It Forgets Mother, Brother, Friends
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Socrates — οὐδέ τινα τοῦ καλοῦ περὶ πλείονος ποιεῖται, ἀλλὰ μητέρων τε καὶ ἀδελφῶν καὶ ἑταίρων πάντων λέλησται, καὶ οὐσίας διʼ ἀμέλειαν ἀπολλυμένης παρʼ οὐδὲν τίθεται,
Socrates now paints the lover as a person swept clean of every other attachment. Beauty has become the only thing that counts; nothing and no one is prized above the beautiful beloved. The lover forgets mother and brothers and every friend, lets the family estate slide into ruin through sheer neglect without caring, and throws over all the social decencies it once wore with pride. It is an extraordinary passage to find here, because it describes exactly the isolation that Lysias's speech, at the start of the dialogue, held up as the great crime of love — except that now the one stripped bare is not the beloved but the lover himself, and the stripping is not a harm inflicted but a liberation embraced.
Love overrides everything else in the lover's life. It will not willingly leave the beloved's side, values no one above the beautiful one, and forgets mothers, brothers, all its friends; it lets its estate go to ruin through neglect without a second thought, and despises every propriety it once took pride in — ready to be a slave and sleep anywhere, so long as it is near what it longs for.
This is one of the most striking reversals in the whole dialogue, and it works only if you remember where it began. Lysias's speech, and Socrates's veiled first speech, made the isolation of the beloved the central charge against love: the lover, they said, wants the boy orphaned, cut off from family and friends, stripped of his estate, so that he can possess him alone. Now Socrates describes love again — and every element of that indictment reappears, but transferred. It is the lover who forgets his mother and brothers, the lover who lets his property go to ruin, the lover who despises the proprieties he used to prize. What the first speech saw as a crime the lover commits against the beloved, the palinode reveals as something the true lover does to himself, willingly, and it is no longer a crime but a kind of ecstasy — the soul so seized by the beauty it has glimpsed that everything it used to count as valuable simply falls away. This is the classic shape of religious conversion and of every account of being overtaken by something greater than oneself: the sudden weightlessness of former attachments, the willingness to lose everything for one thing. Plato is not naive about the risk — a soul this unmoored can be ruined as easily as saved, which is why the whole myth insists that love must be lived 'with philosophy.' But he insists that the self-forgetting is, at its root, the right response to having seen something real. The lover looks unhinged by ordinary standards, careless of family and property and reputation. He is, in fact, a soul that has remembered what those things are worth compared to the beautiful — and answered accordingly.
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