49 pages • 1 hour read
PlatoSymposium
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 380A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Pervasiveness of Dualities
To understand the Symposium, it is important to recognize that the ancient Greeks did not categorize their world along moral lines, dividing objects, feelings, or behaviors as “good” or “bad.” Rather, the ancient Greeks viewed “good” and “bad” as outcomes rather than moral absolutes. For example, strife, in the poet Hesiod’s Works and Days, can be beneficial when it inspires humans to work hard to achieve greatness; it can also be destructive when it provokes humans to compete with each other in ways that provoke conflict. This is the concept at work in Pausanias’s speech, when he describes the Celestial and Common manifestations of Aphrodite. Aphrodite’s duality is the tension between the opposing poles at her core: being both divine and of the people. This tension suffuses the Symposium, from its structure to its central figures to Love itself.
Structurally, the presence of the dual is felt from the outset with the first line: Apollonius’s response to a question or statement that remains unknown to the audience. With this beginning, Plato establishes a tension between his philosophical method (dialogue) and the method of his ideas’ transmission (text). Across the Symposium, the reader is continually reminded that what is being heard or read was a dialogue that now is a fixed text to which the reader does not have full access. The telling cannot respond, only echo: The dialogue is, paradoxically, a monologue.
The figures in the dialogue also embody dualities. Agathon and Aristophanes are a tragedian and a comic playwright, respectively, but Socrates calls the distinction between these into question. Alcibiades is a gifted and charismatic leader, but his excesses have destructive consequences. Socrates can seem harsh and unattractive, but he hides, as Alcibiades says, divinity at his core, like the Sileni and Satyrs, who are figures of frenzy and disorder but also guides for initiates into sacred mysteries.
Plato’s attention to the presence of duality can be seen as an explanation of the need for dialogue since any one view will necessarily be partial and limited. Each of the five speakers before Socrates touch on issues that emerge in his conversation with Diotima, but none creates, as Diotima and Socrates’s conversation does, a web of interconnected meanings that create a larger whole. Ultimately, however close they come to uncovering the true nature of Love, attending to the existence of the dual enables them to get closer than those who look only through one set of eyes.
The Nature of Love
When Eryximachus proposes that each guest offer a speech of praise to love, it is in the context of passing their time at the symposium. In ancient Greek life, any formal gathering could feature some element of competition, as gathering (or “coming together”) and competition are another set of dualities that coexist in ancient Greek society. Thus, the goal is not to reveal the nature of Love but to praise Love, which presumes understanding its nature. Within the course of the dialogue, Socrates reveals that those gathered do not understand the nature of Love, thus the need for dialogue and questioning, rather than eulogy.
This distinction is evident in the first few speeches, each of which set out, in the tradition of eulogy, to praise various qualities of Love. The qualities praised center around Love’s potential to teach foundational virtues as the ancient Greeks understood them: wisdom, bravery, and goodness. Each of the speakers approaches Love from his particular specialization: Phaedrus, Agathon, and Aristophanes draw on stories from myth and folklore. Eryximachus looks at Love through a doctor’s lens. The young Pausanias and Alcibiades speak of Love from the point of view of a “beloved.”
Phaedrus’s speech focuses on how Love for someone can inspire courage, which speaks to Love’s potential educational benefit. Pausanias discusses Celestial and Common manifestations of Love and the type of love each inspires, i.e., “morally sound gratification” and satisfying desire without concern to good or bad, respectively (17). Approaching Love as a physician, Eryximachus is concerned with Love’s omnipresence and with ensuring that its power is executed “in virtuous, restrained, and moral behaviour” (23). Aristophanes’s speech revisits a folktale to show that Love is the search for wholeness, while Agathon introduces the idea that Love and beauty are inextricably connected.
When Socrates’s turn arrives, the tone of the conversation changes: He impresses the speakers with the need to explore the nature of Love further. Socrates tells a story, but his is not from myth, folklore, or other general sources of knowledge. His is from his own experience being “initiated” into Love’s mysteries, a crucial shift that honors Love by showing how initiation into the mysteries has created Socrates’s wisdom.
The Education of the Youth of Athens
A theme across the dialogue is how to properly educate young men and how Love can promote this education. Plato composed the Symposium approximately a generation after Athens lost the Peloponnesian war and, along with it, its prestige as a regional political power, which it would never regain. The generation that heard or read the Symposium grew up in the shadow of their city’s failures. Of the speakers in attendance, only Aristophanes was alive and well at the time of the Symposium’s composition. The rest came to premature or violent ends, most notably Socrates, the central figure at the heart of the dialogue, and his famous follower, Alcibiades. Alcibiades was assassinated in 404 BCE, and Socrates was put to death in 399 BCE for, among other charges, corrupting Athens’ youth, a fact that would have been well known by the Symposium’s historical audience.
In the direct democracy of Athens, in which citizens bore the full responsibility for running the city and consequently bore the full blame for its failures, corrupting the city’s youth was a very serious charge. To harm the youth, who would grow up to lead Athens, was to harm Athens itself and all its residents. Alcibiades is the example par excellence of this: His inability to control his excesses directly harmed Athens, by his encouragement of a disastrous expedition, by the suggestion that he participated in profaning mysteries (as would also be charged against other speakers at the symposium), and, after he fled the city, by putting his considerable skill to Sparta’s and Persia’s advantages, as the tide of adulation and power carried him. In the end, Alcibiades was assassinated, but more importantly from an Athenian perspective, because he was not able to control himself, he was not able to steer the city either, with the consequence that many innocents suffered.
In the Symposium, Alcibiades himself admits that he is seduced by the promises of the material world—physical beauty, power, wealth, influence, adoration, which Socrates avoids. Socrates’s only concern at the gathering is to pursue a dialogue as a means of getting closer to what is most wise and good: in the context of the Symposium, the nature of Love. His investigation demonstrates this, as he not only subjected himself to the kind of questioning he practices on his students but also willingly shares a story of his own experience as a novice and student. On one level, the Symposium provides further defense of Socrates as a teacher. Specifically, it does so through an exploration of how Love can benefit a youth as he develops his character.
The potential salutary effects of Love come up in three speeches: Phaedrus’s, Pausanias’s, and Socrates’s. Phaedrus proposes that Love has the potential to improve one’s character since it inspires courage, a useful skill if one lives in a time of armed conflict. Pausanias argues in favor of Love’s potential educational benefit, provided the relationship leads to the improvement of the beloved’s mind, not just the gratification of the lover’s body. Phaedrus and Pausanias’s speeches touch lightly on the potential educational benefit of Love that Socrates and Diotima develop more deeply. For them, Love of one physical body may prove a useful stepping stone through which the youth, if he is being guided properly, will learn to appreciate more expansive forms of beauty and move on from a preoccupation with physical attraction to pursue the essence of Love’s virtues.
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