Plato's Theory of Love is one of the most fanciful and inspiring dialogues of the great thinkers. In his discussion of love, Plato theorizes that love is “neither beautiful nor good.” Love represents the desire of the human individual to achieve true pleasure and authentic happiness by realizing what is good and beautiful. It is in this effort to achieve this high and ultimately unshakable virtue that we can find love in terms of human emotion. Some critics such as Vlatos argue that Plato's thought does not accurately account for individual and interpersonal love, finding flaws in Plato's argument. However, Plato's definition allows for a more universal perspective of love that takes into account both the personal and the existential. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essay Donald Levy argues that Plato's depiction of love accurately encapsulates the full range of love in human experience. Levy argues that Plato does not idealize love, but presents virtue in its true form. Regarding Plato's dialogue on love, Lévy states that "those who speak before Socrates mainly share the typically Greek tendency to glorify the sexual instinct rather than its particular objects" (285). The Greeks traditionally viewed the impulse toward physical love as a reflection of a greater desire to attain that which is good. However, Socrates advocates a more nuanced perspective that does not view love in itself as the ultimate good. It is not acts of love that enable an individual to achieve the virtue of goodness inherent in love. In reality, it is love itself that allows us to attempt to achieve the virtue of beauty. Socrates' companions, and the ancient Greeks in general, tended to value the concept of love. According to Levy, “For them, love is a god whose beauty and goodness they praise in praise” (285). The notion of love, perhaps reasonably, has been highly romanticized and expanded upon by poets and other thinkers. This romanticization, according to Plato, distracts from the true nature of love. This general perspective reflects Plato's desire to arrive at the fundamental truth underlying objects, theories, and experiences. In order to eradicate and move beyond the romanticized notion of love, one must examine what precisely love aims to achieve and how an individual would feel upon achieving or accomplishing that goal after a hypothetical mastery of love. The Greeks tend to exaggerate, in Plato and Levy's view, the role of physical attraction and the act of love in attributing meaning to the virtue of love itself . Levy argues that "Even Pausanias, who likes to distinguish noble love from base love, asserts that 'it is always honorable to conform to a lover to achieve excellence.' Even if the lover turns out to be bad, it does honor to the boy to have been so deceived! (285). In this sense, Pausanias places the act of love above the ultimate goal of achieving the good. Of great concern to Plato is Pausanias' placement of love itself before the greater virtue he aims to achieve. According to Lévy, “it is this almost universally held belief in the intrinsic value of sexual love into which Socrates subscribes from the very beginning” (285). Therefore, Plato sharply contrasts Socrates' view with those who hold more traditional Greek views on love and the importance of sexual love in demonstrating beauty and goodness. Socrates presents a revolutionary view of love that contrasts sharply with the established Greek notion that love extolssexual. Levy quotes Socrates: “Love,” he says, “is neither beautiful nor good. Love cannot be beautiful because it is the desire to possess what is beautiful, and one cannot desire what one already possesses” (285). Love is therefore tainted by the temporal and earthly reality of aiming for what is beautiful instead of itself representing or encapsulating virtue in its authentic form of what is good. Love is therefore a desire, from which Plato deduces that it is perhaps too animal and temporal to represent a virtue. Plato argues that love exists within every human individual as an example of the notion of perfection. However, this incarnation contains the idea that love itself is tainted and colored in the real world by human error and the tendency to disrespect and shy away from the good. Love in itself is therefore neither beautiful nor good, but it represents a step towards its realization. Socrates nevertheless defends this notion of Platonic love. He proclaims that “human nature can find no better help than love” (212b) (285). It is love that can counteract some of the most negative and pejorative elements of human nature and seek to rectify human existence in the temporal world with that of good. Plato introduces another character, a woman, Diomita, to present a similar, if not slightly different, definition of love. Diomita states that “'The object of love is to procreate and give birth in the presence of beauty' (206e). It is not enough, it seems, for a philosopher, a lover of wisdom, to simply witness the birth of ideas in others” (285). Diomita, like many of her Greek contemporaries, also considered sexual love to be an important semblance of virtue on earth. However, Diomita also connects the ultimate end result of physical procreation, birth and the creation of new life, to that which connects physical love to the beautiful. In this sense, Diomita also exposes