Symposium - AIC

Richard Stalley
will obey (441e-442b). Sōphrosunē will consist in an agreement and harmony among the parts,
whereby appetite and spirit willingly accept the rule of reason (442c-d). There is an important link
between the order and harmony of the soul and that of music, but it is not to be understood, in
Eryximachus’s way, as a balance between opposites. The key point is that reason must be in control.
Only then can the soul as a whole and its individual parts achieve their good.
Eryximachus concludes his speech by commenting that, while love in general is all powerful,
the love that is concerned with the things that are good and is ‘completed with justice and temperance
(sōphrosunē )’ has the greatest power and creates happiness community and friendship among men
and gods (188d). But he has done very little to explain what makes things good, nor why the love of
them creates friendship rather than competition, envy and greed. Nor has he explained how justice and
sōphrosunē enter into the picture.
On the surface, at least, neither Aristophanes nor Agathon recognise the need for restraint in
love matters. But both their speeches remind the reader that love can be a source of moral danger.
According to Aristophanes, lovers are seeking their missing ‘halves’. But Zeus split human beings in
two because of their hubristic behaviour. So it looks as though the reunion of the halves might make
them disruptive once again. Agathon sees love as spreading peace and happiness wherever it goes.
But Plato has given him a speech which reminds readers why sexual desires can pose a particular
threat to sōphrosunē. Love insinuates itself unnoticed into our souls, preferring those which are soft
and malleable to those that are hard and tough. But Agathon claims that, since it does not use force, it
is just and temperate. As evidence of Love’s bravery he refers to Ares’ scandalous love affair with
Aphrodite. This is supposed to show that even the god of war can be overcome by love but it might
equally serve as proof that love undermines sōphrosunē. So Agathon turns features that reveal the
moral danger of Love into arguments for its virtue. His speech is Gorgianic, not only in its language,
as Socrates suggests (198b-199b), but also in its paradoxical arguments. We may recall that in the
Gorgias Plato depicts oratory, which aims at pleasure rather than the good, as the enemy of
sōphrosunē.
It is tempting to assume that Socrates is Plato’s philosophical mouthpiece and that his speech
must therefore contain the solution to the problems raised in the dialogue. In some respects that
approach looks promising. The lack of an adequate conception of the good prevented Pausanias and
Eryximachus from giving satisfactory accounts of sōphrosunē. In Socrates’ speech, on the other hand,
Diotima makes it clear that the ascent of love involves a gradual development in one’s understanding
of the good. Those who make significant progress on that ascent will, doubtless, display the attributes
associated with sōphrosunē. They will, for example, be above the temptation to over-indulge in drink
or sex. This is possible, not because they have suppressed their desires but, rather, because they have
reshaped them and redirected them towards the beautiful and the good. They have achieved selfknowledge
because they understand the nature of their desires and their proper place in the economy
of the soul. Socrates himself has evidently achieved at least part of this ascent. So we can see the
Diotima section as describing an ideal sōphrosunē which is, in part at least, exemplified in the
dialogue by the figure of Socrates.
There is some truth in this picture but it cannot be the whole truth. The ascent to the beautiful
apparently requires powers that are almost divine. Socrates learns about it from an imaginary priestess
who has demonstrated divine power by postponing the Athenian plague (201d). She argues that Love
is himself a semi-divine daemon who mediates between gods and men. In order to embark on the
ascent one needs guidance which, presumably can be provided only by someone like Diotima herself.
No doubt this explains Socrates’ lack of success in improving Alcibiades’ character. More
prosaically we may notice that Diotima says nothing about inner conflict or about the need to restrain
unruly desires. Nor does she say anything about the way in which ordinary men and women might
achieve some kind of virtue. So while the Symposium, as a whole, emphasises that we are embodied
beings with desires that may need restraint, Diotima seems to envisage a ‘heavenly’ virtue which has
little to do with the lives of ordinary mortals. By allowing Alcibiades to have the last word, Plato
warns us that Socrates has not provided a definitive answer to the problems raised in the dialogue.
To find a more rounded answer we must look back at the speeches of Pausanias and,
particularly, Eryximachus. The latter is well aware that we have desires which should not be satisfied.
Virtue consists in replacing the discord in our souls with order and harmony. In this respect virtue is
to the soul what health is to the body. Eryximachus is unable to weld these ideas into a coherent
account, but they are all to be found elsewhere in Plato, most notably in the Republic. There the good
and healthy condition of the soul is one in which the appetites and the desire for honour follow the
direction of reason. This can come about only if children need are brought up in the right kind of
environment and receive the right kind of education in music and gymnastics. But that alone is not
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