Socrates' View Of Love

A Different View of Love

We have heard definitions of love through our lives that have been passed on for decades. Some of us have felt love, and some of us have been in love. But no one ever seems to question what love is, as if it is something that just plainly is.

People tend to just go with it, and think that what they are feeling is really complete and substantial love. In Plato’s The Symposium, the reader is confronted with some very different views of love as brought to us by Agathon, Phaedrus and

Socrates, to name a few. Each man at the dinner party has a different point of view on the issue of love. Some of the men are old lovers, and some are just friends, and each puts in his thoughts of love as the evening wears on. Socrates’ theories of love are a little different than everyone else’s’. Being the great philosopher that he was, he had quite a different take on the issue. Socrates strove to find the truth in love. He was the “ideal lover of wisdom”, never allowing himself to divert from the real pursuit of beauty: Since beauty is one of the true and ultimate objectives of love. Socrates states that, “Love is the conciousness of a need for a good not yet acquired or possessed.” In other words we want what we do not have, and at times cannot have. Love for Socrates is a superficial occurrence and only based on the things in life that seem to be pleasing to the eye.

But in the times when The Symposium was written that tended to be the case more often than not.

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