The Symposium Rhetorical Analysis
Plato was one of Socrates’ greatest admirers, and our knowledge of Socrates stems mostly from Plato’s dialogues. Plato wrote his dialogues so that his students could read them out to each other and from a phrase discuss what it is about.
Plato’s thought is mostly recorded in the form of dialogues that feature Socrates as the protagonist. The symposium was written between the middle and the late period, and the figure of Socrates serves more as a mouth piece for Plato’s own views. For instance in the symposium there is a brief mention of the theory of forms, which is entirely Plato’s invention. The complex framing devices set up by Plato at the beginning of the dialogue are meant in part to suggest the fictionality of the account.
The symposium is one of the foundational documents of Western culture and arguably the most profound analysis and celebration of love in the history of philosophy. It is also the most lavishly literary of Plato’s dialogues – a genius prose performance in which the author, like playful maestro, shows off an entire repertoire of characters, ideas, …show more content…
contrasting viewpoints, and iridescent styles. Its main action consists of three ‘agons’ - Phaedrus vs. Pausanias; Erixymachus vs. Aristophanes; and Agathon vs. Socrates
A symposium is literally a “drinking together” – in other words a drinking party. In Athens, in Plato’s day, symposia were strictly stag affairs. As a rule, they consisted of a fairly abundant, semi-formal banquet followed by ceremonial toasts and bouts of drinking. Wives were excluded. However, serving girls, dancing girls, flute-players, and hetaires (a sort of high-class prostitute/ professional escort/ entertainer) were frequently part of the festives. The fact that Eryximachus sends them away suggests that this party will be more serious than normal, and philosophical discussion will take the place of erotic stimulation.
The symposium is framed by several levels of narrative distancing, Apollodorus tells to his companion, but it is actually a retelling of the story he told Glaucon. And the actual writer of the dialogue is Plato, so there must be a further level of retelling by which he himself learns the story. And in the story itself we get several different speeches. We are given the sense that truth is not something we can be given, but something that must be sifted through, something we must work to acquire.
Plato was generally sceptical about poetry, and we find expression of this mistrust in Socrates’ sarcastic remark to Agathon about his wisdom. Tragedy purports to lay wisdom upon great crowds of people directly and immediately. As the dialogue and its framing devices suggest, Plato is of a mind that wisdom is something that must be worked toward, not something that can be given easily. Socrates suggests that wisdom is not something one can gain by osmosis, simply by sitting near someone wiser that oneself. Implicit in this suggestion is the claim that tragedy does not transmit wisdom, and that only careful philosophical thinking can be a successful teacher.
We find further evidence of this claim in Socrates' delay in arriving at the party. He gets lost in thought and must stand still where he is and think until he has worked his way through a problem. This kind of inner dialectic is clearly common with Socrates, as Aristodemus is already familiar with it. We might liken Socrates' behaviour with that of the stereotypical "absent-minded professor" who cannot deal with day-to-day activities as a result of being so caught up in intellectual pursuits. Socrates does not feel compelled to abide by social norms, valuing philosophy over propriety.
Both Phaedrus' speech, and the others that follow, suggest that male-male love is preferable to male-female love. The term "homosexual" is not appropriate in discussing the nature of these relationships. Homosexuality, as we understand it, is the product of a post- Freudian, industrialized world, where sexuality has been interpreted as a structural and constitutive feature of personality. The word suggests not just a sexual practice, but also the notion that one's sexual preference in some way defines one's character. In Greece, most men would marry women and produce children with them, but they would usually have male lovers as well, with whom there was often a closer emotional bond. "bisexual," is also inappropriate as it suggests a middle ground between homosexuality and heterosexuality. All we can rightly say is that most men in Ancient Greece would engage in sexual relationships with both men and women, and that some had a stronger preference for men and some had a stronger preference for women. There is some evidence to suggest that male-male relationships were more prevalent and more valued in the intellectual circles that Plato writes of than amongst the common people of Athens. Typically, a male-male relationship would exist between an older man (called the "lover") and a younger man (called the "loved one" or "boyfriend"). The older man takes the initiative in the relationship, and is usually the dominant partner in sexual intercourse. The younger man, usually in the age between puberty and that of growing a beard, would gain in return the help, favour, and mentorship of the older man. The lover is often married to a woman at the time, and life-long partnerships, such as the one that exists between Agathon and Pausanias, are rare. While many men preferred women, both as sexual partners and as wives, male-male relationships were idealized for a number of reasons. The activities the Greeks believed most powerfully displayed virtue and glory--athletics, philosophy, warfare, rhetoric, etc.--were exclusively the realm of men; two men could share in this virtue and glory in a way that a man and a woman could not. The male and female spheres in Ancient Greece were very rigidly separated, so there was not much common ground for romanticized courtship between men and women. Marriage was often a social necessity in order to ensure reproduction, while male-male love was considered purer because it was less practical.
