Our first encounter with Socrates in the Symposium is bizarre. Aristodemus, surprised to run into Socrates fully bathed and with his sandals on, asks him where he is going “to have made himself so beautiful (kalos)” (174a4, Rowe trans.). Socrates replies that he is on his way to see the lovely Agathon, and so that “he has beautified himself in these ways in order to go, a beauty to a beauty (kalos para kalon)” (174a7–8). Why does Socrates, who in just a few moments will be lost in contemplation out on the front porch, care about being beautiful? His remark to Aristodemus is clearly in some sense ironic, but on the other hand, he really has taken unusual care with his physical appearance. Later, in his encomium to love, he will claim that beauty has this effect on lovers: the beauty of the beloved causes the lover to disdain his former way of life and “give birth” to beautiful “offspring.” Is the image of the squat and snub-nosed Socrates all freshly scrubbed and kitted out a comic foreshadowing, or a debunking, of his serious speech? Does Socrates really believe in the transformative power of beauty?

One of the most alien aspects of Plato’s ethical theory is that it gives a central place to beauty (to kalon) and erotic love. The young guardians in the Republic must develop erôs for the beautiful before they begin their training in {96|97} philosophy, an erôs first expressed in love for beautiful souls in beautiful bodies (402c–403c). And in the Phaedrus Socrates attributes to beauty the power to awaken the soul’s erotic “madness” and thereby to liberate us from our impure, bodily existence. For some reason, Plato seems to think that receptiveness to and devotion to beauty (including physical beauty) is necessary for a rational grasp of the good and for the virtuous behavior that follows from it. This is bound to strike us as strange. We may be ready to grant that erotic love, and thus physical beauty, is ethically relevant. But why exactly does Plato think they are so ethically important? This is the question I will try to answer here in my interpretation of the Symposium and in particular of Socrates’ speech.

The idea that beauty is central to ethical theory is, as I said, alien to us. So we should not expect an adequate interpretation of the Symposium to show us that this idea is, after all, one we already accept. But neither should we settle for a superficial explanation in which we get the gist, but not the details, of how beauty figures in the virtuous life. This danger is especially acute when we try to interpret Socrates’ speech. He evidently believes that good things are beautiful; and we know from other dialogues that beauty depends on goodness. Thus when he speaks about love as an urge to give birth in beauty, we may be tempted to suppose that this is merely a mysterious way of describing the fact that our desire for the good is focused and made effective when we encounter something in particular that we think is good, as if beauty per se did not really matter in this context. That is to say, we may be tempted to explain the ethical significance of beauty solely by appeal to the fact that, according to Plato, genuinely beautiful things are good. But we should not be too hasty. I do not want to deny that the connection between the beautiful and the good is relevant to the proper interpretation of Socrates’ account of love. Indeed, as we will see, it plays a central role in explaining why lovers want to create beauty. But what is especially interesting about the Symposium is that it draws our attention to the fact that our response to things qua good is not the same as our response to them qua beautiful. Even if, in truth, the class of good things is coextensive with the class of beautiful things; even if a thing’s beauty depends on its goodness, the experience of a thing as good plays a different role in our lives than does the experience of a thing as beautiful. This, I will argue, is something Socrates wants his audience to see. Thus if we adopt the strategy of substituting ‘good’ for ‘beautiful’ in his account of love, we will ignore and leave unexplained his overt and insistent concern with the place of beauty in human life. Perhaps worse, we will flatten out the distinction between the role of good as the object of love and the role of beauty as its midwife, a distinction that Socrates (speaking as Diotima) takes pains to make. {97|98}

I will argue that, according to Socrates, what grabs the attention of the lover when he experiences someone or something as beautiful is its self-sufficiency and lack of change. That is to say, insofar as things are beautiful, their goodness strikes us as being impervious to the passage of time. The temporal dimension of our experience of beauty has not, to my knowledge, been noticed as being part of Plato’s thought. It is important for two reasons, though. Once we understand it, we can better see why, in his view, we lovers who desire to be happy forever care so much about experiencing and creating beauty. This will be my focus here. But in addition, as I will suggest at the end, it helps us see how Plato can allow for that aspect of the experience of beauty which Kant called disinterestedness, while nevertheless maintaining that the pleasure we take in beauty is deeply interested. Thus, my reading of the Symposium will enrich our understanding of Plato’s conception of beauty and, in my view, make it more plausible.

