However, the Ladder of Love in Plato’s Symposium refers to guidelines for the focus of depth conversation at advanced stages. Depth Dialogue is primarily a deep exploration of love. Socrates and Plato define love as an eros. By full sensation, juicy, physical erotic bodily desirability. According to Plato, these is what your body, feels that you love, like, care about, feel attracted to, are pulled by, want, desire, lust for, long for. That is what you find interesting, pleasing, gorgeous, fine looking. It gives you enjoyment, fun, joy, excitement. The ladder of love is actually the ladder of your desires in your life.
Therefore, according to Plato the ladder of love could be anything within the category, from any time past, present, future or any place, whether genuine, here and now, remembered or completely fantasy. The only obligation is that the knowledge you choose be it from the broad category and that it will be the experience of something you sensually, bodily find alluring or attractive, or that gives you pleasure.
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Write My PaperThe most attracting and perfect of Plato’s dialogues, and the mainly entertaining, is the one on Love, The Symposium, it took place at male dinner party in 416 BC. The host is Agathon; this is a beautiful young man of about 30 years. The guests make a decision that, somewhat than just getting drunk, they will hold a speech competition, in which each of them delivers a speech in praise of Eros, the god of Love.
The first speaker on the stage, Phaedrus, praises Love as a mighty divinity, among the oldest of the gods, who delightfully inspires lovers towards virtue, deterring them through embarrassment from that which is disgraceful and inspiring them through love of glory to respectable deeds. However, like the other speakers, Phaedrus through his speech talks about love between males. In his speech, he says that;
“Should one who loves be discovered in any dishonourable action, or tamely enduring insult through cowardice, he would feel more anguish and shame if observed by the object of his passion, than if he were observed by his father or his companions, or any other person.”
Pausanias explains the legal situation. However, Athens and other Greek cities, it was understood, acknowledged, and legal that the relationship involving youth and man could include sex. He contrasts the situation in places that are “subject to the Barbarians”, this was made to mean the Persians and other non-Greeks, whereby not only this species of love, but philosophy and the practice of the gymnastic training, are represented as dishonourable by the dictatorial governments under which the barbarians live. According to Pausanias, freedom for males to be in love with each other was as part of the Greek way. He declares passionately that;
“Wherever, therefore, it is declared dishonourable in any case to serve and benefit lovers, that law is a mark of the depravity of the legislator, and avarice and tyranny of the rulers, and the cowardice of those who are ruled.”
Love is a philosopher, who seeks wisdom. The gods are already clever, and the ignorant have actually no desire to acquire knowledge. Nevertheless, Love is of necessity a philosopher, philosophy being an intermediate state between ignorance and wisdom.
“Love then, is collectively the desire in men that good should be forever present to them.” But human beings are mortal, and change is eternal. All things die away, as others come into being. Moreover, so, at the heart of Love is generation: “Love is the desire of generation in the beautiful, both with relation to the body and the soul.” Love is “the desire for immortality a tendency towards eternity.”
Lover and pupil go up the Ladder of Love, which by each steps leads from the love of attractive bodies to the love of all physical beauty, to attractive behavior and institutions, to fine-looking doctrines, and eventually to supreme beauty itself, at which each point is practically.
In his speech Diotima says, “What, then, shall we imagine to be the aspect of the supreme beauty itself, simple, pure, uncontaminated with the intermixture of human flesh and colors, and all other idle and unreal shapes attendant on mortality.”
However, with the speech of Alcibiades, He speaks from his own heart, in humor, vibrant narrative, and outstanding prose-poetry. This is the most wonderful tribute in literature.
Just after Alcibiades has completed his speech, the party breaks up, and some of the guests go home, others fall asleep, and a few, including Socrates, continue talking until sunrise.
Moreover, that, concisely, is Plato’s Dialogue on Love. Possibly that there are many aspects to Love. That Love should lead to higher things. In addition, the core lesson of Plato, that we approach truth through questioning.
Conclusion
However, in conclusion Plato’s Ladder of Love is categorically the single most influential and significant behavior of love in the western literature. However, From neo-Platonism to medieval mysticism, from Augustine to Dante, from Ficino to Freud, its major insights the identity of attractiveness and Goodness; love as a set of progressive stages, successive rungs in a quest for individual immortality, love as a universal creative principle or sanctified force have fashioned western ideas and attitudes at all levels of culture.
In modern religious ceremonies, in a popular song lyrics, in midnight confessions, in wedding vows. All in all, one encounters the impression of a truly perpetual and eternal love, the words of Diotima, Socrates, and the other figures of The Symposium can still be heard.