Nature of True Love in Plato\'s \"Symposium\"

¶ … nature of true love in Plato's "Symposium"

Rather famously, the ancient Greeks had multiple words for different aspects of the emotion we English-speaking moderns now term "love." In Plato's dialogue "The Symposium," defining the exact nature of love during a drinking party grips the philosophical imagination of Socrates and numerous other revelers at the house of a man named Agathon. The drinking party includes many individuals exposing their different ideas about the true nature of love. However, only Socrates offers a view of love that encompasses not simply the relationship between earthly individuals. Instead, Socrates suggests an individualistic pursuit of love by the soul, where it cleaves to the good in a non-sexual, and what came to be known as a 'Platonic' form of affection, is the ultimate goal of exercising in physical and spiritual love in the world. For Socrates, all aspects of earthly love are merely simulacra, or necessary but ultimately replicable forms of the true love that the soul cleaves for in relation to something higher and is procreative not of children or desire, but wisdom.

The "Symposium" proceeds in a dramatic fashion. Its first extended definition of love that is significant to the definitions that follow, begins with a comparison between the love of men and women, asserting finally that the love of men (because it is spiritual rather than purely physical in its inclination). Later, this becomes clarified by very beautiful myth told by one of the participants, of how love is defined as the soul cleaving to the individual that the body was once separated from at the beginning of creation.

Rather than a purely physical view of love, this example suggests that love's physical acts have a strong spiritual component that cannot be ignored. However, in such a conceptualization, the most powerful form of love and the unity of love are still expressed through the medium of two individuals in a state of physical, rather than purely intellectual congress.

Interestingly enough, as a kind of antidote to conceptualizing love only in a homoerotic fashion, Socrates speaks of his own, previous dialogue between himself and a woman called Diatoma, when discussing his profound revelation about the nature of love. Socrates suggests that human relationships with other humans are simply preparations for the soul's casting off of the material world and entering into a divine congress with something better, with a higher understanding. This is, narratively speaking, not unlike the way the symposium itself progresses, with some hiccups, no pun intended, as it moves from an earthly conception of physical love, to a love that encompasses both the physical and the spiritual, and finally to Socrates' understanding of the physical world as simply a preparation for something higher.

Socrates states that earthly love can take many forms, from the love for money, even for the love of one's own physical health, and the higher love of beauty and the desire to procreate children. But what these forms of love merely strive for is continuance, or procreation of the current stasis, rather than evolution, rendering them problematic. Rather, one must desire to procreate something different from one's singular essence, one must desire to procreate wisdom. Perhaps this is why the author introduces a female at this point, for Socrates acknowledges the base, physically procreative function of physical love with females that extends familial lines and generates human life. However, he states the better form of procreative love is the love that results in the procreation of beauty, beyond merely replicating the self in the physical world. Even more than physical progeny to carry on one's own physical line, one wishes for virtue and the progeny of understanding, a congress not achieved by love in the confluence of male and female, or even the melding of male and male in physical and spiritual ways. Rather, only through striving for the good and attempting to understand what is good by living a morally just life with understanding, can one reach such a higher state of procreative love, a love that procreates wisdom and understanding of the self and the human condition.

The need to enter such a higher state, even in the apprehension of beauty, is underlined by Socrates' rejection of the younger, more handsome Alcibiades. It is not, however, that Socrates is insensible to the attractions of Alcibiades, any more than his pursuit of wisdom means that he has not married or born children, which the has. Rather, Socrates views love and the getting of wisdom as something that must proceed through many states, and many levels, much like the education of a human being.