Alcibiades: An Ancient Greek Soap Opera.

The 5 most important things that Diotima tried to teach Socrates about love were that:

1. Socrates was wrong in saying that if Love desired x, Love must not have x. For example, if Love desires beauty, Love cannot be beautiful. Rather, Diotima says that desire of something does not necessarily mean complete lack of that thing. She posits that Love is the mean between 2 extremes, such as the mean between wisdom and ignorance, and explains this through the story of its birth. In this way, Love can both be beautiful and yet desire beauty.
2. Love means wanting to possess the good forever, and that is why we pursue Love with such eagerness and zeal.
3. The true kind of Love is achieved through pursuing the good, but there is a slight perversion of Love that occurs when people pursue happiness through indirect means, such as money or fame.
4. Love gives birth to beauty. In a way, reproduction leads to immortality, and in the act of reproduction/pregnancy, the parents become more joyful and more beautiful - more good. So, reproduction is the act that allows Love to possess the good forever.
5. Love must desire immortality.

Throughout his speech about Socrates, Alcibiades mentions many things about their relationship that are characteristic of the way Love has been described throughout the evening. For example, Alcibiades talks about how Socrates is so beautiful and wonderful that it makes him feel shame, which is one of the characteristics of love that Phaedrus mentioned. He also mentioned that Socrates tends to Love beautiful boys, which shows that Love is the pursuit of beauty, as Diotima said. Most importantly, he talks about how willing he was to surrender all he was to Socrates so that Socrates might make him good. This means that he recognizes, at least in some small way, that Love is pursuance of the good, and would make him more beautiful and more wise. I think this is why he wishes to consummate the relationship with Socrates, perhaps because he understands that the act of consummation is the act that would allow their Love to become cemented in the pursuit of the good forever.

I think that Alcibiades is only pretending to be drunk, because it seems to be his primary goal to get Socrates drunk. I don't really know what their relationship is at this point, but perhaps he thinks if Socrates is drunk, he will be more loose with Alcibiades, though he mentions bitterly that no matter how much he drinks, Socrates will not become drunk. I've never been drunk before, so I can't say for sure, but it seems to me that he is wayyyyyy too articulate to be drunk as well. That factor aside, I think other things point to his sobriety as well - perhaps he is only pretending to be drunk so that they will let him into the party in an attempt to calm him down. He seems to be angry about Socrates sitting next to Agathon, so it seems possible that he came to break up the Love party and make sure that Socrates was being faithful to him, and just used the guise of being drunk to be allowed in.

The 5 different definitions of love in Plato's Symposium

Phaedrus (Young) - 178a-180b

• Love is the oldest of all the gods, and thus confers the most benefits.
• Love teaches us shame in acting disgracefully and pride in acting well (we feel more ashamed to be caught doing something disgraceful when we are caught by a loved one).
• Love, then, leads to bravery, courage, and honor because if there were an army of lovers and beloveds, they would rather die than display cowardice in front of their partners.
• The gods value love as a guide to action, because they allow people who loved greatly to return from the underworld.
• Speaks in the context of male-male love (as most of the others do as well)

Pausanias (Agathon's life-partner) -180c-185c

• There are two kinds of love: heavenly and common (see blog post below)
• Love in itself is neither commendable nor detestable; rather, if it is done properly, it is esteemed and if it is not, then it has no merit.
• The main purpose of love is to produce virtue, which is why male-male relationships between the wise lover and the younger beloved are so esteemed (His praises of the longevity of relationships make sense given his relationship with Agathon.)
• Pausanias agrees with Phaedrus that love is good, but makes an improvement by adding the distinction between heavenly love and common love, and adding the qualifier that love is good only if it is the former.

Eryximachus (Doctor) 185c-189b

• Commends Pausanias's distinction between the two types of love and agrees with him therein.
• Agrees that it is good to gratify good people, and bad to gratify bad people.
• Expands upon Pausanias's explanation of love by saying that love is not purely emotional, as Pausanias has suggested, but rather that it is bodily as well (which makes sense, given that he's a doctor).
• He completes an analogy by saying that it is appropriate to gratify the healthy parts of the body, and bad to gratify the diseased parts of the body.
• Eryximachus then expands this idea of love to show that love has its place in music, agriculture, medicine, etc. It is the doctor's role to implant the good kind of love in the body and flush out the bad, restoring the body to a homeostasis of harmony. Likewise, love is manifested in unity and harmony in other subjects as well.
• Love is ever-present, all-powerful, and primarily concerned with unity

Aristophanes (Great comic playwright) 189c-193e

• There used to be 3 genders: male, female, and androgynous. The gods sliced them in half because they were getting too powerful, and love is the reunion of the two halves of a person.
• Androgynous individuals are heterosexual, with the other two genders being homosexual (I use the word "homosexual" loosely, since some would protest to the lover/beloved relationship being stigmatized this way).
• Aristophanes praises the male-male relationship for the same reasons that Pausanias does.
• "Love" is our desire for wholeness, and restores us to our formerly whole selves (This gets at what Eryximachus is getting at too).

