{"id":273991,"date":"2026-07-06T05:09:05","date_gmt":"2026-07-06T09:09:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/?p=273991"},"modified":"2026-07-05T09:04:24","modified_gmt":"2026-07-05T13:04:24","slug":"platos-symposium-is-actually-about-love","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/platos-symposium-is-actually-about-love\/","title":{"rendered":"Plato\u2019s Symposium<\/em> Is Actually About Love"},"content":{"rendered":"

I have been obsessed with dinner parties since I was eight or nine. At this age my greatest desire was to get my mum to let me stay up for the ones she threw for her friends. Once I even succeeded. It was amazing. and yes; it involved a hostess trolley. As an adult I have therefore made it a priority in my life to throw a lot of dinner parties.<\/p>\n

The problem with dinner parties, from the point of view of a hostess, is that so much is always going on and once and you can only be in one place at a time. The starter needs plating, you have to check on the main in the oven, one of the guests is being left out of the conversation, another is getting a little too het-up about politics, another still needs a top-up of wine, and you really want to hear what those two over there are saying about your other friend who\u2019s not here, and also where did you leave *your\u201d glass of wine\u2026 It\u2019s a problem.<\/p>\n

I have also now written a book called The Dinner Party: A Book About Love<\/i>. It contains a longish poem about a dinner party, also called \u201cThe Dinner Party.\u201d\u00a0 As might be expected, this poem describes the sort of dinner party I also throw a lot of.<\/p>\n

The problem with dinner parties, from the point of view of a writer, is also that so much is always going on. So many characters, so many dynamics, so many conversations and actions, and they after all going on at the same time. How to catch that spirit, and still keep it comprehensible? And what is it, exactly, that you are trying to catch?<\/p>\n

I am being facetious, but I stand by my point: if we look to the Symposium<\/i> for an orderly or convincing abstract<\/i> account of what we commonly mean by love then, we will not get it.<\/p>\n

When I asked myself this question, the first place I looked for an answer was to probably the most famous piece of writing about a dinner party in western literary history: Plato\u2019s Symposium<\/i>. Relevantly, this is a literary dinner party that is themed around love. Also relevantly, it is extremely gay.<\/p>\n

Accounts of Plato\u2019s symposium have typically focused more on the philosophy of love part than the dinner party part, as if what matters is the content of the various speeches, and not their context. This is even true of George Steiner\u2019s famous essay \u201cTwo Suppers,\u201d which so usefully locates the form as being not a dialogue but a genre Steiner calls the \u201cbanquet.\u201d<\/p>\n

I think this approach is a misapprehension. For one thing most (all?) of the characters have terrible opinions.<\/p>\n

One (Aristophanes) maintains (with however amusing a frame) that we are all searching for our one soul-mate. Like, okay twin flames, simmer down. Another (Pausanius) essentially says \u201cUgh, people who have sex with women<\/i> are stupid, the only attractive people are approximately-13-year-old boys.\u201d Whilst we can feel sympathy for Pausanius\u2019 historical position as a middle-aged man who was scorned by his contemporaries for still being in the gay relationship he got into as a teenager (and, presumably, therefore for still taking it up the arse) this is not a serious claim. As for Socrates, the wisest, the hero\u2026 his speech is the most thrilling, granted, but his final position is that the true goal of love is not having sex or even making a life with the person you adore but (of course) getting really into philosophy instead.<\/p>\n

I am being facetious, but I stand by my point: if we look to the Symposium<\/i> for an orderly or convincing abstract<\/i> account of what we commonly mean by love then, we will not get it. No, the value of the speeches, if not in intention then certainly in practice, is not to explain love in the abstract, but to offer a convenient means of diagramming the tangle of social relations of attraction and hostility and competition that make up the dinner party.<\/p>\n

Each character gets up in turn, casts shade on some people, flirts with others, establishes who they are and how they relate. They tell us their personal metaphysics, granted, but those metaphysics are interesting because they are theirs<\/i>, not because they are right<\/i>.<\/p>\n

In a normal dinner party everyone would be doing this too (we are all always going around announcing our metaphysics) but simultaneously, in a confusing welter. Plato uses the device of \u201cspeech competition\u201d to make the characters themselves<\/i> insist on talking turns to speak, thus making the party comprehensible without destroying the appearance of naturalism.<\/p>\n

