Fakulta filozofická; Katedra románských jazyků

Dne 4.10. od 14:00 hodin vystoupí na Katedře filozofie kanadská filosofka z Dominican University College Marie Sassine se svou přednáškou věnovanou Diotimě v Platónově Symposionu.

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Marie Antonios Sassine, Ph.D.
Executive Director, Centre for New Questions in Ethics, Technology, and Society (CETS)
Directrice exécutive, Centre pour des nouvelles questions en éthique, technologie et société (CETS)
Dominican University College | Collège universitaire dominicain

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Abstract: In Plato’s great work, the Symposium, Socrates speaks of his teacher, the prophetess and priestess, Diotima of Mantinea. He claims that she instructed him in the art of Eros and turned him into a life-long devotee of the daemon.  In Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities, we encounter a new Diotima, a Viennese muse of philosophy and a celebrated paragon of soulful refinement. The lecture views Musil’s choice of giving the name Diotima to a central character in his novel as a gesture full of significance: a clear reference and comment on the ancient Diotima’s teaching.  It will be interpreted as an invitation to recall the ancient Diotima and to place Socrates’ teacher and Vienna’s reigning salon hostess side by side. In contrasting the two Diotimas, a history, a transformation in sense and meaning of Eros, emerges. Musil’s choice will also be seen to reveal an engagement with Plato and Platonism as key players in fin-de-siècle Vienna and in the general collapse that was being prepared and that followed. Plato’s appearance in The Man Without Qualities constitutes a critique that is neither simple nor free of ambiguity. This is crystallized in the person of Diotima’s avatar. The heart of the problem for Musil has to do, as it does for Plato, with Eros and ethics, with beauty and the good. The two Diotima’s, side-by-side, tell us a story about the path Eros has travelled, from the ancient priestess to the salons of Vienna, where self-invention rules, to today’s ‘influencers’, Youtubers, and the market place of Eros.