174174
Is There Method in This Madness?
Context, Play, and Laughter in
Plato’s Symposium and Republic
Christopher P. Long
Though this be madness, yet there is method in’t.
Shakespeare, Hamlet, act 2, scene 2Where there is madness in Plato, method lurks. In its modern guise,
method is designed to establish philosophy as a science by determining
procedures in advance that ensure objectivity. Modern method permits
no madness. Yet another, older, less rigid, but no less rigorous sense of
method resonates in the Greek word mevqodo~, which means “a following
after” and points not to a fi xed set of rules but to a path, an oJdov~, a way.
A lthough he has no method in the modern sense, Plato surely has a way,
a path of thinking that fi nds expression not in a metaphysical system
of doctrines, but in living dialogues between individual characters ani-
mated by an erotic desire to weave the ideas of the good, the beautiful,
and the just into the fabric of human community. By writing this erotic
desire, this madness, into the dialogues, Plato at once subverts the au-
thority of his own texts and infuses them with an openness that not
only resists calcifi cation into dogma but also provokes the very critical,
philosophical attitude modeled in the dialogues themselves.
To discern this method of madness in Plato, we must attend to the
madness of which Socrates speaks in the Phaedrus: it is not the madness
of mental defi ciency, or of divine prophecy, or indeed of poetic inspira-
tion; rather, it is the madness associated with eros that playfully awakens
human souls to the life of philosophy and touches on something of the
truth.^1 Dimensions of this sort of erotic madness can be found in the