Philosophy is not just about knowledge but also about love. There is no love without knowledge and no knowledge without love. Love without knowledge becomes more like an animal drive, and knowledge without love is reduced to a simple search for information. The two are necessary, but they do not form a harmonious couple. Their struggle, which we here call loveknowledge, defines us as humans and their particular configuration in each of us makes us who we are.
In the last chapter we saw how Socrates became the embodiment of knowledge that knows its limitations. In questioning his accusers, he caused others to reflect on their own lives and made the reader engage with the story not just as an outside observer but as an active participant. But how did he live these questions himself? What form did his love take, and how did it come to inhabit the space the knowledge leaves out?
In the Symposium we see Socrates as a primary actor engaged in a performance of love, desire, and knowledge. This performance represents a new genre, one that grows out of the already existent, honored tradition of tragedy, but adds irony and comedy. Socrates becomes a new type of hero—classical in the trial he experiences, but modern in that he is sacrificed not by fate but by his own conscious confrontation with emptiness.
The Socratic tragicomedy brings forth a hero who preaches no message and who resists deification. It is a parody of tragedy since the hero does not wish to ascend beyond human knowledge, but rather stays strictly within its limitations. The irony is that this very faithfulness to being human transgresses the boundaries of social acceptance, as if being entirely what one is, being just that—an individual—is inconceivable and disturbing.
As French philosopher Pierre Hadot explains: “An immense desire arises from such an awareness of privations and this is why, for Western consciousness, Socrates the philosopher takes on the features of Eros, the eternal vagabond in search of true beauty.”1 Socrates, the man who knows his limitations, is also the embodiment of eros.
Introduction to the Symposium
One of the most beautiful features of the Symposium is that it renders the life of philosophy concrete and visible. It is an account of a banquet given by the young and beautiful poet Agathon on the occasion of his victory at the dramatic contest in Athens—the equivalent of an Academy Award—in 416 BC. A number of male friends gather together to drink and offer their praises. Socrates, over fifty at the time, is by far the oldest participant. His presence partly explains why the female flautist, who provides both musical and sexual entertainment, is sent away and the participants decide to offer their praises to eros.
As in the case of the Apology, the reader is literally drawn into the storyline. We can hear the speakers gather in a house surrounded by golden fields of wheat, dotted by olive trees, and sprinkled with low grapevines in between. We can hear the clinking of the glasses, the maidservant coming in with jars of wine and “small-plates” to allow the drinking to go on.
Eros—the subject of all speeches—can be translated as both love and desire. The general Greek word for love is philia, which applies generally to a person’s feelings for family, friends, and lovers. Eros–the word used in the Symposium—refers more to an intense desire or attachment and covers the entire spectrum of passion, from sexual lust to otherworldly contemplation. The versatility of the Greek’s term caused Freud to choose it in constructing his theory of sexuality. As he explains, it mediates the tension between the rational and the animal, the abstract and the lustful: “In its origin, function and relation to sexual love, the eros of the philosopher Plato coincides exactly with the love-force, the libido of psychoanalysis.”2 And again, “what psychoanalysis calls sexuality was by no means identical with the impulsion towards a union of the two sexes or towards producing a pleasurable sensation in the genitals; it had far more resemblance to the all-inclusive and all-embracing love of Plato’s Symposium.”3
To begin with, love—as it is described in the Symposium—is primarily homosexual love, and the praises offered to the god of love are reflected, projected, or transferred onto the relations between the men at the banquet. The term sym-posium literally means “drinking-together”—though of course the Greeks considered it uncivilized to drink without engaging in conversation, songs, and celebration for the gods. After concluding a round of discussion in which each participant delivered a small speech in praise of eros, Alcibiades, a well-known beauty, suddenly appears. He is the former lover of Socrates and the present lover of Agathon. After entering drunkenly, Alcibiades quarrels with Socrates and the former lovers show their rivalry over Agathon. This petty lovers’ spat both accentuates and contrasts the tragicomic speeches given by each participant.
