and then Fer gives the tern to my boyfriend !

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Plato's Symposium

Contents 1 Author's Notes/Introduction 2 Dirty ‘n Quick 3 Detailed Summary 4 Grab Bag 4.1 Speakers preceding Socrates 4.2 What to make of Alcibiades 4.3 Theory of Love being incompatible with Christian ideology

Author's Notes/IntroductionEdit

“Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds.” – Shakespeare.

ToC
I.Dirty ‘n Quick – Barebones of Diotima’s argument.
II.Detailed Summary – Summary of Socrates’ response to Agathon and his speech.
III.Grab Bag - Themes and random points covered by my philosophy professor John Hare

Dirty ‘n QuickEdit

Most of these are copied almost verbatim from Suzanne O.’s lecture notes. She distinguishes between ero (erotic love) and philia (something like fellowship) but that’s confusing and I’ll just use love here. I’ve included some discussion on the difference at the end.

1. Love is the desire of beauty.
2. The good is beautiful.
3. Therefore, love is the desire for the good as well.
4. More precisely, love is the desire to possess the good forever.
5. Eternal possession requires immortality.
6. For us mortals, immortality is achieved through reproduction.
7. Reproduction is divine.
8. Reproduction must occur in the presence of the beautiful (a.k.a. what is in harmony with it)
9. Reproduction must occur in beauty.
10. Love is the desire for birth in beauty.

A second version

1. Love is the desire for beauty.
2. The good is beautiful.
3. Therefore, love is the desire for the good.
4. Love is the desire to possess the good forever.
5. Possessing the good forever requires personal immortality.
6. Love is the desire for immortality as means.
7. Love is the desire for immortality as an end in itself.

To get from love to the form of the beauty…

1. Start by loving a beautiful body.
2. Realize all bodies are similar, so love all bodies.
3. Realize the soul is much more beautiful bodies, so screw the bodies and love the soul.
4. Give birth to ideas in the presence of these beautiful souls.
5. Move on from contemplation of beautiful souls to beautiful ideas and kn owledge.
6. Gaze upon a sea of knowledge.
7. View form of Beauty/Good.
8. Start giving birth to true virtue instead of images of virtue.

Detailed SummaryEdit

Socrates finds that Agathon has made a fabulously shallow speech, one that uses beautiful imagery to mask shoddy ideas. Socrates thinks that one should always tell the truth about whatever one praises. Socrates comments that the general theme of the speeches so far has been to apply the most beautiful qualities to Love whether they are true or not. “And if they are false, that is no objection; for the proposal, apparently, was that everyone here make the rest of us think he is praising Love – and not that he actually praises him.”

Socrates’ interrogation of Agaphon

1. Love is of something in the same way that a brother is a brother of a sibling, or a father is a father of a daughter.
2. Love desires that of which it is the love (of).
3. Something desires something of which it is in need of, otherwise it wouldn’t desire it. Would somebody who is strong want to be strong? If they do, it’s because they want the things they have now to be theirs in the future as well. (might compare with Boethius’ argument on material goods)
4. Therefore, love desires that of which he has a present need.
5. Agathon says: the gods quarrels were settled by love of beautiful things.
6. If that were so, then love would be a desire for beauty, since love is of something.
7. Love needs beauty then, and does not have it.
8. Love is not beautiful then.
9. If all beautiful things are good things, then love needs good things too.

Socrates’ speech – Note that he is merely relating what Diotima has said, in the same way the Symposium opens as a relating of what Aristodemus told Apollodorus.