Pausanias' account refines and deepens the one given by Phaedrus. Not all love is considered honourable, but only love pursued in the proper fashion. The distinction Pausanias pushes throughout is one between love as physical gratification and love as moral and mental development. Heavenly Love, as love that can improve the mind and soul of the loved one. Pausanias disdains love for women and younger boys, as he takes it to be aimed purely at physical gratification.
He is therefore stating that a woman is non-rational and incapable of ethical development. In Greek culture the male and female spheres were strictly separated, and those aspects of civic life in which virtue was thought to be displayed were restricted to men only. Pausanias' central argument, then, is that love is only beneficial when it is directed toward the end of virtue. Lovers should seek to improve their loved ones, and loved ones should look to gain wisdom from their lovers. We should note, however, the asymmetrical nature of this relationship, where loved ones are also expected to sexually gratify their lovers in return for the virtue they are taught. Pausanias' point is that such sexual gratification is praiseworthy, but only on the condition that it is pursued with the end of virtue in mind. Pausanias' emphasis on lifelong partnerships may seem a little biased considering his own relationship with Agathon, but perhaps no more so than the biases that inform any of our own opinions. Eryximachus is trying to speak definitively on all aspects of Love, but synthesizing these different kinds of Love in a rather unconvincing manner.
He makes two principal points, and tries to connect them with all sorts of different areas of study but does not clarify the relationship between them: one is that love is right when it gratifies those who are moderate but is wrong when it gratifies the self-indulgent; the other is that love reconciles conflicting elements. In love, a loved one should only gratify his lover if the couple are not acting self-indulgently; in medicine or music, an expert can gratify a patient or an audience by finding the right level of moderation. Aside from the connection he draws between hot and cold and wet and dry in the body and in the weather, it is not clear how he means to work all these different notions of discordant elements (in a relationship, in music, in a ritual, etc.) under one coherent theory.
Eryximachus' speech widens even further the scope of the discussion. While Pausanias expands on Phaedrus' speech by introducing the question of virtue, Eryximachus expands upon Pausanias by extending the realm of Love to cover far more than just interpersonal relationships. However is "love" the right word for the kinds of harmonies that Eryximachus is describing? This could bring us back to the question of whether Eryximachus has really identified any particular feature or connection that can draw together his many examples.
Aristophanes' myth suggests that we are attracted not to certain qualities in a person so much as we are attracted to the person him or herself. A certain person is right for us not because that person has certain qualities we find appealing, but because that person's character is similar to ours and resembles our "other half." We find that person's particular qualities attractive because they belong to someone whose nature we find sympathetic, and not the other way around. When we have found someone with a similar nature to ours, our “other half” we want to bond with them and live a shared life with them, as they fill the emptiness in our lives. The idea of sharing one's life with another is a common Greek theme regarding interpersonal relationships. A similar thought is expressed by Aristotle in his writings on friendship, for instance. Aristophanes seems to suggest, like Pausanias, that life-long partnerships are ideal. For Aristophanes, this is because it involves a perfect matching of two halves. This suggestion would go against what we know about Greek sexual practice, where romanticized life-long relationships were rare. Aristophanes could also be read as suggesting that there are distinct sexual categories in Greek life, however he does not distinguish simply between homosexuality and heterosexuality, but between male-male, male-female, and female-female love with no suggestion that male-male and female-female love are similar in nature and opposed to male-female love. Within the realm of male-male love, Aristophanes sets up an asymmetrical relationship where boys are attracted to men and vice versa, and gives different names to the love of a man for a boy and the love of a boy for a man. Both of these facts contradict the suggestion that Aristophanes is trying to demark a distinction between homosexuality and heterosexuality.
