Never Gratify the Mindless Lover
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Socrates — ἠγνοηκὼς τὸ ἅπαν ἐξ ἀρχῆς ὅτι οὐκ ἄρα ἔδει ποτὲ ἐρῶντι καὶ ὑπʼ ἀνάγκης ἀνοήτῳ χαρίζεσθαι,
The first speech ends where it was always headed, on its blunt thesis. The beloved, now pursued by a lover who has turned and fled his own promises, grasps too late what he should have understood from the outset: never gratify a lover. Not because this or that lover is bad, but because a lover as such is anoētos — mindless, by the very necessity of what love is. Love, on this account, is the defeat of reason, so to give in to a lover is to reward the absence of sense. It is the tidiest of conclusions, and Socrates is about to recoil from it.
Socrates reaches the moral his whole first speech exists to deliver. The beloved, harried and abandoned, finally sees what he should have known from the beginning: that one must never yield to a lover at all — for a lover is, of necessity, out of his mind, and to gratify him is to serve unreason itself.
Everything the first speech has argued crystallizes in one word, planted deliberately at its close: anoētos, 'mindless.' The lover must never be gratified, Socrates says, because he is anoētos 'by necessity' — without nous, reason, by definition, since love just is the victory of appetite over mind. Notice how much the whole case has depended on this. The speech could condemn love only by defining it in advance as unreason, the mere loss of mind. And that is precisely the premise the palinode will blow apart. Its opening move is to split 'being out of one's mind' in two: there is the madness that is disease, a falling below reason — and the madness that is a god's gift, a rising above it toward what reason by itself could never touch. The very lover this speech dismisses as anoētos, mindless, the palinode will call theios, touched by god. Is love beneath mind or above it? On that single question the two speeches divide, and this word, anoētos, is where the fault line runs. It is also, fittingly, nearly the last word Socrates speaks in this voice: in a moment his daimonion will stop him, he will call the speech a sin against Love, and he will begin again — to say the opposite, and mean it.
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