Plato & Symposium: Eros, Missing and Learning to See Beauty

A party becomes a polyphonic investigation

The guests will make speeches on Eros at a meeting. Each speaker chooses his own emphasis. The well-known story of Aristophanes, in which people look for their lost other half, is one voice within that whole. It is not simply Plato's final doctrine about every human being and relationship.

The shape is important. A reader can first be caught by a story and then rethink it by another speech. Insight arises not only because the last speaker erases an incorrect answer. The differences show what needs a concept of love tries to fulfill: being complete, getting admiration, producing something or possessing the good sustainably.

Diotima speaks through Socrates

Socrates talks about the education he received from Diotima. According to this reason, eros is connected with lack and desire. Loving something presupposes that you don't have it simple and forever. Eros thus gets a place between lack and search, not as a condition in which all desires are already fully fulfilled.

Tradition remains literaryally layered here too: Plato writes a dialogue in which Socrates reflects what Diotima would have said. It doesn't follow from that structure that we own a historical lesson report by Diotima. It does mean that a female learning figure within the text receives decisive philosophical authority. Her role deserves more attention than a fleeting mention in a row of famous men.

From one beautiful body to another look

In the so-called ascent, the attention of one beautiful body focuses on beauty that becomes visible elsewhere, then on souls, actions, orders and knowledge, and ultimately on beauty itself. It is not just a question of collecting more examples. The quality of seeing changes: the desire has to learn which qualities it actually appreciates.

A possible modern comparison is a student who first admires one building and then starts to understand what makes spatial relations, material and human use beautiful. The admiration is expressed more widely and better. This own example does not prove that Plato describes an architectural course. It only makes it visible that a concrete attraction to research can grow.

Is the lover left on the way?

It is precisely the rise that raises a difficult objection. If one person becomes a first step, is he still loved for himself, or especially as access to something more general? An ever broader view can free a person from a possessive fixation. It can also distance itself from the unique other person who does not want to be reduced to a training material.

A good lecture lets that tension exist. It is too easy to praise the text only as exalted romance or simply reject it as cold abstraction. Ask what happens with care, loyalty and recognition when the desire is raised philosophically. Those words do not automatically coincide with the attainment of a higher understanding.

Alkibiades brings the person back

When Alkibiades appears and talks about Socrates, the research will be followed by a concrete, uncomfortable follow-up. The previous considerations are confronted with an experience of admiration, rejection and attachment. The relationship between what one can understand about love and how he appears in a relationship becomes visible again.

The knowledge universe connects this file with Ariadne, the cave and Plotinus. The line to Ariadne compares different stories about desire and being abandoned. The connection with Plotinus opens a later philosophical reflection of beauty. Neither of these lines means that the texts give the same answer or may be read without historical distance.

Think on for yourself

Think of something or someone you like. Can you explain what qualities you admire without describing the particular completely? Then ask whether better understanding makes your attention more careful or more distant. What should a loving acquaintance add to a proper description?