Plato's Symposium: Summary | Cursus #9
What is love? Is it eternal? Where does homosexuality come from? Is fidelity possible? These are some of the essential questions that Socrates and his friends discuss in Plato's Symposium.
1) Phaedrus
Phaedrus delivers the first speech in the Symposium. He says that love is a vital force, an incredible source of energy, which awakens in you shame for wrongdoing and the drive to do good. Shame for wrongdoing: you are ashamed of being mediocre in the eyes of the person you love. Drive to do good: when you are in love, you strive to improve yourself, to make an effort, to progress.
In short, Phaedrus conceives of love as a force for self-improvement, the source of all greatness and progress.
2) Pausanias
Pausanias stands up and says: Phaedrus spoke of Eros as if it were one and the same thing, but in fact there are two Eros. A celestial and magnificent Eros, and a lowbrow Eros, a vulgar Eros. The eternal love of the soul and the perishable love of the body.
How can we know if our love is celestial or vulgar? If it comes from the great Aphrodite or the vulgar Aphrodite?
It's easy: the highest love can only be love between two males. Pure love is homosexual. Pausanias thinks that women are so inferior that one cannot have elevated relationships with them. So he is so misogynistic that he almost becomes progressive. But let's remember the essential point: for Pausanias, love is essentially twofold, with two irreconcilable levels of dignity.
3) Eryximachus
Eryximachus is a doctor, and he sees love through the lens of his professional background. Love is the harmony between the parts of a whole. It is love that harmonizes muscles and nerves, blood and organs… A healthy body is one where every cell loves every other cell. Beautiful music is music where every note harmonizes with the other. Without eros, things are chaotic; with eros, they become cosmic, organized, ordered. Eros is the force that transforms chaos into cosmos.
4) Aristophanes
Originally, humans were not as they are today; they lived in pairs. There were male-male pairs, male-female (or androgynous) pairs, and female-female pairs. One day, to stir up trouble, Zeus, with his thunderbolt, separated them in the middle. Humans, deprived of their other half, scattered across the world, and from then on, they had only one obsession: to find their lost other half.
5) Agathon
Agathon steps forward. He is about to unleash a frenzy: it is the longest, the most beautiful, the most applauded of all the speeches. Until the moment we realize… that we don't really know what he said. We can't get anything out of it. He spoke, but he said nothing. And Plato slyly remarks that Agathon attended the school of the Sophists, and that this is precisely what one learns at the school of the Sophists: to speak for the sake of speaking.
6) Socrates (with Diotima)
Socrates finally speaks. He says that Eros is desire, therefore lack. Love is based on the absence of what is desired, as we saw in the last episode. This is also more or less what Aristophanes says. Except that for Socrates, that is, Plato, we never truly reach our destination; there is no soulmate who will definitively fulfill us. That's pure fantasy. Instead, there is a possible, almost religious experience: the ascent toward the Idea of Beauty.
Initially, says Diotima (a woman Socrates met and whose speech he recounts), I fall in love with a beautiful body. This encounter will transform me. I will be transfigured. This echoes Phaedrus's discourse: love as perfection. But we must go further. Because when I have been in love several times, I begin to gain some perspective, I become less attached to a single person, and I am able to see beauty in all beautiful people.
I progress, I gain even more perspective, and for the first time, I fall in love with a person not for their body but for their actions. For their soul. Plato says that I'm even beginning to somewhat despise purely physical beauty. The ascent continues. We logically move from the love of a beautiful soul to the love of all beautiful souls, of all beautiful actions. We are increasingly in the realm of abstraction. And we will go even further, with the love of all the sciences, and finally, the last stage, the direct contemplation of the Idea of Beauty.
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