Free Beauty And Goodness In Plato's Symposium Essay Sample

Introduction

According to the Plato’s Symposium, one of the most outlandish aspects of his ethical philosophy is that it gives beauty and erotic love a central place. The young custodians in the Nation must cultivate a sexual desire for the beautiful in advance before their teaching in philosophy, a desire first conveyed in love for attractive souls in beautiful physiques. In the Phaedrus Socrates associates beauty to the power to rouse the soul’s sensual psychosis and by this means to release us from our tainted, bodily fact.
Even though Plato seemingly tries to explain the ethical implication of beauty as connected to goodness, it is worth noting that the symposium tries to show that the view of things as good is not the same the view of things as beautiful. Actually, it plays a crucial role in explaining why lovers want to develop the element of beauty. Nevertheless, the sheer fact is that the class which good things fall is comparable with the class of things considered beautiful. Even if a thing’s beauty is influenced by its goodness, the knowledge of a thing as good has a dissimilar role in our existence than the experience of a thing considered as beautiful as Socrates puts it. The role of good is considered the object of love besides the role of beauty being its midwife, a difference that Socrates (talking as Diotima) takes troubles to make.
According to Socrates, what grasps the attention of the lover’s experience for someone or something as good-looking is its independence and privation of change. This means that as things are beautiful, their goodness portrays us as being resistant to the passage of time. The temporal width of our knowledge of beauty has not been observed as being part of Plato has thought. The idea behind this ideology shows that lovers who crave to be happy endlessly care a lot about experiencing and crafting beauty.

Phaedrus’ Speech: A Paradigm and Two Problems

According to Phaedrus, love provides people who anticipate to live in a good and beautiful way the necessity that will lead them over their entire lives. He goes ahead and describes lovers as reacting to the beauty of their treasured ones by living and performing in a way that is itself beautiful. It is this supremacy of love to enable us gets creative of beauty that is praised by Phaedrus. The rest of the speech discloses several feats that are brought about by love. He describes lovers as responding to the beauty of their beloveds by living and acting in a way that is itself beautiful. It is the power of love that makes us creative of beauty that Phaedrus praises. Socrates approves both edges of Phaedrus’ trope. This means that both claim that love is a retort to beauty and that love reacts by crafting beauty. To be certain, Socrates (or Diotima) puts his emphasis on the first half of that statement.
Lovers of all streaks are able to give natal only in beauty and the phases by which the initiate of the love climbs the ladder of love there lies all beauties. But when they meet beauty, lovers of the subordinate vagueness give birth to political wisdom, laws, poetry, and magnificent actions of justice, restraint, and the other virtues all of which Socrates terms as beautiful. However, since he says that these descendants are more beautiful and remarkable than physical, human children, it is rational to accept that bodily lovers also give birth to beauty, though possibly only to beauty that a mother could perceive. The condition is the alike for the lovers of the greater mysteries. At the first phase, when the lover adores a single beautiful body, he makes beautiful speeches. We may have faith in that this singularity is best designated by saying that beautiful experience is impartial. But walking outside our ordinary, limited practical viewpoint does not suggest that we have walked outside the concrete standpoint altogether
At the peak of his journey, the lover holds the most comprehensive understanding of the beautiful giving birth to true feature. Socrates does not say openly that this conception is something beautiful, but since all the previous offspring were regarded as beautiful, and bearing the fact that virtue is considered to be karon, it is evident that Socrates’ lover creates beauty from beauty. It is worth noting that one of the chief responsibilities of Socrates’ speech is to reconsider the way beauty features in sensual experience though remaining true to the extensive perception that Phaedrus expresses

