Plato's Symposium, the ladder of love

A symposion was not a seminar. It was a drinking party: men reclining two to a couch, wine mixed with water in a big bowl, music, games, and fewer rules as the night wore on. This one opens the morning after Agathon's victory blowout, with everyone hungover, which is why the doctor, Eryximachus, talks them into speeches instead of another round. His pitch for the topic: Love is a great god, and strangely, nobody ever thinks to praise him. So tonight they will.

They agree, and they go around the couches in order. There is one small, perfect interruption. When it is the comic playwright Aristophanes' turn, he has the hiccups from eating too much and cannot speak, so he has to swap his place with the doctor while he holds his breath, gargles, and makes himself sneeze them away. Plato put a hiccup fit directly in front of one of the most beautiful speeches in the book. He is telling you, early, not to take the solemnity too straight.

Notice the line above, because it is doing quiet work. Socrates says the only thing he understands is ta erotika, matters of love. This is the man who built a career on claiming he knew nothing. Love is the single subject Plato ever lets him claim as his own, and the whole book is the cash-out of that claim.

The first three speakers are the warm-up act, and they go by quickly, because Plato put the weak speeches first on purpose. Each one gets something a little less wrong than the last.

Phaedrus goes first and keeps it simple: Love is one of the oldest gods, and the best thing about him is that he makes you brave. Nobody wants to look like a coward in front of the person they love, so an army of lovers would be unbeatable. (Thebes actually tried this; their Sacred Band was a unit of paired lovers.) Pausanias goes next and adds the first real idea, the one in the panel above. There is not one Love but two, because there are two Aphrodites. There is a common, bodily love that just wants a body, and a heavenly love aimed at a person's mind and character, the kind that makes both people better. The crude and the fine are already pulling apart. Eryximachus, the doctor, then blows the idea up to cosmic size: love is not just a thing between people, it is the principle of balance in everything, in medicine, in music, in the weather, the pull that brings opposites into harmony.

None of this is wrong, exactly. It is just early. Each speaker has grabbed one true piece of love (it makes you brave, it comes in a high and a low form, it is a kind of harmony) and mistaken his piece for the whole. Then the comedian clears his throat.

Aristophanes, the comic playwright, gives the speech everybody remembers, and it is a myth he makes up on the spot. Long ago, he says, people came in three sexes, not two: all-male, all-female, and a combined male-female. And every person was double, a single round body with four arms, four legs, two faces on one head, who could walk forwards or backwards or cartwheel along at high speed. They were strong and pleased with themselves, and they made a run at the gods.

Zeus could not just kill them, because then who would make offerings, so he cut each one in half, "as you might divide an egg with a hair," and had Apollo turn the faces around and tie off the loose skin at the navel. Each half, suddenly weak and alone, spent its days searching for its other half so it could wrap around it and be one thing again. They were dying of it, refusing to eat or do anything apart, until Zeus took pity and moved their private parts around to the front, so that two halves could at least find a little satisfaction in each other and then get back to their lives.

This is where "you complete me" comes from. The missing half, the soulmate, the one person you were split from at the start of the world: a comedian invented it at a drinking party twenty-four centuries ago, for a laugh, and it is still the most popular theory of love we have. Aristophanes' point is genuinely moving. Love is the name for how badly you want to stop being a half. It is the longing to be whole.

Hold onto it, because Plato is going to take it apart. He gave the most romantic idea in the book to the funny man, and a few speeches later he has Diotima quietly point out the problem: people do not actually love whatever is "theirs." You will let a doctor cut off your own hand if it turns gangrenous. What you love is not your other half. What you love is the good, even when the good is not the thing you started attached to. But that is the next room. For now the myth just sits there, perfect and a little sad, ending on the line in the panel.

Agathon, the host, gives the last of the regular speeches, and it is the prettiest and the emptiest. Love, he says, is the youngest and most beautiful of the gods, soft, delicate, the source of every good thing, and he says it in such polished, perfumed phrases that the room bursts into applause. Then Socrates, instead of giving a speech of his own, asks to ask Agathon a few questions, and over about a page the whole evening turns over.

