Symposium

Plato's Symposium is one of the most famous studies on love. As the topic is love, the style and form of his study can hardly be formal and technical. Rather, Plato discusses love in the vivid form of a dramatic dialogue that takes place between some of Athen's most renowned leaders. These leading citizens meet for a drinking party (or "symposium"), but they are all too tired from the drinking party the night before to lose themselves in any immediate visceral indulgence. Instead, they decide to go around the room and take turns giving a speech in praise of love. The ancient Greeks loved to show off their eloquence, and fittingly enough, at this one party that Plato describes, they decide to compete with each other over who can speak most eloquently–or lovely–about love.

The trick in understanding these speeches is to discover just what type of order and progression, if any, exists between them. It is easy enough to guess that the order of the speeches will progress from the most simpleminded and superficial speech to the most complex and provocative one. But just what type of progress from the simple to the complex will this be?

To crack this code of Plato's work, I am going to bring in some outside help. Working from the Meyers-Briggs personality sorter, David Keirsey argues that there are four fundamental personality or character types. I believe that Plato explores four forms of love in the speeches of his text, and that each of these four forms of love corresponds to one of the four personalities described by Keirsey. Understanding this will be a tremendous help in our understanding of Plato's multi-dimensional view of love. So first, to enter Plato's dialogue with a running start, I highly suggest that you take Keirsey's personality test as it is offered online.

Now that you know what personality type you test as, I hope you are intrigued with just what this and the other three personality types are. (Maybe try to get your family or friends to take the test too and see what personality type they are!)

Let me summarize his findings. Keirsey draws out four basic character types: the guardian; the idealist; the rational; and the artisan. The test is designed around three major polarities. Depending on what side of a polarity your personality gravitates toward determines which one of the four personalities you have.

(1) The biggest polarity that has the most repercussion in Keirsey's scheme is the division between (a) those who tend to be more abstract, either emotionally or intellectually, and (b) those that tend to be more concrete. (2) The second polarity divides those who are concrete minded into either a guardian or an artisan. (3) The third polarity divides those who are abstract minded into being either an idealist or a rational.

Guardian. At the one extreme of pure "sensation" and "judging" is the guardian who is all about law and order, duty and responsibility, or work for work's sake. In Please Understand Me, Keirsey along with Bates describes this personality type through referring to Epimetheus, the Greek god of afterthought (which is what "Epimetheus" actually means in Greek). This god is retrospective and backward looking. He knows, with a vengeance, that time is not reversible. He is the type that faces up to his mistakes and that does not shirk from his responsibilities. Greek myth tells us how, in being tricked by the vengeful Zeus into marrying Pandora, Epimetheus did not abandon his wife, but remains stoically loyal and committed to her after she opens her box and lets loose all the horrors of the world. This is the type of character that values security and stability above all, who is dutiful and always dependable as a provider and protector. This outlook is morbidly realistic, as captured in many proverbial warnings such as "don't count your chickens before they hatch" or in the dark, pessimistic view expressed in Murphy's law, "What ever can go wrong will." They are not curious about the future or meddling: they have learned their lesson and will not open any other Pandora's box. From now on, the lid remains shut. But while bereft of any theoretical interest, while lacking any indulgence in subjective fancy, and while uninterested in any unwarranted focus on future change for the better, their sober, retrospective gaze backwards need not be depressed or cantankerous. As another proverb hints at, if you prepare for the worst, then you will be able to hope for the best and enjoy whatever may be the outcome. A couple of icons that exemplify this view of life include Elizabeth I and George Washington. The fable of Washington resolving never to tell a lie after cutting down a cherry tree exemplifies the personality of an Epimethean guardian. Similarly, Elizabeth's conversion into the "Virgin Queen," quelling the intrigues, scandals, and rumors of her office through her resolute declaration that "I am my father's daughter" (as portrayed in 1999's blockbuster) also exemplifies this personality type. These people represent the moral pillars of society. They are plain speaking and decisive, ever dependable and great conservators of virtue.

Idealists, by contrast, do not prize the security of upholding and preserving yesterday's vows. Their demeanor is not stoical and serious or forbidding and sober. Rather, they prize openness and the personal good will of a dialogue's flow of give and take. Benevolently minded (though naïve according to guardians), they enthusiastically like to emphasize the best in each person. They value harmony and growth, intuitive insight and mystical self-actualization. While guardians are nothing but the role that they have vowed to live and the uniform that they wear, idealists have an antipathy to any playing of roles or wearing of masks. For them, being sincere and open is the most important thing, and each encounter is pregnant with significance. They are sensitive to subtleties in gesture and metaphoric meaning often overlooked by other character types, especially the guardian who tends to be very literal minded. But the danger unique to this type of dreamy demeanor is of course that they are never fully content. As Keirsey and Bates summarize, the idealist's search for self-actualization can be endless: "he wanders, sometimes spiritually, sometimes psychologically, sometimes physically, seeking to satisfy his hunger for unity and uniqueness, to become self-actualized into a perfect whole and to have an identity which is perfectly unique, even though the paths in search of self are never clearly marked" (59). The paradox of authenticity around which these type of people revolve is the paradox of having a purpose to find a purpose, or of striving to be who they naturally are already. But as unsettled as this type of personality is, it is this that leads idealists to be open to others and to think only the best of all. Examples of idealists include the public images of John Lennon, Mohandas Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Bishop Tutu, and Princess Di. They each, as great healers, counselors, teachers, and champions of the needy, exude a warmth, caring, and trust in the goodness of humanity that confounds the guardians but that nonetheless speak to a very important side to each of us. As Apollo is the god of light, music, and healing, so this personality exudes a radiance of enlightening harmony, beauty, and care.

