Notes on Plato’s Symposium

(1) We have a later instance of a set of characters, protagonists of a speech, physically signifying the passage from a lower to a higher condition: in Plutarch’s De facie, a number of wise men, all in a room and each defending a school of philosophy, discuss what could possibly cause the moon to display an apparent face on its visible side. Each speaker lays down the scientific theory in accordance with his school of thought and criticizes that of his fellow speakers. Once Sylla is about to speak and tell his myth, all sit up on their couch and dialectics comes to a stop. As in the Symposium, the superiority of the religious myth over the discursive process is signified by the bodily action of the protagonists. We have here again the confirmation that Greek philosophy saw a limit to rationalist discourse, felt that it alone was not sufficient to reach a higher sphere of knowledge.