Not only in the Symposium, but in other of his writings, Plato is sceptical about the value of tragedy. He suggests that it uses poetic devices and other tricks to produce an emotional response without carefully considering the moral value of these responses. And while Aristophanes' myth represents the comic perspective on love, it is difficult not to read Agathon as giving the tragedian's position on love. Plato seems to want us to draw from this speech is that tragedy, like the tragedian, is a superficial and showy genre that does not teach us much, but impresses us into agreement through its fanciful style.
Agathon's identification of Love with the virtues of justice, moderation, courage, and wisdom is both rhetorically structured and poorly argued.
Justice, moderation, courage, and wisdom were called the four "cardinal virtues," and it would be a common rhetorical move to list all four in turn, showing how each is manifested in Love. Agathon identifies injustice with using force, and goes no further to elaborate on this connection. When speaking of moderation, he fudges a distinction between mastering one's desires by controlling oneself (moderation) and mastering one's desires because a greater power or desire (Love) is acting as the master. The example of Ares suggests that bravery consists in the ability to capture someone, which is completely unfounded, and when discussing poetry, Agathon unjustifiably suggests that since Love motivates us to wisdom, Love must also be
wise. We should also note the narcissism of Agathon's speech, as he seems to identify Love with himself in most respects. He speaks of Love as beautiful, and we learn both from the Symposium and other sources that Agathon was a very beautiful man. He also sees Love in poetry and wisdom, identifying it with the poetic skills for which he has so recently been celebrated. In many respects, Agathon's speech associates Love with the loved one in a relationship, and it was well known that Agathon was the passive partner in his relationship with Pausanias.
Agathon's speech also expands a problem introduced by Eryximachus that is, it is now far from clear that it is only love that is under discussion. Especially when he is seeing Love as the motivating force behind poetry and all other arts and crafts, Agathon seems to be speaking more about desire in general than about love in particular. Our desire to innovate and to create is identified with Love by Agathon, when surely, desire and love are two distinct things. For instance, at 197a, Agathon claims that it was desire and love that led Apollo to discover archery, medicine, and prophecy. It seems that Apollo's desire to innovate would have been enough on its own, and that "love" was thrown in only to make the speech consistent. However, the Greek word eros, which is also the name for the god of Love, can mean both interpersonal love and desire in a far broader sense of the word. The problem Agathon and others encounter is not one of misusing a certain word so much as not defining carefully enough the scope of the term they are using.
Plato’s thought is mostly recorded in the form of dialogues that feature Socrates as the protagonist. The symposium was written between the middle and the late period, and the figure of Socrates serves more as a mouth piece for Plato’s own views. For instance in the symposium there is a brief mention of the theory of forms, which is entirely Plato’s invention. The complex framing devices set up by Plato at the beginning of the dialogue are meant in part to suggest the fictionality of the account.
The symposium is one of the foundational documents of Western culture and arguably the most profound analysis and celebration of love in the history of philosophy. It is also the most lavishly literary of Plato’s dialogues – a genius prose performance in which the author, like playful maestro, shows off an entire repertoire of characters, ideas, …show more content…
contrasting viewpoints, and iridescent styles. Its main action consists of three ‘agons’ - Phaedrus vs. Pausanias; Erixymachus vs. Aristophanes; and Agathon vs. Socrates
A symposium is literally a “drinking together” – in other words a drinking party. In Athens, in Plato’s day, symposia were strictly stag affairs. As a rule, they consisted of a fairly abundant, semi-formal banquet followed by ceremonial toasts and bouts of drinking. Wives were excluded. However, serving girls, dancing girls, flute-players, and hetaires (a sort of high-class prostitute/ professional escort/ entertainer) were frequently part of the festives. The fact that Eryximachus sends them away suggests that this party will be more serious than normal, and philosophical discussion will take the place of erotic stimulation.
The symposium is framed by several levels of narrative distancing, Apollodorus tells to his companion, but it is actually a retelling of the story he told Glaucon. And the actual writer of the dialogue is Plato, so there must be a further level of retelling by which he himself learns the story. And in the story itself we get several different speeches. We are given the sense that truth is not something we can be given, but something that must be sifted through, something we must work to acquire.
Plato was generally sceptical about poetry, and we find expression of this mistrust in Socrates’ sarcastic remark to Agathon about his wisdom. Tragedy purports to lay wisdom upon great crowds of people directly and immediately. As the dialogue and its framing devices suggest, Plato is of a mind that wisdom is something that must be worked toward, not something that can be given easily. Socrates suggests that wisdom is not something one can gain by osmosis, simply by sitting near someone wiser that oneself. Implicit in this suggestion is the claim that tragedy does not transmit wisdom, and that only careful philosophical thinking can be a successful teacher.
