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Abraham Friedman
Plato Seminar

Plato’s Mantic and Feminist Sympathies in The Symposium

To accuse the Socratic dialogues of sexism would be superficially

warranted. Plato, as a dramaturge, is certainly concerned with the diversity in

character of his dynamic cast, but, according to the zeitgeist, women are almost

never present in these conversations. The frame and setting of the Symposium

includes many layers of exclusivity, all of which are meant to represent a purge of

the feminine for the sake of a “productive” conversation. The very framework of

the Athenian social hierarchy dictates that exclusivity (If it’s thought to be good) is

necessarily masculine. In this paper, I will argue that the introduction of Diotima

into the Symposium’s discussion of Love introduces an importantly feminine

dimension into a mistakenly, exclusively, masculine presentation of the nature of

love.

The actual symposium is introduced very complexly: An acquaintance of

Appolodorus asks him to recant the events, as he had heard a notably bad

version before from Phoenix, who told him that Appolodorus was “the one to

ask.” Although this particular symposium seems to be a ubiquitous topic of

discussion even so many years after, the raconteur, Appolodorus, asserts at

least twice explicitly that his is the definitive surviving account. He self-

aggrandizingly accounts for his preparedness: Not only had he taken pains to

learn about it from Aritodemus, a player in the dialogue, he had recently told the

story to Glaucon. Naturally, Appolodorus had debriefed Glaucon in the same

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name-dropping way that he does the Friend. His source was a stalker of

Socrates, and, probably, like Appolodorus admits of himself, had “made it [his]

job to know exactly what he says and does each day” (172c). Further, although

he can’t be held accountable to know the entirety of the dialogue, he had sought

to confirm the details with his companion of three years, Socrates, who approved

even of the secondarily sourced account of the symposium.

Considering that the frame of the symposium also frames the Glaucon

anecdote contained within itself, the meta-poetic theme of exclusivity affirms the

superiority of this particular group of men. Both Appolodorus and Aristodemus

have skeptical attitudes towards class and taking status for granted. Appolodorus

maniacally introduces his story to the Friend with intense vitriol, rambling about

the worthlessness of discussion between ignorant, rich businessmen such as he

(173c). The Friend’s defense explains Appolodorus’ reverence of Socrates, the

only one he isn’t furious with. The start of Aristodemus’ introduction to the

symposium shows his own difficult relationship with status. He is reluctant to

assume that he is welcome to Agathon’s party, and, being barefoot and a runty

man, he is even more intimidated when he sees that Socrates has showered and

dressed formally, responding to the protocol of being received at a beautiful

celebrities house. This is a responsible decision on Socrates part, and would

probably prove to both narrators that Socrates does not hesitate to rise to the

occasion and a philosopher is still a citizen, and should present himself

appropriately.
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In Plato’s social scene, men seem to be the only ones considered, albeit

by themselves, capable of engaging in dialectic that has intellectual import.

However, in the portion of the population which that includes, the citizenry is

subject to further role-assignment; Boys are partially responsibly for the

embodying the feminine, while age brings wisdom, and therefore masculinity.

These oppositions are unabashedly self-imposed within the privileged class,

because their own social construction allows men to re-appropriate the feminine.

They attempt to harness the feminine for use at their own discretion, figuratively

and economically. Eryximachus, who is hyper-aware of his social role as a

physician, curates the evening according to his own interpretation of this gender-

bias, and his suggestions to only drink as much as pleases each guest and to

send away the flute girls are both agreed upon by all (176e). The decorum at

such a party would normally dictate that the extent of their drinking would

correlate to a pre-assigned quantity of wine, which guarantees a certain aesthetic

framework for the party. He asserts the physiological warning that “inebriation is

harmful to everyone,” which, in conjunction with the dismissal of the only woman

in the room, propagates the association of excessive inebriation with iniquity,

and, therefore, femininity. However, Eryximachus’ decisions are actually

incredibly thoughtful here. He tries to curate the party so as to subvert the

competitive and impassioned mood that would come from the usual drinking

procedure and would be exacerbated by the flute-girls presence. He wants the

speeches to be as sober and collected as these distinguished men should be. He

builds in an automatic apology for the speakers, as his request is specifically for
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“as good a speech in praise of Love as [they are] capable of giving, in proper

order from left to right.” The hope is that each speech will be considered

individually, and the ordering would discourage the speakers from having their

contributions function too much like refutations. However, human even read

temporal events from left to right, and it is absolutely inevitable that both the

party-goers, the multiple narrators, and the reader will make meaning out of the

way each speech informs its predecessors and the ones it introduces.

