Diotima

Throughout the course of the speech, Socrates describes love based upon an interaction with a woman named Diotima. After explaining to Socrates that good and bad and beautiful and ugly are more of a grey concept as opposed to a clear cut concept, she tells Socrates that love is a “great spirit” whose purpose is to fill the unknown space between humans and gods. Diotima then tells Socrates of the origin of Love, following Aphrodite’s birth, and how it relates to Love’s parents, the Penia, the embodiment of poverty, and Poros, the cunning and beautiful son of Metis. Additionally, she explains love as a cycle of continuous birth and death. She explains to Socrates that love is neither wise, nor ignorant which further illustrates her claim of love’s equivocalness.
After explaining love’s
The primary way the proposal relates to Plato’s theory involves the top step of Diotima’s “ladder.” Diotima tells Socrates “that in that life alone, 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… but to true virtue.” Because Plato’s theory states that ethereal, metaphysical ideas hold more true to reality than their tangible counterparts, this quote accurately reflects the basis of Plato’s Theory of the Form because true beauty is far beyond a physical image one can conjure. Another way the argument relates to the theory is the concept that the form of love is eternal, which Diotima’s explores in her story of the origin of love where she says that “by nature [love is] neither immortal nor mortal.” The fact that love can enter and leave someone’s life extremely quickly, only to return years later, further illustrates love as an eternal form, with a slight contradiction. While forms may be eternal, love is a form that follows a sporadic path, only to return to those open enough to climb the