Symposium

Socrates reports Diotima's teaching that Eros is not a god but a daimon — a messenger between gods and humans, and crucially a lack, a desire for what one does not have. This reframes the entire dialogue. Earlier speakers praise Eros as a god who gives benefits; Diotima describes eros as the human condition of incompleteness that drives us toward the good. The 'ladder of love' moves from one beautiful body to all beautiful bodies, to beautiful souls, to beautiful practices and ideas, and finally to Beauty itself — an ascent that makes philosophy the highest expression of eros .

The ladder of love is Diotima's image for the soul's ascent from particular beautiful things to the Form of Beauty. The lover begins with attraction to one body, realizes beauty is shared across bodies, then values beautiful souls over bodies, then beautiful laws and practices, then beautiful kinds of knowledge, and finally glimpses Beauty itself — eternal, unchanging, and the source of all other beauties . This framework shaped Plotinus's account of beauty, Ficino's Renaissance theory of Platonic love, and the Christian mystical tradition's language of ascent .

Aristophanes tells a comic myth: humans were originally whole beings, split by Zeus as punishment, and Eros is the longing to reunite with one's lost half . This locates love's object in a particular other person. Diotima's account explicitly rejects this: love is not for one's other half but for the good, and the particular beloved is a starting point rather than the destination. The two speeches present rival anthropologies — one grounding eros in a myth of original wholeness, the other in a metaphysics of desire for the good .

Alcibiades arrives drunk, crowns Agathon, and delivers a speech praising Socrates rather than Eros. His account of loving Socrates — and being humiliated by Socrates' refusal to be seduced — dramatizes the failure of the philosophical ascent in lived experience. Alcibiades is brilliant, politically powerful, and utterly unable to subordinate his desires to reason. His intrusion pulls the dialogue from Diotima's vision of Beauty back into the disorder of Athenian political life, raising the question of whether the philosophical life is compatible with the city or always at odds with it .

Modern usage treats 'Platonic love' as affection without sexual desire, often between friends. But for Plato — or Diotima — eros is inherently desiring and includes sexual attraction as its lowest rung, not its opposite. The Renaissance, particularly Ficino's commentary, transformed the Symposium's ascent into a doctrine of non-sexual spiritual love, and that reading hardened into the modern term . Diotima's point is not that desire should be eliminated but that it should be redirected: the same erotic energy that seeks a beautiful body is what ultimately seeks Beauty itself.

Scholars have read the Symposium as a companion to the Republic, but with an inverted emphasis. The Republic offers a negative critique of art and poetry, banishing imitative poets from the ideal city. The Symposium, by contrast, contains a positive theory of art in the ascent to the Beautiful, with philosophical education presented as a kind of erotic initiation . Where the Republic grounds the good life in the harmony of the soul under reason, the Symposium presents philosophy as eros — a desire that never fully possesses its object and that finds its home in the pursuit of wisdom rather than in any achieved wisdom.