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The vivid love-speeches of the Symposium come to us, reach us, through several layers of incomplete remembrance, and as though from a mythic past...

Symposium (or Drinking Party) by Plato, translated and edited by Eva Brann, Peter Kalkavage, and Eric Salem (Hackett, 2017)

Why hast thou nothing in thy face? Thou idol of the human race, Thou tyrant of the human heart, The flower of lovely youth that art; Yea, and that standest in thy youth, An image of eternal Truth..., Robert Bridges

The Symposium is one of Plato's most beloved and widely read dialogues. And no wonder: Its theme is Eros-erotic love, the all-consuming passion that has inspired countless poems, plays, novels, songs, operas and (in our day) movies. We turn to the works of great authors who have written about love to better understand both love and ourselves. Plato's Symposium and Phaedrus stand out as two of the greatest works on this topic. What is this passion that inspires, torments and consumes us? What causes it, and what does it want? Is there anything to the idea (which Plato appears to share with the poet Dante) that erotic love is somehow connected with the divine?

For the ancient Greeks, Eros was both the passion of love and the god Eros, who is closely associated with Aphrodite, the goddess of sexual delight. Death, Sleep, and Eros are all represented as human males with wings. Eros, however, grows younger with time. Early on, he is a winged youth; in classical times he recedes to early adolescence, while later on he is depicted as a little boy. At this point, he multiplies: swarms of Erotes, baby Cupids, now come on the scene. If the speakers in the Symposium are envisioning the Eros they are praising, he probably has the age and aspect of a paidika or boy-love-a winged one.

Homer does not speak of Eros as a god, but Hesiod calls him "the most beautiful among immortal gods, a limb-loosener who subdues the mind in the breast and the thoughtful counsel of all gods and all men."[1] In the poems of Hesiod and Parmenides, he is connected with cosmic beginnings, as several speakers in the Symposium attest. The great lyric poets of earlier generations, such as Sappho and Anacreon, sang, as such poets do, primarily of Love-though not to praise but to blame. Here is the kind of thing they typically said. First Sappho, their chief:

Once again, Eros, the limb-loosener churns me up-
A bittersweet, intolerable thing.[2]

Or, more brutally, Anacreon:

Once again, Eros, like a blacksmith, has whacked me
With his huge axe, and doused me in a wintry ditch.[3]

Later the tragedians chime in:

Eros, unconquerable in battle! You, Eros who fall on our possessions!...
He who has you within is mad.
You twist the hearts of the just to be unjust-to their ruin.[4]

For these poets, the god, whose name is a passion, is a power not to be praised but to be feared: "Oh no, not again!" So the somewhat effetely civilized dinner company in Plato's dialogue will be trying not so much to fill in a blank as to reverse a fiercely knowledgeable poetic tradition about Eros.[5]

Love's blame is the unstated background of the Symposium, where formal speeches of praise replace (almost) Socratic conversation. The speakers, who have gathered at Agathon's house to celebrate this young poet's first triumph, set out to extol Eros as the divine cause of our greatest happiness. Socrates, who claims to know nothing but "erotica" or love-matters (177D), agrees to be part of this program but in his speech makes a dramatic change.

Through a no doubt fictional love teacher, he presents Love not as a god but as a daemon or spirit that is intermediate between gods and humans, the immortal and the mortal. This is the central teaching of the Symposium: Eros, as the desire for a vision of the Beautiful Itself, is an in-between being, in Greek, a metaxy ti.

The Symposium has a complex narrative frame that captures the real-life difficulties of transmission. The dialogue begins in mid-conversation, as Apollodorus, a follower of Socrates, tells an unnamed comrade that he's not "unpracticed" in remembering what the comrade wants to hear: The love-speeches that were given at a drinking party at Agathon's house. Apollodorus is not unpracticed because just the other day another friend, Glaucon, had asked him the same thing, and he obliged. Apollodorus was not himself present at the party but heard about it from someone who was-Aristodemus, another of Socrates' followers. Apollodorus admits that neither he nor his informant could remember everything that was said (178A). And so, the vivid love-speeches of the Symposium come to us, reach us, through several layers of incomplete remembrance, and as though from a mythic past.

