Plato\'s Use of Multiple Layers

Plato's use of multiple layers of narration to each the actual philosophical arguments in the Symposium are so convoluted as to be almost helplessly confusing upon a first read. Apollodorus relates to his present companion that yesterday he (Apollodorus) was approached by someone who said to him, "I was looking for you, Apollodorus, only just now, that I might ask you about the speeches in praise of love, which were delivered by Socrates, Alcibiades, and others, at Agathon's supper. Phoenix, the son of Philip, told another person who told me of them." This complexity seems almost purposefully obfuscating, and could be a way of reminding the reader that anything reported of what someone else said -- as Plato is doing with others and especially Socrates in this tract -- should be taken with a grain of salt. On a deeper level, the layers of narration and distance that Plato creates in Symposium might be meant as a leveler, of sorts, giving a more equal weight to each of the actual arguers rather than making a more obvious statement about which line of reasoning is the most astute or the most correct when it comes to love. Distance and uncertainty gives the onus of analysis to the reader.

2)

In Apology, Plato has Socrates say of the craftspeople he queried in regards to their wisdom, "because they were good workmen they thought that they also knew all sorts of high matters, and this defect in them overshadowed their wisdom," eventually concluding that if he is wise it is only because he understands what he does not know. In Symposium, Eryximachus waxes philosophic about the nature of love with a scientific certainty derived from his medical knowledge, exhibiting just the same type of arrogance in assuming that his area of knowledge gives him an expertise in other fields of knowledge as well, namely love. Now, if love were indeed a part of the medical and thus the purely physical makeup of plants, animals, and human beings, Eryximachus would not be incorrect in assuming that his knowledge was applicable and that medical mechanisms were at heart in the matter of love. As Eryximachus goes even further in his extension of his own expertise, however, claiming that "in music, in medicine, in all other things human as which as divine, both loves ought to be noted as far as may be, for they are both present" -- that his knowledge applies to everything human divine -- suggests that this is exactly the type of ignorance and foolishness Socrates warned of.

3)