Plato’s Symposium: The Nature and Divinity of Love
A Seminar
What is love? We all have a sense of how central love (eros) is to human happiness, and how empty and pointless life can be without it. But what would it mean to understand it? Would a systematic analysis of love lead to coolness and detachment, as a result of seeing through its follies and delusions? Or would understanding eros ultimately lead us to see it as a fundamental “co-worker of human nature” (212b), luring us through beauty towards perfection?
We turn for guidance to the first and greatest philosophical examination of love: the Symposium of Plato. One might think that the truest understanding of love would come from poetic sources, such as novels or plays, or from spiritual and religious works. And yet, in the Symposium, the philosopher Socrates claims to have a science of erotics (177d). Unlike modern science, this Socratic science builds upon, extends, and critically examines poetic and even theological accounts of love: Socrates’ speech follows and responds to five earlier speakers, including a tragic poet, Agathon, and a comic poet, Aristophanes. Socrates himself claims as his teacher Diotima of Mantinea, a mythical prophetess with miraculous powers (201d). It appears that a true account of love must, as Socrates does in this dialogue, also understand the theological dimensions of love that are implicit in, for example, the feeling of the angelic perfection of one’s beloved, and the striving for immortality in a romantic union. Still, Socrates denies that Eros is a god (202d).
This returns us to the opening problem: is love in harmony with human nature, or a mad, hubristic pursuit of a divine happiness beyond our lot as mortals—of impossible things? Does love come into its own only through law or piety, or is it wild, rebellious, and insatiable? —Or does love in some way truly transcend the merely human?
Readings from Plato’s Symposium, trans. Seth Benardete (U. Chicago, 2001).
Dinner provided.