IS THERE METHOD IN THIS MADNESS?This playful manipulation of the seating arrangements illustrates
how Plato brings together the distancing, grounding, and demonstra-
tive strategies in an attempt to show what he cannot say without falling
into a rigid, self-defeating sort of dogmatism. Rather than offering a
logical argument for the validity and importance of pursuing the good
in human life, he shows the power and beauty of this pursuit in all its
concrete complexity. Without being didactic, the demonstrative strat-
egy has a sort of protreptic effect. It enjoins a critical and refl ective
approach to the core project of philosophy: to translate the good, the
beautiful, and the just into the contingent world of human community.
From this perspective, the distancing and grounding strategies serve an
important moderating role, for they systematically subvert the thought-
less fanaticism that often accompanies this attempted translation.
The Republic
The methodological subversion of fanaticism links the Symposium to the
Republic. On the face of it, the two dialogues seem diametrically op-
posed. The one, set in the city, speaks of private things; the other, set
outside the city in the Piraeus, addresses political things; the one is satu-
rated with eros—in it there is sexual innuendo, eating, and ultimately
drinking, while the other is peculiarly devoid of eros—in it sex is fi rmly
regulated and a promised meal is preempted by philosophical conversa-
tion. The Symposium allows divine madness to enter the human world;
the Republic imposes divine rationality on the human community; the
one is playful, the other serious.^24
Upon further investigation, this superfi cial opposition gives way to
a deeper affi nity. This has already been intimated by the discussion of
the opening passages of the Symposium in which an echo of the Repub-
lic is heard. Strangely enough, Apollodorus’ response to having been
stopped by a certain “Glaucon” along the road to Athens at the start of
the Symposium lacks the playfulness of the response Socrates makes to
Polemarchus’ slave who orders him and Plato’s brother, another “Glau-
con,” to wait at the beginning of the allegedly more serious Republic.^25
While the opening scene of the Symposium reveals the dangerous fanati-
cism that runs just beneath its surface playfulness, the opening scene
of the Republic uncovers a dissembling playfulness that subverts its own
idealistic seriousness. In the Republic, this playfulness serves the same
methodological function that the nested narratives served in the Sympo-
sium: it establishes critical distance and alerts us to be on guard against
taking the lovgo~ about to be presented too seriously.^26