Let us return to Phaedrus, however. His speech is obviously a party set-piece (Hunter 2004:38–39 suggests that it may have been prepared in advance), so it may seem churlish to examine it for philosophical coherence. Still, for the philosophically inclined reader the speech raises more questions than it answers. First, Phaedrus takes for granted that lovers are attracted to beautiful people. But given how ethically and politically crucial the effect of love is in his view, we might well find it curious that it is beautiful people who set love in motion. Why is it beauty that has this power? Second, despite what Phaedrus claims, it is far from clear that love as he understands it will characteristically issue in great and beautiful actions. As he sees it, the beneficial power of love is due to the fact that it instills philotimia, love of honor. Lovers are especially ashamed to be caught by their beloved doing something shameful and so, presumably because they would like to be admired, are zealous to perform fine actions on their behalf. But it is hard to see how love of honor can explain lovers’ inclination to take the most fine and beautiful risk of all, the risk of death. How will the lover enjoy the fruits of honor once he’s dead? Oddly, Phaedrus himself opens the door to this objection when he criticizes Orpheus, who dared to enter Hades for the sake of his beloved, but wasn’t willing to go there by the traditional, deadly route. If Orpheus’ love has in fact filled him with love of honor, as Phaedrus’ account requires, then his eagerness to do something fine up to the point of actually being killed seems utterly reasonable. What good will Eurydice’s attentions do him when he’s dead? (Cithara-players aren’t soft (179d4); they’re smart!)

Phaedrus’ account of love cannot ultimately be supported, therefore. He cannot explain why it is beauty to which we are especially responsive or why love properly issues in beautiful actions. If, as I said before, Socrates preserves Phaedrus’ idea that love is characterized by and is valuable for its response to and creation of beauty, we ought to wonder whether his explanation fares better. Why is it beauty that elicits this response? And why is it good for us to create something beautiful?

And, as we have seen, the new tack does enable Socrates to make progress, for once he conceives of the objects of love as good, he can explain why love wants them. The chain of implication, then, is not from their prior agreement that (1) good things are beautiful to the claim that, therefore, (2) love is of the good; rather, the implication is from the fact that (1′) it is illuminating to conceive of love’s objects as good (being assured that, as such, they are also beautiful) to the claim that (2′) we have reason to suppose that no one desires anything unless it is good (205d10–e2). Diotima supports this conclusion with an additional argument: since people reject even what is their own (e.g. their own body parts) if their own turns out to be bad (205e2–4), we must assume that people desire things only on the condition that they are good.

Still, even though the young Socrates finds it easier to understand why we desire good things, Diotima continues to insist that love is essentially inspired by the presence of the beautiful and that love causes us to create beautiful things, in particular beautiful acts of virtue. That is to say, she remains true to Phaedrus’ paradigm. And rightly so, since even if love does aim at things that are good, even if, as Diotima argues, love can desire them only on the assumption that they are good, it is their beauty that enchants us. So on the one hand, Socrates agrees with Phaedrus that it is right to praise love for making us responsive to and creative of beauty. But on the other hand, he begins his speech by making us uncertain of the value of beauty. Like the young Socrates, we are likely not to know why we want beauty. Since the Symposium raises the question, we may hope it will answer it, too.

What I have argued is that Plato in the Symposium brings our simultaneous attraction to and ambivalence about beauty to the fore in Socrates’ speech. Insofar as love is intertwined with the experience and creation of beauty, beauty is something we must consider in deciding how to live. But if it is clear that beauty does matter, it is not at all clear why it matters. In the next section we will examine the sense in which, in Socrates’ view, love is characteristically expressed in beautiful action or the creation of something beautiful. Once we understand that, we will turn in the following section to the question of the importance to the lover of his beloved’s beauty. {105|106}

I emphasize this point for two reasons. First, it makes clear that beauty reenters Diotima’s account of love precisely at the moment she begins talking about the immortal mode in which the lover desires to possess the good. Beauty is the goddess of erotic generation, the mortal form of immortality (206d1–2; 206e7–8). Thus if we want to understand why it is beauty to which lovers respond, we ought to explore the connections between beauty and immortality. (We will turn to this suggestion in the next section.) Second, it makes clear that the lover’s progeny must be things he considers good (or in possession of the good) if they are to serve his purpose of having the good forever. In other words, by conceiving of love as an expression of the universal human desire for perfect happiness, Socrates explains why lovers tend to create things that are good.

