The Work of Love

Abstract

Socrates is not alone in failing to understand Diotima’s teaching at this point. If Diotima’s suggestion of continuity between sexual desire and desire for the good has perplexed scholars, even more disconcerting has been her abrupt abandonment of “the good” and return to beauty. Are “good” and “beauty” no more than different names for the same thing? Do the two categories overlap with some things both beautiful and good, and others beautiful but not good, or good but not beautiful? Is it a question of genus and species with the “good” the more general category and “beauty,” along with virtue and justice, one of the concepts that fall under it? But even stranger than mixing beauty with good has seemed the introduction of generative language. “Bringing forth,” “τóкoς,” a word referring both to the birth and the siring of children, both to the reproductive act and its resulting offspring, to desire and action? Was Plato confused, putting words into Socrates’s mouth that make no sense? ¹

The nature of mortal beings is ever to try as much as possible to avoid death, and the only way to accomplish this is by generation in that it can always leave behind something new in place of the old.

—Symposium 207d1–3