Cratylus

Cratylus may at first sound a little archaic to our ears because it asks a question that seems to border on a magical view of the power of names -- are things 'correctly' named?  Even to wonder whether there could be some intrinsic connection between a 'true' name and the essence of the thing it describes offends our modern certainty in the arbitrariness of linguistic signs.  Combine this off-putting question with the fabricated ancient Greek etymology that occupies two thirds of the dialog, and you have the recipe for one of Plato's most boring works.  So I won't be spending a ton of time on this one.  Still, there are a few interesting points we should cover.

The first third of the dialog stakes out the sides.  Hermogenes claims that names are just the result of arbitrary convention, so it makes no sense to call a name better or worse based on some putative correspondence between it and the thing itself.  Cratylus, by contrast, claims that only one name belongs to each thing by its nature.  In other words, he thinks there must be a one-to-one correspondence between names and things.  Socrates questions both of these ideas and ends up somewhere in the middle.  He spends the first third of the dialog questioning Hermogenes until he establishes that there must be at least a way of naming that correctly follows the contours of nature.  The middle two thirds are devoted to a long etymological analysis showing how the names of Greek gods and heroes, as well as the names for common concepts like justice and wisdom, might be correct.  I say "might be" because Socrates continually mentions how unsure he is of his own analysis.  He seems to be giving just one example of the type of analysis that he and Hermogenes agreed must exist.  In the final third, Socrates comes back to question Cratylus, and convinces him that while there may be some concept of correctness, it goes too far to posit a one-to-one correspondence between each thing and its secret, almost magical, true name.

The conversation with Hermogenes actually starts out in an interesting way that made me briefly wonder if Plato was aiming at a structuralist theory of language avant la lettre.  Hermogenes claims that names are arbitrary, so no name can be better or worse than another; the idea of 'correctness' doesn't apply to names.  Socrates asks him if he believes that the same logic applies to "things that are".  We've seen this latter phrase appear as a noun once before in Phaedrus, and many times (ironically) in the mouths of Euthydemus and Dionysodorus.  It's scattered all throughout Cratylus however, and seems to make a number of appearances in the Sophist, Statesman, and Philebus, so we should be attuned to the birth of a new concept.  In Phaedrus it explicitly referenced the Forms that souls saw as they progressed through heaven.  Here, though it's not explained, it seems to have broadened into something like "things in themselves", each of which then may have a being or essence.  

Now, Hermogenes isn't sure whether "things that are", unlike names, have a fixed and non-arbitrary essence, but Socrates is pretty adamant.  He bases his conclusion on two observations.  First, morality exists.  If there are good men and bad men, wise men and foolish men, then good, bad, wise, and foolish must all refer to some public essence that isn't simply in the mind of the beholder or the momentary state of the men involved. (386d)  Giving up essences, Socrates claims would be tantamount to giving up morality.  Second, morality exists.  We can imagine a world where things have public and objective qualities, but where everything we meet is always a mix of all the qualities.  Socrates attributes this idea to Euthydemus with his simultaneous affirmation and refutation of every proposition.  But if everything is mixed, then again, we will have to give up our moral judgements about whether a man is either good or bad.  We always have to remember that the metaphysical theory of the forms is moral to its core.  

SOCRATES: But if neither is right, if it isn't the case that everything always has every attribute simultaneously or that each thing has a being or essence privately for each person, then it is clear that things have some fixed being or essence of their own. They are not in relation to us and are not made to fluctuate by how they appear to us. They are by themselves, in relation to their own being or essence, which is theirs by nature. (386e)

Once Socrates' establishes that "things that are" have some fixed and non-arbitrary essence, it's a short step to convincing Hermogenes that names can't be completely arbitrary either, but have to accord with the nature of the reality that they describe and interact with.  After all, any good tool has to itself be structured so as to interact with or grasp on to part of the structure of reality.

SOCRATES: So an action's performance accords with the action's own nature, and not with what we believe. Suppose, for example, that we undertake to cut something. If we make the cut in whatever way we choose and with whatever tool we choose, we will not succeed in cutting. But if in each case we choose to cut in accord with the nature of cutting and being cut and with the natural tool for cutting, we'll succeed and cut correctly. If we try to cut contrary to nature, however, we'll be in error and accomplish nothing. (387a)

At first this suggested to me something close to the theory of science I have maintained.  There's no single objective truth about reality that science could converge to.  Nevertheless, reality does have some objective structure.  Poke it this way or prod it that, and it will respond in characteristic ways.  That is, if you want to cut it into small, sharply divided pieces, you need to use a knife.  Of course, cutting it up is only one thing you might want to do with reality.  So when you stab reality and it really does bleed, your conclusion that "reality is a bunch of sacks filled with blood" isn't wrong, it's just laughably incomplete and partial.  Maybe instead of cutting it, you should have combined parts of reality, or squeezed them, or rolled them down a hill, or whatever.  Each of these actions would reveal something else about reality that might or might not accord with how it reacted when you cut it.  If there is something that corresponds to Objective Reality™ it is just the sum of these various aspects revealed by our various actions that are relevant to our various purposes.  

For a while, Socrates continues his tool analogy in a way that seemed to fit with this interpretation.  If names are tools, then they must have been created by some craftsman (the rule-setter) for some purpose: "a name is a tool for giving instruction, that is to say, for dividing being." (388c)  This seemed to make the 'correctness' of names Socrates had been arguing for a lot less magical and a lot more human and pragmatic.  In fact, he goes even further and points out that individual tools are really just instances of some general form of a tool.  And what constitutes the correct form of a tool is its usefulness in achieving a particular goal.  

SOCRATES: So mustn't a rule-setter also know how to embody in sounds and syllables the name naturally suited to each thing? And if he is to be an authentic giver of names, mustn't he, in making and giving each name, look to what a name itself is? And if different rule-setters do not make each name out of the same syllables, we mustn't forget that different blacksmiths, who are making the same tool for the same type of work, don't all make it out of the same iron. But as long as they give it the same form—even if that form is embodied in different iron—the tool will be correct, whether it is made in Greece or abroad. Isn't that so? HERMOGENES: Certainly.
SOCRATES: Don't you evaluate Greek and foreign rule-setters in the same way? Provided they give each thing the form of name suited to it, no matter what syllables it is embodied in, they are equally good rule-setters, whether they are in Greece or abroad.
HERMOGENES: Certainly.
SOCRATES: Now, who is likely to know whether the appropriate form of shuttle is present in any given bit of wood? A carpenter who makes it or a weaver who uses it?
HERMOGENES: In all likelihood, Socrates, it is the one who uses it. (389d)

Initially I construed this a sort of structuralist account of tools.  The pieces of the tool may be constructed of different materials, but as long as they come together in the same form or structure, that internally structured tool can then interact in a particular way with some aspect of the structure of reality.  It's not quite "tools are systems of differences", but it seems to move in that direction.

