Sharpe, Matthew - The Poetic Presentation of Philosophy - Leo Strauss On Plato's Symposium (2013)

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The Poetic Presentation of Philosophy:

Leo Strauss on Plato’s “Symposium”
Matthew Sharpe
Deakin University, Philosophy and Psychoanalytic Studies
Abstract This essay undertakes a close analysis of Leo Strauss’s remarkable but under-
treated Leo Strauss on Plato’s “Symposium,” reading it as opening a privileged purview
of his own (and his students’) wider understandings of philosophy, poetry, and politics.
The essay begins by drawing out Strauss’s three framing justifications for his manner of
reading the Symposium as a document in the “ancient quarrel” of philosophy and poetry
concerning which of the two should rightly shape the culture and ethical ideals of
the Greeks (part 1). Then, following the course of Plato’s Symposium, the essay ascends
through Strauss’s readings of the first five speeches in Plato’s dialogue (part 2) toward
the highlight of Strauss’s reading, namely, his three remarkable sessions on Socrates’s
speech. Part 3 analyses Strauss’s reading of this speech up to its climax, which Strauss
argues involves the philosophical “demotion of poetry”: a criticism of poets as moti-
vated by the Eros of fame and of tragic poetry as at its best creating captivating images
of gods and heroes which reflect their creators’ self-love and patriotic love of “one’s own,”
as against any transpolitical truth. Part 4 then looks at Strauss’s unusual reading of the
culmination of Socrates’s great speech (Diotima on the “higher mysteries”) alongside
Alkibiades’s speech in the Symposium as representing Plato’s “poetic presentation of
philosophy.” The essay becomes more critical as it proceeds. Strauss’s reading of the
Symposium, like his reading of the Republic, is remarkable for its own “demotion of
metaphysics” in Plato, and in my concluding remarks, I will question this status, or
disappearance, of metaphysics in Strauss’s Platonism. Strauss’s reading of the Sym-
posium, like his wider oeuvre, aims at a defense of philosophy as meaningfully different
from and superior to poetry. Yet he is unable to give coherence to the central idea of the
I would like to thank William Altman and Daniel Townsend for supporting, reading, and
commenting on earlier drafts of this paper.
Poetics Today 34:4 (Winter 2013) DOI 10.1215/03335372-2389596
q 2014 by Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics
Published by Duke University Press

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564 Poetics Today 34:4
Good (versus the Beautiful) in Platonic thought, which he agrees with other commen-
tators is decisive for Plato’s attempt to differentiate philosophical inquiry from poetic
creation. So readers of On Plato’s “Symposium” can be left wondering about how Strauss
can metaphilosophically ground his elevated claims on behalf of philosophy versus the
poets and to what extent his own work remains a decisively rhetorical or poetic pre-
sentation of philosophy.
In other words, this occasion is really a particularly important one. We are likely
to hear interesting things which are not said on every occasion if I can listen to a
symposium.
Leo Strauss, Leo Strauss on Plato’s “Symposium”
Introduction: Framing Strauss’s Symposium
The edited transcript of Leo Strauss’s 1959 seminar on Plato’s Symposium

(1997j) appeared in 2001. Whether because Strauss was inspired by the beau-
ty of Plato’s text, because Leo Strauss on Plato’s “Symposium” is a transcript of
classes, or because he felt the subject of a symposium demanded it,1 Strauss’s
commentary on the Symposium is a highly revealing, open, and sometimes
itself beautiful text.2 In it Strauss is emboldened to speak much more freely
about his mature views on the nature of philosophy, poetry, and politics than
in his written works. The transcripts show Strauss’s extraordinary claims as
a heterodox reader of ancient philosophical texts, challenging more estab-
lished philosophical ways of reading these texts by drawing particular atten-
tion to their literary, rhetorical, and poetic features.3 Insofar as the issue of
philosophy’s differences from poetry4 — and the relations of them both with
political life — is widely recognized to lie at the heart of Strauss’s mature
1. Thus his comment: “Symposia give rise to play and jokes, but at the same time they are
susceptible of noble speeches. . . . You would have to reflect about the medium of symposia,
which is wine, and the effects of wine. . . . In the first place, wine gives rise to the ability or
frankness to say everything — openness, frankness. . . . We are likely to hear interesting things
which are not said on every occasion if we can listen to a symposium” (Strauss 2001: 12).
2. An observation also made by Drew A. Hyland (2003).
3. Strauss’s way of interpreting ancient texts, and his political thinking more widely, has at-
tracted a huge body of scholarship and, very often, acrimonious debates. For some key texts
in the voluminous literature on Leo Strauss and his controversial legacy, the interested reader is
directed to Altman 2010; Batnitzky 2006; Bloom 1974; Burnyeat 1985; Drury 1987, 2005, 2007;
Germino 1991; Janssens 2008; Lampert 1996; Meier 2006; Minowitz 2009; Murley 2005;
Norton 2004; Pangle 2006; Robertson 1999; Rosen 2003; Sheppard 2006; Smith 2007; Tan-
guay 2007; Xenos 2008; Zuckert 1996; Zuckert and Zuckert 2006.
4. Note that poetry will be used here, as it tends to be used by Strauss and his students as a
descriptor of creative literature, including narrative fiction. This sense comes from the Greek
poeisis, which in its widest sense embraces all kinds of human making or artifice.

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Sharpe † The Poetic Presentation of Philosophy 565
output,5 his reading of Plato’s Symposium indeed promises a kind of royal road
to interpreting and evaluating the strengths and limitations of Strauss’s (1983)
“Platonic political philosophy.”6
Yet for all that, Strauss’s On Plato’s “Symposium” has generated only a small
critical response outside of Seth Benardete’s (2001a) editorial introduction to
the volume.7 The essay that follows aims to redress this exegetical shortfall. Its
method is to undertake a close review of this undertreated text by Strauss in a
way that reads Strauss’s Symposium as opening a privileged purview of his own
(and his students’) wider understandings of philosophy, poetry, and politics.
As the essay proceeds, I will also highlight the contrasts between Strauss’s
interpretation of Plato’s dialogues and other (notably Neoplatonic) ways of
reading Plato.
The essay begins by drawing out Strauss’s three framing justifications for
his manner of reading the text as a document in the “ancient quarrel” (Plato
1997h: 607b) of philosophy and poetry concerning which of them should
rightly shape the culture and ethical ideals of the Greeks (part 1). Then,
following the course of Plato’s Symposium, the essay ascends through Strauss’s
readings of the first five speeches in Plato’s dialogue (part 2) toward the
highlight of Strauss’s commentary, his three remarkable chapters on Socra-
tes’s speech in the Platonic Symposium. Part 3 analyzes Strauss’s (2001: 244; cf.
238) reading of this speech up to what he presents as its climax, an alleged
“philosophic demotion of poetry” depicting its beautiful productions as
motivated by poets’ sublimated self-love and love of fame rather than the
suprapolitical search for wisdom. Part 4 then looks at Strauss’s (2001: 248)
unusual reading of the conclusion of Socrates’s great speech (Diotima on
the “higher mysteries”) and Alkibiades’s intervention as representing Plato’s
“poetic presentation of philosophy.”
The reader is forewarned that the essay becomes progressively more criti-
cal as it proceeds. Strauss’s reading of the Symposium, like his reading of the
Republic (Strauss 1964), is remarkable for what might be called the “demotion
of metaphysics” in Plato. In my concluding remarks, I will question Strauss’s
Symposium on this issue of the status, or disappearance, of metaphysics in
5. For recent treatments of the importance of the poetry/philosophy relation in Strauss, see
Janssens 2010 and O’Mahoney 2011. See also Bloom 1968, 1977; Drury 2005: 65 – 75; Janssens
2008: esp. “Epilogue”; Pangle 1983: 10 – 18, 2006: 45 – 56, 76 – 80; Smith 2007: 4, 7, 49, 123 – 25;
Zuckert 1996: 109 – 68, esp. 133ff.; Zuckert and Zuckert 2006: 45 – 58, 102, 129, 163.
6. This is not to say that Strauss’s work more widely has not influenced students to engage with
the Symposium. The reader can consult, for example, Benardete 2001b; Bloom 2001; Nichols
2004; Rosen 1999. These works, however, predate the publication of Strauss’s On Plato’s
“Symposium,” and many make convergent but different specific claims about the text.
7. But see Hemmenway 2003. Hyland 2003 is also a critical review. Cf. Gerson 2006; Reitsma
2006; and below.

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Strauss’s Platonism. Strauss’s reading of the Symposium, like his wider oeuvre,
aims at a defense of philosophy as meaningfully different from and superior to
poetry as both an intellectual practice and a means of education and thinking.
Yet Strauss’s way of reading tends to draw us away from philosophical argu-
mentation toward the rhetorical or poetic framing of philosophical argu-
ments in the texts he examines, understanding this poetic presentation of
philosophy as justified by philosophers’ need for political caution in present-
ing their inquiries to the wider public. In On Plato’s “Symposium” Strauss is
unable to give a coherent account of the central Platonic idea of the Good
(versus the Beautiful), which he agrees with other commentators should
be decisive in differentiating philosophical inquiry from poetic creation.
Accordingly, the reader of On Plato’s “Symposium” is left wondering how
Strauss can metaphilosophically ground his elevated, seemingly “Platonic”
claims on behalf of philosophy versus the poets and to what extent his own
work remains a decisively rhetorical or poetic representation of philosophy.
1. Themes: The Ancient Quarrel, Eros, Philosophy — or Socrates’s Hybris
In the opening session of his 1959 seminar at the University of Chicago,

which forms the basis of On Plato’s “Symposium,” Strauss presents three the-
matic justifications for his unusual decision to devote a political science course
to Plato’s Symposium (Benardete 2001a: vii – viii).8 These justifications frame
Strauss’s wider reading of the Symposium and run through the entire text.
The first concerns Strauss’s famous contesting of modern understandings
of “political philosophy” as concerning only philosophers’ thoughts on
directly political matters, like the nature of government, the best regime,
justice, freedom, or empire.9 As the by now vast scholarly literature has
shown,10 political philosophy for Strauss, following his return to ancient
thought via Moses Maimonides and the falasifa (philosophers) in the 1930s,
also concerns philosophy’s self-presentation to the polis or city as a bios (way
of life). As such, Straussian political philosophy centers upon a kind of
8. The unusual nature of this proposal must have initially struck newly enrolled students, as
noted in Hyland 2003.
9. The original seventeen-page essay which best condenses Strauss’s key claims that political
philosophy preeminently involves the political, poetic, or rhetorical presentation of philoso-
phy is his “On Classical Political Philosophy” (1988a). For a recent special issue dedicated to
Strauss’s conception of political philosophy, see the contributions and articles in the April –
May 2010 Perspectives on Political Science 39 (2): esp. Tarcov 2010.
10. See note 3. See esp. the book-length studies and collections Batnitzky 2006; Deutsch and
Murley 1999; Drury 2005; Janssens 2008; Meier 2006; Murley 2005; Sheppard 2006; Smith
2007; Xenos 2008; Zuckert and Zuckert 2006. Pangle 1983 and 1989 are authoritative intro-
ductions to Strauss’s conception of political philosophy.

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“metaphilosophical” reflection on philosophy’s nature, its relations with (and

its differences from) other human concerns. In particular, Strauss’s idea of
political philosophy involves comprehending how philosophy’s drive toward
a theoretical understanding of human affairs relates to the practical business
of statesmen or political leaders charged with governing those affairs.11 On
the other hand, Strauss’s political philosophy centrally involves comprehend-
ing what Plato’s Socrates in the Republic dubbed philosophy’s “ancient quar-
rel” with the poets. Strauss centrally asserts that philosophers, since the time
of Socrates’s trial if not before, have been obliged — and sometimes com-
pelled by political and religious authorities — to respond to the political charges
of not believing in the city’s gods and corrupting the young, charges which
were mainly directed against Socrates by the old-comedic poet Aristophanes
(n.d.) in his satirical Clouds. This political need, Strauss contends, shapes the
writings of the philosophers, at least until the advent of modern liberalism.12
It is, then, primarily to Socrates’s “ancient quarrel” of philosophy with the
poets that Strauss refers in the opening sessions of his 1959 seminar to justify
the following extended commentary on the Symposium in a course on political
science. This quarrel, Strauss (2001: 6, 8) here as elsewhere specifies, has two
stakes: theoretical wisdom, or “supremacy concerning wisdom,” simpliciter,
but also specifically political wisdom concerning how to engage with, per-
suade, and govern human beings. Aristophanes in the Clouds had in effect
claimed through his “Socrates” that philosophy is unable to persuade the
multitude of its worth as a pursuit or to appreciate how gravely philosophy’s
pursuit of theoretical wisdom challenges accepted nomoi (conventions, laws),
since free inquiry involves suspending inquirers’ commitments to publicly
accepted beliefs (ibid.: 6 – 7).13 For this reason, if Aristophanes is right, poetry
“completes the completely theoretical wisdom by self-knowledge” (ibid.: 7).
As in Clouds itself, it adds to philosophy’s pursuit of theoretical truths a reflec-
tive awareness of the need to accommodate and justify any such theoretical
pursuits, or their public presentation, to accepted political values — or to
present philosophical ideas in the pleasant clothes of comedy or captivating
grandeur of tragedy, open to the appreciation of the many. In this political
light, “poetry is the capstone of wisdom” (ibid.).
11. The locus classicus on the comparison between the philosopher-councillor and the tyrant-
monarch is Strauss’s On Tyranny (2000).
12. Strauss (1988b: 22 – 37) makes this claim paradigmatically in chapter 1 of Persecution and the
Art of Writing. On this political shaping of philosophical writings and the archetypal importance
of Aristophanes’s charges against Socrates for the Straussians, see Bloom 1968: 307 – 10; Meier
2002; Pangle 1983: 10 – 18; Zuckert 1996: 132 – 47, 337, 380 – 87.
13. Cf. Aristophanes’s (n.d.: ll. 220 – 1922), Clouds, translated by Ian Johnston.

