One of the most interesting aspects of the discussion of love that commences at 204B is the form of dialog it is encased in. Here Socrates is not discoursing on love or sharing his meditations; instead, he is recounting how a woman, Diotima, led him through a series of meditations on love. In certain senses it is almost amusing. After all, immediately before this point, Socrates was engaged in consecutively debunking the thoughts on love that other thinkers shared. Agathon, for instance, was reduced at 201B to saying that "It turns out, Socrates, I didn't know what I was talking about in [my] speech." In the end, at 201C, Agathon is entirely outwitted and admits, "I am unable to challenge you. Let it be as you say." To which Socrates replies, "It is not hard at all to challenge Socrates."
Of course, it is precisely very hard to challenge Socrates. Socrates sounds kind and generous when he says he is easy to challenge, but he does not necessarily sound very real (particularly since he has just reduced Agathon's own thoughts to shreds). In the very next section, however, with Diotima, Socrates is suddenly in the role of the person being "schooled."
Diotima, Socrates advises us, "is the one who taught me the art of love" (201D). His reverence for her and her understanding of love is palpable. Again and again, he not only allows her to outwit him, but more or less marvels at it and expresses his appreciation. "As you say," he tells Diotima at 202E, echoing Agathon's own words to Socrates when he realizes he must concede a point to Diotima. When she poses a statement he cannot possibly deny ("Surely you'd never say a god is not beautiful or happy"), he responds like a puppy that is eager to please: "Zeus! Not I." (202C).
Throughout the dialog with Diotima, which Socrates is re-telling, Socrates takes a submissive position. This helps to push a certain idea to the foreground: there is something almost sexual about the dialogs. Perhaps it is more apparent here than in other places because we are more used to thinking of sexual love as being between a man and a woman than the Ancient Greeks were. In any event, however, there is clearly a kind of lover's tension at work; Diotima is leading Socrates further and further into a new kind of knowledge, and he is following willingly and with a sweet eagerness. He wants to know the things that she can show him, he wants to learn. He makes mistakes and then has to be shown what the truth is. Though there is an obvious analogy to a sexual relationship where one is the more experienced and dominant partner and one the more tentative and submissive, there is also an analogy to the process of falling in love, which is about learning how the other person thinks, letting them lead you further and further into the way they see the world and the things that they believe and know.
Rather than submissiveness, it might be best to describe Socrates' stance as one of seeking. He is far less certain here than we usually see him. The relationship that is set up in the dialog, then, perfectly reflects the heart of the idea being conveyed: that eros is a middle state, neither wise nor ignorant. Eros is an in-between state that mediates between other perfect states. One loves, it has been established already in discussion with Agathon, what one does not have. If a man has the wisdom of the gods, he does not love wisdom because he does not need it. If a man is ignorant, he is content not knowing. But when a man has an inkling of something he does not have, he seeks it out, he thirsts after it. Love is precisely this kind of force: love seeks things out, and in loves constant circuit of movement from what it does not have to what it desires, love binds elements of the universe together, it creates coherence. As Diotima suggests:
[Love is one of] the messengers who shuttle back and forth between [god and mortal], conveying prayer and sacrifice from men to gods, while to men they bring commands from the gods and gifts in return for sacrifices. Being in the middle of the two, they round out the whole bind fast the all to all (202E).
Above Diotima is speaking generally of the spirits such as love, of the circuit they trace between the perfect and the imperfect. Love is one particular form of this spirit, one that shuttles between lack of beauty and beauty, because above all, love seeks out beautiful things. Wisdom is one such beautiful thing., Therefore, when in the dialog we see Socrates actively seeking knowledge from Diotima, this becomes a parallel for love. It is not so much that he loves Diotima, but rather that their discussion together is an act of love: love is something that occurs in the interstices, in conversation and dialog.
