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. And is something like thisnot phenomenologically true? Pausanias cannot have both his relativism and hisconviction that homosexuality is somehow inherently beautiful, heterosexualityinherently base.It should be added immediately that it hardly follows that theconverse is true.Pausanias now turns, much more explicitly than did Phaedrus, to his recog-nition that there are also dangers to eros.His proposal for dealing with thesedangers will be law (nomos). There oughtta be a law, he says in e"ect.But webegin to see another way in which Plato has Pausanias s speech begin to breakdown when we note who Pausanias s law is designed to protect.He begins, Actually, there should be a law (nomos) against loving young boys, so that a lotof e"ort will not be squandered on an uncertain prospect.It is unclear howyoung boys will turn out, whether their souls and bodies will end up being bador virtuous (181e).Pausanias s version of the law regarding pederasty will befor the protection of the pederasts!This leads him to a discussion of the various laws regarding pederasty (181e184a).Not surprisingly, Pausanias is dismayed at those cities which straight-forwardly outlaw pederasty.More interestingly, he also does not like those cities the question of beauty in the symposium 33where pederasty is simply aH"rmed, and for an interesting reason: in such cities,rhetorical ability will not be necessary to seduce beloveds, and that will eliminatePausanias s advantage.For as a sophist, Pausanias is nothing if not an ablerhetorician.What he appreciates, he goes on to say, is those cities where thesituation is more complex, such as in Athens.Here, he explains, on the onehand, lovers are praised and encouraged, yet on the other, parents do their bestto keep their children from pederasts, and young boys who submit easily to thesexual advances of older lovers are chastised.It is in introducing this complexity that Pausanias subtly indicates for thefirst time what his crucial criterion will be by which to distinguish beautifullyperformed erotic actions from basely performed ones.He says concisely andapparently in passing, It is considered beautiful to succeed in this matter andshameful to fail (182e).Pausanias s criterion for whether eros is beautiful orshameful is whether or not the lover succeeds! What is happening to the distinc-tion between beautiful and shameful eros here? Pausanias is getting so carriedaway by his own erotic desires that, as we shall now see, he will allow to the loverany behavior, beautiful or shameful, if only he can succeed.In pursuit of thebeloved, he says, the lover can beg, plead, sleep in the beloved s doorway, be aslave worse than any slave, even lie (183a c).In Pausanias s erotic rapture here,the distinction between beautiful and shameful love with which he began iscollapsing before our eyes.At the rhetorical peak of his speech, Pausanias concludes his account of thecomplicated situation in Athens by characterizing the pederastic situation as theconvergence of two laws (nomoi ).It will be useful to hear the rhetoricalflourish with which he develops his conclusion, then try to cut through therhetoric to see what he is really talking about.When a lover and his beloved come together, each has a law (nomon).The loveris justified in performing any services he can for his beloved who gratifies him, andthe beloved in turn is justified in providing whatever services he can for the one whois making him wise and good assuming the former is able to introduce the other toprudence and other virtues, and the latter does want to acquire an education andother skills.When these two laws come together as one, then and only then does ithappen that a beloved s gratifying a lover is something beautiful.Otherwise not atall.(184d e)The speech certainly sounds noble enough, but think about the actualsituation he is describing: he is advocating that the beloved trade sex for wis-dom!9 What we are seeing here as the speech reaches its peak is that the impor-tant distinction with which Pausanias began, that there is both beautiful (ornoble) and base love, and that love itself is thus inherently neither beautiful norbase, is collapsing as Pausanias gives absolutely free rein to the lover to doanything he can to succeed.It is a reflection of Pausanias s sophistic rhetoricalability that he hides this vulgarity behind beautiful-sounding rhetoric.What has Plato done, then, with Pausanias s speech? On the one hand, it 34 plato and the question of beautycontains crucial insights.First, and decisively for our own purposes, there ishere established for the first time a clear connection between eros and beauty:eros can be beautiful.But it can also be shameful.Therefore it is neither beauti-ful nor base in itself. Surely Pausanias is right here.But then everything willdepend on the criterion by which we will distinguish beautiful from shamefulloves.Pausanias first tried to make the distinction rest on sexual orientation:homosexual love is beautiful or noble, heterosexual love is base.That collapsedon his own relativist principle.But then, as he himself seemed to be carried awayby his own erotic desires, he dissolved the very distinction between beautiful andbase love into vulgarity: the noble lover can in fact conduct himself in everydisgraceful manner so long as he succeeds.Then it is beautiful. Pausaniascannot sustain his own important insights because of his erotic passion toseduce his beloveds.As we leave his speech, our guiding question must then be,what after all is the criterion by which we might distinguish beautiful fromshameful love?Aristophanes is scheduled to speak next, but during Pausanias s speech hehas developed a case of hiccups (the Greek word can also mean belching ), nodoubt a symbol of his disgust at the import of Pausanias s speech.The directe"ect of the incident is that Eryximachus the doctor both proposes three curesfor Aristophanes distress and agrees to speak in his stead while he is undergoingthe cures.In a full commentary on the Symposium, the meaning of the hiccupsand the cures would have to be taken up in detail, but they are not, I think,directly relevant to the question of beauty in the dialogue, and so we will passquickly to the speech of Eryximachus.Eryximachus is a doctor, a man of science, and his speech will ingeniouslyportray eros in such a way that, if successful, he, and therefore science, will winthe wisdom contest regarding eros.Eryximachus begins by showing that herecognizes full well the import of Pausanias s speech which we have just drawnout.Pausanias, he says, began his speech beautifully but did not adequatelyfinish it, so I must try to put a conclusion to his speech (186a).But as we shallsee, what Eryximachus in fact does is totally transform Pausanias s position.Both Phaedrus and Pausanias understood eros as primarily a personal,romantic phenomenon.That is, their paradigm of eros indeed, the only genrethat apparently interests them is personal love between two humans.There-fore, insofar as they both tie the issue of beauty to eros, their understanding ofbeauty was also primarily confined to the beauty or its lack in this personallove
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