Symposium

Now then, said Socrates, keep carefully in mind what is the object of Love, and only tell me whether he desires the particular thing that is his object. Yes, to be sure, he replied. Has he or has he not the object of his desire and love when he desires and loves it? He does not have it, most likely, he said. Not as a likelihood, said Socrates, but as a necessity, consider if the desiring subject must have desire for something it lacks, and again, no desire if it has no lack. I at least, Agathon, am perfectly sure it is a necessity. How does it strike you? I am sure of it also, said he. Very good. Now could a tall man wish to be tall, or a strong man to be strong? By what has been admitted, this is impossible. Since, I suppose, the man in each case would not be lacking the quality mentioned. True. For if, being strong, he should wish to be strong, said Socrates, or being swift, to be swift, or being healthy, to be healthy,—since we are apt to suppose in these and all such cases that men of this or that sort, possessing these qualities, do also desire what they have already: I put this in, to prevent any misconception; these men, Agathon, if you consider, are bound to have at the very moment each thing that they have whether they wish it or not; and how, I ask, is a man going to desire that? No, when a person says, I being healthy, want to be healthy; being rich, I want to be rich; I desire the very things that I have—we shall tell him, My good sir, riches you possess, and health and strength, which you would like to possess in the future also: for the time now present you have them whether you would or no. When you say, I desire these present things, we suggest you are merely saying I wish these things now present to be present also in the future. Would he not admit our point? To this Agathon assented. And so, continued Socrates, a man may be said to love a thing not yet provided or possessed, when he would have the presence of certain things secured to him for ever in the future. Certainly, he said. Then such a person, and in general all who feel desire, feel it for what is not provided or present; for something they have not or are not or lack and that sort of thing is the object of desire and love? Assuredly, he said. Now then, said Socrates, let us agree to what we have so far concluded. First, is not Love directed to certain things of which, in the second place, he has a want?

Yes, he said. Then, granting this, recollect what things you named in our discussion as the objects of Love: if you like, I will remind you. What you said, I believe, was to the effect that the gods contrived the world from a love of beautiful things, for of ugly there was no love. Did you not say something of the sort? Yes, I did, said Agathon. And quite properly, my friend, said Socrates; then, such being the case, must not Love be only love of beauty, and not of ugliness? He assented. Well then, we have agreed that he loves what he lacks and has not? Yes, he replied. And what Love lacks and has not is beauty? That needs must be, he said. Well now, will you say that what lacks beauty, and in no wise possesses it, is beautiful?Surely not. So can you still allow Love to be beautiful, if this is the case? Whereupon Agathon said, I greatly fear, Socrates, I knew nothing of what I was talking about. Ah, your words were beautiful enough, Agathon; but pray give me one or two more: you hold, do you not, that good things are beautiful? I do. Then if Love lacks beautiful things, and good things are beautiful, he must lack good things too. I see no means, Socrates, of contradicting you, he replied; let it be as you say. No, it is Truth, my lovable Agathon, whom you cannot contradict: Socrates you easily may. The Speech of Socrates And now I shall let you alone, and proceed with the discourse upon Love which I heard one day from a Mantinean woman named Diotima: [*](These names suggest a connection respectively with prophecy and with the favor of Heaven.) in this subject she was skilled, and in many others too; for once, by bidding the Athenians offer sacrifices ten years before the plague, she procured them so much delay in the advent of the sickness. Well, I also had my lesson from her in love-matters; so now I will try and follow up the points on which Agathon and I have just agreed by narrating to you all on my own account, as well as I am able, the speech she delivered to me. So first, Agathon, I must unfold, in your manner of exposition, who and what sort of being is Love, and then I shall tell of his works. The readiest way, I think, will be to give my description that form of question and answer which the stranger woman used for hers that day. For I spoke to her in much the same terms as Agathon addressed just now to me, saying Love was a great god, and was of beautiful things; and she refuted me with the very arguments I have brought against our young friend, showing that by my account that god was neither beautiful nor good. How do you mean, Diotima? said I; is Love then ugly and bad? Peace, for shame! she replied: or do you imagine that whatever is not beautiful must needs be ugly?

