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Diotima's View On Love

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Those who use Socrates as an example will discover self-actualization in a life-long search for wisdom; however, Diotima represents the state of actually attaining wisdom, as she speaks through Socrates as a distant, god-like figure.
In Greek mythology, demons are intermediaries between messages from gods to men and prayers from men to gods; therefore, love is the great devil. This demon is born by the gods, Porus (resourcefulness) and Penia (lacking). This portrays love as poor as he knows what it means to lack, but also deserving of high praise as the son of Porus.
It is here where we see this middle ground representation of love as well as Diotima’s views – she explains that a majority of this reasoning is due to love’s parents – resource …show more content…

Physically reproducing is for love that arises from an original attraction of physical beauty, while mentally reproducing is love arising from an original gratitude of mental beauty. Therefore, as Diotima concludes, what love really is is the journey to find this true beauty that we speak of. Love is the pursuit of true beauty, however, it cannot be attainable right away – it takes a long process of the education of love through various stages to a higher and higher type of beauty (journey).
Diotima’s views on love contain some of the ideas given by the previous speakers but also have her own slightly modified version; the previous speeches describe the different domains of love while the sixth and final one shows the process of obtaining knowledge. However, one may also argue that we see aspects of this with the first five speakers as well.
The first stage is loving a beautiful body – the lower stage – followed by the comprehension that the beauty of this body can be located elsewhere, in others. We then develop to the loving of beautiful bodies (plural). As we move on, we get something deeper and more divine – the love of beautiful souls; after this, we see what makes a beautiful soul, and this is the love of knowledge. After arriving at this level, we reach eternal and absolute beauty – neither beautiful nor ugly with no face and not a particular …show more content…

Each speech fulfills its own duty to explicitly demonstrate the various angles of love. These speeches on love, in some way, are not completely independent and link up with one another – whether it is disagreement or improvement of former ideas. Plato’s Symposium seems to be telling us that love has many features and many sides. The symposium delights readers with its entertainment, and we get a very good sense of human-being attraction in Ancient

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