The Symposium pt 2

I apologize for the late post, I've been studying like crazy for my theory final Tuesday but I decided to take a break and finish this final post! Today's post will focus on the rest of The Symposium, starting with Eryximachus.

Eryximachus is a doctor, and looks at love from a medicinal point of view. Each part of the body works in harmony with other parts, and if a part doesn't work or is diseased, Eryximachus thinks we should deprive the bad parts so they can no longer be diseased, and we should gratify the good parts. Same goes for love. One of his ideas is the idea of opposites coming together and harmonizing, whether is be good and bad, hot or cold, etc. I like his representation of music to compare to medicine. A song is just a bunch of different sounds coming together to make something beautiful, and same for the body. In terms of Love, for Eryximachus it is more of a practice. Love is ever present and the our good actions come out of Love.
Some of Eryximachus's ideas are hard to understand, but he seems really full of himself. Maybe he just had too much to drink and it doesn't say. =]

My favorite speech is by Aristophanes. He uses a myth to illustrate the idea of love. He says that once humans used to be connected, with four arms and four legs and two heads. Soon these humans started to get too powerful, and thought to revolt against the gods. Zeus decided he needed to end this attempt, and sent a lightning bolt down from the sky and split the human apart. One of the cool parts of the story is how they describe the pulling of the skin together after the split and comes together where our modern day belly button is. What an interesting way to describe our bodies.
Once this human has been split into two... they are no continually looking for each other, their true soulmates. It needs to be noted that it was not always a man and a woman who were connected, it would also be a man and a man or a woman and a woman. This is also another interesting way to describe modern day sexual preference. It also describes that almost indescribable feeling we get when we fall in love.
I personally love this story. I think this could be interpreted in many different ways, and theres a condition to it that if you strive to be good, you can keep your soulmate, but if you are bad, you may be split into two once more. In essence, Love helps us strive for goodness.

Agathon, the host of the party, is the first to talk about the god of Love and not the idea of love. He states that this is the happiest of all the gods, which was the first reason I wanted to use this as my final project. Love almost automatically equals happy. Love is ... soft. Its a word that makes sense when describing love. Its not hard, and seeps into your mind, your subconscious.

Now, I would continue to talk about Socrates and his speech, but I'd like to leave something for you to go read for yourself. This entire dialogue has been a great philosophy reference, and always brings about questions about different issues, not just Love.

I hope everyone has a wonderful Christmas break! Good luck next semester!