Essay Plato's Symposium

Compare and contrast the ways McEwan and Fitzgerald present the complexities of human love in light of this comment.

every human being". He is expressing that the phenomenon of love is as natural and

Purposely difficult and intentionally obsessive, Plato’s Phaedrus is an exceedingly difficult read that defies all conventional logic as a piece of discourse. The text is extremely subjective, open to interpretation and individual creativity as to what or whom the narrative is about. Written by Plato, a close disciple of Socrates, this text is set along the Illissus river where Phaedrus and Socrates meet for a day of speech, debate, rhetoric and okay…flirting. Phaedrus leads of the day and recites a speech by his close friend Lysias, who Phaedrus considers to be a top speechmaker. Socrates then, after chiding by Phaedrus unleashes two speeches of his own that overshadow and refute Lysias claim so boldly that Phaedrus is so taken by the

In the final scene when Louis Levy speaks of the capacity of love I feel he is saying that we as humans have this natural need for an emotional attachment in order to feel complete as a person. Everyone on this earth is looking for love and acceptance and this starts from birth. A baby requires love, attention, physical touch and maternal nurturing along with biological needs in order to survive. This is carried on throughout out a person’s life. If one can look back as far as possible into their childhood they will come to find that love from another being is essential to growth because this will be the basis of what kind of adult you will grow

In the allegory Socrates gives an account of a man that breaks free from his bonds and makes his way out of the darkness into the outside world. His story represents a man's journey to enlightenment. To reach enlightenment a man must use education to break the bonds of ignorance and direct his sight towards true things that originate from the "Form of Good." Man already has the capacity to see, he only needs guidance. Guidance is the job of the philosopher kings. After these kings have reached enlightenment it is their duty to travel back into the cave and educate some of the ignorant masses.

Plato’s ‘Divided Line’ is a model indicating not only levels of knowledge, but basically levels of

Platonic love only partially identifies with Pausanias’s theory. Pausanias’s speech and the speeches of the rest

15th Century philosopher, Francois De La Rochefund stated, “There is only one kind of love, but there are a thousand different versions.” In The Four Loves, C. S. Lewis presented

Sara Brill, who declares that it simply provides a vehicle through which Socrates can present his ideas to the Greek audience, notwithstanding his dislike of imitations. She claims that while Socrates denigrates the use of physical sense and imagery, he recognizes that his companions’ understanding is dependent upon the use of colorful imagery throughout The Republic. In The Limits of Human Life, Brill even goes so far as to say that “the Republic is in many ways a dialogue about vision and the terrains that afford it” (Brill 84). She is justified in this; the theory of the divided line, arguably the cornerstone of the Republic, is itself illustrated by the Allegory of the Cave, in which the ability to see is a metaphor for one’s level of comprehension.

In the Symposium, written by Plato, Socrates and others engage in a dialogue in the home of Agathon on love. Instead of "singing the honours" (94) of love like the other participants, Socrates uses a retelling of a discussion that he had with a woman named Diotima to tell the audience of what he perceives to be the truth of love.

the idea of love and in lines 1-5 he I think is trying to say it's

will take loving action toward a person whether he or she likes them or not. Genuine love implies commitment and the exercise of wisdom. "The common tendency to confuse love with the feeling of love allows people all manner of self-deception."(p. 119) Love is the act of going the extra mile to make something work. He also calls it a form of courage. "If an act is not one of work or courage, then it is not an act of love. There are no exceptions."(p. 120) Primarily the work is the attention one gives to the one he or she loves. This attention includes "true listening." The courage comes into play because one should always fear the risk of loss, commitment, and confrontation.

In M. Scott Peck’s work, The Road Less Traveled, he says “Love is too large, too deep ever to be truly understood or measured or limited within the framework of words” (81). He also seeks to define love as “The will to extend one's self for the purpose of nurturing one's own or another's personal growth” (81). For Peck, he recognizes that the nature of love is so mysterious that a true satisfactory definition of love has yet to be created and suspects his own definition to be inadequate. He also recognizes that love is categorically vast in that it is divided into eros, philia, agape, and others.

In many of Plato’s works, he discusses Socrates’ lessons and quarrels with questions of the immaterial and fascinating, specifically those of knowledge in The Republic and in the Meno. Plato begins his description of knowledge in The Republic with the definition of the divided line as a means of coming to know the Forms. Visually, Plato seeks to divide the metaphorical line “in the same ratio as the line” and then “in terms of relativity and clarity,” so the simplest steps have the largest section of the line and subsequently difficult topics have smaller sections of the line (Plato, The Republic, 509d). The steps to this enlightenment follows the path of imagination,

Furthermore, “the spirited part is a third element in the soul that is by nature the helper of the rational part”; and it must be different from the first, as “even in small children, one can see that they are full of spirit right from birth”; it is “the part that is angry without calculation”. Individual justice is the embracing and ordering virtue that steadies the struggling tripartite. “One who is just does not allow any part of himself to do the work of another part. … He binds together those parts and any others there may be in between, and from having been many things he becomes entirely one, moderate and harmonious”.