But if the arguments are opened and one sees them from the inside, he will discover first that they’re the only arguments with any sense in them, and next that they comprise within themselves utterly divine and multitudinous figures of advantage (agalmat’ aretês). When you had been to hearken to his arguments, at first they’d strike you as totally ridiculous; they’re clothed in phrases as coarse as the hides worn by the most vulgar satyrs. Alcibiades’ love for Socrates focuses on the gorgeous figures of virtue which he thinks he sees mendacity beneath those “words as coarse because the hides worn by the most vulgar satyrs,” which are the analog for him of Socrates’ ugly, satyr-like physique (215b3-4). Aristodemus’ love for Socrates, by distinction, appears to focus on his coarse exterior, in order that Aristodemus himself is a sort of inverted Alcibiades, whose very title associates him with Pausanias’ body-centered goddess of love, Pandêmos. What Alcibiades thinks he sees in Socrates are embryonic virtues, which-like spermatazoa in the embryology the Symposium implicitly embraces when it speaks of the lover as pregnant and as seeking a good looking boy by which to beget an offspring-want only be ejaculated into the precise receptacle as a way to grow into their mature forms (209a5-c2). Sex can result in advantage, in other words, without the need for arduous work.
Alcibiades was so in love with Socrates-“it was apparent,” the Symposium (222c1-2) tells us-that when requested to talk of love, he speaks of his beloved. That he has by no means turned away is made but extra vivid in probably the most intriguing passages within the Symposium. They’re subsequently tailor-made, in a technique a minimum of, to fulfill the Socratic sincerity situation, the demand that you just say what you believe (Crito 49c11-d2, Protagoras 331c4-d1). Under the cool gaze of the elenctic eye, they’re examined for consistency with other beliefs that lie just exterior love’s controlling and sometimes distorting ambit. Despite his reservations, Aristodemus agrees to accompany Socrates-but with an important proviso: “See what protection you’re going to make (apologêsê) for bringing me along, as a result of I won’t admit I got here uninvited, I’ll say you introduced me! Within the course of the c-part, the son makes an incision on a round, playdough “stomach,” going by way of skin and fat and separating muscle, eventually revealing amniotic fluid made out of plastic wrap. He’s always happening about pack asses, or blacksmiths, or cobblers, or tanners… I do know completely properly that I can’t show he’s wrong when he tells me what I ought to do: yet, the second I depart his side, I return to my previous ways: I cave in to my desire to please the crowd” (216b1-5). Even such consciousness of battle as is manifested right here, nevertheless, is not any guarantee of a satisfactory resolution.
For the brand new love-the one that appears to supply coherence, satisfaction, and release from disgrace-might change into just the old irritating one in disguise. English language in some form since Old English was spoken. When these fail him, it’s to the crowd (in the form of the Bacchic revelers we meet at the top of the Symposium) he will regressively return, having never really succeeded in turning away. For Alcibiades, then, Socrates’ physique is identical to his phrases; the virtues which can be in him are in them; talking philosophy is having sexual intercourse, and vice versa. So by showing Lysis that he isn’t already wise, by getting him to recognize that he doesn’t know, Socrates sets him on the road to philosophy (cf. The connection-amounting to an identification-between the art of discussion and the artwork of loving boys explored in the Lysis allows us to see why Plato’s personal explorations of love invariably involve an exploration of dialogue too-love-discuss in the Lysis, symposiastic speech-making and drama in the Symposium, oratory and rhetoric within the Phaedrus. At the start of the Symposium, an unidentified man wants to listen to what was mentioned about love by Socrates and the others at Agathon’s home.
Socrates is invited to Agathon’s-Goodman’s. Alcibiades’ well-known failed attempt to seduce Socrates shows that this is so in his case too (218b8-e5). For Alcibiades doesn’t try to win Socrates’ love by undertaking the difficult job of self-transformation required to develop into a more virtuous, and so more actually beautiful and lovable, person. As quickly because the illusion is loved, due to this fact, it provides beginning to not a realistic try to amass virtue, but to the sexual seduction fantasy mentioned earlier. As is so often the case with love, nevertheless, it’s fantasy we’re coping with. Socrates’ classes in love, we may infer, are elenctic lessons-classes in tips on how to ask and reply questions. Loving Socrates, we could infer, is a complex business, since just what somebody loves in loving him is tied to that person’s peculiar needs, and the boundaries they impose on how like Socrates he can change into. Socrates often is the grasp of foreplay, of arousing need, and may to that extent be a grasp of the artwork of love, however with regards to satisfying want, he is a failure. At the top of the examination, Socrates characterizes what he has completed: “This is how you need to talk to your boyfriends, Hippothales, making them humble and drawing in their sails, as a substitute of swelling them up and spoiling them, as you do” (210e2-5). It sounds merely chastening put like that.