Plato

Question 1

Plato’s views on love (2)

Answer 1

• True Love is admiration
• Love isn’t sex
• Mutual
• “intense friendship”

Question 2

Plato’s symptoms of desire (4)

Answer 2

• Soul grows wings and takes flight (loss of control)
• Shuddering
• Parts of the body become warm, moist and swell
• On fire

Question 3

Plato’s difference between love and desire (7)

Answer 3

Love:
- Creates shame to encourage virtue
- Fulfilled, completed
- Mutual
Desire:
- Can lead to self-improvement
- Brutal + Ugly
- Initial short-term satisfaction
- Physical + sexual

Question 4

Plato’s why should desire be controlled (4)

Answer 4

• Important for a controlled moderate society
• Its the behaviour of a Tyrant
• ‘nailed hammered into the soul’
• Immoderate desire is like a disease/bad food

Question 5

Plato’s How should desire be controlled (1)

Answer 5

Compare it to unhealthy food

Question 6

Plato’s Why can desire be resisted (3)

Answer 6

• Too hard to police + put surveillance on young people
• Make one more desirable
• Diotima = desire for ‘immortality’ can lead to great laws, ideas + art

Question 7

Plato’s how can desire be resisted (2)

Answer 7

• Military endurance test

- Re-channel into laws + worthwhile aims of the state

Question 8

Plato’s views on Homoerotic relationships (3)

Answer 8

• Solely based ob desire/pleasure so is bad
• Is alright if it is an older and younger man, because it is like tutoring the young man (mental enrichment)
• It is natural (from the start of humans)

Question 9

Plato’s nature of good/bad conduct (5)

Answer 9

• Encourage partner to behave in a admirable way
• Don’t be the receiver in a gay relationship (lack of control)
• Help identify beauty (study love)
• Moderating sexual desire (can ruin you)
• Reproduction + fidelity (well ordered state + immortality)

Question 10

Plato’s contemporary context (4)

Answer 10

• Alcibiades’ passion led to failure in Sicily
• The republic was in political turmoil
• Socrates was dead
• The Symposium took place in the middle of the Peloponnesian war

Question 11

Plato Received by his contemporary audience

Answer 11

• Would have viewed love with a heroic background (Odysseus + Penelope, Helen + Paris = destructive)
• Just lost the war so may look at Symposium to sort the political situation