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According to Strauss’s idea of Platonic political philosophy, however, the

dialogic, literary character of Plato’s oeuvre reflects the way that the ancient
philosophers set out to rebut the Aristophanic charges that led to Socrates’s
death in 399 BCE.14 As everyone knows, Plato has his Socrates raise explicit
accusations about the representations of the poets in Republic books 3 and 10,
leading to their expulsion on moral and ontological grounds from the ideal
philosophical city. Strauss and his students read the Republic as a whole as a
politically edifying response to Aristophanes. Its political goal is to show that
Plato, despite Aristophanes’s accusations against his teacher, fully under-
stood the tension or “recalcitrance” between philosophy and the city and
the need to present philosophical activity in a rhetorical or poetic way that
could justify its value to nonphilosophers (Strauss 2001: 7).15
Strauss notes, however, that there are no poets present to reply to Socra-
tes’s charges in Plato’s presentation of the ancient quarrel in the Republic, a
fact which detracts from the authority of his views on poetry there. By con-
trast, the dramatis personae of the Platonic Symposium include both Aristoph-
anes himself and the tragedian Agathon.16 Strauss’s (ibid.: 171) first, framing
claim in On Plato’s “Symposium,” then, is that the Symposium, by including
the great comedian and a significant tragedian among its speakers, should
be interpreted as making explicit Plato’s more complete and “much more
favourable” assessment of poetry compared to the better known dismissals of
the Republic. Not only are great poets present to judge Socrates’s case. Their
presence ensures that the case made by Plato in the dialogue for philosophy’s
superiorities over poetry will have to be made much more adequately and in
a way truer both to the nature of poetry and to Plato’s larger view of the
“ancient quarrel” of the poets and the philosophers.
To support these claims, Strauss makes a series of typically provocative
observations concerning the poetic framing of the Symposium as a work of
literary fiction as well as a philosophical dialogue concerned with sheer
reasoning. These hermeneutic claims frame all that follows in his own text.
First, Strauss contends that the dramatic action of the Symposium, culmi-
nating in Alkibiades’s crowning of Socrates as the unexpected, consummate
exponent of Eros, forms a kind of Platonic response to Aristophanes’s Frogs
14. See Strauss 1970: 112, 164, 1989a; Zuckert 1996: 132 – 46. For examples in scholarship that
address this problematic and the importance of Aristophanes, see Bloom 1968: 307 – 10, 337,
380 – 87; Lampert 1996: 120 – 21; Meier 2002; Pangle 1983: 10 – 18; Zuckert 1996: 132 – 47.
15. For examples of this kind of reading of the Republic indebted to Strauss, see Bloom 1968;
Lampert 1996: 146 – 58; Smith 2007: chap. 4, “Leo Strauss’ Platonic Liberalism”; Zuckert
1996: 146 – 55.
16. The latter was a significant poet in his own right, victor at the Dionysia the day before the
narrated drinking party takes place.

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(1963).17 In that comedy Aristophanes makes us privy to a contest in Hades

between Euripides and Aeschylus, judged by Dionysus (and won by Aeschy-
lus), about who is the greater tragedian. The subject of that poetic contest was
the erotic, tyrannical politician Alkibiades and how the city of Athens that
reared him should now treat this profoundly hybristic (hubristic) man. Just so,
in the Symposium Plato stages a contest of Socrates the philosopher with both a
comic and a tragic poet as to who can make the best speech on love. And it
is the same hybristic politician, Alkibiades of the Frogs, who now bursts in
comically just after Socrates has delivered his speech and assumes the mantle
of the judge, taking the place in the Symposium of Dionysus in the Frogs (Strauss
2001: 17).
Second, Strauss (ibid.: 60) emphasizes that whereas in the Republic Socrates
is several times compelled by his interlocutors to undertake and continue the
discussion,18 “the Symposium is an unusually voluntary dialogue, as you can
see from the opening. Socrates dresses up and goes on his own.” Following
Xenophon, Strauss (1964: 64 – 65) elsewhere suggests that the more voluntary
the speech in an ancient text, the more likely it is that the speaker will speak
frankly or openly.19 So because of the Symposium’s voluntary nature, its
importance as a source for the more complete disclosure of Plato’s views is
again underscored.20 The action of the dialogue culminates with Alki-
biades — a Platonic Dionysus — placing the victory laurel on the head of
Socrates the philosopher: for Strauss, a sure clue to interpreting the Symposium
17. Notably, Strauss (1964: 61n15) suggests in The City and Man that the Republic echoes Aris-
tophanes’s Assembly of Women (1997) in a comparable manner — a point picked up in Bloom 1977
and Zuckert 1996. The Platonic texts, for Strauss and his students, are very direct responses to
Aristophanes up to and including Plato’s frequent recourse to comic episodes and parodies, as
in the Symposium. In The City and Man we are told, gnomically, that Plato’s dialogue “brings to
completion what could have been thought to be completed by Aristophanes” (Strauss 1964: 62).
18. See, for example, ibid.: 63 – 64. Stephen Smith (2007: 98 – 100) highlights Strauss’s empha-
sis on the role of compulsion in political life in the Republic.
19. On the Xenophontic paradigm for reading Socratic dialogues, see Strauss 1972: 93 – 94,
122 – 23; 2000: 26. There is a wealth of scholarship on Strauss’s famous contention that ancient
philosophers wrote esoterically. A revealing recent treatment is Lampert 2009. The two loci
classici are chapter 1 of Strauss 1988b: 22 – 37 and the opening pages of Strauss 1964: 50 – 62.
20. Strauss (2001: 11) draws attention to the ancient, proposed subtitle for the Symposium,
namely, “On the Good” (Peri ton agathon). The Republic names the Good as the highest object
of philosophical knowledge, but at the same time the dialogue makes clear Socrates’s reluctance
to discuss it in any detail, at least in that context or with Glaucon, his immediate interlocutor.
(On the importance of the addresses of speech in classical philosophy, see Strauss 1972: 93 – 94,
122 – 23.) The drinking party in the Symposium is hosted by the poet named Agathon: as Strauss
(2001: 11 – 12) dryly remarks, “This would not be a bad pun.” The foregrounding of the
agathon in the Symposium indicates again that, for Strauss, the Symposium is more important
than the Republic in understanding Plato’s view of philosophy’s relation to poetry, since Strauss
will later assert that a concern for the Good, as against the Beautiful, defines philosophy, against
poetry (see part 4).

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as demonstrating, at least exoterically, Plato’s judgment of the superiority

of philosophy over poetry. Similarly, the Symposium’s famous closing lines see
Socrates the last man standing at this banquet, after first Aristophanes and
then the tragedian Agathon have fallen asleep (cf. 2001: 284 – 86). According
to Strauss, these poetic cues all show that in the Symposium Plato aimed to
display both his own superiority as a kind of philosophical poet to Aristoph-
anes and the others and the larger superiority of philosophy, represented by
Socrates, to the poets in the ancient quarrel about “who is the wisest of them
all,” as it were. For Strauss’s Plato, “poetry is not the capstone of philosophy.
On the contrary, philosophy is the capstone of poetry. This means . . . that
philosophy defeats poetry in the contest for supremacy regarding wisdom”
(ibid.: 7).
So much for the ancient quarrel of philosophy with the poets. Strauss’s
next larger justification for concerning himself with the Symposium as a subject
for political science has to do with the central theme of the Symposium’s speak-
ers, namely, Eros.21 In Plato’s key political dialogue of the Republic, Strauss
claims, the pressing claims of Eros in human affairs are pointedly “abstract-
ed” from — ignored or devalued22 — in Socrates’s attempt to describe the best
regime, including the implausible attempt to exercise political control over
people’s choices of sexual and reproductive partners. Indeed this “deliberate,
and deliberately exaggerated, demotion of eros” in the Republic, Strauss (ibid.:
10) underscores, means that we must read Socrates’s prescriptions to Glau-
con there for the kallipolis (beautiful city) (including “communism” of women
and children among the guardian class) as more “laughable” than serious
(Strauss 1964: 116 – 18).
Strauss’s commentary on the Symposium — one of the Platonic texts on Eros,
unlike the Republic — accordingly becomes a valuable source for Strauss’s own
reflections on Platonic Eros and its decisive relevance to political philosophy.23
Strauss’s argument here for this relevance is somewhat oblique. It begins
from the thought that to understand the true nature of ta politika (affairs of
21. Notably enough, in this context Strauss makes a passing, quietly unimpressed reference to
Harold Lasswell’s work. (Presumably Strauss has in mind Psychopathology and Politics [Lasswell
1986 {1930}], which had brought a psychoanalytic account of Eros to American political
science with what Strauss [2001: 17] says is “very great success.”)
22. To “abstract from” is a characteristic Straussian verbal form: in context, it always implies
ignoring or removing from consideration the particular thing “abstracted from.” Strauss’s
(1964: 62, 109, 111) somewhat enigmatic claim is that each Platonic dialogue “abstracts
from” some decisive factor which would need to be considered for a full and adequate treat-
ment of the topic and that in the Republic this factor is decisively Eros.
23. See esp. Strauss 1964: 62, 109, 111, where the abstraction from Eros assumes the highest
significance for understanding the status of that dialogue as announcing not a utopian vision
but a depiction of the limits of political life as such. On the place of Eros in Strauss’s political
philosophy, see Zuckert and Zuckert 2006: 153 – 76.

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state), we need to understand the place and limits of people’s political con-
cerns and obligations relative to other dimensions of human experience:
“One cannot understand the political without understanding somehow the
non-political” (Strauss 2001: 10).24 In particular, Strauss specifies, we need
to understand the relations of politics to those “sub-political” things (like
geographic or economic factors) that precede and ground peoples’ political
concerns and to those “supra-political things” that transcend but decisively
affect political concerns. The latter category includes the ethical or religious
ideals that people pursue through their political speeches and actions: free-
dom, empire, salvation. And it is here, among these “suprapolitical” factors,
that Platonic Eros belongs. For Plato and the other classical Greek philoso-
phers and Sophists — so Strauss (ibid.) argues in On Plato’s “Symposium” and in
Natural Right and History (1952) — it is first of all physis (roughly, nature) that
constitutes the reality or standard which “transcends the political in dignity
and which gives politics its guidance” (see also Strauss 1952: 88 – 97, 120 – 34).
Yet Strauss (2001: 10) hastens to add (albeit somewhat enigmatically): “It is
somehow the contention of Plato that the nature of man and, in a way, the
nature of the whole [of nature, the cosmos, all things], is eros.”
This relevance of Eros — as a natural, suprapolitical force affecting politi-
cal life — explains why Strauss (ibid.: 11) feels able to assure his students that
the Symposium’s subject, appearances notwithstanding, touches “the foun-
dation of the political — the natural. Somehow [sic ] this is strongly identified
with eros.” True, the Symposium is in one way “the most emphatically non-
political dialogue” in Plato’s oeuvre; this Strauss concedes to almost every
other reading of the text. After all, its direct subject, Eros, is “in essential
tension with the political element” (ibid.: 10). Yet at the same time Strauss
always contended that “Platonic political philosophy” centrally concerns this
very tension between politics and pursuits — including erotic pursuits, like
philosophy’s love of truth — whose aims are tangential to political proprieties
and concerns; and so the Symposium becomes for him a key to Plato’s political
thinking.25
This reference to philosophical or theoretical inquiry as decisively supra-
political brings us to the final and most important point highlighted in
Strauss’s opening remarks about the literary or poetic setting and action of
Plato’s Symposium. Alongside the philosophy/poetry querelle (quarrel), and the
nature of Eros, Strauss, like other commentators, sees the Symposium as prom-
24. I note that the “somehow” here is timely, otherwise the claim might license the relevance of
nearly anything for the understanding of nearly anything else.
25. At stake in Strauss’s reading of the dialogue, in any case, is what he terms the “suprapolit-
ical” end of politics, which at its highest for Strauss (2001: 91), as for Plato, is in some way (see
below) philosophy or theoria itself.