This is probably not how Plato intended it though, as the development of the dialog makes clear.  Socrates goes on to say that it is the dialectician -- the one who asks and answers questions as a means of dividing being -- who judges the usefulness of names.  At this point the analogy to my interpretation of science begins to break down.  Naming is not just one tool among many by which we approach reality, but a tool for "dividing being".  And since we know that "things that are" have fixed essences, namely the Forms which gather them together and split them apart dialectically, then we can no longer see names as merely pragmatically structured tools that latch onto one aspect of reality, but are forced to interpret them as signs that represent the structure of some underlying reality.  Language is a special tool that represents all the divisions of being. 

After he reaches this conclusion about the nature of naming, Socrates moves into the etymological analysis that consumes most of the dialog, and provides examples of how things should be named.   These make it even more clear that he conceives of the relationship between name and thing as one of representational identity.  Socrates begins by giving plausible stories about why the gods have the names they do by relating the sound of their names to similar sounding words that describe some important aspect of them.  For example, Tantalus is so called because he has a stone suspended (talanteia) above his head in Hades, and Ares reminds us of virility (arren) and courage (andreia).  He continues by extending this playful etymology to the names of heroes, and then even to words like justice and knowledge and understanding.  Along the way, we see a pattern developing, where Socrates associates every positive term with words that suggest unimpeded flow, and every negative term, like, say, 'ugly', with something that restrains or hinders a flow.  This allows him to sketch a whole hierarchy of names that are based on primitive or atomic names that relate to stopping and going -- 'ion' ('going'), 'rheon' ('flowing'), and 'doun' ('shackling') (421c).  These elementary names are then analyzed not in terms of other names, but in terms of the letters that compose them.  In particular, the idea is that these names are derived from the motions of the mouth and tongue mimicking the things they stand for.  'R' is the letter used for things in motion because of its rolling characteristic.  'I' is used for small things that penetrate others.  'Phi', 'S' and 'Z' are used for violent shaking or quaking movements because of the associated expulsion of breath.  And so on.  Socrates makes an explicit analogy between painting a representative picture by combining certain colors and finding a representative word by combining the characteristics of certain letters.  At this point, any analogy to structuralism is completely lost.  Letters are not differential signifiers which are in themselves empty, but little atoms of meaning that resemble things in the world.

In the final section of the dialog Socrates returns to finish the other side of the conversation.  He began by convincing Hermogenes that names aren't completely arbitrary and meaningful only by convention.  He ends by convincing Cratylus that, on the other hand, there is also not a single true name for each thing.  Cratylus' position is in fact so extreme that he at first doesn't even allow for the possibility of a name being assigned incorrectly.  Since he believes everything has a single true and essential name that functions almost like a magical incantation, if we were to spell it wrong we would actually end up naming a different thing.

CRATYLUS: That's right. But you see, Socrates, when we assign 'a', 'b', and each of the other letters to names by using the craft of grammar, if we add, subtract, or transpose a letter, we don't simply write the name incorrectly, we don't write it at all, for it immediately becomes a different name, if any of those things happens. (432a)

Cratylus demands a one-to-one correspondence between each and every thing and its single possible name.  This apotheosis of representation would quickly result in a language just as complex as the world, a map as large as the territory, which would be useless for classifying or manipulating it.  We can see now why Socrates didn't push his etymology too far and instead left some playful wiggle room in his names.  Names have to be a lossy compression of the world to be useful.  They have to be an image of the world, not a perfect double of it. 

But this isn't the sort of correctness that belongs to things with sensory qualities, such as images in general. Indeed, the opposite is true of them— an image cannot remain an image if it presents all the details of what it represents. See if I'm right. Would there be two things—Cratylus and an image of Cratylus—in the following circumstances? Suppose some god didn't just represent your color and shape the way painters do, but made all the inner parts like yours, with the same warmth and softness, and put motion, soul, and wisdom like yours into them—in a word, suppose he made a duplicate of everything you have and put it beside you. Would there then be two Cratyluses or Cratylus and an image of Cratylus? (432b)

Socrates goes on to argue that names only have to reproduce the pattern of the thing they name.  This pattern could of course be rendered in various languages, or with various combinations of letters within a single language.  However, since this pattern is a sort of essence that the name attempts to represent, some varieties will capture that essence better or more accurately than others.  So while there's not one true name for everything, we can still say that some names are better or more appropriate than others because their pattern is more like the essence to be represented.  In other words, Socrates would have us steer a course directly between Cratylus and Hermogenes.  

After he's finally come full circle and outlined his middle road theory of names, Socrates concludes by telling us how none of this naming stuff is terribly important.  Names are simply never going to be a completely reliable guide to learning about the things in themselves.  The reader may feel somewhat let down to discover that the whole conversation was in vain, but on some level this turns out to be the whole point of the dialog -- we cannot learn about things just by studying their names.  Names, after all, are just images, likenesses, a way of painting with sounds.  If we want to know, we need to investigate the things themselves.

SOCRATES: So if it's really the case that one can learn about things through names and that one can also learn about them through themselves, which would be the better and clearer way to learn about them? Is it better to learn from the likeness both whether it itself is a good likeness and also the truth it is a likeness of? Or is it better to learn from the truth both the truth itself and also whether the likeness of it is properly made?
CRATYLUS: I think it is certainly better to learn from the truth.
SOCRATES: How to learn and make discoveries about the things that are is probably too large a topic for you or me. But we should be content to have agreed that it is far better to investigate them and learn about them through themselves than to do so through their names. (439a)

As a final illustration of this problem, Socrates recalls his own earlier theory of names which associated positive qualities like beauty and knowledge with names related to continuous motion, and negative qualities with blockages.  That theory sits quite poorly with the theory of unchanging Forms that he always argues for.    Socrates doesn't make an argument for the Forms here.  He points out that if we simply examined names alone, we would be led to believe that everything was flowing and passing away.  Since he claims it is at least possible that a fixed Beauty and Good exist, he concludes that in this particularly important case we also cannot use names alone to adjudicate the matter.  Now that you've climbed to the top of the word ladder, you can apparently throw it away.

Phaedrus

Phaedrus is definitely the most complex dialog I've read so far, and it's easy to imagine that it lies on the cusp between Plato's middle and late period.  We'll have to come back to this question after reading the later dialogs.  What makes Phaedrus so complicated is the way its various literary parts seem to fit together, but not in an obvious way.  

It begins with an unusual literary setting.  Socrates is walking alone with Phaedrus outside the city; the two stop to rest from the heat of the day under a tree, which is where the conversation takes place.  Since most of Plato's dialogs are group conversations, and all of them take place within city limits, it's a noteworthy set-up that allows for the question of how all kinds of nature spirits -- river nymphs, prophetic trees, mad cicadas -- relate to both the gods and the Forms.  

This isn't the only oddity of the dialog though.  The first half contains three separate speeches arguing both sides of an issue.  The question is whether a young boy should accept an older consort who is deliriously in love with him, or whether it wouldn't be better to choose a more level-headed mentor who doesn't love him, but might have more to offer.  The first of the speeches -- in praise of choosing the non-lover, the mere beneficial friend -- is composed by Phaedrus' friend Lysias.  Socrates invents a second to argue the same point.  However, he immediately goes on to disavow his own speech on the ground that it impiously demeans love.  He then supplies a third speech which takes the other side and praises the madness of the true lover.   In the course of his defense of love, he elaborates another version of the myth of metempsychosis to show how this madness is divinely inspired.  All this long speechmaking is pretty rare for Socrates, particularly since it comes in the beginning and middle of the dialog.  

