Alcibiades

What they omit is now movingly displayed to us in the person and the story of Alcibiades. We realize, through him, the deep importance unique passion has for ordinary human beings; we see its irreplaceable contribution to understanding.

Nussbaum argues that Alcibiades’ speech is Plato’s structural counter-demonstration against Diotima, showing that the ascent model omits the irreplaceable cognitive and ethical contribution of particular erotic passion.

Martha C. Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy, 1986thesis

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it is only through the Other and for the Other that Alcibiades, like each and every person, wants to make his love known to Socrates.

Lacan identifies Alcibiades’ declaration as the paradigm case of transferential structure, in which desire for the beloved can only be articulated via the mediation of a third party — the big Other — with agalma as its hidden object.

Lacan, Jacques, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VIII: Transference, 2015thesis

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Asked to speak about Love, Alcibiades has chosen to speak of a particular love; no definitions or explanations of the nature of anything, but just a story of a particular passion for a particular contingent individual.

Nussbaum argues that Alcibiades’ refusal of general definition in favor of singular narrative constitutes a methodological challenge to Socratic-Platonic epistemology and an alternative theory of erotic understanding.

Martha C. Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy, 1986thesis

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Remember the extraordinary scene - and try to situate it in our terms - constituted by the public confession of Alcibiades. You should indeed sense the quite remarkable weight that is attached to this action.

Lacan reads Alcibiades’ public confession as a psychoanalytically weighted event that goes far beyond biographical disclosure, making it the structural model for what transference enacts in the analytic situation.

Lacan, Jacques, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VIII: Transference, 2015thesis

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Alcibiades is said to love victory and pre-eminence (2.1; 33.3), honours and fame (6.3); he is dangerous as a lion (2.2; 16.2), yet still retains the equally thumoeidic capacity for shame (6.1). And in a particularly telling detail, at 23.6 he is called ‘not merely the son of Achilles, but Achilles himself.’

Hobbs establishes Alcibiades as the archetypal thumoeidic hero — driven by megalopsychia, honour, and the need for pre-eminence — whose character Aristotle and Plutarch both confirm as the literary and psychological heir of Achilles.

Hobbs, Angela, Plato and the Hero: Courage, Manliness and the Impersonal Good, 2000thesis

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Alcibiades suggests, then, that there is a kind of practical understanding that consists in the keen responsiveness of intellect, imagination, and feeling to the particulars of a situation.

Nussbaum uses Alcibiades to articulate a non-propositional form of practical wisdom — a ‘knowing how’ irreducible to either acquaintance or propositional knowledge — grounded in the lover’s attentive responsiveness to the particular beloved.

Martha C. Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy, 1986thesis

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Socrates highlights what is in question, he is going to speak about Agathon… Agathon was being aimed at throughout all the circumlocutions of

Lacan interprets Socrates’ response to Alcibiades as an analytic interpretation that reveals the true object of Alcibiades’ desire to be Agathon, demonstrating how the subject’s declared love masks and displaces the real aim of desire.

Lacan, Jacques, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VIII: Transference, 2015thesis

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Alcibiades is to his sight just one more of the beautifuls, a piece of the form, a pure thing like a jewel. So the first problem for Alcibiades is that his own openness is denied. He is a victim of hubris, pierced, mocked, dishonored.

Nussbaum argues that Socrates’ refusal to recognize Alcibiades as a unique individual — reducing him to an instance of the Form of Beauty — constitutes a philosophical hubris that damages Alcibiades and raises fundamental questions about the ethics of Platonic ascent.

Martha C. Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy, 1986thesis

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Alcibiades’ apparently playful response to Socrates’ appeal for a reconciliation between them takes on an ominous resonance: There is no reconciliation for you and me. But I shall have my revenge on you for these things another time.

Hobbs reads the dark dramatic irony of Alcibiades’ threat as Plato’s signal that the failure of Socratic education to redirect Alcibiades’ thumoeidic drives toward philosophical ends carries lethal consequences — ultimately for Socrates himself.

Hobbs, Angela, Plato and the Hero: Courage, Manliness and the Impersonal Good, 2000thesis

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speech makes repeated and central use of the image of opening up the other: an image which is essentially sexual, and inseparable from his sexual aims and imaginings, but which is also epistemic, intended to convey to us his desire ‘to hear everything that he knew’.

Nussbaum demonstrates that Alcibiades’ central erotic image — opening the Silenus figure — functions simultaneously as sexual desire and epistemic longing, showing the inseparability of bodily and cognitive dimensions in his particular mode of love.

Martha C. Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy, 1986supporting

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there emerges a personage like Alcibiades. A background of rupture, of contempt for

Lacan situates Alcibiades against a background of civic subversion and profanation, reading his character as constitutively defined by rupture with the symbolic laws of the city — a psychoanalytic as much as a historical claim.

Lacan, Jacques, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VIII: Transference, 2015supporting

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The atmosphere of mock-threat and mock-violence surrounding Alcibiades’ speech goes deeper than a game, since we know it to be the speech of a man who will soon commit real acts of violence.

