Socrates' speech in the Symposium is urging us on in the direction of an impersonal vision, promising us that in losing our personal attachments, even our attachment to our own self, we will achieve a knowledge that will make us over in its light—the perfect proportions of the True-the Beautiful-the Good assimilated into our knowing minds, knowledge become aretē, which is what wisdom is. The implication is that it was toward this vision that a young man's love for Socrates was meant to take him. For here is where it took Plato, who, in loving Socrates, managed to carry philosophy, Socrates' own love, far past the point that Socrates had reached. To love Socrates is to have been impregnated with his intuitions—the Symposium is filled with references to impregnation—in the manner in which Plato was. The very proof of this impregnation—the living child, as it were—is the ideas that Socrates is given to speak in the Symposium. Because Plato loved Socrates, because he—and not Alcibiades—was Socrates' ideal erômenos, just as Socrates was Plato's ideal erastês, Plato has given birth to a unity of metaphysics and epistemology and aesthetics and ethics that lay implicit in Socrates' intuitions.

 - Rebecca Goldstein, Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won't Go Away

道理我都懂，yet for a second I was like, whaaat? 今天以前从没这么想过，但感觉往后我看到《会饮篇》（以及其他柏拉图对话）的时候再也没法不想起“这是柏拉图对苏格拉底爱情的结晶”了（

听标题以为这本书是对柏拉图对话录的现代戏仿，以柏拉图的格式探讨现代社会的问题。看了半截感觉这么说也没错，但微妙地有些失望。作者主要的写作目的似乎是通过写柏拉图不知怎么来到了现代美国以后与遇到的各界人士的互动来做哲普，突出的就是一点：Why Philosophy Won't Go Away（Because it's still relevant, in case you haven't noticed. 写的倒还是不错的，不过我想看的不是这个。大概我不在目标读者群范围内吧，因为我并不需要谁来告诉我为什么柏拉图的方法和思想依然在被广泛地运用。我是想听听柏拉图对于某些新近出现的问题的看法的来着……比如说代孕合法化，designer babies伦理论，或者谷歌脸书掌握的海量用户信息有多可怕。也不能说作者完全没谈这类问题吧，但感觉只是一笔带过……好吧，只能怪我自己看到标题就产生了错误的期待了（所以说我想看的那本书到底有人写过吗？