How Benardete Read the Last Stage of Socrates’s Philosophic Education

Abstract

Seth Benardete, like Leo Strauss, judged that the Symposium occupies the privileged place in the Platonic kosmos. A chief reason both give is that the Symposium is the third of three dialogues in which Plato tracks a young Socrates becoming the mature thinker of all the dialogues; portraying the last stage of Socrates’s philosophic education, the Symposium shows Socrates gaining the peak of understanding after moving through earlier stages in Phaedo and Parmenides.¹ Benardete treats that peak in “On Plato’s Symposium,” an essay that first appeared in a lovely edition edited by Heinrich Meier, an edition that Meier equipped with a foldout reproduction of Anselm Feuerbach’s mammoth painting, Das Gastmahl des Plato.² I confine myself here to Benardete’s paragraphs on the peak.