Love as a Higher Form Essay

It can be remembered that his speech described love in several ways. In his speech, he identified love as beautiful, wise, and young, sensitive, as well as the object of desire. Socrates then contradicts Agathon’s description, making suggestions that Agathon and the love he describes is not really love itself but the object of love’s desire. He compares himself to love that is fluid that is evidenced by his grace, a trait that is commonly accepted to belong to Love alone. Agathon also claims that love is fair and should be treated fairly as well.

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.

Aristophanes defines love as the “pursuit of wholeness,” implying that true love eventually leads you to goodness. He goes on to say that once one finds their other half, they are “overwhelmed, to an amazing extent, with affection, concern, and love.” This rather positive view of love is quite opposite from Ovid’s view. Ovid treats love like a realist, recognizing that it can be heartbreaking, even going on to compare it to war. Ovid also warns his readers about the dangers of love by saying “if you’re uncertain at all, never step over the sill” (183). In other words, he is encouraging them to love rationally, because he is aware of the dangers of heartbreak. In fact, Ovid wrote an entire book about how to deal with heartbreak, titled “The Remedies for Love.” There is nothing in Aristophanes speech, or The Symposium itself that mentions how to deal with getting over someone, further emphasizing the idea that the greeks had a rather idealistic view of the emotion, not fully recognizing its detrimental effects.

Augustine is guided by the neoplatonic tradition that everything that exists is good. Those lower in the scale of being are not bad or evil, but are only less complete and far from created in the image of God who is eternal and unchanging. All creation is created in the existence of God, and thus they must seek a desire to return to God. Plato’s Symposium and Augustine’s Confessions share parallels and contrasts in certain aspects of this desire, despite the two writer’s difference in time.

He comes in and responds to Phaedrus’ point that rather than being an ancient god, love is “the youngest” god and is “forever young” (Symposium 195b). Youth is one out of four attractive characteristics of love that should be praised. Love is also delicate, as it does not “step on men’s skulls” nor on the ground, living in the minds of men and gods (Symposium 195e). Lastly, love can familiarize itself with the mind and the world in order to adapt when necessary.

Simultaneously to the conventionalization of the troubadour love poetry, also the laws of love were organized and classified through the imitation of Ovid (Mott 5). It is from his Ars Amatoria that the idea of love as a virtue and art originally arose (Mott 55).

In the Greek Era, many philosophers tried to define love, especially one that was timeless. Throughout literature, there have various perspectives on love. In The Iliad, which was during the Greek era, there was greater importance on honor than love. In The Confessions, which was written during the early Christian age, there was a great importance for love of God. In Gilead, which is a modern novel, there is great importance for love in general, especially that for family. Out of all the Socratic definitions of love in The Symposium, Diotima had the most universal definition of love, which was “the desire to possess the good forever” (206A). To possess the good forever, one must reproduce with their body or reproduce with their soul. Diotima’s idea of the desire to possess the good forever through reproduction of the body and of the soul is present in all three sections of literature including The Iliad, Confessions and Gilead.

In Aristophanes’ speech he discussed that love is a desire that we have. He goes on by telling a story about the world with three genders, male, female and the common sex. Each of them were powerful and was ambitious and because of that they attacked the Gods. Since Zeus was not happy and as a punishment he split them up in half. Because of this the creatures became half as powerful and changed to male and female. With them being separated it causes distress in them and wanting to embrace the other half. When one was gone they tried to find another one to embrace them. Since they really want to be together it is a desire to be whole. I agree with his notion that love is a desire to be whole. When it comes to love its is usually two people that want to be together. Being

The Ancient Greeks had around 30 different words to describe various types of love. The seven main ones were agape (love of humanity), storge (familial love), pragma (enduring love), philautia (self-respect), philia (love after a shared experience), eros (romantic love), and ludus (childish love). Because these forms of love are meant for different people, they are expressed differently. For instance, familial and enduring love involve cooperation, support, loyalty, and care among the people sharing those relationships. However, romantic and childish love are are not as serious, and as a result, these types of love do not last long.

Plato had an optimistic view of love and its enlightenment. The Symposium describes the process of finding love for beauty by initially loving the physical beauty of a single person, then the physical beauty of multiple people, the beauty of the soul, the beauty of laws and institutions, the beauty of knowledge, and finally the love of the beauty of the world. “He must grasp that the beauties of the body are as nothing to the beauties of the soul…” Through Diotima’s lesson to Socrates, we’re presented with this concept that all bodies are similar and it’s foolish to love just one body, but instead to love all the world. Contrary to Plato’s view of spreading “universal love”, Freud suggests picking wisely after evaluation of what each person has to offer you. “If I love someone, he must deserve it in some way.” Freud introduces us to two different kinds of love, sexual and familial love. He describes sexual love as the human discovery of fulfilling human’s sexual desire and discovering the way to

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

Understanding love is an age old problem that many people have tried to answer. Wojtyla breaks it down into three separate parts that work together. According to Wojtyla, love is, “based on particular attitudes toward the good, adopted by each of them individually and by both jointly” (p. 73) This seems simple enough and although it does not fully complete the idea of love, it is one of the major aspects. Betrothed love is different than the love that a mother may have for her child. St. Monica truly love St. Augustine and wished goodwill for him but this was not always a mutual love. Love is especially applicable to me because it is something that I hope eventually find as I hope to marry. Before reading

Love is difficult to define, difficult to measure, and difficult to understand. Love is what great writers write about, great singers sing about, and great philosophers ponder. Love is a powerful emotion, for which there is no wrong definition, for it suits each and every person differently. Whether love is between family, friends, or lovers, it is an overwhelming emotion that can be experienced in many different ways.

Love has many different meanings to different people. For a child, love is what he or she feels for his mommy and daddy. To teenage boy, love is what he should feel for his girlfriend of the moment, only because she says she loves him. But as we get older and "wiser," love becomes more and more confusing. Along with poets and philosophers, people have been trying to answer that age-old question for centuries: What is love?

Love is an abundant emotion that has different degrees. There is familial love, friendly love, unconditional love, and of course romantic love. Romantic love will be the superstar of this article. Romantic love may be around every corner whether between an old couple or a young teenage romance. However, love is not the easiest thing to attain. It is such a simple concept, though a difficult thing to actually have a person’s hands on.