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Plato (c 428-c 347 BC), was a Greek philosopher, student and friend to Socrates, and was one of the most creative and influential thinkers in Western philosophy. Along with his Republic, the Symposium lies at the cornerstone of Western thought. It concerns itself at one level with the genesis, purpose and nature of love and, at another, with the nature of knowledge: How do we know what we know?

Plato’s writings are all in the form of dialogues, sometimes framed by a narrator. They depict philosophical ideas being advanced, discussed, and criticized in the context of a conversation or debate involving two or more people. In his dialogues, Plato developed a two layer view of reality, the world of Becoming and the world of Being. The world of Becoming is the physical world we perceive through our senses. This world is always in movement, always changing. The world of Being is the world of forms, or ideas. It is absolute, independent, and transcendent. It never changes and yet causes the essential nature of things we perceive in the world of Becoming. In the Symposium, Plato seems to have reasoned out an internal mechanism through which men may make their way through the world of Becoming to the world of Being. He shows how, through the most mysterious and powerful medium of love, men may eventually arrive at the Highest Good, an intuitive and mystical state of consciousness. As one of the characters, Diotima, says, only in such an experience is ultimate meaning found for human beings.

Each person present at the Symposium agrees to make a speech, or eulogy, in praise of love, or precisely, Eros the god of Love. Within each of the speeches, Plato presented certain messages he sought to communicate about love and its effect on people.

The speech which opens the Symposium, by Phaedrus, speaks of love as promoting virtues among human beings, especially courage, expressed in dying for the one you love.  Pausanias, the second speaker, believes love, when misdirected can lead to evil. To this he adds that evil love is that of the body and not the soul. Evil love is one that deals with the love of money, wealth or power. Love of the mind, meaning a connection with another individual separate from the physical attributes, is the only good kind of love. Love becomes destroyed when materialistic matter enters the picture. That is why in Plato love between men was viewed as a higher, more pure form of love than that between man and woman because the desires of the body cloud the mind.

In his speech, Aristophanes relates to those present the legend of Creation. In this myth, Aristophanes tells of the Greek legend of the two-faced, four-armed, and four-legged ancestors of present day humans. They were also one of three genders – male, female, and hermaphrodite. Because these powerful creatures threatened divine power, they were cut in half by Zeus. This myth explains the innate desire of human beings for each other. The pursuit of the other half is what Aristophanes calls love. Sexual preference for one or other gender is explained by the type of combination from which we were split.

Next comes the dialogue between Socrates and Diotima. Socrates argues that love is not beautiful, but is an expression of the desire for beauty. Diotima introduces the category of intermediate or mediating entities – of love, as a spirit, mediating between mortal and immortal, combining need and resource. She analyses love as expressing a more fundamental desire: that for perpetual possession of the good or happiness. She advocates the ascent of desire from physical to mental types of beauty, culminating in knowledge of the Form of Beauty.

Love helps us find a relationship between the two worlds we live in. Employing Diotima’s process of ascent, it is a movement upward to a finer sense of what love is, and as we ascend we come closer to God through love’s prompting our own abilities to create, first on the physical plane, then on correspondingly finer planes in the creation of works of art, which can range from a piece of literature, to a relationship, to ourselves. Love relationships have a special potential in developing spirituality, for in searching for and recognizing the divine within the beloved, one discovers the divine in oneself, and comes to recognize that, in all its forms, divinity is one and the same. This experience is ultimately the most meaningful of human experiences, purest and most refined in quality, and love, in all its various forms, can help one get there, again and again.