Plato Symposium Love Quotes

He suddenly recalled from Plato's Symposium: People were hermaphrodites until God split then in two, and now all the halves wander the world over seeking one another. Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost.

...and when one of them meets the other half, the actual half of himself, whether he be a lover of youth or a lover of another sort, the pair are lost in an amazement of love and friendship and intimacy and one will not be out of the other's sight, as I may say, even for a moment...

Love is simply the name for the desire and pursuit of the whole.

Love is born into every human being; it calls back the halves of our original nature together; it tries to make one out of two and heal the wound of human nature.

Love is the name for our pursuit of wholeness, for our desire to be complete.

He whom loves touches not walks in darkness.

And so, when a person meets the half that is his very own, whatever his orientation, whether it's to young men or not, then something wonderful happens: the two are struck from their senses by love, by a sense of belonging to one another, and by desire, and they don't want to be separated from one another, not even for a moment.

At the touch of love everyone becomes a poet

According to Diotima, Love is not a god at all, but is rather a spirit that mediates between people and the objects of their desire. Love is neither wise nor beautiful, but is rather the desire for wisdom and beauty.

He feels particularly ashamed if ever he is seen by his lovers to be invovled in something dishonourable.

Evil is the vulgar lover who loves the body rather than the soul, inasmuch as he is not even stable, because he loves a thing which is in itself unstable, and therefore when the bloom of youth which he was desiring is over, he takes wing and flies away, in spite of all his words and promises; whereas the love of the noble disposition is life-long, for it becomes one with the everlasting.

...when he looks at Beauty in the only way that Beauty can be seen - only then will it become possible for him to give birth not to images of virtue (because he's in touch with no images), but to true virtue [arete] (because he is in touch with true Beauty). The love of the gods belongs to anyone who has given to true virtue and nourished it, and if any human being could become immortal, it would be he.

Love is merely the name for the desire and pursuit of the whole.

The truth is that we isolate a particular kind of love and appropriate it for the name of love, which really belongs to a wider whole.

If I am in love, many things about the world, not just the immediate object of my love, seem lovable. To say 'I love X' is somehow really to say 'X inspires love in me', and that love then attaches itself to objects other than X as well. The expansiveness of love is a natural means of ascent between levels.

He suddenly recalled the famous myth from Plato's Symposium: People were hermaphrodites until God split them in two, and now all the halves wander the world over seeking one another. Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost.

Love is a great spirit. Everything spiritual is in between god and mortal.

Human nature was originally one and we were a whole, and the pursuit of the whole is called love.

Love is of something, and that which love desires is not that which love is or has; for no man desires that which he is or has. And love is of the beautiful, and therefore has not the beautiful. And the beautiful is the good, and therefore, in wanting and desiring the beautiful, love also wants and desires the good.

all of a sudden he will catch sight of something wonderfully beautiful in its nature; that, Socrates, is the reason for all his earlier labors

And I understood then that I was a fool when I told you I would take my turn in singing the honours of Love, and admitted I was terribly clever in love affairs, whereas it seems I really had no idea how a eulogy ought to be made. For I was stupid enough to think that we ought to speak the truth about each person eulogised, and to make this the foundation, and from these truths to choose the most beautiful things and arrange them in the most elegant way; and I was quite proud to think how well I should speak, because I believed that I knew the truth.

I think love, both kinds of love, which you remember Plato defines in his "Symposium" - both kinds of love serve a touchstone for men. Some men understand only the one, some only the other. Those who understand only the non-platonic love need not speak of tragedy. For such love there can be no tragedy. "Thank you kindly for the pleasure, good bye," and that's the whole tragedy. And for the platonic love there can be no tragedy either, because there everything is clear and pure.

Yet whenever someone comes upon his very own half then they are wondrously struck with affection and intimacy and love, and are practically unwilling to be separated from one another even for a short time. And it is they who stay together for life, and who wouldn't be able to say what they want to get for themselves from one another.

He suddenly recalled from Plato's Symposium: People were hermaphrodites until God split them in two, and now all the halves wander the world over seeking one another. Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost.