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ising a privileged insight into Plato’s conception of philosophy itself, as embod-

ied by Socrates.26 Strauss (2001: 28, 33 – 34, 73, 252, 273) focuses specifically on
what he terms Socrates’s hybris (hubris): a hybris which, given Socrates’s
paradigmatic status for Plato, is the hybris of philosophy itself. Agathon at
Symposium 175e7 playfully calls Socrates a “man of insolent pride,” a thought
which Alkibiades’s closing speech will echo. In contrast to most commenta-
tors, Strauss (2001: 33) accepts Agathon’s apparent jest — and, as we will see,
Alkibiades’s assessment of Socrates as well — as revealingly true.27 Indeed
Strauss sees the action of the Symposium as highlighting this hybris of Socrates
and of philosophy itself relative to most people’s more mundane ethical and
political preoccupations.
With this in view, Strauss draws attention to the dramatic dating of the
action of the dialogue. The drinking party, we are told, occurred the night
after the tragedian Agathon, present at the symposium, won his victory at the
Dionysia: and Agathon’s victory occurred in 416 BCE. This fact, Strauss
contends, together with the larger-than-life entrance made by the notoriously
hybristic Athenian general Alkibiades at the drinking party, shows that Plato
wanted readers to read the action of the Symposium in the light of the most
outrageous political scandal in Athens in those decisive years. In 415 BCE, as
Thucydides (1972, book VI, paragraphs 27 – 29 [pp. 426 – 27]) recounts, Alki-
biades was implicated in the infamous profanation of Athens’s Hermes stat-
ues — and of the Eleusinian mysteries — the night before the triremes sailed
for Sicily in the ill-fated naval expedition whose failure would bring Athens
militarily to its knees.
So what does Strauss make of these historical facts concerning Alkibiades’s
hybris, and how does he relate it to the question of how we should interpret
Plato’s Symposium and Socrates’s hybris within it? Hybris for the Greeks
mainly involved the kind of insolent pride exemplified by Alkibiades in 415
BCE, which challenged the authority of the gods. Plato’s Symposium, for its
part, Strauss (2001: 15 – 16) observes, is the one Platonic dialogue centrally
devoted to discussion of the kind of “god, goddess, or gods” whose authority
hybris contests. Yet when we consider the content of the six speeches on Eros
made before Alkibiades bursts in, Strauss notes, we witness a progression in
a markedly impious direction relative to the accepted religious beliefs of the
Athenians. The first speaker, Phaedrus, claims Eros to be the oldest god on
26. See, for example, Pierre Hadot (1996: esp. 156 – 78), who discusses Søren Kierkegaard’s,
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s, and Friedrich Nietzsche’s responses to the Symposium and the
enigmatic portrayal of Socrates in the text, aligning him with both Eros and Dionysus.
27. Most commentators dismiss this comment, presumably reading it as incidental, ironic, or
reflective of Agathon’s limited perspective. Strauss’s acceptance of its revelatory truth should be
compared with his similar acceptance of Alkibiades’s charges against Socrates (see part 4).

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good Homeric-Hesiodic authority. Then, following Paunanius and Erixy-

machus, Aristophanes’s already heterodox speech has Eros generated after
the Olympian deities. Agathon, speaking before Socrates, says Eros is the
youngest god; but then Socrates himself claims that Eros is not a god at all (Strauss
2001: 158). Given this framework, Strauss claims that Plato’s Symposium is
meant to indicate to us that the gravest profanation of mysteries in the Athens
of 416 – 415 BCE was not perpetrated by Alkibiades. It was the product of
Socrates’s comparable but distinctly philosophical form of hybris: “The true
story is entirely different from what popular hysteria held. The mysteries
divulged were not those of Eleusis but mysteries told by an entirely different
priestess from Mantinea . . . and the man who divulged them was Socrates
himself. Alkibiades was completely innocent, he came in only after the whole
thing was over” (ibid.: 24; cf. 16).
As we proceed, we will see more clearly what Strauss is aiming at here. For
him, the Symposium mainly concerns Eros as the foundation of political life and
as the animating feature of both philosophical inquiry and poetic creation.
This foundation, Strauss claims, is nevertheless in essential tension with
political life, as Aristophanes’s Clouds has hilariously shown. In the Symposium
Socrates shows himself — being a philosopher rather than a poet — as the
figure who alone is able to consummately praise Eros, this suprapolitical
foundation of politics. In the culminating third part of Socrates’s speech,
moreover, the priestess Diotima depicts philosophy as itself the highest erotic
pursuit — the pursuit of truth or beauty (Symp. 211c – 212a). Since the Sym-
posium thus presents philosophy, not poetry, as embodying the highest species
of Eros, Plato must have wanted to show us through this dialogue that phi-
losophy always courts the kind of hybris that leads people to question and
undermine belief in ancestral customs and gods. Or as Strauss (2001: 24)
explains in the immediate sequel to his thoughts on Socrates and Alkibiades
and the profanations of 416 – 415 BCE: “The allusion to an impious and
criminal relation of mysteries [in the Symposium ] ceases to be strange once one
reflects on what philosophy or science is in Plato’s view. Philosophy or science
attempts to uncover all secrets and in this sense to profane all mysteries — to
discover the truth and to proclaim it.” Having introduced the three framing
Straussian themes of Eros, poetry, and the hybristic, politically heterodox
nature of philosophy, I turn now to his analysis of the seven speeches that
form the body of Plato’s Symposium.
2. Ascending to (the) Agathon: Eros and the City
In this essay it will be impossible to do full justice to all the minute details
of Strauss’s On Plato’s “Symposium” : a consideration that might go some way

574
Table 1 Differentia that Strauss discerns among the seven speeches of Symposium
Phaedrus Pausanius Eryximachus Aristophanes Agathon Socrates Alkibiades
Poetics Today 34:4

Beautiful youn- Older peder- Technician: doctor, Comic poet, Epigonic tragedian, Philosopher (healer Tyrannical dema-
ger beloved, ast/lover, soft healer of bodies author of Clouds, student of Gorgias: of souls?), satirized gogue, leader of
lover of beautiful accuser of Soc- object of Aristopha- in Aristophanes’s Sicilian expedition
speeches rates nes’s satire in Thes- Clouds of 415 BCE, flees to
mophoriazusae Sparta then to Per-

sia, returns to
Athens in 407 BCE
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Implicated in Implicated in scan- First accused of
scandal of 416 dal of 416 scandal of 416
Pupil of Hippias Pupil of Hippias Pupil of Euripides Pupil of Socrates
Weak drinker Weak drinker Weak drinker Strong drinker Strong drinker Strong drinker Strong drinker
Beloved of Lover of Aga- Lover of Phaedrus Beloved of no Most beautiful in Lover of Agathon, (former) lover of
Eryximachus thon one in the dia- body, beloved of beloved of Socrates Socrates and Aga-
logue — thus of Pausanius, Socrates, thon
Plato? (Strauss Alkibiades
2001: 254)
One-sided love One-sided love Love is mutual Love is mutual: Love is mutual, the Sum of bodily Eros, Love is love of self or
of older lovers defense of ped- bringer of peace to Eros for kalon, and “of one’s own”
for beloved erasty as highest, people and gods philosophical Eros (Strauss 2001: 282)
youths most manly love
Eros is sexual Eros is sexual Eros is cosmic: dis- Eros is human Eros more than sex- Eros beyond sexual Eros as bodily
(human only) (human only); tinction between only, although it ual in its products: only; beyond indi-
distinction noble versus base recalls the cos- makes the virtuous, viduals; points
between noble Eros becomes that mic, pre-Olym- peace toward “the Good”
and base Eros between healthy pian gods — Eros and/or Beauty
(body and soul) and unhealthy Eros is tragic
Within nomos Within nomos Eros is a natural Eros as protest Eros as love of kalon, Eros as desire for Disregard of law:
(law or conven- (no mention of force of attraction of against nomos the Beautiful sempiternal posses- paranomia
tion): satisfied nature) while opposites for har- and the Olympi- and/or noble; sum sion of the Good, to
with established wanting to mony — Empedo- an gods; aim at of all virtues give birth, or to
Sharpe
nomoi concern- change Athenian cles cosmic gods (cf. create by the
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ing love as a laws concerning Plato, Epinomis) inspiration provided
†
beloved pederasty: leans by Beauty
The Poetic Presentation of Philosophy

on law for
respectability
Eros oldest god; Eros is a god Eros is divine Eros is a god but Eros is the youngest Eros is not a god
great force not the youngest god
god
Uninspired: sub- Uninspired: sub- Uninspired: subor- Inspired by a Inspired: Eros Inspired: philosoph- Drunken: inspired
ordinates Eros to ordinates Eros to dinates Eros to technē muse (only the higher than the ical Eros above the by love of Agathon
gain, love of self virtue and/as (art), unerotic two poets and gods, rules over the city, “subordinated”
and what is one’s nomos and to the philosopher gods, brings peace to the Good
own own self-interest Socrates are to the gods
as lover inspired)
575
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toward explaining the widespread critical silence on this text. Strauss charac-
teristically mines the Platonic dialogue for nearly every imaginable point
of literary or poetic detail to bring out the complexity of Plato’s text, which
escapes other readers. This means observing the differences among the char-
acters of the ten speakers: their ages; their “softness” or “hardness,” based on
whether they drink alcohol; their erotic statuses, whether as lovers or beloved;
their philosophical, sophistic, or technical educations; whether their speeches
are “inspired” and, if so, by what muse or power. Strauss’s commentary also
involves a series of similarly precise contrasts drawn among the speeches of
the characters: in particular, whether Eros is a god; the age of the god; Eros’s
relations with the other gods; whether Eros the god always existed or was
generated by parents; whether the speaker mentions Eros’s cause or origin,
his nature, or his boons for human beings; whether the speaker treats love as
one-sided (Phaedrus and Pausanius) or mutual (Eryximachus and Aristoph-
anes), as an exclusively human thing (most strongly, Aristophanes), or as a
cosmic principle (Eryximachus and Socrates); whether he praises pederasty,
keeps silent about it, or opposes the practice; and the difference in the
particular virtues that the different speakers assign either to Eros’s benevo-
lence (for instance, Phaedrus identifies these virtues as manliness or cour-
age [andreia ] [ibid.: 48 – 49, 55], while Pausanius instead looks successively
to wisdom, freedom, and moral decency [ibid.: 79 – 80]) or to Eros himself
(ibid.: 181).
In Strauss’s hands, each of these details becomes what the structuralists call
a “signifier,” although Strauss would doubtlessly disapprove of the term. For
him, every Platonic statement takes on significance in its contrast with the
other possibilities instantiated, or not instantiated, elsewhere in the text. Each
of these contrasts thus contributes, however minutely, to the larger literary
or poetic meaning of the whole. As Strauss (ibid.: 5) underlines in his intro-
ductory remarks concerning his famous theme of “logographic necessity”
drawn from Plato’s Phaedrus (1997f ): “There is nothing superfluous, nothing
meaningless in a Platonic dialogue . . . we must consider everything in a
dialogue.”28
In the particular case of the Symposium, Strauss’s key hermeneutic claim is
that each of the speeches made by the characters other than Socrates is
intended by Plato as a partial account of the phenomenon of Eros. This
means that, while each is refuted by Socrates’s more complete account, it
28. On logographic necessity, see Strauss 1968: 120 – 21 and most famously Strauss 1988b:
22 – 37. See also Strauss 1964: 50 – 62 on the Platonic dialogues specifically; cf. Lampert 2009;
Smith 2007: 7 – 10, 37 – 40, 89 – 93.

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nevertheless contributes something that is taken up at a higher level in the

famous Socratic speech. For example, Pausanius’s “is a particular position,
but so is that of every other speaker except Socrates. Socrates’s speech
supplies the synthesis of these particular positions, both regarding the teach-
ing and regarding the life and character, or what is now called the attitude, of
the speaker” (Strauss 2001: 87).
In this way the whole dialogue culminates in Socrates’s great speech and
forms a meaningfully complete account of Eros, or at least a complete pre-
sentation of what Strauss (ibid.: 116) calls “the typical possibilities about
eros.” The characters presented and their speeches Strauss (ibid.: 117)
takes to be paradigms or “types,” and “there must be a completeness in
the selection of types presented.”29
At several points Strauss (ibid.: 120, 182) toys with different ways of divid-
ing the Symposium’s speeches, even according to their stance on pederasty.
However, the key recurrent opposition among the six speeches preceding
Alkibiades’s interruption at Stephanus 212c is that among the first three
speakers (Phaedrus, Pausanius, Eryximachus), who are all “uninspired,”
and the “inspired” next three speakers: Aristophanes, Agathon, and Socrates
(Strauss 2001: 54, 89). The uninspired speakers are also the “valetudinar-
ians,” nondrinkers. Also when we analyse what they have to say in the light of
who they are, we see that each subtly tries to promote his own personal erotic
interest (as do Phaedrus and Pausanius) or professional expertise (in the case
of Eryximachus) behind their words of praise for the god. So what defines
their speeches as “uninspired” is that their praise of Eros involves subordi-
nating Eros to some extraneous principle. In the beautiful young Phaedrus,
the subordinating principle is gain; for the older lover Pausanius, Eros ranks
below moral virtue of a certain stripe; and for Eryximachus the physician, the
highest object framing his view of Eros is his own medical technē (art).
Nevertheless, Strauss suggests, there is a parallel between these three unin-
spired speeches and the speeches of the “inspired” characters, who are of
course the two great poets and Socrates the philosopher. Phaedrus promotes
his own gain (as a beautiful youth flattered by older admirers) in his unin-
spired conception of Eros, and yet behind the evident comic “ugliness” in
Aristophanes’s inspired central speech, Strauss sees the same love of self
(“one’s own”) in the shape of one’s mythically lost “other half.” As Pausanius
tries to promote his own interests as an older lover in the name of moral virtue
29. Indeed Strauss (2001: 117) characteristically adds that if some type or consideration that
we expect to find included is omitted, this omission itself must be significant and imply an
intentional choice of Plato.

