LOVE AND CULTURE 

by W. B. Macomber

The symbol of love on his symbol of love: love incarnate; the legends surrounding Alcibiades; his Grand Entrance; why is Socrates buzzing around the roses?; Socrates begs Agathon to "defend" him; Alcibiades (or Plato) makes love in public; Socrates is a silenus; he is a Marsyas, skinned alive by Apollo, god of discipline and individuation; Apollonian structure and Dionysian spirit; the power and limit of words and emergent individuality; Socrates' patriotism and sensuality, pedagogy and pederasty; Marsyas as multi-lingual; why Socrates resists Alcibiades' advances; how Alcibiades has misunderstood; the notion of love and society as an exchange; whether Socrates is the sole beneficiary of his own activity; how the professor and student need one another to fulfill their destiny; Alcibiades as a springboard to dreaming; how he finally triumphs over Socrates—a perfect pin; whether there is any hope for this sort of thing nowadays.

Alcibiades is the love symbol of all Athens, like Marilyn Monroe or Brigitte Bardot nowadays. He's also the Grand Entrance cat—on a par with Raymond Duchamp-Villon, Salvador Dali, and Sammy Davis Jr. Like Socrates he became a legend in his own lifetime, and inspired an immense literature for half a century after his death. Plutarch still revels in the anecdotes surrounding him years later.

Here's one. Eryximachus was once giving a small, exclusive dinner party at which he unveiled for the first time a complete dinner service in gold. Into the gatherings bursts Alcibiades, unannounced, doubtless much in the way he does in the Symposium—everything comes to a halt and he's the absolute center of attention. He can't stay, banters a bit with the assembled guests, admires the gleaming cups and plates, and, calling for a  bag, proceeds to gather up half of them—admiring each piece, as I imagine, before he drops it in the bag—and splits. The guests are incensed. What an outrage! Unerhort! Unverschamt! But their host replies, "Oh, he's not so bad. He might have taken it all, you know!" Eryximachus knows what he's doing. He lunges for Greek immortality with that remark, hitching his wagon to Alcibiades as much as Boswell hitched his to Johnson. He knew men would tell that story for centuries, and at half his gold service, it was a steal!

Such was the legend of Alcibiades. There are dozens of stories like this in Plutarch, like a Profile in The New Yorker, until he's grown up and goes into politics (the “reality game”), when the biography becomes uninteresting. For the ancients Alcibiades represented the man who lives utterly for himself, like Machiavelli for the Renaissance—for whom nothing is sacred. Plutarch contrasts him with the Roman Coriolanus, who lives for duty. Alcibiades was never troubled by the Categorical Imperative.

Alcibiades' fate is strangely parallel to Socrates'. He awakens the same animosity and hatred as the shadow side of his popularity. God, how they all crave to bring Alcibiades down! Like Mr. Oscar Wilde! Like Easy Rider! He's accused of defacing statues of the gods as Socrates is accused of undermining the notion. And he too is framed, convicted on "eye witness testimony" of a deed alleged to have been committed on an evening when there was no moon. Still, Alcibiades doesn't go Socrates' way, despite the fact that he looks on him as the most interesting and fascinating man in the world. That's when his life becomes uninteresting. I couldn't get through Plutarch's entire account, much as I hung on every word in the first ten pages.

Socrates has just finished his remarks and taken his seat when there's a loud pounding at the outer door, followed by the sound of a flute and festive brawling in the street. Agathon dispatches a servant to see who it is, and a moment later Alcibiades appears, propped up by a flute girl and a couple of his followers, his head crowned with an enormous wreath of ivy and violets and a mass of ribbons, followed by a troupe of revelers.

At once he's the absolute center of attention, as he always is. He takes his place at the very head of the table, between Agathon and Socrates (whom he feigns at first not to notice), and proceeds to crown Agathon, playing the role of Dionysus, the figure of youth and drunkenness and revelry. All the preceding speeches, including Socrates', are swept away, like so much dry theory in the face of bursting life. Alcibiades is Anacreon's ultimate  judge, the finest flower of Athenian youth.

Then he notices Socrates. He leaps up from his seat and cries,

Well I'll be damned! You again, Socrates! So you're up to your old game of lying in wait and popping out at me when I least expect you! What are you up to tonight? Why are you sitting here, and not by Aristophanes or one of those other wits? Why do you always have to latch onto the handsomest man in the room?

It's a good question. Why isn't Socrates honing his mind with equals instead of pursuing youthful beauty—the "old lecher with a love on every wind"! It’s a Pausanian question. What's Socrates after, what does he have in mind?