While I cannot go into the details, I hope you can begin to appreciate the profound difference between these two character types. The guardian type has a very difficult time understanding the forward looking openness of the idealist, just as the idealist has little room in his or her view of life to appreciate the retrospectively focused, rock solid commitment of the guardian. Yet there are other, fundamentally different orientations still to consider.

Rationals. This is the most difficult to understand personality type. Why? Partly because it involves a split in the personality between a public persona (favored by the guardian) and private inner core (favored by the idealist). Rationals thus combine traits from both the guardian and idealist personality types. But in this combination, a new type arises. Rationals are future directed like the idealists and unlike the guardians, but tempered and realistic like the guardians and unlike the idealists. They value their autonomy and ingenuity, and neither blindly trust the past way of things as do the guardians nor do they naively trust in the past and future alike, praising the general goodness of humanity, as do the idealists. Rather, they constantly doubt both the world and themselves. Itchy in their own skins, they focus on what can be improved and fixed. Like Prometheus who gave humanity fire to allow for the growth of civilization, rationalists hope through their labor to contribute to the progress of society. But they do not see themselves as secure moral pillars of society as do guardians, but rather as dwarfs that are merely standing on the shoulders of past giants (who are only dwarfs upon dwarfs themselves). Unlike both the guardian's literal minded ease of conscience and the idealist's vague and hard to pinpoint yet nevertheless unquestionable trust in what is natural and sincere, rationals are inwardly torn. Their forward-looking mind struggles to gain dominance over their body's instincts. While the idealist might be propelled forward by the vaguely circling paradox of self-actualization, the rational's call of conscience is an anxious foreboding that tells her that unless she keeps on the move, all will come to ruin.

Artisans. The last personality type, artisans, are focused above all on raw instinct. They thus escapes the complexities of the rational personality type. Also at the opposite end of a spectrum from the guardians, artisans live for trouble and welcome crisis and instability. Their focus is neither on the past nor on the future but on the immediate here and now. Audacious and impulsive, they are especially good at adapting to circumstances and rising to the occasion. While incredibly, even explosively generous, always lending an electricity to the air and to people around them, their excessive nature can sever ties more easily then any other character type. They value above all to be free and active: action must be an end in itself and not subordinated to anything else, past or future. These are the most "fun" and fascinating of people as well as the most violent and raging. Representatives of the Dionysian impulse include such people as Madonna, Howard Stern, Teddy Roosevelt, Malcolm X, and Courtney Love.

Let us review. These are the four distinctions that Bates and Keirsey draw: from the immobile pillar of the guardian, to the dreamy quest for self-realization by idealists, to the anxious, internal struggle of the rationalist, to the adrenaline rush of the artisan. People are indeed very different down to their core personalities: once again, ranging from the loyal, square-footedness of the guardian, to the open kind heartedness of the idealist, to the autonomous yet anxious rationalist, to the charismatic, free spirit of the artisan.

Apollonian idealist:

natural, sincere, open, dreamy, kind-hearted

Promethean rational:

anxiously private individual committed to public progress

Epimethean guardian:

immobile pillar, loyal, square footed, literal minded

Dionysian artisan:

free spirit, charismatic, relishes in crises just for the adrenaline rush

Bates and Keirsey help the adolescent in each of us today who is unsure of his or her identity appreciate this range of personal possibilities and extremes. Few of us will be centered in any one corner. There are different sides of ourselves that are drawn out by different situations and different people. Moreover, how we may view ourselves is probably very different from how different people view us. But as blurred and complex as we each are, I hope you find this scheme fascinating for the way that it spells out the extremes.

Now you are no doubt wondering: "what in the world do these four personality types have to do with Plato's Symposium?" My thesis is that the speeches in Plato's dialogue revolve clockwise two times around the four-fold scheme that I have just laid out. The first clockwise revolution is the following:

This is of course a gross simplification of Plato's dialogue, but for a first reading, I think it is a helpful step into Plato's wonderful multi-dimensional argument.

