Socrates/Diotima’s Speech: Symposium 199b-212c

Mystery cult’s basic pattern of purification, initiation, and acquisition of a new perspective provides a framework for Socrates’s speech in praise of erōs. Or, more exactly, for the speech he recounts in praise of erōs. Rather than give his own ideas, Socrates recites a speech given by Diotima, a wise woman who taught him the art of erotic love (ta erōtika; 201d). She may have been a historical figure or a fiction invented by Socrates on the spot. Either way, Diotima is presented as something like a priestess in the mysteries of love.

Socrates introduces this speech by taking a second pass at examining Agathon (199c-201c) and turning the young poet’s cuddly view of love on its head. Just as Diotima once found the young Socrates (204c) doing, Agathon is thinking about love from the perspective of the beloved. Socrates forces Agathon to think through what it is like to be a lover. The upshot of their conversation is that we love either what we do not have, or what we now have but worry about losing in the future (200d). What is it we need but have such a tenuous connection to? Beauty and goodness. Being a lover ends up being an ordeal as we labor over beauty, which we tenuously grasp. In terms of the method of hypothesis, Agathon’s speech concealed one more question: How is erōs related to beauty? The answer Socrates gets Agathon to give is “Through lacking it.”

Having questioned Agathon, Socrates turns the tables once again, and recounts how Diotima questioned the young Socrates (201d-203e). The upshot here is that erōs is an in-between sort of thing. Just as correct opinion is situated between ignorance and understanding without being either of them, erōs is neither ugly nor beautiful, neither miserable nor happy, neither mortal nor immortal: erōs is a spirit (diamonion; 202e) straddling the mortal and immortal worlds. Having left everyone a bit perplexed, Socrates launches into Diotima’s speech.

Diotima presents erōs through a myth of her own (203b-207a). On the day Aphrodite was born, Plenty and Poverty were guests at the party.³ Plenty gets drunk and passes out, at which point Poverty makes love to him. Their child is erōs. As with Achilles, erōs’s mixed parentage explains his in-between nature. Like his father, Plenty, he is a lover of goodness, beauty, and wisdom. Like his mother, Poverty, he does not have any of these things and thus spends his time pursuing them. His ultimate goal is to possess the good forever. How can mere mortals accomplish this? The answer Diotima gives is reproduction.

Even animals feel the effects of erōs, and by mating in the presence of beauty attain a kind of immortality. There is more than one way to be pregnant, though (207a-209e). Most people are “pregnant in body” (Diotima seems to have men in mind here) and thus make love to women, who help them attain immortality through childbirth. Other people are “pregnant in soul” (she is still talking about men) and thus turn to younger men to “beget” virtues and ideas. Diotima cites artists, poets, and legislators as examples of people who have attained immortality through their creative work. What does this have to do with making love to younger men? Even according to ancient ideas of procreation, ideas and virtue are not something that can be exchanged via bodily fluids. So, while physical intercourse leads to babies, some kind of spiritual intercourse leads to creative endeavors. What does spiritual intercourse actually amount to? Here the modern meaning of symposium comes through the strongest: by coming together in joint inquiry and creative endeavors, mentors and their students can create beautiful works together. One of the most beautiful is the character of the student himself. Among other things, Greek homoerotic relationships are a mode of education. According to Diotima, such bonds are firmer and more valuable than mere animal reproduction because their children are “more beautiful and more immortal” (209c).

Diotima ties all this together by explaining erōs in terms of mystery cult (209e-212b). She presents what later philosophers would call a spiritual exercise: a systematic way of thinking designed to reorient one’s thinking. The first step in Diotima’s spiritual regimen is to recall a time you felt erotic desire for someone’s body. What do we really want in such situations? Diotima’s answer: to possess that beauty forever through physical intimacy. Likewise for bodies in general. Next, recall a time when you felt strong attraction to someone’s character or customs (nomoi). Diotima suggests it is the person’s virtue, or at least their potential for virtue, that we love. Likewise for character in general: beautiful character arouses in us a desire for a spiritual connection, in which we enjoy and nurture that person’s character and perhaps even take it on ourselves. Next, recall a time when you felt a strong attraction to someone’s intellect. Having your mind stretched can be enjoyable. Diotima suggests that beautiful ideas arouse a desire to engage in learning and creative projects. What do these three sorts of erōs have in common? According to Diotima, what we are really after in all of this is beauty itself. We find particular beautiful things in the world all around us (bodies, customs, ideas), but by going through the mysteries of love, stripping away the particulars and purifying our gaze, we ascend to a vision of a single beauty behind all of them. This is the final revelation of Diotima’s erotic mysteries.