Socrates is being ironical when he begs Agathon for protection.

So I hope you'll keep an eye on him, in case he tries to do me an injury. If he gets violent, you'll really have to protect me—for I shudder to think what lengths he may go to in his amorous transports!

Alcibiades could handle Agathon with one hand, while giving his full attention to something else. And Socrates needs no protection as we learn from Alcibiades' speech. Nobody takes on Socrates: "You could see from half a mile away that if you tackled him you'd get as good as you gave." That's what I call, with Wittgenstein, metaphysics at the surface; you can see Socrates' power. At any rate, the two most exciting figures of Athens cavort before the assembled company, playing the role of jealous lovers, making love in public. Old Pausanias is squirming in his chair.

There follows one of the great love-speeches of all time, Plato making love to his master, Socrates. It shows that Plato is not simply the greatest theoretician of love (for there he has virtually no competition) but, along with John Donne, William Shakespeare and William Butler Yeats, one of the great lovers of all-time. Seven years ago, when I first began teaching the Symposium, I presented the dialogue as six speeches on love and a postlude. How absurd, even purely a priori! Of course, seven speeches on love. This is the love-image of all Athens eulogizing his image of love, a study of love in concreto, of love incarnate, Plato's portrait of Socrates. In this sense it's the most important speech of the dialogue, as though we were to hear six speeches on Christian love followed by an intimate account of Christ.

Socrates, Alcibiades begins, is a silenus, or satyr. Starting right at the surface: he looks like one, “a little pot-bellied old man, with a snub nose,” as my EB tells me, the son of Pan, and “companion and nurse to Dionysus.” We're already beginning to get into the answer to Alcibiades' question.

Socrates is Marsyas, Alcibiades says. Marsyas is a figure in Greek mythology who plays the flute so well that he falls prey to hybris and challenges the god Apollo to a duel, a Darwinian “contest of song.” Apollo wins the competition because he plays the lyre and can therefore play and sing at the same time, turning Marsyas' thing into something like accompaniment. As the prize of his victory, Apollo has Marsyas skinned alive.

It's a gory story at the end, but we shouldn't be put off by it. Freud teaches us to distinguish between the manifest dream-image and the latent dream-image—which are likely to be almost polar opposites. This is a very groovy myth. Being skinned alive is shedding the barrier which separates us from the rest of the world, and imprisons us in isolation. I believe it's a sense of isolation that man has longed to escape, as he dreamed of release from the body. For the body is the incommunicable: the aching tooth or the feeling in the pit of your stomach or the feeling you have when you become sexually excited. We can't share these things; we can't even properly express them. When we do express them, it's typically by facial expression rather than by words. Ecstasy is getting out of yourself, outside the body, "bombing out." Being skinned alive, understood symbolically, is releasing the butterfly from the suit of armor.

In The Birth of Tragedy Nietzsche contrasts two poles of human life, which he calls the Apollonian and the Dionysian. Apollo is the god of discipline, self-control, and individuation, Dionysus the god of drunkenness and transport. It's the difference between dreaming and drunkenness. When we dream, we turn off the outer world and sink into ourselves; when we're drunk, we become nothing but a response to external stimuli. The young Nietzsche sees the Apollonian and Dionysian dimensions of our being at war; an excess of the Apollonian in western man's life has crippled him and made him ill. But the mature Nietzsche comes more and more to see that his two great protagonists are secretly in league. The more discipline and self-control, the greater the possibility of transport.

Apollonian structure increases Dionysian spirit, like battening down steam-pressure or pruning back trees. The Greeks were onto this in the myth of Marsyas. Marsyas is a Dionysian figure of ecstasy and transport, being skinned alive, and it's Apollo, the god of discipline and control, who does it. The pattern applies perfectly to Socrates. With his immense discipline and self-control, especially with words, he has gotten "outside himself," becoming a pure response to the life going on around him. That's why Alcibiades says to him, "You're Marsyas!"

If you opened Socrates up, like the statues of sileni popular at the time, you'd find little figures of gods inside. I take it these are other men's points of view, ways of putting things, systems of metaphysics and morality and politics, the "truths" by which men live, each consulting his own as he does his watch, though no two run alike. Socrates has no "truths" of his own—he’s constantly insisting on this. He understands that there is no principle for which there is no exception, that no explanation can be even adequate, much less final, and there is no world-view or approach to life without a whole host of crucial and insoluble problems. The reason being, as Freud  put it, that nature is immensely over-caused," and our attempts to capture it in words, especially moral principles, only a way of putting it, not very satisfactory. Failure to realize this is what keeps so many parents nowadays from understanding their children and you from understanding your parents. Principles, words, "truth" keep getting in the way. How absurd, Nietzsche says, to want to be right rather than to be loved.