The questions are simple, and that is the trap. Does Love have to be love of something? Yes. And does anyone want what he already has, or what he lacks? What he lacks; nobody who is already tall wishes to be tall. So put it together. Love is love of beauty. And you only love what you do not have. Therefore Love does not have beauty. The thing five straight speakers have been crowning as a beautiful god turns out, by its own definition, to be the one thing that is missing beauty and reaching for it.

This is the hinge of the book. Everyone built Love up; Socrates, with a few yes-or-no questions, shows that love is by its nature a lack. It is not the beautiful beloved sitting on the couch. It is the wanting that points at them. Whatever else gets said tonight has to start from there: love is need, not having.

Now Socrates does something odd. He says he did not work any of this out himself. He learned it, when he was young, from a woman: Diotima, a priestess from Mantinea, who taught him about love and once, he says, postponed a plague. Pause on her for a second. The highest teaching on love in the Western canon is put in the mouth of a woman who almost certainly never existed; most scholars read Diotima as Plato's invention. A man, writing another man, who quotes a woman who is not real, at a party full of men, to deliver the truth about desire. Plato knew exactly what he was doing; he just won't tell you what.

Diotima explains where Love came from with a story. At the feast for Aphrodite's birth, a god named Poros, whose name means Resource, or a way through, got drunk on nectar and passed out in the garden. Penia, whose name means Poverty, was outside begging, as she always is, and seeing her chance she lay down beside him and conceived a child. The child was Eros, Love, and he takes after both parents, which is the entire point.

From his mother he is poor: barefoot, homeless, sleeping in doorways and on the bare ground, always in want. From his father he is a schemer: bold, tough, a hunter, forever plotting to get his hands on the beautiful things he lacks. So Love is not the pampered, beautiful god Agathon described. Love is a barefoot operator on the make. And he sits, permanently, in the gap between not having and having, which is also the gap between ignorance and wisdom. The truly wise do not love wisdom; they already have it. The truly ignorant do not either; they don't know they're missing it. Only the in-between creature, who knows he lacks something good and goes hunting for it, loves it. The Greek for that creature is philosophos, lover of wisdom. Diotima's quiet bombshell: love and philosophy are the same motion. Both are wanting what you don't have badly enough to chase it.

Here is what "Platonic love" actually means, and it is a staircase. Diotima lays out the climb step by step. You start where everyone starts, by falling for one beautiful body. Fine, she says, but notice something while you are there: the beauty in that body is the same beauty that is in every other beautiful body. Once you really see that, you start to love beautiful bodies as a kind, and your grip on the one particular body loosens.

Then you climb. You notice a beautiful mind is worth more than a beautiful face, and you start caring more about who a person is than how they look. From there you rise to the beauty in laws and customs, the way a well-run society is beautiful; then to the beauty in knowledge, in whole fields of understanding; until you reach what Diotima calls a great sea of beauty, and finally the thing every step was a shadow of. She calls it beauty absolute, separate, simple, and everlasting. Not a beautiful body or a beautiful law or a beautiful idea: Beauty itself, the source all of those borrow from and then lose, that never changes and never dies. (Readers of the other Plato post will recognize this. It is the daylight outside the cave, told in the language of love.)

That climb is the ladder of love, and it is the real meaning of the phrase. Not a relationship with the desire switched off. A desire kept fully on and aimed upward: the same wanting that starts at a particular face, followed honestly until it walks you off the face entirely and into the love of something perfect. The sex isn't denied. It is the first rung.

And there is a bill. The higher you climb, the less the particular person matters, because you have learned to find their beauty everywhere and then past everyone. The philosopher Gregory Vlastos pressed exactly this, in a famous 1973 essay: Plato teaches us to love the beautiful qualities in a person, not the person, so people become interchangeable, rungs you are meant to step off. You do not get long to sit with the objection. It is about to walk through the door, very drunk, with its name on it.

