Plato: Love and Lustin Republic, Symposium, and Phaedrus

Clark WolfDirector of Bioethics Iowa State University

jwcwolf@iastate.edu

Argument for Analysis:

The human function must be associated with what is highest and best in human beings, and with the characteristics that distinguish human beings from non-human animals and other things. But it is our capacity for intelligent reasoning that distinguishes human beings– it is our highest, best, and most important faculty, which distinguishes us from everything else. So whatever the human function is, it must essentially involve the exercise of our reasoning capacity.

The human function must be associated with what is highest and best in human beings, and with the characteristics that distinguish human beings from non-human animals and other things. But it is our capacity for intelligent reasoning that distinguishes human beings– it is our highest, best, and most important faculty, which distinguishes us from everything else. So whatever the human function is, it must essentially involve the exercise of our reasoning capacity.

1) The human function must be associated with what is highest and best in human beings.

2) The capacities that are highest and best in human beings are the ones that distinguish us from non-human animals and other things.

3) It is the human capacity for reason that distinguishes human beings from non-human animals and other things.

4) Therefore (preliminary conclusion) the capacity for reason is what is highest and best in us.

Conclusion: Therefore the human function essentially involves the exercise of reason.

Argument for Analysis

Love stinks! When people are in love, they experience horrible pain and longings that make them miserable and cause them to do stupid things. Being in love is a bad thing, because people who are in love are ruled by their desires and passions, not by reason. But being loved– being the object of someone’s love– is also a bummer! People who are in love are possessive and clingy. It’s disgusting! And they’re jealous too: they become nervous when the person they love spends time with friends, because lovers want to occupy the life of the person with whom they are obsessed. It’s much better to keep away from all that stupidity and insanity.

Love stinks! When people are in love, they experience horrible pain and longings that make them miserable and cause them to do stupid things. Being in love is a bad thing, because people who are in love are ruled by their desires and passions, not by reason. But being loved– being the object of someone’s love– is also a bummer! People who are in love are possessive and clingy. It’s disgusting! And they’re jealous too: they become nervous when the person they love spends time with friends, because lovers want to occupy the life of the person with whom they are obsessed. It’s much better to keep away from all that stupidity and insanity.

1) People who are in love become stupid and unreasonable, and miserable.

2) It’s worse for us when we’re stupid and unreasonable, and miserable.

Conclusion: Being in love is a bad thing for the person in love.

1) When people are in love with someone, they become clingy and possessive and try to control the person they love.

2) It’s bad for a person if someone else is clingy and possessive, trying to control her (or his) life.

Conclusion: Being loved by another person is bad for the person who is loved.

Plato on Love:

One function of Philosophy: Philosophy should enable us, by the use of reason, to organize our lives well. It should free us of unnecessary fears (like the fear of death), and from being captured or ‘overcome’ by irrational emotions and attitudes.

Plato on Love:

Love is a hugely powerful force in human lives, one that has the potential to go astray and make people absolutely miserable. Philosophy, as a study designed to help us to organize our lives, has a role to play here, to help us to understand this force, to plan for its effects, and to insure that it plays the right role, rather than the wrong one, in our lives.

On the feeling of crazy passionate love:

Dan (Jude Law): I fell in love with her, Alice.

Alice (Natalie Portman): Oh, as if you had no choice? There's a moment, there's always a moment, I can do this, I can give in to this, or I can resist it, and I don't know when your moment was, but I bet there was one. 

-Closer

Seneca on the Stages of Passion:Seneca’s example is ‘anger.’

Seneca was a Roman Stoic Philosopher

1) First Movement: autonomic, reflexive, non-deliberative. (Skin prickles, adrenaline flows, face flushes…)

2) Moment of Decision: Person must assent or consent to move into a passion. This is an act of will

3) Full blown passion: Reason is no longer in control, passion possesses us.

