Unearthing the Erotically and Poetically Democratic Plato

• In Event: The Erotic Reconstitution of Democratic Life: From Socrates to Today

Abstract

Since 1986, when Martha Nussbaum showed Plato’s leaving deliberate hints for close readers of the evolution of his thinking—away from a pure, abstract metaphysics and toward an at least half-embodied understanding of the erotic soul—a generation of close readers of the dialogues has increasingly shown the deep commitments to an erotic, poetic, philosophical democracy that exist alongside attacks on the follies of democratic Athens. Critical among these is Sara Monoson’s showing the numerous intersections of the essential practices of democracy with those of dialogical philosophy (2000). The essentialness of parrhesia, or frank speech, to both is obvious. Isonomia, equality before the law, becomes equality in the face of the laws of rational thought. The ritual of theatre is transformed into the drama of mutual examination, and the mutually cathartic self-reauthoring it evokes. And the eros of citizens for the polis becomes the eros of wonderers for the world as a whole.

In dialogue with this scholarship, and drawing in particular on Danielle Allen’s understanding of “why Plato wrote” to create a democracy of readers (2012), our first speaker will present a Plato who, by virtue of his poetic writing, offers readers an education in democratic self-government. Focusing on the Republic, the speaker will make the case that it offers a far deeper understanding of justice than living under the mandate of philosopher-kings: showing how, in it, mimesis and metaphysics, epistemological and ethical humility, politics and poetry, are intertwined in an education that depends on an eros for self-actualization in relation with others.

Non-coincidentally, this approach to education in Plato took root in the classroom, when the speaker's students questioned why most everyone in the dialogues says “Yes” to Socrates, including when what he says is conspicuously problematic. This got the speaker thinking about the ethical, political, and philosophic perils of students ceding their authority to teachers, and about how Plato’s dialogues, by way of their poetry, model different styles of pedagogy alongside the deficient ones called out by the students.

Bringing to light how these styles of pedagogy circulate authority, the speaker will argue that they elicit different possibilities for human eros than the pleonexic greed that underwrote democratic Athens’s quest for empire and its accompanying xenophobia, misogyny, and ethno-nationalism. And each of the subsequent presentations will further draw out how historical experience and further philosophic thought can help the now global democratic community avoid Athens's fate: precisely by seeking universal poetic justice in the tradition founded by the fundamentally erotic Socrates and Plato, with its ever-present potential to bring cosmic cohesion to democratic cacaphony through caring conversation.

References
Monoson, S.S. (2000). Plato’s democratic entanglements: Athenian politics and the practice of philosophy. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton).


Nussbaum, M.C. (1986). The speech of Alcibiades: A reading of the Symposium and “This story isn’t true”: Madness, reason and recantation in the Phaedrus, In The fragility of goodness: Luck and ethics in Greek tragedy and philosophy. (NY: Cambridge). 165-234.

Author

• Jill Frank, Cornell University