previous notions to arrive at a new understanding of what love precisely is. Plato's concept of love differs from ancient and contemporary understandings of what constitutes love. According to Plato, Lévy writes: “The different types of love must be ordered hierarchically, one being judged superior to the other because its object is intrinsically better” (286). Plato attributes a structure to this fanciful and difficult to grasp emotion that is love. Here modern observers might object to Plato's essential dichotomy regarding such a complex and multifaceted emotion. Levy states that “there is an ultimate object of love toward which all others must strive in order to become objects of love” (286). Like absolute beauty, absolute love exists and represents love beyond the physical. Plato proclaims, according to Lévy, that “To achieve the vision of absolute beauty, one must first pass from the love of physical beauty in an individual to the love of all physical beauty; then the love of beauty in the soul leads to awareness of the beauty of activities, institutions and sciences” (286). Therefore, one must move away from the more traditional and physical appearances of love in order to understand the more authentic and inner notions of what truly constitutes love. Love of the beauty of society, of the intellectual world and of the sciences that Plato judges superior. Scholars such as Vlastos, and arguably Aristotle much earlier, opposed the Platonic notion of absolute love. According to Vlastos and Aristotle, “Love is wishing good things on someone for that person’s sake.” True love therefore departs from the personal and individualistic conception of love as self-gratifying and represents the capacity of an individual to love the success and happiness of others,completely independent of one's own personal goals or efforts. Levy concedes. “Since Plato already defined love as the desire for oneself to possess what is beautiful, his idea of ​​love, however spiritualized it may be, remains essentially egocentric” (286). The Platonic notion of love therefore does not deviate from the personal gain and benefit of the individual. Vlastos and Aristotle argue that true love must manifest some form of movement away from the self and toward a more universal understanding of love as a virtue. Some scholars have criticized Plato for not giving an accurate account of the particular individuals associated with love. Levy agrees to some extent, writing that “Plato fails to see that love has people fundamentally and primarily as its object” (286). However, Plato views human individuals as the only channels through which to engage in love and ultimately seek to achieve the higher virtues that love can manifest in the temporal world. According to Lévy, “For Plato, the love of people is placed well below the love of an abstract entity, absolute beauty. “What we must love in people is the “image” of the Idea in them” (286). It is therefore not the physical attribute of an individual that must be loved, but the aspect of the Idea of ​​good which is inherent to him. This differs notably from lust and desire which, as Plato suggests, would perhaps focus on the physical. Vlastos argues that love must move away from the individual to be validated as true. He argues that “this is all that love could be for a person, given the status of persons in Plato's ontology” (286). However, Plato's dichotomy does not seek to invalidate one source of love in relation to the other, but simply to recognize that there are images of the Idea of ​​beauty and good present in certain acts or feelings which, as real non-representations of the Idea, should therefore be placed lower in the hierarchy. Lévy writes that “the definition of love given by Vlastos, in relation to which he finds Plato's defective, seems to be a definition not of what love is, but of what love should perhaps be. be be” (286). Vlastos identifies what he sees as a flaw in Plato's theory, noting both the dichotomy and the lack of break with the individual. However, Plato's original thought may simply be more realistic. Humans are not capable of understanding a love completely independent of themselves. So we need to break down what love is. The figure of Diomita is crucial to understanding the universality and applicability of Plato's theory of love. According to Joy Ritchie and Kate Ronald, Diomita presents a slightly different, but still legitimate, understanding of love that helps rectify the apparent inaccessibility of Plato's theory. Ritchie and Ronald write that “Diomita argues that love is a spirit that moves between gods and humans, connecting them through speech and desire” (9). Like Socrates, Diomita recognizes that love is not a god. However, love is also not entirely temporal and represents a kind of intermediary entity. According to Ritchie and Ronald, "Diomita's feminine presence, including her references to the body, the family, and the private realm, reinforces rather than detracts from the powerful homoeroticism of this dialogue" (9). While Plato appears to move away from the importance of heterosexual physical love in his hierarchy, Diomita's presences affirm the female perspective in the dialogue to ensure that important aspects of love in the physical sense are also explored. However, it is ultimately Diomita who teaches “Socrates how to transcend physical desire. 149-157.