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The Symposium as Orgy: The Eroticism of Storytelling

A life spent in community with others requires that every day is woven with communicative exchanges. There is a certain set of conversation that sits apart from these exchanges of mundane necessity. These conversations are impractical, as their goal is not to inform, educate, or accomplish a material goal. They also are not conventionally entertaining, in the sense that entertainment is passive and simple pleasure. It is the kind of conversation that often occurs late into the night or on long drives or meandering walks. It is a conversation that runs smoothly, even when there are participants who barely know each other. It elicits excitement, passion, and vulnerability; even as the night grows darker, the participants find themselves energized. Each participant will, at some point, reveal some intimate truth about themselves that they did not consciously intend to share. This is the kind of conversation held in Plato’s Symposium: an Erotic conversation.

In the Symposium, seven people speak in praise of Eros. Moreso than any specific statement that any one of them makes, they represent the Erotic through the very act of their discourse– a cascade of reciprocal storytelling played out in a group of lovers, friends, and acquaintances. What these men yearn toward is not so much a “full-dress oration in praise of Love,” but an approach to intimacy with each other (Plato 78). This intimacy is asymptotic – the participants grow infinitely close to achieving it, but it can never quite be reached. That is, they seek to understand each other as much as they can without becoming each other. The men tell self-revealing stories about Eros using the literary forms of myth and philosophical argument as a way to enfold one another. As such, the Symposium represents Eros not through any piece of dialogue, but through the Erotic encounter of the gathering itself.

The setting and ambience of the gathering prepares readers for an Erotic exchange. The men in the story come together already exhausted from the revelry of the previous day’s festivities (73). The guests begin their gathering enjoying a feast and Erixymachus brings up the topic of Eros to “make the drinking as comfortable as [they] can” (76). Thus, they intend for their conversation to augment their sensory experience, not interrupt it. Plato does not describe the arrangement of the room, so readers can presume that it follows the typical design of a symposium. In a symposiastic space, “the couches are set up along the walls” so that “everyone is positioned so as to see all the others and to be on the same level as his companions” (Lissarrague 19). The men lounge luxuriously on couches in pairs, situated to reciprocally receive the beauties (physical or intellectual) of every other man. Agathon, the host, proclaims Dionysus as the judge for the men’s “claim for wisdom,” rather than a more conventionally wise deity like Athena (Plato 76). By the time the Symposium takes place, Dionysus was commonly perceived and depicted as “the god who allowed ecstasy– a vigorous extrication from oneself and the boundaries of one’s day-to-day-life” (Isler-Kerenyi 2). To invoke his name at this event signals more than the presence of wine. It draws a link between the ensuing discourse and the dissolution of boundaries– bodily, spiritual, and otherwise. This illuminates the Symposium as, at the very least, sensual, if not sexual. The men gathered for ecstatic union, for Erotic entanglement.

Not one of the men’s speeches stands individually. Fully understanding any of the speeches requires knowledge of the prior speech(es), as the dialogues are reciprocal. Each speaker receives from the others who spoke before, builds upon, responds, examines, and gives back. This pattern clarifies itself early on in the Symposium, in the transition between Phaedrus and Pausanias’ speeches, as Pausanias begins his as a direct response: “I do not think, Phaedrus, [...] that we should just simply belaud Love. For if Love were one, that would do, but really he is not one” (Plato 81). Even as the men’s beliefs in Eros begin to appear irreconcilably different, they receive these differences with curiosity and interest. Gaps in a speaker’s logic are not subject to ridicule, but provide openings through which to explore the other, or to be explored by the other. They use the language and structure of philosophical argument, but what they really do is tell stories about themselves, making the frequent flimsiness of their logic unimportant – and perhaps it is exactly that flimsiness that is necessary to pursue their unspoken project of self-disclosure. When Agathon waxes on about how Eros “walks and abides in the softest things there are,” he tells his friends that he values softness and that which softens; possibly, he discloses his own softness (97). As Socrates builds his argument that “it is great folly not to believe that the beauty in all such bodies is one and the same,” he makes a philosophical statement that doubles as an admission: that he has been hurt by loving the specific, and would rather protect himself by loving generalized beauty-in-itself (114). A confessional element emerges from every man’s speech. They want to be known, as one’s body is known by a lover. When Alcibiades arrives on the scene, he shines a revealing light on the whole affair. Alcibiades’ speech is the most decidedly Erotic in its directness as “the story of his own life: the understanding of eros he has achieved through his own intimate experience” (Nussbaum 153). But this does not make his speech entirely unlike the others. Just as the symposium continues the previous day’s festivities, Alcibiades’ speech continues the symposium. His speech is not different in its intent– to reveal himself– but only in its form. He utilizes the genre of the lover’s confession instead of a philosophical argument. In this confession, Alcibiades reveals that philosophical discourse with Socrates is, indeed, Erotic; when Socrates speaks, his listeners are “overwhelmed and enravished” (Plato 120). This phrasing in the original Greek is noteworthy for its Eroticism. “Overwhelmed” is translated from “ἐκπλήσσω”: to drive out of one’s senses, or, alternatively, to be struck with desire. “Enravished” is translated from “κατεχόμεθα”: to be held fast or possessed (Liddell). Alicibiades reveals that through only his speech, Socrates can provoke sensations akin to orgasm – he overwhelms the listener’s senses, stirs their desire, and makes them feel completely at his mercy. Alcibiades disrupts the symposium, but does not send it off its course. Rather, he concludes it cleanly by recognizing the seductions, flirtations, and gestures toward intimacy that animate the preceding discourse.

The Symposium clarifies itself once embraced as a work of both philosophy and storytelling. The formation and arrangement of Plato’s story is just as, if not more, important as the content of each man’s speech. The story is about Eros, but at no point explains Eros. Instead, it represents Eros through a single Erotic encounter. An image coalesces out of the Symposium: Eros as the compulsion to see others and be seen, to approach the innermost core of another and let them approach yours. As the yearning for closeness. As the rifts in which boundaries between “self” and “other” dissolve and re-assemble into new formations. As the desire to be changed. Plato shows, both within the dialogue of his story and through the narrative itself, that storytelling is Erotic. Through story, we momentarily dissolve the boundaries of the self, receiving experience from others in a way that can change us after we listen or read– so it stands with the Symposium itself.

Works Cited