SECTION II: What is the Self?

This text is from one of Plato’s greatest dialogues, Symposium, in which Socrates and his interlocutors take turns offering accounts of what love is.  In this passage, Socrates is recounting the views of his teacher, Diotima.  Nothing is known of Diotima aside from the contents of this dialogue.  It is not even clear that there was an actual person corresponding this character, though most of Plato’s characters are in fact modeled after actual persons, most of whom he knew.

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"For love, Socrates, is not, as you imagine, the love of the beautiful only."

"What then?"

"The love of generation and of birth in beauty."

"Perhaps," I said.

"Yes, indeed," she replied.

The sophist, Diotima, Jozef Simmler (1855)

Go on to the next reading, Descartes's Meditations.

Go back to Plato's Phaedo.