Love and what we find valuable › What each speaker thinks love does

Phaedrus makes love a source of courage and honor. A lover dreads appearing shameful before the beloved, while attachment can inspire extraordinary sacrifice. His imagined company of lovers would excel through mutual emulation (178a–180b). His speech identifies an intelligible moral mechanism: caring about someone's regard can change how we act. Whether the resulting action is good still requires a standard beyond the wish to impress.

Pausanias supplies a distinction Phaedrus lacks. Love is not praiseworthy regardless of how it is practiced. He contrasts common love, directed toward bodily gratification, with heavenly love, which he associates with enduring attention to character and improvement (180c–185c). This introduces ethical discrimination into the celebration. It also exposes a danger: an elevated vocabulary can defend the speaker's own preferred relationships without adequately questioning their inequalities.

Eryximachus, a physician, extends the distinction into a theory of harmonious and disordered relations throughout bodies, music, seasons, and religious practice (185e–188e). Eros becomes a principle of coordination. This is his cosmological picture, not an established medical or scientific result. Its philosophical attraction is its breadth: desire might belong to an ordered life rather than isolated impulses. Its vulnerability is the leap from one profession's explanatory model to an explanation of nearly everything.

Agathon turns from love's benefits to the qualities of Love himself. His polished speech describes Eros as beautiful, young, delicate, and virtuous (194e–197e). Socrates then asks whether the attractiveness of what we desire has been transferred to desire itself. Before that challenge, however, Aristophanes offers an alternative whose emotional power cannot be reduced to a celebration of harmonious order.