Mark Vernon reflects on the enduring appeal of Plato’s Symposium, a collection of dialogues at a banquet, which still has plenty to say about how we live

Love is a fraught subject. It raises issues about similarities and difference, fluidity and commitment, desires and responsibilities. We need resources to think about it. Plato’s dialogue the Symposium is provocative in all the best senses.

It does not offer a blueprint for love. Human psychology is way too complex for that. But it does have a variety of myths and reflections that help to think things through.

Perhaps the best known bit is Aristophanes’ speech, in which the ancient Greek comic describes humans as originally being wholes who were cut in two by Zeus. That ‘explains’ why we spend our lives looking for our lost halves.

Interestingly, Aristophanes describes three kinds of aboriginal whole – the hermaphrodite male/female and two kinds of homosexual whole, that after the divine surgery were split into two men and two women respectively. Hence he has a mythical etiology for homosexuality as well as heterosexuality.

It suggests that whilst all humans seek union with the person they come to think of as their other half, they seek differently. Many seek a contrasexual half. Some seek a same-sex half. So within a common desire, there’s important variance, which is best respected.

Just what that variance might mean is itself explored in another speech, that of Pausanius. Pausanius – who is, incidentally, in a long-term relationship with another guest at the symposium, Agathon – argues that there are two kinds of love. One is the child of Pandemos Aphrodite, pandemos meaning ‘common’, as in ‘usual’. The other is the child of Urania Aphrodite, urania meaning ‘of Uranus’, the god of heaven.

The significance of this distinction emerges via a little Greek mythology. Pandemos Aphrodite is herself the child of Zeus, which is to say she is a goddess who appeared in the time of the generation of gods. Urania Aphrodite, as the child of Uranus, belongs to the period that came before then.

So the love that Pandemos Aphrodite inspires is itself generative, mostly obviously aspiring to have children. The love that Urania Aphrodite inspires is not, but rather is primarily interested in a certain kind of friendship between the lovers – one a bit like that shared by Pausanius and Agathon in fact. Its ‘offspring’ will not be children but the enrichment of the couple and humanity in other ways – not least in poetry: Agathon is a prize-winning poet, the celebration of which is the reason for the symposium Plato recalls.

So a difference opens up. There is a love focused on biological generation and another focused on soulful expansiveness.

Socrates seems to have enjoyed both: he was married and had children, but his philosophical life was inspired by the love of Diotima the priestess, who appears later in the Symposium. She told him about a different goal that Plato explores when he describes the ladder of love at the spiritual climax of the dialogue.

Both loves are demanding, though there is one feature of heavenly love that seems particularly salient for now. According to Plato, such love must sublimate its early sexual passions in order to channel its energy towards ‘higher things’. Just what those higher things might be the dialogue also strives to show us. It aims to awaken our capacity for a love of what’s good, beautiful and true at the same time as inviting us to explore what love might be about.

Mark recommends that idlers who are interested in reading the Symposium should choose the Hackett Classics edition, translated by Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff, available here

Tom Hodgkinson‘s Idler Symposium takes inspiration from Plato and is presenting six lectures on the history of idling with plenty of wine and conversation. Get your tickets here