Finally, the remaining half of the dialog is also unique because of the explicitly meta-level reflection it provides on the act of making speeches.  Socrates and Phaedrus go on to discuss, now in dialectical, question and answer fashion, what makes for a good or bad speech.  This section recapitulates and extends the arguments we saw already in Gorgias.  Now though, we see the evaluation of rhetoric applied directly to Lysias' and Socrates' earlier speeches.  These are judged on how well they fulfill the ideal of rhetoric as an art that matches the correct type of speech to the correct type of soul.  The discussion culminates in a distinction between speaking and writing that we haven't seen in any other dialog so far.  Socrates is explicitly critical of writing.  It dulls our memory of real speech, it cannot respond to questions, and most importantly, it cannot be individually tailored to its audience.  In what seems like a moment of high Platonic irony, he dismisses all writing as mere amusement.  Seems we've been eating grass this whole time!

The dialog is full of interesting and beautiful passages, as well as some really puzzling moments.  I'll leave the summary at this high level though, because it seems to me more interesting to try and integrate the parts into an overall picture.  On some basic level, I think everything in Phaedrus revolves around the theme of possession, in the sense of being possessed or animated or inspired or driven mad by.  Interestingly, the question is not so much whether we want to be possessed or in our right minds, but what we want to be possessed by.  It's as if there's already a 'spirit world' that animates everything, and our choice lies only in what type of spirit to be animated by.   We can be possessed by the local gods of opinion, and by our desire for pleasure, or we can be possessed by the Forms and our philosophical love of Beauty.  In either case, there's a certain passivity in Plato.  We already came across this in the gender confusion, as it were, of the lover and loved in the Symposium.   Here though, the sexual imagery attached to the older lover is even more explicit.  But at the same time its origin in a divinely inspired mad love of Beauty is made clearer.  The dominant male lover turns out to be himself completely possessed.  This passivity runs throughout the theory of Forms and the idea of metempsychosis in a way that I didn't appreciate before.  It's not that people have souls and things have Forms -- Forms have things just as souls have people. 

The first hint we get for this theme of possession is in the literary setting itself.  Nature abounds with spirits in a way that the city does not.  References to these various spirits are scattered throughout the dialog.  Socrates and Phaedrus sit to talk near the spot where the North Wind, Boreas, abducted a girl (229c).  A river god and nymphs still seem to hover around the area (230c).  Phaedrus even notes that Socrates seems out of place in this natural setting.

PHAEDRUS: And you, my remarkable friend, appear to be totally out of place. Really, just as you say, you seem to need a guide, not to be one of the locals. Not only do you never travel abroad—as far as I can tell, you never even set foot beyond the city walls.
SOCRATES: Forgive me, my friend. I am devoted to learning; landscapes and trees have nothing to teach me—only the people in the city can do that. (230d)

It is possessed by nymphs (241e), inspired by Muses (237a), "filled, like an empty jar, by the words of other people streaming in through [his] ears" (235d), and with a little help from Phaedrus and his tree-god (236e), that Socrates is forced to speak .  And indeed, so strangely animated, he covers his head in shame and gives his strange and un-Socratic speech denigrating love.  He defines love as a desire for pleasure that overwhelms our judgement about what is best for us and for the lover.  Love is a form of madness that wants to turn the lover into a mere tool for gratification.   Just as Lysias argued, Socrates claims the loved would be wise to have nothing to do with the lover, since the lover only aims to keep the boy a slave to his appetites.  

But these animistic spirits and voices of other poets aren't the only spirits out there.  Immediately after he finishes speaking, Socrates' own daimon warns him not to leave before offering an apology (a Palinode) to the god of Love he slandered with his first speech.  Inspired by another spirits, he produces a completely different speech.  He begins by explaining how what we call madness, or the 'manic', is really a form of possession by the gods.  He then defines love as a particular type of divinely inspired madness.  From there, he goes on to give a new version of the myth of metempsychosis that explains how the philosopher, triggered by Beauty, is driven mad for the love of a Wisdom that his soul glimpsed before he was born.  Since this is the main speech of the dialog, we should spend a little more time on it, even though it tells a story of love substantially similar to the one in the Symposium.

First, Socrates argues that, because the soul is self-moving, it always remains in motion, and is hence immortal.  In fact, ceaseless movement is the very definition of what make something a soul.  This obviously fits well with Abram's link between the spirit and the constant movement of air as we breathe.  As we've already seen, everything in this natural setting is literally animated by the 'inspiration' of this constant circulation.  Socrates is going to give us a story of what distinguishes the human soul in this all encompassing spiritual world.  

All souls are like a chariot driver who steers a chariot pulled by a tame good horse and a wild bad one.  When a soul has wings it can fly up into the realm of the gods, but when it loses its wings it falls down and gets stuck in a mortal body.  Experiencing beauty and goodness and justice while in mortal form make the wings grow but confronting ugliness makes them shrink.  The benefit of having well developed wings is that a soul can fly higher into the realm of the gods and participate in their ritual procession around the rim of heaven.  The gods have only good horses, so they easily drive their chariots up the steep hill to the rim of heaven and look out beyond it into the realm of Forms.  So the Forms are in a sense even beyond the gods and other spirits.  Now, if we tame our bad horse, our wings will be strong enough to carry us to the rim as well, but most souls don't manage this, so they never see the reality of the forms, and are stuck with only their own opinions.  The stronger the soul's wings, the more of reality it sees in its flight through heaven.  This results in a higher 'level' when it returns to take human form -- Socrates tells us of 9 levels of human soul, ranging from philosophers (at the top, obviously) to tyrants.  All souls that return in human form have seen at least some of the reality of the Forms.  Our ability to speak implies a certain familiarity with general forms that distinguishes our souls from those that return as animals.

But a soul that never saw the truth cannot take a human shape, since a human being must understand speech in terms of general forms, proceeding to bring many perceptions together into a reasoned unity.  That process is the recollection of the things our soul saw when it was traveling with god, when it disregarded the things we now call real and lifted up its head to what is truly real instead.  (249c).  

All souls circulate through this system, being reborn many times in different bodies.  The goal is to be born at the highest level and thereby have a chance to snatch the best view of the reality of the Forms after death.  Clearly there's a feedback loop at work here, but there's also some amount of choice involved in the process, even if you have the luck of being reborn as a human.

