Plato's Symposium: The Attainability Of Love

The Attainability of Love Plato’s Symposium offers a wide variety of viewpoints surrounding love: what it is, who it effects, and what it means to be achieved. The general understanding is that there are multiple forms of love, and whichever is engaged in will help dictate the status of the one engaging. The speeches of Aristophanes and Diotima present differing definitions of the purpose of love with varying levels of complexity. Each outlines a different path one must take in order to achieve love’s purpose, and the path one chooses dictates what change a person will experience in their life. While both Diotima and Aristophanes’s speeches consider love as a means to an end, Diotima suggests that the purpose of love is destined to remain …show more content…
She asks socrates, of a man, “what will he have, when the good things have become his own?’ ‘He will have happiness.’” Diotima believes that happiness is found through the continued acquirement of such things, and through this form of love he will be able to continue on the metaphorical ladder she creates to define the purpose of love. By using the plural form of “things,” Diotima suggests that, contrary to Aristophanes’s belief, a man must possess more than one “thing” to satisfy the cravings of love. Because of this, love is harder to obtain by Diotima’s definition than by …show more content…
By his definition of love, little work is needed in order to attain it, but rather “when a person meets the half that is his very own…the two are struck from their senses by love, by a sense of belonging to one another, and by desire, and they don’t want to be separated from one another, even for a moment.” Here we can see the simplicity of attaining love; one must simply happen upon their destined partner and they will experience the fullest meaning of love. By choosing the word “meets” rather than an alternative such as “finds” or “discovers,” Aristophanes suggests that love needs not to be sought to be attained. One may simply happen upon their partner by chance, and forever they shall remain together in love. In stark contrast with Aristophanes’s speech, Diotima’s version of love is almost entirely impossible and implausible to attain. We know Socrates to be a very knowledgable and respected man whom Diotima believes can comprehend the purpose of love in the abstract sense, but “as for the purpose of these rites when they are done correctly — that is the final and highest mystery, and [she] don 't know if [Socrates is] capable of it.” To doubt Socrates’s ability to achieve the purpose of love is to doubt almost everyone else’s ability as