Comparing Socrates And Agathon's Speech

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Out of all the speeches in the Symposium, Agathon’s speech appears to lack depth when compared to the others. However, Agathon’s speech plays an important role in the Symposium in relation to Socrates’ speech. The ideas in Agathon’s and Socrates’ speeches don’t align perfectly with each other because each speech is a logical progression of ideas that peaks with Socrates’ speech. Understand that this logical progression of ideas grows from speech to speech, where each speech builds off the last, which makes Agathon’s speech the platform that Socrates’ speech builds upon. To begin, I will analyze both the speeches of Socrates and Agathon separately, with a focus on love as being anchored in the soul rather than the physical relationships

The first of these is the duality that love exerts inherently, and that each example of love has a subject who loves, and something to love (199c-199e). He does this by showing how family relationship terms like mother, brother, and sister only have meaning when they link two subjects together, and cannot possibly apply to only one subject. The second of these key points is that love must lack in attractive qualities in order to seek them (201c). Socrates explains this by stating that you can’t desire what you already have, but can only desire to have it in the future (200c). With this interrogation concluding, we move into Socrates’ real speech, where he gives a recount of Diotima’s theory of love by retelling their conversation. This is where the message of his speech comes out through Diotima’s teachings, showing that love is neither god nor mortal, but instead is a spirit that bridges the gap between them (202d). This is the theme of his speech, that the true role of love in human life is to be a bridge of desire brought forth because humans are self-aware of what they lack. This bridge of desire is what enables Diotima’s concept of ascent towards beauty. Diotima tells Socrates that the process to immortality through procreation is like the ascent of a ladder, where the first rung concerns bodily attraction (210a), where the lover falls in love with the physical beauty of an individual, planting the seed of desire for immortality. The second rung of the ladder is the appreciation for physical beauty in general (210b), followed by the third rung where the lover falls for not the beauty of the physical body, but for the beauty of the soul (210b-210c). From that point on, you “ascend to that final intellectual endeavor, which is no more and no less