The Myth of Aristophanes
The guests offer their speeches in order from left to right, making Socrates, who come to the feast late and shares Agathon’s couch, the last to speak. The first three speeches are rather conventional, though they reveal Athenian society’s hypocrisy with respect to male love and especially the love between men and boys. Aristophanes, who is known as the father of comedy, heats up the discussion. This is the same Aristophanes whose play The Clouds is mentioned in the Apology as the source of the common misconception of philosophy as an idle ramble. Plato, who wrote this a generation or so after the events, makes Aristophanes tell a myth explaining the origin and nature of the force that drives humans toward each other. As the myth goes, human beings were originally created in three sexes: male, female, and a combination of the two—androgynous. These protohumans had twice as many organs as we do today and they had great strength. This strength brought about their demise, since their hubris was so great that they attempted to ascend to heaven and attack the gods. As a punishment, Zeus split them in half. As Aristophanes explains, “Love is born into every human being; it calls back the halves of our original nature together; it tries to make one out of two and heal the wound of human nature.”4 Love is the desire to find our other original half, and our sexual preferences are determined by the sex of our double. Aristophanes’ myth thus explains both homosexual and heterosexual love as natural, even biologically determined.
There are several points that follow from this stunning account. First, it resembles the myth of the Tower of Babel, which tells the story of our ancestors’ attempt to ascent to heaven, to become like the gods. Both these legends result in a fall and a subsequent splitting, though in the Tower of Babel it is not our bodies but our tongues that are split into hundreds of incompatible languages. Second, this story anticipates a modern conception that describes love as a force drawing two individuals together to form a unified whole. Third, it is highly pessimistic because a final or absolute reunion of our halves is impossible. The physical union of two to form one is possible only as a fleeting moment of sexual intercourse, so the goal of loving can never be achieved in a sustained way. Humans are left with the desire to reunite with their other halves and the repeated frustration of their persistent, obsessive attempts to complete this reunion.
Our desire for another is testimony to our inherent lacking and our incompleteness. In Plato’s telling of the evening, Aristophanes says, “we used to be complete wholes in our original nature, and now ‘Love’ is the name for our pursuit of wholeness, for our desire to be complete” (192E). Desire is intended to restore an original state before the splitting into halves. It is born out of lack and sustains itself because of this lack. When this drive is allowed to run loose, it develops a fixation on an imaginary “original” state of union and bliss such as the desire to unite with the mother or to return to a state prior to language or culture. But such a desire, to unite with the mother or to live outside culture or language, is at the same time the death of the desiring subject.
Socrates is not alone in his conception of desire as arising from a need for completion. Other thinkers such as French psychoanalyst, Jacque Lacan, described human desire as “the desire of the Other.”5 Likewise, G. W. F. Hegel, in his classic theory of dialectics, described the relationship between mastery and servitude as turning desire not simply toward the body or an individual, but toward the desire of another person.
One desires the desire of another—even a child knows and experiences this. One naturally desires to be desired by the other. But the stability of such a system is always at risk since it is always alive and open: I cannot posses the desire of another and the other cannot posses mine. The offering of desire must be mutual, circular, and self-supporting: I desire your desire desiring my desire and so on.
Of course, this very circularity is often experienced not as love but as misery and dissatisfaction. One possible solution is to reject desire altogether and to substitute the desire of the other. In other words, I can accommodate myself to another’s desire by choosing the same target and craving it in the same manner. Both parties might find this pleasurable at first. The individual who has given up his independent desires can now live without their complications, and the other has her wish fulfilled completely by her partner. But both people will eventually become unsatisfied. Since the relinquisher is dead to his own desires, he lives without pain but also without pleasure. Meanwhile, the desirer doesn’t get what she wants—the other’s desire—but a facsimile of her own desire.
