In Love with Immortality Would you not agree if I told you that as a lover, you are always on the pursuit of a love that can give you happiness forever? The Speech of Diotima in “Plato Symposium” would agree, but she would take it a step further. In her speech, Diotima argues that “every desire for good things or for happiness is the supreme and treacherous love in everyone” (Plato, 51). She explains in the quote that the highest form of love is the desire for happiness. According to
Diotima, love is in between mortal and immortal, but everyone desires immortality. Once you possess the good forever, only then will you have a chance to achieve immortality. The speech of
Diotima best expresses love because it embodies the notion that
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According to Diotima, what makes reproduction incredible is the fact that it goes on forever. She states, “it is what mortals have in place of immortality” (Plato, 54). As mortals, we cannot achieve immortality, so we reproduce because it is our only way to feel immortal. Parents often reproduce because they want to pass down their legacy and name to their children, and this makes us feel like we live on forever, like immortals. Diotima’s speech expresses love so well because she acknowledges that there is a ladder to the way we as humans fall in love. It is human nature to see someone for the first time and fall in love with their beautiful body. The more time we spend with people, we begin to fall in love with their personalities, then everything about them, even the way they think. This is the same as what Diotima states, that once we fall in love with a beautiful body, we can then fall in love with a beautiful soul, and finally a beautiful mind. Once we fall in love with everything about a person, we desire that they become our own. We are not just content with having these beautiful things to ourselves, we want to possess them forever. It is equal to asking someone to marry …show more content…
As humans we are mortal, but as lovers we have found a middle ground in between mortal and immortal, but how do we become immortal?
Diotima says “anyone who has given birth to true virtue and nourished it, and if any human being could become immortal, it would be he” (Plato, 60). Diotima believes that this reproduction gives humans what they are ultimately seeking, a way to become immortal. This is what makes Diotima’s speech describe love so well, because everyone is in love with immortality. Why else would we reproduce, and pass down our genes to our children? It is
Carrier 3 because this act is so special, and it is the only way for a mortal to seem immortal. We see this all the time today, as parents want to be proud of their children and what they accomplish, because they are the ones who carry on the tradition. Whether we know it or not, we are all chasing immortality. By climbing this ladder of love, we are going through all the phases of love.
Diotima’s speech best expresses love because it embodies all the phases of love, and the happiness that comes when we possess it. We all want to be happy, but we are in love with the idea of
The article '' love: the right chemistry'' by Anastasia Toufexis efforts to explain the concept of love from a scientific aspect in which an amateur will understand. Briefly this essay explains and describe in a scientific way how people's stimulation of the body works when you're falling in love. The new scientific researches have given the answer through human physiology how genes behave when your feelings for example get swept away. The justification for this is explained by how the brain gets flooded by chemicals. The author expresses in one point that love isn't just a nonsense behavior nor a feeling that exhibits similar properties as of a narcotic drug. This is brought about by an organized chemical chain who controls different depending on the individual. A simple action such as a deep look into someone's eyes can start the simulation in the body that an increased production of hand sweat will start. The tingly feeling inside your body is a result of a scientific delineation which makes the concept of love more concretely and more factually mainly for researchers and the wide...
The chapter on fecundity addresses the bizarre ways that nature has evolved to ensure the continuity of a species. As the title suggests, fecundity deals with the fertility of species where Annie Dillard explores the inefficiency of fertility and the brutality of nature’s evolution. In the end, Dillard concludes that death is a part of life.
