The symposium Plato nature of love

Aristophanes had a mind to praise love in a different way whereby he argued unlike Eryximachus and Pausanias that humankind has never understood the supremacy of love for if he surely did understand, then he would have built noble alters and temples and also offer solemn sacrifices in his honor. He first explains the nature of man and what made it change. He explains that original human was different from the present man and the sexes were three and not two which included: The man, the woman and the combination of the two whereby nothing else but the name survives.

The sun, moon, and earth were their parents respectively, and they were all round, and they could budge round and round because they resembled their parents. They had great might and vigor and awfully enough they could attack the gods, i.e., the tales of Otys and Ephialtes who, as described by Homer would have laid hands upon the mighty gods in heaven which raised alarm of whether the councils should murder them and wipe out the race by use of thunderbolts as was the case with the giants.

Zeus revealed a way which was men to be slashed into two which would lead to the diminishing of their might and as a result they would boost in numbers which would render them more productive after all. They were to stroll on two legs and in a vertical position, and if they continued to be impudent and not calm them, they would be spilled again to leap about on a single leg. After the division each part of man preferred his other half came together and threw an arm around each other entangled in joint embraces while yearning to develop into one, they began to pass away from starvation and self-neglect since they wouldn’t do anything while they were away from each other.

Zeus made up a new plan in pity of man due to the rapid annihilation that was going on at that time. This led to the male generating in the female to breed by the mutual embraces and the outcome which was a race could continue and man could go on with the business of life.

In his part, Socrates confesses that he plays no part in trying to praise love since he knows nothing at all on how to give a eulogy and he had thought the best way to give a eulogy was, to tell the truth as far as the subject is concerned.  He argues that all the speeches have praised love and love may impress the ignorant. By asking Agathon whether love is the love of something or other, Agathon agrees that love certainly loves for something and further Socrates argues that what people desire, people should continue to have that thing in the future, and not in the present.

Agathon had suggested that the gods are organized through a love of beautiful things and from this, Socrates had Agathon agree that love must be whole without beauty and adds that if good things are beautiful, then the love must be lacking in good things. With all these, there is a relationship between the way Aristophanes myth of men becoming whole again and that of Socrates where he goes on to question Agathon. The two build an affiliation that there seem to be something that man looks for in his partner which he lacks himself, i.e., Socrates leaps from the claim that love’s desire for beauty suggests that it lacks beauty to the claim that love is whole without beauty.

The mysteries of love Diotima reveals to Socrates include: love is one of the links between the sensible and the eternal world. In that love is a great spirit also known as a daemon and like all spirits, he is an intermediate between the divine and the mortal. In other words, god mingles through love. She goes ahead and tells Socrates that if love embraces every desire for good and happiness, all men may be called lovers, and we seem to have wandered far indeed from the common man’s idea of love. She argues that those who are pregnant in the body only, betake themselves to the woman and beget children-this is the persona of their love. She defines the power of love as being a mediator in which it takes sprayers and sacrifices of men to the gods and takes commands and replies of the gods to men.

Furthermore, she answers Socrates question of who are the lovers of wisdom that love is a philosopher or lover of erudition and being a lover of knowledge is in a means between the wise and his mother, poor and foolish for wisdom is one of the most beautiful things and love is of the beautiful too. She convinces Socrates that love is not a divinity since is beautiful qualities that God is believed to posses

In the context of Plato’s theory of forms, the escalation of the lover to the absolute form of Beauty which begins with physical Beauty as the main object of desire during the first level of ascent whereby beauties of the lower levels partake in Beauty as they are derived from the same source.

A form is a non-material and intangible matter which can be used to offer information on authentic knowledge. It differs from the ordinary object in the sense that: it neither does nor exists within any period, they have no spatial dimensions, they have no orientation in space, and they are unchanging. The relation between absolute beauty and the forms is that a body can function as a distorted image of real Beauty whereby it coincides with Plato’s first stage in the theory of forms which has to do with vision: the sight of something.