Symposium

On Love's Two Faces: Plato's Symposium and the Peril of Philosophical Elitism Plato's Symposium, recently rescued from obscurity by this salon's diligent searchers, presents a familiar yet problematic meditation on love. The work distinguishes between two types of love: the "heavenly" Aphrodite Urania who delights in intelligent nature and "has no shadow of wantonness or lust," and the commoner Aphrodite Pandemos whose "coarser kind" is love of body rather than soul. This distinction, while philosophically elegant, reeks of aristocratic prejudice. The speech by Pausanias acknowledges that at Athens and Sparta there is an apparent contradiction about male loves—some approve, others disapprove "partly because they are aware of the political dangers which ensue from them." The reference to Harmodius and Aristogeiton (the Athenian tyrannicides) as a cautionary tale of homosexual love's dangers reveals Plato's discomfort with relationships that threaten established power structures. Love between equals? Dangerous. Let it remain within sanctioned hierarchies, where the lover instructs the beloved. Plato's transcendence—ascending from physical beauty to mathematical truth to the Form of Beauty itself—is intellectually seductive. "Love is of something, and that which love desires is not that which love is or has." This philosophical ascent appeals to those with leisure and education (the typical philosopher-kings). But what of the laboring classes? What of women, whom Plato elsewhere deems unsuitable for philosophy? The Symposium's beauty "as of a statue" remains inaccessible to most humanity. Yet I cannot dismiss entirely this work's intellectual ambition. It challenges superficial understandings of love by forcing examination rather than indulgence in sentimentality. However, its aristocratic assumptions—its separation of noble souls from base appetites, its presumption that only the educated may pursue truth—make it a mixed achievement at best. The verdict: three stars for philosophical rigor, two for unexamined elitism.