Plato's Symposium One May Gauge Essay

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Indeed, when Alcibiades arrives, we are reminded that love is quite extraordinary, and even Diotima suggests this to her pupil: "For love, Socrates, is not, as you imagine, the love of the beautiful only." "What then?" "The love of generation and of birth in beauty." "Yes," I said. "Yes, indeed," she replied. "But why of generation?" "Because to the mortal creature, generation is a sort of eternity and immortality" (210). Love, in other words, is necessarily related to the eternal because only that which lasts forever can be said to be truly good. Each action that relates to eternity is good because it is directed toward the ultimate possession of the good. Socrates proceeds to bring his discourse to its proper closure and just then is when a very drunk Alcibiades arrives, reminding us all of how human we all are in relation to the divine and eternal.

Thus, in conclusion, we see that even at the end, love follows love, like a dog follows his boy. We see this in varying ways: first, in the way Aristodemus (who loves Socrates) follows the philosopher to Agathon's.

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(Socrates himself loves Agathon, and Agathon, in return, loves Love); second, in the way each speaker follows the one another, alluding to the other's concept of love and building on it; thirdly, in the way each man has an understanding of love, which moves him to reach for an ideal Love that is abstract. The Dialogue is used thus by Plato as a means of defining Love through a variety of ways, before coming to rest upon the definition supplied by Socrates -- which is that human love, which follows the ideal Love, is never fulfilled until it possesses it fully in eternity. Always, love leads on like a pursuit -- as Diotima states: a pursuit of the eternal good for those who wish to be good.

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