After an amusing story about how Aristodemus ended up going to the party at Socrates' invitation, Apollodorus recalls Aristodemus' account of what happened at Agathon's house. The seriously hungover guests and their host forego the customary heavy drinking to give formal speeches in honor of the god Eros, whose praise, they think, has been strangely neglected. In order of their speeches, the men are Phaedrus, who gives the company their theme; Pausanias, a follower of the sophists and Agathon's lover; Eryximachus, the doctor in the house and master of ceremonies; Aristophanes, Athens' most famous comic playwright; Agathon (whose name means "good"), the famously beautiful and recently victorious young tragedian; and the philosopher Socrates, who refutes Agathon's claims about Love and then reports what he learned about Love from a prophetess named Diotima. Finally, there is the party-crasher, Alcibiades-Athens' brilliant statesman, general, and bad boy. He breaks into the party drunk and gives a speech praising not the god Eros but the godlike Socrates. After Alcibiades exposes what he takes to be the real Socrates, whom he alone has seen, revelers arrive and heavy drinking puts a stop to speech-making. The narration ends with Socrates drinking everybody under the table and trying to persuade the tragedian Agathon and the comedian Aristophanes that the same man should be able to write both tragedy and comedy. After they fall asleep and morning dawns, an unfazed Socrates goes off to spend the rest of his day as usual before going home to take his rest.

Agathon won at the Lenaea, a winter festival of Dionysus, which took place early in 416 BCE, sometime in January/February. This gives us the dramatic date of the drinking party recalled by Apollodorus.[6] Other important events and dates for the Symposium include the beginning of the war between Athens and Sparta in 431, the Sicilian expedition (which proved disastrous for Athens) in 415-413, and the trial and execution of Socrates in 399. When the reported symposium is taking place, Socrates (born 469) is fifty-three and Alcibiades (born 451) is thirty-five. Agathon (born around 445 or a little earlier) is about thirty.[7]

A more extensive discussion of the Symposium appears after the translation in our interpretive essay. For now, we propose the following basic points that readers should keep in mind as they make their way through the dialogue:

"Love" translates the Greek noun Erôs, which can refer to either the god of erotic love or the love-passion itself.

Erotic love between males is presented, with more or less emphasis, as higher than other erotic loves. (This should not prevent readers from asking how what is said about Eros applies to all forms of erotic attachment.)

The dramatic details have philosophic and not merely literary importance.

The dialogue is about erotic love, but it is also about rhetoric, especially the rhetoric of praise-the so-called encomium or panegyric.

Poetry and myth are recurring themes, along with comedy and tragedy.

The speeches are strongly influenced by the sophists, professional teachers who wandered from city to city and traded learning for pay.

Each speaker has his own theology.

Each speech, in addition to having a distinctive content or teaching, has its own character, style, tone, and vocabulary- its own "vibe."

The order of the speeches is important, and the reader must regularly search out possible connections between any one speech and all the others.

The Symposium is one of Plato's most visual dialogues. The reader must imagine, as the characters deliver their love- speeches, that they do so not from a standing position but reclining on couches, leaning on the left elbow with the right hand free to do whatever.

Finally, no one Platonic dialogue gives a comprehensive treatment of its apparent topic, or of the philosopher, or of the Whole that the philosopher seeks to Apart from our never hearing Plato in the dialogues but only his characters, each dialogue focuses on certain aspects of philosophy or philosophic topics and downplays or neglects others. Socrates' account of Eros in the Symposium differs significantly from that in the Phaedrus. Moreover, his inspired account of a philosophic "ascent" in the Symposium, unlike the one he gives in the , makes no mention of mathematics as another, perhaps complementary, daimôn or mediator between mortal opinion and immortal truth, or even of dialectic.

