Talking about Love

Plato's Symposium

My latest book How to Talk about Love will be released in January 2025. It introduces the most famous and most delightful of ancient writings on love, Plato’s Symposium.

In the Symposium Plato sets up a kind of debate between a group of men attending a party in Athens in 416 BC, thrown to celebrate the successful theatre production of the host, a tragedian called Agathon. The youngest participant, Phaedrus, challenges those in the party, which includes the philosopher Socrates, to give speeches in praise of Eros, god of love.

In the first of three sections, five men (among them the comic playwright Aristophanes) present their ideas about what they think love is.  Because the Greek for Love is Eros, and Eros was a god – Cupid to the Romans – there’s a persistent ambiguity about whether they are talking about the idea of love or about the god of love.

The speakers take it in turn to give their views.

Phaedrus portrays love as a force that inspires noble deeds. Pausanias insists that true love transcends the physical and requires honest commit­ment. Eryximachus depicts love as a universal principle of harmony. The host Agathon rhapsodises about love as a stimulus for poetry and creativity. Just before Agathon speaks, Aristophanes concocts a memorable comic tale to illustrate how love is ‘finding one’s other half’:

In our original form we humans were quite different. There were three sexes: male, female, and a form combining both. These early humans were round in shape, with four arms, four legs, and two faces on a single head, capable of moving in any direction or rolling swiftly by spinning on all their limbs. These powerful beings threatened the gods, prompting Zeus to intervene. Rather than destroying them, Zeus weakened them by slicing each in half, creating humans as we know them today. The halves clung to each other, desperate to reunite, often perishing from longing. To ease their suffering, Zeus moved their genitals to the front, allowing them to bond and reproduce, with intercourse becoming a source of both pleasure and continuity. From this division, the human instinct to love and seek unity was born, each person yearning for their missing half to restore their original nature.

After the five speeches, Socrates offers a theory of love which he credits to a woman called Diotima. Diotima’s doctrine is that love is like a ladder: one begins on the lower rung by being physically attracted to another body, but as one climbs up the ladder one learns to love ‘higher’ things such things as poetry, law, virtue, and patriotism - we still call non-sexual love ‘Platonic’. Love, she says, is our desire to interact with such things with the aim of creating more good things.

“Up to this point even you can be initiated,” Diotima tells Socrates. She then embarks on a doctrine which reveals the higher truth.

So what is the higher truth about Love?

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As one ascends the ladder, Plato says, one is attracted not by the beauty of bodies, ideas, or whatever one finds attractive, but by beauty itself. “Suddenly the lover will have revealed to him, as he comes to the close of his interactions with love, a wonderful vision, beautiful in its nature. This is the final object of all those previous efforts.” The beauty thus seen is eternal, true, life-giving, and divine; the chance to commune with it makes one immortal.

This transcendent kind of experience is not, however, how we generally think of Love. The final (and longest) section of the dialogue undercuts it. After Socrates has spoken, the playboy-general Alcibiades bursts in on the party and offers a speech in praise not of Eros, but of Socrates himself, a man he has loved from youth. The final thought we are left with, then, is that love is greater and more mysterious even than an idea or an abstract force: what makes us love is the person we love and the goodness we find in every aspect of their being.