1. Phaedrus, caught up in a first, inspirational declaration of love's power, emphasizes how great the god of love is. Along with Chaos and Earth, Love is the most ancient and honored god. Love gives us "a sense of shame at acting shamefully, and a sense of pride in acting well" and "without these, nothing fine or great can be accomplished, in public or in private" (178d). As Keirsey describes the artisan personality, Phaedrus describes love in a concrete manner, emphasizing its explosive power.

2. But Pausanias is more careful: he is "not quite sure our subject has been well defined" (180c). Just as a guardian is concrete minded and focused on clear-cut division and duty bound virtue, Pausanias introduces a clear-cut division between Heavenly Aphrodite and Common Aphrodite. Heavenly Aphrodite prefers older, intelligent partners, as Pausanias thinks is proper, as opposed to Common Aphrodite who has no discriminating sense at all and instead "strikes wherever he gets a chance," tending toward women, young boys, and unintelligent partners (181b). Please note, I will not address here the odd mixture of homosexuality with patriarchy so please just ignore this issue for the moment and focus on the basic distinction between proper and vulgar love, however defined. Pausanias goes so far as to argue for a law that would curtail vulgar love, but then he adds some interesting qualifications of his view, contrasting his absolutist notion of love from the position of the Persian Empire that condemns all forms of love outright. Still, the thrust of Pausanias's speech is not in his nuances, but in his own outright division of proper from improper love. Against the dizzying, hyper-subjective view of the artisan like Phaedrus, Pausanias defends a hyper-objective demarcation.

3. These speeches of Phaesdrus and Pausanias set up the extremes to be reckoned with. Now the next two speeches develop certain nuances. Eryximachus explores the idea of love in terms of harmony. Drawing out what an idealist would also emphasize, Eryximachus the doctor explains how love defines not only the relation between two people, but also the relation between all things. Love is present in the body in the form of health when it is at harmony with itself rather than in discord. Similarly, love is every place where there is a harmonious relation, as in music, in the play of the seasons, in nature as a whole, and in the relation between people and the gods.

4. Idealistic as Eryximachus' view may seem on universal harmony, it was all along interrupted by Aristophanes' hiccups. Now with his turn to speech, Aristophanes argues for how important it is to make room for the "hiccups" of life–and in a positive way. As great as Eryximachus' universal harmony would be, we must also learn to value the particular discords of life (i.e. the hiccups) and not just write them off as unimportant or bad, as does Eryximachus. To argue his point, Aristophanes invents a tale (which is not meant to be taken literally) about how, "once upon a time," each person was a complete being, not needing anyone or anything. Being so complete, we were a threat to the gods if only because we did not need them and were satisfied with ourselves. To correct this offense, Zeus split each of us into two. Love originates from this split: in love, each of us is searching for the other half of ourselves.

Now on face value, this view seems to the modern view of the search for one's "soulmate." If it were, Aristophanes would be making the same point as Eryximachus, the only difference being that he does not refer to referring to some general harmony of the universe as does Eryximachus, but refers specifically to two people bonded harmoniously in love. But Aristophanes stress is not on the idea of the soulmate and the ideal of harmony. Rather, his view brings to light how disharmonious, anxious, or vulnerable our love is. We are vulnerable in several ways: (a) "Ideally" we each will find our other half, but "realistically"–as rationals anxiously remind us–there is the chance that we never will. (b) Moreover, even if we are lucky enough to find our other half, we can never fuse together as we once were (once upon a time). (c) Because we can never really be fused with our other half after we find them, there is always the risk that the other will leave us over some silly, misunderstanding. Worst of all, they might even die before us leaving us all alone.

But we cannot stop here in our unpacking of Aristophanes' speech. What I have noted so far is only the negative, anxious side of seeking to get re-united with our specific, one and only other half. But there is also a positive side to anxiety. Is not love the strongest when it is most anxious, searching for its ideal other, postponing immediate gratification and sacrificing present interests for future reward? This is the paradoxical nature of love. In love, we want only what we cannot have, while if we would finally have it, the search would be over and the mystery gone.

Such is an introductory range of views on the topic of love culminating in the most complex and paradoxical speech of Aristophanes. Plato has led us from (1) Phaedrus's inspirational, Dionysian-like love of love's audacious effects, to (2) Pausanias's cautionary, guardian-like definition of two fundamental forms of love, one proper and one crude, to (3) Eryximachus's idealistic notion of love as universal harmony, to (4) Aristophanes's most subtle and paradoxical, yet realistic tale on our anxiously split self's search for its other half.

5. This range of views is concluded through returning from where we started: to the Dionysian artisan side of life represented now by Agathon, the host of the party and resent winner of a dramatic contest. Agathon's speech adds little substantial to what has already been said. After a promising start where he argues that we must distinguish what love is in itself before we praise how love appears to us, Agathon sinks into a merely ornamental rhetoric that keeps merely to the level of appearances. Such is the tendency and the allure of the Dionysian artisan that captivated Phaedrus' speech as well. The only difference between the two speeches is that at least Agathon is subtle enough to parody oratory itself, which results in a wonderfully comic speech.

