[Author’s Name]
[Institution’s Name]
Essay on Symposium
Because of the centrality and power of love in human experience, men and women throughout the ages have felt the compulsion to sing songs, to write verse, and to tell stories about this ineffable and mysterious force which leads them to the peaks of felicity, and to the depths of despair. Love indeed is an ultimate, if not the ultimate, human concern. It is the universal principle under girding all human activity, the object of all human striving, resulting, naturally, in the need to examine and discuss it carefully. Plato’s Symposium is one such example. The venerable author in this ancient treatise records the speeches of some six prominent Athenians who employ both story and verse to convey a variety of myths and motifs about the nature and function of love.
As much as our society has become involved in the advancement of feminism and the equality of the sexes, there is one fact that neither gender can ignore; none can survive without the other. Love and the want of a soul mate keeps each member of man and womankind in the constant search of the perfect person with whom to become one. Yet if this bond is a necessity of the human race then why has the meaning, purpose and pursuit of it eluded us for so many generations. There has yet to be a one universal explanation of love and there has yet to be one who understands its powers fully. As we see from Plato's Symposium, even to the wisest of men, in a time when the search for knowledge was seen as the pathway to enlightenment, love was still a concept that was not understood and unknown. Though many of their guidelines and characteristics of love are wise, some may not apply to modern society.....