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Table 2 Strauss’s central division of the speeches of Symposium
Uninspired Speeches Inspired Speeches

(what they subordinate Eros to) (what they praise Eros in the name of )
3. Eryximachus (art [technē ]) 6. Socrates (philosophy, love of the Good)
2. Pausanius (moral virtue, law) 5. Agathon (Beauty, love of fame)
1. Phaedrus (gain, oneself, 4. Aristophanes: (ugliness, love of
one’s own) self/one’s own)
Source: Adapted from Strauss 2001: 89.

Note: The arrows indicate an ascending hierarchy of worth in terms of what Eros is subordinated to
or praised in light of.
and political laws, so for Strauss the tragedian Agathon gives an inspired
praise of Eros as animating the distinctly political desire for fame.30
Equally, Strauss’s reading of the Symposium suggests that a parallel ascent
between what each of the uninspired and inspired speeches proposes is cen-
tral to properly understanding and praising Eros. This ascent (indicated by
the vertical arrows in Table 2) passes from love of “me and mine,” what
Strauss calls “love of one’s own,”31 through the love of virtue, beauty, and
fame — Strauss sees them as associated by the Symposium, as we will see in part
3 — toward the more comprehensive visions of Eros Strauss perceives in
Eryximachus and Socrates, the doctor and the philosopher.32
30. See part 3.
31. As this expression is unusual, in what follows I will use it interchangeably with self-love,
although it embraces extended forms of self-love, including love for family, ancestors, one’s
fellow citizens, and one’s reputation or fame.
32. These three stages of erotic ascent seem to Strauss (2001: 10) directly comparable with the
three parts of the psyche about which we learn in the Republic book 4: epithymos (bodily desires,
centering on the self ), thymos (spiritedness, pride), logistikos (reason, rational reflection), in which
Eros, characteristically for that dialogue, is submerged within the lowest part, epithymia. Eros’s
invisibility in the Republic, Strauss (1964: 64 – 65; 1989a: 125 – 26, 155 – 56) thinks, is a constant
and important feature of it. In a full reading of Strauss’s (2001: 35, 95, 113 – 16, 148) text, it
would be important to note his idiosyncratic emphasis on the importance of Eryximachus,
whose uninspired speech tying love to medicine is often passed by. Eryximachus, the unerotic
doctor, presents a cosmological account of Eros heavily influenced by the very kind of pre-
Socratic physikos (nature) — namely, Empedocles — whose teachings the young Socrates had
been fascinated by (Phaedo [Plato 1997e], 97c – 100a; see Strauss 2001: 115 – 16). Strauss, his
own distinction between philosophy and political philosophy notwithstanding, asserts that
Eryximachus’s is perhaps the highest possible praise of Eros (Strauss 2001: 113) and that the
physician is “in a way, the most competent man” present (ibid.: 35). In line with this, Strauss
(ibid.: 180, 218) hesitates between assigning the most significant place in the Symposium, after
Socrates, to Aristophanes or to Eryximachus. Strauss (ibid.: 152 – 53, 258 – 59) also underlines
that Socrates praises how “beautifully” the physician has spoken: high praise indeed. The fact
that Eryximachus only speaks before Aristophanes after they change places, due to Aristopha-
nes’s hiccups, indicates for Strauss (ibid.: 95, 148) some deep, unspecified connection between

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In seeking to understand Plato’s wider political or philosophical concerns,

arguably the key feature of Eros that Strauss stresses is its innate tension with
nomos (law or convention) and therefore with what Strauss calls “the city.”33
This tension, Strauss (ibid.: 127, 129, 131, 133, 144) suggests, is the great
theme of the Platonic Aristophanes in the Symposium’s central speech.34 Yet
Strauss also endorses — in his own name, or in that of Plato — some version of
this teaching. “There is no eros for the polis and hence not for moral virtue or
political prudence,” he asserts at a decisive point in his account of Socrates’s
speech, “for moral virtue and political prudence depend entirely on the polis,
and the polis is unnatural” (ibid.: 242).35
Since Pausanius is the speaker whose account of homosexual love tries to
defend pederasty by a reform of existing Attic political law (ibid.: 87), it is in
relation to his speech that Strauss elaborates most extensively on this crucial
subject of the nature and limits of law and politics in contrast to natural Eros.
The city as Strauss (ibid.: 9, 85) conceives it is always something “harsh,”
characterized by “an essential recalcitrance to reason” or to “intelligence.”36
Political virtues, like justice, courage, or moderation, seem in Platonic and
the speeches of the natural philosopher and the comic poet. By implication, Eryximachus’s
cosmological account of Eros as a force of attraction binding together all things anticipates, at
a physical level, what the Socratic Eros will depict at the higher level of the psyche and the
Platonic Ideas. However, when we look to Strauss’s analysis of Socrates’s speech for an argu-
ment establishing this elevated implication and actually delivering an account of Eros as such a
natural force, we are disappointed (see part 4).
33. The best account on Strauss’s and his students’ use of such abstract nouns ( politics, the city,
man, poetry, philosophy, ancients, moderns) and the issues associated with this use is Klosko 1986: 280.
34. Strauss (2001: 137) reads Aristophanes’s speech as positioning Eros as basically “a desire for
the ancient nature, for the state in which man had the loftiest thoughts, in which he thought of
conquering heaven, or rather Olympus.” Hence the Olympian gods, whom Strauss will associ-
ate with the civic virtues, oppose this Eros, or reshape it by dividing human beings. So most
humans at least become erotically concerned not with challenging the gods but with seeking
their other halves.
35. Strauss’s meaning that the polis is unnatural is unclear here: the context suggests that the
recourse to violence backing laws, necessitating individuals’ deferrals of satisfaction in the name
of maintaining political order, makes the city “unnatural.” There is a clear tension between
Strauss’s view here and the Aristotelian conception of humans as by nature political animals, in
a way that could be argued to challenge Strauss’s presentation of his work as a return to classical
political rationalism.
36. This harshness is, for example, at the center of Smith’s “Leo Strauss’ Platonic Liberalism” in
Reading Leo Strauss (2007). In fact, as Smith (ibid.: 98 – 100) alerts us, this essential harshness
or element of “compulsion” in “the political” is centrally present in Strauss’s reading of the
Republic in City and Man (Strauss 1964: 124ff.; see esp. 128: “Yet justice . . . is not intrinsically
attractive or choice-worthy for its own sake . . . it is not noble but necessary”). See also Strauss
1989a: esp. 115 on the “problematic” status of nomoi (laws) per se. It is revealing just how open
Strauss (2001: 85) is on this unsalutary set of claims in his commentary on the Symposium: “There
is a certain harshness which belongs essentially to political life, which shows the tension between
eros and political life.”

Poetics Today
Aristotelian thought to have a natural status or to develop of natural human

potentialities. In Strauss’s account, however, political virtues are associated
with the body and sharply opposed to “the needs of the mind” in ways that
oddly recall the Neoplatonic opposition of the merely civic and the higher,
intellectual virtues cultivated by the philosopher as he ascends toward word-
less unity with the One.37 “Society as such requires political or vulgar virtue,”
Strauss (ibid: 86) claims, and this is “merely a shadow of virtue, a daylight
virtue . . . a very poor imitation of the genuine virtues” (cf. Strauss 1952:
151 – 52). Terms like justice, courage, moderation, and wisdom, Strauss (2001: 86)
boldly suggests, mean in Plato “something very different” according to
whether they occur “on the level of the philosopher or of the lower level
[of nonphilosophers].”38
Throughout On Plato’s “Symposium,” certainly, Strauss emphasizes that
Eros by its nature and as the key to our natures transcends the calculations
of “merely” political self-interest, whether in its lower bodily or more ele-
vated Platonic senses. We will see how important this is for the alleged “demo-
tion of poetry” Strauss sees as key to understanding the Symposium in part 3.
As in the Phaedrus’s descriptions of erotic love in terms of inspired madness,
the calculating man who does not forget himself in love cannot approach
the higher truth of Eros either.39 Eros always tends toward forms of self-
forgetting or “self-sacrifice,” as can be glimpsed in the desire for procreation
and parents’ almost unconditional love of their young. Strauss (ibid.: 208)
describes this thought in terms of a kinship between love and death, which
oddly echoes psychoanalytic teachings despite his marked reticence about
37. On Neoplatonism and the separation of intellectual from civic or moral virtues, see Gerson
2006: esp. 57n32. There can be surprise at Strauss’s proximity here to Neoplatonism, since his
version of Platonic political philosophy explicitly sets itself against Neoplatonic readings of the
dialogues, as I will show below when I consider Strauss’s hesitations concerning Plato’s meta-
physics, widely deemed, except in the skeptical middle academy, as the core of his teaching. See
Strauss 1964: 61, where he programmatically contrasts his “primitive Platonism” with the
“Christian” reception of the text, shaped by Augustine, who was in turn deeply influenced
by Plotinus. Strauss (2000: 268, 270) does not pick up Alexandre Kojève for the latter’s charac-
teristically hybristic or immoderate attack on Neoplatonism as “nonsense” in the “Strauss-
Kojève correspondence.”
38. At most, “the mind” and the moral virtues shaping political life “meet somehow” in their
shared requirement that human beings be trained in temperance, self-restraint, and justice
(Strauss: 1952: 151 – 52; 2001: 94). However, Strauss suggests that such moral virtue always
presents itself to many people as a sufficient end, or the highest goal, for all human beings. In the
case of politically spirited or thymotic figures like Glaucon in the Republic, this leads to a constant
temptation to subordinate all forms of Eros, including the pursuit of theoretical wisdom and its
pleasures, to the demands of “merely” moral virtues — a possibility which Strauss (1952: 151 –
52; 1964: 65; 2001: 59 – 60) strongly opposes.
39. In Strauss’s (2000: 79, 81, 218 – 19) reading, this situation applies in the Symposium primarily
to the younger Phaedrus himself.

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psychoanalysis: “Eros implies the transcending of death, the negation of

death. This means accepting one’s own death. This is the beautiful — kalon.”40
So the contest between the inspired speakers in the second half of the
Symposium, the poets and the philosopher, will above all concern what either
side sees as the cause and nature of this beautiful, suprapolitical element of
Eros and what species of Eros can inspire people to the greatest heights
of selfless action, poetic creation, and philosophical inquiry. I turn now to
Strauss’s assessment of this contest, especially to his analysis of Socrates’s
great speech, the centerpiece of his reading of the Symposium.
3. Socrates’s Speech: The Philosopher’s Alleged Demotion of Poetry
A full three chapters (out of twelve) of On Plato’s “Symposium” are devoted to

Socrates’s famous speech in the Symposium, which Strauss (ibid.: 87) views as
the refutation and “sublation” of the other six speakers concerning Eros in the
dialogue, including Alkibiades’s raucous intervention. Hence his remarkable
suggestion that Plato’s art has divided the great speech — which ranges from
Socrates’s opening exchange with Agathon through his long account of his
encounter long ago with the Mantinean priestess Diotima, who instructed
him about Eros’s nature, manifestations, and goal — into seven hidden but
discernible parts. These seven parts of Socrates’s speech, Strauss claims,
are meant to be aligned by careful readers with the other speeches of the
Symposium, so that it represents a microcosmic encapsulation of the greater
cosmos of the dialogue as a whole, as per Table 3.
Based on this schematic division of Socrates’s speech concerning Eros,
Strauss makes at least three explicit claims which culminate in what con-
cerns poetry’s relationship to philosophy and so the wider meaning of the
Symposium.
a. For Strauss, Socrates’s initial and seemingly lighthearted exchange
with Agathon concerning how Eros should be praised has a decisive
effect on how we read what follows. Socrates protests that Agathon has
spoken beautifully but that his praise for Eros as the source of all
the virtues is excessive (Symp. 198d – 199a; Strauss 2001: 177). Socrates
thought — before he heard Agathon’s extraordinary speech — that to
40. In the context of reflecting on Pausanius’s speech and the partial truth which he believes this
speech contributes to Socrates’s later, more comprehensive perspective, Strauss goes so far as to
claim that Eros per se involves not simply an element of self-sacrifice but some form of “thral-
dom” or “surrender without concern for one’s dignity” to the beloved. This puts Eros as such at
odds with the characteristic political aspiration to freedom if not to social propriety per se: “Is
there not an element in this thraldom which in a true doctrine of eros must be preserved?”
(Strauss 2001: 87; cf. 93).

