Content area
Full Text
Setting aside the Last Supper, the words shared that night by a handful of half-drunk Athenians have left as deep a mark on Western forms of thinking and living as anything ever uttered over a glass of wine. We owe our acquaintance with this conversation to Plato's dialogue, the Symposium, in which Plato tells us what Apollodorus tells a curious companion about what he told Glaucon a few days before about what Aristodemus told him was said many years ago by those gathered at the house of the dramatist Agathon, who, amid the eating and drinking, had decided to tell one another what they thought they knew of love. Actually the chain of tellings is a bit longer, not just because Pm telling you about it and you might go on to tell others, but also because the most memorable speech at Agathon s gathering was itself a retelling, by Socrates, of what had been told to him many years before by a priestess named Diotima, to whom Socrates says he owes whatever he knows of the art of love.
Commentators on the Symposium tend to disregard this elaborate narrative framework. They jump ahead to the views put forward by this or that speaker and to the arguments for these views. Yet Plato was hardly a haphazard thinker. Surely he must have had some reason for beginning the dialogue with this long chain of tellings and retellings. I hope to shed some light on what his reason might have been. I think it has to do with his wish to exemplify a spectacularly fecund sort of economy, which I will call an erotic economy or an economy of life. And I think that we would do well to understand this sort of economy and seek to incorporate its distinctive form of exchange into our daily lives. But this is to get ahead of ourselves.
The soaring highlight of the Symposium is Socrates's retelling of Diotima s teachings about love. And Diotima's core thought is that eros is a birthing impulse. Its aim is the begetting of the good in the medium of the beautiful. By the time Diotima explains what this rather opaque formula means, her view will turn out to be quite astonishing. It...