What this social diagramming builds to, appropriately, is not a final convincing conclusion to the love discussion, after which everyone can go home possessed of the clarity of philosophical understanding, but instead the interruption of the party by an evil twink with an agenda:<\/p>\n

A moment later they heard Alcibiades shouting in the courtyard, very drunk and very loud. He wanted to know where Agathon was, he demanded to see Agathon at once. Actually, he was half-carried into the house by the flute-girl and by some other companions of his, but, at the door, he managed to stand by himself, crowned with a beautiful wreath of violets and ivy and ribbons in his hair.<\/p>\n

\u201cGood evening, gentlemen. I\u2019m plastered,\u201d he announced. \u201cMay I join your party?<\/p>\n

If you know the history of Athens, and the general esteem in which Alcibiades was held, you will know this is a bit like it would be if vengeful drunk twink version of Mar\u00e9chal Petain suddenly showed up at a dinner with Swann and Odette. It is a true chaos move. But it only works because the dinner party has, up until this point, been constructed in such an orderly fashion, because the social matrix into which Alcibiades is crashing is so clearly established. So it is with all good dinner parties in real life too. They should start in clarity and order, and end in mess.<\/p>\n

This is not just any dinner party, it is legendary.<\/p>\n

In fact, I would go further still, and argue that the true climax is not even what Alcibiades says, as such, but its aftermath, the way he sets the cat among the pigeons:<\/p>\n

Alcibiades\u2019 frankness provoked a lot of laughter, especially since it was obvious that he was still in love with Socrates, who immediately said to him:\u00a0 \u201cYou\u2019re perfectly sober after all, Alcibiades. Otherwise you could never have concealed your motive so gracefully: how casually you let it drop, almost like an afterthought, at the very end of your speech! As if the real point of all this has not been simply to make trouble between Agathon and me! You think that I should be in love with you and no one else, while you, and no one else, should be in love with Agathon\u2014well, we were not deceived; we\u2019ve seen through your little satyr play. Agathon, my friend, don\u2019t let him get away with it: let no one come between us!\u201d<\/p>\n

Agathon said to Socrates: \u201cI\u2019m beginning to think you\u2019re right; isn\u2019t it proof of that that he literally came between us here on the couch? Why would he do this if he weren\u2019t set on separating us? But he won\u2019t get away with it; I\u2019m coming right over to lie down next to you.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWonderful,\u201d Socrates said. \u201cCome here, on my other side.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cMy god!\u201d cried Alcibiades. \u201cHow I suffer in his hands! He kicks me when I\u2019m down; he never lets me go\u2026. It\u2019s the same old story: when Socrates is around, nobody else can get close to a good-looking man\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n

This arrangement of bodies, is, I submit, not an abstract but a concrete<\/i> account of what love is like, and what it is about, which is bodies, particular bodies, and their positioning. It is hilarious and solid and real and vivid and gorgeous. Socrates claims that what we want, what we love, truly, is the move away from particulars and towards the general, the ideal, the good. But that is not where the Symposium<\/i> goes. On the contrary, it is in the detail of human physical relation that it ends, and it is this, I submit, that we keep reading it for.<\/p>\n

I am not suggesting that Plato sat down and wrote the Symposium<\/i> with an intent<\/i> to refute Socrates\u2019 views on love, and I don\u2019t want to be a deconstructionist either, to \u201cread the text against itself\u201d. All I am saying is: there is a tension. The form Plato writes in, perhaps invents, of the dinner party with speeches, Steiner\u2019s \u2018banquet\u2019 form, pulls against the intellectual content its characters express. Philosophy may be spoken about<\/i> at a dinner party, but that the content of whatever is said in this line is necessarily belied by the actual fact that the characters, by necessity, are not depicted engaging in the pursuit of wisdom. On the contrary, they are in pursuit of joy.<\/p>\n

