Saul Aurelio Benitez Barajas

The Platonic Being and the influence of Heraclitus and Parmenides on the
Symposium

Many scholars consider the Symposium to be the most interesting dialogue written by
Plato; conceived when he was advanced in age, it is said that its suggestive content
in terms of rhetorical, poetical and philosophical matters, possibilitate it to be
considered his lifetime masterpiece. However, according to the same experts, it’s also
the dialogue which is most frequently misunderstood, since it derives in a difficulty to
separate its philosophical value from its literary beauty.1
Throughout this text, it’s possible to notice the initial statements of Socratic
Philosophy —concerning ethics and common life in the city— seem to be surpassed
and replaced by ontological concerns; namely, those regarding Forms or Ideas.
Furthermore, the author gives a special emphasis to the most important Idea of all:
Beauty.
Incidentally, and in a rather simplified way, we’ll affirm that Plato’s metaphysical
project consists in asserting that the reality of entities lies in the suprasensible Realm
of Forms (also known as Topus uranus), and that, therefore, what may be perceived
by senses in the physical world cannot be a Being, since everything is subject to
change; only Ideas can be considered as subsistent beings.
Moreover, the previous statement can be supported by the famous Allegory of
the cave presented by Plato in Republic; in which chained men facing the wall of a
partially lit cave, are only able to see shadows of the real beings passing by, but they
may not, by any means, perceive the real entities. With this metaphor, the author tries
to explain that the material world (the shadows), that is, the one perceived by physical
senses, isn’t real, but just a trace of a suprasensible reality (the actual beings passing
by) that exists beyond empirical perceptions. Therefore, according to Plato, the
perceivable world is just “a cheat and an illusion”2.

1
Refer to Plato Dialogue III, Symposium, Introduction, 1. Nature and originality of the dialogue.
Gredos Classical Library.

2
Plato, Republic, 515d.
 This proposal, known as Platonic Idealism, arises from the works of the
presocratic philosophers Heraclitus and Parmenides; thus, before analyzing the
Theory of Forms that underlies in the Symposium, we must briefly lay out the ideas
of those thinkers.
Heraclitus states that all sense-objects are in constant motion and alteration,
therefore, he affirms that individual entities cannot not exist. On the other hand, he
asserts that what really exists is a unity found in the transmutation of perceivable
manifestations (called unity in diversity or relationship between opposites): “λέγει που
Ἡράκλειτος ὅτι ‘πάντα χωρεῖ καὶ οὐδὲν μένει”3.
For this matter, thermodynamics —or the laws regarding the conservation of
energy and mass— offers a didactical explanation, since “the universe is certainly not
a substance: it comprises a plurality of substances. It is, however, … in a sense a
physical totality. The universe, then, may to a certain degree be considered a unity in
diversity” (Copleston 45). In summary, Plato adopted from Heraclitus the notion that
everything is constantly flowing and changing; however, he restricted it to sense-
objects and not to the eternal, imperishable and immutable Ideas:
It is only for a while that each live thing can be described as alive and the same,
as a man is said to be the same person from childhood until he is advanced in
years: yet though he is called the same he does not at any time possess the
same properties; he is continually becoming a new person, and there are things
also which he loses, … his opinions, desires, pleasures, pains or fears, ever
abiding the same in his particular self; some things grow in him, while others
perish.4
Nonetheless, a stance opposed to the Heraclitean flux is proposed by
Parmenides. This philosopher —subsequent to Heraclitus— denied the possibility of
the transmutation of Being, assuring that what appears to senses as change and
motion, is nothing but an illusion; namely, he states that true objects of knowledge are
inapprehensible by senses: only the mind is capable of conceiving them; for instance,
truth can only be intelligible. Hence, the parmenidean being is One, and Becoming
falls into an aporia, because “if something comes into being, it must arise either out of

3
Translation: “Somewhere, Heraclitus states that everything flows and nothing remains —the same
way—”. Plato, Cratylus, 402a. Self-translated.

4
Plato, Symposium, 207d-e
being or out of no-being. If it arises out of being, then there is no real arising, no
coming-to-be; for if it comes out of being, it already is” (Copleston 50). Therefore,
nothing can come from non-being, since it’s impossible for something to originate out
of nothing. In addition, it should be noted that the immutable Parmenidean Being is
only of a material nature, not in a supersensible way —like Platonic Ideas—.

That being said, let's begin the analysis of the dialogue in question. Throughout this
narrative, the exposition of the Theory of Forms revolves around the figure of Eros,
whose intermediate characteristics —between the mundane and the divine— allow
Plato to use him as a metaphor for the human soul, because this god is “not good nor
beautiful … but something betwixt the two”5, and so he stands “midway betwixt wisdom
and ignorance”6. This in-between or imperfect condition of the soul, impels humans to
avidly desire what they lack; hence, Eros provokes an “impulse of human souls
towards beautiful men”7 and other sorts of beauty among things. Thus, the soul seeks
to attain perfection and divinity; that is, to apprehend the most sublime Forms.
Consequently, the pursuit to apprehend Ideas is called Love, which can also be
defined as the desire to seek excellence and integrity; for instance, during Socrates’s
conversation with Diotima, Plato states that “‘love loves the good to be one's own for
ever.’”8
Furthermore, as it has been said beforehand, Platonic Ideas are superior to any
manifestation within the material world; accordingly, love must be “the guiding principle
we should choose for all our days, if we are minded to live a comely life, cannot be
acquired either by kinship or office or wealth”9. So that, opposed to worldly desires,
Love is an aspiration to eternal and unfading affairs; hence, Plato considers perfidious
“that popular lover, who craves the body rather than the soul: as he is not in love with
what abides”10, and so, one should “estimate the body's beauty as a slight affair”11 (In
these last two quotations, we may notice that the evanescence of the body alludes to