We find further evidence of this claim in Socrates' delay in arriving at the party. He gets lost in thought and must stand still where he is and think until he has worked his way through a problem. This kind of inner dialectic is clearly common with Socrates, as Aristodemus is already familiar with it. We might liken Socrates' behaviour with that of the stereotypical "absent-minded professor" who cannot deal with day-to-day activities as a result of being so caught up in intellectual pursuits. Socrates does not feel compelled to abide by social norms, valuing philosophy over propriety.
Both Phaedrus' speech, and the others that follow, suggest that male-male love is preferable to male-female love. The term "homosexual" is not appropriate in discussing the nature of these relationships. Homosexuality, as we understand it, is the product of a post- Freudian, industrialized world, where sexuality has been interpreted as a structural and constitutive feature of personality. The word suggests not just a sexual practice, but also the notion that one's sexual preference in some way defines one's character. In Greece, most men would marry women and produce children with them, but they would usually have male lovers as well, with whom there was often a closer emotional bond. "bisexual," is also inappropriate as it suggests a middle ground between homosexuality and heterosexuality. All we can rightly say is that most men in Ancient Greece would engage in sexual relationships with both men and women, and that some had a stronger preference for men and some had a stronger preference for women. There is some evidence to suggest that male-male relationships were more prevalent and more valued in the intellectual circles that Plato writes of than amongst the common people of Athens. Typically, a male-male relationship would exist between an older man (called the "lover") and a younger man (called the "loved one" or "boyfriend"). The older man takes the initiative in the relationship, and is usually the dominant partner in sexual intercourse. The younger man, usually in the age between puberty and that of growing a beard, would gain in return the help, favour, and mentorship of the older man. The lover is often married to a woman at the time, and life-long partnerships, such as the one that exists between Agathon and Pausanias, are rare. While many men preferred women, both as sexual partners and as wives, male-male relationships were idealized for a number of reasons. The activities the Greeks believed most powerfully displayed virtue and glory--athletics, philosophy, warfare, rhetoric, etc.--were exclusively the realm of men; two men could share in this virtue and glory in a way that a man and a woman could not. The male and female spheres in Ancient Greece were very rigidly separated, so there was not much common ground for romanticized courtship between men and women. Marriage was often a social necessity in order to ensure reproduction, while male-male love was considered purer because it was less practical.
Pausanias' account refines and deepens the one given by Phaedrus. Not all love is considered honourable, but only love pursued in the proper fashion. The distinction Pausanias pushes throughout is one between love as physical gratification and love as moral and mental development. Heavenly Love, as love that can improve the mind and soul of the loved one. Pausanias disdains love for women and younger boys, as he takes it to be aimed purely at physical gratification.
He is therefore stating that a woman is non-rational and incapable of ethical development. In Greek culture the male and female spheres were strictly separated, and those aspects of civic life in which virtue was thought to be displayed were restricted to men only. Pausanias' central argument, then, is that love is only beneficial when it is directed toward the end of virtue. Lovers should seek to improve their loved ones, and loved ones should look to gain wisdom from their lovers. We should note, however, the asymmetrical nature of this relationship, where loved ones are also expected to sexually gratify their lovers in return for the virtue they are taught. Pausanias' point is that such sexual gratification is praiseworthy, but only on the condition that it is pursued with the end of virtue in mind. Pausanias' emphasis on lifelong partnerships may seem a little biased considering his own relationship with Agathon, but perhaps no more so than the biases that inform any of our own opinions. Eryximachus is trying to speak definitively on all aspects of Love, but synthesizing these different kinds of Love in a rather unconvincing manner.
He makes two principal points, and tries to connect them with all sorts of different areas of study but does not clarify the relationship between them: one is that love is right when it gratifies those who are moderate but is wrong when it gratifies the self-indulgent; the other is that love reconciles conflicting elements. In love, a loved one should only gratify his lover if the couple are not acting self-indulgently; in medicine or music, an expert can gratify a patient or an audience by finding the right level of moderation. Aside from the connection he draws between hot and cold and wet and dry in the body and in the weather, it is not clear how he means to work all these different notions of discordant elements (in a relationship, in music, in a ritual, etc.) under one coherent theory.
