The Pros and Cons of Love

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Recommended: Aristophanes's Speech from Plato's Symposium

Socrates stuns the Symposium when he tells how Diotima showed him that “Love is neither beautiful nor good,” thus contradicting the theme of all speeches before his (201E). Diotima’s logic begins by postulating that love is equivalent to desire. This statement is supported by Aristophanes’s speech in which he describes the origin of human nature.

Zeus split the spheres of the three original types of humans: male, female and androgynous; to form the two sexes. Ever since the division of spheres, each individual has been constantly searching for his or her other half. Sex was invented by Zeus to allow for reproduction and to allow productivity; simply put, so that people would “do it” and get on with their daily lives. However, the sex that Zeus introduced is not the vulgar or the lewd type of sex governed by Common Aphrodite (Eros) and Polyhymnia that is mentioned in Pausanias’s and Eryximachus’s respective speeches. Rather, Aristophanes does not define a vulgar species of love; all love and all sex is precipitated by the desire for two halves of a sphere to come together to make a whole, in attempt to return to their original state before Zeus’s punishment was cast down upon them. Aristophanes explains the creation of love and desire. “Love is born into every human being; it calls back the halves of our original nature together; it tries to make one out of two and heal the wound of human nature” (191D). Coincidentally, when another translation of Symposium is examined, the same passage reads: “so ancient is the desire of one another which is implanted in us, reuniting our original nature, making one of two, and healing the state of man” (Trans. Jowett).[1][1] Therefore, here is drawn the conne...

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2. If something is needed, that which needs it cannot already possess it.

3. So, if something is desired, that which desires it cannot already possess it.

4. Love is desire.

5. Love loves that which is good and beautiful.

6. So, Love desires that which is good and beautiful.

7. If Love desires the good and the beautiful, then it cannot possess the good and the beautiful.

8. Therefore, Love is neither good nor beautiful.

NOTE: Steps one and two were emitted or only grazed in essay due to space constraint, but can be referenced to 200B-201A.

Works Cited

Plato. Symposium. 360 B.C..Trans. Benjamin Jowett. n. pag. Online. Internet. 28 Jan. 1999. Available: http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/Symposium.html .

Plato. Symposium. Trans. Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff. Cambridge: Hackett, 1989.[2][2]

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