The question is how we can tame our bad horse, live a better life, and give our soul wings.  Naturally, this is exactly the goal of philosophy, whose reward isn't so much peace in the afterlife, as another life just like this one.  Through discussion, we try to remember the unity of the Forms we glimpsed by seeing them reflected or embodied in the diversity of appearances around us.  The key to this process turns out to be the Form of Beauty, which draws us into discussion with young boys.  As we saw in the Symposium, Beauty is first among forms, the trigger that leads us to a love of wisdom, because it is the easiest Form to see shining out from within the objects of our appearance.  The older lover is possessed by this vision of Beauty; the loved boy reminds him of the Form he saw in his last circuit through heaven.   Plato's imagery here is explicitly erotic.  Seeing Beauty makes the soul sprout wings in exactly the way that seeing a beautiful boy gives an old man a hard on (251b).    The lovers' bad horse just wants to pork the boy, but with time, the chariot driver can learn to hold his horses and reach a chaste love of Beauty itself.  So, paradoxically, the lover is controlling himself only in order to be more fully mad, more fully possessed by love of Beauty itself, which he sees shining through the loved.  The philosopher's mortification of the bad horse, the way he denies himself the sexual pleasure of the boy, is not an end in itself, but a means to getting off at a higher level.   Again, it's not a question of whether to be possessed, but what to be possessed by -- pleasure or Beauty

The story of the soul's ascent to the realm of Forms ends by coming full circle.  Eventually, the boy begins to see how much good this mad lover can do his soul and also falls in love.  If both sides of the couple tame their bad horses of sensual pleasure, they can learn to love each other philosophically, Platonically, each seeing the Form of Beauty reflected in the image of the other, and both souls can grow wings.  So again, we see that both the lover and loved become conduits of a sort that complete a cycle.  The soul of the lover gains its wings only by planting the seeds of wisdom in the loved, and the loved only begins his groping ascent towards the Forms under the inspiration of his lover.  The machinery of metempsychosis seems to always be coupled to the machinery of love, and both require a pair -- life/death and loved/lover -- to operate.  This conjoined active/passive pair reappears over and over again in Plato, and results in a sort of gender euphoria, if you will.

After the end of Socrates' second speech, the dialog shifts tone completely.  With the myth he usually reserves for the finale out of the way unusually early, Plato moves into the classic question and answer format where Socrates begins drawing distinctions.  It's pretty easy to see the theme of possession running through both the form and content everything I've covered so far.  All three speeches assume love as a form of madness.  And all of the speakers are possessed in various ways.  Socrates by nymphs and voices in one case, and by Love and his daimon in the other.  Even Lysias' speech possesses Phaedrus, transporting him into ecstasy (234d), and Lysias himself was probably possessed by the love of the boy he wrote the speech for, despite his cunning claim to the contrary (237b).

The idea of possession is less immediately apparent in the second, dialectical, half of the dialog, which appears to be all about the art of rhetoric.  Socrates tries to define rhetoric, and then apply this definition to the speeches we've seen, and even self-referentially to the writing of the dialog itself.  It's not immediately obvious how this relates to the idea of madness.  Lurking under the surface of this discussion, however, is the question of what possessed you to speak in the first place.  As I said earlier, in Phaedrus, it's not a question of whether you are possessed by spirits or not, it's only a question of which spirits.  Just as Socrates' competing speeches on love were inspired by two different types of spirits, speech in general can be inspired by distinct spirits and will be constructed in different ways as a result.

As if to emphasize the point of contact, Plato inserts a curios literary device at just this point of transition from rhetoric to dialectic. The cicadas.  With the speeches over, Socrates and Phaedrus debate whether to discuss what makes for good and bad writing in general.  

SOCRATES: ... It seems we clearly have the time. Besides, I think that the cicadas, who are singing and carrying on conversations with one another in the heat of the day above our heads, are also watching us. And if they saw the two of us avoiding conversation at midday like most people, diverted by their song and, sluggish of mind, nodding off, they would have every right to laugh at us, convinced that a pair of slaves had come to their resting place to sleep like sheep gathering around the spring in the afternoon. But if they see us in conversation, steadfastly navigating around them as if they were the Sirens, they will be very pleased and immediately give us the gift from the gods they are able to give to mortals.
PHAEDRUS: What is this gift? I don't think I have heard of it.
SOCRATES: Everyone who loves the Muses should have heard of this. The story goes that the cicadas used to be human beings who lived before the birth of the Muses. When the Muses were born and song was created for the first time, some of the people of that time were so overwhelmed with the pleasure of singing that they forgot to eat or drink; so they died without even realizing it. It is from them that the race of the cicadas came into being; and, as a gift from the Muses, they have no need of nourishment once they are born. Instead, they immediately burst into song, without food or drink, until it is time for them to die. After they die, they go to the Muses and tell each one of them which mortals have honored her. To Terpsichore they report those who have honored her by their devotion to the dance and thus make them dearer to her. To Erato, they report those who honored her by dedicating themselves to the affairs of love, and so too with the other Muses, according to the activity that honors each. And to Calliope, the oldest among them, and Urania, the next after her, who preside over the heavens and all discourse, human and divine, and sing with the sweetest voice, they report those who honor their special kind of music by leading a philosophical life. (259a)

Even the cicadas are possessed in this dialog.  And they try to possess us in turn, like Sirens, dulling our mind and steering it towards their sleepy music.  It's only by ignoring these lower level nature spirits, focusing on the discussions that constitute a philosophical life, that we can please the gods and rise towards the Forms.  In other words, we should avoid being possessed by these local spirits of the place in favor of being inspired by greater, more abstract spirits.

This question of what inspires a speech and defines its goal sets the stage for the discussion of speaking and writing that follows.  Do you need to know the truth to speak artfully, or it is enough to merely worry about what convinces the crowd?  Socrates presents arguments very similar to those in Gorgias, where he distinguished a true art from a mere 'knack'.  Even if you wish to deceive folks, he claims, you have to understand how to confuse people with superficially similar things, so you have to know something about what can be seen as similar.  After all, if you don't know anything at all, how can you even predict what the crowd's reaction will be?  How could you then lead them to believe one thing versus another, whatever you wish, in fact?  This is the art of rhetoric, one we've already seen demonstrated by Socrates' conflicting speeches.  Lysias' speech fails to rise to even this level of deceptive artifice.  It doesn't start with a definition of love so it cannot coerce us into seeing love the way it wants us to.  Socrates also claims it has no logical order, and doesn't make an organic whole of its parts.  In short, the speech seems unaware of its audience and is just constructed from Lysias' stream of consciousness.

Even Socrates' first speech is better than this because at least it defines love and then proceeds to examine its consequences.  His second speech, however, is much better because it is more dialectical -- it gathers together various seemingly unrelated behaviors (prophecy, mysticism, poetry, and philosophy) as types of madness and distinguishes one from another, reaching a definition of love as a byproduct of this more complete overview.  This is the first time we've seen the dialectic mentioned in Plato, so it bears a moment of examination.  The purpose of the dialectic is two-fold.  It gathers together, and it splits apart.  Together these procedures create an organic unity of thought that carves nature at its joints. 

