Socrates Love

In this essay, I am going to prove that Socrates could fell in love. I will talk about how Socrates thinks about love, and then give proofs from Phaedrus and Symposium regarding why Socrates could fell in love. Firstly, Socrates thinks that it is better to be a non lover than a lover, since non lover would want his lover to be weak, and that is a negative influence. Then, he rejects his first speech, because that’s merely someone who does not able to see the real truth thinks. People who is fully rational, with a philosopher’s mind, and able to see the real truth, would not want his lover to be weak. The desire of wanting lovers to be weak is not true love. After giving a definition of love, Socrates thinks that is love is a form of madness

It is true that some lovers love regardless, that kind of love is not true love. It is more of passion than love. When people first in love, they would feel like being drowning in honey jar, and don’t want to get out. However, there is a Chinese saying says that: the stronger it comes, the faster it fades. So does passion. Since it comes strongly, it would fade faster. It is Passion that would fade out over time, true love won’t. Just as what Socrates realized. Love is such a divine thing that would not possess such nagetiveness. I do admit that love do include greed. Love would want to possess his loved one forever, and wants to eliminate all competitors. Real love, should show a moderation in the greedy. In Symposium, Agathon’s speech talked about the god of love. “(love) has the biggest share of moderation.”. “…moderation...is power over pleasures and passions, and no pleasure is more powerful than love!”. (Symposium 196C). A true lover would want to what is best for his lover. He would want to improve himself as well as his lover. The love in Symposium is the love that Socrates found admiring, and that is the love Socrates would be fell

Agathon thinks that love is happy, beautiful, attractive, wise, good… (Class notes). When examines his speech, Socrates introduces a theory: it is necessary that a thing desires something only when it is in need and not present. (Symposium 197D). One only in want of something when he does not possess it. So does love. If love is beauty, then love would no longer desire beauty. Since love is still in want of beauty, then love is not beauty. For the same reason, love is not happy, not beautiful, not attractive, not wise, and not good. Thus love is in between. Accoriding to Mooney’s argument,

(Plato) seeks to appropriate the good for oneself and this is held to be incompatible with loving the other for his or her own sake….it fails to capture the notion that we can have different kinds of desires.

He thinks that there are all kinds of love, some are acquisitive, some are not. However, that is not true. The reason regarding this concerns with different kind of people instead of different kind of love. Some people are more concerned about others; some people only care about themselves. It is true that “desire is not essentially acquisitive” (Mooney), it is objective. Whether love is acquisitive or not depends on the owner of the