The Symposium

Immortality and love worthy of the gods are linked by virtue, which is linked to wisdom, in the Symposium. But to arrive at that conclusion, at Diotima's instruction, Socrates deals with the process whereby the conception of love develops from the most simplistic to the more complex. Through Diotima, Socrates develops the idea that love in its highest sense exhibits evidence of a mediating force between the beloved object, which is beautiful, and the lover's experience of feeling for the object. Object and feeling for the object, which is to say beloved and lover, are not really opposites in the scheme of love, but both do come into the experience of what might be called the process--Diotima calls it the nature--of Love.

For wisdom is a most beautiful thing, and Love is of the beautiful; and therefore Love is also a philosopher or lover of wisdom, and being a lover of wisdom is in a mean between the wise and the ignorant. And of this too his birth is the cause; for his father is wealthy and wise, and his mother poor and foolish. Such . . . is the nature of the spirit Love (Plato 195).

Diotima positions love higher than that either of the psychological mechanism of physical fulfillment (articulated by Aristophanes, who of course functions at a higher level of complexity than mere satisfaction of desire), or of such abstractions as delicacy, desire, and grace (Agathon). But a careful reading of Aristophanes' and Agathon's statements yields the conclusion that psychologica

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Category: Philosophy - T