Platos Symposium: Analysis and Commentory - Assignment Example

Plato’s Symposium: Analysis and Commentary1. Phaedrus thinks of women as people who can only earn admiration or be loved by their partners through the bravery they are willing to portray. The fact that a woman can sacrifice to die for the husband means that she loves her partner dearly. For Phaedrus, women are loved only through the admiration that is rooted from their willingness to fight for their husbands. ON the other hand, Pausanias does not think women are people who can be truly loved because the love is not heavenly.

Pausanias treats women as objects that are only loved by men as a result of sex or lust.The effect of love according to Phaedrus is that the sacrifices people make for their partners leads to honor and rewards from the gods. For Pausanias, the effect of love on an individual is gaining the same wisdom and virtues of the partner.2. The nature of love according to Pausanias is that it can come from sexual desires or can be true love from the soul. He says that sexual desires are attributes of common love while the soulful love means appreciating one’s intelligence as well as wisdom making it a heavenly form of love.

The effects of love on an individual would be surrendering to the partner sexually. Pausanias claims that when one man surrenders sexually to the other man, the love they have for each other is comes from the admiration of their wisdom hence sex would mean that they are hoping to be more intelligence and gain the virtues of the partner. For Pausanias, heavenly love has effects of partners willing to do anything for the sake of gaining virtues.The nature of love on a pederasty relationship is that the lover’s conduct upon eyeing a young boy is not direct or rushed into.

The lover must act according to the way the father of the young boy behaves in order not to provoke. There are laws governing the approach that the lover must take while trying to win the love of a boy. When a boy is loved, the friends will often tease him, because he has captured the admiration from his intelligence.3. Erixymachus talks about love as the overall system controlling the way all living things function, humans, plants as well as animals. Basically, love give people total power to live.

He talks about how love governs music, astronomy and medicine. He claims that love controls everything in the surrounding whether hot or cold, and also wet or dry things. Love ultimately brings happiness to people and does this by helping people associate well with each other by being friends and being in harmony. 4. Aristophanes gives a speech of love based on the origin of human begins and the nature in which they were formed in. He argues that love in the present day is affected by the history of man.

He claims that there existed all male sexes, all female and the androgynous sex. Sexual desire serves as a means to portray the difference in sexes which people were originally split from. He claims love in the current day is a result of who a person was split from hence the existence of lesbians, homosexuals and normal couples. Love according to Aristophanes exists because people want to find their better half, once they do, they become satisfied.ReferencesHunter, R. L., & Plato, . (2004). Platos Symposium.

Oxford: Oxford university press.