Diotima’s mention of Alcestis is important because it signals that she (or rather, Socrates) is directly addressing a problem that emerged in Phaedrus’ speech while nevertheless preserving his principal intuition that love causes the lover to respond to beauty with fine and beautiful deeds. Recall, we worried how philotimia could warrant taking the risk of death. As we have just seen, Diotima solves the problem by recasting erotic philotimia as a desire for immortality.

Let me recapitulate Diotima’s picture so far. We all have a standing desire to be happy—i.e. a desire to possess the good permanently. When we fall in love we are inspired to approximate to this godlike condition by creating an image {108|109} of ourselves in association with the good or the good life as we understand it. Those who think sheer physical existence is good create human children; those who think honor is good perform actions worthy of memory; those who think political power is good write constitutions that will influence the city after their death. But in every case lovers aim to create offspring that are, in their opinion at least, possessed of the good. Unless they do create good progeny, they will not succeed in making their own grasp of the good permanent.

We are now in a position to see why, in Socrates’ view, love tends toward the creation of beauty. Since all these creations are (or are apparently) good, they will be (or apparently be) beautiful. But in the case of the honor lovers it seems fair to say that the beauty of their offspring is positively desirable to them. Their ambition is to be celebrated forever. Thus they must try to act not just well, but beautifully. For it is only by acting in a genuinely beautiful way, in a way that commands the admiration of human beings across great reaches of time, that their names will be remembered and praised.

This point about the visibility of the lover’s beautiful creations has broader application than we might at first notice. Diotima says in the passage from 209a1–e4 (i.e. in describing the lower mysteries) that people who are pregnant in their souls give birth in the presence of a beautiful person to beautiful poems and laws and other manifestations of beautiful wisdom. It is notable that Diotima implies that these speeches bring the lover immortality by causing him to be remembered. “Everyone would welcome engendering children of this sort more than human children, and when they look at Homer and Hesiod and all the other good poets they envy the sort of progeny they leave behind them which provide them with immortal glory and memory because they are themselves things of this sort” (209c7–d5). Likewise, Solon and Lycurgus achieved immortality by establishing laws for which they are honored (209d5–e2). In other words, these lovers do not achieve immortality merely by perpetuating their ideas in teaching, song, or lawgiving. Rather, their beautiful logoi are remembered and remembered as belonging to them. Given that this is so, it is reasonable to suppose that lovers of this sort consciously aim to create something beautiful. They must make their creativity conspicuous (apophênamenoi, 209e2); and the more beautiful something is, the more likely it is to be remembered. (Notice, too, that when later generations remember Homer on account of the beauty of the Iliad, they remember him as a good poet. That is to say, he achieves a quasi-immortal possession of the good, as he understands it.)

We have discovered something about the value of living in a beautiful way: beauty allows us to be noticed and remembered as in some way or other {109|110} possessing the good. We want to have the good, but given the sort of creatures we are, our possession of the good is enhanced and extended when it is recognized and celebrated by other people. Thus, there is a sense in which our interest in the beautiful is an expression of our social nature.

This explanation for why lovers desire to create beauty is more difficult to sustain when we turn to the best, philosophical lovers, however. They, presumably, do not equate being honored with being happy. Socrates does not explain why this is so in the Symposium, but it is reasonable to suppose that it is because philosophers do not regard their social nature as essential to their rational selves. (This seems to be the view of the Republic, for example.) So if beauty’s tendency to be noticed and remembered is to play a role in their creation of beautiful offspring too, then we need to ask whether there is some other, higher good than honor that can be preserved by memory.

I want to turn now to the question why beauty is so specially attractive. Diotima says that lovers give birth only in the beautiful because only beauty harmonizes with this divine activity (206c4–d1). Beauty is in fact the goddess of childbirth (206d1–2). But the role of beauty in unleashing erotic activity is obscure. As Anthony Price quite correctly observes, the “appeal to the divine seems extraneous, and sophistical: why must something that is divine in one way (being linked to immortality) be divine in another (being linked to beauty)?” (1997:16–17).