In Plato's Symposium, Aristophanes accounts for this feeling of familiarity by claiming that the loved one was our long-lost 'other half to whose body our own had originally been joined. In the beginning, all human beings were hermaphrodites with double backs and flanks, four hands and four legs and two faces turned in opposite directions on the same head. These hermaphrodites were so powerful and their pride so overweening that Zeus was forced to cut them in two, into a male and female half – and from that day, every man and woman has yearned nostalgically but confusedly to rejoin the part from which he or she was severed.

And if there were only some way of contriving that a state or an army should be made up of lovers and their beloved, they would be the very best governors of their own city, abstaining from all dishonour, and emulating one another in honour; and when fighting at each other's side, although a mere handful, they would overcome the world. For what lover would not choose rather to be seen by all mankind than by his beloved, either when abandoning his post or throwing away his arms? He would be ready to die a thousand deaths rather than endure this. Or who would desert his beloved or fail him in the hour of danger?

if someone got to see the Beautiful itself, absolute, pure, unmixed, not polluted by human flesh or colors or any other great nonsense of mortality, but if he could see the divine Beauty itself in its one form? Do you think it would be a poor life for a human being to look there and to behold it by that which he ought, and to be with it? Or haven't you remembered that in that life alone, when he looks at Beauty in the only way what Beauty can be seen - only then will it become possible for him to give birth no to images of virtue but to true virtue. The love of the gods belongs to anyone who has given birth to true virtue and nourished it, and if any human being could become immortal, it would be he.

love,' she said, 'may be described generally as the love of the everlasting possession of the good?

The vulgar love of the body which takes wing and flies away when the bloom of youth is over, is disgraceful, and so is the interested love of power or wealth; but the love of the noble mind is lasting.

Now actions vary according to the manner of their performance. Take, for example, that which we are now doing, drinking, singing and talking these actions are not in themselves either good or evil, but they turn out in this or that way according to the mode of performing them; and when well done they are good, and when wrongly done they are evil; and in like manner not every love, but only that which has a noble purpose, is noble and worthy of praise.

Nor when love is of this disinterested sort is there any disgrace in being deceived, but in every other case there is equal disgrace in being or not being deceived. For he who is gracious to his lover under the impression that he is rich, and is disappointed of his gains because he turns out to be poor, is disgraced all the same: for he has done his best to show that he would give himself up to any one's "uses base" for the sake of money; but this is not honourable. And on the same principle he who gives himself to a lover because he is a good man, and in the hope that he will be improved by his company, shows himself to be virtuous, even though the object of his affection turn out to be a villain, and to have no virtue; and if he is deceived he has committed a noble error. For he has proved that for his part he will do anything for anybody with a view to virtue and improvement, than which there can be nothing nobler.

Do you know, when I am with you I am not afraid at all. It is a magic altogether curious that happens inside the heart. I wish I could take it with me when I leave. It is sad, my Grey. We are constrained by the rules of this Game we play. There is not one little place under those rules for me to be with you happily. Or apart happily, which is what makes it so unfair. I have discovered a curious fact about myself. An hour ago I was sure you were dead, and it hurt very much. Now you are alive, and it is only that I must leave you, and I find that even more painful. That is not at all logical. Do you know the Symposium, Grey? The Symposium of Plato. [He] says that lovers are like two parts of an egg that fit together perfectly. Each half is made for the other, the single match to it. We are incomplete alone. Together, we are whole. All men are seeking that other half of themselves. Do you remember? I think you are the other half of me. It was a great mix-up in heaven. A scandal. For you there was meant to be a pretty English schoolgirl in the city of Bath and for me some fine Italian pastry cook in Palermo. But the cradles were switched somehow, and it all ended up like this…of an impossibility beyond words. I wish I had never met you. And in all my life I will not forget lying beside you, body to body, and wanting you.

For, observe that open loves are held to be more honourable than secret ones, and that the love of the noblest and highest, even if their persons are less beautiful than others, is especially honourable.

Y es pérfido aquel amante vulgar que se enamora más del cuerpo que del alma, pues ni siquiera es estable, al no estar enamorado tampoco de una cosa estable, ya que tan pronto como se marchita la flor del cuerpo del que estaba enamorado, «desaparece volando» tras violar muchas palabras y promesas.

And the love, more especially, which is concerned with the good, and which is perfected in company with temperance and justice, whether among gods or men, has the greatest power, and is the source of all our happiness and harmony, and makes us friends with the gods who are above us, and with one another.