Although the players are on their second night of a victory celebration and

they are undoubtedly in a revelatory mood, they presume that they will more

effectively explore Love through a round of speeches, only supplemented by

dialectical interludes. It is a very masculine process, as each speech is meant as

a monumental figure, which implies the phallo-centric prejudice of such an

exclusive group. Although they all prefer very different approaches to an

understanding of love, and they are not all entirely content with their speeches,

each speech is only meant to be as good a telling of love, as they are capable.

So, if this Athenian intellectual clique chooses to work together as an academic

symposium in the modern, Apollonian, sense, as opposed to the standard

Dionysian, their product would be a sufficiently exhaustive compendium of

speeches on love: a phallus. That doesn’t discount the excellence of the

evening’s speeches, but illuminates a troublesome limitation of practicing

philosophy in Plato’s time, one that I think he addresses well and alludes to

through his character, Socrates. The context of the speeches is mapped so that

they will methodically progress towards Socrates’ contribution.

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The floor is given to succeedingly more powerful speeches on love.

Phaedrus commences with a mythical etiology of love. He highlights the eternal

reign that Love, as a God, has always, has, and will have over the world. It

serves as an invocation to both the appropriate deities and cites Hesiod,

Acusilaus, and Parmenides to verify his position that Love is the oldest of Gods

and without parents. As a rhetorical device, his allusions account for his notions

about the immense power that Love has to benefit mankind in terms of their hunt

for honor and blessedness. In concluding his speech, he exemplifies the trouble

that arises in their contemporary gender-roles and the lover-beloved distinction.

Here, it’s established that the beloved has to be the younger, more beautiful,

and, especially, more feminine one in the relationship. He evaluates the roles:

[The Gods] are more impressed and delighted, however, and are more

generous with a loved one who cherishes his lover, than with a lover who

cherishes the boy he loves. A lover is more godlike than his boy, you see,

since he is inspired by a god. That’s why they gave the higher honor to

Achilles than to Alcestis, and sent him to the Isle of the Blest.

(Plato, 180b)

The feminine figures in these stories are subordinated and only considered

virtuous in the extent to which they might sacrifice something of themselves for

their lover. Even in the case where the lover is a woman, the gods herald her for

her masculine sense of responsibility and pragmatism when given the chance to
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enter Hades in lieu of her husband. Phaedrus, though, stresses how the gods’

favor leans towards Achilles and Patroclus’ homosexual relationship, an

expression of Heavenly love, as opposed to Common.

Pausanius continues the mythological genealogy of Love that Phaedrus

began, but for the sake of distinguishing between Heavenly and Common Loves.

He is initially wary of Common Love coming off in a totally negative light, not just

inferior to the Heavenly, and asserts that “although, of course, all the gods must

be praised, [they] must still make an effort to keep these two gods apart” (180e).

Quickly, though, his bias is disclosed when he declares that Aphrodite Urania,

not Pandemos, deserves their attention. This relationship, governed by a

goddess of purely male descent, is focused on boys, but it is the lover, the older

man, who is responsible for the nobility and worthiness of the love produced

between them. Heavenly Aphrodite is a feminine being, but is motherless, and

therefore “free from the lewdness of youth,” which is a subversive way to alert us

to the wanton impulsivity that he sees as inherently feminine (181b). Even when

discussing male-male love, Pausanius has to defang the feminine, as the

beloved, not the lover, embodies it. The desired object of Heavenly Love is not

an androgynous youth, but a boy on the brink of pubescence. This figure does

exist in a hazy space in the middle of the gender binary, but is absolutely moving

from femininity into masculinity. Although the ages of the party-guests are varied,

the majority of the speakers are adults, and are purported to understand this

magnificent concept probably better than any other in Athens. Common love

governs the vulgar masses and places their preoccupation with the body in lieu
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of reverence of the soul. The goal in either sort of Greek erotic relationship is

