Abstract

In Plato’s Symposium and the Alcibiades I of a disputed origin, we find the mirroring declarations of erotic love (erôs and derivatives) by Alcibiades to Socrates and vice versa. In the Alcibiades I, Socrates announces that he is the only one who truly loves Alcibiades because he loves Alcibiades’ soul. Others have merely loved something that belongs to Alcibiades, his body, and deserted him when his full bloom has started to fade.

The dialogue culminates in the famous account of self-knowledge in terms of an analogy of an eye seeing itself in the pupil of another eye. Puzzlingly, Socrates also states in the analogy that self-knowledge requires knowledge of god. I shall focus on this latter point and argue that it can be explained by reference to the well-known Platonic claim that the highest goal of human life is assimilation to god insofar as it is possible in bodily life.

I consider this ideal with respect to Alcibiades’ description of the effects of his passion for Socrates in the Symposium and argue that even rather deficient kinds of self-knowledge require recognition of godlikeness. I also claim that the deficiency of Alcibiades’ self-knowledge is not merely in it being about changeable individuals as opposed to general and immutable Forms. This sheds new light on the question of whether or to what extent individuals can be known.