The Symposium
Published:
- “to see in him a so the ramiar ta onocrates, practising what he calls in the Theaterus his art of ‘midwifery’, by which he helps his associates to bring to birth the ideas and discoveries with which they are in travail.
- “Republic (490): ‘Shall we not reasonably plead that the genuine lover of learning has a natural tendency to strive towards true being, and does not remain among the multiplicity of particular things which men believe to be real? On the contrary he goes on his way with unabated desire and unceasing love until he can lay hold of the real nature of each thing with that part of the soul which can lay hold of reality because it is akin to it. Then and not till then, when he has approached reality and entered into union with it and begotten intelligence and truth, does he enjoy knowledge and true life and nourishment, and cease from the pangs of travail.’ Here also we find Plato using the language of love, and speaking of the crowning achievement of the philosophic quest as a marriage with the supremely real and good.
- “For I declare that love is the only subject that I understand.” — Socrates
“Love is simply the name for the desire and pursuit of the whole.” — Aristophanes
After recounting the myth of man as a circular whole made of 2 of each human feature, split apart by Zeus, and longing for their other half.
“Besides being very young and very sensitive (Love) has a supple form. How, if he were stiff and unbending, could he wrap himself round everything, and be so stealthy in his first entrance into and in his departure from every soul?” (Agathon)
Love as supple and yielding. Taoist almost
- “Love is in the first place supreme in beauty and goodness himself, and in the second the cause of like qualities in others.” (Agathon)
- Socrates argues that love cannot be beauty and goodness in their ideal forms, for love desires what it does not yet have, and must thus be deficient in beauty and goodness.
- Love is not a god, then, for they are truly good and beautiful. But it is not merely mortal, for it still embodies the divine yearning for the good and beautiful. It is thus a demi-god, a spirit, that acts as a medium between man and the divine.
- “Love is desire for the perpetual possession of the good.” (Diotima)
- “The object of love, Socrates, is not, as you think, beauty.” “What is it then?” “Its object is to procreate and bring forth in beauty.” “Really?” “It is so, I assure you. Now, why is procreation the object of love? Because procreation is the nearest thing to perpetuity and immortality that a mortal being can attain. If, as we agreed, the aim of love is the perpetual possession of the good, it necesarily follows that it must desire immortality together with the good, and the argument leads us to the inevitable conclusion that love is love of immortality as well as of the good.”
- “It is in this way that everything mortal is preserved; not by remaining for ever the same, which is the prerogative of divinity, but by undergoing a process in which the losses caused by age are repaired by new acquisitions of a similar kind. This device, Socrates, enables the mortal to partake of immortality, physically as well as in other ways; but the immortal enjoys immortality after another manner. So do not feel surprise that every creature naturally cherishes its own progeny; it is in order to secure immortality that each individual is haunted by this eager desire and love.”
- “…he will see it as absolute, existing alone with itself, unique, eternal, and all other beautiful things as partaking of it, yet in such a manner that, while they come into being and pass away, it neither undergoes any increase or diminution nor suffers any change.”
- “Do you think that it will be a poor life that a man leads who has his gaze fixed in that direction, who contemplates absolute beauty with the appropriate faculty and is in constant union with it ? Do you not see that in that region alone where he sees beauty with the faculty capable of seeing it, will he be able to bring forth not mere reflected images of goodness but true goodness, because he will be in contact not with a reflection but with the truth? And having brought forth and nurtured true goodness he will have the privilege of being beloved of God, and becoming, if ever a man can, immortal himself.”
- “Not that my scheming will have the slightest effect on Socrates, my friends. He will drink any quantity that he is bid, and never be drunk all the same.”