Class Reflections: The Final Speeches In The Symposium
we get to the highest point of the dialogue, and then come down from it
Last week in my Foundations of Philosophy class, we finished up our discussions focused on Plato’s Symposium, looking at Socrates’ and Alcibiades’ contributions within the dialogue. I pointed out to my students something that one might take as obvious, but for first time readers confronted with the variety of different speeches in the work, perhaps does need to be said, namely that what we get coming from Socrates is taken to be Plato’s position.
We also discuss how, after his brief dialectic with Agathon, Socrates brings in yet another character to the dialogue, the wise woman Diotima from who he learned all that he knows about love. Hearing that, of course, the natural tendency for some is perhaps to assume that their relationship was sexual, a dalliance between an older woman and a younger man.
Might this not be an odd (from the perspective of the Symposium, stressing male-male relationships) instance of the sort of relationship between older and younger lovers Pausanius discussed earlier, where the younger beloved provides sexual pleasure to the older lover who makes the beloved better in moral or intellectual terms? Setting aside the immediate problem that would arise for such an interpretation, namely that of Socrates’ well-known physical unatractiveness, there are two other obstacles. One is that there’s no mention of them engaging in any amorous activities. She just teaches him about love, and Socrates recounts precisely how she did so, through dialectic. The other is that, as we see in Diotima’s own accounts of love, the priority is set upon love and cultivation of the soul over that of the body.
We also briefly discussed the question of who this Diotima person was. Everyone else in the dialogue is presumably someone who existed, and some of them are quite famous. What about Diotima? There are traditionally three main lines of thinking in scholarship about this character.
One is that she’s entirely fictional, and Plato just uses her to convey his own doctrines through her to Socrates, who then recounts them to the other participants in the Symposium, and thereby to us his readers. Another is that she actually did exist, and Socrates did have productive intellectual interactions with her, which he then told people about, but that she didn’t make it into history in any other manner. The third is that she is a stand-in for Aspasia, a resident alien in Athens who was the mistress of Pericles, and who had deep interest in intellectual matters.
The question I asked my students, who sometimes get quite concerned with a similar historicity matter the “Socratic problem”, is whether it matters for us whether she did exist, and why it would, particularly if our goal is to lift out some ideas conveyed within the dialogue and to think together about how they apply to our contemporary lives. That didn’t get much of a response, so I suggested we just leave that an open question.
Socrates’ Conversation With Agathon
Before he introduces Diotima to the dialogue, Socrates effectively does two things. One of these is to engage in some (perhaps mock-) complaining about the expectations he had for the speech-giving, thinking that it would be merely a matter of making a case and stating the facts about love, not engaging in a lot of rhetoric and flattery by attributing all sorts of attributes of power and virtue to love. In that portion of his discourse, he also asks for an exception to be made for him, claiming he can’t make speeches like the others, but that he is happy to engage in some dialectic back and forth discussion.
The second thing is that he does precisely that, turning his attention to some of the claims made in Agathon’s speech. Through focusing on the aspect of love or desire (eros) being love of something, that is having an object it is directed towards, he gets Agathon first to admit that what a person desires is what they lack. Then this implies, since what you lack you don’t have, whatever it is that one loves, one doesn’t doesn’t have that. If you love virtue, you don’t have virtue. If you love beauty, it’s because you don’t possess it. Agathon realizes that, although he gave a great speech, he was wrong in attributing all those wonderful aspects to love.
This then raises an important issue, which we discussed briefly in class. If love is for what one doesn’t have, does that mean that the one who lacks is entirely lacking in what they love? If you love beauty, is that because you’re ugly? If you love wisdom, is that because you’re stupid or ignorant? If you love virtue, does that mean that you’re vicious? My students quickly responded that there’s an in-between, probably less from remembering the reading and more just relying on their experience in the world.
Diotima’s Three Mysteries Of Love
The discourse with Diotima is the centerpiece and culmination of the dialogue. Socrates talks about her initiating him into mysteries of love through the dialectical conversations he recounts, and there are effectively three main topics she leads him through. The first of them takes up this question of love as an intermediate, or rather as a mediator. It turns out that love is neither a god nor a human being, but something between them, in the class of daemones. He is the child of poverty and plenty, rough-looking and resourceful, desirous of wisdom, having a certain sort of it, but on the lookout for more. And this is why love is a philosopher, literally a lover (philos-) of wisdom (sophia).
We didn’t dwell too long on that theme, and moved on to the second mystery, which centers around a metaphor of pregnancy, and the question: what is it that the lover wants? Diotima’s answer that it is to give birth in the beautiful is rather puzzling at first read, and makes more sense when we look at what it is that she says lovers are aiming at in general and in particular. Those who are “pregnant in their bodies” are looking to produce children, who they view as a means for immortality. Anytime I teach this text with undergraduates, we inevitably get into some side discussion about parents who try to make their children like them, whether that actually works, and how the students as young adult children feel about it (they’re usually not fans!).
Then we get to those “pregnant in the soul”, the people who produce and leave behind great deeds (like the heroes), cultural products (like the poets), or well-constructed societies like lawmakers). In each of these cases, people are remembered for the traces they left on the world, a more lasting sort of immortality. We could broaden this to the notion we have in our present culture of “legacy”. I ask my students whether they want or intend to leave behind some sort of legacy. It’s not something most of them have thought about much at this point, as they say, but it’s a matter well worth thinking about.
