Speech In Agathon's Speech

Agathon’s speech comes directly before Socrates and is much less complex due to his ideas being shallow to the naked eye. However, it is irresponsible to throw out Agathon’s speech due to its position textually, it’s the turning point between the first set of speeches and Socrates’ climactic dialogue. The speech opens with an attempt to connect love and youth directly (195a), however, fails to account for people who are past their youth. He also tries to justify this viewpoint by saying that since love is the youngest of the gods, it was the force of Necessity that ruled the gods in the earlier times (195c). When taken at face value, his argument pales in comparison to those of his companions. However, Agathon’s speech isn’t just mindless

This idea that love isn’t something that affects the physical, but rather affects the soul, is the key message of Agathon’s speech. The other important aspect of Agathon’s speech is the distinctions he makes about love. He’s the first speaker to make the distinction betaween beauty (which Agathon calls attractiveness) and goodness (195a), which other speakers equate (Eryximachus does so in 186b-186c) and Aristophanes ignores. Agathon’s speech then proceeds by comparing love to the four cardinal virtues, justice (196b-196c), temperance (196c), courage (196d), and wisdom (196d-e). This could be seen as a combination of all of the previous speeches, in where the four previous speeches each dealt with one of these four cardinal virtues, courage by Phaedrus, justice by Pausanias, temperance by Eryximachus, and piety by Aristophanes. Agathon, however, does swap wisdom for piety, but this is an important step forward, since a person possessing wisdom would not act on ideas based on faith without adequate

In terms of the understanding of love, Agathon’s speech sows the seeds of understanding in the reader’s brain, and Socrates’ speech nourishes and makes it a fully grown concept. Agathon’s speech is meant to combine the previous four speeches of Phaedrus, Pausanias, Eryximachus, and Aristophanes, and cultivate their common ideas into the realm of the soul and away from the physical. Socrates’ thoughts about Agathon’s speech are clear, as he praises Agathon’s diction and wording, but neglects talking about their value or truth (198b-198c). Socrates sets out by interrogating Agathon to establish that love has a subject of which love originates, and an object of which is loved (199e-200a). This in combination with the points that Agathon made, are what he was looking for as groundwork to build upon. In Socrates’ speech, his younger self mirrors Agathon’s perspective, which suggests that Plato’s purpose in having multiple speeches instead of just spelling out the teachings of Diotima is to allow us to learn by slowing exposing us to a logical progression of ideas that begins with Phaedrus and ends with the heightened understanding of Diotima. Lots of ideas that Diotima discusses are also continuations of Agathon’s ideas. For example, Agathon mentions earlier that Love is a teacher of poets and