pregnancy. For heavenly Aphrodite, pregnancy a slightly mystical, but profound

phenomenon where the lover brings a richer spirit to birth in his love, thereby

benefiting his own soul in the process. Alternately, in a heterosexual relationship,

the lack of contraceptive technology in Greece made the product a physical

symbol, a child, which overshadowed the capability of the lovers to focus on their

transcendental engagement with Aphrodite. Pausanius delves into a fascinating

deconstruction of the Athenian law regarding pederasty and the complex social

customs. According to popular wisdom as Pausanius sees it, “the gods [would]

forgive a lover even for breaking his vows – a lover’s vow, our people say, is no

vow at all” (183b). This excludes the tribulations of a love affair from being

considered in terms of morality, only in terms of its product. Pausanius contends

that the value of the love’s product depends on the character of those involved.

Further, The character of the love, behavior of the lovers, and product of their

experience can only be defined in love’s own terms. Therefore, the pederast’s

vows are not essentially moral, making homosexual love superior to heterosexual

relations, where the lover is bound to a bodily, yet inconstant, beloved. To break

vows of common love, especially when reproduction is involved, is an economic,

political, and moral concern, not simply a complex issue of love in-itself. Precisely

when Pausanius illuminates the metaphysical and biological implications of love

that inform the law, Erixymachus replaces Aristophanes in the order of

operations and diagnoses love through a medical practitioner’s lens.

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Erixymachus engages love rhetorically by likening medicine, “the science

of the effects of Love on repletion and depletion of the body,” to a theory a

musical harmony. His version of the work of music is that the musician strives to

reconcile discordant elements for the sake of a balance. The physician naturally

has a universal concept of good health. Of course, approaches and prescriptions

are always in progress, but the effect, a healthy body, can be practically agreed

upon by most of history’s medical communities. So, logically, Erixymachus

believes that his mastery of the body’s relationship to Love allows him to

backtrack and distinguish “the Love that is noble from the love that is ugly and

disgraceful” (186d). He warns that he may seem overly proud of his profession,

but the frame of his speech evinces the themes within. He took over for the

hiccupping Aristophanes, who Appolodorus infers might have eaten too much.

Erixymachus promises to both speak n his place and cure him, recommending

that he hold his breath for as long of the speech’s duration as possible. He

reflects to his own rules for the party and makes a slightly sardonic allusion to

Aristophanes’ condition to prove his story about the physician (himself) knowing

better than most how to balance Love in medicine, music, and the social life. He

pits Urania’s melodies against Polyhymnia’s popular music:

Extreme caution is indicated here: we must be careful to enjoy his

pleasures without slipping into debauchery – this case, I might add, is

strictly parallel to a serious issue n my own field, namely, the problem of

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regulating the appetite so as to be able to enjoy a fine meal without

unhealthy after-effects.

(187e)

His advice for Aristophanes to hold his breath seems to imply that he is wary that

the satirical playwright will probably follow his speech, which he knows is self-

serving and slightly arrogant, by using his hubris as fodder. He protects himself

with the proposition to cure his hiccups by speaking while he holds his breath. He

proves his competence as a diagnostician at the same time that his speech

logically indebts his medical prowess to his expertise on love.

Aristophanes is not inclined to be apologetic to or embarrassed by the

upper class. After a playful transitional back-and-forth with Erixymachus, he is

warned that if his peers expect a funny speech, they’ll have their guards up. So,

he explains that his speech might be more absurd than funny. His speech on the

mythical original human is certainly absurd from a modern perspective, but it isn’t

obvious why his contemporaries would. They may or may not believe in the

reality of the Olympian gods, but unironically discuss myths constantly. What

might be ridiculous to them is Aristophanes’’ theory of the three-sexed spherical

beings that were dissected to create the genders. After that separation, humans

would be on an eternal search for the other half, which would be a woman for

men. This is an unfashionably argument to present, that male completeness

relies on women. He appeals to his audience by declaring that the male

homosexual, the man who was split from man, is superior to the man split from

the androgyn, who desires his female other half. The male homosexuals are
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bravest in defying the will of nature, and are the manliest as they “grow up as a

lover of young men and a lover of Love, always rejoicing in his own kind” (192b).

