The Influence Of Plato's Symposium On Love

The platonic self focuses on the formation of a good soul and its relationship to the erotic soul as described in Plato’s the Symposium, while the Neoplatonic self in Plotinus’s The Enneads and Marsilio Ficino’s speeches in Commentary on Plato’s Symposium on Love is a Christianization of this erotic soul. All three philosopher’s works, tie into love and the human soul, and the human search for beauty and goodness.
Plato’s the Symposium is a narrative in which its character’s discuss love as it relates to the human soul. The love mainly discussed is an erotic love, in which the human self yearns to erotically its counterpart. The human soul which years for this erotic love and human partnership stems from the idea that there were once three human sexes rather than two. Aristophanes’ describes this phenomenon in his explanation of the power of love over humans: “in the first place, the sexes were originally three in number, not two as they are now; there was man, woman and the union of the two” (Plato, 155). These three sexes were divided by the gods because these three sexes’ powers were so great such that “they made an attack upon the gods” (Plato, 155). As a remedy, the gods decided to split the sexes in order to limit their power, like when Zeus states: “they shall continue to exist, but I will cut them in two and then
Both selves value goodness, love and beauty and seek to obtain a lifestyle in which these values, or virtues, regulate the soul which connects the self to the gods, God, earth (in that nature relates to beauty), and each other. These selves also continue to exemplify the human condition of mortality in which humans fear death and so in order to remain immortal bestow a high value on erotic love and procreation. Therefore, these selves have a fundamentally erotic soul that seeks to find human connection and