The book Phaedrus has a lot of unanswered mythology along with a topic that interested me the most, which was regarding Socrates logic of love. Socrates positioning on love is a topic worth exploring its a notion that is an argument that lacks logic, and then it is immoral. Phaedrus introduces the centrality of virtue to love in human relationships from the first speech. Moreover this statement signifies many possible topics, I would like to focus more on Socrates understanding of love’s irrational aspects; that is, is love a form of “madness?” Would you travel across the states or universe to ask a father/mother for their daughter or son’s hand?
I consider myself to be a mostly sane and rational person. It is safe to assume that I go about
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I think that beauty is all in what a person sees in another person. What might make one person pretty another individual finds that attractive. Beauty is everywhere and inside everyone. It’s not hard to find. All you need to do is walk outside, take a look around you. I’m sure you’ll find something that you believe is beautiful. Once you do that, look in the mirror. Everyone has something beautiful about him or her. Everyone is beautiful. Foundations of relationships create a beautiful image in which a connection between people is made deeper than life itself. By examining these three forms and describing how each is shown to be beautiful the definition of love will be seen to be a personal reflection of experiences and …show more content…
For Eros is the force that seeks to reunite the human being after its split into categories: male and female. Take for example, “love” - which is a form of passion, which in turn, is a form of emotion. Rhetoric does have emotional appeals; just like love: "understand that the friendship of a lover does not come with goodwill; it 's like an appetite for food, for the purpose of filling up - as wolves love lambs, so is lover 's affection…" (Phaedrus pg. 20) The idea seems simple, but there is a danger associated with the mis-categorization of issues in which people are concerned. Different perspectives always come with conditions of subjective nature, so it is impossible to reach a universal consent by which to form some grand and ultimately objective taxonomy, therefore it seems improbable to avoid mis-categorization. So it follows that any error in the process itself will lead to an erroneous grouping, and such groupings can promote associations that are undesirable for certain people, i.e. stigmas. The negative stigmas are derived from a type of false inference called a
It is well known that Plato, a devoted student of Socrates, chronicled many of Socrates' speeches and conversations. Every so often one can find instances where Socrates and other players in these conversations seem to contradict themselves, or at least muddle their arguments. One such occurrence of this is in Plato's Symposium and Plato's Phaedrus. Both texts speak of love in its physical sense, both texts describe love and its effects, and both discuss how it is best realized, yet they do this in very different fashions, and for different reasons.
In the Symposium, written by Plato, Socrates and others engage in a dialogue in the home of Agathon on love. Instead of "singing the honours" (94) of love like the other participants, Socrates uses a retelling of a discussion that he had with a woman named Diotima to tell the audience of what he perceives to be the truth of love.
In Aristophanes’ speech, which primarily takes the form of a myth, he weaves together comical elements with undertones of sadness that serve to create a profound account of what Eros is. The speech describes humans as combined creatures who, after being separated, are filled with longing. These beings spend the remainder of their lives, in a sometimes futile attempt, combating this feeling of longing by searching for the individual that can make them one again. Aristophanes describes Eros as a remedy for this overwhelming emotion. He uses his story to make Eros an entity that acts in tandem with individuals wishing to be whole. As a result, Eros ultimately serves as a guide that allows humans to bring about their original feeling of completion,
In Plato’s The Republic, we, the readers, are presented with two characters that have opposing views on a simple, yet elusive question: what is justice? In this paper, I will explain Thrasymachus’ definition of justice, as well as Socrates’s rebuttals and differences in opinion. In addition, I will comment on the different arguments made by both Socrates and Thrasymachus, and offer critical commentary and examples to illustrate my agreement or disagreement with the particular argument at hand.
Love is often misconstrued as an overwhelming force that characters have very little control over, but only because it is often mistaken for the sum of infatuation and greed. Love and greed tread a blurred line, with grey areas such as lust. In simplest terms, love is selfless and greed is selfish. From the agglomeration of mythological tales, people deduce that love overpowers characters, even that it drives them mad. However, they would be wrong as they would not have analyzed the instances in depth to discern whether or not the said instance revolves around true love. Alone, true love help characters to act with sound reasoning and logic, as shown by the tales of Zeus with his lovers Io and Europa in Edith Hamilton’s Mythology.
