Love and what we find valuable › Possessing the good and making something endure

Diotima shifts the inquiry from beauty to goodness. What does someone who wants good things want from them? To have them and thereby live happily. She treats the desire for happiness as an endpoint that needs no further purpose, then broadens eros to the desire to have the good forever (204d–206a). Ordinary speech reserves the name love for one part of this broader pursuit. Her account therefore includes ambitions and creative activity that do not look like romance.

Possession here should not be read as a license to own another person. The object is having good things in one's life, with permanence added to the wish. Yet the formulation raises a serious question about motivation. If I love a person for the good they bring me, do I also recognize their good as a reason for action independently of mine? Diotima's broad account can include shared flourishing, but its formulation alone does not establish an adequate ethic of mutual care.

Mortality makes permanent possession difficult. Diotima proposes generation in beauty as the characteristic work of eros: mortal beings seek a kind of continuance by producing something that survives them (206b–208b). She distinguishes the unchanging condition of the divine from the succession available to mortals. Even within a life, bodily features, habits, and knowledge undergo loss and renewal. Her explanation of remembrance as renewing knowledge supports this picture of continuity through replacement.

Generation includes children but is not confined to biological reproduction. Diotima also describes pregnancy of the soul, whose offspring include wisdom and virtue, poetry, and arrangements of households and cities. A person carrying such possibilities seeks a beautiful character with whom to discuss and cultivate them; together they tend what emerges (208e–209e). Erotic creativity can thus become educational and political. Her preference for enduring spiritual offspring also creates a hierarchy that a reader can question without denying the value of teaching or art.

For a second modern hypothetical, imagine an engineer mentoring a colleague. At first the engineer wants admiration and a reputation that will last. Working together gradually turns attention toward methods and standards that others can learn. This resembles Diotima's account of creating something beyond one's immediate satisfaction. It does not prove that every mentor secretly wants immortality, and it gives no excuse to treat the colleague as raw material for a legacy. The analogy is useful precisely where both people can share responsibility for what they make.

The inference from wanting the good forever to desiring immortality also needs care. Wanting a friendship never to end does not obviously mean wanting endless personal existence, still less wanting fame. Diotima offers an interpretation that connects these pursuits through resistance to disappearance. A critic can accept that some projects express that resistance while rejecting the universal explanation. The account teaches a way of questioning our aims; it does not settle their psychology by definition.