The blog, like my love for you, knows no bounds.
I just wanted to sketch out some analysis I’ve been doing in my head about Agathon’s speech. That way, we can get on to what Socrates/Diotima have to say. I can’t wait to talk about that with you.
What I want to get at about Agathon is not so much about all the glowing things he says about what Love is and what it causes. Taken at face value, Agathon’s account of Love is not tragic at all. Despite the fact that he’s a tragedian writer, his explanation is quite bright. However, when we consider the implications on the human condition were his account of Love to be true, there’s actually an undercurrent of tragedy beneath the surface of what he has to say.
Agathon begins his speech by saying that the speeches before his fell short because they didn’t identify what Love was or what it caused. First, we get a bunch of adjectives that are supposed to prove that Love is beautiful: young, delicate, supple, sensitive. Then, he starts talking about the Virtues: justice, moderate, courageous, and wise (leaving out the virtue of piety, which is usually included among the Virtues when Plato talks about virtues). When he gets to wisdom, he praises Love for essentially being a maker/poet of wisdom. He says that Love is responsible for the creation of music, the mating of animals, and a number of other arts.
When he gets to what Love causes, he says Love is the cause of the most beautiful and best things. It is the cause of human beings coming together for sacrifices, for festivals, and for dancing. All three of these human gatherings have religious or pious connotations. The audience goes wild with applause.
I would argue that the subtle tragedy in Agathon’s speech takes root in the seemingly offhand comment he makes when he’s talking about fellow poet Hesiod’s Jerry Springer-esque account of the Gods. Although Hesiod’s telling of godly activities involves the gods reproducing through erotic couplings, Agathon says that this just was not true. He says that there was not Love among the gods and that this was evidenced by all the castrating and violence they had going on. Had the gods been objects of Love, according to Agathon, they’d have been way more chill. Rather, the gods in the tales of Hesiod and Parmenides were “agents of Necessity” and did not exist in a world alongside Love, if they ever existed at all.
In other words, Agathon is saying that poets such as Hesiod, Parmenides, and of course, himself are the ones who tell us about the gods. This move, like Love itself, is supple and sneaky because he later says that Love itself is a great poet. I think he is suggesting the Love is, at bottom, the poet’s faculty. Even though he started out his whole speech by telling us that Love is a god and lavishly praises it as such, what he’s really saying is that there is no God and that we are alone in this world. That is why there is no piety in Love itself. Instead, piety arises in the human expression of the experience of Love.
Stepping back, we see that Agathon’s words are disingenuous—he does not think that Love itself is a god whose supple form allows it to trickle down into the softest and most minute crevices of our souls and cause us to to create good and beautiful things. If human beings unite in the name of Love Our God in order to praise and worship, then their piety is in vain. Because, by Agathon’s account of Love, there is no God except the one created in the flowering language of poetry. The words of poets, including those being spoken by Agathon at the Symposium, are what is beautiful and good and the world. The words of poets cause human beings to believe in Love, to believe in gods, to believe that Love is a God, and to gather together in order to praise Love.
In fact, that’s precisely what is going on at the Symposium, is it not? Everyone has gathered in honor of Agathon, the great tragic poet. That is why, upon hearing his beautiful, albeit vacuous words about Love, everyone is moved to applause.
I hope this makes sense, Sweeeeetz, and look forward to hearing whether you have anything to add to it.
I love you. I love loving you. I love to love loving you.