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Love In The Symposium

Love as a strong feeling is a subject of varied interpretations for many people across the world and has been for many centuries. Philosophy, that old realm of reason and logic, has also been central to the explanation of what love really is and how it originated. Philosophers have attempted to explain the nature of love and what keeps lovers going. No work best epitomises the centrality of love more that The Symposium, Plato’s classic dialogue that demonstrated what various philosophers and scholars of the day thought about love and what it really entailed. During the dinner party in honour of the playwright Agathon, the attendants including Phaedrus, Pausanias, Eryximachus, Aristophanes, Agathon and Socrates effectively show in their various parts how the physical and spiritual aspects of love differ based on their own observations or heard experiences (Plato, n.d). The dialogue also provides an important distinction of the social practicality of sexual relationships and their metaphysical aspects. These philosophers and thinkers demonstrate in Plato’s Symposium the centrality of love, beginning with how differently it is conceptualized by those who experience it.

Phaedrus being the originator of the idea according to the one who recounts this dinner party, begins by praising love as being oldest of all the gods and the one that was responsible for the most virtuous actions that were done by people (Plato, n.d). According to Phaedrus, true love has historically been seen in varied tales and lived experiences. The god of love has been seen to consistently reward acts of true love especially when the lovers experience it and pay the ultimate price—death. The ones who had been rewarded according to him were rewarded with chances at second life or immortality. The distinction that Phaedrus provided in this part of the dialogue was of the fact that physical acts of love could be compensated for by spiritual rewards that were availed by the god of love. The grandest of emotions that brought forth the purest virtue among people according to Phaedrus was love.

The second speaker, Pausanias, immediately finds fault in the first interpretation of love by Phaedrus. Pausanias argues for the need to distinguish between the base desires of common earthly love from the purity of heavenly love (Plato, n.d). In his estimation then, Phaedrus had erred in indiscriminately praising love without finding it necessary to distinguish between heavenly and earthly love. Heavenly love in this regard, is the one that is noble and is faithful for man. It does not concentrate on the weaknesses of man but rather revels in his intelligence and ability. The other type of love, earthly love, is cruder and focuses on the body rather than the soul. It is this type of love, explains Pausanias, that is responsible for the sexuality that people display in varied cultures. Furthermore, Pausanias explores the element of honour and dishonour in love, saying that some people deserve of love and loyalty because they have shown that they can love and be loyal. Those who betray their loves are shamed while the ones who demonstrate virtue in love are rewarded. His explanation is an intersection of both the spiritual and physical elements of love. The ones who demonstrate purity in earthly love of men, boys, girls and women are the same ones who deserve the same from the ones they honour with their virtue.

Eryximachus, the third speaker, has a more elaborate thinking when it comes to love. It is his estimation that love is the source of order and moderate acts, and this is true in people and all things alike. According the Eryximachus, love can be seen in the harmony that is demonstrated by all things including art, music and even medicine (Plato, n.d). He sees love as a physical reconciliation of the spiritual elements for a harmonious whole. He seems to be in agreement with Pausanias in the binary distinction of love, but insists that the different elements in love always strain to attain harmony and perfection. It is little wonder then that the varied elements of love, art medicine or music always strive for the good at the expense of the bad. Disharmony in love, he argues, leads to the many disorders that lack of love exemplify. He offers the example of harmony in music, saying that the opposites do not work like agreements of disagreements but rather they strive for perfection, harmony and truth. Love, in his eyes, does not intend to attain chaos and disorder as its ultimate goal (Plato, n.d). It rather aims at attaining harmony and happiness. Consequently then, just and temperate love has the biggest power, and it is a physical demonstration of the same that results in a united accord with the spiritual realm of the gods as well.

Aristophanes speaks next, and in the true spirit of his comic tragedy, provides a story that recounts the nature of love and what brought it about. His mythical conceptualization of love details the fact that once, humans had four legs, four arms, two heads, four eyes, four ears and so on. Some of these people were males, complete with two sets of male sexual organs, some were female and yet others were hermaphrodites. These had one male set and one female set of sexual organs. In essence then, Aristophanes suggests that we actually were twice the people we are today, and this drew the jealousy of the gods. They eventually decided to split us all into half to reduce our power so we would not overthrow them (Plato, n.d). This action by Zeus was the beginning of the pursuit for love. While earlier, man could find love within and be satisfied sexually in whichever way he or she preferred, this was not possible anymore. Man then had to perpetually run after the other half, hoping to join with them and feel complete. According to this perspective then, love is borne out of chaos and the relentless pursuit to quell the chaos. When the man or woman finds the other half, the chaos subside and they call it love.

Agathon then speaks, revealing in his speech, the tender and soft nature of love. In his opinion, love resides in the tender parts. Love itself is tender and has no place where there is violence and war. His flowery depiction of love is emphasized by the fact that no one forces another to love them—love is a consequence of one’s free will and decision. Forced, love will do the one thing it does best in such circumstances—flee. According to Agathon, love is grand because of the manner in which it drives away war, brings understanding and make people sit in a discussion or a banquet (Plato, n.d). It is the nature of love to reside in places where there is peace, quiet and tranquillity. Love brings people together and brings out the best in them. It saves, instils hope, encourages and reconciles. For this man Agathon, love is all about good and calm.

The final speaker is Socrates. Like Aristophanes, Socrates draws from an experience elsewhere to explain what he understands about love. His entire belief on love is founded on what he learnt from Diotima of Mantinea, a wise woman (Plato, n.d). In his estimation, all that has been said may be true, but it is not honest about love. Love is not a god, neither is it a mortal. Love is a spirit that is born when resource and poverty couple. He disagrees with Agathon on his conceptualization of the grand things he mentioned about love, asserting that love does not possess all the grand qualities but is rather a desire for all those things. While some people seek sexual reproduction, others want to give birth to ideas. When see a beautiful person or object, it teaches us about beauty. We can however strive to an extent that we end up loving Beauty itself, the highest form of love.

The social practicality of sexual relationships is expressed by these thinkers in various ways. Many of them affirm that sexual relationships are products of social interactions and relationships. The thinkers had the whole range of sexual relationship possibilities. These could be results of male-female bonds, male-male bonds that were acceptable in the Grecian society or even the relationship with the mind as was evidences by the ideas of Socrates. He was hardly interested in any sexual relationship other than that which was purely intellectual. It is love that makes such sexual relationships possible. Phaedrus sees love in these terms as one that can reward or punish depending on how the other parties are treated. In the metaphysical sense, this reward or punishment is provided by the god of love. Pausanias distinguishes the socially practicable earthly love from the heavenly love that is more ideal and outside the realm of what is humanly possible. Eryximachus and Aristophanes see love as a pursuit for order. Those who socially interact strive for happiness and balance that only love can bring. For Agathon, love is all about perfection, softness and tenderness. Those who socially interact have to display understanding for love to be present. Socrates on the other hand posits that love, for those in it, is a pursuit for the beauty of good in them. The philosophers attempt to harmonize what is physically practicable in the acts of love and what can only be perceived through the association of love with the mythical, the religious and the supernatural. Sexual relationships go beyond the objects of physical desire such as beauty and can be explained in the eyes of the pursuit for truth as seen by Socrates or a demonstration of lasting virtues as espoused by Phaedrus.

In conclusion, speakers in The Symposium demonstrate a wide ranging thought and beliefs about the nature of love both from the physical and the metaphysical standpoints. The variations from speaker to speaker demonstrate how love as a concept is shaped by individual and shared experiences. The Symposium brings out why people are in pursuit for love, how love manifests itself in the nature of man and how this nature varies from person to person and from group to group.