Philosophers Talk About Love: Ancient Visions and Modern Questions
- Utopia 500
- 33 minutes ago
- 4 min read
Love has always been one of philosophy’s most fascinating subjects. In Plato’s Symposium, love is not treated as a simple emotion but as a powerful force that shapes the human soul. Set during a dinner party, the dialogue presents a series of speeches in which different thinkers offer contrasting interpretations of love. Together, these views create a complex picture of love as desire, moral force, harmony, and a path toward wisdom. When compared with modern understandings of love, these ancient ideas reveal how much our perception of love has changed and what may have been lost along the way.Plato’s Symposium, written many centuries ago, invites the reader into a world where love is deeply connected to self-knowledge and spiritual growth. Rather than focusing only on personal feelings, the dialogue suggests that love gives direction to human life. This ancient vision stands in contrast to the modern tendency to see love as fragile, temporary, or purely emotional. Today, love is often reduced to attraction or personal satisfaction, raising questions about whether it still carries the deeper meaning it once had.
The question “What is love?” is never easy to answer. Even today, different approaches complicate it and make it seem mysterious. Let us look, however, from a different perspective: the approach of people who lived in a simpler, more desolate land, with little information and many thoughts about life. These thinkers, with limited means but deep observation of the human soul, tried to understand love not only as an emotion, but as a force that shapes man, his morality, and the way he sees the world around him.
The first speech, delivered by Phaedrus, presents love as one of the oldest and most powerful forces in existence. For him, love is primarily moral. It inspires people to act with honor, courage, and self-sacrifice. A person in love feels shame when behaving badly and pride when acting virtuously. Phaedrus even imagines that an army of lovers would be unbeatable, because no one would want to appear cowardly in front of the beloved. In this view, love is not private or emotional but public and ethical, shaping character through responsibility to another.
While Phaedrus emphasizes love’s moral power, Eryximachus approaches love from a scientific and rational perspective. Speaking as a doctor, he describes love as a principle of harmony and balance. In the human body, love creates health by keeping opposing elements in equilibrium; when this balance is disturbed, illness arises. Eryximachus extends this idea to nature and the cosmos, suggesting that love governs seasons, natural cycles, and even the movement of the stars. Unlike Phaedrus’s emotional and ethical love, Eryximachus presents love as a universal law, an organizing force that brings order to chaos.
In contrast to this rational approach, Aristophanes offers a mythological explanation of love that speaks directly to human longing. He tells the famous story of humans originally being whole creatures, later split in two by the gods. Ever since, people search for their “other half.” Here, love is neither moral discipline nor cosmic balance, but the desire for completeness. This idea strongly resembles modern romantic narratives, where love is often portrayed as finding “the one” who makes us whole. Yet Plato subtly invites the reader to question whether this search for completion through another person is enough.
Agathon, the host of the banquet, presents love as something beautiful, young, and gentle. Unlike earlier speakers who focus on love’s effects, Agathon describes what love is: graceful, harmonious, and morally uplifting. Love, for him, encourages kindness, fairness, and self-control. However, his poetic idealization of love is later challenged by Socrates, who suggests that Agathon describes not love itself, but the qualities love desires.Before Socrates speaks, Pausanias introduces an important distinction that helps organize many of the previous views. He argues that there are two kinds of love: a lower, physical love focused on pleasure and appearance, and a higher, spiritual love concerned with virtue and personal growth. This contrast echoes throughout philosophy and remains highly relevant today. Modern thinkers such as Erich Fromm, for example, argue that contemporary society often confuses love with consumption, possession, or instant gratification, neglecting the deeper, ethical dimension Pausanias defends.
Finally, Socrates, speaking through the teachings of Diotima, brings together and transforms all previous ideas. He claims that love is not perfect or beautiful in itself; rather, it is a desire for beauty, goodness, and truth. Love begins with physical attraction but gradually leads the soul toward knowledge, virtue, and ultimately the contemplation of absolute beauty. This progression, often called the “ladder of love,” presents love as an educational force one that pushes humans beyond surface desire toward wisdom. Unlike modern views that often treat love as an end in itself, Socrates presents love as a path, not a destination.
Taken as a whole, the Symposium shows that love is far more than emotion or attraction. It is a dynamic force that can shape morality, create harmony, inspire creativity, and guide the soul toward truth. When contrasted with modern perspectives where love is often uncertain, individualized, and fleeting the ancient vision challenges us to rethink what love is for. Rather than asking only how love makes us feel, Plato invites us to ask how love can make us better, wiser, and more fully human.
The way the concept of “love” was understood in ancient times was stricter and more philosophical compared to today. Aristophanes, for example, offers an explanation through the idea of the “other half of ourselves,” suggesting that by uniting with another person, we can achieve completeness. This is a harsher and almost metaphysical theory of love, connected to the essence of human existence.
In contrast, in modern society, the same idea is expressed in a sweeter, more playful, and more accessible way. However, this playful way of thinking often causes us to lose the deeper meaning of the emotion, leaving us only with the idea of satisfaction. This leads to an important question: is love truly a deep emotion, or is it simply a form of pleasure?
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