Symposium
What begins as a drunken dinner party becomes one of history's most profound investigations into desire. In 4th-century Athens, a group of intellectuals gather at poet Agathon's home to celebrate his dramatic victory, and amid the wine, they take turns delivering speeches in praise of Eros. Aristophanes offers a comic myth about split beings seeking their other halves. Phaedrus argues love is the foundation of courage. Agathon extols love's refined sensibilities. But it is Socrates who delivers the dialogue's heart: his account of the priestess Diotima teaches that love is not beauty itself, but the desire for beauty, a ladder climbing from physical form toward absolute goodness and wisdom. The Symposium is both a philosophical treatise and a work of extraordinary literary craft, where humor, pathos, and intellectual rigor intertwine. It invented the very concept of 'Platonic love' while simultaneously exploring desire's most primal and terrifying dimensions. Two thousand years later, its questions remain electric: What do we really want when we want? Can the body point toward the soul's liberation?
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“According to Greek mythology, humans were originally created with four arms, four legs and a head with two faces. Fearing their power, Zeus split them into two separate parts, condemning them to spend their lives in search of their other halves.””
— Plato
“...and when one of them meets the other half, the actual half of himself, whether he be a lover of youth or a lover of another sort, the pair are lost in an amazement of love and friendship and intimacy and one will not be out of the other's sight, as I may say, even for a moment...””
— Plato
“Love is simply the name for the desire and pursuit of the whole.””
— Plato
“Love is born into every human being; it calls back the halves of our original nature together; it tries to make one out of two and heal the wound of human nature.””
— Plato
“Love is the name for our pursuit of wholeness, for our desire to be complete.””
— Plato
“And so, when a person meets the half that is his very own, whatever his orientation, whether it's to young men or not, then something wonderful happens: the two are struck from their senses by love, by a sense of belonging to one another, and by desire, and they don't want to be separated from one another, not even for a moment.””
— Plato
“He whom loves touches not walks in darkness.””
— Plato
“what if the man could see Beauty Itself, pure, unalloyed, stripped of mortality, and all its pollution, stains, and vanities, unchanging, divine,...the man becoming in that communion, the friend of God, himself immortal;...would that be a life to disregard?””
— Plato
“...when he looks at Beauty in the only way that Beauty can be seen - only then will it become possible for him to give birth not to images of virtue (because he's in touch with no images), but to true virtue [arete] (because he is in touch with true Beauty). The love of the gods belongs to anyone who has given to true virtue and nourished it, and if any human being could become immortal, it would be he.””
— Plato
