Heraclitus' Symposium

Abstract

How does the $\textit{Symposium}$ (not) hang together? The overwhelmingly popular answer is that the $\textit{Symposium}$ has a teleological structure, culminating in Socrates'/Diotima's speech, which variously incorporates or dismisses noteworthy claims about $\textit{erōs}$ made in the preceding speeches. Whatever endures from a non-philosophical source does so not in anything like its original form, but rather by virtue of having undergone Platonic alchemy, as she translates, reworks and refines ordinary opinions into high-powered philosophical theory. This paper proposes a radical alternative. It argues that we should systematically reverse Eryximachus' reductive judgements concerning Heraclitus on harmonisation, and apply the results to the $\textit{Symposium}$ itself. There is discordant harmony which a complex, polyphonic $\textit{logos}$ embodies. Such a $\textit{logos}$ thrives on dissension, since its very existence as a unified whole depends on the maintained, unweakened opposition between elements agreeing to differ. The $\textit{Symposium}$ is many voices unified, but untrammeled. The paper concludes that, to avoid fundamental question-begging, the $\textit{Symposium}$ endorses a sort of epistemological contextualism anathema in other Platonic contexts. And that it is not a dialogue.