Plato, in The Symposium, makes Love seem as natural parts of life. He refers to love as two different kinds of Love: 1) Commonly Love (Sexual attraction) and 2) Heavenly Love. With Heavenly Love being the most difficult to find because it is on a spiritual level. Plato then compares Love to someone’s health system within the body, how it communicates with each other to keep the person healthy. Love is also referred to as a person, a God many times throughout the story, a young god, and as a mortal man. He (Love) is also seen as the Moon, astronomically.
According to Plato, Love is dependent on Necessity. Always needing what it does not have. Once he receives what is needed, he gains happiness and knowledge of what Beauty really is. Love affects the decisions people make everyday, whether its a person, an object, a sport, or hobby, it is their passion.
It’s interesting how each of the speakers all had different ways to describe the nature of love. To explain “necessity”, Aristophanes explains it as a search to find ones other half after Zeus’s order to cut us all in half. He believed, according to a myth, that a person once has four legs and four arms and the reason why we seek love is to rejoin ourselves with the other half to become whole.
What I found most interesting about the part about “needing what it does not have” is that it’s not necessarily true. There is such thing of wanting more than what you currently have. For example, I could be a millionaire, but want to be a billionaire. Even though I’m rich, I could desire to be even more rich.