The door bangs open. Alcibiades, falling-down drunk, crowned with ivy and violets, leaning on a flute-girl, the most beautiful and most dangerous man in Athens, pours into the room. He is told the rule, give a speech about Love, and refuses. He will praise Socrates instead, and he will tell the truth, because he is too drunk to manage anything else.

What follows is the only speech that is not about Love the god. It is about loving one specific, infuriating person, and it is a confession. Socrates, Alcibiades says, is like those little carved figures of Silenus you see in shops, ugly and comic on the outside, that "open in the middle, and have images of gods inside them." He is the one person alive who can make Alcibiades feel ashamed of himself. And then, in front of everyone, Alcibiades tells the story of how he tried to seduce him.

He was young, gorgeous, and used to getting whatever he wanted, and what he wanted was Socrates' wisdom, so he offered the obvious deal: his looks for the older man's mind. He arranged the private dinners, the late training sessions, and finally got Socrates under a single cloak for an entire night. And nothing happened. Socrates lay beside the most desired body in Athens, treated it (in Alcibiades' own bitter words) with contempt, and went to sleep. Alcibiades got up, he says, as if he had spent the night with his father.

Read it right after the ladder and it cuts two ways at once. One: here is the ladder vindicated. Socrates has climbed so high that the one body half of Athens was in love with, laid in his bed on purpose, is just a rung he passed long ago; he is not being heroic, he is simply no longer interested in the bottom step. Two: here is the ladder's bill arriving. Alcibiades does not love Beauty itself. He loves Socrates, this exact maddening man, and it has half-destroyed him, and from where he is lying Socrates' great serenity looks an awful lot like indifference to an actual human being. Plato puts the strongest objection to his own theory in the mouth of a drunk, lets it land, and then lets the drunk pass out.

So put the misunderstanding to bed. "Platonic love" does not even come from Plato; a Renaissance scholar named Marsilio Ficino coined the phrase more than eighteen hundred years later, reading this book. And it does not mean a warm friendship with the desire turned off. It means desire kept on and aimed up: the same wanting that begins at a beautiful face, followed all the way to the love of what is beautiful and good and permanent in everything. The chaste, sexless meaning is a cooler thing later English speakers did to the word. Plato's version is hotter and far more demanding. It asks you to want, and then to keep wanting, past every single particular thing you wanted.

Whether that is the highest picture of love or a quietly heartless one is the argument the book refuses to settle, and Plato built the argument into the furniture. Diotima hands you the ladder, perfect and rising. Alcibiades, fifteen minutes later, hands you a wrecked man weeping over one person who climbed straight past him. The book gives you both and declines to choose. That is not a failure of the book. It is the book.

And it really does just walk off. The party falls apart, fresh revelers crash in, everyone drinks too much, people drift home. Toward dawn only three men are still awake, and Socrates is patiently wearing the other two down into agreeing that the same writer ought to be able to compose both comedy and tragedy, which is a strange and perfect last note, given that one of the two is a comedian and the other a tragedian, and given that the book you just read is plainly both. Then they nod off. Socrates gets up, washes, and spends the rest of the day exactly as usual, because for him a night like this is just a day.

One last thing, the kind the first Athenian readers would have felt in their chests. The party is set in 416 BC, the high-water mark, with Athens rich and sure of itself. Within a year, Alcibiades, the beautiful drunk at the door, would talk the city into a catastrophic invasion of Sicily, be accused of mutilating the sacred statues, defect to Sparta, and become the most spectacular traitor in Greek history; Athens would lose the war and never fully recover. Plato wrote all this down decades after, knowing every bit of what came next. He set the most beautiful conversation about love on the last good night, and let the man who would help end the city kick the door in. The original readers felt the whole grim future sitting in that bright room. We mostly just get the love, which may be the better deal.