The English word "symposium" now means an academic conference, rows of chairs and a name badge. The Greek word Symposion meant almost the opposite: a drinking party. After an Athenian dinner the tables were cleared, the wine was mixed with water, a flute-girl played, and the men reclining on the couches drank and talked late into the night. Plato's Symposium, written around 385 BCE, is set at one of these parties, and it is a single connected evening in which the guests agree to skip the heavy drinking for once and each give a speech in praise of Eros (love: the Greek god, and the Greek word for desire). That is the whole book: six speeches in praise of love, and then a drunk gatecrasher who breaks the rules and praises a person instead.
Two things shape everything that follows. The single most repeated idea "from Plato" about love (that we were once whole, got split in two, and spend our lives searching for our missing other half) is in this book, but it is a joke. It is the speech of Aristophanes, the great Athenian comedy writer, who is sitting in the room, and the dialogue stages it only to climb past it, not to endorse it. The view the Symposium actually elevates is something else entirely, and it comes last and highest. The second thing is the rule for the whole read: Plato wrote plays, and he never walks on stage. The deepest speech in the book is Socrates reporting what a priestess named Diotima once told him (a character quoting a character), and even that reaches us third-hand, through a narrator who wasn't there. Where the seams matter, the dialogue keeps them visible.
The break
Before the Symposium, when Greeks talked about Eros they were talking about a thing: a god in the old stories, a disruptive bodily passion to be managed, a force that struck from outside. The dialogue's own first five speeches give all the standard takes, each one praising love as a kind of object. Love is the oldest of the gods and the great spur to bravery (Phaedrus). Love comes in two kinds, a vulgar bodily one and a noble spiritual one (Pausanias). Love is a harmony running through the whole of nature, which a physician sees everywhere (Eryximachus). Love is the comic ache of a creature cut in half, hunting for its lost other half (Aristophanes). Love is the youngest, most beautiful, most virtuous of the gods, draped in gorgeous words (Agathon). Five praises of Eros as something to be praised.
Plato's break comes when Socrates refuses the entire genre. Love, he argues, is not a god and is not beautiful: one only ever desires what one lacks, and love is love of beauty, so love itself must be needy, in-between, unfinished. It is not the beautiful beloved; it is the yearning for the beautiful. Socrates calls it a daimon (a spirit, neither mortal nor divine, a go-between bridging the two), and he learned all this, he says, from a priestess called Diotima. Once love is no longer a thing to admire but a desire pointed at beauty, it can be schooled. Diotima describes the schooling as a climb. It starts with one beautiful body, then sees that the beauty in all bodies is one thing, then rises to the beauty of souls, then of laws and institutions, then of knowledge, and at last catches sight of Beauty itself: the single, changeless, eternal original that every beautiful thing is a copy of. This is Plato's theory of Forms put to work on love, with the Form of Beauty as the top of the climb, graspable by the mind and never by the eye.
The Symposium is the first work to argue that erotic desire and the desire to know the truth are the same drive: love, rightly trained, is the soul's ladder from a single beautiful body up to Beauty itself, the eternal Form. No prior speech had turned wanting-the-beautiful into an account of how the mind reaches the really real. And then, in case the abstraction floats off, the book grounds it in a person: the last speaker describes Socrates, ugly outside and golden within, who out-endures everyone and whom the most beautiful man in Athens could not seduce, the ladder made flesh, bodily love refused in favor of the higher kind. That fusion of love, knowledge, and a living example is what makes the Symposium a break rather than a mere anthology of speeches about love.
Chapter 1
A drinking party, retold years too late
"In our boyhood, I replied, when Agathon won the prize with his first tragedy, on the day after that on which he and his chorus offered the sacrifice of victory."
The Symposium does not begin at the party. It begins on a road, with a man being pestered for gossip. Apollodorus (uh-POL-oh-DOR-us), a devoted follower of Socrates, is walking up to Athens from the port town of Phalerum when a friend stops him: is it true there was a famous party at the playwright Agathon's house, years ago, where everyone made speeches about love? Tell me what they said. And Apollodorus, eager, a little fervent about all things Socrates, agrees to retell the whole evening. "Concerning the things about which you ask to be informed," he opens, "I believe that I am not ill-prepared with an answer."