Socrates understands the power and limitation of words, which ultimately come down to the same thing. That's what he tries to teach people—both. He wants us to formulate views on this, that, and the other—what do you think of this or that? Put it in words. This is what philosophers call "thinking." Socrates wants us to think, to formulate and express things in words. It's a splendid game, finding out about ourselves and other people. Once we begin playing it, human sacrifice is finished, and the way is set for politics and history. That's the power of words.

But words can never justify a life, or anything, as people seem to think eternally. That's their limitation. And they may rob your life of a great deal of vitality and spontaneity, if that's what you think they're supposed to do. Here the limitation of words becomes a positive deficiency. This is why words are held in such opprobrium among youth today. Words all favor their parents, Bank of America, Lyndon B. Johnson (who wasn't any better at using them than they are), or generally what Charles Reich calls Consciousness II, and youth turn away from them by the droves. You'd think that all words did was spoil sunsets. Once you try to put it in words, you've lost it. The point is to dig, groove, float.

No one ever succeeded in making a view or principle stick with Socrates. Every claim in words breaks down under relentless questioning. We can see this in the history of thinking, and the succession of views presented in the Symposium. Socrates sees the relativity of views—which doesn't mean that "one view is as good as another." We find that out when we begin questioning. All things are relative, but not absolutely relative. Under criticism, views have to be improved or discarded, and this is the process of Socratic dialogue.

Socrates will ask a kid a question—what he thinks of this, that, and the other—and the first thing fired back at him will be a "tribal truism," some general view which the kid picks out of the atmosphere. Socrates shoots this down, typically by finding a case to which the formula obviously doesn't apply. Then the kid is forced to find another formula. It'll also be shot down. But the second answer is likely to be better than the first, if only because it's given with the knowledge of the limitations of the first, and may be a step closer to what the kid himself believes. A vague and empty notion begins to take on shape and definition—the only "definition" Socrates is interested in (besides, of course, physical). As we proceed from each attempt at an answer to the next, we move away from vague, inchoate things everybody believes to specific things which Phaedrus and Charmides believe, from the community (where we all begin) to the individual. This is the philosophical or dialectical process of "coming out"; Socrates is trying to draw the kid out, the primal sense of education.

Socrates is the one person in Athens who doesn't tell kids what they have to live up to and believe to be good men, good citizens, or whatever. He's just interested in what they think, and anything goes. The only rule is that you be clear and consistent, so that we can understand what you're saying. There's no question of justification—this is what trips people up, and keeps the process from beginning. The question "Why are you doing that?" doesn't mean you shouldn't be doing that, though this is the way we always understand it. We only want to articulate a clear and consistent way of seeing and doing things, in order to bring the individual to expression, to find out where you stand—so that you can find out where you stand, because kids do not announce but first fashion views in response to Socrates' questions. Their thinking first takes shape in dialogue, as an "inner world" comes into being. This is why it's said that philosophy tells you a lot about the world and other people a lot about you. As we lose belief in the “objective truth” which thinking used to be thought to be about, it becomes the vehicle of personal revelation, which is not just personal, like the psychiatrist's couch or the sort of talk which is called "heavy" and "spaced."

Socrates knows about words, knows how to talk, and that's why he can help a person come to expression, or bring him out. We're always plunking ourselves out there, and no one takes us up. It's because they don't know what to do, where to take things—they don't know how language works. That's all Socrates knows—no deep truths, as he continually tells us. Love is the one thing he claims to know something about, by which I take him to mean communication.

To know about language and how it works is to know more than one language, and be able to switch from one to another, as occasion dictates. Language is ultimately a game, rooted in a form of life which neither requires nor admits of justification. Socrates is multi-lingual, omni-lingual, can pick up any language and drive it farther. He always knows where to take things, though there's no particular place (the “truth”) where you're supposed to wind up. We've seen five such languages by the time he rises to speak, and he doesn't attempt to adjudicate  between them, deciding who's "right" and who's "wrong," or what's "right" and "wrong" in the different things each speaker says—much less throw them all out (like the commentators) and replace them with a "truth" of his own—but simply to draw them all together, to bring out a larger pattern than any of the  speakers, from his particular point of view, was able to compass. These are the figures of gods which you will find, according to Alcibiades, if you open Socrates up.

