Alcibiades at Criticism

This paper reads Plato's Symposium as an allegory for the practice of criticism—and as a solution to a canonical problem in aesthetics. In his Critique of Judgment , Immanuel Kant proposes that it is impermissible for us to defer to the aesthetic judgment of others, or to accept aesthetic judgments of works we have not directly encountered on the basis of others' testimony. What, then, is the purpose of criticism? I argue that the Symposium is an object lesson in how glimpsing a beautiful object through another's eyes prepares us to appreciate it, thereby readying us to make our own aesthetic judgments of it

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