For Love of a Statue: A Reading of Plato's Symposium 215A-B

Abstract

In her conversation with Socrates, Diotima explains that ‘all men are pregnant both in body and soul, and when they come of age, our nature desires to give birth; it cannot give birth in anything ugly, only in what is beautiful’ (206c). The man who has been pregnant with wisdom, moderation and justice in his soul since early youth, now wishing ‘to beget and give birth’ (209b), goes in search of a beautiful boy in whose company he may produce his offspring. Through passionate communion with the youth, ‘he conceives and gives birth to what he has been carrying inside him for ages’ (209c), engendering the instructive speeches on virtue and other matters which he delivers to the beloved. Diotima's equation between physical and mental parturition seems so appropriate and intuitively right that we tend to gloss over the real puzzle of her account: in this mode of procreation, which holds good for literal as well as spiritual birth, pregnancy precedes the actual moment of intercourse. The reading of theSymposiumI wish to offer may not explain the biology of this unlikely reproductive act, but aims to set the riddle within the context of a leitmotif that weaves through the larger text: statues, and the particular mode of love they experience and inspire, are uniquely able to perform acts of autonomous generation.