1. Not all things not-beautiful are ugly, therefore love isn’t necessarily ugly.
2. Love could be somewhere in between. For example, the in-between of wisdom and ignorance is is “Judging things correctly without being able to give a reason” (true opinion)
3. If all gods are good and beautiful, and love desires good and beauty, then love can’t be a god.
4. Doesn’t necessarily mean love is a human – he is somewhere in between, a great spirit.
5. Spirits communicate between gods and men, and are the beings through which all divination passes through.
6. At Aphrodite’s 0th birthday party, Poros (way, resource) son of Cunning is date-raped by Penia (poverty) since Penia wanted to cure her lack of resources. They have Love as a child. Since Love was conceived on Aphrodite’s birthday, he is destined to follow her, and by nature a lover of beauty since Aphrodite is especially beautiful.
7. Since he is a mutt, he is always poor, he’s tough, shriveled, shoeless, homeless, basically somebody you would pick off the shadier streets in New Haven. His father contributes the qualities of scheming after the good/beautiful, and he is brave/impetuous/intense/cunning, lover of wisdom, etc.
8. Love is neither immortal/mortal – he springs to life, he dies, but always comes back to life. Anything he gets he always loses, thus in-between poverty and resource.
9. Love (the spirit) is in between wisdom and ignorance. People who love wisdom fall between the two extremes of wisdom and ignorance.
10. The mistake being made thus far in the speeches given beforehand is that they think of love as being loved instead of being a lover.
11. The point of loving beautiful things is so that they become his own. If we exchange ‘beautiful’ for ‘good’ then the lover of beautiful things wants to have good things.
12. Once he has these good things, he has happiness. And they agree that is the ultimate end, happiness.
13. Desire for happiness is universal among humans.
14. Love has a wide variety of meanings, in the same way poetry has a wide range of meanings – the love we are talking about is a special kind of love. Although poetry (which means creation/production in greek) encompasses a great deal of things, poets are those who create things with melody and rhyme. In the same way, out of everything that can be loved, lovers are only those who devote themselves to a special kind of love, not love for money/property/power etc.
15. Takes a stab at Aristophanes here, saying that people don’t desire their other halves unless they are good, for a person with gangrene would be willing to amputate the infected limb.
16. People love the good, and want it to be theirs forever.
17. Love, therefore, is wanting to possess the good forever.
18. People pursue this by giving birth in beauty, whether in body or soul.
    1. (This may mean either giving birth in presence of a beautiful person or that a lover causes a newborn to be in a beautiful person.)
    2. All of us are pregnant in body/soul, and as soon as we come to a certain age we naturally desire to give birth (puberty anyone?)
    3. Nobody gives birth in anything ugly. They turn away/shrink back and do not reproduce, and because they are constipated, the labor is painful. Since reproduction is godly, it can’t occur in the presence of something out of harmony with the divine; therefore it must occur in the presence of beauty
    4. Love wants reproduction and birth in beauty.
       1. Love wants reproduction because it is akin to immortality.
       2. Even animals (winged and footed!!) want immortality.
       3. In the same way studying preserves knowledge by replacing the knowledge we lose, so reproduction preserves animals by…well, you get it.
       4. Achilles and Alcestis both died for the honor and glory of which the memory we still preserve. (<-- that is a godawful sentence btw)
19. People who are pregnant through the soul bear wisdom and virtue (which he says all poets beget – contrast with Republic).
    1. The most beautiful part of wisdom deals with the proper ordering of cities and households, and it’s called moderation and justice. <-- direct quote
    2. Whenever somebody who is pregnant comes in contact with a beautiful body who has a beautiful mind, they will give birth.
    3. These children of the soul (laws of Lycurgus, Homer’s poems) are superior to your piddly human children.
20. How to get to the Form of Beauty, aka Form of the Good
    1. Start by loving one body.
    2. Realize beauty of one body is brother to another and hence, one should love all bodies.
    3. Becomes a lover of all beautiful bodies, and realizes that a body-specific love is foolish
    4. After the above, must think that people’s souls are more valuable than beauty of bodies. Beauty is skin-deep. Should give birth to ideas that will make young men better; thus will be forced to look at beauty of activities and laws, and will come to disregard beauty of bodies.
    5. After customs comes knowledge, and through looking at knowledge he comes to look at a sea of beauty – and will eventually come to gaze upon the Form of the Beautiful, that which “always is, neither comes to be nor passes away, neither waxes nor wanes, is purely beautiful” etc.
21. To sum up the above with a quote: “from one body to two, from two to all, from all to beautiful customs, from customs to beautiful things, from those lessons to the form.”
22. Only after one has seen the true form can he give birth to true virtue instead of images of virtue.

Grab BagEdit

Speakers preceding SocratesEdit

While it’s not important to know the arguments of the speakers preceding Socrates (except maybe Aristophanes’, cause it’s funny), know that Diotima subtly refutes all of them in her speech. From Sparknotes: Diotima's speech can be read as containing subtle rebukes for all the speakers heretofore. We have already seen how Socrates first demolishe Agathonthrough dialogue and then points out that Agathon identifies Love with the loved one rather than with the lover. We can also find an improvement upon Phaedrus, where Diotima speaks of the courage of Alcestis and Achilles. Both of these characters were used by Phaedrus as exemplars of love because they were willing to do anything for their lovers. Diotima refines the example, pointing out that their willingness to die comes from a desire to be immortalized for their bravery.

We also find a refinement of Pausanias’ distinction between Heavenly and Common Love. Pausanias speaks of Heavenly Love as existing when a man gives a boy education and when the boy gives him sexual gratification in return. Diotima removes the sexual element from this relationship (further suggesting the androgynous nature of the love she advocates) suggesting that men should get not sexual gratification but rather the gratification of sharing their ideas with others. While two men cannot sexually reproduce, they can reproduce by passing their ideas down to one another. Diotima values this kind of reproduction over sexual reproduction because ideas last longer and are more valuable overall than individuals. Thus the distinction between Heavenly and Common Love becomes one between reproduction of the mind and reproduction of the body.

Sparknotes also has summaries of the other arguments if you’re interested.

What to make of AlcibiadesEdit

Martha Nussbaum offers an interesting interpretation. She reads the dialogue this way: There is something wrong with stopping the loving of or moving beyond loving a particular beautiful person, and moving towards the love of the universal form. We are supposed to see Alcibiades as a form of correction, that we should see love in Plato’s sense as a love of a particular body exemplified by the love Alcibiades feels toward Socrates.

This interpretation brings up the point that there seems something deficient in loving somebody not for the sake of that person but for what you or he produces.

Theory of Love being incompatible with Christian ideologyEdit

If love is defined as a sort of deficiency, then how can God love when he already is perfect? Plato’s definition of love does not fit the religious tradition.

Perhaps… Love could be beautiful but want to love the beauty in something else. That might be a way to get around the God thing.