...for the interests of rulers require that their subjects should be poor in spirit, and that there should be no strong bond of friendship or society among them, which love, above all other motives, is likely to inspire, as our Athenian tyrants learned by experience; for... [love] had a strength which undid their power...

And so, from such early times human beings have had Love for one another inborn in them -- Love, reassembler of our ancient nature, who tries to make one out of two and to heal human nature.

The first of the two loves has a noble purpose, and delights only in the intelligent nature of man, and is faithful to the end, and has no shadow of wantonness or lust. The second is the coarser kind of love, which is a love of the body rather than of the soul, and is of women and boys as well as of men.

Now actions vary according to the manner of their performance. Take, for example, that which we are now doing, drinking, singing and talking - these actions are not in themselves either good or evil, but they turn out in this or that way according to the mode of performing them; and when well done they are good, and when wrongly done they are evil; and in like manner not every love, but only that which has a noble purpose, is noble and worthy of praise.

The truth of the matter I believe to be this. There is, as I stated at first, no absolute right or wrong in love, but everything depends upon the circumstances, to yield to a bad man in a bad way is wrong, but to yield to a worthy man in a right way is right. The bad man is a common or a vulgar lover, who is in love with the body rather than the soul; he is not constant because what he loves is not constant; as soon as the flower of physical beauty, which is what he loves, begins to fade, he is gone "even as a dream", and all his professions and promises are as nothing. But the lover of a noble nature remains its lover for life, because the thing to which he cleaves is constant. The object of our custom then is to subject lovers to a thorough test; it encourages the lover to pursue and the bloved to flee, in order that the right kind of lover may in the end be gratified and the wrong kind be eluded; it sets up a kind of competition to determine which kind of lover and beloved respectively belong.

There is no sameness of existence, but the new mortality is always taking the place of the old. This is the reason why parents love their children—for the sake of immortality; and this is why men love the immortality of fame. For the creative soul creates not children, but conceptions of wisdom and virtue, such as poets and other creators have invented.

It is not Love absolutely that is good or praiseworthy, but only that Love which impels meant to love aright.

Suppose Hephaestus, with his instruments, to come to the pair who are lying side by side and to say to them, 'What do you people want of one another?' they would be unable to explain. And suppose further, that when he saw their perplexity he said: 'Do you desire to be wholly one; always day and night to be in one another's company? For if this is what you desire, I am ready to melt you into one and let you grow together, so that being two you shall become one, and while you live live a common life as if you were a single man, and after your death in the world below still be one departed soul instead of two—I ask whether this is what you lovingly desire, and whether you are satisfied to attain this?'—there is not a man of them who when he heard the proposal would deny or would not acknowledge that this meeting and melting into one another, this becoming one instead of two, was the very expression of his ancient need.

All ancient philosophers, poets, and moralists agree that love is a striving, an aspiration of the “lower” toward the “higher,” the “unformed” toward the “formed,” ... “appearance” towards “essence,” “ignorance” towards “knowledge,” a “mean between fullness and privation,” as Plato says in the Symposium. ... The universe is a great chain of dynamic spiritual entities, of forms of being ranging from the “prima materia” up to man—a chain in which the lower always strives for and is attracted by the higher, which never turns back but aspires upward in its turn. This process continues up to the deity, which itself does not love, but represents the eternally unmoving and unifying goal of all these aspirations of love. Too little attention has been given to the peculiar relation between this idea of love and the principle of the “agon,” the ambitious contest for the goal, which dominated Greek life in all its aspects—from the Gymnasium and the games to dialectics and the political life of the Greek city states. Even the objects try to surpass each other in a race for victory, in a cosmic “agon” for the deity. Here the prize that will crown the victor is extreme: it is a participation in the essence, knowledge, and abundance of “being.” Love is only the dynamic principle, immanent in the universe, which sets in motion this great “agon” of all things for the deity. Let us compare this with the Christian conception. In that conception there takes place what might be called a reversal in the movement of love. The Christian view boldly denies the Greek axiom that love is an aspiration of the lower towards the higher. On the contrary, now the criterion of love is that the nobler stoops to the vulgar, the healthy to the sick, the rich to the poor, the handsome to the ugly, the good and saintly to the bad and common, the Messiah to the sinners and publicans. The Christian is not afraid, like the ancient, that he might lose something by doing so, that he might impair his own nobility. He acts in the peculiarly pious conviction that through this “condescension,” through this self-abasement and “self-renunciation” he gains the highest good and becomes equal to God. ... There is no longer any “highest good” independent of and beyond the act and movement of love! Love itself is the highest of all goods! The summum bonum is no longer the value of a thing, but of an act, the value of love itself as love—not for its results and achievements. ... Thus the picture has shifted immensely. This is no longer a band of men and things that surpass each other in striving up to the deity. It is a band in which every member looks back toward those who are further removed from God and comes to resemble the deity by helping and serving them.

