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Humanities C1001-014: Masterpieces of Western Literature and Philosophy
Prof. Eileen Gillooly    

PROTOCOLS

#17: Symposium

Written by Jonathan Steiner and edited by Mike Suh

Background Info

            A symposium in Greek, literally means a drinking party.  But Plato’s Symposium takes the occasion of a drinking party first to praise Love and then to define it.  It is a philosophical dialogue, in which meaning is created in the exchange of words between the participants.  Each person in turn makes a speech.  There is no evidence that the symposium actually took place, and there is some speculation that at least the details of the occasion, if not the occasion itself, were Plato’s invention.  Keping this in mind, we may more easily see the artistic structure of Plato’s discourse on love.

 

Setting

            The Symposium takes place earlier than the tale that is being told.  In the prologue, Apollodrus tells an unnamed businessman friend about what he knows about a dinner in the distant past at Agathon’s home where the guests talked of love.  He begins by telling the unnamed friend that he previously was asked the same question by Glaucor, who had heard the story from Phoinix, who had heard it from Aristodemus- as had Apollodorus.  Apollodorus admits that he cannot remember all that he has been told, nor could Aristodemus but nevertheless will try to remember all that had happened.  This way of telling the story is like Herodotus and Thucydides who were not present at all of the events in their histories either.  In Plato, as in the historians, there is the admission (and, in Plato, the demonstration) that facts are received indirectly and by the transmission from one to another; in the process, some aspects are stressed, others lost.

 

Search for Truth

            What does the conversation show about truth?  That truth is the product of interpretation.  Truth and wisdom can only be reached through a lifelong process of studying.  As Diotima says, the teacher acts as midwife to the student in his birthing of ideas.  Wisdom can’t be reached through osmosis, although Agathon suggests that it can.  Education is not the act of being instilled with knowledge by another, but rather a slow progress (from the understanding of concrete particulars to abstract concepts).  If one has gone about this slow progress correctly one may “all of a sudden” get a glimpse of truth.  The truth is never experienced continuously, but as moments of epiphany- a sudden comprehension or perception of Truth.

 

Speakers and Conversation

            The dialogue form itself helps to illustrate the process by which knowledge is attained.  One speech builds on the others, rejecting some features, refining others, adding new ideas.

            The conversation moves from praising love, to defining love, to treating love as an object, then to discussing the lover, and finally to talking about love as an idea.  Love is eventually defined as pothos- unsatisfied longing- and then as a daimōs- a divine power or spirit, longing for good.

 

 

Phaedrus:

            Love governs instructional relations between boys and instructors.  He discusses the apprentice-tutor relationship, of how young men love their teachers in exchange for knowledge.  The boys should not enjoy the experience of sexual acts but should submit willingly.  Knowledge is passed down to the apprentice like semen.

 

Pausanias:

            One situation where man-boy love is honorable is where a boy accepts love when wisdom and virtue comes with it.  He points ot history instead of literature, drawing from his professional knowledge (Pausanias is a sociologist of sorts).  He eventually finds love only pure when it is between men and boys.

 

Eryximachus:

            Aristophanes was supposed to be the third speaker but he gets the hiccups.  This is a dramatic function as Eryximachus is over-dramatic and at times ridiculous, e.g. he inserts comments relating to his profession (doctor) as much as possible.  Eryximachus claims that medicine is the scientific study of the effect of love.  He states that uncontrolled passionate impulses lead to sickness.  His definition is narcissistic, more descriptive of himself than Love.  This re-ordering of speakers is fitting since the first group is then made up of professionals (rhetorician, sociologist, physician) who talk about the benefits of love.  The second group, which was made up of dramatists, speak about love as an idea.

 

Aristophanes:

            Aristophanes shifts the ground of discussion from defining love to trying to identify the origin of love and in doing so, he changes the definition of it as well.  He argued that people once had four legs, four arms; there were three different types of people: men, women, and hermaphrodites.  People were like a sphere, the perfect shape.  However, Zeus cut everybody into two pieces so as to weakn them.  As a result, people feel the separation of loss and love as desire for one’s missing self.  Notice how Aristophanes’s tale suggests the child’s separation from the mother at birth.

 

Agathon:

            Agathon is a Sophist as well as a tragic poet, and as such his discussion of love reveals his reliance on binary categories and the manipulation of rhetoric.  However, his claims and evidence don’t fit together.  He fails to prove that “love is just” and that “violence never touches love.”  He also argues unconvincingly that love is wise by saying it inspires poetry, and that love is “moderate and brave” by saying it’s powerful.

 

Socrates:

            Socrates is the only one whose “speech” is labeled by the text as a dialogue (Diotima’s speech is also a dialogue but isn’t labeled as such).  Socrates, returning to Aristophane’s point, gets Agathon to admit that love is not beauty but the desire for beauty.  He advances the idea that desire for love is identical to the desire for good.