CHAPTER 7

Socratic Character: Proclus on the Function of Erotic Intellect

James M. Ambury

And I, through the love that I had for Alcibiades, felt just as the Bacchants do. For whenever they are inspired they draw honey and milk where others cannot even draw water.

And I, though knowing no lesson through which I could benefit a man by teaching, nevertheless believed that by being together with this man I could make him better through love.

—Socrates from Aeschines Sphettus’s Alcibiades,
quoted in Aelius Aristides, In Defense of Oratory 74

Introduction

In this chapter I attend to the analysis of Socrates’ character in Proclus’s Commentary on the First Alcibiades of Plato. While Proclus comments extensively on Socrates’ arguments, he is also clear that Socrates’ character is equally instructive for Alcibiades. Proclus’s view is profoundly Neoplatonic in the sense that it understands Socrates as more than an intellectualist concerned with propositional truth. Instead, we find that Socrates strives for a nondiscursive pedagogy that aims at bringing his interlocutor to self-knowledge, understood broadly in the Neoplatonic tradition as knowledge of the self as soul.¹ As such, Proclus differs from many modern commentators who focus more on the logical validity and consistency of Socrates’ arguments than on his character and what he is meant to embody in the drama.² This picture of Socrates in contrast leans heavily on the erotic element of the philosopher’s method and in so doing clearly grasps the importance of Socrates as paradigmatic of the good life. Accordingly, in the following we shall observe Proclus’s view that Socrates embodies erotic intellect, seducing Alcibiades away from commonplace ways of living and knowing. We will then examine Proclus’s distinction between the divine lover and the vulgar lover, showing how this distinction represents his view that intellect guides and educates the soul. For Proclus, Socrates is the embodiment of the erotic intellect that asserts the primacy of self-knowledge in the philosophical life.

Socrates as Erotic Intellect

Proclus understands Socrates first as the embodiment of Eros. Considering Eros, he claims, “One must establish him midway between the object of love and lovers: he must be posterior to the beautiful but precede all the rest.”³ Beauty is ontologically prior to Eros because we cannot think of love without its object. At the same time, Eros is prior to individual lovers because there must be a force in which we participate that draws us toward Beauty. More specifically, Socrates represents what Proclus calls descending or providential Eros (Ἔρως προνοητικός) that inspires inferior beings with a love for the divine. Alcibiades, we shall see, is likened to ascending Eros (Ἔρως ἐπιστρεπτικός), the inspired inferior being striving toward divine Beauty.⁴ In the first line of the Alcibiades, Socrates tells Alcibiades that he was the first of his lovers as well as his last remaining lover (103a). Socrates is therefore the temporal embodiment of Eros, posterior to the beauty he sees in Alcibiades but prior to all his other suitors.

Socrates attempts to unite Alcibiades with the objects of philosophical cognition. Proclus claims: “Now the intelligibles on account of their unutterable union have no need of the mediation of love; but where there exists both unification and separation of beings, there too love appears as medium; it binds together what is divided, unites what precedes and is subsequent to it, makes the secondary revert to the primary and elevates and perfects the less perfect” (tr. O’Neill, throughout).⁵ Embodying Eros, Socrates serves not to refer Alcibiades to intelligible truth or point him toward a particular meaning but rather to call him back to his origins. As such, Socrates serves as a bridge between Alcibiades as he stands at the beginning of the dialogue and his recognition of his true nature at the end of the dialogue.⁶ He stands “in between” Beauty, the object of divine love, and Alcibiades’ many suitors, mortals who are lost in Alcibiades’ physical appearance and who do not aspire to Beauty itself. Proclus follows the Symposium (202d–e) in claiming that Eros is between the divine and the mortal and argues that Eros is a “power of intermediacy … a medium between everything that reverts and the cause of reversion and the object of appetency to secondary beings.”⁷ Socrates attempts to make Alcibiades revert or turn back upon himself, to realize the divinity present within him.⁸ As Eros unites us with intelligible being, so Socrates “arouses the mind of the beloved toward attachment to true beauty, stirs up his inward admiration of the life of philosophy, and leads him round to the fulfillment of true love.”⁹

Socrates claims that Alcibiades seems to wonder (θαυμάζειν) at his love, a suspicion that Alcibiades confirms (104d). Calling attention to the Theaetetus (155d), Proclus reminds us that wonder is the beginning of philosophy and that Iris, the daughter of wonder, is the messenger between the gods and human beings.¹⁰ Alcibiades wonders at a love that is entirely different from his other lovers, “for they were dragging him down to irrationality and matter, but Socrates lifts him up, even through these first words alone, to reason and spirit.”¹¹ As the embodiment of Eros, Socrates differs from the other suitors not just in degree but in kind. Whereas they approached him, propositioned him with irrational ways of living and material wealth, and then departed, Socrates has remained ever present. In character alone, Socrates already makes Alcibiades philosophical, preparing to unite him with the divine.