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Table 3 The seven parts of Socrates’s speech (numbered on the left), matched to
the seven speeches of Symposium (with Strauss’s notation of parts I, II, III; subparts
A, B, C; and subsections 1, 2, 3)
(1) I Symposium 198b – 199c: introduction, Phaedrus’s speech [?]41
discussion of Socrates’s rhetoric (Strauss
2001: 174 – 78)
(2) II Symposium 198c – 201c: dialogue with Pausanius’s speech [?]
Agathon (Strauss 2001: 178 – 84)
(3 – 7) III Symposium 201c – 212c: the recounting of
Diotima’s speech to the young Socrates,
itself divided into three parts
(3) III.A Symposium 201c – 204c: Diotima’s myth of Eryximachus’s speech [?]:
Eros’s origins, where he is spoken of as a Eros as a cosmological
daimon, not a god, bearing messages force
between mortals and gods (Strauss 2001:
184 – 98)
(4) III.B Symposium 204c – 207a: central fourth section, Aristophanes’s speech:
Eros as desire for sempiternal possession of bodily Eros, search for
the Good, to “give birth in beauty” (Symp. one’s other half, as in
206b), primarily through bodily procreation sexual coupling
(Strauss 2001: 198 – 215)
III.C Symposium 207a – 212c: on the causes of Eros,
in three subsections
(5) III.C.1 Symposium 207a – 208b: Eros as desire for Agathon’s speech: Eros
immortality (sans the Good), physiological tied to desire for fame
(6) III.C.2 Symposium 208b – 209e: Eros as desire for Socrates’s own speech:
sempiternal possession of the Good through Eros tied to philosophy
the love of fame (Strauss 2001: 223 – 30)
account of Eros (ibid.: 216 – 23)
(7) III.C.3 Symposium 209e – 212c: highest erotic Alkibiades’s speech: Eros in
initiation (epoptika) of the philosopher, the general subordinated to an
two versions of the ladder of love, and the account of Socrates
vision of the Beautiful (Strauss 2001:
230 – 39) himself
praise a thing one should speak the truth (Symp. 198c – d; Strauss 2001:
175). However, as Strauss observes in Agathon’s favor, the demands of
praising a thing may run against those of telling the entire truth con-
cerning its nature or deeds unless the thing in question is morally or
41. Strauss does not himself dot all the I ’s about each of these parallels between the seven parts
of Socrates’s speech and the seven speeches in the dialogue. In Strauss’s (2001: 183) defense, he
presents the microcosm-macrocosm schema tentatively, “as a real question” to pursue, before
then using this scheme in all that follows. The question marks in square brackets indicate
cases where the parallels between the parts of Socrates’s speech and the paired speech in the
Symposium are not made explicit by Strauss.

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intellectually perfect. In that case, one will select only the most beautiful
of the thing’s qualities or deeds and remain silent about its less edifying
aspects. And this is just what Socrates in fact says he will now do
regarding Eros (Symp. 185d), according to Strauss.
This difference between praising and telling the full truth allegedly
shapes the whole of Socrates’s speech as a speech of praise for Eros
(Symp. 198b – 212c). As such, it untruthfully “abstracts from” the lower,
more unseemly bodily or ugly side of Eros, which was highlighted
in Aristophanes’s depiction of love as the search for bodily reunion
with one’s lost “other half.” In its basest form, Strauss agrees, Eros in-
volves this bodily love and desire for possession. By contrast, the priest-
ess Diotima’s revelations to the younger Socrates concerning the
“mysteries” of Eros assert “unbelievably” that Eros, in its highest phil-
osophical form, transcends such egoistic, physical desires altogether
(Strauss 2001: 183, 213). In short, against most commentators on the
Symposium, Strauss (ibid.: 183) argues that we should beware of reading
Socrates’s culminating famous description of the “ladder of love” that
ascends toward a pure vision of the Beautiful as a truthful represen-
tation of either Eros or philosophy. Instead he interprets this speech as a
partial, merely “poetic presentation of philosophy” (ibid.: 248): a noble,
if not deceptive, praise of Eros and philosophy, which as such untruth-
fully “abstracts” from their less edifying or elevated aspects and will
need to be corrected.
b. Strauss claims that the central section of Socrates’s speech — according
to his sevenfold division, Symposium 204c – 207a (III.B in Table 3) — at
once points to the decisive importance of the Good as the aim of the
Platonic Eros but then fails to deliver anything like an adequate account
of this Good.
At Symposium 204c – 207a, Socrates recounts how Diotima instructed
him as a young man that love, truly conceived, involves the desire to
possess good things forever and “to give birth in beauty” (Symp. 206b).42
Given Strauss’s (2001: 47) idiosyncratic hermeneutic supposition that
“the most important in Plato is always in the centre” (see also Strauss
1988b: 22 – 37), his analysis of this section should point to what he sees as
42. In intriguing confirmation of Strauss’s hypothesis concerning the way the parts of Socrates’s
speech reflect the seven speeches of the dialogue as a whole, this fourth section of Socrates’s
speech is where Diotima — with remarkable divination — seems to refute Aristophanes’s speech
(to the effect that love is a search for the Good, not one’s “other half ”), the fourth in the
Symposium as a whole. Since the speech is at this point recollecting an exchange between
Socrates and the priestess twenty-five years before Agathon’s party, Strauss (2001: 203) dryly
comments that “we know better” than to think that Socrates is telling the whole truth here.

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the key to Socrates’s entire speech. As if to confirm this expectation,

Strauss notes that it is in this part of Socrates’s speech, and this part
only, that the Good displaces Beauty as the object of Eros: “ ‘Well’, she
said, ‘ . . . one should change the question and ask using the good
instead of the beautiful’ ” (Symp. 204e). This is of the greatest impor-
tance, since Plato’s Republic (507a – 509e) specifies that the Idea of the
Good (to agathon) is the highest object of philosophical contemplation
and pursuit. This elevating of the Good above the Beautiful (kalon) or
merely useful (chresimon) is one point nearly all interpreters agree upon
as decisive for understanding Platonic thought. Just so, at this point in
his commentary on the Symposium Strauss deems it “crucial” that we,
unlike the witless young Socrates (Symp. 204c – d), do not thoughtlessly
identify the Beautiful as the final goal of Eros. The reason, decisive for
the entire dialogue and Strauss’s (2001: 201) reading of it, is that “if eros
is love of the beautiful [as against the Good], poetry will perhaps be the
highest form of eros.” It is the poets, not the philosophers, who speak
most nobly or beautifully about kalon, whereas Diotima leads Socra-
tes to see, through their philosophical dialogue, that Eros — although
piqued by beauty — always aims beyond beauty toward what lovers take
to be their good, or toward the Good more simply (Symp. 204d – 206a).
However, as we will examine in the concluding remarks, Strauss’s
(2001: 210, 199 – 200) comments concerning this Good — supposedly
the defining object of philosophical Eros and of all desire, understood
philosophically — are highly problematic, to say the least. Indeed the
notion of Eros that Strauss (ibid.: 200) sees as emerging in this central
section of Socrates’s speech comes close to identifying its goal with
physical procreation, as if the “Good” Eros conceived philosophically
leads us only toward the biological “sempiternity” of the species. Such
an identification of Eros with the desire for physical procreation might
be considered “sensible,” as Strauss observes, but what commands
philosophical conviction is not reducible to what is “sensible.” Strauss’s
(ibid.: 214, 208) own earlier arguments, we recall, have instead stressed
the transcendent, transpolitical element in Eros, which often enough puts
lovers at odds with all nomoi and ordinary or “sensible” ways of speak-
ing and acting. Strauss (ibid.: 212) himself indeed observes that “mere
concern with procreation . . . is surely an insufficient account of eros,
even of heterosexual eros,” let alone of Eros as conceived by the divine
Plato. As said, we will return to this key issue for Strauss’s Platonism
in the concluding remarks.43
43. To explain how Plato could have come here to such a deeply uninspiring account of the

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c. The third key claim emerges from Strauss’s analysis of the subsection of
Socrates’s great speech that he labels “III.C.2,” the imputed sixth part
of Socrates’s speech (Symp. 208b – 209e).44 Eros at its peak stimulates
mortals to produce great discourses concerning virtue (Symp. 209b – c).
Poetic works, like those of Homer or Hesiod (Symp. 209c), or the great
founding law codes left behind by Lycurgus or Solon are the creative
products of Eros in this sense (Symp. 209d). On this basis, Strauss argues,
this part of Socrates’s speech contains Plato’s fullest or most adequate
account of poetic creation and whatever fully considered criticisms of
poetry he has to offer.
Thus “poetry at its best generates political prudence, [and] edu-
cates great statesmen and legislators” (Strauss 2001: 229). While this
might sound a fairly elevated political calling, what it means for Strauss
is that poetic creation never transcends the political realm and so never
meets Plato’s requirement from a fully adequate or inspired erotic
practice, like philosophy. On one side, that of virtue, “the poets,
these wonderful men, produce a virtue which is not genuine virtue”:
it is rather, at best, “political prudence,” which Strauss (ibid.: 245), like
the Neoplatonists, sees as “a shadow of true [intellectual or philosoph-
ical] virtue.” On the other side, that of Eros, Strauss (ibid.: 169 – 70,
210 – 11, 223 – 30) more idiosyncratically claims that Plato has unveiled
for us at this point of the text — and in several passing observations in
Agathon’s speech — the underlying, baser motives behind the marvel-
lous beauties produced by the poets. The poets are essentially not moti-
vated by the noble love of Beauty that Agathon’s speech had extolled.
Instead, in unflattering contrast to the philosophers — animated by
their nominal love of the Good — the poets are driven by a love of fame
and, beneath it, by the same love of self that Aristophanes’s speech has
positioned at the heart of all Eros.
Good, Strauss (2001: 212) suggests that Plato chose to “abstract” from “love of the beautiful” —
the principal idea concerning Eros contributed by the tragedian Agathon — in order to “see
what comes out of it [such an abstraction].” (Then, Strauss claims, the component of love of
one’s own returns in III.C.1 [Symp. 207a – 208b], and love of the Beautiful returns in III.C.2
[Symp. 208b – 209e].) Given that the result of the alleged “abstraction” here is so unsatisfactory
and so distant from Plato’s claims about Eros elsewhere, the reader may doubt whether this
really was Plato’s intention.
44. As the allegedly sixth division of Socrates’s speech, Diotima’s remarks here are matched
in Strauss’s larger interpretive schema (table 3) to Socrates’s speech as a whole, the sixth of the
Symposium. So again, we are prompted by this formal consideration to consider Symposium
208b – 209e as crucial for understanding the dialogue. And indeed Strauss claims that this
part of Socrates’s speech contains the heart of Plato’s critique of poetry and the form of
Eros which inspires poetic creation.

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Agathon with Socrates: The Alleged Philosophical Demotion

of Poetry in Plato’s Symposium
Since this striking third claim that Strauss draws from Socrates’s speech goes
to the heart of his understanding of “Platonic political philosophy” — the
attempt to defend philosophy as an erotic pursuit meaningfully different
and superior to poetry — we need to examine Strauss’s arguments for it care-
fully. Claims a. and b. (presented above) will form the objects of part 4 and of
the concluding remarks, respectively.
I begin from Strauss’s remarkable view of tragedy and his explanation of
why Plato placed Agathon the tragedian after Aristophanes both in the order
of speakers and in the order in which people fall asleep at the Symposium’s
(223c – d) end.45 Despite Strauss’s (2001: 254) enthusiasm for Aristophanes, he
maintains that tragedy remains the highest form of poetry and that these
poetic features of the dialogue indicate that this was also Plato’s own view.
According to Strauss, Plato’s reasons for ranking tragedy above comedy are
as follows. In the tragedian Agathon’s speech, we hear right at the start that
Eros, the god of begetting, was the youngest god (Symp. 195a). This implies
that the older Olympian gods are unbegotten. They have always existed,
or have sprung from nothing, or else — as Strauss (2001: 169) immediately
adds — they must have been “begotten” by the poets.
Although Agathon never directly asserts this idea, Strauss (ibid.: 39) feels
licensed to infer from the tragedian’s opening mention of Eros as the young-
est god that Plato clearly supported and wanted to recommend to careful
readers a variant of the same theological skepticism that he has earlier attrib-
uted to the Sophists: that “the gods exist merely by virtue of nomos. They owe
their being to human enactments, tacit or explicit.” The Olympian gods
at least,46 Strauss argues (in Plato’s name), are the creations of the tragic
poets led by Homer and Hesiod.47 In creating the gods, these “tragic
poets” are inspired by a love of beauty and the desire to “visualise something
which looks like man but which is deathless and free of any other defect”
(ibid.: 169). So the tragic poet is a “theogonic” artist, creating the captivating
images of the gods who shape the highest social and political ideals of their
45. Recall also the claim of which Socrates is trying to persuade the two poets as they fall asleep:
that only the complete or “complementary” tragedian could write comic poetry but not the
other way around (Strauss 2001: 285 – 86).
46. Notably, Strauss (ibid.: 131, 137 – 41) is silent here about the cosmic, pre-Olympian gods
central to his reading of Aristophanes’s speech, where he suggests that these gods may have a
completely different significance than their Olympian successors.
47. We note that Strauss’s perspective does not distinguish between epic and tragic poetry,
grouping them together in opposition to comedy. This elision seems to reflect his own concerns
for the political and philosophical significance of different kinds of poetry, not a close analysis of
the different poetic forms themselves.