Now comes Socrates' questioning of Agathon that introduces us to another attempt to "square the circle" of the four-fold division I have made using Keirsey's personality sorter. This second go around reaches a more complex and sophisticated view of love. Thus, I will spend more time unpacking each speech.

Socrates corrects Agathon much in the same way that Pausanius corrects Phaedrus in the first go around–except of course that Socrates does this in a much more profound way. Why more profound? Because Socrates goes straight to the point and rejects what all the other speakers have presupposed: namely, myth. In the face of Socrates' precise and clear cut, choppy and unstylized, and therefore disenchanting questions, all the previous speeches reveal themselves to be what they largely are: mere stylistic ornament and mythical play. Beyond mythos, Socrates takes one solid step into logos in his reply to Agathon.

(a) To escape the trappings of myth-based thought, Socrates clearly reasons through why we must stop thinking in terms of things. This is the nature of the mythological imagination: to reduce complex relations and dynamics to a thing you can quickly and colorfully refer to. Specifically, Greek myth was most focused on reducing complex emotions into things. Thus the complexities of war and hate is personified into the gods Mars, jealousy into the goddess Hera, beauty in the goddess of Aphrodite, and so forth. All the previous speakers have done this precisely in regard to love. But love is not a thing. Love is a dynamic relation. To make this clear, Socrates introduces questions that seem to be irrelevant and ridiculous, as well as nitpicky. He asks us to think of how a father is not a thing, but rather a certain relation a person has with another. To be a father is always to be a father to someone. This applies to the notion of love as well: to love is always to love something or someone. Love is not a think but a relation of one thing to another.

(b) Next, Socrates reasons through just what type of relation love is. If we think of love in terms of desire, where does this lead us? One desires only what one does not have. One desires what one lacks. So the relation of love is the relation of lack. One does not love what one already is or has. But what could this mean? To love is not to possess something. If you think that love is possession, you are going to fall into a lot of problems in your love life. You are not going to be a very good lover if you treat your beloved as a possession.

Thus, so far Socrates has presented two key fundamentals for any notion of love. First, we must escape all myth- or icon-making simplifications of love as all artisans are prone to do. Love is not a thing but a relation. Second, in treating love as a relation and not a thing, we must give up the very dangerous definition of love in terms of possession. In love, we are fundamentally separated from what we love. This is somewhat a non-mythological way of putting Aristophanes' point: in love, we are searching for our other half. Love is thus the split, gap, or lack of the beloved. Putting this point now in a non-mythic manner, we can see more clearly how fundamental this is to any form of love. Moreover, it leads us to Socrates third point:

(c) Now Socrates asks: what is it that one desires and does not have when one is in love? Socrates puts it quite plainly through his questioning: in love, one desires not just the beautiful but also the good. The fact that Socrates here introduces a moral side to love is crucial. It is his criticism of Aristophanes' story which included no reference to morality. Only Pausanias before him has really tried to introduce any moral distinctions. And again, because Socrates argues for this in a non-mythological manner, his point is profound. Combined with the previous points, it leads to a startling realization. If love is the non-possession or lack of the beloved, and if the beloved is beautiful and good, then this would imply that love lacks both beauty and goodness. This is a startling idea but one that is logical and precise. Love is neither identical to nor in possession of beauty and goodness. The relation that love establishes between the soul on the one hand and beauty and goodness on the other is neither one of identity with nor possession of beauty or goodness. But does this mean that if the soul is not beautiful and good it is ugly and foul.

Before an answer is given to this question, the former fundamental points in regard to the nature of love must be squarely faced. If you make the mistake of assuming love to be identical to beauty, you as a beloved are no better than Narcissus who sits immobilized, leaning over the bank mesmerized by his own image in the water, until he leans so far over the bank that he falls into the water and is drowned. Or if you mistake love as the possession of beauty, you are doomed to fall victim to jealousy and insecurity, if not to anything worse. No, the foundation of any decent, proper sense of love must be based on the fundamental acceptance of lack. This is a moral issue of goodness and not just an aesthetic issue of beauty. As the Stoic Epictetus puts it, in love one does not nor should not seek to possess anything. That is not the proper way to love. Your beloved is a gift to be cherished and protected, not a possession to be taken for granted or controlled.

This is a sober warning and a lesson to learn once and for all. It is akin to the lesson Epimetheus learns in regard to his wife Pandora. He is at first drawn to Pandora's exquisite beauty. But then comes the catastrophe when Pandora opens her forbidden box and all the plagues and sorrows of the world are let loose. Epimetheus becomes the exemplar of all guardians by learning once and for all, with Pandora, never to open up any forbidden box again. Rather, one must remain loyal and obedient, avoiding what is forbidden and being devote and obedient to what is proper. This is a primal notion of love, one based on the vow of obedience and service to a beloved as well as the vow of vows, the commitment to another for life. Before these vows are taken, no love can be taken that seriously. After these vows have been taken, after you accept that in love you are playing for keeps, in sickness and in health, then the more profound issues of love can finally be addressed.

