4.1 Diotima

APPEARING BUT ONCE in all of Greek literature, the name Diotima inscribes a moment of pure invention into the Symposium, a text which, like all of Plato's dialogues, offers itself as the record of an actual conversation. Diotima is the priestess and prophetess (she is from Mantineia, suggesting the Greek word for prophecy) who teaches Socrates the doctrine of love. Eros, she explains, is not a god but a spirit residing between the gods and mortals, interpreting and conveying human things to the gods and divine things to humans, and thus supplementing both, such that “the whole is itself bound together in itself.” The child of both resourcefulness (Poros) and want (Penia), an attendant to Aphrodite, Eros is ugly, shoeless, and homeless. Still, he strives after beauty with all his great cunning. Yet beauty is itself only the means to fulfill a deeper desire, the desire to have good things always in one's possession; it is the medium in which to bring forth the good things with which one is pregnant. Love does not belong to human beings alone; all living beings live erotically, striving to overcome the limit of mortality by propagating their species—and they indeed dwell on earth through this unsettling striving. Yet human beings are erotic in a special and emphatic sense, not just because they are more aware of their mortality, more open to the beautiful, but above all because the good that they pursue is not determined by their nature. Rather, it is of their very nature to be torn between fundamentally different goods and ways of immortalizing themselves through their offspring, and indeed to have their nature itself in question and at stake, not given in advance but decided through the good that they pursue. As the instructor in love, and thus also in philosophy as the love of wisdom, Diotima's task is to show Socrates the path toward the highest object of erotic desire, the “beauty itself,” “pure” and “unmixed” and “not filled up with human bodies and colors and much other mortal waste.” She teaches humans, whose very nature is to transcend their given nature, the highest goal of their striving.