Dionysian Plato in the symposium

Fernando Santoro

pp. 15-22

in: Luca Pitteloud, Evan Keeling (eds), Psychology and ontology in Plato, Berlin, Springer, 2019

Abstract

The characters of Plato's Symposium are faces of literary genres, masks of traditional wisdom, or innovation, about love. Plato orders up a mutual challenge amongst friends, affable and philosophical, to celebrate not only Eros and Aphrodite but Dionysus as well (177e). What are the masks of Dionysus in Plato's Symposium? Aristophanes presents a cosmogonic speech, following the model of the Orphic-inspired Theogony, found in the The Birds, by the true Aristophanes. It introduces a hermeneutic lesson, the first stage of the Dionysian rite. Diotima, under the dialectic and ascetic mask of philosophy, seeks to initiate the mysteries. This second stage makes a jump from the particular to the universal. Alcibiades, unmasking himself and Socrates, produces either an epoptic revelation for the initiated or the desecration of a mystery. It is the third stage that brings the profound truth, which is said only by those taken by madness. Three stages in three steps: Cosmogonic hermeneutics, Ascetic initiation, and Revelation of the erotic mysteries of Dionysos.

Cited authors

Plato

Socrates

Aristophanes