Knowing Nothing, Knowing Love

Why Socrates’ Contradiction Makes Perfect Sense on a First Date.

At the beginning of the Symposium, Socrates remarks that he knows nothing other than things having to do with love (ta erotika). This may surprise readers who associate Socrates with the claim that he knows only one thing–that he knows nothing.

Think about a typical date for a while, though, and Socrates’ apparent self-contradiction starts to make sense.

I wait at a bar or a restaurant. The one I love is late. Their present absence heralds the perpetually hovering moment of future loss, the moment we will part forever. The anxiety I feel as I wait derives not only from the vision of awkward dates and lonely nights to come, but from the foreboding that I am going to lose a special kind of knowing. The one I love is a person I know in an exceptional way, the one I love knowing about: I want to see their baby pictures, learn every detail of their old love affairs, hear what they’re thinking. In turn, they know me, and I hope they will come to know me better than anyone else. That deep knowing is the bedrock of trust; trust is the platform for moving through life together in a state of joy and hope. Or so it’s supposed to go.

But…do I know the one I love? Do they know me?

Everyone who has been in love has felt that cold shower of shock when the person we love says or does something disgusting or cruel or crushingly banal and we think: who is this person? What did they just do? How could they have done that? This is not the person I thought I knew. Love confronts us with the painful limits of what we can know even as it entices us with the fantasy of total knowledge.

So it makes sense for Socrates to say both that he only knows that he knows nothing and that he only knows about love, because love is a form of knowing that includes knowing not-knowing, knowing-that-one-does-not-and-cannot-ever-truly-know.

That love itself is known in different ways is borne out by the Symposium’s marvelous line-up of speeches. For the young aristocrat Phaedrus, love is frothy and full of fantasies, like a chick flick, but it also brings out the best in us, as shown by the myth of Alcestis, the woman who volunteers to die in place of her husband. The pompous Pausanias says that love compels us to live virtuously. Eryximachus, earnest doctor, sees love as a superhuman force of cosmic unity. The most memorable speaker, the comedian Aristophanes, describes humans as living in an eternal state of injury, sliced in two by the gods aeons ago: love is the longing each of us feels as we search for our other halves.

Socrates presents love as a series of steps from carnal interest to knowledge. Love of a beautiful youth turns into love of beauty itself and thence to love of the good and the beautiful. Physical desire is displaced by intellectual ecstasy.

But at this point in the dialogue, Plato throws us all into a state of uncertainty by bringing in a touch of my date scene. Alcibiades bursts in late to the party, handsome, charismatic, and drunk. He tells a perfectly calibrated comic/tragic story about his youthful attempt to seduce Socrates by sliding into his bed and wrapping himself around him, making a whole out of their two Aristophanic halves–only to be ignored. “My night with Socrates went no further than if I had spent it with my own father or older brother!” Years later, as everyone can see, the memory gives Alcibiades pain. That night, he wanted to know and be known by Socrates in that special way love makes possible. But Socrates, who only knows one thing (or is it two?) chose to embrace not-knowing.