And so Love set in order the empire of the gods - the love of beauty, as is evident, for with deformity Love has no concern [. . .] Since the birth of Love, and from the Love of the beautiful, has sprung every good in heaven and earth.

If there were only some way of contriving that a state or an army should be made up of lovers and their loves, they would be the very best governors of their own city, abstaining from all dishonour, and emulating one another in honour; and when fighting at each other's side, although a mere handful, they would overcome the world. For what lover would not choose rather to be seen by all mankind than by his beloved, either when abandoning his post or throwing away his arms? He would be ready to die a thousand deaths rather than endure this. Or who would desert his beloved or fail him in the hour of danger? The veriest coward would become an inspired hero, equal to the bravest, at such a time; Love would inspire him.

he who would proceed in due course should love first one fair form, and then many, and learn the connexion of them; and from beautiful bodies he should proceed to beautiful minds, and the beauty of laws and institutions, until he perceives that all beauty is of one kindred; and from institutions he should go on to the sciences, until at last the vision is revealed to him of a single science of universal beauty, and then he will behold the everlasting nature which is the cause of all, and will be near the end. In the contemplation of that supreme being of love he will be purified of earthly leaven, and will behold beauty, not with the bodily eye, but with the eye of the mind, and will bring forth true creations of virtue and wisdom,

Y es pérfido aquel amante vulgar que se enamora más del cuerpo que del alma, pues ni siquiera es estable, al no estar enamorado tampoco de una cosa estable, ya que tan pronto como se marchita la flor del cuerpo del que estaba enamorado, «desaparece volando»

if someone got to see the Beautiful itself, absolute, pure, unmixed, not polluted by human flesh or colors or any other great nonsense of mortality, but if he could see the divine Beauty itself in its one form? Do you think it would be a poor life for a human being to look there and to behold it by that which he ought, and to be with it? Or haven't you remembered that in that life alone, when he looks at Beauty in the only way what Beauty can be seen - only then will it become possible for him to give birth no to images of virtue (because he's in touch with no images) but to true virtue (because he is in touch with the true Beauty). The love of the gods belongs to anyone who has given birth to true virtue and nourished it, and if any human being could become immortal, it would be he.

Aristophanes {xvii} tells a myth according to which human beings were originally of three sexes—male, female, and male-female—and had twice as many limbs and organs as we have today. For a number of reasons, the gods decided to split them in half, and accordingly each one of us today is searching for a half of the same original nature with whom to spend the rest of our life. Love is the desire to find our other original half, and our sexual preference is de determined by the sex of the original double being from which each of us is descended.

Because to the mortal creature, generation is a sort of eternity and immortality,' she replied; 'and if, as has been already admitted, love is of the everlasting possession of the good, all men will necessarily desire immortality together with good: Wherefore love is of immortality.

Plato in the Symposium used to say that, at the beginning of time, human beings had four arms, four legs, and two heads. In time, they began to be insolent toward the gods, who, as punishment, separated them into two parts with a thunderbolt, creating from each primordial human being two new divided beings. As a consequence, every man tries to find his initial wholeness looking for his lost half. He was right, more or less. I believed that even my soul was born differently. With ten arms, ten legs, and five heads. Creepy if I imagined it, but I thought it would make the idea better.

No god is a philosopher or seeker after wisdom, for he is wise already; nor does any man who is wise seek after wisdom. Neither do the ignorant seek after wisdom. But who then are the lovers of wisdom, if they are neither the wise or the foolish? They are those who are in a mean between the two; Love is one of them.

Try to pay attention to me,", she said, " as best as you can. You see, the man who has been thus far guided in matters of Love, who has beheld beautiful things in the right order and correctly, is coming now to the goal of Loving: all of a sudden he will catch sight of something wonderfully beautiful in its nature...

