Love and what we find valuable › Why desire cannot simply be beautiful

Socrates questions Agathon before reporting Diotima's teaching. Love is always love of something, and desire reaches toward what it lacks. If Eros desires beauty, Eros cannot simply possess the beauty he desires in the manner Agathon's praise suggests (199c–201c). The distinction separates the activity of seeking from its object. Admiring wisdom does not by itself make someone wise; desiring goodness does not certify a person's conduct as good.

Socrates anticipates an apparent counterexample. A healthy person can want health, despite already being healthy. His answer is temporal: the person wants to continue having health in the future, which is not yet secured (200b–e). The argument therefore does not require every desire to arise from present deprivation. It requires something about the desired condition to remain unpossessed or unsecured. This qualification matters whenever we use the slogan that love desires what it lacks.

The reasoning is powerful without being beyond dispute. Someone might enjoy an existing friendship without experiencing enjoyment as an attempt to secure anything further. A defender can distinguish appreciative enjoyment from eros understood as reaching toward an object. But that reply narrows the explanatory claim: an account of desiring love need not exhaust affection, gratitude, or delight in another person's present existence. The dialogue's question becomes sharper when we resist making every good relation fit one model.

Diotima corrects another false opposition. If Eros is not beautiful or wise in the fully achieved sense, it does not follow that he is simply ugly or foolish. She describes him as intermediate, a daimōn, or mediating spirit, between mortal and divine. Her myth makes him the child of Poverty and Poros, associated with resource and means. His need is joined to inventiveness, persistence, and pursuit (201d–204c). Philosophy resembles this condition because it seeks wisdom while recognizing that it does not possess it.

The educational insight is that acknowledged incompleteness can make learning possible. Complete satisfaction would remove the motive to seek; complacent ignorance fails to recognize a reason to begin. This is a model of philosophical inquiry, not empirical proof that frustration reliably improves people. Need can also produce manipulation or despair. The direction and discipline of desire remain essential.