Socrates’ stance on love is portrayed in Plato’s Symposium and is what the focus of this paper will be. He focuses on the aspect of love that emerges as our desire for it, and more specifically desire in general. According to Socrates, we desire what we do not have, for it would be foolish to desire something that we already possess. When we see beauty, and when we do not have beauty, we desire it. As love is the desire for those who are beautiful, given beauty’s subjectivity, then love is the desire for the beauty that we do not see in ourselves.
While this definition of love helps to explain the obvious examples of true love, it can also be used to explain the situations where someone might fail at love. The first premise that I will analyze is that of the concept of beauty. The saying “beauty is in the eyes of the beholder” claims that the concept of beauty is relative to the individual, and is a concept that I cannot find ground to refute. In order for such beauty to be understood by the individual, he must actually know what it is that he finds to be beautiful, a process that takes self-analysis and experience. Once we become aware of what it is that we find to be beautiful, we look for it in other people, and value those who possess it. From here arises a discrepancy between my own conception and Socrates’. He claims that we cannot desire what we already have, so it is evident that we must desire in those that we love, what we do not have for ourselves. This seems to presuppose ownership as a necessary condition of desire. The mere desire for experience does not involve ownership of any kind however. We might desire to listen to music, watch a movie, ride a roller coaster, or to be educated but we do not desire to own these experiences. I think love is similar to these desires because it is something that we desire, but only for the experience, not ownership. Therefore it is possible for an individual to find beauty in himself, and then to also desire the love of another individual who possesses that beauty as well. Such a desire is not for the ownership of the lover’s beauty, but rather a desire to experience life alongside an individual who has beauty, and then to procreate with that individual in an attempt to create more beauty.
Socrates was right because he understood that love is our desire for beauty manifested into a relationship between two individuals. He was wrong however when he says love is the desire for beauty that we necessarily do not possess ourselves. It may be, but it is not necessary. Biologically, we can contemplate the idea that love is our possibly subconscious desire to immortalize that which we see to be beautiful. The sexual aspect of love can then be the physical act of not only creating life, but creating and continuing the existence of beauty. This seems sound to me, for it gives the lover so much power over that which he or she perceives to be beautiful. We individualistically conceptualize beauty, have the power to seek it in others, and then have the power to create further beauty through reproduction. It is not that we desire the beauty in others that we do not have, but simply that we seek beauty in others. The self’s beauty is irrelevant to the self, but is of the utmost importance to the lover of the self. This is why we see many relationships where individuals love each other, but have very different conceptions of beauty, and why we see relationships where the individuals have identical conceptions of beauty. It is common to find couples whose conceptions of beauty are dialectical, allowing for both individuals to love the beauty present in the other that the individual does not have in their own self.
i agree with this
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