Autor: Purcell, Brendan M.

Buch: The Drama of Humanity

Titel: The Drama of Humanity

Stichwort: Plato, Symposium, Gemeinschaft, Metaxy, Voegelin, Diotima, Sokrates, Eros, Alkibiades

Kurzinhalt: Euripides - Plato: neue Ordnung, Eros u. Liebe: metaxy, Daimon, daimonios aner, Eros: Poros, Penia, spoudaios, 3 Stufen d. Liebe, Sokrates = Daimon; Alkibiades = Dionysos, Republik

Textausschnitt: § 1 PHAEDRUS' SPEECH
§ 2 PAUSANIAS' SPEECH
§ 3 ERYXIMACHUS' SPEECH
§ 4 ARISTOPHANES' SPEECH
§ 5 AGATHON'S SPEECH
§ 6 DIOTIMA'S DIALOGUE WITH SOCRATES
§ 7 ALKIBIADES' PRAISE OF SOCRATES

() Voegelin sees the Platonic dialogue as 'the successor to Aeschylean tragedy under the new political conditions,' in which the 'drama of Socrates' replaced the dramatic struggle for the order of Dike or justice.
()
At stake in the spiritual confusion of the time was whether there could be fashioned an image of the right order of the soul and society -a paradigm, a model, an ideal-that could function for the citizens of the polis as had paraenetic myth for the Homeric heroes [...] [C]ould a new image of order be formed that would not also bear the marks of a non-binding, subjective opinion (doxa)'?
()
Plato intends to replace the orgiastic disorder represented by the Dionysus of the Bacchae 'with a steadfast and coherent pursuit of goodness and beauty that culminates in the contemplation of Beauty itself.' Rationality is understood not as repression but 'the psychological liberation of instinctive life, as leading to its completion and fulfillment.'
()
Diotima first shows Socrates that Eros, love, cannot possibly be a god. For love is something like the right opinions we have, which are neither the ignorance that cannot attain truth nor the knowledge which can explain itself, but in between (metaxy) wisdom and ignorance. Voegelin notes that 'there is no erotic tension lying around somewhere to be investigated by someone who stumbles on it,' rather it is an event of an 'experience-articulating-itself,'
()
Similarly, love is like desire, which, which is neither indifference to nor possession of beauty and goodness, but longing for these. Nor is love merely a man, mortal, nor a god, immortal, but a daimon, halfway between man and god. Such daimons or very powerful spirits
()
Such spiritual men express their longing for eternal participation in the good through the creation of interpersonal and social communities. These friendships are a communion in goodness which in some sense transcends mortality:
()
Alkibiades ends the encomium by applying the Silenus-image to Socrates' words which have the numinousness of the divine, and affirms that it is Socrates who is the mediating spirit between the human and the beyond-human:
()
The struggle has been between Socrates' Eros of reason and Alkibiades' Dionysian Eros. Alkibiades is 'a symbolic representation of Dionysus himself, very nearly the god's epiphany.'