David Fedaie

In only loving Socrates and showering only him as beautiful, Socrates is presented as a unique individual that Alcibiades cannot get over. In The Symposium, Plato uses Alcibiades as an example to display the difficulty one arrives at when stuck at a rung on Diotima’s Ladder of Love.

After humbling the poet Agathon, Socrates recounts a conversation he held with Diotima of Mantinea. One of the central ideas in Diotima’s dialogue with Socrates is concerning an individual’s investigation through the mystery of love. Diotima claims that initially, during youth, an individual will “fall in love with the body of one individual only”.^[1] Then, they will realize that the body of any one body is “closely akin to that of any other body”.^[1] Further investigating love, the individual will continue until they see the beauty present in psuche, and realize that the beauty seen “in a body is trivial by comparison”. Diotima describes these stages as ascending steps, describing how one must discern through the “things of love” beginning with the beauty of bodies until they eventually recognize the “knowledge solely of the beautiful itself”.^[3]

Plato uses Alcibiades and his love as an example of an individual stuck on the first step of Diotima’s ladder. Bursting into the symposium, Alcibiades is convinced to share his own speech. Through a humorous sequence of events concerning Socrates’ jealousy when Alcibiades praises anyone else, man or god, this speech is decided to be a praise of Socrates. In one part of his speech, Alcibiades shares how Socrates refused to reciprocate Alcibiades’ sexual advances.^[4] It is clear through his speech that Alcibiades is deeply captivated by Socrates, but it is because of this deep fixation on the beauty of one individual alone that Alcibiades cannot move further on the ladder of love. Socrates, in all his wisdom, overcomes the sexual temptation of the body and recognizes that Alcibiades only sees the beauty of a single individual, rather than the beauty of the human project and that which underlies it. In Socrates’ refusal to reciprocate Alcibiades’ advances, he ultimately represents the true form of love in Diotima’s description.

Plato uses Alcibiades and his speech in The Symposium to describe how the true form of love circumvents shallow obsession, showcasing a case example in the narrative itself.