An alternative scenario (and happier, at least to my mind—but who can judge between pleasures?) takes place when both parties acknowledge their inherent deficiencies and work within this framework. Acknowledging our incompleteness is a recognition of a certain tension necessary for our constitution and life. From this perspective, Socrates’ acknowledgment of his ignorance and his unwillingness to accept an overly simplified solution is an outstanding achievement. His process shows us how to move away from a sense of false completion and toward eros, a living and mutually reinforcing desire that perpetuates itself. Eros, as Socrates understands it, is desire made progressive. It still yearns to achieve union, but it finds stability not by regressing to an impossible, Eden-like state prior to the split, but by accepting the vicissitudes of life and altering itself accordingly. Stability is achieved through change, by constantly becoming different and recreating oneself. That is the tall mark of a Socratic pursuit of knowledge. But this conception is not handed down to us from above, as if a moral or a theory has been conveyed. The text literally carries us forward, from one speech to the next, to appreciate and evaluate different understandings of desire that affect and shape who we are and how we live. Soon Socrates’ own story is revealed by way of enactment rather than a direct story line. It is a story of sublimation through self-mastery, though not without its pleasures.
Socrates Questions Agathon
In many ways Socrates’ speech, which comes last but is then followed by the unexpected entrance of his former young lover, Alcibiades, complements the views Aristophanes expresses. The only major difference is that Socrates describes the split of halves in philosophic rather than mythological terms. His claims are based on the principle we just derived—that one desires what one lacks. Since eros is the desire for beauty, and one cannot desire what one already has or is, eros cannot itself be beautiful. By this point in the dialogue, eros is not merely a Greek god but, like all Greek gods, a distilled representation of human passions. We should note that for the ancient Greeks the beautiful is also the good. Since all good things are beautiful, eros cannot be good or virtuous either.
As Agathon finishes his speech, he praises eros as the youngest, most beautiful, and most virtuous of all the gods. “Love was born to hate old age and will come nowhere near it. Love always lives with young people and is one of them: the old story holds good that like is always drawn to like,” he says (195B). This is meant only partly as a critique of Socrates, the oldest and least beautiful of the group. But Socrates follows with a counterassertion, claiming that eros is neither young nor beautiful nor virtuous. If this were simply a charge leveled against a god, it would be both reckless and irreverent. But Socrates circumscribes his words and makes clear that eros is neither a god nor human but a movement that travels between what one is and what one is not, similar to the experience of desire. Having silenced Agathon, Socrates regains his position both in the explicit game of celebrating eros and in the implicit game of praising oneself. As always, his claims are a mix of arrogance and humility.
Next, he tells the story of Diotima—a mysterious priestess he met when he was young and his teacher in matters of love. This is perhaps the first and certainly one of the rare occasions that a woman appears in a philosophical text. It is unique also because she does not appear in person but rather through Socrates’ reenactment of her as a teacher who taught him, when he was younger, the art of love. Diotima is then the teacher of the first teacher of philosophy.
Diotima’s Account: Eros Falls Between the Human and the Divine
Agathon’s mistake lies in conceiving of eros as a model of the beloved and as inherently beautiful, virtuous, and young. Diotima suggests an alternative in which eros is more like the lover than like the beloved. As lover, eros desires beauty, virtue, and youth, but is not necessarily young, virtuous, or beautiful himself (204A). That’s not to say that Diotima envisions eros as ugly or bad—it’s simply that eros exists outside the logic of binary dichotomies. It is neither beautiful nor ugly, neither good nor bad. Eros is the movement between the poles; it never attains beauty or the good, but it always progresses toward them. The careful reader can already hear the resonance of Socrates’ own movement toward knowledge, which he never has but always desires. As Socrates relates her story, the connection between eros and his own occupation soon becomes explicit by equating the logic of desire with knowledge:
DIOTIMA: “Watch your tongue! Do you really think that if a thing is not beautiful, it has to be ugly?”
SOCRATES: “I certainly do.”
DIOTIMA: “And if a thing is not wise, it’s ignorant? Or haven’t you found out yet that there’s something in between wisdom and ignorance?”
SOCRATES: “What’s that?”