When it comes to adultery, love is the most important factor in determining if it’s wrong or right. In Plato’s Symposium, love is discussed among Phaedrus, Pausanias, Eryximachus, Aristophanes Agathon and Socrates. Pausanias is the most important when discussing adultery. Pausanias points out that there are two types of love, Common Aphrodite’s Love and Love of Heavenly Aphrodite. Common love is the root of adultery. It is the love that has plagued the whole world for the past hundreds of years. It is the love shared between two people only for their selfish sexual pleasures. While Heavenly love is the spiritual love between an elder and a boy that provides guidance, and I believe it is the cure for the devastating plague of common love. Most people share common love and have no real soulful love connection between them. In the Symposium, Pausanias refers to a love he calls the common love in which a person is more attached “to the body more than the soul, and to the least intelligent partners, since all they care about is completing the sexual act” (166). Which relates to adultery in that committing sexual acts with someone else’s body is ultimately meaningless if the person is not attached to the soul of the other person. I claim that adultery is morally permissible because having sexual intercores with someone else has little
One perspective shown through Sappho, is the evanescent nature of love. Her only fully recovered poem, known as “Prayer to Afroditi”, was written for a cult of young women formed by Sappho, and meant as a performance for the goddess Aphrodite (encyclopedia.com). Due to this, the anonymous speaker can be assumed female. She vocalizes for Aphrodite, saying the goddess would ask, “Whom shall I persuade again to take you into her love?” This suggests that within Greek society, love and passion are acceptably fleeting. The speaker recognizes that her “crazy heart” is frequently falling in love and she’s asked for many favors,
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 of Love; Agathon enunciates that the correct way to present an eulogy is first to praise its nature and gifts. As the last speaker, and the most important one, Socrates connects his ideas with Diotima of Mantinea’s story of Love’s origin, nature and purpose. Different from the earlier five speakers who regard Love as an object and praise different sides of it, Socrates, referring to Diotima’s idea, considers Love as a pursuit of beauty gradually from “physical beauty of people in general” (Symposium, Plato, 55) to the “true beauty” (55).
Pausanias brings up an excellent way to think about Love. He explains that love can be broken down into two types, that of Common and Heavenly love. The common love is that when a man and a woman join merely to satisfy their sexual desires. On the other hand the heavenly love is the type that occurs when two people are attracted to each other with a strong force that goes past the physical appearance but comes from deep within as if from the soul. Although Plato presents examples of the two loves with having the common love as if only happening between a man and a woman and the heavenly love happening between a man and a man, there is not enough proof in the text to say that this if what the whole of Athens really believed.
There are many essential emotions that form the building blocks of our lives. These emotions help to shape the people that we are. These feelings are emotional necessities to ultimately keep us happy. No piece of literature these feelings more evident than the Odyssey by Homer. Throughout the course of this book there is one major emotional theme: love.
Throughout the story The Odyssey there are many themes that represent major parts of the story. The main theme that stood out to me is love which includes loyalty. “Love is a profoundly tender, passionate affection for another person; a feeling of warm personal attachment or deep affection, as for a parent, child, or friend; or a sexual passion or desire” (dictionary.com). “Loyalty is defined in the Webster's dictionary as faithfulness or devotion to a person, a cause or a duty” (Webster’s dictionary). Through these definitions, it can be expressed that loyalty and love are major themes in Homer's epic, "The Odyssey". Love and loyalty shows relationships that are between two people. The few relationships that represents love and loyalty is between husband and wife Odysseus and Penelope and also between father and son Odysseus and Telemachus. These relationships shows more than just love and loyalty though, their relationships also shows compassion, sympathy and the need to be in each one another’s lives.
Jocasta and Emilia, important minor characters in their plays, both showcase the power of love as well as how destructive it can be. Emilia and Jocasta both unknowingly end their own lives, as well as others, and spread tragedy throughout the towns in which they lived. It is believed that in 425 B.C., Sophocles first produced Oedipus the King (Theater of Sophocles). In the play, Oedipus the King, Jocasta is the main character, Oedipus’, mother and wife. Jocasta’s love for Oedipus ultimately destroys him and results in her death. Sophocles helped shape the heroic ideal that is later embodied in medieval romance, which Shakespeare traditionally uses in Othello (Zerba). William Shakespeare wrote Othello in about 1604 (The Theater of Shakespeare). In the play, Othello, Emilia is a companion to the main character, Othello’s wife Desdemona. Emilia’s love for her husband, Iago, ultimately destroys Othello and results in her own death.
with some very different views of love as brought to us by Agathon, Phaedrus and
It is our nature as human beings to desire being seen as attractive. Both women and men will go beyond barriers to make themselves more aesthetic. Scholars define beauty as the quality of being attractive physically or having in you the qualities that give pleasure to the mind and the senses of other people. Everyone has their own definition of beauty. Therefore, there is no standard measure to determine or judge if someone or something is or is not beautiful. There can be a great variation in the definition of beauty in America while compared to the definition of beauty in other foreign countries. Despite these differences, most countries share a number of ideas regarding what beauty
Throughout history, civilizations have admired the beauty that the world has presented, but isn’t beauty held in the eye of the beholder? The word can be used to describe a variety of things. It can describe places, animals, objects, people and even ideas. However, the one beauty our society embraces today is human beauty. Because the perception of beauty differs from person to person, different ideas of beauty developed throughout history, which in turn formed standards for human beauty, and these standards have had a massive impact on today’s society.