Proclus next likens Socrates to intellect: “Socrates, as being an inspired lover and elevated to intelligible beauty itself, has established himself as corresponding to the intellect of the soul.”¹² The embodiment of Eros, Socrates at the same time embodies intellect. Intellect is an erotic state of the soul on account of which soul is said to be in contact with the objects of philosophical cognition. Intellect therefore guides the soul up toward the divine in the same way Socrates seduces Alcibiades. On account of this parallel, Proclus not only likens Socrates to intellect but also likens Alcibiades to the soul.

As Socrates stands between Beauty and Alcibiades, so Alcibiades himself stands between the extremes of Socrates as divine lover and his other suitors as vulgar lovers: “In conformity with the analogy of the extremes we must relate Alcibiades to the rational soul, to which are still attached the emotions and irrational powers … but the intellect, like Athene, is set above.”¹³ As soul is an intermediary between intellect and corporeal nature, Alcibiades will be drawn either to intellect, in the person of Socrates, or body, in the persons of the vulgar lovers. The soul may be attracted in either direction because it resembles both intellect and matter: “The soul, in regard to knowledge, resembles intellect, by its activity comprehending the object of knowledge, as the intellect comprehends the intelligible; but in regard to twofold ignorance it resembles matter; the latter possesses all things in mere appearance, but in truth nothing.”¹⁴ Intellect’s task with the soul is to draw it away from corporeal nature and into communion with the divine. Socrates undertakes this task in his seduction of Alcibiades.¹⁵

Proclus argues that Alcibiades’ initial attraction to Socrates instead of his other lovers is evidence of his essential goodness. However, despite his philosophical nature, without having inquired into the true nature of justice, Alcibiades hesitates to admit that he is preparing to advise the Athenian Assembly (106c). When Socrates challenges him to account for the better (τὸ βέλτιον) with regard to war and peace (108d–e), Alcibiades, unfortunately, cannot answer. Reading this passage, Proclus interprets Socrates’ use of the phrase “come now” (ἴθι δὴ) to be the intellect reaching out to stabilize the soul: “the word ‘Come’ repeated by Socrates is most appropriate to our soul’s knowledge; since it is in movement and does not subsist all at once and without change, like the stable and enduring activity of the intellect.”¹⁶ As we later discover, Alcibiades characterizes justice as advantageous in one instance and not in the next (115a–116e). The erotic intellect is attempting to seduce the soul away from the flux of everyday accounts of justice in order to grasp justice as Form.¹⁷

Just as intellect draws the soul away from corporeal nature, so Socrates seduces Alcibiades away from contextual accounts of justice. Part of this project requires convincing Alcibiades that his guardian is not Pericles but the guardian spirit of all humanity.¹⁸ Alcibiades must revert to his true nature by caring for himself with Socrates. Proclus reminds us that Socrates tells Alcibiades that he has continuously turned his mind toward him (προσέχων γέ σοι τὸν νοῦν διατετέλεκα) (105a).¹⁹ Intellect here is thus conscious of itself in its erotic function, and when Socrates later tells Alcibiades to trust in his divination and follow the Delphic imperative (123b), we see intellect once more seducing the soul. Alcibiades must turn toward the divine by abandoning Pericles and following Socrates. He will thereby choose intellect over corporeality and the spiritual over the material: he will choose divine love instead of vulgar love.

The Divine Lover

We have seen thus far that Proclus views Socrates as the embodiment of the erotic intellect seducing the soul toward it and thereby toward self-knowledge. In this section I focus on Socrates as the divine or true lover. As erotic intellect Socrates is also the divine lover whose task it is to care for his beloved and properly educate him. Reading 105c–d, Proclus argues that Socrates discerns the aptitudes of individual interlocutors and cares for them accordingly. Each interlocutor is dealt with differently. With Alcibiades, Socrates appeals to his interest in attaining power in order to show him that true power requires knowledge.²⁰ Socrates therefore appeals to Alcibiades’ particular interests not to gratify them as they stand but to redirect them philosophically.²¹

Socrates approaches Alcibiades as a philosophical beloved. While he observes that Alcibiades’ physical beauty is clear for everyone to see (104a), Proclus claims that praising this sort of beauty as good is altogether contemptible: “For the true good is unknown to the many, is known only to the possessors of real knowledge, and is to be apprehended by intellection, but not by sense-perception.”²² The many, who judge by sense perception, cannot truly see the beauty of which intellect is capable. They are lost in an image of beauty without knowing that it is merely an image. Socrates, on the other hand, “approaches evident beauty as an image of intelligible beauty…. He approaches Alcibiades, then, because he holds the position of image, for we are said to approach images.”²³ As divine lover Socrates looks with philosophical vision on his beloved and takes him as an image of Beauty itself.²⁴ Alcibiades therefore learns something from Socrates’ behavior before he advances any philosophical argument: he learns that he is truly an appearance or image of something more substantial, not accessible to sense perception.