5
Plato, Symposium, 202b
6
Plato, Symposium, 203e
7
Plato, Symposium, 186a
8
Plato, Symposium, 206a
9
Plato, Symposium, 178c
10
Plato, Symposium, 183d-183e
11
Plato, Symposium, 210c
the Heraclitean concept of Becoming, while the immutability of the soul finds its origins
in the Parmenidean Being).
Along with the fact that the divinity of Forms prevails over the corruptibility of
the bodies, one must not consider that bodies are completely insignificant for Plato.
Case in point, the most special Idea of all, Beauty, can be admired through them (thus
the reason for its outstandingness); and once contemplated, it will inspire an
irrepressible desire to engender beautiful things. For example, the existing attraction
to the physical beauty of another being generates a natural desire to procreate; and,
as said by the author, this desire is an aspiration to eternity, that is, to overcome the
finitude of individual existence: “the mortal nature ever seeks, as best it can, to be
immortal. In one way only can it succeed, and that is by generation; since so it can
always leave behind it a new creature in place of the old.”12; therefore, it necessarily
follows that “love is of immortality”13.
Nevertheless, love towards Beauty, besides procuring the immortality of one’s
lineage, also seeks the proliferation of other Ideas. Namely, for those who love
wisdom, this desire “should be led on to the branches of knowledge, that there also he
may behold a province of beauty”14, and “turning rather towards the main ocean of the
beautiful may by contemplation of this bring forth in all their splendor many fair fruits
of discourse and meditation in a plenteous crop of philosophy”15.
Moreover, the lover will progressively contemplate more Ideas in a sort of
dialectical way, so that “beginning from obvious beauties he must for the sake of that
highest beauty be ever climbing aloft, as on the rungs of a ladder”16; as it follows, “from
personal beauty he proceeds to beautiful observances, from observance to beautiful
learning, and from learning at last to that particular study which is concerned with the
beautiful itself”17. That is to say, the various beautiful Ideas converge in Beauty itself
(as all the multiple manifestations of the material world take part of their respective
and unique Ideas), which exists “in singularity of form independent by itself, while all
the multitude of beautiful things partake of it”18.

12
Plato, Symposium, 207d
13
Plato, Symposium, 207a
14
Plato, Symposium, 210c
15
Plato, Symposium, 210d
16
Plato, Symposium, 211c
17
Plato, Symposium, 211c
18
Plato, Symposium, 211a-b
 Thus, be noted that the contemplation of Beauty itself’s starting point is the
beauty of bodies; therefore, as it has been said, these cannot be completely negligible.

Needless to say, Plato’s Theory of Forms had a huge influence on later philosophers,
from ones that adopted his ideas with a profound admiration and agreement, like
Augustine of Hippo, who employed his dissertations to explain the sublimity of the
christian God in relation to the ephemeral world; to others whose ideas found
inspiration in this postulate, such as René Descartes and his dualism19, where it
displays res cogitans as the only indubitable truth, while res extensa turns out to be
deceiving and subject to change.
On the other hand, some philosophers were encouraged to avidly contradict
him. For instance, Aristotle, who subverted against the transcendent Ideas to conceive
his immanent conception of Being; or Nietzsche, who’s critique to Christianity and
metaphysics originated from the philosophical tradition started by Plato, as he states
that “Christentum ist Platonismus fürs Volk20” (Nietzsche 10) .
As we have briefly explained the reach and historical significance of this theory,
in addition to the exploration of Plato's ontological proposal within the Symposium,
and, given that it arises from the theses of Heraclitus and Parmenides, it will be fair to
summarize our efforts with a forceful recapitulation offered by Frederick Copleston:
Plato attempted a synthesis of the two, a combination of what is true in each.
He adopts Parmenides' distinction between thought and sense, and declares
that sense-objects, the objects of sense-perception, are not the objects of true
knowledge, for they do not possess the necessary stability, being subject to the
Heraclitean flux. The objects of true knowledge are stable and eternal, like the
Being of Parmenides; but they are not material, like the Being of Parmenides.
They are, on the contrary, ideal, subsistent and immaterial Forms, hierarchically
arranged and culminating in the Form of the Good21. (51-52).

19
As Plato’s dualism asserts a soul-body duality, Descartes’s refers to the coexistence between mind
and body —where ‘body’ implies anything outside one’s consciousness—, tho which respectively
correspond res cogitans and res extensa.

20
Translation: “Christianity is Platonism for the masses”. Self-translated.

21
The Form of the Good is usually found as a synonym for the Form of the Beauty, to which we have
alluded throughout this essay. In this way, our arguments concur with Copleston's conclusion.
References

Copleston, Frederick. A history of philosophy Volume I Greece and Rome. Doubleday,

1993. Web.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. Jenseits von Gut und Böse. Anaconda, 2006. Web.

Descartes, René. Méditations Métaphysiques. Centaur Editions, 2013. 15-32. Web.

Platón, Diálogos III: Fedón, Banquete, Fedro. Madrid: Editorial Gredos, 2008. Web.

“Plato, Symposium.” Plato, Symposium, Section 207d-211b,

http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Plat.%2BSym.%2B210c&fromdoc=Pe
rseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0174.

“Plato, Cratylus.” Plato, Cratylus, Page 402, Perseus Digital Library,

http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0171%
3Atext%3DCrat.%3Apage%3D402.

“Plato, Republic.” Plato, Republic, Book 7, Section 515d,

https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Plat.%2BRep.%2B7.515d&fromdoc=
Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0168.