At the same time, we must concede there is<\/i> something a little transcendent about the Symposium<\/i>. Within the diegesis, the story is recounted long after it happened, by people who were children when it occurred. This is not just any dinner party, it is legendary. And then, the artificiality of the Symposium<\/i>\u2019s structure, the completeness with which each character lays out their metaphysic, the finality with which the bodies move into place, and above all the unruffledness of Socrates himself, his own capacity to resist exhaustion, all combine to give this party, for all its messiness, a feeling of perfection. Indeed, if I were to imagine perfection, it would not come in any abstracted vision of the good, of truth such as other Platonic dialogues often reach towards, but in the specific form of staying up later than everyone else, intoxicated not only by wine but talk, refusing to quit:<\/p>\n

He woke up just as dawn was about to break; the roosters were crowing already. He saw that the others had either left or were asleep on their couches and that only Agathon, Aristophanes, and Socrates were still awake, drinking out of a large cup which they were passing around from left to right. Socrates was talking to them.<\/p>\n

He seems like he could go on for ever.<\/p>\n

Steiner, in that essay about banquets which I keep mentioning, pairs Socrates with Jesus, the Symposium<\/i> with the Last Supper. My own trajectory is a little different. I turn instead to a more immanent figure: John Wilmot, the wicked Earl of Rochester, and his poem \u2018Timon\u2019.<\/p>\n

If the Symposium<\/i> is a depiction of a good dinner party, so that our feeling afterwards is \u201cGod I wish I had been there, I wish I was always,\u201d then Rochester\u2019s \u2018Timon\u2019 is a very bad dinner party.\u00a0 We think \u201cI do not want to go there, and in fact get me out.\u201d But we do<\/i> want to hear about it, as long as it\u2019s from a safe distance.<\/p>\n

In fact, more than just an individual bad dinner party, \u2018Timon\u2019\u00a0 is a representative of a whole tradition of bad literary dinner parties: it draws on Boileau\u2019s Satire III, which in turn draws on Horace\u2019s Satire II.VIII. However where Horace, and to a lesser extent Boileau, focus primarily in how bad the food is, Rochester turns the focus firmly to the social elements.<\/p>\n

Compare, for instance, the moment in Boileau when it turns out the other promised guests are not going to be there:<\/p>\n

\u00c0 peine etois-je entr\u00e9, que, ravi de me voir,
\nMon homme, en m\u2019embrassant, m\u2019est venu recevoir ;
\nEt, montrant \u00e0 mes yeux une all\u00e9gresse enti\u00e8re,
\n\u00ab Nous n\u2019avons, m\u2019a-t-il dit, ni Lambert ni Moli\u00e8re ;
\nMais, puisque je vous vois, je me tiens trop content.
\nVous \u00eates un brave homme ; entrez, on vous attend. \u00bb
\n\u00c0 ces mots, mais trop tard, reconnoissant ma faute.<\/p>\n

[As soon as I arrived, ravished to see me,
\nMine host, embracing me, came to receive me;
\nAnd, performing for my gaze complete delight
\n“We have,” he told me, \u201cneither Lambert nor Moli\u00e8re;
\nBut, now I see you, I’m excessively happy.
\nYou\u2019re a brave fellow; come in, we\u2019re all awaiting you.”
\nAt these words, but too late, I recognize my mistake.]<\/p>\n

with the same moment in Rochester<\/p>\n

But this was not the Worst; when we came home,
\nHe ask\u2019d, \u201cAre Sidley, Buckhurst, Savile come?\u201d
\nNo; but there are above, Halfwit, and Huff,
\nKickum, and Dingboy. \u201cOh! \u2019tis well enough;
\nThey\u2019re all brave Fellows, cryes mine Host, let\u2019s dine:
\nI long to have my belly full of Wine.
\nThey will both Write and Fight, I dare assure you;
\nThey\u2019re men tam Marte quam Mercurio<\/i>.\u201d
\nI saw my error; but \u2019twas now too late:<\/p>\n

What we gain in Rochester\u2019s version is his unforgiving ear for the stupid and (self-)deceitful things people say. The host\u2019s pretentious Latin tag, his rhyming cliche, his feigned \u201coh!\u201d of surprise, all these are so vividly social, so animated with disgust. They put before us, not just a plot development, but an interaction, with all its absurd specificity.<\/p>\n

What this ear of his allows, along with his cruelty in using it, is a drastic condensation of the Platonic method for depicting a dinner party.<\/p>\n

