49 pages • 1 hour read
PlatoSymposium
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Sections 180c-185cChapter Summaries & Analyses
Sections 180c-185c Summary: “Pausanias’s Speech”
Aristodemus cannot remember the speeches following Phaedrus’s, so Apollodorus continues by reporting Pausanias’s.
Pausanias notes a problem with speaking “in unqualified praise of Love,” which is that Love is not “uniform” (13). As such, it is necessary to begin by clarifying “which love deserves our praise” (13). Love cannot be separated from Aphrodite, and since Aphrodite is dual, Love must be as well. Celestial Aphrodite “is older and has no mother,” while Common Aphrodite is the daughter of Zeus and Dione (13). Thus, the terms “celestial” and “common” must be applied to Love as well.
While every god deserves praise, it is important to distinguish the domains of the gods’ celestial versus common manifestations. No action is right or wrong in itself; it is right if done properly and wrong if not. So it is with loving. Love that is done properly “is good [and] deserves our praise” (14). Common Aphrodite incites Common Love: love for women as well as boys, bodies rather than minds. Common Love is concerned with satisfying desires rather than ensuring that “desires are properly satisfied” (14). It is not concerned with good or bad behavior. Celestial Aphrodite, on the other hand, inspires “affection for what is inherently strong and more intelligent,” which means “towards the male” (14). Pure Celestial Love would not be for very young boys since their intelligence has not yet formed.
A wrong relationship is one in which a bad man is gratified immorally, while a proper relationship is one of “morally sound gratification of a good man” (17). A common or bad lover only cares for the body instead of the mind. The body is inconstant: When a boy’s “physical bloom” fades, the lover abandons him (17). Conversely, “goodness of character” is constant and thus inspires constancy in the lover (18). Money, political power, good looks—none are “reliable or constant” and are thus “incapable of forming a foundation for true friendship” (18). The only context in which the lover’s gratification is acceptable is when the goal is to improve the other in some way.
Sections 180c-185c Analysis
If readers are tempted to immerse themselves into events at the symposium, forgetting the frame, Plato has Apollodorus interrupt the narrative to remind them that there is more to the story that is unrecoverable, having been lost to the vagaries of human memory.
Pausanias addresses the pervasiveness of dualities in his reminder that Love is not singular but has two manifestations: Celestial (Ourania, meaning “sky”) and Common (Pandemos, meaning “all the people.”) These two manifestations are epithets in ancient Greek—Aphrodite Ourania and Aphrodite Pandemos—and both were worshiped in cults in Athens. Pausanias’s description of Aphrodite draws on stories in the works of Hesiod and Homer. In Hesiod’s poem Theogony, she is portrayed as part of an older generation of gods who were born from the union of Uranus and the ocean. When Cronus castrated his father, Uranus’s blood dripped into the ocean, and Aphrodite emerged out of the surf. Uranus and the ocean are characterized as male, meaning that Aphrodite has “no mother” (13). Homer’s epic poem Iliad describes Aphrodite as the daughter of Zeus and Dione, one of his consorts. Seemingly contradictory depictions of gods and heroes coexist as different manifestations of the same being, as divinities had both beneficial and harmful effects.
Pausanias is described as being in a longstanding lover-beloved relationship with Agathon, and his speech endorses male-male relationships as beneficial to the education of young men, provided they are conducted in a “morally sound” way (17). For Pausanias, this means striving to improve the beloved’s mind, not only gratifying his body, but Pausanias neglects to provide specifics on how this should be achieved (17). His speech relies on rhetoric rather than logic. Later, Socrates’s speech identifies physical attraction and gratification as the starting points for a higher form of love.
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