After this sober moment of facing up to the primal negation of love as lack of possession and its primal pledge of commitment and service, Socrates tells of how he learned what, in a now uplifting or idealistic sense, all this amounts to. Specifically, he tells of what he learned from Diotima.

(a) To say that love is not beautiful or good is not to say that it is ugly or bad. Rather, love stands in between these extremes, as well as in between the extremes of mortality and immortality and ignorance and wisdom. Diotima explains this in term of a myth. But after Socrates' critical distancing himself from myth, the focus shifts and we see how Diotima's myth is merely a foil to explain this concept of the "in between."

(b) But what does this notion of the "in between" really come down to in relation to love? For Diotima, love is the relation we mortals can have with the immortals. Love is neither identity nor possession. We can neither be nor possess immortality in the direct way that the beautiful and good gods can. But through love, we mortals can indirectly share or participate in the immortality of divine beauty and goodness.

To begin with, think of this in terms of sexual reproduction. You cannot live on forever, but you can share with others, and share especially with your family. In the reproduction of your family, from generation to generation, you partake–in this indirect, in between way–of immortality. As Diotoma says "reproduction goes on forever; it is what mortals have in place of immortality" (207A).

The most famous quotes of the Symposium now are given. This is the section of Plato's dialogue that inspired what has come to be called "Neoplatonic mysticism" and is a specific version of pantheism (the belief that god is everywhere, one with nature, much like the "Force" in Star Wars). Beyond the pedantic and scientistic appeal to harmony by Eryximachus, Diotima brings the sensitive reader to the heights of idealism. Beyond the participation of physical reproduction with the divine, Diotima takes us step by step to higher and more encompassing forms of harmonious participation with the divine. Beyond loving just one particular person, she invites us to appreciate the beauty of all people. Beyond even this enlarged sense of participation, we are to admire the more general and embracing beauty of a properly functioning government and of custom in general.

What could this mean? It means trying to adopt an angelic beatific vision as is given in the end of the film "American Beauty." Imagine being an angel, silently listening in on what people are saying to each other and to themselves while you soar from one town square and market street to the next, from apartment complexes to bus terminals to old country roads and junk yards to hospital wards and homeless shelters. From this angelic viewpoint, filled as you are with beatific humor, just take in the simple fact of all the different people speaking and gesturing one to another–even when they are alone, carrying on in their heads a conversation they just had the other day. Some voices may be yelling, others complaining, others stone cold, still others confused, still others bitter, or joking, or anxious, or lackadaisical. Amidst the diversity of all these voices, imagine yourself as an angel, gently smiling while you take in all these conversations from up high. From the perspective of this ever heightened and ethereal gaze, you can see how we on the ground caught up in our own private worries and concerns are nevertheless all united by invisible threads. Despite ourselves, we are united in a concert of echoing babble that in the end, like the gentle babble of a mountain brook, is rather small and trivial within the scope of things large and immense. From this perspective that stretches from an appreciation of beauty in one and then another person, to people at large, to nature as a whole, if you meditate long enough on this, it will strike you suddenly how beautiful everything indeed is. Diotima's vision is an ethereal gaze that truly puts things in the right perspective. In her own words, Diotima says: "You see, the man who has been thus far guided in matters of Love, who has beheld beautiful things in the right order and correctly, is coming now to the goal of Loving: all of a sudden he will catch sight of something wonderfully beautiful in its nature; that, Socrates, is the reason for all his earlier labors" (211A).

Let me summarize. Socrates' correction of Agathon slams shut once and for all Pandora's box of myth-based intrigue and rhetorical seduction. Socrates presents a bare-boned view of love in the sense of nomos, or love as lawful obedience and duty, based on the fundamental acceptance that nothing can be possessed, least of all one's beautiful beloved. Rather, in love, you are first and foremost the protector, caretaker, or "guardian" of your beloved. The question is not just that of beauty, but also of the good.

Diotima's lesson for Socrates is that, beyond this fundamental, bare-boned ground of love, there is something more. After all the plagues and sorrows fly out of Pandora's box, one more thing unexpectedly slips out before the lid is shut forever: hope. As much as it is important to learn the lesson of obedience and devotion once and for all, it is also important to open up to something more positive. Beyond blind devotion, there is hope. Love in this sense is the opening to something beyond, to a promise and potential that lies within each and everything. Indeed, for the Neoplatonic mystic or pantheist, love is everywhere and anywhere one looks. Like Luke Skywalker's learning to trust in the "Force," we must learn that love is the life-force of all that lifts up and buoys all in one great embrace of oceanic unity.

