Plato's Symposium and the genesis of the notion of tradition

Abstract

What is presented here as an article corresponds to a chapter of my doctoral thesis entitled “Metaphysics as Onto-theo-logy: an interpretation of Plato’s philosophy in the light of Martin Heidegger’s thought”. This chapter is dedicated to Plato’s Symposium where, according to my opinion, the genesis of the concept of tradition takes place: the idea of ​​safeguarding what must be remembered and bequeathed to posterity, a safeguard that will draw a guiding thread, reconnecting each present generation to future generations. The text proceeds to a comparative analysis of the understanding of eros in the Symposium and in the Phaedrus, after an exposition of the two Socratic participations in the Symposium –the Socrates/Agaton dialogue and the Socrates/Diotima dialogue. The starting point of this comparison is the verification of a radical difference between the two: while in the dialogue Phaedrus the doctrine of the immortality of the soul is emphatically defended, in the Symposium there are no traces of this doctrine, since here men are recognized, just as throughout the Greek mytho-poetic tradition, as “the mortals”. This radical difference, in my opinion, outlines two different civilizing projects, projects that, in their most general features, anticipate the two great constellations of the Western tradition: classical metaphysics realized as Christian theology on the one hand, and modern metaphysics with its notion of secular progress that will lead to the Nietzschean will to power, understood as “will to will”, on the other hand. The first project anticipates the notion of paradise in the promise of an eternal life blessed in the coexistence with the gods, whose winged souls would share

with those of the humans a perpetual food from the pasture of the intelligible, a coexistence only achieved if the individual soul is successful in the containment of the appetites that divert it from the ascending path towards the confines of the visible where the gods dwell in the vicinity of the intelligible. The second project just promises immortal fame guaranteed by the production of works (the “spiritual children procreated in beauty”) that, because they were generated in the light of that same intelligible, would last through time in the memory of coming generations--in future throwns whose greater or lesser reach would depend on the proximity to the beauty that generated them. As far as these throwns go, they would carry with them the name of their parents/authors. Together with each of these two projects there is a different understanding of eros. If in the Phaedrus, eros is a god who animates both human and divine souls and aspires to lead them to a life close to the intelligible where, in a loving

relationship, the divine nourishment of the winged pairs is guaranteed, in the second case, he loses his character as a god, gaining an intermediate status between the mortal and the divine (eros as daimon), precisely because he is understood as an élan towards the beautiful and the good that he lacks. Thus, the well-known model of eros as marked by a lack is formulated. Thanks to its astuteness, eros knows what it lacks, but due to its indigence is obliged to be always lacking and on the way to its object, since its conquest would logically imply the immediate end of the desiring aspiration that is his essence. In the modern context that, it seems to us, the Symposium prefigures, eros will be forced to be transmuted into a “desire of desire”, where the object operates only as a condition for its maintenance and increment since, strictly speaking, desire wants desire, it wants himself (Nietzsche and the will to power as “will to will”). A third decisive difference occurs between the two models: the change in the understanding of the divine. In the first model, eros inhabits the souls of the gods who still retain something of the ability to admire themselves for the deeds of mortals characteristic of the mytho-poetic understanding. Already, in the second model the divinity becomes self-sufficient and, as she had turned his back on mortals --since is beautiful and good, happy and lacking nothing--, she is indifferent to the human saga, thus anticipating the “abandonment of the gods” in the poem The Goodby by Hölderlin, which reads: “since formless and rooted fear separated men from the gods, must, expiating it with his blood, die the hearts of lovers.”