To be sure I do.And what is not skilled, ignorant? Have you not observed that there is something halfway between skill and ignorance?What is that?You know, of course, that to have correct opinion, if you can give no reason for it, is neither full knowledge—how can an unreasoned thing be knowledge?—nor yet ignorance; for what hits on the truth cannot be ignorance. So correct opinion, I take it, is just in that position, between understanding and ignorance.Quite true, I said. Then do not compel what is not beautiful to be ugly, she said, or what is not good to be bad. Likewise of Love, when you find yourself admitting that he is not good nor beautiful, do not therefore suppose he must be ugly and bad, but something betwixt the two. And what of the notion, I asked, to which every one agrees, that he is a great god? Every one? People who do not know, she rejoined, or those who know also? I mean everybody in the world. At this she laughed and said, But how, Socrates, can those agree that he is a great god who say he is no god at all? What persons are they? I asked. You are one, she replied, and I am another. How do you make that out? I said. Easily, said she; tell me, do you not say that all gods are happy and beautiful? Or will you dare to deny that any god is beautiful and happy? Bless me! I exclaimed, not I. And do you not call those happy who possess good and beautiful things? Certainly I do. But you have admitted that Love, from lack of good and beautiful things, desires these very things that he lacks. Yes, I have. How then can he be a god, if he is devoid of things beautiful and good?By no means, it appears. So you see, she said, you are a person who does not consider Love to be a god. What then, I asked, can Love be? A mortal? Anything but that. Well what? As I previously suggested, between a mortal and an immortal. And what is that, Diotima? A great spirit, Socrates: for the whole of the spiritual [*](Δαίμονες and τὸ δαιμόνιον represent the mysterious agencies and influences by which the gods communicate with mortals.) is between divine and mortal. Possessing what power? I asked. Interpreting and transporting human things to the gods and divine things to men; entreaties and sacrifices from below, and ordinances and requitals from above: being midway between, it makes each to supplement the other, so that the whole is combined in one.

Through it are conveyed all divination and priestcraft concerning sacrifice and ritual and incantations, and all soothsaying and sorcery. God with man does not mingle: but the spiritual is the means of all society and converse of men with gods and of gods with men, whether waking or asleep. Whosoever has skill in these affairs is a spiritual man to have it in other matters, as in common arts and crafts, is for the mechanical. Many and multifarious are these spirits, and one of them is Love.From what father and mother sprung? I asked. That is rather a long story, she replied; but still, I will tell it you. When Aphrodite was born, the gods made a great feast, and among the company was Resource the son of Cunning. And when they had banqueted there came Poverty abegging, as well she might in an hour of good cheer, and hung about the door. Now Resource, grown tipsy with nectar—for wine as yet there was none—went into the garden of Zeus, and there, overcome with heaviness, slept. Then Poverty, being of herself so resourceless, devised the scheme of having a child by Resource, and lying down by his side she conceived Love. Hence it is that Love from the beginning has been attendant and minister to Aphrodite, since he was begotten on the day of her birth, and is, moreover, by nature a lover bent on beauty since Aphrodite is beautiful. Now, as the son of Resource and Poverty, Love is in a peculiar case. First, he is ever poor, and far from tender or beautiful as most suppose him: rather is he hard and parched, shoeless and homeless; on the bare ground always he lies with no bedding, and takes his rest on doorsteps and waysides in the open air; true to his mother’s nature, he ever dwells with want. But he takes after his father in scheming for all that is beautiful and good; for he is brave, strenuous and high-strung, a famous hunter, always weaving some stratagem; desirous and competent of wisdom, throughout life ensuing the truth; a master of jugglery, witchcraft, >and artful speech. By birth neither immortal nor mortal, in the selfsame day he is flourishing and alive at the hour when he is abounding in resource; at another he is dying, and then reviving again by force of his father’s nature: yet the resources that he gets will ever be ebbing away; so that Love is at no time either resourceless or wealthy, and furthermore, he stands midway betwixt wisdom and ignorance.

