Socrates Shows Love Wants What It Lacks — Symposium

When Agathon finishes, the company cheers. Socrates asks Eryximachus if the fear was true: a wonderful speech, and Socrates left in a strait. Eryximachus grants the first and denies the second. The closing words, Socrates says, amazed him. He felt ready to run away for shame. He fancies Agathon was shaking the Gorgon's head of Gorgias at him, the head that turns a man to stone.

He had thought praise meant telling the truth, then setting out the best true things in the best order. These speeches, he now says, give Love every greatness whether it belongs to him or not. The task was to appear to praise, not to praise. He asks release from a promise of the lips, not of the mind. If they want the truth in his own manner, he will speak. Phaedrus agrees, and allows him to question Agathon first.

Love is of something, as a father is of a child, and it desires what it does not possess. A strong person does not desire strength already held. A wish to stay well or rich is a wish for a future not yet owned. Socrates then uses Agathon's claim that the love of the beautiful ordered the gods' empire, and that deformity has no love. If Love wants beauty, Love lacks beauty, and is not beautiful. Agathon says he did not understand his own words. The good is also the beautiful, so Love wants the good too. Agathon cannot refute him. Socrates says he cannot refute the truth, for Socrates is easily refuted.