SOCRATES: The first consists in seeing together things that are scattered about everywhere and collecting them into one kind, so that by defining each thing we can make clear the subject of any instruction we wish to give. Just so with our discussion of love: Whether its definition was or was not correct, at least it allowed the speech to proceed clearly and consistently with itself.
PHAEDRUS: And what is the other thing you are talking about, Socrates?
SOCRATES: This, in turn, is to be able to cut up each kind according to its species along its natural joints, and to try not to splinter any part, as a bad butcher might do. In just this way, our two speeches placed all mental derangements into one common kind. Then, just as each single body has parts that naturally come in pairs of the same name (one of them being called the right-hand and the other the left-hand one), so the speeches, having considered unsoundness of mind to be by nature one single kind within us, proceeded to cut it up—the first speech cut its left-hand part, and continued to cut until it discovered among these parts a sort of love that can be called "left-handed," which it correctly denounced; the second speech, in turn, led us to the right-hand part of madness; discovered a love that shares its name with the other but is actually divine; set it out before us, and praised it as the cause of our greatest goods. (265d)

A rhetorical speech like Lysias gave might have some idea how to produces effects in the audience, but not when to apply those effects to create a coherent whole.  Socrates likens this to knowing the preliminaries of an art -- like how to make a musical harmony, or sketch a figure --  but not knowing the art itself, which results from composing with these preliminaries.  A true art of speaking would proceed dialectically.  And not just at the level of defining its subject matter but also at the level of its overall effect on the audience.  Socrates says that if there is an art to speaking it lies in understanding the different types of souls, the different types of speeches, and what type of speech should be used to use to move which type of soul.  In short, to speak, we need to have an organic view not only of the subject matter and the form of expression, but also of the audience of the speech.  We have to know who they are and what animates them.  Later, Socrates will examine another drawn from Tisias' book on rhetoric.  Tisias claims you don't need to know whether someone is really innocent or guilty to argue for them in court.  You just need to know what the jury is likely to believe.  So, for example, if you have a scrawny little guy accused of beating up a big strong guy, the path of your argument is clear.  Most of the jury will likely be of the opinion that this is an unlikely turn of events (273c).  Meanwhile, the big guy is unlikely to want to admit his cowardice.  Socrates points out that even Tysias, who claims to have no interest in what's true, has to go through a pretty exhaustive analysis of what an audience is truly likely to believe in his example.  In a sense then, he has to know what's similar to the truth, similar enough to convince the audience.

No one will ever possess the art of speaking, to the extent that any human being can, unless he acquires the ability to enumerate the sorts of characters to be found in any audience, to divide everything according to its kinds, and to grasp each single thing firmly by means of one form. And no one can acquire these abilities without great effort—a laborious effort a sensible man will make not in order to speak and act among human beings, but so as to be able to speak and act in a way that pleases the gods as much as possible. (273e)

For Socrates, any artful and convincing speech will have to proceed dialectically, at least at the level of analyzing the composition of its audience.  But since the goal is knowing how the audience is likely to react to certain ideas, you have to also have some image of how those ideas fit together, if not in the truth, at least in their reflection in the audience.  I think this is basically to say that this type of rhetorical speech is in some sense possessed by the local gods of opinion.  It is animated, or inspired, by a distorted image of truth reflected in the audience.  This is what breathes life into the speech and makes it work.  Isn't this just like being inspired by all those natural spirits floating around us?  The trees and rivers and cicadas with all their particular stories and customs?  In Gorgias, Socrates likened rhetoric to the blind leading the blind.  Here, it is closer to the idea of the Keynesian beauty contest -- each chimp tries to pick what they think the other chimps will pick.  The speech ends up doubly possessed by opinions and by the desire to convince, to move those opinions and win the contest.  It may use some of the methods of the dialectic, but without properly grounding the argument in a truth beyond opinion.  The result is a sort of hall of mirrors effect where the speaker is possessed by the crowd he purports to control.

By contrast, our speech could instead be possessed by love of the Forms.  These aren't local and relative, but absolute.  They aren't animistic and natural, but supernatural, beyond even the spirits of the gods themselves.  A speech like this is dialectical from top to bottom.  It still requires an analysis of its audience, but it also requires understanding the dialectic of the Forms themselves.  These are dialectical in themselves, joining together beautiful things in Beauty, but also splitting them apart into a hierarchy ascending from physical to spiritual beauty and from there to Beauty in itself.  A philosopher speaks like this, inspired by the divine madness of love of wisdom and the beauty that enables him to ascend towards it, just as Socrates was in his second speech.  In fact, isn't this simultaneous drawing together and splitting apart what Socrates claimed distinguished human souls and enable them to use language to begin with? (249c) 

It seems to me this contrast between two types of possession lies under everything in Phaedrus.  We might call it the madness of images versus the madness of  reality.  Plato give it one final twist at the end of the dialog with his discussion of the difference between speaking and writing.  Up to now, the text has vascillated back and forth on the question of whether "speaking well" includes both oral and written speech.  In some cases both are mentioned, in others just one.  A potential difference between the two is first explicitly opened up by a puzzling comment Socrates makes after his general explanation of how the dialectic applies to rhetoric.  

SOCRATES: It's very difficult to speak the actual words, but as to how one should write in order to be as artful as possible—that I am willing to tell you.
PHAEDRUS: Please do.
SOCRATES: Since the nature of speech is in fact to direct the soul, whoever intends to be a rhetorician must know how many kinds of soul there are. Their number is so-and-so many; each is of such-and-such a sort; hence some people have such-and-such a character and others have such-and- such. Those distinctions established, there are, in turn, so-and-so many kinds of speech, each of such-and-such a sort. People of such-and-such a character are easy to persuade by speeches of such-and-such a sort in connection with such-and-such an issue for this particular reason, while people of such-and-such another sort are difficult to persuade for those particular reasons.
The orator must learn all this well, then put his theory into practice and develop the ability to discern each kind clearly as it occurs in the actions of real life. Otherwise he won't be any better off than he was when he was still listening to those discussions in school. He will now not only be able to say what kind of person is convinced by what kind of speech; on meeting someone he will be able to discern what he is like and make clear to himself that the person actually standing in front of him is of just this particular sort of character he had learned about in school—to that he must now apply speeches of such-and-such a kind in this particular way in order to secure conviction about such-and-such an issue. (271d) 

Socrates can explain how to write artfully, but claims he doesn't "know how to speak the words".  But then he goes on to describe exactly how artful writing has to know its audience dialectically -- breaking down and matching up the souls to be moved and the speeches that move them -- and then says that the orator needs to put this same knowledge into practice.  Hasn't he just described both writing and speaking?  Hasn't he also gone some way towards explaining the collage of genres like poetry, myth and argument that we see in Plato's own writing, and particularly in Phaedrus?  Each of these different types of speech would be aimed at different types of souls.  

I'm not sure what to make of this odd line, but the question of writing versus speech recurs just a few pages later.  Socrates relates a story of how Teuth invented writing in Egypt.  Teuth thought that it was a wonderful way of improving our memory.  His king, Ammon, thought just the opposite; writing, he thought, would help remind us of things, but would actually weaken our memory as we came to rely instead on the written symbols.  Socrates thinks that the same logic applies to philosophical writing.  People will be reminded by the words only if they remember the ideas.  

