A philosophically serious visualization of the ascent toward Beauty
The Symposium is not a collection of speeches about love. It is a philosophically structured whole in which Plato arranges seven speeches in ascending order — each one getting closer to, and in some cases further from, the truth about Eros. The arrangement is deliberate. The drama is essential. What's left unsaid matters as much as what is said.
One structural detail that careful readers note: Aristophanes was supposed to speak third. Plato gives him the hiccups. Eryximachus — the physician — cures him and takes his slot. The displacement means Speeches III and IV are reversed from their intended order. Some interpreters read this as a signal that the two speeches are in some sense interchangeable: both present Eros as the drive toward wholeness or harmony restored. Both are wrong in the same way. Expand the Eryximachus and Aristophanes rungs below — or turn on the Straussian reading — for the full analysis.
Eros is the oldest god and the greatest benefactor — he inspires the lover to noble action, to die for the beloved, to perform the most admirable deeds. Love creates virtue.
The view is entirely civic and instrumental. Eros here is valuable because of what it produces (virtue, heroism) not because of what it is. There is no account of what Eros actually is, or why it moves us.
"There is no greater good for a young man than a worthy lover, or for a lover than a beloved worthy of him."
— Phaedrus, Symposium 178cTwo Aphrodites, two Eroses: Common (Pandemos) and Heavenly (Ourania). Common Eros loves bodies; Heavenly Eros loves souls, wisdom, virtue. The distinction allows for a hierarchy of loves — not all Eros is equally valuable.
The distinction serves Pausanias' own interests (he is Agathon's lover). The "Heavenly" Eros still requires a beloved — an object — and Pausanias cannot account for why the soul is more lovable than the body except by asserting it.
"The heavenly love is of the heavenly goddess, and is heavenly, and of great worth to individuals and cities alike, compelling the lover and beloved to take all care for virtue."
— Pausanias, Symposium 185bEros is not just a human phenomenon — it is the universal principle of harmony operating through medicine, music, astronomy, divination. The physician who knows how to produce healthy love (harmony) between opposing elements in the body is serving Eros.
By universalizing Eros into a cosmic principle, Eryximachus loses what is specifically erotic about it. His "Eros" is barely distinguishable from harmony in general. A doctor who cures disease is not thereby a lover.
"Love is a great and wondrous deity, and his power extends over all things, both divine and human."
— Eryximachus, Symposium 186bThe Structural Switch: Aristophanes was supposed to speak third — immediately after Pausanias. Plato gives him the hiccups. Eryximachus, the physician, cures the hiccups (a bodily intervention) and takes Aristophanes' slot. This displacement is not accidental. Eryximachus literally occupies Aristophanes' place in the order. Some interpreters — including Benardete — read this as a signal that the two speeches are in some sense interchangeable: both present Eros as the restoration of a prior wholeness or harmony. Eryximachus' cosmic harmony and Aristophanes' reunion with the lost half are parallel answers to the same question — and both answers are wrong in the same way. Diotima will show that genuine Eros is not toward completion but toward what can never be fully possessed.
Human beings were originally whole — spherical, with two faces, four arms, four legs. Zeus cut them in half. Eros is the longing for one's other half, the desire to be whole again. The beloved is literally our other half.
Aristophanes' myth is the most psychologically compelling speech — it captures something true about the experience of love. But if Eros is just the desire to be whole, philosophy has no role: we would simply reunite with our half and stop. The speech is beautiful and self-defeating.
"The desire and pursuit of the whole is called love."
— Aristophanes, Symposium 192eNote on the displacement: Aristophanes was supposed to speak here — but this is actually his speech displaced from its original position. He was meant to speak third (where Eryximachus now sits). The hiccups forced the switch. He now speaks after the physician who cured him — after the man who took his slot. This creates a subtle irony: Aristophanes, who speaks of the longing for one's proper place, delivers his speech from the wrong place. His account of Eros as the desire to be restored to wholeness is delivered by a speaker who has himself been displaced and then restored. The comedy is structural, not just thematic.
