Bodies Rather Than Souls
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Pausanias — ἐστι καὶ ἐξεργάζεται ὅτι ἂν τύχῃ· καὶ οὗτός ἐστιν ὃν οἱ φαῦλοι τῶν ἀνθρώπων ἐρῶσιν. ἐρῶσι δὲ οἱ τοιοῦτοι πρῶτον μὲν οὐχ ἧττον γυναικῶν ἢ παίδων, ἔπειτα ὧν καὶ ἐρῶσι τῶν σωμάτων μᾶλλον ἢ τῶν ψυχῶν, ἔπειτα ὡς ἂν δύνωνται ἀνοητοτάτων, πρὸς τό διαπράξασθαι μόνον βλέποντες, ἀμελοῦντες δὲ τοῦ καλῶς ἢ μή· ὅθεν δὴ συμβαίνει αὐτοῖς ὅτι ἂν τύχωσι τοῦτο πράττειν, ὁμοίως μὲν ἀγαθόν, ὁμοίως δὲ τοὐναντίον. ἔστι γὰρ καὶ ἀπὸ τῆς θεοῦ νεωτέρας
It is, and it produces whatever it happens to do; and this is the one whom the base sort of people love. Such people love, first, no less women than boys, then, even where they love, they love bodies more than souls, then, the most senseless people they can get, looking only to achieving it, careless whether it's done well or not; hence it happens to them that whatever they chance to do comes out equally good, equally its opposite. For this too comes from the younger goddess
Continuing straight from 181a's description of the Common Love as common through and through: Pausanias says it produces whatever it happens to produce, and this is the Love the baser sort of people feel — indifferent between women and boys, after bodies rather than souls, seeking out the least thoughtful partners, intent only on getting what they want and careless whether that is done nobly or not. He closes by tracing this Love back to the younger of the two Aphrodites.
Pausanias's three-part indictment moves from indifference to indifference: no less women than boys, bodies over souls, the emptiest partners available. The word doing the real work is anoētotátōn, 'the most mindless,' superlative of a word built on noûs — a phrase for people incapable of the reflection a lasting attachment would require, well past ordinary stupidity, which is exactly the point: a partner with no noûs raises no objection and asks for nothing back. diapráxasthai, 'to get the thing done,' is the speech's plainest euphemism so far, a middle-voice verb elsewhere at home in treaties and business deals, applied here to sex as if it were a transaction to be closed.
The moral he draws — that what such love produces is good or bad by pure chance, since no one involved was choosing for the right reasons — sets up everything Pausanias still has to argue. If the common lover's aim, like a body, is undiscriminating, then whatever protects the Heavenly Love from the same charge cannot be a nicer manner of the same act; it has to be a different object altogether — the soul, not the body — which is exactly the distinction the Phaedrus spends its own speech on Love developing at far greater length. Read against that companion dialogue, Pausanias looks less like an innovator and more like someone reaching for a distinction Socrates will later make with much more care.
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