Love In Aristophane's In The Symposium

Symposium is a gathering hosted by Agaton to celebrate his first tragedy award for playwriting. Each of the guests gave a speech about love. The speech dealing with questions about what is love; interpersonal relationships through love; what types of love are worthy of praise; the purpose of love; and others. A series of speech about the love ended by the entry of Alcibiades, known as a wealthy aristocrat of Athens for his good-looking, and political career. He entered the discussion drunkenly supporting by a flute-girl, follow upon his speech about love. His unexpected entrance and speech dramatically changed the mood left from Diotima’s serious dialogue with Socrates about the ideal love. The first five speeches contradicted each other and were reconciled in Diotima’s speech, especially her speech about “Ladder if love” and “love of wisdom ”, which implies the delicate relationship between Alcibiades and Socrates.

Our human nature was not what we always thought of it to be, in simpler times two were made as one. We roamed the earth in unity with our other halves without the burden of trying to find them. However, Zeus did not find this to be in his best interest because of how we behaved so he split each being in two. As a result of this split we must now go about our lives in search of our other half. This is the speech that Aristophanes gave in Plato’s Symposium a book composed of various speeches from many different famous Greek people. Aristophanes’ view of love is compelling because it describes our very human nature to find our love, it justifies the reasoning of why there are different sexualities, and it gives an explanation as to why our bodies are the way that they are today.

The Symposium revolves around a Greek party made up of various men throwing around their views on love, building up to height of the evening by a speech from Socrates. Socrates knows the true way to obtain love, and tells of a tale between him and his mentor, Diotima. Through Diotima, Socrates is able to

thesis what Aristophanes defines as love. He believes that love is innate: " love is born into

Socrates sees love as something that is in between being beautiful and ugly and believes that love is a search for beauty and wisdom. Much like Diotima, Socrates presses Agathon to have him admit that love is not beautiful as it desires beauty, and one does not desire what one already has therefore it is not beautiful. Socrates view contrasts with that of Aristophanes from the benefits of love to the nature of love, as Socrates sees no benefits in something that is not beautiful. Love is seen as primarily a relational property by Socrates that holds between things rather than a desire or a need for another person. Love is not itself beautiful or good or anything specific as much as it is a relation that holds between the beautiful, the good, and those who

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.

In Plato’s Symposium, sequential speeches praise the god of Love, but they stray from truth until Diotima’s speech provides a permanent form in which love “neither waxes nor wanes” (Sym. 211A). Through the speeches, love shifts from identifying with the concrete to the abstract, but still ultimately advances goals of present: Phaedrus sees love as helping “men gain virtue,” Aristophanes as only a “promise” to restore humans to their “original nature” and Pausanias and Eryximachus have to use two changing notions of love (Sym. 180B, 193D). In contrast, Diotima relates love as the closest humans can come to immorality, a future goal motivating us to seek completeness and an uninhibited timelessness. She uses this shift to explain love’s

Plato is often criticized for preaching the gospel of me first. The claim is that his understanding of love is essentially egoistic, and this is seen as troublesome for the obvious ethical reasons. But there may be an even more troubling issue with Plato's understanding of love. In this paper I will attempt to argue that for Plato, love is in a sense impossible; that it can only ever be a desire for something out of one's grasp. The stakes are high but perhaps there is a way to understand this problem in a way that seems a little less damning. To do this I will analyze arguments from the Lysis and the Symposium, first questioning even the possibility of love and then attempt to show that love is in fact possible, all though in weaker

What is love? Is it an object? Is it a feeling? Is it even attainable? Love is everything, it is an object, it is an emotion, and it cannot be bought, stolen, given. Love can only be found. Love is discovered in the most unthinkable places during the most unimaginable times. It can never be predicted who you fall in love with or when you do but all you do know is that you are in love and you would give anything for that person, and for your love to always stay resilient through all other obstacles and distractions. In Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, Montague’s and Capulet’s are know and expected to hate each other until the miracle of love presented its self. Romeo is a Montague and Juliet is a Capulet. They both fell in love when

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

Plato’s Symposium attempts to define the eclectic theory of love, a theory that is often believed to be the universal principle that guides mankind’s actions. Plato introduces several narratives in the form of a dialogue that seek to characterize this multifaceted theory of Eros. The meaning of love naturally varies in each narrative. Yet, in this dialogue of love, Plato presents a metaphysical approach to understanding the ambiguous meaning of love. Ultimately, Plato values the perennial quest for knowledge above all else. In Symposium, Platonic love is exhibited in the relationship between virtue and desire, as expressed in Diotima’s ladder. Desire is the vehicle, or the means to an end. The six Athenians ultimately present different

Plato was a philosopher from Classical Greece and an innovator of dialogue and dialect forms which provide some of the earliest existing analysis ' of political questions from a philosophical perspective. Among some of Plato 's most prevalent works is his dialogue the Symposium, which records the conversation of a dinner party at which Socrates (amongst others) is a guest. Those who talk before Socrates share a tendency to celebrate the instinct of sex and regard love (eros) as a god whose goodness and beauty they compete. However, Socrates sets himself apart from this belief in the fundamental value of sexual love and instead recollects Diotima 's theory of love, suggesting that love is neither beautiful nor good because it is the desire to possess what is beautiful, and that one cannot desire that of which is already possessed. The ultimate/primary objective of love as being related to an absolute form of beauty that is held to be identical to what is good is debated throughout the dialogue, and Diotima expands on this description of love as being a pursuit of beauty (by which one can attain the goal of love) that culminates in an understanding of the form of beauty. The purpose of this paper is to consider the speeches presented (i.e. those of Phaedrus, Pausanias, Eryximachus, Aristophanes, and Agathon) in Plato 's Symposium as separate parts that assist in an accounting of the definition and purpose of platonic love.

Overdosing on the drug Love is something that many people do quite often without even knowing it, until they experience the withdrawal symptoms. Book IV of the Aeneid by Virgil focuses mainly on Queen Dido and Aeneas’s love relationship. After Queen Dido falls in love with Aeneas he leaves her in Carthage to go focus on his own duties. Dido doesn't take this very well and the withdrawal symptoms of the love they had are fatal. Love is just as powerful as a drug.

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.

In the Symposium on that night, Socrates’ speech is one of the most important of the night as he is clearly a central figure, admired by the other guests. Socrates begins by presenting his argument that if love is nothing, then it is of something, and if it is of something, then it is of something that is desired, and therefore of something that is not already possessed, which is then usually beautiful and good. Human beings begin by loving physical beauty in another person, then progress to love of intellect and from that level to see the connection among people and ultimately, the lover of beauty enjoys a kind of revelation or vision of universal beauty, which we find ourselves in the pursuit of during our own study of Plato’s work. The