In preparing this edition of the Symposium, we consulted a wide range of translations. Especially helpful were those by Seth Benardete, M.C. Howatson, and W.R.M. Lamb. We also regularly consulted the excellent German version by Friedrich Schleiermacher. Our goal was to devise a translation that was as faithful as possible to the Greek original in vocabulary and syntax, and that captured the playfulness of the interchanges and the varying tones of the formal speeches. We hope that our readers, as they reflect on what is said in the Symposium about love and other matters, will experience the sheer pleasure of reading-if only in translation-this astonishing product of Plato's incomparable art.

This essay is excerpted from Hackett Publishing Company's (March 2017) edition of the Symposium and is published by permission of the publisher. The Imaginative Conservative applies the principle of appreciation to the discussion of culture and politics-we approach dialogue with magnanimity rather than with mere civility. Will you help us remain a refreshing oasis in the increasingly contentious arena of modern discourse? Please consider donating now.

Notes:

[1] 120 ff. 2 Fr. 130.

[2] Fr. 130.

[3] Fr. 413.

[4] Sophocles, 781 ff.

[5] The poetic indictment of Love accords with the philosophic critique of Eros in the , where Socrates says that Eros "has from old been called a tyrant" (9.573B).

[6] The narration occurs around 402, since Agathon moved to Macedonia in 407 and the dialogue took place "years" after that but before his death in 401 (172C).

[7] Among those present at Agathon's party, Phaedrus and Agathon are the youngest (Phaedrus was born around 444), and Alcibiades the oldest (after Socrates).

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Plato's "Symposium": Beguiling Eros ~ The Imaginative Conservative

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The vivid love-speeches of the Symposium come to us, reach us, through several layers of incomplete remembrance, and as though from a mythic past... Symposium (or Drinking Party) by Plato, translated and edited by Eva Brann, Peter Kalkavage, and Eric Salem (Hackett, 2017) Why hast thou nothing in thy face?

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[Article updated on 7 September 2017]

He whom love touches not walks in darkness. -Plato

Whereas Aristotle is not nearly as interested in erotic love ( erôs) as he is in friendship ( philia), for Plato the best kind of friendship is that which lovers can have for each other. It is a philia that is born out of erôs, and that in turn feeds back into erôs to strengthen and to develop it.

Like philosophy itself, erôs aims at transcending human existence, at connecting it with the eternal and infinite, and thereby at achieving the only species of immortality that is open to us as human beings. Not only does philia strengthen and develop erôs, but it also transforms it from a lust for possession into a shared desire for a higher level of understanding of the self, the other, and the universe. In short, philia transforms erôs from a lust for possession into an impulse for philosophy.

As Nietzsche put it in his book of 1882, The Gay Science,

Here and there on earth we may encounter a kind of continuation of love in which this possessive craving of two people for each other gives way to a new desire and lust for possession-a shared higher thirst for an ideal above them. But who knows such love? Who has experienced it? Its right name is friendship.

In other words, if erotic love can be transformed into the best kind of friendship, then it can open up a blissful life of shared understanding in which desire, friendship, and philosophy are in perfect resonance with one another.

Plato's theory of love is fleshed out in the Phaedrus and the Symposium. Like many Greeks of his era and social position, Plato is most interested in the same- sex desire that can exist between an older and a younger man, but there is no reason to suppose that his theory of love does not also apply to other kinds of erotic relationship. That having been said, Plato distinguishes the kind of love that can give rise to philia from a baser kind of love that is enjoyed by those who are more given to the body than to the soul. Rather than underpin the search for truth, this baser kind of love is almost designed to impede it, and calls into my mind the song of Fanny Crowne in Aldous Huxley's dystopian novel of 1932, Brave New World. In this song, Fanny Crowne compares love to soma, a hallucinogenic drug that has been engineered to take users on enjoyable, hangover-free 'holidays', and that is described as having 'all the advantages of Christianity and alcohol [but] none of their defects'.