So Socrates is Marsyas, whose immense discipline opens him to all the conflicting facets of life which are closed to men who espouse a particular view of it, who is skinned alive because he cannot sing, but only play accompaniment. Alcibiades tells us this, but apparently he hasn't understood the message himself, or he wouldn't believe that Socrates was "laughing up his sleeve at all the world," or feel ashamed for not following his  example or trying to live up to his ideal. Alcibiades goes around all the time attempting to blow people's minds (which he calls "keeping in with the mob"). He has a perfect right to do this; it's a game on a par with any other. If Socrates asks him why he's living as he is, he doesn't mean he shouldn't. Alcibiades is the most brilliant and promising youth of Athens, and it's tragic that Socrates' influence makes him feel ashamed. It means he won't ultimately go Socrates' way—the way of eternal questioning, no matter what one is doing—and that's the tragic background of the Symposium.

From Alcibiades we hear the intimate details of Socrates' love life. We see the relationship at an advanced stage, and from being the pursuer Socrates becomes the pursued. Since Socrates has never attempted to seduce him, Alcibiades decides to take  the matter into his own hands, assuming that he knows what the old man has in mind (to put a fine Pausanian point on it), and wanting to accede to his desires, perhaps make a "conquest" of  him, he shakes his chaperon and visits Socrates alone; they wrestle together in the gymnasium (!), finally they sleep together, and Alcibiades throws his great cloak over Socrates, and takes him in his arms. But all to no avail—Socrates is having none of it. It's a marvelous description of a mind-blowing love-affair, the equal of any in literature.

The question is why Socrates refuses to sleep with Alcibiades. Not because he's not sensually or sexually attracted to the youth. I take it he avows this in talking of "falling in love" with him. And not because it is "wrong," or even lowly or undignified; otherwise he would not say, "We must think it over one of these days and do whatever seems best for both of us—about this and everything else." Why not, then? That's the final question we're left with in the Symposium, and a facet of a bigger question: Why don't Socrates and Alcibiades get together? Why doesn't Alcibiades go Socrates' way? Instead he becomes involved with politics, gives up the game of questioning and expressing, and his biography becomes quite uninteresting.

First of all, it's excellent erotic technique, to encourage pursuit by retreat, like Odette de Crecy and Charles Swann, or Albertine and Marcel. Pausanias would understand (if he could imagine such control). It's in line with Phaedrus' ideal of unrequited love. In Nietzschean terms it's Apollonian control, checking and increasing Dionysian energy, like the ideals of chastity and celibacy which have turned us all into super-erotics, like so many high-compression combustion engines. Look at the Gaugin canvas, "After the Sermon: Jacob wrestling with an Angel"—those chaste virgins are almost lewd. Our entire culture has become super-erotic through repression—not simply isolated individuals among us. The young Nietzsche claims this has made us ill, and he blames Socrates. But it doesn't make Socrates ill. In Alcibiades' speech and the aftermath he emerges as a Hemingway hero, who can strike terror with his look and drink any man in the house under the table.

But if it is an erotic technique, it doesn't work. Socrates loses Alcibiades, fails to seduce him from the “straight and narrow.” It can't be simply for that reason that Socrates resists Alcibiades' advances. The reason is not erotic, a matter of motivation, but pedagogical, a vital part of the message (like Christ's death). Everything is to be subordinated to the pedagogy, and Alcibiades hasn't understood. He still views human relationships, including the love-relationship, in individualistic, isolated, Pausanian terms, as an exchange of benefits and sacrifices. Socrates has given him his magnificent mind and he's prepared to give Socrates his magnificent body—the most splendid mind and body in all Athens. But that is not it, that is not it at all.

Alcibiades hasn't understood that, in a game of chess or tennis or good conversation or making love (and being in love), it's one thing which we both have, not an exchange of one thing for another. For Socrates to allow himself to be seduced, under these circumstances, would be to accede to Pausanias' view of life and adopt the Cartesian posture. This is dangerous, for the Cartesian posture is a banana-peel—once you hit it, you describe a trajectory through Faust, Kant, and Schopenhauer to wind up flat on your back with Kafka, Dostoyevsky's Underground Man, and Martin Heidegger, the lonely, isolated, dark spirit of the Schwarzwald. Socrates is having none of it—not the very first step. As a French aristocrat said, on hearing of a man who had picked up his head and walked away from the guillotine, "C'est le premier pas qui coute." It's the first step that counts.