Agathon interrupts, assuming his managerial duties, and tries to redirect

the discussion away from a self-congratulatory toast to mankind “on the good

gifts that come to them from god,” and towards speeches on the god himself

(194e). Here, the previous speeches’ narrative functions culminate before

Socrates introduces the strongest feminine voice, Diotima. In light of Pausanius’

assertion that love cannot simply be “good” or “bad,” Aristophanes’ theory that

we are all looking for our other half, regardless of which sex we were cut from,

permits us to retroactively acknowledge that heterosexual couples are capable of

heavenly love. Only in reflection backwards can you distinguish Plato’s message.

Heterosexuals were split from the androgynous third, so the halves have both the

masculine and feminine qualities. This hints, at least to me, that Plato learned

from Socrates to appreciate femininity in women as well as men, and therefore

honor the heterosexual relationship.

After his dialectic with Agathon, which puts him in the same aporetic place

that Diotima of Mantinea leads him to in the anecdote. . Because of her gender,

Socrates doesn’t take her reputation for granted, and relates her significance to

his friends, in that she once stopped a plague in Athens for 10 years by advising

their sacrifice. In what looks like the genesis of the Socratic method, Diotima

uses Socrates’ own words to prove that love doesn’t need to be “good” or “bad”

in the same way that correct judgment only exists in the interstitial space

between understanding and ignorance. This deconstructive tool is crucial to

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judging Love “correctly without being able to give a reason” (202a). Diotima’s

sees love as also between mortality and immortality, and therefore belongs

neither to the gods nor humans. Socrates is not reluctant to admit that his

greatest teacher of Love was a woman; she was also a seer. Mantic women

were revered for their nominal knowledge and mediation between gods and men.

Oracles were simply ventriloquized by the gods, and could only relate the divine

words in states of ecstasy, which was usually induced through entheogenic

substances, and not in their metaphysical capacity. Oracles had a similar social

status to high priests, so seers were more accessible to mortals. Considering that

the Greek gods did not exist, the divinators that actually helped and engaged

with humanity hold much more authority in retrospect. Where the most

respected male intellectuals were philosophers, who try to go as far as they can

outside of the world and towards the cosmos in order to understand it, oracles

harness the myth that women are more connected to the earth and spiritual

world. So, the closer they were to the endogenous mysteries of the earth, the

clearer the knowledge they got “from the gods” would be to humans. In this

spiritual tradition, men would naturally favor the sun, and male love, for it’s life-

affirming nature, but miss how integral the moon was in the very structures of

Greek language and cultural identity. The root of mantis, man-, is as related to

men-, for “month,” as it is to its descendant term “Man.” While the moon did not

have the omnipotence of the sun for the Greeks, the tangible influence that it has

on earth is much more profound. The moon revolves around the earth, but it also

responds to external forces and translates them for the earth, for example, in its
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power over the tide. The Athenian calendar combined the lunar and solar cycles,

but favored the festival schedule that was distinctly regional and relatively

arbitrary. Although the calendar was subject to political alterations, the festivals

still corresponded to the lunar cycle, which makes the Athenian calendar a

complex attempt by society to mediate between earth and heavens.

Aristophanes himself recognized this relationship, but criticized Athens for

disjoining the earthly schedule from the divine order. I believe that Aristophanes

meant his dismal and implied derision of the moon in his speech to be ironic.

Plato used the humorist’s reputation to corroborate the genius of Diotima, who

could not speak for herself at the symposium.

Diotima’s understanding posits love in an interstitial space between Gods and

Mortals. Juxtaposing Aristophanes’ myth atop Diotima’s illuminates a crucial

connection. His genealogy: “The male kind was originally an offspring of the sun,

the female of the earth, and the one that combined both genders was an

offspring of the moon, because the moon shares in both” (190b). If we take his

word, that his speech is absurd, not funny, then his seriousness is

uncharacteristic. However, we are reading into a purposefully absurd speech,

told by the master of Greek satire to Socrates, master of irony, and framed by

Plato, who is writing his masterpiece. Aristophanes assures the audience that

BOTH men cut from men and women cut from women are better than the men

and women from androgynous origin. Heavenly love looks better to him and most

others because it exists in a lofty place above the earth where men, who are

more beautiful and more intelligent than women, will become pregnant with a
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Love greater than the sum of its parts. The opposite should be true, that lesbians

are the lowliest lovers. Instead, they merely exist at the opposite pole of male

homosexuals, and have the same sort of non-reproductive sexual relationships

that would birth Heavenly love.