Diotima

• Socrates shows that love is desirous of something which it does not have, meaning that if what the previous orators have said is true, then love can be neither beautiful nor good since it desires what is both beautiful and good.
• BUT, love does not have to be ugly and bad, since Diotima says that things don't have to be one thing or their opposite, but can fall somewhere in the middle. For example, love is not mortal or immortal but is a sort of spirit.
• gods use spirits to communicate with humans, so love is like a message to the humans from the gods.
• Love is the child of Poverty and Resource, and is like both of them, but somewhere in between. For example, love is always poor but very tough; somewhere in between ignorance and wisdom; always in need but can scheme to get what he wants; is neither immortal or mortal so it can result in forever friendship or a temporary relationship (in contrast to what Pausanias says).
• Diotima dismisses what Aristophanes says about lovers looking for their other half, and instead posits that love searches for what is good. In the same manner of Eryximachus, she says that we want to amputate diseased limbs meaning we only want to be attached to what is good.
• Love is the desire to have the good forever, and the closest we can get to this is through birth and reproduction because that's what gets us closest to immortality.
• She, like the others, advocates the male-male relationship by saying that men can be pregnant in both body and mind. They can be pregnant in body and seek to reproduce with a female, or they can be pregnant in mind and seek to reproduce wisdom and virtue in the mind of a younger beloved.
• As far as the whole "loving the bodies is bad but loving the minds is good" thing that Pausanias gets at, Diotima says that boys begin to love a beautiful body until they realize that there are lots of beautiful bodies, so they move onto the mind. Then, the love of the mind becomes more important and the love of the body falls away. Then, he just loves beauty in general rather than beautiful bodies or things.
• Then, he grows to love knowledge, which ultimately leads to love, which is the knowledge of beauty, which is eternal.

Love

The two main types of love discussed in Plato's Symposium are popular love and heavenly love.

Popular love is described as being sort of haphazard and driven by the fleeting passions. It is directed either towards a woman or towards a man, and is driven by a lust for the body rather than a desire for the soul's wisdom. It admires accomplishments in the beloved, but takes no notice of the manner in which they were required. It is characterized by a lack of harmony between the two individuals, and is considered wicked or base.

In contrast, heavenly love is considered noble, and is only directed towards a male, from a male. It is not a passion for boys, but rather is a love of wisdom and goodness. Thus, this love is captivated by the beauty of the mind or of the soul, and because it seeks wisdom and goodness, it makes both individuals wise and good. Essentially, the elder of the two is the pursuer, and he teaches wisdom and knowledge to the younger, who in turn gratifies the elder because it is considered right to gratify good men. This creates a sort of harmony between the two, and results in a forever friendship, even when the lover/beloved relationship dissipates.

Thus, love is the pursuit of wisdom that results in unity between a lover and a beloved.

Guard Your Soul (Protagoras 309a-314e)

"You cannot know to whom you are entrusting your soul,—whether it is to something good or to something evil."

When Socrates hears that Hippocrates is desiring to go see the Sophist, Protagoras, who has just arrived in town, Socrates is shocked that he would so willingly pay a sum of money just to go see him, unsure of what he will actually be gaining. Socrates establishes that if Hippocrates were to pay a sculptor or a painter, he would want to be taught the profession of painting and sculpting. Likewise, if he is paying a Sophist, he must therefore want to become a Sophist as well. Unable to describe what it is exactly that he wishes to gain from Sophistry, Hippocrates concedes to Socrates that what he is really wanting is education, not learning the profession, because he does not want to become a Sophist himself - in fact, Hippocrates says he would be ashamed to be a Sophist. Socrates then establishes that a part of education is indoctrination - at least when dealing with Sophistry - and that he is surprised Hippocrates would pay to be indoctrinated with an unknown doctrine by going to visit Protagoras.

In this excerpt, Socrates recognizes something that we often fail to recognize in this day and age: the sacredness - and malleability - of the human soul. He states that Hippocrates cannot just carry away what the Sophist gives him in his arms - no, he must carry it in his soul. Forever (314a). As consumers, we often fail to recognize that some of the things we purchase and take part in will not just alter our life through the function of the object, but will actually change us. We don't notice that the sort of music we choose to listen to, the lyrics we hum under our breath, the movies we watch, the things we read, the things our ears listen to, the arguments we buy, the things we allow our soul to become aware of are all slowly changing the very essence of who we are. Our generation is young, wild, and free of all repercussions regarding our rumspringa actions....so we think.

Growing up in the Church, we always heard statistics regarding youth who essentially fell off the Church grid during and after college. Our youth pastors all pleaded with us to be careful that we not "lose our faith" too. I think this "loss of faith" (disregarding a discussion of whether one can actually "lose their faith") is due to the fact that the new age is filled with the exhortation to be more open-minded. If you don't want to listen to someone else's point of view or opinion on how the world is or how it should be, then you are labeled as a closed-minded bigot. Because of this, more and more young people are opening their souls to doctrines that cannot help but change it. Strangely enough, I think Socrates would be on the God's side this time (haha). I don't think Socrates is advocating for closed-mindedness, necessarily, but I think he is cautioning one to take much care with what they allow their soul to be privy too. You can think critically about your faith (or whatever the belief/mindset in question is), and that's a good thing, but don't go listen to random, unknown doctrines when you don't want their effects on your soul. After all,

"You cannot know to whom you are entrusting your soul,—whether it is to something good or to something evil."