From the time of the Symposium the association between love and philosophy has been evident: philosophy is love of wisdom. Jean-Luc Nancy, acknowledging this association in Plato's work, has elaborated this linkage suggesting not simply that philosophy is love of thinking but that thinking itself is love (Nancy 2003a: 247). This hints at the depth and complexity of the connection: philosophy and thinking are not the attainment of a final wisdom but the movement toward, or the movement back and forth between knowledge and its lack. Philosophy is not wisdom itself – for the attainment of wisdom, if it were possible, would be the end of philosophy – but a fascination, an infatuation, with thinking. Philosophy plays with thought, invents concepts, speculates, ruminates and investigates. It is not closure or completion but unending intrigue.

Love, too, is an incompletion. As Diotima explains to Socrates, and as he subsequently reports to his gathered friends, and as Plato then recounts in the Symposium, love is mediation not fulfilment. It is a movement between lack and completion, between Poverty and Plenty, between ignorance and wisdom, between monstrosity and beauty. Love and philosophy, both, live from the deferring and differing movement of indirection, non-arrival, endless delay and detour. They both move toward their object of desire but this object remains forever tantalisingly out of reach. This, at least, is what Sappho says of love and Diotima-Socrates' image of the ladder of learning suggests a similar concept of wisdom as a higher state beyond the capacity of the mere mortal (see Chapter 1).