Love Follows Love: Plato's Symposium and Ideal Eros
This paper analyzes Plato's Symposium through the unifying thesis that "love follows love" — that is, human love is always directed toward an abstract, ideal Love. By examining the successive speeches of Phaedrus, Pausanias, Eryximachus, Aristophanes, Agathon, and Socrates (relaying Diotima), the paper demonstrates how each account builds upon the last, collectively portraying love as a search for enlightenment and self-betterment. The paper argues that the dialogue's structure itself enacts this thesis, with each speaker's vision of eros flowing into the next, culminating in Socrates' definition of love as a pursuit of the eternal good — a pursuit that is never fully satisfied until it possesses that good in eternity.
- Introduction: Love Follows Love: Thesis: human love pursues ideal, abstract Love
- Phaedrus, Pausanias, and Eryximachus on the Nature of Love: First three speakers define love as universal principle
- Aristophanes and the Comic Dimension of Eros: Comedy broadens the vision of love's incompleteness
- Agathon and Socrates: Building Toward the Ideal: Agathon's poetry springboards Socrates' deeper inquiry
- Diotima's Teaching and Alcibiades' Arrival: Love as intermediary between mortal and eternal
- Conclusion: Human Love and Its Eternal Pursuit: All speeches converge on love's eternal, unfulfilled pursuit
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What makes this paper effective
- The paper establishes a clear, recurring thesis — "love follows love" — and traces it consistently across every speech in the Symposium, giving the analysis structural coherence.
- It uses the literal narrative frame (Aristodemus following Socrates to Agathon's banquet) as a concrete illustration of an abstract philosophical claim, grounding the argument effectively.
- The paper acknowledges the tonal diversity of the text, treating Aristophanes' comic register not as a contradiction but as a reinforcement of the broader thesis, which shows nuanced reading.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper demonstrates thematic synthesis across multiple primary-source passages. Rather than summarizing each speech in isolation, the writer shows how the speeches accumulate meaning — each speaker's account of love becomes evidence for the overarching claim that human love strives toward an ideal. This technique of reading a text's structure as itself an argument is a strong undergraduate literary-philosophical method.
Structure breakdown
The paper opens with a thesis statement framed around a textual example, then moves chronologically through the Symposium's speakers, devoting a paragraph to each major voice. It closes by returning to the opening metaphor (Aristodemus following Socrates) and synthesizing all the speeches into Socrates' final definition of love. The conclusion is tight and mirrors the introduction, giving the essay a satisfying circular form — appropriate for a paper arguing that love itself moves in circles.
Introduction: Love Follows Love
One may gauge the seriousness of Plato's Symposium from the title itself, which means literally "drinking party." Of course, like all drinking parties, there is bound to be absurdity mixed with philosophy — but the overall mood is light and the atmosphere celebratory. For these reasons, it is appropriate that the theme of the Symposium is love, for if there is one subject that captures the ethereal, the whimsical, the effervescent, and the practical all at once, it is eros.
This paper will show how "love" is examined in the Symposium in such a way that we might suggest — just as Socrates states that "to the feasts of the good unbidden go" (172) before he drops off "in a fit of abstraction" — so too does love follow love. In other words, Plato uses his characters as tools to offer several accounts of love and show its true meaning as a search for enlightenment and the betterment of oneself. Dialogue is a process, and the true meaning of love is reflected in the way characters successively offer accounts of what love is: a search for enlightenment. The thesis of this paper is that everyone's concept of love is different, yet each concept is related as part of a total chimera of "love." Each idea, just like each speech, flows into the next, and Socrates sums it up best — love is concerned with obtaining the eternal good. In other words, love in man follows love in the abstract.
To further explain this thesis, consider the example with which we begin. Socrates is on his way to a banquet — Agathon's, a fine man, as Socrates describes him, for which reason Socrates himself is dressed finely, as Aristodemus observes. Socrates, beloved of Plato, is on his way to dine with one who is beloved of himself, and on his way he meets another who is both lover and beloved and is subsequently invited to join. Upon arriving, Aristodemus is welcomed by Agathon: though not personally invited, Aristodemus is assured by Agathon that he did in fact go out looking for him to extend the invitation. So we see how love, represented by Agathon, draws love — or we might say that love, as represented by Aristodemus, follows love as represented by Socrates. In either case, like knows like, and love follows love just as good follows good — which is implicit in Socrates' opening proverb. Here we see a literal representation of the paper's thesis.
The idea that love follows love is extended further by the very structure of the Symposium: each guest gives a speech about the nature of love. Love is the theme of the evening, and, literally, love follows love in speech after speech.
Works Cited
Plato. Symposium. Trans. B. Jowett. Project Gutenberg EBook. Web. 21 Nov. 2011.
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