Hug me till you drug me, honey; Kiss me till I'm in a coma:
Hug me, honey, snugly bunny; Love's as good as soma.

In the Phaedrus, Socrates says that, although madness can be an illness, it can also be the source of man's greatest blessings. There are four forms of such 'divine madness', prophecy from Apollo, holy prayers and mystic rites from Dionysus, poetry from the Muses, and-the highest form-love from Aphrodite and Eros. The madness of love arises from seeing the beauty of the earth and being reminded of true, universal beauty. Unfortunately, most earthly souls are so corrupted by the body, 'that living tomb which we carry about', that they lose all memory for the universals. When their eyes fall upon the beauty of the earth, they are merely given over to pleasure, and 'like a brutish beast' rush on to enjoy and beget. In contrast, the earthly soul that is able to remember true, universal beauty and so to feel true love gazes upon the face of his beloved and reverences it as an expression of the divine-of temperance, justice, and knowledge absolute. As his eyes catch those of his beloved, a shudder passes into an unusual heat and perspiration. The parts of the soul out of which the wings grew, and which had hitherto been closed and rigid, begin to melt open, and small wings begin to swell and grow from the root upwards.

Like a child whose teeth are just starting to grow in, and its gums are all aching and itching-that is exactly how the soul feels when it begins to grow wings. It swells up and aches and tingles as it grows them.

The lover feels the utmost joy when he is with his beloved and the most intense longing when they are separated. When they are separated, the parts out of which the lover's wings are growing begin to dry out and close up, and the pain is such that he prizes his beloved above all else, utterly unable to think a bad thought about him, let alone to betray or forsake him. The lover whose soul was once the follower of Zeus among all the other gods seeks out a beloved who shares in his god's philosophical and imperial nature, and then does all he can to confirm this nature in him. Thus, the desire of the divinely inspired lover can only be fair and blissful to the beloved. In time, the beloved, who is no common fool, comes to realize that his divinely inspired lover is worth more to him than all his other friends and kinsmen put together, and that neither human discipline nor divine inspiration could have offered him any greater blessing.

Thus great are the heavenly blessings which the friendship of a lover will confer upon you ... Whereas the attachment of the non-lover, which is alloyed with a worldly prudence and has worldly and niggardly ways of doling out benefits, will breed in your soul those vulgar qualities which the populace applaud, will send you bowling round the earth during a period of nine thousand years, and leave you a fool in the world below.

There is in terms of the ideas covered quite a lot of overlap between the Phaedrus and the Symposium. However, whereas in the Phaedrus Plato emphasizes the relationship that love has to the divine and hence to the eternal and infinite, in the Symposium he emphasizes more the relationship that it has to the practice of philosophy, the search for happiness, and the contemplation of truth.

In the Symposium, Socrates argues that, if love is not of nothing, then it is of something, and if it is of something, then it is of something that is desired, and therefore of something that is not possessed. He then relates a conversation that he once had with a priestess called Diotima of Mantinea, from whom he learned the art of love. Diotima ('honoured by the gods') told him that the something that love desires but does not possess consists of extremely beautiful and extremely good things, and particularly of wisdom, which is both extremely beautiful and extremely good. Love, said Diotima, must not be confused with the object of love, which, in contrast to love itself, is perfectly beautiful and perfectly good. If love desires but does not possess beautiful and good things, then love cannot, as most people think, be a god. Love is in truth the child of Poverty and Resource, always in need, but always inventive. He is not a god but a great spirit ( daimon) who intermediates between gods and men. As such, he is neither mortal nor immortal, neither wise nor ignorant, but a lover of wisdom ( philosophos). No one who is wise wants to become wise, so too no one who is ignorant wants to become wise. 'For herein is the evil of ignorance, that he who is neither good nor wise is nevertheless satisfied with himself: he has no desire for that of which he feels no want.' The aim of loving beautiful and good things is to possess them, because the possession of beautiful and good things is happiness, and happiness is an end-in-itself.

