Love In Plato's Phaedrus

Love is an omnipresent phenomenon that has pursued humankind since the dawn of our existence. The experience of love is a sensation that can be attributed to a benevolent and infinite power. Love can be considered a form of faith due to the fact that the loved individual becomes the source of someone’s ultimate concern. In my relatively short time living in this world, love has still managed to integrate itself into many of my thoughts, and it has greatly altered my past choices and current state of being. Plato’s Phaedrus consists of a dialogue where Socrates speaks about his own viewpoint towards love, and I strongly agree with many of his opinions. Many people have attempted to explicitly define love; however, love cannot be fully understood
These two intense emotions follow each other, and you cannot experience one without the other. The contrast between these feelings can cause us to go mad. The fact that love, our ultimate concern, is uncertain can drive anyone a little crazy. Visualizing our wings perishing, discarded in a frayed and torn state, is terrifying. However, it is well worthwhile. Socrates elaborates on this concept by saying, “the ancients testify to the fact that god-sent madness is a finer thing than man-made sanity” (244d2-d4). The madness of divine-sent love allows us to feel emotions deeper than we ever deemed possible in a state of finite sanity. These feelings are beautifully depicted in the passage where Socrates states, “So when it gazes at the boy’s beauty… it experiences relief from its anguish and is filled with joy; but when it is apart and becomes parched, the openings of the passages…throb like pulsing arteries… so that the entire soul, stung all over, goes mad with pain; but then, remembering the boy with his beauty, it rejoices again” (251c6-d8). The reasoning behind these cycling emotions originates from the risks of our faith in love. In Dynamics of Faith, Tillich explains, “herein lies the greatness and pain of being a human; namely, one’s standing between one’s finitude and one’s potential infinity” (21). We are innately aware of love’s elevating capabilities, and our fear of being trapped in a state of finitude causes these maddening and intense emotions of ecstasy and pain. In the words of Plato, “[people] looking upwards like a bird, and taking no heed of the things below, causes him to be regarded as mad” (249d8-e1) and “[people are] entombed in this thing which we carry round with us and call body, imprisoned like oysters” (250c5-c6). We long to be elevated, lifted up by our wings, and freed from our finite