What is Love?

January 15, 2025 | 675 words | 4min read

In the book Symposium by Plato, various people give eulogies on the nature of love. These eulogies roughly follow the structure of:

1. What is the origin of love?
2. What are the good qualities of love?
3. What are the habits and lifestyles of love?
4. What is the effect of love?

Phaedrus gives the first eulogy, in which he argues that love originates as one of the oldest gods. He highlights its benefits, particularly in promoting virtue in human beings, such as inspiring acts of self-sacrifice for a loved one.

Next is Pausanias, who focuses on male-to-male sexual relationships in Athens at the time. He distinguishes between Common Love, which is purely physical, and Heavenly Love, which is directed at developing virtue and rationality in young men. In exchange for education, these young men gratify their teachers. Pausanias considers Heavenly Love superior because its purpose is to cultivate virtue and intellect.

Eryximachus also distinguishes between good and bad love, like his predecessor, but broadens the discussion to encompass all natural processes. For him, just as medicine is about nurturing the good parts of the body and discarding the bad, good love is self-controlled, while bad love is indulgent.

Besides Socrates’ speech, Aristophanes’ eulogy is probably the most famous. His speech recounts a myth about the origin of love. He suggests that humans were originally double their current shape, with four arms, four legs, and two faces. There was also a third gender, hermaphrodite, which had both male and female sexual organs. These beings became arrogant and tried to overthrow the gods on Olympus. In response, Zeus cut them in half, creating the humans we are today. This explains the innate human desire for a partner: we are searching for our “other half” to become whole again. Furthermore, people with heterosexual preferences originated from the hermaphrodite beings, while homosexuals were derived from the original entirely male or female beings.

The last eulogy is given by Socrates. He argues:

1. Love is a relationship between oneself and something else, expressing a lack of something. Love itself is not beautiful but is the desire for beauty.
2. Love is an expression of a more fundamental desire: to possess something good forever.
3. Love satisfies this desire by “giving birth in beauty” and thus achieving self-immortalization.
4. There are two ways to achieve self-immortalization: physical (producing offspring) and intellectual (creating enduring works, such as Homer’s poetry or Einstein’s theories).
5. The highest form of love is mental, abstracted from specific individuals to the appreciation of universal forms of beauty.

Socrates contends that since love is relational, it is neither inherently ugly nor beautiful, but rather an expression of the human desire to attain goodness and happiness. For Socrates, goodness and beauty are inseparable: if something is good, it is naturally beautiful. He also believes that to be happy, humans must be good, which for him means to cultivate virtues.

In rejecting the idea of love as the search for one’s other half, Socrates defines love as the general desire for happiness. Love’s ultimate purpose is “to give birth in beauty, both in body and mind,” which brings humans as close as possible to immortality. This immortality can be achieved through sexual reproduction or through immortal fame gained by heroic acts or intellectual contributions, similar to the distinctions between Common and Heavenly Love mentioned earlier.

Socrates generalizes this desire beyond human relationships and describes it in stages of increasing generality and “higher” quality:

• The first stage involves sexual relationships between humans.
• The next stage is recognizing physical beauty not only in an individual but in all people.
• The subsequent stage values mental beauty over physical beauty, such as the beauty in a mathematical theorem or a philosophical argument.
• In the final stage, one perceives the beauty of beauty itself—what Socrates calls the Platonic Form of Beauty, which is unchanging, uniform, and universal.

To understand this ultimate form is to comprehend what beauty truly is. By recognizing this form, one comes into contact with the “divine” and generates “true virtue,” which, according to Socrates, leads to happiness (eudaimonia).