What is love according to Plato?
What is love? What does it feel like to fall in love or to be in love or to love somebody? These questions are pondered by many people for many centuries. There are obviously many types of love, the love that a person has for his or her parents, siblings, relatives, and pets, would be different than the love for his or her country, which would also be different than the love towards the opposite sex. In "The Symposium", Plato presented definitions of what love is in the opinions of Phaedrus, Pausanias, Eryximachus, Aristophanes, and Socrates. But what is the point that Plato is trying to get across when presenting these definitions? Is he saying of all the definitions, only one is correct in defining love? Or maybe that the definition of love is a composition of all the stated definitions or maybe none at all. An examination of each sophist in "The Symposium" and their definitions on love was evaluated for clarity and possibly answered the numerous questioned arise. The conversation regarding love begins with Phaedrus proclaiming, "...that Love is the eldest and noblest and mightiest of the gods, and the chiefest author and giver of happiness and virtue, in life and after death." (327) While, Pausanias argued that there a
Additionally, a person is required to see beyond the image presented by the body, and in order to complete such a task, a person need to ". " (333) As for me, I like Aristophanes's definition of love, ". use the beauties of earth as steps along which he mounts upwards for the sake of that other beauty, going from one to two and from two to all fair forms, and from fair forms to fair actions, and from fair actions to fair notions, until from fair notions he arrives at the notion of absolute beauty, and at last knows what the essence of beauty is. " (354) In the end, love is so abstract and is felt so differently for each person. However, love is indeed the "noblest and mightiest" and would bring happiness to some people in life and after death. For if they had understood him they would surely have built noble temples and altars, and offered solemn sacrifices in his honor, but this is not done. " (330) Eryximachus criticized Pausanias of a "lame ending" in his definition of love and thus added its deficiency using medicine and art as metaphors, ". " (335) Maybe Aristophanes is right, mankind does not understand the power of love, we only think that we do.
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