On the feeling of crazy passionate love:

“Well, love is insanity. The ancient Greeks knew that. It is the taking over of a rational and lucid mind by delusion and self-destruction. You lose yourself, you have no power over yourself, you can't even think straight.” - Marilyn French

On the feeling of crazy passionate love: “You're in a car with a beautiful boy, and he won't tell you

that he loves you, but he loves you. And you feel like you've done something terrible, like robbed a liquor store, or swallowed pills, or shoveled yourself a grave in the dirt, and you're tired. You're in a car with a beautiful boy, and you're trying not to tell him that you love him, and you're trying to choke down the feeling, and you're trembling, but he reaches over and he touches you, like a prayer for which no words exist, and you feel your heart taking root in your body, like you've discovered something you didn't even have a name for. (…) …he touches you with his fingers and burns holes in your skin with his mouth and it hurts when you look at him and it hurts when you don't, it feels like someone's cut you open with a jagged piece of glass.” –R. Siken

On the feeling of crazy passionate love:Some texts seem to question whether it’s really

love at all.

Remember that the best relationship is one in which your love for each other exceeds your need for each other.

-Dalai Lama XIV

I Corinthians 13:4-8 (NIV): Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices in the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails.

People did write about crazy passionate love in the Ancient world: Is this evidence that it is a

human universal?

SAPPHO, (630-612 BCE) Fragment 31:

“He seems to me equal to gods, that man whoever he is who opposite you sits close and listens to your sweet speaking and lovely laughing. Oh, it puts the heart in my chest on wings. For when I look at you, even a moment, no speaking is left in me. No! My tongue breaks and thin fire races under my skin, in my eyes there is no sight, drumming fills my ears, cold sweat holds me, and shaking grips me all. I am paler than dried grass, and seem in my madness to be little better than dead! But I am compelled to dare everything…”

Also from Sappho:

“Eros shakes my soul, a wind on the mountain overwhelming the oaks.”

"If you're squeamish, don't prod the beach rubble."

Plato: Love is a Serious Mental Disease

REPUBLIC: Republic 329b-d, Character of Cephalus:

“I was once present when someone asked the poet Sophocles: “How are you as far as sex goes, Sophocles? Can you still make love with a woman?” “Quiet man,” the poet replied, “I am very glad to have escaped from all that, like a slave who has escaped from a savage and tyrannical master.” I thought at the time that he was right, and I still do, for old age brings peace and freedom from such things. When the appetites relax and cease to importune us, everything Sophocles said comes to pass, and we escape from many mad masters.”

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)

Plato: Love is a Serious Mental Disease

Symposium (189d-193d), Speech of Aristophanes: A myth about the origin of sex—once human beings were completely round, with back and sides in a circle and with four legs and arms. We were separated by Zeus who, as a punishment, divided each into two separate individuals. Sundered from our “other half,” we run about trying to reconnect and so to become whole again.

Plato: Love is a Serious Mental Disease

Symposium (190e-191a) Zeus “cut those human beings in two, the way people cut sorb-apples before they dry them or the way they cut eggs with a hair. As he cut each one, he commanded Apollo to turn its face and half its neck toward the wound, so that each person could see that he’d been cut and keep better order. [Then Apollo] …drew skin from all sides over what is now called the stomach, and there he made one mouth, as in a pouch, with a drawstring and fastened it at the center of the stomach. [Then he shaped people] using some such tool as shoemakers have for smoothing wrinkles out of leather on the form. But he left a few wrinkles around the stomach and navel…”

Symposium: Love as the search for our “other half.”

Symposium (191a-c), Aristophanes: “Now since their natural form had been cut in two, each one longed for its own other half, and so they would throw their arms about each other, weaving themselves together, wanting to grow together. In that condition they would die from hunger and general idleness, because they would not do anything apart from each other.”

“…each one longed for its own other half, and so they would throw their arms about each other, weaving themselves together, wanting to grow together. In that condition they would die from hunger and general idleness, because they would not do anything apart from each other.”

Symposium: Love as the search for our “other half.”