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cities. This explains why Strauss views tragedy as a higher art than comedy.
The tragedian
establishes the beautiful delusion, the salutary delusion [about the gods and he-
roes], which the comic poet destroys . . . tragic poetry enchants, comic poetry
disenchants. . . . There is a fragment of Heraclitus of which one cannot help think-
ing in this connection. There is one thing and only one thing which is wise, which
wishes and also does not wish to be called Zeus, i.e., to be seen in human form. It
wishes to be seen, to be called Zeus — tragedy; it does not wish to be called Zeus —
comedy. (Ibid.: 169 – 70)48
In response to a student’s question, Strauss further specifies that, for Plato

as he reads him, the tragic poets, in generating these fictive images of gods
and heroes, are nothing less than the highest law-founding politicians. For it is
these poetic creations or mythoi, Strauss (ibid.: 179) claims, which shaped the
Greek cities’ ethical beliefs and highest political ideals, in this way laying “the
foundation for civilization and therefore also limiting human life.” The poets
are the first educators of the Greeks, the poiētai (poets or creators) who “beget”
the shapes of the shadowy gods, which cave-bound men see dancing on the
wall in Republic book 7 (ibid.: 171).49 And as such, Strauss (ibid.: 211) argues,
they compete with the philosophers in the noblest pursuit Socrates claims as
his own in Plato’s Gorgias (1997c) and Apology (1997a), that of ethically edu-
cating the Greeks:
The question is then the begetting of notions which are noble and just in the souls
of men. Very well, Plato says, if you want to study that, let us look at the highest
level. On the highest level it does not take place by the parents, as parents. . . . On
the highest level it is done by the highest form of education. By educators you must
not think of Columbia teachers’ college. Plato has in mind the greatest poets.
In other words, he has in mind, to speak of the Anglo-Saxon countries, the highest
form of begetter — Shakespeare.
How, then, does Strauss regard this extremely elevated, albeit highly polit-
icized, view of tragic poetry as linked to Plato’s alleged demotion of poetry and
his assertion of philosophy’s superiority to it in political and pedagogic terms?
Strauss’s claim that the poets created the gods of the Greeks is already more
analogous to Epicurean and other materialist critiques of theological beliefs
48. For Strauss, this also explains the higher status and capacity of the tragedian, signaled at the
Symposium’s close. If the tragedian can poetically produce the Olympian gods, then he or she
must be disenchanted, since he or she does not believe in the gods’ independent existence or
eternity: he or she does not share the belief that plays no small part in explaining their “enchant-
ing” appearance to the many. But, Strauss then asserts, if he or she is disenchanted himself or
herself, then the tragedian must also be able to disenchant others.
49. Cf. Strauss 1989a: 171 – 83, esp. 179.

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than to views standardly associated with Plato. Strauss (2001: 210 – 11, 217,
223 – 30) not only dethrones the gods from their Olympian heights, recon-
ceiving them as merely human creations, but also explains the particular
features of the Olympian gods by treating them as the sublimated projections
of the psyches of their all-too-human poetic creators (Symp. 208b – 209e).
Having done this, Strauss argues — all on the basis, he says, of a close reading
of the Symposium — we see that the poets’ motivating erota (desires) are far less
elevated or kalon than the beauty of their creations might first suggest and far
beneath the transcending dignity that Plato claims for philosophy.
To take up Diotima’s language, Strauss (2001: 159 – 60) agrees that the
tragic poets beget beautiful speeches concerning virtue and the gods out
of Eros of beauty. This human Eros of beauty (kalon) explains one aspect
of these Olympian deities as poetic creations: their undying physical beauty
and perfection (ibid.: 210). However, Strauss observes, these gods were not
simply beautiful: they had for the Greeks another, harsher side. As the ambi-
guity in the Greek term kalon (signaling both beautiful and noble) might
indicate, the other side of these deities involved their angry or law-preserving
functions as sponsors and protectors of the Greek cities’ fortunes, nomoi, and
customs (ibid.: 165, 209).
Which form of Eros might, then, psychologically explain the poets’ envis-
aging this avenging, law-preserving side of the Olympian gods? Only, in
Strauss’s opinion, the love of self or of “one’s own” — the baser side of Eros that
the speech made by the comic poet Aristophanes has hilariously emphasized.
Hence this passage, which recalls Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality
(1994): “The gods are created by love of the beautiful, on the one hand —
therefore they are eternally young and eternally beautiful — and by eros of
one’s own, on the other. Of one’s own, the descendant of one’s ancestor, the
Figure 1 Strauss’s erotic theogony explaining psychologically the poets’ creation of the
Olympian gods

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deification of the ancestor, and on a higher level the gods of the polis who are
concerned with right, the avenging gods” (Strauss 2001: 109).
The desire to protect and promote one’s own family, tribe, or city — to be
honored as such a benefactor — can motivate the noble willingness to sacrifice
one’s own life, as Diotima indicates. This is the nobility and abiding value of
such extended self-love to the city and hence (for Strauss [ibid.: 86, 94]) its
connection to moral or civic, as against intellectual or philosophical, virtue
(see part 2). Such seemingly self-transcending nobility has indeed inspired
poetic works of such lasting beauty as Homer’s Iliad (1990) which consecrate
the words and deeds of heroes like Achilles, fired by the desire for immortal
fame. However, Strauss (2001: 209) emphasizes, patriotic or filial love — no
less than the desire for fame — remains an extended form of self-love or “love
of one’s own.” Moreover, in Agathon’s speech concerning Olympian gods
like Hephaestus, Athena, and Zeus — patron gods of the Greek poleis —
Strauss (ibid.: 164 – 66) sees Plato depicting these highest products of poetic
creativity as themselves moved by a desire for fame: to be “noteworthy and
brilliant” (Symp. 197a).50 These Olympians thus reflect their poetic creators’
wish to perpetuate their own selves or identities beyond the span of any mortal’s
life, in the lasting memory and good opinion of their fellow citizens.51 In this
way the poets’ gods embody a form of Eros more elevated than sexual desire
or the desire for biological procreation, but this form of Eros still both appeals
to and relies upon one’s own particular city and customs. Nothing more truly self-
transcendent, transpolitical, or philosophically elevated is involved (Strauss
2001: 217).52 Here we arrive at Strauss’s reasoning for the claim that the
Symposium involves the decisive demotion of poetry, albeit “infinitely more
polite” (2001: 244) than what which Plato puts in Socrates’s mouth in Republic
books 3 and 10.
In the Symposium as Strauss (ibid.: 169 – 70, 209 – 11) reads it, Plato fully
respects the elevated claims of poetry to educate the Greeks and engender
their highest gods, heroes, and ideals of conduct. Yet, Strauss claims, if we
50. Hephaestus’s limp, Strauss observes, shows that the view of the gods as born of a love of
Beauty needs some qualifications.
51. After all, immortal fame exists in the memory or recognition of people, as when the great
founding legislators that Diotima mentions were deified (Symp. 209e, which forms the end of
Strauss’s III.C.2 in his division of Diotima’s great speech).
52. Cf. also the following: “The gods have been created by eros and it is only another version
to say they have been created by the poets, or the poets were guided in eros in creating the
gods. . . . But what about love of one’s own? The love of one’s own leads to the polis. It leads first
to the family, and the family cannot exist without the polis. . . . The human race is sempiternal,
at least as is said here; the polis is not sempiternal, and it is, therefore, in need of gods. These
gods, as guardians of the polis, are primarily the guardians of right. They are avenging gods”
(Strauss 2001: 209).

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Table 4 Structuring oppositions in Strauss’s “demotion of poetry” (Agathon’s

speech; Socrates’s speech at 208a – 209e)
Poetry Philosophy (but see part 4)

Poets’ love of fame (form of self-love) Philosophers’ love of truth (Eros
transcending self-love)
Poets’ love of Beauty Philosophers’ search for the Good
Creates images of gods and heroes: Discovers truths of nature,
shaped by images of one’s ancestors “the whole” transcending self-concern
(form of self-love) and ta politika more widely
Inspires “merely” civic, patriotic Embodies intellectual virtues that
virtues (courage, justice, practical transcend “merely” political ones
wisdom) by inspiring emulation by aiming at transpolitical truths
of gods and heroes
read the dialogue closely — and his “close” reading involves a good measure
of his own interpretive creativity — we can see that Plato believes poetic
creation to remain deeply mired in self-love as opposed to philosophy and
its claimed (albeit so far unexplained) capacity to inspire some kind of Eros of
the Good and transpolitical truths concerning “the whole” (see part 4). At
most, the poets’ creations can educate the young to merely moral virtues,
which we saw in part 2 that Strauss (ibid.: 86, 94) wants somehow to rank
beneath the more elevated intellectual or philosophical virtues. Above all,
the gods that the poets sing about are their own creations, politically edifying
fictions, not discovered, transpolitical truths (ibid.: 169 – 70, 211). More pro-
saically, the poet-born gods of the city are the creations of the poets’ desire for worldly
fame: their shapes are elevated sublimations of their own ancestors and of their
own wish for bodily perfection and immortality (ibid.: 164 – 66, 217). Accord-
ingly, beneath all the beauty of the poets’ works, Strauss (ibid.: 245) argues,
Plato unveils an all-too-human love of self — and as such, an Eros which is for
him inescapably lower in dignity than the philosophical love of the Good, or
the truth, and of true virtue.
4. Diotima with Alkibiades: Questioning the Poetic Depiction of Philosophy
If Strauss (ibid.: 244) is right, then, the thrust of the Symposium as a whole is
“the demotion of poetry” within the context of its rivalry with philosophy.
It is now time to examine this thesis more critically and further inquire
whether Strauss’s own depiction of philosophy can sustain this “demotion”
of its ancient opponent.

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If the demotion of poetry is the key meaning of the Symposium, then 208b –
209e (part III.C.2 of Socrates’s speech) must represent its pinnacle.53 The
remaining part of Socrates’s speech as Strauss divides it must in his eyes suffer
its own kind of “demotion,” since it comes after this Socratic pinnacle (III.C.3,
209e – 212c, in Table 3). But however intriguing such a hermeneutic claim
is — and, as I will suggest, however true it is to Strauss’s intention — it raises
deep problems, which I now want to bring out and weigh in the remains of
this essay. After all, the final part of Socrates’s speech involves Diotima’s
famous depiction of the ladder of Eros leading up from lower mysteries to the
highest philosophical initiation, a vision of absolute Beauty:54 “the beautiful
itself in its purity, cleansed and clean, unmixed, and not filled with human
flesh and colours and much other mortal nonsense” (Symp. 211d – e). For this
reason, whether readers have celebrated the resulting ideal of Platonic love as
pointing beyond individuals, bodies, and sexuality toward Beauty and truth
(Symp. 212a) or lamented that it renders Eros, philosophy, and the soul imper-
sonal, disembodied, and inhuman,55 nearly all interpretations of the dialogue
have taken this culmination of Diotima’s speech to be the highest metaphys-
ical moment in the dialogue,56 not to mention a canonical statement of Plato’s
deepest views on Eros and the goals of philosophy.57 Importantly for us, this
53. Referring to Strauss’s wider schema that relates the parts of Socrates’s specific speech and
the seven speeches of the Symposium itself (tabulated above), this subsection is the sixth part of
Socrates’s speech. It would thus supposedly mirror, in terms of significance, the lofty impor-
tance that commentators agree should be accorded to the speech of Socrates, Plato’s hero, as a
whole.
54. In the following text, Good, Beauty, and the Beautiful are used in the Platonic sense, to name
abstract metaphysical Ideas or Ideals, and will be capitalized.
55. Preeminently Nussbaum 1986 and Vlastos 1981.
56. For the classical statement of a position that celebrates the idea that love culminates in
wordless contemplation and holds this to be central to Platonic philosophy, see Plotinus’s (1952)
Enneads 1.6.7 with 3.5 and 5.8. For modern commentators, see Gerson 2006: 56 – 71; Shorey
1933: 196; and the Tübingen school works Kramer 1990: 10, 104 – 7, 178; Szlezak 1993: 87,
2012: 139. For modern commentators who accept that this is Plato’s highest view on love but
dispute its adequacy as a vision of Eros, see Martha Nussbaum (1986) and, more influentially,
Gregory Vlastos (1981). A recent collection on the interpretive debates about the Symposium is
Lesher et al. 2006, and Ferrari 1992 surveys the issues associated with interpreting Platonic love
in the text.
57. Several commentators have argued that, while Diotima’s speech should indeed be taken as a
truthful, if poetic, expression of Plato’s thought, it is not the vision of Beauty alone that renders
the philosopher blessed or immortal but the ability she or he is then said to gain to produce
images of virtue and convey them to others — which calls into question the immortality of the
individual soul, since the philosopher in this case assumes “immortality” in the memory of her
or his living pupils and the next generations (see Hackforth 1950; White 2004). Strauss’s
position, we will see presently, suggests that Diotima is not to be taken as a truthful represen-
tation of Plato’s real account of philosophy, so that there is no commitment to any account
of immortality beyond the immortality of fame. This contention has been argued by several
modern commentators, notably Jacques Lacan (1960 – 61), Harry Neumann (1965), and,