The position is this: no gods ensue wisdom or desire to be made wise; such they are already; nor does anyone else that is wise ensue it. Neither do the ignorant ensue wisdom, nor desire to be made wise: in this very point is ignorance distressing, when a person who is not comely or worthy or intelligent is satisfied with himself. The man who does not feel himself defective has no desire for that whereof he feels no defect.Who then, Diotima, I asked, are the followers of wisdom, if they are neither the wise nor the ignorant? Why, a child could tell by this time, she answered, that they are the intermediate sort, and amongst these also is Love. For wisdom has to do with the fairest things, and Love is a love directed to what is fair; so that Love must needs be a friend of wisdom, and, as such, must be between wise and ignorant. This again is a result for which he has to thank his origin: for while he comes of a wise and resourceful father, his mother is unwise and resourceless. Such, my good Socrates, is the nature of this spirit. That you should have formed your other notion of Love is no surprising accident. You supposed, if I am to take your own words as evidence, that the beloved and not the lover was Love. This led you, I fancy, to hold that Love is all-beautiful. The lovable, indeed, is the truly beautiful, tender, perfect, and heaven-blest; but the lover is of a different type, in accordance with the account I have given. Upon this I observed: Very well then, madam, you are right; but if Love is such as you describe him, of what use is he to mankind? That is the next question, Socrates, she replied, on which I will try to enlighten you. While Love is of such nature and origin as I have related, he is also set on beautiful things, as you say. Now, suppose some one were to ask us: In what respect is he Love of beautiful things, Socrates and Diotima? But let me put the question more clearly thus: What is the love of the lover of beautiful things? That they may be his, I replied. But your answer craves a further query, she said, such as this: What will he have who gets beautiful things? This question I declared I was quite unable now to answer offhand. Well, she proceeded, imagine that the object is changed, and the inquiry is made about the good instead of the beautiful. Come, Socrates (I shall say), what is the love of the lover of good things? That they may be his, I replied. And what will he have who gets good things?I can make more shift to answer this, I said; he will be happy.

Yes, she said, the happy are happy by acquisition of good things, and we have no more need to ask for what end a man wishes to be happy, when such is his wish: the answer seems to be ultimate. Quite true, I said. Now do you suppose this wish or this love to be common to all mankind, and that every one always wishes to have good things? Or what do you say? Even so, I said; it is common to all. Well then, Socrates, she said, we do not mean that all men love, when we say that all men love the same things always; we mean that some people love and others do not? I am wondering myself, I replied. But you should not wonder, she said; for we have singled out a certain form of love, and applying thereto the name of the whole, we call it love; and there are other names that we commonly abuse. As, for example—? I asked. Take the following: you know that poetry [*](Cf. above, Plat. Sym. 197a.) is more than a single thing. For of anything whatever that passes from not being into being the whole cause is composing or poetry; so that the productions of all arts are kinds of poetry, and their craftsmen are all poets. That is true. But still, as you are aware, said she, they are not called poets: they have other names, while a single section disparted from the whole of poetry—merely the business of music and meters—is entitled with the name of the whole. This and no more is called poetry; those only who possess this branch of the art are poets. Quite true, I said. Well, it is just the same with love. Generically, indeed, it is all that desire of good things and of being happy [*](Cf. above, Plat. Sym. 204e-205a.)—Love most mighty and all-beguiling. Yet, whereas those who resort to him in various other ways—in money-making, an inclination to sports, or philosophy—are not described either as loving or as lovers, all those who pursue him seriously in one of his several forms obtain, as loving and as lovers, the name of the whole. I fancy you are right, I said. >And certainly there runs a story, she continued, that all who go seeking their other half [*](A prophetic allusion to Aristophanes’ speech, Plat. Sym. 192ff.) are in love; though by my account love is neither for half nor for whole, unless, of course, my dear sir, this happens to be something good. For men are prepared to have their own feet and hands cut off if they feel these belongings to be harmful.

