Platos "The Symposium" Essay

For many, love is a constant search for happiness that never ends. The desire for love is longed for and pursued by every human. Many constantly seek it in self satisfaction, but are never fully satisfied with the love which they attain. The biggest reason for this is the distortion of the love which is sought for. True love is pure and selfless, the perfection of a person. It is truly something which must be cultivated in order to recognize and attain it. Love is a gift so sacred that it is worth living and dying for. “Love is patient, love is kind. It is not jealous, [love] is not

One of the most complicated experiences in life, love cannot be precisely defined, but some basic indications help to characterize the feeling. Love is a very deep, passionate affection one person has for another or a relationship of the same nature that implies a unique intensity of emotion. It requires an especially strong connection and compatibility between two people, usually identified by a total understanding and respect for each other and a fundamental similarity in ideology. Love can also be seen in the way it alters people’s normal behavior; when someone is in love, the object of their affection seems like the most important thing in the world, and they do extreme things for that feeling to be requited. Love cannot easily be

    Loving one that loves one back is an easy task to accomplish, but loving them without them loving one back is a degrading, embarrassing task and only the bold, courageous, and madly in love people would do such things. The following passage was extracted

“No matter how you define it or feel it, love is the eternal truth in the history of mankind" (Love Sessions, 2009). “Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always preserves”

In Plato's Symposium, Aristophanes and Alcibiades share a specific view on love, while Diotima and Socrates share another. Aristophanes sees love as a pursuit of wholeness and ultimately the desire for humans to be complete. Aristophanes explains the origins of how humans came to have two arms and two legs as well as one sex organ. Humans used to be creatures who existed with eight limbs as well as two sexual organs, however they were far too ambitious and had even made an attempt on the gods. When this event occurred, Zeus and other gods met in council, and in their meeting, they came to the conclusion to cut humans in half, to ensure they could still exist yet not be overly ambitious. Humans have been on the pursuit to find their literal other half ever since separation. In other words, to find their soulmate.

According to Aristophanes, love (eros) – the highest form of love that one human being can feel towards another – is the desire of dissected halves, one to another, for restoring the wholeness of the nature’s origin. I will explain what does Aristophanes mean by his metaphor and why do people fall in love.

If love longs to possess the good there are two possibilities, either man can come to possess the good or it can not. Now the good itself, the form of the good stands outside of the realm of human existence, it is not possible for men to see the form of the good. This can be derived from the worst

Plato was a philosopher who was born in Athens (470-390 BCE), and was also a student of Socrates. He felt that intelligence and one’s perception belonged to completely independent realms or realities. He believed that general concepts of knowledge were predestined, or placed in the soul before birth even occurred in living things. Plato believed that the cosmos was intelligible, and the the universe was mathematically understandable. He believes that mathematical objects could be seen as perfect forms. Forms, a doctoral of Plato, can be understood as an everyday object or idea, which does not, exists in the everyday realm, but merely is existent in the hypothetical realm or reality.

nature of love and argues that there should be a balance between the two. He elaborates on that

In Plato’s work Symposium, Phaedrus, Pausania, Eryximachus, Aristophane and Agathon, each of them presents a speech to either praise or definite Love. Phaedrus first points out that Love is the primordial god; Pausanias brings the theme of “virtue” into the discussion and categorizes Love into “good” one or “bad” one; Eryximachus introduces the thought of “moderation’ and thinks that Love governs such fields as medicine and music; Aristophanes draws attention to the origin and purposes

is beautiful. And if it is beautiful and good then it must be love, because all things

universal truths and pass it on to those who cannot see it. To Plato the above is his

Also, Love must be between wisdom and ignorance. She says Socrates mistook Love to be the beloved instead of the lover and that is why he thought Love to be beautiful and good. The loved thing is perfect and beautiful.

We only call a certain category of those in love, lovers (Symposium 7) and in contrast with what Aristophanes had said about lovers being in search of their other half, Diotima argues that lovers love what is good. After all, the aim of loving beautiful and good things, of course, is to possess them, because the possession of beautiful and good things is wisdom and with wisdom comes happiness and happiness is deep-down what everyone is ultimately in pursuit of.

Our souls divide as do crystals and stars, cells and plants. Those new souls are in turn transformed into two and so, within a few generations, people are scattered over a large part of Earth. In each life, we feel a mysterious obligation to find at least one of those Soul Mates. The Greater Love that separated them feels pleased with the Love that brings them together again.