Though Plato died nearly 2500 years ago, the English language still keeps his definition of love in common usage. To keep a relationship "platonic" means to eliminate its romantic aspect, restricting the partners to intellectual stimulation alone. Modern minds may think that this love is not as fertile as heterosexual romantic love and even consider this asexual affection something other than love, as it bears no children. Plato would respond that intellectual association leads to the creation of timeless ideas, and is therefore a greater love than the physical love which creates children. Plato explores and defends his view of love in the Symposium, specifically in the dialogue between Socrates and Diotima (Symposium, 204e 209e). Plato first defines love by examining the lover, then uses this definition to build an abstract function and purpose of love which places intellectual men above childbearing women.
Diotima teaches Socrates that the lover of good things wants to possess them so that he might be happy (204e). This definition of a lover applies to everyone, for Diotima's assumption, supported by Socrates, is that "everyone wants good things to be his own forever." (205a) There is a need to refine this broad definition which would include as lovers those who try to attain the good by any means. The purview of love, in Plato as in common language, is restricted "to those whose enthusiasm is directed at one specific type who are described by the terminology that belongs to the whole class, that of love, loving, and lovers." (205d) She then goes on to knock down Aristophanes' definition of love as searching for one's other half on the grounds that this is only true if being reunited is good, using the example that amputation is acceptable if a limb is seen as diseased. In place of Aristophanes' argument that love is trying to find oneself, Diotima sets up a definition of love, the object of which is "the good" (205e).