The fact is, I suppose, that each person does not cherish his belongings except where a man calls the good his own property and the bad another’s; since what men love is simply and solely the good. Or is your view otherwise?Faith, no, I said. Then we may state unreservedly that men love the good? Yes, I said. Well now, must we not extend it to this, that they love the good to be theirs? We must. And do they love it to be not merely theirs but theirs always? Include that also. Briefly then, said she, love loves the good to be one’s own for ever. That is the very truth, I said. Now if love is always for this, she proceeded, what is the method of those who pursue it, and what is the behavior whose eagerness and straining are to be termed love? What actually is this effort? Can you tell me? Ah, Diotima, I said; in that case I should hardly be admiring you and your wisdom, and sitting at your feet to be enlightened on just these questions. Well, I will tell you, said she; it is begetting on a beautiful thing by means of both the body and the soul. It wants some divination to make out what you mean, I said; I do not understand. Let me put it more clearly, she said. All men are pregnant, Socrates, both in body and in soul: on reaching a certain age our nature yearns to beget. This it cannot do upon an ugly person, but only on the beautiful: the conjunction of man and woman is a begetting for both. [*](The argument requires the application of begetting and other such terms indifferently to either sex.) It is a divine affair, this engendering and bringing to birth, an immortal element in the creature that is mortal; and it cannot occur in the discordant. The ugly is discordant with whatever is divine, whereas the beautiful is accordant. Thus Beauty presides over birth as Fate and Lady of Travail; and hence it is that when the pregnant approaches the beautiful it becomes not only gracious but so exhilarate, that it flows over with begetting and bringing forth; though when it meets the ugly it coils itself close in a sullen dismay: rebuffed and repressed, it brings not forth, but goes in labor with the burden of its young. Therefore when a person is big and teeming-ripe he feels himself in a sore flutter for the beautiful, because its possessor can relieve him of his heavy pangs. For you are wrong, Socrates, in supposing that love is of the beautiful. What then is it? It is of engendering and begetting upon the beautiful. Be it so, I said.

To be sure it is, she went on; and how of engendering? Because this is something ever-existent and immortal in our mortal life. From what has been admitted, we needs must yearn for immortality no less than for good, since love loves good to be one’s own for ever. And hence it necessarily follows that love is of immortality. All this instruction did I get from her at various times when she discoursed of love-matters; and one time she asked me, What do you suppose, Socrates, to be the cause of this love and desire? For you must have observed the strange state into which all the animals are thrown, whether going on earth or winging the air, when they desire to beget: they are all sick and amorously disposed, first to have union one with another, and next to find food for the new-born; in whose behalf they are ready to fight hard battles, even the weakest against the strongest, and to sacrifice their lives; to be racked with starvation themselves if they can but nurture their young, and be put to any sort of shift. As for men, said she, one might suppose they do these things on the promptings of reason; but what is the cause of this amorous condition in the animals? Can you tell me? Once more I replied that I did not know; so she proceeded: How do you design ever to become a master of love-matters, if you can form no notion of this? Why, it is just for this, I tell you, Diotima—as I stated a moment ago—that I have come to see you, because I noted my need of an instructor. Come, tell me the cause of these effects as well as of the others that have relation to love. Well then, she said, if you believe that love is by nature bent on what we have repeatedly admitted, you may cease to wonder. For here, too, on the same principle as before, the mortal nature ever seeks, as best it can, to be immortal. In one way only can it succeed, and that is by generation; since so it can always leave behind it a new creature in place of the old. It is only for a while that each live thing can be described as alive and the same, as a man is said to be the same person from childhood until he is advanced in years: yet though he is called the same he does not at any time possess the same properties; he is continually becoming a new person, and there are things also which he loses, as appears by his hair, his flesh, his bones, and his blood and body altogether. And observe that not only in his body but in his soul besides we find none of his manners or habits, his opinions, desires, pleasures, pains or fears, ever abiding the same in his particular self; some things grow in him, while others perish.

