Lost Objectivity in the Symposium The Symposium presents several arguments about love at a group drinking party. Eryximachus suggests that each of the guests orate a speech on love and explain what love actually means. Each of the guests presents a speech on love, however; their analysis of love may not be as objective as it seems. They each have their own personal beliefs that they seem to be advancing in each of their speeches. Characters in the Symposium twist the meaning of love to fit their own narrative, rather than provide an objective analysis. Pausanias’s speech uses love as a way to justify his relationships with younger boys. Pausanias’s speech starts out describing two distinct types of love: “If follows, therefore, that the same …show more content…
He states that their young lovers are slaves to them. This idea of younger boys being slaves, deviates entirely from his speech on the two different types of love. This speech has his political motivations linked into his speech. He spends an extreme amount of time discussing the goodness for the love of young boys, that his speech is simply about the actions that he and the others in the room have done. In his speech, he even goes so far as to justify love that brings no benefit to a younger boy.
[S]uppose someone is led by a lover’s putative goodness to gratify him in the expectation of gaining, for his part, moral benefit from the lover’s friendship, but his hopes are dashed: the man turns out to be a scoundrel and to have no goodness to his name. Even so, being deceived in this way is all right. (185a-185b)
Insisting that a man can do nearly anything to a younger boy just because the young boy wants enlightenment is disconcerting, and raises no objections from anyone else at the gathering. This is because they each intrinsically agree with Pausanias, because they all have been involved in relationships with young boys. Pausanias deviates from an argument about love, to an argument about why loving young boys is justified, twisting the speech he was supposed to give to one that protects his
He betrays Lusanna and, as it was expected of him, trades love for power and money. When Lusanna realized that she turned to the church for help. This example illustrates the fact that love and marriage was rather unusual in this era, and Lusanna had unrealistic
Love is a double-edged sword. It can be mutual between both partners or leave one heartbroken. As seen in "Hades to Persephone" by Lee Ann Schaffer and Love by Paul-Albert Besnard, both pieces inquire about the idea of desperate longing by demonstrating contrasting concepts of pathos and chiaroscuro. To begin, the speaker in “Hades to Persephone” uses pathos to instill pity in the audience for Hades’ one-sided desperate longing while in Love, pathos is utilized to demonstrate how the couple’s longing for each other is shared between them.
Theodosia claims that her father is sincerely an admirable, honest, and innocent man. As the author, Henry Brands, mentions, “Theo idolizes her father from the moment she can express herself” (7). She acknowledges that one of the factors
(I.iv.98-100). In these lines, Mercutio exhibits a certain wariness of love. He compares love to dreams, which are only brief depictions of false images. He talks as someone experienced in this analogy, hinting that he has had his heart broken and refuses to let his friend Romeo go down the same
This, combined with his demonstrated hatred of his wife, who he used to love, directly strengthens the idea that Mel does not understand or appreciate Philia anymore. Mel yearns for love and rages that his desire is unrequited. Moreover, Mel disparages Philia across the spectrum. The narrator of “What we Talk about” delineates that Mel thought “real love was nothing less than spiritual love. (137)”
All of the speakers speeches about love in the Symposium are important because they each have a unique idea to contribute about what is love and the idea of love. One of the speakers, Pausanias goes after Phaedrus’ speech. When it is his turn to speak he present his speech about love as not a single thing and therefore we shouldn’t praise it since there is more than one. Pausanias states that there are two kinds of love, he claims that since “there are two kinds of Aphrodite, there must also be two loves” (Symposium 13). The first Aphrodite is called Uranian or Heavenly Aphrodite since she is the daughter of Uranus, she is the oldest and has no mother.
This passage is worthy of discussion because Clarisse, an almost 17 year old girl who just
Afterwards, the reader witnesses how they slowly fall more and more in love with each other. “The only man I love is the son of the only man I hate! I saw him too early without knowing who he was, and I found out who he was too late! Love is a monster for making me fall in love with my worst enemy.” -Juliet.
Even Sister James’s desire to be safe in her assumption of Father Flynn’s innocence and Mrs Muller’s similar assumption of a position of comfortable indifference places them appropriately in the grey realm between virtue and vice. If Sister James’s intellectual error was to concede to Sister Aloysius’s instruction to “be on the look out”, which unduly wrecked havoc on her innocence, Mrs Muller operates from a position of mortal flaw with her tendency to subtract the priest’s possible molestation of her child to avoid courting controversy and risking further damage, psychological and physical, to Donald. In Chapter XIII of Aristotle’s Poetics, his explanation of hamartia, “some great error or frailty”, which contains a range of meaning in Greek literature, are contested
Imagine two people who are polar opposites with different perspectives and attitudes towards controversial ideas, and overall, contrasting personalities. One would think that they would be enemies, but instead, they are best friends. In The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare, Romeo and Mercutio are known as dramatic foils, this can be concluded due to their conflicting opinions on love. Romeo is stuck in love, while Mercutio has fallen out of love. This contributes to how they differentiate on that “contradictory” subject.
I want to argue that in the play, the themes of love and hate are closely linked. To show this, I have selected some example ofrelationships
His past experiences has led him to believe that love should be masked by lies that in a sense it should the truth should be a voluntary definition behind love. In Plato’s Symposium, Aristophanes’ delivers a speech about his experiences of have loved or being in love. Aristophanes’ speech captures how powerful the feeling of love, that since birth love has condition our lives involuntary and will remain so. Love to Aristophanes’ is a form of completion that a lucky couple receives once the meet each other. This completion is empowered by an enormous amount of love, intimacy, and affection that neither bonds can be separated.
In our scene, lines 42-179 of Act One, Scene One, the characters who try to force love upon others are seen antagonistically, while Hermia and Lysander, who strive for true, naturally occurring love, are seen as protagonists whose love should be defended. The overlying message of the play is that love should not and cannot be forced. Theseus, Egeus, and Demetrius use their power, both as nobles and men, to try and force Hermia into marrying Demetrius. Egeus, in an attempt to bully Hermia into marrying Demetrius says, ‘‘‘She is mine, and all my right of her I do estate unto Demetrius’’’ (1.1.97-98). He sees his power as Hermia’s father as a way to force her into a marriage that will benefit him.
The individuals possessed by ideal love are not the only ones who are affected by it. In Romeo and Juliet, Friar Lawrence’s first reaction to Romeo’s drastic change of “love” was shocking : “Holy Saint Francis, what a
The first instance which supports the notion that a lapse of communication is responsible for the unsuccessful nature of heterosexual relationships is the case of Duke Orsino and Countess Olivia’s relationship. Both start the play preoccupied with their own concerns, Orsino is worried about finding love, specifically with Olivia, meanwhile she is busy mourning the death of her brother by refusing to marry anyone for seven years. However, it is Orsino’s obsession with seeking love and how he goes about pursuing Olivia that best exemplifies the problematic nature of a male and female’s relationship. Orsino opened the play by saying of love, “Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting, / The appetite may sicken and so die” (1.1.1-3), essentially saying that he so badly craves the feeling being in love gives him, that he would like in so great a quantity that it would end his life.