Nature of Love and Beauty as Discussed by Diotima in the Syposium

The Symposium is a philosophical dialogue by Plato that discusses about the nature of love and beauty. In a symposium (a kind of tea party) held by Agathon to celebrate his victory in a drama competition, guests, including Socrates, give speeches about love and its mysteries. In his speech Socrates gives a philosophically profound discourse on love and beauty as told to him by a wise woman named Diotima (lit. honored by god) from Mantinea.

Diotima’s View on Love and Beauty

Diotima, by using dialectic, shares her expert idea about love with Socrates. She begins by questioning Socrates’ assumption that love is extremely good and beautiful and is the divine source of happiness. Love is always in search of the beautiful and the good, and thus he is not good or beautiful himself. He is, in fact, neither good and beautiful nor ugly and bad, but somewhat in middle, and is analogous to the true opinions which are means of wisdom and ignorance. Again, since Love does not possess good, he is not happy as well. No one can claim that god is neither good nor happy. That means Love is not god and so not divine.
Love is neither mortal nor immortal, but one of the mediocre spirits, through which the divine and the mortal communicate. The divine conveys through Love, gifts and commands, and the mortal coveys prayers and sacrifices through him. To explain the nature of Love, Diotima creates a myth. She explains that Love is conceived by Penia (Poverty) through Poros (Resource of Plenty) on the birthday of Aphrodite (goddess of Beauty). Therefore Love is always the follower of beauty. Like his mother, he is poor and foolish, while being witty, intelligent and bold like his father. He is thus resourceful but yet poor. He is wise and yet foolish and distressed. Love is a mediocre between being wise and being ignorant, and thus is in constant search of wisdom. Love is therefore like philosopher who is always seeking and never finding.
Socrates questions what the use of love is and the method of its pursuit. Diotima explains that love is not the search of the other half (as Aristophanes describes), but a quest for good. Love is a desire to have good, and thus happiness forever. Everyone desires happiness, but still not everyone is a lover. It is similar to how everybody composes new things now and then, but not everyone is called a “composer”, but only those who create music.
Diotima then describes how people pursue love. All people are pregnant in body and mind and they desire to give birth. Through sex and reproduction, the pregnancy of the body is delivered, and certainly it is not bad but natural and divine. The delivery of the mind that is pregnant with thoughts comes through sharing wisdom. Thus while a body seeks beautiful women, a mind seeks a person beautiful in not just body but mind as well. Diotima also finds a drive for immortality in our pursuit of love. Through the procreation, mortals seek immortality, and through honor and propagation of thoughts, minds seek eternal living. It was how Solon became immortal by his laws, and Achilles achieved honor by dying for his love. Love’s function is clearly “giving birth in beauty and in mind.”
Diotima then proceeds with her hierarchy of love in which she describes about the stage through which a general love ascends into a divine and absolute form. One begins as a young boy by being attracted to a beautiful body. This love slowly evolves into love for all bodies in general, for it is foolish to love one since all bodies are remarkably similar. Next, he will come to appreciate the beauty of a mind, and then minds in general. He then realizes similarity in all kinds of beauty and comes to love beauty in general, without looking for a particular beauty in a body. He evolves further to look at the beauty of knowledge and falls in love with it. The refinement continues until he finally reaches the supreme goal of love: the knowledge of absolute beauty, where he finds and seeks the ultimate, unchanging form of beauty. Beauty then does not appear in a particular body of a particular thing, but will appear in itself, independent of all physical attributes. He then becomes capable of a virtuous life and starts producing virtue itself, instead of the images of virtue, which are produced by those who are obsessed with mortal images of beauty.
Thus, through the dialogue with Diotima, Socrates argues that through different stages, one will ascend from lower forms of love to the higher, refined and universal love. The dialogue recognizes love as striving of the soul to permanent possession of absolute beauty, without denying the lower forms of physical love.