DIOTIMA: “It’s judging things correctly without being able to give a reason. Surely you see this is not the same as knowing—for how could knowledge be unreasoning? And it’s not ignorance either—for how could what hits the truth be ignorance? Correct judgment, of course, has this character it is in between understanding and ignorance” (201E–202A).
Eros, as Diotima explains, is not strictly a god, nor is he mortal either. According to Diotima, “He’s a great spirit. Everything spiritual, you see, is in between god and mortal” (202D-E). Diotima equates beauty and wisdom by describing eros as a lover and pursuer of virtue instead of as a beloved or possessor of virtues. This explanation makes clear that the pursuit of wisdom is motivated by love—in fact, it is love’s highest expression.
Love and Immortality
We already saw that love can never completely possess its target. When the object of desire is achieved, desire dies out. What, then, is the point of loving when love is doomed to failure? What is the point of loving knowledge when we already know we cannot have it? As Socrates asks Diotima: “All right then, my friend. What you say about Love is beautiful, but if you’re right, what use is Love to human beings?” (204C–D)
The attempt to answer this question leads to dialectical spirals that have confounded even the greatest thinkers. Diotima defines eros as the desire for happiness, which she and Socrates interpret as an attempt to possess the good forever (204E–205A). But since humans are not immortal, they cannot posses the good forever, thus they cannot achieve lasting happiness. Eros resolves that conflict through reproduction—if we cannot be here forever, at least we can leave behind a legacy in our offspring or through our ideas. Eros is therefore the human way of achieving immortality. As Diotima says, eros is the desire to reproduce and to “give birth in beauty, whether in body or in soul” (206B, E).
We should note that this conception of desire accepts and embraces its human limitations. It is a process of education, like the one Socrates undergoes with Diotima. Desire wants immortality but cannot have it, so it shapes itself accordingly and finds resolution in birth, either of body or mind. The education we require is not how to become more like the gods but how to live, simply and entirely, as humans.
Philosophy—at least the kind Socrates practiced—establishes an erotic desire with respect to oneself. Self-knowledge is the knowledge of one’s limitation, and to know one’s limitation is to transcend one’s former self. Mortals achieve immortality not by remaining static but by constantly overcoming and reshaping their former selves. As Diotima explains to the young Socrates: “In that way everything mortal is preserved, not, like the divine, by always being the same in every way, but because what is departing and aging leaves behind something new, something such that it had been. By this device, Socrates, she said, what is mortal shares in immortality, whether it is a body or anything else, while the immortal has another way” (208A–B).
The Theory of Ideas
The search for immortality can never be separated from the search for humanity; in fact these are two sides of the same coin. Diotima attempts to explain this seeming paradox as she says, “the immortal has another way.” Her explanation, usually known as Plato’s Theory of Ideas, describes the progression of eros from the love of a beautiful body to the love of all beautiful bodies to the love of beauty in the sciences, in law, and finally to the love of Beauty itself (211B–C).
When love attains this highest level, desire finds a resting place in contemplating the abstract concept of beauty itself. This state is stable because love no longer seeks out a fleeting thing in life, but a pure idea of the mind. This conclusion sounds like the cliché wherein philosophy is an abstract and simply theoretical discipline that ignores the things we see and touch in favor of theoretical constructions understood by the mind’s eye. But Diotima’s view of erotic desire refutes this misconception of philosophy. She explains immortality as a form of impregnation in body or mind. It is part of the traveling nature of eros that it is both very flashlike and abstract, both body and mind.
So Diotima’s speech shows two ways that the desire for immortality can take shape: either it can become an erotic force of reproduction (in body or mind) or it can become fixated on the eternal. The point of the dialogue is not to choose between these two options, but to understand the circuitous path of desire. We are the creatures that will forever experience desire as moving in between reproduction and change, on the one hand, and everlasting presence, on the other. We cannot do with either the one or the other, though both together are impossible.