SOCRATES: Well, then, those who think they can leave written instructions for an art, as well as those who accept them, thinking that writing can yield results that are clear or certain, must be quite naive and truly ignorant of Ammon's prophetic judgment: otherwise, how could they possibly think that words that have been written down can do more than remind those who already know what the writing is about? (275d)

He goes on to point out that, since it can fall into anyone's hands, writing cannot really know its audience, nor can it defend itself and explain further.  Which means it doesn't fulfill the criteria laid out earlier for speaking well.  It is not living breathing discourse, but an image of it, a mere amusement.  Living speech instead employs the dialectic to choose a suitable soul in which to plant the seed of knowledge.

The dialectician chooses a proper soul and plants and sows within it discourse accompanied by knowledge—discourse capable of helping itself as well as the man who planted it, which is not barren but produces a seed from which more discourse grows in the character of others. Such discourse makes the seed forever immortal and renders the man who has it as happy as any human being can be. (277a)

So the dialectician uses speech in a way that reproduces the Form he remembers in another.  This is clearly just like the story Socrates told here and in the Symposium of the path of love.  Writing is really just a beautiful bauble that triggers our memory of the Forms; it's not meant to be taken seriously. 

SOCRATES: .... When he writes, it's likely he will sow gardens of letters for the sake of amusing himself, storing up reminders for himself "when he reaches forgetful old age" and for everyone who wants to follow in his footsteps, and will enjoy seeing them sweetly blooming. And when others turn to different amusements, watering themselves with drinking parties and everything else that goes along with them, he will rather spend his time amusing himself with the things I have just described. (276c)

Ultimately, to become a philosopher, we have to be possessed by the ideas behind the writing, rising above the seductively beautiful words on the page the way the lover, triggered by the beauty of the loved, becomes possessed by wisdom.  We don't want to just be possessed by the voice of the author, to literally breathe his words into existence as we read.  The written word only provides an image of knowledge.  Like the cicadas, it lulls us to sleep because it sings only one note forever.  Instead, we want to be possessed by the same Forms that possessed the author to begin with.  We only breathe life into these ideas if his words spawn more words from us, more living conversations amongst us.  This is precisely how the lover, pregnant with a wisdom that possesses him but he can never possess, gives birth 'in beauty' -- playfully, flirtatiously, but also chastely, inspired by the love of the Forms, not the pleasures of sex that might attend these conversations.

SOCRATES: On the other hand, take a man who thinks that a written discourse on any subject can only be a great amusement, that no discourse worth serious attention has ever been written in verse or prose, and that those that are recited in public without questioning and explanation, in the manner of the rhapsodes, are given only in order to produce conviction. He believes that at their very best these can only serve as reminders to those who already know. And he also thinks that only what is said for the sake of understanding and learning, what is truly written in the soul concerning what is just, noble, and good can be clear, perfect, and worth serious attention: Such discourses should be called his own legitimate children, first the discourse he may have discovered already within himself and then its sons and brothers who may have grown naturally in other souls insofar as these are worthy; to the rest, he turns his back. Such a man, Phaedrus, would be just what you and I both would pray to become. (278a)

SOCRATES: To call him wise, Phaedrus, seems to me too much, and proper only for a god. To call him wisdom's lover—a philosopher—or something similar would fit him better and be more seemly. (278d)

Since only the gods can possess wisdom, the question is instead what we want to be possessed by.  By the gods and Wisdom itself?  Or by the image of these we see in the world around us -- by the spirits of animals, of human opinions, or of words. 

Symposium

After reading so many other dialogs, one of the first things that strikes me about Symposium is how atypical it is.  Every year a new flock of freshmen is fed Plato's classic as a cornerstone of "western civilization" (whatever that is).  And deservedly so.  Symposium is a great piece of literature.  It's funny, touching, and mixes the genres of philosophy, poetry, and drama in a seamless and mature way.  However, it's not much like any of the other dialogs we've read so far, not least because it contains almost no actual dialog, in the Socratic sense of questions and answers.  Instead, we find 7 separate speeches in praise of the god Love given at a drunken dinner party.  If this were your first (and potentially only) direct impression of Plato, you would certainly walk away with a skewed view of his writing.

The first 5 speeches given at the party are relatively short, and feel somewhat gratuitous, or at least accessory to the main philosophical point made in Socrates' speech.  It isn't fair to consider them just filler, or a mere continuation of the literary scene setting that Plato so enjoys, but at the same time, they feel only tangentially related to what comes later.  We might try to extract some overall thrust to them by saying that the first 4 are all about what love can do for us, how a proper love can improve us.  In other words, they praise love for the way it can help us achieve a moral purpose.  In the fifth speech, Agathon points out that everyone has so far praised the effects of love, but no one spoken of love itself, so he elaborates all the wonderful qualities love itself must have if it has all these wonderful effects.  His speech serves as a hinge between the discussion of what love does and what love is, as well as a foil to Socrates' speech, which will pick up on the latter question while reversing its direction.  For the sake of completeness though, here's a little summary of each of the first 5 speeches.

Phaedrus -- Phaedrus claims that love is important because it teaches us about shame and pride.  There's nothing worse than doing something shameful in front of a lover, and no pride is more expansive than the one we feel when we've impressed our lover with a good deed.  Love is so praiseworthy then, because it brings out the best in us and guards against our worst tendencies.  This speech also introduces an asymmetry in love that runs throughout the whole dialog -- there is a difference between being the lover and being the loved.  Naturally, in the Greek philosophical context, this is the difference between a beautiful young boy, and a wise old man.  Phaedrus, as we'll see, sets up Alcibiades concluding speech right from the beginning by saying that the gods are especially surprised and impressed by a young boy (the loved) who truly reciprocates the feelings of an older man (the lover).  

Pausanias -- Pausanias elaborates on the connection between love and virtue, but distinguishes between two types of love.  Whereas Phaedrus gave us the impression that love was always a positive moral force, Pausanias claims that the value of an action depends entirely on how it is done.  Accordingly, he distinguishes between a common sensual love of the body and a heavenly true love of the soul.  This accounts for Athens peculiar social mores when it comes to homosexuality.  Unlike other Greeks, they believe that it is perfectly acceptable for an older man to fall in love with a beautiful young boy, so long as the lover is really in love with, and wants to improve, the soul of the young man, and not just enjoy his body.  Likewise, it's fine for a young boy to (slowly, after much pursuit) accept the passive role in the couple if he values the wisdom (and not simply the power or money) the older man can help him acquire.  An honorable love matches a wise old lover of the soul with a beautiful young beloved who craves the virtue and wisdom of his elder.  Either way then, a true and morally beneficial love is the love of virtue specifically, and, conversely, love's true value lies in focusing our eyes on virtue.   

Eryximachus -- So far, we've only heard praise for the effects of a conventional type of love between two humans.  Eryximachus elaborates on Pausanias' distinction between two types of love by pointing out that love is not just a human but a cosmic principle.    Healthy love produces an orderly harmony of opposites.  Common vulgar love produces disorder and disease.  This is true regardless of whether we are talking about the healthy order of a human body, a musical composition, a city, or a climate.  Just as in Pasuanias' example of human lover and beloved bound together in pursuit of virtue, true love more generally harmonizes poles that in some sense correspond to one another. 