And when one of them meets with his other half, the actual half of himself, whether he be a lover of youth or a lover of another sort, the pair are lost in an amazement of love and friendship and intimacy, and one will not be out of the other's sight, as I may say, even for a moment: these are the people who pass their whole lives together; yet they could not explain what they desire of one another. For the intense yearning which each of them has towards the other does not appear to be the desire of lover's intercourse, but of something else which the soul of either evidently desires and cannot tell, and of which she has only a dark and doubtful presentiment.

Evil is the vulgar lover who loves the body rather than the soul, inasmuch as he is not even stable, because he loves a thing which is in itself unstable, and therefore when the bloom of youth which he was desiring is over, he takes wing and flies away, in spite of all his words and promises; whereas the love of the noble disposition is life-long, for it becomes one with the everlasting

Another term emerged in 1862, in the work of Karl Heinrich Ulrichs. ‘Uranian’ or ‘urning’ was derived from Plato’s description of same-sex love in the Symposium as ‘ouranios’ or ‘heavenly’. (‘Ouranos’ literally means ‘the pisser’, opening up a further line of enquiry.) Whatever its celestial origins, the term did not quite catch on. Who would want to be called an ‘urning’? It sounds like some sort of gnome. An ‘urnind’ was a queer female, while ‘uranodionings’ were bisexual.

I perceived how foolish I had been in consenting to take my turn with you in praising love, and saying that I too was a master of the art, when I really had no conception how anything ought to be praised. For in my simplicity I imagined that the topics of praise should be true, and that this being presupposed, out of the true the speaker was to choose the best and set them forth in the best manner. And I felt quite proud, thinking that I knew the nature of true praise, and should speak well. Whereas I now see that the intention was to attribute to Love every species of greatness and glory, whether really belonging to him or not, without regard to truth or falsehood—that was no matter; for the original proposal seems to have been not that each of you should really praise Love, but only that you should appear to praise him. And so you attribute to Love every imaginable form of praise which can be gathered anywhere; and you say that 'he is all this,' and 'the cause of all that,' making him appear the fairest and best of all to those who know him not, for you cannot impose upon those who know him. And a noble and solemn hymn of praise have you rehearsed. But as I misunderstood the nature of the praise when I said that I would take my turn, I must beg to be absolved from the promise which I made in ignorance, and which (as Euripides would say (Eurip. Hyppolytus)) was a promise of the lips and not of the mind. Farewell then to such a strain: for I do not praise in that way; no, indeed, I cannot. But if you like to hear the truth about love, I am ready to speak in my own manner, though I will not make myself ridiculous by entering into any rivalry with you. Say then, Phaedrus, whether you would like to have the truth about love, spoken in any words and in any order which may happen to come into my mind at the time. Will that be agreeable to you? Aristodemus

He suddenly recalled the famous myth from Plato's Symposium: People were hermaphrodites until God split them in two, and now all the halves wander the world oer seeking one another. Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost. Let us suppose that such is the case, that somewhere in the world each of us has a partner who once formed part of our body. Tomas's other part is the young woman he dreamed about. The trouble is, man does not find the other part of himself. Instead, he is sent Tereza in a bulrush basket. But what happens if he nevertheless later meets the one who was meant for him, the other part of himself? Whom is he to prefer? The woman from the bulrush basket or the woman from Plato's myth? He tried to picture himself living in an ideal world with the young woman from the dream. He sees Tereza walking past the open windows of their ideal house. She is alone and stops to look at him with an infinitely sad expression in her eyes. He cannot withstand her glance. Again, he feels her pain in his own heart. Again, he falls prey to compassion and sinks deep into her soul. He leaps out of the window, but she tells him bitterly to stay where he feels happy, making those abrupt, angular movements that so annoyed and displeased him. He grabs her nervous hands and presses them between his own to calm them. And he knows that time and time again he will abandon the house of his happiness, time and time again abandon his paradise and the woman from his dream and betray the "Es muss sein!" of his love to go off with Tereza, the woman born of six laughable fortuities.