In comes my Lady strait; She had been fair,
\nFit to give Love, and to prevent Despair;
\nBut Age, Beauty\u2019s incurable Disease,
\nHad left her more desire than pow\u2019r to please:
\nAs Cocks will strike, altho their Spurs be gon;
\nShe, with her old blear eyes, to smite begun:
\nTho nothing else, she in despight of Time
\nPreserv\u2019d the affectation of her prime.
\nHow ever you began, she brought in Love;
\nAnd hardly from that Subject would remove:
\nWe chanc\u2019d to speak of the French King\u2019s success;
\nMy Lady wonder\u2019d much how Heav\u2019n could bless
\nA man that lov\u2019d two Women at one time;
\nBut more, how he to them excus\u2019d the crime.
\nShe askd Huff if Love\u2019s flame he never felt:
\nHe answer\u2019d bluntly, \u201cDo you think I\u2019m gelt?\u201d
\nShe, at his plainness, smil\u2019d; then turn\u2019d to me:
\n\u201cLove, in young minds, precedes ev\u2019n Poetry;
\nYou to that Passion can no Stranger be:
\nBut Wits are given to Inconstancy\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n

Here are at least two character\u2019s speeches on love (three if you count the narrator) given in 20 lines. Rochester\u2019s degree of contempt for these people speaks in the concision itself. Huff gets only a single line, but, Rochester implies, that\u2019s enough: that\u2019s really all there is to him.<\/p>\n

Another way to say this is that, in place of the extensive self-announcements Plato allows his characters, Rochester substitutes his own summary judgements, his sarcastic imitations. What he gains is a greater degree of naturalism: he is able to outline the dynamics, to cut through the noise and confusion, without resorting to having the characters stand up one by one and make speeches because he places us so firmly inside the point of view of one (extremely sarcastic) speaker. What he loses is a certain objectivity.<\/p>\n

There is an irony here: in Plato\u2019s more schematic, abstract arrangement, in which each character explains their ideas at length, what we end up getting is not a philosophical argument but a deeply convincing and moving spreading-out of the intricacies of the social involvement of a group of people with each other. In Rochester, by contrast, amidst a naturalistic welter of satirical details and overlapping conversations, what we get is something much more like an argument about human nature. He is making a point at us, providing evidence, and the point is, as he would later develop it, that:<\/p>\n

Were I (who to my cost already am
\nOne of those strange prodigious Creatures, Man)
\nA Spirit free to choose for my own share,
\nWhat case of flesh and blood I\u2019d please to wear,
\nI\u2019d be a Dog, a Monkey, or a Bear.
\nOr any thing but that vain Animal
\nWho boasts so much of being Rational.<\/p>\n

In this passage from \u2018A Satire Upon Reason and Mankind\u2019 we see in miniature what is perhaps the key development in all of Rochester\u2019s work – a turn from contempt for others to self-contempt.<\/p>\n

Although he seems at first view frivolous, it is possible to view Rochester as a sacramental figure, one who underwent an ordeal. If I were making a strong case, I might say I do not know of any other writer who hated themself like Rochester learned to hate himself. He hated himself, not in the modern \u201cwoe is me\u201d sense, or in the religious \u201ccompared to god we are all sinners\u201d sense either, but analytically and specifically: having looked at his life and the things he did he judged himself to be a bad person who had done bad things and did not forgive himself for it:<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve Outswill\u2019d Bacchus, sworn of my own make
\nOaths wou\u2019d Fright Furyes and make Pluto quake:
\nI\u2019ve swiv\u2019d\u00b0 more Whores, more ways then Sodoms Walls
\nE\u2019re knew, or th\u2019 Colledge of Romes Cardinals\u2026.
\nFrighted at my own Mischiefs I have fled,
\nAnd bravely left my Life\u2019s Defender dead:
\nBroke Houses to break Chastity, and dy\u2019d
\nThat Floor with Murther which my Lust deny\u2019d;
\nPox on\u2019t, why do I speak of these poor Things?
\nI\u2019ve Blasphem\u2019d my God, and libell\u2019d Kings.<\/p>\n

‘Timon\u2019, I am fairly sure, is from before all this. It opens with Rochester\u2019s interlocutor asking \u201cWhat, Timon, does old Age, begin t\u2019approach?\u201d but this implies that he is, or should be, still young. And contextually it is clearly from a time from when Rochester was still full of his own brilliance, still industriously doing his bad deeds, a time in which his capacity for contempt was still primarily directed outwards. But it is nevertheless a depiction of a person suffering, of a pursuit of joy gone horribly wrong and, as his friend\u2019s observation tells, us, all this being a man is costing him something.<\/p>\n

