Dan Stewart

“I’d like to hear everyone’s input about love, though and I noticed that Danopoles hasn’t said anything yet.  Let’s hear what you have to say Danopoles,” Socrates finished.

            “First of all I’d like to thank Eryximachus for choosing such a good topic for discussion.  Love is a necessary part of all of our lives.  Just as a newborn baby will die if it does not receive enough attention, mature humans also need the love of others.  Often times, people similar to Alicibiades here become full of themselves and they do not develop love fully.  They are content having many followers, who praise them and make them feel good about themselves, but they do not reap the full benefits of love because they are not experiencing true love, which involves feelings from both sides.  They do not become the best self that they can be because they know that they can do anything they want and these followers will still ‘love’ them.  I agree with Aristophanes’ idea that love is seeking wholeness.  Some people think that they are whole on their own, but that is because they either have not been in love or they have had a bad experience and deceive themselves into believing that they do not need love in order to be happy.  When you are truly in love, you put your lover’s happiness before your own because they are a part of you and if they are not happy, then you cannot be fully happy.   I think that when you love something, you seek to understand more about it because you like everything that you know about it and it makes you happy. Generally, the reason we begin to love a person is because they make us happy.  We are happy when we are around them and we love the feeling of happiness.  Love of country also works this way.  Think about the last time you thought to yourself or spoke out loud, ‘I love my country!’  Did you not have a smile on your face, and were you not feeling extreme happiness at that moment?

            Not only does love make us happy, but love definitely does change our behavior, Pausanius mentioned.  It makes us courageous, but it also makes us aware of how we look to our lover because we desire them to continue loving us.  In the early stages of love, when we are not sure if our lover loves us back, we can do some very foolish things to try to impress our lover.  Agathon, you also had some good ideas about love.  I would like to add to your idea that love is sensitive and settles in soft characters and moves past tough characters.  These tough characters that love does not settle in are the type of people that I have just described.  They either think that they do not need love, or they think that love will only hurt them because they think that love requires too much of themselves.  Love does require sacrifice.  Socrates decided that when you love something you desire to continue loving it.  It is a continuous emotion that does not end abruptly, and it is necessary to make sacrifices to ensure that your lover is happy with you in order to keep the love going.  The good thing is that when you are in love, you are courageous, as Agathon pointed out, and you are willing to do almost anything for your lover’s happiness because you know that your happiness depends on their happiness.  Agathon’s idea that love settles in sensitive characters goes along with the idea that love is continuous.  The sad thing about love settling in sensitive characters is that love can also be very painful.  Because people desire to continue loving, when they realize that their love is not being returned, it is painful because they have invested so much of themselves into making their love happy, and when it is over they feel like they have wasted a tremendous amount of effort.  Because humans seek happiness, though, they will slowly get over their love for that person. 

Thank you, Socrates, for the opportunity to speak in front of such great minds.”