One thing runs under the entire book. Apollodorus was not at the party. He was a boy when it happened. Everything he is about to recite he got from someone else. A man named Aristodemus (a-ris-TOD-em-us), Jowett's "little fellow, who never wore any shoes," a Socrates-follower who actually was there, told it to him, and Apollodorus checked a few details with Socrates afterward. So every speech in the Symposium reaches us at two removes: this is Apollodorus telling us what Aristodemus told him that so-and-so said, a long time ago. Plato builds that distance on purpose. The most extraordinary claims in the book are wrapped in layers of "he said that he said," never handed to us as a transcript. The dialogue is a memory of a memory of an evening that already feels half-lost.
And it was long ago even for the people in it. The party was thrown to celebrate a victory: the host, Agathon (AG-uh-thon), a real Athenian tragic poet, had just won first prize for his very first tragedy at one of the city's drama festivals, and the guests gathered the night after his victory sacrifice. "In our boyhood," Apollodorus says, when Agathon "won the prize with his first tragedy, on the day after that on which he and his chorus offered the sacrifice of victory." The two dates are not the same. Plato composed the dialogue around 385 BCE. He set it around 416 BCE, the year Agathon won that first victory, a generation earlier, before the disasters that would wreck Athens, before several of the men in the room came to bad ends. The reader, like Apollodorus, is looking back at a golden evening through a lot of intervening grief.
The setup at the party is quick and funny. The guests are hung over from the night before, so they make a deal: tonight they will drink lightly, send the flute-girl away, and entertain themselves with conversation instead. The proposal on the floor, relayed from a guest named Phaedrus, is that Eros (Love) has been strangely neglected by the poets, who have written hymns to every other god but skimped on this one. So each man, going around the couches in order, will give a speech in praise of Love to make up for it. Six speeches in praise of love, one after another, each speaker trying to outdo the last, and then a seventh man who arrives late and praises something else. The contest is on, and the dialogue is simply us listening to it, in order, all the way to the bottom of the wine.
Chapter 2
Phaedrus and Pausanias: the oldest god, and the two loves
"Love will make men dare to die for their beloved—love alone; and women as well as men. Of this, Alcestis, the daughter of Pelias, is a monument to all Hellas..."
Phaedrus (FEE-drus) goes first, and his speech is the simplest: Love is the oldest of the gods, and the great maker of virtue. His argument for the age is a kind of pun on silence: Love must be ancient because nobody ever names his parents. "He is the eldest of the gods, which is an honour to him," Phaedrus says, "and a proof of his claim to this honour is, that of his parents there is no memorial; neither poet nor prose-writer has ever affirmed that he had any." No genealogy means no beginning, so Love must come right at the start of things, back when (in the old creation story he quotes) Chaos was followed by Earth, "and Love."
From there Phaedrus makes love the engine of courage. A lover, he argues, would rather die than be seen behaving like a coward in front of the person they love; shame before the beloved is the strongest spur there is. His proof is Alcestis (al-SES-tis), the wife from Greek legend who agreed to die in her husband's place when no one else, not even his own parents, would: "Love will make men dare to die for their beloved—love alone; and women as well as men. Of this, Alcestis, the daughter of Pelias, is a monument to all Hellas; for she was willing to lay down her life on behalf of her husband, when no one else would." Love, on this first account, is what makes ordinary people brave enough to die well.
Pausanias (paw-SAY-nee-us) speaks next, and his move is to correct Phaedrus for being sloppy. One can't just praise "Love" flat, he says, because there isn't one Love: there are two, and they are as different as good and bad. His proof runs through mythology: there are two goddesses of love, two Aphrodites, so there must be two Loves attending them. "The elder one, having no mother, who is called the heavenly Aphrodite—she is the daughter of Uranus; the younger, who is the daughter of Zeus and Dione—her we call common; and the Love who is her fellow-worker is rightly named common, as the other love is called heavenly."
Those two terms, heavenly and common, are the heart of the speech, and Jowett's plain words are clearer here than the textbook Greek. (Scholars often label them "Uranian" and "Pandemos" after the Greek epithets, but Plato's translator here just says heavenly and common, and so will these pages.) The heavenly love, born of an older and motherless goddess, is a love of the mind and of good character, drawn to the soul of the beloved. The common love is bodily, indiscriminate, drawn to the body and not the soul, the love of people who care for the body more than the soul. Only the heavenly kind, Pausanias says, deserves praise.