Nussbaum on the silliness of this story & the absurdity of sex:

“From the point of view of desire,… the penetration of a part of one’s own body into some opening in the loved one’s body is an event of excitement and beauty. From the outside it just looks peculiar, or even grotesque; (…) As we hear Aristophanes’ distant myth of this passionate groping and grasping, we are invited to think how odd, after all, it is that bodies should have these holes and projections in them, odd that the insertion of a projection into an opening should be though, by ambitious and intelligent beings, a matter of the deepest concern. (…) From the outside, we cannot help laughing. They want to be gods—and here they are running around anxiously trying to thrust a piece of themselves inside a hole; or perhaps more comical still, waiting in the hope that some hole of theirs will have something thrust into it.” Martha Nussbaum, 1986.The Fragility of Goodness, 172-3

Symposium (211c-d) “Ladder of Love” (Scala Amoris): Speech of Socrates, explaining what he learned from a teacher of his, Diotima. He says she told him:

“This is what is is to go aright, or to be led by another, into the mystery of love: one goes always upwards for the sake of this Beauty, starting out from beautiful things and using them like rising stairs: from one body to two and from two to all beautiful bodies, then from beautiful bodies to beautiful customs, and from customs to learning beautiful things, and from these lessons he arrives in the end at this lesson, which is learning of this very beauty so that in the end he comes to know just what it is to be beautiful.”

Gregory Vlastos’s Characterization of Plato’s View:

“We are to love the person so far, and only insofar, as they are good and beautiful. Now since all too few human beings are masterworks of excellence, and not even the best of those we have the chance to love are free of streaks of the ugly, the mean, the commonplace, the ridiculous, if our love for them is to be only for their virtue and beauty, the individual, in the uniqueness and integrity of her individuality, will never be the object of our love. This seems to me the cardinal flaw in Plato’s theory. It does not provide for the love of whole persons, but only for love of that abstract version of persons which consists of the complex of their best qualities. (…) The high climactic moment of fulfillment—the peak achievement for which all lesser loves are to be ‘used as steps’—is the one farthest removed from affection for concrete human beings.”

--Vlastos, G. 1973. Platonic Studies. NY: Princeton U. Press:

Does Plato Advocate “Platonic”Love?

Question: Is Vlastos right? Is Plato’s view of love ‘impersonal?’ A possible counterexample, but from an untrustworthy character (Alchibiades):

Symposium (215a-222c) The Speech of Alcibiades: Speaks of his particular love for a particular person (Socrates), expressed in terms of Socrates’s unique characteristics. Very unlike the image of love presented in Socrates’s own speech!

Martha Nussbaum on what we might make of Alcibiades claim that this is the way to tell the truth about love:

“What could lie behind this claim? Perhaps something like this: There are some truths about love that can be learned only through the experience of a particular passion of one’s own. If one is asked to teach those truths, one’s only recourse is to recreate that experience for the hearer: to tell a story, to appeal to his or her imagination and feelings by the use of a vivid narrative. Images are valuable in this attempt to make the audience share the experience, to feel, from the inside, what it is like to be that.”

--Nussbaum 1986, p. 185)

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!

People did write about crazy passionate love in the Ancient world: Is this evidence that it is a

human universal?

SAPPHO, (630-612 BCE) Fragment 31:

“He seems to me equal to gods, that man whoever he is who opposite you sits close and listens to your sweet speaking and lovely laughing. Oh, it puts the heart in my chest on wings. For when I look at you, even a moment, no speaking is left in me. No! My tongue breaks and thin fire races under my skin, in my eyes there is no sight, drumming fills my ears, cold sweat holds me, and shaking grips me all. I am paler than dried grass, and seem in my madness to be little better than dead! But I am compelled to dare everything…”

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.

Two Perspectives?

Do we live “from the rim of heaven,” or do we experience life as if “from the seat of the chariot?”

Two perspectives, not two theories?

Upshot?1) Perhaps Plato’s view of love changed over time, and it is not appropriate to associate with him the standard “Platonic” view that is so frequently criticized.

2) His later view does include a role for love as a particular attachment to another person as an individual, not simply as a stand-in for a more abstract and higher philosophical value. (Perhaps this claim should be qualified?)

3) Plato’s dialogues, and especially Symposium and Pheadrus, present a broad collection of different views. It is inappropriate to associate the words of Socrates (or of “The Athenian Stranger” of the later dialogues) with Plato himself.

4) I don’t have a fully satisfactory account of Plato’s view. (?)