Nussbaum reads the dramatic irony of Alcibiades’ speech as Plato’s deliberate framing of comic-erotic language against the historical background of real violence, linking the mutilation of the Herms to the psychology displayed in the Symposium.

Martha C. Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy, 1986supporting

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If Alcibiades regards Socrates as unique, he presumably also regards him as inimitable — at any rate, there is certainly no hint that he has ever considered adopting Socrates as a role model.

Hobbs argues that Alcibiades’ adoration of Socrates as a unique, inimitable being is itself the symptom of his failure: precisely because he cannot generalize from Socrates to a model for imitation, his thumoeidic drives remain unreformed.

Hobbs, Angela, Plato and the Hero: Courage, Manliness and the Impersonal Good, 2000supporting

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to place in this way the burden of proof on Alcibiades - to force him either to argue with Socrates on Socrates’ own terms or to take his love stories elsewhere - is simply a refusal to hear him or to enter his world.

Nussbaum argues that Socrates’ epistemological demand that Alcibiades justify his speech on philosophical terms is itself a form of violence — a refusal to acknowledge the validity of the experiential, narrative knowledge Alcibiades possesses.

Martha C. Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy, 1986supporting

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Alcibiades proposes a gentleman’s agreement: ‘Must I tell the truth?’ Which Socrates does not refuse: ‘I invite you to tell it’.

Lacan marks the contractual framing of Alcibiades’ speech — the negotiated permission to tell truth — as analytically significant, treating it as an enactment of the conditions of transference rather than mere social politesse.

Lacan, Jacques, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VIII: Transference, 2015supporting

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He makes his appearance ‘crowned with a thick crown of ivy and violets’ (212E1–2), making dress itself an image that tells the truth. The crown of violets is, first of all, a sign of Aphrodite.

Nussbaum interprets Alcibiades’ costuming as a sustained semiotic performance — crown, ivy, violets — that encodes his simultaneous identification with Aphrodite, the Muses, Athens, and the tragic-comic poet.

Martha C. Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy, 1986supporting

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a story of passion for a unique individual as eloquent as any in literature — a story that says that the theory omits something, is blind to something - then we might want to hesitate before calling the author blind.

Nussbaum argues that Alcibiades’ narrative of unique passion is Plato’s own deliberate counter-argument to Diotima’s theory, evidence of authorial intent rather than inadvertent inclusion.

Martha C. Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy, 1986supporting

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His desire for the (alleged) wisdom of Protagoras made him, he says, completely forgetful of Alcibiades, even in his physical presence. And he considers the beauty of wisdom to be ‘more beautiful’ than Alcibiades’ personal charm.

Nussbaum uses the Protagoras to show Socrates already in the process of erotic ascent — rendering Alcibiades’ individual beauty commensurable with and subordinate to the beauty of wisdom, a displacement that anticipates the Symposium’s full drama.

Martha C. Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy, 1986supporting

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This book arose initially from my fascination with certain of the Platonic Socrates’ interlocutors, and in particular with Callicles and Alcibiades. Why was Plato so ready to give room to the views of such unSocratic and charismatic opponents?

Hobbs identifies Alcibiades alongside Callicles as the twin charismatic figures whose persistent presence in the dialogues drives Plato’s inquiry into competing conceptions of manliness, andreia, and the thumoeidic soul.

Hobbs, Angela, Plato and the Hero: Courage, Manliness and the Impersonal Good, 2000supporting

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It is interesting to compare Alcibiades 1 124c, where the young Alcibiades says he wants to excel in the affairs appropriate to Athenian gentlemen.

Hobbs connects the young Alcibiades’ stated ambition in the First Alcibiades to the broader thumoeidic pattern of competitive excellence, linking it to Callicles’ political ideal as a modern adaptation of heroic warrior-kingship.

Hobbs, Angela, Plato and the Hero: Courage, Manliness and the Impersonal Good, 2000supporting

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it is precisely what is going to follow, namely the entry of Alcibiades. As you know, it is after… this marvellous, splendid oceanic development of the discourse of Diotima

Lacan marks the structural placement of Alcibiades’ entry — immediately after the culmination of Diotima’s speech — as analytically decisive, treating it as Plato’s own staging of the confrontation between philosophical sublimation and the return of particular desire.

Lacan, Jacques, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VIII: Transference, 2015supporting

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In the last months of his life he was, wherever he traveled, the object of intense, almost obsessive attention. Athens was on the verge of military capitulation to Sparta.

Nussbaum establishes the historical and political context of Alcibiades’ death — the collapse of Athens, the conflict between oligarchy and democracy — as the background against which Plato’s dramatic choices in the Symposium acquire their full tragic resonance.

Martha C. Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy, 1986aside

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the dialogues which have been translated in the first Appendix, and which appear to have the next claim to genuineness among the Platonic writings, are the Lesser Hippias, the Menexenus or Funeral Oration, the First Alcibiades.

This passage notes the canonical status and Aristotelian attestation of the First Alcibiades as a Platonic work, relevant to the textual tradition surrounding Alcibiades as a philosophical interlocutor.

Plato, Lesser Hippias, -390aside

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