Plato & Shakespeare

Aristophanes’ account of the origin of love

There were people shaped as spheres with four legs and four arms, and they were strong, so Zeus cut them in half. Now, all those people wanted to do was find their missing half, so when they did, they were dying because they were so focused on being together. They grabbed onto each other for dear life and weren’t eating, going to work, or worshipping the gods.

Since the Gods weren’t being worshipped, Zeus sent Apollo to heal them by adding genitals so they could be temporarily together by sleeping together and reuniting at night. Eventually, when your partner dies, you keep looking for another one.

This story explains how human beings are incomplete without a romantic/erotic partner. By nature, we have a deep need to find and be with a partner, so if we are alone, we will be unhappy. We restore our original nature when we find a partner.

Socrates/Diotima’s explanation of love

Being physically pregnant means you are drawn to someone sexually, and that is how you get pregnant. You then give birth when you are drawn to something beautiful.

When you are pregnant, by soul anyone can get pregnant, no matter the sex. This is the psyche, which is the soul and mind, from emotion, reason, and desire. To give birth to what we are carrying in our soul, we need to be in the presence of beauty.

Using the idea of sexual love and physical beauty, and going above that, then being drawn to someone by the beauty of their soul. That’s when you get to intellectual/psychological intercourse happening. Procreating with ideas is a bigger deal than procreating regularly. Writing a book, making music, is bigger than reproducing a human offspring and sort of gives you a sense of immortality.

The ideal form of eros focuses on wisdom and drives one to attempt to understand the true nature of things (or universal truth). Love involves metaphysics (the nature of reality) and it is believed people won’t experience the ideal form.

Urgency and intensity for wisdom

Driven to want to understand, the more you learn, the more exciting it is to you

Like being in love with ideas

Socrates/Diotima’s explanation of the paradoxical nature of love and the reasons for it

Poros (resource) and Penia (poverty) are at Aphrodite’s birthday. Penia ends up hooking up with drunk Poros and then came Eros. Due to this Eros always has to do with need. He also always has some resources and some need which are qualities from both parents. Due to this love is never completely without resources, nor he is ever rich.

What is love’s relationship to beauty and immortality?

Beauty is the object of love. Love is not immortal Love is not what we usually think of when we think of romantic love because we are moving away from an individual to a universal truth. Loving appropriately means making youtself and your beloved more beautiful. Love is conditional and to love soemone means to love them on the basis of nothing. The lover loves the beloved on the basis of his beauty not unconditionally. Without your beauty you ae not going to be loveable.

Socrates/Diotimas’ explanation of the scent/ladder of love

lover starts by loving one beautiful boy (body) which is loving somone we are physically attracted to. It depends on how hot you are which is the first rung on the ladder. Lover will love another beautiful body and if pholisophically inclined, will realize they love hotness. Lover then comes to love all beautiful bodies and realizes the that the beauty of these bodies is one and the same thing, which enables him to move on to appreciate the beauty of a soul which means you are moving up the ladder.

The second rung of the ladder is beautiful souls. Beautiful souls are already more beautiful than beautiful bodies and closer to the form of beauty. By loving the beauty of souls, the lover realizes that it is far superior to the beauty of bodies. Lover’s understanding of beauty of souls leads him to learn to apprecite the beauty of activities and laws. So once you’ve loved multiple beautiful souls, we realize we are in love w/ people with psychological beauty.

Moving up the ladder and now you are in love with beautiful activities and laws NOT people. These activities are more beautiful than people and the more we understand beauty the closer we get to it. Therefore the lover will continue to ascend until he encounters the form of beauty, which is beauty in and of itself. The lover who correctly moves from the particular to the universal.

However if you are stuck on one person you won’t be able to ascend up the ladder fully.

What is Alcibiades’ characterization of Socrates?

Alcibiades says that Socrates is truly beautiful within and his beauty is closer to the form of beauty. There is no one like Socrates and it makes him want to be better and be a better person.

What is the relationship between Socrates and Alcibiades and how does it relates to the view of love expressed in Socrates/Diotima’s speech?

Alcibiades tries seducing Socrates but they just end up talking all night which makes Alcibiades disappointed Socrates never made a move. Due to it being so late Socrates spends the night and they sleep in the same bed together. From this Socrates says their relationship is much like father and son. He did not pursue Alcibiades because it would be like exhancing gold for bronze which means Alcibiades has physical beauty but not psychological beauty like Socrates so it would not be a fair trade. This relationship then flips the standard structure of a relationship between a lover and beloved.

Overall Socrates sees beauty beyond the physical level while Alcibiades is stuck on Socrates and won’t ascend on the ladder to meet Socrates’ level.

What are the possible interpresentations of Shakespear’s view of love-based on Romeo + Juliet?

Implies Shakespeare thinks that all consuming love is destined to burn out and die fast.