We might be tempted once again to recall that, for Plato, beauty is closely associated with goodness. If we human beings have a standing desire for happiness, then coming into the presence of something beautiful—which seems good—will naturally excite this desire. The suggestion becomes all the more promising when we recall that this beautiful thing which excites erôs is, in the first instance at least, a beautiful human body or, if the lover is more elevated, a beautiful human soul. Attraction to this sort of beauty makes sense given that, by manifesting human beauty, the beautiful person seems to be in possession of the good appropriate to human beings. No doubt this appear{111|112}ance will, to put it mildly, seem relevant to someone bursting with the desire for immortal happiness.

This suggestion is correct so far as it goes, but as I argued before, the intimate connection between beauty and goodness cannot all on its own explain beauty’s role as a midwife. Diotima says that “love is not of the beautiful in the way you [Socrates] think” but is rather “of generation and giving birth in the beautiful” (206e2–5). Here she corrects young Socrates’ assumption that beauty is the desirable object of love—that role goes to the good—and assigns it a different role, the role of facilitating the pursuit of the good. Now since all good things are, according to Socrates, beautiful, desirable objects of love are also in fact beautiful. But insofar as beautiful things play the role of love object, it is because they are good. On the other hand, when she emphasizes beauty’s role as midwife, Diotima seems to imply that if good things help us to “give birth,” they do so not insofar as they are good, but insofar as they are beautiful. If this is correct, then the goodness of beauty cannot explain the peculiar way that beauty releases the lover’s pent up pregnancy. We must find some role peculiar to beauty qua beauty.

When we examine the lover’s ascent through the higher mysteries, where Diotima especially emphasizes the phenomenology of encountering beauty, two points are notable, one concerning what the lover finds impressive in the beautiful beloved and the other concerning how his encounter with beauty affects the order of his life. I begin with the second point.

Consider how the lover experiences the form of the Beautiful. It rushes into his awareness. He “catches sight of it all of a sudden” (exaiphnês katopsetai, 210e4, cf. 210d7) and it is amazing (thaumaston, 210e5) to behold. The sight of the Beautiful itself arrests the lover and is experienced by him as interrupting his previous activity. “There, if anywhere at all, life is worth living (biôton) for a human being, for one looking at the beautiful itself” (211d1–3). Diotima says, and surely the lover must recognize too, that his previous activity was just an image of virtue. In the presence of beauty itself, the lover radically reevaluates and changes his life.

If the interpretation I have suggested is correct, we are in a position to understand why beauty is the goddess of erotic creativity. The point is not, as Price worried, that beauty and immortality both happen to be divine attributes. The divine is beautiful because it manifests its immortal possession of the good. This is why Diotima says that beauty in all things harmonizes with the divine and is the midwife of creativity. Most of the time, we go through life with our heads down, being mortal, thinking mortal thoughts. We are absorbed in ordinary prudential calculation, figuring out how to get food, and clothes, and other goods for tomorrow and the next day and the next. Beauty—the manifestation of godlike permanence and self-sufficiency—reminds us that our aspirations for happiness are of a different order. Not just long-lasting, but immortal. When we see our beautiful beloved, our desire for immortality is unleashed.

To repeat, my suggestion is that in the Symposium Socrates presents and makes use of a connection between beauty and immortality. Beauty appears godlike in its relationship to time and change. In fact, its manifestation of its atemporal imperviousness to change is exactly what strikes the lover as being so wonderful about beauty. I think it is good evidence in favor of this interpretation that it can make sense of why beauty facilitates erotic creativity. It also explains why the objects at each level of the ascent are more beautiful than the ones preceding it: at least, the movement from bodies to practices and from practices to sciences is a movement away from what is subject to change. (My thought is that the epitêdeumata are practices peculiar to a particular social time and place.) Notice also that we students of Plato would expect that the more unchanging an object is, the more knowable it is. Thus the conception of beauty I have been describing is entirely consistent with the obvious, but unexplained fact that the higher mysteries represent an epistemological ascent. In fact, since the paradigmatically beautiful object is, of necessity, something intelligible, philosophy will be vindicated as the true art of love. {118|119}

