Brief Notes on the Symposium Aristophanes is the first in the Symposium to speak of love in totally abstract terms.

He describes a myth wherein humans were originally created back-to back with a partner. After a time those people were separated from each other and a great storm mixed them up in the world. Love, he says, is the yearning for that unique other with whom we may become united again. We desire to be whole, and so we seek that other an (comically) attempt to stick our jagged parts together to complete each other. The view is both comic and tragic for those two true lovers may never find one another, and even if they do it is untold whether the love would be self-annihilating or if it is simply impossible to fully unify and frustration would persist forever. Socrates and Diotoma argue against this view and assert that love is neither a god (as previous speakers described) nor is the yearning for an individual. Rather, they postulate, it is more the act of yearning for (and therefore lacking) beauty itself. For this reason it is said that love can be expanded from the particular love of an individual to an increasingly broad love of an increasingly abstract notion of beauty. The best love, therefore, is the love of the form of Beauty because it is the essence of love to seek beauty, and any particularities of love are simply corruptions of this ultimate ideal. At the end of Socrates speech Alcibiades drunkenly swaggers in. He starts off jealous of Agathon and Socrates sharing a couch, and then goes into a eulogy of Socrates. He insists that it is the unique nature and unattainability of Socrates that drives him with desire for the man and that love is very real and undeniable. In this way, through his words, his actions, and his very state, he takes the conversation away from the highly idealised world of the forms and places it firmly back into the imminent universe. In this way we are left with a few different concepts of love that interlock with each other in interesting ways. Both Socrates and Aristophanes argue from a very ideal perspective, and they both argue that love is essentially the act of seeking wholeness. Aristophanes and Alcibiades agree that love is imminent, however, something of a slavery that cannot be altered or made to benefit man, whereas Socrates holds that love can essentially be broadened to rescue man from fixation on cheap paramours and elevate him to pursuit of higher beauty. Lastly, Alcibiades and Socrates actually share a love for each other, completing the interdependency of these three theories. It is through this perspective, seeing the interdependency of the theories that I maintain my own opinion about them. The theories are all held together in a very close way, all making assumptions and holding perspectives that allow general consensus and make the arguments very appealing but that prevents the universality of the message, and ultimately prevents any clear winner from coming forward. The context must be properly understood at first. This symposium is a very Greek action with very strong cultural influence. The point of the symposium is to praise and adore, and further discuss Love. At first the symposium proceeds more or less normally, with praises and descriptions being given, and a tale being spun about the nature of love, and then Socrates interjects with a notion to challenge

and oppose what is going on. It is important that Socrates not begin the conversation, however, and I will come back to that. Socrates is renowned at this point for stirring up trouble in this manner. He uses logic and various pretenses (including large quantities of wine) to overcome his friends and acquaintances in debates. This is usually done through a great deal of abstraction that brings the person out of the practical world for which their philosophies were developed and tries them on purely abstract and theoretical grounds. This is very much in line with Socrates own view of advancing wisdom away from the particular and into the realm of the forms. What happens in the symposium, however is that on the heals of the success of Socrates a physical disturbance interrupts him, that disturbance is his lover, Alcibiades. This man seems to illustrate the point Socrates was making to the wise observer, for he embodies everything that Socrates wishes to avoid through love of the forms and even admits that Socrates is his superior, is correct, and that he is merely trapped in a state of shame when overcome by worldly desires. The reader is left with the rigged choice between the obviously impractical and flawed myth of Aristophanes, (which may not have been intended as such an argument) the admittedly inferior and boyish love of Alcibiades, or the superior concept of his very teacher, Socrates. The choice, if it were not already clear, is then made for the reader, as each member of the symposium passes out except Socrates who goes about his day as though nothing had happened. In my own opinion, as I previously stated, this makes for a very strong argument on the part of Socrates however there are a few minor flaws to his theory and one major one. First, because of his reliance on the others both literally and metaphorically one must question Socrates view. Alcibiades states that he knows that Socrates is right, for he is shamed when he is overcome by desires for other individuals, and this leads one to add more credence to Socrates, however it should be observed that Socrates offers no solution whereby one may skip a rung on the Ladder of Love, and so the love Alcibiades feels is just as essential in his progress as any other level of love, including the top. How then is one to say that one should not love the particular as Alcibiades does, for one must do so in order to learn to love the Forms. More importantly, in my view, because all the pieces fit so nicely together, and each part has such an important and impactful meaning it is evident that the pieces of this puzzle were co-operating either with each other or within the mind of Plato. It is equally evident that few truly novel theories of love were promoted, and that each seemed to understand (though intoxicated) the others perspective. For this reason it can be said that the whole exercise was one of futility, a mere show of dead white men patting each other on the back, and it would be highly uncritical to accept any of this ideal (or these theories, if you insist.)