Mountaineer Undergraduate Research Review
Document Type
Article
Abstract
Plato's Symposium is widely regarded as among the most influential of Plato's dialogues. The Symposium's primary goal is to provide an adequate definition of love and its overall place within the philosophical inquiry. Each of Plato's interlocutors offers a unique account of love, what it might be, and more especially, how one ought to behave in relation to love. This paper will use the insights of Michel Foucault, a 20th-century French philosopher known for critiquing our present-day cultural practices through a reading of the history of thought, in order to shed some light on how love in the Symposium can be better understood. This paper will ultimately argue that love as presented by the interlocutors of the Symposium, constitutes what Foucault calls a technique of self. For Foucault, techniques of self are rules, or sets of rules, which determine our behavior. With this in mind, love, as presented in the Symposium, can be better understood as a technique of self, or at least connected to a technique of self, playing a crucial role in determining one's behavior more generally. Understanding love as a technique of self has important advantages. One advantage is that it helps the reader unfamiliar with ancient Greek conceptions of love to precisely understand love's place in ancient Greek thought, as such conceptions are usually steeped in religious and mythical tropes. Secondly, it helps to clarify the ethical implications of love, something readers today might not be accustomed to.
Recommended Citation
Connors, Aidan T.
(2023)
"Love in Plato's Symposium as a Technique of Self,"
Mountaineer Undergraduate Research Review: Vol. 8, Article 8.
Available at:
https://researchrepository.wvu.edu/murr/vol8/iss1/8