The Symposium

The Symposium

Introduction

Plato was a Greek philosopher who is credited with coming up with many of the concepts that have shaped human behavior and thinking. Socrates greatly influenced him, and as Greek philosophy was, the desire to understand the universe and the various occurrences. This he did by thinking about the various concepts and the ways that they affected human thinking and behavior. It was more than just what it seemed, as he sought to analyze and create the relationships between different things and notions. Plato has had many influential works because of his external look at the world and the various forces that shape human thinking. In analyzing human behavior, he looked both at present and in the past to uncover any influences that the latter might have on the present. In this way, he greatly believed that ideas did not exist in isolation but that it was important to uncover the influences that dictated not only our thinking but also our actions.

It was this thought process that made him such a great philosopher, in addition to his numerous works that brought out these concepts. One of his key works is ‘The Symposium,’ a book that is written in the form of a dialogue among the most influential thinkers of his time. They discuss issues relating mainly to love and desire, and through their discourse, Plato shows that the views they hold are not necessarily their own but passed down from different influences. Thus my thesis for this paper is that human beings have a primal way of behaving, and this is based on their behavior. This means that different people may have different characteristics that classify them in a certain way.

The Symposium

The book details the discussions of the best philosophers and thinkers at the time who agreed to have a symposium. They would treat I informally and even be drinking in moderation as they did so. Those who are in attendance are Socrates, Agathon, Aristophanes, Pausanias, and Eryximachus. They begin by stating that love is the most important feeling of all, and indeed the most important thing about life. A man without love is said to be empty and thus cannot be complete and achieve true success. Love is seen as divine, coming from the gods, and a man who has a lover is said to be intelligent and able to think clearly in life. The next speaker, however, notes that love that is expressed from one dimension cannot be true love, because it does not take note of the entire being.

Therefore, love needs to take on a “Heavenly Aphrodite,” where the cause of love transcends the physical body and falls in love with the mind and the soul. Love cannot be one-dimensional, and if it is, then it is a mere desire to behold the body. They also state that the body fades and withers, while love for the souls is true love and one that remains constant. Eryximachus also adds that love has a bigger influence on the total lives of human beings by dictating the way they behave and the way nature responds. Universal love looks at how well the universe is being taken care of by a man and the corresponding effect that this has.

Aristophanes is the one who perhaps has the most important views when it comes to explaining the origin of love and why it is an innate need in all human beings. He states that man was originally androgynous, but was separated into man and woman as a punishment from the gods who saw that they wanted to be as powerful as them. But after this, one was lost without the other and the gods; this created sexual interaction as to how they can happily come together. This explains why an individual usually feels fulfilled when they meet their beloved and indeed refer to them as their better half because they feel that their individuality is complete.

Socrates, however, came with thought-provoking words that made then entire place wonder. He states that if indeed love needs something to be fulfilled, then it must be a sought of lack. This, he explained that Eros, the god of love, was born between the god of resourcefulness and Metis, the god of lack. This means, therefore, that love is an expression of lack because it seeks to obtain what it inherently does not have. True love, therefore, cannot clearly be defined as something that can be obtained from other people but from within an individual. There is only one true love, and that is the seeking of knowledge to improve ourselves. All these other forms of love that people believe in are mere expressions of desire, and they do not come from individual needs.

Jung’s Archetypes

Carl Jung was an accredited Swiss philosopher who proposed the idea of individual archetypes. In it, he states that human beings have different personas within themselves that influence their behavior. The four major archetypes are the persona, the shadow, the anima/animus, and the self. All of these stem from different needs within the individual and may influence them to do different things. The self, for example, is greatly influenced by the ego and may end up doing things that are seen to be self-serving and in life with their individual needs. The anima/animus displays the traits of the opposite sex that are in one individual, and that affects the way they behave and the decisions they make. Therefore, it is not possible to believe that all the actions of a person are based on their single self because even within the self, there are many selves. In this way, he shows that human action depends on the differences that exist between the different selves and the desires that they have. These desires will also vary with which type is influential at the time.

Support to Thesis

Through the Jungian types, we can see that he supports the thesis that human behavior is based on different things. This has to do with the self that comes out at a particular time because they have different needs that they express in different ways. It is, therefore, important to always look at human behavior from this perspective because, as the Symposium notes, many factors influence action, and some may not be consciously known to a person. This situation can only be rectified by taking a more in-depth analysis of an individual to understand their different influences and how these shape their behavior and character.