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elevated vision of philosophy as, at its highest, a wordless contemplation of

metaphysical truth (Symp. 212a) also seems to provide the kind of philosoph-
ical basis Plato clearly needs if we take him to be seriously maintaining the
idea that philosophy is superior to poetry and different from it in kind, in
its goal, and in the type of Eros it expresses.58 If, by contrast, it becomes clear
that Strauss denies the possibility of any such metaphysical ascent in Platonic
thought, then to the same extent the basis of his own attempts to present
his version of Platonic philosophy as different from and superior to poetry
become unclear.
Certainly, Strauss’s hermeneutic schema, correlating the seven parts of
Socrates’s speech with the seven speeches of the Symposium, suggests that
Socrates/Diotima’s evocation of the philosophical ascent to the vision of
the Beautiful at 211e – 212a is to be treated with some caution. Indeed this
schema (table 4) suggests a hidden proximity between this final, seventh
subsection of Socrates’s inspired “Diotimic” discourse and Alkibiades’s
drunken encomium to Socrates — the final, seventh speech of the Symposium.
On the surface, it would be hard to conceive a speech more distant from
Alkibiades’s bawdy confessions about his unrequited love for Socrates than
Diotima’s beatific vision of philosophical rapture.59 Alkibiades is fixated on
this vexing, physically ugly man Socrates, in sharp contrast to Diotima’s
philosophical lover, whose Eros has transcended individuality, embodiment,
and particularity altogether (Nussbaum 1986; Vlastos 1981).60 Everything
about Alkibiades’s speech and persona, moreover, seem to align him with
poetry as it has been described for us by Strauss61 in his comments on Agathon’s
following Strauss, Stanley Rosen (1999) and before them Uleich Wilamowitz-Moellendoeff
(1920: 169 – 78). For a survey of the recent positions concerning Diotima, whether her speech
promotes personal immortality and on which basis (vision of Beauty or communication to
others of images of virtue), see Scott and Welton 2008: 253 – 54.
58. Compare Symposium 211d – 212a, the culmination of Diotima’s higher mysteries of Eros
(Symp. 210a), with 209d – e, the culmination of the lower mysteries, which lies in the begetting of
the works or “offspring” (ekgona, paidas) of the great poets and lawmakers.
59. Cf. esp. Nussbaum 1986.
60. Among other commentators, Strauss notes the dramatic significance in the Symposium of
the way that Alkibiades bursts in at the very moment that Aristophanes has raised his hand to
protest about Socrates’s speech (Symp. 212c). Alkibiades’s interruption of the natural philoso-
pher Hippias in Plato’s Protagoras (1997g) served in that dialogue, Strauss claims, to derail open
philosophical discussion of the Sophist’s philosophical claims. Just so, in the Symposium Strauss
suggests that we should take Alkibiades’s interruption as clearly meant to prevent us from taking
the higher account of love that Diotima has just been introducing as anything like a direct or
truthful account of philosophy and Eros.
61. I cannot unpack every detail of Strauss’s remarkable analysis here. For Strauss, as for
other commentators, the speech shows that Socrates surpassingly possesses the same virtues
that Diotima’s speech attributed to Eros himself: notably poverty or need — at base, the
need for wisdom — and endurance, although not justice, the political virtue par excellence

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speech and Socrates’s supposed “demotion of poetry” at Symposium 208b –

209e (see part 3). Alkibiades himself enters, Strauss tells us, “led by human
beings [anthropoi ],” as if he were himself not mortal but the kind of daimon
or god the ancient Greek poets had sung. A notoriously magnetic personality
animated by a near-limitless desire for fame, “Alkibiades is presented here as,
let me say, the raw material out of which the poets make gods” (Strauss 2001: 256; my
emphasis).62 Alkibiades himself specifies that his method of speaking about
Socrates will be poetic, not philosophical (Symp. 215a). He then proceeds to
multiply images and similes — Socrates is like the satyr Marsyas or like dolls
that contain hidden treasures beneath their ugly exteriors — to convey the
urgency of his desire for and frustration by Socrates (Strauss 2001: 261).
However, it is exactly to the extent that we recognize Alkibiades’s depiction of
Socrates as deeply poetic — and we have seen that this means for Strauss partial
if not false and never transcending self-love63 — that there emerges a deep
parallel between this final speech of Plato’s Symposium and the final part of
Socrates’s speech on love (Symp. 209e – 212c). In stark contrast to almost all
readings of the dialogue throughout its long history,64 Strauss maintains that
this final part of Diotima’s speech, like Alkibiades’s depiction of Socrates,
is not to be read as a truthful or “philosophical” presentation of Eros and its
highest goals. Instead Strauss (2001: 238) argues that Socrates/Diotima’s
image of the ladder of love and its mysteries is a work of enchanting poetry
only: it marks “the poetic representation of philosophy” itself, following the philo-
(Symp. 218a – b; cf. Strauss 2001: 269, 271, 283). For Strauss, notably, there are six stages in
Alkibiades’s attempted seduction of the philosopher, culminating in the frank, rejected offer of
Alkibiades’s body in exchange for Socrates’s knowledge. Given Strauss’s (2001: 273, 268) pre-
dilection for this kind of gematria, this might suggest that there is for him a parallel between
Alkibiades’s attempt at seduction and Socrates’s seven-part speech as a subtler form of seduc-
tion of the hearers or readers. Socrates famously rejects Alkibiades’s physical advances, leading
to Alkibiades’s affronted, noncomprehending allegation of Socrates’s hybris. Strauss (ibid.:
282), by contrast, accepts Alkibiades’s proposal as veridical: see my concluding remarks.
62. Note the first person pronoun, which Strauss suggests is important in reading great philos-
ophers. In the light of his analysis of the tragedians as “theōn poeitai ” (creators of the gods) above,
this cannot be an idle remark. For a modern comparison, oddly close in many ways to Strauss
on this and other points, including metaphysical agnosticism, see Lacan 1960 – 61. On Alki-
biades as raw material for the poets’ gods, Lacan (ibid.: XI, 13) makes the same kind of claim
about Alkibiades’s entrance, comparing it to the scandalous intrusions of these gods into human
affairs: “The ancient gods did not shilly-shally about it: they knew that they could only reveal
themselves to men on the rock of scandal, in the agalma of something which violates all the rules
as a pure manifestation of an essence which . . . remained completely hidden, the enigma of
which was completely behind, hence the demonic incarnation of their scandalous exploits.”
63. Recall part 3: poetry at its highest, in tragedy, can produce the kinds of Homeric or Hesiod-
like representations that shape political cultures; it can never transcend the political realm
entirely, in putative contrast to philosophy.
64. See note 57.

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sophical demotion of poetry in Symposium 208b – 209e (my emphasis; see

part 3).
It has to be said that Strauss’s primary textual justification for this claim
does not inspire confidence.65 It comes from his assessment of Diotima’s
description of the absolute, unchanging, oceanic Beauty at 211a, toward
which her erotic-philosophical initiate famously ascends (Strauss 2001:
230 – 33, 237). The priestess tells the young Socrates there that this ultimate
object of the philosophical aspirant’s desire will not appear to the initiate to be
an illusion ( phantasthēsetai ). Despite the negation here — “oud’au phantasthēsetai
auto kalon” (Nor again will it [the beautiful] be presented to him) — Strauss
(2001: 236) maintains that everything she says in these culminating passages is
“grammatically dependent” on the verb phantasthēsetai, which is related to the
imagination ( phantastikon), not reason. And on this basis alone “the beautiful
itself would appear to be something imagined”: a poetic fiction.
Aside from any problems we must have with this,66 Strauss’s (ibid.: 238)
more basic claims that Socrates/Diotima’s claims about philosophy are
decisively poetic, beautiful but illusory, turn on the observation that it is
ultimately a vision of Beauty (to kalon), not the Good (to agathon), that is
celebrated as the goal of philosophical initiation. Now, we saw in part 3 that
Strauss (ibid.: 232, 238) aligns the desire for Beauty, to kalon, with the tragic
poets’ polis-founding mythoi as against the proper and — as it is implied —
meaningfully transpolitical concerns of the philosophers with agathon, the
Good, and truth.67 It follows that, for Strauss, Diotima’s vision of the highest
erotic initiation must finally represent a decisively poetic business. That is
65. Compare the different textual bases for similar arguments in Lacan 1960 – 61; Neumann
1965; Rosen 1999 (following Strauss); and Wilamowitz-Moellendoeff 1920: 169 – 78.
66. Note that Strauss (2001: 236) seems to contradict this tendentious claim ten lines previously,
where we hear that “the beautiful itself . . . is not, as I may tentatively say, an object of phantasia;
it will not be imagined.”
67. Strauss (ibid.: 209, 213, 217) suggests that it is significant that the central part of the entire
Socratic speech (Strauss’s III.B; Symp. 204c – 207a) elevates the Good in contrast to the Beau-
tiful. To support this reading, Strauss further notes that in the first two stages of the lover’s
ascent — love of one body, love of all beautiful bodies — we are dealing with loving, but when
Diotima describes the next two stages we pass from loving to observing or beholding. An
adequate ascent, Strauss asserts on this basis, would see the final stage bringing together the
activities of loving and beholding. However, we know that the telos here is only seeing: “to catch
sight of the divinely beautiful itself as a single species” (Symp. 211e). Love is gone. Strauss also
highlights how, when Diotima recounts for a second time the five stages on the ladder of love at
Symposium 211c – d, she passes over the stage of the love involving the psyche: so we now go from
one to two bodies; from two to all the beautiful bodies; then straight to practices, sciences, and
the final epopteia (epiphany) (see Strauss 2001: 237). Strauss (ibid.: 251) asserts that this apparently
contingent oversight has “grave implications” for the meaning of the Symposium as a whole and
certainly of III.C.3: “The Symposium abstracts from what one could call in the language of the
Greeks the cosmic gods. You can also put it as follows: the soul.”

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to say, either Socrates/Diotima falsely represents philosophy’s true nature

as ultimately motivated — like poetry — by Beauty, not the Good, or else
Diotima’s speech truly reveals that philosophy itself is but one concealed species
of poetry. And Strauss, in the end, clearly opts for the latter, far more skeptical
position.
That Diotima’s speech presents a poetic and beautiful representation of
philosophical Eros no one will dispute. Much more controversial is the idea
that this poetic presentation of the speech might indicate that Platonic phi-
losophy’s avowed search for higher metaphysical truths might be a kind of
fantasma or mythos. Moreover, if we did entertain this paradigmatically skep-
tical notion, it would put into real question how Strauss himself could main-
tain that the Symposium shows Platonic philosophy’s difference from and
superiority to poetry as a way of loving, or seeking, wisdom. Certainly, we
have seen ( part 1) that Strauss wants to assert some version of this Platonic
superiority. His wider advocacy of “classical political rationalism” (Strauss
1989b) or “Platonic political philosophy” (Strauss 1983b) seems to depend on
just such a Platonic distinction and ranking. A distinction between philosophy
and poetry appears, again, in the “philosophic demotion of poetry” as born of
love of self or “one’s own,” which Strauss attributes to Plato’s Socrates in the
Symposium (part 3): how else could it stand as a demotion, or as philosophical,
at all?68 In On Plato’s “Symposium” Strauss (2001: 201) repeatedly gestures
toward the Platonic association of philosophy with the search, or love, for
the Good, in contrast to the poetic love of Beauty.69 Diotima’s decisive refu-
tation of the poet Aristophanes in III.B of Socrates’s great speech, Strauss
(2001: 203) says, turns upon the Platonic idea that “all eros is love of the
good.” More widely, Strauss’s oeuvre often indicates that he concurs with
almost all Platonists that philosophy, specifically, involves supra- or transpo-
litical study of the natural whole if not the Good. Philosophers question and
aim beyond merely conventional accounts of truth, good, and evil, which the
poets’ mythoi historically create and appeal to.70 The question, which has
been raised by several critics about other of Strauss’s works, is what content
Strauss is able to give to this imputably suprapolitical, suprapoetic heart of
Platonic philosophy? Does he, like Socrates’s Diotima — and after her nearly
all of the great philosophers as standardly read — offer any account of what
the philosopher will find when he or she finally ascends out of the political
68. See Strauss (2001: 223 – 30, 244 – 45, 170 – 71) on Socrates’s speech, his part III.C.2.
69. For a contrasting account of the same question of the relation of the Beautiful and the Good,
see Gerson 2006: 61 – 71.
70. See part 1. Indeed a vocal defense of strong normative values underlies the famous attacks
made by Strauss (1952: 81 – 97) and his students on modern historicism and “nihilism” (but see
also, e.g., Strauss 1970: 116 – 19, 123 – 24; 1989a: 137 – 38, 142). But I cannot pursue this here.