The uncertainty value of beauty

As far as Phaedrus is concerned, he at first does not give much acclaim the fact that beautiful people fascinate lovers. As he sees it, the valuable power of love is because it introduces philotimia, love of honor. Lovers are mainly embarrassed to be caught by their dear ones doing shameful things and so, apparently because they wish to be revered, are enthusiastic to perform acceptable deeds on their behalf. Nonetheless, it is tough to figure out how love of honor can elucidate lovers’ feeling to take the most acceptable and beautiful jeopardy of all, the threat of death. Diotima’s replacement of good for beautiful is confusing. She and Socrates approved previously (as did Socrates and Agathon) that all virtuous things are beautiful, but they failed to agree that all beautiful things are also good. This means that they did not come to a consensus that the category of good things and that of beautiful things are parallel.
Consequently, Diotima’s alternative reflects to us as being of dubious rationality. In Socrates’ view, beauty is connected to decent goodness in the human case for the reason that, the honorable soul is one systematic to its proper action. In addition to its link to organization and proportion, beauty specifically demonstrates itself to opinion and reasoning due to its close link to the good. Plato in the Symposium brings our concurrent fascination and uncertainty about beauty to the front in Socrates’ speech. As far as love is tangled with the familiarity and conception of beauty, beauty is rather a thing we must contemplate in determining how to live.

Nevertheless, if it is clear that beauty matters, but it is not at all certain why it matters.

Eros for Immortality and Creation of Beauties
In distinction to the earlier speakers, Socrates (and Diotima) reason that lovers adore only things they consider good. In the firmest sense, good is the object of love. Furthermore, as we all by now wish to be happy, as we all already long to own good things for ourselves perpetually, we are by this time full of love, a circumstance Diotima figures as a pregnancy. Thus, a Diotima start her positive version of love by refuting both that beauty is the object of adoration’s desire and that beauty inculcates love.
On the other hand, as soon as she expels beauty from its anticipated roles, she reestablishes it. Peculiarly, she does so in a passage that echoes Socrates’ misperception about the significance of love. Here she retells Socrates of what they had revealed earlier about love having desire for good things so that it may possibly retain them forever. Beauty suggests a resourceful surge, a procreation, and according to what Diotima says an effort to confide immortality. Nonetheless, it is tough to figure out how love of honor can elucidate lovers’ feeling to take the most acceptable and beautiful jeopardy of all, the threat of death. Diotima’s replacement of good for beautiful is confusing. The notion that beauty sets free a yearning for immortality may seem odd as Socrates definitely depicts himself as being surprised by what Diotima says, but it is in fact true according to the statement that love craves happiness.

The Encounter with Beauty

With regard to Plato, beauty is closely linked with goodness. For example, human beings have a great longing for happiness, thus when they come into the presence of a beautiful thing that seems to be good, their desire will naturally be excited. The proposition becomes more auspicious when we recollect that this aspect of beauty that excites sensual desire is a beautiful body or even a beautiful human character. Fascination to this kind of beauty makes sense given that, by creating human beauty, the beautiful person appears to be in control of the good suitable to human beings. No doubt this advent will, seem applicable to someone overflowing with the aspiration for unending happiness.
This proposal is correct so far as it goes, but as I contended before, the close connection between beauty and goodness cannot all on its own elucidate beauty’s character as a midwife. Diotima says that love is not of the attractive in the way Socrates contemplate but is somewhat of generation and giving birth in the beautiful. Here she modifies young Socrates’ hypothesis that beauty is the necessary object of love, that role drives to the good, and allocates it a dissimilar role, the role of enabling the recreation of the good. Now since all respectable things are, rendering to Socrates, beautiful, required objects of love are also in detail beautiful. However, beautiful things compose the role of love entity; it is for the reason that they are good. On the other hand, when she highlights beauty’s character as midwife, Diotima appears to imply that if good things help in giving birth, they do so since they are good, as well as beautiful.

