In Plato's Symposium, three main speeches/eulogies addressed by Aristophanes, Socrates and Alcibiades achieved deeper thought than others. These dialects contain strengths and weaknesses for approaching of understanding love as well as a conflict on the superiority of which individuals should abide by. Aristophanes’ accounts for the origin of love as being due to people originally having been welded with twice as many limbs and organs but forced to being split into halves by the gods as a form of punishment; thus for every person there is a missing half necessary to restore the person to completion as a full human or a “sphere”. “Love is the name for our pursuit of wholeness, for our desire to be complete.” (192E13-193A1) This attraction
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We are pushed to each successive stage when the object, which we loved at the previous stage, fails to fulfill the demands we placed on it—crumbles in our hands and leaves us feeling empty and bereft and could prove inadequate to sustain our primary interest in life. As a consequence we're driven on to something else as a distraction. For example, we may turn for a while from one object to another, a returning to the stage of Aristophanes to find the “other half”. It is plausible that many would be fixated to perfect one stage for the rest of their lives and never grasp the form of beauty itself “and free from distraction” (Nussbaum 187) to reach …show more content…
When we think about love, and about trying to give an account of love from our own experience, the events of a particular love and the feelings of vulnerability, despair, elation, of being held in thrall, of yearning, of compulsion to pursue the beloved, of embarrassment—all these are foreign to an account of love as a begetting on beauty. This eulogy Alcibiades gives about Socrates shows us just how human he is and takes us to a realistic scenario people can relate to. This can help an individual to establish and understanding to emotional and cognitive responses.“…[W]e are suddenly, with an abrupt jolt, returned to the world we inhabit and invited (by the parallel ‘all at once.’)” (Nussbaum 189) The phenomenology of love overwhelms and washes away the intellectual account of
We are pushed to each successive stage when the object, which we loved at the previous stage, fails to fulfill the demands we placed on it—crumbles in our hands and leaves us feeling empty and bereft and could prove inadequate to sustain our primary interest in life. As a consequence we're driven on to something else as a distraction. For example, we may turn for a while from one object to another, a returning to the stage of Aristophanes to find the “other half”. It is plausible that many would be fixated to perfect one stage for the rest of their lives and never grasp the form of beauty itself “and free from distraction” (Nussbaum 187) to reach …show more content…
When we think about love, and about trying to give an account of love from our own experience, the events of a particular love and the feelings of vulnerability, despair, elation, of being held in thrall, of yearning, of compulsion to pursue the beloved, of embarrassment—all these are foreign to an account of love as a begetting on beauty. This eulogy Alcibiades gives about Socrates shows us just how human he is and takes us to a realistic scenario people can relate to. This can help an individual to establish and understanding to emotional and cognitive responses.“…[W]e are suddenly, with an abrupt jolt, returned to the world we inhabit and invited (by the parallel ‘all at once.’)” (Nussbaum 189) The phenomenology of love overwhelms and washes away the intellectual account of