Reflections on the Symposium: Agathon
Posted by P.Dan on October 14, 2008
Agathon, a talented orator, speaks of Love with powerful rhetoric. He first begins with a brief history on the origins of Love. He affirms the cosmology of the previous poets before him – namely Hesiod and Parmenides. He be;ieves that before Love, the god Necessity regulated the world as we know it. The world was marked by violence and discord.
However, Love soon followed Necessity and brought about peace and harmony. This “younger” god Love is marked by daintiness, softness, flexibility, tenderness, and suppleness. The principle Love uses to “make the world go round” is through mutuality and goodwill, never by force. He describes Love using four principles: righteousness, temperance, valor, and genius.
By righteousness, he is talking about moral excellence, which, as mentioned earlier, is governed by mutuality and goodwill. By temperance, he is talking about achieving balance between uncontrolled passions and cold apathy; it is a place where our longing for passion and pleasure are tempered, so that the world is marked by serenity and peace. By valor, he is talking about the kind of courage that imbued the god of war Ares; it is the kind of power that drives men to do the most courageous and valiant things. And most importantly, or so it seems to Agathon, by genius, he is talking about creativity. Love promotes creativity in us to produce such beautiful things as the arts, the sciences, and the virtues (e.g., friendship, kindness, wisdom, worship, etc.).