The link Plato forges between beauty and immortality has not (I believe) been much noticed, but it is not found only in the Symposium. According to Timaeus craft objects are beautiful only when they are accurately copied from an unchanging model. If the craftsman takes as his model something that comes-to-be, his creation will not be beautiful (Timaeus 28a–b). And although what the Philebus says about beauty is extraordinarily complicated, if not just obscure, it clearly draws a link between beauty and self-sufficiency; they are of the same “family stock (geneas)” (66b1–3). To the extent that something is self-sufficient though, it will be resistant to change. It is not clear why in the Philebus beauty is akin to self-sufficiency. At one point Socrates claims that beautiful shapes are ones whose beauty is not relative to something else (pros ti, 51c6–d1). Perhaps his thought is that their appearing beautiful does not depend on their being juxtaposed to something else, so that the pleasure that arises from seeing them is pure. At any rate, it seems clear that in the Philebus the genuineness of a shape’s beauty comes—for whatever reason—from its independence. Furthermore, Socrates says that beautiful things are proportionate and symmetrical (summetron, 66b1). Insofar as they are proportionate, beautiful things will not lack anything—and so will be self-sufficient and stable. Finally, for what it is worth, I refer you to Aristotle’s remark in the Nicomachean Ethics: “For the one who acts (pepoiêkoti), his deed endures, since the beautiful (kalon) is long-lasting (polluchronion). But for the one who is affected, the benefit passes by in time” (1168a15–17). That is, Aristotle contrasts beauty and the beneficial in terms of their relationship to time. I do not claim that beauty’s transcendence of time and change is, for Plato, its most important feature. But there is a connection here that we ought to explore.

The interpretation I have just given is in a certain way satisfying. It makes use of what little Socrates says to explain why he insists repeatedly that love is a response to and creation of beauty. But it may appear less satisfying when we consider it as an interpretation of an account that is supposed to be true. (Socrates begins by saying that he, unlike Agathon, speaks only the truth, 199a7–b2.) Isn’t beauty the most evanescent of qualities? Indeed, doesn’t a sense of transience give beauty the power to heighten our awareness of the presentness of present experience? Furthermore, we may wonder what room there is in Plato’s account of the experience of beauty for that quintessentially aesthetic attitude, disinterestedness.

The conception of beauty in the Symposium is certainly incomplete, but it has the resources to save these, perhaps more familiar, phenomena of aesthetic experience. First, Plato seems to agree that beauty affects the perceiver with a sense of immediacy and presence. The lover does not infer that his beloved participates in something transcendent and divine; he experiences it immediately; it startles him. But we should distinguish the kind of presence in which the present moment is a moment in flux from the presence involved in the immutable. For Plato, to experience something as beautiful is to sense in the present moment an infinite perfection. Now it might seem that this account is incompatible with the common intuition that beautiful things seem fragile. But we need not assume that they seem fragile insofar as they appear beautiful. In fact, if Plato is right that beautiful things manifest perfection, then a thing’s fragility cannot be a proper part of its appearance of beauty. For it is no part of perfection to be and seem to be on the brink of decay. Rather, if beautiful things often affect us with a sense of their fleetingness, then that may well be because something about beauty heightens our awareness of every living thing’s mortality, calling to our awareness how tenuous is their grasp of the good and, indeed, of beauty. The conception of beauty I have been describing, according to which beauty is a shining forth of stability and self-sufficiency makes good sense of this phenomenon. The fragility of beauty {120|121} would be a second, poignant, moment in our experience, when we reflect that this mortal thing cannot grasp the infinite perfection its beauty promises.

The pleasure and excitement aroused by this experience certainly differ from our ordinary experience of desire and prudential calculation. Usually we take as our object a good that can be possessed completely within a finite amount of time. We try to acquire some finite good, for instance a house or a car, and then seek to hold on to it for some specific length of time, for fifty years, ten years, or for tomorrow and the next day and the next. Thus, the way we normally attempt to possess the good is different from the “immortal” way beautiful things seem to have perfection. In this respect, then, Plato’s account captures the intuition that when we experience something beautiful we step apart from or transcend our quotidian practical standpoint. We may believe that this phenomenon is best described by saying that aesthetic experience is disinterested. But stepping outside our ordinary, finite practical standpoint does not imply that we have stepped outside the practical standpoint altogether. For according to Plato, our desire for the good is infinite, although this is not something we ordinarily notice. Thus, it is no longer clear that we must find a disinterested aspect to proper appreciation of the beautiful.

