There is a lot to be said about love. It saturates literature, Hollywood, every means of creative output known to the history of this planet. There is something mysterious about it, something undiscovered. So desperate have populations been to answer the timeless questions of love that it can bring a group of men to a single meeting place to discuss the darkest regions of the heart and psyche. Plato's Symposium has been hailed as one of the greatest discourses on love ever written. The language, the imagery, it contains quotes and stories that are so embedded in modern thought that they could never be separated again. The dialogue basically serves as a competition between philosophy and poetry; the premise is that the former is correctly educated in the ways of love while the latter is misguided. Symposium is not just an exploration of love; it is an exploration of what it means to be human. The speeches delivered in the honor of Eros go beyond mere contrast. They are used to chronicle one man's flawed desire for immortality.
[...] Fathering the Son There is a lot to be said about love. It saturates literature, Hollywood, every means of creative output known to the history of this planet. There is something mysterious about it, something undiscovered. So desperate have populations been to answer the timeless questions of love that it can bring a group of men to a single meeting place to discuss the darkest regions of the heart and psyche. Plato's Symposium has been hailed as one of the greatest discourses on love ever written. [...]
[...] He is ashamed that he fell in love, because his body is nearly tearing apart from the pain of rejection. And this pain serves as the true contrast between Socrates and the rest of humanity. While Socrates escapes these feelings, claims them too below his goals, too earthy, to mortal for his immortality, Alcibiades drowns in them. Willingly, he returns to the feet of Socrates, to once again beg for him, beg for his love, beg for his sex. He is not a military hero in Symposium; he is a weak excuse for a living being. [...]
[...] The idea that love, the same love that can be taken to a Common level, can also be taken to a Heavenly level, is a theory in direct conflict with the later claim of Socrates that to reach any Heavenly state one must completely unattached himself from notions of Eros. Phaedrus gives hope to the men in the room; hope that humans are not just vulgar animals, that they can rise from sexual beings to erotic beings and embrace, even for a moment, a godlike state of existence. [...]
[...] However, the incompleteness does not pertain only to love. To be human is to exist in a perpetual state of discontent, of misery, of endless searches for things like love that cannot be forgotten but hold no answers. Socrates forsakes mortality for this very reason. He sees no point in loving when love is such an empty feeling, a feeling without end, without point. He believes that the key to finding completeness is to rise to immortality, that the depressed masses of humans toiling below the gods truly wish at their cores to be those gods. [...]
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