Platos Symposium. If love has the power to make men virtuous, why has it not had more effect upon the character Alcibiades?

by ryansahih (student)

University Degree Historical and Philosophical studies

Ryan Sahiholnasab

November 13, 2012

Professor Miles

Symposium Paper

If love has the power to make men virtuous, why has it not had more effect upon the character Alcibiades?

In Plato’s Symposium, Plato uses Alcibiades’ dialogue to display his frustration with the social expectations for love and his inability to meet those expectations. The Symposium is set during the Dionysian festival, which emphasizes the Athenian expectations that Alcibiades must confront. The guests of the party in the Symposium met during a festival rejoicing the productivity and fertility of beauty and love. Unlike Socrates, who has gained virtue through this love by understanding Diotima’s ladder, the character of Alcibiades realizes that he is unable to gain virtue through sexual relations. Alcibiades questions his feelings about love, and this confusion is what keeps him from self-improvement. Alcibiades’ fixation with sexuality is what keeps him from becoming virtuous.

Because heterosexual relationships were justified as giving birth to children, to justify homosexual relationships one would have to prove them equally productive. This forces Alcibiades to consider his own behavior in the context of these expectations and justify his sexual relationships. On the other hand, Socrates tries to justify homosexual relationships by relating Diotima’s differentiation between heterosexual relationships, those who are physically pregnant with babies, and homosexual relationships, those who are pregnant in terms of the soul and produce virtue in their partner. “It is giving birth in beauty, whether in body or in soul” (Plato 206B). On Diotima's ladder of love,
the divine rates higher than the physical, and the universal ranks above the particular. Truth and inner beauty are ultimately far valuable than false wisdom and superficial attractiveness. “Beauty is in harmony with the divine.” (Plato 206D) This difference between Socrates and Alcibiades is what really differentiates them from each other. One becomes virtuous through love and the other is seeking virtue through a false analogy of love, attractiveness.

This is a preview of the whole essay

Despite Alcibiades’ attractive charm, Plato describes Alcibiades as unable to achieve any productive sexual relationship because he fails to become the virtuous man that a productive relationship would produce. Alcibiades is prevented from having a productive relationship by his sexual desires which can be called his impotence. Alcibiades is more focused on the sexual act and the physical gratification that would come from it than on the philosophical effect that the act would have on his soul. While Alcibiades knows that Socrates views the sexual act as a means of producing a more virtuous man, he pretends to actually understand how this happens only as a scheme to convince Socrates that their sexual relationship would be productive. Alcibiades said, “So what I did was to invite him to dinner, as if I were his lover and he my young prey.” (Plato 217C) Alcibiades demonstrates to Socrates that he fundamentally misunderstands the productive nature of sexual relationships, and therefore, will be unable to use any sexual relationship to improve his soul.

Socrates does not have a sexual relationship with Alcibiades because Alcibiades cannot engage in a productive sexual relationship, and Socrates is unwilling to enter such an unproductive relationship. Socrates attempts to explain this to Alcibiades: “You seem to me to want more than your proper share: you offer me the merest appearance of beauty, and in return you want the thing itself, ‘gold in exchange for bronze’” (Plato 219A). Socrates is unwilling to help Alcibiades, not because Socrates is inadequate, but because Alcibiades is so corrupted that he could not be helped by any relationship.

The tragedy of Alcibiades’ impotence is that he realizes his insufficiencies and yet is unable to change himself. Alcibiades’ inability to understand the productivity of sexual relationships leaves him in a state of unending frustration, as he understands that he lacks virtue, but is unable to become virtuous. Despite the lessons Socrates attempts to teach him, Alcibiades remains unable to understand Socrates’ reason for not having a sexual relationship with him.

Plato’s great Symposium uses Alcibiades’ dialogue and relationship with Socrates to portray Alcibiades’ tragic inability to become virtuous through sexual relationships demonstrates the impotence resultant of overemphasizing erotic relationships. Alcibiades’ inability to have a productive sexual relationship condemns him to mortality. The tragedy of the character of Alcibiades is both his lack of comprehension of virtue and his inability to change himself.

Consequently, it is Alcibiades’ fixation with sexuality that is keeps him away from becoming virtuous. His ego toward his physical attractiveness doesn’t allow him to climb and pursue the other steps of the Diotima’s ladder. He is stuck in one of the lower stages of the ladder and his physical attractiveness has blinded him and is preventing him from understanding virtue. This is the main reason toward his failure with a relationship with Socrates, who seeks wisdom and virtue. Therefore, this disappointment in relationship reflects on how he cannot pursue wisdom by becoming a virtuous man.

Bibliography:

Nehamas, Alexander, and Paul Woodruff.Symposium. Indianapolis: Hackett Pub. Co., 1989. Print.