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THE GREATEST HOPE OF ALL: ARISTOPHANES ON HUMAN NATURE IN PLATO'S SYMPOSIUM1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 November 2013

Anthony Hooper
Anthony Hooper*
Affiliation:
The University of Sydney
*
anthony.hooper@sydney.edu.au
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Extract

In recent years there has been a renaissance of scholarly interest in Plato's Symposium, as scholars have again begun to recognize the philosophical subtlety and complexity of the dialogue. But despite the quality and quantity of the studies that have been produced few contain an extended analysis of the speech of Aristophanes; an unusual oversight given that Aristophanes' encomium is one of the highlights of the dialogue. In contrast to the plodding and technical speeches that precede it, the father of Old Comedy structures his own speech around a fantastic fable in which he tells how humans, having originally taken the form of comically grotesque ‘circlemen’, assumed their present shape after being divided in two for their impious actions against the gods. This story forms the basis of his discussion of Eros, which he claims is nothing more than a desire to return to our original form (192e–193a). One study on which commentators continue to draw heavily for their own interpretation of Aristophanes' encomium is that of Arlene Saxonhouse. As the title of her article suggests, central to Saxonhouse's analysis is her interpretation of the Net of Hephaestus passage (192c–e), in which Aristophanes suggests that, if offered the chance to be welded together with their beloveds and so become circlemen once more, all humans would leap at the opportunity, thinking that this would be all of the fortune that they could ever desire. For Saxonhouse this passage, more than any other, demonstrates that, on Aristophanes' view, our original nature is one of perfection. According to Saxonhouse, our original form is the telos of human existence and the standard by which we judge the good life, because she understands circlemen as being self-complete beings entirely free from desire and need. Put simply, to be a circleman is to be a perfect being. Eros, on this reading, as the desire for wholeness, is to be praised because it reminds us of our deficiency, and instills in us a desire to actualize our potential for perfection. But unlike Socrates' encomium, which ends with the lover realizing their potential by possessing knowledge of the divine, Saxonhouse believes that the Net of Hephaestus passage lends a tragic end to Aristophanes' speech. For Saxonhouse it is Plato's dirty trick that he turns Aristophanes into a tragedian.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Classical Quarterly , Volume 63 , Issue 2 , December 2013 , pp. 567 - 579
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 2013 

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Footnotes

1

All quotations from Plato's dialogues in this paper are from their respective translations in J.M. Cooper, Plato: Complete Works (Indianapolis and Cambridge, 1997).

References

2 See especially Sheffield, F., The Ethics of Desire (Oxford, 2006)Google Scholar, Reeve, C.D.C., ‘Plato on Eros and friendship’, in Benson, H.H. (ed.), A Companion to Plato (Malden, MA and Oxford, 2009), 294–307Google Scholar and the essays in J. Lesher et al. (edd.), Plato's Symposium: Issues in Interpretation and Reception (Cambridge, 2006).

3 A notable exception to this is Ludwig, P.W., Eros and Polis (Cambridge, 2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, which contains an extensive treatment of the political implications of Aristophanes' conception of Eros.

4 The term ‘circlemen’ is never used by Aristophanes in his encomium. I have adopted it here both for ease of use, and because it is conventionally used in commentaries on this passage.

5 The only other paper of comparable influence is K.J. Dover's article, ‘Aristophanes' speech in Plato's Symposium’, JHS 86 (1966), 41–50. Dover's article focusses more on the imagery and structure of the fable, whereas Saxonhouse's paper offers what could more properly be called a full philosophical reading of the speech.

6 A. Saxonhouse, ‘The Net of Hephaestus: Aristophanes' speech in Plato's Symposium’, Interpretation 13.1 (1984), 15–32.

7 Saxonhouse (n. 6), 21–2, where she says the following about the nature of circlemen: ‘Why then for Aristophanes is our ancient form our telos? It is a form without eros (pain) because it is self-complete. Its spherical shape indicates the absence of a beginning or an end. It requires nothing more to be complete. There is no interdependence among the spherical bodies. They do not need each other, even for the sake of procreation. The absence of need makes them divine rather than human. Their perfection makes them the models towards which humans can strive, that is, the gods we have now are inferior representations of perfection. The ancient spherical beings, our ancestors, are our true gods.’

8 These figures are the main characters of Aristophanes' Acharnians and Peace respectively.

9 For an extended discussion of the comic characters of Aristophanes' plays see Whitman, C.H., Aristophanes and the Comic Hero (Cambridge, 1964)CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Reckford, K.J., Aristophanes' Old-and-New Comedy, vol. 1 (Cambridge, 1987)Google Scholar.

10 Commentators have suggested a wide range of implications for Aristophanes' hiccups, most of which centre around the issues I have suggested here concerning the needs and deficiencies of the human body. For more extended discussions of the significance of Aristophanes' hiccups see R.E. Allen, Plato's Symposium (New Haven, 1991), 20; A. Bloom, ‘The ladder of love’, in S. Benardete (ed.), Plato's Symposium (Chicago, 2001), 96; Nussbaum, M., The Fragility of Goodness (Cambridge, 2007)Google Scholar, 172; and A. Saxonhouse (n. 6), 16.

