialogue’s content show that philosophy is concealed in it, that is, presented in its absence. Socratic dialogue-dialectical mode of argumentation constitutes only a transitory episode in the totality of the work, whereas the rest of the content is on the one hand dedicated to a pre-philosophical discourse, embodied in the speeches of all Socrates’s predecesors, and on the other in Diotima’s speech, which greatly surpasses and overcomes discoursive possibilities of philosophy. The Symposium then makes the inner tension as well as harmonious afinity of poetry and phi- losophy obvious in a poetic manner. Even though they both aspire to that which is divine, poetry aims at that which is in itself organized and adjusted, and which is, just like poetry, always an presentation of the highest divine beauty, while philosophy aims at that which is good, that is, at openness and freedom in which that which exists manifests itself in all its truth.
