Alcibiades Speech On Ladder Of Love

Minh Nguyen.

Forms of Love.

First rotation essay.

Seminar leader: Marcella Perrett.

28-2-2015

Question :1. What is the significance of Alcibiades and his speech in the Symposium as a whole? Make sure to support your interpretation with evidence from the text.

Alcibiades´s speech is an important part of the Symposium, because it serves as a companion to Socrates´s speech that precedes it, which is the Ladder of Love. The Ladder of Love is a highly complex, abstract treatise about beauty, which bring up the idea that love is about pursuing philosophy and the beautiful things, not sexual intercourse. But Plato must have known the Ladder of Love alone is not enough to deliver this idea. It will be scorned and rejected by everyone.He opt, instead,

First, he must love a body. Then he must realize that beauty is a characteristics of all bodies, and love bodies in general, and then move on to loving the souls/ the minds. But he must not love a specific mind, rather a set of patterns that exist in many minds, which should lead him to love beautiful pursuit and laws. He must then love sciences and philosophy, and finally, beauty itself. If he gets there, he could then use the environment to “give birth to and cherish true virtue“(212A), and “if it is possible for any human being, to become immortal as well“(212A). He will be able to keep the knowledge of the good

This could mean that Socrates had understood, or at least on the way to understanding what is the good and how to obtain it. This interpretation also explain Socrates´s behavior, as recounted by Alcibiades. Socrates spend most of his time either thinking(220D), or talking and philosophizing with others(221D, 222E).He seem to show extreme calmness and unrivaled self control( 221B). He does not desire physical beauty, money,power, or anything else that Alcibiades might be interested in(216E), and seem to only be concerned about giving speeches and