Due Feb 25
Socrates’ Higher Vision of Love
Reading: Plato, Symposium, 32-77.
Writing: Respond to ONE of the following prompts. Keep your response short, posting as a reply under the appropriate heading in the comments section:
- Agathon offers a glimpse of the rhetorical style practiced among by trained Sophists—those paid teachers of oratory against whom Socrates defined himself. Focus our attention on a particular phrase or turn of logic and say what you like about it—or perhaps what you find distasteful.
- Socrates refuses to “play the game” and give a proper speech. Instead, he interrogates Agathon. Pointing to particulars, what does this move allow the philosopher to do? Does he accomplish something special, or does he simply sidestep the challenge of giving a speech in praise of Love?
- Some of you likely noticed the odd absence of women in this dialogue. Yet the crowning speech is given by a wise woman, Diotima. Pointing to particulars, how does her style of speech or her thinking differ from those of the men who preceded Socrates?
- The dialogue ends with Alcibiades’ drunken entrance. He, too, gives a speech, but his is in praise of Socrates. Pointing to particulars, how does his speech stand in relation to the earlier ones? Does it clash with them? Or harmonize in some way?
Agathon’s Sophistry
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Socrates Does His Own Thing
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Socrates not giving a proper speech, and instead interrogating Agathon allows Socrates to redefine the argument of what love really is. When he asks “is Love such that he is love of something, or is he love of nothing?” it leads to a long conversation where it leads to showing Agathon’s defenition of love has lots of holes in it.
By refusing to give a proper encomium, Socrates shifts the centralized focus from performance to truth. Although Agathon gave a rhetorically sophisticated speech regarding what love looks like, Socrates narrows the scope down to focusing on what love is. This move of interrogation allows him to engage in “dialectic” to prove the inconsistencies in Agathon’s argument while simultaneously getting him to agree that their is a “love of something” (141 Online Vers), to prove that someone only desires something that they lack.
Diotima: A Woman’s Perspective?
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Diotima is very different from the men because she says Love is not a perfect god. She tells Socrates that Love is actually “in between” everything. For example, Love is in the middle of being wise and being ignorant (p. 46). She says if you are already wise, you don’t need Love, and if you are stupid, you don’t want it. She also mentioned the men only talk about handsome bodies, but Diotima says the real goal is to “Reproduction and birth in beauty” (p. 53). This means we use Love to climb up from physical bodies to beautiful souls, and finally to the “Form of Beauty.” She is the only one who says love is for making wisdom and virtue.
Diotima, being the only female voice, brought something new to the conversation with her male counterparts. While all the men who preceded her talked about Love with praise, Diotima began her speech by questioning that assumption. Diotima says, “‘As the son of Poros and Penia, his [Love] lot in life is set to be like theirs…he’s far from being delicate and beautiful (as ordinary people think he is); instead, he is tough and shriveled and shoeless and homeless…on his father’s side he is a schemer after the beautiful and the good; he is brave, impetuous, and intense'” (Diotima 48). She doesn’t blindly follow the assumption that a god is automatically great, rather she takes the time to construct a basis for the perspective that gods, especially Love, are more complex in their origin. Diotima’s speech takes on a more analytical approach that sets her apart from the speeches of the men who preceded her.
Alcibiades’ Speaks in Praise of Socrates
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What surprised me most in Alcibiades’ speech was how he described his emotional vulnerability towards Socrates, admitting that “Yes, he makes me feel ashamed (Plato 67). This stood out to me because love was portrayed as uplifting, yet in this instance, it causes discomfort and self-criticism. It showed that for Alcibiades, love isn’t just admiration, but a force that exposes flaws and causes personal reflection.