Plato, Symposium | Love as Lack of the Good (Socrates' Dialogue) | Philosophy Core Concepts

Hi, this is Dr. Gregory Sadler. I'm a professor of philosophy and the president and founder of an educational consulting company called Reason.io, where we put philosophy into practice. I've studied and taught philosophy for over 20 years, and I find that many people run into difficulties reading classic philosophical texts. Sometimes it's the way things are said or how the text is structured, but the concepts themselves are not always that complicated, and that's where I come in. To help students and lifelong learners, I've been producing longer lecture videos and posting them to YouTube. Many viewers say they find them useful. What you're currently watching is part of a new series of shorter videos, each of them focused on one core concept from an important philosophical text. I hope you find it useful as well. In the symposium, Agathon gives a rather rhetorically constructed speech in which he makes several important claims about the nature of love, particularly about love's connection with beauty and with moral goodness or virtue. Socrates is going to take all of those claims apart and show Agathon to answer this question, does Agathon know what he's talking about? The quick answer is no, he actually doesn't know what he's talking about. He's saying things that are very plausible, that sound great, that are arranged in such a way as they could convince an audience that's not paying very close attention, but ultimately they're not based on truth. And so there's this important interlude that takes place before Socrates actually goes into his own speech, the one in which he's going to talk about when he was a young man and talking with this elder, you know, wise woman, Diodama. And he's going to bring Agathon into dialogue with him, and Agathon's not really up to it. Before he does that, he's going to make a sort of complaint. And, you know, it's a little bit questionable how ironic he's being at this point and how serious he's being in driving these points home to his audience. But I want to go through that before we look at the argument that he steers Agathon into that culminates in Agathon saying, I guess I didn't know what I was talking about. So Socrates' complaint, in essence, is that all the speeches that have gone before him haven't really been doing what they're supposed to do. This is a complaint that the other people before him have done as well, including Agathon. But Socrates has slightly different grounds for this. He says that these speeches just talk about attributes of things like virtue or power, and then they attribute these things to love. And they do so in a way that's kind of, you know, fortuitous or random or willy-nilly. They're not really about love as such. Instead, they're just saying things that sound really cool, sound really great. And then they're saying love, you know, fits into this somehow. These apply to love. Socrates contrasts this to a different approach. Like I put here, what he thought that everyone should be doing, at least that's what he claims. This is where the irony could enter in. He thought that everybody should be setting out a true and unvarnished, unembellished account. One that's not rhetorically structured. One that, you know, is not bringing in all sorts of, you know, eloquence or, you know, the flowers of rhetoric. Just lay it out, just the facts. And the facts themselves will be enough to, you know, give you a good speech and everybody understands what's going on at that point. Now, the contrast between these is not just between who uses art form and who doesn't. It's a deeper contrast between those who engage in a form of flattery, which is what Socrates takes rhetoric, as well as other things like cosmetics and cookery to be. And those who are engaged in seeking out the truth and articulating the truth. Socrates says that all these other people have just engaged in flattery of love. They haven't actually addressed what love is in its essence, in its truth. So this is a pretty big claim. And this is, you know, not really good manners at this point in a dinner party. Socrates also says, if I'm going to give a speech, I'm going to have to give it in the way that I'm accustomed to. I can't do this speech-giving rhetorical sort of thing that all of the rest of you are so good at. I've just got to talk like an ordinary person the way that I do, you know, in the marketplace. Or he does the same thing in the apology with the law courts. I have to speak in the way that I'm used to doing. So they grant him that. And they say, all right, Socrates, talk in your accustomed way, do the thing that you do. And instead of actually giving a speech, he says, before I do that, let me clarify a few points with Agathon, who just gave his speech. I want to make sure that we're on exactly the same page. And, of course, he doesn't think that they're on the same page. And this is precisely why he's going to ask Agathon the questions. Now, it's interesting, too, to point out that Socrates has attempted to get into dialectic with Agathon at a few other points in the symposium. And he's been shut down because people know what Socrates does. And they're like, look, this is supposed to be a fun party. Everybody's supposed to be giving these great speeches. Don't let Socrates do that sort of thing because if you do, he's just going to engage in this endless conversation that doesn't seem to go anywhere. In this case, it is actually rather short and sweet, though. So here's the dialectic with Agathon. Agathon, just to remind ourselves, has given this wonderful speech that had two main arguments to it. One was that love is beautiful and not only beautiful but the most beautiful. Love is also morally good or virtuous. It has virtue to the highest degree. And then, you know, he goes into a lot of other stuff towards the