Plato, Symposium

Posted: Wed, Jan 22, 2025

Dialogue: philosophical conversation written as fictional play/drama, often using real historical figures as characters.

Symposium: “drinking together” for aristocratic men.

  • Held in the andron (men’s room/cave) of the house, with couches lined against the walls.
  • Dignified women (wives and daughters) are prohibited; courtesans (but not hookers) may be hired for entertainment and sex.
  • Function is to facilitate intellectual pleasure as well as bodily pleasure: eat, drink, recite poetry, talk philosophy, and have sex.
  • Also serves as an important site for pederastic relationships among male aristocrats:
    • The older, active (i.e., penetrating) erastês (“lover”) pursues the younger (~16- to 19-year-old on the verge of full manhood/adult height but not yet fully-beard), passive (i.e., penetrated) erômenos (“beloved”), though the erastês may not be that much older than the erômenos.
    • Educational function: the erastês provides moral and intellectual mentorship for the erômenos, which the erômenos repays with sex (though the erômenos is not supposed to enjoy being penetrated—that would be too womanly!).

The symposium in Plato’s Symposium:

  • Agathon (tragic poet) won the big prize at the festival; threw a party that night; everybody was hungover the next day but threw another party.
  • Socrates (born 469 BCE) attended the festival but not the first party.
  • This symposium is set in January of 416 BCE. The following year, Alcibiades (who appears later in the dialogue) led the Sicilian Expedition, eventually suffering a disastrous defeat and defecting to the Spartans—the turning point of the Peloponnesian War.
  • The story we get is told third-hand, likely in 404 BCE, just after Alcibiades was assassinated.

The Opening

  • Apollodorus (the narrator): latecomer to philosophy (philosophía, lit. “love of wisdom”), completely obsessed with philosophy in general and Socrates in particular (173c–d).
  • The layers:
    • Apollodorus tells the story of telling the story to Glaucon two days ago to an unnamed friend.
    • Apollodorus heard the story from Phoenix, who heard it Aristodemus, who was at the party.
  • Why this elaborate setup? What the symposiast said ~ how he turned out.
  • Aristodemus was not originally invited; Socrates, looking great in his “fancy sandals,” takes him along (174a–d).
  • Except Socrates then gets lost in thought (literally). We are not told what he was thinking.
  • Agathon (the symposiarch & tragic poet laureate) invites Socrates to sit next to him so he can “catch a bit of the wisdom that came to you under my neighbor’s porch” (175d). Socrates makes fun of him.
  • Pausanias (Agathon’s lover) proposes that they go easy on drinking tonight.
  • Eryximachus (a physician) dismisses the “flute-girl” (“let her play for herself, or if she prefers, for the women in the house”) so they can engage in serious philosophical conversation; he then proposes that they all make speeches in praise of Love, a suggestion that he credits Phaedrus for (176e–177d).
    • Erôs (“passionate love”; erastês’s love for the erômenos) vs. philía (more general, affectionate/non-passionate love; e.g., erômenos’s love for the erastês) vs. agapé (selfless, benevolent, unconditional love)
  • So Phaedrus gets pressured into going first. The speeches will get competitive—the next speaker will try to say that the previous speaker was wrong about something (flirty? erotic?).

Phaedrus

  • The educational function of pederasty is achieved through love (178c).
  • More generally, Love directs a person to virtue, “even if she’s a woman” (179b).
  • A teleological theory of X: an account of what X is in terms of its end/purpose (télos).

Pausanias

  • There are two kinds of Love, because there are two goddesses of Love: the Common/Vulgar Aphrodite vs. the Heavenly Aphrodite (180d–e).

In-class activity: What are the two kinds of Love according to Pausanias (181b–d)? Which one is praiseworthy (184c–185c)?

Aristophanes (False Start)

  • Aristophanes is supposed to go next, but gets bad hiccups, and so it’s Eryximachus’s turn now (185c).

Eryximachus

  • As a physician, Eryximachus cautions that Love also “occurs within the animal kingdom, and even in the world of plants. In fact, it occurs everywhere in the universe” (186b).
  • He also stresses the effects of Love on the body: when Vulgar Love “controls the seasons, he brings death and destruction”; when Heavenly Love is in charge, “men and all other living things are in good health” (188a).
  • Aristophanes flirts with Eryximachus (189a–d).

Aristophanes (Finally!)

  • Aristophanes writes comedies, and the story he’s about to tell us is hilarious—but is he also serious, or is he just bullshitting for funsies?

In-class activity: What, according to Aristophanes, is the origin of Love?

  • There used to be three genders: male (the sun), female (the earth), and “androgynous” (the moon) (189e–190c).
    • The original human beings were spherical, with one head, two faces, four legs, four arms, etc.
    • They were too powerful and tried to overthrow the gods.
    • The gods were not happy about this but didn’t want to kill all the humans (then they can’t worship the gods).
  • So Zeus proposed cutting the humans in half, turning their face around to look at their wounds, and warning them that if they get bratty again they’ll be split in half again (190d).
    • An original spherical man -> two gay men.
    • An original spherical woman -> two lesbian women.
    • An original spherical androgynous person -> a straight man and a straight woman.
    • (Bisexuals?)
  • This didn’t work: the halves would not do anything but embrace each other trying to become one again, not even eat (191a–b).
  • So Zeus tried again: he moved everybody’s genitalia around too (191c).
    • So when a male-half embraces a female-half, they can make babies (reproduction “by the man in the woman”).
    • So when a male-half embraces a male-half, “they would at least have the satisfaction of intercourse, after which they could stop embracing, return to their jobs, and look after their other needs in life.” (What about the lesbians?)
    • The men split from the original spherical men are “most manly in their nature,” and are the only ones “who grow up to be real men in politics. When they’re grown men, they are lovers of young men, and they naturally pay no attention to marriage or to making babies” so they get to do the serious stuff (192a–b).
  • Love: longing to become whole with your other half, your meant-to-be (191d–192e).
  • Socrates flirts with Agathon (194a ff), whose turn it is now to speak.

Agathon

  • Love is THE BEST!!!!
    • Love is both beautiful and good.
  • Everybody except Socrates loves Agathon’s speech: “In my foolishness, I thought you should tell the truth about whatever you praise” (198d). (It’s not entirely clear, though, whether Socrates went on to tell the truth about Love.)

Socrates Doing the Socratic Method on Agathon

The socratic method: intense interrogation leading one to realize that one’s initial view isn’t so tenable after all.

  • ~Philosophy as midwifery.

The steps:

  1. To love is always to love something (200a).
  2. To love something you have to desire that thing (200a).
  3. You can’t desire what you already have (desiring to continue to have it in the future is different; the object of the desire is not the thing itself but its preservation) (200b–e).
  4. So, to desire something you can’t have that thing already (from 1–3).
  5. Love desires something beautiful not ugly (201a).
  6. So, “Love needs beauty, then, and does not have it” (201b) (from 4–5).
  7. So, Love is not beautiful (from 6). (Agathon: “It turns out, Socrates, I didn’t know what I was talking about in that speech” (201c).)
  8. Also, everything good is beautiful (201c).
  9. Since Love desires beautiful things, it then also desires good things (201c) (from 5, 8).
  10. So, Love also needs but doesn’t have these good things (from 4, 9).
  11. So, Love is also not good (from 10).

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: Working in groups, please identify the various stages.

  • 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?