Then we arrive at the end of Diotima’s discourse, where she elaborates an ascent through what I call a ‘ladder of love”, moving from one level to another. We start with beautiful bodies, and our attraction to or appreciation of them. That’s something they can definitely relate to. Then I ask them whether or not they have been “in love with” more than one beautiful body, which does turn out to be the case for nearly all of them, and following out Diotima’s trajectory, I ask what those bodies they were attracted to had in common. It turns out that we are generally drawn to certain features, that many of us have a “type”. So far so good.
Then we shift to a higher grade of attraction, to what Plato calls the “soul”, and which in our culture we more often talk about in terms of “personality”. With at least some people, do we experience a shift in the object of, the reason for, our attraction from the merely physical or corporeal to something going beyond that? Could we fall in love with someone for who they are in their person, not just how they look? Again, this is a common experience that all of them can easily wrap their heads around.
The next steps in the ladder are a bit of a harder sell to my students. What makes a beautiful soul attractive? The shaping of that soul by laws, customs, institutions, of course. And what makes those beautiful in turn, types of knowledge or disciplines than inform them. It isn’t that my students can’t see how these might be viewed as good or even as beautiful, but they don’t really follow Plato’s insistence that these are what make souls or personalities attractive. And that’s all right, since we’re just starting out. Maybe the point of a dialogue like this isn’t to convince all readers, but to plant a seed of sorts that might germinate later.
Plato has this ladder terminate in an apex of something entirely beautiful in its nature. This is not something beautiful because of something else, but rather beauty itself, the very form of beauty in which all beautiful things participate He calls this unchanging, eternal, always beautiful It is “itself by itself through itself”, and says that anyone fortunate enough to glimpse this will prefer it to any other beauty they might encounter. Again, not something they can easily relate to. I note that for Plato this beauty is something impersonal, but that in later authors, particularly some early Christian thinkers, this ideal form of beauty takes on a different status, as a God that is personal, who one can ascend to through levels of beauty.
When I say that, I see some of them nodding along and others looking a bit perplexed. Marquette is a Catholic school, which frankly doesn’t mean all that much wheh it comes to how it operates, but many of the students are what we might call “culturally Catholic” (or they belong to other Christian churches). And that often means that their previous religious instruction hasn’t been particularly good in a number of respects. So getting introduced, even briefly, to a conception of the God their family, religious leaders, and instructors have not really told them about, one that has interesting parallels to a notion from a pre-Christian pagan philosopher’s work about love, can get those mental gears turning in their heads.
Finishing Up: Alcibiades’ Speech
After the high point of the dialogue, a sort of denouement follows, with a drunken Alcibiades showing up with a bunch of equally drunk companions. When he spots Socrates, we get the setup for an interesting reversal. Alcibiades won’t give a speech praising love, but rather the one he loves, who he thinks ought to be his lover, Socrates. The first portion of his speech stresses the difference between Socrates’ ugly appearance and the beauty of what lies within him. That’s interesting, as is the remark Alcibiades makes, revealing that Socrates is the only person who can make him feel ashamed, that he values the wrong things in his life, where those things come easy to him.
The part of his speech that we spend the most time on in the class is what might very well be the first “friend-zoning” in Western literature. All of my students are familiar with that term, and doubtless some of them have experiences of it from one side or another. Socrates’ case is rather extraordinary, since Alcibiades would seem to almost any other older potential lover to be quite a catch. He’s attractive and charismatic, from a well-known and well-off family, seemingly endowed with solid mental gifts. He is also prone to pursuing pleasures and honors, which would not only make him a “good-time-guy”, but also one would think would allow a would be lover to get seductive hooks in him.
Alcibiades intends to arouse Socrates interest, as a lover who will share his wisdom and virtue with his younger beloved, who will offer himself sexually in a kind of exchange. He tries four times to engineer that situation, with more and more elaborate schemes, eventually having Socrates sleep over, crawling naked under the covers with him, and attempting a full-on seduction, which fails. Socrates turns him down each time, not giving him a categorical refusal either, but suggesting that they take up the question later on. They’ll remain friends.
That doesn’t satisfy Alcibiades, of course, and we are presented with a amusing picture. The golden boy of Athens, in his early prime, becomes the lover, madly pursuing an older, physically unattractive beloved. How could this wind up as the case? My students were divided on that. Some of them accept the idea that Alcibiades is motivated by what he has glimpsed of Socrates’ inner beauty, his virtue, his constancy, his good-will, his wisdom. Some suggest though that it is the dynamic of wanting all the more what we can’t have, that Socrates becomes even more attractive by turning Alcibiades down, or at least putting him off.
I ended the last of three class sessions on Plato’s Symposium by suggesting to my students that they mull over what we can learn about love that resonates with our own present-day lives and relationships (or desires and wishes for them). Perhaps we’ll see what they say about that in future classes.
Gregory Sadler is the president of ReasonIO, a speaker, writer, and producer of popular YouTube videos on philosophy. He is co-host of the radio show Wisdom for Life, and producer of the Sadler’s Lectures podcast. You can request short personalized videos at his Cameo page. If you’d like to take online classes with him, check out the Study With Sadler Academy.