The real crux of the argument follows presenting Plato's view through the words of a priestess named Diotima. She is said to have shared the secrets of love with Socrates. It is of interest that Plato uses a woman to relate his view on love. Most notably, it seems that Plato is subtly stating that women may be the utmost authority on the subject. The first of the Diotima speech is the elaboration of the origin of Eros. It emerges that Eros is a mixture of things:
“He is neither mortal nor immortal, for in the space of a day he will be now, when all goes well with him, alive and blooming, and now dying, to be born again by virtue of his father’s nature, what he gains will always ebb fast. So love is neither altogether in or out of need, and stand, moreover, midway between ignorance and wisdom” (Symposium203e-204).
It is also stated that love is neither beautiful nor ugly, which, as Socrates connects, relates to good and evil. The continued motif is that Eros is the middle ground of several different qualities. Diotima elaborates to affirm that Eros’s parents are Resource and Need. He takes from his mother in having Need as his constant companion. He takes from his father his ingenuity in going after things of beauty and value. By elaborating on the origins of Eros, Diotima is relating this daemon to the abstract qualities of love. For love is in constant search of things that are beautiful and good and yet, never satisfied, always lacking in some area.
Socrates finds himself the student as Diotima refutes his earlier concept that love is the love of beautiful things, for love is not in being loved, it is in being the lover (Symposium 204c-d). It may be a possibility that the mention of beauty here is Plato’s hint that the awakening of eros in the higher senses of man will hopefully appeal to the lesser parts of the soul so that he may strive for the good. This hint is affirmed as Socrates is asked what it is that the lover of the good is longing for. Socrates’ answer is that he will have happiness, more importantly the ‘good life’, for happiness is the possession of good things. This happiness is the final end of all desires, the ultimate end. It should be noted, that terms beautiful, good, and truth can be interpreted as interchangeable. Such can be observed in this case as beautiful can be related to the good, which is seeking of the truth (wisdom). By this connection, it may be seen that the lover is also an educator in the teachings of wisdom. A conclusion can be now reached as Diotima states, “To love is to bring forth upon the beautiful, both in body and in soul,” (Symposium 206c). So to love is not only to educate in body, but also in the enhancement of the soul. This is one of the central themes that defines Socratic philosophy. We must not only seek out the beautiful for the body, but also the beautiful must be sought to immortalize the soul. This is what the platonic concept of love entails.
For Plato, the sole object of love in The Symposium is the permanent possession of goodness for oneself. In other words Eros is not a god, is not beauty and wisdom, but is a seeking after beauty and wisdom and a movement towards them. It is also a perpetual balance between seeking and lacking. It is through this balance that we may be able to create, to become immortal through the enrichment of the soul. To summarize, The Symposium presents Plato's view of love that is an immortality of the soul through a continuous search for the good. This good is achieved by the procreation of philosophy or wisdom. It is a love that assumes logical validity and ethical value.
In the Phaedrus, Plato introduces a view of eros that is slightly different from that of the symposium. This eros has many faces as it is the unstable, complicated eros found in relationships. This eros is an extension of the problems associated with the body, our emotions and appetites, a divine madness. Socrates establishes the complexity of eros through a reference between iron and silver, just and good (Phaedrus 263b). With the latter topics, each individual has their own arguments of what good/ justice is even within themselves. It is a typical Socratic maneuver to then define what love is by forming an all encompassing definition. What will be evaluated are the speeches of Lysias and Socrates in an effort to summarize Platonic love in The Phaedrus.
In the speech given by Lysias, the tone taken is detached and businesslike as he relates the relationship between the lover and the loved:
“Lovers when their craving is at an end repent of such benefits as they have conferred, but fro the other sort no occasion arises for regretting what has passed. For being free agents under no constraint, they regulate their services by the scale of their means, with an eye toward their own personal interest. Again lovers weigh up profit and loss accruing to their account by reason of their passion, and with the extra item of labor expended decide that they have long since made payment for favors received...”(Phaedrus 231-b).
It is affirmation the a love is only love inasmuch as it pleases the beloved, and when this passion ceases, so too does the love. He continues in a distinction of the love between two people as an earthly, human bond. This relationship is merely one bound by the superficial. Lysias touches on the issue further as he asserts that the lover is in love more with the boys body than with his soul is in this speech that Lysias relates that the possessor of eros conceive bitter hatred and a spirit of malice and injury toward there loved ones (Phaedrus 243c). We have an establishment of love that is a manifestation of human greed. The lover is in perpetual need for physical, bodily demands to be met.
As previously stated, Socrates attempts to define eros by stating that love is some form of desire and that men desire what is fair separate form being lovers (Phaedrus 378d-378b). He continues to elaborate that within each of us there are two separate forces that each follows. One is an innate desire for pleasure and the other is motivated by reason as a guide toward what is best. It culminates to form the agreed definition as Socrates states:
“When the irrational desire, pursuing the enjoyment of beauty, has gained the mastery over judgment that prompts the right to conduct, and has acquired from other desires, akin to it, fresh strength to strain toward bodily beauty, that very strength provides it with its name-it is the strong passion called love” (Phaedrus378c).
