The philosophical debate that is at the heart of Plato's Symposium culminates in Diotima's speech. She is a mysterious figure, a brilliant woman with the power to even ward off an epidemic. What he does here is also miraculous: he manages to connect everything the speakers said during the conference into a coherent whole, extracting what is true from what is false or irrelevant without ever having set foot in Agathon's house. He holds the answer to the question of the night in his hand. She defines love. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay Every speech about love up to that point anticipates Diotima's argument in some way, so that we readers can construct it much like the Fare characters. This does not mean that we must have a functional understanding of Agathon's pompous nonsense before we can understand what love fundamentally is, because truth (or Truth) can stand on its own. Rather, it means that the reader bounces from thinker to thinker. If he is an attentive reader, he tries to reconcile the contradictions, to find the similarities, and ultimately, if Plato is successful, he will want a conclusion, a final explanation that contains no contradictions. And that desire is the culmination of Diotima's speech on love, which the reader can finally fully appreciate, since he has dealt with it: "[the lover] generates many gloriously beautiful ideas and theories, in an untiring love of wisdom" . (210D)If the symposium is an orgy of thought, Diotima is its culmination. The buildup is a very carefully ordered series of lower discourses that build on each other. Phaedrus opens the evening by calling Love "the most powerful [god] in helping men obtain virtue and bliss." (180B) Pausanias follows by giving Love even more power. He does this by saying that love has a dual nature, both a "vulgar" side and a side that forces the lover to "make virtue [his] central concern." (185B) Here Plato interrupts the flow with Aristophanes' "bad case of the hiccups" (185C) which reminds the reader of the randomness of the setting. It suggests that even though the characters are knee-deep in abstraction, they are also inevitably tied to the mundane reality we all know. Then Eryximachus speaks. It makes love omnipotent, saying that it "directs everything that happens."(186B) This implies accepting Pausanias' distinction between good love and bad love, because if love is responsible for everything that happens, and since what happens must be good or bad, therefore love must have a dual nature. Plato then focuses us on less general ideas. The myth of Aristophanes and his subsequent definition of love introduce the idea that love is a longing for something we lack: "Every [human] longed for his own other half." (191A) Agathon introduces the idea that love is related to beauty, using the phrase "the beauty of god." (196B) Socrates concludes this half of the discourses on the nature of love by questioning Agathon. It brings together the idea of ​​lack and the idea of ​​beauty concluding that "Love needs beauty". (201B)But it is Diotima, as Socrates mentions her, who brings together all the different theories. It separates the physical world from the divine world, homosexual love from heterosexual love, and love of the body from love of beauty itself. She constructs an irrefutable argument that inevitably leads to defining love primarily as the desire to perceive beauty in its true and absolute form, a feat that can only be achieved through philosophy. In short, she justifies all the speeches before her, not by agreeing with them, but by praising the act of philosophizing. Philosophy is simply love of wisdom. Plato therefore has.