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cave or caves, which forever necessitates philosophy’s poetic presentation

and other rhetorical accommodations, to “the city”?71
Yet if you come to On Plato’s “Symposium” hoping that Strauss’s reading of
this decisive Platonic dialogue will bring answers to these vital questions, you
will be disappointed. As we glimpsed in part 2, examining Strauss’s claims
for the central importance of Symposium 204c – 207a in Socrates’s speech
(Strauss’s III.B), he has only extremely deflationary things to say here con-
cerning the Good and the Platonic Ideas. Indeed Strauss’s (2001: 238) Sym-
posium does not transcend but reinforces the deep metaphysical agnosticism of
his reading of the Republic: a reading that almost bypasses books 6 and 7 on the
philosophical education of the guardians and devotes just two of its eighty-
seven paragraphs to the Ideas, instead focusing on the dialogue’s literary and
political contents.72 The very word idea is not even used in Diotima’s final
poetic description of absolute Beauty at the end of the philosopher’s erotic
71. Critics have repeatedly expressed the concern that Strauss’s philosophy lacks a clear
metaphysics as distinct from assertions pointing toward the political necessity and ethical
desirability of such a first philosophy. Strauss’s (e.g., 1968: 125, 137; 2000: 101) discussions of
philosophy point toward its surpassing good or excellence: the alleged higher pleasures associ-
ated with philosophical search itself or a sense of one’s “progress” in it and the elevating way
philosophy takes up “fundamental problems” without apparent hope of their resolution. Yet
the reader who seeks an actual philosophical account of the “natural whole” or “natural right”
will find evocations of a “noetic heterogeneity” to this whole which are never developed or
grounded (e.g., Strauss 1989a: 132). For examples of these criticisms, see Robertson 1999:
esp. 39 (“Strauss has uncovered a Plato that perfectly meets the need of contemporary huma-
nity to regain contact with a phenomenological nature able to be a constitutive source of moral
and political life”); and Victor Gourevitch’s (1968: 283 – 93) claim that Strauss points toward a
felt ethical or political need for some kind of teleological account of nature but cannot provide
it, only creating instead strong moral prejudices against its alternatives. Issues such as these
explain more orthodox Platonists’ hesitations about Strauss’s readings of Plato, as with Lloyd
Gerson’s (2006: 51, and 51, n10) harsh argument that Strauss’s skeptical reading of Diotima’s
speech in the Symposium leaves us with “Plato lite.”
72. Strauss (1964: 127) recognizes that books 6 and 7 are “the most important part” of the
Republic. Yet he then does not devote any time to the mathematical education of the philoso-
phers or to the divided line simile, in clear contrast to nearly all other commentators. A
potentially interesting comparison here is with Strauss’s (1972: 74, 116 – 19, 123 – 24) similarly
meager attention to metaphysics in his late book Xenophon’s Socrates (principally, the Memorabilia),
where he argues that — Xenophon’s apologetic denials notwithstanding — Socrates did spend
time with his friends asking “what is?” questions about natural things, not simply ta politika.
Strauss’s (cf. ibid.: 28, 114, 125; 2000: 101 – 2) passing attention to ontological matters and his
complete silence on any discoveries that this “divine” pursuit of knowledge may yield or have
yielded to Socrates matches well Xenophon’s own near-perfect silence, in contrast to Plato, on
the suprapolitical matters of epistemology, ontology, metaphysics. It also reflects Strauss’s
(1972: 120) assessment of the Memorabilia as devoted to Socrates’s phronēsis (practical reason),
not his sophia (wisdom), given the apologetic purpose of the book: “The concealment of Soc-
rates’ sophia is the defence of Socrates.” The same silence is not maintained by the historical Plato
in the Parmenides, Thaeatetus, or Sophist. One is inclined to suggest, on this basis (and thinking
also of Strauss’s three full books on Xenophon), that Strauss’s Platonism was in fact a highly
skeptical, highly politicized “Xenophontism.” Cf. Strauss 1964: 61 and 2000: 26.

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ascent in the Symposium (ibid.: 234). Moreover, as in City and Man, we are
told that Plato’s doctrine of the Ideas is “apparently fantastic” or “absolutely
absurd,” in definitive contrast to nearly all other readings of Plato, ancient,
medieval, or modern (ibid.: 199).73 These Ideas, Strauss (ibid.: 235) instead
claims, seemed to have had a self-evidence for the Greeks: witness the ready
ability of Glaucon and the others to understand them in the Republic (see also
Strauss 1964: 120 – 21). Strauss suggests that such understanding worked by
analogy to the Greeks’ beautiful statues, artistically representing general
principles like Victory or Wisdom or Courage.
But you can see the problem here. We are being told that the most august,
suprapolitical Platonic doctrine — the Ideas at the heart of the philosophical
search — are in effect so many more artistic or, remembering the operative
Greek sense of poiēsis here, poetic creations. If so, then Plato’s abiding excel-
lence for Strauss can only be as a kind of poet, not qualitatively different from
the begetters of edifying gods and mythoi that his Socrates defeats in the
contest of the Symposium. Indeed Strauss (2001: 135) says as much: “Therefore,
I can say that the ideas take the place of the gods and this is ultimately true.
The critical question which arises and is not necessarily critical of Plato, is: are the
ideas as ordinarily presented by Plato not also the products of the eros for
beauty, just as the gods are such products?” (my emphasis).
As for Strauss’s direct comments in On Plato’s “Symposium” concerning the
Good which I outlined in part 2 and which Strauss presents as demarcating
philosophy from poetry, these are even more skeptical, if possible, than
Strauss’s remarks on the Ideas.74 In the central part of the Socratic speech
(III.B, Symp. 204c – 207a), Strauss points out, the Good is raised as a subject
only in passing, while Socrates teaches how love desires to procreate in Beau-
ty. And here is all that Strauss (2001: 210 – 11) then tells us in all of On Plato’s
“Symposium” concerning the Good that should define philosophy’s difference
and superiority to poetry:
We have the element of immortality in the fact of sempiternal procreation. Where
do we find the fact of the good? It must be implied in there. Mere being. That
73. Strauss’s skepticism concerning the Ideas is clearly addressed and avowed in scholarship
on his work. For example, see Pangle 1989: vii – ix; Smith 2007: 100 – 103; Zuckert 1996: 154; cf.
also Robertson 1999.
74. On this subject and the relation of the Good to the Beautiful (kalon), the noble (also kalon),
the just, and the useful in Strauss’s Xenophon — wherein the reduction of good to a relative
adjective (“good for x, y” or even “useful for”) is suggested — see Strauss 1972: 44, 75, 85, esp. 76 –
77 and 119 – 20. Strauss’s (ibid.: 119 – 20) final comment on the decisive matter states that the
Good and the noble are the objects of practical reason ( phronēsis), not of philosophical sophia,
and the context (where the relation of the Good to the Beautiful has been raised) indeed suggests
that philosophy’s concern for “the beings” as “beings simply” places it beyond any concern with
the Good, as philosophy per se stands in tension with “the city.”

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might be, and . . . this question will be taken up by Diotima in the next part of her
speech. And in this part, where the same phenomenon is discussed — procre-
ation — the good is dropped. Procreation supplies sempiternity. The good is out,
because mere being in the narrow sense is hardly good.
Concluding Remarks
So what positive lesson, if anything, can the reader derive from Strauss’s
On Plato’s “Symposium” about the decisively suprapolitical nature of philosophy,
above poetry and the cities, whose mythoi the poets create through love of
fame and of self? It seems to me that, by the end of the book, only one such
teaching has emerged. But it — like Alkibiades’s speech — concerns Socrates’s
specific nature and hybris, not philosophy itself and how it might transcend
poetry. Indeed like Alkibiades’s speech and Strauss’s deflations of both the
Good and Diotima’s ladder of love as “poetic presentations of philoso-
phy,” it unearths the apparently base element in philosophical Eros that
Diotima’s speech had “abstracted” from. In short — despite all of Alkibiades’s
clear motives as a disappointed lover for misrepresenting his master — Strauss
accepts Alkibiades’s claim that, beneath all Socrates’s rhetoric about the
pursuit of the truth or the Good, the philosopher is animated by a sublimated
form of self-love.
Recall that Alkibiades insists that he will speak only the truth in his speech
and that Socrates does not stop him. Alkibiades then asserts that, beneath
Socrates’s idiosyncrasies, there is a consuming need to be loved by his young
admirers: “He has done this to me, however, but also to Charmides the son of
Glaucon, Euthydemus the son of Diocles, and very many others, in deceiving
whom, as if he were a lover, he becomes rather the beloved instead of a lover”
(Symp. 222a – b). He resembles Agathon’s gods, embodying love of one’s self. It
is this depiction of Socrates’s hybris that Strauss (2001: 282) asks us to accept
as the definitive account of the Symposium’s grandest theme: the nature of
philosophy (see part 1): “[Socrates] brings others not to love the beautiful in
Socrates, but Socrates,” the man, himself. Not the least problem with this
reading is how, rather than clarifying Socrates’s putative difference qua phi-
losopher from the poets whom, Strauss says, are “demoted” by Plato exactly
for creating out of self-love and the Eros of fame, it completely annuls this
difference once more. The love of philosophy as embodied by Socrates does
not transcend the love of self. A prodigy of this self-love, Socrates is just the
better able to seduce through his, or Plato’s, poetic presentation of philos-
ophy to young men. The same measure that Plato applies to “demote” the

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poets at Symposium 208a – 209e, Strauss himself, whether wittingly or not,

applies to Socrates.
Like all his commentaries on Plato, then, Strauss’s commentary on the
Symposium reveals a great deal about his own ideas: Eros in relation to the city,
the foundational political status he attributes to the highest forms of tragic
poetry, and philosophers’ rhetorical or poetic presentation of their pursuits
in response to the political need to justify themselves to nonphilosophers. The
exoteric meaning of Plato’s Symposium is, in his eyes, to demonstrate the
superiority of philosophy to poetry. For Plato, through his Socrates, is able
both “to give a philosophic presentation of poetry” — showing its alleged
limits in the presentation of captivating, founding political mythoi animated
by the poets’ love of fame — “and a poetic presentation of philosophy. No
poet has ever succeeded in doing that” (Strauss 2001: 248). Yet this essay has
shown how Strauss’s reading of the text at the same time casts real doubts,
whether esoterically or unwittingly, on Strauss’s ability to provide any dis-
tinctly philosophical rationale to the difference and superiority of Plato and
philosophy to these poets. The force of Strauss’s reading of Plato’s Symposium
as a whole rather points to Plato’s ability to fulfill the highest capacities of a
poet: “The Symposium as a whole is an enchanting work, and a certain kind of
enchantment is the function of tragedy” (ibid.: 283); “the right kind of phi-
losophy is more poetic than poetry in the common sense of the term (ibid.: 7).75
So at the end of On Plato’s “Symposium” it is not surprising to find Strauss
explaining this specifically poetic superiority of Plato as a writer to Socrates,
who never wrote a word, by asserting that, of the two, Plato was not the
more profound philosopher but the definitively more political man. To wish to
write, Strauss argues in his last sessions on Alkibiades in the Symposium, reflects
not any kind of specifically philosophical Eros or desire for the Good. It
instead reflects thymos (spiritedness), which the Republic (439e – 441b) tells us
is the political motive par excellence (Strauss 2001: 247).76 Socrates was more
purely a philosopher in that he did not write, Strauss suggests, although what
the “purity” involved here could be is, by this time in the commentary,
impossible either to conceive philosophically or to imagine poetically. For
these reasons, I can do no better than to conclude by joining Strauss (ibid.:
248) in his own confession of perplexity at just this point in On Plato’s “Sym-
posium”: “I am also not satisfied with this as an answer, because I am not sure
75. The Symposium provides ultimately what Strauss (2001: 204) chooses to call a “true nomos
regarding eros.” It is therefore in the deepest sense tragic, “where nomos means a beautiful,
salutary, but spurious unit.”
76. Strauss (ibid.: 246 – 47) will indeed also link writing with the capacity for avenging or
punitive speech whereby to persuade the nonphilosophical many, a capacity that Socrates
did not have.

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[sic ] there is something hidden there, but I have not been able to crack that
out.”
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Poetics Today

The Poetic Presentation of Philosophy:

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Introduction: Framing Strauss’s Symposium

The edited transcript of Leo Strauss’s 1959 seminar on Plato’s Symposium

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Sharpe † The Poetic Presentation of Philosophy 565

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1. Themes: The Ancient Quarrel, Eros, Philosophy — or Socrates’s Hybris

In the opening session of his 1959 seminar at the University of Chicago,

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Sharpe † The Poetic Presentation of Philosophy 567

“metaphilosophical” reflection on philosophy’s nature, its relations with (and

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568 Poetics Today 34:4

According to Strauss’s idea of Platonic political philosophy, however, the

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Sharpe † The Poetic Presentation of Philosophy 569

(1963).17 In that comedy Aristophanes makes us privy to a contest in Hades

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as demonstrating, at least exoterically, Plato’s judgment of the superiority

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Sharpe † The Poetic Presentation of Philosophy 571

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ising a privileged insight into Plato’s conception of philosophy itself, as embod-

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Sharpe † The Poetic Presentation of Philosophy 573

good Homeric-Hesiodic authority. Then, following Paunanius and Erixy-

2. Ascending to (the) Agathon: Eros and the City

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Phaedrus Pausanius Eryximachus Aristophanes Agathon Socrates Alkibiades

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mophoriazusae Sparta then to Per-

The Poetic Presentation of Philosophy

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nevertheless contributes something that is taken up at a higher level in the

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Table 2 Strauss’s central division of the speeches of Symposium

Uninspired Speeches Inspired Speeches

Source: Adapted from Strauss 2001: 89.

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Sharpe † The Poetic Presentation of Philosophy 579

In seeking to understand Plato’s wider political or philosophical concerns,

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Aristotelian thought to have a natural status or to develop of natural human

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Sharpe † The Poetic Presentation of Philosophy 581

psychoanalysis: “Eros implies the transcending of death, the negation of

3. Socrates’s Speech: The Philosopher’s Alleged Demotion of Poetry

A full three chapters (out of twelve) of On Plato’s “Symposium” are devoted to

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