And here is a yet stranger fact: with regard to the possessions of knowledge, not merely do some of them grow and others perish in us, so that neither in what we know are we ever the same persons; but a like fate attends each single sort of knowledge. What we call conning implies that our knowledge is departing; since forgetfulness is an egress of knowledge, while conning substitutes a fresh one in place of that which departs, and so preserves our knowledge enough to make it seem the same. Every mortal thing is preserved in this way; not by keeping it exactly the same for ever, like the divine, but by replacing what goes off or is antiquated with something fresh, in the semblance of the original. Through this device, Socrates, a mortal thing partakes of immortality, both in its body and in all other respects; by no other means can it be done. So do not wonder if everything naturally values its own offshoot; since all are beset by this eagerness and this love with a view to immortality.On hearing this argument I wondered, and said: Really, can this in truth be so, most wise Diotima?Whereat she, like the professors in their glory: Be certain of it, Socrates; only glance at the ambition of the men around you, and you will have to wonder at the unreasonableness of what I have told you, unless you are careful to consider how singularly they are affected with the love of winning a name, and laying up fame immortal for all time to come. [*](Diotima, like Agathon, breaks into verse of her own composing.) For this, even more than for their children, they are ready to run all risks, to expend money, perform any kind of task, and sacrifice their lives. Do you suppose, she asked, that Alcestis would have died for Admetus, or Achilles have sought death on the corpse of Patroclus, or your own Codrus [*](A legendary king of Athens who exposed his life because an oracle had said that the Dorian invaders would conquer if they did not slay the Athenian king.) have welcomed it to save the children of his queen, if they had not expected to win a deathless memory for valor, which now we keep? Of course not. I hold it is for immortal distinction and for such illustrious renown as this that they all do all they can, and so much the more in proportion to their excellence. They are in love with what is immortal.

Now those who are teeming in body betake them rather to women, and are amorous on this wise: by getting children they acquire an immortality, a memorial, and a state of bliss, which in their imagining they for all succeeding time procure. But pregnancy of soul—for there are persons, she declared, who in their souls still more than in their bodies conceive those things which are proper for soul to conceive and bring forth; and what are those things? Prudence, and virtue in general; and of these the begetters are all the poets and those craftsmen who are styled inventors. Now by far the highest and fairest part of prudence is that which concerns the regulation of cities and habitations; it is called sobriety and justice. So when a man’s soul is so far divine that it is made pregnant with these from his youth, and on attaining manhood immediately desires to bring forth and beget, he too, I imagine, goes about seeking the beautiful object whereon he may do his begetting, since he will never beget upon the ugly. Hence it is the beautiful rather than the ugly bodies that he welcomes in his pregnancy, and if he chances also on a soul that is fair and noble and well-endowed, he gladly cherishes the two combined in one; and straightway in addressing such a person he is resourceful in discoursing of virtue and of what should be the good man’s character and what his pursuits; and so he takes in hand the other’s education. For I hold that by contact with the fair one and by consorting with him he bears and brings forth his long-felt conception, because in presence or absence he remembers his fair. Equally too with him he shares the nurturing of what is begotten, so that men in this condition enjoy a far fuller community with each other than that which comes with children, and a far surer friendship, since the children of their union are fairer and more deathless. Every one would choose to have got children such as these rather than the human sort—merely from turning a glance upon Homer and Hesiod and all the other good poets, and envying the fine offspring they leave behind to procure them a glory immortally renewed in the memory of men. Or only look, she said, at the fine children whom Lycurgus [*](The legendary creator of Spartan laws and customs.) left behind him in Lacedaemon to deliver his country and—I may almost say—the whole of Greece; while Solon is highly esteemed among you for begetting his laws; and so are diverse men in diverse other regions, whether among the Greeks or among foreign peoples, for the number of goodly deeds shown forth in them, the manifold virtues they begot. In their name has many a shrine been reared because of their fine children; whereas for the human sort never any man obtained this honor.

