Plato's theory of love is one of the most extravagant and thought-provoking dialogues of great thinkers. In his discussion of love, Plato theorizes that love is “neither beautiful nor good.” Love represents the human individual's desire to achieve true pleasure and authentic happiness by realizing what is good and beautiful. It is in this effort to aim to achieve this high and ultimately immovable virtue that love can be found in terms of human emotion. Some critics such as Vlatos argue that Plato's thought does not accurately account for individual and interpersonal love, finding flaws in Plato's argument. However, Plato's definition allows for a more universal perspective of love that encompasses both the personal and the existential. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay Donald Levy argues that Plato's depiction of love accurately encapsulates the full range of love in human experience. Levy argues that Plato does not idealize love, but presents virtue in its true form. Regarding Plato's dialogue on love, Levy states that “those who speak before Socrates mainly share the typical Greek tendency to glorify the sexual instinct rather than its particular objects” (285). The Greeks traditionally viewed the urge for physical love as a reflection of the greater desire to achieve what is good. However, Socrates argues for a more nuanced perspective that does not see love itself as the highest good. It is not acts of love that allow the individual to achieve the virtue of goodness inherent in love. In reality, it is love itself that then allows us to attempt to achieve the virtue of beauty. Socrates' companions, and the ancient Greeks in general, tended to idolize the concept of love. According to Levy, “For them, love is a god whose beauty and goodness they compete with each other in praising” (285). The notion of love, perhaps reasonably, has been highly romanticized and expounded upon by poets and other thinkers. This romanticism, theorized by Plato, distracts from the true nature of love. This general perspective reflects Plato's desire to get to the fundamental truth underlying objects, theories, and experiences. To eradicate and move beyond the romanticized notion of love, it is necessary to examine what exactly love aims to achieve and how an individual would feel about achieving or realizing that goal following a hypothetical mastery of love. The Greeks tend to exaggerate, in Plato and Levy's View, the role of physical attraction and the act of love in attributing meaning to the virtue of love itself. Levy argues that, “Even Pausanias, who distinguishes noble from base love, states that 'it is always honorable to conform to a lover in order to achieve excellence.' Even if the lover turns out to be bad, it is to the boy's credit that he was so deceived!” (285). In this sense Pausanias puts the act of love before the ultimate goal of achieving what is good. Pausanias' placing of love itself before the greater virtue he sets out to achieve is very troubling to Plato. According to Levy, “It is this almost universally shared belief in the intrinsic value of sexual love that Socrates places himself in from the beginning” (285). Therefore, Plato places Socrates' view in stark contrast to those who hold a more traditional Greek view of love and the importance of sexual love in manifesting beauty and goodness. Socrates presents a revolutionary vision of love that contrasts heavily with the established Greek notion that boasts sexual love. Levy quotes Socrates: “Love, he says, is neither beautiful nor good. Love does notit can be beautiful because it is the desire to possess what is beautiful, and one cannot desire what one already possesses” (285). Love therefore is tainted by the temporal and earthly reality of aspiring to achieve what is beautiful instead of actually representing or encapsulating virtue in its authentic form of what is good. Love therefore is a desire, which Plato deduces is perhaps too animalistic and temporal to represent a virtue. Plato argues that love exists within every human individual as exemplary of the notion of perfection. However, contained in this incarnation is the notion that love itself is tainted and colored in the real world by human error and the tendency to disrespect and shun the good. Therefore, love itself is neither beautiful nor good, but represents a step towards the realization of this. Socrates however supports this notion of platonic love. He proclaims that “human nature can find no better help than love” (212b) (285). It is love that can counteract some of the most negative and pejorative elements of human nature and seek to rectify human existence in the temporal world with that of good. Plato introduces another character, a woman, Diomita, to present a similar or slightly different definition of love. Diomita states that “'The object of love is to procreate and give birth in the presence of beauty' (206e). It is not enough, he seems to say, for a philosopher, lover of wisdom, to limit himself to witnessing the birth of ideas in others” (285). Diomitas, like many of his Greek contemporaries, also places sexual love as an important semblance of virtue on earth. However, Diomita also connects the ultimate end result of physical procreation, birth, and the creation of new life, as that which connects physical love to beauty. In this sense, Diomita also exposes previously held notions to arrive at a new understanding of what exactly love is. Plato's concept