Platonic literature is famously recorded in the form of dialogue. Dialogue is the method through which synthesis can occur in its purest form. Plato's contemporaries were fundamentally afraid of writing, which was a new technique at the time, because prose, compared to dialogue, did not offer the possibility of an immediate clarification of ideas. Platonic dialectics involved not only the step-by-step creation of ideas that inevitably resulted after a statement; the thesis, antithesis and synthesis were all created by a person who was prejudiced in presenting these ideas. In prose, this bias cannot be questioned, and everything must be accepted as fact because the author must be considered the expert; in the dialogue the background of the people involved can be taken into account and the reader is allowed to question the truth and validity of the participants' statements. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay The symposium is a great example of Platonic dialogue. The prologue to the seven speeches on love and beauty immediately identifies in the reader an alarming distance from the narrative of the story. While Apollodorus tells his companion that he is an expert on the events of the intellectual party, he admits that the party took place many years before the actions of the prologue took place. Furthermore, he himself was not at the party, but Aristodemus told him what had happened, whose account of the party was later verified by Socrates. Because the narrator is so unreliable (how much of his recollections of a second-hand account of this party can one really trust?) the reader is inevitably placed in a perpetual struggle towards the truth. This is the nature of Platonic dialectics. In the Symposium the participants undertake the search for the true forms of love and beauty. Plato incorporates the prologue into this series of speeches to make his readers an external participant. In this way Symposium is a very interactive piece of literature; while the participants themselves attempt to make sense of their discussion, we must make sense of their reflections. Part of the reason for the struggle to find the truth is the organization of the Symposium talks. The scene is a party where conversations take place under the influence of alcohol, so the potential for rhetorical and logical error is already increased depending on the speaker's level of intoxication. The guests decide that instead of drinking, it would be better to spend their time meditating on every aspect of love. Socrates is repeatedly revered as the most important figure in this dialogue and the person whose speech the reader should most anticipate. This naturally implies a hierarchy in the delivery of speeches. Phaedrus' speech is not without merit, but it is certainly inferior to those that follow it. We are inclined to believe that this will be the case for all subsequent speeches, but a flaw in our argument emerges when Aristophanes' speech is delivered interestingly before Agathon's speech, the content of which is significantly less impressive. But this circularity is the essence of what a symposium is, a truly all-male Athenian salon. It seems unrealistic to expect all speeches to have the same weight in terms of content, but this is the assumption that must be made; each talk is a key part of the entire symposium. The consequence of this is that every discourse must be broken down in such a way as to eliminate errors and preserve the fragments that will lead to the truth. Although Plato himself does not attend the party, his presence comesduly noted. There are, indeed, multiple levels of narration, but ultimately it is Plato who narrates the story for us. He deliberately inserts a system of checks and balances into the discourses to act as a filter against which the reader should draw conclusions.process and which should be rejected. For example, Pausanias identifies a source of error in Phaedrus' speech: I think there is a problem with the topic we have been assigned, Phaedrus, in that we have been told to speak in unconditional praise of Love. It would be fine if Love were uniform, but in reality it is not, and since it is not, it would be better to begin by defining what kind of Love we should praise. (Symposium, 180c)Pausanias describes two distinctions of Love: the Common and the Celestial. Common love is the love of common people; it is the most basic and human love that exists. It includes the love of all kinds of people, including women and the ignorant. It is a love based on lust and the need for reproduction. It is the love of people clouded by the desire for sensual and hedonistic objects and feelings. Heavenly love, however, is a divine love. It is on a par with philosophy, that is, the love of wisdom. Accordingly, this is the love that must be experienced by two men. Thus in his speech Pausanias explains that loving properly is loving divinely because: «A lover is bad if he is of the vulgar type, who loves the body more than the mind. This makes him inconstant, because there is no constancy in the object of his desires; as soon as the physical bloom that attracted him fades, he 'flies away and goes away'" (Symposium, 183e). Plato wrote the Symposium as a serious-comic drama, which means that while the speeches are deliberations about truth, about love and on beauty, an element of lightheartedness will periodically emerge. Plato alerts the reader to the potential for error in Eryximachus' speech by giving Aristophanes sobs that remain incurable throughout his speech; how one might take the speech seriously with a soundtrack; so silly? Only when Eryximachus has finished speaking does Aristophanes' hiccups disappear and he is able to move on to his turn. Perhaps the distraction of the hiccups implies how useless it is to listen to Eryximachus' entire speech. The mistake in Eryximachus' speech was that he expanded the definition of love so much, calling it "omnipotent", that it no longer made sense (Symposium, 188e) This pushes Aristophanes to bring love back to a human, or Common, level, and he does so successfully by telling the story. of the third kind. “Love,” he says, “is just the name we give to the desire and search for wholeness,” the integrity that humans lost when the gods feared that the third gender was too perfect. (Symposium, 192a) The circularity of discourses is evident in such content interactions. Aristophanes' speech was a reaction to the previous one, and Agathon reacts to the previous speeches by expressing his disappointment at how much emphasis was given to human beings and how little the god Love himself was praised. Agathon's main argument is that "Love is itself unrivaled in attractiveness and goodness, and secondarily is responsible for similar qualities in others" (Symposium, 197a). In essence, Agathon makes Love too perfect a being. His speech seems quite justified and the other guests applaud his effort but expect a rebuttal from Socrates. This serves as a further guide in the story: if the thinkers themselves are still questioning the truth, then the reader should continue to do so too. In his speech Socrates makes the all too important connection between the Common and the Celestial by building the metaphor for the scale of beauty, which progressively moves human beings from the earthly (deemed not good) to the spiritual, to the intellectual and, finally, to the ideal, which is embodied in the forms, 1994.