Diotima’s Allegory of Love: What is Love like?

(201d-204c)
Diotima, a woman from Mantinea. Debate over whether she is
fictional or real. Priestess. Spoken through Socrates.

Love isn’t beautiful or good, bad or ugly, it is somewhere in

between. For if it was beautiful and good, it would not desire
beautiful and good things.

Someone doesn’t have to be wise or ignorant – they can have

right opinions, but don’t know why they have them.

Love can’t be a great God, as it is not beautiful or good or in

possession of good and beautiful things. Once again, love is in
between, a great spirit.

Spirits “interpret and carry messages from humans to gods and

from gods to humans.” (202e) They “fill the gap between them,
and enable the universe to form an interconnected whole.”
How Gods communicate with mortals.

Story of how love was conceived on the day of Aphrodite’s birth, the child of poverty and resource.

Words used to describe love: Poor, though, always lives in a state of need, wants beautiful things,
brave, hunter, desires knowledge, resourceful, good with tricks and magic, drugs, sophistry.

Love is neither immortal nor mortal. On a single day he shoots into life and then he may die, only to
come back to life. Similar to continuous search for knowledge.

Gods or the ignorant don’t desire wisdom, as they either already have it or believe they are
satisfactory as they are. Love falls between the two, falling between the wise and the ignorant.

Criticising Agathon. Love is not the object of love, so it is not totally beautiful. Describing the
character of the lover.

Socrates, as a lover of wisdom, yet also claiming to know nothing, is then a great example of
Diotima’s love. Ideal philosophical character.

Love communicates with what is beyond us: the forms?

Treatment of women: Diotima is not there, she does not speak.

Irigaray: “love is, above all, a mediator”… “Never completed, always evolving.” (Sorcerer Love: A
Reading of Plato’s Symposium).

Gregory Vlastos: criticises as egocentric; wanting beautiful things only for oneself? Also the “love of
persons [is] placed far below the love of an abstract entity of absolute beauty”. Loving an “image of
the idea in them”. Diotima’s love loves only the good and beautiful parts of people, not the whole.
(The Individual as an Object of Love in Plato).