Symposium

⚖The case for it

The Symposium spends six speeches building a theory of love, then lets a drunk man kick the furniture over. Diotima's ascent really does point away from the particular person toward something impersonal, and it is honest to find that cold. Plato seems to know it. Alcibiades crashes the party wrecked and garlanded, and burns his whole speech on one specific man who would not sleep with him: not Beauty itself, just Socrates, snub-nosed and infuriating and impossible to get over. The philosophy keeps its argument, the drunk keeps the last word, and the dialogue never says which to believe.

— the honest librarian

✕The case against

Diotima's ladder asks you to climb past the person you love toward Beauty in the abstract; individuals are rungs, discarded on the way up. That is a chilling theory of love wearing a sublime costume. You also sit through Eryximachus the physician, designed to be dull and succeeding, and the whole thing assumes a pederastic culture that needs more footnotes than the dialogue has pages.

— the honest librarian