Now what shall we expect after reaching the heights of Diotima's speech? How shall the dialogue progress? Or is there anything more to add and shouldn't Plato just end his text here?

But we are in for a tremendous surprise. What happens after Diotima's speech is similar to what happens to Eryximachus' except now on a much more startling and grand scale. Rather than just the hiccups of Aristophanes, what now disrupts the flow is the raucous entrance of the drunken Alcibiades. Looking for a wild time, he tries to get the group to fly into drink and fun. But the group resists and instead requests of him to give a speech on love. Dumbfounded especially when he is caught short once he sees Socrates in the room, he gives in, but only under the condition that they not expect from him any elegant, rhetorically stylized praise of love that will usher his audience away in ethereal abstraction. Rather, he gives a speech on his ever so specific love of Socrates.

The first thing to keep in mind is the dramatic switch the speech of Alcibiades thus makes, moving away from Diotima's ethereal abstractions where love is described as a participation of each with all, and moving toward a focus on a unique individual who has no equal. As much as Socrates praises the Diotima's ascent from the love of specific things and people to ever greater and more general loves, Socrates in his own person frustrates this very ascent. In Alcibiades' words:

There is no Platonic form or Neoplatonic ascent to the form of forms when it comes to Alcibiades love of Socrates. Something in Socrates' very character frustrates any such idealistic abstraction.

What is it about Socrates' character? Alcibiades' most basic praise is that Socrates lives the most virtuous life imaginable, or better, Socrates' virtuous life confounds the imagination. Socrates' life is an inimitable model of justice, moderation, courage, and wisdom. These are the four great virtues that all ancient Athenians held in high esteem. But Alcibiades description of these virtues of Socrates is complex owing to the paradoxical nature of Socrates himself. According to Alcibiades, there is a radical split in Socrates's very character. He is the exact opposite of his public persona. On the surface, he is in fact quite ugly, while privately, he is more beautiful than one could ever image. How so? Let us take each virtue, one at a time.

(a) Wisdom. The most famous exemplification of the split in Socrates' character is his endless pleading of ignorance. While speaking with another, he assures them of how ignorant he is and how much he wishes that the others could teach him even just a little. But there is a wonderful contradiction here. It is Socrates that will be the teacher of all precisely because he refuses to accept the trappings of being the "teacher who is supposed to know and answer all the questions." Socrates claims that "all he knows is that he does not know." As it turns out, this is to know much more than most everyone else who claims to be wise!

(b) Justice. How would you react to a person who says one thing, casting himself as the fool, but does the opposite thing that he says, proving that he is actually no fool at all? There is something deeply innervating about such a person, something that fundamentally stirs your desire and emotions, though to what end it is hard to say. That is what is so frustrating about such a person as Socrates. He leaves everything up to you and refuses to fill in the gap. Both the gap between his public and private self as well as the gap between you and him remain frightfully open.

This is what bothers Alcibiades so much. About his natural inclinations and what will ultimately become of him, I will say more in a moment. But for now, what is important is to focus on the momentary effect Socrates has on him. In Alcibiades' own words, "Socrates is the only man in the world who has made me feel shame–ah, you didn't think I had it in me, did you?" (216B) or again "the moment he starts to speak, I am beside myself: my heart starts leaping in my chest, the tears come streaming down my face" (215E). Because Socrates never stands still but continually frustrates every attempt to pin him down, either in argument or in love, he has an effect on Alcibiades that is directly moral. Unlike the speech of others, to fall into conversation with Socrates is to become upset "so deeply that my very own soul started protesting that my life–my life–was no better than the most miserable of slave's" (216A). Alcibiades is one of the most popular and wealthy nobles of Athens, and yet Socrates has this effect on him. "He always traps me, you see, and he makes me admit that my political career is a waste of time, while all that matters is just what I most neglect: my personal shortcomings, which cry out for the closest attention" (216A).

(c) Moderation. Socrates equally dumbfounds Alcibiades when it comes to the life of pleasures, and not just the life of thought (via wisdom) and action (via justice). Publicly, Socrates plays the foolish lover and slavishly pleads for the hands of any and every young catch. So Socrates seems to be very immoderate, being dragged around by his pursuit of pleasure. But it is actually all a show that he puts on. Privately, he has little interest in physical pleasure and is truly only interested in the highest of things. Still, it is not that Socrates is an ascetic: that would be flying into yet the opposite extreme. Rather, "no one stood up to hunger as well as he did. And yet he was the one man who could really enjoy a feast; and though he didn't much want to drink, when he had to, he could drink the best of us under the table" (220A).

(d) Courage. But if all this maneuvering on Socrates' part might lead you to think that he would be a coward in battle, Alcibiades reminds us to think twice. As much as he plays the fool, when push comes to shove, Socrates is the most direct and levelheaded to be found on the battlefield. Just by the look of his stance, the enemy evades him knowing that there is a man that will put up a fight.

