Symposium

⚖The case for it

A dinner party where Athenians take turns giving speeches about love, and Socrates, as usual, ruins everyone's comfortable ideas. Aristophanes' myth of the split beings is unforgettable. Diotima's ladder of beauty is genuinely visionary. Then Alcibiades crashes in drunk and confesses his obsession with Socrates. Philosophy performed as theater, eros treated as the engine of wisdom.

— the canon

✕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