11 At this point it should be noted that the story Aristophanes tells in his speech in the Symposium differs in important respects from the works of the historical Aristophanes. Dover (n. 5) argues that, both stylistically and in his focus on the ‘beginnings of things’ (i.e. the beginning of present human nature), Aristophanes' tale of the circlemen is more akin to an Aesopic fable than to the comedian's plays. But we ought not doubt from this that Plato is making some considerable effort to replicate Aristophanes' world view, and Dover himself suggests that it is likely that Plato chose to have Aristophanes tell an Aesopic fable because of the similarities often shared between the values in fables and those in Aristophanic comedies.

12 See esp. Peace 848–9, Birds 187–93, 1515–24 and Wealth 1112–16.

13 See n. 5 above.

14 Although circles and circular motion have important metaphysical significance for Plato, particularly in his later dialogues (see particularly Timaeus and Laws 10), we must be careful not to attribute too much significance to Aristophanes' use of these images, as he is not a philosopher but rather a poet, and one who sees himself as anti-philosophical (see particularly his portrayal of Socrates and Chaerephon in the Clouds). We should not dismiss, however, the very likely possibility that Plato is having his Aristophanes play with the expectations of his philosophically semi-literate audience (something that, as I shall show in §5, he does at several other points in his speech), and actively undermining the idea of circularity as indicative of perfection – a possibility that will become more likely in light of my discussion in §4.

15 S. Benardete, ‘Eidos and diaeresis in Plato's Symposium’, Philologus 107 (1973), 193–226.

16 Significant problems also attend the attempt to interpret this passage in the Symposium by appealing to the myth in the Statesman. Apart from the general hazards involved in attempting to interpret a passage in one dialogue through that of another and the particular difficulties posed in the interpretation of myths, in another passage from Plato's later dialogues, his discussion of marriage in the Laws (721b–d), Plato advances a position that appears to be in direct opposition to that of the Statesman, as here he argues that perfection for humans lies in the continuation of the species through procreation. The conflicting evidence of the Statesman and the Laws shows us that we shouldn't be turning to them to interpret Aristophanes' speech in the Symposium if we don't have to.

17 It is important to note that Socrates criticizes Aristophanes' conception of eros, not because the comedian posited it as the desire for unity achieved (or not) through sexuality, but instead because its goal is not the good (205e). If Saxonhouse is correct, and unity is indeed indicative of perfection, then Socrates' criticism is moot, as in Aristophanes' speech too eros, as a desire for unity, would be a desire for the good. On the reading I offer here, however, Socrates' criticism is effective precisely because he, of all of Aristophanes' audience, recognized that, in being a desire for unity, eros is not a desire for the good, but merely for unity with one's other half – a state no less deficient than the one in which lovers already find themselves.

18 In his book Aristotle on Comedy (London, 1984) Richard Janko attempted a reconstruction of the second book of Aristotle's Poetics. In this reconstruction there are several comments regarding the nature of comedy, but the points that concern us here are more clearly stated in the extant first book, so I shall not be utilizing Janko's work here.

19 For discussions of the farcical elements of Aristophanes' encomium see especially R.G. Bury, The Symposium of Plato (London, 1909), xxxi; K.J. Dover, Plato: Symposium (Cambridge, 1980), 113; Allen (n. 10), 28; and Sheffield (n. 2), 22.

20 In his plays also Aristophanes has certain characters who are the objects of particular ridicule or out-and-out hostility. Of those in the previous group the most prominent examples are Socrates and Chaerephon, the administrators of the Thinkery in the Clouds, who attempt to gain divine knowledge of those things in the sky and below the earth. As for the lovers in the Net of Hephaestus passage, here too Aristophanes ridicules such people for their attempt to overcome their deficiency. The absurdity both of the manner and the objects of the sophists' studies – they are shown to spend their time suspended in baskets, investigating the movement of the planets, or dipping fleas in wax in order to determine the average length of their jumps – highlights the insurmountable distance that separates these people from their goal. But even people such as these are not subject to the out-and-out hostility that he reserves for some figures. In his plays Aristophanes' favourite examples of such people are the proponents of the Peloponnesian War, and the Athenian demagogue Cleon comes in for particularly harsh treatment in the Acharnians and in the Knights. Cleon is shown to be perfectly happy to plunge the entire Greek peninsula into peril in order to attain political position and personal glory. The story of the circlemen's warmongering is most likely an allusion to the historical Aristophanes' treatments of the Peloponnesian War.

21 The general consensus in the literature is that the dramatic date of the Symposium is either 415 or 416 B.C.E. See J. Anton, ‘The secret of Plato's Symposium’, CJ 58.2 (1962), 277–94 and K.J. Dover, ‘The date of Plato's Symposium’, Phronesis 10.1 (1965), 2–20.

22 This position is an even more radical departure from the typical Greek understanding of eudaimonia than Socrates' heavily intellectualized view given at the beginning of the Republic. Whereas the latter still advances perfection as a central concept to eudaimonia (though he limits its scope merely to the perfection of the soul), Aristophanes abandons the idea of perfection altogether in the flourishing life. In doing this, the comedian also strips from eudaimonia the idea of a telos or endpoint; for Aristophanes, it is the living of life itself, rather than any ‘goal’ one attaches to life, that is the essence of eudaimonia. Given Aristophanes' radical view it is little wonder that Socrates feels the need to respond explicitly to the comedian's speech in his own speech (205e). Perhaps Socrates also sees it as a conception of eudaimonia that may potentially be more attractive than his own to the average Greek.

23 R. Hunter, Plato's Symposium (Oxford, 2004).