Plato is often criticized for preaching the gospel of me first. The claim is that his understanding of love is essentially selfish, which is considered troublesome for obvious ethical reasons. But there may be an even more troubling problem in Plato's understanding of love. In this article, I will attempt to demonstrate that for Plato, love is in a sense impossible; that it can only be a desire for something beyond our reach. The stakes are high, but perhaps there is a way to understand this problem in a way that feels a little less overwhelming. To do this, I will analyze the arguments of the Lysis and the Symposium, first questioning even the possibility of love, and then trying to show that love is in fact possible, albeit in versions weaker than is generally assumed. There are a number of conceptions of love. in the writings of Plato. One comes from lysis where Plato, through the character of Socrates, experiments with the idea that love is the love of the useful. at 210c Plato writes: "Will anyone consider us his friends, will anyone love us in those areas where we are of no use?... According to this, then , you are not even loved by your own father, nor by your own father." is someone else by anyone else in the world, to the extent that you or he is useless (Hamiliton 153). "Here we can see the idea that people like people who are useful to them, but it seems that rather than liking people who are useful, what a person really likes is how useful they are. -self. Here is an example of Plato's selfishness. Love for a person is not a desire for the person themselves, but rather a desire to know how the person can be used to improve one's own life. However, if love is simply a desire for useful people and things, can it really be said to be love...... middle of paper..... .when we consider that it is not contradictory to desire the cessation of desire The desire to possess the good could then be understood in the sense of a person trying to escape the consequences of his natural imperfection. is only necessary because a person desires something that they lack, which seems plausible given that it would be very difficult to understand why a person who completely possesses the good would bother to interact with the rest of between us, mere mortals, then we can say that we love. those who bring them closer to satisfaction, and likewise the consequence of their love is to free them as much as possible from the unsatisfied desires of others. Although love can never find what it seeks, the illusion of love and the fulfillment of desire, no different from the other illusions that make up the world of human experience, make possible what humans call love..