Love, he said, is not a god, for a god cannot want anything; but one of those great spirits who are messengers between gods and men. He does not visit fools, who are content with their low condition, but those who aware of their own need and desire, by embracing the beautiful and good, to beget goodness and beauty; for creation is man’s immortality and brings him nearest to the gods. All creatures, he said, cherish the children of their flesh; yet the noblest progeny of love are wisdom and glorious deeds, for mortal children die, but these live forever; and these are begotten not of the body but the soul. Mortal passion sinks us in mortal pleasure, so that the wings of the soul grow weak; and such lovers may rise to the good indeed, but not to the very best. But the winged soul rises from love to love, from the beautiful that is born and dies, to beauty is only a moving shadow flung upon a wall.

I think people have wholly failed to recognise the power of Love; if they'd grasped this, they'd have built the greatest temples and altars for him, though he deserves it most of all. He loves human beings more than any other god; he is their helper and the doctor of those sicknesses whose cure constitutes the greatest happiness for the human race. I shall try to explain his power to you, and you will teach this to others.

Love drains us of estrangement and fills us with familiarity, causing us to come together in all shared gatherings like this, and acting as our leader in festival, chorus and sacrifice. He includes mildness and excludes wildness. He is generous of goodwill an ungenerous of ill-will. He is gracious and kindly; gazed on by the wise, admired by the gods; craved by those denied him, treasured by those enjoying him; father of luxury, elegance, delicacy, grace, desire, longing careful for good people, careless of bad people; in trouble, in terror, in longing, in discourse, he is the best helmsman, marine, comrade, rescuer. For the whole company of gods and humans, most beautiful and best of leaders; every man should follow him singing beautiful hymns of prase, sharing the song he sings to charm the mind of every god and human.

It's rather the possibility of friendship, unencumbered by feelings of attraction or shyness; the possibility of working on the same wavelength, as it were, with someone who understands you because he's a boy as you are, or a girl as you are. Committee work stifles the imagination, because people have to work down to the common denominator of what would be minimally acceptable to everyone. But friendship exalts the imagination. Indeed it is one of the things that the ancients said friendship was for. Plato suggests in Symposium that one of the highest forms of friendship is one whose love issues forth in beautiful and virtuous deeds, for thus "the partnership between [the friends] will be far closer and the bond of affection far stronger than between ordinary parents, because the children that they share surpass human children by being immortal as well as more beautiful.

The boundaries between us had been breached for good, we gave a new meaning t the notion that man and wife were one flesh. You could track back this kind of alchemy in books: '...intimately to mix and melt and to be melted together with his beloved, so that one should be made out of two.' This is Shelley translating Plato, who was putting words into the mouth of Aristophanes, who's the only defender of heterosexual sex in the Symposium, although he makes it sound perverse.

Всеки, който обича, умира. Защото неговата мисъл, забравяйки себе си, винаги се обръща към любимия. Ако не мисли за себе си, той очевидно не мисли в себе си. Затова и дейността на душата не се осъществява в самата нея, доколкото главното нейно действие е мисленето. А който не действа в себе си, и не съществува в себе си. Защото битието е действието са равнозначни. Нито има битие без действие, нито действието надхвърля самото битие. Никой не действа там, където не е, и винаги действа там, където е. Следователно душата на влюбения не е в него, защото не действа в самия него. Щом не е в него, тя и не живее в него самия. Който не живее, е мъртъв. Значи всеки, който обича, е мъртъв в себе си. Живее ли той поне в другия? Разбира се.

Nussbaum, in The Fragility of Goodness, sees the Phaedrus as a sort of palinode in relation to the Symposium in which love is of the individual qua individual.

In the Phaedrus beauty and love act as the triggers to elicit the recollection of a host of different ideas; in the Symposium the nature of love itself is analyzed. Love is explained by Diotima as an intermediate nature connecting humans to the Gods, a daimôn conceived during the celebration among the Gods of the birth of Aphrodite (Symp. 203b ff.).

The accounts in the Symposium and the Phaedrus thus complement each other: the ascent up the ladder to the pure idea was for the purpose of ensuring that the virtue propagated in the polis was genuine and not counterfeit, because it is the cultivation in the polis of the virtues embodied by one’s patron deity that wins the love of that deity. Instead of the erotic cultivation of virtue in the polis being for the sake of the ascent up the ladder, according to this view it is for the sake of becoming beloved by the God, to which end the ascent up the [84] ladder is also subordinated.

