What Is Diotima's View Of Love

In Plato’s Symposium, he makes it a point to include the subject of love under the category of philosophy, along with topics such as justice and reason. Plato is one of the first philosophers to consider love worthy of serious philosophical reflection, as previously the topic of love was considered too frivolous and emotional, left to the poets to discuss. This makes Symposium atypical in contrast to other philosophical works at the time (such as those of his student Aristotle, whose works centered around rationality and logic). Plato doesn’t so much seek to provide an extensive theory of what love is rather than bring to light its true philosophic potential, which, in his opinion, is one that displays love as being active rather than passive

During Diotima’s speech, she first concludes with Socrates that love, as eros, is “wanting to possess the good forever” (206A). They then further conclude that love also “must desire immortality” (207A). The goal of love, as pictured by Diotima, is to move up the ladder from the vulgar love of bodies to seeing “pure, unmixed…divine Beauty” (211E). And to get to that, one must give birth in Beauty, whether by childbirth or, preferably in wisdom, in which Diotima uses poets Homer and Hesiod as examples. However, in saying this, Diotima (whom was most likely made up by Socrates himself) turns eros into something more similar to logos or reason. The “greatest and most beautiful part of wisdom deals with the proper ordering of cities and households,” Diotima tells Socrates, “and that is called moderation and justice” (209A). Eros has now become something intellectual, serving philosophical and rational purposes. One cannot move up the ladder, to admiration for laws and customs and then knowledge/wisdom itself without thinking that “the beauty of bodies is a thing of no importance” (210C). It is after he sees past the beauty of “a little boy or a man or a custom” that he can access the “great sea of beauty” in which he could then give “birth to many gloriously beautiful ideas and theories,” in which his philosophia (or love of wisdom) would lead him to knowledge of beauty itself (210E). Sensual, emotional eros is described in a way that