Thus Socrates is the ultimate lover, as ugly and clownish his appearance may be during everyday matters. (1) As a guardian, he leads you out of any myth-dominated delusions toward a clear-cut acceptance of being non-possessive and devote, treating another as a gift to be cherished and not a treasure chest to be picked at or an object to be taken for granted. (2) As an idealist, he is forever in search with others for the form of forms, ascending to ever greater participation of each with all. (3) But as rational, he does all this with a wink and a smile. Or better, he keeps a perfect poker face and never fully gives away the contents of his hand until it is too late. He talks about the most ordinary and ridiculous things in a way to throw off your defenses.

Now we must remember that these are not word for word speeches that Plato merely recorded for prosperity. We don't even know if this evening of speeches ever happened or if it was just a creation of Plato's. Thus, we must be careful and expect that, as Socrates' most learned student, Plato himself keeps an impenetrable poker face and never fully shows his hand to us. He ultimately leaves us, as does Socrates, to think for ourselves. To get some bearing, I've used a four-fold distinction and have organized the speeches in this manner. But in the end, we must set aside every schema and every interpretive strategy and just let the dialogue as a whole sink deep into us, letting it have its full, immediate impact.

Or this is what we would like to do ideally, while this is exactly what Alcibiades refuses to do. In the end, for the reader who intimately knows about all of the speakers in the text–as Plato's audience surely would have–this is what hits us below the belt, so to speak. Alcibiades is the exact counter-model of everything that Plato and Socrates lived for. As much as Socrates, in his indirect and innervating way, tries to teach Alcibiades to change his ways, Alcibiades in the end returns to his old, corrupt ways. "Yes, he makes me feel ashamed," says Alcibiades during a moment of clarity, "I know perfectly well that I can't prove he's wrong when he tell me what I should do; yet, the moment I leave his side, I go back to my old ways: I cave in to my desire to please the crowd" (216B).

And indeed, this is precisely what happens, again as Plato's audience surely would have known. There is a sword hanging by a thin thread above the head of Alcibiades that would have put any contemporary reader of Plato on edge. What is this hanging sword that is soon to fall? Readers would know that soon after the event of this drinking party, Alcibiades in real life would become involved in defaming the Eleusian mysteries in arrogant disregard of the gods. More tangibly, the readers would be painfully aware of how Alcibiades, a year after the party, will persuade the Athenians to conduct a military operation in far away Sicily. The disastrous failure of this expedition will weaken Athens to the point that Sparta easily conquers it. In the Plato's Symposium, we see Alcibiades at his height–young and beautiful, popular and charismatic. We as readers who know what will become of him can only sit at the edge of our seats and anxiously read how the making of his downfall was at work even then, during the events of the Symposium. If only he would have heeded the lessons of Socrates! Failing to do so leads not only to his downfall, but to the downfall of Athens itself.

This is the elephant in the room that is just crying to be pointed out in Plato's Symposium. And it gets worse. After the fall of Athens to Sparta, the Spartans install a tyranny that lasts only a couple of years. Regaining its sovereignty, the Athenians turn on the one person who exemplified the best of Athens at its height, which is Socrates (at least according to Plato). The Athenians actually blame Socractes for the city's fall. The mob of the city was so disoriented and out looking for a fall guy for their failures, and Socrates happened to be the one who always stuck his neck out and left himself wide open for attack. The Athenians couldn't resist, and they condemned him to death.

The rhetorical moment of thought is always to point out something obvious, some elephant in the room that everyone knows is there but refuses to admit to. It is the embarrassing moment when the child points out that the emperor has no clothes. Throughout Plato's Symposium we have witnessed several forms of rhetorical flourish. But none of the fine speeches of these Sophists ever hit the nail on the head in the way that Plato does. Again, what is the elephant in the room in Plato's text? –The fact that Socrates was unjustly condemned to death, scapegoated for the fall of Athens when he was actually the one man who stood up to Athens and tried to correct its way just as he tried to correct the ways of Alcibiades. That is what rhetoric is supposed to do, as opposed to the way Phaedrus, Agathon, and Alcibiades–outside of his relationship with Socrates–use rhetoric. Sophists, as the sharp tongued, high paid lawyers of the day, sugar coat their speeches and lead you to get caught up in the mere charm and seduction of their ornamental language. By contrast, Plato's overall rhetorical ploy hits you right in the gut leaving you speechless to wonder "if only, if only Alcibiades heeded the teachings of Socrates, then he would not have led Athens to defeat, and Athens in defeat would not have taken out their vengeful frustrations on Socrates!"

Plato makes this point silently, letting Alcibiades have front and center stage, presenting Alcibiades at the peak of his career and a year before his infamous mission to Sicily. Yet Plato's silent, steaming indignation is there, and is all the more forceful for its sublime silence.

