Blog Round Six: Dubstep Remix - Diotima

Woah. I've seriously neglected this. My bad.

Anyways, I like the chapter in which Socrates recounts his questioning by Diotima. The first thing that struck me is that she quickly broke Socrates' usual style of reasoning. In other Socratic dialogues, Socrates tends to reason in binary. What I mean by this is that he says either something is or it isn't, with no middle ground. But Diotima quickly says, "Then don't force whatever is not beautiful to be ugly, or whatever is not good to be bad. It's the same with Love: when you agree he is neither good nor beautiful, you need not think he is ugly and bad; he could be something in between." Indeed, the whole theme of the Diotima sections is reconciliation between absolutes.  She says that Love is neither mortal nor immortal, but in between. Love, according to Diotima, is a mediating force between the extremes of wisdom and ignorance, good and bad, and beautiful and ugly.  Love is the state of wanting something, instead of having something. Therefore, loving is an action, rather than a state. As Diotima says, "I conclude that you thought Love was being loved, rather than being a lover."

I'll admit that when Diotima begins to talk of "reproduction and birth in beauty," she loses me. I think her conclusion is that a desire for immortality is love. But is that it? I hope we cover that in class today.

I really need to step up my game on this. The semester is almost over.

-Andrew