Symposium (206-207)

The fact is, I suppose, that each person does not cherish his belongings except where a man calls the good his own property and the bad another’s; since what men love is simply and solely the good. Or is your view otherwise? Faith, no, I said. Then we may state unreservedly that men love the good? Yes, I said. Well now, must we not extend it to this, that they love the good to be theirs? We must. And do they love it to be not merely theirs but theirs always? Include that also. Briefly then, said she, love loves the good to be one’s own for ever. That is the very truth, I said. Now if love is always for this, she proceeded, what is the method of those who pursue it, and what is the behavior whose eagerness and straining are to be termed love? What actually is this effort? Can you tell me? Ah, Diotima, I said; in that case I should hardly be admiring you and your wisdom, and sitting at your feet to be enlightened on just these questions. Well, I will tell you, said she; it is begetting on a beautiful thing by means of both the body and the soul. It wants some divination to make out what you mean, I said; I do not understand. Let me put it more clearly, she said. All men are pregnant, Socrates, both in body and in soul: on reaching a certain age our nature yearns to beget. This it cannot do upon an ugly person, but only on the beautiful: the conjunction of man and woman is a begetting for both. [*] It is a divine affair, this engendering and bringing to birth, an immortal element in the creature that is mortal; and it cannot occur in the discordant. The ugly is discordant with whatever is divine, whereas the beautiful is accordant. Thus Beauty presides over birth as Fate and Lady of Travail; and hence it is that when the pregnant approaches the beautiful it becomes not only gracious but so exhilarate, that it flows over with begetting and bringing forth; though when it meets the ugly it coils itself close in a sullen dismay: rebuffed and repressed, it brings not forth, but goes in labor with the burden of its young. Therefore when a person is big and teeming-ripe he feels himself in a sore flutter for the beautiful, because its possessor can relieve him of his heavy pangs. For you are wrong, Socrates, in supposing that love is of the beautiful. What then is it? It is of engendering and begetting upon the beautiful. Be it so, I said.

To be sure it is, she went on; and how of engendering? Because this is something ever-existent and immortal in our mortal life. From what has been admitted, we needs must yearn for immortality no less than for good, since love loves good to be one’s own for ever. And hence it necessarily follows that love is of immortality. All this instruction did I get from her at various times when she discoursed of love-matters; and one time she asked me, What do you suppose, Socrates, to be the cause of this love and desire? For you must have observed the strange state into which all the animals are thrown, whether going on earth or winging the air, when they desire to beget: they are all sick and amorously disposed, first to have union one with another, and next to find food for the new-born; in whose behalf they are ready to fight hard battles, even the weakest against the strongest, and to sacrifice their lives; to be racked with starvation themselves if they can but nurture their young, and be put to any sort of shift. As for men, said she, one might suppose they do these things on the promptings of reason; but what is the cause of this amorous condition in the animals? Can you tell me? Once more I replied that I did not know; so she proceeded: How do you design ever to become a master of love-matters, if you can form no notion of this? Why, it is just for this, I tell you, Diotima—as I stated a moment ago—that I have come to see you, because I noted my need of an instructor. Come, tell me the cause of these effects as well as of the others that have relation to love. Well then, she said, if you believe that love is by nature bent on what we have repeatedly admitted, you may cease to wonder. For here, too, on the same principle as before, the mortal nature ever seeks, as best it can, to be immortal. In one way only can it succeed, and that is by generation; since so it can always leave behind it a new creature in place of the old. It is only for a while that each live thing can be described as alive and the same, as a man is said to be the same person from childhood until he is advanced in years: yet though he is called the same he does not at any time possess the same properties; he is continually becoming a new person, and there are things also which he loses, as appears by his hair, his flesh, his bones, and his blood and body altogether. And observe that not only in his body but in his soul besides we find none of his manners or habits, his opinions, desires, pleasures, pains or fears, ever abiding the same in his particular self; some things grow in him, while others perish.