called Diotima... (and) the easiest thing will be to go through the same questions and answers as she did with me. I had said to her as Agathon said to me that Love is a great god and must be reckoned beautiful; but she employed against me the same arguments in which I demonstrated to Agathon that . . . love is not to be confused either with the beautiful or the good. 'What do you mean, Diotima?' I said. 'Is love ugly and bad?' 'Don't say such things' she answered; 'do you think that anything not beautiful is necessarily ugly, and that anything that is not wisdom is ignorance? Don't you know that there are states of mind half-way between wisdom and ignorance, and conditions half-way between beauty and ugliness?'

"The truth of the matter is this,' she continued, 'the lover of wisdom does not love that wisdom which he already possesses, nor do those who do not love wisdom acquire any degree of wisdom, and the same could be said concerning love of beauty, or of goodness. The tiresome thing about ignorance is this, that a man who loves neither beauty, nor goodness, nor intelligence is perfectly self-satisfied; for he who does not believe that he lacks a thing cannot love what he does not believe he lacks.*

"Tell me then, my friend," I said, "for your words carry conviction, what function Love performs among men...?"

""That is precisely what I am going to try to teach you, Socrates. I will ask you this: If it can be agreed that all men always love what they imagine to be good, and that the concept of good includes both the concept of beauty and of wisdom, why do we not speak of all men as being in love, but instead say that some men are in love and others are not?" "I wonder what the reason can be?" "There's no need to wonder; the truth is that we isolate a

particular kind of love and appropriate for it the name of love, which really belongs to a wider whole, while we employ different names for other kinds of love... The generic concept embraces every desire for good and for ultimate happiness. but this desire expresses itself in many different ways, and those with whom it takes the form of love of money or of physical prowess or of wisdom are not said to be in love or called lovers, whereas those whose passion runs in one particular channel usurp the name of lover, which belongs to them all. There is, indeed, a theory that lovers are people who are in search of the other half of themselves, but according to my view of the matter, my friend, love is not desire either of the half or of the whole, unless that half or whole happens to be good. Men are quite willing to have their feet or their hands amputated if they believe those parts of themselves to be diseased. The truth is, I think, that people are not attached to what particularly belongs to them, except in so far as they can identify what is good with what is their own, and what is bad with what is not their own. Thus may we say then, without qualification, that men are in love with what is good?" "Yes..." 'But we must add, mustn't we, that the aim of their love is the possession of the good . . . and not only its possession, but its perpetual possession?" "Certainly." "And love, then, is for perpetual possession of the good?" "Very true," I said, "but in what way, or by what type of action must men show this intense desire if it is to deserve the name of love?"

"Well,' she said, 'I will tell you. The function is that of procreation in what is beautiful, and such procreation can be either physical or spiritual. All men, Socrates, are in a

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