This is a short account of Socrates’ speech on love (or
rather, his retelling of a conversation he had with Diotima on the subject).
Socrates argues that love or desire is relational and
expresses lack or deficiency. If love is love of some object, then love desires
that object. One desires only what one does not have, so love is not beautiful
but is desire of beauty.
Socrates then tells how Diotima described the nature of
love. Love is neither beautiful nor ugly, neither good nor evil. He is an
intermediate state—half man, half god. He is like opinion (Intermediate between
ignorance and episteme). He is the true lover of wisdom because wisdom is
beautiful and beauty is the object of love. Men are lovers of the good which
they want to possess perpetually. Perpetuity is achieved through procreation.
Thus, Eros is procreation: physical, spiritual and philosophical (that of
wisdom).
The correct way to begin to love is to love beautiful
bodies, ideally he should start with loving just one body. Next, he will reduce
the love of a single body and appreciate the beauty of all beautiful bodies.
Then he should reduce the love of beautiful bodies to love the beauty of minds.
Next is to find beauty in laws, observances and kinship and to let go of the
beauty of bodies altogether. Then he will find beauty in the forms of knowledge
(general not particular branches). Finally, he will be “turned towards the
great sea of beauty and gazing on it he’ll give birth, through a boundless love
of knowledge, to many beautiful and magnificent discourses and ideas.”
It is in this way that “when someone goes up these stages, through
loving boys in the correct way, and begins to catch sight of that beauty, he
has come close to reaching the goal.”
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