The 5 different definitions of love in Plato's Symposium

Phaedrus (Young) - 178a-180b

• Love is the oldest of all the gods, and thus confers the most benefits.
• Love teaches us shame in acting disgracefully and pride in acting well (we feel more ashamed to be caught doing something disgraceful when we are caught by a loved one).
• Love, then, leads to bravery, courage, and honor because if there were an army of lovers and beloveds, they would rather die than display cowardice in front of their partners.
• The gods value love as a guide to action, because they allow people who loved greatly to return from the underworld.
• Speaks in the context of male-male love (as most of the others do as well)

Pausanias (Agathon's life-partner) -180c-185c

• There are two kinds of love: heavenly and common (see blog post below)
• Love in itself is neither commendable nor detestable; rather, if it is done properly, it is esteemed and if it is not, then it has no merit.
• The main purpose of love is to produce virtue, which is why male-male relationships between the wise lover and the younger beloved are so esteemed (His praises of the longevity of relationships make sense given his relationship with Agathon.)
• Pausanias agrees with Phaedrus that love is good, but makes an improvement by adding the distinction between heavenly love and common love, and adding the qualifier that love is good only if it is the former.

Eryximachus (Doctor) 185c-189b

• Commends Pausanias's distinction between the two types of love and agrees with him therein.
• Agrees that it is good to gratify good people, and bad to gratify bad people.
• Expands upon Pausanias's explanation of love by saying that love is not purely emotional, as Pausanias has suggested, but rather that it is bodily as well (which makes sense, given that he's a doctor).
• He completes an analogy by saying that it is appropriate to gratify the healthy parts of the body, and bad to gratify the diseased parts of the body.
• Eryximachus then expands this idea of love to show that love has its place in music, agriculture, medicine, etc. It is the doctor's role to implant the good kind of love in the body and flush out the bad, restoring the body to a homeostasis of harmony. Likewise, love is manifested in unity and harmony in other subjects as well.
• Love is ever-present, all-powerful, and primarily concerned with unity

Aristophanes (Great comic playwright) 189c-193e

• There used to be 3 genders: male, female, and androgynous. The gods sliced them in half because they were getting too powerful, and love is the reunion of the two halves of a person.
• Androgynous individuals are heterosexual, with the other two genders being homosexual (I use the word "homosexual" loosely, since some would protest to the lover/beloved relationship being stigmatized this way).
• Aristophanes praises the male-male relationship for the same reasons that Pausanias does.
• "Love" is our desire for wholeness, and restores us to our formerly whole selves (This gets at what Eryximachus is getting at too).

Diotima

• Socrates shows that love is desirous of something which it does not have, meaning that if what the previous orators have said is true, then love can be neither beautiful nor good since it desires what is both beautiful and good.
• BUT, love does not have to be ugly and bad, since Diotima says that things don't have to be one thing or their opposite, but can fall somewhere in the middle. For example, love is not mortal or immortal but is a sort of spirit.
• gods use spirits to communicate with humans, so love is like a message to the humans from the gods.
• Love is the child of Poverty and Resource, and is like both of them, but somewhere in between. For example, love is always poor but very tough; somewhere in between ignorance and wisdom; always in need but can scheme to get what he wants; is neither immortal or mortal so it can result in forever friendship or a temporary relationship (in contrast to what Pausanias says).
• Diotima dismisses what Aristophanes says about lovers looking for their other half, and instead posits that love searches for what is good. In the same manner of Eryximachus, she says that we want to amputate diseased limbs meaning we only want to be attached to what is good.
• Love is the desire to have the good forever, and the closest we can get to this is through birth and reproduction because that's what gets us closest to immortality.
• She, like the others, advocates the male-male relationship by saying that men can be pregnant in both body and mind. They can be pregnant in body and seek to reproduce with a female, or they can be pregnant in mind and seek to reproduce wisdom and virtue in the mind of a younger beloved.
• As far as the whole "loving the bodies is bad but loving the minds is good" thing that Pausanias gets at, Diotima says that boys begin to love a beautiful body until they realize that there are lots of beautiful bodies, so they move onto the mind. Then, the love of the mind becomes more important and the love of the body falls away. Then, he just loves beauty in general rather than beautiful bodies or things.
• Then, he grows to love knowledge, which ultimately leads to love, which is the knowledge of beauty, which is eternal.