The Symposium utilizes many literary forms that are completely foreign to what you would expect to find in modern philosophy. Plato does not just give a straightforward argument. Instead he tells a secondhand story of a party where a number of different views concerning love are offered. It all leads up to Socrates' speech, which we can only assume is Plato's view. It then concludes with a somewhat bizarre rant about how wonderful Socrates is, and about the time Socrates' refused the advances of the beautiful young Alcibiades.
The question of why Plato chose to express his views in this way seems a lot like the question of why a poet would express his or her views metaphorically instead of just saying what he or she means. Some truths just do not translate well into argument. Plato's view of love is that it is a desire always compelling us towards the eternal form of beauty. The way I understand him, it seems that to behold the form of beauty is to go through some sort of transforming mystical experience. By its very nature, mysticism does not fit well into the bounds of a traditional logical argument; neither does love for that matter. Plato uses story, metaphor, and mythology to lead us through the elusive nature of love, first as we generally perceive it, and then as a mystical force uniting us with something that transcends everything it is to be human.
I agree Matthew; love does not lend itself easily to logical explication. I think of those fateful words of Nietzsche “We no longer have a sufficiently high estimate of ourselves when we communicate. Our true experiences are not garrulous. They could not communicate themselves if they wanted to: they lack words. We have already grown beyond whatever we have words for. In all talking there lies a grain of contempt. Speech, it seems, was devised only for the average, medium, communicable. The speaker has already vulgarized himself by speaking.” Indeed, I think we are indebted to James, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, and Pascal for exposing the flimsiness of our traditional, rational claims upon existence. Oddly enough, the father of this tradition—Plato—sets himself against it on the question of love. If it is true that all philosophy is footnotes to Plato, we surely cannot say these footnotes are tacked onto the text of the Symposium; for despite Plato’s insistence on temperance, reason and logic, he was far too wise too suppose the criteria he demanded for the pursuit of truth could ever be applied to the study of love. In this way, he has made the medium suit his message. What language could better attempt the explanation of the wild splendor of love than confused and tempestuous banter of a raucous Greek dinner party? Well, perhaps there is more than just one candidate for such a task. It seems to me that in all the efforts Plato invests in his character’s personality he betrays his own maxims for knowledge, as the Symposium really resembles a work of poetry more closely than a philosophic dialogue. I only have one question for you: do you really think that our experiences in love bring us into contact with a state of consciousness that “transcends everything it means to be human?” I tend to think that love, more than anything else, is the experience in which we distinctly realize what it means to be human.
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