That’s right, folks! Step right up
and get your Immortality elixir here! Available for a limited time only, this
one-of-a-kind product was invented by the great Plato himself folks! Its easy,
its cheap, and its forever! All you have to do is pay a small one-time fee,
give birth in beauty, and you are guaranteed eternal, divine existence or your
money back!
While Plato did
not impersonate a street vendor to sell his friends on the connections of love
and immortality, he did provide a very effective sales pitch for love in his Symposium via the exploits of Socrates.
Plato believed
that wisdom and knowledge were the most divine qualities an individual could
pursue, as these attributes allowed the individual to ‘turn off’ the influence
of their physical body and rise to a level closer to the gods. One means by which the citizens (men) of
Athens achieved such exalted wisdom was by engaging in paiderastic
relationships with older, more established members of the community. Thus,
wisdom is found through love, and divinity is found through wisdom. But when
Diotema asks Socrates what one desires when one loves, he did not reply,
‘wisdom’, instead he replies: Immortality. Socrates claims love yearns for a
union with the divine, or the ideal, in the eternal. In this way, love becomes
a means to immortality.
As
Plato fleshes out this theory, he provides a divergence of different forms of love,
as well as corresponding forms of immortality for each respectively.
The first form of immortality
granted by love is described by Plato to be that of heterosexual love. This love is purely of the body and of a
woman. Due to paiderastic ideals in Athens, this form of love was often seen as
base and dense. This form of love was not seen to support divine wisdom, as it
tied the individual to the physical body. Also of the physical, is the form of
immortality attained from heterosexual love: babies. After a man dies, his children will live on
and carry with them, his name, his memory and his DNA. Diotema claims that the
process of reproduction is the way in which mortal creatures share in some immortality.
However, Diotema continues on to define a more valuable form of immortality:
immortality of ideas. She states, that some individuals have the ability to
‘give birth’ to mental offspring, such as art, poetry, laws, philosophy, virtue
or (most importantly) wisdom. Here, Diotema outlines Plato’s ideal form of
love: Love of the beauty of knowledge.
To achieve this form of love, a man must dedicate his life to the
attainment of wisdom and virtue. Plato describes a wise man be mentally
pregnant with ideas. The children of this pregnancy are born from the
application of his wisdom. They exist in the public works of beauty created,
and left behind, by the parent. For example, the famous poet Homer left behind
‘children’ in his poems. These children hold the highest degree of immortality
because they will survive much longer and influence many more citizens, than
any physical child could. Certainly
Plato has proven that philosophical contributions to society warrant immortal
remembrance, simply by the fact that we know his works and his name. As a result, “giving birth in beauty” is not only the divine
and virtuous process of contributing knowledge to the eternal public, but the
key to immortality.
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