According to Plato’s Symposium, Love and philosophy are synonymous with one another. Love is the pursuit of beauty and since wisdom is beautiful, the pursuit of love is actually the pursuit of philosophy. The love, as discussed by the characters in the Symposium, is homosexual love because some people at the time believed that homosexuality alone is capable of satisfying “a man’s highest and noblest aspirations. ” Whereas heterosexual love is placed at an inferior level, being described as only existing for carnal reasons; its ultimate purpose being procreation.
These dialogues are cluttered with differing views regarding Eros but the six speeches can be divided into two main categories. Phaedrus, Pausanius, and Eryximachus were the first to speak and are lumped into a category praising love, the benefits humankind reaps from it, and how it should be worshipped. For example, Phaedrus worshipped Love’s beauty and youth and the guidance one has when in love. He says that the most honorable soldiers would refrain from doing shameful acts when on the battlefield with their lover and only engage in noble acts so their lover would not be disappointed in them.
Pausanius basically talks about two different types of love: vulgar and noble love. Vulgar love is second-rate and it is the love for women and boys while noble love is homosexual love involving the beloved. Eryximachus did not have anything substantial to add to the conversation and merely talked about love and medicine, music, meteorology, and divination. The second category of speeches from Aristophanes, Agathon, and Socrates is far more important and the theme changes to the nature of love rather than the benefits of it.
Aristophanes gives a very modern idea of love in his speech when he contradicts his peers by treating heterosexuality at the same level as homosexuality, arguing that both are predestined. Aristophanes considers himself as the comic poet and he begins his discourse as such. Yet as the speech continued, he professed to open another vein of discourse; he had a mind to praise Love in another way, unlike that of either Pausanias or Eryximachus. “Mankind,” he said, “judging by their neglect of him, have never at all understood the power of Love.
He argued that if they had understood him they would have built noble temples and altars, and offered solemn sacrifices in his honor. He sought to describe his power and wanted to teach the rest of the world what he was teaching at that moment. Aristophanes spoke first of the nature of man and what had become of it. He said that human nature had changed: the sexes were originally three in number; there was man, woman, and the union of the two.
At one time there was a distinct kind, with a bodily shape and a name of its own, constituted by the union of the male and the female: but now only the word ‘androgynous’ remains, and that as a term of reproach. Aristophanes proceeded by telling an anecdote about the terrible might and strength of mankind and how “the thoughts of their hearts were so great that they made an attack upon the gods,” leaving the celestial councils to decide whether or not to kill them. Zeus found a solution, and decided to cut them in two so as to divide their strength.
As he cut them one after another, he bade Apollo give the face and the half of the neck a turn in order that man might contemplate the section of himself: he would thus learn a lesson of humility. He made all the forms complete except in the region of the belly and navel, as a memorial of the primeval state. Aristophanes continued his discourse in a vein of seriousness and brought forth an important truth. He related the division the two parts of man, each desiring his other half and dying from hunger and self-neglect because they did not do anything apart, to love as a need for completion.
Since when one of the halves died and the other survived, the survivor sought another mate, man or woman. The anecdote continued with Zeus, in pity, inventing a new plan: rearranging the genitals so that by the mutual embraces of man and woman they might breed, and the race might continue. Or, equally so, if man came to man they might be satisfied and go about their ways to the business of life. Aristophanes was trying to demonstrate that our original nature was to search for our other half, to make one of two and to heal the state of man.
Aristophanes thus demonstrated that man was always looking for his other half and this need was perhaps more than purely physical. There was also a longing to regain some lost happiness. “Such a nature is prone to love and ready to return love, always embracing that which is akin to him. ” Aristophanes described that when one half met with his other half the pair became lost in an amazement of love, friendship and intimacy, and spent their whole lives together.
Yet they could not explain what they desired of one another. He added that the intense yearning which each of them had towards the other was not that of the lover’s intercourse, but of something else that the soul of either evidently desired and could not explain. The reason Aristophanes gave to this need was that human nature was originally one and we were all a whole, and the desire and pursuit to be complete is called love. It was because of the wickedness of mankind that God had dispersed us.
Aristophanes eventually adopted a sober tone in his speech and asks his audience to take him seriously. He applied his anecdote to include men and women everywhere, and proposed that if mankind’s love were perfectly accomplished, and each being found his original true love, only then would our race be happy. If this were to be the most favorable, the next best thing would be the nearest approach to such a union; the attainment of a congenial love. Aristophanes’ speech finds itself in contrast with that of Socrates.
While Aristophanes used a vivid and elaborate story to illustrate his point, Socrates dismisses rhetoric and claimed to be indifferent to the formal expression of the truth as its discovery is more important. Socrates questions Agathon’s definition of Love, asking whether or not Love is a desire for something we lack. He adds that a person could not desire the things he already possesses, but could only desire to preserve them. He defines Love as existing only in relation to an object, an object it lacks, and that since Love’s object is beauty, Love thus cannot be beautiful.
After much deduction, he comes to the conclusion that “Love is the consciousness of a need for a good not yet acquired or possessed. ” This has already been exposed by Aristophanes’ speech, but it is more rationally explained here. Love, as Socrates demonstrated it through his dialogue with Diotima, is one of the links between the sensible and the eternal world, meaning that Love finds itself between man and the Gods. Love is the search for spiritual procreation.
Aristophanes had described Love as the manner in which mankind coped with the separation from the Gods. To Diotima, physical procreation was the lowest form Eros could take and she defines three types of lovers: the purely sensual (physical), the lovers of honor, and the lovers of wisdom. Socrates was himself the ideal “lover of wisdom,” never allowing himself to divert from the real pursuit of beauty: since beauty is the ultimate objective of Love. Aristophanes and his comical tale of the way mankind came about needing a partner greatly opposed that of Socrates.
Aristophanes put homosexuality and heterosexuality at the same level, believing that both were predestined. He recognized that love was a need, a longing to regain a lost happiness. Socrates, on the other hand, concluded that heterosexual and homosexual Love were not at all at the same level. Arguing that physical desire was inferior to the “love of wisdom” which is more widespread in homosexuality, adding that women are “incapable of creative activity above the physical level.
Ultimately what transpires from his speech is that he has a meaning of Love quite different from that which the common man would attach to it. Plato incorporates several personifications of his views of Eros in Diotima’s speech and with the sudden appearance and speech of Alcibiades. Diotima believes the lover falls in love with beauty and he gains wisdom from loving this beautiful person by gaining a deeper love for inner beauty and by losing his admiration for the earlier love.
Socrates is personified as both the lover and Eros itself because he does not possess beauty so he gains a love for Alcibiades, which is quite the beautiful man. From his short time loving Alcibiades, he gains insight upon a greater wisdom and acknowledges a love for Agathon, who is more beautiful on the inside than Alcibiades. Socrates is proclaimed as the perfect philosopher in his love and continuous pursuit of beauty, or wisdom. At the conclusion of the six speeches in Plato’s Symposium, the reader has come full circle in the ideas presented by the attendants of the party.
The speeches progress from ideas of the benefits of Eros to the nature of it and from a model of the beloved to a model of the lover, who lacks youth and beauty but is still close enough to acknowledge and value them. The model of the lover encompasses the idea that the lover is the pursuer of wisdom and gains it from the beloved rather than imparting it upon the beloved. The most fundamental theme in the Symposium is “philosophy, the pursuit of wisdom, is motivated by love; it is, in fact, love’s highest expression” (Nehamas, Woodruff xix).
