The Symposium

I have a great little book I used during a philosophy course - I found that after reading some philosophers I was still a little confused over the points they were attempting to make. The book is Introducing Plato and this is what it says about The Symposium. I will paraphrase and make my comments in parentheses. "Symbosia" were after dinner drinking parties which usually involved games and entertainments of various kinds - this conversation is about the "true nature of love." The love they are talking about is homosexual love. For most males Athenians, heterosexual love was regarded as little more than an inferior procreative urge. Most Athenian women played very little part in public life and were confined to domestic duties. Marriage was not conceived of as a partnership between equals. (I would suggest that statements and beliefs such as these are why so many feminist scholars feel that reading the wisdom and scholarship of old, dead, white men is not only irrelevant to lives now, but is maddening as well - In our book p. 31 we read "Men whose bodies only are creative, betake themselves to women and beget children....But creative souls - for there are men who are more creative in their souls than in their bodies - conceive that which is proper for the soul to conceive or retain.")

Back to The Symposium, Nevertheless he (Plato) seems to have convinced himself that physical homosexual love could eventually be transformed into something transcendentally spiritual. Phaedrus begins by claiming that love is a good thing...It instills a sense of honor and self-sacrifice in individuals that experience it. Pausanias admits that love directed towards young boys and girls is merely the desire for sensual gratification. But when directed towards young men, it somehow becomes purer and nobler and results in life-long associations. Eryximachus insists that love is a cosmic force that constitutes the universe itself.
Aristophanes claims that everyone originally consisted of three genders - male, female, and hermaphroditic. As a punishment Zeus split everyone into single genders - so love is always the attempt to find one's own "lost half," whether male or female. Love is more than a quest for sexual gratification - it is the search for a lost self. (Ever see all those Hallmark cards for husbands and wives that refer to that person as "my better half?")

Agathon agrees that love is a kind of yearning: it moves towards an object of beauty which remains unpossessed. Socrates uses the story of Diotima, a woman of wisdom, who told him that love is the link between the sensible and spiritual worlds. If love is that which moves towards what is beautiful, and wisdom is beautiful, then love is the manifestation of the human soul seeking out the true wisdom of the Forms. (It would take a whole philosophy class to explain the Forms theory). True love must eventually evolve into a purely spiritual quest which embraces goodness and happiness. It is associated with the creative force that sustains all art and progress. A higher and nobler kind of homosexual love leaves behind the physical world of sensation, but it is not sterile because it procreates ideas and discoveries, and is one of the root causes of civilization itself. Alcibades brings the conversation down to a more human level. He tells of Socrates resisting Alcibades attempts to seduce him.

This helped clarify - wish I had read it before I read The Symposium, but I did go back and reread and could better appreciate what was being said. It still sounds like a bunch of guys going out for the evening drinking beer trying to impress each other with their vast knowledge.