Symposium - AIC

Thomas M. Tuozzo
Socrates’ reanalysis of desire here as essentially future-related anticipates Diotima’s analysis
of the temporality of the soul in the lesser mysteries. The desire of the rich to be rich is a desire for the
future possession of wealth; it presumably prompts continued business activity, to replace the
necessary outflow caused by the expenditures of a lavish lifestyle. So too the desire of the strong to be
strong is a desire to maintain physical strength; it prompts continued physical exercise, to counteract
the deconditioning effects of time. Oddly, however, when Socrates returns to the question of Love’s
relation to its object, he neglects the possibility he has just sketched for these two cases. He argues
that since Love is desire of beauty, it must lack beauty, and similarly with the good. But his examples
suggest a different possibility: that love is beautiful, but its hold on beauty, like the rich man’s hold on
wealth, is precarious, and requires work. And this is the view that Diotima develops in the lesser
mysteries.
Diotima’s Teachings, First Round
In the first round of Diotimian lectures Socrates reports, Diotima elaborates the notion that Love is a
daimon, midway between gods and mortals, and so occupies a middle position between beauty and
ugliness, goodness and badness, wisdom and ignorance. 3 Diotima then turns to the question of what
the lover gets out of the possession of beautiful things. Construed along the model of the rich person’s
desiring wealth in order to be rich, the answer would be: the lover becomes beautiful. The
unsatisfactoriness of that answer perhaps explains why Socrates does not give it. In fact, he is unable
to come up with any answer at all. At this point Diotima broadens the discussion by making the love
that is concerned with beauty into one species of the general desire for good things, whose goal is
happiness, and which all humans share. She gives other species of this generic love for happiness:
people pursue it “through money-making (chrêmatismon), or athletics (philogumnasian), or
philosophy (philosophian)” (205d3-5). The examples of money-making and athletics recall Socrates’
earlier examples of the rich person and the strong person, whose happiness would consist in being
wealthy and being strong. Diotima does not here explain how philosophy counts as way of pursuing
happiness, but instead turns back to the specific version of love concerned with beautiful things.
Given the philosophical version of this specific love that Diotima develops in the greater
mysteries, we are probably meant to identify the two.
After explaining the general desire for happiness of which specific love concerned with
beauty is one version, Diotima turns back to an analysis of this latter. 4 She first relates a possible
account of specific love that she thinks is wrong: namely, what we know to be the Aristophanic
account of love as a search for one’s other half. This view of specific love is rejected because it
violates the condition that generic love sets for all its different species: they must be ways of pursuing
the good. Diotima then offers her own account: the characteristic activity of specific love is “giving
birth in the beautiful, in both body and soul” (206b7-8). When Diotima introduces this account, she
does not explain how giving birth in the beautiful constitutes possession of the good (which, as a form
of generic love, it must do). Rather she concentrates on the role of the beautiful, vividly describing
how it fosters reproduction (and how ugliness impedes it). She then draws a lesson for generic love
from her account of specific love: it is for immortality as well as for the good. 5 Now since generation
is the only way mortal things have of pursuing immortality, and generation is always in the beautiful,
it might seem that “giving birth in the beautiful” is the definition of the generic love of happiness. I do
not think this can be right. Diotima nowhere indicates that acquiring wealth or physical strength is a
form of self-reproduction or of giving birth, or that it is a response to beauty. While all desire for
happiness is desire for immortal happiness, only specific love actually involves reproduction. This
explains why reason specific love is singled out with the name “love,” which (according to Diotima)
3 She first offers a static conception of this midway condition (e.g., offering “right opinion” as midway between wisdom and
ignorance), and the replaces it with a dynamic one (philosophy as the midway position, consisting in the continual working
at acquiring wisdom).
4 Surprisingly, some commentators deny that this is so; see, for example, Rowe (1998) and Sheffield (2006). The parallels
between 205d and 206b seem to me to tell heavily in favor of the view that the latter passage is concerned with specific love.
See allêi trepomenai ~ tina tropon; eran kalountai ~ erôs kaloito; espoudakotes ~ spoudê. Rowe’s objection, that the activity
of specific love is obviously sex, neglects the rejection of that answer already in Aristophanes’ speech (192d), implicitly
endorsed by Diotima’s rejection of Aristophanes’ own answer at 205d.
5 Diotima’s reasoning here has generally raised eyebrows, but it is a rather natural way of developing the point, earlier made,
that all desire is for possessing something in the future. In order to possess something in the future, one must exist then. One
natural way of dealing with this fact is to include one’s future existence in the content of the wish: one does not only wish to
eat a good meal tonight, one also wishes to be there to eat it. The alternate possibility is to make every desire a conditional
one: “I wish, in case I am alive tonight, to have a good meal.” While both alternatives are possible, it strikes me that the one
Diotima chooses is a reasonably intuitive one (although it is true she does not explicitly argue for it against the alternative).
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