Alcibiades' approach to love is woven into a whole view of life, or Weltanschauung, which culminates in the Enlightenment with  the theory of the Social Contract—as though society were simply a mechanism for apportioning private advantage rather than  one thing which we all share and live from, as though the individual were prior to the society which gives him birth, or were a matter of rational deliberation and individual self-interest rather than something we bring with us from the animal kingdom, more deeply rooted in our animal nature than any rational deliberation. Man is a social animal, not an island, and his sociability is an aspect of his animality, a part of his beastliness, not something else added to it, to make it different, like geometrical clothing and French formal gardens.

Alcibiades' notion of love as an exchange reflects a radical individualism which Socrates cannot accept—in effect, the thing he's charged with in 399. Society, communication, love go far deeper into man than his pathetic little rationality and the scope of his conscious deliberation and decision. We are a species-being, Feuerbach reminds us—a herd animal, as Nietzsche puts it. Something greater than ourselves is always leaning on us, driving us on, influencing or determining the things we do and say, keeping us from "being ourselves" but always striving to be something. That is the species, Feuerback says, just as with animals; I would say human community, in any one of its myriad forms: respectability, conviction, prestige, vanity, conformism, or whatever.

Some primal we is prior to any I, historically and in every individual life. What we call "rationality" is rooted in society, not the other way around, and society is part of our animal nature, not the reflection of something utterly alien to the animal—its very opposite—pointing to some origin and goal of human life other than any which the animal might know, like St. Augustine's City of God or Kant's kingdom of ends.

What we call "rationality" is essentially calculation, appearing at its most impressive wherever calculation is required, as in mathematics and the spectrum of the natural, life, and social sciences, as it degenerates from physics to sociology. But this doesn't mean that mathematics is the most profound language of nature, as Thomas Kuhn (The Structure of Scientific Revolutions) reminds us, simply the one she chose first to reveal to us. Rationes, as Hobbes points out, were initially items or entries in accounting, and human rationality is as limited as the accounting department of a business firm. We recognize human rationality as secondary and derivative to the extent that we realize how deeply individual human life is immersed in society, and society a part of our primal, biological, animal, carnal nature.

Society, Athens, is prior to the individual, to whom she has given birth. Her claims must ultimately take priority over any individual considerations or purely rational considerations. This is Socrates' claim in the Crito—why he refuses to escape, when he is under sentence of death. Socrates has his whole life from Athens, and without her he would have nothing. He cannot take a step against the will of Athens, which had been clearly pronounced in his sentence. In insisting on the execution of his sentence, Socrates demonstrates that his allegiance to society is deeper than the claims of reason or any possible self-interest, that the charges against him are false.

Socrates' trial and death simply capped the teaching of his life, for he was always exhibiting the limits of "reason." His principal claim was that he knew nothing, that he was in the dark as much as any of the rest of us with nothing to hold onto but Athens. He did claim to know something about love, but that, by his own admission, he had on hear-say, which makes it, in philosophical terms, "mere opinion"—and from a woman at that! A few women have managed to get in on our great collective cultural undertaking, but who ever quoted one? All the women's voices in our entire cultural heritage have been imaginary, born in the imagination of men. And all this in accordance with what we have always called "reason."

Socrates is not a radical questioner, as he's accused. He can't question Athens, and basic Greek values, as St. Augustine questions Rome in all its works and pomps. St. Augustine can question everything because he has a transcendent yardstick of "truth" which Socrates lacks. With his claim to know nothing, Socrates has no way of weighing and assessing the Greek project of life or the sensual beauty of Athenian youth. His patriotism and sensuality are both deeper than his power of giving reasons, or even asking for them (which was considerable), rooted in his pre-reflective, pre-human, inherently social, animal nature.

These two, which are ordinarily thought of as diametrically opposed—that for which we are prepared to die (quickly and without thinking) and that which immediately delights the eye, when there's nothing important to think about—are really two sides of the same coin, for one who knows nothing, and so has no abstract, private, personal principles to hang onto for guidance in life. In his playful delight with Greek youth and his unswerving, mindless devotion to Greek values, Socrates displays two sides of his biological nature, and two corollaries of his lifetime teaching that no one really knows anything.

Socrates' sensuality is part and parcel with his patriotism. He has nothing to believe in but Athens, which gave him birth (which alone could have given him birth), and the finest flower of Athenian youth, its future and his future—that which brought forth Socrates and that which must somehow assure that he live forever in a world governed (as the Greek always assumed) by caprice and chance. Socrates is in love with his city-state and the potential of the marvelous and exciting youth he finds about him for the same reason.