Diotima then told Socrates of the proper way to learn to love beauty. A youth should first be taught to love one beautiful body so that he comes to realize that this beautiful body shares beauty with other beautiful bodies, and thus that it is foolish to love just one beautiful body. In loving all beautiful bodies, he learns to appreciate that the beauty of the soul is superior to the beauty of the body, and begins to love those who are beautiful in soul regardless of whether they are also beautiful in body. Once he has transcended the physical, he gradually finds that beautiful practices and customs and the various kinds of knowledge also share in a common beauty. Finally, he is able to experience beauty itself, rather than the various apparitions of beauty. By exchanging the various apparitions of virtue for virtue itself, he gains immortality and the love of the gods. This is why love is so important, and why it deserves so much praise.

For Aristotle, happiness involves the exercise of reason because the capacity to reason is the distinctive function of human beings. However, it could be argued that the distinctive function of human beings is not the capacity to reason but the capacity to form meaningful, loving relationships. Plato reconciles these positions by blending desire, friendship, and philosophy into a single total experience that transcends and transforms human existence and that connects it with the timeless and universal truths of the eternal and infinite. For Plato, truth and authenticity are a higher value than either reason or love, which aim at them, and a higher value even than happiness, which is merely the manifestation of their presence.

Neel Burton is author of The Meaning of Madness, The Art of Failure: The Anti Self-Help Guide, Hide and Seek: The Psychology of Self-Deception, Heaven and Hell: The Psychology of the Emotions, and other books.
Find Neel Burton on Twitter and Facebook

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Article updated on 7 September 2017] He whom love touches not walks in darkness. -Plato Whereas Aristotle is not nearly as interested in erotic love ( erôs) as he is in friendship ( philia), for Plato the best kind of friendship is that which lovers can have for each other.

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Modern thinking about love tries to tame it: to exclude its elements of risk, self-abandon, and its challenges to self-transcendence. It seeks to demythologize love's dimensions of wonder and gratitude so that they are reduced to problems to be diagnosed with a medical vocabulary and managed by public policies. We alternately boil romance down to sex acts and the body, rarefy it to an unbounded spirit of free affectivity, or isolate it as a closed, private world of comfort concerning no one but the two lovers.

In all this it resembles the old thinking-or most of it.

And as David K. O'Connor shows us in this inspiring and brilliantly argued book, the ancient and modern worlds both know enough about love to recognize that it, like C. S. Lewis's lion Aslan, is neither safe nor tame but certainly good. This recognition, however, leads us to flee from or attempt to contain its dangers. We shy from accepting Eros as a strange god who invites us to be drawn out of ourselves, to enter into a sacred mystery in response to which we may be transformed. Like the ancient Athenian general Alcibiades, we fear that, for all our native abilities, we may fail the challenge. Better to pretend that the mystery is an illusion and the challenge no more than wishful thinking.

The problem is that Eros will not just go away; if we lock him out at the door, he will fly in through the window. O'Connor's aim is to "unsettle" our thinking about love only because our thinking is so often hilariously inadequate to our living. We "perform a comedy when we avoid love even as we pursue it," he writes, and "we create a tragedy when we reject love and destroy it even while we demand it."

Like Socrates, O'Connor wants to force us to see what we have willfully overlooked, and he challenges us to embrace the fullness of love, in its comic and tragic scope, because it is a kind of "barefoot philosophy." That is, if we come to recognize the truth about love, we will not become trained aficionados of an arcane discipline. Rather, we will discover the truth about ourselves and live, perhaps, more dangerously and, without question, more fully.