Knowing oneself as a soul requires transcending sense perception through dialectical inquiry. Proclus claims that dialectic is an erotic activity, and he establishes a parallel between lovers seeing one another in their eyes and knowing themselves as souls: “[Dialectic] very clearly shows that in some way both the lover is in the beloved and the beloved in the lover; since as considered in Alcibiades Socrates directs his replies, and as Socrates Alcibiades gives correct answers.”²⁵ Erotic intellect guides the soul back toward itself, away from externals and corporeal nature.²⁶

Through dialectic, intellect also helps the soul recollect notions already present within it. Whereas rhetoric induces knowledge from without, in dialectic we are led to see the truth already present within us.²⁷ At 112e, Alcibiades accuses Socrates of saying that he is ignorant of justice, and Socrates replies by claiming that Alcibiades himself has made the claims about justice. Proclus argues that the dialectical method ensures that Alcibiades knows he is not a tabula rasa receiving notions from without: “Previously, [Alcibiades] was unaware of himself as realizing innate notions, but now he is aware of the fact, because he reverts toward himself, and learning his own activity and process of knowing he becomes one with the object of knowledge.”²⁸ For these reasons, Socrates is clear from the beginning that he will not give a long speech even though Alcibiades is accustomed to hearing them (106b). While the vulgar lovers court Alcibiades by flattering him rhetorically, Socrates does not flatter Alcibiades at all. Instead, he turns Alcibiades back upon himself to elicit the divinity already present with him.

Proclus develops the pedagogical function of erotic intellect by contrasting the divine lover and the vulgar lovers in five distinct ways. First, whereas the true lover arouses the amazement of the beloved, the vulgar lover is distraught over the beloved and pursues him without reserve. The inferior sort of lover “admits that he depends on his darling and says he has need of him, but the other is self-sufficient and full of power.”²⁹ Through his apparent self-sufficiency in the opening of the dialogue Socrates foreshadows his own characterization of the soul (130d) as the more authoritative (κυριώτερόν γε) aspect of human beings. Socrates has complete control of himself and depends on nothing other than himself, thereby reproducing in his person the ontological independence of soul from body and of intelligible from participant.³⁰ As Proclus reminds us, “law is regulation by the intellect.”³¹ Alcibiades is drawn to this self-sufficiency as soul is drawn to intellect. By embodying intellect the divine lover seduces the beloved away from a life of dependency on externals and corporeality toward a life of philosophy and true self-sufficiency. Thus, by the end of the dialogue, Socrates will tell Alcibiades that if he wants to rule the city, he does not need the power to do whatever he wants, but rather needs justice and moderation (134c–d).

Second, the divine lover watches over his beloved and does not approach him until the cessation of the bloom of youth. He is a lover of the soul, not the body. On the other hand, the vulgar lover fawns all over the beloved’s physical beauty but then departs when it has faded.³² Socrates shows that his love is divine by telling Alcibiades that he will not leave him so long as he is eager to be beautiful, not in body but in soul (131c–131d). Divine love, therefore, comes with the condition that the beloved make himself beautiful by following intellect: “This was the cause, that I was your only lover, but others loved things belonging to you (μόνος ἐραστὴς ἦν σός, οἱ δ᾽ἄλλοι τῶν σῶν): while what belongs to you has left its prime, you are beginning to bloom. And now, lest you become corrupted by the Athenian people and become shameful, I will not leave you” (131e–132a; my translation). Intellect loves soul, not what belongs to soul. Between intellect and corporeality, Alcibiades will be beautiful only through participation in the divine love of the erotic intellect.