When I came to my own \u2018Dinner Party\u2019, I had in mind these two models of particularity: the model of the schematic diagram of a social set, and the model of the person undergoing the ordeal of other people. What is at stake in the choice, or balance, between these is the sense of time passing.<\/p>\n

The Symposium<\/i>, for all its specificity, has a feeling of timelessness about it. These characters, these arrangements, are not changing. Everyone announces themselves but no-one becomes different. To attend this dinner party would be to never die. In Timon, by contrast, everything is a rush, everything is broke-off and confused, everything is hurtling through suffering towards oblivion. Both of these, notably, are feelings I have often had at many dinner parties.<\/p>\n

What I tried to do was to have my cake and eat it, to put a narrator like Timon in a narrative structure like that of the Symposium<\/i>. By containing both these impulses, the one towards persistence, the other towards destruction, I hoped to find a way to write about how the bonds between people can keep surviving and overcoming the forces that pull us apart: to resist both Socrates\u2019 idealism and Rochester\u2019s cynicism.<\/p>\n

My previous book, The Call-Out<\/i>, was, in however comic a register, about destructiveness, about the ways marginalised communities can tear themselves apart. It ends, however, with a character asserting that her community had survived the events of the book, and that they\u2019re \u201call still here, still ready to love.\u201d She is certainly not right, exactly, but it was this sense of love, of love as whatever impulse brings people together in a time and place, that I wanted to write about in more detail. It is an understanding of love which definitely includes as one of its forms the very desire to throw dinner parties:<\/p>\n

The \u2019Rona being now at last abated
\n(Or so I thought, in fact the plague was not
\nQuite gone, but biding time) I went and got
\nIt in my head that by this point I\u2019d waited
\nFor long enough, and that I should invite
\nSome friends, acquaintances, and even one
\nOr two newfound unknowns who seemed like fun
\nTo come around my house one Friday night,
\nWhere I would open for them fancy wine
\n(That they would drink but not appreciate)
\nAnd see what kind of food I could create,
\nAnd generally, in short, we all would dine
\nTogether, as we had in days gone by\u2026<\/p>\n

This essay has been, as you may have noticed, gently ghosting George Steiner\u2019s essay \u2018Two Suppers\u2019<\/a>. My epigraph is the assertion Steiner makes at the start of his essay: that \u201cthe sharing of food and drink… reaches into the inmost of the socio-cultural condition.\u201d This is not, I think an assertion Steiner makes good on. Instead his conclusion reaches for \u201cthe problem of the final sources of the poetic-philosophic.\u201d Steiner\u2019s method of reading his suppers is to make them bigger, seeing them as historic, emblematic, symbolic, eventually allegorical.<\/p>\n

But I think the joy of the Symposium <\/i>is not that it tells us some abstract idea about love but that tells us a lot of very real things about what it was like to get trashed and flirt with a bunch of gay guys in classical Athens. I think the joy of \u2018Timon\u2019 is that it shows us how a Restoration London dinner party could actually get so bad it made you want to destroy yourself completely. In much the same way, if I am writing about transsexuals having dinner and kissing and holding it together in New York in 2021, it is because that is what I care about, and that is what I want to try to find some way to hold on to.<\/p>\n

The epigraph to my \u201cbook about love\u201d is from the Symposium<\/i>, from Socrates\u2019 account of his conversation with Diotima:<\/p>\n

\u201cIn a word then, love is wanting to possess the good forever.\u201d
\n\u201cThat\u2019s very true,\u201d I said.
\n\u201cThis, then is the object of love,\u201d she said.
\n\u201cNow, how do lovers pursue it?\u201d<\/p>\n

Love is wanting to possess the good forever. Fine, I buy it. It\u2019s an impossible aim, but that is how it is. But the real question is not what love is, nor what its sources are. The real question is: how is it pursued?<\/p>\n

__________________________________<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

The Dinner Party<\/a>\u00a0by Cat Fitzpatrick is available from Seven Stories Press.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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