The love these men are discussing is, in their world, largely the Athenian institution of an older male lover and a younger male beloved. That is the social frame the dialogue assumes, and Pausanias is the speaker who lays out its etiquette most fully: which kinds of courtship were thought honorable, which shameful. It would be a distortion to scrub this into modern heterosexual romance, and equally a distortion to read it as a modern statement about sexuality. It is the historical setting the speeches take for granted, and the dialogue's own highest account of love (still several speeches away) will move past any particular body of any sex; the frame is the starting point, not the destination.
Chapter 3
Eryximachus and Aristophanes: love in all of nature, and the search for the other half
"...human nature was originally one and we were a whole, and the desire and pursuit of the whole is called love."
The third speaker, Eryximachus (eh-rik-SIM-uh-kus), is a physician, and he does what specialists do: he takes Pausanias' two loves and finds them everywhere he looks, which is mostly in his own field. The double love, he announces, is "not merely an affection of the soul of man towards the fair, or towards anything, but is to be found in the bodies of all animals and in productions of the earth, and I may say in all that is." Love, in other words, is a cosmic principle, the attraction and repulsion of opposites, running through every domain there is.
His own craft is the proof. Medicine, he says, is basically "the knowledge of the loves and desires of the body": health is what happens when the body's opposites (hot and cold, wet and dry, the elements pulling against each other) are brought into the right harmony, the good love winning out over the bad. And then he extends the same principle outward, into music (concord out of high and low notes), the seasons and the weather, even religion: everywhere, things go well when opposites are tuned into agreement and badly when they aren't. It is the most "scientific" speech in the book and quietly the most comic: a doctor who has discovered that the secret of the universe happens to be his own profession. (His extensions beyond medicine, into music and the heavens and the rest, are summarized here rather than quoted; the core line that love runs through "all that is" is his, word for word.)
Then comes the speech everybody remembers, and it belongs to Aristophanes (a-ris-TOF-uh-neez), the actual Aristophanes, the most famous comic playwright in Athens, the man who wrote stage comedies for a living. He delivers a brilliant, deliberately ridiculous origin myth, and the dialogue means it as comedy. Human beings, Aristophanes says, were not always shaped as they are now. Originally there were three sexes, not two: male, female, and a third combining both, the "man-woman" (a word, he notes, that is now "only preserved as a term of reproach"). And the original humans were round: "four hands and four feet, one head with two faces, looking opposite ways," four ears, two sets of everything, children of the sun, the earth, and the moon. They were so strong and proud that they tried to storm heaven and attack the gods.
Zeus, to humble them without destroying them (and losing the worshippers), decided to cut each one in half. "He spoke and cut men in two," Aristophanes says, "like a sorb-apple which is halved for pickling, or as you might divide an egg with a hair," and had Apollo turn each new face around toward the cut and tie off the loose skin at the navel. Ever since, each of us is a halved creature missing its other side. "Each of us when separated, having one side only, like a flat fish, is but the indenture of a man, and he is always looking for his other half." Love, on this story, is the ache of the bisected thing for the piece it lost: the drive to find the missing half and become whole again. "Human nature was originally one and we were a whole," he ends, "and the desire and pursuit of the whole is called love."
This idea is the most quoted in the whole Symposium, and it is almost always quoted wrong. The modern word for it, "soulmate," is not in the text, in Jowett or in Plato; it is a much later coinage. And, more importantly, this is a comic speech, the funny just-so story of the man whose job is to be funny: round eight-limbed people cartwheeling around, Zeus slicing them like pickled apples. It is winning and it is moving, and it is not the dialogue's doctrine of love. It is the best of the wrong answers: the answer the book stages so it can climb past it. Diotima, when her turn comes, will even pause to correct this exact line: people are not really seeking their other half, she'll say, but the good. Aristophanes gives the famous answer; the dialogue gives a different one, and means us to feel the difference. His myth is also even-handed in a way later retellings often quietly drop. A halved creature might be hunting a half of either sex, so the same story explains attraction between the sexes and within them in one breath. The dialogue presents this plainly, in its own Athenian terms.
Chapter 4
Agathon: love the youngest and fairest god
"I maintain him to be the youngest of the gods, and youthful ever... the fairest and best in himself, and the cause of what is fairest and best in all other things."