Into these love-matters even you, Socrates, might haply be initiated; but I doubt if you could approach the rites and revelations to which these, for the properly instructed, are merely the avenue. However I will speak of them, she said, and will not stint my best endeavors; only you on your part must try your best to follow. He who would proceed rightly in this business must not merely begin from his youth to encounter beautiful bodies. In the first place, indeed, if his conductor guides him aright, he must be in love with one particular body, and engender beautiful converse therein; but next he must remark how the beauty attached to this or that body is cognate to that which is attached to any other, and that if he means to ensue beauty in form, it is gross folly not to regard as one and the same the beauty belonging to all; and so, having grasped this truth, he must make himself a lover of all beautiful bodies, and slacken the stress of his feeling for one by contemning it and counting it a trifle. But his next advance will be to set a higher value on the beauty of souls than on that of the body, so that however little the grace that may bloom in any likely soul it shall suffice him for loving and caring, and for bringing forth and soliciting such converse as will tend to the betterment of the young; and that finally he may be constrained to contemplate the beautiful as appearing in our observances and our laws, and to behold it all bound together in kinship and so estimate the body’s beauty as a slight affair. From observances he should be led on to the branches of knowledge, that there also he may behold a province of beauty, and by looking thus on beauty in the mass may escape from the mean, meticulous slavery of a single instance, where he must center all his care, like a lackey, upon the beauty of a particular child or man or single observance; and turning rather towards the main ocean of the beautiful may by contemplation of this bring forth in all their splendor many fair fruits of discourse and meditation in a plenteous crop of philosophy; until with the strength and increase there acquired he descries a certain single knowledge connected with a beauty which has yet to be told. And here, I pray you, said she, give me the very best of your attention.

When a man has been thus far tutored in the lore of love, passing from view to view of beautiful things, in the right and regular ascent, suddenly he will have revealed to him, as he draws to the close of his dealings in love, a wondrous vision, beautiful in its nature; and this, Socrates, is the final object of all those previous toils. First of all, it is ever-existent and neither comes to be nor perishes, neither waxes nor wanes; next, it is not beautiful in part and in part ugly, nor is it such at such a time and other at another, nor in one respect beautiful and in another ugly, nor so affected by position as to seem beautiful to some and ugly to others. Nor again will our initiate find the beautiful presented to him in the guise of a face or of hands or any other portion of the body, nor as a particular description or piece of knowledge, nor as existing somewhere in another substance, such as an animal or the earth or sky or any other thing; but existing ever in singularity of form independent by itself, while all the multitude of beautiful things partake of it in such wise that, though all of them are coming to be and perishing, it grows neither greater nor less, and is affected by nothing. So when a man by the right method of boy-loving ascends from these particulars and begins to descry that beauty, he is almost able to lay hold of the final secret. Such is the right approach or induction to love-matters. Beginning from obvious beauties he must for the sake of that highest beauty be ever climbing aloft, as on the rungs of a ladder, from one to two, and from two to all beautiful bodies; from personal beauty he proceeds to beautiful observances, from observance to beautiful learning, and from learning at last to that particular study which is concerned with the beautiful itself and that alone; so that in the end he comes to know the very essence of beauty. In that state of life above all others, my dear Socrates, said the Mantinean woman, a man finds it truly worth while to live, as he contemplates essential beauty. This, when once beheld, will outshine your gold and your vesture, your beautiful boys and striplings, whose aspect now so astounds you and makes you and many another, at the sight and constant society of your darlings, ready to do without either food or drink if that were any way possible, and only gaze upon them and have their company. But tell me, what would happen if one of you had the fortune to look upon essential beauty entire, pure and unalloyed; not infected with the flesh and color of humanity, and ever so much more of mortal trash? What if he could behold the divine beauty itself, in its unique form?