This essay examines the nature of true love as presented in Plato's Symposium, tracing the progression of definitions offered by the dialogue's participants toward Socrates' culminating vision. Drawing on the myth of divided souls, the concept of Platonic love, and Socrates' account of his dialogue with Diotima, the paper argues that Socrates reframes earthly love — whether physical, homoerotic, or familial — as a series of necessary but insufficient stages. The ultimate goal is not physical union or the procreation of children, but the procreation of wisdom and moral understanding. The essay also examines Socrates' rejection of Alcibiades as a concrete illustration of this higher conception of love.
The paper demonstrates effective comparative analysis within a single text: it systematically contrasts the views of multiple speakers in the Symposium before showing how Socrates' position synthesizes and surpasses them. This technique — surveying competing positions before elevating the central argument — is a useful model for philosophy and literary analysis essays.
The essay opens by contextualizing Greek vocabulary for love and introducing the Symposium's setting. It then moves through the dialogue's competing definitions, pausing on the myth of the divided soul, before pivoting to Socrates' account of Diotima and his hierarchy of love. The final section uses the Alcibiades episode as a concrete illustration of Socrates' completed philosophical position, ending with a synthesis of physical and intellectual love as a ladder toward wisdom.
Rather famously, the ancient Greeks had multiple words for different aspects of the emotion that 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 more than simply the relationship between earthly individuals. Instead, Socrates suggests an individualistic pursuit of love by the soul — one in which cleaving 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 physical and spiritual love in the world. For Socrates, all aspects of earthly love are merely simulacra: necessary but ultimately replaceable forms of the true love that the soul seeks in relation to something higher. This love is procreative not of children or desire, but of wisdom.
The Symposium proceeds in a dramatic fashion. Its first extended definition of love significant to the definitions that follow begins with a comparison between the love of men and women, asserting ultimately that the love of men is spiritual rather than purely physical in its inclination. Later, this becomes clarified by a very beautiful myth told by one of the participants: that love is defined as the soul cleaving to the individual from whom the body was once separated at the beginning of creation.
Rather than a purely physical view of love, this myth suggests that love's physical acts carry a strong spiritual component that cannot be ignored. However, in such a conceptualization, the most powerful form of love and the unity it represents are still expressed through two individuals in a state of physical, rather than purely intellectual, congress.
Interestingly, as a counterpoint to conceptualizing love only in a homoerotic fashion, Socrates speaks of his own previous dialogue with a woman called Diotima 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 — a higher understanding. Narratively speaking, this is not unlike the way the symposium itself progresses: moving, with some interruptions, 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' notion of what came to be called Platonic love is thus not an asexual form of love. Rather, it uses sexuality to find something beyond the mere enjoyment of the physical — something that ultimately does not even require the apprehension of another individual as a unique individual, but extends to the appreciation of all humanity. This is why Socrates rejected Alcibiades' physical advances. Socrates has no need to appreciate Alcibiades' physical beauty, or even the beauty of Alcibiades as a singular human being. Rather, he has extended his understanding of love within his soul to a love that generates wisdom and serenity, rather than the heat of desire.
You’re 54% through this paper. Sign up to read the remaining 2 sections.
Sign Up Now — Instant Access Already a member? Log inAlways verify citation format against your institution’s current style guide requirements.