Aristophanes, in Plato's "Symposium", is purported to suggest that human form was not always as it is today: Originally, humans were spherical, with four arms, four legs, and two faces on either side of a single head. (In evolutionary terms, it's hard to see the advantage of this construction.) Such was their hubris that they dared to challenge the gods themselves. Zeus, in his wisdom, split the upstarts in two, each half becoming a distinct entity. Since then, men and women have been running around in a panic, searching for their lost counterparts, in a desire to be whole again. (Plato makes clear what he thinks of this theory by having Socrates casually dismiss it. We should at least give some credit to Aristophanes for originality.)

Symposium. Explained that our use of the term platonic is completely misguided, and that a platonic romance is actually one in which you find your other half, that Plato’s story tells of how everyone was divided and went looking around for the other piece to complete them.

Plato’s Symposium (c. 385–370 BC) gives us one of the most enduring myths we have about the origins of love. The book itself depicts a number of speeches, each given by a notable man attending a banquet. Amongst these men, who include Socrates, the legal expert Pausanias and Eryximachus the physician, is the comic playwright Aristophanes. The latter succumbs to a fit of hiccups during the rest of the speeches, but finally is able to add his own voice to the conversation, putting forward a creation myth, seeking to explain the sense of wholeness we find when we meet our beloveds, or ‘our other half’. Moving from the bizarre and the grotesque through to a theory of worship and unity, it is a brilliant and unforgettable achievement.

For most modern readers, the chief difficulty in reading the De Amore is not the unfamiliarity of its ideas but the unfamiliarity of its method. Most modern works of prose are either works of fiction or of non-fiction; the De Amore is a little bit of both. (P8)

Ficino, too, can sound very Christian (e.g. the chapter heading of VII.17), but in places he sounds neither Christian nor Proclean, but Plotinian, as where he stresses the point that the One is above being (e.g. I.3). In VI.16 we are told that the stages of love are: World Body, World Soul, Angelic Mind, and God; but in VII.13 that the levels are Nature, Opinion, Reason, and Intellect. In still other places (e.g., IV.3-4) Ficino speaks as if man were not a participant in the ebb and flow of cosmic love at all, but only a spectator who stands apart and tries to make up his mind whether to love God or himself. [...] In short, the concept of cosmic love in De Amore is not based on any single authority and indeed is not any one concept. What Ficino is trying to do in De Amore is to defend the propriety of personal love by showing that it is merely a natural part of a perfectly respectable cosmic process; he is simply trying to persuade the reader, by celebrating the universality of love in the world, that love is a good thing: "So my friends, I urge and beg you to give yourselves to love without reservation, for it is not base but divine." (II.8)

Ficino decided to use the Symposium of Plato as his vehicle. It was an appropriate vehicle because it was on his subject and because it was new; his was the first complete translation of the dialogue ever written. It was because of the convention of the commentary as a substitute for the discursive treatise that Ficino wrote his treatise on love in the form of a commentary, and it was because of the relevance of the Symposium to his own subject, Socratic love, that he chose to attach his commentary to the Symposium. But, as in the case of the banquet fiction, Ficino does not carry out the commentary fiction systematically because both fictions are there only for the sake of the argument which he wanted to advance, his defense of human love.

Dante's Convivio, like Ficino's De Amore, is a banquet, a philosophical feast in which Dante celebrates as his key idea the cosmic nature of love. He describes the universe as a hierarchy in which every level of being is united in a desire to ascend to God.

The main point made by most literary scholars is that Ficino was responsible for shifting the emphasis in treatises on love from an Aristotelean (and medieval) emphasis on the physiology and psychology of love to a Platonic (and renaissance) emphasis on love as desire for ideal beauty. P3

The distinction between esoteric and exoteric meaning was particularly important to the Florentine Platonists for a social reason as well. Florence was a far more democratic society than most societies in northern Europe, and there was a tendency in Florence for the elite class to try to shore up the merely financial basis of its superiority by artificial intellectual devices; lacking the argument of birth which sufficed in other societies to sustain the dichotomy between the upper and lower classes, they tried to reinforce the distinction between the haves and have-nots by generating an intellectual dichotomy between those who understood and those who did not. Though Ficino himself was a have-not, he was employed by the social elite of the Medici circle, and almost everything he wrote up to his death of Piero was designed to serve the ends of developing an intellectual elitism to reinforce the Medici's financial elitism.

