Symposium by Plato
Excerpts from the book
For love is the desire of the whole, and the pursuit of the whole is called love.
Where there is love there is obedience, and where obedience, there is justice; for none can be wronged of his own free will.
Love is 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.
The highest love is the love not of person, but of the highest and purest abstraction.
For he who has beauty or good may desire more of them; and he who has beauty or good in himself may desire beauty and good in others.
The union of the greatest comprehension of knowledge and the burning intensity of love is a contradiction in nature, which may have existed in a far-off primeval age in the mind of some Hebrew prophet or other Eastern sage, but has now become an imagination only.
The ideal beauty of the one is the ideal good of the other; regarded not with the eye of knowledge, but of faith and desire; and they are respectively the source of beauty and the source of good in all other things.
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.
Love will make men dare to die for their beloved – love alone; and women as well as men.
These are my reasons for affirming that Love is the eldest and noblest and mightiest of the gods; and the chiefest author and giver of virtue in life, and of happiness after death.
The Love who is the off-springs of the common Aphrodite is essentially common, and has no discrimination, being such as the meaner sort of men feel, and is apt to be of women as well as of yours, and is of the body rather than of the soul - the most foolish beings are the objects of this love which desires only to gain an end, but never thinks of accomplishing the end nobly, and therefore does good and evil quite indiscriminately.
Evil is the vulgar lover who loves the body rather than the soul, inasmuch as he is not even stable, because he loves 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 works and promises; whereas the love of the noble disposition is life-long, for it becomes one with the everlasting.
Anyone who pays the least attention to the subject will also perceive that in music there is the same reconciliation of opposite; and I suppose that this must have been the meaning of Heracleutys, although his works are not accurate; for he says that The One united by disunion, like the harmony of the bow and the lyre. Now there is an absurdity saying that harmony is discord or is composed of elements which are still in a state of discord. But what he probably meant was, that harmony is composed of differing notes of higher or lower pitch which disagreed once, but are now reconciled by the art of music; for if the higher and lower notes still disagreed, there could be no harmony, – clearly not. For harmony is symphony, and symphony is an agreement; but an agreement of disagreements while they disagree there can not be; you cannot harmonize that which disagrees. In like manner rhythm is compounded of elements short and long, once differing and now in accord; which accordance, as in the former instance, medicine, so in all these other cases, music implants. making love and unison to grow up among them; and thus music too, is concerned with the principles of love in their application to harmony and rhythm. Again, in the essential nature of harmony and rhythm there is no difficulty in discerning love which has not yet become double, But when you want to use them in actual life, either in the composition of songs or in the correct performance of airs or meters composed already, which latter is called education, then the difficulty begins and the good artist is needed.
The reason is that human nature was originally one and we were a while, and the desire and pursuit of the whole is called love.
If we are friends of the God and at peace with him we shall find our own true loves, which rarely happens in this world at present.
The inference that he who desires something is in want of something, and that he who desires nothing is in want of nothing is in my judgment, Agathon, absolutely and necessarily true.
He is a great spirit and like all spirits, he is intermediate between the divine and the mortal.
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