Aristophanes Definition Of Love Essay

Plato is often criticized for preaching the gospel of me first. The claim is that his understanding of love is essentially egoistic, and this is seen as troublesome for the obvious ethical reasons. But there may be an even more troubling issue with Plato's understanding of love. In this paper I will attempt to argue that for Plato, love is in a sense impossible; that it can only ever be a desire for something out of one's grasp. The stakes are high but perhaps there is a way to understand this problem in a way that seems a little less damning. To do this I will analyze arguments from the Lysis and the Symposium, first questioning even the possibility of love and then attempt to show that love is in fact possible, all though in weaker

I believe that love is a natural sentiment that is experienced differently by each individual. For instance, the love for our parents will vary from the love for our life-partners. Just because one form of love may (at times) overshadow the other, does not mean that the end result will be the nonexistence of either one. In the play, Antigone by Sophocles, the character Haimon impersonates a major role at delivering this very message throughout the play and also promotes the classic love story plot of Romeo and Juliet, in the sense that both the families allow hatred to control their lives and lovers kill themselves.

In Plato’s work Symposium, Phaedrus, Pausania, Eryximachus, Aristophane and Agathon, each of them presents a speech to either praise or definite Love. Phaedrus first points out that Love is the primordial god; Pausanias brings the theme of “virtue” into the discussion and categorizes Love into “good” one or “bad” one; Eryximachus introduces the thought of “moderation’ and thinks that Love governs such fields as medicine and music; Aristophanes draws attention to the origin and purposes

According to Aristophanes, love (eros) – the highest form of love that one human being can feel towards another – is the desire of dissected halves, one to another, for restoring the wholeness of the nature’s origin. I will explain what does Aristophanes mean by his metaphor and why do people fall in love.

thesis what Aristophanes defines as love. He believes that love is innate: " love is born into

For some people love is a complete devotion and endless adoration, for others is a temporary feeling that will disappear in time. For some people it is a fairy-tale and for others it is a dream come true. Some people say love is once-in-a lifetime thing and others believe that after one love comes another. The more you try to find a universal definition of love – the more you get confused with all these words you get from different people around you. The more you think you get closer to the true meaning of this feeling- the more you realize that the definition of love is probably your own, unique and sincere truth about love. Throughout the history a lot of writers suggested their understanding of love to their readers. And it is important

Pausanias’s speech utilizes love to justify his relationships with younger boys. Pausanias’s speech begins by outlining two distinct types of love: “It follows, therefore, that the same distinction of title - Common and Celestial - should be applied to the different Loves who are the associates of one or the other Aphrodite” (180e). There are two different gods of love; therefore, Pausanias argues there should also be two specific types of love. Common Love is the love for the body, while Celestial Love is the love for someone’s intellect. This distinction is critical, as he expounds upon who can experience Celestial love: “[T]he Love who

with some very different views of love as brought to us by Agathon, Phaedrus and

What is love? Is it an object? Is it a feeling? Is it even attainable? Love is everything, it is an object, it is an emotion, and it cannot be bought, stolen, given. Love can only be found. Love is discovered in the most unthinkable places during the most unimaginable times. It can never be predicted who you fall in love with or when you do but all you do know is that you are in love and you would give anything for that person, and for your love to always stay resilient through all other obstacles and distractions. In Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, Montague’s and Capulet’s are know and expected to hate each other until the miracle of love presented its self. Romeo is a Montague and Juliet is a Capulet. They both fell in love when

In Aristophanes’ speech he discussed that love is a desire that we have. He goes on by telling a story about the world with three genders, male, female and the common sex. Each of them were powerful and was ambitious and because of that they attacked the Gods. Since Zeus was not happy and as a punishment he split them up in half. Because of this the creatures became half as powerful and changed to male and female. With them being separated it causes distress in them and wanting to embrace the other half. When one was gone they tried to find another one to embrace them. Since they really want to be together it is a desire to be whole. I agree with his notion that love is a desire to be whole. When it comes to love its is usually two people that want to be together. Being

The ancient greeks language had many different words for love categorizing the different types. With the theme love makes people do crazy things, they specifically point out the love between man and women. In ancient greece, it was frowned upon to let you relationships with others to dictate your decisions and actions for the greater good. Family was very important, but not as important as the rules, laws, and the gods. In Ode 4, the chorus says “Love!-you wrench the minds of the righteous in outrage,

Our human nature was not what we always thought of it to be, in simpler times two were made as one. We roamed the earth in unity with our other halves without the burden of trying to find them. However, Zeus did not find this to be in his best interest because of how we behaved so he split each being in two. As a result of this split we must now go about our lives in search of our other half. This is the speech that Aristophanes gave in Plato’s Symposium a book composed of various speeches from many different famous Greek people. Aristophanes’ view of love is compelling because it describes our very human nature to find our love, it justifies the reasoning of why there are different sexualities, and it gives an explanation as to why our bodies are the way that they are today.

Love in Greek mythology is frequently one sided which usually leads to tragedy and abandonment. It is the one feeling that personally all, as humans and gods, have in common. There are many types of love that suddenly emerge in myths. For example, the story of Psyche and Cupid shows the power of pure love. When Cupid first saw Psyche, he instantly fell in love with her beauty and wanted to marry her. Somehow her beauty was admired by tons but none of it leads to the love of marriage. However, Cupid did fully appreciate Psyche’s beauty through it all.

Love is also the feeling someone has for a job perhaps, for a lobby of the hotel you serve in that always smells just so and has plants hanging from the wall giving the illusion you had just stepped out of a dreary gray, salt-encrusted winter into a touch of the exotic. Or for a hobby, for the grip of a ball, the tension in a muscle, the throw, watching it spin just so to the exact right spot. For rolling a die and dreaming up daring adventures against ancient dragons, or of that risk of gaining or losing it all. For the whoosh of air in free fall from 10,000 feet, or the watery embrace of sea exploring. For healing a sick child, for holding a kite string as it plays upon a wind we've no control over. For

Love has many different meanings to different people. For a child, love is what he or she feels for his mommy and daddy. To teenage boy, love is what he should feel for his girlfriend of the moment, only because she says she loves him. But as we get older and "wiser," love becomes more and more confusing. Along with poets and philosophers, people have been trying to answer that age-old question for centuries: What is love?