Symposium
Plato's dialogue on the nature of love — seven speeches at a drinking party in Athens, 416 BC
Tradition: Classical Greek philosophy / Platonism
Eros is the ascent — from beautiful bodies, to beautiful souls, to the Beautiful itself — Diotima's ladder of love
The Symposium is the most influential ancient philosophical treatment of love (eros) and one of Plato's literary masterpieces. At a drinking party in Athens in 416 BC, seven speakers — Phaedrus, Pausanias, Eryximachus, Aristophanes, Agathon, Socrates (relaying Diotima of Mantinea), and finally Alcibiades — each offer an encomium of love. The dialogue's philosophical core is Diotima's ladder: the lover ascends from desire for a particular beautiful body, to beautiful bodies in general, to beautiful souls, to beautiful laws and learning, and finally to the Beautiful itself — the eternal Form. Together with the Republic and the Phaedrus, this is the central middle-period statement of the Theory of Forms, and it shaped every later Christian mystical theology of ascending love (Augustine, Bonaventure, the Victorines).
Author
Editions cited
- Plato: Symposium (Alexander Nehamas & Paul Woodruff, Hackett, 1989)
- Plato: Symposium (Christopher Gill, Penguin, 1999)
- Plato: Symposium (Robin Waterfield, Oxford World's Classics, 1994)
School Embodiments
The Symposium is one of the three central middle-period dialogues that establish Platonism. The ladder of love is the canonical statement of the philosophical ascent from the sensible to the intelligible.
"Beginning from obvious beauties he must for the sake of that highest beauty be ever climbing aloft." (Symposium 211c, Diotima's speech)
The Beautiful itself — "eternal, neither coming into being nor passing away, neither increasing nor diminishing" (211a) — is the canonical ancient statement of the priority of intelligible form over sensible particular that grounds later Western idealism.
"It is not anywhere in another thing, as in an animal, or in earth, or in heaven, or in anything else, but itself by itself with itself." (Symposium 211b)
Plotinus draws extensively on the Symposium's ascent. The Enneads' analysis of Beauty (I.6) is a sustained commentary on Diotima's ladder.
"The man for whom this thing has come to be in sight... touches not images but truth." (Symposium 212a)
Augustine, the Victorines, and Aquinas inherit the Symposium's ascending-love framework through both direct Latin translation and Plotinian mediation. The doctrine of the ordo amoris — rightly-ordered love — descends from this dialogue.
"Love is the desire that the good be one's own for ever." (Symposium 206a, Diotima)
Emerson and Thoreau read the Symposium in Thomas Taylor's Romantic-era translation; the ascent from particular to universal beauty resonates with Transcendentalist nature-mysticism.
"The Beautiful is not body or any part of the body... but is itself by itself with itself, eternal." (Symposium 211a–b)
The dialectical method of ascent — from many instances to the one Form — is the precursor of rationalist procedures of intellectual abstraction in Descartes and Spinoza.
"He who has been instructed in love is in the right way." (Symposium 211b)
Internal Tensions
Aristophanes's comic-myth speech (the original pair-bond creatures split by Zeus) and Alcibiades's drunken final speech sit awkwardly with Diotima's philosophical ascent. Modern readers split on whether the dialogue's literary structure (the descent into Alcibiades's frank eros for Socrates) is a deliberate complication of Diotima's austere ladder or a confirmation of it. The Symposium's treatment of homoerotic love has also been the subject of much modern interpretive disagreement.
I. Time
The Beautiful is eternal — "neither coming into being nor passing away" (211a). Within the temporal world, eros's task is the ascent. The Symposium presupposes the Phaedo's doctrine of soul-immortality and the Republic's framework of reincarnation.
Attributes
II. Space
Standard Platonic cosmology — a finite ordered cosmos. The Forms are not in space; they are "elsewhere" in the philosophical sense, seen by intellect not sight.
Attributes
III. Matter
Beautiful bodies are real but derivative — the lowest rung of the ladder. Matter is emergent, finite, conserved across transformations, but ontologically subordinate to the Forms.
Attributes
IV. Observer
The Symposium's observer is the lover — embodied (the ascent begins from physical attraction), plural at the social level, active in the philosophical pursuit. Knowledge culminates in the direct intuition of the Beautiful (a total knowledge). Moral authority is reason guided by eros; the metaphysical agency is the cosmic order that draws the soul upward.
Attributes
V. Energy
Eros itself is the energetic principle — the dynamic striving by which souls ascend. Emergent within the order of Forms-and-particulars, conserved across the soul's pursuit, irreversibly directional.
Attributes
VI. Information
The Beautiful is the substantival informational structure that the ascending lover progressively apprehends. Personal information is conserved across death; the philosophical lover's soul carries its knowledge of the Forms.
Attributes
Personas that cite this work
Personas with the nearest attribute fingerprint
Historical figures whose own classification on the same six-dimensional grid lands closest to this work's. Computed by attribute-agreement on coordinates both address.
Computed school proximity
The work's attribute fingerprint scored against all schools using the same quiz scorer. Useful as a sanity check on the hand-curated embodiments above.
How Symposium resolves each dilemma
51 resolved positions across 4 dimensions, including 13 distinctive where the majority of schools go the other way · 6 unaligned.
Each dimension is sorted so minority positions come first. Mainstream positions are folded into an expandable list.
Time · 9 dilemmas, all mainstream
Matter · 7 dilemmas · 3 distinctive
What stuff is — fundamental, relational, or appearance.
4 mainstream positions
Observer · 37 dilemmas · 5 distinctive
Mind, agency, and the knower's relation to the known.