Abstract
Despite Diotima’s irresistible virtues and attractiveness across the millennia, she
spells trouble for philosophy. It is not her fault that she has been misunderstood,
nor is it Plato’s. Rather, I suspect, each era has made of Diotima what it desired
her to be. Her malleability is related to the assumption that Plato invented her,
that she is a mere literary fiction, licensing the imagination to do what it will.
In the first part of my paper, I argue against three contemporary ‘majority views’
about Diotima that I regard as false. The first is that we can be certain she is
fictional;1 a second is that Diotima is our best evidence for Plato’s feminism; the
third, that she is Plato’s mouthpiece for the higher mysteries in the Symposium.
After I have set aside what I regard as false, I proceed in the second half of my
paper to develop Diotima’s positive contribution to philosophical psychology,
her naturalistic account of the psyche as mortal, unified, and developmental.
Whether the view Plato assigns to her is one that he held I do not pretend to
know; but it is a powerful, defensible, and coherent view that inspired positive
aspects of Freudian psychology in the twentieth century. Freud’s insight, in fact,
makes clear how erōs can be developed in relation to the bad as well as the good.