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.