It must now be determined how to separate the lover from the non-lover. By use of this definition of love, we see that those in love are motivated by an overpowering force that can influence all reason, all inclination toward the good. It is motivated here as love with negative connotation. Any man that is dominated by this desire is a slave to pleasure, for all his concern will be the fulfillment of such from the beloved. The search for pleasure will manifest in the manipulation of the beloved by the lover, so much so that the relationship is skewed beyond the limits of danger; the greatest of these dangers being the separation from that which would increase wisdom-divine philosophy. This seemingly anti-love speech is an apparent solution to the problems laid out by Lysias.
In the first speech, there is a love characterized by madness, the overwhelming embodiment of passions. We have the exaggeration of madness insofar as it rejects all rationality. In the second speech, we find that Socrates recants earlier statements as he elaborates that this can only be the true form of love, when the lover is a philosopher. The divine madness is not presented as evil, but as of a human quality. We should take note that this ascription of eros to human madness is separate from the divine origins. He also classifies different kinds of madness. He enumerates that there are different benefits conferred by different kinds of inspired passion, whether arising out of divine sources or from human sources. The lowest among the inspired madness is that having human origin. The second kind is the one arising from prayers and religious rites, third, coming from poetry and lyrics, and the highest one following from divine sources.( Phaedrus 244 e2-245 c3). The fourth type of madness that befalls a lover will remind him of true beauty, to which effect he will then care nothing for the world as he has transcended earthly desire in exchange for that of the divine. Platonic love can be seen here as a crossing into higher realms of truth and goodness from the earthly physical beauty. It is a special kind of love that focuses on the nature of the lover's soul.
We should take heed that there are similarities in the first speech of Socrates and that of Lysiais. The man in the first Socratic speech seems to know how to avoid pain by detaching himself to another in a loveless relationship, which would seem damaging to the soul insofar as it is not enhancing its emergence from this plane to that of the divine. It amounts to exploiting another for the benefits of position, ease, sexual gratification without the true love that is gifted by the gods. The ideal lovers in the Phaedrus conform to Plato’s notion of true love. Here the beauty of soul is clearly recognized. Similarly, physical beauty of the beloved inflames the lover and this love is transcended when the lover seeks kinship with soul.
This notion of love is a wonderful conception and should be the basis for what we would aspire to, but a question persists: 'Are we, the non-philosophers, able to achieve such a level of transcendence?' Socrates mentions several times in both works that the what is beautiful is good and that the only way to reach the good is through attainment of wisdom. This wisdom can only be sought after by the Platonic philosopher, or lover of wisdom. Here, there is clear negligence for others who desire eros. In our perpetual search for love the main point of focus seems to be on the individual.
Taking into consideration the two presentations of eros, Plato seems to be lacking in another crucial area. He has omitted any reference to personal love. It is clear that Platonic love seeks to elevate eros above any typical meaning to a higher ethical plane. By doing this, we have a love that is impersonal and is not to the conception expressed by today's standards. Today we know of a love that is unconditional as it relates to another's emotions and in seeking improvement of each other rather than the perfection of the self. By the omission of personal love, he also ignores the concept of sexual passion that we tend to construe into our own misgivings of love. The malaise that characterizes our love lives naturally finds its way into modern social conceptions that would have you believe that you are beautiful and unique. For Plato, eros is predominantly intellectual, with the possibly for passion, but always a form of rational activity. His ideal lover leaves emotionality behind, his love being not an attempt to express or purify sensuous feelings, but rather to suppress them by sheer rationality. Emotions are set aside and are merely an afterthought, as the soul enters a relationship with divinity. I believe that It needs to be a love that is a synthesis of passion and rationality. As the man improves, he will leave irrational inclination aside, resisting the impulse of strong emotion. The love presented by Plato in The Symposium is an entity of goodness that surpasses the usual notion of passion, and in the Phaedrus, it is the unstable menace that we see. Love is infused with our desires for pleasure , well-being, and ease. It is that which will make us whole. Plato reaches for a eros with qualities that transcend our basic notions, an eros with beauty that is absolute! He asserts his egocentric ideas as his love is a progression of the soul, an improvement of self fostered only for the purpose of attaining higher ends. To be put more simply, we only love so that we may achieve a higher goal. This being said, I feel that love is a selfless attainment of things beyond the immortalization of the soul. It is the sacrifice of ones own happiness for the aggregate, so that others may reach a semblance of the good. It is an eros that is neither good or bad, beautiful or ugly, but wise and true. Love, the love that we should aspire to, is something that should be actively sought after. It is more than a byproduct of the good, it is the cause of the good. We see that human love is that for which must strive through an individual's own efforts to be better. As Kant would say, we have a semblance of divine within each of us as we are all members of the kingdom of ends.
¹Henry George Liddell, Robert Scott, A.Greek-English Lexicon, on Perseus
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samson4321 (student)
