Platio's Symposium, Part 3: Knowledge Versus Mastery, and Love's Light in The Cave

In the opening of the last third of Plato’s Symposium, the very drunken Alcibiades erupts in a comic and dramatic demonstration of his love for Socrates. When members of the Toronto, Calgary, and Chicago Philosophy Meetup groups met on May 28, 2023, we noted that whereas the previous six speeches were about love in the abstract, Plato chose to end the dialogue with the practical. In our discussion, Alcibiades was compared to the prisoner in the cave of Plato’s Republic, caught in between, and pained by, the contrast of the light of love’s beauty and the shadowy images on the cave wall. One observed that Alcibiades was trying to leave the cave, but without the right reasons. And at the end of our discussion, we came to see that Alcibiades’ inability to escape his love from Socrates is a metaphor for Athens’ inability to escape Socrates, and that Socrates’ own fate may be an example of the dangers when the enlightened reveal the truth, of which the prisoner in the cave was warned. It was a fabulous conclusion to three amazing meetings on Plato’s Symposium.