All this is threatened by Alcibiades' assumption that making love, or human relationships in general, can (or should) be conceived as an exchange of something for something, grounded  in rational deliberation and choice, as he explains his infatuation for Socrates. If Alcibiades can delight in Socrates' body as he ought to delight in his mind, for itself and not as a means to some further end, that would be love. As it is, Alcibiades doesn't yet love—hasn't really encountered the greatness of Socrates, the delight in words and experience in themselves, and Socrates’ ploy, with his display of self-control, serves to remind him of this.

So Socrates has his greatness, apart from its eternal reflection in Plato, all by himself. Alcibiades concludes with a lengthy encomium. He is awesome physically; no man is his match in combat. He is utterly fearless, and prepared to risk his life for a friend, for Alcibiades. He goes into trances, one which lasted for 24 hours, from dawn to dawn. It's just such a trance which has made him late for the banquet, and the theme recurs in Alcibiades' speech, framing the dialogue. He can drink any man under the table. Alcibiades tells us no one ever saw him drunk, which I take to mean inarticulate. These are all the marks by which a common man is able to recognize greatness, things which he can appreciate, outward signs of manliness. The average man can't understand Socrates' finely honed techniques of discourse. He only sees what these do for the man as a whole, and at his own level. The image, Alcibiades' thing, is part of it. Socrates must back up his thing with his life—the way the priest, guru, and expert do not. So he needs a bit of Alcibiades the way Alcibiades needs of bit of him. All this is metaphysics at the surface.

Can it be that Socrates is the sole beneficiary of his own activity (apart from Plato)? This is the hypothesis we've been advised to adopt towards our own lives since Kant—if you're living for achievement nowadays, you're in trouble intellectually. Like every great man, Socrates is certainly the chief beneficiary of his activity, and he exhibits this in his behavior, which is great all the time, and not simply the other day, like Agathon. This is the challenge to American education in the present crisis of values, with the collapse of all spiritual and cultural authority among alarming numbers of our educated youth. Professors must fill the gap left by the general bankruptcy of priests, parents and politicians.

If there's to be any real education at this juncture, one must begin from the ground up, with "Please don't eat the daisies." In the spiritual drought of the times, professors must back up their disciplines and techniques with their marvelous lives, which those disciplines and techniques serve to foster. How else? What other motivation can teaching awaken in the present spiritual climate? It is an age of immense nihilism and despair, and we must begin somewhere. Why should students learn? They are no longer accepting the old answers, which worked well enough with me and my generation. As things now stand, we might as well be trying to teach them tennis by giving more and more superb exhibitions, while they're scratching their heads wondering about the point of it all. Every ten weeks they watch 160 consummate exhibitions and play a handful of sets themselves (their essays and exams) and their progress is so slow most only become discouraged.

Education must begin again in the university—although parents might help by inculcating some basic values. Here is where we must discover new motivation and new direction. We don't have to be Socrates—with courage and integrity and manliness and all that. We just have to be groovy, interesting, emulable, like Falstaff and Charles Swann. The telos of the professor is to find someone to carry on his thing, someone to respond to him to this degree. It's a marvelous challenge.

Students should be more like Alcibiades, Romeo, the wandering scholar in Faust, Goldmund—perhaps (dare we hope?) James Boswell. Then teachers might be more like Narcissus, Friar Lawrence, Mephistopheles in Faust's robes, Plato, Socrates. Can you imagine a teacher today titling a dozen of his works with the names of brilliant students? Or madly in pursuit of them, as we read in the Phaedrus? (Like a coach, perhaps.) Everyone today would concur in Socrates' self-control, I imagine, but I doubt for the same reason.

We can't experience the tragic aura which hangs over the Symposium if we find Socrates' relationship with Alcibiades embarrassing. We've been systematically overlooking this sort of thing long enough, with our great awe-struck Puritan eyes, which make fig-leaves necessary. Honi soit qui mal y pense. Socrates is more chaste than the common man can understand, whatever he and Alcibiades do when they're alone. The failure of Socrates and Alcibiades to know complete communion symbolizes that their love never comes to fruition, that they never get together—the most exciting teacher and student Athens had ever seen. That's the tragedy for Athens, and it has nothing whatever to do with sex.