Diotima’s interrogation of Socrates proves that the masculine attempt to

honor Love solely as an immortal, or intellectual, concept is just as misguided as

the feminine (as they see it) angle that looks at human Love from the earth. The

notion remains intact throughout the whole dialogue that Love is not essentially

moral and that it depends on the behavior that the love elicits. Erixymachus’ most

profound point is that Love is about a balanced intake of pleasure without

compromising our health. So in his own musical terms, Love is between Urania

and Polyhymnia, and striving for either extreme misses the point about love.

Diotima does believe that valuable love does strive towards divinity, but, in

reality, it is an infinitely elusive goal, and any Love, which we can only experience

on earth, will ALWAYS exist between sun and earth. The moon, which reflects

and contains both the sun and earth, represents the heterosexual relationship.

Most of the speakers cast man-woman relations as inferior, because something

with such a distinctly mortal function couldn’t be as truly beautiful as the solely

spiritual homosexual relationship is. Diotima sees that Love can be both an

intermediary between the lovers and the psychobiological duty of procreation,

which are not complementary positions. However, her own logic proves that Love

can just as well be a mediator between these oppositions.

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Diotima’s own genealogy of Eros refers to his parents as Resource and

Poverty. Aristophanes contended that Love is never totally fulfilling and,

therefore, as the source of desire, “tries to make one out of two” (191d). As all

sexual persuasions are oriented towards the missing half, it’s a uselessly

condescending exercise to dismiss the type of practical love that commands the

lovers’ responsibility to remain faithful. Diotima sees that Love is impoverished

but resourceful, and therefore has the motivation to seek wisdom, even without

being wise or having a reason. Her answer to Socrates describes that state of a

lover of wisdom, a philosopher, and is too perfect to be paraphrased:

Those who love wisdom fall in between those two extremes. And Love is

one of them, because he is in love with what is beautiful, and wisdom is

extremely beautiful. It follows that Love must be a lover of wisdom and, as

such, is in between being wise and being ignorant. This too comes to him

from his parentage, from a father who is wise and resourceful and a

mother who is not wise and lacks resource.

(204b)

Although Socrates acknowledges in the Meno that the titular character’s paradox

is a legitimate concern for him and all philosophers, Diotima’s quote here deftly

diffuses the aporia. In the intertwining of Love and wisdom, the former is the

driving force that allows even the ignorant to search for wisdom. In a certain

sense, any ontology that deals with Being rather than nothingness is

fundamentally indebted to love. Socrates, in all of the dialogues, struggles with a

metaphysical base for his quest for good and truth. At the symposium, he
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exposes his secret for justifying his life: the mind-altering and beautiful lesson

that he learned from Diotima.

Socrates and Diotima’s identities share interesting similarities. However

authoritative Diotima is on Love, she is only spoken for by Socrates, and,

rhetorically, her contribution to the dialogue as a whole is buried under more

framing than any other. Nevertheless, Socrates sees that, ironically, at an

exclusively male party, his first teacher is needed the most, and he is especially

qualified to represent Diotima. Socrates’ condition of epilepsy led him to claim

that he would sporadically receive divine signs. Diotima was probably not

epileptic, but the concept of ekstasis was very important for the prophetic class.

Although did not necessarily see epileptic fits as supernatural, they certainly had

a profound effect on Socrates life. Even when a slave tries multiple times to

summon Socrates from Agathon’s neighbor’s porch, he is helpless to move.