The host speaks last before Socrates, and Agathon, the tragic poet whose victory the whole party celebrates, gives the showiest speech of the night. Where the others reasoned, Agathon performs. His speech is a glittering set-piece of balanced phrases and pretty images, and Socrates is going to tease, gently, that it was a speech about beautiful words more than about love.
His main claim is a direct contradiction of Phaedrus, and the clash is built on purpose. Phaedrus said Love was the oldest of the gods; Agathon says the opposite. "I cannot agree that he is older than Iapetus and Kronos," he says of love; "I maintain him to be the youngest of the gods, and youthful ever." Love is forever young, he argues, because love flees old age and keeps company with the young; and love is tender, delicate, the softest of things: he "walks not upon the earth" but in "the hearts and souls" of people, "which are of all things the softest."
From there Agathon piles every virtue onto love. Love is beautiful and supple and graceful; love is just, temperate, brave, and wise; love is the source of all the arts and the maker of peace among the gods. His refrain gathers it all up: love "is the fairest and best in himself, and the cause of what is fairest and best in all other things." It is a beautiful speech, and a hollow one: rhetoric at full sail, lovely and empty. And it sets up the puncture, because Agathon has just claimed that Love is beautiful and possesses every good thing, and Socrates is about to ask the one question that turns that praise inside out.
Chapter 5
Socrates turns the question over: love is what it lacks
"...every one who desires, desires that which he has not already, and which is future and not present, and which he has not, and is not, and of which he is in want;—these are the sort of things which love and desire seek?"
Socrates praises Agathon's speech, then quietly dismantles it with a handful of questions, the method he is famous for, turning a confident claim into a contradiction by asking only what it already implies. The questions are simple. Is love always love of something? Agathon agrees: yes, love is always love of some object. And does a person desire the thing they desire when they already have it, or when they don't? When they don't. People long for what they lack, not for what they already hold. "Every one who desires," Socrates draws out, "desires that which he has not already, and which is future and not present, and which he has not, and is not, and of which he is in want."
Now the trap closes. Agathon has agreed that love is love of beauty and goodness. And he has agreed that one desires only what one lacks. Put those together: if love is the desire for beauty and goodness, then love itself must lack beauty and goodness, must be, of all things, neither beautiful nor good. Agathon's gorgeous speech had it exactly backwards. Love is not the beautiful possessor of every virtue; love is the needy thing reaching for them. "I think you were right," Agathon admits, deflated. The whole genre of the evening, praising Love as a beautiful god, has just collapsed, because the thing they have been praising turns out, by their own admission, to be not a god and not beautiful at all.
Every speech before Socrates' praised love as a thing: a god, a force, a feeling, an object to point at and admire. Socrates has just shown that love can't be the admired object, because love is the wanting, and one only wants what one doesn't have. Love is a lack pointed at something, a direction rather than a destination. And once love is a direction, a desire aimed at beauty, the obvious next question is where that direction leads, and whether it can be aimed higher. To answer that, Socrates says, he has to stop speaking for himself, and report what he was once taught by someone wiser.
Chapter 6
Diotima: love as a daimon, and the ladder to Beauty itself
"He is a great spirit (daimon), and like all spirits he is intermediate between the divine and the mortal... he is the mediator who spans the chasm which divides them..."
Socrates says he learned the truth about love from Diotima (dee-oh-TEE-muh), a wise woman, a priestess from the town of Mantinea, who once questioned him exactly as he just questioned Agathon, and taught him what love really is. Diotima appears nowhere else in the historical record, only here, and most scholars think Plato invented her. So the most careful way to put it is that she is the priestess to whom, Plato has Socrates say, he owed the teaching. It is a striking authorial choice: Plato puts his deepest account of love in the mouth of a woman, at a men's drinking party, reported by a man who heard it from another man. The teaching is Plato's; the voice he gives it is hers.
Diotima starts where Socrates left off. If love is neither beautiful nor good, is it therefore ugly and bad? No, she says: it is in between, and that betweenness is the key to everything. Love is not a god, because the gods already possess beauty and goodness and so don't desire them; but love is not merely mortal either. Love is a daimon (a spirit, a go-between). "He is a great spirit (daimon)," she says, "and like all spirits he is intermediate between the divine and the mortal." (That parenthetical Greek word is Jowett's own; it's the one place his translation prints the Greek rather than rendering it, which is why it can be quoted here as his.) The daimon's job is to ferry messages across the gap: to carry "to the gods the prayers and sacrifices of men, and to men the commands and replies of the gods." Love is "the mediator who spans the chasm which divides them," because, she says, "God mingles not with man," and it is only through Love that the two ever meet.
