Plato's Symposium and Phaedrus - Admission/Application Essay Example

Love can neither be good, beautiful, or mortal as argued out by Agatha nor ugly, bad, and immortal (201e); it’s an intermediate, a transitory amidst the extremes. It is a striving force based upon lack (201e, cf201b-d). Hence we experience love because we are lacking and desire to possess that which we lack. It, therefore, cannot be equated to goodness since it desires that which is good.

He argues that the ultimate purpose of love is to fulfill the need for something beautiful that we lack. Diotima associates love with pregnancy and reproduction to further illustrate the function of love as the perpetual possession which we desire in order to attain happiness either through the procreation of children or intellectually by ideas (206a).

Love is the pursuit of beauty in a slow and systematic ascent as brought out by Diploma. It initially takes the form of general beauty with sexual desire as even the most ignorant soul is drawn to the beauty at some point. It progresses to physical beauty through the attraction of an individual’s beauty but not the person. It extends to moral beauty, that of the mind and structure. Love grows into the ultimate form of beauty, the absolute and divine beauty. (And the true order of going, or being led by another, to the things of love, is to begin from the beauties of earth and mount upwards for the sake of that other beauty, using these as steps only, and from one going on to two, and from two to all fair forms to fair practices, and from fair practices to fair notions, until from fair notions he arrives at the notion of absolute beauty, and at last knows what the essence of beauty) (William, 1993). Read More