But if Alcibiades doesn't go Socrates' way, we shouldn't sigh over his fate. He thrilled a century, alive and dead. He gave people something to think about (while Socrates labored to teach them how to think)—the pure type of a man living for himself alone, and making no bones about it. Alcibiades was for the ancient world what Machiavelli and Cesar Borgia were for the Renaissance. Just where the philosopher wants to begin, with a wild stallion which he can break properly, instead of trying to work with a bungled job—in effect, the wandering scholar in Faust, whom I take to be Goethe's wish-fulfillment of a student, in contrast with the proper and devout young Wagner, who appears empty and pretentious (doubtless the Goethe of forty years before). Alcibiades lived one of the most exciting lives in history, and became immortal through his own efforts. We might as well lament that T.S. Eliot is no Shakespeare.

Alcibiades gave Socrates as much as Socrates gave him. Unfortunately, by my hypothesis, more, since the crazy kid never understood. He is the crowning summit of the sensual world, which Socrates would never put down as "mere appearance." Appearance is a great marvel and Alcibiades with it. If only Socrates didn't make him feel small; if only he didn't take self-evaluation so seriously, if he had real self-confidence and took delight in himself, like the narcissistic image he conveys, which figures so prominently in men's fascination for him. It's one thing which they've both had, and Socrates is as grateful for it as Alcibiades—again, more, since Socrates got more out of it. Socrates might speak of Alcibiades in the way Dante speaks of the being who captured his imagination, the immortal Beatrice,

Love says of her: "How can flesh drawn from clay, 

Achieve such beauty and such purity?" 

He looks again, and to himself he swears 

That God intended something new for earth.

In short:

This too has God Almighty graced her with: 

Whoever speaks with her shall speak with Him.

Alcibiades triggered this sort of excitement everywhere he went, and for this he's become immortal. In him and Socrates "depth" and "surface" come together, bound by a mysterious tie, which Phaedrus explores. Alcibiades is a perfect figure of Robert Bridges' Eros.

Surely thy body is thy mind,

For in thy face is naught to find; 

Only thy soft enchristen'd smile,

That shadows neither love nor guile, 

But shameless will and power immense

In secret, sensuous innocense.

Bridges begins with a shattering challenge:

Why hast thou nothing in thy face,

Thou idol of the human race?

(Oh dear, there's nothing behind the facade.) But Bridges ends the poem by answering his initial question:

Ah, yet no victim of thy grace, 

None who e'er longed for thy embrace,

Hath cared to look into thy face.

That's another story! That's the failure of Platonic love. There's nothing there because we're not continually looking, searching, challenging, responding, applauding—that's why. That's just what Dante says of Beatrice:

Upon her face you see depicted love, 

There where none dares to hold his gaze too long.

That's the power of youth, of youthful power and attraction, which the Greeks built into their sacred statuary, but which we have put down for 2,000 years. Can we yet learn to respond to it? Is there any other hope?

Alcibiades is the art of the moment, like cuisine and jazz. He sees communication as simply making an impression on another person, blowing people's minds. He embodies Emerson's maxim (out of a colder climate): "Life consists of surfaces, and the point is to skate well.'' Dialogue he sees as a contest of words, like boxing or wrestling, in which we try to out-maneuver and top one another. He subscribes to the Sophist definition of communication: Sounds are made and money changes hands.

There is this dimension to discourse, and whether there is anything more is eternally questionable. Even in the graduate seminar, students chiefly top one another, and the professor tops them all. It's precisely like boxing or wrestling. Plato gives us a marvelous exhibition in the Euthydemus, which is what would happen if a student ever went up against a prof—he'd get cut down mercilessly, and look like an idiot, even if he had the better side of the argument. He just doesn't know as much about words, technical terms, the moves that score points, etc. He might as well be wrestling or boxing for the fifth or tenth or twentieth time against someone who's been increasing his skill and power for twenty years. It's not a question of who's right, the prof will always get the better of the argument.

For the same reason students don't appreciate words as much as the man who's been in them for twenty years. The same words which thrill me may leave students quite unimpressed, the way thrilling music might fail to impress anyone who was hearing the medium for the tenth or twentieth time. Words don't come with their power attached; it's only gradually through cultivation and practice that we come to feel their power. Look at the empty way the student Wagner uses words in Faust. He's not simply pretentious; that sort of thing is inevitable. We have to use words for years, often, before we come to penetrate their meaning, or feel their power (which I take to be the same thing), as we have to play chess for years before we begin to realize with any clarity what's going on. The student is not very good with words, or their technical use, and he's not very deeply  into words, at least in a way which requires their technical use—both, obviously, for the same reason.

