Stardust
Love, beauty, and the good are human constructions of the universal truth. With the blunt tool that is human language, and without the benefits of modern scientific knowledge, the speakers in Plato's Symposium each attempt to explain the driving force in their human nature - love. Socrates' speech as passed to him by Diotima is the best account of the origins of love given. As well, his compliments and completes the thought process presented by Plato through the rest of the speeches.
The goal of both science and philosophy is to discover the absolute truth which is masked by human senses and further diluted by human speech. Truth is in the laws that govern the universe. For the Greeks, these were the God of Olympus. Eros is the law that dictates the actions of all living beings; Love is the desire to reproduce and evolve.
The innate function of biological organisms is to propogate the DNA that is the essence of their existence. From this can be derived four basic forms of love:
(1) Familial: family members share our genes, we love them because they are us. Children are the most loved because they carry genes into the future; they are our tangible immortality.
(2) Romantic: We love those who we most want to share our genes with to send into the next generation.
(3) Friendly: We love those who are most beneficial to our survival, those whom
wish we shared genes with, those whose children we might pair with our own.
(4) Idyllic: We love our original thoughts and ideas that can be passed down, contributing to the quest for truth, and affecting generations to come - intangible immortality.
Each speaker gives an account of what eros is, but only Diotima, through Socrates, gives an account of the origins of Eros. The most important part of discovering truth is that it can only be achieved in slow gradations, not all at once. This allegory is reflected in the order and nature of the speeches presented by Plato. The passing of knowledge from one to another is part of the awakening process.
According to Diotima, love is neither mortal nor immortal, but rather a mean between the two; "between gods and men, conveying and taking across to the gods the prayers and sacrifices of men, and to men the commands and replies of the gods; he is the mediator who spans the chasm which divides them, ... for god mingles not with man but through Love." Such is the bond between consciousness and the laws of chemistry to which the mind is bound.
Socrates inquires to Diotima the use of love to men. She answers "Is not the good also the beautiful?" To love the good, as all men do, is to love the beautiful, and that quest is the key to happiness. What is beautiful is good, and vice-versa. The nature of the good is to be good for something, though good for accomplishing what? A sunset and a philosophy are both beautiful because they are both good. Both reveal love's transcendental bond between Olympus and earth.
"... human nature is desirious of procreation -- procreation which must be in a beauty and not in deformity; and this procreation is the union of man and woman, and is a divine thing; for conception and generation are an immortal principle in the mortal creature, and in the inharmonious they can never be ... for love, Socrates, is not, as you imagine, the love of the beautiful only ... The love of generation and of birth in beauty ... because to the mortal creature, generation is a sort of eternity and immortality ... and if, as has been already admitted, love is of the everlasting possession of the good, all men will necessarily desire immortality together with good: wherefore love is of immortality."
Diotima observes that love is not a strictly human passion, but present in all living things. "See you not how animals, birds, as well as beasts, in their desire of procreation ... the weakest are ready to battle against the strongest even to the uttermost ... Man may be supposed to act thus from reason; but why should animals have these passionate feelings?" She recognizes that love is the natural embodiment of the supranatural law.
"If you believe that love is of the immortal, as we have several times acknowledged; for here again, and on the same principle too, the mortal nature is seeking as far as is possible to be everlasting and immortal: and this is only to be attained by generation." By generation, Diotima speaks not just of the desire to procreate, but the desire to derive truth and become immortalized for deeds and works.
4 billion years ago the first chemical compound that could make copies of itself chanced into existence, and what we regard as "life" was begat. Since then the natural push has been of competition towards complexity, eventually resulting in complex chemicals that became self-aware. And they have been trying to explain themselves to eachother ever since.
The power to learn and reason is the power to see one's nature. Inherent in our beings are the archetypal answers to why we are here. That is how Plato was able to so well explain love and the meaning of life without literal knowledge of DNA or the big bang. Nature has worked so that the chemicals have reverse-engineered themselves, and once the truth is shared by all, the process of complexity and evolution should be sped up substantially.
