A Group Of Philosophers All Get Together At A Man Named...

In Plato’s Symposium, a group of philosophers all get together at a man named Agathon’s house and eventually decide to give speeches on love. The men all take turns giving their various speeches on Love, each attacking the idea of Love in a different way. Phaedrus talks about Love’s origins and how Love encourages people to be virtuous, Pausanias makes the distinction between Common Love (love of body) and Celestial Love (love of mind), Eryximachus talks about how Love promotes balance, Aristophanes talks about how Love is about people continually searching for their other half (quite literally), but how people can never find this other half, so people will never be whole, and finally Agathon talks about Love’s beauty and Love’s desire for beauty. When Socrates speaks, he starts off by saying that he will give the truth about Love, which he claims no one else did. He proves this by questioning Agathon’s speech, asking how Love can both be bea utiful and desire beauty when people do not desire what they already have. Furthermore, Socrates recounts a conversation about Love with Diotima, whose view of Love combines parts of all the other speeches into one truth about love. True love is passing on one’s ideas through celestial love in order to live forever. The clearest part of Diotima’s argument about love is that people use love to make themselves immortal. After Diotima has finished incorporating the ideas of every speech about Love into one giant truth about love, she