Plato’s Symposium:
The Nature of Love and the Promise of Happiness

A Discussion Seminar

Join us at AAI this Fall for a seminar on Plato’s Symposium.

Starting September 23, we will meet for 8 weeks every Tuesday from 6:30 PM to 8:00 PM at the Abigail Adams Institute at 14 Arrow St, Ste G10 in Cambridge.

There is no cost to the program, and each week's readings will be provided to all participants.

The translation of the Symposium that we will be using is by Seth Benardete (U. Chicago, 2001).

Dinner will be provided.

Open only to Undergraduates and graduate Students At Harvard and boston-area universities.

Registration for this seminar is limited, and all confirmed registrants will be informed over email the week before the seminar. Indicating your interest to register in the form below does not guarantee a spot.

This seminar has reached participant capacity, and registration is now closed. Please fill out the below form if you would like to be added to the waitlist.

We feel love (eros) is central to human happiness. We feel life would be pointless without it—but do we understand it? Do we want to? Would a rational analysis lead to detachment and skepticism? Or even suspicion—is eros not the deepest root of hubris and injustice? On the other hand, would understanding eros lead us to embrace it as a benevolent “co-worker of human nature,” as Plato’s Socrates says? Isn’t the longing for immortal beauty the source of the greatest human creations? This ambiguity in love is evident from the start, in the attraction to beauty. What does beauty promise? Love inspires enthusiasm and self-sacrifice that can seem like madness. Yet perhaps true sanity or self-knowledge also presupposes “madness,” an erotic experience that breaks us open and awakens us.

We turn for guidance to the first and greatest philosophical examination of love, Plato’s Symposium. One might think that the true understanding of love would come from poetic sources, such as novels or plays, or from spiritual and religious works. Yet Plato’s Socrates claims to have a science of erotics. Unlike modern science, this Socratic science builds upon, extends, and critically examines poetic and 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. It appears 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 divine or angelic perfection of one’s beloved, and the striving for immortality in romantic union. Does love in some way transcend the merely human?

But Socrates denies that Eros is a god. The private banquet for which the dialogue is named takes place on the eve of a political witch-hunt which ensnared several characters in the dialogue—Phaedrus, Eryximachus, and the general Alcibiades—and others suspected of religious sacrilege and conspiracy against the democracy. In the closing speech of the dialogue, Alcibiades, himself a byword for hubris, charges Socrates with hubris. Is love in harmony with human nature, or is it a mad, hubristic pursuit of a divine happiness beyond our lot? Is it compatible with law or piety, or is it wild, rebellious, and insatiable?

Discussion will be led by Manuel Lopez, who taught political philosophy at the University of Chicago after receiving his undergraduate and law degrees from Harvard. His academic research has centered on Plato and his understanding of the relation between justice and eros. He currently serves as AAI’s Scholar-in-Residence.