She gives love a birth-story to match. Love was conceived at a feast for the birth of Aphrodite, the child of Plenty (resourcefulness, abundance) and Poverty (need, lack), who slept together that night. So love takes after both parents at once: always poor, needy, unfinished, like its mother; and always scheming, resourceful, reaching for the beautiful, like its father. That mixed parentage is why love is a lover of wisdom rather than wise: the gods are already wise and don't seek wisdom, the ignorant don't know they lack it and don't seek it either, and love, knowing it lacks and wanting to have, sits exactly in between, which is the position of the philosopher. Love and philosophy turn out to be the same shape of longing.
Then Diotima asks what love is really for. People say lovers seek the beautiful, she says, but press on it: what does a lover get if the beautiful becomes theirs? What love is ultimately after, she argues, is to possess the good forever; and "forever" is the giveaway. Mortal creatures reach for the one immortality available to them, which is to keep generating, to leave something of themselves behind. Some do it through the body, by having children; others, the higher sort, do it through the soul, giving birth to wisdom, virtue, poems, laws, lasting works and a lasting name. (This stretch of her speech, love as the desire for immortality pursued by "birth in beauty" in body or soul, is summarized here from the dialogue's argument rather than quoted line by line.) Love is the mortal grasping after the eternal in the only way it can.
Diotima then describes the climb the whole book has been building toward, the famous ladder of love. (The word "ladder" is the scholarly nickname; Plato's translator calls them "steps.") Each rung must be taken in order, from bottom to top. The destination at the top is Beauty itself: not any beautiful thing but the single changeless original behind all of them, the thing the last rung reaches.
Rung one: one beautiful body. Rightly guided, Diotima says, a person "should begin in youth to visit beautiful forms," and the first step is to fall for a single beautiful person, "to love one such form only." This is ordinary physical attraction, the kind everyone starts with, and the ladder does not sneer at it. It is the foot of the climb, and there is no climbing a ladder no one will step onto.
Rung two: all beautiful bodies. Then comes the first move upward. The lover notices that the beauty in this one body is the same beauty found in any other beautiful body; it was never unique to the beloved. Seeing that, the lover comes to love "all beautiful forms," not just the one. The pull has shifted from a single person to a quality many people share.
Rung three: beautiful souls. Higher still, the lover comes to see "that the beauty of the mind is more honourable than the beauty of the outward form," and so loves beautiful souls above beautiful bodies, caring more about a fine character than an ordinary face. Love has climbed from bodies to who a person is.
Rung four: beautiful laws and institutions. From admiring fine souls, the lover rises to admire the beauty of "institutions and laws," the customs and structures that shape good souls and order a whole society well. Love has climbed from individual people to the common goods that form them.
Rung five: the beauty of knowledge. Higher again, the lover comes to love the beauty of "the sciences," the beauty in knowledge itself, no longer tied to any single person or thing at all.
The top rung: Beauty itself. And at the very top, after climbing through bodies, souls, laws, and knowledge, the lover "will suddenly perceive a nature of wondrous beauty," not one more beautiful thing but beauty as such: "beauty absolute, separate, simple, and everlasting, which without diminution and without increase, or any change, is imparted to the ever-growing and perishing beauties of all other things." This is the Form of Beauty in Plato's larger system, the single perfect changeless original that every beautiful thing in the world borrows from and only ever copies. To stand at last "in the contemplation of beauty absolute" is, Diotima says, the best life a human being can live; the soul that reaches it brings forth not images of virtue but real virtue, and comes as near as a mortal can to the divine. Love started as the pull toward one pretty face and turns out to be the same motion as the philosopher's climb toward the eternally real.
