Symposium — themes & analysis

The ladder of beauty is the most ambitious argument in the Symposium and one of the most ambitious in all of philosophy. Socrates does not give it as his own. He attributes it to a priestess from Mantinea named Diotima who, he says, taught him about love years before. In a dialogue full of Athenian men praising Eros, the deepest account belongs to a woman who is not in the room.

The argument begins by demoting love. Eros is not a god, Diotima says. A god possesses what is good and beautiful; love is the longing for what is good and beautiful — which means it is not yet possessed. Love is therefore not divine but a great spirit, a daimōn, born of Plenty and Poverty at Aphrodite's birth-feast and forever in between. He is hungry but resourceful, neither rich nor destitute, always pursuing what slips away.

What Eros wants, finally, is immortality. Mortals cannot have eternity directly, so they reach for it through generation: bodies generating children, souls generating poems and laws and ideas. Both are forms of begetting in the beautiful. From here Diotima begins the ascent. You start by loving one beautiful body. You realize the beauty in that body is the same beauty in other bodies, and you learn to love physical beauty in general. You ascend to the beauty of souls, then to the beauty of laws and institutions, then to the beauty of knowledge, and finally — last — to beauty itself. Eternal. Neither growing nor decaying. The source from which everything beautiful borrows.

The ladder is the founding text of what we still call Platonic love. It is not the rejection of physical attraction; it is the claim that physical attraction is the first rung of a staircase that leads, if you keep climbing, to the contemplation of the eternal. Most people stop on the first rung. The philosopher is whoever keeps going up.

Where to follow it: Section 7 (the ladder itself), Section 6 (the speech it answers).

The Aristophanes speech is the most quoted passage in the Symposium and probably the most quoted thing Plato ever wrote. The image has become so much a part of how we talk about love that most of the people repeating it have no idea where it came from.

Originally, Aristophanes says, there were three sexes, not two: male, female, and a combined form, the androgynous. Each was a sphere with four arms, four legs, two faces looking opposite ways, and the strength to challenge the gods. Zeus, threatened by them, split each one in half down the middle, then had Apollo turn each face toward the wound so they would always remember. Ever since, every human walks the earth as half of something, looking for the other half. When two halves find each other, they cling and refuse to let go. That clinging, says Aristophanes, is what we call love.

It is a beautiful story, and a wrong one. Plato has Diotima refute it directly two speeches later. Lovers, she points out, do not actually want to merge with their other half — what they want is the good. Tell a lover that their beloved is bad for them, and the love eventually fades; tell them that their beloved makes them better, and the love deepens. Love is not the search for our missing piece. Love is the search for what is good. The two can look the same in early infatuation but they come apart under pressure.

Plato's strategy is precise. He gives Aristophanes the most charming speech in the dialogue because the myth of split halves is the most attractive version of the wrong answer. If you don't think hard, the myth feels right; you have probably felt, at some point, that someone you loved was a missing piece. The Symposium is, in part, an argument that this feeling is misleading you about what love is for.

Where to follow it: Section 5 (the myth told), Section 7 (Diotima's correction).

Plato is one of the most careful prose writers in antiquity, and the order and content of the speeches in the Symposium are not arbitrary. Each speaker, asked to define Eros, ends up defining himself. The speeches are theories of love and self-portraits at the same time.

Phaedrus speaks first because he proposed the topic; he is an enthusiast for fine speeches and so he gives a heroic, slightly conventional one — Eros is the oldest god, the inspiration to die for one's beloved. Pausanias, who is in a long-standing relationship with Agathon, splits Eros into two — common and heavenly — in a way that conveniently justifies his own kind of attachment. Eryximachus the doctor turns love into a cosmic principle of harmony, expanding it from the human body outward to medicine, music, and astronomy; the speech is exactly the kind of speech a physician with too much theory would give.