Aristophanes -- Aristophanes speech is marked off as comic relief.  He tells a fanciful story of how humans were originally double-faced creatures that looked like two people glued together back to back.  Later, we were separated from our other half by Zeus as punishment for fucking things up.   Ever since, we've longed for reunification (and feared that Zeus might split us again).  Since the originals humans were composed of two men, two women, or the androgynous combination of a man and a woman, homosexuals, lesbians, and heterosexuals result from the split.  Any type of human love is the pursuit of our lost wholeness in life, and we fixate on our missing soulmate.

Agathon -- As I mentioned, Agathon marks a transition when he says he wants to speak about love itself and not just the effects of love.  He claims the god Love himself is young, delicate, supple, just, moderate, brave, and skilled (because anyone can learn a skill if love demands it).  Agathon infers all these qualities from love's effect on us, but the greatness of Love himself lies in his possessing these desirable traits.  This direct personification of Love opens the door to the only real moment of dialog in Symposium and sets off the irony of the final two speeches.   

Of the initial guests, only Socrates remains yet to give a speech.  Socrates, however, does not give speeches; he asks questions and let's you reach your own conclusions.  He begins by agreeing with Agathon that we should be speaking of love itself, and not merely its effects.  Then he begins to question Agathon in an oblique way that will completely undermine his characterization of love.  With just a few strokes, he establishes that we desire or love only what we do not have or are afraid of not having in the future.  Love is lack.

Socrates (Diotima) -- Having clarified Agathon's beliefs with these questions, Socrates goes on to give his own speech.  Of course, anytime Socrates gives a long speech, tells a story, or presents a myth, Plato is careful to put it in the mouth of a third person.  Socrates always tells us something he heard from someone else; the only time he speaks in his own voice is when he asks questions.  It's as if he's a perpetual ventriloquist of sorts.   In this case, he attributes his speech to Diotima, the woman who taught him the art of love back when he was as confused about it as Agathon.  As the questions already indicated, it will come as a surprising reversal of Agathon's speech.

Socrates begins by observing that if love desires beautiful things, it can't be beautiful itself, and cannot even be a god at all (since all gods are beautiful).  Since love is no ordinary mortal either, it must be between the mortal and the immortal, which Socrates calls the realm of 'spirits'.  This 'spirituality' also fits with the way love wants the beautiful, but does not possess it.  It lives in a state between wisdom and ignorance.  This is Plato's mature characterization of something we've already seen quite a lot of in the dialogs.  Socrates knows only that he knows nothing, and as we saw in Meno, this type of ignorance is actually the beginning of wisdom.  In a sense, it may also be the end of wisdom, because here we also see repeated Meno's unexpected appeal to "correct judgement" or "right opinion" as a guide to action that is explicitly not knowledge.  Socrates encapsulates all this in a story of Love's parentage; love is the child of resource (Poros) and poverty (Penia).  In short, Love is always striving after the beauty it lacks.  In terms of the initial asymmetry introduced by Phaedrus, love is being the lover not the loved, the old man, not the beautiful young boy. 

Of course, love strives after beauty for a reason.  What love really wants is not to possess beautiful things per se, but to be happy.  This ethical quest is the absolute bedrock of Plato.  I think it's impossible to overemphasize that when Plato talks about knowledge or even lays out some abstract metaphysical theory like the Forms, these are in service of achieving the good and flourishing life: eudaimonia (translated here as happiness).   The connection is obvious in the early dialogs, where the definition of whatever in particular is in question seems to inevitably lead us to ask what makes for a good and virtuous life in general.  But the same question animates the middle period dialogs we've seen so far like Meno and Phaedo.  The theory of learning as remembering in Meno is explicitly meant to help us figure out what virtue is and whether it can be taught.  And the belief in metempsychosis in Phaedo is designed to point us to how to live and die well, focused on the things that really matter for our deepest happiness.  Here again, love and beauty are in service of happiness.  

Socrates goes on to point out though, that the desire for good things and happiness is very general.  We could call any way of pursuing these things love, but we won't have said very much.  However, there's one special kind of love that wants to be happy by permanently possessing the good and never being separated from it.  Socrates is alluding, of course, to philosophy, that special love of wisdom and virtue.  How does this specific love go about achieving its aim?    In a curious turn of phrase, he says that it pursues this goal by giving birth "in" beauty -- that is, within or in the presence of a beautiful person.  Interestingly, this love does not give birth "to" beauty.  The translator's note on this preposition is helpful.

The preposition is ambiguous between "within" and "in the presence of." Diotima may mean that the lover causes the newborn (which may be an idea) to come to be within a beautiful person; or she may mean that he is stimulated to give birth to it in the presence of a beautiful person.

So the goal of love is not to produce beautiful things, but to be around them, and through this to be stimulated to give birth to something the lover is already pregnant with.  Diotima (speaking through Socrates) explains this to Socrates:

This is the source of the great excitement about beauty that comes to anyone who is pregnant and already teeming with life: beauty releases them from their great pain. You see, Socrates," she said, "what Love wants is not beauty, as you think it is." 
"Well, what is it, then?"
"Reproduction and birth in beauty."
"Maybe," I said.
"Certainly," she said. "Now, why reproduction? It's because reproduction goes on forever; it is what mortals have in place of immortality.  A lover must desire immortality along with the good, if what we agreed earlier was right, that Love wants to possess the good forever. It follows from our argument that Love must desire immortality."(206e) 

It's interesting that beauty is something we strive to not so much to possess as to be within.  When we are within beauty we come as close as we can to permanently possessing the good.   This takes the form of some sort of reproduction, which is as close as we can come to immortality, (naturally you have to be immortal to possess something forever).  Socrates at first speaks here of animals inspired to reproduce by beautiful mates, as if he were only referring to biological self-reproduction as a good in itself.  But remember, self-reproduction here is really a means to an end, the necessary condition, as it were, for most permanently possessing the good.  Socrates' examples of what is reproduced seem designed to underline that he's not especially interested in our simple biological self.

For among animals the principle is the same as with us, and mortal nature seeks so far as possible to live forever and be immortal. And this is possible in one way only: by reproduction, because it always leaves behind a new young one in place of the old. Even while each living thing is said to be alive and to be the same—as a person is said to be the same from childhood till he turns into an old man—even then he never consists of the same things, though he is called the same, but he is always being renewed and in other respects passing away, in his hair and flesh and bones and blood and his entire body. And it's not just in his body, but in his soul, too, for none of his manners, customs, opinions, desires, pleasures, pains, or fears ever remains the same, but some are coming to be in him while others are passing away. And what is still far stranger than that is that not only does one branch of knowledge come to be in us while another passes away and that we are never the same even in respect of our knowledge, but that each single piece of knowledge has the same fate. For what we call studying exists because knowledge is leaving us, because forgetting is the departure of knowledge, while studying puts back a fresh memory in place of what went away, thereby preserving a piece of knowledge, so that it seems to be the same. (207d)

The first case is less about self-reproduction that the re-production of a self.  And the second is clearly a restatement of the theory of learning as remembrance we found in Phaedo and Meno.  Socrates gives a third example to the same effect when he characterizes seeking fame and honor as ways of reproducing our virtues in future stories.  