This paradox is implicit in the pursuit and love of knowledge. In the previous chapter we interpreted knowledge as a search that turns on itself to discover its limitation. Here desire undergoes a similar process of self-reflection and self-limitation. From both ends loveknowledge returns to the condition of being human. Knowledge must always be limited and know its limit; likewise love must include its own inner limit so that it can be sustained. Love is not something to know, but something to live by and act. Love demands love, not knowledge, as a response. It cannot be explained, but only performed. This is the performance played out in the Symposium, and it is brought to its drunken climax with the entrance of Alcibiades.
The Tragicomic Nature of Philosophy
Acting out the duality of loveknowledge takes shape as both a tragedy and a comedy. It is tragic because it ends in failure and it is comic because it repeatedly ends in failure. Socrates becomes the personification of this ironic tragicomedy, and, stylistically, the text underscores the combination of genres. It alternates between a serious philosophical treatise and a drunken ramble. Alcibiades’ entrance represents one notch closer to lighthearted debauchery. After he arrives, Alcibiades is asked to make his own contribution in praise of eros. He refuses because he says that Socrates is too jealous to tolerate praise for another, even a god, in his presence. What follows is what philosopher Jonathan Lear calls a “bitchy squabble” over who is jealous of whom.6 By the end, the participants permit Alcibiades to praise Socrates instead of eros. Given the connection between eros, the lover of beauty and good, and Socrates, the lover of knowledge, this shift does not amount to a change of subject but rather to a more clear presentation of it.7
Alcibiades’ speech is a mocking tribute to Socrates and emphasizes the ironic, deceitful, double character of his ex-lover. He begins by describing Socrates as the statue of Silenus—the semi-divine companion of Dionysus. Silenus is far from beautiful on the outside, but he contains beautiful little figures of the gods inside. Again Socrates represents not physical beauty, but a vessel containing beautiful ideas. His desire is to impregnate not in body but in mind. Alcibiades is shocked to discover that he, an attractive young man, found himself pursuing the old rag: “as if I were his lover and he my young prey!” (217C). And so Alcibiades concludes his diatribe: “He has deceived us all: he presents himself as your lover, and before you know it, you’re in love with him yourself!” (222B).
For Alcibiades, everything is part of the drama of possession and rejection. He is therefore unable to appreciate Socrates’ attempt to initiate him to a more “Platonic” conception of love, which cannot be consummated in a one-night stand. Socrates is deceitful, according to Alcibiades, because he turns from the lover to the beloved. Socrates is unattractive on the outside but full of beauty within. Given his looks and his old age, he cannot expect to be pursued by a beautiful young boy, but that is what happened in the course of their relationship—the lover turned into the beloved. Alcibiades does not seem to appreciate the irony he describes. Socrates is doubled, both lover and beloved, having and not having the virtues desired.
This portrayal of Socrates resembles the original man in Aristophanes’ myth. Complete unto himself, he possesses his other half and is therefore divine. But the comic and even ridiculous character of Alcibiades shows a common misunderstanding of Socrates. Socrates’ double nature does not mean that the two sides are ultimately reconciled in perfect harmony. Instead, the two sides exist in perpetual tension, which is why he remains an erotic figure. His nature is to tempt and resist and to sustain and overcome itself. His knowledge does not remain peacefully within himself, but instead it comes alive in the company of others to provoke, agitate, and challenge them. He is pregnant and therefore he needs partners in dialogue with which to “give birth in beauty, whether in body or in soul” (206B, E).
At the end of their erotic journey toward their other halves, most of the dinner guests have gone home or fallen asleep. Socrates talks to the two who remain: Aristophanes, the famous writer of comedies, and Agathon, the honored tragic poet. The details of their discussion are lost on another drunk and tired onlooker who, in Plato’s retelling, “couldn’t remember exactly what they were saying … but the main point was that Socrates was trying to prove to them that authors should be able to write both comedy and tragedy: the skillful tragic dramatist should also be a comic poet” (223D). Even in style, philosophy is ironic—it moves in between, it is neither the one nor the other. Socrates is the first hero of a new genre. The rest of the thinkers we read here form part of the tradition of loveknowledge as they lend their unique voices to this mask.