Diotima’s account of erōs attempts to explain a huge range of human activity. To evaluate it as a philosophical theory, we must first ask: How huge? Does it make sense to say that all our desires ultimately strive for immortality through the possession of beauty? When I brush my teeth in the morning, am I really thinking deep down, “I want immortality through the possession of beauty,” or do only certain desires aim at this lofty goal? The root of the interpretive problem sits in the passage where Socrates’s conversation with Diotima moves quickly from the desire to possess beautiful things to the desire to possess good things to the desire to possess good things forever (204d-205a). How exactly do we connect the dots between goodness, beauty, and forever? Most scholars either equate beauty and goodness, or see beauty as an aspect of goodness. Insofar as dental health is a good, and healthy teeth are attractive, this lands us back at the toothbrush problem. Gabriel Richardson Lear takes an alternative approach, arguing that when we encounter beautiful things, “their goodness strikes us as being impervious to the passage of time… . For Plato, to experience something as beautiful is to sense in the present moment an infinite perfection.”⁴ On this reading, only those desires count as erotic that jar us out of complacency with everyday goods like dental health and move us to strive for immortality as best we can. But what exactly does this entail?

Striving for immortality can mean a couple of things for a human being. One is to stretch one’s legacy as far as possible, whether through having children, building a reputation, or creating a piece of art that outlives its creator.⁵ These strategies rely on quantity of time and run into the problem that we cannot control what happens to our descendants, reputations, or creations after we die. There is also the more basic question about what possible effect our future legacies can have on our happiness in the here and now. One response is that it is not a matter of actually being remembered, but of living our lives in a way that makes them worthy of being remembered.⁶ This brings us to the second way to understand a human being’s striving for immortality, which is to live our lives in a way that is as close as possible to the way the immortal gods do. Here it is not quantity of years but the quality of our lives that matters. In Symposium’s terms, this means bringing our time-bound lives into sync with timeless paradigms of number, proportionality, and beauty. As Eryximachus showed us, this imposition of timeless ratios onto time can happen in a huge range of cases, from the gym and farming to music and astronomy. Perhaps the feeling of time slowing down that elite athletes use today to describe flow was on Diotima’s mind when she talked about the collision of the mortal and immortal, time and eternity.⁷ If this is right, we should strive to look like the gods by imposing immortal ratios on our mortal bodies (as Eryximachus counseled), to move like the gods through our rhythmically balanced actions, to desire like the gods by having our desires for things reflect their worth (compare Pausanias’s idea of valuing souls over bodies).⁸ Most importantly we should strive to understand the world as the gods do.⁹ In short, erōs is the drive for transcendence.

While this might sound like a noble set of aspirations, does it actually explain erōs in a relationship between two human beings? Individual people feature in Diotima’s mysteries of love, yet they occupy the bottom stages of the ascent to beauty. Even if we move beyond loving people’s bodies to loving people’s characters and then their ideas, we eventually leave individuals behind as we set out onto the “great sea of beauty” (210d) and behold beauty itself, “absolute, pure, unmixed, not polluted by human flesh or colors or any such nonsense of mortality” (211e). Diotima seems to make erōs an impersonal affair, as she treats people as steps on some kind of ladder in the ascent to beauty. Gregory Vlastos defends this position in his 1973 essay, “The Individual as an Object of Love in Plato,” which sparked a lively debate.¹⁰ One way to answer Vlastos’s worries about Diotima’s seemingly impersonal view of personal relationships is to set her speech in its broader contexts.

Mystery cults provide the first context. Many scholars have read Diotima’s ascent to beauty as presenting a three-stage process of purification via love of bodies, with “lesser mysteries” focused on honor, and “greater mysteries” in which some secret knowledge is revealed.¹¹ On this reading, we must be purified of our love of bodies and then set those bodies aside (perhaps like the piglets of the Eleusinian ritual). In philosophical terms, this reading drives a wedge between beautiful bodies and beauty itself.¹² More recent studies suggest the point of actual mystery cult was not to reveal a secret doctrine but to offer an unusually intense experience of divinity, such as the face-to-face encounter with Dionysus at the end of Euripides’s play Bacchae.¹³ While such experiences do not bring any particular knowledge, they alter the way we perceive things. This explains why individuals would return to the mysteries multiple times. Repeat visits, after all, would make little sense if the point was merely to reveal a secret idea. If we apply this thinking to Symposium, the final revelation of beauty itself is not so much a new piece of knowledge as an intense experience. As with any intense experience (athletic, musical, theatrical, religious), we can say various things about the experience of beauty itself, but all such descriptions fall short. When it comes to human individuals, this reading suggests continuity between the various stages on the ascent. While Diotima talks about the ascent in terms of “steps” along the way, we should be careful not to get caught up on the idea of a ladder that we ascend and then discard. While talk of “Diotima’s ladder” is widespread, it does not appear in Symposium itself.¹⁴ Perhaps mountain climbing would be a better metaphor: the higher we go, the more we appreciate the view. To say we “look down on” the initial stages of the ascent is not to say that we want to replace them.¹⁵ Rather, we come to appreciate how each element fits within an ever more holistic picture.

