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The Symposium: An Analysis

Introduction

Love is one of the most influential feelings in the world and one of the most discussed emotion in all forms. It has been discussed in poetry, literature, philosophy, politics and every medical science. Love has been discussed as a topic with its own nature as well as ramifications (political and mostly ethical). In different societies and cultures, love has different meanings and context. For some societies, love is an entirely different phenomenon as compared to some other societies. In some cultures, love is considered as extremely sacred and pure whereas for some cultures, love is a concurrent event that could reoccur many times through a person's life.

The question, “what is love” has been asked again and again throughout history by different philosophers. Philosophy is linked closely to this question because many philosophers have pondered over this thought and given a lot of time to this question, trying to understand how the word and the emotion can best be defined. According to dictionaries, love is an abstract noun. According to certain philosophies, love is a word that is attached to the extreme liking for something yet it is unreal and insensible. Some philosophers describe love as our connection to the world and the things in this world. Some philosophers strongly discuss the term “touched by love” as a feeling where a person is so overwhelmed by the word and its power that all other sensations and feelings of the person are overridden by the feeling of love.

Throughout the different cultures prevailing in the world, love plays different roles and portrays different meanings. It has different meanings when we read about it in poems, when we watch it in movies, read about it in novels and witness it in real life. In philosophy, it has been termed as a concept purely materialistic and pertaining strictly to physical desires and at other instances, it has been termed as the spiritual affair that is the closest thing to divinity that a man can witness. Plato's Symposium is one of the most significant theories of philosophy, when it comes to defining the word 'love'. In this paper, we shall discuss the Symposium in depth and how it defines the word love and describes the feeling. Plato's description of love has been discussed deeply by many different philosophers over time. His own student, Aristotle, described love in a much more secular form than Plato. However, the description given by Plato and the thoughts that he invoked are still a topic of much discussion.

Discussion

The philosophical treatment of the word 'Love'

In philosophy, the word 'Love' has been treated according to various different disciplines. It has been considered from the point of metaphysics, ethics, politics, human nature, religion and even epistemology. The nature of the feeling, its role in a person's life, its significance and importance as well as its impact and influence on people in a person's life has all been observed. There are different philosophies on gender, sex and ...