The obvious question becomes what love desires to reproduce if it is not our self.  The equally obvious answer is wisdom.  We don't possess wisdom, but if we love it and are pregnant with it, and if we surround ourselves with beauty, this wisdom can reproduce itself through this partner.

Now, some people are pregnant in body, and for this reason turn more to women and pursue love in that way, providing themselves through childbirth with immortality and remembrance and happiness, as they think, for all time to come; while others are pregnant in soul—because there surely are those who are even more pregnant in their souls than in their bodies, and these are pregnant with what is fitting for a soul to bear and bring to birth.  And what is fitting? Wisdom and the rest of virtue, which all poets beget, as well as all the craftsmen who are said to be creative. But by far the greatest and most beautiful part of wisdom deals with the proper ordering of cities and households, and that is called moderation and justice. When someone has been pregnant with these in his soul from early youth, while he is still a virgin, and, having arrived at the proper age, desires to beget and give birth, he too will certainly go about seeking the beauty in which he would beget; for he will never beget in anything ugly. Since he is pregnant, then, he is much more drawn to bodies that are beautiful than to those that are ugly; and if he also has the luck to find a soul that is beautiful and noble and well-formed, he is even more drawn to this combination; such a man makes him instantly teem with ideas and arguments about virtue—the qualities a virtuous man should have and the customary activities in which he should engage; and so he tries to educate him. In my view, you see, when he makes contact with someone beautiful and keeps company with him, he conceives and gives birth to what he has been carrying inside him for ages. And whether they are together or apart, he remembers that beauty. (209a)

In short, old men are pregnant in soul with virtue and wisdom, and give birth to these in the presence of, and within, young boys.  This is a really interesting image of philosophy.  Notice how oddly passive it is.  Even the active/old/male partner in this couple does not possess or control virtue but is merely pregnant with it (something we already associate with the female pole of love).  And he can't even give birth to it or turn it into something useful without the help of the passive/young/female partner.  In a sense, both partners are just mechanisms or conduits for the reproduction (or perhaps it would be better to say transmission) of virtue itself.  The good uses their love as a vehicle for its own repeated incarnation, planting a seed in a youth which ripens in an old man who then plants this seed anew in a self-perpetuating cycle.

So love (the lover) lacks beauty but desires it as the catalyst for this cycle of the perpetual rebirth of wisdom and virtue.  But what exactly qualifies as beautiful?  Socrates is clearly referring to the young man's physical beauty in the customary homerotic relations that Phaedrus and Pausanius praised.  However, the final part of Diotima's speech makes it clear that the concept of beauty is significantly broader, more like the cosmic principle that Eryximachus discussed.  To give birth to true wisdom, and not mere images of it, we have to give birth within Beauty itself -- the Form of the beautiful -- not simply within the conventional beauty of boys.  Diotima describes Beauty a little and outline how we ascend towards Beauty in itself through a process of generalization.  

First, it always is and neither comes to be nor passes away, neither waxes nor wanes. Second, it is not beautiful this way and ugly that way, nor beautiful at one time and ugly at another, nor beautiful in relation to one thing and ugly in relation to another; nor is it beautiful here but ugly there, as it would be if it were beautiful for some people and ugly for others. Nor will the beautiful appear to him in the guise of a face or hands or anything else that belongs to the body. It will not appear to him as one idea or one kind of knowledge. It is not anywhere in another thing, as in an animal, or in earth, or in heaven, or in anything else, but itself by itself with itself, it is always one in form; and all the other beautiful things share in that, in such a way that when those others come to be or pass away, this does not become the least bit smaller or greater nor suffer any change. So when someone rises by these stages, through loving boys correctly, and begins to see this beauty, he has almost grasped his goal. This is what it is to go aright, or be led by another, into the mystery of Love: one goes always upwards for the sake of this Beauty, starting out from beautiful things and using them like rising stairs: from one body to two and from two to all beautiful bodies, then from beautiful bodies to beautiful customs, and from customs to learning beautiful things, and from these lessons he arrives in the end at this lesson, which is learning of this very Beauty, so that in the end he comes to know just what it is to be beautiful. (211a)

Of course it's not immediately obvious what it means to give birth "within Beauty itself".  Is this "in the most beautiful way"?  Is there a coherent reading where we construe "within" as "inside", and not "in the presence of" Beauty?   We already know Socrates is so pregnant with wisdom that he wants to plant this seed within nearly any handsome youth.  Can you reproduce wisdom, or propagate it, as it were, "within" customs and knowledges as well as within people?  Or is this meant to suggest that we have to be in the presence of the beautiful milieu of Attic customs and scientific knowledge to give birth to wisdom?   While it's not clear how to read this, we at least know the goal.  Love helps us ascend to Beauty, which enables us to give birth to true wisdom.  This is like making the soul of wisdom pass from one body to another; there is a sort of metempsychosis of Forms.  The lover of wisdom needs the help of beauty to reproduce wisdom, which is as close as he can come to possessing it.  The ultimate goal is the most permanent contact with wisdom and virtue and the good, but Beauty is first among Forms.  Without love drawing us into ever higher levels of beauty, we could never reach the other Forms.  

Alcibiades -- Just after Socrates finishes speaking, a very handsome, young, drunk Alcibiades crashes the party.  After he gets the lampshade off his head, he's horrified to discover himself seated right next to Socrates, who he claims is always jealously chasing after him.  In fact, he claims that Socrates' attentions are so overbearing that he can't contribute a speech in praise of love for fear that Socrates would fly into a jealous rage. Instead, the crowd encourages him to simply go ahead and praise Socrates instead!  So Alcibiades launches into a brilliantly ironic 'praise' of Socrates that starts as pure slander and ends by making it clear that he actually gave a speech in praise of love anyhow -- Socrates is Love personified.

Alcibiades begins by comparing Socrates to the satyrs Silenus and Marsyas.  Marsyas enchanted people with his flute music  Silenus was the perpetually drunk and legendarily ugly companion to Diosnysus.  Apparently, Silenus was often depicted in the form of a hollow statue that contained smaller images of gods within (these were perhaps wooden statues).  Immediately we realize that these are exactly the images Diotima gave of Love.  Love in itself lacks beauty, just as Socrates and the satyrs do, yet somehow it still enchants us into giving birth to all those images we are pregnant with.  Alcibiades goes on to cement the equation of Socrates with Love by illustrating just how fixated Socrates is on the Form of Beauty itself, to the exclusion of conventional beauty.  He tells the story of how Socrates actually rejected the handsome young Alcibiades' advances, even going so far as to spend all night in bed with Alcibiades without trying anything.   Socrates is the ultimate lover then, motivated by an otherworldly beauty to try and give birth to wisdom within his student, but contemptuous of anything so pedestrian as actual sex.  And Alcibiades' speech makes clear that Socrates' attempt at procereation has been successful; Alcibiades has obviously fallen in love with the virtue and wisdom of the old man and gone from being the loved to being the lover.  I guess that's the way the whole darned human comedy keeps perpetuatin' itself, down through the generations.