Plato

Life is a wonderful and beautiful thing. I think sometimes we all take that for granted. We live in a society filled with greed, hunger for wealth, physical looks and technology driven. We get so wrapped up in everyday life, sometimes we forget about ourselves. Although, Plato writing is a little tough to read and comprehend ill give it a shot. By reading this short writing, the word beauty just kept repeating itself in my head. We all have our own feelings and definition of beauty. If its the beautiful physical attractions in the opposite sex or possibly the personality of someone. Possibly you look at beauty is being the world around us and everything involved with it. I liked this writing because it talks about beauty coming from within. A constant repitition from religion to religion about coming from within. Its so true, it deals with anything in life, we percieve the world through our own two eyes and our own powerful brain.

Diotima explains that life itself is beauty. Our own living soul that god has gifted us with is beauty. We get so worried about the physical aspect of beauty, that we forget about the beauty of our gentle heartbeat that continues day in and day out. There is one quote that really stood out to me.

"Nor will his vision of the beautiful take the form of a face, or of hands, or of anything that is of the flesh. It will be neither words, nor knowledge, nor a something that exists in something else, such as a living creature, or the earth, or the heavens, or anything that is--but subsisting of itself and by itself in an eternal oneness, while every lovely thing partakes of it in such sort that, however much the parts may wax and wane, it will be neither more nor less, but still the same inviolable whole"(15).

In a way this writing opened my mind up a little bit. That basically the definition of beauty is something that you cant grasp or define. Reminds me of how religions repeatedly say that about heaven and God. That the only way you find the universal beauty, "Heaven", is to find the beauty within ones self. I enjoyed this writing because the time difference is so large and its interesting to read the insights of these great historic figures. We must realize that we won't always find real beauty on the outside of things or materialistic things.

"Man's life is ever worth the living, it is when he has attained this vision of the very soul of beauty"(16).