Real Life Beauty

First, Plato appears to approve that beauty have emotional impact to the perceiver with a logic of imminence and presence. The lover does not conclude that his beloved partakes in something superior and divine but he experiences it instantaneously. Nevertheless, we should differentiate the kind of existence in which the present instant is a moment in mutability from the presence involved in the unchallengeable. For Plato, to understand something as beautiful is to sense in the current moment an endless accomplishment. Now it might seem that this justification is mismatched with the common perception that beautiful things appear delicate.
However, we need not undertake that they seem delicate for they appear beautiful. In fact, if Plato is correct that beautiful things mark perfection, then a thing’s delicacy cannot be a good part of its form of beauty. For it is no part of faultlessness to be and give the impression to be on the edge of decay. Reasonably, if beautiful things often have emotional impact to us with a logic of their fleetingness, then that may well be since something about attractiveness intensifies our awareness of every existing thing’s mortality, calling to our consciousness how unsubstantiated is their hold of the good and, certainly, of beauty.
The commencement of beauty I have been addressing according to which beauty is an unresolved forth of firmness and self-sufficiency makes good logic of this spectacle. The delicateness of prettiness would be a second, distressing, moment in our involvement, when we mirror that this finite thing cannot hold the infinite exactness its beauty undertakes.
The desire and excitement stimulated by this involvement certainly change from our ordinary understanding of desire and sensible calculation. Usually we take as our thing a good that can be influenced completely within a finite amount of time. We try to obtain some finite good, for instance a household or a car, and then pursue to hold on to it for some precise length of time, thirty, forty fifty, ten years, or for tomorrow and the next day. Consequently, the way we normally endeavor to possess the good is dissimilar from the immortal way beautiful things seem to have faultlessness.
In this respect, then, Plato’s explanation captures the perception that when we experience somewhat beautiful we step separately from or surpass our quotidian practical position. We may have faith in that this singularity is best designated by saying that beautiful experience is impartial. Nevertheless, walking outside our ordinary, limited practical viewpoint does not suggest that we have walked outside the concrete standpoint altogether. For according to Plato, our craving for the good is endless, although this is not a thing we ordinarily notice. Thus, it is no longer vibrant that we must find an unbiased aspect to proper gratitude of the beautiful.
Lovers are mainly embarrassed to be caught by their dear ones doing shameful things and so, apparently because they wish to be revered, are enthusiastic to perform acceptable deeds on their behalf. Nonetheless, it is tough to figure out how love of honor can elucidate lovers’ feeling to take the most acceptable and beautiful jeopardy of all, the threat of death. Diotima’s replacement of good for beautiful is confusing.
For Plato, the principled domineering to become lovers of beauty is a replication of his apparition of human nature as intended towards self-transcendence. We are individuals who by nature desire to be perfect like the deities. Must we admit Plato’s view of human nature as being fundamentally self-transcendent in order to admit his account of beauty? Maybe not. All we must admit is that central to our everyday standpoint are not only finite requirements, desires for things which can be fully comprehended in a determinate part of our lives, but also a yearning that takes as its object the entirety of our lives. Our desire to own permanent happiness now is a craving to transcend our predetermined, temporally restricted moment and have a good that it appears no human being can have so long as he’s flourishing and subject to alteration.
Plato in the Symposium brings our concurrent fascination and uncertainty about beauty to the front in Socrates’ speech. On the Platonic account, beauty recaps us of this craving and so evokes us to ourselves, to our sensual, ambitious nature. As far as its link to organization and proportion are concerned, beauty specifically demonstrates itself to opinion and reasoning due to its close link to the good.
This is something usual happenstances with the good do not do. Even if no worldly thing can have the gradation of faultlessness, its beauty makes it appear to have. This means that they did not come to a consensus that the category of good things and that of beautiful things are parallel. Nevertheless, in its splendor it gives us a preview of what truly faultless being is like. If this is correct, it is virtuously important. In the middle of this unavoidably imperfect mortal life, the lover gambles on someone beautiful, living evidence that it is not entirely futile to purpose at an idyllic of happiness more faultless than anything we can plainly achieve.

Work Cited

Rosen, Stanley. Plato's Symposium. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968. Print.