Socrates then cautions Alcibiades to look at the Athenian people stripped, not in their immediate appearance (132a). Proclus claims that Socrates strips Alcibiades bare by showing that he is shameful (108e) and then chides Alcibiades for changing arguments as if they were fine garments when he does not like the consequences of his claims (113d–114a).³³ The divine lover strips his beloved to show him in his purity, naked, as a soul. Alcibiades needs neither fancy garments nor rhetorical flourishes but to follow intellect and practice dialectic. As Socrates has stripped Alcibiades, so Alcibiades, if he is to be a virtuous man, must strip others.³⁴

Third, Proclus claims the divine lover is stable and always the same, while the vulgar lover is swift to change, fickle, and easily inclined to forsake the beloved. Socrates again embodies the characteristics of the object of philosophical knowledge. This is contrasted with Alcibiades whose soul is unstable and indeterminate, and thus Socrates cannot claim to truly know him.³⁵ Socrates’ fear that Alcibiades will remain indeterminate is reflected in the following passage immediately preceding Alcibiades’ first admission of ignorance:

S: Therefore, while answering about things that are just and unjust, admirable and shameful, bad and good and advantageous, do you not say that you wander (φῂς πλανᾶσθαι)? Accordingly, is it not clear that, on account of not knowing about them, you wander on account of them?

A: It is to me.

S: Therefore, it’s like this: when someone does not know something, it is necessary that the soul wanders on this subject (ἀναγκαῖον περὶ τούτου πλανᾶσθαι τὴν ψυχήν)? (117a–b; my translation throughout)

Socrates claims that Alcibiades is wandering, incapable of grasping philosophical truths that are always the same.³⁶ Through divine love, the erotic intellect is attempting to stabilize the soul, prevent its wandering, and thereby open up the possibility of its knowing the objects of philosophical cognition.

Fourth, while constantly present before the beloved, the divine lover approaches only when he can benefit the soul. The vulgar lover is always bothering him and attempting to unite with him sensually.³⁷ Proclus claims, as the “intellect is always active in our regard … so also the divine lover is both present to the beloved before the many lovers … [and is] not like that of those many lovers, divided, deficient, implicated in matter and concerned with mere images.”³⁸ While Alcibiades is here the indeterminate beloved, by the time of the Symposium he is clearly a wandering vulgar lover, pursuing Socrates as the object of his desire.³⁹ Socrates’ reply that Alcibiades offers only apparent beauty in exchange for the real thing is the remark of a divine lover refusing the transient good of corporeal nature offered by a vulgar lover.⁴⁰

Proclus blames Alcibiades’ failure on his being reared under a bad form of government.⁴¹ At the end of the Alcibiades, when Alcibiades tells Socrates he will care for him in return for his divine love, Socrates expresses his doubt. He says, “I wish that you would persevere: but I am afraid, not distrusting your nature, but seeing the force of the city, lest it overpower both me and you” (135e). Alcibiades becomes a victim of the vulgar love of the many, not a beneficiary of the divine love of Socrates. While he praises the benefits of philosophy, he later claims that he caves in to his desire to please the crowd the moment he leaves Socrates’ side.⁴² Without intellect, soul continues to wander, indeterminate and without stability.

Finally, Proclus argues that the divine lover “is spoken of as being akin to the One and the Good and as reaching up to the simple and one-like exemplar of beautiful things, but the vulgar sort as ‘common’ and a ‘random heap.’”⁴³ He later characterizes the vulgar lovers as a “mob” or an indeterminate, confused, and disorderly multitude. That the vulgar lovers all mob Alcibiades is “evidence of a slovenly, confused way of life that drags down the beloved to the materialized, fragmentary, and manifold kind of variety of the emotions.”⁴⁴ Socrates is identified with unity, the vulgar lovers with plurality. Pedagogically, Proclus associates their plurality with sophistry: “Sophistry, then, is on a level with the multitude and the life of the multitude: it aims at deceit and appearances and recoils from the Truth and the One.”⁴⁵ Socrates faithfully plays the role of divine lover, attempting to educate Alcibiades by drawing him away from the life of the many. Intellect continues its seduction of soul; Socrates, in his character, behavior, and way of life, is already bringing Alcibiades toward self-knowledge.

Conclusion

In his presentation of the divine lover and vulgar lovers, Proclus reaffirms the presence of intellect as an erotic state that draws the soul away from corporeal nature and toward itself. Caught between intellect and corporeal nature, the soul that truly knows itself as divine reverts upon itself through the guidance of intellect and thereby opens up the possibility of philosophical cognition. Accordingly, Proclus’s Commentary on the Alcibiades is instructive not only because of its close attention to Socrates’ arguments but equally because of Proclus’s treatment of Socrates as the embodiment of erotic intellect.⁴⁶ Proclus’s emphasis on Socrates’ behavior reminds us that philosophy is primarily a way of living, and that knowledge of intelligible being is possible only for those that first know themselves. Like intellect beckoning the soul, Socrates, through his love of Alcibiades, shows us the meaning of divine love, and thus what it is to truly love wisdom.