Irving Singer has written a three volume book on love entitled the Nature of Love. He singles out four distinct forms of love that I believe is very helpful especially in a reading of Plato's Symposium. These four forms of love he calls nomos, philia, eros, and agape. Let me now use these four concepts to review Plato's Symposium. These are the four types of love:

(1) Nomos. Love in the sense of providing security and protection, accepting that there are fundamental limits to live by in love as well as in life. The most fundamental limit is accepting that you can never (nor should ever want to) possess your lover, but are only her dutiful guardian during the short time that you are blessed to be together. This is love in the sense of nomos. It is the bare-boned side of love. Taking the rock solid vows of obedience and service, and especially taking the vow of commitment for life, your love must then be taken seriously.

(2) Philia. Love in the sense of mutual participation in increasingly higher unions and fusions, eventually reaching supreme, mystical heights. This is love in the sense of philia and has several levels of intensity. On the mellowest level, it is the love that exists between good friends and consists of a natural form of mutuality and bonding that need not be spoken nor made explicit. On a more intense level, it is one side of love that any good couple develops in time. You better hope that the person with whom you spend most of your life together can be, among other things, a great friend with whom you have mutual interests and concerns. Finally, mysticism pushes this type of love to its most intense level where you fuse with the whole of the universe, finding in everyone and in each thing, wherever you look, an unspoken sympathy or "force" that unobtrusively but surely pervades all.

(3) Eros. Love in the sense of a tension filled, on edge, ever anxious split between what one says and what one thinks, or between a poker-faced public persona and a private core that is burning up in passion. This is love as eros. It is what we most commonly think of as love: love as desire and longing for another. On the one hand, this side of love speaks to how vulnerable we feel when falling in love. Unsure of whether or not to commit to the other, you keep your guard up while intensely keeping watch on how high or low your beloved keeps her or his guard. On the other hand, even after you have finally committed to someone for life and no matter how much you have become good friends that keep no secrets from each other, there will be plenty of times when you anxiously long for each other. Any number of things can come between you and your partner, forcing you to repress your desire for her or him for the moment. Maybe your partner has to go on long business trips or spend a lot of time away from you taking care of another family member. Then of course there is the raising of your children that has to come before your own needs and desires as a couple. And ultimately, when you loose your beloved, you will especially be thrown into this side of love, longing to be with her or him while faced with the ultimate barrier that confounds all unions: death.

(4) Agape. Finally, love in the sense of a publicly expressed explosive power that draws in anything and everyone within its carefree carnival of throwing everything to the wind in ecstatic jubilation. This is love as agape. On the light side, it is the slapstick, death defying, comic side of love shared with another. But on the most intense level, this is when you finally let down your guard completely and release yourself into the arms of your beloved in total abandon. It is a mode of radical forgiveness and starting over, a clearing the ground and forgetfulness of the past and openness to the raw presence of each other. In the searching mode of eros, you anxious appraise the value of your beloved as part of the process to decide how low you should lower your guard. But in the mode of agape, you throw open the floodgates of your passion, and in the exuberance and magnanimity of your love, you graciously bestow value on your beloved simply through the pure power of love itself.

These are the many sides of love. But least we get carried away with the wonders of these forms of love, maybe finding more truth in one side rather than another, I must warn you. Each side of love requires the other three. Alone, each becomes twisted and one-sided.

(1) The danger of nomos: Love as cut and dry security and as dutiful protection becomes a prison of blind obedience and unimaginative routine unless tempered with the other forms of love.

(2) The danger of philia: Love as harmonizing, mutual fusion of each with all becomes a mere flight into starry-eyed fantasy unless also tempered.

(3) The danger of eros: Love as erotic longing and guarded appraisal of the other becomes neurotic and repressed without again being opened up to the three other forms of love.

(4) The danger of agape: Finally, love as jubilant explosion becomes explosive in the all too real, violent sense when this form of love is not complemented by all the others.

You see how many-sided love is? Just as there are many sides to each of us–the guardian side, the idealist side, the rational side, and the artisan side–so too there are many sides of love. This is why Plato chose to write about it in the way he did, allowing several speakers to stress now one side, now another, until all sides are covered.

Personality Type

Speaker

Type of Love

Artisan

1. Phaedo

5. Agathon

9. Alcibiades' uncorrected by Socrates.

10. Plato's silent (and therefore all the more powerful)

condemnation of Athens for condemning Socrates

to death.

Agape

Guardian

2. Pausanias' critique of Phaedo.

6. Socrates' critique of Agathon.

Nomos

Idealist

3. Eryximachus' on harmony.

7. Diotima's Neoplatonic mysticism.

Philia

Rational

4. Aristophanes' split self.

8. Socrates' mysterious split self that shames Alcibiades

out of his destructive, crowd-pleasing ways.

Eros

© Gardner H. Fair, 2000. Permission is granted for electronic copying, distribution in print form for educational purposes and personal use. No permission is granted for commercial use.