beauty before we can truly cherish other forms of beauty around us. “Two or three things
Paragraph one intro-What is the origin of this universal feeling known as love? It all starts with the history of love. There really is no marked beginning of this feeling that has no evidence of its existence. It could have begun scientifically with Neanderthals, or even religiously with Adam and Eve-the theories and stories are endless. Some psychiatrists claim it begins with the Oedipal suppression, where the son feels a form of love for their mother just as their daughter would feel the same for their father. As they mature and meet a potential mate who shows similar characteristics to their parents, passionate love forms between them. There is no specific answer as to why any one person falls for a particular type of person, only theories, and approaches. In this essay, we will look at all aspects of love and just what it does to the brain as well as what parts it deactivates, the things you go
The meaning of love is as intricate and unique as the purpose that it serves. It seems that the nature of love is found in the mind, the body and the soul. In Plato’s Symposium each member of the drinking party gives their own interpretation of love. As each speaker engages in their discourse, the concept of love is evaluated from different angles. According to Phaedrus, homoerotic love is the highest form of love and that sacrificing oneself for love will result in a multitude of rewards from the gods, while Pausanias believes that there are two forms of love: Commonly and Heavenly. As a physician, Eryximachus claims that love appears in every part of the universe, including plants and animals and that protection results from love. Before starting his speech, Aristophanes tells the group that his discussion about love may seem completely absurd, as he explains that in the beginning one body had two people who were eventually split in half by Zeus. This is meant to explain why people are constantly looking for their “other half”. Moreover Agathon, the poet the symposium is celebrating, critiques the previous speakers by stating that they failed to praise the god of love. He claims that love rejects feebleness and embraces youthfulness while also implying that love creates justice, courage and wisdom.
This passage marks the first of several types of love, and gives us an intuitive
happiness, and can lead to the choice of death over life. Hopefully, we will fully
As the last speaker, and the most important one, Socrates connects his ideas with Diotima of Mantinea’s story of Love’s origin, nature and purpose. Different from the earlier five speakers who regard Love as an object and praise different sides of it, Socrates, referring to Diotima’s idea, considers Love as a pursuit of beauty gradually ranging from “physical beauty of people in general” (Symposium, Plato, 55) to the “true beauty” (55). The first five speeches bond with each other. Each of them mentions the opinions of the former in order to either support or against them. However, just like the elements of a beautiful picture, they fail to show us the integration of love.
The phenomenon of love is such that when two souls first fall into love, their passions and
Love and the way we love others varies across different individuals of various cultural backgrounds. From a psychoanalytic approach, many theorists in this field focus on the development of love and it’s stages as we become of age to establish a loving, healthy relationship with a companion. In the book titled Personality: Classic Theories and Modern Research (Friedman & Schustack, 2013), a person must have social connection with others in order to achieve true happiness. This is something so unique to humans: the human connection. Connecting with another person on an emotional, intellectual, and even physical level brings an entire new perspective on life.
As any romantic will assert, love is by far the most powerful force known to human hearts and minds. This sentiment is espoused throughout history, almost to the point of cliché. Everyone has heard the optimistic statement, “love conquers all,” and The Beatles are certain, however idyllic it may be, that “all you need is love.” Humanity is convinced that love is unique within human emotion, unequalled in its power to both lift the spirit up in throws of ecstasy, and cast it down in utter despair.
We should not focus on pleasures of the body and only fulfill those that are necessary to live. The soul’s only desire is wisdom, which can only be achieved through the intellect and not through the deceitful senses. This can be illustrated by the fact that the true form of things such as justice, beauty and goodness can never be perceived through the senses. However, we are born with some sort of sense of what these things are, therefore there must be an ideal form which the things in the emperical world are somewhat equal to. Since the mind already has a sense of these forms when its born, the soul needs to be immortal. (102-104,
himself to divert from the real pursuit of beauty: Since beauty is one of the true
Love flourishes throughout cultures. Music, literature, and religion allocate the most important aspects of love. Many people have become dependent upon this single emotion. It determines with whom a person will forge the long-term commitment. Love exists in many forms: the love mothers share for their children, intense jealousy and obsession amongst individuals, the strong desire to procreate between two people, a god’s love for worshippers, and the connection between young lovers. The way individuals express their love can be classified by: storge, mania, eros, agape, and ludus.
Immortality is a complex idea in society, even today. Immortality is the indefinite continuation of a person’s existence, even after death. (2) Immortality implies a never ending existence, regardless of whether or not the body dies. In order to understand the immortality of the human soul it is important to understand the difference between an individual’s body and soul. The body is the physical object of an individual, which lives until death, and then decomposes. On the other hand, people connect soul to an individual’s personality. The soul may also be associated to the mind. Th...