Lost Objectivity In The Symposium

Lost Objectivity in the Symposium The Symposium presents several arguments about love at a group drinking party. Eryximachus suggests that each of the guests orate a speech on love and explain what love actually means. Each of the guests presents a speech on love, however; their analysis of love may not be as objective as it seems. They each have their own personal beliefs that they seem to be advancing in each of their speeches. Characters in the Symposium twist the meaning of love to fit their own narrative, rather than provide an objective analysis. Pausanias’s speech uses love as a way to justify his relationships with younger boys. Pausanias’s speech starts out describing two distinct types of love: “If follows, therefore, that the same

He states that their young lovers are slaves to them. This idea of younger boys being slaves, deviates entirely from his speech on the two different types of love. This speech has his political motivations linked into his speech. He spends an extreme amount of time discussing the goodness for the love of young boys, that his speech is simply about the actions that he and the others in the room have done. In his speech, he even goes so far as to justify love that brings no benefit to a younger boy.

[S]uppose someone is led by a lover’s putative goodness to gratify him in the expectation of gaining, for his part, moral benefit from the lover’s friendship, but his hopes are dashed: the man turns out to be a scoundrel and to have no goodness to his name. Even so, being deceived in this way is all right. (185a-185b)

Insisting that a man can do nearly anything to a younger boy just because the young boy wants enlightenment is disconcerting, and raises no objections from anyone else at the gathering. This is because they each intrinsically agree with Pausanias, because they all have been involved in relationships with young boys. Pausanias deviates from an argument about love, to an argument about why loving young boys is justified, twisting the speech he was supposed to give to one that protects his