¶ … nature of true love in Plato's "Symposium"
Rather famously, the ancient Greeks had multiple words for different aspects of the emotion we English-speaking moderns now term "love." In Plato's dialogue "The Symposium," defining the exact nature of love during a drinking party grips the philosophical imagination of Socrates and numerous other revelers at the house of a man named Agathon. The drinking party includes many individuals exposing their different ideas about the true nature of love. However, only Socrates offers a view of love that encompasses not simply the relationship between earthly individuals. Instead, Socrates suggests an individualistic pursuit of love by the soul, where it cleaves to the good in a non-sexual, and what came to be known as a 'Platonic' form of affection, is the ultimate goal of exercising in physical and spiritual love in the world. For Socrates, all aspects of earthly love are merely simulacra, or necessary but ultimately replicable forms of the true love that the soul cleaves for in relation to something higher and is procreative not of children or desire, but wisdom.
The "Symposium" proceeds in a dramatic fashion. Its first extended definition of love that is significant to the definitions that follow, begins with a comparison between the love of men and women, asserting finally that the love of men (because it is spiritual rather than purely physical in its inclination). Later, this becomes clarified by very beautiful myth told by one of the participants, of how love is defined as the...
However, in such a conceptualization, the most powerful form of love and the unity of love are still expressed through the medium of two individuals in a state of physical, rather than purely intellectual congress.
Interestingly enough, as a kind of antidote to conceptualizing love only in a homoerotic fashion, Socrates speaks of his own, previous dialogue between himself and a woman called Diatoma, when discussing his profound revelation about the nature of love. Socrates suggests that human relationships with other humans are simply preparations for the soul's casting off of the material world and entering into a divine congress with something better, with a higher understanding. This is, narratively speaking, not unlike the way the symposium itself progresses, with some hiccups, no pun intended, as it moves from an earthly conception of physical love, to a love that encompasses both the physical and the spiritual, and finally to Socrates' understanding of the physical world as simply a preparation for something higher.
Socrates states that earthly love can take many forms, from the love for money, even for the love of one's own physical health, and the higher love of beauty and the desire to procreate children. But what these forms of love merely strive for is…