There are a number of ways to interpret the idea of dialog as love. At a basic level, it is part of the general concept that Diotima preaches of love as an active and unfinished process. She points out that Socrates has made a fundamental error in reasoning his way toward an understanding of love: he has assumed love is the condition of the one who is being loved. This has allowed him (like Agathon later) to see love as an object-doubtlessly a beautiful object, because it is worthy of being loved. This is the wrong way round, however, according to Diotima. Love is actually the condition of the one seeking the object out, love is that active state of yearning for the object, not the static state of the desired object itself. Therefore, love is not beauty, it is a force that continually prompts us to seek beautiful things out. And wisdom is merely a subset of beautiful things.
There is a very poignant implication to this finding: that love itself has an ugly and rapacious aspect. Love is the child of Poros and Penia, Poros being plenty, and Penia being a state of poverty and lack. Love seeks plenty, and indeed schemes of ways to reach abundance. But as the child of Penia, love ultimately is "shriveled and shoeless and homeless, always lying in the dirt without a bed...having his mother's nature, always living with Need" (203D). What do we make of this insight? Taken on one level, it reads almost as a justification for the worst kinds of attachment, in which the seeker constantly hounds the object, relentless in its need-a form of Socratically authorized stalking. If love is the state of always needing, then it is never satisfied-suggesting a sort of madness to the process of love (and simultaneously, the danger of utter lack of interest once the beloved object is "attained"). This, at least, is what comes to mind if we read the story of Poros and Penia on a very visceral, physical level.
If we move to a "loftier" level, on the other hand-where we think of love as philosophy, the constant seeking of knowledge-then at first it seems as if an almost banal picture emerges. After all, in this age of information and compulsory education, we are constantly being reminded to be "life-long learners," to keep seeking out new ideas and new forms of knowledge and expertise. One can imagine a dean's welcome speech at a class reunion, where he reminds the assembled guests of the story of Poros and Penia and then urges them to sign up for continuing education classes.
Of course, there is something more desperate and potent to Diotima's conception than the idea of the life-long learner; after all, love/philosophy is born of hunger and want, not simply a middle-class thirst to be well-cultured. The thirst for knowledge is something that moves through the body, just like a pregnancy. It is physical and deep. And just as physical need for the beloved can veer off into a form of madness and violence, the ugly aspect of love could well drive the seeker of knowledge mad. Humans can stalk the beauty of ideas just as intensely as they stalk beautiful individuals.
This is where the importance of the dialog form itself appears to reassert itself. There is something so genial and playful about Socrates' and Diotima's exchange. They go back and forth, they make funny exclamations, they tell stories. In the course of this easy discussion, some fairly startling ideas and insights emerge. (After all, how often in the course of a lifetime does a person experience a groundbreaking new conception of love?) Yet these potent ideas evolve through a form of dialog that maintains the evenness and sanity to the quest. Just as love itself is an intermediary force, its quest seems best contained in interchange and intercourse. Here Socrates is not simply stalking knowledge alone, nor is Diotima. Rather, between them knowledge emerges.
When Socrates says that Diotima taught him the art of love (201D), it seems unlikely that we are supposed to think of Diotima as a kind of ancient Greek love columnist, instructing Socrates in how to attract lovers. The more elevated stages of love, according to the dialog, are really about ideas and abstractions. Yet ultimately, the interchange with Diotima helps to shed light on some of the most intimate moments of a life between two people.
In the very best of relationships, it seems, the act of making love is accompanied (whether before or after or during) by dialog, where partners learn about each other, push each other to laugh, teach each other things they know. If we take Diotima's conception of love as our guide, this kind of exchange between lovers has so much power because it is a manifestation of that intermediary force, shuttling between them. They feel a kind of seeking in making love, and a parallel seeking in dialog. There is always something more to know about each other, both each other's bodies and each other's thoughts and minds. Their commerce with one another, and the mutuality of their endeavor, helps to channel the base and crueler aspects of love, so that instead of a kind of mental or physical stalking, it finds its truest form-as a force that shuttles between things, binding all to all.