This is Alcibiades. He uses words (along with everything else) brilliantly, but he's not really into them; he doesn't really trust them. When I say Alcibiades doesn't trust words, I mean he's not prepared to follow them wherever they lead—which would be going Socrates' way. Alcibiades uses words simply as counters in a game or elements in the grand strategy of personal aggrandizement (or "getting ahead"); they are simply means of getting the better of one another other than physically, as in wrestling and boxing. He does not see anything going on there, beyond sounds being uttered and approval and adulation directed this way and that.

This is the great game that Alcibiades worships as the source of all the excitement in his life—living, like Socrates, primarily for excitement. He wrestles and boxes and swaps words with anybody, Socrates included, and it's all a great game in which we take one another's measure, and make our lives more interesting and exciting. But there's no more going on in intellectual discussion than in wrestling and boxing, simply two men contesting for superiority.

It’s not a bad hypothesis. What is going on as words surge back and forth in Shakespeare's histories, in all the intrigues and conflicts in the courts of Richard II and III or Henry IV or V? Would anyone care to take sides in the issue which made Englishmen slaughter one another for the houses of York and Lancaster? It was all a drama, in the Bard's own words, "full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." Nothing at all (or nothing we can understand), beyond who is to rule, as between two youthful idols who divide a high school under their allegiance. They must eventually lock horns, though over no real substantive issue. As boys say, “I can take you down.” “No, you can't.” “Yes I can.” So we get down to it and see. Fifteen years later, in graduate seminars, we say, “I can make an argument or interpretation stand up against all comers,” and so we get down to it and see. It's eternally arguable whether anything more than this is going on in graduate seminars—which is not to say that vital and fairly objective techniques of argument are not being disseminated, as they are when athletes train in wrestling, or boxing, or tennis.

This is the approach to language which Alcibiades is into, anyway, and he is a past master at it. He and Socrates get into a playful game of one-upping one another and virtually make love before the assembled gathering in words. Alcibiades is the only one who could get away with this sort of thing, playfully boxing Socrates' ears. Men were absolutely paralyzed by him, his power was so great—as though he were the only man in the community who was a trained boxer or the only one who had a gun. But not Alcibiades! He's prepared to step right up there and give as good as he receives. He's not intimidated by a word "Socrates," and he's prepared to take on anyone in anything. That's the image which blows everybody's mind. He might as well have been a combination of Mohammed Ali, Bobby Fisher Sammy Davis Jr., Marilyn Monroe, and Oscar Wilde—all those rolled into one. He's the only one who'll take on Socrates in a public contest of wits. He's not afraid to put himself on the line.

That's the great Alcibiades, who brought a whole age to its feet cheering (and left them scratching their heads), who strewed excitement in his wake left and right as he went about Athens, bursting into dinner parties and saying and doing outrageous things (which only he could get away with), and generally exploiting all his endowments to the hilt. It's to this archetypal youth that Plato assigns his portrait of Socrates, which he must have regarded as his most important passage, paying his last respects to the man who gave him his life, like Boswell and Dr. Johnson.

His performance on this evening is consummate. Not only does he give us an unforgettable personal view of Socrates; he pits his thing against Socrates' and triumphs. It's a sheer conflict of will and cunning, to see which way language will be approached, Socrates' way or Alcibiades' way, and Alcibiades adroitly manages to get the champion into his game and have his way with him. He is master of the art of taunting and teasing, to find a person's limit and take his measure (by words along with every other artful trick), and he succeeds this time in finding even Socrates' limit and taking his measure. On this evening, apparently, he can't be stopped, even by Socrates. He's talking to Eryximachus:

And another thing, my dear Eryximachus. You mustn't believe a word of what Socrates has just been telling you. Don't you see it's just the other way around? It's him who can't keep his hands off me, if he hears me say a good word for anyone, god or man, besides himself.

And he stings Socrates into replying with the most un-Socratic thing one could possibly say under any circumstances, the one thing Socrates is committed never to say, to remain faithful to his image: "Oh, do be quiet!" Touche! What are we to think? Methinks he doth protest too much. Clearly he can be got through to.

I mean this quite seriously—I'm not just trying to be clever. That one little interjection is a renunciation of Socrates' whole message that discourse is to be pursued endlessly; there can never be an end to it, where we say, "Be silent, and accept!" One might as well succeed in getting Christ to say, "Oh, stop your incessant bitching!" Alcibiades has so swept Socrates away with his cunning that he has gotten him to forget his most basic teaching. He has lured the great champion into a style which is not his own—say, fighting inside or wrestling on the mat—and proceeds to pin him. At the very least one must say, "A hit! A palpable hit!" What power!

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