The ladder is the most misread idea in the book after Aristophanes' myth. The Symposium elevates Diotima's account, not the search for the other half. Aristophanes gave the appealing wrong answer; Diotima gives the answer the dialogue endorses, and her ascent moves past any single beloved rather than hunting for one. The modern phrase "Platonic love," meaning warm affection with the physical part removed, gets this exactly backwards. The ladder does not suppress physical desire: it starts with it. The first rung is loving one beautiful body, and that bodily pull is the engine that powers the whole climb. Eros is not the thing renounced; it is the force that, schooled and redirected, carries the soul all the way up. "Platonic love" as chaste affection is a later distortion of a ladder whose bottom step is a body.
Chapter 7
Alcibiades crashes in: the ladder made flesh
"...he is exactly like the busts of Silenus, which are set up in the statuaries' shops... they are made to open in the middle, and have images of gods inside them."
Just as Diotima's speech has lifted the room into pure philosophy, the doors bang open and the party crashes back to earth. Alcibiades (al-sih-BY-uh-deez), the real one, the brilliant, beautiful, scandalous Athenian general and politician, staggers in drunk, garlanded with ribbons, propped up by a flute-girl, demanding more wine. Told that the rule of the evening is that each man must praise Love, he refuses: he won't praise Love with Socrates sitting right there, because Socrates would be jealous. Instead, he says, he will praise Socrates. What follows is the most personal, most loving, most devastating portrait of Socrates anywhere in Plato, delivered by a drunk man who clearly never got over him.
His central image is a joke that turns serious. Socrates, Alcibiades says, is like the little carved figures of Silenus (sy-LEE-nus, a snub-nosed, comically ugly satyr) found in the sculptors' shops, the kind "made to open in the middle, and have images of gods inside them." From the outside Socrates is ugly: bald, pug-nosed, shabby, endlessly ironic, forever claiming to know nothing. But pry him open, Alcibiades says, and inside are "divine and golden images" of such beauty that one glimpse is enough to be lost. He compares Socrates to Marsyas the satyr, who enchanted people with his flute; except Socrates needs no instrument: he enchants "with words only." The image is the whole dialogue's argument turned into a person: surface ugliness, hidden beauty, the real worth not where the eye looks. Socrates is the lesson that the body is not where the beauty is.
Then Alcibiades tells the room something he probably shouldn't, and it is the proof of everything. He had been certain, in his beautiful youth, that Socrates was seriously taken with his looks, and he decided to use that: he would trade his body for Socrates' wisdom, let the older man have him in exchange for being taught. So he engineered the chance, got Socrates alone, kept him late, and finally lay down all night beside him under a single cloak, offering himself. And nothing happened. Socrates was completely, serenely unmoved: "so superior to my solicitations, so contemptuous and derisive and disdainful of my beauty." In the morning, Alcibiades says, calling the gods to witness, "I arose as from the couch of a father or an elder brother." The most beautiful man in Athens could not seduce Socrates.
It is the dialogue's whole argument made flesh, and Alcibiades doesn't even fully realize what he's proving. He came to buy wisdom with his body (common love, the lowest rung, beauty mistaken for a currency), and Socrates, who has already climbed past bodily love toward the higher kind, simply wasn't for sale. The man who couldn't be seduced is the man who has started up Diotima's ladder and left the bottom step behind. Alcibiades meant to praise Socrates and accidentally illustrated the theory of love the room had just heard, by describing a man who lives it.
He adds one more kind of proof: Socrates' sheer physical mastery on military campaign, at the siege of Potidaea where the two served together. Socrates out-endured everyone: went without food when there was none, bore the cold when others couldn't. "No human being had ever seen Socrates drunk," Alcibiades marvels; the man could out-drink anyone and never show it. And in a brutal winter, "Socrates with his bare feet on the ice and in his ordinary dress marched better than the other soldiers who had shoes." The endurance is the outward sign of the inward ascent: a man who has mastered his appetites well enough to climb Diotima's ladder is, not coincidentally, a man who can go barefoot on ice and never be ruled by his own hunger or fear or wine.
So the dialogue ends not with the priestess's vision of Beauty absolute but with a drunk man's portrait of a barefoot philosopher. That is the point. The high abstraction of Diotima's ladder needed a body to land in, and Alcibiades supplies it without meaning to. The most beautiful man in Athens offered himself and was turned down by an ugly old man who had something better than beauty to want. The whole argument of the Symposium, that love rightly trained climbs past the body toward the eternal and that this is the best human life, stands there in the room in the person of Socrates: ugly Silenus on the outside, golden within, the man who praised Love best by becoming the thing it points at.