Diotima's Speech and Aristotle's Ethics

I actually had already read books one and two of Aristotle’s Ethics and begun crafting my blog response when I saw the update on blackboard that I was, in fact, reading the wrong thing! However, refreshing my memory of Aristotle actually made the latter half of the Symposium a much more interesting read. I had only ever read the Ethics as a stand-alone piece; Aristotle’s reliance on Plato was clear from today’s readings. First off, in Socrates’ retelling of Diotima’s speech there is a clear assumption that living and acting well, Eudaimonia, is the only appropriate underlying good in life. Through the development of the five speeches leading up to Socrates’ speech, we have been able to trace the fact that love leads to all of the other virtues. In other words, love is the center of the living and acting well. We love, explains Diotima, things that are lovable. There is always an object of our affections. As we find this object—something beautiful—we should “[behold] beauty with the eye of the mind.” This is directly comparable to Aristotle’s life of contemplation that he describes at length in his Ethics. In fact, Another relationship between the two texts can be seen when Socrates/Diotima describes the nature of beauty. Socrates originally asserts to Diotima that if something is not fair it must necessarily be foul. Diotima refutes that assertion and claims that love can be a mean between good and evil, foul and fair. In order for a mean to exist, there must be a “gray area,” or a gradient between two opposite ideas. This clearly expresses a basis for Aristotle’s theory of the golden mean.