Alcibiades contrasts with the other men at the symposium in many ways. Clearly, Alcibiades differs from the others in manner: drunk, he makes an emotional, confused and insulting speech. Meanwhile, the other men at the symposium have decided to refrain from heavy drinking in order to share insights in respectful, sober conversation.
Parallel to the respective behaviors of Alcibiades and the other men of the Symposium are the directions of their speeches. Phaedrus, Aristodemus, Pausanias, Socrates, Agathon, Aristophanes and Eryximachus have dedicated their symposium to the understanding and praise of Love. Each gives his own opinion of what Love is and how one should praise him, adding on to or modifying the view of another. For they share the common goal of making sense of the foreign and praise-worthy concept of Love. Alcibiades, however, does not have the same aim in his speech. Sharing his simultaneous "praise" and "reproach" of Socrates, Alcibiades haphazardly admits a range of personal emotions to his audience rather than answer a philosophical question (75). The relative aimlessness of Alcibiades' speech, next to the other men's, can be assumed to have resulted from an intoxicated state of mind. But it also reflects Alcibiades' comparably foolish decision to get drunk: he prefers the vulgar pleasures of alcohol, as well as the weakened mental state it entails, to his peers' sober search for an answer to a philosophical question, and the enlightened state to which it leads.
This lack of direction in Alcibiades' speech, foiled against the preceding speeches of the men at the symposium, points to inferiority in him as valuing vacancy over enlightenment. The subjects themselves that Alcibiades addresses - his disdain and love of Socrates - further highlight his deficiency. While the men of the Symposium speak of Love, a god who resides above men and enables their success, Alcibiades discusses Socrates - though a great philosopher, a single mortal man. Thus, Alcibiades focuses on a much more low-level topic than his peers. For in the world of the Symposium, value is placed on large, meaningful concepts over individual mortals. For example, one who truly loves beauty pursues it in all its forms, not just in one body, as Socrates claims Diotima says, just before Alcibiades' speech. "A lover...should love one body and beget beautiful ideas there; then he should realize that the beauty of any one body is brother to the beauty of any other...When he grasps this, he must become a lover of all beautiful bodies, and he must think that this wild gaping after just one body is a small thing and despise it" (57-58). Diotima then proceeds to say that the pursuit of beauty in all bodies is then a 'small thing' compared to beauty in its essence, or in all its forms. Alcibiades, revealing his emotions towards one man, Socrates, is caught up at a primary level then, according to Diotima. By placing Alcibiades' speech after Diotima lays out what should be valued and what should not, the Symposium encourages the reader to understand him as inferior to the other men, in that he values the individual mortal over the immortal concept.
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