Aristophanes the comic playwright tells a comic myth that is also genuinely moving, the only speech in the dialogue that catches what we call romantic feeling. Agathon the young tragic poet, just off his prizewinning debut, gives a virtuoso rhetorical performance — beautifully balanced, completely empty, exactly what you would expect from a young man who has just won first prize for his looks. Socrates dismantles it in three questions, then refuses to praise Eros at all, claiming instead to report what a priestess told him. Even his self-effacement is a self-portrait.

Then Alcibiades arrives drunk and gives the seventh speech — not in praise of Eros but in praise of Socrates, the one man he could not seduce. The speech is the most personal in the dialogue because it is the only one not pretending to be about love in general. It is about a specific man being loved by a specific other, and failing.

Where to follow it: Section 2 (Phaedrus), Section 3 (Pausanias), Section 4 (Eryximachus), Section 6 (Agathon).

Alcibiades arrives in Section Eight propped up between a flute-girl and another reveler, garlanded with ivy and violets, very drunk. He is shown to a couch and is settling in before he notices Socrates is already there — at which point he flinches as if caught. The flinch sets the speech in motion. He cannot praise Eros after Socrates has just spoken about him; instead, he says, he will praise Socrates.

The speech that follows is the most personal thing in all of Plato. Alcibiades compares Socrates to a Silenus statue — ugly outside, hiding a god within. He recounts Socrates's superhuman endurance on campaign at Potidaea: standing all night thinking through a problem, walking barefoot in the snow without complaint, saving Alcibiades's life in battle and refusing the prize that should have been his. And he tells the story he has been carrying alone: the night he tried to seduce Socrates, having engineered every possible excuse for the two of them to be alone, and was gently and devastatingly refused. Socrates lay beside him through the night, Alcibiades says, the way a brother would lie beside a brother.

Plato's audience knew exactly who Alcibiades was when they read this. He was the most gifted Athenian of his generation — beautiful, brilliant, ruinously charismatic — and the man whose vanity persuaded Athens to launch the catastrophic Sicilian Expedition the year after this party. He defected to Sparta, then to Persia, and helped destroy the city that had loved him. The dialogue is set in 416, the very last year before everything fell. Plato is showing us a young man who knew exactly what he should do and chose otherwise.

The speech is a witness to philosophy's limit. Socrates can refuse the seduction; he cannot save the man from himself. Alcibiades knows the good and reaches for the splendid. Knowing is not enough — and the dialogue, which has just spent six speeches praising love as the soul's ladder upward, ends by showing us a soul that climbed partway and then jumped.

Where to follow it: Section 8 (the speech).

The word philosophos means, literally, lover of wisdom. Most of Plato's dialogues use the word without dwelling on the metaphor. The Symposium is the dialogue that takes it seriously.

Diotima's account of Eros in Section Seven is, by extension, an account of the philosopher. Eros is neither a god nor a mortal but a great spirit between them — neither beautiful nor ugly, neither wise nor ignorant, always reaching for what he lacks. So with the philosopher. The truly wise (the gods) do not philosophize because they already possess wisdom. The truly ignorant do not philosophize because they do not know what they are missing. Philosophy is a middle condition: aware that one does not know, longing for what one has glimpsed, never finally arriving.

This reframes a great deal. The philosophical life is not the possession of truth but the structured pursuit of it. The philosopher and the lover are doing the same thing, only at different rungs of the same ladder. The young man who stops on the street to look at someone beautiful and the old man bent over a problem at his desk are both, in Plato's view, expressing one drive — the longing for the good, dressed in different clothes.

It also explains why Socrates is the figure of philosophy in this dialogue and not merely its mouthpiece. He arrives late because he has stopped on a porch to think. He stays sober while everyone else gets drunk. He listens to all six speeches before refusing to add his own. And at dawn, when everyone else has fallen asleep, he is still arguing — and then he gets up and walks to the gymnasium to begin his ordinary day. The whole evening is an image of what philosophy looks like: a longing that keeps going after every other longing has fallen asleep.

Where to follow it: Section 7 (Eros as in-between), Section 1 (Socrates arriving late), Section 8 (Socrates the last awake).