Abstract

The speeches in praise of eros in Plato's Symposium offer competing and compelling accounts of what we, as human beings, want. More particularly, the dialogue sheds light on that peculiar eros that Socrates says characterizes his philosophic life. Socratic eros is viewed against the backdrop of eros as understood by the poets. I examine these issues through a close reading of the final four speeches of the dialogue. ;The comic poet, Aristophanes, characterizes eros as love of ourselves. We do not know, however, that we love ourselves nor that our love is rooted in a desire to assault the gods. Nor do we know that what we want is forever inaccessible to us. We are both self-loving and self-ignorant. ;Agathon, the tragic poet, portrays eros as the beautiful poetic god who overcomes necessity through a benevolent tyranny. To be erotic is to have attained our desires, indeed, to be beautiful and wise. Wisdom is synonomous with poetry and Agathon himself is synonomous with eros. Aristophanes and Agathon exhibit a deep kinship, in spite of their differences. ;Socrates'/Diotima's speech reinterprets the love of ourselves and of the beautiful and weaves them together in the notion that love is of the good. Diotima moves beyond Aristophanes and Agathon, at the same time that she gives an account of eros that is neither wholly Socratic nor wholly satisfactory. She reveals instead how our tendencies toward immortality and the beautiful pull us in different directions. ;The dialogue ends, then, with Alcibiades' portrait of Socrates, which turns out to reveal much more about Alcibiades than about Socrates. Alcibiades, who is a lover of self-sufficiency, takes the ugly Socrates' beauty and divinity to be his ability to rule over others because of his own self-sufficiency. He fails to see Socrates' eros and thus fails to accept the gift that Socrates offers him. ;These partial views of eros point the way toward an understanding of eros that is more satisfactory, an understanding that comes to light in Socrates' erotic pursuit of wisdom