Eros is the most beautiful, youngest, most virtuous, most skillful of gods. He is the cause of all good things. Agathon praises Eros in the most beautiful language — the speech is a masterpiece of rhetoric.
Agathon confuses the beautiful with the lover of the beautiful. Socrates will show that Eros cannot possess beauty — if you desire beauty, you must lack it. Agathon has described not Eros but the beloved.
"Of all the gods, Love is the most beautiful and the best... He is tender, and, as Homer says, he is of delicate step."
— Agathon, Symposium 196aEros is neither beautiful nor ugly, neither mortal nor immortal — it is a daimon, an intermediary. It is the love of wisdom, which means the lover of wisdom must lack wisdom. Eros is the philosophical impulse itself: always seeking, never possessing, always between ignorance and knowledge.
Starting from a beautiful body, ascending to all beautiful bodies, then to beautiful souls, then to beautiful activities and laws, then to beautiful knowledge, and finally to Beauty Itself — absolute, pure, unmixed with flesh or color, always the same with itself.
"This is the right way of approaching or being initiated into the mysteries of love — to begin with examples of beauty in this world, and using them as steps to ascend continually with that absolute beauty as one's aim."
— Diotima, Symposium 211cDiotima's ascent is the most famous passage in the Symposium — and perhaps the most philosophically contested. Is it a description of how philosophical education actually works? An idealization? A test of whether the reader can distinguish the aspiration from the achievement?
The ascent begins in the most ordinary place: falling in love with a beautiful person. This is not a mistake to be transcended. It is the starting point — the first appearance of Beauty in the world.
Question Diotima leaves open: Why does one beautiful body produce love rather than satisfaction?
The lover who reflects realizes that the beauty in one body is the same as the beauty in all bodies. To be captured by one body is to fail to see what beauty actually is. The step to all beautiful bodies is the first abstraction.
Question: Is this how desire actually works? Does loving many feel like progress or loss?
The beauty of the soul is more honorable than the beauty of the body — so that even one of slight bodily beauty, if the soul be beautiful, is loved more than one of bodily beauty alone.
Question: What is the beauty of a soul? How do we recognize it? Diotima's answer here is surprisingly thin.
The lover ascends to the beauty of activities, practices, and institutions — the beauty of political life, of laws well-made, of customs that shape excellent human beings.
Question: This is where philosophy meets politics. The beautiful city and the beautiful soul are, as the Republic shows, internally related.
The lover of beauty comes to see the vast sea of the beautiful — the sciences and arts in their full extent. The mind is freed from the slavery of a single beautiful thing and opens to all of knowledge.
Question: Is this step the same as philosophy? Or does it include all the sciences, even those that don't ultimately point upward?
Suddenly — the word is exaiphnēs, "all at once" — the lover beholds Beauty Itself: absolute, pure, unmixed, not beautiful in one respect and ugly in another, not beautiful now and ugly then, not beautiful here and ugly there. Always the same with itself. Subsisting eternally in itself and by itself.
Question: Has anyone in the Symposium actually made this ascent? Has Socrates? Diotima says he "may perhaps" arrive there. The subjunctive is not accidental.
Diotima's ascent is described as initiatory — an ascent through the mysteries of love. But the Symposium itself is narrated at multiple removes: Apollodorus tells Glaucon what he heard from Aristodemus, who was at the party. We never have direct access to the philosophical summit. The form of the dialogue enacts what the content describes: we approach Beauty Itself only through imperfect representations and at several removes. This is not a flaw. It is Plato's teaching about the limits of written philosophy.
The Symposium is a drama before it is a philosophical treatise. Who is in the room, why they are there, what they want from each other — these questions shape everything that is said. The frame is as important as the content.
Five questions about your relationship to desire, beauty, and the erotic — placing you in one of the speeches of the Symposium.
Not which character you admire. Which speech describes how you actually think.