Plato’s Symposium offers one of the most sophisticated explorations of love in Western thought. Rather than reducing desire to romance or physical attraction, Plato presents it as a force that shapes character, action, and the mind. Across the dialogue, Phaedrus, Pausanias, Aristophanes, Agathon, Socrates (through Diotima), and Alcibiades offer different perspectives, creating a complex portrait of love that is ethical, philosophical, and intensely human. These speeches reveal how love can inspire courage, cultivate virtue, elevate the soul, and, at times, overwhelm reason. The Republic complements this picture, showing how desire and love intersect with the rational and appetitive elements of the soul, guiding humans toward the good.
Phaedrus: Love as Motivation for Virtue
Phaedrus opens the dialogue with a simple yet compelling argument: love is a god who motivates noble action. He draws on mythic examples, specifically Achilles avenging Patroclus, to show how love can inspire courage and honour. For Phaedrus, desire is not just personal – it shapes behaviour and fosters ethical excellence. The speech highlights one side of love: its public, aspirational power. In Plato’s broader thought, this aligns with the spirited part of the soul in the Republic: love energises the drive for honour and courage, motivating heroic action in alignment with the good.
Pausanias: Heavenly and Commonly Love
Pausanias complicates this view by distinguishing between two kinds of love: common love, focused on bodily pleasure, and heavenly love, which seeks the mind and cultivates virtue. In particular, he praises pederastic relationships in which the older erastes educates the younger eromenos, guiding him toward intellectual and moral excellence.
Pederasty in Plato is not simply about affection but about structures of authority and moral formation. The lover is a teacher, while the beloved is a learner, reproducing in miniature the hierarchical ordering Plato envisions in the soul and the city. Pausanias’ “heavenly love” is thus more than personal – it is an attempt to legitimise an unequal social arrangement, presenting eros as a tool for shaping virtue. This closely parallels the Republic, where the rational soul must guide the appetitive: just as the older lover disciplines the beloved’s desires, reason must discipline bodily impulses to create harmony.
Aristophanes: Desire as Longing for Wholeness
Aristophanes departs from this didactic model with his comic myth of human origins. He imagines humans as once being double creatures – male, female, or both – split in half by the gods. Love, in this vision, is the search for one’s missing half, a desire to restore wholeness. While exaggerated, the myth captures a psychological truth: love emerges from lack, from a sense of incompleteness. Plato uses this comic account to prepare for Socrates’ more philosophical definition of eros as desire for what one does not have, a theme that runs throughout his thought.
Socrates and Diotima: The Ladder of Love
Socrates’ speech, drawing on Diotima’s teaching, forms the intellectual core of the dialogue. Love, he argues, is a daimon, an intermediary force between mortal and divine, born of Poverty and Resource. Eros is therefore neither wise nor ignorant, neither mortal nor immortal: it is always striving for what it lacks. Diotima describes the famous “ladder of love”: the ascent from desire for one body, to all bodies, then to souls, laws, knowledge, and finally to the eternal Form of Beauty known as ‘Absolute Beauty’.
Plato here transforms the traditional framework of pederasty. While Athens saw pederastic eros as a hierarchical bond between older and younger men, Plato recasts this desire as a metaphor for philosophy itself. The ascent from bodies to souls to Absolute Beauty reproduces the dynamic of teaching and learning but redirects it toward the eternal. In this way, Plato acknowledges the cultural institution of pederasty while simultaneously transcending it: the true lover does not seek to possess another but to ascend toward wisdom. This ascent mirrors the Republic, where the rational soul must rule over the appetitive to achieve justice and harmony. Love, properly directed, educates both mind and character, turning private desire into the pursuit of wisdom and virtue.
Alcibiades: The Disruptive Power of Desire
Yet Plato is not content to leave love in the realm of philosophy. Alcibiades’ drunken entrance brings the abstract discussion down to lived experience. Bursting into the banquet, he delivers an encomium not to love in general but to Socrates in particular. His speech is comic, tragic, and revealing: Alcibiades confesses his obsessive infatuation, his attempts to seduce Socrates, and his humiliation at being rejected. Alcibiades’ confession reveals the instability of pederastic power. Traditionally, the erastes should guide the eromenos, but Alcibiades reverses this, offering himself to Socrates in exchange for wisdom. Socrates, however, refuses to conform, undermining the erotic hierarchy. In doing so, Plato exposes both the draw and the limits of eros. Alcibiades’ passion embodies the appetitive soul unchecked by reason: it is intense, destabilising, and overwhelming. At the same time, his admiration for Socrates’ wisdom shows eros’ potential to inspire reverence for virtue.
Alcibiades’ speech is arguably the most vivid of the dialogue, uniting philosophy with the messy realities of human passion. Where Diotima’s ladder presents love as structured ascent, Alcibiades shows the difficulty of living this out. Love, he demonstrates, is not only an intellectual force but a destabilising human experience – capable of elevating the soul or consuming it entirely.