Most readers do not keep books of philosophy on their shelves. I think they will want this one, however. O'Connor's argument is not a new one, but an ancient one made sinuously responsive to modern culture. So, also, is his mode of argument ancient. Like his acknowledged master, Plato, he proceeds by way of myth and storytelling, by a kind of conversational reflection and inquiry that invites us to wander with him, to be puzzled, and to marvel at what is most startling about what we thought we already knew.

Plato's Bedroom, at one level, consists of O'Connor's patient and exciting retelling of the stories in Plato's two great dialogues on love, the Symposium and the Phaedrus. He gives us a seat in Agathon's house, as the noble Athenians offer their inadvertently revealing speeches on the nature of love. He lets us walk with Socrates and Phaedrus out in the countryside as they read their own speeches on what it means to fall in love. At each turn in these dialogues, O'Connor highlights a problem that any would-be lover must someday confront and then explores it through works of modern art and literature.

We already know that love has depths our "medicalized vocabulary" about it cannot express, but we do not always recognize how its complex roots interweave with everything in our lives. In the first chapter, O'Connor leads us into the worlds of Atom Egoyan's film Exotica and Andre Dubus's short story "Falling in Love" to remind us how various, gnawing, and frightening love can be. We think it is a simple matter of lust-until the moment, like a potion, love transforms our lives into something wilder, stranger, and more true.

In his subsequent chapters, O'Connor reflects on the various tricks human beings have of trying to reduce, or even to kill, love. Like the early speakers in the Symposium, we may try to pretend that love is simple and subject to our control precisely because we are afraid that love reveals how badly we all need to be needed (illustrated here with Woody Allen's Hannah and Her Sisters). Like Lysias in the Phaedrus, we may conclude that it is something so violent and unruly that we are better off killing it. That is just what Othello does to Desdemona, as O'Connor convincingly shows: He kills his beloved not so much because he is jealous of her infidelities but because he is jealous of his own individual freedom.

But love comes back. We cannot forever resist the emptiness in ourselves that demands to be filled by another. We want to be made whole. What, we ask, will do that? The one we love? Yes. But that will not suffice. Plato's Agathon claims that love is an "overflowing fullness of the human heart." The desire not only to cleave to another but to "give birth in beauty" to new life, to new ideas and new works, is no mere ornament to love but of its very essence. So much we already know, writes O'Connor, not only because we have read Genesis and the Gospel of Matthew but because we sense that the whole excitement of love comes from its "openness to the sacred." We feel that the meaning of our lives grows out of it.

To fall in love, and to be loved, is not simply to be made whole, as if one were then complete and content. We do not want to be content. We want to be good. In Socrates' great speech in the Symposium, he teaches us that love entails becoming better than we are, remolding ourselves so that we may be worthy of the absolute dimensions of reality. But this leads us to a confrontation with just that aspect of love we may have been most tempted to avoid: We may fail to live up to the image of ourselves that the one who loves us proposes.

So may we also fail to account for the fullness of those dimensions, leaving behind the particular beauty of this peculiar person who loves us for what Socrates calls the "great sea" of Beauty Itself.

O'Connor is a master storyteller who, like Plato, is at his best when retelling and revealing the depths of others' stories. His manner of weaving ancient and modern thought together alone suffices to make us lonely, "medicalized" moderns feel part of a greater drama. And his warm, disarming style will seduce even the most cynical reader into undertaking the long walk toward wisdom with snub-nosed, barefoot Socrates.

James Matthew Wilson teaches at Villanova. His latest book is The Fortunes of Poetry.

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Modern thinking about love tries to tame it: to exclude its elements of risk, self-abandon, and its challenges to self-transcendence. It seeks to demythologize love's dimensions of wonder and gratitude so that they are reduced to problems to be diagnosed with a medical vocabulary and managed by...

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Plato on Friendship and Eros (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

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Plato discusses love ( erôs) and friendship ( philia) primarily in two dialogues, the Lysis and the Symposium, though the Phaedrus also adds significantly to his views.