Plato, Symposium - II

Posted: Tue, Nov 19, 2024

Socrates/Diotima

Socrates then proceeds to recite a conversation he had with a priestess Diotima.

  • In their conversation, Diotima uses the Socratic method on Socrates.
  • Diotima is most likely a fictional character. Her name (lit. “honor the god”) may be a reference to Alcibiades’s mistress Timandra (lit. “honor the man”).
  • But why go through this trouble? Why must Socrates speak through a woman?
    • Using a wise woman instead of a wise erastês avoids the implication that Socrates was once an erômenos?
    • Using a woman makes what she says about pregnancy, as well as love between men vs. love between men and women, more credible?
    • There is meant to be something distinctively feminine about Diotima’s conception of love? (Or does it merely appear feminine to men?)

The stage-setting:

  • Love is in between beautiful and ugly, good and bad, mortal and immortal, and wise and ignorant (201d–204b).
  • Love desires beautiful things, and wisdom is particularly beautiful; so, Love must be a lover of wisdom—that is, a philosopher (204b).
    • Objection to Aristophanes: Love desires not wholeness but the good (and love desires the wholeness only insofar as wholeness is good). How did Diotima manage to anticipate Aristophanes’s speech (205e)?
    • Love not only desires the good but it desires to possess the good forever (206a).
    • (This gets qualified later: “what love wants is not beauty,” but “reproduction and birth in beauty” (206e).)
  • Note two interconnected claims:
    • Love (eros) is not restricted to the romantic.
    • Love is not only aimed at the good but we only desire the good (“psychological eudaimonism”).
      • If we desires something that is not good, we are committing a cognitive/intellectual error (i.e., we must have misidentified the good).
  • But we are mere mortals. How do we possess the good forever? Diotima: we do this by “giving birth in beauty, whether in body and in soul” (206c).
    • Invokes the distinctively Socratic ideal of the philosopher as a midwife of wisdom: the wisdom is already in us (we are “pregnant” with it), which the Socratic method then brings out.
  • “All of us are pregnant, Socrates, in body and in soul” (206c).
    • People who are pregnant more in body than in soul “turn more to women and pursue love in that way, providing themselves through childbirth with immortality and remembrance and happiness” (206e).
    • People who are pregnant more in soul than in body turn more to beautiful minds and give birth to “[w]isdom and the rest of virtue” through pederasty (209a–d).
      • It turns out that the “people” here are men!
      • ~“Platonic love”

The Ascent of Love:

  • Initially: “if the leader [Love] leads aright, he should love one body and beget beautiful ideas there” (210a).
  • Then: “he should realize that the beauty of any one beauty is brother to the beauty of any other.”
    • So, there is something shared by all beautiful bodies.
    • This is the form of Beauty: not any particular beautiful body, but something that makes all beautiful bodies beautiful.
      • Abstract but not an idea in our minds.
      • Think a model/blueprint.
  • Then: “he must think that the beauty of people’s souls is more valuable than the beauty of their bodies” (210b).
    • Indeed, compared to “the beauty of actives and laws . . . he will think that the beauty of bodies is a thing of no importance” (210c).
    • Then, “the beauty of knowledge” outshines the beauty of human customs.
  • Culmination: “all of a sudden he will catch sight of something wonderfully beautiful in its nature; that, Socrates, is the reason for all his earlier labors” (210e).
    • The form of Beauty/Beauty itself (211a-c).

Socrates was “persuaded” (212b). But is Diotima telling us something true, or something beautiful?

Alcibiades

Aristophanes has an objection (he got singled out for critique in Socrates’/Diotima’s speech), but we never get to hear what he has to say because Alcibiades shows up completely “plastered” (212e).

What’s going on?

  • Alcibiades is obviously deeply in love with Socrates. But he also accuses Socrates of stealing “the most handsome man in the room” (213c), of not telling the truth (214d), of “trap[ping]” him (216a), of “bit[ing] me in my most sensitive part—I mean my heart” (218a), of “humiliat[ing]” him (219d), …
    • Indeed, even though Alcibiades says he “shall never forgive” Socrates, he still can’t help but adore Socrates’ “magnificent head” (213e).
    • Does Alcibiades’s love for Socrates desire the good? Is it a more bodily or intellectual kind of love? How does this trouble the Ascent of Love?
  • Subversion of pederasty norms: the erômenos is meant to be passively desired as an object of love, and he is not supposed to actively pursue sexual pleasure with the erastês.
    • Kenneth Dover’s study of ancient Greek art: “The penis of the erastes is sometimes erect even before any bodily contact is established, but that of the eromenos remains flaccid even in circumstances to which one would expect the penis of any healthy adolescent to respond willy-nilly.”

In-class activity: who among the symposiasts (Phaedrus, Pausanias, Eryximachus, Aristophanes, Socrates/Diotima, and Alcibiades) do you think knows love the best, and why?