Most historians have explained Ficino's method on the ground that he is a syncretist: that he believed that Platonism was compatible not only with Christianity but also with all three of the other classical philosophies, and with the theologies of ancient Greece, Babylonia, and Egypt as well. Another possible rationale which has been given for Ficino's method is that it stems from his anti-rationalism, that the reason he does not conduct a clear, logical argument is that he does not believe that reason leads to truth. [...] What we call the unconscious Ficino called divine inspiration, and he firmly believed that there was no need for him to understand any sentence came into his mind to say, since all sentences were put there by God; St. Thomas himself had pointed out that God does not think discursively. But I think that there may be a slightly different explanation for the method of the De Amore. It was intended to say one thing to the initiate and something else to the rest of the world; it was meant to have two meanings, one esoteric and the other exoteric.

In other places, however, Ficino appears to endorse a view more like that of Plato and Plotinus [regarding human love]: the soul begins in heaven, falls into the body, and then reascends to heaven, but the individual soul is free to eschew the desire for the body which causes it to fall and free also to decide when, or if, it will return to the desire for ideal beauty, which causes it to rise. That is, once born into the flesh, man is free to choose between earthly love and heavely love.

[B]oth of the Greek authors whom Ficino had been reading more recently, Plato and Plotinus, define love as the desire for beauty. Thus in the De Amore, beauty becomes an important subject. Unfortunately, as soon as Ficino tried to define beauty, he found himself once more confronting a disagreement between Platonists and the Aristoteleans. The Platonists defined beauty as an abstract universal existing separately in the mind of God, whereas the Aristoteleans define beauty as an abstraction generated by the individual human mind from many particular sense experiences. Moreover, most medieval and renaissance theorists, from Bonaventure to Alberti, believed that beauty was a form which was given to the matter, an order or arrangement imposed upon objects of experience, whereas the Platonists held that beauty was an abstract quality in which physical objects participated in various degrees.

As we have seen, Ficino had at his disposal in writing the De Amore three principal groups of authorities, the "Latin" Platonists, the Scholastic theologians, and the "Greek" Platonists whom he had just translated. In writing about the human soul, Ficino skips eclectically from one to another among these three sources.

Because the De Amore was written as a Platonic work and because it was written for the Medici, any renaissance reader would have expected it to follow the Platonic mode of non-discursive form but also to conceal some more esoteric meaning that was apparent on the surface. This is, in fact, the way in which Giovanni Pico della Mirandola read De Amore. He ignored the external paraphernalia of the banquet discussion of the Symposium and discussed the work as if it were a treatise on love. This is the way Ficino intended the De Amore to be read. He intended that any ordinary person outside his own group be preoccupied by the fictions (the banquet and the commentary) which constitute the exoteric fable. What he intended for his friends to see in it was its esoteric meaning, the reasoned defense of 'Socratic' love. The fictions and the multiple authorities, the confusing aspects of the method of the work, are deliberate strategies of the technique of esotericism, the desire to write a work which says different things to different groups of people.

For almost two hundred years, the De Amore was an 'in' book in courts all over Europe. Since the people who read the De Amore and talked about it were the same people whose patronage supported the artists of the period, the beneficiaries of that patronage were not slow to incorporate the secrets of Ficino into their works of art. [...]Discussion of the nature of love had long figured in the social life of the Italian ducal courts, and the De Amore gave these courts something new to discuss, the topic of idealized love. Though the work had been written for and about men, its doctrine that the love of the body is a step toward a higher kind of love was especially welcomed by women.

The renaissance conception of esotericism is only a particular version of the ancient principle that writers who wish to conceal their meaning from some readers while making it available to others have always used one of two techniques for doing so. One is the technique of saying something which is perfectly clear but which will mean one thing to an uninstructed reader and another to an instructed reader. Myth is an example of this technique: to the child the myth is only a story; to an instructed reader the myth may be an allegory of some deeper meaning. The other technique is to use language which does not mean anything to anyone who does not know the code. This is the technique of encipherment, such as the system of using numbers in place of letters, or letters in place of other letters, or code names instead of ordinary names. In the renaissance each of these two techniques was associated with an ancient philosopher. The first with Plato and the second with Aristotle. [...] A related distinction between the Platonic and Aristotelean methods of writing was that Plato wrote non-discursively, casting his ideas in the form of imaginary dialogues and myths [...] "The Platonic style is more poetic than philosophical," said Ficino.