Diotima Symposium Quotes

According to Diotima, Love is not a god at all, but is rather a spirit that mediates between people and the objects of their desire. Love is neither wise nor beautiful, but is rather the desire for wisdom and beauty.

If I am in love, many things about the world, not just the immediate object of my love, seem lovable. To say 'I love X' is somehow really to say 'X inspires love in me', and that love then attaches itself to objects other than X as well. The expansiveness of love is a natural means of ascent between levels.

All right, all right. There’s a copy of Plato’s Symposium there. In it he wrote that his old mentor Socrates was taught philosophy by a woman. Her name was Diotima.

Socrates described his philosophical inspiration as the work of a personal, benign demon. His teacher, Diotima of Mantineia, tells him (in Plato’s Symposium) that “Everything demonic is intermediate between God and mortal. God has no contact with man,” she continues; “only through the demonic is there intercourse and conversation between man and gods, whether in the waking state or during sleep.

In the Phaedrus beauty and love act as the triggers to elicit the recollection of a host of different ideas; in the Symposium the nature of love itself is analyzed. Love is explained by Diotima as an intermediate nature connecting humans to the Gods, a daimôn conceived during the celebration among the Gods of the birth of Aphrodite (Symp. 203b ff.).