Structure
At Agathon's party the guests praise Eros in turn: Phaedrus, Pausanias (heavenly and common love), Eryximachus (cosmic harmony), Aristophanes, Agathon, Socrates and finally Alcibiades.
Aristophanes' myth
Humans were once round double beings; Zeus split them, so love is the longing for one's other half and for wholeness.
Diotima
- Eros is intermediate—neither beautiful nor ugly, a daimon between gods and mortals, child of Poverty and Resource, always lacking and therefore a lover of wisdom.
- Love is desire for the good to be one's own forever; mortals pursue immortality by begetting in beauty, in body or in soul (virtue, poems, laws).
The ladder of love
One beautiful body → all beautiful bodies → beauty of souls → practices and laws → knowledge → Beauty itself, whose contemplation gives birth to true virtue (210a-212a).
Alcibiades and significance
Alcibiades likens Socrates to a Silenus statue hiding divine images. "Platonic love" originally meant redirecting desire toward wisdom rather than simply denying the body. See also Meno's paradox and recollection.
References
- Plato. Symposium (A. Nehamas & P. Woodruff, Trans.). Hackett, 1989.
- 플라톤 (2010). 향연 (강철웅 역). 이제이북스.
- Vlastos, G. (1973). The individual as an object of love in Plato. In Platonic Studies (pp. 3-42). Princeton University Press.
- Sheffield, F. C. C. (2006). Plato's Symposium: The Ethics of Desire. Oxford University Press.