Weeks 6 & 7

Socrates: Love of the good, the (vertical) longing for the perfect eternal

October 14, 2025 & OCtober 21, 2025 6:30 PM - 8:00 pm

Socrates begins with a paradox: Love is desire, but desire is only of what we need and don’t have, yet we do love what we have. How is eros a combination of possession and need, of present and future (200d)? Do the three parts of the new definition of love — that love is “[1] of the good, [2] to be one’s own, [3] always” (206a) — harmonize? In what way might beauty allow us to hold together the promise of three parts that may be fundamentally at odds with one another? When Socrates says that “good things are beautiful” (201c), does it follow that all beautiful things are good? What does it mean that love first appears as of the beautiful (or noble) rather than of something one knows to be good (204d)? What is concealed by “beauty” that is revealed by “good”?

What is the link, and what is the difference, between eros as the natural desire to generate (and die for one’s children, 207b), which we share with the animals, and eros as the human desire for fame and glory (and to die for it, 208d)? How does beauty tie sexual desire to immortality (209b)? The final stage in the ladder of love is the beholding of beauty itself (211c-d). Is this completely purified eros recognizable to us any more as love, or does the truly eternal leave the human soul behind? Could the highest end of eros mean seeing what is beyond eros? Are the beautiful gods or “beauty itself” more beautiful?

Reading: 198a – 212c

Readings are from Plato’s Symposium, trans. Seth Benardete (Univ. of Chicago, 2001).