All People Are Pregnant
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Diotima — ἀλλʼ ἐγώ, ἦ δʼ ἥ, σαφέστερον ἐρῶ. κυοῦσιν γάρ, ἔφη, ὦ Σώκρατες, πάντες ἄνθρωποι καὶ κατὰ τὸ σῶμα καὶ κατὰ τὴν ψυχήν, καὶ ἐπειδὰν ἔν τινι ἡλικίᾳ γένωνται, τίκτειν ἐπιθυμεῖ ἡμῶν ἡ φύσις. τίκτειν δὲ ἐν μὲν αἰσχρῷ οὐ δύναται, ἐν δὲ τῷ καλῷ. ἡ γὰρ ἀνδρὸς καὶ γυναικὸς συνουσία τόκος ἐστίν. ἔστι δὲ τοῦτο θεῖον τὸ πρᾶγμα, καὶ τοῦτο ἐν θνητῷ ὄντι τῷ ζῴῳ ἀθάνατον ἔνεστιν, ἡ κύησις καὶ ἡ γέννησις. τὰ δὲ ἐν τῷ ἀναρμόστῳ ἀδύνατον γενέσθαι.
But I, said she, will speak more clearly. For all people are pregnant, Socrates, she said, both in body and in soul, and when they come to a certain age, our nature desires to give birth. But it cannot give birth in the ugly, only in the beautiful. For the union of man and woman is a bringing-forth. And this is a divine thing, and this, in the mortal creature, is the immortal element: conception and generation. But in the discordant it is impossible to come to be.
Diotima makes the doctrine plain. All people are pregnant, in body and in soul, and when they reach a certain age their nature longs to give birth. But it cannot give birth in the ugly, only in the beautiful — for the union of man and woman is a bringing-forth. This is a divine thing, and in the mortal creature it is the immortal element: conception and generation. In what is discordant, no birth can happen.
Two claims reach far. First, generation is called theion, divine, and named the one immortal thing present in a mortal animal — the point of contact between the perishable and the eternal, which the next lines (206e–207a) will develop into love's true aim, immortality. Second, birth requires concord: what is discordant (anarmoston) with the divine — the ugly — cannot host creation, while the beautiful, being in harmony with the divine, can. Beauty is thus reconceived as a kind of fitness for the eternal, not a static loveliness. Plato is turning the erotic gaze into a generative act and preparing the reader to hear, in 206d, that Beauty herself is the goddess who presides over every birth.
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