Symposium

Since I had already finished reading Symposium over spring break, I had the time to do some extra reading in the introduction provided in my copy of the book. I found a few interesting things to consider as I continue to look at this dialogue. For starters, here is some background information on this piece. The banquet did occur; Xenophon reports on it as well as Plato.  Agathon had won first prize for his dramatic play and guests were invited back to the house for a party. A symposium is literally a "drinking together"--in other words a drinking party. This is unlike Plato’s other dialogues in that Socrates does not question the others in the dialectical fashion as seen in Plato’s other works, except briefly. Instead the various speakers take turns, as it were, each offering what he knows from his own perspective and then Socrates presents a view that can place the others within a grander scheme.

This is the part that I found most interesting: the dialogue centers on a series of speeches praising eros, a term usually translated as ‘desire’. Eros is the name for one of the Greek gods of love (we would be more familiar with the Romanized name, Cupid), which lends to the definition of the term eros a ‘passionate sexual desire’. So why do we get the translation ‘love’ instead of desire? In the words of Christopher Gill, whom I have to thank for this introduction in my book, “Some of the speeches, especially Socrates’, suggest that sexual desire is an expression of certain deeper and more universal types of desire or motivation.” This actually helped me a lot to understand how Socrates’ speech fits in with the speeches at the beginning. A wide range of definitions of love were explored, but Socrates says “first, that Love is of something; second, that it is of something that he currently needs” (Plato, 200e). The initial accounts of love weren’t necessarily incompatible with that of Socrates’, but the different views of love they gave were just facets of what Gills calls “deeper and more universal types of desire or motivation.”