Socrates 's View Of Love

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.

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

Agathon hosted a gathering for a small group of philosophers to talk about how they perceive love and what their own unique ideas are of beauty, virtue, honor, or anything else that may fall under the category of love. Eros, or Love, is a god that the philosophers have decided to praise with a speech of their own perspective. You get to see each philosophers different style and way of thinking within their speeches. All philosophers have agreed to drink while each other is speaking, but there is no pressure from one another or one’s self to drink excessively. The first to kick off the speeches is Phaedrus, an idealist, who believes that being shamed upon who you love most is of the highest caliber of embarrassment, even compared to relatives

Comparing Socrates' speech on love in the Symposium and what he says about wisdom in Apology, through the perspective of wisdom and ignorance, there is definite contradiction. The reason being that in Symposium, Socrates first implies the idea that people already have knowledge that they do not know they have, and that by question and answer, we can bring out that knowledge. In the Symposium, Socrates' speech on love is a retelling of a story he was told by Diotima. He claimed that love and beauty is only a concept to the ignorant and uneducated people. It is said that through question and answer, people can develop and become aware that love and beauty is a real being instead of an object. Socrates claimed that “[Diotima] [was] the one who

In James Baldwin’s collection of essays, The Fire Next Time, he discusses a range of topics stemming from the ultimate point that despite current implications and present maltreatment of African Americans in America, White Americans are not the only ones who contribute to the inferiority of Blacks. It is a collective action problem that has to be realized on both sides of this issue. In order for the nation to move on as a whole and get somewhere past this, Blacks and Whites have to work together in an attempt to realize that the past is a determinant of the future and shapes who we are as a people, and in order for equality to transform from a state of mind to a physical concept practiced by all, African Americans have to first accept their past in order to look to the future. Eleanor Roosevelt once said, “[n]o one can make you feel inferior without your consent” and these words ring true in reference to the oppression of African Americans by White Americans as displayed in The Fire Next Time.

In the Symposium Plato places Socrates in a dialogue with the goddess Diotima. She says two things of interest to this paper about love. Firstly, at 206a that humans when they love long to possess the good and do so for ever, and secondly that at 206b that "To love is to bring forth upon the beautiful, both in body and soul (Hamilton 558)." The first statement makes a claim about what love is, a desire to posses the good, and the second a statement about what love does, bring forth the beautiful. I will now briefly analyze both claims.

The ancient greeks language had many different words for love categorizing the different types. With the theme love makes people do crazy things, they specifically point out the love between man and women. In ancient greece, it was frowned upon to let you relationships with others to dictate your decisions and actions for the greater good. Family was very important, but not as important as the rules, laws, and the gods. In Ode 4, the chorus says “Love!-you wrench the minds of the righteous in outrage,

Baldwin writes his first essay in the book “The fire Next Time” for his nephew on advice for the survival of living in the society they are in. The race relations during this time period was of police brutality, riots, violent and nonviolent protests. Baldwin describes race relations in America through the meaning of acceptance, he writes to his nephew about what he has to do in the society he lives in to cope with living as a black person in America. Baldwin’s influences through the church and through religious backgrounds attained him the ability to relate his

In James Baldwin’s collection of essays in The Fire Next Time he expresses a call to action for Americans to abandon the belief that skin color separates people from one another and to unite together as a whole country. In the essays, he identifies religion as the source for this disillusioned belief that the whites’ skin makes them inherently better than African Americans merely because of their skin color. In participating in the Christian religion, he learns that the teachings to love one another go unpracticed towards those with a different skin color or of another religion. While religion benefits its members by preventing people from falling into the life of crime that prevails in the ghetto, its influence causes the members to develop

Alcibiades proves what Pausanias has said about Heavenly Love - it’s an attachment to the soul and intelligence of a man, which Alcibiades feels toward Socrates.

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.

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