Eryximachus' speech widens even further the scope of the discussion. While Pausanias expands on Phaedrus' speech by introducing the question of virtue, Eryximachus expands upon Pausanias by extending the realm of Love to cover far more than just interpersonal relationships. However is "love" the right word for the kinds of harmonies that Eryximachus is describing? This could bring us back to the question of whether Eryximachus has really identified any particular feature or connection that can draw together his many examples.
Aristophanes' myth suggests that we are attracted not to certain qualities in a person so much as we are attracted to the person him or herself. A certain person is right for us not because that person has certain qualities we find appealing, but because that person's character is similar to ours and resembles our "other half." We find that person's particular qualities attractive because they belong to someone whose nature we find sympathetic, and not the other way around. When we have found someone with a similar nature to ours, our “other half” we want to bond with them and live a shared life with them, as they fill the emptiness in our lives. The idea of sharing one's life with another is a common Greek theme regarding interpersonal relationships. A similar thought is expressed by Aristotle in his writings on friendship, for instance. Aristophanes seems to suggest, like Pausanias, that life-long partnerships are ideal. For Aristophanes, this is because it involves a perfect matching of two halves. This suggestion would go against what we know about Greek sexual practice, where romanticized life-long relationships were rare. Aristophanes could also be read as suggesting that there are distinct sexual categories in Greek life, however he does not distinguish simply between homosexuality and heterosexuality, but between male-male, male-female, and female-female love with no suggestion that male-male and female-female love are similar in nature and opposed to male-female love. Within the realm of male-male love, Aristophanes sets up an asymmetrical relationship where boys are attracted to men and vice versa, and gives different names to the love of a man for a boy and the love of a boy for a man. Both of these facts contradict the suggestion that Aristophanes is trying to demark a distinction between homosexuality and heterosexuality.
Not only in the Symposium, but in other of his writings, Plato is sceptical about the value of tragedy. He suggests that it uses poetic devices and other tricks to produce an emotional response without carefully considering the moral value of these responses. And while Aristophanes' myth represents the comic perspective on love, it is difficult not to read Agathon as giving the tragedian's position on love. Plato seems to want us to draw from this speech is that tragedy, like the tragedian, is a superficial and showy genre that does not teach us much, but impresses us into agreement through its fanciful style.
Agathon's identification of Love with the virtues of justice, moderation, courage, and wisdom is both rhetorically structured and poorly argued.
Justice, moderation, courage, and wisdom were called the four "cardinal virtues," and it would be a common rhetorical move to list all four in turn, showing how each is manifested in Love. Agathon identifies injustice with using force, and goes no further to elaborate on this connection. When speaking of moderation, he fudges a distinction between mastering one's desires by controlling oneself (moderation) and mastering one's desires because a greater power or desire (Love) is acting as the master. The example of Ares suggests that bravery consists in the ability to capture someone, which is completely unfounded, and when discussing poetry, Agathon unjustifiably suggests that since Love motivates us to wisdom, Love must also be
wise. We should also note the narcissism of Agathon's speech, as he seems to identify Love with himself in most respects. He speaks of Love as beautiful, and we learn both from the Symposium and other sources that Agathon was a very beautiful man. He also sees Love in poetry and wisdom, identifying it with the poetic skills for which he has so recently been celebrated. In many respects, Agathon's speech associates Love with the loved one in a relationship, and it was well known that Agathon was the passive partner in his relationship with Pausanias.
Agathon's speech also expands a problem introduced by Eryximachus that is, it is now far from clear that it is only love that is under discussion. Especially when he is seeing Love as the motivating force behind poetry and all other arts and crafts, Agathon seems to be speaking more about desire in general than about love in particular. Our desire to innovate and to create is identified with Love by Agathon, when surely, desire and love are two distinct things. For instance, at 197a, Agathon claims that it was desire and love that led Apollo to discover archery, medicine, and prophecy. It seems that Apollo's desire to innovate would have been enough on its own, and that "love" was thrown in only to make the speech consistent. However, the Greek word eros, which is also the name for the god of Love, can mean both interpersonal love and desire in a far broader sense of the word. The problem Agathon and others encounter is not one of misusing a certain word so much as not defining carefully enough the scope of the term they are using.