Symposium - AIC

Thomas M. Tuozzo
as the lover pregnant in soul learns to appreciate first the beauty of bodily form as a whole, and then
the beauty of soul and its sources in beautiful customs and laws, and then the source of their beauty in
the sciences and, ultimately, the Beautiful Itself. 11 The focus is on the change in the beauty
contemplated, not (until the very end) in the change in offspring that results from it. Indeed, there is
no reason to doubt that Diotima’s account, in the lesser mysteries, of the persistence of knowledge
through study is applicable also to the lover’s dealings with the sciences in the greater mysteries. 12
Even when the soul has seen the Form of the Beautiful, such knowledge as it acquires will
still be subject to the conditions of temporality that characterize the being of the soul. It will still need
to practice (meletan) to retain its knowledge. But in Diotima’s account of the greater mysteries we
learn something important about that practice: it involves contemplating the Form of the Beautiful.
Diotima gives two descriptions of the experience of the Beautiful Itself. The first emphasizes the
value of the experience, and does not mention any resulting product: “Here in life, said the visitor
from Mantinea, if anywhere, is it worth living for a human being, contemplating the beautiful itself”
(211d1-3). The second description, however, which serves as the finale of Diotima’s teaching as a
whole, emphasizes the birth and rearing of true virtue:
Do you think it’s a base life, she said, if a person turns his gaze in that direction and contemplates that
[beauty] with the appropriate faculty, and is able to be with it? Or do you not realize, she said, that it
is there alone that it will belong to him to bring to birth not phantoms of virtue, since he is not
grasping a phantom, but true virtue, since he is grasping what is true? And that when he has given
birth to true virtue and has raised it, it belongs to him to be a friend of the gods, and, to him, if to any
human being, to be immortal? (211e4-212a7)
It has been suggested that we should read this second description in terms of the first: the only
“virtue” produced is knowledge of the Beautiful Itself, which is nothing other than the activity of
contemplation. 13 I think it much more likely that we are to assume that Diotima has in mind a
production of virtue much like that in the lesser mysteries: virtuous state of character, virtuous
actions, and educative talk and/or writings directed towards producing virtue in others. However, the
change in the character of the beautiful which conduces to this reproduction, we may reasonably
speculate, makes some difference in the nature of the virtue produced. Certainly, as Diotima explicitly
indicates, the virtue produced in virtue of communion with the Form of the Beautiful is “true virtue,”
as that produced merely in response to the beauty of the beloved is not. But further, we may suppose
that the very process of generalization – starting from the move from one beautiful body to bodily
beauty in general, and moving to ever greater levels of generality – also conditions how the lover
conceives of his product. In the lesser mysteries, just as the beauty which fostered the production of
virtue was that of a particular individual, so too the virtue produced was valued, in part, because of its
connection with the lover himself. It was a living memorial to the lover’s excellence in its
particularity, making not only his goodness, but also his name live on. The lover initiated into the
greater mysteries knows that the particularity of any instance of beauty (including virtue) is not part of
what makes it valuable. What he identifies with as valuable in himself, and what he wishes to
propagate, is nothing particular, but only virtue as such. His encounters with others are geared
towards moving them to virtue, and not at all towards making sure that that virtue bears his own
stamp. And the model of such a lover is surely the character Socrates himself.
Works Cited
Ferrari, Giovanni. 1992. "Platonic Love." In The Cambridge Companion to Plato, edited by Richard
Kraut, 248-276. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Ferrari, G. R. F. 1994. "Moral Fecundity. A Discussion of A. W. Price, Love and Friendship in Plato
and Aristotle." Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy no. 9:169-184.
Ionescu, Cristina. 2007. "The Transition from the Lower to the Higher Mysteries of Love in Plato's
11 On this cf. Patterson (1991).
12 It is not uncommon for interpreters to suppose that the account of the persistence of knowledge at 208a3-7 applies only to
right opinion or something else short of true knowledge. Cf. Obdrzalek (2010), Ionescu (2007).
13 See Sheffield (2006).
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