For Plato, the ethical imperative to become lovers of beauty is a reflection of his vision of human nature as aimed towards self-transcendence. We are creatures who by nature long to be more perfect, like the gods. Must we accept Plato’s view of human nature as being radically self-transcendent in order to accept his account of beauty? Perhaps not. All we must accept is that central to our practical perspective are not only finite desires—desires for objects which can be fully realized in a finite part of our lives—but also a desire that takes as its object the totality of our lives. Our desire to possess permanent happiness now is a desire to transcend our finite, temporally bounded moment and have a good that it seems no human being can have so long as he’s alive and subject to change. On the Platonic account, beauty reminds us of this desire and so recalls us to ourselves, to our erotic, aspiring nature. This is something ordinary encounters with the good do not do. Even if no mortal thing can have the degree of perfection its beauty makes it seem to have, nevertheless in its beauty it gives us a glimpse of what truly perfect being is like. If this is correct, it is ethically important. In the midst of this inevitably incomplete mortal life, the lover chances on someone beautiful, living proof that it is not completely futile to aim at an ideal of happiness more perfect than anything we can literally achieve. {121|122}

It is an assumption of my interpretation that not every experience of desire is an experience of erotic desire. Or to put it more clearly, not every desire is a desire to give birth in the beautiful. This is controversial and my reasons for interpreting the Symposium this way are not novel. (1) I cannot see how, for example, the desire for lunch and the activity of eating it, as normally pursued, can be interpreted as giving birth in the beautiful. There might be occasions where this activity does qualify—gourmet cooking may be like this—but it is not always a creative response to beauty. Eating lunch is sometimes just a response to the pain of hunger. Likewise, I do not see how every case Diotima mentions of acting for immortality can be interpreted as giving birth in the beautiful, e.g. growing hair (207d5–e2). (2) At 206b1–3, immediately before the analysis of erotic activity as giving birth in the beautiful, Diotima indicates that she wants to talk about the activity that is “called love.” I take it that she is referring back to the distinction made at 205d1–7 between erôs in the generic sense as desire for permanent happiness and erôs in the specific sense as sexual love. It is this sort of love that she analyzes as the desire to give birth in the beautiful. (Contra Rowe [1998b:245n15] Socrates’ perplexity at 206b5–10 does not indicate that Diotima is asking about generic love. Socrates is perplexed because he cannot see how sexual activity could be an expression of desire for permanent possession of the good. Diotima’s language of exertion and zeal [206b2] prompts Socrates to think of sex but, understandably enough, he cannot see how this could be the right answer to her question.) Now although in ordinary Greek and in the preceding speeches in the Symposium ‘erôs’ means sexual love, we should not think that it ordinarily connotes merely a desire for sexual pleasure. Lysias’ speech in the Phaedrus, which portrays a non-lover trying to persuade a young boy to give him sexual favors, shows quite clearly that ‘erôs’ does not simply mean a desire for sex. It is precisely because erôs means something more that, once she has analyzed it as giving birth in the beautiful, Diotima is able to expand the meaning of ‘erôs’ in this specific sense to cover cases that do not involve sexual desire at all. But just because “giving birth in the beautiful” describes more than sexual erôs does not mean that it describes absolutely all other kinds of desire for the good.

In sum, it seems to me that Diotima describes three layers of human striving: (1) All living things aim to possess the good forever, most basically by continuing in their own existence (e.g. growing hair); (2) sometimes that striving takes the form of desiring to have the good permanently, e.g. money-{122|123}making; (3) and sometimes that desire for the permanent good takes the form of desiring to give birth in the beautiful, e.g. sexual love, honor-seeking, and philosophy. (My thinking about this issue has been greatly helped by Rowe’s [1998b] thorough defense of the opposite position.) {123|124}