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pocket_saint 's review for:
The Symposium
by Plato
Eros evades definition. In Plato’s Symposium Eros becomes a topic of intrigue, frustration, admiration, and confusion. He is described as a god, a feeling, an impulse, and a spirit. Conjured and imagined in a number of forms, it’s clear that Eros is a driving force of Greek (and human) life.
To me, Symposium is Plato’s most entertaining work (although I know that that is not its purpose). From the moment they discuss how much drinking the hungover group can handle there is something palpably fun about the text that I think adds so much to its subject matter. Personally, I’m fascinated by the way sex, sexuality, and gender fluidly move and intertwine throughout the work as the symposium works to define and redefine a driving impulse of human life. I found Diotima’s teaching to be the strangest in its concerns with of sex and gender. I think it is in part interesting in its narrative form. It is Plato’s narration of the symposium and Socrates’ retelling of his dialogue with Diotima. The narrative levels in the text oppose what we earlier discussed about mimicry vs truth and, as a portion of the dialogue that is chiefly concerned with heavenly truth or platonic ideal of love—it is the dialogue most obscured by its multiple retellings.
Socrates’s presentation is the second-to-last of the symposium. His word is much anticipated by his companions but in a true-to-Socrates fashion, he presents a dialogue between him and Diotima—a prophetess who he calls a great teacher. She introduces a new conception of Eros, not as man or god but something in between. Since he desires truth and beauty he is not in possession of it and therefore, not a god. He exists in a liminal space between the immortal and mortal worlds as a spirit—a messenger from man to the gods and gods to man. It is Eros that fills the gap between man and god, sealing the earth as one, as an interconnected whole. She opposes Hesiod’s genealogy of Eros as a god older than the gods and she also opposes the idea that Eros is the newest (and therefore most passionate and volatile) god. She imagines Eros as born from Poverty’s union with Resource—the moment where lack is impregnated by plenty produces Love. Due to his origin (in Diotima’s retelling) he lives in a state of need but schemes for access to the love, knowledge, and beauty he so desires. He is cunning and resourceful. Here is where love and wisdom intertwine.
Sourced from her mythology of Eros, Diotima introduces two forms of love for humans: the lower teachings and the higher teachings. In the former, she imagines that every person is pregnant—either of body or of mind. The goal of love is to seek the beautiful, seeking the beautiful means happiness, and one wants happiness eternally. It is through birthing and children that humans reach immortal, eternal happiness. “Reproduction is the object of love…reproduction is the closest humans can come to being permanently alive and immortal” (207a). It is important to note that while she offers an image of a “pregnant body”----this is still a male-centric metaphor. It is men who are pregnant in body— they desire women and reproduce children.
She clarifies that there is another way to achieve this sense of immortality beyond the bodily form. One can be pregnant of mind, producing beautiful, wise, and immortal art. Such art is a model for life and can be used to organize cities and households—a legacy of moderation and justice. She uses the examples of Homer and Hesiod (and other good poets) as men of immortal fame and legacy—due to their immortal children: poems. She values this type of man most because they are honored and revered for their creations in a way that has “never happened as a result of human children” (209e). Pregnancy and birth as a metaphor for creation is now an extremely common troupe and, often, serves to value the creations of men (as artists and craftsmen) over women (as bodies/mothers). I see this conception of love as creation/immortality as a precursor to that hierarchy.
Diotima further defines a “high teaching” of love—one that looks beyond the human. In defining this teaching she outlines the step-by-step process wherein man can see the true form of love and become wise. It outlines as so: The love of one beautiful body, the love of two beautiful bodies, the love of all beautiful bodies, engaging in beautiful practices, understanding beautiful forms of learning, learning what beauty really is. That is reaching a true knowledge, it is encountering and understanding the ideal form of beauty. Like all of Plato and his forms Diotima’s process of ascension is one of the essential, single truths. She narrates the pathway to the platonic ideal of love—the “truest” and therefore best/most beautiful version.