ABSTRACT
On the contrary, the Socrates of the Platonic dialogues is indeed a 'concealed lover'; that is, the lover is Plato, concealed within the persona of the Socrates. Differently stated, Plato is both lover and non-lover; Socrates poses as a lover, but his Eros is defective. It would be going too far to say that he is a nonlover, but it would be a still greater exaggeration to refer to him as an erotic madman. In cautious terms, regardless of the difference between Plato and Socrates, there can be no doubt, when all the evidence is considered carefully, that the philosophical nature must combine the natures of the lover and the nonlover. According to the Phaedrus, philosophy, whether understood as an erotic purification or as the successive refinement of discourse, is possible only as a divine gift, as madness or as prophetic anamnesis, two themes which are absent from the Symposium.