The second context is the larger educational enterprise to which the symposium and the gymnasium belong. While romantic relationships provide the occasion for Diotima’s ascent, they need not be its focus: if Diotima does not spell out interpersonal relationships for people who have seen beauty itself, it may simply be because she is talking about something else.¹⁶ If the ascent is in fact the search for happiness, then to think that our happiness relies on another person is “deeply misguided,” even if that is the point of Aristophanes’s speech.¹⁷ The main thrust of Diotima’s speech is that the ascent to beauty is at every point creative. Whether it be the generation of fine speeches, laws, or virtues, Diotima describes the philosophical encounter with beauty in terms of pregnancy and creation. The ancient symposium and gym were spaces for intimate, caring relationships, which served as apprenticeships for aspiring citizens. The connections between this and Diotima’s ascent are clear. If people today tend not to think of intimate relationships as vehicles for improving self and partner, that may simply be a sign of our culture’s impoverished status compared to Diotima’s ideal.¹⁸

In sum, how we evaluate Diotima’s account of erōs rests in no small part on what we take that account of erōs to be. At the root of the scholarly debates are different assumptions about Plato’s understanding of goodness. Coleen Zoller contrasts “austere dualism,” according to which all goods are goods of the mind, and “normative dualism,” according to which bodily goods are accepted as real goods, albeit at a lower level than goods of the mind. Scholars typically assume that Plato has the former in mind. Zoller argues that the latter makes better sense of Plato’s writings, and puts his thought more squarely in line with current social justice movements.¹⁹ There is a related question about how we understand the vision of beauty as a highest good. Vlastos’s critique rests on the assumption that beauty is a highest good in the sense that it is valuable in itself and for no other reason. As a result, anything that leads us to the vision of beauty is a mere means, a step along the way. One response is that this is “a common (and correct) way of understanding Aristotle,” but not of Plato, who contrasts it with the idea that “the best goods are those we seek both for themselves and for their consequences.”²⁰ This supports a reading according to which “we are to live our lives in response to something superior to ourselves,” such as beauty itself, which deserves our “admiration, wonder, and devotion,” and provides a model for how we should live.²¹ To decide which way to go on these various interpretive questions, we can look at how a particular expert in the mysteries of love approaches relationships: Socrates. For this, we have one final speech.

Party Crasher: Symposium 212c-223d

Having brought us to this height of mystic revelation, and tied a neat philosophical bow on everything that came before, Socrates is interrupted by a ruckus outside. It turns out to be his own beloved, Alcibiades, who has been doing his own drinking. A lot of it. As a result, he does not even see Socrates at first and ends up startled to find himself sitting on a couch next to him. The two men interact like an old married couple, both of whom flirt with Agathon. Since it would not be civilized to drink in silence (214b), Alcibiades decides to give a speech in praise of Socrates, whom he roasts mercilessly.

At this point, the project of praising erōs seems to be derailed. Yet we must remember that this speech lets us glimpse how one member of a homoerotic relationship thinks about the other. In this particular case, Alcibiades is the younger, attractive, rich, and politically powerful beloved. Socrates is the older, ugly lover who usually dresses like a bum and has spent his life avoiding politics. Alcibiades compares him to a satyr. Everything else about their relationship is turned on its head. It is Alcibiades who pursues Socrates, wrestling with him at the gym, inviting him to dinner, and even plotting a sleepover. Alcibiades’s goal in all of this is to seduce Socrates into making Alcibiades a better man. Socrates is swayed by none of it, and Alcibiades’s ego is shattered as his advances are shot down.

What should we make of Socrates shunning Alcibiades’s beauty? On the one hand, Socrates refuses to engage in literal sexual intercourse. On the other hand, Socrates does not shut down their relationship. The two of them spend time together and do a lot of talking. Furthermore, Socrates plays the gadfly, getting Alcibiades to worry about improving his character. If anything, Socrates’s refusal to go along with Alcibiades’s plan advances this project. Alcibiades seems to think of virtue as something you can get via exchange; hence his plan to give his body to Socrates in exchange for virtue.²² Socrates knows better: virtue is something you need to develop for yourself, though mentors can help by providing models, asking questions, and getting you to put the work in. From this perspective, Socrates is giving Alcibiades what he is asking for, but it is a decidedly tough-love approach. (As a historical note, the actual Alcibiades had a notorious political career in which he repeatedly switched sides in Athens’s war with Sparta, profaned the Eleusinian mysteries by performing them in public, and, in a night of drunken mischief, desecrated several herms by breaking off their phalluses.)²³

Particulars of their relationship aside, this portrait of Socrates as a philosophical lover provides another way to confirm Diotima’s account of erōs. Just as Diotima did not hear the other speeches at Agathon’s party, Alcibiades did not hear Socrates’s retelling of Diotima’s speech. The cross-references are there nevertheless. To see the method of hypothesis at play, we must simply connect the dots.

