Plato: Love is a Serious Mental Disease

Two Philosophical Perspectives from Phaedrus:

View from the rim of heaven” (Phaedrus 247b)

View from the Chariot: (Phaedrus246b)

Phaedrus:(1) Lysias’s Speech: Sex without passionate attachment as the ideal:(231a-234d) argues that it is better to have a love life with someone who is not in love with you, because the strong emotions associated with love cause pain and unpleasantness between lovers, while “lovers” who merely use one another for pleasure won’t suffer those disturbances.

Phaedrus2) Socrates’s First Speech: An Argument Against Love (237a-241d): Socrates argues that passionate love is bad for the person in love, because it makes those who are in love stupid and disgusting, and it is bad for the person who is beloved because lovers love the beloved the way wolves love lambs. (241a) A love will fear losing the beloved, and so will want to keep her or him weak and dependant. So just as lambs have reason to avoid the wolf, those who are loved by others need to protect themselves and should probably flee. Socrates implies, peculiarly, that indeed it is much safer to have a sexual relationship when love is absent.

(Epicurus agreed!)

On the feeling of crazy passionate love:

Is the advice to avoid upsetting passions like love, because they’re disturbing?

“Who wants that? I'd rather choose to fall in love and be hurt. Sometimes I can't even sleep because I love someone so much. And there's always sadness in our lives. It's that sad feeling that keeps us going. Because if we can overcome that sadness, we can hope for happiness in the future.” –House

Phaedrus(3) Socrates Second Speech: Love as divine madness (244a-257c) “’There is no truth to that story,’—that when a lover is available you should give your favors to one who doesn’t love you instead, because he is in control of himself while the lover has lost his head. That would have been a fine thing to say if madness were bad, pure and simple; but in fact the best things we have come from madness, when it is given as a gift of the God.

Phaedrus: Love as Divine Madness

Two Varieties of Madness: “There are two kinds of madness, one produced by human illness, the other by a divinely inspired release from normally accepted behavior.”

 Four Kinds of Valuable (Divine?) Madness:

(i) Madness of prophesy (244c) (ii) Madness to escape guilt and hardship (244e) (iii) Madness of Poetry (245a) and (iv) Madness that overtakes us when we

perceive beauty with the eye of love (249d)

Phaedrus: Love as Divine Madness“When he sees… a form that has captured beauty, first he shudders and a fear comes over him like those he felt at the earlier time. Then he gazes at him with the reverence due to a god, and if he weren’t afraid people would think him completely mad, he’d even sacrifice to this beloved person as if he were the image of a God. Once he has looked at him, his chill gives way to sweating and a high fever, because the stream of beauty that pours into him through his eyes warms him up and waters the growth of his wings. Meanwhile the heat warms him and melts the places where the wings once grew, places that were long ago closed off with hard scabs to keep the sprouts from coming back; but as nourishment flows in, the feather shafts swell and rush to grow from their roots beneath every part of the soul (long ago, you see, the entire soul had wings).”

Phaedrus: Love as Divine Madness

Phaedrus 251c-d: “Now the whole soul seeths and throbs in this condition. Like a child whose teeth are just starting to grow in, and its gums are all aching and itching—that is exactly how the soul feels when it begins to grow wings. It swells up and aches and tingles as it grows them. But when it looks upon the beauty of the beloved and takes in the stream of particles flowing into it from his beauty (that is why this is called ‘desire’), when it is watered and warmed by this, then all its pain subsides and is replaced by joy.”

Phaedrus (251d-e): “When, however, it is separated from the beloved and runs dry, then the openings of the passages in which the feathers grow are dried shut and keep the wings from sprouting. Then the stump of each feather is blocked in its desire and it throbs like a pulsing artery while the feather pricks at its passageway, with the result that the whole soul is stung all around, and the pain simply drives it wild. But then, when it remembers the beloved in his beauty, it recovers its joy. From the outlandish mix of these two feelings-- pain and joy—comes anguish and helpless raving: in its madness the lover’s soul cannot sleep at night or stay put by day; it rushes, yearning, wherever it expects to see the person who has that beauty. When it does see him, it opens the sluice-gates of desire and sets free the parts that were blocked up before. And now that the pain and the goading have stopped, it can catch its breath and once more suck in, for the moment, this sweetest of all pleasures.”

The phomenology of love at Pheadrus 251a-c:

We see…We react with a shudder of awe (remembrance!)We are drawn to regard the beloved person almost like a God. Chill, sweating, fever, a “melting of the soul”Throbbing, aching passion

 Compare Sappho Fragment 31: Follows almost the same sequence!

Plato’s Defense of Love in Phaedrus:

1) Plato’s description does not defend love as a reasonable activity– it is something that transports us.

2) The value of this transport is still (in part) that it raises our minds to things that are higher and most real. But this is part of a process that involves the other person essentially, not merely as an accidental means.

Plato’s Defense of Love in Phaedrus:3) Plato’s account of love incorporates

something like a “modern” view that people in love will commit their lives to one another.

4) Interestingly, Plato claims that wise lovers will abstain from sex (?!) because the attraction of pleasure might change the quality of their experience of each other. Abstinence (apparently?) keeps the passions alive more effectively. (?!)

Two Conceptions of Love in Plato?(i) In Symposium, this reaction to beauty (not described in such appreciative terms!) was presented as the first step in a process that would lead us, ultimately, to abandon the individual for the sake of a more abstract and intellectual devotion to beauty itself.

(ii) In Phaedrus, this is described as a “divine madness” that constitutes the first stage in a lifelong relationship of devotion, after which the devoted lovers “sprout wings together” and ascend to bliss.