of love differs from both ancient and contemporary interpretations of what constitutes love. According to Plato, Levy writes, “The different kinds of love must be ordered hierarchically, one judged superior to another because its object is intrinsically better” (286). Plato assigns a structure to that extravagant and difficult to understand emotion that is love. Here, modern observers might raise objections as to what Plato's essential dichotomy of such a complex and multifaceted emotion is. Levy states that “there is one ultimate love object towards which all others must strive in order for them to be love objects” (286). Like absolute beauty, absolute love exists and represents love beyond the physical. Plato proclaims, according to Levy, that “To achieve the vision of absolute beauty one must first pass from the love of physical beauty in an individual to the love of all physical beauty; then the love of beauty in the soul leads to awareness of the beauty of activities, institutions and sciences" (286). Therefore, it is necessary to move away from the more traditional and physical guises of love to understand the more authentic and internal notions of what truly constitutes love. Love for the beauty of society, of the intellectual world and of the sciences that Plato considers superior. Scholars such as Vlastos, and probably Aristotle much earlier, object to Plato's notion of absolute love. According to Vlastos and Aristotle, “Love is desiring good things for someone for that person's sake.” True love therefore starts from the personal, individualistic understanding of love as self-rewarding and represents an individual's ability to cherish the achievements and happiness of another completely independent of his or her own personal goals or efforts. Levy admits it. «Since Plato has already definedlove as the desire to possess what is beautiful, his idea of ​​love, however spiritualized it may be, remains essentially self-centered” (286). Plato's notion of love therefore does not deviate from the individual's personal gain and benefit. Vlastos and Aristotle argue that true love must show some form of movement away from itself and towards a more universal understanding of love as a virtue. Some scholars have criticized Plato for not accurately accounting for particular individuals associated with love. Levy agrees to some extent, writing that "Plato does not see that love fundamentally and primarily has people as its object" (286). However, Plato understands human individuals as the only channels through which to engage in love and ultimately seek to arrive at the highest virtues that love can exhibit in the temporal world. According to Levy, “For Plato, love of people is placed far below love of an abstract entity, absolute beauty. “What we must love in people is the “image” of the Idea in them”” (286). It is therefore not the physical attribute of an individual that we must love, but the aspect of the Idea of ​​the good inherent in him. Notably, this differs from lust and desire, which perhaps, Plato suggests, would focus on the physical. Vlastos argues that love must move away from the individual to be validated as true. He argues that “this is all that love for a person could be, given the status of persons in Plato's ontology” (286). However, Plato's dichotomy seeks not to invalidate one source of love over the other but simply to recognize that there are images of the Idea of ​​beauty and goodness present in certain acts or feelings which, as they are not actual representations of the Idea , they should therefore be placed lower in the hierarchy. Levy writes that "Vlastos's definition of love, compared to which he finds Plato's defective, seems a definition not of what love is, but of what love should, perhaps, be" (286). Vlastos identifies what he sees as a flaw in Plato's theory, noting both the dichotomy and the lack of distancing from the individual. However, Plato's original thought may simply have been more realistic. Human beings are unable to understand a love that is completely independent of themselves. We therefore need to break down what love is. The figure of Diomita is fundamental to understanding the universality and applicability of Plato's theory of love. According to Joy Ritchie and Kate Ronald, Diomita presents a slightly different, but still legitimate understanding of love, which helps correct the apparent inaccessibility of Plato's theory. Ritchie and Ronald write that "Diomita argues that love is a spirit that moves between gods and humans, connecting them through speech and desire" (9). Like Socrates, Diomita agrees that love is not a god. However, love is also not entirely temporal and represents an intermediate entity. According to Ritchie and Ronald, "Diomita's feminine presence, including her references to the body, family, and private sphere, enhances, rather than detracts from, the powerful homoeroticism of this dialogue" (9). While Plato seems to move away from the importance of heterosexual physical love in his hierarchy, Diomita's presences affirm the female perspective in the dialogue to ensure that important aspects of love in the physical sense are also explored. However, it is ultimately Diomitas who teaches, “Socrates how to transcend a basic physical desire and move toward a philosophy of perfect love and intellectual relationship that reproduces the form of unchanging beauty” (9). Therefore, Diomita does not simply reflect a sexualized female perspective. 149-157.