Agathon jests about the tardiness, but knows Socrates’ idiosyncrasies and

assumes that what we can assume was an epileptic seizure was only quelled

when Socrates’ “saw the light” and found some bit of wisdom. Socrates is

bemused, and fantasizes about wisdom being transferable through osmosis. It

would inarguably be simpler and more comforting for Socrates if learning about

Love from Diotima didn’t depend on his own intellectual capacity. He struggles to

believe that he could accrue wisdom by his own will, and without the aid of his

“condition.” The masculine prejudice here is that such distractions, even for the

female prophets, could only receive knowledge only from Apollo, the Sun, who

equates better with Heavenly than Common love. However, the Delphic Oracle
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(Obviously a woman) later told Socrates that he was wisest because he knew he

was ignorant, which allowed for his project of loving wisdom to continue. Her wall

warned to “Know thyself first,” which contradicts the oracles wisdom from the

female perspective. Apollo’s numinal wisdom only answered to feminine

fecundity, but the answers would really have to come from inside of the guest.

While an oracle was a conduit for the Apollo’s decrees, priests would have to

mediate for the client. A seer like Diotima, however, would be more aware of her

mortality and might acknowledge that, because the feminine is omnipresent in

between gods and men, even men without supernatural powers are capable of

further understanding true Love and wisdom. Socrates believes that he is seized

by an exogenic spirit, but should have learned from Diotima that the relation of

his peculiar wisdom and his epilepsy are not necessarily causal.

Socrates seems inclined to believe that the development of genius

depends on some sort of existential shortcoming or void in a person’s soul or

body. His view is in line with Diotima’s saying that Love, being genetically poor

but resourceful, is what makes even ignorant people strive for wisdom and

Aristophanes’ mythic proof that Love is the search for the other half that

completes us. However, Diotima doesn’t fully satisfy his metaphysical questions,

and, for my argument, Aristophanes is misguided by sexism. For both

Aristophanes and partially for Diotima, procreative sex only simulates

completeness and is a way to approach immortality. Aristophanes’ myth

accounts for the desire of wisdom, but only for Heavenly love between men,

whose sexual practice only generates desire for more. On the contrary, if the way
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to heavenly love is about spiritual fecundity, then the female ability to give birth

does not exclude them from other sorts of impregnation. Plato’s Socrates is still

inclined to favor pederasty as the means of the lover to cultivate his younger

beloved’s genius. Plato deals with this in Theatetus when the promising

geometry student that Theodorus procures for Socrates is as snub-nosed and

runty as he is. Erixymachus asserts that the body always lacks certain things that

forms of Love can help. Socrates is self-conscious of what he lacks; He is ugly

and self-deprecating because of his epilepsy. Although he can’t prove it to

himself, he is considered an incredibly wise soul. It follows that he is sure the

only way for a person to recognize their ignorance or even see that they could be

much better is a traumatic and disorienting deficiency that traverses body as well

as mind. Ecstasy, being outside of yourself, literally implies disorientation.

Socrates is familiar with the power of ecstasy in his life, but the dialogue is set up

so that only the feminine seems to have this attribute in its essence.

More artfully than in any other dialogue, Plato uses the numerous

bracketing devices of the symposium to enrich the content of the main

discussion. By exploring the limits of his narrative’s form, the reader is allowed to

extend metaphors both inward from the frame and outwards from the

symposium. The magnificence of Diotima’s speech would only be apparent to the

reader if the speeches weren’t intertwined. Erixymachus’ plan to have each

speech considered separately reflects Socrates’ dream of receiving wisdom

through osmosis. The profundity of each speech only comes out in their

intertwining with those surrounding it. Some speeches refer to the significance of
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Love for human beings directly, but even those that try to praise the God and

ignore the human complexities make the human aspect more apparent by

crossing it out. In doing so, they prove that the feminine perspective of Love is

the most fruitful when evaluating the symposium. They are all truly excellent

speeches. But their value is rhetorical, and has nothing to do with the validity of

there arguments. In fact, Socrates’ recanting of Diotima’s speech uses all of the

tools set before him in the other speeches to disclose truth about Heavenly and

commonly love that wouldn’t be possible without her feminine presence. In

Socrates doing so, Plato brackets all of the speeches outwardly from Diotima and

places all of these varying elaborations on love in the same interstitial space

between gods and men. The profundity of Love for human beings is neither

masculine nor feminine in nature, but Plato’s feminine inclusion is breath taking

and nearly flawless, even if it is so densely removed from the action. In doing so,

his treatise on love is as complete as humanly possible. “Socrates speech

finished to load applause” (212c). Once the feminine perspective is proved

superior, the door is opened for Dionysus and the symposium REALLY starts.