Plato, Symposium II

Posted: Mon, Feb 2, 2026

Today

  • Wrap up Phaedrus
  • Phaedrus, Pausanias, Aristophanes’ hiccup, Eryximachus
  • Aristophanes’ comedic myth
  • Socrates’ Diotima

Warm-up activity

  1. In your experience, why do people yearn for love? [Bobby]
  2. What difference, if any, is there between love at first glance and Love the real deal?
  3. Are you interested in being in love? Why or why not?

Agathon [Leah]

  • Love is THE BEST!!!!
    • Love is both beautiful and good.
  • Synthesis of the prior symposiasts’ insights.
    • Best analysis of love a non-philosopher could do.
    • Rhetorically beautiful yet feels empty?
    • Close to sophistry?
    • Comic to come from a tragic poet?
  • Everybody except Socrates loves Agathon’s speech: “In my foolishness, I thought you should tell the truth about whatever you praise” (198d).
    • It’s not clear, though, whether Socrates went on to tell the truth about Love.

Agathon interlude

The socratic method/elenchus: Intense interrogation leading one to realize that one’s initial view isn’t so tenable after all.

  • ~Philosophy as midwifery.

The steps:

  1. To love is always to love something (200a).
  2. To love something you have to desire that thing (200a).
  3. You can’t desire what you already have (desiring to continue to have it in the future is different; the object of the desire is not the thing itself but its preservation) (200b–e).
  4. So, to desire something you can’t have that thing already (from 1–3).
  5. Love desires something beautiful not ugly (201a).
  6. So, “Love needs beauty, then, and does not have it” (201b) (from 4–5).
  7. So, Love is not beautiful (from 6). (Agathon: “It turns out, Socrates, I didn’t know what I was talking about in that speech” (201c).)
  8. Also, everything good is beautiful (201c).
  9. Since Love desires beautiful things, it then also desires good things (201c) (from 5, 8).
  10. So, Love also needs but doesn’t have these good things (from 4, 9).
  11. So, Love is also not good (from 10).

Socrates/Diotima/Platonic Love

Socrates then proceeds to recite a conversation he had with a priestess Diotima.

  • The Platonic ideal of mansplaining?
  • In their conversation, Diotima uses the Socratic method on Socrates.
  • Diotima is most likely a fictional character. Her name (lit. “honor the god”) may be a reference to Alcibiades’s mistress Timandra (lit. “honor the man”).
  • But why go through this trouble? Why must Socrates speak through a woman? [Elizabeth]
    • Using a wise woman instead of a wise erastês avoids the implication that Socrates was once an erômenos?
    • Using a woman makes what she says about pregnancy, as well as love between men vs. love between men and women, more credible?
    • There is meant to be something distinctively feminine about Diotima’s conception of love? (Or does it merely appear feminine to men?)
    • Could a woman possibly do this much philosophy on her own?

The stage-setting

  • Love is in between beautiful and ugly, good and bad, mortal and immortal, and wise and ignorant (201d–204b). [Momo]
  • Love desires beautiful things [Lindsay, Sophia, Carlos, Lang, Natalie], and wisdom is particularly beautiful; so, Love must be a lover of wisdom—that is, a philosopher (204b).
    • Sappho?
    • Objection to Aristophanes: Love desires not wholeness but the good (and love desires the wholeness only insofar as wholeness is good). How did Diotima manage to anticipate Aristophanes’s speech (205e)?
    • Love not only desires the good but it desires to possess the good forever (206a). [Joselyn]
    • (This gets qualified later—“what love wants is not beauty,” but “reproduction and birth in beauty” (206e).)
  • Note two interconnected claims:
    • Love (eros) is not restricted to the romantic.
    • Love is not only aimed at the good but we only desire the good (“psychological eudaimonism”).
      • If we desires something that is not good, we are committing a cognitive/intellectual error (i.e., we must have misidentified the good).
  • But we are mere mortals. How do we possess the good forever?
    • Diotima: We do this by “giving birth in beauty, whether in body and in soul” (206c).
    • Invokes the distinctively Socratic ideal of the philosopher as a midwife of wisdom: The wisdom is already in us (we are “pregnant” with it), which the Socratic method then brings out.
  • “All of us are pregnant, Socrates, in body and in soul” (206c).
    • People who are pregnant more in body than in soul “turn more to women and pursue love in that way, providing themselves through childbirth with immortality and remembrance and happiness” (206e).
    • People who are pregnant more in soul than in body turn more to beautiful minds and give birth to “[w]isdom and the rest of virtue” through pederasty (209a–d).
      • It turns out that the “people” here are men!
      • “Platonic love”

The Ascent of Love [Juniper, Sierra]

  • Initially, “if the leader [Love] leads aright, he should love one body and beget beautiful ideas there” (210a).
  • Then, “he should realize that the beauty of any one beauty is brother to the beauty of any other.”
    • So, there is something shared by all beautiful bodies.
    • This is the form of Beauty: not any particular beautiful body, but something that makes all beautiful bodies beautiful.
      • Abstract but not an idea in our minds.
      • Think a model/blueprint.
  • Then, “he must think that the beauty of people’s souls is more valuable than the beauty of their bodies” (210b).
    • Indeed, compared to “the beauty of actives and laws . . . he will think that the beauty of bodies is a thing of no importance” (210c).
    • Then, “the beauty of knowledge” outshines the beauty of human customs.
  • Finally, “all of a sudden he will catch sight of something wonderfully beautiful in its nature; that, Socrates, is the reason for all his earlier labors” (210e).
    • The form of Beauty/Beauty itself (211a-c).

Socrates was “persuaded” (212b).

  • But is Diotima telling us something true, or something beautiful?
  • Can Love be made reasonable/compatible with philosophy? [Luyu]