end. Socrates is going to contest this. And here's how Socrates is going to do it. He's going to make an argument that's not actually a particularly good argument. And there is a linchpin in there that things are going to turn on where if Agathon was better versed in dialectic, if Agathon actually knew his topic, he could have said, wait a second, you need to clarify things here. But he doesn't. So, Socrates gets Agathon to agree that love is always love of something. It's not love of nothing. This of here is very important. In English, we express a certain set of relations with this preposition of. In Greek, it's done in a somewhat different way using case structure. In this, it's the genitive case. And, you know, if you don't know anything about case structure from Greek or Latin or German, that's okay. Suffice it to say, there's endings that signify a certain kind of relation. Now, it's not a necessarily simple relation. So, the genitive in Greek or our preposition of can express a number of different ways in which the things on either side are connected up with each other. Talking about love of something means loving something. Or, in this case, since it's eros, desiring something, right? Socrates will bring up a bunch of other examples and say, you know, a father is not just a father per se. A father has to be a father of somebody, right? Not a father of nothing because if he's not a father of anybody, he's not actually a father. In that case, we have a somewhat different sense going on here. This is where the equivocation is going to take place. A father, you know, for instance, my father is the father of me in the sense that in some way, he is my origin, right? Now, of course, we know with genetics that the mother and all that, so we can say the mother of me too, right? Father and mother together of me, my origin. And Greeks had a genitive of origin. We can also talk about social roles, right? So, you know, father can be not just a genetic thing. It can also be somebody who behaves towards me as a father. In fact, I'm adopted. And when I talk about my father, typically the person that I mean is my adopted father because he has behaved towards me in a certain way, a certain way that's structured by roles. That's another way of using this of. The father of Greg Sadler is Anton Sadler, right? That's, in this case, actually a different father than my original genetic father. But it's good for illustrating this case. These are different senses of the term of or of the Greek genitive that's being used here. So when Socrates gets Agathon to agree to this, love is always love of something, and then he gets him to follow through with that. Love of something involves a lack of what is love because love is desire, right? You love what you don't have. So if I were to say I love chocolate, what that means is I'd like to eat chocolate because I have desire for it. Or I love, I desire sleeping, sleeping in on, you know, Saturday mornings or something like that. Or I love watching Saturday morning cartoons. That means I want to do that. I want that sort of thing for me. And, you know, there's also a clarification that has to take place here that I didn't put on the board, but it is important to point out. What about when we have something and we say that we love it? Well, like I'm eating a chocolate bar. Oh, I love this chocolate, right? I'm enjoying the taste, but I want that taste to go on. I want that taste to be something available for me in the future. And I don't possess the future yet, right? Because I'm not, you know, I'm not some sort of divine being who controls all time and destiny. So maybe that chocolate bar won't be there for me in the future. And if I eat it up right now, it sure isn't going to be for me. Another chocolate bar could be. And, you know, so on and so on. He uses the examples of health. If you're healthy right now and you say, I love health, I desire health, that means that you want to remain healthy. If I'm rich and I want to go on being rich, I desire riches. Not because I, not the riches that I have currently right now, but the riches that I want to continue to have in the future. So all that said, we come back to this point. Love of something involves a lack of what is love. A desire for what is love. This is a key idea here. Now, where is it going to go from here? Agathon has agreed to these points. Agathon has also said love is of the beautiful and the good. Some of the evidence for love being beautiful is the fact that love hangs around with the beautiful. For example, the young. And love is good in all these different ways. You know, he talks about four virtues. There's an affinity there. Now, what Socrates is going to get Agathon to agree to, which Agathon probably shouldn't agree to, is that love is of the beautiful and the good in the sense of this desiring, you know, and that leads to this love actually lacking the beautiful and the good. Why does love desire the beautiful? Not because love is beautiful, but because love lacks the beautiful. Why does love desire the good? Because it lacks the good. So we can draw a further corollary. Then love is neither beautiful nor good. If it had goodness, it wouldn't be desiring that goodness that it doesn't have. Same thing with the beautiful. So, you know, Agathon can be steered into an assertion actually of the opposite. Love is actually ugly, and love is not good. So, you know, Agathon, what were you talking about when you said this, that love is in fact beautiful and good? Agathon has to come to the point conquered by dialectic where he says, I guess I didn't know what I was saying. I was asserting something, and now that I look at it more closely, which is what dialectic actually does, look at it more closely, I realize that I was mistaken. Now, there are some flaws to this, as we've pointed out, but this is going to be a very important turning point in the argument.