If we work backward, Diotima’s speech provides answers to the questions sitting behind the previous five speeches. By making erōs an in-between thing, she answers Socrates’s question to Agathon regarding how erōs relates to beauty: erōs seeks to possess the good forever through various kinds of reproduction. This is a mortal way to engage with immortal reality. It provides the kind of stability that Aristophanes described in terms of wholeness. In practical terms, this is often done by imposing immortal proportions onto mortal bodies and their actions.²⁴Erōs’s constant striving casts Eryximachus’s focus on medicine in a new light. If we survey the mathematical arts of the day, arithmetic and geometry study static objects (numbers and shapes), while music and astronomy study objects that exist in time (sounds and the motions of the heavens). But this second pair was most often reduced to processes that were static across time (such as the relationship between pitches).²⁵ A physician’s work, by contrast, is never done. Like the other mathematical arts, medicine engages in immortal proportions, yet it does so in the most mortal of ways, tending to changes within the body and its environmental context through an “agonistic relationship” that forever strives for balance yet never secures it for long.²⁶ A philosophical lover-mentor will likewise always be consulting immortal ideas to care for his beloved.²⁷ In such a scheme, he must love ideas more than his beloved’s body or soul, but in the sense that immortal ideas provide the standard for shaping body and soul, not vice versa. This is not to shun the individual but to love him correctly. Insofar as the soul can actively engage with and impose these ideas on bodies, Diotima goes beyond Pausanias by giving a reason for valuing souls over bodies. These immortal ideas supply the ultimate standard for judging Phaedrus’s concerns for honor and shame. More importantly, Diotima’s idea that mortals can engage with immortal happiness by bringing their bodies, actions, character, and understanding into sync with immortal ideas provides a profound alternative to Phaedrus’s more traditional idea of living on through posthumous reputation.

If we work forward, Diotima’s theory is shown in practice via Alcibiades’s portrait of Socrates, especially the way Socrates engages with younger men. Socrates performs honorably in battle, yet without worrying about getting credit for it, thus embodying a more substantial approach to Phaedrus’s ideas about honor and shame. While he clearly enjoys the company of attractive younger men, he shoots down Alcibiades’s sexual advances for the sake of Alcibiades’s education, thus showing that he meets Pausanias’s criterion of loving souls more than bodies. While Socrates does not heed Eryximachus’s concern for moderate drinking, he is able to drink everyone else under the table without showing any signs of inebriation.²⁸ He is gregarious but also perfectly fine spending time lost in his own thoughts (compare Aristophanes’s concern for wholeness). And while he may not be as physically attractive as Agathon, all the men fall for him, as he devotes his life to engaging others in creative philosophical inquiry. In short, Socrates is at every position of Diotima’s ascent at once.²⁹

If Symposium has struck some scholars as short on arguments, it is because of the piecemeal way the text has been read.³⁰ Building on this insight, I suggest that Symposium’s argument is spread across all seven speeches, each of which fits into an organic progression shaped by the method of hypothesis. In the end, I take this argument to be provisional. Diotima’s ascent is about beauty itself. There is one more basic question to be asked: What is beauty itself? To this, Diotima does not give an answer but merely points the way. Still, not all provisional answers are equally valuable. If my reading is correct, we should judge Symposium’s overall account of love by how well the initial speeches uncover ever more basic questions and ring true to our lived experiences of erōs; by the extent to which Diotima’s account of erōs provides a useful framework for understanding those experiences; and by the extent to which Alcibiades’s presentation of Socrates provides an attractive model for us to emulate.

Symposium and Spiritual Exercise

Outside of religion, transcendence is not a common goal in life in the United States today. Thanks to various economic forces, worries about the here and now tend to eclipse any desire to step outside of time. The proliferation of social media has brought worries about reputation to levels unmatched since the age of chivalry. The main exception to this might be sports. One day while teaching Symposium, I rambled on about ecstatic experiences of great music only to see blank stares all around the classroom. Eventually one student raised her hand and asked, “Is it like when you get into a flow state swimming?” To which, I answered, “Yes!”

One thing our gyms have in common with their ancient counterparts is training. For us, as for the Greeks, the pursuit of athletic excellence is never-ending. Symposium invites us to see this familiar aspect of our lives in a new light, as an instance of the mortal pursuit of immortal beauty. And it challenges us to extend this pursuit to other parts of our lives, in particular to think about intimate relationships as a vehicle for the joint pursuit of excellence in all aspects of our lives. Symposium’s exploration of erōs, beauty, transcendence, and training provides a practice run for the much more elaborate project set out in Republic’s account of gym training’s role in pursuing mental and political health, to which we now turn.